Why Trump’s Cartoonish Fascism Is So Effective with Jason Stanley

Speaker 1 Hi, Yive.

Speaker 2 Don't Oid Ve at me.

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 2 My guest today is Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism and a professor of philosophy.

Speaker 2 Stanley, along with his colleagues Marcy Shore and Tim Snyder, made international news when they decided to leave Yale and America for Canada, where they'll be teaching at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

Speaker 2 He's the author of seven books, including How Fascism Works, The Politics of Us and Them, and Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past and Control the Future.

Speaker 2 I'm excited to talk to him because I've followed Jason for a long time. I just ran into him at a book festival and we have a lot in common.
We've talked about a lot of the same things.

Speaker 2 I gave him a hard time for leaving this country. He said he should stay here and fight.
And we'll talk about that too.

Speaker 2 We have two expert questions for Stanley: one from Clay Risen, the author of Red Scare: Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, and a reporter at the New York Times, who we recently had on the podcast.

Speaker 2 And another from Deb Roy, someone I've known for a long time, a techie. He's a professor of media arts and scientists at MIT and the director of the Center for Constructive Communication.

Speaker 2 This is a really sharp conversation, so stick around and come back, Jason.

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Speaker 2 All right, Jason, you ready? What perfect timing?

Speaker 1 Perfect timing.

Speaker 2 Perfect timing. So you study philosophy of language, the language of politics, and the language and strategies of fascism.
And you've been outspoken about calling President Trump a fascist.

Speaker 2 Tell us why and then explain how Trump compares to other fascists.

Speaker 1 So I think of fascism as sort of based on great replacement theory. The idea is that the nation was great and its greatness consisted of the exploits of its great men.

Speaker 1 And then the idea is that foreigners are coming in and destroying the nation's greatness. They're polluting the blood of of the nation, as it were.
And

Speaker 1 so great replacement theory is central here. And the mythic past is central, this idea of a past that was once great.

Speaker 1 That is what you see in India now, the idea that there was a pure mythic past, a pure Hindu past. So purity is very central here.

Speaker 1 We see purity entering into the description of immigration or foreigners or people regarded as other and that they're some kind of pollution.

Speaker 1 And then we need to get back to rigid gender roles according to fascism because we need to repopulate the nation with the pure

Speaker 1 people of that race.

Speaker 1 And patriarchy is very central because the glorification of men's exploits in the past and women's equality threatens the primacy of men.

Speaker 1 And that's part of this great pure mythic past that is supposedly being destroyed by foreigners and

Speaker 1 liberal equality. Now,

Speaker 1 what we have, you know, in terms of ranking of fascists, I mean, it's pretty typical to say that Romania was particularly horrific. We have to distinguish the old right from the new right.

Speaker 1 So I would think if you're looking at Mussolini, you're looking at someone who himself, I mean, Ethiopia,

Speaker 1 he invaded Ethiopia. That was obviously a race war, but it wasn't the kind of genocidal, efficient genocidal mania of Hitler.

Speaker 1 And Hitler, of course, focused on Jews as the sort of force behind feminism and liberalism. This is what people don't understand.
Just a short

Speaker 1 pat peeve tangent. It wasn't Orthodox Jews that appear in Mein Kampf.
It was Jews like me, like leftist, pro-equality Jews.

Speaker 1 So Hitler focused on Jews. I think actually Netanyahu

Speaker 1 is right now showing himself to be a fascist along historically horrific dimensions.

Speaker 1 I think with

Speaker 1 Trump,

Speaker 1 with immigration, you know, we're seeing concentration camps. We're seeing something very similar to the German storm up Thailung.
ICE looks very similar. Hitler was like, okay,

Speaker 1 goons, here are your state uniforms. And so we're seeing something eerily similar to that move.
And we're seeing concentration camps.

Speaker 1 But, you know, we didn't have the final solution in Germany until 1941. So really, I mean, my family was living in Germany in 1937 and 1938.

Speaker 1 It wasn't until Kristallnacht that things really got extremely extreme.

Speaker 2 He's just in the early stages of this is what you're saying, correct? In the early stages of fascism.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, I don't think you would say that Hitler in 1934 was in the early stages of fascism. No.
He was a fascist. And I think that we're looking at a kind of 1934 kind of moment.

Speaker 1 It's tricky because, you know,

Speaker 1 I mean, Trump is declaring emergencies left and right, right?

Speaker 1 So, you know, it's the same strategies we're seeing. We can talk about whether these strategies are things he got from books or whether they're just natural reactions if you want to take over.

Speaker 2 So your latest book is Erasing History, and there's been a lot of recent attempts by President Trump to do exactly that.

Speaker 2 Let's go through some of them, and we'll talk about where they fit with the standard fascist playbook, of which there is one.

Speaker 2 President Trump has placed Washington, D.C., as we noted, police force under federal control, deployed the National Guard, and ordered federal agents to patrol the city.

Speaker 2 You've written that, quote, fascist law and order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless.

Speaker 2 So, talk about how Trump's move fits into that framework. And he's using words like bloodthirsty and deranged maniacs, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Right. So it's clearly, you know, racial in character in the case of DC.

Speaker 1 It's part of the, here we need to bring in American history and not European history and look back to this idea of black-run, black-majority cities during Reconstruction being described as corrupt.

Speaker 1 So that and lawless. This idea, this is a chapter I talk about in my book, How Fascism Works, called Sodom and Gomorrah.

Speaker 1 The idea is that cities are filled with foreigners, immigrants, and our, you know, the law and order has completely broken down and they're filled with LGBTQ citizens doing, uh, doing decadent things.

Speaker 1 So this is the kind of structure, the rural-urban divide that Trump leans into. And he leans into many Americans not,

Speaker 1 you know it's very natural that's why sodom and gomorrah appears in the bible there's something about the rural urban divide that that speaks you know geographically and centrally to humanity so dc because of its historical associations he can tell a fake story that draws on racism that draws on America's sort of founding sin, genocide of indigenous people and racism.

Speaker 1 So that's what he's doing.

Speaker 1 What you do is you draw on stereotypes, you draw on myths about oppressed groups to basically create a sense of emergency and then take over. Right.
And that's what we're seeing.

Speaker 2 So another one, Trump is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska for what he calls a feel-out session. It's kind of creepy over the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 Trump has repeatedly blamed Ukrainian President Vlodymir Zelensky for starting the war, despite obvious evidence. The contrary, he's also blamed Putin recently.
He's all over the place.

Speaker 2 Is the constant shuffling of blame a deliberate tactic, a fascist tactic to undermine truth, or is he just reacts, you know, as he feels like it at any one moment?

Speaker 1 That's a great question. I assume that's a question for both of us, Cara.
I could throw it back at you and we could discuss it. I think neither of us really know.

Speaker 1 I mean, there is that 1984-esque kind of now we are at, we've always been at war with Oceania thing going on.

Speaker 1 Orwell sets it up as if it's deliberate, deliberate, whereas with Trump, one has more of a feeling that it's chaotic.

Speaker 2 So does the muddling the narrative around Russia can give Trump any sort of strategic benefit, or is it just he doesn't know what he's doing? I can't tell. You're right.
I can't tell.

Speaker 2 But has there ever been fascists that do this?

Speaker 1 Good question.

Speaker 1 There seems to be more anarchy here. I guess this is one of the objections that the it's not fascism people would make, that there's too much anarchy for it to be a coherent ideology.

Speaker 1 We're familiar with that point. But I think that Trump's supporters want him to bring these wars to an end.
Right.

Speaker 1 So I knew intelligent people who thought Trump was going to bring the war in Gaza to an end and bring the war in Ukraine to an end and stop funding Israel with weapons to do its genocide.

Speaker 1 And I'm for weapons for Ukraine and I am not for supporting Israel's war in Gaza. But I think there are people, his supporters, J.D.
Vance, for instance,

Speaker 2 were people who were invested in him bringing these wars to a conclusion so i see trump especially with it with russia and ukraine i see him under a lot of pressure internal pressure right so it's not the tactic if we're at war all the time because that's what he'd stick with for in that regard so i'm going to move on the white house is going to review smithsonian museums ahead of america's 250th anniversary to ensure they are quote accurate patriotic and enlightening they've also announced that trump will host the kennedy center's award show given everything else Trump's trying to accomplish, why would he want to micromanage museums and performing arts centers?

Speaker 2 It could be part of his ego, the need for control. Is this a fascist tactic or are the two mixed up with each other?

Speaker 1 I published How Fascism Works in 2018, and other people as well were saying Trumpism is fascism. And one of the major objections was, where's the cultural element?

Speaker 1 So, you know, fascism involves a takeover of culture and linking of culture to the greatness of the nation and an exceptionalist narrative. And it's exactly what we're seeing.

Speaker 1 In fact, this was the objection to calling it fascism, that he wasn't doing this.

Speaker 1 So now we see the kind of autocratic structure that of the White House, the gold leaf everywhere, the kind of Qaddafi-esque structure.

Speaker 1 Qaddafi wasn't a fascist, but obviously he was a despotic autocrat.

Speaker 1 And now we're seeing the kind of cultural takeover in the service of the greatness of the nation and the greatness of its leader that we would expect if this were fascism.

Speaker 2 Along with the media, correct? Along with suing me.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's the super obvious stuff, like shutting down the media, shutting down the universities, changing the school system.

Speaker 1 I mean, a lot of people didn't see that as much, which is why I wrote Erasing History because I knew people weren't going to.

Speaker 1 predict that the attack on the universities, but I knew that was going to be like one of the first things because it's fascism.

Speaker 1 And so, so that's and education is central. Museums, culture, and education are central here.

Speaker 1 And so, you have to take over the education system, you have to take over the museums because the museums are part of the education system.

Speaker 1 And they're not even hiding what they want to replace it with. They want to replace it with an American exceptionalist narrative.
That's what they say. And it's so ironic, right?

Speaker 1 Because the American exceptionalist narrative is that the United States is a free country, a free democracy.

Speaker 1 And at the very same time as they're showing us not to be exceptional at all,

Speaker 1 they're imposing an American exceptionalist narrative by law.

Speaker 2 Right. And where would be the next thing they would go for?

Speaker 1 Great question, Tara. I think

Speaker 1 at this stage, things are moving very rapidly. But it's also the case that some things, and Orban realizes this, are just not that relevant to them.

Speaker 1 Like they're not, you know, some intellectuals talking, just don't harm them. You know, if anything, it feeds into their narrative.

Speaker 1 So, but

Speaker 1 now Putin doesn't tolerate any of that. Putin is going to crush any dissent violently, but that took a while to happen.

Speaker 1 And it could be that we will skate along with them saying, well, you know, as long as this person isn't,

Speaker 1 you know, is not effective in their dissent,

Speaker 1 we'll leave it alone because, you know, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 Right. Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and accused her of having rigged the jobs report.

Speaker 2 His pick for the job said that he would suspend monthly job reports for walking that back. Your average voter probably doesn't pay attention to BLS revisions, but markets do.

Speaker 2 And if you assume investors are tougher to fool, why would Trump try to manipulate the data and risk undermining the administration's very dwindling credibility?

Speaker 1 I don't think he cares about credibility. You know, this is all cartoonish, right, Kara? This is just straight out of some novel that you would write about an authoritarian.

Speaker 1 I mean, facts are irrelevant. All that's relevant is what makes the leader look good.

Speaker 1 So, you know, that's why history is a danger. The nation has to be great.
Anything the nation did that wasn't great has to be erased.

Speaker 1 Any facts that run counter to the idea that Trump is the greatest leader in history have to be erased. In fact, serious dangers.

Speaker 1 He views it as a kind of betrayal of him to report accurate numbers when they don't support his image of greatness.

Speaker 1 So to loop back to your earlier question, we have a kind of cartoonish performance of a fascist dictator out of some kind of,

Speaker 2 you know. Very chaplain-esque, actually.

Speaker 1 It feels very chaplain-esque, right? It's a kind of every kind of, okay, well, you know, we're just going to have the museums turn into glorification of the nation.

Speaker 1 We'll slap Trump onto Mount Brushmore. I mean, the whole thing seems chaplain-esque.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, it's such a commentary on this putative exceptionalism of the United States that we would fall for such a direct cart.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is not Paul Kagame we're speaking of, the leader of Rwanda.

Speaker 2 Does being cartoonish make it less effective?

Speaker 1 I mean, Arendt and Origins, as you know, says, you know, totalitarianism bumps up against reality and founders on those shoals.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I think that's more a hope than anything else.

Speaker 2 So cartoonishness can be effective.

Speaker 1 But when I say cartoonish, I mean it's a kind of paint-by-numbers fascist dictatorship that is emerging.

Speaker 1 It's something that you would read a book and it says, this is what they do, and that's what they're doing.

Speaker 1 Sometimes I feel like they're reading my books. You know,

Speaker 1 it's not hidden. It's not a sophisticated version of authoritarianism, not even as sophisticated as Putin.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 2 But does it have to be?

Speaker 1 It doesn't appear so. It appears that the United States is exceptionally vulnerable to fascism.

Speaker 1 We have the largest prison system in the world, and we're already, to a large extent, a racist police state. And the theory of fascism is that when you have that, when you have that kind of, I mean,

Speaker 1 there's this notion of the dual state, right?

Speaker 1 Under fascism, you have Frankl's dual state, that you have one state that allows the favored group to do what they want and the other state that is sort of a more regular structure.

Speaker 1 Now, you don't have the exact same thing in American American history, but Du Bois talks about two systems of justice, one for white people and one for black people. And we've long had that.

Speaker 1 So of course we're vulnerable to the collapse of law because we've long had the collapse of law just directed against poor people and

Speaker 1 racial minorities.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So another one, Harvard is reportingly negotiating a deal with the Trump administration to pay $500 million settlement and potentially give the federal government access to its emissions data in order to restore its federal funding of billions of dollars.

Speaker 2 We're recording this interview on Wednesday, and by the time it airs, they might have reached a deal.

Speaker 2 You've written that Columbia University's deal with the administration, quote, threatened to be a model of the capitulation of American universities to fascism. Talk about this settlement now, because

Speaker 2 Harvard was attacked before in the 50s, right? In the 40s, 50s, many times. Is this the most important settlement in that regard, if they strike it? And do they have a choice?

Speaker 1 Well, the idea that they were run by, you know, by

Speaker 1 cultural Marxists was always absurd. And there were certain elements of the last five years, like diversity statements, that I disagreed with pretty strongly.

Speaker 1 But I saw them as more like bureaucratic overreach than the workings of some malevolent cultural Marxists who somehow, unbeknownst to everyone, were controlling things.

Speaker 1 So we have a lot of sort of people who already were, you know, disturbed by the number of women coming up through the ranks as faculty, things like this.

Speaker 1 And I think this is true of all of our institutions. So there's some amount of sort of self-capitulation of saying, okay, you know, we wanted to get rid of this stuff anyway.

Speaker 1 But I think that what it's looking like is they're going to do DEI for Trump supporters,

Speaker 1 DEI for conservatives. Let's be clear.

Speaker 1 There are hardly any Trump supporters in science departments. There are hardly any registered Republicans in science departments.
And that's because of the extreme nature of the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 It's become an anti-science party, an anti-knowledge party. So, but I think they're going to try to correct that.
They're going to try to bring in more right-wing students.

Speaker 1 They're going to try to bring in more right-wing faculty across the board. And then a bunch of it is just going to be corrupt.
You're just going to have to hire some cronies of Trump in order to

Speaker 1 make nice. So this idea that you have from some of the mainstream press, like, oh, the United States has lots of Trump supporters, so you should have Trump supporters everywhere in the university.

Speaker 1 I mean, let's just look at the reasoning behind that. I am not comparing Trump supporters to Nazis.
I am not doing that.

Speaker 1 However, if you were to have a lot of Nazis in your country, it would be crazy to say we have to fill the universities with them.

Speaker 2 Do they have a choice, though? Do these universities have a choice, given the amounts of money here? Or should they just wait them out?

Speaker 1 No, no, they should move. We need Harvard should move to Canada, like Central European University moved to.
Yeah. One of those universities should just leave.

Speaker 2 They're not moving to Canada. You know that.

Speaker 1 I'm aware, Cara, they should. That's what Central European University did.
Maybe they had to. But imagine if you're a non-wealthy family in Beijing or a wealthy family in Europe.

Speaker 1 Are you going to send your kid to a place where they have no freedom of thought or freedom of expression? Or imagine you're a political science professor who's not a U.S. citizen.
Suddenly, you know,

Speaker 1 you're really under threat if you speak, even about your area of expertise. You ask what's going to happen.
That's going to get more and more extreme.

Speaker 1 Khalil Muhammad told me and Martha's Vineyard book festival that settler colonialism, the concept of settler colonialism will be used as a basis for, if you teach that, it'll be a basis for sort of anti-Semitic bias.

Speaker 1 So, we're going to see more and more of that. Right.
And so, the settlements, insofar as they're leaking into the sort of, oh, you know, the fake anti-Semitism pretext, that's just a

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Speaker 2 So let's switch back now and go to more analytical moments, stay on the education system, which is one of the major focuses of your book.

Speaker 2 Trump's attacks on the American education system are much deeper than just elite universities. What is the ultimate goal of a fascist, and if Trump is this fascist when it comes to American education?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so as Vladimir Putin said, wars are won by teachers. So we had progressive education for a while.
We still do.

Speaker 1 The idea is to empower citizens, to give them a sense of agency, teach about social movements for positive progressive change, for equality.

Speaker 1 And that kind of teaching, where you teach about what ordinary people do to affect social change, is very dangerous for autocrats because autocrats don't want people to know that they have power.

Speaker 1 They don't want people to know that large social movements can challenge hierarchies. So you get rid of that.
You get rid of labor history. You get rid of black history.

Speaker 1 You get rid of movements for LGBTQ rights and women's history. And you say, history is just the deeds of great men.

Speaker 1 And in fact, in Mein Kampf, that's exactly what Hitler says. He says education should take the form of just teaching about the deeds of great men of the rich.

Speaker 2 Uber mentioned, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you want to zap the agency. out of ordinary citizens in an autocracy and just have them stand back in worshipfulness of these powerful, great men.
And then they feel, well, that's how history is.

Speaker 1 Nothing historical came from groups of ordinary people. In the case of the United States, you have something historically particular, which is the role of the public school in combating racism.

Speaker 1 So in the South, the Black Americans fought for the establishment of the public school in the South, not just for a liberal education for their kids, but also so that white students and black students could encounter each other's perspectives.

Speaker 1 So the public school is always in the United States a target because of its role in racial equality and racial understanding.

Speaker 2 Right. So 10 years ago, the Atlantic published an article headlined, The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff.

Speaker 2 You and other critics have pointed out that piece is a starting point for the panic around wokeness and cancel culture in universities, which you say ultimately helped lead to Trump's re-election.

Speaker 2 He wrote in The Guardian, quote: the U.S. mainstream media has waged a decades-long propaganda campaign against American universities.

Speaker 2 Can there not be some concerns about language policing on college campuses or campus protests without being, you know, a handmade into fascism?

Speaker 1 Oh, absolutely. I mean, the 90s political correctness thing,

Speaker 1 William F. Buckley drew attention to this issue of the, you know, the liberals,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 not allowing conservative speech. It's a very old topic in American life.
It is not new. What's new is self-described liberals becoming William F.
Buckley.

Speaker 1 And then the main institutions of the main newspapers backing that, not

Speaker 1 with articles not written by professors, but just by people claiming they're liberals. And so, of course, there's always things to critique.

Speaker 1 Diversity statements, that was absurd, like the loyalty oaths.

Speaker 1 There was definitely overreaches and excessive performances of, you know, the whole sit down and shut up unless you belong to an oppressed group. None of that I was in favor of.
However, you know,

Speaker 1 it was not something that I experienced as anything near as powerful as the power of anti-woke white guys. It has never been the case in my time in university that the power of anti-woke white guys

Speaker 1 complaining about feminism, and that's always been the dominant voice at universities.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, my department at Yale, which was a liberal progressive department, we hired our first tenured black professor last year.

Speaker 1 So, you know, definitely saw like Kendi, Abraham Kendi, I did not agree with that. I did not agree with his ideology.

Speaker 1 I thought a lot of the movements, I thought, you know, the idea that you're going to end patriarchy and end racism in a few years was, you know, obviously lent itself to problematic excesses.

Speaker 1 But everyone around me, the university is. part of the world, is part of the country.

Speaker 1 And so just as people were panicked about wokeness outside of the university, inside of the university, the university was dominated by anti-woke white men panicking about, you know, a few more women.

Speaker 1 So, which is not to say that, you know, not to say that I agree with diversity statements.

Speaker 1 It's not to deny that, you know, sometimes people were just idiotic in the service of otherwise laudable goals.

Speaker 1 But in general, my entire 29 years as a professor has been occupying spaces dominated by donors, by boards, by administrators who are not responsive to issues of equality and diversity.

Speaker 1 So in 2015, the thing that Haidt and Lukianov were responding to was when Black Lives Matter moved onto campuses in 2015, 2016.

Speaker 1 It started with the University of Missouri and then moved to Yale University, where one of our colleges was named after John C. Calhoun, the sort of foremost proponent of slavery.

Speaker 1 And three black students, philosophy majors, had come to me in September 2015 and told me no one had ever seen a black person on a philosophy syllabus. And so that was the impetus.

Speaker 1 And then to be ridiculed, dragged over the coals

Speaker 1 for that utterly legitimate concern, that's what I witnessed. And I witnessed my fellow professors responding with fear when they were actually the ones in power.

Speaker 2 So let's stand this for a minute. You've characterized some of the reactions to the Gaza protests, which really sort of supercharged it, and so-called wokeness on campus as a betrayal.

Speaker 2 I'm paraphrasing here, but in your view, the betrayal was a mainstream media liberals and I guess centrists failing to recognize accusations of anti-semitism on campus and accusations of wokeism as a fascist strategy to destabilize democracy.

Speaker 2 Talk very quickly about

Speaker 2 your theory of this case,

Speaker 2 why this particular thing was effective.

Speaker 1 Well, partly it was effective because there's a generational battle between my fellow Jewish people. Jewish students are, by and large, many of them are very critical of Israel.

Speaker 1 You know, the opinions are very divided. The younger you go, the more critical of Israel you get among Jewish people.

Speaker 1 So one reason it's effective is because older Jewish people are much less critical of Israel. It's much easier for them to think of protests against Israel as anti-Semitic, even when

Speaker 1 one of the largest identity groups in those protests are Jewish students. They get erased and they were erased by the mainstream media.

Speaker 1 And then we have more erasures of history where, you know, Muslim students at Harvard report in much larger numbers feeling that their speech is chilled than Jewish students. But that gets erased.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about your decision to leave the country and move to Canada, speaking of erasing yourself. I make fun of you for this.

Speaker 2 I said you shouldn't have left, but you justified it by saying, I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.

Speaker 2 What do you think is the likelihood you'd have been punished if you stayed? And if you didn't have children, would you have stayed?

Speaker 1 I probably would have stayed if I didn't have children.

Speaker 1 I have black Jewish children, and I've had long-standing worries about

Speaker 1 their safety in this country, even though we're very privileged. And so that, you know, obviously class plays a role.
If you're poor and white, it's also a very dangerous country for you.

Speaker 1 So that played a significant role. I also think it's strange now to judge this decision.
Mossed Hamid, the writer, recently said to me, there's two perspectives on your decision.

Speaker 1 One is that you are sending an alarm to your fellow Americans about what is happening in the United States. But the second and more interesting perspective is what will you do in Canada?

Speaker 1 And that chapter has yet to be written. I feel a great responsibility to do something

Speaker 1 about the global rise of fascism and to see it as a global rise in Canada, which I feel is honestly a place of relative safety compared to other countries in the world. And I include Germany in that.

Speaker 1 So, you know, with the rise of AFDE, Alternativ for Deutschland. So I think whether or not it will have been the right decision depends upon what I'm able to do in Canada for democracy.

Speaker 2 So if you look at the history of fascism, the leftists who had the means to go into exile are often seen as having betrayed the cause of working-class citizens who didn't have the option to leave.

Speaker 2 For example, Isabel Allende and Ariel Dorfman have written about the guilt and survivors' complex that came with leaving Chile after Pinochet took power.

Speaker 2 In their case, they escaped torture and potentially death at the hands of the regime.

Speaker 2 Was that fact, were you actually scared? Did you feel,

Speaker 2 and how do you feel having left, though nothing here has degenerated into what happened with Pinochet?

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I wasn't scared.

Speaker 1 I saw it more as an expressive act

Speaker 1 when I did it. I saw it more as an expressive act, as an act of sending an alarm.
It sort of seemed very abstract to me. So much of my work has been about sending an alarm.

Speaker 1 So this was intended to send an alarm to the world saying, look, things are bad in the United States.

Speaker 1 Now, an expressive act, it's not up to you to decide whether or not that expressive act was the the right one. As someone I deeply respect recently said to me,

Speaker 1 this is an expressive act that the fascists like. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes, they do.

Speaker 2 Like, look at him cut tail and run, right? Right, exactly. Does that hurt your message being received by Americans? Because people often make fun of, oh, he left.
Like, he's not here.

Speaker 2 Like, he doesn't, what a wimp or whatever, anything like that. Does that worry that your message will be, you know,

Speaker 2 diluted in some fashion?

Speaker 1 I've never worried that much about that kind of thing, about those sorts of opinions of people, because I tend to be, you know, I've been challenging Trumpism now for, you know, actually 15 years, because my first New York Times piece was about birtherism.

Speaker 1 But I've been pretty loud and open and have been targeted many times. And

Speaker 1 many people who make these charges haven't done the things that I've done.

Speaker 1 They don't go to Ukraine regularly. They don't put themselves out there.
So I just don't, I'm just not moved by that.

Speaker 1 Of course, I am moved when Kara Swisher says it to me, because Kara Swisher is another brave person who I respect. But I'm completely unmoved by people who haven't been in this fight for a long time.

Speaker 1 Yes, I get that.

Speaker 2 What would make you move back? I mean, is that part of the plan? Is there like, okay, safe now?

Speaker 1 No, the academics can almost never move. That's why it's such a privilege to have received this opportunity and this offer.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I intend to have a, I mean, I have a global perspective. It's hard to have a global perspective in the United States.
The noise is so intense. But I think it's vital to have a global perspective.

Speaker 1 If you don't understand the connection between Germany's fascist party and the Trump administration, you're not informed enough. And so my plan in Canada is to create a safe haven for journalists.

Speaker 1 I'm fundraising to create a place where journalists and civil society leaders from all over the world can come and pool their resources and knowledge to explain to each other what's going on in their countries, just like the global fascist movement is doing.

Speaker 1 They're all in communication. That's why the Germany's off-day party slogan, remigration, is the name of a new office in the reorganized State Department.

Speaker 2 They coordinate rather well. The right always does in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 What I'm hoping in Canada is we can have that kind of coordination. Canada is not in the center of things in that regard.
And so it seems to me a relatively safe place.

Speaker 1 Though I also view my job as to illuminate for my new country the dangers that they now face.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 Let's wrap up by talking about potential solutions. We'll start with expert questions.
Every episode, we get an expert to send us a question for our guests. In your case, we actually got two.

Speaker 2 Let's hear the first one. Hi, I'm Clay Risen.

Speaker 17 I'm the author of Red Scare. McCarthyism, Blacklists, and the Making of Modern America.
I'm also a reporter at the New York Times.

Speaker 18 And so my question for Jason this.

Speaker 17 You've been very critical and open about your views on how newspapers like mine and other parts of the news media have fallen short when it comes to covering the president and this administration.

Speaker 17 How specifically would you like to see the New York Times and other publications report on this moment and help people to understand better where we might be headed?

Speaker 1 Thank you. Oh, I admire him.

Speaker 1 So normalizing. I think the New York Times does a lot of normalizing.

Speaker 1 I'd like to see the normalizing end. So there's two things the New York Times is guilty of, I think.

Speaker 1 Number one is hiring a lot of people who do normalizing, especially the op-ed page, normalizing of Israel's actions and normalizing of what we're seeing here, sort of humanizing and normalizing.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 of course, fascists can be warm and and normal people.

Speaker 1 But Ross Dalvat's interview with Christopher Ruffo, a very sophisticated extreme far-right propagandist, fascist propagandist, he allowed Ruffo to say things like, oh, of course, there's racist practices, you know, things that, you know, say things to a New York Times audience that he's never going to say or communicate via the legal orders that he helps author.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of normalizing going on. These guys aren't as scary as you think.
So that's one thing.

Speaker 1 And secondly, I think the Trumpists were looking to the media to give them justifications for their actions, to give them pretexts.

Speaker 1 So what Hait and Lukianov started was a moral panic about essentially a black faculty and, you know, making it seem as if people were hiring people because of wokeness or something and looking at these topics like race as if they were forced to do so by wokeness.

Speaker 1 So that kind of moral panic untethered from factual reality about what's actually happening,

Speaker 1 you don't actually need to hire people who are normalizing. Again, let's go to this analogy, not comparing Trumpism with Nazism.

Speaker 1 But if you were to live in a country that had a lot of Nazis, would you hire people who normalized Nazism in your op-ed page?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a fair point. That's a fair point.

Speaker 2 Let's hear the second one.

Speaker 18 Hi, I'm Deb Roy. I am a member of the MIT faculty where I direct the Center for Constructive Communication, and I also am co-founder and CEO of Cortico, affiliated nonprofit.

Speaker 18 My question for Jason is: when we think about today's tech-driven public sphere where information is fragmented and tailored to individuals, and where trust in institutions and experts have plummeted, how can we rebuild what philosophers sometimes called common knowledge, a shared set of facts that everyone knows?

Speaker 18 And importantly, everyone knows that everyone else knows, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Thank you. My thesis advisor is one of the main theorists of common knowledge and he's at MIT.
So yeah, democracy requires structures of trust. It requires a background of common knowledge.

Speaker 1 And that has completely fractured. I do think that one thing to recognize is that a lot of people

Speaker 1 do know things that they like that the election in 2020 wasn't stolen, but they think that's like not my side. My side doesn't say that.
So there's a lot of that.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of deep, deep just mistrust of the other political sides on both sides. And,

Speaker 1 you know, the problem is there's a war footing. And we have to see it as a war footing, as we can see with redistricting now.
Right.

Speaker 1 so we're in this kind of problem where democracy is under existential threat and i think conservative republicans belong in a democracy what i don't think is this and these anti-democratic forces destroying democracy belong in a democracy this is a very old problem tolerating the intolerant how do we address this problem um

Speaker 1 chara i mean i think you probably have better things to say about that uh the informational disaster we're in no Yeah,

Speaker 2 I think it comes at exactly the wrong time, right? Where people have different realities. But I've been talking about this for a decade.

Speaker 2 Like if everyone has a different reality, it creates an opportunity for a dictator to come in and confuse and upset people.

Speaker 1 That was my first

Speaker 1 piece for the New York Times in 2011 on the dangers of birtherism.

Speaker 2 I mean, it works. It actually works because of, you know, my whole thesis is it was an information desert.
Now it's an information flood.

Speaker 2 And probably the flood is more damaging if you have to think about it.

Speaker 1 Right, Fahrenheit 451.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 So you pointed out the civil rights movement as a blueprint for countering fascism and said, quote, that kind of concerted attempt to elicit empathy to awaken a dominant majority in this country's case, white people, to what was happening was essential.

Speaker 2 You went on to say, I think it's quite clear we need something like that to happen.

Speaker 2 What does that look like in practice today?

Speaker 1 Well, we're going to see with the ICE raids on immigrants. We're going to see whether Americans are capable of that kind of empathy because they're going to get much uglier.

Speaker 1 And we're going to see resistance because, you know, people who underwent so much to come here, it's existential. I mean, think if you, you're going to, you're going to be sent some strange place.

Speaker 1 It's the end of your life. So it's going to be this existential moment.
And these concentration camps are going to be brutal. So we're going to see a huge military force arrayed against immigrants.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think immigrants will be fighting back in some way with nonviolent means, for example. And that we can hope will be effective on the American conscience.

Speaker 1 I just hope that we will have strategic nonviolence. But one of the problems is we don't have what Derek Bell called interest convergence.

Speaker 1 We don't have the United States facing a Cold War where the other side is calling them a white supremacist nation.

Speaker 2 Right. Alien invasion is what we need right now, now, Jason.

Speaker 1 That would be the solution.

Speaker 2 Is there any leader? I have two last questions. Is there any leader right now that you think,

Speaker 2 I mean, I was just laughing at Gavin Newsom's version of Trump tweets right now, or whatever, True Socials, that are very funny. He's been quite

Speaker 2 forthright in attacking Trump. Is there any leader right now you see as pulling people together? In that case, in the civil rights, you had Martin Luther King, you had

Speaker 2 RFK, excuse me, the original, not Jr. Is there anyone you see like that in this country that has that kind of?

Speaker 1 Well, we need charismatic authority,

Speaker 1 right? We need a leader with charismatic authority.

Speaker 1 Trump is very authentic.

Speaker 1 He's an authentic liar. So I see, obviously, AOC as having the kind of authenticity and charisma that would be needed in this moment.

Speaker 1 But whether she can appeal to a nation that is so fond of patriarchy, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's difficult. Let's end with a prediction.
I recently spoke to David Remnick about his latest piece in The New Yorker.

Speaker 2 In it, he makes the case for why it's not inevitable that Donald Trump's authoritarian project will prevail.

Speaker 2 And he told me it's important for the media to, quote, rally people's spirits as best you can. But Remnick admitted he might be the only three-quarters honest when he says Trump won't prevail.

Speaker 2 So give me your 100% honest prediction. Do you think America will overcome Trump's fascist project? It's very hard for maggish fascism, I think, to outlive this charismatic leader.

Speaker 2 I think it will fall apart. But what is your thoughts?

Speaker 1 Well, the problem with an autocracy is always the successor problem, right? What comes after?

Speaker 1 And we now have a complete destruction. We have a Supreme Court that is just, you know, looking for that autocratic leader to back their young justices.
I mean, relatively young.

Speaker 1 So that situation is something that is going to be very hard to overcome. Now we've seen that you can be an autocrat in the United States.
You can take the country over. So

Speaker 1 how do you go back from that knowledge?

Speaker 1 You know, the courts are lost. The machine behind Trump, they won't have a charismatic leader.
J.D. Vance is not a charismatic leader, but it's not clear to me they'll need a charismatic leader.

Speaker 1 But anarchy is always the result of an autocrat dying in office, right? So we just don't know.

Speaker 2 I want your prediction, though. I'm making mine.
It dies after him.

Speaker 1 I want to say we don't know and I don't know, but I think that the United States will fall to a sort of far-right machine and democracy will be a thing of the past.

Speaker 1 That's what I think with some moments of enormous anarchy, but it will basically become a semi-dysfunctional nation run by a kind of far-right machine.

Speaker 2 All right. That's what you think.
I don't. We'll see, won't we? Well, you don't live here anymore, do you?

Speaker 1 But I don't think it's smart to say that. No.
I'm in New York right now, Kara.

Speaker 2 Oh, oh, God, you'll be fine. I'll come over and protect you.
Don't worry.

Speaker 2 Me and the militia at the Ridge will come in and take care of the situation.

Speaker 2 Lesbians are good at shooting guns.

Speaker 1 We need that spirit. But I think it's a global fight, just like in your tech world.
You see very clearly that nations are no longer the basic currency they once were. Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1 And so we need to think globally. And I am thinking globally.

Speaker 1 But I think the United States, I'm not really sure how when you've seen this and when you've seen what Trump has done, how you're supposed to return to, as it were, checks and balances.

Speaker 2 Right. That's a very good point.
Well, I'm hoping for an alien invasion then. We need someone from Mars to get here stat.

Speaker 2 Who's really mean, an evil villain, that kind of thing. Then we'll all be together.

Speaker 2 Anyway, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Kara.

Speaker 2 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishad Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Speaker 2 Special thanks to Skylar Mitchell. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 2 If you're already following the show, fingers crossed for the Martian invasion. If not, oive.

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Speaker 2 Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

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