The Racket: Recent Episodes
Jonathan M. Katz
Fearless reporting and analysis in audio form by Jonathan M. Katz. For written issues and to support the pod subscribe at theracket.news
theracket.news
Find all episodes and newsletters at TheRacket.news
Atlanta: Home of Coca-Cola, Jermaine Dupri, and the country’s most open-ended racketeering law. Two very different cases of national importance are headed to trial under Georgia’s version of the RICO Act. One of course involves Donald Trump and eighteen allies for their attempt to steal the 2020 election. The other targets more than sixty activists who tried to stop the construction of a $90 million police tactical training center in a forest outside Atlanta, a project the protesters have indelibly nicknamed “Cop City.”
As I tried to think through these very different cases — and what they say about the law and American criminal justice in general — I couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to than Josie Duffy Rice. A journalist and graduate of Harvard Law School, Duffy Rice is the host of the podcast UnReformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, and a legal commentator who has appeared everywhere from the New Yorker to The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. We talk about activism, free speech, the mob, and laws as tools for both justice and revenge. It’s a great, and I think enlightening conversation, and I hope you enjoy. (There’s also an automatically generated transcript available on the website.)
And if you do enjoy, or get something out of my work in general, please consider supporting The Racket with a paid subscription. This newsletter has become my main job, and I can’t do it without the active support of readers like you. For $6 a month or $60 a year, you’ll get every issue, access to subscriber-only podcasts and nearly 300 past issues going back over four years, not to mention the sastifaction of supporting real, independent journalism. Thanks again for reading and listening.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit katz.substack.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit katz.substack.com
Last week, in its story on the latest African coup the New York Times included precisely one line of context about the United States: National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby saying the “attempted takeover”was “deeply concerning.” What Times readers didn’t learn was that the U.S. has a direct interest in that country, Gabon, as it has been using it as a key staging ground for military operations in wars that most Americans don’t even know we’re involved in. Or that at least fifteen of the leaders of recent coups in Africa were trained by the U.S. military.
That last factoid was uncovered by investigative journalist Nick Turse, a historian and reporter who has spent the last decade reporting from inside Africa’s wars and on the hidden roles of the United States Africa Command. He graciously accepted my invitation to join me for this conversation. We get into what the U.S.—and the recently orphaned Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group—are really up to in the Sahel; the details of that aforementioned U.S. training; and the NATO war that kicked off this wave of unrest. We also unpack the unlikely (and not uncomplicated) role of far-right Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as a lone voice on the American political front.
Paid subscribers to the Racket can listen to the audio of my conversation with Nick using the player above, or the podcast app of your choice. There’s also a transcript, edited and abridged for clarity, below. And if you aren’t a full subscriber, now’s a great time:
The Racket is 100% reader- (and listener-)supported. If you like it, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit katz.substack.com
Subscribe and read the full transcript at TheRacket.news
In his non-apology apology for his just-revealed years of genocidal racism, Richard Hanania made a brief allusion to a foreign leader few Americans have heard of, but who has become hugely popular on the far right.
Nayib Bukele has been president of El Salvador since 2019; he has announced his intention to run again in 2024, despite a constitutional ban on reelection. Just 42 years old, Bukele has been referred to as the “first millennial authoritarian”; in a Twitter bio he called himself “the coolest dictator in the world.” Bukele, so far, is most famous for two things: making Bitcoin one of El Salvador’s national currencies, and taking credit for reducing the country’s murder rate through draconian policing — or, as our good buddy Hanania called it, “the Bukele miracle.”
But is this “miracle” real? And why are America Firsters so into a Central American president of Palestinian descent?
To find out, I called Michael Paarlberg, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and former senior Latin America policy adviser for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign who has spent years researching in and writing about El Salvador. We talk about Salvadoran history and politics, Hanania’s alleged “small-l liberalism,” and the outsized role of U.S. imperialism—and the LAPD!—in the gang situation in that country.
You can listen to the subscriber-only conversation by clicking the play button above, or read the transcript below.
And before you do, just a word of thanks to everyone who’s read, shared, and above all subscribed to The Racket, whether for the last four days or the last four years. It’s great to see this newsletter getting cited in and inspiring further coverage and inquiry from the Huffington Post to the New York Times. As a friend of mine put it, we set the agenda on the Hanania story, and there’s more like that to come.
But I can’t keep doing this work without your support. If you aren’t a paid subscriber yet, now’s the perfect time.
In this episode we go to Haiti via the 1932 horror cult classic White Zombie. Starring Bela Lugosi as “Murder Legendre" and set during the then-ongoing US Occupation, this was the film that introduced the Haitian zonbi to the American masses, with all the deep-seated racism and contradictions that infuse zombie movies and literature to this day. Our guest is Kaiama Glover, a professor at Barnard College and scholar of Haitian and Francophone literature par excellence. | Get Gangsters of Capitalism: https://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Capitalism-Smedley-Breaking-Americas/dp/1250135583/ref=sr_1_3 | Get Kaiama Glover's newest book: https://www.dukeupress.edu/a-regarded-self
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
Panama! Boxing! Colonialism! De Niro! De Armas! This week we're exploring the heart of America's historic "sphere of influence" through Jonathan Jakubowicz’s 2016 drama Hands of Stone. A biopic of famed Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán, the film tries to divine the complex interior life of a man who grew up on the wrong side of U.S. imperialism (and the Panama Canal Zone) and fought his way to becoming a four-time champion of the world. In so doing, the movie deals with—and in some cases re-enacts—some of the themes and scenes I talk about in GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM. I’m joined for the conversation by my friend and political scientist Michael Paarlberg, a terrific thinker on Latin American policy and migration who spent much of his childhood living in Panama City. | Read Mike's bio here: https://politicalscience.vcu.edu/people/faculty/paarlberg.html | Get Gangsters of Capitalism here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250135582
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
This week we’re crossing the Pacific Rim to the Philippines—America’s longtime colony and the subject of three chapters of Gangsters of Capitalism, via the 2018 Filipino war epic Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral (The Boy General). It is a fascinating film not only because it portrays Americans as villains, but because of its deeper critique about the response of colonized people. I’m joined from Metro Manila by film critic Philbert Dy, who shares his perspective on the movie, as well as the state of both cinema and politics in the Philippines. See more of Phil's reviews here: https://letterboxd.com/philbertdy/ And buy Gangsters of Capitalism here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250135582
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
Special pub week edition! I invite an expert on modern China and the Boxer Rebellion to watch 55 Days at Peking -- the 1963 Western-in-China starring Charlton Heston, David Niven, and Ava Gardner. Set during the 1900 Boxer War, it reflects the politics of the high Cold War in which it was made. My next Gangsters event is Jan. 27 in conversation with Clint Smith at New America: https://www.newamerica.org/fellows/events/jonathan-katz-gangsters-of-capitalism/ ... You can order the book here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250135582
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
In preparation for the release of GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM, we’re taking a tour of the places I (and Smedley Butler) traveled to as portrayed in film. First up: Guantánamo. I sat down with Spencer Ackerman to talk about what this 2008 stoner comedy has to say about America, its empire and the forever wars. Plus … Don’t miss the online launch event for Gangsters with me and podcast ace Mike Duncan on JAN. 18th at 6 pm ET. More info here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pp-live-jonathan-katz-gangsters-of-capitalism-with-mike-duncan-tickets-220103685047 … And check out the first excerpt from Gangsters published by Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/coup-jan6-fdr-new-deal-business-plot-1276709/
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
Listen now | Are the unvaccinated entitled, deprived, or just misunderstood? What would be a more effective way of controlling the COVID pandemic—shame or providing healthcare for all? (Or both?)I talked with Eula Biss, author of On Immunity: An Inoculation, for this week’s Racket podcast. We went deep into the long history of debates over inoculation (debates that started even before the first vaccine was invented!), the power of conversation, and our own experiences vaccinating our respective kids. Also discussed in this episode: “The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think” by Zeynep Tufekci | Who’s afraid of the vaccine mandate” (The Racket) | Having and Being Had by Eula BissGangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, The Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz | Historian Farren Yero
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
Listen now | For the debut podcast edition of The Racket (theracket.news) I talked to Amy Spitalnick, Executive Director of Integrity First for America, the organization behind the federal lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rampage. I also talked with Heidi Beirich, an expert on global far-right extremism about the bigger implications of the case.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
Listen now | For the Biden administration, the arrival of thousands of Haitian immigrants on the southern border has been a telling moment. An even more dire response was hinted at last week by NBC News: an ad by the Department of Homeland Security for a “new contract to operate a migrant detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with a requirement that some of the guards speak Spanish and Haitian Creole.” The revelation horrified many Americans, who associate Guantánamo with the worst abuses of the Forever Wars. To Haitians, it brought back an even older memory: of the original Gitmo detention camps, built in the early 1990s to house an earlier group of Haitian refugees.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
Trump has described COVID-19 as a problem that “came out of nowhere.” “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” he said on March 26, as he steered his country to the worst nightmare of the pandemic so far.
That’s a lie. In this audio edition of The Long Version, I talked with Dr. Jonna Mazet, the former global director of the U.S. government project to identify and prevent viruses from jumping into human populations. Trump shuttered that project in September 2019, three months before the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China—by scientists Mazet had been working with until the funding ran out.
You can keep independent journalism alive in this time of crisis by signing up for this newsletter/podcast at katz.substack.com or using the box below. You can also support it with a paid subscription, or check out my Patreon for more options.
Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors)
Theme Music
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Hello, and welcome to The Long Version. A newsletter by me, Jonathan Myerson Katz, which you can find online at Katz dot Substack dot com. That's K A T Z dot substack dot com. I hope everybody is doing well, away from other people to the greatest extent possible. These are frightening times. It is currently April 10th, 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic is raging in the United States of America. The new coronavirus is now the leading cause of death on a daily basis in the United States. The epidemic is worse here than anywhere else in the world. In just the city of New York alone, there have been more deaths than in any other country. And even if you don't buy those numbers, if you think that as is very possible, that China underreported the number of deaths in Wuhan city and Hubei Province you can't deny the fact that in New York there are unclaimed bodies being buried on Hart Island in the Bronx.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
It's a nightmare. Donald Trump, the president of the United States in case you've somehow forgotten has said a number of times that this came out of nowhere, right? He said that on March 6th, a couple days later on March 19th, he said that this pandemic is something that just surprise the whole world, quote, "If people would've known about it, it could have stopped being in place. Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion." March 26, just a couple of days ago, he said nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could happen. He's obviously saying that to excuse his action, lack of action that has cost so many lives. But I think it's a statement that a lot of people can probably relate to, right? You know, for most of us, this does seem to have come out of nowhere. [That] it was hard to predict.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But he's wrong. There were people who were out there predicting this. There were a lot of people who had devoted their lives to trying to predict the next pandemic and more importantly, stop it or at least stop it from killing as many people as it otherwise could. And a lot of those people worked for the United States government. So I've written in the long version about the decision to shutter the National Security Council's pandemic response team for instance. You have also probably read about the fact that the Obama administration literally handed the Trump administration when it was coming into office in late 2016, early 2017 a playbook that had the word playbook stamped on the front about how to handle, you know, a potential viral pandemic. But the details are even worse than that. This one may blow your mind. It blew my mind. There was a program at USAID, the US Agency for International Development to identify potential viruses that could spread from animal populations into human populations with the explicit goal of preventing a global pandemic.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
That project worked in about 30 countries around the world, including China and one of its partners where the virologists at the viral lab in Wuhan, the city where the COVID-19 pandemic would eventually start. That project was effectively shuttered by president Donald J Trump's administration in September, 2019. And of course the pandemic erupted in central China in Wuhan three months later. Now, a brief caveat, the PREDICT program was working with the scientists in Wuhan, but they were focusing in Yunan province in Southern China. It was somewhat limited because of a lack of funding under President Obama, but really under the Republican Congress that was in charge of funding it for the last several years. With more funding, it could have done even more than it already did. But of course it was completely unable to do anything once its fieldwork was shuttered in September, 2019.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So to get at the bottom of what happened, what might have been, what possibly still could be, I'm pleased and honored to have on the podcast today, dr Jonah Mozet for 10 years, dr Mazet was the global director of the predict project. And she is the executive director of the one health Institute of the university of California Davis. And if you stay tuned until the end of this podcast, I will have a comment from USA ID. Dr [inaudible], welcome to the long version. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. I wanted to, there's a lot I would like to talk to you about actually, but I want to start off by asking what was the predict project and what happened to it?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Well, the PREDICT project is a 10 year effort funded by us agency for international development where we built a consortium of people from the U S Canada and 35 low and middle income countries around the world to look for identify viruses just like this, SARS-CoV-2 in advance of their spilling over, understand the characteristics that might put us at risk, like what hosts and transmission interfaces. And at the same time we were sort of building what I like to think of as kind of a global immune system by training people in all of these countries to be ready anticipating this event and be able to jump into action.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
You use the term spillover. What do you mean by that?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
So spillover is, is what we think of when a a micro organism. We work mostly on viruses. Actually makes the jump from one host to another. And often in the host where it evolved, it won't have caused disease, but when it gets into a naive host, it may be able to cause disease. And so that's the spillover event is what we're after preventing. But even if we can't prevent all of those spillover events, we want systems to be ready and strong to be able to detect them early and control them at their source.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So basically in September 20, 19 fieldwork stopped like what, what, what, what exactly happened?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Correct. So we, we finish up with the field teams in the countries in September, 2019. So they were no longer you know, out in the field collecting samples from wild animals, people, domestic animals and they were no longer testing in the laboratory.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
One of the countries that you were working in was China,
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Correct. And we were working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They've been very instrumental in identifying this virus, the SARS-CoV-2. We had been working specifically on coronaviruses and worrying about coronaviruses all over the world. The PREDICT project discovered 160 new coronaviruses during its performance period. We were not working up in Hubei or near Wuhan. We were, we were kind of slated to work in Southeast Asia. So we were working in China, but on the just in Yunan province. So we didn't detect this particular one, but the project in China did detect more than 50 novel coronaviruses. And so, so they were ready at least to detect this one. I think what we've seen around the world is that the, the, the forward thinking side of looking for these viruses and being ready and being able to detect and diagnose them much quicker than, for example, what you saw with SARS, the original SARS proves that this can help. So it was days rather than weeks or months to get to the stage where we could actually do specific diagnostics. But we need to go so much farther because the rest of the systems as far as the healthcare systems policy, everything in most is not where it needed to be.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So the, okay, so, so fieldwork stops in September of 2019. At what, what, at what, what's the earliest date that we can say that the novel coronavirus that ended up becoming, you know, SARS-CoV-2 was detected?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
So certainly right at the end of December, we know it was detected and the information was shared. The the virus itself was probably circulating quite some time for the course of the illness for those that, that were sick, that were identified as early cases for some time before that. But we don't have a definitive date.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So I mean, if you had been in place what might have gone differently, do you think it would've been possible that we would have, that you would have found the, the virus in October or November?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Well anythings possible, but we weren't working in that region of China.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Got it.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
So unless we had expanded scope and had been working in that region of China, I'm not sure that the predict project itself would have helped with that. But what I'm super proud of is that the predict project, even though the teams weren't funded anymore, did help. Right. Then at the beginning of this whole then epidemic now pandemic did help in I think raising the flag in China, but then also in all of the countries surrounding China and in Africa. Frankly, the, our labs were the initial ones to be ruling out introduced cases before they're even first cases in places like Tanzania.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
You guys were focused mostly in Yunan province, which borders Vietnam. Correct. and so why, why that province in particular?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Hm. So before at the beginning of the project, we used all the best scientific information we could find to target hotspots around the world where the most likely spillover events as we've talked about already could occur. Now they can occur anywhere, but we wanted to, you know, sort of target the resources to the highest likelihood locations. And we had to work with the portfolio of where USA ID wanted to and could make their investments. So when you overlay the scientific map with the geopolitical structure you come up with the portfolio, the best portfolio you can invest in as far as doing this work. And that took us to places with very specific characteristics where there's a lot of fever of unknown origin, where human populations are growing or changing the way they behave and interact with well the earth, but especially wildlife species. And then where there's high biodiversity. So there's a lot sources of viruses that we may not have seen in our evolutionary history.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
The working theory, I mean, you obviously know much more about this so you can tell me about it. Is that the new coronavirus came from a bat, is that the idea?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Correct. Correct. So all of our work we, we certainly discovered coronaviruses in multiple species. And the reason coronavirus was we're sort of on our high risk list in our concerned list is that they seem to be able to be identified often in different species so that that gives us a hint that they're a jumper and this is known for other coronaviruses that were already known as well. So when we started the project, only a handful of coronaviruses primarily human pathogens and pet pathogens were known, but we dramatically expanded that and started to identify the ones that looked like they had multiple hosts that they could infect. So that's one of our high risk factors.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Do you wait for the virus to appear in a human or are you just picking, you're just picking up animals randomly and seeing if they're carrying viruses.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
So just like I mentioned, what kind of, how you pick the countries where you're going to go. That's when we get into the countries. We work with, the ministry of health, ministry of agriculture, ministry of environment. Sometimes there's communication ministry and we get them all together and then we start working on the maps within the country to say where do those same factors I mentioned occur. And then we pick those sites where people are interacting in a either intimate or different way than they've interacted with in the past. So an example is certainly the wildlife farming all the way to wildlife, hunting to market, to restaurants some even live animal restaurants. So that was a certainly a very intimate, if you eat something that's about as much as you can get, right. So especially for the bat. Yeah, unfortunately. But but it's not just those, it's it's other interfaces that you might not think of. People farm, bat guano for example. So they're, they're attracting bats to their property in order to get their poop directly near their crops and put them straight onto the crops that go straight to market. So other things like going into caves that maybe humans have never been in to explore for minerals to make our phones better, faster, smaller. All of these things are high risk interfaces that we've been exploring and working with the communities.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
In a lot of ways a US foreign policy was built on chasing guano around the world in the 19th century. So you're--you're in a long batshit tradition of U S government investment.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Yeah. [Laughs] Anytime to learn to do once it spills over. Now I think that's what we really need to strengthen. We need to keep going with this. We need to identify all the threats, but we also need to have a resilient systems that are ready for these detections hopefully before they spill over. And for the spillover events themselves to be able to ramp up the testing and all the things that we're, we're sort of suffering from right now.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And it's certainly predictable, I guess. No pun intended that, you know, China would have you know, it's an authoritarian government. They would have covered up, you know, some of the early cases. They, they, they were, you know, prosecuting or persecuting--both--whistleblowers. What was your experience like working with the Chinese government and do you, do you think that, how do you think they handled this so far?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Well, I have great relationships with scientists that I work with in China, which include George Gao, who's the head of the China's CDC is recently promoted to that. So my my, I guess support goes out to him in this tough time because I think you do, you, you can be, and we are here as well, challenged between sort of good communications public perceptions of what everyone is doing, including the government and and good science. And that's why I think podcasts like yours are so important that we get the good solid information out. I'm more worried, frankly, a citizen of this country right now about our own response. And we, we were slow getting out there and getting testing done and being ready so that we could have controlled it without these sort of more really strict measures.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Yeah. I mean, four years ago I read an interview that you gave to the Sacramento Bee where you said that our government is doing more than any other, any government in the world to prevent virus outbreaks. I mean, do you think that that's, do you still think that's the case?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
We were, but not in our country. We were doing it in the other countries, which helped. I believe that they really helped for, this one gave us maybe a little bit of time and a, a bit of preparation. But I do think that we need a better streamlining system where we integrate the experts that might not be in government agencies, but work with them. For example, in academia in NGO research institutes, we need to be able to call upon them. We need our system to have a way to call upon them right at the beginning of these problems and to trust and integrate science back into our government. And I think that was a big mess, frankly.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I mean, do you, do you think that shuttering or, or dialing down the predict program in 2019 is a symptom, you know, symptomatic of, or indicative these larger issues with, you know, the failure to respond quickly to, to get out ahead of the virus this time around?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
I mean, I can't, I don't know what was going on beyond behind the scenes, but I can tell you that from my perspective, human nature is such that we work on things, we make big investments. Personally, I make big investments of my own time and energy to see something work. And, and over time, if, if there's not a lot of receptive listening globally you know, it can be frustrating and people start to say, okay, well let's do something else for a while. I have no idea specifically within our U S government if that was happening, but I can say that, you know, we were starting to get much more sort of pushback and lack of interest over time, even though we were finding all the viruses and building all the systems because there were less outbreaks or, or less, you know, the, the concern about Ebola and Zika and other things had started to wane and that, that's human nature. I, it's a terrible situation to be in that it takes a tragedy like this to really get the world to listen again. But I hope that we will learn our lesson and never forget about this one.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Did, did that sort of lessening of interest when, when did that begin? Is that just when Trump came into office or was it true under Obama as well?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Oh, I, I, I don't know. I think it's, it, again, we see waxing and waning of interest with whatever's happening in politics and in the world. So there was interest when there was the Ebola outbreak in West Africa that seemed more scary here. But less interest, frankly, when there was Ebola outbreaks in DRC that have had them in the past. Certainly when Zika was coming through South America and up to our shores, lots of interests but then waning. That's just human nature and I'm not just speaking about in the federal government, so hard for me to know. Yeah.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I actually, my wife and I had Zika in, in 2016 so we had a lot of very personal interest at the time. Yeah. Say that again. You, you kind of---
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Oh no, I was just, yeah. Commiserating and so you, you remember, I mean, I, I kind of liken it to lung cancer. People who are in families who have recent lung cancer experience tend to have many fewer smokers or no smokers. And then as the generations move on or you know, people forget and start doing it again because it has a lot of attractive. Yes. So it's very similar, once,
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Once bitten, twice shy to use the veterinary term. When you were working w--when you were doing fieldwork with PREDICT were you guys coordinating at all with the national security council's pandemic response team?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
We certainly were. So when we've found a virus, for example, we discovered a new Ebola virus. And when we discovered that virus before any evidence of spillover we went straight to the governments where we found the viruses. But we also immediately put that information into the hands of the national security council and put that into a briefing. And we saw a response there for things like that.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So what year, what year was that that you found the new Ebola?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Oh, shoot, you're gonna test me, I think it was three years ago now. So yeah, I can send you infomration,
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
It's like 20, 2017 ish, so yeah.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So this time when you know, you're not doing fieldwork anymore, but you're still in touch with, with your colleagues in China, in Wuhan, like the, the, the pandemic response team wasn't there at the national security council anymore. So who did you, who did you call at the white house or where, wherever to say, Hey, there's something going on here. We should be paying attention to it.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Uh huh. Well, again, on this one we were sort of in that extension phase and not working with our country teams any longer when, when it was recognized. So it was more unofficial channels I would say because the, the relationships with the countries had been completed. So some of us had direct, you know, communications, texts with people. And then we absolutely were following our other partner who is also a partner on PREDICT the ProMed mail detections and responses. So, so the information was coming in from a lot of places and going up the chain. But whether, you know, I don't know how they handled it internally,
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But when you say that you were sharing this information up the chain, you mean that USAID?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Yes. We would send it through USAID for them
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And then it was just sort of up to the aid, USAID administrator or whoever to share it with somebody else.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Yeah. Whoever would have been the briefer for the NSC previously.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Okay. And is that, is that how it worked when the NSC team existed? Was it w w you went through the chain of command at USAID and they reported to the,
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
yep.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Okay.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Definitely.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But you don't know who they talked to or if they talked to anybody.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
This time?
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
This time, yes.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
No, I don't know. And I don't know how they were briefed, you know.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I mean it, I mean that, and again, I'm like a complete outsider here, but it seems like you know, that that coordination mechanism at the national security council was really important for making sure that like all of these people from all these different things, you guys are working overseas at aid. The CDC is, I guess also working globally but maybe more focused on, on the United States. And then all of the other agencies, Homeland security, DOD, everybody could sort of communicate through that central node. And when that node went away in 2018, that coordination was also lost. Right?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
I would assume, but again, yeah.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Yeah. I was looking back at some previous interviews that you gave, you know, obviously before all of this and you were saying that you thought that for basically like three point $5 billion over 10 years we could, you could find basically not all of the zoonotic that's the right way to pronounce that, right? Okay. Yeah. You couldn't find all of them, but you could find most of them are the most important ones.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Correct. So thanks for mentioning, I mean, what I think many of us in this space are advocating to do is have a, a bigger coalition of the willing and hopefully the whole world is willing now to find these viruses, understand, again, the hosts, the interfaces, all the things we need to reduce our risk and to also begin to be able to gather information for forecasting which viruses might be next. And and whether or not we need to preemptively think about therapeutics and th and prevention like vaccines. So in order to do that, we really need a huge group and we're, we're calling that the global virome project. And and there are some of us like the PREDICT scientists who are immediately willing to sign on. We're getting emails now from all over the world of people who are willing.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
But it's kind of a how do you do that? How do you finance that at the same time as responding to a pandemic? And I, and I think probably we just need to build the momentum and then get after the business when everybody's safe. That said, what we were able to do with the predict project is really to intensively sample a few species to understand how much it would cost to find all the viruses in those species. And then we could project that an estimate what it would cost to find all of the viruses for all of the mammalian and waterbird hosts where influenzas tend to come. And some of the other viruses tend to come from waterbird hosts. So we could estimate that cost. And it's, it's a big number. It is in the billions. We could do a huge amount of work to find most of the really known to be dangerous viral families for just over a billion dollars for that three and a half billion.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
We could find almost every virus that you're likely to have the opportunity to come into contact as you get out, sort of into the rarer and rarer viruses. Of course those are harder and harder to find, so they get much more expensive to find those that you could go up to a little over 4 billion and try to find all of them. But I guess those ones at the end past the three and a half billion Mark, we think are, are so rare and so hard to find or come into contact with that they're very unlikely to be spillover risks. So we're not advocating for going all the way out there. But even if you took a $4 billion number, that is only 10% of what it costs to respond to the first SARS. And we know that the, which was about a $40 billion response, we know that we're in just our country in the trillions now, right? So we're dropping it down to, you know, single digit percentages of what it would cost to, to know and be ready much more ready for these viruses. Is, it's a completely reasonable number.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Yeah. I mean it's a couple, it's a couple hundred million dollars a year, basically.
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
Exactly. All over the globe.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Yeah. And I mean, and I mean, of course these things they become clear in, in, in hindsight. But it wasn't, it didn't take hindsight for you to realize that this was a big threat that needed to be addressed ahead of time. Right?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
No, but it was a big concern and criticism that we're getting. We actually had two teams independently work on the economics to understand and I, I use the sort of my more back of the envelope, you know, feasibility with our discussion just now, but our, our current team that that's working amazingly on the economics that started before this outbreak again before the price tags went so high because of the pandemic and just using the, the more recent ones that we mentioned like SARS and MERS, even then the cost of doing the project, what you would only need to see a 0.3% reduction in impacts to all of these outbreaks to pay for the whole project.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Wow. I just want to ask you very briefly, just about yourself and your career were, were you interested in, in, in diseases and epidemiology when you started studying veterinary medicine or, or did that come later?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
You know, I started because I wanted to save species. It was really about conservation for me. And so I really probably I, before I had kids and stuff, I didn't care about people such as, I'm sorry to say, but I really wanted to save species. And by doing that I ended up working like you on a lot of emergency events outbreaks, oil spills. I, I worked with the state of California to develop their wildlife oil spill response, some urgency system. And then I was recognizing and working with again in great collaborations recognizing some terrible diseases that our Marine wildlife were getting from living close to coastal communities and seeing runoff or pathogen pollution coming in and killing them. But by the way, those things were also killing people with HIV AIDS and other vulnerable parts of our population. And that really got me directed towards this kind of work.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
That's fascinating. So yeah, we covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that I didn't ask or that you would like to, to talk about?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
I still want to make sure we understand that what everyone is doing, sheltering in place and keeping distance is very difficult. And it again affects certain parts of our society even more heavily. I really am feeling for the folks who are hourly workers who may be losing their, their whole livelihood or you know, kids that can't go to school and get their, their school meals and things like that. So you know, it, I never started this thinking that you know, that comprehensively. And so I, I also think this terrible situation we're in, this pandemic is reminding us how interconnected all things are and that we are citizens of the whole earth and that we need to behave like that.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Well said. You know, again, like talking about things that are not necessarily intuitive to everybody. You know, the idea that scientists working on the other side of the ocean you know, swabbing bats could keep your kids in school and keep you from having to miss work or getting sick because you were forced to work. That's something that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily think about, but it's, it's, it's how the, it's how the math works, right?
Dr. Jonna Mazet:
It is, it is. Yeah. And our economy is going to be recovering for quite a long time because of it as well.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So thank you to Dr. Mazet. After I spoke with her, I reached out to USAID for comment. I had a couple of questions. I wanted to know why PREDICT's fieldwork was defunded in 2019. When they, when, when Dr. Mezat and the PREDICT staff informed them about the emergence of the SARS Cove to virus virus who they had communicated with up the chain. And I also want to know about the, the next bidding cycle. A USAID spokesman essentially declined to answer any of those questions but they sent me a statement noting that PREDICT was just one component quote, "of USAIDs investments in global health security and accounted for less than 20% of the agency's funding in this area," unquote. I'm not sure if that's a good piece of information or bad that they, that they were not funding it adequately.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And they gave me a statement that said that they are currently developing a "Stop Spillover" project that will focus on strengthening national capacity to develop, test and implement interventions to reduce the risk of spillover. And that they are confident that that project will eventually allow the world to Mount stronger and more effective responses to epidemics and pandemics, including COVID-19 and possibly reduce the chances of their recurrence. They are planning to look at applications this spring and to make an award by about September.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
The last thing that I will say is this would be no breaking news bulletin into listeners of this podcast or readers of The Long Version newsletter. But look, the US government has done a lot of bad things in the past, including more, you know, recently under President Obama and, and certainly under President Trump. But the same kind of expertise in the same kinds of just incredible wealth that has allowed the United States to say, develop and then drop atomic bombs on civilians. Does allow it to do important things that protect lives and being put in good, capable, competent science-velieving hands that don't treat the government as a personal piggy bank for one man and his cronies could do things like detect pandemics before they start and keep us from living out nightmares like the one that we're living right now, and nightmares that could possibly be even far worse in the future. That is all for now. Thank you very much for listening. Please check out The Long Version at Katz dot Substack dot com. Thanks for listening. Stay home. Wash your hands.
Theme Music
Photo: University of Kent, under Creative Commons License
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
With Trump again threatening war with Iran, last week’s best-known scandal—the president doctoring a hurricane map with a marker—might already seem quaint. But #Sharpiegate was revealing. It showed the depths to which the federal bureaucracy, including Trump’s deeply corrupt Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, were willing cover for the president’s insanity and crimes. And it showed the ways in which the noise from the White House can be used to cover up the damage it causes in the world.
Gabriel Synder, the Columbia Journalism Review’s resident New York Times public editor, joined me for a discussion about Sharpiegate, the Stupid Show, and how not to cover the presidency. We talked hurricanes, mushroom clouds, and Maggie Haberman.
You can keep independent journalism going by signing up for this newsletter/podcast at katz.substack.com or using the box below. Thanks for listening.
Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors):
Audio clips: 00:00 [Nicole Wallace, MSNBC: It appears the White House attempted to retroactively correct a tweet that the president issued over the weekend in which he warned ... Alabama would in fact be impacted. The graphic appears to have been altered with a Sharpie ... [CNN Host: ... a forecast map altered by a black marker to prove his point ...] [24horas.cl: ... un marcador por encima de la linea blanca ] [Stephen Colbert: He used a Sharpie to extend the path into Alabama [laughter]] [Clip: This is what's become Sharpiegate] [Liz Wheeler, OANN: ... so obsessed with Sharpiegate …] [Brian Williams, MSNBC: Does anybody remember Sharpiegate?]
Jonathan M Katz: 00:26 ... To the point that you know, I, and you are on this podcast where I have complete editorial control. We could talk about anything I want and we're talking about it!
Intro Music: 00:41 [Music]
Jonathan M Katz: 00:44 It's getting stupid out there. Hi. Welcome back to The Long Version. This is the audio edition of the newsletter that you can find at katz.substack.com. That’s k-a-t-z dot s-u-b-s-t-a-c-k dot c-o-m. I am the eponymous Jonathan M Katz and it is currently September 16th, 2019. That's a Monday for those of you who've lost track. I know I have. It's very hard to keep track of what's going on in the world right now. Remember Sharpiegate? Feels like it happened about a billion years ago when the president of the United States used a marker to draw on a weather map so that he wouldn't have to admit that he was wrong? Anyway, that was about last week. So today, while the world is consumed with trying to figure out if he is going to declare war on Iran to defend Saudi Arabia's oil fields in a war in Yemen, that Trump refuses to get out of. I wanted to go back a little bit to a conversation that I had a couple of days ago with a special guest, Gabriel Snyder.
Jonathan M Katz: 01:53 Gabriel is a journalist. He was the editor in chief of the New Republic. We worked together way back in the neolithic era when I was covering the Paris climate talks back in 2015. Remember those? He is now at the Columbia journalism review where he occupies the very cool role of the public editor for the New York times. Not employed by the New York times, which I think is possibly the best way to do that. He is, is serving a role that used to be filled in the times newsroom of, of looking at the journalism there, responding to, to critiques and concerns that readers have. He does an excellent job. You should definitely check out his stuff. We had a conversation about a piece that I had written a couple of days before that called turn off the stupid show in which I was talking actually primarily in that piece about what was going on in the United Kingdom with Boris Johnson, the "Tesco Value Trump" prime minister they have over there.
Jonathan M Katz: 02:50 That was my attempt at British humor in the piece. Something spoke to him in the piece and I think we sort of both agreed that there's a bunch of real stuff that is going in the world. A lot of it, the fault of the president of the United States, but it is very hard to pay close attention to what is going on precisely because there's just so much noise coming out of the white house and it can be very hard to figure out what is important and what isn't. And so we sort of had a conversation about that and I think that it I think it was really interesting. I think it was really enlightening and even though it was about the president drawing on a map with a marker like a child we both saw the ways in which that spoke to, to a much bigger, a much more serious issues.
Jonathan M Katz: 03:36 And I think now that once again, as they have so many times in his presidency, war clouds are gathering. It's important to understand the way that the reality show that this reality show president is overseeing serves to confuse people and make it very difficult for us to make a important decisions as a country and to observe the, the, the crimes and the dangers that are coming out of Washington. Anyway, I think it's a really interesting conversation. You're going to totally dig it. Here is my conversation with Gabriel Snyder. Gabriel, welcome to The Long Version.
Gabriel Snyder: 04:09 Thanks for having me.
Jonathan M Katz: 04:12 Thank you for being here. I know you've been talking about how for the last couple of days, all of your feeds and this was true for me as well were filled with a Sharpiegate. You said while you were appalled by Trump's disregard for truth or reality, you have no desire to engage in the infinite loop of debunking and fulminating what's the point? So yeah, tell, tell me a little bit what you were thinking there and and we'll go from there.
Gabriel Snyder: 04:38 In the past, you know, I guess it's going on three years now. I've watched my media consumption change just profoundly, I think after the election where, you know, everything kind of kind of changed over the, the, the next thing that I was noting was just this monoculture. Like there was an incapacity for at least the circle of people that are in my Twitter universe to think about more than one story at a time. And since 2016, that story has pretty much been all Trump all the time. But it's also just kind of made me think about sort of, you know, how the attention economy works with a, when you have a president who is a product of, you know, media culture, what point does continuing to watch actually make him stronger and give him more sway over the culture?
Jonathan M Katz: 05:35 Yeah. But to a certain extent, it's kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm making sort of a, maybe both of us are kind of making kind of a, a facile complaint, right? It's, people always complain about this in journalism. Journalism is always about why are you painting? Why are you paying attention to this instead of that? So I mean, do you think that this is different from that or are we just like sort of being like,
Gabriel Snyder: 05:55 Well, I hope I'm being different than that. I mean, I, I, I have to say, I, I've always been very resistant to the, you know, the complaint of why is the media covering X when, you know, why is so much more important? You know, I've, I've recently been doing this Columbia journalism project. I'm acting as the public editor for the New York times. And so people send me these complaints, a lot of these complaints that come in through Twitter and they're like, Oh my gosh, how dare, you know, the New York times tweet out a joke about something in the style section when X, Y,Z is terrible. That's happening in the world. And,uand it's, it's always kind of, I've always been resistant to that as an editor because, you know,unewspapers are big, staffs are big. They, they do lots of things.
Gabriel Snyder: 06:39 You know, it doesn't mean, you know, the existence of a sports department doesn't mean that the foreign desk is any less important. But I think the, the reason why all of this came up with Sharpiegate, which, which actually, you know, twist, I, I've, I've kinda changed my opinion on a little bit since I sent off that email to you, but is that there, there has been just this glee of, you know, this meme of vacation of Sharpiegate that that happened that really didn't seem rooted in doing anything. It seemed, it seemed rooted in entertaining people and there is sort of a, you know, a very natural, you know, yearning to, you know, have laughed instead of have a cry during the, during the Trump years for people who are terrified of them. The, you know, what the other, the other massive change that I've had in my media consumption is I can't watch any of the political satire shows.
Gabriel Snyder: 07:36 I mean, and I say that as someone who thought Jon Stewart was the smartest best thing on TV was I modeled myself, I modeled, modeled by the publications I edited after John Stewart and I just have had to completely turn it off. You know, cause I, I, there's this, there's nothing funny about the news right now. Is I guess I guess is, is, is my feeling. And, and so, you know, while I, I, I think, you know, John Oliver does great and Sam B is fantastic and Trevor Noah and all the rest, I, I just don't feel like they have, I, there was just a profound shift in what they had to offer, offer me an [inaudible]. And I've been getting that a lot of thought, you know, what is that? I think, I think the big change, and I think it's related to everything, you know, Brexit and the world falling apart is social media.
Jonathan M Katz: 08:27 Yeah, exactly. And there's also nothing to puncture. Like, you know, during the Bush administration part of the joke, or really the joke was that, you know, George W. Bush still sort of carried himself with a certain dignity in office people. People at least, you know, ascribed to him a certain dignity of office. You know, there was the idea, you know, the Iraq war was sold as something that was in the country's best interest. It, you know, it was, it was built on lies. It was all about revenge. But the way that, the way that it was sold to the public was there's a clear and present danger facing the United States. In a situation like that, you can have somebody like John Stewart who can be like, you know, Mesopotamia and, and everyone's like, Oh ha ha ha, like, and of course, you know, and the emperor has no clothes because like George W. Bush is an idiot.
Jonathan M Katz: 09:22 And like, he, he can't talk. And he like, he clearly can't think very well and [inaudible] why does it, nobody noticed this? Whereas with Donald Trump, everybody knows it and it's, you can't, you can't out clown a clown. And I, you know, I, I think the, I mean let's, I, I started to kind of do want to drill into Sharpiegate a little bit because it is a really interesting moment cause of course what it is like fundamentally what it's, what it's a story about is that the president of the United States fabricated in a childish clownish way, a government document broadcast it to the world for no reason other than to avoid admitting that he had made a mistake. And it was, you know, during, it was in the middle of an actual national crisis. And instead of dealing with those things the president of the United States was forging documents in like in, in the stupidest way anybody possibly could. And so it's like at one level that is really dumb. And like almost, it doesn't deserve the time of day. On the other hand, it was a federal crime. And and I actually kind of important, what do you make of it now? You said you had changed your mind about is the problem that the mono culture that we were just, we were all paying attention to this one thing? Or should we have not have been talking about that at all?
Gabriel Snyder: 10:52 Well, what I think changed was the story that was reported out on Friday and I believe it was in New York times, although it was Washington post. I apologize that reported on what the Wilbur Ross did to get the statement out of NOAA. Yes. The secretary of commerce and you know, calling up the acting head, the appointee, it wasn't just a civil servant, but calling up the Trump appointee to say, you know, you've got to put out a statement saying that your, your, your staff is wrong and the president's right. Yeah. It turned a story about, you know, what did, what's the latest dumb thing that Trump did into here is how power works in our country today. And, and I think that that story is so important because in all of the, sort of my thinking about like what has changed, why has everything in the media changed?
Gabriel Snyder: 11:51 Why is w what is, why does that, why does the world seem like it's going to help? The one idea I keep coming back to is that the stories we tell ourselves about how power works, every culture has them, right? And they have stopped making sense in our culture right now. And, and so we are, we're, we're in this point of, of kind of relearning how power works and, and what, what I mean by that is like, you know, think about all of the run up to the Mueller report, right? I mean, all of that was largely kind of defined by Washington insider, conventional wisdom of how power is exercised in D C when it comes to, you know, crimes that the president has committed. You almost kind of think of it as more of like a chain of dominoes that, well, if this thing happens and it's gonna cause all these other dominoes that eventually could lead to impeachment. Right, right. And, and, and, and it's, you know, so clear that that set of dominoes just doesn't, it doesn't look the same anymore. And, and I think, I think this, this, you know, the, the, the, the satire, you know element, which, you know, where w which is where S Gates started was kind of this, it was kind of rooted in this old, this, this outmoded notion of, of, of chain of chain events, right. And, and, and so
Jonathan M Katz: 13:07 And one of the other things that happened was that the president was caught in an obvious lie and then he got people to cover for him. Like, yeah, yeah. I mean, Wilbur Ross, got, you know you know, the, the, the Admiral from the coast guard and you know, you had no of putting out ridiculous statements in, like, if, you know, if you knew, if you understood the science, if you, if you know about hurricanes and you read the specifics of their statements, you realize that they basically were still saying that he was wrong. They were just trying to sort of find a way to rationalize him, not being like too terribly wrong. But it's, but it's, it's really scary, right, because it doesn't take very much imagination to imagine another circumstance, right. Where, you know, Trump launches nukes at an ally, right.
Jonathan M Katz: 13:58 And we, you know, we blow up Vienna and you know, and, and, and instead of being held accountable, all these people in his administration are just running around and saying like, well, there was credible intelligence related to Austria. And, you know, like they, you know, Austria had been a threat you know, during the, the, the 1940s. And so, like, it wasn't horribly unrealistic for the president. It's just like whatever. Instead of just doing what they should do, which is what thing, which is what somebody should have done all along, which is just go to the oval office and put the dude in handcuffs and drag him out of there. Cause he just keeps, he just keeps committing crimes and he just keeps doing insane s**t in front of everybody. And the, andS and, and you know, there's, there's been this idea, you know, it's, it's kind of a conspiracy theory, right? It turned into that like the deep state was going to save us. Well this is the deep state. This is the professional bureaucracy and the way the deep state is reacting is the way that I think we could have expected them to react, which is not by trying to preserve some kind of deep secret, you know, long-held set of principles, but a bunch of individuals just trying to keep their jobs.
Gabriel Snyder: 15:15 Jonathan, I can, can I, can I try to bum you out more than you just tried to bump me out? Cause I, I'm, I'm so par. I'm so far past that. I, I, I mean, you know what, there is nothing, there's nothing in the dynamics of our political system right now to prevent that slide. Absolutely none. You know, the, the, the, the, the answer to your question of, you know, what if, what if Trump wants to do this is there's pretty high chance that neutral flop. One of the bigger fears I had during the transition era was that, you know, if everyone was, you know, reading about, you know, the, the Weimer Republic and, and, and, and all of these, you know, kind of fears and because they were scared out of their mind, but there was, it kind of created this really high bar for Trump, right?
Gabriel Snyder: 16:05 That if, you know, and I, I would joke this, if he doesn't show up with, you know, to the inauguration with the, you know, a Hitler mustache and an armband, people are going to say, well, there it goes at American statesman. You know, and, and I think that the stupidity sort of element has been, well, all right, well, he drew, he, he drew, he drew a, you know, a, a line on a map, but at least it didn't, you know, launch nukes at, at an ally. Well, that line isn't actually, you know, there isn't anyone who's saying, okay, well this stupidity is okay, but that stupidity isn't, that's the thing that should be terrifying. Right? Right. And, and, and we're, and we're just taking these, these baby steps. And I think, I think what sort of I'm reacting to with the haha reaction to the Sharpiegate is that that is now the reaction of the people who oppose him. Right? It's, it doesn't, it actually plays into his, you know, media strategy to, to, to, to laugh along because, you know, ultimately if it, and that's why I loved, you know, that I reacted so much to that tier. You're the headline on your piece because I'm not sure how, but I do think turning the stupid show is part of the solution. You know, describing the trick is one way to break the spell of the trick.
Jonathan M Katz: 17:18 Yeah. I think, I think that's absolutely right. And I mean, I should say normally I'm very skeptical of slippery slope arguments and I try not to make them, you find yourself very quickly and Rick Santorum marrying your dog territory. But in this particular case, I should also say, by the way, that a nuclear strike is bad no matter who it's against, regardless of it's an enemy or an ally. But that is the signal example of the power of the American presidency. I mean, you're right, there's, it is built into the system and it's been built in since the cold war that there is ultimately nobody to stop the president from launching a nuclear strike. What do you do when the clear and present danger is coming from the white house?
Gabriel Snyder: 18:04 Yup. Yup. Well then I think that's, I mean, that's the answer, isn't it? I mean it's, it's, it's to, it's to focus on the clear and present danger and, and, and really emphasize those two, those two words. Right. that the, the, the in, you know, and, and I guess, I guess in some ways set the fluff aside, but also maybe set aside some of the slippery slope stuff just in, in the, in the sense that it distracts from the, the president. I mean, you know, I, I was just thinking as we were talking about all of this, like, you know, hypothetically, he can, he is the president. He can do whatever he wants. Well, we just saw him do that. He just did that with the, with Afghanistan and you know I don't know how many people are going to die because he, you know, decided not to, to kill the peace plan.
Gabriel Snyder: 18:49 But I would bet that, you know, that that's a significant loss of life. That's gonna you know, that we can attribute to a spur of the moment decision. That from all the reporting that I've read so far is because he didn't like how he was going to look at the announcement ceremony. I think that also that, that kind of comes back to this need for story that people have, like the world makes a lot more sense if, you know, in a way to both, you know supporters and opponents. If Donald Trump has a secret plan and is executing it perfectly and we don't know it, but it's gonna, it's gonna change everything. You know, the more we know about, certainly Trump, how Trump operates and, and, and the more we learn about, you know, the, the election interference operations that, that Putin, that Russia ran is that there wasn't a plan.
Gabriel Snyder: 19:38 You know, it, this is, you know, they, they, they, they, they look like a tech startup. You, you've just tried what works, you've run some analytics and then you keep doing more of what works. What if, what's the, what's the Molotov cocktail theory that if you throw them all into a cocktail you, you, you, you, you might have a new problem but you'd certainly don't have your old problem. Like you know, it's, it's kind of, I kind of see that with, with Trump's like, OK, well I sometimes I think, Oh, well did he just do the stupid thing to make us stop talking about the last stupid thing? Like, you know, what's, what's, what is there, is there a plan? And it might not be any, any, any, any further developed than, than, you know, than what most people do when they fire off tweets.
Jonathan M Katz: 20:20 And that's, and that's and that's part of the issue where, you know, we've, we've talked about slippery slopes a couple of times. You know, one of the issues with Trump is that what seems like a slippery slope one day just becomes fait accompli the next Ezra Klein tweeted right after the firing of John Bolton that he said, "I've said it before, but the best thing about Donald Trump is that he seems instinctually skeptical of to war is hiring of Bolton was a strike against that. His firing of Bolton is a rare bright spot in his presidency." I have an idea of what he was talking about, which is that, and this kind of I think goes to the stupid show kind of idea that we're so fixated on Trump's antics in the white house. Trump's antics on air force one.
Jonathan M Katz: 21:07 Trump's antics on Twitter. That things like the fact that Trump has escalated the bombing of Somalia you know, Trump is killing more civilians than Obama did in Syria. Trump blocked, you know, the, the, the legislative attempts to end the war in Yemen. And of course, which just happened with Afghanistan, you were just talking about like, Trump is Trump's a Hawk. Which is why he hired John Bolton. That all I, I think that, I think the reason why as your client who's obviously not a stupid person was able to sort of get by with that thought in his head is that it's just, it's not front and center, the Wars, the imperialism. Even though, you know, with the exception of moments of like Trump, you know, trying to buy Greenland, which is I think a very clear moment of imperialism. You know.
Gabriel Snyder: 22:02 And perhaps distraction.
Jonathan M Katz: 22:04 And perhaps -- but this is the thing with Trump, everything's distraction and everything's the crime. He commits crimes to distract from other crimes and the crimes that he's committing are also crimes. It's like he throws people at concentration camps to distract from other s**t. But then there's also people in concentration camps and then he's doing other stuff to distract people. I mean, it's just, this is why you don't let a guy like that become president, basically.
Gabriel Snyder: 22:26 Right.
Gabriel Snyder: 22:27 All right. Well. Well, I think a lot of the, the notions of political power, the media's role in, in relationship to it is kind of goes back to the corporate age. When, you know, your former employer, the Associated Press, you know, the three net networks you know, handful of papers defined the news agenda. We now live in a multipolar world. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the most, the most concerning, the most concerning stuff that I've, you know, political polling and information that I, that I've been reading is looking at, you know, what, how is racism polling? And you know what, it's polling pretty good. That's the problem. What isn't understood right now fully understood by I think including people like, you know the, the reporters on the White House beat is understanding how they are now in this weaponized, you know, media landscape and, and they, and you have to think about not just what you're saying, but potentially how that will be used by other people to twist into their own agendas. And that is a very unnatural way for journalists to, to think if anything, I mean, you know, Trump, Trump is fundraising with Sharpies right now. He, you know, he is, if you go to his website, you can buy your own Trump Sharpie and it's got some like, you know, tagline about like, "make a liberal cry and, write and start Sharpies today."
Jonathan M Katz: 23:47 Tom Scocca wrote about that in, in Slate recently where he talked about, you know, governing, governing by owning the libs. Yeah. It's like, ultimately they're always just kidding there. It's, you know, and how do you, how do you deal, how do you deal with somebody? How do you, how do you deal with a clown, like, you know, in, in, in, in your role as, as sort of the, the, the contents of the New York times? You know, th th one of the accusations that get thrown at the times a lot and I think rightfully, and I think that, I think that a lot of people at the time still don't understand this word is the idea that they're normalizing the presidency first of all the times just needs somebody to teach them how to respond to criticism. Maybe that's something we could do at some point.
Gabriel Snyder: 24:36 Only by exercise, repeated exposure
Jonathan M Katz: 24:40 But by reporting on it in this kind of old respectful, you know, Mr. Trump sort of way it creates this image that I think still sells to a lot of people that like ultimately we have a precedent and ultimately he is in charge. And I mean like, you know, so what like what should they be doing? Like, like what like is, is should Maggie Haberman be doing her job differently? Should she be doing the job the same way? But it just should always be put on, on page eight 21 instead of, instead of a one.
Gabriel Snyder: 25:22 I kind of feel like the person who has the, the, the one of the world's worst jobs in journalism right now is Peter Baker, who seems to be the one who draws the Trump tweeted news duty the most often it's not just them, but it, it's one of the things that, that tries to be crazy is, you know, is the context free rep repetition of a, of a Trump tweet at one on one hand I get it, you know, president of United States says something is basically your textbook definition of newsworthy. Right. But they don't, and I think that goes back to sort of thinking about their, how does their work exist in the, in the landscape. And I just don't think they, they think about that
Jonathan M Katz: 26:04 Well, and it adds nothing. I mean, we're in an era now where anybody who wants to know what the president is tweeting can find out pretty easily. You don't need, you don't need you don't need stories that are just sort of announcing that he said it. I mean, you know, this was one of the things was that like, I was already sick of hearing from Trump and about Trump, you know, before the 2016 election. And, and, you know, I was furious. I'm still furious at CNN at a lot of places for sort of just giving him this open megaphone to use over and over again. And, and, and once he became president of the United States, it was very hard to turn that megaphone off because like you said, he's the present of the United States. Like, people need it. People need to know what he's saying.
Jonathan M Katz: 26:50 You know what I mean? For a lot of people in this country, the president is a personal and visceral threat. And he can be for me too at times. But it needs to be done in this context. I mean, I guess I, you know, I, I guess part of it is that it's sort of this idea that the show itself needs coverage. The show itself needs to be centered as opposed to putting the show in the larger context of, of what it's really part of. Like what it's actually doing. If you put the places that are getting ravaged by climate change at the center, if you put the people who are in the concentration camps at the center if, if you put the people who are suffering under his, you know, his, his narcissistic trade policy at the center the people who bombing in Somalia, I don't even remember the last time I read a story from Somalia anywhere by anybody.
Jonathan M Katz: 27:44 Then you can, then you can, you know, you can contextualize your story with a quote from the president you know, saying, well he said X, Y, Z, he tweeted this or that. You know what I, I think, I think that's one of the things that, that, that really, you know, gets to me about, about Haberman is reporting. And I've got, I've got a lot of respect for somebody who can put up with the kind of abuse that she does. And you know, although she's well compensated for it, the stories that she does that I think drive it drives me up the wall on a lot of other people are sort of the Trump whisperer stories where it's, you know you know, frustrated Donald is sitting in his room, you know, banging on the table, you know, for fresh, frustrated Donald is lashing out as his aides because he doesn't like the way that his fascism is being covered.
Jonathan M Katz: 28:36 And it's like, who the f**k needs that? It's like we don't need stories. Humanizing the president when I know more about what Donald Trump is thinking at any given moment than I do about almost anybody in my family and certainly anybody on my street, everybody, everybody in the country is living inside that man's head 24, seven. And we would all like to get out and, and I don't really see the point. And I think maybe that's part of the show that needs to get turned off is just this kind of, yeah, this, this soap opera of, of, of, of as the Donald turns. And, and start moving on to, to what the actual effects are of the policy. Because I think if more people knew about that, it would change the way they understand.
Gabriel Snyder: 29:18 I think the, the, there's two ends. I mean w number one, I do think you can turn the show off. I do think you can move out of his head. I think, I think there is, you know, I think that is a personal choice. And I think that if you take, make that personal choice, it just means like it unfollow him, unfollow people who make jokes about him, you know, like, like that, that re don't read, you know, the, those reality recap that, you know, Maggie Haberman does and at the post or rubber Costa was doing, I mean, again, in a different era you would say, Oh my gosh, this ticktock of all the moods and infighting inside the white house is, is, is a one political reporting material. But it, you know, you read them in this era and it is, it's, it's a, it's a, you know, a real Housewives recap. You know, except for it runs on a one. Yeah.
Jonathan M Katz: 30:04 We have been in an era for a while where everything gets boiled down into the election and everything in the election gets boiled down to the horse race and at the earliest possible date, the, the coverage of the next election starts. So without making this a horse race question, which I'm not interested in for the moment, regardless of who becomes president in 2021 or if it's Trump, again, the question is like, can we ever, will there ever be a point where we're talking about something other than the president? Again, regardless of who the president is. Like, could we ever have a situation where the president is only something you think about, you know, a couple of times a month or when there is a war or a natural disaster? Or is this just, is this our, is this our permanent reality now where this dumb reality show is on all the time and when, and when, when, when this, you know, hellish reboot of the apprentice finally gets canceled or the stars killed off. The, there'll just be some other show that's put on after it and politicians will have to be chosen specifically for their suitability, for their role in the show and not for their ability to govern.
Gabriel Snyder: 31:20 I bet. I bet. No, and for one reason I think that, that, that the belief that we have entered some new static era is an, is an artifact of the static era that we witnessed in the mid 20th century. Which I think is most best understood as a great aberration. That era is never coming back. And and, and if you, if anything, if anything that the last 20 years or 30 years has taught us is that the next 10 years will look nothing like the last day. And you know, and I think there are some trends that are, are helpful. I mean the, the, you know, being, being as old as I am, I, I've seen platforms rise and die before and, and I, and I don't think there's any reason to say that, you know, Facebook and Twitter and, you know, signal or whatever the kids are using is, is, is, is, is going to have the lasting power that, you know, that blogs or comments didn't have. And, and
Jonathan M Katz: 32:31 Although, I don't know, I don't know what ticktock politics are gonna look like. Is like every, every politician is going to have to sing the same song? Like they're going to have to, like, act out the same sketch as the other ones? I don't really under—I don't understand TikTok. That's a separate show.
Gabriel Snyder: 32:47 Sorry. I, I tried it. I, I laughed. I put it down. So I don't know if, you know, I'm not quite sure if there is another personality that is going to be able to, I don't know, make the world pay attention or make the country pay attention—well, the world pay attention in the same way that the mix of like, you know, love and hate makes everyone pay attention to Donald Trump. I do hope that he is a singular personality in that sense.
Jonathan M Katz: 33:23 Yeah. All right. Well we have covered quite a bit of ground here. Is there I don't know, is there anything else that you want to throw in?
Gabriel Snyder: 33:32 I, I feel like we, we have lived up to the, the, the name of the show and this feels like the long version of a, of a conversation, right?
Jonathan M Katz: 33:41 This was The Long Version! That was it. All right. Great. Well, I really appreciate your time.
Gabriel Snyder: 33:49 Yeah, glad to do it!
Jonathan M Katz: 33:49 I will look forward to seeing you continue to bring The Times to task.
Gabriel Snyder: 33:55 Alright. This was a lot of fun. Be well.
Jonathan M Katz: 33:58 That's it. Thanks for listening to The Long Version again. You can go and sign up, subscribe at katz.substack.com. I'll be back soon with another one -- written -- voiced -- fingerpainting -- we'll see. Take care.
Jonathan M. Katz is a freelance journalist and author. Check out my latest piece on Puerto Rico’s disappearing schools in this week’s New York Times Magazine. My next book, Gangsters of Capitalism, traces the origins and contradictions of American empire.
Follow me on Twitter @KatzOnEarth.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
The president’s authoritarian rhetoric, racist tweets, and tolerance for surging white supremacist violence make one question more urgent than ever: Is Donald Trump a fascist?
According to Prof. Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works, the answer is an emphatic yes. In today’s special audio edition of The Long Version, the Yale philosophy professor and I talk about the surprisingly long history of fascism in America, how the president and his Republican allies are unleashing dangerous forces for power, and why institutions from the Democratic Party to the New York Times keep proving themselves so unable to deal with the crisis.
Please listen and share widely. And if you haven’t yet, help support independent journalism by subscribing to The Long Version, right now:
Transcript [automatically generated, contains errors]
Donald Trump (00:00:02):
Omar blamed the United States for the crisis in Venezuela.
Trump rally audience (00:00:06):
Oooooo
Donald Trump (00:00:06):
I mean, think of that one.
Jason Stanley (00:00:09):
When you're talking about president Trump's rhetoric and ideology, you are talking about national socialism.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:00:16):
She said that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:00:20):
You're talking about a race based ideology, uh, an ethno nationalists.
Donald Trump (00:00:26):
And importantly, Omar has a history of launching ...
Jason Stanley (00:00:32):
You don't have, you have a religious minority that's being targeted. In his case, it's not Jews, it's Muslims, but you have some of the very same tropes.
Trump rally audience (00:00:42):
Send her back send her back send her back send her back
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:00:53):
Hello everybody, this is Jonathan M. Katz and you are listening to a, another special audio edition of the long version newsletter, which you can find and I hope you do find at katz.substack.com go. You can check it out, see some past issues, maybe subscribe, please subscribe. Um, I've got a interesting program for you today, a special guest professor Jason Stanley from Yale university who is the author of a book called how fascism works. What we're going to be talking about is an important and emerging trend in American life, but one that's a little bit hard to define. So there are a couple of things that are going on and sometimes they get sort of sporadic attention, but I think it's worth taking a step back and looking at them as a general picture. There's a very clear rising tide of violent white supremacist activity going on in this country.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:01:47):
Just in the last couple of days. There was yet another mass shooting this time in California, the shooter referenced a white supremacist manifesto on social media just beforehand. There was yet another synagogue shooting the third shooting at a synagogue since Donald Trump became president this time in Miami, uh, that suspect is still at large. So we don't know very much about who did that. We also have a occupant of the oval office who has, again, despite attempts to obfuscate and ignore what is very clearly going on, is very obviously a racist. Um, very much believes in the superiority of the white race and, uh, has a very clear predilection for authoritarianism, both in his own rhetoric and his choice of foreign leaders that he prefers to associate himself with, whether it's, uh, uh, the neofascist, Viktor Orban in Hungary, uh, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made Alliance with, uh, so pharmacist parties in Israel, uh, Kim Jong UN in North Korea and of course his, his good buddy Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:02:56):
But the question is, can we use the F word to describe him? Can we fairly call Donald Trump a fascist? And that's what professor Stanley and I are going to be talking about today. That's a question that has gained new salients in recent weeks. Um, on July 17th, there was the rally in Greenville, North Carolina that you heard audio from, uh, a few minutes ago where, uh, Trump building on racist tweets that he had already sent, um, kind of worked the crowd up into a frenzy about a young women of color, uh, legislature, the legislators, particularly representative Elon, Omar of Minnesota, um, who is really sort of a, a Paragon of the American dream that somebody who, uh, was born in Somalia, came to the United States as refugee, uh, worked her way up and is now, um, uh, a member of Congress. Uh, and, uh, he invade so much bile and hatred against her that he sort of worked the crowd up into a lather, uh, to the point that they started chanting, send her back center back and you kind of took a step back himself, self satisfied.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:04:11):
And uh, I kind of let it all sink in a short time after that. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri gave a speech at the national conservatism conference where he used some very clear national socialist fascist tropes. Um, he got a lot of attention because he used the word cosmopolitan in a way that, that some people, uh, including me, heard, heard echoes of the way that, for instance, the Nazis talked about Jews. Um, but really the similarities went much deeper than that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Um, I've got a great guest to talk about this today. Um, professor Stanley, uh, welcome to the long version.
Jason Stanley (00:04:52):
Thanks very much for having me on your podcast. I'm a great admirer of yours.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:04:56):
Thank you. I really appreciate that. Um, I, uh, I, I want to ask you, so first of all, I really enjoyed, um, I don't know if that's the word. People say that to me about my books. It's like, Oh, I, I really enjoyed it, but I don't know if that's [inaudible] but I don't know if that's the word, but I, I got a lot out of reading, um, how fascism works. And, uh, it's interesting to me just in the short time since it's been out, how much has changed in the world, the back in December, 2018, um, you tweeted, uh, that how fascism works is quote not about Trump at all. It's about how fascist ideology is actually much more familiar and normal than we like to think, including in the United States. Flash forward to July 17th, um, after the Trump rally in Greenville, North Carolina where the crowd was chanting to send a Illinois Mark. What a quote back to somewhere. Uh, and then you told him you tweeted, um, I'm not easily shocked, but we are facing emergency journalists must not get away with sugarcoating this. This is the face of evil. So I'm, I'm wondering if you can take us through a little bit, um, first of all, why you did write the book that you wrote and what has changed between then and now?
Jason Stanley (00:06:13):
Good. So I wrote that book in the, uh, in 2017, uh, and at the time it was Trump's first year in office. Uh, I had been writing about propaganda and the far right for years. Uh, and, and it was unclear how much of the fascist rhetoric and ideology that Trump used to win electoral office, uh, would guide his policies. But it soon came clear that the policies were a soft fascism, uh, the rhetoric, the rhetoric, uh, proceeds the policies. But we're seeing clear attempts and in many cases, successes of realizing that ideology. So for example, to take one example much in the news recently, the detention camps, uh, the detention camps that are Alexandria Ocasio Cortez called concentration camps are being used in a similar fashion to the way Sachsenhausen and DACA were used in the 1930s as sites of brutality where people would be arrested in prison. Then quickly released, say soon after Castagna when 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to camps, uh, and they would be tortured and the camps would be used to encourage them to self deport.
Jason Stanley (00:07:33):
Right? So we're seeing explicitly that policy, uh, being implemented. We've got, uh, we've got, uh, a sign of fascism that I don't talk about in the book because my book is about fascist rhetoric, ideology and propaganda. Now we're seeing fascist policies. And one thing you see and you have been seeing in the United States for quite some time is you're just seeing one political party betraying what had, are rent calls, a loyalty to party over parties. And what she means by that is a one party state. And we're seeing that with our courts that are being packed with totally partisan hacks to be Frank, uh, and, uh, with lifetime appointments. And we're seeing the Republican party just doubled down on voter suppression, gerrymandering with a terrible court decision. Legitimating partisan gerrymandering. Uh, we're seeing, uh, we're seeing a one party state. So, and, and you know, majority rule is right now a joke in the United States.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:08:34):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're touching on a number of really important things all of a sudden. I want to talk about, um, I guess maybe one place to start because you mentioned it off the bat, are the concentration camps, um, you know, so, you know, for most Americans I think their understanding of effect, maybe we should even take a step back before that for Americans, what their understanding of fascism is, is what they've seen of Nazis in movies and TV shows and video games about world war II. Um, and the understanding is that when you say that somebody is fascist, you are saying that they are in effect the Nazi party of Germany, um, in the 1930s and the 1940s. And first of all, I'm wondering if, uh, you think that they're on the right track when, when people think that or if, if, uh, there's a more subtle definition that people need to have in mind.
Jason Stanley (00:09:27):
The fascism literature is all over the place because there were many fascist movements. The people, some part of the fascist literature focuses on Italian fascism. Uh, and, and in some of that literature they would argue the national socialists aren't even really fascists. So, uh, so it gets a little bit, when you look at the history, uh, it gets, you know, there's a lot of partisan, there's a lot of sniping depending upon which part of the world you're looking at. When you're talking about president Trump's rhetoric, geology, you are talking about national socialism. You're talking about a race based ideology. A N with that is ethno nationalist. Um, you don't ha you have a religious Mar minority that's being targeted and his case, it's not Jews, it's, it's Muslims, but you have some of the very same tropes. Uh, Hitler's antisemitism was not hatred of Israel.
Jason Stanley (00:10:23):
Israel after all, didn't exist that, ah, it, Hitler's antisemitism was directed against a supposedly fifth column of people in Germany whose loyalty was really to each other and not to the German nation. Uh, they were, uh, who were secretly trying to use, uh, the media and culture to bring communism and socialism to Germany. And right now in the United States, you have a conspiracy theory accepted by many Americans that Muslims aren't. Muslims aren't, can't really be American. That their loyalty is really to Islam and they're sick and they're socialists and communists. Right? So the structure of the, uh, conspiracy theory underlying the Islamophobia that president Trump has been fomenting since birtherism, uh, is the same as the structure of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Hitler fomented the hysteria about immigration. That is the calling card, a fascist movements. Um, the, uh, Oswald Mosley, the head of the British fascists, his motto was Britain for the British, they favored, or 100% ban on immigration. So, you know, uh, so we've got this theory about immigration. My encompass filled with hysteria about immigration, hysteria about, uh, communists in labor movements and labor unions, uh, uh, Jews, uh, in this, in the United States, it would be about Muslims. Uh, it's about the media, the elite controlling the media, uh, the culture industry. Um, you know, the cosmopolitan elite, all of that is president and present in us politics today and took a sudden lurch towards more respectability with this national conservative conference.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:12:16):
But I guess one of the questions that a lot of people would have is, um, you know, certainly everybody knows to label racism is bad xenophobia as bad. Um, a lot of the debate around Trump right now is, is sort of his apologists trying to claim falsely. I think it's very clear if you look at the record that, you know, he's not racist or that he's not seen a phobic. Um, but I, I, you know, I guess, you know, one of the things that, that people say it to, you know, to quote, uh, Robert Paxton, right? The professor Meredith of history Columbia, who's who, who are the anatomy of fascism, um, he said in an interview that the trouble with using fascism as a label is that it generates so much heat and not necessarily so much light. Um, and he kind of went on to talk about ways in which she thought Trump wasn't like a fascist because among other things, and I, I hope I'm not being too reductive here, but then everybody wasn't wearing the same colored shirt and sort of saluting in the same direction. Maybe more, maybe more broadly that, um, you know, the Republican party doesn't want, uh, the kind of of absolute regulation that, that I think a lot of people would associate with fascism. So I'm wondering if you could talk about that. I mean, what is, what is gained by talking about, um, the ways in which Trump is exhibiting fascism, uh, that we don't get just from having a conversation about him being racist or corrupt or xenophobic.
Jason Stanley (00:13:43):
So, uh, so I think that, um, a couple of quibbles about Paxton, I think he would agree that the rhetoric and the ideology we're seeing is fascist. Uh, but, um, but, uh, so a couple of points about the, the type of authoritarianism. Fascism is somewhat distinct. So you have a difference between Germany and Italy here between national socialism and Italian fascism and Italian fascism. You had a lot of government control of the economy. That's not what you saw in Nazi Germany and Nazi Germany. You saw big business outlying itself with the Nazis because it was mutually beneficial. And as I discussed it and how fascism works, Hitler promises to CEO. He says, you'll leave the political sphere up to me, I'll leave the industrial sphere to you, the cop. And so that's the difference between the sort of facts on the ground, the state, state government relations.
Jason Stanley (00:14:38):
I didn't get into the state government relations, uh, the, the state, uh, the, the gotten the relation between government and private businesses. Um, so there are differences between fascist regimes there. Um, as far as the sort of constant surveillance, well, you have that with Stalinism, but in Nazi Germany, I mean, you have the Gestapo and you have the fact that they're German. So Germans take records on everything, whether they're doing fascism or not. Um, but, but it, you know, it's not, it feels differently than Stalinism, uh, what happened in Germany. So the, there, there are, there are, um, so those are quibbles with Paxton's points as far as the usefulness of using the term fascism. I'm a philosophy professor. And so, uh, what I do is I seek to describe ideologies that can take hold and in different historical moments and, and our labels for those ideologies. And I think fascism is a label for a worldview. And that worldview does not always have to end in genocide. Uh, you know, uh, it's, it's a worldview based on ethno, nationalism, patriarchy, authoritarianism. Uh, I mean, I think that Trump is not in a system, the United States that is set up to easily enact the kind of authoritarianism that he might want. Um,
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:16:01):
so what, so I mean, can you give some examples? Like what, what is, what is preventing him and what do you think he ultimately would like to do?
Jason Stanley (00:16:08):
Well, his rhetoric sounds like he wants to shut down newspapers, target political opponents. But you know, as yet as with a lot of these, these Neo fascist movements, political parties like Hungary or bond and Hungary, they're going through the system to do it. And the system has, a lot of our democratic institutions are not in complete tatters. So you can't just arbitrarily in prison and arrest people for being political opponents. He can't get the DOJ to go after Hillary Clinton. He can't get anti Antifa declared a Tor terrorist organization immediately. But you know, when he tweet what he tweets is terrified and then what he tweets is very concerning. So now what's happened is you see the policies that, and, and goals that he said he do slowly being implemented.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:17:06):
So, I mean, D does, does that mean to say that you think that it's not possible for full fascism to really take root in the United States because the institutions would prevent it from happening?
Jason Stanley (00:17:16):
No, the institutions will be slowly eroded and are slowly eroding. Okay. Um, but, uh, but you don't have, if you compare it Italy to the, to Germany, the, uh, you know, Italian culture and society was not as set up to hunt down every political opponent and Jewish person. Uh, you know, Italians don't follow what the government says. You know, Germany is a very different country and you marry German culture with fascist ideology and you got a particular thing.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:17:46):
So what do you think you get when you marry American culture, if it's even possible to speak of one American culture, but, uh, if, if w when, when you marry the situation in the United States right now to Trumpist rhetoric, what do you think you can get?
Jason Stanley (00:17:59):
And, and, and our, and our institutions and our, yeah. Um, well we get a, we have a long history of frankly, fascist fascism in the United States. I mean, the America first and went Bradley hearts, great book. Hitler's American friends is terrific on this, you know, w the silver league, the, um, we had the silver league, we had the German American Bund, we had the America first movement. These were racist fascist organizations. We had fascist marches. Uh, we had Madison square garden filled with 22,000 fascists in 1939. So Hitler took great inspiration from the KU Klux Klan. It's very hard to distinguish KU Klux Klan ideology in the 20s from Nazi ideology. So we have a long history of this. Uh, we have people like Pat Buchanan and George Wallace who are, who are going along a sort of equate Cy fascist, uh, you know, milking equate I fascists line. So, uh, so, so what we have is we have a long history as we're seeing now of, of white nationalism, of, uh, American supremacy, uh, Christian nationalism. Uh, and what you, what, what, uh, but we also have a kind of anarchy. We have the States have a lot of power. The cities have a lot of power. You see California resisting Trump. Um, you see sanctuary cities a week.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:19:24):
You see, you see Baltimore hitting back hard against Trump, at least rhetorically right now. I'm guessing that that could have more teeth to it going forward after his, his tweets about Elijah Cummings and using frankly, I think what you would call probably fascist rhetoric to describe, uh, the living conditions and black parts of Baltimore.
Jason Stanley (00:19:41):
Yes, that's right. Um, I should say PacSun is a European historian and so when he looks at the United States, he does not see our fascist, the, the, he, you know, he somehow overlooks the ways in which us history fed into European fascism. It's going to his comment about uniforms, it's going to look differently here. Fascism is about ethno nationalism. It's about the culture in the country. And our culture is a culture of, uh, you know, NASCAR. I mean, the kind of culture that's going to feed fascism is going to be the kind of culture that's going to feed white nationalism that is going to be connected to events like NASCAR races or things that, not to say that all NASCAR is a fascist, but, uh, but it's going to have be asso associated with symbols that are different than the symbols you see elsewhere. Take NASCAR, for instance, Sean Klemperer, his first chapter, the first chapter of the language of the third VI LTI is, he says, when any German raised under Hitler national socialist, here's the term hero three and only three images come to their mind.
Jason Stanley (00:20:53):
A Panzer tank commander, an SS officer, and a race car driver. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And so those symbols are going to be culture specific, right? And, and we're, we have our own culture specific symbols and to under one fascism, you know, fascism, fascist ideology, America. I, you know, I'm reminded of this, this Spanish person in the, uh, the Spanish fascists in the early thirties was once invited to give a talk at a fascist international conference. And he said, I'm not a fascist. I'm Spanish. So then what do you think, what do you think he meant by that? He meant, you know, well, if you're a fascist in Spain, you're a Spanish Athens ethno nationalist, right? You're not a German ethno nationalist or an Italian ethno nationalist, so, so you might not see that you're part of a broader ideology because you're so taken by the particularities of the cultural symbols of your own nation. Yeah,
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:21:53):
that's one of the really interesting things here is I think that to a certain extent, when this conversation takes place about whether Trump is a fascist, whether his supporters are fascist, there's sort of this idea that this came out of nowhere, that basically American history was just sort of troubling. Chugging along. We were a democratic Republican til 2016 something happened. Trump got elected. And then in order for the fascist label to be correct, it means that, uh, uh, you know, that there was this huge break in history essentially in November of 2016 but it sounds like you don't see it that way.
Jason Stanley (00:22:28):
Uh, how fascism works is based in us history. It's not based in European history. Right. And, uh, you know, I, I, I must read from my family, doesn't like me to read from [inaudible], but, uh, reading from a part two of mine comp, I know that this is unwelcome to here, but anything crazier and less thought out than our present laws of state citizenship is hardly possible to conceive. But there is at least one state in which feeble attempts to achieve a better arrangement are apparent. I of course do not mean our pattern German Republic, but the United States of America where they are trying partially at any rate to include common sense in their councils, they refuse to allow immigration of elements that are bad from the health point of view and the absolutely forbid naturalization of certain defined braces. And thus the United States is making a modest start in the direction of something not unlike the consumption of the national state. I defend here. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when ad off Hitler in mind calm points to your country as his model that may be U S history is slightly relevant for a foreign account of a fascism.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:23:36):
Well, I think it's, but I mean, but that brings up another critique of, of using the term. Um, you know, that, that I've run into, um, uh, I think Dan Denver brought this up specifically on, on Twitter. Um, but you know, I mean, just me right now, I'm writing a book, uh, that takes place primarily between 1898 and 1940. Um, and there are, you know, when you hear things that Trump says, um, some of which, you know, will echo things that, that, you know, totally that are coming from, from Hitler. But they also very closely echo things from like, say Theodore Roosevelt, who Hitler also echoed. I mean, the, the, the, the, the sort of white nationalism, the idea that the, you know, the, the, the good lands of the world are, are the inheritance of, of the white race. Um, and that, you know, uh, uh, we were lucky because, um, uh, you know, uh, the, the, the, the, uh, British aristocrats who brought African slaves, this is what Teddy Roosevelt said, that the British aristocrats who brought African slaves to the American continent didn't also bring people from Asia.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:24:45):
Um, and basically that, you know, we just should get rid of everybody except for, you know, what, what Roosevelt called Anglo Americans. So we didn't have to say Anglosaxon so he could include himself since he was a Dutch descent. Um, but I mean, I guess what, what I'm what I'm saying, and I'm also thinking about, you know, James Whitman's book about Hitler's American model, um, that is, is it possible that, that using the F word, you know, calling, calling Trump a fascist right now is actually in a way, or racing America's own racist, uh, authoritarian Heron Voke democratic past. Um, and, and trying to pretend that this is a, a foreign import that's come to America when really we're dealing with something that's much more homegrown. Well, I mean, since you've read how fascism works, you know that, I agree with you 100% on that, that I think that fascism is home grown, uh, that, that my book is based on both and it's informed both by Europe, by India.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:25:37):
It's informed by places all over the world. Um, but my reaction to, I mean, I hope using the word fascism does not have the result you say, because I, I can't stand the norm core literature, the, you know, crisis of democracy literature that it's like, Oh, in 2016, this attack on our wonderful democracy happened. I think this is all home grown. These are elements that I've always been here. Trump ran for office knowing that, you know, many politicians before him had refused to go this route and were therefore leaving, you know, not attracting certain votes they could have attracted by going this route. [inaudible] so, so I agree with all of that and now you're asking me a strategic question about whether you, whether using the term fascism obliterates, you know, makes it seem that this is some kind of Euro trash import, you know, and, uh, some sort of Swedish pop bam. But, um, but, uh, so I hope not. I mean, I, I mean, Dubois uses the term flashes and black reconstruction
Jason Stanley (00:26:44):
to describe, uh, to describe race relations in the United States. Uh, James Weldon Johnson uses the term fascism to describe race while relations in the United States in the 1930s. Um, uh, we, uh, the, the parts of Teddy Roosevelt you're talking about are what I would describe as the fascist elements. Now, fascism is many different elements put together. Uh, and what I think you see with Trump is like almost perhaps, you know, a great number of those elements if not all of them.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:27:16):
Well, so you talk, you talk and how fascism works. Um, you kind of give like a, a 10 point checklist, right? And the first point is, is the construction of a mythic past. Um, and it sounds like in, in, in, in a certain way. Uh, and I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but it feels like maybe in a certain way, using the term fascism and understanding that that entails the construction of, of a past, that, that as, as you point out, is quote, never the actual past that is fetishized. Um, I'm wondering if it enables us to maybe grapple a little more realistically with what the past really is. I mean, it sounds like to a certain extent, you think that the, you know, hashtag resistance folks are also trafficking in a certain kind of mythic past that they're imagining was violated by the 2016 [inaudible].
Jason Stanley (00:28:04):
Right? I mean, I think all nationalism and, and all, and lots of legitimate forms of conservatism traffic in a mythic past because, you know, France wasn't a coherent nation with a uniform cultural and religious and linguistic community. Uh, so even French nationalism requires a mythic past. There's a particular kind of mythic past that you see in fascism. You go back to some heroic moment, uh, military moment, military domination. Uh, you talk about men being men and women being at home. You talk about purity. So this is where [inaudible] fits in. You talk about that,
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:28:43):
first of all, Duvalle and the president for life of Haiti from 1957 until, uh, 1971,
Jason Stanley (00:28:49):
right? Doula doula. Yay. Uh, who was a black nationalist as you pointed out to me, but that fits in with the ethnic purity point that, you know, the great moment was one where only the ethnic, the ethnic, there's this sort of one culture or ethnicity dominated. So it's a particular kind of mythic past, you know, has the United States, the United States, as I see U S history has always been a battle between fascist elements and democratic elements. I want to say one thing about the difference between Europe and the United States. Fascism requires panic about communists. So it requires panic about, you know, communists are in factoring the universities, you know, uh, you know, you attack the academics for being communists, you attack the press for being communists, you pack pack. The opponents for being communists and the United has never had a powerful communist movement. Right. Ah, so you know, fascism has never been empowered like that in the United States. Although of course the United States has had red scares and we might be going through another one again. So that's, that's the one go on.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:30:00):
Well, can you explain a little bit why that is for, for, uh, people who might not know? I mean, why, why is, why is a fear of communism a necessary condition for having what you're defining as fascism?
Jason Stanley (00:30:13):
Uh, communism organizes society around principles of wealth, not around race and ethnicity. So it is a mortal threat. Anything that, you know, you know, I mean, I think communism is an authoritative, authoritarian. Communism is always a threat, but, uh, but it's also a extremism. It's a kind of extremism that you can then paint your opponents, uh, and I as an extremist and therefore justify your own extremism. Right.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:30:44):
Well, so the topic on either side that makes sense, let, let's, let's go down this checklist really fast. Just cause I'm, I'm, I'm just curious what you'd say. I mean, briefly. So the, the, the first condition you say is, is, uh, this, this idea of a mythic pass. And I think we see that very clearly with make America great again as, as a organizing principle. Um, and it's interesting that Trump, uh, Trump actually tried to create as a slogan for the 2020 race, keep America great. Um, but it never quite took off because this idea of reclaiming make America great again was just so attractive that it just remains a, an irreplaceable slogan for his movement. Right? The, so the second thing is propaganda. So how do you see that
Jason Stanley (00:31:29):
manifesto? So propaganda's [inaudible] works in all political movements, but you have a particular sort of sort of propaganda, what you had before, what you have in liberal democracy are ways of propaganda that hides racism and hides, uh, and, and, and hides the worst illiberal sentiments while simultaneously trying to draw on them. So bill Clinton talked about, um, uh, uh, [inaudible] w w what was the phrase? Ending welfare as we know it, or, yeah. And, uh, and you know, that's a dog whistle about welfare, like leading to poverty, leading to laziness and, you know, racist dog whistle as, uh, as researchers, researchers have shown that use of the word welfare, uh, triggers highly negative, uh, emotions and people with, as they euphemistically call it, racial resentment. Uh, uh, so, um, so and in liberal democratic politics, people try to hide a liberalism, um, with, with fascist politics, illiberalism is fronted.
Jason Stanley (00:32:41):
So you have, you know, you call your opponents the most toxic things you, you, you gained, you engage in explicit racism. Um, so you call you, you talk about immigrants in fasting the nation, that's classic fascist propaganda. Uh, you paint whole groups as, uh, as, as serious violent offenders. Uh, so that's classic classic fascist propaganda. One thing that struck me, however, in doing the research for my work is one common theme that you find everywhere, which is that fascists always focus on corruption. Non fascists, focus on corruption too. But fascist do Dubois makes a big thing of this. And black reconstruction, he says, reconstruct and reconstruction ended because they claimed that black people were corrupt. But you know, he said there's no evidence that black majority cities and, and, and States with large black populations had any kind of corruption under, I had greater corruption under reconstruction. What corruption meant is that black people could vote. And, and so that's what corruption men,
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:33:54):
and interestingly, it seems like president Trump's own personal manifest corruption gets overlooked by his supporters, perhaps in part because they're focused on corruption in a, in a, in a different sense than say the New York times would imagine it. Right? I mean, like we, we look at Trump cheating on his taxes, hiding his taxes. Um, we look at Trump, you know, self-dealing and, uh, using the office to, to make money by, you know, encouraging people to rent rooms at his hotels. But it seems like his followers have a different idea of what corruption means. They think it means something that other people do.
Jason Stanley (00:34:31):
Right? Absolutely. Your own people can't be corrupt. They should be getting all the goods. I mean, Donald Trump might be the most corrupt American in history given the New York times report, given the $400 million that he got from his father and didn't pay taxes on. I mean, the research that's been John suggests a level of corruption that's never been seen before. And so, and yet he ran by accusing his opponent of being corrupt, which is stunning. And if you do the letter, read the literature, like the literature on the Nazis mentioned this again and again, that's a national socialist. We're an extraordinarily corrupt party who stole and robbed and were seeking money everywhere. But somehow we imagine them as these sort of pure antisemites whose only focus was killing Jews.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:35:19):
Even still like even like that propaganda kind of still works on us today.
Jason Stanley (00:35:23):
Yeah and exactly. Exactly. It's still works off on us today. We don't see the Nazis for what they were, which is people who to this day had their descendants are hiding the wealth that they're, that the seized. So uh, so Putin in 2011 ran an anti corruption campaign. So things mean they're opposites. You also have the open lion. So the open lying, I complained about this in a November piece in the new 2016 piece in the New York time, the lying is the point. The line is the point. Like you openly lie, you create a political environment
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:36:00):
and this is, this is sort of your, your number four right? Which is unreality.
Jason Stanley (00:36:04):
Exactly. Now we're skipping to unreality. The lying is the point. Cause you destroy reality. You say, look, even when the other side is telling truths they're doing, so to advance their agenda, truth does not matter. What matters is your agenda. Are you with me or against me? So your lies don't matter. Their truths don't matter. It's OS against that.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:36:26):
And I think, I, I think I read or heard you say that, uh, you know, if you could give Vince people that everybody's lying, then the person who at least is the most blatant in their lies, seems like they're the most authentic.
Jason Stanley (00:36:38):
Absolutely. That's my 2015 peace, October, 2015 peace democracy and the demagogue, which was one of the first pieces, the New York times published in Trump, which it took. And I wrote, tried to get it published for like two months. But yeah, so, so I was like, at the time I was like, this is a strategy to, to openly lie, to openly be racist. And then everyone thinks you're authentic because, uh, and I, I include this and this is included in how fascism works in the book. Um, because, uh, everyone else is sort of being cagey. And I'm saying on the one hand and the other hand, because that's what democracy involves and there's corruption involved. And the other side they have to say on no, they have to represent corporate interests as their own interests. And so you can cut through it by just, you know, saying what's on people's minds on quote. In other words, saying the unsayable and people think that guy tells it like it is. He's authentic. His very lies, his very racism shows he's authentic.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:37:38):
I'm, I'm interested actually. So you, the, the times resisted of publishing the piece back in 2015,
Jason Stanley (00:37:46):
uh, at the time a number of outlets said, yeah, no one took Trump seriously.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:37:50):
[inaudible] was it because they, they, they thought that the comparison work terming him a demagogue was, uh, unfair and Cindy area is it just because they didn't think anybody needed to pay attention to this real estate
Jason Stanley (00:38:02):
reality TV star? It was a combination. Uh, so first of all, all my references to Weimar Germany had to be taken out. And, uh, you know, they weren't allowing those references even though they're opt, uh, their app, not in terms of the historical damage that Trump has rocked, but in terms of the ideology and rhetoric he's employing. Um, but I wonder if [inaudible] if,
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:38:24):
I mean, what, what I'm kind of where I'm, when I'm thinking there. Um, but do you think that, I mean, to a certain extent, it seems like one of the issues and, and one of the reasons why it seems important to use the, the, the F word to call Trump a fascist, um, is that there's this kind of asymmetric warfare going on. You have institutions like the New York times and like a lot of American universities and think tanks and other institutions who are kind of trying to play this game within the rules that they understand from liberal democracy. They, they, they will subtly call people out. You know, Robert Mueller will refer you back to the report and say, you know, when Veronica Escobar, uh, the Congresswoman from, uh, El Paso asked him, you know, are you implying that we should impeach him? He was, he was sort of, you know, he tried to rise above it and say like, you know, well, you can, you can look back at what I've, I've said already versus a guy like Trump who will say anything constantly, the more offensive, the better. Um, and just does better by it. I mean, he, he, he gets, he gets support and when he accuses the Democrats of being, you know, communists and liars and, uh, you know, which hunters, um, and says, you know, Obama should be the one who's investigated, you know, the Democrats and the New York times and, and, and all these people on, on the other side of the ledger can't fight back. I mean, does it, do, do, do you see that in a way?
Jason Stanley (00:39:55):
Right. So, Jonathan, earlier you asked me whether what I thought about the strategic use of the term fo, you know, why should we use the term fast? Some given, uh, given the situation, maybe it will backfire. And I responded by saying that that's not my concern. I'm a scholar, I'm a philosopher trying to define an ideology and this is an important ideology to define. And now you just gave a brilliant answer to your previous question that I will give in future iterations and future interviews. Namely, it is important strategically because it's important to see that the rules are being broken and when you remain within liberal democracy, you are completely constrained. And so, you know, you're absolutely right by calling Trump a fascist, you are telling people he is completely unconstrained by rules. The Republican party, the large bulk of the Republican party has now shown that, you know, they are completely unconstrained by liberal democracy. Their only goal is power one party, state domination, minority over the majority. And you know, that's what we're facing. And when you try to respond to that by, uh, liberal democratic means, uh, yeah, I, I, you know, I couldn't have put it better than you just [inaudible]
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:41:13):
well, it's, I mean, and one of the, one of the alarm bells that went off for me, um, was when, uh, uh, Josh Holly, the, you know, the, the, the, the Senator from Missouri, uh, uh, gave a speech recently in which he said, um, and, and, and this quote, I mean, it was just like a gong clanging for me. And I was wondering if you have the same reaction? He said, yeah. Okay. So he said free for years, the politics of both left and right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interest, not of the American middle, but if a powerful, upper-class and their cosmopolitan priority. He said, this class lives in the United States, but they identify as citizens of the world. They run businesses or oversee universities here, there's some anti intellectual aneurysm, but their primary loyalty is to the global community. And he said, but at the end of the speech, the old platforms have grown stale. And the old political truisms. Now ring hollow, the American people are demanding something different and something better. It's time we ended the cosmopolitan experiment and recovered the promise of the Republic.
Jason Stanley (00:42:24):
[inaudible] yeah, go ahead. It's terrifying. I mean, I mean, or Victor, our bond said only a part of that and everyone uniformly agreed it was antisemitism. There's Aurobindo the leader of a hunger hungry and, and uh, and that is arrived on our shores. May I note where Josh Holly went to Yale and he went, I went to the state university of New York at Stony Brook, you know, and, and this guy who went to like, did he go Stanford and Yale? I dunno what fancy school he went to, but you know, I teach at Yale, I went to Yale, I'm at Yale. And the only way someone like me can be at Yale or people like me regularly get to yell his professors. But you know, he went to like the most elite schools possible. And I mean, this is like, this whole thing is like a joke, right? But Trump and Holly are representing themselves, but right. The ideology that he lays out there is, you know, uh,
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:43:18):
I mean, well, I just, I want to take a second to dissect it, right. Because a lot of the, a lot of the debate around his comments, um, I mean it fell into sort of familiar pattern where this one word, cosmopolitan, which is an important word to look at, came out of the speech and it became a debate over sort of whether this was un-PC right. I mean there's clearly, you know, just does cosmopolitan implied Jewish. Um, he's, he denies that it implies Jewish even though there's a long history of it suggesting that. But to me, even beyond that, um, and, and, and I didn't know if you had the same reaction. It was this whole idea of going beyond left and right, that there's this sort of small L liberal consensus that's been formed on both sides and that it is, it has come about sort of through the malign influence of this shadowy, you know, dare not speak its name, group of, of cosmopolitans Jews, but they're not as big as name cosmopolitans. Um, and then he says, you know, it's time we end the cosmopolitan experiment and then he goes back to this mythic past and he's using Republic. But I don't think he's using Republic in the sense of, of a, a democracy where people elect leaders to represent them. He just means cup. Yeah. This nation, this constitutional past when everything was great and we had slaves or whatever he's thinking about it. I mean, is that how it struck you? Yeah.
Jason Stanley (00:44:41):
Classic, you know, the cities versus the, ah, the rural areas. Chapter nine in my book is called Sodom and Gomorrah. You know, the cities are the places where there's race mixing in different languages and the traditions of the nation are destroyed. And the elites in the cities control the universities and they control the process and they're trying to destroy the national traditions. Um, now I, the thing about the anti, so that is, you know, it's, it's the straight forward, uh, I mean it's hypocritical because he of course is a member of the elite card carrying member of the elite. Uh, but the, the ideology is the pure, uh, nationalists ideology that, you know, it can take a nontoxic form. You know, people are now trying to distinguish, you know, uh, some kind of version of nationalism that's not athletic from the toxic sword. But what you have there is the attack on, uh, on liberalism that is characteristic of anti-liberal movements.
Jason Stanley (00:45:40):
It's minimally illiberal. Um, I, I agree that now, um, HUBZone in a series of tweets pointed out rightly that cosmopolitanism is a political philosophy that you can contest. Um, and that's correct, but that's just when you embed the word cosmopolitan in that larger framework. Well, it's a familiar rant. It could come right out of the, uh, the dark chapters of history and what that, and it doesn't need to be about Jews. Um, uh, you know, Hitler, uh, was not, the problem is antisemitism. The definition of antisemitism isn't changed by the state of Israel. So nationalism and ultra nationalism were where the source of European antisemitism as, as Iran makes clear with the drug drive discussion of the Dreyfus affair and, uh, and origins of totalitarianism. Uh, it's ultra nationalism that makes people think, okay, the Jews don't really belong here. Just as here, people I think were ultra nationalists. So Muslims don't really belong here because we're, how do they say it? Judeo Christian. So, um, so, but add, but what Hitler was railing against and mind calm was the cosmopolitan elite who live in cities, who control the intellectual culture, um, who do, who, who are asking for equality for different cultures, uh, and, uh, and are, and recognize the dignity of other ways of life. Uh, and he Osos and any assault. And Hitler's thinks those people are the Jews. Well, Holly does everything but mention the Jews. Right?
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:47:23):
Well, and, and I mean, the hypocrisy is almost kind of a nonstarter. I mean, and this is something that I've, that I've been sort of wrestling with for a little while. I mean with Donald Trump, right? I mean, he's, he's an anti elitist billionaire. He's a guy who s***s on a gold toilet and then, and then tells, you know, and, and has this, you know, almost comical, you know, at our borough. Um, but like elite outer borough, uh, you know, Queens accent who then you know, is, is trying to tell people and like, you know, Appalachia that he's one of them but, but they, but they buy it and it seems like a big part of the reason is, you know, and, and this goes right back to your, you know, I think maybe the, the, the, the core line from, from your book that the most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into us and them. So what Holly is doing is, and what Trump is doing is they're saying, even though we're rich, even though we move in these elite circles, we're, we're part of us, we're part of you. And we are, we are going to help lead a movement against them against these.
Jason Stanley (00:48:27):
Why and why are they us? Because they're white. I mean, Holly won, went to Stanford, he taught at st Paul school in London and then he went to Yale law school. Right. In what world is he not an elitist?
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:48:45):
Because somebody say somebody like Elon, Omar in a lot of ways would have them have a, a much closer relationship to the kind of struggles that the, the, the sort of imagined prototypical, you know, in, in the diner, in the, the, the collapsing, you know, West Pennsylvania rust belt town, uh, that the New York times imagined was, was sort of the core of Trump's support. Somebody like Elon, Omar would actually have much more of a connection to that because she, she really did have to pull herself up by her boots. Now you're, now you're just exaggerating. I mean, I mean, ha Holly went to Stanford and Yale to working class institution. Ilhan Omar went to North Dakota state.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:49:26):
I have a C but not a real American, right? The lead us from an elite. So these are people. So it's a Holly trust. So why does that, but I guess one of the big questions is why does that work? I mean, Trump, Trump supporters aren't, they're not all idiots, right? I mean, they're the, the, the people who are in the arena, in, in, in Greenville, North Carolina, which is by the way, a college town, home of Eastern Carolina university, East Carolina university, like th they're, they're not, they're not all stupid. They, they, you know, why, why does this rhetoric work on them? Why, why is what Trump and Holly and other people are and Steve Bannon are selling? Why is it appealing to them?
Jason Stanley (00:50:05):
Because whiteness is appealing the psychological wages of whiteness. So that's what's going on, obviously. I mean, that's, that, I mean, why is Holly one of us and not them, despite the fact that he is a gold plated, uh, background from the most elite institutions in the world, both in the U K and has lived abroad and in the U K teaching at the st Paul school, teaching at the elite of the elite, uh, secondary schools. Uh, you know, why does he feel what one of us, because he's white
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:50:38):
and, and I think it's, I mean, I think the word that you used that was really interesting is, is appealing, right? It's a, it's a positive sense because we often, we often think about racism and white supremacy in this country is being negative. You see other people and you hate them and people want to reject that for themselves because they just don't want th th that's bad and they just don't want to think that they're bad people. But I think you're, you're pointing to something really important there. And using the word appeal that, that they, that Trump and Holly and Bannon and Gorka and all these other guys, Steve Mellon, uh, Steve Miller are all constructing a, a appealing world. It's a world that people would want to live in where they imagine it will all be people like us. We'll all be saying Merry Christmas to each other. Um, we can all share our wealth because we won't have to worry about, uh, black people and immigrants stealing it. I mean, it's, it's, it's an appealing image that, that they're trying to sell. Right? Well, there are,
Jason Stanley (00:51:39):
there are appeal. I mean, as with so much about American history, Dubois puts his finger on it, you know, with his concept of the in black reconstruction of the psychological wages of whiteness. I mean, the appeal is, you know, we belong to this tribe and this is our tribe. And you know, we're not at home everywhere. Where at home, you know, in this try and, you know, Joe, whiteness is the appeal. I mean, it's stunning. It should be stunning to every American that Sebastian Gorka is able to represent himself as like more American than Elon. Omar, or like somehow this great American citizen when he was a, uh, advisor to Victor, our bond, a well known Hungarian political, uh, uh, uh, well-known handgun, Hungarian political figure. I mean, we're not talking about someone on the fringes. This was a person deeply involved in Hungarian politics who simply moves to America, gets naturalized so fine. He's an American citizen as well. And, uh, and suddenly is the most patriotic American who presents himself as a patriotic American when a thick Hungarian accent denounces other Americans.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:52:51):
So let, let me, let me, let me ask you a question. Following up on that, that, um, might sound weird or, or, or obvious or tautological, but I just think it's interesting to really explore. So given all of that and all the things we've talked about, let's stipulate for the moment that Donald Trump is a fascist. Why is fascism bad?
Jason Stanley (00:53:13):
Well, I would never, you know, I, that goes beyond my purview to say certain things are bad and good, but, uh, but you know, I take myself to be someone who described structures rather than normative claims about them. But, uh, so, and I think that that we're talking about political systems, uh, fascism, uh, when, what we have now is what we have now is fascists hide themselves behind a kind of ethno nationalism that claims it's all about separation, separate but equal. Right? Uh, and the American past should tell us that separate but equal is a joke. Um, but what people now will say is like, no, no. As Brendan Tarrant says in his manifesto, the New Zealand killer, uh, who self describes as a fascist Jews are fine as long as they're in Israel. Um, so, but so, um, but I think that it's impossible to like demand different homelands for different peoples, uh, based on ethnicity and not create a hierarchy of value.
Jason Stanley (00:54:21):
And I happen to have an, uh, liberal democratic ethos that says that all humans are deserving of value, are equally deserving of value. And if all humans are equally deserving of value, then viewing some as good as having more value because of a particular religion because of a particular ethnicity. Um, uh, is uh, is uh, particularly, particularly skin color and ethnicity. Cause you could say religion is a choice. Um, but, but I think religion is a part of the freedoms that liberal democracy grants people. So I would put it in because to treat people differently, which to assign different valuations based on ethnicity, based on what language they speak based on their ethnic, cultural background, based on their religion. That violates my liberal democratic ethos. Now if you want to go back and ask me why is liberal democracy valuable, why liberal democracy? That's a great question, but too much for a podcast.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:55:20):
Okay. Okay. Um, well let me ask you this. Um, you know, as we're moving toward 20, 20 and it seems at least from what you know, the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, uh, and Adam Schiff and others are signaling, um, that Trump will finish the rest of his term. Um, and that even if, if a representative Nadler is able to sort of open, uh, an impeachment inquiry, um, uh, in, in everything but name, um, that the odds of him being removed are very low if he is able to run again and he is able to oversee this election and we already know that he's taking measures to make sure that the elections aren't secure and lying about what he did in, in 2016. Um, first of all, do you think it's possible for us to have a fair election in 2020 if, if, if the incumbent candidate is a fascist, um, do you think that if he loses that he would be willing to leave? Um, and if, uh, the answer to either of those is no. Um, I mean, what does that mean? We all seem to be proceeding as if there's going to be a normal election coming in, in a little over a year. Um, but if we're talking about fascism, it's, it's hard to imagine that would be the case.
Jason Stanley (00:56:41):
Well, I think the last election wasn't normal, uh, because of, uh, interference and Cambridge Analytica and various and Russian interference. Um, it also, and also the way the campaigning happened. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, so I'm a philosophy professor and a scholar. And so you're asking me about, uh, I, I agree that the 2020 election will not be normal. And I, and I suspect along with many Americans in my status as a private citizen that, uh, that Trump will not stop down, will not accept results that go against him. But we also have an anti-democratic system. The electoral college is anti-democratic. Um, Trump lost the election by a huge amount, uh, almost 3 million votes. Uh, so we have systematic problems in our democracy. Uh, we have, um, you know, felon disenfranchisement, so Florida stays Republican. And even though they passed the bill ending at the legislature, uh, essentially passed the poll tax. So, you know, so we have systematic problems throughout the, and now we're going to face many more systematic problems.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:57:59):
So. Well, so this is kind of, this is kind of what I was thinking and it was something that you wrote in, in how fascism works. Um, that, that kind of triggered this question from me. Um, so you talked about pizza gate, right? The conspiracy theory that came up at the end of the 2016 election that essentially Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington DC. And you talk about how the pizza Gators condemn the man who went to comet pizza with a gun, essentially because he'd taken this conspiracy theory too seriously, that, that, uh, uh, the function of conspiracy theories you wrote as to impugn and malign their targets, but not necessarily by convincing their argument, their audience, that they are true. And the reason that it just triggered a moment of sort of soft reflection for me, if I go online as I do and, uh, you know, I refer to Trump as a fascist or I try to, you know, martial evidence, uh, as, as we've been doing here in this conversation that, that this is the case.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (00:59:03):
I get the response sometimes, um, that I'm a conspiracy theorist, right? That I am trafficking in a certain kind of conspiracy theory. And one could say, and I've, I've had people say this and people were writing this, um, I didn't agree with them, but they were writing this during the 2016 election that essentially, if we are serious that Donald Trump is a fascist, then that would imply that we would be rising up. Right now we would be forming militias and overthrowing the government. Right? Um, so I am, I am I the am I the pizza Gator that you're describing here? Like, are we like, are we talking about, um, you know, Trump being a fascist but we're not willing to follow through and we would sort of mock or condemn somebody who actually did try to say, you know, assassinate the president of the United States, like w or, or, or is there some, is there some other difference between, uh, that conspiracy theory and the analysis that we're undertaking? Right.
Jason Stanley (00:59:59):
Well, I just think it's a confusion about what fascism is. We've had, the United States has long flirted with fascism. We've had many elements of fascism in our society. Our criminal justice system has written through with fascist elements. I mean, we, we in prison, 25% of the world's population, probably that statistic changes with the OGAP Muslim, uh, situation in China. But, uh, but we have many elements of our society that are and have been fascist. And so, uh, you know, we're in a continual struggle between democracy and these more deeply problematic illiberal elements of our society. And people have risen up. That's what the civil rights movement was. That was people rising up. Um, people will need to rise up and in the street as we see in other countries, if the 2020 election is, is marred by even greater at irregularities in Puerto Rico, by the way, in our own country as we see in Puerto Rico, in our own country, we need to have a culture of street protests.
Jason Stanley (01:01:04):
Uh, but, uh, but um, fascism, uh, so my, the point of how fascism works says you actually you American, we Americans are familiar with fascism. We've heard it many times, you know, elements of it, you know, the whole, it's a continuum. Fascism is a continuum. So you can talk about how it's not a on one off thing. So the people, your interlocutor is thinking, okay, you know, to say that someone is a fascist is to say they're immediately going to set fire to the parliament and pass article 48 and you know, sees complete control. But no, that's not how it works. It's a continuum. And so fashion Trump is,
Jonathan Myerson Katz (01:01:45):
is
Jason Stanley (01:01:46):
pretty high on that continuum. Uh, his ideology is extremely fascist. Uh, not, you know, there are some differences between these contemporary fascist movements in the past. Not all, but we live in a society with democratic institutions. Um, now the States have a lot of power. I bet the Republicans are regretting that now. And, and so we have a lot of democratic institutions and, uh, and we have a, uh, a mobilized anti-fascist population. I don't just mean on [inaudible]. I, you know, we have black America, which has largely been sort of our anti-fascist movement in the United States. Uh, we have, uh, so, so we haven't fought fascism and anti-democratic ways. We have the institutions we have, but it has to be us. I mean, we have to mobilize, uh, and push back using the resources we have. But your interlocutor there is saying, uh, your, your interlocutor there is saying, uh, you know, when you hear the word fascism, you know, it's so far and such a threat that the only way to do, to respond is by anti-democratic ways.
Jason Stanley (01:03:05):
Um, you know, that's, I mean, I think some nonviolent protest by the nonviolent protest is important, but, uh, but we have, we have healthy democratic institutions that are surviving in the United States. Even in the depths of the Trump administration, you have thousands of bureaucrats who are lifelong bureaucrats who are not going to circumvent things as a fascist government might want. Uh, you don't have, even the Republican, the Republican party has bent and Benton bent, but they're still going to need some kind of superficial excuse to, to do extreme things. So, so we, so the response is, uh, America's always fought fascism in democratic ways and by nonviolent street protests, we can do it again. And if the democratic party institutionally refuses to treat Trump as, as a, as a threat, I mean, will it be possible to, or will, will, will we just end up going farther down the road?
Jason Stanley (01:04:08):
Well, the future is undetermined. That's the great thing about the future. Um, as a child of Holocaust survivors, my inclination is always to be pessimistic. But, uh, I try, but I live in the United States where, you know, I mean, black Americans had the civil rights movement in Alabama. I mean, I totally would have chosen Vermont or maybe Massachusetts. I wouldn't have chosen Mississippi or Alabama. That's scary. So we have a history of bravery, the labor movement, the women's movement. So we have these different social movements and, uh, if the democratic party is going to, uh, going to, um, disappoint us, uh, we're going to have elements of the democratic party stand up, which we're seeing today. This reminds me a little bit of a certain president who said, uh, there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America. Uh, yeah.
Jason Stanley (01:05:01):
I mean, you know, I've, I'm spinning that, uh, that, but that is our history. Yeah. We, we, we just have a, we just have, we have these large groups, the, this historical traditions of fighting against this. And, you know, it seems to me wrong think that those, that, you know, just as we look back in our history and we see the horrifying parts, we can look back at a U S history and see, you know, a kid's landing on the beaches of Normandy. Uh, so, uh, so and, and, uh, and moments, you know, abolitionism the civil rights movement, uh, right now, uh, the push for criminal justice against mass incarceration. So, which is a bipartisan movement, uh, to a large degree. So I think we have these elements that, that, uh, it's only if we see fascism as like, uh, uh, an on-off thing. Like it's either there or it's not, it's not like that.
Jason Stanley (01:05:56):
It's like we're going in that direction. We have to push back. That's sounds like a great place to end it. Thank you very much. It's so much fun talking to you. Great. It's so much fun talking to someone who has really thought about the responses that I've been getting that because they've been getting similar arguing, you know, and you know, you've raised some great points. What was the point you made about right? I'm you. So Jonathan, you're going to hear from me that from me in the future. I hope you don't mind about the point about, you know, it's important to call him a fascist because it tells you about the tactics he's going to be using.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (01:06:30):
That's it. That's it. Just, uh, just, just, just tell him to, to subscribe to the long version and they can, they can get more of it. They're awesome. Okay, great.
Jonathan Myerson Katz (01:06:38):
Great discussion. Thanks so much. Thanks Jason. And that's it. If you have not yet subscribed, you can go do so right now, go to K A T Z dot S U B S T a C k.com. That's katz.substack.com or just Google Jonathan Katz, the long version. You can find it there. See you next time.
Jonathan M. Katz is a freelance journalist, author, and national fellow at New America. His next book, Gangsters of Capitalism, will trace the origins and contradictions of American empire. Follow him on Twitter @KatzOnEarth.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe
Happy Friday. Hope everyone had a good — and dry — Independence Day. This week I was on the U.S.-Mexico border, getting as close as I could to America’s concentration camps.
I was following a congressional delegation led by Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas. It featured most prominently Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Democrat from New York who has done as much as anyone in the country to bring attention back to this issue.
After the tour, I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Ocasio-Cortez — much of which I published as a transcript in Mother Jones.
I had other thoughts and reporting to share as well. I’ve done that here in the first-ever Long Version podcast edition, which you can listen to using the player above. It includes exclusive audio from that interview and the scene along the border.
Please enjoy and share.
And, if you haven’t yet, sign up for The Long Version! You’ll get the backstory others missed, the details they didn’t bother to look for, and analysis you won’t get anywhere else:
Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors)
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Hi, this is Jonathan Katz and you're listening to a special audio edition--in fact, the first ever audio edition--of The Long Version. That's my new newsletter. I'm just back from El Paso and the US-Mexico border where I was following around a congressional delegation that was visiting Donald Trump's concentration camps. And I thought that this would be a good medium to share some of my thoughts. Some of the things that I saw when I was down there.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I want to start off, first of all by thanking everybody who's already subscribing to The Long Version. Hello. If you have not yet I invite you to check it out. You can find it by Googling my name and the long version. Or you can go directly to katz.substack.com to sign up. That's K A T Z dot SUBSTACK dot com. And you can read some back issues there and see if you like it and sign up to get it in your inbox every week.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So on Saturday, I was on my way back from Puerto Rico and I got where I was working on a different story and I got a phone call that a congressional delegation was about to head down to El Paso to visit some of the concentration camps. And this delegation was going to include Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez is of course a freshman, 29 years old representing the Bronx and Queens, who in her, it's almost been exactly a year since she won an upset victory in the democratic primary against a long time, but little known nationally Democrat. And in the time since she's been in office, she has established herself as a significant voice and she used that voice a couple of weeks ago to make a very powerful statement.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
She said that the migrant detention centers as some people call them that were set up all along the Southern border -- but of course there are others throughout the country -- are concentration camps. Now this was a call that resonated particularly with me. Those of you who have been reading this newsletter for a little while it has been going on know that I wrote a piece in late May called "Concentrate on the Camps" where I made that same argument. I made that into a op-ed that ran in the Los Angeles Times. And sometime later the representative responded to that call and made that statement and I think we were thinking about the same thing, which was that calling them by their name using a powerful term that would resonate with people, would call attention to a crisis that to a large extent had been forgotten.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
There had been a brief flurry of attention during the so-called zero tolerance or family separation in 2018, but ever since that had been quote unquote resolved essentially by president Trump deciding to throw whole families into his camps together. It hadn't been talked about a whole lot and I thought that was wrong. I think that this is one of the signature policies of an administration that has shown clear, authoritarian and white nationalist tendencies. And I think that the Congresswoman saw the same. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to see things through the eyes of an emerging and very important public figure and get some access that I might not be able to get myself as, as a journalist.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Now. I was not allowed inside any of the camps or any of the places that we visited. No reporters were--only the members of Congress were--but by virtue of the fact that I was sort of following them around with a small pack of, of other reporters and of course some staff, I think I was able to get more of a look than I normally would be able to. I mean, even just being able to stand up against one of these fences and look through and you know, record little videos and, and a little bit of audio, some of which I'll play for you on my phone. That's something that I probably wouldn't have been able to do if I had just gone on my own. And of course I was able to talk to the members when they came out. Especially Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez who sat down with me for an interview. And I'll be playing a couple snips of that later.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But let me just give you a brief overview of some of the places that we saw and I'll, I'll set the scene a little bit. For those of you who've never been there before. El Paso is a really fascinating town. It's very far from other cities. I was told that if you drive east it's hours before he gets in the next major city, which is probably San Antonio. And it is really a binational city. Really it's, it's still in a lot of ways El Paso del Norte, which is what the area was originally known as. Half of it is El Paso, Texas, and the other half is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. And you really feel that in a lot of ways. I mean the, the people, you know, families have relatives on both sides of the border.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
People are crossing back and forth every day. And by virtue of that fact, it's a very interesting place to have these camps which are primarily being used to hold people from Latin America. Now, not so much Mexico because immigration from Mexico is way down and has been way down from, from the much higher numbers that we saw, you know 10, 15 years ago. A lot of the people who are moving through right now are coming from farther South and central America from what's known as the, the Northern triangle. That's Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and a couple of other places. You also have significant populations of other people in computing interests, including interestingly enough, Cubans who are flying from Cuba often to Ecuador or to Nicaragua or countries that have good relations with Cuba and making a long and very dangerous Trek North to try to get through the border.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And those people are being held in these places and they are places that are meant not to be seen. I think that's one of the major things that really stuck out to me from what I saw there. There, there are places that are meant to blend in with their surroundings and be ignored. So the first one that we went to was called Casa Franklin and it's a building, nondescript office building, kind of a sandy beige color brick, no signs on the outside except for some very small ones that basically tell you the troublemakers are going to be prosecuted. But you could walk right by it, which is what I did. I, it was actually very close to the hotel that, that I was staying in, which was also where some of the members were staying. And I use my Google maps to head over there and I, I walked right past it because I just didn't see that it was there.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But if you look really closely, if you stop on the street and notice you can see that there's something strange going on. All of the blinds are really tightly drawn. No daylight is getting in or out. And of course, that means that you can't see anybody who's inside. And the people who are inside are children. Several dozen children. Again I think the majority of them from central America who have been put in there and a lot of them have actually been taken away from their families. Not parents because of the result of, of, of the outrage over the family separation policy back in 2018. But if they travel across the border with an uncle, an aunt, a grandparent, a cousin, even if they have parents who are already in the United States is my understanding. They're taken away from them and some are being put into, into this particular place. And the delegation got there. And they visited there first and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez actually came out and told us in Spanish a little of what she had seen inside
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Aquí por un tour algunos días, pero hay tambien niños aqui que esta, you know, llegando a, como, algunos meses aqui en estas facilidades. Y tambien yo tengo preocupaciones por los niños que solo pueden hablar quiché, o mam, o otros dialectos -- idiomas,idiomas indigenas
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And what she's saying there is that, first of all, some of the kids who were supposed to be kept there for only a matter of days had been kept there for months on my heard from one member as many as eight months. And also that she's concerned because some of those kids not only don't speak English but don't speak Spanish, they speak indigenous languages such as Mam, Ki'che, and so they're having trouble communicating with anybody from the outside. I also was told by another member of Congress who went in that one of her concerns was that there's a telephone that the children can use to call in and make a report of abuse if there are any abuses going on. But then that phone is being put in a very public area. So like you would have to be making these declarations basically in front of all of the other inmates, the other child, inmates who are being held in this place.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Not to mention the guards. So that, that would suggest that if there's malfeasance going on, we may not know very much about what's going on inside. The next place we went was a border patrol station one El Paso. And if you've been following any of the coverage of this trip, including what I wrote in mother Jones this is where a lot of the news that you've been seeing came out of. I'll give you a little bit of background about what was happening right at the moment that we went in that morning. ProPublica had published a story about a Facebook group of border control agents who were posting racist and sexist and just awful, awful memes and jokes. Both about the migrants and sort of retaliation against the members of Congress who were about to come inspect them. Particularly AOC.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And this story had come out, you know, just then, and when the members went inside they were already, you know, kind of nervous about what they were going to encounter. Because this Facebook group, I mean, let's, let's be clear here. It contained about 9,500 members. That's almost half of the entire border patrol. I think that's, that's like the, almost the majority of the people who actually worked for this entire agency. And I mean, one of these, one of these photo illustrations that somebody had made showed Representative Ocasio-Cortez literally being raped by Donald Trump. And that's the level of, of what we're talking about here. And so the, the members were understandably concerned. There are also some sort of weird ground rules that were being laid out that the members couldn't take phones inside. They couldn't record what was going on.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And I just, I, I really want to underline this, like over and over and over again. Remember, press isn't allowed inside. You know, anybody who's basically below the level of a member of Congress isn't allowed inside. And even the members of Congress, I mean, these are elected officials. Some of your elected officials are being told that they can't record, they can't take any video. They can't take any audio of, of what they're seeing. Border patrol does not want you to know what is happening inside of these places. The Trump administration does not want you to know what is happening inside these places. They want to be able to get away with whatever they want to do. They want to have no oversight whatsoever. And this was understandably concerning. It was understandably concerning to a group of law makers one of whom in particular had been targeted by, by some, some pretty violent and, and sinister stuff online. But, you know, they were willing to go with this because these were the ground rules. I mean, it's, they didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. So during the visit well I'll, I'll let, I'll let you hear from Representative Ocasio-Cortez herself. This is from the one on one interview that she and I did just after.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
I'm listening to CBP kind of give this tour. And then I see, and I think someone else has seen it first. It was either like Madeline Dean or Rashida to leave or somebody saw the screen with the surveillance that had like all of the video feeds of all of the cells. And so I started walking up to the screen with the surveil--with all of the surveillance feeds and I started, since they made us check our phones at the door. I did have like some paper and some pen and I started jotting things down. I was writing down everything that I had seen around me and so I was counting, I kind of have my pen up and I was counting like all of the little, in one of the, one of the feeds of the cell, there was one cell that just had very large amount of people, like large -- there were so many people crowded in the cell that people could not sleep in there.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
So there were some people like sitting, some people crouched and I went in and I started counting all of the people that were in the cell and then I looked down and I kid you not, there was literally a CBP officer with their phone and they started trying to do this to take a selfie of themselves with me in the background.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Right?! It wasn't even in the distance. She was like two feet in front of me and there was this glass perimeter in front of them and she was literally like, and that's when all hell broke loose.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I mean, can you imagine that? Right. So what ends up happening basically is the congresswoman told me that that was the end of the scripted tour and she and some of the other members basically demanded that they be allowed access to a holding cell and that holding cell was full of women from Cuba. And that's where they had a, a conversation that has basically made the biggest headlines so far out of, out of this particular visit.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
At first, they were just like answering very clear questions like, yes, no, or how many days have you been here, et cetera.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
You're speaking to them in Spanish?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Yeah. I was speaking to them in Spanish and eventually they started saying a little bit more and all of a sudden they all start just like sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. One of them had been separated from her one daughter, the other had been separated from her two children. Women had been in there. One woman had been in there for two months. Most of the women had been there a long time, like at least twenty days. And this was a cell that had no running water. And this was the cell where the woman said that she was told earlier today that that the toilet water is drinkable. They also told us the extent to which CBP cleaned up before we got there. So they said that they would go, they were, they were kind of officially like the policy was to give them one shower for 15 days.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Right on. And then that changed four days ago. Four days ago is when we announced that we'd be coming here four days goes when we reached out to CPP, that this was gonna be the facility we're going to visit. And then they said that they get one shower a day, but it's in like these kind of tub things. It was hard to suss out exactly what they were describing, but it was kind of like these like seemed like they like their showers are inadequate to like they're not normal showers.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And the toilet situation was like that picture, like where it's like the sink on top of the toilet?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Right. Like it was, it was a toilet a lot like the one that was shown except that top sink had no water.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Cause it wasn't working.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Cause it wasn't working.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And so they were told to drink out of the toilet.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
So they were told that that they could drink out of the toilet bowl. And then CBP officers were like, Oh no. Like we have water out here outside the cell. And like if they need water, they can tell us. But I'll tell you, I was in that saw, I didn't see one cup, I did not see one bottle of water. I didn't see anything that told me that these women had water to drink. Some of the women said that they were able to drink water, not from the toilet.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Right.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
But other women told me that they had drank from the toilet.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Cause I mean two months like, you'd die.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Where do they get their meals?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
They get fed. They, they, they receive meals, but the meals are wholly inadequate. They get like they literally get like a Nature Valley oat and honey granola in the morning.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Wow.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Yeah, she showed it to me. I saw two oranges on the concrete floor and I think they get like sandwiches, but they don't get any greens or vegetables. And so these women were showing me they had like canker sores. And and because the food is so lacking nutritionally, they're developing digestive issues and other health problems.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And to be clear, I reached out to a customs and border protection after this interview for a comment and they refuse to answer direct questions. They issued a statement essentially saying that they gave people you know, adequate food and water and that anybody who is found to be committing malfeasance will be held accountable. But they wouldn't give any further comment on, on this particular toilet situation. And, and I just, I mean, I, I think it's important to be clear here. There's, there's been just in the last couple of days since all this happened, you know, a lot of back and forth about the toilet and you know, whether this was true and what it means. First of all, there's, you know, I talked to immigration advocates, people who are experts on this. They said, there's absolutely no reason to think that this isn't true.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I mean, if you look at these diagrams, that peo--these photos that people are sharing online as some kind of defense against the situation where they're showing that they're these units that have the, the sink up top and the toilet down at the bottom. I mean, it's already disgusting. It's man, if, if, if if, you know, if you're at home and you don't close the lid on your toilet, when you flush it, there's just particles of just, you know, like s**t and piss going everywhere and these toilets don't have covers on them. The sink is built into the toilet. And so if you're drinking water out of the same sink where you're washing your hands after you go to the bathroom and it's open next to the toilet where everything's spinning around and you know, flying up in the air, like that's already a bad situation before you even get to the part where, and there's, there's just no reason to doubt this.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And CBP -- CBP, sorry, won't as you know, deny this. They won't say that this isn't true. That the water wasn't working up top. And so they were being told to, to drink out of the bottom. I mean, it's a bad situation and I think that part of the reason why it's set up this way is because people aren't supposed to be held in these places for long periods of time, but they're being held there for a very long time. I mean, you heard there the Congresswoman talking about people who were being held there for for two months, we heard about the kids who are in Casa Franklin who have been held there for, for something on the order of eight months. And that's because these are now concentration camps. They are places that perhaps at one point were meant to be temporary holding facilities before somebody could move somewhere else.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But they're now just the places where these people are being vanished from society. They're places where are being put and, and we're supposed to forget about them. We're just not supposed to remember that. They're there. And it's through visits like this and it's through conversations like this and it's through using correct terms like concentration camp that people are at least for this moment starting to pay attention again. The last place that we went was Clint and Clint is another CBP, a holding facility that had received a lot of attention in, in, in the time since AOC concentration camp comment because it was a place where children are held and it was a place where you know, inspectors were finding major, major problems and because it was the place that had been in the news there, there are two things that happened.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
First of all, it was the place that received the most thorough cleanup before the Congressman and women came to visit. But it was also the place where protesters came out in force. And there were some protestors who were, there were a couple dozen who were protesting against the camps. I talked to a woman from Sitka, Alaska who had come all the way down and, and had had a sign the side, close the camps, but there were also, believe it or not, America 2019, there were pro concentration camp protesters. I mean, just like, just sit with that. Like there were people who were there and they were like, these camps are good and the people who are criticizing them are bad. And they were, you know, they, they were sort of, they were occupying this kind of double space where on the one hand, they were denying all of the reports of, of of, of abuses and bad conditions inside of the camps.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But at the same time they were saying, well, those are the fault of the Democrats. Those are the fault of, of you AOC. They were really particularly excited when she showed up, so, so that they could start screaming at her and they were holding signs that, you know we're calling for mass deportations. They were flying a big Trump flag. One of the guys was there with a, an actual megaphone. So he would drown everybody else out. And I would play you recording what that sounded like, but it just sounds like noise. I mean, people are, I mean, it's really interesting because th th to have the chance that we're going in, in opposition to one another where the were were people chanting, close the camps, close the camps, and then their sponsor that was Trump 20, 20 Trump, 20, 20, which, I mean, I, I think I think really captures it, right?
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I mean, that's, that's what this is about. That's the point of this is that you know, one group of people are like, look, there's human rights abuses going on and this is terrible. And the other group of people is saying, we're in charge, we're in charge. This is about our power and we're going to continue. We're gonna continue our power. And one of the things that was really interesting to me, and I, I, I have to say this report, I haven't really experienced this really anywhere. So after the delegation visited the inside, they came out and a bunch of them held a press conference. It was, it was, it wasn't very far away. It was, you know, a couple of steps away from, from the front. But it wasn't in the exact spot where the, the protest had been taking place. The protesters followed them.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And th the protestors, the maggot protesters in particular the Trump protesters, the, the pro concentration camp protesters, it didn't just follow them. They came to disrupt the press conference. They came to basically tried to drown out the press conference with their shouts. And they did that while AOC was speaking. They did that a while while all of the different members were speaking. Ayana Presley gave a, a particularly strong rebuke to them. But the, when it really opened up was when Rashida to leave. The Palestinian American Congresswoman from Michigan got up to speak. And, you know, it was interesting, the protestors, the mega protestors had gone to considerable lengths, I think to try to diffuse any criticism of them for being racist. You know, I mean for supporting the, the interment of, of, of you know, people of a particular ethnic group which is, you know one of the major things that's going on here among other things first of all, several of them were from El Paso, which is a majority miss DSO, you know, Mexican-American community.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And so some of them came from that community. There was one man front and center who had you know, very dark skin was black. And and, and I think they thought this was very funny. I mean, they thought this was like a great thing to use to troll people. You know, that people would call them racist, the, the protesters against the concentration camps would call them racist. And then they would, you know, respond like, you know, look at me, look at me. You know, it's like they knew what they were doing. They, they, they knew that this was an effective troll. But when Rashida Talib got up, the mask fell. Just, just have a listen.
Tape:
[Inaudible] [inaudible]
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
So did you hear that? So what, what was going on was she started to speak about what she had seen inside and the pro Trump protesters were screaming at her, we don't care about Sharia law. We care about Jesus Christ and telling her to go take care of, of her own country. And when she said, I'm meaning, I guess, presumably Palestine. So I, I guess the, I guess the Trump protesters were, were recognizing a two state solution. That's interesting. Anyway, I don't know. I don't know. I mean you know, and, and, and a Congresswoman Talib was, was responding you know, I will out love your hate. But I, I mean, it's really, it's really fascinating what's going on there. I mean, these are, you know, these are people acting thuggishly, and what they're doing is they're doing essentially the work of the Trump administration.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
They're doing the work of, of customs and border protection. They're trying to keep the truth from getting out there, trying to keep people from finding out what's actually happening inside, what's happening to these people. And you know, the, the conversation devolves into, you know, arguing about the construction of a toilet and you know, people accusing people who are just trying to explain what's happening inside to human beings of being liars. And in this case, you know, foreigners, traders people trying to, you know, impose Sharia law. That's what we're dealing with here. That's what's going on. And that's the way that camps like this are, are able to operate. That's, that's why we now have a system of concentration camps in this country and what's allowing them to be there. Now, it's not all, it's not all the, the, you know, pro concentration camp forces that are out there.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
It's not all the president. In order for them to get away with this, the rest of us have to look away. The rest of us have to look for the truth, not in the facts, but somewhere in the middle between two political positions to say, well, perhaps everybody has a point here and perhaps is not as bad as these people are saying. And worse than these people are saying. And the truth must lie somewhere in the middle, but it doesn't, it lies in the facts. And you can hear what the facts here are. You've got a border force with a culture of impunity, of racism, of sexism, of hate. They hate and they fear people who are different from them. They hate and they fear people who are trying to hold them accountable. They want to intimidate members of Congress if they can.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
They want to keep them from seeing what's going on inside. They want to keep them from bringing in their phones and recording devices. They want to keep out the press. They share, want to keep out people, me who might look around and actually report on what's going on. They want to stage manage these visits. They want to, you know, keep people in, in terrible conditions, not allow them to shower and clean themselves until they find out that members of Congress are coming. And then at that last minute, start moving people around. Start emptying out some of these cells. Start a power washing the walls and they don't want you to know what's going on. They don't want you to know what's going on, and I think it's important to ask ourselves why and I think, I think the answer is, is absolutely obvious because what's going on are abuses.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
What's going on is that there's a system to take people, many of whom are legally exercising their right to seek asylum in the United States. They're coming here, they're presenting themselves, and they're being unceremoniously carted away to hidden places behind barbed wire, behind electrified fences, behind armed guards. They're being deprived of sleep. They're being held in isolation, they're being tortured, they're being underfed, they're being insulted, they're being abused and God knows what else to discourage them from coming here to have people look at the United States as a place that isn't going to be hospital to hospitable to them, and that's going to encourage them to stay home. The irony, of course, being that one of the major reasons why they want to leave those homes in the first place is because we went to those homes first because we've invaded those countries. We've occupied those countries.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I mean, you look at the people who are coming from Honduras for example. And I'm, I'm writing about this in my book right now. Gangsters of capitalism, which will be coming out, hopefully the not too distant future. You know, we in the United States invaded Honduras and ensured that the government that would be friendliest to our interests and American business interests would, would would be empower and ensured that there will be the creation of a big export industry to the United States and in a, in a valuable crop, which was the banana. And it was because of that mixture of U S intervention and military invasion and a unstable politics in a single export dominated economy that a Williams Sydney Porter better known as O. Henry coined the term banana Republic to describe what we, what the United States had created in Honduras.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And there's situations like that in, in Guatemala, in El Salvador in Nicaragua, in all over the world. And in Cuba. I mean, all, many of the places that these people are coming from are, are places that th th these, these problems that exist in their countries, it didn't happen in isolation. They came as a result of our involvement. And as happens, they are now trying to seek better lives here because the, the resources that we took from those places are now here. And they're trying to follow those resources and they're trying to follow that wealth. And we'd bet that's, that's a conversation for another time and, and, and a future version of, of the long version or, or many future versions of the long version. But I think that's ultimately what I came away with from this trip was realizing the links that people wanted to go to Nazi, what's going on inside and the abuses and, and they're meant to, to put fear in people and to target people.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
And I think the last thing to say is, and I, and I was really left with this, is don't think that this is just a story about something that's happening to someone else. I mean do, do think about that, right? I mean, do you think about what is being done in your name and what's being done with, with your tax dollars? Because I think those are important things to remember. But don't think of this as just a story about something that's happening to some Cubans and some Hondurans and some, some Salvadorans who are trying to come to the United States. You know, as, as Andrea Pitzer the journalist who wrote one long night which is one of the most comprehensive histories of, of concentration camps. So she keeps saying there's other people who are experts on this keep saying and as, and as I keep saying it, I'm going to say right now, once these systems get created, they don't usually stop with the first group of people that they're meant to detain.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
If people can be thrown into the ladders, into the iceboxes and the Petra narratives, the, the dog kennels, and they're able to be hidden from view and people can't get in from the outside. And even members of Congress can't really get in to see what's going on. And when they do see what's going on, they come out and people for whom it is in their political interest to deny what is happening on the inside. When they are able to, you know, so easily shout down the, the people who are are, are, are just trying to describe what's going on that can happen to you, that could happen to any of us. And I had just like a very little just, I mean really minuscule taste of that at the end of my trip after the delegations had gone home I went over to Juarez.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I wanted to see what was going on on the other side of the border. I walked over the bridge. There was basically no customs in, in Mexico, which I thought was interesting. I was actually a little confused by, and I went around, I had a nice time. I saw some things and some food and I got on the bridge and I came back to the United States across one of the, the major crossings, the, the Santa Fe bridge. And there was a very long line. It was like almost out the door. And I have I have, I have global entry. I have, you know, I travel a lot, I travel a lot internationally and so I, yeah, I have the thing where I can, I can skip the line of customs. Right. And I thought that may be, maybe it would work there cause there was sort of a, an express line that I could get in and it didn't say global entry.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
So I wasn't sure if it was actually what it was for or if it would work. And I had a little card that they had issued me, which I thought would, you know, maybe be able to get me through to allow me to, to cut this line. And I went up and I, I showed the agent the card and I was basically asking like, is this, does this work here? Can I, can I get through this line? And the agent said what, why don't you go over to that door? And it was not the door out. It's not the door back to Texas. And I was like that to where over there he's like, yeah, just, just head over to that door and you have this like very polite kind of, you know, sing-song voice. But I realized that I was being, I was being taken off somewhere else.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
I was, I was going to secondary screening and I got back there and he told me to, I had a backpack with me, told me to take off the backpack and put it on the table. And I was thinking at that moment of texting somebody I think my wife, you know, just someone to let them know that like I, I was being taken off the grid here and he of course knew that I would probably do that. And so he told me to empty my pockets as well and put everything inside the backpack. And I went and I sat down and I was in a waiting area with a group of men. And this is one of those situations where you know, you're in the do not make eye contact with other people space, which I realized when I made eye contact with some people and they gave me a look back that was like, you know, Oh, why are you making eye contact with me?
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Was the guy next to me with a, you know, a neck tattoo who was handcuffed to the chair. There's some fact guys, there was something guys, I mean, nobody looked like they were having a really good time. And I was in that liminal space. I was in that space where you have no control over your own destiny, where you have no real control over what's going to happen to you. And I was able to sort of watch what was going on back there and you know, customs and border protection, El Paso, again, lots of people who are, you know, of Mexican descent some of whom have been on that same land dating back to when it was Mexico before the United States took it. And they were sort of talking among themselves about what to do with the different people who were in there, the different people who were in the seating area.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
At one moment, one of the guys say, dude, I'm trying to figure out what to do with, with this a family of five. I can't figure out, you know, what room to put them in or if their space in this room. And they called them and I saw them, it was a mother and some young kids and kind of a teenage kid and they were brought back and they were put in this room and the door was closed. At one point a guy came out, a CPB, a CBP agent and you know, he was sorta wrapping his Palm over and over again with this like, you know, wouldn't Baton and kinda, you know, cop style. And I was wondering, you know, what's, what's going to happen to that family? Is that a family that's headed toward the camps now? Is that, is that a family that's going to be taken apart?
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Are those kids going to be ripped from, from their mother right now? Or are they just going to be sent badly? Who knows? I mean, you know, are they going to be put in these camps at the United States? Is trying to get Mexico to create on the Mexican side of the border where, you know, other, other abuses may be a whole other category of abuses are happening. Or is it all just a big misunderstanding like it is with me and they're gonna, you know, continue on their way. I had no idea and there was no way for me to find out and there was certainly no way for me to find out under the circumstances when I was at that moment, if not under the heel then at least, you know, under the, under a bit of the, of the toe of the boot.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
Right. If you catch my drift. And so I sat there for a little while and finally, basically I was, you know, brought over and I was told that I hadn't, you know activated the card and so I needed to do that next time. And I don't know why they hadn't just asked for my passport. I was also told that as a U S citizen, I couldn't actually be held there, but I, I could be like, Oh, but then I could, you know, be be some sort of fine or something like that. But I had done nothing wrong in the end. And I don't know, you know, any of the other people in that room, I don't know if any of them, including the guy who had his handcuffed to the chair, I don't know if he had done anything wrong, maybe had, who knows.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But we were all in that space where there was somebody else's power. There was somebody else who could decide our fates. And that's a space that a lot of people are finding themselves in. And a growing number of people are finding themselves in all over the country. And I think the big experience that I had of, of being down there is how normal all of this is. How hidden these facilities are. They just blend in with the landscape around them and they can kind of disappear and the people in them can disappear. And that's what the people who were in charge want. Because individually we're quite powerless against the system, this big and this powerful and this strong. But together we can do something if we are looking at it and if we are concentrating on it and if we are saying what we want to have done in our names with our tax money, with our power, we can, we can actually do something about it.
Jonathan Myerson Katz:
But it requires a certain kind of concerted action and it requires a certain kind of paying attention. And that's ultimately what this trip was about. I think it was what it was about for the Congress people. I is what it was about for me. It was, was trying to pay attention. And so I hope I hope you're paying attention and I'll continue talking about this. I, I hope that if you've enjoyed this, that you'll share it. Tell other people that this is out there and I head over to the long version. Sign up for yourself again. It's katz.substack.com. KA T Z dot SUBSTACK dot com. And I'll see you on a, a future vision, a future edition audio or, or print. Have a good one.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theracket.news/subscribe