Not even a month has passed since the presidential election, and the incoming slate of Trump cabinet nominees is already beset with controversy and scandal. But the litany of sex crimes and other misdeeds Trump’s appointees are accused of is just the tip of the iceberg—what’s even more threatening is the agenda they represent. Journalists and returning guests Steven Monacelli and Jeff Sharlet join The Marc Steiner Show for a breakdown of the incoming cabinet. Studio Production: Cameron GranadinoPost-Production: Alina Nehlich Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Marc Steiner: Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. While it feels like a lifetime has passed, it’s only been a few weeks since the election. And since then, Democrats have been busy looking for scapegoats to blame for the losses. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is busy making cabinet and administrative appointments at a dizzying speed. Trump has sent shock waves throughout the political world with his jaw-dropping picks, from Fox News personalities, fellow billionaires, and figures from across the far right. Trump has tapped Thomas Homan, an Obama-era appointee to ICE, who is one of the architects of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for border czar. He tapped Florida Senator, and foreign policy hawk, Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. He’s appointed the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to head the new, get this, Department of Government Efficiency. Trump also named Florida Congressman, Matt Gaetz, for Attorney General, but that pick was blown up spectacularly last week. As the Guardian reported on Thursday, “Donald Trump announced that he would nominate for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, the former Florida State Attorney General. Hours after the former representative, Matt Gaetz, withdrew in face of opposition from Senate Republicans who had balked over a series of sexual misconduct allegations.” A similar fate may be in store for Trump’s extremely controversial pick of Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer and Fox News commentator, to lead the Department of Defense. The Daily Beast reported, “Pete Hegseth’s chances of being confirmed to lead the Defense Department have sharply declined in Polymarket.” The plunge from 89% chance at his announcement, to a low of 47 on Thursday afternoon came shortly after Donald Trump’s other controversial cabinet appointment, Matt Gaetz, pulled himself from the running. Complicating things for the 44-year-old Hegseth is the recent release of a police report that contains graphic sexual assault allegations against him from 2017. So it’s very possible that circumstances will change by the time you hear this episode, but this is par for the course for Trump. So it’s very possible that circumstances will change by the time you hear this broadcast, but this is par for the court for Trump. In the last administration it was a burning down clown car of frightening, weird, and dangerous political appointees coming in as fast as they were going out, and we’re already taking the plunge back into that administrative chaos that characterizes Trump’s style of operating. That’s what he does. But Trump is still revealing a lot about his far-right, even downright fascistic political designs and desires with these cabinet and administrative appointments. So what do we know about these figures who are beginning to fill out the Trump administration roster? How far right are their politics? In this crucial installment of Rise of the Right, I’m honored to be joined once again by two past guests whose expertise and insight we really need at this moment. Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times bestselling author and editor of eight books, including The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. It was adapted into a Netflix documentary series, and his most recent work, which we discussed on the Marc Steiner show, is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Also joining us is Steve Monacelli. Steve is the Texas Observer’s special investigative correspondent, based in Dallas, and a columnist for the digital publication, The Barbed Wire. His reporting has been featured in the Rolling Stone, Daily Beast, the Real News, Dallas Observer, Dallas Weekly, and many more. He’s also the publisher of Protean Magazine, which is a non-profit literary journal. Gentlemen, welcome. Good to have you both with us. Jeff Sharlet: Hi, Marc. Good to be with you. Steven Monacelli: Thanks for having us. Marc Steiner: Oh, it’s great to have you both. I really can’t wait to get started with this. To even know where to begin, when you look at the nominations that Trump has picked out to lead the most critical agencies in the government, what were your first thoughts, Jeff? Jeff Sharlet: The turning point for me wasn’t Tom Homan or Kristi Noem, as horrifying as those appointments were, but was Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, who I was familiar with in his capacity as a Fox News host and as the leading advocate for murdering prisoners and unarmed civilians. He’s an advocate for that. He was the man who led the crusade for the defense of convicted war criminals and got them pardoned. SO once I saw that, I realized it was very much all bets off and every appointment since then has kind of confirmed that. I should emphasize, and I’m curious to hear what Steve thinks about this because one thing that’s frustrating to me as a person on this beat, and I think Steve, I know from your work too, there can be all this attention on Matt Gaetz or Hegseth and not as much attention on what’s Linda McMahon going to do at education? The assumption that these folks, that those are the adults in the room when in fact they’re very much a part of the program as well. Steven Monacelli: I agree with what you’ve said, Jeff. And for me it was a combination of Pete Hegseth, which ridiculous decision to run the largest bureaucracy in the world, for a TV host with no real experience in this executive position. Setting aside all of the other things that you’ve just said, Jeff in addition- Jeff Sharlet: The murder part. Steven Monacelli: Yeah. And then the reporting that we’ve since seen about, he has tattoos that indicate he’s well steeped in this Christian nationalist type ideology. And the suggestion of what he may or may not do as the head of DOD, during a time in which a Christian Zionist, Mike Huckabee has also been nominated to a key position as it relates to Israel as a U.S. envoy to Israel. The other one that really threw me through a loop was someone you already mentioned, Jeff, Matt Gaetz, for the top law position effectively, Attorney General of the United States. No longer in the running, spectacularly blew up. It was insane to begin with, someone who had been begging for a pardon from the president to then be suggested as the top law enforcement official in this country. And the person who’s since been named to replace him I think is, it’s not as controversial on it’s face or not as explosive in terms of ethics probe around alleged sex trafficking. But Pam Bondi from Florida, former Attorney General of Florida was donated, she received over $20,000 from Trump and then chose to not pursue a case against Trump University. So there’s this perception created that she may or may not have effectively been bribed. And so I think that is an equally mind-boggling choice. In addition to, yeah, Linda McMahon. Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, given what has come out about her connections to some other unsavory regimes globally. So we could really talk a lot about this probably more than we have time for today. Marc Steiner: Yeah. And there’s a lot. Kristi Noem has run the border and what that means. And so I’m curious though, given the nature of these appointments, we can go through some of them as well as you just started doing, and the fact that both houses of Congress, Supreme Court, these cabinet picks, A, what do you think that portends, and B, where’s the fightback going to come from? How do you resist this? How do you oppose it? How do you address it? Jeff Sharlet: Well, look, those of us out there have been arguing that this is a fascist movement. And people would say, this isn’t like Germany in 1936, which was a statement of the obvious, it being United States in 2024. Of course it’s not like Germany. But also that it was a movement, not a regime. Now it’s a regime. Okay. And it is announcing itself very vigorously with the furthest right most corrupt and most hostile and aggressive elements of its own movement. And we’re seeing actually a tension. Look, we’re in terrible trouble when John Thune is maybe our best hope. And I say that people like John Thune is the Senate majority leader. Marc Steiner: Yeah. Jeff Sharlet: He’s going to cave. He’s going to cave again and again and again. We also know that he hates Trump and that he comes from a far right movement that wants a right wing state. Trump wants a right wing regime, they’re different things. Marc Steiner: Let me stop you for a second. Parse that out for a moment, for people listening to us. Jeff Sharlet: So Mitch McConnell, John Thune, that kind of right wing establishment, their differences with Trump are often chalked up to style, how you tweet and so on. There’s that, but it has more to do with exercise of power. And particularly, senators have power in a state in which the vast administrative state is at their beck and call, the millions of federal civil servants. Trump with each one of these appointments is signaling his absolute disregard for the administrative state and rather his interest in ruling from above. So you go back to Hegseth, who has conveniently laid out his vision for the Pentagon in a book he just published called The War on Warriors. And the first step is fire all the generals. And here’s the key thing, because people say, well then how will it run? He says, “And we’re not going to replace them.” The idea is that a military, a branch of the government should be an extension of the strongman’s will. And so you can see where Mitch McConnell and John Thune and those characters are like, well, we’d like a piece of that power too. But this is no hope. If our hope is in John Thune, we’re doomed. And I’ll just say, where is the pushback going to come from? The one thing that shocked me, because I think like a lot of us on this beat, we’re like, yeah, Trump can come back. I think January 6th, 2021 was, wow, look at that campaign launch. That guy is building something. The thing that has astonished me is the rapidity and the fullness across the left liberal political spectrum of the acquiescence. And of course we can point to people who aren’t doing that and we can point to activists and organizers who are doing good work, but they are, at this point, the exceptions to the rule. And particularly the mainstream media. And I know, again, the left likes to say, “Well who cares? They’re in the bag anyways.” It’s pretty hard to resist fascism. The New York Times and the Washington Post for all their failings and their weaknesses, they also have some strengths and they also have some resources. And look, me and Steve and you on Blue Sky, we’re not going to be able to do it. We need a bigger popular front and it’s not showing up right now. Marc Steiner: Yeah. Steve? Steven Monacelli: I generally agree with everything Jeff has said and just building on the point around it’s not just Pete Hegseth’s vision to gut the entire administrative state. That’s the premise of project 2025 or at least one of the key premises. And so the sort of resistance that we saw coming from the federal administrative state, the guide rails that were put in place by longer institutionally minded servants may not be there anymore. There may not be that inherent [inaudible 00:11:44]. And Mitch McConnell and Thune, those folks, they may have more of an interest in preserving some of that institutional power that is already established. And so we might see a little bit of jockeying there. But I agree, I don’t think that is going to be a key source of any resistance to Trump’s agenda. And I also agree that currently there is not a big enough popular front established to resist this. But we are at least seeing some suggestions of approaches which they mirror some things that have already been done in the past around sanctuary cities. Not to say that that actually really panned out. When I lived in San Francisco and Trump was in the presidency at the time, ICE was still coming into San Francisco and conducting raids on immigration. Marc Steiner: Right. Steven Monacelli: So the point is that this is the headline that I’m thinking of, “Denver Mayor suggests using Denver police to block mass deportations under Trump.” Now, I don’t want to blow up that particular- Marc Steiner: Where was that headline? Steven Monacelli: This is in local Denver news. In the past 24 to 48 hours, this has become a thing and it’s already blown up on right-wing news, which is where I actually really first saw it because they’re holding this up as a sign of liberal resistance, and to try to make points around hypocrisy, I’m sure as well. But I think this is an example of federalism and the opportunities that federalism provide for some sort of resistance from the local or the state level in a way that somewhat ironically you could say the conservative movement has had a much better handle on over the past many decades. And so I’m not necessarily saying that this is the way, or I’m not endorsing this as an approach, but I am pointing to it as something that we’re already starting to see bubble up. And other mayors in blue dominated cities, which are pretty much almost every major city, they may consider following suit to some extent, but to have a standoff between local and federal law enforcement, that’s pretty serious, to say the least. Marc Steiner: So I don’t make an equivalency between 1930s Germany and where we are now, but one of the things that allowed the National Socialist Party, the Nazis, Adolf Hitler to take power was that the opposition was not united. The opposition was disparate, it was all over. And I look at where we are right now, and the right has been building this before Trump. The right has been building this since the ’70s. They’ve been trying to rebuild power and they’ve been doing a good job of it across the country. And this particular moment we’re in, it requires an opposition. The question is, before we go back to the cabinet picks, where does that come from? How does that get organized? How do people pull that together? Because without that, over half the country doesn’t want this to happen. Jeff Sharlet: I disagree with that. Marc Steiner: Okay, go ahead. Jeff Sharlet: I disagree with that. Marc Steiner: Start right there. Go ahead, Jeff. Jeff Sharlet: Over half the country didn’t vote for it. A good part of that, well, I didn’t vote for it, but okay. And some consciously saying, “I’m going to tune out,” and some saying, “Well gosh, I was wrong.” This idea M. Gessen writing in the New York Times today saying, “This idea, this debate, and Democrats, wait a minute, maybe we should back off on trans rights so much.” And Gessen makes the point you can’t back off on something that you haven’t been there for. And even the term trans rights is misleading. We’re talking about human rights, we’re talking about rights of, leaving aside undocumented folks, U.S. citizens. Maybe we should abandon the rights of some citizens. So look, I’m not a doomsayer, but I do think that we need a kind of hard-headed assessment of where it is because I think we got here by just a lot of fooling ourselves and telling ourselves, for instance, to me this idea like half the country or majority of the country doesn’t want this. Look, majority of the country isn’t paying attention and I think- Steven Monacelli: It also doesn’t matter whether a majority or lack of a majority exists when it comes to issues that people view as moral issues. People didn’t organize around civil rights in the past because they were organizing from a majority. They organized because they believed it was right. And you don’t achieve a majority by not organizing. You achieve and you build ground by organizing, particularly whenever you’re coming from a position of not inherently having a majority of people with you. And I think it goes without saying that it doesn’t actually require a majority of people to have an impact on an issue. Small dedicated groups of people can have great impact in their communities if they choose to organize. But it will be challenging. I don’t think anybody should discount how challenging it could be in the next four years if people choose to try and organize any sort of resistance to mass deportation, for example. Marc Steiner: Right. Mass deportation, all the appointees he’s made right now have been very clear, they support mass deportation. Anybody who’s involved in that. And what that will look like, physically look like on the TV news, in the press, rounding up masses of people and shipping them across the border to Mexico. You’ve got Selden who wants to tear apart every environmental protection law that exists in this country. That’s there. This is a rabid right radical group of cabinet officers who are prepared to change everything. So coming back to what we just left off, I’m really curious how both of you watching this see that resistance starting. You’re right, what you were just saying, I’m of the civil rights generation. I was one of those folks down south when I was a teenager in the civil rights movement and we were a minority, but we changed things. We changed things, we changed laws, civil rights bill and all the rest. But it was a battle. People died, people got hurt, people went to jail. So do we have that now? Do we have something that can be built similarly to that to resist what is in our face, to resist for our sakes, for our children’s sakes, for our grandchildren’s sakes, do you think we have it? Steven Monacelli: I don’t want to dilute us into thinking that we have exactly what we need right now, but I do think there’s clearly motivation and if people do focus where they can have an impact locally and perhaps at the state level, they may be able to do something. But as I said, it’s going to be challenging and people usually lose before they win. Marc Steiner: Yes. Steven Monacelli: But I would like to add that on the issue of mass deportation, the federal government, it has a lot of resources, but it can’t necessarily conduct that sort of scale of operation on its own unless it somehow is able to use the entire capacity of the Department of Defense. At some level they’re still going to require assistance from states like Texas. They’re going to need land, they’re going to need potentially local law enforcement to support their activities as well. And so people, if they focus, they may be able to organize some resistance to some of those sorts of things happening in their own backyards. But exactly what that looks like is going to vary depending on the context. Jeff Sharlet: Let me be the voice of… It is a popular thing now to say let’s not be doomsayers. And I agree. But let us look at the converging forest fire and hurricane that’s coming. And I think one of the things, Steve, I would disagree with you there a little bit just this is from my own reporting, but looking around, I would recommend actually this American life, has got a good episode with an Obama era ICE official who has been gaming this out and lays out says, “Look, yeah, you could do about a million in about six weeks.” And here is… This was a man who knows. Marc Steiner: Take a million people in six weeks. Jeff Sharlet: Yeah. And so I kind of feel like there’s a little bit of a reassurance narrative of the reassurance narrative of well, they’re incompetent. The reassurance narrative of these things aren’t real. You can’t do them in this order, which is why we need to pay attention to what is a revolutionary declaration. And I don’t mean revolutionary as any virtue, but this is, they’re declaring a revolutionary regime. And look, let’s not sleep on Elon Musk and Vivek with the declaration to cut the government by a third. And that seems absurd. There’s no way to do that unless you really don’t care and you use a wrecking ball.You cut the government by a third, we are talking massive collapse. I think a resistance is going to come. Look, I’m not a doomsayer, because I think we’re going to get through this or some of us are going to get through of it. But that means us sort of recognizing… Steve, I agree with you, but I sort of feel like right now the left and liberals are leaning on, if we were to organize, we could stop mass deportations. And I’m like, well, we know where the land in Texas is. How come there aren’t 10,000 people there right now saying, sitting in. That if is doing a lot of work. Steven Monacelli: Yeah. To be clear, I don’t want to be considered as saying we can stop. Jeff Sharlet: We can do it. Marc Steiner: Right, right. Yeah. Steven Monacelli: If you look at Stop Cop City for example, they’re working- Jeff Sharlet: They did not. Steven Monacelli: They did not succeed. What did they do? They slowed the gears of a larger operation. Jeff Sharlet: Which is important. We can’t overlook the value of slow losing. Right? Steven Monacelli: So the point is this, they have a certain number of years before Trump can no longer be the president. Jeff Sharlet: I don’t know about that. Steven Monacelli: Or hypothetically the constitution would change and he becomes a dictator forever. There’s tons of hypotheticals. But there could be value in slowing down something. If the idea is it can happen in six weeks, what if it takes six months? What if it takes six years? Well, those are the sorts of equations that I think unfortunately some people would have to think about because I don’t think anyone is in a position to convincingly argue that if they choose to try and do this with the full force of the federal government that it can be stopped. Jeff Sharlet: So it’s a big organizing challenge, come join our losing fight. And I do mean that, actually, look, the last chapter in my last book is the good fight is the one you lose. That is where we’re at now. And I don’t know how to do that organizing, but it has to happen. Marc Steiner: So let me ask in the time we have here, this clearly has to be a fight. Even though in blue cities you have police departments that where many of the officers, not all of them, are on the right. And you’ve got these people in the cabinet controlling different parts of the government who are very right-wing. I think you’re going to see environmental laws torn asunder. You’re going to see let industries just run roughshod over the country and the environment. You’re going to see that taking place. You’re going to see these mass deportations. And so I’m going to go back to what I originally asked here. I think people can resist. We can stand between the ICE and the immigrants. We can hide people out. We can do all kinds of things. In my generation, we foolishly started blowing stuff up, took us nowhere. And so the question is, I’m very curious about how it gets pulled together, how a resistance to this is pulled together. But it just feels like politically for me that we’re entering a very dark moment. And how do you think we get through that? How do you think that gets organized from your observations and the stuff that you both do so well? Jeff, you want to start? Jeff Sharlet: I think we press the fault lines. That’s sort of what I understand- Marc Steiner: What did you say? Jeff Sharlet: We press the fault lines. And the good news is as fractured as the left and liberalism is now, the right is always that fractured. I think one of the mistakes that has enabled the right to advance is secular liberalism and a lot of the left failing to distinguish between factions of the right, failing to look at… There’s a fallout now between, what are they, the Catholic new traditionalists and the integralists. And the integralists are the Catholics. And these intellectual leaders, and they are intellectuals, let’s pay attention, those guys are thinking, are fighting viciously over territory in this new regime. So I think as a journalist, my idea is like let’s bring light to that, let’s make that possible. But I also think, and I would say let’s do what we can to start pivoting. So Gates was brought down by three things. Right? Gates was brought down by three things, or really the main thing was that all his colleagues hate him. But he was brought down by the persuasive allegation that he had sex with a 17-year-old statutory rape. But it was also that he went to a sex party and then he paid for sex. Two of those three things… The problem with Gates is the fascism. Hegseth. Sounds like there’s serious allegations of rape, but that’s the only thing the media’s talking about. The problem is the fascism. We need to start saying, look at what the plan, look at this man’s explicit laid out plan for bringing troops into U.S. cities, which he identifies as like Samarra in Iraq. He says they are indigenous-held territory, and he doesn’t mean indigenous. To him, that’s a good thing. He’s calling them Indian country as in an old Western. Until we can get to that point, we’re quibbling over scandals, which is the politics of the pre-Trump era. Marc Steiner: Yeah, what were we going to say, Steve? Steven Monacelli: So I think from a perspective of accountability, what Jeff is saying is right. We have to highlight these fault lines and press on them as investigative journalists and reporters. But from a sort of positivist organizing perspective, which I can’t claim to speak from a position of expertise, I’m not an activist organizer on a day-to-day basis. But what I am seeing is people talking about a few things. I’m seeing people talk about the labor movement isn’t necessarily building ground, but there is a strategy that at least Shawn Fain has laid out about a longer term perspective of trying to align their bargaining for the future so that they can kind of coalesce around certain things and build power and collectivize their power in that way. But that’s 2028 is what he’s saying. That’s not now. So that’s a long bridge into the future, which is important to have. In the short term, I’ve heard people talk about, okay, well how do we become more community focused? So building on something Jeff was talking about, secularized America and liberalism. They’ve allowed their civil society to basically decay at least relative to conservatives. Everybody’s civil society has largely decayed, but churches still exist. And the role of churches and politics and sort of centers of organizing and community is really significant and religion is one of the biggest aspects of our political story right now. So at the Democratic Party or sort of liberal and progressive organizers want to work on something to kind of reorient their party and reorient their thinking. They need to figure out how to create community civil institutions that actually bring people together. It doesn’t have to be a union hall, but that would be nice. Something that can actually serve as a connective node for a variety of local struggles that can then build coalitions together. Because it has to be a popular front and it has to be a large coalition in order to overcome the strength of the right-wing coalition. But then also the burden of apathy and sort of disconnectedness from day-to-day politics that a lot of Americans, they inhabit that space. And political education is a hugely important project that we’re going to have to figure out how to get the messages out as well. So for the state, journalism and communicating messages, that has to be a component of the strategy as well because it does feel like sort of mainstream news is that organ is, it still plays a role, but it is increasingly waning in influence and progressives and liberals need to figure out how to really use the current tools to the best of their ability. Marc Steiner: Before I came here today, I was at a friend’s funeral who was a labor leader, organizer, and majority of the audience, not all of it, majority of the audience was African-American. And part of the scuttlebutt in the room before services began was people talking about what we face and how you’ll pull people together nationally, regionally, and locally to resist what’s happening. Now it’s like building a broader coalition. If something like that’s not built, it has to be very consciously built to confront what we’re about to face. In your observation of society and where we are, the complexity of the society, the complexity of the opposition to what we’re facing, how do you see that getting organized? It’s got to be more than us producing stories and you writing articles for it to stop them. It’s very clear they have an agenda. And when I watch this, I realize they’ve been waiting for a Trump to come along, this kind of anti-social figure that can spit in their eye. And they’ve got him now. And they’ve got his boy wonder next to him ready to take over. So I’m just curious, looking at where we are, how you see the possibility of something larger being built from the ground up to say no and stop it and to resist it. Was that just pie in the sky? Steven Monacelli: The last big thing that I think a lot of people on the left saw that gave us hope for something like that was the Sanders campaign. And there’s a lot to learn from that. Obviously it didn’t succeed. But having a positive message that resounds with people’s real experiences and needs is clearly important. But also people are disaffected with our current system. It’s clear that they are disaffected with our current system and they view Trump as an avatar of change regardless of what he really stands for. We’ve seen interesting examples where people voted in a trans representative, but then a lot of people also voted for Trump. And so squaring those two things is really key. We need to figure out why were people motivated so much to vote for Trump? Was it his outsider message? Was it that they were upset with the collapse of the COVID safety net? Was it purely just the price of groceries or was it a combination of all these things? So we have to understand truly what’s motivating people to even make these choices. And then we need to give them a movement that addresses their concerns and speaks to their anxieties. And the Democratic Party is clearly not in a position to do that. They spent so much time basically defending the status quo that they allowed Trump to become like punk rock. Marc Steiner: Yeah. Right. I got that. What were you going to say, Jeff? Jeff Sharlet: I don’t know if I have anything hopeful to add. I think, look, I’ll just say, and maybe by being this dark lets other people come and bring the light. I don’t see it. And I’m sitting here at a college campus which is not organizing, where Trump’s vote increased four or five fold. He still didn’t win it from last time. There were no protests after. One of the failures I think is you look is again, it’s like the New York Times, colleges and so on, they’re very inadequate, frustrating, liberal status quo institutions. And so the left, very understandably, can’t stand them, right? And the right says like, uh-huh, that’s great that the left doesn’t like them because we know… We know from Heritage Foundation, we know from Fox News, I’m at Dartmouth College, Fox News has name checked my college three times since the election and saying, all the professors need to be fired, not because of any leftism on campus or anything. They don’t care because they understand that this is an institution that’s not theirs, right? And meanwhile, the institution is torn between saying, well, we’re above it, we’re neutral. There are no neutrals here, to quote the old labor song, right? And frankly, the campus left sees the enemy as that administration as opposed to understanding they’re coming for us all. They’re not making the distinction between, oh great, you’re teaching a radical class and you’re teaching boring economics. They don’t care. And I think maybe I would say this, the movement, this most positive thing I can say. Right now, we have been captured by altruism. Liberalism traditionally thrives in altruism. The left has gone over to a two. Well, I am just so upset about what’s going to happen to those other people. This is a historical misunderstanding of fascism and a way of turning away from how the right is organizing because they don’t care. They’re not working by the categories that we work by. They’re not saying first we come for X group. They’ll come for the undocumented. They’ll also come for people who are American citizens. And if you happen to get in the way, they’ll be glad to arrest you too. And the local town councilman, Marc, who hates you because your tree leans over to his yard, he’ll come for you. With Marc Steiner on the top of the list, suddenly now you are. So then that tells us how do we fight that? Solidarity. Altruism is concern for what’s going to happen to others. Solidarity says, hey, what’s going to happen to you is going to happen to me. What’s going to happen to me is what’s going to happen to you. My body is on the line. This is not us protecting others. This is if we stand in the way of mass deportations, it’s not protecting people, it’s protecting yourself. You put your body on the line. So that I hope is coming. It’s not here yet. Marc Steiner: It’s not here yet. And as we close out, I have to harken back to my early days as a community organizer. In a neighborhood that was a white working class George Wallace city neighborhood. And we turned it into a McGovern neighborhood. We turned it on its head. And people did that by organizing, going door to door, fighting bad landlords, bringing people together who never talk to each other, crossing the line and bringing black and white working class people together to fight their common enemy. And it might seem high in the sky, but it’s not. It takes organizing and it takes work. And I think that’s what I think a broad coalition of people has to be brought together to stand up and be able to build something and opposition because we’re going to need it. We don’t know what we’re going to face. We’re about to find out. But I think that bringing voices together in places like Real News so they interact with each other, going out into the community, helping to organize is the only way that this is going to be stopped. I think we have to realize that this is not 1933 Germany, it’s 2024 United States of America. And it could be just as bad. Steven Monacelli: The contexts are different. Marc Steiner: Yes. Steven Monacelli: You might have some strange bedfellows like what would organizing in Texas around mass deportation look like? Or even in Florida. Might you end up trying to convince some suburban single-family homeowners who might be inclined to vote for Republicans that they’re going to be harmed if a bunch of people who they rely on for their yard work as a statistic reality, statistical reality, are they going to be opposed to that? Or are they going to wait until they face the impact of that instead of standing up to say, hey, maybe this is a bad idea. There are contradictions that can be exploited is I guess what I’m trying to say. And the coalitions may end up being strange because- Marc Steiner: They will be strange. Steven Monacelli: … who is going to be impacted by this. And a lot of these people may not realize that they too are going to face some sort of consequence. Not to compare their consequence to far worse- Jeff Sharlet: Steve, I’m going to disagree with you. To compare their con… Because some of them are going to get killed too. That’s what I’m talking about. We can’t do the ranking. You don’t know. Fascism doesn’t have a list and saying, oh, you’re on this. If you have troops marching through a city, rounding up people, and maybe they’re rounding up someone, but this guy comes out and says, “Hey, what are you doing on my lawn,” And some 19-year-old national guardsmen shoots him, it doesn’t do him any good that he voted for Trump. Right? And I think that’s why… Talk about strange bedfellows. We got Rand Paul out there saying, “Hey, wait a minute. No, no. Using troops on American soil, that’s a problem.” I don’t want to have any kind of solidarity with Rand Paul, but if he will help fight troops. Yes. Yes. I don’t know. Steven Monacelli: Right. That is the nature of a, quote unquote, popular front. You kind of suspend certain disagreements in the process of fighting a much larger threat. Marc Steiner: And I think that the role that you two play, that we play, is really important in building that and pulling that together, pulling voices together, bringing stories together to help fight this resistance that has to take place. So this is just the beginning. I’m going to look forward to having both of you all back to really kind of push this because we have to push it because we have no choice. We have no choice. We have to stand up to it. And so I want to thank both of you for the work you do and for being here. Jeff Sharlet, Steve Monacelli, great to see you both again, and we’ll be linking to all your work that people can just look at and see what you’re doing and hit the magic thing and read and see what you’re doing. So I really appreciate you both taking the time today. We have a lot more to talk about. We have a lot more fight to do, and I appreciate your voices and you being here today. Jeff Sharlet: Thanks, Marc. Thanks Steve. Steven Monacelli: Thank you both. Marc Steiner: Once again, let me thank my guest today, Jeff Sharlet and Steve Monacelli for joining us, and we’ll be linking to their work here on the Marc Steiner show site at The Real News. And thanks to Cameron Grandino for directing and running the program today, audio editor Alina Nehlich for her work and her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing the Marc Steiner Show and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at Real News for making this show possible. Let me just say that we’ll be covering this with some intensity. It’s no longer just about the rise of the right, but how to resist a neo-fascist takeover of our world. So we’ll be bringing you voices and stories from across the country and around the globe of people who are resisting and working to build a more equitable future for all of us. So please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover, what’s happening in your community and your story ideas. Please just write to me at [email protected] and I’ll get right back to you. And once again, thank you to Jeff Sharlet and Steve Monacelli for joining us today. So with the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner, stay involved, keep listening, and take care.