Transcription
[Music] Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power. In our case, historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism, and Christian fundamentalism are erased. There is to be no shared reality. There are to be no other legitimate perspectives. History is to be static. It is not to be open to reinterpretation or investigation. It is to be calcified into myth to buttress a ruling ideology in the reigning political and social hierarchy. Any other paradigm of power and social interaction is tantamount to treason.
One of the most significant threats that a class hierarchy can face is a universally accessible and excellent public school system, writes Jason Stanley in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely and that unites hostility towards public education with support for class hierarchy is a certain form of right-wing libertarianism and ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods. The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike who see in democracy a threat to their power and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascistleaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians, in undermining the institution of public education.
The right-wing attacks on programs such as critical race theory or DEI, as Stanley points out in his book, quote, intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included, like black Americans for instance, are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.
Joining me to discuss his books, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us in Them is Professor Jason Stanley. Professor Stanley is the Jacob Arowski Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Let's begin with a piece you had in the Guardian where you uh quite specifically talk about uh like Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, and how all of these things well that that's already pretty much been dismantled by the Supreme Court. How all of these things are being dismantled and why.
So, first of all, Title VI isn't being dismantled. It's being weaponized. It's being reversed and weaponized. And the way it's being weaponized is it's being directed to to fight supposed anti-white discrimination. So this regime is following Victor Orban. And Victor Orban placed, uh, focused on Christians, saying Christians were the most persecuted group in the world. Now this this regime uh is saying whites are the most persecuted group in the world. Uh, of course, Trump signed an executive order giving special status to Afrikaners who supposedly were under threat, uh, when actually Afrikaners own, you know, whites own much of the land in South Africa. So, uh, so this idea that white people are under threat, they're using Title VI to push this. And basically what they're going to do is they're going to say any uh, you know, uh, uh, black people in positions of power uh, that came at the cost of supposedly more competent, uh, uh, white Americans, which leans into uh, racist stereotypes baked into the American past. And then most concerningly for me as a Jewish American is they are using us Jewish Americans. Uh, they're like nakedly using us as an excuse to take down the most Jewish institution in American life, the university.
Well, but they've also. Well, you're right that they've weaponized it, but they've also stripped the protections that it once gave to vulnerable uh and marginalized people. Yeah. Conceptually. So, Title VI is intended to help traditionally marginalized, traditionally oppressed people, but the idea now is that there are no power. What this group wants to say is there are no power differentials anymore. And so, the really oppressed people are the majority group, the dominant group. This gets to my book, How Fascism Works, where I have a chapter called Victimhood. Fascism always relies on portraying the dominant group as victims. Uh, so the idea that that white Americans are somehow being victimized in the university uh by uh by sort of uh critical race theorists. I mean, my department of philosophy at Yale hired our first black tenure professor last year. He started in fall 2024. So I mean, the level of absurdity, factual absurdity uh beggars belief. But uh, but that's the idea is to make white people feel like they're victimized. And so you erase the history. So you erase uh the fact that black people were marginalized in America. You make it illegal to talk about the continuing marginalization by the aftereffects of housing segregation, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, etc., or the current effects. You make those, you make it illegal to talk about those things and then you say, "Okay, look at how white people uh and and Asians are discriminated against." Um, so it all it all comes. But I think there's also an element of retribution here. Title VI was used against segregated southern schools and uh racism in the school districts in the South. And now they're flipping it and they're saying, to the glee of many of their supporters, they're saying, "No, the real racism is directed against whites. Uh, and it's done by these universities."
We'll go into your book, but when I covered the war in Yugoslavia, I watched Slobodan Milošević use exactly that tactic of telling the Serbs who controlled what was left of Yugoslavia that they were the victims. And a famous speech in Kosovo, "I will not let them beat you. I will not let them beat you." But it's it's exactly the same phenomenon. Yeah. Victimhood is uh what you do is, and this is sort of a mixture of the books now, is you you say in the past we were the great ones. We were the we we we created the culture and you we're now being punished for that. We're being punished for our greatness and uh and you know, and we're an existential threat. So it goes together with the great replacement theory narratives. And then what they're going to do is they're saying the schools and universities uh represent, by representing accurate history, are a challenge to this myth. And in fact, the history itself, what if you read the uh what the Department of Education is saying, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that just teaching black history accurately wouldn't would be a Title VI violation. In other words, just teaching say redlining and mortgage, the history of our mortgage laws that result in segregated cities today, it looks like that would be the same as a white professor continuously calling all of their black students with the worst racial slur.
So, let's open with your book, Erasing History. I mean, and I think the the book does a very good job of explaining why they're making war on the universities. Uh, you say authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening. At every opportunity, these regimes find ways of erasing or concealing history in order to consolidate their power. Why is this? Why does history do that? Uh, why does history do that is so disruptive to authorit or what does history do that is so disruptive of authoritarian goals? Perhaps most importantly, it provides multiple perspectives of the past. This is this is really the underlying, you would argue, the underlying goal of what's happening has nothing to do with anti-semitism, has nothing to do with DEI or critical race theory, anything else. These become the tactics for something far more nefarious.
Yeah, I mean, the department, Linda McMahon, in her final, and you know, the department, her letter about the final mission of the Department of Education says it's going to be to impose patriotic education. Patriotic education being a kind of, you know, uh, flat, one-dimensional story of the greatness of the nation. Uh, it's just, of course, just picture in your mind an authoritarian country and the education system in an authoritarian country. It's just telling students to love their country. Well, it's mythic. It's mythic. It's not true, right? It creates a fake version of the past and it tells it it tells students, you're the greatest country in history, and your leaders are the greatest people in history. Uh, it's exactly what Hitler and Mein Kampf said the education system of the Third Reich should be. That's I talk about that at length. Hitler talks a lot about education and Mein Kampf.
Um, so multiple, so one of the, the, the fuel for fascist movements is this feeling of resentment by the dominant group. And so what you want to do is you want to create fear and resentment, uh, uh, among the dominant group. So they keep supporting you and they think you're going to protect them. So you say there's this, so you instead of, so you represent another perspective, the perspective of marginalized groups, as uh, as somehow an attack on the identity of the dominant group. So you say, like, AfD in Germany, you know, they want to say, uh, one of their platforms, uh, uh, Björn Höcke's platform is to, one of the leaders is to remove the monument to the murdered Jews of Europe from Berlin because the idea is all that history is there to make the the dominant group feel shame. Uh, which it's not. It's there just to remind people, let's not do this again. But uh, but the idea is it's, but it is powerful for a non-Jewish German to to see the Stolpersteine, to see the monuments that recent, very recently have been placed on German streets, and it it does generate powerful feelings. And what they're trying to do is leverage those powerful feelings into fear and resentment.
Uh, when when Musk said to the AfD, the most extreme far-right party in Europe that other far-right parties won't work with, when Musk said, you know, the German tribes were great, he didn't mean German Jews. He meant he was feeding into a myth of Aryanism, of Aryan supremacy, and he was feeding into the AfD line that German soldiers in World War I and World War II were in fact heroes. Uh, so this, this idea that, so what you try to do is you try to, you erase the history, and then you represent the dominant group as great, and then you represent history itself, the actual history, as a threat, as some sort of, you know, nefarious threat to destroy the nation. And that is fundamental to what's happening in places like Colombia, because you're pushing out uh, all sorts of people who challenge the dominant narrative. Of course, the primary group that's targeted now are people who challenge the Zionist narrative. Uh, but that, that's not exclusive. They're hardly interested in stopping with Zionism. No, this is an, I think this attack on the universities is anti-Semitic because the universities, first of all, it's placing us American Jews at the center of things. So the American university system is the greatest university system in the world, and they're using American Jews as the excuse to dismantle. So it's never good to be used politically like that. Uh, and there it's billions and billions of dollars in federal funding. So, uh, and the, you know, and of course, who are the leftist protesters and in critical intellectuals and among the students and faculty? Well, one group of them are obviously Jews. That's that's it's they're using anti-Semitic stereotypes of the university as filled with these leftist dangerous leftist radicals. Those are anti-Semitic stereotypes, and they're using those to say we have to protect the Jews against anti-Semitism. Just means leftism for them. They're just saying the left is anti-Semitic. But what this does is it sets Jewish people up. It sets Jewish people up. It feeds into the anti-Semitic stereotypes that Jews control the institutions. Um, so it's hard for me not to see this ironically and paradoxically as an attack on American Jews.
Well, you know, philosemitism is as insidious as anti-semitism. Yeah, but this isn't philosemitism, even then, because we're on both sides of this issue. As long. Well, that's true. But but within the narrative. Within the narrative. Absolutely. Within the narrative. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Um, and then of course, the mainstream media has been preparing the ground, has been dupes for fascism, has been preparing the ground for the attacks on universities since 2015, since the Kochs and and started this uh right-wing attack on universities for free speech. So it was like, so the editorial pages of the New York Times were concern trolling about leftists on campus, repeatedly feeding into the propaganda that free speech was threatened by leftists on campus. And then suddenly last year, it was like, okay, there's too much free speech because criticism of Israel. So, but the mainstream media did all that. They did all that work for authoritarianism. Yeah, that's an important point which you make.
Um, you write, "The nation's self-standing of its history and identity preserved through its schools and its culture was proven to be far less protective than many believed." Uh, so that very swift disintegration, which was also true, by the way, in the former Yugoslavia, brotherhood and unity and Tito and all this kind of stuff, it it really crumbled uh with frightening rapidity, and that I think was a very important warning. Absolutely. The school. For some reason, the schools taking over the schools with patriotic education, with, you know, just uh blather about how great the nation is, has a very dramatic and very quick effect for some reason. Uh, the Nazi takeover of the schools had an immediate drastic effect on German attitudes toward, on non-Jewish German attitudes towards Jews. The majority German attitudes towards Jews. Germany became very rapidly much more anti-Semitic than, for example, France, which, as we all know, or many of I mean, as you should know, was the anti-Semitic country for a long time there. So, uh, so the, uh, the now there's a concerning point about Weimar and National Socialism. The National Socialist regime that superseded it, which is that the textbooks in Weimar Germany were already very nationalist. They already extolled, spent a lot of time talking about the greatness of the German nation. So the Nazis didn't need to do much. They already had a basis of a case in the textbooks that Germany was the greatest country in history, etc., etc. Uh, look at our education system. Our education system, at least the one I was raised in, also said the United States is the greatest country in history. It also said the United States is the natural heir to Greece and Rome. It said the things that were uh were exceptionalist narratives about the country that you had to accept. Uh, and so that really prepares the way for uh, for a fascist story that this is the greatest nation in history. We deserve, that's why we have so much power. We deserve to crush others because we are the best.
You have an interesting, we'll come to it later, an interesting point about the misuse of classics. Yeah. Um, which I studied. Um, but just to make this final point on that issue, you said that authoritarians, the reason they create these patriotic mythic narratives, is to leave students with the impression that the status quo has never been and cannot be challenged. Yeah. So this is what folks like, philosophy of education through the 20th century, folks from Dewey, the less radical version, to Freire, emphasize that education should be about agency. So an education system should give people the sense that they have agency to change history. And if you want to impose patriotic education, you want to impose the kind of education that fits into an authoritarian system. You want to remove agency from people. You want to uh excise the references to social movements for positive change. Uh, you want to make people feel that it's all great leaders from the dominant group. It's great men who do everything. Uh, and you, you're just a passive observer to history. So this is when you teach philosophy of education like I do. I teach the philosophy of education course at Yale. Um, you know, progressive education is all about giving citizens in a democracy a sense of agency. Authoritarian education is all about removing that sense of agency, erasing the history of social movements. Most recently, they're going, they're focusing on erasing uh Black Lives Matter as if it never happened. So Florida, you can't mention text, it's being excised from textbooks, even under recent events. So, uh, so this is obviously in China, you can't talk about the Tiananmen Square protests. So, uh, so this, this move to excise agency, it's a move to excise agency, because democracy and democracy is about uh agency.
Well, it also, all of the openings within society, Howard Zinn makes this point, you know, People's History of the United States is that it, it's achieved by movements. But the, in this mythic version, it's a gift from benevolent leaders. It's a gift from Roosevelt. It's a gift from Lincoln. It's even a gift from Nixon. That's a great man narrative that I was referring to. And Zinn, of course, uh, you know, People's History is this great, you know, critique of that that has had an history from below that's had an enormous impact. Um, and as a result, Trump actually singled out Howard Zinn's book, uh, in 2020 or 2021, whenever he gave the patriotic education executive order, I believe. I think it was an executive order, uh, he denounced Howard Zinn's propaganda because, of course, he did.
Um, you write, "History is the study of not just people and events, but also the practices, structures, and institutions that shape them. Without accounting for these forces, history is history is rendered flat and malleable, ideal for manipulation by fascist politics." When fascists attempt to rewrite history, they sometimes claim that they are erasing only theories and interpretations of history which they claim to be biased, rather than underlying historical events. But they know well that their interventions result in the erasure of events themselves, as well as the patterns they form.
Um, that attack on bias. I mean, of course, the irony is that you, the attackers could not be more biased, but it works. Yeah, it works. Yeah. I mean, it works even though it's flagrantly absurd because they themselves are saying we want to replace supposed bias and indoctrination by patriotic education. What the hell is patriotic education? Just means indoctrination to love your country. So, you know, it's literally they're, you know, it's nonsensical. Also, they're bringing in Christian nationalism and they're representing Christianity as the unbiased position. So Christian, you know, I mean, obviously this is your territory, but one of your territories, but but they're representing Christian nationalism and patriotism and sort of deep patriotism uh lessons as uh nonbiased, unbiased, and actually looking at the history saying like these are the social movements that happened. This is why you have the weekend. Uh, they're representing as indoctrination.
It goes further than that because if you closely read the "Dear Colleague" letter of I believe February 10th or February 14th, um, would directed to universities about Title VI, uh, it really looks like even teaching basic facts about black history, such as the way banks were designed to discriminate against uh, black borrowers, the lending system, or school segregation, it looks like that is going to count as school on student harassment.
I want to talk about this. When I wrote my book on the Christian Right, and I'm a Divinity School graduate, I swiftly found them to be selective literalists. They pick out, you know, what works to fit the ideology and erase the rest. But that also happens. You write in the, in the creation of, you write about Hungary's 2020 National Core Curriculum, how they will erase Hungary's only Nobel Prize winner for literature, Imre Kertész. You write, "Surrendering a national point of pride to erase the contributions of a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust." I mean, the, there becomes this in the creation of these curriculums, there are huge distortions, including the elevation of mediocrities. Boy, Stalin did this to the tenth degree. Um, the elevation of mediocrities and the erasure of people, you know, such as uh, the Nobel Prize winner for Hungary, who you know are should be held up as uh, these, you know, great national writers or thinkers or, but so it's, it's, it talk a little bit about how in the creation of a national curriculum, they jettison what perhaps you and I would call the best and and and and elevate the most mediocre.
You're really making an important point, Chris. Uh, uh, it's actually, it's in, in positively representing the nation as great, they are eliminating everything that's great about the nation, right? You know, so, so it's an, this is why I regard fascism, the fascist, this fascist takeover we're seeing in the United States as an attack on my country. It's an attack on the greatness of America. It's an attack. Our greatness is these social movements that push us towards multi-racial democracy. Our greatness is the project of mo of improving on democratic ideals of freedom and equality. And they're erasing this. They're attacking our university system. Our university system, I think, other than the NBA, it's the only institution, only thing in American society that is universally and unqualifiedly recognized, and in an unqualified way recognized as the greatest thing America does. So in the name of American greatness, they are t they are attacking institutions that everyone in the world sends their kids to if they can get in and if they can afford it. You know, everywhere in the world, the remotest towns, they've heard of, you know, Yale University. Now, go and ask them about a French university. Maybe they've heard of the Sorbonne, but they've heard of many American universities. So in the name of American greatness, they're attacking, you know, the greatest universities. So similarly, similarly in the name of American greatness, they're attack, they're doing the same thing to Toni Morrison as Hungary did to Imre Kertész, whose books are b I want to be in that list of banned books. Toni Morrison's on the list, is targeted unbelievably harshly. She might be the most targeted major author. I think she is the most targeted major author. I mean, Yiannis Varoufakis on the Beloved bill to ban banning Beloved. She won the Nobel Prize. She's one of the most important and influential, and I would say greatest Americans of the last 50 years.
Well, she also saw what's coming. You quote her in the commencement address at Howard, "Racism," and she kind of laid it out. She laid it out, which is again why you have to ban. They target, just like Orban targeted gender, gender studies. Whatever they target is the is actually a tell because whatever they target are the conceptual resources you need to see what's going on. So they target gender studies because it tells you about appeals to patriarchy and the manosphere. They target, uh, the rigid gender, they want to defend rigid gender roles and natalism. It draws in the Christian conservatives and then it also draws in, like non-Christian manosphere types who think the woman's proper role is in the home. So, so these, these, uh, Yeah. So, these these targetings, um, uh, Yeah.
All right. Well, I, I. Well, you write, "An education system is the foundation upon which a political culture is built. That's why you have to destroy it along with the media. Anything that reproduces ideas." And let's be clear, fascist totalitarian regimes, they drive out their most important intellectuals, those people who are able to interpret and explain reality. You can start with Paul Tillich, Thomas Mann, yeah, scientists, you know, Stalin had to get rid of the Jewish science and create what was it, some kind of fake physics, I can't remember, but what they do is they actually, they decapitate their intellectual and artistic elite, which is what's happening.
Yeah. So a very important point about from the history of elites that you know is that you have to disaggregate the elites. There's the financial elites and there's the cultural elites, and fascism always marshals the financial and business elites, the oligarchs, the wealthy concerns against the cultural elite. And what, what we're seeing in the United States is teachers, federal workers, and professors being vilified. The cultural elite, these are not the financial elite. The vast majority of professors are teaching, you know, constantly making 60k a year, struggling. This is the, you know, being sent far away from the places they want to live or have grown up in, because that's where a job may be. These are not people living great, you know, teachers, school teachers. These are the people being vilified by the fascists and painted as the elite.
Um, and the point you make, and this is in your second chapter, "Colonizing the Mind," you said, "When one group erases the history of another, the latter becomes significantly more vulnerable to domination and conquest." One of the clearest examples of this is the practice of modern colonialism. It is much easier for a colonial power to justify taking land when that land can be represented as lacking a history. When a group of people is represented as having no history, they are being denied any valid claim to the present. One thinks of, of course, the Palestinians and Zionism. Colonialism is an ideal case, perhaps the clearest for understanding how and why the erasure of history is central to the exercise of power and domination. And that's precisely the goal.
Yeah. It's, um, you can, so the idea of represent, so the idea of colonialism, you say those people aren't using their land correctly. They're not, you know, they're not managing it correctly. They're not getting out of it what you should get out of it. They're incompetent administrators of their land. They can't self-govern. So they need us to move in and use the land correctly and do things for them. This is this is what happened in Michigan with the Emergency Manager Act. So this is what is so this is what is happening now. And when when they, they're trying to disempower uh, uh, uh, black politicians, for example, they're trying to say that cities run by the political opposition are dysfunctional and so they need to be taken over. Um, you, you say you justify taking over the property of other people by saying that you have their best interests in mind. You're going to manage their affairs for them because they're incompetent. And I don't need to go into, uh, how much that tactic is being used in, by this regime today.
Well, and then your kids drink water that they're poisoned by lead. Yeah. So what happened in Flint, Michigan, what happened in Michigan is that the Emergency Manager Act said, "Okay, all of these uh, black majority cities or cities with large black populations, they're incompetently run, so we're going to send an emergency manager in to make decisions for them and get rid of the city council and the mayor." And what results is poisoning 6,000 children with toxic waste in Flint, Michigan for a year because the emergency manager was making these strange deals, uh, on using using the, the, the, um, financial, using mortgaging essentially, the city of Flint for tens of millions of dollars for, well, they pumped the water out of the river, and then of course, the car manufacturers complained because it was corroding the metal. The water people were drinking. What we have to look at is why in the first place did they pay for this new pipeline? Uh, and, and this is something that I, I wrote a big paper about in 2016. Um, so the excuse they gave was the water prices were much higher in Flint than in say, Ann Arbor. But why were the water prices so high? It made no sense. So it looked like, so they were raising the water prices. So it was like a hundred, well over $100 a month for water. So they said this pipeline will ease the water, will make the water prices lower. None of it made any sense. It looked like they were, it, you know, so it looked like it, it was all corruption. So they said these administrators of cities, these of black majority cities were, uh, corrupt, and they replaced them by emergency managers who just used the cities and municipalities as a bank machine.
Five major themes of fascist education: national greatness, national purity, national innocence, strict gender roles, vilification of the left. We've touched on that, but strict gender roles, why is that so important?
Yeah, it's something. So, first of all, uh, you get, you tell the dominant group that they're under existential threat of being replaced by, by people who are not in the dominant group. So, Madison Grant's 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, sort of lays out great replacement theory. Hitler reads that in prison, and it has an enormous effect on him. So Hitler says, it's actually, I won't go into the weird details of the conspiracy theory that Hitler bought into, but the idea was he thought that, you know, the liberals, the Marxists were backed by global Jews, by the global Jewish conspiracy to bring in non-whites into the country and overwhelm the Aryan population. So if you're a white supremacist, you want the women of the dominant group to be having babies. So, uh, so the Nazis weren't, it wasn't in Germany, at least as opposed to Romania, it wasn't a Christian movement, but they got huge buy-in from the Christian right, from the old right, because they were natalists. They were saying women should be in the in the home, having babies. So, because you have to reproduce the dominant, dominant race. So the big key when you have real, something that really looks like Nazism is great replacement theory. If you're facing a political party that's saying the big threat is non-white immigration, you're really, you're really dealing with Nazism. So, uh, so, so that's the foundation is great replacement theory. And, and the, uh, and great replacement theory is going to have women having lots of babies, the women of the dominant group, and that's going to draw in the social conservatives. It's going to be a big, a win-win. So, and that's a very powerful coalition, white supremacists plus Christian conservatives. Hard to beat.
I want to talk about two points you make in the book. One of them might be from another book, I forgot, but you have far-right European parties led by women. This would have not happened under traditional fascism. Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen. And the other point you make that I thought was really interesting, made me think, was you were talking about Hannah Arendt and you talked about the, that patriarchal was vital to fascism, but not vital to communism. Right. I thought that was really interesting. I mean, you did have Uncle Joe. I mean, you know, it was it was a patriarchal system. Although you're right that women could achieve positions they couldn't under fascism. Anyway, I just wondered if you could talk about those two points.
Two different points. Let's start with the first point about Western European Europe's, um, fascist, some of their fascist leaders being women. And it's very unique. We don't have that in Eastern Europe. It's inconceivable that Russia would be ruled by by a woman, but Russian fascism would have the face of a woman, or, uh, it's hard to imagine in the United States, though not impossible. I mean, Phyllis Schlafly was far-right and obviously, um, but the thing about Western Europe is that the scapegoat is different. The scapegoat is not black Americans. The scapegoat is not, uh, Marx. Well, I mean, it's still, uh, they're attacking the left, but the scapegoat is Muslim immigration. The scapegoat are Muslims. So your, uh, so pinkwashing is a central move in Western European politics and feminism washing. So what you do, so scapegoating is the core of this far-right system. You say, uh, you unify different groups. You unify different groups who might be otherwise at each other's throat, like, uh, white supremacists and, uh, and Latinos, or white, white supremacists and black men, by having a scapegoat like trans, trans women that they can both hate on. Um, and the scapegoat in Western Europe is Muslims. And what you say is that they threaten women's equality and LGBTQ equality. So that I think is the clearest explanation of why in that very local area of Western Europe, you have fascist women leaders. Um, now, uh, and some of them are, and Meloni, of course, is anti-LGBTQ. So she, uh, so, um, and pro-natalist. So, so she has these, these traditional gender role views.
Um, so the second question is about communist systems. Now, I agree with you about Stalin. I think, you know, Stalinism looks a lot like fascism, except with politicide rather than genocide, mass killing of political opponents. I mean, obviously the Nazis did that too. Um, but but the Nazis were focused on an ideology of racial supremacy, whereas communist ideology is not about racial supremacy.
I just want to interject. The Nazis would kill the whole families, and the Stalinists did not. Ah, right. Good point. They sent the kids to orphanages. Great. Great. Genocide. Yeah. Genocide. You're absolutely right. The killing of the entire families, the women and children as well. Great point, Chris. So, uh, politicide has a different form than genocide. Um, in the Genocide Convention, the Soviet Union fought against the, uh, the politicide being counted as genocide, of course. But I do think that that difference aside, Stalin became a dictator, you know, he, he, he mass killed people, and he gradually took on the role of, of a, of a, uh, fascist dictator. Not fascism is equality, whereas the ideology of fascism is inequality. The ideology of fascism is some people are greater than others. People are fundamentally slotted into different roles. The ideology of communism is, you know, we're all fundamentally politically equal. So, so women have just as much of a right to occupy positions of power. So you have this clear ideological difference where communism is, and then there are these studies like the studies of East Germany that East German women had more orgasms than West German women, that has been repeatedly confirmed. And so, but but Stalin's Russia sort of descends into harsh, you know, anti-feminist patriarchal. I mean, maybe it's like that, and anti-Semitic as well. Anti-Semitic, yeah, but there's no mass, it's not like the Doctor's Plot, whatever it's not, I mean, obviously, um, but anti-Semitic as well, because, uh, there's a book called by the Berkeley political theorist, I believe, called, uh, The Fascist, uh, the Fascist Dimension of Radical Politics, that's not quite the title, but he argues that all of these, all of these systems like Maoism and Stalinism descend into some version of fascism in practice.
You make a really interesting point. You said, "Some of the leading politicians decrying institutions of higher education as factories of leftist indoctrination are often among those who have benefited the most from them." That's most of the people around Trump, including Trump. All of them, right? All of them. Not, I mean, I mean maybe not all of them, but, you know, Ted, all these people. Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard. Holly went to Stanford and Yale. Tom Cotton went to Harvard and Harvard. That's the thing. These are not dumb guys. You know, these are very smart. I don't know. Come on. I've been at some of those schools. They might be dumb guys. Oh, no. Right. They absolutely might be. But Ted Cruz was like a national debate, like one of the top debaters in the country. These are people who are, this is, it's important to see because these are people who are down intellectually with authoritarianism. Yeah. They're not dupes being tricked. They know the election of 2020 wasn't stolen. Yeah.
Well, the, I had a great mentor at Harvard, James Luther Adams, who was at the University of Heidelberg in '35 and '36, and he went to the lectures where Heidegger began the lectures with the Nazi salute. Yeah. Right. Well, leading, a leading intellectual, right? So what Schmitt and Heidegger represented in German history, in Nazi history, where they were the first world-famous intellectuals to declare for the Nazi party, and that becomes very important. It becomes like in the first Trump term, people were like, well, they don't have intellectuals. So they're not fascists. They're not. Now they have intellectuals. They certainly have, you know, they have Adrien Vermeule at at Harvard. Now they're developing a cadre of far-right intellectuals. And then the production, all these figures like DeSantis, they would be nowhere without Harvard and Yale, right? Um, so these institutions have given us all the people attacking these institutions, and I don't think their kids are going to go to Hillsdale College for some reason. I think their kids are going to go to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. So what's that about?
Well, I think it's a bit of a puzzle. I think I think different, there are different theories of it. I mean, these are the institutions that produce power, and so we should expect the powerful people, whoever they are, to come from these institutions. These are the institutions where the networks of power are and patronage. So, so that's going to be true of the far right and the authoritarians, just as much as it's going to be true of, uh, of Obama, you know, of the, of the liberal Democrats or the Democrats. So, you know, it attacking these inst, there's a, there's a longstanding, these institutions have made themselves vulnerable to attack by their elitism, certainly. So there's there's resentment you can use. And then I think they, as Rufo, Christopher Rufo, the far-right propagandist of the new right, says, they want to take the institutions over because they are, they are powerful. So they want to have power over these institutions. But having these institutions like Columbia pretty much acquiesced to everything, well, is an international embarrassment for its acquiescence, right?
Well, but all of these, Yale, Princeton, they've all shut down the encampment. I mean, they've ended free speech on college. They've all guilty of this. All of them. Yeah. Yeah. They've all, they've all acquiesced in the trap. Um, but the mainstream media is, is, uh, hugely at fault. The opinion page of the New York Times. Of course. Of course. And, and that's why, you know, it's the mainstream media who has betrayed democracy because they have attacked, they have viciously attacked for years and years the other institutions of democracy. Yeah, that's right. And, and then like, why should I defend the media when they just, they've been, you know, just, um, you know, dupes for fascism. Uh, and, and, you know, so, so I think it's, it's been very hard because, you know, you have the opinion page of the New York Times saying Harvard, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are run by communist agitators, you know, so what are you supposed to do? And the university is a fundamentally conservative institution. So, so, you know, you also have many people inside the university, most professors are these sort of anti-woke white dudes, and, and they too are, are, uh, are easily swayed by, you know, the presence of non-white dudes in academia.
Well, let's also be clear, having worked at the New York Times 15 years, that you could hold a reunion, a pretty sizable reunion for all of these Ivy League colleges on the floor of the newsroom, right? They also come out. Yeah. So, so, so it's weird. I think I, I don't exactly solve this, I don't think I solve this mystery in the book of why all of these Harvard and Yale and Princeton grads are the ones who are devising these attacks on the very institutions they came from, which in no way resemble what you would see from the newspapers. For instance, it took months for the New York Times to acknowledge that one of the largest identity groups in the protests were Jewish students. Yeah. So they're just using anti-semitism, just means for them leftism. Yeah. But these institutions were created to perpetuate the plutocracy. They all acquiesced during the Red Scare. They couldn't get rid of people fast enough. I, I don't, I don't think they've changed. I think that they are adapting to their current role to perpetuate this plutocracy. Yeah. Uh, but we can, there are still, I'm, I'm at Yale, and, and I think there's a large number, there are faculty, there's faculty resistance at Yale to the attacks on universities. And now, the finally, what we're seeing in universities is we're seeing conservative professors. And now when I say conservative, I don't mean Trump-supporting professors. They're very few. And there, and that is used by the right as an attack against the university, but that's absurd. Because the physics and math department have very few Trump supporters. Chemistry has very few Trump supporters. Engineering has very few Trump supporters. You're going to have to have affirmative action for Trump supporters to get any kind of, to get to 20% Trump support in any science. But you're, you're, you're at a multi-billion dollar private with endowment institution. People at state universities that depend on state funding, they don't have that kind of protection. So, you're in an elite position. Most other universities are far more easily purged because they're far more vulnerable. Look at what happened. Look at the AUP report on Florida's universities.
Well, they're, it's in your book. Yeah. The level of terror that what at Hillsdale, Hillsdale College has a lot of, Hillsdale's in Michigan, but they have a lot of roles. Yeah. But they take over the, they took over that University of New College of Florida. Yeah. New College of Florida being an elite private, uh, state college. Not private elite liberal arts state college that, you know, I know plenty of professors who went to New College, and they're utterly destroying it. What they mean by classical education seems to be like just.
Well, that's a point of your book. Yeah. I mean, that the way classical, and as someone who studied classics, the way they use classical education to essentially just, or you know, misappropriate it to form it to buttress white supremacy, quote unquote, the sanctity of Western civilization. I just, before we go, I want to talk about propaganda from your second book. You write, "Fascist movements have been draining swamps for generations. Publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics, and anti-corruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of fascist political movements. Fascist politicians characteristically decry corruption in the state they seek to take over, which is bizarre given that fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat." Boy, that's the Trump administration right there. And it's Putin and Russia. And Putin, of course. So, it's, it's just, um, you know, everything is projection. Everything they say is projection. So, you know, we've been talking about education. Oh, they're indoctrinating. We're going to cure this with Christianity and patriotic education. Like, it's all projection all the time. The corruption stuff is like just a chief example. Corruption here just means the wrong people are in power. You know, it's not corrupt when we do it. You know, and then we can do it however we want. We can we can do whatever we want and enrich ourselves because that's what's happening. The billionaires class is just enriching itself, giving itself massive tax cuts for, you know, and throwing like try, you know, throwing some anti-trans bones to their supporters. Um, so, so this kind of naked corruption we're seeing and naked incompetence is done by people who are saying they are doing the corruption and incompetence because the people they're firing were were incompetent and corrupt. It's surreal. Um, so, you know, the rule of law, they're saying, is corrupt. So they're going to replace it by, oh, look at what Trump does, says to the Justice Department. We're going to get rid of the weaponization of the Justice Department and the political bias by replacing it with pure, naked, you know, explicit political bias for the regime.
We won't go into conspiracy theories because I just want to ask you when we end, where are we on that road to fascism? How far have we gone down? How much is our experience replicating what took place in other fascist societies, Italy, Germany, etc.?
All right, and let's look at India today. And India today, India, Turkey, Hungary, Russia. So the, the, the zone of freedom is shrinking in the world. Uh, the, the free world, always a vexed concept, because, you know, the degree to which capitalism is a kind of freedom, I think we're seeing it's not the, it threatens democratic freedoms, but
The democratically free world, or the world where people are still progressing. Uh, you know, democracy is a practice. It's something you do. So the places where that practice is at the center of ideals and values are shrinking. Canada, maybe, is an example of a place where whose democracy has been buttressed and lifted up by, uh, by the shrinking, because it's like a, a refuge now.
Um, so we're pretty far along. Um, we are, uh, we're unfortunately even further along when you see, for example, the universities behaving the way they are, where university presidents are saying, "We're going to keep our heads down so we're not targeted," meaning the other universities are going to be targeted instead. When all universities and all people who work in universities should be defending their workplace.
This is why unions are so important. Like at Yale, Republican professors and Democrat democ- and and Democratic professors, the people with very different political ideologies now see they're all in this together in defending the institution. Uh, so the, the situ- so I'm seeing that cross-political, cross-group, class consciousness arise in the universities where people are like, "Well, okay, you know, I have very different political views, but they are really trying to take down the institution. They're not just going for gender studies, they're going for the whole ball, so ball of wax."
And then we have the media betraying, like acting like it's immune and spraying machine gun fire at the other democratic institutions, the education system. So we have all the targets. We have the targets fighting each other and amongst each other. So we need solidarity. We're not at the point where Russia is, where journalists are being thrown out of, uh, windows. We are, however, at the point where they are illegally arresting people for their speech. Uh, if they can arrest Khalil at Columbia, uh, uh, they can arrest, uh, any of us because they can arrest him legally.
So, so we're pretty, you know, they're targeting. They're starting with green card people with green cards. They're going to move to protesters and professors who, uh, who, uh, and stu-, you know, students and professors who just, you know, shared the pro-Palestinian cause. We're already using "pro-Palestinian" as a slur. So, uh, so they're targeting political opponents with this excuse and using Jewish Americans as an excuse to do this, which is horrifying to me. Um, and and dangerous for American Jews. Uh, so we're pretty far along, uh, when they start arresting people, you know, arresting protesters, uh, uh, for their speech, uh, arresting anti-war protesters.
And note that Trump, whenever he talks about this, he says, or often he'll say, "We're going to attack, un-, defund universities that allow illegal protests." He's just saying "protest." There's not going to be any protesting. And and the McCarran Act, which was used, uh, was ostensibly used to arrest, uh, Halil, written in 1952 by a vicious anti-Semite, was used to strip the passports of Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. I was, I was going to mention that. Uh, I was going to mention Robeson and Du Bois, you know, two of the greatest Americans, you know, the last 150 years. Du Bois being one of the most important intellectuals in the world. Uh, yeah, so they can go after anyone.
Columbia fired Katherine Frank, and Katherine Frank is academic royalty. Her father, you know, Timothy Snyder, and I taught the Franki seminar. That's her father who funded all of these seminars and all of these humanities institutes all over the country. Uh, and they f- and she's distinguished. Like, for me, we academics care about how many books you have, how many citations you have, the the effects of your scholarship. So we really, you know, they've been going, the the right-wing media has been targeting professors, uh, recently since 2011 for, you know, you have these organ- Campus Reform, these different right-wing newspapers.
But, you know, it is what is really alarming is when they start targeting people like Katherine Frank, who have highly cited work, who have, who run centers at prestigious universities. Uh, that's what happened with Du Bois and Robeson. Like, if they can take down those people, they can take down anyone. And so that is clearly the next phase. Clearly the next phase is like stripping the passports of, of oppos-, of people they don't like. Uh, you know, every authoritarian country does that. We've done it. Uh, and I expect that to come, unfortunately. Thank you. That was Jason Stanley and his two books, *Erasing History* and *How Fascism Works*. I would like to thank Diego, Sophia, Max, and Thomas who produced the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com. [Music]