By Henry Giroux
August 30, 2025
Introduction:
Conclusion:(Counterpunch) The Trump administration’s race toward fascism is unfolding at breakneck speed and on multiple fronts. At the heart of this transformation lies the emergence of the United States as a warfare state, a captive state that merges the interests of the military-industrial-academic complex with the toxic ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. What makes this moment especially dangerous is that warfare no longer refers solely to foreign conquest; it has become a central organizing principle of governance at home. The state itself has been weaponized, turning inward against its own population, normalizing domestic terrorism as a tool of rule. The scourge of militarization as the driving force of American politics, which has its contemporary roots in the terror state created by Bush and Cheney after 9/11, is even more intensified as a domestic and foreign policy mode of governance. The long legacy of armed intervention abroad by the U.S. now appears on the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. as well as in universities, courthouses, and even sports fields. As Melissa Gira Grant notes, “federal agents are the new proud boys.” Perpetual war is now waged against Americans, legitimated as a normal condition of politics.
This is domestic terrorism, the transformation of inflammatory, fear-mongering, and dehumanizing rhetoric into acts of state violence. It is a form of necropolitics wedded to the notion of death worlds and the ascendence of a corpse-like order. As Achille Mbembe argues, “death worlds” mark regimes in which “new and unique forms of social existence [emerge] in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions conferring on them the status of the living dead.”
Read more here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/2 ... re-stateThe task before us is not only to defend the remnants of democratic institutions but to cultivate a cultural and educational imagination capable of shattering the grip of authoritarianism. To resist is to reclaim the future: to forge a pedagogy of liberation that restores dignity to memory, possibility to politics, and justice to the social fabric. Only then can we dismantle the machinery of terror and reclaim the possibility of a socialist democracy as a living, breathing project of freedom, equality, and justice.
