The sun on the meadow is a river.

The stagh in the forest runs free. Hello everybody and welcome to the Antifada. This is a Sean solo episode but I am

privileged to have an excellent guest with me today. Dylan John Riley, who's a professor of sociology

at Cal Berkeley, whose interests are political sociology,

comparative historical sociology, and social theory

here to talk about his relatively new book and talk about a lot of current events and news and analysis that he has.

So welcome Dylan, thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.

It's great to be here.

I was fortunate to have Anthony from Verso Books and Anthony, if you're listening,

I'd like to give you a huge shout out who found Dylan Forrest and put the two of us together when we needed a pinch hitter and I had the pleasure also and this is one of the perks you know of being a podcaster I had the pleasure to of receiving your book and being able to read it on my commute in the last couple days as I

crammed for this. Super excited for this episode. So let's dive right in. Your early research

interests were in the interwar period of Europe and understanding

how fascism arose during that time.

Over the last, let's say since 2015,2016 or so a lot of the liberal discourse in the United States and certainly in Europe as well has been around this sort of the resurgence of fascism and the figure of Donald Trump or Melanie in in Italy or

Orban in Hungary a sense that fascism is back on the rise again.

You like myself, and I've made this argument on the podcast,

and some people have got a little wigged out about it,

argue that what we're seeing right now cannot be adequately described

as fascism. There is an illiberal

right that is arising again in the United States and in Europe and elsewhere, but it's

insufficient to call that fascism. Can you expand a little bit on what your thoughts are about

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