Brad gives a preview of his new book by discussing how some of Trump's tactics and myths are comparable to what Hitler used to gain power in Germany. Brad is careful to point out that his comparison is just that - a comparison. He is not arguing that Trump and Hitler are identical. Rather, his argument is that Trump's Big Lie and the myth that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago was unconstitutional and illegal are resonant with the Stab-in-the-Back myths Hitler used in Germany to convince his followers that their country had been stolen from them and only he could return it to glory.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, our show's hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And I want to do something today I haven't done in quite a while, which is to do a solo episode.
And I actually want to give you a preview of my new book, Preparing for War, the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and what comes next.
The reason I wanted to do this episode is because this week, or actually this past week, I should say, President Biden gave a speech in which he declared that MAGA Nation and MAGA Republicans, including Donald Trump, are enemies of democracy, who do not respect the Constitution.
He made the case that you cannot be pro-insurrectionist and pro-democracy.
And he tried rhetorically to isolate MAGA Republicans from the rest of the country, in essence, to say that one cannot be part of this group of people, this group of this movement, and also be for the American Republic.
Now, this also came on the heels of Biden giving a speech on August 25th, in which he basically said, well, he explicitly said that the MAGA movement and Trump's followers are semi-fascist.
That raised quite a stir.
People have been talking about it, as we discussed on the Weekly Roundup this week.
Governor Sununu of New Hampshire asked for an apology from Joe Biden, and so on.
One of the things that has caught my eye over the last couple days is that there have been really prominent media figures who have kind of got on the both sides train.
They've asked Biden representatives, Biden staffers, and other Democrats whether or not Biden's using the word fascism and giving the speech that he gave at Independence Hall where he explicitly named MAGA Nation as an enemy of American democracy.
If this was a good idea, if this was going to bring unity, if this was going to be going too far.
One notable example of this is Martha Raddatz of ABC, who asked whether or not Biden's use of the term semi-fascism and some of his lines from the speech at Independence Hall Categorized as hate speech.
And so you can see there, right, on a legacy network with an overwhelmingly influential journalist like Martha Raddatz, who often is a debate moderator and other things, saying that perhaps Biden had ventured into hate speech by claiming that this movement is semi-fascist.
Now, there's some really laughable things about this that we could spend our time on.
One of them is the fact that Donald Trump called Democrats fascists going back a couple years ago.
Nobody noticed.
Nobody seemed to take an eye to it.
Nobody asked if that was hate speech.
There was no nothing.
It was just run-of-the-mill Donald Trump discourse that had all been but forgotten except for Matthew Sheffield of Flux and Some other people basically shared the clip on Twitter and it got picked up and people kind of realized that Trump's been calling Democrats and others fascists for a long time.
The other thing that I think is more concerning to me, though, is that We discussed on Friday in the Weekly Roundup that, you know, when we think about fascism, we don't think about something that A, happens in an instant, or B, happens from the outside.
That we talked about how fascism takes place over time, and it's instituted over time, and it's often instituted using the very levers of democracy, such that you look up after 5 or 10 or 15 years, And all of a sudden, all of the democratic processes and institutions have been eroded, and you're left with a fascist leader who is, in essence, the rule of law.
The second thing we discussed is that when fascism is instituted, it uses the homegrown symbols of a country.
When it happened in Germany or Italy, it used mythology and symbols and events to garner support.
As it's happening here, and we discussed this Friday as well, It's drawing on the most kind of Americana of symbols that one can think of, talking about the American flag and defending American freedoms, the border, the military.
The idea is to make the MAGA movement the most American thing that could have ever been.
And then to divide everybody between patriots with the MAGA side and everyone else who supposedly hates the country and is a communist and a Marxist and wants to destroy the United States as we know it and blah blah blah blah blah.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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