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Staten Island is often referred to—by its inhabitants—as the Forgotten Borough of New York City. But who knew that in the 1990s, Staten Islanders literally tried to secede. Our guest this week, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, is a journalist and senior producer for the Revisionist History podcast, and he’s created a brilliant new series called The Staten Island Problem that tells the history of this moment when New York City almost came apart. Ben sees this story as an early example of the politics of resentment that dominates America today. To understand Staten Island is to understand the communities across our country that feel forgotten and disrespected, whose resentments Trump rode to power. Oh, and obviously we also talk about how Staten Island—or Shaolin, as they call it—explains the Wu-Tang Clan, which totally fits perfectly well with the other themes and definitely isn’t just shoehorned in because it’s super interesting. To get started on Ben’s series, click here to listen on Apple Podcasts. Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

Last week, we spoke with campaign manager Ben Shanahan about David Morales’s winning strategy in his successful campaign for Providence mayor. Today, we have a very different conversation with Jenn Steinfeld, David’s field director, about how they built the grassroots operation that knocked proportionately more doors than Zohran’s, without burning anyone out. It turns out campaigns really can run field the right way and win. Let’s do it more often! Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

Two weeks ago, 28-year-old democratic socialist David Morales defeated Providence's incumbent mayor Brett Smiley in the latest electrifying win for the Democratic Party's populist wing. But how did it happen? And how can it be repeated? In the first episode of this two-parter, Aaron and Matt talk to David's campaign manager Ben Shanahan about the message, strategy, and tactics that powered this insurgent victory. Next week, we expand this conversation with David's field director, Jenn Steinfeld, who gives a window into what it looks like to combine electoral campaigns with movement building. For more analysis on David's win, see Aaron's piece in The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/david-morales-mayor-race-providence-rhode-island/ Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

Yotam Marom has been helping build movements — and many of the most important movement organizations — for the last 20 years. His new book, "For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness" is an essential read for everyone on the left who wants to win a better world. Yotam, who became an organizing leader in Occupy Wall Street alongside Jonathan approximately a million years ago, joined us to talk about the left's conflicted relationship to power, leadership, identity, and strategy. We discuss how and why movements too often get in our own way, turn on each other, and play small, and talk through the big shifts we need to make if we hope to win the big battles ahead. Check out Yotam's book here: https://yotammarom.net/book Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

For this Labor Day episode we’re joined by Bill Fletcher, a longtime union organizer who’s spent the last several years working to build out the labor movement’s anti-fascist infrastructure. Bill has an important reminder for those of us who direct most of our anti-fascist energy against Trump and the oligarchy: MAGA isn’t some astroturf trick. It’s a genuine social movement representing some 25-30% of Americans, and any strategies that ignore this fact are missing something fundamental about today’s dangerous political reality. You can learn more about Bill's organization, Standing for Democracy, here: https://www.standing4democracy.org/ Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

What can ancient human prehistory teach us about fighting fascism today? It turns out, quite a bit! So says historian Patrick Wyman, whose recent book, Lost Worlds, covers the 10,000 years between the end of the Ice Age and the Late Bronze Age collapse. Together, we discussed what makes societies fall apart, what is lost when they do, and how history demonstrates that human agency — and our decisions today — really do matter in determining what comes next for our civilization. Check out Patrick’s wonderful book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World⁠: https://bookshop.org/p/books/lost-worlds-how-humans-tried-failed-succeeded-and-built-our-world-patrick-wyman/d35a39f742ad1625 And his great podcast, Past Lives: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/past-lives/id1852618120 Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

Nobody asked for this. But we said we'd talk about Graham Platner someday, and that day has arrived. We were all super excited about Platner. That excitement turned out to be misplaced. So what are the lessons we should draw from this saga? We also reflect back on the broader primary season, debate Woke 1, talk data centers, and look toward November, in this first just-us-cohosts-episode. Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

“The first and crucial step to closing a camp is being against the camp. Not a camp, not that camp, not a newly proposed camp or this particularly atrocious camp. But against camp as concept, against camp as practice — against all camps. Against locking people up because of where they were born or where they are.” This is the thesis of “How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention” by John Washington. Washington is a longtime reporter on the border and immigration detention, and he joined us to discuss what we can learn from the organizers and activists who’ve been leading the fight against America’s expanding network of immigration camps — and why these mechanisms for indefinite detention, without the benefit of due process or trial by jury, are obviously the infrastructure of authoritarianism. Check out John’s book here. And here’s Aaron’s review of the book for The New Republic. Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

We all love making fun of fascists. But Dr. Bret Devereaux makes an art of it. Bret is a historian of antiquity and a Tolkien scholar, and he doesn’t suffer fools. He’s been going at it with the world of online chud “historians” — the fascists who say they’re fighting to defend “Western Civilization,” something they’ve never bothered to actually try to understand. And he has similarly choice words for the far right billionaire freaks who idolize, and utterly misunderstand, the Lord of the Rings. This is a genuinely delightful conversation for nerds like us. But it’s also a serious look into the ways the far right misuses history and literature to advance their f****d up worldviews — and how we can fight back. Check out Bret’s WONDERFUL blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, at acoup.blog. Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

Something weird is happening on the far right. MAGA influencers are calling out the pork industry. RFK Jr. is taking credit for militant animal rescue actions. And the animal welfare movement is taking notice. Astra Taylor joins us again to talk about a forthcoming article she and Aaron co-authored on the shifting political terrain around animal rights. The core question: Could this be the new MAHA (Make America Healthy Again)? A few years ago, it was impossible to imagine that crunchy moms who hate Monsanto would become a key part of Trump’s electoral coalition. But here we are, in part because Democrats created a vacuum on health issues that the right stepped into. We think something similar could be happening today with animal rights — which, if the left doesn’t wake up, could be very bad for all of us. Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

In recent weeks, we’ve seen our skies engulfed in dystopian haze. We’ve had lethal heat waves ruin our Fourth of July cookouts. States have announced emergency water rationing due to record-breaking droughts. Tens of thousands of Europeans have been killed by extreme heat so far this summer; hundreds of thousands are being evacuated by apocalyptic wildfires. And we know it’s just the beginning—this is, after all, not just the hottest summer of our lives, but the coolest summer for the rest of our lives. This didn’t just happen. Climate change is overwhelmingly the result of pollution and deception from specific Big Oil companies that were predicting decades ago that their fossil fuels would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate harms that would create “more violent weather” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Even as they used this knowledge to protect their own infrastructure, they orchestrated fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to lock us into the disasters we are currently experiencing. But we’re not powerless in the face of these nightmares. We can take on Big Oil, and the fossil-fueled authoritarianism that these corporations have done so much to engender. And there are few people with more experience in these fights than Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media. He joined us for a great conversation about making polluters pay, the ways clean energy developments have totally transformed the climate fight, and how to balance hope and fear in the midst of climate chaos. Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

This one’s a little different. Aaron, Matt, and Jonathan talk with Ken Salazar—former U.S. Senator from Colorado, Secretary of the Interior under Obama, and Ambassador to Mexico under Biden—about why Democrats need to rethink their approach to the U.S.-Mexico border and start treating immigration not as a liability to be managed, but a genuine opportunity to be seized. We also discuss the politics of Mexico and Ken’s experiences with AMLO, Mexico’s former insanely popular populist president, and Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s current insanely popular populist president. Aaron even tries to get a little feisty with Ken about his climate record, but fails spectacularly due to Ken’s kind grandpa demeanor. Oh well! Check out Ken Salazar’s new book, Borderlands: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Borderlands/Ken-Salazar/9798902680215 Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

Back in May, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” — a surprisingly forceful call-out of dehumanizing technology, Big Tech oligarchs, and an economic order that casts the few as gods and the many as disposable. To talk about this work (and Aaron’s growing Catholicism-envy, and the utterly pathetic “faith” of J.D. Vance), we invited Matthew Sitman, co-host of the great Know Your Enemy Podcast and official Catholic sage of the erudite left, to walk us through this era of moral leadership from the Catholic Church. This is a good one. We swear, so help us God! Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

To celebrate the 250th, we’re looking back at the founding with Tad Stoermer, author of the NYTimes bestseller “A Resistance History of the United States.” Why did the same people who kicked off the American Revolution actively oppose the adoption of the Constitution? Was Rhode Island always a mob state? What can we learn from the musical 1776, starring Mr. Feeny? All this and more on this special 4th (well, 6th) of July episode of Fighting Fascism. Check out Tad’s book here: https://www.tadstoermer.com/ Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod

Sara Nelson is the President of the Association of Flight Attendants, and one of the most badass leaders in the labor movement today. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t do a hard-hitting, critical interview with her. Well, actually, that’s exactly what it means. Hear Sara lay out the challenges and opportunities that unions face right now and the role of organized labor in fighting fascism. And hear us just kinda fan-boy nod along to everything she says! Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation. Intro song and music by Horse Radish. Follow us! Instagram @FightFascismPod BlueSky @FightingFascismPod.bsky.social Twitter @FightFascismPod