If Books Could Kill - Liberal Fascism

00:00:00.000 The EQ for this show is different than the one for 5-4, so you're like 6% sexier on this show.

00:00:04.740 That's all me.

00:00:05.560 You're welcome, Peter.

00:00:06.400 I've never had a girl email the 5-4 podcast saying that they have a crush on me, but it's happened like twice now.

00:00:13.120 And every single one of our reviews is like, who's this sexy guy and why is the woman he's with so hysterical?

00:00:19.360 These are the comments that I get on the internet.

00:00:21.420 Who's that sexy jock and his data-obsessed female friend?

00:00:25.020 okay tell me if this uh zinger is bad all right michael peter what do you know about liberal

00:00:35.560 fascism is that the kind where there are mass graves but they're only full of gas stoves

00:00:55.020 Have you ever seen the cover of this book?

00:00:58.180 Oh, God, isn't it like the smiley face with like a Hitler mustache?

00:01:02.720 That is right. 1.00

00:01:03.460 I got to say, it was a good idea.

00:01:06.300 It stops being good after the cover, but the cover kind of rules, I have to admit. 0.83

00:01:11.260 Yeah, it's a smiley face with a little Hitler mustache.

00:01:14.040 And that is Jonah Goldberg, the author, telling you that liberal fascism is sort of fascism with a polite face.

00:01:24.360 fascists are known for being like too nice yeah too accepting now this book in the broadest strokes

00:01:30.240 is about how it's actually liberals who are kind of fascists and not just that but fascism itself

00:01:38.480 is a liberal project more than a conservative one oh history teaches us so if you've ever heard

00:01:45.920 someone say like did you know that nazis were socialists right this book is sort of like the

00:01:52.300 origin story for a lot of those arguments. Oh, yeah. You can sort of infer based on the basic

00:01:58.380 description of the thesis that this is not a real history book, right? Jonah Goldberg is not a

00:02:04.320 historian. He is a pundit. The project of the book is not to explain history. It is to provide

00:02:10.860 arguments for modern conservatives who are being called fascists. And he opens the book

00:02:18.620 by talking about that, by saying that conservatives are sort of recklessly

00:02:22.920 targeted with accusations of fascism. And like his whole project is just turning those guns around

00:02:29.660 and pointing them back at liberals. This is ammunition for the arguments in your head

00:02:35.300 that you're having with like fake college sophomores. Right. The purple haired feminists

00:02:39.920 that exist exclusively on right wing websites and not in the real world. This is how to own 1.00

00:02:45.100 those little chipmunks. You know, a lot of our books are super popular with the public,

00:02:48.940 but ignored by the serious people. This one is basically the exact opposite. It's not a mega

00:02:55.860 bestseller. It sells well, but it's very popular among conservatives and especially like conservative

00:03:02.800 elites. Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House and Mitt Romney's running mate,

00:03:08.100 cited it as an influence back in the day. Ted Cruz said that he was a big fan in the 2016

00:03:14.500 campaign. It is a grueling book to experience, Michael, just like arduous to read because every

00:03:21.480 page is political philosophy, which, you know, I hate. Yes. And also history that you read and

00:03:28.420 you're like, that doesn't sound right. And you have to look it up and you're like, no, I guess

00:03:31.620 it wasn't really right. Right. It was a nightmare to try to like debunk this book. My indicator of

00:03:37.700 how infuriating a book is, is how often I'm doing alt tab to go over to like another window to be

00:03:43.440 like okay i gotta fucking google this now right this seems like a uh a very frequent alt tabber

00:03:49.540 do you know anything about jonah goldberg himself he's just like a generic national review guy 0.89

00:03:54.760 that's right uh he's still i think an anti-trump republican to this day which i guess adorable

00:04:00.560 shows some some level of intellectual honesty or steadfastness relative to his peers he's only

00:04:07.000 against the liberal kind of fascism though that's right he's not really animated by like the fascism

00:04:11.420 fascism. He's working on like his Trump is a liberal book or something. He is a Nepo baby.

00:04:17.500 His mom was a literary agent and Republican activist who, fun fact, was the person who 0.94

00:04:25.200 told Linda Tripp to record her phone calls with Monica Lewinsky. God, if only the never Trumpers

00:04:31.060 could harness like one percent of the energy of the never Clintons. It's like fusion versus vision.

00:04:37.000 All right. So let's talk about the thesis here. He says that, quote, fascism is and always has

00:04:43.820 been a phenomenon of the left. Yes. Many of the ideas and impulses that inform what we call

00:04:51.240 liberalism come to us through an intellectual tradition that led directly to fascism.

00:04:57.560 OK, so I'm already seeing the pattern here where it's like the ideas, the impulses,

00:05:03.180 the tradition yeah and not like the outcomes yes he uses the term echoes quite a bit a huge

00:05:10.700 percentage of this book is him being like look obviously this isn't the same thing as you know

00:05:16.740 the brown shirt nazis but it echoes a lot of the same ideas when you think about it me asking your

00:05:24.520 pronouns and me putting you in the gulag are roughly the same thing he i mean it's it's

00:05:29.240 incredibly funny how often he gives that caveat of like I'm not saying they're the same and then

00:05:34.060 we'll make a direct analogy to like Nazi Germany so a couple of big caveats up top when he says

00:05:42.260 liberalism he is referring to modern progressivism not like classical liberalism which he considers

00:05:49.200 to be like conservative right like libertarianism he considers that to be functionally conservative

00:05:53.960 right so and that's important because like Mussolini expressly said that he's anti-liberal

00:05:58.960 And what he meant was classical liberalism.

00:06:00.680 So obviously Goldberg has to make sure that that's not what he's saying.

00:06:04.060 He's talking about you, our democratic voting listener.

00:06:08.120 This is an extended subtweet of Rachel Maddow.

00:06:10.100 Yeah.

00:06:10.320 Let's be clear.

00:06:10.960 Right.

00:06:11.500 The whole book is very kitchen sink.

00:06:13.800 He's constantly drawing every parallel he can between liberals and fascists and liberalism

00:06:18.100 and fascism.

00:06:19.400 He will find associations between historical progressives and historical fascists, some

00:06:24.960 of which are legitimate, some of which are a stretch.

00:06:27.020 and then he'll also just try to connect these ideals in like very very abstract ways right

00:06:33.480 do you know who else was a vegetarian i'm expecting that to come up that will come up

00:06:38.300 yes that is not a small part of this book uh impossible to satirize the argument he's making

00:06:46.060 in advance so the single biggest issue with this book is that if you want to draw connections

00:06:51.920 between liberalism and fascism, you probably need like coherent and accurate definitions of both

00:06:58.580 terms. Or do you? So I'm going to send you his definition of fascism. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry

00:07:07.100 that we are now reading a definition of fascism. Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes

00:07:12.940 the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the

00:07:18.920 people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any

00:07:24.000 action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all

00:07:29.000 aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of

00:07:33.460 thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything,

00:07:38.740 including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity

00:07:44.040 is part of the quote-unquote problem and therefore defined as the enemy.

00:07:48.640 I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

00:07:55.060 It actually says liberal sim, but I'm assuming that's your typo and not his.

00:07:58.960 You assume incorrectly.

00:08:00.660 That is a typo that is present in the definition of fascism in the first edition of this book.

00:08:08.740 Yeah, I'm willing to forgive a couple typos, but the thing that sticks out to me is this

00:08:13.080 whether by force or through regulation and social pressure right because like what people object to

00:08:19.140 about fascism is the force part if it's regulation then we're just talking about like yeah the

00:08:24.080 government has like food safety laws and then we all don't get sick you can see that he's sort of

00:08:29.400 like creating a definition such that he can bring in like really mundane government regulation

00:08:36.160 right and social norms changing and things like that right and also social norms are

00:08:40.900 just irrelevant to this because like a social norm, like, I don't know, it used to be cool to

00:08:45.900 smoke and now like it's a lot less cool to smoke. There's no way that that's fascism. That's just

00:08:50.520 like changing. Oh, there's no way that that's fascism, Michael. You're going to learn. He says

00:08:57.300 fascism is the religion of the state where any action by the state is justified to achieve the

00:09:04.780 common good. I want to dissect this a little bit nerdily because there is a problem here,

00:09:09.460 which is that it's missing what most scholars agree is like the key component of fascism.

00:09:16.120 Trains. Roger Griffin, a scholar of fascism, defines fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism.

00:09:23.280 Palingenesis essentially means a national rebirth. The idea that we as a people were once great

00:09:30.240 and have somehow lost our way, but that we will restore our former greatness. And then there's

00:09:37.120 the ultra nationalist part, which means that the national rebirth will center around a specific

00:09:42.840 identity, a specific in group. Wait, so make America great again is like the perfect encapsulation

00:09:48.960 of this basically. Jonah does get a little bit owned by the fact that Trump's messaging is like

00:09:55.840 relatively fascist. We've lost our national greatness. Let's restore it. He's also leaving

00:10:01.620 out a lot of smaller things like nativism militarism heavy reliance on the police right

00:10:08.220 all common features of fascism according to scholars and i'm not trying to say this as like

00:10:13.400 a gotcha to be like he got the definition of fascism wrong i'm bringing it up because this

00:10:17.580 is why fascism is considered right wing right it's about hierarchy and tradition authority and order

00:10:24.360 but he leaves all that out of his definition because then you might start to realize why

00:10:29.640 every scholar on earth thinks that fascism is right wing.

00:10:33.020 Right. He's basically leaving out all the parts that would make him sound like a fascist.

00:10:36.760 Right.

00:10:37.400 Like fascism is obsessed with tradition and hierarchy and the use of force. And also,

00:10:43.620 you're a fascist if you don't honor our brave first responders.

00:10:46.680 Another little sleight of hand here is that Goldberg says that fascism is about using the

00:10:52.080 state to achieve the common good. But as some scholars pointed out when this came out,

00:10:58.420 it's distinctly not about the common good it's about in-group domination it's the the good for

00:11:05.020 one group of people fascism is very bad for some specific groups of people uh the whole point of

00:11:11.380 goldberg's definition is that it's designed from the bottom up so that he can basically say that

00:11:15.220 like anything the government does or any attempt to do anything for the common good is a little

00:11:20.720 bit fascist while also leaving out the elements of fascism that are just very obviously right wing

00:11:26.060 Right. Throughout the book, he sort of defines conservatism as like laissez-faire libertarianism, which is like a very convenient way to define it if you're trying to avoid accusations of fascism. Right.

00:11:37.540 So he's clearly backfilling this to fit his conclusions. He's basically like the dictionary defines fascism as a woman with short hair with a talk show where she talks about the Russia investigation.

00:11:48.480 Just doing Merriam-Webster here.

00:11:50.600 Maybe the single wildest part of this book is that despite it being half of the title, he does not at any point just sit down and clearly define liberalism.

00:12:00.700 Oh, he says that he's referring to like modern American liberalism, but he never concisely defines what that means to him, which, again, just allows him to evade the fact that like he if he just listed out the tenets of modern progressivism, you might notice that many of them are not compatible with fascism.

00:12:19.900 right commitment to egalitarianism pluralism democracy all parts of modern progressivism

00:12:26.600 right and i think all things you'd have a hard time squaring with fascism which is distinctly

00:12:31.900 anti-egalitarian anti-pluralistic right because again fascism is about the ascendance and

00:12:37.660 domination of the in-group right that's just like big picture philosophy words there's also like

00:12:43.320 human rights what if not torturing prisoners goes too far fascist much so yeah uh right now

00:12:51.360 we're like 25 pages into this book uh he we are starting off with a definition of fascism that

00:12:56.580 does not align with any scholarly definitions of fascism he does not define liberalism at all

00:13:01.760 and uh yet i am contractually obligated to continue reading

00:13:07.040 how many pages was this peter it's like 500 jesus christ really i don't understand why

00:13:14.540 this keeps happening to me but i've got to start looking up page numbers before i agree to do a

00:13:21.420 book how do you stretch an argument this bad to that long it's kind of impressive honestly

00:13:27.080 one one big feature of this book is that goldberg is constantly saying like liberals and the

00:13:32.400 mainstream media never talk about this oh yeah great but he like doesn't actually ever provide

00:13:37.720 any evidence of the information being ignored or suppressed or whatever right and it often seems

00:13:43.200 like stuff that's either common knowledge or at least well known to people who are loosely familiar

00:13:48.520 with history for example a huge part of the book a big theme throughout is pointing out that the

00:13:54.560 early progressive movement had ties with the eugenics movement yeah which is entirely true

00:14:00.920 yeah and also something i learned in like junior year history yeah it's like when someone says

00:14:05.860 like did you know that it was republicans who freed the slaves and it's like yeah i paid attention in 0.84

00:14:11.660 10th grade you fucking dumb right and like did anything uh relevant happen in the 150 years 0.95

00:14:17.360 since then do you want to mention or we're just going to do that and then skip to now now i i 0.99

00:14:20.720 want to send an example it's a nuanced one uh and i'm sort of genuinely interested in your reaction

00:14:27.680 here. Oh my God. Consider the infamous Tuskegee experiments where poor black men were allegedly

00:14:35.240 infected with syphilis without their knowledge and then monitored for years. I have some comments

00:14:40.940 already. In the common telling, the episode is an example of Southern racism and American

00:14:46.320 backwardness. In some versions, black men were even deliberately infected with syphilis as part 0.59

00:14:51.740 of some kind of embryonic genocidal program. In fact, the Tuskegee experiments were approved and 0.82

00:14:57.440 supported by well-meaning health professionals who saw nothing wrong or racist with playing God.

00:15:02.820 As the University of Chicago's Richard Schweder writes, the study emerged out of a liberal

00:15:07.740 progressive public health movement concerned about the health and well-being of the African

00:15:11.840 American population. If racism played a part, as it undoubtedly did, it was the racism of liberals,

00:15:17.960 not conservatives. But that's not how the story is told.

00:15:22.640 Uh, Peter.

00:15:24.260 All right. Let's break this down because I think this is a nice archetypal Goldberg anecdote. He sort of like ascribes a preexisting liberal narrative to this. He's like, everyone blames this on Southern racism, but it was actually liberal institutional racism. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. The way that it's taught, in my view, in my experience, has been that it's an example of institutional racism.

00:15:51.360 Like, he's just sort of being like liberals might have taught you that this was the fault

00:15:55.460 of racist Southerners.

00:15:56.800 And it's like, no, I don't think that they did, dude.

00:15:59.180 I don't think that anyone who genuinely learned about the Tuskegee experiments viewed it like

00:16:02.940 this.

00:16:03.240 You've just sort of like ascribed a narrative to it and then debunked that straw man narrative.

00:16:07.680 I realize he's saying this before Twitter, but it's it's very similar to a lot of conservative

00:16:11.500 arguments now where it's it's basically people on Twitter saying this.

00:16:15.380 But that's not true.

00:16:16.600 Right.

00:16:16.860 It's like, well, what's the authority that you're pointing to?

00:16:20.080 And then you throw on top of that his references to how maybe these men were purposefully infected with syphilis.

00:16:26.540 Which isn't true.

00:16:27.280 Which is, in fact, a common myth.

00:16:28.680 You know, me and Sarah did two episodes on the Tuskegee experiments.

00:16:31.700 And they were, like, basically inspired by, like, this liberal idea of, like, we have to help black people.

00:16:37.120 Like, this was before there were any effective treatments for syphilis.

00:16:39.800 And, like, it was done by large-scale philanthropies. 0.97

00:16:42.600 So, like, you could say that it was liberals, but also racism was so fucking bipartisan at that point. 0.98

00:16:48.620 Yeah. 0.99

00:16:48.800 It's not like the liberals were like, let's do this to black people.

00:16:52.540 And there were conservatives being like, no, that's against like Frederick Hagel or whatever. 0.97

00:16:57.900 Everyone thought that syphilis was different in black people than it was in white people because black people were like less evolved. 0.99

00:17:03.800 Yeah. 1.00

00:17:04.040 That was like a universal fucking belief at the time. 0.96

00:17:06.560 I think this is a really good example of like a bunch of his how a bunch of his anecdotes work where like there's a real truth in there, but he frames it in a really dishonest way. 0.97

00:17:18.040 But that's not how the story is told.

00:17:20.780 Yeah.

00:17:21.020 And then also he mentions like maybe maybe these men were purposefully infected with syphilis, which is a myth.

00:17:27.440 And just sort of like unveils how hollow his commitment to the actual truth is.

00:17:33.820 Right.

00:17:34.220 Right.

00:17:34.380 It's like Wikipedia level mistake.

00:17:36.140 Right.

00:17:36.400 Yeah.

00:17:36.800 So one of the first substantive chapters is about Mussolini.

00:17:40.360 It starts with a similar sort of framing, which I will send you.

00:17:43.840 Mussolini was bad and liberals don't want to talk about it.

00:17:46.880 I feel owned.

00:17:47.840 I feel pre-owned like a Toyota by this quote that you're about to send me.

00:17:53.580 All right.

00:17:54.380 He says, if you went solely by what you read in the New York Times or the New York Review

00:17:59.200 of Books or what you learned from Hollywood, you could be forgiven for thinking that Benito

00:18:03.700 Mussolini came to power around the same time as Adolf Hitler or even a little bit later

00:18:08.640 and that Italian fascism was merely a tardy, watered down version of Nazism.

00:18:14.120 What?

00:18:14.340 Does the New York Times ever say that? Has the New York Review of Books ever published that Mussolini came to power after Hitler?

00:18:24.580 Yeah. The liberal media doesn't want to admit like the basic timeline of when people became the heads of state.

00:18:30.360 It's very it's very baffling to me. But again, he needs to insert this framing such that he is like telling you the real version of history.

00:18:39.140 Right. I would be shocked if you could find a single example of either the New York Times or the New York Review of Books implying or saying outright that Mussolini came to power after Hitler.

00:18:50.340 Right. That basically Mussolini was like NSYNC to Hitler's Backstreet Boys.

00:18:54.700 Worse of the version. 0.59

00:18:56.160 I actually don't know which one was technically first, even though I view Backstreet Boys as the OG.

00:19:02.580 If someone told me actually NSYNC was founded first, I wouldn't know that that was wrong.

00:19:06.680 Well, that's because you can't read it in the New York Times or New York Review of Books

00:19:08.780 or Hollywood.

00:19:09.340 They don't want to tell you.

00:19:10.240 They don't tell you.

00:19:11.360 That the Backstreet Boys were first.

00:19:12.260 They won't admit it.

00:19:13.560 So the Mussolini chapter is actually like a really good microcosm of how the book operates

00:19:18.700 in general.

00:19:19.300 A lot of it is just describing a smattering of progressive people and institutions who

00:19:24.740 showed various affinities for Mussolini in the 1920s.

00:19:28.840 So Goldberg is naming journalists and politicians and educational institutions, etc.

00:19:34.240 that admired Mussolini in some regard, which is not inaccurate. Mussolini was actually quite

00:19:40.540 popular in America in the 1920s. Now, there is no actual data, nor is there an effort to show

00:19:47.620 that Mussolini's popularity was something limited to liberals or even predominantly liberal. And so

00:19:55.040 I went to his source and his primary source is John Patrick Diggins, a historian who wrote a

00:20:01.180 seminal book in the early 1970s called Mussolini and Fascism, The View from America.

00:20:06.680 The heart of Diggins's book is just giving examples of literally hundreds of American

00:20:12.420 people and institutions who were either supporters or opponents of Mussolini.

00:20:16.900 Diggins makes it clear that this was from across the political spectrum.

00:20:21.100 To give some examples, he talks about how the largest pro-fascist outlet in the 1920s

00:20:26.720 in America was probably a conservative paper, the Saturday Evening Post.

00:20:30.600 massive circulation. On the other hand, The Nation, the liberal magazine, was one of the most

00:20:35.720 vociferous anti-fascist publications of the decade. And The New York Times was one of the

00:20:41.180 first major publications to identify Italy as a dictatorship. What Goldberg is doing is going

00:20:47.380 through that book and handpicking out the progressives who supported Mussolini and just

00:20:52.320 ignoring the conservatives. And it's clearly intentional because there's no way you could

00:20:57.120 read Diggins in good faith and just miss them. One of the most notable pro-Mussolini figures

00:21:02.880 in the country at the time was Richard Washburn Child, a Republican political operative who would

00:21:08.900 go on to help ghostwrite Mussolini's autobiography. Then there's the fact that the conservative

00:21:14.120 Coolidge administration coordinated with Mussolini's government to prosecute anti-fascist

00:21:19.100 labor activists in America and then only back down after a campaign of pressure from liberal

00:21:25.780 media outlets and labor, I could just cherry pick a few anecdotes like this and write a whole book

00:21:31.560 called conservative fascism or whatever. And it would be just as dishonest as what Goldberg is

00:21:37.200 doing. He's casting it as accepted by one side, but it's actually accepted by everybody.

00:21:44.080 Oh, God. I've been sitting on that. I haven't been listening for the last couple of minutes.

00:21:49.040 I've just been sitting on that. I'm always I'm always struck with these arguments that it's like

00:21:53.600 it's so much less fucking interesting that's the thing i ended up reading diggins's book almost in

00:21:59.600 full and it's it's fascinating people should read it yeah you're not going to learn anything from 0.53

00:22:04.120 goldberg because goldberg is sitting down trying to get from point a to point b and that means

00:22:10.980 expressly ignoring a shitload of the history that he's reading i like that you do retain the capacity

00:22:17.160 to enjoy books well i was reading it out of anger the best reading i went to the source and i was 0.99

00:22:25.260 like i knew he was lying this motherfucker and then i continued to read being like i got you 1.00

00:22:30.700 you motherfucker you lying piece of shit i can only read if i'm doing it with the purpose of 1.00

00:22:36.860 trying to feel smarter than the author of another book yeah the uh the way to get americans reading 1.00

00:22:42.320 again spite i'm gonna hit you with a another chapter title here okay

00:22:46.680 chapter two adolf hitler colon man of the left hell yeah other than the vegetarianism how the 0.96

00:22:57.480 fuck is he getting there what do you mean other than the vegetarianism michael 0.55

00:23:01.600 so yeah this chapter is dedicated to the idea that hitler and the nazis were leftists he has 0.99

00:23:10.560 a few different discreet arguments he says quote hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left

00:23:15.820 because first and foremost he was a revolutionary what broadly speaking the left is the party of

00:23:21.220 change and the right the party of the status quo uh for the left revolution is always good what

00:23:28.500 again who where a lot of the chapter is just about how nazis in germany often adopted

00:23:34.600 anti-capitalist rhetoric, especially early in their rise to power, which is absolutely true.

00:23:40.600 But again, another instance where it's instructive to look at what he does not

00:23:44.620 talk about. He doesn't talk about how both the Nazis and the Italian fascists led violent

00:23:50.600 campaigns against labor unions from their inception. He doesn't mention that Hitler

00:23:55.520 abolished trade unions in 1933. He doesn't mention that the first death camps were for

00:24:00.820 socialists. He also does not talk about the fact that like the Nazis were adopting, for example,

00:24:05.820 religious rhetoric early on before they abandoned it. And in fact, you know, became much more

00:24:12.240 expressly anti-religious. Another thing that makes fascists bad is that they fucking lie to get into 1.00

00:24:17.100 power when they have no interest in doing any of that stuff. That's the thing. That's the thing is 0.99

00:24:21.440 that there are scholars who point out that the heart of fascism is attaining power. Yeah. And

00:24:29.100 Therefore, you should be looking at their actions much more than their rhetoric because

00:24:33.720 their rhetoric is like necessarily dishonest, right?

00:24:37.720 Yeah.

00:24:37.840 One of the most interesting things I read about fascism when I was doing research was that

00:24:42.340 it's not actually inherently authoritarian either.

00:24:46.540 It's just that over time, in order to retain power, it will almost inevitably become authoritarian

00:24:53.380 because there is no other way to hang on to power.

00:24:55.460 No, that's another reason why these regimes oftentimes become really conspiratorial is because they make all these promises that they don't actually intend to keep. 0.99

00:25:02.280 They get into power and then eventually their voters are like, wait a minute, you promised us all this great shit. 0.99

00:25:06.660 Right. 0.99

00:25:06.900 And they're like, oh, there's a conspiracy against me, right?

00:25:09.060 This is where we get the deep state stuff.

00:25:11.140 This is what Milosevic did as soon as he was in power.

00:25:14.240 He's like blaming, oh, the people around me can't be trusted, blah, blah, blah.

00:25:18.600 They're just saying, again, they're just saying what they need to say to stay in power.

00:25:22.500 They don't actually have like a coherent description of what they want.

00:25:26.260 I'm going to send you something.

00:25:27.480 God, I'm getting fired up, Peter.

00:25:28.800 I'm like sitting up in my chair.

00:25:30.240 I knew that philosophical discussions of fascism would get you going.

00:25:33.820 I know. You mentioned the Tuskegee experiment and Hitler. 0.59

00:25:36.660 Like I lived in Berlin for seven years. 0.98

00:25:38.500 Like I feel very strongly about this stuff.

00:25:41.120 All right. I just sent you something.

00:25:43.040 He says, consider the explosion of health and new age crusades in recent years

00:25:48.580 from the war on smoking to the obsession with animal rights to the sanctification of organic

00:25:55.040 foods. No one disputes that these fads are a product of the cultural and political left,

00:26:00.680 but few are willing to grapple with the fact that we've seen this sort of thing before. 0.99

00:26:04.820 Oh, fuck. Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of 0.99

00:26:11.700 natural healing. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies.

00:26:17.360 Hitler and his advisors dedicated hours of their time to discussions of the need to move the entire nation to vegetarianism as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism.

00:26:28.660 In profound ways, the Nazi anti-smoking and public health drives foreshadowed today's crusades against junk foods, trans fats, and the like. 0.53

00:26:39.040 A Hitler Youth Manual proclaimed, nutrition is not a private matter, a mantra substantially echoed by the public health establishment today.

00:26:47.960 So as the co-host of a health and wellness podcast, I'm interested in your thoughts.

00:26:53.280 Well, the thing is, is a lot of people don't know that Hitler actually coined the phrase don't mess with Texas as an anti-littering campaign.

00:27:01.120 He was also very against littering.

00:27:02.460 That's how you know he's a liberal. 0.99

00:27:04.140 God, this is fucking bleak, though, dude. 0.99

00:27:06.540 I mean, it's just the thinnest guilt by association sort of reasoning you can comprehend. 0.99

00:27:11.880 Yeah.

00:27:12.120 I mean, there were generally like relatively aggressive health and wellness campaigns in

00:27:16.540 Germany.

00:27:17.380 There were animal rights protections that were relatively progressive, shall we say. 0.95

00:27:24.320 So there's truth here. 0.93

00:27:25.740 Hitler became a vegetarian in something like 1937, 1938.

00:27:30.220 There are mixed reports of how dedicated he was.

00:27:33.240 One of the most consistent reports across multiple sources is that he continued to eat liver dumplings.

00:27:38.420 Ew.

00:27:38.880 However, it does seem to be true that Hitler was a vegetarian and that his primary reason eventually became animal rights to some degree, that he really did not enjoy, that he really struggled with the idea of animal suffering.

00:27:54.300 Very sort of Tony Soprano, you know, the animals are innocent and pure and human beings are corrupt.

00:28:02.680 and debased yeah it's what's interesting is all of this stuff is based on this weird sort of

00:28:08.020 hierarchical view of the world right hierarchies of species and hierarchies within humanity right

00:28:14.300 that people who are like strong and masculine are like the most superior humans and this this is

00:28:20.560 where we get the stuff about like killing people with disabilities and this idea of sort of like

00:28:24.200 weakness and like scrawniness being like the next group that was going to get targeted by these 0.98

00:28:30.240 fucking purges because the whole thing is about establishing a ladder of superiority so like 0.98

00:28:34.520 after you wipe out one group you just start looking at who's left right the whole thing 0.99

00:28:38.380 comes from a a fascistic worldview not from like a liberal worldview right so he says that this is

00:28:45.160 all about like the fascist obsession with the organic order but like yeah is his position that

00:28:51.360 there is no public interest in health at all that's just sort of convoluted not to mention

00:28:57.680 that like he mentions hitler youth multiple times when talking about health and like membership in

00:29:02.780 hitler youth was mandatory you know what i mean like this is not the same thing as like a commercial

00:29:08.980 telling you to eat your vegetables or some shit that's like put out by uh some government funded

00:29:15.320 health organization right you know the book is about collapsing these distinctions and making 0.97

00:29:20.200 it seem as if this is all on one spectrum he's basically acting as if any public health measure

00:29:26.220 would be fascist. This is one of the themes of the book. And remember, I mentioned that he sort

00:29:31.980 of defines conservatism as like libertarian, essentially. Right. Anything that involves

00:29:37.620 the conception, even like the contemplation of the public sphere and the common good,

00:29:44.200 he would categorize as being like a little bit fascist. Right. If you categorize basically all

00:29:49.120 large scale government efforts as an echo of fascism, then like, yeah, liberals are extremely 0.94

00:29:54.260 fascist. Right. If that's if you're defining it in this totally incoherent way. So let's talk 0.92

00:30:00.000 about racism, which is part of his Nazi section. And he also has a separate chapter about liberal

00:30:06.420 racism. Again, it's just this idea that like the recognition of racial differences is either racist

00:30:13.500 or upstream of Nazism in some way. Sure. I do feel like this is one of this argument comes up all the 0.56

00:30:20.040 fucking time in like reactionary centrist things now and it's literally like aren't the people 0.99

00:30:25.400 trying to eradicate minorities the same as people trying to empower minorities like it's the dumbest 1.00

00:30:32.380 fucking thing when you when you recognize that racial differences are real you're doing step one 0.99

00:30:38.960 right that's their that's what their view is yeah it's like step one is you say those people are 0.99

00:30:44.360 different than me right step 25 is the camps right that's that's how they're conceptualizing

00:30:50.760 it whereas like the obvious retort is like it's not that we are recognizing racial differences

00:30:56.460 per se we are recognizing that people are treated differently based on these perceived differences 0.74

00:31:02.280 right that is not the same fucking thing right he's conflating the anodyne like generic first 0.79

00:31:08.540 step of a process with like a very specific odious outcome. He's basically saying like, 0.93

00:31:14.700 oh, a guy drove to a place where he killed a bunch of puppies. And so when you drive,

00:31:21.340 you're echoing the puppy killer. Like, I don't know if he realizes that this framework would

00:31:27.780 essentially invalidate all human behavior. So Goldberg says, well, first of all,

00:31:32.840 brace yourself, a content warning. Quote, the Nazis played the same games against the Jews

00:31:38.120 that today's left plays against whiteness oh my fucking god later he goes on to say quote 0.99

00:31:45.080 the white male is the jew of liberal fascism oh jonah later in the paragraph slow it says quote 0.99

00:31:52.980 now this is not a genocidal movement no one is suggesting that white people be rounded up and

00:31:59.100 put in the camps but the principles passions and argumentation have troubling echoes

00:32:05.540 i told you i told you this should be echoing oh my god in the same way that like thomas friedman

00:32:12.960 did not understand metaphors it's not clear to me that jonah goldberg understands comparisons

00:32:19.080 like it would be really weird to be like mike and peter are just like eric harris and dylan

00:32:26.720 klebold now i'm not saying they want to shoot up a school like there are specific reasons why

00:32:33.920 historical figures and events are well known. And if you're going to make the comparison,

00:32:39.720 then you have to be drawing a parallel to that central reason. Like, I would not compare Jonah

00:32:45.880 Goldberg to Ben Shapiro unless I was talking about his inability to make his wife wet. 0.99

00:32:50.560 Even putting aside how dumb the comparison is, it always cracks me up. And people on the left do 0.99

00:32:54.760 this too. When people say something like, this is a less severe version of Nazism. Because like,

00:33:01.040 it's the severity that really made the nazis unique wasn't it they're not the first racist

00:33:06.600 or something yeah right like that's not what was happening with the nazis also if we're doing

00:33:10.880 slippery slope arguments isn't he saying like the identity politics people are similar to the nazis 0.98

00:33:16.200 isn't he also on the same slippery slope oh shit you got him you got you're right he's he is saying 0.99

00:33:22.060 that we need to be stopped like the nazis were stopped right god i hate how talking about his 0.99

00:33:27.000 book is making me as stupid as his book the nazi parts of this book and like the discussions of 0.99

00:33:32.120 racism are so fucking tiring because he's always weaving between these like abstractions and these 1.00

00:33:38.640 cherry-picked anecdotes to show vague ties between nazis and the left but like nazis still exist 0.98

00:33:46.120 and when they have rallies they don't call them the unite the left rally yeah you know what i mean

00:33:51.260 Not only that, but there are tons of historical American fascist groups, right?

00:33:56.600 There's the Silver Shirts, who were Nazi supporters who were active during the 30s.

00:34:01.640 The American Nazi Party from the mid-century, the National Alliance.

00:34:06.580 You'd think that if you wanted to do like an actual survey of the landscape of American fascism, you'd want to take a look at the groups that openly identified as fascist.

00:34:15.780 Right.

00:34:15.860 But Goldberg does not mention any of these groups, nor, by the way, does he mention the fact that National Review, the publication that employs him, was founded in the 1950s and immediately took up the cause of segregation, very famously writing that whites were the advanced race, which does feel like a glaring omission when the whole premise of the book is that liberals are obscuring their problematic history and need to start being honest about it or whatever.

00:34:42.620 Yeah, you can go and just ask Nazis, like, which ideology are you aligned with?

00:34:47.680 And they're not going to be like, oh, vegetarians and feminists.

00:34:50.960 I consider myself a modern progressive in the vein of Hillary Clinton.

00:34:57.060 Did you see Maddow last night, bro? 1.00

00:34:59.280 Great shit. 1.00

00:35:00.100 Hand me that tiki torch. 1.00

00:35:02.740 One of my pet peeves is people speculating about things that we have actual data on or

00:35:07.560 that are, like, at least measurable.

00:35:10.380 Right.

00:35:10.540 Right. Like we we know which political party is more racist, Michael.

00:35:14.700 Yeah, I know.

00:35:15.220 There are a couple of ways to measure this. One is by surveying what's called racial resentment. 0.57

00:35:21.620 Right.

00:35:21.920 Which inquires into whether you think racial disparities are the result of systemic causes or work ethic.

00:35:28.800 Right.

00:35:29.080 And then there are surveys of what's called old fashioned racism, which is just measuring express forms of racism by surveying things like opposition to interracial marriage.

00:35:38.800 Right. 0.91

00:35:39.320 By both metrics, Republican voters are more racist. 0.95

00:35:43.380 Yeah.

00:35:43.660 The interesting thing about this is that it actually wasn't really true until the Obama

00:35:49.400 era, and it has intensified since then.

00:35:52.960 Goldberg publishes this in 2008.

00:35:55.340 So in a sense, you could say at the time he couldn't have known better.

00:35:59.240 In another sense, you could say that he wrote this and then was immediately proven wrong

00:36:03.340 by history.

00:36:04.220 Right.

00:36:04.580 Again, this is another situation where there's some real nuance, right?

00:36:08.540 This is not a situation where expressed racists were always more conservative Republican, for example.

00:36:15.780 It's something that did not align along partisan lines so cleanly until the mid-aughts when you have a combination of debates about immigration and Obama. 0.93

00:36:25.880 You won't read about that in The New York Times except for like the 50 fucking times you've read about it in The New York Times. 0.86

00:36:30.640 Yeah. 0.59

00:36:30.800 The actual place that you find this data is in the work of liberal scholars, for the record, whatever.

00:36:35.740 I can't cover everything in this book, as we've discussed, but I do want to give you a sense of

00:36:41.700 like what I'm skipping over. There are extensive arguments that Woodrow Wilson was a fascist and

00:36:48.660 in fact that the United States under Woodrow Wilson was briefly a fascist state. Wait,

00:36:53.260 what did Wilson do that was fascist? I don't even know anything about Wilson.

00:36:56.660 Well, so part of the reason he gets away with this is because no one knows anything about Wilson.

00:37:00.380 Okay. Wilson exercised a lot of aggressive war powers. He had some authoritarian impulses. And so did FDR, who, of course, Jonah Goldberg believes is fascist. There are bits of this that are about how the New Deal and great society are fascist.

00:37:19.540 And the sort of idea behind that is basically what we've discussed, right? The idea of like a like the common good, the subjugation of like the individual to the will of the state. Those are like the themes that ride through these portions of the book. In like 2010, I started to notice conservatives talking about Woodrow Wilson. And I was like, why the fuck is everyone talking about Woodrow Wilson? And this is why Jonah Goldberg has to us.

00:37:45.520 Yeah, for sure. I mean, he sort of like was making this case that like Wilson is like the first progressive. You can trace modern progressivism to him. And he's also like an evil fascist. And I had some conservative acquaintances who all of a sudden started bringing Woodrow Wilson up in arguments. And I was like, what the fuck is going on?

00:38:01.580 The most shocking thing about this is that you have conservative acquaintances. 0.98

00:38:03.940 I did back in 2009, 2010, because they were just people I went to high school with.

00:38:09.600 That is over.

00:38:11.120 Absolutely. I have lost touch with them, not invited to the wedding.

00:38:15.520 So that's the shit that I'm sort of skipping past. 0.99

00:38:18.860 And if someone wants to say that I am not giving him enough credit on those points, I don't give a shit. 0.99

00:38:24.180 This is the fundamental challenge of this show is that, like, if you debunk everything, it'll be really fucking boring. 0.98

00:38:30.460 Yeah. And then if you skip over stuff, they're like, Peter didn't even address the Woodrow Wilson fascism.

00:38:35.680 No, I will. I will just concede all of these points.

00:38:38.240 I agree that Woodrow Wilson, FDR, the New Deal and the Great Society are all fascist.

00:38:44.060 That is the official position of the podcast.

00:38:47.160 Giving people jobs, giving people salads.

00:38:49.340 So I do want to talk about a couple emblematic digressions in this book.

00:38:56.780 One is what can only be described as light apologetics for the Ku Klux Klan. 0.61

00:39:02.400 Okay.

00:39:03.280 He says that, quote, the second Klan was certainly racist, but not much more than society in general.

00:39:11.040 What?

00:39:11.340 And then he repeats later that it was, quote, less racist than we've been led to believe.

00:39:17.500 Oh, no.

00:39:18.100 Well, we've been led to believe that they're like level 100 racism.

00:39:21.360 So anything under that, like, oh, they were only like level 99.

00:39:25.060 Yeah.

00:39:25.620 Okay.

00:39:26.180 There is like, again, something resembling truth under this.

00:39:30.920 To give some historical context, the first clan of the Reconstruction era was almost

00:39:36.460 exclusively an anti-black terrorist organization, right?

00:39:40.420 the second clan arises in like the 1910s and is much more complex it's anti-black yes but it is 0.89

00:39:49.260 anti-immigrant anti-catholic pro-prohibition um but it's still extremely racist right right

00:39:56.040 they carried out racist lynchings across the country severe enough that they were like

00:40:00.180 prominent fights over federal anti-lynching legislation yeah maybe i shouldn't have to say

00:40:05.880 this, but the Ku Klux Klan was racist. I mean, they weren't as bad as like vegetarians. Well,

00:40:13.500 no, there are tears. They weren't as troubling as people that like animals. He says it was a

00:40:18.440 misnomer that the second Klan was rural and fundamentalist. And he says that it was actually

00:40:23.500 quite cosmopolitan and modern thriving in cities like New York and Chicago. He is doing a little

00:40:30.320 bit of like, well, maybe it was like the big city libs. Right. Right. Now, in reality, the second

00:40:34.800 clan was largely midwestern uh 40 of their membership in the early 20s was in indiana

00:40:41.840 ohio and illinois i spoke with the historian kevin cruz he said that about two-thirds of

00:40:48.500 membership was located in towns with populations under 100 000 so no it was not particularly

00:40:55.280 cosmopolitan it was actually rural and fundamentalist right right so it's just a

00:41:01.140 weird little digression in the book. And I think the only reason it's in here is because Robert

00:41:06.740 Paxton, a very prominent scholar of fascism, has basically said that the Klan was the first fascist

00:41:13.880 organization. And so I think that Goldberg sort of felt like an obligation to address them.

00:41:19.120 And he didn't he didn't really know what to do with them. So he's like, well, they weren't that

00:41:23.080 racist. And also maybe they were liberal. I don't know. It's just it's sort of a bizarre digression

00:41:28.680 in this book it's also amazing this focus on like the echoes there's like in the tradition of yeah 0.66

00:41:34.600 and he's like oh banning trans fats is somehow fascist but also like the kkk which is just

00:41:41.120 straightforwardly conservative he's like oh i don't know about that you guys right it's just

00:41:46.500 like one methodology he's aiming at the left and a completely different methodology he's aiming at

00:41:50.700 the right another dishonest portion of the book his vignette about the willard straight hall

00:41:57.000 takeover at Cornell. The basic story is that in 1969, there are disputes at Cornell between

00:42:02.780 black students and administration. The disputes were about black studies programs and about some

00:42:08.200 black students who were being disciplined for their involvement in a protest. In the midst of

00:42:12.380 that, someone burns a cross in front of the black girls dorm on campus. And in response, members of

00:42:18.360 a black student association sees Willard Strait Hall forcibly removing occupants and occupying

00:42:26.240 the building for about 36 hours until a settlement is reached with administration.

00:42:32.000 The way that Jonah tells the story, he doesn't tell you who or what it's about.

00:42:36.480 And he tells the story of a group of thugs armed with rifles and shotguns who were demanding

00:42:41.780 an ethnically pure educational institution.

00:42:45.420 Oh, so he's not telling you this with the race of the participants.

00:42:48.100 He does not tell you the details at first.

00:42:50.180 And then he's like, does this sound, what does it sound like?

00:42:52.680 Does it sound like Berlin in 1933?

00:42:55.380 three well guess what it was cornell did you see this coming you must have known it's like so clunky 0.98

00:43:04.200 when they do this shit i had like by coincidence just read about a bit about this a couple weeks 0.94

00:43:08.420 ago and so he started saying this and i was like this is cornell yeah there's only like five of 0.99

00:43:14.000 these anecdotes too they're like they always recycle the same fucking anecdotes because there's 0.67

00:43:18.140 actually a very finite number of these like little events on college campuses that confirm their 0.92

00:43:23.120 worldview so it's like it's this weird sort of like greatest hits like a cover song you're like

00:43:27.740 oh it's hallelujah i fucking know this one so he also says it was later revealed that the cross

00:43:33.440 burning was a hoax perpetrated by the students themselves and goldberg then compares it to the 0.94

00:43:38.920 reichstag fire oh yeah is that true great question michael will circle back in a quick second that

00:43:44.700 doesn't sound true on top of the facial absurdity of these characterizations comparing this to the

00:43:49.780 Reichstag fire. There are some key omissions here. It's true that these students were armed.

00:43:55.660 That is because after they occupied the hall, they were aggressively confronted by a white

00:44:00.460 fraternity. And so they went to arm themselves afterwards. Within the next year or so, one of

00:44:06.840 the black studies research buildings that resulted from the agreement with administration was burned

00:44:13.040 down. Right. So I'm not going to say that I condone the tactics of these students or whatever

00:44:18.140 they're, you know, 20-year-old radicals in 1969. I don't know. But if you're going to accuse them

00:44:23.580 of being fascist because of their use of violence, it might be worth pointing out that their

00:44:27.720 opponents were also quite violent. And it sort of makes sense that they would anticipate needing

00:44:32.960 to violently defend themselves. And to your question, Michael, it has never really been

00:44:38.320 revealed that the initial cross burning was a hoax. As far as I can tell, there is one source

00:44:44.900 for that and one source only the speculation of the local police oh okay another sort of like

00:44:52.180 emblematic goldberg anecdote leave out the key information that sort of like explains a lot of

00:44:59.000 what's going on here make a direct comparison with nazi germany right and move on but what

00:45:04.640 if i told you that the armed radicals later tried to ban trans fats and bring smoking rates down

00:45:10.040 what about then i don't know i i if there were a picture of like a black nationalist with a gun

00:45:16.240 eating a salad somewhere in like the public domain it would have been the cover of this book

00:45:20.260 that's replacing the emoji yep all right we're in the final stretch here most of the latter half of

00:45:25.920 the book is him sort of like just trying to squeeze his modern political grievances into

00:45:30.440 the context of like this liberal fascism idea that he's now created at one point he says that

00:45:37.180 Che Guevara killed more people than Mussolini. What? That just seems unlike, like, Mussolini

00:45:41.620 had a notoriously brutal military campaign in Northern Africa. So I was like, I don't,

00:45:46.520 are you counting that? Also, Che Guevara's body count is widely disputed and debated.

00:45:53.380 Yeah. It would be very unlikely that that is true. But also the context of that complaint

00:45:58.440 was that he was mad that college students wear Che shirts.

00:46:01.040 you're like what's the point in debunking this right it wasn't like a substantive complaint

00:46:08.840 about Che Guevara per se or about like the revolution in Cuba it was a cultural complaint

00:46:15.900 about college students and how he's mad right that college students wear Che shirts and yet

00:46:22.840 call him the fascist right right his goal of like giving this grand explanation of political

00:46:29.260 philosophy and history is actually subjugated to his goal of winning a cultural argument.

00:46:35.680 So you get a lot of complaints about affirmative action, like a shocking number of complaints

00:46:40.380 about affirmative action, which of course he thinks is racist. Abortion, which is of course

00:46:45.540 eugenics adjacent in his mind. And then you hit this chapter. I will send you the title. 0.76

00:46:50.400 Oh no. Chapter nine, Brave New Village, Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism. 0.99

00:46:58.780 This is the Hillary Clinton chapter of this book about fascism.

00:47:02.380 Oh, my God.

00:47:03.000 Brave New Village is a combination of the title of Brave New World and Hillary Clinton's 1996 book, It Takes a Village.

00:47:13.980 One of the most like anodyne, tedious political books.

00:47:18.580 I read that when I was in high school. 0.99

00:47:19.840 It's so fucking boring. 0.98

00:47:21.260 The audacity of Fahrenheit 451. 0.97

00:47:23.540 most of this chapter is built around his claim that hillary clinton wants to abolish the legal

00:47:31.680 distinction between children and adults what oh you're skeptical wait is this even a thing i've

00:47:37.480 never even heard of this as like even like a weird right-wing myth this is basically all built around

00:47:41.660 a wildly dishonest reading of a paper that she published on the state of children's rights in

00:47:47.760 the early 1970s right after she graduated from yale law she published this article titled

00:47:52.520 children's rights under the law which basically laid out the current state of children's rights

00:47:57.540 law and advocated for clarifying the legal status of children so she talks about like balancing the

00:48:04.720 protection of children against the rights of parents the need for clear legal standards in

00:48:10.060 cases of abuse and neglect nothing particularly outlandish but it was portrayed by conservatives

00:48:15.760 as her belief that like government should replace the family unit he says that her proposal for

00:48:22.920 employer provided daycare is fascist he says that she wields children as ideological weapons

00:48:29.100 and generally that she believes in like usurping the family and the individual with her conceptions

00:48:35.560 of like the common good but that's what's so ironic about that too is that like that's actually

00:48:39.680 anti-fascist fascists are all about like the traditional family and so to actually upend

00:48:44.420 that and do this like it takes a village thing that's actually anti-fascist well this is the 0.98

00:48:49.260 thing is that this shit is so fucking abstract that if you just try to like pull out individual 0.98

00:48:54.300 political positions you can make the case that anything is fascist or not just you know maybe 0.99

00:48:59.120 this is like the core problem with the entire framework is that fascism is like more of a

00:49:05.260 methodology than a coherent set of principles it's like narcissistic personality disorder

00:49:11.060 it's a combination of things and everyone thinks Donald Trump has it but no one actually knows

00:49:20.120 but I am being somewhat serious in that like fascism has all of these different components

00:49:26.520 and if you cherry pick your components you can say that anything is yeah right yeah but it's

00:49:32.840 you know it needs to be a critical mass of those things before you can realistically call it

00:49:37.880 fascism this is actually why i nope out of the debate about like whether donald trump is fascist

00:49:43.520 or not because yeah if people want to say that i don't particularly mind like i don't do a lot

00:49:48.020 of scolding about that but also if people don't want to use that term because they reserve it for

00:49:52.120 very specific circumstances i also don't really mind that yeah you can just look at the situation

00:49:56.200 and see that it's so self-evidently bad right if we can all agree that it's bad then like we can

00:50:00.960 easily move forward on that basis yeah and people are going to differ on the terminology but like i

00:50:05.300 just don't care that much what people call it it's just very bad it shouldn't matter except as a

00:50:10.580 matter of like scholarly interest right um which is it's fine it's fine to be nerdily interested 0.94

00:50:15.940 in that yeah i love that i i honestly love this shit but i don't like care i don't i don't even 0.97

00:50:20.340 want to talk about it because i'm so fascinated by the debate about whether trump is fascist and 0.98

00:50:24.260 that it makes me feel like a big fucking loser the final chapter of this book is called the new 0.99

00:50:30.740 age, we're all fascist now. And it's about how liberalism is trying to impose its cultural agenda 0.99

00:50:36.960 on conservatives. Here we go. This is mostly just rambling about culture war pet peeves. And he's

00:50:42.580 like almost entirely dropping the pretense of talking about fascism. Hell yeah. I've picked

00:50:47.400 out some choice pieces here. He says, quote, hip hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of 0.99

00:50:52.480 fascist themes. I know you're excited. I got excited, too. He actually does not extrapolate

00:51:00.120 on this at all he just moves on oh he's just riffing he's just like oh you didn't like my 0.99

00:51:04.940 chapter about hillary being fascist uh fuck you hip-hop's fascist yeah uh like i'll say i'll say 0.99

00:51:09.880 whatever he talks about hollywood of course of course he says quote is there any doubt that a 1.00

00:51:17.520 young hitler would have given dead poet society a standing ovation what dead poet society

00:51:22.880 of all the movies he could get mad at he gets mad at dead poet society

00:51:27.520 i was like is there any doubt that hitler would give it a standing i was

00:51:33.180 yeah i think there's some doubt that young hitler would give dead poet society a standing

00:51:38.660 ovation i don't i wouldn't bet on it either way i don't think no i mean look dead poet society is

00:51:44.100 about this like stuffy conservative institution and some kids that like poetry yeah but the whole

00:51:48.700 thing is like reifying like shakespeare being good and shit that movie's like profoundly conservative 0.87

00:51:53.640 now we're just debating whether dead poet society is conservative he has like literally he talked 0.78

00:51:58.160 about dead poet society for three pages no way i'm not kidding and i was just reading the whole 0.98

00:52:02.540 thing and like i couldn't possibly give a shit i'm not gonna do fucking analysis of dead poet 0.92

00:52:05.860 society i'm sorry is there any doubt that hitler would love minions if he was around now chapter 0.95

00:52:12.020 11 the fascism of despicable me too why are this is like the doubt that thing too conservatives 0.97

00:52:16.560 are so obsessed with like movie shit i don't get it he calls um he calls 300 fascist which is 0.86

00:52:24.120 probably the only correct diagnosis of fascism he makes in the entire book i was like yeah preach 0.99

00:52:29.280 jonah yeah fair fair you got to give him one or two things that was his broken that was his broken

00:52:33.800 clock hit on uh on fascism okay there's also a portion of this chapter where he tries to

00:52:39.880 argue that nazis were not as anti-gay as people generally think but were actually 0.91

00:52:46.580 kind of gay themselves that's both of those are true he says nazi attitudes toward homosexuality

00:52:54.040 are also a source of confusion while it is true that some homosexuals were sent to concentration

00:52:58.620 camps oh long pause it is also the case that the early nazi party and the constellation of

00:53:05.200 pan-German organizations in its orbit were rife with homosexuals. 0.96

00:53:09.180 Read a book, Jonah. 1.00

00:53:10.060 Read any book about minority groups.

00:53:12.560 His citation for this section is a 1995 book written by a couple of anti-gay American activists

00:53:22.140 called The Pink Swastika, which was a famously pseudo-historical piece of anti-gay propaganda

00:53:29.060 that claims essentially that Nazi crimes were driven by gay men and perhaps linked to

00:53:35.180 homosexuality in some way. What? The book claims, just to give a taste, that Hitler, Himmler, 0.93

00:53:42.280 Goebbels, Goering, Rudolf Hess, all gay. What? Yeah. But there was the one high up, 0.93

00:53:49.240 wasn't it Ernst Röhm? That's correct. Who was gay and was killed in the Night of the Long Knives?

00:53:53.520 So Ernst Röhm was gay and was killed in the Night of the Long Knives, presumably because he was sort 0.69

00:54:00.260 of maintaining a power center of his own in different factions of the Nazi party. 0.68

00:54:06.920 And on top of that, 20s Berlin, for example, was a place where gay people operated with

00:54:14.400 a relative amount of openness compared to a lot of comparable cities around the globe.

00:54:19.980 So were there people who were probably more open about their homosexuality in the Nazi

00:54:25.480 Party in like the 20s than you might have seen, for example, in the United States, perhaps

00:54:31.040 maybe was the Nazi Party notably gay by population? 0.65

00:54:36.040 Almost certainly not.

00:54:37.260 There's no real evidence.

00:54:38.740 And the people that have tried to make that case are out and out homophobes. 0.97

00:54:44.340 But that's just like any time you have like demonic little white twinks making life worse 0.99

00:54:49.080 for everyone, some of them are going to be gay, partly statistically and partly because 0.98

00:54:53.160 of like internalized homophobia of like if i'm really aggressively trying to fit in they won't

00:54:59.880 come for me like some of the biggest opposition within the fda during the aids crisis to like

00:55:06.240 fast tracking medications was from gay closeted gay men in the fda this is something that happens

00:55:12.140 wherever you have like invisible minorities right they will push back against minorities who are 0.82

00:55:17.660 fighting for visibility because they're like if i can do this you should be doing this too again

00:55:21.560 he's citing this insanely homophobic book and he sort of knows that and so he creates a little bit

00:55:29.000 of weird distance he quotes that book and here's the quote the national socialist revolution and 0.99

00:55:34.100 the nazi party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals pederasts pornographers 0.99

00:55:39.380 and sadomasochists oh my fucking god that's the quote he uses then goldberg says this is surely 0.99

00:55:44.340 an overstatement but it is nonetheless true that the artistic and literary movements that provided 0.99

00:55:49.960 the oxygen for nazism before 1933 oh my god were chock-a-block with homosexual liberationist tracks 0.66

00:55:57.120 clubs and journalists what does that mean provided the oxygen i mean he wants to quote that insane

00:56:06.620 book yeah but he knows that you can't quote it without some sort of qualification so he's like

00:56:12.960 well that was probably an over yeah what are gays solely responsible for the holocaust that's

00:56:19.680 probably an overstatement right but but but like come on man let's pick a middle ground between

00:56:25.660 like historical reality and like these deranged psychos elsewhere in the book he sort of

00:56:31.560 acknowledges that gay marriage is like likely inevitable in the country and keep in mind this

00:56:36.360 is you know 2007 2008 and says like and that's probably a good thing uh so these are your

00:56:42.720 republican allies yeah gay marriage look i'm a i'm a bit of a libertarian so i say yes right

00:56:49.280 gays did cause the holocaust however gays putting gays and pederasts in the same sentence eh maybe 0.84

00:56:55.240 a little five percent too much that's a little too much let's turn it down a little bit the 0.87

00:56:58.380 holocaust echoes gay so that is essentially the book as i mentioned i have i have condensed and 0.54

00:57:08.780 uh cherry picked my favorite portions just like jonah did isn't debunking the worst parts of this

00:57:15.600 book an echo of the book burnings that the gays did i have never claimed that i was intellectually

00:57:22.320 honest so i in our bonus episode about the the success sequence we discussed how like there are 0.76

00:57:30.860 no serious conservatives yes they complain about being left out of academia but they have no real

00:57:37.420 interest in academics per se like there are all these serious scholars of fascism many of whom

00:57:45.140 popped up to be like this is not correct right and goldberg like responded to them basically

00:57:51.000 just accusing them all of being dishonest and taking very few of their critiques seriously

00:57:57.400 and you know dishonestly framing the responses as if they were like you know ignoring what he

00:58:03.920 was really arguing, et cetera, et cetera. This reminds me of in 2017, I spent a year and a half

00:58:09.360 working on a long article about how millennials are screwed. Like the objective economic conditions 0.99

00:58:15.720 of millennials are worse than they were for our parents' generation. And after it came out,

00:58:20.700 Chris Rufo wrote an article in the National Review just being like, no, it's not.

00:58:25.460 And like, he didn't, he didn't do any work. He was like, millennials are lazy. 0.98

00:58:29.420 Right. And then he wanted, he like challenged me to a debate. I was like, well, no, I did work and

00:58:33.380 you didn't do work. This is not serious. And it's certainly not limited to conservatives,

00:58:39.220 right? There are liberals who are just hacks. But what continues to jolt me about the modern

00:58:47.620 conservative political movement is the absence of non-hacks. Yeah, it's wild. That's not to say 1.00

00:58:53.140 there's none, but there appear to be very few to the point where the leading conservative scholar 0.91

00:59:02.100 on fascism is probably fucking jonah goldberg like i don't i don't get it um and i also am

00:59:10.960 i i am intrigued by the sort of like widespread project on the right of whitewashing history 0.97

00:59:18.240 yeah i have like different little half-baked theories bubbling around in my head and one is

00:59:23.680 that if you're like a reactionary you're a status quo defender you are anti-progress over the course

00:59:31.300 of your life, you will almost by definition be viewed negatively by history in certain regards,

00:59:39.400 right? This is true of anyone, but sort of sharp reactionaries more than anyone.

00:59:45.300 Progress will march forward and your views will appear increasingly antiquated. And so if you

00:59:51.200 want to preserve the image of their movement, they need to be engaged in constant historical

00:59:57.920 whitewashing. They need to be constantly reframing history. Otherwise, it will be obvious that they

01:00:04.800 are history's antagonists to some degree. It does feel notable to me that there are liberal historians

01:00:11.260 who will very readily confront the fact that progressives had deep ties to the eugenics

01:00:18.500 movement. Yet Republicans are just crafting elaborate lies about how they are history's

01:00:25.020 good boys. And liberals have actually always been the bad guys. And if you find bad guys that are

01:00:33.800 conservative, no, they're actually liberal. Right. Right. It's just so transparently dishonest that

01:00:40.860 it's hard to take seriously. It's hard to confront. It's hard to like dissect. I think the core

01:00:46.780 problem is that conservatism isn't an outcomes based or values based ideology. It's methodologically

01:00:53.280 based. It's I don't want change. Yeah. It would also be equally incoherent to be like,

01:00:57.600 I want society to change. Even though that does appear to be what Jonah Goldberg thinks

01:01:01.980 progressivism is. Yeah. And like that, that's a satire of progressivism because it's like,

01:01:07.400 well, some directions of change are good and some directions of change are bad,

01:01:10.340 but you have to actually view them on the merits. But the problem with conservatism is that you

01:01:14.020 can't view things on the merits. Right. It doesn't rely on like values other than

01:01:18.820 preservation of existing society it's an impulse more than an ideology right um it's a quite

01:01:25.340 literally a reaction in like the sense of a almost physical chemical reaction right to the prospect

01:01:32.180 of change the prospect of disruption to your status quo which um which you feel safe and

01:01:39.280 protected in something that i'm resenting more and more as we talk about this book is the way 1.00

01:01:44.500 that his stupid framework makes us be like, no, you're the fascist. Because going back through 0.99

01:01:53.180 history and saying my political enemies have been the villains of like every historical atrocity of

01:02:00.780 the last 100 years is like kind of fascist. And like, I don't actually believe that. I don't,

01:02:08.740 I don't think that like he's doing a fascism, but also like he's the one that set up this

01:02:15.620 asinine framework where it's like, we should look at the echoes and the rhymes of fascism.

01:02:20.740 Yeah. Well, okay, Jonah, looking at the echoes, whatever you want to say about the philosophy of

01:02:27.100 conservatism, like organized conservatism as it exists today in the United States is engaged

01:02:35.640 in a large-scale history revision project.

01:02:40.580 You can read more about this in my book, Liberal Fascism Fascism, about how this book is fascist.

01:02:47.940 There's something weird about it. Like, fascism is a very abstract thing. What's really happening

01:02:52.160 when scholars are studying fascism is that they are looking at this era of political history

01:02:57.900 and trying to identify exactly what this was. And they've sort of identified a set of phenomena

01:03:05.780 because they are engaged in a good faith effort to try to understand what happened.

01:03:12.660 What Jonah is doing is then being like, actually, fascism is something else. And it's like, well,

01:03:18.160 no, it necessarily isn't something else because all that they're doing is putting a helpful label

01:03:24.580 on a set of phenomena that we're all witnessing right there's something so inherently dishonest

01:03:31.500 about the approach here where he's just like i actually have my own definition of fascism 0.94

01:03:35.880 right who the fuck are you dude it's it's such a great cheat code like we could write a book 0.96

01:03:40.900 called like books are dumb yeah and we could we could provide examples of that like there's plenty 0.99

01:03:45.440 of dumb books in the world but like the central you couldn't debunk the central premise because 0.99

01:03:50.260 the central premise is just like so fucking stupid yeah and broad well let's think about a 0.99

01:03:55.500 better title because i want to do this uh what about the last book you'll ever read oh the whole 1.00

01:04:01.960 concept is like you books are stupid they're making you dumber let this be your final one 0.98

01:04:07.700 now you're i mean now you're just like pitching a book that we should write together yeah which 0.99

01:04:10.740 is where this podcast is going and then we can it should be like twice the price of your average

01:04:14.820 book because like you were actually saving the last one it's actually an investment yeah you're

01:04:18.320 paying yourself first.

If Books Could Kill - July 27, 2023

Liberal Fascism

Episode Stats

Transcript