Episode 286
Dr. John Donoghue discusses how the Trump regime’s fascism is rooted in deep white supremacist historical currents running from colonial North America through the present. Confronting this history is essential if we are going to determine what it will take to defeat MAGA fascism, which poses a grave menace to freedom, decency, and the common good at home and abroad.
John Donoghue’s work has focused on the history of early American colonialism, radical political thought and action, slavery and servitude, abolition, and the political economy of capitalism. His new book (forthcoming) titled American Insurrections: An Unruly History of White Christian Nationalism traces how insurrectionary violence established white supremacy in the colonial era and played a vital part in its transition to white nationalism in the U.S. and the resurgence of white Christian supremacy after the Civil War.
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
A Short History of American Fascism: From the KKK to the Trump Era
Mon, Mar 30, 2026 6:30AM • 48:49
Sam Goldman 00:23
Welcome to episode 286 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 works to unite all who can be united in mass, relentless, nonviolent resistance to drive the Trump fascist regime from power.
Today’s episode features an edited recording of a short history of American fascism from the Ku Klux Klan to the Trump era. A forum in discussion with John Donahue, Associate Professor of U.S. history at Loyola University in Chicago. This Forum was held on March 22 in Evanston, Illinois. As always, we want to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who rates and reviews the podcast, supports us on Patreon, subscribes on Substack and picks up Refuse Fascism merch. This support is how this platform keeps going and growing.
Before we get to the forum, Saturday, March 28, millions of people across the country took to the streets again to show opposition to the Trump regime. Refuse Fascism was out at no King’s Day, spreading the demands Stop the War on Iran! Trump Must Go Now! Trump Must Go Now! This is a demand that millions of people should take up in this moment, a moment of dangerous escalation and fascist consolidation on the one side, and deadly waiting and capitulation on the other. We were out fighting for those millions to confront three truths and act accordingly. 1) fascism is not looming, it is here. 2) Trump’s war of aggression against Iran is illegitimate, illegal and immoral. It must be stopped, and 3) relying on the Democrats is a deadly delusion.
We were out organizing people to be part of the movement to drive the Trump fascist regime from power, because millions in the streets builds the power of the people not to accommodate and delusionally hope to slow down the regime until the next election, but to resist this fascism, face its repression with courage and conviction and drive this regime from power through overwhelming non-compliance and nonviolent resistance. Unless and until the Trump fascists are removed from power and their hold over the major institutions severed, their terror will continue.
Kudos to the thousands of people in San Francisco at Ocean Beach who created a human banner with the words Trump Must Go Now! and kudos to all who are part of Refuse Fascism contingents nation wide. Be sure to check out sights and sounds from the day. See the show notes or Instagram @RefuseFascism. Get connected, get organized, donate and support and join the movement demanding the Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now! In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America. See the show notes to do that or visit RefuseFascism.org.
Now, on to talk about this forum that you’re about to listen to. The unadulterated racism spewed by Trump and his entire regime is undeniable. White supremacy is a powerful glue binding this American fascist movement. The genocidal truth of slavery in this country is whitewashed. Attacks on DEI and so much more, beg the question, how did we get to this hellscape? Listen for a deep dive into U.S. history, to grapple with the answers to that crucial question. John Donahue is a distinguished historian who will discuss how the Trump regime’s fascism is rooted in deep white supremacist historical currents running from colonial North America through the present.
Confronting this history is essential if we’re going to determine what it will take to defeat MAGA fascism, which poses a grave menace to freedom, decency and the common good, here in the United States and across the globe. Professor Donoghue’s work has focused on the history of early American colonialism, radical political thought and action, slavery and servitude, abolition, and the political economy of capitalism. His new book project traces how insurrectionary violence established white supremacy in the colonial era and played a vital part in its transition to white nationalism in the U.S. and the resurgence of white Christian supremacy after the Civil War. This event that you’re about to listen to was presented by Refuse Fascism Chicago chapter, endorsed by Northside Friends Meeting Ministry and Racism committee and Evanston Neighbors for Peace. With that, here is John Donoghue at the forum, A Short History of American Fascism, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Trump Era, which took place March 22 in Evanston, Illinois.
John Donoghue 04:45
You don’t know where you are in time unless you know where you came from, and you don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are. American fascism was not inevitable, but its roots are clear. Its origins are clear. It didn’t have to happen this way, but it did. So this is not anachronism. This is not the present projected on the past. This is thinking about how the present came to be. We have to talk about what fascism is before we go any further. As I said before, this is a distinct form of cultural politics.
In my reckoning and reference here to Kubrick’s “How I Learned to Relax and Love the Bomb,” Dr Strangelove, well, how I learned to relax and to drop f-bombs when we’re talking about our present moment in time. So what is fascism? Why is this term so important? Why is this concept so key to understanding where we are? Fascism is an ultra nationalist form of authoritarian politics that seeks — this is the key word — regeneration, rebirth; Make America Great Again, Second Klan, restore white supremacy and Christian chauvinism as the centerpiece of 100% Americanism. Or another phrase the Second Klan used, this may sound familiar: America First. On their very banners, the same slogan as the MAGA movement.
This is not hard to interpret, but people don’t know it. Historical illiteracy is the best way to destroy your democracy, because when you have a false myth of American history, and you tell white people who’ve been on top forever that that history is being revised by left wing lunatics who wanna replace you, history becomes the battleground for democracy — the truth against lies. So what is fascism? It’s regeneration of the nation — and by nation here, we’re not polity, it’s a national culture — who belongs and who doesn’t? Who belonged here in the American construction, pre-fascism, all the way from colonial up through the Civil War, white, native born, not Christians, Protestants. Make that distinction. Catholics, of which I am one, have only recently been allowed in the club. Archbishop Dolan of New York gave the benediction at two Trump party nominations. It’s lovely.
Why do you need the regeneration? It’s because the outliers among you, among the nation, have corrupted the culture. If we were to frame that today, corrupting our culture, non-Christian religion, the whole transgender manufactured controversy, revising American history to suit left wing ideologues, all that stuff. The culture’s been corrupted. The nation’s been betrayed. Liberals, so called, have led the nation into degeneration, weakness, and a national life that goes against all of its values and traditions. It’s the big betrayal. Stop the steal, orchestrated by Black precinct workers. No, but that’s the lie. Atlanta, Detroit, why focus on those areas? Black majority cities known as focal points of Black culture, and who’s obviously responsible, and always has been, for the degeneration of American culture, right? You put white supremacy on top, and you subordinate Black people, and you outsource the scapegoats to them.
Stop the steal — who else stole the election? [audience member: Trump!] Something that [laughs and audience joins]… That’s enough truth telling! Who stole the election? A being that does not exist, illegals — especially on stolen land — illegals, aliens, two traditional scapegoats being resurrected from the white supremacist cemetery, cause we were all in the post racial age when Obama was elected. Also remember gun sales going off the charts after Obama was elected, and the resurgence of paramilitary organization, the creation of new paramilitary organizations, and the proliferation of right wing fascist talk radio and news — direct reaction to it. Poisoning the blood of our people — Trump’s used that phrase, that was a direct Nazi phrase, there’s no difference, it’s the same phrase. Poisoning the blood of our people. What does that mean? It means the people are of European ancestry. They’re Christian fundamentalists, and they were born here.
Trump talks about genetics all the time, does he not? [audience member: He don’t know a damn thing about it! followed by laughter] No, he doesn’t. Genetics is just another way of saying master race. We can’t have immigrants in here because they’re gonna pollute the purity of our white ancestry, who’s done nothing wrong, ever and has only promoted freedom and virtue, as you all know. So dehumanization, poisoning the blood, illegals, aliens, traitors. That’s another phrase that these people use. Dehumanization — Alligator Alcatraz, sending a paramilitary force of U.S. government personnel in Black Hawk helicopters to storm into a tenement building on the Southside, where mostly African Americans live, hustling them out of their dwellings, naked, and zip tying them, as Trump’s putting memes out there with him flying an F-15, dumping shit on protesters declaring war on a major American city. [audience member: Chipocalypse] Chipocalypse, yep.
So dehumanization, those are some good examples. Historical falsification: put portraits of Confederate generals up at West Point, as Secretary Hegseth said, to honor our great Confederate heritage. What started the Second Klan? Rehabilitation of the first klan’s legacy. They’re not nuanced about this, gang. They’re not nuanced about it at all. Now here’s the key. This is at the center of it all, white Christian nationalism all the way up to the 20th century and then its evolution into fascism, it all depends upon political violence as the chief mobilizing catalyst. Insurrection is built into this worldview. January 6th is not an aberration, except for disrupting the peaceful transition of power in our elections.
January 6th is an old tradition deployed in a new format when fascist power has consolidated and does have the ability to overthrow the democracy. Mike Pence and the Capitol Police were all that stood between a dictatorial installation of Donald Trump and the tenuous survival of our democracy. If I don’t get to it in the end, I want to say this now: This is why American fascism today is more dangerous than it’s ever been. If you look at the Second Klan in the 1920s, chapters in all 48 states, women’s independent organizations, 6 million members — that’s one out of every six native born white American Protestants. They never captured a political party. It was a bipartisan white supremacist movement, guys, and they never developed a cult of personality at the service of one charismatic leader.
Now you do the math about the MAGA movement. It’s captured one of the two political parties. It has this charismatic, buffoonish leader. It has led to two sovereign co equal branches of government, the judiciary and the legislative, to forfeit their constitutional power to be accumulated by Donald Trump. Something the founders could never have conceived of. It wasn’t even a possible thing that a party would control the forfeiture of our constitutional rule of law, forfeited. Not taken, given away. As anyone who’s studied political philosophy understands, you can’t give away your natural rights because they’re still in you. You’re still born with them.
It’s impossible to existentially forfeit, and that’s why fascism is really dehumanizing. It says: You don’t need them. We’ll take all the power; We’ll take care of you. Conspiratorial thinking. There’s a million of them out there. You know, you pick yours. First it was QAnon, and then it turned out MAGA really was the cabal — Stop the Steal, immigrants are taking your jobs. You know, you pick your conspiracy. It used to be that the Irish Catholics coming in the 1840s were gonna install Rome rule and make everyone drink whiskey till they puked.
You just substitute a new group in here — for vilification, and the conspiracy. The Catholic Romish conspiracy, the George Soros funded caravan of Latinas who are gonna flood in here, turn everyone communist, end American democracy and steal elections — conspiratorial. Fascism is essentially a culture, a political culture, that can sometimes organize into a hierarchical political movement with great power. Think of how the Nazis arose. Street thugs beating up communists on the streets, Beer Hall Putsch fails miserably, Hitler goes to prison, writes this big tract, and then they understand organizing a party is the best way to mobilize, but the best way to mobilize recruitment for the party is violence. Drop f-bombs. I listen to Pod Save America sometimes, and I can learn a lot from it, but when I heard John Favreau reduced to, he called it idiocy, worrying about whether or not this term applies, that shows you how the liberal establishment has no idea where we are in time.
They are still hiding under the delusion that the two-party system is still in place and that we’re actually going to have real elections in November. The regime does not go to two sites and take ballot boxes, while trying to pass legislation that will deprive women of the right to vote, basically, married women, as well as various other forms of voter suppression — myriad forms they’ve been working on for decades through the American Legislative Executive Council, otherwise known as ALEC — same group, funding it all for the last 20 years. We are not where we used to be in terms of establishment politics. As flawed as they were, we still had some kind of functioning democracy — inequitable according to class and race, of course, but it was there for our taking, if we would’ve used it wisely. That democracy does not exist now.
Part of this whole thing with fascism is you have to have a historical narrative that the nation is born in innocence with the mission of purification and divine ordination. Everyone’s favorite great communicator, Ronald Reagan — this is from a 1980 debate with, I think it was John Anderson, the independent. He says: “I’ve always believed that this land was placed here between the two great oceans by some divine plan — that it was placed here to be found by a special kind of people, people who had a special love for freedom and,” hold on for it, “we’ve built a new breed of human.” You can substitute “white person.” That’s what Reagan means. “We’ve built a new breed of human called an American, a proud and independent and a most compassionate individual.”
I cut out some parts Reagan saying here coming to America was all voluntary, and it only happened from Europe to America. It kind of leaves out millions [audience member: yeah], and why? Because fascists whitewash history. Literally, in America, you could just, with a wave of the Reagan rhetoric, erase the history of Native Americans — subjected to genocide since the beginning — genocide present at the creation of American colonialism. You can wave a magic wand and disappear the 4 million Americans who were wearing chains and reduce the non personhood under the law through the legal category of, “Negro,” which is the word for Black in Spanish, but became, through an English borrowing, the designation of non-personhood, and who can be enslaved or not. That’s gone. And what else is gone? I’m just beginning to learn about this — the environmental destruction that accompanied westward expansion.
There’s reason why the buffalo had to be rehabilitated when at one time they were the Great Plains. Here’s something called the violence of abstraction. This is what a lot of people in the MAGA movement learned in school. It’s what a lot of us learned in school. But we paid attention, because we knew there was more to the story than this violence of abstraction, where you can see continental expansion neatly carved up in color code, and, instead of wars, you see, what? peace treaties; diplomatic agreements. From the Louisiana Purchase — oh, Texas was just annexed, just waiting there for us to claim — half of the Republic of Mexico taken by force in the Mexican War. To do what? Driven by the cotton slave power in Congress, to expand the Cotton Kingdom, because they couldn’t get into Cuba and Nicaragua before the war, and that was the plan.
Audience member 1 17:33
There’s something else you could get to on it: The Trail of Tears, [JD: yes] It started with my Choctaw tribe in 1830 [JD: Oh,we can talk about the Choctaw, yep.] And ended with my Cherokee tribe in that area.
John Donoghue 17:49
Yeah, I’ve got you, exactly. See that map, or the map I had on? You could also just put this list up. The Northwest Indian War, Ohio country, Great Lakes area, 1785 to 94. Seminole Wars start in the 1790s there’s supposed to be three of them. It’s one long war that ends in 1858, two years before the Civil War, the Creek or the Red Stick wars, which the Choctaw are drawn into, as well as the Cherokee. That’s during the War of 1812, a little before and a little after Tecumseh’s revolt, 1811, unites the Great Lakes and Ohio Country Indian nations in one giant revolt, which was arrived at in democratic deliberations by these Indian nations.
So if you want to look for democracy in early America, before the age of Jackson, look at Tecumseh. The War of 1812, we fight the British. But that was really an Indian War that involved the Creek the Creek wars, the Tecumseh wars, and the Seminole war, I could go on and on and on. Black Hawk War, that should mean something to us here in Chicago and Illinois. Texas War, it’s war of independence, and then it’s annexed. Talked about the Mexican War. Half the Mexican Republic was violently wrested away on a war based on a lie by President Polk that Mexico had crossed the border to attack us. It was the exact opposite. We crossed their border and they defended it.
Only time a lie has ever been used to justify war in American history. Got that one taken care of. All right. You guys can read through these. We don’t have time to go through all of them, but I’d be happy to talk about any of them in the Q and A. But here’s one that we don’t talk about much, is the conquest of the Philippines that came out of the Spanish American War, where we liberated the Cubans from the Spanish Empire. Passed an amendment — I think it was… I get Platte and Teller mixed up — but there was amendment Congress passed before the war, saying we have no interest in holding on to Cuba — it’s not what this war is about, we’re not gonna do it.
Soon as the war was over, there was another amendment passed, I think, the Teller amendment, which said: No, we’re taking it. Within five years, 80% of the Cuban land mass was owned by American corporations. Because we defeated the Spanish there, we got the extra prize of the Philippines, where the concentration camp — there were two places it was invented in the late 19th, early 20th century. One was South Africa and the Boer War, the next one was the Philippine War, where the Americans destroyed in bloody, genocidal fashion, the Filipino resistance that was quoting the Declaration of Independence to assert its rights.
Check out the history of the occupation of the Dominican Republic and Haiti in the early 20th century, border wars with Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. These are not sidelines of American history, it’s the center. It’s the pivot. It’s there. It’s the foundation. ‘American Freedom, American Slavery.’ It’s an old book by Edmund Morgan of Yale that was published in 1976. I’m not giving you guys new historical conceptual breakthroughs here, but very few Americans can talk with detail about this history. So I just want to put two things in relation to each other. Every acre of the “frontier,” where you see settler colonialism expanding, is a site of genocidal destruction. And where was the frontier most contested in its bloodiest form? [Audience member 2: New England].
I think there’s many good examples of that in 17th century. And in fact, you’re right. King Phillip’s war in New England was the bloodiest per capita war in American history. But I’m gonna look at a region that is more systematic on a wider scale, and more directly tied to the development of American capitalism. So the heart of American capitalism, which is really saying the heart of American colonialism, in the South, in the plantation, part of what will become the United States, every inch of that ground was being subjected to genocidal force to expand the plantation complex, which means expanding the racial slavery regime that is at the foundation of the history of American capitalism.
Because in no other place was capital accumulated so rapidly in such a wide volume and with such systematic use of force, to reinforce white supremacy in three ways. 1) accumulation of capital done by subjecting African Americans and Native Americans to different forms of destruction and exploitation. One thing to remember about America this. This is key to it. If you’re going to remember something, remember this one: Every time there’s an assertion a surge of white supremacist violence and politics and organizing, it’s in response to resistance, which is also at the center of American history. If you want to make want to make America great again, read that history.
That’s what we should have the monuments to. We have a great history, we’re just looking at the wrong side of it. We have a great history. Here’s another lesson. These are a list of Indian revolts. Got King Philip’s War in there, okay. Here’s the history of slave revolts. I have the Jamaican Maroons in here for a reason. It’s because John Brown’s revolt in 1859 — John Brown religiously studied the Maroon movement in Jamaica, which was a series of slave revolts over 200 years, where the successful rebels would go to the hinterland of Jamaica and create their own syncretic African societies to live free. John Brown wanted to create a free African society in the Appalachian Mountains.
So this is an Atlantic history. It’s all interconnected…You can see here the long list of slave revolts. Big point: White supremacy worked for whites. It accomplished its mission, but it never, ever, ever, in its history, has it been secure, ever. What do you think explains the paranoia, the hyper vigilance, the being armed to the teeth, the conspiracy theories? It’s never secure because it’s always been resisted. What does that tell you about our current moment? Where the hell did January 6th come from? In large part, it came from the BLM, summer of 2020. Go read what the Jan 6th rioters were saying — I’m sorry, insurrectionists. Colonial period, early national period, through the Civil War, and then after the Civil War, the two great threats to American greatness: Native Americans and African Americans — through resistance. You see the fear in these engravings.
Why did white supremacists in the MAGA movement fear Black Lives Matter so much? Why do they have to lie about it and say, you know: Cities were burnt down, violence and terrorism? They thought this was the initiation of the apocalyptic script of racial genocidal warfare; white genocide. They see this when they look at a BLM demonstration. Think about the McCloskeys in St. Louis standing on… you know, these wealthy MAGA whites as a peaceful BLM march with kids in it, strollers, they’re out there with their AR-15s…and they become icons of the MAGA movement. Icon, Kyle Rittenhouse [audience grumbles], goes to a BLM demonstration and murders people — Is a hero, what are they telling you? [Audience member 2: With an illegally owned gun?] Yeah, there you go, Alex Pretti [for contrast]. [Audience member 1: His mother’s responsible for bringing him out.] That’s right.
Fascism is a kind of imperialism. Hitler admired the genocide against Native Americans. It helped him understand his primary goal of liebensraum, with my terrible German accent. That means living space. Well, people were living there, just like they were in the United States, but they’re gonna be liquidated for the expansion of the master race. Sound familiar? That’s why they studied us. Fascism was not, in America, is not an imitation of the Nazis. It’s a dialectical formation; one borrows from the other, in time.
We talked about the great replacement. So who’s going to replace the people? Black rebels, Indian rebels, and now, starting in the mid 19th century, it was immigrants, particularly Catholic immigrants. New immigrant groups who are alien, they’re here to replace us, et cetera, et cetera. They get racialized. So, here you have a very interesting depiction of an Irish immigrant, and there’s a melding of anti-Irish and anti-Black racism here. I don’t know if you can see the caption here, but it says the King of a-shanty, Irish shanty, right, see the ridiculous crown he’s wearing, he’s sitting on a wash tub.
Well, Ashanti is an African ethnicity. Ashanti is an African ethnicity. It’s the Akan people broken down into Fante and Ashanti. That is absolutely what this cartoonist is going for, racializing the Irish to put them with African Americans at the bottom of the hierarchy. So here we have this ridiculous thing called phrenology, like your skull size and shape could determine your intelligence. [audience member: mm-hmm] It’s a nice inheritance of Thomas Jefferson’s scientific racism project that you can read all about in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and here’s all the stereotypes at once about the Irish, drunken brawlers who are here to destroy American democracy.
So we have epics of white Christian nationalism that lay the foundation for the evolution of American fascism. Reconstruction after the Civil War, we have abolition of slavery, 14th Amendment, due process, which is also going to safeguard, allegedly, voting. Then that didn’t work. So 15th Amendment interracial democracy. The opposition to reconstruction, was the remobilization of the Confederate army into paramilitary groups labeled the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of White Camellia, the White League, the Red League, the Red Shirts. That’s what it is. They were slave patrols that became Confederate companies that remobilized after the war’s Ku Klux Klan chapters. It’s not an interpretation, they’re saying it. But General Lee goes down in history as the benevolent Yoda, like figure, who refuses to continue the civil war in guerrilla fashion. Bullshit! He did!
Here are all kinds of examples of insurrectionary violence and reconstruction. This is Memphis in 1866 where scores of African Americans are gunned down and systematic rape was employed in Black neighborhoods against Black women. Here’s the Colfax massacre, that is 1873 in Louisiana. It was an anti-Black, Democrat right massacre that killed over 300. We don’t know because they threw them in rivers and dug mass graves. We don’t know how many, but at least 300. [heavy sigh] This is the Opelousas massacre, the one in the lower left here, in Louisiana, and here on the far right over here, this is the state capital of Louisiana at the time, in New Orleans, the Mechanics Institute, the Public Building.
This is the Republican Party, which was biracial at this time, trying to form a ticket for the 1866 election. Confederate veterans simply got together, armed themselves, and with the help of the New Orleans police, stormed the building and tried to murder all of them. Second epoch of white Christian nationalism, Jim Crow. Reconstruction essentially is defeated in 1876. That paves the way for Jim Crow, which is an apartheid state, despite the Natural Rights Declaration of Independence and all of the post Civil War amendments. How is Jim Crow enforced? Lynching…upwards of 3,800 African Americans lynched between 1880 and 1940.
Usually after being accused of violating a white woman. White women, these claims aren’t imposed on white women, they’re making them, Which should be no surprise, since 40% of enslaved people before the Civil War were owned by white women, who, according to the slaves, were crueler masters. Don’t ask me, ask Stephanie Jones Rogers of Berkeley, who wrote a prize winning book on the subject correcting a bunch of white feminist dogma that white women couldn’t be good slave masters because they were too virtuous and exercised a more moderating moral influence on the institution…good god. So here’s little Myrtle Vance. She was a white girl who was murdered… and train tables, tickets, fields cleared, stage built. This was a mass event lynching. The whole community took part in it.
Center, that’s Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898. This is one of the last vestiges of Reconstruction still going in 1898. You have an integrated local government. You have Black policemen. You have Black people in the militia. Integrated living. Well, one of the Black newspaper men publishes an article saying… The woman who becomes the first white Senator, Rebecca Felton from Georgia, remarked on a lynching: “If it takes 1000 more of these to secure white womanhood and the virtue of Christian civilization, I say yes.” She goes down in history as the first female Senator. That’s identity politics, and it sucks. [skeptical tone] Rebecca Felton’s a hero?
So Wilmington, there’s the pogrom there, and interracial democracy ends. This is St. Louis, 1917, one of the worst examples of insurrectionary racist violence in American history. Here’s the link to how all this becomes fascism: Fascism is modernity. It seeks a regeneration of a glorious path and utilizes modern technology to do it. So how was the Klan reborn? Power of Hollywood — taking a novel and making it into Birth of a Nation, and the message that the meaning of the Civil War is that white supremacy was maintained, and this faction of Southerners who went a little crazy, they get to come back. Interracial democracy in Reconstruction was a great mistake of radical left wing lunatics who, in the early 20th century, they were beginning to conflate racial justice with Bolshevik communism.
So you have this idea in the Second Klan that what we would call ‘woke,’ let’s reclaim that, everything that we would call woke is a communist, Black immigrant Catholic plot to destroy masculinity, white supremacy, and Christian civilization. Movies, mass print culture and other forms of modern associations we’ll talk about. The second clan was literally a corporation founded by a white marketing male executive and a female white marketing executive who are at the top of their craft. This is a new business venture, marketing, early 20th century. Then, public relations, they delve into that. PR was invented to protect John D. Rockefeller from repercussions of the Ludlow Colorado massacre of striking workers. So the Klan is formed through this new kind of business paradigm where public relations are really important.
So it’s a corporation. It’s built on a corporate hierarchy of executives, and it utilizes a sales force paid in commission to go out and recruit members. What they found out with the grand cycloptic wizard klegal clavern, whatever his title was, Dwight Stevenson, D.C. Stevenson, recognized insurrection is the best way to mobilize the consciousness that’s being stirred by all these forms of mass media — get them involved. Not just the weird secret rituals and the marches, get them involved. American tradition: Klan baseball leagues. American tradition: County fairs, sponsored by the Klan…picnics, religious services, civic gatherings. And there’s that America First thing, Ladies leading the charge there. So the ritual that’s that special sense of belonging.
You’ll hear a lot of MAGA people talk about, I could solve all my problems, become the real me by joining something bigger than me. Think of a Trump rally as a ritual. So the insurrectionary vector continues as white Christian nationalism becomes fascism. Fascism, all the things I describe, but what it seeks the most is to make the state…its first primary purpose is to protect and perpetuate the people’s culture, unifying culture and the state, they’re inseparable. Which is really interesting in a natural rights Republic. So we see Chicago in the upper left hand corner, that’s 1919, Tulsa on the bottom lef, and bottom right there’s Houston, and I think that’s part of Washington, D.C. in the center there.
At the upper right is the Elaine, Arkansas massacre of 1919 when Black sharecroppers were organizing into a branch of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. 1919, Bolshevik revolution, Black workers organizing. You tell me what happens. So they wait till the crops harvested, the Black folks had harvested the crop, and then they kill about 300 of them. Machine guns, aided by the United States Army, based on the lie that Blacks were revolting and gonna kill all the white people. So they got the crop in, they did the massacre, and then they sold the crop that they stole from the Black workers. Now, in Elaine, Arkansas, which was once, in the early 20th century, is where a lot of freed African Americans even owned their own land. That ended in this insurrection, which was attributed to the Bolshevik Revolution.
One of the most important insurrections that’s not talked about, happened about a mile away from where I grew up, in Pittsburgh, in the little industrial town of Carnegie. The Klan’s quarry at that one was Irish town. So in 1923, the Irish were labor organizers, they were Catholic, and they didn’t ever back down. They won this battle too, just like the students at Notre Dame who beat the Klan in their own battle and earned the nickname the Fighting Irish. How many of you knew that’s the story? Great story. You think we should stop for questions. Okay. I think we stop for questions now. I’ve got a whole lot of stuff here on MAGA that we can talk about, so you’re handling questions first.
Jay, Refuse Fascism Chicago 36:08
Let’s get a few questions out on the table and see where we’re at.
Speaker 1 36:11
I do have a question. This is very informative, very interesting. Lot of dot connecting to make a dire picture, and we have an election at 200 and some days. So I want to go to the pragmatic. What do we do to stop this? [JD: Wow!]
Jay, Refuse Fascism Chicago 36:11
What do we do to stop this fascism?
John Donoghue 36:31
How do we prevent our election from being stolen?
Jay, Refuse Fascism Chicago 36:32
Okay, I was….
Speaker 2 36:33
This is fascinating. I’d like to see if you could integrate the idea of the very wealthy from the very beginning, which were the plantation owners and large land owners, and they’re very wealthy now, and how that dominance also runs through this thread, how those relate.
Speaker 3 36:55
Going off of that, I was curious about how you think the current oligarchy, with fascism, which is kind of intertwined, but then also the fact that previously, oligarchy and fascism were in decline because people weren’t able to communicate with each other and see how the rough gap was materializing. Now we have that opportunity with social media and other things. So do you think that that is going to be significant in helping to stop said…
John Donoghue 37:27
So let’s take class first. My friend said something profound, and it’s hard to get to because it’s so embedded in all of this madness. It’s that capital formation is tied to all of this. The question is, then — let’s take the American South, first and Second Klan. Now let’s take it. These are the deepest pockets of poverty in America. Just look at the stats for infant mortality, every indicator. So why do poor whites support this? Because in a capitalist class hierarchy, white supremacy is something that makes all whites equal because they’re all on top of the racially subordinated and terrorized and exploited. That sense of identity, of belonging to something greater than yourself, this has always been the case in the American labor movement.
If anyone knows the history of the American labor movement, there are very promising bursts of interracial organization, but sooner or later, whether you’re talking about the Knights of Labor or the AFL or the United Auto Workers, internal racist divisions inhibited the growing power of the labor movement. So what I’m trying to say is that the power structures through which white Christian nationalism and then fascism will thrive are based upon a capitalist organization of the economy. You can’t have a labor movement resisting that. You can’t have active class consciousness resisting that. So you create the false pretense of white egalitarianism that has to be defended at all costs, because those subjugated are going to rise up and replace all.
So I think that’s kind of how it works. Bob Dylan’s wrong in the Medgar Evers song — they’re not pawns in the game, they buy into it. That’s what my Irish did. They weren’t white when they came here. They weren’t Black, but they were something else, and it was racialized. How do you fit in in America? New York City draft riots, 1863 Irish Americans lynched dozens of African Americans because they didn’t want to be drafted in the Civil War to fight for white oligarchs, we’ll say, so Blacks could be free to steal their jobs. So now we’re talking about oligarchs, and then that was connected to media. It’s the dialectic of technological innovation in modernity. You can have Birth of a Nation. You can have Nick Fuentes on Instagram, but you also have Refuse Fascism podcasts. You have so many organizations and influencers mustering the power they have and building bases to oppose it.
So it’s not technology itself, obviously, it’s how it’s utilized. But let’s take a step back and think about something inherently stupid, which I’m too often guilty of, which is arguing with people on social media about politics [laughter], not smart. Started in the pandemic because I was bored, got off Facebook, but please don’t read my Instagram exchanges. It’s dehumanizing, because all the crap that you would self-censor out of courtesy and politeness to someone as a human being, that evaporates. We’re all in our little atomized places, and it’s so much easier to tear someone down that way, especially if you’re a racist. It’s easy enough for people who are anti racism, to objectify the people that they’re opposed to.
The technology is accomplishing, not just getting the message out of fascism, but it’s accomplishing one of its greatest goals as a ancillary development, which is dehumanizing. And who’s orchestrating it all? The master capital class, the oligarchs. That was really cool the inauguration wasn’t it? to see them all sitting there. They’re not shy about it. They’re putting it in your face, [audience member: financing the ballroom].. the ballroom, and all that gold gilt, the White House! What to do about it? Let’s keep talking about that. First step is to join an organization and/or devote yourself to some pursuit that is spreading the word and facilitating organization.
I would say to do that without the delusion that the midterm elections are going to determine up or down the fate of the MAGA movement. I hope I’m wrong. Historians shouldn’t predict, but damn it, they’re telling us. So one of the things we can do about it is have a plan B. The only way I believe this can be stopped is through mass organization and stepping out of the system to see it collapse, and that’s a general strike. If you think the Democratic Party is going to come to your rescue, please pay attention. It’s not. [mocking Chuck Schumer, presumably] I’m going to write a strongly worded letter to the President… Come on, man, it’s not gonna happen.
So what we need to do, A, I think, is see the moment clearly for what it is, understand that this just isn’t a lunatic, buffoon, vulgarian trying to be an authoritarian. He’s got an entire movement behind him. He’s captured a political party, two branches of government. He’s got the weight of American historyand its most dysfunctional aspects, driving it. [audience member: He’s got the Supreme Court too.] First step, wake up. Second Step, do something. Organize, do some activity, help mobilize, and then put your ass on the line. There’s no other way to do it. There’s no risk free resistance. It’s time to recognize what’s going on, and if you’re not gonna put your ass on the line, we will lose.
Jay, Refuse Fascism Chicago 42:56
Fascism rules by a different form of rule. We still are in the same economic system, but fascism rules by force. [JD: mm-hmm] That’s the whole history of we’ve heard tonight — not by the rule of law, which is being destroyed every day. Every day you read a new one. Particularly when it comes to elections, that’s a whole…you can write a book about what they’ve already done. It rules by force. It doesn’t rule by popular support. They don’t depend on popular support. They don’t care that their poll numbers are down because they don’t plan on winning an election. All the people who go crazy: Oh, we’re winning; We’re winning because their poll numbers are down.
That’s not how they’re going to stay in power. [JD: No] They’re gonna stay in power by rigging the election, by trying to overturn the results. They’re putting their people into different state levels to take over their electoral college votes. As John was saying, there’s a whole pattern that they’ve been working on, a whole plan that they’ve been working on for decades. [JD: yeah] And now, having taken over the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel, in round two, they are gearing up. What do you call a failed coup attempt? A rehearsal. They are putting it in place right now. Like I said, going to Fulton County and taking the voting records, the election results from 2020. They’re investigating in Arizona. To rely on those elections is denial. It’s denial in the face of fascism.
That is what Fascism is. We could get into the whole history of the economics of it. We’ve talked about, why was Reconstruction terminated? Because a whole empire depended on the super exploitation of Black labor. There’s a great book called The Empire of Cotton, 1965. That’s where American democracy actually started. It didn’t start till 1965. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, his approval rating was 35 percent or something. [JD: Oh, yeah.] He was considered a Bolshevik. Those forces have never reconciled themselves to what the 60s were, and none of what accomplished in the 60s where there was Black civil rights, Black liberation, the Freedom Riders, women’s liberation, Native American, A movement. None of that was elected. None of it was elected. It came from the people, and that’s what’s gonna have to stop this fascism.
Speaker 1 45:27
I need it simple. So I got the wake up part [JD, through laughter: okay] Put your ass on the line…I’m not sure what that means, and general strike.
John Donoghue 45:36
It means protest and be willing to commit acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. That’s really scary, because you’re could end up in jail.
Jay, Refuse Fascism Chicago 45:45
On November 5th, we called for people to come to Washington, D.C. en masse and not leave. Civil disobedience, civil resistance, shut shit down. Call it what you will. The Occupy movement…people saw some relationship to that. Make it ungovernable in a nonviolent way. That’s what we were about. We didn’t succeed. Not enough people understood the danger that we are facing. Not enough people were willing to take those risks. Now we have No Kings Day coming up. Is that going to be a fun family outing? A big picnic? Or is it gonna be an expression of real determination. Stop the war on Iran — which we didn’t even get to that. I mean, how friggin dangerous that is.
There was, just this morning, some U.S. flunky of the regime was talking about private talks with Israel, where Israel is considering using a nuke against Iran. [JD sighs, followed by an audience member] This was in the news today, okay? This was in the New York Times. And Trump Must Go Now! Not just mass resistance. I don’t care if you call it a general strike, or we’re all heading to D.C. on July 4th, or whatever. But what is your demand? What is the demand of No Kings? [JD: Clarify your demand.] Yes, the demand has to be the end of this fascist regime. This is the time where we might have a chance. If we think that the Democrats are going to save us in November, our chance could be gone.
Speaker 1 46:07
How do we do that?
John Donoghue 46:11
They can’t even call it fascist. They won’t do it because they’re afraid of the optics and the blowback.
Jay, Refuse Fascism Chicago 46:11
Well, they’re afraid of the unrest. They’re more worried about maintaining the status quo [JD: That’s a good point.] than stopping this white supremacist juggernaut than John described.
Sam Goldman 46:57
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Thanks to Richard Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. There is no new episode next week. We will be back April 12th, but stay tuned to our Substack and social media in the meantime, until then, In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept the Fascist America.