With all the discussion of the contentious 2016 election, the most shocking fact is often ignored: that millions of people had their votes stolen through malicious means. The Republican Party is currently working to purge millions more voters leading up to the 2018 election.

To explain this major attack on our supposed democratic process, Abby Martin interviews investigative reporter Greg Palast, who has done the most extensive work uncovering this massive disenfranchisement campaign.

 The Hidden Purging of Millions of Voters

In a jaw dropping article published in Rolling Stone in August of 2016, investigative journalist Greg Palast gave us fair warning about the massive voter purge set to take place during the 2016 presidential election. The system, dubbed the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, often called Interstate Crosscheck or simply Crosscheck, promised to toss out the votes of any registered voter who places a vote in two different states.

With all the talk of voter fraud during the primary and general elections, a system to weed out potential fraudulent votes was a welcome idea to many. But the good news stopped there. Never mind that the claims of massive voter fraud were not based in any fact whatsoever, the entire Crosscheck program was a front- an integral part of a massive Republican-led campaign to disenfranchise millions of voters, robbing them, without their knowledge, of their constitutional right to vote.

Not only did Crosscheck strip registered and legal voters of their right to vote, but it did so in a way that tipped the scales in favor of the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald Trump. Crosscheck works by finding matches between registered voters in states participating in the program, disproportionately affecting voters based on their race. Eighty-five out of one hundred of the most common names are held by minorities and minority voters tend to cast their votes for democratic candidates. But Crosscheck does not simply look for 100% matches for names and other identifying information as one would expect- the program considers first and last name matches as the same voter even when middle names and social security numbers differ.

For an example of how Crosscheck influenced the 2016 election outcome, consider what took place in the state of Michigan during the general election. Donald Trump won Michigan by approximately 10,000 votes. Michigan’s Crosscheck list included half a million people with Palast estimating that 50-60,000 votes were deemed fraudulent, the majority of which were cast by people of color. It is easy to see how different an outcome there may have been had all of the votes cast been fairly counted.

Not only are votes discounted using Crosscheck in the United States, but there is a major campaign of voter suppression occurring across the country that undeniably targets voters of color, poor voters, and young voters alike. These attacks, and the reach of the Crosscheck program, are only increasing under Republican leadership with a full blown campaign underway working to purge millions more voters leading up to the 2018 election.

As Greg Palast explains in this eye opening and informative episode, American voters must join together to fight for fair elections and to fight against modern day Jim Crow tactics, all without the help of the Democratic Party.

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Abby Martin: In one of the most contentious presidential elections ever, a hidden fact is that millions of Americans lost their vote through various methods employed in a coordinated multi-million dollar operation. Stunning in a country that claims to be the greatest democracy on earth.We don’t hear about it. What we do hear about is, claims from Trump and Republicans that they system is rigged. Because, millions of people are voting illegally.

Donald Trump: It’s rigged like you’ve never seen before.

Stephen Miller: This issue, of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone working in New Hampshire politics…

Kellyanne Conway: Is there dead people registered? Are there illegal people registered?

Donald Trump: Dead, illegal, and two states, and some cases maybe, three states? But we’re going to stop it. We’re not going to back down.

Abby Martin: Not only are these hysterical claims provably false, but they are in fact used by the same people committing actual vote rigging. None the less, these myths are perpetrated by right-wing politicians and media to justify wide spread voter crackdowns.In the latest purge, nearly half a million people have been kicked off Indiana’s voter registration list. Just since the 2016 Presidential Election. That’s a whopping 10% of total voters in the entire state.Alongside an arsenal of voter suppression tactics, a program called Interstate Cross-check institutionalized vote theft nationwide. Investigative journalist, Greg Palast uncovered exactly how the cynical billionaire back scam works in his recent film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Where he travels the world exposing how the GOP is robbing millions of votes from minorities and poor people while the democratic party shrouds itself in silence.I caught up with Greg, to talk more about the 2016 Election and the myth of American Democracy. So, your film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, amazing film, that everyone needs to watch. It dealt with the interstate voter registration cross-check program. First talk about what exactly that is and it’s impact on the most recent election?

Greg Palast: Interstate cross-check, was Donald Trumps’ secret weapon. That handed him the election more than anything. It’s a way that you can eliminate voters of color. Just wipe them off the voter rolls, in my investigation for Rolling Stone, which is in the film, you’re watching me do it. Our experts estimate that 1.1 million people lost their votes in especially concentrated in those key swing states. Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, that’s where cross-check was operating. And that also, by the way, we talk about Trump, but let’s not forget that was also wiping out voters of color which meant that, that’s one of the reasons we have a republican congress. So that’s what interstate cross-check does. What interstate cross-check is, is go back to Donald Trumps’ line, “The election is rigged, there are millions of people voting many, many times. Millions of people voting twice.”That’s the second part of his statement that no one was picking up. And so, what that is, is his claim that there are people for example, a guy named James Brown in Atlanta is voting a second time in Detroit. That’s the accusation. Everyone says, “Oh, that’s nuts.” Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s nuts. The accusation was devastating because it was backed up by his political operatives, actually removing voters from the voter rolls on the accusation that they were voting twice. Over a million people.This is one of the grave hidden purges of 2016. And yet, they didn’t arrest. They didn’t arrest anyone for voting twice in the last election. Not one person was arrested for it, yet they’re removing people. And so here’s how it worked. And by the way, here’s how we knew it was going to be Trump.Because the guy who created interstate cross-check is a character named Chris Kobach. Who’s like this right-wing, Fox news darling who’s a secretary state of Kansas voting official, and he’s the guy who basically perfected and spread this system to hunt down these so called double voters and remove them from the voter rolls.He was backing Trump, so we knew that locks Trump for the nomination, and that locks Trump for the White House. And it doesn’t matter how you vote, because they’ve already eliminated the margin in those really close states.

AM: When did cross-track come into existence?

GP: Its been around for quite some time. Before this guy Kobach took it national, a couple of states were sharing voter rolls to see if people were voting twice. There was no big damage. Because they didn’t find anyone voting twice so there’s no one to remove. Had no effect.This guy Kobach comes in a changes the whole thing and was basically after the Supreme Court, took the guts out of the voting rights act back in 2013. As soon as that happened, cross-check spread like virus. To 30 republican states where the republicans controlled the office of secretary of state, or the chief voting official, and these guys were sharing voter rolls.Now just so you know, Donald Trump said that there were three million illegal voters. Now that’s an important number to remember. Now people think, oh he just pulled that out of his wig, out of his comb over. No. That number comes from Kobach, because the list of suspects is seven million people. Seven million names. They said that’s three and a half million people voting twice. They use the list, they tag people as voting twice, and they removed not the whole seven million but they removed about 1.1 million voters in the 2016 Election.That’s just … We put it in the Rolling Stone, I put it on Al Jazeera, I put it in The Guardian. It’s all over the world, but not in the United States.

AM: Talk really quickly about how the voting rights act was guided and how it made cross-check easier to implement?

GP: What happened was, I contacted all these voting officials. Every single one and said, “Give us these lists that you’ve got from this guy Chris Kobach, accusing people of voting twice.” So we were turned down. They said, “You know, if you vote twice, it’s a crime.” Yeah, you vote twice, you go to prison for five years. So who would do this thing? So who are these people? But they wouldn’t give us the list because it’s a criminal investigation. Well you see the hat, I’m an investigative reporter, right? Took us about six months, five months to begin getting some of these lists we weren’t supposed to have. So we have these confidential lists of the voters, we have two million of their names. And we start going through the list. And this is where the rubber meets the road. Who is on the list of voting twice? Guys like 288 guys named, James Brown in Georgia voted in another state in the same election.How do they know that? Because they found a guy named James Brown in atlanta, and believe it or not, they found a guy name James Brown in Detroit, and said, “Obviously, James Brown, this is the same voter, voting twice.” Now here’s the thing about the list, and you’ve got to take a look at these lists. Name after name after name, James Thomas Brown’s supposed to be the same guy as James Edward Brown. Christina Isabel Hernandez is supposed to be the same person as Christina Maria Hernandez. By the way, these aren’t made up examples. These are real, real, real. James Brown Jr, and James Brown Sr are supposed to be the same- father and son are supposed to be the same voter.Now here’s the trick, you’ve heard Maria Hernandez, you’ve heard James Brown, David Kim is another one. When you’re looking at common names you’re looking at black people, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.85 of the 100 most common names in America are held by minorities like Rodriguez, Chung, Nguyen, Hernandez, and how do they vote? It’s not the color of their skin, they vote democratic. So if you want to knock out democratic voters, you knock out voters of color. Here’s where the Supreme Court comes in. In most of these states, you cannot put in a new system of removing voters like cross-check unless you get it first approved by the justice department and make a claim that it is in no way prejudicial against voters of color. Of course, when you’re knocking out James Brown and Jose Garcia, it’s a game that’s pulling out voters of color. So they could never get away with this if the voting rights act were still in place. The voting rights act also gave the justice department all kinds of powers to stop this game before it happens. You don’t remove everyone, ’cause this adds to the racial bias, they send post cards to people.They don’t even say, “You’re accused of voting twice.” They just say, are you registered to vote in another place? If you don’t send back the card, and most people don’t- the poor people, who move a lot don’t get the cards etc. You lose your vote. So that happened in mass. In Michigan, I was there after the election, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,700 votes. The secretary of state of Michigan himself told me, he’s a republican, “We move aggressively against people on the cross-check list.” Half a million people on that list in Michigan, we estimate they removed 50-60,000 voters. Mostly voters of color. Several times, Donald Trump’s supposed margin. March down the list of states like Arizona, North Carolina and Ohio. Cross-check made the difference.

AM: According to your research, 1/4th the names in this cross-check list you obtained didn’t have a middle name match. And the cross-check instruction manual even notes that the social security numbers may or may not match? That is astounding.

GP: Well, yeah. They use this con, this guy Chris Kobach who’s working for the Trump Campaign and is also a state official. When he’s asked about the cross-check list, when a reporter asks something, sniffs something, he says, “Oh well we check their middle name, we check the last four digits of their social security number. We checked their birthdate. It sounds totally kosher, how could you miss? “Well, in the instructions itself it says to ignore the mismatches. Ignore the mismatches? So the trick is, they have the information if anyone asks them, well what- you have all this information, but they ignore the mismatches deliberately. And let me tell you something, this whole business requires millions and millions of dollars of government money to effectuate this.Yet we have systems, these huge database operations, in fact for example, one owned by the Koch Brothers called I360. One owned by Trumps cronies called Cambridge Analytica. Those operators can with 99.9% certainty name every single real double voter in America, but then they would get all three. They wouldn’t be able to get a million people off the voter rolls.

AM: And you know people like to pain Trump as this anti-establishment figure who’s standing up to the empire. Greg, talk about his ties with Chris Kobach and how- who else is behind this.

GP: As an investigator, I can tell you, the oldest rule is the important rule: Follow the money. But what we’ve been doing is hunting down the money behind this steal. Now who funds Chris Kobach? The money goes back to a four letter word, Koch. K-O-C-H. We follow the trail back, boom. It’s the Kochs. And so the Kochs are behind the money to Kobach. Now, taking apart the voting rights act, 1965. It’s a really complex expensive lawsuit. And that was brought by Shelby, Alabama. Where does Shelby get the money? It’s 10’s of millions of dollars to bring cases like this. Where does little Shelby get this money? The answer is, it was supplied again by the Heritage foundation which is Koch money that they put into it, and other billionaires. And also a character that is known by his nickname the Vulture. His given name is Paul Singer but he’s a multi-billionaire who’s vital, he became the number one donor to the republican party for some time.So the money to take these things- to go after civil rights law and voting rights law, the money to run cross-check, the money to sell it to the public, is coming from people like Paul “The Vulture” Singer, the two Koch brothers who I’ve been following for years. And these are the people behind it. These are the people behind it. The Mercer family, and other billionaires putting their money in these operations. This is not new stuff. This is old accusation against black people.In the film, the big Klu Klux Klan propaganda film, Birth of A Nation which is now 101 years old. 101 years ago, they made this film and they had white actors in black face sneaking a second ballot into a ballot box. So the accusation that black people like to vote twice, that’s an old Klu Klux Klan trope and Trump just shop lifted it for this election.

AM: Yeah, and these people are just patsies like, again Trump paints himself as this anti-establishment figure, really he’s just a complete patsy for the Mercers, the Koch brothers, Banon too. You look at Breitbart, and the funneling with the Government Accountability Institute, it’s all Mercer and Koch money funneled right into these people and they’re just using them.

GP: The big backer of Trump was a guy called JP, John Paulson as he’s known, the foreclosure king as he’s best known. And JP the foreclosure king joined with Paul Singer to take Delphi Auto Parts which is GM Auto Parts and move it to China and move it to Mexico. And yet, he’s the big backer, one of the big secret backers of Donald Trump, and yet Donald Trump stood at the gates of a closed Delphi plant which his donors had moved to China, and said, and his donors had moved also, one of the plants from Warren, Ohio to Mexico. He said, held a big rally and said, “See this, see this closed plant? I’m going to build that wall higher and bigger. Every time I look to this plant I just add a few more feet to that wall.”Now I don’t know what the wall has to do with moving the plant across the border but it was his boys who were funding his campaign. And by the way, it’s very important to understand this, Donald Trump just plays a billionaire on TV, he’s no billionaire. He’s hocked up to his keister. So he had to turn to these guys quietly.

AM: You know, this has always been kind of a talking point, the voter fraud, especially on Fox News. The voter ID laws have been pushed through and through. Alec and Koch brothers and that think tank. It seems like Trump was really the one to mainstream it, just act- you know, creating that false reality and that paradigm that people just fall behind and believe it.

GP: He took it out of the Fox News, foxhole, spread it nation wide, they’re coming to take your vote way. This is the idea: If someone votes twice, they’ve taken your vote away. And of course, never just anyone, it’s always a voter with dark skin. It’s an immigrant swimming the Rio Grande, voting illegally. Find me one, I know of only two convictions. And it’s very easy to find alien voters, they show up to vote, sign their name. One was a republican in Georgia from Austria. Not in Georgia, in Florida from Austria.So what’s happened is, they create this false hysteria. And here’s a new one. By the way, as we head towards 2018. Chris Kobach, met with Donald Trump in Trump Tower just days before the inauguration. He had a memo in his hand which you could see, he didn’t hide it when he was shaking hands with Trump before they went in, there’s pictures of him holding the memo he’s about to give Trump. Well, we could blow it up about 100 times and see what it was. And it said, one of the things it said on it was, “To change and amend the national voter registration act.” That’s the Motor Voter law, which is one of the main things that registered minorities in America, when you get a drivers’ license, you get a voter form attached.He would remove that, he wants people to prove, Kobach, and now Trump want people to prove that they’re citizens to vote. And I say, well why not? Prove you’re a citizen to vote. Excuse me? How do you prove your a citizen in America? This is not Red China, we don’t carry citizenship cards. Social security cards, drivers licenses, those are issued to aliens, including my team who aren’t American citizens but have green cards.So, social security number, drivers license mean nothing, you have to have a passport? Now excuse me, who has a passport? Or there’s your original birth certificate, good luck finding that. Or naturalization papers. So what happens is, Kobach, Trumps’ guy, took this thing on a test drive in Kansas saying, you’ve got to prove your a citizen. The only thing that happened was, 36,000 students were blocked from voting because they couldn’t get these papers, they didn’t have passports, they’re too young. They had no passports, they didn’t have birth certificates. 36,000 young people.Now a federal judge knocked that out. A federal judge said, “You have 36,000 people who couldn’t register, could you tell me one, Mr. Kobach, even just 1 out of 36,000 that’s an illegal alien voter?” He couldn’t name it. So the judge said, “This is all bogus.” Threw it out. Why? Because of the National Voter Registration Act which this violated. So he’ll eliminate the act, just like eliminating the voting rights act, eliminate the national voter registration act, he’s going to eliminate the civil rights act.

AM: Greg, your movie was devastating, because it’s not only the cross-check, it’s not only the voter ID laws, you go to some of these polling places, and the disenfranchisement is stunning. Miles long lines. Thousands of people waiting in the freezing cold for hours and hours. Talk about some of the other voter suppression methods that are going on too?

GP: In Ohio for example, which is as we know, the vital swing state, and this happened many places, they did this in Wisconsin too, where they said, “Early voting, you can only have one single voting station for an entire county.” And they tried this is Wisconsin as well, this was key to Trumps victories in Ohio, supposed victories in Ohio and in Wisconsin. What they did, was you wait in line, on Tuesday when most white people vote in Ohio, they had for example, in Montgomery county which is Daton, they had 178 polling stations.But yet, on election on the Sunday before, which was when black people tend to vote, they call it Souls to the Polls day, there’s one polling station. The result was, and you can see it in my film. I saw literally, I’m walking, walking, there’s a half mile long line, there was one polling station, are you ready? For 80,000 voters. One polling station for 80,000 voters. You’ll see this line of black people waiting to vote. Waiting, when I was in Daton, five hours to vote. And at the end of the process, and they did this in Wisconsin, this very election, at the end of waiting all this time, they’re not given ballots, they’re given absentee ballots.Now what’s the difference? You fill out a- in Ohio and Wisconsin, you fill out the ballot, you put it in an envelope, you have to fill out the envelope perfectly. If you don’t have a driver’s license and it says, driver’s license and you leave it blank, you lose your vote. You lose your vote because you left off your driver’s license which you don’t have. You have to write “No driver’s license.” You have to sign it in several places, properly, and your signature has to match exactly your registration’s signature. So if you no longer include your middle initial but you signed your registration form 40 years ago with a middle initial, you lose your vote.All these tricks, because officially, this is an ugly thing that we don’t talk about in the United States, people who mail in their ballots, absentee ballots, or mail-in ballots, 1.7 million of those ballots never ever get counted. This is the ugly type of what I called soft apartheid in voting in America. We use fancy terms like disenfranchisement. You know what, someone steals your car, you don’t say, “Someone’s disenfranchised my car!” No, they’ve stolen your car. They steal your vote. It’s a theft.

AM: We focus on obviously the presidential elections with this because obviously its the biggest most vast disenfranchisement of the votes, but local elections, every election this is happening.

GP: Really, what’s very, very important, is that most of this vote theft is actually aimed at the state, local and congressional elections. I’ll give you an example. One of my first big investigations of vote theft was back in 2000 when I discovered that Katherine Harris and Jed Bush, of Florida had removed 10’s of thousands of black men from the voter rolls.10’s of thousands of black men from the voter rolls, what was the reason? They were all felons, criminals who aren’t allowed to vote. And Florida is one of the only states that still removes people from the voter rolls if they have a felony conviction. Okay. The problem was, I investigated and not one, absolutely zero of the people on this list who lost their vote, none of them were illegal voters. None. But yet George Bush became president by 537 votes because of what Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris did.But here’s the trick, they didn’t do it to elect George Bush. It was originally created two years before this system of purging black folk off the voter rolls to elect Jeb Bush as governor.

AM: There’s so many backups in place to secure the republican vote, to secure that this happens which brings me to the most obvious question, of course Hillary, and during the run up to the election, every time Donald Trump would bring this up she would poo-poo it and say, “Oh you’re crazy, how dare you question this sanctimonious system that we have?”

GP: This is one of the big problems that I run into. I’ll get questions like, “Well, if the republicans are stealing votes, how come the democrats aren’t saying anything?” Well, one answer to that, by the way, is democrats steal votes too, lots of them. I saw some of the most ugly Jim Crow style tactics used against Bernie Sanders voters here in California in the Sunshine State. I mean it was raw, today as you and I speak, there’s still over a million ballots that were cast, that were never tallied, never counted.Over a million, today, overwhelmingly those were Bernie Sanders votes. The victims are always the same, the victims are always voters of color, poor people, students, basically progressive votes. And because the democratic party, if they let everyone vote and help everyone vote it would be a very different party. So the establishment democrats don’t want those votes. They’d rather lose them in the general election than have those votes in the primary.That’s just the ugly awful truth.

AM: I think its hard for people to believe that the Clinton dynasty would give up power because they would rather legitimize the system that bred them.

Greg: The Clinton’s are the system. Remember, whether we like it or not, Hillary Clinton did some pretty shady things, the last thing she wants to do is talk about illegality. And misuse of the electoral system, misuse of campaign finance.

AM: Here you are, doing this giant in depth investigation, this feature film, trying to get this story out and here everyone, is just hysterically fear mongering about another country, usurping our election.

Greg: Well, heres the problem, the Russians did not tell Hillary Clinton, “Do not make a single stop in Wisconsin.” She didn’t tell those long lines in Ohio. Did Russia remove the votes of students in Georgia because they didn’t have citizenship proof papers? It wasn’t the Russians.

AM: We cannot count on the Democrats to fix this, Greg, what do we do, how do we give back a voice to the voiceless here?

GP: We have to form the organizations and participate in the organizations that exist right now that’ll expose the con that America has the world’s most perfect elections. We don’t. We still have apartheid elections, we still have Jim Crow. The only difference now is that Jim Crow has gone from wearing white sheets to using spreadsheets. We can expose it, and then we can act on it. We gotta do those two things and not ask the Democratic party to do it for us.

FOLLOW // @AbbyMartin & @Greg_Palast

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

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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FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles & @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

Dubbed ‘The School of Dictators’ by human rights activists, the US Army School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has produced some of the world’s most notorious torturers, drug traffickers and war criminals. The spectre of their crimes still haunts much of Latin America—from Argentina to El Salvador.

In El Salvador, the human rights abuses were beyond the pale–from the public assassination of bishop Óscar Romero to the raping and killing of four American nuns. 

Some of the school’s well known graduates include Jorge Videla, military dictator of Argentina from 1976 to 1981, who caused the deaths of at least 9,000 people and disappearances of an estimated 30,000 others. Another star pupil of the school was CIA agent, Vladimiro Montesinos, who went on to become Peru’s counterintelligence head. Montesino directed an anti-communist death squad called the Colina Group which committed numerous horrifying massacres of peasant farmers, trade unionists and alleged leftists.

The brutal crimes being committed in our names and with our tax dollars led a man named Father Roy Bourgeois to form The School of the Americas Watch, an organization dedicated to closing down the school.

Join Abby Martin in this edition of The Empire Files as she uncovers how the US funded right wing death squads and intentionally uprooted democracy across Latin America.

The US School That Trains Dictators & Death Squads

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FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles and @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

Joe Rogan defines new media. He’s a comedian, MMA fighter and former Fear Factor host who also pioneered The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), a wildly popular podcast featuring an eclectic variety of fascinating and unfiltered guests. Because he runs the project, there are absolutely no constraints, censorship nor shady corporate sponsorship.

I was honored to join Joe recently for an in-depth discussion about a range of issues including the Gaza massacre, Gitmo, NSA spying, Fukushima, Big Pharma & much more. Many fucks are said, so if you’re offended by swearing please skip the broadcast.

The Joe Rogan Experience with Abby Martin

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Larry King and I have had strong differences in the past about what defines a journalist, so I was lucky to be invited on his show to share my perspective on the two-party dictatorship, stop-and-frisk and new media.

Abby Martin Faces Off with Larry King on Dinosaur Media

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I also recently joined Kevin Pereira, hilarious host of the Pointless Podcast, to talk about a whole host of craziness.

Follow me at @AbbyMartin