Fascism is Our New Normal

Brad Onishi: Hello, y'all, I'm back. Good to see you and good to be with you on the mic. Want to thank all of you for the best wishes. We kind of had a pretty eventful week. My second child was born this past week. She's actually a week old now, and so we're adjusting to life with her and her two-year-old sister. My wife and our newborn are doing great, so everyone is happy and healthy, even if we're not sleeping that much. Really excited to sneak away for a couple minutes today and just be back with you to share some thoughts on some current events and other things happening.

It's October, and that means we have a new book recommendation for you all, and this month is When Religion Hurts You by Dr. Laura Anderson. For those of you on YouTube, I'm holding it up here. Dr. Anderson is just one of the world's, in my view, leading experts on religious trauma, as the co-founder for the Center for Trauma Resolution, and somebody that I've worked with extensively in the past. Dan works with currently as a practitioner at the center. And so I encourage you to check the book out. If you're somebody who has undergone religious trauma, or somebody who has family members or friends who have, or just want to learn more about what that is, this is really one of the first books on this subject. And so I would say, check it out—When Religion Hurts You by Dr. Laura Anderson.

Now if you're listening or watching, go to the show notes and click our link and buy the book on our Bookshop book recommendations list. It'll help us. It'll help Dr. Anderson, and yeah, that's the best way to do it.

Today, I want to jump into some stuff. Let me just stop and say one more thing, and then we'll jump in. We today released episode three of Andrew Whitehead's American Idols, and it's all about how Andrew, a world-renowned sociologist, stayed Christian, renewed his faith by leaving Christian nationalism behind. So if you haven't checked out American Idols yet, it's a produced series by us here at Axis Mundi Media, and it includes interviews with people you'll recognize—Robert Jones, Jemar Tisby, Anthea Butler, Paul Djupe, all kinds of different folks, Sam Perry, and the list goes on. And it's really a great narrative series that unpacks: What is Christian nationalism? Why is it a threat to democracy? Why is it a threat to Christianity, and what we can do about it? So check that out.

Now, Inform Your Resistance, the other podcast we launched last month—episode two is out. It's all about racialized capitalism. So if you are somebody who wonders how race and capitalism intersect, and more specifically, how capitalism really has been built in this country to marginalize and oppress people of color and how that happens systemically, the episode that we have out now, episode two with Saki Bhati, will really help you understand that. So I would say, check out Inform Your Resistance. You can get all of that at axismundi.us.

All right, let's jump into it.

This past week, Joe Biden went down to Arizona, and he gave a speech that many—Jeff Sharlet, for example, on Twitter—said it was one of the most profound speeches he's heard from an American president in his lifetime, on the topic of American democracy and why it is so important. Now I know for many of you listening, Joe Biden is not an exciting person, and he's not somebody that, no matter what anyone says, you're going to get excited about or feel anything for, and that's fine. And today I don't want to do anything that's supposed to be a kind of "this is why you should think Joe Biden is the greatest thing in the world." What I want to do is analyze what Biden said and how it relates to some things that I think are happening in our country.

So Biden—one of the hallmark lines from the speech, and maybe the most memorable one, was this: "We should all remember democracies don't have to die at the end of a rifle. They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up or condemn threats to democracy, when people are willing to give away that which is most precious to them because they feel frustrated, disillusioned, tired, alienated."

So I want to hold on to these ideas. I want to hold on to the idea that democracy dies. When does it die? At the end of the rifle? Maybe, maybe not. It dies, according to Biden, when people are silent. Okay? So why would people be silent? If democracy is in peril, why would you be silent? Some of you might be thinking back to your days in school when you learned about Nazi Germany, and inevitably, somebody always asked, "Well, why didn't the Jewish people resist or why didn't certain German people stand up to Hitler?" That was always a question when you're like in seventh grade or ninth grade and you're learning about all this stuff. How come nobody said something or did something?

And when Biden says this line, that's what comes to mind for me—that democracy doesn't die at the end of the rifle, but when people are silent.

And you know, one of the things I saw on Twitter trending this week, and I saw various folks who I respect, scholars and journalists, talking about how this is true, that democracies often die not in one fell swoop—even though there are a history of coups and other things that have happened across the world, of course—but they die inch by inch, and they die moment by moment over time. And people become—and this is what Biden said, and I want to hold on to these ideas—people become frustrated, they become disillusioned, they become tired, and they become alienated. All right, let's come back to those in a second.

He went on to say: "Democracy means rejecting and repudiating political violence, regardless of party. Such violence is never, never, never acceptable in America." Now, he's obviously referencing things like January 6. He's also referencing the fact, and he called this out by name in one of his speeches in Arizona, that Donald Trump, over the past week, has gone on some rants that have included language of political violence.

No surprise, one of those rants included suggesting that General Milley, who just left his post as the head of the Joint Chiefs in the military, somehow partnered with China, and he said it's—you know, he did something that was deserving death, or in certain days, would have deserved death. And people across the world were like, "The former president of the United States just suggested that General Milley should be killed for treason." That was the takeaway for so many of us as we kind of read those words.

So when Biden says that violence must never be normalized to advance political power, that it has to be something that's rejected, I think we can all agree. I mean, that makes sense to me. I don't think we should have a situation where people are saying that someone like General Milley should be killed for treason, for some drummed-up idea without evidence, without much kind of data. There's really nothing there except for vitriol from Trump, and therefore he says he should be killed.

So I want, right at this moment, to hone in on this word "normalized." Here's what Biden said again. Let me say it for you one more time. He says: "Democracy means rejecting and repudiating political violence, regardless of party. Such violence is never, never, never acceptable in America. It's non-democratic. It must never be normalized to advance political power."

The idea is you cannot use violence or the threat of violence to get power—I don't know, to stay in office after you lose the 2020 election, or use it to sway votes in places like Georgia or anywhere else.

But I want to hone in on this word "normalized." We live in an era, and I know you all see this. You see it on Instagram posts, you see it across the web, you hear it in the discourse. "Normalize blank," right? "Hey, let's normalize blank." Let's normalize this thing that we think is a good idea. One of the things that I saw recently is, "Let's normalize polyamory." We've had all these centuries and millennia of monogamy—polyamory, no big deal. There should be no stigma surrounding it. Normalize polyamory. And more and more people, if you look at the data, are polyamorous, and they're basically saying, you know, please don't treat this as something that carries a stigma or is aberrant. It's just people who love each other in various ways, and no big deal.

I'll give you an example from my life as a professor. I remember the first time that a student asked me to allow students, when they introduce themselves on the first day of class, to give their pronouns. I think it was 2017. They said, "Hey, Professor Onishi, when we go around the room today, it's our first day, would you allow—we're going to say their name and where they're from and their major, but also, what are their pronouns?" And I thought, "Sure. I mean, no problem. That sounds fine." I had never thought to do that before. I'll be honest. This is six, seven years ago, but it wasn't something that I thought was problematic in any way. And there's various discussions about whether asking people to say their pronouns puts too much pressure on them, etc. But that was new to me, and over time, over the last five, six years, it's kind of become normalized that a lot of professors will allow students to say their pronouns when they introduce themselves, and a lot of people put that in their email signatures and other places.

To me, that's an example of we're normalizing this. We're saying, "Hey, folks might have different pronouns than you would expect. Folks might use they, or he/they or she/they pronouns. You might not be used to that. So let's normalize people telling us their pronouns so we can all kind of get accustomed to and adjust to the realities of various gender identities." Sounds good. That's normalizing something that for me before 2016-17 as a professor, I just didn't do in my classes. But hey, I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna grow. And, yeah, that seems like a good idea.

Well, there's an essay out today by Dr. Gabriel Rosenfeld, who's at Fairfield University and is actually the editor of a new book called Fascism in America, and I'm hoping to interview Dr. Rosenfeld along with his co-editor, Dr. Janet Ward, in a few weeks. But he writes about the new normalization.

And one of the things that Rosenfeld argues in this essay is that we're in this time in the United States, and really in the world, of seemingly ongoing crisis, ongoing catastrophe. And I think on this point, he is right—that we live in a time where nothing seems normal. Let's just put it plainly: nothing seems normal. The weather is not normal. We live in an age of climate crisis. Things are not normal. Sometimes you get a hurricane in Southern California. Sometimes New York City floods out of nowhere. Sometimes the city of Lahaina on Maui burns down in an instant, a city that's near and dear to my family's heart as people whose family story and American story goes back to Maui to the 19th century. That's not normal. It's not things that 50, 60, 100, 200, 400 years ago were happening in our weather patterns. And it's just one example of things that are not normal.

The pandemic—not normal. Think about, I know you don't want to think about it, and I don't want to think about it either. But in those months in March and April and May of 2020, all the things that weren't normal, the ways that life got upended—the masks, yes, but the not celebrating holidays, and the people not going to school and kids not being able to attend class and telework, the whole thing. I'm not going to go on about this. I think you get it. We live in an era where things just aren't dependable, where the normal doesn't seem like it's expected. We live in a time, in other words, of catastrophe, of crisis.

So what Rosenfeld talks about is that what this means is that we as people have to kind of accept new normals, or we have to normalize things that weren't there before, such as the climate crisis. I often think, to my mom's generation or my grandparents' generation, they didn't think about the weather and the climate in the ways we do. But we now live in a new normal where thinking about the climate is just something we have to do all the time. Where should we move? Should I take a job in that place? Should we travel in these months? Will there be hurricanes? Will there be monsoons? Will there be flooding, so on and so forth?

So he says, look, we have to sort of live in this world where we're always adjusting to a new normal, or we're normalizing things that before weren't there. I think you get it. I think you understand what normalization is. Let's go back to Biden.

Political violence must never be normalized, because it's anti-democratic. And he says that democracies die in silence when people get frustrated, disillusioned, tired and alienated. I want to connect these dots, and I want to talk about how this—and if you're like, what is the thesis for today? It's this: because we have to normalize so many things in this era, because there's so many things that we kind of have to adjust to, accept, build our lives around, I think it is easy to become exactly what Biden said—frustrated, disillusioned, tired and alienated, in a way that we just say, "Well, there's a whole new thing happening. It's scary, it's unprecedented, but I don't have the energy, I don't have the focus, I don't have the reserves to pay attention because I am tapped out."

And I'm afraid that that's what's happening in our democracy, if we turn our attention to politics, to the looming presidential race on a day when Donald Trump appeared in New York court because of his fraud suit, when he's been indicted four times on 91 counts. I'm afraid that we're in a place where, as Biden says, our democracy is on the brink because of us growing frustrated, disillusioned, tired and alienated as a result of normalizing political crisis. Let me be more blunt—as a result of us normalizing rising fascism in our country.

We have lived, if you go back to the first Trump campaign, with Trump as a political figure since 2015. We are closer to a decade of Trump as a political figure than we are of anything else. It's been almost a decade of this. There's been so much that's happened, but we can all agree that as time goes on, the rhetoric never gets softer. It never becomes more moderate. It gets worse, more extreme, more ramped up. For example, he said he kind of thinks General Milley should be tried for treason and put to death, and it really was no big deal.

Y'all, there was a time when Barack Obama was running against John McCain, when Barack Obama was running against Mitt Romney, when John Kerry was running against George W. Bush, that for one of them to say something like this would have been the end of their political careers. They would have gone away, never to be heard from again. Neither party would have called them. They would have been persona non grata. You can never show your face on a political stage. You're not going to help someone run for Congress. You're not going to give an endorsement. You're nobody. CNN is not going to put you on the TV so you can be a commentator. Just go away.

It was barely a blip. Here's a man saying, "I was the president, if I'm president again, and I'm leading in the Republican primary, I kind of think putting the former Joint Chiefs of Staff to death is what we should do."

So what does that mean? It means that it's become normalized. Trump is somebody who has normalized what I would call fascist impulses in our midst. It's become normal.

So let's talk about normalization. And this is where I return to Gabriel Rosenfeld's essay called "The New Normalization." He says this: "The first way that deviant acts are normalized is through redefinition. Liberal commentators have invoked different theoretical explications of this process to explain the behavior of Donald Trump. Some have cited Daniel Patrick Moynihan's concept of 'defining deviancy down,' which argued that societies often contend with increasing rates of deviant behavior by lowering their standards for defining abnormality."

So this is a pretty clear example of normalization. You just redefine what is abnormal. Again, in 2003, a presidential candidate says, "Hey, I think we should put the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff, to death." Your political career is over. I mean, it is going to be outrage after outrage from both parties.

In 2023, the increasing rate of deviant behavior by Donald Trump and many other political figures means we've lowered our standards for defining abnormal. Most people don't even know he said that, unless you're like me—somebody who does this all the time and is always paying attention, because this is what I do, and many of you out there are the same way. Unless you're one of us who's just glued to all of these things and paying attention and really digging in, you probably missed it. And I'm not saying you're somebody who doesn't read the news, doesn't pay attention. You might read the New York Times in the morning, or watch cable news at night, or whatever. You're somebody who tries to stay informed. Listen to NPR on the way to work. You might have missed that—I don't know, the man who might become president in a year, who is leading by a lot in the GOP primary, is like, "Yeah, put that guy to death." For what? Basically, because I just don't like him.

He also said—I'll just add this in right now—Trump also said that when you're leading someone in the polls, he claims he's leading Biden in the polls by 15 or 20 points, that you should indict the mother-effer. I'm not going to say the word because then I have to bleep it and the whole thing. I'm not a prude. I just don't feel like having to go through all that. So here's a presidential candidate calling his political opponent a mother-effer, saying, "Yeah, just indict him, because..."

Can you imagine? Can you imagine George H.W. Bush calling Bill Clinton that? Can you imagine Mitt Romney calling Barack Obama that? No, but we've lowered our standards for what is abnormal.

Another important component of normalization, according to Rosenfeld, is destigmatization. So what is destigmatization? As Kristin Harlow explains, "Removing the barriers of shame surrounding a behavior or belief helps integrate it into mainstream society." So if you destigmatize something, you admit it into mainstream society. I don't know, saying that you want to kill a former Joint Chiefs of Staff, you want to lock up Hillary Clinton in 2015, you want to enact vengeance—I mean, Trump said this this weekend: "I am your vengeance. I'm your retribution." When you go to Trump rallies and see people calling for the hanging of people like Mike Pence, that's a destigmatization of behavior and belief that says that's totally fine. Yeah, you can be a Republican, American, a normal guy, normal gal, whoever you are—that's normal, totally normal, no big deal. Yeah, we're good. That's destigmatization. We have destigmatized so many things, y'all, in this country over the last eight years of this whole Trump era.

Another integral feature of normalization is repetition. Now I think really, this is where Rosenfeld starts to get into things that really catch my attention and are really important. Repetition. He quotes James Harbach: "Repetition leads to acceptance. If we see something regularly, we come to view it as normal." Let me say that again. If we see something regularly, we come to view it as normal.

I want to stop right here and say that what has happened with Donald Trump is that he has been around so long—he has sort of continued the rhetoric—that when he says things or people say things that are quote-unquote "Trumpian," when they sound like Trump, when Kari Lake or Doug Mastriano or Ron DeSantis or anyone else sounds like Trump, when Matt Gaetz or Lauren Boebert, any of these people, sound like Trump, the repetition is so deep. We've been dealing with it for so long that it leads to acceptance.

And I just want to say that, like, think about people in your life. Y'all ever have someone in your life who seems to operate by different rules? They seem to do things however they want, and usually in a bad way or a selfish way or a kind of way that others wouldn't, and over time, as you stay in a relationship with them—maybe they're your mother, maybe they're your cousin, maybe they're your friend, maybe they're your spouse, I don't know. A lot of times we're in relationships with people and we feel like we have to stay in a relationship with them because they're our family or for some reason, and you sort of start to get a different set of rules for that person, because you know that they'll never abide by the kind of relational standards that you have with everyone else. And so when they do something, you look at it in one way, and if anyone else does it, you would be like, "What's your problem?" A friend or a family member—they wouldn't do that. What's wrong with you? But if it's the other person, you're like, "Well, yeah, that's how they work. That's how they operate."

That's called normalizing that person's behavior. The repetition of their behavior means you start to just accept it. You just start to accept all the things, because you have to accept it. Otherwise, you have to break off that relationship with that person. And what's happened in this country is that Trump has been around eight years, and he has spawned so many political generations now—the Kari Lakes, the Matt Gaetzes, the Boeberts, all those people, the Kristi Noems, the Ron DeSantises, everybody that we think of. The repetition makes us accept it.

So we have this popular acceptance of abnormal behavior, this popular acceptance of what I would call with Trump, fascist behavior. He's telling us what he will do if he is president again. He will kill his political enemies. He will take over the federal government. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago on this show—Project 2025. "I am going to fire anyone who's not a loyalist." He's telling us what he'll do, y'all, and we've just accepted it because of the repetition over and over and over again. We just accept it now.

That leads to a couple of other factors, and I'll go through these quickly, because I know I'm talking a lot today. It means that we've all had to adapt. We've had to accept the exceptional as normal. We've had to accept the exceptional as normal. We wake up every day, and we do not have a normal operating country. And I'm not saying that the normal operating status quo of the United States before Trump was just or humane to everyone or anything like that, by no means. But we do wake up in this country now with a situation where, yes, we have to wake up to the former president saying he'll kill his political enemies. We have to wake up to the fact that he's willing to call his political opponent crass names. We have to wake up to the fact that in his speech, he mocked Paul Pelosi, who was beaten almost to death, and made a joke of him.

I want you to stop and think about that. Think about if you knew of someone—your neighbor, your co-worker, your ex-girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, somebody that you may not feel all that great about, just because things didn't end well—and they had their home broken into and were beaten one inch from their death. Would you make a joke about that? Would you let other people make a joke about it? But we have to stand here and accept the exceptional as normal, because that is what is normal now in American politics and American life.

And it leads to the second thing. It means we're desensitized. We're desensitized to what is called—and Rosenfeld says this in the essay—the restless onslaught against democratic norms when it just happens over and over and over again. You become desensitized.

I think we all know how this works. You don't even look up anymore, because you're like, "Yeah, it just keeps happening. What am I supposed to do? Look up, react, go into outrage mode every time it happens? Yeah, maybe in 2016 I did that, and then 2018, and maybe again in 2019. But you know what? It's 2023. I'm so desensitized. It just keeps happening. I don't even notice anymore."

This is what happens with mass shootings in this country. We have a mass shooting. Three people, five people, eight people—sometimes it doesn't even make the news. If it's 30 people, it does for a week, and then it goes away. We're desensitized.

There's also a sense of self-defense. Why are we desensitized? Because we have to be in order to survive. There's a 2016 Baltimore Sun article that puts it this way: "Many are attempting to normalize Trump's behavior as a coping mechanism to get through the day. Developing a callous," Jared Yates Sexton says, "is much easier than continually suffering a raw wound."

We oftentimes become desensitized because it's a way of coping. It's a way to get through. And I get it. I'm not—I do it too. I can tell you that when I think of Maui and Lahaina because of my family's history and ties and family and friends who are there, it hurts my heart. It hurts my soul to even think about Lahaina right now in Maui. But I can tell you that when New York City was flooding this weekend, yes, I paid attention and I read about it, but ultimately it didn't affect me in the same way. And part of it was because I know—so many of these things happen every week and every month now that it's hard to give my whole emotional self to those things without becoming just totally weakened and imploding. If I'm going to cope, I have to kind of become desensitized to what's happening. And I think that's what's happened with Trump.

One more, and that's self-delusion. David Remnick of The New Yorker talked about it this way after Trump was elected. He was mystified that, quote, "Washington is going about its business talking about who's going to get what jobs. You would think that Mitt Romney had won. It's a hallucination."

I think we see this right now. We've had Republican debates. We have, we still have the ongoing cable news, 24 hours a day beat. We have non-stop coverage of everything that there could be to cover, whether it's online, whether it's cable news, whether it's newspapers, whatever. And one of the things that happens, because those people need content, and they need to kind of keep going, is we just pretend like things are normal. Who's going to win? What do voters feel better about when it comes to the economy, Biden or Trump? What about immigration? Oh, what will a Trump presidency mean for the economy?

Are you kidding? Why are we talking about whose policies on job creation are better? The only conversation should be: if Trump wins, we will not have a United States that resembles or gestures toward a democracy anymore. Period.

So we have this sense of hallucination, because we don't want to live in the reality we live in now. And we all do this, friends. Come on. We escape, we dissociate, however we try to regulate ourselves. I can tell you, I have a two-year-old and a newborn, and there's about like 15 minutes at the end of every day where I have to myself, and I can scroll Instagram, or I can do Duolingo or do something, just to kind of turn off a little bit. Should I be looking at the screen before bed? Probably not. I know some of you are going to email me about that. But we all sort of just kind of escape a little bit sometimes. Well, self-delusion, when it comes to the normalization of catastrophe, is part of that.

Now what these lead to, and this is what I'm really afraid of, and this is what I'm driving at today—it leads to capitulation. It leads to legitimation. And these are things Rosenfeld talks about in the piece. When we get to the places of hallucination, of fatigue, of desensitization, of adapting to the exceptional as normal, when we turn things that are shameful, that should be stigmatized, things that are really out of bounds, into things that we just give into, into things that we accept, we really get to a place where I think it's dangerous, because the threat is still there, even if we're tired, even if we don't want it to be, even if we just wish we lived in just a different world for just one second. We really don't want this to be our life anymore, but it is.

So if we capitulate to that, if we just say, "Well, there's nothing I can do," or if we just stop paying attention, or if we just think, "Well, it's not a big deal right now, maybe in a year it will be," I think we're going to get to a place where we are going to wake up and say, "Why didn't we do something when we could have?" Why? Just like that seventh grader asked, when learning about Nazi Germany, "Why didn't we do something when every day, the norms were eroded to the point where threats of killing generals, threats of killing political opponents, January 6, people comparing Jamal Bowman pulling the fire alarm"—I don't know why Jamal Bowman pulled the fire alarm. I have no idea. Not going to sit here and say I do, but comparing that to the insurrection.

Why didn't we do something? Why didn't we? And I know some of you are listening like, "Brad, I've done so much." So have I. I'm with you. And I'm not trying to say you haven't. I'm not accusing you. I'm not trying to admonish you. I'm not doing any of that. Here's what I am saying, is that Biden goes down to Arizona, and he gives this speech, and it's all really couched in John McCain stuff. They're opening a new John McCain center, and it's a kind of way for Biden to point to a Republican who seemed to have some values and some ideals, and say, "Hey, there used to be a world where my political opponent would have been like John McCain. We would have disagreed, but we wouldn't have had what we have now. We wouldn't have had threats of death and political violence and retribution and insurrection and all of that. We wouldn't have mass chaos and carnage." This was the way Biden kind of got into it. "Hey, here's McCain, the new legacy McCain Center opening. Wouldn't it be great if we went back to that? It's not what we have anymore. We have this guy, Donald Trump." That's why he was there.

And I just want to, I want to close with this. I want to stay in Arizona, and then I'll wrap up for today.

Arizona is a place that in the last round of elections—Mark Kelly is a senator now. Mark Kelly was arguing with Tommy Tuberville over the last week about military and other things. Mark Kelly won his seat, not by a ton, but he beat Blake Masters. Was it by 28 points? Was it by 57 points? No.

Governor in Arizona was a slim, slim, slim margin. You know who almost won there? Kari Lake. Kari Lake might be more Trumpian than Trump. Kari Lake is now, I think, going to run for Senate. Kari Lake almost became the governor of Arizona by the very slightest of margins. So here's Biden standing in the Southwest in Arizona, in a place that, if things had broken different, might have had Blake Masters, somebody who was bankrolled by Peter Thiel and who many were very scared by, in terms of his right-wing approach and his seemingly lack of empathy and humanity, just his real, seemingly cruel demeanor, and Kari Lake—maybe the most Trumpian spawn of the political Trump era, just a real gaslighting, cruel political candidate.

All right, so let's take a break, and when I come back, I'm going to wrap this up by providing a little bit of historical context and explain why Biden's remarks really kind of set off a set of alarms—might be the wrong word—but really kind of brought some thoughts and knowledge to the fore for me that lit up my brain a little bit. So we'll be right back.

All right, so Biden's in Arizona. He's giving these remarks, and the reason he's in Arizona, ostensibly, is to introduce this new complex for Senator John McCain and his legacy as a war veteran, as a POW, as a senator and so on. But if you read my book, you know that there's a history here that is worth recounting, and the history that I'm talking about is the history that points us back to John McCain.

So John McCain, if you're old like me, you might remember, but John McCain ran against Barack Obama in Obama's first election. Now, McCain was a longtime senator in Arizona. McCain was a war hero. He was a POW. He was famously disparaged by Donald Trump in the first campaign. He talked about how he likes heroes that aren't captured, or things like that. So McCain was always known as this Maverick, this sort of centrist in the Senate who did things to flout traditional party lines, and he worked across the aisle, and that's what he was known for. All right, great.

Now, the first part of the history, if we go backwards, that many of you have heard Dan mention over and over on the show, is that John McCain famously chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate when he ran against Barack Obama in 2008. Well, that was really, for many, a kind of resurgence of the Religious Right into presidential politics, because Sarah Palin was, of course, a figure on the Religious Right, governor of Alaska, and somebody that really brought the whole ethos of the Religious Right and Christian nationalists back right into the spotlight. And McCain was never going to be that guy. Romney eventually would not be that guy, but Palin—yes, she was right from that world, and she was right there to give all the talking points and all the points of view on abortion and on femininity and on womanhood, on foreign policy, so on and so forth. So that's one. McCain, despite all of his centrism and his working across the aisle, is in some ways responsible for reintroducing some of these dynamics into our national political sphere.

But if we go back further, there's something that's really quite fascinating to me about Arizona. Arizona is a state that's always been somewhat individualist. You have this image of the rugged, sole, lone cowboy who does what he wants and does it his way. And that's kind of, if people talk about Arizona politics, that's kind of how they talk sometimes.

Well, who was the senator right before John McCain? Who did John McCain succeed in the Senate from Arizona? None other than Barry Goldwater.

Now, Barry Goldwater is somebody I talk about a lot in my book, but I just want to go over this here, because it's really interesting to think about Biden in Arizona commemorating McCain. McCain not only chooses Sarah Palin and reintroduces this whole element into our politics, not only did Biden debate Sarah Palin on the debate stage way back when—they squared off in a presidential campaign—but Biden's in Arizona commemorating McCain, and McCain is the one who takes over in the Senate for Barry Goldwater.

Now, Barry Goldwater was a longtime senator in Arizona. He also was somewhat of a maverick, but in a different way. But as you know, and if you might have heard me talk about, Goldwater ran for president in 1964. He ran against Lyndon Johnson. Now Goldwater, like Trump, was never supposed to be the candidate, and yet Goldwater, who flouted all the kind of party lines and norms, beat Nelson Rockefeller, who was kind of a Mitt Romney kind of figure—centrist, Country Club, rich as hell. This is the person that the Republican Party wanted to be at the top. Well, Goldwater wins.

So here's Goldwater, the Arizona senator, the cowboy senator, the rugged individualist, the non-intellectual, somebody whose sister said he probably never read a book cover to cover, the guy who didn't graduate from college, took over the family business. Goldwater runs, and he runs as this guy who introduces something into our politics, at least in the presidential realm, that had not been there for a long time. He is a firebrand. He is a libertarian, and he does not hold back in terms of rhetoric. He normalized things that were not normal. He made things that were once thought taboo, stigmatized, out of bounds. He made them something that were part of the American Right and the Republican Party.

He talked about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He totally openly says, "I will never support legislation that will advance civil rights in the country. That's up to the communities and the people to figure it out." He's somebody who says the government should have their hands off of social policies. He wants to be aggressive and warlike when it comes to foreign policy. And when it comes down to his acceptance speech for the GOP nomination, many of you have heard me say this time and time again, he says these words: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation is no virtue."

Think about those words in terms of everything I've said today about normalization. In 1964, Barry Goldwater was a Republican candidate who said, "You know what? I want to normalize extremism. I don't want extremism to be stigmatized. And if you Republicans want to win, if you want to take your country back, then you need to get over it and be extremists and be radicals. Don't let them stigmatize you. Don't let them label you. Say exactly what you feel, as bigoted, as extreme, as warlike, as violent as it may be."

Now, Goldwater was supported by so many white conservative radical Christians, many of them from Southern California, from Arizona, from LA, from the Deep South. I've chronicled all that in my book, and if you haven't read it and you want to know more, or if you have read it and you want to know more, it's all there.

Now, he loses in grand fashion. Lyndon Johnson beat him handily. Lyndon Johnson got over 400 electoral votes in that election. But you know what? Goldwater normalized extremism, and the people that were in his campaign, they didn't forget that, and they didn't give up. So what happens is people who were in his campaign, like Dana Rohrabacher, who became Putin's favorite congressperson, he said, "I'm going to fulfill the mission of Goldwater." And he went on to serve in the Reagan administration and then in Congress for decades.

You know who else was in the Goldwater campaign? Paul Weyrich. Paul Weyrich was the founder of the Council for National Policy, the founder of the Heritage Foundation, the founder of ALEC. Now think about it, y'all. I've been talking all day about Trump and the normalization of Trumpian politics, of what I would call fascist politics in this country. And Trump has spawned so many copycats—Kari Lake and Boebert and Gaetz and DeSantis and Ramaswamy. The list goes on and on and on.

Who is the think tank that wrote the Project 2025 handbook for Trump to use, if he wins again, to basically bulldoze the State Department and the bureaucratic levers of the federal government so that he can put in place only loyalists? The Heritage Foundation. Who started the Heritage Foundation? Paul Weyrich. Where did Paul Weyrich learn the chops of politics? Under Barry Goldwater and his campaign.

So Biden standing in Arizona talking about not normalizing political violence, about not allowing democracy to die in silence, has an incredible set of historical convergences for me—Goldwater, Weyrich, Trump, on and on and on.

I guess for me today, the biggest takeaway is it makes a lot of sense if all of us are tired, if in some ways, we've developed calluses to get through it, we have our coping mechanisms, and we're just not people who want to live every day in crisis—political and social crisis. I don't want to either, especially after a pandemic, especially as we deal with a climate disaster. I'm with you.

I would say, though, that Biden's speech was a really good reminder that what is coming for us is something that is going to be really hard, and it's not over yet. And so I want to encourage you to take that in, to think about the state that we are in as a political body, as a social body, and to find ways to remind yourself that if we're going to preserve things that we find to be good and beautiful and true, as lacking as the United States is in terms of equality, in terms of representation, in terms of so much humanity, then we have to face where we are and not run away from it. And that's not easy. It's not something that I think can be done with a simple flick of the wrist.

But every so often, something happens that reminds me that it's worth for us to take hold of where we are and prepare for what's next. Because you saw today, Trump in court was angry. He was flustered. He's only going to get more outlandish as the months go on. The rhetoric will only get more outlandish and violent.

Just today, and I'll just mention a few more things as we close here, I saw former aides to Chuck Grassley and Neil Gorsuch calling for—these are his words—the Black underclass to be reined in and for these thugs to endure mass incarceration. I saw prominent people on the Right saying that if you are going to be a congressperson or a politician in this country that you should have to pledge allegiance to Christ. These are the kinds of things that are now normal in our politics.

Is it all because of Trump? No, we've said it over and over, but he helped blow the floodgates open, and this is where we are every day, this kind of rhetoric coming at us, the repetition, the onslaught. So I just want to encourage you—take stock of that, because it's not going to dissipate anytime soon. And as much as many of us have fought this far to see that Trump didn't get a second term, to see that any sense of democracy and its workings were preserved, that fight's not over.

So I wanted to just get on the mic today as I come back from the birth of my second child, and still not doing as much work and as much stuff behind the scenes as I usually do, but this seemed really important to me, and I wanted to get it off my chest. So I appreciate y'all listening. Appreciate y'all being here.

Want to say thank you to all of our patrons and the people that support us. Want to say thank you to everybody who makes this show happen. And I just want to say one more thing—we have launched Axis Mundi Media, and the whole reason we did that is to create reliable and relevant content that helps safeguard democracy. And so if you want to learn more about that, that's at axismundi.us. And if you want to support us, if you've already checked that out, you're like, "Yo, I'm on board. That seems like really important stuff, what you guys are doing with the shows you're coming out with. How can I help?" One way you can help is becoming a paid member of our Axis Mundi Substack. That's a big one. You can also support us on Patreon through Straight White American Jesus. You can also buy our merch or buy books that are in our recommended book reading list, because all of that helps us as well. And you can tell people about the show.

So thankful for y'all. I appreciate this community. I appreciate all of you who listen and watch. We'll catch you on Wednesday with It's in the Code, and Friday with the weekly roundup. But for now, I'll say thanks for being here. Have a good one.