In this episode, Rolf talks about the rise of the term "fascism" in the modern political discourse, and why he thinks it's dangerous and why we need to get rid of it. He also talks about why the use of hyperbolic language by the left is dangerous, and how we should stop using it.
00:09:51.180Everything about social order is fascism, which is a pretty dumb game for the left to play.
00:09:54.720If you keep telling the average person that any desire for a normal, safe, prosperous life is fascist, at some point they're just going to believe you, right?
00:10:03.700Like they're going to be like, well, then that sounds pretty good.
00:10:06.320Of course, they're really counting on the fact that they've turned that word into a synonym for evil and Satan to scare people off of it, right?
00:10:13.480They're like, well, we can always push this button.
00:10:15.760There's never any cost to pushing this button because we've designated this word to basically mean evil.
00:10:22.880And so if you're on this side, then basically you can be killed.
00:10:26.880We can normalize violence against you.
00:10:29.320That's the way the left has set this up.
00:10:30.740And then they just pile everything they don't like, including like having a functioning society, having a normal family, not hating your people, your history, your tradition.
00:10:40.440They pile all that under fascism and then just say, we've banned this, right?
00:10:43.860Because fascism is banned from our society.
00:10:45.580And ultimately, I want to address this because this anti-fascist crusade has become a very dangerous thing in our society because so many people were scared about the return of fascism.
00:10:57.840We now have this anti-fascism crusade, which justifies literally anything, including the destruction of the family, destruction of the church, the destruction of safety in our society, all in the name of anti-fascism.
00:11:10.360We have entire blocks of terrorists who basically operate unopposed by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security just because they call themselves anti-fascist, right?
00:11:21.100And they're obviously aligned with the regime.
00:11:23.440They get special favors from the regime.
00:11:25.760They're allowed to do violence because they're doing it on behalf of this anti-fascist crusade.
00:11:30.640And so I think it's really important for those left and right to understand what fascism really is because even those on the right are buying into this.
00:11:41.440It's very harmful to our political future.
00:11:45.700So that said, let's dig into what fascism actually is.
00:11:49.820Now, I want to say before we get started, I'm pulling the majority of this from the scholarship of Paul Gottfried, who's been on the show several times.
00:11:57.980But if you would like to get a better understanding of this topic and do it in a much more formal and academic way, then you can check out his books on both fascism and anti-fascism.
00:12:07.500They're both great, explained kind of from all angles what's going on here.
00:12:11.960And so that resource is there for you if you better want to understand what's going on.
00:12:17.120So let's begin on what fascism actually is.
00:12:22.240So first, we need to understand that fascism is not just authoritarianism, okay?
00:12:29.380Authoritarianism has existed since the beginning of mankind.
00:12:32.700It is a system in which, you know, the individual rights and these things are not considered.
00:12:39.920And, you know, you have a heavy hand, a wide latitude of powers coming from the governing authority.
00:12:45.520That has been around since the dawn of time.
00:12:47.920So just because something is authoritarian does not make it fascist.
00:13:14.600There have been right-wing monarchs that were not fascism.
00:13:18.260Fascism is not just right-wing authoritarianism.
00:13:21.420I also want to make it clear that there should be a distinction on what countries that were really fascist.
00:13:27.880Again, under the scholarship of Paul Gottfried, he points to the fact that really Italian fascism is only the only true fascism that existed.
00:13:36.760A lot of people think of Hitler and the Nazis as the primary exponents of fascism, but that's actually not the case.
00:13:45.260National socialism had a lot of aesthetic overlap with Italian fascism, and they obviously allied during World War II.
00:13:53.860So many people simply lumped them together, but they are not the same thing.
00:13:58.080In fact, national socialism takes some big liberties, ultimately, with Italian fascism.
00:14:06.060And so these things, you know, they're not entirely unrelated, but they are not the exact same thing.
00:14:11.580And dictators like Franco and others were also not fascist.
00:14:15.760Salazar, these people were not directly fascist.
00:14:18.200Again, some of the aesthetic qualities, the, yes, authoritarian, you know, for sure, but that is not just a synonym for fascism.
00:14:26.800I also want to make it clear as we get into the different aspects of what fascism is, that one similarity does not make something fascist.
00:14:36.200A lot of people are going to say, well, one of these aspects does exist in our society, and therefore our society is fascist.
00:14:46.540Just because, you know, cats are four-legged animals, you know, Socrates is also an animal of some kind, and therefore he is a four-legged cat.
00:14:58.560Like, that is not a valid syllogism, just because, you know, they have some overlap, you know, they have one feature in common, does not make them the same thing.
00:15:07.600So you are going to notice that some of these things do exist in our society, but simply because, you know, there's a corporate economy or there's, you know, the silencing of opposition does not mean that all of a sudden you necessarily have fascism.
00:15:25.260The first thing we need to grasp is that Paul Godfrey and many other scholars recognize that fascism is a specific movement in a specific context.
00:15:35.800It is born out of a reaction to modernity, a large transition in societies, a revolutionary aspect of the left, and a big shift in economics, okay?
00:15:48.500So when we look at this, we need to understand that fascism is born of a specific time, and it is very particular to that time.
00:15:56.520It is not a universal ideology in the way that we think of ideologies today.
00:16:01.580It's not liberalism or communism in its ambitions.
00:16:07.440It's not looking to, you know, necessarily spread its way of understanding into all other areas.
00:16:14.020Obviously, guys like Hitler did try to, you know, conquer other nations necessarily.
00:16:20.400Eventually, Mussolini did this as well to, you know, at least he tried in Ethiopia, but that was not initially, you know, the fascist understanding.
00:16:28.940And so we need to understand that this is particular to a time and a place and a history.
00:16:34.060It's a reaction to certain realities involved.
00:16:37.280We should also recognize that the two big forces really in fascism were Benito Mussolini, the eventual leader of Italy, and Giovanni Gentelli, who is probably the most well-known intellectual proponent of fascism.
00:16:52.040So it's not like we have to guess at, like, where fascism comes from or what theories are.
00:17:14.300It's grounded in a specific context, and we need to put it in that context if we want to understand why our world today is not fascist in any real sense.
00:17:24.040We're going to get deeper into what fascism is.
00:17:26.280We're going to go over these different bullet points.
00:17:28.600But before we do, guys, let me tell you a little bit about ISI.
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00:19:12.360I would like to make it clear again here before we get started that I do not like fascism.
00:19:18.160I think that it's stupid that we constantly have to denounce this.
00:19:21.560I'm going to talk more and more about why this ritual of denunciation is a failure.
00:19:26.960But people are going to immediately take this stream out of context.
00:19:30.340So just at the top, I want to make it clear.
00:19:32.500I oppose the system of government, not just because of the historical context or whatever, the necessary denouncements of the post-war consensus.
00:19:40.220But because of specific doctrinal differences I have with it, ultimately fascism is a progressive modernization of society to the extent in which I think any level of authoritarianism is in any way justified.
00:19:53.840It would be of the throne and altar variety.
00:19:56.100It would have nothing to do with this more modernized understanding, this managerial ideology that ultimately that is fascism.
00:20:04.540So I have problems with this ideology.
00:20:06.780This is not a stream in defense of this.
00:20:08.400In fact, it's specifically going to point out the problems with this.
00:20:11.800But my problems will not be that of the left.
00:20:13.880And more importantly, the problems will be specific to the ideology.
00:20:17.520It will not just be because I'm supposed to not like this thing.
00:20:26.300So what are some of the pillars of fascism?
00:20:30.440So the first one would be its historical context as an opposition to leftist destruction of tradition.
00:20:37.580So you have to understand that in many scenarios, this is a reaction to communism.
00:20:43.920In fact, in all scenarios, it's a reaction to communism and the wider leftist revolution against, you know, classical identity and tradition in the nation.
00:20:53.660Now, ironically, it itself will replace that tradition, which is why I have a problem with it.
00:20:58.580But this is what what it is initially supposed to do.
00:21:02.480The reason that it tends to have a lot of support in, say, rural areas and in middle class areas is that these are areas that are still clinging on to tradition.
00:21:13.680That don't like the revolutionary aspects of the left that tend to be very cosmopolitan, usually concentrated in urban areas and cities.
00:21:22.480It usually has a revolutionary subject that is, you know, fighting against these traditional hierarchies and, you know, the type of structures that middle class people tend to rely on to maintain their way of life and their culture.
00:21:36.880And so first thing you have to understand is that this is a reaction to to that.
00:21:43.480Now, this immediately I want to make this clear for right wing people who throw around this and are like, oh, the left is the real fascist.
00:22:03.580The Dems are the real racists that, you know, Kamala Harris is the real fascist.
00:22:07.240And we'll point to elements of Kamala Harris's policies that do share one or two pieces of overlap.
00:22:12.900But like we said at the beginning, that is a failure of identity metaphysics to say, well, it shares one one aspect that is the same.
00:22:20.560And therefore, it is that thing that is simply a logical fallacy that does not work.
00:22:25.560And throwing this around on the right just does not help you.
00:22:28.660OK, and we'll go into deeper at the end of this, why it's so important for the right to stop throwing this word around.
00:22:34.540But to be clear, just off the bat, this does not work when you call the left fascist for the simple reason that it is by definition an opposition to the leftist revolutionary spirit, right?
00:22:49.080Like you simply cannot have that as part of any kind of left wing movement.
00:22:58.680Now, you could say, oh, well, you know, maybe on the right you could you could see this now, you know, because there is the left wing revolution is going on.
00:24:36.680But I don't think he's planning to end, you know, other opposing political parties.
00:24:41.100I don't think he's planning to ban elections or anything.
00:24:45.160Even if some people would prefer that, that that's just not what he's going to be doing.
00:24:49.700You know, the left's fever dream is that's what he wants.
00:24:52.400But that's really just a projection on what they want.
00:24:55.380The next thing is an artificial ethnic ideology.
00:25:00.120So important thing to understand that we're going to get into a little bit of the weeds here.
00:25:05.220But that's critical to understand the differences, especially here between fascism and national socialism.
00:25:10.080So think about Italy at the time period where fascism is kind of emerging.
00:25:17.340Italy had been trying to unify in one way or another for a very long time.
00:25:22.300Machiavelli's dream back in the 1500s with the unification of Italy.
00:25:26.300But that was just not in the cards for Italy for a very long time.
00:25:29.640In fact, prior to World War I, many of these states simply had not unified.
00:25:34.340Nationalism was still a revolution in progress.
00:25:36.860Many states still existed under imperial or monarchical structure.
00:25:41.660The idea of the nation state as kind of this singular organizing principle for all political entities simply did not exist at the time.
00:25:49.720And so unified national identities were relatively new, especially in Italy, which had had its unification around 1860, I believe, with Garibaldi.
00:26:01.100And so a unified Italian identity was still relatively like it was almost within a generation or two that this thing had even been created.
00:26:10.400And it was still not really unified at that time.
00:26:14.300And so one of the functions of fascism and communism later on, but we'll get to that in a second, was this attempt to modernize and unify, right?
00:26:26.160One of the things I talk about in my book, The Total State, is the dominance of managerialism.
00:26:30.900And one thing I'm going to explain here is that fascism, communism, and liberalism, as we understand it now, all eventually become this managerial ideology.
00:26:39.740And so both fascism and communism are attempting to unify, centralize, and again, FDR's liberalism also does this, the national identity into one.
00:26:51.600And in the case of communism, an international identity.
00:26:55.320But the idea is to centralize production and consumption, centralize this top-down understanding of the nation and the way it can be managed.
00:27:03.920This happens across all of these ideologies, is James Burnham's thesis in the managerial revolution.
00:27:09.640And also, in many ways, it's just a way to modernize.
00:27:13.140Many of these nations were behind in the industrial revolution.
00:27:19.760And so a way to do this, a way to kind of create this identity that allows you to unify everybody is to create this artificial ethnic ideology.
00:27:29.880Now, there are plenty of ethnosis inside Italy.
00:27:33.820And today, because of its existence as a more unified whole for a while, there's probably a larger Italian identity.
00:27:40.100Though, ironically, actually not that ironically, we would kind of predict this.
00:27:44.480Many, it's people outside of Italy, of Italian heritage, that tend to have an Italian identity.
00:27:50.360People inside Italy today still have a very fragmented identity.
00:27:54.340There is a more unified national identity.
00:27:56.580But at the time of Mussolini, this is largely synthetic, right?
00:28:01.860And you can say the same thing when it comes to Germany.
00:28:05.080You know, Germany was a relatively new state.
00:28:07.300Now, again, national socialism and fascism are not one-to-one.
00:28:59.900It is a significant distinction when it comes to understanding these political ideologies.
00:29:03.820Also, fascism is not necessarily anti-Semitic.
00:29:07.160In fact, there was a large contingent of Jewish fascists inside the Italian party until they were eventually expunged once mostly kind of eventually paired up with Hitler.
00:29:19.800But that was not a core doctrine of fascism.
00:29:23.600That is not necessarily something that was part of it.
00:29:26.480And so these are ways in which these ideologies depart, even though there is a certain level of overlap.
00:29:33.640National socialism is most assuredly a derivative of fascism, but it comes heavily with a German flavor focused much more on race, focused much more on anti-Semitism, features of the occult and that kind of iconography that were part of more of a Hitlerian understanding of this.
00:29:51.300So, again, that might just be in the weeds for most people, but it does matter when we're just throwing around a political ideology that is actually very specific to a time and place and a nation.
00:30:02.100Remember, fascism is built on nationalism, meaning it has a specific national character.
00:30:08.600Italian fascism cannot be exported to Germany and it can not be exported to Spain or the United States.
00:30:16.980You can think of someone like Oswald Mosley in England, who's the fascist leader in England.
00:30:23.820It has a very different understanding.
00:30:25.660His was not racialized for the most part.
00:30:28.560And so there's, again, just a very different understanding of what that is.
00:30:32.500Some of the failures of fascism in England had to do with the fact that Mosley did try to export some of the Italian aspects that just didn't fit into English culture.
00:30:41.060And so that's why I'm saying this, you can't have this idea that fascism is this eternal thing that exists across societies and perpetuates itself well in like a hundred years or whatever, almost after its inception, because it's specific to a time.
00:32:12.720There have been plenty of dictators and others throughout history that have silenced their opponents.
00:32:17.280Our democratic governments are currently silencing and eliminating their political opponents and trying to make it illegal for them to exist in the political environment.
00:32:26.460So this is not somehow unique to fascism.
00:32:45.160Another big one is the corporatist economy.
00:32:47.900So, again, you need to understand the context in which fascism is taking place.
00:32:52.400The Industrial Revolution has radically changed the economic production model across all of, you know, kind of more advancing societies.
00:33:00.820This has created huge social upheaval, massive disruption.
00:33:05.200And the way that this is being handled in these countries is different, but they all have to handle it.
00:33:10.160They all have to get this process under control and have it serve the ends of the nation once again.
00:33:15.280Nick Land outlines this in great detail when it comes to capital escape and the ways in which modern managerialism are really a human defense mechanism attempting to recapture aspects of the system and bring it back under human control.
00:33:30.460Both communism and fascism are a reaction to this process.
00:33:35.540Communism obviously tries to go ahead and just grab the means of production, make them public, make sure that, you know, that ownership is socialized.
00:34:11.620There is a corporatist understanding right now of economics that is coming out of many different nations across Western liberal democracies, these public-private partnerships, right?
00:34:22.340Like a lot of people point to the WEF and the desire for public-private partnerships.
00:34:27.500There is a certain corporatist economic aspect that is now coming into popularity across all of these systems.
00:34:34.920But I want to make it clear, this is also what FDR did, right?
00:34:38.480Like he also basically brought corporations.
00:34:41.920He brought private capital under the control of the government and made them bend the knee to the needs of the state, these kind of things.
00:34:51.900So if you want to say this is fascism, okay, well, then America has been fascist since the 1930s.
00:34:56.800The answer is actually that this is all part of managerialism.
00:35:01.600A lot of what people are noticing, both in communism and fascism, and why they think that our current liberal state is actually becoming communist or fascist, they use those words interchangeably, is what they're actually recognizing is aspects of managerialism, which decides that all aspects of human existence can be ordered top-down.
00:35:20.300Everything can be tweaked, everything can be brought under the control of experts and bureaucracies, everything can be managed, there doesn't need to be an invisible hand, there doesn't need to be an organic understanding of the needs of the people, we can define the needs of the people, we can define the economy, we can force it all to work together under managerialism.
00:35:36.300So a lot of people will point to the corporatist economy that is coming out of many nations right now and say, well, that means it's fascism.
00:35:44.980Again, I understand it, you're right, there's one aspect of overlap there.
00:35:48.380Maybe there's even multiple aspects of overlap, but most of these corporatist economies are increasingly globalist, right?
00:35:54.060They are trying to extend into a global network.
00:35:56.500So again, that immediately disqualifies them from being fascist.
00:35:59.960They simply do not check one of the necessary and critical boxes to have fascism.
00:36:05.380And again, this is a historical reaction in a specific time.
00:36:09.780So when you try to extrapolate it out to a wider ideology, especially when it is particular and nationalistic, you're going to fail.
00:36:17.700You can say, oh, well, there's an aspect of fascism that everyone kind of fell into, and that's pretty obviously true.
00:36:54.720Well, the answer is it's managerial, but people don't have that language.
00:36:58.240They're just using these dead ideas that haven't really functioned for a long time.
00:37:03.200And that's why we get the level of confusion that we do.
00:37:06.300Again, I know this seems pedantic to break this down at this granular level, but I want you to understand that our failure to grasp that these political ideologies are dead brings us to a point where we're screaming at each other about aspects of our current reality.
00:37:20.020That mimics some aspects of these previous political ideologies, but ultimately leads us to confusion.
00:37:27.200We don't understand what our political situation is because we don't understand context and the reality of these political ideologies, what their historical significance is and why they're no longer operating in the real world.
00:37:39.340And finally, I want to hit on an aspect that I really disagree with when it comes to fascism, is that it's ultimately a secular progressivism or a pagan synthesis with antiquity.
00:37:52.180You'll notice that a lot of kind of the fascism, you know, Italian fascism and then the like national socialism that's adjacent to fascism is focused on synthesizing with antiquity, right?
00:38:06.820Whether we're the Italians or the Germans, we're aping a lot of the iconography of the Roman Empire.
00:38:12.140We're bringing back many of the ideas that we are, you know, kind of tied to the blood of these ancient pagan people.
00:38:19.100And so in many ways, fascism is really trying to bring back this and synthesize it with the modern world, right?
00:38:26.140How can we modernize this pagan understanding?
00:38:28.840There is a level at which fascism will kind of work with the church, right?
00:38:33.600There's lip service to this, but ultimately these ideologies are actually anti-clerical.
00:38:40.660They don't want the church to have a significant influence in politics.
00:38:44.780They're in many ways an ideology that is trying to free the political from its ties to Christianity or to the church, to, you know, to their modern understanding of religion.
00:38:55.400And so it's trying to, it's very future oriented with the idea that perhaps we can synthesize a pagan identity and kind of orient it towards a dominant future, right?
00:39:06.940So this is something that is discarding the throne and altar stuff, right?
00:39:10.520Like if you look at even the Spanish Civil War and its different factions, you do have like the Falangists and then you have the Monarchists.
00:39:18.500You know, so you have the Fascists and you have the Monarchists.
00:40:05.340It can't be fascist because again, it doesn't check one of the critical boxes that aligns it with fascism along with the fact that fascism is dead.
00:40:13.020And that's really what I want to get to now.
00:40:18.540It's stupid to throw this around and call everything fascist because fascism is dead.
00:40:22.300This is also true, by the way, of communism and liberalism in any real sense.
00:40:26.020And you might say, but Orin, you know, we exist in this kind of liberal state or there is a certain level of communist rhetoric, Marxist rhetoric that is involved in wokeness and these kind of things.
00:40:39.720It's not that none of these ideas have survived.
00:40:42.240Some, a few of the fascist ideas have survived, but the ones that have survived in most part are ones that are useful to managerialism.
00:40:49.940And the, and so what we have now is not really any of these ideologies.
00:40:55.100They might have a certain level look, even I will make the joke that the left are kind of, you know, doing the gay race communism thing, but, but ultimately they're not, they're not true economic Marxist.
00:41:05.200They might believe in some level of redistribution, but they're not, they're, no one is at this point really talking about destroying the complete private ownership of anything.
00:41:14.340They're not going to completely seize the means of production.
00:41:18.420It might be more of this corporatist model, but it's not going to be true communism either.
00:41:22.580So like all of these political ideologies are dead, but the reason that I'm focusing on fascism as the really dead ideology is that we have turned it into this crusade, right?
00:41:34.400R.R. Reno and many others have talked about the post-war consensus.
00:41:38.240This idea that kind of after World War II, there's this never again mentality, many, much of it is tied to kind of like this sacralization of a Holocaust.
00:41:48.280And it is said that basically we have to avoid all authoritarianism, but we also need to avoid like all instances of greater connection to the good and beautiful and the true.
00:41:59.780Nothing about, you know, no powerful identities.
00:42:02.340Again, R.R. Reno calls it the strong gods.
00:42:04.780We have to banish the strong gods, all these strong affinities, these transcendent identities.
00:42:09.680They have to be done away with after World War II because like just terrible things happened.
00:42:14.100Hitler was a really bad guy and we have to banish all of these things.
00:42:17.860Now, I think that what we're seeing is that that kind of founding myth of our current order is allowing really terrible things to happen, right?
00:42:27.160The anti-fascists in the sense of, you know, these Antifa people are given carte blanche to do violence against people, to do things that, you know, no other, they're basically become paramilitary groups, right?
00:42:39.460And the ironic sense of basically being black shirts or brown shirts, but for the regime at this point.
00:42:45.000And this is really dangerous place to be again, Paul Godfrey points out in his excellent book on anti-fascism that this crusade has more or less enabled the government to do anything in its name by turning Hitler into Satan and fascism into the worst evil possible.
00:43:00.160We've kind of given a blank check to our governments to become as totalitarian as they want to be in the name of anti-fascism, right?
00:43:09.180An ideology that is dead and can't really hurt them ultimately, but it does allow them to have this kind of boogeyman that they can shake at any time.
00:43:17.540You know, some idiot in a uniform runs around, you know, holding up, you know, old flags from 1940s Germany.
00:43:24.900We end up in this scenario where they revivify this evil and they're able to, you know, summon all of their powers after it.
00:43:31.800And it's just this ongoing cycle of, you know, we can bring any weapon to bear on these enemies of freedom and democracy.
00:43:39.000We have to be, you know, constantly vigilant for the return of fascism, these kind of things.
00:43:43.680And this is why I want the right to stop throwing this term around.
00:43:50.640Two, because it is feeding into the ideological justification the left relies on to do its crusade, right?
00:43:59.600The anti-fascist crusade is the ideology of the left.
00:44:03.820This is the ultimate unifying idea that, you know, that all of these groups are coming together to defeat fascism.
00:44:09.360And we have to constantly be vigilant and anything and everything is legitimate.
00:44:13.020And anything you love, anything that you believe in that opposes the regime, anything like, you know, family, anything like faith, any of this stuff, well, that's just fascists.
00:44:35.120That's morally allowable because we have entered this anti-fascist crusade.
00:44:38.820And so when the right throws around fascism and says, oh, the WF is fascist or Kamala Harris is fascist or, you know, Barack Obama is a fascist.
00:44:47.940What they're saying is I am affirming your frame of fascism as the ultimate evil, you know, a terrible thing that we always have to watch out.
00:44:57.400It's the eternally, you know, we have to be eternally vigilant to stop this devil, the Satan.
00:45:02.860I'm affirming that frame and I'm just including my enemies in it.
00:45:16.520We have to stop, you know, the globalists because they are fascists and we are anti-fascists and therefore we will work against it.
00:45:22.340You notice that trick never works, right?
00:45:24.260These people never buy in to that narrative because ultimately they know that's just not the case.
00:45:29.180That's not what the word fascism is doing.
00:45:31.120It's enabling their crusade, their power, their frame, their worldview.
00:45:36.200And so the reason, again, I want to do this is not just to be, you know, really pedantic about the specific political implications or the historical context, though I am doing that to be clear.
00:45:46.560But also because I'm really tired of right-wingers reinforcing this frame and this narrative.
00:46:21.300I wanted just to kind of grasp what fascism really is.
00:46:24.480I wanted to grasp why it's important not to reinforce the left's frame, why people who are constantly using this language are doing it incorrectly and often maliciously,
00:46:33.920and how it's kind of become the ruling ideology, how it's enabled this crusade that is now allowing the government to do anything and everything and be as totalitarian as it wants in the name of fighting fascism, right?
00:46:45.600Like when they say we have to, you know, ban elections to save democracy and stop fascism, there's a reason that that word salad, in one sense, that word salad doesn't make any sense, right?
00:46:55.520Because all the terms aren't attached to any of the real definitions of those words.
00:46:59.800But if you understand the ideological and like kind of religious connotations to those phrases, then actually that word salad does make sense because it's all it's really saying is we need to kill the enemy so that we can continue to have our reigning power structure in control.
00:47:16.100That's really what that sentence means.
00:47:18.780And so you need to understand that when you use their language, you are empowering that frame.
00:47:23.400You are reinforcing that frame, and that is just terrible from a, you know, from a politics standpoint, from a moral standpoint, from a historical standpoint.
00:47:32.160It's just a failure to understand the situation you're in.
00:47:35.160All right, guys, let's go to the questions of the people here real quick.
00:51:38.960Because like Mussolini even said, like, we're not the collectivists, which I know sounds very weird to people who are thinking about even, you know, genuine fascism that existed in Italy.
00:52:33.920And, you know, I don't know if MAGA is goofier than libertarianism.
00:52:39.020I mean, you know, guy dancing around in kind of the, you know, the Trump hat with an elephant attached to it, guy dancing around in his underwear on stage.
00:52:46.700I guess you can make the decision there on who's goofier.
00:52:50.340I would say that MAGA is really liberal.
00:52:53.800It's liberal in a real sense, like a classical sense, not in a not in the sense of, you know, kind of the current explanation of progressivism.
00:53:03.040But even then, it's not classical liberalism either.
00:53:05.420It derives many different conclusions that like John Locke wouldn't derive.
00:53:10.280But it is closer to actual liberalism, which is ironic because most people call themselves liberal hate it.
00:53:16.140Even the people who call themselves classical liberals usually aren't fans of Donald Trump and MAGA.
00:54:53.300Ultimately, I think that managerialism does explain this better than most.
00:54:56.900But it is it is a synthetic identity for sure, to a certain extent, though, I suppose you could say that about many of the Chinese empires.
00:55:06.360I have to think on that a little more.
00:55:07.540But I still don't think that China really operates entirely as a fascistic understanding, again, if only because it's historically contingent and grounded mainly in Italian identity.
00:55:19.340So maybe you could say it shares several of these aspects, but I don't think it ultimately qualifies here.
00:55:28.960And then we have historian Kane says Gottfried is a great is great on fascism pain to there was an attempt for international fascism fell apart.
00:55:37.820Yeah, again, Gottfried identifies kind of that understanding that you can't really spread this because of its nationalistic character.
00:55:45.060Any idea of exporting this, I mostly kind of ends up with kind of these weird importations of customs and rituals and understandings that simply aren't natural to the place.
00:55:57.380You might see different aspects of this filter into different movements that are nationalistic, but ultimately they can't be specifically fascist because it really is grounded, again, in that historical cultural context that just doesn't exist everywhere.
00:56:09.700So it can't be accurately replicated across every different part of this.
00:56:14.960All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:56:17.200But thank you, everybody, for coming by.
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00:56:35.440And if you'd like to pick up my book, Talking About Managerialism, so you can better understand why these modern ideologies are not just one-to-one with, say, fascism or communism,
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00:56:49.280Thank you, everybody, for watching, and as always, I will talk to you next time.