Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, although today we're sharing a sample of this week's episode of our other show, solved.

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Best of Left YouTube channel and catching every episode of Solved there. And now here's a few minutes

for free to wet your appetite, but just like Best of

the Left, the real benefits kick in when you hear the whole show, which is greater than

the sum of its parts.

Today, we're going to tell you that fascism doesn't look the way you think it looks, and

that you should make friends with your neighbors and watch what you

say in a manner speaking.

Starting with this article from Vox that says quite clearly, life in authoritarian states is

mostly boring and tolerable.

And I'll skip ahead to the part where the person says, look, this could sound like a

defense of authoritarianism, no big deal. And they're like, no, no, it's the opposite of that.

It's the, it's a warning about how the boringness of it and how it doesn't look like

jackbooted thugs walking down your street and harassing you

personally on a regular basis tricks people into thinking, well, maybe it's not happening or maybe

it's not so bad. And then it just turns out that you don't have a democracy anymore and you just

didn't notice. So it starts out, says, quote, the mental image that most Americans harbor of what

actual authoritarianism looks like is fantastical and cartoonish. This vision has jackbooted thugs,

...