Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: How many Turning Point USA members does it take to send a historian into exile?
3.
One DL terrorist, one to make memes, and one to define the First Amendment on Fox and Friends.
I'm Matthew Remsky. That was an anti fascist ad joke. I don't think it was that funny, actually.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: So sorry about that.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: This. This is the Anti Fascist dad podcast, episode three with Mark Bray, author of the Anti fascist handbook of 2017.
Now, at the end of last week's episode, I said this week was going to be Ben Case, but the news cycle intervened and so Ben will be with me next week.
What news cycle, do you ask? Well, Bray and his family, as you might have heard, have fled into exile thanks to the backlash over Charlie Kirk's murder and the Trump admin accelerating attempts to label anti fascists as terrorists.
Bray, his partner and their two young children, they're 4 and 7, fled the US after the local Turning Point USA chapter posted a petition to have him fired from Rutgers where he teaches altogether. These attacks prompted a flood of death threats in his inbox.
So my interview with Mark is coming up, but I'll note that the focus of that interview is really just his work because we recorded in August before all of this went down. He was in Mexico at the time on a research trip.
I think our conversation will give you a good sense of how straightforward and uncharismatic this work can be and by contrast, how absurd the panic around anti fascism is.
As I said in a video on TikTok, on one hand it shows just how fast the emerging regime is that it can't tolerate even scholarship about anti fascism.
But it also shows how fragile the regime is because it can't tolerate scholarship about anti fascism.
However, I do have a few up to date comments from Mark via voice memo over signal, so I'll just run those for you here. I asked him whether he had a network in Spain to help his family resettle. I asked him how he felt about the media coverage so far.
What they told the kids again, they're very young. Like, what do you say to your kids when you have to like, uproot in a couple of days and move to Europe?
I also asked about whether this exile means he's being embraced by a larger international antifascist community.
And also I asked whether he was going to change his research plans at all. So here's what he said.
[00:02:51] Speaker C: So, yeah, I do have a network.
[00:02:52] Speaker D: Of support in Spain, a number of friends and colleagues who I've known over the years. So that certainly factored into the decision to come here.
Rutgers has been supportive in general.
[00:03:02] Speaker C: I think that actually the mainstream media.
[00:03:04] Speaker D: Has been okay regarding antifa insofar as they've come to recognize that it is not a specific group, it's more of a politics or an activity.
So I think that the coverage in.
[00:03:17] Speaker C: General hasn't been so bad, with the.
[00:03:18] Speaker D: Exception of course, of Fox News and right wing outlets. I told my children that we're on a research trip, which we've done in the past. And so in that sense it's not, it's not that strange.
Definitely there's a broader anti fascist community that's embraced me both in terms of like self described anti fascist organizers, but also kind of a broader left sphere, both in academia and outside has definitely embraced me. I'm not planning on changing my research plans right now. Research is kind of far from my mind.
I'm just trying to get through all of the media and interviews, getting my family settled.
But I'm in the middle of writing a book about scams and right now that's my plan is to finish that book.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: So our interview is coming up.
Now before I forget, gotta do the housekeeping because as our favorite fascist uncle.
[00:04:09] Speaker E: Says, it's like, I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Okay. You know, I don't know how long I'll run that joke for because as I mentioned last week, Peterson is extremely sick, according to an announcement from his daughter Michaela with what she says is something called chronic inflammatory response syndrome due to biotoxin exposure. Now I say, she says, not because I doubt that he's been very sick. Apparently he was in the hospital in the ICU with pneumonia and sepsis.
But I have a little bit of doubt because the Peterson family has unfortunately been a sluice gate of pseudoscience and wellness grifting for years.
Also, Michaela Peterson's daughter speculated that her dad is just so important, so righteous that he's being attacked by spiritual forces.
Now, to me this sounds like not only is the diagnosis unclear, but that the family is is going to blame his death, at least in part, on you, dear listeners, if you have ever had an unholy thought about Jordan Peterson.
Now, I don't believe in spiritual attacks or in karma in that sense. I'm more of a 17th century Poetic justice kind of guy in that if Peterson is suffering from a disease in which his body is under attack from literally everything in the world that seems to check out.
So that's a long way of saying I'll stick with the housekeeping joke as a weekly inoculation, especially given how much BS we'll all have to wade through after he really does die.
All right, about the housekeeping, you can find me on bluesky and Instagram under my name.
I'm on YouTube as antifascistdad. I'm also on TikTok under that handle where I post three to four mini essays a week. I'm finding that kind of a really engaging platform. In fact, incredible responses and lots of enriched dialogue there. So that's really cool. The patreon is @AntifascistDadpodcast and as I've said, this is a temporary paywall for the part twos of these episodes because I really want this entire thing to be an educational project. So today you'll hear the first half of my interview with Mark, and then you'll be able to catch the second half on Patreon immediately. It's already up there and it'll be exclusive for a couple of weeks.
Last thing in the show notes, you'll see a pre order link for the book that this podcast is based on. If you'd like to pre order. That's really cool for exposure and algorithms and stuff like that, I'm told.
Fascist Squish and anti fascist news of the week.
[00:06:54] Speaker F: Just like we did with cartels, we're going to take the same approach. President Trump with Antifa destroy the entire organization from top to bottom.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: That's Pam Bondi, Trump's Attorney General Todi, at a recent Antifa roundtable where a bunch of pseudo journalists held court in front of Trump about how the Pacific Northwest and Portland specifically is burning to the ground because of highly organized and violent antifa gangs. So all of that obviously is BS, but the utility of it is clear in Trump's September 22 executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Now I'll link to that notice in the show notes because it's one of the catalysts for the story that our guest is embroiled in currently.
Now, in the Squish category, this might seem a little nerdy, and I do want to note that Mark himself wasn't too hard on the mainstream coverage of his story. We heard him say that. But I do want to look at a few examples of mainstream publications and tacitly accepting the Trump and Turning Point USA framing on Antifa. So here's what I mean.
The New York Times ran a story on Bray's flight to Spain and the lead reads as follows, quote, mark Bray was teaching courses on anti fascism. Turning Point USA accused him of belonging to Antifa, which he denies. He left the country Thursday night. Okay, accused him of belonging to Antifa is really not a great way of presenting this. If you do a thought experiment here and you replace the term Antifa with the term Hamas, you'll see what I'm saying. Because when the Times does not contextualize and clarify that Antifa is actually not a political organization, it's not centralized, it has no, you know, financial structure, there's no membership lists or anything like that.
When it doesn't clarify this, when it doesn't clarify that anti fascists in the US are responsible for virtually no political violence at all, the New York Times is kind of just tossing gas on the fire, endorsing the premise of this entire Antifa panic.
Now this squishiness was replicated in many publications. It's almost as if there's a pro forma theme or set of talking points that goes out from somewhere and, you know, it shows up in the Hill and a whole bunch of other places. Now in anti fascist news this week, I'm raising up the genius of seth Todd, the 24 year old DE facto commander of the Portland Inflatable Frog Special Ops Detachment. They are battling ICE in the streets every day in the most Portland way ever. So set speak for himself here. What kind of suit are you wearing, Seth?
[00:10:16] Speaker G: It's an inflatable frog suit.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: And what brought you out to the protest to begin with?
[00:10:22] Speaker G: To begin with, I personally, as part.
[00:10:25] Speaker H: Of the.
[00:10:27] Speaker G: Mexican community, Latino community, I don't like seeing my neighbors, my community members, my family being kidnapped essentially, and being disappeared without due process and then being sent to different places around the world without, without any, any due process to it. And it's kind of ridiculous that they're being so aggressive and so inhumane with their treatment of immigrants. And that's why I'm here. I'm here protesting the inhuman way that ICE and DHS is treating our immigrants. Whether they hear legally or not, they should be treated as a human being because that's what they are. That's what we are. We are humans and we are not supposed to be treating other people unfairly just because we have the power to do so. Since you have that power, you should be even more careful with how you treat people because you have that much power. And it comes with a lot of responsibility and obviously started a movement of people showing up looking ridiculous, which is the exact point is to show how the narrative that's being pushed with how we are violent extremists is completely ridiculous. Nothing about this screams extremist and violent. So it's just a ridiculous narrative that the Trump administration wants to put out so they can continue their fascist dictatorship.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Reading from the Wired magazine report on Bray, the threats emailed from anonymous accounts and reviewed by Wired included a message that read, I'll kill you in front of your students.
Another message with the subject line, your violent rhetoric is under investigation, listed Bray's home address where he lives with his wife and two young children.
So this makes antifascist dad very angry. And. And Mark has been dealing with this craft for about eight years now because his main book, the book he's most famous for, antifa, the Anti Fascist Handbook, excellent history manual. It came out in 2017, right around the time of Charlottesville. And so he was catapulted into mass media exposure with a harrowing tour that we touch on in the interview and talk about how he managed that.
Now, what impresses me most about Mark's work was not only the frank clarity of his historical analysis and his unflinching understanding of structural power, it's also that he was able to be so unflappable in that harsh spotlight. Here's a typical moment from a PBS call in show. All right, let's go to Lewis, who's.
[00:13:12] Speaker C: Calling from Pensalken, New Jersey, on the line for Republicans. Good morning.
[00:13:16] Speaker I: Good morning, sir.
Your organization mirrors the Nazis when Hitler was gaining power, the Brown Shirts. You guys show up at political rallies, you intimidate people, you beat people up, you disrupt meetings.
You know, where do you get. I went, I was an anti Trump guy. I showed up at some of those and I seen your guys spit on children, pepper strip, pepper spray, women attack people from behind and run away. And you guys are wearing the brown shirts on a mask. I mean, where do you get off? You guys are the fascists. You're against free speech. If they don't agree with you, you beat them up. Thank you, sir.
[00:13:57] Speaker C: Okay, well, so first of all, I.
[00:14:00] Speaker H: Am not a member of any antifa group, and Antifa is not a single group.
Second, also to point out once again that disrupting a far right event does not therefore mean you're far right. Historically, we can see how anti fascists have used a variety of tactics to disrupt fascist meetings. In the 20s and 30s, they would infiltrate events and sing and have singing protests over the speaker. There's a variety of tactics to do this.
And really, fascism entails an illiberal politics, just like socialism or anarchism. But that does not mean they're the same. There are very clear political differences. And to reduce politics to tactics is really ahistorical and apolitical. Rather than looking at an action, let's look at why it's carried out and who it's carried out against.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: So I don't know what this guy is describing in relation to street scuffles that he says he's observed and who the actual aggressors are. Obviously, when antifa folks show up to protect neighborhoods from hate speech and physical intimidation, words and hands can fly.
Now, did someone lose their cool at the event this guy says he was at and start spitting?
It's possible, but this would be a very isolated anecdote.
But the important part here is that Mark doesn't take the bait. He zooms out to make the basic political reality clear and then to start listing the variety of nonviolent disruptive tactics that have come down through the ages.
Now, in the second part of our interview, by the way, he goes into some length about these behavioral issues, these sort of discipline issues within movements. We discuss movement diversity and discipline.
And the conversation pivots around the fact that there's always a mixture of intensities and a spectrum of radicalism in any given group.
And part of that conversation was connected to the subject of how young anti fascists might feel about Bob Villain chanting Death to the IDF at Glastonbury this past summ.
Now, one of the paradoxical circumstances that made all of the media and culture war pressure on Mark both more acute and more tolerable was that he became a dad for the first time around that publication time as well.
And so we talk about being one person, sometimes the anti fascist dad, but also that we are sometimes two people who can support each other. The anti fascist scholar and then just the plain old dad at home.
So we open there and then we nail down the basics of anti fascist philosophy.
And in part two, again, it's up. Now our conversation gets into liberal anti fascist strategies and their discontents.
How relying on courts, norms or institutions is historically ineffective since fascists exploit those very systems to consolidate power.
We also look at the moral and strategic aspects of radical slogans like abolish ICE and ACAB and globalize the Intifada. And we come to some clarity on the fact that movements need a range of rhetoric, from the accessible to the militant, to sustain both energy and accuracy.
And we also talk about how, despite decades of struggle, Bray takes hope in younger Generations, boldness and creativity.
He emphasizes that the future is unwritten and activism must always leave new space for new experiments and possibilities.
And then in my reflection on the interview, I take some time on a moment that really stood out about the difference between conservative or right wing views of history versus fascist views of history.
Because while the content is often functionally the same between the two, that is capitalism is just the way things are, the method is very different. So here's my conversation with Mark Bray, part one.
Hello, Mark.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Welcome to Anti Fascist Dad.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: Yeah, hey, thanks for having me.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: So you are a top historian of anti fascism. I rely on your work all the time. But you're also a parent, and if.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: You'Re anything like me, I think you're.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: A little bit like me. My bet is that it's hard to keep those two things apart. Is that fair to say?
[00:18:34] Speaker C: The degree to which I want to keep them separate depends on exactly what we're talking about. Right. So, Yeah, I have two kids, 4 and 7.
On the one hand, I do kind of keep the two things separate insofar as when I wrote Antifa, I did a lot of media. I got a bunch of threats, death threats, negative responses, animosity. Also a lot of positive responses too. Right. But after a couple of years of doing interviews and touring, it took a kind of a toll a bit. And so for me, my oldest child was born in the middle of all that. Being with him was sort of a little bit of a refuge from all of that.
[00:19:20] Speaker H: Right.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: So in a sense, I kind of liked the idea of having the Mark Bray that people knew. Kind of feel like a separate person from the dad that my kids got to know growing up.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:35] Speaker C: That was really more for me than anything else. But like, I don't talk to them really about the books I've written.
I'm not opposed to it. If it were to somehow come up some, you know, over the next year or two, I'll talk about it. That having been said, though, I'm a very political person and I don't really think, as much as we may want to, that we can ever teach or parent in a way that's value neutral, nor should we.
So my values inform everything I do, including parenting.
I do want to inculcate the same basic values around justice and resisting oppression into my kids.
My oldest, the 7 year old, has over the past few years gotten interested in those ideas and receptive to them. I mean, obviously kids tend to agree with their parents when they're little and then tend to not agree with them when they're older. But that having been said, though, you know, while the specific form that my children's politics will take is up to them, it is meaningful for me that they do care about justice.
[00:20:40] Speaker H: Yeah.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: Let me just ask about this amazing moment of the intersection between becoming a new father and going through this sort of meat grinder of having the book out there, which attracted a lot of attention, and the types of media appearances that you had to do were often very harrowing. And if behind the scenes there are also threats on your safety, it really brings up this kind of core, I think, maybe historically relevant tension that people who are both anti fascists and parents are engaged with, which is, where am I going to risk my sort of life? Like, where am I going to. Am I going to endanger myself now that I'm responsible for this smaller part of the human family? That seems to be a real tension intergenerationally, I would think in anti fascism.
[00:21:38] Speaker C: Any kind of risky political behavior brings the question of how it could not only blow back on the individual, but on their family. And of course, that's been the case all along. When you're a parent, that's perhaps the most magnified, familial version of that. I mean, sure, sure, I got some threats. None of them were to the level of specificity where I had any particular concerns. And on the scale of kind of risky political action, I was not towards the nearly towards the top of that. For me, it was kind of less a concern that something would actually happen physically, although that is a consideration, and more just around my sense of wanting them to not be exposed to all of the crap that's out there and.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Perhaps including your own sort of preoccupation with it, because we also have to separate ourselves off from that particular life in order to be fully present and actually enjoy who the kids are.
[00:22:37] Speaker C: Sure. And years ago, I stopped arguing with people on the Internet.
That helps.
Stopped arguing with people on the Internet, Facebook.
Read nothing. And so I also tried to kind of unplug to a reasonable extent from social media and try to be more present from them. And I think that something happened early on when my oldest was a baby where I was like, my mind was in this toxic political space and I was like, this is not good for me and it's not good for my family.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: Okay. So that's the danger and security part of our conversation. Let's turn now to making anti fascism legible to young people in my book.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: One of the things that I suggest now that we're talking about, like, how do the sort of political values of kids form in relation to their parents? I suggest that teens and tweens and maybe even younger kids can pick up a lot of knowledge organically about fascism and perhaps responses to it just from the schoolyard and understanding what power dynamics are like there. And I'm wondering if you think that's fair or are there limits to that analogy.
[00:23:47] Speaker C: I think it's fair and I think there are limits. We'll start with the fair and then I can talk about the limits.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: I think that's fair because I think that fundamentally fascism is this desire for power born of a sense of insecurity. Right. And so that sums up a bully.
Right.
That's a classic bully. And a lot of bullying and a lot of violence in the schoolyard, I think has to do with enforcing certain kinds of norms that the bullies would argue are natural and universal and ageless, around gender, masculinity, clothing, ability, all sorts of things.
[00:24:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:38] Speaker C: And that is inherent in fascism is the notion of claiming to be the defenders of allegedly universal natural values that are under attack from what they perceive as being these kind of like aberrations in the left or aberrations in whatever kind of form. So I do think that some of the kind of core impulses and core responses. Responses are there, obviously, like, the kinds of, like, bullying predates fascism.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:25:11] Speaker H: So.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: So, so in a sense, that kind of brings up the larger question of how fascism relates to certain kinds of proto fascist and imperialist politics of the 19th century and older, which we can table that for the moment. Where I would say that there's kind of a limit is because.
Well, I guess my first thought is that there is a problem that I think you see sometimes in Western interpretations of fascism as being individual moral failings.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:25:39] Speaker C: While I don't think the schoolyard metaphor necessarily says that, it could be interpreted.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: As saying that the notion of the bully brings up an archetype. It brings up the image of not a system in which necessarily an aggressive person can thrive, but the picture of his face. Like, when I think of the bullies that I would have known as a child, I have very specific images. And so I think. I think what you're driving at is that if that's my image, then I have probably individualized the sort of dynamics that we're actually talking about as being forming of a political movement.
[00:26:21] Speaker C: That having been said, though, bullies, none of us is an island, right? So bullies are the products of structures and systems in their society. The Family, community, and so forth and so on. But yeah, going back to the earlier point, there's this kind of Western notion that fascism is an individual moral failing. And of course it is to an extent, but obviously, as you suggested, born out of larger historical circumstances, political movements.
To be a fascist is not just to be a jerk.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:56] Speaker C: It is to buy into certain interpretations about power and social norms and history.
And so in that sense, I think that the schoolyard bully metaphor, I think, is a great place to start, particularly with young people. I think it's good, of course, then also to take, if possible, further steps to sort of zoom out from that.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: I mean, one of the things that.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: I try to do with that in the zoom out phase is to talk about how bullies wind up often manipulating or being able to figure out how to use school systems or other sort of social organizations to their own advantage. And that really depends upon how they're enabled or how normalized their behaviors are and that sort of thing. So that's, I think that's one potential direction.
[00:27:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: The next thing I wanted to ask.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: You was that in my experience, experience so far, it feels like young people often enter a world where the basic logic, let's say of the schoolyard for one instance, can make fascism seem normal, seem just the way it is.
And then there are social and cultural contexts in which fascist ideas are even presented as being attractive.
And I'm wondering, because one of the things that you do really well is you study the sort of history of fascist propaganda in many forms and at many levels.
What are the earliest sort of cultural messages you think kids pick up that parents want to be aware of, that, that kind of push people towards, you know, right wing or fascist ideology.
[00:28:42] Speaker C: This may sound like a little bit of a kind of history professor in the weeds comment.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:28:49] Speaker C: But what I think is interesting about fascism historically is that it is a version of older forms of kind of illiberal right wing domination and violence in the colonial and imperial world brought home to Europe, as Amy Cesair and other kind of theorists have put it. So in that sense, like if you look at just the history of the U.S. for example, though I think it applies to Canada in, in similar ways. Right. The kinds of echoes that we would maybe think of in terms of fascism around genocide and white supremacy and so forth, predated an official fascism and informed Hitler and informed fascism. So I bring that kind of historical wraparound to bear on this conversation because there are, I think, messages that just thinking of my own experience as like a cis white guy growing up in New Jersey in the 80s and 90s, for example. One of the messages that I feel like I somehow got from society was that, like a kind of rugged individualism that people need to kind of like, if you don't have a job, get a job.
That, like, the death penalty is good because, you know, like, we can't be soft on things. So this kind of association, I think, between individualism, masculinity, violence, self sufficiency, that whole kind of nexus, I feel like, was somehow communicated to me through various sources.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: And discipline, too. Discipline, yes.
[00:30:25] Speaker C: I think that there's obviously a lot of overlap with those kinds of principles. And not fascist politics, just like centrist politics, quote, unquote, regular right wing politics. Even in some regards, in some circumstances, aspects of kind of politics we might associate with the left. And so what I would kind of emphasize is thinking this goes back to, like, what is anti fascism?
Is antifascism only stopping fascism? Or does it entail a broader vision of social transformation that creates a more just society that opposes versions of these kinds of violence or versions of these kinds of discrimination that also appear in not entirely or not at all fascist kinds of politics? And that's where for me, my mind ends up going.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:14] Speaker C: That having been said, whether or not we want to categorize these things as explicitly fascist or kind of in the orbit of undesirable politics that can lead you in that direction. I think that fascism does a good, when it's successful, does a good job at presenting itself as common sense, as what is natural and what is normal.
I remember Noam Chomsky years ago made this point that, like, if he were to debate a right winger, they're not having a fair fight because the right winger's job is basically some version of the way things are is fine.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:53] Speaker C: Which is an easy sell to most people or to a lot of people versus, hey, we should really change almost everything or maybe everything. And that's, that's, that's a more difficult sell.
The irony of it, though, is that if you study history, this is partly why I love history, is to realize that these kind of fascist myths, like that the nation is eternal, nationalism is like 200 years old. There are interpretations of gender.
Everything that we think is normal has a history and used to be different in different times and places, but people don't know that.
[00:32:26] Speaker A: And when people don't know that, they get very upset when you tell them.
[00:32:29] Speaker C: Yeah. And what we've seen a lot recently in response to MeToo and Black and a number of other movements is the kind of the racist or sexist white guy who's called out on his behavior, then says, all right, well you all are mistreating me, so I'm gonna head to the right, Right, right. The boo hoo stories, that they're the real victims.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:55] Speaker C: And unfortunately, some centrist politicians have concluded that like, well, the solution is basically not to advocate for anti racism or advocate for queer or trans rights, but just try to just like coddle these people. I disagree. I think that whenever you have social justice movements, you are going to meet resistance and that kind of reactionary resistance is always going to try to portray itself as a victim. That's just always the way it is. But we still need to plow forward.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: I want to dig deeper into this question.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: What kind of basic misinformation or incomplete information in the typical global north public school sets stage for kids to be vulnerable to right wing or fascist recruitment, would you say?
[00:33:39] Speaker C: Again, I would come back to the elements of continuity between kind of far right and centrist politics and interpretations of history.
So you were talking before about the conversion of indigenous people in a Catholic church, the history of the colonization of North America, and more broadly, what do we say about that?
There are, I suppose, three different main things that people could say. One is it was outright bad. One is it was outright good or that it was unfortunate, but there have.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Been good outcomes and some outcomes that must be improved and that sort of thing.
[00:34:24] Speaker C: Right, okay, Right.
And so I think that at least in the US for the last few decades, the social justice movements of the 60s managed to push the center of gravity around educational conversations in the direction of it was bad, but.
And that is far from a satisfactory answer. And I think it kind of that tension between is it good, is it bad, is it good, is it bad? Is the kind of dance that kind of centrist liberal politics I think is always forced to do in the pursuit of what they perceive to be practical, possible, reasonable, and it's always unstable. And I think it ultimately never really satisfies anyone.
[00:35:17] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:18] Speaker C: And so then in the context of the last, basically from Trump onward, there's this right wing movement that says it was good, it was just good. If you look at the social media being put out by the Department of Homeland Security these days, they have these explicitly white supremacist images of these kind of probably generated by AI of these kind of white pioneers in the heartland. And this is just, we need to celebrate this as the message.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Right. Or they're doing spots where they're actually.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Filming, you know, detainees who have been shipped off to El Salvador and they're coming off of the plane in chains. And the sound itself is being compared to a kind of asmr, or sensually thrilling kind of spectacle of how we're actually, you know, putting the bad people away who happen to be brown.
[00:36:08] Speaker C: Right. So. And then what. What the right has been successful in doing is framing leftist structural critiques of racism, for example, and how white privilege is a part of that into saying the left hates you because you're white, and talking about this notion of guilt, which is not how the left frames discussions of white privilege.
It's not about white people should be guilty, it's how white people should recognize the privilege and do something about it.
And has harnessed a lot of kind of grievance politics, which is ironic because that's the phrase that they use to discredit left wing identity politics.
And it draws upon the kind of ambiguous place of nationalism in the. It was good, but.
And we can see that happening in Europe where after World War II, nationalism, generally speaking, became relatively. It fell out of vogue, certainly compared to the US and then you have these generations of Italian fascists and German fascists and so forth saying like, no, we need to just reclaim the nation. And for them, it's a racialized nation. I mean, here in the US it's also racialized, but we have the different history of this idea of the melting pot in the US which of course is also in its own way a kind of racist analogy around how immigrants need to melt their own identities into this, you know, homogenous, allegedly nation. But in a country like France, you have the tension between what does it mean to be French? Is it ethnic, is it national, is it both?
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:55] Speaker C: And that opens space for a more explicit right wing, I think, reaction against the presence of non ethnically German people, non ethnically French people, and so forth.
So I think that going back to the kind of educational, classroom history conversation has to do, I think, a lot with this kind of liberal dance around national identity, racial identity, the histories of colonialism and imperialism and how they impact things today.
Because I think the liberal goal is ultimately to talk about it and then sweep it under the rug insofar as it applies to today.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: So that's a wrap for episode three, except for fascist dad of the week.
Remember Seth Todd? He's the frog commander of the fighting Portland Lily Pads?
Well, at one of the protests outside of the Portland ICE facility, an ice goon sprayed his mace can into the ventilator opening at the back of Seth's costume.
So this guy chose to flood this kid with a chemical irritant while he was in an enclosed space, which is potentially lethal.
Now, Seth managed to get the hood off before passing out, but I don't think I need to say much more about this Ice fash, dad, except to say that there are a lot of life choices that lead you down the pathway to attacking a kid in a frostuit.
Edit.
Now, I don't think I need to say much more about this ice fashtad, except to say that there are a lot of life choices that lead a person down the pathway to attacking a kid in a frog suit with mace.
So many forks on the road, so many opportunities for therapy or to study power relations or the civil rights movement or to just make some friends.
Imagine being the guy who winds up there. What an incredible embarrassment. At least he was wearing a mask. But that means he'll have to live with that shame alone.
I'm Matthew. That's it for this week. I'll see you over on Patreon for Mark Bray Part 2. Or next week back here with Ben Case, where we'll be talking about courage, physical and otherwise, in anti fascism. Take care of each other.
