Jan 7, 2018
Randy Blazak is the guest on this week's episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show. He is a tenured sociologist and criminologist who has taught at Portland State University as well as the University of Oregon. He is the author of numerous books and articles and has had his work featured on NPR, CNN, the Discovery Channel, BBC, and the New York Times. He is most well known for infiltrating white supremacist hate groups such as the neo-Nazis in an effort to help the public understand the threat embodied by such organizations and individuals. Professor Blazak is also heavily involved with human rights organizations such as the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime.
During this week's episode
of The Chauncey DeVega Show, Randy and Chauncey
discuss how Trump and the American right-wing wing's obsession with
the nonexistent
"War on Christmas" is part of a larger white supremacist
agenda, why young white men are so angry and attracted to
Trumpism and other white supremacist so-called "alt-right"
organizations, if Trump himself is a white supremacist, and the
lies and confusion about "white working class economic anxiety"
that helped to usher in American fascism under Donald
Trump.
In this week's episode, Chauncey DeVega tries to make sense of the maelstrom of chaos and confusion that is the first week of 2018 where the book "Fire and Fury" has distracted too many people from substantive politics, a white supremacist planned a mass murder spree against black folks on an Amtrak train, Trump continues his fascist assault on the Constitution and an independent legal system, and the radical right-wing keeps on winning while so-called progressives and liberals (and too many other Americans) are stuck in a condition of learned helplessness.
And to close out this week's podcast, Chauncey shares two uplifting stories about our animal family members and their human friends.
Instead of fixating on the hope alone that we can stop it, we must simultaneously explore the necessity of learning to survive the worse case scenario, if indeed this Democracy devolves into an unapologetic Neo-Nazi genocidal ethnic cleansing Fascist state, which it appears is the ultimate unrelenting goal of the GOP. What can you do to make sure you aren't among the dead, that you don't willingly submit to the Gestapo and succumb to the learned helplessness that allows them to herd you onto the next train ride to death, and still manage to maintain your humanity on the other side. You can't see who they are until they let you know, but they already know who you are because they assume if you aren't them you are an acceptable target.