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https://l.smartnews.com/p-8vQmQBCE/AEibKi


Sure. First, I think a lot of the stuff you were just saying could be summarized as “fascist.” I mean, really fascist in a—especially like an Italian Mussolini way. Often too many people think of fascists as exactly what the Nazis did, and especially late Nazis, say in the ‘40s, exactly what they did. And so it’s a very Mussolini fascist style, especially with the strutting, and if you think of the picture of Mussolini with chest puffed out and the rest of it.<


But yeah, it is failing in so many ways. And I mean, we can connect this to domestic stuff with manufacturing, or the idea that the working class are large white men doing, particularly—and it’s, I mean, always racialized—doing a particular type of factory work. And whereas what is actually the working class in numbers—I mean, obviously there’s some people who work in manufacturing, but most of manufacturing at this point is robots.


The working class is all distributed in things like, I don’t know, service jobs, for example, cleaning hotels and waiting tables and nurses and, I don’t know, many others that we could mention. And they have never connected to that.


There is a degree of denial inherent in fascism, in that the past that they are trying to recapture is fake. It never was real, it was sort of imagined nostalgia, and so it can’t be recaptured. And yet they force it to a point where it usually then consumes itself, where it falls in upon itself. And I think we’re witnessing that now. I hope we’re witnessing that now, that I’m reading it right.


It’s going to take a decent amount of more time to fully dislodge from power—let’s, you know, get through the midterms, then we deal with Trump in the presidency and bigger questions about that. But it does seem to be imploding in a way that a lot of fascist movements do. And I’m just thankful that it would be before the election, as opposed to doing a lot of this stupid stuff and economically damaging stuff after the election, when the public did not have a chance to react.


Sargent: Another piece of this is immigration. You get rid of all the nonwhite unskilled workers, and then the yeoman American working class will get more jobs as a result. The men will be more attractive to women, they’ll have more babies, and they’ll solve the fertility problem without having to let in more dark people. It’s part of the same story.


Grossman: Yep, very much so. And again, it still feels weird to me that we’re living through it, because it does sound like something out of 20th century fascism. But that’s a lot of what they’ve done, and Stephen Miller has done. Or there was a Department of Labor propaganda that they put out, all these AI images of strapping white blond guys working the fields. And it has not materialized that way at all.


You notice they have done a lot of the immigration crackdown that they’ve promised. It’s been, you know, violence in the mass deportation. They’ve gotten a lot of people out of the country, or made it that people don’t come. And yet there aren’t all of these great jobs that have suddenly flowered in response to that, because that was always nonsense.


Sargent: And by the way, the violence of the removal of nonwhite immigrants was also supposed to be rejuvenating. The ICE propaganda, ICE recruitment info, is very, very, very steeped in that basic imagery.