It is my belief that it is vital for us to listen to voices such as those of Jason Stanley and Chris Hedges. This is the way that we become empowered to know the truth, to claim agency, to shed layers of indoctrination, and that we are no longer vulnerable to believing and spreading authoritarian narratives. There is an imperative that we are able to discern truth from disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies. As Emma Goldman once said, "Ignorance is the most violent element in society." May we all be passionate seekers of deeper and deeper truths. — Molly
By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report
Ever since the first Donald Trump administration, the word “fascism” has dominated discussion around Trump’s policies and ambitions to the extent of semantic satiation. Liberals and leftists often use fascism as a blanket term for anything right-wing politicians represent and Republicans equally use “communism” to denote Democratic or left-wing politics. Jason Stanley, author, American philosopher and Yale professor, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to give proper context to what fascism means and how the Trump administration’s second term could really mean the completion of the American fascist state.
One key element in the spread of fascism is the attack on a central pillar of democracy: education. Stanley explores the recent assault on crucial parts of the American education system, including critical race theory, Black history and now the sanctity of free speech. Legislation pushing for the suppression of these segments is expected, Stanley explains, since “it creates a fake version of the past and it tells students that you’re the greatest country in history and your leaders are the greatest people in history. It’s exactly what Hitler in Mein Kampf said the education system of the Third Reich should be.”
Stanley also illustrates the various ways in which fascist regimes attempt to psychologically manipulate the public into being subservient and by eliminating any reference to historic self-determination. “An education system should give people the sense that they have agency to change history,” Stanley tells Hedges. “And if you want to impose patriotic education, you want to impose the kind of education that fits into an authoritarian system, you want to remove agency from people.”
The bleakness of the near future is hard to avoid, Stanley warns. He likens the deportation and hunting down of pro-Palestinian student protestors to the stripping of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson’s passports:
“That’s what happened with Du Bois and Robeson. Like if they can take down those people, they can take down anyone. And so that is clearly the next phase. Clearly the next phase is stripping the passports of people they don’t like. You know, every authoritarian country does that. We’ve done it and I expect that to come, unfortunately.”
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power—in our case historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism—are erased. There is to be no shared reality. There are to be no other legitimate perspectives. History is to be static. It is not to be open to reinterpretation or investigation. It is to be calcified into myth to buttress a ruling ideology and the reigning political and social hierarchy. Any other paradigm of power and social interaction is tantamount to treason.
“One of the most significant threats that a class hierarchy can face is a universally accessible and excellent public school system,” writes Jason Stanley in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future:
The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely—and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy—is a certain form of rightwing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods. The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike, who see in democracy a threat to their power, and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascist-leaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians in undermining the institution of public education.
The right-wing attacks on programs such as critical race theory or DEI, as Stanley points out in his book, “intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included—like Black Americans, for instance—are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”
Joining me to discuss his books Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them is Professor Jason Stanley. Professor Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Let’s begin with the piece you had in The Guardian, where you quite specifically talk about, like Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin and how all of these things, well that’s already pretty much been dismantled by the Supreme Court, how all of these things are being dismantled and why.
Jason Stanley
So first of all, Title VI isn’t being dismantled, it’s being weaponized, it’s being reversed and weaponized. And the way it’s being weaponized is it’s being directed to fight supposed anti-white discrimination. So this regime is following Viktor Orbán and focused on Christians, saying Christians were the most persecuted group in the world. Now this regime is saying whites are the most persecuted group in the world. Of course, Trump signed an executive order giving special status to Afrikaners who supposedly were under threat when actually Afrikaners own, whites own much of the land in South Africa.
So this idea that white people are under threat, they’re using Title VI to push this and basically what they’re going to do is they’re gonna say any, you know, Black people in positions of power that came at the cost of supposedly more competent white Americans, which leans into racist stereotypes baked in to the American past. And then most concerningly for me as a Jewish American is they are using us, Jewish Americans, they’re like nakedly using us as an excuse to take down the most Jewish institution in American life, the university.
Chris Hedges
Well, they’ve also, while you’re right, they’ve weaponized it, but they’ve also stripped the protections that it once gave to vulnerable and marginalized people.
Jason Stanley
Yeah, conceptually, so Title VI is intended to help traditionally marginalized, traditionally oppressed people. But the idea now, what this group wants to say is there are no power differentials anymore. And so the really oppressed people are the majority group, the dominant group. This gets to my book, How Fascism Works, where I have a chapter called “Victimhood”. Fascism always relies on portraying the dominant group as victims.
The idea that white Americans are somehow being victimized in the university by sort of critical race theorists. I mean, my department of philosophy at Yale hired our first Black tenured professor last year. He started in fall 2024. So, I mean, the level of absurdity, factual absurdity, beggars belief. But that’s the idea is to make white people feel like they’re victimized. And so you erase the history.
So you erase the fact that black people were marginalized in America. You make it illegal to talk about the continuing marginalization by the after effects of housing segregation, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, et cetera, the current effects, make it illegal to talk about those things. And then you say, okay, look at how white people and Asians are discriminated against. So it all comes, but I think there’s also an element of retribution here.
Title VI was used against segregated Southern schools and racism in the school districts in the South, and now they’re flipping it and they’re saying, to the glee of many of their supporters, they’re saying, no, the real racism is directed against whites and it’s done by these universities.
Chris Hedges
We’ll go into your book, but when I covered the war in Yugoslavia, I watched Slobodan Milošević use exactly that tactic of telling the Serbs who controlled what was left of Yugoslavia that they were the victims in a famous speech in Kosovo, “I will not let them beat you, I will not let them beat you.” But it’s exactly the same phenomena.
Jason Stanley
Yeah, victimhood is, what you do is, and this is sort of a mixture of the books now, is you say in the past, we were the great ones, we created the culture, and we’re now being punished for that. We’re being punished for our greatness. And we’re an existential threat. So it goes together with the great replacement theory narratives.
And then what they’re gonna do is they’re saying the schools and universities by representing accurate history are a challenge to this myth. And in fact, the history itself, if you read what the Department of Education is saying, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that just teaching Black history accurately would be a Title VI violation.
In other words, just teaching, say, redlining and mortgage, the history of our mortgage laws that resulted in segregated cities today, it looks like that would be the same as a white professor continuously calling all of their Black students with the worst racial slur.
Chris Hedges
So let’s open with your book, Erasing History. I mean, I think the book does a very good job of explaining why they’re making war on the universities. You say,
“Authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening. At every opportunity these regimes find ways of erasing or concealing history in order to consolidate their power. Why is this? Why does history do that? What does history do that is so disruptive of authoritarian goals? Perhaps most importantly, it provides multiple perspectives of the past.”
This is really the underlying, you would argue, the underlying goal of what’s happened. It has nothing to do with antisemitism. It has nothing to do with DEI or critical race theory or anything else. These become the tactics for something far more nefarious.
Jason Stanley
Yeah, I mean, the department, Linda McMahon in her letter about the final mission of the Department of Education says it’s gonna be to impose patriotic education. Patriotic education being a kind of, you know, flat, one-dimensional story of the greatness of the nation. It’s just, of course, just picture in your mind an authoritarian country and the education system in an authoritarian country. It’s just telling students to love their country.
Chris Hedges
Well, it’s mythic. It’s not true.
Jason Stanley
Right, it creates a fake version of the past and it tells students that you’re the greatest country in history and your leaders are the greatest people in history. It’s exactly what Hitler in Mein Kampf said the education system of the Third Reich should be. I talk about that at length. Hitler talks a lot about education in Mein Kampf.
So the fuel for fascist movements is this feeling of resentment by the dominant group. And so what you wanna do is you wanna create fear and resentment among the dominant group. So they keep supporting you and they think you’re going to protect them. So you represent another perspective, the perspective of marginalized groups as, somehow an attack on the identity of the dominant group.
You say, like, AfD [Alternative for Germany] in Germany, you know, they wanna say, one of their platforms, Björn Höcke’s platform, one of the leaders, is to remove the monument to the murdered Jews of Europe from Berlin. Because the idea is all that history is there to make the dominant group feel shame. Which it’s not, it’s there just to remind people, let’s not do this again.
But it is powerful for a non-Jewish German to see the Stolperstein, to see the monuments that very recently have been placed on German streets. And it does generate powerful feelings. And what they’re trying to do is leverage those powerful feelings into fear and resentment. When Musk said to the AfD, the most extreme far-right party in Europe, that other far-right parties won’t work with, when Musk said the German tribes were great, he didn’t mean German Jews.
He meant he was feeding into a myth of Aryanism, of Aryan supremacy, and he was feeding into the AfD line that German soldiers in World War I and World War II were in fact heroes. So this idea that, so what you try to do is you erase the history and then you represent the dominant group as great. And then you represent history itself, the actual history as a threat, as some sort of nefarious threat to destroy the nation.
Chris Hedges
And that is fundamental to what’s happening in places like Columbia [University], because you’re pushing out all sorts of people who challenge the dominant narrative. Of course, the primary group that’s targeted now are people who challenge the Zionist narrative. But that’s not exclusive. They’re hardly interested in stopping with Zionism.
Jason Stanley
No, I think this attack on the universities is antisemitic because the universities, first of all, it’s placing us American Jews at the center of things. So the American university system is the greatest university system in the world. And they’re using American Jews as the excuse to dismantle. So it’s never good to be used politically like that and it’s billions and billions of dollars in federal funding.
So, of course, who are the leftist protesters and critical intellectuals among the students and faculty? Well, one group of them are obviously Jews. They’re using antisemitic stereotypes of the university as filled with these dangerous leftist radicals. Those are antisemitic stereotypes and they’re using those to say we have to protect the Jews against it. Antisemitism just means leftism for them. They’re just saying the left is antisemitic.
But what this does is it sets Jewish people up. It sets Jewish people up. It feeds into the antisemitic stereotypes that Jews control the institutions. So it’s hard for me not to see this, ironically and paradoxically, as an attack on American Jews.
To continue the transcript, and to watch the original video interview, please go here: https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/26/erasing-history-how-fascism-works-w-jason-stanley/
No comments:
Post a Comment