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Sam Goldman interviews Annika Brockschmidt, German freelance journalist and podcast host, author of America’s Holy Warriors: How the Religious Rights Endangers Democracy.
Follow Annika on Twitter at @ardenthistorian. If you speak German you will want to check out her podcast (co-hosted with recent Refuse Fascism podcast guest Thomas Zimmer), Kreuz und Flagge (Cross and Flag). Read her recent piece on Religion Dispatches: Don’t Laugh at Rick Scott’s ‘Plan to Rescue America’ or Be Fooled by Reports of a ‘Backlash’ — His Only Mistake Was Revealing the Truth of Today’s GOP
Then, we share a clip of a conversation with Andy Zee and Paul Street, members of the Refuse Fascism editorial board, from The RNL Show, discussing Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and what a US-enforced “no fly zone” actually means. Read Paul’s recent article: Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now: Reflections on War, Peace, and Ukraine.
Recommended Reading on Abortion Rights Emergency:
Florida’s Abortion Ban Will Obliterate Access in the South by Anna Eskamani
The Pseudoscience That Could Kill Women by Sarah Jones
RiseUp4AbortionRights.org is calling for more emergency mobilizations; find out more at riseup4abortionrights.org.
Refuse Fascism is more than just a podcast! You can get involved at RefuseFascism.org.
Venmo: @Refuse-Fascism
Cashapp: @RefuseFascism
Paypal: paypal.me/refusefascism
Web: donate.refusefascism.org
Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.
Episode 103
Sun, 3/20 6:08PM • 50:07
Annika Brockschmidt 00:00
Laws have been passed that forbid the mentioning of LGBTQ issues or the existence of LGBTQ people in the classroom, or horrifically denied trans children and teenagers the medical care that is potentially life-saving for them… These laws and these narratives are spreading and they will only grow more and more extreme… The anti-trans hatred is a wedge issue for the religious right, and the arguments applied to discriminate against trans people will and have been used against other groups as well… Fascism is never satisfied. It is built on the premise of battle, of a never-ending fight, and they won’t stop until they are stopped. And for that, unfortunately, time’s running out.
Sam Goldman 00:58
Welcome to Episode 103 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country.
Before we get to today’s interview, I want to give a shout out to monthly sustainers for Refuse Fascism. We couldn’t do the show without you. Thanks to all your rating, reviewing, subscribing and following to help us reach more listeners. If you haven’t yet, go do it. Of course, after listening to today’s episode. With all the big monetized shows that have staffs and publicists, we appreciate that you value what we have to say. We read all of your reviews, emails, Tweet replies, messages, all of it. After listening to this episode, we hope you’ll share your thoughts with us. Comment on our social media or send us an email, or leave us a voicemail at anchor.fm/reviews-fascism clicking the voicemail button. You might even hear yourself in a future episode.
Sam Goldman 02:02
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a conversation I recently had with Annika Brockman, freelance journalist, author, podcast host and podcast producer, whose best selling book America’s Holy Warriors: How the Religious Right Endangers Democracy, published in German, is exposing European audiences to the reality of rising American fascism. Then we share an interview Andy Zee, host of the RNL show on YouTube, recently conducted with Paul Street, member of the Refuse Fascism editorial board regarding the situation in Ukraine. In my interview with Annika, we talk about the Christian fascist program, how deranged views on gender and sexuality shape their worldview, are weaponized in the interests of their political power, and how that is playing out right now with millions of lives in the balance.
Sam Goldman 02:45
Before I share the interview, I just want to give a bit of an update and add some context. The assault on abortion is the battering ram of a whole fascist program. Christian fascists and other right wing fanatics have openly proclaimed that opposition to abortion is a way of building up shock troops for a larger fascist program. Their program is advancing against voting rights, LGBTQ rights, science, education, public health, climate and any opposition to “Law and Order” racist police terror. With Roe v Wade on the immediate chopping block, the attack on abortion rights has accelerated.
Florida’s 15-week abortion ban that Governor Ron DeSantis has committed to signing is scheduled to go into effect July 1. Anna Eskamani, for The Nation, broke down the implications, saying: “But this abortion ban doesn’t impact just Floridians, but the entire American South. Today, given the lack of providers and often insurmountable, unnecessary abortion restrictions in surrounding states, Florida servers as a crucial access point for people seeking abortions in the Southeast. Last August, Rewire News reported that a Tallahassee Planned Parenthood health center saw, over a six month period, a 30% increase in out-of-state patients. Most were from Georgia, but people from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and even a few from Texas traveled hundreds of miles for what used to be, until now, the most permissive abortion laws in the region. This is just another example of how abortion bans don’t stop abortions from happening. It just forces those impacted to find another way.”
An even more egregious bill has passed in Idaho, where a copycat of Texas has a near total abortion ban enforced by vigilante bounty hunters, set to be signed by their governor. This bill enables rapist’s family members to sue their victims for upwards of $20,000. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern for Slate wrote: “That bill, SB 1309, now headed to Republican governor Brad Little’s desk for his signature, constitutes an explicit effort to afford the biological relatives of a “preborn fetus” more rights than the person carrying it.” They go on to say: “What Idaho has done is even more ruthless and vindictive. The state now invites family, including intimate partners, and extended family into the home to coerce and pressure her. Texas weaponized community to diminish autonomous decision-making. Idaho plans to weaponize the family.”
Tennessee is not far behind with a similar bill. As I said last week, Missouri aims to ban abortion even for ectopic pregnancies in a bill preventing women from leaving the state to receive care, showing the absolute disdain for women’s lives that animates this Christian fascist movement. The fascist dominated Supreme Court is providing cover for all of this, making clear their intention to overturn Roe and Casey, endorsing Texas’ bounty hunter system, and using the language of fetal personhood in oral arguments. A lot of times I hear things like: Well, what we need to do is give all our money to abortion funds, so that people can go and get abortions, no matter where they may need to travel. People should fund abortions, but the thing is that the fascists know the generosity of people, and they know that people will try to do whatever they can to help people get the abortions they seek. They’re not going to let any loophole stand.
The fascists, with a Fugitive Slave Act-remix laws, their bounty-hunter system, are going after and criminalizing travel out of state to receive care. They’re going so far as going after abortion funds themselves, with lawyers targeting with cease and desist letters — even going after city bonds for saying they would pay for travel for their employees who seek abortions. Again, this is all under the ticking time bomb of a SCOTUS decision, which is hitting all of this into high gear. We’re expected to see wave after wave of these types of bans, including bans on out-of-state travel, bans on contraception, sex education, the abortion pill, throughout this summer. The fascists are aiming for complete subjugation of women through taking away any control over our reproduction — no abortion, no contraception and no loopholes to getting care.
We must aim for nothing short of stopping this attack on abortion rights. They will not stop until they have it all, and all the horrors they will inflict, unless we stop them, which will require confronting that there is no easy way out; no court that will save us, or workaround or loophole we can rely on. It’s up to us in our millions. If the people in this country let abortion protections fall without a ferocious fight, not only will it kill women and others who need abortions, not only will it diminish the stature and power of all women throughout society — not just here but around the world — not only will this strengthen this larger fascist juggernaut, it will feed a culture of capitulation to more horrors.
Conversely, standing up to this assault on women can beat back a key plank of this fascist program and strengthen the fighting spirit of decent people everywhere. To this end, I want to encourage folks after listening to today’s episode to connect up with RiseUp4AbortionRights.org. Sign the statement. Get involved in organizing nationwide protests on April 9th, and join the fight for abortions to be safe, legal, on demand and without apology. I’ve also included a few must reads in the show notes this week on this topic. Now, I’m so excited. Here’s Annika Brockschmidt.
Sam Goldman 08:20
I am really excited to have this conversation. I have been listening to the guests that we’re going to have on today. I’m talking with Annika Brockschmidt. She is a journalist and author, a podcast producer. Her second non-fiction book, America’s Holy Warriors: How the Religious Right Endangers Democracy was published in German in the fall of 2020, and, no surprise to me, it was an immediate bestseller. She co-hosts a podcast which, in its English translation, is Cross and Flag with visiting professor at Georgetown University, Thomas Zimmer. You may have listened to his interview with Coco Das a few weeks back. They explore the history of the religious right. So thank you so much, Annika, for joining me.
Annika Brockschmidt 09:03
Very happy to be here.
Sam Goldman 09:07
Your latest book dives into the American Christian fascist movement in a way that’s geared towards German audiences. I was wondering how do German people generally view the situation of what we call rising American fascism?
Annika Brockschmidt 09:23
Most German scholars are not usually very careful to apply the term fascism, and I’d say rightfully so. That means that usually whenever the word fascism is used in German public discourse, especially in relation to the US, it’s usually met with a lot of pushback, kind of as a reflex. There are many reasons for this. I’d say one is that the general public, but also many journalists, usually don’t differentiate between fascist politics and a fascist state. So that makes it very easy to argue against the existence of fascist tendencies and tactics in the American right because the US has no fascist state. But this also overlooks that even the fascist state doesn’t just drop from the sky. So I’d say it’s important we call out fascist narratives whenever we see them.
When fascism is used as a term, people often try to apply the last century’s version of fascism to the situation to see if it fits. This almost always results then in the conclusion: No, it can’t be fascism. But fascism takes on different forms in different countries and in different time periods and the introduction of new technologies alone, I’d say, the internet and social media were not present at the peak of European fascism in the last century.
However, as many scholars have pointed out, there are core aspects of fascism, of fascist politics that are the same that you and your guests have already talked about: the narrative of the secret degenerate enemy from within trying to destroy the country, mournings of a mythical golden past, anti-intellectualism, us versus them distinctions, only to name a few. I would say another reason for the reluctance to acknowledge this that many Germans feel is that a lot of them don’t know that the US has its own history of homegrown fascism.
Tomas Zimmer, who I co-host with, on the religious right came onto your show and talked about this. He talks about how often invoking fascism tries to write what is happening now as an anomaly of American politics, something that had to be either imported from Europe, or that we have to look to Europe or to find even a comparison. That is just not the case. The American fascist movement, Christian nationalist in nature and homegrown, is very well documented. One example would be the KKK of the 1920s, which historian Kelly J. Baker has done a lot of work on and has laid this out many times. Many Germans, for example, don’t know how Christian the KKK was. We remember the US as the ones who fought the Nazis, so how could they have a rising fascist movement rearing its head now? That’s the logic that’s often being applied.
I’ll say this: As it’s become more mainstream among scholars to use the term fascism and to apply it to what’s happening in the US at the moment, there have been at least a few more chances for experts to issue their warnings on this in mainstream German media. That still doesn’t apply to the majority of the media coverage of US politics in Germany, but I’d say it’s at least a start, and there is a great interest among the general public on this topic. So many people who follow what most American experts on politics, the religious right, and fascism are saying, are deeply worried about what’s happening in America and they want to understand.
Sam Goldman 12:28
I think that what you’re saying is not so different than how people think here. There’s all sorts of exceptionalism that people in this country forget or never knew from their own history. I think that often times it’s really important to cross the pond, if you will, and bring in voices from outside these borders, who can often provide insight or shed light onto things that people in this country have difficulty or resistance confronting. Sometimes someone else is able to pull back the lens in a way that we’re not able to do ourselves, or don’t want to do ourselves.
One of the things that we’ve been thinking a lot about is that a key element of fascism is this irrational devotion to your own identity group. This has infected the body politic generally. I know some journalists in the US have been critical that you write about the US, but you don’t live here. I think I said this before we started recording, but I love the response that you’ve given around this. Honestly, I think sometimes people see things clearer, in my opinion, from a distance. Is there anything that you think stands out to you about the situation in the US that you might see clearer from your distance?
Annika Brockschmidt 13:41
Yeah, it was a journalist who said this and who claimed that my warnings of American democracy being in severe danger were proof of my alleged anti-American sentiment, which then set the whole German conservative media machine into motion, but those attacks are to be expected. The book I’ve written focuses on the history of the religious right from its beginnings until the present. That means I work with historical sources.
I think there’s a misconception that many people believe that historians of contemporary history only work with eyewitnesses, so they only interview people. Yes, while oral history is an important part of contemporary history, it only answers a very specific set of questions. I work with written sources — so textbooks, speeches, sermons, letters, declarations, blog posts, video, whatever is available — and while I would still have loved to spend some time in the US while I was writing it, because of the pandemic Europeans couldn’t enter the US at the time, so that was the reason behind that. I was able to talk to a number of wonderful American colleagues whose existing work I build on in the book.
But you’re right, I think there is something to be said about distance, be that physical or really in a more meta sense of just not belonging to the group that you write about that makes it easier to look at sources from a different angle and maybe add something to the discussion that was previously not there. I think one of the most important themes there is American exceptionalism, where it can be quite hard even for American scholars sometimes to see it, whereas with a more European lens I think it’s sometimes easier to spot it when it pops up on both sides of the aisle, because it can really make it more difficult to see clearly the roots of Christian nationalism, and its effects.
Sam Goldman 15:28
When you talk about the roots of broad strokes, and this being a short interview, but is there anything that you think or that you uncovered that surprised you in terms of the roots of this homegrown fascism?
Annika Brockschmidt 15:41
I think what surprised me was — and there’s been a lot of very good scholarship on this already — but what surprised me was the extent of the whole industry of this revisionist Christian nationalist history and the whole machine behind promoting that history. That’s really where this movement derives its legitimacy from. That’s why they are fighting for what they’re fighting for, because they say that this country was founded by white Christians for white Christians. A lot of the pushback that I sometimes even get from a German audience, when they’re like: Well, but it says “in God We Trust” on the money, and how do you explain that? So a lot of people are very surprised by how recent many of these additions were that paint US history in that picture.
I think a lot of people also underestimate, especially from a European perspective, how racialized religion is in the US. That’s why I always try to speak of white Christian nationalism, because we’ve seen in the data — and I think Sam Perry just posted something about this today, I think I saw it a few hours ago — there’s a big difference between the political attitudes that go together with white Christian nationalism and Back Christian nationalism. That’s something that’s very important and that was missing, I would say, from a lot of the media coverage here.
Also, something that was very important for me to stress is that the religious right is not this modernist movement only consisting of white evangelicals, because, you know, whenever you read an article on the religious right in German media, it was usually when another polar white video would go viral, or when there was a crazy Kenneth Copeland video where he spit on COVID or something. This is what’s visible, and it’s very easy to laugh that off as: Oh, this is just the crazy fringe, which is still a view that permeates even amongst German political analysts, not all of them, but many of them. They see this as: Well, you know, this is the crazy train that the GOP has had to cater to for a long time, but these are not the people in charge.
That’s what drives me nuts when I read coverage. When for example, the headline says: GOP rebukes… The latest example would have been “Rick Scott’s 11 Point Plan to Rescue America,” which was just an authoritarian fascist fever dream. I wrote about this for Religion Dispatches. Mitch McConnell said this is not my plan and we’re not going to raise taxes. He didn’t argue against any of the massive culture war aspect the whole plan, because he knows this is what the base wants. There was another piece that only quoted former Republican officials all saying, Well, this is not who we are, most likely yes, but nobody who still has to be elected today is goinf stand up against the actual content except for the tax thing, because that was a massive blunder on his part because he’s not the smartest cookie, but this is who they are. Believe them when they tell you who they are. There’s an 11 point plan, which in part is already being enacted. It aligns perfectly with what’s going on in state legislatures in red states at the moment.
Sam Goldman 18:46
Really appreciate, Annika, what you’re breaking down, because this is something, if you’ve listened to any shows, I’ve become quite shrill about: the dismissing, the constant decades long, at our own demise, dismissing of what I call the Christian fascist movement in this country; dismissing them as fringe, dismissing them as stupid, dismissing them as whack jobs, dismissing them as something that is hindering the interests of the GOP. It is so ass-backwards doesn’t even do it justice.
I do want to let listeners know to check out the article that Annika is mentioning. It’s really worth reading. There was not enough coverage about this 11 Point Plan, because it was just dismissed. Again, this is what’s happening and they deserve to be believed. They deserve to be heard, because they’re a threat. Related to that on the lines of what you were talking about, it made me think about, maybe this is true, about European journalists — I don’t have enough access to all the press there — but in this country and the United States the lens is really on white evangelicals.
It was harmful, in my opinion, that the attention wasn’t paid to the machismo aspects of Latin American men and Black men evangelicals. Even though they were a smaller population in this last election — I don’t want to overstate their rise or influence — but they were discounted, and the patriarchal roots of their religion were discounted. Then, as we look at our current makeup of the Supreme Court and months away from the very likelihood that legal abortion is gutted in the United States, which is often trumpeted as, what, the modern world? And how we see a society as modern is whether women have basic rights, so when you look at the Supreme Court, what is in the driver’s seat is not evangelicalism, it’s Catholicism. When we look at the danger posed by this six – three court, we’re looking at the most vicious aspects of Catholicism.
Annika Brockschmidt 20:51
I think this is something that’s been really under-reported in the coverage of German news correspondents in the US. There’s been some change in US journalism on this topic, but not enough. I always get asked, “Well, why do these Catholics get on with evangelicals? They believe in different things about baptism and this and that. I will say, it does not matter. It doesn’t matter. They have the same end goal, and that is it. They don’t fight about theological differences. They couldn’t care less. Why do you think the Unification Church has been deeply embedded in the founding of the Christian right? If theology had anything to do with it, these people wouldn’t even be talking. It really grates on me.
One of the problems is probably structural in journalism, because there is a 24/7 news cycle, there isn’t enough staff, and few people have to cover a lot. So to a certain extent, I don’t think you can expect a political correspondent to know the intricacies of the religious right. What you have to do then, as a correspondent, is ask experts on this topic, because otherwise what we have is a complete miscommunication. The problem is that journalists who usually cover politics tend to fall for the rhetorical traps that the religious right sets — they say they’re for family values — without decoding what that means. So, the religious right has their own lexicon that you have to understand in order to be able to contextualize what it is they’re actually saying, and that is often missing in political reporting, because people don’t have the expertise, which again, they don’t have to have. But then ask an expert, that’s always a good thing. Sorry for the rant.
Sam Goldman 22:34
It is a very helpful rant. What I started writing in my notes is “allow them to set the terms,” and I think right now they, the “journalists” in question, allow the Christian fascists to set the terms, including changing language, allowing for usage of words like fetal personhood, and things like that. Even talking about parental rights, on the one hand, touting parental rights to ignore educational experts, to ignore historians when it has to do with teaching basic history, but revoking parental rights when it comes to ensuring that their children have gender-affirming care. It always makes me feel like there’s gymnastics, but it’s not mental gymnastics for them. It’s very easy for them to do. It’s very hard to do when applying a logic of seeing people as human beings, but what can I say?
I want to return to something that you were talking about in terms of the culture wars, when you were alluding to why many of these former leaders in the Republican Party touched that in the 11 Point Plan. One element of the Nazi experience that is often overlooked is their attacks on what they saw as sexual deviancy, in particular their attacks on the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute — that I don’t even pretend to say the name because I know I will butcher it. [Annika: That was good.] Okay — broadly, what we would call the LGBTQ community in Germany, and we see these attacks now going full speed ahead in the American fascist project, but also elsewhere in the world. Hungary, we could go on. Why are strict patriarchal gender and sexual norms so important to these fascist movements? How is that woven together in your opinion with the white supremacy and the xenophobia, the militarism and Christian supremacy that you’ve been exploring?
Annika Brockman 24:25
Fascism basically promotes the idea of a fog, so often is an even group that has clear boundaries, be it through race, ethnicity, political or religious views or combination of all of them. It rests on a highly heteronormative view of gender that is also deeply misogynist. Sexual angst and sexual paranoia plays a big role here as well. Men have to represent a very militant form of masculinity. Their job is to fight and to protect and, very important, to produce offspring to ensure that the nation prospers and continues.
Women are often overlooked but women play an important role in fascism as well. Their domain is the home, where they give birth to children and they bring them up to be potential little soldiers, be that to the culture war or an actual war. The narrative of a gay or LGBTQ conspiracy is actually quite often used in fascism. As any conspiracy theory about “elite infiltration” of elites that go after the children, is also always steeped in anti-Semitism, as are claims of sexual deviancy or sexual degeneracy.
There is also the narrative of homosexuality, or any expression differing from heteronormative gender norms, as a disease — as a disease that can infect others, especially young children. If you follow this train of thought that LGBTQ people spread a contagious disease, this is something that needs to be curtailed and legislated to protect public health. That’s a lot of what we’re seeing on the state level in red states. That suddenly makes sense if you follow that line of thinking. Laws have been passed that forbid the mentioning of LGBTQ issues or the existence of LGBTQ people in the classroom or horrifically denied trans, children and teenagers the medical care that is potentially life-saving for them. But why LGBTQ individuals? This intense hatred in modern fascism and in Christian nationalism is based on the very existence of LGBTQ people. This has nothing to do with what they do or what they like or how they behave.
It’s about the very existence of LGBTQ people, because by existing they challenge the gender norms of the Christian national society, and its core: the patriarchal nuclear heterosexual family. If these clear boundaries get blurred, everything unravels in the eyes of these people. Claims of a “degenerate, decadent LGBTQ culture” or “woke” culture as they now call it as well have been prevalent. The latest addition to that list is Madison Cawthorne, who I think yesterday or today, claimed that Ukraine’s government was evil because it supported “woke” politics. That means it protects LGBTQ people, it doesn’t persecute them. Rhetoric to protect the children of sinister LGBTQ actors who groom children into abusing them have been all over the promotion of various repressive anti-LGBTQ laws that have…
Sam Goldman 27:26
Just to cut in, for listeners who may not know, because not everybody follows things in the same way, the rhetoric that Annika is talking about, the grooming aspect that was heavily used in Florida to push through the Don’t Say Gay bill and to get too many people to go along with it.
Annika Brockschmidt 27:46
Yeah, and also to get certain books banned in libraries that speak about these things, because that then gets framed as pornography because it covers LGBTQ issues. That’s another way of framing LGBTQ issues as something perverted, where you’re trying to sexualize children. That’s also something that comes up very often. Anything that addresses LGBTQ issues gets labeled pornography and is therefore framed as disgusting, icky, grooming of children and makes it automatically improper. Why are you even talking to kids about this? The narrative of depraved LGBTQ people who want to snatch away innocent children and “infect” them with queerness, and therefore want to bring ruin to America because white Christian America rests on this family structure and on those gender norms, that has deeply troubling echoes in the fascist past.
These laws and these narratives are spreading, and they will only grow more and more extreme. The promotion of heteronormative gender norms in white Christian nationalism is also closely tied to its white supremacy and its xenophobia. Why? Well, not for nothing, when Alan Carson and two of his acquaintances, when they founded the World Congress of Families, they bonded over fears of a “demographic winter” in their countries; meaning that too few white Christian babies were being born, in their opinion, a narrative which people like Tucker Carlson reproduce at the moment on an almost daily basis to his millions of viewers.
This is then contrasted with narratives of people of color, invading the country as immigrants. In the American context but also in the context of the European right, we often see this then tied to conspiracy theories like the great replacement, or the more openly anti-Semitic one, the white genocide, where the narrative is that shadowy elites seek to “replace white people” with people of color to destabilize and eventually take over society. These aspects — xenophobia, racism, hatred of LGBTQ people — are very tightly connected, even though they might not look it at first glance, which is why that makes it so hard to explain.
One last aspect that I think we can’t overlook is that in fascism, you need an enemy from within, as we’ve already established, they need an enemy because fascism is this constant state of battle. You can never stop. You always have to have the struggle. This enemy needs to be extremely powerful, so he instills fear in the followers of the fascists, but he also has to be disgusting or perverted, so he can also be ridiculed. This means that rather than paralyzing the followers in fear, this gives them, the fascist or the fascist politician, the tool to rile up their followers. The narrative goes like this: The secret LGBTQ elite, who is in cahoots with a smaller group who lead this country from the shadows is trying to groom and sexually violate the children. But, they’re also gross and ridiculous and easy to point out. So it does both: it gives you an enemy that is threatening, so you have to take action because they want your children — It’s also a very common narrative, X group wants to take your children, so you have to legislate against X, but this enemy can also be ridiculed.
Sam Goldman 30:59
That was a really helpful breakdown. I think that it’s something that, unfortunately, we’re seeing take place now in hyper speed, and replicate very, very rapidly, not limited to just Florida and Texas. I think that we’re going to see it really nationwide, very, very soon. It’s important for people to pay attention to — and not just to pay attention to, but to put everything on the line to resist and stop. I think that there’s a lot of connection between the patriarchy at the core of it — you we’re talking about the very existence challenging their whole way of life, and there’s a connection between that and connection between the efforts in this country for forced motherhood. That’s something, and I think that the more they’re able to advance on one, the more they’re able to gain momentum to crush the other. The more that they are able to speed through these horrific laws that target children and young adults that are trans, that strengthens their fight and momentum around abortion rights, and vice versa.
Annika Brockschmidt 32:01
Oh, definitely. This will not start with trans people. The arguments that have been used to deny trans people, trans children, trans teenagers, their bodily autonomy, will be and are already being used against other groups; against, queer people, gays, lesbians, pregnant people, women. The anti-trans hatred is a wedge issue for the religious right, and the arguments applied to discriminate against trans people will and have been used against other groups as well. So this is basically a new testing ground, because they feel like they’ve at least come out and the public opinion lost the culture war when it comes to gay marriage. Because that feels more normal to many people, anything related to trans people still makes a lot of people uncomfortable, who don’t know what they’re talking about.
So it’s very easy to weaponize prejudice and fear for the safety of the children to combine both, and then make this a very explosive emotional issue where we see a lot of parents get on board. This is what I mean when I talk about irresponsible media coverage. This is then when we look at, for example, the governor’s race in Virginia. This is then framed as, “Oh, Glenn Youngkin is making education his main issue, he doesn’t want our children to read pornography.” [sigh] I can’t even. This is what makes this so infuriating. I think it’s very important that we uncover the narratives that these people are using, that we explain why they’re using them, be that critical race theory or this grooming of children narrative. Everything that is related to this group X wants to indoctrinate your children with Y, and you can put whatever you want in there. It has a very clear aim and it weaponizes fears and prejudices of parents for these people’s political gain.
Sam Goldman 33:48
I think that’s so clear with the Youngkin race and how that unfolded. Also how we’re seeing just the more recent developments in Texas. It maybe makes headlines for a couple days if that, and still hidden, is heartbreaking to say the least. I guess my closing question would be: Over a year Trump’s been out of office, we’re seeing these fascist initiatives going after restricting abortion, history, education, LGBTQ rights, voting. They’re rapidly advancing in state houses across the country. Why is this happening?
Annika Brockschmidt 34:25
I think the fact that these collective attacks on democracy by the right have intensified so much that it’s shocking even the most pessimistic and critical analysts of the right. Within the last year alone is a further sign that this movement knows it’s time is running out. They know that demographically, in the long run, they won’t be able to win a majority again. Mind you, they don’t need it. That much was clear even in the 60s when the architects of the modern religious right started forming it, because they planned to explore it and play the American political system which favors minority rule, but even this is getting harder now as their numbers continue to shrink. So, the measures have to get more and more extreme to make up for that.
We’ve seen a dramatic shift, not because the anti-democratic tendencies were nonexistent before Trump, quite the opposite of that, but because they feel that the demographic dangers, so to speak, is accelerating. Time is running out for them to secure white patriarchal Christian rule, even by playing the system that’s already bent in their favor. So, they have to have more draconian voter suppression laws. They need authoritarian laws in schools to stop teachers from teaching the kids anything that challenges the Christian nationalist myth that they weaponize; that this country was founded by white straight Christian men for white Christian men who deserve political and cultural supremacy, basically, by a divine right.
The more these people realize that they’re losing the culture wars amongst the general public, the more extreme these laws will get. A Missouri State Rep introduced a bill, I think yesterday, that would make it illegal to have an ectopic pregnancy, the number one cause of death for pregnant people in the first trimester. It would also make it illegal for pregnant people to leave the state to get an abortion. This is no coincidence. They’re already coming for abortion, contraception will be next. That’s quite clear. That’s always been on the agenda of the religious right as well. The end game is very clear. We’ve already talked about the attacks on trans kids that have and will have horrifying consequences that will lead to suicides, that will penalize parents for providing their children with the medical care they so urgently need.
People often tell me when it comes to these things, or when I warn about these things: Oh, they won’t go that far. To that I can only say: If you think they won’t go that far, you have not been paying attention. That is because they have been crossing line after line after line in the last year alone. Even for me who is quite pessimistic, it’s gotten worse at breathtaking speed, and they will not stop because they cannot stop. Fascism is never satisfied. It is built on the premise of battle, of a never ending fight against an enemy from within. They won’t stop until they are stopped. And for that, unfortunately, time’s running out.
Sam Goldman 37:12
I think that is a great place to end. [Annika laughs] In terms of this interview, not in terms of our objectives in refusing fascism. To that we’ll have more to say later on what people can do, because while time is running out, it is not too late yet. That’s why these conversations matter, and more importantly, the actions based on them matter. So, I want to thank you, Annika, for joining me and sharing your expertise, your perspective, your time with our listeners and with me. How should people who want to learn more from you in the US follow your work?
Annika Brockschmidt 37:49
I think the easiest is probably Twitter.You can find me @ardenthistorian. You can also find our podcast. If you’re not a German speaker, that’s not necessarily a problem, because the interviews that Thomas and I do with English and American experts are in the original, so we don’t synchronize them because that would be our headache for us to do and for other people to listen to. You can find the podcast via the Twitter side as well. It’s called Kreuz und Flagge. That’s the German for Cross and flag. If you don’t know how to type that, it’s not problem. You can find it via my Twitter site. If you’re a German speaker, there’s also a Patreon where you can find many more texts on the US religious right and political right, and most of my Twitter feed is half in English as well, so you’ll find plenty there.
Sam Goldman 38:36
You’re gonna want to check out the show notes, where we’ll have the link to Annika’s, Twitter, podcast and the text.
Annika Brockschmidt 38:44
Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. And there’s another one in the pipeline, but I have to finish that one first for Religion Dispatches as well. You should read any text and Religion Dispatches anywhere, so just keep an eye out.
Sam Goldman 38:57
Thanks again. [Annika: Thanks so much for having me.]
The battles in Ukraine and over the fate of Ukraine are inextricably linked to the rise of 21st century fascism across the globe, and the existential threat that poses to all of us. They’re steeped in and deeply impacted by the whole history of fascism, and how people have understood that history. One thing to chew on: Most Americans don’t understand that a no fly zone is a term of military engagement; that it’s the literal shooting down of enemy airplanes. That Ignorance isn’t just because it’s an odd euphemism, but because in a perverse reflection of US accusations against Russia, for decades the US has been enforcing so-called no-fly zones over countries that have little to no capacity to fight back. They have been a tool of violently enforcing US domination.
Particularly now, much of the anti-Trump intellectual space has been dominated by conversation framed by the lens of “authoritarianism,” void of discussion of actual ideological political programs of said “authoritarians” creates a narrative of: Authoritarians of right and left varieties, which serves the return to the so-called center; aka good old US imperialism and American chauvinism. The point here isn’t that the US is authoritarian, too, but that the concept of authoritarianism just doesn’t hold water. Instead, we need to discuss power and empire and political programs, social programs even, as part of analyzing what’s actually going on. So, now, here’s Andy Zee in conversation with Paul Street.
Andy Zee 40:38
Alright, so I’m here with Paul Street from Chicago, Illinois. I’m here in New York City. How are you doing, Paul?
Paul Street 40:46
I’m doing all right. It’s kind of a nice day today. I’m a little worried about World War III, but, you know, we’ll see. Every day I wake up and thank God the sky hasn’t been closed, you know.
Andy Zee 40:58
I’m with you on that, serious times. That’s why we invited you back to the show this week. You wrote on CounterPunch two weeks ago in an article saying that “President Zelinsky’s call for a NATO imposed no-fly zone over Ukraine is a call for US warplanes to directly engage Russian jets and thus a call for great power escalation, potentially proceeding to World War III, which nobody wins. Talk about reckless.” This is important to get into, because since you wrote that this has escalated and escalated. It’s all over the media, nd I think this is important for us to talk about,
Paul Street 41:38
Well, to quote Bob Dylan, let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late. The last time I looked at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock, they were at 100 seconds to midnight. That was on January 22. I bet they’d cut that in half right now after the invasion of Ukraine, and not just the invasion of Ukraine, but the Western response to it. I’m wearing a button that I bought from the Revcoms. You might not be able to see it there, it says “Stop thinking like an American and start thinking about humanity.” Well, also, don’t think like a Russian, start thinking about humanity. Don’t think just like a Ukrainian, start thinking about humanity.
And don’t think like a Zelinsky, start thinking about humanity. There is a cult being built up around this man and I’m finding it increasingly dangerous. He’s speaking on gigantic telescreens in European city town squares to tens of thousands of people. He’s speaking to the British Parliament. He’s speaking to the Canadian Parliament, and he’s going to be speaking, I believe, tomorrow to Congress. He’s on TV constantly, and the most consistent theme coming out of his mouth is: Close the sky; give us a no-fly zone. I don’t know if you’ve had ethnic Ukrainians March in New York City, but we certainly have in Chicago. I’m pointing in the direction of a neighborhood a couple miles northwest of here called Ukrainian village, and they had 5000 people in the Loop, chanting “Close the sky!” That’s their way — which to me sounds very chilling, because I’m worried exactly about the entire sky being closed on the whole planet.
I don’t know if people know what a no-fly zone actually is. A no-fly zone is a direct military act of war, where the US — and I was gonna say NATO but the NATO really is the US — US/NATO would militarily close off, both through patrolling with jet planes and through antiaircraft, precision guided military hardware, would engage Russian planes over Ukrainian land, potentially, for example, chasing Russian planes, potentially downing or getting downed by Russian planes in Ukrainian airspace, potentially chasing Russian planes into Russia, potentially being chased by Russian planes to enter full-on NATO territory, into Poland, as so on and so forth. It would lead to a direct military engagement.
This is very important: A no-fly zone means it a very likely direct engagement between US forces and Russian forces. That, in turn, means World War III. That, in turn, means a distinct possibility of escalation to a global nuclear war. We are closer than we’ve ever been to a potential World War III in my conscious lifetime. We’ve been extremely lucky. We’ve been unbelievably fortunate over the decades, with these hundreds and hundreds of nuclear weapons capable of blowing up the world 15 times over, that we haven’t gone there yet. We haven’t gone to the Dr. Strangelove territory.
This is the scenario, this is the kind of scenario that would give rise to this, and it is just absolutely irresponsible for MSNBC, CNN and Fox News to constantly be coupling these — very real, don’t get me wrong, and which makes them all the more provocative. They’re not made up like some sort of Pavlovian Putin left type of people would have you believe, these are very real images of civilian carnage that is laid at the door of Vladimir Putin. Make absolutely no mistakes. You have these images, you have all the outrage about it, and of course, a lot of us on the left, whatever the left is anymore, are noticing that there’s an incredible amount of outrage about Ukrainians, but almost no outrage in Western media about Yemenites and Palestinians, and the victims of our own bombardments and the bombardments of our own allies.
But nonetheless, there are these incredible images of outrage, coupled with these pleas for a no-fly zone. And every single day, the media is building mass sentiment for a no-fly policy on the part of NATO, which is really the United States of America. In fact, it’s been so effective that the last Ipsos poll I looked at, 74% of the American population supports a no-fly zone. I wonder sometimes if those who support a no-fly zone, know what it is. I have a feeling that there’s a lot of Americans, if you ask them, they’d almost think it was like a video game with air traffic controllers sitting around behind screens. I’m not sure they get it. I’m not sure they understand the threat of mutually assured destruction resulting from a direct engagement between two nuclear superpowers.
There’s certainly more to say about it, but this is this is extremely worrisome, and it’s extremely irresponsible for liberal intellectuals to get up with their MSNBC, CNN bully pulpit, and their Yale credentials. And also this roster of war criminals like John Brennan, and James Clapper that are constantly on, being paraded in front of liberal viewers. It’s extremely irresponsible for them to not talk about the real risks involved. And by the way, not to mention that a no-fly zone wouldn’t even be all that militarily effective. Most of the damage is coming from ground artillery. Most of what Putin’s forces have done has not been through the sky anyway.
Sam Goldman 47:32
In this segment you just heard, we shared the views of Andy Zee and Paul Street, two members of the Refuse Fascism Editorial Board. The views featured are theirs and theirs alone, and not an official platform of Refuse Fascism. For Refuse Fascism submission and key statements, please see, RefuseFascism.org.
Want to learn more from Paul’s perspective? Check out his March 18 essay on CounterPunch, which is an updated version and partial reconfiguration of a presentation he gave online to the Chicago chapter of Refuse Fascism. It’s linked to the Show Notes.
For more from Andy Zee, check out the RNL — Revolution, Nothing Less — show on YouTube. And if you want to dig deeper into understanding Christian fascism, check out some of the recent episodes from the past few months, including an interview we did with Katherine Joyce on January 23. The interview I did with Samuel Perry on January 9, and there’s an interview that Coco did with Annika’s co-host of her podcast, . So you’re gonna want to check those out.
Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. I want to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics or guests. Tweet me @SamBGoldman. You can drop me a line at [email protected]. Or you can record a voice message by going to anchor.fm/refuse-fascism and click the button there. You might even hear yourself on a future episode.
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Thank you. Thank you, Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers. We have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox each week. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity we refuse to accept a fascist America.