The most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda is the possi — Jason Stanley

"The massive state bailout of financial institutions, leading to immense public debt, was followed by a demand by those very same financial institutions that were bailed out by those states for the states to pay down their debt."

"I havent been focused as much as I should have been on supporting trans rights in the last 12 months. I now realize that this is where the fight for global democracy is. There is no avoiding it."

"You have a media environment in which Trump is very cleverly not at all like a charlatan—behaving exactly like any fascist would, claiming the other side is the democratic threat and being extremely open about his intentions.Hes going to replace everyone in the government-by-loyalists. He’s going to target the universities, the schools. This process is called gleichschaltung in the literature on Nazi Germany, where every organization, every government institution turns loyalist-like and is transformed. Their employees are replaced by people loyal to the leader and loyal to the party. And Trump has already announced he’s going to do this. So hes already announced a full fascist plan."

"Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, was a member of RSS, as was current Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements, its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930s and 1940s."

"The nature of liberal democracy prevents propagandistic statements from being banned, since among the liberties it permits is the freedom of speech. But since humans have characteristic rational weaknesses and are susceptible to flattery and manipulation, allowing propaganda has a high likelihood of leading to tyranny, and hence to the end of liberal democracy."

"The significance of Project 2025 is that it calls for what in the Nazi parlance is called Gleichschaltung, the systematic replacement of civil servants by loyalists—by party loyalists—and the systematic replacement of teachers in schools and universities and, in general, institutions throughout society by party loyalists.In the case of education, it’s completely implausible that Trump is ideologically distant from the goals of Project 2025. Trump has repeatedly said he’s going to target critical race theory, which, let’s face it, is simply Black history. The Project—he’s targeted—he said he’s going to replace education with patriotic education—namely, representing the United States as an exceptional grand nation whose exceptionality is due to its white Christian heterosexual men, who have defined the nation."