Dear Friends,
THIS WEEK’S PODCAST, with Charles Goldman, Kathy Byrnes Fallon, and Ed Fallon:
(01:33) Project 2025: A playbook for fascism;
(18:15) A deep dive into fetal personhood;
(35:54) Fossil fuel giants double down on greenwashing;
(54:08) June garden Q & A, with Kathy Byrnes Fallon.
Kathy holding the biggest tastiest artichokes we’ve ever grown. More on that later.
You’ve probably heard of the Heritage Foundation — the far-right think-tank whose “trustees have historically included individuals affiliated with Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Mobil, Pfizer, Sears and other corporations,” according to Wikipedia.
The Foundation’s latest contribution to the subversion of democracy is a 900-page corporate wet dream called “Mandate for Leadership,” known also as Project 2025. It’s a detailed guide on how the next Republican president should govern — a blue print for further consolidating wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Project 2025 is also a blueprint for full-blown fascism.
“Fascism.” A term that some, including Trump, throw around lightly. I’m more judicious, but just so we’re on the same page, Merriam-Webster defines fascism as “a political system headed by a dictator in which the government controls business and labor and opposition is not permitted.”
Think Project 2025 doesn’t go that far? Read it. Or if that’s more than you can stomach (I don’t blame you), check out the 15-minute conversation Charles and I have during the first segment of this week’s program.
Some feel fascism could never happen here. For years, I’ve wanted to believe that. Desperately. But Trump and his political posse, corporate cronies, and media minions have convinced me otherwise.
The links between Hitler and Trump — and between 1930s Germany and 2020s USA — are hardly fantastical. A column in The Nation by Dan Simon (Who Voted For Hitler?, January 15, 2021) reviews a prescient book of the same title by Richard F. Hamilton, written in the early 1980s.
Hamilton’s Who Voted for Hitler? is more relevant now than ever. The author examined German voting records from 1928-1933, and found that a majority were opposed to the Nazis. Here are a few excerpts from Simon’s column:
“[T]he key election was the one that took place on July 31, 1932, when Hitler’s Nazi party secured only 37.3 percent of the national vote.”
“[T]he greatest danger with a movement like the one embodied by Hitler’s militant National Socialists does not stem from the movement itself, always a minority, but rather within the larger society and its halfhearted disavowal of the Nazis, together with a kind of secret brainwashing of the educated and well-off middle class that is vulnerable precisely because they think they aren’t.”
“Nazis came to power because they had enough support from almost every demographic group, and not strenuous enough opposition from any dem
“The idea of the Good German is dangerous to us because it suggests that the national character flaw by which Germans fell into the hell of Hitlerism could never happen here. The percentage of American voters who still support Trump is already vastly greater than the percentage of Germans that supported Hitler during his rise to power.”
To Americans who believed last year, and may still believe, that Trump’s legal troubles would sink his political prospects, Simon reminds us that, “Hitler served eight months of a five-year sentence for the attempted putsch in 1923. And rather than denigrate him in people’s minds, it elevated him.”
I hate being a downer, especially after just enjoying a lunch of the best artichokes Kathy and I have ever grown (see photo, above, and be very jealous). But honesty is way more important than pretending everything’s fine. If we’re candid about the threat we face, and if we act now, we might still prevent a slide into the unthinkable abyss of fascism.
Thanks for reading, listening, and doing your part for a better world.
Ed Fallon
*******
In addition to our PODCAST, listen to the Fallon Forum on these affiliates:
– KHOI 89.1 FM (Ames, Iowa)
– KICI.LP 105.3 FM (Iowa City, Iowa)
– WHIV 102.3 FM (New Orleans, Louisiana)
– KPIP-LP, 94.7 FM (Fayette, Missouri)
– KCEI 90.1 FM (Taos, New Mexico)
– KRFP 90.3 FM (Moscow, Idaho)
– WGRN 94.1 FM (Columbus, Ohio)
– KKFI 90.1 FM (Kansas City, Missouri)
Please support the local businesses and non-profits who make this program possible. Click on their logos on the Fallon Forum website and in our weekly email, and visit Bold Iowa, and Birds & Bees Urban Farm. Thanks to Des Moines Irish Session for providing our bumper music, and thank you for supporting a civil alternative to the shock jocks!
Ed Fallon