HIGHLIGHTS: The ‘F’ Word with Adrian Goldberg for Byline Times Podcast
Posting some highlights from my interview on ‘Trump, MAGA, and the ‘F’ Word’ — Fascism — on Byline Times Podcast with Adrian Goldberg — for those who prefer the written word as part of their arsenal
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“I fear we're going to be debating semantics while we're being marched off to the camps.”—me on Byline Times Podcast
I spent the night talking friends off the ledge, reassuring them that we’re not just going to give our power away, no matter the outcome. Below are some helpful words.
In my recent Bette in the News post, I included a link to my interview this week with Adrian Goldberg from Byline Times Podcast.
I realize that a large percentage of the Bette community prefers to read their news, so I transcribed some of the highlights from the interview, so next time you run into someone who believes it can’t happen here, you can wield some evidence.
CW: Adrian opens our interview with clips from Trump’s Madison Square Garden event. To understand the significance of this location, please watch this film first:
Below are excerpts from my interview with Adrian, the finest of hosts. To hear Adrian’s questions — which were rich with detail and factual evidence — please listen to our podcast. The excerpts contain highlights from my responses to his questions:
Adrian: So snippets there of Donald Trump's recent pre-election rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, let's hear now from Heidi. Siegmund Cuda… many of the people who support Donald Trump would not remotely think of themselves as fascists, or indeed of Donald Trump as a fascist, they simply regard themselves as patriots.
Heidi: I think you're so right that the people in what I describe as the MAGA Cult think of themselves as patriots, just like the National Socialists thought they were patriots. And the way Mussolini’s farmers thought they were patriots. They believed they were saving the sanctity of their country and their women from hordes of outside forces.
Let's first remind people what fascism is, because I think they get stuck on that word. It's a centralized government under a dictatorial leader that suppresses the opposition. I think of it currently in Vladimir Putin's Russia, Victor Orban’s Hungary… and of course, we've seen it throughout history, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.
And I just want to remind people, because we have a terrible case of amnesia, Trump is using words like vermin. He's promising to round up 15 million people. He praises strongmen, and I think this is very important: he deploys racist fake news on a population, and that news is designed to instill fear, and enough lies like that are what causes people to overthrow their own democracy. MAGA Cult members don't know they’re foot soldiers of fascism. It's 100% correct that they believe their patriots. They don't know they're being used to overthrow their own country. Despite the fact that we are living in a post January 6 world.
I fear we're going to be debating semantics while we're being marched off to the camps.
Trump is saying he's going to round up 15 million people. That is genocidal language.
Trump is a professional propagandist who misuses words and denigrates the meaning of words all the time. And Jason Stanley calls this ‘undermining propaganda.’
There's a battle for truth in this time of grave deception, and we need to return words to their original meaning and intent.
And Trump is using a cruel and effective playbook that comes right out of the 1930s Germany to overthrow democracy. And my fear is that we're going to be debating fascism versus authoritarian versus whatever, while we're already beyond the point where we can get back or pull away from it, I'm worried about that.
Trump ticks everything off the list from Jason Stanley’s book — How Fascism Works — returning people to a mythic past, using propaganda, using sexual anxiety, using ‘othering’ of a tiny percentage of the population to throw everybody into a fear frenzy. The very first march eight years ago, I held up a sign saying, ‘We do not accept a fascist America.’ And maybe because I'm German American, I grew up reading the history. I feel the parallels are too stark to ignore them.
(Adrian relays reports where Trump details his plans to round up 15 to 20 million immigrants and deport them).
Heidi: There's no way to enact something like that without harming people, without the potential of deaths. And keep in mind, this is a man who is continually telling us he is going to seek revenge on his enemies, and we only have to look at what happens to reporters, for example, in these regimes, look at Orban’s Hungary and what has happened to the free press in Hungary, it doesn't exist anymore. The media owners were literally ‘encouraged’ to donate their companies to the state run organization.
So again, he uses language that I can only interpret as genocidal when he’s talking about rounding up people, but he's also telling us he will seek revenge on his enemies. And I don't know how much more ‘strongman’ you can actually get than that type of language, and again, using words like vermin. I don't think we want to wait to hope for a better outcome or a better version of this man telling us what he's going to do to his enemies, and telling us what he's going to do to people who are here in our country today.
I believe America is a multi-racial democracy in the process of succeeding, and I think that he is telling us that he's going to go back to this mythic past, and the dog whistle in that for me is the white mythic past, because he's telling us he's going to be rounding up people of color. It's very brutal language.
(We segue to talking about what I mean when I use the word ‘technofascism.’)
Heidi: So all the internet is in my mind at this point is a new weapons delivery system (h/t HiFi). I wrote about the cult of the genius tech bro, and how people were so dazzled by these shiny boys and their vast wealth that I think they missed the societal impacts.
And Elon Musk, in his acquisition of Twitter, changed the algorithms to boost his own posts. I'm sure that you may have noticed suppression of some media voices and popular voices. My account has dwindled down to very little interaction. What we're seeing, I think, is authoritarian control of the media, and that is what I would call technofascism. And it's not just social media. In America. In the last few days, billionaires who own the Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times — tech billionaires — refused to endorse the only non-convicted felon in the presidential race, much to the dismay of their own editorial staffs…
Another important piece of this: We have JD Vance, who is running for vice president alongside Donald Trump, and JD Vance and Peter Thiel — who started PayPal with Elon Musk — they fund a social media platform called Rumble, and all day long, Rumble promotes what can only be seen as Russian propaganda. RT being one of the sites that is platformed on Rumble, and that to me, again — we now have our three letter agencies saying covert influence operations are not journalism. Covert influence activities have nothing to do with free speech.
And all day long, on Rumble, you will see RT stream to 24 million people. You will see all the influencers that we now know are being paid or had been paid by Russia because there was an RT indictment. They are still featured prominently on Rumble. They're featured prominently on X.
And by the way, I think this is also very important. Two years ago, in Byline Times, I wrote about how a Russian analyst was warning us that Elon Musk, on his Twitter platform, was sending messages from Vladimir Putin. Now we learned he's communicating directly with Vladimir Putin, as is Trump.
Two years ago, I wrote, Musk is going to turn Twitter into Vkontakte, a Russian propaganda outlet under the guise of social media (h/t Dr. Michael MacKay). And everybody was hand-wringing two years ago about, ‘Oh, he's spending too much money,’ right? My podcast partner — a Silicon Valley technologist — High Fidelity — he called it a $44 billion-dollar psyops cannon. And I think that's proven accurate, because what did Musk do? He replatformed people who had previously been banned. He's built himself a cult of 200 million followers.
I've always felt we're behind enemy lines, and yet, it's where we do the counter-messaging… and it's where we've met each other and all our allies. So it is a very important battlefield in this information more, and I don't think that can be denied…
What's interesting is that my friend in Vienna, Dietmar Pichler, who’s a disinformation analyst, just discovered through reading one of my reports, that he can access Rumble from Vienna. And again, when something is banned, but a vice presidential candidate is literally linked to a platform that is still offering that type of influence, that's something that's very dangerous, and you made an amazing point: Up until September, we didn't have the proper words for this type of influence activity. But now we know, again, thanks to our US State Department, that Russian covert influence activities, or any covert influence activities, are not journalism. So that is why you have somebody like JD Vance and Elon Musk out there saying, ‘Censorship! censorship! Free speech!’
No these are influence campaigns, and again RT — in an indictment that just happened in September in America — has been linked directly to Russian military intelligence. Employees from RT have been indicted for paying an American-based media company and its influencers millions of dollars — that is not journalism, but you can still find the work of these people and the company, Tenet Media, on Twitter. You can find the work from the influencers on Rumble. And that is a problem.
(Adrian offers a terrific summary of Project 2025)
Heidi: Trump is the frontman right now, but project 2025 survives beyond Trump if the Republicans get back into power, and I think it's incredibly important, I wrote a piece for anybody who wants to know more MAGA Hat and a Gun (h/t Ruth Ben-Ghiat), which breaks down the essential things you need to know about Project 2025, but what it really boils down to is a recipe for the end of democracy (h/t Craig Unger).
It's literally a playbook telling us what they're going to do, how they're going to dismantle our functional government. And again, this is what fascists do, and even former Republican leaders who worked with Trump and under Trump are calling him a fascist. So I'm just saying this is a perfect point to talk about what really looks like a fascist project.
They want to dismantle the DOJ, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, the Departments of Education and Commerce. They want to give the President complete control over the Federal Communications Commission, which is the agency that governs radio, television, satellite, cable, all of that, and they want to install — here's a key piece of it — conservative warriors through Bar Associations and State Attorney Generals offices, while eliminating dissident bureaucrats. And it goes on and on… register teachers and librarians as sex offenders if they teach sex education on and on and on and on like this. Does that sound like democracy or democratic governance? No. It sounds like something we've terrifyingly seen before.
I look at our unwillingness to believe that it can happen here… it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. We have this horrible case of amnesia about the fact that Trump worked for Putin in his first administration (h/t Keir Giles), and we know from all of the great reporting from people like Craig Unger that Trump has been bailed out over and over again since the 80s, financially, from people linked to the Russian mob. We also know that he was groomed as a presidential candidate by somebody that we call a Grey Cardinal, Paul Manafort, who did the same job for Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and was paid $70 million through various Russian proxies.
I feel like we just have this lack of imagination and this unwillingness to really confront what we're dealing with. And if we were a different country, maybe we would understand what's going on, but because we're America, and we believe somehow we're immune to this, that we just can't believe it could possibly happen here. And my mind is filled up with all of the historic reading I've been doing. And there’s reporter from the ‘30s in Germany named Bella Fromm, and she wrote a book about her Berlin diaries, and she had to flee the country in ‘38, and was not able to be a reporter after ‘34 because she was Jewish, and she stuck around to try to help people.
But in her diary, when she fled to New York, she wrote:
“There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms.”
And I just think about those words, because we're seeing these men who are willing to sell out humanity for their own personal profit, and we're seeing emotional masses everywhere who, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms, will do the bidding of those men.
And so I just think that you started with the appropriate framing: the continuation of democratic governance, or this other thing that we've seen before, strongmen, fascism, authoritarianism, and that's what's on the menu in America right now, a week ahead of our election.
For more from Bella Fromm, please read this report:
“Went to Berchtesgaden yesterday. The SA had a monster parade. The word ‘monster’ is fitting, I think. The brown monster rolled along the road from Reichenhall to Berchtesgaden. The pounding of their boots haunted my mind all night long. Will there be anybody who can stop the stamping of their feet all over Germany? When I was small, I loved parades. I hate them now. The feet pound, pound, pound, and under their thunderous, insensitive impact lies my beautiful country.”—Bella Fromm, July 13, 1932
“There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary, 1943, New York
We can be the people who defeat fascism again.
We must be the people who do so.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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Marching on November 12, 2016, holding a sign:
“In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America”
Not going back.
