Guerrilla History - Far-Right Rhetoric and the Politics of Fear w/ Ruth Wodak

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on the world-renowned linguist, Professor Ruth Wodak, to talk about her book The Politics of Fear: The Shameless Normalization of Far-Right Discourse (SAGE Publications).  This book takes both a historical and analytical look at how the rhetoric of the far-right ("right wing populist" in Prof Wodak's words) plays to and stokes our fears, and how far-right parties today are emulating the worst tendencies of far-right parties of the past.  A fascinating conversation on the intersections of linguistics and politics!  We are also joined by guest host Safine Ashirova, a Russian linguist who has also done linguistic research on the rhetoric of the Nazi Party as well as current far-right parties in Germany. Ruth Wodak is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University.  She is one of the pioneers of the Discourse Historical Approach of critical discourse analysis.  Her book The Politics of Fear is available from SAGE Publications: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-politics-of-fear/book265617.  You can also keep up with her latest academic publications using her research portal https://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/ruth-wodak(71b5650a-f48c-4c2e-8b71-6896e291dc2b).html.   Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You remember Dinn-Vin-Vin? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by a different panel of co-hosts than usual. We have one co-host that's the same and one that you're probably only slightly familiar with. So my usual co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast is here. So hello, Brett, how are you doing today? How are things in Nebraska? Hello, I'm doing good. It is ice cold out here. And we record out of a shed in the back of David's house. So it's even extra cold. But I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Well, you know, bundle up during the episode, but we have a very fun episode ahead of us. Just to briefly reintroduce my other co-host for today, it's not one of our usual co-hosts, but listeners that

listen to all of our episodes will remember Sophia Ashirova, who, was a Russian linguist from our episode that we did, the intelligence briefing with Taylor Genovese on Art in the Working Class, where she co-hosted that interview as well. So, hello, Safi. How are you doing today? Hi, Henry. Yeah, thanks. I'm very good. Great. So we're bringing Safi on because the topic today is going to be very heavy on linguistics and neither Brett nor I are linguists by training. But we're both very interested in that. However, despite that interest, we thought it was probably a good idea to bring on somebody that actually does know what they're talking about to help us with this interview. So today we're going to be interviewing the

highly respected and pretty famous professor Ruth Vodach, who is a Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University. Also does work at the University of Vienna. One of the, you could say, godmothers of discourse studies, critical discourse analysis. and the historical discourse approach. So, a discourse historical approach, I should say. She is the author of the book, The Politics of Fear, which won the 2016 Austrian book prize when it was in German. And her work really focuses on the confluence of linguistics and politics, particularly with right-wing populism. And so this was a topic that Brett and I both really wanted to talk about, Adnan as well.

he just was unfortunately not available today. So Brett, why don't I pitch this over to you to get us kind of into this introductory discussion of, you know, the first things that came to your mind when we were talking about doing an episode about linguistics and the right-wing populism? Yeah, well, first of all, I think it's sort of a novel thing for this show and for like the family of shows that we're doing altogether to move into this field of linguistics. But I think language, as so many other things, is a front for political struggle. for class struggle. It offers us insights into the way that certain political formations think and

have thought historically. And so I think it's going to be a really interesting intersection of the stuff we usually do with the show, moving into sort of a new field and exploring what we can, what insights we can glean from that. And we couldn't have a better guest as far as I know than Ruth. So I'm very, very excited about this. And it's going to be a unique but hopefully enlightening episode. Yeah, absolutely. So like you, I had an interest in linguistics. And I had thought about linguistics and politics before. You know, we think about things about the language of exclusion, the language of the other when it comes to politics. This is something that right wing forces across the world always play on is the language of the other. We think of things like calling back to an imagined past. You know, of course, those of you in the United States will probably remember, you know, make America great again. and you ask them, when was America great? And they don't necessarily have a great answer on that, but it is this imagined past.

Now, what I'm going to do now is turn things over to Sophie because I was very unfamiliar with a lot of these linguistic concepts before we decided to do this episode. So I was not aware of critical discourse analysis. I was not aware of discourse historical approach, which are the things that she is really the pioneer of. And I think that instead of using the time that we have with Ruth to talk about, you know, what is this field, what does it mean? What do you do with it? How does it relate to the world? Instead of using the time that we have with her on that, which in my opinion would be better served talking about her actual analysis of politics and linguistics. Sophie, why don't I turn this over to you now so that you can give the listeners like just a very brief explainer of what these things mean so that everybody is kind of at least has a baseline. knowledge of this field. Yeah, sure. So the discourse historical approach, which I'm going to base

my definition of what Professor Wodak writes in our politics of fear, focuses in ways in which power dependent semiotic means, semiotics relates to the study of signs and symbols, in which those means are used to construct positive self and negative other presentations. So here, we have us and them, right? Us is positive and them is very negative. Then the good people and the scapegoats, which we'll be talking about in detail later, the pro and contrary of some crises in events and so on forth. So that's...

And that was discourse historical approach. Yes. Okay. So from what I'm understanding here, based on your explanation and what the listeners are going to understand is that it is a way of analyzing the us versus them language within society. How does the historical part of that fit into this picture? That's a very interesting question because for the discourse historical approach, language is not powerful on its own, right? So it is a means to gain and maintain power

by the use of language, powerful language. And this actually explains why the DHA critically analyzes the language use of those who are in power who have the means and opportunities to improve the current conditions. Very interesting. And as we said, she really is, you could think of as the godmother of this field of analysis. So Brett, why don't I turn it back over to you for a little bit more discussion, we're going to try to keep this intro a bit shorter. That way we have more time to spend with the professor.

Any additional thoughts that you have about linguistics, about right-wing populism, what you're perhaps hoping to try to get out of this conversation. Because I know for me, at least, there's a lot of things that I want to know more about, you know, that I have kind of vague ideas of. Like, I understand that there's a language of anti-Semitism, for example. I understand that there's a language of body politics. I understand that there is a language of patriarchy, right? I understand that there is a language of this.

And until I had looked through Professor Vodok's book, I didn't really understand fully how these things can perpetuate themselves within society, integrate themselves into the thought of people within society and how the media, in many cases, is amplifying these messages to the populace. So the things that I'm really hoping to get out of this conversation is, really further dive into those ideas because, like I said, until I had looked at the book, the politics of fear, I really had no idea specifically. You know, once in a while, you'd see it come up in the news and you'd think to yourself,

ah, yeah, okay, dog whistle language, whatever, whatever. But this book is a really analytical approach that takes it step by step in all of these different ways in which linguistics and right-wing populism relate to each other in these different fields like anti-Semitism, like the imagined past, like body politics. So that's my thoughts, Brett. Is there anything that you want to add to that? Yeah, just like the idea that, you know, I'm interested in the idea of how maybe elements of the left might internalize some of this language and be like unwitting purveyors of a certain sort of reactionary, you know, linguistic approach to how we talk about, you know, events or people or things. So that's an

interesting thing. What Sophie said about the positive self and the negative others, very interesting. Like the words that came to my mind that we've been hearing a lot lately are like, you know, the real Americans, right? You know, as distinct from the non-real Americans, which is like anybody on the left, you know, people that are immigrants, Muslims, people of color, et cetera. In Europe, we have like the rise of like European identitarian politics. We have the narratives of Western civilization coming out of formations like the Proud Boys. Several years ago, even up through today,

we often hear of like the clash of civilization, specifically when it comes to Islam. So all of these things I'm really interested in exploring, as well as the way that anti-communism and the language of anti-communism, not only intersects with anti-blackness and anti-Semitism, but also how it is used to, you know, maybe cover up problems that right-wing government,

governments are having or to ramp up the fear of threat or to, you know, forward a conspiracy theory, cultural Marxism, right, which goes back to anti-Semitic, Judeo-Bolshevik, neo-Nazi or Nazi sort of talk. So all those things and more, I'm very interested in parsing out, seeing what we can learn from it, and then how our movements and our organizations and our forms of education can take into consideration how language itself is such a fundamental front in these struggles. You mentioned one thing that I just want to bring up in the intro here very briefly because it's something that I'm hoping to get time for in the interview itself. You know, the listeners at this point know that I'm not afraid to push back on the guests in some way. And this is something that I'm going to try to do here as well.

I've noticed that Vodok in her work kind of takes the Arendtian view of totalitarianism and lumps communism in the same way with, you know, Nazism. And, of course, I have a problem with that. And as you mentioned, Brett, it's very interesting to look at the linguistics of anti-communism as well. And I think that that, at least coming from the ideological standpoint that I come at this from, which to the listeners is very clear at this point, we've been doing the show for over a year, I think that that flattening of politics by lumping communism and Nazism into this camp of totalitarianism, one, is historically not necessarily. the most true thing in the world, right? I think that that's a bit of a revisionist take, although at this point it's become the accepted reality. But I also think that by flattening the politics, you really allow forces on the other side to limit the amount of progress that you can make within certain realms of social life. So by claiming that communism is totalitarianism

that's equivalent to Nazism in some spheres, you have right-wing reactionary conservative, who would say, well, you know, this is communism and communism is totalitarianism. And really in that way, you're doing things that are detrimental to the struggle of advancing a more just and more equitable society. But that's just my view and something that I'm hoping to, you know, push on her a little bit with. And I'm sure that she's going to have a very thoughtful response. She's a, you know, a scholar that I highly respect after looking into her work.

And she's not, you know, a right wing. She's on the left. She just has that kind of a Rentian view of communism. Just really quick, just to bounce off that, I'm sorry, you know, the thing about liberals engaging in the totalitarian false equivalency discourse is that to the extreme right, liberals and communists are functionally indecipherable, and there's no real reason to make those distinctions on the far right. Like they call Biden and Obama communists and Marxists, right? So by playing into that sort of horseshoe theory, you actually, from a liberal perspective, you actually undermine your own position and make yourself more likely to be attacked. Also, I think, just generally, not with her in particular, but just in general when this false equivalency between communist and fascism is done, what it really does, it operates as fascist propaganda precisely because it lowers communism and the moral integrity of, despite what failures and flaws and mistakes might have happened in this history, the idea that we should all be equal and we should live in more just societies, etc. It lowers that. And it raises fascism. A wholly toxic, poisonous. political formation that only ever leads to death and destruction and despair, you know, that that

otherizes people. It raises it up to like the moral equal of communism. And so all across the board, that sort of language is a problem. So I'm interested to hear what what she has to say about that in particular. Yeah. So that was a much more concise way of basically summing up what I was trying to look for. So thank you for that. Safi, I'm going to give you the final word in this intro before we get into the conversation with Professor Vodak herself. So what do you want to say before we get into the interview? You know, you just brought up Nazism, and I have an example that ties in pretty well with that. It's Newspeak. And you know, whether you love 1984 for its literary qualities or detested because of Orwell's anti-communist list, the example of Newspeak

is a very, very useful example in fiction of how linguistics and language can be, closely linguistics and language can be intertwined with politics. So if you remember, Newspeak was a fictional language that reduced its vocabulary and grammar very, very aggressively. It's also an example of linguistic determinism, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. It basically says that the language we speak shapes and determines our thinking. And a milder version of this linguistic determinism theory is linguistic relativity. It just postulates that language influences our thinking, but not necessarily determines it very rigorously.

So what are you hoping to get out of the interview then? I'm very excited about the interview because I've been doing research in this field for a couple years now. And Professor Wodak is a professor that I quote the most, I think. So it's just, it feels like a dream coming true. Yeah. So I should mention briefly that Safi has been doing research on the linguistics of the Nazis as well as current day far right parties within Germany and the parallels between that linguistics for several years. That's another reason why we decided to bring her on because not only is she a linguist, but she also has intimate knowledge of this field of linguistics of right-wing populism and

Nazism. So hopefully we get to hear some more examples from the research that you've done during the interview because I've seen it before, and it's very, very fascinating stuff. So, you know, thank you for doing that work and looking forward to hearing more during the interview. On that note, then, we're going to wrap up this introduction. We're going to get right into the interview with Professor Ruth Vodak to talk about her book, The Politics of Fear, and the intersection of linguistics and right-wing populism. And listeners, we're back on guerrilla history, and we're joined by the very distinguished

Professor Ruth Vodak, who, again, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University and the author of The Politics of Fear, which is what the conversation that we're going to be having today is going to be centered about. So, hello, Professor Vodak. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Hello. It's very nice to see you, even if only virtually, and I'm happy to be here. Yeah, of course. It's our pleasure. Like I said, we were really, really happy that you agreed to do the show with us. So I guess a good place to get into the interview itself and something that's going to really lay a groundwork for the conversation to branch off of is we're going to be talking about the confluence of linguistics and right-wing

populism. It would be really useful for us if we could give at least a brief explanation of what framework you're using to define right-wing populism and perhaps how you would separate right-wing populism from left-wing populism, which is something you do in the But unless the listeners are all on the same page of what right-wing populism is, perhaps some of the hallmarks of right-wing populism, some of the things that come up later may not make the most sense. Okay. I'm happy to just summarize some main characteristics of the far-right populist agenda.

Maybe just to say first and to emphasize it, it is really important to understand that far-right populism is not just a performance, it's not just rhetoric, it has very clear contents, very clear agenda, and as some of the scholars rightly claim, it's always a mix of form and content. And one needs to understand that, as you're a linguist you know, there is the arbitrarity of signs, and in the that way, meaning is always produced through mixing content and form in a specific context. And I think this is also very important to understand what far-right populism is about. First of all, it's very context-dependent. It's sort of not, there's not one definition for all the different varieties of far-right

populism. That means that it's different in Hungary than, let's say, in the Netherlands or in Sweden, it's different in the UK than in Spain or in Greece. Now just talking about Europe or different in Russia, Turkey or on the Philippines, or Trump. So in that way, we have to really also look at the very specific context. And that implies also a strongly qualitative research. And many political scientists usually do more quantitative research, and they look at elections and opinion polls and surveys and so forth. You get kind of a overall distribution of certain factors and variables.

But if you really want to understand why a certain part is successful or not successful at a specific time in a specific country, you need to look in depth. And it's important also to look at the historical context and the trajectory of these parties and what they draw upon. And that's what I'm basically doing. And what I found when doing research on several far-right populist parties, It is, there are four dimensions which seem to cover most of the agenda of most of these parties, but in different combinations and by emphasizing different dimensions. So the first one is a very viral in nationalism, which also might appear as nativism, very much so,

especially going back to some kind of fascist blood and soil politics. So it's very much about certain ethnicities living in a certain territory and an imaginary of a homogeneous people, which obviously doesn't exist. Never existed, doesn't exist. But that is an imaginary which is very strong and can be very arbitrarily defined. So who belongs into these people, who doesn't belong, is something which can be redefined and changed all the time, and it does change. Just to give you an example, like there was a debate in Germany, do Muslims belong to the Germans or do they not belong? And the IFTA said they don't belong to the German people, and Merkel said, obviously, they do belong.

So there are big debates about belonging and that is this first dimension. The second dimension is also well established and well known. It's the anti-elitism, which is something very constitutive of these far-right populist parties, but also of the left-wing populist parties. And it depends on who are the elites, who's opposed. And usually the elites are intellectuals, liberals, quote-unquote, that has really become a negative word for some people in the States, as far as I understand. These can be journalists who have become very negatively connotated in the far right. And there's a revival of Nazi terms like Luggenpresses.

and the whole debate about fake news is important. Then there is, but there are other elites or other groups which are excluded like very obviously oppositional politicians. And then we have two other groups which are, are or can be excluded. Do you hear me well because you're, yeah, I was just not sure.

So there can be other groups which are important like migrants or people coming in, but of course not all migrants, certain migrants, refugees, which are then labeled as illegal migrants. And the third group is people below, Yeah, sort of homeless, unemployed. Actually, Orban has a law against the homeless people, so they're not allowed to live in Budapest,

or that's what he attempted to do. So basically, as I call it, the ideological map or the mind map of the far right is that they seem to be attacked from three sides, from above, from the elites, from below, from those so-called homeless, spongers, lazy people, beggars, and so forth. And from outside, those are the people who want to come and take our benefits, quote, unquote, and so forth. So these are, this is the second important, very important dimension because that was, if I can just mention that historically, York Heider, who famously

started the rise of the Austrian Freedom Party from 1986 on, the Austrian Far Right Populist Party already started after the war, 1947, as a successor party to basically mixed back of previous Nazis and then developed in various stages. But the big success came with York Heider, an extraordinary charismatic, very skillful rhetorically politician. And he actually his success began with opposing the privileged, sort of, and staging himself as the Robin Hood, the savior of, you know, the little man, little woman on the street. And so this has become a really important indicator. The third dimension is the law and order ideology,

which also implies a very hierarchical party structure, a very strong leader. can be female of course as well it doesn't have to be male and a strong sort of direction into putting down very conservative even reaction even reactionary values so the the order actually implies a certain family order obviously heterosexual, marriage, it's against abortion, or it can be against abortion. And so these are very conservative values which are being endorsed. And the order is also against, again, criminals, migrants, homeless, etc.

And by using this term illegal migrants, actually all migrants are being criminalized. And it's a notion which we don't use in scholarship. We talk about irregular migrants. We don't talk about illegal migrants. And I can say something about that later on. And the fourth important dimension, apart from those conservative values, is revisionist history, sort of rewriting the past, where this homogeneous people were either victims or heroes

of some kind of circumstances. And we experience this rewriting of the past very much now. Currently, Poland is a good example with its laws that no collaboration of Poles with Nazis, German Nazis should be mentioned, that no Poles were ever involved in the Shoah So there is a very strong rewriting of the past where there are certain scapegoats, very clear as in them distributions, and this rewriting of the past.

And then what Sigmund Bauman calls the retropia, sort of the nostalgia for this particular past, which has been constructed, is very important. So if you have Donald Trump saying, as he did, he'll make America great again. By the way, Heider said that about Austria already in the 1980s. That's an old slogan, make Germany great again. So Donald Trump certainly did not invent that slogan. But it means the again means we're going back to something

where it was better, where, you know, this sort of multicultural life, these career women, these other ethnicities, these minorities were not in the foreground and where it was sort of still all white people living in those small families and there was this homogeneous nation. And we find these four dimensions in most of the party programs,

if you look at them, and there's a lot of research on the party programs as well, not just on slogans and posters and speeches, et cetera. And you see that not everywhere are all these dimensions so apparent. So you wouldn't win votes with anti-abortion laws in Scandinavia. Obviously, I mean, the definition of gender politics is very different. in the West and in the East. Well, you are in Russia right now. You know how strong the homophobia is.

And the same in Ukraine and in Hungary. Whereas even in the UK now, there's marriage between gay couples. And so there's big differences, which are really very manifest actually in gender politics. Gender politics have become an, area where there's a lot of controversies and contestation, which refer to other areas, but it's fought about in the gender politics.

And the same is true with other dimensions, which you wouldn't find certain law and order issues in some countries which you find in others. And in that way, I think it's really important to look at the specific case and to see what their program is, what their propaganda looks like. If one really can still call Fides, the Hungarian party, far-right populist, if it's already neo-authoritarian, which many scholars say. So there's a blurring of boundaries between extreme right. this neo-authoritarian style and the far-right populism.

And just to finish about this, left-wing populism, very apparent or came from South America and was quasi revived there after the war. Also has some very nationalistic dimensions, if you think of Chavez, but even Ceresa was quite patriotic. and nationalistic, but not nativist. And that is really a very big difference. So it's not about blood and soil,

and you have this heritage, and I don't know, in German, we would say an impasse of grandfathers and grandmothers and going back various generations, but meaning people who live in this territory. And there's a debate about citizens. about citizenship, how easy or how difficult it is to get citizenship. That also varies between countries. The role of national language. So all of that is part of this body politics. And the elites which are sort of attacked by left-wing populists are very much in Marxian terms,

sort of their upper class. There's a class society. There's the big firms. There's sort of financial capital. So it's not directed in that way against certain people in groups

like journalists, but more against systems. And I think that is also important to understand. And there are interesting overlaps. In some times, between the far-right populists and the left-wing populists.

I haven't done that much research on the left-wing. There are some Greek colleagues who are very knowledgeable, Stavrakakis and others. There's a big center in Thessaloniki about that. But we do see when we look at Melancho in France, who at the last national election was the leader of the left-wing populists, or also the link in Germany.

You see that sometimes their program about immigration overlaps. They might term it differently. They wouldn't say these are out of religious reasons or because they look differently or not in that way racist, but because of the issue of jobs and taking jobs away. trade unions have these slogans as well. So sometimes you find an overlap because of certain fears of unemployment or existential fears.

And that was quite interesting in Germany that the link had a quite controversial program about migration. So would be another field of lot of research, which I haven't so much investigated. There is also, of course, a very interesting party in Spain, Podemos, which was created as a grassroots movement by intellectuals, by scholars, a very interesting sociologist, and now has joined a coalition with the Social Democrats there, although first they wanted to stay outside of any coalitions, etc. But now they have joined into party politics. And again, that leads

to certain conflicts, of course, between what they actually attempted to do and their visions and what they then do as realpolitik. Ceresa has also a big problem when they were forced to acknowledge the politics of the Troika, yeah, in the Euro crisis and the Greek crisis and actually have to change their programs. So I think we have to really distinguish the programs than what they actually do and when they do what, yeah, and that makes those parties both on the right and on the left very interesting. Yeah, and there's so much that you said that I'm hoping that we follow up on later, like you mentioned Haider several times, the section in your book on the

hydroization of politics was absolutely fascinating. You brought up gender politics, which is something that I really wanted to talk about because within your work, in terms of far-right populism, that really was the point that there was so much, the most divergence on, in my view, based on my reading of your literature, between these different far-right populist parties in Europe. But before we go on and Brett asks his follow-up, question. Sophia, I know there was something you wanted to say. Just to clarify for the listeners who might not be familiar with the term Lugn Presser,

it translates into English as lying press and, well, is very self-explanatory. It can be traced back to the 19th century, if I'm not mistaken. But today, it's mostly associated with the Third Reich and with the Nazis who adopted the term. So Hitler, for example, used this term for the most. Marxist press in the 1920s. Yeah, it was used actually for all non-Nazi press by the propaganda ministry by Goebbels, and especially in the Weimar Republic, all the mainstream press, not just the Marxist, the entire mainstream liberal, left-wing, but also conservative press, which hadn't jumped

on the Nazi bandwagon, was termed... And it was directed very much against the journalists as well, many of whom were Jewish. So it was also the Jewish press. And there was sort of really terrible campaigns against both the journalists and those press. And what we observe now is that the German IFD, Action for Deutschland, which is the far-right Populist Party in Germany, which has actually achieved about 12% in the national election, is represented in the German parliament in the Bundestag, that they use this term again, and they have launched it, and it's used all the time.

So in that way, we observe a revival of such very much Nazi connotated terms. I'm interested. Does that far right-wing German party see itself or talk about itself in terms of its lineage from the Nazis or does it try to distance itself? It very much tries to distance itself, but this party is not homogeneous. And there, as far as I know, there are at least three strands in that party. There is a more liberal strand, which, and all of those three are represented in, as IFD, in the Bundest, and also in the European Parliament, there is a more liberal strand which actually goes back to the creation of that party, and that party had a very different creation, or started very differently than the other far-right populist parties, which started very differently than the other far-right populist parties, which start. with former fascists or very extreme right or far-right people. They started with intellectuals. And they were basically economists, and they were against helping Greece

and helping the countries after the financial crisis. And they propagated that Germany shouldn't send its money to the South and so forth. And there were basically neoliberalism liberal, that means in center-right scholars. There's quite an interesting beginning of that party. Now, those were, in that way, they were all taken out of that party. They left or they were kicked out, and a much more traditional far-right came about,

especially with the refugee movement, 2015, with Pegida, which colonized the IFD. And Pegida was a mix of far-right, identitarians, extreme right, neo-Nazis, all kinds, but just people who didn't want foreigners. And so the party became a far-right populist party, and there's still a bit of this more neoliberal central right part, but then there is a religious far-right part, fundamentalist part of Beatrix von Stoch, is one of the protagonists who is famous for anti-abortion and for various campaigns. And then you have the really extreme right part and the protagonist is Bjorn Herke and they are in the former GDR in Saxony

in Turingen and they refer to Nazi jargon they revive Nazi jargon even in the speeches sort of insinuating very well-known slogans by Goebbels or Hitler and so forth but the other strands don't like that. And so there is a constant debate of distancing themselves from this strand and kicking out some and putting others in and so forth. So the heterogeneity is very obvious. But I would say that all of them are united by a nativist

falkish belief system. Yeah, I think that's very helpful. The nationalism, nativism aspect, the anti-elites, and you're on point with pointing out how it's only certain elites, liberal intellectuals, but like the elites on the far right are not considered part of their enemies. I really loved your point about law and order implicating an entire hierarchical sort of structure within society and the values that those imply. Make America Great Again is also a Reagan slogan.

which is sort of is worth mentioning, yeah. But it really leads into this question, which is, do you distinguish at all between right-wing populism, I mean, and fascism proper? And what is the language around those two things? Like, why is it important to make those specific delineations and where do you make those delineations? Well, that's also a very difficult question, yeah. And there's a lot of controversies about terminology. And I think it's better to talk about, you know, the manifestations because there is, I don't know, I think Kasmude wrote that there are about 40 terms which are now being used, you know, from extreme right to far right to right wing to whatever. There are so many terms being used just populist, which I find really wrong to use just populist because I every politician is also populist.

Every politician makes distinctions between us and them and talks to the people and for the people and if they want to win voters. So that's a very old rhetorical strategy which is used. It really depends on the contents which are then propagated. So I think it's important to use the attribute, whichever one then chooses to use. And now to talk about this blurring of boundaries. Again, these parties, as I just mentioned with the IFDA, they're not homogeneous. So these parties, like all big political parties, are umbrellas for various different groups

and more progressive, more conservative, more this, that, and the other, young, old, and they have different interests. And the same is true for the far right. So the far right parties, some of them in Europe, have become very big. They're just as big as the conservatives and the social democrats. For example, in Austria, there are now always used to be two-party systems. Now we have much more party systems, and it's not.

not anymore, those big blocks and small satellite parties, but, you know, the Austrian Freedom Party is almost as big as the Social Democrats or the conservatives, and then, you know, it goes up and down. Same in Switzerland, which, by the way, has one of the oldest and biggest far-right populist parties or in Norway or in some of those countries. by the way, very rich countries. So unemployment doesn't mean that there is a lot of far-right populism. I think that that is too simple as an explanation, especially if you look at those countries, which are actually social welfare countries, very rich, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Norway,

Switzerland, and they have such large far-right parties. So I think that's an issue one really has to think about. And then there's a blurring of boundaries in this heterogeneity, which goes from extreme right, neo-Nazi slogans, sometimes, to this kind of more neoliberal, libertarian thinking also,

and there's much in between. And I think the biggest distinction is, do those parties, still remain inside the society or do they put themselves outside of the society do they want to destroy democratic institutions or not yeah again that's not always easy to detect and are there violent gangs or paramilitary gangs or movements related to these parties now if you would look in the Golden Dawn in Greece, the fascist party. They had paramilitary troops.

They also stood for elections, but they were not at all interested in any democratic procedures, et cetera. And they were really violent. The same is true for Jobbik in Hungary. They had paramilitary groups. They went into villages where there were many Roma living. They beat up those people. And if we think of the states again,

I mean, if you think of such groups as the proud boys or the old right, I mean, these are clearly outside of any democratic system. And then there is sort of a blurring of boundaries because the far right populist parties do something. stand for election, they get many votes, but then they also try to undermine democratic institutions. And so this is where the blurring of boundaries start, but they don't have violent paramilitary troops, at least not yet. And moreover, some of those parties have their agenda have been taken over by the conservative mainstream. So the conservative mainstream has moved

very much to the far right and have actually become far right populists, or at least national conservatives, like Fides or like the Austrian People's Party. So there's very little difference anymore between the far right populists and the mainstream conservatives in some dimensions or policy fields. So I think it's, again, a case-for-case definition. Are they fascists? Are they violent? What are their interests?

Are they still inside of this democratic system? Are they undermining it? Are they wanting to overthrow it? It's really a slippery slope. So I'm going to jump in now and ask you a question that's going to be a pretty unfair question because I'm asking you to summarize a large portion of your book and in an answer, you know, in a way that we still have time for other questions. So we're going to have to be doing a lot of simplifying here. But one of the things that you said in your last answer was that, for example, in rich countries, there's very old and pretty large far-right populist parties in that, you know, something like unemployment would be far too simple in explanation. and also just probably incorrect in those cases as to why those countries had large far-right populist parties. So what I'm wondering, and I'll just provide a kind of a counter-narrative at some point, what I'm wondering is if we've seen in the last couple decades, decade,

decade and a half, a resurgence of far-right populism across Europe and large swathes of Europe. So in many of these countries, there's going to be very different reasons for why we see this resurgence of far right populism. And the reasons are going to be different in basically all of the countries. But what I'm wondering is if there are some events that you would like to highlight or specific causes that you would like to highlight as to why we see this resurgence. I know one of the ones that you talk about in some length in your book is the EU, an anti-EU politics on the far right. And I find this is an interesting example because, of course, there's also criticisms of the EU from the left as well.

These are criticisms that I hold very strongly as somebody who, you know, looks at what happens to Greece, this is something that you mentioned. Sariza comes in with their platform, what they plan on doing for the people, and what happens, the EU is an impediment to, if they were, you know, legitimately trying to do the things that they were campaigning on, the EU essentially makes it impossible to do any actual left-wing, progressive, somewhat socialistic policies in individual countries of the EU on an individual basis. And on the left, there's right cause to complain about those things. There's fair criticisms of the EU. But we see much more and much louder criticism coming from the right wing

all across Europe against the EU for, you know, nativist reasons and for other reasons that you highlight in the book. So that's just one thing that pops to mind, but I'm wondering if you can just highlight some potential causes that you think maybe shared across different countries in the EU, as well as maybe even more broadly of why we see this resurgence of far right populism, as well as any specific perhaps events that come to mind for you that would be driving this wave of far right populism. Well, there are far, there are quite a few events and issues which come to mind, you're of course quite right with EU. One has to say that there is coming back of some left-wing governments now.

So in the EU, so look at Spain, look at Portugal, look at the Scandinavian countries which all have social democratic governments now. So Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. So quite a lot has changed and of course we don't know and that's outside of the EU what will happen in the UK. It looks very interesting. And there is I think quite a lot of very legitimate also critique towards the EU. Something which I'm really very dismayed about is the migration and refugee policies. and the way human rights are challenged and not really vote for, so that there is no big sanctions to Hungary or to Poland for their sort of violating human rights in many ways.

So I think there are lots of things, and of course the neoliberalism, but also really something which is consistent. for the EU are human rights. It's in the Charter. It's the second whole segment of the European Charter. And you would expect that to be put on the table. And I think that is quite horrendous what is happening in that respect. But other big events are 1989 in the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain and the immigration of people from former Stalinist countries, communist Stalinist countries, especially again looking at Austria, because Austria is neighboring at that time to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, ex-Yugoslavia, and sort of the whole rhetoric changed.

So as long as this Iron Curtain so-called was there, refugees were very welcome because they came from these authoritarian systems, and especially after 1956, Hungary or 1968, the Czechos, in Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring, those refugees were extraordinarily welcomed, also Solidarno. They were very welcomed, 1981, from Poland. But then, now the rhetoric went like follows. Now they have liberated themselves. They should build up their own countries. Why do they come to us? They take our jobs away. That came both from the far right and the left from the trade unions. And there was big fear.

So Haider started his big campaigns and the party grew and grew against migrants. And that was a very important tipping point, 1989. Apart from the EU, Austria only joined the EU in 1995. EU 1995, so Hyder was already rolling here. So that was much more important anti-immigration and xenophobia, and the nativism, obviously, which that implies. And the second, apart from, interestingly, after the, in the Yugoslavian war, many Bosnia were very welcomed again in Austria, and everybody thought they would return, so, you know,

one can give them some refuge. That climate has completely changed. Austria hasn't taken one Afghan refugee now. And they decided not one. Although other Western European countries have taken refugees, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France. France, Belgium, but just to show you how this far-right ideology has influenced policies enormously, mainstream policies. That's what I call in the second edition of my book, I call that the shameless normalization. How that has been normalized, yeah, that has become mainstream politics. The next tipping point was certainly 9-11.

So there is no question that the anti-Muslim sentiments grew, and that fueled the anti-immigration anyway. But then it became against Muslims inside and outside of the country. So not just people coming in, new people coming in, migrants, but also Muslims living in the country, sort of the whole securitization, rhetoric and policies have. were, of course, very much endorsed by the far right, yeah, law and order, borders, closing borders, building walls, that started, and especially directed against the Muslim minorities. Yeah, really quickly, just to bounce off that, I'm sorry to interrupt with them. In the U.S., right, it was that anti-Islamophobia or that Islamophobia went so far as to become like a conspiracy theory on the right about,

Obama being a secret Kenyan Muslim, and in fact, it was Donald Trump who spearheaded that entire effort and then became president a few years later. So that really ran very deep and shaped the right wing around the Western world. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really excellent example, and there's another example how these world conspiracies can go together with the anti-Muslims sentiments, because George Soros is. part of these world conspiracies, also now in the COVID conspiracies, et cetera. But he was blamed to bring in the Muslim refugees to Hungary and to Europe. So this sort of Jewish world conspiracy is bringing in the Muslim migrants to Europe.

And of course, they neither want Jews nor Muslims. So there was this very strange integration of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic prejudice. And 9-11 was really this tipping point. So this entire closing the borders, border control, building walls, law and order, against migration, but also inside against those minorities. minorities that was really fueling the far right and they built on this. Then next big crisis, financial crisis. So then we have the economic aspect. So we don't only have the ethnic and discrimination and securitization.

Then comes the entire insecure. security, terrible losses, unemployment, existential fears, and the left didn't react. I think they didn't react well to this financial crisis. One would have expected them to do something and to put forward some alternatives and some economic programs and whatever, but the far right one very much because they supported many of the unemployed, and especially if you look at Greece, that's really an interesting example, that the Golden Dawn won so many votes at that time was because they put out soup kitchens for the unemployed. They helped the workers on the docks and the harbor

in Athens. And in that way, they provided social work and actually did that what we would have expected either the government to do or the left wing to do. So many unemployed, angry people. So that's where the term Wutburger also comes from, you know, German. So the angry people, because the banks were saved, but not the people. They're terrible existential crises, and the far-right used, instrumentalized that crisis. So that was the next big event, and you see that especially in Greece, in Italy. The Lega thrived, but also the five-star movement, which is an interesting movement. And you see that in the UK.

So there, the far right, was, had a lot of support through this financial crisis. And then the refugee movement, I don't call it crisis, because that was not a crisis of the refugees, but a crisis for what the governments did with it. So the refugee movement, everybody knew this would be coming. There were already so many refugees had already drowned in the Mediterranean. Years before that, the Italian government had again and again talked about

how it was felt neglected, the Greek government as well. So the refugee movement again, enabled the far right to instrumentalize xenophobia, anti-Muslim sentiments, terrible reactionary gender policies, this whole fear of the dark men, the dark young men was established as a symbol of threat and danger.

And I think, for example, that the IFD would have never, have made it without this refugee movement. Yeah, and Pegida. And so all of those build on each other, yeah, because of course the refugee movement and the fear of unemployment and the financial crisis, I mean, they belong together

and the securitization and 9-11 already laid the ground for the xenophobia. So they are not sort of certain distinct phases, but they actually are almost a continuum. If you think about how they enabled the growth of the far right and with very little alternatives. I'm going to veer into a bit different topic right now, namely language. So speaking of the right-wing rhetoric, I think there is a unanimous understanding of how crucial overall language plays in it, right? So right-wing politicians stir emotions with it using language, then they create new emotions that weren't even there before. They provoke. And in the past,

you've talked about the provocative strategy. And here, an example pops to my mind. You know, a certain German politician, which will remain nameless, although I'm pretty sure you'll figure it out, used the term Leibn's Holm during a speech. And for the listeners, it translates as living space and refers to an ideological principle of Nazism, which created the justification for the German territorial expansion into central and eastern Europe. Then he made a pregnant pause. and went on to say, oh, I think I just used Leibn's home. So it just popped to my mind. Was that Bjorn Hoker?

Yeah. Okay. She says she won't name names, but I will. That's what I do. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So what role does language play in creating fear among populations?

And how does the media play into it? Well, the rhetoric plays an enormous role, and that can be certain, as you, your example shows certain lexical items which insinuate certain histories and ideologies, and they can also condense them. So if you say something like Leibschaum, people who know that see an entire ideology sort of, alluded to. People who don't know it, well, they will not think a lot about it, yeah. And so the addressing of various audiences belongs to something politicians should actually be skillful with and know how to do that. And I call that calculated ambivalence because they can address very, they frequently address various audiences with some arguments or words or slogans.

And some understand it. Some understand something very different. Some don't know at all what is meant. And in that way, they can satisfy very different audiences. And they speak to multiple, sometimes even contradictory audiences. Now, scandalization and provocation are part and parcel of the toolbox, so to speak, because you can keep the media busy.

And that is very important. You want attention to, of course, get many readers or viewers, or listeners, and you get voters in that way. And many media have been seduced and have let it happen. That such slogans and provocations continuously lent themselves for headlines.

So I'm just thinking again of Trump and his tweets. I once talked to a very interesting senior journalist from the Financial Times, and he told me his whole job has changed, his everyday life has changed, because he has to stay up in the night to follow Trump's tweets, then write something in the morning, and there's, you know, some days Trump tweeted 200, 200 tweets, so they were kept very busy.

They could have taken a different strategy. They could have said, well, we actually don't care for all those tweets. We actually want to follow a specific topic, and we'll investigate that. But media also depends, as we know, on lots of money. And they have, and especially newspapers and television, and they have to make money and scandals sell well, and provocations sell well. So there is a big dilemma, you know, what to do. Shall we constantly repeat all these provocations and thus also disseminate them enormously

and help those people get attention, but also sell well? Or should we put them somewhere else in the whole paper or just ignore? them sometimes, but good news don't sell that well. So it's a very difficult act, yeah, to follow. And journalists are reflecting on that. You cannot just blame the whole profession. And due to social media, journalists anyway, many have lost their jobs. And I think we all need to really support investigative

journalism and it's their profession which has become very volatile and very vulnerable and also due to attacks on press freedom and so forth like in Russia or in Turkey or in Hungary and so forth and I think basically that these provocative slogans and utterances can either you be very offensive. That was also Trump's way, what I call shameless. It just violated all politeness conventions, all sort of taboos on certain words. You don't talk like that in public. Yeah, well, he did, yeah. Didn't matter. Quite in the contrary, many people like that. And actually, that was one of his one of the reasons for his success that people, many people think that he came across as authentic,

and that he talked to them and not down to them, but he talks like us, yeah. He daresay what we think, yeah? That was also a slogan, British slogan, for Nigel Farage, also of Strache and Heider. So this claiming of authenticity, of speaking like the people, but also saving the people, and thus knowing more than the people, this is the interesting rhetoric, which they, in different strategies. Now, other important strategies are the victim perpetrator reversal, which we frequently could observe. So they provoke, and then they claim that there's a conspiracy against them, and they are actually the victims. Then there's the distraction, the way that you can basically distract by provocation. And when everybody talks about that, you actually implement another policy. So there are many such strategies which other politicians sometimes might also use,

but not with these agenda. So in this whole concept of shameless normalization, I think, that the breaking of taboos, the acceptance of racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic language and utterances that that has really brought in a new quality. And especially that politicians who do that, they don't even have to apologize anymore. And I find that really a big shift, a big discursive shift, from, let's say, when I wrote this first edition of my book, 2014, I still have a section in it about apologies. So kind of apologies. But now, I mean, such politicians don't apologize. Yeah. This is, you know, you can contradict yourself the next day. It also doesn't matter. And they're, what I call this far-right populist perpetu mobilis. sort of that there's a constant dynamic from provocation, to turning the tables, to sort of pointing to a conspiracy, to looking for somebody who's to blame for that.

And this whole dynamic, we can observe that. And it actually leads to the fact that the newspapers. don't set their own agenda anymore and also the other the opposition or the other parties don't have the space to set the agenda because that space is occupied and that can take quite really quite sort of massive proportions the the former government here in Austria by Sebastian Kurz which became a far-right populist party, the former conservative party, similar to the grand old party in the state, put forward something which they called message control, and

were they basically controlled what the media were to write about. And they briefed the media every week. They put out some agenda. The media was supposed to write about. and when they did, they were not only praised, but they got presents, they got money. Yeah, so they were bribed, basically. There's a big scandal now, corruption scandal going on, investigations at court about that. So basically the independent media who didn't follow this control and these briefings and so forth didn't get money, and were basically starved. So there are many ways how you can deal with the media and press freedom.

And of course you can also threaten journalists like Orban or Putin and Erdogan. You can imprison them in some countries they're killed. So I think the interdependence of media and far-right populism is a very, very difficult one and very intricate. It's very complex. How, but far-right populists need the media. And just as a last sentence to that, the social media, since that exists, like with the tweets, they don't need the mainstream media anymore. So Trump was his own journalist. He didn't need media. He posted his news anyway. And he, he, he posted his news anyway, and he he could avoid talking to journalists.

He didn't need press conferences. So once that is possible, it's really difficult to predict in which way journalism will go. Yeah, and with his use of Twitter and new media, social media, he forced the mainstream media to sort of continuously be chasing the car that is him and his outrageous statements. And he used it strategically to great effect to distract at certain points when he was. particularly under fire, which is not new in politics, but he took it to a new level. It's also worth saying that when you were mentioning the taboos

that Trump sort of just obliterated, it's also worth noting not only the way that he obliterates those sort of linguistic taboos, but the fact that only a certain sort of white man could possibly talk like that in America and get elected. Can you imagine a black man,

Obama talking like that immediately would be destroyed a woman talking like that, immediately destroyed. So it's just like the fact that he can even say it and get away with it says so much about the politics. But the question that I have for you surrounds conspiratorialism and right-wing linguistics and the way they use conspiratorial language. You know, we have obviously here in the U.S., we have QAnon, for example, which was really a radical phenomenon and just totally in the deep end of Looney Tunes conspiracy theory stuff.

And it was actually more of a sort of catch-all conspiracy theory that you could plug any other already existing right-wing conspiracy theory into, which made it, you know, extra viable. But we also hear a lot of talk all across the, you know, the Western world particularly, all across the world in general with these right-wing movements. And they're used specifically of like anti-communist rhetoric. This goes obviously back to Hitler himself. But this idea that the Marxists, the communists, the anarchists, they're infiltrating our. suburbs or they're infiltrating our education system or our media. And that's obviously also tied up with anti-Semitic tropes, right? Judeo-Bolshevism was a huge term for Hitler and the Nazis.

And today they talk about, a lot of people in American right-wing talk about cultural Marxism, which is just, you know, one step removed from using, you know, that sort of language, but it ties back into that anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. So I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on the use of conspiratorial language, particularly anti-communist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and how they operate in the right-wing world. That's, again, a very big question. I will try to summarize a bit.

These conspiracies theories have become very apparent now during the pandemic. I mean, they were always around, yeah? And as I said with this far-right perpetual mobile, there were always conspiracies created and somehow was behind these campaigns and so forth. But now they have really taken off in an extraordinary way and they are really, really, I think, very dangerous in many ways. Because in the pandemic, many people are afraid. The sphere is also instrumentalized by some of the far-right leaders, but also by other governments. And the uncertainty makes you accessible, or makes some people accessible for very simplistic narratives.

So, as we, nobody knows when this pandemic will end and where it will go and what will happen afterwards. and many people fear for their jobs, have lost their jobs, have lost their money, terrible things, lives, relatives, families, etc. The crisis is enormous. And so if you get a simplistic explanation, that works quite well. So what, and conspiracy theories are actually narratives with a very simple plot, if you look at them. You have a plot. There's the good guys, the bad guys. The good guys are passivized. Yeah. They're even looked at as sheep. You frequently find that metaphor. The bad guys are sinister. They're black or different. Yeah. Non-white. And they're hidden. And they are somehow directing and commanding the world. Yeah. You have the these typical images of, you know, playing with marionettes and sort of everybody's puppets on the strings, yeah, and there are those people on the top, be they Bill Gates, Rothschild,

the communists, the liberals, some very, very dangerous people. And so they draw on traditional conspiracy theories, which belong to sort of a collective memory and collective oral history talked about. And as you said, they're a classic. They are about the dangerous left, the socialists, the communists. But frequently, you don't even have to say communist. They just say socialists, and that is already set equal with communists. And I think many Americans haven't, if I may say so, no clue that there is differences and what that is and where they were and so forth. For example, for an European, Western European, Bernie Sanders, we would say that's a nice social democrat who could, you know, be in Portugal or Denmark or Austria or wherever. and he's depicted as this vile communist, yeah, and Jewish, yeah, so he fits this fine build, yeah.

So, and these simple stories allow people to explain what is happening, yeah, in this uncertainty and where there's very little orientation, and that is a failure by many governments, that the crisis communication, is bad, that they're not given orientation, that even if there's no clear prediction or recipe that the governments involve people and tell them, you know, we're trying to do the best and this, that, and explain. And if there's not enough or confusion or contradiction or nothing at all, then you go back to these simple explanations. And these old, new, narratives lend themselves well over the centuries, from Dreyfus to the communists, to the Bolshevists, to the Jewish Bolshevists, to the Rochschilds,

to Soros, to Bill Gates. So you can easily put together such a narrative and easily scapegoat. And the scapegoating is a very important ingredient of this whole, again, toolbox, the resources which the far right uses. So the scapegoats are constructed, they are to blame, they are the bad guys. Once we get rid of those bad guys, then everything is okay. So we should get rid of the refugees, the migrants, the Muslims, the Jews, you know, whatever,

all these scapegoats. then the pandemic is over. And so this function of the conspiracy theories, I think one really has to discuss those critically and put alternatives out, not sort of positive conspiracy theories, but other alternatives which would orient and help people orient themselves,

because it's not just the bad extremists and the neo-Nazis. They instrumentalize them. But there are many people who are really angry and frightened. And many young people who have no perspectives and who then get caught in these echo chambers and in those very dangerous conspiracies, these theories. So that really has become a very, significant part now of social media, of hate incitement, and especially if you look, of Holocaust

denial, if you look at what is happening on German and Austrian streets when they go around with the yellow star and it says not vaccinated, which means we are like the Jews who were deported and killed in Auschwitz. And we feel like them. we are the new Jews, and they go around with the yellow stars, or they go around and say, vaccination makes free, insinuating Abedmacht Frey. So you have this whole fascist Nazi ideology being revived

and re-contextualized, actually refrained in a specific way. And I think that's really, really dangerous. As you said, professor, conspiracy theorists usually create these us versus others' narratives, overly simplistic and for some reason quite believable for some people. And I dare say it takes a pretty good public speaker to make people believe, right? So in German, there is an expression, if I'm remembering it correctly, it says, you speak me out of the zeal, like you speak out of my soul.

you say what I think. So can you elaborate on how right-wing politicians get people to think that they're one of them, like speaking for them? How do they become so authentic? This is something that we also saw in the United States, of course, with Donald Trump. Somehow a lot of Americans, you know, 80 million Americans thought that this guy who's a billionaire is the one that understood their experiences. They're material reality.

Now, of course, that's not to say that Hillary Clinton was a better understander of the working class in the United States. I mean, we've all seen the pictures of Hillary Clinton walking into regular people's kitchens and just looking shocked at the conditions that an average American lives in. Yes, Brett's laughing. We all know the picture that I'm talking about. But Donald Trump somehow was able to convince tens and tens and tens of millions of Americans that he understood their material reality and he had their best.

interests at heart. And I think that that's an example to go to what you said, Safi. So, yeah, just to piggy on to that. Yeah, that is absolutely, I thought it was really fascinating to watch Trump, but also not just Trump. He, for the, for the Americans, probably he was a very special case as a demagogue. And I don't know if you ever read Lundel's book about the, The Prophets of Deceit, which is a fascinating book by one of the Frankfurt School exiles who were saved in the States and then returned to Germany because they were to left wing in the McCartney era. But that is really, it's a prophetic book because Loventhal described. the demagogie of the Vietnam War, also the Nazis, then the Vietnam War, and actually you think you're reading about Trump.

And the way Trump succeeded was very much by using actually a very simple language. So many people I frequently have the feeling we're laughing, you know, and saying, well, you know, what is he talking and is understandable and there are only half sentences and the lexicon is so small he's always repeating himself and so forth but that was

I think quite clever from a strategic point of view because that's how we talk people usually talk in half sentences if we talk to our friends and neighbors and not now

in the university here in lectures, but what we usually do is we have a jargon, we insinuate certain things, we have certain code words, which everybody knows what they mean, and we have pauses, we repeat, we don't finish sentences, we do all that stuff, yeah, in non-official situations. And he just did it, yeah? Moreover, Trump as a demagogue, and I think this This feature is really important for Trump. As a demagogue, he was able to also use his skills as entertainer. He is a professional entertainer. That was his TV show,

and he could make people laugh. So once you get, you mobilize audiences, and that's something which is well known by, social psychologists or Siegmund Freud or Le Bon already knew that how do you mobilize big masses well you have to bring you have to somehow create an atmosphere in which they feel together and then you know you can mobilize them with emotions with slogans with you can actually appeal you can bring you can use hate incitement people

shouting, applauding, all of that. You can start that by getting them to laugh. You create this atmosphere. You mobilize a mass. This wonderful book, not just by Loventhal, but by Canetti, Marcel Mach. How do you do that? So the strategies are well known,

and the pathos used is well known, and of course it's mobilizing anger. anger, mobilizing hate, polarizing against them, building yourself as the saviour, building scapegoats, which again you discriminate against, and you create resentment, envy, all kinds of sort of sentiments of that kind. And I think what Trump was also able to do is he brought some recognition. for people who felt not recognized. Sort of this left behind people, yeah?

And by addressing them and again, talking to them, not down to them, not preaching down to them, not lecturing, but talking to them in this conversational style was very successful from his point of view. Somebody who was also good in this was Berlusconi. So Berlusconi also was one of those demagogues. A very, had a lot of very problematic humor, very sexist,

all kinds of taboos, apologized. Trump never apologized. But the mobilizing of masses by, you know, sort of, sort of giving agenda and emotions to identify with is a very strategic way to get people, voters to agree and to vote for you. And I think Trump was clever in that. Nigel Farage was very clever, even though, again, Nigel Farage went to a public school in the UK. was very rich and people just said he's talking to us he understands me and one of the journalists who I interviewed when I was doing research for my books

said Obama you could never think of as you would cut wood with him and then drink beer but with Trump yes or also with George Bush, a real American. I'm going to jump in here because I know we only have a few minutes left with you. And this question that I'm going to ask is, I mean, another unfair question because a lot of your book is devoted to it. A lot of your work is devoted to it. We only have a few minutes, but I do want to get at least a little bit of a taste on the record for the listeners before you have to leave, which is gender politics. Because this is a very interesting topic within right-wing popular.

in terms of the actual politics, as well as within the linguistic side of things, within right-wing populism. So we already talked a little bit about the idea of anti-abortion politics, but we also have the example of just women in general at the head of some of these far-right parties. So in your book, you point out people like Marine LePont, Pierre's Guard, Barbara Rosencrantz, you know, these women have roles in these far-right populist parties that when we, you know, the stereotypical view that pops to your head when you think of a leader of a far right party, these women are not that. But yet they have this really, you know, outsized influence within the far right of their respective countries. And just something else is an aside

since it popped to my head. I remember an article from Salon a few years ago that was titled Altright women are upset that alt-right men are treating them terribly. And, you know, it's, it's funny that we have this two sides of the coin. Like we have these women with far right politics that at one level are treated terribly by men within the same movement that they share their political ideology with. But at the other hand, we have people like Rosencrans who are, I mean, just obscene right wingers that rise to prominence, I mean, at the very highest levels within their respective parties in their country.

So if you have anything that you want to say on that before you have to go. Well, there are, of course, several, again, aspects which you have now opened up. It's a big box, yeah. But just to say, I mean, of course, women can be also very reactionary, far right, Nazis, whatever. Yeah, we know that. So we know that there were Nazi, female Nazi concentration camp, war. We know that there are female politicians who are at the far right or very conservative. We don't have to think far. We can even think of Maggie Thatcher.

So, you know, I'm not surprised, yeah. Just the fact that somebody is a woman doesn't make her better or something. They have different, also have different ideologies and different education and different interests and so forth. So, I always say being a woman is not enough. It just depends, again, what agenda do you have and what beliefs. So, thus, again, it doesn't, it's not surprising that some of these women also have far-right ideologies and beliefs. And they can extend, first of all, to family values. They can be also very influenced by religious themes.

and, of course, fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism is very strong, especially in the States, but also elsewhere, Catholic countries, like Austria or Poland. So there's a lot of ideologies there which substantiate these points of view. Then women, if we talk about Marine Le Pen, I mean as a far-right politician, and she's certainly very skillful as a politician in many ways, she is seen as a mother, very strong as a mother of the French people. So if Trump and Courts and Heide or whoever construct themselves as saviors, these Robin Hoods and saviors of the people, Marine Le Pen also does that. and she is sort of a mother as well. And she wants to protect her people in this function. And she goes back to Jandak. And she's the new Jandak.

And that's what the symbol she uses. And if you look at the poster she uses, there's always this Jandak situation. So again, rewriting history, a symbol of the past used and makes her very strong. And she's quite ambivalent about abortion. She first had a very anti-abortion.

Now it's not that clear, yeah. And then some of these far-right female leaders have an interesting agenda in respect to abortion, or also gay, sort of being gay, gay or homosexual in that it's okay if you are a German to be that, but not if you mix with other ethnicities. So there is a one very famous gay, female politician of the IFD, who's also one of the leaders in the Bundestag, Alice Weidel.

She's openly gay. She talks about it. it doesn't matter because she's a real German. So, you know, you can always shift boundaries. And if it doesn't fit anymore, and if there's too much opposition, like in Germany, you can't be really anti-gay, and it has become part of the mainstream. Then you have to shift boundaries, and then you say, okay, it's okay, but only for real Germans. only for members of this part of the party or something.

And on the other hand, Barbara Rosenkans, whom you mentioned, who has 10 children or something, or 12, I don't know now, and who really is extreme right and who wanted to stand and stood for election as president, got very, not very few votes, actually, much less than they had expected and was quite obviously denying the Holocaust and in a sort of more or less coded way which led of course to a scandal which then led to all the headlines so it was the old dynamic but she was not successful but I mean that we have women of these kinds is quite obvious. The way that like racial white

identitarian political movements, especially here in the U.S., especially in Nazi Germany, they weaponize white womanhood in particular as progenitors of racial purity. And so in that way, they can be lured in as well because

ideologically they're welcomed in as like you are absolutely essential to our political project, even if once in they're treated predictably rather poorly. Yeah, that is sort of of this contradiction that we protect our women, which was very strong in the refugee movement, especially after this New Year's Eve in Cologne. But we were never for the rights of women.

And so you have this very strange contradiction, and moreover, you stand for the freedom of Muslim women, but you don't really stand for the equality of the white women, but you protect them. So, but it doesn't have to be coherent, yeah, that it just, and it's interesting and maybe I can stop with that, that many people didn't understand how many American women could actually vote for Trump with his sexist utterances and so forth. We're all aware of that. But But there are studies now which show that anti-immigration agenda were more important also to these women, to this part of the electorate, than the sexism. So they swallowed the sexism, so to speak, because the wall was being built. And so it's a prioritizing of agenda, which made it a bit more understandable then.

then. But I mean, first, we all didn't understand that. Again, listeners, our guest was Professor Ruth Vodak, who's a highly respected and distinguished world-renowned linguist, Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University, an author of the Politics of Fear, which I highly recommend everybody to pick up because we really were only just barely touching the surface of these discussions during this long interview. And you all need to check out the book to get a lot deeper into what we were talking about. And perhaps we can bring you back again at some point in the future to dive even deeper into the conversation that we were in.

So thank you very much, Professor Vodak. It was a, it was a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. Of course. Listeners, we'll be right back with the wrap. Listeners, we're back on guerrilla history. We just finished our conversation with Professor Ruth Vodok. And really, when I said at the end of the conversation that we were really only scratching the surface, that really was the case.

There was so many more questions and so many more topics that we wanted to get to and really couldn't because even though we were trying to dive deeper and deeper, there's so much latitude within the field of linguistics and right-wing populism and the confluence of those two subjects to go into that no matter. what we try to do, we're not going to be able to cover it in a two hour, you know, hour and a half long conversation. So this is something that perhaps we're going to continue the conversations on with Professor Vodak as well as other linguists who look at things like this. And this is something that I highly recommend that if you enjoyed the conversation that we had with the professor, you check out her book and other books like this. Brett, I'm going to kick it over to you now for your initial thoughts as we, like I said,

we just got out of the interview. So what are the things that are striking you as we came out of that? Well, first of all, thank you to Safi for helping make this happen, for joining, for asking questions. We really, really appreciate it. It was a fascinating conversation. There's so much to talk about, as you said, we only scratched the surface. One thing that's very interesting to me, and this is not just America-specific, but is very specific to the United States, is the way that anti-communism conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, intertwine with anti-blackness in the U.S. right-wing imagination, you know,

George Soros being behind Black Lives Matter was a long-running narrative, for example, and that ties, you know, that stuff together. MLK during the civil rights movement was often lampooned as a communist or a useful idiot for Moscow or whatever it may be. So these things are deeply tied, particularly in U.S. reaction. But of course, it's broader than that as well. You know, there's so much to talk about that she had a great point about the function of conspiracy theories being mostly to simplify narratives and scapegoat certain already existing enemies of right-wing formations

and there's also it ties in well with the persecution complex of the adherence because a lot of these conspiracy theories place people that are otherwise in the religious, ethnic, racial majority as if they are the victims of nefarious, shadowy forces. So you could be a right-wing white, straight male Christian in the United States with a good job and still feel like you are the victim, even in the face of like Black Lives Matter protests, it's actually us that are the victims because this is all a deep conspiracy. So that's really important to know why that sticks with so many people and that could possibly help us combat it. But it also puts at our

feet as the left, especially the principled socialist communist left, a real duty to be able to use all the platforms at our disposal to help people understand. Because with right-wing conspiracy theories, you get hyper-simplistic narratives, right? And those obviously are alluring for various reasons that I just mentioned. But the left, we take seriously complexity, right? We understand the deep historical and structural complexity of these problems. And a big problem of ours historically and presently is being able to articulate that complexity in a way that regular people can understand. And I think we're getting better at it, certainly using YouTube and all this new media and social media can help us in that direction. But it really is our task and we have to think of it in those terms.

The other thing that really stuck out to me was when she mentioned the Golden Dawn in the wake of the financial crisis in Greece, going out and doing mutual aid, especially with working class movements, pantries, et cetera, that's a real threat. When you see fascist movements successfully going into working class areas and doing this, you don't really see that that much in the U.S. Because, I don't know, various reasons, the petty bourgeois class strata, the overall distrust of these more explicitly fascist formations to average Americans, et cetera. But I think the moment you do start seeing that, it's a real sort of canary in the coal mine that this fascist movement is growing in new ways. So be on the lookout for that. Now, Golden Dawn, they overplayed their hand in Greece. They eventually became too violent. They murdered a left-wing rapper, and his mother, you know, went to court against these goons and became like a national figure, a heroic figure to the regular people of Greece.

So Golden Dawn has been decreased in their ability to do this in the last few years specifically. But still, it's worth pointing that out. The one thing I do have to sort of question, not anything to do with Dr. Wodeck specifically, but just this use of right-wing and left-wing populism, I think sometimes, you know, especially instead of like socialism or fascism, I think sometimes it can it can delineate important distinctions between those movements, but sometimes they're just kind of stand-ins for those movements. You know, socialist movements are just called left-wing populist movement, like in South America, for example, the pink tide. was certainly socialist or saw itself as being democratic socialist, right? And so to call it a left-wing form of populism can sometimes be confusing and sometimes decrease the value in people's minds because populism, I don't know, it doesn't seem as rich or maybe as precise as socialism does. And the use of the term populism just colloquially in our culture sort of implies a legitimate center,

right? There's right-wing populism and there's left-wing populism. And the implication sort of implicit in that distinction is that there's some like natural or good or neutral center that these things are deviations from. And so I think we should at least, you know, think about that when we use these terms. And it's not a very easy problem to solve, but it's at least worth mentioning. And then I don't, I guess I'll just toss it back over to you to see if you have any thoughts on any of that or anything else. I mean, I agree entirely. And there was a few things that I really liked that you said, which I'll just mention briefly before I give it to a fee for her opening thoughts in terms of what we got out of that conversation.

I really liked what you said about the flattening of politics into right-wing populism, left-wing populism and some center. That's the problem that I've had with the narrative of right-wing populism, which, you know, if we had an extra five hours for the interview, I would have pushed her on. But, I mean, it really wasn't what we needed to get out of this conversation with her. And I hope the listeners understand that. There's a lot of things that would have been fun to talk about, but there was some things that really are more important for actually understanding

how things are working in the real world from a sociolinguistic, political linguistic perspective, then, you know, why are you using the term populism? We mentioned that at the beginning, but I agree with what Brett is saying that not only does it kind of center the center in terms of like some natural existence of what politics should be, be. But also, I think that it overly simplifies things because you either then get to claim to be a centrist, a left-wing populist, or a right-wing populist. We know that in politics, there's so much more nuanced than that. I mean, you know, ask a Marxist Leninist and a Trotskyist to explain

their differences between themselves, and you'll be listening for days and, you know, bottles will be smashed and, you know, all kinds of things are going to happen. But using only that not dichotomy, but I guess trichotomy of center left-wing populism and right-wing populism, they'd both be left-wing populists, as would social Democrats, as would anarchists. I mean, get a social Democrat and anarchist, a Trotskyist, and a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist in a room, and let them have a conversation. And then when they come out after that conversation, tell them that they're all left-wing populists and see what happens to you. Right. Same thing would happen on the right. You know, you get Paul Ryan, you know, at all.

Hitler and, you know, I don't know, Benito Mussolini and, I don't know, somebody from the Golden Dawn in a room together. Let them have a conversation. And then when they come out, tell Paul Ryan that he's a right-wing populist, the exact same as the others. You know, Paul Ryan, we, we, there's a lot of things to be said about Paul Ryan and believe me, I have a lot of things to say about Paul Ryan. But by flattening the politics into that tricotomy? I don't know. You're really losing any sort of nuance. And as Brett said, we care about the details. We care about nuance. We care about understanding the deeper complexities of the world and of politics. That's why we just had an hour and a half long conversation and we didn't even

feel like we got to anything because we care about these deep complexities. And then just brief mention, and again, I said that I would be brief, but I'm already rambling, is that you mentioned anti-blackness and anti-communism. And that's something that I've been looking into myself. And there's a work that I know is going to be coming out that we are going to be highlighting on the show. The author said that she will come on the show. And that's Dr. Sherees Burden Stelly, Dr. CBS, who's a friend and comrade of mine. She has a book that's coming out relatively soon called Black Scare, Red Scare, which is basically on this topic, on the confluence of anti-blackness and anti-communism.

and how, yeah, those two things are kind of equated with one another and are used as a cudgel against one or the other group. And, I mean, we can kind of figure out just based on the American experience, which group that's usually leveled against fairly or unfairly. Safi, what are your thoughts as you come out of this conversation with Professor Vodak? Well, first and foremost, I'd really like to say thank you to you guys and, of course, to Adnan, for letting me join you. It was a very insightful conversation to have. And, well, I do come from this field, but some of the points that professor mentioned really drove the point home just now. When I was doing my research, which consisted of like analyzing speeches of right-wing politicians,

you know, sometimes I was just petrified how good of public speakers, they all were in at the end of like 12 page speech i don't know you might start believing with what they're saying and it was so distressing for me for me to notice um so this the scheme you know this hope and um in fear juxtaposition um when they just when they first create fear and then post themselves as um your saviors uh by offering you hope. I think it was a very important insight that I got out of the discussion. Well, I also want to say thank you because you were the one who raised Professor Vodok to our consciousness through your own research into this field. As you said, you'd been studying

Nazi rhetoric, neo-Nazi rhetoric, the off-day rhetoric in Germany, and how those things compare and perhaps contrast in some ways. And I wish that we had more time. for you to talk about your findings of this research because there were some very interesting examples that you had, you know, if we would have had, again, five more hours to talk about this. But you were the one who raised Professor Vodak to us because of you, we were able to get in touch with her. So I do thank you for that. Brett, any final thoughts on your front? We'll go around the horn one more time as we wrap up the conversation here. Sure, a few points. One, I think it is just generally true that we should try to understand right-wing populism, however defined

as in part a reaction not only to 9-11 financial crisis, etc., but to neoliberal globalization more broadly, right? Neoliberal capitalist globalization in so many ways is like capital has no borders, but labor does. And that way you can concentrate certain pools of labor, let's say in the global south, this is cheap labor for capital to go over and exploit, et cetera. So it's important understand the capitalist underpinnings of globalization that creates the right wing backlash so that's one point another point is she mentioned this we didn't really quite get into it but she said like you know i don't use like we don't use a legal immigrant for example right or i won't i won't talk about it as a refugee crisis i think that's important because that is one way that the left plays into right wing narratives

when we pick up those terms right border crisis that is something that in the u.s is very pertinent very very very prescient is this idea that there's a border crisis now that's right-wing talking point. There is no such crisis. This is like a sort of a manufactured outrage most of the time. But you see left-wing and liberal people talking about the border crisis. So right there, you've already lost at least part of the game because you're playing on their field using their term. So keep that in mind. The other thing about media and the right-wing media and how it's so good at pushing its propaganda, its conspiracy theories, and its nonsense, is that we need to counter it, not only just with left media, but with like, what we do, I think, in our family

of shows around RevLeft is deep left media, right? We're not chasing the car of daily electoral politics, like so much of liberal and progressive media do. This politician said this. This upcoming election is like this. Who's going to win Virginia's governorship, right? So you're just kind of chasing the car of daily politics, but I think having a deeper analysis equips people to be able to think for themselves through the complexities of whatever may come up in any given moment in time. And so, rooting ourselves in deep

principles of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, talking about these histories, these philosophies, why they're important. I think that's really important for left-wing commentators and media people to do, as opposed to either personality, ego, intra-left nonsense,

which we do see a lot, especially on, like, YouTube and stuff, because it generates clicks, but also this electoral day-by-day, baseball game basically. So avoid both of those two errors and be deeper with it. And then the final thing I just want to say, and this is sort of neither here nor there, but she mentioned how Trump talked like regular people talk, sort of half thoughts, half sentences, you know. And it is very, very true. And one of the great ways that I've come to learn that is the Cohen brother movies, right? The way the Cohen brothers write dialogue specifically in something like the Big Lebowski is really

interesting because what they're trying to do is is in film form create dialogue that people actually sound like in juxtaposition to like a sorkin west wing-esque everybody's super witty and speaks in complete hilarious full fucking sentences or whatever and they're going down the hall talking to each other that nobody talks that way co-in brothers do a really good job of showing you the stilted half-assed weird ways that we actually do talk when we're just you know shooting shit off the cuff. So if you want to kind of get a little taste of that, I think Coen brothers are really good at that. So those are just some of my closing points. But yeah, love the episode, learned a lot, and would love to get the book and dive deeper. Yeah, I wish we had time

to talk about arrogance of ignorance that the professor mentions in her book and in some of our lectures, which kind of refers to an appeal to common sense, if I understood it correctly. So my audience right now only consists of intellectuals and those who are sitting at home watching TV or anti-intellectuals. That's something that I, well, that I noticed in some of the speeches that I analyzed, always this we and those others. So, yeah, but maybe next time. Is there anything else that you took away from this conversation that you, were happy that we did? Well, pretty much everything that we covered.

I do wish we could dive a bit deeper in some of the things. But again, it's a highly analytical book. And sometimes you really need to plough through it as opposed to just, you know, smoothly glide through it. So, yeah, I'm very happy about this conversation. Yeah, and then just my final thoughts. You know, this is, as Safi just said, it's a very analytical work. I mean, in the book, there's like 15 vignettes of different analyses of rhetoric used by a specific right-wing politician or a specific right-wing policy platform or whatever.

There's these long vignettes that highlight different aspects of linguistics and right-wing populism. So, again, right-wing populism, such as it is. things like anti-Semitism, she'll have a vignette highlighting that, things like gender politics, she'll have a vignette highlighting that, talking about an imagined past, there's a vignette highlighting that. There's 15 vignettes. She highlights many, if not all of the major parties, right-wing populist parties in Europe. She discusses the rise, the resurgence, the historical perspective, comparisons between historical

right-wing populism and current right-wing populace. how there are things that they were really focusing on have changed over time. There's so much here that, you know, it does feel a little bit overwhelming at times because there's so many different things that you have to really explore in order to get any sort of, you know, dialectical understanding of the processes of right-wing populism in society. So it is a bit daunting, but at the same time, I think that it's vital for us to take these sort of daunting projects on, you know, the communist left. I think that if we don't understand the rhetorical and linguistic devices that the far right use, we will never understand how they are

successful and will never understand how we can combat that success, either by co-opting their successful strategies in a way that's not targeted towards utilizing nativism and racism and anti-Semitism, et cetera, you know, family values, law and order, how can we utilize these linguistic successes that they've had without co-opting the negative political aspects of them? Or just as importantly, how can we see the linguistic and rhetorical points that they're using successfully and find ways of shutting them out? I think Brett, you had a very good point, you know, when people on the left will say the border crisis, you've already lost half of the argument because you're conceding that there

is a crisis and crisis has a negative connotation. We have to understand how this terminology, how this rhetoric is used, because until we understand that and until we have a deep, both theoretical and real world material, look at how things are working and how they are utilizing this rhetoric, we are not, we're going to fall into the trap of allowing them to dominate the narrative and we are playing to the rules of their game. That is the problem. So this is a, you know, a difficult field to really delve into if you're someone like myself who does not have a background in linguistics, right? It's difficult, but it's essential because you know that these far right populist movements are doing these linguistic things intentionally. It's

intentional. It's not a mistake that the exact same terms that Goebbels and Hitler, we're using are now being brought back up, not with reference to the people who brought them up, but they're being brought back up by current day far right fascist parties. It's not unintentional. It is intentional. They're doing it because they know that it works and they're playing on the same fears and the same desires that people had back then that they knew that they fell into. We have to understand that so that we don't fall into the trap. of playing by their rules and that we know how to combat this in order to fight for a more just and more egalitarian future.

So that's my final note. Brett, you look like, do you have anything that you wanted to add there? No, no, I think that's great. I was just thinking at the end there that I think Trump is kind of the exception to the rule of it being hyper conscious because I think he's just so instinctually and intuitively a reactionary, you know, that I think he gives voice and does things in a certain, like, you know, classically sort of neo-fascist or right-wing authoritarian way, almost with, like, you certainly don't know the history of these terms and like he doesn't know any of the

intellectual stuff behind it, but he just so naturally is that that it comes out in really effective ways. But yes, you're right behind the scenes, especially on his staff, the Stephen Millers, the Bannons, the Ted Cruz's of the world. These nefarious characters certainly know exactly what they're doing and they're playing into it perfectly. But that's neither really here or they're excellent well i'm really glad that we had this conversation i'm really glad that sophia raised this work for us to look at because it's it's very important for us on the left to understand um whether or not you agree with every point that's made it's very important so on that note we're going to wrap up sophie why don't i turn to you first how can the

listeners find you on twitter or anything that you want to direct them to um well it's how do you say that Maybe the listeners shouldn't look for me. Okay, you can find her. I'll read it for you. It's at S-O-N-J-A, so Sonia with a J- underscore something in German, T-S-C-H-K-A. I just really try to make sure that nobody finds me on Twitter, like my students or, you know, I'm a teacher, so I really need to look out for that stuff. S-O-N-J-A underscore T-C-H-H-K-A, give her a follow. Brett, how can the listeners find you and all of the excellent work that you can continue to put out from Rev. Left, Red Menace, as well as guerrilla history, of course.

Of course. Yeah, no, thank you. Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. You can find everything. All the shows, our social media, our Patreon, and our merch now. So we have merch with goods for the people. There's a link there on the website now as well. And it's a great way to support them, to support us, just showing off your love for Rev Left. And hopefully we can get some red menace and guerrilla history merch going here pretty soon as well. So, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I'd love guerrilla history merchandise to be available. I know, you know, my mom will be the biggest supporter of that. She'll have, you know, the guerrilla history bandana. And I don't, she's not going to have a bandana, but I know she's going to listen to this.

So she'll hear me saying that she's going to be wearing a guerrilla history bandana, whether she likes it or not. That's funny because all my family obviously buys the Rev. left merch to support me. It's literally like the White House on fire with a hammer and sickle parachuting in and my little niece and nephews are running around wearing the stuff. I just love it. Yeah, I've seen those pictures. It's absolutely lovely. I love that. So yeah, maybe we'll get the guerrilla history family going. We'll get your growing family and guerrilla history stuff. We'll get my family and guerrilla history stuff. I know Adnan already has the shirt. He loves it. He loves it. Yes, absolutely. So listeners, you can find me on

Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995. You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And please, if you do have the financial means to do so, consider supporting the show on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash gorilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Those donations really do allow the show to be sustainable. So we appreciate everybody that signs up to the Patreon. And we give you some bonus content for signing up on there, somewhat frequently, actually. So I think it's good value money. So do sign up, help support the show, and we can keep this going for many, many years to come. I'm hoping. So until next time, listeners, solidarity.

I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.