We live in a dangerous historical moment when fascist politics no longer lurk on the margins but occupy the centers of power. Across the globe—from the United States to Hungary, Chile, India, and Argentina, and elsewhere—authoritarian regimes are hollowing out democracy, merging violence with spectacle, and transforming education into a battlefield over truth itself. Journalists increasingly describe this shift as a “campaign of annihilation”.      

What is under assault is not simply the university or the classroom, but the capacity to think, remember, and act collectively. The struggle over education is therefore the struggle over democracy’s very promise. To reclaim education as a public good is, therefore, to reclaim the means through which consciousness becomes political, and politics becomes collective. The question before us is not merely whether education matters, but whether it can still awaken a public imagination capable of turning thought into resistance, and resistance into mass action. In such times, the issue is also whether education can survive as a democratic force in an age of emerging fascism across the globe. 

Disinformation: The Impetus for Authoritarianism

Under the Trump regime, ignorance has been manufactured and weaponized, twisted into a force that shrouds lies as truth and redefines education as an act of violence. In the United States, and across other authoritarian regimes, a culture of lies, along with the deliberate erasure of reality, serves as a mask for tyranny. Trump, with his grotesque parade of over 30,000 lies during his first term, continues to poison the public mind, even now refusing to concede his loss in 2020. 

There are alarming examples of this disinformation, which now functions as a central weapon of authoritarian politics rather than a marginal pathology. Republican Senator Mike Lee, in a grotesque inversion of reality, blamed “Marxists” for the murder of a top Democratic state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, despite the fact that the perpetrator was a Trump supporter. In a similarly revealing display of fascist logic, the Trump administration claimed that the political left was responsible for the assassination of right-wing youth leader Charlie Kirk, converting right-wing violence into a pretext for further repression. These fabrications are not random acts of distortion; they are part of a broader strategy that casts dissent as treason and prepares the public for state violence. Accordingly, the administration has openly declared a war against so-called “enemies within”, a category that increasingly includes communists, leftists, journalists, educators, and anyone who challenges Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

This politics of disinformation does not circulate in a vacuum. It is amplified, legitimized, and normalized by a powerful media ecosystem that routinely privileges propaganda over truth. Right-wing media, spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, provides the most flagrant example. Murdoch’s Fox News lost a major legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems after knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion had helped steal the 2020 election, a lie that fueled the January 6 insurrection and further eroded democratic norms. Yet even after the settlement, conspiratorial rhetoric continues to spread largely unchecked, saturating public discourse and drowning reason in its wake. 

The failure is not confined to the right. The mainstream press has shown a troubling reluctance to confront authoritarian violence directly, often sanitizing or minimizing it through euphemistic language. Coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal assault on Gaza, for instance, remained muted until the scale of devastation became impossible to deny. 

Similarly, corporate media outlets routinely describe the Trump administration’s illegal abduction and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as him being “captured”, adopting the language of state power rather than naming the crime itself. Such linguistic laundering does more than obscure reality; it normalizes lawlessness, erases accountability, and conditions the public to accept authoritarian violence as ordinary politics.

The mainstream media was also mostly silent in discussing Trump’s bombing of Iran in July 2025 as a violation of international law and a reckless act of militarized violence. It refuses to draw connections between Trump’s illegal military strikes against alleged cartel boats (resulting in over 100 deaths) to his deployment of U.S. troops to a number of American cities—both of which share a common contempt for due process and constitutional limits. It is difficult to imagine that Trump’s brutal, gangster-style assault on Venezuelan soil, including the kidnapping of the country’s elected leader and his wife, will be examined by the mainstream press as a violation of both international and domestic law. Nor is it likely to be named for what Trump himself has admitted it to be, a ruthless imperial intervention aimed at seizing control of Venezuela’s oil resources. 

In the hands of the far right and MAGA mobs, truth has become a dangerous force to be neutralized or destroyed, and the mainstream media has increasingly enabled this assault through omission, normalization, and linguistic laundering. Critical thinking, once a defining feature of an informed society, is now being steadily exiled from libraries, schools, and much of the corporate press.

This has fast-tracked the American public’s sinking into a pit of civic illiteracy, a condition in which people lack knowledge of history, are unable to think critically, remain trapped in a culture of immediacy, and are incapable of connecting their private troubles to larger systemic forces. At danger here is what American cultural critic David Levi Strauss, citing philosopher Jerome Kohn, calls “the public spirit”—the essence of democracy, where citizens engage in dialogue, debate, and struggle, working together to promote the common good. 

As civic consciousness wanes, culture decays simultaneously. This decay is evident in the “Disneyfication” of society, where sanitized illusions mask brutal truths, and in the rise of a zombie politics ruled by the living dead—soulless figures with blood on their lips. In this politics of the undead, power is held by the corrupt, the incompetent, the unethical, and the extremist, leaders who drain public life of meaning while advancing authoritarian agendas. As journalist Chris Hedges astutely observes, America is a decaying regime, its vitality drained, clinging to spectacles—like Trump’s grotesque military parade—that serve only to feed the pathologies of a diseased society. 

Hedges speaks with precision when he writes: “The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality.” 

In this world, the population is conditioned by a mass culture dominated by sexual commodification, mindless entertainment, and graphic depictions of violence. Thoughtlessness has not only been normalized as entertainment, it has become the precondition for authoritarianism, amplified by toxic social media ecosystems, endless scrolling that numbs critical judgment, and a culture of spectacle that prizes outrage over understanding. 

The Collapse of Critical Education

Thus, the first casualty of authoritarianism is the critical mind. This is not only a political issue but an educational one. As Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire understood, education is never neutral. It either functions as an instrument to reproduce the existing order or becomes a tool for liberation. In the face of escalating fascism, education demands reclamation as a moral and political project whose task is to cultivate the knowledge, skills, values, and civic courage necessary to challenge injustice and imagine alternative futures. It must be rooted in critical pedagogy, a moral and political practice that enables students to speak, write, and act from positions of agency and empowerment.

In the age of the neoliberal university, many educational institutions have abandoned these responsibilities. Under the weight of privatization, standardization, and corporate influence, many institutions have hollowed out their democratic purpose. Universities have become sites of credentialing, training, and conformity rather than inquiry and critique. 

Driven by the ideological and instrumental dictates of gangster capitalism, the logic of the market has reduced students to consumers, faculty to managed labor serfs, and knowledge to a commodity. Ranking systems, performance metrics, and austerity budgets have supplemented public investment, intellectual freedom, and pedagogical citizenship. 

As universities submit to far-right ideological pressure, chase corporate funding, and no longer define themselves by a claim to democracy, they abandon the mission of cultivating critical, engaged citizens capable of imagining a radically different future. Aligned with the forces of predatory capitalism, they erode public conscience by celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, and privatization. Academic life is increasingly organized around high-stakes testing, narrow measures of individual achievement, and cut-throat competition for grants, producing a pedagogy of compliance rather than critique and a culture that prizes metrics over meaning, entrepreneurial self-interest over democratic imagination.

Yet, an even more insidious force is at work. In addition to market-driven logic, higher education is being re-engineered to serve authoritarian control. In both subtle and overt forms, universities are increasingly being transformed into an apparatus of white Christian nationalist indoctrination and citadels of fear. Curricula are being purged of so-called “divisive concepts”, anti-racist scholarship is demonized, and educators who teach about settler colonialism, gender, or Palestinian liberation are being censored, surveilled, or fired.  What we witness across the United States is not merely the erosion of democratic education, but its replacement by a theocratic and ethnonationalist vision rooted in exclusion, historical erasure, and moral authoritarianism.  

Under Trump, the assault on higher education has taken on the character of political extortion. Universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern are threatened with funding cuts, targeted investigations, and public humiliation unless they align with the regime’s ideological demands. Faced with this mafia-like pressure, many institutions such as Texas A&M capitulate: syllabi are monitored or pre-approved, faculty self-censor, and entire fields—from gender studies to critical race scholarship—are quietly dismantled. Academic freedom becomes a permission granted by administrators rather than a right grounded in democratic life, and universities shrink into obedient service providers rather than spaces for critique and possibility

Journalist Indigo Olivier argues that Trump’s war on education extends beyond the suppression of campus dissent. It is a concerted effort to seize the very essence of higher learning, reshaping it in the image of authoritarian ideology, built on power, control, and the erasure of critical thought. She writes:

In recent months, Trump has: signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, suspended student loan repayment programs and $400 million in funding to Columbia University, and threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after freezing over $2 billion in federal funds. Dozens of universities now face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion campaign. Perhaps most disturbingly, he has encouraged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target international students involved in Gaza solidarity protests for deportation; several are currently being held in a processing facility in Louisiana…Taken together, these actions have been widely seen as a chilling assault on academic freedom and institutional self-governance that threatens to undermine the character of American higher education itself.

This project mirrors, with chilling precision, the ideological reengineering of higher education under past fascist regimes. In Nazi Germany, universities were purged of Jewish professors and political dissidents, while academic disciplines were reshaped to propagate racial pseudoscience and Aryan supremacy. Professor of global engagement Iveta Silova notes how swiftly and systematically German universities were transformed under Hitler: “Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge, they served power.”  

In Mussolini’s Italy, intellectuals were coerced into swearing loyalty to the fascist state, and scholarship became a tool of nationalist propaganda, intertwining classical myths with imperial ambition. As American history professor and political commentator Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, “Leftists, liberals, and anyone who spoke out against the Fascists were sent to prison or forced into exile”. 

In Franco’s Spain, the university was subjected to Catholic authoritarianism, with philosophy, history, and literature marshaled to serve an ultra-conservative, patriarchal order. In Chile, as Ben-Ghiat writes, under the brutal regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, universities were condemned as “hotbeds of Marxism and targeted…for ‘cleansing’”. She notes that by 1975, 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed, thousands imprisoned and tortured, and entire philosophy and social science departments disbanded. 

The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle DEI programs, censor dissenting faculty, and freeze funding to elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard echo this dangerous legacy. These are not random acts; they are part of a calculated attempt to remake higher education into an instrument of ideological control. The pattern is clear: authoritarian leaders understand that universities must either serve the state or be silenced.

Rebuilding Critical Consciousness     

Yet, even amidst this reactionary onslaught, resistance is burgeoning. Across campuses in the United States, Canada, and around the world, students and educators are refusing to be conscripted into authoritarian narratives. From the pro-Palestinian encampments protesting genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, to the nationwide student walkouts opposing book bans and censorship, young people are transforming educational spaces into laboratories of dissent and collective imagination. These acts of defiance recall earlier waves of resistance, from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley to the student uprisings in 1968 Paris, to the Black campus revolts of the 1970s, to the anti-apartheid university occupations of the 1980s, as well as the feminist struggles that reshaped the twentieth century, when women broke through the walls of misogyny by organizing for reproductive freedom, demanding equal pay and educational access, confronting gender-based violence, and insisting on the right to define their own lives.

Resonating with past movements, today’s students are reclaiming education as an act of resistance, not a preparation for conformity and ideological indoctrination. They are forming assemblies, teach-ins, and counter-courses, horizontal spaces of power where knowledge is co-created, solidarity is forged, and the university is reimagined as a site of justice rather than domination. Faculty, too, are pushing back, filing lawsuits, penning public letters, creating sanctuary classrooms, and insisting that pedagogy must serve not power but freedom. 

In this context, critical pedagogy transcends mere academic method; it becomes a political act. It is a refusal to surrender the university to fascism and a commitment to making it a space where new forms of collective life can be imagined and fought for. In cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, students are joining with immigrants, workers, artists, activists, and politicians to resist Trump’s ruthless immigration policies, the criminalization of dissent, and seeks to consolidate power by placing the military under his personal control, turning the armed forces into an instrument of his rule. 

This convergence of struggles signals a growing recognition that education cannot be separated from the broader fight for human rights, sanctuary, and democratic life—struggles that are now under threat from the unfolding authoritarianism of Trump’s regime. It is through these alliances that a new critical pedagogy of resistance is emerging, one rooted in memory, insurgent hope, and an unshakable belief in the possibility of a different future.

Drawing upon the lessons of history and the radical value of critical education, the Foro de Sevilla collective writes, “Auschwitz was much more than a concentration camp, it was a laboratory of dehumanization”. Gaza, too, has become such a site, where children, schools, and entire futures are being systematically annihilated. Education, in this context, is not just about knowledge transmission but about moral reckoning. It must preserve memory as a living force, capable of shaping civic courage and alerting us to the dangers of silence, complicity, and ideological manipulation. From Auschwitz to Gaza, from Nazi Germany to Trump’s America, we see the same dangerous arc: a politics of exclusion that depends on erasure, that turns classrooms into sites of fear rather than freedom.

Pedagogy that Matters

To meet this moment, educators must embrace a form of pedagogy that is inseparable from politics. Critical pedagogy begins not with answers, but with probing questions about history, justice, identity, power, and possibility. It refuses the notion that teaching is a technical act, a homage to empty instrumentalism, divorced from context. Instead, it insists that education is always implicated in the struggle over meaning and memory.      

As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu warned, some of the most powerful forms of domination are symbolic and pedagogical. If authoritarian regimes aim to control not only public institutions but the public imagination, then our task as educators is to illuminate, disrupt, protest, and reimagine. In this struggle, education and culture are not peripheral but central to politics, for the battle over shaping mass consciousness is the very bedrock of any genuine resistance.

Education exists not in a vacuum, but in the throes of a battleground for identities, values, and power. As such, it carries the potential to either suppress or empower—or often, to be a complex mix of both. Author Paulo Freire warns us that pedagogy can become a tool of oppression when it reinforces entrenched power structures. Yet, he powerfully extends this argument by emphasizing that education is a site of struggle, where its potential for both oppression and liberation is constantly negotiated. It can awaken consciousness, empower individuals, and resist the forces of injustice. In this sense, education becomes a critical site where the struggle for freedom, dignity, and transformation is waged.

Let us be clear: the relentless attacks on higher education by authoritarians like Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the Trump regime expose a deeper truth—universities have always been incubators of resistance to authoritarianism and its ever-shifting forms of fascist politics. This is precisely why they are viewed as such a threat. As institutions dedicated to the public good, their core mission is to defend and nurture democracy—however fragile or imperfect—making them a formidable challenge to those who seek to dismantle it.

This means embracing education as a public good and a site of collective responsibility. It requires curricula that foster a culture of inquiry, equip students with the knowledge and skills to hold power accountable, challenge dominant narratives, and cultivate a historical literacy that can dismantle the myths sustaining fascist ideologies. It calls for defending the university not as a corporate entity but as a democratic commons—a space where a culture of critique and academic freedom can thrive, and where students are empowered to define themselves and break free from the continuum of manufactured ignorance. It demands a language that links freedom with social responsibility, agency with solidarity, and critical thought with civic engagement.

As postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha once said, civic education must disrupt the consensus of common sense. It must fracture the settled order of things to make space for the not-yet-imagined. In an age where language is stripped of meaning and culture is weaponized by the far-right, education must reclaim its capacity to name injustice and summon hope. We need a language of critique and a language of possibility. One that refuses both fatalism and false neutrality.

Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis argues that there is no democracy without an educated public, no justice without a language to critique injustice. In dark times, education must do more than transmit knowledge; it must cultivate the political and moral imagination necessary to resist tyranny and build a future rooted in equality, dignity, and shared responsibility. To make education central to politics is to insist that the fight for democracy begins not only in the streets or at the ballot box, but in the classroom, in the slow, transformative work of teaching people to think otherwise, so they might act otherwise. 

Castoriadis reminds us that democracy is not merely the absence of censorship or the formal guarantee of rights, it is the collective power of the people to shape the conditions of their own existence. The classroom is one of the last spaces where the future can still be imagined differently. That is why it is under siege—and why we must defend it with everything we have. To defend education is to defend the very capacity for politics itself: the slow, difficult work of shaping public consciousness against the tides of ignorance and authoritarianism. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, culture, and by extension education, “is a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled”.

It is within classrooms, libraries, community centers, and public forums that citizens learn not only to read the word but to read the world—to connect private suffering to public issues, and to translate moral outrage into collective action. Every lesson that nurtures empathy, every discussion that rekindles historical memory, every act of critical questioning pushes back against the machinery of fascism and reclaims the political as an educational project, and education as a political act.

To confront fascism today is to reclaim education as a practice of becoming fully human, one rooted in the ability to listen deeply, remember truthfully, and imagine boldly. Critical pedagogy invites educators and cultural workers to create spaces where freedom can be practiced, tested, and lived, where the world rehearses the possibility of renewing itself. A radical democracy will emerge and endure only if we summon the courage to build a mass movement grounded in historical memory, collective imagination, and the willingness to act together in the name of justice.

In this struggle, schools and universities cannot stand aside. They must become laboratories of freedom—sites where democratic renewal is nurtured daily, and where the power to name injustice is inseparable from the collective will to confront and dismantle it. Only when educational institutions embrace this mandate can the work of resistance take root and help remake the world.