Episode Transcript
UNLOCK 14.1 How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism w/ Craig Johnson Pt 2
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Craig Johnson
[00:00:08] Matthew Remski: Welcome, Patreons, to part two of episode 14, “How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism,” with Craig Johnson. I’m really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your work and your days.
In part one, I talked with Craig about why fascist movements deliberately target boys and how online culture enables that recruitment. He talked about how fascism relies on young men shaped by Western masculinity’s emphasis on power, dominance, and control. And he described the internet as a kind of political heat sink where humor, irony, and transgression disguise extremist ideas as jokes.
Racist and sexist memes function as social signals that draw kids into in-groups. And he stressed that when children bring this content to parents, it’s calm, curiosity, and never—never—anger, certainly not disgust. That’s really important. So let’s get right back into our discussion here, beginning with this question of how anti-fascism might become cool.
[00:01:25] Matthew Remski: For young people to be aware of is that fascism pretends that it’s cool. So maybe we can get at this question of how Mr. Rogers would do on TikTok from the other direction, which is: how does fascism present itself as being cool? How does it do that?
[00:01:44] Craig Johnson: One of the—yeah, you have absolutely hit the nail on the head here. The problem is that fascism… I don’t know if we get to say that it pretends that it’s cool anymore. I think it is a version of what is cool.
[00:01:58] Matthew Remski: Yeah, I’ve got some thoughts about that. But we can leave those, right?
[00:02:01] Craig Johnson: Yeah, yeah. Fair. Totally, totally. By which I mean: fascism is popular. It is a popular ideology. Millions of people adhere to it. It has an aesthetic that appeals to people. It has a culture, it has a community that appeals to people and draws people in. It’s a subculture like any other.
This was true back in the 1930s and 40s and 50s—or even more so in the 20s. Lots of people all over the world were infatuated by Mussolini’s fascist party because of its aesthetics, because of its speed, because of its power, because of its newness—because it was new.
And I think that’s a lot of what people find appealing about fascism today: in most Western countries, there has not been a powerful fascist party for 50, 60, 70 years or more, if there ever was one. And so it seems innovative, it seems new, it’s exciting to people. It’s new ideas that they haven’t encountered before—ideas that people haven’t been telling them about.
That is one of the central problems with fascism. It appears to be new, it appears to be exciting, it appears to be transgressive. And a lot of young people simply enjoy those things. They like those qualities in things, frankly, for roughly the same reason that young people tend to be the people who adopt a new form of music or a new form of dress.
Fascism is the youngest of the modern political ideologies—liberalism, conservatism, communism, etc. Fascism is the youngest one.
[00:03:39] Matthew Remski: I wonder where—thinking almost like a behaviorist—where the die-off point of coolness is. Because you’re right: there’s an aesthetic attraction, an attraction to power, an attraction to the idea that, “Oh, I’m going to overcome my humiliation,” or “I’m going to have a purpose,” or “I’m going to have something to do.”
And then what I see over time is that most new, aesthetically based—or aesthetically rich—movements tend to lose their coolness. They have to. Something beneath the coolness begins to reassert itself. And with fascism, it’s going to be: somebody’s telling you what to do all the time, somebody’s telling you how to behave, and somebody is actually very anxious about whether or not you’re going to follow the rules.
And that’s where things become uncool: somebody telling you what to do. Is that fair to string it out that way?
[00:04:43] Craig Johnson: I think that’s pretty accurate.
Although the fact is that lots of young people do like and believe in and want order and discipline in their lives. Young people join the military, and there are some people who believe that the military is cool. And that’s what the military is: it’s an organization steeped in tradition that tells you what to do with your brain and your body at all moments of the day.
However, when it comes to the typical young kid that fascism appeals to, that’s not quite the same kid. A lot of the transgressive fascist young men out there right now are excited about it exactly because it’s transgressive—because it’s new, because it’s exciting, because nobody’s telling you what to do.
If the movement becomes big and powerful, it may lose that edge, it may lose that allure, but in doing so it might capture all the kids who do, in fact, just want somebody to tell them what to do. Those are different kids, but there’s still a fair number of them.
[00:05:51] Matthew Remski: And I suppose it might capture them for long enough to make a real difference. But I’m thinking about how, in the heyday of the Hitler Youth, they were not universally admired amongst the young people of Germany. In fact, they inspired a number of rebel movements.
One gathered under the umbrella name Edelweiss Pirates—roving gangs of kids listening to American jazz, wearing what we’d now call vintage store clothes, making fun of these kids marching around in lederhosen. They rewrote their songs to make them dirty. They eventually got into sabotage—slashing the tires of bike couriers, lighting storehouses on fire—really dangerous stuff. But the basic premise was: the Hitler Youth are just awful, uncool people, and we’re not going to be part of that.
So I’m wondering: is that just a demographic phenomenon that’s always going to happen—there’s going to be a sector that resists youth indoctrination—or do you think, at a certain point, the conformity of either the Hitler Youth or something like the MAGA movement becomes uncomfortable for too many young people?
[00:07:48] Craig Johnson: That’s an interesting question.
I would argue that the MAGA movement itself is primarily the purview of older folks, of middle-aged types. And the young fascists—they might say “MAGA” in order to piss somebody off, to scare somebody. But what they identify with is something to the right of that—something scarier, more on the edge.
As long as they can remain on that edge, on that bleeding edge—as long as they can actually piss off and scare MAGA Republicans—they might continue to have legs on this.
A perfect example is Nick Fuentes. Nick Fuentes is a young fascist influencer—probably the most important fascist public face in the United States right now. I would argue he has always been on the absolute fringe of the Republican Party. He’s associated with the party, he’s associated with public figures. He has had lunch with Donald Trump. He has had meetings with members of Congress. They’ve talked at his talks and stuff. But he’s never really been embraced by the party.
[00:09:07] Matthew Remski: So everything but getting a speaking spot at CPAC, really.
[00:09:11] Craig Johnson: Exactly, yes.
[00:09:11] Matthew Remski: Right. He’s in the lobby outside.
[00:09:14] Craig Johnson: He’s in the lobby outside. But then they kick him out because he says actual Nazi propaganda stuff. And then a couple of the more fascist-adjacent Republicans go across the street to his show and say, like, “Hey, we secretly agree with you.”
As long as they stay there, I think they can remain “cool.” They can continue to have that cachet.
If they start to take over the coalition—which is what their goal is—then they might cease to be cool, but they would also suddenly become fantastically more powerful. So I don’t know if they’d care.
The point is that right now a lot of what they are trying to cash in on is being cool, influential, transgressive. If we can catch them now—while they’re trying to get a bunch of kids, while they’re still relying on that—we might be able to stop them in their tracks.
[00:10:23] Matthew Remski: This is perfect for my next question. I don’t know whether this is my Gen X age and my status as a parent and caregiver, and my own limited sample, but when I look at Charlie Kirk, when I listen to Andrew Tate, when we listen to these guys, we’re laughing. It’s incredible to us. Not laughing at their influence or what they say, but Nick Fuentes as well—these seem like deeply unsettled, very anxious, very stuffed-shirt type people we wouldn’t want to hang out with.
I’m wondering what the easy ways are—there have to be easier ways—to show a wide variety of young people that guys like this are really not worth listening to. That their claims and views come out of gross places that don’t align with most people’s values.
[00:11:59] Craig Johnson: Yeah, I would agree.
When we look at survey data about young people’s opinions about Andrew Tate, most of them think he’s kind of a loser. The thing is that he deeply appeals to a small but large subsection of young men—let’s say 20 or 30%. How do you get to those kids?
A lot of the ways that people like Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes are being attacked on the left—progressives, liberal people—are by trying to make them look stupid. Unfortunately, a lot of this is by attacking them at the source of their claims to influence or power.
So, circulating images of Andrew Tate looking like a schlub, when a lot of his appeal is that he’s this big burly bro—I take a lot of umbrage with that, because it reinforces the idea that a person should be influential based on physical appearance or physical prowess or how many sexy women they can sleep with.
[00:13:23] Matthew Remski: So you’re saying the implied hypocrisy—the image that says, “Hey, look, you’re not all that, you’re like the rest of us”—that doesn’t read.
[00:13:35] Matthew Remski: It humiliates, and that’s not helpful in your view.
[00:13:41] Craig Johnson: Yeah. And it also implies, like, well, the problem isn’t his fascism—the problem is his jawline or something, which is simply wrong. The problem is his fascism.
And it also feeds into the same rhetoric he has: telling young men, “The problem is your jawline. That’s why people aren’t listening to you.” The problem is that you don’t have a cleft chin, right? As opposed to coming at it like: this guy’s a loser. He’s a failed boxer who then committed a series of heinous crimes. He’s a terrible person. That’s the sort of attack I’d prefer to be seeing—and there is a lot of that, too.
[00:14:33] Matthew Remski: I interviewed Josie Reisman, who writes about professional wrestling and the politics of kayfabe and neo-kayfabe. Her thought about media in the Trump age was to stick to stories—like a dog on a bone—that humiliate a leader in relation to their following.
So if a leader can be humiliated by a particular story—say, coming out of a trial involving allegations of abuse—that can be beneficial in tainting their image for followers. She was suggesting something as a journalist I tend to shy away from: digging for dirt. Not to foreground dirt, but to place a wedge between the person with noxious influence and the people following them.
You want to show that 30% you’re talking about that Andrew Tate is a loser. You’re saying the prison-sweats photo isn’t going to do it. But I’m wondering whether the full accounting of how humiliating his behavior actually is—whether that’s the core.
[00:16:32] Craig Johnson: Yeah, I have the same trepidation, the same concern, about that strategy. I’m not a professional journalist, but I am an amateur propagandist.
[00:16:47] Matthew Remski: So are we all. Exactly.
[00:16:49] Craig Johnson: I mean, I think that’s what having a microphone and talking into it means.
My concern is: are we not just saying, “All you need is somebody who looks like Superman and is a Nazi,” and then what are we supposed to do? Like, sure—Trump does not embody the features and statuses and behaviors his white supremacist, male supremacist positions would espouse, but neither did Adolf Hitler, and that didn’t change anything.
Would we have preferred if 6-foot-tall family-man Reinhard Heydrich had been leading the Nazi Party? No. Absolutely not.
We have to be careful. We cannot fight them on their terms. That’s the delicate balance we’re talking about—combating them on coolness, on appeal.
You can’t say, “Well, you’re not cool according to your own measurements,” because that capitulates to the claim that their measurements are the ones people should be measured by—which we must deny.
[00:18:17] Matthew Remski: Changing gears, and on an upswing: are you aware of any subcultures that you think might have a kind of natural immunity to fascism? For me, I think about the neurodiversity community.
[00:18:39] Craig Johnson: That’s a good example. I don’t think anybody is 100% immune.
My knee-jerk answer would be: there are not a particularly large number of trans youth who are Nazis. There are not zero.
[00:18:59] Matthew Remski: There are a few.
[00:19:01] Craig Johnson: There are some, and it’s endlessly confusing.
But the LGBTQ movement in general is relatively defended from fascist ideology. Feminism in general as well—especially because Nazis hate feminists.
I wish I could say the organized left is immune, but it simply is not. There’s a long, scholarly, confusing tradition of people moving from the extreme left to the extreme right, going back to Mussolini himself.
In the United States, Lyndon LaRouche is a perfect example. Those forms of radicalization get people sometimes, and sometimes they get the same people in a confusing fashion.
[00:20:09] Matthew Remski: What’s the connection? Is it an aesthetic and energetic harmony—the way someone prosecutes a left position and then flips it to the right? Are we talking about temperament: someone into politics for reasons other than content, so they can argue for redistribution one year and the opposite the next, as long as they keep the same anger or authority?
[00:20:59] Craig Johnson: Yeah, that’s the billion-dollar question in fascist scholarship: what is its relationship to that kind of transition?
There are personalist explanations, but the fact that this has happened to thousands—maybe tens of thousands—across different times and places suggests there’s more going on.
One thing is that fascism has not always been what it is today. Fascism used to be very anti-capitalist, or at least capitalist-critical. So if you were already part of a movement critical of capitalism in the 1920s and 30s—socialism or communism—you might be radicalizable by the extreme right wing.
Often, if there’s a single-word explanation for how a person goes from being a communist to being a Nazi, the answer is anti-Semitism. If you come to believe the problem with capitalism is not capitalism, but who is supposedly in charge of capitalism, that becomes an easy on-ramp.
[00:22:32] Matthew Remski: Not being a historian of fascism—sorry, let me phrase that again—not being a historian of fascism, I wasn’t aware this was a difficult problem in the discipline, but it makes sense.
I’m wondering if it relates to online life for young people, where certain forms of left activism can bounce people toward reactionary views, and we might see influencers flip pathways—not because of commitments to content, but because they’ve learned audience capture. If they keep the pitch of emotionality at a certain level, they can bring followers regardless of what they’re talking about.
[00:23:45] Craig Johnson: I think there’s something there.
To the extent that part of the appeal of fascism is its transgressiveness—and if part of the appeal of the left is its transgressiveness—for some people there’s definitely a connection. Transgressive is transgressive. Opposed to the status quo is opposed to the status quo. If that appeals to you, there’s a connection.
When it comes to influencers: most aren’t dyed-in-the-wool believers, but some are. A counterexample to a right-winger like Nick Fuentes would be Abigail Thorne, Philosophy Tube—someone pushing progressive and left ideas for quite a long time.
But for most influencers, when they talk about politics, it’s because they think it will get clicks—in the same way they might think showing prank goop will get clicks. It’s bait like anything else.
[00:25:16] Matthew Remski: Two more questions.
This reflects on transgression and coolness, but it’s more difficult and necessary. As young potential anti-fascists figure out how to resist this tide—how to protest, how to speak out—there are slogans that are popular and energizing. They can be thrilling to say. Sometimes they galvanize an event, but sometimes they’re not easy to understand or assess strategically.
So I’m thinking about the transgressive or strategic value of slogans like “fuck the police.” As someone studying how fascists capture young people, is there value in muscular pushback through language that carries a strong message? Or what are the implications and liabilities of being a young person yelling at the police?
[00:26:50] Craig Johnson: That’s a very good question.
Young people have been, for hundreds of years, more connected to radical, transgressive, breaking-the-mold politics than most folks. They’re going to say slogans older folks find questionable or upsetting. That’s going to happen.
If those slogans galvanize young people—good. Period. The end. That’s my opinion.
We on the left need to understand that a movement is a movement. It is not a coherent unity. People in the movement will say things you disagree with. As long as you do not believe they are evil, you should chill out. Organizing young people is good. We need young people in the movement. I say this as someone approaching middle age.
That said, if you are a movement organizer—if you’ve moved from joining chants to making chants, planning things—you’re a propagandist. You have to think strategically. What is the purpose of this language? What is the purpose of this message? At what level am I pitching this? Am I talking to true believers already? Am I trying to galvanize them and bring energy so they can deal with what’s coming—police confronting them illegally, or fascists showing up wanting political violence? You might need to bring energy then.
But if instead you’re talking to people you’re trying to convince, you need to think about how you can convince them. Screaming things people disagree with at them is not a good way to convince them. Screaming things people are scared of is not a good way to convince people.
It’s a complicated question. If you’re grappling with it—good news. It’s been debated for about 250 years by political propagandists. There’s a lot written about it.
[00:29:19] Matthew Remski: I want to lean into that. Questions about protests often get filtered into moralizing: how do we want to behave, how do we want to be seen, will I be seen as a good person or disruptive person, noble or destructive? But not in a strategic sense.
So when we focus on strategy, and the fact that for centuries people have debated each situation and which slogan meets the moment, I take comfort in not having to decide alone. I’m always talking with comrades, with allies. I’m not alone with that question.
[00:30:45] Craig Johnson: Absolutely. That is probably the most important refrain in political work: you’re not alone. You can’t be alone. You cannot do this by yourself. If you’re at a protest, you’re there with other folks.
[00:31:03] Craig Johnson: If you are bringing an entirely different energy than the rest of the folks at that protest, you might ask: is this the right place for that kind of energy? Are these people who want to hear this? Is it going to drive them away? Is that what I want?
Those are strategic thoughts.
We see arguments about violence, accusations that antifa is violent because it breaks windows or destroys an ATM.
[00:31:42] Matthew Remski: Sets a fire, or pushes back against riot police.
[00:31:47] Craig Johnson: Right. Or they punch somebody who punched them, or defend people who are getting punched, trying to go to school, or trying to get out of indefinite illegal ICE detention.
That’s a huge, complicated conversation. But the point is: all tactics are tactics. All rhetoric is rhetoric. You have to consider its purpose. What is it useful to say now? What can move people? What can get me and the people I love what we need? If you’re not thinking in those terms, you might not be thinking strategically—you might be thinking about performance.
[00:32:36] Matthew Remski: Or what you particularly need in any given moment. That will be a factor—it motivates people, it joins you to others—but it can’t be the only thing.
Speaking of strategy and togetherness and coalitions: you argue in your book that multiethnic, multicultural movements and spaces are key to inoculating against fascism and stopping its spread. Why does that work? And how do you think Zohran Mamdani did it?
[00:33:17] Craig Johnson: Stopping fascism requires millions and millions of people. Fascism in the United States is white supremacist and male supremacist.
So if you have a movement comprised of a great diversity of people—men, women, non-binary folks, trans people, cis people, religious and irreligious people—that movement is going to have a hard time being infiltrated and turned fascist. A fascist movement like that simply is not going to work.
If you want to ask what kind of community is hard to organize as a fascist, it’s one in which fascist lies about women, minorities, people of color, non-Christians would be patently false. If you know a lot of Jewish people, it becomes harder to see them through an anti-Semitic lens. It’s not impossible, but it’s harder.
Diverse, organized communities are hard to organize fascistically. Fascistically organized communities are easier to organize as a fascist.
That’s why, for decades, ripe areas for fascist organizing in the United States were rural areas that were predominantly white—and also places like Orange County suburbs. Orange County is diverse on paper, but it’s full of non-diverse enclaves: neighborhoods, cul-de-sacs, schools, churches, clubs, teams. When those things are not integrated, even in a community that is diverse by census data, that’s a breeding ground for fascism.
Diversity has to be real. It has to be experienced and human to function as an antifascist inoculant.
People sometimes think community stops fascism, but it’s not just community. Historically, communities with more clubs and events can be easier to organize—because it’s easier to organize anything. What stops fascism is when it’s harder to tell lies about people if you know people like that. It’s harder if you know, care about, and love someone who is trans or non-binary or Muslim or feminist or Black, or any of the groups fascists target. It becomes harder to convince somebody—even a kid—of lies about those people.
[00:36:43] Matthew Remski: Craig Johnson, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate your book, and I hope you keep writing on it—and keep doing your podcast as well. Fifteen Minutes of Fascism, right?
[00:36:57] Craig Johnson: Fifteen Minutes of Fascism—spelled out all one word—wherever you get your podcasts, wherever good podcasts are sold.
[00:37:07] Matthew Remski: Thanks, Craig.
[00:37:07] Craig Johnson: Thanks so much for having me on. It was lovely talking.
[00:37:15] Matthew Remski: Okay, everybody, make sure you check out Craig Johnson’s book in the show notes. I’ll put a link to his podcast in there as well.
I have a little coda here that follows up on my opening remarks from part one about preparing to discuss the murder of Renee Nicole Goode with our kids. And I want to broaden that out to geopolitics.
Days before Goode was murdered, the Trump regime murdered between 40 and 80 people in the process of kidnapping Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. This was another news story that came up in conversation.
The 13-year-old is a solid, critical thinker, and I’m really proud of him. Being young, however, also means he’s not used to blatant contradictions that we learn to either navigate or suppress within ourselves. There’s still an earnest shock of: how can this be happening now?
Specifically, he’s fascinated by the spectacle of Erika Kirk. So his other question that morning was: how is she going to justify the violence of her dear leader after her husband was murdered? Like, the guy she’s propping up is just invading other countries now.
So that was his question—going on pure intuition.
My guess is that with questions like these, it’s both honest and stress relieving, in that long-view sort of way, to convey two things at the same time: fascist violence is pretty much always like this; and if no one in charge is sane or kind or courageous enough to stand up, then we have to do that for each other, and we have to do that for as many others as possible.
Now, to say fascist violence is pretty much always like this doesn’t diminish anything. It doesn’t diminish the murder and mayhem. What it does, I think, is spotlight an event like the attack on Caracas as a crest in a long rolling wave of imperial violence against the Global South—a flashpoint, a symptom of ongoing theft through power.
The fact that it’s spectacular shouldn’t obscure the thousand quieter but completely normalized forms of this stuff that undergirds the entire system.
Back during Trump 1.0, there was this liberal resistance saying: don’t normalize him. And I think that makes sense. It can be good for vigilance, especially if people have been politically disengaged. And of course it’s not normal to kidnap foreign presidents.
But I also think there’s a hidden vulnerability to that mantra, especially with tweens and teens. Because when you say “don’t normalize him,” it can make it sound like Trump is some kind of mistake—an aberration—someone to burn yourself out with outrage on.
But I think the truth gives more safety: the normal behaviors of the powerful under capitalism are predictable. They’re not hard to understand. You should know what to expect.
So maybe don’t normalize Trump—but absolutely normalize the understanding of how empire works.
Back to the 13-year-old: the question was, as the smoke is rising over Caracas, how are they going to justify this? What are they going to say?
And so I said something like—I’m paraphrasing, but I think this is accurate—I said: well, he’ll do a press conference and talk about how great the U.S.’s military prowess is, and he’ll make up lies about Venezuela and history and claim ownership over Venezuela’s resources. But he won’t really justify anything or mention that he just killed people in Caracas. If he faces questions, he’ll deflect, because he doesn’t have to justify it, really, does he? That’s pretty much what fascism is about.
Fascism is about not needing a reason to exercise power. That’s how it works.
What I want to do is spare him too much time in the liberal habit of expecting a reason—in the belief that fascists can be negotiated with or deterred or shamed by reason.
The reason you want a reason is so you can argue and show it’s false. But this is a waste of time when the fascist is pointing a taser at you—and then a missile at someone on the other side of the world.
What I am clear on is that less time spent in shock and outrage that there are no adults among the powerful means more time and space, perhaps, to become sober adults who are free to be better.
And that starts with seeing things clearly.
I don’t think there’s any avoiding the shock and outrage. I think there’s real value, however, in thinking carefully about how to reflect and guide it.
Take care of each other, everyone.
