Sep 24, 2026 · 56 min · 14 segments
Philosopher and leading scholar of propaganda and authoritarianism Jason Stanley joins veteran journalist and broadcaster Patt Morrison for a conversation on how propaganda, historical narratives, and…
Jason StanleyGuest
Patt MorrisonHost
sense is that fascism is about excluding and cutting out this group and that group and leaving however small a core, that core becomes the dominant core in how it dictates culture and how it dictates, in your book as you lay out, education.
And I wonder The word fascism has always been, at least since World War II, a third rail in American politics.
But to what extent has America always had fertile soil for fascism, which is an alarming idea in itself?
Oh, it's just historically you have to understand that Hitler deeply admired the United States.
And Mein Kampf, the United States, is the racial nation that he says that he wishes to model Germany after.
Until 1965, essentially, U.S. borders were closed between the U.S. Asian Exclusion Act in 1965, especially the Immigration Act of 1924.
And we tried to cluster, apparently, according to my colleague, Daniel Ho-Sang, who's writing a book on this, Yale tried to corner them, you know, made three offers to eugenicists, so a big blanket hire in the 20s.
Jim, the Jim Crow laws were the basis of the Nuremberg laws, as Jim Whitman's great book, Hitler's American Model, makes clear.
And then, of course, so my father had his citizenship removed at the age of three by the Nuremberg laws when he was living in Berlin with the rest of my family.
But the Nazis chose to go with one-eighth because they decided the one-drop rule was too extreme.
Well, yes, we certainly have a history that is, as your book points out now, a lot of it is being erased and marginalized because it doesn't fit the narrative that Trump or MAGA or the longer standing conservative movement is trying to promulgate.
This should be shocking because like Hitler and Mein Kampf, as I talk about in the book, talks about education quite extensively.
He has many pages on it where he says, the goal of education is to give a grand vision of the nation and the nation's great men, the great men of the race, should be put forward as examples of the greatness of the nation and the purpose of education of history.
sense is that fascism is about excluding and cutting out this group and that group and leaving however small a core, that core becomes the dominant core in how it dictates culture and how it dictates, in your book as you lay out, education.
And I wonder The word fascism has always been, at least since World War II, a third rail in American politics.
But to what extent has America always had fertile soil for fascism, which is an alarming idea in itself?
Oh, it's just historically you have to understand that Hitler deeply admired the United States.
And Mein Kampf, the United States, is the racial nation that he says that he wishes to model Germany after.
Until 1965, essentially, U.S. borders were closed between the U.S. Asian Exclusion Act in 1965, especially the Immigration Act of 1924.
And we tried to cluster, apparently, according to my colleague, Daniel Ho-Sang, who's writing a book on this, Yale tried to corner them, you know, made three offers to eugenicists, so a big blanket hire in the 20s.
Jim, the Jim Crow laws were the basis of the Nuremberg laws, as Jim Whitman's great book, Hitler's American Model, makes clear.
And then, of course, so my father had his citizenship removed at the age of three by the Nuremberg laws when he was living in Berlin with the rest of my family.
But the Nazis chose to go with one-eighth because they decided the one-drop rule was too extreme.
Well, yes, we certainly have a history that is, as your book points out now, a lot of it is being erased and marginalized because it doesn't fit the narrative that Trump or MAGA or the longer standing conservative movement is trying to promulgate.
This should be shocking because like Hitler and Mein Kampf, as I talk about in the book, talks about education quite extensively.
He has many pages on it where he says, the goal of education is to give a grand vision of the nation and the nation's great men, the great men of the race, should be put forward as examples of the greatness of the nation and the purpose of education of history.
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