How to Stop the Far Right in Three Easy Steps

of sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations. We haven't really done is talked about what can be done electorally. And I do think that a significant portion of the far right can be defanged and eventually defeated through a series of things that are not particularly complicated. But the problem is that defeating feeding the far right means going beyond simply trying to win every single election, which is

the current sort of democratic strategy. Right If you want to actually defeat the far right, winning every election is not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already with Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely on simply winning every election into the future. You have to go beyond mere electoral victory towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat the

base of the far right. When the Republican Party held power for twelve years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan, they did it by destroying the political base the Democratic Party. They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to ensure unions would no longer be able to provide the ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If we are going to defeat the far right, we need to wage the same kind of campaign against them. Now.

Luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, we do not need to completely rebuild the American economy to knock the legs of the far right out from under them. There is, in fact, a pretty minimal program that we can implement to defeat the far right that is very simple. It has three components. First, a crack down on MLMs that drives them effectively completely underground.

very important political base for the far rights. I'm probably the most famous and the one that Robert has done an entire show on. So go listen to that if you want to really actually in detailed thing on the history of Amway, Mway and the sort of political family the devices that they've generated are an incredibly important part of the emerging far right. I mean, obviously, most famously, Betsy de Vos, who married into the Klan, was our Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of

prince family is embedded into this. And Amway famously used its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party candidates and also uses its base and also directly its own funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of Republican congressional candidates. Now, obviously, and this is something that is true of all of these reforms, is that everything we're doing here, they're morally and politically good in their

own right, right, MLMs are scams. They're extremely exploitative, and their rule, I think in the far right is a lot more important than people understand. Even if you just look at the money, you're sort of missing part of what's going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot. They're part of how the far right builds his ideological base. Teach you to convert all of your personal relations into

potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on a moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level. The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world, and this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway works so well.

Once you've been trained that literally everything, even in your sort of closest friends, and you know your dearest relationships with your family, are just business opportunities, it's extremely easy to convince you of the rest of the Republican Party platform. In the same way the experience of being in a union and organizing with your coworkers once reliably turned out

the ideological base of the left. MLMs have generated enormous political basis for the right and Unfortunately, this sort of ideological threat doesn't just go away if people are able to get out of MLMs, or especially if they're sort of cast out of mlems because they've simply are broken

brand of money and are in debt. The isolation and alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every single relation that's close to you, from attempting to sell them soap or whatever, makes people isolated and alienated and makes them more vulnerable to far right radicalization. And this is why driving these MLMs under isn't just a way to sort of cost Republican party money, because that's not enough to defeat the Republicans. They can find other sources of money.

What you need to do is systematically remove parts of their political base. And when I say your roofports to their political base, what I mean is you have to go after the systems that are creating more members of the far right. Going after MLMs is a way to do that. Now. The FTC has gone after m lms before.

They sort of famously, as you talked about in that episode an mway, they went after a bunch of MLMs in the eighties, but this sort of caused MLMs to get smarter and has you know, has been pretty effective in in sort of warding the FTC off from really going after MLM since then.

And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government regulation just means setting fines and if the finds still all the business to make more money than they lost from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.

It's not actual regulation. And if you're one of these businesses and the worst that could happen to you is the government takes a cut, you end up with, you know, two thousand and eight right where all these banks know they're going to get bailed out and they know the worst punishment that's going to happen to them is just the government taking a small cut and they can go back to just making all their money. So in order to actually go after MLMs, we can't simply rely on

the FTC. You know, even if if you were to sort of put in charge a more militant FTC that was were willing to go after stuff. There needs to be actual regulatory change here, and that is possible but difficult. But if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious about wielding political power to defeat the far right and to keep them from re emerging and to keep them out of power generationally, then this is the start of what we have to do. So we mentioned neutral Light,

which is you know, a very very power. NEUTRALI is important because it is actually two kinds of business that are extremely important to the far right at the same time, it is part MLM, but is an MLM that also sells dietary supplements. And when we come back from these ads, we will be considering the role of the virtually unregulated dietary supplement markets in the rise of the far right more broadly, and we are back. Oh boy, Yeah, the supplement market. There is a lot less that has been

written about this than there should be. So dietary supplements are barely regulated by the FDA. People are getting scammed all over the place. Enormous numbers. I mean, I've seen numbers that we're suggesting. I mean two hundred million people take some kind of dietary supplement if you include things like sort of vitamin gummies, et cetera, etc. This is an enormous This is an enormous business. I'm going to read from Johnny R. Starr, who wrote an article about

supplement regulation in the American Journal of Public Health. If you're going to read this, By the way, this is slightly out of date because the next year, I don't know if this is part of this. The next year at FDC a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations. But

here is star quote. The dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which is the big thing that sort of deregulated supplements, prohibits supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury, allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue immediate bands on substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes the

FDA to implement current good Manufacturing Practice guidelines. The law also requires pre market notification for new dietary supplements, defines supplements that were not marketed in the US before October fifteenth, nineteen forty four, which is when the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act went into effect. Products violating these regulations are

deemed dangerous, adulterated, and miss it, or otherwise unlawful. And that all sounds well and good until you get to the next sentence, which is quote, However, supplements need not be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on safety are required for new supplement ingredients.

lot of seats the Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need to use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block of sort of political power in these states. I want to read a little bit more from that article by Star about what kind of regulations are required for supplements because I think it's extremely dire in and of itself. Quote, manufacturers are not required to confirm the identity of all ingredients supply to them.

Only six brands of dietary supplements are currently verified by US pharmacopia, so they don't have to work. They can choose whether or not they want to be submitted to see if any of this stuff works now in theory, also, the marketing of dietary settlements is supposed to be regulated by the FDC, But like, is the FDC regulating all of these false class people are making with their dietary elements? No,

of course they're not doing that. So why do we care about supplement market Robert has kind of has talked about this at the very beginning of the episode. The easiest answer for why we should care about supplement markets is simply the figure of Alex Jones, who, you know, we have talked about extensively on this show. It's been behind the Bastards. If you want to really, really in depth, look at who Alex Jones is. The podcast and Knowledge Fight is the single best resource I think anyone has

ever created. Yeah, it would be hard to beat. Yeah, it's it's unbelievably detailed. But Alex Jones has, you know, as an individual figure, has done more to sort of spread the ideology the far right and turn this country into what it is now than maybe almost any other

single person other than someone like Trump. Right, he is probably most well known now as quote the Sandy Hook guy, which he's extremely mad at all people calling him, but he's why everyone thinks that not everyone, but a bunch of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flat And importantly, here's from NPR quote most of Free Speech Systems, which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company. Most of Free Speech System's revenue to this day, about

eighty percent comes from dietary supplements, according to court records. Now, these court records come from one of a number of lawsuits against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the victims of the Alex Jones shooting. Are serty for defaming the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry, yeah, yeah. And you know, in the process of discovery, we got a bunch of information about how Alex Jones's internal media

empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones over the years, you know that he's hawked everything from silver to satellite phones. But it is the dietary supplements that actually sell. Right, As an MPR article said, about eighty percent of his revenue comes from dietary supplements. This is not a sort of small independent media outlet right free

speech systems. Again, as Alex Jones' company was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, this is an enormous far right media empire, and supplement sales allow right wing figures like Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads, which removes a lot of potential leverage from activist groups who wage pressure campaigns against you know, dated this against Tucker Carlson for example, where people went after their advertisers and showed them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on Fox before

he got kicked off, and what do you want to fund this? And you know that was actually a sort of effective strategy. But you know, the funny part about this is if you look at the end of Tucker Carlson's show, right, the ads on that show were ads from the my Pillow guy who was a far right extremist in his own right and a very important election denier,

and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales are a durable and renewable grift because there's a ready an extensive network of suppliers and distributors right wing brands who want to make a bunch of money can just sort of slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale, and then they can market them to their viewers, and this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding. And this is used all over the place.

own profit. And so it's not just a matter of like this is how they get money, but this also is why they do some of the things that are so harmful.

incentive structure that's selling these supplements creates. Now, this is actually not an enormously difficult sort of feel to just completely shut down the next branch we're going to talk about, I think is actually a much harder political fight, But a lot of the market for this can be defeated by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the way they do drugs because, and this is really important, these supplements are being marketed as drugs, right The advertisements that

these people are already doing are already illegal. The FTC is not supposed to allow people to sell supplements like this. They shouldn't be able to be manufactured like this. And this is again, as with banning MLMs, this is something that helps the consumer because it'll mean that whatever supplement market exists after sort of a massive regulatory even crackdown will be much safer, it will be much more effective, and it will also destroy the base of far right media.

If you can cut the knees out of this sort of far right media ecosystem, you can go an enormous way towards solving the crisis of the far right that has been brought upon this country. Speaking of crisis, Yeah, we're gonna let the ads talk about the ads, and then we're going to come back and close by talking about car manufacturers in the American gentry.

These are millionaires, and notably, these are not billionaires. These are multi multimillionaires whose wealth derives from immediate wealth extraction from the surrounding communities. In places like Wyman's childhood home of Yakima, Washington, these elites have enormous local power over the territory. They rule like the landed gentry of old.

Here's Wyman quote. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet setting cause of politans, if popular imagination exists, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed league group, one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies

that govern life for tens of millions of people. Donald Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance, acting as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct, when he crowed about his quote beautiful boaters, lauding the flotilla of his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January sixth crowd that included people who had flown to the event

on private jets. He knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry, the salts of the earth, multimillionaires. You see them as local leaders in business and politics, the underappreciated backbone of a once great nation.

and their wealth and influence literally cannot be overstated. The journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in an article in Slate in twenty twenty three. Quote auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top point one percent of American earners car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors. It turns out, make up the majority of the countries one hundred and forty thousand Americans who earn

more than one point five million dollars a year. Crunching numbers from the US Census Bureau, data, scientists and author Stephens Devotowitz found that over twenty percent of car dealerships in the US have an owner in banking more than one point five million a year, which is absolutely absurd. That is an unbelievable amount of money for people who, really, when you think about it, don't do anything like what is the actual service that a car dealer is doing.

problems with a used car or whatever. Like, it's it's all fraud, right Yeah.

actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association NADA became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with sixteen thousand dues paying members spanning thirty two thousand, five hundred franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual Nauta convention became routine for presidential hole fuls, and even Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came

after they left the White House. And the fact that Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a moral level. Right, This is an entire organization of fraudsters and it doesn't even work.

if you do any research about this at all. A huge part of the power is because these people are spread geographically across the country, and because they are the richest people or among the richest people in the sort of small areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts of political power. And because they are again unbelievably wealthy, they can funnel this money directly into local politics on a scale that cannot be matched by your sort of

grassroots organizations. This allows them to buy everything from city council's to seats in Congress.

that we'll come back to it a little bit. But yeah, these car dealerships are a durable and extremely powerful for us in electoral politics, and they deliver seats and this is the most important thing if you're an electoralist, right, these people consistently deliver seats to Republicans by flooding an amount of money into local races that people can't compete with. And because of this, they miserate the lives of hundreds of millions of people. And they can also largely be

destroyed in a single stroke. That's maybe oversalling it a little bit, but their power largely rests on an enormous array of state level monopolies that ban the direct sales of cars to consumers or prevent car companies from competing with local retailers. And this is something that the autolobby has been you know, the Auto Association Lobby NA has been fighting for for ages. They've gotten it in an enormous number of states.

written about extensively. So they absolutely despise elect cars. And this is actually a political opportunity for us, right because Elon Musk now is again one of there is I think he's still the richest person in the world technically until sort of all his stocks implode. But this is an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base, right, because the local government monopolies that these car dealers have are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the other

parts of the Republican base. Right, Elon hates them. Actual car manufacturers hate it. No one likes car dealers, like, oh yeah, and this is everything you know. This is also something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this, and this is one of the few times libertarians are right. They look at this and go, oh yeah, Well, these

people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there, if you're a car company, you can't compete with these things. So these are state sanction monopolies. So there's large portions of the Republican base who oppose these companies. And if you can, you can use this as a wedge issue to split the Republican base. And that's sort of where

I want to close on. As much as I've been talking about these three very specific things, right, banning MLMs or at least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns on supplements, and legislation to allow direct car sales. What we're trying to do here isn't just getting rid of the money that supports the far right. We're trying to destroy their institutions, and we're trying to fracture their base. Right.

Going after MLMs destroys their ability to sort of produce more produce more Republicans from these MLMs and produce more people in the far right from these MLMs. Going after supplements is a way to destroy the right wing media ecosystem, which has been crucial to the rise of the far right. And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican coalition by pitting two parts of the Republican base against each other, pitting these car dealers versus Elon and versus the auto manufacturers.