2023: The Year In Review

2023: The Year In Review

Refuse Fascism Episode 183

Sat, Dec 30, 2023 11:35AM • 1:28:18

Sam Goldman 00:22

Welcome to Episode 183 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is 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.

As is our show’s tradition, in our last episode of 2023, we’re sharing clips of previous episodes to help us make sense of the year that was and prepare for the struggle ahead. As we close out 2023 and head into 2024, many of us are feeling a frightening sense of deja vu, but with higher stakes. 2024 is an election year, which means among other things, the Republican candidate Donald Trump will be given an increasingly large platform over and over and over again by the media. As he ramps up his campaign, he promises to double down on his Hitlerian rhetoric, and his fascist collaborators openly plan to institute a more fully fleshed out fascist program, “on day one” of his dictatorship.

I thought it would be useful to hear a recap of some of the history of Refuse Fascism as an organization beyond this podcast. We started the show during the pandemic, as the protests for George Floyd and to end systematic racial oppression were just breaking out in the spring of 2020. And we’ve kept it going as a vehicle to continue to engage with some of the diverse voices of conscious writing, speaking and acting on the most critical issues of the day, to build networks and to develop our collective understanding of the actual political stakes of the moment we’re in, not what the pundits will tell you about this or that horse race, but what the U.S. fascist movement is doing, as well as how people are resisting, and, more importantly, need to resist.

But even before the show, and even before the coup attempt, we were in the streets, demanding the ouster of the Trump pence regime through sustained, mass, nonviolent protests. Just a few weeks after the 2016 election, as many people struggle to comprehend how a profoundly repulsive sexual predator could ascend to the highest office, we hosted, called for, and organized an emergency meeting at Cooper Union in New York City that formally launched RefuseFascism.org to prevent the Trump pence regime from taking power.

This was followed by nightly pre inauguration protests to stop them before they started. We use the word ‘fascist’, when far too few people were willing or able to call it what it was, what it is. Working quickly to sound the alarm, united around a call to action, beginning with the phrase “No! In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America,” we united people from diverse perspectives who shared the common recognition, understanding of the peril to all of humanity and the planet that this regime posed.

We organize people on a grassroots level through local chapters across the country, organizing tours, involving people of influence and community leaders in town halls, holding nationwide protests — not just once, not just twice, but over and over, unleashing people’s fury, fear, creativity. We put the call before millions through national print ads [in the] New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere. We worked to mobilize people into the streets with this single demand to do nothing short of ousting the Trump/Pence regime. We united with protests focused on specific outrageous, such as the Muslim ban, immigrant family separation, the ramming of multiple fascist judges onto the Supreme Court, the bellicose threats to unleash “fire and fury” on various other countries, resisting the fascist base when they reared their ugly heads, such as in Charlottesville and so many other horrendous things they did.

But very importantly, we also struggled with people to see that what was happening could not be contained piecemeal. We needed to take inspiration from our siblings in places like South Korea. Puerto Rico and many other places around the world where people have driven wannabe dictators from office through mass, nonviolent protest that stays in the streets and doesn’t relent. Suffice it to say we didn’t succeed, and we’re still paying the price. And after hundreds of thousands died in the United States, not in small part due to the anti scientific hysteria whipped up by Trump and the fascist movement, and a prolonged coup attempt that culminated in the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6th, Trump finally left office.

This was a relief, but did not close the books on fascism in the United States, because this isn’t just about Trump. Galvanizing force though he is, it’s about deeper dynamics that have been churning in this country since its founding. Guests on our show such as Jeff Sharlet have eloquently captured the way that the echoes of the genocide, slavery and imperialist war have shaped mass consciousness that makes a large section of the US population susceptible to becoming activated as a fascist army — whether it’s a slow or not so slow Civil War.

So as we go into 2024, and prepare ourselves for what’s to come, it’s essential that we think about these deeper dynamics, and what that means for how we need to fight for a better world. For example, as we watch a genocide carried out, essentially by our government, more than 20,000 people, including thousands of children in Gaza are killed with bombs made in the .U.S and given freely to the US client state of Israel, people are righteously furious with the Biden administration. But some will scold you for that fury because it “helps Trump.” These reprimands are morally bankrupt, and frankly, ridiculous, but it goes deeper than this, because this same twisted logic has been a factor holding people back from doing what must be done to actually confront and defeat fascism.

If we’re going to stop Trump and/or fascism, it can’t and won’t happen because one day next November. The Democratic Party has and will continue to lead people into accommodating, accepting, and even collaborating with fascism to advance their actual imperative; the stable maintenance of empire. Look at the ruthlessness of Biden’s wholesale murder of children in Gaza. Yet, his government can barely make a case against one bloated billionaire who the majority of the country despises.

Defeating fascism can only come about through a thorough transformation of the tens of millions of decent people in this country — through bringing them off of the sidelines and changing the game. In fact, the widespread recognition of Biden as “Genocide Joe” is a moment that should make clear that we cannot allow the Democratic Party to maintain the fiction that the only option is to pick a side between MAGA fascism or imperialism as usual, as new global crises strain that status quo ever closer to its breaking point.

We saw what confining everything to the electoral arena did last time: a fascist stacked SCOTUS that continues to overturn basic rights, a violent coup attempt, followed by a retooled and even more revenge filled movement, hell bent on getting back into power. Instead of browbeating people into accepting the unacceptable now in fear of some greater danger, this podcast exists to uncover the only power that can actually stop fascism, the power of the people. The stakes remain extremely high.

I think our analysis of the Republi-fascist movement is important, but so is the history of sustained resistance. If our story is new to you, I hope you’ll spend some time scrolling through old content on RefuseFascism.org or scrolling back in time on our Instagram, or You Tube, or other social media and learn more about this. Let’s be real, Trump should be removed from the ballot everywhere, and we’ll have to see how this finally gets decided in Colorado, for instance, but how many times have people been convinced that “Aha, this this is the moment that the whole nightmare comes to an end”? And yet he keeps bouncing back. You see, that’s not a fluke.

Trump and his fascists thrive on playing the victim, and his opponents in the halls of power and in the media thrive on maintaining decent people’s passivity and submissiveness to their misleadership. It’s past time people reckoned with that. I am so glad you’re here with us on the journey as part of a growing community, together, building this podcast as a vital resource for anyone who wants to see a future free of this fascist threat. And while he truly do not — do not — in 2024 want to be facing the Trump nightmare again, having to refuse fascism still, if we have to be in this fight, I so look forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with you.

So let’s get to it. As we talked about on the show before, Republi-fascists are fighting for a permanent win — one that eliminates, for good, all of their political enemies and all of the people who they think destroyed “their country”. And so, in their time out of the White House and not behind bars, Trump, and his now much more sophisticated team, are planning, devising, sprucing up, if you will, a vengeful program and blatant dictatorship in which their unchallenged domination would be enforced by every means at their disposal.

But let us not forget the fascist horror show that was under the reign of Trump/Pence: the kids in cages, the mass detention and deportation, the Muslim ban, his total transformation of the judiciary, the coup attempt, his unleashing of bloodthirsty, armed to the teeth, fascist thugs, and so so much more. And yet, even as terrific as it was, what they are promising and are increasingly prepared to do would make that look like Fisher Price fascism. Schedule F, Agenda 47, Trump’s own fascist policy bucket list, and Project 2025, which is championed by, facilitated by the Heritage Foundation to be ready day one, with a full roster of MAGA loyalists to replace all those the regime will purge.

Project 2025 calls for the dismantling the federal civil service system, filling the federal government with those who are beholden only to the fascism, unbound by the rule of law, and, again, getting rid of anyone who is unwilling to carry out illegal orders. It includes massive deportation and detention camps, and enacting again — this time achieving — a Muslim ban, weaponizing the Justice Department, of course, pardoning those who participated in the coup attempt, and locking up any who try to resist. This time around, ardent loyalists only.

Not those who care about those pesky norms, Constitution or rule of law. And this would be supported by, protected and advanced by a legion of pit bull MAGA lawyers. Over the past year, we covered Agenda 47 and the comprehensive blueprint for fascist consolidation that is outlined in Project 2025. To start this year in review, let’s hear from Wendy Via with a wake up call on this danger.

Wendy Via 12:41

People are not grasping the gravity. People continue to fool themselves. Even the smartest, brightest, most experienced, sophisticated, whatever, even common sense people, they continue to tell themselves that x, y and z, can’t happen again. Trump can’t get elected again, there won’t be another insurrection at the Capitol, there won’t be another Charlottesville, there won’t be another George Floyd. You know, that all of these things are not going to happen, or they can’t happen, I should say. We saw the dangers of it, and nobody’s gonna let that happen again.

Well, that’s just false. I certainly hope it doesn’t happen. Nobody wants that. But the idea that it can’t happen, that’s how we got Trump to begin with, right. As you know, it just couldn’t happen. It didn’t make any sense. It was just a ridiculous thought that this man could be President of the United States. Two years ago, it would have been a ridiculous thought that he would get up in front of thousands of people and call his political enemies vermin, and say straight up that he’s going after them; that he’s going to take control of the DOJ and the FBI, and he’s going after them. This is what I would encourage people to take in. I don’t want people to be afraid, I want them to work. I want them to be informed. Do not put your head in the sand. The only reason that this is being written, this Project 2025, to this degree, is because there is a general feeling that it could very well come to pass.

Sam Goldman 14:12

Next you’ll hear from Coco Das, speaking at our most recent patron only q&a Zoom event about what has and hasn’t changed heading into 2024, followed by a clip from our most listened to episode of the year, my interview with Jeff Sharlet discussing his book, the Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War, and Paul Street at a patron only q&a Zoom event that we held this summer, speaking to this sharp contention, and the fascists who will accept nothing less than the whole ball of wax.

Coco Das 14:48

We really cannot predict how quickly things can change, and in terms of what might happen in the next few months or the next year, who would have thought that there would be all this turmoil over what’s going on in Israel and Palestine? Here’s the problem: Today I was listening to the podcast, the guest, she was really interesting. She was saying how these fascists keep their eye on the ball, and they don’t take their eye off that ball.

I think the problem with the Democrats and in thinking that there is an electoral solution to this is that the ball that the Democrats actually have their eye on is not the ball that most of the masses of people think that they have their eye on. It is not to stop fascism, it’s not to even speak up for the rights of people, it’s to protect the Empire. I think there’s a lot that’s sort of being ripped apart right now, that is exposing what the Democrats are about. We don’t make an assessment on whether people should vote or not, but I think that it’s very clear what the last three years has shown us is that you cannot just simply vote fascism out.

You’re not going to defeat it just through an electoral strategy, and especially not through the Democrats, because they are actually, as Paul pointed out from the mission statement, that the Democrats are constantly going to reach across the aisle. And here’s a perfect example ,and I think this is part of what needs to be brought out to people, everything that happened with the House Speaker fiasco. It seemed like a fiasco, right. People were saying: You know, look at this Republican Party, they can’t even agree on a house speaker. But what actually happened was that the war lunatic wing of the party made a gamble and it paid off. They got a house speaker that is a rabid, frightening, Christian fascist, but he’s also got a respectable veneer. And you have Chuck Schumer and Biden saying they can’t wait to work with him.

This is the dynamic, and it’s so deadly. Rachel Maddow, and are they going to change their tune just because we say they should? No. But there’s a combination of what we add to the discourse, what people do in the streets, and what the objective situations are, what unfolds. But we have to be ready, I think, to seize on the things that are happening that are ripping the mask off, and really be able to bring out the reality of what’s happening to people.

Jeff Sharlet 17:22

Thanks, Samantha. And it’s wonderful to get to talk with you again, even in dire times, like the name of the show, because it always cheers me up. It’s the imperative: “Refuse Fascism!” not like “Will we succumb?” but No, we won’t. I’m glad to be here. Thanks.

Sam Goldman 17:36

Let’s start big. Civil war. It’s on the lips of many of the people you spoke to, and something that many in the fascist space are preparing for. You mentioned in your book, the work of Barbara Walter, and the rise of the militia, the second coming of the Confederacy, this simmering but not starting Civil War. It’s infected military ranks, as we’ve talked about on the show. It’s not limited to one region. You traveled across the country. Right now, I feel that this would be a one sided Civil War, otherwise known as a genocide. I wanted to get a little bit more into how is the real life prospect of civil war related to the deranged visions of civil war, or even holy war in the minds of the people you spoke to.

Jeff Sharlet 18:27

This book, The Undertow, I began sort of assembling — some of it predates that and then — the larger part is actually post Trump. I suppose you might say it began on January 6, 2021, when I saw the insurrectionist, Ashley Babbitt, who was crawling through a broken window in the Capitol and she was killed by a Capitol police officer, and we see just his hands. It turns out to be a Black man, Lieutenant Michael Byrd. As soon as I saw it’s a Black man killed a white woman, well, that’s the oldest American story; that’s the lynching story.

That, as I write in the book, that’s the origins of Hollywood. A lot of people don’t realize the movie called The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, right there at the beginning of Hollywood, based on a novel called The Klansmen — and they mean it in a good way. I was sort of curious there, and then I saw a survey of historians — my wife’s an American historian, and I know that historians very deliberately don’t move fast, because they know that history actually usually moves slow — for the first time, they were talking about: Oh, some of the conditions for a civil war are here. If you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have said there’s all kinds of bad under the sun, but that’s not our kind of bad.

So I started driving across the country, kind of following the martyr myth of Ashley Babbitt, but also talking to people about civil war. Pretty quickly, I realized I didn’t have to explain it. I mean, really, all I had to do was, say: Civil war? And then there was two kinds of answers, which were: Yeah, or: ‘Fraid so. Everyone saw it was coming, or believed it was coming. But what is the shape of it? I think that’s really important. I went to militia churches and militias, and just people with guns. I’m not afraid of guns — I mean, I’m afraid of guns as we all should be, but I’m a gun owner. I mean, I live in Vermont, and they are not intrinsically terrifying to me, but there’s more guns than I’ve seen in the United States in 20 years reporting on the right. I think a lot of liberals dismiss the prospect of gun Civil War, although less and less. Marjorie Taylor Greene, two years ago was a marginal character, now she is the center of the party. I think people — and the left does this too, they love to make fun of militia guys, a lot of fat shaming of militia guys; Oh, they’re just big heavy guys.

First of all, I’ve been surrounded by Proud Boys in armor. Every one of them could beat the shit out of me. There’s also a lot of jacked-up steroidal guys out there. But the reality is, they’re not really the threat. So when people say: Well, wait until these see one F16. The threat is not a January 6th times a thousand. The threat is a spark. Whether the spark occurs at an armed standoff at a drag show, or a governor like Ron DeSantis forces it in an attempt to raise his profile. You don’t have to be a leftist to say this, there’s a group of former generals who are saying the military is at risk of splitting.

If you get a situation where a military commander isn’t sure whose president, whose orders do I take? That’s suddenly where you see the Civil War. I think some of the political scientists like Barbara Walter does some very important work, still is thinking in terms of low intensity conflict. One Air Force Base is enough to make it a major war. One rogue Commander. I think that’s where we’re simmering. But I want to say one thing is really important: Inevitability is the lie of of fascism. None of this is inevitable. I say it’s coming, but it’s not too late to turn away. This is not doom scrolling. This is preparing.

Paul Street 21:51

Can it continue? This kind of red state/blue state divide? That’s a really interesting question. You know, there is now a growing literature and I haven’t read it yet, on secession, the country breaking up. I saw a review somewhere recently that there, are like four or five books that are talking about the country breaking up. I have never in my lifetime seen the division between states quite this extreme. I’m old enough to remember the Jim Crow South, believe it or not, I remember my folks taking me down to New Orleans and Mississippi before Jim Crow was overthrown down there.

But that was just the South and now really, you’ve got a blue/red divide that reaches up into the state I’m talking to you from right now, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin and Michigan go back and forth. It’s really, really intense. I kind of doubt that it can go on for that long. Fascists want the full country. They think they can get it, and maybe without a mass movement of opposition, they can get it because of the very right tilted killing confines — to use a phrase from Avakian — of bourgeois democracy American style. They have the electoral college that is biased towards the rightmost rural revanchist states, they have widespread gerrymandering, we have now the lifetime appointed far right Supreme Court which stands well to the right of the population, we have voter suppression all over the country, and particularly in red states.

I think they want the whole thing. And if we don’t get serious about the fascist menace and the fascist threat, and we’re seeing that right now with the ban of mifepristone, and if anyone tells you that the second abortion drug will be the solution, you’ve gotta be kidding me. You don’t think the Fascists are gonna go after that one too? They went the whole ball of wax. So I do think it’s going to have to be confronted nationally, whether we like it or not. They want the whole ball of wax.

Sam Goldman 23:43

Mike Johnson, an overt theocrat, now sits second in line to the presidency, exemplifying the full embrace of Christian fascism by the GOP, and just how far the GOP wants to go. His ascendance is the result of the lunacy that was the House of Representatives this past year; the harebrained chaos-making clowns you are told to laugh at, achieving their wildest dreams. Now listen to some of the insights shared on this topic by our guests throughout the year, getting closer to the truth, while things were still developing than most pundits have today with hindsight. Here is Thomas Zimmer, Fred Wellman and Sarah Posner in that order.

Thomas Zimmer 24:28

I think there’s been, in general, a little too much focus on the chaos. Not saying there hasn’t been chaos. I mean, look, we all remember the 15 tries it took for them to finally elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House. I’m just saying it is, I guess, tempting to look at that and say: Oh, how dangerous could these people be? It’s just a bunch of chaos agents, a bunch of clowns. They’re not ever going to get their act together. It’s maybe annoying. It’s kind of shameful, maybe, in the eyes of the world, but it’s not dangerous, right? It is just a bunch of clowns and they basically just going to be infighting, and this is what we’re going to get from them.

I think what that underestimates is, first and foremost, there’s just no natural law, that democracy can’t be brought down by a bunch of clowns. That’s just not a thing. There’s no higher power saying: Oh, if they’re are a bunch of clowns, instead of a, say, a super cunning cabal of genius evil guys, whatever, then democracy is going to be fine. That’s not how it works. The chaos itself — we’re seeing it right now — that alone might be enough to sabotage the country, sabotage the world economy. That alone is bad already.

More importantly, I think it is true that the current Republican House caucus is very unlikely to ever gel into an effective governing machine, but that’s also not what they are trying to do. That’s not what they’re for. There are very few people in this caucus that have a proper legislative agenda or any sort of discernible interest in public policy-making. That’s not why they’re there. In fact, they’re super happy to just paralyze government, and then turn around and say: See, we told ya, Washington is bad and government doesn’t work. Even the chaos in itself is already dangerous.

Then you have to combine that — and I think that’s where the focus on the chaos is kind of misleading — you have to combine it with what else is going on in the country. You can’t just focus on Washington, DC. You cannot just focus on the House of Representatives. You have to also look at what’s going on in the states. You have to look at what’s going on the Supreme Court. I think it’s best to think of what’s going on as the broader reactionary counter mobilization happening against the country moving closer to becoming a proper democracy. That counter mobilization has different arms. It has a political arm, and the part of the political arm that’s in the House of Representatives is just there to obstruct, basically; that’s the task, that’s what they’re there for.

But on the state level, we are seeing something very different. We’re not seeing chaos. We’re seeing a very deliberate, very systematic, very successful counter offensive, reactionary offensive, against civil rights, against the post-1960s civil rights system. And again, if you just see the chaos, and if you think: Oh, look, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, these people are clowns, what is there to worry about? You’re missing the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is very concerning.

Sam Goldman 27:32

When you say that they’re not there to do. Did you say governance?

Thomas Zimmer 27:35

Yeah, like yeah, they have no actual proper legislative agenda. The Republican Party hasn’t had any interest in actually tackling the country’s most urgent problems via public policy. That’s not how they look at the world. They don’t look at: Here are the problems, the 10 most urgent problems that the country is facing, let’s find some proper public policy solutions and then put those into legislative form and pass them in the House and write bills. That’s not what they’re interested in doing.

To the extent that they are interested in a functioning House, in a functioning Congress, it’s just to do their completely nonsense investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop or impeaching Joe Biden. That’s what Marjorie Taylor Greene needs a functioning Congress for, but she doesn’t need to pass proper bills. I mean, they’ve just passed bills that have no chance of becoming law. They passed this IRS bill where they’re just stripping the IRS of all the funding that was supplied in the Inflation Reduction Act from the summer and then they’re claiming they’re stopping the army of 87,000 heavily armed IRS agents.

No one ever talked about any of this nonsense. That’s not proper legislation. That’s not public policymaking. That’s not trying to solve any problem. That’s just, you can call it a messaging bill or whatever. They’re just signaling to the base: Hey, look, we’re fighting back against a leftist takeover of our institutions. It’s not serious public policy. That’s not what they are interested in. That’s not what they’re there for. It’s quite remarkable, honestly, to have one of the two major parties so completely uninterested, and also so completely unable to engage in any serious public policy discussion. It’s remarkable, and it’s a complete disaster for the country, because it’s not like America doesn’t have any serious public policy issues to tackle. But they’re not interested in that.

Sam Goldman 29:28

I would push back slightly and say that I think that there is public policy that they’re interested in, it’s not aligned with the will of the people or the interests of the people or the majority — let alone what’s popular, there’s what’s right — but they are interested in policy. They’re interested in policy that promotes the most vicious anti-women legislation, the most anti-immigrant platform, the most anti-LGBTQ platform. Not you, but there are people who are like: They have no politics, they have nothing, they just want power. They do have aims. Which is not to say that they want to engage in public policy as the typical party. They have no interest in doing that. I think that’s the point that you’re making. I just wanted to parse out what people might popularly think versus what is.

Thomas Zimmer 30:22

Thank you for clarifying that, because I’m very specifically not saying they don’t have any very clearly defined ideological goals that they would like to impose. They have a very clear vision for the country that they would like to impose on the entire country. If they get in a position to do that, via law, via passing laws for Congress, they will absolutely do this. I’m just saying right now they don’t, because they don’t have the Senate and they don’t have the White House, so they’re not gonna pass those laws in Washington.

What they’re doing right now, that’s not going to lead to any national legislation. They’re not interested in solving gun violence or that sort of thing, but you’re absolutely right, they have a very clear vision and they are advancing that vision, and they’re rapidly, aggressively advancing that vision. But right now, they’re not doing it in Congress. In Congress, the most important function that this current Republican House Majority serves is to obstruct any attempt to come up with any sort of national legislation that would safeguard American democracy. That’s what they’re doing. But the actions of ideological offensive happens on the state level, and that’s where you actually see what you’re describing, where Republicans, generally, are not nihilists.

They’re not just trying to burn the system down. They have a very specific vision and they’re fully committed to it. That’s why I’m saying don’t focus too much on the House level, on that “chaos” there, right, because once you look at the state level, what you see is they’re banning abortion and they want to control women by whatever reactionary measure they can come up with — even including passing dress codes [SG: Mississippi, right?], where now women lawmakers have to cover their arms for something. That’s actually passed. They passed this.

It’s crazy. Criminalize LGBTQ people; install authoritarian, white nationalist education system; ban dissent; restrict voting rights; purge election commissions; criminalize protest. That’s happening wherever Republicans are in charge, and all Republican led states. These are not disparate actions, it’s one political project. Again, they have been escalating that, definitely since the summer of 2020, and again, even just this year, it’s not been that long, but there was a less than 48 hour period on like January 13 to January 14, literally, one week after Kevin McCarthy became House Speaker, and everyone was like: How dangerous could they possibly be? It’s just chaos agents.

Again, this is less than 48 hours. The Idaho Supreme Court dominated by reactionaries required doctors to force women into C sections or delivering the fetus so that they can tell the state that they did everything they could to save the fetus or whatever. Completely cruel and futile. Just no medical reason to that. Republicans in Wisconsin voted to allow conversion therapy. In Nebraska, they introduced a bill that would criminalize trans people for just being out there in public; existing and public. In Michigan, right wing activists completely defunded a town’s library because the library refused to ban all “gender queer literature.”

And then North Dakota introduced a bill that would ban all books from public libraries that include any depiction of trans or gay people. So this is just a random 48 hour period, January 13 to 14. It’s not even a comprehensive collection. It’s literally just what came across my radar. It doesn’t even include the complete escalation of what Ron DeSantis is doing with his of anti-war campaign in Florida. But that’s precisely the point. Once you look beyond the “chaos” in Washington, what you see is the work not of nihilists, but committed ideologues fully determined to impose their reactionary vision of what America should be on as many people as possible and to punish those who dare to deviate from that vision or dissent. That’s what’s happening.

That’s why I mentioned the Supreme Court earlier. Ideally, in a better world, the Supreme Court would step in and say: No, wait a minute, you can do this, stop this. They would stop these escalating attempts to undermine democracy and rollback civil rights. But in fact, the conservative reactionary majority on the court is doing the opposite. It’s acting as the spearhead of this reactionary counter-mobilization. You have Republican led states and communities — it’s not just the state level, it’s also the local level, Republican led states and communities — undermining democracy and entrenching white reactionary rule with or without the support of the majority of voters, and then the Supreme Court just says: Yes, keep going.

That’s where the Republicans in Congress come in and where the House majority comes in, because all they have to do in this situation is to block any attempt to counter this via national legislation, because now there’s not going to be any national legislation that would put a stop to all of this. Because they have the House, they can block most of that. That is the bigger picture I think people need to look at, instead of just focusing on Kevin McCarthy hugging Marjorie Taylor Greene, and look at these chaos agents.

I think two things. One is it is important to always emphasize the fact they do not have majority support for what they’re trying to do. They do not have majority support for that reactionary vision that they want to impose on the country. That is important. To make it very clear, if democracy falls in this country, it’s not going to be because over 50% of the electorate are voting in a fascist dictator; that’s not happening. But here’s the problem: The people who say: Oh, okay, so then we don’t have to worry, because we have the numbers.

Or: Every year, the electorate is moving away from the Republicans — which is true, by the way, to the extent that the electorate gets younger, more diverse, it is moving away from a party that is so entirely focused on the interests and sensibilities of conservative white people. Yes, the demographics are moving away from the Republican Party, but here’s the problem: If America were a functioning democratic system, in which, if you get the majority of votes, you also get to hold political power, then the problem would be a lot less concerning, but that’s not what America is.

The American political system has all these anti democratic distortions that consistently award a lot of power to a party that doesn’t get and doesn’t need 50% of the vote. So that’s the first problem. It’s just not the case that they need a majority of the electorate behind them because of the many anti democratic distortions in the system, they don’t. The second thing is: If you make the argument: They are pursuing a minoritarian project — which is true — and that can’t work, because at some point, don’t just have to accept that a growing majority is against them. Why do they have to accept that?

The question of whether or not a minority can hold on to power, that entirely depends on how far the minority is willing to go to stay in power. It’s true, if the minority says: Oh, look, if we’re losing elections, we have to go. But that’s already not the position. The Republican Party is already saying: Losing elections, not a thing. We’re not losing elections. If we lose elections, then that’s because, well, there was fraud, or too many of the wrong people have the right to vote and we have to rectify that by taking that away or making it harder for them to vote. So that’s already a problem.

And then, again, if you are willing to use a lot of oppressive measures, if you’re willing to just not let the people who are not voting for you vote, or make it harder for them to vote, or if push comes to shove, if you’re willing to even endorse political violence, embrace political violence, then a minority can stay in power. Look at South African apartheid. Yes, at some point, it crumbled in the late 80s, early 1990s, but that was after decades of a relatively small minority clinging to power by just oppression.

Basically, the people who are saying: Oh, the Republicans, they can’t do this, we have the numbers and the demographics are so bad for them, basically, what you’re saying then, is: I don’t think the Republican Party would go so far as to use oppressive measures to stay in power; anti democratic, oppressive measures. And then I would tell you: Where is the evidence that they wouldn’t do that? Because I’ve seen a lot of evidence that they’re absolutely willing to do that. So again, this whole they will not go that far, that’s the most dangerous idea out there. All the evidence we’ve had is that they’re absolutely going that far. That’s how we should think about this stuff and not rely on ideas of they will not go that far, because they absolutely will.

Fred Wellman 39:05

And so, what I say is, they do need to do their part. My frustration with the left when I complain about things often is: Well, the reasonable Republicans need to stop this. Like: There aren’t any, okay. Nazis didn’t stop Nazis. We did. It takes many forms. The sliding scale of what constitutes a Republican and a conservative has slid so far off to the right that it’s actually fallen off the far side, and it’s fallen off the side where we find ourselves with fascism.

What we see now is the rising tide of using government for ruthless behavior, using our government to shut down dissent, using our government to control language, to control what kids can be taught, to control the bodies of those who are subjected to ’em. And that’s all right out of the fascism playbook. I started a project about a year and a half ago called the Beer Hall Project, and it’s still exists, it’s a little bit short lived, but these things happen sometimes. Our focus at Beer Hall Project was the idea that The Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, 100 years ago, was not the end of Hitler. It was the rise of Hitler, and the failure point was how he was disciplined for it, how he was punished for it, and how it actually added to his aura and led him to power.

So for us, and I say it a lot is January 6th was in no way in any form the end of the Republican movement towards fascism. In many ways, it was simply a step in the process, in many ways, propelled it further forward. And it was funny, I remember after the election, I was still at the Lincoln Project, I was the senior advisor for veterans affairs during the campaign, and then took over as Executive Director. I got the idea on inauguration day. I remember talking to people all the time, who thought: Well, everything’s gonna be good now. Now that Trump’s gone, you know, the Republican Party’s gonna come to their senses and we can go back to norms, norms and traditions.

All Biden has to do is adhere the old norms and traditions. I was one of the voices early on saying: Y’all are fucking idiots, right. Are you high? I mean, going back to norms and traditions is gone — those days are gone. And what we are facing is a movement that’s gone beyond Donald Trump. I think everyone wants to hang it on Trump, but I say it often: Hitler did not exterminate 6 million Jews by himself. Hitler did not take over Europe and a global movement by himself. Mussolini didn’t either. There are willing participants who are even more passionate about the topic.

Sarah Posner 41:16

Yeah, there was a Washington Post article this morning that talked about his quieter tone. Okay, yes, he does have a quieter tone, but he believes the same things that all these other Republicans believe. He was willing to go to the mat for Trump on his impeachments. He was willing to go to the mat for Trump on the stolen election lies. He thinks there’s no separation of church and state. He thinks that God ordained government. He thinks that government should be run from a biblical worldview. He thinks that abortion should be criminalized. He thinks that same sex sex should be criminalized.

If you say it quietly, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous. Johnson has been able to talk about this issue in such a way that gets him quoted in the newspaper and seeming reasonable. For example, there was a really good AP story that came out yesterday or the day before about his background, litigating all of these cases and working in religious right circles, but it quoted him saying, we’re just trying to make it so that everybody can live in a diverse society being tolerant of one another — I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist.

The AP article used that quote to kind of say: Well, maybe he’s softened his sharp edges a little bit. But really, what that quote means is — what he’s saying is: We Christians, who are bigoted against LGBTQ people, need to be listened to more and tolerated more in a diverse society. I think a lot of people miss that, and I think that that is part of how well he is done on the PR front for them, because I think that’s something that you’re seeing crop up in a lot of the mainstream news coverage of his ascent to the speakership.

There’s another thing that I want to point out that’s really important along those lines of how he frames that collision course between LGBTQ rights and religious freedom, is that the religious right is treating Obergefell much like it did Roe. They’ve said this themselves, it’s not like I’m reading into anything, they’ve said this themselves. With Roe, which was decided in 1973, they decided: Well, eventually we’d like to see this whole thing overturned, but in the meantime, we’re going to do some other stuff to make it harder for people to get abortions.

So then you see trap laws and parental notification laws and various restrictions at the state level, leading up to Dobbs. This was a 50-year project. They never lost sight of what they aimed to do. And this is exactly what they’re doing with Obergefell too. They would really like to see Lawrence vs. Texas overturned. Lawrence vs. Texas was the Supreme Court case, striking down criminalization of sodomy. They’re not just going after marriage equality, they’re basically going after everything. Just like with Roe, they’re not looking at it as: Oh, are we going to accomplish this in the next two years?

No, they’re looking at it like, are we gonna accomplish this in the next 50 years. Johnson is very much in that milieu, and that’s why his framing and work on the religious freedom angle of this is so important, because it’s part of this effort to chip away the rights that LGBTQ people have slowly gotten from the Supreme Court with the eventual goal of eviscerating that.

Sam Goldman 44:24

Now that we’ve heard some of how the Republi-fascists have positioned themselves, ruthlessly grabbing up as much power as they have been able to, let’s talk about some of the actual nightmares they and, in some of these cases their Democratic Party collaborators, have brought to bear. Republifascists have spearheaded efforts to even more outlandishly, sinisterly militarize the border and the police, with key assistance from both the Biden team and the Democrat dominated Atlanta city government.

You’ll hear from activists exposing these horrors and leading the fight to stop them. Meanwhile, we spoke with folks directly defying DeSantis’ book bans, students organizing resistance at their Florida colleges, and people exposing the lies at the heart of the fascist indoctrination being imposed across fascist dominated states. When Moms for Liberty aka “Moms for Fascism” held their National Summit this summer, we connected people with those exposing and opposing them. Activists like Karen Svoboda from defense of democracy and journalists like David Gilbert.

The attacks on education have focused greatly this year on censorship and education, intimidation — education, gag orders, if you will — around gender identity and sexuality. This has been part of an all out assault on trans people that has dominated the fascist agenda for much of this year. 2022 had been the worst year yet for anti trans laws, but 2023 surpassed previous records for the most anti trans laws. Legislators across the country, with help from their friends at Christian fascist think tanks, providing white papers model legislation and moral panics, introduced more than 400 anti trans bills, dozens of which became law this year. Now, listen to Brynn Tannehill on the attacks on trans rights. David Gilbert on Moms for Liberty, Marvin Dunn on teaching the truth in Florida phase Faisal AlJuburi on Operation Lone Star and Reverend Kiana Jones on the struggle to stop Cop City in that order.

Brynn Tannehill 46:46

The New York Times has not been a friend to the trans community in the slightest, but they did an interview with one of the people responsible for the anti trans campaign with American Principles Project, and he was rather explicit: We want to make sure that there are no trans people in the United States. Our goal is to end access to transition-related care for everyone. In Britain, you have leading anti-trans campaigners saying that any number of trans people is a major problem to society.

You have Michael Knowles with the Daily Wire talking about how we must eradicate transgenderism from public life. He’ll claim that well, that doesn’t mean eradicating trans people. Well, you can’t talk about eradicating transgenderism any more that you could talk about eradicating Judaism from public life without recognizing exactly what it really is. These laws are just some of the first step, and you can see starting to creep into it, the bathroom bans — how do you function when you can’t use a public bathroom anywhere in the state?

How do you function if you can no longer get health care unless you go to a doctor’s office that doesn’t take Medicare or Medicaid or use any state funds and there’s no telehealth visits? In there’s no more working with a nurse practitioner or physician assistant, it has to be with a doctor in their office who doesn’t get any state or federal funding. That’s what a lot of these laws do. Then there’s other laws that make it really super hard for health care for trans people, including routine care like hormones — a lot of trans people, just like women who had a hysterectomy, or have hit menopause early, take hormones to maintain bone health and maintain health in general.

These laws being put in place make it impossible for trans people to get their hormones covered. Whereas women with the same hormone deficiencies or men who have the same hormone deficiencies can get them, trans people can’t. This is clearly discriminatory, and it’s gonna go to court, but if you’ve been paying attention to the Supreme Court, exactly how much faith you have in Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch?

At this point, the trans community, we have bans on health care for trans people in 16 or 17 states. It’s probably going to finish up with somewhere between 20 to 25 by the time the year is over. We’re gonna see bathroom bans. We’re gonna see it become very, very difficult to get health care for trans adults. We’re seeing laws being passed that de-recognize trans identities, which means you can no longer get a valid driver’s license or change your birth certificate, or use a bathroom technically, because the state will not recognize your gender identity.

It sets up all kinds of weird problems of what happens with a trans person using a bathroom in Montana, which Montana doesn’t recognize gender identity, but you’ve got a California driver’s license. What about Full Faith and Credit Clause? What about a passport from the federal government? This is leading to some really, really ugly legal questions. But the ugliest that I’ve hit a number of times is the law in Florida that lets state courts break custody agreements…

David Gilbert 49:51

They ironically I guess, call themselves these joyful warriors but there’s nothing joyful about what they do. They use harassment tactics, they berate school board members, they are undermining LGBTQ rights, they are banning books, they are limiting what kids learn about in schools across the country. But it’s all wrapped up in this shiny package of kind of suburban moms who are just out fighting for their kids rights. And who wouldn’t support that? It kind of reminds me a bit of, I cover Q-anon conspiracies as well a lot, and those conspiracies repackaged under the “save the children” mantra, in 2020 and 2021, and that really got a lot of people on board, because again, who doesn’t want to save the children? It’s a great thing to do.

What they do is they push this kind of far right, Christian nationalist agenda, but do it in such a way that it seems as if it’s just a couple of moms who are looking out for their kids’ education. That has been an extremely, extremely powerfully successful way of getting their policies and their messages adopted across the country.

Dr. Marvin Dunn 50:53

Well, let’s talk about Ocoee. In 1920, when women got the vote, this was a very contentious time in American politics, especially in the South. In the 1920 election, a Black man named July Perry in Ocoee, Florida went to vote, he was turned away from the polls, allegedly because he hadn’t paid his poll taxes. Mind you, July Perry was one of the richest men, white or Black in Ocoee. He had orange groves and did very well, so his taxes were paid. Plus he was an advocate for people paying their taxes, so the lie that he hadn’t paid his poll taxes, was used to turn him away from the polls.

He went to a judge, a Republican judge, a liberal judge, and got instructions to go back to the polls and take the names of the people who have turned them away — a very dangerous thing to have asked him to do. In any case, the mob formed when he got back, he had another black man were chased away. He goes to his house, he’s in with his family, maybe one or two other people, relatives, and the mob comes to his house. They surround the house and start shooting into it, and they kill two of their own people. According to the sheriff of Orange County, that’s what happened at Ocoee.

July Perry didn’t kill anybody, but yet the historical burden is on him. And now teachers are being required to tell students that this man killed two white men in Ocoee. It did not happen, they killed each other. So says the Sheriff of Orange County. So that’s why I took 30 teachers from Miami Dade County up to Ocoee a couple of weekends ago, so that we could stand on that ground and tell the story and get it right, and have them go back and teach the truth. We also went to the site of the Rosewood 1923 massacre.

I’m the only Black person today who owns land in Rosewood. I own five acres of land in Rosewood. Rosewood is now a rural community — all white people out there. I’ve been taking teachers to this property — and others, students and parents as well — so that they can experience the Rosewood event as close as you can in these days and times. The lie about Rosewood, that teachers are now required to teach, was that there was Black on White violence at Rosewood — another lie. Sylvester Kelly was the Black hero of Rosewood. He was an Army vet, World War One, knew how to use a rifle, he was independent, he taught piano, he didn’t depend on white people.

When this lie started a couple of miles away in Sumner that this white woman had been attacked by a Black man, a mob comes to Rosewood and they start killing and burning the town. They come to the Perry home and Sylvester Perry is there. It’s his mother’s house, actually. Two story home, one of the nicer homes in Rosewood, and he’s there with his family, his mom, kids and upstairs and the mom comes — his mother goes to the window, raises the window, tries to put a stick to hold the window up. And as she’s telling these people: My son had nothing to do with this. Go away, please leave us alone. And they shot her, killed her, she falls dead in front of her son. And when two of these white men come up onto the porch, he shot them. He shot them dead. And that’s Black on White racial violence? Or is that defending your home?

That’s the other lie that the standards require these teachers to teach. So we go to Rosewood, we spend most of the afternoon there. We’re able to walk on the part of the railroad that operated between Gainesville and Cedar Key, about a 40 mile distance. It runs through my property. So the rails are gone, but the railroad bed is still there, like a green tunnel through the woods. So that’s why I purchased that particular piece of property, because it speaks to that horrible three or four day period when people were out in those woods trying to escape the violence in Rosewood. So that’s why those two places are particularly important and while we will continue to take teachers and others there to teach the truth.

Faisal Al-Juburi 54:30

Operation Lone Star, it is a mixture of different sort of tactics that are being used to keep out sort of this mythic enemy to scapegoat the immigrant community, the asylum seeking community for a Fentanyl crisis that is statistically not tight. I think it’s a perfect storm right now with federal policy because federal policies that are being implemented, policies and practices, are limiting people’s access to that asylum system.

Federal policy is leading to imprisonment of asylum seekers en masse, in government custody, rushing them through an expedited removal process, that then limits their ability to access legal counsel before they have their asylum interview, because they’re trying to get their asylum interviews within 24 hours of entering into US government custody. Just practically speaking, how are you going to access legal counsel in that time and have the expert sort of guidance and advice to lead you through that process, so then it leads to immediate sort of deportation, so that then you’re limited, if you try and enter into the country, again, obviously, there are variations and all of these different specific circumstances.

But again, if you were now deported, then if you try and enter into the country, within the next five years, there’s criminal liability there. And for people who are in pursuit of safety and security for themselves and for their families, five minutes is too much, let alone five years. We hear so often, especially parents, right? Like I would do anything and would do anything for my child, right? And so yeah, so take that channel that energy, practice some empathy. And also understand that if you’ve made it that far, it’s not about that final barrier. So really, all we’re doing by putting up that barrier is being vindictive. All we’re doing by putting up that barrier is showing that we have complete disregard for human life. That’s the issue.

Keyanna Jones 56:43

So when we talk about people being charged with domestic terrorism and RICO, and for the bail fund, particularly initially being charged with money laundering, and I think it was misuse of funds for a charitable organization, the fact that they had people who were able to be reimbursed for gas, or lunch, as they were working for the bail fund, somehow has been translated into a criminal activity. Somehow, not only were they charged with money laundering and the misuse of funds for a charitable organization initially, they are now being charged with RICO because the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is being named as a conspirator.

As part of this racketeering case. And all of the work that the bail fund has been doing since 2021, is being viewed as a covert act in furtherance of the conspiracy, whatever the conspiracy is, what happens when they attacked the bail fund, their hope, is that the bail fund would be bankrupt, that people would be deterred from even donating to the bail fund for fear of Rico charges. And if they can keep people from donating to the bail fund, then the bail fund can’t bail people out of jail. So that means that people who are resisting this fascist inception of Cop City would be jailed, with no hope of getting out. And this is what they desire.

We heard after the bail fund was targeted, initially, we heard police transmission where officers were talking about the fact that they were specifically going after the bail fund because it was the money of the movement. And if they could stop the bail fund, they could stop the movement. They literally said We’ve tried everything, we’ve come at him from every angle. And it’s simply because people want to be upheld in wrongdoing. There are people who don’t want to be called out for doing the wrong thing. There are people who don’t want to be called out for embracing what we know to be fascism, because this is supposed to be a democratic place and that Atlanta, Atlanta the black Mecca, the cradle of the civil rights movements, “We’re not fascists. We just want you to do what we say without question or else,” sounds pretty fascist to me.

Sam Goldman 59:07

As we’re recording, the United States and Israel are creating a graveyard of children in Gaza, with hundreds murdered daily and over 50,000 maimed amidst the criminal destruction of health care services, and key infrastructure for over 2 million people. All in pursuit of ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip. We brought Susan Neiman back on the show to speak about the massive state sanctioned suppression of criticism of Israel and resistance to the war and the fascist mythmaking necessary for history shaping crimes.

Susan Neiman 59:44

You know, if we wait until they build concentration camps to use the word fascism, it’s already too late to avoid it. And I think that’s absolutely right. I’ve been quoting him for a while. It’s not just that Bennett called Palestinians Nazis. It’s that Netanyahu has been making references to Amalek, as of course his ministers are and that’s why I wrote that little piece for the New Statesman. I asked a bunch of people, what does it mean to be a leftist Jew today and I wrote that there are two very different strains in the Jewish tradition that go back to the Bible.

One is a Universalist tradition that says, We were strangers in Egypt, therefore, we have an obligation to take care of the stranger. Now that happens 36 times in the Bible, which is interesting. Three times in the Bible, there’s a mention of this tribe Amalek and the tribe Amalek. As we were wandering through the desert, I always say we, this is comes from childhood, you know, Seders, you feel bound to say we and not they, as we were wandering through the desert and weak, this tribe Amalek came and tried to kill all of us, including the women and children. Therefore, this tribe should be wiped out down to the last child. When the Israeli head of state says that, it’s pretty scary. So basically, I’m agreeing with Jason Stanley. There’s genocidal intent, not just behavior.

Sam Goldman 1:01:14

In 2023, the horrific results of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the right to abortion was borne out in living color, mainly the color red. Despite the rosy delusions dominating the reproductive rights movement, and despite Democrats running on abortion, 18 million women are now unable to get an abortion in the state they reside. Tens of thousands of women and others were forced to give birth this past year, urgently needed miscarriage care was cruelly withheld with lifelong consequences, and fascists advanced their agenda to decimate abortion access in state after state with their eye on a nationwide ban.

Meanwhile, an absurd and baseless court case, challenging the FDA approval of the leading method of abortion care worked its way from outrageous lower court decisions all the way to the Supreme Court’s docket to be heard in early 2024. We covered this topic and multiple episodes from various angles, all worthy of a thorough listen, including interviews with activists on the front lines in Iowa, a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Newhall, who was involved in mifepristone’s FDA approval process 20 years ago, a discussion of the post Dobbs human rights emergency with Christine Ryan, and more. But today, we’re sharing excerpts from interviews with Mark Joseph Stern and Koko Das, on the attacks on the abortion medication. mifepristone.

Mark Joseph Stern 1:02:51

I’ll just preface this by saying I think Dobbs was a terrible decision. I think it badly botched the history. I think it was malicious and extremely misogynistic in erasing women and their interests. I think it was a direct assault on precedent and the very foundational stability of law. And yet I think Dobbs was 100 times more defensible than this decision, which is not even to say that Dobbs was defensible. But just to kind of give you an idea of how this is in a different league of lawlessness, even though Dobbs was atrocious, this is almost in a different category.

So what did the decision hold? This was a case that was brought by a group of anti abortion doctors who are seeking to suspend the approval by the FDA of mifepristone in the year 2000. You remember 2000? We had just gone through y2k, computers were very large, Bill Clinton was President, the FDA approved this pill all the way back then there’s actually a six year statute of limitations on when you can challenge an agency action like that in courts. The plaintiffs here waited 23 years, not six years, but the judge literally just ignored that.

And so these doctors, they don’t prescribe mifepristone, which is again, the first drug, no medication abortion regime, they don’t want to prescribe it, and they don’t have patients who take it. Instead, what they have said is they think that at one point in the future, unclear when, could be weeks, months, years decades, a patient might walk into their practice and say I had mifepristone prescribed to me by someone else, who you don’t know. I had bad side effects from that mifepristone that was prescribed by somebody else. And now I’m coming to you for treatment. And the doctors argue that that hypothetical scenario in the future is enough to give them standing to ask for a nationwide suspension of mifepristone.

Obviously, insane to be clear, that’s not how it works. The federal courts have said many times that to have standing to sue, you have to have a personal injury that is actual or imminent. It can’t be hypothetical. It can’t be totally speculative. This is the definition of totally speculative but set that aside. They also argue, and I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds here because it’s just nutty, nutty stuff. But they have this conspiracy theory that basically the FDA only approved mifepristone on an accelerated basis in 2000, because Bill Clinton was applying pressure on the FDA, alongside population control advocates, who wanted to use abortion as a means of reducing global population and possibly imposing eugenics on the United States.

So they cut a bunch of corners and changed everybody’s minds. And we’re like, you know what, we’re just going to license this immediately without even taking a look. It doesn’t matter what we do, we’re just going to put it on the market. And because they cut so many corners, according to this complaint, the courts now have license to over rule their decisions 23 years ago. So where can we identify some problems? Well, the conspiracy theory here is not true.

The FDA studied mifepristone for well over four years, it actually took way too long to study mifepristone, and was afraid of political consequences, not afraid of provoking the ire of Bill Clinton’s White House by not approving it. This was something that everyone was scared of doing. The FDA only finally did it after it had many, many, many studies that proved that mifepristone was safe and effective, those studies were as good as you can really get for the FDA. They were very clear and very conclusive. And mifepristone was approved. And for the last 23 years, it has been used safely and effectively.

Yet, Judge Kazmirek comes in and says, I disagree. He looks at 150 scientific studies that show that mifepristone is safe, and effective, and he says they’re wrong. And instead, what does he do? Well, he goes to an anti abortion website, where people anonymously post stories about their abortion regrets. And so he looks at I believe, 54 blog posts that are purportedly from women who say they regret their abortions. It could be all the same person, the whole system was set up by an anti abortion group. And he says this is proof that mifepristone is dangerous and bad. And so I am going to overturn the FDA approval and suspend it from the markets.

That is something that no judge has ever tried to do in the history of this country. We have never seen a court claim to suspend the FDA approval of a drug. It’s not a power people thought that courts had. And frankly, I don’t think it is a power that courts have, there’s a complicated process under law that the FDA has to go through to withdraw a drug from market so that people don’t suddenly have medication yanked away out from under them. And Matthew Kazmirek is directing the FDA to essentially break the law by ignoring that process and yanking this drug all at once. It is a demented decision, it makes absolutely no sense. And it really rests not on facts, not on law, but on a brazen assertion of power to say, I get to decide who gets to have an abortion, and I don’t want people to do it, and I’m going to do everything in my power to stop them.

Sam Goldman 1:08:03

And if they do it, it should feel like punishment. If they do it, it should be less effective, more painful, and feel like punishment. Yes, I really found your breakdown, helpful, both in terms of what is different about this case, and also the ways in which it is so pernicious. When I was looking at it, I’m not a lawyer, you know, I’m just like an everyday person who is concerned. And I had to say it was Ctrl, copy the plaintiffs’ documents, the whole thing was there. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that, because I found that to be something really helpful in your piece up on Slate, about what the content of the ruling was, and the seeds that were planted within it for further harm.

The ruling entered into the federal court record a litany of the most dark ages shit, you know, the most vile women hating anti scientific garbage? Yeah, I just felt you spoke to multiple levels of horror or damage, one that popped out to me, and then I saw it spoken to and what you wrote about was enshrining fetal personhood. You talked a little bit about how it overstepped the law, how courts technically can intervene, correct me if I’m wrong, please. Six years post approval of a drug. And this has been 23 years and denying law denying science delegitimizing a whole federal agency, which I think is worth noting and also planning some more Comstock action, reviving that zombie that we can never put down or that we have never put down. Can you talk a little bit about what’s been entered into the record that you find most egregious, most concerning, you spoke a little bit about how it could have far reaching consequences, potentially with their aim of the national abortion ban.

Mark Joseph Stern 1:09:58

So there’s two different things here. to focus on first of all, there’s the fact that Judge Kazmirek says that one of the reasons that he needs to issue this decision immediately and have it apply nationwide is to protect fetuses from mifepristone. And for support for that proposition, he cites an amicus brief that was filed by two fringe scholars who argue that fetuses are persons under the Constitution with equal protection rights, and that abortion bans are actually required by the Constitution, and that if a state allows abortion, federal courts need to come in and strike down their abortion laws and force them to declare abortion as murder or killing in order to protect the equal protection rights of fetuses.

That is, again, fringe theory, highly, highly contested, very, very contested. And yet, Judge Kazmirek cites it as though it is the truth and the law. You know, he doesn’t say, oh, there are a few guys out here who think that fetuses are persons over the country. He just says it as though it’s the truth. And again, like it’s not hard to see what the implications of that are, it’s that he doesn’t just have the power to ban mifepristone. He has the power to issue a purported nationwide injunction and said, You know what, I’m just going to issue this sweeping decision because I need to protect these fetuses from mifepristone, but the same logic could apply to any kind of abortion anywhere and everywhere.

The same logic could apply to an abortion that takes place procedurally in the District of Columbia, to an emergency abortion that takes place at a hospital in California, it could apply anywhere, and this judge is so lawless and so out of control and out of his lane, that I think it could, that I think that’s going to be the next case before him if he gets away with this. And then turning to the other thing, like if that’s not enough, the Comstock Act, which is this federal law that’s been on the books since the 1870s. That was a Victorian era kind of prudish attempt to censor the mail.

It has this provision that the judge read for the first time in the courts. This has not been the reading, but he read it to ban the mailing of any abortion inducing drug. Now, the federal courts have spent a lot of time dealing with Comstock Act. And there’s a unanimous consensus that it does not in fact, Ban dat that what it bans is an intent to use the mail illegally to produce something illegal to produce a crime. So if say you sent a mifepristone to someone in Texas, who took it illegally, that in theory might violate the Comstock but simply mailing with a purse don’t do your patient when you’re in California or whatever. There’s no way that violates the Comstock act, but Kazmerik says it does.

He says, anytime you put a medication abortion in the mail, anytime you put it in a common carrier, anytime it’s being carried by anybody basically, who’s not you, that is a federal offense that can be punishable by years in prison. And so that’s just another effort to ban abortion nationwide, because like think about it for two seconds, these pills have to travel somehow, whether it’s by wagon, or by plane, or by USPS, or by FedEx, they’re going to have to be transported and what Kazmirek has done is given the broadest possible reading to this law, so that any kind of transportation of the pills are unlawful, and that would effectively ban medication abortion in all 50 states by making it impossible to access the pills.

Coco Das 1:13:16

Yes, it’s a good thing. Supreme Court didn’t uphold Kazmirek’s ruling, which would have taken mifepristone off the market. This is temporary, it’s going to be going back through the Fifth Circuit. And even the Fifth Circuit ruling that had come down upheld a lot of you know, very damaging rulings about this case, and would have limited a lot of the access to mifepristone. One thing is, is that upholding the status quo in states where abortion is legal, and there are many states, Texas being one of them, where abortion is not legal, I’m still trying to sort out what does this mean for women in Texas?

And what does it mean for women nationwide? Certainly being able to get mifepristone here, so that women don’t have to travel out of state. That’s an important service. But the fact remains that we are living in a moment where Christian fascists are really going for the whole thing. They are not going to be satisfied with this being a state by state question. That’s bullshit. They want female enslavement across the land where women do not have access to abortion don’t have the right to make their own decisions about when and if they’re going to have children, and what that means for women’s lives, their place in society, their ability to participate fully to fulfill their dreams.

We know what’s happening on the ground in the states where abortion is legal, where women are being like forced to bleed out and in horrific pain because they can’t get miscarriage care. It’s just an all out punishment of women. As you’ve said in other podcasts episodes, maybe we can call it a speed bump on the road to Christian fascist consolidation. But that’s all it is that people need to wake up to the reality.

Sam Goldman 1:15:13

This past year, the unelected fascist dominated Trump stacked Supreme Court of the United States retains the status as America’s leading policymaking body. While we ran several episodes on the court that I hope you’ll dig into on the implications of particular cases, overall practices like the shadow docket and the transformation of the judiciary. We wanted to share insights from Dahlia Lithwick, on ruling through the courts when they don’t have the votes. And my interview with Madiba Dennie on the Supreme Court ruling last June, which eliminated race conscious education admissions. Those will be in that order. First, you’ll hear from Dahlia then Madiba.

Dahlia Lithwick 1:15:56

So there’s case after case after case. And we had that last year, by the way, that happened in several cases where the courts below took it upon themselves to force an issue. And the reason I think you’re asking about the Fifth Circuit, and the reason this pattern is really interesting, is that in some of the cases last year, where the Supreme Court blinked, where the Supreme Court wasn’t willing to go, as far as a court below was pushing, was then coded as a win for liberals or a draw.

The reason this framing is really important for listeners to understand is that if a lower court says something insane, and then the Supreme Court in a handful of cases says, okay, you know, we’re still going to strike down the Biden loan forgiveness plan, we’re still going to do away with the Clean Water Act, we’re still getting rid of affirmative action. But in this one case, we’re gonna say the courts went too far. That doesn’t mean it was a moderate term.

That means that the court accepted a whole bunch of crazy cases and then split the difference. If you don’t lose, in a crazy case the court should not have heard in the first instance, all I can say is not getting punched in the face is not a win, and to have it coded as a win, or to have it coded as well, Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett are real moderates, because they did the insane thing four times, but they didn’t do it twice, is how we fall into the trap we were talking about before, which is believing that the court is a really moderate, sane, gravitas laden institution, we need to understand that this effort to commandeer the Judiciary for the purpose of making sure that the very wealthy the very white, the very conservative, big donors and oligarchs, run the country through the courts, because they can’t win through democracy has been ongoing for decades, the fact that we were kind of asleep at the switch, and I want to be very transparent and say, you know, it’s been a huge source of what we’re doing editorially at Slate, which is Mea Culpa, because we have not covered it enough this way.

But the fact that we continue to say it’s too confusing, I don’t understand who’s Leonard Leo we you know, what’s what’s wrong with a justice, flying on an empty seat to an Alaska fishing retreat with a guy who had a case before the court? We do that at our peril, because I think this is the most obvious manifestation of how you commandeer democracy when you cannot win by voting. You cannot win in the legislature. The only way to win is to capture the courts. And how we got here is that that’s been happening in plain sight for many years. And those of us who cover the court didn’t really cover it. We didn’t think it was our beat. And the folks whose job it was to say, hello, hello, hello, this is happening, were treated like they were nutbag, even though they were right about everything.

Madiba Dennie 1:18:47

The conservative supermajority really emphasizes this myth of racial neutrality and colorblindness and the Constitution. This is connected to a previous John Roberts opinion where he halted the integration of schools in the 90s. And he had a famous line and this decision that was SIC, the latest stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race is completely watch. It’s silly, if you think about it for like more than approximately two seconds, but he presents it as this really reasoned and logical thing. He’s really sort of pulling a fast one on the audience because you would think that, you know, in the first instance, is talking about discrimination as in subordination.

But in the second instance of discrimination, he’s really just talking about making distinctions just because the schools in that case, it’s called, like parents involved versus like Seattle school system. I think it might be the name of the case. It was when a lot of local governments were busing students to like integrate schools because of the way housing segregation is set up. Even if you just tried to use folks who live near each other, it will still produce all segregated schools. And John Roberts said that was a no go we’re seeing something very similar in this case. where he says eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.

And once again, we’re not actually talking about discrimination and what I think would describe as real discrimination like oppression, subordination, like entrenching, like social, economic and like racial hierarchies. But that’s not what John Roberts is talking about at all. He’s just talking about noticing that some people are of different races, and as a result have different experiences that skews DNA acceptable. Eliminating racial discrimination is eliminating all of it, because recognizing ways even if you’re considering race in order to address racism, for him, those are the same thing. And that’s the case for the conservative legal movement widely. And also, like the other justices, Clarence Thomas has a concurring opinion in the case. And he has a line that was like two wrongs don’t make a right, the cure to racialism is not more racialism. And it’s just absurd if you really think about it, because the argument kind of boils down to them, good things, and bad things are the same, actually, which doesn’t make any sense.

Sam Goldman 1:21:03

Next was a popular favorite interview of our listeners. Here’s Marc Jacobs on how the mainstream media has, and is creasing the tracks that Fascism is continuing to advance on and the media that’s needed. Now, I feel that there are a lot of members of the news media who just have learned nothing, they just long for the days when it was just Republicans and Democrats and they could go there cocktail parties and sorted out all their differences in a bill and then they passed it. And then they all shook hands. And it was just more collegial or at least I the parents of it. And I think that the news media like that they liked it when it was just public.

The Democrats were just sharks versus jets. And it was just two different sports teams, they could cover it completely, like a sporting event. problem now is that its truth versus lies. Chris licked in that interview says, one of the things that really struck me in that profile was him saying that I think that because of Trump, you know, he changed the game. And some journalists started putting on the uniform put on the Jersey, so they were like, into the game rather than just covering the game. When the game is not Republicans and Democrats, it’s decency versus hate, and it’s lies versus truth. There’s a place for the news media to be in the game, they better be in the game, they’re in the truth business, their game is to tell the truth.

So if they’re not getting involved, they’re just like bystanders selling advertising and then letting newsmakers say whatever they want, then they’re surrendering what their real role is, for me personally, and I think other people have come to the same conclusion as me, this whole disaster of this rise of fascism in the United States that threatens our democracy. And that’s what it is. It’s a rise of fascism that threatens our democracy. And I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years. But I’m scared to death and minimizing it is stupid. We all should be scared to death. I don’t really believe in journalistic objectivity anymore. I used to, I don’t anymore. And when you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense.

Because as an editor, you know, I came into the office, I’d read the news. And I’d be thinking about this, or I’d noticed something on the way to work. And I talked to a reporter, and I’d say, you know, go cover that go write a story about that. I wasn’t telling him to write every story about everything. I was making decisions. The very act of me assigning a news story was making a value judgment, I was making a decision on what was important to our readers. And that’s not objective. That’s me making a decision. It’s not an objective move.

So to think that your objective all the time was just fooling yourself, they always kills me to see like longtime reporters, like somebody who has been on a beat for 20 years, writing things that act as if they just showed up yesterday, to where they write in such a faux objective way that they don’t want to be, you know, seem like they’re prejudiced against anyone or like they have any opinions. They just wondering, like, say what everyone said, Would you trust a reporter who’s been covering the same subject for 20 years and hasn’t reached certain conclusions about what’s going on on their beat? I wouldn’t. And the truth is, they have reached conclusions. They know who’s lying. They know who’s telling the truth. They know what the problems are on that subject. If they’re in transit, they know why, what the issues are in transit, and to pretend otherwise, is trying to fool the reader. That’s not a reader service. We’ll leave you with this from Janet Ward, on the importance of the refuse fascism community of which you are a part.

Janet Ward 1:24:28

To end perhaps with some thoughts from our very first essay by the historian Jeff Ely, who says that, obviously, over his long career, his role as a historian has morphed with responses to other kinds of major events such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of the internet and social media throughout his life. But what we do in the present, I’m here I’m echoing Jeff, must always inform the questions we ask about the past. And I think your efforts with refuse fascism, Samantha and way that you serve as a conduit to broaden discussion and response is part of how we’re all addressing this now with an increased sense of urgency.

Sam Goldman 1:25:10

Thanks for listening to refuse fascism. And thanks to all our patrons who helped make this show happen, we seriously could not do the show without you. Each week on this pod, we help people look at uncomfortable truths and act with creativity and daring. Right now, let’s be honest, not nearly enough people know about this podcast resource. Instead of people hearing you know what you need to do? You need to vote. Oh, that’s it. You’re done. You’re done. You’re gonna do it in November, and you’ll be done. It’s gonna go away. Or fascism couldn’t happen here. This is America. Or, yep, yep, Trump’s gonna get back into power. And there is nothing we can do. And it is going to be awful. And we just need to leave the country.

Instead of all of that. Millions should be hearing our truthful message and joining a growing movement of people refusing to accept a fascist America. Do you agree? You do. Well, then if it’s in your reach, I hope you’ll become a patron today to help make that possible. Whether you can give $2 or $20 a month, it all makes a difference in producing and promoting this independent weekly podcast. We have no sponsors. And we count on you. So I hope you’ll give today at patreon.com/refuse fascism or by visiting refuse fascism.org and hitting the donate button selecting recurring donation to support our podcast to help people understand and act to stop the fascist threat.

Got thoughts or questions off this episode? We want to hear some ideas for topics or guests Yes, please send them to us have a skill you think could help we want to know all about it. Reach me at the site previously known as Twitter at Sandy Goldman. Drop me a line it’s magical minute refuse fascism.org leave a voicemail. See those show notes. You can also find me on tick tock if that’s your thing. At Sam Goldman our app connect with refuse fascism on Instagram threads blue sky mastodon. I might be missing something you’ll let me know.

Thanks to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne, and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode and all episodes of 2023 Thanks to incredible volunteers. We have transcripts available for each show. So be sure to visit refuse fascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox each week. We’ll be back in the new year. hate when people say that we’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.