If It Looks Like a Fascist and Talks Like a Fascist, It's a Fascist.

Intro

(AI Disclosure Notice: Riverside.fm generates a transcript automatically, which BJ then uses Duck.AI and runs it through Claude 4.5 Haiku. The purpose of doing this is to shield the content from being stolen by Anthropic, while still allowing the transcript to be properly formatted in AP Style and made ready for presentation. BJ then reads over the final transcript before publication, because Claude has a tendency to alter or tweak certain words to make them fit what the Associated Press wants.)

BJ Mendelson: Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of Privacy Tips, the sister podcast for Stupid Sexy Privacy. I'm your host, BJ Mendelson. Today's show is made possible by our friends at DuckDuckGo.

So if you enjoy what we do, check out our DuckDuckGo subscription. It comes with an easy-to-use VPN, identity theft protection, a data removal service, and more. Additional information can be found at duckduckgo.com/subscribe.

(And some features and offerings will vary, based on your location...)

Now, my friends, Stupid Sexy Privacy has wrapped, and you can find all the episodes online at stupidsexyprivacy.com. All you have to do is click or tap "Episodes."

Pardon our dust—I'm still updating the website, so certain links don't work or if things are missing, I promise that's on me, and I will get that taken care of as soon as I can.

The purpose of Privacy Tips, the podcast you're now listening to, is to give me an opportunity to read from my version of "How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos." Think of this as the DVD commentary track that you can listen to after you finish the book, or if you haven't heard it at all. The PDF is coming along nicely. There's some minor stuff we need to fix, but it looks about done. This is the last holdup on getting the book out for sale officially.

So if you're wondering when this thing is coming and you want to buy it: I'm hoping this week we'll finish all the tweaks to the PDF. It's the last item we've been waiting on. And as soon as it's ready, we'll release it. I definitely want it out before the election because I think chaos is going to happen, and I'd like the book available before then so people can protect themselves from the fascists and weirdos.

I also want to call something out before we get to this week's book excerpt—something we touched on briefly and just had a good example of happen last week. The book spends a lot of time discussing the oligarchs and their ownership of all these platforms and the ability they have to manipulate all of us.

I'm recording this on Sunday, Oct. 18. You're going to hear it on Thursday, Oct. 22. So it might be old news by the time you hear this, but just in case: on Oct. 17, the No Kings event occurred.

The No Kings Instagram account vanished without warning, notice, or explanation. The Indivisible Group believes this was intentional censorship on the part of Meta. There's no proof of that, but the timing is definitely suspicious. There was widespread outrage, and after that outrage, Meta restored the account but kept people from being able to post on it for a number of hours.

The fact that this happened on the day of the No Kings event is really suspicious, and it occurs during the same month when over a thousand accounts in Brazil that support Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva experienced suppression, bans, or algorithm manipulation at the hands of Meta.

Meta is Facebook. They changed the name because they didn't want you to think of all the genocide that their platforms triggered. Just look up the Rohingya genocide and you'll see more about that. That's why they became Meta instead of Facebook. That's Mark Zuckerberg.

These acts of censorship came at the same time that Elon Musk and the current president cut off Starlink access to our friends in Ukraine who are bravely fighting on the front lines of democracy. The people of Ukraine are heroes, deserving of our full support. Musk's interference with them—cutting off access and putting their cities and people in danger—is reprehensible and unacceptable. And it demonstrates the points we make throughout this book: the power that the oligarchs have over us and how we need to stop them.

To be clear, these are acts of censorship and sabotage by the oligarchs against all of us. So whenever they do this to No Kings protesters, even if you're on the conservative side of the fence, you wouldn't like it if that kind of censorship and suppression happened to you. And I know that for a fact because for about a decade, the conservative movement in America has been complaining about censorship from big tech. So it doesn't matter what side of the fence you're on—this stuff is unacceptable.

The fight against fascists and weirdos isn't going to end anytime soon. That's the bad news. The fight will go on until all the oligarchs are defeated. There are definitely people in the Democratic Party who don't like Trump but don't want to fix the things that gave rise to Trump. That's not good either. There's this sense they're giving people now: "Well, we just removed this guy, and everything's going to be fine." Our position is that we're nonpartisan. We don't really care which political party is in power—we care only that the oligarchs are not in power.

And they are not going to go away just because we changed presidents. I think that's really important to stress. The fight will go on until the tech billionaires and the rest of the oligarchs are defeated. We achieve this by passing the Second Bill of Rights. That is a very specific and tangible goal that you and I can work toward. And that is something this book is also going to sell to you. If you don't know what the Second Bill of Rights is, we will get to it as we go through the rest of this book.

With that in mind, let's go to our book excerpt for the week on the other side of this ad from our friends at DuckDuckGo.

This Week's Book Excerpt

BJ: Just an FYI: you don't have to wait for the official audiobook to come out to read "How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos." The book is out now for free. The entire text is available for free at stupidsexyprivacy.com. All you have to do is click or tap the word "Book," and when you go there, you'll see Chapters 1 and 2 right away, regardless of whether you're logged in.

If you want to access the full book, you need to sign up for our mailing list. Don't worry though—if you're listening to this podcast, that's what the mailing list is. It's just this podcast. You're not going to get anything weird or crazy. No one's looking at your info. I barely look at this stuff when people sign up.

If you follow the contact page at Stupid Sexy Privacy, we'll show you how to set up an alias email. So if you don't want to sign up for any newsletter or give out your information, I'm right there with you. Just go to our contact page, and we'll show you how to set up an alias @ duckmail that you can use to sign up for this newsletter or podcast.

That'll give you access to the full book. The reason we did this—and this is something I was just discussing with a listener—is because we're afraid of AI scraping the book. That's why we said: okay, Chapters 1 and 2 are free, and everything else is going to be behind a login. You sign up for the newsletter, log in, and you'll get the rest of the book. This keeps AI scrapers from stealing the book. This is something 404 Media does, and there's also a New York City blog called Hellgate that does the same thing to keep AI companies away.

So if you see Chapters 1 and 2 but don't see the rest, you gotta sign up for the newsletter. It's free. Nobody's looking at your information. You're not going to get anything weird. Nobody's going to spam you. It's just me here, and you'll get this podcast for as long as we're doing it.

Now, let's get to today's book excerpt. I think this is the shortest chapter in the book, and it's also one of my favorites, so I'm looking forward to reading this to you.

"What is Fascism?"

George Orwell provides his definition for the word "fascist": "Even the people who recklessly fling the word 'fascist' in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it."

So by fascism—again, the Orwell quote—"they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal, and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'fascist.' That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come." That's a quote from George Orwell in his essay "What is Fascism?" I agree, obviously.

Amanda and I define fascists as illiberal, anti-democratic bullies. We recognize this as a broad definition. Our response is to use a very simple test: if it looks like a fascist and talks like a fascist, it's a fascist.

Okay, but there is actually a more academic test. If you insist on something more rigorous, there is one from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblat, the authors of "How Democracies Die." I recommend that book if you have not read it. Their test is this:

"We should worry when a politician: one, rejects in words or action the democratic rules of the game; two, denies the legitimacy of opponents; three, tolerates or encourages violence; or four, indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media."

If that sounds like any number of people you might be thinking about, you're right. You are absolutely right. They are fascists.

Weirdos

Weirdos are trickier to define. But we use the term as an umbrella for con artists, religious fanatics, and others who, in the words of George Carlin, "kind of like it when a lotta people die." If you refused to wear a mask during a global pandemic, we consider you a weirdo. But that may not be your fault. It may be the fault of people who gave you bad information—influencers, journalists, or others. We don't know for certain.

But the odds are good that at least a few of them were weirdos. So let's start there.

The influencer industry could be worth $500 billion by the time you listen to this. And influencers are how one in five Americans get their news, so this isn't a joke—it's something we should take seriously. Since Amanda and I have been both influencers and journalists, we thought we would explain the difference.

An influencer is someone who talks about the news. A journalist breaks the news and does so in a way that you can retrace their steps. Good journalists will even tell you whom they reached out to and whether that person replied, in their work. This means if you want to call an influencer a journalist and a journalist an influencer, it's like the Berenstain Bears versus Berenstein Bears debate: it's fun to argue over, but what you call them really doesn't matter.

Neither does the form, style, and presentation they use. As long as you follow the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics, you can call yourself whatever you want. We'll have no problem calling you a journalist.

That means for the rest of us, we can't let snobbery get in the way of those who want to document the actions of fascists and weirdos. And there's a lot of that out there. Some of it is ageist—some of it's baby boomers who, as I've encountered at the Monroe Gazette, believe that if the news isn't presented the way they experienced it in a newspaper, it's not news. If you swear, it's not news. If you make colorful jokes, it's not news.

We can't let snobbery get in the way of those who want to document the actions of fascists and weirdos. All should be encouraged to do so, because documentation is an effective method to prevent them from distorting reality.

Just ask anyone in China who's curious to learn more about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Nothing could be found in search results, classrooms, or news. This is what George Orwell meant when he wrote in "1984": "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

How effective is documentation? Well, the political leader Vladimir Putin has a secret lab in Russia. This lab employs a dozen or so people to do one thing and one thing only: develop an untraceable poison called Novichok. Over a period of at least three years, Putin dispatched teams to practice how to kill Alexei Navalny, and then finally poisoned him with Novichok in August 2020.

Those are the lengths that fascists will go to stop someone from documenting their corruption—which is what Navalny did. And that's exactly the kind of documentation we need right now to seal the rupture.

Outro

Today's episode of Privacy Tips was recorded in Hollywood, California, and sponsored by DuckDuckGo. It is written, produced, and hosted by me, BJ Mendelson.

Before we go, I want to give a shout-out to our production team at Stupid Sexy Privacy, which includes Andrew Vanvoorhis, Rosie Tran, and my co-author, Amanda King. I hope to have everyone back as soon as we can afford to do so. Of course, we also want to thank our friends at DuckDuckGo who made all of this possible.

If you enjoyed today's show, we hope you'll take a moment to leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening. This won't take more than two minutes of your time. You see, we have this crazy goal, and we need your help to achieve it: we want five percent of Americans to be one percent better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdos.

Leaving us a review can help make that happen. Your reviews will help other people find the show. So please take a moment to leave a review, and we'll see you next Thursday on Privacy Tips.