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Welcome to it could happen here, a show about things falling apart. We are back from our little break, and today I'm joined with Robert Evans to discuss fascism.
I guess, yeah, yeah, I'm here. We're talking fascism. Listeners, excuse me. I have a sinus infection. So that's why it sound this way.
Oh that's why you sound like that.
Uh huh that sucks life.
Yeah, well, it might not suck as much as what I had to do last week, which is uh, watch this six part documentary about the twenty twenty four Trump election campaign. God, well, the art of the surge, I don't know. Overall, it was actually pretty boring. They were obviously trying to edit it like a succession episode. Oh
my god, really obnoxious. There is some insight into like the inner workings of the Trump team, like watching him and his team react to the Kamala Harris, D and C speech like workshop counter messaging was actually interesting, and the doc does show kind of Musk's influence steadily ramping up starting in July. The only time you see Trump and Vance together is after Trump's ABC debate, when JD Like preps him for the spin room. That's the only time, Wow, we see them at a act.
I mean, yeah, that makes sense, Like I wouldn't want to be in a room with JD Vans more than I had to be, although the fact that he does want to be in a room with Musk is baff lit.
Yes, and actually Musk and JD get along quite well in the interactions that are seeing in the documentary Milania.
Trump never appears once, not a single time. Well, it's good to know that they've they've managed to put together a functional thrupple.
Ooh, don't like that. Don't like that at all, first, buddy, the yikes. My biggest takeaway from this documentary is that it just showed how much his rallies are a religious experience for his supporters, deeply deeply religious, especially the Butler Pennsylvania rallies, where everyone talks about it like they would like like a genuine like limit experience or religious experience. Right now, this episode, I actually I want to focus on the rhetoric employed at these rallies in attempts to
label Trump a fascists. There's been a lot of discussion on like Trump's authoritarian and dictatorial desires and tendencies and expressions of those fears, in particular, were not enough to persuade the majority of voters against Trump, let alone safe and Republican support towards Harris and we on this show have not talked much about the escalation of rhetoric used by Trump and his allies this campaign cycle, with the
Biden administration's horrific border policies and the enabling of Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza drawing a great deal of our attention in the past few months, But now I do want to draw attention to the ethno nationalist framing that has become all too common, especially with the Democrats just complete submission to try Trump and the GOP's distinct focus on immigration as the top issue facing America. So part of what I'm gonna do here is I've outlined a
few clips and some quotes I'm trying. I tried to limit the clips because I know no one wants to hear Trump and these guys talk for too long, but I will play some.
And Robert, We've spent.
A lot of your time thinking about fascism in the past few years and reading about fascism, so I'm certainly curious on your thoughts on some of these clips and quotes, as we'll kind of go through like three specific rallies, mostly great and outline what type of rhetoric they are using and what it kind of points to historically. Now, one of the reoccurring phrases at Trump rallies this cycle was that the United States has become an occupied territory.
Here's Trump invoking that language at a rally in Atlanta a week before the election.
But it will soon be an occupied country no longer. November fifth, twenty twenty four, will be Liberation Day in America, and during day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. We're going to get these criminals out. I will rescue every city in town that has been invaded and conquered.
These towns have been conquered, you know, they have been invaded.
And can you imagine, just as though a foreign enemy was invading, a military was invading.
Okay, I will rescue every city in town that has been invaded and.
Conquered, conquered.
Yeah, just as though an enemy, a foreign enemy was invading.
Yeah. I mean that's I don't even know what to say about that. It's like that's textbook fascist shit, right, Like, I mean, among other things, ramping everyone up to justify, you know, at least the potential for violence against migrants. You know, it's self defense, right. Yeah.
Now, I like to focus first on the Medison Square Garden rally. Certainly the put floating island of garbage comments from the roast comedian got a lot of media attention, but what got less coverage was the much more historically worrying statements made by those within Trump's circle. Let's start with Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
America is for Americans and Americans only.
So, Robert, does that phrase remind you of any other phrases that have been used over time?
Yeah, I mean like one people, one vulc one Reich, right, I guess yeah, I mean again, Like I don't even know what to say at this point, right, Like, we're it's so obvious. When I started in the warning people about fascism game, you had to like explain a lot of history and then sort of like walk in, here's how you know what this is a sign post? I mean, when someone doesn't eighty eight this is what it means or whatever, And we're so far past that like.
Well, and and specifically this one invokes the Germany is for the Germans, which is a phrase that is banned in Germany now due to its use during.
Not the era.
That gives us something to look forward to now.
In a rant advocating for election denial in the case of Trump losing the election, Tucker Carlson referred to Kamala Harris as a Samoan Malaysian low IQ. This is just kind of baffling old school racism. Yeah, I honestly didn't expect this type of thing to have such a resurgence the past year.
More esoteric than I expected.
Yeah, it's frankly odd now that Tucker also spoke about how the elites are trying to replace the population and the culture and customs of this country, just clearly invoking the white nationalists, a great replacement ideology that he kind of previously spread on his Fox show.
In a country that has been taken over by a leadership class that actually despises them and their values and their history and their culture and their customs, really hates them to the point that it's trying to replace them.
Very clear stuff. And Don Junior invoked very similar rhetoric, saying that the government no longer puts Americans first and that the Democratic Party would rather quote replace Americans with people who will be reliable voters on Club Wow. And again, this is types of stuff that we talked about in like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. It's like like Laurens Southern YouTube videos.
And like, if there's one thing that dims are bad at, it's getting reliable voters.
Yes, Like, this is the type of stuff that was so that was much more niche. And then you had a few like four chan guys start like doing a writing on Tucker's show, and now it's being used at a disappoint the president's rallies.
Yeah. Now, when Trump finally.
Took the stage, he mirrored Tucker's Kamala Harris IQ comments, saying everyone knows she's a very low IQ individual. Like usual, he called the press the enemy of the people, uh huh, But he went on to describe the true enemy masterminding the fall of America, the quote radical left machine that has taken control of the Democratic Party.
It's just this a morphous group of people, but they're smart and they're vicious, and we have to defeat them. And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy, becomes a sound the hole. How can he say, no, they've done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.
And I do find interesting the way he describes them as like a morphous Yeah, it's not like a distinct sect. It's not like a fuss of people. It's this like a MorphOS almost like like a like like ethereal force that can like inhabit people.
Well, you need that because, that, among other things, allows you to refocus the lens on anyone. Yeah, right, Like you need the opportunity to keep shifting because eventually, if you're just actually focusing on a real, discreete group of human beings, you get rid of those people, you throw them in prison or whatever, and then you don't have an enemy anymore. And you always need that.
And do you know what we need right.
Now, Robert Products and Services.
Yeah, we do need to go on a quick break, and then I come back to talk about Dluth, Georgia. So not good, great, all right, we are back. I'm gonna now turn to a Turning Point action event on October twenty third in Dluth, Georgia, which I actually just visited for the first time. I went ice skating in Duluth, Georgia, and to kind of get a sense of what this town. It's not even really a suburb of Atlanta, it's it's
so far north. As I was, ice is skating there, I'm pretty sure like a Christian cult showed up and they had all their members also ice skated, because they're all wearing like the same outfits. They hold like very specific like headscarves. A few of like the more like youth pastory types had like like you know, like christ As King Taype puddies. But it definitely wasn't like a regular church it was. It was more of some kind of like evangelical like cultish formation based on like the
uniform clothing. So that's deLuce Georgia.
Yeah.
Now, Charlie Kirk.
Gave a fifteen minute speech which he closed with a spiritual appeal, saying, quote, you have a biblical obligation to engage in this election and to fight evil. The Democratic Party supports everything God hates unquote. Kirk then called this election a quote unquote spiritual battle, and finally he said, quote this is a Christian state. I want to see that continue. So none of this is like new right. This is kind of at this point bog standard Christian nationalism.
But this is a rally of about ten thousand people. It's not an official Trump rally. It is a turning point action rally that Trump did speak at. But I like to hone in once again on Tucker Carlson's comments. Now, he called this the first speech he's ever given at a political rally. Now, both me and you saw Tucker speak at the RNC. I guess he kind of views the R and C is a little bit different from like a standard like kind of more like a campaign
rally type event. But Tucker called Trump a triumph of the human spirit, christ a triumph of the will. You could say, yeah, yes, like what's another word for the human spirit. But now I'm going to play Actually, this is the longest clip we have, just because it's so fascinating, and I have a lot that kind have written on this already. I'm just going to play this clip.
There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that's right, Dad comes home and he's pefted.
Dad is pissed.
He's not vengeful.
He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because there's children, they live in his house, but he's very disappointed in their behavior and he's gonna have to let them know.
He's gonna have to get.
To your room right now and think about what you did. And when dad gets home, you know what he says. You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl, and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it's not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.
No, it's not. I'm not gonna lie.
That's gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.
And you earn this.
You're getting a vigorous spanking because.
You've been a bad girl. Well that's just real sick and deranged. I mean you can tell he really gets off on spanking little girls.
I mean, like beyond like Tucker's like shown depravity here, I also just find like the willingness of the audience just to eat this stuff up and like really enjoy it to like similarly be be like both like fascinating and like a show of like a certain level of a depravement.
Well it's this, it's leaning into what has always been the core of like the most militant conservatism, which is the like strict Christian conservative parents rights people sure be like my children are my property, and also the right way to parent is like a dictator.
I mean, this is like the most like openly Freudian display of American fascism that I've ever seen before.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, It's amazing, this.
Idea of like a harsh father whose love is replaced with fearful authority. It's really important that like America is framed as a bad girl. There's this like feminizing of them, right, America is not like a bad little boy. A bad Girl's like really important. Carlson's almost invoking like an incestuous
like domination. Yeah, it's it's quite sick, and like I had to actually like like look up stuff on this because I'm like, I know, Freud and a few others have like written about this type of thing before, and specifically Adorno has written about this in an essay called Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda that I'd like to read just a few brief quotes.
From Oh I love some Adorno, Yes, please.
Quote There is either no mention of love whatsoever between members, or it's expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way through the mediation of some religious image. In the love of whom the members unite and who's all embracing love they're supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. It seems significant that in today's society, with its artificially integrated fascist masses, reference to love is almost completely excluded.
Hitler shunned the traditional role of the loving father and replaced it entirely by the negative one of threatening authority. I'm going to pivot to Freud here, specifically his essay on group behavior and how individuals regressed become a part of masses. He writes about how a leader of a cult can exploit psychological shortcuts in its followers to embody this like group ideal that governs their ego as a substitution quote, the leader of the group is the dreaded
primal father. The group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force. It has an extreme passion for authority, It has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal. This is like so displayed on what Tucker is doing. Like this is just exactly what it is. I mean, it reminds me of the other quote about how people seek out salvation in subjugation. And I'll leave just one more quote from Adorno here.
Quote.
Fascist agitation is centered in the idea of the leader, no matter whether he actually leads or is only the mandatory of group interests, because only the psychological image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the
all powerful and threatening primal father. The formation of the imagery of an omnipotent and unbridled father figure, by far transcending the individual father and therefore apt to be enlargened into a group ego, is the only way to promulgate the passive masochistic attitude to whoms one's will has to be surrendered, an attitude required of the fascist follower the more his political behavior becomes irreconcilable with his own rational interests as a private person, as well as those of
the group or class to which he actually belongs. The follower's reawakened irrationality is therefore quite rational from the leader's point of view. It necessarily has to be a conviction which is not based on perception and reasoning, but on
an erotic tie. I'm sure someone more skilled than me could write like a whole dissertation just on Tucker's speech here, because it invokes so many of these ideas, and like without trying to this is always like subconscious on their part, like they're pulling on these things like specifically, like like the passive masochistic attitude. It's like their submission to Trump is like this deep masochistic urge.
There's another thing in there that I think is important, especially because I'm hearing a lot of people talking about like, well, once Trump pushes through his tariffs or does this or does that, the horrible negative consequences of this will like absolutely destroy the GOP right. That'll finally bring them down to me let them, you know. No. And one of the things that Dorno says there is that like the leader doesn't even need to be pro and that's an
underdiscussed aspect of psychology and fascist states. One of the phenomenons within Nazi Germany was, you know, there were a number of Nazi policies, Hitler's policies that had serious negative effects on people in Germany, and one of the most common phrases that you would hear from them was if only hit new right, you know, you usually deployed when like you were dealing with a government agency that was headed by just like an absolute criminal that you know,
Hitler had appointed that Like, Oh, well, Hitler doesn't know that the Gestapo are doing this, right, you know, he would stop this, he'd put a stop to this if he knew, he wouldn't let this happen, Right, That's what That's what Trump's believers. I don't know if that's what the American people writ large may never buy into Trump the way that the Germans bought into Hitler, but Trump's supporters are certainly already there.
And this is something that Tucker saw in the audience when he started on this rant. He started repeating certain phrases because it got such a good reaction from the crowd.
Like this wasn't like planned.
It was it was him reading the crowd and realizing, oh, they really like this. I'm going to keep doing it and specifically this. This is also how he closed his speech. And I don't believe this was this was planned. I believe this was because of the reaction that the crowd had previously. I'm going to play the very end of his speech where he basically endorses like a coup. If Harris actually wins.
If they do all of that, they need to lose. And at the end of all of it, when they tell you they've won, no, you can look them straight in the face and say I'm sorry.
Dad's home and he's pissed.
Thank you.
They love it.
Yeah, of course, of course, all they have ever wanted is to be forced to be right, you know, and to the extent that reality disagrees with their beliefs, which it usually does, to be able to beat reality into place and at least continue to trick themselves until they die, right, Like, that's all the fascists I know, you know, the older people,
many of whom raised me. That's what it really was about for them, was never having to acknowledge the mistakes that they had made, the things that they had supported that didn't work out. Like it was a rage at the peopleeople who insisted on pointing out, Hey, you said this was going to happen, and the opposite happened. So that promise of like, even if they win, Dad's going to come home and beat them into submission is deeply attractive, I.
Mean, and even if it hurts your own like self interests, your only class interests, right, And it's like replacing all of the anguish you have as like an individual person and like replacing your own ego with the embodiment of this group ideal that is just someone else. Like this is why so many people have like dedicated their lives to Trump. Like you look at all these like like boomers and even some like gen X people at these Trump rallies who like Trump has like become like their personality.
He's fully occupied their life. And yeah, like that's it's similar into the way that like occult leader has like how Freud wrote about it. Freud wrote all that stuff like in the nineteen twenties before before like Hitler really rose to power, but he could like sense what was like coming in Germany. He could he could feel. Yeah, and what I'm gonna feel right now is the products and services that support this podcast.
Huzzah, All right, we are back.
I like to close by talking about Aurora, Colorado. Now, a tactic the Trump campaign consistently used this past year is to hone in on particular small communities as being taken over by immigrants who they would call like criminal migrants. The best known example of this is what happened in Springfield, Ohio, but this also happened in the Denver suburb Aurora, Colorado, after a video went viral showing men walking through an
apartment complex holding firearms. A false claim then spread that a Venezuelan gang was forcibly taking over entire buildings in this city. At a Trump rally in Aurora on October eleventh, massive banners on both sides of the stage read Deport illegals now and end Migrant crime. On either side of the podium there were large mugshots of Latino men with
text that reads occupied America. Steven Miller, now like Chief Advisor for Immigration Policy, takes the stage and says that the patriots gathered at this event can quote end the invasion and end the occupation by voting for Trump.
Look at all these photos around me. Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors that you want in your city? No, these are the criminal migrants the Kamala Harris brought into your community.
Again, It's all pretty brazen stuff.
Yep. Yeah, I mean we call that brazen. But like that's just mainstream now. Yes, Like the fight to look at migrants as human beings and have any kind of samee justice you know for undocumented migrants in this country has been completely botched.
There's something about like the suburban neighborhood idea that is more like disturbing to me, like pointing to actual pictures of people being Are these the kids you grew up with?
Yep?
And like the fight to like preserve this nostalgic idea of like your childhood neighborhood, it's just so dark to me now. Invoking great replacement framing, Miller says that Kamala Harris was bringing these immigrants into your communities and that they are now taking over America.
We don't need in this country homeless migrants, criminal migrants. We don't need migrants consuming and depleting our public resources, overwhelming our public schools, overwhelming our hospitals, taking over our apartment buildings, and yes, murdering innocent Americans. You have a right to love the community you grew up in. You have a right to love your neighbors as they are. You have a right to want a country that is of, by, and for Americans and only.
Americans again with that, like you have a right to love the community you grew up in, and then of course like Americans for Americans, and Miller later closed his speech by yelling, America will be reclaimed for Americans.
Oh gosh, yep. I mean, look, these people suffered no consequences for what they did the last time, so they're going to keep pushing further. It's done nothing but work for them. No one has ever taught them any lesson that, like, hey, you've gone too far and now there are going to be negative consequences. That hasn't happened. So yeah, they're just going to keep getting more and more masked off. This is where they've wanted to be, Miller, certainly from the beginning.
And they've used these past four years as prep work to build them to this point. Of course, none of what they're saying is like real in terms of like, you know, buildings being taken over the famously pro Harris liberal extremist group. The Aurora Police Department have continued to clarify that no apartment buildings have been taken over by any gangs, nor have tenants been paying gang members rent money.
According to the police, none of the armed men seen in that viral video who have all been since identified or arrested. None of them have any ties to Venezuelan gangs or organized crime. What happened was slum lords spread a false story about their apartment complex being taken over by a gang as a way to get out of doing repairs on the property, saying it was too dangerous to enter the premises. Jesus, it was all like a fucking scam by slum lords so that they wouldn't have
to fix their own apartment building. Denver seven found code enforcement and inspection records dating back to twenty twenty that show numerous violations prior to the influx of Venezuelan immigrants
in the Denver metro area. The complex is now under new care, but a similar false tale of an apartment building in Chicago being taken over by immigrant gangs went viral in September due to the efforts of libs of TikTok and Elon Musk, with libs of TikTok saying quote, first they did this in Aurora, Colorado, and now Chicago, which city will be next? This invasion happened on Kamala's watch unquote. The last thing I will mention here is all of the blood comments that Trump has been making
the past year. In interview last year, Trump said that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease, people are coming in with every possible thing that you could have unquote. This clearly invokes like blood framing used by Hitler and Nazis, and like eugenics in general. Yeah, and this is rhetoric that he's continuing to use for the present. In an interview last month, Trump say that immigrants are naturally murderers
because quote, it's in their genes. We've got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
I mean a lot of what this comes down to is that after World War Two, we really needed to execute a lot more people, you know, like you could have quashed the eugenics movement. We needed to go after a lot of people in the US. There were a lot of American fascists involved in eugenics, and after Treblinka and Auschwitz, we really just should have cleaned house, and instead we let all of these people get into think tanks.
I'm going to close with a quote from the Atlantic here quote. When Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan, trump was right about everything. This is the language borrow directly from Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth ben Gate posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini's Italy displaying the slogan Mussolini is always right.
Uh huh, And that reminded me of what you said earlier about how these people just always wanted to be right.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the that's the core of it.
Similarly, like people can surrender their own individual ego and substitute it with this image of Trump right, Trump was right about everything.
Yep.
Anyway, this is kind of what I wanted to put together, just focusing on on all of these things, because I mean, as much as you know, foreign policy in America is always kind of fucked. Domestic policy, I think, does often get changed based on who is in office. And this is what we're going to be dealing with these four years, especially with Miller taking a larger and larger role inside the White House.
We sure are, so everybody, buckle up.
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