In this book Henry A. Giroux passionately argues that education and critical pedagogy are needed now more than ever to combat injustices in our society caused by fake news, toxic masculinity, racism, consumerism and white nationalism. At the heart of the book is the idea that pedagogy has the power to create narratives of desire, values, identity, and agency at time when these narratives are being manipulated to promote right wing populism and emerging global fascist politics. The book expands on the notion of the plague as not only a medical crisis but also a crisis of politics, ethics, education, and democracy itself. The chapters cover a range topics beginning with historical perspectives on fascism and moving on to issues of social atomization, depoliticization, neoliberal pedagogy, the scourge of staggering inequality, populism, and pandemic pedagogy. The book concludes with a call for educators to make education central to politics, develop a discourse of critique and possibility, reclaim the vision of a radical democracy, and embrace their role as powerful agents of change.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. His books include On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd Edition (2020), Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy (2021), Pedagogy of Resistance (2022) and Insurrections (2023).

Preface: State of Crisis
Acknowledgements
Section I Pandemic Landscapes
1. Pandemic Politics and Pedagogy in the Age of the Coronavirus
2. Militarized Pandemics and the Language of War
Section II Populism and the Crisis of Education
3. The Ugly Terror of a Fascist Abyss and the Politics of Depoliticization
4. The Populist Pandemic and the Plague of Thoughtlessness
Section III The Promise of History
5. Reading History Against Fascism in the Age of Trump
6. Law and Disorder in the Age of Organized Forgetting
Section IV Thinking Beyond Plagues
7. The Plague of Inequality in the Age of Pandemics
8. Conclusion: Thinking Beyond a Covid-19 World
Notes
Index