This American Fascism: A Retrospective

This American Fascism: A Retrospective

Refuse Fascism Episode 200

Sun, May 05, 2024 3:42PM • 1:32:05

SPEAKERS

Sam Goldman, Jason Stanley, Anthony DiMaggio, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Paul Street, Wendy Via, Coco Das, Dahlia Lithwick, Jared Yates Sexton, Brynn Tannehill, Wajahat Ali, Richie Marini, Federico Finchelstein, Umair Haque, Annika Brockschmidt, Henry Giroux, Anthea Butler, Mark Tinkleman, Bradley Onishi, Thomas Zimmer, Donald Trump, Andy Zee, Jeff Sharlet, Michael Coard, Lina Thorne, Walden Bello

Sam Goldman 00:22

Welcome. We are now 200 episodes years old. You heard that right gets episode 200 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.

We simply would not have reached this milestone without this relentless fascist movement, without the complicity of the Democratic Party leadership and the mainstream media, or without you, our dear listeners. In all seriousness, thank you for being on this journey with us. Thank you to our OG listeners who were with us from the beginning, as I recorded on a cell phone[?], in a car[?], and to our brand spanking new listeners just joining, and everyone in between.

Thank you to all who have rated, reviewed, shared on the socials, sent us an email with their thoughts, commented on a YouTube, left a voicemail — you haven’t, I’m still waiting… sent this pod to your friends and fam, used this podcast as a resource in your college classroom, started a discussion group off this show, hit the streets after listening, and so many other brilliant things. And of course, a special thank you to those who have financially made this show possible, our lovely patrons.

If you’re not a patron already, we hope you’ll help us mark this 200 episode milestone by joining and supporting this independent all weekly podcast. $200 for our 200th episode.? [chuckle] Anyway, really, whatever you can chip in, join our Patreon community with perks for as little as $2 a month. Visit Patreon.com/RefuseFascism, thank you.

We are six months to the day out from the very real possibility, even likelihood, of Donald Trump winning the presidency, with all the horrors that would mean. You’re gonna want to tune in to our Mayt 19th episode, a forum on what it will actually take to stop this fascist threat, and what role voting does or does not play in that. To be clear, I’m gonna say right now, we are not telling people not to vote, just to clarify. In the fascist worldview:

Donald Trump 02:54

We’re gonna win this election because we have no choice. If we lose the election, we’re not going to have a country left.

Sam Goldman 03:00

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 have destroyed “their country.” In their time out of the White House and not behind bars, Trump and his now much more sophisticated team are planning a vengeful program: straight up dictatorship, in which their unchallenged domination would be enforced by every means at their disposal.

Let’s also not forget the fascist horror show under the reign of the Trump pence regime: the kids in cages, the mass detention and deportation, the Muslim ban, his transformation of the judiciary, Charlottesville, the coup attempt, and so, so much more. And even as her horrific as it was, what they are promising, and are increasingly prepared to do, would make that look like Fisher Price fascism. if you forget what the Trump/Pence regime did when they were in power, go back and look through the archives at RefuseFascism.org.

As Trump ramps up his campaign, he promises to double down on his Hitlerian rhetoric and his fascist collaborators openly plan to institute this fully fleshed out fascist program “on day one” of his dictatorship. The GOP and Trump are clear: If they lose the next election, they will not fail at having Republican legislators decide the election instead, and if necessary, take it by force. But no matter what happens, it must be said that fascism is never legitimate, no matter what happens this fall. In today’s episode, you’re gonna hear from coproducers of the show, truly a tremendous tiny team starting with Mark.

Mark Tinkleman 04:48

Hi, I’m Mark Tinkleman, one of the volunteer producers of this podcast. Over the course of 200 episodes, we’ve created a resource collecting some of the best insights from over 170 people with expertise, experience and and authority to speak on the threat we face from 21st century American fascism. With this episode, we’re not just trying to share some highlights but using our archive to create a crash course and what this fascist threat is, and an essential tool to enable commensurate action as this threat unfolds. This isn’t a Golden Girls clip show. It’s not the funniest, most entertaining or most nostalgic clips, not just something for us to look back on with pride but an asset for preparing for the fight ahead.

This podcast was launched in June of 2020. We started the show during the pandemic as the protest for justice for George Floyd and to end systemic racial oppression were just breaking out. This show was the voice of a movement that was mobilizing people to drive out the Trump/Pence regime, when their genocidal program and intent to maintain power by any means, was clear to anyone who didn’t have their head up their ass.

We’ve kept it going as a vehicle to continue to engage with some of the diverse voices of conscience, writing, speaking, and acting on the most critical issues of the day, to build connections 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 need to resist.

Over four years of exposing the nature, roots, and trajectory of American fascism, we’ve provided coverage and analysis in the immediate aftermath of Trump losing and refusing to concede. We’ve sounded the alarm over the abortion rights emergency as SB-8 went into effect in Texas and the Dobbs case was taken up by the Supreme Court. We have called on you to join us in the middle of the action in D.C. before, during and after the fall of Roe in 2022 as people rose up to defend and restore abortion rights nationwide. We’ve shared stories of people rising up from student walkouts against don’t say gay laws, to the battles over drag performance, from those defying book bans to those raising hell to bring attention to the living hell for migrants at the southern border.

You may not hear all of this on this episode, but we invite you to go back and listen. Through all this we have seen the potential power of the people breaking out of politics as usual and protests as usual, from the uprising of 2020 to the campus encampments today, a power which has challenged and even driven out hated regimes across the world, which has de-legitimized and helped end genocidal wars, which has won essential rights through the Green Wave in Latin America. It’s a power which has shaped our world today, much more than any election, and which we’ve still only gotten a glimpse of. In the midst of struggle, we take hope and inspiration from people beginning to ask big questions of how we got here, where things are going and what must be done. So I hope you listen to this episode today and that it inspires you to dive deeper in.

Sam Goldman 07:35

Okay, let’s get to it. First we’ll hear insights into what fascism is, and some of what it’s not. Because if we don’t accurately identify what it is we face, then we can’t possibly sound the alarm commensurately and mobilize to stop it. Fascism isn’t just a gross combination of horrific shit you don’t like. It’s not your mother telling you to do laundry. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive reinstitution of oppressive “traditional values.” Truth is obliterated and fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build their movement and consolidate power. Dissent is criminalized piece by piece, group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to atrocity. Once their power is cemented, fascism’s defining feature is the essential elimination of the rule of law, and democratic and civil rights.

All of this took dramatic leaps under Trump’s first term. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late. With the help of guests from all over the world, we’ve helped weave together, in short, the concrete historical record of fascism with insightful theory of how fascism works, and what compels societies towards fascism, and how all of that is taking shape today in the United States and around the world. Here’s a snippet of that featuring Jeff Sharlet in 2020; Jason Stanley in 2020, Michael Coard in 2020; Walden Bellow in 2021; Thomas Zimmer and Annika Brockschmidt in 2022, in that order.

Jeff Sharlet 09:21

I thought I would begin with an apology. In 2008, I published a book called The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, plugging it just so you have the context — you can see, there’s a Netflix documentary made out of it too, talking about the oldest and arguably most influential Christian nationalist organization in the United States, with global impact. And when we talk about how we’re connected, I think of Mike Pence, [who] first came on my radar through his involvement in this organization and arms deals in Sri Lanka.

If you look at these look at these American right wing movements and understand that they are simultaneously provincial and global, but in that book, I had a chapter called the ‘F’ word — the F word, of course, is fascism — and I argued that fascism as it was understood in the European context, which is where most Americans get it from, because they don’t realize that there’s fascisms all around the globe. That wasn’t gonna happen in the United States.

I didn’t say that we were immune from trouble, there’s more than one kind of bad under the sun, but I thought that what would prevent that from happening would be American fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism, which just wasn’t going to switch out its idea of divine for the cult of personality, which is sort of a defining feature of classic fascism. I was wrong. I was wrong. I should have known I was wrong, because this organization was supporting just that kind of fascist cult of personality and regimes around the world, but they had always sort of drawn a line in the United States.

Along comes Donald Trump, and, I think I understood most when I was wrong: I was covering a Trump rally in 2016 in Youngstown, Ohio, I was standing with a nice, elderly couple, very sweet, kind of older hippies, and the guy started fantasizing about what he would do if he could get his hands on a CNN reporter and really describing in graphic violence the beating he was gonna give him, and his wife was just looking at him with such admiration.

This is the fantasy of the fist, the fist that can smash the democratic norms, can smash through truth. Fascism always has to challenge truth. So I recognized I was wrong, and I said: Okay, here it is. There’s always been authoritarianism ingrained in American power, but that kind of fascism, cult of personality fascism, is here. What’s going to happen with the Christian right and fundamentalism? What are they gonna do? Are they really gonna switch out Jesus for Trump? The answer is yes, they did.

Jason Stanley 11:55

My book was published two years ago in September 2018. At the time, people charged me with alarmism. I would like nothing more than to be wrong, than to have been wrong. However, I’m concerned that events have, if anything, vindicated the concerns that I was raising in my work. The reasons people gave for why I was being alarmist is they said things like: Fascism requires an informal militia on the streets, it requires a relationship between the leader and militias on the streets, and we see no such development in the United States; we do not see white supremacist militias being organized to defend the fascist social and political movement.

I think that’s one case where we see that we were presented with a reason for why the description “fascism” was overwrought. And I think that has been met. We saw yesterday in the debate, Trump talking to the Proud Boys, telling them to stand down and stand by. There is clearly some kind of informal messaging going on between leader and militias — that’s the concern here. No one would like to be wrong more than me, let me add.

The second reason that people gave for why calls for fascism were overblown, was that the President was not calling into question the democratic system, the President wasn’t claiming that elections were rigged, the system was corrupt. The President was not saying that it’s either me, or the system is rigged. He wasn’t directly attacking democracy. Well, I think we see that the President is directly attacking democracy. So again, I would like to be wrong. No one would like to be wrong more than me in this project.

I would like to go back to working on the semicolon, or whatever god awful things I used to do before this. However, that is not the situation in which we find ourselves. Third, the reason that people gave to say that my concern about incipient fascism was alarmist was that the President was not taking control of the party and taking control of the institutions of government. The institutions were supposedly still independent according to the critics of my work. Fascism is a cult of the leader, it’s a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposedly threats by immigrants, minorities, and leftists.

People said the Republican Party is not a cult of the leader. The Republican Party is not the same as Trumpism. We’re not seeing the courts being taken over the institutions being taken over by a cult of a leader by devotion to the leader. There to my concern is that we have seen significant progress on that particular front, people say when you talk about fascism, when you say Trump is a fascist, Trumpism is a fascist social and political movement, people say: Well, Trump isn’t at all like German or Italian, he’s very American. That’s a conceptual error about fascism.

All fascism must be local. Fascism is palingenic ultra nationalism. It’s a leader who says: I am the country and I promise to restore the country’s greatness. That leader must remind everybody in the country, they must be the most archetypical member of that country. The fact that you couldn’t be more American than President Trump is not an argument that he isn’t a possible fascist leader, it’s an argument that he is a possible fascist.

Michael Coard 15:46

Let me start by defining fascism as I see it. I break it down by saying it involves violence — I’m gonna apply that to Trump — it involves ultra nationalism — I’m gonna apply that to Trump — it involves authoritarianism — I’m gonna to apply that to Trump — it applies to right wing political ideology — I’ll apply that to Trump — and it’s manifested in a cultish kind of blind allegiance to a leader, then finally, it engages in the nostalgic type of approach to the country.

What I mean violence, Donald Trump at his rallies, has actually told his supporters to knock people in the head, told cops to rough people up, so clearly a violence is there and irrefutable. When I say Ultra nationalist, he defined himself out of his own mouth as a nationalist, so we’ve got that there. We then move to whether he’s an authoritarian: You can see that authoritarians tend to engage in purges, and they want loyalty. That’s exactly what he’s done. I have no admiration for any Republican in the history of the United States of America, but some who were aligned with him realized he wasn’t going the right way, and what did he do? He purged them. That’s when the authoritarianism comes in.

We talk about right wing ideology. That’s on its face, that’s even well beyond the standard Republican ideology. Then we talk about a cultist blind allegiance to a leader. I think maybe once before the 2016 election, I engaged in debate with a Trump supporter, just once, and then I realized that I can’t make any headway. I could say one plus one equals two, and they would engage me in debate — why am I wasting my time? When I talk about that cultist, blind allegiance, that’s the MAGAts. Then, when I talk about wallowing in nostalgic approach to the past, about a societal rebirth, that’s exactly what the MAGA thing is: Make America Great Again.

Coco Das 17:55

It mattered that Refuse Fascism was calling for this regime to go, to be driven out because it’s fascist, because that was borne out to be true. We recognized the white supremacy, the misogyny, the xenophobia, and the vengeful violence — the revenge fueled rhetoric — that was going to make life a nightmare for millions of people. On top of that, then, the constant lying, the hatred of science, the denial of even the idea of objective truth.

All of this then contributed to a situation where actually hundreds of thousands of people needlessly died from COVID. That blood is on the hands of the Trump Pence regime. To think the cruelty of celebrating that they had this win in changing the verbiage of the CDC, which is tasked to tell people truth, and give people the scientific knowledge to be able to protect themselves from these deadly diseases, that they would celebrate that, that really concentrates actually what this regime and this fascist movement is about. It’s just this cruel, ultimately genocidal hatred of people who are not who they think are the true human beings, and that includes people who died from COVID because their immune system was not up to par. Trump himself went to — I can’t remember which rally it was, I think it was in Wisconsin — and said you have good genes. This is more than a dog whistle, this harkens back to Nazi ideology.

At the same time, there was very little confrontation of what this actually represented in the media. Nobody wants to use the ‘F’ word. Nobody wants to say it was fascist. It took January 6th for a lot of people to confront that this was a fascist ideology. One of the tenets of fascism is that elections don’t matter; they should remain in power no matter what, and that elections can be overturned through violence and intimidation. That forced some people to confront, but still we don’t have enough people who really talk about that what happened in those four years under Trump and that we were actually on the road to the fascist movement consolidating state power, and what that would have meant for, not only all the people that they hate and demonize.

But what it would have meant for what are supposed to be democratic rights, what it would have meant for the right to dissent, what it would have meant for the right to abortion and birth control, with already the courts being stacked with these Christian fascist judges? And if they had won, they would have been full of vengeful arrogance. I don’t know if I answered your question, but I think there was just tremendous import to what refuse fascism was calling for and what we were organizing towards for four years. It went beyond unfitness.

Trump as a person is deranged. But as a fascist leader for a long time, actually, he was quite effective. He wasn’t incompetent, and he advanced a lot of the things that this fascist movement wanted for years, and were like getting frustrated about not having achieved. Trump was the only one actually who was willing to completely tear up the norms. You saw that with the culmination on January 6th. People in that movement don’t really see that as a failure. We might say it’s incompetent to let hundreds of thousands of people die from COVID, but that’s not at the heart of why that happened. At the heart of why that happened is this ideology that says that the truth is what we say it is, and that has a hatred of scientific reasoning and that kind of intellectual thought.

We should talk about the Christian fascist elements in that too, because although Trump himself, I don’t believe that he’s a Christian for a moment, the Christian fascist backing — they were the most organized elements that helped to get him into the White House. That also advances a worldview, that’s very anti science. There were a lot of factors that went into the way that the COVID response happened, but it wasn’t mainly that it was incompetence. We know from that interview that he did with Bob Woodward, he knew what this was about, he knew what the disease was going to do, he knew it was very deadly, and he made a choice. The choice was consistent with what this fascist movement believes about the world.

Walden Bello 17:58

First of all, the way that the key features of fascism come together are very unique in each case. If you’re expecting a spitting image of Adolf to come along, you will be waiting forever, whereas in fact, a lesser figure than Adolf has already come to power. But second, you may not have the features of fascism unrolled all at once.

Let me give you two examples: In the United States, it was not till the aftermath of the elections of 2020 that you saw the full fascist characteristic or reality of Donald Trump come out; basically he was out to subvert and overthrow the electoral system. Before that people had just:Okay, yeah, he’s like this, he’s like that, he had all this fake news, they did not think that he would go to the extent of trying to overturn an election. So, yes, therefore, it doesn’t all come together in one fell swoop at the beginning of a regime — it’s one of the reasons why people were late in recognizing that transgression by Trump.

On the other hand, if you look at a person like your Duterte, right from the get go, he started the most fearsome feature of his fascist rule, which was the drug war and the killing — extrajudicial execution — of people who were suspected of being drug users. In the space of three years, over 20,000 people have been subjected to extrajudicial execution. Immediately the most horrible feature of fascism, which is the systematic persecution of a certain sector of the population — not only imprisoning them, but killing them — sort of just unrolled very, very quickly.

This is why, I call/refer to as a blitzkrieg fascism. Now the effect was a bit different than in the United States, the effect was the stun the population; Is this really happening? And then people began to recover their senses that this was in fact happening. It was: Can he really be doing this? And so, but even that, when people began to ask themselves: Why is he getting away with it? He was able to get away with it, not only because he stunned people, but because there was a base he was appealing to people who felt that drugs and criminals were the cause of society’s degeneration, crisis in the Philippines. Not only that, people were so frustrated with the lack of social reform that, although they might have disagreed with Duterte’s, execution, maybe they thought: Oh, but maybe what the country really needs is an iron hand to set things together. So by the time that he was in his second year, there was, already consolidated, a base for fascism in the Philippines.

So the point is that the features of a fascist personality or a fascist movement may come together differently, and they do not just unfold in one fell swoop. So I just wanted to use these two examples to show you how, in the one case, in the United States, there was a protracted kind of recognition of a fascist, and in the case of the Philippines, the fact that the fascist went immediately to the the most horrible crime, which was extrajudicial execution of thousands had the effect of stunning people, so that it took them several months to recover, and realize that: Hey, this guy is the real thing, the real fascist.

Thomas Zimmer 25:45

So he explicitly says: Look, I think over 50% of the electorate should not even be considered American. I don’t think you need to know much about history to understand how radical and how dangerous that sort of rhetoric and that sort of thinking is, because once you start excluding people from the body politic, I mean, look, what’s the next step? That basically means you also forfeit all the rights and all the protections that come with being an accepted member of the body politic, but that’s where they are; they’re openly anti democratic, they’re very blatant in their sort of disdain for democracy, and more than that, they are very clearly saying: We are the minority. They’re not claiming to be the numerical majority.

There’s a big shift here from even a few decades ago, when these sort of conservative intellectuals would usually claim to be speaking for a moral majority [CD: silent majority] or a silent majority, right. They’re not doing that anymore. They are acknowledging more people voted for Joe Biden. But that’s exactly what makes them sort of more aggressive, not less aggressive. They’re not willing to grapple with the fact that: Oh, okay, so maybe we have to either moderate — or: We have to sort of find a consensus. No, nothing.

They’re basically saying: Look, numbers don’t matter, we are the only proponents of “real America,” again, by which they mean a white, Christian, patriarchal understanding of America. So, we have a right to rule and to dominate in this country. Basically, what they say is: If democracy doesn’t grant us that right, any more, then democracy has to go, and the people who vote for democracy, or for the Democrats, specifically, they have to go too, their vote doesn’t count, it doesn’t matter. It’s a radically anti-democratic, it’s a radically anti pluralistic vision.

And again, it’s radicalizing precisely because they acknowledge that they’ve lost the 2020 election. I think what we always need to ask ourselves is: How are they justifying the radical, radically anti-democratic agenda that they are sort of propagating, and they are justifying it by basically creating this supposedly radical leftist threat that is out to destroy the country. So, if you are the sole defender of “real America,” if you are the sole proponent of “real America,” which they claim to be, then you have every right to defend America by whatever means.

That’s basically sort of where these people are, and I think what is really interesting is how openly and how blatant they are with that diagnosis, which is something that has shifted over the past few years. Those anti democratic tendencies and impulses, they have been there for a long, long time, that’s not new, but the radicalism and the openness with which that is now put out there by these reactionary intellectuals is very… I can say interesting, but it’s honestly frightening is what it is.

Annika Brockschmidt 28:40

People often tell me when it comes to these things, or when I warn about these things: Oh, they won’t go that far. To that I can only say: If you think they won’t go that far, you have not been paying attention. That is because they have been crossing line after line after line in the last year alone. I would say, even for me, who’s… I’m quite pessimistic, but it’s gotten worse at breathtaking speed, and they will not stop because they cannot stop. Fascism is never satisfied. It is built on the premise of battle, of never ending fight against an enemy from within, and they won’t stop until they are stopped. And for that, unfortunately, time’s running out.

Sam Goldman 29:22

Seriously, 74 million people voted for Trump, and many are ready to do this again, even after a bloody coup, many saying: No matter what trials found him guilty of, they would vote for him. You get a sense of what this is about when you look at the video of the frat boys at Ole Miss harassing and mocking, really terrorizing, a black woman standing up for Palestine with the most vile racism to whoops of laughter and cheers from dozens of white people, if not more, unabashedly filming it themselves. Following Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020, we co-produced a series on the roots of this American fascism, as part of calling on people to remain vigilant to organize to stay in the streets, and to not stop until Trump/Pence were out. Here’s a clip from Andy Zee presenting at one of those forums.

Andy Zee 30:14

Why did 74 million people vote for an open racist, toxic male supremacist, antisemitic, stunted person lacking any capacity for empathy, who caged and separated children from their parents without remorse, a pathological liar and narcissist who consistently and brazenly opposes science and rational thought at the cost of 300,000 lives disproportionately people of color? Why did 74 million vote to reelect such a person to lead, through a Catholic and evangelical Christian fascist movement, a pandemic, a resulting economic crisis, an existential ecological crisis backed by enormous scientific evidence of climate change imperiling the earth with hundreds of millions of people besieged every day by catastrophic storm, fire, drought, leading to mass migrations and to the extinction of many species, including threatening our own?

Why did 74 million people vote for a regime that is packed with Christian fascists who care nothing for the future because they believe in end times, we’re only they will be raptured to heaven, biblical literalist theocrats, whose core beliefs demand the subordination of women and the demonization if not the elimination of differently gendered people? Why, indeed, would 74 million people wave their MAGA flags and vote for a demonstrably psychopathic leader who said: If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them? and vote to keep his finger on the nuclear trigger? A vengeful bully who reportedly two weeks ago had to be taught out of attacking Iran, at least for now.

And why would 74 million people vote for someone who repeatedly showed themselves in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, to be a vicious white supremacist and genocidal racist? The simple and basic answer is: Because they agree with him. Ron Reagan, the liberal son of President Reagan, whose presidency began this reactionary momentum that is built over the past 40 years towards the fascist regime of Trump and Pence, said that people follow Trump because he hates the same people that they do.

I hear the objection: All 74 million people are racist? Sure, there are those who say they’re not. Trump even says that he’s the least racist person. Bullshit! To vote for Trump means that you’re not just okay with, but you’re willing to support, to collaborate with and put in power for a second term, a vengeful, open racist, you knowingly collaborate with concentration camps and a genocidal program against immigrants and refugees, and that’s not the 10th of it. It doesn’t fucking matter if people say their reason for voting for Trump is because they think he is good for their money, or they identify with his outrageously sticking it to the elites.

Plenty of good Germans in the 1930s, including liberals and progressives thought they could ignore the ugly parts of Hitler and use him to get the policies they wanted, they were not just wrong, but they in effect became Nazis at the horrific cost of the tens of millions of lives. But, to answer the questions of: Why? and What do we do about the 74 million? we must go deeper and pull the historical lens back and apply a scientific method and approach to the underlying structures and dynamics that have given rise to what aspires to be a second coming of the Confederacy.

I’m going to be drawing a lot of this analysis from the work of the revolutionary thinker and leader Bob Avakian. Donald Trump did not create these divisions. The oppression of black people began with the first slave ship to the U.S. shores in 1619. Slavery was written into the U.S. Constitution. It took on new horrors with the betrayal and reversal of reconstruction, with its violent apartheid that permeated every sphere of black people’s lives under Jim Crow, and has continued in new forms with a viciousness that seeps into and permeates every metric of the masses of Black people’s lives today. Women, from the founding of this country through the Mad Men of the 1950’s, and much of the 1960’s, were kept under the thumb of men, with almost no control over their own bodies, their own destinies, even their very lives. And from the theft of the native peoples’ lands down to today, the U.S. has marauded all over the world, plundering and slaughtering.

All of this is the America that Trump wants to go back to to make America great again. Since the Civil War, there has been a section of white America, mainly located in the South, but not only, that has created a deadly myth of a lost noble cause, a way of life where people knew their place. Through two World Wars and a depression, this myth has persisted and the oppression of the masses of people continued in new and evermore vicious and perverted forms.

Then comes the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement developed into a powerful Black liberation movement with society shaking uprisings in ghettos of over 200 cities. Radical and revolutionary forces like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party emerged to shake the foundations of people’s thinking and awaken the aspiration towards a radically better and different world, a powerful anti war movement deeply questioned the whole framework of “we’re the good guys” that lies at the heart of American exceptionalism, and responding to all this and to the profound changes that were taking place in the underlying economy, a youth counterculture arose. Women and gay people then rose up to question the whole foundation of society and of gender itself.

One section of the ruling class, represented by the Democrats, adopted a policy of concession and inclusion on the basis of this same capitalist and imperialist oppressive economic system that an all these different forms of oppression were tightly tied into, in order to bring a section of these rebelling forces back into the system. Another section of the ruling class, represented by a section of the Republican Party, went to work and built a movement within a section of the fundamentalist Catholic and evangelical churches for over the last 40 years. They said: No, these changes are too much, too destabilizing to cohere this country and to maintain the U.S. empire.

The decades since have accelerated a fast-paced globalized imperialism, creating a vast network of sweatshops that has moved manufacturing jobs out of the U.S. or into low wage areas, hollowing out people’s lives and making them susceptible to appeals to fortify their white privilege and regain the status they once had. These are the foot soldiers of both the Christian fascist and militia movements, the shouters who filled the quasi lynch mob rallies of Donald Trump. This same globalization through which the U.S. exploits people internationally, has rendered whole populations of Black people, especially the youth, superfluous, condemning them to a life of hustling and mass incarceration and terror at the hands of the police. So too, with immigrants, driven from their homelands due to the imperialist destruction of the economies of their countries, along with the First World fueled Climate change, has driven billions of people into vast mass shanty towns, slums, and tens of millions into being refugees.

Trump has not only amplified all of these pre existing conditions, this pre existing oppression, and these sharp divides, but he’s normalized this with an unabashed vicious racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. Trump has cohered diverse and reactionary fascist movements that predated his regime into a force that has now tasted power, and is now embedded in the key institutions, including the courts up to the Supreme Court, and that lives and seethes in its own conspiracy laden universe of victimization, that will propel an aggrieved revanchism. This is a movement that is not going away. There cannot be going back to an imagined past. It’s not possible, and it’s not desirable.

Sam Goldman 38:20

What you just heard was recorded right aer the 2020 election, before the January 6th coup attempt. To some of us, it was already clear that the lie of the stolen election was not simply incorrect, or misinformed, but dangerous. Of all the thousands of lies that Trump has told, why is belief in this lie about a stolen election, the litmus test of the modern GOP and the MAGA movement? Because, as Matthew Rocha explained on Episode 55, in 2021, this lie transforms all the other lies, along with all of the underlying beliefs about white Christian male and American supremacy into an actionable program against everyone the Fascists see as “the enemy within.”

We’ve consistently gone after the fascist lies from “Jewish space lasers,” to babies being aborted after they’re born, to Biden inviting hordes of terrorists across the southern border, not to mention COVID and so much more. But beyond each individual lie, we’ve worked to expose the fact-free worldview that is central to the fascist cause, and which deeply affects the whole society within which fascism is rising. To dive deeper into this here are clips from Federico Finkelstein in 2021, Jared Yates Sexton in 2020, and Henry Giroux in 2022.

Federico Finchelstein 39:46

They all agree — I mean, Hitler, Trump or Mussolini, they all agree that whatever they don’t like shouldn’t be the truth even if reality says otherwise. Not only that, but what makes this fascist way of lying so dangerous as the cases of Mussolini, or Hitler demonstrated, and I think, as the case of Trump demonstrated as well, is that this kind of understanding of the truth, I mean, and let’s be clear for, for the fascist, or people like Trump then, and we can talk about this later, that are very much related to fascism, whatever probably most of us regarded as a truth — that is to say, things that can be or should be empirically demonstrated — for them, the things are lies. Whatever they regard as things that should be, as opposed to what they are, they will regard them as truth.

So it’s a radical understanding of lying, because in fact, they don’t think they are lying, they believe they are telling us the truth, and the truth is whatever they want it to be. So either they are believing these, or even when they realize that what they say might be untruth, they really believe even that is at the service of, let’s say, wider, larger truth, which is not related to empirical world, because that is the truth of faith. This is not something that they believe should be demonstrated, but rather something that you have to believe in without proof. That is faith that is typical of religion, and what we see in this ideology is, is basically a displacement of what is properly religious into what is not, which is properly, political.

That’s why these are a political religion. What is not a lie, but it’s a matter of faith in the world of religion becomes a lie in the world of politics. So whatever Trump says, is a matter of faith for the followers, and thereby, basically such an irrational statement such as don’t believe in what you see, kind of makes sense for Trump’s followers.

Jared Yates Sexton 41:37

One of the bigger problems here, and this goes back to what I’m saying about the mythology of America, the sad truth is that we’ve all been living in an alternate reality. For generations, Americans have been living in this idea of American exceptionalism; that America is the hero and that America is good and inherently out for the good in the world, while we’re just a nation that has had its own problems, and certainly some of the larger fascistic elements in it.

One of the things that happens is, it’s really hard to convince people that the story of themselves and the story of the country that they’ve been taught their entire lives isn’t true. This is one of the reasons it’s really hard to get a person out of a cult or a religion that is abusive and problematic is because you are taught that from a young age, it makes you look at the world through a certain view. I got out of this, what I now call the call to the shining city, white identity, evangelicalism. I got out of it, and there are still moments where something crackles, you know what I mean? And it’s actually weird because like when I watch Fox News, or when I hear Trump speak, or when I hear all these pastors sort of talk about Trump and what’s happening, it hits a nerve. It’s still that programming that’s left over.

So a lot of Americans are still fundamentally biased towards what Trump sells. There’s an entire group of people that have been raised to believe in this mythology. So when people say it’s almost like they’re living in an alternate reality, they absolutely are. They deny things that are empirically true.

Henry Giroux 43:07

Fascism is rooted in a kind of anti-intellectualism, that’s a lot smarter than simply saying somebody stupid — that personalizes the problem. It’s about an ignorance that’s a manufactured. It’s about a culture that’s no longer able to question itself. It’s about a culture that aligns itself with strong men. Anti intellectualism has been weaponized. It’s no longer just an attribute, it’s a weapon of political power. First of all, the book burning, the attack on universities, the anti intellectualism, the attempt by Hitler, and Goebbels — who make the claim that you have to be conquered, we have to make sure they never think again, the claim to ultra nationalism and racial purification — nothing can exist in the curriculum, which is un-German.

The firing, first of all Jewish professors, then the firing of anybody who disagreed, the intervention into the curriculum, the rewriting of history, the claim that it could only be patriotic German history, the ongoing attempt to create organizations outside of the schools that reinforce the schools, the urging of students and other faculty in both the high schools and in higher education to basically spy on each other, the signing of loyalty oaths — you can’t ignore this stuff, and you can’t ignore the larger project, which is really fundamental in what took place. These are not simply ad hoc policies that happened to come out of nowhere, they were systemic, they wanted to build institutions that produced a consciousness of utter conformity, loyalty and racial superiority.

What strikes me the most about that curriculum, and what strikes me the most about those educational policies is not just the attempt to make people ignorant, but the racial cleansing, the white supremacy. At the heart of this curriculum was white supremacy and racial cleansing. Ask yourself: What is going on in the schools today that suggests the same thing? It’s impossible. It’s impossible to separate these policies of the United States from white supremacy. It’s impossible; the call for vouchers, the call for getting rid of government schools, the claim that teachers are pedophiles who believe in anything critical, the claim that basically you have to eliminate from the universities and from high schools, and elementary schools, any teacher who basically is willing to hold power accountable.

This is about creating a systemic formative culture that ensures that fascism will thrive in those institutions that threatened it most. The first casualty of authoritarianism are the minds that would oppose it, and fascism begins with language. It begins with the language of dehumanization, it moves to the language of exclusion, it embodies the language of racial cleansing, and it moves then into camps. The camp is a metaphor. It’s a metaphor not simply for genocide. It’s a metaphor for developing what I would call a politics of disposability in which the punishing state overrides the social state, and all problems now that you disagree with are criminalized.

Richie Marini 46:22

Thanks for listening to the Refuse Fascism podcast. Hi, I’m Richie Marini, a volunteer with the Refuse Fascism podcast. I’ve helped to produce the last 200 episodes of the podcast because I think it’s an important way to promote critical thinking, and an important analytic tool to help understand the dynamics that are currently shaping the world. You the listener also play an important part in producing these podcasts, through your feedback, liking, sharing, and donating. But most importantly, by becoming a part of this movement.

When I listen to the podcast myself, it always makes me think of some aspects of the world I hadn’t thought of before. I think all of us take away something from this podcast that we can use in our conversations with coworkers, family, friends and others. Together, we can become a force that acts upon and changes the trajectory of fascism we’re on. Thank you for listening. I’m glad we’re in this together.

Sam Goldman 47:11

Our present chapter is a story of a never ending coup, of an opposition party unwilling and perhaps incapable of stopping them, beholden to order over justice and a people so eager to be placated, and to be told fairy tales. No amount of voting alone can rectify this. They aren’t missing your vote to convict Trump. In a recent, now viral, Time magazine cover story, Trump was asked: “Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Trump said: “No, quite the opposite. I think a lot of people like it.”

In six months, Biden may win the election, and the Republi-fascists are poised if that happens to refuse to accept the results, Trump recently saying: “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country,” eerily echoing what he said on January 6th. With all the violence and terror this would bring, it’s also not out of the question, given these wild times, that we don’t make it to the election before something like this pops off.

As things sit right now, however, the frightening reality is that it’s extremely likely that in six months, Trump win — coup not required — Trump re-seizes the White House legally, thanks in part to voter suppression, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, etc… cue the violent retribution. If you are only looking at the official channels, it appears we’re totally fucked. It is at this point, in my opinion, pure delusion to listen to the incantations of: Only the vote can stop him — as he promises a bloodbath if he isn’t anointed victor once more.

We have to get real about the danger and stop lying to ourselves and others, it needs to become clear that for the goal of defeating fascism, these next six months cannot be defined by the coming election. Instead, decent people in this country must decide what horror we will accept, whose suffering we will dismiss,what monsters we will absolve, what demands we will obey, what of all this will we justify, as the unstoppable will of history races by? Or, if not, what will we actually do about it? With that, here’s Anthony DiMaggio and Wajahat Ali, in that order, both from 2022.

Anthony DiMaggio 49:38

There is clearly fascist ideology that exists the United States and it’s most strongly articulated in the U.S. media with regards to right wing media figures on Fox News, OAN network, Newsmax, talk radio, and so on. You can have a fascist movement that includes tens of millions of Americans who subscribe to the use of violence for political purposes and believe in white nationalism and the cult of personality around Trump.

By the way, 62% of Trump supporters said during his presidency that there was nothing he could do that would make them not support him. That’s the cult of personality, right there, clearly, and almost two thirds of his supporters. So the subtitle of the book is: It Can Happen Here — which means that we had an election in 2020 where state Republican leaders and state Democratic leaders told Trump in terms of his big lie and stealing the election, his attempts to pull off an insurrection and a coup, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen again, moving forward, because what Trump did it was really very simplistic.

It was this idea that if it didn’t work in 2020, and Mike Pence isn’t going to hand you an election through a coup, and the state leaders aren’t going to hand it to you then find people who will. You just do that next time, you spend the next few years promoting Big Lie election propaganda, that’s totally baseless and you replace these people at the state level and the local level who certify elections and you find people who will nullify majority votes in swing states. So that’s part of the end goal here is moving toward this idea of a one party state.

Wajahat Ali 51:03

Republicans who have just won their primaries since May all believe the Big Lie, the majority of Republican voters believe the Big Lie. The RNC, ladies and gentlemen, not just Marjorie Taylor Greene, the RNC itself decided to censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kissinger for appearing on this bipartisan committee. Liz Cheney used to be the number three Republican, ladies and gentlemen, but that same day where they censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who voted with Trump 93% of the time, but said: You know what, a violent insurrection is a step too far.

They said the violent insurrection, as the RNC said this, the violent insurrectionists were “ordinary citizens” engaging in “legitimate political discourse.” The RNC said this. What we’re witnessing right now is the Republican Party is purging itself of everyone who’s not extreme enough. Mo Brooks, a freakin extremist who wore a Kevlar vest on the day of January 6, and according to the hearings, apparently asked for a pardon, he’s kicked out. Why? Because he eventually said: Eh, we should move on from the election. Dan Crenshaw is now called eyepatch McCain and a traitor. He is freaking hard, far right, Texas Republican, accosted just last week by the Texas GOP because he says we gotta move on.

The Texas GOP itself is saying: Hey, guys, in 2023, we reserve the right to secede — to secede, and by the way, the Texas GOP — the Republicans are the second most populous state — have said that they affirmed the Big Lie, and Joe Biden is not the legitimate president. So, even if the hearings went, what I see right now, Sam, is that the institutions barely held, and all it would have taken was a few more Republicans who are, say, in the Justice Department, who are already in the Supreme Court, who are already packed in the state legislatures, to go along with this ongoing coup and boom, that’s a wrap.

That’s it, all it takes is a few. The next time they get power, which seems like likely in 2022 and 2024, they’ll have the House, they’ll have the Senate, they have the Supreme Court they have the State Legislatures, they’re unleashing the precinct strategy, they’ll have the Justice Department and the coup will be a success. Who or what will stop them? If I’m wrong here, tell me where I’m wrong. I’d love to be proven wrong.

Sam Goldman 52:52

Before they were storming the Capitol, they were bombing abortion clinics. Our loyal listeners know that there is no talking about fascism in the good ‘ol USA without talking about Christian fascism that is at the heart and center of the modern GOP, not just propelling them to power but setting the pace and scope of policy. You know, like banning abortion over a third of the country. This movement is not stopping, slowing down, or losing. See gender affirming care bans, the mifepristone case, the moves to resurrect the zombie Comstock law, with birth control in their sights. With them clearly going after — and this should be without question — a nationwide abortion ban.

They are not marginalized. They have deep connections with, and often hold, the center of political power. Hello, Supreme Court of the United States. Hello, Mike Johnson. Here we are sharing with you insights from Anthea Butler and Bradley Onishi, and if you want to learn more, check out our episodes with scholars, journalists and legal experts including Sarah Posner, Samuel Perry, Philip Gorski, Catherine Joyce, Andrew Seidel, and many more. If you want to get fired up and inspired, we also have a full catalog of resistance episodes about standing up against the Christian fascists for abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and education. So again, here is Anthea 2021. And Bradley 2022. In that order.

Anthea Butler 54:15

When you can say that Donald Trump was, as a lot of evangelicals said, God’s man — that he was King Cyrus, he was the one that was appointed — then you have that man who they think is God’s man saying that the election is stolen, well, of course people are gonna go out there and fight for him and do what they want. But I think this hits a deeper problem about evangelicalism. That deeper problem is that in the quest for power and authority in this country, that they have lost their way and they’ve lost their way in terms of trying to think of themselves as religious actors, and now their religio-political actors who have set themselves up against the government.

That’s really important because they think god is more important than the government. So if you understand what they were doing on January 6th, they really believed that god called them to take down the Capitol, and that they wanted to establish god’s government, and god’s government was the representative, Donald Trump. That’s hard for a lot of people to understand, but I think you need to understand it and be fearful and mindful of the fact that although January 6th failed, you still have a lot of people out here who embrace that belief.

Bradley Onishi 55:24

There’s this character on The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, who’s the annoying neighbor up the street. Ned Flanders is the Christian who goes to church every week and goes to Bible study on Wednesday night, and he’s always telling Homer Simpson not to drink as much beer and don’t use cuss words, and he’s always like, kind of that irritating moralist, like the guy that you don’t really like, but you’re not afraid of, because he’s just that good old hokey sandal wearing cargo shorts wearing neighbor up the street who, you know, wants you to come meet Jesus someday, and alright. That is the common image of white Christians in the country.

That is the benefit of the doubt they’ve been given. The benefit of the doubt they’ve been given is: You are the pesky moralists, who are always trying to get us to come back to Jesus. We’re not scared. You’re not fascists. You’re not insurrectionist. I mean, you’re annoying, but you’re not the person who’s going to ruin the country. In fact, yeah, it’d probably be good if I drink less beer, and it’d probably be good if I didn’t use cuss words in front of my kids as much. That’s probably a good idea, yeah okay.

Now, there’s another character in the in the Simpsons, who’s Mr. Burns, and Mr. Burns is this sort of authoritarian owner of the nuclear power plant, and he’s always scheming to take more and more power. There’s nothing good about Mr. Burns, when you watch the show; he’s evil and he’s cunning and he’s really cruel. My argument is that we didn’t see this coming because we have treated white Christians in the country like Ned Flanders, when they have been giving us the cues all along, that they’re more akin to Mr. Burns. Their number one goal is power, and they don’t care if that means exclusion, they don’t care if that means taking rights away from people, they don’t care if that means not extending rights to people, they don’t care if that means being anti democratic.

That kind of talk has been going on for decades if we just listened, but the lens is: No, you’re just a Christian, I mean, you’re a church going, Bible holding irritatingly moral kind of guy. You’re not the fascist up the street. You’re not the extremist up the street. Your church is not the place where people get radicalized… No, that’s that’s not what happens there. You’re a small business owner, you own this the shop up the street, you’re the dad who coaches the baseball, you’re the mom who is on the PTA board.

All of the fears and all of the ludicrous kind of paranoia that was cast upon Muslims in this country in the aughts, the 2005s and sixes and eights; all of the ways that supposedly Sharia law and extremist forms of Islam were supposedly infecting the country and all this.. None of that kind of lens was ever conjured when Christian extremists actually acted in ways that were overwhelmingly deletireous to our democracy. The Tea Party, if you read Ruth Bronstein, the sociologist, was an overwhelmingly Christian fundamentalist movement, even though they said on the surface: We’re libertarians, we’re just against taxes.

Dig into the data, dig into the respondents and what they said, going back to when we had a black President in the Oval, the Tea Party formed very quickly and very adamantly, very vehemently — this is the era of: The whole goal is just to shut down the country until we get our power back.

Sam Goldman 58:25

Deep in their delusions, millions of Christian fascists devote their lives to bringing into being their cruel and brutal future. It’s quite unnerving. Meanwhile, millions more among the non fascist majority of people in this country scoff at and write off this determined minority, steeped in the almost as dangerous delusion that fascism couldn’t happen here, that everything will always stay the same as it ever was in the heart of American Empire. That’s fucking scary.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not human nature, and it’s not insurmountable, but there are definite obstacles in the way that must be broken through if people are going to fight fascism with a chance to win. When the right to abortion was on the chopping block, what did we see from the Democratic Party leadership and the official “reproductive rights” nonprofits subordinate to it? Did they lead the millions of women and others who cherish this right? Millions whose lives would have been derailed, diverted or destroyed without it? Did they lead these righteously enraged people into action?

No, they told them to put their energy into voting after the fact for a party that, at that time, held the presidency and both houses of Congress. And in every election since, they have manipulatively appealed to our grief, without any meaningful plan to reinstate this right nationwide, let alone action towards that end. One might think, even if politicians are taking advantage of their voter base, surely they would mobilize people to stop fascist threats against their own power, the Democratic Party’s power, or even their lives. But did they take any action to stop the coup attempt in 2020?

As Coco Das exposed on this podcast during the campaign, they used their influence to wreck any attempt to politically challenge the fascist promise of stealing the election, and then for months, again, as the fascists geared up to storm the Capitol, and it is their own Attorney General that has refused to meaningfully hold Trump accountable. And now, with millions among their own voter base taking heroic action to stop them, these liberal leaders, these guardians of democracy, are green lighting and funding a genocide against the people of Gaza and the Democratic Party leaders and their sycophants have the gall to say that any criticism of the genocide, let alone action to stop it, imperils American democracy.

They acknowledge that this genocide splits their support base, in itself, quite an indictment, but are more committed to raining down murder upon tens of thousands of trapped human beings, than winning an election that they claim is the only thing standing between a free world and fascism. It should tell you something that they are going to hand over power — just give it up to Trump, who has literally promised to kill them, to never hold power again — in order to maintain U.S. dominance in the Middle East. They claim that students shutting down their campuses to stop a genocide are giving the fascists every advantage in this election.

But in reality, those committing the genocide and presenting their genocidal program as the only alternative to “something bad” — because they refuse to use the term ‘fascism’ — who are paving the way to a fascist future. It is a good thing that millions are questioning their allegiance to either of these two visions of empire. In my opinion, people in the streets standing up for humanity have much more connection to the potential for a movement capable of stopping fascism than the chief enablers and conciliators currently occupying the White House. Now, to discuss the restraints and potential of decent people and the media they look to, we have Dahlia Lithwick in 2021, Ruth ben Ghiat in 2020, Umair Haque in 2021, in that order.

Dahlia Lithwick 1:02:18

No matter what was happening for the last four and a half years, I think the ability of most people to just integrate it and move on is shocking. In some sense, what I’m describing is almost a mental health phenomenon, that you can normalize anything. Things that horrified us: the Muslim ban, the first week of the administration, at some point, we were okay with it; family separations, we were out of our minds, we were marching and then we were okay with it; forcing migrant teenagers at the border to keep their pregnancies. At some point, the shock of all of these things dissipates, and then as we said, the goalposts have moved, right? Now, this is normal and our brains long for normal.

So I think one of the things I was trying to say is, I felt like I spent the four years of the Trump era, as a legal correspondent, setting myself on fire, going into the greenroom at MSNBC and trying not to rip my hair out and scream and trying over and over and over again to say: This is not normal, this is not okay. Being — I use the word gaslit advisedly — just constantly and consistently being told, not just by Bill Barr, but by folks on the left that we’re hysterical, we’re overreacting, calm down, he’s not really going to stop vote by mail — okay, maybe he’s going to try to stop vote by mail, but it’s not going to be with the complicity of Bill Barr — oh, maybe with the complicity of… maybe he’s going to try to set aside the election results, maybe he’s going to try to foment a coup.

At every turn, we are being told, like: Come on, you are really overreacting here. I felt as though, having spent four years being told it’s not that dire, please stop worrying. You know, all the anxiety is just feeding into the hysteria to have that directed at you again, post Trump, by folks at the Biden Justice Department, by, as you say, some of the Democratic leadership. It’s like: Oh, you know, don’t overreact, what Georgia and Texas are trying to do in suppressing the vote isn’t that bad… who doesn’t have voter ID? It’s so enervating.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat 1:04:36

There’s a huge amount of human denial. The book I’m going to publish next year, it looks at all these cases in the past, like Italy in the 1920s, Germany in 1930s, even places where, like in Chile before the coup, and America with Trump coming up, in every case, these extremists come and they try and get into the mainstream and the conservative elite let them in because they think they’re going to control them. So the elites know very well what this guy is about, but they think they can tame them. Remember the phrase people would say, like when he said he’s going to shoot someone, they said: It’s just Trump being Trump. There was almost a nervousness, and a desire to not take seriously what was going on, because it was too threatening.

Of course, the political solution that you advocate, which is banding together and uniting, that didn’t happen, and it hasn’t happened in history in the past. So that’s one part of it. The other is this human optimism that the person actually can’t be that bad, that it’s all for show, and that they’re going to pivot. So in our case, the delusion of the Trump pivot, that as soon as he got into office, he was gonna become normal; he’s gonna become a normal politician, and settle down. That was said of Mussolini, that was said of Hitler and a lot of other authoritarians. So we’re repeating history.

Umair Haque 1:06:10

Something that I try to teach Americans in this very, very, very resistant period, which is that you have to call it what it is. There are like three or four interlinking reasons you have to do that. Job number one, the first reason: If I say these guys had a riot, maybe you think of people stealing a VCR in the 90s or something. If I say these guys led a fascist coup, suddenly you’re thinking! Your mind is working. You’re like thinking of the Nazis, the Beer Hall Putsch, or like you know, Goebbels, or whatever; you’re thinking all of a sudden this huge, rich vocabulary, conceptual language of history comes into play.

What is fascism? It’s this thing of genocide, it’s a thing of purges, this thing of bans, this thing of hate, you have this whole mental model that begins to pop into your head. The first reason it’s important is that it brings us towards naming the thing as it really is. Unless we’re able to do that, we’re always just kind of shadowboxing; we’re kind of like punching in the dark and maybe sometimes a hit lands, but most of the time, they don’t. Reason number two: Without naming it, there’s nothing that you can hold people accountable for. So, what happened on January 6th? We call it an insurrection. This is like an 18th century term.

When was the last time there was an insurrection in the modern world? The rest of the planet calls them coups. Is anybody else saying we had an insurrection in Myanmar or Russia or whatever? We had a coup. So if you don’t call it fascism, well, then you’ve helped the fascists erase the bad stuff that they’ve done. What are you gonna hold them accountable for exactly? It’s not just some random act of spontaneous violence, which is what an insurrection kind of points to; it’s organized, it’s planned, it’s systematic, it’s funded, it’s a real movement and party and goals and operations, mechanisms and workings. When we don’t say the word we kind of strip all that away.

In the same way that when I say insurrection, it’s like: Well, what does that mean? I don’t know, slaves, nobly rising up against their owners? Was it merchants dumping tea into the harbor? What was it exactly? It can be a lot of things. But have you seen a fascist coup, there’s a lot more clarity that comes with it, and that lets you hold people accountable. The third reason is: America has a really ugly history. In the last few years, we’ve taken some steps. And I would say they’re good steps, and in some cases, even big steps. The kind of reckoning — slavery, segregation, hate, centuries of it — and the way that we are taught about fascism in America — and you have to remember, I grew up in many places, so I have a kind of different perspective on this — the way that we’re taught about fascism in America is completely wrong and completely backwards.

When I ask the average American: What’s your definition of fascism? I get this really weird definition that they’re taught in high school, which is like fascism is the convergence of economic and political interests. That’s not fascism, man. Fascism is some dude, with an SS insignia who wants to kill me and everybody like me. So a lot of Americans don’t understand fascism to begin with, because the way that they learn about is completely wrong, and the reason that that definition is wrong is because that was actually the definition of forms of communism. Americans were trying to demonize socialism and communism with this weird definition of fascism that has nothing to do with real fascism.

The reason it’s important for us to begin undoing all that is because the Nazis studied us. They admired us. When the Nazis were figuring out how to exterminate and annihilate and oppress the Jews, you know, who they studied? America. Explicitly, they would write things like: We think America is so great. They managed to oppress a whole race of people. It’s the only time it’s ever been done. My God, what genius is these people are. They went out and studied Jim Crow, and the race laws. They literally went out and studied — went way out of their way to study — American history.

We have a really ugly history and the way that we understand fascism as Americans is totally wrong, totally backwards. We think Fascism is something that came out of nowhere in Europe in 1935, and it just like happened one day. Like, the Germans woke up one day and they were like: Oh, my God, we gotta kill all the Jews. That’s not what happened at all. Fascism started here. So to really understand fascism, we need a whole new model of it, theory of it, culture… the words kind of fail at this point…. maybe paradigm is the best word; a whole different way of looking at.

Sam Goldman 1:09:55

I think that part of it is that paradigm shift. It’s not a battle over definition. If we define it perfectly, it’s about people being able to notice a pattern that keeps reasserting itself [UH: Exactly right.] and will keep reasserting itself until the root that brings it into being is addressed. That is a huge thing that I appreciate. In one of your recent pieces, you were struggling with people to ask questions, you were struggling with people to basically look at: Why is it that people think about it [that way]? I think you were struggling with people who were saying: Are you really saying that 70 million people in this country are fascists? [UH: agrees, chuckles] I think that was the article. Yes. But let’s talk about the deeper question.

Umair Haque 1:10:34

Let’s talk about it. Yes, yes, look!

Sam Goldman 1:10:36

These fascists have no off button. As we’ve talked about on the show before, capitalism is pushing the climate to its brink, endlessly compounding the global refugee crisis, locking in demographic change is on track to end the white majority in the U.S., continually upending the economic basis for oppressive traditional gender norms and so much more. For today’s ruling class, fascism is providing increasingly tempting solutions to the deepening crises woven into the capitalist system.

Even if Trump turned around tomorrow and said that he was wrong about everything, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. But he’s not saying that. Instead, he is leading this movement to untold depths of depravity. Just look at Project 2025, championed by the Heritage Foundation, which calls for 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 purging any who are unwilling to carry out illegal orders. Making previous efforts of Trump/Pence look puny in terms of their plans for unprecedented levels of massive deportation and detention camps, enacting again — this time achieving — a Muslim ban, weaponizing the justice system, pardoning those who participated in the coup attempt, and locking up any who tried to resist.

This time around, ardent loyalists only [in the government], not those who care about any of those pesky norms, constitution or rule of law — including being supported, protected and advanced by a legion of Pitbull MAGA lawyers and a rabid gunned up base. This is a blueprint to turn the American government into a streamlined machine of unrestrained punishment.

Looking again at Trump’s Time magazine interview on how far he would go by Eric Cortellessa, [he] writes: “What emerged in two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors and confidants were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world to carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country. Trump told me he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland; he would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans; he would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress. According to top advisors, he would be willing to fire a U.S. attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty, or have been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. Civil Service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House Pandemic Preparedness Office and staff his administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

The Fascists are on their way to re-seize power and hold it indefinitely, and what they aim to do with that power presents a horrific trajectory for humanity unless we stop them. To illustrate that path here is Jeff Sharlet, 2023 Jared Yates Sexton, 2021, Brynn Tannehill in 2021, as well, Thomas Zimmer in 2022, and Wendy Via in 2023, in that order.

Jeff Sharlet 1:14:14

Thanks, Samantha, and it’s wonderful to get to talk with you again, even in dire times. I 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 1:14:28

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 base 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 this 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 1:15:19

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, 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 capital police officer. We see just his hands, it turns out to be a black man, Lt. Michael Bird. As soon as I saw it’s a black man that killed a white woman, well, that’s the oldest American story. That’s the lynching story. That’s, 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 10 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. Really, all I had to do was, say: Civil war? And then there were 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 live in Vermont, and they are not intrinsically terrifying to me. But that’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 too, they love to sort of 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 til these guys see one F 16.” 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, and if you get a situation where a military commander isn’t sure who’s 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, who 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 that’s 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.

Jared Yates Sexton 1:18:43

There has been a concerted effort by politicians, media pundits, to frame this whole thing as a weird aberration that took place on January 6th, and it just so happened that there was a riot that spilled into the U.S. Capitol: It’s really terrible what happened but we’ve moved past it and we’ve turned the page and Donald Trump is behind us, and now we can unify and move on. That’s unfortunately a fairy tale. We have a real problem in this country. I want to go ahead and say first and foremost, what happened on January 6th.

This is the way history will look at it, if we have history. The President of the United States of America, after fomenting one conspiracy theory after another years, and then engaging in a fascistic white supremacist, white supremacist paranoid conspiracy theory, sicced his radicalized followers on his own vice president in the legislative branch of the United States of America. He declared war on the government of the United States and tried to carry out a violent coup. We were incredibly lucky that it didn’t move further. Part of it has to do with the fact that Donald Trump is an incompetent coward. We’re incredibly lucky that basically the first fascistic President — openly fascistic President of the United States — was an incompetent coward.

The problem is that Donald Trump, through his gnashing of teeth and wild indiscriminate thrashing, has exposed one weakness after another in democratic institutions and the democratic machinery of the United States of America. On top of that, we have to look at the fact that Donald Trump is a symptom, he’s not the disease. There is something that has been going on in this country since its very founding through white supremacist, misogynistic, hyper capitalistic exploitation, and it has reached the end of the line.

Brynn Tannehill 1:20:21

What people have to understand about what is happening to transgender people here is that this is a fascist movement, that they don’t have a switch that turns off when they say: Oh, well, we passed this bill, we’re done with trans people, now. They’re gonna keep going and keep going and keep going. Their ideal number of trans people is zero. They are willing to storm the Capitol and kill Mike Pence to get the kind of government that they want. This is extraordinarily dangerous, and particularly dangerous for trans people as we are the number one group being targeted now, except for perhaps immigrants, but probably trans people are now front and center as the most visible group of people being singled out by this movement.

When Americans stop at: Well, it can’t happen here, bad things can’t happen here — you need to go back, you need to read the American history of the South and what we did to Black people, and what we did Japanese people during World War Two. Americans can do horrible, horrible things to their fellow citizens or to people live here — the Trail of Tears. Don’t think for a moment that this isn’t serious, that this isn’t incredibly dangerous, and that we need to remain energized, because Trump’s going to run again, and the Electoral College map is going to get even harder next time. We can’t think that yes, we’ve won. No, this is an operational pause for the right.

Thomas Zimmer 1:21:35

None of this is inevitable. There’s never been a moment in history where anything was inevitable. I think I think we should not allow ourselves to sort of fall into a sort of politics of despair, where we’re basically just giving up because it’s all going to hell anyway, and they’re winning and whatever. Let’s not do that. I am more pessimistic now than I’ve ever been over the past few years, including the entire Trump presidency — more pessimistic now about the fate of American democracy, but I think it’s important to really acknowledge that the reason why the American right is radicalizing against democracy, right now — the reason why they are on this fascistic pathway — it’s not coming from a place of strength, it’s actually coming from a place of weakness, it’s actually coming from the realization that they are losing.

That is their diagnosis, that they are losing. It was basically also why they have sort of united behind Trump — all these conservative intellectuals and reactionary thinkers that we touched on earlier, many of them said in 2016: Ah, we don’t like Trump, the person, we don’t like the man, and he’s disgusting, he’s despicable, whatever — many of them still claim to believe that about Trump, but what they’ve all said was: Look, we are losing — in their imagination, that means real America is losing — so what we need now is someone who just fights back by whatever means, who does not care about norms and precedent and whatever, who just fights back, right?

The term that you found in these sort of, again, right wing intellectual circles in 2016 was: We need a bruiser, we need a brawler. That’s how they came to Trump, where they basically said: Look, he’s terrible, he’s despicable, but that’s exactly why he is the right man for this moment where we just need someone to fight back by whatever means, someone doesn’t hold back, someone who doesn’t care about norms. That’s sort of the rationalization that led them to this place. There is a glimmer of hope in there because they are reacting to something real. They are not making up the fact that the country has become less white, less conservative, less Christian. They’re not making that up. Those are facts. That’s demographic change. That’s cultural change.

Wendy Via 1:23:47

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, 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 — that all of these things are not going to happen, or they can’t happen; 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 — 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 ’em, that he’s going to take control of the DOJ and the FBI and he’s going after ’em.

This is what I would encourage people to 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 1:25:17

Over these 200 shows, we are proud to have established with you a strong network of people who care enough about the world to confront the fascist threat head on at this epic juncture. Here is one member of our community, Paul Street, frequent guest and editorial board member of Refuse Fascism, with a little milestone message.

Paul Street 1:25:36

There’s something of a false dichotomy buried in the young Marx maxim. It isn’t really either/or when it comes to the difference between understanding history and changing history, not when you dig into the question of how and for what purposes you want to bend the arc of the world of history. How you understand history in the world impacts how you want to change history in the world.

What I love about the Refuse Fascism podcast is the way it manages this balance. The change-seeking political agenda behind the podcast is clear as day: It seeks the defeat of American fascism and the overcoming of the oppressive social, political, and historical conditions that give rise to that fascism; that fascism which poses a grave existential danger to humanity. Make no mistake, the Refuse Fascism podcast is about changing the world, but the podcasts’ staff and of course, its remarkable host, Samantha Goldman, know that this requires serious, dare I say, scientific intellectual work to help create and spread popular understanding fitted to the task.

For literally 200 weeks, basically, four years, the podcast has hosted a remarkable panoply of brilliant thinkers and activists from a broad range of professional activist, intellectual, and political backgrounds to help us understand the nature of the authoritarian white Christian nationalist and yes, fascist, Republi-fascist menace that stalks this land, that stands on the precipice now of consolidating triple branch power in the United States, a distinct possibility early next year. This menace will certainly rear its ugly head in violent ways if it fails to achieve that goal through semi peaceful means this Fall.

We cannot engage in the American historical process in a desirable way right now if we fail to understand what Fascism is, where it comes from, how it rises to power, and how it is defeated. The defeat of fascism is something that has always required popular struggle far beneath and beyond making little marks next to the names of ruling class political candidates for two minutes once every two or four years. Those who pretend that it can’t happen here, and in fact, that isn’t already happening here, to no small extent, those with their head in the sand about all of this, are revealing a dangerous failure when it comes to understanding past and current history.

The Refuse Fascism podcast includes not just the remarkable interviews with top level intellectuals like Carol Anderson, Ruth Ben Ghiat, Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern, Rick Pearlstein and Henry Giroux, it includes also Samantha Goldman’s — I think, extraordinary — weekly summaries of the latest in creeping American fascism. Together, these interviews on these weekly summaries make the Refuse Fascism podcast an indispensable antidote to historical and political ignorance and denial regarding the fascist danger that stalks the land. The Refuse Fascism podcast is a necessary part of our toolbox as we seek to change history, not just for the sake of change itself, but to change history in ways that can put us on the path to liberation — to a world where the conditions that give rise to fascism are swept into Marx’s proverbial dustbin of history.

Lina Thorne 1:29:14

Hey, guys, I’m Lina, one of the volunteer producers of the show. Before we close out our 200th episode, I want to ask you to begin to support this podcast. We are six months out from Trump possibly retaking the White House. Simply absorbing the details of political reality in 2024 can be intense and often painful, and it isn’t something we can go at alone. Do more people need to hear content like what you just listened to today? Do we need to help people prepare to act no matter what November brings? Do More people need to find a community that won’t lie to you and is willing to look at uncomfortable truths together, struggle together and refuses to accept a fascist America together?

If you answered yes to any or all of those questions, please pitch in so that we can continue to make this show, plus, advertise it right now, so that this message reaches greater numbers of people. This spring, you can help publicize the show via podcast ads and social media by donating whenever you can, and whether you can make a gift of $2 or $200, it’s really all needed, and it all makes a difference. You can give today at RefuseFascism.org — just hit the donate button there. Or take one step further and become an ongoing patron for as little as $2 a month. Just visit patreon.com/RefuseFascism. And as always, tell a friend, rate, review, and share it with a comment on social media. It all helps and it’s all appreciated. Thanks.

Sam Goldman.

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Thanks to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne, and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode and the 199 episodes that preceded it! Thanks to Coco Das for helping several of episodes as well!

Thanks to incredible volunteers Debra, Mort, & Janet we have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox.

Connect with us via social media @RefuseFascism on all the places. Youtube Refuse_Fascism – subscribe if you like getting your podcasts there. Reach me at @SamBGoldman on Twitter, drop me a line at [email protected] or find me over on the TikTok @samgoldmanrf

We’ll be back next Sunday, until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!

END