After nearly 10 years of covering the far right after Charlottesville, Chris Mathias has written an important book called "To Catch a Fascist, The Fight to Expose the Radical Right." In addition to modern efforts to out the fascists and racists, Chris takes us through some fascinating history of that as well. It is inspiring work at a time when we all could use some inspiration and uplift! Also check out his article in the Nation, Liberals Think Antifa Isn't Real. But It Is—and It Knows How to Win.
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming?
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic can sound.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything, everything, everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 111, 111.
I'm Thomas that over there's Lydia.
How are you doing?
Hello.
I am doing okay.
Oh, sorry to bother you.
There's a lot going on in the world.
It's really heavy.
Every day just feels really heavy.
It's been rough.
But we've got a really good one today that I think might be a little uplifting.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm really, really excited.
We have an interview with Chris Mathias.
He is a former Huffington Post journalist, now does more like freelance stuff, but he has a book coming out called To Catch a Fascist, The Fight to Expose the Radical Right.
And it's, there's a little bit of, you know, storytelling of his experience being around a lot of folks in Antifa, starting from the Charlottesville rally and the Unite the Right stuff and nonsense and the Jews will not replace us, that those pieces of crap were doing.
But what I find really, really remarkable is the people that he highlights in this book and sort of all the different ways that we can fight back, even if we're not on the front lines.
And so I'm super excited for you all to hear from him and some of the stuff he has to share.
It's really cool to learn and inspiring to learn about the history of Antifa.
Like it's just, we just aren't taught the right things in schools at all and in public school.
And it's a great reminder of some of the heroes of history and how some people in history were doing better than we are today, which is not a good sign.
But it's, it's, so it's, it's inspiring to look at, but also more motivation to be like, what are we doing, everybody?
Yeah, let's keep figuring out ways to fight back.
Yeah, so much fun.
Really excited to get to the interview and excited for the end of the month chunkage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Quick note before we dive on over there, though.
The book comes out February 3rd.
So go ahead and pre-order now wherever you get your books.
And I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
I got to read it ahead of time and I enjoyed it.
So I'm sure you all will too.
Awesome.
All right.
Well, we'll take our break, support the show, patreon.com slash where there's woke and we'll be on with Chris.
And we're joined by Chris Mathias.
Chris, so great to have you on Where There's Woke.
Welcome.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
We're going to talk about your book that's coming out, To Catch a Fascist, The Fight to Expose the Radical Right, out on February 3rd.
We have a lot I'm sure we can get into.
Well, you need help catching them.
I can tell you where they are.
Well, yeah, it turns out I didn't need to write a book about this.
They're everywhere.
Just open your eyes.
We'll get into it.
But before we dig into all that, did you want to just give folks who are listening a little bit of background on who you are and how you came to report on this kind of beat?
Yeah, of course.
I used to work at HuffPost for a long time as a senior reporter for the last decade or so.
I've been covering the far right.
Back in 2017, I was at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where Nazis largest white supremacist gathering in a generation.
And a Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters and killed Heather Heyer.
I kind of like to say something I thought a lot about when I was writing the book.
Anyone who was in Charlottesville that day, their lives were irrevocably changed.
And for me, it meant kind of this decade-long project of investigating, you know, what at the time was branding itself the alt-right, which is basically just this kind of resurgent fascist movement in America that was came to be alongside Trump's rise to the White House.
A lot of the work I've done over the last 10 years has been stories about kind of the radicalization of the GOP and showing what a lot of people might think is fringe actually isn't that fringe anymore.
And a lot of what I did was writing stories about unmasking secret white supremacists.
So neo-Nazis that were hiding behind usernames or avatars while holding down respectable day jobs as police.
Presidents and presidents, professors.
Yeah.
I've covered a lot of protests and a lot of rallies.
So, you know, I covered a lot of the far-right rallies in Portland, in Florida, and Michigan, Berkeley, during the 2020 uprisings.
I covered some of those as well and got arrested actually in Brooklyn in the process.
Oh, wow.
What'd you do?
I'm just kidding.
It was my fault.
Yeah, a little advice.
Don't say fuck you to a cop or to an NYPD cop because they will wrongfully arrest you.
Yeah.
So that's, you know, basically a scattershot summation of what I've been doing the last decade or so.
You mentioned the experience that folks who were at Charlottesville and the change that they experienced.
From your perspective, what was Antifa looking like at that time and the far right at that time in 2017 during, you know, not specifically Charlottesville itself, but that kind of era?
And what does it look like now?
Like, have we seen an evolution of sorts on either side or are they largely the same?
That's a great question.
You know, I should start out by saying that obviously I just wrote a book about Antifa, but when I arrived in Charlottesville in 2017, I had a very dim idea of what Antifa was.
And I think that's the case, honestly, for most Americans.
Yep, that was for me.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't think most Americans knew what Antifa was before Richard Spencer got punched at the inauguration, Richard Spencer being kind of the neo-Nazi poster boy back in 2017.
And then after Charlottesville, everyone knew about Antifa.
You know, somebody told me once that like basically Antifa, as we know it, kind of rises and falls with the fortunes of the far right.
So it's no mistake that we all heard about Antifa in 2017 because the far right's fortunes were suddenly amazing.
Where Antifa came from in America is groups like anti-racist action.
Are you guys familiar with anti-racist action and like skinheads against racial prejudice?
A little bit.
Just we did an interview a couple months ago with Josh Fernandez, who was involved in that movement.
He also wrote a book kind of about his experience there.
So a little bit, yeah, the punk scene and everything.
Amazing.
Actually, incidentally, it started in Minneapolis.
Oh, wow.
Where a group called the Baldies, which was like a multiracial group of teen punks, were tired of seeing Nazis at shows and they banded together and started kicking Nazis out of the punk scene, sometimes violently by punching them.
Eventually, they got more and more sophisticated.
They grew older and the Baldies turned into this national kind of organization called Anti-Racist Action with chapters all over that were kicking an entire generation of Nazis off the streets of America.
In the early aughts, Antifa, as we know it, or anti-racist action, there was kind of a lull in activity.
And then there was this kind of organic grassroots need for anti-fascist work.
And I think a lot of people in 2017 or so were looking to do something.
And they used kind of the blueprint provided to them by anti-racist action to start forming their own little collectives or groups.
Contrary, I'm sure we'll get into this, but Antifa is not an organization.
It's a decentralized kind of subculture or movement.
It's a style of politics, kind of a militant tradition.
It's made up mostly of anarchists and socialists and communists who might quibble ideologically, but they all agree that sometimes you have to punch Nazis in the streets.
Fascists should be given no platform to speak or organize, and that law enforcement and the state can't be trusted in this fight because, especially with law enforcement, it's a inherently white supremacist institution.
That's kind of the basis of modern Antifa.
There's an amazing book called We Go Where They Go, which is an oral history of all of these punks in the 80s and 90s and early aughts, basically dealing with Nazis in their communities.
And it's just like the coolest like old punk zines and pictures and stuff.
I think people would really enjoy it.
Obviously, the alt-right, Charlottesville was kind of it's a bit of like a mask off moment.
All these movements were organizing online, and the alt-right was very much a phenomenon of the internet.
Yeah.
They often took credit for the way they would put it is memeing Trump into the White House, which I don't necessarily disagree.
Charlottesville was kind of their celebration of what they had accomplished.
It's also kind of the jumping off point, I think, for my book, inso much as Trump's rise to power corresponded with this explosion in new secretive white supremacist groups, all these groups that emerged as if they were trying to like resurrect the Klan's invisible empire from like the 1920s or after the Civil War.
Its relevancy has collapsed over the last couple of decades.
This was like a revived movement of secretive white supremacist groups that were organizing online, hiding behind avatars and usernames and like spreading all this racial invective, committing hate crimes, attacking people in the streets.
And that, of course, all culminated with Charlottesville.
You ever just step back and be like, hey, why so many Nazis?
Where the fuck are all the Nazis?
We don't live in Germany.
I don't know why there's, you know, like even there, I would hope there shouldn't be any today, but there are.
Why So Many Nazis?00:15:57
But why?
What's the theory?
Why is it so?
Is this something that like all countries face or is it a product of like maybe, you know, the our unique history and diversity?
And, you know, I don't know if that's something that, you know, you get into much, but it just seems, it's just so funny to take a step back and just be like, what the hell is this such a pervasive, never-ending problem here?
Right.
Yeah.
Writing this book and researching this book and thinking about what fascism is has kind of really changed my perspective on it.
I think a lot of people have this idea that there's like one breaking point where we'll reach outright fascism.
That's not really the case.
And there's always this dance throughout the Trump administration about like, is it happening here?
Did it happen here?
The perspective I've gained, I think, from reporting this book is that America has always been fascist for certain people.
What is the material difference, for example, if you are a black man swept up in mass incarceration from living under what we would call a fascist state?
For them, it is a fascist state.
We also have this notion of us as heroes in World War II and defeating Nazism and fascism, which, you know, of course is true.
But America, the UK were also colonial powers.
America's army was segregated and a lot of the black soldiers that returned came back to Jim Krill.
And then when you start to think about the origins of Nazism and the inspirations for Nazism, there's a great book called Hitler's American Model, where this academic studies and finds all these documents about how Hitler and various Nazi figures were influenced by race laws in the U.S.
I guess this is all to say that fascism has always been present in America.
I think we're just in an especially pronounced moment of it.
Does it feel inevitable?
Does it feel like it's just there's always going to be this like baseline level racism?
It's just about controlling it.
Just is so confusing.
It feels like intractable.
Yeah, just it's like, God, you know, it's crazy.
Yeah.
So many of the anti-fascist or anti-if activists I talk to are anarchists or socialists or communists.
And one of their theories or critiques that I think resonates with me is that fascism, racism, bigotry are all methods of dividing and conquering.
Yeah.
You are pitting people against each other, promising that they'll always have a little bit more than someone beneath them so that everyone down below doesn't band together and steal or take the wealth that people are hoarding at the top.
From an anarchist, socialist, communist perspective, capitalism is the root of this and fascism is kind of a defense mechanism of capitalism.
We're living in times of extreme inequality.
I think people are susceptible to this.
It's what W.E.B. Du Bois called the invisible wages of whiteness.
You're getting paid with whiteness, this feeling that you're superior to people beneath you when obviously you're not.
And it's just a method of controlling you.
Yeah.
I think there's also an element of education's responsibility here too.
Like when I think back on the history that I learned in school, and I grew up in the Bay Area, you know, like pretty progressive place.
I mean, when you compare it to the rest of the country.
And there's so much that I didn't know because our history textbooks, they're a little bit nationalist.
Like, oh, dude, yeah.
If you absorb that stuff when you're young and impressionable and you trust your teachers, you know, that you are learning what is right, what is accurate, without nuance or context, you know, things are messier than what they appear to be in textbooks.
And then you don't go seek out that information yourself.
It's probably really easy to get pulled into this trap for some people.
It's something like, as a parent, I think about a lot.
Totally.
I mean, I think it's very seductive.
The last chapter of my book is a profile of a Nazi that contacted me in the course of reporting my book to tell me that he had left this Nazi group behind him and was leaving white nationalism.
We end up talking a lot and he kind of describes that moment when he was younger where he, you know, just had nothing else going on, no other confidence, and then kind of learned that without doing anything, he could consider himself better than other people.
He was attracted to like the essentialism of racism.
It's like low bar for entry.
From my perspective, like what you were talking about with education, I grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.
Even in the classroom there, the site of the Union Army's greatest victory, you were often taught that it was states' rights, not slavery that was the root of the war.
And there was Confederate flags all over town.
Wow.
Can you share with us a particular story?
You don't have to give away the ending.
You know, we're not going to tell people everything that's happening in the book so they don't buy it.
But is there a particular story that stood out for you that you'd share with us today?
Yeah, sure.
I have two chapters.
One is called A Brief History of Punching Nazis, which is a chapter about the history of anti-racist action.
And then another chapter called A Brief History of Unmasking, which is about efforts to unmask the Ku Klux Klan.
It occurred to me when I was writing this book because most of the book follows a Antifa spy who goes undercover into a white supremacist group called Patriot Front for about six months.
And he goes on their missions.
What are their missions?
Sorry, it sounds so dorky.
I know it's so dorky.
A lot of it is a LARP.
They're doing vandalism.
They're going on a hike.
Yeah, one was unfurling a sign off of a freeway overpass, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You guys just LARP.
You can just do LARPing.
I know, I know.
They're also the ones, of course, that do the flash mob marches in cities.
And there's, is there dancing and singing, or is it just, you could just do flash mobs, the dancing, singing.
There's a, you know, there's a non-roast version of all this, you know?
Yeah.
It's like springtime for Hitler.
We'll let you sing that.
Well, just for fun.
Eventually, he gathers enough intelligence that the intelligence he gathers, this wide network of anti-fascists across the country use that intelligence to ID or dox or unmask about 80 white supremacists.
Wow.
The book is about Antifa activists over the last 10 years and how they doxxed or unmasked thousands of this new generation of American fascists.
People just don't appreciate the work they did.
With that very long preface to what I'm about to tell you is there's a chapter called A Brief History of Unmasking because it occurred to me that I was investigating a period in history where there are these activists unmasking an entire new generation of fascists.
I wanted to know who was doing this previously.
There was this fascinating book called Hooded Knights on the Niagara, which is a book about the Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo, New York in the 1920s.
Something I didn't appreciate is how the Klan, the second Klan, the second iteration of it, is still very racist and anti-Semitic, but it's also extremely anti-Catholic and is against kind of the new wave of immigrants coming over from Eastern and Southern Europe.
You know, it's essentially like a Protestant fascist group.
If only you could go back and show them today's Supreme Court, be like, hey, some of the biggest tools of white supremacy now.
I know, exactly.
But this is, I think, such an actually an interesting point, right?
Fascism always targets the most marginalized groups.
And at that point, it was all these new arrivals, these new immigrants.
Now, Catholics have been assimilated and they're part of a dominant culture and they can get to be fascist now.
Congrats.
Yeah, congrats.
All that said, you know, very quickly, this Catholic mayor in Buffalo, New York enlists a spy from the police department to go undercover into the Klan.
This spy ends up locating the Klan's secret headquarters.
One night, the headquarters gets ransacked.
All its fight owned cabinets like tossed around.
The mayor, after some deaf denials of any involvement, claims to have received the list of members.
So it's like 18,000 members of the Klan.
Wow.
And he takes this list and it ends up posted for the public to see, I believe, at the police station.
So what ends up happening is thousands and thousands of Buffalonians wait in line to see who among their neighbors is a Klansman.
Eventually, so many people are in line that they have to move to a warehouse to hold all the people to look at this list.
As soon as people start to realize who's in the Klan, Klan-owned businesses are boycotted or vandalized.
Klansmen lose their jobs.
What they did was to basically create a social cost for being a fascist.
Basically saying, if you're going to be a fascist, you don't get to hide behind a mask.
And that did spell the end of the Klan in Buffalo.
They fell into infighting.
People left the group.
And it actually ends with a shootout.
And it's pretty dramatic.
Oh, wow.
They figure out who the spy was and then the Klan kill him.
Oh my God.
Well, that person's a fucking hero.
Yeah.
That's my current favorite cop, probably.
Yeah, no.
Well, yeah.
If you go to the Buffalo History Museum website, you can see the list.
And there's an article basically saying that this cop that was killed should be a hero and a martyr.
Wow.
The second clan across America also goes into decline and disappears.
And that's largely from people that were fighting against them.
I just think it's so interesting.
Sorry to interrupt, but I just think it's so interesting.
I think there's often a narrative that, like, well, in the past, people didn't know any better.
And, you know, people were racist.
It's like, right.
You're talking about the 20s, right?
Yeah.
1920s.
The 20s, they had to be secret.
And when they were exposed as being part of the Klan, it fell apart.
People were like, fuck this.
Let's boycott businesses.
Yeah.
Let's do some cancel culture.
We've tweeted a list about them.
Yeah.
And now let's cancel culture them.
And like, that was good.
It was good that they did that.
And we are falling short of the 1920s now.
Congrats us.
Yes, exactly.
A theme that I try to get through in my book is that people that do this type of activism, fascist activism behind masks, do so in hopes of creating a world in which they won't need their masks at all.
So like the first Klan, for example, they hide behind masks right after the Civil War because they want to destroy reconstruction in the South.
They want to destroy the project of equality for black people.
Boy, did they?
And they did.
And yeah, and exactly.
And Reconstruction is abandoned.
The first Klan disappears, I think, by the late 1860s, early 1870s, largely because their project was successful.
The second Klan, what it's antagonizing for a big part of it is quotas on where immigrants can come from.
They die in a large part because of the people fighting them, but also because they were successful.
The 1924 Johnson Reed Act severely restricted where immigrants could come from, basically Northern Europe.
That's weird.
What an arbitrary choice.
I know, right?
Yeah.
Incidentally, you know, that's what Stephen Miller, 100 years later, wants to go back to.
He's upset at the fact that those immigration quotas were gotten rid of in 1965.
All these modern MAGA pundits like talk about how they love this 1924 act.
Yeah.
But it was, it was named after a fucking Klansman.
The Johnson Reed Act is named after a congressman that was in the Klan.
Wow.
You can tell I've been locked in a room for three years thinking about this shit.
Yeah.
So have I.
Yeah.
Maybe not in the same way.
Right.
It makes you feel a little crazy sometimes.
Do you think, though, I mean, as we're talking about shame and these pressure points that we could put on people and it worked.
And I just think about the current administration.
And I'm not going to sit here and say we shouldn't shame them because I think we should.
Like even if it doesn't work, I think we should still shame them because it's the right thing to do.
What do you think?
Do you think like any of that stuff would actually make an impact knowing the people that are in power right now that are this way?
You're kind of touching on the animating question of my book.
And I think like the way the book operates the time period, it's kind of a preamble to this fascist moment we're having, right?
For years, these anti-fascists are laboring to identify all these Nazis and white supremacists.
And they have a lot of success.
They get a lot of people fired.
They bring attention to how much the GOP is radicalizing.
And, you know, the whole point of anti-fascist doxing is to create a social cost for being a fascist.
It basically says if you join one of these groups, if you're really outwardly racist or homophobic or transphobic, people are going to know.
And you're going to lose your job.
You're going to lose your girlfriend.
You're going to lose your house.
You're going to be shamed.
And what that does is it leverages an existing societal taboo against explicit white supremacy to like create a cost.
But the animating question of my book, obviously, is what happens when that taboo starts to disappear.
And I think that's kind of the moment we're in.
It's interesting to consider that I just wrote a book about Nazis wearing masks.
And now the people wearing masks are agents of the state.
Yeah.
People who wear masks like that want to create a world where they don't have to.
And, you know, it scares me to think about a world where those ICE agents don't have to wear a mask anymore.
So I think it's a really important task to preserve, maintain, fight for that social taboo.
I noticed that you wrote about this on Blue Sky and we just talked about it on one of our sister shows where, yes, the agents on the ground are wearing masks to hide their identities, but the institutions are not wearing masks anymore.
That's why I was in Charlottesville.
They weren't wearing masks.
Yeah, true.
That's like the story of my book, which is that all the groups that were in Charlottesville made a big mistake by not wearing masks because they got fucked up.
Oh, well, that's good.
Yeah.
Like Identity Europa, National Socialist Movement, Traditionalist, Workers' Party, League of South, all these groups were defunct within a couple of years because of anti-fascist work.
What you were getting out about the institutions just being masked off now.
Yeah, DHS.
Yeah.
The DHS social media feed is basically for Chan 10 years ago.
Crazy.
I don't know how to describe it.
Obviously, we're all working out the answer to this.
I think when your institutions are that explicitly fascist, you are going to adopt different tactics.
What's happening in Minneapolis, as horrifying as it is, is also really heartening because you're seeing people turn up for their neighbors and telling these ICE agents to fuck off.
And it's like really brave.
That kind of grassroots, street-level, sometimes militant activism is really inspiring.
And it's a lot of people realizing that the institutions they thought were there to protect them from this aren't going to protect them.
They're seeing their neighbors thrown into the back of vans and abducted from their workplaces and ripped away from their families.
Got to maintain your sense of shock when you see DHS posts an old blood and soil Nazi slogan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I've been on lately.
And this is just my personal kick, but I really do think we should preserve our shock.
And unfortunately, the incentives on social media are for every jack off to be like, knew this.
This is how it always was.
Are you surprised?
That's not helping.
It just doesn't help.
All that is is for you.
That's just for you to be like, yeah, wasn't surprised.
It's one thing if you want to have a discussion about, and it's totally valid that like, yes, this is, you know, this is kind of how we've always been in a certain way.
Sure.
And to certain people, of course.
Right.
But like, it doesn't help to go everywhere and anywhere and just normalize it.
You're just saying like, yeah, this is what's not surprised.
Trump will get away with it.
Like they just pre-give up all the time.
Right.
The currency is like this sardonic, ironic, jaded, whatever.
Like that's, that's for some reason the response.
It's unfortunate because what we actually need is we need the naive response.
We need a response of like, holy shit, what is this crap?
What are you talking about?
Trans Normativity Matters00:04:42
Nazis in America.
I'm like, I would take 100 of those people who are like Nazis in America.
No way.
That'd be great.
I would love that.
If you think about like a parallel here too, is like when you become so desensitized to violence in media, then it just continues to escalate and escalate and escalate.
If we can maintain our sensitivity to this stuff, then that could serve to prevent some of the escalation.
Yeah, totally.
I think what you're getting at, Thomas, about like this habit of people to be like, no, it's been like this.
If it's taken someone 10 years at this point to realize how bad MAGA and Trump are, they should be welcomed in.
You know, it takes like a popular front.
It takes people coming together.
It takes normies and radicals figuring some stuff out.
And I think like that's what we're seeing in Minneapolis for sure.
Something I was heartened by reporting the book is that MAGA, Trump, they paint this hysterical notion of what Antifa is, right?
It's like these like highly regimented army of uber violent people when in fact some of them are old.
Some of them are just like kind of normal soccer moms.
Some of them are like punks.
Some of them are rednecks.
They're just like working and middle class people that realized that whatever was brewing in our politics would come for them eventually too.
And like they had personal brushes with fascists in their communities, right?
One of the characters I talk to is a woman whose friend lost a family member in the El Paso massacre in Walmart.
And she was like struggling to figure out how to console her friend and just started idly kind of going down the rabbit hole, figuring out how like a 20-year-old could be inspired to walk into a Walmart and do what he did.
And that just kind of started her anti-fascist journey.
Wow.
When we're talking about Antifa and anti-fascism and militant anti-fascism, it's like always like an organic grassroots response.
In the 80s and 90s, it was like, you know, these young punks trying to kick Nazis out of the scene.
Now, a lot of the people I talk to, a lot of people doing militant anti-fascist work, doing Antifa work, are queer and trans because they're among the groups being targeted the most extremely.
They're sooner in the poem.
Yes, exactly.
Not to try to be holier than that, but I don't think this shit will ever come for me.
I'm as privileged as it could come.
I just, it's bad.
It's just bad, everybody.
It's bad to be mean to people.
It's not good to be racist.
I don't know.
Yeah, man.
Crazy growing up in the 90s.
And I do think that's a lot of just speaking as a privileged white American dude.
Right.
Like, I really think so much, so many of us, that specific demographic grew up in the 90s, just thinking like this was all solved and anyone complaining about it was just trying to gain like sympathy.
I really think that's kind of a lot of the mindset.
And I just think that made a lot of people ripe for like the plucking in terms of being able to just appeal to that.
Yeah, you know, these complainers, you know, these minority groups that are just kind of whining about stuff.
They've fixed all that in the 60s.
You know, it's like, right.
It's so untrue.
And it's like sad though that that feeling in the 90s, a part of it did come from a good place.
Like I, I'm looking back fondly when stuff like being pro-diversity and anti-racism was looked at as like a socially good thing.
And now this administration is successfully branded it the other way.
Yeah.
It's just so depressing.
Makes you real like all like the how actually important like all the corny cringe.
Yeah.
I felt like I've said that exact thing.
Yeah.
And it's like, I remember last year I went with my buddy who's gay to Pride Night at the Mets in New York.
It's City Field and they, but they have like the trans flags like everywhere, like hanging up in a ballpark.
And it's like, you know, it's corporate sponsored.
It's like the epitome of corporate pride.
At that moment, with like Trump coming into power and downright genocidal language of the GOP about trans people, like that shit fucking matters.
It's important.
Yeah.
Kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with education.
I think we are taught that, you know, shit was fucked up until Martin Luther King marched peacefully.
And all the white people cheered.
We figured it out.
And then our Congress passed laws and now it's all fixed because it's the law.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
And like, I remember like, I swallowed that shit.
Oh, me too.
100%.
Yep.
100%.
I was like proud of it.
You know, like, I like, I like really believed in that myth.
And I feel like my entire adult life has been a story of really unpacking that myth.
Absolutely.
As a journalist, what do you feel like is journalism's role in all this?
You touched on this a little bit in the nation piece that Andy No got off about.
Right.
Andy No, one of our favorites on the show.
Have you guys, have you guys talked about him a lot, Andy?
Oh, yeah.
Andy And Andy's History00:04:24
He's been talking.
Thomas has been talking about Andy No for many years.
I have a kind of a history with him.
Like a personal history.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was interviewed by him back in 2017 or something.
Oh, shit.
When he was an unknown, kind of, I felt like he was a campus reporter for school or something.
Yeah, well, when he was in grad school, I guess.
Yeah.
Portland State.
Yeah.
Well, we, I mean, I could talk about Andy for a while, but we don't have to do that.
He's the worst.
He's the fucking worst.
In your piece in the nation, you kind of talk about like how some folks on the left default to saying that Antifa is not actually a thing.
It's not an organized thing.
It's not a centralized thing with hierarchy and structure to just like, oh, you've made up this imaginary fear to try and maybe like poke at Trump a little bit, maybe potentially like that.
What is your feeling like the journalistic role and responsibility in lifting up and kind of supporting Antifa?
Because as you said, it's often even not a violent response.
It's people on their computers going down rabbit holes to try and figure out, you know, connect the dots, which I think anybody who is like me, I just do that anyway because I want to know.
I want to know the information.
Right.
How are they failing and what are those expectations?
Who should we be listening to in that space?
The nation peace you mentioned is about there's been this tendency to over the last 10 years, I think, to dismiss, like among Democrats and centrists and the liberal media, to dismiss Antifa as something that doesn't really exist.
To a certain degree, it's understandable to think that, right?
Because Antifa is just a shortening of the word anti-fascist.
So people just think it means anti-fascist, which is a label that could be applied to most of us.
I think it's important to stress that Antifa refers to a specific tradition, to a specific kind of militant style of politics in approaching the far right.
I think some of Antifa's strategies have worked.
There's kind of this implicit thing in the way Democrats and other people say Antifa is just an idea and it doesn't exist, where they can't come to terms with there being any other form of resistance to this.
They're also still struggling with saying that things could be as bad as they were in the 30s or 40s.
And so they could never think that this kind of militant resistance would form or be needed.
The reason to kind of stand up and say Antifa is real, it exists, is A, because it's true.
Like it's all findable.
We know that there are these kind of public anti-fascist groups, even though their memberships are hidden.
I just wrote a book about it.
I talked to like 60 Antifa activists.
Like they're out there.
I think it's important because when you look at the way MAGA and Trump use the Antifa label, they will apply it to anyone they disagree with.
That's telling on yourself a little bit.
Yeah.
Anyone who's anti-Nazi is anti-me.
Wait a minute.
Yeah.
Right, right, exactly.
There was this really funny moment.
Trump convened this like farcical Antifa roundtable at the White House.
God, I watched that.
Oh my God, I watched it.
Yeah, we watched that.
God.
Andy was there, right?
Yeah, Andy was there.
Andy was there.
Yeah.
And I think he basically was the one that suggested that these groups in Europe be foreign terrorist organizations, which Rubio did a month later.
So Jack Pesobic has this moment where he's discussing the origins of Antifa, like the term and the type of activism.
And he says it was in 1930s Germany and then just moves on.
And it's like, yeah, yeah, what were they fighting against, Jack?
Like, yeah, like maybe it was a decent thing.
Yeah.
When MAGA has used the term Antifa, they use it as a boogeyman and a scapegoat and to kind of deflect and distract from the right's very real, very deadly violence.
They will apply that label to anyone they don't like.
I think it's of paramount importance for the people that are Trump's opponents to come to the defense of people that are actually Antifa.
This is how I think fascism works.
It's just going to pick one group after another off until it breaks apart any coalition and kind of comes for the rest of us.
Man, so many things to talk about.
Maybe if you're somebody who kind of might have grown up somewhat like me, I'm not sure, but I grew up in a conservative household and obviously, you know, I had to come to terms with a lot of this stuff and learn new stuff.
Fascism's Pipeline00:11:12
And I do find myself having this simultaneous thought.
And I wonder if this is anything that's that's valid in your mind.
We see something crazy, horrible, racist, you know, that they're saying outright.
Anything out of Stephen Miller's mouth, whatever it may be.
Hard to think of an example, but just like any of the typical anti-immigration, you know, racist stuff.
And I have this thought of like, dear God, wow, that's shocking to hear that.
That's awful.
And then I have this other thought, which is like, well, that is what all Republicans believe.
Like, it's like, I kind of have, I keep having this thought where I'm like, God, that is so radical, how radicalized they've been.
And then I think like, well, I don't know, I was a Republican and like they do kind of think all this stuff.
And yet I still simultaneously think that if in the 90s they heard someone say that out loud, they'd be like, ooh, well, that's too far.
I don't know about that.
Right.
Is there something about saying it out loud that's like worse or something?
You know what I mean?
You know what I'm trying to get at?
Like it's it's it's both not any different than a lot of Republicans have felt, but something about it being so bold and actually just said outright.
It's almost, I, in the same ways as I pine for corporate pride, I almost pine for the days where the Republicans didn't think they were racist.
Now they're like, oh no, yeah, I'm racist.
That's great.
Exactly.
Or something, you know, you know what I mean?
Like it's weird.
Yeah.
I mean, this is something I think about all the time.
I think stuff today that would have been a two-month news cycle, scandal, outrage, controversy, maybe gets a couple headlines.
Yeah.
And whatever headline it gets is going to be both sidesy anyways.
So yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I think what you're getting at is correct, which is that the Republican Party since the 70s maybe has been cultivating white voters.
It's been cultivating whiteness, part of the Southern strategy, right?
And when you base a political party off that, your chickens are going to come home to roost.
Part of the reason everything is suddenly so explicit and desperate is because they know they're losing.
Wait, they are?
Hold on.
This is news to me.
How are they?
Well, I know.
Yeah, I know.
But, you know, when you think about it, like, you know, this country is growing more diverse.
Oh, sure.
Oh, in that sense.
Yeah.
It will be a minority, majority country.
Like, that's what they're freaking out about.
I think that's the reason the GOP's response, for example, to the uprisings in 2020 has been so hysterical because they were scared by it and what it represented.
Sometimes, and this is maybe a fleeting bit of optimism, I do think of this fascist moment as kind of like the death cry of a political movement or a political party.
Well, I hope so.
Me too.
We've talked a lot about the infrastructure for the far right a little bit in like the internet space.
The internet has served as a pipeline for people who were just kind of going about living their lives to then finding communities on online spaces and things like that.
And sort of this potential pipeline for an evolution of your far right thoughts that I imagine is still very much a pipeline to the far right to kind of bring people into the fold there.
Are there other things like, I guess, social media is a place too that you've noticed where people can get sucked into sort of that rabbit hole of fringe beliefs that then are no longer fringe?
Yeah, where's recruitment happening, I guess?
Yeah, is it just the internet or is there anything we don't know about?
Yeah, it's definitely the internet.
But I think it also goes to like what we've been discussing.
Like now it's kind of everywhere, right?
Yeah.
TPUSA, which Charlie Kirk was obviously the head of, was increasingly like explicitly racist, kind of the major organs of the Republican Party.
The former Nazi I've been, I told you guys about earlier, the one that's kind of left the movement has described how X on Twitter after Elon Musk took it over has been a major source of radicalization.
Yeah, but at what point can we just call that, no, that's headquarters now?
It's one thing to be like, oh, they're, they're finding them on X.
It's like, yeah, no, that's the clubhouse.
No, totally.
I agree.
I haven't used X in a while intentionally because it's bad and I think we should probably stop using it.
But I did post the nation piece I wrote about Antifa on there just to see the response.
Yeah.
Dear God, man, it is just like it was already bad, you know, 10 years ago.
Yeah.
It is like literally nothing but Nazis now.
Yeah.
That is obviously a vector, I think.
I think, you know, you also have some of the most popular podcasts.
Yeah.
Like Joe Rogan, for example, consistently has platformed some of the most vile bar-right MAGA influencers and still enjoys this kind of respectability.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
It's kind of tough to tell.
It feels like it's happening all over the place.
Yeah.
Where it used to be kind of this underground for the far right, anyway, like these underground spaces talk about 4chan, 8-chan, all that kind of stuff where you get crazier and crazier.
But now it just feels like pervasive.
It feels like it's just kind of everywhere.
Like if you cut off one thing, it wouldn't matter anyway because everything else is built out too.
Yeah, but you got to start somewhere.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, you said something early on that I wanted to return to because it's an exact thought I had in the wake of all the Renee Good discourse.
And we see police chiefs coming out.
And, you know, there have been a few good ones.
I saw someone online say, you know, why hasn't someone issued a warrant for the officer's arrest or what, you know, that kind of thing.
And it just got me thinking a little bit.
You said that law enforcement is like inherently white supremacist.
Right.
That's what I was thinking about.
I was like, geez, I had this thought of like, are we just screwed?
Because I know what it was.
There was someone online who said, and maybe they were, you know, naive like I was so many years ago.
They were like, but I don't understand.
Why don't these blue state police do, you know, do whatever.
It was just like, oh man, yeah, I wish, you know, and I had this thought of like, are we always going to be kind of limited in a way by the fact that like those kinds of jobs, which people, you know, as much as I would love some level of abolition and some massive kind of different thing, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Are we always limited by that fact that like the people we rely on to be instruments of violence for the state, essentially?
And sometimes in good ways, they're taking out child rapists and crap.
Like, obviously, we need some level of that.
Are we just limited by the fact that that just attracts a certain kind of person?
There just aren't a lot of like woke people seeking police jobs, you know, military jobs, National Guard, whatever, whatever it is.
That's a really good question.
I think maybe an undertold story over the last 10 years is just how MAGA police departments are everywhere and how marinated they are in far-right fever swamps.
That is a scary part of this moment.
I personally don't have a ton of faith that cops are going to kick ice out of Minneapolis or wherever.
You know, I could be wrong.
I think there's like an instructive story actually in the book.
Do you guys remember in 2020, there was that viral video of cops shoving over that old man in Buffalo?
Oh, yeah.
And it's an awful video, right?
So Martin Gegino, he's like 80 years old.
I read about it a lot and I didn't realize he actually had cancer at the time.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
And he was a lifelong Catholic peace activist.
He was like a part of the Catholic workers movement.
He very peacefully approaches these like riot cops in Buffalo and they just knock him over.
And you can like hear his skull crack in the video.
It's awful.
Incidentally, afterwards, Trump labels him Antifa, by the way.
Yeah.
He was one of our best.
One of our best.
Yeah.
Something I learned when I was reading about that incident, Martin, the victim, was not a radical dude.
He had come to the demonstration because he had seen a video from the day before of officers kneeling with protesters, like kind of like acknowledging that Black Lives Matter.
Like you saw videos like that.
He came to the march that day to, he wanted to do the same thing.
He wanted to pray with the cops, kneel with the cops.
One of the cops that shoved him over was one of the cops from the day before who knelt with protesters.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
I think it says a lot about law enforcement and its kind of functions.
The perspective in the book is cops are typically deployed by the ruling class to keep the lower classes in check and to kind of criminalize being poor, which often means the most marginalized among us.
I've seen some clips this week of, in quotes, like good cops, but those definitely always inspire some skepticism in me for sure.
Yeah, that's fair.
It's really a cheery conversation at the end.
I guess before we close this out, hope.
Yeah, no, no.
Any things that we can kind of focus in on as a community, as a group, words of advice.
Yeah, I probably sound like a real doomsday merchant, but I actually earnestly, even cringily believe that all these fascists are bound to lose.
It's a self-destructive mode of politics.
They will not be able to stand up to the rest of us.
Anti-fascism is like a politics of hope against all odds.
We get so mired in debates about what Antifa is and isn't that we kind of forget how romantic it is.
The kind of militant anti-fascism that undergirds it all earnestly believes that a better world is possible and tries to act that out in everyday ways by mutual aid and by putting your body on your on the line for your neighbor.
And I think that's like super inspiring.
Seeing some of the protest footage in Minneapolis over the past week and other places has like brought tears to my eyes.
I think it's really inspiring.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I even love the folks that have gathered around the hotel that they're all the ICE officers are sleeping at.
Dude, yeah, the guy that set up his drug shit and just play like all night long.
Perfect.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Yeah, that's like confrontational grassroots stuff.
Yeah.
The militant anti-fascism that I'm like kind of describing in the book.
It's like taking actions into your own hands.
And I just think it's like wildly inspiring and contagious.
And I think it will be victorious.
And there's so many ways that that can look like too.
Like, like if you're a person where maybe you play bass, maybe, you know, like if you can't take on the potential risk for whatever reason of, you know, like being present physically there to your book, there's there's plenty of people who spent their time investigating things on their own hand and unmasking people who don't want to be found out.
And you can do that behind your computer.
Yeah, exactly.
Diversity of tactics.
Everyone thinks of Antifa as Nazi punchers, which sure they've punched the Nazis, but that represents a percentage of a fraction of the work they do and the percentage of the fraction that are like part of that subculture or movement.
There's plenty of ways to get involved.
Great.
Well, thanks so much for joining us.
Really appreciate you.
Really appreciate your work.
This was so great, guys.
Thanks for thinking of me.
Oh, throw out the book one more time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The book is called To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right.
You can pre-order it wherever you buy books online, and then it will be in stores on February 3rd.
I think it's actually a really good book, and I'm proud of it.