1188 Prof Jason Stanley + News & Clips

Stand Up! with Pete Dominick

Pete Dominick

News, Politics

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2024

⏱️ 85 minutes

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Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future Hardcover by Jason Stanley

The human race finds itself again under threat of a rising global fascist movement. In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people all across the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.

Democracy requires a common understanding of reality, a shared view of what has happened, that informs ordinary citizens’ decisions about what should happen, now and in the future. Authoritarians target this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. By setting us against each other, authoritarians represent themselves as the sole solution.

In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, the authoritarian right’s tip of the spear, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.

In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places, he explains, that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.

Deeply informed and urgently needed, Erasing History is a global call to action for those who wish to preserve democracy—in America and abroad—before it is too late.

I am the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I am also an honorary professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, where I use my salary to support the Come Back Alive Foundation.

Before coming to Yale in 2013, I was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. I have also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). My PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and I received my BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.

My first book is Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. My second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of my papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. My third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. My fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy. The proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Prison Policy Initiative. My fifth book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018).

My last book, published in November, 2023, is The Politics of Language, co-authored with David Beaver, with Princeton University Press . My newest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, published in September, 2024 with One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon and Schuster.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, day two of my trip to Nevada to try to get out the vote.
0:06.6	The swing state tour, the stand-up swing state tour, is off.
0:10.4	I am in Nevada.
0:11.6	It is day two.
0:12.6	And joining me on the program today is Yale philosophy professor and author of how fascism works the Politics of Us and Them.
0:21.0	Jason Stanley joins me today to talk about his awesome new book, Erasing History,
0:26.3	How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, which I have seen in my own life.
0:31.2	Jason Stanley is my guest.
0:32.4	My conversation with him begins at 28 minutes.
0:35.6	But before we get to the news and headlines, just want to say thank you again
0:39.7	to everybody who is supporting the Swing State tour. So many of you have reached out and sent 20 bucks,
0:45.3	100 bucks, 200 bucks, 500 bucks. It has been really generous. And I am very grateful because
0:51.4	things add up quickly, especially when you fly spirit discount air. not so discount. It turns out if you want to have any kind of comfort or joy or even water, that's right. They charge you for a water and spirit. She's like water. I go, yeah, I'll take one. She's like $3.50. I just kind of laughed. And she immediately goes, would you like a cup of ice? Because clear these is not the first time. That's happened. And I grabbed a cup of ice. I took it. Thankfully, gratefully, thank you so much for the chunks of water. And I put it on my tray table in the sun that was coming through the window in my window seat. My pre-reclined for your comfort window seat. seriously, the first time I flew Spirit a couple of weeks ago to Indianapolis, it took me a few minutes to realize there was no button to recline. It's always fun to watch someone discover that for the first time. And eventually it melted enough that I could get a sip. So thank you, Spirit Airlines. The costs do add up. You guys are helping me cover those. And I think I probably have enough to buy a drink. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I made some signs yesterday that I was holding up in the middle of the street because I am going to do literally everything I can while I'm out here for a week, including knocking on doors as well as firing up some organizing crews and hopefully
2:03.1	registering folks to vote as well as just networking, interviewing Nevada folks, which I should
2:08.6	start getting on tomorrow's show. But of course, I'm staying here at Cassie Rice's house and her son,
2:13.9	Becca and I went shopping and we made some signs with another co-worker of theirs
2:19.7	at the gymnastics gym gym, gym cats that they own out here in Henderson, Nevada.
2:24.7	Amazing people already I've connected with doing the work, getting it done.
2:29.3	I'm connected with the DNC out here and I'm hoping to make a little scratch, a little dent, do whatever I can.
2:35.5	It was just a few weeks ago that I heard Ben Wickler, who is the very successful organizer in
2:40.3	Wisconsin, who has organized Democrats there to win time after time again, including the Supreme
2:45.1	Court. And he said, you know, one of the things that you can do is you can go to a swing state
	...

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