Trump does not just fan the flames of violence with his rhetoric, he also provides legitimation to a number of white nationalists and right-wing extr… - Henry Giroux

As public discourses... cultural texts can be addressed in terms of how they are constituted as objects that gain their relevance through their relationship to other social institutions, resources, and non-discursive practices.

The other side of this, this slow violence, is that increasingly the racism, the segregation, and the discrimination, has become intensified. We saw it particularly with the rise of ‘zero tolerance’ policies in schools, which are basically nothing more than racial codes. Schools have really become school-to-prison pipelines; they’ve become militarized and the behavior of young people — not just black and brown people, but poor white kids as well — becomes criminalized. The school becomes modeled after the prison. You have all of the accoutrements of the prison there: you have metal detectors that people have to walk through, you have security guards and police, and the school is defined in terms of the language of surveillance. This is a creeping form of punishment that is now imposed on kids and on schools through a machinery of pedagogical repression.

Fascism begins with the rhetoric of dehumanization, humiliation, and reification, right? It starts with the language of brutality, which it normalizes. It legitimates hatred and racism and violence. It views certain groups through rhetoric as enemies of the American people. It operates off of the rhetoric of war, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy. It operates off of the language of disposability. That language doesn’t just simply normalize increasingly the notions of white nationalism, white supremacy, racism, and xenophobia; it also enacts policies and it creates a culture of utter stupidity, a culture of ignorance. And, unfortunately, it functions so as to enable violence against groups labeled as dangerous, other, excess, and a threat to the whitewashed notion of citizenship.