Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure

Henry A. Giroux (2026) Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Regular readers of Policy and Practice will be closely familiar with Henry Giroux’s incisive, urgent and lyrical writings on critical pedagogy, cultural studies, critical race theory, historical consciousness and social democracy.  For Giroux, education must be political with a dual focus on reflection and action toward social transformation and a reimagining of the economy to prioritise social need over profit and privatisation.  As a regular contributor to progressive online publications including Truthout, Counterpunch and Salon, Giroux monitors the centres of power, particularly in North America, and applies a transformational pedagogy to his diagnostical analysis of social and economic ills. 

In 2021, Giroux published Race, Politics and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis which reflected on the intersecting plagues of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first presidential term of Donald Trump.  The book did not end with any sense of triumphalism at Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.  It instead ended with the prophetic line that: ‘The ghosts of fascism may have been pushed back in the shadows, but they have not disappeared’ (Giroux, 2021: 20).  Trump’s re-election has vindicated this judgement and his latest book, Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure, coincides with the first year of Trump’s second term and the United States’ alarming ‘descent into authoritarianism’ (Giroux, 2026: 89).  It is both a warning of the erasure of historical memory and critical thought and an invocation to collective resistance through citizen action.  Oxfam’s 2026 global economy report reflects on the political capture by extreme wealth analysed in detail in Giroux’s book.  It reveals that the number of billionaires worldwide has surpassed 3,000 and collective billionaire wealth is higher than at any time in history (Oxfam, 2026: 3).  While Elon Musk sits on wealth estimated at half a trillion dollars, one in four people across the world regularly don’t have enough to eat (Ibid.).  Oxfam argues that the world faces the choice of ‘oligarchy or democracy’ (Ibid.).

In the United States under Trump, oligarchy is crushing democracy through an ‘unholy alliance between Trump’s political machine and a powerful cohort of corporate and tech oligarchs’ (Giroux, 2026: 88).   This alliance is advancing ‘racist, nationalist culture that champions white supremacy, directly eroding the core American values of equality and justice’ (Ibid.: 91).  Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2025, was a preview of his administration’s political alignment with the cultural power of Information Technology platforms as the tech leaders of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and X were more prominently seated than Trump’s cabinet nominees (Helmore, 2025).  The political conventions of democracy were to be eradicated or subjugated to the higher influence of billionaire and corporate wealth.  With Trump’s transactional approach to politics, there was no better appointee as US Special Envoy to the Middle East than Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer.  With Trump’s presidency blurring the lines between business and government amid accusations of ‘crony capitalism’ (Aspan, 2025), there was no better pick as Senior Advisor than his son-in-law Jared Kushner.  At this moment of real peril for democracy as economic and political power becomes concentrated within an increasingly unaccountable billionaire class, Assassins of Memory delivers moral clarity and an urgent invocation to act in a post-truth world.  It is a stirring reminder that we can’t face into the future without historical memory which means resisting the politics of erasure that would ban books, champion ignorance and silence dissent. 

The precarity and possibilities of youth

There are three parts to Assassins of Memory with the first devoted to the precarity of youth in the age of neoliberalism.  In the United States, the welfare state has come under renewed attack from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) with its planned cuts of over $1 trillion from health programmes described by the Center for Medicare Advocacy (2025) as ‘the largest rollback of federal support for health care in American history’.  The Yale School of Public Health (2025) estimates that the OBBB’s removal of health coverage for millions of Americans could result in 51,000 preventable deaths per annum.  This is a clear case of criminal negligence in which the President, enabled by Congress, is consciously removing food and welfare provisions that will severely impact children, ‘particularly those in working class and poor families’ (Gotbaum and Calame, 2025).  Chapter one of Assassins of Memory is part memoir in which Giroux recalls his tough working-class upbringing that later required him to unlearn racist ideologies and the stereotypes and prejudices that underpinned them (Giroux, 2026: 13).  As a child carer who was separated from his sister at an early age, Giroux experienced homelessness in his own home (Ibid.).  His difficult transition to tertiary education and struggle for tenure reflect the social and economic barriers erected for working-class students and intellectuals ‘especially when they were on the left of the political spectrum’ (Ibid.: 16).  This reminds us why Paulo Freire radically rejected a class-based society and believed that ‘a thorough understanding of oppression must always take a detour through some form of class analysis’ (Macedo, 2000:13).

In his rendering of youth, Giroux both connects the personal to wider societal forces and bears witness as a border crosser between cultures, ideologies and occupations.  The atomisation of neoliberalism has greatly impeded social mobility, stigmatised poverty, commodified education and supplanted community cohesion with ‘cutthroat survival’ (Giroux, 2026: 21).  This chapter recalls an immersive study of homelessness in New York by Andrea Elliott (2022) that meticulously framed the marginalisation of an African American family living in a homeless shelter to the racial, historical, political and institutional injustices that pushed them into poverty.  Resistance to these injustices, urges Giroux, demand that we name them, unmask them and fight against them ‘with the full force of collective defiance’ (Giroux, 2026: 27).  Chapters two and three focus on the scholasticide (UN, 2024) carried out by Israel as part of its genocide in Gaza (Amnesty International, 2024) which Giroux argues is part of ‘a disturbing global alignment in the attack on intellectual freedom and historical truth’ (Giroux, 2026: 42-43).  Chapter three rightly applauds the growing international calls for civic disobedience to resist the rising tide of fascism in the US and the ongoing genocide in Gaza but importantly adds that action must be accompanied by ‘political education and consciousness-raising’ (Ibid.: 57).  As Freire (2000: 88) reminded us: ‘if action is emphasized exclusively, to the detriment of reflection, the word is converted into activism’ or ‘action for action’s sake’ which ‘negates the true praxis and makes dialogue impossible’.

Historical amnesia

Part two of Assassins of Memory on ‘The Scourge of Historical Amnesia’ reports on the relentless assault on public education in the US through book banning, the withdrawal of courses on critical race theory, the defunding of public institutions and curtailing of academic freedoms under the auspices of Christian white nationalism (Giroux, 2026: 64).  Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has been a relentless purveyor of far-right rhetoric with a speech in May 2025 decrying what he described as ‘cancerous, communist, woke culture that is destroying this country’ and called for the dismantling of policies on diversity, equity and inclusion, and transgender medical treatments (Viser and Wootson Jr., 2025).  In chilling rhetoric recalling fascist Europe of the 1930s, Miller said: ‘Children will be taught to love America.  Children will be taught to be patriots’ (Ibid.).  Miller has been accused of turning the US State Department into an ‘anti-immigration machine’ revoking thousands of visas and establishing full or partial bans on immigrants from 19 countries (Roth, 2025).  This theatre of cruelty is not only designed to terrorise migrant communities in the US but ‘deflect attention from headlines about economic contraction and job losses’ (Viser and Wootson Jr., 2025).  Trump’s reimagining of history and nativist rhetoric are intertwining dynamics, argues Giroux, ‘demonstrating how the suppression of critical thought and the manipulation of historical narratives coalesce to undermine democratic ideals and promote exclusionary ideologies that fuel a politics of disposability’ (Giroux, 2026: 68). 

Chapter five on ‘the violence of historical amnesia’ argues that when a society ‘refuses to remember or address past injustices – whether its slavery, imperialism or economic exploitation – those in power can continue to exploit the present without fear of historical accountability’ (Ibid.: 81).  Chapter six considers the impact of right-wing social media platforms – what Giroux calls ‘disimagination machines’ – in fostering ‘oppressive ideologies’ and mainstreaming toxic hate speech and launching culture wars.  The concentration of corporate media and cultural and political institutions has narrowed political debate and reduced much of our journalism to stenography.  Giroux finds that just six corporations’ control ‘over 90 percent of the information to which Americans are exposed’ (Ibid.: 90).  This narrow media base in the hands of right-wing ideologues is creating ‘manufactured ignorance’ and normalising censorship, propaganda and cruel invective as political theatre (Ibid.: 93).  The defanging of media has been compounded and enabled by a bi-partisan approach to the crucial issues of today including the Republican and Democratic parties’ consensus on neoliberal economics, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and colonisation of the occupied West Bank, silencing dissent on university campuses, ‘othering’ migrants and people of colour, and de-politicising education thus denying millions of Americans a progressive political voice.  It necessitates ‘making the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical at all levels of society’ (Ibid.: 97).

Pedagogy of resistance

The final section of Assassins of Memory is titled ‘The Crisis of Education and the Possibilities of Resistance’ and takes stock of the plague of neoliberalism on welfare and its enabling of Israel’s genocide through the manufacture and supply of weapons.  The complicity of some American universities in Israel’s genocide through partnerships with military contractors is contrasted with the courageous resistance of students who were subjected to ‘brutal state repression’.  ‘These students’ defiance’, writes Giroux – ‘rooted in principles of justice and human rights – stands as a beacon of hope in a world increasingly defined by dispossession, cruelty, violence and domination’ (Ibid.: 108).  He adds that ‘Democracy cannot endure, let along thrive, without citizens who are civically literate, critically engaged, and capable of resisting forces that seek to reduce us to mere spectators in our own lives’ (Ibid.: 111).  Giroux is careful, however, not to reduce the current crisis to economics alone, situating it within an inflamed racial panic framed by the loss of dignity, community and hope within a sinister identity politics and white replacement theory.  This lethal cocktail demands a ‘pedagogy of identification’ that ‘connects people to the broader forces shaping their lives’ (Ibid.: 116).

‘As neoliberalism collapses into overt authoritarianism’, argues Giroux, ‘its machinery of repression intensifies’ ((Ibid.: 107).   This has been most evident in Trump’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in American cities ostensibly to arrest and deport undocumented migrants but as Jeffrey St. Clair (2026a) reports: ‘Dozens, perhaps hundreds of American citizens, have been illegally stopped, interrogated, tasered, tear-gassed, arrested and detained by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents’.  St. Clair presciently summarises the aim of the Trump / Miller progrom: ‘to inflict maximum cruelty on a vulnerable population that it has used as a scapegoat for the decline of the American economy, resulting from four decades of ruthless neoliberal policies’ (Ibid.).

Since the publication of Giroux’s book, Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse were shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis within a few weeks of each other on 7 and 24 January 2026 (St Clair, 2026b; Allison, 2026).  While Trump and his acolytes sought to gaslight the public by urging them not to believe their eyes, it was clear from cellphone footage of their final moments that Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were murdered (Andersen, 2026).  In the case of Renée Good, Vice-President JD Vance offensively and outrageously suggested that she had been ‘brainwashed’ and was ‘a victim of left-wing ideology’ thus compounding the pain of her grieving family (Price, 2026).  We now live in a post-truth world where irrefutable evidence of grievous crimes is clouded in doubt and those guilty of such crimes operate with impunity.  The Trump administration and those European powers that have been complicit in Israel’s genocide and imperial drain of resources from the global South (Hickel et al., 2022) depend on our ignorance, historical amnesia and inertia.  As Giroux argues: ‘mass ignorance’ fuels ‘the death of moral conscience’ and ‘the collapse of social responsibility’ (Giroux, 2026: 153).  We require a pedagogy of hope and resistance to sustain a ’ferocious battle requiring courage, vision and mass action’ (Ibid.: 152).

Conclusion: embracing discomfort and learning to resist

Challenging historical amnesia not only involves learning from the past but, as Giroux argues, knowing what ‘has to be unlearned’ (Ibid.: 71).  This means embracing discomfort and confronting imperial histories that sustain a Eurocentric view of the global South and a complicity with the normalisation of genocide in Gaza.  It means recognising the interconnections between the criminalisation of dissent, the enabling of genocide and what Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro, describes as ‘the barbarism of consumption based on the death of others leading us to an unprecedented rise of fascism’ (Klein, 2024).  In positioning the role of educators during this polycrisis, Giroux suggests that ‘education is not meant to soothe; it is meant to awaken’.  And our role in the global education sector is to embrace a pedagogy of discomfort to address our own silences and support learners on a journey to social and economic transformation (Stein, 2024).  

At the beginning of 2026, Trump illegally invaded Venezuela and abducted its head of state, President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, killing 83 Cuban and Venezuelan soldiers in the process (Aljazeera, 2026).  His reckless, cruel and increasingly authoritarian domestic and foreign policies go largely unchecked by a compliant media and supine Congress, and are applauded and normalised by tech platforms controlled by billionaire allies.  Vital to Trump’s disastrous foreign policy has been the vassal-like role played by European states that have been complicit in the genocide in Gaza and silent on grievous breaches of international law such as the invasion of Venezuela (McKelvie, 2026).  This is a component of contemporary international relations that could have been explored in greater depth in Assassins of Memory as many European states are shifting to the far-right (Henley, 2025) and experiencing similar pedagogical pressures from the forces of neoliberalism to those deployed in the US (Díez-Gutiérrez, Alonso-Martínez and Palomo-Cermeño, 2025).  Many European states have criminalised protest against the genocide in Gaza and tried to silence dissent on university campuses (Amnesty International, 2025).  The Euro-Atlantic relationship in the context of Trump’s ‘authoritarian capitalism’ (Macfarlane, 2025), increasingly aggressive foreign policy and attack on historical memory could perhaps have broadened the book’s analysis and geographical reach. 

However, Trump’s administration is the epicentre of the unravelling of international law, hollowing out of democracy, the march toward racism and attack on public education.  Assassins of Memory rightly concentrates its analysis on how educators can arrest Trump’s slide to authoritarianism by reviving radical democracy and solidarity as a ‘political and moral force’ (Giroux, 2026:  156).  This book is a warning against ‘oligarchic gangster capitalism’ but also a source of hope for a ‘multiracial working class rising like a phoenix from the ashes of despair’ (Ibid.: 152).  Our activism and organising have never been more necessary.  ‘The stakes could not be higher: the future of democracy, the survival of justice and humanity itself hang in the balance.  The time to act is now’ (Ibid.: 156).

References

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Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education and Editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review.