News Brief: Media Won’t Say a Nazi Salute is a Nazi Salute and How MAGA Became Too Big To Fail
Citations Needed | January 22, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes, and today, Adam, we are going to be discussing not only the inauguration of Donald Trump for the second time, but the media coverage of it, and especially the media’s coverage of some of the key players in this new administration.
Adam: Yeah, so there’s a lot to go over. A lot happened in the last you know, 24 hours. This is recorded on Tuesday morning, so it’s been about 24 hours. We are trying to recap the news the way the media covered it. Overall, not great. For all the problems of, quote-unquote, “The Resistance,” namely, its obsessive and unproductive focus on foreign conspiracies from the elites, I think the rank-and-file was a little more earnest, if not, you know, kind of brought into that, that framework by MSNBC, New York Times and, you know, Washington Post. But this time, there’s no resistance. I made a joke on Twitter or on Bluesky, I forget which one at this point: “Feel like pure shit, just want #theresistance back.” You know, kind of talking about the ways in which, there was a lot of bad things, obviously, about that, in terms of how elites sort of shaped it into a neoconservative project. But there was also a lot of good things. You know, I was at the March on January 21. I was also there for J20 and was near where all the, you know, the J20 protesters were arrested. And then, of course, I went back the next day to what’s pejoratively referred to as the Pussy Hat Protest. But it was different, was not that, it was a sort of a weird moment of hope. It was like you’ve got a genuine sense that people were going to resist Trump in meaningful ways and protect migrants and protect women’s rights and protect all these vulnerable communities. And this time, as Hamilton Nolan wrote about it at his Substack, I think, quite well, and others have noted this. Even Peter Baker at the New York Times did a kind of sneering piece about how there’s no resistance. That’s just not the case this time, and that, of course, has major problems, but it also, I think, does present opportunities for that gap to be filled by things other than neoconservative foreign policy projects.
Nima: Right. Well, some of the veneer is dropped, even though it’s one of those situations where things will get worse before they get better.
Adam: What I would argue, perhaps somewhat self-servingly, is that the neoconservative co-option of Resistance politics in 2016 and 2017 is precisely why we are at where we are today, that there wasn’t a effort to build an alternative, populist vision, but instead was a sprawling conspiracy of foreign meddling and trying to separate Trump from Republicans and Republicanism, and separating him from the 1%, from the billionaire class, in a way that was not at all related to reality when you actually looked at what Trump did when he went in office, of course, the first thing he did in 2017 was pass a bunch of tax breaks for corporations, and rather than making that the focus of our ire, although, of course, some some did, but broadly speaking, that wasn’t. It was years and years of what, in retrospect, was total waste-of-time lawfare, while not building the systems, the messaging, the grassroots to offer an alternative populist vision to Trump’s dark, pseudo populist right wing vision. Now, again, I know that’s been the drum we’ve been beating for years. And so maybe it’s a little-self serving to say that, but I do think it’s correct. And so what we have now is we have the logical conclusion of that, which is that most so called Never Trump Republicans or large billionaire donors to Democratic or liberal causes, which is to say funding these kind of, you know, ‘Save democracy,’ facile neocon think tanks are either pro-Trump now or kind of nowhere to be found, with some rare exceptions.
And so we’re at a place now where the Resistance, such as it is, is largely resigned to rank and file. Community organizers, I know that in Chicago, they’re doing great work around protecting migrants, doing lawyers and activists and migrants themselves have gotten together to create kind of Know Your Rights campaigns. People in various cities have been doing this. People are figuring out ways of protecting trans people and trans health, protecting women’s rights. So there’s all these people who are in the grassroots doing the day to day. I don’t want to act like that’s not a thing. That is very much a thing. But as far as, like, a kind of popular movement, in terms of, like, who showed up to the protest in Washington, it was, it was less than 5,000 people, versus the over 200,000 people in 2017, which again, has to be steered by these kind of elite, these kind of elite media nodes, is nonexistent, and in that absence, I think it takes you to a very dark place, which is that the coverage of Trump, unlike in 2017, which again, bracketing out or fully qualifying this to know that a lot of that was kind of the New York Times and Washington Post trying to gin up a bunch of Russiagate stuff this time, it’s kind of just very soft-pedally.
The New York Times ran a push poll on the eve of his election saying, ‘Well, most voters don’t really like Trump, but they like his policies.’ And the only policy they cited was his support of mass deportation, which was a push poll because they referred to people as ‘illegal’ vs. ‘undocumented.’ And of course they did note that the overlap of people who support mass deportation and support a pathway to citizenship is something like 30 to 40% of Americans, depending on the poll. Which is to say, Americans don’t know what the fuck they believe. Obviously, the issue has been polarized by Democrats going right.
Nima: And that a lot of other polls have shown that, broadly, people do not support mass deportation.
Adam: It all really just depends on how you juke the question. I mean, it really does.
Nima: Especially with no other alternative.
Adam: Yeah. And that was kind of, the consent manufacturing go brrr. That was like, Okay this is happening, elite liberals and Democrats are increasingly supporting quote-unquote “tough” immigration policies, which is to say, making sure you arrest and subject to thirst and starvation people at the border. And the New York Times has been doing a lot of this kind of soft–because here’s the thing. We’ll talk about this later. But nobody wants to say, I was anti-Trump, and now I’m kind of soft-pro or indifferent. Because that sounds hypocritical or pathetic. Because what they say is, The people have spoken. Joe Scarborough did this. Mark Zuckerberg did this when he came out as–
Nima: The fake mandate argument.
Adam: Well, right. Despite the fact that, again, he won by historically low margins, despite the fact that most of his policies, a great deal of his policies if you actually poll the top 20, are deeply unpopular. He won for a variety of reasons, but the mandate is at best weak. So all of this being said, this is all to kind of lay the table of an inauguration that was very grim. It was, again, typical kind of grievance-filled speech, his scapegoating of migrants, his faux-populist, all the same bullshit we’ve been doing for 10 years.
Nima: The way back to the greatness of America, I mean, all this bullshit. Obviously really telling is who some of the VIPs were, sitting even in front of cabinet officials, to show really who’s wielding the power here: His billionaire friends. Whether it was Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or others. There’s a photo of them kind of lined up, which obviously led to a lot of oligarchy takes, which I don’t think are off the mark.
This actually hearkened back to something W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Nation in 1956, which is this, quote,
This Administration is dominated and directed by wealth and for the accumulation of wealth.
He continued,
Corporate wealth profits as never before in history. We turn over the national resources to private profit and have few funds left for education, health or housing.
End quote. And he continues, quote,
It costs three times his salary to elect a Senator and many millions to elect a President.
Again, this is from 1956. DuBois writes,
This money comes from the very corporations which today are the government.
End quote. So, yes, I think the parallels are stark, to say the least.
Adam: This is why I’ve never been a fan of the, saying that all these corporate executives, Bezos, Zuckerberg, that they’re bending the knee, or that they’re obeying in advance. I think these terms are kind of designed, like a lot of this kind of Pat Snyder-isms, they’re designed to continue to treat Trump as if he’s some anomaly, that he’s outside of the system. And that these rich people are partnering up with him and buddying up with him because either they fear retribution, or there’s some kind of minor venality.
Nima: And that this has never happened before.
Adam: Rather than what it is, which is a textbook case of class solidarity. They are extremely wealthy and know that Trump is good for the extreme wealth, and they want to be at the table when decisions are made. Because unlike last time, I think last time, there was a sense that Trump was maybe kind of a genuine wild card or genuine populist. And then about five minutes into his administration, it’s, Oh, he’s more or less just a normal Republican. And he’s gonna do normal Republican stuff. And guess what? Wealthy people like Republicans for the most part. Now, of course, they donate and try to manipulate Democratic politics, but between the two, they’ll generally take Republicans because they support more pro-wealthy-people policies. And so there wasn’t some other kind of mysterious force at work. It’s not like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are secretly worried that Trump is going to assassinate them. That’s not the play. The play is, they like low taxes, they like low corporate taxes. They want to be able to harass and fire minorities without any pushback, e.g., get rid of Woke or DEI or whatever. They want to be able to pollute. They want workers to be weak. They want the NLRB to be weak. They want, certainly, public unions to be weak.
Nima: Right. All of this is in line with the things that they want, including tax breaks and government contracts as well.
Adam: Yeah, this idea that they’re sort of reluctantly agreeing I think is false. Again, the reason they weren’t all pro-Trump in 2017, because I do think there was an element of, an uncertainty, and a belief that the lawfare strategy against Trump would be successful. I think people kind of broadly believed that that was going to impeach him and get him out of office, that he was this fluke, and they were the elites were going to get together and throw him out. And they realized very quickly that he can be instrumentalized, because he’s more or less, again, aside from sort of these tacky statements he makes. He’s more or less just a normal Republican president. So that framing, again, I think this idea of preserving this sort of innocence of our ruling elite by acting as if they’re being dragged across the finish line here, I think, is not accurate. This is all to say that now Trump is kind of too big to fail. That pretty much no matter what he does, the illegality, the demagoguery, he is held to a standard of basically nothing he says can be disqualifying. Because while he is the person in power, and if he’s the person in power, is disqualifying, then the whole system breaks down.
And so we saw this with Elon Musk–again, the richest person in the world, almost worth half a trillion dollars. Projections are, by 2030, he will be worth a trillion dollars, who is basically co-president from all reporting, or, you know, maybe a vice president of sorts–did a clear-as-day Nazi salute three different times on live TV that you absolutely cannot mistake as a Nazi salute. I mean, that’s what it is.
Nima: That’s right. During the Inauguration events. Yeah.
Adam: And this was a classic, too-big-to-fail scenario where the media is looking at what, again, if anyone else, Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders had done this gesture. You know, some college kid at fucking Columbia had done this gesture, whatever. Of course, they wouldn’t because they’re not Nazis and Elon Musk is. But if they had done this, there would absolutely be no qualification or doubt or couching about what everybody saw, but because it’s the co-vice president, and richest person in the world, and someone who controls whatever remains of Twitter, we have to kind of act like it wasn’t the case.
Nima: So the media is doing this classic, What you’re seeing clearly is not what you’re seeing What is exactly right in front of your face, and obvious to all, and cannot be mistaken for anything else, is actually not what you’re seeing. And so we’re gonna parse this, and we’re gonna write statements, and we’re gonna hem and haw all because we are dedicated to preserving the power of these people that we have now hitched our wagons to. And so, you know one example that came out quickly. So you know, Musk does numerous Nazi salutes. Sieg Heil, Heil Hitler salutes, unmistakable. And very quickly as soon as this starts spreading around, the ADL releases a statement. Yes, the Anti-Defamation League.
Adam: Perennial Citations Needed punching bag for being the biggest goddamn phonies on Earth. The ADL.
Nima: Supposedly an anti-hate group, actually just a Zionist lobby group. This is their statement that they pushed out publicly. Quote,
This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety.
It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge.
In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.
Adam: This is a tweet that is made in a lab specifically for our show. So here, we have a lot going on here. Okay, we have bullshit therapy speak right, sort of, everyone’s feelings. There’s very little overt ideological content. It’s kind of about calming nerves. Everyone’s on edge, well, why are people on edge? Oh, maybe because the party in power just did a Nazi salute. But set that aside. This was predicted. This is why, you know, I was sort of monitoring the ADL’s response, because I knew they were going to, they were going to spin for Musk, because Musk, basically the ADL is a shakedown operation. If you donate to them and do your little pro-Israel tour, your anti-Palestinian racism tour that they put you on, where you go to Israel, you wear the IDF dog tags, all of which Elon Musk did, and you spout the kind of right, anti-Palestinian bromides, you can pretty much say or do whatever you want. You know, John Hagee–
Nima: Megachurch leader John Hagee, who’s all about bringing upon the end of days, so that all Jews can be destroyed or convert. John Hagee, number one friend to Israel, always defended by the ADL.
Adam: Right. I mean, they’ll issue some mild criticisms when he goes overboard, but mostly they forgive him and don’t really criticize him. If you say, you can pretty much get away with anything, so long as you’re pro-Israel. And I knew, so I knew this would happen, but I was a little bit, dare I say, and I know it’s a facile observation, but I was a little surprised how badly this was done. Now again, and I cannot stress this enough, and I know we are an audio podcast, and there are times I wish we had a video element. Go watch the video. There is literally no way it is not a Nazi salute. Now, there’s been two different excuses. One, that’s slightly more plausible, but not plausible, and one, not at all plausible. The not at all plausible is, he was saying, ‘My heart goes out to you’ and hits his heart. But again, you can watch it with your own eyes, right?
And I keep going back to the Star Trek episode, “Chain of Command.” There are four lights. It’s very clear that there are four lights. There is not five lights. He is doing a Nazi salute, three different times, twice in a row. It’s very clear what he’s doing. There’s no natural human gesture that one does that could possibly be confused with what he did. And then the second excuse they made, which, again, is slightly more plausible, is, Oh, he’s actually doing a Roman salute. Okay, this is the equivalent of Oh, that swastika on his T-shirt is actually a Hindu symbol. It’s kind of the, Oh it’s the antecedent actually. It’s not the thing that was popularly co-opted by, I don’t know, the most notorious evil thing that ever existed, Nazism. Well, okay, even if that is the case. And he tells himself that–
Nima: Guess what the Roman salute is. A very, very thinly veiled reference, again, we did a whole episode on how ancient Greek and Roman aesthetic has been co-opted by white supremacist culture, so check that out if you haven’t heard it. But this is one other example, the idea that, No, no, this is, you know, back to back to the roots of Western civilization, you know, because Musk then says, This administration is going to save our civilization. And so it’s a Roman salute, which, if you know anything about not only the Roman salute to Roman emperors, but also then how that was used by fascists like Mussolini, hearkening back again to that kind of ancient era of strength and power and honor. But a Roman salute is a Nazi salute. It is the same thing. That is what it is used for. This is a fascist gesture.
Adam: And look, people say, Well, why would Elon Musk do a Nazi salute? And I’ll tell you exactly why Elon Musk does a Nazi salute. A) He has a lot of Nazi sympathies. Anyone who’s followed his account could know that he’s obsessed with this white genocide narrative. He’s obsessed with, whatever, Woke and DEI. He’s a fucking obvious racist. He’s obviously very much promotes eugenicist content all the time. I mean, it’s, again, this isn’t like a sort of normal supply-side economics conservative. He’s a fucking fascist. I think that’s pretty clear. He promotes Knockout Game type stuff, this sort of lurid 4Chan race-baiting stuff. There’s dozens of examples. You’re welcome to go look them up. I won’t go over them all.
Nima: You can go down the list of what fascism is all about, and he supports all of those things.
Adam: So the sort of meta-reason, or what I believe he may be telling himself, is, I’m gonna do this Roman salute. That’s really wink-wink. And I agree with everything Nazis say pretty much, but I’m so big and I’m so powerful, and I’ve kind of bribed the appropriate pro-Israel lobbying groups that present themselves as civil rights leaders, that he knows he can get away with it. He does it because he knows he can get away with it. And I think he’s so bored. And again, someone with fucking $500 billion or whatever it is, now, I think it fluctuates. You and I would say, Well, why would we not just go, you know, retire to a mountain somewhere and do good works and fucking ski all day and drink hot toddies by the fire? Why would I not be on a beach somewhere?
Nima: Because he’s a power-obsessed Nazi.
Adam: He’s also, you know, a fucking manic, stimulant-abusing weirdo who wants to go giggle with his gamer friends and say, Yeah, I got away with it. I got away with it. You know, I knew I could get away. I was trolling the libs. I was triggering the libs. And the difference between ironic Nazism and natural Nazism is not a meaningful distinction. And this is the thing you saw this during the whole like alt-right studies. And I think good experts on this will tell you this, that the way in which one becomes a Nazi is through ironic Nazism. There is not much of a distinction.
Nima: If you’re cosplaying, it turns into reality very quick.
Adam: Yeah, or it just is reality. Because a Nazi salute is a Nazi salute.
Nima: It’s like the Venn diagram is just a complete circle.
Adam: Because, from a scientific perspective, that which cannot be measured doesn’t exist. All I can see is what you say and what you do. I don’t know what’s in your mind. What’s in your mind is solipsism. I have no way of interrogating that. All I know is that he did a Nazi salute on live TV.
Nima: Yeah.
Adam: And the only reason why we’re doing this seven-dimensional apologia is because he’s powerful and white. And again, this level of grace, as the ADL puts it, would not be afforded to any other group.
Nima: Not even would not be. Has not been, in the history of the ADL.
Adam: Any other group, any minority, any fucking Democrat. Joe Biden wouldn’t get this fucking treatment. He gets the most soft treatment for anything.
Nima: A fucking community college professor or student–
Adam: Oh, fired, fired, fired.
Nima: Who says Free Palestine or says, I think all people in Palestine and Israel, from the river to the sea, everyone should live in a representative one-person, one-vote democracy and have equal rights.
Adam: No, that’s genocidal.
Nima: The ADL dubs that genocidal, and would get that person fired or expelled or have their entire lives ruined. But now we need to take a breath. We need to have grace. We need to give the benefit of the doubt. And to make this as clear as day, we also have one of the worst commentators on Earth right now, Batya Ungar-Sargon, chiming in with this, in defense of Musk for doing a Nazi salute. She wrote this, quote,
As a person with a *strong* track record of criticizing Elon Musk, I feel extremely confident asserting that this was not a Nazi salute. Elon Musk is a friend to the Jews. This is a man with Aspergers exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd. We don’t need to invent outrage.
End quote. So again, too big to fail. He can do whatever he wants. He supports the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people, and therefore he is dubbed a quote-unquote “friend of the Jews,” which itself is an antisemitic statement, because Zionism is not Judaism, and this idea that Musk needs to be defended for being a Nazi is all about power, is all about knowing exactly how you want to show up online in this new administration.
Adam: Yeah, and corporate media, again, because he’s too big to fail, because he’s powerful. This is not a standard that would apply to literally anyone else that is not powerful, white, and well, basically the co-vice president. New York Times, quote, “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture.” Reuters: “Musk’s hand gesture during Trump inauguration festivities draws scrutiny.” Newsweek: “Elon Musk’s Gesture at Trump’s Inauguration Parade Sparks Online Chatter.” So the story is about the kind of anger about it.
Nima: It’s just the online chatter, Adam, it’s not that he actually did, like, a Heil Hitler salute. It’s that people online can’t just, like, get over it, man. It’s all just about viral chatter.
Adam: When it comes to these things, I’m pretty gracious. I really am. Because I do think people can kind of take clips out of context, or look at an image and say, Oh, they’re doing Heil Hitler, which you can kind of do for anyone, just by the nature of how public speaking works. But if you watch the video, it’s clearly a fucking Sieg Heil. Clearly.
Nima: Right. Right.
Adam: Because there’s no other job, like, if I was trying to do a Nazi salute, there is absolutely no other way you would do it. I mean, that’s the thing. There’s no other explanation for it. So it’s sort of, there are four lights. There are not five lights. There are four lights. Okay? You cannot let your lying eyes not deceive you.
Nima: Then you add the thing about, like, Well, you know, he’s on the spectrum, or he has Asperger’s, and now criticizing his awkward emotions is really just ableist, right? No, he’s a Nazi. That’s what he’s doing.
Adam: They’re trolling with that one. I don’t think they don’t really believe it. But look, he did it twice. It’s pretty clear, he did it really three times, but twice in a row. And of course, so we’re gonna get all this well, maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t, and it’ll blow over, and people will move on, and he’ll go back with his fucking his little online friends in the chat boards. You know, weedboner69, and say, Look, we trolled the libs, look. Because, again, it’s about triggering the libs and about the fucking thrill of having both power, but also going as far right as possible, being as edgy as possible, while feigning ignorance. And this was not like a dog whistle. This was literally a Nazi salute. And now we’re being told that it wasn’t one, or there’s some ambiguity. And we, you know, we can’t rush to judgment about it.
Nima: Well, let’s see what happened later in the day, following Trump’s inauguration. He immediately signed a whole raft of executive orders, and I’m just going to quote from the Guardian’s coverage of this, not because I’m slamming the Guardian at all, just for some context, so we all know what actually happened. Quote,
Among [the orders] was an order for the US to withdraw from the World Health Organization. On immigration, Trump declared a national emergency at the US-Mexico border; designated criminal cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations”; and redefined birthright citizenship, a move against children of undocumented migrants born on US soil that contravenes the 14th amendment to the US constitution, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on American soil.
The Guardian continues, quote,
Other measures included making federal workers easier to fire; a recision of 78 Biden-era measures; a federal regulatory freeze; a freeze on all federal hiring except in the military and some other categories; and a requirement that federal workers return to full-time in-person work. Trump directed every department of government “to address the cost of living crisis”, and issued directives “preventing government censorship” and ordering the end of the “weaponization of the government against the adversaries of the previous administration.”
End quote. The Guardian continues, quote,
Trump rescinded Biden’s removal of Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, announced just last week, and removed Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers and entities in the West Bank. He told reporters he would impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico from 1 February.
End quote. Other executive orders included, quote, “unleashing Alaska’s energy potential for the entire nation,” end quote, and reversing a Biden-era order that sought to reduce the use of private prisons, as well as signing an order to, quote, “protect women against radical gender identities.” End quote.
Adam: Yeah, it was Project 2025. There was a Heritage Foundation wish list, which everybody knew he was going to do, again, despite his de-emphasis on this. And let’s talk about the sort of Transphobia-Persecution-Industrial Complex that really, I think, this was their party, this was their day. If you heard the Transphobia-Media-Industrial Complex talk, you would think they were bold truth telling radicals who had to meet in secret like the Decemberists and plot their sort of strategy to defend women. Okay? So here they are being ushered into power and so Bari Weiss is at an Uber, Twitter party with Ted Cruz and other senators and other celebrities talking about how, you know, celebrating her big day, right? She’s kind of a keynote of hate towards trans people. And I’m looking at this going, Wow, you guys, you know, for a bunch of edgy truth-tellers who are constantly on the edge of being fired and being persecuted, you seem like you’re in power. If what you were saying was genuinely subversive, I don’t think that really happens usually. And so they’re having their moment again, riding in on the backs of far-right, name it. You just listed off the EOs.
And I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, This is why the just-asking-questions types like Bari Weiss and Elon Musk comes from them and funds her magazine, Free Press, probably with free Twitter ads, this like, I’m not really conservative. I’m not religious, you know, I’m sort of a centrist, I’m kind of, I’m even a liberal. And I’m just asking questions. How that morphs into, like, overt fascism in months. And this is why, when someone does the kind of sheepish just-asking-questions centrism, people are immediately suspect. Because pretty much 99 times out of 100, if not 100 out of 100, they just become fascists like 10 minutes later, more overtly. And I think this is the, this was the kind of just-asking-questions centrist Bari Weiss-type discourse around the so-called, trans issue, which is to say, people’s fundamental human rights. This was its kind of final form. This is where it was always going to end up.
And it did, and they won, and they passed a bunch of horrific fucking executive orders, and God knows what they have planned for the next few months to really go after trans women, ostensibly, and men, ostensibly, under the pretenses of protecting women. But again, at the same time, they’re figuring, they’re, you know, they’re working with the Heritage Foundation Institute for Chaining Women to the Stove to figure out, you know, how best to protect the women that they supposedly care about. I mean, it was the Super Bowl of the most cynical fucking assholes in media, really what it was yesterday. And now they can all kind of come out of the closet because they’re in power. They don’t need to do the stalking horse routine anymore. They don’t need to do the like, Well, you know, I’m not really sure, I’m actually a liberal. It’s like, oh, Trump’s fucking great. Let’s all party. And it’s like, Oh, okay. Well, I guess this is where this was ending up.
Nima: Yeah, wandering the desert, looking for a home, you know, Ronin style. Like, I just believe what I believe, but I’m kind of politically–
Adam: Rogue iconoclast.
Nima: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, I’m just a rogue. I’m kind of homeless.
Adam: Despite all these mysterious fucking Silicon Valley funders.
Nima: In this polarized world, and I’m just–no. They’re at the Inauguration parties for the fascist president. That is what is happening.
Adam: Despite having all these, you know, Silicon Valley funders with an underground bunker with, like, a caliper collection, you know, let’s not ask. I don’t know where my money comes from. I’m user-supported through Patreon and Substack. It’s like, Okay, well, here we go. And again, I’m happy for your success. And then, of course, the next thing on the list–sorry, there’s a lot of horrific stuff to go through here, and how the media handled it–was Trump pardoning the January 6 riders. Now, obviously we are not generally pro-people being in prison. If you’ve listened to their show, you know that. But clearly this was not some magnanimous leftwing gesture of abolition. This was Trump giving a green light to rightwing vigilantes to commit violence.
Nima: Right. The people who tried to do an insurrection on his behalf are being rewarded for that.
Adam: And that’s a message to every you know, Oath Keeper, white nationalist, you name it, who can commit violence, ostensibly on behalf of Trump, however they perceive that, more or less at will now.
Nima: With impunity, exactly. And not only impunity, but with praise.
Adam: And persecution complex.
Nima: Exactly, exactly.
Adam: That’s obviously a very dangerous thing for a lot of reasons, because even people who said, Okay, well, the January 6 coup never had a chance to succeed. I think that’s probably true. I don’t think the military was ever going to back these fucking you know, guys who want boat dealerships in Virginia. But fascist mobs are bad in and of themselves. They’re bad because they intimidate, attack lawmakers, undermine whatever vestiges of democracy are left in this country, and effectively anoint through heckler’s veto violent rightwing vigilantes to kind of decide who gets to be in public, who gets to pass law, and who gets to have any influence in our politics. And that’s very, very, very bad in and of itself.
And I think that what you saw with the January 6 pardons was kind of that, finalized. It was for the next four years, especially, if there’s any perceived liberal check to Trump, whether it’s through, you know, law, or through investigations or through even protesting, right? Again, imagine Trump does some horrific thing, and a bunch of liberals and leftists go protest, and some guy mows them down with a truck, that that act, again, maybe not something that extreme, but probably pretty close to it, will, in effect, be legal. It will be made legal by the president.
Nima: Right. That will be protected.
Adam: So long as it’s a federal case, and even then, I’m sure that some MAGA fucking governor will do Trump’s bidding. So that’s not good. That’s a very bad place to be. And reading the January 6 coverage from our media, it was kind of resigned, like, Well, that’s what happens when you lose elections, I guess. And it’s like, Okay, so we’re not doing the liberal rule-of-law anymore, handwringing. It’s just kind of what it is. All these decisions were made in 2021 and 2022 to not prosecute Trump for trying to overthrow the government, and once Garland and everyone else kind of shrugged their shoulders–
Nima: That laid the groundwork for all of this.
Adam: Then that was it. And we can sort of argue about why that was, or whether the media did a piss-poor job on that or not, but that was kind of determined three or four years ago, and so this is what we have today, we have basically just full-on rightwing vigilante sanction, which is a key element of fascism. We can have the fascism debate all we want, but a kind of unelected group of vigilantes who can sort of franchise-model, who can go commit violence whenever they want, with the obvious, glaring implication that they can get away with it, is a key element of fascist terrorism.
Nima: Yeah, exactly. You just enable and kind of deputize Brownshirt mobs, and that’s what happens, except these Brownshirts just wear MAGA hats and wear Trump flags as capes. So they’re kind of anointed and deputized as longer arms of the administration, which is also just how fascism and authoritarian governments around the world have long operated. You know, it’s not even like the official uniformed forces that need to do the bidding. It is the empowered, deputized mass supporters.
Adam: Yeah, and to be clear, there’s a bunch of other really essential, horrible things that Trump did, you know, whether it’s the climate, rolling back EPA rules, again, it’s a fire hose of rightwing Heritage Foundation bullshit. So it’s, it’s deliberately designed to kind of discombobulate liberals and leftists, and it’s all very bad. And again, I think to a large degree, it was kind of covered matter-of-factly, because, again, to go back to the sort of opening theme, I think that the sense that major publications were going to be aggressively and conspicuously anti-Trump, which they should be, just as they should attack everyone in power from a position of what ought to be the orientation of what’s good for the working class and the masses, they don’t, because I think that partisan shtick, they’re not doing anymore. And so they’re kind of just doing stenography, for the most part. This is a generalization, there are exceptions. But it’s like, Oh, yeah, Trump just did this executive order. And people say, Well, that’s obviously unconstitutional. He can’t do that. Well, that’s not for us to determine, it’s for a judge. And it’s like, Well, okay, but that’s not really the case though. There are things that are obviously illegal and unconstitutional.
Nima: And the CEO of this oil company says this. But then someone at the League of Conservation Voters says this. You decide.
Adam: Right. Everything’s framed as this, you know, he said, he said thing, and that’s the way, I guess, the way we’re rolling with it now. So we’ve gone from Democracy Dies in Darkness to here’s what dear leader said, and we’ll have the occasional criticism here and there. So we don’t look like the fucking New York Post. And that’s kind of where we’re at. So liberal opposition is very weak, either through a series of deliberate ideological decisions, or capitulation, or just, frankly, discombobulation, and hopefully, and this is, I guess, the theme we’ll end on here is that maybe something, a more robust vision can emerge in its wake, in the hollowing out of the so-called Resistance, maybe a real populist, leftwing alternative can be form that presents a vision to to combat rightwing populism from the ground up, from the orientation of the working class, rather than this kind of Liz Cheney just trying to plug the holes in the boat, and hope you don’t sink.
Nima: Right. Because we’ve seen what liberalism and even kind of neoconservatism has wrought in the face of rightwing populism, in the face of this nationalistic white supremacy. And so, that ain’t working. It didn’t work the first time, and it subsequently has not worked. And so that is where we’re at. But that also means that we will end this Citations Needed News Brief on, sorry, not the most hopeful of notes, but by now you know us, but we will be back very soon with not only more News Briefs on the new administration and the way that the media is covering it, as well as more full-length episodes for season eight of Citations Needed, which we are in the middle of right now.
So again, thank you all for continuing to listen, to share, and support the show. Of course, you can follow us on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. But that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production Assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, January 22, 2025.
