The Haunted Screen

Yeah, Y'all—This is Fascism: The Paxton Mixtape, Pt. I

• Travis Mushett

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We knew it would be bad, but holy shit.

With the collapse of the American project, it's been hard to focus on film history. So in this two-part series, we're switching things up. Using the five-stage framework that scholar Robert Paxton lays out in his Anatomy of Fascism, we try to make sense of how a slack-jawed game show host groped his way to autocracy. Part One covers fascism's first three stages, from the creation of a fascist movement through its seizure of power. The next episode will look at the fourth and fifth stages—where we're at and where we might be going if we don't get our shit together.

Appearances from Indiana Jones, Green Day, and a clown car of assholes. 

SPEAKER_38:

So, it's been a minute. Last time you heard from me, it was back in January, and we were chatting about that movie where Jerry Lewis stars as a clown who performs at Auschwitz. Which, I don't know, seems like that particular storyline would have left me better prepared for the last six months. Last episode, I was projecting that we would hopefully get an episode out a month in 2025, but honestly, I have been, I guess, too busy mourning the collapse of the American project. It wasn't exactly that I was optimistic about the coming year. We knew this guy was coming back, after all.

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We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible, and it is now clear that we've achieved the most incredible

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political thing.

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Look what happened. Is

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this crazy? It really, really is, Donald. My view of where all this was going, it was pretty dark. I mean... Which... is maybe why I started thinking in terms of samples, splicing, loop breaks, everything feels so fractured. And I found myself wondering if, to torture a metaphor, if there's a beat underneath the maelstrom, a pulse that might make the present comprehensible. Somewhere along the way, this episode became something like a mixtape. Part essay, part collage, part panic attack, News audio, snippets of pop culture, commentary from yours truly, and sure, some royalty-free beats scattered throughout. Over the top, campy, maybe even a little cringey. Sure. But so am I. And so is our country. Every day, there's something... like giving the world's slimiest Twitter troll and a teenager named Big Balls the authority to demolish the federal government.

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Managers at two federal agencies have warned staffers that Doge might be secretly monitoring their communications, including using software to track computer activity and possibly using artificial intelligence to scan for disloyalty or DEI buzzwords.

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And pretending they can finance trillions of dollars of tax cuts for rich people. It's

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a massive transfer from the bottom to the top.

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By taking health care and food from poor Poor Americans.

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Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP food stamps.

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And just letting poor people in foreign countries die. Now a chilling warning from several medical researchers. They say people

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around the world, millions of them, could die in the next five years because of the Trump administration's cuts

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to humanitarian aid. Sending people to foreign gulags without due process.

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Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father, wrongly deported and locked inside one of the world's most feared prisons, El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, or Seacott, stripped naked, beaten, forced to kneel for hours, guards striking anyone who moved. And in just two weeks, he says he lost 31 pounds.

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All the psychopaths in the White House soothed themselves by tweeting out what they call deportation ASMR videos. masked government thugs on American streets, kidnapping brown people seemingly at random.

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This violent arrest was captured on camera. You can see agents restraining a 48-year-old man, repeatedly punching him, blood visible on his shirt as he screamed. We've since learned that man is the father of three Marines.

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Elsie Berrios was arrested on March 31st by a pair of ICE agents who actually broke through her driver's side window to get inside the car. And her daughter, who's 18 years old, was riding with her in the car.

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You guys cannot do this. A

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Texas family says their loved one was also mistakenly deported to the notorious mega prison in El Salvador last month. This man's friends and family say he was told his autism awareness tattoo was proof he belonged to a gang.

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A Senate, House, and Supreme Court that's readily giving up its power to a wannabe strongman with dementia.

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I hear so much about the word groceries. I used to use groceries a lot on the trail. It's like sort of an old-fashioned word, groceries. But groceries is the word that's the most accurate word.

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You're American furor, ladies and gentlemen. And then there's the opposition party, the Democrats, who haven't exactly seemed ready, willing, or able to lead the charge against a genuine fascist takeover. Even knowing all the risks that Trump posed, they took a deeply unpopular incumbent so diminished that he was incapable of running a normal campaign and tried to shove him down the throats of the American people until the charade fell apart at the last minute.

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It

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was a choice that set them up for failure in November. A party that wants to win might have learned something about the foolishness of deferring to gerontocracy, about empowering younger, more dynamic leaders. Come on. These are the Democrats.

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Today, Democratic Congressman Jerry Connolly of Virginia was elected by his caucus to be the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.

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Connolly, who is 74 and was just diagnosed with esophageal cancer, beat back a challenge

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from 35-year-old progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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amid call

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for

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a new generation

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of leadership in the Democratic Party.

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Five months later.

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Virginia Democratic Congressman Jerry Connolly has died at the age of 75 after a battle with esophageal cancer.

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But the To be fair, maybe a pulse is optional when this is the best plan your party strategist can muster.

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So the question is, how should democratic politicians respond to this? And what I think they should

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do is what we call in rural America, play possum. Just let it go. Don't

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get in the way of it.

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Or when your colleagues are ready to throw you under the bus for showing any signs of life.

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Some breaking news we've been following. It has to do with Texas Congressman Al Green. The House has now voted in favor of an official reprimand for his disruption of the president's joint address to Congress. And several Democrats voted with Republicans to censure him.

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Or who think the best way to stand up to bullies is to blame your party's electoral defeat on a class of vulnerable children.

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Last week, Moulton told the New York Times Democrats spend too much time trying not to offend anyone, adding, I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.

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I meant exactly what I said. I meant what I said as a dad.

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Daddy's

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so, so, so brave.

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But yeah, looking around at, like, everything, I don't know, it just kind of made coming back to the mic to do a podcast about movies, even movies that I loved. It seemed small ball or beside the point. I'd had some episodes mapped out about Fellini, Eight and a Half, La Dolce Vita, and as much as we all love Anita Ekberg in that black dress in the Trevi Fountain,

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I

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felt like I needed to go back to the drawing board. And... This... this is what emerged. It might seem like a clean break from what the show has been before, a film history podcast, but I think there is continuity. During that first season, the one about the cinema and the politics, the history of Weimar Germany, I did learn a lot about fascism. And in the three or so years since, I've kept reading. History and political theory... They've helped me get my arms around our current situation, at least to some degree. And for my day job, I'm a teacher, a professor of film and media history at Fordham University and Marymount Manhattan College. So here, I did what I could to turn something that was useful to me, this research, this anxious energy, into something that might be useful for you. I read a lot of good shit, but there was one book that really stood out for me. And that was Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism, first published in 2004. Paxton is a scholar's scholar.

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The father of fascism studies, professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University.

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Arguably the preeminent historian of the clusterfuck that was Europe in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. In his book, it provides a five-stage framework for the evolution of fascism in a given society. from a set of really bad ideas to the establishment and actions of really bad regimes. And for what it's worth, Paxton agrees that Donald Trump is a fascist.

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Trump shows a rather alarming willingness to use fascist themes and fascist styles.

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He resisted using that label for years, but January 6th was a kind of Rubicon for him. A moment where the open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crossed a red line from mere right-wing authoritarianism to genuine old-school fascism. And I've done my best to apply Paxton's model to the United States of the early 21st century in a way that's rigorous, but also comprehensible to most anyone interested in beating back the current fascist threat. My diagnosis is that over the past few months, we've hit stage four, but this isn't cancer. We're not terminal yet. We can still fight our way out of this, but things can still get worse, and the momentum is against us. Our institutions have failed us. We, you, me, normal people out there listening, We are the only guardrails we've got left. So it's time for us to understand what we're fighting and to formulate strategies that can win. This episode is a two-parter. In the first, we're gonna walk through how we got here. I'm gonna give you my interpretation of the United States' progression from fascism's first stage through its third. The next episode, we'll focus on stages four and five. I know that there are some Donald Trump voters who listen to this podcast. And honestly, I don't know what to tell you. This probably won't be your favorite episode. I'd still encourage you to listen to see if anything that I have to say might still resonate with you. But... You might come to hate me after you hear me opine at length about the current state of American politics. That's just a risk I'm going to have to take. And whatever your political affiliations, if you're just here looking for some escapism into the lives of directors, actors, and their movies, I apologize. It's just hard for me to put myself in that headspace right now. Though I guess today's material is reminiscent of a horror movie, so there is that angle. In any case... Welcome to the Haunted Screen. This is the Paxton Mixtape, part one. To get things rolling, to make sure we're on the same page, here's Robert Paxton's definition of fascism, along with another royalty-free beat. That's a treat. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood.

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The world is laughing at us, folks. They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. This country is really, we are a nation in major decline. The world laughs at us, folks. The world laughs at us.

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By compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.

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They're poisoning the blood of our country.

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In which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants.

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A federal jury found Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes guilty of seditious conspiracy. I did nothing wrong. The Proud Boys did

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nothing wrong. And American patriots did nothing wrong.

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Working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites.

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I was called by Mark Zuckerberg and he actually

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apologized. I think Wall Street loves what they're hearing.

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This is enthusiasm about what a Trump administration will look like, economic policy. which is tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts for business. Well, I

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love the president. I just want to be clear about that. I think President Trump is a good man.

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Abandons Democratic liberties. These claims by the former president and his Republican allies have corroded and corrupted American democracy. And the president was as mad as I've ever seen him. I told him that the stuff that his people were shuttling out to the public was bullshit. I mean, that the claims of fraud were bullshit.

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and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing.

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We will root out the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

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And general expansion.

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We need Greenland for national security and international security. So I think we'll go as far as we have to go.

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My administration will be

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reclaiming

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the Panama Canal.

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Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state.

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Paxton's

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first stage entails the creation of fascist movements. Unfortunately, political worldviews that could fairly be called fascist feel like mold in a basement apartment. They grow quietly in the corners before they send their spores floating from room to room until the walls sweat. The air chokes, and there's nowhere left to breathe. We really like to tell ourselves otherwise, but here in the United States, fascist roots run deep. Paxton's book, The Anatomy of Fascism, focuses on the European fascism of the early to mid-20th century. Fascism with a capital F, if you will. But Paxton also writes that, quote, It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American.

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You have reached the Ku Klux Klan. Please leave a message and God bless white America.

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So we can all agree, or at least hopefully we can all agree, that the Ku Klux Klan is a trash organization full of trash people.

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Prejudice is a disease of the mind and heart.

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But my history books growing up, they never called them fascist. If I were to venture a guess, yours probably didn't either. When you start to think about it, though, it's hard not to notice the family resemblance. The Klan explicitly embraced racial hierarchy, putting whites at the top of the pyramid and everyone else.

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We're not bad like the Italians and Negroes and Jews. We're not like them, are we?

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They were there to be subjugated. It was ultra-nationalist. Celebrating whiteness as the only We don't

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have time

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to get into it here, but like all races, whiteness is a made-up category whose boundaries have shifted over time. The Klan was disdainful of democracy. In fact, it was specifically founded in the 1860s to counter the nascent political power of newly freed black slaves who suddenly had the ability to vote and to organize and to even get elected into office. That democratic power had to be suppressed, often through violence. And like the explicitly fascist movements that would emerge in Europe in the decades that followed, They got really into their costumes.

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I

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mean, I guess being a bigot is all about group identification, so you want to get real Matchy-matchy with your outfits, your hoods, or your brown shirts, or your MAGA hats, or whatever the case may be.

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As part of our preparations for the invasion, I'm redesigning my uniform. The feathers for aerodynamics, the sparkly color to desert the enemy, the boots, truly decorative.

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But especially after World War II ended in 1945, we Americans tended to pride ourselves on having a low tolerance for fascist bullshit. When we're looking for villains that a hero can dispatch without the audience feeling even a tinge of sympathy, you know who we make them? Nazis. I hate these guys. Fuck them up, Indy. And even our right-wing racists have historically taken pains to distance themselves from fascism. Take William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the National Review and defender of Jim Crow and South African apartheid. Here he is on his talk show, Firing Line. in 1966.

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What an accent.

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So across the American political spectrum, there is a long-standing antipathy towards fascism, at least as a term, as a brand, as a label. But these ideas, these fringe groups... they've been floating around like pond scum in the cultural water of America, basically forever. But when it comes to the wave of bullshit that's currently washing over us, let's go back to 2008. Decades of globalization, de-industrialization, and declining union membership, they'd weaken the hand of working class Americans. Then comes the financial crisis, the Great Recession, And with the burst of the housing bubble, that cornerstone of the American dream, home ownership, it was yanked out from under millions of people like a poorly chosen Jenga block.

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And then that happens. What is that?

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That's America's housing market. In this country, houses are people's main source of wealth. So with the bottom falling out of real estate prices and the attendant collapse of the stock market, folks just looked on as their savings evaporated. The unemployment rate more than doubled to reach a high of 10% in the fall of 2009, and it didn't return to pre-recession levels for another seven years after that. A pervasive cloud of anxiety started to engulf people's perceptions of the economy. And it's never really gone away, even though the facts on the ground have changed. I'm an older millennial. I'll turn 40 this year. And even with the ups and downs over the past couple decades, I can't remember a time of unbridled economic enthusiasm. It's all kind of Weimar. Remember what else happened in 2008?

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CBS projects that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois will be the next president of the United States.

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Yep. A black dude got elected president. And a lot of white people lost their fucking minds. Now, Most of them didn't express their seething hate for Barack Obama in explicitly racial terms. And I'd wager that most of them didn't, and still don't, consider themselves racist. But the racism was there. Remember this shit?

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The more time Barack Obama serves as president, the more Americans become convinced, incorrectly, that Obama is a Muslim.

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Or this?

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Tea Party assaults on President Obama have been raising eyebrows and hackles for a while. We've all seen the signs. There have been signs that compare Barack Obama to a monkey. There have been signs that had the N-word on them. Or how about this guy?

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A few years ago, you led the birther movement. You sent investigators out to Hawaii to find out whether or not Obama, which you said, was not born here.

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Well, I don't know. And it turned out to not be true. Well, I don't know. According to you, it's not true. I don't know. He released his birth certificate. You know, if you believe that, that's fine. I don't care. It's an old story. It

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seems kind of relevant that Donald Trump started groping his way toward the center of our political discourse by braying about a baseless conspiracy theory that holds that the first black president was, in fact, a foreigner. Someone who isn't authentically American. And therefore, unfit to hold office. Never mind the fact that Obama ascended to the presidency in 2008 with a generational landslide victory at the polls. But our boy, he has never met a fact that he can't deny.

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Put it out

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before the American people. Got 306 electoral college votes. I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.

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Add together an economic calamity, the reins of power passing into hands that aren't Well, white and, oh yeah, a stupid prolonged war in Iraq that went a long way towards discrediting both establishment politicians. We cannot

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wait for the final

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proof, the smoking gun

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that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there's no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

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and the mainstream media. I reported on this when I was at the Washington Post. There was something like 140 front page pieces between August 2002 and the

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date of the invasion, basically carrying the administration's case for war. And on the occasions when some very good reporters

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wrote pieces that challenged or were skeptical of the intelligence, those stories were buried, they were minimized, they were spiked. And you get the Tea Party, a political formation that would mutate and evolve into the populist revolt we've come to call MAGA. But stage one? It's not just about organizing. It's also about theorizing. Books and articles get written, concepts get fleshed out, and a worldview gets articulated. It could feel like a contradiction in terms to talk about fascist intellectuals.

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The Nazis' approach to intellectuals was to dismiss them. They played no role. A Nazi's bookshelf has Mein Kampf. And that is basically it.

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But even political groupings that prioritize brute force over reasoned thought They still have people who type stuff. In 1919, Alceste de Ambrose and Filippo Thomas Omarinetti, they wrote the Fascist Manifesto, laying out their vision for an authoritarian Italy. And even before World War I, the Volkisch movement in Germany was publishing treatises that advocated for a mystical, virulently racist brand of German ultranationalism. Whether Donald Trump has ever read their work, and let's be honest, when's the last time you think that guy read a fucking book, there are writers whose work informed the current shape of Trumpism. Some have legitimate academic posts, like Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame. From Against Gay Marriage, 2009. The form of marriage that they, gay people, wish to join is akin to demands to be able to wear nose rings or engage in voluntary amputation. and Adrian Vermeule at Harvard Law School. From a New York Times op-ed, 2025, the president may ignore a judicial order that, on the president's independent interpretation of the law, exceeds the scope of judicial power. Others operate outside the university. Like... Someone who

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calls himself the Bronze Age pervert.

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Pervert. That's pervert, by the way. But this guy's the author of such classics as Bronze Age Mindset and... Selective breeding in the birth of philosophy. His, um, spirited defense of eugenics, laundered through some third-rate classical history, basically arguing that philosophy is the product of aristocrats deciding who gets to fuck whom. Now, it could be easy to dismiss somebody who once wrote, and I quote, because I really want you to know that this is not me speaking, this is me reading from Bronze Age pervert's own writing, but it might be easy to dismiss somebody who wrote, quote, The anti-male and anti-white rhetoric of the new left is extreme. The racial attacks on whites in particular approaches exterminationist propaganda seen only in, e.g., the Hutu against the Tutsi in 1990s Rwanda. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. But deranged as he might be, this guy has an audience. A powerful audience. Take Nate Hockman. No, really. Take him. Please. Honestly, he's a fucking fascist. Fuck this guy. But yeah, Huckman was a right-wing wunderkind, a staff writer at the National Review, who quit to work for the DeSantis campaign before getting fired for making and distributing a fan video of his guy, Ron. That's... prominently featured Nazi symbols. But Huckman, who's in a position to know, he told the New York Times that every junior staffer in the Trump administration reads Bronze Age pervert. And, quote, there was something there that was clearly attractive to young conservative elites. Is it the fascism? I think it's the fascism. I got someone. But perhaps even more influential than our pervert friend is a 50-something dweeb named Curtis Yarvin. And when I say dweeb, I mean fucking dweeb. At the start of his blogging career in 2007, he was going by the name of Mincius Moldbug. Mincius being the name of an ancient Confucian philosopher, and Moldbug being a hilarious pun on Goldbug, a nickname for weird-ass uncles who rant about fiat currency and take financial advice from Fox News infomercials featuring endorsements from reactionary freaks who served hard time for their involvement in Watergate. You

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ready? Young man, what's the most important thing to remember? To secure my future with gold through Roslyn Capital? No! To make sure Amy's back by 11. Call Roslyn Capital and tell them Gordon Liddy sent you.

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You may have heard of Yarvin. The New York Times ran an interview with him in January, which fine, I get. But they also printed this photo of him that I guess you could call flattering. But yeah, just check out the guy's Wikipedia page to see what he looked like before he got a Stitch Fix subscription or whatever. He's exactly the kind of chud that you're envisioning in your head. But the New Yorker's Ava Kaufman was actually interviewing Yarvin when the Times thing came out. Her profile is a masterclass in giving an asshole enough rope to hang himself. Definitely check it out if you haven't already. But yeah, here's a snippet of Kaufman's piece. as read by the boys at Chapo Trap House.

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Here's another very telling quote. It says, That morning, the Times Magazine had published an interview with him accompanied by a moody black and white portrait. Until recently, Yarvin, with his frazzled curtain of shoulder-length hair and ill-fitting wardrobe, had seemed indifferent to his appearance. Now wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through his stylishly tousled hair. His friend, Steve Saylor, a writer for white nationalist websites, said he looked like the Fifth Ramon. Like, okay. The most handsome band in the world.

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Granted, Joy Ramone is no Richard Hell, but Felix's comparison there, still more than a little unfair to those homeliest of punk rock icons. I'd say that Yarvin looks more like the guy who makes everyone at work uncomfortable by insisting on calling the 24-year-old receptionist, m'lady. Which, I guess makes sense. because this guy is a self-described monarchist.

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This is a basket-hilted rapier, and it has a companion piece, which is

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the main gauche right here. But, like, a cool, futuristic monarchist who wants nothing more than to genuflect before a king of America that he envisions, and he's literally said this, as a kind of all-powerful, all-knowing tech CEO. Here he is from the January interview, fantasizing about a... sumptuous Silicon Valley sampler platter of boot leather.

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I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad, but the overall quality, you know, just pick one at random and put him or her in charge of Washington. Ooh, her. More women dictators. And I think you'd get something much, much better than what's there. It doesn't have to be Elon Musk. Could be. Doesn't have to be. The like

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median performance is so much better. Public good, private profit. Same shit, right? Now, I couldn't find any examples of Musk citing Yarvin's work explicitly, though according to The Times in early July, Musk hit up Yarvin for some sage advice about starting a new political party, the America Party. I hate them all so much. But their ideas are definitely simpatico. Take Doge, for example. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Well... Here's Yarvin giving a talk all the way back in 2012. I

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like to see a lot of things, so I've reduced this very complicated problem to a

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four-letter acronym,

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which is RAGE. And RAGE stands for Retire All Government Employees.

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Retire All Government Employees. So, like... Take a chainsaw to the federal government or something?

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Chainsaw!

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Yarvin's ties to the right-wing power elite, they're more than just an ideological similarity. Though they're sometimes overstated, he does have some personal connections with these people.

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Well, I

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definitely know Mark Andreessen. Cool. But yeah, he knows some rich dipshits. Dig Peter Thiel. The other techno-fascist PayPal alum who grew up in South Africa. The OG oligarch who boarded the Trump train in time for the RNC in summer 2016.

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When Donald Trump asked us to make America great again, he's not suggesting a return to the past. He's running to lead us back to that bright future.

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Okay.

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But yeah, Peter Thiel. The one who hired future failed Senate candidate Blake Masters to sit at his feet and take notes on his lectures that he then turned into blog posts. In case you need a refresher on Masters, he's the MAGA Republican candidate who got stopped by Mark Kelly in the 2022 Senate race in Arizona. He was best known for looking like a school shooter and saying things like,

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We do have a gun violence problem in this country and it's gang violence. People in Chicago, St. Louis, shooting each other. very often, you know, Black people, frankly.

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Teal is also a booster of our country's most prominent upholstery fetishist?

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Here are a few of J.D. Vance's biggest billionaire backers. At number one is Peter Teal, whose net worth is$7.9 billion and who has given$15 million to Vance Groups. Vance once described a talk Teal gave as, quote, the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School.

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Okay, okay, okay. Teal and Masters... Smooch. Teal and Vance. Smooch. But back to Teal and Yarvin. In 2017, BuzzFeed got their hands on some leaked emails from figures in the alt-right. This included correspondence between Yarvin and Milo Yiannopoulos, that bigoted, bleached blonde darling of the alt-right from Trump's first term. Remember him?

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

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You know what? I'm grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn't give nearly such good head if it wasn't for him. In just 48 hours, the Provocateur has lost a major book contract. I have been uninvited from CPAC, which I'm disappointed with. And this afternoon, he resigned from his job at Breitbart News.

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Man. Makes you feel nostalgic for, I don't know, consequences. Simpler times. Anyway, BuzzFeed reported Curtis and Milo's exchange as follows. Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been, quote, coaching Teal. Peter needs guidance on politics for sure, Yiannopoulos responded. Less than you might think, Yarvin wrote back. I watched the election at his house. I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He's fully enlightened. Just plays it carefully. By the way, Yarvin has created his own dorky fascist vocabulary. So when he talks about enlightenment there, he's referring to something called the dark enlightenment, where we all bow to autocrats who understand inherent hierarchies and the value of human biodiversity or racial separatism. And in case that racism isn't explicit enough for you, Yarvin was just using the N-word on Twitter as recently as the end of July. That notwithstanding... We know that Vice President J.D. Vance is a reader, too. Here he is in 2021, bringing up Yarvin's work on the right-wing podcast Jack Murphy Live.

SPEAKER_41:

There's this weird way where you're kind of like completely de-Americanizing American culture. That's really what's going on. So, I mean, I think that there are two different ideas here, right? So one is like, you know, there's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things.

SPEAKER_38:

The host, knowing Laugh There, It really tells you something. But yeah, Vance is a Yarvin fan. And should his boss, who famously adores Big Macs and thinks that exercise is bad for you. I'm serious about that one. But should Trump, a 79-year-old walking ad for Lipitor. Oh, there she is. There she is. Thank you for the support. But should Trump kill over, as pleasant a thought as that might be, it would install this guy in the presidency. This self-styled, phony-ass champion of the working class who reads Curtis Yarvin, a guy who literally describes Trump's working class supporters as hobbits.

SPEAKER_10:

Potatoes! Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew.

SPEAKER_38:

And he himself, Curtis Yarvin, As a dark elf. In place of a dark lord, you

SPEAKER_50:

would have a queen! Beautiful and terrible at the dawn!

SPEAKER_38:

So fucking nerdy. So fucking nerdy. It's funny how many of these would-be Ubermenschen could still, as adult men, be successfully bullied by whatever 12-year-old you happen to have on hand. Here are the Chapo guys again. Discussing another anecdote from that New Yorker profile.

SPEAKER_42:

I didn't get to the quote, but basically Jarvin starts crying at this French Nazi's house because he imagines his kids being killed in a white genocide. It's like, come on, don't you have to have a little stoicism if you're going to be like the dark elf of the new dark enlightenment?

SPEAKER_38:

You might think so. But just because Jarvin, Musk, Vance, and their whole fascist wiener brigade... Just because these guys are pathetic dork babies, it doesn't mean they're not dangerous. Goebbels was a giant dweeb too. In the second stage, fascist movements move from the fringe to the mainstream, establishing a foothold in the political system. Views that would have once got you booted from polite society start worming their way into the cultural and political firmament. Taboos are broken so often, so publicly, and so unashamedly that they cease to be taboo at all. Even the way we talk about this process becomes little more than a cliché. Norm shattering.

SPEAKER_41:

Norm breaking.

SPEAKER_32:

Norm shattering. And I just want to get off normal. Normalize Trump.

SPEAKER_19:

And I just want to get off normal. Normalize Trump.

SPEAKER_18:

Normalize the president. Normalize the president. He's breaking those norms. Breaking, breaking those norms. Normalize the president. Breaking, breaking those norms. Normalize the president.

SPEAKER_49:

I don't know what normal is anymore.

SPEAKER_38:

Now, think back to 2015, 2016. The first Trump campaign. And for our younger listeners who have no memory of it, well, fuck you for your lack of hangovers and back problems, but I'll provide the broad strokes so you can follow along. But yeah, let's go back to Trump's first campaign. The way that he spoke and the ideas that he pushed, they shocked a lot of us almost daily. But now they can still upset us or offend us. but you can't really call them taboo anymore. But Trump alone couldn't pull the country into the second stage. Like all fascists, he needed other people, people who were ready to ally with him and enable him. He needed the traditional conservatives of the Republican Party. In the original journal article that inspired Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton argues that there are some preconditions that that predispose establishment types to fall in with fascists. Namely, as he puts it, polarization within civil society. A

SPEAKER_06:

huge new Pew Research Center study of 10,000 American adults finds us more divided than ever.

SPEAKER_38:

And deadlocks within the political system.

SPEAKER_20:

A lot of people are wondering whether our lawmakers are actually interested in solving problems.

SPEAKER_38:

Pretty familiar, right? If you've listened to the original iteration of The Haunted Screen... A six-episode season about the film, culture, and politics of Weimar Germany, you might remember that the Nazi Party never won an outright majority in the Reichstag. It reached its high watermark in the elections of 1932, where the Nazis garnered 37% of the vote, which gave them a plurality, but still left them well short of a majority, which means by a significant margin, most German voters cast their ballots against fascism.

UNKNOWN:

I'm not a Nazi.

SPEAKER_38:

In other words, Hitler never would have come to power without help from people beyond his base. Mainstream German conservatives, especially business elites, they proved willing and able to give him a hand. As historian Stefan Malinowski put it, the conservative elite wanted to ride the Nazi movement like a horse. They would use the momentum and the political potential of the Nazi party but still keep it at bay. Except that within three or four months, they discovered that they were the horse and Hitler was the horseman. Yeah, these ritzy, upper-crust characters found Hitler and his crew to be uncouth. A rabble of brawlers and drunks, not people they'd invite over to dinner.

SPEAKER_59:

Ladies and gentlemen, A grievous social error has been made here tonight.

SPEAKER_38:

But that same thuggery, they thought, it was a handy way to keep the political left in check. They assumed that Hitler could be tamed. They were essentially the Teutonic 1930s version of a certain 21st century

SPEAKER_06:

meme.

SPEAKER_38:

So they teamed up with the leopards. In October of 1932, for instance... a group of economic titans signed the Industriellen Eingabe, or in English, the Industrialist Petition, which called for President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor, the chancellorship being the position of real executive authority in the German system. Three months later, they got their wish. Trump and his MAGA movement got similar help through alliances with conventional conservatives. In this case, the Republican Party. It's easy to forget in 2025, but back in 2016, Donald Trump's grip on the GOP wasn't as unbreakable as it is now. Now, when he commands something very near complete and utter fealty from every elected Republican. His autocratic intent was always there, but he just couldn't realize it yet. There was still a coalition to cobble together. For his running mate, he tapped Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a man known for an ostentatious brand of conservative piety. See, it's a promise my wife and I made to one another. I promised her that I wouldn't dine alone with a woman. It's not my why. Totally cool, normal stuff there. No weird psychosexual stuff at all. But the Pence pick, it was a clear play for the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, much of which saw in Trump and his multiple divorces, his coarseness, his mockery of the armed forces. Thanks. I'm trying here. They saw in him the type of crude libertine that they, at least ostensibly, define themselves against. Donald Trump and evangelical

SPEAKER_41:

Christians are doing an uneasy dance. From the start of his campaign, Trump has courted Christian conservatives. But many Christian leaders have recoiled at Trump's profane outbursts and his recently revealed boorish behavior. Now,

SPEAKER_35:

75 evangelical leaders have signed a petition saying they cannot support Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_38:

Listening to that now, it sounds like a dispatch from another planet. Of course, in time we've come to see that a critical mass of evangelicals are willing not just to overlook Trump's shortcomings, but to insist that he is divinely chosen and that his opponents are literally diabolical. These people are not only revolting against Trump, they're revolting against what God's plan is for America. But in 2016, it wasn't entirely clear that they'd show up for Trump. But Mike Pence, he set up the bat signal to the evangelical community. In Trump's promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would curtail reproductive freedom, one promise that he did, of course, follow through on.

SPEAKER_04:

The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, ending abortion as a constitutional right after nearly a half century.

SPEAKER_38:

It won him the endorsement of other right-wing religious leaders like Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell Jr., These guys are, without exception, dickheads and hypocrites. Just Google, Falwell pool boy cuckold fetish for an example.

SPEAKER_21:

Towards the end of my work shift, she's like, hey, would you want to go back to my hotel room? And then she's like, but my husband wants to watch.

SPEAKER_38:

But still, these guys' support carried weight amongst the born-again rank and file. And come November 8th, a month and a day after the leaked Access Hollywood tape confirmed Trump's attitudes towards women...

SPEAKER_22:

And when you're a star,

SPEAKER_38:

they

SPEAKER_22:

let you do it.

SPEAKER_38:

You can do anything.

SPEAKER_22:

Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy.

SPEAKER_38:

Even after that, 81% of self-identified evangelical voters cast their ballot for the Donald. He's like the phoenix. They think he's dead. He's come back. An alliance was forged that lasts to the present day. Other established wings of the Republican Party also joined the Trump coalition. Take the cable channel that would become Trump's most powerful ally in the media. Fox News.

SPEAKER_42:

And welcome to Hannity Hannity. Welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. And welcome to Hannity Hannity. Welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. President Trump will always stand up for you, the American

SPEAKER_66:

people, people, people, people, American people, American people,

SPEAKER_35:

American

SPEAKER_42:

people.

SPEAKER_41:

I love Trump. Love, love, love Trump. Love Trump. Like as a person. As a person. As a person.

SPEAKER_16:

I love Trump. President Trump does have a spine of steel. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine of steel.

SPEAKER_66:

People, people, people Americans. People Americans. I love Trump. Like as a person. I think Trump is

SPEAKER_41:

funny and insightful. Funny, funny, funny and

SPEAKER_20:

insightful. I love Trump. Insightful. People, people, people Americans. Trump is curb stomping these know-nothing bitches. These know-nothing bitches. Know-nothing bitches. Trump is curb stomping these know-nothing bitches. I love Trump. Know-nothing bitches. Know-nothing, know-nothing, know-nothing bitches. I love Trump. Know-nothing bitches. Curb stomp these know-nothing bitches. As

SPEAKER_38:

slavish as they'd eventually become, way back in the sands of time, Trump's relationship with the right-wing propaganda network was tense. Yeah, they'd given him the platform to spread his racist lies about Obama's birth certificate, thereby ushering him towards politics.

SPEAKER_22:

Just walk into the hospital and you get a certificate of live birth.

SPEAKER_38:

But Fox owner Rupert Murdoch was skeptical. According to his son James, Rupert told him that if Trump were to win the presidency, it would, quote, be the end of the Republican Party. And heading into the first GOP debate in August 2015, which aired on Fox, Fox he urged moderator Megyn Kelly to go at Trump hard. She did.

SPEAKER_50:

You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.

SPEAKER_38:

And you might remember what Trump said about her afterwards.

SPEAKER_50:

You know, you could see there

SPEAKER_19:

was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.

SPEAKER_38:

As usual, Trump whined like a bitch and complained that he was the victim. So he boycotted the other Fox debates during that cycle because of what he saw as, quote, unfair treatment. Ultimately, though, Trump was a hit with viewers. So Murdoch softened his approach to the candidate, giving hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson the space to become cheerleaders for this nascent authoritarian and his ever more ridiculous lies. By 2020, 2021... They would prove so loyal that...

SPEAKER_40:

Avoiding a trial that would have turned Fox News' biggest stars into star witnesses, the company will cut a$787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems.

SPEAKER_02:

The president's lawyers alleging a company called Dominion... Fox

SPEAKER_40:

was accused of knowingly airing conspiracy theories and baseless claims falsely linking Dominion to a scheme to flip votes during the 2020 election.

SPEAKER_22:

Today's settlement represents vindication and accountability. Lies have consequences.

SPEAKER_38:

Every now and then, sure. Now, of course, there were some out-and-out MAGA freaks in Trump's first cabinet, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Birth name? Jefferson Beauregard

SPEAKER_28:

Sessions III.

SPEAKER_38:

But back in 1986, when Ronald Reagan nominated him for a federal judgeship, Jefferson Beauregard found himself in a little bit of trouble. In trouble for what?

SPEAKER_23:

In trouble for saying that the NAACP is a pinko organization and that a white civil rights attorney from his home state of Alabama is a disgrace to his race.

SPEAKER_38:

Now, I know it's hard to believe that a man who was named after both the president of the Confederacy and the general who oversaw the attack on Fort Sumter, the bombardment that kicked off the Civil War, would spout that kind of bigoted bullshit. But here's the man himself.

SPEAKER_05:

These comments that you could say about, uh, economy organization or something. I may have said something like that in a general way and that probably was wrong.

SPEAKER_38:

Yeah, probably. There was also Trump's first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, who believes that the theory of evolution was literally the work of the devil.

SPEAKER_36:

I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary.

SPEAKER_38:

And of course, chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose view of global geopolitics is essentially that of an 11th century crusader.

SPEAKER_31:

I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis. We are in an

SPEAKER_41:

outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism.

SPEAKER_38:

And who often sounds like he's just a Freudian slip away from using the term Jew with a hard J, if you catch my drift.

SPEAKER_11:

They're corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed, adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has.

SPEAKER_38:

But especially compared to Trump 2.0's current crop of sycophants and true believers, most of the first cabinet was conventionally conservative. ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson was Secretary of State, Goldman Sachs exec Steve Mnuchin was at Treasury. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was Trump's first chief of staff. And Nikki fucking Haley served as ambassador to the United Nations. This is the era of the so-called adults in the room.

SPEAKER_31:

The adults in the room. Adults in the room.

SPEAKER_48:

The adults in the room. Access of adults.

SPEAKER_38:

Ostensibly sane, responsible nannies to keep Trump's tantrums and unhinged impulses in check. Of course, the shelf life of many of these appointees tended to be short. In his first term, Trump managed to burn through four chiefs of staff, press secretaries, and national security advisors apiece, and six different communication directors. This from a guy who regularly touted his flawless hiring skills. I know the best people. I know the best managers. I know the best dealmakers. I know people that will make us so strong. I know guys that are so good. But the bottom line was that Donald and his fascist MAGA faction were to some degree governing in coalition with the GOP old guard. For his first two years as president, the failed VP candidate and Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan was Speaker of the House.

SPEAKER_66:

It's required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged.

SPEAKER_38:

Mitch McConnell led the Senate Republicans for his entire term. And... Personally, McConnell loathes Trump.

SPEAKER_40:

No one hates Donald Trump more than Mitch McConnell.

SPEAKER_38:

He's privately called him a despicable human being and stupid. Still, McConnell very much saw the president as the horse and himself as the horseman. And during much of Trump 1.0, not without reason. The major GOP successes of those four years were a tax cut that sent 65% of its savings to the top 20% of earners, and cramming the federal courts full of young conservatives, a longtime goal of McConnell's and of the Republican establishments. Now, obviously, I am not saying that Donald Trump did not say and do some really vile, awful, fascist, racist shit during his first term. Shit that went beyond even your run-of-the-mill Republican bigotry. Here are some greatest hits.

SPEAKER_22:

When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the

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children away. Trump told the Washington Post that Curiel has a conflict in presiding over the case because he is of Mexican heritage.

SPEAKER_11:

Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can

SPEAKER_30:

figure out what the hell is going on.

SPEAKER_43:

The Post reports that according to two people briefed in the meeting, the president asked, quote, why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?

SPEAKER_11:

But we're taking people out of the country. You wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people. These are animals.

SPEAKER_38:

Obviously, we don't have time to get to everything. So insert your favorite outrage here. For me, it's probably COVID. Just all of COVID.

SPEAKER_22:

Right. And then I

SPEAKER_11:

see

SPEAKER_22:

the

SPEAKER_11:

disinfectant.

SPEAKER_22:

where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection? And

SPEAKER_38:

after COVID, after George Floyd, after decisively losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, after the big lie in the Capitol riots, after the American people kicked his bitch ass out of the White House, it looked for a minute like the fever had broken, like Trump's fascist ambitions, would never make it further than Paxton's second stage. But goddamn.

SPEAKER_43:

Stage three. Look at me. I'm the captain now.

SPEAKER_38:

This brings us to fascism's third stage, where it becomes nakedly clear who is the horse and who is the horseman. This is the fascist seizure of power. Unsettling as they were, the Capitol riots on January 6th, they were a buffoonishly executed attempt by Trump partisans to take power by force. The Nazis tried something similar back in 1923, with their sloppily executed Beer Hall Putsch, a clownish attempt to spark a fascist revolution by taking municipal leaders hostage in Munich. For a full account of that particular shitshow, check out the third episode of The Haunted Screen's first season, about Weimar Germany's film, culture, and politics. Following that failed putsch, Hitler spent some time in the wilderness, serving nine months of a five-year sentence in Landsberg Prison, where he regrouped and wrote Mein Kampf.

SPEAKER_33:

I never read Mein Kampf. Trump may not have read Mein Kampf, but according to his late ex-wife, Ivana, he is familiar with Hitler's writing. She told Vanity Fair back in 1990 that he received a book of Hitler's speeches as a gift and kept it on his bedside table.

SPEAKER_38:

Of course, while Donald Trump racked up his share of convictions during his interregnum, he never actually served time. But he did regroup, eventually bullying his way past a weak-kneed set of challengers to the Republican nomination

SPEAKER_11:

and accepting

SPEAKER_38:

his victory with all of his characteristic graciousness, And

SPEAKER_65:

then, of

SPEAKER_38:

course, in the general, Trump benefited from Joe Biden's selfish, arrogant insistence on running for re-election and proceeded to eke out a win over a slapdash Harris campaign after the Democratic Party belatedly forced sleepy Joe to step aside. The hubris of one old man and his enablers. set the stage for another much more dangerous ones return to power

SPEAKER_65:

many people have told me that god spared my life for a reason and that reason was to save our country and to restore america to greatness and now we are going to fulfill that mission

SPEAKER_16:

together we're going to fulfill that mission

SPEAKER_38:

so now Thank you for watching. But the fact his voters were ignorant of his dictatorial impulses or in denial about his fascistic plans for the country, it doesn't mean that the man made any attempt to hide them during his campaign. Rather, he was explicitly positioning himself at the center of an autocratic cult of personality and boasting about his plan to punish his enemies. Here he is in 2023. In 2016, I

SPEAKER_10:

declared... I am your voice.

SPEAKER_11:

Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and

SPEAKER_65:

betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. Not going to let

SPEAKER_38:

this happen. And people who worked closely with him were talking literal generals, not bleeding heart Brooklyn podcaster professors like me. they called their former boss a fascist in public.

SPEAKER_52:

In newly revealed... conversations between General Milley and the author Bob Woodward, written about in Bob Woodward's new book, War. General Milley felt compelled to clarify and articulate his concern about the future of our country should Donald Trump ever return to power. He cornered Bob Woodward at a 200-person reception in March 2023 and said this, quote, he is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental health to But now I realize he's a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country." A fascist to the core, General Milley repeated. Bob Woodward said he will never forget the intensity of Milley's worry in that moment.

SPEAKER_11:

Trump's longest serving chief of staff, John Kelly, is making headlines for calling his former boss a fascist and suggesting that he praised Adolf Hitler. Let's watch.

SPEAKER_29:

But certainly the former president is in the far right area. He's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators. He has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of a fascist, for sure.

SPEAKER_43:

Secretary of Defense under Trump, Mark Esper. Secretary Esper, what do you think? You have all these people who know Trump saying that they think he's a fascist. These are military guys, conservative guys, people who worked with Trump. Do you agree?

SPEAKER_57:

Well, Jake, I have a lot of respect for each of those men, whether it's Jim Mattis, Mark Milley, or John Kelly. They've all served their nation honorably for decades. What John Kelly laid out, he said, look, just look it up in a dictionary what fascist means and come to your own conclusion. And as I've said, if you look at how it's defined in elements, you can't help but come to the conclusion that he has those tendencies. And so my concern is we should take those warnings with due respect and regard.

SPEAKER_38:

But still... We elected him anyway, and Trump wasted no time pushing us into stage three. As a protest sign I saw at a march a few months ago put it, we knew it was going to be bad, but holy shit. Now, as much as he had tried, Trump was unable to fully consolidate power during his first term. There had been a handful of congressional Republicans still willing to push back against him,

SPEAKER_30:

Tonight, piercing criticism of the president by a fellow Republican. Senator Bob Corker tweeting, it's a shame the White House has become an adult daycare center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.

SPEAKER_49:

Let me just read the title of Mitt Romney's opinion piece that he wrote. The president shapes the public character of the nation. Trump's character falls short. It is searing. It is damning.

SPEAKER_08:

After seven years of promises to repeal and replace Obamacare, it came down to just one vote. John McCain's.

SPEAKER_17:

When McCain walks back in, the room wakes up. With all eyes on McCain, he casts his vote with a thumbs down. From President Trump, frustration.

SPEAKER_05:

Boy, oh boy.

SPEAKER_17:

Thumbs down. Thumbs down. Thumbs down.

SPEAKER_05:

Get his

SPEAKER_38:

ass, John. But then, after January 6th, these dissident Republican voices got a lot less lonely. Even if the bulk of Trump's momentarily emboldened critics would cowardly and cravenly walk back their words and bend the knee.

SPEAKER_05:

Madam Speaker,

SPEAKER_27:

let me be clear. Last week's violent attack on the Capitol was undemocratic, un-American, and criminal. The President bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters.

SPEAKER_11:

He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.

SPEAKER_34:

Well, let me give you my view of what happened January the 6th. And we're all we're here. We're here. We saw what happened. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election. The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.

SPEAKER_31:

We saw a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol. It was despicable. It was an assault on the citadel of democracy. I think the

SPEAKER_41:

president's rhetoric was irresponsible. I think it was reckless. And I don't think it was remotely helpful.

SPEAKER_38:

For the record, that was future Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and Senators Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, all of whom understood the attack on the Capitol for what it was and a sloppily executed attempt at an authoritarian takeover, and all of whom would abet its leaders' return to power. Three rats fleeing a ship when they think it's sinking, and clinging to its hull when it starts to float again. So those were legislators, members of Congress. But even inside Trump's own administration, people he appointed, there were individuals who tried to rein in his most fascistic impulses, at least to some degree. Maybe the most famous example takes place in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests. Here again is his Secretary of Defense Mark Esper talking to Nora O'Donnell of 60 Minutes about a protest in Washington, D.C.

SPEAKER_47:

What specifically was he suggesting that the U.S. military should do to these protesters?

SPEAKER_57:

He says, can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something. And he's suggesting that that's what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.

SPEAKER_47:

The commander in chief was suggesting that the US military shoot protesters.

SPEAKER_38:

Yes, in the straits of our nation's capital. That's right. Shocking. Thanks to the interference of people like Esper, this didn't happen. Remember, it's the period of the adults in the room that we talked about earlier. Members of Trump's team who saw it as part of their job to buffer the country and the world from their bosses' erratic moods and ideas. Mostly military guys or rich business people who Trump had some respect for, inasmuch as he can respect anybody besides himself or dictators like Vladimir Putin. But the second term, it's been different. Effectively, the entire Republican Party has fallen in line behind Trump, to the point where Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who likes to posture as one of the GOP's last remaining independent voices, where she laid out the attitude of Republican lawmakers with some rare candor.

SPEAKER_24:

That's why you've got everybody just, like, ziplip, not saying a word, because they're afraid they're going to be taken down, they're going to be primaried, they're going to be given names in the media. On

SPEAKER_38:

July 1st, Murkowski seemed to prove her own point by casting the deciding vote in favor of Trump's so-called Big beautiful bill. A budget that will strip something like 10 million Americans of their health insurance, balloon the national debt, and gut investment in clean energy, while still finding the money to turbocharge Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That street gang of masked thugs, better known as ICE, with an annual budget that's more than double that of the FBI and DEA combined, and with more active duty personnel than the militaries of countries like Serbia, Portugal, Norway, in Belgium. How did Murkowski defend her vote in favor of such a noxiously bad bill?

SPEAKER_24:

Do I like this bill? No. Because I tried to take care of Alaska's interests. But I know, I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don't like that.

SPEAKER_38:

If only somebody could have done something about that. Like, I don't know, A senator whose no vote would have stopped the bill from becoming law. Someone who, less than a week before the vote, published a memoir whose back cover positions her as, quote, a voice of reason in a polarized U.S. Senate, whose politics are, quote, grounded in compromise and compassion. God, this fucking coward. So by his second inauguration, Trump had secured a death grip on a party made up almost entirely politically of true believing fascists and spineless wieners. And that, it came in handy when he sought to consolidate his strength in what Paxton calls the revolution after power. Like Trump, both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini began their governments legally, at least kind of. The specter of violence, it certainly helped Mussolini ascend to Italy's highest office. In October 1922, The privilege!

SPEAKER_26:

The fascist

SPEAKER_38:

assent was, if anything, even cleaner in Germany. In the federal elections of 1932, the last free and fair ones the country would see until the end of the Second World War, the Nazis secured a plurality of seats in the Reichstag. From there, it was just a matter of months before Hitler was appointed chancellor. But neither man arrived in office as a dictator. Mussolini's consolidation of power took a few years and several iterations. The Acerbo Law of 1923 restructured parliament so as to guarantee the party with the plurality of votes, the fascists, two-thirds of the seats. This blatantly unjust but ostensibly legal state of affairs hung around till the beginning of 1925, when the Blackshirts essentially forced Mussolini to act, telling Il Duce to crush the enemies of fascism, or they would do it without him. Mussolini chose to strike while his fascists were hot, and over two years of increasing political repression, he managed to solidify his power by early 1927. The Nazis they move more quickly. In February 1933, less than a month after becoming chancellor, Hitler received a huge gift from a very stupid Dutchman. A

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23-year-old

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Dutch communist named Marnius van der Lubbe, he set a fire at the Reichstag. which the Nazis claimed to be the starting gun of an organized left-wing revolution.

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Hitler, now chancellor, has announced that the fire was the work of communists and was intended to be the signal for a Bolshevist uprising throughout the country. In consequence, Germany has been placed under a system of martial law, a decree having been signed which aims at the total destruction of communism.

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No such revolution ever materialized. But under a month later, Hitler pushed the Enabling Act through parliament. Legislation that effectively installed him as dictator, able to make and enforce laws without consulting the president or the Reichstag. Trump and his MAGA faction, their revolution after power, has rivaled the Nazis in terms of speed. Just look at how quickly they've transformed the nature of the executive branches, departments, and agencies. That choice blend of fanaticism and cowardice that defines Republican lawmakers. It came in handy when Trump needed the Senate's approval to staff his administration with appointees whose only apparent qualification is fealty to him. Take, for example, FBI Director Kash Patel. During Trump's first term, Patel's work as a congressional staffer trying to discredit the FBI's Russia investigation, it got him noticed. So he was hired by the administration and he leveraged his ideological fanaticism to rocket up the ranks, eventually ascending to chief of staff for the acting secretary of defense. Now, he never spent a day at the FBI before being tapped to lead it, but who needs relevant experience when you're the Maurice Sendak of American authoritarianism? Here's NPR discussing Patel's Literary oeuvre.

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In the Plot Against the King children's book trilogy, Cash the Distinguished Discoverer helps King Donald defeat characters like Hillary Quinton, Kamala Lala, and Baron Von Biden. One of the books refers to 2000 Mules, the thoroughly debunked film that falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

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I'm sure Patel's Caldecott medal is in the mail. And of course, there's RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services. You probably know all about this guy, the excommunicated scion of the Kennedy dynasty, a conspiracy theorist who thinks vaccines cause autism, a dude who's pretty sure he acquired the worm in his brain. During

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that one episode with a bear... Now to more in the presidential race, a confession from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that he once left a dead bear cub in New York's Central Park. He confesses in a new video that he left the dead bear

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right there with an old bicycle beside a Central Park bike path because he thought it would be, quote, amusing.

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And perhaps the worst of the worst, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was previously best known as as a second stringer at Fox News.

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We are so stupid and so vulnerable right now.

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After serving as a guard at the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay and as an infantryman in Iraq, Hegseth returned to the United States where he found his true calling, getting drunk and hating women, colleagues from across his career, have observed him drinking on the job.

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He smelled of alcohol before going on the air as a co-host of Fox& Friends weekend more than a dozen times.

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Which, okay, I don't think I could handle hosting a Fox show sober, but the stakes are a little different when you're running the Pentagon. And in the wake of 2017 sexual assault allegations, hope you can hear the air quotes around allegations there, he paid$50,000 to make his accuser go away. He was such a monster that his ex-wife felt compelled to create a safe word system to let her sister-in-law know when a hammered Hegseth was making her feel endangered. Even Pete's own mom acknowledged that she had raised a piece of absolute human garbage.

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And the mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Department of Defense, reportedly called her son, quote, an abuser of women in a 2018 email. The New York Times published the text of the email Friday. In the email, Penelope Hegseth told her son that he had abused many women and urged him to get some help.

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She later walked it back in a Fox News interview. But, come on, has your mom ever written you an email like that? No, I could run through other examples. Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Dan Bongino, Emil Bove, Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon, even Thomas Fugate, that fucking 22-year-old who's apparently overseeing counterterrorism for the Department of Homeland Security. None of these people are qualified in terms of skill or experience. But what they are is loyal to Donald Trump. And with Senate Republicans ready to rubber stamp anyone short of a card-carrying pedophile like Matt Gaetz, Trump has consolidated power throughout the executive branch, and not only at the upper echelons of its departments and agencies. Elon Musk's doge purges, they were never really about saving the government money.

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A CBS News review of three of the largest cuts listed there shows the actual savings were not a combined$6.4 billion, as claimed, but$165 million. In other words, Doge was off by 97%. They

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were about kneecapping the regulatory state and pushing out career employees who did not see themselves, first and foremost, as servants of Donald J. Trump. Outlets like the AP and the Washington Post have reported that job candidates are having their social media accounts scoured for political posts and are being asked questions like, when did your MAGA revelation occur? And, was January 6th an inside job? In most of the ways that count, Trump is ignorant, incurious, and intellectually lazy. This is a guy who refuses to read his briefings, forcing his staff to convey information through jazzy visual presentations that are capable of keeping his limited attention. Yahoo News reports that his intelligence team is even considering hiring a Fox News producer to design video briefings that, quote, could include maps and animations of exploding bombs. But when it comes to acquiring and maintaining information, personal power, he is capable of learning. And one of the lessons of his first term was that on the second time around, he would need to stock the government with loyalists. Here he is talking to Joe Rogan.

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The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people. I picked some great people, you know, but you don't think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn't have picked. I that I shouldn't have picked. Neocons? Yeah, neocons, or bad people, or disloyal people, or

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people that were just bad.

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Emphasis on disloyal people. When it comes to Trump 2.0, lesson learned. So the thoroughly Trumpified Republican Party now controls the entire legislative branch, both the House and the Senate. And Trump has stocked the executive branch with loyalists. even in roles that have traditionally been filled by nonpartisan career bureaucrats. And this leaves exactly one branch with the authority to check his authority, the judicial branch. You probably know how that's going. The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative supermajority, it's been as eager to give Trump what he wants as the legislature. Last year, in the midst of legal wrangling over his role on January 6th, The court threw Trump a lifeline and the possibility of a second term unfettered by fear of criminal accountability.

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The

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landmark ruling from the United States Supreme Court divided six to three long ideological lines. The justices say a president now has, quote, absolute immunity from prosecution when it comes to so-called official acts.

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What the court is saying is quite surprising. They're basically saying that nothing he does can ever be subject to criminal liability.

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And this year, They extended his power over government staffing, further than for any president before him.

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Yes, some breaking news. Just a few moments ago, the Supreme Court giving the green light to the president to fire the heads of two executive agencies, the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protections Board. They are typically appointed. They were designed by Congress to be independent from politics. But the Supreme Court now giving the president the ability to remove those leaders at his own will.

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This morning, major changes may be coming to the nation's school systems. The Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling clearing the way for President Trump to overhaul the Department of Education after a lower court had blocked the layoffs of nearly 1,400 employees out of a workforce originally around 4,000. And

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they've even given Trump free reign to collect human beings and ship them anywhere on earth he pleases.

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Back here at home, we are following late developments out of the Supreme Court tonight related to President Trump's deportation efforts. In a brief unsigned order, the court clearing the way for the Trump administration to swiftly deport migrants to countries where they have no previous ties, known as third countries. The ruling immediately applies to a group of men the administration seeks to send to South Sudan.

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South Sudan. A country teetering on the edge of famine and civil war. So within months of returning to office, Donald Trump has consolidated power across all branches of government. The Republican-controlled House and Senate are happy to rubber stamp his every whim. He has remade the executive branch into an ideological operation from top to bottom. And the Supreme Court continues to bestow him with authority that looks less like a president and more like a monarch. The government is no longer ours. It's Trump's. He has seized power. And, as I'm sure you've noticed, he's begun to exercise it. We've officially entered fascism's fourth stage. What does this mean? What does it look like? That's for next episode. Until then, stay safe, stay vigilant, and stay angry. In accordance with the principles of fair use, we use clips from The Day the Clown Cried, Fox 5 Washington, MSNBC, Bloomberg, NBC4 Washington, CNN, The Daily Wire, CBS News, KCEN News, NBC News, The View, Newsmax, WCBV Boston, La Dolce Vita, Democracy Now!, Now This Impact, KTNV 13 Las Vegas, Politico, Sky News Australia, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, CTV News, IT Part 1, Black Klansman, Prejudice, Django Unchained, Jojo Rabbit, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Firing Line, The Big Short, The AP, ABC News, Radio New Zealand, Chapo Trap House, The New York Times, EIL Talks, Fox 7 Austin, Drunken Peasants, Jack Murphy Live, Lord of the Rings The Two Towers, Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring, A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, The Takeaway, Rev.com, News Nation, 30 Rock, Trump of the Day, All Things Considered, Men in the High Castle, The Lone Ranger, Kept Husbands, Francisca Ramsey, Al Jazeera, The 700 Club, Good Morning America, Inside Edition, The Washington Post, Young Turks, Dignitatis Humanae Institute, On the Media, Yahoo Finance, City News, WTHR, C-SPAN, BBC News, Captain Phillips, Right Side Broadcasting, Fox 9 Minneapolis St. Paul, On Demand News, The Huffington Post, News West 9, Today in History, NPR, Good Morning America, Scripps News, The Joe Rogan Experience, and The Today Show. Music comes courtesy of... and the Great Pacific Garbage Vortex.

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Travis Mushett

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