Part of the Series
The Public Intellectual
Separating children from their parents has a long and vile legacy in history among authoritarian regimes. Trump is mobilizing those fascist passions that inevitably lead to prisons, detention centers, and acts of domestic terrorism and state violence. Echoes of the Nazi camps, Japanese internment prisons, and the mass incarceration of Black and Brown people and the destruction of their families weigh on the Trump administration with a degree of shame and cruelty that marks the neoliberal fascism that now shapes American society.
Memories of the horrors of the past disappear under Trump only to return within a culture of cruelty and violence that is both revealing and ugly. What Trump is doing is a form of hostage-taking in which children become bargaining chips in his attempts to implement his racist policy of building a wall while demonstrating his politics of white supremacy to his core base. Children are now being used as part of an attempt to extort support for his racist politics from the Democratic Party.
In this interview with Mickey Huff from Project Censored, Henry Giroux explores the fascist ideology and policies that give rise to cruel practices, such as Trump separating children of undocumented immigrants from their parents and putting them in “cages,” makeshift detention centers and sometimes outdoor tents. While such practices have provoked a great deal of moral outrage across the ideological spectrum, the underlying logic of such practices has been largely ignored. Such practices run deep in the history of the United States and in recent years have been intensified with the collapse of the social contract, expanding inequality, and the increasing criminalization of immigrants, young people and other populations considered most vulnerable. In this interview, Giroux explores these mobilizing features of neoliberal fascism within a larger discourse of disposability and rule by white supremacists, religious fundamentalists and political extremists.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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