My parents met in a bowling alley. A lot of my generational peers’ parents met in bowling alleys. Those days are long gone. As sociologist Robert Putnam detailed in his 2000 classic, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, nobody joins clubs anymore and our happiness has suffered for it. We are a nation of miserable loners. No wonder people identify with Trump.
A land of 340 million people staring at their phones does not make for a vibrant democracy. COVID was the nail in the coffin of civic engagement. We were locked down with Netflix and we liked it. Why build community when you can binge Love Island? Why prioritize democracy when you can doom scroll. And now you can share your alienation with your AI girlfriend.
All this loneliness is catnip to fascism. Where we got endorphins from meeting people at parties and pubs, we now get it from likes and algorithms. Fascism will walk in while we’re on TikTok, and be just another 60 second reel.
Let’s hope for a countertrend. And the countertrend is actually pretty cool.
As a college student, I probably over-romanticized the mythology of revolutions and protests being born in cafés and coffeehouses, but there is some truth to those stories. Rejecting British tea, the political discussions in the American colonies moved to coffeehouses. The Green Dragon tavern and coffeehouse, built in 1701 in Boston, became known as the “headquarters of the revolution” after Paul Revere bought it 1764 to give the Sons of Liberty a meeting place.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his 1989 book, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, refers to places like the The Green Dragon as “third spaces.” First place is home and second place is work. Third spaces are the community gathering spots where we have regular interactions with our neighbors. They include bars and barbershops, cafés and churches, local stores and hair salons. Anyplace people hang out. In the new 2025 edition, Oldenburg’s coauthor Karen Christensen argues that third places are the answer to political polarization and climate resilience. It’s like that Sesame Street song, who are the people in your neighborhood?
Third places are vital to democracy to several reasons. Putnam argues these places create social capital among community members, building trust which is key to democratic action. Taverns and barbershops encourage free expression and the exchange of ideas. Many a night in my youth I argued theory at cafés until the chairs were on the tables. Third places become places for building social movements. Yeah, Hitler did it in beer halls, but we can hijack Starbucks to fight fascism. Third places are a cure for isolation as we reconnect with fellow travelers. Finally, democracy requires a sense of shared ownership and salons and local shops can help people to care about public life and bond over shared struggles.
In the 1990s, I had a third place I virtually lived in in Atlanta called Café Diem. To say I held court there would be an understatement. But the realization that inhabiting that space and getting to know owners, employees, and regulars was more rewarding than sitting on a couch in front of a TV made it an easy lifestyle choice. Much bohemian joy came from what we lovingly referred to as “Diemland.” Social media has zapped that impulse in the 21st century. We’re zombies.
But the counter-trend is bubbling off screen. Two years ago a group of dads at my daughter’s elementary school started a poker club and it’s become medicine for my soul. Every other Thursday, cards, whiskey, and good conversation. People are re-discovering their local coffeehouses, not as alternative offices, but place just to talk and share the emotions of this insane moment. Churches, mosques, and temples aren’t just for religion anymore. I actually went to a great local church, called Riversgate, to hear people talk about political civility! It was awesome!
So let’s get out of our first place and find a third place. You don’t have to dive in like a crazy person. “Hi everyone! What the fuck are we gonna do about this fucking fascism?” Ease in like you’re a new kid at school. Third places are relaxed. Belly up to the bar and check the vibe. You might talk about a ball game or the history of the establishment long before you bridge political chat. Maybe you’ll just hang out reading a book until somebody asks you what you’re reading. But that’s your place and those are your people. It’s time to get to know them. Democracy might depend on it.
The American Revolution started in a coffee house. And it will again.
These first two weeks have been dizzying. Trump and his billionaire bros have attacked multiple aspects of our democracy. They have ripped the guardrails off while Democrats have stood there, dazed and confused. The flurry of bias-motivated executive actions, appointments of merit-less droogs hell-bent on dismantling the imagined “deep state,” inflation driving tariffs, saber-rattling at our allies, and the pardoning of violent criminals who, in 2021, tried stop democracy in its tracks. It’s all too much.
The chaos of Trump, ripped from the pages of Project 2025, is the intent. In a normal world, each action would occupy a few weeks in the news cycle, but there’s a dozen actions a day. The chaos is the point. The opposition is playing Wack-a-Mole to each insane impulse from the orange madmen who is declaring war on our allies with one hand and canceling Black History Month celebrations with other. He’s throwing countless federal employees into economic crisis (as well as those, like me, who are employed by federal grants), while blaming the airline crashes on Obama and dwarves. It’s like being punched in the face over and over again with no chance to land a counterpunch.
Trump didn’t invent this strategy. Bush used it to destroy Iraq in 2003. Twenty-two years ago, they called it “Shock and Awe.” Use the military might of the United States to overwhelm Iraq and out of the chaos, create a machine that would profit post-war contractors. Just Google: Halliburton, Iraq, and Profit. This “shock doctrine” (as Naomi Klein called in her 2007 book) has a history of effectiveness. The disaster capitalism employed in nations like Chile was utilized to generate billions in profits for war contractors in Iraq. This week, as witnessed by the plunging of markets after Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, Trump has brought disaster capitalism to the homeland and he and his billionaire bros stand to take home all the money.
The shock doctrine relies on chaos to shake up markets and political organization. Not only is the opposition stuck on the back foot trying to respond to each affront, economic destabilization paralyzes the working class who is more worried about inflation and holding on to their jobs than developing a strategy to fight back. Meanwhile, oligarchs are positioned to swoop in and calmly reassemble the pieces in a way that permanently protects their power and profit. This happened in Russia in the 1990s and it’s happening here now. It’s like that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when there’s a run on the banks and George Bailey tries to calm the panic, saying, “Don’t you see what’s happening? Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicky and he’s not.”
Trump, unregistered foreign agent Elon Musk, and their army of gangster capitalists are crashing the economy on purpose. Shipping migrant labor across the border, ludicrous tariffs, rampant deregulation, and appointing insanely unqualified loyalists are all meant to tank financial stability. Trump no longer needs his MAGA troops who were told he would lower the price of groceries on “Day 1.” They served their purpose of installing him back in the White House. They will suffer at the checkout line along with the rest of us. But at least they got to “own the libs.” Musk, now with the keys to the U.S. Treasury, can let the air out of America’s tires and jack up his global banking portfolio and Trump’s voters will have no idea what happened.
Like Mr. Potter, Trump’s billionaire bros will come in to “manage” the economic crisis. The German National Socialist Party did this when the Great Depression hit Germany. They consolidated power with the promise of affordable eggs. And now, when we look for the storied institutions of democracy to prevent an authoritarian takeover in the United States, including a free press, an independent judiciary, and a non-partisan Department of Justice, we will find they have been hollowed out during MAGA’s war of the “deep state.” Trump’s vow to purge the FBI of agents and analysts who investigated January 6th should be all the warning Americans need.
It’s easy to draw on the rise of Hitler as a historical parallel. And even though Melania has claimed that Trump kept Mein Kampf on his nightstand, Donald probably isn’t going back 90 years for a playbook. The rise of Putin and the rule of Russian oligarchs provide the formula. Just read Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book, Winter is Coming. Putin used economic calamity and the fear of Chechen terrorists to dismantle Russian democracy, making him President for Life. Dissidents get poisoned or sent to a Siberian gulag. Trump using the federal government to go after his political enemies is a page out of his comrade’s manifesto.
So what do we do?
We’ve have three weeks of the worst assault on American democracy in our lifetime. We’re all in shock that it’s really this bad. And it’s going to get worse. We can’t depend on Chuck Schumer and the corporate toadies of the Democratic Party save us. Many of them are in line to profit from the consolidation of power by the billionaire class. The Democrats who stand against them need to make themselves known now (or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said). But this is about us first. Us who are battered and defeated by the task at hand. Do we retreat into Netflix binges, or is there a path forward?
This is great opportunity to remember the practices of mindfulness. We’re all in reaction mode right now. Personally, I’ve had to resist the desire to punch someone, especially fellow working class people who think DEI is their enemy while their egg prices skyrocket. This is time to stop. Take a pause and breathe. Then we can start planning. There’s a great device popular in AA circles called “HALT.” Does this situation make me “Hungry Angry Lonely or Tired”? If so, just stop and take stock. So slowing the freakout roll is key.
Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter offers a simple strategy to re-enage with solutions. First, focus on a few key issues you care about instead of being overwhelmed by the tsunami of fires that need to be put out (to mix metaphors). Second, find trusted sources of information who can do the work of providing needed facts and analysis. Third, if their goal is to overwhelm you, take mental health breaks. Meditation is a favorite “self gift” of mine. Next, Walter suggests taking 48 hours to respond to a news story to let your emotions subside and sort out what’s important. And lastly, build community to share the load. My faculty union president sent out an email last week, entitled, “What to Do in a Burning House,” asking faculty not disengage but step forward. I immediately joined a union committee.
Progressives, real patriots, and those who just care about the price of heat this winter, have been knocked to their knees by the Trump/Musk war on the buttresses of American democracy. But it’s time to stand back up. A lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by lawyers who still have access to the courts to stop Trump’s actions, many of which are illegal and/or unconstitutional. The rest of us who are not the uber rich have a role, whether it’s monkey-wrenching the shock doctrine or building a viable alternative to Trump’s fear-fueled vision of America. Take a breath. We will do this.
As a student of the history of fascism and a teacher of that history, I’m well aware of the echoes of the past. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the first targets of the Third Reich were not Jewish shop owners, but college professors. Germany’s universities were purged of faculty that were Jewish or branded to be communist, socialist, or liberal. Albert Einstein, among other intellectuals, wisely fled his home country. The main work of the Nazi purge was not done by the SS, but by fascist students who were part of the Hitler Youth movement.
One the reasons Einstein and others, including the brilliant social theorists of the Frankfurt School, came to America is because of our value of academic freedom. Academic freedom creates a space for faculty and students to have the right to the free exchange of ideas. One core tenet states, “Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to express their views — in speech, writing, and through electronic communication, both on and off campus — without fear of sanction, unless the manner of expression substantially impairs the rights of others or, in the case of faculty members, those views demonstrate that they are professionally ignorant, incompetent, or dishonest with regard to their discipline or fields of expertise.” (Source: Inside Higher Ed)
I highlight this passage because it is clear that Donald Trump plans to go after universities in his second term, which is also laid out in Project 2025, authored by his former and current advisors. Trump has derided universities as engaging in “radical left indoctrination” and promised using federal levers to turn higher ed into centers of ideological loyalism. This includes making it harder for non-wealthy students to attend college, deporting student protestors, and firing accreditors. American universities are encouraging international students to return before Trump reinstates his Muslim travel ban and other draconian travel restrictions. His vow to reclaim universities from the “radical left” is a page torn from 1933.
Trump is not even sworn in and academics are already feeling the pressure as emboldened MAGA students try to out their liberal professors at colleges and on social media. I remember the last version of this in the 1980s when the group, Students for America, tried to publicly ostracize professors they deemed to be leftists. It was chilling. This time those students will have POTUS and the repurposed Department of Education on their side. Teachers and professors, especially those who are un-tenured, may censor their lessons out of fear of being dragged before institutional review boards or disciplinary hearings for making MAGA students feel uncomfortable.
My job as an educator is to make students feel uncomfortable so I am not looking forward to the Trump Reich. As a sociologist, my entire pedagogy is based on C. Wright Mills concept of the sociological imagination, popularized in his 1959 book of the same name. Mills, writing at a peak moment in the Cold War, wanted Americans to be focused, not just on their (micro) personal lives, but the larger (macro) social structures that affect their personal lives. Mills argued that that happens with two conditions. First people have to be aware of their values and second is some sort of threat to those values. Mills argued that the threat puts people in a “crisis” where they begin to see things in a more sociological way.
I’m here to present the threat.
Don’t get me wrong. College classes are intended to be safe spaces, free from harassment. The threat is presented as challenges based on the Mills model. For example if your values say that women should have autonomy over their bodies, I will present how that right is threatened by politicians (including Trump) who have actively limited access to legal abortion procedures. That news should put you in a state of crisis, where you start thinking about social systems that allowed this to happen.
In my classes, we talk about race, gender, God, class, sex, and a bunch of other “uncomfortable” topics and my goal is to never make students feel more comfortable. (We called my own college Sociology 101 course, taken in 1981, the “everything you know is wrong class,” and I’m better for it.) I’m here to push buttons, but I’m guessing educators like me are concerned that some MAGA snowflakes are not going to respond well to intellectual challenges. They will be encouraged by a president who has positioned himself as the enemy of truth and science and the core values of The Enlightenment that brought us here.
When Trump is sworn in on the 20th, there will be numerous battlefields across the country, including the places where immigrants work and live, where women and girls get health care, and where trans people simply exist. I fear the classroom will also become a battleground. But instead of falling into the us vs. them narrative the fosters more conflict, my work will be to bring those students in, valuing their different views, and engaging them in the magic of academic freedom. I am not afraid.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” – JD Vance, 2022
October 29, 2024
There’s an old adage called Godwin’s Law that states that when an argument reaches the point where somebody is compared to Hitler, that argument is officially over.
But what about somebody that compares himself to Hitler?
The fall of 2024 will forever be known as the moment in American history when a leading candidate for the presidency was outed by his former Chief of Staff for praising Adolf Hitler and not losing a single point in the polls. America, what have we become?
After not one but two of “his generals” confirmed Trump’s praise for the German fascist, Trump headed to off to Madison Square Garden for a fascist rally of his own. Yes, MSG is the site of a thousand historic concerts (Maybe Trump even knew about Elvis’s famous 1972 show there). The Garden was also the site of a hate filled Nazi rally in 1939, organized by an American pro-Hitler group. And 70 years ago, Madison Square Garden hosted a rally for Joseph McCarthy that highlighted anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-communist speakers. Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and boy was the world’s most famous arena rhyming Sunday night.
The coverage of the MAGA hate rally revealed just what you would expect of a celebration of America’s wannabe Fuhrer – The triumph of the shill. “Comedians” and “celebrities” degraded Puerto Ricans, Latinos, black people, women, and called Vice President Harris a prostitute. There was Putin fan boy Tucker Carlson mocking Harris’ ethnicity and other Putin fan boy Trump vowing to round up all undocumented immigrants on “Day 1” of his administration. (How, he, nor his loyal generals, have yet to tell us.)
Those of us who are scholars of fascism have been screaming from the mountain tops, like Julie Andrews, that Trump’s authoritarian fantasies present an existential threat to the very existence of the United States. I first wrote about it on August 24, 2015 (while working in Mexico). Here’s just a sample of the many pieces I’ve written about Trump and fascism.
So we know that Trump has all the hallmarks of a fascist. (4-star General John Kelly, Trump’s longest serving Chief of Staff, has enumerated the qualifications.) We know that Trump’s MAGA base qualifies as a fascist moment, with its fervent religiously justified nationalism and racist xenophobia. We know all this and the perpetual question remains; Why is this still so close?
In this final week, Trump could say he plans on throwing undocumented immigrants in ovens and not lose a single supporter (not even Speaker of the House Mike Johnson). Trump could say he plans to nuke Gaza and give Ukraine to Putin and not lose a single cheerleader (not even Senator Lindsey Graham). Trump could eat a baby on live TV and not loose a single MAGA minion (not even Kid Rock). His base is locked in and it’s ride or die with the billionaire from Queens. How do we explain this fanatical obsession with a man who can barely speak in complete sentences?
I’ve studied fascism for 40 years, both its historical cases and its real time manifestations (including over five years embedded inside white supremacist groups). I could write a dissertation on MAGA. The first attempt to psychoanalyze fascist movements was Wilhelm Reich’s 1933 classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, that argued that the emerging German Nazi movement was made up repressed homosexuals. While that might go a ways to explain MAGA’s obsession with drag queens and transgender athletes, sexual repression ain’t what it was in the Weimar Republic.
Put most simply, MAGA is a cult of personality. They could care less about Trump’s foibles or failed policies. His poorly educated base couldn’t define “fascism” if Elon Musk paid them. They just love Trump. He’s rich but, like them, he don’t speak right. His puffed-up faux masculinity gives them an imagined fighter, with a new mail-order-bride on his arm. They see themselves in him and they will follow him into the gates of hell, wrapped in American flag, made in China. His racism, rape charges, and his hyper-nostalgia for a mythical American past just serve to inflate his “fuck the world” strong man con act. MAGA knows their emperor has no clothes, but, as my mother used to tell me, if you stop believing in Santa, he will stop bringing you presents.
So we’ll head into Election Day with half of voters fully aware they are the grip of a madman, finding an intoxicating comfort in feeling like the oppressor instead of the supposed oppressed. And like many of those arrested at the January 6th attack, when it all goes sideways, they may way up from their fever dream, as did Hitler’s willing executioners. But the damage will be done.
I was 18 or 19 when I first heard the line, “Real men don’t eat quiche.” I remember being so confused because I loved quiche! Eggs, pie, it’s the perfect meal! Was I not a real man? What if I ate quiche with one hand and bashed someone over the head with lead pipe with the other? Where was this guidebook for what was and wasn’t the permitted behavior for real men, so we wouldn’t become fake men?
Judith Butler, the philosopher who wrote Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), took issue with any attempt to define “real men” or what makes a “natural woman.” These are human inventions, invented by humans who have no actual authority over such designations. Sociologists know that gender is fluid and changes across time and space. What was masculine in 1954 is quite different from what is masculine in 2024. My own research on racist skinheads found them largely motivated by this changing nature of masculinity, as their manly factory jobs were offshored and “their women” declared their independence and began bringing home bigger paychecks. For Butler, gender was a performance and, boy, did the skinheads perform.
So it’s with great amusement that I watch the buffoonish performance of masculinity by former President Trump. This child of privilege, who has never lifted anything heavier than a golf club, has routinely pretended to be a strongman. On his first run for president, he regularly told his supporters to “knock the hell out of” protestors. When, as president, he contracted COVID, he defiantly ripped his mask off on the White House balcony (and was then whisked off to be treated by the nation’s top doctors). When an assassins bullet barely grazed his ear, he raised his fist and chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” His endless admiration of dictators like Orban and Putin is all part of the act. Former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly had to beg Trump not to praise Adolf Hitler in public. Admiring Kim Jong Un is one thing, but Hitler, well, that might be a PR problem.
One of the themes of this election has been the 18 point gender gap between Trump and Harris supporters. And it’s not just uneducated white men that are breaking for Trump. It’s also a lot of uneducated brown and black men. Even Obama has been enlisted to try to convince black men to vote for the black woman. Is Kamala Harris this year’s quiche?
Patriarchy is the oldest power dynamic on earth. Older than capitalism. Older than racism. It doesn’t go all the way back, but as long as we’ve been defining God as “He,” men have enjoyed the privilege of being the king of the hill. Over the last 100 years, men have been slowly pushed off their throne, but they are not giving up without a fight. More women are fully employed than men. More women are graduating from college than men. And now a woman is favored to be Commander in Chief. What’s a fragile boy to do? Trump’s appeal to these broken men is as He-Man, the Master of the Universe. Ah, those were the days.
So it’s not surprising that men from every generation who still buy into 1950s myths of masculinity have glommed onto the the fake bravado of the Richie Rich from Queens (who wears a girdle). They want their UFC, their trad wives, and their unrestricted access to women’s bodies and paychecks. Trump is the incel icon. His conviction for sexual assault only endears him to the lost boys of the twenty-first century. He claims he will restore the moral authority to the days when manly men (like him?) ruled the roost. Masculinity in Harris’ America is under assault from DEI, illegal immigrants, and drag queens, according to Fox News/MAGA doctrine. Trump even referred to radio host Howard Stern as a “woke beta male” after Stern interviewed Harris this week.
Trump’s dive into the cesspool of the manosphere, doing interviews on bro podcasts and bumping chests with misogynists like Logan Paul, may be intended to stiffen his limp poll numbers, but they’re likely to have the opposite effect. Trump should have taken note of the response to his Mini-Me, JD Vance, who tried to define what was and wasn’t a “real woman.” (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t childless cat owners.) The quip rallied women from across the political spectrum who collectively said, “You don’t know me, Couch Boy!” Trump’s pathetic performance of toxic masculinity may endear him to a small number of women who have Stockholm syndrome after years of abuse, but female voters are the proverbial sleeping giant. Just look at the turnout anytime abortion restrictions have been on the ballot.
The vast the majority of these self-declared “alpha males” (pffft!) have women in their lives who have caught glimpses of life outside of patriarchy. It’s a world where they have control over their lives and are safe(r) from sexual harassment and violence. They don’t want to go back to being Mrs. John Doe. A lot of the “alphas” are materially supported by women, even if it’s just living in their mother’s basement. And these women who have their alpha ears are telling them that real men support women’s autonomy and that, if not respected, they could easily take their love to a man who sees women as human beings. My guess is that those men who are still falling for Trump’s macho con don’t have women available for honest conversations. Like Logan Paul, they are flailing in a world that sees alpha men as vestiges of the bad old days.
That’s why Harris running mate Governor Tim Walz is so refreshing. Like me and Kamala, Tim is Generation X (all three of us were born in 1964), and grew up in an era when women gained immense economic and social power. We saw our moms move from housewives to career havers. Walz has all the manly credentials (veteran, football coach, fried food eater). He’s also a girl-dad (of a Swiftie, just like me!) and a defender of queer kids and women’s reproductive rights. The sad incels can try to define him as “soft” (“Tampon Tim”), but Walz’s version of masculinity is something painfully out of reach to them. His 30-year-marriage, compared to Trump’s serial philandering, stands as a model of how men should be in the world. (If you think any of Trump’s marriages were happy, I’ve got some stocks in Trump Steaks I’d like to sell you.) If Alpha Boy thinks he’s going to have a 30-year marriage with a trad wife, he hasn’t spoken to an actual female off the internet.
The conventional wisdom is that it will be female voters that save us from the strongman authoritarian trip of Trump and his Handmaid’s Tale Project 2025 vision of making America 1954 again. Many of those women will be telling their men they are voting for Trump and in the privacy of the voting booth pulling the lever for Harris. But I think a bunch of those alpha males will be voting for Harris, too. Because their girlfriends, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters told them that real men vote for women.
A hundred years ago there was an organization in Weimar Republic Germany called Verband nationaldeutscher Juden, the Association of German National Jews (VnJ). They were fascist German Jews who opposed immigration (including by Eastern European Jews). They also fought against German communism and believed they were part of the racially superior German race. Their newspaper, Der Nationaldeutsche Jude, The National German Jew, had a circulation of 6,000 in 1927 and supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
The VnJ saw Hitler’s platform as good for the German economy. His fierce nationalism would serve to make Germany great again, restoring their might that had been destroyed by humiliating defeat in the first world war. The group saw Hitler’s emphatic anti-Semitism as merely a rhetorical tool to “stir up the masses.” Mainstream Nazis initially saw them as the “good Jews,” praised by Reich leaders with the refrain, “If only all Jews were like you.” After Hitler’s appointment to the position of Reich Chancellor in January 1933, critics of the VnJ joked that their motto was, “Down with us!” In 1935, Hitler outlawed the organization and the vast majority of the members and their families died in the Holocaust.
I always think of the VnJ when I see that “Blacks for Trump” guy.
Trump’s Long History of Racism
It’s increasingly difficult for Trump supporters to defend his over-the-top racist appeals. White guys will say, “But he’s got a black friend! I heard he gave a donation to Jesse Jackson! He CAN’T be racist!” But we’ve got the receipts and they go way back. They include the 1973 federal lawsuit brought against Trump for racial discrimination at his New York housing developments, the full page ad he took out in 1989 calling for the execution of the Central Park 5, his campaign to prove that President Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and the 2015 launch of his presidential campaign, where he said, and I quote, “Mexicans are murderers and rapists.” And there is so much more.
In 2019, after President Trump’s incessant blathering about an immigrant “invasion” at the Southern border, one of his supporters drove to El Paso, Texas to turn Trump’s words into action. There, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius walked into a Walmart and opened fire. He killed 23 Hispanic shoppers and injured 22 others. Crusius pre-attack manifesto, posted on 8chan, was full of anti-immigrant diatribes, lifted from the rhetoric of Trump and conservative television personality Tucker Carlson. The slaughter of innocents didn’t quell Trump’s xenophobia and in 2024 it has only increased.
The scapegoating of immigrants has a long history in the U.S.. “Dirty” immigrants were blamed for the “Spanish Flu” in 1918. (It started in Kansas.) The second era of the Klan, beginning in 1915, was fueled by anti-immigrant hysteria with the anti-black racism. The waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants upset the dominance of Protestant culture. In 1924, the 6 million member-strong Klan successfully supported the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, that severely limited immigration from non-WASP nations, including those that Donald Trump would later call “shit-hole countries.” Trump’s own reference to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan Flu” echoed the pandemic xenophobia a hundred years-prior. It’s not surprising that hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans exploded following Trump’s scapegoating.
The latest version of this has been Trump, and his Mini Me, JD Vance, and their retelling of the lie that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. It’s been proven that both Trump and Vance knew that the story, initially spread by a neo-Nazi group, was untrue. But it fed their anti-immigrant, anti-black mantra that (white) Americans are threatened by outsiders who have been “dropped in” (Vance’s term) to Small Town, USA by Democrats. The reality is that Springfield’s crime rate was higher when Trump was president and that the cat that was originally believed to be stolen by immigrants, Miss Sassy, was found safe it her owner’s basement. The impact of the lies of Trump and Vance have been devastating. There have been dozens of bomb threats, repeating Trump’s lie. Schools have been shut down and cultural festivals have been cancelled. The Proud Boys have marched in Springfield and the KKK have handed out flyers. Immigrants are being harassed and the city fears an El Paso-style mass shooting.
That Trump chose Springfield to trot out this old tired trope that immigrants are invading your town (and here they are legal immigrants, which is neither here nor there from Trump’s racist base). Springfield is Anytown, USA. There are 34 states with a Springfield (including here in Oregon, site of another mass shooting in 1998). Springfield was the fictional town on the TV sitcom Father Knows Best (1954 – 1960). There were no immigrants on Father Knows Best, Haitian or otherwise, to “infect the blood” (Trump’s words) of the country. There were no people color at all. No queer people. No disabled people. And women’s job was solely to support their men. It’s the “Great” Trump refers to on his red caps. Make America Springfield Again. And to do that, there needs to be “mass deportations” of anyone who doesn’t look like the mythical Anderson family.
And Trump has been very vocal that his mass deportation plan will be molded on President Eisenhower’s 1954 program, “Operation Wetback.” Those sweeps rounded up nearly two million Mexican immigrants, many of them U.S. citizens and legal residents, and dumped many in the desert, across the border, leading to scores of death from heat. In July 1955, 88 deportees died in 112 degree heat, left without food or water. This is Trump’s immigration policy model.
Trump’s racism is also evident to his complete unwillingness to acknowledge that the casualties of his abortion bans have mostly been women of color. White women with resources can travel to safe states, but lower income women are stuck in Gilead. If Ivanka Trump wants to terminate a pregnancy, for whatever reason, she can hop a plane to California, but not so for less fortunate women, like 28-year-old Georgian Amber Thurman, who is dead and won’t be voting this fall. Maybe that was Trump’s intent. We’ve watched Kamala Harris, who is a human being, shed tears over these preventible deaths. Trump refuses to acknowledge them, even when Harris forced him to hear the details at the Presidential debate. They’re just black women.
Blame the Jews
Of course behind all this, just like with another sociopath who came to power 91 years ago, is anti-Semitism. Speaking to Jewish groups in Washington DC on Thursday, Trump said that if he didn’t win in November, the Jews would be to blame. And if blaming Jews wasn’t enough (Where have we seen that before?), he told his audience that if Harris was elected, “Israel would cease to exist in less than two years,” which a) is completely insane, and b) uses the same old anti-Semitic trope that Jews only care about Israel and no other issue. Jews are not a monolith. It should also be pointed out that Trump’s evangelical base loves Israel, but not because they love Jewish people. The see Jews as keeping the “promise land” warm for the return of their messiah, and then they will be dispensable. Trump did get a warm round of applause in DC, and some likely chanted, “Down with us!” (At these events, Trump also stated he would re-instate his Muslim ban to prevent people from coming to America from “infected” countries. An anti-Semitic/Islamophobic two-fer!)
Trump’s flirtation with neo-Nazism is also not new. He used anti-Semitic imagery to claim that secret sources of money was behind rival Hillary Clinton in 2016. He referred to the murderous Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.” Trump hosted Nick Fuentes, a notorious neo-Nazi, at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and could not seem to get enough of famous Hitler fan Kanye West. “But he can’t be an anti-Semite! He has a Jewish son-in-law!” If you like Trump, he likes you. And neo-Nazis REALLY like him.
Trump’s Black Nazi
This brings us to North Carolina and the black man Trump described as “twice as good as Martin Luther King.” North Carolina Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, an ideological basket case, has cast doubt on the occurrence of the Holocaust, praised slavery, and said he would prefer if women did not have the right to vote. Trump, endorsing Robinson for governor of the state, called him “MLK on steroids.” (Apparently, all Trump knows about King is that he was a black man who gave speeches.) This week it was revealed that Robinson, who has an established history of eating pizza in porn shops, had been claiming to be a “Black Nazi” on an adult website called Nude Africa, where he posted that he preferred Hitler to Obama. Robinson fits the profile of fellow black Republican Byron Donalds of Florida, who Trump said, “is one of the smart ones.” As long as Black Nazi praises Trump, he has the orange seal of approval.
Let’s be 100 percent honest. The core of Trump’s base are old white men who see their Father Knows Best America fading from view. They desperately want to make America 1954 again. They are thrilled that Trump is weaponizing a segment of the population’s fears about the rapid pace of demographic change. The good news is that the old white man vote is shrinking fast. Like Trump himself, that demographic is increasingly incoherent, shaking their fists at clouds. But those mean old white men can do a lot of harm to others on their way out the door, including training a new generation of white men, like JD Vance, to continue their politics of hate and exclusion. A massive rejection of Trump’s racist views of America is the only way we can move forward.
I don’t want to pull rank, but I’ve been actively studying the fascist movements since the first Reagan administration. I spent a large chunk of my life from late 1988 to early 1995 imbedded in extremist right-wing groups while working on my Masters Degree and doctorate on the subject. I’ve published widely on the topic including a chapter in the new book, Conspiracy Theories and Extremism in New Times(Lexington Books). So I feel pretty qualified in identifying what is “fascist,” and, conversely, what is not “communist.”
Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have the core elements of fascism and they are weeks away from upending the two and a half centuries of American democracy.
Trump’s insane assertion that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are gobbling up local pets for dinner has unleashed a wave of terror in the small town as MAGA-loyalists phone in repeated bomb threats to the city. But that’s just one factor in the many-sided fascist tactical campaign by the former president and current felon. I’m just going to run through some of the well-agreed upon tenants of fascism that have Trump’s tiny fingers all over them.
Opposition to Marxism
Historians will tell you the first target of Hitler in 1930s Germany was not the Jews, but German communists. Trump has suddenly become fond of calling all his political opposition “communists,” including “Comrade Kamala,” and his followers have fallen suit. My guess is that Donald and the MAGA rank-and-file couldn’t define communism, or be able to tell Karl Marx from Richard Marx, if you paid them. Harris is far from a Marxist, and her proposed $50,000 tax break for small businesses marks her as pretty damn pro-capitalist. Over 200 Bush, McCain, and Romney former staffers (and Dick Cheney) have endorsed her. It’s hard to imagine these legions of Republicans going to bat for a Marxist. Goldman-Sachs, not exactly a communist institution, has publicly declared that a Harris election would be better for the U.S. economy than a Trump victory.
But Trump throwing out terms like “communist” and “Marxist” to his poorly educated base is sure to motivate those who think Harris is a threat to freedom. A similar trend emerged in the the late 1940s, when the America First Committee, rooted in some of the most vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, birthed Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, entering the country into a dark period of political witch hunts. Trump has promised much of the same for his return to power.
Opposition to Parliamentary Democracy
There was never a greater threat to our parliamentary democracy than the mob Trump sicced on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Their goal was to prevent the constitutional transfer of power and they almost succeeded. Their bloodlust to hang VP Mike Pence and “find” Speaker Pelosi had been ginned up by Trump in the preceding weeks, who repeatedly told them that “his” victory had been stolen. He continues to push this lie, stating that Democrats are trying to steal the 2024 election “again.”
Added to this has been Trump’s pledge to arrest and try his political opponents, including Pelosi, if elected. He’s posted memes, on his Truth Social, of Obama, Fauci, and others being subject to military tribunals. This weekend he threatened election workers with retribution if he reclaims the White House. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country,” he wrote. We saw how in 2020 Georgia election workers faced death threats from Trump supporters and election officials have stated that threats against poll workers have only escalated in 2024.
Threats to the voting process and threatening to transform courts and federal departments into agents of his transactional whims completely destabilizes the balance of power and crashes the very fabric of a democratic system based on the rule of law. Due process, congressional oversight, and the influence of voters are all erased for will of one man. That Trump cited Hungarian dictator Vicktor Orban as his character witness in this week’s debate is evidence that he sees dismantling democratic structures as a sign of “strength.”
Opposition to Political and Cultural Liberalism
Like Orbán, Trump sees himself at war with the “cultural left,” made up of various movements for social equity. This includes his obsession with transgender athletes who, somewhere, are beating up women in the boxing ring. Trump sees all things “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as upsetting the natural order of straight white cis-gender men (i.e., him). Feminists, like Taylor Swift, Gay Pride, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, or anything that attempts to shine light on the history of oppression and methods to make “all men are created equal” an actual reality are framed as “destroying America.” There’s no room in MAGA for queer folks, women who are, you know, people, and racial minorities who aren’t willing to prop up the basic tenants of white supremacy.
Anyone to the left of Trump are considered “communists.” This includes traditional Republicans who are labeled, “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only). If Ronald Reagan were to be reanimated in 2024, Trump and his cult would brand him a “commie” for his (now) relatively liberal policy positions. Trump’s world is divided in to “us” (all who love Trump) and “them” (libtards).
Totalitarian Ambitions
Other than weaponizing the federal government to jail his political enemies, Trump has joked about wanting to be a dictator on “Day 1” and the end of elections after he’s voted in to power. He admiration for Obán, Putin, Kim Jong Un, and other dictators is even starker in contrast to his complete lack of admiration of leaders of democratic movements and nations. (Although, he occasionally compares himself to MLK.)
Trump is transactional, devoid of any shared values. He cares about what serves him. Witness his recent ping pong positions on abortion. History as shown that today’s Trump allies are likely to be tomorrow’s Trump enemies. He surrounds himself with the “best people” until they no longer serve his interests and then they are deemed to be turncoats. If the former first lady is to be believed, the one book Trump has kept close by is not The Bible, but Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and it shows.
Conservative Economic Programs
As someone who has waded through the 887 pages of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, authored by some of Trump’s more notorious staffers, it’s clear what Trump’s second term will deliver; price raising tariffs, cutting Obamacare, education, environmental regulations and civil rights protections, and giving handouts to billionaires and big business. It reads like Reaganomics on methamphetamine. We saw the impact on the economy during Trump 1.0. Trump 2.0 will turn the wealth gap in America into something we see in third world, where a small group of wealthy oligarchs rule the peasant masses. Say goodby to the middle class as unions are busted and worker protections are rolled back.
Corporatism
The hallmark of fascism in Italy and Germany was corporatism, where private industry joined with authoritarian regimes to bring union labor unions under government control and reconfigure private/public entities to maximize profits. In Trump 1.0, we saw him leverage is status as a “billionaire” (we still haven’t seen his tax returns) to the massive benefit of corporations under his 2017 tax law. When Trump invited right-wing corporatist Elon Musk to play a role in Trump 2.0., anti-fascist scholars saw a giant red flag (and not the kind you see on May Day). Musk, who has been busy re-platforming neo-Nazi (I’m sorry, I mean “free speech”) activists on X/Twitter, has bragged about firing striking workers, to which Trump has shown great admiration. Installing Musk as a federal “auditor” would be a page right out of Mussolini’s playbook. Any federal regulations on economic protection, worker rights and safety, civil rights, and protections for the free market would be struck down as “government waste.”
Hyper-masculinity and Violence
I’ve written countless words in this blog since 2015 about how the pear-shaped billionaire, who never got his hands dirty in the real world of labor, presents himself as a macho fighter for the “little guy,” playing into the fragile anxieties of men in a rapidly changing society. In right-wing memes, he’s barrel chested, with Rambo muscles, carrying an AR-15, standing on a tank. (I doubt if the plump country club lizard has ever fired a gun.) Trump’s public persona routinely advocates for violence. Last weekend, he said of undocumented immigrants who recross the border after being deported, “If you come back you will be executed. You will be killed immediately. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ll do it.” Strong men don’t abide by weak ideas, like due process.
The result of Trump’s macho man talk was on full display on January 6, when Trump told his well armed crowd, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then he sent them to the Capitol, telling them, “ I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.” Of course, he then went back to watch the carnage from the safety of the White House. Since then he has routinely referred to the well over 12,000 Americans arrested as “patriots” and promised to “free them” when elected.
In 2024, the violent rhetoric of an anti-government insurgency has been turned up to eleven in support of Trump. In the federally funded anti-political violence project I work on, Cure-PNW, I monitor rightwing social media sites, like Gab, Rumble, and Trump’s Truth Social. The calls for violence, especially if Trump loses, are clarion and specific. Trump supporters are urged to arm up, stockpile ammo, and invest in trauma aid kits for when the “globalists” (i.e. the Jews) fire back. A popular meme states, “There will come a time when none of them will be able to walk down the street.” Fantasies of cvil war include executing anyone left of Trump, including “RINOs.”
Racism and Xenophobia
Most Americans, when asked to describe to Hitler’s reign of terror, would comment on the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that fueled it. It certainly was a guiding principle of the Third Reich, and their “final solution.” That plan of mass extermination swept in many other groups, including Poles, Romani (“gypsies”), homosexuals, and children with disabilities. My 2022 trip to Auschwitz brought me to my knees when I saw the meticulous scope of the Nazi’s genocidal operations.
Trump, who is sweet on right-wing nutjob Laura Loomer, has leaned heavily on racist conspiracies made popular my modern Nazis, including the lies that Venezuelan gangs have taken over “entire sections” of Colorado and that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are stealing pets and eating them. Now, not surprisingly, immigrants in these states have become the target of threats of violence from Trump supporters stupid enough to believe these claims to be true. President Trump’s Muslim ban and reference to African nations as “shit hole countries” wasn’t a surprise given his (and his father’s) long history of racism before he entered public office. Now, on the campaign trail, he’s ramped up the fear mongering of “migrant crime” to full volume. The fact that violent crime has dropped dramatically since he left office, and is significantly lower among immigrant communities (especially if they are undocumented), is completely erased by a rumor that a black Haitian ate somebody’s cat.
What to Do
This analysis could easily be as long as Project 2025. When we add Christian Nationalism to the mix, 2024 is a doppelganger of 1934. Obviously, the first line of defense is a resounding rebuke of Trump at the polls in November. Harris has to win by a clear margin. But even if pulled a landslide, like Reagan did in 1984, Trump and his droogs will still claim the election was stolen by “them” and call for violent retribution. The defeat of Hitler in 1945 didn’t end Nazism in Germany (as Rachel Maddow’s excellent podcast, Ultra, details). What ended it was a collective revulsion over how fascism only serves the self-appointed strong man and sycophantic club of corporatists.
The way through this is to pull back the curtain of the Wizard of Mar-a-Lago. Behind it is a very small, self-serving man and the potential destruction of a great nation.
I had a dream I turned on the classic rock radio station and heard a song I never heard before. I woke up thinking how boring nostalgia was. As much as I love a good Steve Miller Band single from 50 years ago, there has to be something more to life. Thanks to my 9-year old Swiftie daughter, the car radio is now locked into the Top 40 station. Z100! I know Steve Miller and his Jet Airliner are still there, but we’re in a droptop ride with SZA today.
I’ve now entered the age where I’m surrounded by peers, Baby Boomers and increasingly crotchety Gen Xers, complaining about “kids today” and how much better things were back in the day, music and values and the price of gas. It’s endlessly annoying. Just because Van Halen made “totally awesome” music in 1980, doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of bands making great music now. (I’m writing this as I’m playing the new Bleachers record.) But I’m regularly being beaten over the head by Grumpy Old Men who don’t think any music released this century is worth a damn. They desperately want the world be like it was when they were young and you could ride in the back of a pick-up truck to the drive-in.
Let’s first deal with three important facts.
FACT 1: I love when I read old timers complain that youth today have no morals or respect or blah, blah, blah. They forget that their parents’ generation said the same thing about them. Kids have never had any goddamn respect. Socrates, over 2400 years ago said much the same thing. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” They might be assholes half the time, but the kids are alright.
FACT 2: Rock and roll was created in the 1950s for one specific reason, to annoy your parents. The noise of youth creates space for young people separate themselves from adult society. Adults thought Elvis was noise in the 1950s, with his gyrating hips and “negro intonations.” Every year kids have had something to push their parents back, including Hendrix (1960s), Kiss (1970s), Run DMC (1980s), Nirvana (1990s), Eminem (2000s), Beyoncé (2010s), and Doja Cat (now). I remember my father endlessly perplexed at why I preferred Led Zeppelin to Ricky Nelson. “That’s not music,” was the constant refrain. “I hope I die before I get old,” I’d reply. I remember elders thinking Van Halen was absolute garbage when they came out. (I saw them get booed when they opened for Black Sabbath in 1978.) Now grandma and grandpa are in a heated Sammy Hagar versus David Lee Roth debate.
FACT 3: The past always looks great through the rear view mirror, but the past was always a mixed bag. Yeah, it was fun to ride around in the back of a pick-up truck, but a bunch of kids fell out and died. Yeah, there were some great songs back then but there were some super shitty ones, too. Does anyone really miss “Disco Duck”? Yeah, it was fun to play in the streets with your pals, but often you were playing “Smear the Queer.” Whenever someone waxes on and on about the dreamlike good old days, I flash to me holding the TV antenna in just the right position so I could watch the Watergate hearings on one of the three channels we got, while also trying to manage the horizontal hold. I’ll take my Roku, thank you.
Nostalgia was originally defined as a sickness in the 1680s to describe Swiss mercenaries who couldn’t fight because the longed for home. During the American Civil War, nostalgia was seen as a problematic form a depression, melancholia to be cured so the soldiers could wage war. It’s root as a mental disability is not lost on the lives of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, endlessly caught in loops of their past, unable to engage in the present world in a meaningful way. “If I could just go back to when I was happy.” Odds are you weren’t as happy as you imagine.
There’s a dangerous political aspect to all this hyper-nostalgia, this over romanticizing of the past. It’s the impetus behind all forms of fascism, from Hitler’s mythologizing of Germany’s past or Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. For Trump’s crowd it’s the belief that America was great BEFORE all the various civil rights movements upset the “natural” authority of straight white cis-gender men. The America before pronouns, diversity trainings, and black lives mattering. Make America Jim Crow Again. It’s not surprising that Trump has leaned heavily on 20th century music artists to take his MAGA crowd back to the GOD (Good Old Days). It’s encouraging that dozens of these artists (or their estates) have petitioned Trump to stop using their music, including Aerosmith, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eddy Grant, Elton John, the Village People (!), Everlast, Guns N Roses, Isaac Hayes, The Smiths, Leonard Cohen, Linkin Park, Neil Young, Ozzy Osbourne, Phil Collins, Prince, Queen, R.E.M., The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and even Nickelback. Just this week, the estate of Sinead O’Connor asked Trump to stop using her version of “Nothing Compares to You.” Fascism requires nostalgia but they are not doing it with Nickelback!
Two Important Points
Number 1: I get nostalgia. When we are young, and the world is in front us, every new experience is massively vibrant, the first kiss, the first time listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Those experiences and their soundtrack are woven into our very construction, like the iron beams that hold up the Empire State Building. Sitting in a smoke field movie theater watching The Empire Strike Back or falling to sleep to Steely Dan on the FM headphones has been fused into our DNA. As we age, and more of our life is behind us instead of in front of us, we start to lean on those iron beams. The Empire State Building, built 93 years ago, might not be here 93 years from now (2117), but it will always remind us of a specific moment in history that was both “great” and horrible.
I can get caught up in nostalgia, just like everyone else. I currently have 955 public playlists on Spotify, most mining the music of my youth. (Playlist #956 is going to be songs from albums released in March 1974, starting with Grand Funk’s “Locomotion.”) If I have any actual hobbies, it’s collecting vinyl LPs and anything related to the Beatles. And I would trade my eye teeth to get behind the wheel of my first car, a ’73 Gran Torino, again. But that brings me to Point #2.
Number 2: Nostalgia can block out our ability to be present in the present. We’re so focused on the past and making America “that” again, we miss out on the wonderful stuff right in front of us. I will never stop listening to Top 40 radio and looking for new bands to obsess over. (Currently, it’s Blood Command.) I love sharing my daughter’s love of all things Taylor Swift and discovering this music with her (Lover is our current favorite album, although I’m starting to get into folklore.) Listening to contemporary music connects me to the present moment, not when America Was Ricky Nelson. Even if for a moment, it liberates me from the endless nostalgia loop. And it’s inevitable that Taylor Swift will be on “oldies” rotation in 30 years and my kid will say, “When I was a kid, we had REAL music, like Dua Lipa. These kids today…” And so it goes.
So enjoy the past. There’s great wisdom in a Crosby, Stills, and Nash lyric and a Jimmy Carter foreign policy. Huey Lewis and Ronald Reagan don’t seem as horrid as they did 40 years ago. And some of our fond memories are shockingly marginalizing now. (If you can’t remember how racist, sexist, and homophobic we were, just watch any 80’s comedy film. Weird Science has not aged well.) But also plug into the present reality. The kids today have both the exact same issues we contended with and so much more. And their world is reflected in their culture, which should not be dismissed as our parents dismissed ours. Their soundtrack is worth a listen.
As a “subject matter expert” on right-wing extremism, I often get asked, “What about the left?” There are obviously some stark differences between the two political wings (I would offer bodycount as one measure), but there also might be some parallels worth considering as we look for ways to reduce political violence.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog discussing the “militia funnel” that became a useful tool in explaining anti-government violence in the wake of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. I even got to sit down and explain it with W. Kamau Bell on CNN’s United Shades of America in 2021 (and CNN turned it into a cool animation). There was a great need after the bombing in Oklahoma City, that included 19 children among the 168 casualties, to explain how “average people” were falling into the world of domestic terrorism.
In April 1995, I was just finishing up my dissertation on right wing extremism, when the news of a massive bombing in the “nation’s heartland” blasted across the news. It was devastating, and the images of dead children in the building’s daycare center brought the country to its knees. I stayed up that night, listening to talk radio from my Atlanta apartment. The talking heads were sure the carnage was the work of the usual suspects, Muslim terrorists. It wasn’t a crazy hunch. Two years earlier, Ramzi Yousef and a small band of jihadists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York City, killing 6 people. But Oklahoma was on April 19th, so I knew it was probably one of my guys.
April 19, 1993 was the culmination of the standoff in Waco, Texas that had become a rallying cry for the far-right. That carnage (that included the death of 28 children) was being framed as the result of an out-of-control federal government that was no longer by and for the people. So when on April 20, 1995, a white guy named Timothy McVeigh, who had been at Waco, was arrested for the Oklahoma bombing, I got a chill. These were the anti-government white supremacists I had spent the last seven years studying. The radio hosts who had been quick to blame “Muslim terrorists,” pivoted to the “Wacko from Waco” narrative. It was the act of a crazy person. It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with their aggrieved white male hatred of the government.
The structure of the militia funnel
I learned about the militia funnel from Kenneth Stern’s excellent 1996 book, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. He got it from Ken Toole, at the Montana Human Rights Network. The funnel model explains how people can enter a world that sees violent revolution as the only solution from very mundane starting points that have nothing to do with violence or terrorism. For decades, my work has focused on the movement of people through a ‘right-wing funnel.’ I have written and spoken extensively about this dynamic. At the bottom of this article, I set forth how the funnel analysis applies to current willingness to use political extremist violence among some people in the left wing of politics. First, let’s address how the funnel has been used for the last nearly 30 years to frame pathways to right wing extremism.
At the top of the funnel are just a lot of people who are activated by fairly mainstream conservative issues. They are second amendment gun activists, tax protestors, or think the federal government shouldn’t be taking perfectly good timber land to save spotted owls. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including black and Jewish conservative spaces.
Some (importantly, not all) fall into the next level, based in a deep hatred for the federal government. Instead of “we the people,” the feds have too much power and have superseded their Constitutional mandate. Some of these folks are part of the Posse Comitatus movement who believe the highest legal authority is the county sheriff and any constitutional amendment after the first ten is hokum. But the bottom line is the federal government is the bad guy. Growing up in the rural South, the term we’d hear for this was “revenuer.”
At the third level down the funnel, some of these folks start buying into some pretty pervasive conspiracy theories. We are now into the world of Freemasons and the Illuminati and who REALLY killed JFK. Just watch those Nicholas Cage National Treasure movies for a dose of this world. Here the Republican and Democratic parties are both controlled by the same puppet master, leveraging the federal government against hard-working (white) Americans for their own benefit.
Some of those conspiracy believers make it down to the next level, where the conspiracy takes a familiar turn. The elite Bilderbergers are rebranded as simply “the Jews.” In a same way Hitler used anti-Semitic tropes to explain Germany’s downfall, anti-government conspiracy theorists here see a global Jewish cabal behind everything from immigration to gay rights to why their kids are listening to rap music instead of Lee Greenwood.
Again, this is a funnel, so each level has fewer people than the one above it. In the final stage of the model are the revolutionaries. It’s one thing to have analysis, but here is the belief you have to act on it. The people who make it to the bottom of the funnel are consumed with language about a second American Revolution, and a second Civil War, and “Rahowa” (short for Racial Holy War) and a whole bunch of stuff concerning the “blood of patriots.” The funnel starts wide and ends very small, but as we saw in 1995, it only takes a small band of self-proclaimed patriots to change the face of a nation. And McVeigh’s intent was to inspire other like-minded Americans to commit similar acts of terrorism.
The militia funnel in the MAGA-era
The militia model became useful again in the Obama era when anti-government militias roared back into action. Here in Oregon, a militia group occupied a federal wildlife refuge for 40 days in 2016, resulting in one death. Then the surge of militia activists, like the Oath Keepers and the 3 Percenters, under Donald Trump’s MAGA movement made the militia model even more applicable, especially after the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
In the Trump years, I regularly updated the 1990s militia model when explaining the “new” right-wing activism. Because of social media and reach of the Trump message, the mouth of the funnel was much wider than it was in the 1990s. It included some of those same conservative issues, like gun rights, but now included “culture war issues,” like opposition to rights for transgender people and hostility to Critical Race Theory, but also a rejection of lockdown mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This wider funnel served to attract not just rural white men who were the 90s candidates for patriot militia groups, but suburban moms, aging incels, and others who thought America was last great before the civil rights movements made “inclusion” a weapon against white privilege.
The rest of the funnel, took an updated sheen. The anti-federal government level was rebranded as “the swamp,” full of libtards and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). The conspiracy theory level was now the domain of QAnon adherents and beliefs in the “deep state.” Below that were the anti-Semitic theories about “global Jews,” including George Soros, Anthony Fauci, and a belief (spread by Robert Kennedy, Jr.) that COVID was created to kill non-Jews. At the bottom of the funnel, the revolutionaries renamed their call to arms the “Boogaloo,” and began stockpiling weapons. In 2020, I had a chat with a 3 Percenter in a Home Depot parking lot and asked him what he thought about the escalation of violent rhetoric. His only reply was, “We’re locked and loaded.”
That this funnel was exponentially wider at the top meant more Americans were ending up at the violent bottom level. This was evident in the massive turnout for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, motivated by the President of the United States, not a fringe website, spreading a fully debunked conspiracy theory that the “deep state” stole the 2020 election. While organized militia groups, like the Oath Keepers, were key players in the attack, many of the over 1,2000 people arrested have claimed they just got “swept up” in the moment. They had fallen down the funnel into the land of Timothy McVeighs and Stewart Rhodes. I half expected to see my Trump-loving father there that day (but his feet are bad).
The value of the militia funnel in this work is that there are multiple points along the pathway down to violence where intervention can take place. Someone who angry about public school dollars going to a student Gay Straight Alliance isn’t automatically destined to become a domestic terrorist, but if they are, there are places where that path can be diverted. Could there be a similar trajectory for activists on the left?
Constructing a left-wing funnel
The origin of the right-left political spectrum, that has its roots in the French Revolution, is all about who should have power. On the right, power should be concentrated and on the left, power should be dispersed. That’s why the far right values fascism and the far left values communism. But all along that spectrum there are values concerning fairness. The liberal is concerned teachers’ low pay is unfair and the conservative thinks their tax dollars supporting a curriculum they think opposes their values is unfair. Oh, yeah, and plenty of people on both sides think the government sucks.
The structure of the militia funnel offers a guide to what a left-wing militia funnel might look like.
At the top level are widely popular liberal issues related to social justice-based matters of equity, including Black Lives Matters, abortion access, and LGBTQ+ rights, along with other stalwart liberal causes. The next level finds strong distrust of the federal government as the historic defender of status quo power dynamics. The feds are “the Man,” who surveilled MLK and protected alleged sex-offenders, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. And also, all cops are “bastards.” Further down the funnel, we see the appearance of all-encompassing conspiracy theories that see Republicans and Democrats as puppets of corporations, the monied class (Google “Bohemian Grove”), and the World Trade Organization. Like on the right, there is a darker level that introduces anti-Semitism to the conspiracy theories. This is where Robert Kennedy, Jr. lives and where anti-Zionism slides into a broader anti-Jewish narrative, most recently seen as an element of some pro-Gaza rallies. (It should be pointed out is that anti-Semitism is less visible on the left than it is on the right, but it does rear its ugly head in places.) At the bottom of this funnel is the rhetoric of Marxist revolution, which sees the entire capitalist system, and all its institutions, as corrupt and in need of overthrow.
Those of us who are older than millennials and Gen Z kids will remember that in the 1970s there were hundreds of terrorist bombings in the United States. They weren’t from patriot or neo-Nazi groups. They were committed by radical leftist groups like the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. And there were casualties. In 1970, a group of leftists angry about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s participation in military work related to the Vietnam War, detonated a massive bomb in Sterling Hall, killing one researcher and injuring several others. The FBI has counted 2500 bombings connected to the Weather Underground, including one that killed four people in a Wall Street restaurant in 1975.
When the Right-Left political spectrum becomes a circle
There is also a weird space where the extremes at the end of the left side and right side meet to form a circle. In the 1990s, some neo-Nazi groups began publicly (and financially) supporting the PLO’s campaign against Israel under the guise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Seattle WTO protests in 1999 that brought labor union members, environmentalists, and other liberal activists to the streets also saw participation far-right activists, who saw the “global bankers” behind the World Trade Organization as the hand of Jewish control. In the 2000s, the right also joined the left on issues related to climate change. Their angle was the climate crisis was the result of immigration, non-white population growth, and (again) Jewish monied interests.
More recently, the language of “accelerationism” has pervaded extremists on bother the far-right and far-left. The philosophy states that standard democratic forms of social change, like voting, are too hopelessly glued to institutions of power to ever affect real change. Each November we vote for a Tweedle Dum or a Tweedle Dee and hope things will be different. Accelerationists believe the only way to achieve their desired society is to bring the current one crashing down and rebuild the new one out of the ashes. The right and left have radically different visions of what those societies look like. (I know the right has no place for progressive academics like me, but they left would probably see me as a “collaborator” with “the Man” and exclude me from their Utopia, so I’m likely SOL whoever wins fantasy league fanaticism.) We have seen extremists on the right, like Proud Boys and active clubs look at their counterparts on the left in anarchist and Antifa circles, not as enemies, but as allies in bringing the system down. In 2021 a Boogaloo activist said, “Right now it’s about provoking BLM, antifa and militias or 3 Percenters into engaging in violence that will provoke disproportionate police response, which can be used to fuel further unrest.”
If the value of understanding the militia funnel is to interrupt well-meaning conservatives’ slide down the rabbit hole of violent extremism, there should be a similar opportunity for those escalating towards left wing violence. Again, the intent is not to “de-radicalize” anyone one either side, just to prevent the violence that might emerge at the bottom of those funnels. Working on constructive engagement with the government as, not an oppressive entity, but a reflection of our collective will can slow the roll down the funnel. Also, the work on critical thinking skills that disrupt simplistic conspiracy theories can be hugely helpful in dismantling the binary thinking that characterizes extremist ideologies.
The vast majority of activists are doing the important work of putting democracy to the test and advancing their shared values. A small fraction fall into the black hole of political violence. Understanding these paths across the political spectrum allows to us design strategies to reroute those who may see terrorism as a legitimate expression of their political agendas.
Every December 7th, we remember the 1941 attack on Japan by imperialist Japan. December 7th, 1941 is also the date that Hitler made his “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog) decree, the order that instructed the Gestapo to round up all the enemies of Nazism in the lands controlled by Berlin, and send them to concentration camps. Sadly, many of those who supported Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision were political activists in the United States. That included aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, spokesperson of the America First Committee, founded in 1940. Four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States, declaring that Franklin Roosevelt was a spawn of the “eternal Jew.”
It’s important to remember that the Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers. It began with anti-Semitic hate speech. The fact that former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump gleefully dines with anti-Semites like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, tells Proud Boys to stand by, refers to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville as “fine people,” and has routinely retweeted disinformation from white supremacist accounts should exclude him from any political credibility whatsoever. Instead, it places him in the center of right-wing politics that has always had its right foot in the mud of anti-Semitism. Blaming the Jews isn’t back. It never went away. It’s now just got a media platform so expansive it would make Father Coughlin drool on his frock.
First, let’s dispense with a crucial piece of bullcrap. Saying, “I can’t be anti-Semitic, I support Israel!” is like saying, “I can’t be racist, I support the Lakers!” Support for Israel is not the same as support for Jewish people (including Jews who are critical of the state of Israel). Evangelicals see Jews as “unsaved people,” who are just getting the Holy Land ready for the return of Jesus. MAGA support for Israel is inherently anti-Semitic. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the MAGA subculture has plenty of neo-Nazis, like Nick Fuentes, it its ranks.
This isn’t about Trump and “Ye.” There has been a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes and incidents over the last few years. The ADL reported that 2021 was the highest year on record for anti-Semitic incidents and 2022 looks like it could end up worse. Oregon has already logged 257 bias crimes and incidents with Jewish victims this year. Just last month, New York City saw a 125% increase in hate attacks targeting Jews over the previous November. Trump and Kanye just make it more acceptable for those people to come out of the shadows.
While the Jewish people have a long history of oppression, the Adolph Hitler/Kanye West version of anti-Semitism has a fairly recent starting point. The 1789 French Revolution not only brought the promise of democracy to Europe, and the end of the divine right of kings, it emancipated French Jews, making them full French citizens. So when the defenders of church and monarchy needed a convenient scapegoat to blame the revolutionary chaos on, the “anti-Christian” Jews were an easy target. Aside from the fact that European Jews had a fairly good reason to not be fans of the Catholic Church, Jewish participation in the French Revolution was fairly minimal. And yet a new myth was born; the pro-democracy/anti-church rule movements around the globe were the work of secret cabal of Jewish rabbis. The puppet masters; controllers of banks, media outlet, competing political parties, and all things liberal.
This new belief that Jews “control the world” spread like wildfire as the old empires began to crumble. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the bizarre conspiracy theory was codified in a supposedly real (but fully fabricated) document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was used to blame the Russian Revolution on Jews and used by Henry Ford to blame unionization efforts on the “international Jew” (the title of a series of booklets Ford wrote in the 1920s). The conspiracy theory became equally popular among jihadists and Neo-Nazis into the twenty-first century. We are almost a quarter of the way through the century and Trump acolyte Kanye West’s proclamation that “I like Hitler” on disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show barely sparks a response from the Learned Elders of the Republican Party. That should make the world say, collectively, we’ve seen this movie before.
Volumes have been written on how the authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump map on to other nations’ slide into fascist rule. American democracy is not guaranteed and Trump’s recent claim that the U.S. Constitution should be “terminated” is straight-up Germany 1933. All we need is an economic collapse to send the “stable middle” into a panicked blame-game and a charismatic figure to convince them that all their problems are because of George Soros/drag queens/woke bankers/deep state agents and we’ve got pogroms in the streets of America; the Proud Boys and their ilk, who have been on “standby,” leading the charge to “make America great again.”
This might seem like a lot of hysteria but let me conclude with two thoughts. Every single Jewish person has a deep personal connection to the violence of anti-Semitism. Every news story about a synagogue covered in swastika graffiti, or about Jewish people attacked just walking down the street, or another “crazy” claim about Jews by an popstar who has 16 million followers on Instagram is a reminder of the long history in the belief that the complete annihilation of the Jewish people is a good thing that is both dreamed about and acted upon. The trauma of living in that world must be immense and yet the Jewish people continue to contribute to a world that imagines destroying them.
Finally, as I’ve written, earlier this year, I spent a snowy April day at the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps in Poland. After walking though the gates that still read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work sets you free), I suffered my first panic attack, realizing that it was all very real. A population, motivated by fear, was willing to commit mass genocide. Children, like my daughter, were ripped from their parents arms and thrown into the fire pits of Birkenau. Why? Because they were “dirty Jews.” I stood on that spot and wept. Because, unlike what certain guests at Mar-a-Lago believe, the Holocaust happened. And, like certain guests at Mar-a-Lago hope, it could happen again.
We must stand together against this insanity or it will be our children who will be thrown into the fire pits.
Watching the Wheels 