Friend,

It Can, It Has, It Is Happening Here

Sam Goldman talks to Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio about Trump’s open embrace of the fascist QAnon movement, the kidnapping of Venezuelan migrants by Florida governor DeSantis, media and politicians’ normalization of fascism and much more.

Paul Street is an historian and member of the Refuse Fascism Editorial Board, author of This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. Anthony DeMaggio is a political scientist and author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here.

Salute to the courageous protesters fighting the theocracy in Iran this week!
Must read: Iran’s Feminist Revolution–Women, Life, Liberty by Mona Eltahawy.

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Paul Street: Now we have a guy who tried to do a coup in the Imperial freaking homeland. And they're still trying to overthrow a previously normative bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law...This is fascism, and if you don't stop it, it's going to dig in. And it's going to be here for a very long goddamn time...You're going to need more than voting. We're going to need movements, we're going to need people power, we're gonna need people in the streets.

Anthony DiMaggio: There's no casual discussions of fascism. It's either threats, and then it's an existential threat or it isn't...The alternative of inaction is even more dangerous, because then you allow people to do things like engage in an insurrection, and try and steal on election and next time, maybe it doesn't end so well for everyone.

Sam Goldman: [The kidnapping of asylum seekers by Governors DeSantis & Abbott] shows the federal government and the law itself, how seemingly endlessly amenable they can be to the threat of fascist violence — which this is. This is a form of violence, to kidnap people to dump people where they know no one, and are further at the whim of various forces. It just goes to show that there isn’t some magical force in our legal system that keeps this all in check, where the fascists can’t go too far out of bounds, because then the law will step in. I think that’s how a lot of good people, unfortunately, feel in relation to this.

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Send your comments to [email protected] or @SamBGoldman
Here a listener calls Refuse Fascism "the most important podcast of our time:"

    Dear Sam and everyone at Refuse Fascism,  

I am a new listener, having just discovered your podcast this past summer. (I have been reading Paul Street at Counterpunch for a while now.)  

I am so glad to have found you, what I am calling the most important podcast of our time. You always seem to articulate what I am thinking and feeling far more knowledgeably and eloquently than I ever could. I find myself frequently quoting and paraphrasing excerpts from your show and sharing episodes on social media, hoping that more people will become regular listeners and, in turn, become activists.      

Thanks for finding quality guests who are equally concerned about the current state of affairs and for continuing to sound the alarm about what we face if we remain passive citizens.      

With gratitude and admiration, Kristina  

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