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Dr. Kendi is a world-renowned historian and scholar, and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Be an Antiracist. He is the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History at Howard University. His new book is called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. It is incredibly insightful and illuminating in terms of mapping how we got to where we are. And I think what Dr. Kendi shares in our conversation today is also quite helpful in terms of pointing us in a potential direction out of this mess.

I’m so glad that I got on his card for this interview, and very excited to share it with you now…

Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age

How to Be an Antiracist

His Website

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ELISE:

It’s nice to see you again.

I interviewed you many years ago, probably six or seven years ago at this point. So it’s nice to see you. I wish we were meeting in a different culture and climate and that we didn’t keep having these conversations.

IBRAM:

Yeah. I mean, I wish these conversations were in the past tense, but maybe one day we’ll get there.

ELISE:

Yes. I maintain my optimism. Well, thank you for this latest work. I thought it was incredibly helpful in the way that you outlined it for creating this larger context for me and to make all of these figures who are obviously allies and friends as we saw with JD Vance showing up for Orban. Thank God he did not get elected. But these cronies, but the way that you assembled it, I was like, “Oh, I understand now what to me has always seemed sort of a bit like an incoherent stream of consciousness from Trump. I understand now the closet in which he is operating and sort of these pieces of clothing that he is putting in here. I get it. So thank you. You made someone who I do not understand a bit more legible, so thank you.

IBRAM:

You’re welcome. I mean, that was the purpose and frankly, I learned that as well through the research.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it was really, really a helpful read. So let’s start with this, the sort of basic definition of great replacement theory, which as you point out is slowly boiling us across the globe and is this unifying principle that all of these authoritarian leaders are employing to get us by the throat. So can you explain what that is?

IBRAM:

Sure. So I ended up defining great replacement theory based on studying its full history as a political theory that suggests that there are these powerful elites who are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives, livelihoods, even power of white people who thereby need authoritarian protection. And so when we hear things like immigrants are invading the nation, we’re hearing great replacement theory. When we’re hearing ideas like diversity programs are discriminatory, we’re hearing great replacement theory. Even when we hear ideas like the enemy is inside the gates or ideas like we need to separate ourselves from international organizations that are enabling this great replacement, whether it’s NATO or the European Union or in Canada, there’s a province Alberta that’s trying to separate from Canada. We’re also hearing great replacement theory. But what I also document in chain of ideas is that it’s actually mutated beyond a racist theory, a racist theory which positions people of color as replacing white people or that there’s this war against white people.

It’s mutated to say that there’s apparently a war against men, that women are waging. It’s mutated to say that there is a war against heterosexuals, that apparently queer people are waging, that there’s a war against Christians, that apparently Muslims are waging, or that frankly, any ethnic minority in countries across the world are being positioned as displacing and taking over the country, whether it’s the Muslim minority in India that’s positioned as replacing the Hindu majority or even the Muslim minority in China that’s positioned as displacing the Han majority. So it’s mutated to essentially state that there are these disadvantaged and minoritized groups who are apparently displacing the privileged and majority groups and taking over and therefore all these privilege and majority groups need authoritarian protection.

ELISE:

Right. And so you outline this playbook and then you start to see and then you are sort of profiling these people across the globe who have emerged and come to power in some cases and sometimes been stopped at the last minute from coming to power who are employing this playbook, which really rides psychologically rides on fear and is also, I think you make a very compelling case, it’s neo-Nazism and it’s just been renovated and dressed up to look like something else because it is not necessarily targeted directly at Jews, even though antisemitism is on the rise. So as a Jew, it’s very helpful to understand. I mean, it chills my bones when I hear about lists being made at the University of Pennsylvania and wars and universities being waged on behalf of Jews because it feels with this proclamation that these professors are anti-Semitic and not that antisemitism isn’t a very real and terrifying issue.

I have a child at a Jewish day school. I understand I pay a special stipend for security, but that Jews are often frequently as our gay people and as our Black people used as a Trojan horse of we are not racist and we are not Nazis because look how much we care about the Jews in this particular instance using Jews as a way of saying, oh no, no, no, we’re not Mussolini’s granddaughter. We’re not the party of Hitler renovated, but it is. You make that quite clear. This is Neo Nazism, which is a different flavor, the same ice cream.

IBRAM:

Yeah. So there’s two arguments or frankly elements that I show to demonstrate this. One is that literally the political parties or even the leaders themselves who are articulating great replacement theory were in the case of parties founded by Nazis or former Nazis in the case of parties or people who collaborated with Nazis. So you’re talking about the National Front in France, which was co-founded by a collaborator with the Nazis in France or the Freedom Party in Austria, which was founded by former Nazis or even the brothers of Italy, which of course is the party of the prime minister of Italy, which was originally called the Italian Social Movement, which came from the term Italian social republic, which was the northern state of Italy that was led by Mussolini through the power of Nazi troops. So you have the actual parties themselves who literally were originally founded by Nazis or collaborators with Nazis and then you have actual people who are the children and grandchildren of former Nazis.

And so the most obvious example is the current president of Chile, whose father was a lieutenant in the Nazi army and a card carrying member of the Nazi Party, even as only about 10% of Germans were members with cards of the Nazi Party and he fled Germany after the war, like many Nazis, arrived in the Southern cone, became a very wealthy business person, had children, one of whom was the current president of Chile. And so that’s the actual organizational personal connection, but then the ideological connection whereby in the case of these Nazi theorists, they positioned international jewelry as controlling the world as certainly controlling Europe as the cause of all the bad ills and the most specific bad ill. It was that apparently Jews were displacing and replacing Aryan Germans and taking over and affecting what they called the racial purity of Germany, or they were poisoning the blood of Germany.

And so similarly now, the construct of international jewelry has changed to the construct of globalists or the construct of a powerful elite. And then they point to wealthy Jews as apparently behind that like Jewish Soros and a whole host of others. And then instead of saying that the Jews are replacing the Aryans, now they say that the Muslims are replacing the Christians or the Black people are replacing the white people.

ELISE:

Right. Or as you say, culture is the new blood. So they’ve moved it out of the vernacular of genetics to talk about this idea of quote unquote white culture. I don’t really know what that is, but that white culture is being swamped or erased by these other cultures. And I mean, of course, once you articulate it, you’re like, “Oh yes, this is so obvious.” And then one of the more pernicious things, which I think is understandably very confusing, besides the abundance of names and just the ability to rebrand and rebrand and remarket these things and not know what anyone is actually talking about based on the title of their political group, but they also understand, I think you call it proximate denial. Is that what it is?

IBRAM:

Proximity denial.

ELISE:

Proximity denial that if they get Tim Scott or Marco Rubio or Alice Weidell in Germany who is a lesbian married to a Sindhalese woman, is that right? Or a woman of color or Barry Weiss that you have this plausible deniability. We cannot hate gay people, we cannot hate black people, we cannot hate Jews because look, we’re led by a person of color. I mean, it’s brilliant and it’s confounding, right? But it’s when you hear Candace Owens and you hear what she is saying and the hate-filled anti-Semitic, I mean, it’s horrifying and then it’s completely confounding. This breaks my brain in terms of understanding what’s happening here.

IBRAM:

Well, and this is the reason why I’ve attempted in my work and I’ve received a lot of pushback even amongst people who could claim that they’re against racism or against sexism or anti-Semitism and that is I’ve tried to get people to disconnect ideology from ... And so you can have a set of racist anti-black ideas and be black. You can have ideas that are patriarchal as many feminists have talked about and be a woman. You can have ideas that are hostile to queer people and be queer. You can be pushing policies that are endangering Jewish people and be Jewish. But we, I think have been long taught that if you’re a proximate to a particular group that there’s no way you can be participating in that bigotry towards that group. And then what’s even more pernicious is we imagine that if a person is a member of a group, then they are an expert on the bigotry that is affecting that group.

Because not only do these spokespersons for these great replacement parties say that their parties are not racist or not sexist, but they also say, “I’m black so I know what racism is. “ Or, “I’m Muslim so I know what Islamophobia is and this party is not that.” And because we connect identity with both expertise and ideology, it has then allowed these spokespersons to then argue that some of the most hateful and extreme parties and leaders of our time are somehow not hateful and extreme.

ELISE:

It really forces people to think, which is very difficult, right? We immediately ... No, but it’s true. I mean, it’s very hard. You want to look and say, “I understand this person. I know what they represent and who they are and what their world experience is. “ We’re built to categorize people quickly and easily and this instead it’s, well, what is this and what is this person actually saying? I mean, it requires a level of engagement that is definitely too much for some people, right? And then they find themselves entrapped in participating in things that they would’ve said that they would never have participated in. It’s a slow slide, yeah?

IBRAM:

It is. And that’s frankly why I ended up calling what Great Replacement Theory effectively does to people is it change them by their own ideas. And it ultimately really the purpose of this theory is to get people to consent to their own domination, get people to demand for the preservation or the restoration of privileges at the expense of their power, at the expense of democracy, at the expense of their rights. So privileges become everything because what these politicians are saying is that for the most part that people’s privileges are being lost, that their nation, quote unquote, where they were the majority or the privileged group is being taken away, that their culture, which has been the center of sort of the cultural atmosphere of that country is being taken away. So no, I want you to protect that, protect me because people then connect their identity to their privilege and they don’t even know how to imagine themselves if they are not a man who has male privilege, right?

If I can’t dominate women, so what does it even mean to be a man? And so it then compels people to want to support these authoritarians who ultimately strip them of something far more important than their privilege and that’s their power.

ELISE:

Yeah. And then you end up in sort of post World War II Germany or post World War I, Germany, where everything is destroyed and everyone is suffering. And you write about, I mean, beyond even putting aside the six million murdered Jews, you look at that country and the devastation, the economic devastation, the cultural devastation of Hitler. So that’s the inheritance, right? And you write a lot about Heather McGee and her work and this idea that we cannot get out of the zero sum thinking, whereas when poor people generally are helped, it is beneficial to everyone when people of color ... When we go after, try and excise groups and take away their privileges, we devastate ourselves at the same times.

IBRAM:

Exactly. And I think that that ... I’m happy you mentioned the case of Nazi Germany because I think there’s a certain segment of humans because of the sheer amount of carnage and brutality that was brought on Jewish people and other so- called undesirables, it’s hard for people to really want to study what truly happened. And because we’re not able to fully study what happened, we’re not able to accept the level and the depth of carnage as Jewish people and other undesirables faced and then even look beyond to see the level of carnage that other people face. So the people who were told that they were being protected from the Jews were ultimately harmed by their “protectors.” And that’s why I write about that in the introduction, how you had Hitler during World War II and even justifying the war, claim that he was seeking to defend Aryan Europe or white Europe, but ultimately 45 million white Europeans, civilians and soldiers were killed during the war, the largest amount of mass death in history.

And that’s how if you can get your slayer, if you can get people that you are slaying to believe that you’re trying to protect them, if you can get people you’re literally robbing to believe that you are their savior, that’s when you’re able to institute and bring into being what is now the authoritarian age,

ELISE:

Which is emerging at different clips but emerging all over the globe. And you point to various theories about exactly what the intent is that Russia and China and the US have some sort of covert agreement where we each rule our slice of the world or whatever it is that’s happening, but something is happening and there is a playbook that’s being executed on us. And many of us despite theoretically learning from history or not are letting it happen because the victims or the targets are different, but it’s the same thing dressed up. In the beginning, you talk about these tenets, these pillars, livelihood that all this taxpayer money is going to these immigrants and people of color and everyone else, they’re taking people’s jobs, this idea of culture, replacing cultures of white people, electoral power, this is a wild one, but that Democrats are importing voters so that we can maintain power.

And then freedoms, this is all related as you point out. Vaccine mandates are curbing people’s freedom and therefore civil rights legislation, gun safety measures, anti-racist and feminist education are supposedly taking away the freedoms of white people. So it’s all connected as you point out and it’s psychologically connected certainly, but it’s also politically connected as well. So that was really helpful just to be like, this is a through line of the sort of machinations that the notes that are being struck to really scare the shit out of people.

IBRAM:

It is. And another area I think just to add to this is the most extreme great replacement theory is this idea that white people are suffering a genocide and apparently at the hands of immigrants who are apparently all animals and rapists, Muslims who are apparently are all terrorists and black people who apparently are all criminals. And as a result, you’ve had a number of people who’ve decided that they are going to pick up their guns and end up slaughtering Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, Jewish people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Latino Americans at a Walmart in El Paso, Muslims at multiple mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and on and on the belief to quote the shooter in Pittsburgh that quote, “My people are being slaughtered, so I have to go in to defend them.” And another group that these theorists imagine are contributing to this genocide of white people are actually white women who they claim are not having enough children.

So they’re saying that there’s these declines in birth rates among white people. They primarily say it’s because of “gender ideology,” which is another word for feminism and that has infiltrated white women and these quote childish cat ladies don’t want to sort of do what they’re supposed to do as women and their primary duity apparently and birth children. And so there’s a tremendous amount of anger among these theorists and politicians within this movement for even white women. And then there’s obviously a tremendous amount of resistance to abortion in any form of reproductive justice and freedom, which they also imagine are bringing on the great replacement.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and this also goes back to Nazism, which I didn’t know the three Ks, kinder, Kirch, children, kitchen, church, right? It’s just the same pattern pulled forward. And you mentioned the way, I think one of the easiest ways for people to connect to this idea that you can be a woman and be a guard dog of the patriarchy is you look at who Trump surrounds himself with. Well, they’re all getting guillotined right now. But Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi and Karoline Levitt and Tulsi Gabbard, he loves blonde, I guess Kristi’s brunette, but this particular archetype of woman to put out on the front lines, like modern day Phyllis Schlaffley to do this work and be his ... I mean, it’s wild. They’re his shield, but I think a lot of women can look at that and say, “Wait, what? This is different.” So I mean, there are a million directions to go, but let’s talk about immigration because I was just earlier this week I was in Omaha intervening.

I don’t know if you’ve ever chatted with Devorah Dwork, who’s a genocide and Holocaust historian who’s written nine or 10 books and maybe more Or her latest book is called Saints and Liars and it’s about Unitarians, Quakers and American Jews who were working throughout mostly Europe trying to get political prisoners, Jews, et cetera, out to immigrate them. To Shanghai, I mean there’s some wild stories as you know, but it really puts a point on this idea and you hear it all the time from people who don’t really know that much about the Holocaust of, well, why didn’t they just go to fill in the blank? No one would take people. It was much like it is today. You couldn’t go anywhere and you had likely been stripped of your papers. So even if you had been legal, you might no longer be legal or no longer have papers and these are desperate people and it’s the same story now.

Why would someone pick up, abandon everything that they have and try and flee somewhere else? Why do you think it is so difficult for people to remember their empathy for people in flight? What is that?

IBRAM:

I think that’s one of the, frankly, that question is one of the defining questions of our time, particularly because sometimes if not most times, we develop our empathy or maintain our eporthy through a knowledge of our own personal history. And so if you are, let’s say you’re an American who is Jewish or Black or of Italian descent or Polish descent or Russian descent or Irish descent or Spanish descent or Chinese descent or Indian set. If you are a person whose ancestors a century ago when they were migrating to this country or even migrating, let’s say from Mississippi to Chicago as African Americans were, and they were primarily cast as criminals, they were primarily cast as invaders. It was imagined that these immigrants and migrants were going to destroy the nation. There was a New York eugenicist named Madison Grant who wrote a book called The Passing of the Great Race in 1916 in which he was outraged at the number of people who were coming to the country from the East or the West.

The East being from China and other parts of Asia, the West coming from particularly Southern and Eastern and Europe as well as Jews. And he argued that these immigrants were coming to replace us and the us being Anglo-Saxon Americans. And that book ended up being translated into multiple languages. One of those languages was German. And when Hitler was incarcerated for his attempted insurrection, he ended up reading the passing of the great race and ultimately calling it my Bible.

ELISE:

I often think that, and you see this in the culture, the obsession with 23andMe and ancestry.com and where did I come from? And I think that there is this angst, this, I don’t know if you call it homesickness, but this anxiety certainly, particularly I think for white people when we talk about things like white culture of where did I come? We’re all indigenous somewhere and this, where did I come from? Who am I? I am a stranger in a strange land. We all are. And essentially, I mean, 99% of us have moved or been relocated in our family line or against in deeply unsavory ways. I don’t know that we really understand the impact of that on our psyche of this need to claim home, need to claim something, but it feels so pernicious somehow or that that’s some driver. I don’t know, but I do feel like there is an anxiety amongst white people too of this, where do I have a claim?

I’m going to make my claim here and nobody ... I don’t know. I don’t know how much that kicks up for people.

IBRAM:

Well, what I write about at one point in chain of ideas is that I speculate that among some people who believe these pernicious ideas, there is this belief that there will one day be a turning of the tables. So there’s a knowledge. So for instance, the emergence of Great Replacement Theory as the theory we know it today really emerged in the late 1800s and it was articulated by these white colonial leaders who started to imagine what would happen to the world if people in Latin America, Asia and Africa were no longer colonized and they started to theorize that there would be a complete turning of the table, that these Africans and Latin Americans, Asians wouldn’t just seek to gain their sovereignty and their freedom, but that they would come and try to colonize and take over Europe and engage in genocides and ultimately do a complete turning of the tape even as- Keep revenge,

ELISE:

Like revenge Ritlard.

IBRAM:

Exactly. And so that was really the origin story of what we now know is Great Replacement Theory, even as the evidence in the 1800s shown that people were actually truly just seeking their freedom, just as even in Europe where you had nations that gained their independence or their sovereignty after being colonized by another European nation, they didn’t try to then reach, but somehow some way people thought that there would be this revenge, this turning of the table. So we have to apparently, it was imagined, continue to dominate and control them because if not, they’re going to dominate and control us, which of course was the Hitler idea that we have to annihilate them before they ultimately annihilate us. And that is the single most dangerous idea that humans, in my opinion, have ever created because it will continuously lead to political violence, to genocide, to war, and it will prevent us as a human community from living.

If there’s any idea that can bring about our extinction, it is that one.

ELISE:

Have you ever encountered James Kimmel Jr? He’s at Yale that he wrote this book called The Science of Revenge. But yeah, his work essentially is he was a former litigator that he thinks that we have undiagnosed revenge addiction, like running rampant across the globe

And it’s easy to find co-participants in this. Yeah, it just makes me think that that’s also ... Hitler was a revenge addict. Mao was a revenge addict, Stalin Trump, obviously and that it’s like having an alcoholic running a bar. It’s incredibly dangerous. And until we attend to that or even understand it or recognize it that I think it has us by the throat because they really can whip people up into participating in things that they don’t realize. Do you feel optimistic? Obviously Orban losing Marine Le Pen is not allowed to run. I mean, maybe it’s hard to feel optimistic, but do you?

IBRAM:

So let me say this. I feel the most hopeless or pessimistic when I don’t really understand what’s happening in society or in our politics. And frankly, that’s to a certain extent where I was at when I started the research for this book. And so once I finished the research and wrote this book and gained clarity and was able to really understand how we got to this point, it gave me a tremendous sense of hope. The clarity gave me a tremendous sense of optimism because frankly, we have not only been shoved in this authoritarian age, but those who’ve shoved us have tried to conceal exactly how they shoved us. The idea, in this case, Great Replacement Theory, that helped usher us into this age. I mean, right now, even as it relates to chain of ideas, those who have been using this theory are alternating between trying to ignore the chain of ideas, hoping it’ll just go away and coming out and just slamming it and completely misrepresenting it because they want the playbook to continue to be concealed.

But once we understand the paybook, then we can begin to understand how to counteract it. And so I actually feel much more hopeful now and much more optimistic. And frankly, that’s the reason why I wrote this book.

ELISE:

We obviously in this culture have talked a lot about the breaking of these norms and these standards and you write about researchers, this is in 2020 and 2021, that the researchers revealed YouTubers no longer spoke about anti-whiteness through a defensive framework. The YouTuber spoke in a way that indicates that the idea had become normalized within reactionary political discourse and no longer needed to be quote unquote proven as a reality. So there is this idea some of these things have really stuck and germinated particularly amongst young men in

IBRAM:

The

ELISE:

Adolescencesphere as Michael Mead calls it. How do you think that we restore this assuming that the worst doesn’t happen and that ice is curbed and we get a changing of the guard and we can start to restore our culture, do you think that people will just sort of wake up?

IBRAM:

No, I do think we have to ensure people know what is happening to them ideologically and allow people to have a different way of understanding what’s happening in the world. And I think part of what’s happened is among those who have been trying to build authoritarian states, they’ve largely cohered around this narrative of great replacement theory even as it’s radically different in different nations. And I think those who are trying to restore democracy, there are some of us who are talking about the relationship between racism and the rise of authoritarianism or sexism or antisemitism or ... So we’re in a way talking in different lanes and focused on different lanes. Even some critics of this book have sort of argued that somehow I’m not really talking about the material conditions that help to propel this age of authoritarianism even as I talk about the relationship between ideas and material conditions.

And so I’m saying that to say that we who are serious about democracy and are serious about ushering ourselves out of this age, we have to sort of build solidarity around a clear idea of what the problem is and what the solution is as opposed to competing and arguing constantly amongst ourselves. And that’s one of the reasons why in writing chain of ideas, I didn’t think I would be able to tell the full story if I did not talk about the relationship between the way in which this racist theory is connecting to sexism and homophobia and antisemitism and xenophobia and how it’s connecting to ancient fascism and how you have these super wealthy people who are taking jobs from people, but trying to get them to believe that Muslims and immigrants are taking their jobs to try to help us to try to cohere around a master narrative that’s actually based in facts and history so that we can explain to people what’s happening to them and how, again, we can usher ourselves out of it.

That’s what I’m hoping people can help. And I’m going to continue to learn and refine based on what other people are saying and researching, but that’s what we need.

ELISE:

Is there a directory of all of these political parties and their association? One of the things that I find, and you write about this too, that is so disconcerting as a voter, for example, is when you’re trying to discern the impact of a policy, right? There’s just so much spin. Is there a database where people can understand the ideology at first from a political political lens, not neutral, but- Did you build

IBRAM:

Up? If you go to chainofideasbook.com, it has a database of all of the political parties around the world who have been espousing great replacement theory. It also includes the main political leader. It also includes a quote from that leader. It also includes where that political party is at in terms of their sort of power. And so we really wanted to map the problem so people can see just the sheer scale of parties across the Americas and Europe and Asia that are espousing and even North Africa that are espousing this theory and we’ll continue to try to maintain that database. But I mean, it also really shows the tremendous amount of research, frankly, that went into this book.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, it’s a great service and it’s so helpful just to even have every from Canada to Germany to just essentially what’s happening in those countries in a coherent way that connects to what Trump is up to and Netanyahu and so on and so forth. And it’s full of interesting stories. I had no idea, for example, that Hitler’s original plan for the Jews was this idea of remigrating them all to Madagascar. That I did not. No, that was the plan originally until it became quote unquote the final solution. But yeah, you do a beautiful job of also saying, “What was this is now rebranded as this? What was that is now rebranded as this in a way that I think is incredibly clarifying. So thank you.

IBRAM:

Of course, of course. I mean, I guess my job as an historian, I mean, this is complicated propaganda, right? And I think it’s on us who study it to clarify it for people so that they can understand it and be more effective political actors.

ELISE:

Right. And understand what they’re being sold and how to discern what’s really happening and the way that they are. And I know you’re not a psychologist, but the sort of psychological manipulation is very intense, very human, very understandable, but the more we can understand how we’re being played, the stronger and more durable we become in terms of discerning what’s really happening.

IBRAM:

I mean, just to give an example, imagine if we were forced to eat food without an ingredients label and so much of our campaign, so much of the campaign ideas that’s put ... There’s no ingredients label. So this book gives, I think, people the ability to see that ingredient label, some of which goes all the way back to Nazi Germany or to Apartheid or to the colonial or enslaving era so that they can understand what’s, as you stated, what’s being fed to them.

ELISE:

Chain of Ideas is a big book, but it is divided into these very short chapters, which makes it really digestible and easy to get through and it’s full of interesting stories. I found it really helpful in terms of understanding globally what’s happening and how all of these various parties are connected. And he also, of course, makes a case for the countries that have been, including here in America, so deeply, deeply, deeply enriched by immigration and how these numbers, which are often presented to us as just these massive sweeping hoards and Trump loves to call every immigrant a criminal, but how they’re presented to us as these unfathomably huge numbers and yet even in countries like Germany, which have taken in so many immigrants, climate refugees and so on and so forth, they’re just so incredibly enriched by these new citizens who are taking care of older populations and helping with the economic growth that we all rely on.

And as someone obviously who lives in California in a state that is dependent, enriched, indebted to immigrants, it breaks my heart when we are so cruel in the face of what’s often complete desperation. So I wanted to briefly read from Ibram’s book. This is a really helpful ... This is near the end of the book. “World War II ended the Nazi age in 1945, all those bombs on the House of Hitler. The House of Hitler became uninhabitable for the rest of the 20th century. It became difficult for politicians to attract voters with Nazi ideas and win and yet politicians and obscure parties like Germany’s National Democratic Party, Italy’s Italian social movement, Austria’s Freedom Party, and France’s national front did not abandon the House of Hitler. They gutted it, they renovated it, new walls and fixtures and furniture. White and Christian, the New Aryan, Muslim and immigrant, the new Jew, globalist elites, the new “international Jewry,” culture, the new blood, cultural Marxist, the new cultural bulsivist, remigration, the new final solution, mega prisons, the new concentration camps, electoral dictator, the new conventional dictator, neo-Nazi renovation that ushered in the authoritarian age, a renovation completed in the 21st century by a secret agent in Russia, a career political operative in Hungary, the French daughter of a party founder, the billionaire grandson of an apartheid promoter, the son of a Nazi lieutenant in Chile, a lifelong Euroskeptic in England, Islamophobes from India to the Netherlands, a leader of a troll farm in El Salvador, a real estate tycoon in the United States, a renovation marketed as “not racist,” by party spokespersons of color suited in proximity denial.”

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