ABSTRACT
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that he liked the illiterate masses and that once he assumed the presidency, he would appoint a range of incompetent people to high-ranking positions that would ensure that many people remained poorly educated, un informed, and impoverished. It is hard to believe that this gaggle of religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theory advocates, billionaires, and retrograde anti-communists, who uniformly lack the experience to take on the jobs for which they were nominated, could possibly be viewed as reasonable candidates for top government positions. Under the reign of right-wing governments and social movements spreading throughout the world, thinking has become dangerous. In the face of Trump's draconian assault on democracy, it is crucial to rethink mechanisms of a repressive politics not only by highlighting its multiple registers of economic power, but also through the ideological pedagogical mechanisms at work in creating modes of agency that both mimic and surrender to authoritarian and social practices.
