Renowned Afro-Latinx activist and scholar Rosa Clemente sits down with Abby Martin to discuss her experiences running for Vice President, organizing under Obama versus under Trump, advice for new activists, identity politics and more.

In the face of a resurgent far-right movement, backed by unleashed reactionary state forces, Clemente gives valuable insight into the challenges, strategies and tactics for a new era of organizing.

Rosa Clemente & Abby Martin – No Savior in 2020

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Abby Martin: Rosa Clemente is a leading scholar on Afro-Latinx identity and the anti-racist struggles of the 60s and 70s. Also an activist and political organizer, she’s led political tours, built radical organizations, and much more. Among many accolades, she was selected for Ebony Magazine’s list of top 100 most inspiring African-Americans and was the 2008 Green Party candidate for vice president. I sat down with Rosa at the People’s Congress of Resistance in Washington, D.C. to talk about third party politics and organizing in the Trump era.Rosa, you worked as an aid in the Democratic Party for years, up until 2000 if I’m not mistaken. What made you leave the Democratic party and embrace more revolutionary politics?

Rosa Clemente: I was part of that radical black/Latino left of colleges that was every day having a protest or rally demanding something, so I knew the flaws of the Democratic party. I was never like … I would obviously vote or was voting as a Democrat, but then I saw Ralph Nader speak in upstate New York. At that time, he was with the Green Party. I was like, “Oh. How don’t I know that there’s another party? How am I in any way involved in electoral politics and don’t know that there’s more than two parties?”Really, the turning point for me was in 2005 when I went down to report on what was happening right after Hurricane Katrina and the levy breach in New Orleans. The minute I saw what was going on, I was obviously mad at George Bush and the response from the government, but began to talk to a lot of people and how they felt the Democratic Party, just in general, had been letting them down. It kind of gave me a focus of looking at the Democratic Party from a very critical lens. In 2006, I registered and became a Green Party member.

AM: In 2008, you ran as the vice presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney as the presidential candidate. Two women of color, the first time in history. I voted for you. I was so proud to do so. I told everyone to do so.

RC: Thank you.

AM: What was the biggest takeaway or lesson learned from that whole experience, and what backlash, if any, did you get from the Democrats, Greens, Progressives for infringing on Obama’s presidency as the first person of color?

RC: I always tell people I believe if two men of color had been the nominees, there would have been more support for those men of color. Patriarchy, misogyny, sexism was rampant for many circles. Me and Cynthia didn’t work for almost two years after we ran. Nobody would really hire us. Of course, we were told, especially by a lot of black and Latinos that were heavily involved with the Democratic Party, that we were basically traitors and we were making the worst mistakes of our lives. I was told by some of my mentors that I was destroying any ability to have any type of career afterwards.Also as a historian, I’m a trained historian in black studies and Africana studies, I knew the significance of Barack Obama. I just wanted people to also respect the significance of two women of color, Afro-Latina, a Puerto Rican and an African American, and what that meant. I knew the significance of when Obama won, and I myself that night took a moment to watch him and Michelle and Sasha, Malia go and know this is a historical moment, but history doesn’t make movements like that. The people made the movement. That was a moment and it wasn’t a movement. Barack Obama was never a movement. I felt like that from that time. I think history has proved a lot of what me and Cynthia did to be the right thing.Lastly, there was a lot of racism in the Green party from a lot of white men in that party. The Colorado State Green Party took us off the ballot. I think people out there don’t understand the significance of what it means to take your own candidates off the ballot because you think they’re too radical.

AM: We saw two mass movements arise under the Obama administration despite … People can criticize the progressive movement for failing the anti-war movement, for dying, but really you cannot discount Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street.

RC: Yeah.

AM: What does that mean? Looking back on his legacy, what significance did it have and what space did you think it carved for those sort of grassroots mobilizations?

RC: I’m sure by day two or three, the police had infiltrated Wall Street, as well as began to do the tactics of the Counter Intelligence Program, which is create destruction and discord. Then with Black Lives Matter, what predates Black Lives Matter though is important. You have young people that are undocumented that are seeing that the Barack Obama administration and the Democrats, along with Cecilia Munoz, who was the director of domestic policy, ratcheting up deportations. You began to see young people saying, “Undocumented, unafraid.” That was before even the DREAM Act was in the zeitgeist.Then what we see under a black president is a rise of Black Lives Matter. I often think of it too historically, would Black Lives Matter have risen if it hadn’t been a black president? I think so, but I think the impact wouldn’t have been as great because at this point, those black young people, whether they’re the Ferguson frontline resistors or those that were part of Black Lives Matter after it became not just a hashtag, had seen Troy Davis executed and had seen Trayvon Martin’s killer walk free. They were also those that voted for Obama the first time they could vote. They were deeply upset and disappointed, I think, at him, like, “You’re the black president and this is happening. There are things you can actually do and you’re not choosing to do them.”Then what we saw in Ferguson was queer folks, but it was also really what we call street organizations, the young brothers and sisters that people call gangs, we call them sets, that said, “Nah. Michael Brown’s death won’t be in vain. If we have to throw rocks like our Palestinian brothers and sisters are doing at military tanks, we’re going to do that.” I think it was a culmination of all of it, but particularly the disappointment that African American and Latino young people specifically felt who had helped President Obama become the president.

AM: Even this year, Rosa, with the two most hated, detestable candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a reality star game show host narcissist, misogynist, racist, and you can go on all day about Hillary-

RC: Megalomania.

AM: Jill Stein barely broke that million vote. I don’t understand it. I really, really thought that this time … I was like, “Clearly, with these two hated candidates, Jill Stein’s at least going to get three million, maybe 5% of the vote.” I was pretty surprised. Then you see the non-votes. Almost twice as many people in these swing states went out, voted for everything and left president blank.

RC: Right.

AM: That’s incredible.

RC: Yeah.

AM: Then there’s the shaming of people, still blaming people who voted for Jill Stein, of course, on Trump, which is insane, but why do you think there was such a poor turnout for Greens?

RC: We had too many Green Party people that were trying to sway Bernie Sanders to come the way. What the Green Party should have been doing is going to half of the population that doesn’t vote in any election. Don’t try to change a Democrat. Don’t try to go after a Trump supporter. Don’t even go after Bernie Sanders. Why don’t you go after the 50 so percent of people that are not voting in this country? We know where they’re at. We have the statistics to … We could look at all the data to say, “This is where we need to be.”I think the Green Party made a mistake by almost chasing after Bernie and Hillary and Trump, even though this was the year that we got the most mainstream media coverage. To have Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka on a CNN stage and see no results from that means that then the party has to be very either introspective or that people of color, especially young people, may have to form their own new political party if they want to be part of electoral politics. Even with all that said, we’re not going after the people who are not voting. Instead, many people, as you say, shame them as opposed to saying, “Why are you not voting? What would make you vote? What does leadership in your community look like?”I don’t know if the Green Party’s going to be able to recover from the narrative that takes us back to 2000, that it was Ralph Nader’s fault, and now the idea that less than 1% of people that voted for Jill Stein is the reason that Trump won as opposed to always being very clear that the narrative is Trump won because 52% of white women in this country voted for white supremacy instead of themselves. They voted for patriarchy instead of their own liberation. How do we have those real and deep and honest conversations with people that are not existential conversations and really academic conversations, but true grassroots conversations?

AM: I guess just talk more about the trappings of Bernie Sanders as a whole and the whole Democratic Socialism movement.

RC: I think, in general, Americans are always looking for someone to save them. They’re either looking for someone to save them or an authority figure to tell them what to do. When it comes to Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialism in America, I have to ask any Socialist like, “Did he run as a Socialist, or did he run as a Democrat?” He’s made his choice. I’m not saying … In fact, Bernie Sanders was in Albany during a campaign stop and he actually met with Black Lives Matter Upstate, which I help found, and met with the family of victim of police murder by the name of Dante Ivy. We were there for a good 40 minutes, and talking to him, of course I see he is not like the rest of these people, but he has his blind spot. He thinks the Democratic Party can be pushed. It’s never going to be pushed to that.I just don’t understand how they don’t see what the majority of us are seeing and why Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have taken the step forward to say, “Wait a minute. I’m going to run as a third party candidate.” He wasn’t going to run as a Green. Then run as a Socialist or figure out how we do that line or how it is that you’re independent. I think the Draft Bernie people, the folks that think he’s going to run again, I don’t think he is, but are looking for literally someone to save them at this moment of crisis. Electoral politics never saved anyone. I always look at Africans who were enslaved in this country. Not one of them voted to be free. They organized to be free, knowing that their freedom might not come, but their children’s freedom was definitely coming.I think sometimes in our movements’ faces, whether they’re progressive, left, radical, socialist, new African, Puerto Rican, independent, that we often don’t look at the psychology and the psychosis that a lot of people are going through that essentially is saying, “Either save me or tell me what to do, because I got two jobs, I got to pay my rent. I don’t have healthcare. I’m formerly incarcerated. I don’t have my prescription benefits.” College debt, that’s a privilege for some of us to have college debt when people can’t pay their rent. That’s what happens sometimes. I think that’s where we’re at right now in this country, like in a mass social control kind of way.

AM: Is there viability right now to build a new third party?

RC: I would have said a couple years ago maybe, but I think now the electoral political system is so … Corrupt is not even the right word. It’s so driven by money, obviously. Citizens United, I think, dealt a huge blow to what that looks like. To form a third party that can get on the ballot … The reason the Green Party is still critically important as well is because Greens know how to get on a ballot. I don’t think people understand the mechanisms of what it means to run and get on a ballot. I think there’s an assumption Rosa is running, I’m on a ballot. No.Then people don’t realize that often times, the Democrats and Republicans will come together to keep off any third party. In sense, they could keep switching power on and off. Four years, eight years. “Here. Your turn.” Ballot access. The fact that to run a New York City council race in the 80s would have cost $10, $15,000. You can’t even run for New York City council if you don’t have $250,000 already probably pledge. Look at our senators. We’re talking senate races that are now going in tens of millions of dollars. Who can do that? The only way you raise that money is what? Through corporations. I don’t know, at this point, if, on the federal level, we’re going to ever see a third party candidate. I do believe on the local level. That’s a whole different ball game, if it’s a smaller city and a smaller municipality.I don’t know if we should now be putting all our efforts into that. That’s lastly one thing that I’m very concerned about. I don’t like going into spaces where people are talking about who’s running in 2018 or 2020. It’s like what’s happening right now and what work can we do to basically have communities that are localized, self-determining, and can defend themselves from what we know is about to happen with the Trump administration, which, on its face, is going to be most likely massive amounts of roundups. If we can’t stop roundups and people from being deported, I don’t know if we can get to the point of starting a third party in this country, other third parties.

AM: Great point. Let’s just analyze what we’re looking at right now. We have the J20 arrests of over 200 people facing life in prison for being in the vicinity of a broken window. We have the Trump regime ramming so much down our throats. It’s so hard to figure out where to focus our energy. Then you have the Democratic Party, of course, co-opting the resistance, even Hillary Clinton using Heather Heyer’s name to try to get money.

RC: She also threw Black Lives Matter-

AM: It’s disgusting.

RC … under the bus in her book.

AM: What did she say?

RC: In her book, she said that Black Lives Matter would be great if they had a policy platform. I’m like, “So you didn’t read the movement for Black Lives policy platform that took a year to be created from over 40 groups that are mostly young people of color, queer-led groups, that gave you every solution to every problem on a website and have been for the last year, infusing what is called the Movement for Black Lives Platform into all the work.” It doesn’t help also that Bernie Sanders and all his people are talking about identity politics as something that our identities are something that we shouldn’t be talking about, when Trump won on identity politics. He ran on a white identity politic and won, but then we’re being told as people of color not to bring all of who we are into the space.

AM: It’s a disgusting contradiction.

RC: I’ll say specifically that type of mainstream media and some liberals and so-called progressives have also normalized it, like, “Let’s give him a chance.” I think Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi just meeting with him last week and then walking out and saying, “We got a deal on DACA,” and then six hours later, he tweeted, he’s like, “What deal are they talking about?” Why are they walking in a room with him? Why are you even giving … It was almost like at the State of the Union. There were two Congress people that didn’t go, Luis Gutierrez and Maxine Waters. My whole thing was, why was any Democrat sitting at any State of the Union? Because you believe in the institution to the point that you want to save it, but maybe it’s no longer savable. What you’re essentially doing is you help normalize this behavior, which could actually lead to another Trump presidency.

AM: I think it might because that’s how tone deaf these people are.

RC: Because his base, no joke, they’re going to ride, like we say in hip-hop, they are riding and dying with Donald Trump. What we’ve seen is the Democratic Party failing, maybe even some third parties that should be doing better failing, so we might see less people of color, less marginalized people that would be usually inclined to be independent or Democratic maybe voting in this next election. Then obviously, we always have the Republican Party spot on with voter suppression.

AM: Not only this vitriolic repression, undocumented people, trans people, everyone’s under attack, minority or queer. I feel like we’re seeing a two-fold effect. Organizing is getting stronger, but then maybe the people on the front lines who are at risk maybe are pulling back. How do we deal with this apparent contradiction, and what will organizing look like, do you think it will look like, under Trump?

RC: I think that’s a question that … That I don’t have the answer to, because what’s also happening is what Jeff Sessions is doing with the Department of Justice. I think that’s the quiet, maybe not quiet for us, but that’s really what we should be talking about. You have Jeff Sessions basically saying he wants a new War On Drugs. There will be no crimes prosecuted, no police misconduct, not that the Department of Justice really ever comes back with anything to say that police officers have violated rights.You have someone like Betsy DeVos that is now saying that we have to think about the rapists on campus and that they’re not thrown under a bus, where you’ve had a 10-year movement of young women on campus and their male allies not only being brave enough to tell their stories, but suing the federal government under Title IX violations.While the Trump clown factory is what we see every day, then what’s happening to departments? You don’t have time to think about how do we have an underground system that’s not going to rely on Twitter, Facebook to tell our stories when the government decides whatever, an algorithm changes, and you don’t know what’s happening. We could look at mainstream media and even some progressive media that are obsessed to the point of Trumpism that they don’t tell any other stories of resistance. When you don’t even see that within the progressive media and the obsession with Russia, it’s just like I don’t know what organizing looks like right now on a mass level.I know that what I’m seeing on a local level is literally people just trying right now to survive. I spoke about that earlier. We’re like in survival mode and our thriving mode. Usually out of these moments comes a new group of people, usually young people. What I think we’re going to see is my daughter’s generation, my daughter’s 12, and I would say to like the 21, 22 year olds, are going to be faced with such a crisis and they’re going to have to figure out a new way of how we do the work and what organizing looks like and what movement building looks like.

AM: You’re a firm believer in building those organizations that can serve as a political home, not just the protest politics, not just fighting in the streets. There has to be something larger. Expand more on that.

RC: Political education is key. I think we have a lot of people that are organizers and activists that are still not have political education. What I mean by that is it’s as simple as dedicating yourself to making sure you’re watching the most progressive media, going to those spaces where there’s the Empire Files or–and I mix what I like–or Black Agenda Report to actually see the nuances and real, still deep, investigative narrative storytelling of the people, the others that are the most marginalized. I think it’s like that.I also think it’s about reading history and understanding that we’ve been here before. America is founded on the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of African people, the exploitation of immigrant people. We’ve had bans before, mass deportations before, and people say, “That will never happen again.” It’s literally happening now. I think history is super instructive. I don’t think history as much repeats itself as it stays on a continuum. I think it’s important that if you’re new into this movement work that you sit down and study, that you talk to elders who’ve done the work, but also the elders who will admit the mistakes that they did so those are not repeated.

AM: Rosa, what is your message to young people under 20 or just getting involved in political activism? What’s your message to them?

RC: Toni Morrison did a speech a couple years ago at UMass Amherst. She said, “Never see yourself do the white gaze.” That stuck with me because I think especially for young people of color, sometimes what young people of color are seeking is the same system that is seeking to destroy them, to edify them, to say, “You’re doing a good job. You’re good. I like what you’re saying.” Usually when that happens, you’re not doing a good job. You can’t lastly expect that all your work is always visible and awarded or rewarded. Carter G. Woodson, the father of African American history, never got one award in his life. He was never on a magazine cover. You have to be okay with being on the margins. I feel like I was born on the margins and I’m always going to be there. Young people who are doing movement work are going to have to get through that too. You might be born on the margins. You’re never going to be normal. You’ll probably die on the margins, but those of us that do that work, history will always tell the truth and we’ll always reward that work.

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Joe Rogan and guest Abby Martin discuss US politics, free speech, the alt-right, Palestine, and more on Joe Rogan Experience.

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For the first time in modern history, a fringe wing of Christian extremists have obtained the highest seats of power in the US government—from Mike Pence to Betsy DeVos.

This new development is coupled with the emergence of the Alt Right, the Trump movement, and the rise of fascist movements abroad.

Renowned journalist and author Chris Hedges has embedded himself in what he calls “Christianized Fascism” and warns that this is the biggest danger we face under Trump.

Chris Hedges & Abby Martin – Trump, Fascism & the Christian Right

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ABBY MARTIN: Many are calling Trump a fascist, even the next Hitler. Can you define what fascism is?

CHRIS HEDGES: Fascism is not really ideologically based. It’s very protean in terms of its ideology. There’s a German historian I like very much who wrote a book called Male Fantasies1 about the Freikorps, and the Freikorps were the antecedents to the Nazi Party. They were demobilized, right-wing World War I veterans who were used to crush the Spartacus uprising in Berlin and the kind of radical left. They killed Rosa Luxemburg. And it revolves more around emotion, hyper-masculinity, a virulent nationalism, a celebration of “strength” and of “military virtues.” It holds up a kind of moral purity that it claims to represent. Robert Paxton wrote a very good book called Anatomy of Fascism,2 and he notes that fascism in every country has its own peculiar characteristics in the sense that Italian fascism was very different in many ways from German fascism. I think that fascism, although I’ll use the word to describe Trump, is perhaps not finally accurate. I think you’re better off describing our system as what Sheldon Wolin, the political philosopher, calls inverted totalitarianism,3 by which he means that you’re not replacing old symbols and structures. It’s more like the old Roman republic after the civil wars and the rise of Augustus. So you still had a Senate. You still supposedly had a republic, but it was all a facade. So you have corporate forces that purport to pay fealty to electoral politics, the constitution, the iconography and language of American patriotism, but internally they have seized all of the levers of power to render the citizens disenfranchised. And Wolin writes that in that system, politics is never able to trump economics. It’s all about economic consolidation, maximization of profit, and so what we’re getting with Trump is, I think, a species of inverted totalitarianism, with demagoguery.

AM: It’s insane that one of Trump’s first measures was basically making it harder for poor people to get mortgages.

CH: Right, so what we’re going to get is a turbocharged neoliberalism. You can see it from all of the appointments around him.

AM: His political base is far from monolithic. We have the Christian right and the alt-right. I know that you’ve spent an enormous amount of time studying the Christian right, but what exactly is the alt-right. How would you even define this ideology? Would you say it is synonymous with neo-Nazism, like how people are saying that today?
CH: Yes, I think it has a lot of characteristics of neo-Nazism, but so does the Christian right. The Christian right, like the alt-right, is endowed with all sorts of conspiracy theories, coupled with magical thinking, coupled with an utter disdain for historical fact, and I think that what we will see is that the Christian right will fill Trump’s ideological vacuum because he doesn’t really have an ideology. He’s such a narcissist. And I think that that will be handled through Pence, so I think this in many ways will be the empowerment of Christian right, which I’ve always considered a political movement. I went to seminary. I grew up in the church. I do not consider them Christians any more than the German Christian church, which was pro-Nazi, was Christian. The German Christian church had the Nazi flag on one side and the Christian cross on the other. That’s how I look at the Christian right, and that’s why you saw 81% of evangelical voters support Trump, even though his personal life makes a mockery of the very values, the kind of family values that they say they hold sacred. So I think as we’re watching the Trump presidency, especially as it comes under attack from the establishment, both the old landed Republican and Democratic establishment, you’ll see his fortress become the ideology of the Christian right. I wrote a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I didn’t use that word lightly. I think that they are Christianized fascists.

AM: But certainly there’s a differentiation between the Christian right and this emergence of these emboldened bigots who seem to be much more vitriolic—the alt-right, those who call themselves alt-right.

CH: No, I think the Christian right is as bigoted as the alt-right. The Christian Right is much more sophisticated because it is a network. Tens of millions of Americans are hermetically sealed within this bizarre world. With Betsy DeVos this is going to be expanded if everything goes through: $20 billion of federal money will get, in essence, handed off to religious schools, so they are sealed within their news, their religious information, their entertainment all gets colored with this Christianity. So one of things I learned when I wrote the book, which I spent two years on, was I would go to the services and they would have nice music and the chairs would be a lot more comfortable than the pews in the Presbyterian Church where I grew up. And it was kind of warm, and you would feel good, but then you would be pulled into the back rooms where you would be disciplined, and you would be assigned people. They would really break you down and sever you from your family because the next thing you know, you’re there every night of the week. I was in prayer groups where people were weeping because their children weren’t saved or their husband wasn’t saved, and that’s one of the great ironies. As they talk about family they’re the great destroyer of families. So they’re quite clever in having a kind of public face, which in many ways is even appealing, but which is very dark and cultish. I found many aspects of cults within it in terms of the way they broke people down, the kind of inability to question these white male pastors who had direct communication with God, made fabulous amounts of money off of these people’s despair, so I think that the Christian right is a far more dangerous movement than the alt-right, and I think that it has many characteristics that it shares with the alt-right in terms of its anti-Semitism, it’s homophobia, and it’s Islamophobia. I think the alt-right, because it incorporates so-called New Atheists, has its own coloring, but I think it shares many common traits with the Christian right. But I don’t think it’s as dangerous as the Christian right. I think people focus on it because it’s more visible. There is a strain of deep cruelty, savagery even, fascism and intolerance within the Christian right that is institutionalized in a way that makes it a far more dangerous movement than the alt-right.

AM: You mention that 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump. I wanted to briefly talk about how evangelicals became this highly politicized force because they don’t comprise that much of the population.

CH: It’s really a kind of fascinating story. It was a conscious attempt on the part of right-wing groups to politicize Christian conservative movements because traditionally fundamentalists, for instance, and evangelicals hated each other. Fundamentalists considered evangelicals, because they spoke in tongues and stuff, Satan. There were all these divisions. Fundamentalists called on believers to remove themselves from the political process and not be contaminated by it. This was in the 1920s and 30s. And what you saw roughly around 1980 was the rise of what we call dominionism. It was propagated by Rousas Rushdoony who wrote this very turgid book I had to read based on the ten commandments. This goes back to their saying we don’t have to worry about prisons because all murderers will be put to death and women who commit adultery will be stoned. It’s really crude stuff, and that got very heavily funded. They took over seminaries like Southern Baptist, which used to be a great seminary. They used to have in the Southern Baptist Church a fusion of kinds of Christians who were conservative, in terms their personal piety, but they were very left-wing in terms of their politics, which is how my father was, actually. That’s all gone, and so there was a kind of hostile takeover. The essence was: can we create the Christian society? And that viewpoint got infused into a movement that, while it’s called the Christian right, really doesn’t bear any resemblance to what had come before in terms of evangelicalism or fundamentalism. It was a new entity. Many people call it dominionism, and that’s when it got political and it began to strive for political power, with a lot of mistakes at first. They were too heavy-handed. They were too obtuse. Remember Pat Robertson ran for president, this kind of stuff, and now they’ve got a lot more clever, and they ally, for instance, with The Federalist Society. So Liberty University has a law school. They’re producing these federalist judges, so they have quite effectively seeped into the inner workings of power, and it is an ideology that, in that sense, although they speak about tradition, is really new.

AM: And Mike Pence was told by Trump’s people that he would be running domestic policy. He will be the most powerful Christian evangelical, if I’m not mistaken, ever in political history, especially with the executive power that’s given to the presidency. Will this move us forward to what you call Christianized fascism, and if so what would that look like?

CH: Yes, that’s what I expect because this is an ethics-free administration, as we’ve seen. There’s not even a pretense about ethical rules, whether it’s with Trump or anyone else, and so you have what’s going to become a kind of naked kleptocracy, and I’m not just speaking about Trump’s family, which of course will get fabulously rich, but about all those forces that are predatory, sucking money out of the education department. They’re just going to loot the country, but they’re also inept, which is a very bad combination. As that ineptitude becomes more pronounced and more understood, they are going to have to become more ideologically rigid, and I think the only place they’re going to go is to the Christian right. So what is it going to look like? It’s going to look like a Christianized fascism. It’s going to be the fusion of the American flag with the Christian cross and the Pledge of Allegiance. We’ve already seen it. It is going to be assaults on women’s rights. It’s going to be assaults against the educational system, so we’re teaching creationism and magical thinking. It’s going to be attacks against “those forces of secular humanism that are destroying the country.” It’s going to be a kind of sanctification of law and order, and imperial adventurism turned into a kind of crusade. And I think that as society unravels they will stoke this demonization of the other: Muslims, undocumented workers, African- Americans are on the list… feminists, all the way down the list, to vent the frustration and the rage against segments of the society that are vulnerable within the context of a kind of Christianized language. That’s what I think is coming.

AM: Betsy DeVos: you mentioned her. She’s being roundly condemned for many reasons as being Trump’s appointed secretary of education, but people are under-reporting her ties to Erik Prince, her brother. He’s the famous mercenary founder of Blackwater. He’s also one of Pence’s biggest donors, and now he’s advising Trump.

CH: Right, and I had a conversation with Jeremy Scahill who wrote the great book on Blackwater4, and I had been going around the country speaking about the Christian right, and I said, “We don’t have to worry. They’re not fascists because they don’t have an armed wing,” and Jeremy said, “What do you mean? That is their armed wing.” And I realized he was right and I was wrong, and they do have, through Blackwater, essentially mercenary forces at their disposal, and any totalitarian or even authoritarian government relies heavily on vigilante violence because they’re not held accountable for it, even the excesses of the Brownshirts. People forget Hitler would denounce them because he could, but of course he was giving a green light to them, but then they would go beat up a bunch of people and there would be an outcry, and Hitler would say, “Well, they shouldn’t have done that.” These forces, will, I think, play an increasingly prominent and frightening role within American society because they’re not going to be punished. They’re not held accountable and they can carry out forms of coercion and violence and intimidation, and threats on behalf of the state, and the state will protect them, but they’re kind of immune. And that’s classic fascism.

AM: Yeah, we saw it in Israel. We see it everywhere with these kinds of militias that then become…

CH: I saw it in Yugoslavia.

AM: Yeah, but I was going to say Blackwater and what Eric Prince is doing is kind of institutionalized whereas, as far as the vigilante groups on the ground, the actual armed militias that are emboldened by people like Joe Arpaio and are taking action on their own terms at the border, those are different, right?

CH: They are, but they’ll be brought under control. Again, you can go back to the historical record. The state wants centralized control. That’s what finally did in the Brownshirts with the Night of the Long Knives. When Hitler got rid of Röhm and the SS supplanted the Brownshirts. They want control, so I think all of those groups, if we come to this, will be put within structures that may not be public structures, but will be put within structures.

AM: I think a fascinating example of how this has already happened under the Obama administration is the difference between the Standing Rock North Dakota access pipeline protesters, who are unarmed, and crushed, and then you have the Bundy Ranch Militia.

CH: There you go because imagine Bundy and all those guys were black. They’d all be dead. There’s a good example, but that’s always been true, and Richard Hofstadter wrote about that in his last book on violence.5 Throughout American history we have relied on white vigilante thugs to go after African-Americans, the Chinese labor movement. We’ve had bloody labor wars in US history. Hundreds of American workers were killed, and who killed them? Gun thugs, Pinkertons, Baldwin-Felts, mine militias raised by the Scrantons in Pennsylvania. There’s a long tradition of that, including the klan (the KKK), and so we have this kind of historical precedence for what’s coming.

AM: And as the Trump administration uses the rhetoric of alternative facts to basically shut down any dissent, what about the alternative facts being promoted from websites like Breidtbart or Infowars? Do you have any comment on the fact that Steve Bannon is now in the ear of Trump, and so is Alex Jones.

CH: Well, they’re conspiracy theorists, just like Trump, so they just reinforce his kind of loony worldview.

AM: The US isn’t the only country where we’re seeing this far right rise. Obviously, this is happening in Europe and beyond. How is what we’re witnessing here connected to elsewhere in the world?

CH: Well, it’s the result of neoliberal economics where you destroy public institutions, and, whatever you say about communism, and I was there in Eastern Europe, they had a first- class educational system which people did not pay for. Everyone had health insurance. There was full employment, and so neoliberalism went in and destroyed, in the name of the free market—which everyone confused with freedom, all of those institutions. Huge state enterprises closed, and this caused massive unemployment. I was just in Poland. Two million young Poles work as baristas in Spain or somewhere. And it created a new oligarchic class by selling off state assets. This happened, of course as well, with Russia, and people finally woke up and realized they were being had, and they were being had by that “liberal establishment” in the same way that we’ve been had by these liberal elites on the East Coast and the West Coast. And we’ve seen the rise of proto- fascist movements in Hungary and Poland. We’re seeing powerful proto-fascist movements in France and even Germany. And it all goes back to this idea that human society and human life should be ruled by the dictates of the global marketplace. It’s an insane ideology that’s never worked anywhere in human history, but until we break the back of corporate power, we’re not going to blunt the rise of these movements.

AM: Yeah, we’re in such a post-truth reality that people think that Trump is still anti- establishment because they’ve just learned to blame the state for all of their ills.

CH: That’s right, and when they figure out somehow that he isn’t, when they get what’s happening, then you will see turbocharged the hate talk and the hate crimes. That is classic fascism.

AM: Like you said, the police state was already put in place. It just takes someone like Trump to pull the lever.

CH: This was the big mistake. He has all the tools at his disposal to, with the flick of a switch, turn this into a police state. They were all given to him primarily by the Bush and the Obama administrations. We allowed whole segments of our population to be stripped of their rights. I’m talking about poor people of color and marginal communities, a court system where you know 95-94% never even get a trial, of the system of mass incarceration, the police terror where police can use indiscriminate lethal force against unarmed people. Hannah Arendt writes about this in The Origins of Totalitarianism.6 When you allow a segment of your population—she was talking about stateless persons—she herself was stateless in France—to be stripped of their rights, once rights become privileges, then should unrest spread throughout the society, you have both a legal and physical mechanism to impose. They’re already in place to impose on everyone else, and that’s what we’re seeing: that what poor people of color have been enduring in these mini police states is just instantly expanded once the rest of the population is no longer passive.

AM: You talk about how the biggest way to fight Trump, the Christian right and the alt-right is to revolt. Mass resistance. What does that look like? What does that mean? And why is the Democratic Party not the vehicle for the resistance?

CH: Because the Democratic Party is not going to confront the underlying ideological system of neoliberalism or corporate power, which has created the mess that we now live in. Instead of we, and the opposition, dealing directly with the ravages of neoliberalism and what it’s done, you have a Democratic Party that blames the election result on Putin or on FBI director James Comey. This is ridiculous, and it is a way to be as demagogic as Trump, and a way to present alternative facts of your own, and that’s very dangerous because if we don’t have significant segments of the society that deal with the ideology, the utopian ideology of neoliberalism that has led us to this mess, and continues to offer up these alternative facts, then, in essence, they’re going to collude with Trump to create a form of American fascism, and they will be in many ways as responsible. If we don’t go after those corporate forces through acts of civil disobedience, such as at Standing Rock, we don’t have any other way to have our voices heard or to create resistance. Now, it’s going to be ugly under the Trump administration, and Standing Rock was ugly under Obama—rubber bullets, concussion grenades, water in sub-zero temperatures laced with pepper spray. It was ugly there, but it’s going to be even uglier because there just will be no holds barred at all. And in Standing Rock they brought in private security contractors who had just come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which gets back to these kinds of quasi-militias aligned with the Christian right. We’re just going to see a lot more of that. It’s going to be fierce, but there are no institutions left that are authentically democratic, that are going to challenge the centrifugal forces that have brought us to where we are. That’s only going to be done in the streets.

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