0:00 This video is dedicated to Renée Goode and Alex Pretti, 2 human beings executed in cold blood by the American government. For obvious reasons, I've been reading and thinking a lot about fascism and its particular manifestation in the United States right now. So first, a quick reminder of what fascism is. Fascism is a cult obsessed with national purity and this kind of mythic golden past that must be returned to through a form of national rebirth. A rebirth that happens through a revolutionary nationalist movement that rejects liberal reforms and leftist class struggles. That's fascism. So cutting to the heart of the matter, I think the average American is basically filled with fear. MAGA is afraid of the unknown and the various boogeymen that the fascists have manufactured, and the rest of us are afraid of the forces that this has unleashed. So I've been trying to figure out why so many American Christians in particular are fascist. I think the reason that fascism is appealing to so many self-proclaimed Christians is that modern Christianity is essentially an abstraction. It's a system of disembodied symbols and rigid rules. Despite what Jesus taught, it cherry-picks bits from the Bible that justify othering. And as a religion, it has failed entirely at the true goal of religion, which is to give people the direct experience of love, bliss, and of being held by life. So the terrified masses look to a reified nation-state as their god and a demagogue as their savior. In other words, fascism offers the illusion of certainty in what feels to MAGA like a chaotic world. They have replaced love thy neighbor with a feeling of righteousness and hate. The way religion is practiced today also creates an enormous shadow, as Carl Jung pointed out. If you are brought up in a religion that tells you that you must be perfectly good and that you must have no bad thoughts, That the flesh is sinful and the spirit is pure? Well, where does all that repressed shame and self-loathing go? It goes into the basement. And eventually, you have to project it onto someone else. You need a them— the immigrant, the liberal, the woke intellectual, the garbage, the vermin— to carry all your darkness that you refuse to acknowledge in yourself. So fascism provides a wonderful outlet for this. It gives you this kind of moral license to hate. It tells you that your hatred is actually morally superior, and it allows you to feel holy while you're being cruel. And that is a very seductive drug for someone who has been repressing their humanity for a lifetime. So what do we do about this? I don't know. I think, I think it has something to do with getting underneath the fear and finding some sense of humanity in people. So I want to keep talking about this. It feels like the most urgent thing to be doing right now.
