Fascism no longer announces itself with marching boots or military coups. It now emerges through culture, through the seductive rhythms of social media, viral spectacle and the normalization of cruelty.

Today, culture is not just a backdrop to politics; it is politics. It teaches us how to see, what to remember, whom to fear, and what to forget.

In this age of resurgent authoritarianism, culture functions as a powerful pedagogy of domination.

Consider the grotesque moment when Kanye West released a song praising Hitler, a cultural act that doesn’t merely shock but educates.

It teaches, legitimizes and celebrates fascism in a society already desensitized to cruelty. This is not just tasteless provocation; it is pedagogy in its most sinister form.

It helps normalize hate, bigotry, and exclusion. And it is far from isolated. It reflects a broader cultural movement that erases historical memory and replaces it with white nationalist mythologies and criminal fantasies.

Culture today is largely a disimagination machine.

It erases the past, strips the oppressed of presence and dignity, and turns cruelty into common sense. It saturates everyday life with pedagogical forces operating through TikTok algorithms, Fox News broadcasts, YouTube rabbit holes, and billionaire-controlled platforms.

In this setting, fascism doesn’t only wear jackboots, it wears designer sneakers, speaks in memes and scores record streams.

Too many educators and progressives still underestimate culture’s power.

They focus on policy battles while the right wages a full-scale cultural war, defining reality, shaping desire and teaching people how to hate. They ignore Antonio Gramsci’s warning that all politics is pedagogical, and Stuart Hall’s insistence that ideology is lived in the everyday, that culture is where political meaning is formed and contested.

Authoritarians understand this better than most. Trump and his allies have declared war on critical thought, academic freedom and dissent.

Universities are defunded or censored. Histories of slavery, settler colonialism, and genocide are erased. Children are arrested in schools. Solidarity is criminalized. The aim is not just to dismantle critical institutions, but to strip culture of its emancipatory power and weaponize it for domination.

Under Trumpism, fascism is performed and televised.

Elon Musk embraces Nazi salutes. Stephen Miller echoes Hitler’s toxic language of exclusion and racial purity. Trump embraces Confederate symbols, proposes ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and calls for annexing sovereign nations, including Canada.

These are not random outbursts. They are cultural scripts rehearsing and normalizing authoritarianism, teaching a public steeped in amnesia to accept the unacceptable.

This is not merely a political or economic crisis, it is a cultural catastrophe.

A society that forgets how to think, to feel, and to remember becomes fertile ground for fascism. Under such conditions even grotesque acts, children starved in Gaza, immigrant families torn apart, fade into the background noise of spectacle and distraction.

And yet, culture remains a vital site of possibility.

José Mujica, former president of Uruguay, reminded us that real change does not begin with laws or institutions, but with the values that shape how people see the world.

You cannot build a society rooted in justice with individuals trained to prize greed, selfishness, and domination. As he put it, “You can’t construct a new kind of future with people whose hearts still belong to the old one.”

The struggle for radical democracy must begin in the realm of culture, where imagination is nurtured, public conscience awakened, and the seeds of transformation take root.

Educators and progressives must learn from this. To resist fascism, we need a new cultural politics, one that educates us toward solidarity, historical memory and moral imagination.

We must reclaim education as a tool for liberation, not indoctrination, through schools, libraries, universities, grassroots media and the arts. Culture must become a weapon in the fight for justice, not a mirror held up to hatred, terror and despair.

We are not just fighting to preserve democracy, we are fighting to teach it, to feel it, and to imagine it anew.

In that struggle, culture is not peripheral. It is the front line. This poses a profound challenge to Canadian higher education, which must confront how it prepares young people to navigate, resist and transform a world increasingly shaped by authoritarian values and pedagogies of cruelty.

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