An undercover investigation reveals the deception of “humane”-certified farms

Regulators had a chance to fix the meat industry’s false advertising problem. They failed.

by Kenny Torrella

VOX

Nov 14, 2024,


A flock of large white broiler chickens, approximately 10 weeks old, are ready to be processed. 

Monica Fecke/Moment via Getty Images


An overwhelming majority of Americans say they’re concerned about the treatment of animals raised for meat, and many believe they can help by simply selecting from one of the many brands that advertise their chicken or pork as “humane.” But such marketing claims have long borne little resemblance to the ugly reality of raising animals for meat.


Nearly all farmed animals in the US live on mega factory farms, where they’re mutilated without pain relief and fattened up in dark, overcrowded warehouses before being shipped off to the slaughterhouse. Only a tiny sliver of livestock are actually reared on the small, higher-welfare farms that many companies conjure on their packaging with quaint red barns and green rolling hills — and even those operations can be rife with animal suffering.

This summer, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had an opportunity to fix the false advertising problem pervasive in the meat aisle when it published updated guidelines that companies must follow when making animal welfare claims on their labels. Instead, its new guidance barely changed anything.

The updated rules “remain insufficient to combat misleading label claims used to market meat and poultry products,” as the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute put it, allowing companies “to essentially make up their own definitions with no repercussions.” (The one improvement, the organization noted, was a clearer definition of the term “pasture raised,” though that label remains poorly enforced and does not guarantee animals were raised humanely.)

Here’s how the USDA’s guidelines work: If a meat company wants to make an animal welfare or environment-related claim on its packaging, it must fill out a form with an illustration of its label and an explanation as to how the animals are raised to justify the claim; how the company will ensure the claim is valid from birth to slaughter to sale; and whether or not an independent, third-party organization certified the claim, which is optional. The USDA never conducts surprise audits, or any audits at all, to verify the company is telling the truth. It is, in essence, an honor system.

The USDA also has an incredibly low, and often nonsensical, bar for what passes as humane treatment.


The agency states, for example, that a chicken company can use the term “humanely raised” if it feeds its birds an all-vegetarian diet, which has virtually no bearing on their welfare (chickens are omnivores).


Similarly, the agency says pork can be labeled “humanely raised” if the company provides its pigs with “proper shelter and rest areas.” By that definition, standard factory farms — which produce practically all US pork — are humane because they provide ample shelter in the form of vast, crowded warehouses where the animals have nothing to do but rest on the same concrete flooring where they defecate and urinate.

Chickens raised for meat at an operation in Maryland. Edwin Remsberg/The Image Bank via Getty Images

Pigs at a breeding farm. Chayakorn Lotongkum/iStock via Getty Images


“I think that a lot of this is out of touch with what consumers are really thinking these claims mean,” P. Renée Wicklund, co-founder of Richman Law & Policy — a law firm that takes meat, dairy, and egg companies to court over false claims — told me.


Over the last decade, the Animal Welfare Institute has requested from the USDA the applications that meat companies submitted for 97 animal welfare claims. For the overwhelming majority of them, there were either no records at all or the justifications for the labels had little to no relevance to animal welfare.


The USDA declined an interview request for this story and didn’t directly respond to numerous detailed questions. Instead, it sent a statement that read in part: “USDA continues to deliver on its commitment to fairness and choice for both farmers and consumers, and that means supporting transparency and high-quality standards.”


To be fair to the agency, it doesn’t have the authority to conduct on-farm audits, which would require an act of Congress. But it does have authority to define animal welfare claims — an authority it rarely exercises. Instead, it allows companies to define animal welfare claims themselves.


The USDA also added that it “strongly encourages” companies to validate animal welfare claims using third-party certifiers — private organizations that audit conditions on farms and license the use of their own humane labels. But a recent undercover investigation into one of the nation’s biggest “humane-certified” poultry companies shows how low third-party certification standards can be.

Chickens kicked and run over with forklifts: Inside a “humane-certified” poultry farm


Foster Farms, the 11th largest chicken company in the US, advertises meat from animals raised with supposedly “better care.” On its packaging, chickens are shown roaming free on pasture, even though the company’s conventionally raised birds will never step foot onto grass. On its website, Foster Farms says its farming is “safe, sustainable, and humane” and that its chickens are “raised on local West Coast farms” with “strenuous, high standards.”


The company also promotes its chicken as “cage-free” with “no added hormones or steroids ever.” But touting these aspects is misleading because chickens raised for meat in the US are not kept in cages — only those raised for eggs are — and it’s illegal to feed chickens hormones or steroids.


“They’re feel-good words, but they don’t have any real meaning,” veterinarian Gail Hansen told Vox.


This summer, an undercover investigator with the animal rights group Animal Outlook worked for a month on the company’s catch crew, a job that entails grabbing chickens on farms, stuffing them into crates, and loading them onto trucks bound for the slaughterhouse.


Over the course of more than a dozen shifts at multiple Foster Farms facilities, the investigator — who requested anonymity due to the covert nature of undercover investigations — documented workers slamming birds into crates, kicking and hitting chickens, and numerous instances of forklift drivers running over birds.


The investigator recalled making eye contact with a bird shortly after they were run over by a forklift. “They were being crushed and everything was being pushed forward, and they had their beak open, and they had this look on their face like they knew that they were dying. And then I watched them flap and struggle for a moment before passing,” the investigator told me.

“From a veterinary perspective, some of the things are just horrific,” Hansen said.


The investigator chalked up most of the cruelty to the chaotic, fast-paced work environment imposed by supervisors during long, grueling shifts.


After Animal Outlook released its investigation last month, Foster Farms fired several employees and reported them to county law enforcement. In a statement to a chicken industry news site, the company said it would also hire for more roles focused on animal welfare, retrain employees on animal welfare, and conduct more audits. Foster Farms did not respond to Vox’s multiple requests for comment.


Cheryl Leahy, who was executive director of Animal Outlook when the investigation was released but has since left the organization, said the company’s problems go much deeper than just a few employees.

Related:The “humanewashing” of America’s meat and dairy, explained
Undercover audio of a Tyson employee reveals “free-range” chicken is meaningless
“Wild-caught,” “organic,” “grass-fed”: What do all these animal welfare labels actually mean?


Cruelty is “woven into the culture,” Leahy said. “It is a feature, not a bug. It is a business practice. There is a decision made to go with volume and speed” over animal welfare.


In recent years, the USDA has cited Foster Farms for 18 incidents of violating federal animal welfare laws. Numerous other investigations into Foster Farms facilities have found cruel conditions and practices that, to be fair to the company, have also been documented across the US poultry industry.


Foster Farms’ announced reforms in response to Animal Outlook’s latest investigation are unlikely to do much to improve overall conditions, Leahy said. It has already taken similar actions — penalizing workers and increasing training — in the wake of previous investigations. More importantly, the company’s animal welfare standards are already at rock bottom, in line with the rest of the chicken industry.


But you wouldn’t know that from its marketing or its “American Humane” certification.

How misleading marketing — enabled by the USDA — tricks consumers


For years, Foster Farms has bolstered its humane image through a certification from the nonprofit American Humane — the kind of third-party organization that the USDA “strongly encourages” meat companies making humane claims to work with. As of the late 2010s, the company paid American Humane $375,000 annually for its certification, and a lawsuit claimed that American Humane would give Foster Farms seven to 14 days’ notice of an audit, allowing them to prepare for the visits.


Animal advocacy groups like Animal Outlook argue that American Humane’s standards largely mirror that of the typical chicken factory farm, not the higher-welfare conditions a consumer would reasonably expect.


Hansen, the veterinarian, echoed that sentiment: “The daylight between them is pretty narrow.”



American Humane’s “standards are not meant to actually bring these companies up to a level of palatability for the public,” Leahy said. “What they’re trying to do is stop the criticism.”


A former American Humane executive is now an owner and partner of a PR firm that defends factory farm interests and executive director of a related pro-factory farming organization. American Humane did not respond to multiple requests for comment.


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A 2015 class action lawsuit, alleging that Foster Farms misleads consumers with its American Humane Certified label, demonstrates how the USDA’s low standards enable such deception: In a 2018 decision, a three-judge panel rejected an appeal in part because the USDA had already approved the label.


“The Foster Farms of the world can say, ‘Look, this was approved by a government agency,’”said Wicklund. (Wicklund’s law firm, Richman Law & Policy, has represented and co-counseled with Animal Outlook in meat labeling lawsuits; earlier this year, it filed a legal complaint against Foster Farms over its animal welfare claims, which is ongoing.)


The recently released Animal Outlook investigation reported that Foster Farms employees — and, according to the undercover investigator, its supervisors, too — did violate some of American Humane’s poultry handling standards, which are laid out in a dense 115-page document. However, Foster Farms remains certified by American Humane — when companies are in violation of the organization’s standards, there are seemingly no penalties. They have to fill out a form explaining how they’ll meet full compliance in the future and alert American Humane when that’s been done. Companies can still obtain certification even if they don’t fully pass their annual audit. (And numerous investigations into poultry companies have found that rough handling appears to be the industry norm, not the exception).


While some animal certification programs do set standards above the industry norm, what makes especially weak third-party certifications like American Humane’s so fundamentally inadequate — and deceptive — is that they permit the worst systemic abuses of poultry farming: cruel breeding practices, overcrowding, and especially inhumane slaughter methods.


Virtually all chickens raised for meat in the US have been bred to grow so big so fast that they’re in constant pain. Many have difficulty walking or even standing and are more likely to suffer from leg deformities, heart attacks, and other health issues when compared to heritage breeds that grow at a normal pace. Animal Outlook’s investigator alleged that many of the birds in the Foster Farms operations couldn’t walk and that some had broken legs. American Humane’s standards allow for these rapid-growth chickens, which animal rights activists call “Frankenchickens.”

The group’s standards also allow for overcrowding, giving birds a little more space than the industry standard but what still amounts to almost 20 percent less space than what animal advocacy groups argue should be the bare minimum. American Humane allows for the standard chicken slaughter process: shackling chickens upside down, dunking them in a bath of electrified water to stun them unconscious, slitting their throats, and then placing them in a scalding vat to loosen their feathers.


Despite all that, the resulting meat can still be advertised as humane, sustainable, and produced from healthy birds.


The empty claims many meat companies make on their labels and in their advertising stem from forces bigger than the USDA and third-party certifiers. Currently, chickens and other poultry birds have zero federal legal protections while on the farm or in the slaughterhouse, and third-party certification programs make an exceptionally weak substitute for this legal gap. If we wanted truly “humanely raised” chicken, we’d have to fundamentally change how chickens are farmed, which would require significant anti-cruelty legislation from Congress. That would substantially raise the price of chicken, making it more of a delicacy than a staple.


But the USDA, the poultry giants, and the dubious third-party certification schemes would like us to believe otherwise — that wholesome marketing and hollow honor systems can fix the horrific reality of what it is to be a farmed animal in the US.

Kenny Torrella is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat.

A New Wave of Movements Against Trumpism Is Coming

Our job is to translate outrage over his agenda into action toward a truly transformational vision.

By Mark Engler, Paul Engler 

November 10, 2024

Source: Waging Nonviolence


The Protect Our Futures march in New York City on Nov. 9. 

(Facebook/Met Council on Housing)

For many of us, the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s decisive electoral victory has been a time of deep despair and mourning. There has been plenty of commentary trying to make sense of Trump’s win and the factors that led to it. But no analysis changes the fact that the outcome represents a serious blow to our most vulnerable communities, a sharp setback for causes of economic and social justice, and a profound challenge to whatever semblance of democracy America has been able to secure. We have lived through it before, and it feels even worse the second time around. It is right that we take this as a moment to grieve.

But even amidst our feelings of sorrow or hopelessness, we can recognize that political conditions are not static. As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge. And in making this happen, we can draw on lessons from what has worked in the past and what we know can be effective in confronting autocrats. Our job will be to take advantage of the moments of opportunity that arise in coming months to hold the line against Trump’s authoritarianism — and also link them to a vision for creating the transformative change we need in our world.

Here’s why we can expect a new wave of movements to arise.

Trump is a trigger

We have often written about the importance of “trigger events” in sparking periods of mass protest. Social movement organizers can labor for years in relative quiet, carrying out the long-term “spadework” — as civil rights icon Ella Baker called it — of consciousness raising, leadership development and building organizational structure. But there are also moments when issues of social and economic injustice are thrown into the spotlight by a dramatic or expected public event: A shocking scandal, a natural disaster, a geopolitical conflict or an investigative report revealing gross misconduct stokes widespread outrage and sends people into the streets.

In 2016, Trump’s election itself served as a trigger event. A wide range of groups, from the liberal ACLU to the more radical Democratic Socialists of America, saw membership and donations surge as concerned progressives braced for what was expected to come from his administration. New groups also emerged, such as Indivisible, which began as a viral Google Doc about how to confront elected officials and compel them to resist the Trump administration. It then quickly grew into an organization with more than 4,000 affiliated local groups by 2021.

At the same time, outrage among women about Trump being able to take office in spite of his overt misogyny led them to mobilize in record-breaking numbers. A call to action went out immediately after the election, and on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, upwards of four million people rallied in Women’s March events, spread across every state in the nation. Scholars tracking participation identified this as “likely the largest single-day demonstration in recorded U.S. history.”

This time around, the mood is different. The shock of “how could this ever happen” that many experienced eight years ago feels distinct from the gut-churning sense of “it is happening again” that is sinking in this time around. As the New York Times described it, there is a “stunned, quiet and somber feeling,” sometimes accompanied by resignation, rather than an immediate impulse to rise up in resistance. That said, established progressive groups that have created space for members to gather to make sense of the electoral outcome and plan a response have seen a strong response. Most notably, a mass call two days after the election organized by a coalition of 200 groups — including the Working Families Party, MoveOn, United We Dream and Movement for Black Lives Action — drew well in excess of 100,000 people, with thousands signing up for follow-up community gatherings.


There is no better antidote to hopelessness than action in community.

There will be more opportunities to come. It is highly likely that future trigger events will arise as Trump begins implementing his agenda. Although he won a commanding electoral victory, a significant portion of his gains can be attributed to rejection of the status quo and a desire on the part of voters to sweep out a broken political establishment. On a policy level, Trump is often incoherent. Although he presents himself as a champion of those left behind, he cannot deliver for working people. Instead, many of the things that he will attempt may prove to be deeply unpopular, from tax cuts for the wealthy and attacks on women’s rights, to unconstitutional power grabs and cuts to social services or public benefits.

Should Trump begin to carry out the program of mass deportations that he has promised, resulting in separated families and shattered communities, conservatives could quickly find that their overreach has sparked backlash and defiance — not only from defenders of human rights but even from business people alarmed at the economic disruption.

In late 2005, when the Republican majority in the House pushed through a piece of anti-immigrant legislation known as the Sensenbrenner Bill — a measure which, among other impacts, would have created penalties for providing humanitarian services to undocumented immigrants — it gave rise to a series of massive immigrant rights protests in the months that followed. Hundreds of thousands marched in 2006, not only filling the downtowns of major cities like Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles, but also flooding public squares in places such as Fresno, Omaha and Garden City, Kansas. These actions galvanized the Latino vote and had lasting impacts in multiple election cycles that followed.

Likewise, in the early days of Trump’s first term, his administration’s “Muslim ban” prompted rallies and civil disobedience at airports around the country. While the ban was being challenged in court, the actions served as major public flashpoints, both bolstering local groups and giving rise to national formations such as #NeverAgainAction, while also prompting cities to make vows to protect migrants.

Public revolt can cut both ways: The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 became a significant hindrance to Barack Obama’s ability to pursue a progressive economic agenda. But whether such mobilizations come from the left or right, it is important to recognize that they can have significant consequences.

Activism during Trump’s first term was able to create a sense of an administration that was embattled and mired in controversy, rather than one carrying out a popular mandate. While most presidents can expect to enjoy a bump in popularity following their inaugurations, Trump instead faced record-low approval ratings. And while conservatives passed a major tax law that favored the rich, they were unable to realize other top goals such as the repeal of Obamacare. With the 2018 midterms, movements played a significant role in creating one of the most dramatic swings in recent electoral history, propelling a wave that both swept Democrats into power in many states and deprived Republicans of control of the U.S. Congress, closing their window of maximum legislative power.

Looking forward, Trump will trigger outrage. But outrage alone is not enough. It needs to be translated into action. Movements must be ready to capitalize on and extend the opportunities that Trump’s policies create. Here, preparation is helpful: By anticipating and planning for trigger events, movements can position themselves to take maximum advantage.

Different strategies for change can work together

When we track the impacts of mass protests, one of the most consistent things that we witness is that critics are eager to denounce activist tactics and preemptively declare new movements as ineffectual, even when they have scarcely just appeared. When mass protests erupted in Trump’s first term, there were a plethora of voices condemning them as pointless and even counterproductive.

In the New York Times, David Brooks conceded that the Women’s March was an “important cultural moment,” but argued that “Marching is a seductive substitute for action,” and that it ultimately amounted to little more than “mass therapy” for participants. “Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics,” Brooks wrote, contending that “these marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.” Such pessimism was sometimes echoed by left-wing commentators as well, who devoted more energy to dissecting the political limitations of the Women’s March than capitalizing on the opportunities it created to draw new people into long-term organizing campaigns.

In fact, people newly activated by the march became part of many subsequent efforts, and the following year the mobilization fed directly into the #MeToo movement, which erupted after another trigger event — namely, publicity that shed light on the sexual abuses perpetrated by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Not only did #MeToo have far-reaching implications for policy, in the legal system, and in other arenas of public life, it also significantly affected voting patterns, with the Washington Post reporting on a “women-led army” that was “repulsed by Trump and determined to do something about it” driving abnormally high turnout in 2018 and 2020.

But the even bigger problem for the argument of those who dismiss mass protest is the assumption that different approaches to creating change are mutually exclusive. To the contrary, key to both defeating Trumpism and winning what we actually want in the future is cultivating a healthy social movement ecosystem in which multiple approaches to change complement and play off one another. There is strong evidence from past mobilizations that mass protest in fact feeds such an ecology in many different ways. Following peak periods of unrest, which we describe as “moments of the whirlwind,” those who have been laboring for years in the trenches often remark on how the surge of interest and support significantly expands their horizon of possibility.

Social movements alone have the potential to produce a response to Trump that both invites mass participation and that is connected to a broader vision for change. The alternative — relying on legal cases or other insider challenges to the administration’s policies, hoping that politicians will save us, or relying on Democrats, by themselves, to not cave or conciliate themselves to Trumpism — is a recipe for defeat and demobilization.

The bright spots of the first Trump era came as movements not only rallied large numbers of people in defensive battles against the White House, but also carried forward popular energy by organizing around a positive vision for change. Here, the model offered by Bernie Sanders was very important. Sanders achieved far greater success in his 2016 primary challenge to Hillary Clinton than anyone in the Washington establishment could have imagined by running on a resolute platform of Medicare for All, free higher education, and confronting the power of corporations and the rich. Whether or not “Bernie would’ve won” in 2016 had he been in the general election, as many of his supporters believe, the senator was nevertheless vital in pointing to a model of how Trumpism could be combated with a progressive populist vision, rather than a retreat to the center and the adoption of “Republican-lite” versions of policy.

Groups motivated to build active support for such a vision — which included progressive unions, community organizations investing in electoral work in a more concerted way than ever before, and new or re-energized formations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Working Families Party and the Poor People’s Campaign — entered into contests that gave rise to the Squad at the federal level, as well as an unprecedented number of movement champions taking office locally.

The Sunrise Movement, another group that contributed to this push, exploded onto the scene in 2018, playing a key role in putting the Green New Deal at the center of policy debate and, along with Fridays for Future, revitalizing climate activism. Trigger events around police violence ignited a new round of Black Lives Matter protests and a national reckoning on race that has helped secure important gains around criminal justice reform — strides toward which have continued in spite of backlash.

This time around, we must be more clear than ever that our goal is to win over a majority of Americans. Movements should not be afraid to engage in polarizing protest, but they should be mindful of the challenge of producing positive polarization that reaches out to include more people in the fight for justice, while minimizing negative polarization that pushes away potential supporters. Crucial to this is always seeking to expand the coalition of allies, engage in political education to bring in newcomers, and not accept the myth of the righteous few, or the idea that the path to victory is through demanding ever-greater levels of moral purity among those we associate with, even if that means ever-greater insularity.

The day after the election, Sunrise tweeted: “Trump loves corporations even more than Democrats do, but he ran an anti-establishment campaign that gave an answer to people’s desire for change.” As social movements respond to outrage over Trump’s policies and tie their actions to a real agenda for transformative change, they puncture the pretense that he offers any sort of real alternative to a democracy ruled by elites and an economy designed to serve the wealthy. “We can stop him, and we must,” Sunrise added. “But it’s going to take many thousands of people taking to the streets and preparing to strike. And it’s going to take mass movements putting out a better vision for our country than Trumpism and proving that we can make it happen.”

If ever there was a time to allow ourselves a space for mourning as we contemplate the fate of our country, it is now. But ultimately, only we can save ourselves from despair. David Brooks intended to be dismissive in characterizing collective protest as “mass therapy,” but in one respect he is onto something: There is no better antidote to hopelessness than action in community.

Our past experience tells us that coming months and years will offer moments that trigger public revulsion. Social movements provide a unique mechanism for responding, creating common identity and purpose between strangers and allowing genuine, collective participation in building a better democracy. If we are to make it together through Trump’s second presidency and emerge in its aftermath to create the world we need, this may be our greatest hope. Indeed, it may be our only one.

Mark Engler is a writer based in Philadelphia, an editorial board member at Dissent, and co-author of “This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century” (Nation Books). He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.

Paul Engler is the director of the Center for the Working Poor in Los Angeles, and a co-founder of the Momentum Training, and co-author, with Mark Engler, of “This Is An Uprising.”

© Waging Nonviolence. Waging Nonviolence content falls under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Mark Engler is a writer based in Philadelphia, an editorial board member at Dissent, and co-author of "This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century" (Nation Books). He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.

America’s Descent Into Fascism Can Be Stopped

Henry Giroux

 November 8, 2024
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Photo by Jon Tyson

The election of Trump is more than a political event; it is an attempt to legitimize a brutal evolution of fascism in America. His rise is not accidental but symptomatic, emerging from the depths of collective fear, dread, and anxiety stoked by a savage form of gangster capitalism—neoliberalism—that thrives on division and despair. This climate, steeped in a culture of hate, misogyny, and racism, has given life to Trump’s authoritarian appeal, drowning out the warning signs of past and present tyranny.

While it’s clear that American society changed dramatically with Reagan’s election and the corrupt rise of the billionaire elite, we must also recognize how liberals and the Democratic Party, instead of resisting, aligned with Wall Street power brokers like Goldman Sachs. In doing so, they adopted elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class, intensified the class and racial divide, accelerated staggering levels of inequality, and intensified the long legacy of nativism,  all of which fed into the conditions for Trump’s appeal. Clinton’s racially charged criminalizing policies, Obama’s centrist neoliberalism and unyielding support for the financial elite, and Biden’s death-driven support for genocide in Gaza have contributed to a culture ripe for authoritarianism. In short, this groundwork didn’t just make Trump possible; it made him inevitable.

But perhaps one of the most overlooked failures of liberalism and Third Way democrats, and even parts of the left, was the neglect of education as a form of critical and civic literacy and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering an energized collective movement. This failure wasn’t just about policy but, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, about forgetting that domination operates not only through economic structures but also through beliefs and cultural persuasion. Trump and his engineers of hate and revenge have not only rewritten history but obliterated historical consciousness as fundamental element of civic education. Historical amnesia has always provided a cover for America’s long-standing racism, nativism, disavowal of women’s right. Capitalizing on far right propaganda machines, Trump managed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, to convince millions of Americans that they “simply could not accept the idea of a non-White and female president.” Nor could they insert themselves in a history of collective struggle, resistance, and the fight for a better world. He also convinced the majority of Americans that it is okay elect a white supremacist to be the President of the University.

Bernie Sanders rightly observes on X that “It comes as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Of course, the Democratic Party shares with mainstream media stenographers the fact that they have refused to forcefully acknowledge, as Sherrilyn Ifill points out, that not only the MAGA crowd but also “a majority of white Americans in fact have chosen to embrace white supremacy rather than the promise of a multi-racial democracy.”   Sanders’ comments only scratch the surface. The issue of abandonment and moral collapse also extends to the pedagogical realm: for decades, the right has wielded the educational force of culture to persuade white, Latino, and Black workers to turn their backs on their own interests, binding them to an authoritarian cult and white supremacist ideology that exploits their alienation and sabotages any sense of critical agency. Since the 1970s, galvanized by the Powell Memo, reactionary conservatives have grasped, far more than the left, the transformative power of ideas. They have weaponized culture to dismantle institutions that once nurtured critical thought, education, and resistance. Recognizing that reshaping public consciousness was essential to their agenda, they systematically eroded critical literacy, attacked public spaces, and transformed public and higher education from forces of liberation —turning them into either sites of repression and training or more disdainfully, full scale sites of indoctrination. This was no accident; it was a core part of their long-term strategy—to strip society of its capacity for dissent, molding a populace more easily controlled, more willingly complicit in its own subjugation.

Trump is the grim culmination of this cultural war against reason, truth, and critical thinking. Mass ignorance and civic illiteracy have become not mere byproducts but the very engines of a strategy to blind working people and those considered expendable to the economic injustices ravaging their lives. Rather than addressing these economic onslaughts, they are instead lured into a communal theater of hate and bigotry. This spectacle of manufactured ignorance and call for cult-like loyalty does more than cloud the mind; it becomes a political weapon, rendering the dispossessed both docile and divided. Neoliberal ideology intensifies this dynamic, imprisoning people in suffocating bubbles of self-interest and hyper-individualism. It wages a calculated assault on collective solidarity, designed to transform the public into isolated consumers, unable to envision a politics beyond their private lives or recognize that their true power lies in unity and critical consciousness. At the same time, it takes advantage of the anxiety and loneliness experience by the disposed to lure them into a false community of hatred and lawlessness. The need for solidary falls prey under Trump into the lure of what Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope called the swindle of fulfillment.

With no viable movement for meaningful social change in sight, Trump and his modern-day Brownshirts exploited the void left by a crisis of consciousness. Into this gap, they injected a corporate-controlled culture that shaped daily life with a culture steeped in hatred, fear, anxiety, and the force of endless fascist like spectacles. It is worth noting that such spectacles are chillingly reminiscent of Nuremberg in the 1930s, designed to stoke division and obedience, distracting the public from any path toward collective resistance or liberation. This carnival of divisiveness and dehumanizing rhetoric did more than destroy the nation’s civic and educational fabric, it produced a poisonous populist culture that changed the way most Americans view the past, present, and future.

If we are to confront this fascistic momentum, we must urgently return to the tools necessary to rebuild a mass consciousness as a precondition for a mass movement–one that can use the mobilization of mass consciousness, strikes and other forms of direct action to prevent this new fascist regime from governing. We need to stop this machinery of death from enacting the enormous suffering, misery,  violence, and power that gives it both a sense of pleasure and reason for enduring.

With Trump’s rise to power, American citizens have empowered a fascist agenda—one bent on enriching the ultra-wealthy, gutting the welfare state, deporting millions, and dismantling the very institutions that uphold accountability, critical thought, and democracy itself. These structures are not just formalities; they are the lifeblood of a radical, inclusive democracy and the safeguard for an informed citizenry. In this perilous moment, Seyla Benhabib, drawing on Adorno and Arendt, confronts us with a question of profound urgency: “What does it mean to go on thinking?” Her call to “learn to think anew” resounds with particular force as we grapple with the stark reality of Trump’s election.

We are now compelled to rethink the very foundations of culture, politics, power, struggle, and education. The stakes are clear. In mere weeks, as Will Bunch notes, a man who attempted to overturn an election—who espouses overt racism, embraces white supremacy, and boasts about his rancid misogyny, has pledged mass deportations, and threatens military force against political opponents—will once again assume power. This is a historical crossroads that demands a radical reevaluation of our democratic commitments and strategies for real social and economic change.

Chris Hedges aptly warns that “the American dream has become an American nightmare [and that] Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump embodies the cumulative effects of decades of moral and social corrosion. His presidency signals not a departure but an intensification of a deep-seated national crisis.

In this historical moment, we face an urgent challenge to confront and dismantle the forces entrenching fascist politics and authoritarian governance. Now is the moment to radically transform our approach to theory, education, and the liberatory power of learning—tools we must wield to build a robust, multi-racial working-class movement that is unapologetically anti-capitalist and unwaveringly democratic. We must relinquish the myth of American  exceptionalism and the dangerous illusion that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The cost of inaction is dire: a future where democracy is not merely eroded but supplanted by a violent police state,—a betrayal soaked in blood, extinguishing the dream of a society committed to the promise and ideals of justice and equality.

The stakes could not be higher. We must confront this moment with uncompromising purpose, a blueprint for bold action, and an unyielding commitment to a radical democracy that defies fascist cruelty, bigotry, and the stranglehold of the financial elite at every step. Our future demands it, as does the vision of a society where justice, solidarity, and human dignity are not just ideals but realities—part of a future that defies the rising shadow of fascism threatening to consume us. We either fight to reclaim this promise, or we surrender to a darkness from which there is no return.

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 most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

Race, Class, and Inequality: A New Study

John O'Kane

 November 8, 2024
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Image by Jon Tyson.

In a recent op-ed, Lydia Polgreen said that if Kamala Harris is labeled as a DEI candidate, then J. D. Vance must be as well. She supports this with research from a Tufts University scholar who claims that elite schools, like Yale, where Mr. Vance graduated law school, give extra attention and resources to poor white students to help them succeed. In other words, Affirmative Action effectively applies to those suffering deficits in terms of class. There’s no question that colleges and universities support poor students. But, of course, they first must survive the competitive process for admission. And once in the institution, the white students can’t get DEI protected status, according to an administrator at the University of California, Irvine. It doesn’t protect students who suffer damages from exclusion and who do not fit into one of the racial categories. The “equity” component doesn’t include the category of class, despite claims to the contrary in the popular press.

But it should in these times when ever more wealth is concentrated at the top and at the expense of the working class—when the inequality gap keeps widening. Skin color trumps class for those from racial and ethnic groups who are already protected. But factoring class into the Affirmative Action guidelines will provide even stronger protection for those of color who are also class deprived.

A recent Harvard University study investigated the relation between race and class. It targeted fifty-seven million subjects across the Gen X and Gen Y (Millennial) generations, those born in the late 1970s and those born in the early 1990s, comparing low-income black and white populations. In the white population, it found, the Gen Y group had suffered a decline in income in relation to the Gen X group. In the black population, however, these results were reversed. For the aggregate low-income population, whites suffered a decline of $2050 in income, and blacks accrued a $1420 increase in income across this generational stretch. Over one generation, the black-white racial income gap narrowed. Admittedly, these are not exactly striking figures. But whites have outpaced blacks economically for generations prior to the period covered in this study. And these results preceded the spike in “woke” that occurred in 2020 in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, the top-down cultural revolution that has blossomed in lock step with the Biden administration’s tenure.

The conclusion: “Between two generations, Americans’ ability to break into the middle class has changed. Race has come to play a smaller role in upward mobility while economic class plays a larger role.”

But it’s also true, according to German Lopez and Ashley Wu, who evaluated the study, that “people’s lives aren’t guided by immutable facts like class and race.” In other words, success also depends on the quality of the community the individual grows up in, the status of the family, the availability of work, social networks, the effectiveness of the school system, the presence of nice parks, the absence of crime, etc. The more of these there are in a community, the more positive sentiments there will be about the chance to succeed. And fates are intertwined: success breeds success. These have always disproportionately benefited the white population. But this is changing as well. The study found that the presence of these factors for low-income blacks contributed to their success, while their relative absence for low-income whites inhibited theirs. The greater incidence of these factors in black communities was the result of pockets of improvement in social, economic, and everyday life over the past twenty years or so. Progressive legislative gains and ongoing civil rights activism have seeded sufficient changes that have prevented these improvements from being clawed back (like SCOTUS tried to do in the mid-1990s with Affirmative Action).

The results by region were revealing. For blacks, the improvement was relatively constant across the country, though the southeast performed better. For whites, the reversal for Gen Y occurred mostly in rural America, the mid-west through the mountain states.

This was especially evident in areas that experienced a loss of jobs to China, India and elsewhere from technology and globalization. This began in the 1970s and was responsible for de-industrializing a significant swath of the heartland where manufacturing companies once paid high union wages. This gutted the cultural and financial livelihood of these communities, the negative consequences evident still today. This much is well known. But the impact on black and white employment, according to Lopez and Wu, is a surprise. Whites were pushed out of the work force while blacks found other jobs.

They posit the following explanations for this disparity:

“White workers might have had more wealth or savings to weather unemployment than their black counterparts did, but at a cost to their upward mobility. They might also have been less willing to find another job. A steel mill that shut down could have employed not just one worker but his father and grandfather, making it a family occupation. People in that situation might feel that they lost something more than a job and might not settle for any other work. The places where black workers live were generally less affected by job flight than the places where white workers live. And compared with earlier generations, black workers today are less likely to face racial prejudice in the labor force, making it easier for them to find work. While a white worker might have a generational connection to a steel mill job, a black worker often does not, because segregation kept his parents and grandparents out. These trends add up to decades of lost economic progress for low-income white people and the opposite for black Americans.

This only pertains to the black and white low-income populations. As the study notes, the real issue we face is the widening of inequality overall

(that has increased in the Biden administration). It references this malady in relation to the white population, but this widening is also present in the black population. The structural workings of the neoliberal, monetarist capitalism that oppresses such a formidable swatch of American society keep expanding the capital of the 1% exponentially, irrespective of its skin color.

The question moving forward is whether this systemic force can be checked so that this widening begins to reverse while gains can be made within all the low-income populations. And redrawing Affirmative Action to account for class in a way that preserves the strength of race will help motor this progress.

John O’Kane teaches writing at Chapman University. His recent book is Toward Election 2020: Cancel Culture, Censorship and Class.