The War on Women & the Genocide in Gaza

The Fascist Fuhrer Decision & Schedule F

Refuse Fascism Episode 209

Sat, Jul 06, 2024 7:33PM • 1:13:06

Paul Street 00:00

Immune, immune, immune. It’s an open recipe for authoritarian rule. I call this the fascist fuhrer decision. This is the end of the game for all legal cases against Trump. There will not be another verdict, and there will not be a single verdict on his most serious crimes.

Matt Shuham 00:15

Trump represents the unitary executive theory, this idea that the President should have a lot more power and a lot more political leeway once he gets into office to form the government to his will. Schedule F is a way to give him a lot of power very quickly. The effect of this is sort of the authoritarian impulse that Trump has talked a lot about, that he is the revenge that his supporters want, that he wants. But you could also make the government work for and against people whose politics you like or don’t like you.

Sam Goldman 01:06

Welcome to episode 209 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing two interviews — two, that’s right!

First, a conversation with Paul Street on the Supreme Court’s extremely blood curdling immunity decision and recent developments, followed by an interview with Matt Shuham. Matt is a reporter for Huffington Post, and we discuss Schedule F. Thanks to everyone who rates and reviews this podcast, like Dr. DK2 who reviewed last week’s show, gave us five stars, thank you, titled their review Best Post Debate Show and wrote: “Sam did an incredible job summarizing the complete tsunami of anti democratic rulings by the Supreme Court. It’s illegal to be homeless, but legal to take bribes. And yes, Biden’s debate performance was shockingly dismal, but that 90 minutes did not make Trump less of a lying, greedy fascist. Thank you for the reminder to keep fighting, even at this very low moment.”

I made that commentary into a Tiktok, so if you missed it, you can watch it over there. If it resonated with you, give it a like, comment, repost. And you asked, we answered, there are now Refuse Fascism t-shirts for sale. With your purchase, you can spread the prerogative and start the urgent conversations we need now — plus, you support the show. So after listening, check the show notes for the link, go buy some shirts.

Before the interview. You know, I have some things to say about the fascist leap the Supreme Court of the U.S. just took with their totally illegitimate presidential immunity ruling. Just listen to some of what Trump said in the past year:

Donald Trump 03:16

I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. Not going to let this happen… Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it — it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country — that will be the least of it… We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country… There are people that did some bad things. I know who they are, and all of that. Revenge does take time. I will say that. [Dr. Phil: It does.] and sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest, sometimes it can.

Sam Goldman 03:57

So let’s get into it. This past Monday, the Supreme Court came back with a decision in Trump v. United States. In its simplest terms, this ruling ended any hope of holding Trump accountable for his past actions, and did more than anyone can really imagine to enable horrors to come should Trump return to power.

The impact of this ruling, I thought, was put really starkly and well synthesized by Adam Serwer, writer for The Atlantic, who stated: “This ruling must be understood as a permission slip for the despotic power that Trump has vowed to assert if he is reelected. It is not just a grant of immunity for past crimes, but an enthusiastic endorsement of the ones he will commit if given the chance.” This decision provides extraordinary legal cover for a wide array of crimes, some of which Trump has committed, others which he has promised, others still, which his lawyers, lower court judges and the defending Supreme Court justices have enumerated, and who knows how many more.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a highly referenced dissent: “Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding. This new Official Act’s immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation. The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country and possibly the world. When he uses his official power in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold on to power? Immune. Take a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune! Let the President violate the law. Let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain. Let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out — and I pray they never do — the damage has been done. the relationship between the President and the people he serves have shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Let’s be clear, every President has committed war crimes and/or crimes against humanity, and they’ve enjoyed effective immunity. Why now, in this moment, is the Supreme Court taking it upon themselves to not only codify, sanctify, but expand it? And so based on the heaviness of the ruling and and the heaviness of the indictment within Sotomayor’s dissent, the minute the decision came down, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats set a detailed and robust strategy into motion. They immediately moved to expand the court, filed airtight insurrection charges against Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, with a few corruption charges on the side for Thomas, and kick started impeachment proceedings for all six fascists on the court to enable all this.

To come to fruition, they whipped out long-awaited insurrection charges against members of Congress who had participated in January 6th, gutting their ability to obstruct such moves. Biden directly addressed the nation from the steps of the Supreme Court minutes after the decision, and called the people into the streets against this fascist menace. He promised to do everything legally in his power to reverse this decision and uphold his beloved Constitution.

Meanwhile, the American people could not be held back from protesting in their millions nationwide. Their outrage against the Supreme Court was palpable, unsatisfied with Biden’s response, connecting this outrage with the larger fascist threat afoot, and losing allegiance to the whole setup, people shut down, whole cities. Federal buildings were shut down. Highways and ports shut down. People in their millions saying: We’ve refused to be governed by fascists, and questioning the legitimacy of any system that would bring this to pass.

And that’s how the revolution started, right? Wrong! Instead, Biden hobbled up to a podium nine hours later and made clear that in the face of the Supreme Court granting the President unprecedented powers, there was nothing that he, the current President, could do. He didn’t even say it. It was simply off the table. Instead, he said all that could be done by anyone – anyone at all — the only thing humanly possible was to vote for him again in November. So that he could, what? Continue to enable the rise of fascism?

The majority of Americans, steeped in the mythology of a forever stable and good America, indoctrinated in the passivity of the “American democracy,” cowed by an ever more powerful fascist movement, responded with a shudder and a whimper, if it registered with them at all — any outrage limited to a tweet, may be a threat, and the growing fascist movement, empowered by this decision, doubled down on their fascist agenda, with one more key milestone reached ahead of schedule.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, in their recent piece on Slate, highlight how this decision clears the path for the MAGA movement’s program, dripping with vengeance. “Project 2025 sets forth the blueprint for achieving the rest. Had the high Court remained a plausible check on a possible second Trump presidency. The next few years would have been challenging enough. Having shown themselves to be the rocket fuel powering this revanchist New World Order, the six ultra conservative justices have positioned themselves as partners in Trump’s fight.” Indeed, this is what Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, architect of Project 2025 and the think tank for the Republi-fascist movement, said, in celebration of SCOTUS, presidential immunity ruling:

Kevin Roberts 10:49

We are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.

Sam Goldman 10:55

As experts on fascism, such as Ruth ben Ghiat, have noted, such remarks from fascists are salutes to their dear leaders’ right and freedom to slaughter their enemy, sans consequence. The reality is MAGA fascists are emboldened by such a ruling promising their entitlement to threaten, terrorize, dominate, eliminate all those who do not eagerly submit to their white supremacist, patriarchal, Christian fascist, xenophobic order. For more on all of this, here’s my conversation with historian and frequent contributor to the pod Paul Street.

It has been a week. I don’t want to understate the major leap that happened this week in dismantling the rule of law in this country, turning the laws and transforming the highest court in the land into an instrument of fascist atrocity through this immunity ruling. To talk a little bit more about this major development in the courts and government, along with other court cases that have come out, and just the overall wee, I’m glad to be talking to historian, friend, co editorial board member of RefuseFascism.org, Paul Street. Welcome Paul. Glad to be talking with you.

Paul Street 12:12

Yeah, dark week, Sam, but glad to be talking to you. We’ve got to process this, don’t we?

Sam Goldman 12:17

Let’s start with the truly horrific ruling in Trump v. United States. It’s a monumental ruling, essentially giving a license to the President, and specifically Trump, to commit crimes, so long as they use the official powers of their office to do so. Basically, the Supreme Court has given Trump a roadmap to literally assassinate his political rivals. I was just hoping you could tell us a little bit about what you’re thinking about in terms of the significance of this decision. What happened? Why does it matter?

Paul Street 12:56

Sam, I think it’s very much the capstone in the darkest aspect of an incredibly dark week. I was thinking about this the other day, that this last week, if you include the fiasco that was the Biden debate on Thursday night, is the darkest moment in recent American history that I can remember. I sort of have it in with when Trump was elected in 2016. For me, when shit really went down near the end of the George Floyd rebellion, and the killing in Kenosha and the attack on protesters in Portland was very dark, and the category of Trump’s response to the George Floyd rebellion. then, of course, January 6th, and don’t forget the Dobbs decision — the bottom fell out of a lot of us when that incredibly horrific, forced motherhood decision came down, around this time of year, in June of ’22.

This is when they drop their worst decisions. This decision is absolutely horrifying, and you’ve seen all over the place the quoting from Sotomayor, the liberal Justice’s dissent. And bear in mind, she made the unusual step of reading her dissent aloud, and that is supposed to be, I’m told by Supreme Court watchers, a real sign of ideological or personal factional division within the Supreme Court, when you do that.

Basically, absolute immunity for official acts, with official acts defined in an incredibly broad brush stroke kind of way, along with this Chief Justice Roberts’ notion of presumptive immunity, which, as far as I can tell… well, there’s this distinction between official acts and unofficial acts, it’s very hazy — official acts are official acts and unofficial acts aren’t [granted immunity]. Their cover is that it’s going back to the district court to tease out this fine legal distinction between official and unofficial acts, but really, the way they’ve framed it is that the official acts — and then there’s this notion of presumed immunity, which basically makes just about anything that’s even slightly related to the official status of someone as President, we presume immunity in advance.

So it’s an absolute, broad, presumptive immunity. As Sotomayor said in her dissent, send out SEAL Team Six to kill a political rival? Immune. Take a bribe in order to institute presidential pardons? It’s immune. Use your office in corrupt kinds of ways to enhance your own economic portfolio? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. It’s an open recipe for authoritarian rule. I call this the fascist fuhrer decision, and in a lot of the commentary, we’re seeing references to divine right of kings — it’s a monarchical decision.

But we’re not in early modern Europe, we’re not at the end of the feudal era, we’re not in the period of the absolutist state, on the verge of the English or the French Revolutions or something, we’re in the modern capitalist era. When you look at the content of the parties behind all of this, the ideology and worldviews behind people putting up all praise to heaven [Appeal to Heaven] flags in their home, like Justice Alito and that white nationalism and Neo fascism of Trump and Trumpism. It’s really a fascist fuhrer decision.

It’s a little bit reminiscent of the enabling act after the Reichstag fucker in Nazi Germany. It’s a freaking blank check. It’s just absolutely horrifying, and it was on strict ideological grounds, 6-3. That thing about SEAL Team Six, that’s not an invention by Sotomayor, that actually came up in the previous level, in the District Court, where one of the district judges said to Trump’s lawyers: Are you saying that the President would be immune if he sent out SEAL Team Six to kill one of his rivals? And the legal logic of the argument was such that they had to say: Yes, we are saying that.

There’s a big joke going around in the Internet right now: Did the Supreme Court just give Joe Biden the power to send out a hit squad? To send B2 stealth bombers to Mar-a-Lago to take out Trump? It’s just absolutely extraordinary. I’d say it’s not just a recipe for authoritarian rule, per se, but that it’s a recipe for fascist power. And it connects with that debate issue that Biden had last week where he was just essentially incoherent and really being exposed as something a lot of us already knew he was, and there was a lot of fears in the electorate about, and just proved it, that he’s really not up to the job of fighting back against Trump, if even up to the job of the presidency right now. So the double whammy of the worsening of Biden’s reelection chances — and he needed a boost, and he got exactly the opposite. Now, of course, there’s all kinds of discussions and crisis within the Democratic Party, and it’s chilling.

Sam Goldman 17:26

It is quite chilling, both chilling in the fact that people are having to confront the reality that so many just did not want to face, which was that Trump will have zero accountability for any of his crimes.

Paul Street 17:43

That’s another, just, critical point.

Sam Goldman 17:46

You and I both said we’d caution people again and again to think seriously whether this was ever going to materialize, and even if it did, the extent to which it would be able to really take on the fascist threat. That said, now people are seeing: Oh, there will be no January 6th case — that he will never be tried for that. Not only that, a totally separate crime that happened before he was in power, when he was campaigning, that sentencing will happen, I guess, now in September, maybe. People coming to grips with sheer dreading of any semblance of what people know as the rule of law, or any “justice,” or however people see it.

That being gone, I think that’s major, and then you add in: What is the pathway that they’ve created for his plan of violent retribution? This being a fascist decision that’s teeing up for him to reseize power. I think that both sides of it really haven’t been reckoned with. I think that people are in a: What the fuck just happened? moment. And then they immediately go to: Okay, well, we need to look at, “our guy,” and is our guy gonna beat that guy? The whole frame of terms of debate get shrunk so, so tiny, back into electoral bullshit.

Paul Street 19:23

I was in Chicago briefly, and then I’m back in Iowa City, so I’m in liberal world. Iowa City’s just really bright blue, and its blueness is intensified by the fact that it’s a campus town in a red state. People are still reeling, many of them, just from the shock of the Biden debate. They’re all at the electoral level. But there’s these two critical aspects of bourgeois democracy. We’re not in the America farewell tour, to use Chris Hedges terms, we’re in the bourgeois democracy farewell tour right now. It’s in freefall.

There are two critical aspects of it: One is the electoral politics, which is just blowing up in people’s faces right now. And the other aspect is the rule of law. And this guy, Trump, this is the end of the game for all legal cases against Trump. There will not be another verdict, and there will not be a single verdict on his most serious crimes, which is attempt to overthrow, subvert, and cancel — even physically cancel — the 2020, presidential election. We are not going to get a trial and a verdict prior to the election.

The Georgia case has been completely screwed up and put past. The classified documents, case, there’s a Trump hack judge named Aileen Cannon, and she’s delayed it indefinitely. People were sort of hanging on for this one. There was the New York verdict, of course, but that doesn’t change anything. If anything he was able to fundraise off it. I was a little surprised by this decision. I thought the Supreme Court’s role was going to be to delay the ruling on the January 6th cases so far back that Trump could cancel him when he became president. A lot of us didn’t imagine the Supreme Court actually saying: Yes, the President can send out SEAL Team Six to kill his political opponents. And they freaking, did! They freaking did! They did this!

I think a lot of us are reeling in shock from that. Even some of us who get how bad this court is. Bear in mind, there’s a bit of a departure with this court: They refused to rig the census for Trump in 2020, they did not intervene in 2020-21 for him on the election, they did not actually sign on with the insane independent state legislature theory, which would have allowed the cancelation of popular votes in states that don’t go Republican ways, They kept Trump’s papers open for federal investigation and inspection. There were some reasons for liberals to kind of hope that the Court wasn’t going to go full Trumpist. This term is kind of a full on, that’s it, we’ve decided to go all the way with Trumpists, and they really are revealing themselves this time around as a fascist court.

Sam Goldman 21:52

I think that would be a good transition, Paul, to talk a little bit more about how this Court has further revealed itself as a completely illegitimate, fascist court with some of their other rulings this term.

Paul Street 22:06

You remember when some of us were in DC, when the Dobbs decision came down, and the first thing we said was: Illegitimate. This court is illegitimate! And if the evidence of its illegitimacy has only deepened the last couple years, Clarence Thomas is just an open recipient of millions dollars worth of in kind contributions from a far right wing [humms in thought]… must be a billionaire — I was gonna say millionaire, but we’re in billionaire period now… And Thomas is married to a woman who is a leading player in the attempts to overthrow the 2020, presidential election. Clarence Thomas’s wife is a putschist. Sam Alito has been caught flying white nationalist flags in his properties, including his New Jersey beach home. What is the name of that one flag? All praise to heaven? It’s a Christian white nationalist.

Sam Goldman 22:50

Appeal to heaven, not to interrupt.

Paul Street 22:52

[Laughs] He ruled in 2022, he cited medieval Christian doctrine in his Dobbs decision to defend female enslavement through forced motherhood. Those two people shouldn’t have been allowed to rule in this case. There have been numerous bad rulings from this court. These are not the only bad rulings. They overthrew the 40 year constitutional Chevron doctrine. I’m not a lawyer, but basically, the way I read it is essentially, disproportionately Christian, far right wing, white nationalist judges from the Federalist Society get to veto the expertise of policy experts at places like the FDA, the EPA, name your federal agency. The previous stare decisis ruling of deference to policy expertise is gone.

It has blown up across the board in numerous federal government agencies that deal with very complex matters of policy, like carbon emissions and drug safety and traffic safety and aviation safety, you know, mercury in the water. No deference to knowledge, to science, to expertise, which you know, even in a capitalist, bourgeois society, there’s such a thing as that, and it matters. And there used to be a ruling class that really cared about that, because ruling effectively required honoring that. They’re ready to freaking blow that shit up and go medieval on the environment, and go medieval on abortion drugs, and go medieval on social policy, generally speaking, environmental policy.

And that’s the Loper vs. Bright [Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo] decision, last Friday, horrifying decision, plutocratic decision. People go: Well, they’re not really fascist, they’re corporate, they’re neoliberal. Well, that’s a false dichotomy. Fascism and capitalism and neoliberalism are bound up with each other. Billionaires made out of wonderfully under classic fascism. The rich do very well. Fascism likes capitalism. It fits its survival of the fittest, ethos of social Darwinian rule. That was a long answer to your question. I may have lost your point there. Maybe I didn’t. [SG: No, my point was whether there were…] They made other decisions that were horrible.

Sam Goldman 24:55

Whether there were other decisions that are part of this trend of the court further revealing itself.

Paul Street 25:01

Oh yeah, bribes are okay. And Snyder versus the U.S., Ohio versus EPA, any industry second guessing can block pollution controls. Garland versus Cargill, this was horrifying, this was the decision that basically said hell yes to bump stocks; go ahead turn your military assault weapons into de facto freaking machine guns. Like that guy in Las Vegas who killed, what, 80 people. They essentially ruled that homelessness can be viewed as illegal; you can ticket people for homelessness. Bribes are okay, homelessness is illegal. I suppose bribing local policymakers to make homelessness illegal. It’s just insane. And by the way, liberals were thinking they got a decent ruling on the Idaho abortion law, which prevents the intervention even to save a woman’s life… No, what the court did was kick it back, but it didn’t actually intervene to save women’s lives for abortions required to keep their biological existence intact. It’s gotta be the most horrifying Supreme Court session since before the Civil War.

Sam Goldman 26:04

One of the things we’re talking today July 5th, and yesterday was July 4th, and I saw a lot of people posting about this being the last July 4th, the end of democracy because of the fear of Trump. It was tongue in cheek. People are are laughing as they’re crying, filled with fear, but also smiling about it. You had mentioned in passing the farewell America tour. I just wanted to get your thoughts on the moment that we’re in. People are thinking that it’s the end of something, and I guess

I worry about the people on the left — not the listeners of Refuse Fascism, that is — but there’s others that are kind of forgetting that it’s not like just everything burns and then something beautiful comes into being, that the direction things are going, I don’t think people can fully imagine what that hell would bring for immigrants, for trans folks, for women’s reproductive rights, for Palestinians. I don’t think people fully get the scale of like, we’re talking about something qualitatively different than things being even shittier than they are now. I was wondering what your thoughts are on this: Okay, America’s done. I mean, like, I wish! If America was done… but you can have a fascist America.

Paul Street 27:26

First of all, you know, July 4th, be careful about July 4th. The Declaration of Independence is a dodgy document in a number of ways. One of its great complaints against King George is that he stirred up domestic insurrections against the colonial overlords. Everyone ought really sit down and read twice, one of the greatest orations in human history: What to the slave is the meaning of the Fourth of July? delivered on July 5, 1852 in upstate New York, by the great bourgeois revolutionary Frederick Douglass.

But, you know, there’s this book that came out, I think, a few years ago by Chris Hedges — I think it was a book — and I like Chris Hedges, and Hedges has always sort of gotten the Christian fascism that is part of the American historical experience. The book was titled ‘America the Farewell Tour.’ This isn’t really the America the farewell tour. By all means, read Chris’ book, but also read Stephen Hahn’s new book that’s just come out, called Illiberal America. Hahn goes all the way back to the colonial period and up through the American historical experience to the present. He doesn’t want to say fascism for the last 10 years, and I think that’s a problem, but nonetheless, what he’s very good at is showing that illiberalism and anti -liberalism and authoritarianism and white supremacism and nativism and patriarchy and Christian fundamentalism have always been interwoven with the liberal and more civil and decent and tolerant wings of the American political tradition; it’s been an ongoing dance.

Trump and Trumpism, contrary to what Biden said in his campaign announcement in 2020, is not an anomaly for American history. Trumpism and this drifts towards a type of Amerikaner neo-fascism is also part of the American historical experience. I say that not in order to honor it, but in order to get us beyond this notion that this is outside of what America is. We really have to confront deeply the historical formation and the oppression structures that are a part of the American national experience to this very day, and that really means looking at our institutions and our society: our mode of production, the whole thing, and how it creates and germinates this fascism and where it comes from.

This fascism has many rich antecedents and very proto-fascistic moments in the American past, including the whole Jim Crow era, which was just an era of extraordinary proto-fascism. At the very least in the deep South. There’s a wonderful book by the non academic historian Adam Hochschild called ‘America Midnight,’ which really shows that this country had a very, damn near, fascist evolution, racist, patriarchal and anti-radical during and after World War One — during the presidency of a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. We’re not going through the American farewell tour, we might be going through the American bourgeois democracy, rule of law farewell tour, and I don’t know that the solution to that is to then go back and try and put bourgeois democracy and rule of law back together.

We might really have to be thinking about something more radical than that, because it is that mode, it is that system that gave birth to all of this. And not just here, there’s a big right wing moment in bourgeois France, which has more of a left and radical bourgeois, small ‘r’ republican and radical socialist tradition than the United States does. So it’s not just us, there’s a fascism problem globally.

Sam Goldman 30:46

Absolutely a global phenomena, a global moment. I was thinking about how all of this is developing — all of this being the court cases coming together at the same time as that debate, all of this is happening — and the Republi-fascists have not slowed down or stopped in this moment. You have the head of Heritage Foundation going off and saying, “We’re in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows.”

This is a moment where people are, I think, seeing more and more nakedly, more overtly, is the word I want to use, how brazen this movement is, how brazen these fascists are. They’ll go up and they will say their full plan. There is no hiding it, there’s no surprise. And you have the Supreme Court going out and saying: Great, let’s do that coup again; you want a platform of retribution? Here you go. Many people are extremely scared about that, and yet the streets are silent, where, in most other places, if this would happen, people would be pouring into the streets. Why is that?

Paul Street 32:02

Just for a second, that comment from Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation is really quite chilling. This judge-led revolution, try counter revolution. This is not a revolution. This is what, maybe our second counter revolution? Like the teardown of Reconstruction in the 19th century, now the last teardown of the what’s left of the New Deal, Great Society, civil rights, “revolution,” so that’s a counter revolution. “This revolution will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” What does that mean? What are there just like a bunch of leftists out there in the streets with bombs and guns?

That strikes me as a threat of violence on their part. If you resist this, if you oppose this, it won’t be bloodless. Refuse Fascism, we’ve been fighting from the first election of Trump on, to get people to understand what this is, that this, this is a fascist assault on what used to be previously normative modes of governance and rule in this country; bourgeois democracy. It’s a hard thing for Americans to connect with because of the strength and the power of liberal exceptionalism — the mythology of our supposedly indispensable and nation that, as Biden can’t stop saying, is the envy of the world of the way life should be; [mocking tone] the beacon of the world of the way life should be.

The Germans and the French have been protesting against the emergent power of their right wing parties. But bear in mind, they have living historical examples that they actually have to learn about in primary school of fascist governance. Obviously in Germany, the Third Reich, but in France, I think people still learn about the Vichy Regime, which was an openly collaborationist French fascist occupied governance system between 1940 and 1945, till the liberation — when was it? 44 — until the liberation of Paris and France. I think that lack of a historical model — we don’t have many living historical examples. That’s why I feel like Hochschild’s book, which is very readable, is really important. It really shows you during and after World War One, how far down a fascist path the United States went between 1917 and 1921. It’s really quite extraordinary.

Sam Goldman 34:07

What book is that, again?

Paul Street 34:08

American Midnight by Adam Hochschild. It came out, I think, earlier this year. It’s really extraordinary, the depth and the degree of of what he shows. It’s really worth a read. It’s very readable. It’s very recommended. He’s really something. Where are people? I’ve been talking to people in Iowa City, they’re scared, is where they are. There’s a lot of fear, and this has been an explicit right wing project, to make American politics so disgusting and so nauseating and so scary that people just recoil in horror from it and go back into their private lives.

America is a monument to — you know, the Serenity Prayer and the substance abuse recovery movement, give me the power to focus on the things that are within my sphere of influence, and also the power to see things that are outside my sphere of influence. You hear that a lot; I can’t really change this; this is too big, this is too complicated; Oh, I hope Biden can rally and get his brain back in shape, or maybe they’ll get somebody else in there, but it doesn’t look very good.

I’m a Refuse Fascism person, I say: What are you talking about? We’ve gotta fight this shit. We’ve gotta go to the streets, we’ve got to go into the public squares. We’ve got to really confront people with the reality of what we’re up against, not just in this election cycle, where people get seduced by this quicksand of electoral politics, or, as Bob Avakian says, it’s like the siren songs from Greek mythology, where every four years, people just can’t resist this definition of politics that’s about making little marks next to the names of one of two presidential candidates selected in advance for you by the ruling class in these quadrennial corporate crafted, big money, major media, candidate centered, candidate obsessed, electoral extravaganzas, to use Noam Chomsky’s phrase on that.

And as Chomsky used to say: “And that’s politics. That’s the only politics that exists.” No. We need a politics beneath and beyond these four year time cycles. We’re running out of time to think of politics that way. We don’t have, climatologically, environmentally, and in terms of geopolitics and what’s happening between the great imperial powers in the world. We don’t have time anymore for just hoping and wishing and fearing in connection with one day every four years. We have got to develop movements beneath and beyond all that.

I think that when Refuse Fascism started, that’s a lot of where it was, and there are other movements that are trying to do that. Who knows where we’ll be a year from now. We might have to be, we may very well be finding ourselves back in the streets and in the public squares again in different types of ways, with new types of allies. What’s happening now is quite instructive. I’m not an accelerationist, and I’m not somebody who says it’s all got to go to hell to really show people how it is.

On the other hand, the system is accelerating. I’m not an accelerationist, you’re not accelerationist, but American late capitalism/imperialism is an accelerationist, and if and when we get this full fascist consolidation, as I think is going to happen, I’m not personally, and I don’t have the money for it anyway, I’m not going to be one of these people who’s start going on Facebook and talking about my plans to live in France or Denmark or Ecuador or Colombia or Mexico. I don’t think you can escape American imperialism. They might be going fascist in France, Italy’s got a fascist Prime Minister. Where are you gonna go? I mean, you know, and climatologically… I’m gonna stay I’m gonna stay here. I’m gonna fight. Trump says he wants to clear the Marxist vermin. Okay, deport me to Denmark.

Sam Goldman 37:37

But you know, when he’s saying that, he’s not actually talking about communists. He’s actually talking about the Democratic Party.

Paul Street 37:47

When you call the Democratic Party communists, that really is showing how far down the path of fascist ideology you have gone. It’s just a preposterous association, and it doesn’t resonate with independents. It doesn’t have any electoral cache. The only people that listen to that and think that’s cool are people already in the kind of Trumpian neo-fascist base. So what is that? It’s an indication that they really are tapped into aspects of classic fascist ideology. That’s Mein Kampf kind of stuff. That’s the origins, the anti-Bolshevism and all of that.

Sam Goldman 38:19

I want to thank you so much, Paul, for taking the time to chat with me. Folks should go and check out the Paul Street Report. Make sure you subscribe so that you can regularly read and sometimes listen to Paul’s analysis.

Now to focus on one big element of the fascist agenda, a project that’s tied directly into the Court’s recent decision. We have HuffPost reporter Matt Shuham to talk about Schedule F. This is the Trump plan, which he began to institute in the waning days of his last term, that would purge the U.S. government of people who hold what are deemed non-political positions and to replace them with Trump loyalists. In this conversation, we get into what Schedule F is and why and how they plan to implement this.

But I also want to draw attention to the mass movement component of this, where Trump’s conspiracy theories and vindictive rage is directing people to despise and dehumanize experts and administrators as tools of the deep state, as enemies of Trump. We see this from the stages of Trump rallies to the MAGA media networks, to the dark corners of the internet. Earlier this year, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a man, immersed in in Trump World, murdered and decapitated his own father, an engineer, for the crime of having been a federal employee. In a live YouTube video, he raised the severed head and called on people to join him in killing all federal workers.

It’s true that in many ways, the federal bureaucracy was the most effective opponent, or at least hurdle, of Trump’s program in his first term. But it never should have been, and relying on it now would be utterly ridiculous. We must build a real opposition to fascism. The people who don’t want to live in their future must become an unmovable force that not only impedes the fascist movement, but that ends it. Now, my interview with Matt Shuham.

I’ve often spoken on the show about how dangerous and deadly Trump’s first term was, and how even as dangerous and deadly as Trump’s first term was, which many have seemingly forgotten or excused, what the Republi-fascists are promising, and are increasingly prepared to do, would make that look like Fisher Price fascism. Schedule F, Agenda 47, Trump’s own policy bucket list, and Project 2025, which is facilitated by the Heritage Foundation to be ready day one with a full roster of MAGA loyalists to replace all those the regime plans on purging.

In Trump’s first term in office, Trump faced a big problem: With every extreme action, he was faced with officials who blocked him from within the federal bureaucracy, thankfully, which is a vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of doing this thing called government. They stood in his way and said: Wait, wait, no, you can’t actually do that. This time, the Fascists are preparing for a complete takeover of the government with an army of loyalists behind Trump’s every move to take things all the way — to shred the “normal government functions,” in order to carry out their full agenda.

A key part of this, enabling this, is in Trump’s plan called Schedule F. For a breakdown of Schedule F, I’m chatting with Matt Shuham, who recently wrote an article over on HuffPost titled “The Chilling Trump Plan That Could Pave the Way for Authoritarianism.” Matt is a reporter for The HuffPost national desk. Welcome Matt, so glad to be speaking with you.

Matt Shuham 41:55

Thanks so much for having me, Sam. I really appreciate the chance to talk about this reporting.

Sam Goldman 41:59

I guess, first, out of all the stories that come across your desk, what motivated you to be like: See this? this, we need to get into, this, I need to be writing about.

Matt Shuham 42:11

Yeah, it started years ago. I was at a website called Talking Points Memo. I was writing a weekly column at the time called The Trump Swamp, and it was basically focused on the executive branch and specifically on political self interests. What was Trump doing, and what were members of his administration doing to enrich themselves, to benefit their donors? that sort of thing. It was a lot on how the regulatory process worked, how the staffing at these agencies worked.

In October of 2020, Schedule F sort of made its debut. That’s when Trump signed the executive order saying we’re going to take tens of thousands, potentially even more, civil servants, strip them of their job protections, and make them at will employees. In the context of making government work for the President and his allies, that seemed like a really big deal. At the time, it got far enough that certain agencies in the government started to make lists of job descriptions that would qualify for Schedule F, that would qualify for having the job protection stripped, and to make them essentially political employees of the President.

Then Trump lost, Biden, took office, reversed the executive order, and now that the next presidential election is only a few months away, Schedule F is once again in the news, because there’s a possibility that Trump will win, and if he does win, he’s made it pretty clear that he’s going to pursue this, not in the last months of his administration, but as soon as he takes office.

Sam Goldman 43:43

In your article, you wrote that Donald Trump has no greater enemy than the United States federal bureaucracy — what he calls the “deep state.” And he has a plan to bend it to his will if he’s elected in November.” That is Schedule F. So what exactly is Trump’s Schedule F plan and its significance for federal civil service.

Matt Shuham 44:05

It helps to know just a bit of history about how the federal civil service works. Basically, when we first started out as a country, and for a few decades after that, if you knew somebody in government, you could get a job. If you did a favor for them on the campaign trail, if you were connected then in some way. Over the centuries, there have been civil service reforms that have basically made it so the majority of federal employees have merit protections, meaning you’re hired and fired based on merit, rather than personal connections or political favors, and if a disciplinary action is taken against you, you can appeal it and say this was done because my boss didn’t like me or they didn’t like my politics.

So the majority of the federal civil service is governed by those protections. There are exceptions to those job protections, and they’re laid out in categories that are called schedules. Schedule A, B, C, D, E, exist. There are certain exceptions, for example: intelligence officers, attorneys with specialized knowledge, that sort of thing, where it might make sense if there’s a certain demand for a job category, and the civil service protections make it too onerous for the government to hire people.

The most well known exception are the President’s political appointees, the people who, when a president takes office, they bring about 4,000 people with them to help staff the White House, as well as people who are confirmed by the Senate to lead the various agencies — so the people at the top of the political hierarchy. Schedule F makes a new category based on people who have “confidential policy determining, policy making and policy advocating positions.” That is a lot of people.

Just think about what it means to have a policy making position. It could mean someone who crunches numbers at a financial regulatory agency. It could be an environmental scientist. It could be an IT person. I saw job descriptions of secretaries, because they come in contact with sensitive documents, they could be turned into an accepted position. So what Schedule F does is add tens of thousands of job categories, taking them from the competitive service, with these merit protections, to the accepted service where you can be, in this case, hired and fired based on the whim of your boss or based on the whim of the president.

Sam Goldman 46:37

My understanding is that the aim of Schedule F for the potential Trump 2.0 would be to gut the U.S. Civil Service and install political appointees, and that this could happen, that it’s it’s a realistic proposal. Oftentimes we’ll see a news story like this, and immediately you’ll have on MSNBC, CNN, wherever you watch, you’ll have pundits being like: We can’t actually do that, that won’t actually happen. If you could, walk us through a bit how this could go about.

Matt Shuham 47:13

That’s a really important point, because there are a lot of policies where Trump says: Oh, I want to make a fight club for asylum seekers or something — and it’s like: Okay, I mean, that’s repulsive, but would that actually happen? But this is one of those policies where that phrase that is used, that he wants to transfer the job positions that are confidential, policy determining, policy making, policy advocating, that’s in the current law. That’s the current civil service law.

The reason it hasn’t happened before now is because that phrase has generally been used to apply to political positions. The people I just discussed who work in the White House, who the President has the ability to hire and fire. The reason that this could happen, and likely will happen if Trump is elected, is the executive order he signed in October 2020 expanded the scope of the existing law to apply to tens of thousands of additional job classifications. So it’s not like they’re inventing a new law, it’s not like they would need Congress to sign off on this.

Basically, this is them saying we’re going to take the existing law, we’re going to apply it to a lot more people. They might face a lawsuit from a federal employee union or something like that if this happens. But I’ve spoken to people on both sides of this issue who say, no, they have a shot at succeeding in court if Trump wins. The Biden administration did pass a rule a few months ago saying all that language in the civil service reform law from the 1970s, this policy making language, that only applies to the political people, that doesn’t apply to anyone else, and if you’re reclassified against your will, if you’re turned into an at will employee, you have the ability to contest that, to appeal it.

But that’s just a rule, that’s not a law. If Trump takes office, he can just make his own rule, and he could put Schedule F into place. There have been a few efforts by congressional Democrats make a new law and civil service protections [to] protect against being reclassified into an at will employee. But those haven’t reached the President’s desk, and frankly, it doesn’t look like they’ll have the opportunity to reach Biden’s desk before November, because Congress is split between Democrats and Republicans. If Trump wins, I don’t think it’s unlikely that he would pursue this, and again, the only thing that stopped him last time was Schedule F got delayed.

According to the people who created it, the people in his White House, it was delayed by Covid, and then there’s a lot of back and forth behind the scenes with lawyers for the White House making sure they crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s, and by the time it was ready for Trump to sign, it was already October. Because Biden won, Schedule F was prevented, but if Trump had won a second term, no doubt he would have pursued it, and if he wins in November again, no doubt, according to everything that I’ve seen and heard from people who know more about this than I do, he’ll pursue it once he gets in the White House.

Sam Goldman 50:05

I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about the implications of this and what it would offer the Trumpist movement, how maybe it aligns, or manifests his “I am your retribution” motto; how it fits into the overall program, from what you’ve been researching, what people who are opposing it are bringing to light, that kind of thing.

Matt Shuham 50:26

I feel like a metaphor that people use for the government is that it’s like this giant ship, and if you’re trying to change course, it takes a long time for a huge ship to change course in the water, because Congress, over the years, has given the federal government a lot of responsibilities. The federal government is charged with protecting the environment, administering Social Security, research, regulation, everything in between.

So, by design, there are a lot of checks and balances inside the federal bureaucracy to make sure that the executive branch executes the law according to what Congress, representative of the will of the people, has created in its legislation. So that’s how our government works, is all these checks and balances. Trump represents, sort of the unitary executive theory, this idea that the President should have a lot more power and a lot more political leeway once he gets into office to form the government to his will. There’s a lot of legal debate over how much power this president should have, but Schedule F is a way to give him a lot of power very quickly.

There are a few reasons it would do that: Again, the main one is the at will employment category, 50,000, let’s say, people who touch policy in some way — whether they’re crunching numbers or interpreting the law or whatever else — they can be fired immediately if they get on the wrong side of their bosses. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but the secondary effect of that is they can be fired, so the knowledge that you can be fired for crossing your bosses, that creates a chilling effect in the government. So even people who have no interest in politics, you might just want to make sure that banks are following the rules, suddenly they’re aware of their boss’s politics.

There’s a quote from a financial regulator who may be reclassified to Schedule F that I include in my piece. She said: “We shouldn’t have to worry about other things, like I might be fired if I say the wrong thing to the wrong person, or I now have to compete with that guy for my job because that guy happens to wear a red hat or a blue hat.” So there’s this knowledge that politics has entered the workplace, but I think the effect of this that I hadn’t really considered and that we ended up highlighting in our story is sort of the authoritarian impulse that Trump has talked a lot about, like you just said, that he is the revenge and that his supporters want, that he wants.

So yes, you can go after individual people, you can strip them of their jobs, but you could also make the government work for and against people whose politics you like or don’t like. That’s where this sort of authoritarian impulse comes in. There’s a quote from Donald Moynihan, he was a professor of public policy at Georgetown, and he’s spoken a lot about Schedule F — not all of this made it into the piece — but he told me if you look at authoritarian countries, there’s a pattern of going after the Civil Service, going after the administrative apparatus, because that is sort of the skeleton key for the executive at the top of the government having his way much easier, is sort of those middlemen that actually regulate and execute policy. That’s who this would affect.

Sam Goldman 53:38

That makes a lot of sense. Matt, I was hoping that you could tell us a little bit about how Schedule F fits into other things that people are becoming familiar with, unfortunately. I mean, it’s good that people are becoming familiar with it now — better now than after the fact — but I’m thinking about Project 2025 and how it those kind of fit together.

Matt Shuham 53:58

A lot of Project 2025 — I feel like I just pulled up the table of contents — there’s like a 900 page document that is Project 2025. Heritage Foundation got all these groups together, and they said: Ideally, what would the next presidency look like? They never really said, Trump, but even if he loses, the next Republican that takes office, chances are they’re going to agree with a lot of what’s in here. If you just look down the table of contents on this thing, the White House, the personnel agencies, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, State, Intelligence, Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, the EPA, Interior, Justice, all of these are executive branch agencies, and all of them are sort of part of this civil service apparatus that Schedule F would affect.

In essence, what this would do is take the political position at the top of that agency and extend it throughout the middle of the agency. There’s a guy named James Shirk who worked in Trump’s White House. He’s credited, and he’s taken credit for coming up with the idea of Schedule F, for going through the old Civil Service laws, coming across this language that says: This doesn’t apply to policy making people, it applies to everyone else, these protections. He’s the one who had the light bulb moment, he called it, of saying: Wow, this could really apply to tens of thousands of more people than it currently does. What he said — I’ll search my article for it — he said it could apply to 50,000 people, but the most important federal workers, he said, the people who are telling all the rest of the bureaucracy what to do.

Now, we can argue if that’s actually the case, but that’s what they see the role of Schedule F as being, is taking 50,000 or 100,000 or however many it ends up being, and saying: Because you are in that crucial role between the political appointees and, let’s say, the Border Patrol officer, or the IRS Agent, who are on the ground, that middle section, anything that Project 2025 wants to do, it depends on having those sorts of positions sort of in line and able to reflect the President’s will.

Sam Goldman 56:07

One of the things that stood out to me in your article is where you quote Professor Moynihan, where he says: “This feels like the biggest problem that the fewest people understand about a potential second Trump administration.” Given that Schedule F is just out there, given that Project 2025 has been out there — they’re posting it. They’re not hiding it. They’re brazen.

In fact, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the organization that facilitated Project 2025, is brazen, goes on MSNBC and basically doubles down on: Yes, this is a means to institutionalize Trumpism. I just wonder, there are exceptions to this, there’s the John Oliver segment that got into Schedule F and Project 2025, so I don’t want to say there aren’t exceptions, but why do you think it’s only now that we are just beginning to see more coverage of this?

Matt Schuham 57:06

That’s a great question. If anyone hasn’t seen John Oliver’s, he did a really great job, actually. It came out right after our article, and I really appreciated how he treated this. So I would recommend that. I think the easiest answer to it is the campaign season is heating up again, and maybe reporters are just now remembering: Oh yeah, there’s that Schedule F thing in October, whatever happened to that? I think another reason is that people don’t generally stand up for bureaucrats.

The Democratic Party doesn’t do a good job of standing up for federal workers, and ever since sort of Bill Clinton, I feel like there was sort of a trend in the Democratic Party, to sort of accept the premise that government isn’t the answer, that government workers aren’t to be trusted, that really it’s about handing power back to communities or individuals, or there’s this political trend away from a belief in sort of a capability of government to tackle shared communal problems. That makes it harder for Democratic politicians to make an issue out of Schedule F, because it’s not as sympathetic of a constituency, federal workers.

I think that in particular, that dynamic, has made this harder for reporters to talk about because it hasn’t been as big of an issue on the campaign trail for Joe Biden or for other Democrats. There are certain members of Congress, particularly around DC, obviously, the people who have a lot of federal workers in their constituency, who make a lot of noise about Schedule F, so they deserve credit, but overall, I feel like Democrats don’t have a lot of stomach for standing up for the role the federal government should play, and it’s been like this for a few decades.

It’s sort of an odd dynamic, but I think if you look at the role the federal government does play, there are so many things that as Americans, we’ve come to expect from the federal government: environmental regulation, things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. I spoke to someone from the project on government oversight, Joe Spielberger there, I spoke to him, the Policy Council, who pointed out just the administration of basic benefits that people rely on. If you have a Civil Service that is afraid that they could be fired for any reason, which is what at will employment means, even if they’re trying to make their bosses happy, they’re going to be working slower, they’re going to be a lot more cautious, and things are just going to grind to a halt. I think if that were to be the case, the public would really take notice. They would really be upset, but it’s hard to find politicians making those sort of arguments now, when it’s not a reality.

Sam Goldman 59:41

When it’s a potential, but not yet. Yeah, I mean even things like, today’s the anniversary of two years since the Dobbs decision, what it would mean for Heath and [MS: Human Services] — yeah, thank you — if you only have loyalists? What information gets out to the public and what doesn’t? It’s truly staggering to think about the impact that it would have, really on every aspect of people’s lives, to have only people in power that are going along with that party line.

On our show, we would call it fascism. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the response from the Civil Service community, because that’s something that stands out in your piece. I wanted to lift up two things for listeners: One is, there’s a working group to protect and reform U.S. Civil Services, and there’s a petition with signatories from different roles, whether in Civil Services or people in academia, that are defending those roles.

Separately, there was a letter to congressional leaders from, these are not radical rabble rouser folks, it was a bunch of old Bush era national security officials that warned against Schedule F. Those are some things that caught my attention, but I’d love to hear, and I know listeners would as well. What kind of response is this getting from the Civil Service community? And what are they doing now? Because it doesn’t seem like you could do much after the fact.

Matt Schuham 1:01:09

So there are unions for federal workers. The American Federation of Government Employees is a huge one. There’s another that I quote in the piece NTEU, the National Treasury Employees Union. They raised a lot of hell when this came out. Initially, they were really upset. They understood the kind of impact this could have, yes, on the federal government, but also on the members of their unions, the folks whose interests they represent. Like you said, there’s also a lot more conservative leaning sort of groups, or maybe temperamentally conservative, people like policy professors, even some military folks I’ve seen.

I spoke to a sitting federal prosecutor for our piece, Stephen Wasserman, who didn’t speak to me in his official capacity, but rather as the president of the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys — it’s not a union, but it’s a professional association that represents Assistant U.S. attorneys. I remember when I was at Talking Points Memo, I spoke to representatives at the Senior Executive Service, which is sort of a smaller group of federal workers that have employment protections, but they’re also part of leadership, it’s sort of an in between group, so kind of across the spectrum of federal employees, people who study the Civil Service, and people who rely on the Civil Service, you know, former government executives, have raised the alarm about this kind of thing. They’ve requested documents, that’s how I came in contact with a lot of them. NTEU did a public records request of Schedule F documents from the first Trump term, basically to see how far this got.

That’s the reason they and American Oversight, a watchdog group, did public records requests. American Oversight hasn’t published theirs, but they shared them with me, and the two public records matched each other. They both sort of showed, I think this is at the Office of Management and Budget, which is kind of an office that does budget analyses on the rest of the government, so there’s a lot of policy folks there. 68% of the jobs at the Office of Management and Budget would have qualified for Schedule F according to the first Trump administration. We have those documents, and we have the literal job descriptions of what would qualify because NTEU did that records request.

They’ve also lobbied the Biden administration, first to rescind the executive order, which Biden did, second, to pursue the new rule that would make Schedule F harder to pursue, which Biden did. It wouldn’t make it impossible, but it would take a little bit longer. They’ve also supported those efforts in Congress, but like I said, those haven’t gotten to Biden’s desk yet. But yeah, the federal employee unions in particular have done a really good job, I think, in raising awareness, including of their members. I feel like a lot of federal workers don’t realize what this is or where it’s going, and may affect them, so I feel like they’ve done good work in educating their members and the public on this issue.

Sam Goldman 1:04:03

Are there any developments since you conducted that series of interviews and wrote the article that you think that listeners need to know, that people should be aware of?

Matt Shuham 1:04:15

I quoted a video from Trump, it was a few months ago, and I quoted it at the top of the piece. He called Schedule F power to remove rogue bureaucrats, and he said: “I’ll wield that power very aggressively.” So that hasn’t changed, he’s sticking with it, he’ll pursue it if he’s elected. My editor flagged me an article from the Associated Press, I’m just reading it now, the headline of the article, this was today: “Conservative Backed Group is Creating a List of Federal Workers It Suspects Could Resist Trump Plans,” which is an ominous headline.

Just like Project 2025 — it is linked to the Heritage Foundation — so is this. The Heritage Foundation gave a $100,000 grant to a small right wing group called the American Accountability Foundation, and the goal is, to read from the article here: “To post one hundred names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second term Trump agenda, ripe for scrutiny, reclassification, reassignment or firings.”

It sounds like this right wing group was given $100,000 by the Heritage Foundation to create a hundred name list of government workers who could get in the way of Trump’s agenda, and who could be reclassified or fired. What that tells me is the sort of right wing ecosystem from which Schedule F emerged is not only not backing down, but that they think this is a winning issue, that they think this resonates with the public, that they think putting a list of 100 government workers up on a website is something people want [chuckles].

We saw this during the Republican presidential primary: Ron DeSantis endorsed Schedule F, a few other people did as well. So I think before, in 2020, this was maybe not such a public push to reclassify all these workers. Trump talked about the “Deep state,” but he didn’t really get into too much detail in his public speeches. But what I see going forward is they’re going to make this a public campaign issue. I think, like we were talking about earlier, the Democratic Party has not really put a bunch of energy into countering that narrative. So I’m interested to see what they do in response to this.

I’m gonna keep following and keep in touch with federal employees’ unions to see how they deal with this and these right wing groups, like I said, I think there’s going to be more of this type of thing. I don’t know what you would call this. The AP article compared it to McCarthyism, which I think is a useful way to think about it. I would be on the lookout if people are listening to this and are interested in following along, how people talk about Schedule F and how they pitch it to voters, because this really does come down to what happens this November.

Sam Goldman 1:07:00

Yeah, and I think part of it has to do with people getting the implications and seeing the through lines between this program of vengeance and this program of retribution and Schedule F. I think that there will be a lot of framing of this increasing efficiency, and that kind of thing, and I would just strongly advise people to go back to: Where’s this going and what purpose does it serve?

This has been said before, but I think bears repeating that there was a lot of surprise the first time around, yes, by the majority of people filled with outrage that Trump was now in the White House, but also by Trump and his people; Uh, we’re here, we gotta govern now? Like, there was surprise and there was chaos, and chaos with a purpose, but there was chaos. They’re coming in, this time, or they want to come in this time, and they’re coming in prepared, and they’re coming in with their lists ready, of their good list and their naughty list, of the people they want to remove, and they’re ready to implement their program fully. That’s incredibly dangerous.

I want to thank you for your work highlighting Schedule F and what that has to do with the Trumpist movement’s aims and taking the time to talk with us about it. Really appreciate it, and I want to give you an opportunity to share, how can we connect with you, your work? Where do we go if we want to read more? Where do you want to send people to?

Matt Shuham 1:08:33

Just Google my name, Matt Shuham and my work’s at HuffPost. My email is just [email protected] I’m always eager to hear from people about stories they think are important. I also do a personal newsletter called Gathering String at Substack, so you could search for that. It’s mainly been about the war in Gaza, just to try to keep some focus on that, because I think that’s important. I’m on social media, but I’m the only Matt Shuham with my name, so if folks want to get in touch, you can just Google, I’m around.

Sam Goldman 1:09:04

We’ll link to your author page on HuffPost, and we’ll link to your Substack in the show notes. Thank you, Matt, so much for coming on and talking with me.

Matt Shuham 1:09:13

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the chance to talk about this. I think it’s a really important issue, and I really appreciate people are starting to clock it as an important issue.

Sam Goldman 1:09:22

One fact we want to add is that, in addition to a list of a hundred people the fascists want fired, Project 2025, under Heritage Foundation’s lead, has been painstakingly constructing a database with a goal of tens of thousands of people willing to step into these purged departments as Trump loyalists. They already have a beginning list of thousands of people whose fascist loyalties come pre-certified by the Heritage Foundation.

While the Republifascists are salivating and enthusiastic at their prospect of retribution, will we remain cowed and confused, fearful but resigned? Will we put our heads in the sand, or continue to believe, against all evidence, our proxies in power have this covered? Will we accept Trump’s cruel and brutal future? The future remains unwritten, but it is racing forward. Which one we get is up to us. We encourage folks to join the march on the RNC Monday, July 15 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The rally is starting at 11am followed by a march. The starting point is Red Arrow Park, which is located at 920 North Water Street.

Sam Goldman 1:10:31

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Wanna help this show reach more people at a time when it’s needed more than ever? Perfect. As people rightly agonize over the fascist threat, help grow the community we need by literally wearing Refuse Fascism emblazoned across your chest by purchasing one or more of our Refuse Fascism T-shirts. When you buy the shirt, you’re also helping produce and promote the show. So take a look at the show notes to get your shirt today. When it arrives, I hope you’ll take a selfie or a pic of your whole crew wearing your Refuse Fascism shirts. Post it up on the socials and tag Refuse Fascism to spread the word. Can’t wait to see it.

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Leave us a voicemail — we always love hearing your voice — see the show notes for the button to do that. And if you want to reach me, you can find me at Twitter, @SamBGoldman, you can drop me a line at [email protected] or find me on the tiktoks @SamGoldmanRF. Thanks to Mark Tinkelman, Richie Marini and Lina Thorne for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each show, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism..org and sign up to get them in your inbox. Until next Sunday, In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!