The Fascist “Freedom” Caucus

The Fascist “Freedom” Caucus

Refuse Fascism Episode 144
Sun, Feb 05, 2023 1:57PM • 51:00

Werner Lange 00:00

Fascism is nothing to be trivial about. It is an existential threat to humanity. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. That House Freedom Caucus is a cancerous caucus within the House of Representatives that will in the next two years do damage to our democracy. And I don’t know if the democratic forces are strong enough to stop that. It is a very dangerous institutionalization of fascism in America today. We need to organize. We need to share. We need to lock arms and take on this great evil that is confronting us.

Sam Goldman 01:00

Welcome to Episode 144 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. In today’s episode, we bring on a regular listener of the show, Werner Lange, a retired educator and pastor and author of Onward Christian Soldiers, The MAGA March Toward a Fascist America to discuss his recent essay A Lesson for America 90 years after Hitler’s Ascension to Power.

Then we share an encore interview from way back in Season 1, October 31, 2020 of this show. We’re giving listeners a chance to hear an excerpt of the interview we did with Andrea Chalupa, co-host of Gaslit Nation. We talk about taking the streets and how that challenges a dictator’s legitimacy.

But first, thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews the show on Apple podcast or wherever they listen. Here is one from this past week, titled Anti-fascist Analysis from US and International from AcesPlaces who gives the show five stars and writes: “Every time I listen, I become more convinced that fascism isn’t on our doorstep here in the US. It’s in the entry hall. Listen yourself and you’ll get a lot to think about. The wide-ranging guests bring light from many angles. This is a relevant and necessary podcast, people.” Thanks AcesPlaces.

If you appreciate the show and want to help us reach more people who want to refuse fascism, be a gem and go write a review and drop five stars wherever you listen to your pods. Please tell the people out there in podcast land why you listen and they should too. Of course, subscribe/follow so you never miss an episode.

Sam Goldman 02:59

Trump escalated the already horrific attack on our trans siblings via a four-minute genocidal video on Truth Social; a full scale war on transgender folks and the health care community who serve them. I felt that Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the Pulse nightclub attack, put it well when he tweeted: “Donald Trump’s transphobia. at a fever pitch as he rattles off every lever of government he would wield, every freedom he would torch to punish transgender people for daring to exist, and their allies for daring to affirm them.”

The danger cannot be overstated. This further unleashes violence against trans folks, emboldens more anti-trans legislation at the state level, throws the gauntlet down for others to meet or beat his brutality. As of this recording, state lawmakers have introduced 200 anti-trans bills. more than all of those introduced in 2022. In case you forgot, it is only the first week of February. In Utah, a ban on gender affirming care for minors is already in effect with devastating consequences.

On the same House floor where members of the GOP are proudly wearing AR-15 pins, the GOP ousted Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota from the Foreign Affairs Committee, allegedly over previous comments on Israel. Reality doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Omar co-sponsored a resolution that condemned anti-semitism and recognized Israel as America’s legitimate and democratic ally. It doesn’t matter that the GOP traffics perpetual anti-semitism and collaborates with Holocaust deniers and defenders. Reality doesn’t matter here. But we should know what this really is. We should not turn away from the fact that this removal, this ousting of Omar is the latest act of political revenge. This time revenge for the removal of Gosar and Greene from their committees last term for inciting and promoting political violence.

We should also note that this is only their beginning. For those relying on the goodness of institutions to be the guardrails to the fascist danger, please see how the College Board completely caved to Ron DeSantis. The College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the SATs and AP courses across the US, has taken the fascist baton from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, doubling down on his anti-Black racism and adding a whole new level of anti-intellectualism with nationwide effect.

You might recall that the state of Florida rejected the AP Black History curriculum proposed by the College Board as having “no educational value” and being a tool for left wing indoctrination. Did this esteemed institution of learning stand up to this attack? No. They stripped their curriculum of not only the contested mention of “Critical Race Theory,” but of theory of any kind. According to The New York Times, David Coleman, the head of the college board said that during the initial test of the school course this year, the board received feedback that the secondary, more theoretical sources were “quite dense,” and that students connected more with primary sources, which he said have always been the foundation of AP courses.

He went on to say, “We experimented with lots of things, including assigning secondary courses, and we found a lot of issues arose as we did. I think what is most surprising and powerful for most people is looking directly at people’s experience.” To remind our listeners, we’re talking about Advanced Placement courses. Over hundreds of years, millions of Africans were violently seized from their homelands and dragged to the Americas. Through the course of that and all the events that followed, and were shaped by it, people have dreamed and envisioned a better life and often a whole better world; analyzed why and how this world is the way it is; how it can be so cruel and so beautiful and everything in between; imagined and strategized over how to get free; debated and discussed and argued over all of this. But according to the College Board, all of this is just “secondary sources.”

This anti-intellectualism is all too common in our society — one more factor priming our society for fascism. To see it so clearly articulated and weaponized from no less than the College Board itself is astounding. I encourage you to listen to our episodes with Federico Finkelstein, where we discuss fascism’s need to decimate critical thinking throughout society. The AR-15 pins this week, the Islamophobia, that anti-socialism, racism and anti-intellectualism straight from the College Board, fascism is trending pretty hard right now. It’s important to call it what it is. Each of these actions give someone, or many someones, the opportunity to disrupt, to say no, to call it what it is and refuse fascism. What will you do when that someone is you?

We can’t go on to the interview without touching on the continued assault on abortion rights and the war on women. We wanted to highlight just a couple of stories that were buried, if not entirely omitted, by the mainstream media. The RNC pledges to “Go on offensive in the 2024 election cycle” on abortion, and “pass the strongest pro-life legislation possible.” Right now, looming over the post-Roe hellscape of legal abortion access in the United States is a federal case that could result in what experts have characterized as a nationwide ban on medication abortion, preventing patients from gaining medication abortion from any pharmacy or provider.

Medication abortion is the most common way that people terminate pregnancies, and the medications have been on the market for over two decades providing safe and effective abortions. The decision whether to keep mifepristone accessible is now up to a federal judge in Texas. In case you are unsure, yes, he is a Trump appointee, and yes, he is a longtime Christian fascist with a track record to prove it. Jenny Ma, Senior Counsel for Center for Reproductive Rights, shared the significance of this case, stating: “This would be one court in Texas deciding whether or not medication abortion could be allowed across this country, even in states that have protected abortion since the Dobbs decision.” Women’s March has called for emergency mobilization in Amarillo, Texas on February 11 to defend the threat of a nationwide ban on medication abortion.

The Christian fascists aren’t waiting idly for a decision. Twenty Republican state attorney generals sent a letter to CVS and Walgreens, warning them that mailing abortion medication to their states would be against the law. If they’re able to keep abortion medication out of their states, not only would it mean that women wouldn’t have access to the most common form of abortion, but it would also mean that those having miscarriages wouldn’t be able to obtain the medication. Such medication is a standard treatment in miscarriage care. Yesterday there was a nationwide day of protests around pharmacy chains who carry abortion medications.

As Carrie Baker reported for MS magazine, they targeted “pharmacies that have announced plans to offer abortion pills including Walgreens and CVS and Rite Aid. The protests are organized by the so-called progressive anti-abortion uprising PAAU, a group that claims to be peaceful and progressive, but whose members have repeatedly broken the law to achieve their goal of intimidating, harassing and blocking women from accessing reproductive health care.” We will be, as always, continuing to cover this story and look forward to hearing from you as well on ways that you are taking action to rise up for abortion rights. With that, now, here’s my conversation with Werner.

I am happy to welcome on Werner Lange, a retired educator and pastor who was born in the rubble that was Germany after the fascists got through the Fatherland. He is chair of the Ohio Peace Council and author of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers, the MAGA March Toward a Fascist America’. Welcome, Werner. Thanks for joining us.

Werner Lange 11:13

Thank you for inviting me.

Sam Goldman 11:15

So you recently wrote a piece titled “A Lesson for America 90 Years After Hitler’s Ascension to Power.” In it, you stated, “There is an alarming lesson in this disastrous historic development for a deeply divided America today, cutting deals with fascists to catapult a voraciously, power hungry politician to high national office places a nation in grave peril.” I was hoping you could talk to us more about what this lesson is, and the moment that we’re in right now,

Werner Lange 11:47

First of all, to go back to that disaster that took place 90 years ago, on January 30. I hope listeners and generally the public know that Hitler was never elected to that position. He was installed in that position by big business in Germany at the time, the bankers and some of the more powerful industrialists that were nervous over a growing movement toward socialism. In the last free election before the Nazis took over, the Nazi Party lost some seats in Parliament and the Communist Party gained some seats. So the pendulum was swinging to the left and these industrialists were very nervous about the direction and they basically had Hitler installed as Chancellor, to stop the movement to the left.

Now I find some parallels to that here in our present situation. This January, we also had a lot of contentious dialogue going on between the powers-that-be in Congress that allowed then for McCarthy to be catapulted into his position as Speaker. It occurs to me that this was probably the result of the ruling class in our country calling in its chips, and finally demanding a return on its investment. In that sense, it has a similarity, although not a complete one, to what happened in Germany. That is, that basically behind this move to the right, behind this corruption, was the force of big business, the most reactionary, the most racist forms of the ruling class in our society. Also, like happened in Germany, looking towards the right, and leaders on the right to protect them from the growing populist movements, which is continuing here in our country on the left, but needs to get much, much stronger.

Sam Goldman 13:50

You had spoken in the article and in your conversation just now about how your personal experience shapes how you see this danger, and the need to sound the alarm. I was wondering if you could speak more about that?

Werner Lange 14:05

If this installation of Hitler and this power grab by the fascists never took place, I and my family would probably be continuing to live in Germany in peace, and there will be at least 50 million more people alive who were consumed in the flames of World War II. Fascism is nothing to be trivial about. It is an existential threat to humanity. As the sign that is not legible behind me says, in the name of humanity, we refuse to have a fascist America. And that, I think, is number one on the agenda overall in what we are doing now, in our times; that we have to avert this reality so that we don’t fail to learn from the mistakes of the past.

My family came from what is known as the Volks Deutsche. They were the second class Germans, the ones that live in German-speaking communities in Poland and in Russia for centuries. We were not the weiss [white] Deutsche and so this catastrophe also destroyed that long legacy of our farming in that part of the world and created war refugees for us and for our family, which we were, and then eventually arriving in America, as we were called “DPs” at the time, displaced persons in the early 1950s.

As a result of those experiences and the result of the very good education that I’ve received, I became a committed anti-fascist early in my life, and remained so. I just never thought growing up in the 60s and being a child of the 60s, and all of those great progressive movements, that 50, 60 years later, we would be in the situation that we are in now. I thought we would have a socialist America by now and I still am hoping and working towards that goal.

Sam Goldman 16:02

When you think about the decent people of this country, in their hearts most people have the same sentiment that you do, that this is not a direction that we want to go in. And yet there is inaction or there’s complacency, or “this is just the way it is” mentality. “I don’t need to worry about it, I just have to focus on my life.” There’s a lot of dynamics at play. What do you think is most important right now in helping people recognize the situation we’re in? What are people not getting that they need to get in this moment?

Werner Lange 16:41

That’s a good question and not an easy one to answer. There is an endemic of false consciousness, as I would call it, of people not knowing really who their friends and their enemies are in this struggle for ongoing and qualitatively improved democracy. That is certainly true among the evangelical Christian Right, that there is a complete lack of understanding of what really Christianity is about. And also, in many ways, what America and democracy are all about. I don’t know if there is any one thing that could finally wake up the sleeping giant of the good people of America, but whatever it is, I hope it happens soon, because that was, of course, one of the problems of the rise of fascism in Germany.

Fascism is always a dictatorship so it’s not really the will of the people, of course. It’s imposed upon them, and many realize much too late what a monster has been given a life by the inaction. But as one said very wisely long ago, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. The bulk of the American population is very good in terms of its moral bearing and its general outlook. It’s just that they have been manipulated by masters of deceit, let’s call them — and fascists are excellent masters of deceit — and have them fall into the trap of following a wolf in sheep’s clothing, rather than recognizing by the actions that are done and the ideology that has announced how absolutely evil the goals and intentions are.

We need really a great awakening of the spirit of enlightenment. I think, really, education plays a very, very important role in this. That’s why the far right is so hell bent upon destroying quality public education. They recognize the danger of people coming from the working class, coming from the margins, coming from low income Americans, getting a good education in there by recognizing very clearly what needs to be done to change the situation and having the courage to do it.

I am optimistic that we will not repeat the disaster that happened 90 years ago in my homeland at that time, but that the true spirit of America, which has come out over and over again, in breaking through the forces of tyranny — first in the foundation of the country, and then the second American Revolution with the abolition of slavery, and then the powerful movements in progress of the 1960s.

They are still there now, it’s just that we face a growing organizational problem. The left is not organized strong enough. The Christian left, for instance, is very weak compared to the Christian right. Labor unions are much weaker today than they have been in the past. Progressive political movements are splintered, also generally weak. Something, if not this threat of the MAGA movement, something like it needs to unite all these disparate parts and awaken them into a united front against fascism. It would be an absolute disaster if there was greater power achieved in the next election, and certainly in 2024, by the fascist elements, and by the MAGA movement. It’s my hope that with the united front against fascism, the MAGA movement will be put to rest and it will join the dust heap of history just like the KKK and other fascist movements did.

Sam Goldman 20:40

What would that look like? For people to imagine, what would it look like for there to be, using your words, the “united front against fascism? What would that look like?

Werner Lange 20:49

Well, it would look like the anti-Vietnam movements in the 60s. It would look like the women’s movement in the 60s. It would look like the civil rights movement in the 60s. It would look like America the Beautiful, when we are rising against America the ugly, and saying, “No, You Shall Not Pass” here. It comes with focusing upon certain issues. One of the great galvanizing forces within the past year has been the abortion issue. The fact that this fundamental constitutional right of some 50 or more years has been just ripped away basically from the American public is something that I think played a large role in preventing the red wave that was predicted of 2022 — there was only a modest victory but not a overwhelming one.

Now I think also the environmental movement, climate change, also the growing threat of World War emanating out of the Iran conflict, and also the desperate need we have in our country for a national health care. We’re the only one that doesn’t have it. There was just a report out that we spend much much more on health care than any other country, but we have results that are abysmal — that make us look like a third world country. These things are points — health care, the environment, abortion, war threatening — that can galvanize the movement in this year and in the coming years, as strong as the movements in the 1960s that changed America, but not sufficiently because they decapitated our leaders. They killed JFK and then Malcolm, and then RFK and MLK and the forces behind that have never been brought to justice.

Sam Goldman 22:39

You’ve written a book that is now two years old, really sounding the alarm on what we — you and I — call the Christian fascist threat, which has been euphemized in many different ways to the Christian Right, or those kinds of phrases that sanitize, if you will, the danger that they pose. For listeners, it delves into the nature of this MAGA movement, which is a fascist movement and has a deep component of Christian fascism as its most loyal and organized core that brought it to power and helps maintain its power — “it” being the Trump-Pence nightmare regime.

One of the things that the book gets at is the qualitative shift, the difference, how this is something new and yet ongoing, and what the danger this movement poses. It’s really aimed at getting people to sound the alarm and wake up and say, “Hey, this is something we need to respond to.” I was wondering how you view the threat now, two years later? What has changed in your thinking, if anything, since you’ve written it, just reflecting on the research that you did and where we are?

Werner Lange 23:55

Now, first of all, you and I have been using the phrase “Christian fascism.” You don’t hear that in the corporate media. You don’t even hear that on the left for the most part. At the very most, they say Christian nationalists or far-right Christians or the Christian right. I think one step in that direction of enlightenment is calling this force what it is: it’s Christian fascism. Which, of course, is an oxymoron because you can’t be a Christian and fascist at the same time. You can’t even be a fascist and a Christian at the same time. But nevertheless, you’ve got to name your demons correctly. I think that’s part of it.

One thing that has been also largely overlooked is the ideology of the End Times. I’m not sure that everybody is aware of the madness that is incorporated at the heart of the Christian fascist movement, that basically the idea that in the end times there will be this great World War, and it’s a good thing that it is there. It’s going to take place in the Middle East, in Holy Land, Israel, Armageddon, and even what’s happening right now in Palestine, in Israel, is something that is cheering on the Christian fascists. They say this is all supposed to happen in God’s plan, that we have this war, that we have this enormous slaughter of people because this is the way that we have the Second Coming of Christ, which was equated with the second coming of Trump in 2020 for so many people.

We also need to uncover not only the fact that this movement is basically a fascist movement, not just simply nationalist or right wing, but that it has at its heart, the invitation to World War Three in the Holy Land, and working anxiously towards that goal. There are a number of Christian Zionists that are behind this, and the number is increasing. There was — and almost no coverage was given to this — a major event in the fall of 2020 — it was on September 26 to be exact — called The Return in National and Global Day of Prayer and Repentance. I covered that in my book to a certain extent. If you listen to what was being said there by the 60 or so main speakers, it was basically a call to war, and the fact was that the 250,000 that were assembled there were all warriors of God in this End Times movement.

I encourage people to become aware of this ongoing organized group called The Return. They are holding events in Africa and I believe the Middle East, maybe even this year. This is an ongoing movement that is also part of the Christian fascist movement that has very specific goals, and peace is not one of them. This idea in fascism is about the pure and the impure, about the chosen and the unchosen, about the damned and the blessed. You have very deeply ingrained this type of a bifurcation in mentality between the good and the evil in the mindset of the Christian fascists; that they are the good ones, and any liberal, let alone socialists and communists, is the embodiment of evil, deserving not only containment but annihilation.

One thing that disturbed me, and I hope this is not a harbinger of things to come, is what happened in Arizona, where one of these fascists took it upon themselves to shoot the homes of Democrats as a way of dealing with so-called liberalism. That is a very clear sign of fascism. You asked about what has changed since I put this book together — rather quickly, by the way — in early 2021. So far, what has changed is: Number one, the good, we didn’t reelect Trump in this MAGA movement. But that was by the skin of our teeth. He still got 10 million more votes, even after the fascist putsch attempt than he did. But he didn’t have the red wave. That is the good thing. I really attribute that also to the progressive core in the African American community, because what happened there in Georgia with the victory of Warnock, gave us the majority in the Senate.

Another positive move was the growing abortion rights movement that stopped many of these right wing ideologues from winning at the state and at the local, if not the national, level. But the bad thing about all of this is now the MAGA movement basically is stronger than ever. And the worst thing about it, it has now a very, very strong foothold in the House of Representatives. That House Freedom Caucus, as I mentioned, that the article, is a mini Nazi Party. I don’t say that lightly. That is a cancerous caucus within the House of Representatives that will in the next two years do damage to our democracy, and I don’t know if the democratic forces are strong enough to stop it. We have just about all of the Republicans falling lockstep into anything that they come up with, as they did with all the deals — we don’t know how many there were — that were cut to get McCarthy the House. I think that is a very dangerous institutionalization of fascism in America today. We have not had that before. This is new and it’s dangerous.

Sam Goldman 29:43

Yeah, and I want to add that you have that in the House of Representatives, which we talked in last week’s episode a lot about and the danger that they pose, and then you have these state houses across the country, where these Christian fascists have really consolidated power. You have whole states that really are under fascist domination at this point — looking at Florida, Texas — where all the institutions, almost, have been taken over, and then they’re the model for what’s being named nationwide.

When I think about what happens with this Christian fascist movement — there’s this thing every couple of years, there’s different phrases and different things that people say: “they’re done. They’re over. They went too far and now they’re done. The Christian fascist are done.” They don’t say Christian fascists, because they won’t use the word but people will popularly say things like: The Christian right went just too far. [WL: yeah] And the latest is: They went just too far with Roe! They went too far, and yet, they’re still able to go further, and they still have power.

The fact that the Christian fascists went after abortion isn’t stopping them from now having a Trump appointed judge oversee whether medication abortion is going to stay on the books. We have the purging of libraries in state after state because you have Christian fascists, not just on school boards but you have them in the Department of Education. You have them in the Governor’s mansion. You have them everywhere and they are following deeply patriarchal doctrines to decide what stays and what goes on shelves. The tsunami of anti-transgender bills, banning gender affirming care — I think it’s now up to 150 bills that have been proposed in 25 states just this year — it is mind boggling how folks can not see the genocidal implications of the Christian fascists. Before we close out the conversation, I wanted to see if there was anything that we didn’t touch on that you wanted to speak to, anything that’s burning on your mind that you want to make sure that listeners hear.

Werner Lange 31:50

Well, this is the beginning of Black History Month. I think all white Americans should celebrate Black History Month, and especially in times like this, when the critical race theory is under such vicious attack, we need to stand up and say no, we will not have lies replace the truth about our history. That reminds me then of a statement by a great African American scholar, who I admire very much, W.E.B. DuBois, whose birthday — this is the 155th anniversary — is later this month, who way back in the middle of Jim Crow, said: “Either the United States will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States.” Right now it’s a tossup.

Sam Goldman 32:33

I think that’s a perfect place to close out. I want to thank you, Werner, for giving us a lot to think about and sharing your perspective, your expertise, your insights with us and of course your time. Where should people go to find more from you?

Werner Lange 32:50

First of all, you can get a copy of the book that was mentioned, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. It’s in Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Or you can also just email me [email protected]. We need to organize. We need to share. We need to lock arms and take on this great evil that is confronting us. I have 12 grandchildren — they need a future.

Sam Goldman 33:22

So true. So true. They do. Thank you again, Werner.

Sam Goldman 33:27

We want to shout out the Organization of American Historians for their statement denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s decision to reject AP African American Studies, leading to decisions to strip scholarship from the curriculum. In their statement they write, “Vibrant democratic societies are not built upon a foundation of selective depictions of the past, but rather demand critical examination of and grappling with the historical record.” We’ve linked to their statement in the show notes along with an open letter in defense of AP African American Studies. This letter was signed by 600 scholars of African American studies including members of the Organization of American Historians. Next, we’re sharing an interview with Andrea Chalupa that originally aired on October 31, 2020. I was re-listening about the way that Andrea described Trump in the context of fascism and genocide, with deep roots in this nation’s history was clarifying and has renewed relevance. Give it a listen:

Sam Goldman 34:30

I have been listening to Gaslight Nation for several years now. It’s been since 2018.

Andrea Chalupa 34:39

Yes, 2018. We launched right I think after the news of the kids in cages was coming out, and even though that horrendous policy was started from the get-go — as soon as they got in they were just like: Release the Nazis. So we launched heading into the midterms to give people a space to come together and stay engaged in what really mattered.

Sam Goldman 35:05

It’s such a beautiful thing, and it’s been a lifeline for so many people. You have been exposing Trump, his regime, and sounding the alarm about how dire the situation truly is for years. I think one of the things that is worth exploring is, in the US any blatantly — what I would call — fascist movement — you may use the word authoritarianism. For the context of this conversation, I don’t think that the definition is the most essential — is going to have genocidal underpinnings [AC: absolutely] given the history of this country, a country built on genocide, slavery. How do you see Trump in relation to that history?

Andrea Chalupa 35:47

Oh, dear God. An extension.

Sam Goldman 35:51

And what do you see him calling forth?

Andrea Chalupa 35:54

Donald Trump is very clearly an extension of the genocide that built America; the massive genocide of Native Americans, which was so great, so horrific, that it literally changed the global climate on the planet, and, of course, the hundreds of years of the holocaust of slavery. It was the white people and the complicit Black and brown people that tried to hide in that system for their own protection and were complicit in it. It was that system of white supremacy that to this day is what we’re up against. That is it. That’s what’s central to the work that we’re doing. That’s why it’s so important to protect the most vulnerable among us, and to undo white supremacy and just to be relentless in doing that.

There’s a reason why Donald Trump has put up a portrait to Andrew Jackson; bloody, bloody Jackson. And that’s because he believes in the ideology of white supremacy. There was a report that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in his bedroom, that he read it, that he studied it. And you see that and how he loves his rallies and how he works his rallies.

So I think, obviously, if he manages to steal this election, as he’s been trying desperately to do for a while now — he got impeached trying to essentially steal the election [SG: mmhmm] and what you’re gonna see is the camps, the camp system they built up on the border filling up. I think you’re going to see a ratcheting up of harassment, including legal harassment, financial harassment against journalists and activist whistleblowers. We’ve seen some of that in the last four years, but I think it’s going to be a lot more aggressive.

I do believe we will have show trials. If anyone thinks that that it is insane, to say we’re going to have show trials in United States, look at the movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7; look at the documentary on the Chicago 7. That was a show trial by Richard Nixon of anti-Vietnam War activists. So we’ve had show trials in America. A lot of cases against Black people, especially cases in the Jim Crow South were the equivalent of show trials, and they’re already considered guilty. They were just displays of white power, essentially.

A lot of white people in America are clutching their pearls and thinking how could this be happening? How is this happening? Understand that this has always been happening. I think the silver lining of where we are today is the fact that a lot of people are waking up to the fact that this is our country and that we were born into fascism here in United States and that people of privilege can no longer keep their eyes closed to it or be oblivious to it because it’s impacting us now.

When you have the coronavirus killing nearly a quarter of a million people in America, that’s a lot of white people that have been impacted. And as they’re paying attention to this virus, they’re seeing that it’s killing — you know, in all the news reports we’re all breathlessly following, we’re seeing all the racial inequality and income inequality that’s being exposed with the horrendous death tolls of Black and brown people in America from coronavirus.

That and what happened to George Floyd is what fueled a lot of those Black Lives Matter protests that we saw in the spring. You finally have white people understanding full well what white supremacy is because they too now are threatened by it with Donald Trump in power and all his abuses of power, and all the corruption and all the environmental protections he’s rolling back, and how he’s destroying our country deliberately from within. I think we are at a tipping point moment where you do have larger and larger numbers of white people waking up to white supremacy, how it works and why it must be dismantled if you want to protect everybody.

Sam Goldman 36:00

That’s a really important point about what you’re getting at in terms of it, the ingredients that exist, both in terms of the white supremacy at the core of it, but also on the flip side the ingredients that people have at their disposal to see the direction that this could go, because the evidence is is so ample — should people confront it. Given how this country was formed, and since its inception and onward, there has been the basis for fascism to take hold here. With Trump, I think that we see what is a slow genocide in many ways, very quickly becoming a fast genocide. [AC: Yes]

One of the challenges that I’ve faced — and I know others have to — in getting people to come to terms with the growth of fascist movements in this country and fascists now currently in power, is this American exceptionalism, the idea that fascism is a foreign thing to the US, that Nazi Germany was something that was a horrific aberration unique only to Germany in the 20th century, and something like that could never take hold in our country. Yesterday or the day before, Jeff Sharlet tweeted out a really powerful thread of analysis of how the Blue Lives Matter flag has replaced the American flag as the official flag at Trump rallies, really visually illustrating the fascist remaking of their movement. What do you say to people who have this notion that what we saw in Nazi Germany could only happen in Germany at that time in history, and could never happen here?

Andrea Chalupa 41:20

Well, anybody that thinks that needs to be reminded that it could have very well happened in the United States in the 1930s. You had all American hero, Charles Lindbergh, the Brett Farve of his day — because Brett Farve just endorsed Trump. So you had Charles Lindbergh, right, the great aviator hero who wrote in Reader’s Digest — mainstream, all American, Reader’s Digest — a 1939 essay saying that in order to keep America great, we must keep America white. You, of course, have Nazi rallies in the United States during the rise of Hitler. You had Joe Kennedy, the United States ambassador to the UK in London, sending reports back to FDR saying that the United Kingdom was going to fall to fascism, it was just a matter of time; that the UK was going to align with Hitler and that we just had to get used to it. That’s the way the wind was blowing. The world was headed to fascism and that’s fine, that’s absolutely perfectly acceptable.

Joe Kennedy, JFK’s dad, was staunchly on the side of Hitler and the fascists. This created a lot of tension between him, FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt at the time. So I want to emphasize that again, Joe Kennedy, the father of JFK and RFK, was on the side of Hitler, and was telling his President, FDR, to prepare for fascism, to prepare for fascism being the prevailing wind during that time, and not doing it in an alarmist way, saying: “Well, Hitler won, we’ve gotta get used to this new Hitler world order.” He was doing it in a very pragmatic way. You have to wonder — we don’t have to wonder, it’s well documented but — you have to understand that this whole welcome mat that a lot of elites in the West rolled out for Hitler, it was here in the US, too. It wasn’t just Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler, it was a lot of Western elites who thought Hitler said what most people were afraid to say. That’s not unique to America. That’s not unique to Great Britain. That’s not unique to Germany. That can exist and take root anywhere around the world.

Sam Goldman 43:27

I learned a lot from that. I didn’t know all of those things about Kennedy. [AC: Yeah] In my work, doing grassroots organizing and outreach to many people troubled by Trump, one phenomenon I’ve encountered again and again and again is people who really thought that the institutions were going to save us, particularly through the Mueller investigation and then the very narrowly focused impeachment hearings.

Within Refuse Fascism, we’ve always struggled to place the primary emphasis on the fascist character of this regime and the fact that the normal channels are not adequate to stop them, that we need a mass movement in the streets focused on what’s fully at stake for immigrants or women, for Black people, for the environment — for all the people in the crosshairs of a fully consolidated fascist regime in the United States. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that sort of faith in the institutions and whether you’ve evolved your own understanding of the various normalization and enabling that has happened by these institutions, and what you would say to someone who has told us over the past four years that we don’t need a mass movement to oust Trump now at this late hour.

Andrea Chalupa 44:45

It was what I said before: Everything comes down to human nature. We’re up against people. Institutions are made of people. The institutions aren’t like a dam that was built and the waves of fascism are crossing against the steel of the dam. There is no steel in our institutions; they’re human beings. And they’re human beings that can be bought; they’re human beings that can be intimidated; they’re human beings that can be fired for doing their jobs. That’s essentially what we’ve seen.

We’ve seen a rapid purge. We’ve definitely seen an out-in-the-open purge of our intelligence community. All the times Trump was tweeting about Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and Bruce Orr, and Bruce Orr’s wife and others, that was open obstruction of justice. He was harassing the investigators. He was putting their lives in danger. He was purging our government throughout. He just passed an executive order demanding loyalty from civil servants, the bureaucrats that make up our institutions. This is playbook fascism, where he’s making sure that he cannot be checked, his powers cannot be checked, and that he is the state. Donald Trump is the state now. That’s where we are.

So we were certainly not going to survive four more years of this, or else it’s going to just set us back for a very long time and I don’t know how we would claw our way out without mass mobilization. Mass mobilization — it should always be there in the best of times, and in the worst of times mass mobilization is essential. What it’s so good at doing is hitting the dictator where it hurts. As I said earlier: A dictator, fascism, is ego unleashed. What these guys crave is legitimacy. That’s why they often do their crimes within the rule of law.

They want to be legitimate. That’s why they held the Republican National Convention on the White House lawn. They wanted that photo op, the propaganda of the White House in the background to show their power and show their legitimacy. We are the White House, we are the United States, you’re not going to get rid of us, we’re here to stay. So when people show up in the streets, thousands of people, even a handful of people in a red area, in a Republican district that challenges the legitimacy that these dictators crave — like Putin is humiliated when tens of thousands of Russians marched against him, especially all these young kids, this new generation of Russians. Putin is humiliated when some rich Russian rapper tries to put out a YouTube video praising Putin and it becomes the most hated and the most disliked YouTube video on all of Russian YouTube. That’s the humiliation that really gets to them because it challenges their legitimacy.

You have this currently going on in Belarus, where the more Lukashenko’s riot cops, brutalize the protesters — including women, including elderly women who are in the frontlines of the Belarus mass mobilization — the more people come out and the more people risk their lives, risk their freedom to stand up against this. There’s a great power there because it’s showing the world that this dictator is illegitimate. So that’s really essential. Mass mobilization in good times and in bad times is essential to freedom, to protecting the most vulnerable, to showing the world that none of this is okay. Within time, those movements grow electoral power, and they grow progress. Because what you have through mass mobilization is that people find each other. People are strengthened; there’s solidarity. All of that courage, all of that faith spreads and it’s very powerful, which is why dictators are terrified and do everything they can to try to stop it.

Sam Goldman 48:32

Thank you for that clarity. I think that it’s really important and it’s important to look as you did to other parts of the world and examples that we have on that power, on our power.

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