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

22:09Or imagine you're a political science professor who's not a U.S. citizen. Suddenly, you know, 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. 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. 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.

22:54That's just a—

22:55Kara Swisher:That's just one of them that they'll use. Yeah. We'll be back in a minute.

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26:04Kara Swisher:So let's switch back now and go to more analytical mode, but stay on the education system, which is one of the major focuses of your book. 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 for American education? Yeah, so as Vladimir Putin said, wars are won by teachers. So we had progressive education for a while. We still do. The idea is to empower citizens to give them a sense of agency, teach about social movements for positive progressive change, for equality. 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.

26:51They 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. You get rid of movements for LGBTQ rights and women's history. And you say, history is just the deeds of great men. 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 race.

27:18Kara Swisher:To Uber mention. Yeah. 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. 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. 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.

28:03So the public school is always, in the United States, a target because of its role in racial equality and racial understanding.

28:14Kara Swisher:Right. So 10 years ago, the Atlantic published an article headline, The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff. You and other critics have pointed out that piece as a starting point for the panic around wokeness and cancel culture in universities, which you say ultimately helped lead to Trump's re-election. You wrote in The Guardian, quote, the U.S. mainstream media has waged a decades-long propaganda campaign against American universities. Can there not be some concerns about language policing on college campuses or campus protests without being, you know, a handmaiden to fascism?

28:45Oh, absolutely. I mean, the 90s political correctness thing, William F. Buckley drew attention to this issue of the, you know, the liberals, you know, not allowing conservative of 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. And then the main institutions of the main newspapers backing that, not, you know, with articles not written by professors, but just by people claiming their liberals. And so, of course, there's always things to critique. Diversity statements, that was absurd, like the loyalty oaths. There was definitely overreaches and excessive performances of, you know, the whole sit down and shut up unless you belong to an oppressed group.

29:45None of that I was in favor of. However, you know, 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 complaining about feminism, and that's always been the dominant voice at universities. And so, you know, my department at Yale, which was a liberal progressive department, we hired our first tenured Black professor last year. So, you know, definitely saw like Kendi, Abraham Kendi. I did not agree with that. I did not agree with his ideology. 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.

30:39But everyone around me, the university is part of the world, is part of the country. 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. So, which is not to say that, you know, not to say that I agree with diversity statements. It's not to deny that, you know, sometimes people were just idiotic in the service of otherwise laudable goals. 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.

31:30So in 2015, the thing that Haidt and Lukianoff were responding to was when Black Lives Matter moved on to campuses in 2015, 2016. 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. 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. and then to be ridiculed, dragged over the coals 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.

32:22Kara Swisher:So let's say 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. I'm paraphrasing here, but in your view, the betrayal was 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. Talk very quickly about your theory of this case, why this particular thing was effective. Well, partly it was effective because there's a generational battle between my fellow Jewish people.

32:57Jewish students are, by and large, many of them are very critical of Israel. You know, the opinions are very divided. The younger you go, the more critical of Israel you get among Jewish people. 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 one of the largest identity groups in those protests are Jewish students. They get erased, and they were erased by the mainstream media. 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.

33:43But that gets erased.

33:45Kara Swisher: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. 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. 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? I probably would have stayed if I didn't have children. I have black Jewish children, and I've had longstanding worries about their safety in this country, even though we're very privileged. And so that, you know, obviously class plays a role.

34:21if you're poor and white. It's also a very dangerous country for you. So that played a significant role. I also think it's strange now to judge this decision. Mossid Hamid, the writer, recently said to me, there's two perspectives on your decision. 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? and that chapter has yet to be written. I feel a great responsibility to do something 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.

35:07And I include Germany in that. So, you know, with the rise of AfD, Alternative 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.

35:23Kara Swisher: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. For example, Isabel Allende and Ariel Dorfman have written about the guilt and survivorship complex that came with leaving Chile after Pinochet took power. In their case, they escaped torture and potentially death at the hands of the regime. Was that fact, were you actually scared? Did you feel, and how do you feel having left, though nothing here has degenerated into what happened with Pinochet? Yeah, no, I wasn't scared.

35:59I saw it more as an expressive act 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. So this was intended to send an alarm to the world saying, look, things are bad in the United States. Now, an expressive act, it's not up to you to decide whether or not that expressive act was the right one. As someone I deeply respect recently said to me, this is an expressive act that the fascists like. Yes. Yes, they do.

36:39Kara Swisher: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. Like, he doesn't, what a wimp or whatever, anything like that. Does that worry that your message will be, you know, diluted in some fashion? 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. But I've been pretty loud and open and have been targeted many times.

37:23And many people who make these charges haven't done the things that I've done. 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. 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.

37:52Kara Swisher:Yes, I get that. What would make you move back? I mean, is that part of the plan? Is there like, okay, safe now? No, academics can almost never move. That's why it's such a privilege to have received this opportunity and this offer. but 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. If you don't understand the connection between Germany's fascist party and the Trump administration, you're not informed enough. And so what I, my plan in Canada is to create a safe haven for journalists.

38:34I'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. 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.

39:03Kara Swisher:They coordinate rather well. The right always does in a lot of ways. 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. Though I also view my job as to illuminate for my new country the dangers that they now face. We'll be back in a minute.

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42:02Kara Swisher: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. Let's hear the first one. Hi, I'm Clay Risen. 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. And so my question for Jason is this. 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.

42:40How 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? Thank you. Oh, I admire him.

42:58So, normalizing. I think the New York Times does a lot of normalizing. I'd like to see the normalizing end. So there's two things the New York Times is guilty of, I think. 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. I mean, of course fascists can be warm and normal people. 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, 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.

43:53So there's a lot of normalizing going on. These guys aren't as scary as you think. So that's one thing. And secondly, I think the Trumpists were looking to the media to give them justifications for their actions, to give them pretext. So what Haidt and Lukianov started was a moral panic about essentially 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. So that kind of moral panic untethered from factual reality about what's actually happening, You don't actually need to hire people who are normalizing.

44:39Again, let's go to this analogy, not comparing Trumpism with Nazism. But if you were to live in a country that had a lot of Nazis, would you hire people who normalize Nazism in your op-ed page?

44:54Kara Swisher:Yeah, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. Let's hear the second one. Hi, I'm Devoroy. 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, an affiliated nonprofit. 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 and institutions and experts have plummeted, how can we rebuild what philosophers sometimes called common knowledge, a shared set of facts that everyone knows, and importantly, everyone knows that everyone else knows, etc.?

45:37Thank 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, and that has completely fractured. I do think that one thing to recognize is that a lot of people 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. There's a lot of deep, deep just mistrust of the other political sides on both sides. And, 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.

46:27Right. 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 these anti-democratic forces destroying democracy belong to democracy. This is a very old problem, tolerating the intolerant. How do we address this problem? Cara, I mean, I think you probably have better things to say about that. The informational disaster we're in now.

46:57Kara Swisher:Yeah, 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. Like, if everyone has a different reality, it creates an opportunity for a dictator to come in and confuse and upset people. That was my first piece for the New York Times in 2011 on the dangers of birtherism. 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. And probably the flood is more damaging if you have to think about it. Right. Fahrenheit 451. Exactly. 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.

47:42Kara Swisher:You went on to say, I think it's quite clear we need something like that to happen. What does that look like in practice today? 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. 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're going to be sent some strange place, 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.

48:18So we're going to see a huge military force arrayed against immigrants. 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. I just hope that we will have strategic nonviolence. But one of the problems is we don't have what Derrick Bell called interest convergence. We don't have the United States facing a cold war where the other side is calling them a white supremacist nation.

48:55Kara Swisher:Right. Alien invasion is what we need right now, Jason. That would be the solution. Is there any leader? I have two last questions. Is there any leader right now that you think, 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 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 RFK Jr. RFK, excuse me, the original, not junior. Is there anyone you see like that in this country that has that kind of?

49:32Well, we need charismatic authority, right? We need a leader with charismatic authority. Right. Trump is very authentic. 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. But whether she can appeal to a nation that is so fond of patriarchy, I don't know.

49:58Kara Swisher:Yeah, that's difficult. Let's end with a prediction. I recently spoke to David Remnick about his latest piece in The New Yorker. In it, he makes the case for why it's not inevitable that Donald Trump's authoritarian project will prevail. And he told me it's important for the media to, quote, rally people's spirits as best you can. But Redmond admitted he might be the only three quarters honest when he says Trump won't prevail. So give me your 100 percent honest prediction. Do you think America will overcome Trump's fascist project? It's very hard for magish fascism, I think, to outlive this charismatic leader.

50:29Kara Swisher:I think it will fall apart. But what is your thoughts? Well, the problem with an autocracy is always the successor problem, right? What comes after? And we now have a complete destruction. We have a Supreme Court that is just looking for that autocratic leader to back their young justices, I mean, relatively young. 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 how do you go back from that knowledge? you know the courts are lost the machine behind Trump they won't have a charismatic leader J.D.

51:12Vance is not a charismatic leader but it's not clear to me they'll need a charismatic leader but anarchy is always the result of an autocrat dying in office right so we just don't know I

51:26Kara Swisher:want your prediction though I'm making mine it dies after him 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. 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. All right. That's what you think, Ido. We'll see, won't we? Well, you don't live here anymore, do you? But I don't think it's smart to say that. No. I'm in New York right now, Cara. Oh, God, you'll be fine. I'll come over and protect you.

52:11Kara Swisher:Don't worry. Me and the militia at the Ridge will come in and take care of the situation. Lesbians are good at shooting guns. 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%. And so we need to think globally. And I am thinking globally. 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. Right. That's a very good point. Well, I'm hoping for an alien invasion then.

52:55Kara Swisher:We need someone from Mars to get here stat, who's really mean, an evil villain. that kind of thing. Then we'll all be together. Anyway, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Cara.

53:11Kara Swisher:On with Cara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Skylar Mitchell. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, fingers crossed, for the Martian invasion. If not, oy vey. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. 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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