Pod Insights On with Kara Swisher Why Trump’s Cartoonish Fascism Is So Effective with Jason Stanley About this episode As federal troops patrol the capital and masked men whisk away immigrants in unmarked cars, it’s reasonable to ask: is President Trump a fascist? According to Jason Stanley, the answer is a resounding yes.
Stanley is a philosopher and the author of seven books, including How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works, and Erasing History. He’ll be teaching at the University of Toronto this fall, after leaving Yale and the United States for Canada. He describes his self-imposed exile as an expressive act meant to sound an alarm, but Kara is skeptical, and the two of them spar over his choice. They also break down the ways in which Trump is following the fascist playbook — from cultural capture of museums and universities, to data manipulation, and emergency declarations — and the role of the media in normalizing anti-democratic power grabs. Finally they debate whether MAGA can survive without Trump, and whether America can survive MAGA.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Oy vey.
0:01 Kara Swisher? Don't oy vey at me.
0:15 Kara Swisher? Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism and a professor of philosophy. Stanley, along with his colleagues Marcy Schor and Tim Snyder, made international news when they decided to leave Yale and America for Canada, where they'll be teaching at the Monks School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He's the author of seven books, including How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past and Control the Future. I'm excited to talk to him, because I've followed Jason for a long time. I just ran into him at a book festival, and we have a lot in common. We've talked about a lot of the same things. I gave him a hard time for leaving this country.
1:00 Kara Swisher? He said he should stay here and fight, and we'll talk about that, too. We have two expert questions for Stanley, one from Clay Risen, the author of Red Scare, Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, and a reporter at The New York Times, who we recently had on the podcast, and another from Deb Roy, someone I've known for a long time, a techie. He's a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the director of the Center for Constructive Communication. This is a really sharp conversation, so stick around and come back, Jason.
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3:38 Kara Swisher? All right, Jason, you ready? What a perfect timing.
3:41 Speaker 00 Perfect timing.
3:41 Kara Swisher? Perfect timing. So, you study philosophy of language, the language of politics, and the language and strategies of fascism. And you've been outspoken about calling President Trump a fascist. Tell us why and then explain how Trump compares to other fascists.
3:55 Speaker 00 So, I think of fascism as sort of based on great replacement theory. The idea is that the nation was great, and its greatness consisted of the exploits of its great men. And then the idea is that... Foreigners are coming in and destroying the nation's greatness. They're polluting the blood of the nation, as it were. And so great replacement theory is central here. And the mythic past is central, this idea of a past that was once great. That is what you see in India now, the idea that there was a pure mythic past, a pure Hindu past.
4:39 Speaker 00 So purity is very central here. We see purity entering into the description of immigration or foreigners or people regarded as other and that there's some kind of pollution. And then we need to get back to rigid gender roles, according to fascism, because we need to repopulate the nation with the pure people of that race. And patriarchy is very central because the glorification of men's exploits in the past and women's equality threatens the primacy of men. And that's part of this great pure mythic past
5:21 Speaker 00 that is supposedly being destroyed by foreigners and liberal equality. Now, what we have, you know, in terms of ranking of fascists, I mean, it's pretty typical to say that Romania was particularly horrific. We have to distinguish the old right from the new right. So I would think if you're looking at Mussolini, you're looking at someone who himself, I mean Ethiopia. He invaded Ethiopia, that was obviously a race war. But it wasn't the kind of genocidal, efficient genocidal mania of Hitler.
5:59 Speaker 00 And Hitler, of course, focused on Jews as the sort of force behind feminism and liberalism. This is what people don't understand, just a short pet peeve tangent. It wasn't Orthodox Jews that appear in Mein Kampf. It was Jews like me, like leftist, pro-equality Jews. So Hitler focused on Jews. I think actually Netanyahu is right now showing himself to be a fascist along historically horrific dimensions. I think with Trump...
6:36 Speaker 00 With immigration, you know, we're seeing concentration camps. We're seeing something very similar to the German Storm Upteilung. ICE looks very similar. Hitler was like, okay, goons, here are your state uniforms. And so we're seeing something eerily similar to that move. And we're seeing concentration camps. But, you know, we didn't have the final solution in Germany until 1941. So really, I mean, my family was living in Germany in 1937 and 1938. It wasn't until Kristallnacht that things really got extremely extreme.
7:14 Kara Swisher? He's just in the early stages of this, is what you're saying, correct? In the early stages of fascism?
7:20 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, I don't think you would say that Hitler in 1934 was in the early stages of fascism.
7:25 Kara Swisher? No.
7:26 Speaker 00 He was a fascist. And I think that we're looking at a kind of 1934 kind of moment. It's tricky because, you know, I mean, Trump is declaring emergencies left and right. Right? So, you know, it's the same strategies we're seeing. We can talk about whether these strategies are things he got from books or whether they're just natural reactions if you want to take over.
7:48 Kara Swisher? So your latest book is Erasing History. And there's been a lot of recent attempts by President Trump to do exactly that. Let's go through some of them and we'll talk about where they fit with the standard fascist playbook, of which there is one. President Trump has placed Washington DC, as we noted, police force under federal control, deployed the National Guard and ordered federal agents to patrol the city. You've written that, quote, fascist law and order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes, those of the chosen nation who are lawful by nature and those who are not, who are inherently lawless. So talk about how Trump's move fits into that framework. And he's using words like bloodthirsty and deranged maniacs, et cetera.
8:24 Speaker 00 Right, so it's clearly, you know, racial in character in the case of DC.
8:31 Speaker 00 It's part of the here we need to bring in American history and not European history and look back to this idea of black run, black majority cities during Reconstruction being described as corrupt. So that and lawless. This idea, this is a chapter I talk about in my book, How Fascism Works, called Sodom and Gomorrah. The idea is that cities are filled with foreigners, immigrants, and are, you know, law and order has completely broken down and they're filled with LGBTQ citizens doing decadent things. So this is the kind of structure, the rural urban divide, that Trump leans into and he leans into many
9:16 Speaker 00 Americans, not, you know, it's very natural. That's why Sodom and Gomorrah appears in the Bible. There's something about the rural urban divide that speaks, you know, geographically and centrally to humanity. So DC, because of its historical associations, he can tell a fake story that draws on racism, that draws on America's sort of founding sin, genocide of indigenous people and racism. So that's what he's doing. What you do is you draw on stereotypes, you draw on myths about oppressed groups to basically create a sense of emergency and then take over.
10:00 Kara Swisher? Right.
10:01 Speaker 00 And that's what we're seeing.
10:02 Kara Swisher? So another one, Trump is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska for what he calls a feel out session, it's kind of creepy, over the war in Ukraine. Trump has repeatedly blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war despite obvious evidence. The contrary, he's also blamed Putin recently, he's all over the place. Is the constant shuffling of blame a deliberate tactic, a fascist tactic to undermine truth, or is he just reacts, you know, as he feels like it at any one moment?
10:31 Speaker 00 That's a great question. I assume that's a question for both of us, Kara. I could throw it back at you and we could discuss it. I think neither of us really know. I mean, there is that 1984-esque kind of now we're at what we've always been at war with Oceania thing going on. Orwell sets it up as if it's deliberate, whereas with Trump, one has more of a feeling that it's chaotic.
10:54 Kara Swisher? So, does the muddling, the narrative around Russia can give Trump any sort of strategic benefit, or is it just he doesn't know what he's doing? I can't tell. You're right. I can't tell. But has there ever been fascists that do this?
11:06 Speaker 00 Good question. There seems to be more anarchy here. I guess this is one of the objections that the "it's not fascism" people would make, that there's too much anarchy for it to be a coherent ideology. We're familiar with that point. But I think that Trump supporters want him to bring these wars to an end.
11:24 Kara Swisher? Right.
11:25 Speaker 00 So, I knew intelligent people who thought Trump was going to bring the war in Gaza to an end and bring the war in Ukraine to an end, and stop funding Israel with weapons to do its genocide. And I'm for weapons for Ukraine, and I am not for supporting Israel's war in Gaza. But I think there are people, his supporters, J.D. Vance, for instance, were people who were invested in him bringing these wars to a conclusion. So, I see Trump, especially with Russia and Ukraine, I see him under a lot of pressure, internal pressure.
12:01 Kara Swisher? Right. So, it's not the tactic of we're at war all the time, because that's what he'd stick with in that regard. So, I'm going to move on. The White House is going to review Smithsonian museums ahead of America's 250th anniversary to ensure they are, quote, "accurate, patriotic, and enlightening." They've also announced that Trump will host the Kennedy Center's award show. Given everything else Trump's trying to accomplish, why would he want to micromanage museums and performing arts centers? It could be part of his ego, the need for control. Is this a fascist tactic, or are the two... Mixed up with each other.
12:31 Speaker 00 Well, I published How Fascism Works in 2018, and other people as well were saying, Trumpism is fascism. And one of the major objections was, where's the cultural element?
12:40 Kara Swisher? Uh huh.
12:41 Speaker 00 So, you know, fascism involves a takeover of culture and linking of culture to the greatness of the nation and an exceptionalist narrative. And it's exactly what we're seeing. In fact, this was the objection to calling it fascism, that he wasn't doing this. So now we see the kind of autocratic structure that of the White House, the gold leaf everywhere, the kind of Gaddafi-esque structure. Gaddafi wasn't a fascist, but obviously he was a despotic autocrat. And now we're seeing the kind of cultural takeover in the service of the greatness of the nation and the greatness of its leader that we would expect if this were fascism.
13:25 Kara Swisher? Along with the media, correct? Along with suing the media?
13:28 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, there's the super obvious stuff, like shutting down the media, shutting down the universities, changing the school system. I mean, a lot of people didn't see that as much, which is why I wrote Erasing History.
13:42 Kara Swisher? Yes.
13:42 Speaker 00 Because I knew people weren't going to predict that the attack on the universities, but I knew that was going to be like one of the first things because it's fascist. And so, so that's, and education is central, museums, culture and education are central here. And so you have to take over the education system, you have to take over the museums because the museums are part of the education system. And they're not even hiding what they want to replace it with. They want to replace it with an American exceptionalist narrative. That's what they say. And it's so ironic, right? Because the American exceptionalist narrative is that the United States is a free country, a free democracy.
14:27 Speaker 00 And at the very same time as they're showing us not to be exceptional at all, they're imposing an American exceptionalist narrative by law.
14:37 Kara Swisher? Right. And where would be the next thing they would go for?
14:40 Speaker 00 Great question, Kara. I think at this stage, things are moving very rapidly. But it's also the case that some things, and Orban realizes this, are just not that relevant to them. Like, they're not, you know, some intellectuals talking just don't harm them, you know? If anything, it feeds into their narrative. So, but Putin, now Putin doesn't tolerate any of that. Putin is going to crush any dissent violently, but that took a while to happen. And it could be that we will skate along with them saying, well, you know, as long as this person isn't, you know, is not effective in their dissent,
15:22 Speaker 00 we'll leave it alone because, you know, it doesn't matter.
15:26 Kara Swisher? Right. Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and accused her of having rigged the jobs report. His pick for the job said that he would suspend monthly job reports for walking that back. Your average voter probably doesn't pay attention to BLS revisions, but markets do. And if you assume investors are tougher to fool, why would Trump try to manipulate the data or risk undermining the administration's very dwindling credibility?
15:49 Speaker 00 I don't think he cares about credibility. You know, this is all cartoonish, right, Kara? This is just straight out of some novel that you would write about an authoritarian. I mean, facts are relevant. All that's relevant is what makes the leader look good. So, you know, that's why history is a danger. The nation has to be great. Anything the nation did that wasn't great has to be erased. Any facts that run counter to the idea that Trump is the greatest leader in history have to be erased. In fact, serious dangers. He views it as a kind of betrayal of him to report accurate numbers when they don't support
16:34 Speaker 00 his image of greatness. So, to loop back to your earlier question, we have a kind of cartoonish performance of a fascist dictator out of some kind of, you know...
16:49 Kara Swisher? Very Chaplin-esque, actually.
16:51 Speaker 00 It feels very Chaplin-esque, right? It's a kind of, every kind of, okay, well, you know, we're just gonna have the museums turn into glorification of the nation. We'll slap Trump onto Mount Brushmore. I mean, the whole thing seems Chaplin-esque. And then, you know, it's such a commentary on this putative exceptionalism of the United States that we would fall for such a direct card. I mean, this is not Paul Kagame we're speaking of, the leader of Rwanda.
17:23 Kara Swisher? Does being cartoonish make it less effective?
17:25 Speaker 00 I mean, a rant in Origins, as you know, says, you know, totalitarianism bumps up against reality and founders on those shoals. But I think that's, I think that's more a hope than anything else.
17:40 Kara Swisher? So cartoonishness can be effective?
17:42 Speaker 00 But when I say cartoonish, I mean, it's a kind of paint-by-numbers fascist dictatorship that is emerging. It's something that you would read a book and it says, this is what they do and that's what they're doing. Sometimes I feel like they're reading my books. You know, it's not, it's not hidden. It's not a sophisticated version of authoritarianism, not even as sophisticated as Putin.
18:07 Kara Swisher? Right. But it, does it have to be?
18:10 Speaker 00 It doesn't appear so. It appears that the United States is exceptionally vulnerable to fascism. We have the largest prison system in the world and we're already, to a large extent, a racist police state. And the theory of fascism is that when you have that, when you have that kind of, I mean, there's this notion of the dual state, right? Under fascism, you have Frankl's dual state, that you have one state that allows the favored group to do what they want and the other state that is sort of a more regular structure. Now, you don't have the exact same thing in American history, but Du Bois talks about
18:51 Speaker 00 two systems of justice, one for white people and one for black people. And we've long had that. So of course we're vulnerable to the collapse of law because we've long had the collapse of law, just directed against poor people and racial minorities.
19:08 Kara Swisher? Right. So another one, Harvard is probably negotiating a deal with the Trump administration to pay $500 million settlement and potentially give the federal government access to its admissions data in order to restore its federal funding of billions of dollars. We're recording this interview on Wednesday, and by the time it airs, they might have reached a deal. You've written that Columbia University's deal with the administration, quote, "threatened to be a model of the capitulation of American universities to fascism." Talk about this settlement now, because Harvard, Harvard was attacked before in the 50s, right? In the 40s, 50s, many times. Is this the most important settlement in that regard, if they, if they strike it? And do they have a choice?
19:44 Speaker 00 Well, the idea that they were run by, you know, by, by, you know, cultural Marxists was always absurd. And there were certain elements of the last five years, like diversity statements, that I disagreed with pretty strongly. But I saw them as more like bureaucratic overreach than the workings of some malevolent cultural Marxists who somehow, unbeknownst to everyone, were controlling things. So we have a lot of sort of people who already were, you know, disturbed by the number of women coming up through the ranks as faculty, things like this. And I think this is true of all of our institutions. So there's some amount of sort of self-capitulation of saying, okay, you know, we wanted to get rid of this stuff anyway.
20:29 Speaker 00 But I think that what it's looking like is they're going to do DEI for, for Trump supporters. DEI for conservatives. Let's be clear, there are hardly any Trump supporters in science departments. There are hardly any registered Republicans in science departments, and that's because of the extreme nature of the Republican Party. It's become an anti-science party, an anti-knowledge party. So, but I think that they're going to try to correct that. They're going to try to bring in more right-wing students. They're going to try to bring in more right-wing faculty across the board. And then a bunch of it is just going to be corrupt. You're just going to have to hire some cronies of Trump in order to, you know, make nice.
21:14 Speaker 00 So this idea that you have from some of the mainstream press, like, oh, the United States has lots of Trump supporters, so you should have Trump supporters everywhere in the university. I mean, let's just look at the reasoning behind that. I'm not comparing Trump supporters to Nazis. I'm not doing that. However, if you were to have a lot of Nazis in your country, it would be crazy to say we have to fill the universities with them.
21:42 Kara Swisher? Do they have a choice, though? Do these universities have a choice, given the amounts of money here? Or should they just wait them out?
21:49 Speaker 00 No, no, they should move. We need Harvard should move to Canada like Central European University moved.
21:55 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
21:55 Speaker 00 One of those universities should just leave.
21:58 Kara Swisher? They're not moving to Canada. You know that.
22:00 Speaker 00 I'm aware, Kara, they should. That's what Central European University did. Maybe they had to. But imagine if you're a non wealthy family in Beijing or a wealthy family in Europe, are you going to send your kid to a place where they have no freedom of thought or freedom of expression? Or imagine you're a political science professor who's not a US citizen. Suddenly, you know, you're really under threat if you speak, even about your area of expertise. You ask what's going to happen, that's going to get more and more extreme. Khalil Mohammed told me and Martha's Vineyard Book Festival that settler colonialism,
22:40 Speaker 00 the concept of settler colonialism will be used as a basis for, if you teach that, it'll be a basis for sort of antisemitic bias. So we're going to see more and more of that.
22:52 Kara Swisher? Right.
22:52 Speaker 00 And so the settlements, insofar as they, they're leaking into the sort of, oh, you know, the fake antisemitism pretext. That's just a.
23:03 Kara Swisher? That's just one of them that they'll use. Yeah.
23:07 Kara Swisher? We'll be back in a minute.
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26:20 Kara Swisher? So let's switch back now and go to more analytical mode, but stay on the education system, which is one of the major focuses in your book. Trump's attacks on the American education, it's much deeper than just elite universities. What is the ultimate goal of a fascist? And if Trump is this fascist, when it comes for American education?
26:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, so as Vladimir Putin said, wars are won by teachers. So we had progressive education for a while, we still do. The idea is to empower citizens, to give them a sense of agency. Teach about social movements for positive progressive change, for equality. And that kind of teaching, where you teach about what ordinary people do to affect social change, is very dangerous for autocrats. Because autocrats don't want people to know that they have power. They don't want people to know that large social movements can challenge hierarchies. So you get rid of that. You get rid of labor history, you get rid of black history, you get rid of movements for LGBTQ rights and women's history.
27:21 Speaker 00 And you say, "History is just the deeds of great men."
27:25 Kara Swisher? Mm-hmm.
27:26 Speaker 00 And in fact, in Mein Kampf, that's exactly what Hitler says. He says, "Education should take the form of just teaching about the deeds of great men of the race."
27:35 Kara Swisher? The Uber mention.
27:36 Speaker 00 Yeah. So you want to zap the agency out of ordinary citizens in an autocracy. And just have them stand back in worshipfulness of these powerful, great men. And then they feel, well, that's how history is. Nothing historical came from groups of ordinary people.
27:56 Kara Swisher? Right.
27:57 Speaker 00 In the case of the United States, you have something historically particular, which is the role of the public school in combating racism. So in the South, the black Americans fought for the establishment of the public school in the South. Not just for a liberal education for their kids, but also so that white students and black students could... Encounter each other's perspectives. So, the public school is always, in the United States,
28:24 Kara Swisher? Mm-hmm.
28:25 Speaker 00 a target because of its role in racial equality and racial understanding.
28:31 Kara Swisher? Right. So, 10 years ago, The Atlantic published an article headlined "The Coddling of the American Mind" by Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff. You and other critics have pointed out that piece is a starting point for the panic around wokeness and cancel culture in universities, which you say ultimately helped lead to Trump's reelection. You wrote in The Guardian, quote, "The US mainstream media has waged a decades-long propaganda campaign against American universities." Can there not be some concerns about language policing on college campuses or campus protests without being, you know, a handmaiden to fascism?
29:02 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. I mean, the 90s political correctness thing, William F. Buckley drew attention to this issue of the, you know, the liberals, you know, not allowing conservative speech. It's a very old topic in American life. It is not new. What's new is self-described liberals becoming William F. Buckley. And, uh, and then, then the main institutions of the main newspapers backing that. Not, you know, with articles not written by professors, but just by people claiming they're liberals. And so, of course, there's always things to critique.
29:45 Speaker 00 Diversity statements, that was absurd, like the loyalty oaths. There was definitely overreaches and, and excessive performances of, you know, the whole "sit down and shut up unless you belong to an oppressed group." None of that I was in favor of. However, you know, it was not something that I experienced as anything near as powerful as the power of anti-woke white guys. It has never been the case in my time in university that the power of anti-woke white guys saying, complaining about feminism, and that's always been the dominant. Voice at universities.
30:27 Speaker 00 And so, you know, my department at Yale, which was a liberal progressive department, we hired our first tenured black professor last year. So, you know, definitely saw like Kendi, Abram Kendi, I did not agree with that. I did not agree with his ideology. I thought a lot of the movements, I thought, you know, the idea that you're going to end patriarchy and end racism in a few years was, you know, obviously lent itself to problematic excesses. But everyone around me, the university is part of the world, is part of the country. And so just as people were panicked about wokeness outside of the university, inside
31:08 Speaker 00 of the university, the university was dominated by anti-woke white men panicking about, you know, a few more women. So, which is not to say that, you know, not to say that I agree with diversity statements. It's not to deny that, you know, sometimes people were just idiotic in the service of otherwise laudable goals. But in general, my entire 29 years as a professor has been occupying spaces dominated by donors, by boards, by administrators who are not responsive to issues of equality and diversity.
31:47 Speaker 00 So in 2015, the thing that Hite and Lukianoff were responding to was when Black Lives Matter moved on to campuses in 2015, 2016. It started with the University of Missouri and then moved to Yale University, where one of our colleges was named after John C. Calhoun, the sort of foremost proponent of slavery. And three black students, philosophy majors, had come to me in September 2015 and told me no one had ever seen a black person on a philosophy syllabus. And so that was the impetus. And then to be ridiculed, dragged over the coals for that utterly legitimate concern.
32:31 Speaker 00 That's what I witnessed, and I witnessed my fellow professors responding with fear when they were actually the ones in power.
32:39 Kara Swisher? So let's stand on this for a minute. You've characterized some of the reactions to the Gaza protests, which really sort of supercharged it, and so-called wokeness on campus as a betrayal. I'm paraphrasing here, but in your view, the betrayal was mainstream media liberals and, I guess, centrists failing to recognize accusations of antisemism on campus and accusations of woke-ism as a fascist strategy to destabilize democracy. Talk very quickly, but on your theory of this case, how, why this particular thing was effective?
33:08 Speaker 00 Well, partly, it was effective because there's a generational battle between my fellow Jewish people. Jewish students are, by and large, many of them are very critical of Israel. You know, the opinions are very divided. The younger you go, the more critical of Israel you get among Jewish people. So one reason it's effective is because older Jewish people are much less critical of Israel. It's much easier for them to think of protests against Israel as antisemitic, even when one of the largest identity groups in those protests are Jewish students. They get erased, and they were erased by the mainstream media.
33:49 Speaker 00 And then we have more erasures of history where, you know, Muslim students at Harvard report in much larger numbers feeling that their speech is chilled than Jewish students. But that gets erased.
34:01 Kara Swisher? So let's talk about your decision to leave the country and move to Canada, speaking of erasing yourself. I make fun of you for this. I said you shouldn't have left, but you justified it by saying, "I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words." What do you think is the likelihood you'd have been punished if you stayed? And if you didn't have children, would you have stayed?
34:20 Speaker 00 I probably would have stayed if I didn't have children. I have black Jewish children, and I've had longstanding worries about...
34:31 Speaker 00 Their safety in this country, even though we're very privileged. And so that, you know, obviously, class plays a role. If you're poor and white, it's also a very dangerous country for you. So that played a significant role. I also think it's strange now to judge this decision. Moshe Hamid, the writer, recently said to me, there's two perspectives on your decision. One is that you are sending an alarm to your fellow Americans about what is happening in the United States. But the second and more interesting perspective is what will you do in Canada? And that chapter has yet to be written. I feel a great responsibility to do something about the global rise of fascism and to see
35:15 Speaker 00 it as a global rise in Canada, which I feel is honestly a place of relative safety compared to other countries in the world, and I include Germany in that. So, you know, with the rise of AfD, Alternative for Deutschland. So I think whether or not it will have been the right decision depends upon what I'm able to do in Canada for democracy.
35:40 Kara Swisher? So if you look at the history of fascism, the leftists who are the means to go into exile are often seen as having betrayed the cause of working class citizens who didn't have the option to leave. For example, Isabel Allende and Ariel Dorfman have written about the guilt and survivalist complex that came with leaving Chile after Pinochet took power. In their case, they escaped torture and potentially death at the hands of the regime. Was that fact, were you actually scared? Did you feel, and how do you feel having left, though nothing here has degenerated into what happened with Pinochet?
36:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, I wasn't scared. I saw it more as an expressive act.
36:21 Speaker 00 When I did it, I saw it more as an expressive act, as an act of sending an alarm. It it sort of seemed very abstract to me. So much of my work has been about sending an alarm. So this was intended to send an alarm to the world, saying, look, things are bad in the United States. Now, an expressive act, it's not up to you to decide whether or not that expressive act was the right one. As someone I deeply respect recently said to me, uh, this is an expressive act that the fascists like.
36:53 Kara Swisher? Yes, yes, they do. Like, look at him cut tail and run, right?
36:57 Speaker 00 Right, exactly.
36:58 Kara Swisher? Does that hurt your message being received by Americans? Because people often make fun of, oh, he left, like, he's not here, like, he doesn't, what a, what a wimp, or whatever, anything like that. Does that worry that your message will be, you know, diluted in some fashion?
37:14 Speaker 00 I I've never worried that much about that kind of thing, about those sorts of opinions of people, because I tend to be, you know, I've been challenging Trumpism now for, you know, actually 15 years, because my first New York Times piece was about birtherism. But I've been pretty loud and open and have been targeted many times. And many people who make these charges haven't done the things that I've done. They they don't go to Ukraine regularly. They don't put themselves out there. So I just don't, I'm just not moved by that. Of course, I am moved when Kara Swisher says it to me, because Kara Swisher is another
37:58 Speaker 00 brave person who I respect. But I'm
38:00 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
38:01 Speaker 00 completely unmoved by people who haven't been in this fight for a long time.
38:08 Kara Swisher? Yes, I get that. What would make you move back? I mean, is there, is that part of the plan? Is there a, like, okay, safe now?
38:16 Speaker 00 No, academics can almost never move. That's why it's such a privilege to have received this opportunity and this offer. But I intend, I intend to have a, I mean, I have a global perspective. It's hard to have a global perspective in the United States. The noise is so intense, but I think it's vital to have a global perspective. If you don't understand the connection between Germany's fascist party and the Trump administration, you're not informed enough. And so what I, my plan in Canada is to create a safe haven for journalists. I'm fundraising to create a place where journalists and civil society leaders from all over
38:57 Speaker 00 the world can come and pool their resources and knowledge to explain to each other what's going on in their countries, just like the global fascist movement is doing. They're all in communication. That's why the Germany's off day party slogan, remigration, is the name of a new office in the reorganized State Department.
39:20 Kara Swisher? They coordinate rather well. The right always does in a lot of ways.
39:23 Speaker 00 What I'm hoping in Canada is we can have that kind of coordination. Canada is not in the center of things in that regard, and so it seems to me a relatively safe place, though I also view my job as to illuminate for my new country the dangers that they now face.
39:42 Speaker 05 We'll be back in a minute.
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42:15 Kara Swisher? Let's wrap up by talking about potential solutions. We'll start with expert questions. Every episode, we get an expert to send us a question for our guests. In your case, we actually got two. Let's hear the first one.
42:27 Speaker 07 Hi, I'm Clay Risen. I'm the author of Red Scare, McCarthyism, Blacklists, and The Making of Modern America. I'm also a reporter at The New York Times. And so my question for Jason is this. You've been very critical and open about your views on how newspapers like mine and other parts of the news media have fallen short when it comes to covering the president and this administration. How specifically would you like to see The New York Times and other publications report on this moment and help people to understand better where we might be headed? Thank you.
43:07 Speaker 00 Oh, I admire him. The, uh, so, normalizing. I think the New York Times does a lot of normalizing. Uh, I'd like to see the normalizing end. So there's two things the New York Times is guilty of, I think. Number one is hiring a lot of people who do normalizing, especially the op-ed page. Uh, normalizing of Israel's actions, uh, and normalizing of what we're seeing here. Uh, sort of humanizing and normalizing. I mean, it, it, of course fascists can be warm and normal people. Uh, but Ross Dolezalat's interview with Christopher Rufo, a very sophisticated, extreme far-right propagandist, fascist propagandist.
43:51 Speaker 00 He allowed Rufo to say things like, "Oh, of course, there's racist practices," you know, things that, uh, you know, say things to a New York Times audience that he's never going to say or communicate via the legal orders that he helps author. So there's a lot of normalizing going on. "These guys aren't as scary as you think." So that's one thing. And, and secondly, I think the Trumpists were looking to the media to give them justifications for their actions, to give them pretext. So what Hyten Lukianov started was a moral panic about essentially with black faculty and, you know, making it seem as if people were hiring people because of wokeness or something. Right.
44:35 Speaker 00 And looking at these topics like, uh, race as if they were forced to do so by wokeness. So that kind of moral panic untethered from factual reality about what's actually happening. Uh, you don't actually need to hire people who are normalizing. Again, let's go to this analogy, not comparing Trumpism with Nazism. This is true. But if you were to live in a country that had a lot of Nazis, would you hire people who normalized Nazism in your op-ed page? Yeah, that's a fair point. That's a fair point.
45:10 Kara Swisher? Let's hear the second one.
45:11 Speaker 08 Hi, I'm Deb Roy. I am a member of the MIT faculty where I direct the Center for Constructive Communication, and I also am co-founder and CEO of Cortico, an affiliated nonprofit. My question for Jason is, when we think about today's tech-driven public sphere, where information is fragmented and tailored to individuals, and where trust in institutions and experts have plummeted, how can we rebuild what philosophers sometimes call "common knowledge," a shared set of facts that everyone knows, and importantly, everyone knows that everyone else knows, et cetera? Thank you.
45:51 Speaker 00 My thesis advisor is one of the main theorists of common knowledge, and he's at MIT. So, yeah, democracy requires structures of trust. It requires a background of common knowledge, and that has completely fractured. I do think that one thing to recognize is that a lot of people do know things that they like, that the election in 2020 wasn't stolen, but they think, "That's like, not my side. My side doesn't say that." So, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of deep, deep, just mistrust of the other political sides on both sides.
46:30 Speaker 00 And, you know, the problem is, there's a war footing, and we have to see it as a war footing, as we can see with redistricting now.
46:40 Kara Swisher? Right.
46:41 Speaker 00 So, we're in this kind of problem where democracy is under existential threat. And I think conservative Republicans belong in a democracy. What I don't think is this, these anti-democratic forces destroying democracy belong in a democracy. This is a very old problem, tolerating the intolerant. How do we address this problem? Kara, I mean, I think you probably have better things to say about that. The informational disaster, where and now?
47:10 Kara Swisher? Yeah, I think it's, I think it comes at exactly the wrong time. Right? Where people have different realities. But I've been talking about this for a decade. Like, if everyone has a different reality, it creates an opportunity for a dictator to come in and confuse and upset people.
47:25 Speaker 00 That was my first, first piece for the New York Times.
47:28 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
47:28 Speaker 00 In 2011, on the dangers of birtherisms.
47:30 Kara Swisher? I mean, it works. It actually works because of, you know, my whole thesis is it was an information desert. Now it's an information flood. And probably the flood is more damaging, if you have to think about it.
47:40 Speaker 00 Right, Fahrenheit 451.
47:43 Kara Swisher? Exactly. So you pointed out the civil rights movement as a blueprint for countering fascism and said, quote, "That kind of concerted attempt to elicit empathy to awaken a dominant majority, in this country's case, white people, to what was happening was essential." You went on to say, "I think it's quite clear we need something like that to happen." What, what does that look like in practice today?
48:01 Speaker 00 Well, we're going to see with the ICE raids on immigrants. We're going to see whether Americans are capable of that kind of empathy. Because they're going to get much uglier. And we're going to see resistance. Because, you know, people who underwent so much to come here, it's existential. I mean, think if you, you're going, you're going to be sent some strange place. It's the end of your life. So it's going to be this existential moment. And these concentration camps are going to be brutal. So we're going to see a huge military force arrayed against immigrants. And, you know, I think immigrants will be fighting back in some way with nonviolent means, for example.
48:45 Speaker 00 And that, we can hope, will be effective on the American conscience. I just hope that we will have strategic nonviolence. But one of the problems is we don't have what Derek Baal called interest convergence. We don't have the United States facing a Cold War, where the other side is calling them a white supremacist nation.
49:08 Kara Swisher? Right. Alien invasion is what we need right now, Jason.
49:11 Speaker 00 That would be the solution.
49:13 Kara Swisher? Is there any leader, I have two last questions. Is there any leader right now that you think, I mean, I was just laughing at Gavin Newsom's version of Trump tweets right now, or whatever, Truth Socials, that are very funny. He's been quite forthright in attacking Trump. Is there any leader right now you see as pulling people together in that case in the civil rights? You had Martin Luther King, you had RFK Junior, RFK, excuse me, the original, not Junior. Is there anyone you see like that in this country that has that kind of?
49:45 Speaker 00 Well, we need charismatic authority, right? We need a leader with charismatic authority.
49:51 Kara Swisher? Right.
49:52 Speaker 00 Trump is very authentic. He's an authentic liar. So I see, obviously, AOC as having the kind of authenticity and charisma that would be needed in this moment. But whether she can appeal to a nation that is so fond of patriarchy, I don't know.
50:12 Kara Swisher? Yeah, that's difficult. Let's end with a prediction. I recently spoke to David Remnick about his latest piece in The New Yorker, and he makes the case for why it's not inevitable that Donald Trump's authoritarian project will prevail. And he told me it's important for the media to, quote, "rally people's spirits as best you can." But Remnick admitted he might be the only three-quarters honest when he says Trump won't prevail. So give me your 100% honest prediction. Do you think America will overcome Trump's fascist project? It's very hard for magish fascism, I think, to outlive this charismatic leader. I think it will fall apart. But what is your thoughts?
50:45 Speaker 00 Well, the problem with an autocracy is always the successor problem, right? What comes after? And we now have a complete destruction. We have a Supreme Court that is just, you know, looking for that autocratic leader to back their young justices, I mean, relatively young. So that situation is something that is going to be very hard to overcome. Now, we've seen that you can be an autocrat in the United States. You can take the country over. So. How do you go back from that knowledge? You know, the courts are lost, the machine behind Trump. They won't have a charismatic leader. J D Vance is not a charismatic leader.
51:28 Speaker 00 But it's not clear to me they'll need a charismatic leader. But anarchy is always the result of an autocrat dying in office, right? So we just don't know.
51:39 Kara Swisher? I want your prediction, though. I'm making mine. It dies after him.
51:44 Speaker 00 I want to say we don't know, and I don't know. But I think that the United States will fall to a sort of far right machine and democracy will be a thing of the past. That's, that's what I think with some moments of enormous anarchy. But it will basically become a semi dysfunctional nation run by a kind of far right machine.
52:10 Kara Swisher? Hmm. All right, that's what you think, I don't. We'll see, won't we? Well, you don't live here anymore, do you?
52:15 Speaker 00 But I don't think it's smart to say that.
52:18 Kara Swisher? No.
52:18 Speaker 00 I'm in New York right now, Kara.
52:21 Kara Swisher? Oh, oh, God, you'll be fine. I'll come over and protect you. Don't worry. Me and the militia at the ridge will come in and take care of the situation.
52:31 Kara Swisher? Lesbians are good at shooting guns.
52:33 Speaker 00 We need that spirit. But I think it's a global fight, just like in your tech world. You see very clearly that nations are no longer the basic currency they once were.
52:45 Kara Swisher? Yeah, 100%.
52:47 Speaker 00 And so we need to think globally, and I am thinking globally. But I think the United States, I, I'm not really sure how, when you've seen this and when you've seen what Trump has done, how you're supposed to return to, as it were, checks and balances.
53:04 Kara Swisher? Right, that's a very good point. Well, I'm hoping for an alien invasion, then. We need someone from Mars to get here, stat, who's really mean, an evil villain, that kind of thing. Then we'll all be together. Anyway, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
53:19 Speaker 00 Thank you, Kara.
53:25 Kara Swisher? On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Skylar Mitchell. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Track academics. If you're already following the show, fingers crossed for the Martian invasion. If not, boive. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.
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55:33 Speaker 06 Now streaming on Paramount+. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser. And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter: Resurrection. New season now streaming on the Paramount+ Premium Plan.
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