Jason Stanley is against some fascism, I guess
I really like Chris Hedges as a writer, as a journalist, and as a person. He has impeccable instincts and principles. I don’t think that there is any way that he doesn’t know who Jason Stanley actually is. He interviewed him anyway, so that we could all have a look at how someone can sound like they’re on your side when they’re really falling far short.
Erasing History: How Fascism Works (w/ Jason Stanley) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)
I waited long minutes to see if Stanley would discuss which current genocide is leading to the crackdown on universities, and realized that he was never going to. He incredibly adroitly avoided even discussing for a second WHY the universities have been cracking down on protest. The only mention of Palestine, Israel, or Zionism came from Chris, to which Stanley at least nodded relatively vigorously. He did not take the bait, though, instead keeping vague or instead taking a U.S.-domestic example of the “Michigan Management Act,” which to him I suppose has more salience to the discussion of modern colonialism than Palestine. I find myself utterly unsurprised that this interview focused laser-like on domestic policy.
On top of that, Stanley is also an American exceptionalist, unabashedly saying that the U.S.‘s education system is the best in the world—like a goddamned hayseed—and even doubling down and saying that no-one can even name a university in France or anywhere else. “Maybe the Sorbonne, ” he admitted. That’s a lesson in how to tell us how you really feel without telling us how you really feel. Even within the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge come to mind. I’m sure China, the Arab world, Russia, Africa, etc. all have their own institutions of learning that they consider to be vastly superior to the elite indoctrination factories of the U.S.—factories like Stanley’s employer Yale.
One commentator said that this guy’s book was good, and in the same virtual breath, recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. I feel Timothy Snyder is not even close to fighting in the same morally clear weight class as Chris Hedges. Snyder’s book “On Tyranny”, though quite short, felt long. It was very much about Trump but didn’t mention him by name, positing 20 “rules” about tyranny, many of which were obvious reformulations of each other, and almost all of which were so vague that they often felt more like horoscopes. I’m mystified how he’s so popular or how he’s even a professor. I haven’t read “Black Earth”, though. Perhaps that’s better. But I doubt it.
Stanley is also a professor at Yale. It seems that that school is expert in hiring people who can very carefully discuss fascism, colonialism, and empire without ever discussing any of the parts that they consider too unsavory to mention. While some might chastise Hedges for not having pushed him on it, I think it was a good interview about what Stanley’s book likely contains, it stayed very much on a topic on which Chris has written, and it very much gave Stanley enough rope to hang himself by giving him ample opportunity to show us the very obvious—and immoral—lacunae in what he’s willing to discuss. Instead, Stanley very often took his examples from Nazis and Hitler’s Mein Kampf—over 80 years ago—and didn’t mention anything about U.S. foreign policy.
Even when discussing how fascists want to control schools and education in order to indoctrinate a love of one’s own nation, to the exclusion of all others, he mentioned only the U.S. It’s possible that he’s unfamiliar with the extreme level of indoctrination in Israel but I’m not buying it. I just think that he has carved out an immoral exception for Israel. It is tantamount to refusing to discuss it. This is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
This entire interview became a fascinating study in psychology and self-brainwashing. He didn’t even seem to have to dance around the subject of Israel to avoid slipping up. He simply had trained himself not to see it as a glaring example of all of the evils he discussed—fascism, educational control and indoctrination, propaganda and hate against the “other”, erasing history, colonialism, and genocide. He cheerily discussed all of these topics—in early 2025—and didn’t mention Israel once.
His book is called “Erasing History” and he didn’t spend one minute talking about Israel’s incredible campaign of indoctrination that convinces otherwise perfectly nice people to be ravening monsters against specific groups of people, and to consider theft, rape, murder, and even genocide to be not only ok but morally necessary when directed at those people. I keep using the word “people” as if Palestinians are considered people by most Israelis. I wonder whether Stanley thinks that they’re people?
Even when Chris had to point out that Stalinists didn’t kill the entire family, whereas Nazis did (when Stanley was starting to rail against communism as if it were worse than Nazism, like a good little, well-indoctrinated U.S.-American), Stanley agreed that that was “genocide” because they’d “killed entire families”, but then blew right past it. “That’s a great point, Chris.” Chris’s impassivity here was impressive because we absolutely know what he was thinking.
Stanley is a scholar for the state. He talks about fascist indoctrination and seems to be utterly unaware that his Israel lacuna is also indoctrination. His contribution is more insidious, in that he pretends to be against fascism but he’s just really against fascism that isn’t Israeli fascism. Look, I may be wrong about this, and he may just be utterly ignorant of what Israel is doing and he might be shocked—simply shocked—to find out what’s been going on.
Even toward the end, they discuss how “these are smart guys”—Trump, Cruz, etc.—who’ve been educated in the highest institutions of the U.S. Still, nothing. He doesn’t see the irony. He won’t see the irony that he teaches at Yale and he’s indoctrinating his students to not see Israel as fascism, colonialism, or genocidal. He just doesn’t see it.
To be clear, Trump et. al. have the same lacuna about Israel as Stanley and Snyder, but they don’t purport to be against fascism—instead, they openly embrace it as the way things should be run.
Late in the discussion, Stanley says “the opinion page of the NYT says that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are run by communist agitators,” but that’s such a strawman! Of course the elite institutions in charge of indoctrinating the next custodians of empire, each with endowments in the dozens of billions of dollars aren’t communist. This guy’s not very intellectually interesting except as an example of how an indoctrination system can produce people that seem like they’re supportive but are actually counterproductive. The best statements came from Chris.
When Chris cites about corruption from Stanley’s book and Chris says that “that’s the Trump administration right there,” Stanley responds with “and Putin” because he is, in the end, a good little liberal lapdog who almost certainly still believes in most of Russiagate and the Steele Dossier. I mean, he’s not bad, you know?
He says things like “when they say they’re against corruption, they just mean that the wrong corrupt people are in charge.” and “this is why unions are so important.” Yes! That’s right! But I can’t help but think that this dude only pops back up after having slept for four years during the Biden administration—because obviously there was nothing fascist, anti-democratic, or actively suppressive of free expression going on then.
He’s a good potential ally but he needs a few more rounds of deprogramming because his blind spots will make him incapable of focusing on the methods with the most leverage. It’s inconvenient to rail against an erasure of history while clearly suffering from a self-imposed version of the same.
A commentator on the video writes,
“He wants to equate anything done against universities with antisemitism, I guess. And I find that absurd. Hedges gently suggested that universities are deeply conservative servants of American power systems, but Jason would rather pretend that only Orange Man Bad.
“I’m not too clear on the rant as a whole. When they started talking about projection, haha! Government criminality is suddenly perceptible now that Trump is in office, but not before?”
To which I answered,
My thoughts exactly. Stanley is fine. He’s a potential ally. He has an enormous Israel lacuna. He has but a pale shadow of the moral and historical clarity that Chris has.