Historically, the most terrible things war, genocide, and
slavery have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. – Howard Zinn
The irony is unbearable. Trump has saturated public life
in lies, turned immigrants and Black citizens into targets of contempt, and
made corruption and violence the grammar of governance. He pledges loyalty to
dictators, surrounds himself with sycophants and thugs, and uses state power to
abduct foreign students, persecute immigrants, and declare war on the so-called
left, grotesquely blaming them for Charlie Kirk’s death, even
before a suspect was arrested. What should be a moment of grief over Charlie Kirk’s death
has been twisted into a weaponized spectacle, with Trump and his allies rushing
to frame the assassination as proof of leftist extremism.
As
Jeffrey St. Clair observed, “Leaders of the Right didn’t waste much
time counseling their ranks to restrict themselves to ‘thoughts and prayers’
over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even before the assassin had been identified
or a motive uncovered, they blamed the ‘violent rhetoric’ of the Left for
Kirk’s death.”
This is not mourning, it is the oldest trick in the
authoritarian playbook: accuse first, investigate never, weaponize tragedy to
consolidate power. In this poisonous narrative, the real “enemies within”
are not the racists, insurrectionists, corrupt corporations, and right-wing
extremists who stormed the Capitol, but the critics of authoritarian power as
well as groups designated as “other.”
Against
them, Trump and his allies wage war on the First Amendment, turning freedom of
speech from a cornerstone of democracy into its target. In their
framing, freedom
of speech is recast not as a bulwark of democracy but as its enemy.
From comedians and journalists to students, educators,
and independent groups, every dissenting voice is branded a conspirator in
imagined crimes–their real offense nothing more than speaking against cruelty
when silence was demanded. Or committing the crime of not being loyal enough to
Donald Trump.
As Hannah
Arendt once warned, under totalitarianism thinking itself becomes
dangerous. Authoritarianism in its many forms arises in part from the failure
to think—a prescient warning in the age of
manufactured ignorance. The normalization of ignorance, thoughtlessness,
and moral blindness in the age of Trump is foundational to creating fascist
subjects who cannot tell right from wrong, truth from lies, or justice from
evil.
This warning is even more urgent today, for there
is a horrifying ignorance in Trump that unleashes predatory passions,
stretching from his embrace
of war criminals and historical amnesia to the fatal
strikes he ordered on three alleged drug-smuggling vessels. For Trump, the
legality of such acts is irrelevant. Violence coupled with
criminalizing dissent is central to the logic of annihilation at the core of
fascist politics.
This is
fascism’s signature maneuver. Hitler did it in 1933 after the Reichstag
fire, blaming
communists and invoking emergency powers to suspend civil liberties.
Mussolini did it in 1925 after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, turning
a moment of crisis into a justification for outlawing opposition and silencing
presses. Orbán
has perfected the tactic in Hungary, scapegoating “Soros-funded leftists”
to dismantle universities, criminalize protest, and eviscerate the press.
Trump is no exception. He exploits Kirk’s death not to
grieve but to consolidate power. His message is blunt: dissent is violence,
criticism is terrorism, disloyalty is a crime, and free speech itself is a
threat to Trump’s ideological panopticon. The vicious amplification of this
line of toxic thinking is evident in Elon Musk declaring “The Left
is the party of murder,” and Trump’s consigliere Laura Loomer demanding the
state “shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization…The
Left is a national security threat.” It reaches hysterical
heights in the anti-communist rhetoric of Stephen Miller, the White House
deputy chief of staff, who has likened the left to a “vast
domestic terrorist network,” which he vowed to uproot and dismantle. The
rhetoric is chilling not only for its cruelty but for its naked embrace of
repression and the threat of violence as policy.
The consequences of Trump’s assault on dissent flare like
a blazing neon sign in Times Square, impossible to ignore. Under his lawless
reign, even satire is recast as treason, branded a ‘hate crime,’ as though
laughter itself had become treason. Academic institutions that keep alive the
memory of history and the struggles for freedom are stalked with mob-like
threats, extortion masquerading as patriotism, intimidation parading as
loyalty.
Canadian
citizens are being threatened with visa revocation simply for making
what Marco Rubio, Stephen
Miller, Pam Bondi, and others defined as critical comments about Kirk’s
death. This sends a chilling message: Trump’s authoritarian reach now crosses
borders, extending its silencing power beyond U.S. soil. In this twisted logic,
simply making a critical remark about Kirk is branded as a ‘celebration’– a
perverse distortion far removed from reality. Kirk’s death should be mourned,
but that is distinct from condemning his
far-right ideological beliefs.
These acts of silencing are never isolated. They are
instruments of power that legitimate broader forms of state violence.
Censorship, propaganda, and the glorification of cruelty converge to normalize
repression as both necessary and inevitable.
Corporations and universities bow
in fear and greed, sacrificing every shred of public responsibility to feed an
unending hunger for power and capital. Nowhere is this surrender more shameful
than in higher education, where universities crush dissent and betray
their own students by handing over the names of those protesting
genocide to the Trump administration. tragically repeating the cowardice of
fascist-era campuses.
Even worse, Ken
Klippenstein reports that “the Trump administration is preparing to
designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie
Kirk’s murder and are considering compiling a watchlist of Trans people.
It is a chilling echo of fascist-era complicities, a
moral collapse disguised as institutional neutrality. The echo is haunting and
has given rise to a new McCarthyism of campus informants, a reprise of the
shameful complicities of fascist-era universities. As journalist David French
argued on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes show, the current
attacks on free speech and dissidents critical of Trump are worse than
McCarthyism, because it is “larger and broader in scope. It is more aggressive.
It stretches across all aspects of American society.”
This is not
merely an institutional failure but a moral collapse, a repudiation of
knowledge, conscience, and the very democratic commitments that should define
the purpose of the academy. What we are witnessing is McCarthyism reborn with a
vengeance–surveillance, informants, blacklists. Higher education has
long unsettled the right, especially since the democratizing struggles of the
sixties. Today that fear has hardened into something darker: not merely efforts
to weaken its critical role, but the
imposition of pedagogical tyranny that turns universities into laboratories of
indoctrination.
Trump, Rubio, Miller, Bondi, and their cohort of
democracy-haters now
threaten to strip dissenting Americans of their passports, revoke
citizenship, and criminalize free speech. They howl in outrage at being
compared to fascists, even as their actions mirror the same grim playbook:
militarizing society, crushing dissent, concentrating power in the hands of a
cult leader, and reanimating the legacy of white supremacy and racial
cleansing.
Trump hails Netanyahu, a war criminal,
as a war hero. With grotesque irony, he denounces the left as the true
perpetrators of violence. At home, his vindictiveness is just as corrosive:
boasting of pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel. This petty act of vengeance
amounts to his own assault on the First Amendment and is a chilling reminder of
how fragile free
speech becomes under authoritarian whim. Yet no alarm is sounded
when Fox
News host Brian Kilmeade casually suggests exterminating the homeless through
“involuntary lethal injections.”
Nor does outrage rise in the Trump
administration, or much of the mainstream press, over the United States’
complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, where, as the Quds
News Network reports, “At least 19,424 children have been killed in
Israeli attacks over 700 days of genocide in Gaza, the equivalent of one child
every 52 minutes. Among the victims are 1,000 infants under the age of one.”
Silence here is not neutrality; it is complicity in barbarism.
When the conduct of comedians is criminalized, it is not
simply a matter of taste, decorum, or even misplaced moral outrage, it is a
direct assault on the principle of free speech. Comedy has always served as a
space where hypocrisy is unmasked, abuses of power are ridiculed, and the
absurdities of authoritarian politics are laid bare.
In fact, when Vladimir
Putin first came to power in 2000, one of the early targets of his cultural
crackdown was the
satirical television show “Kukly” (Куклы, meaning dolls), a
puppet show produced by the independent channel NTV. Apparently being called
the little Tsar puppet was too much for him to tolerate. This
ruthless act of censorship was widely seen as a watershed moment in Putin’s
consolidation of power. Of course, the real issue here is that to police or
punish comedians for doing what they do is to signal that the state now seeks
to control even the spaces of laughter and irony.
This criminalization is more than censorship; it is a
canary in the coal mine for gauging the advance of fascism. When jokes are
reclassified as crimes, the warning could not be clearer: what begins with
comedians will not end with them. It marks the testing of boundaries, the
normalization of repression, and the silencing of one of the oldest and most
effective forms of dissent. The move reveals the fragility of regimes that
cannot tolerate critique, no matter how playful or irreverent, and it signifies
a broader project to narrow public space until only official voices remain.
In this sense, the attack on comedy should not be
dismissed as a trivial or secondary issue. It is a symbolic and practical
escalation of authoritarian politics, one that exposes the contempt fascist
movements hold for humor, irony, and dissenting speech. If laughter is made a
crime, then resistance itself is already under indictment.
Repressing dissent
has a long history in the U.S extending from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the
domestic repression that followed Bush’s war on terrorism. Today’s attacks on
dissent are more widespread, damaging, and unchecked than much of what we have
seen in the past. To borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton, Trump and his MAGA
stooges are drunk “on fantasies of omnipotence” and revel in acts of violence,
destruction, and the exercise of boundless state power.
The parallels with fascist history could not be more
ominous. The Reichstag fire decree suspended civil liberties and imprisoned
communists; today, Trump declares dissent worthy of censorship and if Pam Bondi
is to be taken at face value will be labeled as hate speech and subject to
state repression. Benito
Mussolini used Giacomo Matteotti’s assassination to further
consolidate his own power; today, Trump uses Kirk’s death to silence
students, educators, and journalists. Orbán
dismantled Hungary’s free press and universities by conjuring enemies;
today, Trump and Miller invoke “the radical left” as an existential threat.
Violence in America’s militarized streets now fuses with
what John Ganz calls
a “sanctimonious hue and cry … over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up
about terrorism and public disorder [and] the power of the state is brought to
bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime.” Fear has
become the regime’s preferred weapon, wielded alongside a politics of erasure,
historical amnesia, and ruthless denial.
Jeffrey
St. Clair noted with grim precision that Kirk’s killing is “awful,
disgusting and about as American as it gets”, but the hypocrisy lies in
Trump’s silence after earlier acts of MAGA violence: “When two
Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter
in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch.”
Violence
committed by the Right elicits no outrage, but a single death weaponized
against the Left becomes the justification for a war on dissent. As St.
Clair recounts, the ledger of right-wing violence between 2018 and
2025 reads like a requiem: the assault on CDC headquarters, the murder of
Officer David Rose, the plot to seize Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the massacre
of 23 souls in an El Paso Walmart, and the slaughter of 11 worshippers at
Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Every act carried the rhythm of cruelty;
every atrocity struck like a warning written in fire and blood.
In spite of the nefarious claims by Trump, Miller, Bondi,
and other officials that the left bears responsibility for Charlie Kirk’s
death, the facts tell a different story. NBC
News reports that “the federal investigation into the
assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link
between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups
on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack
down.”
The Trump regime refuses to acknowledge this, erasing evidence and
fabricating a narrative designed to demonize its critics. This distortion
follows a familiar historical pattern, yet what the Trump administration
refuses to admit and desperately hide is that, according
to the Anti-Defamation League, “since 2002, right-wing ideologies have
fueled more than 70% of all extremist attacks and domestic terrorism plots in
the United States.”
This is not simply denial but calculated deceit. By
inverting reality, blaming dissenters for the violence overwhelmingly fueled by
their own ideological allies, the Trump administration wages war on truth
itself, weaponizing lies to justify repression. This is the oldest tool of
authoritarianism; a script lifted from the fascist playbook in which regimes
fabricate internal enemies to mask their own violence.
This is the machinery of fascism: scapegoating,
historical amnesia, and the fabrication of a “threat within” to mobilize fear
and erase accountability. To remain silent in the face of such lies is to allow
history’s darkest patterns to repeat. The ominous rattling of boxcars is no
longer mere metaphor; it is rehearsal. The same trains that once ferried
enemies of the state, Jews, communists, Roma, and others- to concentration
camps echo in today’s discourse of surveillance, detention, and deportation. These
echoes abroad make the danger at home impossible to ignore. The first targets
are always the vulnerable, immigrants, refugees, students, and the homeless.
But the machinery of repression, once primed, sweeps wider. What begins at the
margins always moves to the center.
First the masked thugs of state-sponsored terror
descended on immigrants, then on student protesters; they occupied
neighborhoods, turned cities into militarized staging grounds, and normalized
violence as the language of lawless rule. Now the machinery of repression is
tightening its grip, moving ever closer to ordinary citizens. A shadow from an
authoritarian past has fallen across the republic, and unless it is confronted,
the future will echo the grim theaters of repression already unfolding in Hungary,
India, and Argentina.
In all these countries including the United States,
leaders of the new fascism speak with vomit in their mouths and blood on their
hands. They share a language that Toni
Morrison calls “a dead language” It is an “oppressive language that
does more than represent violence; it is violence;” Trump and his minions
traffic in a repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring.
Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than
maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity
and dominance. It offers mass spectacles, a moral somnambulance, and a
psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a
community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow
fulfillment.
In the current historical moment ripe with a
politics wedded to revenge, systemic racism, and the building of a police state, language
is weaponized, functioning as a powerful force for manufactured ignorance. The
Trump administration turns grief into a rallying cry for repression. The
radical imagination is now doused in conspiracy theories and civic ignorance. A
hollow politics of cruelty now finds its match in the ruthlessness of state
terrorism.
At home, Trump and his political hacks imagine themselves as victims
while they spread violence, misery, cruelty, and moral decay both at home and
abroad. The stakes could not be clearer: silence is complicity, and to speak,
to talk back, and to engage in non-violent action is now the most urgent
precondition for building powerful modes of collective resistance. The lights
are going out fast, but there is still time to make justice, equality, and
freedom the foundation for a radical democracy; resistance is no longer
optional but the urgent political and moral task of our time.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster
University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in
Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen
(Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition
(Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time
of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured
Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of
Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony
DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy
(Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
-CounterPunch
