The Battles We Pick
What can we learn about making social and political change from talking to professional change-makers? This work takes a combination of persistence, shrewdness, and luck. On the Battles We Pick podcast, skilled advocates and organizers talk about how they deal with the various challenges they confront.
Theme music by generous permission of recording artist Stephen.
The Battles We Pick
White nationalism researcher Hannah Gais on the overlap of hate groups and the GOP
The Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center is well known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate and extremist groups. So it was great to have one of their researchers, Hannah Gais, as a guest on the podcast. Discussing her work on White nationalist and Neo-Nazi groups, Hannah told me about the extremist voices and ideas that the MAGA Republicans have welcomed into their Party. As one example, Hannah gave the back story on the Holocaust-denier who appeared recently on Sean Hannity's show, arguing that America was on the wrong side of World War Two.
The conversation was a sobering reminder of the authoritarianism poisoning our politics and society—and the stakes of the upcoming election. Hannah talked about an authoritarian strategy called entryism, which focuses on reshaping institutions to serve autocratic purposes. It sounded a lot like Project 2025.
In a discussion of how women feature in white nationalist narratives, I mentioned a pair of historians. Kathleen Belew's Bring the War Home is about the emergence of the American white nationalist movement in the 1970s-1990s, and Tim Snyder's Road to Unfreedom similarly traces how Vladimir Putin cemented his position as Russia's strongman. Both accounts talk about the narrative of the need to protect women from sexual violence or perversion.
Looking beyond the dangers posed by Donald Trump as a chief executive or nominee, there is the larger problem of millions of Americans abandoning democratic principles in favor of authoritarianism. To help grapple with this difficult problem, Hannah and I listened to a clip from the classic post-WWII US government propaganda film Don't Be a Sucker.
