Transcription
There's a lot to talk about today, and I'm going to start somewhere that you don't expect me to start, but it's time. Um, I want to talk to you about fascism and what fascism is because I think we have a reluctance in this country, really, to grapple with the concepts of really big ideas like socialism and fascism and so on. And there has been a tendency not to talk here about what fascism is. We have a caricature of what socialism is that I talk about a lot versus the actual definition of socialism. But it's time for us in this country to be grappling with fascism.
And fascism is a system of government. And they come in different flavors around the world according to the, um, the the distinct, um, cultural characteristics of the country that is embracing a concept, um, of a government like a fascist government. But and and well, I won't go down that rabbit hole, but, um, but there are some some hallmarks you can identify.
Fascism is a form of government that relies on the idea that the vast majority of people should not and cannot have input into their form of government because they're just not as smart or as able as a very small group of people. About 10% is the way the initial ideas of fascism talked about who should rule a society. Um, and again, I'm doing a such a high-level view here, but that 10% or that that small group of people are the only ones who really understand how a society should work. And because of that, they need to direct the economy, and they need to direct government, and they need to direct society in order to create a strong country that is going to be able to exert its forces elsewhere.
And there are a number of hallmarks to that. So, first of all, the idea that only a few people really know what's going on and should rule inherently means that some people are better than others. So that, of course, means that there's one person who should be at the top of that because if there are gradations to people, right, there's got to be somebody who's really good. But it also means that the the mass of people have to be directed by that small group of people. They have to be brought in behind that small group of people. And the way that you do that, according to fascist thinkers, is by creating an other, by splitting a population along lines of religion or, um, or race. Uh, you set this idea that there is somehow a small group of people who are the good guys and everybody else is a bad guy. Um, they use different words than that, but that's the scheme of it because what you're doing is you're setting a group of people against another psychologically. So you're deliberately saying, "We're the good guys, and they're the bad guys." And often they define those bad guys as socialists. Think of these as words, by the way, not as concepts. As socialists or as the radical left. Uh, I'm going to come back to that in a minute.
And if you can convince the in-group to hate the out-group, the the what they do to the out-group matters, of course, especially to the out-group. It matters in many ways, but what that really does is it solidifies that in-group because you don't want to be one of the out-group. You want to be with the in-group. So you deliberately split a population and then, once you've got that in-group, you know, sort of eating out of your hand, you convince them that they are the true members of that society, that they are the ones who can usher in a resurgence of a great past, that they don't need other countries, that that you need to kill all kinds of foreign ties because those foreigners are no good. Um, that you need to make sure that the government and business work together, often with the business taking, um, a percentage of, I'm sorry, of the government taking a percentage of businesses, and you need to, um, to make the military, the government, and the army all work together with this very, very loyal base, forcing everybody else to come along with it.
And there are all sorts of implications for that for gender roles. For example, women are supposed to be religious and housekeepers and produce a lot of children rather than working outside the home. Because the whole point of this is to denigrate the idea of any kind of equality among people. Because the point is, there's not equality among people. Some people are better than others, and they have to be trusted to whip this country into shape in such a way that they move the army, the businesses, and the government together to create a very strong state at home, and then to spread into other countries and to take over those other countries and to be able to grab their resources. That's the philosophy behind fascism, and it is now very much a part of the current administration in the United States of America. And if you know my work, you know I don't say that lightly. I've talked a lot about how the United States has a history of things that have fascist tendencies, like the elite southern enslavers before the Civil War. But we are now looking at a moment when you have an administration that has those hallmarks and that also is deliberately breaking the law and deliberately acting as if our constitution doesn't exist. Recognizing this administration as fascist is now imperative, not least because of the shooting yesterday of, uh, Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 37-year-old woman, uh, an American citizen, and the deliberate attempt of the administration to lie to us all and force us to believe something that is demonstrably not true. That is a number of the videos that were taken at the time of the shooting and the subsequent analysis of those videos by experts makes it very clear that, um, she was shot, uh, by, she she did not provoke an an officer of the state who used state violence against her. In the wake of that, the administration has insisted that she was the aggressor and that violence against a US citizen, um, for exercising, you know, being on a public road and exercising, you know, her her right to be there, um, should be punishable by death. This is an incredibly important moment in US history because of that.
I'm not going to go any further into fascism, which is a really interesting, um, study in the United States because I say we have so many hallmarks of it at different times. Um, but in this moment, there, that's the backstory here. But the the shooting itself has a political story, and I want to grab that political story at the same time because, uh, that too is very important. The Trump administration has, or I'm sorry, Trump's political career has depended on his ability to convince white Americans that he would protect them from that dangerous other. This has been the justification first for putting him in office in 2016, but then also for his use of federal officers from ICE and, um, uh, and other federal agencies to round up undocumented immigrants and to hurt civilian, hurt citizens as well, um, denying both of due process. Um, but he's been able to get that because of that long-term, as I say, splitting of our population. There's the good guys and the bad guys. And you saw this really clearly, and you still see this very clearly with Trump. Um, Robert Mueller, for example, who did the Mueller report, special counsel Robert Mueller, was a Republican. James Comey, former director of the FBI, a Republican. You know, many of the people who stood against him in his first term were Republicans. But the minute they stood against him, he started to call them Democrats. Um, you saw this, for example, with, um, Mitt Romney, who was at the time a senator from Utah, although he had been the Republican nominee for president, when he voted in, uh, in favor of one of the articles of impeachment in, um, Trump's first impeachment trial in 2020, January of 2020. Um, Trump literally began to call him a Democrat. He said that that he, no Republicans had voted to convict him. Only Democrats had. And he said, "Everybody knows that Mitt Romney is a Democrat."
That deliberate splitting of our population has been central to Trump's rise, but it has depended on white Americans buying into it. The violence has overwhelmingly been against brown Americans now and against black Americans. White Americans have certainly experienced violence, but but they have not had that light bulb moment. The shooting of Miss Good is a game-changer in that for the first time, white Americans can see on their phones the power of the state being used to kill somebody just like them. And that is a political story because if Trump loses those white suburban moms, especially, but white suburban people, he can't put together any kind of a winning coalition.
And you asked me to talk about some other times like this. And if you think about times when a right-wing, potentially fascist government lost steam in the United States, it has always come at a time when the white population sees themselves in the victim of state violence. So if you start with the 1850s, for example, I know none of you wanted to read this book in high school, but the reason that Uncle Tom's Cabin became an important political book, it's an important literary work as well because it is the first real American popular novel that creates a black American as a central character and shows, um, personal growth for that character. That's one of the hallmarks of a major, uh, figure in a work of literature. And Uncle Tom is, is the not only a, I guess I'm giving away too much here, but everybody should read it. But if you don't, if you're going to cover your ears, um, he is a Christ-like figure, and he grows into that throughout the book. But the the real kicker to that book, if you read it, was that the centerpiece of it was white women recognizing that the sale of, um, Eliza's son away from her broke the maternal child bond, and every woman in the 1850s lost children to disease. And the centerpiece of that book is the loss of children and the recognition for all those women, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had lost a child to disease, uh, that what was happening to black Americans was that compounded by the fact that they were losing their child by the acts of man. And that that becomes a game-changer, that becomes our first real popular, um, uh, theater production. There's a story behind that, but it's a huge, a runaway bestseller, and it really changes the way people think about the institution of human enslavement. That book does. That's 1852 that comes out.
But think about what happened in 1963 when, um, white Americans saw four black children, four black girls bombed at church. That was a game-changer as well. I mean, there were a lot of other things going on in that period as well, but for a lot of people who were like, "I don't care what happened to the to the three people registering to vote, you know, registering black Americans to vote, whatever. That's not my problem." When they saw four little girls dying because they went to church, that woke a lot of people up.
Similarly, in, um, 1924, the KKK was on the rise in the United States until the head of the KKK kidnapped, raped, and murdered a young white woman, and that broke the KKK in the United States. There were other things going on as well, but the the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer is a huge deal for breaking that poisonous moment in the United States.
And then you asked about Kent State. Kent State, which happens in May of 1970, is huge. A lot of people forget the fact that that was supposed to be the weekend that the new Stone Mountain in Georgia was to be dedicated. The the the carving on the side of the mountain of, um, Stone of, uh, Stone Mountain in Georgia outside of Atlanta that had been started in the late 19th century, but they had run out of funds and they had fought with their sculptor, and so it had really fallen into, we're never going to finish this sort of thing. It was after Brown versus Board of Education in 1954 that they started to remake Stone Mountain, and, um, that was supposed to be dedicated on the same weekend that Kent State happened. [snorts] And you think about what that means. You know, this is the rise of this, this second major segregationist movement. Kent State happens, and, uh, Nixon's handlers make the huge mistake of suggesting that the fault for that shooting was the four murdered college students. Nixon's base was those white, um, uh, World War II vets who had all sent their kids to college. That was the American dream. And they loved their kids. And the idea that the power of the state would kill those people, kill their children. You can see Nixon's popularity falling off a cliff. And you can see after that his desperate attempt to find a new kind of base because he has lost his central base.
So, you know, I've belabored that maybe longer than you expected to hear because when you think about why this matters, and everybody is thinking it matters in a lot of different ways. Those two things are huge. It has enabled us to identify that this government is now a fascist government. And it has enabled us to, um, to recognize ourselves, even if, you know, we're not a young black man. Um, there's always something that people recognize as theirs. For me, it was Breonna Taylor. I mean, that she looked like my my children. And but for a lot of people who weren't paying attention, this made them feel like it could be them. And you can see the administration trying desperately to blame it on her and to say, "No, no, no, no. She was this." The reason I made the point of radical left terrorist is now you actually have White House, uh, spokesperson, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre out there saying that there is a left-wing conspiracy. No, they're not. This is there's not. This is, um, again, classic authoritarian/fascist behavior, but it is also, um, clearly an attempt to try and split the American people at a moment when the rest of us are looking at this and saying, "The power of the state should not be able to execute people." End of discussion. And for a lot of people who maybe didn't pay a lot of attention, they are now looking at that and saying, "That could be me." The same way that women read Uncle Tom's Cabin and said, "I lost my son to cholera or measles or any of the horrible diseases that were killing people before vaccines." And and I know what it's like to lose a child. And if you have the state tearing children away from their parents, that's wrong. From their mothers, I'm sorry, from their mothers, that's wrong because they can see themselves in that. And if you've ever wondered, that's why that book is so incredibly important. Um, and and again, I, I, because I like rabbit holes, um, if you've read the book and you know how you look in the modern era and you think, "Little Eva, oh, come on." Like she, when she dies, angels sing around her and the whole thing. Imagine if you're a parent who has lost a child. You, you don't want to remember the vomiting and the tears and the slow death. You want to imagine your child has just ascended to heaven. So, so that book is really about, we need to mobilize humans to recognize themselves in the people that the state is persecuting. And that's what the killing of Renee Nicole Good did for the United States of America.
Of course, now that we have so many people here, I want to add in here, um, the loss to the community and to her family. Um, and the human aspect of this, obviously people are reacting to as well. I don't want to belabor that because that's not my place to, but I also don't want it to go unsaid. All right. So if that's the case, today has been lit, as they say, uh, because it is clear to a lot of people that things are getting more and more extreme. So, in addition to the attack on Venezuela and the extraction of, uh, Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, I mean, it feels like a month ago, but wasn't it like, it hasn't even been a week. Anyway, that that the recognition that the the pardoning of the former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of a number of drug trafficking charges in order to keep his party in power, the, uh, threats made against Colombia, the threats made against Cuba, the threats made against Mexico, the threats made against Greenland, um, the increasing salting of our media with the bird's Western Hemisphere by the right wing. Clearly, Trump is intending to exercise this idea of creating a very strong America and then grabbing other countries and their resources with that. And then, of course, yesterday he turned around and said that even though the US budget for the military jumped from $800 billion to a trillion dollars this year, he wants it to go to $1.5 trillion. We are already spending more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. He wants us to spend another half a trillion dollars on that. And he has this fantasy that, uh, the tariffs are bringing in so much money that we're going to be able to pay for this. In fact, if you are not watching, you should be. You will see that our, uh, deficit and debt are skyrocketing. They are skyrocketing under him. And it just, it just sort of astonishes me that when Biden used money for investment in the United States, in infrastructure, and in surviving the coronavirus pandemic, he got all kinds of, uh, feedback of people going, "What are you doing to our debt?" Now that Trump is simply basically putting money into ICE, the military, and his own pocket, um, and trying to re to to fix the damage that he did with the tariffs and stuff is going straight up. No one's talking about it, and we ought to be.
All right. So, what else has happened today? Uh, the other thing is it's very clear that Trump is doing this. He actually said to the New York Times today that the only limit on his behavior in foreign affairs, um, was his own morality and his own mind. And that, of course, is not only antithetical to everything that the United States stands for. I think it shows in a way that is harder and harder to ignore that he is not mentally okay. And a lot of people who were willing to look the other way and say, "Well, he can be reined in or let's just let him sleep or let him play with architecture." And by the way, he announced today that the new ballroom he wants to build is going to be as tall as the White House. I mean, basically, he's he's going to create his own huge ball house ballroom. That's his plan, anyway. Um, yeah, I've said that they were trying to have him do architectural stuff to to kind of distract him. And while that's the case, it's very clear there's something else going on with his own mental acuity. And there's a real question about how much he is aware of and how much of what we are seeing right now is actually been being directed by people like Stephen Miller, um, the White House deputy chief of staff, who has, um, you know, certainly embraced all the tenets of fascism before this.
So those two things were very in-your-face today. At the same time, JD Vance doubled down on the attempt to smear Good as, um, a provocateur and as somebody who, uh, was trying to attack the person who shot her. That has been thoroughly disproven at this point. He nonetheless, he went out and is increasingly trying to force us to believe it, which is another hallmark not just of fascism, but also of authoritarianism. That's, I'm sorry, of totalitarianism. That's one of the big differences between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is that totalitarianism, they want to control how you think as well as how you behave. And there's this clear attempt to get us to say, "Oh, yeah, you're right," when it is demonstrably untrue. And that, you know, from, uh, George Orwell's 1984, you know, the first rule of the Party is, "You must always believe whatever the Party says." And that's sort of one of the whole points of George Orwell's 1984. Um, um, so that has been going on in this moment. They're also saying they're going to send more troops to Minnesota on the heels of this, um, this, uh, shooting. And today the FBI told the Minnesota, um, I forget the precise name of it. Hold on. The, um, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. This is an investigative, a statewide investigative, um, uh, bureau within the Minnesota Department of Public Safety that, uh, that usually investigates crime scenes and normally works with the FBI. If the FBI comes in, the FBI has shut them out, said they can't have anything to do with this investigation. So again, they're really going to be trying to push this idea with the hope that this is the moment they can really solidify that power.
And when I went out for a walk this afternoon, that was going to be today's talk, that this is the moment to say, to light up the phones, to, um, especially to Republicans, to really say, "We're not going down this road. We are not going to abandon the rules-based international order that has kept us safe for all this time in order to use our money." Remember, our tax dollars are ours. And in order to use our military, which are our sons and daughters, and which are is supported by our money, in order to arrandise freaking Donald Trump and his cronies, that that it is so long past time to say, "Yeah, sure. Or go ahead. You can use my money for ICE. You can use me. You can use my money for whatever." There are many ways in which often the government spends monies in ways that we don't necessarily approve of as individuals. And that's sort of the way it goes. I don't want that bridge, but I sure want this one. It's different when you stop spending any of our money on us, our healthcare, our infrastructure, our ability to enter the 21st century, addressing climate change, our health, all those things, and instead say, "I'm going to take all your money and I'm going to use it to create a squad of my own goons who are responsible only to me," which is what the administration is clearly doing. And it's high time for us to stand on that. And and that was kind of where I was planning to leave stuff today.
And I went out for a walk, and then I came back, and something interesting happened this afternoon. First of all, um, the, uh, the Democrats in the House and in the Senate as well, but the Democrats in the House, of course, as you know, have been screaming about extending the Affordable Care Act, uh, uh, um, credits, uh, healthcare, the the credits for the healthcare insurance that you buy on the Affordable Care Act markets. And the Democrats [clears throat] have been howling about this, and they were trying to force a vote on it, um, through a discharge petition, I believe. And Mike Johnson was like, "Ain't happening." Well, you know what happened today? Um, they got that vote. They forced, I think it was a discharge petition that got that through. They forced that vote, and more than a dozen Republicans voted in favor of it, and the House passed it. Still has to go to the Senate. The Senate might not deal with it. They may or they may not. But that is a huge crack in the dam in the House that more than a dozen Republicans voted with the Democrats to extend the affordable healthcare, um, um, why can't I think of the word? You know, the insurance credits, whatever they're called. I'm sorry, I can't think of it now. And I've written it 16 million times. You can just tell I'm on overload like everybody else. Um, but I'm not done yet. Um, the next thing is that it certainly looks as if the House is going to vote to overturn two of Trump's vetoes, including one for that bipartisan bill, um, to, uh, clean up Colorado's water. Um, now, it's not clear the Senate will take those up, but this is a House that at this point only can the Republicans can only lose two votes. And already they're saying, "Okay, we got to back off on this stuff that people care about." Right?
But we're not done yet. In Minnesota, the county district attorney of the county in which Ms. Good was killed said, "We have the jurisdiction to charge the ICE officer who shot her, regardless of what the FBI does." He's clawing back that power and saying, "Hang on just a minute here." But I'm not done yet. You know, Spotify was advertising recruitment ads for ICE. News about that went out, and people quit Spotify. They quit using Spotify. Its stock dropped 10% in a month. And this afternoon, Spotify has said it will no longer accept recruitment ads for ICE. They're taking them down. But I'm not done yet. The Senate today agreed to move forward legislation that would force Trump to ask Congress before he advanced any more military action against Venezuela. Now, that to me looks a little bit like that horse is not only out of the barn, it's in the next county. But it was a big move, a big enough move that Trump promptly took to social media and said, "I'm going to get all you people that you, you can't vote against me." But they did. But I'm not done yet. The other thing that happened was that in the Senate, the Senate agreed to a resolution to hang that [clears throat] January 6th plaque honoring the officers who protected them during January 6th. Now, by law, it's supposed to be up, and the Republicans have simply refused to put it up. John Thune, the Senate majority leader, said, "Okay, we'll put it up." They passed that resolution. They put it up. Now, it's a plaque, right? It's symbolic. Who cares? You know who cares? Donald Trump. Because what that says is, "We don't buy your idea that this was a peaceful patriot visit to the White House. We are honoring those officers who protected us on that day."
So, um, so as I said, today it was lit in that the administration is really going for broke here. They're really trying to put in place this fascist government before Trump can no longer be president, which I think is very much writing on the wall here. I think you can see JD Vance trying to step into that role. And once the system is in place, you could put, you know, a chicken in that system because it's not going to break easily. But at the same time, they're trying to do that, and Trump is saying that, you know, he can do whatever he wants and so on. We are finally perhaps starting to see real pushback from Republicans because the Democrats are not in power. There's nothing that they have really been able to do except gum up the works and they have gummed up the works and make speeches and they have made speeches and complained and they have complained. But until they had those votes, there wasn't much they could do. And now today they had some of those votes. I'm not telling you that we're done here, but this afternoon was not the same country as we had this morning. And I, I think that's a really important change.
So now I have, um, gone over where you, uh, you know, my my normal time here. But, um, but but I want to, I mean, everything's happening, and there's just so much going on that I haven't touched, and, um, and and I'm doing the best I can between the letters and these things. But but here's what I would tell you. So every time I interview anybody, behind the scenes as well as in public, I say, "What do ordinary people do in this time?" And there are two things that people always say. The first is act locally. The place you start to change politics is at the local level. And so do that. I mean, you never forget that the reason we know what happened to Ms. Good was because so many of her neighbors were out there filming. And you know, you may not feel like holding up your camera and pushing a button is heroic, but remember, we wouldn't have known about George Floyd if that woman had not had the courage, the unspeakable courage, really, to stand there while the cops are screaming at her and videotaping what they were doing. So acting locally like that, standing up for your neighbors, recording things, making a record, you know, running for office, showing up to school board meetings, doing things at the local level matters for the future. Matters now, but it also matters for the future because it will change the way people think about governance.
But there is now a crucial need to really, really press on Republican lawmakers. The Democrats, for sure, don't leave them. You know, call out the people who are not speaking up enough and really encourage those who are. But at this point, Republicans need to know that you do not stand behind Donald Trump's fascist government. And when you think about the world that way, um, they need to hear that. And I will tell you, there are some people who are on his side. And and I could, I, you know, watch the news today. There are some people out there saying, "This is great. We got to go after people this way." That is un-American. That is, um, you know, the idea that the state can use its power against American citizens like that. This is literally what we formed this country to stop. They are un-American. And where we are in this moment is those of us who care about democracy versus those people who want to establish an authoritarian or a fascist government. And that's not about politics. It's not Republicans versus Democrats. It's about recovering American democracy, for our good, but also for the good of the world. And and if you are listening to me and you're an independent or you're a Republican and you don't like what the Democrats are doing, more power to you because if you get rid of those people, the people who are admiring Adolf Hitler right now, the people who are like Kyle Rittenhouse joking about crossing the the state border again into Minnesota like he did, uh, when he killed those two people, you know, get rid of those Nazi sympathizers. You can take back the Republican party. We need a healthy Republican party. And now is the time to hive those people off. Get rid of them. Vote against them. Say, "We are never going to let you darken our doorstep again." But we're going to support these people who are within the mainstream of American society. This is the moment to do that. And and it's not, not literally this this moment, although feel free to do it in this moment. The next period into, I was talking to some, I guess it was Senator Warner this morning, and he agreed that he thinks between now and May is the crucial period here. His reasoning was different than mine. But, um, but but now is the time really to bear down and to do it, not just for people like, um, Ms. Good, and for people like Breonna Taylor, and for people like George Floyd, and for people like all those undocumented, um, immigrants who have suffered under the American state. Um, but to do it for us, and for our nation, and for all those people who came before us and and stood in the breach in this in in a similar moment in their own lives.
And, you know, one of the things that you're going to be seeing from me, uh, and my team in the next couple of days is, uh, a series of videos about the Battle of the Bulge. We are the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge in 1945. And, you know, those people didn't want to be there. They did not want to be in the Arden Forest, um, in trenches being shelled. Um, but they did it because they knew they had to hold the line. And when we were doing these videos, I, I, I, we get a great addition to our team, and he's been writing the videos. I realized that the the ultimate success at the Battle of the Bulge was in large part thanks to Patton's Third Army. And, you know, I don't, I know military history sort of well enough to do a drive-by, but not really well enough to get into the details. And I realized I had people on Patton's march, and I knew that, but I just hadn't really put the two together. And you think about that, and you think about all the people in your life who have done, you know, I was going to say heroic, but but I think really the word is more, they did what they had to do. This is our moment to do what we have to do, and it's easier than being in the Arden Forest, and some of us are paying the ultimate sacrifice. Um, Renee Nicole Good paid the ultimate sacrifice. But if we can throw our shoulders to this wheel in this moment, recognizing that Trump is extraordinarily unpopular, that nobody believes this crap about that they are trying to smear this victim with, that at the end of the day, when people knew about Project 2025, only 4% of Americans wanted it. That on every policy, Trump is underwater. You recognize that what we have to deliver right now is is only solidarity and determination, and that we can do. So as distraught as many of us are in this moment, let's not let up. Call your Republican lawmakers and say, "This is not the country I want," and really hammer that home. Write to them. Call them. Make it really clear that they can't get away with this. And and today, that's all I heard from from electeds that I was corresponding with. Keep the pressure on. Now is the time for that.