Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.

What must be addressed in the most immediate sense is the threat that the emerging police state in the United States poses not to just the young protesters occupying a number of American cities, but also the threat it poses to democracy itself. This threat is being exacerbated as a result of the merging of a war-like mentality and neoliberal mode of discipline and education in which it becomes difficult to reclaim the language of obligation, social responsibility and civic engagement.

We need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy.

I think the very idea of the social contract is in disarray.

I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.

It's much better to talk about the media as a system of propaganda and abuse, of manufactured consent, than it is to claim it's some kind of democratizing force that is not responsible for what it does. The notion that the media simply reflects reality is an argument that justifies its flight from responsibility.

When we talk about total war, and we talk about war zones, and we talk about the breakdown of the cities, when you exclude questions of race from that discourse, something disappears that's really central to the forms of repression that we're talking about.