We Must Name It, In Order to Deal with It

We Must Name It, In Order to Deal with It; Dale Anderson

Refuse Fascism Episode 165

Sun, Jul 30, 2023 2:57PM • 39:03

Dale Anderson 00:00

The GOP in general is moving towards that conclusion that rather than giving up and sharing power, they’ll give up on democracy. States that have a control over the entire state house are demonstrating where they will take the country if they get into power. When fascism arrives, democracy ends. It absolutely can happen here. If civil rights go away, freedoms disappear, we will not have a democracy if Trump and his ilk regain federal power. Right now I think the most important thing is to talk to your neighbors and your friends about it — share some of this information and be willing to stand up in a crowd and say it.

Sam Goldman 00:54

Welcome to Episode 165 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’re sharing an interview with Dale Anderson, advisor to Choose Democracy Now.

Thanks to Steve, one of our listeners, for the recommendation. It’s good to be back with an episode. I want to start by thanking all our new patrons. A production level shout out to Cindy L. and Alessandro M. Coco, Paul and I had a great time meeting some of y’all last Sunday for our Zoom q&a. We got together with patrons and monthly sustainers at the show. We’ll be getting a taste of that, sharing an important insight from one of our patrons in today’s episode. Wanna join us next time? Become a patron. Visit Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. After listening to today’s episode, please help us reach more people who want to refuse that fascism. Write a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, sharing why you tune in and recommend the show. Drop five stars wherever you listen to your pods.

Before we get to the interview, I want to acknowledge the moment we are in, where federal indictments for Trump’s role in January 6th appear imminent. Trump’s attorneys met Thursday with the Department of Justice investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat. We learned earlier this month that the fascist leader, former US president and, yes, leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, Trump, has received a target letter from the U.S. Department of Justice in connection with the criminal investigation into his efforts to retain power after he lost the 2020 election. This is a strong indication that he will be indicted for his efforts to subvert and overturn Biden’s victory.

As Donald Trump prepares to be indicted — for now the third time — he’s promoting barely veiled rhetoric related, yes, once again, to political violence. Donald Trump reposted a video on his truth social platform in which he has heard saying, “If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.” His threatening words play over a black and white image of his face and his 2024 campaign logo. And when asked [chuckles] — I’ve gotta laugh because it’s just so disturbing — about the prospect of incarceration as a result of his many alleged felonies, Mr. — I will be your retribution — Trump replied: “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters much more passionate than they had in 2020, and much more passion than they had in 2016. I think it would be very dangerous.”

As folks listening know, Trump currently faces numerous investigations at both the state and federal levels. He has been indicted in two previous cases at the federal level for his handling of classified documents and at the state level in Manhattan, in connection with the alleged payment of hush money to safeguard his path to presidency in 2016. This week, federal prosecutors announced additional charges in the documents case against Trump. They have expanded the scope of crimes Trump is accused of committing, filing three new federal charges against Trump in his alleged keeping and hiding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

To me this was all confusing. Perry Stein for Washington Post explained it in a way that was helpful for me. She wrote, “essentially replacing the initial indictment in the case with a new one that reveals more evidence and brings the total charges against the former president to 40.” She went on to break down that “the superseding indictment accuses Trump of working with his employees to try to delete security camera footage from being reviewed by investigators, while adding a new count of willfully retaining National Defense Information.”

We’ve gotta to be clear, the documents case, which is the most serious charge thus far, is set for trial for May 2024, and is very likely to be pushed back even further. Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis is reportedly concluding a criminal inquiry into Trump’s effort to reverse the 2020 election results in that state. As we’ve said before, we must not pin all our hopes and a mechanism that cannot and will not address the reasons we so badly want to see Trump locked up — you know, that fascism thing. Now is a time for vigilance, not complacency. We must not be lulled into submission.

Every crisis Trump and his fascist party gets through strengthens the US fascist movement, leaving a core a battle tested, and even more dangerous, genocidal, and revanchist lunatics in power to set the terms for all of society. Whether or not Trump is able to remain the GOP presidential candidate, these indictments cannot and will not stop this fascist movement — that is up to us.

At the same time, a recent New York Times report shows that the Trump campaign is “planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government” working up detailed plans to “reshape the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands” should trump receive the White House. He continues to hold a wide lead outstripping nearest Republican rival DeSantis by 30 points in the latest poll. So I highly recommend that folks read frequent guest of our pod, Brynn Tannehil’s essay that’s up right now on New Republic titled: People aren’t facing up to the horrors a new Trump term would bring. It gets deeply into the real stakes and it’s linked in the show notes.

Sasha Abramsky for Truthout puts the stakes starkly this way: “When Trump says he wants to concentrate power in the hands of the President, you better believe it.” In Abramsky’s op ed, linked in the show notes, titled: Trump’s attacks on the legal system are a preview of how he plans to govern. He writes: “In seeking to stoke right wing ire, the legal system and the grand jury system in particular, Trump, who is now fighting not just for his MAGA priorities, but for his personal freedom, is waging a ferocious rearguard action against the rule of law itself.”

Historian, Refuse Fascism editorial board member, frequent guest of the pod, and good friend Paul Street explored Trump’s blueprint in depth in a recent piece on Counterpunch that is also linked in the show notes. In his latest essay, he gets into the center cannot hold and analyzes Yeats poem that we talked about a lot on the show and on the website, RefuseFascism.org, or more often reference as an analogy. So anyway, go read the piece, but I do want to get back to why I originally brought up Paul’s piece because it gets into, really what the Trump agenda going forward is now: “Trump has a vast army of policy strategists with a comprehensive blueprint for the consolidated fascisization of the federal government. Liberals and progressives I know are plagued by the persistent belief, even now, that Donald – take down the metal detectors – Trump isn’t really all that serious about politics and policy, that he’s just a comical buffoon who is only running to slake his ego and stay out of jail. This is dangerously naive. It is clear from an abundance of recent reporting and from Trump’s own website. Look at his dystopian ‘Agenda 47’ and speeches that the Trump tide, this time, includes a concerted, heavily funded and sophisticated and detailed policy agenda committed to the full authoritarian collapse of what’s left of democracy in the United States. The plan involves the drastic expansion of the executive branch authority under abject fealty to the demented fascist maniac that Noam Chomsky properly identified in January 2020 as ‘the most dangerous criminal in human history.’”

Abramsky speaks to people’s refusal to confront the threat years ago, and now looking forward, are we going to confront it or not? Stating: “Seven years ago, too many critics dismissed Trump’s impulses as hyperbole — as the calculated bluster of a consummate showman. But once elected, Trump proved their optimism wrong.” Sasha is perhaps kinder than I am — I do not think it was optimism, but willful self delusion; a sinister American chauvinism, that blinded and ignorance if you will. And at this late hour, we cannot afford to ignore.

There can be no: We didn’t see this coming, as he and other popular fascist openly plot to concentrate power solely in the hands of the executive. Nothing here is prescribed or destined. But nobody should dismiss the threat. So dispense quickly of any remaining notion that investigations count him out of the running as he increases in popularity, wearing the indictments as a badge of honor while raking in funds. Our vigilance remains as important as ever, less we delude ourselves to assuming such indictment put Trump out of the race and into a jail cell.

These things could, of course, happen — unlikely but possible — and still they would not expunge the fascism. We should not be so foolish, so willfully blind of the fascist base, and, yes, Trump’s strength as a fascist, to think he couldn’t win. Another aspect of what Jeff Sharlet has called the slow civil war is fascist state governors’ open defiance of the federal government. So, I want to share some insightful remarks Clark, a sustainer of the pod, made in our Zoom q&a. Have a listen.

C. Clark Kissinger 11:46

I think people are certainly right to be bringing up what’s happening in the states in the state governments. Just as in the first Civil War in this country, the state governments are becoming the locus of alternative power bases for the fascist movement in this country. I mean, it’s gone big time in Texas, and what you see is an increasing tendency of these fascists controlled state governments to openly openly defy the federal government. We saw it down in Texas with the governor putting those floats in the river, building his own wall; he was told he couldn’t do it, he basically said: ‘Fuck you, I’m doing it anyhow.’

Well, I don’t know whether people follow what’s happened in the last few weeks in Alabama, where [SG: I’m glad you brought that up.] both the state and federal courts had overturned a gerrymandering of the electoral districts that would restrict black people to a single representative out of seven and the state. It went to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court sent it back to Alabama, said you can’t do it. The Alabama legislature met and they just did it all over again.

Now, the last time something like that happened was in 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus stood in the doorway, and he brought out the National Guard to try and keep the Little Rock High School from being integrated. And Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican president of the United States, sent the 101st airborne division to Little Rock Arkansas, nationalized the national guard down there, and integrated the high school. Does anybody think for a minute that Biden and the Democrats nationally will send the 101st airborne division to Alabama or Texas? Or to enforce any federal court decision? If you think that you’re dreaming. It’s another one of the reasons why trying to rely on electoral solutions here is simply not the answer. The Democrats cannot be counted on at all to stand up to anything. In fact, the more violent it gets, the more their tendency will be to fall away. They’re gonna wilt like a flower in the hot sun when they really get tested on this.

I live now in a small town in the South. Now it’s it’s a blue dot, and a big red area around it. I stick my nose in a lot of places and look at what’s going on. You walk into a local gun store down here and what you see is wooden pallets on the floor, not with boxes, but cases of NATO 5.56 ammunition — you know, the ammunition that is used in the assault rifles and so on — and people are actually actively preparing for civil war. People keep going: Why, why is there this big problem with AR -15s? Well, there’s a big problem with AR-15s because there’s a social base for fascism in the United States is preparing for civil war — that’s why.

People act ually need to understand the seriousness of the situation that we’re confronting now — it’s very bad. We do have to find the ways that there can be manifestations of opposition to this. So that people understand that this will not go down without a fight. This is not going to be allowed to happen. Of course, we know from history that the first thing these fascist movements do — people start thinking: Well, they’re not coming after me, they’re not bothering me. Well, no, the first thing they do is they tear out the bourgeois democratic structures and after they’ve done that, after they destroyed the liberal state, then they turn and go directly on the people.

Sam Goldman 15:04

We’ll be talking more about this next week, especially about what Texas Governor Greg Abbott is inflicting on our immigrant siblings on the Texas border right now, and the unprecedented clash between state and federal governments. All of this and more raises a number of questions that deserves serious attention as we struggle against the terrifying specter of fascist consolidation in the world’s most powerful and dangerous government.

Making these conversations on the show conversations that need to spread and we want to hear your thoughts. Spread episodes that have been most meaningful to you with your friends and family to get this going. Create TikToks on themes/questions the show raises, comment with your reactions to the show on YouTube and social media. Use the episode as a resource in classes you teach or attend. Share with academics or students you know. Write to us with your thoughts. Reach out to us on the socials at Refuse Fascism. Email us at [email protected]. And yeah, while I’m at it, I’m gonna say it again: Rate and review the show. Seriously, it helps get more people into this fight. It’s critical right now to spread the understanding of this fascist movement to the millions who righteously want to see Trump behind bars and to actively oppose this fascism in every sphere of life.

Now, here’s my interview with Dale Anderson. It was recorded July 18.

Sam Goldman 16:32

Today I’m talking to Dale Anderson. He’s a Sarasota resident and an active volunteer at local nonprofit organizations. His career included practicing internal and emergency medicine, managing group practices, and working as a healthcare executive and consultant with large hospital systems. Over the past several years, he has been actively researching and presenting on topics related to fascism, authoritarianism, and the future of our democracy. He is a leader in advising Choose Democracy Now. Welcome, Dale, thanks so much for joining us.

Dale Anderson 17:08

Thank you for having me on your program.

Sam Goldman 17:10

You were recommended by one of our patrons who reached out and said: Did you ever think of having Dale Anderson on your show. Then I watched one of your presentations on fascism that you gave to an indivisible group and I said: Yeah, we do need to get Dale Anderson on the show. Dale let’s start with what is going on here. As someone who’s been sounding the alarm about the fascist threat since Trump came to power, how do you see things having developed since then? They’re out of the White House. They’re trying to recease power. How do you see the fascist danger right now?

Dale Anderson 17:47

I first got interested in this when I read an article by Steve Levitsky in Foreign Affairs — I think was May or June 2017 — entitled, Is America Still Safe for Democracy? And at that time, at the end of the article, they made the comment that it’s very unusual that a democracy can survive in a nation where the dominant group loses its majority. They were talking about the demographic threat to the white majority in the country. And I thought: Is that possible, that our democracy is really under threat? And if it were under threat, is Trump the first kind of foray towards undermining our democracy and making the changes.

I think ever since then, every indicator is that the MAGA GOP, or the GOP in general, is moving towards that conclusion that rather than giving up and sharing power, they’ll give up on democracy. I focused on fascism, because it was so verboten to speak. It was something that when I first started presenting on how fascism works, I can’t name the number of people that would come up and say: Can you change the word to ‘authoritarianism’ or something else, but don’t use the word ‘fascism’, it’s too inflammatory and so forth.

But I did that, and I did those presentations to Indivisible groups and Democratic Party groups up and down that Gulf Coast for a year or so, thinking that if we could defeat Trump, that it would at least give the democracy a chance to survive. I’m not convinced at all that that’s the case. I think that the party has now doubled down, and I think, like David Pepper, who reports on laboratories of autocracy in the different states, there’s an article today in the Atlantic about is Tennessee still a democracy? I think that states that have a control over the entire state house are demonstrating where they will take the country if they get into power.

Sam Goldman 19:42

Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Dale Anderson 19:44

Living in Florida, and actually in Sarasota, which is an epicenter of Trumpism, and kind of Christian nationalism or Christian fascism, you feel it every day, there’s an assault on every institution in Sarasota County. So if I give you a little tour of Sarasota — remember it’s about an hour and a half south of Tampa equal amount to get down to Fort Myers — Sarasota is 55,000 population, the county 450,000.

If you begin with a tour of kind of the fascist centers, you would start at The Hollow, which is a ten acre site in the southern portion of Sarasota County that is owned by Victor Mellon Sr., and it has become the organizational site for a lot of the far right groups. It really became a focus of interest when retired General Michael Flynn purchased a house in southern Sarasota County in 2021 and really got connected with this ten acre site called the Hollow, where he’s been on 50 occasions. They hold kind of rallies there, he’s rubbed shoulders with Proud Boy members who were at the federal Capitol during the insurrection. It’s a place where they have put together their ideas about how to take over the Republican Party of Sarasota.

To learn more about that, there was that PBS Frontline report, I think it was entitled Michael Flynn’s Holy War, that you can see on YouTube, and it really gives a good perspective of that site; southern end of Sarasota County, there’s The Hollow. Then if you go four and a half miles north, from downtown Sarasota, you come on to the campus of New College. Remember that New College is the small liberal arts college that Governor DeSantis decided to take over with a hostile move of replacing their board and firing their President, getting rid of their diversity and equity program, and putting some of the most radical people on the board, including Christopher Rufo, who is, of course, the originator of this critical race theory scare. And members of the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College — that Christian right college.

Right here in the county, we have those two things happening, as well as the fact that during the school board and hospital elections last fall, Governor DeSantis came down and campaigned for a group of new members — far right members — to take control of both the school board and tried to take control of the hospital board, and ended up controlling the school board where they fired the existing superintendent and attempted to bring down kind of a Hillsdale College consultant to change the curriculum to be more consistent with that far right Christian approach. So we’re in the middle of a lot. All these institutions really under ideological attack by the Governor in a state where they have control of the entire apparatus of the state.

Sam Goldman 22:38

It’s incredibly frightening to think this is only one state, and even though there are definitely particularities to how far, how fast, and how furiously DeSantis has worked in this fascist laboratory to create a horror, what that would mean on a national scale, he’s also not alone. This is not, anymore, really, an outlier when you look at GOP state houses across the country. I don’t think that people really sat with the fact that if we don’t root this fascism out, if it is not thoroughly defeated, then this is going to continue to metastasize. [DA: Yeah]

One of the things before we started recording is, you made a point that I’ve been thinking about a lot, one of the things that we’ve talked about on this show, and as a movement that began with the sole purpose of driving Trump from power because he was a fascist — not because he was stupid, or we didn’t like him, or he was orange, but because he was a fascist — we’ve talked about the refusal that people have had to fully confront the danger as fascist, and to not obscure that reality. When we’re talking about fascism, we’re talking about a qualitative change in how society is ruled, that once consolidated, the end game is the total elimination of democratic and civil rights. [DA: Yes]

We were talking about people have the checklist in their mind of how many of these characteristics of fascism are being checked off? And if it’s three or four, six, even, is that really fascist? And all these ways that people rationalize away the threat level. You were bringing up a question, basically, of: When people look at the way that the GOP is so violently going after the transgender community, with a clear genocidal aim, does that shift the way that people are able to understand the threat level? I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that.

Dale Anderson 24:45

I think it was a Washington Post article, back in, maybe, October of 2016, which was how fascist is Trump? Where they interviewed a bunch of fascism experts, historians and others and came up with 12 or 13 indicators and then they tried to assign those to Trump, and he scored very high on that. I think Paul Street’s book, ‘It Happened Here’ is probably the best documentary of any that I’ve seen in terms of the fascist activities that occurred under Trump; it’s a great book.

But at the time when I first started getting into this, the three books that were most important to me were How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, and How Democracies Die. Those three are kind of like the fundamental books, I think, that people need to read to, to kind of begin to understand what this is. I think as we went through and tried to score all these attributes, and decide whether 6 out of 14 indicators is enough to say it’s fascist, I think all of that should go away at this time.

I review the articles, you know, that are showing up about fascism, and there was an article in the Salt Lake Tribune recently, Is DeSantis Fascist? in which they, again, tried to go through this list Umberto Eco, of aligning each of his activities with one of these. I’m saying, none of that is necessary anymore, because what we now have is a party that has decided to attack a vulnerable minority, the trans community of 1.5 million people, less than 1% of the population, similar to the percentage of Jews that were in Germany at the time of Hitler’s assault in 1933. The fact that they decided through a broad propaganda hate campaign to demonize this group, and now in the states where they have control, passing discriminatory laws that persecute them to the point where they’re looking at trying to escape these states because of they feel threatened.

And then to have the third thing, is to have this paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys showing up at their events and threatening them. How is that not as fascist as you could possibly be? In comparison to what Nazi Germany did to this Jewish population? I think we’ve made it too difficult by trying to count those 14 measures and saying this is fascist or this isn’t. This is a clear, fascist political campaign, if we don’t call it that, we’re not going to be able to address it.

I really appreciate here in Florida that Congressman Maxwell Frost, the Z-generation, youngest member of Congress, has been stating the word ‘fascism’ and calling DeSantis fascist. Few leaders are willing to do that yet, and part of my goal in terms of our Choose Democracy Now organization is to educate this and continue to advocate for people to use the word ‘fascism’ and feel confident about it, just on the basis of what’s happening to the attack on the transgender community.

Sam Goldman 27:46

I want to definitely talk about resistance and the work that you’re doing, but before that, just because the story came out yesterday, and based on what we were talking about how glaring the fascist threat is, I did want to give you the opportunity to talk about the New York Times piece that Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, and I’m forgetting the third writer of the piece [Charlie Savage] did on the blueprint that came ou;t the detailed plan to consolidate power if Trump retakes the White House, which basically was a clear plan to control all federal agencies, if he wins.

Dale Anderson 28:22

Yeah, the audacity of that suggests to me that they believe they have the power to do it, regardless of what the citizens of this nation think; that they have the money, and the power and the position and the propaganda network to be able to make that happen — as well as some Supreme Court justices that will go along with it. I mean, when you really think about it, this is a long term assault on the nation in preparation for this demographic shift.

The only thing I can say is they are very confident that they can do this, or they wouldn’t come out with that. And the other thing, though, is that remember, Trump has been quite willing to publicly speak about his transgressions. I think he thinks that normalizes it, so that people go: Oh, okay, well, that’s interesting, that’s an option — not understanding how far away from any kind of basic democratic principles that he is. Whether DeSantis is successful in his attempt to be the nominee or Trump, it really doesn’t matter.

Rick Scott recently, on Twitter, where he said that communists and socialists are not welcome in Florida. So that takes us back to the German National Socialists with the Nazis focusing on communists and socialists as being the enemy of the people. The fascism parallels between what’s happening here and what happened in in Germany are compelling, and that’s despite the fact that it’s, what, seventy years or more ago? I just think that shows a level of confidence on their part. It’s very scary.

Sam Goldman 29:49

Absolutely. I’m wondering if you could clarify for people what the stakes are when we’re talking about increasing presidential powers and limiting the independence of federal agencies. What does that mean?

Dale Anderson 30:02

When fascism arises, democracy ends. We need to make that absolutely clear, that we will not have a democracy if Trump and his ilk regain federal power. I don’t see how we’ll be able to recover from that. I mean, what was it, Venezuela had over ten years of a very successful democracy until Chavez came along as that populist, very popular person during a time of some economic crisis, and they’ve lost their democracy. It absolutely can happen here.

If civil rights go away, freedoms disappear, oftentimes, talent flees from the nation, you get a culture of surveillance, the police become threats to citizens that are interested in democracy, women’s rights are severely restricted. Political corruption is unrestrained. We’ve already seen how far Trump was able to take political corruption even without having full control of the federal government. And then minorities that are considered enemies are at great risk for either being eliminated socially from the society or harmed — imprisoned. The attacks on the Democratic organizations that support democracy in Florida are significant.

I think it was Larry Diamond, who has said that civic organizations are very important for supporting democracy; those things like clubs and other organizations, universities. They’re all under attack here in Florida. For example, the League of Women Voters, of all people. The recent omnibus bill passed by DeSantis creates a $50,000 fine for the organization if they hire someone to do voter registration that’s a past felon or not a citizen, and the League of Women Voters is about as benign a civic organization you could think of, and they’re attacking them, trying to reduce their ability to register voters. It’s a an assault on every aspect of democracy supporting structures.

Sam Goldman 31:57

Tell us about the work that you’ve been doing in Florida to sound the alarm about the fascist threat, and to organize people to resist.

Dale Anderson 32:07

It’s been mostly in the Sarasota area that we’ve been able to do this. One of the big problems is the Democratic Party in Florida is just laser focused on finding candidates and raising money for candidates. So you don’t have any group that is promoting or exposing. Across the whole state, there isn’t any organized approach to getting the message out about the threat to democracy. There are pockets of it in different locations. So what we have here is we have an organization called the Florida Veterans for Common Sense.

They’re a very important group, actually, Steve Martin, having referred to me as a member of the Florida Veterans for Common Sense, they put out a regular newsletter, they’ve been using the word ‘fascism’, they’re warning the community, they’re organizing video events, webinars, and they’re kind of connected to Choose Democracy Now; their members are on our board. We’re putting out blogs, we’ve started putting ads into the Sarasota Herald Tribune, and what we found is that if you put an ad in the center of the ticket section, which is the entertainment portion of the thing, that every retiree here in Sarasota, Florida walks through that to find out what they want to do on the weekend, and they turn the page, and here’s a full page ad about fascism.

We decided we’re going to continue that until the next election. We’re going to put it out once or twice a month, and hopefully, we’re going to find some of the other communities around Florida who will fund this. It’s expensive to buy that kind of ad, but if we could find a member or someone that helped on that in Naples and Jacksonville and other locations, we’d start getting some kind of consistent message out. But it’s tough because there’s no uniform organization that’s doing this now. There are church organizations like the Unitarian Universalists have their social justice group, there’s the ACLU, there’s a lot of organizations working on this, but there’s no consistent messaging around what is fascism, or why is this fascism.

Sam Goldman 34:02

What is the ad saying? What are you putting out?

Dale Anderson 34:06

The first ads we put out simply said: Call it what it is, fascism. We listed these elements of fascism, just some of the ones I spoke about, and right under it, we put the bill that had been passed by the legislature, that was the evidence of this. So it’d be HB 1705, was their “don’t say gay” bill. So it’s a list of that, and interestingly, just in the paper today, there was a letter from the editor, where he quoted those back and encouraging people to read those bills. And so it’s getting a little bit of recognition about what’s happening. But it needs to be a statewide effort, and we haven’t yet figured out the connections are going to be able to do that. The Democratic Party isn’t the platform to do that. We need a pro democracy coalition that hopefully we can figure out how to pull together.

Sam Goldman 34:52

For people in other areas, whether they’re in Florida or not, you weren’t somebody who was doing this here. You were inspired because you found a need and saw it, and said: Hey, we’ve gotta do something, and you did it. For people like that, what is your advice to them? What would you recommend that people do right now that are listening to you and saying: You know, I feel like Dale does, what should I do?

Dale Anderson 35:16

I think that a lot of people are not confident to speak about this because they haven’t studied it closely enough to understand the nuances to this. I think that if you read three books on a subject, you become knowledgeable, and I think that right now, I would recommend those three books for people to read: ‘On Tyranny’, ‘How Fascism Works’ by Jason Stanley, and ‘How Democracies Die’.

I think if they read those and then begin looking at some other options, I think Brynn Tannehill’s book, ‘American Fascism’ is a terrific summary if you wanted to read one book that pulls everything together. She’s a terrific writer, she’s a trans activist, and she’s got a great article — I think the title was Trans people are in great danger. It was published a year ago and I think that’s worth reading. But I think turning the television off and doing some reading on this subject and thinking about it so that you feel confident that you can speak about fascism. Right now, I think the most important thing is to talk to your neighbors and your friends about it, share some of this information, and be willing to stand up in a crowd and say it.

Sam Goldman 36:26

I want to thank you so much, Dale, for taking the time to share with us your experience, your perspective and your developing expertise on this topic that nobody wants to be an expert in. [DA: Good point.] For those who want to connect with you mor and the work that you’re doing in Florida, where should they go?

Dale Anderson 36:48

The name of the website is ChooseDemocracyNow — you have to put the word now in there — .org. But they can reach me at my personal email is: [email protected].

Dale Anderson 37:00

Thanks again, Dale.

Dale Anderson 37:01

Thank you.

Sam Goldman 37:02

I’ll end this episode with a gem from Paul Street — an insight that he wrote in his last Counterpunch essay. He wrote this: “Understanding history is essential, but the point remains to change it when one lives under the reign of oppression. And the duty to act is not about the crystal ball. Both pessimism and optimism are besides the point. The center cannot hold. Which way things fall is up to us.”

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics, guests, or lend a skill. Tweet me @SamBGoldman, drop me a line at [email protected]. Yes, we are on Threads, you can get in touch with us there. Yes we are on Mastodon @RefuseFascism, find us there. Leave us a voicemail — to do that, see the show notes.

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