Brief: How To Talk To Your Son About Fascism (Pt 1)
Historian Craig Johnson (PhD Berkeley) hosts Fifteen Minutes of Fascism, which covers the global rise of the radical right. He’s the author of an excellent new book, How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism, a guide for parents and educators on keeping young men out of the extreme right wing.
In this first of a two-part interview, Matthew and Craig discuss definitions of fascism, why it appeals to young men (or how masculinity is socially constructed), irony poisoning, and whether fascism can be fought through accelerating cringe cycles.
Part 2 drops in Patreon on Monday. That episode centers on an exploration of strategy: how do we theorize the agency of kids becoming political actors? How do we maintain trust while engaging with a family member sliding to the right?
Show notes
How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism - 1st Edition - Craig A. Johnson
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The Brief today is a continuation of the Anti-Fascist Woodshed series, and the title is from the excellent book just released by my guest today, Craig Johnson.
How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, out just this March from Rutledge.
Now, Craig and I have a lot to talk about, and so I'm going to break this up into two parts and publish the second part this coming Monday on our Patreon.
But in this episode, we'll get into the weeds of how Johnson diagnoses the pathways to and effects of fascism in the lives of young men.
And then on Monday, we'll get into the intervention and repair strategies that Johnson points to, including his closing argument in which he basically says that DEI is an inoculant against fascism.
Imagine that.
So I'll get to the interview in a few minutes, but as I typically do when, you know, there's a book author and I've got the author on, I'm going to do a 101 on the book first so that the author doesn't have to.
That means that Craig and I can get right into the weeds.
First of all, I was really surprised to see this book come across my feeds while I was finishing up a draft of my own quite related book, which is called Anti-Fascist Dad, 12 Conversations to Have with Young People in Chaotic Times.
So that's going to be out with North Atlantic Books next spring.
I think, I mean, huge coincidence, very serendipitous, and I think it's just one of those times where those of us who feel a lot of the same urgencies are going to find one another, so I'm really grateful to have Craig on today.
Now, Craig is a professional historian, PhD from Berkeley, and he begins his book with a very tight and accessible first chapter defining fascism and tracking its global features and advancements.
And early on, I think this is crucial, he flags that his ultimate focus will be misogyny and sexism.
And so he homes in on how that plays out in fascism.
This is super refreshing because you're not going to see this in Paxton or Snyder or many of the standard sources, who often treat misogyny as a comorbidity rather than a central obsession, that fascists have an obsession.
With sexual hierarchies, that's at the heart of things.
So right up front, we get this super clear paragraph that points directly to the intersection between the manosphere and fascism.
And this will give you an indication of how accessible the writing is as well.
Quote, fascism is sexist.
Like most people on the right wing, fascists believe that there are certain spheres of life, like government, business, and anything with power, that are a natural environment for men and not for women.
They think that women should be relegated to the world of family and childcare and that they shouldn't have or want social power.
Fascists think that this is both biologically obvious, since women are the ones who have children, and also politically and socially vital, since they think that anything that changes our society away from their imagined version of the past is wrong and needs to be counteracted.
In recent years, fascists have also become more insistent that sex and gender are the same, denying the experience and existence of trans people.
So, extremely clear opening gambit here in the first chapter.
In the second chapter, Johnson is really strong on the specific attractions between fascism and young men that go both ways.
First of all, he describes...
The consonants between the pleasures of the young man's time of life and the political imperatives of fascism, speed, violence, recklessness, and self-assertion.
These are all qualities, he says, that are recruited and mobilized by fascist leaders who need street muscle and cannon fodder and therefore...
Now, I do have some tough questions for Johnson about how we actually talk about these seemingly common sense links without reinforcing gender essentialisms about boys that may actually be undergoing a resurgence at the moment precisely because they are losing credibility.
Now, in subsequent chapters, Johnson is really strong on the workflow of the online pipeline.
From YouTube through to the Manosphere, featuring close studies of influencers like PewDiePie, which seems like ancient history, but he's really instructive.
PewDiePie couched his racism and misogyny in the plausible deniability of, hey, I'm just joking.
And Johnson tracks this slippery slope from a joke that is useful for parasocial bonding to a joke that is useful for fascist recruitment.
So this is the phenomenon that many of us have been calling irony poisoning, and it remains a driving force in many zones and demographics, I would say including Joe Rogan's most recent reclamation of the R-word for mentally disabled people at the very moment that Bobby Kennedy Jr. is using outright eugenics language against autistic people.
Rogan really wants to always just say, hey...
It's a joke.
Don't take it so seriously.
But there is a pipeline from the joke to the dehumanization.
So you can call it woke language policing to object to dehumanizing behaviors, but telling Rogan and Bill Maher and Jordan Peterson to shut the fuck up has actually turned out to be starting line anti-fascism.
Now, here's what I really found helpful about this book in relation to my own.
Johnson starts his intervention into the fascist recruitment of kids farther down the line from where I start.
He takes more of a harm reduction approach because in his book, fascism is in your kid's world already.
It's already appealing to and recruiting your son.
So his approach is to offer a solid explanatory framework for how that happened and then provide advice on how to take care of it up to and including The extremely difficult measures of quarantining the kid from the rest of the family,
if that's necessary, or even getting law enforcement involved if their behaviors become dangerous.
So I think this is an essential service.
But I started my project in a slightly earlier developmental place with the assumption that the kind of everyday communism that David Graeber talks about of family life is already apparent to my readers.
Even just a little bit.
And can therefore be strengthened to the point where fascism itself is just not appealing at all.
It just looks wrong when it comes in the door.
So Johnson is correct that there is some biopsychosocial evidence to believe that an attraction to fascist energy and affect is hardwired for some boys.
I think that's going to take a long time to really nail down.
Through a lot of gender studies work and the work of anthropologists like David Graeber, I think Johnson and I also view masculinity in the plural because I think we both know that there have been many ways in which kids around the world and throughout time have come into their gendered behaviors in different ways,
and I see no reason to believe that future research will not turn up forms of maleness rooted in caregiving, essentially, rather than competition or anything else.
I've also come to believe that good parenting demands a type of irrational faith that leapfrogs the trials and despairs of adulthood to always encourage a kid's better angels.
That belief makes me careful about taking any kind of rearguard or defensive posture toward the possible specter of fascism in the home because it's very easy for...
Even the most progressive worries to communicate messages of danger, conservatism, and surveillance.
And kids can smell our anxiety from miles away.
And if they do, we run the risk of encouraging them to shut down.
And that's the worst outcome.
I'm going to talk about all of this with Craig Johnson.
Really looking forward to it.
He has a PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley.
He hosts an excellent little podcast called 15 Minutes of Fascism.
It covers the global rise of the radical right in bite-sized pieces, including...
Like, really cool segments like I'll See You in Hell, in which he profiles every episode some right-wing figure who's died.
He's also the author, as I've said, of How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, a guide for parents and educators on keeping young men out of the extreme right wing.
He also started a YouTube channel called 15 Minutes of Fascism, so you can subscribe to his work there as well.
Craig Johnson, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Hey, thanks.
Glad to be here.
I am really grateful that your book is out and that it's out a year ahead of mine.
It gives me a lot to think about, and I think at this point it's all hands on deck, so good work.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to start with your orientation because you affirm throughout the text that you are approaching this in as nonpartisan a way as you can.
You identify as a leftist, but you also say that everybody wants to defeat fascism.
So I just wanted to ask you about that particular point of view to begin with.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you encounter in a lot of leftist, progressive, even liberal spaces, lots of people talking about fascism as this big civilizational problem, but then they don't do the work in it as if that were true.
Hmm. The fact is that the last time that fascism was a big global threat as it is today, we needed help from all sectors of the world.
of society.
Yeah. So back in the day when fascism was defeated in the 30s and 40s, anti-fascists included everybody from the Soviet Communist Party to people who wanted to bring the king back in France.
Like, all hands on deck, just like you said, right?
I think we got to live our lives like that.
Now, specifically, you point out that, you know...
Conservatives also want to defeat fascism.
And so for those people who might think that, oh, well, you know, my popular front thinking doesn't extend that far.
Like, how do we explain that?
Why do conservatives want to defeat fascism?
Yeah, so when I'm talking about conservatives, think about people like Mitt Romney, right?
Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney voters, like some of those people ended up being Trump voters, but some of them didn't.
Some of them held their noses and voted for the Republican candidate in 2016.
but didn't vote for Trump in 2020.
And some of those folks stayed home in 2024, or maybe they thought Trump would moderate this time or whatever, right?
When we're talking about conservatives, I disagree with them about a whole lot of things.
Right. Like a whole lot of things.
Right.
and U.S. conservative movement of doing a lot of really heinous stuff.
But they don't believe that democracy is bad.
They don't openly say that they want to disappear people from the street.
They don't openly say that they want to, well, they don't say this at all, that they want to deport tens of millions of people from the United States.
And so while they are not allies in most respects, they're allies in some.
And it is not fun to have to align yourself with people that you disagree with so heavily.
But that's where we're at.
That's what we got.
It's what we got.
And also you have something sly at the end, which is in chapter six.
You know, you kind of basically come around to saying that DEI will protect communities against fascism.
So you do slip in a fairly strong perspective there.
Well, I am definitely opposed to people who are opposed to, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion.
DEI as such, I think it's more a corporate governance policy than a social program.
I do believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion are good, not just for societies, but for the people who live in them.
Fascists disagree with those things, and some conservatives disagree with it too.
I would not claim that diversity solves fascism.
That's not true.
Instead, what I would say is that...
If you showed me two kids and you say, okay, they're both white cisgender men and they're both 15 years old, one of them lives in an exclusively white community and the other one lives in a diverse community, and I mean an actually really diverse one, like not one where there are multiple communities that sort of overlap but don't touch each other,
like a really diverse community.
You asked me, and I think if you asked anybody, which of these is more likely to become a neo-Nazi?
Well, you'd say the one who's only grown up around white people, right?
Um, it's because they, they haven't.
I think that's a big factor.
That's a big help in terms of a person ending up interested in the right wing.
So let's turn to those young men who you describe really clearly as from the
culture who are also in the right wing.
are also
Also, downwardly mobile.
That this is the demographic that is most vulnerable to fascist recruitment.
Now, fascist propaganda gives them a reason for their downward mobility in the form of scapegoats.
So, the situation will be clearly described on one level, and then it will be answered in a misdirecting way.
It is the Jews, it is the feminists, it is the immigrants who are responsible for your downward mobility.
So how do you counter this half-truth outside of, speaking of, you know, our positionality and who we're speaking of and who our allies are, how do you combat that kind of half-truth outside of a leftist or even Marxian analysis?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
You know, as the man said, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.
And I think that that holds true today just as much as it did in the 19th century.
But you characterize the problem extremely well.
The problem is that young men are right when they say, hey, the world is not going to work out for me.
The system is not going to help me get along.
My life probably will be materially relatively less prosperous than previous generations.
That's probably true.
For a lot of people.
If that is true, and most of the mainstream politicians and other, you know, politically active people in your country do not acknowledge it, you know, if the Democratic mainstream leadership does not acknowledge it and,
you know, wants to say, like, oh, no, no, no, the line keeps going up and to the right, if you fail to acknowledge that, then people experience and really understand that disconnect.
It's really obvious to people.
So you need to give them an alternative.
You need to give them an alternative, something that they can actively, earnestly believe in.
I do believe that the only possible answer to that is a sort of left progressivism, is that it requires a belief in expanding the sphere of human equality and human opportunity, that it means letting more people in than have been let in in previous generations,
that it means expanding our sphere of understanding who matters.
On a societal level.
That, I do think, is the only possible answer.
But at the same time, we are kind of in a crisis scenario.
And so that's where this popular front thing comes in, where it's like, okay, yeah, I mean, in order to kick the actual fascists out, we might need to work with some people who ultimately do not believe in that project, or who even actively oppose it.
Like the Mitt Romney types of the universe, right?
Right.
And so, like, you know, Mitt Romney...
Probably doesn't even necessarily, you know, if he had won, right?
Or if he were the nominee to lead the Republican Party in 2016, right?
He probably wasn't going to really even push the Supreme Court to overturn homosexual marriage, for example.
Whereas in the United States, you know, I think we can expect that to be tried within the year.
I think it brings up the question of whose story, whose alternative story?
is cooler, which is something we'll get into quite a bit more.
And here's what it was going through in my mind as I read a lot of your book, which is that it seems like it is as much of a slam dunk to me as the fascist answer to be able to say to a white kid, actually...
If you're feeling exploited or demeaned, you have a lot more in common with feminists and black people than with Alex Jones, who's like a shouting ham, or with Jordan Peterson, who's this rich asshole who dresses like a clown.
Is that really a hard sell?
Yeah, I mean, I personally agree with you there.
I think that that is a possible sell to a lot of kids.
And when we look at...
Politicians who do push the envelope and do actually say, talk pretty directly and earnestly about the problems that our society is facing.
People like Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders.
Young people do like those people.
Remember, Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016.
And I'm not a Rogan fan.
I think he's wrongheaded in almost every potential respect.
But the point is that lots of kids love him.
And lots of young men love him also, you know, in their early 20s.
And so if the problem, as you say, one of the problems with fascism is that it is cool to a lot of young people.
And part of the reason that it's cool is that it goes against the powers that be.
And another reason that it is cool for a lot of young people is that it carries with it a set of aesthetics and demands on your behavior.
That encourage fellow thinking, encourage group behavior, encourage group, you know, in keeping.
And that simply works, you know.
And if all that the Democratic Party or any other mainstream left-of-center party in any other country in the world, you know, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, the CDU, well, the CDU is a right-wing party, but you know what I mean, in Germany, if all that they have to offer is the same sort of,
like, Neoliberal mass donor as opposed to mass membership party system, then that's not going to get hearts and minds.
People are not going to turn out in droves for the status quo because they know that the status quo is not working for them.
So I think ultimately I agree that part of the benefit to the left, to progressives...
Even to some liberals in the United States.
Part of the benefit of the popular front is that coming out the other side, we are the only ones that have a viable answer to fascism.
The conservatives will have to answer for the fact that they worked with them.
And in many other countries, when conservative parties have had to answer for that, it has resulted in generational problems in vote-giving for them.
That is one possible positive outcome.
From the Trump administration.
Let's talk about the longevity of coolness as well, because this is, I think, a new problem, especially when a fascist movement comes into power.
You write, this is really cool.
The simple truth is that many people wanted to be fascists.
The parents of young men were proud to see them in uniform.
We're talking about the 1930s here.
They were prizes on the dating market.
They were the face of the nation, and they were launching their people into the future.
Fascism was new, exciting, and active.
It captured people's imaginations, even beyond politics.
It inspired artists, authors, and filmmakers.
It was, in a word, popular.
So I'm reading this, and then I'm also reading about Hans Scholl, who was central to the White Rose resistance in Munich.
And he actually left the Hitler Youth.
After coming back from the Nuremberg rallies, because he thought they were uncool, because they were all so rigidly, aesthetically aligned, he didn't get the black shorts.
He actually came back to Munich and he wanted to create his own fancy banner.
I don't know.
He got out better colors.
He wanted to put griffins on it.
He wanted to do it all up.
And of course, when he went in public with it, he got into a fight with some of the, I guess, I don't know, normie Hitler youth kids.
And that was it for him.
And then there's the Edelweiss pirates who made fun of the Hitler youth all the time.
So I'm wondering if there's an Achilles heel here.
That it always depends on a kind of coolness that appeals to young people, but that young people burn through those things pretty quickly, and that coolness will eventually fail to mesmerize the next generation because it just gets cringe.
That is a really good question.
The power of cringe to keep young people off of something is something that I, as an educator, am sometimes very unfortunately aware of.
It's entirely possible that, yeah, if we're envisioning a potential bad future in the United States, in which Donald Trump remains the president and enforces some of his more fascistic leanings, and we get organizations like the Proud Boys or Patriot Front or something like that,
I don't really think that they would become...
official in the Hitler Youth type capacity, but they might be sort of like looked askance at.
Right. In the way that, in my academic work, I study primarily Argentina.
In Argentina, the comparable organization and the last dictatorship was something called the Triple A, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance.
Okay. They were not an official branch of the government, right?
But their membership was like off-duty cops, soldiers, and also just like local rough guys, right?
Something like that.
That's something that I think we can easily envision happening in the United States in a more open capacity than it already is.
To some people, those guys were cool.
To other people, they were cringe.
That's very accurate.
But the fact is that in order for them to become cringe, they would have to have been popular enough that they would have to have been able to do all the terrible stuff they want to do.
So while that might be a hope for 20 years from now...
You know, where, like, the kids that are eight are looking at their friends, you know, their older brothers, their older cousins, their older classmates, who are getting involved in this stuff, and they're like, oh, that's gross.
No.
Man, that sucks.
I don't want to do that anymore.
That would only be after, right?
This seems like its own sort of media studies discipline, figuring out what the cycles of cringe are and seeing...
That'd be fascinating.
...what it would be for the...
Politically savvy fascist and media organizer to avoid the sort of cringe fall-off.
And to actually capture the mechanism instead of being sort of subjected to the inevitable decline of a particular trend.
To be able to predict, you know, what's the next thing going to be.
So yeah, okay, well, we will come back to that.
Maybe in a year.
As you say, it's entirely possible, right?
You know, these cycles are speeding up.
It's entirely possible that kids, young people, in my book I'm primarily talking about 10 to 25, because that's primarily what we're talking about here, but it's entirely possible that they'll look at this and be like, oh yeah, I don't want to do any of that establishment stuff.
Let's go to the nature of the young men that you're talking about in very particular terms.
You have described in a number of different interviews being uncomfortable.
With the sort of possibility of gender-essentializing boys and young men and their behavior in this book.
But you also have the need to describe how speed, competition, violence, physical recklessness, and attraction to street fighting find their natural home in fascist ideology.
So how do we square that circle?
Like, how do we talk about That is an extremely good question.
And it's something that, as you said, that I grappled with a lot when I wrote the book.
I struggled with the title for a long time.
The title of the book is How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
And when I tell people that, you know, they often say, like, well, why not kid?
Why not How to Talk to Your Kid About Fascism?
And the book does deal with how to talk to...
Young women and non-binary or otherwise not cisgendered children about fascism.
But for them, it's primarily going to be a warning as opposed to a sort of inoculation.
When I think about fascism, when I think about its appeal to young men, and when I talk about young men being excited about fascism, it runs into this problem for me because I think about myself as a young man.
I wasn't.
A violent, physically competitive kid.
I don't think any of you out in radio land can see this, but Matt can see that behind me there's a big old bookshelf.
That was me.
I was a nerd, right?
I'm an academic right now.
That's a professional nerd.
But when we think about the realities of gender as it is socially constructed, because I don't really buy into the biological construction of masculinity demanding physical violence.
Or demanding physical competition or demanding loudness or an obsession with speed and power.
Those are socially constructed realities in Western society.
But that means that they're real.
They are real.
It is true that when we think about what it means to be a man, we think about those things.
We think about power.
We think about protection.
About providing for your family or your community.
We also think about violence.
We think about anger.
And so when a young person in our society is figuring out what it means to be a man, and this person is 10 to 25, let's say, these are some of the things that they're thinking about.
These are some of the questions that they're asking themselves.
How do I protect my community?
How do I protect my reputation?
How do I show up for myself at school, at home, in my community?
And the tools that such a person will have been shown...
In stories, in interpersonal examples, in histories, if they are a boy, the tools that they will have been shown are anger and violence.
And there's a lot of really important counter-programming to do in that respect.
Counter-programming that happens both on an individual level, you know, providing examples, people that you can look up to who aren't embodying those things, historical examples.
But the fact is that that's a lot of what they're going to see and a lot of what they're going to hear about.
And fascism, as a political ideology, uniquely among all the modern political ideologies, is directly tied into this.
To the extent that I would argue, many people in the United States would argue or say that fascism is inherently white supremacist.
Fascism certainly, almost in every fascism that I've ever heard of, plays into the system of racial oppression that has been imposed over the world.
But there are also many fascist parties that are run by people who are not white.
Some of the biggest ones being in South Asia, but there are also examples in Latin America and even Africa.
All fascisms that I have ever heard of are male supremacist, period, the end.
It is a sexist ideology.
And this is in contradistinction to most other.
At least like the espoused positions of most other modern political ideologies, communism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism.
They might say that there are natural differences between the sexes, which they impute as being inherently the genders, right?
They might say that there are different but equal spheres, right?
Fascism does not truck with any of those kinds of euphemisms.
Fascists will simply say that society is better when men are in charge.
Society is better when society is more violent.
Society is better when those kinds of violent controlling impulses drive the world.
And that means that it has to be confronted on a gendered lens.
And so that was why I ended up deciding I needed to write this book this way, in addition to the practical aspect of it, which is, it is simply true that most fascists are men.
Yeah, I mean...
Listening to you, it feels very clear that we also have this convergence of probably 15 years of manosphere culture now that has looked for and has found and pushed biological essentialisms.
That have then given fascist movements a kind of pseudoscientific or maybe, I don't know, like academic legitimacy or something like that when they do command their particular sexual hierarchies.
So it's fascinating because we have this great history of constructed roles and...
You can either work to tear them down and smash them to dust, or you can say, actually, they're natural to us, and we have to seize them by the horns and run with them.
And I agree with how you're approaching this very difficult problem.
I understand how difficult it is.
And I think that the danger is that if we come close to affirming that this is simply the way men are, this is simply the way boys are, then we sell more books for people like Scott Galloway
who say, well, men are simply like this.
And in order for them to avoid fascism, they should be going out and having more sex and not being online so much.
They don't really have answers.
So there's a lot of lines to walk there.
You have hit the nail on the head of one of my principal worries.
About writing the book is that I didn't want to fall into that kind of essentialism.
I don't believe that I did.
But I can understand that hearing about the book, if I were pitched the book by somebody else, this would have been what I would have said too.
You've got to be careful about this, man.
If you fall into talking about it in the same categories that they use, what's to stop it?
From being, you know, potentially misinterpreted in this way, or you making some misstep and, you know, accidentally arguing something that you don't mean.
Coming at this from the academic world, you know, that's something that we're constantly afraid of.
You know, what if I write a thesis that I don't agree with, it turns out?
But yeah, thinking about this inherently as being a socially constructed thing.
Is what helps me through it.
And to acknowledge, while I do not claim that there is such a thing in the biological universe as masculine, in our contemporary culture there is such a thing.
In precisely the same way that phenotypically there is no such thing as race, on a social scientific level, there certainly is.
Race is real in that it is socially constructed, and masculinity is real in that it is socially constructed.
And the fact is that I also knew that I couldn't come at the intended audience of this book, which is a popular audience.
I knew that I couldn't come at them saying a bunch of third-way feminist things all the time.
Really long introductions.
Exactly, right?
The book is only about 140 pages long, and I would have had to be like, okay, now let's get to Butler first, and then we can.
Yeah, and it's a really particular intervention that I think envisions the parent who is saying, huh, you know what?
There are a lot of young men joining groups like Patriot Front.
It's not young women who are joining Patriot Front.
It's young men.
Now, why are young men joining Patriot Front?
And if my young person is vulnerable to joining Patriot Front, what should I do?
What would I look for?
So you're starting at a very pragmatic.
Intervention level.
And I think that tells the story.
I say in my introduction that I'm starting in a prior developmental place, more within the family.
And so my subtitle is about young people, it's not sons.
And there isn't really the kind of, I'm not trying to stop something that's already happened, but you are.
And that's really important.
What is this thing that you're trying to stop?
I wanted to turn to the question of agency, because you're really insistent that fascism is not a fever, it's not a virus, it's not mass psychosis, it's not like, you know, sort of transmittable mental illness or something.
It's a political choice.
Why is that so important to you as a concept?
Yeah, I mean, part of it is that I come at this question as a historian.
I come at it as the kind of historian I am sounds really highfalutin.
I swear it's not as bad as it sounds.
I'm an intellectual historian.
What that means is that I think a lot about how people think and where ideas come from.
To me, that means that I try my absolute hardest.
To take people at their word when they tell me that they believe something.
And so primarily in my dissertation work, I studied right-wing thinkers and specifically Catholic theologians in Latin America who are justifying political disappearances and justifying dictatorship.
And almost all the scholarship about these guys, and they are mostly guys, almost all the scholarship about these guys uses words like...
The politicians used theology in order to justify their actions.
And I say, well, what if they just believed it?
What if they just believed something that you, a reader in the 21st century, somebody in a different country, somebody who has a different political bent, what if they simply believed something that you find inconceivable?
Why don't we just start from the perspective that they are not lying about what they are saying?
I think that that results in more clear-eyed analysis about what these people are about.
It results in you being a little bit less bamboozled when they turn out to actually do the things that they told you they were going to do.
That's pretty important, yeah.
Any listener in the United States who has been paying attention on U.S. news for the last couple of years will know that the entire global financial establishment has apparently been deeply confused by the fact that Donald Trump is doing the thing that he said he would do for years.
So not only will it keep you from being confused that they are actually following through with what they say, the other reason that I do it is frankly because it's the scarier option.
I think that we often, when we talk about fascism, hide behind the idea that, oh, but they can't really.
They must not really mean it.
They can't really mean what they say, can they?
They must have been fooled.
They must be confused.
They must be duped.
They must have been lied to.
They must be lying.
I think that that is a shield.
I think that's a defense for us.
It's a way to help us not think.
That other people could be so monstrous.
But the fact is that they are.
They do believe heinous, evil things.
There are people who believe that many types of persons are not persons.
There are millions of them.
Millions of people believe this.
And if we tell ourselves, like, no, they must not really believe it.
I think that's us hiding in our shell, frankly.
Okay, so this intersects with what we're going to get to in the bonus episode with regard to the sort of developmental strategies that are applied to the young person as they come into an awareness of fascism.
Because the person who really believes the heinous thing One has to ask the question, how did they come to believe that?
And were they born that way?
And I appreciate that you're saying that I'm choosing this approach because it is the scarier approach.
Rhetorically, it gives the advantage of forcing us to actually take the threats seriously as spoken, as read.
Here's the thing.
I come from the cult studies world, which...
You know, says that deception is a primary condition of recruitment.
You know, the famous phrase is, nobody joins a cult, they join an organization that misrepresents itself.
So according to that, and some people will say this about the MAGA movement, nobody joined the MAGA movement knowing that he was going to fuck over the, you know, working people everywhere, right?
So, you know, we can argue about whether that's true or not.
I think it's kind of up in the air.
But my bias is to think that coming to believe...
Heinous things like Jews are parasites or autistic people are useless eaters, that this is the outcome of a cultural deception, that people who are deceived are not actually free agents.
So, like, how do you square with that?
Yeah, I think that that's a really good point.
When it comes to, you know, thinking about the terrorists, for example, I agree.
I think that probably the super majority of Trump voters...
Heard the word tariff and then just said, oh, that means China gives us money.
That's a lie.
We know it's a lie.
Trump knows it's a lie.
His advisors know it's a lie.
That doesn't matter.
The people didn't know they were being lied to.
They didn't understand.
They weren't informed.
I consider that to be our failure, not theirs, because I'm a professional academic.
Sort of, like, aspiring public intellectual type.
Like, it is my job and the job of people like me to explain things.
Like, if we're claiming that people should be listening to us, then we better be good at it, right?
And we fail.
We didn't do it.
I can't expect everybody to be as obsessed with this stuff as I am.
I think it's an interesting question, especially coming at it from a cult studies perspective.
I wonder myself...
You know, and this is not a line of scholarship that I personally have gone down that much, so this might just be ignorance on my part.
At what point does one stop saying that it's a cult?
I mean, the Nazi party had membership in the millions, and it controlled one of the most powerful nation-states in the history of the world.
It's not a small rinky-dink organization with hundreds or even thousands or even one million people in it.
It made a credible claim to take over the entire planet.
They believed something that is truly evil, undisputably.
And I think that calling them a cult, I think that while that exposes some things, I think that it shields us from other truths.
Well, I will say that as somebody from the cult studies world, I've been pretty critical of the application of cult theory to the MAGA movement or to the Trump presidency because of this problem of scale and all kinds of ways in which
the various sort of rules around cult formation and retention don't really apply.
Like people can come and go.
Nobody's sort of governing your behavior or misconducting.
dictating when you can sleep.
So there's an overreach that I think does make the MAGA movement sort of exceptionally other and not firmly embedded within American society.
And it gives a
I want to continue this on our Monday bonus episode, and I want to start with a similar question, or coming off of this, which is, if we're talking about our sons and our children,
We are talking about giving tools for making choices that point away from environments that are truly infectious, right?
So there's something paradoxical about this intervention.
Like, fascism is a political choice that young people do not choose except through exposure and recruitment, right?
So I want to talk about how we theorize their agency when we come back.
So let's take a pause there.
And thank you so much, Craig.
This is great.
Absolutely.
Thank you so very much.
These are spectacular questions.
I really had a lovely time talking to you about these things.
