Latest / FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD / #40 THE WORM TURNED

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#40 THE WORM TURNED · FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD

• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hey y'all, welcome to From the Inside Out Notes from a Liberal Southern Woman.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Beth Arnold.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's April 16th, 2026, and I'm reading And the Worm Turned.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: The smallest worm will turn being trodden on.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: While the concept of the downtrodden worm turning first appeared in print in John Haywood's collection of Proverbs in 1546, it was William Shakespeare who made this proverb popular, and its message has been imparted to generations of us through the centuries.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Even a lowly worm resists if it is pushed too far.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: When this phrase popped into my mind, I thought, this is it.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's where we are now.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Trump has finally used up his black magic, and the worm is turning.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this turn is energizing us all.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is not about gradual change.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's about reaching a breaking point, which is what we've just seen in Hungary and what the American people are starting to feel now.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: After 16 years of Viktor Orban's profound corruption, making himself and his friends rich while the rest of the country is impoverished, demonizing others, budding up to Putin, and fighting initiatives favorable to the European Union and democracy itself, Hungarians were fed up with Orban's fraud and deceit, and they gathered together and booted him out.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: An Applebaum in the Atlantic.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the end, the defeat of Viktor Orban, Hungary's autocratic prime minister, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging, but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And by building exactly that, Hungary's opposition changed politics around the world.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Orban's loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief, also present in Russian president Vladimir Putin's rhetoric, that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win, but to hold power forever because they have the support of the quote real unquote people.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: As it turns out, history doesn't work like that.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Real people grow tired of their rulers.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Old ideas become stale.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Younger people question orthodoxy.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Illiberalism leads to corruption, and if Orban can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so fascism around the world has been dealt a blow that will reverberate in the collective unconscious for patriots like us resisting Donald Trump and for patriots in Russia.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: The activism and courage of murdered hero Alexei Navalny will always ring true.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I have every hope that China will one day shake its communist chokehold and Tibet will be free.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Look at what the Hungarians were pummeled with.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Orban used his control of the state to build an extraordinary web of international illiberal and far-right supporters and funding mechanisms to support some of them.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the last weeks of the campaign, these friends and beneficiaries rallied around.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Orban received visits or verbal support from Donald Trump, J.D.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Vance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right, Elise Weidel, the leader of the German far right, and other illiberal leaders from Argentina, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, and more.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Both Hungarian and American news organizations reported that a Russian intelligence team had set up in Budapest to amplify Orban's social media campaign and perhaps to stage provocations.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yet the worm turned.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: What does the word illiberal actually mean?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: It describes policies, actions, or individuals that are narrow-minded, intolerant, or restrictive of personal freedoms.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: It signifies a rejection of liberal principles like open-mindedness, rule of law, and civil liberties, often favoring majoritarianism over minority rights and democratic safeguards.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: It often appears in such forms of control as competitive authoritarianism or managed democracy.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Over this past year, as Trump has acted to shut down more and more facets of American democracy, he has continually posted online depictions of himself in all-powerful hero roles.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: A Superman, a king, a cowboy, the Pope, a Jedi, George Washington, even a pilot dumping excrement on the helpless minions below.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: But he really tipped towed on his tiny member when he depicted himself as Jesus, just after he had publicly dissed this American Pope.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: When this particular double delusion of grandeur hit the fan, MAGA Christians and Catholics were mad as hell.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Trump promptly backpedaled on the meme, claiming that it was of himself as a doctor.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Never mind that he was wearing Jesus y robes.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody was buying it, especially Catholics.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Pop Leo's true humanity, which rings through in his messages of peace, charity, and social justice in the world of men, is the complete opposite of Trump's lurid attempt to elevate himself to messianic stature.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, even some MAGA-Americans were holding Trump accountable.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: In Donald Trump's march toward American fascism, he has shifted the vibration of the world.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: In January 2026, Trump signed a memo withdrawing the United States from 66 international organizations and entities, including 31 UN-related bodies and 35 non-UN organizations, citing a need to protect U.S.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: sovereignty and national interest.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: To add to this disaster, he cut out U.S.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: aid, which helped millions of people and was important to our global soft power.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Key drivers of our vibrational shift also include ridiculous U.S.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: tariff policies, conflict in the Middle East, and growing trade reliance on China.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Trump has betrayed our traditional allies, they can no longer trust us, and changed global order from peace and prosperity to aligning the United States with an oligarchical axis, as Heather Cox-Richardson said on March 27th.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Trump has put us on the side of the world's great villains.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to take a look at American fashion before World War II, which gives us a broader and deeper view of what's happening today.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Christian nationalism is a root of fascist ideology that prioritizes white superiority and racism, the traditional gender roles of a patriarchy, and the mythology of a golden age of religious purity.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Some time ago, I wrote about the aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Mara Lindbergh's early support of Nazism.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: The piece is called Double Lives, and it tells a surprising story that most Americans don't know.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a new reader or want to refresh your memory, you can read it here, you can click through.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: In 1935, after fleeing America when their child was kidnapped and later found dead, the Lindbergs moved to the UK to a house called Longbarn, owned by Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville West, and later to the small island of Iliac, a small island off the coast of Brittany, France.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: In this complicated and fascinating history, the Lindbergs were exposed to Hitler and his national socialism, Nazism, in Europe.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: To be precise, National Socialism, Nazism, was a far-right totalitarian ideology led by Adolf Hitler in Germany, 1933 to 1945, characterized by virulent anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and violent anti-communism.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: It sought a racially pure Aryan society expanding eastward for living space.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The ideology rejected democracy and class struggle, advocating for a strong central dictatorship.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt and members of his cabinet, as well as the Secret Service and the FBI, began to be concerned about a fascist threat in America.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: The FBI began investigating and archived material from the FBI.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Each FBI field office at once formally opened an investigation in its geographical region into the intelligence threats posed by domestic groups connected with Hitler's Germany.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: This initial effort was limited in scope and time.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: It sought to determine only if foreign agents were working with the American Nazi groups.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: While in Europe, Charles Lindbergh was dispatched by the U.S.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: government to visit Germany and report on the status of German aviation.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: But did U.S.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: leadership know then that Lindbergh believed in the supremacy of the white race and the need to protect Nordic or Western bloodlines?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: That he was concerned about the degeneration of civilization through racial mixing or immigration?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Lindbergh's political views in the late 1930s and early 1940s reflected how much he admired Nazi Germany's approach to strengthening its racial stock.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: He accepted a medal from Hermann Gring, who personally awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle in 1938.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Gring used Lindbergh's visits as propaganda to showcase American approval of the Third Reich.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time in England, the English aristocracy was smitten with Hitler and Nazism.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: While Neville Chamberlain failed to judge the Nazi threat, aristocratic women were wearing swastika jewelry as a fashion statement.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Winston Churchill was the canary in the mine about Hitler, the lone, consistent voice trying to make Chamberlain and his peers understand the Nazi threat.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: He urged rearmament and he challenged Chamberlain's policy of appeasement until German aggression made it impossible to ignore.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Of the famous Mitford siblings, who were related to Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine in several different ways, Unity Mitford and Diana Mitford were the primary adherents to Nazism and Fascism, with Unity becoming a close intimate of Adolf Hitler.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Their sister Jessica was a communist, while Diana married British fascist leader Oswald Mosley in 1936 in a Berlin ceremony attended by Hitler.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Mitford brother and mother were also dedicated fascists.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because Diana and Oswald were so close to the Nazi regime, they were put in prison during the war until Churchill felt sorry for them and finally released them.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then there was the German American Boon, 1936 to 1941, a pro-Nazi organization in the U.S.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: that promoted Hitler's ideology among German Americans.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: With a membership of some 100,000 people, the Boone was led by Fritz Julius Kuhn, and there were pockets all over the United States.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Boone ran summer indoctrination camps, mostly in the Northeast and on the West Coast, from San Francisco to the state of Washington.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: A PBS documentary called Nazi Town USA gives a vivid account of this movement and these camps and is worth watching.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: I highly recommend it to get a sense of these cultural undercurrents that I suspect never went away but have quietly continued to simmer beneath our surface.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: According to Wikipedia, the organization claimed to show its loyalty to America by displaying the flag of the United States alongside the flag of Nazi Germany at boon meetings, and it declared that George Washington was the first fascist because he did not believe that democracy would work.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Boone rallies featured Nazi symbols, and one rally at Madison Square Garden attracted 20,000 people.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: The Boon also held rallies with the KKK.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The organization was banned after Pearl Harbor and Kuhn was deported back to Germany.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Boone members went back to their lives, but how much of this hidden sentiment remained and festered over the decades?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Then there was the American First Committee, the AFC, which had 800,000 paying members who opposed direct military aid to the Allies in World War II when England desperately needed our help.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Henry Ford, an anti-Semite and racist, was a high-profile AFC member until he became a liability for them.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, the AFC became infamous for the anti-Semitic and pro-fascist rhetoric of its most prominent speaker, Charles Lindbergh.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: America First has been used as a trigger for authoritarian ideology.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Randolph Hearst used it in his publications to campaign against the League of Nations and President Roosevelt's New Deal.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: The Ku Klux Klan, which had roughly 5 million members at its height, regularly employed the slogan America First to promote its nativist agenda.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Others, like radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, who had a massive national following, spread virulent anti-Semitism through the airwaves.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Silver Shirts, Silver Legion of America, was another prominent paramilitary fascist organization mentioned in the broader context of the era's fascistic fringe.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: They modeled themselves directly after Hitler's brown shirts.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get to Trump's paternal family history.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: According to reports from the New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Fred Trump Sr.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: was arrested on May 31, 1927, when approximately 1,000 robed Ku Klux Klansmen and their supporters clashed with 100 police officers in Jamaica, Queens.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Fred Trump, then 21, was one of seven men taken into custody for refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: While archival reports from the Long Island Daily Press stated that all seven men were wearing clan robes, there is no conclusive evidence specifically documenting whether Fred Trump was wearing a robe or if he was a member of the KKK.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Trump was released without being charged.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Some biographical accounts and reports characterize Fred Sr.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: as an American firster before World War II, who associated with various pro-Nazi groups like the German American Boon, though his specific level of membership in the boon is not conclusively documented.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: While Donald Trump's grandfather, Frederick Trump, and his wife Elizabeth left Germany, other relatives remained.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Some members of the Trump and Christ, his grandmother's family, served in the Nazi military, including a first cousin once removed who was an officer in a unit that was involved in a massacre of Russian Jewish families in 1942.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Fascism goes with Christian nationalism like peanut butter and jelly.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Many scholars and historians call this unholy intersection Christo fascism.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And as you can see, American First has a history that Trump and his Christian nationalist strategists and supporters like Russell Voigt and Stephen Miller have used for a reason.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Victor Orban's defeat was a huge loss for Trump in Vance and the Christian nationalists' agenda everywhere.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: The collective unconscious is humming with inspiration and energy while the world rejoices.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's actions are catching up with him.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: On April 10th, Zelensky posted part of an interview on X, in which he, like others now, mentioned Trump and Putin in the same breath.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: In my view, Russia played the Americans again, Zelensky said about Russia's oil sanctions being lifted and Russia sharing intelligence with Iran to target U.S.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: forces.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And despite Trump's threats and harassment of our former close allies, they keep saying no to helping get the U.S.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: out of this global upheaval of Trump's own making.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: They've all seen the worm turn too.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: P.S.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're taking the word patriot back from the collaborationist GOP.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, y'all, thanks for listening.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know what you think and come back again.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: You hear now?