Where have all the strongmen gone, long time scrolling? Where have all the strongmen gone, long time ago? Where have all the strongmen gone? Gone to posting, everyone. Oh when will they ever turn off their phones? Not anytime soon. Trump on Truth Social, Modi on Instagram, Bolsonaro tweeting from a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Miami.
Today we’re looking at the new strongmen at the top of our political circuses. According to our guest, strongman-whisperer historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, they’re of new breed. They’re not the steampunk fascists of 100 years ago. They’re not Cold War autocrats, installed by the CIA. These guys are posters. They do not need to seize the means of production. Their goal is to disrupt the production of meaning.
Julian’s interview with Ben-Ghiat gives us a great opportunity to look at the strongman fetish in conspirituality, and to rate the top male influencers in our book on a scale of 10 Gaddafis.
Show Notes
Twitter’s moderation system is in tatters
Who is the 'Trump of the Tropics?': Brazil's divisive new president, Jair Bolsonaro— in his own words
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There's a link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode and every other episode.
And you might have noticed a new format type episode from us popping up in our regular feed.
We're calling it the Conspirituality Brief.
Just on Tuesday, I published an interview with Dr. Theslim Annali-Virgi, who teaches psychology and ethics here in Toronto, and we talked about whether Jordan Bloody Peterson should still be allowed to call himself a psychologist while his college reviews his practice of clinical Twitter harassment.
Well, I mean, that's what I talked about.
My guest was a little bit more diplomatic.
But we're going to be doing these short reports on a more regular basis, allowing us to engage the news cycle in a more organized way and to keep it brief as well.
In Spirituality 136, Virtual Strongmen with Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
Where have all the strongmen gone?
Long time scrolling.
Where have all the strongmen gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the strongmen gone?
Gone to posting?
Everyone?
Oh, when will they ever turn off their phones?
Not anytime soon.
Trump on Truth Social.
Modi on Instagram.
Bolsonaro tweeting from a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Miami.
Today, we're looking at the new strongmen at the top of our political circuses.
According to our guest, strongman whisperer, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, they're of a new breed.
They're not the steampunk fascists of a hundred years ago.
They're not Cold War autocrats installed by the CIA.
These guys are posters.
They do not need to seize the means of production.
Their goal is to disrupt the production of meaning.
My interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat gives us a great opportunity to look at the strongman fetish in conspirituality and to rate the top male influencers in our book on a scale of 10 Gaddafis.
So Julian, we're recording as the dust is settling in Brasilia after 400 Bolsonaristas were arrested and locked up for storming and trashing the Capitol buildings under the pretense of protesting a stolen election.
Where have I heard this before?
The new, also former, President Lula da Silva was inaugurated the week before, surrounded by a tableau of Brazil's diversity.
Indigenous, black, trans, disability rights leaders all were there.
In response to this vandalism, to this attack, he quickly federalized the city's policing to squelch it.
He didn't let the rioters just get back in their pickups and drive back to Kentucky and hope the FBI didn't come knocking.
He zip-tied them all.
Then he goes to the press room and he says, these people we call fascists invaded the three powers.
He's talking about the palace and the Congress and the judiciary buildings.
Like real thugs, all these people will be found and will be punished.
Democracy demands that people respect institutions, these vandals who might be called Nazis.
So Lula doesn't mince words, even though he often sounds on the verge of breaking into a Pablo Neruda poem.
Now the day before, Bolsonaro was photographed munching on a drumstick in a Miami KFC, looking a little green, maybe with long COVID.
He'd actually fled 48 hours before his term concluded the week before, and Democrats are now calling for his extradition.
But it looks like they might have to send an air ambulance, because Reuters is now reporting that Bolsonaro has since been hospitalized with abdominal pain.
So, Julian, you've got this great interview with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat about strongmen coming up on the show, but why don't you tell us a little bit about some distinctions she might make between January 6th, 2021 in Washington and January 8th, 2023 in Brasilia.
We're watching the stuttering rise of neo-fascist movements around the world, and they echo movements going back over a century, and they definitely inspire the conspirituality movement.
But not all strongmen are the same, are they?
You know, a lot of the analysis I'm seeing about what just happened in Brazil frames it as being Influenced, inspired in the Trumpian style, denying losing the election and fomenting an indignant uprising against the new president.
But that said, I think the more recent political history of Brazil and the reality on the ground is quite different than the U.S.
And Bolsonaro's background as an army officer who had been accused in the past of planning terrorist actions whilst in the military does draw a strong contrast with Bonesburg Donnie.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, but in Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book Strongman, she starts from a three-part historical delineation between the fascist takeovers of the 30s, like Mussolini and Hitler, and then the Cold War-era military coups that we've touched on, in which the U.S.
tended to back right-wing dictators so as to oppose the Soviets, in a long list of Latin American, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries.
And then that's followed by the more contemporary style of hijacking democracy using the authoritarian tactics exemplified by, say, Silvio Berlusconi or Putin, and yes, Trump, and of course Steve Bannon's Dream Party guest list, Orban, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Duterte, and other far-right figures who are not yet in power.
But today, we're going to explore how conspiritualist influencers are themselves either channeling, emulating, or otherwise being themselves influenced by the strongman archetype.
Yeah, we've known about this fetish for a long time, and it's not surprising given the soft authoritarianism of New Age philosophy and, you know, the century-long love affair that this whole subculture has had with cult leaders.
We have to remember that the Austin crew held a prayer meeting on the eve of the 2020 election
with Mickey Willis reading a poem.
It was his own, it wasn't Pablo Neruda.
JP Sears got a photo op with Trump, Lori Ladd, and Elizabeth April called him a lightworker.
And when Putin invaded Ukraine, the Love and Light crowd said that he was attacking bioweapons
factories and he was disrupting child trafficking rings.
Of course.
And recently, the Anons are saying that Andrew Tate has been taken down by the Deep State.
Of course, he's saying that too.
Yeah, of course.
He's such a threat to the established power structure, right?
Absolutely, yeah, he threatens so many things.
So, is the conspirituality strongman fetish really about wielding actual power in the world?
I mean, I think that's the thing that we're grappling with so often, and I want to refer to Julian Field, especially through QAnon Anonymous' Man Cave series who, I mean, he keeps making this great point that when Tucker Carlson and other people tell men to tan their balls to get back at the man, to develop higher T, he's not telling them to mount an armed revolt.
He's not telling them to organize.
In, you know, labor unions.
He's not telling them to actually seize control of electoral politics, and that's because either Carlson doesn't believe that material solutions to problems are possible, or, you know, he's too comfortable to really commit to the revolutionary changes he says he wants, or he uses as fodder for his audience.
Yeah, he's telling men to tan their balls to get back at maybe the trans, I don't know.
Or at feminists, or at wage depression, or at environmentalists, or yeah.
To make a bold stand against being metaphorically castrated.
I mean, that's all on-point commentary regarding the role that these people play.
I do want to add that with people like Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok rallying parents and religious fundamentalists to really vicious and incendiary anti-LGBTQ moral panickery, That Tucker is more than happy to amplify.
They're all fine with the armed militia members showing up outside drag shows, and they go to bat now, like immediately.
It's turned into something they don't even pause before they start rebutting the accurate analysis of how they contribute to stochastic terrorism, as happened after the Club Q attack.
But as with January 6th, I think they contribute to the worldview that stokes the flames of right-wing domestic terrorism, but just as our conspiritualists have already shown, mere political agitation is not as monetizable as tapping into whatever the associated cultural vulnerabilities are, and then these pseudoscience products and services can be framed as the solution.
So, to that end, the so-called crisis of masculinity that we seem to be hearing about a lot lately from the right, it's something that strongmen historically also exploit.
And so, it's right on track with supplement sales and the ball tanning gambit.
Right.
Even if the classic old-school strongmen would have nothing to do with supplements and ball tanning.
I mean, they might, I suppose.
That wouldn't be their primary product.
Their primary product would be an actual vision, an actionable vision of a new nation.
Yeah, I mean, much like Liver King is saying, look, I'm this manly man who's going to return you to the ancestral way of being.
And the way we're going to do that is by eating all of this raw meat and animal organs.
And oh, by the way, if you can't go hunting yourself, I've got these supplements that are the desiccated You know, the essence of these things that you can just buy from me and take and then you can look like a dude who's on steroids.
The most incredible thing to me about his shtick was how so many of his reels would be shot outside of his, I don't know where he lives, but some suburban home.
It's like San Diego or something like that or it might be in Arizona.
But he would just be sort of dragging the sledge behind him on the sidewalk in this suburban, you know, with manicured trees and lawns and stuff like that.
It was so bizarre.
Yeah, I think he would even go down to like Venice.
If it's here in LA, he would go to the boardwalk and have that whole apparatus that he's working out with in this very kind of performative way.
Super weird.
Well, I took a tour through our galley because we just handed in the last round of proofs for this book.
Finally!
Amazing, yeah.
And I wanted to take another look at all of the dudes that we've covered sort of through this lens.
Now, I would say that the most toxic masculine Machismo-wielding dudes on our beat are Tim Kennedy and Aubrey Marcus.
Now, Kennedy, if people remember, is the... how would we describe him?
He's like... Well, he's somewhat tangential or like he has just a small overlap, right?
Because we know of him in this way because he was interviewed by J.P.
Sears as Sears was beginning his spiral into becoming a full-blown red-pilled conspiritualist.
He's a former UFC fighter, he's a former military guy, he now does tactical training that people like JP Sears are happy to avail themselves of to learn how to be paramilitary dudes.
Yeah, so they work out together and they talk about freedom and they talk about dangerous freedom and peaceful slavery.
That's right.
I mean, Kennedy is aggro, he's armed.
He doesn't really strike me as a leader.
Let's say, too, we shouldn't leave out that he's the guy with the tactical van that was showing up at the George Floyd protests ready to, you know, snatch people off the street.
Yeah, there was one sort of, I guess, insinuating Facebook post that he put up that showed him loading up into an unmarked van and heading off to Portland.
Fuck around and find out kind of thing.
He strikes me as somebody who just loves the flag and following orders a lot, and that is not really...
Sort of harmonious with the strong man who loves to make their own rules.
I don't think that Kennedy is too much into that.
He strikes me as like super disciplined and ultimately obedient.
Aubrey Marcus can really strut and flex, but he also has to show how open his heart chakra is for his brand to fly.
Like he cannot lose the women from his wellness market thing.
He has to be vulnerable.
He has to talk about how his butthole hurts after a toxin purge.
He has to bow before the divine feminine that he sets up to objectify.
He has to do, like, you know, poetry and kind of, like, very banal films.
Right before the take that is most authentic of the poetry, he has to have one of his wives come and lay her hand on his chest, right, so that he can come from the heart.
Yeah, let's be accurate here, he's got one wife.
But yes, his partner comes and says, make it come from the heart.
And he nods.
Yeah, so that's a very particular kind of strong man, I think.
Then there's J.P.
Sears.
I mean, steroids and sucking up to Trump do not a strongman make, I don't think.
Well, it's strongman adjacent, right?
I mean, one of the distinctions I think we need to make here is that there's the lineage
of eugenics, right, of Eugene Sandow and really being a strong man in a liberal sense.
And then there is the strong man, uh, dictator type who tends to actually be just like, just like the gurus who claim to be enlightened.
They tend to all be completely undisciplined gluttons, uh, with, with, with just like indulging all of their appetites while projecting this image of being somehow the superior, uh, embodiment of masculinity.
Yeah.
I mean, going down the list, we have Mickey Willis as well.
And I think that he'd like to be a strongman or strongman adjacent, but only if he was in charge of his own lighting.
Sayer G, eh.
Kind of nebbishy.
And even somebody like Keith Raniere, right?
Like, short, kind of nerdy, not good hair.
He'd make a terrible fascist.
Fascists don't use neuro-linguistic programming.
They also don't wear knee pads while they're playing volleyball.
They don't.
Then there's the mixed martial arts set.
Joe Rogan.
He's obviously a fighter.
He's obviously well-trained.
He would lose listeners, I think, if he used his muscle in some sort of aggressive way, if he assaulted people.
There was recently this video circulating of Dana White.
I don't think Rogan could get away with that culturally.
So, Rogan is kind of muted, I would say, as a strongman in the sense that his brand is based on dialogue, on parasocial warmth, or at least the appearance thereof, and the attempt to at least not totally alienate women listeners.
Now, we haven't on the podcast or in the book covered Andrew Tate, and his connection to conspirituality is tenuous.
There's only his delusion that he's escaping the Matrix, which I think is like inside out.
I think he is the Matrix that people are escaping from.
A lot of the reporting on this is still unclear.
I think it's clear that he is a huge piece of shit, but in strongman terms, his vision of power is really just stunted at about 15 years old, right?
Bugattis and porn.
You know, this is not somebody who aspires to, you know, change history.
And while he views himself as coaching young men into alpha states, I don't think he really cares about them beyond, you know, subscription money.
Yeah, I mean he's stuck at the notion that being a pimp is somehow cool and manipulating women is something he can make money off of by teaching other aspiring pimps how to do it in the new sort of digital economy of online porn.
Really grotesque.
I don't think a Bolsonaro-type strongman will ever be lauded in conspirituality land.
This is another sort of test.
And I think this is because the demographic actually has a lot to protect.
Most of the men that we cover on the podcast are just too interested in self-care, in self-preservation.
This makes them risk-averse.
And I also think That the hyper-individualism of the self-help project and this need to market aspirational strength will probably always just block the extreme risks that strongmen actually have to take.
Like, you know, Bolsonaro just spent his entire three or four years in power saying, fuck it, I'm gonna get COVID eight times, then I'll have half my colon removed or whatever happened, and still I'll personally go out and chainsaw the Amazon.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have to make a distinction here.
We talked at the top about, and you suggested this idea of sort of, in a half-tongue-in-cheek way, ranking the strongmen that we're going to talk about in terms of Gaddafi, right?
So Gaddafi is like the benchmark, and we're going to say, how many Gaddafis do we give each of these people?
And I think in terms of global leaders who are exemplifying the strongman archetype, there's a case to be made and we can say they're better or worse, they're more embodying of that archetype in some ways than in others, and some of them are throwbacks to an earlier era of what that kind of authoritarian power looks like.
But the conspiritualists that we've been doing a rundown of right now, I think they rhyme with the populist, the right-wing populist trend that's rising, that has been rising in the world for the last 10-15 years, in that they themselves are appealing to a fascist throwback to when men were men and women were women and we were pure, right?
All of the stuff that we actually get into quite deeply in the first part of our book They themselves are not aspiring to some kind of political power, but we can see that because of this affinity for that kind of romanticization of a long-lost sense of masculine purity or back-to-the-land spirituality, they therefore find themselves resonating with figures like Trump and able to get behind a weird affinity for someone like Putin or even
Because it's in the water somehow, right?
Yeah, and I'm of two minds, because on one hand, no, they don't really have political aspirations, although I think we should keep our eye on Dr. Zach Bush, because if there's anybody who is well-connected enough and probably mainstreamable enough, it would be him.
You know, they don't express political aspirations because the industry is narcissistic.
It doesn't really point itself towards any kind of collective action or the difficult work of party politics.
You know, none of these people are interested in building coalitions.
They want to have affiliate networks, but they're not going to, like, do deep canvassing and try to convince people to, you know, vote.
They want people to buy their shit.
But that's one of the reasons.
That's one of the reasons we saw them slowly turning toward Trump in 2020 because, sort of in an inevitable way, because that's Trump.
Trump is not interested in service.
He's not interested in coalition building.
He's not interested in ideology.
He's interested in taking being a reality TV show and a fortunate son, real estate tycoon,
to the next level of power and influence and getting away with whatever the fuck he wants
to get away with, right?
Yeah.
I mean, being of two minds, what I mean by that is, is that like on one hand, these folks
not having political aspirations gives me some kind of comfort.
On the other hand, I would imagine that given their widespread mainstream social media reach, it's almost as if the people that we cover soften up the center-right or the vaguely liberal population in yet another sort of instance of, well, this is just the way the world works and I suppose that You know, self-care really is the most important thing.
They're part of a depoliticization project, right?
Yeah, it's a depoliticization project.
It's also a project of finding these transitive properties that can move across different categories, right?
So if body sovereignty becomes the rallying cry of the anti-vaxxer, and not living out of fear becomes a reason to reject quarantine measures, then It's not too big of a stretch to start saying, well, the woke agenda is really about imposing some kind of controlling ideology that makes us live in fear or that forces us to accept the victim playing of these minority groups, you know, whatever the rationale becomes.
One of the things that I was interested in figuring out is whether or not the people that we follow have stomach for people who are sort of not really coherent with the New Age part of the right-wing agenda, like Bolsonaro.
So I searched the Telegram accounts of Northrop, No mentions of Bolsonaro, none whatsoever.
Bow House wife, Del Bigtree, Amber Sears, the whole team.
I went deep.
No mentions of Bolsonaro, none whatsoever.
Many of these folks have posted favorably about Putin.
And not even the QAnon accounts that I follow on...
Telegram seem interested in Bolsonaro.
So, there's a QAnon Plus channel with 44,000 followers.
They haven't posted about Bolsonaro since...
since the 23rd of December.
QAnon Warriors channel, 56,000.
No posts about Bolsonaro.
QAnon Fighters, 59,000. No Bolsonaro.
The only influencer, he deserves a medal, I think, for posting in favor of Bolsonaro,
who's in our sort of milieu.
We've covered him before, is David Avocado Wolf.
He's the only Bolsonaro fan who has been featured on our podcast.
There he is in Telegram cheering on the rioters.
And so, my unscientific hot take is, With regard to strongmen, can spirituality folks fantasize about violence, but not too much violence?
I think it's a movement that needs its authoritarians to perform strength more than to exert it.
And to me, this suggests that they're not really that dissatisfied with the status quo.
Like, everybody wants a revolution, but these guys really want to make it happen through supplements and ball tanning and reciting A Course in Miracles.
Well, you know, everybody wants to change the world.
Yeah, I'm picturing what kind of medal we might give David Avocado Wolf.
It's giving me some funny images in my mind.
But, you know, who was publicly cheering on the writers as well is Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon Tweeted out a picture of what was going on in Brasilia with the caption, Freedom Fighters.
Right.
So he's very, you know, and obviously we know that he has ties to Bolsonaro, he has ties to De Calvario, who's sort of like the Dugan figure in Brazil, who's part of that traditionalist religious stream that Benjamin Teitelbaum told us about.
But speaking of sunshine and tanning, there was an interesting wrinkle, if you'll excuse the term, in the unfolding story of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who's using authoritarian tactics to fuel his presidential ambitions.
We know about his cruel anti-immigrant stunt of flying 48 migrants from San Antonio, Texas to Martha's Vineyard after having cruelly lured them onto the planes with brochures and false promises of work and easy immigration papers.
That's amazing.
By the way, yeah, by the way, allegedly spending over $600,000 of taxpayer money to do so.
Which he's being investigated for, as well as DeSantis' don't say gay and anti-CRT in schools legislation and his recent anti-woke speech.
This is all red meat to the base.
But this new development pricking up our ears is that DeSantis appointed a certain Brett Weinstein to something called the Public Health Integrity Committee, which of course sounds totally legit, right?
This announcement in early December was a little overshadowed by DeSantis, who had previously celebrated COVID vaccines and bragged about the high vaccination rates in his state, but now calling for a grand jury investigation into what he called wrongdoing on the part of pharmaceutical companies and government officials who promoted those same vaccines.
Well, no, I missed that.
So he's actually, he's actually, okay, so now he's investigating pharmaceutical companies because vaccines have killed people in Florida and not his own policies?
Absolutely, absolutely.
He's also tasked the Florida Surgeon General with investigating cases of people dying suddenly, which of course must bear no relationship to the To the schlock anti-vax documentary.
That flip actually is quite strong, Manny, to not just sort of like avoid the issue of your own incompetence in COVID response, but then to go on the attack and to actually, yeah, that's pretty bold.
Yeah, we've always been at war with East Asia, right?
I'm for vaccines, yes.
Aren't we great?
I've done such a good job.
Oh, hold on a second.
There's going to be a grand jury investigation because some heads need to roll about the fact that these vaccines are obviously killing people.
Right.
But what of this overshadowed public health integrity committee?
Well, it's made up of seven people.
And of course, it has a well-tuned balance of epidemiologists, vaccine researchers, and science communicators.
Wait, sorry, that's not right.
It's made up of seven individuals who are all either involved in the Brownstone Institute, which was founded in 2021 to oppose COVID restrictions and promote anti-vax rallies and endorse disproven cures, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
So unless they're involved with the Brownstone Institute, they're affiliated with the Great Barrington Declaration.
Which is a widely criticized open letter advocating lifting quarantine measures and pursuing a three-month herd immunity strategy.
This was published in October 2020 by the American Institute for Economic Research.
Now, that is a libertarian think tank that's also involved in climate science denial.
Yeah, absolutely.
We won't break down the entire committee today, but Weinstein is joined by people like Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor of medicine who's also worked as an economist at Rand and the Hoover Institution, both conservative organizations.
He was one of the three main authors of that great Barrington Declaration.
Other members include a mix of doctors and researchers like Christine Stabel-Benn and Joseph Freiman, who both argue that COVID vaccines are very dangerous and ineffective, as well as Stephen Templeton and Stacey Beth Hogue, who are opposed to masking and other attempts to mitigate infection rates.
Now as for Brett Weinstein's qualifications and why he should be on this committee, it's really hard to say.
He did just recently make a return visit to Joe Rogan podcast, so maybe that's what qualifies him.
After being himself the vector for infecting Joe's listeners with the anti-vax, pro-ivermectin, triple-damic of Pierre Cori, Robert Malone, and Peter McCulloch, So amongst other things, on this recent visit, Weinstein and Rogan actually spent 11 minutes discussing what turned out to be a fake tweet that they thought showed just how nasty and hateful pro-vaxxers are, with Joe taking a moment to explain very earnestly to Brett that as a result of his podcast gig, he's become completely immune to bullshit.
Like, he can just smell it a mile away.
Okay, so, but the tweet didn't happen.
The tweet actually was fabricated.
And there were many obvious things about the tweet that meant that it couldn't possibly have been a tweet.
Like, it was too many characters.
Can you imagine if we spent 11 minutes talking about something that didn't happen to an audience of, like, How many million people?
Oh, I think he gets about 11 million per episode.
And just like breaking it down in detail psychologically about what this showed about the person who made this tweet.
Amazing.
I would be so ashamed.
I would go into the ice bath for a very, very long time.
I wouldn't come out.
I think he may have done that.
And to his credit, Joe Rogan did, you know, tweet something saying we made a mistake and we do apologize.
But look, bottom line here, Brett's appointment by DeSantis to this ridiculous committee could actually endanger both public health and public health officials due to he and his esteemed associates inability to distinguish misinformation from actual science.
Okay, but let's get back to our theme.
What kind of strongman vibes do you get from DeSantis?
I mean, I get the sense that he is ideologically ruthless, he's managerial, he's gonna work any angle he can flex, but there's also something awkward and fragile and socially inept about him.
I mean, if he is charismatic for some people, it's in a Ben Shapiro sense of always having something acerbic to say.
Always trying to look sure of himself.
And then teaming up with Weinstein is not a strongman move, because it shows that he's ready to capitulate to intellectuals, even if they're pseudo-intellectuals.
And that's what anyone invested in culture war topics has to do.
And then Weinstein himself has pretty low strongman points, especially with the hat.
I'd give DeSantis 3 out of 10 Gaddafis.
I'd give Weinstein 1.
If we think about the big grandpappy of all of this, Mussolini, I don't know that he's necessarily not awkward and fragile and socially inept.
The sticking out of the jaw that became his kind of characteristic move, it's all very, to anyone who has any kind of empathic intuition or relational intelligence, it's very
obvious what you're seeing.
You're seeing someone who's massively overcompensating, just like with Adolf Hitler, you were seeing
someone who was hopped up on amphetamines and with a small man complex just like frothing
at the mouth.
Right.
So I don't know that what we would think about as confidence and genuine charisma, it's not
like these people are Elvis Presley or something.
They're all pretty strange characters, pretty odd characters who probably wouldn't be at the top of the pecking order were it not for some sort of sleight-of-hand authoritarian magic trick that they'd figured out how to enact.
Yeah.
I think we do well.
I hear a lot of people on the left saying, ah, DeSantis will crumble on the national stage.
I think we do well not to overlook That he went to Yale, he went to Harvard Law, he's an ex-Navy Lieutenant.
He's the favorite of the gang of misfits who just held McCarthy hostage for 15 rounds of voting on the House floor.
I mean, of course, they're loyal to Trump, but some of them have publicly said they think DeSantis is the next guy.
In these moves that we've just been discussing, using the machinery of government to do strongman theater And creating pseudoscientific alternative facts committees is par for the propaganda game of authoritarians.
I don't think he goes full Gaddafi, but he's more than happy to rub elbows with Meloni and Orban, right?
He had Meloni come to CPAC when it was in Florida.
He's more than happy to rub elbows with those folks, and he has reportedly invited libs of TikToks A right-wing homecoming queen, Chaya Reichick, to stay in the governor's mansion anytime she's in town.
I mean, she was basically fanning herself on Tucker Carlson at how honored she felt and how she was blushing at this invitation.
You know, Julian, I'm really glad that we're going to cut to the interview now because I'm just finding myself very confused and I want to hear from a proper historian about who the fuck the strongmen are and what they do.
It's great.
By the way, listeners, I've heard it.
It's fantastic.
Stay tuned.
We turn now to my interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
She's a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders.
I asked her about all of that, as well as how it overlaps with our topics here on the podcast.
Her book is titled Strong Men Mussolini to the Present.
It's a pleasure.
Your book is titled Strongman Mussolini to the Present and it's about authoritarian power.
You cover a rogues gallery of dictators in an intersecting analysis of their tactics and psychology.
So people like Mussolini, Hitler, Gaddafi, Mabuto and Pinochet.
Tell us just off the top here, what are the characteristics of a strongman leader?
So I see strongmen as a subset of authoritarians, and if we want to define authoritarianism, it's really at its most basic an illiberal political system where the executive overwhelms the other branches.
And in my book, I have case studies of these, I call them personalist rulers.
That's a kind of political science category.
And these are people who, their personal financial, legal, and other needs, ideological obsessions, come to set the nation's policy.
It's all about them, right?
So that's one criteria I used in picking who I featured.
The other is the kind of use of machismo and masculinity as a kind of tool of political legitimacy.
So it's not just, you know, Mussolini and Putin are stripping their shirts off and we can laugh at that.
It's when masculinity, that kind of toxic masculinity, how it intersects with corruption and violence and propaganda to become what I call a tool of rule.
So the strongman is somebody who consciously uses that.
And so those were, those are the things that I decided constituted the strongman.
Yeah, I want to come really close to home at first here.
You set the following scene really well, this is toward the end of the book, and it's during the George Floyd protests.
It's the weekend of May 29th, 2020.
There are military helicopters buzzing racial justice protesters around the White House.
5,000 National Guard troops have been summoned.
There are other heavily armed personnel with no discernible uniform insignia who are
doing things in the crowd.
On that Monday, Trump denounces the protesters in a televised address from the Rose Garden.
He then threatens to use the US military against what he calls professional anarchists
and violent mobs.
Then there's that extraordinary scene of the flashbangs, the tear gas, the mounted police being
used to clear Lafayette Park so that he can stride through it.
I just watched the video again.
He has an entourage of guys in black suits behind him, like various allies from the government.
You know, for a lot of that walk, they're like 10 feet behind him.
And then he stages that now infamous photo op, sort of awkwardly holding up a Bible in front of St.
John's Church.
And the reporters are a fair distance away and they're sort of yelling questions.
And his only answer is, we have the greatest country in the world.
So I know that Donald Trump is clearly not quite in the league of some of the other figures in your book, but to what extent does the authoritarian strongman Venn diagram overlap with what we saw from Donald Trump?
Yeah, I'm glad you isolated that moment.
So the book is, one of the things I wanted to do in the book was show how authoritarianism evolves over a century.
So it's not a work of comparative politics.
I'm a historian, I'm not a political scientist, so I'm not comparing Trump with Hitler.
Although, you know, the chapters are structured so that, like, the tools of rule go over a hundred century, sorry, over a hundred years.
So you can see what's changed and what stayed the same.
And for sure, Trump is a superb propagandist and he uses some of the same techniques that fascists use.
But today things work a bit differently.
You have, you know, you keep elections going.
You don't have, as often outside of communism, a one-party state.
The impulses and personality of somebody like Trump are autocratic.
And Trump was different from any other president of either party because his goals were autocratic goals.
He wanted to make money off the presidency, he wanted total control, and he had no regard whatsoever for human life.
And so that scene where he, having studied the Cold War military dictatorships, Pinochet's Chile was my example, where the military is turned on the population and terrorizes and tortures And when I saw what he was trying to do,
it was a combination of co-opting the military, have them parade with him,
and General Milley later regretted it, as did Defense Secretary Esper,
and also the psychological warfare of the unmarked troops.
It's very diabolical, gathering together all these uniformed people who nobody,
like the post office had, like these troops that nobody knew practically existed,
and gathering them all there unmarked, it is a very smart psychological warfare mechanism,
arraying them as a spectacle.
That was a very fascist thing that he did there.
And then, you know, his attitude towards protesters and other occasions, he said, you just shoot them in the legs.
You know, you shoot them.
He he truly has an autocrat's view of how you should treat dissenters.
You just do away with them.
And he used his rallies from the beginning of his campaign in 2015 to kind of seed the idea in his followers that protesters should be roughed up, should be treated with violence.
And so there's a direct There's a direct line of him radicalizing people through his rallies and throwing out protesters to what happened in 2020.
But there we have the attempt, a very authoritarian attempt, to use the military on the domestic population.
And so I wasn't alone.
When he had the helicopters buzzing, protesters and people, journalists and diplomats and people who had served in authoritarian contexts, they were calling out on Twitter, oh, this is looking like X regime.
And so that that was a very telling moment.
Yeah, that is that is really noteworthy that people who are familiar This is something that we cover on this podcast a lot.
noticing, this is different. And this is indicative of that kind of style. You know, it makes
me think about how, this is something that we cover on this podcast a lot, how central
to the QAnon conspiracy theory was this sort of prophesied climax in which the blood drinking
satanic pedophile cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elites would be publicly executed. And even
as all of the QAnon predictions failed one after another and January 6th then didn't
lead to Trump being reinstated, some QAnon influencers were still actually live streaming
Biden's inauguration in the hope that it would culminate in a righteous military coup and
summary executions that of course would be televised. So I'm just curious to ask you,
do you think that these kinds of preoccupations in the MAGA supporters are indicative of them
actually longing for a kind of authoritarianism?
Are they being programmed to want that by the way Trump uses propaganda?
What do you think?
Yeah, that's a great question.
In a way, there's lots of this research showing that, for example, Karen Stenner, Showed that in the states about 30% of the population is Has authoritarian impulses which are normally expressed in Non-political realms like how they view parenting how they view hierarchies in society many of them let's say you know male authority must be absolute and they can get activated and
If the time is right.
And here we have, I call it, the meeting of personality and circumstance.
And it happens over and over from Mussolini's The First, where there's a situation in society and often, and this happens over and over, it's when society has gone through a lot of social progress quickly, or it's perceived as quick.
It could be workers' rights, it could be racial emancipation, gender equity.
And it makes, let's say in a European-American context, white males very uncomfortable and white people in general.
And we had eight years of Barack Obama who admitted women to combat, legalized same-sex marriage.
So we were ripe for this.
And so in those circumstances where people feel that the ground is slipping under their feet and they don't like what's happening, a demagogue can appear.
In this case, it was Trump.
And what Trump knew how to do, because he was a marketer, and a lot of these guys are either journalists, mass communications, they come from TV, they know how to scan the marketplace, political marketplace, and offer themselves as a solution.
And they see there's a void of people who are not being fulfilled by the current offerings in politics and can be radicalized.
And that was, Trump was like, you are the forgotten, but you're forgotten no longer.
I will save you.
I will.
And he elevated them.
He told them he loved them.
He made them feel special.
And that's what, you know, the fascists did with veterans.
So there's over and over in history that this happens.
And so in that sense, these are people who are primed in a way to um follow a demagogue and then some of them are just like fulminated by the charisma by the communicative skills of these men so it's it is important that a lot of them have a background in journalism or um
TV, because they speak to, they use media in a different way than other kinds of politicians.
They have these direct, unmediated channels through rallies.
They all know how to use the latest media technologies, like Mussolini had newsreels and Hitler was screaming with the radio.
Modi used holograms and he Instagrams his life.
You know, Trump had Twitter.
And so they present themselves and they dialogue with followers in a different way.
And so all of this leads people to get swept up into this feeling of bonding with the leader in a way that's totally different than other kinds of politicians.
Yeah, it's so deeply related to a theme that we come back to again and again on the podcast, which is charismatic influence and how, you know, we deal a lot with conspiracy theorists who gather or actually people who prior to COVID had gathered really big audiences as wellness influencers or as yoga teachers or as spiritual leaders of some kind and then through the course of COVID they Got more and more radicalized, more and more political, more and more on the conspiracy track.
And how that capacity to use media in such persuasive ways and to build a cult of personality around how they're communicating.
There seems to be so much overlap there with authoritarian leaders.
I wanted to ask you if If it's generally part of the strongman playbook to rely on propaganda and conspiracy theories, and if so, does the exponential impact of the technology that we now have available through the internet and social media, does it smooth the road to authoritarian power?
Yeah, it's like it soups up these dynamics that are old dynamics.
And that's why, believe me, it would have been a lot easier to have this book just be biographies, you know, so one chapter on Mussolini, one chapter on Hitler.
But I wanted to do it structured by the tools of rule so that the propaganda chapter you see, you know, it goes from the 20s, 1920s to 2020, and you see that conspiracy theories, victimhood complexes,
Again, what we were talking about, the charismatic ruler, they've stayed the same, but when you get to social media age, some of the, well let's put it this way, social media accelerates certain fundamental principles of propaganda, and one is repetition.
And ideally you have to have the same message repeated with small variations which we call like now segmentation of audience right?
But the Nazis did this they called it synchronization that all the different areas of of life the schools and they all had the same message but in slightly different forms for different audiences.
So you see how social media Hugely, you know, soups this up.
The other is that, you know, in old days, you would have a newspaper, and you would consume the news.
And you would see, let's say, Mussolini, he would make a speech, and then it was in the newspaper, and then it became a graffiti on a building, like official graffiti.
So it circulated And you had like the equivalent, you could say, of memes, but people were not also producers.
So here, every time we share and we add an emoji or we add a meme, we are not only consuming propaganda, but we're putting our own twist on it.
And so all of this makes the destructive elements of radicalization, cult dynamics, they all work far faster.
And I've been very concerned.
About Trump, who's, again, he's one of the most skilled propagandists of our times.
People always laugh when I say that, but he truly is.
Where he is now, because he's not in the best of, you know, his popularity is declining, he's taken some hits.
So he's reaching out to the QAnon people.
And how smart is that?
If you think the way, if you've immersed in these guys far too long, you take an existing cult and you try and transfer their loyalties onto you.
That's pretty smart.
So I think, I don't know if he's going to continue to do that.
I know Michael Flynn is a very dangerous individual also doing his part, and he's still allied with Trump.
But you have to have the dynamism too.
You have to have new audiences discovering you.
So I'm worried about that intersection of Trump and QAnon right now.
Yeah, me too.
I wanted to mention perhaps a slightly tangential reference point, but maybe it'll resonate with you.
Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book called The Denial of Death.
And in this book, he has a chapter where he posits cult leaders As gaining a kind of charismatic power in front of the group by violating taboos, by showing that he's unafraid to do things that they would be afraid to do.
He psychologically describes it as they're communicating an immunity from the fear of death that everybody else has, from existential anxiety.
You write about the strongman as simultaneously positioning themselves as men of the people.
I have a quote by Becker from a different book in Strongman.
who can do whatever they want and get away with it.
Do you see that as having cult-like overlaps as well?
Oh, totally.
I have a quote by Becker from a different book in Strongman.
The essence of authoritarianism is getting away with it.
And when Trump, you know, the biggest red flag there ever was, end of January 2016,
when Trump said, I can stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I won't lose, wouldn't
lose any followers.
And he was saying he was capable of violence.
So the transgression.
And that he was above the law and that he'd be loved loved because and and people would be devoted to him because he is transgressive.
It was all there and extraordinarily and I was following this very closely and very upset about this.
Within the two weeks after he gave that speech um the the GOP courtship of him's um like accelerated and Jeff Sessions endorsed him and then Jimmy Fallon uh invited him on to his show and like tussled his hair so he had the media he had the GOP so you know what bigger red flag could there have ever been that this was an authoritarian personality saying that he was going to
You know, elicit violence and be loved for violence and breaking the rules.
So the cult, the man who is above all other men, is extremely important.
And every successful authoritarian has this dual thing with their cult of personality.
They have to be relatable.
They are the man of the people.
In fact, you know, even, and this crosses into communism, of course.
Xi Jinping, like literally, they're tweeting all the time, Chinese state media, that he's the man of the people.
And yet he's also, of course, above everybody else.
And they are too powerful to be sanctioned by anyone.
So, and this is also why January 6, so if you have that reputation, you're the cult leader.
If your followers think that you are in grave danger, They become very volatile and they can be manipulated.
So January 6th, it was many things.
There were many people involved in it, many conspirators, but it was a rescue operation of a cult leader by the followers.
And he called them and he said, please, you know, help stop the steal.
And what was the steal?
The steal was his reputation.
And if you don't fight back, you're not going to have a country anymore.
It was oblivion without me.
So it all worked very well and off they went and we know the rest.
I feel like as we continue for these last few questions, we're going to be in this realm of... Paradox is sort of the gentle way of saying it, right?
It's hypocrisy, it's just ridiculous kind of upside-down reasoning.
Populism, I think, advertises itself as being an anti-elite movement of the people.
Yet you write about how elites will often buy into what the populist, or faux populist we might say, authoritarian leader is selling, and you call it the authoritarian bargain.
Tell us about how that functions.
Yeah, I don't use the category of populist much because so many times there are populist parties that have been very important.
But what happens almost every time, Brexit was a perfect example.
Or Matteo Salvini's League Party, which ended up taking money from Putin.
Or what was Brexit?
Brexit was also funded by kind of dark money and billionaires.
And so it's a faux populism half the time.
It's very sad.
This is, you know, modern disinformation.
And this is the Kremlin information warfare playbook.
The key is to get people to act against their own interests.
But they think they're doing it in the name of the people.
So Brexit was just a terribly tragic example where people were misled and things were done for the benefit of elites.
And yet it was presented as a liberation, you know, sovereignty, all this stuff.
And there are many, many other examples where secessionisms, all the things that the Kremlin is fostering.
So There can be populist movements that are authentic, but with the right-wing populists, all too often they are allied with very powerful interests and taking money secretly from those powerful interests.
And look at Trump, he presented himself as a populist and he was, you know, indebted to Russia and China, you know, heavily leveraged of loans from Russia and China and money investments from them.
So what kind of populist is that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, one thing I've noticed about this current wave of strongmen, because you talk about them in a few different phases, so if we talk about Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Trump, most recently Meloni, who I want to ask you more about a little bit later.
They all seem to recognize one another.
It's kind of like they're crime bosses in their separate territories.
They have these sort of uneasy alliances, but there's also a twinkle in the eye about how we're really getting away with something here.
You talk about, in an odd historical twist, how Muammar Gaddafi, who became the 42-year-running dictator in Libya, And that Libya had been a former Italian colony under Mussolini, but then later Silvio Berlusconi comes to power and he finds a way to form an alliance with Gaddafi and famously embraces him publicly.
More recently, I'm thinking of that really diabolical exuberant handshake between Putin and MBS at the 2018 G20 Summit, while Trump was sort of like, Almost looking on in the background like the fool they were playing him for.
That is how I interpreted it.
How do you make sense of these sort of international alliances between these types of figures?
Yeah, I wanted to have a whole chapter called Partners.
There just wasn't room for it, the way the structure ended up being.
But the key to understand those things is that these strongmen are entirely transactional beings.
opportunistic and transactional they have no moral code they have no respect for anything but power and money and so they will ally with anyone so that you know this is the same as when we're talking before about um finding devoted followers they will say anything to anyone they will be what you need them to be And in power relations, they will do whatever the deal is they need to do at that moment.
And so you get also the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Then that didn't go very well.
You get, you know, Mussolini and Hitler, and then Hitler invades Mussolini.
You get Putin and Erdogan, who they're best friends, and then they're like almost going to war.
You know, it's just, that's how these guys are.
And it's kind of, it's why you should never appease them.
There's a lot of lessons like for, you know, dealing with Putin now, and you also can never expect them to negotiate in good faith.
But it's also why they're chaos agents because they're not, they will just change and do the opposite of what they were doing before if it suits them.
There's an enduring trope in the MAGA lexicon.
That I know you're familiar with.
It's of the corrupt deep state.
And the deep state has a leftist agenda.
But we know that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were involved in the White House all the way back to the Nixon and Ford administrations, even though they'd rise to their strongest influence during George Bush II in his eight years as president.
And then on a related note, you write about how Roger Stone, Who's CV also goes back to Nixon and Paul Manafort headed up an infamous political lobbying firm in the 1980s.
Talk about deep state and deep involvement over multiple administrations.
Who did Roger Stone and Paul Manafort work for and why does this matter in terms of understanding their leverage with Trump?
So I, who come to American politics and studying global things, I didn't know this until I researched the Trump part of the book, that the people, and it alarmed me, the people Trump had around him had been wrecking democracies and trying to take down democracies for decades.
He had this team of people, you know, in the foremost, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, Who had a lobbying firm that was known as one of the torturers, lobbyists, because they worked for dictators.
And this is so relevant to what ended up happening in our country on January 6th.
One of their first big jobs was they were hired by Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippine dictator, because he was not doing well and he tried to have a corrupt snap election in 1985.
And so they were hired to oversee this fraudulent election that was going to, like, deliver him a big victory and then he would be on a better footing.
And it didn't work, but that's how long they've been doing election fraud.
And then, you know, Manafort worked for Putin.
Right.
So these are the people he had around him, as well as Bannon, who's, you know, a kind of psychological warfare operative, far-right operative who loves every dictator he's ever heard of.
And that really disturbed me because there's this, there was this fiction always that Trump was just a clown, the same thing people used to say about Hitler and Mussolini.
That Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
That he just makes it, and they do make it up as they go along to some extent because they're opportunists.
They're always looking for the best angle for what benefits them.
But there's also, this is what was frustrating to me, you know, during the Trump years, people did not see the danger because they had professionals around them who had years of experience doing exactly what, you know, how to wreck a democracy.
That's who we had around him.
Michael Flynn, who's, again, he's one of the most dangerous people in America because he unites You know, military, psychological warfare, QAnon, Christofascism.
These are the people he has around him and the people who he elevated after he lost the election to do to try and pull off this coup.
And they've been doing this.
They were ready for this.
They've been doing this stuff for like 40 years.
Yeah, yeah.
And if we don't know that, we think it's just, even today some people, you know, you hear them say, well Trump is just a blunderer and so is January 6th didn't work out.
It's like, no.
I mean, it didn't work out, but he had professionals around him and it almost worked.
Yeah.
If we take Bannon, Flynn, Manafort and Stone, it's like this is what they'd been training for their whole lives to get into this kind of position with Trump.
Yeah.
And then you have Bannon at CPAC right after Trump gets elected talking about how he's there to dismantle the administrative state, that there are these buckets of work that need to be done in order to advance basically his agenda.
Really extraordinary.
And then, of course, all four of the people that we've just been talking about were convicted and jailed and then pardoned by Trump.
When you when you look at the patterns of history, it's very disturbing because Mussolini ended up pardoning all the black shirt thugs who beat up and killed, you know, socialists and progressive priests.
As soon as he declared dictatorship, he had like an amnesty for all these like thugs.
And Pinochet, he not only pardoned human rights abusers, but this is like totally diabolical.
He pardoned people who were concealing The human rights abuses in the bureaucratic record, so he pardoned the concealers.
And then here comes Trump, and he's pardoning people.
And of course, promising pardons is a way to get people to do stuff as part of the corruption.
Now, I said we'd come back around to Giorgia Meloni, recently elected prime minister in Italy.
I noticed so many masculine reference points in her campaign.
Perhaps you did too.
Is she the first female strongman leader?
Can we say that?
I would say that in the conclusion of Strongman, I said that it's inevitable we're going to have a female-led authoritarian state.
And at the time I was thinking of Marine Le Pen, but I was actually looking at my epilogue.
There's a paperback edition from 2021 that covers January 6th, but I also update Putin and some other things.
And there I mentioned Meloni.
I singled her out because her party was rising.
But she is a very interesting figure because You know, she's petite and blonde, and she's doing her gender-washing thing, I stand for women, but she, and she calls herself a conservative, but she is a hardcore neo-fascist.
She's been a militant since 15 years old, and she absorbed, I'm going to write about this, she absorbed a lot of Mussolini's style.
And she's careful to have, when she speaks to Italians now, especially since she's been elected, she's careful to seem reasonable.
But I urge everybody, it doesn't matter if you don't know Spanish, find this YouTube video of her talking to a far-right party in Spain, the Vox party.
She is screaming like I've only seen Mussolini and Hitler scream.
And she's a demagogue.
And that's who she is.
That's her essence.
And she had to be this very tough woman to make her way up in this neo-fascist party, which was intensely sexist and patriarchal.
So she's a very, even more than Marine Le Pen, She's a very tough woman and in original fascism there was this idea of the virile woman.
And of course they used virile for the man because they didn't have another conceptualization.
And she's like the virile fascist woman.
It's super interesting.
Yeah, the hearkening back with, what is the slogan?
The fatherland is in there somewhere.
Family, God.
God, family, fatherland.
Something like that.
And then renaming the party as Brother, is it Brothers of Italy or Brotherhood of Italy?
Yeah and she was one of the founders and she tellingly the symbol has a flame in it and the flame is the original flame symbol of the original neo-fascist party founded like when fascism died right then they had to keep it going and unlike in Germany they allowed a legal neo-fascist party and that flame some people when they founded the party it was like I think 2012 Some people wanted to take the flame out to kind of whitewash it more.
And she refused.
She was the one who refused and said, no, we're keeping that flame in there.
So that's who she is.
Incredible.
It's extraordinary.
And when she was elected, you know, there were people here and elsewhere were saying, don't worry about it.
You know, government's come and go and she's not going to really do much.
And I was like, no, no, no.
Because every experience, Of an extremist in power, even if they don't last long, really changes the culture.
Look what's happened in America with Trump.
Yeah, I noticed too that as she was sort of on her way to power, I was reading articles about her sort of defending of Orban or the back and forth that there was some kind of initial sort of willingness to run interference for one another.
Can you tell us about that?
An underappreciated thing is there are these very strong transnational fascist, or whatever you want to call them, far-right networks.
And Orbán has made Budapest a hub of these networks.
And one of his major clients is the GOP.
And that's why they're trotting there all the time.
They're having CPAC there.
They're inviting him to come.
And she is very Maloney is also very close with Orban.
And right before she was elected, she gave an interview to the Washington Post.
And she said that they asked her about the GOP.
And she said, well, we were basically she said their kindred spirit with her party.
And that their struggles are things that we talk about.
And it's the same with Orban.
And I have a newsletter, a sub stack newsletter called Lucid.
And I've written a number of articles about these talking points about demography and race and that they recur.
They're the same among her party, Orban, the GOP.
And you're going to see more and more of this kind of standardization of talking points.
Um, and, and we, we Democrats in the world, we don't have anything comparable to spread our docking points the way that they do.
Yeah.
I mean, it seemed like the, the, you know, the whole Francis Fukuyama thing that, that the 20th century had represented the sort of, Coming to fruition of the arc of moral freedom bending towards justice, I think on the left we got a little perhaps complacent in the Western world that there was an inevitability about it all.
Yeah, I think so.
And he actually reviewed my book in the New York Times in a negative fashion, including the focus on leaders.
And then just in the last few months, he published something in the Atlantic where now he espouses all the things that, including the focus on leaders.
And that authoritarianism, hey, maybe it is really a problem.
He's decided, without acknowledging that I was right and he was wrong to criticize my book in this terrible way, which kind of doomed its fortunes in some ways, because I have a very different picture of history.
I have a resistance chapter, and so that's very important to the book.
And the book shows, you know, how peoples have suffered terribly and I needed to write about torture and psychological warfare and, but that people have managed to resist.
And the last chapter is the endings, how these guys fall.
So it's, it's not a totally pessimistic book, but it, it also, you know, says we need to understand these impulses and take them seriously.
If we're going to get through this.
Yeah, it's a fantastic book that really goes a long way towards helping us understand exactly what it is we're dealing with.
By way of closing, how can we participate in sort of turning back the tide of this rising authoritarian tendency in the world?
What do you think?
I think that much depends on where you live.
But if you live in a place where like America, you still have rights.
I mean, they're trying, of course, on the state level, trying to make protests a criminal act.
And we all know what's, you know, trying to get us to forget about the memory of slavery.
There's all kinds of things we all know are going on.
But it's very, very important to use our to exercise our democratic rights to vote.
And to do nonviolent protest, which is a great engine of history.
And, you know, it's really significant that the two largest protests in American history were the Women's March 2017 and then Black Lives Matter.
And over 20 million people participated in Black Lives Matter events, which were multi-generational, multi-racial, was a true mass movement of protest.
And So, that's very important.
And then looking at, you know, the very, look at this inspiring new protest in places that it's very difficult to protest, like Iran.
Or China.
And in fact, 2019 was a record year for protest around the world.
So while we do have the narrative, and it's true, that authoritarianism is spreading, so is resistance to authoritarianism.
And I'm planning to write more about that in the future.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
Your support and feedback is always very much appreciated.
