Ejeris talks with Kelly Hayes, longtime activist, organizer, and writer, to examine how the growth of fascist movements impacts organizers, activists, and the communities most likely to be targeted.
Ejeris talks with Kelly Hayes, longtime activist, organizer, writer, and host of the podcast Movement Memos, to examine how the growth of fascist movements impacts organizers, activists, and the communities most likely to be targeted. Kelly and Ejeris discuss how to engage more people in anti-fascist activism and what actions we all can take.
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Podcast production by Phil Surkis
Intro Music by Meklit Hadero
The Fascism Barometer Podcast is an Ejerie Labs Project. Thank you for joining the movement.
Ejeris Dixon: Hi friends, welcome to the Fascism Barometer. I'm Ejera Stixson, your movement meteorologist, and The Barometer is an educational project where we learn together what fascism is, how to stay safe, and how to create democracy and liberation for us all.
As a Black queer feminist, I exist at the [00:01:00] intersections of communities that fascists see as the enemy. And for years, I have deeply desired a way for us to understand and measure the threat of fascism and how it impacts all of us. And that's what we'll do each episode. As barometers measure pressure, we'll work to unpack the pressure that fascism puts on us.
We'll learn what fascism is, from the perspectives of each of our guests, and what we can do about it. So I'm looking at the fascism barometer today, and the reading is high. We're a little over a week before the presidential election, and so many of us are anxious about what this election will mean for the safety of targeted communities and the power of fascist movements within the U.
S. But don't worry. I know that we can navigate the storm together, and I believe that we can come out the other side. Fascism is best fought with massive amounts of people power, and that's what we're building here. And by listening, you're joining the movement.[00:02:00]
And now to the fascism roundup. In this segment, I outline current trends in US fascism, hopefully in five minutes or less. In our first trend, it seems like we can use the word fascist again. The multi year debate around whether or not it was too extreme or inaccurate to use the word fascist has kind of declined recently.
Kamala Harris is using the F word. Multiple mainstream media outlets are discussing fascism, and even some fascism scholars are revising their assessments to state explicitly that Trump is a fascist. In a recent ABC poll, it was found that 49 percent of registered voters believe that Trump is a fascist, while when asked the same question, a much smaller number, 22%, saw Harris as a fascist.
But let me take you back to kind of when this [00:03:00] uptick in conversation around fascism started. In the last two weeks, General Mark Milley, who's Trump's former chair of the Joint Chiefs, called Trump fascist to the core and the most dangerous person to this country in an interview with Bob Woodward. And then later on, John Kelly, Trump's longest serving chief of staff, said Trump certainly fits the definition of a fascist.
He also went on to discuss that Trump had named that he desired the kind of generals Hitler had. So now the Republicans are comfortable calling Trump a fascist. But with all this conversation on fascism, it's important to see it in context. Rising fascism in this country is more than just about the potential second term of Donald Trump.
This election is important, critical even. And unfortunately, fascist movements will still exist. No matter what the election's results are, and we need to continue to focus on the [00:04:00] impact of rising fascism, the safety of targeted communities, and the threats to civil liberties. It's also really critical that we pay attention to the enablers, the downplayers, and the deniers of Trump and MAGA's fascist tendencies.
That way, when the utility of talking about fascism fades from mainstream view, we're clear on who's leading and supporting fascist movements in the U. S. And then we can create strategies towards organizing for our collective safety and liberation. In our second trend, according to NPR, Trump has issued more than a hundred threats to investigate, prosecute, or imprison his perceived opponents since 2022.
And yet recently, In a Fox News interview, Trump named that he intends to address the enemy from within. When he was pressed to explain this further, he said that enemies inside this country are more [00:05:00] dangerous than external enemies. And according to Trump, these enemies include Democratic politicians, and what he calls radical left lunatics.
He went on to state that he intends to use the National Guard or the military against these enemies. And the question is, can he do this? So legal experts have said that there are few barriers preventing Trump from pursuing his plans, and even noted that Trump pressured the Department of Justice to investigate his rivals during his first term.
So again, we need to keep an eye on and work to out organize the enablers of fascist movements in this country. And in our last trend, we're in the midst of heightened anxiety around the election. And it's become clear that multiple organizations on the right have worked diligently to increase barriers to voting, to remove eligible voters from the voting rolls, and a decreased confidence in the voting system.
[00:06:00] With a presidential election this close, these actions can have tremendous impact on the outcomes. It can make it more complicated to count votes accurately and make it easier to contest election results in battleground states. According to NBC, since January 1st, there have been a hundred lawsuits in seven different swing states that have alleged voter fraud, that have changed how votes are counted, that have outlawed types of ballot boxes.
And the states include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Texas. North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To take this even further, according to the Brennan Center, a program called Eagle AI has accelerated the removal of eligible voters. Eagle AI uses public data to flag people as potentially fraudulent voters.
However, voting experts have called the criteria it uses unreliable and, at times, irrelevant. However, Eagle AI does more than just [00:07:00] identify people. It automates the removal process. So suppression activists have been using Eagle AI because it automates the process to file challenges on voters. So they can use Eagle AI to auto prepare challenge forms and send them in, increasing the speed and the amount of people that these activists can impact.
This results in local election boards having to dedicate their limited resources to review this increase in challenge forms. In the process, Local election boards can send out notices to eligible voters that they may actually not be eligible to vote. Now, if you are truly eligible to vote, you can kind of dispute and fight this process.
But it can also intimidate eligible voters into not voting at all. and not contesting. Reducing access to elections is an indicator in the rising power of U. S. based [00:08:00] fascist movements, and it's something we need to keep an eye on. So what our roundup is showing us today that fascist movements in the U. S.
are showing their strategy and their power, and we definitely have some work to do to stop them.
To help us weather these conditions, I have brought in a genius who not only knows how to read the fascism barometer, but knows how to expand our pathways to liberation as well. Now, for full transparency, this conversation was recorded about a month ago, so you may hear some things that happened in the news a little while ago, but still the conversation is so relevant.
So Kelly Hayes and I have been in conversation about fascism for over eight years. Our conversations inspired my desire to [00:09:00] create the fascism barometer. We were both exploring knowledge and sharing ideas, trying to track the progression of fascism, understand it better, and think about what it meant for the safety of our communities.
And there were times when people treated us like we were exaggerating the threat. But we knew we had each other's backs, and we knew we understood each other. Kelly has challenged me, expanded my thinking, and done incredible organizing. So I would like you all to welcome Kelly Hayes, host of the Movement Memos podcast.
Kelly is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator, and photographer. She is also the author of the best selling book, Let This Radicalize You, with Mariam Kaba. Kelly is a co founder of the Direct Action Collective, Lifted Voices, and the Chicago Light Brigade. Welcome, Kelly. How you doing, friend? I am doing my best.
How about you? You know, [00:10:00] we are going to make it through these times and we'll make it together. Absolutely. And I'm really grateful to be here with you as you start this journey. Thank you. So the whole plan with this podcast is to talk about fascism in ways that our friends, our loved ones, and our communities can really understand.
Fascism is a political phenomenon, a force, and fascist movements affect us all, but sometimes they're talked about in such ways that are really hard to grasp and, and hard to tell, like, how is this going to affect me? So I'm wondering, Kelly, how do you define fascism when you speak about it to other people?
Kelly Hayes: So there are a lot of definitions out there. I tend to lean on the work of Robert O. Paxton and my friend Shane Burley, whose writing has helped shape my thinking around what fascism is and how we ought to fight it. I think one of the problems we have in our political dialogues is that the word [00:11:00] fascism has become sort of a shorthand for anything oppressive or evil.
The unfortunate reality is that oppression and evil come in many forms. Fascism as a political phenomenon involves certain elements. First and foremost, it involves social unity around the belief that inequality is not a social condition, but an innate part of what it means to be human. There's an in group, out group dynamic, and the in group is fundamentally superior to all out groups.
Your identity determines your value. There's also a shared sense of grievance, of having been wronged or brought low in some way, and the outgroups are always to blame for this. So you have scapegoating. And this scapegoating lends itself to a fetishization of violence. Fascists believe they will be redeemed through violence against scapegoated communities.
To [00:12:00] them, that violence represents a reclamation of a natural order, as well as justice in the form of punishment for people who have humiliated them by defying that order. Some people tend to think about fascism purely as a state construct, like it's all about one guy and whether that one guy has power.
But fascism is a state construct. a much bigger problem than one guy because it requires mass participation and mass cooperation. So if one charismatic fascist leader actually has the potential to take and hold power, it's because there's a much bigger fascist problem afoot, which is something I don't think we've really reckoned with here in the United States.
So it's really important to understand that fascism isn't something that simply happens to people. People participate, cooperate, and become acculturated to it.
Ejeris Dixon: Kelly, I love that definition. You really hit on kind of the difference, because people have been throwing around like [00:13:00] authoritarianism and fascism, and there's a lot that's connected, but the difference is the mass participation, the focus on movements.
And that's what makes fascism almost like it's an organizing game. It's there's, there's a crew of people who are feeling grievances and it's really around who's going to organize them and are going, are they going to be organized? towards liberatory aims? Are they going to be organized towards freedom or are they going to be organized towards violence?
And I think you really hit the nail on the head in a way that was super clear. So I, I appreciate that so much. I'm wondering what made you first concerned about fascism? Like there are so many things that you work on. You work on abolition, you work on like organizing in communities of color. Um, when did fascism become something that you also wanted to organize around and you felt compelled to do?
Kelly Hayes: Well,
Ejeris Dixon: like you,
Kelly Hayes: I have long been horrified by the MAGA movement and Trumpism, [00:14:00] but more broadly, we are living in catastrophic times. And one of the ways that people respond to catastrophe is by doubling down on established norms and traditions, including norms around gender roles and structural hierarchies.
We're seeing all of that. Then we have imagined crises, for example, while the presidency of Barack Obama didn't actually upset the dynamics of racial capitalism or change the role of black people within that structure, that presidency was a nuclear moment for a lot of white people. And while the Black Lives Matter movement has not won a world with less police violence or lower police budgets for the most part, the fact that Black people took to the streets en masse asserting their rights and humanity was received as a declaration of war by people who were already doubling down on their sense of hierarchy.
Because we have to remember, it's not about hypocrisy, it's about hierarchy. [00:15:00] We eventually landed in a place where online spaces could serve as a pressure cooker. for conspiracy theories and fascist subcultures and where a showman like Donald Trump could pontificate to the masses on social media. So I think it was the sort of viral dynamics of the last decade or so that really got me worried.
Ejeris Dixon: Mm hmm. That makes a lot of sense. And it's this like, um, interesting contradiction between catastrophe, hard times, people who don't have what they need economically, like, The connection between hard times and crisis and this desire for comfort, right, which is really human and really understandable, but then that being a catalyst for people to then want to scapegoat others, right?
And if this is happening to me, who did it to me? Whose fault is it? And that animating people into fascist movements, like [00:16:00] MAGA. I'm wondering if you think fascism is rising? It's been this question I've been a bit obsessed
Kelly Hayes: around for quite a while. We live in an era of collapse and catastrophe. There are people struggling to survive that destabilization.
There are people endeavoring to maintain the norms they are accustomed to amid that destabilization. And there are systems working to survive that destabilization. Fascism is one of the simpler formulas for overcoming the contradictions these conflicting struggles pose. Um, to unpack that a bit, when we talk about politics in a context where more and more of the world is becoming unlivable, we have to talk about who and what is trying to survive.
In the minds of neoliberal conservative world leaders, Western civilization is a collapsing box. Inside the box, we have habitable land and intact supply lines. As habitable land decreases and supply lines break, [00:17:00] the capitalist solution is not to help the land or displaced people recover. It's to push more people out of the box as it collapses, and to contain people who are viewed as low value in carceral frameworks, where their consumption of resources is minimized and their premature deaths are manufactured.
From the neoliberal perspective, this process will be framed as a matter of pragmatism and inevitability. From a fascist perspective, it will be framed as a recovery of the natural order. Both of these paths lead to authoritarianism. That's why we are seeing the rise of cop cities around the country.
It's also why disabled people are disposable to both parties and why the criminalization of homelessness is a bipartisan affair. Within the framework of the collapsing box, liberal democracy and capitalism are basically in divorce proceedings. And we are presented with potential leaders who are either outright fascist or who, as [00:18:00] Ruth Wilson Gilmore has stated, are trying to domesticate.
elements of fascism. We can see this effort to domesticate fascistic politics and impulses in Kamala Harris's refusal to condemn Trump's invocation of a hoax about Haitians eating people's pets on the debate stage. Instead of pointing out that this is fascist, dehumanizing rhetoric that will stoke violence against marginalized people, she laughed and talked about how much Republican support she has.
She also made a big deal about how Trump stepped in to kill a horrific bipartisan border bill earlier this year that would have been a nightmare for migrant rights. So the Democratic candidate for the presidency is seeking to co opt rather than combat fascist impulses and scapegoating. I think it's a undeniable that fascism is rising and I think we should expect any neoliberal version of authoritarianism to eventually collapse into fascism because the more authoritarian Democrats become, the less inclined people will be to oppose [00:19:00] fascists on their behalf.
Ejeris Dixon: Yeah, that makes sense to me. There's this piece around low value people that you spoke of and I, I think that in, In certain people's eyes, like me, as like a Black queer person, like, as a Native person, like, we come from the communities of quote unquote low value people. And I'm curious around then what the stakes are for us, for our loved ones, because there's a lot of reasons for people to oppose fascism.
There are a lot of folks who are deeply concerned with the shifts and the reduction in democratic practices and policies and options and, and that concerns me as well. But I'm really also concerned about, survival for those of us who are deemed unworthy. And so I'm wondering, um, why is it important to you that we talk about fascism particularly in communities of color, in low income communities, in oppressed communities, when there's so much [00:20:00] other stuff to talk about like rent and like affording food or child care or surviving police violence, um, Recognizing what you were saying about the expansion of cop cities, like, when our folks are struggling with so many issues, how do we make the link around fascism and why is it important to talk about?
Well, first,
Kelly Hayes: we need to think about the fact that the conditions that racial capitalism has generated, we are the ones who are already being ensnared by those systems. We are the ones who are already being treated as subhuman in various contexts. So when it gets worse, who does it get uglier for first?
You know, who are the first people to be completely obliterated under an annihilatory politics? I would say it's the people who are already fighting not to be forgotten behind prison walls, not to be left behind as a pandemic continues to rage on. The most vulnerable among us. [00:21:00] have the most to lose as conditions continue to deteriorate.
It's never a question of, Oh, it's going to get worse for you over there. And then you'll know what it's like for me over here. That's not real. That mentality is not real. There is no scenario in which it gets worse for everyone else and also does not get phenomenally worse for you. For us. So I want folks to check in about that reality.
Um, the oppressed don't live in some sort of stagnant situation, whereas fascistic conditions worsen. We aren't getting hit harder. Of course, we're going to get hit harder. You know, they don't have to create, they don't have to invent apparatuses in this country for the disposal of human beings and the manufacturing of premature death.
Those systems already exist. That is the prison system. People are already conditioned to forget it. So I also want people to understand that the work we are already doing to try to keep our unhoused neighbors alive, to try to keep our siblings in prison remembered [00:22:00] and fought for, this is anti fascist work.
This is fighting the fascism in the fabric of our society that is only going to be amplified. as conditions worsen. I'm also, I'm very focused on the kind of work we need to do in our communities, which is the work of collective survival under all scenarios. For all of my critiques of Harris, I think it does matter who wins this election.
I think there is a very immediate fascist plan to assault our communities, that Republicans are ready to roll out under Trump. And I appreciate people who are engaged in efforts to stop that. I find the block and build strategy that some leftist organizers advocate for compelling, even though I am skeptical about electoral politics and what the system will allow them to do.
The working class to accomplish. I think people who are angry about the limitations of electoral politics and about the atrocities that are ongoing right now need to remember that people doing electoral work to block Trump are not our enemies. People who [00:23:00] are afraid of losing abortion care or gender affirming care or their lives or freedom here in the U.
S. are not their enemies. If we had an electoral option that would end the genocide in Palestine, I would advocate fiercely for that. If all of us refusing to vote would end the genocide in Palestine, I would advocate fiercely for that. Unfortunately, none of that is the case, and that hurts. It's unjust and infuriating, just as it is unjust and infuriating that months of dogged protests have not moved the needle in terms of stopping this genocide.
I think that's left a lot of us feeling powerless, and when we feel powerless, sometimes we want to lash out at someone who will actually feel it. In this case, that includes people who care about some of the same things we care about. Punishing those people for their political imperfections can become a pastime or even an obsession, but it doesn't build power.
Presidential election years are always an ugly mess for our movement. [00:24:00] People become mesmerized by the electoral circus, even if they hate it. They argue nonstop, they berate each other, they destroy relationships that they're going to need later. I would say the most important thing you can do, if like me, you are not an electoral organizer, is to focus on the actual work we need to do.
What do we need to build right now to defend unhoused people? To defend our migrant siblings? To defend abortion access? To have the kind of movement power that can't be brushed aside or ignored, we are going to need strong solidarity networks and a lot more power than we have presently built to face what's ahead, regardless of who's elected.
And I think people should focus on that. I think they should focus on building the things that they believe should exist. If you hate the circus, like I do, don't live your whole life in the tent. And also recognize that as an organizer, you are going to have to work with a lot of people you don't agree with.
You know, organizing is not matchmaking. We are going to need each other to survive. And I [00:25:00] would ask people to remember that.
Ejeris Dixon: I agree. I agree. And I think there's, there's a piece of this around. both our conversations, our work separately and our work together around fascism, like this interconnection between Black people struggling against fascism, Native people struggling against fascism, like all of us who have so much to lose, but recognizing that that's the organizing game, that we need to organize to survive.
We need to connect with people who both share our exact same struggles. and also are from different communities, are navigating different needs. Some of those folks are deeply in electoral politics. Some of those folks are just trying to figure out how to make ends meet, but it takes mass movements to defeat fascism, and mass movements involve a mass of people, like the conversations that we have to build.
Recognizing that, um, while I don't think that fascism is a [00:26:00] conversation that often comes up, you know, at the dinner table with our friends and family or at the barbecue, I'm curious around, how do you have these conversations with kind of your friends, community, and family, because they can be scary, they can be off putting, they can be a downer.
Like, how do you find ways where people can take these small efforts towards building the big movements that we need?
Kelly Hayes: You know, I talk about fascism with the people around me in the same way I'm talking about it with you, but I do find that when I'm talking with people who aren't as steeped in this stuff as I am, uh, tapping into fiction can be helpful, uh, when people didn't want to accept that the pandemic was coming.
I learned a lot about how resistant people are to imagining things outside their experience. There's a reason a bunch of people watched the movie Contagion once they realized that COVID was a pandemic. And it's not just that people are [00:27:00] morbid, it's that they were grasping for a story that would help them imagine something outside of their experience.
We understand the world and stories. So what stories Matter to people in ways that are useful to us. What stories can be made to matter? How can we draw on the ways people are influenced by those stories? That's something I think about a lot. You know, the TV show Deep Space Nine was politically important to me when I was young.
The Hunger Games was politically important to a lot of the young people I work with today. So how do we use that? And you know, how do we connect with people on a level that engages their imaginations?
Ejeris Dixon: No, it's true. I've been, um, I've been on a deep dive of The Handmaid's Tale. And there are so many ways through that show that I can give examples or talk about what fascism and authoritarianism creates with people.
And I think you're right. I think that there are so many ways that we can use fiction. There are [00:28:00] ways that we can use pop culture to really have an entry point into these conversations. Um, so everybody's busy. including a lot of people in my life. And, and it can be sometimes annoying to be told what you need to do.
How do you encourage folks? To get involved with anti fascist
Kelly Hayes: efforts. Well, you know, so much of anti fascism is just the work that clearly must be done. Anti fascism takes so many shapes. For starters, everyone should be building strong solidarity networks. Who do you connect with? When things fall apart, or when someone is in trouble, or when you're in trouble.
If you haven't done your pod mapping and figured out what your ecosystem of support and crisis response looks like, please start there. Uh, don't wait until the next major crisis to un strand yourself. As I mentioned, I am not focused on the electoral situation right now because that's not my work. What I know is [00:29:00] that even if the Democrats win, we will still be living in a collapsing box on a dying planet.
People will still be experiencing genocide. We will need to upend the systems that are killing us. We need to change everything. That means building power on a lot of fronts. I think we need to organize like we have never organized before. Our workplaces, our buildings, our churches, our schools, any place we can form bonds of fellowship and learn to take action together.
Whether it's mutual aid, community defense, environmental defense, whatever the purpose, if people are learning together and getting invested in collective survival, that's progress. Organized communities can pivot in a crisis a lot more easily than scared, alienated individuals can. Thank you. everyone needs to find their people.
Everyone needs to be building skills. You know, my friend, Chris Begley is a survival instructor and an archaeologist who has studied various [00:30:00] apocalyptic events. And in his book, The Next Apocalypse, he talks about the importance of being able to work with people who aren't of your own choosing to survive.
We have to be able to do the work of collective survival with whoever's there. You can learn a lot of basic survival skills pretty quickly, but not that one. It takes time to develop a practice of solidarity. Organizing is a craft. It took me years to learn, but the skills I have developed are essential survival skills, and they are skills we are all going to need, whether we're trying to win a campaign or survive the aftermath of a major catastrophe.
Ejeris Dixon: I love this. Um, when Kelly speaks about pod mapping, just so people know we can add a resource, um, near where you download the episode where you actually see what pod mapping is. And pod mapping is a way of identifying a couple key people in your life that you want to [00:31:00] have some deliberate conversations with around safety, around survival, around like what you all will do together in various forms of crisis.
Thank you. And, um, Kelly, I'm so grateful to have you today, because, um, In your answer around anti fascist efforts, it also felt so like anti fascism, it's like pro compassion, and it's pro solidarity, like there's more than being anti this incredibly violent and negative and dehumanizing thing. movement, but it's also about like how we show up for each other, how we take care of each other, and how we recognize in times that are really scary, how we can build the networks that we need to survive and to affirm all of our lives.
So I'm, I'm just really, really grateful for you taking the time today. Our whole goal is to keep these episodes [00:32:00] shorter and conversational so people can listen to them on their commute. or they can listen to them as they're making dinner, other such things. And, um, thank you for breaking down fascism in a way that was really easy to understand and, and clear for our folks.
I'm wondering, um, you sent me, an article that you just wrote. And one of the pieces in this podcast is we really want to talk to people about how we can apply the lessons of each episode. So I'm curious around if you want to talk a little bit about the essay you just wrote and how you think people can apply, um, what we talked about in their everyday life.
Kelly Hayes: Absolutely. So, the essay that I just wrote for my newsletter, Organizing My Thoughts, is called On Cats, Fascism, and the Moral Clarity We Need. Um, it was a piece I wrote in response to Kamala Harris not pushing back on Donald [00:33:00] Trump's invocation of a fascistic hoax about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.
And to emphasize the degree to which this is not a laughing matter and something that actually must be challenged and called out fiercely, there was a bomb threat yesterday morning, relative to the day we're recording this, there was a bomb threat in Springfield, Ohio City Hall. And the elementary school there has been evacuated twice.
So there are real world consequences for these horrifying lies that have historical counterparts, right? These lies that are being told about Haitian people are reminiscent of, Of the blood libel that emerged in the Middle Ages that was used to target Jewish people that was revived by the Nazis in the run up to the Holocaust.
Um, it's reminiscent of stories about migrants that were told in the 1980s about migrants eating rats that were followed by attacks [00:34:00] on refugees. And the idea there is, and you'll notice like rats aren't Generally, some, some people love rats, but rats aren't generally pets and beloved in the way cats are.
But what's being honed in on there is this idea that they are not like us. They are savage. It's about framing immigration as a clash of civilizations, which is a kill or be killed situation. So these ideas that fuel tremendous violence are being perpetuated right now. And we need to not play into that on any level.
We cannot treat it as a laughing matter. I've seen people who are not right wingers sharing memes they think are funny about people eating cats. This is no time for that. This is no time to indulge that nonsense. When we see that kind of thing, we do what Kamala Harris did not. We call it out. We say this stops here.
We are not going to dehumanize people. We are not going to indulge Nazi fantasies about immigrants as invaders. [00:35:00] We need to call that what it is. That's fascistic. It's about inciting violence against people. Those are our neighbors. They are community members just like us. They are parts of families just like us.
They are just trying to make a good life in their communities, and they deserve to be protected and cared for. And we need to hold the line in that way for each other, and for our collective humanity, and not just caught up in this electoral circus and cheering for one side or the other. We need to be defending each other.
Our investment must be in each other and our collective survival, and not in this kind of messy, hoax throwing nightmare that's happening in front of us right now. Like, we need to hold our values, and we need to be messengers for our values in these times.
Ejeris Dixon: Well, thank you so much, Kelly. You're so right.
There is this connection between dehumanizing people and therefore then making it okay psychologically for those people not to not be around anymore, right? For the [00:36:00] fascists too. Eliminate or to disappear people as, as, as one would say, and, um, your work where you continually remind us of solidarity and humanity and how much we need each other is just ringing in my head and I hope really, um, inspiring so many folks who are listening to this episode and engaging in this project.
I know you have so many places to be and you are doing so many different types. of activism and organizing. So I'm very grateful for not only you coming on this episode, but for the years and years of work and time that you've put into, like, how do we build the communities and the kind of world and society that we need where we all take care of each other.
Kelly Hayes: I'm so grateful for you as well, and for your friendship and for your efforts to educate folks so that we can learn and think alongside and [00:37:00] figure out how to wage these fights together. And just thank you for everything that you're doing and for having me on your show.
Ejeris Dixon: We've reached the end of today's episode. And I know it's heavy. But when we're learning together, I always feel lighter. And do you know? That you help fight fascism just by listening to the barometer. If you want to know more about Kelly, her activism, writing and podcast, please check out the resources section of our website, fascismbarometer.
org. Please subscribe to this feed as more episodes are coming. And with fascism in the news. It's a really great time to share and discuss the barometer with your friends and communities. So please, share the show with a friend, because when you do, you help fight fascism. We appreciate you [00:38:00] joining us, and we're hard at work, we're keeping an eye on the weather, we're staying focused in these uncertain times, and we're monitoring the fascism barometer.
And together, we can keep fascism at bay. Stay ready. Take a breath. We can, and we'll make it. Our producer is Phil Serkis. Our theme is by Makleit Hedero. The Fascism Barometer is a project of Ejeri Labs, where we work to make strategic interventions for the future of social justice movements. And I am your movement meteorologist, Ejeris Dixon.
See you next time on the Fascism Barometer.