August 16, 2025 • 38 mins
As The World Churns’ Andy Levy examines the media’s role in letting Trump subvert the law.
Author Jason Stanley details how to read Trump’s plays in the fascist playbook.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And Donald Trump says he was the
one who told Malania to threaten Hunter Biden with a
one billion dollar lawsuit. We have such a great show
for you today as the world churns Andy Leevey stops
(00:20):
by to talk about the media's role in letting Trump
subvert the law. Then we'll talk to author Jason Stanley
about how to read Trump's play in the Fascist Playbook.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
But first the news.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
It's May the DC Attorney General is suing the Trump
administration to stop the police takeover so they don't chase
down people in West End who are throwing sandwiches.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yes, it's called sandwich Gate.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well, and it's the story of a man and a sandwich. No.
So here's what's happened. We have a very Nightmari scenario
in the District of Columbia, something that we all saw
coming when DC was denied statehood. Right, Trump can do
whatever he wants to DC. It has no protection. It's
(01:08):
not a state. It's not protected. It's this weird sort
of amorphous thing. So Donald Trump, when he can do
what he wants. He is doing what he wants, and
we are watching him do this authoritarian takeover of the
district of Columbia. This is what it looks like. This
(01:29):
is what authoritarianism looks like. So we knew this was coming.
Thank you Kristin Cinema and Joe Manchin for making sure
that Democrats couldn't use the filibuster because, by the way,
that would have crushed norms and institutions. And so here we.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Are sending Kristin a glass of wine across the bar
at whatever wine tasting she's at today.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
So, speaking of other dystopian things coming out of Washington,
the White House now has a loyalty rating for companies.
Definitely doesn't feel fascy.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Well, it doesn't feel fascy except it does.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
But it also is so deeply anti capitalist, right, Like,
the whole idea of capitalism is that you have companies
that do things, And here we have kubodies that are
being rated on whether or not they're nice enough to Trump, right,
the nice enough to the administration so that Trump will
let them live.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
This is like crony capitalism. This is the worst of
crony capitalism.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yeah, you're really seeing it as the way whether they're
going to buy stock in Intel Chips, which is hilarious,
that's a competitor to Apple, who just sucked up to Trump.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
All of these companies could have done something. They could
have said we're not going to do this, we're not
going to behave this way, and it would have been
really great. It wouldn't have been great, but it would
have made everything slow down.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
But what happened here is that all these companies kick
themselves just to go along with Trump, and so now.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
There's a kind of competition to suck up to Trump,
and that means that company is involved in this kind
of authoritarian push and it's just incredibly dark. You know,
it's exactly what we had all wanted to avoid.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, speaking of avoiding things, it's kind of funny like
you and I both know DC geography well as one
of us has a lot of family there and another
has visited a lot, and everybody's kind of noticing this
thing that the presence of all the footage they're getting,
it's like those are really not where the crime is
in DC. And you're kind of like, hmmm, I wonder why.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
Yeah, there's none of this is about fighting crime. All
of this is about authoritarian show of force. Right, They're
not going in neighborhoods where there's a lot of crime.
They're putting up these stops on Fourteenth Street. My friend said,
they have a checkpoint at the bottom of her street.
You know, this is not about safety. This is all
(03:55):
about intimidation, right, be in the nice neighborhood show fancy
people that you have power over them. Have a guy
who you can't see his face, stop your car.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I mean, this is exactly that one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
It really is ridiculous because, like, we can't deny that
there is areas of every single city that have crime
because cities have poor populations, because that is how cities work,
and poor populations do disproportionately commit crime. But yet walking
the national ball where the crime map is invisible.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Is not that Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So this is a pretty interesting thing. Some of the
people who can sense these type of things are saying
that the doga seems a little nervous about all of
Trump's tariff lawsuits and whether they're actually going to hold
up and he's going to be able to keep doing
these tariffs that are really going to doom his popularity,
since my group chats are lighting up with people who
are not happy about getting tariff bills in the mail
(04:52):
these days.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, I mean, this is such a crazy, crazy, stupid
thing to do. There are people who are as powerful
as Trump, like the Kochs, who are on this other
side of this tariff thing, who have relationships with this
incredibly corrupt Supreme Court, who desperately want to stop these tariffs,
(05:16):
and who very well might be able to stop these tariffs.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
The administration knows they may be on the wrong side
of things with the tariffs. Also, there were just these
crazy numbers that were released that are super inflationary. The
consumer sentiment number is terrible. That inflation number from yesterday
I ticked up like three points. I mean, inflation is here.
The tariffs are causing it. It's a straight line. And
(05:42):
the other thing about inflation, which none of us totally
know how to deal with this Once Trump says uncle,
which eventually he will, I don't know how you get
the prices back down.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
No, he probably don't.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
I've seen no one give a good answer to that.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Andy Levy is the co host of As the World Churned.
Andy Levy Wally jogfast. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
I don't know you were going to be here.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, what are the odds you and me?
Speaker 6 (06:14):
Yeah? I know, I thought I was just chatting for
like twenty minutes, like monologuing.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Listen to me, Andy Levy. Things are going great in
the federal government. Oh yeah, just a cake walk. What
is this thing that you're the most worried about?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Now?
Speaker 4 (06:30):
That is sort of the question, isn't it?
Speaker 6 (06:32):
But it's also almost impossible to answer it because it
changes every day and sometimes multiple times a day.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
I mean, I guess right now it's.
Speaker 6 (06:42):
The government crackdowns, the federal takeover of DC and the
threats of doing this to more cities. And you know,
it's starting to look very much like like a playbook
at this point, you know, like this is what they
want to do. And you know, I was thinking, there's
that's famous Obama phrase from I think when he was
(07:03):
first running, when he said we're not blue states and
red states.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Where the United States?
Speaker 6 (07:08):
I think with this administration, they also they agree that
we're not the blue states and the red states, and
they're just in their mind we're just the red states
and that's what they want. They want fifty red states,
so they have absolutely no compunction. And you're seeing this
from the you know, the conservative media sphere and whatever,
who are sort of gleefully making lists of what city
should be next, and surprise, surprise, it's San Francisco, it's
(07:30):
New York, it's Los Angeles. You know, it's the big,
it's the big, beautiful blue cities.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
So look, they really are.
Speaker 6 (07:38):
They're obviously doing the you know, throw as much shit
against the wall as possible and see what sticks method.
So it makes it hard to sort of identify which
is the overall scariest.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Thing they're doing or most dangerous thing they're doing.
Speaker 6 (07:52):
But this one right now seems like because it seems like,
like I said, it seems a little bit like a
playbook like that there's an end goal here of doing
this in as many blue cities as they can get
away with, and basically taking all the power away from
those localities and from those Americans who live in those
(08:12):
cities and who vote in those cities, and work in
those cities, and in producer Jesse Cannon's case, drink in
those cities.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
And they are trying.
Speaker 6 (08:22):
Desperately the places where they can't win at the ballot box.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
They're trying to win by other measures. Is I think
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
So sato populism is this idea we just I just
talked about it with Jason Stanley that part of the
joy you find in populism is your syndistic desires to own.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
The libs, to make poor people suffer. Is that what
we're working at right now?
Speaker 6 (08:48):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (08:48):
I mean, that's a really I had never heard that
word before.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
I don't know if he coined it, but but it's
it's a good word.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
And no, I think that's true.
Speaker 6 (08:57):
And you can look at you know, you look at
the memes that are coming out of the White House
and various governmental agencies, and they're all predicated on meanness.
Seems it seems like an understatement. I mean, you look
at it and you say to yourself, you know, well,
that's just mean. But you realize as you're saying it
(09:17):
that how much of an understatement that is. You know,
this is not someone in the cafeteria making fun of
your shirt. But you look at the mindset behind everything
that they're doing, and you look at the white nationalist
memes and the absolute glee at other people's misfortune, particularly
if those people aren't white, or aren't straight, or aren't Christian,
(09:39):
aren't male, and yeah, it's hard to come to any
other conclusion.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Then this is a big part of the game.
Speaker 6 (09:45):
And this is Look, this has always been a big
part of fascism. I think we're way beyond the point
of debating whether it's okay to call.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
What's going on fascist.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
It just very clearly is, and it very clearly is
the mindset. And again you see it in the memes,
you see it in the messaging that they are trying
to put out, which is that you know, you are
not welcome here if you are not like us, and
you know, removing things from museums that ill PRESIDENTE doesn't
like or doesn't comport with his view of America as
(10:18):
this literally a perfect union and you can't come to
any other conclusion. And it's been like this for a while.
But there are always people who said, well, you know,
I don't know if it's okay to use the F word,
to say fascism. We are so far behind that, and
I cannot imagine in August of the year of Our
Lord twenty twenty five looking around and thinking, well, I'm
(10:41):
still not sold that this is fascist.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
It's pure, uncut fascist.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
So what do you think.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
About like the smart people who are on the right
who are going along with this, because you know a
lot of those people, Like do you think that they
are like, yes, it's fascism, or do you think that
they're just having fun.
Speaker 6 (11:00):
I think it's a case by case basis. And you know,
this is similar to a sort of thing. I don't
do it so much anymore because ultimately it doesn't matter.
But you know, I used to play this game. I
used to play it with other people that I was
friendly with, who knew the personnel, and try to figure
out who what Fox News really believed what they were saying,
and who just wanted the paycheck and the adoration and
(11:23):
you know, the fame. And I think you really do
have to take it on a case by case basis
because I think there are the true believers on the right,
smart or otherwise, who have absolutely no problems with fascism,
and maybe they never did, or maybe they have.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Just come around to it.
Speaker 6 (11:41):
And then you have the ones who you know, maybe
deep in their heart they're not fascist and they don't
necessarily love everything that's going on, but they're going along
with it and promoting it to advance their own careers.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, and it never mattered.
You are what you're doing in a case like this,
and whether you're promoting this shit because you believe it
(12:03):
in your soul or because you somehow think it's good
for your career, it ultimately doesn't matter. And I'm never
sure what the answer to this is. Are the true
fascists worse than the ones who are costplaying fascism just.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
To get ahead? Like, because you can sit there and say, well,
the true fascists.
Speaker 6 (12:20):
At least they honestly believe this, whereas the other ones
it's like, really, you'll go along with this because it
gets you some money and keeps your face on TV.
But then the flip side of that is, obviously you
know the true fascist what they believe, Like, it doesn't
matter that they're sincere in their beliefs. Their beliefs are abhorring,
(12:41):
Their beliefs are awful, their beliefs are straight up evil.
So I don't know the answer the overall answer your question, Molly,
other than to say I do think it's a case
by case basis. I don't think you can paint a
broad brush and say, oh, they're all doing this because X.
I think there's really two different groups and you have
to name and then you can say, oh, that person
(13:03):
is a true believer or oh that person is absolutely cost.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Playing and they don't really believe this shit?
Speaker 2 (13:08):
How do you sell it to yourself?
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Then I don't know. I will never understand that.
Speaker 6 (13:13):
I don't understand the you know, I've been saying this
a lot lately, like beyond, I don't know how a
lot of these people sleep at night, Like how do
you look in the mirror? And I always think when
you were a kid, it's just what you dreamed of
growing When I grow up, I want to be someone
who lies on TV for money. Maybe there are people
who are so you know, sociopathic that the answer is yes.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
But for a lot of these people, I don't think
the answer was yes.
Speaker 6 (13:36):
I don't think it was a lifelong dream to get
on the TV or to get on the internet, and
why for a living? And I don't know how you
live with yourself doing that. I couldn't do it. And
I don't think that makes me a great person. I
think that makes me a person, you know, So I
don't understand this and and this sort of piggyback to
a thought I've been having lately with regard to like
(13:56):
cable news in any place that has a lot of
these people on as guests, whether they're maga politicians or
maga commentators, you know, these people are lying to you,
and you can say while you're lying, but I don't
understand how you interview these people and you don't sit
there and say to them.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Well, you don't believe that, because that's what it comes
out to.
Speaker 6 (14:14):
You hear these people saying things, and they'll say something
about how, you know, I'm afraid to walk down the
streets of New York in broad daylight.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
These interviewers, instead of letting that go, they need to say, no,
you're not.
Speaker 6 (14:25):
You don't believe that, Like, they need to be called
out on this shit, because they are straight up lying
or making shit up. And we're pretending to have these
serious discussions about you know, is New York safe to
walk down the street in the middle of the day.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Maybe on the left will tell you it is, but here,
our guest today will tell you it's not. And it's like, no,
fuck off.
Speaker 6 (14:46):
Start calling these people out for their bullshit and start
calling them out for the fact that it's not just
that they're wrong, it's that they don't believe what they
themselves are saying, and call them on it and say
you don't believe.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
That right and you thing happens.
Speaker 6 (15:00):
Then I don't know. I don't know if maybe they
stop coming on or what, but I think it needs
to be done. We have to stop in the media
bears so much responsibility for this, for normalizing all this
shit and for taking it seriously, and for pretending to
have debates about stuff that should not be debated because
it's not debatable and one side is just making stuff up.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
And this goes for everything.
Speaker 6 (15:24):
This goes for whether it's vaccines or you know, DEI
or whatever. Stop letting the right make shit up and
stop people on the left. Stop having these quote unquote
intellectual conversations with people who are making things up. Stop
presenting the other side, because it's not the other side,
(15:44):
it's the truth. And you don't need to sit there
with someone who tells you that vaccines are killing people,
because all you're doing by having that debate is elevating
it to both sides have equal standing thing, and instead
of that, you need to start telling people. You don't
believe that. You are saying that to get on TV.
You are saying that to advance your career, You are
(16:06):
saying that to please Donald Trump. But you know that's
not true. You don't believe that, And see what happens.
There's a reason I'm not a cable news host because
that show would follow me be off the air at
five minutes. Yeah, So let me ask you.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
You have this sort of unforgivable stuff going on, right
You have people being run around by I say, gents,
you have checkpoints, I mean, just shocking stuff. Do you
think that it feels like the only way that any
of this stops is if people like people are clearly
not happy.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
The polling is terrible on this. But I don't know
what that leads to.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
I don't know what it leads to either.
Speaker 6 (16:44):
I mean, I don't know if it means more beautiful
sandwiches being wasted, you know, in the sense that you're
not being eaten, but because they've become a symbol of resistance,
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
I don't know the answer.
Speaker 6 (16:56):
And I don't know how far they can push before
the pushback becomes more than it is. And I do
know that if and when this is all over, I
don't want to see any truth and reconciliation bullshit, and
I don't want to see any you know. Well, we
(17:18):
need to move forward, and we need to forget that
all this stuff just happened. I know, I want people
in prison. I'd be happy if we brought back exile
and just sent them all to an island with no
gear and no food and they can fight for their
own survival because they think they're the alphas. Let them
go prove it somewhere outside of America. But I don't
(17:41):
want to hear shit. And I think Joe Biden, you know,
really screwed this up. And I don't think his intentions
were bad, not just Joe Biden, the Democratic establishment in general,
sort of giving a pass to a lot of the
January sixth stuff and just letting this stuff fester and
trying to pretend that we could just move past what happened.
And a lot of that is how we got where
we are now, and that shouldn't be forgotten, and nothing
(18:03):
they're doing.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Now should be forgotten.
Speaker 6 (18:05):
The elimination of due process, the unlawful taking over of cities,
kidnapping people on the streets, and sending them to foreign countries.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Who should not have that being done to them. I
don't know.
Speaker 6 (18:18):
It goes on and on, the removal of stuff from museums.
Every single one of these things should not be forgotten
and should not be glossed over again. If and when
we get through this, there has to be a reckoning.
There doesn't have to be reconciliation, and there should not
be reconciliation.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Andy Levy, I think you're right, But I also I'm
not sure that Democrats have the stomach for that, if
it even happens.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So who is the big villain here? If on the
Democratic side, Merrick.
Speaker 6 (18:49):
Garland, god, I guess to quote top Gun, the list
is long but distinguished. I can make you a list
of people who definitely didn't help, and Merk Garland would
be high on that list. Think Joe Biden helped, But
I say that with a lot of caveats. I think
on this particular front, Joe Biden didn't help. Joe Biden's
sort of twentieth century for lack of a better way
(19:12):
to call it, twentieth century political mind reach across the aisle.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
It's just very.
Speaker 6 (19:17):
Clear to everyone who is not a Democratic politician or
consultant that that shit is over look. Democratic leadership has
been god awful, the Democratic consultant class. I was going
to say something that I probably shouldn't say. Yeah, not great.
I don't need to hear from James Carville ever again.
(19:38):
I don't need to hear from Bill Clinton ever again. Honestly,
I don't need to hear from Hillary Clinton like the Clinton's.
You know, go enjoy your life. I'm not saying I
wish Hillary Clinton ill. I'm just saying, go enjoy your life.
James Carvill, go enjoy your life like go go, go
sit on a porch and sip whiskey. God bless, but
(19:59):
stop writing eds with horrible, horrible advice.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
I'm using him. It's not just him.
Speaker 6 (20:04):
I'm using him as sort of an avatar of the
Democratic political class.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
And they are not up for this.
Speaker 6 (20:10):
And they don't understand the world in which we live
in twenty twenty five. They understand the world in which
we lived in nineteen ninety five. But that world is dead,
and I'm not saying it won't ever come back. There
may be a time again in America's future where we
all can just get along, but right now is not
that time, and that is not what we need from
(20:33):
our democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate. It's
not what we need from democratic governors, and it's not
what we need from democratic consultants.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Andy Levy, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
I will come back, Molly, maybe to talk about something
more fun.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Jason Stanley is a professor at the Monks School of
Global Affairs and Public Policy, as well as the author
of Racing History, How Fascist We write the Past to
control the future. Welcome to Fast Politics, Jason Stanley.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
I'm Mollie. I know you feel bad for me, all right,
full disclosure.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
I am in Los Angeles going to do Bill Maher,
likely going to ruin my life by being yelled at
by all of whatever. We're putting the fun in fascism here.
Let's talk about we got streets filled with people from
(21:34):
enforcement agencies, some of which are ICE, some of which
are whatever.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
They're unmarked.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
I mean, talk me through what the sort of its
Oraitorian healthscape we're looking.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
At here is.
Speaker 7 (21:47):
I'm in DC now not to meet with any politicians,
but to go to my nephew's bar mitzpah. You know
it reminds me a little bit about what they said
about the military parades. It's kind of joky, but it
is a show of power. It's showing that Trump is
repeatedly showing that he can do whatever he wants, and
(22:08):
that's the he can impose martial law.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
He can do whatever he wants. It's all haphazard here.
Speaker 7 (22:15):
I'm not sure there's really any organization in DC, but
as we've seen from Los Angeles, they can crack down
hard when they want to. And I think the thing
that I'm thinking about most right now is Ice. It
is the new Ice recruitment because historically speaking, it looks
a lot like the storm up time in the Essay
(22:37):
when the Nazis were like, hey, street goat goons, We're
going to pay you and give you uniforms to do
what you're doing anyway. So it looks historically that sort
of recruitment of Trump's own personal security force looks very
bad when you put it in that historical context.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
And the Homeland secure stuff, like the art that the
Homeland Security people are posting. Talk to me about these
homeland security posts.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Right.
Speaker 7 (23:11):
So, there was an interesting article today in Mother Jones.
I was interviewed for it. About exactly the Homeland security posts.
The author pointed out that the daily stormer of the
far right neo nazi rag Online Rags said in twenty seventeen,
make sure people don't know whether or.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
Not you're kidding.
Speaker 7 (23:33):
So we're seeing a lot of that happening, like, oh,
we're just kidding, but in fact we're really not kidding.
But the idea is to have fun with horror. Timothy
Snyder has this concept sato populism, like taking pleasure and
the pain of others, and that's what this regime is selling.
They're selling sato populism. They're selling owning the Libs and
(23:57):
with cruelty towards people that the lib roles supposedly are
empathetic with. So you're supposed to get joy that they're
really bashing heads, splitting apart families, sending people, destroying thousands
of people's lives by erecting concentration camps, and it's all
a funny joke. And the real joke is watching the liberals,
(24:19):
who care about these people becomes so outraged and scream
and complain.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
That's the fuel. Owning the Libs is the fuel of
the global fascist search right.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
But in Germany, there was this record high unemployment. So
Hitler came to power on all of these people who
had fought in the First World War now being homeless,
having nothing to do, having no purpose, seeing your government
fail them.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
That's not exactly the same scenario here, is it.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
No, So that was long an objection to the use
of the term fascism, that the material conditions of fascism
weren't not that we weren't facing some sort of dramatic
we weren't emerging out of the ashes of the financial
crisis with huge unemployment, we weren't emerging from World War
War one situation, so therefore it couldn't be fascism, you know.
(25:15):
I think what we can say is that the material
conditions for this kind of politics, you know, can can
come out of resentment, you know. We we can speculate
on why this politics is exactly as successful as it
was in the early thirties German.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Right, Yeah, but that's not what I mean. I'm not
making a case against not calling fascism. What I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Is right, I know, but you have these people, like
one of the reasons why Hitler was successful was because
you had all these people who had nothing to do, right,
it wasn't like you had record low unemployment. It was
like you had So it's more of just a pragmatic question,
not an ideological question.
Speaker 7 (25:57):
Yeah, no, I took it as such. I mean, the
ice bonuses are crazy. Fifty thousand dollars signing bonus, sixty
thousand dollars off your student loans, which is a little ironic.
Yeah right, It's it's like these are We're talking life
changing amounts of money for many people. I mean, fifty
(26:18):
thousand dollars signing bonus would be a life changing amount
of money for me, and I'm well off. So you know,
we're going to see and God knows what their salaries
are going to be. So these are essentially bribes. I
mean we see this with a Russian army, right as
well that the Russian Army. Now they're paying people enormous
amounts of money to join.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
So I think even in you know, this is a.
Speaker 7 (26:42):
Creating a violent governmental force ungoverned by laws, that is
highly that is highly compensated, and so I'm not sure
you need you know, I mean, we have record low unemployment,
but we also have extreme wealth and equality, and you know,
fifty thousand dollars signing bonus is a lot for a
(27:05):
lot of people.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yes, but if you get that, you still need to
be able to have people be willing to do the
things that they're unwilling to do.
Speaker 7 (27:16):
Usually how does that work exactly? So this is interesting.
It's a piece I'm writing now. The moral injury involved
in being an ice agent will be something you will
have to live with for the rest of your life.
We know that those sort of actions that they're encouraging
people that you would have to do as an ice agent,
you know, arresting a parent in an immigration court as
(27:40):
their kids or partners screams and cries while you drag
them away to be sent to a concentration camp and
then to the Sudan or something, you know, where their
life is over. These are things that will affect people
for the rest of their lives. So you need some
kind of governing ideology. You need payments, but then you
also need a going ideology. And here we can also
(28:03):
look to history like Himmler's posing speeches. So I'm writing
a piece on this now where he's speaking to the
ass and saying, you know that, you know it's terrible
the job you do and you are the best of humans,
so you feel terribly when you do this job. However,
since you are uba mentioned you're superhumans, you know that
(28:27):
it's necessary. You can overcome the first order feeling of
pain at killing people and brutalizing them because you know
that it's for this higher purpose preventing the poisoning of
the blood of our people.
Speaker 4 (28:44):
So that's going to be what they need to do.
They need to instill.
Speaker 7 (28:48):
This idea that this is for a greater purpose, and
you understand this greater purpose and that makes you smarter
and better. Now Here, we're really bumping into dark places
and human and human psyche that we've tried to figure
out for many, many decades, how people can do atrocities,
(29:11):
how people can revel in these atrocities. I don't think
we solve these problems, but I think we know that
people that the ice agents that will be hired, that
come in, the ice agents that now serve you know,
they're going to undergrow tremendous moral injury like soldiers do.
They also will have to know that their grandkids will
(29:31):
not be proud of them, will be ashamed of them.
And so Granddaddy interned Japanese people in tournment caps. You know,
that's not something that you find grandkids bragging about. Now,
So you'll have the moral injury. They'll need to treat
the moral injury with humor, with you know, the kind
of over cruelty. And then the question is how much
(29:52):
will Americans go for that? How much will Americans go
for this combination of you know, the ideology high mind,
we have to save America from the poisoning of its
blood by immigrants on the one side, and the other
this kind of laughing cruelty that it's like, you know,
get into it.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
It's fun, it's torture and cruelty. I see it as
a moral.
Speaker 7 (30:15):
And an ethical and psychological disaster coming because I've lived
in countries like Germany for years, so I know it's
very difficult.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
You know, it does wear on you for life.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
I don't want to be overly optimistic here, but it
doesn't feel like you have quite the right combination of
factors to go full not to We.
Speaker 7 (30:38):
Have to remember the final solution doesn't start till nineteen
forty one, when they're like, okay, we can't send to
choose away.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
We need to get rid of them completely.
Speaker 7 (30:45):
What we're having now is we're having concentration coumts, zones
of lawlessness where people don't really have access through lawyers.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
There's no real rule of law. Inside Alligator Alcatraz.
Speaker 7 (30:58):
We have congress people getting arrested for trying to look
into these zones of lawlessness. So we're at the beginning here.
And I think, as we can see also from our
prison system, which is notoriously brutal, that things get bad
really quickly when people aren't looking and when people can't walk.
(31:21):
They're exhibiting this incredible power over the law. We can
stup you into unmarked bounds, we can put you in
places where you don't have accessed the lawyers, you don't
have accessed the courts, journalists can't see you. We're going
to brag about how bad these conditions are. So yeah,
that is far far from auschite, but it's pretty bad.
(31:45):
I don't know if we should be saying to ourselves, well,
we're not doing gas chambers, so hold on, So it's
not that bad.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, no, no, no, I mean that's not what I'm saying.
I'm just sort of trying to game out how it
goes and what it looks like and that I think
is a real question.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
So what would you say would be the way to
push back on all of this?
Speaker 7 (32:06):
Yeah, I mean, you know, the model is always the
civil rights movement fight against jen Crow right to try
to spur empathy. Empathy is being attacked and ridiculed, right,
that's like what these means and what these it's meant
to show? It's weak and like you're a liberal if
you care about this, and isn't it more fun to
(32:27):
torture people and.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Laugh about it?
Speaker 7 (32:29):
And you know, So the question is can we draw
on those resources that Martin Luther King drew on in
the Civil rights movement when people were brutalized in front
of cameras and Americans, white Americans were horrified? So can
we do that with this xenophobic push Can we get
(32:50):
Americans who were are not from an immigration background to
be horrified at what is happening and what's going to
be happening even more to our immigrant neighbors. So I
also think you're going to get a lot of pushback
from immigrants because a lot of these people are very tough,
you know, I mean my parents were immigrants.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
They were tough, but you know.
Speaker 7 (33:12):
These people have done a lot to come to the
United States and being deported back to who knows where
with no resources and no, I mean, that's like the
end of their lives. So I expect there's going to
be organized resistance from immigrants and their allies, and then
we have to see how Americans will react to what
(33:33):
might become pitched battles on our streets. MM.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
That doesn't sound good. I want you to say more
about this empathy idea.
Speaker 8 (33:41):
Yeah, So the civil rights movement explicitly, King explicitly looked
for a tough shareff who would crack the heads of
nonviolent protesters, so to get that on camel so that
people would be horrified.
Speaker 7 (33:54):
That was a strategy you didn't have at the time,
Jim Crow sheriffs broadcasting the horrors that they were doing.
Of course, there had been public lynchings and things like this,
which is a little bit in the direction of you know,
the public cruelty aspect is where we're where we are
(34:16):
at right now. But the empathy was a call to
our better natures, to saying, you know, we Americans are
not about this cracking the heads of people trying to
devote So you know what this admit this regime is
doing is it's trying to say we Americans are about
tearing kids away from their families. We Americans are We're
(34:38):
about blood and soil. We're about as JD. Vance said,
We're about the people who are buried in our graveyards
one hundred years ago, not about.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
An idea or an ideal.
Speaker 7 (34:49):
So the empathy would be reaching to America as a
set of ideals. What a state is is it's not
just a collection of people. It's not just a collection
of families who are related. It's an ideal, it's something.
It's a vision of a common good that binds people together.
And what we need is a movement that speaks to
(35:12):
that vision of America, that speaks to that vision of
a common good and refuses to reduce us to a
bunch of people who are related by blood and soil
to those who came before us.
Speaker 4 (35:24):
We need that.
Speaker 7 (35:25):
What we're starting to see this regime do is give
us a blood and soil vision, give us a Nazi vision.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Of who we are.
Speaker 7 (35:34):
We're not a democracy, we're not a tolerant nation. We're
not a nation of immigrants. We're not a beacon of freedom.
We are fundamentally decendenced by blood of people who lived
on this soil for generations, and that's the vision we
have to fight against.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
So it sounds like a sort of Obama is the
answer to this.
Speaker 7 (35:57):
Right, someone charismatic. I mean, you know, another central value
is equality. I mean, I think you're right. We need
someone who can speak against these horrors or change the topic,
switch the topic to justice, to equality to material things.
Often democracies are healthiest when someone can say, Okay, let's
(36:18):
stop talking about integration, let's stop talking about trans people,
let's talk about the rents, let's talk about affordability, you know,
and then that changes the topic from cruelty. We need
to change the topic from cruelty. We need to change
the topic from this blood and soil vision of who
(36:39):
we are.
Speaker 4 (36:40):
And there are various ways to change that topic.
Speaker 7 (36:42):
One way, as you say, is a charismatic call to
a nation where people come to be free, rather than
come to have their speech rights taken away from them,
as we're seeing now, where if you come to America,
you're not a citizen.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
You can't speak at all.
Speaker 7 (36:59):
So we need that, or we need a change of
subjects where people are like why are you vilifying immigrants?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
I need cheap groceries, Jason Stanley. I hope you'll come
back always, Mollie, thank you for the work you do.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Oh moment perfectly Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
So, Molly. As we know, courts aren't going to save us.
Federal Appeals Court has allowed the CFPB dismantling to proceed.
You know, I love when Trump pretends he's for the
American people and the little guy and says, you know,
a consumer protection board that keeps people from being predatory
towards you, that's me protecting you.
Speaker 7 (37:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Trump ran on populism, right. He said he was going
to make things less expensive. Now here we are, and
every moment that Trump said the opportunity to do something
like that, to make things less expensive, to protect the
little guy, to work on inflation, every moment he's done
just the opposite.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
It is exactly how we thought it would go.
Speaker 6 (38:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
It doesn't care about the little guy. He just was lying.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Yep. So when you see these bank fees and your
credit card fees and interest rates go up, we can
put a nice little I did that sticker of Trump
on it.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
That's right, Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Of all this chaos.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And Donald Trump says he was the
one who told Malania to threaten Hunter Biden with a
one billion dollar lawsuit. We have such a great show
for you today as the world churns Andy Leevey stops
(00:20):
by to talk about the media's role in letting Trump
subvert the law. Then we'll talk to author Jason Stanley
about how to read Trump's play in the Fascist Playbook.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
But first the news.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
It's May the DC Attorney General is suing the Trump
administration to stop the police takeover so they don't chase
down people in West End who are throwing sandwiches.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yes, it's called sandwich Gate.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well, and it's the story of a man and a sandwich. No.
So here's what's happened. We have a very Nightmari scenario
in the District of Columbia, something that we all saw
coming when DC was denied statehood. Right, Trump can do
whatever he wants to DC. It has no protection. It's
(01:08):
not a state. It's not protected. It's this weird sort
of amorphous thing. So Donald Trump, when he can do
what he wants. He is doing what he wants, and
we are watching him do this authoritarian takeover of the
district of Columbia. This is what it looks like. This
(01:29):
is what authoritarianism looks like. So we knew this was coming.
Thank you Kristin Cinema and Joe Manchin for making sure
that Democrats couldn't use the filibuster because, by the way,
that would have crushed norms and institutions. And so here we.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Are sending Kristin a glass of wine across the bar
at whatever wine tasting she's at today.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
So, speaking of other dystopian things coming out of Washington,
the White House now has a loyalty rating for companies.
Definitely doesn't feel fascy.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Well, it doesn't feel fascy except it does.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
But it also is so deeply anti capitalist, right, Like,
the whole idea of capitalism is that you have companies
that do things, And here we have kubodies that are
being rated on whether or not they're nice enough to Trump, right,
the nice enough to the administration so that Trump will
let them live.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
This is like crony capitalism. This is the worst of
crony capitalism.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yeah, you're really seeing it as the way whether they're
going to buy stock in Intel Chips, which is hilarious,
that's a competitor to Apple, who just sucked up to Trump.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
All of these companies could have done something. They could
have said we're not going to do this, we're not
going to behave this way, and it would have been
really great. It wouldn't have been great, but it would
have made everything slow down.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
But what happened here is that all these companies kick
themselves just to go along with Trump, and so now.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
There's a kind of competition to suck up to Trump,
and that means that company is involved in this kind
of authoritarian push and it's just incredibly dark. You know,
it's exactly what we had all wanted to avoid.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, speaking of avoiding things, it's kind of funny like
you and I both know DC geography well as one
of us has a lot of family there and another
has visited a lot, and everybody's kind of noticing this
thing that the presence of all the footage they're getting,
it's like those are really not where the crime is
in DC. And you're kind of like, hmmm, I wonder why.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
Yeah, there's none of this is about fighting crime. All
of this is about authoritarian show of force. Right, They're
not going in neighborhoods where there's a lot of crime.
They're putting up these stops on Fourteenth Street. My friend said,
they have a checkpoint at the bottom of her street.
You know, this is not about safety. This is all
(03:55):
about intimidation, right, be in the nice neighborhood show fancy
people that you have power over them. Have a guy
who you can't see his face, stop your car.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I mean, this is exactly that one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
It really is ridiculous because, like, we can't deny that
there is areas of every single city that have crime
because cities have poor populations, because that is how cities work,
and poor populations do disproportionately commit crime. But yet walking
the national ball where the crime map is invisible.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Is not that Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So this is a pretty interesting thing. Some of the
people who can sense these type of things are saying
that the doga seems a little nervous about all of
Trump's tariff lawsuits and whether they're actually going to hold
up and he's going to be able to keep doing
these tariffs that are really going to doom his popularity,
since my group chats are lighting up with people who
are not happy about getting tariff bills in the mail
(04:52):
these days.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, I mean, this is such a crazy, crazy, stupid
thing to do. There are people who are as powerful
as Trump, like the Kochs, who are on this other
side of this tariff thing, who have relationships with this
incredibly corrupt Supreme Court, who desperately want to stop these tariffs,
(05:16):
and who very well might be able to stop these tariffs.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
The administration knows they may be on the wrong side
of things with the tariffs. Also, there were just these
crazy numbers that were released that are super inflationary. The
consumer sentiment number is terrible. That inflation number from yesterday
I ticked up like three points. I mean, inflation is here.
The tariffs are causing it. It's a straight line. And
(05:42):
the other thing about inflation, which none of us totally
know how to deal with this Once Trump says uncle,
which eventually he will, I don't know how you get
the prices back down.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
No, he probably don't.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
I've seen no one give a good answer to that.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Andy Levy is the co host of As the World Churned.
Andy Levy Wally jogfast. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
I don't know you were going to be here.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, what are the odds you and me?
Speaker 6 (06:14):
Yeah? I know, I thought I was just chatting for
like twenty minutes, like monologuing.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Listen to me, Andy Levy. Things are going great in
the federal government. Oh yeah, just a cake walk. What
is this thing that you're the most worried about?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Now?
Speaker 4 (06:30):
That is sort of the question, isn't it?
Speaker 6 (06:32):
But it's also almost impossible to answer it because it
changes every day and sometimes multiple times a day.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
I mean, I guess right now it's.
Speaker 6 (06:42):
The government crackdowns, the federal takeover of DC and the
threats of doing this to more cities. And you know,
it's starting to look very much like like a playbook
at this point, you know, like this is what they
want to do. And you know, I was thinking, there's
that's famous Obama phrase from I think when he was
(07:03):
first running, when he said we're not blue states and
red states.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Where the United States?
Speaker 6 (07:08):
I think with this administration, they also they agree that
we're not the blue states and the red states, and
they're just in their mind we're just the red states
and that's what they want. They want fifty red states,
so they have absolutely no compunction. And you're seeing this
from the you know, the conservative media sphere and whatever,
who are sort of gleefully making lists of what city
should be next, and surprise, surprise, it's San Francisco, it's
(07:30):
New York, it's Los Angeles. You know, it's the big,
it's the big, beautiful blue cities.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
So look, they really are.
Speaker 6 (07:38):
They're obviously doing the you know, throw as much shit
against the wall as possible and see what sticks method.
So it makes it hard to sort of identify which
is the overall scariest.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Thing they're doing or most dangerous thing they're doing.
Speaker 6 (07:52):
But this one right now seems like because it seems like,
like I said, it seems a little bit like a
playbook like that there's an end goal here of doing
this in as many blue cities as they can get
away with, and basically taking all the power away from
those localities and from those Americans who live in those
(08:12):
cities and who vote in those cities, and work in
those cities, and in producer Jesse Cannon's case, drink in
those cities.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
And they are trying.
Speaker 6 (08:22):
Desperately the places where they can't win at the ballot box.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
They're trying to win by other measures. Is I think
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
So sato populism is this idea we just I just
talked about it with Jason Stanley that part of the
joy you find in populism is your syndistic desires to own.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
The libs, to make poor people suffer. Is that what
we're working at right now?
Speaker 6 (08:48):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (08:48):
I mean, that's a really I had never heard that
word before.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
I don't know if he coined it, but but it's
it's a good word.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
And no, I think that's true.
Speaker 6 (08:57):
And you can look at you know, you look at
the memes that are coming out of the White House
and various governmental agencies, and they're all predicated on meanness.
Seems it seems like an understatement. I mean, you look
at it and you say to yourself, you know, well,
that's just mean. But you realize as you're saying it
(09:17):
that how much of an understatement that is. You know,
this is not someone in the cafeteria making fun of
your shirt. But you look at the mindset behind everything
that they're doing, and you look at the white nationalist
memes and the absolute glee at other people's misfortune, particularly
if those people aren't white, or aren't straight, or aren't Christian,
(09:39):
aren't male, and yeah, it's hard to come to any
other conclusion.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Then this is a big part of the game.
Speaker 6 (09:45):
And this is Look, this has always been a big
part of fascism. I think we're way beyond the point
of debating whether it's okay to call.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
What's going on fascist.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
It just very clearly is, and it very clearly is
the mindset. And again you see it in the memes,
you see it in the messaging that they are trying
to put out, which is that you know, you are
not welcome here if you are not like us, and
you know, removing things from museums that ill PRESIDENTE doesn't
like or doesn't comport with his view of America as
(10:18):
this literally a perfect union and you can't come to
any other conclusion. And it's been like this for a while.
But there are always people who said, well, you know,
I don't know if it's okay to use the F word,
to say fascism. We are so far behind that, and
I cannot imagine in August of the year of Our
Lord twenty twenty five looking around and thinking, well, I'm
(10:41):
still not sold that this is fascist.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
It's pure, uncut fascist.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
So what do you think.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
About like the smart people who are on the right
who are going along with this, because you know a
lot of those people, Like do you think that they
are like, yes, it's fascism, or do you think that
they're just having fun.
Speaker 6 (11:00):
I think it's a case by case basis. And you know,
this is similar to a sort of thing. I don't
do it so much anymore because ultimately it doesn't matter.
But you know, I used to play this game. I
used to play it with other people that I was
friendly with, who knew the personnel, and try to figure
out who what Fox News really believed what they were saying,
and who just wanted the paycheck and the adoration and
(11:23):
you know, the fame. And I think you really do
have to take it on a case by case basis
because I think there are the true believers on the right,
smart or otherwise, who have absolutely no problems with fascism,
and maybe they never did, or maybe they have.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
Just come around to it.
Speaker 6 (11:41):
And then you have the ones who you know, maybe
deep in their heart they're not fascist and they don't
necessarily love everything that's going on, but they're going along
with it and promoting it to advance their own careers.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, and it never mattered.
You are what you're doing in a case like this,
and whether you're promoting this shit because you believe it
(12:03):
in your soul or because you somehow think it's good
for your career, it ultimately doesn't matter. And I'm never
sure what the answer to this is. Are the true
fascists worse than the ones who are costplaying fascism just.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
To get ahead? Like, because you can sit there and say, well,
the true fascists.
Speaker 6 (12:20):
At least they honestly believe this, whereas the other ones
it's like, really, you'll go along with this because it
gets you some money and keeps your face on TV.
But then the flip side of that is, obviously you
know the true fascist what they believe, Like, it doesn't
matter that they're sincere in their beliefs. Their beliefs are abhorring,
(12:41):
Their beliefs are awful, their beliefs are straight up evil.
So I don't know the answer the overall answer your question, Molly,
other than to say I do think it's a case
by case basis. I don't think you can paint a
broad brush and say, oh, they're all doing this because X.
I think there's really two different groups and you have
to name and then you can say, oh, that person
(13:03):
is a true believer or oh that person is absolutely cost.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Playing and they don't really believe this shit?
Speaker 2 (13:08):
How do you sell it to yourself?
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Then I don't know. I will never understand that.
Speaker 6 (13:13):
I don't understand the you know, I've been saying this
a lot lately, like beyond, I don't know how a
lot of these people sleep at night, Like how do
you look in the mirror? And I always think when
you were a kid, it's just what you dreamed of
growing When I grow up, I want to be someone
who lies on TV for money. Maybe there are people
who are so you know, sociopathic that the answer is yes.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
But for a lot of these people, I don't think
the answer was yes.
Speaker 6 (13:36):
I don't think it was a lifelong dream to get
on the TV or to get on the internet, and
why for a living? And I don't know how you
live with yourself doing that. I couldn't do it. And
I don't think that makes me a great person. I
think that makes me a person, you know, So I
don't understand this and and this sort of piggyback to
a thought I've been having lately with regard to like
(13:56):
cable news in any place that has a lot of
these people on as guests, whether they're maga politicians or
maga commentators, you know, these people are lying to you,
and you can say while you're lying, but I don't
understand how you interview these people and you don't sit
there and say to them.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Well, you don't believe that, because that's what it comes
out to.
Speaker 6 (14:14):
You hear these people saying things, and they'll say something
about how, you know, I'm afraid to walk down the
streets of New York in broad daylight.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
These interviewers, instead of letting that go, they need to say, no,
you're not.
Speaker 6 (14:25):
You don't believe that, Like, they need to be called
out on this shit, because they are straight up lying
or making shit up. And we're pretending to have these
serious discussions about you know, is New York safe to
walk down the street in the middle of the day.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Maybe on the left will tell you it is, but here,
our guest today will tell you it's not. And it's like, no,
fuck off.
Speaker 6 (14:46):
Start calling these people out for their bullshit and start
calling them out for the fact that it's not just
that they're wrong, it's that they don't believe what they
themselves are saying, and call them on it and say
you don't believe.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
That right and you thing happens.
Speaker 6 (15:00):
Then I don't know. I don't know if maybe they
stop coming on or what, but I think it needs
to be done. We have to stop in the media
bears so much responsibility for this, for normalizing all this
shit and for taking it seriously, and for pretending to
have debates about stuff that should not be debated because
it's not debatable and one side is just making stuff up.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
And this goes for everything.
Speaker 6 (15:24):
This goes for whether it's vaccines or you know, DEI
or whatever. Stop letting the right make shit up and
stop people on the left. Stop having these quote unquote
intellectual conversations with people who are making things up. Stop
presenting the other side, because it's not the other side,
(15:44):
it's the truth. And you don't need to sit there
with someone who tells you that vaccines are killing people,
because all you're doing by having that debate is elevating
it to both sides have equal standing thing, and instead
of that, you need to start telling people. You don't
believe that. You are saying that to get on TV.
You are saying that to advance your career, You are
(16:06):
saying that to please Donald Trump. But you know that's
not true. You don't believe that, And see what happens.
There's a reason I'm not a cable news host because
that show would follow me be off the air at
five minutes. Yeah, So let me ask you.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
You have this sort of unforgivable stuff going on, right
You have people being run around by I say, gents,
you have checkpoints, I mean, just shocking stuff. Do you
think that it feels like the only way that any
of this stops is if people like people are clearly
not happy.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
The polling is terrible on this. But I don't know
what that leads to.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
I don't know what it leads to either.
Speaker 6 (16:44):
I mean, I don't know if it means more beautiful
sandwiches being wasted, you know, in the sense that you're
not being eaten, but because they've become a symbol of resistance,
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
I don't know the answer.
Speaker 6 (16:56):
And I don't know how far they can push before
the pushback becomes more than it is. And I do
know that if and when this is all over, I
don't want to see any truth and reconciliation bullshit, and
I don't want to see any you know. Well, we
(17:18):
need to move forward, and we need to forget that
all this stuff just happened. I know, I want people
in prison. I'd be happy if we brought back exile
and just sent them all to an island with no
gear and no food and they can fight for their
own survival because they think they're the alphas. Let them
go prove it somewhere outside of America. But I don't
(17:41):
want to hear shit. And I think Joe Biden, you know,
really screwed this up. And I don't think his intentions
were bad, not just Joe Biden, the Democratic establishment in general,
sort of giving a pass to a lot of the
January sixth stuff and just letting this stuff fester and
trying to pretend that we could just move past what happened.
And a lot of that is how we got where
we are now, and that shouldn't be forgotten, and nothing
(18:03):
they're doing.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Now should be forgotten.
Speaker 6 (18:05):
The elimination of due process, the unlawful taking over of cities,
kidnapping people on the streets, and sending them to foreign countries.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Who should not have that being done to them. I
don't know.
Speaker 6 (18:18):
It goes on and on, the removal of stuff from museums.
Every single one of these things should not be forgotten
and should not be glossed over again. If and when
we get through this, there has to be a reckoning.
There doesn't have to be reconciliation, and there should not
be reconciliation.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Andy Levy, I think you're right, But I also I'm
not sure that Democrats have the stomach for that, if
it even happens.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So who is the big villain here? If on the
Democratic side, Merrick.
Speaker 6 (18:49):
Garland, god, I guess to quote top Gun, the list
is long but distinguished. I can make you a list
of people who definitely didn't help, and Merk Garland would
be high on that list. Think Joe Biden helped, But
I say that with a lot of caveats. I think
on this particular front, Joe Biden didn't help. Joe Biden's
sort of twentieth century for lack of a better way
(19:12):
to call it, twentieth century political mind reach across the aisle.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
It's just very.
Speaker 6 (19:17):
Clear to everyone who is not a Democratic politician or
consultant that that shit is over look. Democratic leadership has
been god awful, the Democratic consultant class. I was going
to say something that I probably shouldn't say. Yeah, not great.
I don't need to hear from James Carville ever again.
(19:38):
I don't need to hear from Bill Clinton ever again. Honestly,
I don't need to hear from Hillary Clinton like the Clinton's.
You know, go enjoy your life. I'm not saying I
wish Hillary Clinton ill. I'm just saying, go enjoy your life.
James Carvill, go enjoy your life like go go, go
sit on a porch and sip whiskey. God bless, but
(19:59):
stop writing eds with horrible, horrible advice.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
I'm using him. It's not just him.
Speaker 6 (20:04):
I'm using him as sort of an avatar of the
Democratic political class.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
And they are not up for this.
Speaker 6 (20:10):
And they don't understand the world in which we live
in twenty twenty five. They understand the world in which
we lived in nineteen ninety five. But that world is dead,
and I'm not saying it won't ever come back. There
may be a time again in America's future where we
all can just get along, but right now is not
that time, and that is not what we need from
(20:33):
our democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate. It's
not what we need from democratic governors, and it's not
what we need from democratic consultants.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Andy Levy, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
I will come back, Molly, maybe to talk about something
more fun.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Jason Stanley is a professor at the Monks School of
Global Affairs and Public Policy, as well as the author
of Racing History, How Fascist We write the Past to
control the future. Welcome to Fast Politics, Jason Stanley.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
I'm Mollie. I know you feel bad for me, all right,
full disclosure.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
I am in Los Angeles going to do Bill Maher,
likely going to ruin my life by being yelled at
by all of whatever. We're putting the fun in fascism here.
Let's talk about we got streets filled with people from
(21:34):
enforcement agencies, some of which are ICE, some of which
are whatever.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
They're unmarked.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
I mean, talk me through what the sort of its
Oraitorian healthscape we're looking.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
At here is.
Speaker 7 (21:47):
I'm in DC now not to meet with any politicians,
but to go to my nephew's bar mitzpah. You know
it reminds me a little bit about what they said
about the military parades. It's kind of joky, but it
is a show of power. It's showing that Trump is
repeatedly showing that he can do whatever he wants, and
(22:08):
that's the he can impose martial law.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
He can do whatever he wants. It's all haphazard here.
Speaker 7 (22:15):
I'm not sure there's really any organization in DC, but
as we've seen from Los Angeles, they can crack down
hard when they want to. And I think the thing
that I'm thinking about most right now is Ice. It
is the new Ice recruitment because historically speaking, it looks
a lot like the storm up time in the Essay
(22:37):
when the Nazis were like, hey, street goat goons, We're
going to pay you and give you uniforms to do
what you're doing anyway. So it looks historically that sort
of recruitment of Trump's own personal security force looks very
bad when you put it in that historical context.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
And the Homeland secure stuff, like the art that the
Homeland Security people are posting. Talk to me about these
homeland security posts.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Right.
Speaker 7 (23:11):
So, there was an interesting article today in Mother Jones.
I was interviewed for it. About exactly the Homeland security posts.
The author pointed out that the daily stormer of the
far right neo nazi rag Online Rags said in twenty seventeen,
make sure people don't know whether or.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
Not you're kidding.
Speaker 7 (23:33):
So we're seeing a lot of that happening, like, oh,
we're just kidding, but in fact we're really not kidding.
But the idea is to have fun with horror. Timothy
Snyder has this concept sato populism, like taking pleasure and
the pain of others, and that's what this regime is selling.
They're selling sato populism. They're selling owning the Libs and
(23:57):
with cruelty towards people that the lib roles supposedly are
empathetic with. So you're supposed to get joy that they're
really bashing heads, splitting apart families, sending people, destroying thousands
of people's lives by erecting concentration camps, and it's all
a funny joke. And the real joke is watching the liberals,
(24:19):
who care about these people becomes so outraged and scream
and complain.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
That's the fuel. Owning the Libs is the fuel of
the global fascist search right.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
But in Germany, there was this record high unemployment. So
Hitler came to power on all of these people who
had fought in the First World War now being homeless,
having nothing to do, having no purpose, seeing your government
fail them.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
That's not exactly the same scenario here, is it.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
No, So that was long an objection to the use
of the term fascism, that the material conditions of fascism
weren't not that we weren't facing some sort of dramatic
we weren't emerging out of the ashes of the financial
crisis with huge unemployment, we weren't emerging from World War
War one situation, so therefore it couldn't be fascism, you know.
(25:15):
I think what we can say is that the material
conditions for this kind of politics, you know, can can
come out of resentment, you know. We we can speculate
on why this politics is exactly as successful as it
was in the early thirties German.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Right, Yeah, but that's not what I mean. I'm not
making a case against not calling fascism. What I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Is right, I know, but you have these people, like
one of the reasons why Hitler was successful was because
you had all these people who had nothing to do, right,
it wasn't like you had record low unemployment. It was
like you had So it's more of just a pragmatic question,
not an ideological question.
Speaker 7 (25:57):
Yeah, no, I took it as such. I mean, the
ice bonuses are crazy. Fifty thousand dollars signing bonus, sixty
thousand dollars off your student loans, which is a little ironic.
Yeah right, It's it's like these are We're talking life
changing amounts of money for many people. I mean, fifty
(26:18):
thousand dollars signing bonus would be a life changing amount
of money for me, and I'm well off. So you know,
we're going to see and God knows what their salaries
are going to be. So these are essentially bribes. I
mean we see this with a Russian army, right as
well that the Russian Army. Now they're paying people enormous
amounts of money to join.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
So I think even in you know, this is a.
Speaker 7 (26:42):
Creating a violent governmental force ungoverned by laws, that is
highly that is highly compensated, and so I'm not sure
you need you know, I mean, we have record low unemployment,
but we also have extreme wealth and equality, and you know,
fifty thousand dollars signing bonus is a lot for a
(27:05):
lot of people.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yes, but if you get that, you still need to
be able to have people be willing to do the
things that they're unwilling to do.
Speaker 7 (27:16):
Usually how does that work exactly? So this is interesting.
It's a piece I'm writing now. The moral injury involved
in being an ice agent will be something you will
have to live with for the rest of your life.
We know that those sort of actions that they're encouraging
people that you would have to do as an ice agent,
you know, arresting a parent in an immigration court as
(27:40):
their kids or partners screams and cries while you drag
them away to be sent to a concentration camp and
then to the Sudan or something, you know, where their
life is over. These are things that will affect people
for the rest of their lives. So you need some
kind of governing ideology. You need payments, but then you
also need a going ideology. And here we can also
(28:03):
look to history like Himmler's posing speeches. So I'm writing
a piece on this now where he's speaking to the
ass and saying, you know that, you know it's terrible
the job you do and you are the best of humans,
so you feel terribly when you do this job. However,
since you are uba mentioned you're superhumans, you know that
(28:27):
it's necessary. You can overcome the first order feeling of
pain at killing people and brutalizing them because you know
that it's for this higher purpose preventing the poisoning of
the blood of our people.
Speaker 4 (28:44):
So that's going to be what they need to do.
They need to instill.
Speaker 7 (28:48):
This idea that this is for a greater purpose, and
you understand this greater purpose and that makes you smarter
and better. Now Here, we're really bumping into dark places
and human and human psyche that we've tried to figure
out for many, many decades, how people can do atrocities,
(29:11):
how people can revel in these atrocities. I don't think
we solve these problems, but I think we know that
people that the ice agents that will be hired, that
come in, the ice agents that now serve you know,
they're going to undergrow tremendous moral injury like soldiers do.
They also will have to know that their grandkids will
(29:31):
not be proud of them, will be ashamed of them.
And so Granddaddy interned Japanese people in tournment caps. You know,
that's not something that you find grandkids bragging about. Now,
So you'll have the moral injury. They'll need to treat
the moral injury with humor, with you know, the kind
of over cruelty. And then the question is how much
(29:52):
will Americans go for that? How much will Americans go
for this combination of you know, the ideology high mind,
we have to save America from the poisoning of its
blood by immigrants on the one side, and the other
this kind of laughing cruelty that it's like, you know,
get into it.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
It's fun, it's torture and cruelty. I see it as
a moral.
Speaker 7 (30:15):
And an ethical and psychological disaster coming because I've lived
in countries like Germany for years, so I know it's
very difficult.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
You know, it does wear on you for life.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
I don't want to be overly optimistic here, but it
doesn't feel like you have quite the right combination of
factors to go full not to We.
Speaker 7 (30:38):
Have to remember the final solution doesn't start till nineteen
forty one, when they're like, okay, we can't send to
choose away.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
We need to get rid of them completely.
Speaker 7 (30:45):
What we're having now is we're having concentration coumts, zones
of lawlessness where people don't really have access through lawyers.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
There's no real rule of law. Inside Alligator Alcatraz.
Speaker 7 (30:58):
We have congress people getting arrested for trying to look
into these zones of lawlessness. So we're at the beginning here.
And I think, as we can see also from our
prison system, which is notoriously brutal, that things get bad
really quickly when people aren't looking and when people can't walk.
(31:21):
They're exhibiting this incredible power over the law. We can
stup you into unmarked bounds, we can put you in
places where you don't have accessed the lawyers, you don't
have accessed the courts, journalists can't see you. We're going
to brag about how bad these conditions are. So yeah,
that is far far from auschite, but it's pretty bad.
(31:45):
I don't know if we should be saying to ourselves, well,
we're not doing gas chambers, so hold on, So it's
not that bad.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, no, no, no, I mean that's not what I'm saying.
I'm just sort of trying to game out how it
goes and what it looks like and that I think
is a real question.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
So what would you say would be the way to
push back on all of this?
Speaker 7 (32:06):
Yeah, I mean, you know, the model is always the
civil rights movement fight against jen Crow right to try
to spur empathy. Empathy is being attacked and ridiculed, right,
that's like what these means and what these it's meant
to show? It's weak and like you're a liberal if
you care about this, and isn't it more fun to
(32:27):
torture people and.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Laugh about it?
Speaker 7 (32:29):
And you know, So the question is can we draw
on those resources that Martin Luther King drew on in
the Civil rights movement when people were brutalized in front
of cameras and Americans, white Americans were horrified? So can
we do that with this xenophobic push Can we get
(32:50):
Americans who were are not from an immigration background to
be horrified at what is happening and what's going to
be happening even more to our immigrant neighbors. So I
also think you're going to get a lot of pushback
from immigrants because a lot of these people are very tough,
you know, I mean my parents were immigrants.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
They were tough, but you know.
Speaker 7 (33:12):
These people have done a lot to come to the
United States and being deported back to who knows where
with no resources and no, I mean, that's like the
end of their lives. So I expect there's going to
be organized resistance from immigrants and their allies, and then
we have to see how Americans will react to what
(33:33):
might become pitched battles on our streets. MM.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
That doesn't sound good. I want you to say more
about this empathy idea.
Speaker 8 (33:41):
Yeah, So the civil rights movement explicitly, King explicitly looked
for a tough shareff who would crack the heads of
nonviolent protesters, so to get that on camel so that
people would be horrified.
Speaker 7 (33:54):
That was a strategy you didn't have at the time,
Jim Crow sheriffs broadcasting the horrors that they were doing.
Of course, there had been public lynchings and things like this,
which is a little bit in the direction of you know,
the public cruelty aspect is where we're where we are
(34:16):
at right now. But the empathy was a call to
our better natures, to saying, you know, we Americans are
not about this cracking the heads of people trying to
devote So you know what this admit this regime is
doing is it's trying to say we Americans are about
tearing kids away from their families. We Americans are We're
(34:38):
about blood and soil. We're about as JD. Vance said,
We're about the people who are buried in our graveyards
one hundred years ago, not about.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
An idea or an ideal.
Speaker 7 (34:49):
So the empathy would be reaching to America as a
set of ideals. What a state is is it's not
just a collection of people. It's not just a collection
of families who are related. It's an ideal, it's something.
It's a vision of a common good that binds people together.
And what we need is a movement that speaks to
(35:12):
that vision of America, that speaks to that vision of
a common good and refuses to reduce us to a
bunch of people who are related by blood and soil
to those who came before us.
Speaker 4 (35:24):
We need that.
Speaker 7 (35:25):
What we're starting to see this regime do is give
us a blood and soil vision, give us a Nazi vision.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Of who we are.
Speaker 7 (35:34):
We're not a democracy, we're not a tolerant nation. We're
not a nation of immigrants. We're not a beacon of freedom.
We are fundamentally decendenced by blood of people who lived
on this soil for generations, and that's the vision we
have to fight against.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
So it sounds like a sort of Obama is the
answer to this.
Speaker 7 (35:57):
Right, someone charismatic. I mean, you know, another central value
is equality. I mean, I think you're right. We need
someone who can speak against these horrors or change the topic,
switch the topic to justice, to equality to material things.
Often democracies are healthiest when someone can say, Okay, let's
(36:18):
stop talking about integration, let's stop talking about trans people,
let's talk about the rents, let's talk about affordability, you know,
and then that changes the topic from cruelty. We need
to change the topic from cruelty. We need to change
the topic from this blood and soil vision of who
(36:39):
we are.
Speaker 4 (36:40):
And there are various ways to change that topic.
Speaker 7 (36:42):
One way, as you say, is a charismatic call to
a nation where people come to be free, rather than
come to have their speech rights taken away from them,
as we're seeing now, where if you come to America,
you're not a citizen.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
You can't speak at all.
Speaker 7 (36:59):
So we need that, or we need a change of
subjects where people are like why are you vilifying immigrants?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
I need cheap groceries, Jason Stanley. I hope you'll come
back always, Mollie, thank you for the work you do.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Oh moment perfectly Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
So, Molly. As we know, courts aren't going to save us.
Federal Appeals Court has allowed the CFPB dismantling to proceed.
You know, I love when Trump pretends he's for the
American people and the little guy and says, you know,
a consumer protection board that keeps people from being predatory
towards you, that's me protecting you.
Speaker 7 (37:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Trump ran on populism, right. He said he was going
to make things less expensive. Now here we are, and
every moment that Trump said the opportunity to do something
like that, to make things less expensive, to protect the
little guy, to work on inflation, every moment he's done
just the opposite.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
It is exactly how we thought it would go.
Speaker 6 (38:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
It doesn't care about the little guy. He just was lying.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Yep. So when you see these bank fees and your
credit card fees and interest rates go up, we can
put a nice little I did that sticker of Trump
on it.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
That's right, Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
Of all this chaos.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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