so i think we're going to start with just quickly reading like theory micro sections of the book i don't want to destroy your book that's really boring so let's start with that and then we're going to have a bit of a conversation and then thorough thirty all and then hopefully fascism is and you know the right likes to say that fascism is basically shutting down free speech which technically is absolutely false because fascism is deliberate ultra nationalist ideology right it sort of goes through a blot and so while understanding of like who belongs in what place directly emerging out of like ethnic structures usually using some form of biological or cultural racist formulation in a patriarchal reassertion of natural elites instead of a sort of  colonialism and imperialism a lot of fascists present like anti imperialists but this is a total falsity because fascism really gets its moment right and so the appropriate basically everything that the left does that might be attractive and use it for that ultra nationalists revolutionary in quotations movement to overthrow liberal center and replace it with a hard authoritarian ultra nationalism and so one one particular example of this is with the turn of fascists appropriating anti fascist stuff is a really interesting sort of movement that happened and it came out of germany as  wall was coming down and the soviet union was falling apart fascist started to crimp the styles groups so i'll just read like a really micro section about that from my book against the fascist creep that's the mobilizations and police support brought together thousands in black blocks it was this vibrant movement as well as ecology struggles like the ukase anti rhodes movement and animal liberation that proponents of the new trend toward leftwing fascism attempted to enter or co opt at one point german neo nazis approached to offer a deal to form a joint alliance against the police but they were rejected out of hand failing entry into some kind of coalition the nazis attempted a new approach in braced by the march twelfth group which developed into a new brown international based on national bolshevik geopolitics they call it brown international based on the essays brownshirts right from the european secretary it and would have organized themselves under a non dogmatic of all ism including a rejection of the system and the globalization of mcdonalds with  others could coordinate strategies across nations for its for instance in an effort to infiltrate environmental parties in spain france germany poland and italy southgate and others on the neo fascist left brought in the scope of strasser is national bolshevism to include national anarchism national resistance and left nationalism and general exchange of ideas facilitated it in no small part by the e l f was taking place between europe and the newly emerging russian federation and russian fascist and widely known of to participate in the editorial board and write call ins in one thousand nine hundred two traveling to russia on behalf of a revived l f to meet with political leaders john francois t v i had an important effect on the ideological direction of post soviet politics robert story corps and then while also played a direct and ongoing role in reorganizing the political spectrum of russian politics by providing russian neo fascist with access to networks within europe and by traveling to moscow to assist in strategy and planning so it's a little bit heavy there's a lot of names it is page one hundred seventy so it's further than halfway through so you read that text and actually get that history and start to realize how the modern russian federation was shaped in no small part by fascist intrigue thank you passed on the phone to me oh yeah  election the majority of americans knew that trump would not win n p r the n p r the new york times and five thirty eight were uniform about the narrow path to victory that trump had to the white house the n p r politics podcast discussed this as a near impossibility unless he miraculously won states like ohio florida new hampshire much for genya five thirty eight set of chances at twenty eight point seven percent in the upshot so that only fourteen as the day wore on social media post began to increase in speed and anger against the odds trump it only amplified once it was validated by trump selection and then ten days after the election the southern poverty law center which tracks hate groups listed almost nine hundred pointed hate crimes a number so astronomical i had no precedent muslim women reported having a jobs pulled from their heads while latin american students were told stories of being surrounded lunchrooms as white students hurled racial slurs white nationalists have a revolutionary vision one of the poses the state and dominant white culture as much of the does  must look back to pass the contradictory phrasings and confusing tactics to do that the incidence of reactionary violence the mobilization the figures like trump and his racial scapegoating has inspired and working class people and the mainstream of the explicit nationalism has made real th that was only in the background for many political battles over the last sixty years fascism has never been silenced exclusively by its own ineptitude but instead by the concerted efforts of organizers that risked everything to stop it fascism attacks at all of our movements from the labor fascism is an attempt to answer the unfinished equation of capitalism and instead of challenging the inequalities manifested through this economic system hardens them with donald trump selection this worst case scenario fascism taking hold now it's impossible which added material impetus to movements of the left to link up and take charge it changed everything sort of being thrust to the foreground a little bit there's been there was a news story out about them and in which they in refuting the news story actually admitted that they had infiltrated the roy campaign in alabama but the other interesting too hard you know the other interesting thing about that is that their ideas ology while they approach from like an appalachian down home sort of  around geo political thinker from russia named alexander doogan so they kind of exhibit this weird transnational fascist presence that utilizes localism in kind working class type movement and i was wondering if you could talk about them a little bit more because your book does such a great job you know exploring the alumina thing and like dragging these guys out into the sunlight and  like what they're what exactly they're trying to do all right so so so can you talk a little bit about them in the context of what's going on in the alright right now yeah so you know the traditionalist workers party was a white station the started a few years back as the traditionalist network it was just on campuses mainly midwest and east coast campuses and they were do things like starting white student unions and doing the thing that's so tired now it's like why can there be a black student union on a white student union they use that to kind of enter into basically university administrations that didn't know how to handle it and didn't know how to like create reputations and basically defending them defending their presence against an organized  resistance they got older and developed this kind of program which was to basically exploit financial crisis to exploit crisis and exclusively white working class community so like opiate addiction that's a really major point for them it's a way for them it's these international elites a lot of times they drop the airports and just go with you openly but basically what they have is a kind of traditional national socialist they want socialism for white people so a state that basically monitors things to preserve quote unquote white interests whatever they think those are but it's basically the states to be there to promote white summer tea and white exclusivity but what they've done was decided that unlike a lot of other all right groups which really wanted to go for like upper middle class college students they would go first to but they would also really try to embed themselves in places hit financially really really hard so they would do things like data research and find the lowest socioeconomic status areas went for trump the most and then they would do rallies there they would do you food drop offs and drives very similar for example kind of a mirror image of redneck revolt in a way they would you like look at what redneck of all those food drop off needle exchange they would do some version of that  and then they would try and connect with working class communities where unemployment was hitting forty or fifty percent especially really heavily in west virginia in ohio and in indiana coal jobs are drying up there's a lot of problems going on and they would have basically take anti capital measures and given a really heavy racial twist and so hard to get numbers on these groups but they're numbering clearly closer to about a thousand people and they're doing actual on the ground organizing work unlike a lot of the other ones which are really stuck on line and i think in a lot of ways where they're going next all this group is the crystals workers party but then the rest of the all right i think is the big question there was a point which in the middle of last year they had to do something they had maxed out their ability to you know dominate me mz and hashtags and things like that so they had to move out into the real world otherwise there was nothing nothing left at the same time they started to cut off their more moderate kind counterparts you know breitbart wasn't on their side anymore people weren't mainstream in their message and so they decided just throw all in on some big public event was going to be just them it was just going to be every went to the rights of the white nationalists and to the right of them the young nazis klansman all right figures and they were going to go to charlottesville and they would have one big event prove that they're able to stand on their own two feet except that event turned out a disaster a mass movement from the against them they got shut down both because of their own violence and because people just refuse them they've lost most of their platforms and they were stuck about this the other day every social media platform from facebook to tender has blocked them they don't exist really in the way they did before and so now there's a certain amount of desperation on how they're going to organize and so what they're focusing really heavily on is these large public events workers party but focus on things like areas in appalachian where they can do these big public rallies and then we do something really broad you know we're against global banks will who like school banks know and at this point in history being against global banks about the easiest  do and it speaks of that common language and the other side of the all right the richard spencer well qualified fair khakis and white polos are focus almost entirely on colleges specifically on state schools because they they have  a precedent legally to have the state school protect them since the government institution that seems to be the direction they're going now and it's been really tough to see which one is going to be more fruitful for them they're certainly able to recruit and call it republican circles  going out and they're not just doing things like talking to people but they're actually providing services they're showing up and saying like hey we can give you rights to the hospital we can do things like you do food share as we do the for example very well coordinated child care systems almost like i mean like shifting to like the pacific northwest where they don't seem to have as big of a presence we have an issue here with the proud boys right and and joey gi prayer well like tiny to easy who's like charlie gibson's right hand man is a probably right and there's a group that started out way more of like pro trumpet militia style and then just really sort of like roll down like that snowball type like whoa now they're just like proud boys like how did they get from like the militia to like fred perry shirt like traditional  spencer sunshine calls it right where like the trump supporters kind of dealing from his authority while maintaining him as kind of this symbol and then went their own strategic way and a lot of it is this resentment against liberals which is grounded in the fact that instead of using their power to enfranchise and better the conditions of rural areas democrats have tended to punish rural areas for voting republican and so there's animists right against liberal centers college towns cities and you see these guys coming in usually from rural areas to portland and just being like hey i'm here market to stand flag leg let's rock you know as basically provocation incitement intending to anger people so they'll react right like their whole theme it's a very psycho reactive it's a phenomenal logical process sorry for using that word but it's like they their whole movement is organized around operationalizing people's trauma in order to strike them psychologically such that they'll have to respond they'll be in a place to respond physically you know because that's how trauma works right it's like fight or flight you know you just like in a bad place that you need to get out of and that's what their presence does in the city it shifts the city to their power right because they're directly violating people's safety and there's a heavy focus on seattle right now which i think is worth talking about this isn't heard of the northwest  form sounds like the most innocuous boring thing i would ever want to go to well you still don't want to so one of the largest white nationalist publishers has this outfit called counter currents so the kind of model themselves on like left wing publishers like versa they're go put out these books they were going to be kind of academic sounding they might resurrect old philosophers the idea was they wanted white nationalism to look smart again and so they started working with the less smart group of people and doing large white sort of like an academic like speech type started with the new york forum and they what they were doing was private invite only of that's and different to the halls they looked really innocuous and no one kind of was the wiser and they started doing them every month and then they expanded out to atlanta to chicago to detroit there's a cascadia forum in portland and a big big big center of it is the northwest pharmacy apple the founder of character it's great johnson moved here decided to start setting it up here and is trying to do these i quarterly now but it's becoming a really kind of go to of that and they've been able to really mobilize lots and lots and lots of people from around the country to make this a center for trying to develop that what they want to do is take like the cultures on the coasts they see they like the academic culture they like you know things like craft beer and what they call basically inherently white culture you know like an exclusionary liberal white culture and they want to kind of create their bases here and i think that's one one way that they've really actually kind of started to expand on this direction and it's really important i think to it's kind of it's a little boring because it returns to like nine hundred of the discussions that have been going on since you know  became like sort of winning movements after world war two very roughly speaking it's sort of like yes european civilization has co opted to literally every advancement that humans have ever made and turned it into a white supremacist narrative right you can go back to shake book civilization or barbarism where he breaks down all of the ways that historians have classicists have co opted a mathematical revelations that came out of egypt and africa for greece right so greece become the center of modern civilization by shifting all of the innovations of humanity from africa and the arab world and this scene also with colonize ation of africa itself right when the portuguese went to western africa they wrote a poem in this is fifteenth century they wrote home about how how clean everyone was how the streets  actually like highly civilized no worse than europe and then fast forward to the super colonial period in the nineteenth century and you have the exact opposite narrative and they're forcing people into pong african palm plantations murdering millions and millions and millions of people in order to get their rubber and their african palm and what do they use the african palm for  soapmaking right so it's like ethnic cleansing and genocide of the people of the world by european civilization has been going on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years  fascism is i call it in my book a force majeure like it's the momentum of that colonize asian process in the most extreme form returning to europe and ethnically cleansing europe drawing from the crusader tradition drawing from the colonial tradition and furthering it whereas other tendencies in the european context sought a more international internationally linked movement for global liberation which is not to say right just as a caviar that the social democrats were particularly wonderful in their own right you know like in the one nine hundred century and early twentieth century they were actually arguing for colonialism and imperialism and wanting to enter world war one right so the problematic nature right of of european history is one that we really we need to contend with if we're actually going to fight fascism on our terms right not on terms of someone who will turn around and betray us which is what we've seen time and time again with radical movements but that's not to say that anarchists can afford to be completely exclusionary an anti fascist organizing and i think one thing that your book draws out is how the fascists have organized right to shut down fascism using more using broader platforms and access to different communities different social groups different economic scales and so i was wondering if you would talk a little bit about a little more about the legacy of anti fascist organizing and how to stop how it has successfully st fascism in the past right ray i think was what's been unique over the last few years is that it's really opened up with that term meant so like anyone that looks back to like the seventy's and eighty's was the image of anti fascism white streets fighting people period and there's a whole kind of legacy of where that kind of tradition came from and a lot of it comes from the logic of the late seventies and early eighty's of white people policing their own communities and taking responsibility for what's happening in my communities what we've seen over the last several years is the ability of a mass movement the form that has lots of different kernels that takes things went different starting points and different areas we've seen areas coming out of organized labor seen the growth of environmental movement in the same thing and people being willing to take on different strategies and different organizations based on different affinities different personalities different backgrounds different life experiences or limitations and things like that so on the one hand we have lots of militant the fascist organizations which are fantastic and have directly confront people in the streets we also have ones that do organize really mass actions they're able to kind of overwhelm fascists in physical space both of those  conducive we can gather and not just kind of those in opposition to one another and so over the last two years two and a half years along with the reza trumpets and we've seen a huge influx of people there turning these events from kind of maybe smaller confrontations to really large societal confrontations we're talking about a few few examples of this so we're in portland people probably remember this really tragic stabbing on a train in the springtime so basically there is a guy who had been participating what was called for a while those free tacking a couple people got involved in two people were murdered one person sent to see if the people that he had been organizing this for free speech events with decided that right afterwards they were going to go ahead and have another one so there was about two hundred or so of them a lot of people came from out of town it was a big event for them but they were met by four thousand people so on one side we had a labor coalition with a lot of like trade unions a lot of marxist organizations on one side it was a lot of kind of like left progressive organizations overwhelmed them at that scale we're talking about like dozens of organizations and movements working in tandem to completely shut this thing down and to totally overwhelm its capacity to recruit right after charlottesville some problems and some other all right people wanted to organize a similar event in boston they were able to get about one hundred fifty people together and forty thousand people came out and just shut they've been down with forty thousand people come on the streets there is nothing they can too can't stop them the mayor's office can't stop them a state of about different ideas because it would be really remiss for you why does appear to decide exactly what the right yeah and so i think one of the things was that well with understanding the logic of a lot of like white organizations the eighty's it created problematic dynamics of all white organizations period which i think are limited obviously by experience but they end up being really limited in scope and so i think one of the things about confronting that dynamic and being open about it and trying to like obliterate that kind of a much of a was a really important thing that's something we're starting to see but it should be done a lot more intentionally and one of the other ideas that we would spend time talking about is that there's a really heavy focus on really just looking at europe and north america and what the struggles means they're essentially like you said when colonialism was with turned on europe but not seeing in the context of ongoing colonialism ongoing appearance them and then also the replication apartheid movement right i mean like apartheid south africa you know is is often forgotten in terms of how just how right wing that you know government actually was but there was effectively a fascist organization called the brutish after something like that which kind of ran a lot of the corporate corporate and political life in south south fighting against the portuguese forces this is also a kind of a forgotten part of history but this cia was running a network of fascist provocat portugal which were effectively you know a pair of fascist fascist countries and would also be used in the colonies like portugal had colonies you know in the sixty's and seventy's and and they would  basically you know serve the colonial purposes so i mean brawl i actually wrote a letter to portuguese anti fascists saying we are in the same struggle it's not identical but w against the same people and if we don't collaborate we'll probably both lose like you in portugal must resist colonialism just like we must resist fascism and these kinds of struggles are happening in latin america to move to latin america and set up shop helping these dictators torture and kidnap and murder left wing left wing or not you can always just militants like journalists and professors and that the cia in fact helped orchestrate not only set up but orchestrate and the deepest irony of it all the historical twist to it all is that the same people who were brought into that movement that underground fascist movement are now cooperating with russia in attempting to overthrow the liberal democracies of europe and the united states again so it's like the same exact people talk about like momentum you know like and i think it's also so specially important right now with nationalist movements in south asia they're going after muslim minorities and like basically what  a history of collaboration with the far right in europe the fact that we're not seeing that means we haven't put it in that context because continuing basically clinical mindset of not refusing to see these as international problems and continuing to see them as once that's a find only so yeah one of the funny and this is just kind of like i mean we should probably turn it over for audience questions some point but just like one of the one of the ironic coincidences of history maybe not coincidence is one of the more sort of meaningful historical facts is that the first person who has ever actually called a national socialist was a french guy marquis to more who moved to the united states in the late nineteenth century to the badlands because he wanted to live out that ideal that western or that western europeans had of the cowboy so he set up a meat packing plant in the dakotas and it worked with teddy roosevelt who was a rancher at that time too ended up butting heads but marquis de moore's ended up moving back to france and participating in the new tories anti semitic dreyfus affair with a gang of butchers literally who would wear cowboy hats and boots real spectacle in paris table hitler called it one of his bible his bible that's what he called it so you know he got like the merge and the fascism from the colonial expansion the internal colonization ideas and he was a conservationist so that's the thing that's what i try to really kind of draw out in my book is that apparently innocent themes like environmentalism you know  like like oh you know it's me means maybe they mean it maybe they don't maybe it's more of an anti p c revolt or some other kind of silly jargon but in reality these are white nationalist ideas they've been around for decades and what they're doing is kind of reinterpreting them selves for a new social media landscape one that deemphasize politicians is important and one that kind of has brought the internet celebrity to dominate and what they'd be able to do under that cover is recruit in such massive numbers of people who are trying to incapable of understanding exactly how large  they were until they began kind of bringing that on my culture out to physical space which is why i think now we're actually starting to see the effects of the large mass movement organizations that are coming out to stop them and that's i think is the most positive thing as we're kind of coming into twenty eighteen is that their growth this big story to shrink and be halted back not because of their own ineptitude but because people stop them and there's literally the only thing that will and  is tough tough crowd head yeah so i was really i watched that rally that he did in mobile with jeff sessions came up onstage and somebody in the audience shouted white power and now it's just like i have to say something about this and y'all aren't going to like that  because it was the thing that particularly surprised me was that he went directly for the fourteenth amendment which is the reconstruction amendment after civil war that give civil rights well that stresses civil rights for all people and the priority of the federal government to mandate and enforce civil rights over and against whatever the states want to do right so going after the fourteenth amendment is often seen or interpreted or presented by the far right as oh we're actually just going against like birthright citizenship right which yeah totally non racist read it but it opens the door for what i think make america great again it's way more insidious than that i think the elder bundy kind of let it slip that time when he was saying that black people were better off as slaves right i think that people i had to make it had mixed reviews i think so i back pedaled a little bit in order to please the scholars saying that basically we can't fully know trump's you know hit in sort of like what he dreams of that night although somebody with hitler's speeches and his arm was like a weird right you know you we're right to be a little bit suspicious there but he still has the sort of machinery of the liberal state to pin him in right so he can be like especially not all of a sudden this kind of authoritarian will do chair right you can't be the sort of the leader over all right he's checked their balances to his power and things like that so i kind of this is part of the reason why i wrote this book is to say that the far right which encompasses the the radical right and fascism and the ultra right is way more than we can you know strictly discerned by breaking it up into little boxes of your radical right you are fashioned in fact we look at radical right parties in europe a lot of them came out of the fascist movement the f b o in austria was literally a container for disenfranchise nazis that was formed after world war two and then morphed into a political party right the film that's the amount right was and it came directly out of a fascist group that was saying how do we get out of the fascist ghetto right that's the french radical right party so when we look at the radical right often what we're actually seeing is a fascist movement that's walking around with sheep's clothes on right like we believe in parliamentarian is we're cool but like muesli needed that too in the in their early twenty's hitler was doing that in the early thirty's it's just you know all it takes is the rice diet burning down and then you have the enabling act and hitler taking complete power  so it is a little bit you know anxiety inducing that that trump keeps saying you know would really bring this country together a horrible catastrophic event you know it's like i don't want to see that happen right so it's a complex question thank you for asking it and i don't think that there's anything but a complex answer that takes me two hundred some one pages to flesh  crazy wild fascist ideas that are being the same minority and they kind of consul out basically enact kind of these axis was like seemingly spontaneous violence but they don't really threaten state power you know i wouldn't have said like the klan of the east or something was ever going to take the reins of the federal government but like trump essentially is also what we call it a populist rage he kind of gets this kind of working class angry tries to direct it into a right word faction does that allow people with fascist ideas actually drive their ideas into the public consciousness and i think that's absolutely unquestionably what's happening they do they focus on a few axes and they integrate anger islamophobia and they're able to change the channel that basically take what we're white sixteen a number of people were trying to shut down the hammer skin nation from having a music that this isn't brooklyn every year they have one of the hammer fests place in brooklyn and one of the issues that they had with some of the skinhead bands i had actually we were like multiracial members but when you look at the stuff it was multiracial like we support japanese nationals and for the japanese and white nationalism for white people and a lot of very very very heavy focus on  very it was like a string on each one of the bands ots what being a good example and so when we started to do the groundwork contacting people saying like hey this is a problem let me show you which said there are people that say things president said the same thing like a week ago he didn't shock people the more people were moved by it actually became very very difficult and i think that's kind of the danger of trump ism in a lot of ways because he ideologically who knows i think he really cares that much you know he sees  a story clee it doesn't take much it doesn't take long that kind of anger especially that white rage that like white resentment that they want to tap into that can feel very very quickly and could create like a really big caul tough because on the one hand they've been good it means to make some of that messaging and they've done it at the cost of building a movement for themself that's able to meet goals instead what they want to do is get ideas on the public consciousness which may or may work for may or may not work for them and they focused almost entirely on immigration and islamophobia at first because those are things that could have some crossover into the g o p to get public policy and a lot of with the left has done this on other things reactionary white anger and a lot of places like racism still exists in liberal america right like and they knew it and i kept kind of coming up and i was reading about this this theme there is this movie called the believer about you know nazi and he was talking about the like what would you do you start revolutions like i would kill jews because everyone would hear that and i think that's exactly what i was thinking and in a lot of ways with this kind of pep a medium and this  anti immigrant anger what they did was give people permission to drop the work they did on themselves and kind of just give in to what was implicit in the culture which is that they immigrate hatred so when people they did those sorts of things up the ball pit there's a large portion of  basically young white men they're like that's exactly right i was thinking i mean no and so they were able to mobilize in a lot of ways what was already there i think that honestly working on our ability to communicate with people in general we will do by because we organize and they really don't i think i don't want to overvalue they're like me and them as actually influencing the culture in the way that organized coordinated action does  that's what builds movies beyond just this one thing because you know we this struggle wouldn't just stop at fighting the all right you know if the all right was gone today if they completely dissolved there was still the police murders every single day there would still be a boss in every workplace there was struggles happening all the time and so what we have the advantage of doing is we can go after a lot of talking points and issues but we can organize of the same time and that's even like i think i would say infinitely more powerful in the end al just just real quick like all right is not necessarily great at getting their message out on their own like we get our message out and then they capitalize and they're like yeah like you know single payer health care that's a really great idea for white people you know or like you know like just like they capitalize on our movements and they turn everything like genuine and honest and to like corruption and deceit and their whole fascist movement and history bears this out is like have like lefties broken down with richard spencer on national t v right like we can't have like debates with fascists be like oh we're going to treat this like a normal ideology right like and we need to oppose journalists and media sources that are you know uncritically helping them get their ideas out there and i don't necessarily think that that's happening as much anymore it was really in it was really during the election season that happens it happens definitely  but it was during the election season when just like this day loser of stuff from like the new york times like all over just like it is really breaking down social order here's richard spencer you know it's like  not a fucking correspondent he's another you like yeah but but they're at they're like they're kind of savvy up that turning things around for their own usage right and that's the issue we can't just let things we can't pretend that things are neutral and that they belong to us by nature right except for you know the argument the main principle of equality border so that enemy troops could hear them and stuff like that like these tactics and gone on for years and years and years and so i think it is important to confront essentially their opportunity is to make  their public case because it's not just them talking it's them or i think i think it's i think we're over our time already thank you so much for bearing with