Highly popular celebrity culture now works in tandem with neoliberal values to represent extreme forms of solipsism and a cultivated ignorance. A form of manufactured ignorance now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops, and the need for instant gratification. This is a mode of manufactured ignorance and education that has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility, or the demands of citizenship.
The rise of dystopian politics and cultural mystification must be exposed and challenged on the local, national, and global planes. What is crucial is that the mechanisms, discourses, policies, and ideologies that inform authoritarianism must become part of any analysis that is willing to challenge the anti-democratic forces metastasizing within the United States today. This means in part, focusing on the ongoing repressive systems that have been developing in American society since its inception.
It also means 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 of George and Martha Washington enslaved hundreds of people while flying flags of freedom. ~ Henry A. Giroux
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