128: How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, with Craig A. Johnson
Jack and Daniel welcome to the show Craig A. Johnson - academic, researcher, antifascist, and host of the (excellent) podcast 15 Minutes of Fascism - to chat about his (excellent) new book How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, a primer on today's fascist and far-right, in all their styles and iterations, aimed at people worried that a young person in their lives (most especially a young man, obviously) is being sucked into the darkness. Episode Notes: How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, book. 15 Minutes of Fascism at Soundcloud IDSG on 15MoF Craig's bluesky Craig's Patreon Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
One of the hardest things about telling people about this stuff is that it is just so goofy and dumb.
It doesn't make any sense.
It has two modes, and they are goofy and gut-wrenchingly horrifying.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
So welcome back to I Don't Speak German, the podcast that does the things that you know that it does, because you listen to it, probably.
And I'm Jack Graham, and I'm here with Daniel Harper, as usual.
And Daniel, say hello to the little girls and boys and everybody else.
And the little boys and girls and non-binary folks.
And everybody else.
I said everybody else.
I hear you.
I just don't want to yada yada, the non-binary folks.
But yeah, no, hello to all those people.
You're absolutely right.
I did yada yada, and I shouldn't have done that.
And we are very lucky and happy and honored to have with us a special guest on the show.
Craig Johnson, host of 15 Minutes of Fascism.
Hi, Craig.
How are you doing?
Hi. I'm doing about as you might expect for a person living in the United States right now.
Yeah, there is that, isn't there?
There is that.
I don't know, I have my health.
I'm fine, honestly.
Yeah, you try to be sunny with people, and then you suddenly remember, oh, yeah, yeah, of course, I forgot.
Personally, the way this comes up for me is every time I'm talking to a therapist or something, and I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, I...
I have these anxiety things that I deal with, and then my therapist is like, what do you do?
And I'm like, oh, I study fascism for a living.
So, the plot dilutes, I think.
Yeah, they're like, well, I've literally had a therapist be like, have you considered not doing that?
Yeah. Daniel, any thoughts on that?
I have as well.
I've literally had that experience.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I'd assumed you did.
Yeah, this was before I started the podcast.
I was briefly in therapy for other things, and I was like, oh.
Another thing that might be causing this anxiety is, you know, I listen to like six hours of fascist podcasts every day.
And she was like, oh, well.
I think I have a clue.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm at the point now where, you know, people like the lady that brings the post in the morning, she'll say, hi, morning, how are you?
And, you know, I'll literally sort of grab her by the.
By the lapels.
And it'll be, do you realize that Britain's on course for a hung parliament with reform as the biggest party?
And, you know, it's rough.
It's rough.
Oh, yeah.
God, you know, I have friends in various EU countries who are like, yeah, you know, it's nice to not be in the United States.
And I'm like, okay, AFD is the second biggest party in Germany.
Like, what do you guys think is going to happen?
As you point out in your book, which we will get around to talking about, listeners, a party literally descended from Mussolini's original fascist party is currently in power in Italy.
So, yeah.
That's one of the things that I really appreciated about the book, actually.
And I know I'm not introducing it properly, but very early on, you take a sort of a whirlwind tour of all the...
The most significant, I suppose, fascist groupings, fascist movements, parties, not only in the United States, but then around the world, in Europe and India and stuff like that.
And I thought, you know, we're getting through this information at a hell of a clip as I'm reading it.
And I'm also thinking this is really important stuff because there is an awful lot of, I think anyway, there is an awful lot of parochialism in the way that the anglophone world talks about our problems with this.
And it is definitely a global problem.
Oh, I absolutely agree.
I mean, I wrote the book primarily for English-speaking audiences.
You know, the publisher is Rutledge, so it's a UK publisher.
Lots of the sales, I assume, are going to be in the United States.
But, like, yeah, this is a global problem.
Not understanding it as a global problem is going to make it a lot harder to fight.
You know, especially when, you know, even if you are talking about it in domestic policy, in terms of US domestic policy, like they are explicitly excited about and looking at people like Javier Millet, people like Viktor Orban as examples.
Those are their examples.
And if we don't understand that, then like...
Yeah, they have a global view and a lot of us are failing to have one as well.
We should probably backtrack a little bit, because I know my enthusiasm get the better of me, and introduce the book a little bit.
Craig, as I say, is the host of the excellent 15 Minutes of Fascism podcast.
Daniel and I were very happy to be guests on that a little while ago.
It was lovely having you.
Oh, thank you very much.
It was lovely to be on.
And of course, we're returning the favor, not just out of politeness, but also because you do have this book that's just come out just recently from Rutledge called How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
So, Craig, introduce the book for us.
Tell us, you know, what is the idea behind it?
Yeah, so...
I think the title is pretty self-explanatory, actually.
Yeah, I mean, that is one of the benefits of why I titled the book that way.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, you know, I studied fascism in my PhD program at UC Berkeley, and I did that because I was afraid of fascism, because I was worried about what was happening in the world.
And then when it came time to write a book, when I was done with the PhD, I was like, well, I could write a monograph that's, you know...
Maybe a couple dozen people will read, which is something that I will do.
Or I could see the writing on the wall and write a book that I hope people will get some real political use out of in their everyday life.
And so when I pitch the book, when I wrote the book, when I talk about the book, the way I introduce it is that it's a guide for parents and educators on how to keep young men out of the extreme right wing.
I use the word fascism in the title, but I don't want it to be exclusive to whatever academics would...
I don't specifically define as fascism.
I wanted the book to be about red-wing extremism in general.
And so that's what the book is about.
That's the tone that it is written in.
And that's the level that it's written at.
The book is designed, it's written to be readable by people who are not academic experts and also people who don't listen to The Daily Show every day.
Yeah, well, I noticed you have a pretty broad definition of fascism.
It's in the book.
It's in the first page of chapter one.
And I'll just read it, and I want you to just kind of walk us through that briefly and why you chose this particular definition.
You say, fascism, a nationalist, anti-liberal, sexist, and violent right-wing political movement that aims to remake the world.
Yeah, yeah.
So one of the reasons that I wanted a...
I'm not challenging that, by the way.
I'm just wondering, you know, kind of...
Oh, totally.
Why you use that, you know?
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons that I wanted a relatively broad definition of fascism, and this is something that is somewhat different from how I posture myself when it comes to, like, academic inquiry.
You know, like, if I was writing for a peer-reviewed journal, I have a somewhat different definition of fascism that is, you know, maybe a little bit more antiquarian, you know, a little bit more siloed, like, separating out different varieties of extreme right-wing beliefs.
When it comes to the book, I wanted the definition to be rough and ready, useful, to help people hear when a duck is quacking, basically.
So all the components of fascism that I distilled in that definition are ones that I think are vital for people understanding what makes fascism different from other right-wing political formations.
Its violence and its vision for the future are the two biggest ones that I think a lot of people miss.
This is especially coming from the United States where, like, you know, I remember the W. Bush regime and people talking about him as a fascist and me being like, well, I mean, no, like, he's a nationalist, he's a Christian nationalist, etc., etc.
But, like, there was nothing like the transformative vision that the fascists have in the Trump coalition.
Like, just nothing even remotely like it.
And I think that the word fascism is useful politically in order to differentiate between those two things.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I agree.
I noticed, I particularly appreciated the inclusion of the word sexist in the definition.
Because I think one of the things that, I mean, it's a, and again, I'm not critical.
I think this is good.
It is a diffuse definition of fascism.
And that's clearly, as you read the book, it becomes clear that that's deliberate and it's part of the point because you're trying to, I mean, you're trying to reflect the fact that in In 2025, as opposed to 1925, fascism is more diffuse.
It is literally more diffused through society, you know, into the internet.
It's not as discreet a party phenomenon as it was when it first started.
It was widespread in the 1920s and 30s, but it had a much more tightly defined identity than it does now.
And I think one of the reasons that some people have been a bit slow to understand that we are dealing with a resurgence of fascism.
Is there very diffuseness?
And I think your definition does capture the unity of these diffuse phenomena that are still recognizably fascist.
And as I started, I started by saying I appreciated sexist in that definition, because I think that's absolutely key to today.
I mean, it always was, obviously.
But I think it's absolutely key to today, to how today's fascism works.
And you get into this into the book because you spend a lot of time on the male supremacism.
Yeah. And misogyny, which is inherent to online, particularly online fascism.
And you go into Gamergate and incels and all that stuff, which is, again, at this sort of entry level for the reader who's encountering this stuff maybe for the first time.
But yeah, I really appreciated that.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that especially when it comes to thinking about fascism, a lot of people, and again, especially in the United States, in the Western world, in Europe, They think about fascism as being a political movement that is about racism.
And fascism is about racism, but the part that is often missed is it's, yeah, it's inherent male supremacy, it's inherent sexism.
And that's one of the reasons that the book is titled the way that it is, is that fascism is a gendered phenomenon.
It was back in the 1920s, back in the 1930s.
And, you know, that was partly because, like, fascism as a political formation emerged from the trenches.
You know, it emerged from people who were veterans of World War I, or depending on your timeline, and you know, this isn't the time or place for this, but you know, like, it's
that or you think it came out of the ku klux klan which is also a veterans organization right right um so yeah either way the politics much more in general politics was much more male dominated i mean it's still male dominated don't misunderstand anybody but in the 20s and 30s of course it's
it's very much more heavily mailed it's um you know
Certainly on the right or on the mainstream centre, almost exclusively male.
And on the left, too, there's comparatively few women active in party politics and campaign politics.
That's true.
And when there are women leaders, it's leading a female auxiliary or something like that, generally.
Although the founder of the first fascist party in the UK was a woman, unusually.
Yes, indeed.
But just in terms of the basic makeup of politics at the time when it originates, whereas now, of course, I mean, part of what today's fascism is reacting against, of course, is the decline of the ability of men to expect that degree of sort of overall dominance in these sorts of spheres.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
You know, what I try to convey in the book, and when I talk to people, Who aren't academics, who aren't professional political observers, or people who are obsessed with politics, and they're trying to understand why this is happening,
why it's happening now.
Why are young men like this?
Why do they like this?
The answer that I give is that, well, fascism appeals to downwardly mobile young men.
So, you know, people can say, like, oh, well, in the Biden administration, the GDP grew by X whatever percent.
Or, like, people's lives are better now than they used to be.
And you say, like, well, yeah.
But when people look at the relative amount of power that they would have had if they had lived in the past, they see that they have relatively less power now.
And that is what fascism is a reaction to, in large part.
It is white cis men wishing that they had the degree, like the preponderance of social power, that they would have had back in the early 20th century, back in the 19th century.
Or even in the 1950s, you know.
And the United States fascist groups are, you know, when they're making propaganda about what they want, they say leave it to Beaver.
You know, they say white picket fence, 2.5 kids, car in the garage, golden retriever.
Like, that's what they say they want for people.
Yeah, what an exciting, expansive, exhilarating, utopian vision.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, ignoring, of course, or, I mean, in their case, not ignoring the fact that that is...
It's founded on women being subservient to men financially, socially, politically.
It's founded on racial segregation.
That world was founded on those things, and to them, that's not a defect.
That's what they want to get back.
The book is very much oriented towards how to talk to young people.
I think arguably you're talking usually like...
12 to 20 would be kind of the age range that the book is designed for.
And I think that's, you know, the question I get, I mean, this is weird because the question I get most often from people, like not, you know, very often from people is like, my son or my kid is like looking at this stuff and what do I do about it?
And my answer, I just never have an answer for it.
I mean, it's not that I, it's like, well, I've given you the tools to understand, you know, what you're seeing.
But I don't know how to do this.
And I think this book actually does a really good job of sort of like both – it's a very good like fascism 101 for people, first of all.
I think the first three chapters do a really good job of like here's what fascism is.
Here's what's going on.
Here's why young men are attracted to it in particular.
And then chapter four, you go through and you say, okay, here's like specifically what you need to do.
Here's what you're looking for.
And I think it's a very good, like practical step-by-step thing that, that I think people can embrace.
And, you know, I would have given them, you know, kind of similar advice, but to have like, to have a book like this that I could just, you know, literally like hand somebody and say, this is, this is your reference.
That's, I think.
Thank you so much.
It means a whole lot to hear that.
I wrote this book because I've had those conversations, too.
You meet people at dinner parties, you meet them at bars, you meet them.
And you tell them what you do, and they say, like, well, what do I do?
Like, my nephew's saying this shit, my son is saying it, kids in the class I teach are saying it, like, what am I supposed to do?
And I wanted, first of all, I wanted to have an answer for that, and I, you know, I'm an academic at heart.
I knew that I had to write a book if I wanted to figure out the answer.
And so, this was how I did it.
And the answer that I arrived at was one that I found Uncomfortable at first, because I am a proud anti-fascist.
I believe that fascism should be stopped in its quest to take over the world and oppress people around it.
And as such, I believe that fascism needs to be fought.
You know, we need to combat it in the world.
We need to confront fascism when it is trying to take over space and power and political organizations.
But I also know...
We're talking to an individual person at home, around the Thanksgiving dinner table, a friend at a bar.
Yelling at that person is not going to change their mind.
In fact, it will probably do the opposite.
And so I thought to myself, well, who could I possibly ask to hear out a fascist when they're talking about their beliefs?
Who could I possibly ask to hear this kind of garbage, like evil nonsense?
And experience and show empathy.
And I was like, well, literally, it's only parents.
Parents, educators, relatives, loved ones, community members.
Those are the people that you can ask to do that.
And it's a tall order.
It's hard work.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, we've had, you know, people like, let's say, Daryl Davies.
Yeah. And some of the, like, sort of, like, you know, like, you know, I just go and I have conversations with random Ku Klux Klan members and, like, really, like...
Yeah, what you've done is, you know, you've allowed yourself to be used by them for propaganda purposes.
You're literally, you know, you're testifying as a character witness in their trials.
Like, you know, this is not good work, you know?
And so, like, confronting people like strangers and kind of, like, trying to, like, have that debate that way is just counterproductive.
I think we would agree on that.
I absolutely agree that if it is somebody that you have an actual relationship with, especially a close relationship like a parent-child or a family member or even an educator or whatever, as you say, those are the people who actually can reach out.
Me as a nobody with a podcast, I can't talk to somebody and convince them even though I know how they're feeling about as well as they do because I've consumed probably more of the material than they have.
But without that really close personal connection, you just really can't.
You really can't get somebody's soul the way you can.
Again, I agree 99.9% with everything that's in the book.
It's basically the same thing that I had come to, and to have it in this distilled form I think is going to be really useful for people.
I really appreciate that.
As we were laughing about earlier on, we're in some dark times.
And, you know, we can laugh about it in an attempt to shield ourselves from that, but it is really hardening to feel like you've done something useful.
And, I mean, you too do something extremely useful every time you put out this podcast, helping people understand what's going on.
I think when we talked last, you also, you know, talked about hearing people giving feedback about how hearing an outside perspective helped them, you know, steer away.
Yep. From falling down the abyss.
And yeah, I mean, that's the work.
You know, it's uncomfortable.
It's hard.
And when it comes to a loved one, you know, that's a situation in which a person can show this kind of, like, radical empathy, but which is nevertheless principally concerned about safety, right?
You know, the first advice that I always give is, like, well, yeah, you know, like, if your kid is actively threatening other people with credible threats of violence, like, okay, yeah, it is not time for empathy now.
Right. You know,
whatever other crap a kid is into.
You know, you say like...
Yeah, I mean, like, literally, you know, like...
Fascism is the new Pokemon, yeah.
I mean, for some 12-year-olds, yeah.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I completely agree.
Like, Andrew Anglin, like, deliberately targeted people.
He, like, wrote in things.
I'm targeting, like, 13-year-olds.
Oh, precisely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anglin is one of the...
Principal villains of this story.
Yes, no, definitely.
He's one of the few who are actually name-checked in the book.
You name-check Anglin.
You spend a lot of time with Andrew Tate as well.
Yeah, Andrew Tate is somebody who has been in and out of the limelight since I started writing this book, but the fact is that he has taken up the mantle of the biggest misogynist influencer that's around these days.
And this is...
Despite or because of the fact that he is charged with human trafficking, sexual assault, and numerous other crimes, financial crimes, not just in Romania, but apparently also they're looking into doing some prosecuting in Florida where he is currently fighting.
I mean, it's, you know, it's nuts.
I think the thing that really, really got me was I, research for this book, I heard about an educator who was saying like, yeah, I have heard on my,
On my elementary school playground, an adaptation of the rhyme, one, two, buckle my shoe, that includes the words, Andrew Tate, it's 7'8, Andrew Tate, 9'10, etc.,
etc., right?
Right, right, yeah.
And so, like, you know, the six-year-olds who sang this rhyme doesn't know who Andrew Tate is, or maybe, you know, they know he's some guy, right?
Right. But they know that their 12-year-old brother likes him, or they know that their 16-year-old brother likes him, right?
And so he's just infiltrated the zeitgeist of young people.
And it's terrifying, you know, like, oh, my God.
It's hard to think about.
No, there is such a short book.
It's 135 pages, excluding notes.
The survey it takes of the present moment is really impressive.
You pack an awful lot into those 135 pages.
From, you know, influencer culture, Joe Rogan, to Alex Jones, you know, the soy and estrogen scares.
You go right the way through it.
Oh my god, I had a friend read the book and they texted me that they were in a cafe and laughed out loud at the testicle tanning part.
They were like, yeah, I missed that part.
How can you not?
And that was like...
Mainstream on Tucker Carlson.
What are you talking about?
That's one of the things that is...
I know that you two deal with this.
One of the hardest things about telling people about this stuff is that it is just so goofy and dumb.
It doesn't make any sense.
It has two modes, and they are goofy and gut-wrenchingly horrifying.
That's on purpose, right?
They did that on purpose in order to make it feel like a joke, read like a joke to people who aren't paying attention.
And I think that that was one of the principal things I was trying to convey in the book, to parents especially, is to be like, this might sound like a joke.
Your kid will treat it like a joke, but it is not a joke.
This is the serious, this is the content, right?
This isn't just like South Park gross-out humor stuff.
Although that is the gateway for it, you know, is intentionally using the fact that young people, and especially young men, at least in the contemporary Western world, tend toward a kind of like South Park-y kind of exaggerated transgressive humor.
And using that as a gateway to actual fascist content.
And Anglin is a perfect example of somebody who's literally on record saying, oh yes, we can exploit this in order to get fascism in front of.
Young people's eyeballs.
Yeah, no, I mean, he just out and out said it.
He's like the Chris Ruffo of that.
He just went out and said, this is the thing I'm doing, and he goes out and does it, and then people look at it and go, do you think he's actually doing this thing?
Yes, no, obviously, he's doing this.
I'll tell you one of the, one of the funniest, like one of the horrifying, but funny things that I ran into early on that, you know, was a song by a guy named Roscoe Jones, who Roscoe was, I don't think the third rail is still producing episodes, but it was one of the TRS affiliated podcasts.
This had been in 2017, 2017 or so like that era.
And they did a, a parody version of the rainbow.
connection, the Muppets song, and they did it as the Hebrew connection.
And it was about how we need to annihilate all the Jews.
God. God.
Hello, everybody.
Jack from the future, popping in briefly at Daniel's request to correct a little mistake there.
It wasn't actually on the third rail that the song appeared, but rather a podcast called Exodus Americanas, just for the sake of accuracy.
And back to the discussion.
I mean, that's one of those things I just never, like, I would never play the audio on this podcast or anything, but, like, it was, you know, it was pretty, you know.
Like, it's just pretty gross.
And they use that kind of, like, that transgressive humor.
They use that kind of, you know, we're taking something that's, like, literally made for children and we're turning it against itself.
And we're turning it into something that's, you know, ennobling in their eyes.
Obviously, it's not ennobling, but you know what I mean.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, like, in the book, I ask parents to, you know, you have to make a complicated calculation here.
Like, the fact is that young men are interested in transgressive comedy.
And so...
It's possible that when your kid says a racist joke or something like that, he is testing the waters and he doesn't really believe anything or he's not connected to anything yet or anything like that, right?
But that is the way that that slippery slope does in fact go.
That's one of the ways it can go.
And so you have to react to it carefully and seriously and say, oh, I don't understand what's funny about that.
My algorithm doesn't show me those kinds of things.
Where does it show up in yours?
What other stuff is going on where you encounter that kind of stuff?
What do you find appealing about this?
How do you think people who are different than you would feel about hearing this thing?
To not let them stand behind the shield of it's just a joke because I'm living in a country that is currently ruled by an unelected bureaucratic organization that is named after a meme.
From, like, 2012.
Like, the jokes are not jokes.
They're real.
Yeah, essentially, you know, the Gamergate aesthetic is in the process of executing an internal coup in the American government.
God, what a sentence.
Jesus. Almost literally, my God.
Yes, yeah.
I mean, like, you know, you imagine talking to some of these guys in, like, 2012, 2015, 2017.
I mean, I've been, I've been, I continue, even though we produced fewer episodes lately, one of the things that I'm going to be doing is kind of revisiting some of the old topics that we've done and some of the old figures and saying, here's what they're saying now in 2025.
Because it's, it's just, they were like, they're, they're literally seeing the Trump return and the Doge and all this stuff.
And like, it's like, well, we're gonna, we're gonna set aside That Trump is still ruled by the Jews, because they still see him as being ruled by the Jews, because he isn't actively anti-Israel, right?
But they're like, this is more than we ever thought we were going to get.
We wouldn't have thought we could get this in 100 years.
And they've just won.
It's just one of those things.
And I don't know, maybe that's something to...
Does the advice in the book...
I understand this was just released, but if you had to write this now...
Knowing the era that we're in, what advice might change for you?
Because one of the things that you do, and we could talk about this, is that you kind of pitch the book as like, this is not just for progressives, it's not just for activists, it's for conservatives as well, because the United Front, the popular front is going to be important to combating this, and I don't disagree with that.
But I think when Donald Trump can kind of phrase himself as like, well, I'm just kind of a regular conservative guy, when he's the President of the United States.
It mainstreams this stuff in such a way that it's harder, I think, again, at the 101 level, at the level that we're kind of pitching this book to, that you pitched the book to, how do you differentiate between that and a Bill Kristol or something?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think that if I started this book now, the main thing that I would want to add in there or possibly change is to help parents understand that That this isn't some sort of fringe game or something that your child might be involved in.
This is not a behavioral issue.
To really understand that this is an entire social-political world that your kid could extremely realistically think of as a future for him.
Now that Donald Trump is in office, and if he continues to be extremely successful at the things that he's wanting to do...
It's very possible that, like, the only government institutions that will be hiring for anything at all in the coming years will be, like, fascist-type initiatives, like DOGE, like other sorts of, like, prosecutorial roles to go after Democrats,
to go after other perceived enemies of the Trump administration.
And so, like, helping parents understand that if your kid gets into this stuff...
And he says, like, well, this is where my future is.
He might be right.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely. Like, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, fascist parties back in the 30s.
Like, that was a career path.
Like, that's bread and butter.
That could just be your whole life.
Like, and it really could.
This is where the example of Horst Vessel that you bring up quite early in the book is so instructive.
Because that's, I mean, that could be today.
You know, just change some of the terminology.
Oh, yeah.
He found a career in what turned out to be the Nazi takeover of Germany.
I mean, it just so happened that it got him killed.
And he was then co-opted as a martyr for the movement.
But yeah, he's a template.
Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the things that often gets missed in instruction about fascism in the 1920s and 30s is just like, I mean, it was just popular.
Millions of people liked it.
I think that one of the reasons that people have such a hard time understanding what's happening now, We believe that fascism is something that is done to populations, as opposed to something that populations do to themselves.
I know that none of us here operate under that illusion, but most people do.
They think that fascism is something that happens.
It's like a disease or a cloud that envelops people in spaces.
People even talk about this, and people talk about it in those terms.
People talk about...
Like, as if it were an infection that was spreading around Europe.
And they talk about it that way today, when it's like, no, it's an intentional political project, just like any other one.
And, like, millions of people simply do support it.
And it appeals to people, like, for a reason.
Like, you know, I often, you know, I kind of make the, you know, sort of my gut reaction to this is, like, fascism is, like, short-circuiting, like, leftist goals, effectively.
Yes. Is that, like, there are problems that leftists have, want to solve.
You know, income inequality or, you know, healthcare or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever.
And, but, you know, the solution to those problems or the problems of capitalism ended up needing to be solved by, like, very long, grueling hard work of, like, actually correcting injustices that involves a lot of, like, both internal and external work.
Like, you have to work on yourself and work on the world around you.
And fascists say, no, it's the Jews, it's the black people, it's the women, it's the trans people, it's etc., etc., etc.
And they just short-circuit that, and it's like, well, of course I'm going to go for the easy answer, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And it's the left as well.
It's the people who are telling you that it's a long, hard, difficult road to solve these problems.
They're the problem.
They're telling you that for a reason.
One of the things I really appreciated in the book is that there is a refreshing degree of honesty in the book, I think, which does contrast with a lot of conventional...
Pieties that I think people try to, some people anyway, try to run away from acknowledging some of the difficult stuff.
I mean, you say in the book, you know, fascism has been around for about 100 years.
Within the confines of that period, it has been normal for young men to be attracted to it.
It is not an abnormal thing.
It's not the empire in Star Wars.
For 100 years now, it has been a political movement.
You know, with ups and downs, obviously, that it has been normal to a given value of that word for young men to be attracted to.
It is the truth that white men, white cis men, are less powerful.
They have less privilege.
They have less social prestige now than they used to.
The left does, in fact, advocate taking power away from white people and men.
You know, we can't...
If we're going to continue to be on the left, we can't sort of shy away from that.
Because that's when they pounce, when you flinch.
You refuse to shy away from Antifa.
There's a great bit where you...
And it's a bit that stuck out to me as a moment where the approaches of the book really come together.
Because the book is...
It's quite conversational in places.
It's aimed, as we say, at this sort of entry-level reader, this person who's reading it because they're concerned about a family member.
You're introducing a lot of new content.
And then you get to the bit where you talk about Antifa, and you explain that it's this diffuse movement of all sorts of different ideologies and all sorts of different approaches.
And you say, you're reading this book because you're concerned about somebody in your life that you think might be falling into fascism.
Congratulations, you're in Antifa.
I really appreciated that approach.
Yeah, I wanted to do that, like you said, partly to be honest about the nature of the conflict that the Western world is in.
And also, yeah, to break down the biases, the stigma, the misunderstanding about what Antifa is.
Yeah, of course there are radical anti-capitalist anarchists that are in Antifa.
Back in the 30s, there were monarchists who were anti-fascists.
All you have to do is not want there to be a fascist dictatorship.
You can be a liberal democrat.
You can be a communist.
You can be a libertarian.
I definitely want to get at what you were mentioning just a little before that about being honest about the fight, about being honest about the problem, which is that fascism is simply appealing.
To young men.
Like, not only does it intentionally seek out young men, like it appeals to them, like the verb, but it is appealing to them because it talks about the world in a way that they can understand, you know?
Antisemitism is the socialism of fools, right?
As the man said.
And there's a reason that it works.
This is a propaganda tool that has worked for over a century, well over a century, centuries.
And when it comes to young men and telling them about the world that they have been born into, especially young cis heterosexual white men or men who are belonging to whatever the majoritarian ethnic religious group that is in their country,
you know, so in South Asia, this is Hindus.
In the United States, it's primarily Protestants, although radical Catholics as well, you know, depending on where you are, it differs.
But when you talk to the
Yes, in fact, yes, what the left wants.
Yeah. Yeah.
excuse me?
Like, I haven't gotten anything and you're going to take it from me?
Fascism comes to that young man and says, that's right, they're taking it from you.
Who are they?
Well, it's communists and Jewish people and black people and women, everybody who is not like you.
You've never gotten your due, you deserve it, the world was better in the past, etc., etc., etc.
And it's a much easier pill to swallow than like,
Try really hard and maybe we can keep global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade.
But that's the struggle.
The only part of Florida will be underwater if we really, really work at it, you know?
Exactly. But that's, I mean, if that's what you're saying, then that's contemporary society being reasonably good.
I mean, contemporary society, I think, is...
I mean, another great moment in the book is where you point out that, you know, to young men, or at least to a lot of young men, this sort of transgressiveness that you find in fascist culture online, it's cool.
You know, for want of a better word, I think is what you write.
It's cool.
And, yeah, I think the reason that it's cool is because so often the gap between the sort of conventional pieties and the reality of society is so visible.
And we're not going to get this done by insisting upon the conventional parties and just say, don't see the gap.
No, they do see the gap.
We do have to face some of this stuff head on.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the issue with the fact that fascism is just cool and popular is one of the biggest problems in trying to take a young man off of that ramp, because if you prohibit it, it just becomes cooler.
In the same way that don't-do-drugs programs often result in kids doing more drugs, or scared-straight programs end up in higher incarceration rates, which is something that I learned when doing research for this book.
Or anti-gay programs, where you put a bunch of gay kids in it.
You put a bunch of gay kids in a room together and you force them to be straight and what happens overnight is not what you would expect.
Exactly. It's just come to me.
A lot of left approaches amount to a kind of secular left version of abstinence-only education when it comes to fascism.
That's true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The idea is that, like, well, all we have to do is tell them not to.
And, like, for adults, yeah.
I mean, like, that's...
I think that that is what you...
You know, like, if your uncle is saying some racist crap and you know that you're not going to get to him, you can either make a boundary and say, like, hey, I don't want to talk to you anymore.
Or you can make a different boundary and say, hey, I don't want to talk to you about this anymore.
And, like, you can leave it at that.
But when it's a child, I believe that adults are morally obligated to help them not become Nazis.
And just telling them what not to do, like, you remember when you were a kid, you loved doing stuff you weren't supposed to do.
So instead, well, I was a goody two-shoes, so that didn't really apply to me.
But lots of kids, right?
That's the big challenge, is like, how do you make this something that they know is bad and wrong, but which doesn't have the allure of things that are bad and wrong?
Like the allure of the transgressive, which is another big component of it.
They know that it's something that everybody who has power over them doesn't like.
And that is simply appealing to a lot of teenagers, adolescents.
Yeah, that leads me on to another thing that I really appreciate about the book is the fact that it faces head-on what could be seen as a disjunction between the advice that it's giving specifically to people working with young men and what you might call,
I suppose, the wider social tactics for the adult world.
There's a bit where you talk about the phrase, It's not my job to educate you.
And you say, essentially, yeah, I agree with that.
I mean, I might be mischaracterizing you, if I am, put me right.
But you say, essentially, I agree with that in the public adult context.
But what we're dealing with here, I mean, talk a little bit about that difference between tackling these things on that wider social adult level and tackling them in what I think is the key distinction you make on the private one-to-one family level.
Yeah, that was the aha moment.
That was the answer that I needed to write the book to understand, at least to understand my perspective on it, was that if you want to stop fascism in public, there are a series of tactics that you might follow, and there's lots of books and guides and historical examples of how to do that,
right? But when you want to fight fascism in the private world, the rules are different, you know?
You're not talking about social aggregates.
You're not talking about political messaging.
You're talking about a person that you know intimately or who you're related to or who you have an ongoing relationship or situation with or who you are dependent on or who is dependent on you.
And so in the public sphere, fascism is a political problem.
Private sphere, fascism is not just a political problem.
It's a personal problem.
And you have to sort of treat it that way.
And, yeah, when you mentioned the, like, you know, it's not my job to educate you about my oppression, or it's not my job to educate you about what you are doing that is hurting me, I think that that's perfectly valid.
You know, like, it is certainly not the job of any given oppressed person to educate their oppressors about what is going on.
That's in the public sphere, though.
In the private sphere, if you know someone, like, who else is going to tell them?
It might suck that you have to, but who else will?
And given what is happening in the world, we're just going to have to step up and do a lot of uncomfortable, difficult stuff.
I know that me saying this from my subject position, I'm a cisgendered white guy in the United States, that means that there are certain aspects of that that I don't have to deal with.
But at the same time, it's like...
People are going to have to have these conversations with these young men.
People that I believe that they could credibly be, you know, asked to listen to are the people that they're already listening to about stuff.
That's just, that's what we got.
I mean, to the degree that they are still listening to, right?
Yeah, exactly.
You know, that's the thing.
The deeper they get into it, the less they're going to listen to you at all.
Yeah, exactly.
And so it's like, yes, it is unjust that people who are affected by this rhetoric might It might be necessary for them to do some of this educating, to provide some of this empathy, but I literally don't think there's an alternative.
We don't have a state anti-fascist propaganda regime.
We're not going to have it.
I don't think definitionally that can exist, honestly.
Probably not.
One of the things that I like both about the book and about your podcast is something that I'm very bad at, which is covering fascism in the rest of the world.
And that's because I'm like, look, I'm a horse with the blinders on.
I look at this one thing that I know really, really well.
And it's not that the rest isn't important, it's just that somebody else's job.
And you do that other work.
You do look at fascism around the world and you include many examples in the book from parties in India, from parties in the UK, from parties in Germany and Italy, Brazil.
But also in your podcast, you're often covering not just kind of USDA and fascism, but fascism around the world.
I'm wondering if you would speak a little bit to that and kind of what your perspective is on that and, you know, just why.
I don't have to ask why, but you know what I mean.
Oh, totally.
Yeah, I mean, so in my PhD, I studied fascism in right-wing political movements, some of which are fascists and some of which were not particularly fascist or not quite fascist.
My PhD was about extreme right-wing organizations in South America, so Chile, Argentina, Brazil.
But these people are international, just like fascists, just like the right-wing today.
And so they were connected with all these guys in Europe, in the United States primarily, but also with anti-communist organizations in Taiwan or Japan or South Korea.
And so I think that the way that I understand the problem, it just is a global way that I understand the problem.
And so sometimes this means that my apology centrally is usually that I don't I know about that many trees, but I can't tell you about the forest.
And it's a different thing than the kind of expertise that you have and the kind of expertise that the two of your podcasts provides.
Instead of a deep dive, it is more of a like, hey, here's the lay of the land, encouraging you to find and go into resources, sources that are about your particular country or your particular worry.
Or the particular thing that your kid is into, because that was one of the other challenges when writing the book.
I started drafting this book in 2022.
I knew that I couldn't be like, hey, here are the big bad YouTubers now.
Because I'd be like, well, by the time this book is published, no kid is going to be caught dead watching those guys, right?
Andrew Tate has had some more legs.
But I knew that that wouldn't be the case.
And so one example of that is PewDiePie, I mentioned in the book.
It's like somebody who was a big name, you know, I don't know, like five, seven years ago, that at this point is like the kids today who are watching YouTubers and getting weird, transgressive, extremist content on it.
They might not know who he is, or they think about him as some sort of like grandpa influencer, you know?
That's my dad's influencer, thank you.
I mean, it might literally be.
It might be, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely.
But yeah, the global perspective thing, I just simply think it's the only way to think about it, especially when, if we're talking about European examples of fascism, like Giorgio Maloney's Italian movement, that is deeply involved with other European right-wing movements.
The United States is looking at Hungary, it's looking at Argentina.
Where does Millet look?
You know, he looks at Austrian economists and, you know, like the Chicago boys and stuff, right?
Right. Like, these people have a global movement, and I think that, I think I wanted to study the right wing globally because I came into the academy, I came into university to get a PhD, and I saw that there wasn't the same amount of rigor applied to the extreme right wing that has been applied to the left over the last 50 years.
Over the last 50 years, since the 60s, there's been an extremely large and very wonderful amount of scholarship about leftist ideas and organizing.
And those are really beautiful books and a lot of really wonderful careers have come out of that.
But there just isn't the same amount of attention given to the bad guys, right?
And that was what motivated me.
I wanted to treat them as the terrifyingly legitimate objects of study that they are.
And then this book was an attempt to translate that into something that was popularly useful.
Yeah, no, I agree.
A 400-page treatise on Argentine fascists in the 1940s is probably not going to be as effective as your book is.
Although that might be the next book, maybe.
Yeah, well, you know, and I will read it for sure.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense to me.
I was listening to the political cesspool this morning before I, before I picked up your book.
I don't know how familiar you are with that, with that podcast, but that's a Southern nationalist podcast.
We actually covered it in like episode eight or something like that, like way, way early in this podcast, we covered it.
But it's, it's a weekly listen for me.
Usually I do it on Sundays, but lately I've been letting it slide and just doing it whenever I get around to it.
But every March they do a March, what they call the March around the world series is actually a radio program broadcast out of Memphis.
This guy named James Edwards, who...
worked for the Ron Paul campaign back in the 2000 Ron Paul campaign.
And eventually found this radio show.
they've now been running for 20 years.
Oh my God.
But they do a, and it's like a Southern nationalist, like a very like pro Confederate show, but they definitely have, you know, they do some, they do a little bit of Holocaust and all.
They tend to like shy away from that most of the times of like the, the anti-Semitic stuff, but you know, the last year or two, they've really been embracing it more and more and not, you know, not doing the wink, wink, nudge, nudge on it, but just talking about like,
Yeah. Oh,
yeah. They're very enthused by what's happening here under Trump right now.
It's a huge deal.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, people are excited.
And the unfortunate truth is that they have every reason to be excited.
Oh, yeah.
First of all, I wanted to thank you both for having me on.
It's always lovely talking to both of you, despite the subject matter.
Yeah, so the book is coming out with Rutledge Press, so you can get it at the Rutledge website.
If you are in the United States or the UK, you can also check in with a local bookstore and ask them to order it for you.
It is on Amazon, but don't order it on Amazon.
Just get it from Rutledge straight away.
If you are in the United States, you could also ask your local library to buy a copy and have it there.
And also, I want to say that if you are a member of a parenting group, like a PTA or something like that, And you are interested in having me talk about the book, I would be glad to.
You can reach me at howtotalktoyoursonaboutfascism at gmail.com.
And my podcast, 15 Minutes of Fascism, is wherever you listen to podcasts, so you can just Google that, and it'll come up.
It's a really great listen because it is like quick bites.
It's like bullet points, you know, for a while.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's the idea, is that it's something that I...
You know, this book is a short book because it's a parenting book, essentially, and parents don't have a huge amount of time to read books.
And when I was first making this podcast, I was like, man, the purpose of this podcast is so that I don't talk the ear off of, you know, like a partner or a friend.
And so I was like, okay, let me just dump it all in 15 minutes.
And everybody's got 15 minutes for fascism, right?
Well, it's a good concept and it works well.
I listen to it regularly.
Thank you.
Yeah. Podcast, highly recommended.
And the book is highly recommended as well.
How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism by Craig A. Johnson from Rutledge Press.
I really do strongly recommend it.
It's short, but it's packed with information.
It's very informative.
It's very accessible.
It's a great sort of primer for anybody, really, but particularly with the advice, I think.
