Henry Giroux – Assassination Talk, the Banality of Evil, and the Paranoid State of American Politics

During a campaign rally in North Carolina, Donald Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” would take care of Hilary Clinton for picking Supreme Court judges who favor stricter gun laws. The Clinton campaign and many others saw this as a veiled endorsement of an assassination attempt.[1] These inflammatory, if not dangerous, comments are part of a wider movement in American politics …

Henry A. Giroux – The National Insecurity State

I think it is fair to say, following Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, that each country ravaged by neoliberalism and its attack on the social state will develop its own form of authoritarianism rooted in the historical, pedagogical, and cultural traditions that enable it to reproduce itself. In the United States, a “soft war” is being waged on the cultural …

Project Censored – 11.03.15

Peter and Mickey spend the hour speaking with author/educator Henry Giroux. Giroux explains the concept of ‘critical pedagogy,’ and the pivotal role that education plays for the whole of society. He warns of the increasing domination of the world by the ultra-rich, and a new form of anti-intellectualism fostered by a failing corporate media. Among the measures the left must take to resist these forces, he names the formation of a third political party, and more academics taking on the duties of public intellectuals, rather than limiting
their activities to the campus.

Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism by HENRY A. GIROUX

In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley shared a fundamental conviction.  They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward an historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of …

Universities, Inc: How Academia Became a Business – BEN AGGER

We use shorthand for evaluating faculty: “She is productive.” We don’t necessarily have in mind a steel worker toiling in Andrew Carnegie’s factories but, given one’s orientation, perhaps a Hero of Socialist Labor. Factory work may be too grubby a metaphor for genteel academics. The antonym is worse: Loser, slacker, non-publisher. Generational politics are in play as young faculty who …