*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender* To access the full episode, additional content, and support the podcast, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Jared had a chance to sit down with Author and veteran Brynn Tannehill to discuss her new book "American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody! | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday. | |
| And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you'd want to go over there. | |
| Join the patreon and be part of that community which has been incredible and amazing a lot of people there and a lot of great conversations So here it is check it out and feel free to check out the actual patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrake podcast Hey everybody, this is Jared Yates Sexton with the weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| We have a special opportunity today. | |
| I had a chance to sit down and talk with security analyst Bryn Tannehill, the author of American Fascism, How GOP is Subverting Democracy, a really excellent book. | |
| I recommend everybody pick it up. | |
| It is a must read, a really good synopsis of the current crisis. | |
| Bren, of course, is a veteran and a security analyst and has a lot of really interesting and important things to say about this current moment of crisis. | |
| So without further ado, Bren Tannehill. | |
| Hey everybody, we have a real treat today. | |
| We have with us Bryn Tannehill. | |
| Bryn Tannehill is a security analyst and a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and the Air Force Institute of Technology with degrees in computer science and operations research, respectively. | |
| She did four deployments as a naval aviator to locations such as the Adriatic, Middle East, and the North Atlantic. | |
| We're here today to talk about Bryn's incredibly important new book, American Fascism, How the GOP is Subverting Democracy. | |
| I was lucky enough to do an event earlier this week with Bren and found her to be incredibly intelligent and has an incredibly important impression message. | |
| And I was so excited that we got to have another conversation today and to talk about this book. | |
| But we were talking right before we started recording. | |
| We talked a couple of days ago, and within the couple of days that we talked, Already there have been more steps in the direction of the destruction of democracy, the march of fascism. | |
| It's almost impossible to keep track of it at this point, which is one of the ways that this occurs. | |
| It happens so quick. | |
| It's overwhelming. | |
| It kind of throws people into an alternate reality of panic and fear and feeling overwhelmed. | |
| How are you feeling as of right now with your book coming out, with being out there talking about this, watching this stuff come to the forefront? | |
| What's the feeling on your behalf? | |
| So I've joked sometimes, and my wife has agreed, that I think on my tombstone is going to be the words, I told you so. | |
| Uh, and things, unfortunately, you know, when I finished up editing on the book to include what happened, uh, during the 2020 election, during the one six insurrection, uh, and the, the inauguration, I included some things that needed to be done and some things that needed to go right in order for us to start vaguely reversing the trend of what we're seeing to, uh, give us some measure of defense against. | |
| Uh, encroaching competitive authoritarianism and collapse of democracy. | |
| And I can tell you that essentially of the things that we need to happen, basically only half of any of them has happened. | |
| When I say half of any, I mean, we needed 10 things to happen and none of them have happened in their entirety. | |
| And only one of them has happened in partiality. | |
| And that's the things that we need to happen to stop this from happening. | |
| simply aren't. | |
| We lack the political will to do so. | |
| And the factors that are causing the implosion of democracy not only are still there after 1-6, but are worsening in many ways. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I mean, to even say at this point, January 6th feels like it happened a lifetime ago. | |
| And one of the more disturbing parts about it, and you brought up the idea of the will that is actually needed to cut this thing off at the pass before we reach some really gnarly, ugly, tragic consequences. | |
| 1-6 is... | |
| is now treated by a large part of our population and i'm not just talking about like people who supported january 6th i'm talking about people who should know better people who studied this stuff people who were even horrified by it as it was happening we have watched this absolute assault this attempted coup and insurrection suddenly has just been digested and And you now have people who even deny what their own eyes saw on that day. | |
| They now deny that it was an attack on democracy. | |
| Oh, it wasn't even that bad, even as almost every single day brings new information. | |
| That shows all of the different groups that were there all of the plans that were being carried out. | |
| Uh, there's even disturbing links between, uh, intelligence and and what occurred at the Capitol. | |
| Uh, but people are either in denial about it. | |
| Or they're delusional or they're profiting from it. | |
| And that, I think, if there was a canary in the coal mine moment, it might have been that. | |
| And while I was watching it, there was a part of me that hoped that maybe that would be the moment where people started taking this seriously. | |
| But the fact that we're having this conversation, I think, tells us otherwise. | |
| So the insurrection on January 6. | |
| Donald Trump obviously hoped that it would result in him in the legislature overturning the election. | |
| He wanted to turn that moment into his March on Rome, if you're like Mussolini did in 22. | |
| What it turned into was the Beer Hall Putsch. | |
| The takeaway from that is, with the Beer Hall Putsch in Germany in 1923, Hitler got sent to jail, he spent nine months there, wrote Mein Kampf, and developed a different political strategy, which was, we're going to win this legally, by any means necessary, but it will be legal, and then we're going to do what we're going to do. | |
| which is we saw exactly what they did, is seize power and form a single-party state. | |
| And what we see with the Republican Party today is the push failed through violent means. | |
| Now they are taking every step to ensure that they can't lose future elections, either by voter suppression, gerrymandering, allowing dark money to flow in from conservative billionaires in ways that are completely untraceable. | |
| By the billions, if they want. | |
| And if that fails, they are putting legal mechanisms in place and putting people in place to overturn or veto the results of elections that they don't like. | |
| And that right there is kind of my nightmare scenario because that's the most obvious collapse. | |
| That results in the biggest chance of friction within the United States, where blue states recognize that this is no longer. | |
| And in some ways, I actually fear more that people don't recognize that elections have been rigged to the point where Democrats can no longer win, that there's always that hope that, well, we'll get them next time. | |
| Well, no, actually, the game has been so tilted by controlling the referees and controlling the rules and being able to change the rules whenever you want, that functionally, we're no longer a democracy, but nobody can actually see it. | |
| And if that's the case, then we kind of sink into this hopeless, gray, Russian misery of, you know, today's an average day, worse than yesterday, but better than tomorrow, right? | |
| Essentially kind of this gray nihilism of helplessness. | |
| The more overt stealing, that is just as terrifying. | |
| Uh, because that might actually induce states to say, we're not playing this. | |
| This is clearly not a democracy anymore. | |
| We are going to cease playing the democracy game with Republicans. | |
| Um, that has a potential to wield a or yield a better outcome than the slow descent. | |
| Uh, it also has the potential to yield a much, much, much worse outcome, uh, much more suddenly, but in either case. | |
| We're on a glide slope to the end of American democracy at this point. | |
| You know, I I've been covering so I've paid close attention to politics for most of my life. | |
| It's been something that I sort of studied. | |
| But what I would say is that I studied traditional politics. | |
| You know, it's it's sort of the conventional type of history and politics that you learn. | |
| And for me, What woke me up was in late 2015 and in 2016 when I started going into Trump rallies and I started talking to Trump supporters and I started to see this movement coalesce and I watched things like the alt-right and paramilitary groups and white supremacists and white terrorists start to gravitate around this center. | |
| And, you know, then there was a moment for me where, and I refer to it as deep politics because there's not much else to Call it at this point. | |
| It's what's actually happening behind the veneer of conventional politics and history. | |
| Like, what are the actual levers? | |
| What are the actual actions that have taken place? | |
| And I have to tell you that outside of actually studying what's going on, we are not prepared for this. | |
| We are not taught in schools how to recognize growing fascism. | |
| We're not taught how to recognize what happens when democracy is corrupted and hijacked. | |
| And I think in a way, for a lot of people, there's a part of their brain where they see this and they're terrified of it, but it's so horrific that being able to wrap their heads around what is actually occurring, there's another voice that's like, no, we're America. | |
| This could never happen here. | |
| This could not possibly ever occur. | |
| We're America. | |
| Look at the flag. | |
| Look at our history. | |
| All this stuff. | |
| And, you know, I thought in your book, I thought you did a really good job of talking about that and laying out, you know, these are the actual facts. | |
| These are the things that we can all recognize. | |
| Here is objective reality. | |
| But do you think there's any possibility? | |
| Because I thought January 6th might have been the moment. | |
| I was hoping it would. | |
| But then on January 7th, I realized very quickly it wasn't. | |
| Do you think that there is any moment or there is any sort of a step that can occur that maybe some people will wake up in sheer horror, or is this a situation of the frog in the water, the boiling water? | |
| So I think it's frog in the water. | |
| I think that the one thing that might get people to go, oh my God, this is the end of American democracy, is on January 6th, | |
| To 2025, the results of the election being essentially overturned by various mechanisms exploited by the GOP to kick the decision on who the president is to the House, where Republicans have an advantage structurally based off of the rules for electing a president when there isn't a majority of electors. | |
| After states have done things like refusing to send electors, sending separate sets of electors, Refusing to certify elections, those sorts of procedural maneuvers that are done in complete bad faith in order to get the results that they want if the Democrats had won the 2024 election. | |
| That's the moment when people would go, oh my God. | |
| But at that point, it's already too late. | |
| Your options are, accept the result and hope for something better next time, when clearly, no, you're not going to get something better next time. | |
| The Republicans can do this as often as they want, as long as they want, because the states that are doing these things have been gerrymandered into oblivion. | |
| Or states could say we're not going to recognize the legitimacy of the federal government anymore. | |
| Well, that's essentially secession or a soft secession. | |
| Well, that's pretty terrifying too. | |
| That's pretty fucked. | |
| That's really kind of the – only the two options on the table if the GOP goes down that route where they have to resort to their backstop of using legal mechanisms to overturn elections or legal but not good faith. | |
| I'm trying to find a word for a single word for not good faith bad faith. | |
| So that's that's kind of the oh no, but we're on a between now and then Democrats are almost certainly going to lose control of the House and the Senate. | |
| Um, once that happens, any chance for Biden to do anything to prevent whatever skullduggery happens in 2024 is essentially lost. | |
| Uh, that, uh, people feel like, well, Biden's elected, we've got the House and Senate, things seem kind of normal right now. | |
| Republicans are just, you know, being obstinate and offering dumb excuses for why they don't want to follow any sort of legislative agenda that's even vaguely popular, you know? | |
| Minimum wage, why none of them voted for the stimulus, why it's so tough to get them involved in talks about infrastructure, why they won't pass the Equality Act, why they won't renew the Voting Rights Act. | |
| All of these things are actually extraordinarily popular, anywhere between 60 to 75% support, but they're not going to happen. | |
| And this is in part because we're no longer We don't have proportional representation, part because of the filibuster, and in part because even things that are popular with the Republican base, if they disagree with the oligarchs, then it's not going to happen. | |
| So at this point, the other things that we needed to do is we needed to pass the For the People Act, we needed to pass H.R. | |
| 1, we needed to pass In the Renew the Voting Rights Act, we needed to pass laws that would prevent states from overturning elections. | |
| And that's not happening. | |
| We would need the Supreme Court to uphold voting rights and transparency with politics to see what the oligarchs are up to. | |
| And yesterday they did the exact opposite of that. | |
| So we are quietly continuing to a point that's going to put us in crisis in 2024. | |
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