Hey everybody. Well, we're starting the new year with a great one for once.

Heather Cox Richardson joins me to talk about her New York Times bestselling book,

Democracy Awakening. You might know, Heather, if you're one of the

millions of subscribers to her daily substack, the most popular one in America. And if you listen to

this one today, you'll understand why. In our conversation, Heather says we are on a knife's edge, meaning that we could go either way this year.

I'm talking about the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, November 5th.

Yikes.

You know, while Trump was president, I was always very careful not to use words about him like fascist.

Because fascism is, and I quote, a far-right authoritarian political ideology characterized

always by an authoritarian leader, forcible suppression of opposition, and a belief

in a natural social hierarchy. And I don't remember where I got that, but it seems right.

Anyway, even when I was tempted, I was always careful not to use the word fascist about Trump.

But Trump's rhetoric these days is making it hard to avoid the word because he's been going to

the language of blood poisoning. He has said several times now that the people coming across the border are, quote, poisoning the blood of our country.

And I got that straight from Trump's mouth, unless PBS and MSNBC were using the same AI app to create this, and they're not, because he's been repeating it.

He's using Adolf Hitler's language. In M. Kempf, Hitler wrote, all great cultures of the

past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.

So what Trump is saying is pretty much exactly the same as Hitler.

Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

Now, Trump defended himself a couple weeks ago by saying,

I never read Minkv.

So how could he know he was echoing Hitler?

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