Chaos Comes Calling with Sasha Abramsky

Refuse Fascism Episode 217

Sun, Sep 15, 2024 2:19PM • 43:24

Sasha Abramsky  00:00

What happens when MAGA comes to town? It turns out, when MAGA comes to town, chaos follows. If you bring into power people whose sort of overriding motivation is to deconstruct the apparatus of government, at the end of the day, you don’t get smaller better government, you just get worse government, you just get chaotic government, and it comes with all kinds of consequences.

Sam Goldman  00:41

Welcome to episode 217 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. 

In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Sasha Abramsky, author of Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far Right Takeover of Small Town America. Thanks to our patrons who make this show possible. Patrons join us for our next virtual event, a discussion of the War Game documentary, Sunday, October 6, at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific. If you want to join us and aren’t a patron yet, sign up to become one for as little as $2 a month over at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism, Patrons, find out information, including how to register for the event over at our Patreon page. 

Thanks to those who are spreading the imperative by purchasing and wearing our Refuse Fascism t-shirt and those who take the extra step to share the show to rate, review, and subscribe, which helps more people discover this resource and join the community. So hopefully, after today’s show, you’ll be inspired to do the same.

Before we get to the conversation, we need to talk about the debate and the escalating racist attacks on Haitian immigrants. Springfield, Ohio is being terrorized. On the debate stage Tuesday night, Donald Trump claimed that he had seen on television that Haitian immigrants are eating family pets, cats and dogs all over this small, all American town in the heartland. Earlier in the week, we had heard the same story from J.D. Vance — truly horrific shit. But it’s not the Haitian immigrants who are terrorizing Springfield because, shocker, Trump and Vance were lying. It is, in fact, the MAGA foot soldiers, including, but not limited to, explicit neo-Nazi groups, Blood Tribe  and Goyim Defense League. 

In the days since the debate, Springfield City Hall, Springfield’s hospitals, their schools and even their DMV have been forced into lockdown multiple times from very real bomb threats issued by the MAGA mob. As we are recording, we learned that today, Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio has canceled all events as someone has threatened to shoot Haitians on campus. Other targets include the Mayor and the parents of an 11 year old child who died in a car accident last year. Fascists have seized on Aiden Clark’s accidental death to claim that Haitians were dangerous. Aiden’s father, Nathan, spoke out to condemn this blood libel, and now he is being targeted with the full weight of the fascist movement. 

Last month, armed neo-Nazis waving swastika flags marched through downtown Springfield, and now Proud Boys have joined in. These accusations of pet eating are not simply rumors, as much of the press would have you believe, but disinformation spawned on neo-Nazi social media platforms — disinformation that was then taken up by Fox News, other more mainstream fascist media scions of supposedly serious conservative institutions, before coming out of the mouths of the very highest leaders of the 21st century American fascist movement. The local Nazis celebrated this, going on to Telegram, taking credit for putting Springfield on the map, saying: “This is what real power looks like.” 

Trump and his fascist movement have been attacking immigrants from the global south as a leading edge in their campaign to re-seize power. Already, right now, inflicting cruelty in the Rio Grande with deadly razor wire, promising the immediate mass deportation of at least 10 million people, trying to coin the term “migrant crime,” as a new worst kind of crime, claiming that the Democrats are using undocumented people to steal the upcoming election, calling for even more violence and militarization on the border, celebrating migrants’ deaths, and all but promising to order Border Patrol to shoot brown people on sight. 

The Democrats’ response has been varied, but it should be noted that it includes unleashing vigilantes, .like New York City’s so called Guardian Angels to intimidate and beat up people they suspect of lacking documentation, and it includes Biden and Harris’s current militarized border policy along with their proposed legislation to crack down with thousands more Border Patrol agents. This latest development in Ohio, which has shown no signs of fading away, is straight out of the Nazi playbook, but let’s be clear, it is also straight out of centuries of American history. Irrational and debunked moral panics have been at the heart of wave after wave of all-American violence at home and abroad, and they widely persist today, even if their extremes have been temporarily checked. 

From the anti-Arab sleeper cell hysteria of the 2000s to the racist tropes of the War on Drugs of the 90s, from fears of godless communists collectivizing wives in the 20th century, to the myth of free Black people ravaging white women en masse in the 1800s. And almost every time, in addition to the lying, the supposed targets at these heinous fictitious crimes are groups — women, children and now pets — being systematically victimized by the very perpetrators of these myths. We’re even seeing the same fascists perpetrate another panic in real time, one presenting trans people as a dire threat to women and children in sports and education and culture, in bathrooms, and society at large. It’s worth noting that many Haitian immigrants are in a particularly vulnerable position in the U.S. today, as their temporary protected status can be revoked at any time by any administration. 

TPS gives legal residency to people who have fled to this country from Haiti, as a result of the political chaos and violence that boiled over with the assassination of Haiti’s president in 2021, and before that, fleeing from the effects of the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country. A number of commentators have come out to defend the Haitian community, saying that they are reviving the struggling town in Springfield, Ohio. But that isn’t the point. They are human beings. This dehumanization, the threats, the violence would be unacceptable, directed at people of any nationality, regardless of their contributions. And it’s not a coincidence that the reason so many have come to the United States from Haiti is because the U.S. has systematically destroyed Haiti for literally centuries, through assassinations, coups, invasions, imperialist trade agreements enforced at the barrel of a gun. 

Trump’s fear-mongering at the debate, a stage he has repeatedly used to incite violence, is not a distraction. It’s not just an unhinged tantrum from a mentally deteriorating man. It’s not just another politician lying. For all the talk that the debate lacked serious talk about policies and issues, this is his policy: from his birther days peddling lies about Obama, to his grand descent down the golden escalator in 2015, claiming Mexico is sending rapists across the border, through four years of draconian border policy, Muslim bans separating families and much more. 

Now through four years of strengthening the core of his fascist movement to overcome everything that held him back in his first term, this is what Trump is. This is who he is. This is his policy. It is the real world program. The men who massacred Latino people in El Paso at the El Paso Walmart, Black people at the Buffalo supermarket and Jewish people at the Tree of Life Synagogue may not have been on the payrolls of the Trump administration, but the line separating official policy from semi-sanctioned slaughter is a line that the fascists themselves are fast erasing here and across the globe once more. 

The actual policies and issues were on display despite widespread opinions to the opposite. They are just so horrifying that people don’t want to acknowledge that, and the PR machine of the Democrats is eager to spin legitimately horrifying promises of violence into apolitical, inconsequential tirades and tantrums. Once more, we see the decent people content making jokes amongst themselves as the fascists incite real world violence against the most oppressed. The  Haitian people in Springfield are telling anyone who will listen that they are scared, that they feel isolated. 

What would it look like if the tens of millions of people across this country who don’t want a fascist future, let alone the federal government, left the jokes aside, left aside being personally offended, as in the words of Biden spokesperson, Karine Jean Pierre, and fully recognized the terror being brought down on this community? What if people actually stepped up and stood with our Haitian siblings in Ohio and across the country, acting with the understanding that these attacks on immigrants are the linchpin and battering ram of the whole fascist program? not allowing the vicious, lethal anti-immigrant rhetoric to go unopposed, working to defend immigrants now so that it’s clear that immigrants and refugees are welcome and it’s the fascists that must get the fuck out, and setting up plans to protect oppressed people, especially immigrants living in red and purple states and those where power is contested?

Because while we’re laughing, Trump’s people are taking this all deadly seriously. Watching Trump on that stage, it’s hard to fathom how anyone could support this man as a serious candidate. He is entirely illegitimate. But his base does. Our disbelief can often conceal the fact that millions in this country thought he won the debate, just like he won the last election! They think that he’s bravely fighting the bad guys, tit for tat, that his bellicose lies are courageous truths. This doesn’t go away by ignoring it. It certainly doesn’t go away by laughing at it. It is then of no surprise but logical extension, that once the demonization and inciting of violence has led to real world threats and terror, Trump doubles down on dehumanization of immigrants as the fascist movement salivates at the pogrom it is propelling. Just listen to what he said since the debate:

Donald Trump  11:14

Under Kamala Harris and the communist left, our country is under invasion. We are under invasion, just like it was an Army, except in many ways it’s more difficult because they don’t wear a uniform. You don’t know who the hell to go after.

ABC moderator  11:30

The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, the police chief, the Republican governor of Ohio, have all debunked this story about people eating pets, and now there are bomb threats at schools and kids being evacuated. Why do you still spread it?

Donald Trump  11:41

No, no, no. The real threat is what’s happening at our border. Because you have thousands of people being killed by illegal migrants coming in and also dying. You have women dying as they come up. They’re coming up in large groups. We call it a caravan. I think I came up with that name, but it’s really what it is — 10,000 15,000 20,000 people… and illegal Haitians, and he came in, illegal Haitian migrants taking over a beautiful place [strained wistful tone]. It was so beautiful. Springfield, Ohio, I was there. I campaigned there a while ago, Springfield. It was so beautiful. Now it’s just — what a place. Can you imagine? You have this small, little community, all of a sudden, you have 20,000 illegals in your community. Nobody knows where they come from. I’m angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.

Sam Goldman  12:40

And Vance has continued to spread the Hitlerian lie that there’s been a rise in infectious diseases in Springfield since migrants arrived. So it doesn’t go away when we ignore it. It doesn’t go away when we laugh about it. It doesn’t go away when we leave it at being personally offended. It goes away when we, as a society, collectively, institutionally confront it, when we fight it — when we dig it up from its roots and throw out that toxic soil too. And to the extent that our societies, institutions and organizations refuse to do that and divert us from doing that, they can go too. 

This was not the only topic where Trump told us exactly what he plans to do if he regains power. If you chose to actually listen, he told you that he won’t accept an election loss, he proved to you he will send violent mobs to terrorize his enemies. When he says: “I won’t have to” sign a national abortion ban,” he’s telling you that he’ll do that and worse. Threatening immigrants in response to a question about election integrity, that’s precisely where he stands on that issue. Yes, Kamala wiped the floor with Trump as promised, and yet Trump always got the last word. And even more, what has dominated the airwave social media and real world terror in the streets of Springfield, Ohio and in immigrant communities across the country, has been Trump’s words setting the terms. 

Kamala Harris clearly went into this debate with a strategy to rile Trump up and make him look crazy, make him look weird. Her campaign insisted that both mics should stay live, enabling Trump to interrupt and interject. This highlights the core lesson that the Democratic Party has adamantly refused to learn for almost ten years now: that Trump’s wildness is his strength. For his ruling class backers and his million strong base, that wildness separates him from every career Republican Party politician who failed to deliver over the past 50 years; failed to overturn Roe, failed to decisively seize the Supreme Court, failed to dismantle the administrative state, failed to inspire and lead the worst reactionary tendencies of the United States into a cohesive, monstrous movement. 

Even if some of them think it’s a risky gamble, he is their man for this period of intense global crises, and they are all in. The Democratic Party refuses to learn this lesson because they value order over justice — because recognizing this would mean recognizing the crisis that their empire is in, so they refuse to change course. How about you? It is past time to confront this head on, to soberly recognize the actual threat we face, to share that recognition with everyone we know, to address it together. With that, here is my conversation with Sasha.

For years now, wherever Republicans hold power, they have both rewritten laws and shredded the rule of law to hammer in their white supremacist, misogynist and xenophobic fascist program. They have successfully undermined the very concept of truth, leaving tens of millions to be susceptible to the calls of demagogues and the vilest conspiracy theories. Death threats against public officials have become routine. Election officials hounded, lynch mobs terrorizing health officials, doctors, teachers, school board members, librarians, commonplace and all too normalized. Nazi rhetoric is endangering immigrant communities in towns like Springfield, Ohio and Aurora, Colorado, where we see the dangerous dynamic between the fascist leaders and the MAGA fascist mob is only escalating. 

Sasha Abramsky is The Nation magazine’s Western correspondent. He is the author of several books. His latest book released earlier this month, and the topic of today’s interview is ‘Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against Far Right Takeover of Small Town America.’ This book documents how two rural communities in the Pacific Northwest, Shasta County and Sequim Washington, were overwhelmed by MAGA mobs, and how communities ripped apart, and in one case, beat back the MAGA menace. It examines what happens when Qanon, anti-vaxxers, Christian nationalists, malicious supporters and other denizens of the MAGA fascist movement take control of the very levers of power at the local level. Welcome, Sasha, thanks for joining!

Sasha Abramsky  16:57

Such a pleasure. Glad to be on 

Sam Goldman  16:58

Without giving away your book — people need to read it — can you tell us a little bit about what led you to selecting Shasta County and Sequim?

Sasha Abramsky  17:10

Yeah, I’ve been reporting on the rise of these sort of very extremist irrationalist political movements for a decade now. Since Donald Trump came down that golden elevator in 2015, it’s been one of the areas that I focused on, because it seems to me that we were witnessing not just a sort of transition in how we did national politics, but we were witnessing something that was going to percolate downwards to the most local of levels and really impact people on the ground; really impact how we negotiated community. So I was looking for places that had these stories, that in some ways were hyper hyper local, but in other ways spoke to a much larger national story. And two things happened. 

First of all, there was this election in Sequim, in a very picturesque little town on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. They resulted in a man called William Armacost getting onto the city council, and Armacost was then made the mayor. It turned out Armacost was a QAnon supporter. This was back in 2019 when QAnon was pretty new, and there really weren’t elected officials, on the radar anyway, who were admitting to being QAnon fans. Armacost went on the radio and basically said that QAnon were truth seekers and that the public should seek them out. This created a storm, and I thought, well, what’s going on up in Sequim? 

The first part of the narrative thread is set in this very picturesque community that ends up being torn to pieces by these very vitriolic political debates, not just about QAnon, but then about the pandemic and the pandemic response, a whole bunch of other issues. The second strand is Shasta County, California. Shasta has always been a pretty right wing place. It’s very rural. It’s very beautiful. It’s in the foothills of Mount Shasta, which is this soaring mountain at the northern end of the California Central Valley. Shasta swung just dramatically rightward at the beginning of the pandemic. It had been Republican, sort of, for years and years — fairly conservative Republican, Reaganite, Republican. 

But what happened in 2020 and 2021 and into 2022 was this lurch rightward towards the politics that more resembled militia politics than Ronald Reagan politics. Again, I thought, well, you know, if I can go up there and talk to people, I can get a sense of what’s happening, not just nationally, but how this plays out locally; What happens when MAGA comes to town? It turns out, when MAGA comes to town, chaos follows, like, fairly predictably. If you bring into power people whose overriding motivation is to deconstruct the apparatus of government, at the end of the day, you don’t get smaller better government, you just get worse government; you just get chaotic government, and it comes with all kinds of consequences. So again, I wanted to explore that, put the two stories together, and you have a book, which I think tells a story of what’s happening in America in the 2020s.

Sam Goldman  19:55

Thank you for that. I agree. I thought that they were really fascinating case studies. I had the opportunity to go to Olympic National Park for the first time, and got to be very close to where you were talking about in one of the spots, and had no idea when I was there, to be honest, about that whole history. I only learned all those details after the fact and I wish I had done it in reverse. You spend considerable time and care in describing the real people that you met that are there. There is no characterizing, these are not cartoons, they’re real people — even people who we might see as villainous in terms of the grave harm that they’ve had when they’ve held the levers of power. I wanted to get your thoughts on how do you do that? How do you talk with people and work with people in an interview setting, where what they believe is lunacy?

Sasha Abramsky  20:54

There are a few things. The first is, you can’t tell a story about a place like Shasta unless you do those wraparound interviews. So I had people who were like: Well, we’ve Googled you. You’re from The Nation magazine, and you don’t agree with our politics,  we’re not going to talk to you. But I had other people who said: Well, you and I are going to disagree, but here’s my worldview. Sometimes I’d be the one who initiated that. Sometimes I’d say: Look, I know you’re going to Google me. I know you’re going to find out that my perspective is very different from yours, but let me tell you a story, because if you just blanket refuse to talk to me, if you say I’m part of the mainstream or lamestream media or whatever they want to say, then I get definitionally a partial understanding of what’s going on. 

Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes people were fine to talk to me, and other times people really were quite hostile. I’ve been writing for 30 years, and I’ve had that issue right from the get go, that you’re going to have some people who just don’t want to talk. I wrote about the criminal justice system for years and years about a quarter of a century ago, and I had district attorneys who wouldn’t talk to me. I had jail officials who wouldn’t talk to me, prison officials who wouldn’t, but then I had other ones who would. It didn’t mean I always agreed with them. I oftentimes, obviously disagree with what I was hearing, but you have to be willing to try and get voices from across the spectrum, it makes the story richer and it makes it more accurate. 

But there is an issue in this kind of polarized environment where people sort of ghetto-ise — right wing people only talk to right wing people, left wing people only talk to left wing people, and you end up in these echo chambers. From my perspective, it doesn’t really matter if you’re left wing or right wing or right wing; echo chambers aren’t particularly fruitful; they play to your existing biases. If you want to understand what’s happening during the pandemic when so many norms broke down, or you want to understand what’s happening in the Trump era where our understanding of just what politics was, shifted so dramatically, you can’t only stay in your comfort zone. I really do believe that. 

It doesn’t mean you have to get rid of your moral compass. It doesn’t mean you have to get rid of your ethos that governs your behavior, but you have to be willing to tell a complicated story. Any good journalist will tell you that. You have to be willing to tell a story that challenges readers to think outside their own boxes. I hope I do that in ‘Chaos Comes Calling.’ It’s clear I don’t agree with a lot of the people I’m talking to, but it’s also clear that they have a somewhat internally consistent, at any rate, worldview. I didn’t agree with that worldview, and I thought that some of the policies that they were promoting were deeply harmful, and I thought that some of the behaviors that were going on at a local level in Shasta or in Sequim again, were deeply harmful. 

But why were they happening? Why in 2020 were armed mobs taking to the street against public health officials of all people? Why in 2016 to 2020 was there a president in charge of this country who would use his Twitter platform to go after private citizens? What on earth was going on there? So to try and sort of dig down a little bit and work out why is this happening and why is it happening now, you’ve got to have that willingness to interview people from a lot of different positions.

Sam Goldman  23:49

Moving from there, I think it’s important to look at, as you were talking about, why is this happening? especially in relation to the lethal consequences from Covid response and the lethal consequences from what happens when these MAGA lynch mobs were able to actually hold power in local areas — those covered in your book and those not. How did we get to a situation where people who believe that the Democratic Party is really a child kidnapping operation organized around capturing children to literally suck their blood? How were those forces able to seize power? 

Sasha Abramsky  23:49

I think that we’ve had three massive dislocations in the last ten years in our culture. The first of them was the rise of social media. That was so disruptive in both good ways and bad ways, but it completely undermined traditional news distribution and news absorption systems. The way we got information changed, and it changed at breathtaking speed. It didn’t happen over a hundred years or even over ten years, it happened in the space of a couple years, that the traditional news systems began to implode, and they were replaced essentially by glorified high technology, high speed rumor mills. 

That set the stage both for a sort of jag rightward in politics, but also set the stage for a collapse in our collective attention span, that everything became reduced to clicks. We lost the capacity to sort of think slowly and sort of cogitate and meditate over you know, what does this imply? What does this mean? We started looking for instant reactions. That has profound effects. Ten years into the social media revolution, we’re still only now getting to grips with what this does to our mental health and getting to grips with what it does to our collective capacity to understand events. So that’s the first thing. 

The second dislocation is the rise of Donald Trump and this uniquely demagogic form of politics. There have been other demagogues in American history. Good example would be Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. But Trump takes it to a new level. Just a sheer blizzard of lies that he puts forward. You saw this last night in his debate against Kamala Harris — just one lie after another, lie after another, lie and one recycled internet myth after the next. And he does it in a way that for his base, at least, is very effective. 

Trump sort of shreds our traditional notion of what politics is, and he introduces this sort of very bombastic, very lie based, very charismatic form of politics that is more akin to strongman, authoritarian or dictatorial leadership than to Democratic leadership. And the third thing that happens, the third Black Swan moment, is a once in a century pandemic. And the pandemic happens just when social media and just when zoom technology is taking off to the extent that we can say: All right, we’re going to shut down a lot of our societies, but we’re going to continue to operate; we can shut down schools, but we can go online; we can shut down non essential businesses, but we can go online; we can shut down government offices, but we can go online. We sort of could, sort of couldn’t, but one of the impacts of this — having a pandemic just at the moment when that technology had made possible, the sort of removal into the virtual world of a lot of our daily life — is an extraordinary shock to our collective consciousness. 

So you have people who are being told you can’t send your kids to school. The pandemic basically creates this total sort of spasm of anxiety and fear, some of it public health related, but some of it loneliness related, because we are being asked to basically isolate. We are being told: You can’t go to your churches — or: You can’t go to your places of worship — or: You can’t go to your schools — or: You can’t go to your business — you can’t really have social gatherings, etc., etc. Obviously some people ignored that, some people took it seriously, but collectively, it produces this huge upsurge in anxiety, and we see it in increased uses of drugs, we see it in alcoholism, we see it in the upswings in violence in 2020, and 2021, we see it in upswings, in homelessness. 

There are all these indicators suggesting that beyond the physical health impact of the pandemic, there’s a vast and probably ongoing psychological impact. And that plays into politics. People got angry. Their fuses were short. People who might have been civil a year or two or three before, suddenly are going to community meetings and County Board of Supervisors meetings, and they’re screaming and shouting at their neighbors, and they’re treating their neighbors not as someone they might disagree with on one or two political issues, but they’re treating their neighbors as enemies. That’s profoundly dangerous. 

When communities turn against each other with that kind of jagged edge, that’s when civil norms break down, and that’s when the sort of very foundation, pillars of democracy, the cultural pillars that make democracy possible, start to wobble. Once they wobble, then you’ve got violence in the political process. Donald Trump played that up. He started flirting with paramilitary groups and street fighting groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. He started making these very, very inflammatory tweets in the Spring of 2020 about liberating democratic counties and democratic states from lockdown. 

This stuff was dangerous. And when you have a President and his advisors basically putting the thumb of approval onto street fighting methodologies, well, there’s no surprise that come January 6, 2021 several thousand of those followers decided to try and attempt an insurrection. That’s directly a chain product of what happened a year earlier with Covid responses.

Sam Goldman  25:22

There’s a lot of time, you mentioned earlier, spent on looking at this national story of what’s unfolding. On this show, we spend a lot of time talking about the horrors that have been brought down from fascist state and federal offices, but the local politics of the fascist movement, which is often too vast and diffuse to cover on a show like this, offers unique insight, I feel, into the goals, vision, methods and strategies of the fascist movement we are confronting nationally, and to be real, globally. What do you think is missed when we leave out these local stories?

Sasha Abramsky  29:41

I think what’s missed is the texture of how this plays out on the ground. So it’s one thing to say: All right, Donald Trump is using a kind of fascist oratory. If you’d said that nine or ten years ago, you were quite far out on the sort of extreme of the political spectrum. But after four years of Trump and then four more years of Trump trying to rehabilitate himself, we see it fairly commonplace now that people across the spectrum look at this and say: Well, you know what, this is tinged with fascism, this isn’t some abstract thing. 

What happens is, when people right at the top give their imprimatur, when Trump says that there are very good people on both sides in Charlottesville, when one side was filled with neo Nazis, that gives legitimacy to neo -fascist movements. When people like Tucker Carlson flirt with the great replacement theory and have this idea that there’s this conspiracy to dilute the racial stock of America and replace it with non-white, non-Christian voters, again, that sort of gives the imprimatur, and then people lower down the food chain are like: Well, you know, Tucker Carlson said it, so it must be okay.

Recently, Tucker Carlson hosted on his show a Holocaust revisionist. This would have been unthinkable ten years ago — for somebody who has pretensions to be a major national figure, a mainstream political journalist, to give a platform to a Holocaust denier who says that the single greatest villain in World War Two was Churchill, not Hitler, and that the Holocaust was an accident of history. This is the stuff of nightmare, that this kind of language is being rehabilitated. The fact that there are now neo-Nazi movements springing up. They’re not huge movements, but the fact that the neo-Nazi organizations can now field people at demonstrations you’ve been seeing in these rallies that have been going on around the country, far right rallies.

The unthinkable truth is that there is now a neo-Nazi presence at some of these rallies. Now that’s not to say everyone who turned up on January 6th was a neo-Nazi. They weren’t. There were people from a variety of different backgrounds with a variety of different political motives who turned up. But the very fact that there are some people using Nazi iconography and using the swastika in their politics, and talking in the language of Adolf Hitler, this is shocking, and this could not have happened without that lurch rightward that Trump accelerated.

Sam Goldman  31:50

Some of the signaling even in last night’s debate — the talking about small towns and the “invasions” and the dehumanizing, grotesque language — straight up disinformation, but not just disinformation that is neutral, but deadly.

Sasha Abramsky  32:07

The debate last night was flat out fascism. This ranting and raving about immigrants eating pets. Well, you know, there’s no evidence of that. This is just, literally, a blood libel theory. This is one viewing of racial bile after the next, after the next, after next. It was completely extraordinary to watch a mainstream political candidate saying the kind of things that Donald Trump said yesterday. Obviously, that plays out locally; when you have these rumors at a local level, and then you know, given the imprimatur of approval. It’s not that different from England last month, when there was this rumor that it was an undocumented immigrant who had killed three young girls. 

Well, it turned out it wasn’t an undocumented immigrant, it was someone else, but meanwhile, these mobs had started attacking asylum centers around the country. And the mobs were accelerated by Elon Musk re-platforming on X various extremist individuals and groups so that they could have their say, and then reposting — using his enormous, enormous reach — reposting some of the more inflammatory racist taunts. This kind of thing carries huge consequences. It percolates down from the top, and it impacts localities. I’ll say one more thing about the debate: It was completely remarkable that Donald Trump would use as a character reference in the debate Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban. 

Well, for goodness sake, Viktor Orban is a pariah leader in Europe because he flirts with fascist leadership. He has what he calls an illiberal democracy, which is, in all but name, a dictatorship. The very fact that Donald Trump would think it was a good idea to use Victor Orban as a character reference — my word, I mean, why not just take it one step further and actually find a genuine neo-Nazi and use him as a character reference? It was complete insanity to watch Donald Trump doing that.

Sam Goldman  33:54

Absolutely. Here we are, weeks away, less than two months. Are we at two months? 56 days, 55 days?

Sasha Abramsky  34:03

Less than two months.

Sam Goldman  34:04

How do you see the situation looking in local areas where millions of people — not in each local area, but — millions of people across this country deeply believing this disinformation about this conceding of a stolen election, and that this election is already rigged, and if he loses, it’s only because of fraud. All of that. Right now it’s looking very close — too close. How do you see this moment looking? What do you think is on our hands in November? Not on the election, but after that?

Sasha Abramsky  34:43

My gut is it is a close election. To me, I find that a little bit unfathomable, because when you watch Donald Trump, regardless of whether or not you like right wing politics, when you watch Donald Trump, you see a man who clearly is so far past his intellectual prime and so confused in so many ways, and so prey to disinformation. It’s extraordinary to me that so many people are still attached to him politically — but it’s going to be a close election, and there’s a danger. The danger is the Trump’s movement has captured boards of elections in places like Georgia, and they’ve got a mission. That mission is basically to gum up the works if there’s an unfavorable election result that goes against Donald Trump. That gumming up the works — there are many spots in the process. 

There are these different dates for certifying elections. it seems to me there’s a strategy here: You gum up the works, you try to stop certification, and you throw enough chaos into the process that either gets thrown to the House of Representatives or to the Supreme Court. In a normal time, all of those ideas would be sort of far fetched, because in normal time, both candidates would have pledged to respect the election result; there wouldn’t be this risk that one candidate would try and sort of inspire insurrectionary politics again. In this election, Trump’s been asked again and again and again, not just by his opponents, but by journalists: Will you accept the election result? And he hedges; every single time, he’s hedged. 

So that’s telling his followers something. He’s already talking about the election being a sham, and he’s talking about stolen votes, and he’s talking about all the things he talked about after he lost in 2020. Well, you only do that if you think you’re going to lose. Trump’s looking at the polling. He’s seeing that he’s not doing as well against Harris as he was against Biden. He knows there’s a pretty good chance he’s not going to come out the victor, so he’s already priming his followers to disregard the result. That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous in so many ways. It’s dangerous, particularly in a country as heavily armed as America is. We have 400 million guns in this country. 

That’s powder keg stuff. Trump is playing with fire, not for the greater good. He’s playing with fire for his personal good. In a previous era, a politician who did something that dangerous for their personal good and put the risk of the country at that much it would be called treasonous. Whether or not Trump’s a traitor — I don’t know the legal definitions of the word, but — it is the most scandalous thing possible for a man of his power and influence and reach to prime millions and millions of followers to reject the democratic process and the democratic election system. 

So I’m worried. You ask what’s going to happen after the election? Hopefully it will be smooth, but there’s at least a possibility that you’ll have some redux of January 6, 2021, because Trump’s learnt nothing. He’s the least humble person on this planet, and he’s the least introspective person. All he cares about is his personal gratification, and that means he cannot ever admit to having lost.

Sam Goldman  37:31

I mean, in short, I think his takeaway is, what he’s learned is he can get away with it.

Sasha Abramsky  37:36

Right. And he’s been told by the Supreme Court he can. He’s been told by the Supreme Court: You just put on the stamp of presidential official act, and we’re going to give you immunity. It’s ridiculous. In a fully functioning democracy, that would never be allowed to happen. But yes, he thinks he can get away with it, and as long as he thinks he can get away with it, he’s going to keep on sowing chaos politically.

Sam Goldman  37:55

There is hope in your book. It is not only a book of communities being ravaged. It is also a book of people coming together and being able to, at least in one county, beat back these MAGA forces. And as people think about what does it mean to prepare for this moment where, if you are looking at the situation with any kind of reality based approach, you can say it’s fraud. What lessons do you take away from Sequim County, Cowan County?

Sasha Abramsky  38:28

I loved the reporting in Sequim County, because one of the really sort of upbeat parts of the book is that Sequim residents in Sequim, it’s not just Sequim in the abstract, but individual residents, came together and looked at what was happening, and looked at the dysfunction of local government, and decided this couldn’t stand. They were Democrats, they were progressives, they were liberals, they were moderates, they were centrists, and they were a goodly number of Republicans as well, who came together and formed what they called the Sequim Good Governance League. They fielded slates of candidates, and they did a huge voter education and voter outreach effort, and they ended up beating back the forces of extremism electorally. They ended up winning two electoral cycles in a row, and really pushing back. 

I hope when my readers read this, they see that there’s more than one potential ending here. You can look at all of this dysfunction that sort of coalesces locally, and you can say: Oh, it’s hopeless. I must just put my head in the sand. Or you can look at all the dysfunction and say: We can do something about this, me and my neighbors, me and my friends, me and my family, whatever it might be. When that happens, you get really interesting local things emerging, local movements emerging. I hope my readers read to the end of the book. I think they’ll be surprised, and I think they’ll end up experiencing something vicariously that was really very interesting.

Sam Goldman  39:41

Thank you so much, Sasha for taking the time to talk with us, to share your experiences, to share your insights and perspective, and most importantly, to share ‘Chaos Comes Calling’ with us. In the show notes, folks can find a link to get the book. Besides reading the book, where else do you want to direct listeners to if they want to learn more about your work?

Sasha Abramsky  40:07

I’m doing readings around the country at the moment, so if any of your audience happens to be in San Diego tonight, for example, I’ll be reading at Warwicks. If your readers are going to be in Seattle on the 13th, I believe I shall be at Seattle Town Hall, doing an event, and on the 15th in Portland, I’m in one of my favorite bookstores on Earth, at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, and I’d be delighted to see some of your listeners there.

Sam Goldman  40:30

Is there a spot to find where your multitude of events are, your readings are?

Sasha Abramsky  40:36

You know, my social media presence is a bit scattershot, but they can certainly look me up on X[itter] or they can look me up on Facebook, and I do try and post my events.

Sam Goldman  40:45

Perfect. Thanks so much, Sasha.

Sasha Abramsky  40:47

You’re very welcome. Thank you.

Sam Goldman  40:49

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Wanna help this show reach more people at a time when it’s needed the most? Amazing! As people rightly agonize over the fascist threat, help grow the community we need by literally wearing Refuse Fascism across your chest, by purchasing one or more of our Refuse Fascism t-shirts. If you want to take a step further, become a patron for as little as $2 a month over at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. And whether you can give it $2 a month or $25 a month, it all makes a difference in producing and promoting this independent, all volunteer weekly podcast.

We’ll be having our next patron only event October 6, that’s a Sunday, so patrons, head on over to our Patreon page and register to join us. We’re gonna be discussing the War Game documentary. Thanks for your support. And if you can’t give now, or if you did already share the show with others, rate and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, or comment on our social posts or YouTube uploads. It makes a difference and is so appreciated.

And of course, follow, subscribe wherever you listen, so you never miss an episode. As always, we love hearing from you. Find us on social media at Refuse Fascism. Find us on YouTube at Refuse_Fascism. Be sure to hit that subscribe button. If YouTube is your thing or leave a voicemail, see the link in the show notes to our voicemail button. If you want to reach me, you can find me at Twitter, @SamBGoldman, drop me a line over at [email protected] or over on the tiktoks at SamGoldman,RF.

thanks to Mark Tinkleman, 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. And if you’re interested in helping edit transcripts or doing research, let us know. We’re always looking for volunteers. Until next Sunday, In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!