Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the particulars of 88 year old Pope Francis and his death, move on to the Supreme Court standing up to Trump kinda sorta, before landing on the Pete Hegseth Debacle, where it's reported he was responsible for another leak of classified information on Signal. Then, author Craig A Johnson joins the show to discuss his latest book How To Talk To Your Son About Fascism.
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Let me tell you, I was in Portland for some of the most beautiful weather I ever imagined anywhere on Earth.
And it's the only kind of weather I know when I've been to Portland a few times in the last few years.
So keep it up is all I can tell you for you Oregonians.
Portland has some beauty to it.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, we did some hikes.
And by the way, the people there, just a fantastic place.
Again, I might not feel that same way if I had experienced the 50-degree rainy weeks in a row that I have there, but so far...
You were hiking in beautiful Portland, and me and Carl Folk were basically screaming, put these people in jail.
Listen, I was mentally screaming with you.
I think everybody was.
Everybody, we have an absolutely packed show.
We're also going to have an interview with Craig A. Johnson, a researcher whose new book from Rutledge is called How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
I cannot recommend him enough.
Really, really good conversation.
I'm excited for people to listen to it.
But Nick, listen, the news doesn't stop because you're up in the hills.
It certainly doesn't.
And so, so much has happened and we have to talk about so much.
We have to begin though with...
Pope Francis, 88 years old, dies.
The Pope is dead.
He has been the Pope since 2013.
He has been controversial in so many different circles.
This is newsworthy, not just because a Pope has died, which is always newsworthy, but this has massive connotations in terms of how our politics are going to go and our culture is going to go moving forward.
Before we get into the actual context of why this is so important, what were your initial thoughts?
It's hearing that Pope Francis had died.
I mean, I don't know.
I find it funny because I saw the movie where they picked the Pope.
Conclave. Great movie.
You should probably watch it.
Yeah, I really liked it.
Although it was also like, what struck me about it was how, not random, but it was like, this felt like some of the rituals were just like...
Shake it five times.
No, shake it six times, and then we're going to do this for an hour.
It almost felt like it was just arbitrary, a lot of the stuff.
Wait, Nick, are you saying that organized religion and its practices can be arbitrary?
I know, I know.
I'm going to go ahead and go for that bit.
You know, so that's what it kind of really reminded me of.
But it also, you know, it does have you reflect a little bit about the Catholic Church and their progression, you know, on certain social issues.
Which this guy, Francis, was getting there, I have to say, right?
The idea that you would hear a Pope say anything that would be on the way toward accepting same-sex couples slash marriage would be crazy to think about not too long ago, but there we were.
So I want to address something very quickly before I get into my take.
I've had a lot of people reach out to me and say, Jared, do you think that there is a possibility that Vice President J.D. Vance murdered Pope Francis?
And to that I say no, I don't think so.
But I do think that it is worth intellectual curiosity and consideration about whether or not he met J.D. Vance.
And he said, you know what, I'm good with this world.
Yeah. Take me.
Take me.
I'm done.
I think that that is a fair thing.
And, you know, to take the joke about how absolutely repulsive J.D. Vance is and to bring it into the political realm of why I think this is important, J.D. Vance is a converted Catholic.
And much like other people within the right, including people like Rod Dreher, who's like one of the thinkers and one of the people who introduced Viktor Orban as a possible sort of role model for the Trump administration.
And also Steve Bannon, who is another converted Catholic.
One of the issues with Francis has been the fact that he was, in the modern era, one of the more liberal, outspoken popes, including moderate reform, the idea of tolerance, whether or not it's with gay people or condemning genocide and oppression by governments.
This pope was absolutely hated by a sect.
Right-wing Catholic converts who got into the religion because, as we've talked about, the relationship between organized religion and fascism or authoritarianism, they work together, right?
I mean, there's a reason why Mussolini was friends with the Catholic Church.
There's a reason why Hitler used all the Protestant churches to bring them into his own religion.
It's about telling a story and using an ideology that holds sway over people to move them away from that tolerance and away from those reforms and progress That's why Francis was hated And so he has basically been held almost as like an anti-pope that these people could absolutely hate.
And they've been champing it a bit for Francis to die because they very much want a conservative, authoritarian, friendly pope to be elected out of this.
And we now are in a situation where now that Francis has passed, we're going into a conclave moment.
And the leading candidates for this...
Or all across the political spectrum, Nick, we have other liberal reformers who are like Francis.
We have conservatives who sort of—moderates conservatives who sort of hold that line.
And then we have more right-wing Catholic— So I actually think...
That with Francis dying, we're sort of looking at kind of a touchstone moment that could really affect our politics and our culture and culture and politics around the world in a way that I don't think most people are really wrestling with right now.
For sure.
I thought, what was eye-opening about the movie Conclave itself, and if it is to be taken at face value in what really happens, I couldn't get over how catty and how immoral everyone was acting, backstabbing.
How human and secular, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
It was certainly not like a Pope-like behavior.
Anybody who's definitely trying to gain that kind of power, even if it was for good.
So I think that we're sort of, you know, being exposed.
Every year that goes by, we learn more and more about the real world and what really happened.
And this brings up even the fact that Malay in Argentina was supposedly going to release, you know, like we have our Epstein files, we have the JFK files.
He was going to release files that supposedly either confirmed or denied that, like, the Vatican had helped.
Hitler, for instance, maybe he didn't really die, and he also got along with Mengele and a bunch of other Nazis to Argentina and lived their lives there.
So, you know, we can't forget, it's not that long ago that, like you mentioned, the Vatican was complicit in a lot of some horrible stuff.
Let's also just point out that the Pope before Francis was in the Hitler Youth, but, you know, we don't need to get into that much more.
But I do want to say, in terms of what I see coming...
I think there are a couple of possibilities here.
I think this is going to be one of the most contentious conclaves of many, many decades.
I think that this is going to be a wild fight for power within the Vatican for who will be the next pope.
And I think what comes along with that, and by the way, Francis installed a bunch of new cardinals that could very well sort of shift the power toward a reformer.
But Nick, I think what we're about to see, One, they could pick somebody, and these are always old men.
You know what I mean?
And so, like, you could have a pope that could just last for a couple of years and die, and then we're going to have another fight over this thing.
Or we could see the election of a liberalizer, of a reformer.
And what would be wild about this is it could very well look like the 2020 election, which is not accepting that this choice has been made and that it was made above board, that it was fixed.
And we could see a schism within the Catholic world.
We could see, and it's happened before, I brought up the term anti-pope, it's happened because there has been a lot of fighting for power, particularly at weird, malleable moments like we're at right now, where you could see a lot of these converted Catholics who are interested in patriarchal authoritarianism not really recognizing this new pope.
Because this reflects the political reality of the world, and it sort of finds its expression in it.
And again, this is all about sort of trying to create the place for power and influence that we've been talking about.
Right. And J.D. Vance killed the Pope.
And J.D. Vance, I mean, just, and listen, I'm not saying that he poisoned him, but I'm saying just simply being in the same room as J.D. Vance should come with a Surgeon General's warning, quite frankly.
I'm not opposed.
Nick, other big news.
The Supreme Court.
This is a weird little thing.
The Supreme Court hurried out a halting of deportations under the Aliens Act.
It wasn't numbered, but it seems by all evidence that this was a 7-2 decision with Thomas and Alito dissenting, telling Donald Trump that he could not carry out these mass deportations without due process.
This was another moment where we saw some of the friction between Trump And by the way, we didn't even get to talk about this, Nick.
Last week, like, we saw the Supreme Court hand down a ruling and we saw Donald Trump just absolutely say, I don't care what you're saying.
And it had absolutely no effect on him whatsoever, which is a massive shift.
And also, I think, kind of opens our eyes a little bit about how this thing can actually work.
But this is another sort of a fracture.
And we're seeing MAGA push back against the court, vilify them, delegitimize them, saying that this is all from, quote, meritless litigation.
What are your feelings about this ruling, and what do you see happening between the executive branch and the judicial branch?
Well, I mean, connected to this is that, you know, Trump releases a picture of the knuckles of Kilmar Abreu-Garcia.
And I think you knew.
That they put the letters MS and then the numbers 13 over it superimposed, right?
Did you get that?
Yeah, that was an incredibly doctored photo.
And I also, because you brought it up, I would not put it past Bukele and all of his little bootlickers to actually be tattooing people who have been brought to that prison.
But that's me.
Right, exactly, exactly.
So I got that far because that was an outcry as well.
Oh, it's a doctored thing where I think they just wanted to sort of say that this sounds for him and that's whatever.
But this is...
What they're doubling down, tripling down is to try.
And I think that the administration is sort of centering this whole case on this one person.
This is the person, right?
If they can make sure he stays disappeared, then everything else will be fine.
And if they can't shake this one, then they're going to be in trouble.
I would suspect Trump did say on the cameras that he would listen to the Supreme Court.
At some point in the last...
Week and a half, he had said that, with a lot of other shit happening in between there and now.
But I do feel like the only thing that stood out to me, I guess, was that when they did this in the middle of the night, the Supreme Court, Alito, seemed really upset because I think that they thought, well, we'll do it now when he's sleeping and he won't wake up and won't bother us so we can get this thing at least seven to two.
I don't doubt that it was something along those lines.
I do think that...
You know, there are these lines in the sand and I'm starting to see like a real through thread in what we're talking about today, which are things that could go either way and we're going to look back on them being crossroads.
And what has happened at this point, and John Roberts is Chief Justice, and again, God help us, Amy Coney Barrett is the conscience of the court at this point.
I do think that this ruling shows that this Supreme Court, as wrong as it is and as corrupt as it is, it cares about its power.
And, you know, these are people who were raised up specifically to care about the Supreme Court because they saw it as a weapon that could be used for oppression and regression.
And so having Trump flaunt their ruling, I think, is going to escalate a back and forth between them.
But I also, because we can't talk about any of this without bringing it up.
Nick, he didn't listen to the Supreme Court and the sun came out the next day.
We're still here.
Which actually goes ahead and opens up the possibility that, like...
You know, maybe at some point Donald Trump isn't going to be president of the United States of America, and possibly a progressive or a leftist is, and we now have an understanding.
We've seen it happen.
You can go ahead and disobey a ruling from the Supreme Court, and nothing happens.
There's been talk about him being held in contempt by courts.
We haven't seen that take place.
We don't even know what that would look like, particularly because the Supreme Court gave him immunity from any type of prosecution or any sort of consequence.
We're in uncharted waters right now.
I mean, we've seen presidents, including like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, not really care about...
Or Jackson.
Andrew Jackson.
Good Lord, Andrew Johnson.
I was thinking about him today.
That's always a bad day when you think about Andrew Johnson.
But, you know, with Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, but both of those moments actually crack something open in our politics and culture, which is that you can go ahead and move these...
We haven't seen a president arrested or impeached because they, you know, went away from the Supreme Court.
We haven't seen them being removed from power.
So I think that this is one of those moments that...
We're going to see a lot of weird things happen, and I think that we're going to get kind of a roadmap to where the future is going one way or another with this thing.
Well, am I hearing that correctly when you're kind of thinking or saying that maybe the Supreme Court is saying, well, you can't oppress people.
Like, only we can.
Like, that's our job.
I don't know if that's what this back and forth is in terms of the power dynamic, or is it really, you know, the notion of what is legal or what's not?
Because what I think...
We also need to have at some point is somebody bring a case against President Trump that will challenge the immunity thing, primarily because he'll do something that he'll argue is under his official duties, but someone else could successfully argue whatever he's doing is illegal,
right? You know who would be a good plaintiff in that?
Who? Gilmar Albrego Garcia.
That would be a great plaintiff in that if we could ever get him back from El Salvador.
Right. I agree.
And then, you know, if you can find the right standing in the right state, wherever to do it.
But, like, at some point, the dynamic will exist where whatever he thinks is official duties runs the foul of the law, which is what he's doing a lot of.
And it would sound like a kind of case that would force the hand of the Supreme Court to remove this immunity that they gave him.
For me, Nick, and, you know, a lot of people use this example, but I think it's useful in this context.
A lot of people use the example of King Kong fighting Godzilla and the guy standing back and saying, let them fight.
I want to make it very clear.
I do not respect the authority or power of Donald Trump, and I do not respect the authority or the power of the Supreme Court.
And this showdown, it might be useful in the moment.
I don't think it's going to restrain him.
I think he's going to eventually end up putting his boot on their neck.
But I do think that exposing the Supreme Court for being illegitimate and also without power, I think is going to be useful in the long run.
And again, one of the things we keep talking about, Nick, we live in a new era now.
And a lot of the old rules that applied in the past, they don't apply anymore.
Like, and you take a look at Donald Trump, and I don't think it's about a rebuke from the Supreme Court.
I think it's about Donald Trump spending the rest of his natural life rotting in a prison cell.
And that is a different thing than the Supreme Court handing down a ruling that I find appropriate in the moment and looking at it long-term as that being the solution to this problem.
And we forget that, or less we forget what the state of New York looked like after Godzilla and King Kong fought, right?
They laid the waste to the entire city, if I remember.
So we have to be careful of that.
Yeah, and you can't live in a post Godzilla King Kong world in which one of them wins and then saunters off and you have to worry about them coming back and destroying the city again.
Right. Like you have to take care of the problem.
And now that we're through the door, I said this the other day with Carl Falk, there's no going back.
We're in new territory.
Speaking of new territory and speaking of El Salvador, Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele is now taunting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with what he is calling a prisoner exchange, offering to ship 252 Venezuelans in exchange for political opposition to Maduro.
So this is a weird new type of...
Undeclared war, almost, that's using humans as collateral.
And I don't know about you, Nick, but I don't think this is going to be the last time we're going to see this in this brand new authoritarian era.
No. Well, especially when you're in a young or a burgeoning authoritarian country that needs to get on the stage, needs more airtime, right?
I think Bukele really enjoyed what he had.
Bukele is having the time of his life, which is another reason why he needs to join Donald Trump in a prison cell for the rest of his natural life and rot there.
Right. Yeah, I mean, it's like there's a furnace, and he's got the air blowing in to get the fire going hotter, and so he's going to be looking for any manner of media attention on a lot of these things, and unfortunately, that's sort of all this is, it sounds like.
And, you know, the people that live in this country are the ones who are going to suffer for all of this.
Which, you know, one thing that we didn't get a chance to talk about because you were traveling, Nick, is that...
You know, after Van Hollen went to visit Garcia, and by the way, like, we call balls and strikes on this podcast.
Well done.
Well done, Van Hollen.
Like, you did what you needed to do.
It was exactly what every Democrat should have been doing.
And it feels weird giving credit because this is just what he should have done.
But he fought to meet with Garcia.
He got information out of him, which is that he's living in absolutely abhorrent conditions and that this is wrong.
But we saw afterwards Bukele react to it and saying, hey, now that we know that he's okay, he now has the privilege of staying in El Salvador for the rest of his life and just trolling people.
And I think one of the things to look at here is that there is a common relationship between authoritarians like Bukele, like Trump, like Orban, like Putin.
The list goes on and on.
And these people...
These motherfuckers are not going to stop.
They're not going to listen to courts.
They're not going to listen to public opinion.
We're in a fight with these people, and we need to recognize that there is just simply no end to the cruelty that they're capable of.
And this thing right here, trading human lives like this as if it's some sort of normal state of affairs and also taunting Maduro like this.
And by the way, fuck him too.
Fuck Maduro while we're at it.
This entire class of people, they have no loyalty, they have no class, they have absolutely nothing going for them besides absolute contempt for human life and human dignity.
And we as a people, and we as the mass of people, we need to recognize you can't deal with these people, you can't work with these people, you can't reason with these people.
The only thing you can do is remove them from power, and that is the bottom line.
I do want to go on record as saying I was upset with Dan Holland because of the way he was allowed to be made into propaganda for Bukele.
They put margarita glasses on the table.
They got these pictures.
And so I suppose the argument would have been if he would have insisted, Van Hollen insisted, no, I need to meet him in the prison.
I want to see the conditions and all those kind of things.
It probably would never have happened.
And so the only chance he was going to have is to be able to sit down where they tell him to do it, whatever.
But I think that there could have been a little bit more control over that meeting and what was broadcast out of it.
I'm glad you brought this up, because as we're giving Van Hollen credit...
Like, one of the things that we keep talking about is what Democrats should do versus what it is that they are doing.
Him going there, thumbs up.
Absolutely. Him saying, hey, they're not allowing me in the prison and then making a meeting with Garcia happen.
Absolutely well done.
But you know what you do at that point, Nick?
You control the photo op like you just said.
But the other thing that you do is you link arms with Garcia and you walk out of there.
And you make the people stop you.
You make them get violent with you.
You make them become confrontational.
You say, this person is my constituent.
It is my right and my duty to take this person out of there.
And that is where that thing should have gone.
And the Democrats, Von Holland made the right choice going there and doing this.
He should have escalated it and said, no, this person deserves to be free.
Oh, absolutely.
A great point.
And he could argue that the Supreme Court has mandated this, and that's why I'm empowered to be able to bring him back.
And again, you could argue it's a cynical, you know, photo op on his own as well, but at least it's on his terms.
And you can, you know, what I worry about are the right-wing MAGA people who will just see the pictures of him.
Oh, look, he's got, you know, jeans on.
He looks happy.
He's talking at this nice restaurant.
How bad can it be, right?
Like, that's...
And I think that feeds into it.
And we know the power of the imagery that can sway an entire public like we did during Vietnam just from seeing the real what's going on.
So I was deeply disturbed by the fact that they allowed that to happen and he was used like that.
And we talked about the same thing with Bill Maher going to the dinner with Trump as well and normalizing him on another level, which is just all these things are troubling.
By the way, an update on the Bill Maher thing.
I was traveling this weekend and I was in a hotel room.
I turned on real time with Bill Maher to see how he would react to the reaction.
And listen, Bill Maher is unsalvageable.
Like, this guy, he is who he is.
Nick, he was shaken up.
And in that broadcast, he was very critical of Donald Trump.
He kept trying to put daylight between him.
The one time that a guest said something about what he had done and how it was wrong, he got very bristled because, as we talked about, he's a very insecure boy.
And what ended up happening was he got very angry about that.
But public opinion and reaction to that led to Bill Maher on the air.
And he is one of the most untouchable people in terms of his opinion and how he presents himself.
But that pressure, I think...
I think that's important and necessary.
Same thing happened with Joe and Mika.
The moment everybody was like, hey, this ain't it, and you're going to go away if you keep doing this.
Even they had to moderate that.
Yeah, and you just would hope that they would have realized that before, that they had enough intelligence to realize that that was going to happen.
But, you know, ego is a powerful drug.
Speaking of egos.
Not a bad transition, and also bad TV hosts.
There's a new report out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—you ready for this, folks?—had a second signal chat around the attack on the Houthis.
This one wasn't with the apparatus of the Trump administration, which, a reminder, is illegal.
He shouldn't have been doing it through Signal.
This one included his wife, his lawyer, his brother, and upwards of nine other people, it sounds like.
This was a group chat called Defense slash Team Huddle.
This is highly illegal, awful, ridiculous, just absolutely absurd.
And Nick, the rumors swirling around Washington, D.C. right now is that Donald Trump and his administration are currently looking for a new Secretary of Defense.
Oh, it'll be worse.
There's got to be more.
There's got to be at least one more signal chat he's been on, you know, passing out, you know, secrets.
And it rivals the worst response.
Any politician's ever had anything when you take a step back and listen to what he was saying immediately after Goldberg's revelations, right, where he was just sort of combative and insisting nothing was shared.
And it turns out a lot of other stuff was shared.
If I'm not mistaken, this one with his wife and the lawyer and whatnot had even more actionable intelligence in these texts.
Is that right?
Listen, I haven't heard the particulars of it, but I've heard a couple of people say as much, yes.
Yeah. And so I can guarantee you there's more.
And so you think that really this is an out-of-an-ego thing where he's trying to brag and boast about how big he is and what this job is, and that's why he wants to share it with these people?
You know, I had a conversation with David Roth over on Dispatches from a Collapsing State, and one of the things we talked about was Pete Hegseth.
And I think we kind of nailed it in that conversation, which is the only explanation for the things that Hegseth does, and I'm talking about everything from abuse to the mishandling of the signal stuff, I think it comes down to a deep insecurity.
Like, this is a person who, first of all, should have never been Secretary of Defense, never even should have been on the radar for this post.
And I always, when we talk about this...
Nick, this is one of the most sensitive times in modern American history.
We are constantly on the precipice of a world war.
World War III is just over the horizon if we don't play our cards right and we don't handle this the right way.
This guy never should have been in this position.
And not just because of his lack of experience, but also because he can't even do this job without using the details of the job to try and impress people.
Like, the entire reason for this group chat, where these details were being leaked, was because he wanted people around him to be pumping him up during the confirmation process.
This is not a person who should be in this type of a position of power.
And that goes not just for Headset, but people like Donald Trump and the people he keeps in his orbit.
And again, we're going to talk to Craig Johnson in a second about the rise of fascism and its influence over young men.
And the whole point is...
That these people are carrying around a deep-seated insecurity that makes them abusive, that makes them untrustworthy, it makes them cruel, and on top of it, it makes them unserious.
How many times have we heard about Donald Trump bragging at Mar-a-Lago about something that's actually classified?
Right? This is a person who's the most powerful person in the world, and that's not enough for them.
They have to brag about it and exaggerate it.
And so what we're actually talking about is we're talking about a problem with the people who have taken the reins of power.
And unfortunately, that's one of the tenets and underpinnings of fascism and authoritarianism.
And I don't think it wasn't made clear enough to a lot of people during the process where it was like...
I mean, I don't know what you would do if you were a senator doing the confirmation and you could call him out on it saying you appear to be a deeply insecure man and, you know, we can't trust you with it.
I mean, it wouldn't matter because, again, we're stuck in this weird cycle where they vote along party lines and they're going to stick with this until you don't stick with them anymore.
But I do find it interesting that, like, there's a real consistent pattern with most of the cabinet members that Trump has chosen from the first and now.
Maybe not as much related to insecurity as much as just sort of corruption.
Like, hey, check this out.
You know, watch what I can do.
And I'm going to, like, order a whole, you know, a whole bunch of stuff that I benefit personally on the taxpayers' dime or that kind of thing.
And we're going to fly, you know, on these private jets all over the place, and you're going to come with me, honey.
Like, all that stuff just seems like a real solid through line through the most corrupt cabinets we've seen so far of any president ever.
Yeah, and I think that's the thing is going back to Trump meeting with Bukele, and I talked about this previously, they recognize each other.
You know what I mean?
Like when you're like that, there's a reason why bullies travel in packs.
It's because they recognize in each other a deep-seated insecurity that needs to oppress other people.
And so they build each other up and they grow each other.
There's a reason why the manosphere exists the way that it does.
There's a reason why all of this has to do with performative masculinity.
And when you actually take a look at it, it's Doug Burgum.
I refuse to learn his name, whatever it is.
You're hearing about like a secretary.
He's like making people make him chocolate chip cookies and like, you know, serve him like, you know, waiters and stuff like the way that they treat people.
Is because they don't feel secure in themselves.
They can't handle treating other people appropriately or treating sensitive classified information appropriately because what matters more to them is not the security and safety and well-being of other people.
What matters to them is trying to fill some sort of vacuous hole that can't be filled, which is why the richest man in the world can't just be happy with what he has and do good things, why the President of the United States of America is the most powerful man in the world, and that's not enough.
Because you can't fill that hole, you know?
Like, that hole is unfillable until you fill it yourself.
And that puts all of us in so much more danger because that type of person is who has been rewarded in this culture and has been given the keys to power because, quite frankly, that is, like, one of the main drivers of American culture and politics at this point because we have a massive voting base of tens of millions of people who happen to share that state of being at the moment.
How about this?
If you are of a certain political background, you may have been convinced over a long period of time that all these politicians lie and they're really corrupt.
So when you get into that position, you're like, oh, great, this must be how we all act, right?
I'm going to be able to take advantage.
This must be the place.
Right. There's no sanctity of the office, right, that exists because you've been convinced of that, even though, and by the way, both sides of the aisle have this problem, but there are people in our government that...
do care about the government, right?
They do.
They treat the people like you're talking about how they, these people want to have people below them and treat them poorly.
Well, they are, there are people that treat the country like they want to be treated and well, and with respect.
And that's the thing that I think isn't celebrated enough or isn't established clearly enough with a lot of these people.
And then, you know, somehow it should be disqualifying.
I wish we could figure it out before they run that they're going to treat the country.
You know what's wild about that, Nick, is I actually think That, you know, I always talk about Trump as a symptom of a larger problem, right?
He's not the disease.
Like, you actually look back through modern American history, it's dotted with presidents and political leaders that were incredibly insecure.
Right? I mean, Richard Nixon is, like, the first one that pops up.
Like, I mean, look at how much of an absolute disaster he was.
You know, he won 1972 in an absolute landslide and tried to steal information and broke all kinds of laws because he was terrified about it.
And as the chief executive of the country, continued to break laws and abuse power and all that stuff.
He couldn't just be with what he had.
But then you move forward, Nick.
Somebody like Bill Clinton.
I'm sorry, but if Bill Clinton came out as a politician in 2025, we would all see through it.
You know what I mean?
Like, and we saw through it then, but we wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and the things that he did, not just in terms of policy with, like, free trade and wiping out everything and laying the foundation for mass neoliberal globalism, but even what happened with someone like Monica Lewinsky.
Like, that's uncalled for.
You know, and that was something that we didn't feel comfortable talking about that time.
It just so happens that now we've reached the logical conclusion of that time period, and now we have a class of people that we can see through it transparently because they can't even hide it.
So I think that the soul feels it and is repulsed by it, and now that we see the final evolution, it might not be the final evolution, but the modern evolution of it, I think we do see the people who are going to do this.
That's why we knew what Trump was going to do if he ever got...
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, since you brought up Nixon, I suspect you know what I'm going to say now.
But for what it's worth, he should have been very, very paranoid that the Democrats had the information that he held in the JFK assassination, which is why he was so paranoid.
But you still don't hire the plumbers to go do it.
Well, if not for that, we wouldn't have had the amazing multi-episodic series called The Plumbers, which I recommend highly.
Well, Nick, one last topic of the day.
We both have been keeping track of this, and we're ready to talk about it, and I think we've now entered the part of it.
Harvard. University has refused Trump's pressure basically to fold like Columbia.
Billions in grants have been put in flux.
The IRS has been weaponized in order to possibly take away their tax-exempt status.
On top of that, Harvard said, no, we're not going to do this.
They calculated it, weighed the risks, said we're not going to comply with this.
And the Trump administration, and this is strange, and I want to put this into context of the fact that Pete Hegseth might be removed as Secretary of Defense, it feels like they blinked a little bit.
They've admitted that the letter asking for this compliance was sent by accident, which kind of gives them an escape if this university fights back.
What are your reactions to this?
And also, and I'll talk more about in a second.
It feels a little bit like the worm is turning.
Just a little bit in terms of how people are reacting to this, pushing back against it.
What are your thoughts on this developing story?
Well, for sure.
The letter they sent in the email to Harvard, which demanded, like, oversight over who they hire, what the curriculum is.
It was really intrusive, so I get why Harvard had to push back.
I'm willing to go on the record and say that it was a mistake.
Like, it was a draft.
They were putting it together.
They had a bunch of things.
Idiot over there sent it to Harvard when it wasn't supposed to be sent.
I'm willing to actually acknowledge.
I think that's really what happened.
America's preeminent university.
Yes. Now, that said, who knows if had it gone through all the channels, they still would have demanded all these things at a different time.
Maybe, probably still.
But I would imagine somebody in the White House, whatever, would have looked at it and said, you know, we've probably got to take out a couple of those sentences.
So I'm willing to believe that that happened to some degree.
Only because the reaction that it was a mistake is so far removed from how they would normally react to this, even if it was a mistake.
I'm choosing to believe it's the truth for the first time ever.
Now, that said, I think this is exciting because it looks like it's spurring the Big Ten to stand up in mass against what's going on here.
And, you know, listen, most of these, those at that level have such huge endowments, they could probably handle that, although a lot of that money funds really important medical research.
And so that's the next level of like, you know, are they going to be able to allocate stuff to continue that medical research to help cure things like cancer in kids?
I certainly hope so.
And then at some point they go away.
We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Nick.
You know what a bully respects getting punched in the fucking face.
That's what usually puts an end to the bullying.
And in this case, first of all, I want to give props to Harvard.
That's a sentence that I didn't expect.
To say, but like being like, no, we're not going to just crumple.
And I don't think that that is necessarily just sort of like a courage, although, you know, good for you to have courage to do that.
It's looking at what happened to Columbia.
Columbia folded like a wet paper bag, and they're having trouble bringing students in at this point.
They're having trouble, because who wants to send their kid to a college where the college is just like, yeah, you can take our students and send them to El Salvador.
That's totally fine.
Whatever. What do you want from us?
You want us to stand up for your kids?
Like, yes, you do.
And in this case, I think Harvard recognized that they had standing.
That if they push back, that eventually they were going to be able to have tons of lawsuits and could possibly even win damages from the federal government.
Who even knows?
But what you brought up in the Big Ten, which for people who don't pay attention to sports, is the name of the sporting conference that a lot of major universities now belong to.
Starting with Rutgers and is now moving through the system, all these state universities are coming together and saying, hey, you know what?
Like, we're going to get attacked, and we need to defend each other.
We need to pool our resources in order to fight back against this thing.
This is what has been missing over the last few months.
We've seen law firms, we've seen politicians, we've seen universities, we've seen corporations, and they have just capitulated one after another.
But it does feel right now, Nick, like it's almost like a storm.
With waves of rain.
I got caught in a weird tornadic moment yesterday, so I think that that's in my mind a little bit.
Where, like, you'll have, like, a hard wave of storm and wind.
And if you weather it, sometimes you will get a break in it, you know?
And eventually, sometimes it can stop.
And instead of going along with it and capitulating, I think a lot of people right now are starting to realize, hey...
If we don't push back against this thing, it's only going to get worse.
We have choices to make here.
And so I think Harvard standing up in this way is good.
I really, really give them credit for that.
To my friends and colleagues and peers in the academic world, you cannot wait for your institutions to do this.
You as an individual and as a collective with your colleagues and your peers, staff, administrators, well, some administrators, never mind, you know, other academics and students, you need to come together to push against this thing because I think we're seeing an opening right now where we can start to say enough is enough and fuck these people.
Absolutely. And again, the only worry I have is that the way they're behaving is the kind of way that politicians would behave if they were not afraid of elections, of real elections.
That's right.
And, you know, it's starting to come up again now with the notion of, you know, we couldn't criticize the 2024 election because we'd sound like the crazy 2020 people.
But, you know, there's weird stuff.
And we heard things about Musk and Starlink and whatnot.
And, you know, now that we've heard that there's this whistleblower revelations about the NLRB and how within minutes of establishing credentials into their system at administrative levels, that Russians were using those credentials to log in accurately.
You know, it makes you wonder if that is true, just how deep all this goes and how deep the election stuff was and what will happen in the midterms and what will happen in the 2028.
I keep saying you can't think about 2026, you can't think about 2028.
Right now you have to think about day to day.
I do not trust that free and fair elections are going to be held.
Do you know why, Nick?
Because authoritarians notoriously and historically make sure that free and fair elections aren't held.
So any of the fight that you want to have, you don't wait for a campaign.
You don't wait for November of an election year.
You fight.
Now, because there may not be a tomorrow.
So I'm with you.
I don't think that you can pin your hopes and your confidence on that.
All right, everybody, as promised, we have with us Craig A. Johnson, a researcher of right-wing and conservative ideology and author of a new book from Rutledge called How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
Craig, the moment that I saw this title, I knew I had to read this book.
I knew I had to talk to you.
Thank you so much for coming by.
Thank you so much for having me.
That's why I picked the title of the book.
I hoped it would hook people like that.
Well, you know, as somebody who spent a lot of time with academic books, you don't often find a lot of titles that get directly to the point and are, you know, kind of cutting to the quick of the thing.
This, I think, is a necessary book.
I cannot recommend it highly enough, not just for...
Parents, people, anyone who knows young men.
But Craig, could you talk very quickly, just sort of give us a little bit of a thesis of what you discovered studying the radicalization of young men, particularly during a time of rising fascism?
Yeah, I mean, the short version of the book is that you have to understand that fascist messaging is coming at these kids hard and fast and kind of from everywhere.
You can't keep them from encountering it, and so the only thing that you can do is get out ahead of it.
You have to talk to them about it first, sort of in the same way that you would talk to a young man about rape culture or about white supremacism.
You have to say, hey, this is the world that you live in.
Here's how to act.
Here's how to be moral in it.
And the way that you do that is the same way that you would do for a kid that you're worried about making any other kind of big mistake.
You can't cut them out of your life because they made a really bad joke or because they follow some...
Terrible influencer or something.
Instead, you have to treat it as if it's a big, huge mistake that a young person made, and young people make big, huge mistakes.
It's up to you to decide, well, what's my boundary here?
How do I want to engage with this?
You've got to engage with them empathetically.
That's the big final takeaway of the book, is that to fight fascism in the public sphere, you have to confront them.
You have to prevent them from taking up space, prevent them from taking up airtime.
But when it's your private life, when it's a kid, In their home or in a church community or in a school team or something like that, yelling at them is not going to work.
The only thing that can work is to be like, where's this coming from?
Why do you feel like this?
What do you think is funny about that joke?
What do you like about this influencer?
What do you like about this community?
Talk to them.
Figure out what they're getting out of it, what they need.
Well, you said yelling at them doesn't work.
And coming from a coaching background in sports where yelling at them seemed to be the only way that you could get anything done, I'm kind of curious why you feel that and how have you gotten to the point where you realize, like, you know, are we sure it doesn't work at all or are we sort of stressing that there simply are infinitely more optimal ways of getting to the goal that you have?
Expressing your displeasure is a good thing to do, right?
You got to be able to say like, hey, what you're doing is unacceptable.
That's not okay.
You can't be like this.
You can't treat people like this.
You can't say those things.
I don't accept it.
I don't want to hear it.
I don't want to be around it.
But the problem is that the people who make the fascist messaging that these kids are finding online, they're really good at it.
And they have counter-programming.
They have counter-arguments.
They'll say, okay, well, your mom is going to yell at you for making this joke.
Here's what to say in response.
Your dad will say this isn't fair.
Here's what you should hit him with.
You know, if you are making this anti-Semitic argument and you're a New York Times reading parent who isn't like a theorist about any of these things, they're going to say like something that they know to be true.
You'll hit him with this, right?
That's how they do.
And so if you make it an argument, they're prepared for an argument.
They know how to argue with you.
You know, they're a teenager.
But if you make it instead a situation where you're like, hey, I'm, like, this isn't working for me.
I don't really want to be a part of this conversation.
I don't really like where you're going with this.
Or even worse, you know, like, I know where you're coming from.
I know that you're looking for community.
I know that you're sad.
I know that maybe you feel alone.
Maybe you feel disempowered.
Maybe you don't feel like you have control over your life.
But if you come at them with some empathy and say, like, what's this doing for you?
You know, what are you getting out of this?
That's a way that you can get them back on track.
Craig, I've been on this beat going back to 2016.
I had my realizations then about how masculinity was playing into the burgeoning MAGA movement.
And as I did my research, I noticed a couple of things, which is there's a very delicate dance that has to be done here.
And it's hard, and this is one of the reasons I was very, very grateful for your book and the tack that you took and the resources that you shared.
Because on one hand, we're in the middle of an existential threat.
There are people who, their lives are being lost.
They're being thrown into hellish concentration camps abroad.
We're seeing people's rights being taken, liberties being taken away.
I mean, when it comes to fascism, particularly in a clash with liberal democracy, we're talking about a battle.
We're talking about an ongoing war that has very real consequences.
But there's a thing that has to happen within that, which is you have to harden yourself politically But individually, in order to get out of this, because I think fascism is this mental health crisis that takes advantage of a lack of hope and direction and isolation and fear,
that you have to be able to talk to young men who are specifically being radicalized or who have been radicalized and somehow or another welcome them back into the fold.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that sort of delicate dance.
That we're talking about, because I think empathy is the key word here, but it's also having to do two very contradictory things at once.
And all of this actually depends upon us welcoming people in so that we can limit the danger that we're actually in while fighting the dangers that happens.
Absolutely. This is the big, important line to walk, right?
And it's going to be hard to determine exactly where your line is.
It's going to be different for everybody.
What I like to say is, if you're on the street, if you're in a political conversation, if you're hearing something on the radio, if you're online and you're posting, that's when you call people out.
You say, what you're doing is wrong.
This isn't acceptable here.
I don't like what you're saying.
You're wrong for the following reasons.
You debunk people.
When you're in private, you're at home, you're dealing with a kid, that's when you call people in.
That's when you say, Hey, what's wrong?
You know, like, what aren't you getting that you need?
Because the real problem with left progressive responses to fascism, and especially with centrist responses to fascism, is that fascism accurately tells young people that the world is not going to work for them.
The first part of their message is true.
If the world is not going to work for you, the world you were promised, you're not going to get it.
The privileges that your parents, that your grandparents had, you're not going to have them.
Like, the world is going to be worse.
It's going to be on fire, and there'll be fewer resources to go around for fewer people.
That's true.
And their answer is monstrous.
Their answer is heinous and evil.
Their answer is about violence and oppression.
But if you can't acknowledge that problem, if you can't acknowledge that fear that young people have, that their world that they're going to grow up in is going to be bad, it's not going to be a fun one to live in.
If you can't really meet them there empathetically, then you're not going to be able to start with them.
They'll see you're fake.
You know, this actually, and I'm glad you touched on this, this is a conversation that Nick and I have been having for years, which is it's not enough to defeat...
Fascism electorally.
And I think that we've seen that because you can't really do it while pretending that the material conditions that feed it aren't there and don't need to be addressed.
And so one of the things that we talk about a lot is you will hear people on the right say things.
That they may believe or that they may be motivated by.
And there's actually a deeper emotional truth underneath it, even while what they're saying is completely and utterly wrong, right?
And we often talk about Steve Bannon is one of the people we bring up a lot.
And we say Steve Bannon's diagnosis of what went wrong in the country, there's a nugget of truth to that.
That's the problem.
Which is the issue, and it has always been the problem.
And that lack of hope, that lack of direction, and also, I think, young men feeling, you know, they feel like they're under attack.
Whether or not they are or they're not, they also feel like they're in an environment where they have to react to that thing.
And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the material conditions, that lack of a better future that you're talking about, and how the weird twisted knot of it is in order for them to have a better future, they actually need to be vulnerable and work on a project much in a way that they feel like they are under attack by what that project is.
Absolutely. Yeah, you're absolutely right that, like, the problem here is that fascism, you know, White supremacist messaging, misogynist messaging, it lets young people, especially young cis heterosexual men, it lets them feel like the victim.
And being the victim is a very addictive feeling.
It allows you to position yourself against the people who have power and say, I'm being oppressed, you're the problem, you're doing this to me.
It's a very simple answer to a very complicated question.
There's a reason that...
Even, like, dyed-in-the-wool Marxist communists don't put big Marxist theoretical arguments on political placards.
It's because nobody wants to hear that, right?
That's too much to get people.
Fascist messaging is simple.
Their message is, other people have taken your future from you.
And if you want to get people, you have to start by meeting them there, especially when they're young, because, like, you know, some of these people that the fascists are, like, intentionally recruiting, They're 10. They're 14, you know?
Major systemic analysis is not something that you can really approach them with.
You have to hit them with, like, these people are manipulating you.
Think about what they want.
What project are they preparing you for?
Is it really going to make your life better?
But you're right.
The answer can't just be to debunk fascism.
You have to give them something else to believe in.
There has to be some other truth that they can approach.
And this is, you know, this is where, like, bigger questions about what the left, what progressives, what even centrists or even conservatives stand for.
It has to be something positive.
There has to be like a real vision about something.
Or otherwise, you know, the fascists will take up all that airtime.
I think the worry also is that the generational trauma that we've seen throughout the country continues to pass along these things.
You know, these kids need to be taught these things generally.
We've known that since South Pacific came out on Broadway.
And so my wonder is, in writing this book, did you end up coming across the way that fascists and people like that would use?
Pop culture to be able to lure the kids in.
I know I got a little taste of that with my son, you know, really into Star Wars, started to sort of think that maybe the Stormtroopers were the good guys, you know, and that's really troubling to me for a while because it doesn't take long to put that on its head and actually have an argument about that.
Yeah. Pop culture, you know, video games, major movie franchises, some books, like, those are real Trojan horses that fascists use.
That white supremacists use, that male supremacists use.
And it's because it's one of the first times, you know, it's meeting people where they live.
You know that they care about this.
They clicked on the video.
It came up in their algorithm or whatever.
And so it's another example where you can make them the victim, right?
You're a fan.
You're a gamer.
They're taking this from you.
Why are they doing it?
Well, it's because of their, you know, the fascists would say it's because of their woke agenda, right?
The message.
Yeah, it's because of the message or the establishment or because of DEI or something.
Or big whatever, right?
And that enables them to be in this place where they're the victim.
Something is being done to them.
They're doing it to us.
It also makes it so that the viewer, the kid who's getting the message, and the person giving the message, well, now we're on the same side.
And now they get to say, like, okay, well, maybe we're on the same side about other stuff, too.
Maybe this guy has something to say about politics.
And when he has Donald Trump on, I'll be like, oh, yeah, you know, okay, like, I guess we are also.
You know, I'm against that insider, too.
It's this, like, real creepy shift that they do, and they do it on purpose and very well.
No, and I've been, I have a really hard time, and I would like to talk more about this before we finish up, Craig, because what I started tracing, and it took me a minute to get to it, was I started to notice that the backlash to movies like Star Wars or in video games,
it was always...
And, you know, there's a culture war aspect to it where it was like, oh, the woke corporations, which is one of the most amazing.
Like, oxymorons imaginable, right?
That they were trying to somehow or another press a message onto the people through Marvel movies, through all these very, very fervent fandoms.
And anybody who hasn't been on YouTube, it's just one of these after another.
It's an angry, conservative white guy who is yelling about taking those things back.
And what they're actually talking about...
And I'm being careful with this word, but it's a narcissistic worldview, which is that everything needs to be about you or else it's about somebody else.
And one of the things that you kind of touched on a little bit is they're not promising them wealth.
They're not promising them economic mobility.
They're promising them the illusion of cultural dominance.
And making sure that the things that they enjoy in their pastimes reflect their interest.
And in fact, it's a very weird, it's different than fascism's in the past.
Like we've had those sort of cultural sort of nodes before, but there was always an economic piece to it.
And now it's superficial and it's based completely almost in consumer identity and whether or not you're getting the products that you want or if they're being tailored to somebody else.
Absolutely. That's a major difference between fascism today and fascism in the past.
It's not a mass party organization.
You're not really going to be able to make your career being in the GOP, right?
They're just not hiring enough people.
You might be able to be one of the influencers, right?
But probably not.
You know, that's the dream that the kids have.
Thinking about it as, like, fascism, like, yeah, you're right.
It's a sort of consumerist fascism.
And it is the promise of, like you say, A cultural dominance, a cultural power, putting men back in their quote-unquote place in society at the top, understanding that it's probably not going to come with any major prosperity.
We've seen with Donald Trump's actions, the United States economy is not doing so great.
We might gain some manufacturing jobs back, but we'll lose tourism and business and agriculture and a million other things, right?
But that's not the promise.
The promise is that...
While the pile might be, you know, shorter, you know, the pyramid's going to be shorter, but you'll be at the top again.
And that's what they promise.
Relative dominance.
Relative power.
And that's all that they think they can get.
Craig A. Johnson is a...
Oh, you...
No, no, go ahead.
I have to imagine that also translates into, like, relationships with women, for instance.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely. That's a major component.
One of the big differences, again, between today fascism and fascism in the past is that all fascism is male supremacists in general, but fascism today is about masculinity in a real serious way.
And one of the grievances that fascists today have, they imagine, is that, like, well, the women that I want to have sex with are not having sex with me.
And they think that they can remake the economy, make women dependent on men again, and bring back that system.
It's really ugly, but that's one of the promises that Trump is trying to deliver on.
I mean, look at me.
I jumped the gun, and then Nick asked the perfect question, and we got the answer we needed.
All right.
Craig A. Johnson, a researcher of right-wing and conservative ideology and the author of the new book from Rutledge, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
Craig, thank you so much for your work.
Can't wait to talk to you again.
Thank you both so much.
Lovely to talk to you.
Thanks, Craig.
Thank you again to Craig A. Johnson for coming on.
The book is How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
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