reason is simply ignored

http://therealnews.com

GIROUX: ... the crisis of politics, the crisis of agency, the crisis of history, the crisis of ethics, it's not being matched by a process of ideas. I mean, we don't realize the degree to which education has become central to politics itself in ways that speak to cultural apparatuses that dominate the mainstream media and other sources that are constantly producing what I call a disimagination machine, one in which evidence doesn't matter, reason is simply ignored, evidence, again, is thrown out the window. Civic literacy is viewed as a liability, that it's more important, basically, to be stupid than to think.

I mean, you know, Hannah Arendt had said something interesting. I mean, among other things. She said that thoughtlessness is the [instance] of fascism. And I think the right understands this, and I think the right uses the media as a giant pedagogical machine to constantly constantly reproduce lies to appeal to the basest instincts of the American public to distort history, to erase all those public spheres where actually matters of thoughtfulness and political dialog and engagement can actually take place.

Henry Giroux, Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University and author. His latest book, 'Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle'. He also has a forthcoming book titled, 'America At War With Itself'.