It Can, It Has, It Is Happening Here

Refuse Fascism Episode 128

It Can, It Has, It Is Happening Here

Mon, Sep 26, 2022 12:42PM • 57:02

SPEAKERS

Anthony DiMaggio, Paul Street, Sam Goldman

Paul Street 00:00

Now we have a guy who tried to do a coup in the Imperial freaking homeland. And they’re still doing trying to overthrow a previously normative bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law.

Anthony DiMaggio 00:11

There’s no casual discussions of fascism. It’s either threats, and then it’s an existential threat or it isn’t.

Paul Street 00:17

This is fascism, and if you don’t stop it, it’s going to dig in. And it’s going to be here for a very long goddamn time.

Anthony DiMaggio 00:23

The alternative of inaction is even more dangerous, because then you allow people to do things like engage in an insurrection, and try and steal on election and next time, maybe it doesn’t end so well for everyone.

Paul Street 00:32

You’re going to need more than voting. We’re going to need movements, we’re going to need people power, we’re gonna need people in the streets.

Sam Goldman 00:58

Welcome to Episode 128 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 the United States. Thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews on Apple podcasts, shares and comments on social media or YouTube. It helps us reach more listeners, and of course, we read everyone.

Here is an email I received from this past week: “Hi, Sam. I’m telling friends to listen to this podcast for essential updates on the abortion rights situation. I also watch the news media of course, but it is a hodgepodge to sift through and I don’t get the overall picture and summary of the key issues. This podcast is useful for that. Thank you. FYI, I don’t have an Apple iPhone or computer so apparently I can’t listen on Apple podcasts and read, comment, review, but I can still listen on Spotify or Google podcasts, although they apparently don’t give options for rating, comment, etc. And people can also listen on YouTube and like comment, share them there. Zeke.”

Well, thank you, Zeke, for your kind words, and very importantly, sharing the show and letting folks know how else they can listen and promote. I did want to let you know that on Spotify, listeners can leave ratings, but no reviews yet. To leave a rating you’re going to go to our show, you’re going to make sure that you follow it. If you have not done so already, click that follow button. Then you’re going to tap on the star button and follow the instructions to rate the show.

If you have not listened to the show on Spotify before, they’re going to prompt you to listen to a few episodes before you rate and review. So yeah, you can do that and rate us there and that would be awesome. So after listening to today’s episode, go help us find more people who want to reach refuse fascism by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or rate/review on another platform and encourage your friends and family to listen to do the same. subscribe, follow so you never miss an episode. Subscribe to our YouTube as well. And of course continue all that sharing and commenting on social media that commenting on YouTube, it is the best.

Sam Goldman 03:26

Before the interview we want to salute all the women and all the people rising up in Iran for Mahsa Amini and an end to theocracy. Mahsa, a 22 year old Kurdish woman in Iran was beaten to death by morality police after being arrested for an improper headscarf in Tehran last week. The fury of women flooding the streets of Iran, cutting their hair, refusing to wear headscarves in the face of violent repression from the state, burning their hijabs in defiance of these morality police, have inspired protests across Iran. It has increased the courage and determination of others across the country. It is a powerful display of the refusal to accept tradition’s chains one moment longer.

The refusal to be beaten, abused, controlled by the state for being a woman is an inspiration to people all over Iran and people all over the world. As feminist author Mona Eltahawy wrote earlier this week in her powerful essay: “Glory and power to the women in Iran for serving us this challenge. If women and men in one of the most perfect police states are this unscared, then what are you doing to fight your oppressors?”

She goes on in her essay to write: “As you see it, as you watch the glory and power of the Feminist Revolution in Iran right now, ask yourself — I’m looking at you people in the US, cheering on the Feminist Revolution against Theocrats over there — what the fuck you are doing to fight theocrats and fascists over here? And make sure it’s more than hashtags and just voting.” We must all take note, take heart and take to the streets. Look at how they are finding their power in their actions, their power in each other. Take no but more essentially follow them into the streets. With that, here’s this week’s interview.

Sam Goldman 05:26

So here we are, 20 months post-coup attempt and Trump not only still roams free he continues to lead a Republi-fascist party, free to hold Nazi rallies. A party, which I need to say, is completely consolidated around fascism; The Big Lie. A party which, wherever they hold power, has trampled on the rights and lives of oppressed people; banning abortion, criminalizing dissent, outlawing teaching real history, suppressing the vote, and raining particular hell on trans youth, just for some of what has been at play.

So, it’s essential to talk with folks who have been sounding the alarm and writing in depth on how this fascism can, has, and is happening here. So today, we’re doing something a bit different on the show, and I am all here for it. I’m talking with Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street. Anthony is a professor of political science at Lehigh University. His latest book, Rising Fascism in America, It Can Happen Here is linked to in the show notes. And Paul is an author, journalist, political commentator, historian. His most recent book is This Happened Here, Amerikaners Neoliberals and the Trumping of America, it’s also linked in the show notes. Paul is on the Editorial Board of Refuse Fascism.

They are both, I need to mention in various states of recovery, so I’m extra grateful that they’re talking with us today. One is healing from surgery and the other from, I think, a virus, maybe the flu, hopefully not. So they’re both medicated, and this should be fun. So I’m so glad to welcome them both back on the show. Thanks for coming on, guys.

Sam Goldman 05:29

Thanks for having us.

Paul Street 06:31

Yeah, we’re both stoned off our ass, so look forward to talking.

Sam Goldman 07:16

Let’s start with what has been really on my mind. I know that both of you have been researching and writing about it in various ways: After winking and nodding at QAnon for years, Trump is without a doubt, overtly embracing the lunatic baseless conspiracy theory known as QAnon. This is at a time where extremely ominous real world events that are acts of terror, carried out by those affiliated with QAnon are growing and spreading.

Earlier this week, Trump went all in on Q, leaving the winking aside, sharing QAnon content on Truth Social. In particular, this Punisher imagery, memes promising military tribunals, executions — the latest iteration of Trump openly committing to murdering his political opponents. This is on top of his latest rally where the QAnon music played. They did the Q version of Sieg Heil. I think Trump even was wearing a Q lapel pin. What the hell is going on here? Tony, I know that you wrote recently about this. Do you want to take a stab at it first?

Anthony DiMaggio 08:33

Sure. If you’ve been paying close attention to this for the last couple of years, everybody knows that Trump has a QAnoner, but he’s always had what he thought was plausible deniability. Not very plausible, I mean, because you can’t talk about how QAnon loves America, fights pedophilia; be inviting numerous QAnoners to the White House like Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn to try and overthrow an election; hiring Mike Lindell, another QAnoner, to be in your campaign and plausibly say that you’re not in QAnon. So, he’s just sort of removed any sort of even basic attempt at plausible deniability when he’s posting these things himself.

If you’re looking over the last few years, there’s actually been some decent research on this. Apparently, he’s retweeted or reposted on his new social media account, between both, more than 150 times, QAnon accounts, perspectives, content. This was black comedy a long, long time ago. You don’t accidentally repost QAnon content 150 times. Then of course, the final coming out party is him posting the content that shows him with the “where we go one, we go all” motto, “the storm is coming.” These are just infamous QAnon slogans.
Unless you’re just willfully ignorant with your head buried in the sand, you really can’t deny anymore that this is going on. I think it’s really just a question of understanding what that means. Unfortunately, if you look at the the political commentary on this, and this is something I try to talk about my recent Counterpunch piece Erasing QAnon Fascism, this is a neo-fascist movement. It’s not neo-fascist-ic — I use that term in my book — I don’t think it’s really accurate anymore because there’s idea that Donald Trump for a long time, he relied on fascist themes while not claiming fascism. So the hence the ‘-ic’ part neo-fascist-ic — this is just neo-fascist.

If you look at QAnon that he’s identifying with, they recycle old Nazi-era blood libel propaganda that framed the Jews as drinking the blood of children and as satanic. If you look at the actual polls on this recently, there was a poll which found out that half of QAnon supporters say that liberalism “equipped Jews to destroy institutions and gain control of the world.” This is old sort of antisemitic propaganda talking about how the Jews control the economy, the media, politics. Apparently, people in the survey said they believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is old Russian antisemitic propaganda from more than 100 years ago. 80% of these people who buy into that antisemitic propaganda, also believe in QAnon. So, there’s clearly the antisemitism here.

There’s clearly the cult of Trump behind QAnon, when he talks about this idea that he is going to impose himself as a dictator, and it never happens, but then it gets re-prophesized over and over and over, like the Second Coming of Jesus. This guy is a deity type figure for them. You got the anti-liberal democracy angle. Clearly you’re anti liberal democracy — liberal in the small ‘l’ sense, not like Liberal Democrats, but the whole idea of electoralism and democracy — if you are against elections and want them overthrown. Of course they’re eliminationist too; they want the Democrats strung up on streetlights, hung, executed in public — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama. All four of these elements are classic fascism, not neo-fascist-ic. They’re just fascist.

Sam Goldman 11:50

Paul, did you want to chime in?

Paul Street 11:52

Well, a couple things. First of all, I want to reinforce this point that this movement checks off all the boxes, not just on fascism, but on a particularly virulent neo-Nazi, antisemitic variant of fascism — like the worst classic Third Reich type of fascism. It is conspiratorialist, it is antisemitic, it is cultist, it is irrational, anti intellectual. It embraces political violence, and yes, as Tony was saying, it’s eliminationist. I mean, they literally talk about Trump coming back — independent of an election, maybe even depending on what Q says next week — and overthrowing and executing and torturing leading top Democrats, and sending some of them to Guantanamo.

It’s extraordinary. One interesting question for me is why this full embrace now? What’s going on? I agree with Tony that if you’re paying careful attention, you can see this guy was a QAnoner on back through his presidency, but this is a new qualitative breakthrough. Wearing the lapel in his photo and the one-fingered salute thing that’s going on at these rallies. Did he do it again in North Carolina last night? I don’t know. The one I knew about was Youngstown, Ohio.

Sam Goldman 13:03

Although I think that there was some footage about a Trump security guard trying to prevent it from happening. I don’t know whether that was this one or last one.

Paul Street 13:10

So why now? I think he’s trying to up the ante a fear that he wants to impose on those who are investigating and may charge him. There are multiple legal inquiries and investigations underway now. Talk about fascism. Him and Lindsey Graham, the two-faced reptile South Carolina Senator, both threatened political violence if the Department of Justice even dares to indict him. So I think there’s a desire to up the ante of terrorism and terrorization against those who might investigate him. Maybe there’s something going on mentally, where his malignant narcissism — and he’s a classic malignant narcissist — is being heightened as he feels cornered, trying to link himself more to his cult.

It ought to be one hell of a wake up call that somebody embracing this shit is the kingmaker within one of the two major parties in the world’s most powerful nuclear state. He’s the presidential front-runner at the top of one of the two major capitalist parties, and he’s saying this kind of crap. It’s gotta be a wake-up call about what’s going on in this country and where we are and how low our political culture has really sunk.

One of the dangers here is that he will mainstream QAnon in a way that he mainstreamed the Proud Boys. There’s a new book out now — I can’t remember the author, but he’s been making the rounds on cable news — he says Proud Boys were always there, but that moment in the 2020 presidential debates when Trump said “Proud Boys stand back and stand by” just catapulted them in a new kind of way. It’s a green light to this lunacy. So it’s very dangerous.

Sam Goldman 14:46

I completely agree. There was this one line in Tony’s Counterpunch article that really stood out. I thought it captured a lot. Tony wrote: “The QAnon connection, perhaps more than anything else, demonstrates Trump’s commitment to a fascist politics.” You both spoke in various ways to what those fascist politics are, and I think there’s a little bit from certain spheres like: “Why is this news? He’s always been this way. Nothing’s different.” That kind of covers over how overt it’s getting.

Paul, your point that this is intentional to normalize it on a whole other level, where this just becomes part of political discourse, where we talk about our political opponents being pedophiles, and that’s just what we do now. I think that is particularly ominous, especially when there’s real world violence that is happening because of people that consume and peddle these dangerous conspiracies. I am wondering whether you have any other thoughts, either of you, on the people who are just laughing it off because it’s ridiculous — and it is ridiculous, right? It is ridiculous to think that there’s “reptile people.” The conspiracies are absolutely ridiculous, but they’re also dangerous.

Paul Street 16:06

As a historian, Hitler’s blood libel and his wild conspiracy theories were very commonly laughed off and not taken seriously, both within Germany and across the supposedly responsible Western nations in the 1920s and early 1930s. Give you one example: There’s a minimization of the Trump threat, in general. I asked some people on Facebook recently, how many folks are actually MAGA? The numbers came in very low, people think it’s a lot less than it really is. Tony sent me some data that it’s about 43% of the population that approves of Trump right now, the job he’s doing. Trump being almost completely identified with MAGA, you know, I think that’d be fair to say.

Anthony DiMaggio 16:47

I would add, it depends on who you talk to you. This is dark comedy for those of us who have been paying attention and know what’s going on. There’s a massive segment of the rest of the population that’s just in complete denial. I was talking to a relative today about this podcast, and they were rolling their eyes saying, “Oh, God, you know, anybody who talks about their political opponents and mentions fascism or Hitler, that’s just irresponsible.” My response is: Well, so what happens when it’s appropriate? What happens when you actually have documentation and evidence?

People don’t see it because they don’t want to see it. These are people who support Donald Trump, so they have an obvious reason to reframe this. I just saw some segments with Sean Hannity recently where he’s obsessed with this term “Walmart shoppers.” He’s a Walmart shopper and all the other Trumpers are Walmart shoppers. They’re not fascists, he said. He wants to be very clear about that, they’re not fascists. This is part of a larger political culture. We’re talking about the news media, I talked about it in my book in detail, where you can use the word “populism” to refer to Donald Trump and Trumpism. You can use, maybe, sometimes, the word “authoritarian.”

Fascism? No, that’s really been sort of cut out of the discussion. And that’s not just in general, when you talk about Trump and the term fascism. You could be talking about QAnon, which is clearly neo-Nazi in its politics. The term fascism almost never comes up from the research that I’ve been doing. And this is not just Fox News. I’m talking about The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC. Kyle Rittenhouse poses with these Proud Boy fascists and they’re all doing hand signals for white supremacy and he’s not a white supremacist or a fascist. The coverage very rarely ever suggested that, if ever. [Paul: He’s a Walmart shopper.] Yeah, he’s Walmart shopper.

Peyton Gedron, the Buffalo shooter, is a self-identified fascist, almost never called a fascist in any of the news stories. Robert Cremo, the guy who’s responsible for the Highland Park shooting, not a single story in any of these allegedly liberal media talking about him as a fascist, even though he’s a self- identified alt-righter, wears alt-right stuff, content shirts, Pepe the Frog. This is Neo-fascist stuff, right? He was targeting a synagogue, scoping it out. So people just don’t deal with it. That’s the way that it’s been. The evidence is so damning across so many different points. You just don’t talk about any of it. You talk about it, and you have the cat out of the bag. So that’s really where we’re at for a lot of Americans, and apparently you’re at that point with 43% of them, right? Because they’re still normalising Donald Trump. That’s not even getting into people who don’t support him, but won’t use the language of fascism.

Sam Goldman 19:07

Yeah, there is an insistence to, even after all that we’ve experienced, to not name it. When people do name it, that is the story, people naming it — they use the F word — instead of the story being, as Paul put it, that one of two major parties in this country is completely consolidated around this. What a crisis that is, but instead the story is “so in so called XYZ, a fascist.” Often they’re not even calling the person a fascist, it’s calling a particular policy move or decision semi-fascist, or having a hint of fascism or something like that.

Paul Street 19:47

There is a significant — I’m noticing it — an uptick in the use of the word ‘fascism’ since Biden said semi-fascist, and it’s now regularly said on Joy Reid. It’s regularly said on Chris Hayes, but they say it in passing. They don’t linger on it. It’s just like another bad thing about that other terrible party. Oh those racist, ecocidal, pandemicist, sexist, oh, and by the way, fascists. Rip those crazy fascist Republicans, right. Oh, those crazy MAGA Republicans. “Semi.” I love that. They don’t stop and linger. They don’t take the word seriously and dig into what exactly that means, what its characteristics are, which means they end up in a way normalizing it. It’s just astonishing how weak the treatment of it is, even when it is used.

Sam Goldman 20:38

It’s a good point. I wanted to turn to the vicious xenophobia and white supremacy embodied in the fascist kidnappings by Trump protege, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, where migrants and asylum seekers were flown from Texas to Massachusetts. I was hoping. Paul, you could speak a bit on what that was about, and this trend that has been characterized by the press as a “political stunt.” One thing I have to point out is that the Attorney General Merrick Garland has nothing to say about this, to the point where even Democratic congress people are even like: What the hell? I know that this is something you wrote recently about.

Paul Street 21:17

The phrase “political stunt” is another example of downplaying and almost normalizing or making it just: Oh, like “another crazy thing that’s part of that partisan politics and those crazy Republicans.” There’s two things wrong with that: A) There are crimes involved. And, B) it’s fascism. So let’s get to both of those. Let me just mention what I think the crimes are that are relevant. I did look at the federal kidnapping statute. They were deceptively lured and carried away for perceived political reward. Kidnapping does not have to involve an economic ransom or an economic reward.

There’s a big emphasis in the federal statutory law on deception and false promises and luring people. That seems to be one of probably the best angles. DeSantis violated state budgetary laws and state budgetary rules within Florida. That money he used is not designated for going to Texas to get people who are allegedly coming to Florida and then flying them to Massachusetts. It’s complete violation of any normal state’s budgetary rules. And there may be issues involved with the transport of people of unclear legal status across state lines that may violate some federal laws.

Fascism, well, it’s profoundly illegal. They’re doing illegal things in the name of law and order. Just a classic fascist calling card. There’s the obvious racialism of what they did; the racist nativism of it, which is a big theme. Border racism, border obsession, border paranoia is a consistent theme in fascist thought. The racialism is so intense here that DeSantis seems to have screwed up and not completely appreciated the fact that the people who are illegally transported were Venezuelans. So from one perspective, he’s supposed to want to treat those folks somewhat decently because they are fleeing a supposedly — this is the in the media, they say, again, socialist communist tyranny in Venezuela — he should be treating them with kid gloves. He’s got some trouble now with his right wing Venezuelan voters in Miami and elsewhere.

But the racialism of it all just trumped all that. He didn’t care, he just saw brown-skinned people. Then there’s the cruelty. This is another calling card. Fascism doesn’t have a monopoly on cruelty, don’t get me wrong. There’s an intense, explicit, open cruelty in fascism. Deceiving people, taking them off where they don’t know they’re going, and then dumping them like human garbage in places where they’re confused and scared. You’ve screwed up their immigration hearings — they’re trying to declare asylum now they don’t know where they are, what’s gonna happen. Then there’s this attempted humiliation of your liberal enemies. This “proud that we’ll show those liberals up in Martha’s Vineyard and we’ll dump this human garbage and they’ll be ashamed.” [In Massachusetts} they actually didn’t get humiliated. They had a fairly decent response, like what human beings would do to try and take care of other humans. It’s not just DeSantis by the way. Greg Abbott in Texas has been sending busloads of these people, the same thing, with false promises, and then dumping them in Chicago. Apparently him and Ducey in Arizona have been dumping busloads [Sam: New York] of people — do they do it in New York — Washington DC and Chicago. That there’s fascism connected with DeSantis should surprise nobody that studied his gubernatorial reign. This is a guy who has championed that “don’t say gay” bill. He has led the charge against so-called critical race theory, alleged grooming of kindergarteners. He has introduced a Crimes of Communism Day in Florida.

I mean, can you fathom that as a reflection of his Venezuelan especially his Cuban voting base there? He’s put together state money for like a private state militia to follow him around. He almost never appears in public without a bunch of armed law enforcement type of people around him. He cultivates a Mussolini esque persona. He’s sort of the fascist waiting in the wings kind of chomping at the bit in case Trump goes down, or in case Trump really doesn’t want to run again, which is a possibility. Then he’s hoping to just move in to that MAGA space. Whether he can do that or not, is an interesting question. He doesn’t have some assets that Trump has.

Paul Street 21:37

Did you want to add anything, Tony,

Anthony DiMaggio 25:33

This is still an ongoing story, of course, with the migrants. We know that this Texas County Sheriff is doing a criminal investigation of this too. People who are here illegally as migrants, and were lured under false pretenses based on promises of people acting like good Samaritans, who did not end up being good Samaritans. In the case of the DeSantis, this is a political sort of operation. They were promised employment and housing and education and other types of benefits, and then they’re just dumped. So this is really not just potentially illegal and criminal, but also a great example of what Paul’s talking about regarding dehumanization. These are important aspects of fascist elimination as ideology, right. The idea that people can be treated like a means to an end, dehumanized, dumped, and just disregarded as trash.

Sam Goldman 26:14

Another aspect of this that I talked briefly about on the last episode was the way that this shows the federal government and the law itself, how seemingly endlessly amenable they can be to the threat of fascist violence — which this is. This is a form of violence, to kidnap people to dump people where they know no one, and are further at the whim of various forces. It just goes to show that there isn’t some magical force in our legal system that keeps this all in check, where the fascists can’t go too far out of bounds, because then the law will step in. I think that’s how a lot of good people, unfortunately, feel in relation to this. That links back to what we were talking about earlier, in terms of the media coverage of fascism, or the lack of coverage of, of whether this is fascism, or the passing coverage of fascism, as Paul talked about,

Paul Street 27:18

Maybe not all-that-noticed aspect of this is the kind of neo-Confederate collaboration that certainly took place between DeSantis and Abbott. I can’t imagine that DeSantis didn’t tell Abbott that he was going to fly a plane in there and pick up Venezuelans. You’ve got Republican governors who are purporting to make national immigration policy right now. I remember at some point last year, maybe it was further back that when I was in Iowa, hearing that the right wing, neo-fascist state governor of that state, Kim Reynolds, had sent a bunch of state troopers down to Texas to participate in border patrol. I mean, there is this kind of neo-Confederate nationalism that they have amongst themselves, that they’re trying to cultivate. So maybe that’s part of our trip towards civil war.

Sam Goldman 28:05

That’s a really important point, Paul, and you also see that within some of the discussion that’s been happening regarding abortion, and the traveling between states, and the coordinated surveillance. In terms of the media and normalization, I’ve been thinking about how, yes, even during “normal” times, the mainstream media has played a role in mollifying people in saying: No, no, the danger is not that big of a deal when it comes to fascism coming to power in the United States.

I feel like this is escalating, that they — the mainstream media, that is — are continuing to cover the most incendiary, the most outrageous, the most criminal actions, the most covert fascism as merely part of the horse race, and simultaneously failing to cover stories that could potentially break that noise, or covering stories in the way that could break the noise. I am wondering, Tony, if you think that’s a fair assessment, and because you do so much work with quantitative studies, is there a way that we can measure the impact of the way the media talks about or doesn’t talk about the threat of fascism?

Anthony DiMaggio 29:17

You’re talking about more broadly, a both sides-ism problem, where there’s sort of a gentleman’s agreement among journalists and political leaders where the political class and journalists won’t throw around this kind of language. So how do you study the effects of that? Well, I’ve only really gotten to the point, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, where you can look at the content. You can see the message is just not getting through systematically in terms of the use of the words “fascism” or “fascist,” so I haven’t seen any polls, because it doesn’t seem that pollsters are terribly interested in this. I’d have to commission my own poll to do this.

But whether people who pay a lot of attention to the news are more likely to be concerned with the problem of rising fascism, it’s just not something that’s ever really been polled with regards to media impact. My expectation is that you would not see any real significant impact of people paying more attention to the news and being more concerned with either Trump being fascist or with fascism in general, because it’s just not salient at all. It’s just very clear from the news coverage hasn’t been a real focus. There’s a reason for that. The reason for it is because they typically take a page from the political system itself. So when you have a Democratic Party that’s very, at most, hemming and hawing.

Biden will occasionally use a term like semi-fascism. He’ll call Trump Goebbels in regards to the the big lie of election propaganda and the allegedly stolen election. Obama and Hillary Clinton had private phone conversations when Trump originally won about how they’ve got to stop a fascist. That was the motivation in 2016. This is what’s going on. You have a political system that hasn’t taken it seriously. I don’t think that Biden is stupid. I don’t think that Obama and Hillary are stupid. I think that they know what it is. I think that they’re afraid of fully recognizing maybe to themselves as well as to the public the severity of the threat.

It’s this idea that Paul tossed out here, of the way in which an MSNBC will casually talk about fascism. There’s no casual discussions of fascism, it’s either a threat, and then it’s an existential threat, or it isn’t. You don’t have a situation, unless you’re inviting disaster where you have someone like Joe Biden, who well, he hasn’t talked to Merrick Garland about bringing charges against this fascist, whether it’s related to trying to extort votes in Georgia and throw the 2020 election, or the national security documents that were stolen or participating in an insurrection and violence in stoking that and being a part of it. These things are all illegal, and so you have multiple avenues here where you could take action, and it just hasn’t happened. The Democratic Party has this fear that: what kind of precedent would it set if we did this? And then this becomes a partisan game of prosecuting presidents.

So there’s been this gentleman’s agreement forever, that you don’t prosecute a sitting president or a former president. Well, the real problem here is that if you don’t do that, the alternative of inaction is even more dangerous, because then you allow people to do things like engage in an insurrection, and try and steal an election. And next time, maybe it doesn’t end so well for you, when you have a president who’s embracing QAnon, and a movement that wants to execute you as a political partisan. So I don’t think that they’re stupid. I think they know what this is. I think that they’re deluded about the severity of the threats. Journalists are just sort of taking a page from these political leaders, and they’re downplaying it. I think everybody knows, on some level, what’s going on here, they’re just in denial about the extent of the threat of fascism.

Paul Street 32:41

You know, that gentleman’s agreement, I think, goes back to and has a lot to do with the US President’s role as the commander in chief of a vast global empire. If you’re the president, you’re gonna have to commit war crimes — it just goes with the job, you’re gonna blow some people up, you’re gonna overthrow some governments, you’re gonna bomb some regions of Africa, or the Middle East, or name your region. No one’s gonna want the job. Hence, Obama’s “let’s look forward instead of backward,” in regard to the epic, monumental crimes of George W. Bush involved with torture, and above all the invasion and occupation of Iraq. What’s new or different here is the crime committed. Coups in Venezuela, coups in Honduras, coups in Guatemala, in the Congo are fine.

Now we have a guy who tried to do a coup in the imperial freaking homeland, and they’re still doing it; trying to overthrow a previously normative bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law within the US itself. That’s just an unprecedented situation. I think they never thought they’d come up against something like that. People don’t want to deal with it. I remember watching the 2020 election night on PBS. They were just naming off the different election returns in the different states as if it was just a normal, usual presidential election, and I thought to myself, do you not understand the mail-in ballots still have to be counted?

Do you not understand that this lunatic is going to declare himself the victor before the mail-in ballots? And then do you not understand that after the mail-in ballots come in and probably show that Trump lost he’s going to deny them, and going to insist that he won and going to engage in a long struggle to overthrow the election? It was just happy face as if it was a normal election. I’m thinking about 2024 right now. Is that how we’re going to cover that presidential election when we may very well have in place high level, state level Republican election officials — governors, secretaries of state and attorney generals — who are actively committed to election nullification and nullifying the popular votes in their states?

This is extraordinary. This right wing fascist Supreme Court — the same one that gave us Dobbs v. Jackson, that gave us a rollback of Miranda rights that gave us an assault on the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions, that gave us a few other horrible decisions this last session, it’s a horrible court, absolutely ridiculous court — is, this next term, going to hear a case in which I’m guessing they’re likely to give a thumbs up to the independent state legislature theory, whereby states may be permitted to veto — step above state courts — in terms of exercising complete authority over what Electoral College slates get sent to Congress for certification. The next president’s election, it’s a hell of a thing, it’s extraordinary what they’re doing. It’s just bizarre, this acting as if everything’s normal.

Sam Goldman 35:30

There’s definitely psychological aspects of it, and the even though they are not what is primary and principal, as you were talking about this “nothing to see here” culture isn’t just spontaneous, either. It’s what people are told, whether they’re told it through the media that they consume and the lack of any sense of that something rotten is afoot coverage, or just in campuses and universities or wherever you’re looking at this kind of largely and very quickly, people acclimate because people are told to. What we were outraged by yesterday is now just today’s compromised position and tomorrow’s limit on what’s possible.

This is something that I look to your work, Paul, for frequent reminders to not do in terms of the role you play in keeping people honest on how we got here, how we continue to get here, how, indeed, the Democratic Party has enabled this monstrosity, or perhaps put better, greased the wheel, even while you are very clear to delineate the differences that do exist, in that you don’t call the Democrats fascist, even while you can condemn the actions of them. One of your most recent pieces was an in-depth piece on how, indeed, the assault on abortion rights was a bipartisan affair. I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about why you think it’s so key for people to come to grips with this.

Paul Street 37:04

Well, you know, you see the Democrats now rushing to use the Dobbs v. Jackson decision as what they think will be the basis for winning the midterms in 2022. It’s now shaping up that they’re going to win the midterms, incidentally, and that comes across as almost like an ex post facto response to the decision. In fact, I remember talking to Democrats leading up to the decision, and they were actually looking forward to it. They were actually saying: Oh, yeah, the imposition of patriarchal female enslavement, forced motherhood, that sucks, but we’re going to take advantage of that. As if the partisan electoral process in this country is just nothing but a policy referendum.

But the Democrats are a bourgeois democratic party. They continue to maintain a kind of ever-weakening hold on electoral, so called, democracy and rule of law. Yet they are at the same time, and simultaneously, deeply complicit with the fascistization of American politics. Their clear capture by concentrated wealth, by elite corporate and financial interests, their commitment to capitalism tends to discredit democracy, because there’s a problem in capitalism and its inherent tendency towards the concentration of wealth. Well, the concentration of wealth is also the concentration of power, which means that policies, even when they’re in charge, generally don’t reflect majority sentiments.

At the same time, capitalism is constantly creating new and different types of chaos and crises; ecological crisis, bacteriological crisis, immune diseases, savage economic inequalities — problems, that demand solutions. People want solutions. And when they want solutions and democracy is discredited and shown not to work, they become open to the notion: “I alone can fix it.” They become open to the notion of authoritarian solutions. There’s this long- standing corporate captive neoliberal abandonment and shutting down of their own base. It leaves the barn door open for the GOP to win.

Even at the same time, as the GOP has been transforming itself — you saw it under Obama, you can even see aspects of it under Clinton in the 90s, and certainly under Bush — even as that party is becoming fascist, and in the American variant, the [Democratic] Party continues to preach, “let’s reach out across the aisle.” As if this is just another normal party; reach out across the aisle to a party that is eliminationist towards them and towards democracy and towards liberalism. Just consistently refusing to ever call that party what it really is.

They embrace a lot of the same narratives that are part of fascist ideology: liberal Hollywood embraces violence. The Democrats have long embraced Pentagon, military violence and liberal Democratic mayors and cities embrace mass incarceration. Democrats embrace a neoliberal schooling processes that are part of the dumbing down of the population, which is part of fascist-ization and they embrace American exceptionalism. The Democrats are real big on American exceptionalism. Listen to Obama, listen to Bill Clinton, listen to Joe Biden, it’s always: “We’re the greatest country that ever lived. We’re the beacon to the world.” And that kind of creates a sense of: “Well, it can’t happen here because how could that ever happen here if we’re such a great country?”

Now the Democrats literally are providing literal, material financial support to the worst MAGA Republicans in numerous congressional races. For all I know, they’re doing in some state races, too. They did that during the primaries with the “pied piper strategy” as it was called, that Hillary Clinton carried out in 2016. What they’ll tell you is that it’s the real intense QAnon-y MAGA Republicans are the most beatable ones. Talk about a low bar and making it clear that you don’t have a positive program to run on, that your hope for the midterms, is to coast off of this horrible abortion decision that you anticipated favorably before. Your other hope is that the Trumpies will be so appalling that that’ll help you win in 2022.

Sam Goldman 41:07

The last thing that you were saying, Paul, I think, there’s the “we have no program,” but there’s also the ignoring that there’s any chance in hell that there are millions of people who actually go along with this fascist program. This is a country that is filled with fascists. This is a country that is, time after time, in many of these primaries, the most delusional hogwash. That the refusal to think that deranged MAGA has a chance, to consistently underestimate your opponent, and not just underestimate them, but to discount the fact that they don’t care an iota about your process of free and fair elections is just insane.

Anthony DiMaggio 41:49

From the polling data that I’ve collected myself, you’re just talking about straight-up fascists, alt-right style people who identify with that, it’s probably about 25 million people. Tens of millions of people are willing to normalize that stuff. And that’s not even getting into the 43% of adults who still have a favorable view of Trump. So I wouldn’t call them out-and-out fascists, but I’d say they’re in the orbit of it, if Donald Trump is at this point. So, what is 43% of adults? You’ve got about 250 million adults in this country, 43%, about 110 million people.

So if you’re gonna hang your hat on that — that they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump, you have tens of millions of people here. Tens of millions who will religiously stick to this notion that no matter how bad a Republican might get, the Democrats are always going to be worse. And they will find a way to justify it. That’s a very dangerous sort of game to play. And that’s also a sign that the Democratic Party is not very serious in putting forward any sort of real opposition here. The story of the Democratic Party over the last few decades is demobilizing working class, poor people, people of color. It’s not so much that these people overwhelmingly flocked to the Republican Party, they just didn’t vote in large numbers, particularly in depressed areas of this country that have lost a lot of jobs.

What you have at the Republican Party is people who are willing to normalize the most atrocious things because they think that the Democratic Party is worse. They’ve been socialized to believe that they’re not people who are particularly poor, generally speaking. They tend to be overwhelmingly white, middle aged to older, middle, middle-upper income, if you’re talking about the mass base of the GOP. So they’re privileged people who aren’t going to be targeted by Trump’s fascist politics, and they’ll find a way to ignore those things. They will and they always have. I don’t think it’s gonna end well for the Democratic Party, and we are headed for disaster because of it.

Sam Goldman 43:29

That said, my interests are not in where does this go for the Democratic Party. I don’t care about their future. I care about the future of humanity. The future is going to be in a really rotten place, a horrific place if people continue to delude themselves that there’s no chance of these fascists tasting, let alone holding power again. As the fascist threat escalates and the drumbeat to the midterms gets louder, there is a mountain of delusions being fed to and happily consumed by, in my opinion, too many decent people. I’m sure you both have heard them all. There’s all the variations of: “We’ve gotta vote to stop fascism.”

This takes various forms: “stop worrying, stop talking about fascism, we’ve gotta wait till 2024,” or the flavor of: “Everything is on the line in these midterms, vote in the midterms or this will be the last free and fair election, vote in the midterms or they won’t accept the will of the voters next time,” even while more and more Republicans are not accepting the will of the voters now — so I’m not sure about that one. Then Paul, you talked about, thanks to Roe being overturned, we’re going “blue, baby, everywhere. Look at what Kansas just showed us.” And then the last, but not to be discounted: Trump won’t be back in office, he’ll be in jail. If there’s thoughts that either of you have on how to counter any of these. I am all ears, and I know our listeners are too.

Paul Street 45:07

I’ll say something about the Trump in jail thing. I did a piece on Substack recently that was seven reasons that he’s not going to jail. It’s a very fluid situation. There’s something going on in the ruling class. Is the gentleman’s agreement about you don’t prosecute former presidents going to hold in this particular case? This is a new kind of case: the guy actually tried to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy in America, and is threatening to do so again. But, it just seems like a stretch. I hope I’m wrong. I hope it changes. They’re very afraid of political backlash. They’re very afraid of violent backlash, and they’re very afraid of setting a precedent.

You hear this again, and again: The United States is not a banana republic that throws its former presidents in jail, right? We don’t do like Brazil, or we don’t do like, you know, name your other third world country, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know what, maybe you need to be like one of those countries for a change, at least in this particular case, because this is fascism, and if you don’t stop it, it’s going to dig in, and it’s going to be here for a very long goddamn time. But the notion that they’re going to put him in jail, it just seems dubious to me, I don’t see them doing it. Wait till ’24 and all hell breaks loose. All hell may very break loose in ’24.

It is not looking good. There are a lot of problems afoot, and that includes what kind of mechanisms might be in place in battleground states, when ’24 comes. By the way, that includes what the balance in the House of Representatives may be come the 2024 election. Because if the GOP holds the House they can use that position to screw with the 2024 presidential election. You might want to get started on that right now. I don’t particularly have a problem with people voting. I never say don’t vote, never. But I always say: It’s very time staggered, it takes about 10 minutes, you do it once every two or every four years. I mean, one of the problems with putting all your eggs in the electoral basket and in voting in the United States, and voting for Democrats and electoral politics is they’re pretty damn weak right now. It’s a pretty damn weak counter to fascism.

We already discussed the Democrats, they’re pretty much the party of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon and Boeing and so forth. But beyond the Democrats, bad as they are, and as right wing as they tend to be, this system is stacked against them. We have a very unusual form of bourgeois democracy, which dates from 18th Century slave owners, for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare. You start putting together the Electoral College — which is preposterous. Try to explain the Electoral College to — not only someone from another country, but probably to — most Americans, they don’t understand it. The absurd Senate apportionment regime, whereby Wyoming and California both have two senators, even though Wyoming has less than 600,000 people and California has 40 million people.

The extreme power of the lifetime appointed Supreme Court and the power of judicial review. And an underestimated factor is states rights, which is a really distinctive aspect of the American political system. 50 different jurisdictions, and they have remarkable power to make policy in defiance of overall national majority opinion. Then you have all the constitutionally Supreme Court-enabled under the Citizens United decision, dark right wing money from revanchist billionaires that can tilt the system. It’s just a hell of a thing to try and tell people that this is going to save you from the fascist-ization of the country. So we’re obviously going to need more than voting. We’re going to need movements, we’re going to need people power, we’re gonna need people in the streets. I think a House controlled by the GOP in the next two years would be just utter chaos.

Sam Goldman 48:58

If things stay on the trajectory that they’re on, absolutely. I try not to operate in a world of fantasy, but I do have a recognition that even as totally fucked as we are, there still is a majority in this country that does not want the full nightmare that a fully consolidated fascism would bring in this country. I think that there are millions of people that, at various levels of recognition, are already alarmed and do not like the direction that things are headed in.

All of us, the people listening very much included, have a responsibility to continue sounding the alarm, to continue talking about things that make people uncomfortable, to continue to speak the unpopular, uncomfortable but irrefutable truth that is the danger that we face and what that would mean. Not just speaking the truth, but also getting organized as Paul was talking about. There is a movement that we are lucky to have an organized network that isn’t waiting until it’s too late to act, and that is Refuse Fascism.

So, listeners, I know that what we talk about every week — especially this week — is scary, and rightfully so, and we are not hopeless, we are not powerless, but it does mean that we have to roll up our sleeves, and we have work to do. That work can’t be confined to a few minutes of voting in November. That was a long winded way of saying: Don’t feel like shit. Do something about it. And that something can be as small as signing up at RefuseFascism.org. It could also look like writing to Tony and Paul and spreading what they’re writing, so I’ll say more about that in a bit. I wanted to give both of you, if you had any closing thoughts, any final myths you want to bust in terms of how we can refuse fascism or anything that we didn’t talk about that you want to address.

Paul Street 51:01

Well, let me give a shout out to Tony’s point that he just made about the importance of prosecuting Trump. It’s not clear that the GOP, which is now a fascist party, has a replacement. I’m not sure that DeSantis or Abbot, or god knows who, has that kind of background in whatever that weird charisma this orange lunatic has with his base. We’re going to find out perhaps whether that can be replicated. It’s very important that this guy be put away — at the very least disqualified from running again. I’ve been wondering for a while where’s the mass movement to demand the prosecution of this guy? When are crowds going to show up outside the Department of Justice and demand the Garland move on this?

I guess the main myths that I just want to reinforce that we really need to gut check and question people on are this American exceptionalist notion that it can’t happen here. The myth that I know personally a lot of people engage in is that you can ignore politics, that you can just sort of not pay attention to them and sort of live in a privatized world where all that crazy stuff out there is just something I really don’t need to pay attention to. When you’re in the audience, when you’re in the crowd, just watching the game, if that even — of course a lot of people aren’t even watching, right. The game has a way of jumping up off of the field and impacting your life in really, really horrible ways. The abortion decision, which caught a lot of people more by surprise than they should have been caught, is a really classic case of that’s a case where the game has really jumped out and is starting to have a direct impact on young people’s lives.

Sam Goldman 52:29

Well, I want to thank you both. This has been a very meaningful conversation, and I honestly could chat with y’all all day, but I want to let you both rest up, recover, get well. Thank you for sharing your expertise, your perspective and your time with us.

Sam Goldman 52:48

You can follow Paul on Twitter @StreetWriter17. A link to his site and to get his latest book are in the shownotes. To read more from Tony check out the show notes for a link to his book, and I am also going to link to his page on Counterpunch so you can read many of his other articles, including the QAnon one that we discussed earlier in this conversation.

Sam Goldman 53:11

At the beginning of this interview, we spoke about Trump’s full-on embrace of QAnon. For more on this topic, I encourage folks to go and listen to episode 68, our interview with Dr. Mia Bloom, co author of Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, that was uploaded July 18, 2021. We encourage folks to get in the street and take action. This Wednesday, September 28, International Safe Abortion Day. What we need, what the times demand urgently, vitally and most of all, is a movement of people who care about abortion rights, who care about justice, who want to refuse fascism, in the streets with righteousness, with the determination to put things on the line to turn this whole trajectory around.

Let’s take a page from our sisters in Latin America, who, against their conservative Catholic governments, raised the green bandana and a green wave for abortion rights and went into the streets again and again. Growing in numbers and determination, they tore down the laws criminalizing abortion in several countries and continue fighting and many more. So this Wednesday, September 28, International safe abortion day, let’s make a leap in gathering this wave of struggle here. Raise the green bandana in public acts of protest, big and small. This is part of fueling massive society wide nonviolent but relentless, sustained protest and resistance that grows, drawing in more and more people, compelling those in power to respond to our demand: legal abortion on demand and without apology everywhere. Learn more, find organizing tools, and register your actions for that day at RiseUp4AbortionRights.org

Sam Goldman 54:59

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts questions, ideas for topics or guests, or lend a skill. Tweet me @SamBGoldman, drop me a line at [email protected], or leave me a message by visiting anchor.com/refuse-fascism and hit that search button.

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