Bonus Sample: How To Talk To Your Son About Fascism (Pt 2)
Part 2 of Matthew’s conversation with historian Craig Johnson (PhD Berkeley), who 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.
Today we tackle strategy. To debunk or not to debunk? How do you derail the coolness of fascism? 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
Fifteen Minutes of Fascism YouTube
Stream Fifteen Minutes of Fascism
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Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
In other words, your daily news feed.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just the bonus episodes on Apple subscriptions.
I want to welcome back Craig Johnson, PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and the host of the 15 Minutes of Fascism podcast and YouTube channel covering the global rise of the radical right.
He's the author 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.
We had a great conversation that we started on the Saturday bonus, or the Saturday brief, rather, and he's back with me on Monday.
Hello, Craig.
Thank you.
Hey, and thanks for having me back.
Okay, so we're going to talk about strategies today.
Your book is called How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, and so I want to get right to that.
But I want to sort of pick up where we left off, because we were looking at this question of fascism being a political choice.
And this brings up the issue of the agency of children, right?
What kinds of choices...
Are they making versus wait for them?
And what happens when we intervene?
Because, you know, about mediation or intervening when we see that a kid is getting into right-wing content online.
And I think the premise there is that right-wing content is kind of infectious, right?
It is a little bit like a virus.
I was pointing out that there's kind of a paradox in this project, that we want to describe, we need to describe fascism as a political choice, that young people are not choosing, but that also that they're being exposed to,
not according to their will, not through their consent.
They're being recruited.
Not because they necessarily want to go that way, but because they're having their buttons pushed.
So this is a very deep philosophical issue to start with.
How did you theorize the agency of kids and sons for this book?
That's a big one to dive right into, but I'm very glad to.
Yeah, the central question of the book is, how do you stop someone from believing something?
Right.
And that's especially hard with a kid.
And especially hard when it comes to kids in politics, because one of the appeals of a lot of the extremely online but also in-person appeals of fascism and, frankly, many other radical political projects, is that it might be the first time that a young person has been approached as an adult.
Right.
Somebody is coming to them and saying, like, this is about the real world, and I'm treating you as an adult, talking to you about real problems.
That, you know, previously you might not have really thought about.
Like, that's how a lot of this stuff works.
That's how a lot of this propaganda, fascist propaganda, is intentionally organized.
This is why it uses Trojan horses like Gamergate or complaining about, quote-unquote, woke hiring in Disney or Marvel movies or something like that.
Because they know that 10 to 20-year-olds come into the conversation probably caring about video games or sports or cars.
Or, you know, big TV shows and movies and stuff.
Like, those are things that they can probably assume that a lot of these kids are going to care about.
And you use those things in order to get them to care about the thing that you really want them to care about.
This is one of those instances where I use, not as an example, but I use the actions and speech of the people who are writing this propaganda as a jumping off point.
For how we need to think about it.
So one of the few people that I identify in this book as a specific fascist, because I started drafting the book in 2023, I knew that any particular references that I made were going to be super outdated by the time it came out.
But one of the particular references I do make is to an online poster whose last name is Anglin.
Anglin created the Daily Stormer, which is the biggest neo-Nazi webpage in the United States.
And he is on record just saying like, hey, when I make fascist propaganda, I'm going after 10-year-olds.
That's my goal, is to get them to make fascist jokes and to think about fascist things and to use fascist memes.
He is thinking about this as a propaganda war.
And so propaganda, it's by itself, you know, propaganda has its own entire, like, theoretical universe about how do you think about the agency of people who experience propaganda.
I think that this is a much bigger political question.
It's like, obviously, we know that most people, full adults, even extremely educated, very politically self-actualized adults, are not walking around deeply and personally probing and considering all the political messages that they receive.
For children, we know that that's even less so.
They might not even really understand that they are engaging in a political question.
And so part of what I think the intervention that a parent can do, and part of how I conceptualize this intervention, is by characterizing that way with your kid.
And to be like, hey, one of the things that's happening here is that this guy is engaging with you as an adult, and so I'm going to do the same thing.
You have just said a political opinion.
I disagree with it.
I can't.
I won't.
Tell you that you can't believe this because I can't get in your head.
What I can do is I can talk to you about the facts behind that belief.
I can talk to you about where that propaganda came from.
I can talk to you about what those people want you to do.
Why it's in their interest and not yours.
I can tell you about my beliefs, where I got them, why I have them.
Like, this is one of the reasons that the interventions that I suggest in the book are fundamentally different from the interventions that you must make against fascism in the public sphere.
Because in the private sphere, yelling at somebody isn't going to work, and even less so at the earth.
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