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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we convey you Part 2 of our dialog with Jason Stanley, creator and professor of philosophy at Yale University. His new guide is titled Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He’s additionally the creator of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.
Thanks a lot for staying with us. In this a part of the dialog, I wish to get into Project 2025 and additionally the nice alternative idea. But I wish to begin off, for many who didn’t hear maybe Part 1, by you simply laying out the thesis of your guide.
JASON STANLEY: The thesis of my guide is {that a} sure type of erasing historical past justifies actions by authoritarian leaders, equivalent to chopping down voting for minority populations, equivalent to justifying state violence — in the case of the United States, in opposition to immigrants; in the case of, say, India, in opposition to Muslims; and in Israel, in opposition to Palestinians.
Vladimir Putin lately blurbed my guide. He mentioned, “Wars are won by teachers.” You can see that from the Russian textbooks in 2022, for instance. They fully justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They justify it by representing Ukraine as faux. They remove all Ukrainian historical past. They justify it as representing the West, as threatening conventional “European values.”
So, textbooks have an monumental position to play in authoritarianism. When we take a look at the United States, what we see is the similar individuals attacking voting are attacking public faculties. So, what I’m attempting to do is clarify that hyperlink between authoritarianism and attacking training.
AMY GOODMAN: I imply, that’s actually fascinating, which takes us immediately to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In 2022, he signed into regulation House Bill 7, also called the Stop WOKE Act, which he claimed would take on essential race idea in the office and in faculties.
GOV. RON DESANTIS: We consider an vital element of freedom in the state of Florida is the freedom from having oppressive ideologies opposed upon you with out your consent, whether or not it's in the classroom or whether or not it's in the office, and we determined to do one thing about it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Governor DeSantis. Explain precisely what’s occurred in Florida.
JASON STANLEY: So, to begin with, let me be aware his invocation of the time period “freedom.” Toni Morrison mentioned that freedom in American rhetoric is much too usually a white notion, contrasted with the unfreedom of Black Americans. Ron DeSantis sells this invoice as selling freedom, however whose freedom are we speaking about? It’s supposedly the freedom of Americans to be free from oppressive literature. However, when you’re a Black pupil, a Black youngster in these faculties, your historical past just isn't being represented. Are Black mother and father free to complain about the curriculum as representing the normative American household as white? Are Black mother and father free to complain about the proven fact that the historical past of Black company is being eradicated, Black Lives Matter not allowed to be taught in Florida faculties? What about LGBT households? Are they free to complain about the illustration of heterosexual households as the norm, as Project 2025 tries to impose on a federal stage? Think about how this makes LGBT households really feel. Think in case your mother and father are in a same-sex relationship and their relationship is banned from the faculties. That’s not — freedom right here means the freedom of white Christian males.
So, in Florida, what we now have, the results of this, individuals down —
AMY GOODMAN: White Christian males who aren’t homosexual.
JASON STANLEY: Who aren’t white Christian cis males, precisely.
So, now in Florida, these legal guidelines have created a tradition of concern and intimidation. They’ve made public faculty academics public enemy primary. The universities are below dire assault. No one has reported on the proven fact that the University of Florida, in their post-tenure evaluation, virtually 20% of the professors have failed it and face lack of their jobs.
Similar payments have been handed in Ohio and Indiana. We’re speaking about Ohio State and the University of Indiana, two of the world’s biggest public universities. Now professors face penalties, from lack of their positions to lack of their salaries to civil penalties for instructing ideas like white privilege, for instructing Black historical past, for instructing LGBT views. Students are being inspired in these states to show their professors in, like in an authoritarian society. Tennessee has an on-line reporting type to show in not simply public faculty academics, however professors, for instructing primary ideas of Black historical past and LGBT views, so — or American historical past.
So, this assault on historical past has created, particularly in Florida, a tradition of concern and intimidation, encouraging individuals to show their fellow residents in for violating the official ideology of the state.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re in an election 12 months. We have been at the Republican National Convention, protecting it. Among those that spoke was Tucker Carlson. Media Matters has accused Tucker Carlson of being liable for, quote, “single-handedly introducing the white supremacist ‘great replacement' conspiracy theory into mainstream American politics.” This is a clip of Tucker Carlson when he was nonetheless internet hosting a nightly present on Fox News.
TUCKER CARLSON: So, into that, you throw tens of millions of name new individuals who don't have any connection to America in anyway, individuals who broke our legal guidelines to get right here, who don’t converse our language, who don't know what the U.S. Constitution says and don’t care. And what do you have got while you put all of that collectively? You have a recipe for social collapse.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you even have written a piece in Slate, “Donald Trump is openly running a Great Replacement Theory campaign.” Talk about what Carlson mentioned, what Trump repeatedly is saying, and why you suppose that is so harmful.
JASON STANLEY: I used to be lately speaking to my — a few of my kinfolk who're Orthodox Jewish, who're parroting this line about how our household got here in legally. However, many, many 1000's of Jewish refugees from Germany weren’t capable of come in illegally — come in legally. They would have needed to come in illegally. Many of them have been turned away. Their ships have been turned away, and they died in focus camps. What my fellow Jewish Americans are saying after they’re saying we must always solely settle for individuals who come in legally is they're supporting the mass homicide of Jews who have been turned away from America’s shores. And that's one thing that I'll by no means do. I'll by no means flip away the victims of genocide.
So, this nice alternative idea is the core of the message of MAGA Republicanism, in this election and beforehand. It hyperlinks to the training framework, as a result of in training, what you do is you remove the historical past of nonwhite Christian cis males, and you as an alternative elevate the tales of nice white Christian males, who're supposedly what — the individuals who make our nation nice. And that manner, you possibly can characterize nonwhite immigration as an existential risk to the nation.
And what we all know from historical past is that nice alternative idea motivates mass violence. It motivates mass violence on the state stage and the particular person stage. We have many, many mass shootings since Anders Breivik in 2011 justified on the foundation of nice alternative idea about immigrants ruining the greatness and innocence of the nation. And it justifies, in fact, mass violence, as we’re seeing in India, after they characterize Muslims as type of overseas invaders, and, you recognize, there’s common lynchings. And it, in fact, was the core of Nazi ideology, when Hitler had this crazed conspiracy idea that Jews misplaced World War I to — betrayed Germany in World War I in order to convey in Black Senegalese troopers into the Rhineland to mate, have kids, rape and seduce German girls, to undermine the white race. So, that’s what we’re seeing. We know from historical past and the current what it justifies.
AMY GOODMAN: And what’s so fascinating is that, look, while you had the white supremacists marching in the University of Virginia, they have been marching chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, I all the time ask my college students a quiz once I’m instructing this materials. Are they saying Jews will numerically change Christian Americans? No, they’re saying Jews are behind the engineering of this alternative. What we’re now seeing is we’re seeing the Republicans say Democrats are behind this nice alternative. And that's really aiming political violence not simply in opposition to immigrants, however at their political opponents.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s return to Donald Trump in his debate with Kamala Harris, hosted by ABC News.
DONALD TRUMP: Because they’re destroying the cloth of our nation by what they’ve achieved. There’s by no means been something achieved like this in any respect. They’ve destroyed the cloth of our nation.
AMY GOODMAN: “They’ve destroyed the fabric of our country.” And, in fact, that is the similar debate the place he mentioned that Haitians are consuming your pets.
JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, when you have got correct historical past, when you knew, for instance, that Haiti had the solely profitable slave revolution in human historical past, then you definately would possibly be capable to see what the demonization of Haitian immigrants is doing. The demonization of Haitian immigrants has a number of points. It’s racist, in fact. It’s saying that — precisely like Hitler did with the Senegalese troopers, it’s saying that Black immigrants are going to undermine the character. So, trace, trace, what's the character of the nation? And it’s singling out Haitians is especially harmful. And that’s a shoutout to historical past, because it have been, since Haitians have been being punished by the world for his or her revolution for tons of of years.
AMY GOODMAN: I wished to go to Project 2025 and how that matches into Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. President Trump has needed to distance himself from this, regardless that one thing like effectively over 100 of his allies and aides have been concerned with writing Project 2025. It was achieved below the auspices of the Heritage Foundation. The head of it has simply written a guide. It has a foreword by JD Vance, and it’s been postponed for publication ’til after the election. But discuss the significance of it.
JASON STANLEY: The significance of Project 2025 is that it requires what in the Nazi parlance known as Gleichschaltung, the systematic alternative of civil servants by loyalists, by get together loyalists, and the systematic alternative of academics in faculties and universities and, in common, establishments all through society by get together loyalists.
In the case of training, it’s fully implausible that Trump is ideologically distant from the targets of Project 2025. Trump has repeatedly mentioned he’s going to focus on essential race idea, which, let’s face it, is solely Black historical past. The Project — he’s focused — he mentioned he’s going to interchange training with patriotic training — particularly, representing the United States as an distinctive grand nation whose exceptionality is because of its white Christian heterosexual males, who've outlined the nation.
So, in Project 2025, the civil rights agenda is to base civil rights enforcement on a correct understanding of the legal guidelines and eliminating essential race idea and gender ideology. In different phrases, civil rights regulation in faculties is totally there to ensure that there’s no racism in opposition to nondominant teams, in opposition to Black Americans. Civil rights regulation is there to ensure that LGBT kids or the kids in LGBT households aren't discriminated in opposition to. In different phrases, it is a mandate to remove civil rights enforcement.
Project 2025, in a weird type of quasi-fascist manner, targets funding for disabled college students. Of course, fascism includes privileging nondisabled individuals, privileging type of supposedly producers to the nation. And that, I discover a weird type of resonance of fascist ideology, to slash funding for disabled college students.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stanley, inform us who JD Vance is. I imply, he went to Yale Law School. You’re a professor of philosophy at Yale. He is the actual assault canine for Trump in, simply this weekend, seizing on the obvious assassination try, the second one in two months of Trump. He went after Democratic rivals for his or her rhetoric. This is Vance at a Faith and Freedom Coalition occasion in Atlanta on Monday.
SEN. JD VANCE: Well, you recognize the huge distinction between conservatives and liberals is that we now have — nobody has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the final couple of months, and two individuals now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the final couple of months. I’d say that’s fairly robust proof that the left must tone down their rhetoric and wants to chop this crap out.
AMY GOODMAN: I imply, that is fairly superb. He was following what Elon Musk had mentioned — you recognize, why haven’t individuals tried to assassinate Biden and Kamala? Why simply Trump? And then he needed to delete that tweet. Now he’s being investigated by the Secret Service. Tell us about JD Vance and additionally what's being mentioned about him at Yale.
JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, to begin with, Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was overwhelmed on the head with a hammer by somebody who — affected by Republican conspiracy theories. So, that that will get erased is type of stunning.
AMY GOODMAN: I imply, you had Don Trump Jr. mocking Paul Pelosi being hammered on the head, one thing he's affected by to today.
JASON STANLEY: Absolutely. So you have got a congratulations for violence.
AMY GOODMAN: And additionally, you have got Trump saying these are two far-left individuals who tried to assassinate him, once I suppose in each instances — I imply, the psychological well being issues of each males, you recognize, have but to be totally laid out, however they have been initially Trump supporters. And this final one, Rauth, voted for President Trump.
JASON STANLEY: Right. Misrepresentations of actuality, as we all know, are not any barrier to the marketing campaign that the Republicans are waging.
Now, JD Vance, I believe he ought to be regarded as one among the rising intellectuals of this authoritarian motion. Initially, individuals mentioned, “How could it be fascism when you don’t have intellectuals, the fascist intellectuals?” I believe that’s what we’re beginning to see. JD Vance is a Yale man. When I got here to Yale quickly after he left, everybody spoke glowingly about him. He is somebody that Yale loves, like Ron DeSantis, like Tom Cotton at Harvard. These leaders of this motion come from the very elite establishments that they're supposedly decrying. Both Vance and his partner are Yale graduates.
Now, Vance is totally inconsistent. Hillbilly Elegy is a guide about how poor whites reject meritocracy and the promise of America to wallow in self-pity and resentment. And now Vance is working a marketing campaign about self-pity and resentment, saying to the dominant group, “You’re being replaced by immigrants. Your misery is not your fault. It’s the fault of the very institutions that trained me to become the vice-presidential candidate of the United States and connected me to billionaires like Peter Thiel, who are supporting me, who are my mentors.” So, JD Vance comes from the billionaire world of personal fairness and hedge funds. So, he's being supported by billionaires who're exploiting, who need him to use resentment to elect an administration that’s going to chop their taxes and remove regulation in opposition to them.
So, JD Vance, I believe his inside ideology is a far-right, anti-woman ideology that's primarily based round nice alternative and natalism, the thought that girls ought to be having giant households, to interchange the true Americans, the actual Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: And then going after, in fact, the childless so-called cat girls.
JASON STANLEY: Absolutely, as a result of in this ideology, in this type of far-right fascist ideology, that pulls in each social conservatives, anti-democratic social conservatives, as the — in addition to type of macho males, who suppose males ought to be males, type of Musk, who additionally has rather a lot — you recognize, goes in for we now have to interchange our populations.
There’s a easy answer to coping with declining beginning charges in the United States, and it’s on the southern border. It’s immigration. If that’s actually what you care about, is declining U.S. populations, then you definately’re going to open the floodgates to immigration. Really, JD Vance is asking for there to be extra immigrants. But as a result of what is supposed are non-Black immigrants particularly, as a result of what is supposed are Christian immigrants — effectively, as a result of, sorry, what is supposed are Black immigrants and non-Christian immigrants as a risk to the nation, JD Vance is looking for inflexible gender roles, denouncing girls who don’t have kids. And that’s the ideology right here. That’s the ideology that sweeps in — that sweeps in social conservatives. They see girls’s rights being then diminished alongside the traces that democracy permits. It’s an anti-freedom agenda. Women’s rights are central to the democratic worth of freedom. And attacking girls’s rights is the most central manner — attacking the freedoms of fifty% of the inhabitants is the most central technique to assault freedom.
AMY GOODMAN: I wished to change gears and go to Israel. You’re the son of Holocaust survivors. I wished to speak about the situation. You have the faculty campuses, encampments throughout the nation, and you have got what’s instantly taking place in Gaza and the West Bank. Last 12 months, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke at a convention in Paris, France, the place he mentioned there’s, quote, “no such thing as Palestinian people.”
BEZALEL SMOTRICH: [translated] There’s no such factor as a Palestinian individuals. … Do you recognize who’s Palestinian? I'm Palestinian. … My late grandfather, who's Thirteenth-generation Jerusalemite, is the true Palestinian. … The Palestinian individuals are an invention that's lower than 100 years outdated.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you discuss what Smotrich is saying?
JASON STANLEY: Smotrich is paving the manner for genocide. If there are not any Palestinians, then there are not any Palestinians to evict, there’s no Palestinians to starve, there’s no Palestinians to kill. So, I believe it’s mistaken to get slowed down in the query of whether or not Israel is a colonial nation, colonialist nation. It’s fully apparent that Israel is partaking in colonialist practices. And that’s what we must always focus on.
They’re erasing the historical past of Palestinians in order to evict them from the nation, to limit their rights. One would — what liberal Democrat would countenance the thought of a rustic that should stay as — have as a majority one ethnic or spiritual group? That’s not one thing that we'd stand for in Western Europe, for instance. So, this erasure of Palestinian individuals, this illustration of them as missing a historic declare and rights, it permits for stereotypes, equivalent to Palestinians are unjustifiably reacting to the circumstances they’re in. And now, I don’t wish to justify the actions of Hamas, that are horrific, and the terrorist actions of October seventh. But to erase the Palestinian individuals from historical past is what underlies what we’re presently seeing, which is an lively genocide in progress.
AMY GOODMAN: You have JD Vance saying that “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Your response?
JASON STANLEY: Well, we all know the individuals in query weren't motivated by that. I believe they have been motivated by attempting to get themselves in historical past books by assassinating some well-known particular person, as a result of, ideologically, they weren't — they have been, if something, Trump supporters, so apolitical or Trump supporters. So that’s an total mischaracterization. And at the similar time, you’re focusing on your political opponents, the Democrats, as the people who find themselves behind the supposed alternative of Americans, and, due to this fact, an existential risk to the greatness of the nation. We must do not forget that this focusing on of political opponents is extraordinarily harmful and a attribute of authoritarian regimes about to interact in both violence or different courtroom strategies, utilizing the justice system to focus on their opponents.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you finish your guide by exploring how reclaiming historical past is an act of resistance in opposition to authoritarian regimes that search to erase the previous. Why don’t you wrap up along with your closing ideas?
JASON STANLEY: So, while you — authoritarians have to create a situation the place all of us concern one another, the totally different teams in a rustic all concern one another, so we want an authoritarian chief. So, the dominant group wants an authoritarian chief to guard them in opposition to predators focusing on their household or immigrants changing the nation.
What reclaiming historical past and reclaiming views does is it humanizes the individuals that you just’re alleged to concern, that the authoritarian units you as much as concern. It explains their perspective. And since democracy is a system the place all of us want to know one another’s views in order to have a democracy in any respect, particularly the views of nondominant teams who've been denied the democratic beliefs of freedom and equality, reclaiming historical past, reclaiming perspective, saying that is what it feels wish to be a Black American in the United States, that is what it appears like in Hungary to be the youngster of Holocaust — to be a Holocaust survivor. Like Toni Morrison is being banned in the United States, Imre Kertész, his work, a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, is being faraway from faculties in Hungary. So that’s very typical. So, putting these views in —
AMY GOODMAN: And, in fact, Donald Trump regularly, proper via this presidential debate, holding up Orbán as an ideal chief.
JASON STANLEY: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: The Hungarian ruler.
JASON STANLEY: Orbán is their mannequin, which is utilizing the courts to focus on universities, taking on the courts, utilizing the courts to buttress this type of kleptocracy and crony capitalism that the billionaire class in America is hoping for, I believe mistakenly. They’re hoping to get a leg up, the laws slashed, and they’re hoping to, early on, align themselves with this —
AMY GOODMAN: Why mistakenly?
JASON STANLEY: Mistakenly as a result of simply take a look at Vladimir Putin’s Russia. How effectively has it labored out for the oligarchs there? This is all the time a mistake that oligarchs make. They suppose that they’ll be capable to management their little dictator. And that could be a profound error.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wish to thanks a lot for being with us and additionally penning this guide. Jason Stanley, creator and professor of philosophy at Yale University. His new guide, simply out, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He’s additionally creator of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. To see Part 1 of our dialog, go to democracynow.org.
I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for becoming a member of us.
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