[T]here is this narrative out there of we’re winning, the good people are winning, the Democrats are winning. Trump is losing. He’s desperate, he’s going to fall apart any second now you know. It’s the desperate lashing out of a trapped animal and he’s done for.
Which doesn’t comport with the facts.
Michael Slate from KPFK in Los Angeles interviews Sarah Roark from Refuse Fascism, 2/15/2019Audio of the interview:
Editor’s note: the following transcript has been slightly edited for publication
MS: We’re going to begin the show with an interview that I did just recently with Sarah Roark a contributing editor of refusefascism.org. We’re going to be talking about the shut down the state of emergency why so many people are willfully ignoring the danger it represents and why we need to take a stand for humanity.
It was recently announced that the US Senate has approved the border security compromise on Thursday that ignored most of Trump’s demands for building a wall along the border with Mexico but would prevent a new government shutdown supposedly. According to most reports the House of Representatives led by Democratic Nancy Pelosi, will sign the bill as well. In response Trump announced that he will sign the bill and quickly declare a national emergency and perhaps invoke other presidential powers to shift the money he needs to build his border wall from other sources.
Joining us to talk about what that hell is going on now, all this and more is Sarah Roark. And Sarah is a contributor to refusefascism.org. Sarah welcome to the show.
SR: Thanks so much for having me.
MS: Sure, I got a bunch of questions for you so you can spread it out take as long as you want but you must answer every question okay (both laugh).
SR: Let’s do this.
MS: Let’s start by you telling people what Refuse Fascism is. As I said you’re a contributor to refusefascism.org. But tell people what this group is and what you aim to accomplish with it.
SR: Okay. Well, our main website is refusefascism.org, all one word, “refusefascism.” And anything that you want to know more about, please surf on over to our site where you can get lots of writing, details, there are pages for donating and lots of analysis — there’s fact sheets, because it’s so hard to keep track of everything that happens in Trump time, each day’s like a new flood of stuff, — so it’s really easy to lose, just lose your way in the current. So there’s a lot of resources there.
But basically, what Refuse Fascism is, is a group of people coming from very diverse political perspectives. For instance, I am a pretty mainstream Democrat who volunteered for Hillary in 2016, and would do it again in a heartbeat, even though the loss was heartbreaking. On the other hand, we also have, you know, socialists, communists, anarchists, progressives, so on and so forth — all kinds of folks in the group. I’m hoping to even get some Never Trumpers on board before it’s all over. Because what we are facing is a fascist collapse of the world’s biggest superpower, a nuclear superpower. And that’s an all hands on deck moment, that’s an all people of conscience moment.
The mission of Refuse Fascism is to bring together, to unite all who can be united to remove the Trump/Pence regime (and I mean both of them) as quickly as possible, through nonviolent mass direct sustained action. If you need a parallel there’s the Candlelight Revolution in South Korea, very recent, in 2016. Nonviolent street protests over several months that eventually wound up involving 1/3 of the country, and that successfully removed their corrupt President Park. So there’s other models, but that’s the most recent one and it’s a very good example of how this can be done successfully. I don’t think we are going to get 1/3 of the US, but we don’t need a third of the US. This is an enormous country. We should be able to do what they did. If we are as big and powerful as we like to think we are as a people, we should be able to do this.
So at Refuse Fascism we believe we can do this, and we are making the case that we can do this, and we are demonstrating with our events, our own events. We hold events and we also attend other protest events.
MS: Let me ask you this and I think it comes off of some of what you were saying. Even as Trump makes his moves regarding the wall many people Democratic politicians and progressive people at large still don’t get what’s actually happening because there is an element of like how much people are actually able to see what’s happening and to join in on things and stand up to do what’s necessary depends a lot on what they understand about what’s happening so what is it that you would tell people is actually happening and where are things going and what’s it going to mean?
SR: Well I think you just hit the nail on the head. We live in a narrative driven age. I mean reality has always been very complex and humans come up with narratives to make sense of it, and the more complex the world becomes the more we simplify in a way our narrative to understand it, and then it becomes sort of the dual of the narratives — it becomes less about facts and truth and more about who can sell their story the best. So one of the problems we have right now is that there is this narrative out there of we’re winning, the good people are winning, the good guys are winning, the Democrats are winning. Trump is losing. He’s desperate, he’s going to fall apart any second now you know. It’s the desperate lashing out of a trapped animal and he’s done for.
Which doesn’t comport with the facts. If you step back from the narrative that you want to believe and look at what actually happened just now, you will see that it’s not winning for the good guys. We’ve just moved our needle so far, we’ve moved our bar so low, that losing less now looks like winning. But if we can try to keep our consciousness of who we were before 2016, and look at this through our normal eyes that we had before all of this, you know, disorientation and chaos came, then we very rapidly see that this is insane by those standards. It’s insane to say that this was a victory for the good guys. I think that the Dems in Congress did fight, not enough, but they did fight to try and mitigate harm…but that’s not the same as winning.
And time is not on our side. There’s an erosive problem of, the democracy’s ground is crumbling out from under us as we fight. So you know, just backfilling is not ultimately going to be enough. And that’s all that’s going on, and telling a narrative otherwise is I think putting us into a dangerous complacency. I understand why they’re doing it and it’s not completely evil why they’re doing it, but it is absolutely the wrong course. And we’ve been here in history before. Weimar Germany went through a lot of these same processes, and we are repeating a lot of their mistakes.
MS: You know I want to step back from it. Because you actually have described this is a seductive narrative that’s going on, the idea that no matter what the system will adjust and correct what needs to be corrected. And you know I think it’s important to look at that because you will also argue that people have to open their eyes and see what’s actually happening and to me that’s one of the things about … look you know watching the State of the Union basically the whole thing that was being put on there and the whole chanting of you know “USA USA” frankly by both Dems and Republicans.
SR: Oh yeah.
MS: And then this kind of you want to talk about a Nuremberg rally that really reminded one of that you know.
SR: Yeah well if you’re asking me about the State of the Union, people paint it as just more of his usual incoherent rambling. I happen to disagree. He does ramble a lot, but this speech I actually regarded as being pretty brilliantly evil in the way it sort of deliberately swung between carrot and stick and sort of set groups of Americans against each other, and tried to get the buy-in of people who normally would not be responsive to a fascist sales pitch. But then he turns around and says oh hey, we’re going to cure AIDS. Anybody who’s been paying any attention, especially since Trump himself disbanded the AIDS commission, and who sees what Trump is doing in terms of trans People, and trans people in the military especially — and also in terms of supporting religious conscience laws that discriminate against gay people. He’s not the queer community’s friend. He is an enemy of us. So if anybody actually believes that promise…but he made it — he still made it.
Just like Van Jones when Trump said hey Van, come to the White House, we’ll work on criminal justice reform. Well Van Jones wants that so bad, and I don’t blame him. We need it desperately. But he allowed himself to believe that Trump is going to be the source of that justice reform. Again, if you step back from what you want to be true and look at how Trump has behaved, you will absolutely know he’s not your justice reform guy.
But it’s so easy — and I thought he actually did a really good job of trying to pull in new groups, and also forcing applause lines even on the Democrats. The Democrats did not have to chant “USA.” That’s entirely on them. I will take them to task for that. But there are other places where you know, here’s a child, here’s a veteran, here’s a Holocaust survivor. You have to you have to clap for those things or look like a jerk. And then you have to, say, clap when things like peace are mentioned. So I don’t know. I thought it was a very successful exercise in getting the Democrats to look like they were buying into a lot of this, and probably sadly to actually buy into way too much of it.
MS: You’re listening to the Michael Slate show. We’re talking today with Sarah Roark, contributor to refusefascism.org an organization mobilizing to drive out the Trump/Pence regime through a sustained nonviolent protest movement. Yeah I think that’s really true. And there’s a whole point here too where a lot of what was going on there was this manufacturing a crisis and this is what Trump is doing, he’s manufacturing a crisis and then proposing to solve it with the expansion of his executive power which is if you think about what that means in the world today this is a very dangerous thing.
SR: Oh yes. Yeah, one of the reasons I was so alarmed when I woke up this morning is that the shoe dropped. I’ve been expecting it to drop. For some reason a lot of people did not think of the possibility that he could sign the legislation and declare an emergency. I think people had it in their heads that if he quote-unquote “caved” he would quote-unquote “cave” completely. Obviously, this is not the case. He’s keeping the government open and he’s going to get his emergency. But I’m alarmed at the relative lack of response to it.
This is a major escalation today, and yet I’m seeing really not that furor over it. And what you were saying just now about this emergency declaration, you know, if you understand the powers that he gets in an emergency, if you understand how little oversight the Congress really has, if you have all the facts at your disposal — then you understand that once he’s been written this blank check it’s probably not gonna get rescinded, and that he can and will use it far beyond the scope of what is intended.
That’s partly a flaw in how the act, the Emergency Powers Act, was written. But that’s where we stand, and it just is blowing my mind today that people do not recognize this for the profound loss that it is. People are like I said really hooked on this narrative of the Democrats winning, and they’re also hooked on this narrative of “creating an emergency,” he’s manufacturing a made-up crisis. He absolutely is. Absolutely he is Reichstag-ing this thing.
But there is a crisis that is not manufactured, and that crisis is his emergency declaration, is his holding the government hostage and starving it. Possibly by repeated shutdowns. There’s no reason he can’t do that. Dribs and drabs — look at what he did this last time. Longest shutdown on record. Look at what that did to us. And the knowledge that he can do it again is going to be present in negotiations from now on, as long as he’s President. We know he done it — he can do it again! That people overlook how much leverage he really has and is willing to use, just to reassure themselves everything is going to be okay, is I think fatal.
People cling to this idea because they want to believe that that they’re holding onto their safety and security, but I think in telling ourselves these comforting lies we’re actually dooming ourselves to unsafety, insecurity, unfreedom. You know. We’re losing what we’re trying so desperately to hold onto by desperately trying to hold onto it. We have to recognize that the ground has moved, there’s been a tectonic shift, that’s not where we are anymore.
MS: Well let me ask you this. Because this is tied into that because you’ve also argued that what Trump is doing now is in fact an existential threat facing humanity as a whole and if let stand it could have really dire circumstances really dire effects.
SR: Absolutely. Like I said, you know, people ask me how, when I predict something that Trump was going to do correctly, they say how do you know? And I tell them it’s not prophecy, it’s not smarts — just read history and believe it. Because all this or something very like it has happened before somewhere in history, and what he is doing now is what many dictators before him have done to seize absolute power, whether suddenly and brutally like Hitler did, or over time as other dictators like uh, I would say Orbán in Hungary, is doing. But Carl Schmitt, the Nazi philosopher/legal analyst — Timothy Snyder, the historian, has quoted him, and I think it’s very apropos. Carl Schmitt said that one of the ways you get absolute power is the permanent emergency. “Sovereign is he who declares the exception.” Because if you can suspend normal rule and you control when normal rules come back, then effectively there are no more rules. So all you have to do is convince people that this is such an emergency that you need those powers, which is of course exactly what the Constitution was meant to guard against, but the Constitution is only paper if we don’t enforce it. If Congress doesn’t enforce it, and they’re not, and the people don’t enforce it, and so far we’re not, then it’s just words.
MS: Let me ask you this. We’re coming up on the close I think I have maybe one more question — they might blend into one another but there is this whole point a lot of people know that Trump’s wall and the whole idea of this is based on lies. I mean it’s really interesting because people, I think even people that are in his camp recognize that there’s a certain amount of lying going on but they accept it and they accept it as sort of if you say it enough it will be true. Now this thing, his wall, factually is based on lies. You pose it as that’s the case it’s actually based on lies but how many of us will stand up to fascism and that’s the question that you’re posing people now.
SR: Well, listen. If truth and reality were going to win this struggle for America’s soul and humanity, then we would’ve won it already. So many debunkings are out there of his thousands and thousands of lies. Nobody who actually wants the straight dope on that can claim ignorance. The facts are out there. They’re very clear. So people who claim that they’re not convinced of the facts are lying to you, or lying to themselves, or probably both. So if you dispense with that — obviously this is not about the facts — then what is it about? Well it’s about power; it’s about narratives; it’s about fascist myths of past societal glory that is to now be reborn into a new era, “make America great again,” through purging the culture of alien and corrupting elements. That’s the basic Ur-myth of fascism. And there’s, there’s nothing about it that’s realistic. It doesn’t work. But it is seductive enough to destroy whole societies, and that is what we’re in the process of.
So yeah, when people keep quoting fact after fact, like more facts are going to finally convince these people who’ve made clear they don’t give a crap, that’s another thing that blows my mind. You have to concede that that’s not the ground this is being fought on. You have to move over to where the ground is, which is about power and decisiveness, moral courage and action. If we are inert and the bad guys are active, guess who wins?
MS: Absolutely. I have one more question. See what we can do in this time. I have just more question and it’s related that and it’s because you’ve actually stated this — there is only one question that ultimately matters here and I thought that was a really important thing to state and I wanted you to expand on that a little bit because it’s actually what we’re saying to people I think in terms of — look if you sit here and you watch this fascist regime consolidate itself, which Trump is doing, you actually you are opening the doors for horrors that are undreamt of, for things that are going to be much worse than the worst horrors that of ever been come down on the planet and you’re looking at the possibility of all that happening and you have a chance to step in and stop it that’s the thing so only one question ultimately matters here. What are you telling people with that statement?
SR: I am telling people that they need to get out of their political tribal thinking, and I’m not saying Kumbayah, hug with the Republicans — that’s complete bull. That’s not what’s going on here. This is about people who believe in humanity versus people who believe in fascism, hate, and cruelty. Those are the tribes now. People who know me as a loyal Democrat — you know, which I still am – are constantly expressing their shock that I’m working with communists, socialists, anarchists, Bernie supporters… all kinds of people on the left who I deeply disagree with, but that I am — because that’s not what this is about. These are good people, they’re brave people, they’re willing to stand up to fascists, they’re willing to take my hand. I’m willing to take theirs. And we are going to stand up for humanity in its dark hour. And then we can go back to fighting about all the other stuff. But if we don’t make it, if we can’t dismantle fascism, then nothing else any of us wants for humanity — whether you think capitalism is it, or communism — nobody gets what they want under a fascist regime except fascists. That is absolutely the thing.
MS: Sarah Roark thank you very much for joining us today.
SR: Thank you so much. I am really glad to be here.
MS: Take care, bye.
SR: Bye.
MS: We’ve been talking to Sarah Roark who is a contributor to refusefascism.org an organization mobilizing to drive out the Trump/Pence regime through a sustained nonviolent protest movement. Their slogan is IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA something that everybody needs to be looking into right now. All right, that’s right.