Cheryl Crazy Bull's Keynote Address to Oglala Lakota College Grads: Look to Your Culture (American Indian College Fund)

Cheryl Crazy Bull, President and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, was the 2025 keynote speaker for Oglala Lakota College’s graduation ceremony. She acknowledges the difficulties Native communities are facing with the new administration’s budgets. Native experiences in the sixties and seventies led to a renaissance in Native communities and education and she cites the lessons they provide, based on Lakota culture, for surviving and thriving.

Campus Journalism in the Shadows: Publishing What Colleges Won’t

Student journalists often do the work of professional reporters: digging into campus finances, tracking misconduct, documenting protests. But many of these efforts never reach publication. Stories are pulled, reworded, or delayed—especially when they touch on administrators, donors, or internal disputes.

The Higher Education Inquirer is creating a space for this kind of reporting. We will publish student work rejected by campus editors, including pieces withheld out of fear or pressure. Submissions may be anonymous or credited, but all will be reviewed for accuracy and relevance.

This isn't about embarrassment—it’s about access. Students know their institutions from the inside. They see what official channels miss or avoid. By giving these stories a platform, we aim to bring useful information to light, help protect whistleblowers, and support independent inquiry.

We invite students to submit now. If your story was blocked, it still has a place to be heard. 

Caltech Settlement Spotlights Critical Need for OPM Transparency and Oversight in Higher Education

A recent Republic Report article by Jeremy Bauer-Wolf outlines the terms of a legal settlement between the California Institute of Technology and students enrolled in its Simplilearn-run cybersecurity bootcamp. The case and its resolution reveal larger systemic risks associated with university partnerships with Online Program Managers (OPMs), particularly those involving aggressive marketing, limited academic oversight, and questionable student outcomes.

The Caltech-Simplilearn bootcamp, launched under Caltech’s Center for Technology and Management Education, was marketed heavily using the university's brand. Students enrolled in the program alleged that Caltech misrepresented its level of involvement. The program was, in fact, designed and operated by Simplilearn, a for-profit OPM controlled by Blackstone and backed by GSV Ventures. The university seal and branding were used extensively in recruitment materials, leading some students to believe they were enrolling in a Caltech-created and Caltech-taught program. The class-action lawsuit contended that the program failed to live up to the expectations created by this branding.

As part of the settlement, Caltech and Simplilearn agreed to provide refunds to more than 260 students, totaling about $400,000. In addition to financial relief, the agreement requires clear disclosures that the bootcamp is “in collaboration with Simplilearn” and mandates that recruiters use Simplilearn email addresses rather than appearing to represent Caltech. The university must also ensure instructors possess verifiable professional credentials, not just certificates from prior bootcamp participation. Caltech is scheduled to wind down the program by the end of November 2025.

The Higher Education Inquirer previously reported in September 2024 that the Caltech-Simplilearn partnership was a case study in what can go wrong with white-labeled OPM programs. Simplilearn, which reported 35–45 percent annual revenue growth, had entered similar arrangements with Purdue, UMass, Brown, and UC San Diego. In many of these cases, the university’s brand was being used to sell pre-packaged courses created and delivered by the OPM. In Reddit forums and independent consumer reviews, former students regularly cited misleading marketing, lack of academic rigor, and poor support services. HEI's reporting raised concerns about the involvement of GSV Ventures, whose investors include high-profile education reformers like Arne Duncan and Michael Horn, as well as the private equity backing of Blackstone.

John Katzman, founder of the Noodle OPM, publicly warned about this model in 2024, saying, “White labeling is done everywhere… Still, I wouldn’t put my university’s name on other peoples’ programs without clear disclosure.” The Caltech case confirms that the reputational risks of such arrangements are real and can result in legal and financial liability.

The broader implications are significant. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, universities have increasingly turned to OPMs to expand their online offerings quickly and with limited internal resources. These partnerships often involve tuition-share agreements in which the OPM receives a large percentage of student revenue—sometimes as much as 80 percent. In return, the OPM provides marketing, recruitment, course development, and instructional support. However, as Caltech’s case illustrates, this model can easily sideline university faculty, diminish educational quality, and mislead students.

Policy makers have begun to respond. Minnesota has banned tuition-share arrangements in its public colleges. Ohio now requires OPM disclosure on university websites. A 2023 California state audit found that several public institutions were engaging in misleading marketing through their OPM partners. Yet federal regulations around OPMs remain limited and largely unenforced, despite calls for greater oversight.

The Caltech settlement reinforces the need for strong institutional governance over OPM partnerships. Universities must ensure full transparency in marketing, maintain academic control over curriculum and instruction, and build systems of accountability that protect students from misleading practices. Caltech’s retreat from its bootcamp partnership may serve as a warning to other elite institutions that have outsourced large portions of their online education operations with minimal oversight.

This episode also underscores the importance of investigative journalism in higher education. The Higher Education Inquirer’s early reporting on the Caltech-Simplilearn relationship helped expose a pattern of questionable practices that extend far beyond one institution. With private equity and venture capital deeply embedded in the OPM sector, the risks of commodifying higher education continue to grow.

Sources:
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2024/09/cal-tech-simplilearn-blackstone-scandal.html
https://www.republicreport.org/2025/caltech-settlement-underscores-need-for-opm-oversight-in-higher-ed/
https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/caltech-settles-lawsuit-over-cybersecurity-boot-camp-marketing
https://newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/

Linda McMahon’s Holocaust-Denial Response Sets Off Alarm Bells

In a tense moment during a recent House Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced sharp criticism for comments that some argue could lend legitimacy to Holocaust denial. When asked by Rep. Mark Takano whether refusing to hire a Holocaust denier at a university like Harvard would constitute an impermissible ideological litmus test, McMahon deflected by stating that “there should be diversity of viewpoints relative to teachings and opinions on campuses.”

McMahon’s answer was met with disbelief from lawmakers, educators, and journalists, who see her framing as a troubling signal of how far the rhetoric of “viewpoint diversity” can be stretched. Critics argue that her remarks echo the language used by far-right groups to justify pseudohistory, hate speech, and conspiracy theories under the guise of academic freedom.

The exchange quickly drew national attention. On CNN, host Abby Phillip challenged panelists over whether McMahon’s statement meant that institutions must accept Holocaust denial as a legitimate perspective. The conversation became heated, exposing deep divisions over how educational institutions should manage historically discredited views, especially in an era of increasing political polarization.

This controversy isn’t occurring in a vacuum. The Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance against perceived ideological bias in higher education, using terms like “viewpoint diversity” to criticize hiring practices, curriculum content, and campus speech policies. The result has been a chilling effect on institutions that wish to enforce rigorous academic standards while navigating political pressure from federal and state governments.

For institutions like Harvard—and for the broader higher education community—the implications of McMahon’s statement are stark. Academic freedom is not a license for falsehood. Holocaust denial is not a matter of interpretation or opinion; it is a deliberate distortion of documented genocide. By refusing to categorically reject it, McMahon undermines the integrity of scholarly inquiry and opens the door to broader normalization of anti-intellectualism.

Higher education institutions face a dilemma: how to defend academic freedom while protecting the truth. Universities must clarify that “diversity of viewpoints” cannot extend to historically debunked and morally abhorrent falsehoods. Faculty and administrators need clear guidelines that distinguish between open inquiry and misinformation masquerading as intellectual dissent. Curricula must reflect historical consensus, not propaganda.

McMahon’s response reflects a larger political movement that seeks to erode trust in institutions and blur the line between truth and ideology. The Higher Education Inquirer has long warned about the rise of pseudoscience and revisionist history within the credential economy. What happened in the hearing room last week is a symptom of that broader rot. If the idea of "viewpoint diversity" is weaponized to protect Holocaust denial, then the American educational system is not merely in decline—it is being actively dismantled.

For those committed to education grounded in truth, McMahon's comments should not be dismissed as a gaffe. They should be seen as a warning.

Sources
The Hill: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/opinion-linda-mcmahon-s-answer-on-holocaust-denialism-should-scare-us/ar-AA1J16hH
The Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/abby-phillip-clashes-with-cnn-co-star-over-trump-education-secretary-linda-mcmahon
CNN coverage archived on July 18, 2025

Borrower Defense Stories: The Human Cost of Higher Education Fraud

Over the past month, the Higher Education Inquirer has chronicled the experiences of borrowers misled by predatory institutions—mainly for-profit colleges—through its Borrower Defense Story Series. These narratives shed light on the deeply personal consequences of institutional deception and a federal loan forgiveness process that is often slow, bureaucratic, and uneven in its outcomes.

The stories are as diverse as the students who tell them, but they share a common theme: individuals who sought to improve their lives through education but were instead left with debt, broken promises, and uncertain futures.

In the first story, “I Did Everything Right. And I’m Still Paying for a Degree I Never Got,” a single mother describes her experience at Chamberlain University School of Nursing. She followed every instruction, met every deadline, and committed herself to a profession in health care. Yet she never earned her degree. Despite this, she remains burdened with thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Her borrower defense application has yet to yield relief.

In “Anxiety & Interest (KH),” another borrower shares her journey with Kaplan University Online. Lured by promises of job placement and flexibility, KH soon realized that the school’s assurances were empty. The debt accumulated rapidly. After transferring to another college and completing her degree elsewhere, she applied for borrower defense, but the outcome remains unclear. Her story highlights the emotional and psychological toll of dealing with deceptive institutions and a broken loan forgiveness system.

The third story in the series, “Modern Indentured Servitude,” critiques the broader system of higher education finance. It describes how students—particularly those without wealth or institutional support—are drawn into debt relationships that limit their freedom, autonomy, and economic mobility. Rather than offering a pathway to security or upward mobility, college becomes a mechanism of financial entrapment.

In the most recent installment, “Fashion Gone Bad for a Private Student Borrower,” a former fashion student recounts how she took on private loans to attend a program marketed with glowing career outcomes. In reality, the education was minimal, job prospects were nonexistent, and her private loans—unlike federal loans—offered no path for borrower defense relief. The result was financial devastation with no recourse.

These stories are not isolated. As of April 30, 2024, over 974,000 borrowers had received more than $17 billion in loan discharges under the borrower defense rule. Many of these were through group claims tied to settlements involving institutions like Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, and DeVry. However, hundreds of thousands of other borrowers still await decisions, and many more are excluded entirely—either because they took out private loans, their schools were not included in settlements, or their claims have been delayed indefinitely.

The Borrower Defense to Repayment rule was intended to protect students from institutional fraud. But implementation has been marred by political interference, legal challenges, inconsistent enforcement, and an overwhelmed bureaucracy. The HEI story series captures what those numbers and legal filings cannot: the lived experience of people who were deceived, indebted, and left behind.

HEI continues to collect and share these narratives—not only to document harm but to advocate for deeper accountability, faster relief, and a transformation of the credential-based education economy that profits from the desperation of working-class students.

Sources
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/i-did-everything-right-and-im-still.html
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/fashion-gone-bad-for-private-student.html
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106530
https://standup4borrowerdefense.com
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/student-aid-policy/2023/10/24/colleges-concerned-about-rise-borrower-defense-claims

The Disillusioned Young Man and Higher Ed in the US

Across the United States, growing numbers of young men are dropping out—of college, of the labor market, and of public life. They are disillusioned, disappointed, and increasingly detached from the institutions that once promised stability and purpose. Higher education is at the center of this unraveling. For many young men, it has become a symbol of a broken social contract—offering neither clear direction nor tangible reward.

Enrollment numbers reflect this retreat. Women now account for nearly 60 percent of U.S. college students. Men, particularly working-class men, have been withdrawing steadily for years. They are not disappearing from education simply out of disinterest—they are being priced out, pushed out, and in some cases replaced.

College has become a high-risk gamble for those without economic security. Some students take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans and find themselves dropping out or graduating into dead-end jobs. Others gamble in a more literal sense. The explosion of online sports betting and gambling apps has created a public health crisis that is largely invisible. Research shows that college students, particularly men, are significantly more likely to develop gambling problems than the general population. Some have even used federal student aid to fund their gambling. The financial and psychological toll is severe.

Alcohol remains another outlet for despair. While binge drinking has long been part of campus life, it is now more frequently a form of self-medication than social bonding. The stresses of debt, job insecurity, isolation, and untreated mental illness have led many young men to drink excessively. The consequences—academic failure, expulsion, addiction, violence—are often invisible until they are catastrophic.

The education system offers few lifelines. Counseling services are understaffed. Mentorship is scarce. For-profit colleges and nonselective public institutions offer quick credentials but little career mobility. Internships are often unpaid. Adjunct professors, who now make up the majority of the college teaching workforce, are overworked and underpaid, with little time for student engagement. The result is an environment where young men are left to fend for themselves, often without guidance, community, or hope.

Into this vacuum step political influencers who promise meaning and belonging—but offer grievance and distraction instead. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, has become one of the most recognizable figures appealing to disaffected young men. His message is simple: college is a scam, the system is rigged against you, and the left is to blame. But Kirk’s rhetoric does little to address real economic suffering. Instead of empowering young men with tools for analysis, organizing, or resilience, he offers them a worldview of resentment and victimhood. It's ideology without substance—an escape route that leads nowhere.

Compounding the crisis is the transformation of the U.S. labor market. Union jobs that once offered working-class men decent wages and stability have been gutted by automation, offshoring, deregulation, and union-busting campaigns. The pathways that allowed previous generations to thrive without a college degree have largely disappeared. Retail and service jobs dominate the landscape, with low pay, high turnover, and little dignity.

Meanwhile, higher education institutions have increasingly turned to international students to fill seats and boost tuition revenue. Many universities, especially at the graduate level, rely on international students—who often pay full price—to subsidize their operations. These students frequently gain access to internships, research positions, and jobs in STEM fields, sometimes edging out U.S. students with less financial or academic capital. While international students contribute intellectually and economically to American higher ed, their presence also reflects a system more concerned with revenue than with serving local and regional populations.

This mix of economic decline, addiction, alienation, and displacement has left many young men feeling irrelevant. Some turn to substances. Some drop out entirely. Others embrace simplistic ideologies that frame their loss as cultural rather than structural. But the deeper truth is this: they are caught between institutions that extract from them and influencers who exploit them.

The American higher education system has failed to adapt to the reality of millions of young men who no longer see it as a path forward. Until colleges address the psychological, social, and economic pain these men are facing—until they offer real support, purpose, and value—the disillusionment will deepen. Until labor policy creates viable alternatives through union jobs, apprenticeships, and living wages, higher education will continue to function not as a ladder of mobility but as a mirage.

Sources:
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Current Term Enrollment Estimates
University at Buffalo, Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions
International Center for Responsible Gaming
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance
Turning Point USA public statements and financial filings
U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: Union Membership Data
Institute of International Education, Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange
The Higher Education Inquirer archives on student debt, labor displacement, and campus disinformation campaigns

Student Aid and Student Gambling: A Risky Connection (Glen McGhee)

A growing body of research points to an unsettling trend on U.S. college campuses: a significant percentage of students are using financial aid—including federal loans and grants—to gamble.

Multiple recent surveys show that approximately 1 in 5 college students in the United States have used student aid to place bets, particularly through online platforms. With the explosive growth of sports betting apps and the normalization of gambling among young adults, this misuse of public and private education funds raises serious financial, ethical, and policy concerns.

A Look at the Data

Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, gambling—particularly online—has surged in popularity among college-aged individuals. Students have access not only to traditional campus distractions like card games or local casinos, but also to 24/7 mobile apps and websites offering fast payouts and endless opportunities to bet on sports, poker, and other games.

Financial aid, meant to support students' educational costs—tuition, books, housing, and food—is increasingly being used for riskier pursuits. A 2022 survey from Intelligent.com of nearly 1,000 students found that 16.7% of respondents admitted using financial aid or student loan funds to gamble. A follow-up survey in 2023 showed the number had risen to 20%, with most students confirming that access to aid increased their ability to place bets.

Other state-level reports from Nevada and Florida suggest a similar pattern, with 20–21% of students reporting misuse of aid for gambling purposes.

A Dangerous Cycle

The convergence of accessible credit, mobile betting platforms, and normalized gambling culture—often promoted through campus partnerships with major sports betting companies—has created an environment where student gambling is both easy and, in some cases, encouraged.

This behavior comes with serious consequences. Gambling with student aid can lead to:

• Missed tuition or rent payments

• Accumulation of unmanageable debt

• Academic disruption

• Increased psychological distress and financial insecurity

Students who gamble with loan money not only put their academic futures at risk but also burden themselves with debt obligations that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. In effect, the use of student loans for gambling amounts to converting long-term federal debt into high-risk leisure spending.

What’s Being Done?

A handful of universities have begun implementing gambling awareness campaigns, and a few states have introduced legislation restricting betting advertisements on campuses. The NFL Foundation has pledged $600,000 toward gambling prevention efforts in higher education, but these measures are modest given the scale of the issue.

Financial aid offices and higher education institutions face difficult questions. Should students who use financial aid for gambling face penalties? Is financial literacy enough to deter this behavior, or is regulation required? Should gambling apps be restricted from targeting students?

Managing Madness

The use of student aid for gambling highlights a critical weakness in how we monitor and distribute public funds in higher education. As gambling becomes more prevalent and more accepted, especially through mobile platforms, policymakers and university leaders will need to consider stronger safeguards—not just to protect taxpayer dollars, but to preserve the financial stability and well-being of students themselves.

Sources:

• Intelligent.com. (2022, 2023). Surveys on college student gambling habits.

• GamblingHelp.org. "Problem Gambling Among College Students."

• Nevada Council on Problem Gambling. (2024).

• Time Magazine. (2024). “An Explosion in Sports Betting Is Driving Gambling Addiction Among College Students.”

• The New York Post. (2025). “Online Gambling on the Rise Among High School Students.”

• Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling. (2023).

The Rich Life: Joy, Asceticism, Solidarity—and a Rejection of GDP Thinking

In a society obsessed with growth, speed, and accumulation, the phrase “the rich life” is most often used to describe an existence of luxury and exclusivity—curated vacations, designer goods, elite diplomas, and six-figure job offers. Elite universities in the United States, with their billion-dollar endowments and glossy marketing, have long sold students on this vision. Success is measured in metrics: earnings, endowment size, prestige rankings, and placement in the upper tiers of a system that quietly rewards exploitation.

But beneath the glittering surfaces lies a deeper poverty—a poverty of meaning, connection, and collective well-being. The GDP may rise, but so do depression, ecological collapse, burnout, and social fragmentation. In this context, the rich life must be reimagined. It cannot mean more consumption and more isolation. It must mean deeper joy, chosen simplicity, and solidarity with others. It must reject GDP as a measure of progress, and instead embrace a fuller, more humane vision of what it means to thrive.

Since World War II, Gross Domestic Product has been the dominant measure of national health and success. But GDP counts weapons manufacturing, fossil fuel extraction, and fast food sales as positives. It says nothing about equity, sustainability, or whether people have their basic needs met. It is a deeply distorted metric that treats all economic activity as inherently good—even when that activity is war, incarceration, deforestation, or cancer treatment. When universities follow this logic, they end up celebrating job placement in exploitative industries, increased student consumption, and rising tuition as signs of vitality. Entire institutions become addicted to a model of growth that quietly undermines the very conditions of human and planetary survival.

To understand what a truly rich life looks like, we might turn not to economic models but to psychological and philosophical ones. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, often misunderstood and oversimplified, offers a more nuanced framework. At the base are physiological needs: food, water, shelter, rest. Above that are safety needs—security, health, freedom from violence. Next come love and belonging, followed by esteem and the need to be respected. At the top is self-actualization: the ability to live with purpose, creativity, and integrity.

In a society driven by GDP and status competition, many people are stuck in the lower tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy—working long hours just to meet their physiological needs, or trapped in precarity with no sense of safety. Even among the affluent, the higher needs—belonging, self-worth, purpose—are often unmet. Elite universities contribute to this problem when they promise that self-actualization will follow prestige, when in fact they often deepen student anxiety and isolation through competition and debt.

The modern economy creates the illusion of abundance while delivering profound scarcity—scarcity of time, attention, care, and community. That’s where asceticism comes in, not as a form of self-denial, but as a conscious disengagement from toxic excess. True asceticism is not about suffering. It is about choosing a life that centers intention over impulse, relationships over acquisition. It allows us to reclaim our attention, our agency, and our sense of enoughness. When you no longer define your worth by your salary or possessions, space opens up—for joy, for learning, for resistance.

The joy that emerges from this way of living is not found in consumption, but in connection. It’s the joy of a shared meal, a collective project, a moment of awe in nature. It is not fleeting or hollow. It’s grounded in the rhythms of real life. In resisting the culture of more, we make room for what actually nourishes us.

Solidarity is what makes this kind of joy sustainable. Without solidarity, simplicity becomes privatized and performative. With solidarity, it becomes transformative. Solidarity means recognizing that none of us can be truly free while others are suffering. It means organizing not only for ourselves, but with and for others—workers, debtors, the unhoused, the planet itself. It is in solidarity that we find the courage to say no to extractive systems and yes to mutual care.

Maslow’s model, when viewed through a collective lens, demands that we create conditions where everyone—not just the privileged few—can ascend the ladder toward self-actualization. That means addressing structural violence, not just personal healing. It means challenging the dominance of GDP and the institutions that promote it. And it means building systems that nourish every layer of our shared humanity.

The richest life is not the most expensive or exclusive. It is the most grounded, the most connected, the most free. It is a life where basic needs are met without destroying others’ ability to meet theirs. It is a life where safety comes from community, not surveillance. Where belonging is unconditional. Where esteem is earned not through domination, but through care. Where self-actualization is not an individual escape, but a collective unfolding.

Elite universities, with their resources and visibility, have a responsibility to shift the narrative. They must abandon GDP-driven metrics and begin teaching students how to live and act for collective well-being. That means investing in degrowth, sustainability, and solidarity—not in fossil fuels, consulting firms, and Silicon Valley pipedreams. It means embracing joy, not just success. It means returning to education as a path toward wisdom, not just wealth.

The rich life is here. It is in the soil, the story circle, the union hall, the community fridge, the silent meetinghouse, the protest march, the long walk at dusk. It is in every act that centers sufficiency over supremacy, care over conquest.

Let us stop measuring the wrong things. Let us live lives that matter. Let us be rich in what counts.

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Sources and Influences:
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
Jason Hickel, Less Is More
bell hooks, All About Love
Juliet Schor, Plenitude
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

Digital Dope: How Internet Addiction Mirrors the Great Crises of Gin, Opium, Meth, and Fentanyl

In the 18th century, gin swept through the working-class neighborhoods of London, offering brief euphoria and long-term devastation. In the 19th century, opium dulled the pain of colonialism and industrial collapse. The 20th century brought methamphetamine and its promise of energy and escape, followed by fentanyl—cheap, potent, and deadly.

Now, in the 21st century, we face a new form of mass addiction: not chemical but digital. The most addictive substances of our time are not smoked, snorted, or injected—they are streamed, swiped, and scrolled.

The internet, once hailed as a revolution in knowledge and communication, has been weaponized into an empire of distraction and dependency. Social media, pornography, and online gambling—backed by surveillance capitalism and unchecked corporate power—are engineered for compulsive use. And like the addictive epidemics of the past, they are eroding individual agency, family life, and the very foundations of civic society.

The Gin Craze and the Algorithmic Binge

In 18th-century Britain, the Gin Craze turned city streets into open-air taverns. Cheap, potent alcohol flooded the market, leading to widespread addiction, crime, and social decay. The state profited from taxes while the poor drowned in despair.

Today’s equivalent is the infinite scroll. Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—like gin—are engineered to be consumed endlessly. The user is reduced to a set of engagement metrics. Like the gin drinker numbing pain, the social media user seeks validation, escape, or identity in a flood of curated images and outrage. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness have exploded, especially among teens and young adults. Suicides, particularly among girls, have surged in tandem with social media usage.

Opium Dens and the Porn Empire

The opium den offered oblivion. It soothed pain but eroded will. Victorian elites warned of its moral decay while quietly indulging themselves.

Today, online pornography is the new opium—widely available, hyper-stimulating, and often degrading. Once confined to private spaces, it is now accessible to children, monetized by multi-billion-dollar platforms, and normalized by mainstream culture. The effects—especially on young people—include desensitization, unrealistic expectations, isolation, and difficulty forming real-life relationships.

Research has shown that excessive porn consumption alters brain chemistry similarly to addictive drugs. It hijacks the reward system, rewires sexual expectations, and in many cases, contributes to erectile dysfunction, compulsive behavior, and emotional detachment.

Meth, Fentanyl, and the Speed of the Feed

Meth promised productivity; fentanyl promises relief. Both deliver destruction.

Digital addiction today mimics the frenetic highs of meth and the numbing power of fentanyl. The constant rush of notifications, likes, and headlines overstimulates the brain and crushes attention spans. Apps and games are engineered like slot machines, delivering intermittent reinforcement that keeps users hooked. The average smartphone user touches their phone over 2,500 times a day.

University students struggle to read long texts or concentrate for extended periods. Professors battle declining classroom attention and rising rates of anxiety and burnout. Like meth, the digital feed gives the illusion of efficiency while grinding the mind into dust.

Online Gambling: Casino in Your Pocket

The rise of online sports betting and casino apps has brought Vegas to every dorm room and bedroom. Targeted ads on Instagram and YouTube lure young people into betting with "free" money. Many students—especially young men—develop compulsive behaviors, losing thousands before they graduate. Some turn to credit cards, payday loans, or family bailouts.

States, like governments in the gin and opium eras, have embraced online gambling for its tax revenues. Universities, meanwhile, remain largely silent—even as students destroy their finances and futures through legalized digital addiction.

Higher Education: From Ivory Tower to Digital Trap

Colleges were once sanctuaries of thought and reflection. Today, they are nodes in the digital economy—where learning management systems monitor clicks, and students are nudged toward screens at every turn. Social interaction is filtered through group chats and Reddit threads. Pornography, gambling, and endless scrolling are a click away on the same device used to write term papers and attend virtual lectures.

Even counseling services are digitized. The solution to tech addiction, students are told, is often more tech—apps that monitor screen time, AI chatbots for mental health, or video therapy that feels detached and impersonal.

The Profiteers and the Pushers

In every addiction crisis, there are profiteers: distillers, opium traders, pharmaceutical companies, and cartels. Today, Big Tech plays the same role. Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Pornhub, DraftKings, FanDuel, and hundreds of smaller apps compete for attention with algorithms that exploit human weakness.

Their business model depends on addiction. They study neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and micro-targeted advertising with military-grade precision. Like the drug lords of the past, they deny responsibility while reaping billions.

And just as the poor suffered most in the gin and opioid crises, it is the working class, the unemployed, the chronically ill, and the disconnected who fall hardest into the digital pit.

The Need for Radical Intervention

Digital addiction is not a moral failing—it’s a public health emergency. Like past addiction epidemics, the solution requires:

• Public awareness campaigns

• Stricter age and content regulation

• Taxation on digital vice industries

• Digital literacy education at all levels

• Offline spaces and activities that foster real connection and attention

Higher education must lead. Not by digitizing every service, but by teaching students to reclaim their minds, their time, and their agency. Faculty must model mindful engagement and challenge the corporatization of the university by tech companies. Administrators must reconsider their reliance on LMS systems, data harvesting, and digital surveillance.

Will We Wake Up in Time?

In the past, addiction crises forced society to reflect on what was lost: family cohesion, civic virtue, mental clarity, and freedom itself. We stand again at such a crossroads. The digital drug is in every hand, and the overdose is slow—but devastating.

Like gin, opium, meth, and fentanyl, the internet addiction crisis is about more than chemicals—it’s about despair, disconnection, and exploitation. And like those earlier epidemics, it is not an individual failing, but a systemic one. The good news? As with past crises, awareness is the first step toward recovery. The question is: Will we act before another generation is lost?

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The Higher Education Inquirer continues to investigate the intersection of capitalism, addiction, and the commodification of human attention. Reach out if you have a story to share.

How Neoliberalism Haunts Our Lives: 24/7/365

Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic theory or a dry policy framework. It’s a lived reality that operates around the clock, shaping our lives in ways many people don’t fully see. Neoliberalism tells us that markets solve everything, that individual responsibility trumps social solidarity, and that human worth is best measured by productivity, consumption, and credentialing. Its presence is constant—at work, in education, in healthcare, in housing, even in our relationships.

This is not a new critique. But as the 21st century drags on and late capitalism becomes more extractive, predatory, and digitally surveilled, the impacts of neoliberal ideology have intensified. For the working class, for students, for adjuncts, for debtors, for renters, and for the chronically ill, neoliberalism is not an abstraction—it is a system of permanent exhaustion.

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The Day Begins: Sleep-Deprived and Algorithmically Watched

The neoliberal day begins before the alarm rings. If you’re poor, you may be sleeping in your car or waking up in a crowded home. If you’re middle-class, the first thing you see is likely your phone, already feeding you metrics about your body (sleep scores, heart rate, missed messages). Neoliberal logic tells us our time must be optimized, even our rest must be productive.

Gig workers check their apps to see if they’ll get enough rides or orders to survive. Others log into remote jobs monitored by keystroke trackers, digital timesheets, or AI productivity tools. Control is constant, and surveillance is internalized: we discipline ourselves with planners, metrics, reminders, shame.

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Education: Credentials Over Knowledge

For students, neoliberal education is a high-cost simulation of opportunity. Degrees are sold as investments in "human capital," with ever-rising tuition and debt. Public funding is replaced by predatory loans, branding consultants, and privatized ed-tech platforms. The curriculum is shaped by market demand, not civic responsibility. Liberal arts are gutted, and adjuncts are paid poverty wages while administrators balloon in number.

The university, once imagined as a space for critical thinking and collective inquiry, is now a debt-fueled credential mill—an HR pipeline for corporations, a subscription model of social mobility that rarely delivers.

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Healthcare: A Business of Despair

Neoliberalism doesn’t take a break when you get sick. In fact, your illness becomes a profit center. In the U.S., the healthcare system is a financial trap. Insurance is often tied to employment; losing your job means losing your access to care. Big Pharma, hospital chains, and insurance conglomerates operate under the logic of maximizing shareholder value—not public health.

Even mental health is commodified. Wellness apps, “self-care” products, and Instagram therapy push the idea that individual solutions will fix systemic problems. Suffering is reframed as personal failure.

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Housing: A Market, Not a Human Right

Housing insecurity is one of neoliberalism’s clearest failures. Real estate speculation, gentrification, and the financialization of housing have made shelter a luxury good. Renters face skyrocketing costs and eviction threats, while homes sit vacant as investment vehicles.

Public housing is stigmatized and underfunded. Homelessness becomes a criminal issue instead of a humanitarian one. You’re told to “pull yourself up” while the ladder is systematically removed.

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Work and Labor: You're Always On

The 9-to-5 is no longer the norm. Neoliberal work is either hyper-precarious or all-consuming. The gig economy pretends to offer flexibility, but in practice it strips away rights, benefits, and security. Professional workers face unpaid overtime, side hustles, and an expectation of constant availability. Labor laws lag decades behind. Union-busting is normalized.

At the same time, those without work are treated with suspicion. Unemployment, disability, and even retirement are framed as moral failings or burdens on the system.

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Nightfall: No Rest for the Weary

At night, the apps don’t sleep. Your data is still harvested. Your bank is still charging fees. Your landlord’s algorithm is still adjusting rent. Your student loan is still accruing interest. Your body, overstressed and under-cared-for, begins to break down.

Even dreams aren’t free: entertainment has been colonized by neoliberal culture, feeding you aspirational lifestyles and endless content to dull your exhaustion. Everything is monetized. Everything is a subscription.

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Resistance in the Cracks

Despite its pervasiveness, neoliberalism is not invincible. People are resisting in small and large ways—through union organizing, mutual aid, alternative media, degrowth activism, and radical pedagogy. These aren’t just political choices; they are survival strategies.

But for resistance to grow, we must name the problem clearly. Neoliberalism is not just a phase of capitalism—it’s an ideology embedded in every institution and mediated by every platform. It isolates us, overworks us, and extracts from us while pretending to offer freedom and choice.

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The 24/7/365 Trap

We live in neoliberalism’s world, but we don’t have to live by its rules. That starts with refusing its myths: that poverty is personal failure, that education is a private good, that health must be earned, that the market is sacred.

As long as neoliberalism governs our lives without challenge, inequality will deepen and democracy will continue to erode. The question isn’t whether we can afford to abandon neoliberalism—the question is whether we can survive if we don’t.

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Sources:

• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

• Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back

• Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market”

• Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity

• Michael Hudson, The Destiny of Civilization

• Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man

Borrower Defense Story 4: Fashion Gone Bad for Private Student Loan Borrower (Depressed Debtor)

As many high school students start looking for higher education options as graduation approaches, I had no idea what I was looking for. My parents worked in the food/service industry my whole life and no one in my family attended college. I knew I wanted something more. I came across International Academy Of design & Technology (IADT) at a college fair held at my high school. Which was a low income public high school.

 
IADT marketed themselves in a different way than any other university. They prided them self on that we can get hands on experience, work right in the industry, travel around for classes, classes were morning or night and that I can be done with a bachelors degree within 3 years. All while working right in the industry with mentors that the school will help set us up with. This all was perfect, as I had to still work to make money to live. I was so excited that I could do all this hands-on work and get a degree too. I knew that a 4-year university would never work for me.

I started at the Las Vegas campus. Within a few months I noticed that it was nothing that they promised me. I would ask the teachers and they said it was because the campus was NEW. I decided to switch and go to the Chicago, IL campus. When I did transfer, the school did tell me I had to take out private loans because my federal loans were all maxed out. So I did, not knowing this was a scam. 

As the Chicago campus was more “established” all the lies started to come out and seeing the other students and talking to them. Seeing that this school knew who to target and what kind of places to recruit low-income students. Lie to us, tell us we’ll get great jobs, etc. it was all lies. I never had a fashion “mentor” I never worked with major brands, fashion shows. Gosh, I barely learned programs on computers that were to be taught. I knew if I dropped out my parents (not too smart to begin with) would never understand. I stayed and just hoped for the best, working hard and trying to find connections myself. It was hard, I was 19 trying to find my way in life with no guidance. I had a mental breakdown. It caused me many relationships, money struggles, my faith and low confidence that got me into a social life mess.

The past 15 years of having a useless degree and 100k in private student debt. The only job I could ever get was a retail manger making $40,000 a year. I had many interviews with top brands like Nordstrom, Zappos, Macys, ETC, they all pretty much laughed in my face saying I had no degree just debt. I was never qualified for a buyer job, or a marketing manager at the brand. I went to school and all that debt for what? To make $40,000 a year. Being forced to pay $500+ in private student loans a month , that’s all I got. If I miss one payment I start to get threatening calls saying I need to pay or I’ll be sent to a collections agency, and they will start to take my wages. The lender (MOHELA) says they will work with me but they never do. Interest rates on the loans are 5% or higher. 

I cannot save, I have no retirement, I don’t own a house, car, no credit cards.my credit score has never been above 500. 

No American dream for me and my family. 

After paying my loans I barely could survive. I would love to file for bankruptcy, but I can’t, because the “Private loans” are not able to come off. But, When I do ask the lender (MOHELA) they tell me private loans are like a credit card, so why can’t I file for bankruptcy? Doing research on all the private loans, reading other stories of people in the same mess and all saying that we were victims of fraud. it’s a scheme of the poor stays poor and the rich, stays rich.

This loan has caused nothing but mental breakdowns and depression. I have to choose to dress my kids and put food on the table or pay this useless loan. It was all lies. I’m beyond terrify that a marshall will pound my door down when I’m late on payments. Once COVID hit I lost my job in retail and could never get back in at a manager level. Only way was working hours that I could never raise my family. I now clean houses to be able to have a family life. I have thought about going back to school and get more loans but nothing at this point can get me out of the mess I’m in.

I fell for a scam and for that I hate myself for doing it. I lost my faith and life to this loan. It controls me. I am not making anywhere near the money I was promised by IADT.

After doing countless attempts of the Misconduct application and being denied every time. I have read that MOHELA has discharged student loans that were 7+ months or more in default. But nothing for the ones that have been struggling to pay? I am trying to do what’s right. Yet again I was screwed. MOHELA has not worked with me they have just caused me to be terrified of life and a prisoner of this loan while I live paycheck to paycheck with a useless bachelor's degree.

Liberty University Online: Master’s Degree Debt Factory

Liberty University, one of the largest Christian universities in the United States, has built an educational empire by promoting conservative values and offering flexible online degree programs to hundreds of thousands of students. But behind the pious branding and patriotic marketing lies a troubling pattern: Liberty University Online has become a master’s degree debt factory, churning out credentials of questionable value while generating billions in student loan debt.

From Moral Majority to Mass Marketing

Founded in 1971 by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., Liberty University was created to train “Champions for Christ.” In the 2000s, the school found new life through online education, transforming from a small evangelical college into a mega-university with nearly 95,000 online students, the vast majority of them enrolled in nontraditional and graduate programs.

By leveraging aggressive digital marketing, religious appeals, and promises of career advancement, Liberty has positioned itself as a go-to destination for working adults and military veterans seeking master's degrees. But this rapid expansion has not come without costs — especially for the students who enroll.

A For-Profit Model in Nonprofit Clothing

Though technically a nonprofit, Liberty University operates with many of the same profit-driven incentives as for-profit colleges. Its online programs generate massive revenues — an estimated $1 billion annually — thanks in large part to federal student aid programs. Students are encouraged to take on loans to pay for master’s degrees in education, counseling, business, and theology, among other fields. Many of these programs are offered in accelerated formats that cater to working adults but often lack the rigor, support, or job placement outcomes associated with traditional graduate schools.

Federal data shows that many Liberty students, especially graduate students, take on substantial debt. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, the median graduate student debt at Liberty can range from $40,000 to more than $70,000, depending on the program. Meanwhile, the return on investment is often dubious, with low median earnings and high rates of student loan forbearance or default.

Exploiting Faith and Patriotism

Liberty’s marketing strategy is finely tuned to appeal to Christian conservatives, homeschoolers, veterans, and working parents. By framing education as a moral and patriotic duty, Liberty convinces students that enrolling in an online master’s program is both a personal and spiritual investment. Testimonials of “calling” and “purpose” are common, but the financial realities can be harsh.

Many students report feeling misled by promises of job readiness or licensure, especially in education and counseling fields, where state licensing requirements can differ dramatically from what Liberty prepares students for. Others cite inadequate academic support and difficulties transferring credits.

 The university spends heavily on recruitment and retention, often at the expense of student services and academic quality.

Lack of Oversight and Accountability

Liberty University benefits from minimal federal scrutiny compared to for-profit schools, largely because of its nonprofit status and political connections. The institution maintains close ties to conservative lawmakers and was a vocal supporter of the Trump administration, which rolled back regulations on higher education accountability.

Despite a series of internal scandals — including financial mismanagement, sexual misconduct cover-ups, and leadership instability following the resignation of Jerry Falwell Jr. — Liberty has continued to expand its online presence. Its graduate programs, particularly in education and counseling, remain cash cows that draw in federal loan dollars with few checks on student outcomes.

A Cautionary Tale in Christian Capitalism

The story of Liberty University Online is not just about one school. It reflects a broader trend in American higher education: the merging of religion, capitalism, and credential inflation. As more employers demand advanced degrees for mid-level jobs, and as traditional institutions struggle to adapt, schools like Liberty have seized the opportunity to market hope — even if it comes at a high cost.

For students of faith seeking upward mobility, Liberty promises a path to both spiritual and professional fulfillment. But for many, the result is a diploma accompanied by tens of thousands in debt and limited economic return. The moral reckoning may not be just for Liberty University, but for the policymakers and accreditors who continue to enable this lucrative cycle of debt and disillusionment.

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The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to investigate Liberty University Online and similar institutions as part of our ongoing series on higher education debt, inequality, and regulatory failure.

Right-Wing Hillsdale College Targeting MSN Readers for Donations

Hillsdale College—a small, private Christian liberal arts institution in Michigan—has increasingly turned to digital advertising, including Microsoft’s MSN platform, to extend its reach and solicit donations. Known for its conservative ideology and its refusal to accept any federal or state funding, Hillsdale is relying more than ever on mass digital engagement to sustain its growing national influence.

Hillsdale sponsors content across digital news aggregators like MSN using native advertising platforms such as Taboola. These sponsored links promote Hillsdale’s free online courses in subjects like the U.S. Constitution and Western political philosophy. Readers who click are typically prompted to provide an email address, after which they are placed into a recurring stream of newsletters and donation appeals. Hillsdale’s marketing strategy combines educational branding with ideological and political themes designed to deepen audience loyalty and increase donor conversion.

The school’s strategy is informed by its unique financial model. Unlike most colleges, Hillsdale accepts no Title IV federal funds and avoids other forms of government support. While this independence allows Hillsdale to circumvent Department of Education oversight, it also necessitates a highly developed fundraising operation. Hillsdale reportedly raises between $100 million and $200 million annually through private donations, which support its growing campus, online educational infrastructure, Imprimis publication, and a national network of affiliated classical charter schools.

Hillsdale’s digital fundraising and brand-building efforts align closely with its broader ideological mission. On February 19, 2025, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk delivered a keynote lecture at Hillsdale’s National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix. Titled “Hitting the Ground Running: The Trump Transition and Early Priorities,” the event illustrated how Hillsdale fuses academic outreach with conservative political messaging. The speech was promoted on Hillsdale’s social media platforms and streamed via its Freedom Library website.

[Charlie Kirk speaks at Hillsdale College in February 2025.] 

Hillsdale’s collaboration with platforms like MSN reflects a wider shift in how politically-aligned institutions use digital media ecosystems to bypass traditional gatekeepers. Because MSN blends sponsored content into its main news feed using algorithmic curation, promotional material from ideological institutions can appear alongside conventional journalism—without the benefit of editorial transparency or disclaimers. For Hillsdale, this means access to millions of readers, many of whom may not realize they’re engaging with sponsored political content masked as civic education.

This convergence of ideology, education, and marketing raises critical questions about the future of higher education outreach and the role of big tech platforms in shaping political narratives. Hillsdale’s success in these spaces underscores how easily lines between education, influence, and revenue can blur in the digital age.

Sources
https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/promo/constitution-101
https://freedomlibrary.hillsdale.edu/programs/national-leadership-seminar-phoenix-arizona/hitting-the-ground-running-the-trump-transition-and-early-priorities
https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en/solutions/ad-products-formats/display
https://www.hillsdale.edu/about/frequently-asked-questions/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsdale_College
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu
https://www.facebook.com/hillsdalecollegemichigan/posts/livestream-today-1000-pm-et-watch-charlie-kirks-speech-hitting-the-ground-runnin/905074171834140

To compare is to despair

"Comparison is the thief of joy." —often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, and weaponized daily by the digital world we live in.

In an age of filtered feeds and performance metrics, comparison is no longer a passing emotion—it’s a way of life. For people raised with smartphones and social platforms, the pressure to measure up has become both ambient and acute. “To compare is to despair” is more than a caution—it’s a diagnosis. And it’s quietly devastating a generation’s mental health, self-worth, and trust in institutions like higher education.

Documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield has been chronicling this culture of status anxiety for decades, from The Queen of Versailles to Generation Wealth. In her latest docuseries, Social Studies, she turns her lens toward teenagers navigating school, relationships, and identity—all through the distorting lens of the internet. In a media-saturated world, Greenfield argues, comparison has shifted from a social quirk to a psychological crisis. Teenagers now compare their lives not just with classmates or neighbors, but with curated content from the global elite, influencers, and AI-polished strangers. What Greenfield captures is the raw vulnerability of growing up under digital surveillance—the feeling that you’re never doing enough, never owning enough, never being enough.

This manufactured inadequacy bleeds directly into higher education. Universities don’t just market degrees; they market lifestyles, futures, identities. The elite college brochure is a fantasy of rooftop gardens, tech internships, and backpacking trips between semesters. Meanwhile, the lived reality for many students is debt, stress, food insecurity, and academic burnout. But even that struggle becomes content, aestheticized into productivity vlogs or “study with me” videos that offer a sanitized glimpse of chaos. In today’s world, even your suffering must be marketable.

Social media didn’t invent comparison culture, but it mechanized it. Platforms are built on engagement, and nothing engages like insecurity. You see the roommate who lands a six-figure tech job before graduation. You watch influencers turn their gap years into brands. You internalize their wins as your losses. This algorithmic envy operates in real time and at scale, colonizing your attention and monetizing your despair.

Comedy shows like The Daily Show have long satirized this trap, poking fun at everything from the elite college admissions racket to the corporate-speak of “personal branding.” In one segment, a correspondent joked that “success” now means optimizing yourself for LinkedIn before you’ve even figured out who you are. That’s the punchline of the meritocracy myth: you’re told that everything is possible if you just work hard enough—while quietly being outpaced by generational wealth, legacy admissions, and curated advantage.

Meanwhile, musical artists like Social Studies echo the emotional toll. Their lyrics speak to the distance between who we are and who we’re performing to be. That split—the psychological tension between self and spectacle—is the breeding ground of despair. It’s not just that others seem to be doing better; it’s that we no longer trust what “better” even means.

Higher education plays its part. Universities now sell the dream of transformation while enforcing systems of stratification. Your college isn’t just where you study—it becomes your brand, your future network, your worth. And when so much of that promise turns out to be hollow—when the degree doesn’t lead to stability, when the tuition bill becomes a lifelong debt—you don’t just feel disappointed. You feel defective. The system tells you the problem is you.

But the problem is structural. Comparison thrives in systems built on scarcity and spectacle. When there aren’t enough good jobs, enough affordable housing, enough room at the top, we’re trained to compete with each other rather than question the game. Greenfield’s work reminds us that these systems aren’t accidental—they’re profitable. In Social Studies, young people live their lives on screen while corporations harvest their data and self-esteem. The comparison economy runs on your insecurity.

To opt out—however imperfectly—is a quiet revolution. That might mean logging off. Or choosing a slower, less “optimized” path. Or resisting the urge to measure your value against someone else’s performance. Or just remembering that most of what you see is only half true. It might mean treating your own life not as a résumé or content stream, but as something real, worthy, and complex.

To compare is to despair. But to recognize comparison for what it is—a system, not a truth—is a first step toward something else.

Sources
Lauren Greenfield, Social Studies, FX / Hulu, 2024
Greenfield, Interview with Interview Magazine, 2024
“Social Media Swallowed Gen Z,” Wired, 2024
The Daily Show, segments on education and meritocracy
Social Studies, “Wind Up Wooden Heart,” 2010
Patricia Greenfield, Cultural Psychology and Individualism, UCLA
The Higher Education Inquirer archives

Language in the Age of Fascist Politics (Henry Giroux)

In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.

In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism. 

In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language. For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve. 

Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is "dumb, predatory, sentimental." It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.



Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance. 

In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one--fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US—marked by fantasies of exclusion accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle. 

As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump's regime.

State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability

As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance.

This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.” 

Trump is not alone. Many of his MAGA follower use these same hateful discourse. For instance, conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote “in response to a speech by Melanie Yazzie, a Native artist and professor, about decolonization, “We didn’t Kill enough Indians.” This is not simply harsh rhetoric; nor is it a performative display of emboldened hatred and historical forgetting, it sets the stage for state-sanctioned repression and mass violence. What is at stake is more than civic respect. It is democracy itself. When language loses meaning and truth is blurred, tyranny thrives. Trump’s and too much of MAGA discourse is not about persuasion; it is about dehumanization and domination. It functions as statecraft, laying the groundwork for a society where suffering becomes spectacle and repression masquerades as law and order. Language is the canary in the coal mine, warning us that democracy dies without an informed citizenry.

As Eddie Glaude Jr. has powerfully argued, Americans must confront a brutal truth: the creation and expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), now the largest federal law enforcement agency, is not merely a matter of policy, it is a cornerstone of white supremacy. It is a racist institution, entrenched in an immigration policy designed to uphold the values of white nationalism. In the face of shifting demographics, ICE is tasked with an urgent mission—to make America white again, a calculated attempt to turn back the clock on progress, to preserve an imagined past at the cost of justice and humanity.

We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land. The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.

Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy

Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross. 

America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as "domestic terrorists." 

It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong's associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should "blow yourself in the back of the head," and that Christians should "pray for their deaths." Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be "beaten and stomped in the mud" before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a "parasitic plague." Empathy's true danger lies in its role as an enabler—granting permission to dehumanize others and constricting the very “definition of who should be included in a democratic state.” This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.

Naming the Deep Roots of the Police State

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles.

The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time.

Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.

The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will.

Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased?

The Collapse of Moral Imagination

What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage-- a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: "With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking." Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”

Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism

This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is "an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE," constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe.

This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself. 

A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer, who ominously remarked that "the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have 'at least 65 million meals." Change.org, along with others such as Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.” Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump's inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime.

The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible, deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.

For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.

Higher Education and the Fight Against Authoritarianism
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It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and modern day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.

White Nationalism and Reproductive Control

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.

These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.

The Systemic Assault on Democracy

This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.

In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.

The Normalization of Tyranny

Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.”

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”. As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president. As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials , and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island.

A central player in this current regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass abductions, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent is Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American.

Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy. At stake here is what Timothy Snyder calls the practice of fascist dehumanization.

This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.

Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy

In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity. 

What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us. 

The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.

As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.

[This article first appeared in the LA Progressive.]


By Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His latest book is The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025). He is LA Progressive's Associate Editor. His website is www.henryagiroux.com