Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will take place on Friday, February 20, 1-2pmET. Paying subscribers will receive a link on Friday at 10amET to register for the Zoom gathering. If you can’t attend, you can find the video at lucid.substack.com.

Our guest is Tim Garson, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a pediatric cardiologist who also has an MPH in health policy and finance. He was Vice Chancellor for Health Policy at Duke, Dean of the medical school at Baylor in Houston and University of Virginia, and then Provost of UVA. He has been president of the American College of Cardiology and currently teaches health policy at the University of Texas School of Public Health.

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We have some wonderful upcoming guests for Lucid Q&As: Dr. Diana Butler Bass on religion and resistance; Andrea Pitzer, who wrote a great book on the history of concentration camps; Janine Di Giovanni, co-founder of the Reckoning Project; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz; Iran and Middle East policy specialist Vali Nasr, and more!

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The Munich Security Conference has recently concluded, and once again United States officials have used it as a backdrop for speeches that seek to normalize right-wing extremism and feature rhetoric that echoes Fascist causes and concerns. One of the main purposes of the Munich Security Conference since its founding in the early 1960s has been to monitor and strengthen collective security against perceived threats from powers outside of Europe.

Now the threat is coming from “inside the building,” so to speak. Not only has the United States vowed “resistance” against multiracial democracies in Europe, but the United State government is also treating issues of national purity and “civilization” as vital to national security. This is Fascist thinking.

As predicated a year ago, America is allying with autocrats; treating European and other democracies as virtual enemies, to the grave detriment of collective security; and shredding democratic norms of international law and justice.

This is a main purpose of the “Board of Peace,” created as a dictator-friendly international structure, and of rogue actions such as kidnapping the Venezuelan head of state and claiming his country’s oil, inviting leaders with arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (Putin, Netanyahu) onto U.S. soil, and threatening to invade NATO member territories such as Greenland and Canada.

To boost this new autocratic order and harm democracies, the United States is also re-establishing relations with dictatorships such as Russian satellite state Belarus, known for its corruption and transnational repression, and also bailing out ailing autocrats with financial subsidies (Javier Milei) and other soon-to-be revealed “fixes” (Viktor Orban) to help them stay in power.

White Racial Rescue as a Foreign Policy and National Security Priority

The authoritarians selected for these “gifts” are part of a transnational effort to rehabilitate right-wing dictatorships from the past, consolidate right-wing and neo-Fascist forces in the present, and protect and reclaim European identity. MAGA is using prestigious international gatherings to announce that foreign policy will be aligned with the uber-goal of saving White Christian civilization.

And so, at the 2025 Munich meeting, we witnessed Vice President J.D. Vance criticizing the “firewall” that prevents the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which contains neo-Nazis and politicians who perform Nazi salutes in public, from being accepted into mainstream German politics. Such “gatekeeping” tactics are essential for democracy protection. With the excuse of protecting “free speech,” United States officials such as Vance are targeting the whole idea of gatekeeping and simultaneously doing their best to normalize Fascism.

This is why Vance met with the leader of AfD in 2025, breaking a taboo. It is why MAGA luminaries who operate internationally, such as Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, perform Nazi salutes, and why Musk showed up (virtually) at an AfD campaign event to tell Germans they no longer needed to feel guilty about Nazism.

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