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Brad converses with Anna Lind-Guzik, head of The Conversationalist. They discuss a wide range of pressing topics including the catastrophic state of the U.S. government, gender violence, authoritarianism, and global political dynamics. Guzik offers insights into how familial violence parallels the rise of authoritarian regimes, the U.S. political landscape, and the alarming alliance among Trump, Musk, and Putin. They also explore the role of American exceptionalism, the lack of accountability, and the failure of the Democratic leaders to effectively combat these challenges. The discussion underscores the urgent need for bold actions to address the ongoing crisis.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus and good to be with you on this Monday, joined by a first-time guest and that is Anna Lindguzik.
So Anna, thanks for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
I really love the name of the podcast.
It's hard to put on shirts, but we're working on it.
So you are...
You know, you're the head of The Conversationalist, which is a great outlet and have been a fan for some time.
You're also somebody who's on Blue Sky posting regularly.
And I got to your page probably a week ago and just started kind of looking at your post.
And I was like, oh my gosh, finally, somebody who sees these things like I see them.
And, you know, usually friends, if you listen to the show on Mondays, I interview guests.
I have like a whole agenda.
I've like read a book or something and I'm just like.
Ready to go.
This conversation is going to be a little more loose because I feel like I just wanted to call somebody who actually gets it, is like totally with me in terms of the catastrophe that we're facing in this country, the soft coup, the doge takeover, the overrunning of the Constitution, the executive branch taking the power of the purse away from Congress, the Senate Dems being useless.
I don't know.
We'll just pick some light topics.
Maybe like plans for spring travel.
I don't know.
We'll just get to some of our favorite tea.
We'll get to some things in a minute.
But let me start here, Anna.
You wrote a piece at The Conversationalist about the ways that we understand authoritarian leaders and governments and how a prism for understanding that might be familicide, the instances in which a man usually takes the life of his children and his wife and then himself.
And you write in the piece that studies on familicide say in almost every case, the man claims his family as property with the right to end their lives.
And you have this paragraph that I'm not going to lie, it's kind of like stuck with me.
And it's really about the ways that patriarchal entitlement motivates domestic violence and it motivates atrocities like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If I can't have you, nobody can.
And you've written on social media, you know, if you disobey me or I won't be controlled by you, then I'll just burn down the entire building with everybody in it.
Would you mind just helping us understand how and why familicide is a helpful prism for understanding authoritarian governments in the present moment?
Yeah, absolutely.
I firmly believe that gender violence and authoritarian state violence Differ as a matter of scale, not kind.
And it really speaks to control, the need to control, and what happens when you can't control someone or something, and this really destructive impulse.
And it's one that I think a lot of people are really unfamiliar with.
I think it's something that feels very unnatural to a lot of people, understandably so.
But what we're witnessing right now with...
This wholesale destruction of the administrative state in the United States.
One that was, you know, they published a manifesto about with Project 2025 that they've been very explicit about their goals, but people didn't really believe them because it felt like, why would you destroy something that's good and functioning?
And the answer is because they can and because they feel entitled to and because they think it will make them money.
So long as they are not hurt personally, they don't really care who else gets hurt in the process.
And I saw it with Putin invading Ukraine, which started, despite what Trump might say, because Ukraine had been considering trade deals with the European Union.
He wanted them to do a trade deal with Russia.
And the crisis devolved from there, and it ended up with an actual invasion that, again, a lot of people thought was never going to happen because it just felt so self-defeating.
And now we're seeing an explicit alliance between Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin.
And what I would argue is probably one of the biggest geopolitical realignments since World War II in terms of the way we've been treating our allies compared to how we are treating these other autocrats.
It's scary.
I don't know.
I'm very, very worried.
And weirdly enough, when I wrote that piece, I also wrote about Elon's destruction of Twitter because it seemed to me to be very much parallel to what was happening.
And now they're using the exact same playbook on the federal government.
It's bizarre to see it happen in real life.
But yeah, I wish more people understood that there are people out there who do violence because they can and because they can get away with it.
And so the lack of accountability is an enormous problem.
I think the thing that strikes me here is there's assumptions.
I think a lot of the legacy media has these assumptions of like, well, doesn't Trump want to have good approval ratings?
Or, you know, don't they care if they're hurting the people that voted for them?
And I think those assumptions need to be banished from...
From the ether.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I think Trump is a narcissist who likes to think of himself as universally popular, but he can do that through misinformation and echo chamber.
He doesn't need actual poll numbers and reality.
I want to get to Ukraine and Putin, but this follows on a day where Trump said, you know, he ended congestion pricing in New York and said, long live the king.
And that's one thing, and I'm happy to talk about that, and I think we probably should talk about the symbology there of the patriarchal head of the family who is a king, who is an authoritarian.
There have been so many on the American right who've referred to Trump as daddy recently, like daddy's home, which I know.
I can see one of your ears just almost disintegrated.
You threw up in your mouth a little bit.
I should have warned you I was going to say that.
But Tucker Carlson tweeted or whatever, daddy's home.
And so did Charlie Kirk.
And it just follows along everything you're saying.
When you think of him as the authoritarian dad, the familicide starts to really click.
Yeah, it does.
And he definitely sees us as his property that he can do with as he wishes.
When people talk about, well, doesn't he care about X, Y, and Z? No.
No.
He's never demonstrated any caring whatsoever.
His goal is to never be held accountable.
And every time any institution works in his favor, that doesn't create some sort of corresponding duty for him.
He is just glad to have gotten away with it.
And he...
I would say his goal, and I said this before he took office again, his goal is to never leave office again.
His goal the first time around was to not leave office.
That's why he committed a coup the first time.
And now we're experiencing a second one from within.
But no, he told voters during the campaign that they would never have to vote again if they voted for him this time, which is a pretty big clue.
That he's not planning to hold fair and free elections in the future.
It's one of the reasons I get very concerned whenever people talk about correcting this in two years or correcting this in four years because already we're a month in and the country's unrecognizable.
And so by two years from now, who knows?
It's not to say that we won't necessarily host elections or have elections, but what do they look like?
If already we're seeing people scared to do anything owing to death threats, threats of investigations, threats to lose their jobs, their lives, you name it, people are acting out of fear.
The chances of that improving are slim.
So, I don't know.
It's...
Well, you know, the day that Trump called himself king, he signed an executive order saying that he, as the president, has the sole ability to the law.
And, you know, you tweeted about having gone to Harvard.
You know, you have your JD from Harvard Law.
You went to law school with Will Scharf, who's kind of running the press conference and standing next to him as he was talking about this.
Would you just, you know, for me, I think the King comment is important.
It's not something I'm going to look away from.
It also seems to be a classic Trumpian move of like, he knows it's going to rile up everybody, including us.
And we're going to talk about it and so on.
The story of the executive order may be the more substantive story, just in terms of what it's going to do for our government and what it says about the way Trump views the executive branch and the structure of American democracy as a whole.
I'm just wondering if I could get your thoughts on that before we go to Putin, Trump, Ukraine, and so on.
I see what he's doing as a coup by the executive branch against both Congress and the courts.
And I find it very strange when people talk about a constitutional crisis using the future tense as if it's not already happening.
It's always like, but if this happens, then there will be a crisis.
And I think that speaks to the concern that actually that alarmism will, you know, that people will panic if they understand what's actually happening.
But it ends up people are not getting the actual story, which is that they are claiming the right to both decide what is law, decide how money is spent.
And those are both very explicitly things that first, you know, what is the law and what does the Constitution say?
That is very much the court's realm.
And how does our money get spent is very much Congress's realm.
And what scares me is that neither Congress nor the courts, well, certain judges, absolutely.
But the Supreme Court in particular has not really shown a sense of self-preservation when it comes to holding on to these powers.
The U.S. versus Trump case, the immunity case, I would call that a crisis in itself.
That that even came out is a problem.
And that there are, you know, a lot of steps along the way that got us here.
This is not something that happened overnight.
And so we've been watching this slide into authoritarianism for many, many years.
I'm not the first to point this out, but Obama's election broke a lot of the white gentleman's agreements between the government on how to behave and what the norms were.
And Republicans have behaved like an autocratic party since.
One really self-interested and unconcerned with accountability to voters.
Or any follow-through, but really about holding onto power.
And it's, to me, it's clearly white supremacy.
And the fact that this entire administration is staffed by a lot of open white supremacists is horrifying.
And I don't know.
I would love to see some sort of self-preservation instinct kick in, especially in Congress.
And I'll be curious to see if there are any ways to peel off any Republicans in the process.
But so far, it's not looking good.
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Well, we just had, in the hour before we started recording, we just had Kash Patel get confirmed as FBI director.
Susan Collins voted no.
However, you know, this comes on the heels of a story that...
That came out yesterday that GOP senators are scared of physical violence.
So Tom Tillis is a senator who cast the 50th vote for Hegseth, and he was warned by the FBI of credible death threats.
I talked about this when Mike Johnson became Speaker.
If we all remember our ancient history...
Like, two years ago, or a year and a half ago, when Mike Johnson became Speaker, the GOP went through, like, how many rounds of voting?
They couldn't figure it out.
Some people were putting forward Donald Trump to be Speaker of the House, and so on and so forth.
They landed on Mike Johnson, this backbench, you know, guy from Louisiana.
And part of that, though, was there were threats.
There were threats coming to those House GOP members.
And I remember sort of saying then, This is a foreshadowing of what a second Trump president would look like.
Elon Musk has promised a primary, any House GOP member who doesn't vote in line.
And now we're getting reports that GOP senators are afraid for their lives and their families' lives, so they're getting in line.
You said a constitutional crisis is not in the future tense.
It really does seem like our slide into an authoritarian government where...
Our legislative branch is compromised by fear of retribution from the so-called king is in place.
And I don't know how that hits you.
I guess when I've been in polite company recently and talk like this, people are like, you know, Brad, can we just get some chips and dip and calm down?
Do you need a Snickers?
What's your problem, dude?
Take it easy.
You're like, yes, I might need a Snickers.
I just don't know what else to do.
Like, I might need three Snickers and something else to help me here.
Give me the Snickers, but also we're dealing with a coup.
Yes, and urgency.
The house is on fire already, and the problem is that people are not acting like it, but that doesn't stop the destruction.
And the more explicit and the more outrageous it is, the harder time people have.
I wrote a piece recently about the failure of imagination and how that's leading to state failure, because I think a big issue is that we have some cognitive issues, some emotional issues around authoritarianism and this belief that that can't be, that America can't become an authoritarian state.
And that has enabled exactly that, that we're not fighting back because...
We don't believe it's real because if it were real, that would be bad, which is not a great way to solve problems.
Yeah.
Turns out.
It turns out.
And, you know, I can hear my therapist telling me that about, you know, my relationships and stuff.
But when it comes to, like, I don't know, slide into illiberalism, it seems even, yeah.
My therapist and I talk about this a lot.
We both come from Jewish families that survive the Holocaust.
And we're here because they didn't stick around to find out just how bad it would be.
And it's interesting because not everyone with that background necessarily feels the same way I do.
I know there's a lot of Trumpy members of my own family.
I think that in part relates back to...
Anti-communism more than anything else.
And also a real sort of lack of understanding about U.S. history and the fact that there are deep roots of anti-democratic governance in this country.
We don't have to.
I mean, I think that there are some people who would rather we don't analogize whatsoever to other countries.
I think it's actually very helpful to see us as one country among many and that we're similarly affected by trends.
But at the same time, we have our own awful history of authoritarianism and concentration camps and all of, you know, we inspired the Nazis with Jim Crow.
And even they were like, that's a little harsh, you know, when it came to like the one drop rule, for example.
So we were a little too extra, even for the actual Nazis.
And yet we want to pretend like this is coming out of nowhere.
And it's very frustrating.
It feels like a lot of time the coverage also treats.
This issue, like, we're goldfish.
Like, we have to restart without any context whatsoever, which is part of why I think people are really not informed about what's actually happening.
But it's going to happen anyways.
You know, that's the issue.
It's like, even if we pretend it's not, it doesn't change things.
It only allows them to rob us faster.
And I wish that our leaders weren't such cowards.
I think that's a big issue.
Well, I spent a lot of my weekend talking with friends about that and the ways that the Democrats have really put up very little resistance.
And so one of the things that you talked about when it came to confirming cabinet members is they're not putting up any kind of parliamentary fight.
There's no holding up the vote.
There's no in the Senate.
There's no lack of quorum.
There's none of the procedural tricks.
That Mitch McConnell would have used 100 times by now to do anything to slow this down.
I think people keep waiting for the Democrats' plan here.
Are they waiting for the weather to get warm so people can demonstrate?
Are they waiting for the right moment?
As we wait, our government's been taken over by Elon Musk, and he has our Social Security numbers.
And, you know, is cutting the FAA workforce, destroying the nuclear, the folks who oversee our nuclear stockpile, letting go people who oversee the safety of the country here and there and everywhere.
So it is happening.
Before we started recording, we emailed a little bit and you said you wanted to talk about Putin, Trump and Ukraine and Trump calling Zelensky a dictator because the press just doesn't seem to be able to get it right.
Let me shut up and say, what do we need to know about that?
I think what we need to know is it's not just limited, actually, to the invasion of Ukraine.
Putin has his hands in this administration.
We have Tulsi Gabbard, who is now the director of national intelligence, who is a Putinist and an Assadist.
And we go all the way back to Trump's first election with Russian interference.
We go to Russian, the bomb threats that went off.
During this last election coming from Russia, they have been meddling in our politics and have succeeded to a degree that I don't think they could have ever imagined.
I think that they sort of poked us in a soft spot and we were rotten underneath and it's all just come right out.
It's very disturbing, but we're doing a lot of their work for them.
Russia's thrilled that we're turning our back on Ukraine because it also means we're turning our back on Europe.
And it's a very weird feeling to be like, well, I kind of hope Germany remilitarizes.
That's fine.
You're like, well, who's going to step up?
And it's not going to be us.
This new alliance, when Rubio talked about a historic, potential historic agreement, and not just I think it was trade, but also just other political issues, it's horrifying.
It's this idea that we are tying ourselves to another failed empire, frankly, that is trying to reassert its own glory while also destroying any quality of life for its people.
And that's our blueprint for how we want to run this government in the U.S. Not great.
And just leading with fear, the vindictiveness, the corruption.
One of the stories that always stuck with me from the first time around was the Trump Tower Baku.
It was a building he had licensed his name to in Azerbaijan that put him in business with a bunch of, like, oligarchs, oil people, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
So just a bunch of really lovely folks.
And these are familiar criminals and they are running our government now.
It is, again, it's weird because when you talk about it, you really do sound a little nuts.
And I'm used to people giving me weird looks when I describe it.
And at the same time, it's true.
The evidence is all there.
That this is a network of, a criminal network and a white supremacist network and that they have been training for this moment.
And when it comes to the Senate Dems and their lack of obstruction, I mean, they did do some things.
Like they had, they filibustered when it came to Russell Vought, who was taken over at OMB and was the Project 2025 mastermind.
But they've allowed a lot of other procedure to go on as usual.
I understand they want to be collegial, and I also think it's very stupid.
I think this is—they have power now that they will lose, and they will regret not exercising it in the meantime.
They don't want to be pilloried, I guess, as obstructionists, but that's exactly what we're looking for.
There are ways—they can't stop things, but they can slow it down, and they can make it incredibly painful for Republicans to get anything done.
They can do a quorum call.
Every five minutes.
Are there enough people in this room to actually vote on this?
And make everyone say their name.
They can do a roll call before every vote.
Make sure that everyone has to actually do it individually.
Slow it down.
Deny unanimous consent when it comes to any sort of procedural issue.
Just gum up the works.
They don't want to do it.
And it doesn't seem like our protests, our calls, our emails...
Are getting through to them.
I think it's the American exceptionalism at work again.
I think that they see themselves as and these institutions as holding just because they're American and they have for, you know, however many years and this is the way things work, but they don't work anymore.
And You're letting the fox into the henhouse.
They're there.
They're going to destroy things that can't be rebuilt easily.
I don't know.
I just think that if you don't exercise the power, the power will be gone, and then you're going to regret not having used it when you had the chance.
You said they want to be collegial, which is the stupid...
Why would you want to be collegial with fascists?
I don't understand.
I keep coming back to certain...
What should I conclude from the data?
A, they don't care.
B, Chuck Schumer's just not built for this.
And we have a generation of, like, consultant class Dems who are not built for this.
I will say, like, Senator Murphy's been out sounding the alarm.
And, you know, the Oregon senators, Merkley and Wyden, have been punching above their weight.
You know, Elizabeth Warren is doing Elizabeth Warren stuff.
But as a whole, no, they're not.
So I think, are they scared?
Do they have the same fear that the GOP Dems have in terms of what will happen to them and their family?
I'm not reporting that.
I don't know that.
I'm saying I don't know what to do here in terms of conclusions when it comes to the data that I have in front of me.
And so I think that's there.
We're jumping around a lot today, but I had a friend text me yesterday and say, Trump said what he said about Zelensky being a dictator, that the Putin-Trump or the Russia-United States-Saudi Arabia kind of like triumvirate is way more powerful than the Axis powers might have been in World War II. And as you say,
when Hitler decides to invade Poland, when we think about the Japanese...
And Pearl Harbor, there was always this like sleeping isolationist giant called the United States that they were hoping wouldn't get involved.
When you look around the world now, you're like, well, Zelensky says that if Trump doesn't help Ukraine, then Putin will take Europe, will invade, will threaten, and we'll see what he can do to basically have the continent.
The United States is over here backing that.
That regime, in addition to saying that it wants to buy Greenland and make Canada the 51st state.
So who do we expect on a global stage is going to emerge?
And then we haven't even gotten to China.
And, you know, what they're thinking as all of this goes down, all of that to say the cards on the table look quite dire in terms of anyone stopping the Trump-Putin alliance.
Yeah, I was speaking about this with a friend and colleague who is a human rights lawyer from Kyrgyzstan.
And she lives in exile because of dictatorship.
And I was saying they're trying to turn the country into Russia.
And she said, no, it's worse because you guys are so much more powerful.
Like, we have the world's biggest military.
We have the world's biggest economy.
And if that gets reoriented towards criminality and towards, you know, these autocratic goals, we're in big trouble and we can do a lot more damage.
We, you know, are a much bigger player than Russia, despite the fact that we are treating them as our geopolitical equal.
And it's very scary to think.
The fact that the New York Times treated the invasion of Canada as an electoral thought experiment speaks to the problem.
We're talking about an invasion of our neighbor and ally, and I think one of the longest borders that's been at peace in history, and we're going to ruin that.
And just because the New York Times thinks it's interesting doesn't mean any single Canadian does.
I don't know any Canadians who don't see this as an immense threat, as they should.
Actually, to throw it back to what we started with, this idea of gender violence, I think that there are a lot of times when women report violence or abuse until no one takes it seriously until she's dead.
And they're like, oh, I didn't ever think he was going to do that.
And you're like, well, but he said he would regularly.
You just didn't take the threat seriously.
And so people judge these situations based on how they would behave in that situation.
And not on how this other person who's actually doing, you know, the threatening would behave.
So this lack of seriousness is very disturbing.
We've already got, like, you know, there are things that are happening on a scale right now that it's horrifying.
There are concentration camps that we've built in Panama now, in the jungle, to take asylees and just, you know, throw them in some hotel where, you know, someone already committed suicide.
It's a nightmare.
In destroying USAID, we destroyed so much of our global goodwill that we had built up over decades of good sort of human rights and civil society work for a lot of marginalized populations around the world and fledgling democracies.
That was actually one of the few things I think as an American I was very proud of, that we were doing this and funding this kind of work.
I don't know that we will keep funding the UN. I don't know that the UN will exist.
In the same way a year from now.
NATO doesn't exist anymore.
I mean, if de facto, like de facto, not de jure, de facto, NATO does not exist.
You know, not as it was six months ago, if you ask me.
Yeah, no, I agree.
There's no NATO anymore.
There's no way that Trump isn't going to intervene on behalf of any European country.
He's explicitly said he's, you know, he's thrown Ukraine under the bus and aligned himself with far right autocrats around the world.
And yeah.
Alliance with Saudi Arabia, with Orban, with Netanyahu.
All these guys are really not all that different from one another.
Tulsi Gabbard also has ties to Modi in India, to the Hindu nationalists.
It's scary, really, the people that we are becoming aligned with.
And to the extent that...
I'm curious to see how this...
Sorry, one second.
I'm curious to see how American people take this, because I don't think these actions are popular.
Clearly not.
But at the same time, what are people willing to do to prevent it?
And if our leaders are not doing anything, who's going to step up?
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We were founded, you know, after the first Trump admin as a response to that and as a response to just sort of wanting to see the stories that I wanted to see written by people who knew what they were talking about.
And you can find me on Blue Sky.
Brad mentioned I'm a poster there for better and for worse.
And, you know, Find Conversationalist is also there and we're on all of the other platforms.
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So if you enjoyed this, there will be more of that on our podcast.
More party fun.
Party fun, but also, you know, a range.
It's not just me talking, so.
No, no, no, no.
I'm totally, yeah.
This has been great.
It's so great to get to talk to you and just to really dig into things that I think a lot of people are not willing to kind of confront.
As always, friends, you can find us at Straight White JC. We'll be back Wednesday with It's in the Code, Friday, the Weekly Roundup.
Don't forget, Andrew Seidel, One Nation Indivisible, is coming February 25th, first episode, and he's talking about 1930s Germany with Annika Brockschmidt.
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