Rev Left Radio - Fascism in the USA: An Analysis & Strategies for Fighting Back

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It(AK Press). His work as appeared in places such as Jacobin, AlterNet, In These Times, Political Research Associates, Waging Nonviolence, Labor Notes, ThinkProgress, ROAR Magazine and Upping the Anti. Follow him on Twitter: @shane_burley1 Shane joins Brett to discuss fascism in the US; what it is, and how to fight it! Outro Music: You Fascists Bound to Lose by Woody Guthrie Reach us at: [e-mail] follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Well, I'm going to tell you fascists, you may be surprised. People in this world are getting organized. You're bound to lose. You fascist bound to lose. Woo! Oh, you fascist bound to lose. I said. All of you fascists bound to lose.

Yes. All of your fascists found to lose. Workers of the world, unite. Revolution, Revolution, Revolution, revolution, and liberalist, and liberolution, and liberate, and liberation, and liberate the proletary left radio now, oppose the system any way you know how, unite the left, against the capitalist lies, and liberate the proletariat's mind. working class Uniform equality By I guess the right free Fascist ideology

To tip it in And turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio Starts now Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio I'm your host Anne Comrade Brett O'Shea And today we have on Shane Burley

To talk about fascism in the USA What it is and How to Fight It Shane, would you like to introduce yourself And say a bit about your background So, yeah, I'm a filmmaker and writer based here in Portland, Oregon. I've been writing for a lot of publications, like in these times, wage nonviolence, and others covering social movements in the far right. And I've been organizing labor and housing for, I guess, 10 years now.

Awesome, yeah. It's an honor to have you on the show. I've followed your work, and I recently saw you and Mark Bray do a talk together, which I really appreciated. Just out of curiosity, what leftist tendency do you identify with and what initially got you into studying the far right? I guess libertarian socialist tendency, libertarian left. I guess I started sitting the far right by happenstance because I kept kind of intersecting with them coming to town, basically, having events that were kind of flying on the radar. one was

the Pacifica Forum out here in Oregon was a forum at the University of Oregon that was hosting controversial speakers but then they started bringing Holocaust and hires

and other people that were basically what we sometimes kind of non-traditional fashion they didn't look like Klansmen or neo-Nazis but they definitely were from the radical right

and then the same thing when I was living in upstate New York when David Irving the Holocaust and Iyer was coming to town and it was really hard actually to motivate people to see this is something that was significant and important. And when investigating that, I came across Vanguard Radio, which is the podcast from Spencer. This is back in, I think, about 2011. And there was something about it that if the politicians were right, that this could really hit the culture hard

and could create a really influential movement like the Identitarian that we see in Europe. Yeah, I've noticed, I mean, obviously since Trump's campaign, the emboldening of the far right. There's just been a consistent refusal to take it seriously by the center of the country, the liberals, and the conservatives. And over time, as we've seen, I mean, in 2017, if I'm correct on these stats, the far right doubled their body count in this country.

So as we've seen the sort of the increase in far right terrorism, basically, I think more and more people are starting to realize the threat, but still, it seems not enough. So it's amazing how much that they, how much horror they can commit, but yet still a huge segment of the population refuses to see them as a threat and actually looks at the far left as more of a threat. Yeah, in a way it's outside of people's frame of reference,

they actually can't understand acts of mass violence without contextualizing as mental illness or as an issue of guns themselves and without seeing actually a revolutionary white supremacist movement, like those decades and decades and decades that has a huge, huge body calendar it. So the words we use to describe the far right, you know, that they range from alt-right to white supremacists to Nazis, but these words tend to obscure or generalize about what in reality is a multitude of different factions and groups that operate under these larger umbrella terms.

Can you talk about the various strains of fascism in the United States and what their differences in beliefs are? Historically, the U.S. always had, in a way, it's on brand of white supremacists because it was really baked into American. and the specifics of American history and the mythologies about America, like the Wild West and so on. And so we had things like neo-Nazis in the one hand and the KKK and the other, generally working class groups, maybe not as deeply ideological in some ways. And that's really changed over the last couple decades. And what we have today that really dominates that is the alt-right, which takes a lot more of its inspiration from Europe, from France specifically.

and is more of philosophical fascist, it accepts open fascist ideas on their face more, is more willing to go in deep to try and explain themselves, and sees themselves more as a European movement than one that's specific to America and the kind of histories of America. Starting in the 90s, my nationalism started to catch on.

This, again, was people trying to kind of class it up a bit, and we saw with institutions like American Renaissance that were focusing on, race and IQ arguments, trying to use pseudoscience to justify it. But in general, people never really escaped the history of the working class blue-collar white supremacist movement until the alt-right, until they were able to rebrand it completely for the middle class. So there's like discussions about what fascism is, and I think that you're right that

there's a large base in the working class. And once we see some of these mass shooters get identified and come out, or some of the people carrying torches in Virginia, I believe it was. It's revealed that they actually work in like, you know, pretty shitty service industry jobs. But there's also this notion that white men feel entitled to sort of middle management positions in this society and they're being forced down into lower strata of the working class actually helps give rise to basically what would be the revenge of the petty bourgeoisie or the wannabe petty bourgeoisie, the sort of want to be white men middle management people that think that they they deserve that role in

society how do you think about those class differentials there yeah i think i think one of it's is the effect of um basically an educational priority since gen x of positioning everyone to what what we thought was going to be a professional class of people which was kind of an inflated delusional methodology inside the working class, that all these people in better working class positions were just going to continue to be upwardly mobile, that we're going to promise kids, especially young white men, that they were going to have these great jobs. And when it didn't come to fruition, because capitalism is in perpetual crisis and collapsing on itself, that that created that kind of that sense of entitled rage.

In a lot of ways, though, it's a signal of the broader kind of affect a curve in American capitalism that's curving towards destruction rather than stability and increased affluence, which in some ways I think is the same cauldron that creates something like Occupy Wall Street, except in this specific case, it was really well motivated by a far-right kind of sense of angst and also a reaction to a growing anti-oppression movement. Absolutely. So many people are aware of, you know, like the Pepe, the Frogot writers and Richard Spencer, neo-fascist and the KKK.

but can you talk about some of the more obscure and less well-known strains of fascist thought? Sure, sure. I think what people don't realize the lot of the alt, right, and the Pepe memes and things like that, is that they actually are tied in certain ways to the less known strains of the far right. One of the things that has really dominated this movement that we're broadly calling the alt right now, but really comes out of various strands of white nationalism from Europe and from other pseudo-intellectual spaces is a focus on esoteric ideas, primarily what was called traditionalism, basically a pro-phal philosophy that saw the hierarchies of religions and

the stratifications therein as sacred and around kind of esoteric philosophers like Julius Evela. That, while kind of unknown to a lot of population, actually motivates a great deal of alt-right and neo-reactionary thought. At the same time, what I talk about my book a lot is focus heathenry, which is basically the revival of North or Northern European pagan religions, but with a racial motivation. It kind of uses an old-fashioned interpretation of Carl Jung that archetypes, the gods of myth are kind of baked into the psyches of white people and that we have to kind of reclaim our natural way of understanding them. The purpose of these things, beyond being kind of esoteric and allowing people to jump into arcane volumes is to give their

ideology a sense of depth and to make it beyond politics. It's actually something spiritual and transcendental. That influences quite a bit of the alt-right, even if they don't always take it as literal or not have space value. Another one, another kind of a sector of this are the very far-right interpretations of Christianity, which are waning to a degree. One being Christian identity, which is tied to a lot of kind of acts of spontaneous violence in the 80s and 90s. These are churches that do kind of, I guess, heretical readings of the Bible. See Jews is actually the spawn of Satan. People of color don't have souls, and they're actually animals that need to be controlled by white people.

Another version of this is called kinism. It's, I guess, slightly less repulsive by some. it being pretty disgusting, where basically they think that in the Bible it sets down parameters for what a church should be, and it should be monoracial, and should create separations between races. These have had a lot of influence for a long time, but as white nationalism kind of moves out of the countryside to a degree, it just become less influential. And frankly, Christianity is not in vogue in white nationalist communities in the way that

it once was. And so a lot of these kind of more odd channels like heathenry, like esoteric stuff, like occult interpretations, those are getting a lot more currency. I talk a little bit about NeoReaction. This is sort of like a cousin to the all right, really heavy in Silicon Valley. It's based around a few kind of obscure philosophers in the Silicon Valley scene, focusing really heavily on retracing monarchism, re-centering traditional hierarchies. again, focusing on a very racist pseudoscience and really attacking democracy as a concept. And so what they're trying to do is re-center basically corporate elites as social elites in the same way. And this has just a ton of overlap with the alt-right, including the same figures and funding sources and things like that.

And frankly, like, this is only growing, these kind of what we think of as the strange weird fascists in a lot of ways are the status quo fascists today. and they're only getting stranger. They're only getting weirder. And there's actually a long history stretching all the way back to Nazi Germany of like this fascination with occultism. I know there's a podcast that I like. It's not political. It's more of a comedy podcast,

but it studies conspiracy theories and like aliens and stuff. It's called Last Podcast on the Left. And they do this whole series on, you're familiar? Oh, yeah, definitely. They do this whole sub-series on Nazi occultism, which is just, it's funny. It's an entertainment. show, but it's also really informative. So I'd point people to go listen to that if they want to

find more about the roots of occultism on the far right. But there's also like a huge infusion of conspiratorial thinking. And there always has been on the far right in the U.S., but certainly info wars and people like Alex Jones perpetuate this conspiratorial thinking. So what role does that like sort of conspiracy thinking play on the alt-right today? You have to have it on some level. It's impossible to have fascist ideas without some kind of sense of conspiracy. There's a few primary things, right? The most obvious is

anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews control and finance, the media, social systems, whatever. Usually it's whatever the enemy of the day is. Jews control it according to them. That's the most obvious version of it. But in reality, it's all baked into

conspiratorial worldview at its very basic core. What fascists believe is that human beings are fundamentally unequal. They disregard 99% of modern science, of our understanding of technology, of social history, almost all of it, and then replace it with their own version. And for those, their version to be true, there has to be mass, mass conspiracies, basically hiding us from the reality of the world. A really good example is a focus on Egypt. And there's a lot of focus from white supremacists on Egypt and trying to prove that ancient Egyptians were actually Europeans.

Now, there's no evidence that's actually accepted amongst anthropologists that's true. It's just factually untrue. Yeah, if I was to Google search right now, I would find dozens, maybe hundreds of white supremacist's websites proving the linkages, showing falsified documents, saying that governments cover things up. It requires a mass, mass, mass, global infrastructure of conspiracy to make what they think true. The same is true of race and IQ arguments. This stuff has been discredited for 70 years now, yet they keep drumming it up and saying that, you know, colleges, government institutions, media figures are hiding the truth about race differences in intelligence.

These are fundamentally untrue things, but it requires a conspiratorial worldview. I think with something like Alex Jones is he may drop the obvious racial connotations to the conspiracy, but he maintains the conspiracy infrastructure itself. So, and we see this a lot in conspiracy circles that try and claim to the, non-racist. They'll essentially take an anti-Semitic conspiracy, change Jews to bankers or to Rothschilds or something like that, and continue the same logic that there's a cabal of people who use Cripsis to control things for their interests and not our own. What it does is it stops us from looking at social systems. It's not capitalism. It's these people, right? If only these people are gone, we could take care of capitalism ourselves. But it also essentially keeps that mind going

that there's always some kind of secret group that's not just, for example, a capitalist class, but it is some other group that has some other interests that control things. And frankly, as distrust and dominant institutions continues for obvious and correct reasons, conspiracy theories feed even bigger. And we see this any time there's actually a resurgence of left populism that's driven into organizing, conspiracy theories also grow. yeah and there's a lot of there's a lot of talk about trying to reach out to these people to reach out to disaffected young men and try to bring them leftward but for those that have bought into this this sort of conspiratorial thinking um is is reason and logic and arguments even something that's going to pierce the bubble most times is that even a strategy worth pursuing in your opinion i think i would like to think so i i it really depends on where people are at um you know it would it comes to something like Holocaust and Isle? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think there's

already been mental leaps made in a willingness to blame oppressed people so heavily that I find that kind of irredeemable. But when it comes to the more kind of casual banker kind of conspiracy theories about the Fed, Federal Reserve, or about the IMF or World Bank, in a certain sense, those institutions actually do work in conspiracies. The conspiracies of capital, like the conspiracies that create inequality globally, and it takes, I think sometimes when people are new to those conflicts, conspiracy narratives can make sense, and so I think we should be intervening on that. But I do, like with the Alex Jones crowd, for example, they become so toxic and so kind of violent and so reactionary and have become basically an essential tool for

white supremacist organizing, that I don't. At this point, I just see them as opponents, not as someone want to be kind of worked with or redeemed. Yeah, I agree. There is some interesting spillover from sort of the fascist authoritarian right to the libertarian right. They're not as overtly racist or anti-Semitic as the fascist right, but the libertarian right does, like, as you say, sort of take the word Jewish out of the equation and replace it with Rothschild or the bankers or whatever it may be.

And so I think there we might have an opening. Lots of people that are on the left today. We all went through weird phases as we went through our political do. development. A lot of us were liberals, a lot of us were new atheists, a lot of us were libertarians. So to reach out to that crowd specifically, I've personally had it work for me, and I think that that might be more of the crowd that the left can win over as capitalism continues to kind of circle the drain. Yeah, libertarianism in a lot of ways, is the stopover to the alt-right. I mean, the alt-right is kind of a post-libertarian ideology. If you look at like the right stuff,

or altright.com countercurrents, all those really popular alt-right websites. These are almost universally ex-libertarians. They went through a libertarian phase. They went through anarcho-capitalism and they eventually got to the alt-right. At first, they were willing to accept inequality. Then they were

aggressively in favor of inequality. Now they sanctify inequality. So it's like that stepping stone through. But I think there's a lot of kind of I guess libertarian left folks that have been attracted to that. that, you know, through the kind of reason magazine, moderate tone, that I think if they have

motivating issues that can come left, then we should definitely interview on that. Yeah, definitely. Personally, I've seen the Libertarian right over the past two years have like sort of a 70-30 split. I've seen like 30% of the Libertarian right move sort of leftward, and then I've seen the bulk of the libertarian right over the past two years kind of move towards authoritarian. terrorism, towards fascism, you know, anti-Antifa, anti-Black Lives Matter. And so, I don't know. There's something to think about there. There's like the Reason Magazine Cato Institute, kind of friends of socially liberal cause on

the one side, then like the MISIS Institute on the other, which is essentially just a breeding ground for the far right at this point. Exactly. Yeah. So let's go ahead and move on to leaders, because I think it's important to kind of, I know we probably are familiar with some of them, but who are some of the most prominent U.S. fascist leaders on the far right today that we should be aware of and what organizations do they represent? Well, so the primary figure I personally think is Richard Spencer is now a household name. I never thought he would be. And he runs the National Policy Institute. He is the person who coined the term alt-right. Essentially, in 2010, he started a website that was

supposed to link up all these far-right currencies starting to see. And he was going to call it alternative right and it was going to be a big tent. And people eventually kind of took the word away from him, made it a assortment to all right and made it a catch-all for all these people. And he just kind of went with it and continued his leadership. As an organization, NPI National Policy Institute runs conferences. They have a book publishing wing. They publish a website.

They have popular YouTube channel, social media, that kind of thing. And he has kind of broader projects linking up with Identity Europa and starting a new project called Operation Homeland. And what he really wants to fashion himself on is what's called the Adanitarian movement in Europe, which is a little bit more of a grassroots fascist movement as opposed to the party-based politics we know of of nationalist parties in Europe. They wanted something that was a little bit more youth oriented and more on the ground than, say, the Front National in France or the British National Party or something. So he wants to be in that model of creating a cultural movement that influences young people. And he's been very successful in doing that. Lots of media interviews, creating lots of content, creating commentary about every issue that's happening, and doing it from a third positionist standpoint.

So he's also going to be critical of capitalism or whatever he thinks imperialism is or try and use kind of leftist jargon for his own kind of far-right ends. So he's kind of in leadership on the one side. What we're seeing in a lot of other places is an evolution of the more traditionalist white supremacist organizations that we've had. So Matthew Heinbach is the founder of the traditionalist Workers Party, and he really does come out of the alt-right grouping, but he feels a little bit more comfortable around the more blue-collar folks that he's seeing in rural areas, Appalachia, the Midwest, and the South, around southern nationalist groups, neo-Confederate groups, people in the KKK, skinhead organizations. And what he's done is kind of mix the alt-right with that more traditionalist blue-collar white supremacist organizing and created something that's very large and, frankly, pretty good organizers as these people go in the traditionalist workers party. And I think that's a place to keep watching. On campuses, there's a number of groups. I think Charlie Kirk and a turn-in-point USA, while not committing to the full white nationalist program, definitely kind of edges into it.

It's what I call in the book, the Alt-Lite, basically, as sort of diet alt-right. They like the trolling and some of the talking points, but they're not willing to commit to the full open program. And then Identity Europa and the Proud Boys, organizationally, are also kind of leading that push towards young people on campuses. And so I think in a lot of ways, the leadership has started to change from what it used to be. You know, traditionally we had figures like David Duke. he was sort of a politician. He was sort of an organizational leader. Really, he was just kind of like a talking head.

And at this point, in a more diffuse social media atmosphere, we're seeing a lot of figures come and go very quickly. And we're also starting to see a lot of people who are disconnected from organizations entirely becoming leaders. But as we go forward, Richard Spencer really stays the center of the all right. Yeah, I've had experiences with TPSA, specifically here in Omaha. we've confronted them at some marches and rallies and they kind of come off as like young Republicans

they're very into sort of respectability politics and they talk about free markets and how socialism is bad et cetera but we do see them aligning explicitly with the far right recently in Colorado Charlie Kirk was on a campus in Colorado doing a speech or whatever and you know Antifa showed up to sort of confront because they do have far right wing elements

and then straight up Nazis rush out to defend Charlie Cook's speech and sort of got into confrontations with Antifa. So there's really deeper connections than the TPUSA wants to admit. Yeah, you know, TPUSA is a really good example of a dynamic that has existed in American far-right circles for decades, where on the one hand, we have explicit white nationalist groups, neo-Nazi groups, KKK groups, other open fascists. It's very clear what their politics are. And then you have people that sort of are on the middle ground.

They kind of lean in their direction. They definitely help their talking points. They're kind of a stopover point to the more mainstream conservatism. You know, so in the 80s, we had paleo-conservatives and Pap Buchanan. That's a really good stopover point. You know, he was part of the GOP. He was a well-known politician. He talked in Republican terms, but essentially what he was talking about was a real nationalist,

old-school nationalist policy and a sort of anxiety about the, the quote unquote death of the West, you know, that non-white immigration was going to change the demographics, that we're going to lose our cultural core, all of the things that motivate the alt-right. But, you know, he kind of crossed through. Now, like with TPSA, they operate in a very, very similar way. You know, they're able to talk about those cultural issues. They're able to connect with Republicans or Republican donors. And frankly, the far right sees them as a very, very, very useful tool on college campuses to bridge the college Republican crowd with like the identity of Europe of people. You need a stopover point because

open white nationalism is still really unpalatable to most people and you have to ease people into it. And TPUSA is like a perfect middle ground for that. Yeah. What you were just saying kind of reminded me or kind of made me think of this and perhaps the analogy is imperfect, but sort of the role that the TPUSA plays on the right is sort of analogous to the role the DSA plays on the left. So it's kind of a stopover between the progressive literacy. liberals and then the anarchists and libertarian socialists and Marxists on the far left. So I think that's kind of an interesting way to sort of conceptualize what the TPUS does on the right. That's a really, really good point.

I personally feel very comfortable comparing far-right groups to far-left ones. I know there's a lot of reasons that people don't like doing that. But for my understanding, to make sense of them, I kind of map it in that way because I kind of know left organizations. and in a lot of ways, there's patterns that we can look at and try and see that. And I think that's a really good analogy is because there is, there has to be gateways between those things that kind of take people from maybe like a center-right politic to a far-right politic. It doesn't usually happen on its own.

And so this is true of Infowars to a degree. This is true of the Mike Zernovich types, the Milo Unopoulos, and it's certainly true of TPUSA. And I think, you know, if the alt-right is smart as they have been over the last couple of years, they've continued to try and find these bridge organizations and figures that help mainstream their ideas. You know, they kind of used up Milo as much as they possibly could, getting recruits out of it. And after he kind of lost favor, they move on to the next thing. Absolutely. So let's go ahead and move on and talk about the connections between fascism and mass violence.

because this past week we saw Nicholas Cruz, someone who was trained with white supremacist militias, carry out a mass shooting in Florida. And in your article for the Hampton Institute entitled Institutionalizing Lone Wolf Terrorism, how fascist organizations inspire mass violence, you analyze fascist organizing methods and discuss the inexorable link between fascist organizing and mass violence. Could you kind of summarize that article and highlight its main points for us? there's a real pattern in the way that white nationalist public organizations operate and what seems like random acts of violence that are disconnected from those organizations

so like take someone like richard spencer because we were talking about him it's very obvious that any act of violence bombing shootings would be totally antithetical to what he wants it's not going to help him it doesn't grow his organization it doesn't help them build a movement. But his behavior and the behavior of his organizations is always going to be linked to that acts of violence. There's a pattern on the far right that essentially starts with them trying to create bridges to the mainstream.

So let's take like TPPUSAs because we were talking about it, working with those groups, monitoring their message, and getting a really certain bit of boost. And so historically we see patterns like this. So for example, the battle over segregation, the third era KKK found a lot. of crossover with pro-segregationist people who maybe didn't want to sign on to the KKK's program, but definitely there was a crossover there. What eventually happens is that the slightly more moderate right will always betray the radicals. This is true on the left, too, right? But this, I mean, it's something you can set your watch to. And so in the 80s and 90s,

paleo-conservatives eventually abandoned their white nationalist contingents when they started to get more funding, when their careers were on the line. eventually cut out their more radical figures and push them to the fringes. And once that starts to happen, their strategy begins to lose. And because their ideologies really aren't built and organizing, there begins an internal process of failure and the inability to latch on to productive organizing strategies. And when that happens, fringe figures within that, take what is a radical ideology, one that's about revolution, one that's fundamentally about violence and definitely about dehumanizing

enemies and then does the logical conclusion they lash out into acts of extreme violence and for example when you're looking at something like the bombing of the homo federal building we're talking about a feeling internal to parts of the militia movement that there was a really big loss taking place and that they were even though some of their numbers were growing but they were actually going to lose the country because you had something like the brady assault weapons ban you had the attack on the Waco compound of the Branch of Vidians. You have the Ruby Ridge attack with the ATF. And so you have a series of things that create this alienation

will lead certain members who are built on a revolutionary ideology already to carry out really extreme acts of violence. Yeah, and as I was saying earlier with the last podcast on the left, I hate to keep plugging them, but they also did a series on Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. And it's super interesting to study his trajectory because it is very much a trajectory of somebody that goes to the far, far right. And the reason he committed those crimes was out of a far right-wing fascist ideology.

And a lot of times when we talk about the Oklahoma City bombing, I think people don't quite fully understand or doesn't get talked about enough that Timothy McVeigh's motivations were 100% far-right white white supremacists, sort of fascist ideologies. I mean, he was in love with the Turner Diaries, which is a seminal text on the far right, and he carried out those attacks based in the conspiratorial far right-wing, you know, sort of thought bubbles that he existed in. Yeah, yeah.

And frankly, when you create a sense of alienated desperation like they do, it leads people to spontaneous or seemingly spontaneous acts of violence. I think that white genocide narrative is a really good example of this. There's a kind of apocalyptic sense within them that they are dying, that they're actually going to be extinct at some point. that the world is actually snuffing them out. And what wouldn't you do to stop from being snuffed out? I mean, this is obviously a perversion of genetics and reality. But when that kind of, it starts to bake people's worldview, when they start to see everything within that,

then very, very extreme acts of violence start to make sense. Definitely. And you were talking about sort of the analogies between the far right and the far left as is opposites of each other, but they mirror each other in certain ways as the center drops out. I think where the analogy, it breaks down in the sense that they're not similar, that they're just complete opposites, that they're perfect opposites of one another. And one sort of oppositional reality is that you never hear in the United States about communist or anarchists' terrorist attacks. You know, communists and anarchists aren't killing innocent people.

That's something almost exclusive to the far, far right. And so I think it's worth making that point over and over and over again. you never see left-wing terrorist attacks. There's really no comparison of those things. You know, anarchists and communists organize and believe in mass politics are connecting with working-class people. Like, random acts of violence play in no way into that ideologically. As opposed to the far right, which really is foundationally about violence.

It's about persecuting subgroups of people. Yep, absolutely. So I know that you've listed a lot of the, you know, the leaders and the factions on the far right. Can you talk about the specific factional splits on the far right? What are some of the biggest sectarian infighting scenes on the fascist right that we should be aware of?

I think one of the big ones is about optics after Charlottesville. Richard Spencer's mission in a lot of ways was to rehab white nationalism. He was going to make it sound intellectual, he was going to make it cultural, he wanted to build art, he wanted to have music, he wanted to

talk philosophy. He thinks his ideas are really important and very serious. And so he wanted to create what he called a meta-politics, basically reshaped the way people think so as to influence politics down the line. And this is a playbook that came from the European New Right in France that basically try to take kind of the theories of Antonio Gromsky and create kind of cultural revolution. And a lot of organizations have really kept up that mantle of Arctose publishing countercurrents They publish white national philosophers, esoterica, novels, things like that. And as it got shortened and it kind of merged with the troll culture of the Manosphere and Fortune and things like that,

it lost a great deal of that sense of intellectual persona. And in a lot of ways, it just kind of went open and upfront with its vulgar racism. and a lot of the popular alt-right websites now have dropped the academic tone entirely and are just kind of like in the gutter race hatred. And especially since what happened in Charlottesville, Charlottesville in August of 2017 was supposed to be sort of their coming-out party. This is who they are now. They've had this two years of growth and now they can stand on their own two feet.

That did not go well for them. And so now they're trying to establish how they go forward out of that. And a number of people are really pissed about the direction that the podcast and the Twitter trolls are going. And so there's a lot of splits over tone and perception. I think there's a lot of splits still happening over how to deal with anti-Semitism. Some of the older school kind of pre-Aulbright white nationalists, there is a contention of them that didn't actually share the same anti-Semitism. And the anti-Semitism has become very angry and virulent. along the all right. And so there's some splits along those lines. And I think there still

continues to be a split over what kind of tactics work and what kind of groups people should be working with. So on the one hand, you have the Matt Heimbach and traditionalist Workers Party crowd that's totally comfortable reaching out the skinhead gangs and the more traditional white supremacist American organizations that we know from the past. And then we have the Richard Spencer times and the identity Europa and otherwise they don't feel comfortable with that and actually think that's a really bad move and so there's a certain negotiation that's happening there as the alt-right is further marginalized from that kind of crossover community we're talking about you know as as as you know places like Breitbart actually want to further

get away from the open white nationalists they might actually spend more time with the more traditional clansman type but but right now there's the splits are happening happening about what their public persona is going to look like. You know, a really good example of this is on the right stuff, which is one of the most popular white nationalist blogs. It hosts the most popular white nationalist podcast, The Daily Shoa. They really, while they're incredibly vulgar and just filled with vile race hatred, they still try and prop themselves up as quote unquote anti-imperialists and, you know, for everyone's right to difference and that kind of thing. one of their paid staff people openly advocates exterminationism, basically to eradicate every black person in Africa.

There's confliction there, and it's one that's basically irreconcilable for them. And as before, they're going to pick one or the other, and I think that's where the two factions are going to be. The ones that still kind of use coded language, trying to appeal to areas of the left, and the ones that simply won't, and are just ready to be up front with their race hatred. Yeah, and the far right stealing from, stealing sort of verbiage from the left is a very old tradition on the far right. But how can leftists, is there any way that we can sort of exploit and widen these tensions? Do you have any thoughts on how we can maybe sort of play on their weaknesses here and sort of create more and more divisions?

Yeah, yeah, I think for one, making them play by their own rules is really important. if they're going to make arguments about anti-imperalisms like that, holding them to those standards and showing the exploiting the fact that what they say is antithetical to that, I think the fact they have a steady stream, it's almost like a verbal diarrhea coming out of them in terms of content, podcast, blogs, like that, that's easy to hang them on because they are not subtle and they're not clever. They're very open about what their intentions are. Absolutely.

And so we can use that to highlight any of those differences. that basically create persona non grata between them. And I think we should exploit that as much as possible. You know, their behavior has gotten them kicked off of almost every media platform. And so as institutions that have been running for a few years, like, for example, countercurrents publishing, the white nationalist book publisher, as they lose financial mechanisms that keep them alive because of the behavior of other white nationalists, that I think is something a point to exploit. But I think more than anything, though, is that what we need to do, their splits will happen regardless of us. I think what the priority in a lot of it should be is exposing them in every specific instance and created targeting campaigns to go after individuals, organizations, and public appearances. Because if we are successful at that, that will actually foster the divisions internally, as well as create good public campaigns.

Right. Yeah, something stuck out to me. I don't know if people are still familiar, but there was a vice documentary that came out after Charlottesville. And it was very much, you know, in the face of the white nationalist and sort of tracking along with them and listening to how they talk. And one of the things they said that it really, really stuck with me is they basically said in so many words that the left, because of our activism, because of how organized we are outside of our anti-fascist work, that we've built up a certain sort of solidarity. And we've built up trust networks amongst us. And the right doesn't have that. So when you had everybody all different weirdos on the far right coalesce in the unite the right rally in Charlottesville, you really had a lot of people that, you know, if you force them to stay together and talk long enough, they will start splitting up and fighting amongst themselves. And that's something that the far left should sort of think about. Like we have the solidarity, we have the organizing, and we have the networks of trust, and maybe that is our strong point. And maybe we should not replicate the sectarian infighting on the far right, but rather find ways of comradly disagreement while building together

and fighting common enemies. What do you think about that? Yeah, absolutely. You know, you can't listen to white nationalist podcast and not hear them talking about leftist literature, left books, left organizing strategies, because they don't have them of their own. They don't have the same history of actual organizing. Their consciousness isn't developed through struggle. and so in a lot of ways what they what they've tried to build and they've done it unsuccessfully is stuff that actually is pretty commonly understood of the left it should be better understood for example not punching left they talk a lot about not punching right so for example the slightly more moderate right people not you know singling out the neo nazi types I think you know the fact that we are able the left has has created ideological factions out of action organizing gives us the ability to respond to them and to counterorganize in really mass ways. The other fact that we actually have access to mass people and mass movements, the left historically has mass movement organizing, and the far right simply doesn't have it.

And so I think, like, we look at failures. They come from a lot of inexperience and inability to overcome those basic things that actually we've been dealing with for 100 years already. they're actually coming to it for the first time and not being able to quite figure it out the alt-right specifically didn't come out of organizing it came out message boards and right now is the time and when it's trying to move from the online space

to the physical world and do real world organizing and they're just frankly really fucking bad at it and so we actually have a lot of advantages to take them on that way we have the example when they're organizing all campuses we actually have campus organizations that already have solidarity that we can build on to confront it. We actually have constituencies that are being affected by this to mobilize

with. And we already have historic ideas of how this works. We shouldn't abandon that. We should mobilize and radicalize that. Absolutely. Yeah, that's extremely important. And I hope everyone listening takes that to heart and really internalizes that because that is our strength. We need to play to our strengths right now more than ever. But let's go ahead and move on to Trump and his presidency and the relations there. How did the fascist right view Trump during the election and during his inauguration, and has that perspective of him changed over the first year of his presidency? Are these people still loyal to him, or has he angered and disappointed them? Angered and disappointed some of them. I wouldn't say loyal in any meaningful way. Because they

never really were, they at least had enough kind of self-sense to know that he's not fully on board with their platform. But again, he works like TPUSA, at Turning Point USA. He's an easy crossover vehicle that helps mainstream their narratives. So, for example, in 2016, Hammer Skin Nation, which is like the largest skinhead organization in the country, was trying to hold a concert in Brooklyn. They try to do this every year. And so when looking at some of the bands, people who were counter organizing them, were trying to communicate with people in the community and saying, like, hey, there's these Islamophobic bands that are going to be playing, because that was kind of the dominant theme from some of their

music. So it was like, okay, there's these a lot of Islamophobic bands that were coming into your neighborhood, let's counter-organize this. And people actually really motivated by that because at the same time, the number one presidential candidate was saying the exact same things. He had really mainstreamed Islamophobia

and made it really safe for Islamophobic organizing. And so in that way, he's really useful to them, even if he doesn't, you know, come on board with their full program. Even if he doesn't care about their program, he's useful. And so, as, as, As his presidency has gone on, there's things that they really strongly disagree with, like his approach to Syria or his antagonism with North Korea, the things they obviously do like, the ongoing commitment to, like, draconian deportation policy, to racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and especially to soft peddling how we talk about white nationalists after Charlottesville.

So there's things they really like about it, but frankly, they know at this point that he's not going to be. a dependable ally in any really meaningful sense. And so it's really a hands-off approach. Some organizers like Matt Heimbach and the traditionalist workers' party have been so critical of them, but they really can't get on board with them again. Part of that comes from their heavy commitment to kind of left language about capitalism and Trump's capitulation to Capitol and Wall Street on the one hand. And I think those are divisions that are happening there.

But, you know, Trump has been really committed to victimizing folks of color and immigrants. And so as much as he does that, they love it. Going back to the analogy theme that we've kind of been bouncing back and forth with throughout this interview, would Bernie Sanders have, if he would have won the presidency, would he have played that sort of carryover role that Trump plays on the far right? Is it worth at least putting the very minimal energy into voting for a candidate like Bernie? just to have the Overton window shifted slightly to the left so that then we can take advantage of it on our end? I think it's debatable. I think the difference is that there's a large faction of the radical left, the largest factions of the radical left, that don't see any point allying with electoral politics.

And the radical right, the revolutionary right, the other hand, isn't quite as consistent about that. And so, I mean, you know, I come out of a tradition that sees politics coming from the community level and from community resistance and not trying to connect with that, whether or not voting for someone like Sanders is helpful on that, maybe on a minor scale. I think the Bernie Sanders campaign did some for shifting the conversation, but again, it also took a lot of that energy and focused it back into kind of dead end and electoral work. and that I think in the long run I really would have liked to see go directly into the community level but I do think there is a certain analogy to it but I also think that like a Bernie Sanders presidency

probably wouldn't have motivated the militant left quite as much as Trump motivates the far right extremely well said yeah I totally agree so Trump as you said has clearly emboldened and energized the far right throughout his campaign and his presidency but what do you think would have been the far rights reaction if say Hillary would have won and would

Would it have been different at all if Bernie would have won? Oh, yeah. I mean, it would have been a blow, a massive blow to them. So one of the things about Trump, and this goes back to the concept of metapolitics, is it's about changing Overton windows, it's about changing what's acceptable to talk about. It's about changing what the feeling of the social status quo is. And if, you know, someone other than Trump basically had won, that would have something.

sent the message to the GOP that right populism, that this kind of reactionary stuff actually doesn't work as well as they thought it did. And they would have gone back to focus groups and, you know, and focused market testing and that kind of thing. And at the same time, that crossover connection, that Trump Republican that the alt-right so desperately wants to recruit from would start to dissipate a bit. It wouldn't have a central figure to organize a route. And so it actually probably would have been pretty destabilizing to their ability to organize, not just in terms of policy, but really in terms of social acceptability. So I actually think there would have been a significant difference.

And the question is how much practical politics would have been different, you know, how would that affect people on a social and economical in terms of policy? That's more debatable. Yeah, it's counterfactuals, but it is interesting. I know that there was a lot of talk on online forums about, you know, the far right being armed and taking to the streets of Hillary won because in their conspiratorial worldview, Hillary's winning would have been synonymous with a rigged game. And so I do kind of wonder if the far rights reaction would have been militant and angry in that direction if she had one.

But, of course, nobody can say for sure. Yeah, I'm sure we would have seen some form of attack. I don't think it would have happened on a mass scale. We haven't seen that tipping point with that part of the radical right. And when I say radical right in that context, I don't mean the explicitly fascist right, but I mean the kind of militia movement, populist, right, that kind of blends over with white naturalists, but isn't always a part of it. We haven't seen that kind of mass act of violence from them quite yet in response to something like that. But again, even when Trump won, he still stoked this idea that the system was rigged against him.

So it was almost as if win or lose, he's continuing that sense of pushing that conspiratorial narrative that could lead someone to one of those spontaneous acts. Yeah, good point, good point. So we're kind of getting close to 60 minutes, so a couple more questions here. But I do want to be very, very clear about the far right's intention. So if in some way the far right were able to grab a hold of real power in this country and hypothetically we're able to suppress the institutional checks and balances of the system, what sort of United States do they envision? What would a U.S. ran entirely by the far right look like, in your opinion?

Oh, it would be a whites-only space. They're really clear about this. It would be an ethno state, one that's defined racially. That would mean mass deportations of all non-white peoples, especially Jews and anywhere from the Middle East that would be priorities. There would be a real heavy, heavy focus on a social authoritarianism, both through state institutions that there's social ones that would do like an open assault on gender non-conforming people, on queer people, putting women back in the home, setting up. really, really old-school versions of social normalcy. This would also be instituted. But I think the other thing is that when you see these movements grow and become more established,

they become even more victimizing. And so they would eventually be focused on southern European people, on Slavic-derived people. There would be debates internally about how far to go with the patriarchal marriage. And so it would continue to move its way to the right. But I think institutionally, you would see mass arrests, mass deportation, and a huge scale of violent persecution. The other thing is that these states really require, and this is not just a fascist state,

I mean, this is really, in a lot of ways, just capitalist states in general, require a participation of a certain vigilante, non-state actor as well. And so there would be a really heavy encouragement to basically police your own communities, to keep them white, to keep out anyone that's outside of a very narrow view of citizenry.

And so that would be systematically encourage all across the population, which would be a large part of the violence. It wouldn't just come from the police and from state actors. It could be coming from neighbors as they were further radicalized and something like that. Yeah. Do you think it would rise to the, I mean, if it was able to rise to the level of a Nazi Germany, if they could make that happen? I mean, would they? Oh, absolutely. Because the fact is that when you create such a hyper radicalized core on the far right,

like the people that we would see in that state we can't even see them yet they would be more radical than what we have now that's what happened historically in Germany and that's what would happen in this case. Someone like Richard Spencer would be the moderate because there would be a large pool that would continue that feeling of revolution of a revolutionary government that has to act that has to do something that feeds people's impulses

which at that point would be ones that were kind of like racial anger and animus and we continue to act in ways of violence and so as we're seeing for example the language used to be for decades was this one of separation oh, we need to be rid of people of color, we'll just separate from them and everyone will be peaceful.

That's actually even starting to change as they get bigger, the movement gets bigger and it's becoming more openly genocidal. I don't think there's any reason to believe that if they took state power, they wouldn't enact really mass-scale genocide. Yeah, I think that's important for people to really understand and really take in.

But let's go ahead and finish off this interview with a couple questions about how we can fight back. So in all of your research into the fascist right and those who fight them, What do you think are the best ways that the left can effectively fight back and undermine their efforts to organize and recruit? Yeah, all hands on deck. There's a lot of debate about which is the most effective organizational strategy, which tactics work and this and that. The number one thing is for participation and organizing at all levels.

I think we need to look at where the most pressing areas are, what communities are being affected the most. And to begin to target and create coalitions there, we need to find what institutions and resources we have. So, for example, we already have community organizations. We have labor unions. We have other organizations that have resources and organizational might and a currency with people. We need to start mobilizing them. We need to find out what's unique about those organizations and what they can do in this fight and create coordinated action. A good example of this is college campuses.

And the reason I said that I don't want to focus too heavily on college campus. But it's happening really heavily with recruitment. We're seeing like TPUSA, Identity Europe, and other groups recruiting very heavily in college campuses. There's a big focus, especially at state schools, to hold events where people like Richard Spencer can speak. But also what we have on campus is we have diverse student groups. We already have revolutionary groups on there. We have labor unions. And we can create coalition actions that actually refuse space that confront all of their attempts at organizing and recruiting and block them.

And so we actually have the tools already As long as we can mobilize as many people as possible So I personally think that before looking at what the most optimal thing is Is getting as many people into the organizations that exist now And filling the gaps that we're seeing Yeah, personally, so after Charlottesville We're part of an organization here called the Nebraska Left Coalition And after Charlottesville

We had this big sort of rally in Omaha Like almost 1,000 people showed up in this big park and you know we had speakers and I was one of the speakers and I really tried to appeal not not to confront and sort of denigrate the progressive liberals but to really try to appeal to their sense of moral conscious and bring them over to the left at least on this issue so I gave a speech and then after that we had a couple other events where we went to like a liberal women's group and talked to them about the fascist threat we went to a sort of an academic sciencey reason you know sort of organization and talked to them

them about the threat of fascism. So my personal strategy has been to try to reach those liberals and try to make it very clear about what we're dealing with, draw on the history there, and try to bring them over, at least on this one issue, because I truly do think that when it comes to fighting fascism, as you say, we need all hands on deck, and that includes creating a popular front against fascism, and we need allies wherever we can take them. Do you think that's a correct way to think about that? absolutely absolutely you know one of the things is that the impulse I think is to immediately confront liberals on their unwillingness to support military anti-fascism but in reality what we need is a certain really just communicate to them about tolerating that and creating some kind of coordinating actions so that if they're participating mass actions they don't necessarily have to participate in and whatever they disagree with but being there actually creates that united front and actually creates support for the militant actions as well. So like, for example, out here in Portland, on June 4th, there was a big action

after there was a stabbing, an Islamophobic attack on the train. Patriot Prayer was doing another one of their actions, except 4,000 people came out. There was a militant faction on one side. There was a more moderate faction led by the international socialist organization on the other side, and then there was a labor faction on a third side. All those things aren't the same, but they do work in concert in that event. They create that united mass action, and each one kind of supports each other. And so I think that kind of level of coordination, even though it's not perfect, I think that's the kind of thing we need.

Absolutely. So what are some, now that we've touched on what we need to do, what are some mistakes that you think the left makes in their fight against the far right, if any, and what should we avoid doing? Well, one of the things, I think there's this basically full frontal attack on Amtifa and media outlets. I think that there's been a response on the left to, like, worry a heavy bit about optics when actually I think it's really disingenuous the language being used this is

almost exclusively far-right blogs and stuff that are defining this and I don't think we need to double back and punch left to everyone people who are doing that organizing work I think another one of them is to think that we have to reinvent the wheel a lot of groups actually have been doing this for a really long time and have a lot of insights even if it's not exactly the kind of organizing you want to do and so there needs to be a lot of learning from people that have been doing this for a long time I think the other thing is is the problem of not really understanding what fascism is and essentially calling all things bad fascism.

And that creates a real problem of targeting enemy. You know, institutional violence and racism is awful, and we should be working against it. You know, prison industrial complex. We need to be counter organizing that. You know, corporate consolidation of wealth. We need to be on the ground organizing that. But that doesn't make all those things fascism.

Fascism is just one thing that rises in certain times and you can confront it on its own terms. otherwise it won't be confronted effectively. And so we really need to parse that out, be honest about what it is, and be willing to call it what it is. Yeah, perfectly said. When I talk to liberals,

whether it's in speeches or one-on-one individual talks, the two things I make sure I do is define fascism and then also to say, you know, we support a diversity of tactics. You may not want to dress in all black and hit the streets,

and that's totally fine. But you have other roles that you can play. You can engage in that call campaign to the university who has that Nazi and you can talk to your liberal friends about how, hey, we might not agree with the Marxist and the anarchists, but they're on our side against these white supremacists, and at least that's something that we should support. And so I try to make that very clear to liberals.

And in my experience, they're very open to those ideas. Yeah, yeah. I think it's also important to back away from this notion that there actually has been anti-fascist violence. In reality, what we're having is anti-fascist defense of marginalized and attacked communities. And that's something that all factions of the left should be really good. cognizant of and be supportive of in a certain sense. You know, if you're talking to

church groups, talking about the fact that they're defending, they need to defend their friends and neighbors from people that want to hurt though. And that's really what's happening here. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Shane, so much for coming on. It's been extremely enlightening. I think this conversation is very, very, very important. And I hope a lot of people take away the sort of tactical edge to this conversation because we have a long fight ahead of us. These monsters aren't going away overnight. We have a lot of work cut out for us. So I appreciate all the work you do in highlighting these realities, all the on the ground you work you do organizing, and we're honored to have you on the podcast.

Before we let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find your work? Yeah, you can find it at shaneberley.net on Twitter at Shane underscore Burley 1. And I write for a lot of places truth out in these times, Jacob and other places pretty regularly. So I'm always around there. And you can get my book at aprakech.crest. All right, thank you so much for coming on. Keep up the good fight.

All right, thanks a lot for having me. Put it there, boy, and we'll show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do. Well, I'm going to tell you fascists, you may be surprised people in this world are getting organized. You're bound to lose You fascist bound to lose Woo Oh, you fascist bound to lose

I said All of you fascists bound to lose Yes All of your fascist bound to lose You found to lose You fascist bound to lose There's people of every nation Marching side the side

Marching across the fields Where a million fascists you're bound to lose New cowardice You flash is bound to lose All of you're FACCH and bound to loose Yes

All of you faces bound to loose Yes I said All of you нож You're bound to loose You're bound to lose

You're faces found to lose I said All of you fash is bound a loose Yes All of you fascists Found to lose Yes Oh, oh, you're precious bound to lose.

You found a lose, your precious bound to lose.