Fascism is Our New Normal II: Terribly and Terrifyingly Ordinary
Brad draws on the work of Hannah Arendt to explain how fascism relies on ordinary people operating within a cruel system. He uses two clips - one from Fox News and the other from a right-wing show - to reveal how fascist thought has creeped into our political stream, cultivating ordinary people into a totalitarian mindset.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Back today with an episode on fascism as our new normal.
I talked about this two weeks ago, and I want to keep talking about it.
In fact, I'm going to keep talking about it for the next month or more because I think It's just that important.
So if you're watching on YouTube, you can see that I literally have a baby strapped to my chest.
If you're listening on your podcast feed, you might hear some baby snores or groans because I have a three week old and that three week old is strapped to my chest and taking a nap.
So there you go.
Let's talk about fascism as our new normal.
One of the things that I just really am scared of, if I'm really honest with you all, is the fact that over the last Three or four years, certainly the Trump era.
But certainly since January 6th, I feel like we've seen a normalization of fascist rhetoric.
And I talked about this two weeks ago.
I talked about the word normalization and what's normal.
Talked about what that meant and how the normalization of fascism has happened over these years.
I want to give two examples today, and I want to do so in order to I just kind of keep highlighting this point and the theme for today is going to be the ordinary.
If two weeks ago the theme was normalization, this week our theme is going to be the ordinary.
Because here's the thesis for today.
The thesis is that evil in general, but fascism in particular, relies on the ordinary, relies on ordinary people who just want to go about their lives and not think too much about politics or the civic square.
It also just relies on people who are ordinary.
And by that, I don't mean anything slight.
I'm not trying to say that some people are extraordinary and some people are ordinary and whatever else.
I don't care about any of that.
What I mean by fascism relying on ordinary people is I mean that it relies not on supervillains.
There are those.
And we could name them.
We could talk about them.
There are people who are really, really nefarious.
People who wake up in the morning with evil intentions.
There's no doubt.
I have no doubt in my mind.
But there's way more ordinary people who are not supervillains.
And In order for fascism to take root, in order for us to have a situation where we are in a place where we have rhetoric coming from a totalitarian leader who is villainizing their enemies, who is dehumanizing groups of people, who is asking for totalitarian submission and surrender from the public, I could go on and on about what fascism is and what it requires, but I want to stick to this idea.
Fascism requires ordinary people.
And it does so because not everyone is a supervillain.
Most of us are not.
can't be trusted at any turn.
I could go on and on about what fascism is and what it requires, but I wanna stick to this idea.
Fascism requires ordinary people.
And it does so because not everyone is a super villain.
Most of us are not extraordinary.
That's not a slight.
That's not some sort of like, you know, negative thing.
A lot of us are just people who have goals we want to accomplish, careers we want to carry on, babies we want to raise, loved ones we want to spend time with, experiences we want to be able to cross off our list before we die, and so on and so forth.
What fascism does is it asks ordinary people to be part of a larger system.
A system that demonizes and villainizes certain leaders and says that they're worthy of death.
A system that looks at certain groups of people and says they're not actually human and they deserve to be expelled or to die in mass events.
And it says to the ordinary person, that makes sense.
You'll go along with that.
And it happens over time.
As I mentioned two weeks ago, it becomes normalized.
It becomes something that when the former president says that a former Joint Chiefs of Staff or his political opponent should be killed or hung or indicted, that we just get used to it.
We become numb to it.
Okay?
There's a famous book out there by the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
And Hannah Arendt is a Jewish-German philosopher who wrote in the 20th century.
Some of you will be familiar with Hannah Arendt.
And she went to cover one of the trials in Jerusalem, the Nuremberg Trials, after the Holocaust.
And she was in Israel.
Actually, I'm not sure if she was in Jerusalem.
I'll have to look that up.
Anyway, I apologize.
I don't have that in front of me.
I don't want to get that wrong.
But she was in Israel covering a trial of a man named Adolf Eichmann, and it was one of the most famous trials of the latter half of the 20th century.
She was asked to cover this as a journalist, and she went and The conclusion she took away from that trial is one that has been debated ever since and it's actually quite fascinating, okay?
She says that, let me read this, the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.
So she's covering this man who is accused of heinous crimes as part of the Nazi regime.
A man who oversaw, uh, bureaucratically the organization of Jews into camps and eventually that led to their, uh, their mass death.
Eichmann, she says, was not sadistic or perverted.
He was neither of those things.
He was terribly and terrifyingly normal.
Eichmann, for our end, was part of a system that had become normalized, and he was just doing his job as part of that system.
He's a good citizen, a good worker, a good German, whatever.
He was just going along with what was normal.
Now, philosophers and others have debated all of this, and there's a lot of different opinions out there, but here's the thing for me today.
Eichmann is terribly and terrifyingly normal, and yet he was able to participate in an extraordinarily evil regime.
That is what scares me about fascism in the United States, is that there are so many folks who are terribly and terrifyingly normal, and yet they are able, by way of cultivation through news media, through their churches, through their communities, to become part of a system, a culture, a regime that is truly and extraordinarily evil, can be violent,
That can be destructive.
That can be dehumanizing.
I want to play for you a clip of Greg Gutfield.
Gutfield, to me, is somebody who's quite normal.
He's on Fox News.
He's supposed to be one of the kind of funny figures on Fox News.
Somebody who provides comedic relief as well as analysis of contemporary events.
And Gutfield is somebody who I mentioned a couple weeks ago, but I just want to play the clip.
I'm actually just going to let you listen to it, and then I'll talk about it.
But only certain people get criminal mulligans, and January 6th protesters, they don't get criminal mulligans, and here's why.
They're the oppressor, right?
So the oppressed get criminal mulligans.
The people that are complaining, like us, we're actually oppressors, and we're losing power, so that's why we're upset.
I just got a job at MSNBC.
So let's compare the rights between criminals and victims.
Okay, the criminals, they get a mulligan.
They get to steal up to $900 worth of stuff.
They can loiter, sleep, and shoot up in public areas, including playgrounds.
They can loot and burn and call it social justice.
They can pile up dozens of arrests.
And never do time.
Meanwhile, what about us?
Well, we have to change our lives to accommodate risk wherever we go.
We have to move out of cities for the sake of the safety of our families and our own safety.
That's what's happening.
We're being driven out of cities by the oppressed.
So I return to my imperfect analogy from yesterday.
We had a war over slavery.
We knew slavery was inhumane and immoral, but somehow we couldn't solve slavery peacefully.
It was an evil.
But one side refused to acknowledge that it was evil because it was too big of an admission for them to make.
Doesn't that feel that way now?
That this defiant refusal to reverse this decline argues against the survival of a country.
What does that leave you with?
It leaves you with, you need to make war to bring peace, because you have a side that cannot change, because then that means an admission that their beliefs have been corrupt all the time.
So in a way, you have to force them to surrender.
Or we could make love, not war.
Ah, I tried that once.
Or we have an election.
I had to go to a doctor.
No, elections don't work.
We know that.
We know they don't work.
Look what we have!
Look what we have!
We had a moderate president, and we have crime exploding everywhere.
We had a Democrat president promise that he was going to be moderate, promise that he was going to unite the country, and now we have a terrible education system, we have no border, we have crime everywhere.
Every facet of society is in peril and in chaos because our elections don't matter.
No, elections do matter.
We don't need to go to Warfort.
We go to the election booth and vote the people out who don't do the thing.
So this clip is from a couple weeks ago.
And I think this is one of those terribly and terrifyingly normal clips that now is just part of Fox News, Newsmax, The Daily Wire.
I mean, we could go on the dozens of places where you might hear this.
And the tens of millions of Americans who would hear it, listen to it at night on the way home from work in front of the television while eating their dinner, whatever, and just say, yeah, I agree with that.
So Gutfield says, OK, that he makes this whole comparison with the Civil War and slavery, and that's a whole I could talk for three hours about it.
OK, I'm not going to I'm not going to do it.
But he basically says, look, We have to leave, uh, cities.
He's talking about conservatives.
I think he's, if we gave him true serum, he'd talk about white people, middle-class people, Christian people, God-fearing people, whatever.
We're driven out of cities by the oppressed.
Okay.
And he says, look, you know, if you look at the civil war, there was two sides and it just came to the fact that they had to fight.
One side would not admit this.
The other side would not admit that.
So what, you know what they had to do?
They had to fight.
And here's the part that gets me about this whole thing.
We could talk about the Civil War.
I mean, this whole rant he gives, we could break it down for three hours.
I don't want to.
Here's what I want to break down.
He says, it was an evil, but one side refused to acknowledge it was evil because it was too big of an admission for them to make.
Doesn't it feel that way now?
That this defiant refusal to reverse this decline argues against the survival of a country.
So he's saying that there is a group of people in cities, people that want chaos and destruction, FIFA, and people who break into stores and do all kinds of stuff.
And he's like, look, they will not, they will not admit that there's an evil taking over the United States.
So guess what?
It feels like we just need a war.
Okay.
It feels like we need a war.
All right, now his like co-host or whatever, they try to temper him.
They try to say, well, you know what we need is elections, okay?
We should have elections, not war.
And Gutfield says something, friends, I'm sorry.
This should scare you because it's coming on Fox News.
It's not like... It's on a channel that tens of millions of people watch every night.
It might be the most watched, depends on what night, but it's often the most watched news source, quote unquote, news source in the country.
And he says, elections don't work.
They don't work.
Elections don't work.
We know that.
We know they don't work.
And others on the panel say they do work.
Okay.
And here's what Gutfield says.
Look, we have a, we had a moderate president.
We have a crime exploding everywhere.
We had a Democrat president promise that he was going to moderate, promise he was going to unite the country.
Now we have a terrible education system.
We have no border.
We have crime everywhere.
Every facet of society is in peril and in chaos because our elections don't matter.
I want to come back to Hannah Arendt right now, because Hannah Arendt said in another of her works, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she says this.
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.
Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
Friends, I bring that quote into this because it seems to me that the end of the end goal, I should say, of media like Fox News, like Newsmax, the Daily Wire and so many other outlets, the constant, constant, constant fear mongering, the never endering, excuse me, never ending creation of fear and anxiety.
It does have a goal.
You might say, well, what's the point?
Do they just want people to watch?
Yes, they do.
They just want ratings?
Sure.
Do they just want advertising dollars?
Yes.
But friends, if you get to this place, and Gutfield said it out loud, if you get to this place, where you think we have no border, our education system is completely, absolutely broken, Are there problems in our education system?
Totally.
I'm happy to talk about those.
I have family members who teach public school.
I have so many friends who teach public school or principals in public schools.
I'm happy to talk about education.
But to say that it's just absolutely, 100%, totally, completely collapsed?
No, it's not.
But here's Gottfield saying, we have no border.
We have no education.
You can't go to Seattle.
You can't go walk down the street in San Francisco because it's so bad that you'll just get overrun by violence and crime and looting.
He is saying out loud this, the country is so bad.
It is in such crisis that elections won't even work.
You know what he's saying?
You know when somebody says elections work or they don't work?
You know what they're telling you?
Let me translate it for you.
They're saying democracy doesn't work.
If I tell you, hey, in order to help change this country, reform this country, improve this country, let's have elections.
And you say elections don't work.
We need something else.
We need a war?
We need a different kind of government.
We need a different kind of system.
You know what you're saying to me?
Democracy doesn't work.
I've given up on the voice of the people, the will of the people.
I've given up on a more perfect union.
I don't think democracy is the answer.
That's what he's saying.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
Evil, terrifyingly, and terribly normal.
Gutfield is normal.
Gutfield is not extraordinary.
He's on TV.
And you know what?
He's a talking head.
And he's like the epitome of a talking head.
If you watch Gutfield day in and day out, he is not a genius.
He is not brilliant.
He does not have seven degrees or a Nobel laureate... Nobel Prize, excuse me.
He's not someone who ever blows you away with his insight.
You don't ever walk away from his speeches going, wow, that's a different kind of human.
That's a human who just thinks in a way that I don't even comprehend.
Y'all ever have that kind of situation?
You walk away from a performance or a book reading or a concert or something, and you just think, yeah, that's different.
That's just not normal.
That's extraordinary.
I had to play a lot of pickup basketball after in college and grad school.
And there was a couple of times I was on the court with NBA players.
And, you know, I'm a pretty normal basketball player.
When I was playing in high school, I had a couple of Division III colleges ask me if I wanted to play for them.
So, you know, was I good?
I was, yeah, good enough, I guess, for them to ask.
Was I extraordinary?
No.
No one from UCLA or any big school was calling me, right?
But you know, you play enough basketball, you hang out, you're in the right spot.
Every once in a while, you're at a gym and some people who are extraordinary show up.
And lo and behold, you're like, oh my God, I'm in a game with somebody who is in the NBA or is on their way to the NBA.
Very scary.
And the thing I took away, if you were my friend after that game and you asked me about it, you know what I would tell you?
I'd say, it was like being on the court with someone who's like a different species because they're so extraordinary.
Like they're so different.
Athletically, and in terms of the way they can make their body move.
It felt like being on the court with someone who's not quantitatively better.
Like, hey, I'm a three, they're a nine.
It felt like they're just qualitatively different than me.
It just felt like they were extraordinary, right?
Greg Gutfield is not that guy.
He is terribly and terrifyingly normal.
If he was fired today, Fox News could find one million Greg Gutfields to put in his place.
It's not that hard.
And yet Greg Gutfield's on the TV, a talking head, just saying, you know, I don't think democracy works.
We need a war.
That is how fascism becomes normalized.
And it's how it becomes ordinary.
It's in the water and it shapes and it feeds and it nourishes ordinary people to think and believe and act in a certain way.
Now, the next thing I want to touch on is another clip.
And I think it goes along today with everything I'm saying about fascism being normal and fascism being ordinary.
This is from this is a clip from Mike Davis.
Mike Davis is speaking.
Mike Davis is part of the Article Three Project.
Mike Davis was once a clerk for Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court Justice.
Let me read you some of Mike Davis's bio.
The former chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley.
All right.
That's pretty good.
He has worked to reign in big tech along with the unsilenced majority, an organization dedicated to opposing cancel culture and fighting against the woke mob and their enablers.
So he worked for Chuck Grassley.
He oversaw the floor votes for 278 nominees, including the confirmations of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the record number of circuit judges confirmed during President Trump's first two years in office.
So friends, Mike Davis is a guy.
Whose career has been spent behind the scenes helping judges get confirmed, right?
Helping people like Chuck Grassley and Neil Gorsuch and others function as levers in the government.
He's somebody who's not out in front.
He's not Ted Cruz.
He's not on your TV all the time.
Rand Paul or someone like that.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Kristi Noem.
This is someone behind the scenes.
You wouldn't rec- If you walked by him today, except for a few of you, you wouldn't know who he was.
If I showed you a picture, you wouldn't know if it was him or not.
So is he extraordinary?
I don't know.
I mean, he's at a pretty, he's achieved a lot.
He's, he's pretty accomplished.
He's, he's probably gotten paid pretty well and he's, he's pretty influential, but he's normal in the sense that it's not like he's someone you recognize.
You don't know his name.
You probably didn't know his name before I said it.
Probably didn't know his organization before I said it.
Pretty normal, pretty ordinary.
I mean, you know, accomplished, but not extraordinary.
All right, let me play you the clip of what he says he wants to do and what he envisions happening, what he hopes could happen if there was another Trump term.
OK, so let me play you what he said.
Mike, I've never called for lava to rain down from the heavens, but maybe upon Washington, D.C., would you be that sweet, red-hot lava for us?
I've never been called sweet, and you call me sweet ginger, so I think I've been.
But during my three-week reign of terror as Trump Acting Attorney General, before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon, I will rain hell on Washington, D.C.
We've talked about this, Ben.
I have five lists ready to go and they're growing.
List number one, we're going to fire.
We're going to fire a lot of people in the executive branch of the deep state.
Number two, we're going to indict.
We're going to indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball sleazeball Biden except for the five-year-old granddaughter who they refused to acknowledge for five years until the political pressure got to Joe Biden.
Number three, we're going to deport.
We're going to deport a lot of people.
10 million people in growing.
Anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents.
We're going to put kids in cages.
It's going to be glorious.
We're going to detain a lot of people in the D.C.
Gulag and Gitmo.
And list number five, I'm going to recommend a lot of pardons.
Every January 6th defendant is going to get a pardon, especially my hero Horn Man.
He is definitely at the top of the pardon list.
All right.
Think about what he said first.
He said, I have lists.
I have five lists.
Now, I don't want to overstate this and I don't want to be too hyperbolic.
We all have lists, lists of things to do, things we got to get done, blah, blah, blah.
All right.
That's fine.
These are lists of people.
And the lists are of people that he wants to either prosecute or indict.
Another list is people he wants to fire.
Another is people that he wants to deport.
The list is all about retribution, violence, revenge.
He wants to clear away the federal government.
We've talked about this on the show so many times.
Project 2025.
If there is a second Trump term, the goal is to gut the federal government such that unless you're a Trump loyalist, you are fired.
You cannot exist there.
They want to weaken democracy, gut democracy from within.
They want to take out the center of the government.
All of the people who make it happen, the ordinary people, I've been talking about it all day.
And they want to put in people that will be loyal to Trump.
Then he says, I have lists, people that I want to fire, people that I want to, all the Bidens, the James Bidens and the Joseph Bidens and the Hunter Bidens and all the others.
Like I want to indict the whole family.
Okay, sure.
I mean, I'm not going to spend three hours on the conspiracy theories about the Biden family and why they think they need to indict Joe Biden and everyone.
I'm not going to do it.
I'm just going to focus a couple more minutes here on the last thing.
We're going to deport a lot of people.
10 million people and growing.
Anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents.
We're going to put kids in cages.
It's going to be glorious.
Friends, I don't know how that became normal.
I don't know how that became something you can say and have a career.
Somebody saying, I want to put kids in cages and it's going to be glorious.
That is where we are.
When you hear me talk about the normalization, that's what I mean.
Now, again, I don't think Jason Campbell is extraordinary.
Yeah, he's accomplished.
He's done some stuff.
He's had a career.
He's been in rooms you and I haven't been in, right?
He's been in rooms at the Supreme Court or the Senate or other places.
We haven't been in those rooms.
I'll admit it.
He's been around some pretty important people.
Fair enough.
But now he's the head of this Article 3 project.
He's not somebody you would recognize.
None of you listening know what he looks like.
None of you knew who he was.
I mean, maybe one or two of you did before I started talking about him.
And he's repeating something that has just become normalized in our country.
Here's an ordinary guy who's like repeating things that are, uh, just normal in the United States.
We're going to deport a lot of people.
We're going to put kids in cages.
It's going to be glorious.
Friends, when Donald Trump walked, he didn't walk, when he came down that escalator in 2015 and started his presidential campaign, when he announced his presidency eight years ago, this was not something you could say.
And yet here he got down the elevator or the escalator and Trump says, they're not sending their best Mexicans, they're this, they're that.
And he said all kinds of really terrible things.
And from that moment till now, eight years later, we're at a place where someone like Mike Davis can say, I want to put children in cages.
And it's not like, Hey, there's no solemnity.
There's no regret.
There's no, like, I don't want to, but we have to.
You ever seen like a talk, like a head of an organization, a principal or a president or a founder say, I don't want to do this, but we have to, it doesn't make me happy.
But I have to fire all these people or I have to blah, blah, blah.
He says, we're going to put kids in cages.
It's going to be glorious.
And you can say, he's kidding.
It doesn't matter.
This is how the normal becomes the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of the ordinary.
Let me say it again.
This is how the normal or the normalized when fascism is normalized, it becomes the water That the ordinary drink and he's just repeating things.
That are in the water.
He's repeating things.
He's not new.
He's not original.
These are ideas that are floating around and he is bringing them to light.
All right, y'all.
I want to close today with two more quotes from Hannah Arendt.
Here's one.
The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity.
What convinces masses are not facts and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part.
Eight years ago, friends, Trump started his presidential campaign by dehumanizing people from Mexico.
Years later, this man gets on and says, Mike Davis says, we're going to put kids in cages.
It's going to be glorious.
He's not trying to persuade.
He's not presenting facts.
He's not telling you why we need to do it.
He's not saying here are the reasons we just absolutely can't avoid doing it.
He's saying over and over and over again, you've heard the message and we're just going to do it.
It's just normal.
That's what has to happen.
It will happen, right?
Hannah Arendt says it.
It's not about persuasion.
It's about the consistency of the system.
Friends, I'll tell you what, when I was young, I hated routine.
Y'all like this?
Some of you out there might still be like this, but when I was a kid, if you had to ask like young, just unbearable me, like unbearable 15-year-old, 16-year-old me, you know what the thing I thought was the worst about being an adult?
Routine.
I thought, you know, if you have a routine, life's boring.
Like, how could you ever want a routine?
You need novelty.
You need new adventures, right?
You need to change and grow and, and never stop exploring, right?
And I'm, I'm, I, you know, I've done some of that in my life, traveled all over, lived all over.
That's been great.
All right.
Now I'm old.
I'm in my forties.
Got a baby strapped to my chest while I'm doing this podcast.
And you know what I really love now?
Routine.
Cause I'm old.
And when I wake up in the morning, I want my toothbrush to be where it's supposed to be.
I want to do things.
The same way every day because there's no surprise and I have the things that I need.
I want to go throughout the day and have everything in place.
I don't want to go searching the house because I don't know where something is or blah blah blah, right?
You know when you move to a new place, one of the things that get disrupted is your routine.
Where do I go to the grocery store?
What about the gas station?
What about the, you know, blah blah blah, right?
And there's something there that we all want.
We all want to kind of have a life that makes sense.
Right.
But, you know.
That can also lead us to what she's talking about here, Hannah Arendt.
The consistency of the system.
If you just keep going with the system day in day out, the fear mongering we heard from Greg Gutfield, the fear mongering we hear on right wing media all day, every day.
And then just never stopping saying, we're going to put kids in cages.
We're going to deport all these terrible, infectious, whatever immigrants and people from other places who are ruining.
You just keep saying it.
It eventually becomes real.
Does it become a fact?
No, but it becomes real.
It becomes real to the masses.
And they just start to say, that's real.
That's true.
That's it.
It's not a fact.
It's not verified, but it becomes real.
All right, here's one more quote to finish for today, and it comes back to everything I said about ordinary people and the ordinary ways that fascism takes root.
Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them.
But few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before the misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with a folded arms, to dare or know when a yes is demanded.
We all know this.
We all know this from being kids, from being teenagers.
It's so easy to follow the crowd.
But that's what happens over and over and over.
In real life, in adult life, in political life.
It's so hard to resist the crowd.
Yes, you might stand up to the monarchs, refuse to bow down before the king who says, you know, whatever.
But it's really hard to stand up alone before misguided masses.
And what I fear is that normalization and ordinary people being fed by fascist rhetoric is going to lead us to a place where we are prepared.
Where we are prepared for totalitarian government.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who's a great scholar and commentator said, that is what we are being prepared for.
When you hear Gutfield say, elections don't work.
When you hear someone say, we're going to deport tens of millions of people.
We're being prepared for the normalcy of when those things happen.
When they happen, you won't be shocked.
When they happen, you won't be like, I can't believe it.
We can't, we have to do something.
It'll just be normal.
It'll just be part of the fabric of what you thought was coming.
It'll be something that was always possible.
It's like, well, yeah, it could always happen.
It's happening now.
So I guess here we are.
That's why I'm spotlighting fascism.
That's why I'm going to keep talking about it for the next month or so, because this is where we are as a country, and I'm not going to take my eye off of that.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for, if you're on YouTube, hanging out with me and my little baby.
If you're on audio, you might've heard her.
A couple things dropping this week is On God's Campus, a new original show from Access Moody Media.
It explores the history of discrimination and marginalization on religious campuses across the country.
And it shows all the way from the racist roots of that discrimination to the current ways that it takes place and takes form against the LGBTQ community.
There's great interviews and audio here, and it really will rock you to your core.
On God's Campus is out tomorrow.
You can still listen to American Idols by Andrew Whitehead.
It's a really popular series, a lot of folks listening, and it might just be the best four part series out there for understanding Christian nationalism.
So you may say, Brad, I understand it.
I listen to this show.
I listen to so many shows about it.
Well, think about that friend who needs to know about it and say, if you could send one thing to them about Christian nationalism, I would say send them American Idols by Andrew Whitehead.
All right.
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We'll be back on Wednesday, that's in the code, and on Friday with the weekly roundup.
