Henry Giroux, Truthout:

The current political moment is dominated by a massive propagandistic machine, fueled largely by right-wing social media platforms that undermine the promise of hope and its foundational political and educational elements that wed truth and the search for justice to action through mass collective struggles. This is a powerful ocular-image-based pedagogical apparatus that both erases history and distorts it. Manufactured ignorance now parades as news, performs as spectacle, and in doing so, sabotages both the truth and democracy itself. Politics has become a form of ethicide — a disavowal of social responsibility and the removal of political, discursive and economic actions from social costs.

The challenging times in which we now live operate as hope’s antithesis by spreading the ideology of regressive individualism, consumerism, deregulation and anti-intellectualism while reproducing a model of gangster capitalism that empties politics of its democratic possibilities. We live in an age in which radical hope faces the challenge of a number of fundamentalisms rooted in economic, religious and educational forms of repression, all of which characterize a brutal form of gangster capitalism. Accentuated by a growing inequality, uncertainty, fear and distrust of the public good, capitalism hides its ruthlessness and criminogenic power relations by saturating U.S. culture with depoliticizing narratives which echo the fatal notion that it “has no alternative.” In doing so, it has deepened the gulf of shared fears and learned helplessness that enable the formative culture that supports a rebranded fascist politics.