Fascism Isn’t Coming — It’s Here. Now What?
Part of the Series
Movement Memos
“We’re not just contending with right-wing movements. We’re talking about movements that have reached one of their goals, which is to take over the government,” says organizer and grassroots strategist Ejeris Dixon. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Dixon and host Kelly Hayes discuss fascism, coalition building, and the compassion and shared knowledge we need to create safety and justice in these times.
Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about fascism, coalition building, and the compassion and shared knowledge we need to create safety and justice in these times. We will be hearing from my friend Ejeris Dixon about what our playbook for confronting fascism should look like during the second Trump administration. Ejeris is an organizer, writer, and strategist with 25 years of experience leading organizations within racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, transformative justice and economic justice movements. They are the Founding Director of Ejerie Labs where they focus on building movement strategy towards creating transformative futures and curtailing rising fascism. Ejeris also serves as the host of The Fascism Barometer, a podcast and learning hub that discusses the rise of fascism in the United States and how to organize against it.
If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help.
Truthout is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate media won’t touch in these times. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
[musical interlude]
KH: Ejeris Dixon, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Ejeris Dixon: Thank you so much for having me. I am happy to be back.
KH: How are you doing today, friend?
ED: Oh, I am, I think today I am a mix of both weary and fortified, which I know can sound like a contradiction. So weary because it’s only been a couple of months of this administration, but fortified because I also have had the opportunity to be in some spaces with some really good humans trying to find new ways to collaborate to address what’s happening. So there’s a part of that that’s also an emotional boost.
KH: I am likewise in a weary, but fortified mode. Today was a reading day for me. I did lots of hours of reading and research, which meant taking in a lot of information that can be hard to hold. But then I got to do my therapy exercises and take a walk and look at the lake. So, I’m feeling the weight of the moment, but also getting some of the rejuvenation I need to stay in the game. So I am grateful to have some space for healing and renewal, and also grateful to be in conversation with you today.
ED: Yeah. And thank you for having a whole day for reading and for taking in all that information because it’s hard to hold. I know myself it’s hard to hold. And it’s so needed, it really helps us build better strategy the more that we are trying to keep track.
KH: Well, you know, I am lucky to have friends like you, who I can discuss all of the mess and the ugliness with, because it is… entirely too much. And when we are holding a lot of painful information, we need people who can help us make sense of what we’ve learned, and maybe weave some of that knowledge into a strategy that can help us move forward. And you, of course, are one of the most strategic thinkers I know. Some of our listeners will remember you, and I am sure some know you from your podcast, your organizing, and your written work, but for those who don’t, can you tell us a bit about yourself and the work you do?
ED: Sure. I started in organizing and activism in my teens. And I came up through a lot of different movements. I’ve been connected to Black liberation movements, queer and trans anti-violence movements, abolitionist, prison and police abolitionist movements. And I have started organizations, led organizations, I’ve done movement security. And these days I do a lot of work through an organization I just started called Ejerie Labs, and I am the host — I have challenged myself to call myself a “movement meteorologist,” but I do try to give us a little bit of a forecast and a sense of the weather that we’re swimming in. And I do a lot of political education. And while I don’t do as much direct organizing, because I did organizing for I think 15 years without a break, I also advise and support a small crew of organizers around the country on how they can do work and make it more impactful and more strategic and also more sustainable.
KH: Well, I have a deep appreciation for the work you do, and for your podcast, The Fascism Barometer, where some of the movement-meteorologist work plays out. I also deeply appreciate our conversations about the state of the world, the threats we’re facing and what the hell we can do about them. Back in 2020, in the early days of this show, you and I recorded an episode where we talked about what our political playbook for the moment should look like. What do you think is different between now and then? How would you assess this moment, and what our playbook for 2025 should look like?
ED: Yeah. I remember, God, I mean we’ve had the conversations on the “Movement Memos” podcast and then just the conversations off. And my dear ones, I call you my “fascism homie” because we were both in our own ways, in our own places and in the organizing that we were both connected to, doing deep dives on fascism and what it meant for our movements I think as early as, like, 2016, 2017. So when we talked in 2020, it was right after I’d written a Truthout article around the Fascist Emergency Playbook. And then the question is, well, what’s our playbook? And in our previous convo, I’d lifted up a few things, which I think still stand. It’s just that they have more power now and they’re moving really fast. So the things that we discussed were the need for broad alliances, and many of them might be temporary, and emotionally and spiritually captivating vision for our organizing and movement work, the connection between deep relationships and solidarity across communities, multi-tactic and multi-year strategy, and a way of navigating pain, grief and discomfort.
And I think all of these still matter, but what people really call these times are fascist and authoritarian state capture, which means we’re not just contending with right-wing movements. We’re talking about movements that have reached one of their goals, which is to take over the government. And not just taking over local governments or governments in certain states, but also the federal government. And what this means is that they’re starting to consolidate or they’re moving to increasingly consolidate power to eliminate and remove and imprison and cause violence against their opposition, which is a lot of us. And so when I revisit that playbook, one of the pieces I think around alliances and a friend in comrade, Malkia Devich-Cyril, recently named I think on Facebook that if there ever was a time for strange bedfellows and solidarity politics, it’s now. I think that’s really, really true.
In my estimation and from my reading, more people in this country are against Trump and MAGA than are for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those people may agree on more than just that. And to truly defeat them, to some degree, we have to be in coordination from folks as far right as anti-Trump Republicans all the way to leftists. And that involves some intensive organizing, some outreach and mobilizing, and just a level of strategy to say for this moment, for this thing, we’re going to be in some form of cooperation.
When I think about the vision that we need, I think an emotionally and spiritually captivating vision still matters, but it’s about to what end. And I think that we need to share with people a vision that is so captivating and so motivating that they’re willing to navigate danger and fear to mobilize around rising authoritarianism and fascism in this country. And then we need to kind of connect that to how do we go from these incredibly repressive times towards liberatory times, and that’s where that multi-tactic and multi-year vision connects. I think deep relationships and solidarity is still really important, but I think we really have to get bigger. We have to recruit more people into our movements. I think we’re safer in larger, more connected formations. I don’t think keeping our heads down or hiding in one specific crew means fascists won’t find you. They’ll use every tool, every form of surveillance, every form of policing to find us.
And then I think because this piece around strategies to navigate pain and grief and discomfort, I think we have to say the word that I did not want to say then but I was thinking, which is violence. So pain, grief, discomfort, violence, and imprisonment. Right? We’re already seeing abductions. I expect that that will increase and expand. And so we are going to have to be connected and courageous in the face of violence, which many of us have done in our lives. Many of us come from people who’ve been navigating that for quite a long time when we’re talking about queer and trans people, when we’re talking about Black communities, Indigenous communities, immigrants, communities of color, disabled communities. And I think it’s also a real challenge. And a lot of the people I’m talking to right now, we’re all feeling the emotional impacts of knowing danger, knowing the increasing danger that so many of the people we love and so many that our communities are in.
KH: I really appreciate what you were saying about the need for a spiritually and emotionally captivating vision. We need something bigger than being against Trump to rally people right now. This has obviously been lost on the Democrats who spent the early weeks of Trump’s second administration with their heads down, hoping that people would just get sick of the havoc Trump caused and beg for the return of the status quo. It’s mind-blowing to me, because the Trump vs. the status quo contest has already been lost. That was the last election. People have no passion for neoliberalism and the damage it’s done. The masses are not going to be passionate about reviving the status quo, and we need passion. We need people to be willing to fight for something, and that means actually addressing people’s needs, and desires, and the crises they face. The other side has plenty of passion and belief, and they know how to exploit it. We need transformative politics. The MAGA movement has a lot of people power, and people power that’s propelled by identity-based, myth-based bullshit can be defeated, but we’re gonna need a lot more than “not Trump” to rally a force that can do that.
ED: Myth-based is true, myth-based is true. Oh, my god, yeah. There’s so much of this mythic past that was never true in this country, it wasn’t true for them either. But it’s just a form, it’s just a strategy for them to think about eliminating marginalized people. I really am often disappointed with the Democrats. I hunger for a whole bunch of different types of power-building formations, electoral and non-electoral. But what history tells us about fascists is that they have to be defeated. So waiting for them to just fizzle out does not have a historic parallel. When you allow fascists to continue to grow power, they become more violent, they imprison more people, they consolidate more power, they remove all checks and balances. There’s nowhere to go. It’s a direct fight. It’s a direct fight, and we’re going to have to fight for our people and we’re going to have to fight for our safety and we’re going to have to fight for our services and the conditions that we need to organize towards liberation.
So really it’s ahistorical and unstrategic. And so then, I mean often, as is the case, recognizing that we are still in a two-party system, there’s a lot of work on the left to both build what we want and to push the Dems left. And that’s about organizing and mobilizing and moving our people towards something that we really want, more than not this, but like a liberated world.
KH: Hearing that, I know some people are going to sigh, or even curse, because they feel like they are completely done with this system, and/or completely done with the Democrats. What would you say to folks who are having those thoughts?
ED: Yeah. I’m not excited about our current system. I am not happy with a lot of the Democrats. I am really, I’m horrified by the support for genocide and murder in Palestine and Gaza. There are some Democrats that excite me. I’m excited about Bernie Sanders and AOC’s tour that they’re doing against oligarchy. So disliking our conditions and disliking what’s out there is different than ignoring it. So we are in a lot of danger. And what fascists do is that they are not just trying to control the government, they’re trying to control our lives, they’re trying to control our bodies, they’re trying to control society, and they will keep coming. So we need all the allies we can get. And I do work in collaboration with Working Families Party and with the DSA, but I think it is also really important to push the Democrats left for our survival.
Not all of the Democrats are the same. Too many of them think that they can keep not representing us and keep their jobs, and we need to change that. But we need to build allies to end fascism. We may only agree there. I’m not a person who thinks that American democracy is liberatory. But I was recently at a conference and an abolitionist scholar said, “We need to defend the democratic…” I’ll say it again. I was recently at a conference and an abolitionist scholar said, “We need to defend the democratic practices that still exist, like having access to elections, and we need to build real people’s democracy and we need to build liberation.” And I believe that we’ve got a multi-front fight which needs a multi-front strategy and organizing. So yeah, I think that ignoring the Democrats does not help.
And there’s a lot of solidly Democratic folks who are saying, the only thing that gets us out of this is mass mobilizations. Well, who does mass mobilization really well? It’s not the Democrats. It’s the left. They need us. They need us. And to some degree for certain things, including defeating MAGA, we need them. And it’s a temporary strategic alliance around certain goals. And then we keep building power and we build both the systems that we deserve and the processes that we need. And we can use electoral politics as a tool like many forms of organizing are a tool. And this is what I mean when I say we are invited to a deeper level of strategy and we are invited to a deeper level of nuance. The either/or politics will not keep us safe right now, so we’re going to have to be in some complex conversations. And I don’t need people to agree with me on this point. I’m just asking for us to be in conversation, for us to be in collaboration, and us to find some points of agreement so that we can build the power we need to get out of this.
KH: What this brings up for me is that you really don’t have to trust someone, believe in, or even rely on someone, in order to push them — or to recognize that someone needs to push them. I believe in pushing left in all arenas, at all times. I hate electoralism, but simply throwing up our hands, and allowing the far right to dominate that sphere has consequences that I personally can’t live with.
ED: And I think there’s this piece around you don’t have to do electoral work, you don’t have to do policy work, but often that work can affect us. It can affect our organizing terrain, it can affect the resources we have access to, it can affect the level of crisis that our people are in. And that’s the piece where this stuff matters. So politically, you can decide where you fit, but let’s be real about the fact that that election affected us. Harris and Trump were not the same. That was not an accurate assessment. They were both bad on some really critical issues. But even then, we have to be able to recognize these distinctions. We have to be able to talk about them. And to some degree, we have some political education work to do with our own folks around how to understand this stuff without having to go through really drastic circumstances in order to learn the lesson.
KH: I really appreciate what you were saying a moment ago about either/or politics. I feel like we have a lot of exclusionary tendencies, on the left, and within our movements — a lot of black and white thinking that is not compatible with the extremity of this moment. So, what do we need to do differently? How can we get our act together and form a coherent response to these threats?
ED: Yeah. I mean I think we’ve been acting like the norms, and I think you and Mariame talked about this, the norms that sometimes work in social media don’t necessarily work in organizing and mobilizing people. Meaning the politics of hot takes and instant disagreement, we’re going to have to find lots of forms of collaboration. And I see this as an invitation into nuance and an invitation into deeper strategy. What we really need is a lot of us getting together in some forms of coordinated plan and to also be able to say, I don’t agree with you here, I don’t agree around organizing around the rule of law, but I do see what’s happening in this country. I see Trump talking both about monarchy and I see that they are destroying the administrative state. And I see the incredibly negative impact, what we’re seeing with these tariffs and the nosedive in the economy, there is a lot for us to organize for, and there are a lot of people who deserve way better.
And so if I’m specifically speaking about what leftists need to do, I really think about a term in a form of strategy called being a left pole, which is when leftists are in collaboration with a whole bunch of other folks, maybe on a specific issue of challenging the amount of power, let’s say that MAGA has amassed. And then we don’t actually break collaboration. We just say, we can’t work on this thing and here is why we disagree, and here is the frame that we’d want, and I’m wondering if we can talk about that. So there’s Bernice Johnson Reagon [who] has a whole amazing article on coalition building. And she’s a recent movement ancestor of ours and an incredible artist. And there’s a big piece of that around how coalitions aren’t necessarily the same thing as a political home. They’re not necessarily a place of comfort. They are a place where we struggle together to build what we need and to build the things… Like what coalitions are designed to do is to do the thing that we cannot do as just an organization or as just one community. And so some of these larger aims, that’s what we need to do. So we will have to find ways to disagree and navigate political struggle and still show up for each other, and that’s going to be tough for some people.
KH: What objectives do you think our coalition building work should be grounded in?
ED: I mean, I think that we have to build tremendous power because there’s a lot of community defense that’s needed. We need to defend immigrant communities and trans communities. We need to defend, we need to ensure that people have access to their basic needs. We need just coalition work on keeping sanctuary cities [as] sanctuary cities, and ensuring no matter what level of defunding and militaristic violence is proposed, that we’re able to keep our people safe. I think we also need to organize, a lot of people are talking about mass noncompliance, which can be both massive protests where we are working to really push both Trump, the Republicans and MAGA’s approval levels so low that we start to create breaks in their coalition. Because they are a coalition as well. And I start to imagine, imagine if there’s like a million or millions of people in the streets every week. But also mass noncompliance is for people who disagree with what’s happening but are actually caught up in it, to forget files, to not let ICE into their classroom. There’s all these ways that everyday people can not go along with what’s happening and can show various forms of resistance under the threats they’re taking.
What I think the overarching thing is that we need to make room to change the conditions that we’re facing because the conditions that we’re facing right now are incredibly dangerous for our communities and can really make some of our liberatory forms of organizing a lot less possible. And by doing that, we need to build a lot more power and we need to exercise more power to break MAGA’s hold on the government and to kind of disrupt this level of state capture that they have right now.
KH: I really agree, and I am also thinking about the support systems that need to exist for people who engage in actual resistance and refusal. When people suffer professional consequences for refusing to criminalize people or surrender them to fascist forces, what is their support system going to look like? How do we ensure that people who do what we’re asking people to do are not left behind? There’s gonna be a lot of legwork and fundraising and organizing involved there. I am also thinking about the physical, psychological and financial impacts of long-term organizing and protest. This is a long game, so we are going to need resources like the WildSeed Society’s revolutionary aftercare, and we are going to have to fortify those resources, while also knowing where to send people for help. How we take care of each other, or fail to, is going to determine whether or not we can maintain any tactic or strategy in the long term.
[musical interlude]
KH: Can you talk about what it’s going to look like to do the kind of outreach and base building work this moment demands of us?
ED: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this so much and I’ve been thinking a lot about the election results and some of the statistics, and my understanding is that around 30% of Black men under 45 voted for Trump. So if we’re talking about 30% of younger Black men, that’s not just rich Black men. Those are people who are impacted by policing imprisonment, a lack of housing, a lack of benefits, unemployment.
So there’s this whole conversation that people are having about voters that didn’t have a lot of information and voters that voted against their interests. And so actually. This gives us some of our own goals. Our goals are to recruit people who need and believe in things like universal healthcare and access to a good job and a world without policing and punishment and imprisonment. Our goal is to recruit these people into our organizations.
So if people are voting directly against their interests… And it’s not just statistics that tell me this. I have an uncle who talked a lot about things he liked about Trump. My brother has friends who voted for Trump. My partner knows people who likely voted for Trump. So it’s not just what the statistics tell us is what the level of both outreach and base building and political education work. Their coalition only accesses state power with a certain amount of our communities and our people facilitating this. And I think we need to cut that off.
The other thing I think, and I’ve said it before, is I’ve been talking to a lot of different groups and it’s not a number based in science, but I’ve been calling for everyone to grow their groups by 20%. And if that’s a formal base building group or if that’s a bunch of your friends and homies that get together and go to protests or make calls about what’s happening or provide mutual aid, I think we’re safer bigger. And it can sound like in times of crisis and in times of threat, people can think that a small crew can be safer and can kind of go underneath the radar. But there is this piece around they will come for us, and fascism makes everyone including people who think they’re aligned with the fascists less safe. So we’re safer bigger. We’re safer in sizes that are very hard to round up. We’re safer when we can outnumber the people who are coming to challenge us. We are safer bigger, and we’re more powerful the more people we mobilize.
KH: When we think about growing our movements, that obviously involves welcoming people who haven’t always been in lockstep with our politics. It can mean welcoming people whose previous positions or choices have upset us, which is something that a lot of people don’t seem terribly ready to do right now — and that worries me. When Mariame was a guest on the show recently, we talked a bit about the politics of fuck around and find out, and the pitfalls of celebrating the misfortunes of people who have disappointed us politically. What are your thoughts about that?
ED: I mean, so the emotional reality makes a lot of sense. I think of it as it’s a way that people are navigating the heartbreak of these times. There’s a lot of folks who worked really hard to create a different state of politics right now, me and you included, and that is heartbreaking. So part of what I think it is, the kind of fuck around and find out piece, it’s a way that people are blowing off steam, but it is not… Sometimes things that are emotionally helpful are not politically strategic. These times are so much about both/and politics. So absolutely, I want to vent, I am angry, I’m owed a lot of apologies, and so are you. There’s so many people who called me alarmist over so many years who are now calling me back and be like, “so that fascism thing.” Alarmist, ridiculous, understudied, under-researched, all of these pieces. So yeah, am I mad at that? Absolutely. Is that the place I organized from? Absolutely not. And that’s the difference.
There are a lot of people who heard a couple of things and moved on that, and had a lot else going on, and are not into what’s happening now. And some of what’s happening is that they are going through a very, an earth-shattering politicization. And we need to be there and say, yeah, that wasn’t the best choice, but let’s be together now and how do we move forward. So it’s like, yes, hang out with your friends and say all the things you need to say, write it in your journal, talk to your therapist about it, think about it at the gym. I have angry thoughts all the time. Anger is sometimes the fuel that gets me out of bed, but it is not the thing I bring to the meeting and it is not the thing I bring to my coalition work or my collaborations.
And I got recently asked by somebody who was like, “Oh, it feels like you bring a lot of love to the work.” And the word love is hard for me. I’ve experienced a lot of things that were not great from people who were supposed to love me. But I really think tremendous compassion is [great] and tremendous compassion is transforming. Both of us come from abolitionist movements, from transformative justice movements where a part of it is about how do you want to be with somebody on their worst day, from the worst things they’ve done to the worst things they’ve survived, and how do we move from there. And that takes grounding and compassion and the knowledge that all of us have made some pretty big mistakes politically and non. All of us have had humbling moments where we had the wrong take. And the people that we are in connection with aren’t the people who laughed at us in the midst of those humbling moments.
KH: I think that’s such an important point, in terms of the ways in which we have all grown, and whose compassion helped enable that growth. I think you’re absolutely right, and that we should strive to enable those moments of transformation and redemption in other people.
This actually reminds me of a conversation I had with a book club recently — a group of mostly women who were reading Let This Radicalize You — and one woman asked me if I struggle to accept and forgive people who show up to our movements, who’ve had harmful politics in the past. And the group seemed really surprised when I said that I don’t struggle with that at all. I consider it a victory. Because, why wouldn’t I? Because with enough of those transformations, we will see less harm in the world, and that’s one of our major goals out here. When people who sided with what was wrong switch teams, the folks who would destroy us have less power, and we have more. That’s what I want.
And I am thinking much more expansively here than people who voted for Trump or didn’t, because that’s the line that a lot of people tend to obsess over, but if we’re honest, it doesn’t take a transgression of that magnitude for liberals and leftists to declare “you can’t sit with us.” There is something deeper going on, in terms of demanding that people be deemed worthy of being on our side.
And if we’re talking about the election, there are a whole lot of people who didn’t engage with it at all, and I understand that folks are mad about that, too, but we need those people. And to wholesale reject each other when, now, more than ever, we need to be deeply invested in one another? That’s strategically untenable, and we’re not going to survive that way.
ED: Absolutely. And the thing is is that in that anger is the organizing assignment that we did not succeed at. So there are ways that there are really complex conversations that we needed to have about organizing and voting and fascism and the difference between neoliberals and the difference between fascists and the difference between a whole bunch of political tendencies and how you can be anti-genocide and anti-war and also an anti-fascist and figure out a pathway there. Now, unfortunately with fascism, one of the ways I’ve been thinking about it a little bit is like a video game, but it’s a video game that when you lose a level, the next level is harder. It’s not like you get to play the same level again. And so yeah, now we have a harder road, and that road is about how we’re reaching people, how we’re engaging people, and how we create spaces that people want to be in and stay in and fight together in and see their safety as connected to each other’s.
KH: I think the comparison to a video game that gets harder every time you lose is incredibly apt.
I also want to circle back to this idea about what was true in the first Trump administration that’s still true today. One thing that I think is still true is that the fascist agenda is most successful when we divest from one another’s fates. They need us to hunker down and only worry about ourselves. They need us to splinter and to be ruled by our resentments. I really believe that Elon Musk refers to empathy as the fundamental weakness of western civilization because empathy has the potential to undermine his political agenda. So what are your thoughts about the empathy we are and aren’t extending at this time? And what can we do to address the cruelty that’s showing up on our side? How can we course correct, and lean into empathy?
ED: Well, I actually think that it’s really hard to have a successful organizing meeting if you’re facilitating it from a place of cruelty. It’s really hard to have a useful outreach conversation bringing someone into an organization. We unlearn these habits in the doing. There’s something inherently compassionate about mutual aid work, about what you’re going to extend to other people who are in need. So some of it is, I actually think it will be worked out not in us discussing or telling people where they should be, what their stance should be, but in us actually doing the work and doing the work together.
There’s this, I was thinking a lot, of course, Nazi Germany is on my mind periodically, frequently. And I was thinking about how people had to send their children to strangers not knowing them at all, and trust that their children would be okay, and did so to get their children to safety. And you don’t know. If you have to do that, you don’t know how that person voted. You don’t know if they, at one point, were intrigued by Trump’s politics. You don’t know that. We don’t get to choose the people who show up for us and who save us sometimes. Sometimes it’s about who’s around and who’s available.
So to move in that world and to move in that space, which is increasingly what it’s going to be like, absolutely we want to have plans that the people who come and support us are the people who know us. But if you are abducted off the street going to the store, it’s about who else is on the street with you, not about the people who have the exact same identity as you or your politics. And that’s what we’re building. Because it’s not just… We have to get people to care about what’s happening to people that aren’t them, but also recognizing that they’re not going to stop. It’s not like, oh, they’re only going to target these people and then I’ll be safe. I really feel like the more I read even about people who are in leadership of fascist parties, there’s so much that they’re doing out of fear as well at a certain point out of survival. So just trying to not be the one that gets got is exactly how you get got. And this is about us being together in this and recognizing that what’s happening to you is happening to me and what’s happening to everyone who is being targeted and everyone who feels powerless right now is all of our business because they will make it all of our business.
KH: Absolutely. And what you’re saying is making me think about a Masha Gessen piece that I read recently, where Gessen talked about the ways we try to exempt ourselves from disturbing news. We read that someone has been targeted or kidnapped by the state, and we look for the ways that they’re not like us. We look for the transgressions, the missteps, or other differences between their circumstances and ours, in order to feel like maybe we’re still safe—in a world where people are being snatched off the street, in unmarked vehicles, and sent to nightmarish prisons in El Salvador without any due process. It’s a natural thing to feel inclined to do, to try to imagine there’s some version of all of this where we can just lay low, and maybe not be directly impacted. But those illusions are only going to delay the very real work we need to do to create as much safety as we can for ourselves and others during this incredibly dangerous time.
We’re not experiencing a constitutional crisis, we’re experiencing a constitutional collapse. And while it’s true that some people have always been treated unjustly under this system, it’s not like things are going to stay the same for folks who’ve always gotten the worst of it and get worse for everyone else. As a Native person, for example, I know that if conditions are becoming really difficult for suburban white folks, my people are already being left for dead. During early COVID, there were Native medical workers who requested more medical supplies from the federal government and were sent body bags. That’s the reality of how bad times fall on the marginalized.
A lot of things are in free fall right now. We need to be building coalitions and infrastructure to create as much safety and justice as we can. And on the subject of safety, you have spent a lot of time working on and contemplating what safety and security look like in our movements.
ED:
A little bit.
KH: What do you think that kind of solidarity work looks like right now?
ED: I got the chance to be at this gathering that had queer and trans people from every state represented, and I got the chance to speak, and it was a huge honor. It was not too far after the election. And what I said there, I think some of our best defense is offense. We actually have to substantially reduce their power. And we have to do that in combination with building safety teams and safety work. So we have to create and do that also while taking care of people’s material needs. So many people have lost their jobs. So many people have lost access to benefits and life-saving, life-surviving benefits. So there is a piece where I think our safety work, our power-building organizing, our policy work, our mutual aid work need to be interconnected. It’s not the time for the argument around this is the one way we will defeat the fascists. There isn’t one way, and that’s kind of their strategy.
Their strategy is to create so many crises, so many forms of need, so many types of harm that we have to do our community defense work and the offensive political work and reducing the amount of people in Congress who are MAGA-aligned and the mass protests, all of this needs to be linked and connected, whether it’s through coalitions, whether it’s through a shared vision. So I think that fascists are a form of organized bullies. And with every bully, people take advantage of you because they think you can’t hurt them and that you can’t stop them. And so we have to stop what’s happening and protect our people simultaneously. And so one of the things when I’ve been in spaces where we’re talking about safety and security, I’ve been really trying to drive that point home around how important, like that any of the debates that I’ve seen and witnessed over the last couple of years around power-building organizing versus community defense or power building organizing versus mutual aid are not useful. And it’s about interconnected organizing that protects communities but also builds power for all of us.
KH: I couldn’t agree more. The work of keeping each other safe and alive has to be woven into the fabric of our power building. We need a movement of movements. We’re obviously not all going to be doing the same work at the same time — outside of moments of mass collective action, which I hope do occur.
The reality of what we are up against is that we’re dealing with competitive, cooperative forces, which are creating a whole variety of crises. Those forces need to be fought and undermined in different ways.
One of the fascistic forces we are up against right now is the tech oligarchy, and the techno-fascist cults of Silicon Valley. We have Peter Thiel’s vision moving forward. We have Elon Musk’s vision.
ED: We have Curtis Yarvin’s vision.
KH: Absolutely.
ED: And one of my biggest fears is that some people… So people I think think that they’re going to, they’re trying to remake the government. But to some degree, because Peter Thiel funded Curtis Yarvin and JD Vance calls Curtis Yarvin one of his mentors. And so Curtis Yarvin is like we just need to destroy the administrative state and create a monarchy, which would mirror how a corporation works. So, there’s a piece where this is incredibly dangerous and volatile, and I think their dreams of what they want goes a lot further than what some people think the goal is.
KH: I’m really glad you brought this up. Because Curtis Yarvin’s vision of breaking nation-states up into corporate fiefdoms, ruled by CEO-monarchs, is a major force in US politics right now. Yarvin is one of those guys who is extremely plugged in with this administration and Republican leadership and the people whose money made this presidency happen, but most folks have never heard of him. So, it’s not surprising that most people didn’t notice that these massive cuts to U.S. health agencies came a short time after Yarvin started whining that the administration wasn’t doing enough to eviscerate existing scientific institutions. Yarvin specifically said, “Every existing institution of science … must be fully cremated in a nuclear autoclave.” He said that “To capture an elite, you have to demolish its institutions.”
For the techno-fascists, this gutting of the government isn’t about cutting costs, it’s about who is going to rule over the rubble of a ruined society, and what institutions they can rebuild that are beholden only to their politics and agenda.
I’ve been worried about these techno-fascists for years. It’s something I’ve tried to get people to pay more attention to. Which is one of the reasons I have been really excited about the #TeslaTakedown movement, because it makes so much sense to me to go after Elon Musk’s money. That’s a material objective. Let’s fuck with this guy’s money. And it’s having an impact. Which I think connects with what you were saying about having a good offense. What do the oligarchs care about? Their money, so hitting them on that front is important.
ED: Yeah. And creating the breaks in their coalition. JD Vance I think said, hinting towards, “Well, Musk will always be a friend to the government.” So that’s already signaling some level of disengagement or separation or at least recognizing how low Musk’s approval rating is compared to Trump and how that’s affecting their work. Their approval rating matters. And targeting them where they are vulnerable to build more power, I think the whole… I did a short thing on social media a little bit ago where I was just like, power is the game, y’all. Why is this happening? We need to build more power. And how do we get out of it? We build more power. And there’s a piece where sometimes we’re not talking about power building enough as organizing, or people have gotten the idea that power is inherently bad, inherently corrupts, inherently evil. But that’s the whole idea of organizing.
The whole idea of organizing is that there are elites in this country and in many societies who have tremendous power as individuals. And so that’s why we get together, to show our unified people power to try to write the balance in a lot of those forces. That’s how we navigate as oppressed communities and as oppressed people. And so I just think it’s really critical that we work towards building power and use all of our forms of organizing and forms of community support and forms of community defense to do that.
KH: I appreciate what you’re saying about power. It made me think about some community organizing workshops I’ve attended where, in the sort of early dialogue of the training, some participants expressed that they were actually averse to the idea of wanting or building power. Because they associated wanting power with being power hungry or wanting to dominate others. And, to me, that really reinforces the need for political education, to help people reckon with the idea of power with.
ED: Yeah. Power with, power through. And yeah, there is this piece where domination is people’s deep association with power, as opposed to the power to keep our community safe, the power to ensure that no one gets abducted, the power to ensure that everyone has enough to eat. And I think we have to actively, continually keep talking about power in that way about what it creates for the world that we want.
KH: In terms of creating space for political education, you have created a new resource that you’ve been sharing with the world that I absolutely love. Can you tell us a bit about The Fascism Barometer and what you’re working to accomplish with this project?
ED: Yeah, absolutely. The Fascism Barometer is something I’ve been dreaming about for years. In my head originally, it was like a clock that could tell me how safe we are, how much fascism there is, what levels of threats do we need to watch out for. But it’s evolved and emerged since then because the concept of measuring and tracking fascism is pretty hard. But I’ve made some really big shifts in my life in the last year or two and moved to doing a lot of political education and strategy work. And one of the things I noticed is similarly to this conversation about growing our bases or talking to more people, the people in my family, folks who are less political, I would be doing a lot of breaking things down from different resources that I was looking at because I think a lot of us can get comfortable in speaking to people who have the same level of political experience or political development as we do.
And I just started to really think about it. Fascism requires mass movements to defeat it. That seems to be a part of the equation every time we look at an overthrow of a fascist dictator, an overthrow of an autocrat. But mass-based organizing requires us to speak in everyday language. So I was like, how about me and a couple other people in my life, we create a podcast that is a bite-sized course on fascism? So I imagine that The Fascism Barometer is this project that gets to hang out with people while they do their laundry or wash dishes or on their commute or they’re going to pick up their kids. And so the goal is kind of short topical episodes, and I do a little bit of here’s what’s happening in fascism in terms of the news. And then in the website we have resources for folks who want to get deeper involved. Here’s where you can take action. So this whole conversation we had around Curtis Yarvin, we should drop some resources about how people can learn more about him and about Peter Thiel and about techno-fascists so that they can do some deeper understanding.
And then I’ve also been creating these learning guides where whether it’s your organization or, I don’t know, or you could create your own kind of Fascism Barometer book club style. And I was recently at an event in Maine, I went to speak at Colby College, and this amazing crew of folks drove I think three hours total, an hour and a half each way because they listened to The Fascism Barometer in a group and take action together and have worked on their own learning guides and are recruiting people in their own community. So it’s a political education project slash podcast slash hopefully mobilizing space. And we’re starting this new segment I’m really excited about where it’s just going to be people asking their questions about fascism. And I’ve already been, people have been sending in questions around like, oh, this term that you used, or can you define left versus right more and all kinds of things. And I’m hearing for people that they’re listening with their grandparents or they’re listening with their kids.
And so the idea was just something that was… Fascism is actually a complex topic, as is authoritarianism, dictatorships, all of these things. And there’s a lot of research and a body of work. But people need more information to be equipped for the organizing that we need for the movements that we need for this fight. And so I thought I would kind of throw a little thing in the water and see if it worked. And yeah, we have people listening from all over the country, we have people listening from different parts of the world. And I am humbled and excited and inspired by the response. And I’m also so grateful that you were also on The Fascism Barometer. But yeah, it’s bringing me so much hope because I think it is naturally hopeful when you’re bringing people together to make change, and I’m really excited about it.
KH: Well, it’s a great podcast, and I think it’s a real gift to folks right now as an educational resource. And I’m just so happy that you’re doing it.
ED: Thank you.
KH: Is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?
ED: I think the thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot, I think it’s time for us to all deepen, if we can, our connection to resistance movements. And that can be at so many different levels, whether it’s that you want to share this episode of the podcast with a friend who wants to know what to do, whether it’s actually having a conversation with a family member who is increasingly saying oppressive, racist, transphobic, or other fascist-aligned things, or going to a protest or joining an organization or donating. I think that if we can all make sure that we are engaging in some type of regular way, and that depends on your life, whether it’s monthly or weekly or however, but we will not be able to end this with just people who are long-term activists and organizers. We need massive amounts of people power. And so the ask is for everyone to think about something you can do and something that you can deepen and to get in there because we need a lot of support and we need a lot of help.
KH: Well, thank you so much for that. I am really grateful for your insights today and always so grateful to be in conversation with you. I deeply appreciate your work and always appreciate getting the chance to talk.
ED: I am such a big fan of you, Kelly Hayes, and such a big fan of “Movement Memos,” so I am really excited and grateful to be here. Thank you.
[musical interlude]
KH: Well, I hope you will all check out Ejeris’ podcast The Fascism Barometer. I also really appreciate Ejeris’ call to think about something you can do and what work you can deepen in these times. If you are already involved in an effort to change the conditions we are faced with, and create more safety and justice in the world, I am grateful for your efforts. If you feel moved to act, but haven’t figured out where to plug in yet, I am going to once again recommend that you check out Mariame Kaba’s Making a Plan zine, to help you find your way. You can also check out my book with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You, which was written with new organizers in mind.
We are living scary, destabilizing times, but in the work of collective survival, and the struggle for collective liberation, we can find hope, fellowship, and, most importantly, each other. So let’s continue to experiment, gather, and make connections. Let’s double down on our commitments to each other, to our principles, and to the pursuit of a better world. We have never needed each other as much as we do right now, so let’s show up.
I want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes