The Politics Girl Podcast: Don’t Try to Out-Fascist the Fascists

I put a lot of thought into what this podcast should be. I didn’t want to just have one to have one, or do it because it was the next logical step. I only wanted to take on this project if I thought I could add to the conversation. There’s a lot of things you could be doing or listening to and I wanna make sure that if you choose to spend the time with me, I’m giving you something you can’t get everywhere else. You don’t need me to dictate the news to you. You have a Twitter, mainstream media an

d late night talk shows for that. You don’t need me making jokes to lighten the mood, there are people far better skilled in that department. So, I’ve decided to make The PoliticsGirl Podcast a deeper dive into subjects. Most of the information we consume these days is in bite size snippets. And that can be good. I do it myself with my rants. People have very little time, and sadly, with our dwindling attention spans, snackable information a good way to get ideas into people’s minds. But not eve

rything in the world isn’t black or white, good or bad, click bait headlines. One of the things we’ve lost in the society of 24 hour news, social media and smart phones is nuance and I’d like to add that back into the conversation but in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming. To give you some context on the big issues facing the world right now so, when you hear them come up you are able to filter them through a lens that includes critical thought and understanding. At the end of the day the only

way we’re turning this country around is if more people care, and understanding is the key ingredient in getting people to care. So, I’m gonna take this half an hour once a week to take fill in some blanks, and give you the context that is deeply lacking from our national perspective. Starting in the new year I’ll begin an interview project where I have conversations with leaders to best understand what they are doing to help us, and what we can do to help them. Both pods will both be under the

PoliticsGirl banner but one will be an interview project while the other is a thought expansion project. Ultimately the goal is to increase people’s knowledge on the issues, because when we understand we care, and when we care we do something. As my original slogan went Know, Grow, Change. That’s what we’re looking to kickstart here. There’s lots of places you can go to be entertained and, although I hope I’m entertaining, I also hope hanging out with me once a week gives you the confidence to

go out in the world and talk about these things with other people because it won’t work if I’m the only one talking. We need you. So, on that note let’s begin. Hello, and welcome to The PoliticsGirl Podcast, I’m your host Leigh McGowan, let’s get into it. Right off the top I want you to know I’m hearing you. I get hundreds of messages a day that express your concerns for what is happening in this country and what can be done about it, and I want you to know you’re not alone. What I’ve noticed wh

ile positioning myself in this kinda “warrior for democracy” space, is that I’ve struck a nerve, not just with the people who tell me I’m an idiot or a communist or really hate when women speak, but with a lot of important and powerful people, people with real influence and the ability to make actual change. People who, despite what we may see on TV, in their very formal tweets, or what their general by-the-book demeanor might suggest, really do care what’s happening to the country and want to f

ix it. I say this because I want you to know that you’re being heard. That people recognize you’re unhappy and worried and, even when it’s hard for us to see it, and sometimes it’s EXTREMELY hard, there is still a solid group of people attempting to to work within the system to fix it. I think it’s important to know we both haven’t been abandoned and, the louder and clearer we are about what we want, and what we’re willing to fight for, the more confidence these people will have to make the big

changes this country really needs. We need to give them strength. We need to give them money and we need to give them shit when they drop the ball. I understand this is an incredibly frustrating time to be an empathetic and aware person because it feels like an impossible up hill battle where the bad guys just keep winning but, there is something we can do about it and that starts with supporting the people fighting the good fight. We need to remember that we are dealing with two parties in Amer

ica. One that wants democracy (the will of people) and one that prefers hierarchy (certain people ruling over other people). As my favorite appellate lawyer Teri Kanefield says, “When democratic presidents go to work, they try and figure out how to make life better for people, with things like improving health care, social programs, and moving our society closer to equal. They want things to be fair, and they believe part of the government’s job is to build a system that makes it more fair. Even

with the understanding that the world will never be completely fair, you can see it is those with liberal values, who have always pushed for fairness over the course of America’s history with things like ending slavery, ending segregation and creating social safety nets. And then we have the group of people who prefer a hierarchy, with certain people at the top, who don’t believe fairness is possible, who see democratic governments as getting in the way of those who are able to get things done,

and giving handouts to those who don’t reply deserve them. This is what Republicans mean when they say “small government” and libertarians mean when they say government should “stay out of their business". They believe no one and no laws should get in their way. As Kanefield says, “When hierarchal presidents go to work, they think about how to maintain the hierarchy, and how to keep themselves, and their people, on top.” I spoke to Teri Kanefield because I wanted to have her on the pod. I wante

d her to come on and share her ideas with you because she’s brilliant and I thought you’d get a lot out of it, but, turns out she doesn’t love being on camera so, she agreed to let me break her ideas and share them with you. Now, saying that, I highly recommend you go to her website terikanefield.com (that’s Teri with and I) and read some of her genius for yourself. But, for now, let me do my best to break it down. For most of American history we’ve lived in a hierarchy. Before 1920 there were n

o regulatory agencies or regulations to prevent powerful, and let’s be honest, white men from taking what they wanted. They could manipulate prices and fix markets. They could cheat and force people to work for pennies. They didn’t need to provide worker safety or keep their hands off women, or treat “the other” with any respect. Before the women’s movement and the modern Civil Rights movement, we had democratic institutions, but they were primarily run by white men. If you were a White woman, y

ou had limited rights. If you were Black you had almost no rights. White men controlled universities, governor mansions, industry, both political parties, just on and on and on. Through the hard work of people like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Thurgood Marshall, and now people like Stacey Abrams, we have been making the transition from a form of government ruled entirely by White men, to more multi-racial democracy and, big surprise, some people don’t like it. The thing is, when the wor

ld has revolved around you for so long, having the universe expand to include others can be unsettling. You might have heard the famous quote “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” And this idea of sharing power, wealth, and decisions with others (especially others some deemed lesser than themselves) was something people were going to fight. They liked it better the way it was, when they picked the politicians and the police chiefs and the judges and everybody ult

imately worked for them or, at least worked to keep the system that revolved around them running smoothly. And these people still exist. They’re the Trumps and the McConnells and the Koch’s and the Murdochs. They’re the Sackler Family and Kushners. They’re the people who were pro-slavery, pro-Jim Crowe, who liked the age of the Robber Barron and hated the New Deal. They are your modern day white suprematists, anti-semites, mysogynists. They’re the people who are still mad about desegregating sch

ools, are pissed off about CRT and still working to get back to “the way it was”. To make America Great AGAIN. The Republican Party represents this group now, and they’ve decided that in order to keep the right people on top they’re willing to take our democratic institutions down. If the institutions no longer serve who they believe they should be serving, they will stop the growing threat of a multiracial democracy and create a new system that continues to favor them. In making this decision t

he Republican Party has coalesced around Donald Trump and honestly, if it wasn’t Trump it would probably be some other rich, white man willing to burn it all down to keep their place at top. You can see them, lining up behind him. It’s people like Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Chris Christie, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz. Ambitious, unscrupulous men willing to do or say anything for ultimate power. Immediately after the insurrection there was the very briefest of moments where a fair amount of Republican

leaders were shocked and self aware, but instead of distancing themselves from Trump they chose to double down. To embrace the clearly obvious lie that the election was stolen and choose to both glorify and underplay the danger and lawlessness of the people who stormed the capital and those who supported them. In the Republicans quest for power, and the ultimate maintaining of white, male supremacy in this country they now debase themselves and our country’s values daily. Kanefield explains that

the form of authority we use in democracies is what’s called “legal-rational” or what we refer to as “the rule of law”. This is the kind of government that strives for fairness but, knows things won’t always be fair because the institutions themselves are made up of people, and people are flawed. The “legal-rational” form of authority is also very slow because the power is spread out to make sure nobody has too much of it. It’s why our founding fathers created 3 separate but co-equal branches o

f government, we have checks and balances, you need a warrant before you arrest people, are presumed innocent until proven guilty and we get a trail by a jury of our peers. All these steps, these checks on power, make it harder for some wanna be autocrat to take over, but it also makes government move at the speed of molasses. Autocracy, on the other hand, moves fast. A dictator or a fascist leader doesn’t need to follow the rules or ask for permission. They just do what they want to do when the

y want to do it. And that speed, that control, it thrills people. The whole idea of “Lock her up” falls into that authoritarian camp. The Republican base wasn’t interested in looking into what Hillary had done, putting her on trial, punishing her if she deserved it - they just wanted her gone. Rule of law be damned. And Trump made it very clear that if he had just had a little bit more power, that’s exactly what would have happened. Kanefield says, This idea that Democrats should fight like Repu

blicans is misguided because it only plays into the hands of the wanna be authoritarians.The Republican Party is deliberately using hardball tactics and glorifying lawbreaking because they don’t wan to live in a “rule of law” government that no longer serves their interests. They want something new and if they have to bring down American Democracy to do it, so be it. But Democrats can’t help them do that. If you want to save rule of law you can’t use the same tactic as the people who want to des

troy it. It goes back to that old expression about Democrats bringing a knife to a gun fight. Because if you bring a gun and I bring a gun, we just upped the chances someone gets shot. I understand, not having a gun feels frustrating and unfair. We want action and results. Why do they get to cheat but we have to play by the rules? We have to play by the rules because ultimately we want to live in a society that has rules. And we can’t fight for them from outside of them. Most of us can agree tha

t we want Trump and Company in prison like, yesterday. But we can’t do that because democracies don’t just throw people in jail. We have due process. And from what it looks like the DOJ is working its way through that process. Despite the lack of fireworks. Over 700 insurrectionists have already been charged, the Trump Organization has been indicted, and the January 6th Commission is plugging away. But, because Trump isn’t already in handcuffs a lot of people feel it just proves our “system is b

roken”. Counter point: the fact that he’s not already in handcuffs means the system is working. Slowly and annoyingly but exactly as it was designed. We have to remember that for much of America’s history, criminal justice meant locking up black men and a lot of people worked for years in criminal justice reform to counter this pipeline to prison system and make justice more accountable. To make it harder, not easier, to put people in jail. To slow things down to make sure you’re doing it right.

We’re light years away from a truly fair justice system but we don’t want to just remove all the protections that people have fought for because we want a certain person locked away. I mean, we do, but we can’t. Autocracies throw dissenters in jail. Democracies give them due process. As Kanefield says, “If both sides act like autocrats, we guarantee ourselves an autocracy. Because if nobody is defending rule of law, both sides are the same and there’s no hope for America.” PC: Ok, so that’s a g

ood dip into where we find ourselves in our fight for American Democracy, so let’s take a little palate cleanser with a segment I’m calling “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” And this week we’re going to talk about a phrase… People keep talking about a red wave. The red wave. Prepare for the red wave. First of all, that makes no sense. A blue wave makes sense. It’s water and water is blue and water makes waves. A red wave is either a biblical apocalypse, a bloodbath in the

streets (which coming from the party of endless guns, and no consequences, is way too close to home) or, an expression that makes women all over the world cringe. Like, really man? No. Gross. Red wave sucks. Get your own expression. And for the record, polls are not showing a red wave. Nancy Pelosi just said Democrats are strategically poised to retain majority control in the House in 2022” and, despite what you hear, it Biden’s poll numbers are actually better than Reagan, Clinton and Obama’s a

t the same period in their administrations and they all went non to win reelection easily. If the Republicans win it won’t be because they were out winning hearts and minds and building support for their policies it’ll be because they gerrymandered, redistricted, and voter suppressed their way to an unlawful seizure of the house. If your key concern is stirring up fake controversy and changing laws so democratic votes don’t count, you’re not winning, you’re rigging the game so you can’t lose. An

d that’s a little more Red Dawn than Red Wave, if you know what I’m saying so….stop it. And we’re back…So, right now we’re feeling impatient and stressed from what feels like the lack of action and consequences for Trump and his enablers. We watched Trump mass pardon people on his way out of office. We hear about all the crimes he’s committed on the news. People keep publishing books about the endless criminal actions that went down during his administration, and we see him and his people contin

ue to break laws every day. There’s just story after story after story and it’s making us crazy. But, unfortunately, real life justice is not the same as TV justice. It’s not quick or wrapped up in 40 minutes. You don’t get a conviction from what we heard on the news, we get them in the courtroom. And it takes a lot of work, and a lot of time to get a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. We only get one shot at Trump and if we get it wrong, and he becomes an acquitted martyr, which would be way

worse than waiting longer for a guilty verdict. As much as I would like to know, I’m pretty sure we’re not hearing what they’re doing over there at the Justice Department because no reasonable prosecutor should be talking about an ongoing investigation. We’ve all seen enough law and order to know that. They can’t be tipping their hand, or letting anyone know where they’re at because telling us would just be bad lawyering and only help the other side. There is something called the Magic Bullet T

heory that goes like this: If only Blank would happen then the problem would be solved. Right now the January 6th Committee and the Department of Justice is playing the role of the magic bullet. We think if we could just hold enough people accountable, put enough people in jail, Trumpism will crumble and the threat of authoritarianism will just go away. The problem with the magic bullet theory is, if your bullet fails, you’re fucked. You put all your eggs in that basket. It’s the disappointment

many of us felt when the Muller Report failed to produce the results we’d hoped for, or the second impeachment trial failed to remove Trump from leadership. We were counting on these things to fix the problem and when they fell through we got depressed. But we have a bigger problem in America than just one corrupt administration. We have alarming amount of people who now fully support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election or believe that he actually won. A dangerous percentage of them look at

the insurrectionists as heroes and martyrs. A fair amount of those supporters are law enforcement and military and in the justice system. These are people with government jobs, key roles in the media, or billions of dollars at their disposal. We have people starting their own militias, and working on college campuses and taking over our school boards. And this whole group is fed by an almost completely unregulated propaganda machine. If we think putting Trump in jail, or holding those responsib

le accountable, is just going to cause all these people to change their minds, go home and just learn to embrace a multi-racial democracy we’re kidding ourselves. Criminal justice won’t solve our political problems. This is bigger than one man or one movement. Holding this corrupt leader accountable is an important first step, but the problem will still be here. Kanefield points out, that a lot of big names were pushing for the Justice Department to make a statement by hauling Steve Bannon off t

o jail the second the deadline for his subpoena passed, even though she says it’s likely the committee already had copies of the documents they were seeking and they wouldn’t be deposing him for at least a week. And she agrees it would have made quite a statement and it would have made for some great theater, but it also would have seriously raised the temperature in the country and started us down a road we might not be able to get off. When Bannon did in fact fail to show up for his deposition

, the committee made a criminal referral then. Which, in Kanefield’s opinion was the most appropriate, if not the most dramatic, time to make that call. Twitter went crazy calling the democrats lazy and cowardly and afraid. But Kanefield points out, that by actually following the legally appropriate standard rather than doing some sort of Trump style theatrics, Biden’s DOJ actually did the country a favor. She says, “when the news becomes a show, what matters is who puts on the better show and t

here is no better showman than Trump.” In other words, don’t try and out fascist the fascists. I get the anxiety here. I feel it myself. Every day these people aren’t held accountable for what they tried to do, what they still want to do, for the lies they’re telling, and the chaos they’re sowing, the worse it gets. It’s an emergency and we can’t underestimate the threat we’re under. But, as Kanefield points out, the last thing you want to do in an emergency is panic. Panic can motivate people t

o action but, it’s usually a pointless action. Think of the Titanic launching lifeboats half filled, or people stampeding over others to escape a fire and the death toll ends up higher from trampling than the fire itself. Kanefield points out the increasing panic we’re feeling has a few sources. The first being people who sincerely believe it is essential everyone understand how close we are to slipping into autocracy - I fall into this camp - We want to wake people up. To shake those who aren’t

paying attention out of their complacency. The problem, Kanefield explains, is that while we’re trying to get the attention of people who aren’t paying attention, the people who ARE paying attention are drowning in doomsday messages which either sends them into a complete panic them or wears them out. The next group of people are those who’ve realized that peddling panic and doom earns clicks. This is the business model of right wing news but, it’s also the tactic now used by most major media o

utlets. People like hits and, “If this doesn’t happen, we’re doomed” gets a lot more clicks than “Here’s a list of steps we can take to save democracy”. Anger is also a huge motivator for likes and clicks. It’s Facebook’s entire model. Stirring people to anger is easier than any other emotion so “The DOJ is failing us” is going to generate a lot more traffic than “The DOJ is busy doing their jobs, we think, because they’re not talking to the press so we don’t really know”. Chaos rewards bad acto

rs, and fascism itself flourishes in times of great anxiety. People want to see results. They want to see “justice”. They want someone to get what’s coming to them. And both sides want this. One side believes the election was stolen and wants justice, and one side sees the coup attempt that’s happening and wants justice. This is the time when people abandon democratic, rule of law, principles to get results, and even though one side is willing to do it, the other side can not. There are a lot of

people, myself included, who worry Democrats don’t have the killer instinct to win this fight and it stresses us out because we understand how much is on the line. But, we can not fight like them or we will end up like them. I’m not going to lie, there’s part of me that wants heads on pikes, that dreams of mile long perp walks and jails filled up with these so obviously guilty people, but this idea that the left should essentially set aside the rules and procedures to fight fire with fire is a

recipe for disaster. Republicans are trying to destroy democratic institutions to create a cult of the leader, top down, authoritarian-form of government, the solution is not to follow them down that road but to do the work to strengthen the institutions they want broken. This is where you come in. Basically, the way to save democracy is with more democracy, or what Barack Obama calls “citizenship”. We need more votes, more representatives, more people running for office, more people knocking on

doors and registering voters. We need more people talking to their friends and neighbors about why it’s important. No Republican should run ever run unopposed. Politics is ultimately local. We hear so much about national politics but, putting pressure on local officials works. We can’t leave the school boards, and local offices and state assemblies to the crazies. If you want to help run, or find out who in your community being targeted by right wing groups and support them. Being angry is powe

rful but, it’s exhausting. Yes, this is a crisis, but you’re more effective in a crisis if you’re calm and deliberate. We need to defend the institutions holding the system together and support the political party running against those who would destroy it. You don’t have to be a Democrat to know that what is happening is wrong and you have to vote against it. American journalist Jon Lovett put it beautifully when he said, “The reason the right wing doesn’t see the Rittenhouse verdict as a trage

dy, or even what happened that day in Kenosha as a tragedy, is because that’s the society they're quite comfortable building. It’s not just that they’re out here saying “justice was served”. They’re holding up this this kid as some kind of hero, someone to admire and emulate. They’re offering him government jobs, and congressional medals of honor and federal holidays. This is the exact kind of lawless society the Republicans want. Between open carry laws, concealed carry laws, stand your ground

laws, self-defense laws, the amount of guns in this country and this toxic racial stew we are all simmering in we’re setting ourselves up for an absolute catastrophe, and the race war that the Republicans have been claiming is coming so long. They are literally going to be the cause of it and it will only serve them because fear and terror are what lead us to strongman leaders and authoritarian control. This isn’t just about upholding democratic institutions. It’s about upholding a society. We n

eed to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in, because it is now a main stream Republican view that someone like Kyle Rittenhouse should be able to carry a weapon of war through our streets and, if feeling threatened, should be allowed to kill without remorse or consequence. As Stephen Colbert said, “I’m not a legal expert so I can’t tell you whether or not Kyle Rittenhouse broke the law. But I can tell you this, if he didn’t break the law, we should change the law.” A growing aut

horitarian impulse is winding its way through the republican party. They want our police to be fully militarized. They were supportive of vigilante groups picking up protesters and throwing them in unmarked vans. They put paramilitary on the steps of the Lincoln memorial to scare people. They cleared the streets by tear gassing their own citizens and sent military helicopters to intimidate us. They publicly support the insurrection where a mob broke into our capital to stop the peaceful transfer

of power, and would have allowed their leader to stay in office despite losing the election if they could have managed it, and now their actions are telling us they’re ok with the kind of lawlessness that would have certain people shooting other people dead in the street. We’re at a place where one political party is willing to use the institutions when they go their way and discard them when they don’t, and we need to find a way to counter that behavior without discarding the institutions ours

elves. The bottom line is we have to convince more people to defeat this kind of politics by USING the democratic system NOT by abandoning it. Voting works. Organizing works. If our votes didn’t matter they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress them. So stop being mad at the Democrats for not stopping this swing into fascism and be mad at the Republicans for embracing fascism. Stop demanding the Democrats be perfect and deliver on every promise, while expecting the Republicans to behave despica

bly and only look out for themselves. Stop saying if the Democrats don’t fix all of this, or give me all that, I’m not voting for them again, without acknowledging that decision only gets you less of what you want, and gives the people you disagree with more power. If we give up now, things will only get worse. So we have to stop attacking the people standing between us and authoritarianism. They want us to turn on each other or get so despondent we just give up. They’re wearing us down with the

ir terrible behavior and lack of consequences. They want us to believe it’s hopeless so we let our guard down they waltz in and take it all. But, if we let them take it all it really will be hopeless. America has always struggled between those who want democracy and those who so not. We work to make laws that create fairness and there’s always a group working to roll those laws back. We push forward. They push back. America has never been a fully working democracy but it has always been a work i

n progress. And you can look at that and think “wow, look at how far we’ve come” or you can look at it and say, “See we started broken and we’re still broken, nothing’s ever going to change.” But don’t forget the people who made real change over the years, who pushed for fairness and equity and changing the status quo, they didn’t have the luxury of being cynical or nialistic, of just throwing up their hands and abdicating responsibility to a broken system. They had to be idealists. They had to

believe change was possible or they wouldn’t have been able to fight. And that’s how we’ve accomplished every major piece of progress in this nation’s history. It’s how we desegregated schools, and got women the vote and made gay marriage a reality. It’s how we got social security and worker rights and passed the ACA. It’s how we’ll end up embracing the trans community, building a democracy that works for all of us and saving our planet for humanity. Not from being cynical and shutting down but

from being passionate and standing up. So, that’s it for this week, let cool heads prevail. Don’t buy into the doom and gloom that unless this happens it’s all over. That’s the kind of thinking that make us feel helpless when we actually have the power to make a difference. As Kanefield says, the closest thing we have to a magic bullet is a Democratic sweep in ’22 from national politics all the way down to local offices and we can do it. Now, go out and make the world better place because no one

needs red wave. I mean, seriously, gross. Until next week, PG Out. The politicsgirl Podcast is written and performed by me, Leigh McGowan, in partnership with The Meidas Touch Media Network and produced and edited by Happy warrior Entertainment. All rights reserved.