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Foreign.
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Welcome to this special episode of IHIP News. I am joined by the best selling author of Strongmen, Ruth Ben Ghiat, a historian. Ruth, welcome to IHIP News.
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Thank you.
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I want to cover some very important information regarding what's happening in the United States. Because all of this, and you say this a lot is new for the United States to have this form of government. And I read your lucid substack and listener, you should read it as well, because when you're armed with information, when the government is abusing its citizens, it can be cathartic and therapeutic to know what is going on. And Ruth, you speak a lot about the government. The Trump regime is intentionally weakening the government. Explain to my listeners why would you get power and then want to weaken the government that you operate within?
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Yeah, this is one of the most tragic aspects of what's going on now. And I was calling it out in lucid, like in February, in March, you have somebody who's a head of state who really long ago internalized Kremlin and other authoritarian views of the world that see democracy as the problem. And then the question is, why would you kneecap your own country?
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B
Right.
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A
And authoritarians do that so they can more easily grab control. If you have an impoverished diseased population, they're less likely to be protesting in the streets. And if you care about profiting off of governance and you really don't care about the people you are supposed to be governing. And remember President Trump did the AI video of him like dumping excrement on American people and protesters. That kind of shows you the mentality. And they're all like this. They despise the people they govern. Sometimes the bad outcome economically is over time, and it's a result of incompetence. Here everything has happened so fast. And taking away vaccines, doing things that will increase the likelihood of mass disease, things like that, they are part of really a mentality that wants to create the conditions to be able to rule more easily in an authoritarian fashion.
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B
And is it that in a democracy, historically, we think the power is within the people, of the people, by the people, for the people. We've learned that mantra, you know, from school age on. And is it to take the power away from the people and consolidate it in this regime?
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Yeah, and it works in different ways. One is, of course, and this has a long, long racialized history of voter suppression. So we have a long precedent of some of these authoritarian practices. And I consider the Jim Crow South a kind of regional authoritarianism. So we have that precedent. But we can't really only define authoritarianism as in a legal way, which is important. So the executive wants to get as much power. That's why Trump has marginalized Congress. That's why he keeps ruling by executive orders. He's made the judiciary, the Department of Justice, into his personal revenge tool. All of that is by the book.
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B
But.
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But I think we also need to see authoritarianism as a process by which you deprive the many of their rights and you create hardship for them to allow the very few, the billionaires, the oligarchs, to have unlimited liberties, to plunder the workforce, to plunder the environment. You roll back all the regulations, including moral regulations, that kept people behaving ethically. You take all of that out of government, and that's going on, too. And that's one again. It's very tragic, but it's all proceeded very quickly, which is one thing that differentiates what we're living through. If we feel like our heads are exploding every day, it's because the pace of change doesn't really resemble other states where the authoritarian came to power via elections.
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B
So that tease up my next question. A lot of people say we're in the middle of a power grab. And is it a power grab if this candidate was democratically elected? A lot of the things he's doing, he telegraphed that he was going to do during the campaign, he was going to root out the enemy from within. And so will you please talk to that and also speak to the role that the oligarchs played are playing in this specific power grab in the United States of America.
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Yeah, and you're right that he did campaign on this. At one point during the campaign, he said to an event, evangelical Christian group, I'm going to fix it so good that you'll never have to vote again. If you only vote for me now, you'll never have to vote again. And so today we have something called electoral autocracy. So in the old days, you declared dictatorship, or you had a couple, and so that's it. Today they come to power via elections. That's what happened with Putin, with Orban, with Erdogan and Turkey. And then you use the system and you actually hollow out elections, you use voter suppression, you use intimidation, you do everything possible. So you keep elections going. So you can say, like Viktor Orban, oh, I'm not a dictator, this is illiberal democracy, that's his phrase. But there's nothing democratic about it. And elections, so you keep them going, but they mean less. And the Trump administration is very worried about this now because Democrats have had unbelievable successes electorally, because there's a blowback to what's going on. And so there's going to be a push to perhaps do something with elections. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep registering people to vote, because the elections are the last thing that you have sometimes. And that's true in Turkey, it's true in Hungary. You have to use them.
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I read somewhere, probably on Twitter that I really shouldn't be on, but we all peek over from time to time. Yeah. That rarely do authoritarians or autocrats or dictators, whatever we want to call him, rarely are they voted out. What do you have to say about that? That terrifies me.
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Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest cases in Chile where Pinochet is one of my cases in my book, and I interviewed people, I did a lot of work on Chile, he came in via military coup and then he lost power over the time he was there for 17 years. And the United States, which had backed his coup, Kissinger and Nixon, they made it possible, they lost faith in him. And they actually, the United States went from taking democracy away to helping it come back. And so Pinochet lost so much power, he had to agree to a referendum, an election, basically, whether he would stay or leave. So he's a case and he lost. And he's a case where the dictator left and didn't want to leave, but he left. But often if they come in via coup. Via coup, they leave via coup or something happens to them, they have to resign, like Assad, and if they're lucky, they go into exile somewhere. Now, I would hope that we would have an electoral outcome so that Trump would leave office peacefully. But the track record on that is not very good. As we saw from January 6th.
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Right. Right. He packed his toys up after he threw a giant temper tantrum that we all saw, and then was very fragrantly, flagrantly pardoned. The loyalists that committed these felonies and that type of, I describe it as the rules that apply to everybody else don't apply to us. And they, it's like a neon sign with these guys. And they, you see what's going on in Minnesota right now. And after Renee Goode was shot, after she was murdered by an ICE agent, our logic as Americans being part of a civilized country, we would think there's going to be an investigation, they're going to recede. The opposite has happened. Kristi Noma said we're sending hundreds more in now. They're in targets, they're in gas stations. They have accelerated this type of terrorizing. The public, they are terrorizing. And I think Minnesota, Minneapolis, Canada. I'm thinking about border, border protection. I'm thinking, okay, why aren't they in Florida or in Texas or Arizona or on the California border? They're all the way up there. And it doesn't take that much of deduction skills to assume this isn't about immigration, this isn't about the border. This is intentionally to terrorize the citizens and even more insidiously, to prime us to be scared of their power.
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The immigration has been very important ideologically because they do want to create a white, Christian, male dominated ethnostate ever since Bannon was talking about that in 2015. But immigration has always been an excuse to build an infrastructure of repression. And ICE is like, they remind me of, like the fascist militia. When Mussolini came in, that was the original stuff I studied for years, which is how I recognized Trump in 2016 for what he. For what he is. And Mussolini came into power and he wasn't sure, and he came in through a lot of violence with his black shirts. And he was before Hitler, right? And Hitler learned from him. And he didn't really trust the armed forces of Italy, and they were under the command of the king. So he created a militia, the fascist militia. And when he became prime minister and then he became dictator later, he put all the thugs, all the black shirts, all the killers into the militia. And then guess what he did? He pardoned them all. Because the authoritarian mentality is, why would you have perfectly good killers and bribers and the people who have the criminal skills you need? Why would you have them sitting in prison when they could be useful?
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Oh, God.
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And that's why so many authoritarians pardon. They pardoned people. Pinochet pardoned human rights abusers. They even pardoned the concealers, the people who went through the police records and wiped them clean. Everybody has to be pardoned because you need those people. And we're seeing this in the United States now. And so what happened in Minneapolis, I just want to tell people, and it's terrifying, but it's good to know that in an authoritarian state, for a police state, there is no concept of peaceful assembly. There is no concept of legal observer, which is what Renee Goode was doing. There's no concept of monitoring people. They don't care about evidence, about body cams, because they are empowered to act lawlessly. If you look at this in an authoritarian framework, they just don't. They've they have completely discarded democratic notions of law enforcement, of public space, of decorum of everything. And that's how they're acting.
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Do you remember out of Trump o, all of the people that worked around him, that put up guardrails, they came out and said, he's a fascist through and through. And then there was that quote where he had told, I can't remember which cabinet member it was, that he wishes that he had generals like Hitler had. And as you're talking about the pardoning of the January 6th writers, for me, I thought that's just so flagrant. That's such a, you know, snubbing your nose at the rule of law. But to hear from you, from an historical perspective, there is. They're not universally unique. These, this MAGA regime. They're following a tried and true failed playbook that history does not bode very well upon. Which brings me to my next question. And you've. You have spoken about this, and I want you to describe it to our listeners, because it's fascinating to me. We're seeing a rapid increase of this flood the zone. They were first, you know, killing people in. We did with no due process in Venezuela. Now we've captured horrible dictator. We've captured Maduro. We have the, the ICE agents acting bananas. We have the Supreme Court bending the knee to him. All of these things happening so much. It's so overwhelming and it feels so abusive. And you talk about in your substack, lucid about the autocratic gamble. Walk us through what that is.
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So it's like a push and pull with autocrats. And normally things, as I said, happen a bit more slowly. But when autocrats feel they're becoming less popular, there's blowback. Maybe the elites they depend on are starting to be disaffected. That is when they do these reckless moves. Political scientists call this gambling for resurrection. And so Mussolini did this. Things were so bad because people hated his Italians, hated his alliance with Hitler, that in 1939, when he was doing public speaking, they had to bus in people who they paid to create a crowd for the newsreels. And so rather than retrench, what does the autocrat do? He doubles down. So he goes into World War II on the side of Hitler. And we know the rest. He ended up executed, hanging from a gas station. Hitler killed himself. So it doesn't have to be that dramatic. But Putin was in the same kind of mentality. The economy was not doing well after the pandemic. There were lots of polls coming out in Russia, where young People were opposing him, wanted a different ruler. And I saw him sitting in Geneva in the summer of 21, I saw him sitting there, and I was covering it, doing live coverage with NBC. And something about him, he was sitting there twitching as he sat there with Biden. And I went home and I wrote that night in lucid that he might do something reckless. And that was the invasion of Ukraine, because that was his gamble for resurrection. So Trump is kind of in the same thing where this Venezuela thing, which took everybody by surprise, it was perfectly planned operationally, it had been months in the making. But it came as a kind of reckless gamble to say, I have all the power, I am omnipotent, I can even depose a dictator, that kind of thing. And so that's the gamble. And the more they feel their backs are against the wall, the more they do reckless things and they double down. That's the key for us. We have to be prepared. They never retrench. They never say, oh, I'm sorry, I have been too extremist. They become more, more and more.
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B
And so does this impulsivity, this lack of impulse control, where they escalate and does it backfire versus if they really wanted a long term ruling white Christian nationalist regime. It's like a frog and water. You know, you incrementally slowly get everybody adjusted to the temperature of it, and right now we all have whiplash and horrified and terrified, which is the result they want. So does their impulse impulsivity and does their acceleration backfire on them because they have no impulse control?
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A
I believe in this case, the Trump administration has acted so recklessly on every front, so quickly that there will be this process I call autocratic backfire. We see this in the rising numbers of people protesting in Minneapolis, even as people are being terrorized. There's an uptick in people registering for nonviolent action training. And that's kind of a microcosm of what is going on in the country. Protest has risen and risen as they have become more repressive because ordinary people from all walks of life are realizing also that Trump is not doing what he promised. It's not America first, it's Trump first. It's Trump and cronies first. And that is a recipe for blowback.
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So he ran on this uber nationalist, nativist America first. And in flyover states where people are isolated from diversity and their main sense of culture, their main avenues of culture or church, and their main identity is being an American. And there we have this, you know, really fantastic military that has done These heroic things that we see in movies. So they attach a lot of their identity to that. But since he has taken over Trump 2.0, we see $40 billion to Argentina, Venezuela. Apparently he's asked his generals to draw up plans for Greenland. Whispers of Cuba, whispers of Colombia. He has even you posted this, that he even posted. He was the acting president of Venezuela. Lindsey Graham was on Fox News with Make Iran great Again. And our heart goes out to everybody in Iran right now. But it seems that, that there seems to be a complete global realignment with this where we used to have kind of a competition and cooperation within democracies. And I feel like we're moving towards a competition of autocracies. What are your thoughts on that?
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A
So we are in a moment where autocracies are working closer together. People don't realize that Russia is economically dependent on China now and Russia is not doing well. It's a failed state, it's a kleptocracy. And they had to call. That's why they had to call North Korean troops in to help them. That's not a good sign. A well run military, everything, all the institutions are hollowed out, ravaged by corruption. So they're working together more closely because they're weaker individually, many of them. That's the thing we have to realize now. The Trump administration marauding around the world is really significant and awful because we have this thing where parallel to destroying the rule of law at home, the goal has always been to advance is very important in this, to destroy any adherence and allegiance to democratic internationalism, to visions of international relations where diplomacy is diplomacy, not like shakedowns and thuggish moves. Marco Rubio has made himself the agent of this thuggishness. The instability you see is hugely increased by the United States acting in this lawless fashion. A lot of this is economically oriented. They want to plunder. I have a quote in strongman from 2019 and Trump, this thing about buying Greenland or getting Greenland is old. And Trump started talking in 2019 about getting Greenland. And Mike Pompeo, this is the quote in my book. As climate change proceeds, that precious minerals, of which Greenland has many will be liberated. That's why they want Greenland. And we saw also in Venezuela, they got rid of Maduro in exchange for supposedly being able to exploit Venezuelan oil. And it's all about the oil companies. And so there's a history of this also in Iraq under more democratic leaderships. But right now the plunder aspect is really important because that's what they do. That's what the Axis in World War II was about, it was about plundering as well as the Holocaust. And we always have to think about plunder and self enrichment. And that's why they're doing so many deals with other autocrats, all of them lawless, including Saudi Arabia.
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Oh, yeah. Is it a part of the personality type for these strong men? Hitler came in, Germany had economic problems, and they felt ashamed for World War I. And he ignited this nationalism. But then he just couldn't help it. And then he had his sights on all, you know, on conquering and Trump America and even Stephen Miller, you know, during that Madison Square Garden rally that they had leading up to the 2024 election, a lot of America first, America only type language. And then immediately we start expanding to their abandoning. And I think what you say intentionally weakening the population. And is that a personality trait of this megalomania where it's just. They get. It's like a shark in the water. They get a little taste of it. And I, when Trump, I saw him on Fox News, Ruth, after the Venezuela thing, and you could tell he was like Pavlovian's dog. He was just. Or Pavlov's dog. He was salivating on Fox. And he said, I watched it and it was like watching a movie. Our military was so fast and violent. It was incredible. And I thought, oh, God, now he's gotten a taste of this and he's going to be off of his decorating projects and now he's going to be turned on by this military might because he seems like he has a short attention span to me.
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Trump.
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And now he seems to be advancing, you know, globally, everywhere.
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Well, yes, and this is when they make unforced errors, because there's this whole process where first they surround themselves with sycophants and loyalists and they get rid of anybody who's going to tell them anything objective. And so they start over time and again. In our case, it's just happening real quickly. They start to believe their own propaganda, they start to believe in their own genius. And then their megalomania is just totally out of control right now. But you know what's interesting is the Venezuela thing is actually connected to the ballroom, because, in fact, when Trump had a recent meeting with oil executives and somebody from Exxon spoke out in a very. He was very disturbed because Trump was meandering and wandering and he interrupted the meeting, which was supposed to be about Venezuelan oil, to wander to a window and start talking about his ballroom. Because the ballroom is about donors and more money. Coming in to him and his ego. And so it's actually all connected. It makes sense from the demented, very particular autocratic mentality that he would interrupt a meeting about plundering the oil of Venezuela. He feels so powerful because it did go off beautifully in terms of military operations. It was perfect and it was well rehearsed. It was, you know, like perfect. I've studied military coups and stuff like that. It was really well done. But he feels puffed up because of it. And so of course he's going to wander to the window and start talking about his ballroom, which made the executive of Exxon very uncomfortable. And now Trump is saying, well, Exxon's not going to be involved, so it's a whole cycle.
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B
Yes.
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A
And then he's very upset that somebody pointed out that, you know, he's maybe not as focused, shall we say, as he could be. And now they're going to be. He has to take revenge on them.
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B
Regarding the ballroom, he always says something super interesting. He says, it's going to be great. We're going to have the inauguration in there. And we will have drone proof ceiling and bulletproof glass. And he keeps projecting.
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Yes.
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To the inauguration.
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And, and that's. So I have some quote in Strongman somewhere that they're. What, what motivates Strongman is fear. They're always worried about. They know people hate them and they always are worried about people who are going to go after them. And that's why they build these palaces, they build these bunkers. And the White House has become Trump's bunker. It's become his world. And that's why he wants to expand it and redo it and put his own name on it. And so it's very telling that when he's projecting something which is illegal because he can't have a third term, that he would be talking about making it drone proof and bulletproof. And fear dictates almost everything that autocrats do. Usually, again, this fear builds slowly because they've been doing this incrementally. Trump has done everything so fast and he knows perfectly well what people think of him. And that's why he is conjuring the idea of his own safety. His own safety. And self preservation motivates autocrats more than anything. They will even prolong wars. Netanyahu has always. Everything he has done is motivated by self preservation. If they have, if they. So I'll give you an example, a regular politician, if they are under investigation, they don't want to run for office because the journalists will start Poking around, right? If you're an autocrat, you feel compelled to run for office so you can get into power and shut down the investigation. And a list of people who were under investigation when they ran for office, Berlusconi several times, Trump three times, Putin and Netanyahu, and I'm sure there are others. So this is because of their fear. And they watch what happens to other autocrats. And it's really interesting. A Russian analyst said that Putin watched 201112 when he had a lot of protests going on against him. He kept watching the tape of what happened to Gaddafi, who ended up in a hole in the ground. And then he was executed because he had a 42 year long dictatorship. And Putin kept watching this, this footage and he was like, very. And then he did a crackdown on Russians. So they watch what happens to others, what they get away with, but also when it doesn't go well because they're motivated by fear.
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B
Did you see this week? You know, I think it's safe to say that Trump lives in a literal bubble, in a virtual bubble. I mean, he is always around sycophants. He's great. Everything's Trump branded. And he goes off the reservation to tour a Ford plant and a Ford worker. Not all heroes wear capes. Screamed at the sitting President of the United States. You're a pedophile protector. And Trump, you can see, he says fuck you. And then he flips the guy off. And now this guy has been suspended from his job because I'm sure Trump pitched a fit. But what can you say about the fragile ego and the fear driven autocrat when he's faced and heckled by somebody who in his mind, he would think, oh, this is just a mere peasant. What type of humiliation and exposure and how damaging is something that I would think if you're going to be a big boy and you're running for president, you better have thick skin because everybody's going to say everything about you. Like Barack Obama, people called him the N word, hard R all the time. And he never showed any sort of ruffled feathers. But here we have this thin skinned man. What do you suspect studying all of these types of strongmen? How did that episode impact him?
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Oh, it's huge. He probably thought about it for hours afterwards because the more they surround themselves with sycophants and the more they create these bubbles around themselves, also with real estate, the less they're prepared to have any kind of narcissistic ego injury. And the whole Nobel Prize thing is part of that too. He's still obsessed with the, with, with the not getting the Nobel rights.
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B
He won't stop talking about it.
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A
So what I didn't say in the, the, when I told the story of Putin in 2021, he was in the Geneva summit with Biden and he was exposed to American journalists, some of whom asked him really hard questions. And that I could see him like being extremely rattled by this because nobody would do that in Russia. You can't, right? He's killed. He's had journalists killed. He doesn't have open press conferences. And that's why he sat there afterward. And he looked really rattled. You can't tell. But I've studied him for years and that's why I wrote that night, that I think he could do something reckless because any kind of confrontation is a narcissistic ego injury. And what is the response to that? It is repression. Repression.
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B
God, that's absolutely terrifying. So the strongman, you know, during Trump 1.0, he had energy. He has a non stop type of personality, like an Energizer bunny, you know, he campaigned nonstop. It seemed like he just had oodles and oodles of injury, I mean, energy. Now there is reporting that his staff have told him to look less sleepy in meetings. And there are cracks in this machissimo facade. The strong man, from my sides of it, he has physical manifestations of aging on his hands that he's covering up with makeup and he has these cankles falling asleep in public. I've observed, and I'm not a medical doctor, just an armchair stroke expert, if you will, but I've noticed his lip. And it seems like the strong man is becoming frail and weak. Historically, what happens when the strong man is not so macho and strong and alpha any longer?
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A
Well, that's when this whole process of their fear and being more repressive kicks in. It kicks into, goes into overdrive because. And especially somebody like Trump who is really, really so skilled at creating images, right? He's a skilled propagandist and he knows the stakes of him not appearing omnipotent anymore. All powerful. And they're all, remember the fear thing? They're always worried that somebody's going to come and get them. Strongmen don't like, talk about successors because that implies they're not going to be there forever. And they never appoint anybody around them who has any charisma. And so that's why J.D. vance, who's there as a proxy for Peter Thiel and all the techno fascists, but he has no Charisma. He's not very well liked outside the hardcore base, and that's by design, because as they age, as they become more vulnerable, and he knows perfectly well that his body. He's a certain age. And. And. But that they want to grasp onto power all the more. And so I don't think he can. People can. His. His advisors can tell him not to fall asleep, but I don't think he can. He can help it.
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B
Right.
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A
So it's a recipe for grabbing everything you can while you still can.
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B
Have you heard anything about this? You know the. There's leaks that come out of the administration that he intentionally plays J.D. vance and Marco against each other.
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Yes.
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Purposely.
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A
This is called divide and rule.
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B
Okay.
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A
Like, literally everything. It's so crazy.
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B
It's a playbook.
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A
I've been studying this stuff for decades, and it's like, check, check, check, everything they're doing. So divide and rule is when the autocrat pits people against each other, cabinet officials, whoever it is, so that they won't conspire against him. And here we go back to the fear that somebody will. There'll be like a palace coup. And remember, when you're in authoritarian territory, things that seemed unthinkable in a regular democracy, they're not Democrats. Like, he's not a Democrat. He thinks in terms of authoritarian. And somebody getting him. So that's why he pits them against each other. And that's the other thing that autocrats do. It's with. Which happened a lot in the first administration with Trump. It's like a revolving door. Cabinet officials and people come and go, partly because they're never loyal enough, but also everybody has to be humiliated and be made to see that they're dispensable, that only the leader matters. And so if they start getting too much power. And autocrats love to fire people in public or in humiliating ways. So Rex Tillerson, who was briefly Secretary of State, and he was put there because he's a friend of Russia and he is in the oil sector, he learned that he'd been fired while he was scrolling through Twitter in the bathroom. Other real dictators like Mobutu and Pinochet would fire people on television. They'd fire people in public. And so you're standing there at some rally and he tells you that you're fired just to humiliate you. And Trump is an expert in this kind of ritual humiliation, affiliation.
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B
Yeah. So his administration, since the murder of Renee Good, they have. We spoke about this earlier, but they seem to be doubling and tripping down, tripling down. Now they are using straight up Nazi propaganda translated from German to English. And it feels very intentional. It feels like they are taking a victory lap on all of this. And is it intentional? Is this type of use of propaganda to terrorize the public and link it back to does this backfire in a country this big and this diverse?
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A
It is intentional. Government agencies don't message without knowing what they're doing. Right. Trump campaigned on this. He. There's a very interesting campaign video he released in 2024. I wrote about it also for CNN that was done in the style of 1930s newsreels. And there was a frame of it and it came back twice saying that he would be creating a quote, unified Reich with the R capitalized. And again it depicted him as a kind of little bit Churchill, but mostly a Hitlerian figure, somebody who would make America strong again. And there's a whole, we all know Nick Fuentes, the kind of normalizing fascist style rhetoric, dehumanizing people. This was a feature of the campaign. And so now they feel empowered that they're actually doing social media messaging based on Nazi style and fascist style rhetoric. And it's all part of. So propaganda isn't just about getting people to believe this or that lie, even a big lie like Trump won the 2020 election. It's really about changing the way people, people feel about themselves and others and the world. So it's inculcating, educating for a worldview. And the Trump administration and Trump going back 10, we've been 10 years into this now where he's been trying to put forth a worldview where violence is acceptable way of settling differences. He's definitely built a leader cult that's been going on and he's been recycling, he and his associates have been recycling fascist worldviews. And Stephen Miller is really important in this and he's like the, the, the kind of brains behind it and he, and the ideological fanaticism and he's very, he's a very smart guy. He's very versed in the fascist playbook. And if you listen to what he says, a lot of about saving, you know, Western civilization, it's the same stuff that Mussolini said. Mussolini was saying this stuff because before Hitler got into power, that Mussolini. I have stuff in my book about this that Mussolini said the entire white race is. The white civilization is being submerged by. And at the time he said brown, yellow and black people. And so this he was constantly talking about whites being overcome, being extinguished. So it's great replacement theory. Right. And the Administration has made great use of that. And so now delivering these coded messages, meaning all neo Nazis and fanatics will know that they're taken from Nazi rhetoric is part of this.
- [39:55]
B
Now the last question. You've studied all of these authoritarians, dictators, if you will, and a lot of their countries are smaller. They don't have the expansive territory that the United States of America has. They never have had as much diversity as this country has had. And our diversity has really been woven into our culture. If you think about the Statue of Liberty, you think about. I mean, I remember grade school, we're a melting pot. And how difficult is this ambition of theirs? Like Mussolini had the ambition, Hitler had the ambition, with everybody being so spread out. And then you have 50 different states. And then after that, all of these localized governments, just you and I are in New York City right now. You walk down the street and it is a beautiful multicultural experience. Walking two blocks where you might hear three or four languages and you see every shade of skin imaginable and you might see somebody walking around in go go boots and nobody cares. It's no big deal. How big of a swing is this?
- [41:07]
A
Yeah.
- [41:08]
B
For them with this style of country. From your expert opinion, when you think about how small Germany is in comparison, Chile is in comparison, Italy is in comparison.
- [41:19]
A
Yeah. I'm. One of my maxims is never underestimate the American people. And I am an optimist. I think that it will not be possible to dominate and transform America into a white Christian ethnostate. It's not who we are. And the reason they're working so hard right now, also all the anti d EI stuff is because we were on a trajectory to be a world example. We were already a world example of a successful multi faith and multiracial democracy. And that's why they have to work so hard to take it down. But they will not succeed. In fact, the 2022 midterms, we elected more and more people who were firsts to be the first black governors of certain states, the first this and that. And we were on a trajectory, which is also what Kamala Harris represented in her person.
- [42:15]
B
Yeah.
- [42:15]
A
A multi faith, multiracial democracy. And I believe that we will prevail. It may get worse before it gets better, but I believe that we will prevail because you can't erase all of that. And indeed, we are far more complex, far bigger now that poses organizational problems to having a unified pro democracy movement and today often protest. And it's been like this in the United States. Is decentralized. In other countries, you see everybody descending on the Capitol.
- [42:47]
B
Yes, Budapest, recently.
- [42:49]
A
Yes, Georgia. We may have marches on Washington, but it's decentralized. It's community up. And that is actually very effective. And you simply can't take away for hundreds of millions of people this identity, who they are, and a politics that expresses that. So I believe that they will not be successful ultimately, in transforming us into some kind of fascist state.
- [43:18]
B
All right, Ruth, thank you so much. I know for me, it is so disturbing watching the government abuse my fellow Americans. And it's cathartic to know that these guys are not originalists, that they are playing a failed playbook, that they're incompetent in executing it. And I think it helps all of us stay engaged so that we don't descend into nihilism, and that we, like you said, really prompt everybody for voter registration. And we have to have such a turnout that it is too big to rig. So I thank you so much for joining me. I always enjoy it. And please check out Ruth's substack. It's called Lucid. It will be very therapeutic for all of you guys and intellectually intoxicating, I promise. Thank you for joining us.
- [44:13]
A
Thank you.