Trump Knocked Out After He's Exposed For Secret Fascist Agenda

IHIP News

Historian Heather Cox Richardson joins Jennifer Welch to dissect the growing authoritarianism in American politics under Trump, tracing its

Key takeaways

• The GOP's shift began in the 1970s with the Powell Memo and strategic use of abortion as a wedge issue to mobilize religious traditionalists.
• Religious nationalism has been weaponized since Nixon to undermine public support for progressive policies like social security and environmental regulation.

Main topics

• Authoritarianism in American politics
• Religious nationalism and Republican strategy

Notable quotes

"The reason that the United States had endured 9-11 was because of issues like abortion and gay rights." – Reference to religious rhetoric post-9/11

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a call to action: despite rising authoritar

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) What is happening in the concentration camps, and they are concentration camps in the United States of America, I think is going to make people's hair curl when we get to the other side of this and learn what actually happened in those camps. Speaker 3 (0:27) All right, listeners, we are in for a treat. We are going to school today, but the good kind of school, the therapeutic type of school. And joining me, because all of you have demanded for over a year to have Heather Cox Richardson on I've Had It. And here she is. She's a professor, a historian, and author of the nightly newsletter, Letters from an American, which reaches over 6 million readers. Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for joining me. It is such a pleasure to be here. I'm such a fan. Oh, thank you. Likewise. I want to just dive right in. Over the course of the last week or so, we had the 25-year anniversary of 9-11. And there was a split screen that happened. And I'm going to play a video for you of Trump at the Pentagon honoring those that fell there. Kylie, play that clip. And for those of you that are listening and not watching, he is just completely asleep, as he always is. These taxpayer-funded naps that he takes all of the time. And this is the type of stuff that if that were a Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, or a Joe Biden sleeping at 9-11, the hysteria in right-wing media would just be fever pitch. And then if you juxtapose that, Heather, with MAGA intentionally propagandized a video that was taken way out of context of Zoran Mamdani and AOC. And here's the video in its complete entirety. And then I want to get your take on the juxtaposition of these two videos. Kylie, play the other clip. Speaker 2 (1:59) So in Speaker 3 (1:59) this clip, Speaker 3 (2:02) Zoran and AOC see each other, hug, have a moment, and then they go right back into the ceremony. And this made the rounds all over right-wing media that they were hamming it up, laughing. And this kind of split-screen propaganda that goes on right now, tell us what's going on behind all of this. Speaker 3 (2:22) I Speaker 2 (2:22) think in order to understand the moment we're in, we got to go back and we got to go back at least until, sorry, the 1980s. Because I think what you're seeing playing out here is the delegitimization of Democrats being in power, of being the people who are governing the United States. and the legitimation of anything that the Republicans choose to do. And that's playing out in exactly what you're showing. Trump's sound asleep, whereas Joe Biden, with his speech impediment, sounded old and sometimes couldn't put a sentence together. And there was this right wing outrage. But embedded in that are a couple of things. One that's embedded in it is the idea that Democrats, because they represent people of color, minorities in either ethnic, gender, religious, whatever minorities are an illegitimate contributors to the American polity, while Republicans by sort of definition are the people who should be running the country. So that becomes embedded in politics in the 1980s and the 1990s, and it continues forward until you get, for example, around 9-11, a religious figure insisting that the reason that the United States had endured 9-11 was because of issues like abortion and gay rights. You get that spreading forward, but I think there's also issues in it, embedded in it. One is the propaganda that so much of this idea that Democrats are illegitimate and Republicans are legitimate is based in propaganda-based media. And finally, you get the fact that until very recently, there was not a lot of media on the center and in the center left that was pushing back on that kind of propaganda. So it's become embedded in our system. It's been a long process. Speaker 3 (4:06) So this propaganda started a long time ago. And we were speaking before we clicked record. You lived in Tulsa for a year. I lived in Oklahoma City for 50 years. And I saw this propaganda incubate in my childhood in the 80s. And all of my friends were very, very religious. And the enmeshment of their Christianity with the Republican Party. was very aggressive and active during my childhood. I remember driving down the street and looking at the marquee for my junior high school or my high school. And I'm not my high school for a church. And it would say, God wants you to vote for George H.W. Bush today. And I saw that on the churches. And my friends were always trying to recruit me. I was raised by atheists, but my friends were always trying to recruit me and I would go to church. And it was Let's pray for Ronald Reagan. Let's pray for George H.W. Bush. They really started embedding themselves in the heartland and making no daylight whatsoever with the Republican Party and Christianity. Do you have any studies or anything to add to that? I Speaker 2 (5:18) do. Actually, I'm just finishing a book that covers this pretty extensively. And what you're seeing there is actually the attempt of the Republican Party beginning back during Nixon, actually recognizing that it no longer commanded the loyalty of a majority of Americans who really quite liked the idea of social security and clean water and clean air and, you know, and limits to hours and minimum wages and the sorts of things we associate with the modern American state. but which in fact didn't go into place until 1933. The Republican Party wanted to overturn that and were pretty aggressive about it after 1971 with the Powell memo. But they recognized that Americans liked it, especially after we start to have people voting at age 18 and especially after women become more and more active in the political scene. So beginning in 1972, Nixon begins to try to overcome this popular liking of the modern state by bringing religious traditionalists into the party. And he does so by weaponizing abortion. The idea of, and remember, that's 72, that's not 73, which is Roe v. Wade, that's 72. And what they're talking about in 72 is getting rid of women's livers, these women who are contributing to the support for the modern American state. And the reliance of the Republican Party on those religious traditionalists who characterize themselves as anti-abortion, but who are pretty clearly arguing that women should not be taking up a position in modern America, certainly not in politics, is pretty clear. And you can see the party getting more and more and more enmeshed in it. So the fact you saw those things about George H.W. Bush is really interesting because he, in fact, supported abortion rights until he went onto the ticket with Ronald Reagan in 1980. And there was always concern that he was a little bit wishy-washy on abortion. And you can see the issue of abortion becoming more and more of a political... um sort of touchstone a political fire that is burning through the republican party and giving that sense that those americans who believe in reproductive rights originally we get the abortion legalization in the 1960s really at state levels in 1970s because it was an extraordinary public health crisis that women were dying from botched abortions illegal abortions You see that reconstruction of the abortion issue around the idea that it's just women who are so determined to have their own way. They're willing to literally engage in infanticide, which is how you get somebody sometimes like Ronald Reagan characterizing it. And increasingly, as the Democrats become the party of this extraordinary immorality in the ideas of people like, say, Ronald Reagan, his famous empire. Evil Empire speech of 1983 was actually given to a bunch of evangelicals. And while we focus on him calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, the majority of that speech is about abortion and how it must be rooted out of America in order to reclaim American goodness. Ronald Reagan himself, of course, signed a very liberal abortion law in 1967 as a governor of California, but he clearly was trying to pick up those voters. And as that party became more and more associated with the Republican Party and the Republican Party with it, we know that it was actually evangelicals who pushed Trump over the victory in 2024. It became more and more determined that nobody else was a legitimate. group of people to govern in the United States. And I think we've seen the fallout from that on January 6th, when, you know, Trump and his supporters literally said, we don't care how the voters voted. We are going to take over the government. Speaker 3 (9:11) Yeah, I remember back when George H.W. Bush was president. I remember there was an episode on Oprah Winfrey where Barbara Bush came on and Oprah asked her about the abortion issue. And she said, I disagree with my husband on this. And she was, you know, kind of maverick minded. But I remember that as being a big moment because he wasn't near the right winger that his son was, George H.W. Bush. But a lot of well-knowing men. like Ronald Reagan, who probably was pro-choice, George H.W. Bush, who definitely was pro-choice and made sure his wife went out and said that on Oprah, because that stuff just doesn't happen independently when you're at that level of politics. That's intentional. They incubated and fed this thing. And for those of us that have been blue dots in red states, we have seen up close what Republican super majorities do. So what Trump is doing on a national scale right now is familiar to me because this is what the Republican Party has been doing in Oklahoma for a very, very long time. And it's so terrifying to see the fringe, you know, in the White House now. But as we as we see this injection of religion, Pete Hegseth basically. There were whistleblowers in the military that said he was kind of telling them like this is a spiritual war. And you spoke there about the language of Ronald Reagan and evil empire. And in my book that's coming out, I draw the parallels of the language that I heard growing up from my very, very religious friends that were always trying to recruit me to save me from going to hell. And it was very black and white thinking, good versus bad. don't question, blind obedience. And it was a very authoritarian religion in my view, which I think primes the psychological soil for a lot of these people to fall prey to an authoritarian government, which I see as abusive. They see as familiar. It's familiar for them to blindly be obedient and not ask questions. And so as we look that, you know, a lot of people in the United States just think, oh, I hate the moment Trump came down the escalator. But that's not the moment that this thing happened, right? Speaker 2 (11:33) No, no, not at