#Ruth Ben-Ghiat

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Donald Trump has now been impeached twice, indicted twice, but remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. In a recent interview, he vowed to stay in the race even if he gets convicted for any of the crimes for which he’s been charged. "If [Trump] gets back into power, he'll never leave," says Ruth Ben-Ghiat. "He needs to get back into power because he's so corrupt and shut down all investigations.” And while a handful of Republicans have notably criticized Trump post-indictment, the majority of the GOP have come to his defense and echoed his talking points. “The GOP, as you know, I feel they’re an autocratic party operating in a democracy,” Ben-Ghiat tells Ali Velshi. “They have talking points just like the Kremlin does and we have seen everybody use the same language about the weaponization of government.”

[corporationsarepeople]

“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, they will do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

—Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate, Nov 12, 2023

Since the fascists, authoritarians always want to do two things — they want to change the way that people see violence, making it into something necessary and patriotic and even morally righteous, and they want to change the way people see their targets.

And so they use dehumanizing language. And former President Trump is doing both. He's been using his rallies since 2015 to shift the idea of violence into something positive. And now he's starting to use dehumanizing rhetoric, all these groups who live like vermin. And this is what the original fascists did. Hitler started talking about Jews as parasites in 1920.

So by the time he got in, in 1933, Germans had been exposed to this dehumanizing rhetoric for 13 years. And Mussolini literally talked about rats. After he had become dictator in 1927, he said, we need to kill rats who are bringing infectious diseases and Bolshevism from the east.

This matches up with Trump talking about immigrants bringing disease and other such things. So this is very dangerous rhetoric with a very precise fascist history.

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There's a two-part thing that authoritarians do.

First, they change the view of violence. And Mr. Trump, since 2015, he started saying at his rallies, using his rallies and campaign events for radicalizing people. And he started saying, oh, in the old days, you used to hurt people. The problem is, Americans don't hurt each other anymore.

Now he's going into a new phase of openly dehumanizing his targets so that will lessen the taboos in the future. And we see that, in 2025, he's got plans for mass deportations, mass imprisonments and giant camps. So you need people to be less sensitive about violence, either committing it themselves or tolerating it.

And I see that as the reason he's using this dehumanizing rhetoric now, to prepare people.

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This (being a proud election denier) is part of being much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy, because the endgame of election denial is actually to convince Americans that elections shouldn't be the way they choose their leaders, they're too unreliable.

And we're beginning to see this with his allies. Michael Flynn said we shouldn't — elections, we might not even have one. Tommy Tuberville, the senator, said let's not even have elections, or the talk about America is never — pure democracy doesn't work. All of this is part of a campaign of, you could call it mass reeducation of Americans to want forms of authoritarian rule that Trump will give.

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In all cases of history that I have studied in my book "Strongmen," people did not take the various Hitlers and Mussolinis seriously until it was too late.

—Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Nov 13, 2023

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Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

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Top Expert on Fascism WARNS of Trump and MAGA movement’s DANGER to America | Burn the Boats, Meidas Touch

“Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an historian and expert on fascism. She discusses the features shared by strongmen across the world, and what they can teach us about the rise of authoritarianism in America today.” - Burn the Boats

If you want to feel scared and have a sick feeling in your stomach, watch this video. The United States is in danger of an authoritarian fascist takeover.

[kensaidthat]

Stop "Orange Mussolini!"

I read an article in The Atlantic written in 2016 about the threat that "Orange Mussolini" posed to American democracy. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in Fascism, accurately predicted what "45" would become as POTUS. Why didn't more people (particularly political leaders and the media) take her seriously? Had Ben-Ghiat been given a bigger platform, maybe she could have gotten Democrats to regard "45" as the democratic threat that he turned out to be and work harder in getting the "base" (particularly black people in "swing" states) out to vote. Now that we know who "45" is, I hope the Democrats and the media don't make the same mistakes again about him and a Republican Party who is too afraid to confront him. Starting with the midterm elections, Americans need to vote in the masses for people who support American democracy. And as a side note, the Democratic Party should stop undercutting Republicans who support democracy (in other words, Democrats should stop supporting Far Right Republicans who they see as easier to beat in a general election; that tactic doesn't always work). The stakes are high in our upcoming elections, and those who value democracy should take the threats to it seriously, even if it means working with political opponents to preserve it. America's future depends on it.

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Authoritarianism Expert Explains Why Trump Fans Love ‘Daddy’ So Much

Ruth Ben-Ghiat broke down the former president’s effective “manipulation of emotion.” Source link

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Cutting Through: Opposing Trump Must Not Mean Accepting Biden's Crimes

The panic and bullying is starting again. And we should be very frightened of another  Trump presidency. But that should not mean we ignore the massive crimes and failures of Joe Biden. This piece in the latest edition of the Cutting Through newsletter captures the duality. Please subscribe, share, and if you can, support the work being done here.

[pilgrimjim]

"We must learn to forget revenge"—Thinking about Gaza

Israel and Gaza: a time for tears, a time for thought.

Palestinian Christian girl in Ramallah (May 1989). I photographed her on Easter Monday 34 years ago. Does she have children? Are they safe? If we could see every face as an icon of God, peace would come. “[A] contemplative politics will be one that is capable (as seems so unthinkable in public life at the moment) of recognizing and naming our own failure, the hurt done as well as received, and…

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A federal judge in Florida has thrown out former President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which the former president alleged that the network’s use of the term “the Big Lie” associates him with Hitler.

The lawsuit cites five times when CNN commentators and writers used “the Big Lie” to refer to Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent and stolen. The term is generally associated with the Nazis, and the origin of the term is associated with Adolf Hitler’s accusations of wrongdoing against Jewish people.

In dismissing the case on Friday, the judge ruled that the term’s use is opinion, not fact, and therefore not liable under defamation law.

“Trump complains that CNN described his election challenges as ‘the Big Lie.’ Trump argues that ‘the Big Lie’ is a phrase attributed to Nazi Party politician Joseph Goebbels and that CNN’s use of the phrase wrongly links Trump with the Hitler regime in the public eye. This is a stacking of inferences that cannot support a finding of falsehood,” Judge Raag Singhal wrote.

Singhal also wrote that defamation is significantly more difficult to commit against public figures, especially those as prominent as former presidents.

Additionally, he said that just the use of the term “the Big Lie” does not inherently connect Trump to Nazis.

“CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people,” the decision reads.

“The Court finds Nazi references in the political discourse (made by whichever ‘side’) to be odious and repugnant. But bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.”

The exact origin of the term is disputed, but it is generally attributed to either Hitler or Goebbels.

It is most closely associated with the quote, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” often attributed to Goebbels.

The suit cited uses of the term by CNN host Jake Tapper, former commentator Chris Cillizza, and writer Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Trump initially requested a $475 million judgment against the company.

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"Because [Historian Ruth] Ben-Ghiat[, who studies authoritarian leaders,] sees the GOP taking on more of the characteristics of other “authoritarian parties” in thrall to strongman leaders, she’s skeptical the legal challenges converging around Trump will undermine his hold on the party. But, she says, the experience of other countries shows that imposing legal consequences for the misdeeds of authoritarian-minded leaders is nonetheless critical to fortifying democracy. There may be no proof of wrongdoing that can move large numbers of voters in Trump’s coalition, she says, but for everyone else in society, “it is very important to show that the rule of law can hold, that our institutions can do things, that democracy can work.” Ben-Ghiat likens the multiple legal proceedings around Trump to the “truth commissions” established in countries such as South Africa and Chile that cataloged and documented the misdeeds of autocratic governments. “In the short run,” she says, the threat to US democracy “may get worse before it gets better” as Trump, echoed by most of the GOP leadership and conservative media, portrays any accountability for him as a conspiracy against his followers. “But in the long run,” she says, establishing the evidence of any misconduct or criminal behavior through indictments, testimony and trials “that everyone can read is very, very important.” For anyone concerned about upholding the rule of law, Ben-Ghiat says, the choice by so many Republican leaders to preemptively dismiss any allegation against Trump “is just more proof of how important these procedures are.”"

Source

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Strongmen can lose power in stages. That was the case with Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After twenty years of tyranny, his own Fascist Grand Council removed him from power in 1943 for incompetent leadership after the Allies landed in Sicily. Adolf Hitler revived him as head of a puppet state (the Republic of Salò), and he resumed the ruinous war that ultimately led to his death.

Will a wartime erosion of power, jump-started by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin's show of force, eventually take down Russian President Vladimir Putin too?

Seen from the perspective of authoritarian history, this moment stands out as a breach of a system--one of those stress tests that wars can bring--and as an omen of what could befall Putin in the future.

Prigozhin's action reminds us of the fragility of authoritarian power and why such leaders live in fear of being overthrown. It brought to mind a passage from the "Endings" chapter of Strongmen. "The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure. It does not foresee the leader’s people turning against him, from military men he trained to young people he indoctrinated to women he rewarded for having babies."

Authoritarian leaders arrange things to prevent intimations of that failure from reaching their ears. They surround themselves with sycophants who won't tell them the truth about their incompetence and puff up their personality cults and aura of omnipotence. Ironically, this "institutionalized lying," as I call it, only increases their insecurity and obtuseness about what is happening on the ground, in their ministries and among their regular and irregular armed forces.

The longer such individuals stay in power, the more defensive and paranoid they become, which is why they multiply their bunkers and informants, monitoring everyone and trusting no one.

While Putin blames the West for threatening Russia's cultural and moral integrity, his greatest fear seems to be the prospect of the Russian Federation imploding from within, repeating in miniature the breakup of the USSR that so scarred and shaped him.

All autocrats fear being overwhelmed by "the mob" that could come for them. But Putin's particular obsession with tropes of disintegration speaks to his terror of everything falling apart, of the center not holding, of the power verticals he has so carefully assembled crumbling.

--Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Some Strongmen Lose Power in Stages,” Lucid

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By  Bob Brigham

Raw Story

July 02, 2022

Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat provided fascinating insight — and a terrifying prediction about future Republican Party violence — when she was interviewed by CNN's Jim Acosta on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that on Jan. 6, Trump was "irate" when the Secret Service would not drive him to the Capitol and lunged for the steering wheel of his presidential limousine.

Acosta began that interview by noting that weeks before Hutchinson's testimony, Ben-Ghiat had informed his audience that Trump had to go to the Capitol for the phase of a coup where the new order would be announced. Acosta described her analysis as "almost clairvoyant."

"And we have since learned that Trump did try to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, but his Secret Service stopped him," Acosta said. "Ruth, what is your reaction to everything we learned this week, including this new CNN reporting that seems to back up what Cassidy Hutchison was saying?"

"I'm really disturbed, not surprised, about the role of violence," the New York University professor replied.

"It was very telling to me that Trump said chief of staff Mark Meadows, who seems to have been like the control center of this operation, she said that when the violence broke out, he didn't seem concerned at all, and he didn't seem perturbed, and that's because violence was part of the plan. It has to be in a coup," she explained.

"That's also why Trump wanted the, you know, weapons detectors removed, and so the other thing that stands out is that not only did he want to be driven there to the Capitol and be at the head of this, you know, violent thug march into the Capitol, but Ms. Hutchinson testified that there were conversations about him entering the chamber," she continued. "And what that says to me is first, you know, you've neutralized the presidential chain of succession. They were going to do something to Pence, they were hunting Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi, speaker, and so he was going to also have fixed the problem with the electoral counts because Pence wasn't there, and then he was going to declare himself at the head of this violent mob in the chamber as a legitimate president, and that's where that phase of the coup would have ended."

"It's extraordinary what we're learning from these hearings," she said.

Acosta asked Ben-Ghiat to compare Trump to other leaders she has studied.

She said Trump, "and his party are behaving in a desperate way, and when autocrats think they're going down, they will do anything -- and we've seen Jan. 6 -- to stay in power. What's really extraordinary is how Trump, who came from outside politics, put the GOP in such a state of authoritarian subjection and discipline that the whole party is completely compromised. We're learning from these hearings just how many people were involved," she said.

"And unfortunately, I think we can expect more extremist behavior, aggressive behavior from the party because they are acting out of fear. They're guilty, and their coup failed, and they've been exposed to the world by these hearings, and so they are -- they're in emergency mode," Ben-Bhiat warned.

Watch:

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Why Trump is always praising dictators

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