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