How to Catch a Fascist: Antifa vs. MAGA
As Gaslit Nation has long warned: our institutions are complicit. Nazis infiltrate police departments, protecting an elite pedophile ring–protected by the FBI and DOJ. What can the American people do in a time of elite criminal impunity? Enter antifa. As investigative reporter Christopher Mathias reveals in his new book To Catch a Fascist, the solution is self-reliance and tenacious research skills.
As Mathias explains, antifa does exist, haunting Donald Trump’s nightmares, and has been a force of resistance throughout American history. Antifa is part of a long tradition in America, composed of LGBTQ people, neurodivergent people, the working class, and other everyday Americans–operating in a hyper-localized decentralized network.
Mathias details how activists have unmasked neo-Nazis through Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), infiltrating online and offline groups, hacking, posting “meet your local Nazi” fliers in communities, and citizen investigative journalism. One researcher read 60,000 tweets just to find a single biographical detail to out a Nazi hiding in the dark.
As we’ll cover in future episodes, antifa's strategies can also apply to outing Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators who think they can continue hiding from justice. Just as the NAACP’s Walter White investigated lynchings in the 1920s when the police protected their friends in the Klan, citizen researchers can map the flight logs and financial ties of Trump and Epstein’s friends. If the FBI and DOJ continue to protect billionaire lawlessness, we must create a social cost for corruption and predatory elites. If the Department of Justice won't unmask the villains, then it's up to us to do it. “We protect us” is the rallying cry of liberation movements, of neighbors helping neighbors against corruption and institutional failure that protects predators in power. As Gaslit Nation has long warned: it’s up to us to save us.
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Andrea Chalupa (01:10):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the historical thriller, Mr. Jones, he film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. This week's guest is the great investigative reporter Christopher Mathias.
Christopher Mathias (01:27):
Yes. Hi, hi.
Andrea Chalupa (01:29):
Hi, hi, hi. He's out with an amazing new book that you have to read. It's called To Catch a Fascist. It is documenting the network of ordinary people across this country, risking their lives to unmask the white supremacist terrorists hiding and not hiding so much in our police departments, school boards, and elected offices, obviously ICE. It is an absolutely essential read for the times we find ourselves in today. Welcome to Gaslit Nation, Christopher.
Christopher Mathias (02:03):
What a wonderful introduction. Thank you so much, Andrea. Thanks for having me.
Andrea Chalupa (02:06):
I'm so grateful for this. So what led you to write to Catch a Fascist?
Christopher Mathias (02:13):
Yeah. So back in 2017, I was a reporter at HuffPost and I had started to cover the far right a little bit, but ended up in Charlottesville on August 12th, 2017, for the Unite the Right rally, which of course infamously was one of the largest white supremacist gatherings in a generation. And it ended with a neo-Nazi driving his car into a crowd of counter protestors, killing Heather Hyer. So when I got back from Charlottesville, my editor at the time was like, "This is your beat now." So I spent the next essentially decade covering the far right and trying to figure out who the players were, who was part of this kind of insurgent fascist movement and very quickly started to realize that there was an underground network of activists doing this work already and they were doing it very successfully. And that network was Antifa.
(03:16):
And we can get into exactly what Antifa is, but these activists through espionage and through intelligence gathering and through just kind of remarkable research and I would argue journalism ended up unmasking thousands of pseudonymous white supremacists that were part of this kind of new cadre of secretive masked white supremacist groups that emerged during the first Trump presidency. I think we kind of forget because a lot has happened over the last decade, but when Trump first came into power, this kind of horrifying new collective of masked Nazi groups just emerged. They're kind of emboldened by Trump's rise, as if they were trying to resurrect the Klan's invisible empire from the ashes. The more they organized online, the more they rallied in the streets, the more resistance they came up against from Antifa. And very quickly, I can define Antifa-phoria if you want, but...
Andrea Chalupa (04:15):
It's anti-fascists. It's storming the beaches of Normandy. It's the underground railroad to liberate enslaved people. Yeah, I know what anti-fascist means.
Christopher Mathias (04:25):
Sure, sure, sure.
Andrea Chalupa (04:26):
But what do you see it as in the context of your book?
Christopher Mathias (04:30):
Yeah, no, totally. So correct. Antifa is just a shortening of anti-fascists, but I would argue there's a bit of a distinction between Antifa and anti-fascist. And for example, when we think about World War II, obviously the US Army was fighting fascism and defeating fascism, but the US Army was also segregated and Black soldiers were separated from white soldiers and they returned after the war to live in Jim Crow. So this is not to denigrate the soldiers that fought in World War II for the US. It's just to make a distinction in terms. And I think, for example, it's maybe instructive to think about the Americans that joined the Lincoln Brigades and found the Spanish Civil War as Antifa. They fought side by side with Black soldiers and integrated units and so on and so forth. And when I talk about Antifa today, it refers to this kind of very decentralized network of radical leftists, anarchists, socialists, and communists that believe in a few basic tenets, which is that fascists sometimes need to be confronted in the streets, sometimes violently.
(05:38):
Most common association with Antifa in most people's mind is Nazi punching. They do do that occasionally. That is a fraction of the percentage of the work they do. The second big thing about Antifa is that they believe fascists should have no platform to speak or organize. So they will often argue that Nazis should not be given permits to hold rallies because they pose kind of an imminent danger. You'll also see anti-fascist Antifa try to get Nazis kicked off social media for violating terms of service. And then finally, Antifa does not believe in the power of the state or law enforcement to fight fascism and fascist groups. They see state and law enforcement as kind of inherently white supremacists and kind of maybe too invested in right-wing politics or too often credulous or collaborative with a fascist. So that's kind of who we're talking about when we talk about Antifa.
(06:36):
And by the way, this modern iteration of Antifa emerges from groups like anti-racist action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, which were these remarkable groups in the 1980s and '90s that emerged in the punk scene to kick Nazis out of the punk scene. And they ended up developing these very sophisticated political strategies that kicked an entire generation of fascist groups off the streets of America. So when Trump came to power, Antifa kind of rose again from those previous groups to kind of combat this new threat.
Andrea Chalupa (07:13):
And who are they? Are wine moms, are beloved wine moms? Are they in Antifa? What is sort of the typical profile that you found?
Christopher Mathias (07:23):
Yeah, no, great question. So I think part of the reason people have so many misapprehensions about Antifa is because they're anonymous. And so no one really gets to see them online. They don't really have any spokespeople or leaders to speak for Antifa necessarily. And what I've found, I was really lucky and privileged to get access to so many of these activists that sometimes don't talk to the press. And what I found is that they're kind of across demographics and kind of everyday people, they include wine moms, they include soccer moms, they include rednecks, they include punks that faux Nazis in the 80s and 90s, but now have kids. They include people working at Amazon warehouses, they include bartenders, they include ... It's mostly like a working class and middle class phenomenon. And most of the people I talked to were radicalized to do this work after personal brushes with fascists in their communities.
(08:24):
So for example, a story I think about a lot is one of the kind of best, most prolific anti-fascist researchers I interviewed for the book started doing this work after her friend lost a family member in the massacre at the Walmart in El Paso. There's a lot of other stories like that. The main character in my book who goes undercover into a Nazi group called Patriot Front, started doing this work after narrowly missing a train in Portland where a white supremacist ended up killing two people after threatening two Muslim girls. And so a lot of people have similar stories like that for why they start doing this type of work. A lot of the people doing this work are queer. A lot of them are trans who see this work as kind of a form of urgent community self-defense. And then I think one of the other overrepresentative demographics I found was neurodivergent people who are very good at tedious research and doing it for hours and hours.
(09:28):
I talked to someone who read 60,000 tweets to find just enough clues and morsels of information to identify a Nazi. So yeah, I think Antifa kind of is representative of just kind of everyday Americans in the end.
Andrea Chalupa (09:49):
And how do they find each other? Is there a central operating system, a Slack channel? What is their infrastructure of how they do this?
Christopher Mathias (09:59):
No, no, totally. I mean, I think the way you would hear Trump and MAGA talk about Antifa, they have some secret headquarters somewhere, but in fact, it's like a very organic, decentralized, hyper localized phenomenon, right? So there are no leaders. Everything is organized horizontally and groups kind of form and then disband. So yeah, there are some more formalized chapters that grew out of anti-racist action, like I said, in the 80s and 90s, but for the most part, your local Antifa is likely three or four people and they might announce their presence with social media account or some flyers on some telephone polls if they announce their presence at all. So it's a really interesting ... It is by every definition, just like an underground political resistance.
Andrea Chalupa (10:52):
And what historical parallels did you see? When you're learning more about them and their networks and how they operate, what resistance movements, if any, throughout history came to mind?
Christopher Mathias (11:01):
Yeah. So some of the historical stories I tell in my book around unmasking the first and second clans. There was an effort to unmask the first clan. Obviously, one of the more phenomenal stories I came across was with the second clan in Buffalo, New York. And there was a huge chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo, thousands, tens of thousands of members. And I think maybe people don't appreciate that the second clan had millions of members across America and was not confined to the south. It was in the north, it was in the Midwest, it was in the west, and they were not driven only by anti-black racism and antisemitism, but by anti-Catholicism, which was a bigotry that they've formed in response to a wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe that were largely Catholic. And they accused Catholics of a dual loyalty to the Pope and not to America.
(11:58):
We've heard it all before. But basically in Buffalo, the mayor is Catholic. He hates the Klan. He starts collaborating with local Jewish leaders, local Black leaders. He develops a spy. He enlists a spy to go undercover into the Klan. One night, the Klan's secret headquarters in Buffalo is broken into and ransacked and its membership list. They kept a list of all their members. It disappears. And the mayor, after some deaf denials of any involvement in this burglary, announces that he's gotten hold of the list and he posts the list downtown for all of Buffalo to come see. They end up having to move the location because so many people want to go see this list and there are lines around the block to see this list. Buffalonians want to go there and know who among their neighbors is in the Klan. They do this and in short order, Klan-owned businesses are boycotted and vandalized.
(12:56):
Klansmen homes are also vandalized with like KKK lives here. Klansmen turn up to work only to realize that they had been fired. And basically what this does, this kind of great unmasking is that it creates a social cost for being in the Klan. Suddenly, it shows to people that might be interested in joining the Klan that if you do, you're going to be named and shamed. You're going to lose your job, you might lose your girlfriend, you might get kicked out of your apartment. And the Buffalo Klan did not survive this new social arrangement. It eventually despands. And in a crazy end of the story, the spy that actually went undercover into that Klan gets in a shootout with another Klansman and they both die. And there are multiple other examples of this kind of resistance to masked fascism in American history. Leon Lewis in Los Angeles is a Jewish warrior who operates a spy network to go undercover into the German American Bund in the 90s and foils all these Nazi plots to massacre Jews in LA.
(14:03):
Stetson Kennedy goes undercover into the Klan in the 90s and he's a good friend of Woody Guthrie's. And there are just so many more examples of this. And you realize that this type of work is actually like a very proud American tradition. One more example I'll tell you is Walter White, who's one of the founding members of the NAACP. He was light-skinned and could quote pass as white. So during the era of lynchings in the US, he went down to investigate the lynching of Mary Turner, which is a very infamous lynching, one of the most brutal things I've ever read about in my entire life. And I won't go into great detail about it here, only to say that Mary Turner was pregnant when she was lynched. And Walter White investigates this, passes as white, and gets this town in Georgia, these townspeople to confess to lynching Mary Turner.
(14:55):
And he returns home and files one of the most blood curdling dispatches I've ever read, identifying these executioners. By the way, he identifies them for the governor of Georgia at the time who declines to prosecute. But at any rate, this is all to say. What Antifa is doing now is part of a long tradition in America that takes different shapes, but I think is a very inspiring story of resistance and kind of the darkest of times.
Andrea Chalupa (15:23):
I'm getting inspired and it's emotional hearing these stories because every single story you shared, it's just the power of bearing witness, the power of confronting the evil and the dehumanization, that is extraordinary power and strength to do something that just seems ... I mean, it was heroic and it was dangerous and the great risks that they took obviously, but just to go in there like what Walter White did, confronting it, staring it in the face, sitting down with it, meeting it, and then documenting it, extraordinary power. I'm absolutely moved to tears hearing you tell these stories.
Christopher Mathias (16:04):
Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (16:05):
And could you talk about ... And the other point I wanted to make listening to you is what these fascists, like Woody Guthrie, all you fascist bound to lose. What these fascists don't understand is that every life they destroy radicalizes, wakes up the people that witnessed, were impacted the family. So all of the murders that are being carried out right now, gleefully by ICE, and those murders are just the tip of the iceberg to kill as casually as they do.
(16:39):
Imagine what is going through their heads, what they talk about over lunch with each other, what they're being told by their superiors. It's an absolute culture of lawlessness. And it's just the beginning and they don't feel so empowered by it because the Klansmen and Chief in the White House is empowering them to do this. So we're just at the start of this horror. And every murder, every victim, just as while we're recording this, the news just broke that one protester who's exercising her constitutionally protected rights just had her hand blown off by an ice agent. So every single life destroyed is, like you said, that's how people are turned and they understand that they have to take their own safety, their own community security in their own hands. That's exactly what led to the popular uprising in Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution. The more those videos and those photographs went viral of protestors getting their faces beaten in, the moms and dads of those protesters showed up in the square and more people flooded the square.
(17:42):
So they don't understand what they're unleashing. They don't care. They think that their tweets and their terror will be enough, but what your book to catch a fascist shows is that that's not how it works.
Christopher Mathias (17:56):
Yeah. And I think I'm glad you brought up the Ukraine example and what we're seeing in Minneapolis right now, this axiom you hear a lot on the left or in kind of radical leftist spaces, anarchist spaces, black liberation spaces, the phrase, "We protect us." And what that means is that you can't wait to rely on your institutions to protect you because they're in all likelihood going to fail you. So it is up to you to organize with your neighbors, to protect your neighbors, to show up for your neighbors, and to show up for the most marginalized among you. And I think what we're seeing in Minneapolis is such an amazing demonstration of that because ICE is terrorizing that city and seizing that city, and the Democratic Party and local police are relatively defenseless against it.
Andrea Chalupa (18:48):
They're impotent. Hakeem Jeffries, Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, he's here in Brooklyn, okay?
Christopher Mathias (18:54):
Right.
Andrea Chalupa (18:55):
He couldn't even whip up votes to stop funding for ICE.
Christopher Mathias (18:59):
Yes, exactly. And I think this goes to kind of the militant anti-fascist approach is that you can't trust these institutions. That analysis, that worldview is kind of bearing itself out, which is what is happening in Minneapolis right now is so interesting from my perspective and inspiring, but it also reminds me so much of the anti-fascist response to the wave of Nazis taking to the streets in 2017, 2018, 2019, where you have people on their own monitoring these people, these agents, following them around, documenting what they do, pressuring businesses and hotels and venues not to host them or a deal with them. And then you have efforts to unmask ICE agents, which is what Antifa was doing in 2017, 2018, 2019. And it really is just this kind of organic grassroots uprising. And I would argue a popular embrace of militant anti-fascist tactics. And so it's a remarkable moment.
Andrea Chalupa (20:14):
And what about the personal steps that these people take in order to document? What are some of the strategies they use that the militant organization ... I do want to say, I know this film is problematic, but one battle after another, the reason why that film took off like wildfire is because at the very least, it showed well organized resistance. They had a call center. That was the fantasy. Just like K-pop demon hunters, it's female power fantasy. Women just want to binge eat, veg on the couch and kill demons. That's like all a girl wants. And so what real militant strategy do they have any in terms of what practices they keep in order to document and out the fascist and also protect themselves in the process?
Christopher Mathias (21:09):
Yeah, sure. I'm glad you brought up One Battle After Another. I keep thinking about that movie in context with my book. There's a lot of overlap, I think. So it's actually really remarkable. A big part of what Antifa did over the last decade was, like I mentioned, they had spies. So these spies would go undercover into white supremacist groups, in some cases, kind of in-person infiltrations, right? So that means they're going to IRL meetings, vandalism missions, hikes with these Nazis. They are method acting as Nazis to gain these Nazis trust and to gain information about them. There's also anti-fascists that do just online infiltrations. So they'll pretend to be a Nazi online and that will sometimes get them enough access to get what they need. But in the course of all these infiltrations, what ends up happening is because this new generation of fascists organizes online, they often communicate with each other in private messaging servers.
(22:11):
So when these spies go undercover into these groups, they hack into these servers and take all the messages. And what ended up happening is these messages end up in a public database, open source for anyone to look at on a site called Unicorn Riot, which is a fantastic independent media organization that actually has done some of the more incredible reporting in Minneapolis, not only now, but during the George Floyd uprisings, but they created this database of leaked Nazi chats where you see Nazis communicating to each other. And during the course of those interactions, Nazis inevitably reveal biographical information about themselves, their real offline identities. Think created a database of a thousand anti-fascist doxes over the last 10 years. I found six cases where Nazis posting photos of their dogs led to them being unmasked in the real world because anti-fascists were able to see that photo of a dog, find the same dog on Facebook and then so on and so forth.
(23:14):
So that's just one example. Another example is there was a Nazi once who posted a photo from his house, but he forgot to remove the metadata from the house from the photo. So the anti-fascists looked at that metadata, were able to find the address of the house and look at property records and then figure out who lived there. So basically what Antifa doing was doing was a lot of incredible investigative journalism. And what they would typically do is they would do all this work and then post it in a blog or in a Twitter thread. Sometimes they would make flyers and post them in communities with language like meet your local Nazi. And they would do that to warn neighbors or warn the community about this person that might want to do violence against your black friends and family members and loved ones, your two brown residents, to queer residents, but it also stripped these fascist groups of their anonymity, which at the time they thrived on their anonymity.
(24:21):
They realized that their views were repellent enough that they would face consequences for them in the real world. They might lose their job and so on and so forth.
(24:35):
The kind of question over the last decade though that starts to haunt anti-fascist work is, what happens when the societal taboo against explicit white supremacy starts to disappear a little bit? And that's what we're seeing now. It's kind of a mask off moment for fascism.
Andrea Chalupa (24:55):
Were they responsible for the big leak of young Republican chat groups? Do you remember the story that came up?
Christopher Mathias (25:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (25:07):
Where suddenly all these young Republican chat groups were like Nazi fever dreams, everything was Nazi and it's like, "Oh my God, these people are actual Nazis as we've always been saying."
Christopher Mathias (25:20):
Right. Well, and I actually don't know if Antifa was involved in that. I know also interesting, I remember with that story, JD Vance calling them young when they're like in their 30s and 40s. But what I will say, one of the more remarkable infiltrations that Antifa did was of a group called Identity Europa, which was a very big white supremacist group and one of the main organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. They were kind of like this suit and tie fascist group, right? A lot of them were in college or just graduated college and they kind of positioned themselves as the smart guys of the Alt-right, sophisticated. And their whole thing was to infiltrate the Republican Party and push the Republican Party right. Dude infiltrates Identity Europa. I actually have the recording of his interview with Identity Europa to get into the group.
(26:12):
It's a remarkable bit of method acting. But eventually, again, they collect all of these messages. They end up identifying a hundred members of Identity Europa and what they find is GOP officials and lawmakers are deeply connected with the group. They find that basically all of these kind of young Republican groups at colleges across the country, a lot of them are led by members of identity Europa. They basically, I think, realize before a lot of the rest of mainstream pundits in America and the chattering classes, that the Republican Party is crawling with Nazis like this. And they basically see before anyone else that ideas that we once thought were fringe actually weren't there fringe at all, and that the Republican Party was radicalizing at an accelerating rate. An argument I make in the book is that when I write about Antifa over the last decade, it's a bit of a Cassandra story.
(27:17):
They kind of saw before a lot of people the direction things were headed, but a lot of people wouldn't listen to them and they were kind of dismissed as hysterics or alarmists or radicals or extremists.
Andrea Chalupa (27:30):
So the Republican Party has been taken over. Would you say by the Republican Party today is a Nazi party? Is the MAGA movement a Nazi movement based on your reporting?
Christopher Mathias (27:41):
I would say I'm comfortable calling the MAGA movement a fascist movement. There's a lot to unpack there, obviously, but I think just on a kind of daily basis, we are now talking about a president who's essentially doing lebensraum, like the Nazi idea of living space of expansionism. He's threatening to invade or annex Greenland. And then you have a honest to God secret police force terrorizing communities that is ripping people based on the color of their skin out of their houses and putting five-year-olds into vans and separating them from their parents and sending them to detention centers thousands of miles away. We are seeing this secret police force kill people that are opposed to this project. Trump and this administration claim to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. And then when you just back up and look at the people in this administration, Stephen Miller, the kind of eminence Greeze or vizier, or you could argue actual de facto president right now is steeped in white supremacist literature and fascist literature.
(28:55):
I think it was a story that didn't get enough attention at the time, but again, there are leaked emails that were obtained by Michael Hayden at the Southern Property Law Center years ago that showed Stephen Miller pushing the most vile white supremacist stuff while he was at Brightbart and kind of being just indoctrinated in this world of the Great Replacement Theory, which is an outright white supremacist conspiracy theory. And what Miller is enacting right now is an honest to God, ethnonationalist program of ethnic cleansing. And it's long past time, I think, for the press to understand that that's what's happening. So yeah, I've been an advocate for calling this fascist for a while. I know some people don't agree with that. I think one of the big examples was Robert Paxton, who's kind of the foremost scholars of fascism, initially declined to call Trump a fascist, but then changed his assessment after the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
(29:56):
Yeah, it's a pretty scary stuff.
Andrea Chalupa (30:00):
I recently found myself at a posh private club in Manhattan talking to a dapper gentleman who is so enthusiastic about what Trump is doing because quote-unquote Biden had the borders open and he can't wait for the Melania movie. He and his friends bought out a theater for it.
Christopher Mathias (30:18):
Oh my God.
Andrea Chalupa (30:20):
And I was like, so you're a Nazi.
Christopher Mathias (30:23):
You said that to him?
Andrea Chalupa (30:23):
Yeah, of course. And he's like, "Well, do you understand I'm a gay man and how I struggle with being a Republican and a gay man?" I'm like, "Well, Peter Thiel's gay. They're gay Nazis." Hitler came to power with the help of Rome who was always at the El Dorado club, a big gay club in Berlin before the Nazis shut it down and turned it to SS office. So I told him to his face, I'm like, "You're Nazi." And he was like, "Well, we live in a Republic where we can have these conversations." I'm like, "For how long?"
Christopher Mathias (30:57):
Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (30:58):
"And they're coming after us civil liberties. Don't you see that? Do you think it's going to stop with murdering people point blank in the face?" Peaceful protestors. He's like, "Oh, they deserved it. They're being violent." I'm like, "No, they were not. Where do you get your news from?" He's like, "Same as you. " I'm like, "No, you don't. You clearly don't." But he was just so in denial and just so openly proud, but don't you dare call him a Nazi.
Christopher Mathias (31:22):
Right.
Andrea Chalupa (31:22):
That's what's so funny about it. It's like they get very offended when you call them Nazis.
Christopher Mathias (31:27):
Yeah. It's a really strange, and sometimes it's why the terms get so confusing. A lot of the people who I would argue are outright fascists and who will cite fascist scholars like Julius Evola and shit. Sorry, I don't know if I can curse. But they will simultaneously do that and support outright neo-Nazis and then turn around and use fascists as a sword themselves and call anti-fascist the real fascist. It's such a confusing mess of terms sometimes. And understandably, they don't want to conceive of themselves that way. I mean, some of them do. But yeah, man, I don't know. It's also, I think what you're touching on with that interaction too is one of the animating questions of this moment is like, how do you deal with people in your life or even that you meet that support this? And I think it's a really tough quandary.
(32:37):
I mean, obviously, I grew up in central Pennsylvania. I grew up in Trump country. A lot of the people I grew up with are Trump supporters and were important to me. And it's a tough thing times to figure out, but also I would argue there's also a point where, I don't know, man, something you can't stand for on an interpersonal level. And I think that kind of shame needs to come back and needs to be created. I think something I'm thinking a lot about right now and writing about the article should be up this week is Antifa, for the last 10 years, unmasking Nazis. Now they're unmasking armed Asians of the state. And I think it's a worthy project because I think very important to defeating ICE defeating this, what I would argue is a campaign of ethnic cleansing, stopping watching footage of our neighbors being taken off the streets.
(33:46):
A very big part of that is to create shame forever having been involved in this, to have been a member of ICE. I think it's very important to create and preserve the social cost and to say, to let the people doing this know that if they don't quit this now, they will live with the stench of what they were a part of for the rest of their lives. They won't be able to wash it off. They need to know that they are the Nazis in this movie and that they will be depicted as villains in the movies their children watch. So I think that is a very big part of the anti-fascist project right now and something I'm thinking a lot about.
Andrea Chalupa (34:29):
100%. So there is this word lustration that I first learned about in Ukraine's Euromaidon revolution because after they were able to get the Trumpian government out and the Trumpian dictator Yanokovich is still in Russia to this day, along with Asad now. And so one of the words that all the Ukrainian activists were throwing around was lustration. But basically for those who don't know, it's making a list of who carried out the crimes in government, whatever your job was large or small, and making sure that you never work in government again. You're banned from government, lustration. It's like cleaning out the system. There has to be lustration for every single ICE agent. Do not put them in our military. Do not put them in our police forces. Do not put them anywhere where it's taxpayer funded money. You're banned for life from working for anything paid for by the taxpayers, lustration.
Christopher Mathias (35:25):
Yeah. That's fascinating. I've never heard that before. I wish I had known about that. I would've put that in the book. It's amazing. I think a lot about that kind of idea when we think about reconstruction in American history. Reconstruction was this pretty remarkable moment after the Civil War where suddenly there was this very big, quick enfranchisement of black people where they got to vote and they were, I think in South Carolina had the majority of the legislature and so on and so forth. And it did involve ... Reconstruction was like, in a sense, a liberal. The North was taking over Southern governments and ensuring that equal rights could be had. And a big part of Reconstruction government was pushing back against white vigilante violence. And obviously Reconstruction was abandoned and we've been paying the price for that ever since. And it's basically never really stopped fighting the Civil War in a way.
(36:24):
But I think, God willing, when this is all over, there will be, like you said, a illustration, like a new Reconstruction where we have to come to terms with one of our political parties being completely disinvested from the idea of democracy and being only invested in a politics of domination, which is fascism.
Andrea Chalupa (36:51):
And also the second political party, the Democratic Party, which is cowardly and complicit and thinking that we as the people can risk our lives to do all of this work for them and that they'll ride our coattails back into power and just carry on business as usual and not do anything meaningful, not get anything done. They spent two years back in power. They had control of the White House, both chambers of Congress after January 6th, 2021.
(37:21):
Merrick Garland spent two years kicking the can down the road when they had the 14th Amendment in the US Constitution that was put in place by Reconstruction to keep traitors out of Congress, out of our government from running for office. So I don't trust the Democratic Party either. The one that's being sued, Elise Lotnick, and I think she's probably stunned out of her mind that she's being investigated by the DOJ, she and Mark Kelly for being veterans saying, simply going on to prove that we're up against fascists, they simply told the American men and women in our military, "Abide by the law, abide by the law." Simple.
(37:59):
And they're both under the powers, the machinery of government are now investigating them. And I listened to an interview with Elise Lotnik, who's a moderate. She's a centrist, and she sounded absolutely stunned by what was happening to her. And she was saying, "Welcome to the resistance, Elise Llotnick. How do you think the rest of us have been feeling all this time, sticking our necks out? " And she said in that interview that the majority of Congress, and of course she's calling out her own party, but doing it in a very diplomatic way. She said, "The majority of Congress is too scared. They're keeping their heads down and they're waiting and hoping for the next election"
Christopher Mathias (38:32):
Oh.
Andrea Chalupa (38:34):
That is exactly what gave rise to Hitler. It was the obeying in advance.
Christopher Mathias (38:41):
Yes, exactly. And I think what you're touching on is there's this pervading sense, I think among the Democratic Party and among, I would argue, centrists and liberals that things can never be as bad as they once were. And something I try to talk about in the book is that anti-fascist activists don't believe that. They think that things could very much be as bad as they once were. They don't subscribe to this myth of inevitable progress, that things are always getting better all the time. And I think the other thing, the Democratic Party's refusal to understand what's happening and to, like we talked about earlier, call it fascism and understand what it means when you say that, is that for a lot of people, their lives haven't been touched by this yet, but it will come for them. And I think something you have ... I mean, it's the famous nimholer poem.
(39:44):
First, they came for the socialist, but I did nothing because I wasn't a socialist. But the thing about fascism is that it always targets the most marginalized groups, and then it moves on. And it always needs a new scapegoat and a new enemy, and eventually it's going to come for you. And I think it's really interesting to think about, I was talking earlier about how the second clan was so anti-Catholic, which is so interesting for me. My family is Catholic, but I've never in my life have I not enjoyed had all of the privileges of being light in America. And now when you look at the far right, a lot of them are Catholic and kind of trad cath. And I think what I'm trying to get at is that Catholics were assimilated and they became part of the majority and it shows that how fungible fascist targets are.
(40:39):
A hundred years ago, they thought Catholics were an existential threat to America and now Catholics are part of this fascist movement.
Andrea Chalupa (40:46):
They make up at the majority of our Supreme Court, rubber stamping the fascism.
Christopher Mathias (40:51):
It's so interesting. But I think when we look at perspective, when you're looking at who they're targeting now, namely trans friends and neighbors and family and our immigrant friends and neighbors and family and our Muslim friends and neighbors and family, they're always going after those with the least power at this moment. They're bullies at the end of the day.
Andrea Chalupa (41:12):
But what is remarkable, and I just did an episode on this, Austria and Germany were the intellectual hotbeds, the world's leading thinkers, especially in this new exciting field of psychoanalysis. Freud and his massive school and all of his followers and all the leading journalists, the international reporters that were covering the rise of Hitler all had their analysts on speed dial. And out of this movement of leading philosophers and intellectuals across Germany come, of course, the rise of Hitler. And so these intellectuals were stunning, like the social scientists that they are, this horrible flood of fascism while also trying to survive it.
(41:52):
And they left an incredible record of what these fascists were about, the ones that you and I come across in our day-to-day lives. And what they ultimately said is a point that you made, which is the fascists will always come for you. They will inevitably always come for you. They start with the easiest target, the marginalized, and then they come for you. Why? Because as Walter Benjamin pointed out, they thrive on endless conflict. They need endless conflict. It's like they're in a hyper state of conflict. Just like Trump invades Venezuela, immediately pivots to invade Greenland, endless conflict. And meanwhile, he's invading Minnesota, endless conflict, so it will absolutely never be enough for them.
Christopher Mathias (42:37):
I hadn't heard the Walter Benjamin one before. Yeah. Something I've really come to terms with, and I think what you're getting at is we were talking about the Woody Guthrie song, All You Fascist Bound to Lose earlier. And I actually earnestly believe in that saying, not only because I think we're going to win, but because fascism is inherently self-destructive, it basically, like you said, because it needs constant conflict and needs constant enemies to destroy, it's kind of like a snake eating its own tale, right? Eventually there's going to be nothing left and there's going to be no one else. And I think the anti-fascist struggle understands that these fascists really are bound to lose and the mission and the project is just to stop them doing as much destruction as you can.
Woody Guthrie (43:33):
For their boy, we'll show these fashions what a couple of hillbillies can do. Well, I'm going to tell you fascists. You may be surprised people in this world are getting organized. You bound to lose. You fascist bound to lose. All you fascist bound to lose. Yes. All you fascist bound to lose. You bound to lose you fascist bound lose. There's people of every nation, marching side by side...
Andrea Chalupa (45:10):
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