AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we bring you Part 2 of our conversation with Jason Stanley, author and professor of philosophy at Yale University. His new book is titled Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He’s also the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Thanks so much for staying with us. In this part of the conversation, I want to get into Project 2025 and also the great replacement theory. But I want to start off, for those who didn’t hear perhaps Part 1, by you just laying out the thesis of your book.

JASON STANLEY: The thesis of my book is that a certain kind of erasing history justifies actions by authoritarian leaders, such as cutting down voting for minority populations, such as justifying state violence — in the case of the United States, against immigrants; in the case of, say, India, against Muslims; and in Israel, against Palestinians.

Vladimir Putin recently blurbed my book. He said, “Wars are won by teachers.” You can see that from the Russian textbooks in 2022, for example. They completely justify the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They justify it by representing Ukraine as fake. They eliminate all Ukrainian history. They justify it as representing the West, as threatening traditional “European values.”

So, textbooks have an enormous role to play in authoritarianism. When we look at the United States, what we see is the same people attacking voting are attacking public schools. So, what I’m trying to do is explain that link between authoritarianism and attacking education.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, that’s really interesting, which takes us right away to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In 2022, he signed into law House Bill 7, also known as the Stop WOKE Act, which he claimed would take on critical race theory in the workplace and in schools.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: We believe an important component of freedom in the state of Florida is the freedom from having oppressive ideologies opposed upon you without your consent, whether it be in the classroom or whether it be in the workplace, and we decided to do something about it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Governor DeSantis. Explain exactly what’s happened in Florida.

JASON STANLEY: So, first of all, let me note his invocation of the term “freedom.” Toni Morrison said that freedom in American rhetoric is far too often a white notion, contrasted with the unfreedom of Black Americans. Ron DeSantis sells this bill as promoting freedom, but whose freedom are we talking about? It’s supposedly the freedom of Americans to be free from oppressive literature. However, if you’re a Black student, a Black child in those schools, your history is not being represented. Are Black parents free to complain about the curriculum as representing the normative American family as white? Are Black parents free to complain about the fact that the history of Black agency is being eliminated, Black Lives Matter no longer allowed to be taught in Florida schools? What about LGBT families? Are they free to complain about the representation of heterosexual families as the norm, as Project 2025 tries to impose on a federal level? Think about how this makes LGBT families feel. Think if your parents are in a same-sex relationship and their relationship is banned from the schools. That’s not — freedom here means the freedom of white Christian men.

So, in Florida, what we have, the result of this, people down —

AMY GOODMAN: White Christian men who aren’t gay.

JASON STANLEY: Who aren’t white Christian cis men, exactly.

So, now in Florida, these laws have created a culture of fear and intimidation. They’ve made public school teachers public enemy number one. The universities are under dire attack. No one has reported on the fact that the University of Florida, in their post-tenure review, almost 20% of the professors have failed it and face loss of their jobs.

Similar bills have been passed in Ohio and Indiana. We’re talking about Ohio State and the University of Indiana, two of the world’s greatest public universities. Now professors face penalties, from loss of their positions to loss of their salaries to civil penalties for teaching concepts like white privilege, for teaching Black history, for teaching LGBT perspectives. Students are being encouraged in these states to turn their professors in, like in an authoritarian society. Tennessee has an online reporting form to turn in not just public school teachers, but professors, for teaching basic concepts of Black history and LGBT perspectives, so — or American history.

So, this attack on history has created, especially in Florida, a culture of fear and intimidation, encouraging people to turn their fellow citizens in for violating the official ideology of the state.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re in an election year. We were at the Republican National Convention, covering it. Among those who spoke was Tucker Carlson. Media Matters has accused Tucker Carlson of being responsible for, quote, “single-handedly introducing the white supremacist 'great replacement' conspiracy theory into mainstream American politics.” This is a clip of Tucker Carlson when he was still hosting a nightly show on Fox News.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, into that, you throw millions of brand new people who have no connection to America whatsoever, people who broke our laws to get here, who don’t speak our language, who have no idea what the U.S. Constitution says and don’t care. And what do you have when you put all of that together? You have a recipe for social collapse.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you also have written a piece in Slate, “Donald Trump is openly running a Great Replacement Theory campaign.” Talk about what Carlson said, what Trump repeatedly is saying, and why you think this is so dangerous.

JASON STANLEY: I was recently talking to my — some of my relatives who are Orthodox Jewish, who are parroting this line about how our family came in legally. However, many, many thousands of Jewish refugees from Germany weren’t able to come in illegally — come in legally. They would have had to come in illegally. Many of them were turned away. Their ships were turned away, and they died in concentration camps. What my fellow Jewish Americans are saying when they’re saying we should only accept people who come in legally is they are supporting the mass murder of Jews who were turned away from America’s shores. And that is something that I will never do. I will never turn away the victims of genocide.

So, this great replacement theory is the core of the message of MAGA Republicanism, in this election and previously. It links to the education framework, because in education, what you do is you eliminate the history of nonwhite Christian cis men, and you instead elevate the stories of great white Christian men, who are supposedly what — the people who make our country great. And that way, you can represent nonwhite immigration as an existential threat to the nation.

And what we know from history is that great replacement theory motivates mass violence. It motivates mass violence on the state level and the individual level. We have many, many mass shootings since Anders Breivik in 2011 justified on the basis of great replacement theory about immigrants ruining the greatness and innocence of the nation. And it justifies, of course, mass violence, as we’re seeing in India, when they represent Muslims as sort of foreign invaders, and, you know, there’s regular lynchings. And it, of course, was the core of Nazi ideology, when Hitler had this crazed conspiracy theory that Jews lost World War I to — betrayed Germany in World War I in order to bring in Black Senegalese soldiers into the Rhineland to mate, have children, rape and seduce German women, to undermine the white race. So, that’s what we’re seeing. We know from history and the present what it justifies.

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s so interesting is that, look, when you had the white supremacists marching in the University of Virginia, they were marching chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, I always ask my students a quiz when I’m teaching this material. Are they saying Jews will numerically replace Christian Americans? No, they’re saying Jews are behind the engineering of this replacement. What we’re now seeing is we’re seeing the Republicans say Democrats are behind this great replacement. And that is actually aiming political violence not just against immigrants, but at their political opponents.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Donald Trump in his debate with Kamala Harris, hosted by ABC News.

DONALD TRUMP: Because they’re destroying the fabric of our country by what they’ve done. There’s never been anything done like this at all. They’ve destroyed the fabric of our country.

AMY GOODMAN: “They’ve destroyed the fabric of our country.” And, of course, this is the same debate where he said that Haitians are eating your pets.

JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, when you have accurate history, if you knew, for example, that Haiti had the only successful slave revolution in human history, then you might be able to see what the demonization of Haitian immigrants is doing. The demonization of Haitian immigrants has multiple aspects. It’s racist, of course. It’s saying that — exactly like Hitler did with the Senegalese soldiers, it’s saying that Black immigrants are going to undermine the character. So, hint, hint, what is the character of the nation? And it’s singling out Haitians is particularly dangerous. And that’s a shoutout to history, as it were, since Haitians have been being punished by the world for their revolution for hundreds of years.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Project 2025 and how that fits into Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. President Trump has had to distance himself from this, even though something like well over a hundred of his allies and aides were involved with writing Project 2025. It was done under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation. The head of it has just written a book. It has a foreword by JD Vance, and it’s been postponed for publication ’til after the election. But talk about the significance of it.

JASON STANLEY: The significance of Project 2025 is that it calls for what in the Nazi parlance is called Gleichschaltung, the systematic replacement of civil servants by loyalists, by party loyalists, and the systematic replacement of teachers in schools and universities and, in general, institutions throughout society by party loyalists.

In the case of education, it’s completely implausible that Trump is ideologically distant from the goals of Project 2025. Trump has repeatedly said he’s going to target critical race theory, which, let’s face it, is simply Black history. The Project — he’s targeted — he said he’s going to replace education with patriotic education — namely, representing the United States as an exceptional grand nation whose exceptionality is due to its white Christian heterosexual men, who have defined the nation.

So, in Project 2025, the civil rights agenda is to base civil rights enforcement on a proper understanding of the laws and eliminating critical race theory and gender ideology. In other words, civil rights law in schools is entirely there to make sure that there’s no racism against nondominant groups, against Black Americans. Civil rights law is there to make sure that LGBT children or the children in LGBT families are not discriminated against. In other words, this is a mandate to eliminate civil rights enforcement.

Project 2025, in a bizarre kind of quasi-fascist way, targets funding for disabled students. Of course, fascism involves privileging nondisabled people, privileging sort of supposedly producers to the nation. And that, I find a bizarre kind of resonance of fascist ideology, to slash funding for disabled students.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stanley, tell us who JD Vance is. I mean, he went to Yale Law School. You’re a professor of philosophy at Yale. He is the real attack dog for Trump in, just this weekend, seizing on the apparent assassination attempt, the second one in two months of Trump. He went after Democratic rivals for their rhetoric. This is Vance at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Atlanta on Monday.

SEN. JD VANCE: Well, you know the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down their rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is pretty amazing. He was following what Elon Musk had said — you know, why haven’t people tried to assassinate Biden and Kamala? Why just Trump? And then he had to delete that tweet. Now he’s being investigated by the Secret Service. Tell us about JD Vance and also what is being said about him at Yale.

JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, first of all, Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was beaten on the head with a hammer by someone who — affected by Republican conspiracy theories. So, that that gets erased is kind of shocking.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you had Don Trump Jr. mocking Paul Pelosi being hammered on the head, something he is suffering from to this day.

JASON STANLEY: Absolutely. So you have a congratulations for violence.

AMY GOODMAN: And also, you have Trump saying these are two far-left people who tried to assassinate him, when I think in both cases — I mean, the mental health problems of both men, you know, have yet to be fully laid out, but they were originally Trump supporters. And this last one, Rauth, voted for President Trump.

JASON STANLEY: Right. Misrepresentations of reality, as we know, are no barrier to the campaign that the Republicans are waging.

Now, JD Vance, I think he should be thought of as one of the emerging intellectuals of this authoritarian movement. Initially, people said, “How could it be fascism when you don’t have intellectuals, the fascist intellectuals?” I think that’s what we’re starting to see. JD Vance is a Yale man. When I came to Yale soon after he left, everyone spoke glowingly about him. He is someone that Yale loves, like Ron DeSantis, like Tom Cotton at Harvard. These leaders of this movement come from the very elite institutions that they are supposedly decrying. Both Vance and his spouse are Yale graduates.

Now, Vance is entirely inconsistent. Hillbilly Elegy is a book about how poor whites reject meritocracy and the promise of America to wallow in self-pity and resentment. And now Vance is running a campaign about self-pity and resentment, saying to the dominant group, “You’re being replaced by immigrants. Your misery is not your fault. It’s the fault of the very institutions that trained me to become the vice-presidential candidate of the United States and connected me to billionaires like Peter Thiel, who are supporting me, who are my mentors.” So, JD Vance comes from the billionaire world of private equity and hedge funds. So, he is being supported by billionaires who are exploiting, who want him to exploit resentment to elect an administration that’s going to cut their taxes and eliminate regulation against them.

So, JD Vance, I think his internal ideology is a far-right, anti-woman ideology that is based around great replacement and natalism, the idea that women should be having large families, to replace the true Americans, the real Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: And then going after, of course, the childless so-called cat ladies.

JASON STANLEY: Absolutely, because in this ideology, in this kind of far-right fascist ideology, that draws in both social conservatives, anti-democratic social conservatives, as the — as well as sort of macho men, who think men should be men, sort of Musk, who also has a lot — you know, goes in for we have to replace our populations.

There’s a simple solution to dealing with declining birth rates in the United States, and it’s on the southern border. It’s immigration. If that’s really what you care about, is declining U.S. populations, then you’re going to open the floodgates to immigration. Really, JD Vance is asking for there to be more immigrants. But because what is meant are non-Black immigrants specifically, because what is meant are Christian immigrants — well, because, sorry, what is meant are Black immigrants and non-Christian immigrants as a threat to the nation, JD Vance is calling for rigid gender roles, denouncing women who don’t have children. And that’s the ideology here. That’s the ideology that sweeps in — that sweeps in social conservatives. They see women’s rights being then diminished along the lines that democracy allows. It’s an anti-freedom agenda. Women’s rights are central to the democratic value of freedom. And attacking women’s rights is the most central way — attacking the freedoms of 50% of the population is the most central way to attack freedom.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to switch gears and go to Israel. You’re the son of Holocaust survivors. I wanted to talk about the situation. You have the college campuses, encampments across the country, and you have what’s directly happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Last year, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke at a conference in Paris, France, where he said there’s, quote, “no such thing as Palestinian people.”

BEZALEL SMOTRICH: [translated] There’s no such thing as a Palestinian people. … Do you know who’s Palestinian? I am Palestinian. … My late grandfather, who is 13th-generation Jerusalemite, is the true Palestinian. … The Palestinian people are an invention that is less than a hundred years old.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what Smotrich is saying?

JASON STANLEY: Smotrich is paving the way for genocide. If there are no Palestinians, then there are no Palestinians to evict, there’s no Palestinians to starve, there’s no Palestinians to kill. So, I think it’s mistaken to get bogged down in the question of whether Israel is a colonial country, colonialist country. It’s completely obvious that Israel is engaging in colonialist practices. And that’s what we should focus on.

They’re erasing the history of Palestinians in order to evict them from the country, to restrict their rights. One would — what liberal Democrat would countenance the idea of a country that must remain as — have as a majority one ethnic or religious group? That’s not something that we would stand for in Western Europe, for example. So, this erasure of Palestinian people, this representation of them as lacking a historical claim and rights, it allows for stereotypes, such as Palestinians are unjustifiably reacting to the conditions they’re in. And now, I don’t want to justify the actions of Hamas, which are horrific, and the terrorist activities of October 7th. But to erase the Palestinian people from history is what underlies what we’re currently seeing, which is an active genocide in progress.

AMY GOODMAN: You have JD Vance saying that “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Your response?

JASON STANLEY: Well, we know the people in question were not motivated by that. I think they were motivated by trying to get themselves in history books by assassinating some famous person, because, ideologically, they were not — they were, if anything, Trump supporters, so apolitical or Trump supporters. So that’s an entire mischaracterization. And at the same time, you’re targeting your political opponents, the Democrats, as the people who are behind the supposed replacement of Americans, and, therefore, an existential threat to the greatness of the nation. We have to remember that this targeting of political opponents is extremely dangerous and a characteristic of authoritarian regimes about to engage in either violence or other court methods, using the justice system to target their opponents.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you end your book by exploring how reclaiming history is an act of resistance against authoritarian regimes that seek to erase the past. Why don’t you wrap up with your final thoughts?

JASON STANLEY: So, when you — authoritarians need to create a situation where we all fear each other, the different groups in a country all fear each other, so we need an authoritarian leader. So, the dominant group needs an authoritarian leader to protect them against predators targeting their family or immigrants replacing the nation.

What reclaiming history and reclaiming perspectives does is it humanizes the people that you’re supposed to fear, that the authoritarian sets you up to fear. It explains their perspective. And since democracy is a system where we all need to understand each other’s perspectives in order to have a democracy at all, especially the perspectives of nondominant groups who have been denied the democratic ideals of freedom and equality, reclaiming history, reclaiming perspective, saying this is what it feels like to be a Black American in the United States, this is what it feels like in Hungary to be the child of Holocaust — to be a Holocaust survivor. Like Toni Morrison is being banned in the United States, Imre Kertész, his work, a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, is being removed from schools in Hungary. So that’s very typical. So, placing those perspectives in —

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Donald Trump continually, right through this presidential debate, holding up Orbán as a great leader.

JASON STANLEY: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: The Hungarian ruler.

JASON STANLEY: Orbán is their model, which is using the courts to target universities, taking over the courts, using the courts to buttress this kind of kleptocracy and crony capitalism that the billionaire class in America is hoping for, I think mistakenly. They’re hoping to get a leg up, the regulations slashed, and they’re hoping to, early on, align themselves with this —

AMY GOODMAN: Why mistakenly?

JASON STANLEY: Mistakenly because just look at Vladimir Putin’s Russia. How well has it worked out for the oligarchs there? This is always a mistake that oligarchs make. They think that they’ll be able to control their little dictator. And that is a profound error.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us and also writing this book. Jason Stanley, author and professor of philosophy at Yale University. His new book, just out, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He’s also author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. To see Part 1 of our conversation, go to democracynow.org.
I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.