We believe that political and civic Illiteracy is PUBLIC ENEMY NO.1! Therefore, the Forum is designed to see through the sandstorm that authoritarianism is unleashing, and to point toward alternative pathways offered by critical pedagogy, insurrectional democracy, and international solidarity. The privilege as well as burden of all us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond the nation’s self-defined goals, interest, and positions. We speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of fascism and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

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Civic literacy in the United States is at a steady decline and has become the object of scorn and derision. Corporate media have abandoned even the pretense of holding power accountable and now primarily serve as second-rate entertainment venues spouting the virtues of consumerism, greed, and the mythology of U.S. innocence and exceptionalism. The signs of extremism are everywhere.

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The rise of dystopian politics and cultural mystification must be exposed and challenged on the local, national, and global planes. This requires drawing connections between historical forms of racial, ethnic, and economic violence that have been waged against indigenous communities, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged since the days George and Martha Washington enslaved hundreds of people while flying flags of freedom.

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We think that unjustified military invasions, racialized tough-on-crime campaigns, the wealth gap that has decimated democracy, neoliberal policies supported by both parties, the U.S. war on terror, racially based bands on Muslims, and criminalizing immigration would not have been possible without a deep, public anti-intellectualism. In other words, there’s a kind of systemic ignorance that these structured systems need, it requires, in order to operate and exist. Most Americans have been fed these binaries about the free world and the unfree world, peace-loving people and terrorists, and have accepted these binaries wholesale. The job for an informed citizenry is to insert critical thinking as a prevention tool, a way of thinking past these simplistic binaries, and thinking geopolitically, historically and contextually, making connections between U.S. racism domestically and imperialism abroad.

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Hannah Arendt was right in stating that “the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any,” suggesting that totalitarianism was as much about the production of thoughtlessness as it was about the imposition of brute force, gaping inequality, corporatism, and the spectacle of violence.