Mass Shootings, Baby Formula, and Increasing Threats
Nick Hauselman is out for the day, so Jared Yates Sexton jumps into the white supremacist shooting in Buffalo, the Right's weaponization of White Replacement Theory, and how deteriorating material conditions will only increase the chance of more violence. Then, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present author Ruth Ben-Ghiat stops by to chat about growing authoritarianism.
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Nick Halsman is taking the day off, so I am here manning the store.
We have a long-awaited interview coming up later in the show with Ruth Bengayat, the author of Strongman.
Mussolini to the present.
I urge you to stick around for that.
Unfortunately, before we get to that interview, we have to talk about some really serious stuff that has transpired over the past few days.
On Saturday, as you are all aware, a radicalized gunman walked into the Top Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, carrying a semi-automatic rifle, scrawled in racist slurs,
And shot 13 people, killed 10, and in the wake of this absolutely terrible tragedy, a manifesto was discovered, surprise surprise, that espoused white supremacist conspiracy theories.
This is something that Nick and I spend a lot of time not just studying, but warning about.
How the fear-mongering among right-wing pundits, personalities, and politicians inevitably leads to this type of violence.
And how this environment of conspiracy theories inevitably radicalizes people to the point of carrying out violence.
I heard about this shooting and was Disgusted by it, but also frustrated by just the emerging story of it all, this cycle that we've all now lived through so many damn times.
One of these domestic terrorists will shoot up a public location, take the lives of people needlessly, There'll be a few days of coverage.
We'll see the same stories over the next few days.
We'll hear about the community's healing while all of these corporate networks just sort of glom onto them and shake their heads and perform this sort of public mourning and wrestling with the issue without actually talking about what's going on.
And then it'll happen again.
And to look around over the past few days, not only is it going to happen again, it already happened.
We've already seen other shootings around the country in the wake of this shooting.
It gets to be so much that you can barely even keep track of it.
I am.
Terribly upset by this.
You know, part of this job with this podcast and the things that I research and the things that I write.
is about trying to diagnose these problems and warn people about the possibilities of not just cultural wars, but also this radicalization process that happens during these cultural conflicts and how the right wing is ensuring that these things are going to happen more and more.
I mean, these aren't even relegated to just sort of the fringes of online communities anymore.
This stuff is ripped directly from the headlines of Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, mainstream Republican right-wing media.
And it's only going to get worse because that's the only thing it can do, particularly with circumstances being what they are.
In a previous episode of The Weekender, I detailed the history of proto-fascism, fascism, and neo-fascism in France.
And one of the things that I talked about in that episode, and if you haven't already, go back into the archives, go to patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
One of the people that I talked about in this, it was a French influencer named Renaud Camus, who has trafficked this idea of the Great Replacement Theory or white genocide.
This is the idea that not only inspired the shooting in Buffalo, but also the terrible massacres in New Zealand with the Christchurch shootings.
This idea of white genocide.
Camus, of course, has said that declining birth rates among white populations are being taken advantage of by populations of color.
Camus makes the argument that this is a reverse colonization, that immigration is systematically and purposely going into these so-called Western powers and replacing the white populations with people of color.
This idea of replacement has been latched onto by the far right.
The white population is being replaced by populations of color has been used by right-wing ideologues and demagogues to argue that this is an intentional weaponized strategy that is being carried out by sinister quote-unquote international forces.
If you've listened to this show and paid halfway attention to anything, you know that all of that is a dog whistle to say that this is a Jewish conspiracy.
This is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
The idea is that Jews, like George Soros and other sinister puppet masters, are manipulating people of color and using immigration crises to overwhelm and flood Western nations and replace those populations with Controllable populations of color.
And by the way, like all of this is always predicated on some of the most racist, disgusting ideas imaginable, because the idea is that people of color are so much more manipulatable and controllable than white populations.
White people are just they're too strong and they're too courageous and they're too independent.
And as a result, they have to be done away with.
And they have to be replaced by these populations of color.
Of course, as we've talked about extensively on this podcast, and I've written about extensively in my works, this is a three-sided conspiracy theory.
There are the Puppet Masters on the outside of the country, in this case a George Soros or a quote-unquote cabal of Jewish Puppet Masters, who are working in league with these populations of color who don't understand that they're being manipulated or controlled.
And they're also working hand-in-hand with internal traders, liberal traders.
In this case, the entirety of the idea is that the Democratic Party, Joe Biden included, and other operators within the Democratic circles,
are using replacement in order to solidify their political control and usher us into a sort of satanic post-christian society that will take away the guns of the people, throw the true believers into camps, and basically create a new transhuman society.
That's literally what they believe.
Now with all of this, I want to reiterate something I've said in the past.
If you believe this, if you actually hold these things to be true, if you actually truly believe that there is an international conspiracy That is coming for your guns, that's going to throw you and your family into FEMA camps.
Or, and some of these people push this stuff constantly, this is a reoccurring white supremacist paranoid idea, that they're coming for your wife, for your daughters, for your friends, that they will sexually assault them, that they will hurt them, that they will torture them, that they will turn them into slaves, while trying to destroy the Christian religion in America itself.
If you truly believe that, then you think that you are at war.
You have to believe that literally anything that you do is in an effort to stop this.
You are either part of the problem or you're part of the solution.
If you truly believe that this despotic plan is being carried out, well, then you have to act.
Which is what all these shooters believe.
They're lashing out and they're killing people because they believe that they're involved in an invisible war.
The shooter in Buffalo, shooter in New Zealand, and so many other shooters, you've got your Dylan Roofs, you've got your guy in El Paso, it never ends.
These are angry, aggrieved, young, white men Who believe they are powerless and alone.
And when they find right-wing conspiracy theories, they believe that they have found the answer to why their lives feel the way that they do.
And they feel the calling.
They have to participate in an invisible war.
Now, I've talked about this before, but I want to go ahead and put this in context that we can spend a little bit of time with and we can start to understand how current events play into all of this and how these different sort of ideas and these narratives and these mythologies come together to create this modern, nightmarish scenario.
The White Genocide Great Replacement Theory idea is predicated not just on fear of open society, multiculturalism, pluralism, tolerance, you name it.
Behind these sort of conspiracy theories and ideological ideas, there's always a socioeconomic material basis to what's happening.
In this case, one of the reasons we're seeing this type of violence, and also why we're watching a stolen Supreme Court getting ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, has a lot to do With the fact that birth rates are declining.
And I want you to remember for a second that we're talking about a capitalist system.
And you've seen this before.
I mean, one of the weirdest things about capitalism or hypercapitalism is the incessant need to grow at all costs.
And if you don't grow, and if you're not growing, then you're dying.
That's the way capitalism chooses winners and losers.
You know, you've got places like McDonald's, which are of course one of the leading corporations in all of the world.
One of the most dominant businesses in the history of humankind.
And yet they always have to continually grow and grow and grow.
And if there is a setback, it's seen as almost a fatal moment.
In this case, we are watching a drop-off of birth rates.
And this Roe v. Wade situation is not just about reestablishing evangelical patriarchal control or the domination of women.
It's also whether intentional, conscious, unconscious.
It is seen among these circles as something of a remedy in order to quote-unquote restart The birth rates in this country.
Now there's a really interesting kind of a perspective on this, and I say interesting, but I actually mean kind of repulsive.
There's this article that came out in the New York Times.
It was written by Matthew Walther.
It was called overturning Roe will disrupt a lot more than abortion period.
I can live with that.
I still think it's.
Absolutely amazing that the New York Times.
You know, stepped up to the issue of overturning Roe v. Wade and women's reproductive choice and said, yeah, let's go ahead and publish this article by a straight white man to talk about how he's OK with overturning Roe v. Wade.
I mean, that is.
It's quite a decision.
I'll just leave it at that.
But Walter, in the middle of this pretty repulsive screed, he's talking about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and some of the consequences that maybe people on the right are not considering.
I'm just going to read a quick couple of passages.
Quote, this has always seemed to me a great failure of imagination.
That failure must now be rectified.
With the appearance last week of a draft of what seems to be the forthcoming majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Americans are being invited to consider what it would mean to limit a country in which abortion, though not illegal everywhere, is likely to be banned or heavily restricted in as many as 28 states.
For opponents of abortion, it is worth asking what might follow from overturning Roe, apart from the joyful fact of hundreds of thousands of additional babies being born, and how we should reckon with the arrival of any apparently unwelcome social or economic circumstances.
Social or economic circumstances.
I just want to reiterate that for just a quick second.
Because one of the things that Walther is sort of starting to tiptoe up into in this article is something, despite his own efforts, is actually true.
Which is that one of the reasons why we are experiencing declining birth rates in this country
Is because this country has been so overtaken by capitalism and so bought and corrupted by private wealth that we no longer make it affordable to have children, to have families, to procreate, to follow the lives of our parents and grandparents because the so-called quote-unquote American Dream has completely collapsed.
That lie of having it better or being able to establish your life or live something even approaching this mythological middle class existence is unattainable at this point.
Because all of the methods of doing so have been completely co-opted by concentrated capital.
The safety net has been all but utterly shredded.
Everything costs more and the only way that we're able to subsist is just to continue amassing on more and more private debt.
Quick aside, it shouldn't surprise anybody that the New York Times just came out this weekend against student debt forgiveness.
In case you want any more proof of what is happening or what perspective the New York Times is coming from.
Now while they're in this article, in order to answer that concern, he says, For the same reason, opponents of abortion should commit ourselves to the most generous and humane provisions for mothers and children.
Paid family leave.
Generous child benefits.
Direct income subsidies for stay-at-home mothers.
Oh, my skin just curled a little bit.
Single-payer health care, without being Pollyanna-ish.
No matter what we do, in a post-Roe world, many children who would not otherwise have been born will live lives of utter misery, and many of our fellow Americans will be indifferent to their plight.
If we wish to dispel the noxious argument that only happy lives are worth saving, we will have to be honest about the limits of social policy and private charity in regulating the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.
Now, the idea that the overturning of Roe v. Wade should lead to the construction of a new safety net which makes it more affordable and realistic to have children, I mean, it's an argument.
I still think Roe v. Wade shouldn't be overturned because I actually value the autonomy of women to make their own reproductive choices.
You know, because that's the right thing to do.
But at least this is an argument.
The problem here is that Walter is coming to this issue from an absolutely ludicrous point of view.
His belief that a social safety net could be constructed by using this authoritarian impulse is not just naive, it's pretty embarrassing.
Because concentrated capital and concentrated wealth will not allow that to happen.
Neoliberalism and hypercapitalism have so captured government that it cannot create social safety nets.
Unless, of course, and this is part of this right-wing evangelical white supremacist movement, they would create a social safety net for a preferred race or group.
In this case, White people.
Particularly evangelical white people.
Otherwise, neoliberal captured governments can only offer austerity and the punishment of the state through law enforcement in order to protect property and maintain order.
Oh, and they can also bail out corporations and banks that are getting ready to fail because of aggressive malfeasance.
That's all they can do.
The right-wing national conservative movement is seeking to gain control of the apparatus of power in order to start using the functions of government in a right-wing evangelical patriarchal mode of almost socialism.
I talked about this a little while back, but it basically would be the same thing that they're doing with white farmers now.
Only now it would be pushing an evangelical patriarchal home in which basically the state would be trying to re-emphasize the patriarchal concept of the family.
Where the father goes in and works in a factory and manual labor gives over his body while the wife takes care of the children.
That mode of existence is exactly what they're trying to recreate in order to re-sanctify industry to try and jumpstart an economy that could roll back neoliberalism, but still maintain some of the components of neoliberalism, including austerity and the punishment and protection of property by the state against everybody else.
Basically to prioritize the white evangelical patriarchal experience.
Now in that same vein, I want to take a moment and talk quickly about this baby formula shortage that's taking place in the United States of America.
This is another failure of the capitalist order that the right wing is completely twisting and turning into something else.
Those who haven't maybe followed what's happened here and they just looked up and they were like, what?
There's a baby formula shortage.
What's going on?
To get everybody up to speed, what has happened here is that the baby formula industry, like almost every industry in this country, has been so captured and monopolized by just a handful of corporations that a setback with one of those corporations has now created a literal crisis of life and death when it comes to the nation's infants.
In this case, it's a company called Abbott.
And Abbott, which has been producing this baby formula, has experienced outbreaks of bacteria, including babies getting sick from imbibing this formula.
And the reason why this has happened, much like all these other products around the country that end up going bad and killing people and making them sick, is because the company just didn't give a shit enough to really take care of its product.
To continually inspect it, or update its machinery, or quality test.
And on top of that, neoliberalism and hypercapitalism has so dismantled the regulatory bodies that this stuff just got worse and worse until it finally had to stop.
And now we have reached this shortage, which is an actual crisis.
Now that is what's actually occurring.
Those are the material conditions on the ground.
Capitalism has failed the people, once again, because profit has been prioritized over the fates of individuals.
So what does the right wing do?
And this is instructive, and this goes back to everything that we've been talking about today.
Instead of dealing with the actual problem here, instead of diagnosing this as a consequence of capitalistic greed, what is done with it?
It's turned into a conspiracy theory.
It's turned into a radicalizing message.
The GOP has reacted to a very real crisis which has resulted from a deficit of regulation and oversight and has resulted from capitalistic greed.
They have reacted to it by blaming Democrats for giving formula to illegal immigrants.
Now this is straight up base level reptilian brain stuff.
It's us and them, which is of course what the GOP benefits from the most.
It is their main weapon in all of this.
Of course, we've now seen Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who is just one of the most disgusting perpetrators of all of this, come out and say, as parents face the nightmare, God, the rhetoric that these people have.
I mean, Abbott is very good at it.
As parents face the nightmare of a nationwide formula shortage, the Biden administration is happy to provide baby formula to illegal immigrants coming across the southern border.
Shameful.
Our children deserve a president who puts their needs and survival first.
To go ahead and make sure that we're all on the same page, the so-called immigration crisis at the southern border is a result of capitalism destabilizing regimes around the world and creating this situation where people are having to move from one place to another in search of better lives and
safety and on top of that represent a cheap source of labor for people like Greg Abbott and the Republicans he represents.
So here we have a situation where Republicans are now saying that the Democratic President of the United States of America is prioritizing the health of illegal immigrants over Americans.
We've seen this a lot in history.
This is what we call a famine plot, and this has always gone hand in hand with revolutions, wars, and genocides.
It's the idea that food, life-saving resources, the type of stuff that you absolutely cannot negotiate with, you have to have, that when they disappear, Then, it's obviously a plot.
It's obviously a weaponized attack on a population.
Famine plots are incredibly useful in inspiring violence and the overthrow of governments and cultures.
Why?
Well, you need food.
You need water.
You need resources.
You need supplies.
You don't have them.
I'll tell you who has them.
Those people right over there.
Let's go take them.
That's a long, long, long standing rhetorical device that is led to just unbelievable amounts of suffering.
Wars, genocides, coups, revolutions, you name it.
This baby formula shortage is not going to be the end of this.
In the next few years we're going to deal with a lot of shortages.
In part because hypercapitalism has reached the point where all of these markets and and all these endeavors are operating at such like a hair's level like width of with a margin of error That one thing goes wrong and suddenly you're not able to do anything.
I mean, we saw partly this during the pandemic, but it's only going to get worse because all of these people are operating at this level.
So we're going to see some of these supply chains start to break down.
That's already happening.
It's going to get worse.
On top of that, we're already facing the specter.
of a worldwide famine.
What's happened in Ukraine with the Russian invasion is going to hamper food production.
On top of that, there's untold numbers of problems with food production, not to mention that global climate change is going to affect food production on levels that we can't even wrap our heads around right now.
When climate change catastrophe really rears its ugly head, we're not just going to watch food become more scarce.
We're going to watch water become more scarce.
We're going to watch land become more scarce.
This stuff is only going to get worse and worse because of the consequences of industrialization and the domination of corporate interests.
You can put your money on that.
There's no way that it won't.
And what's going to happen along The lines of the right wing.
Are they going to look at the material situation?
Are they going to diagnose what has happened?
Absolutely not.
The GOP and other parties and groups like them are paid to be the public front for the exact same people who have created these consequences.
For decades, they have stepped in in order to divert the actual attention away from the material consequences and blame vulnerable populations in order to further the interest of the people they represent.
That's what's happening here.
And in Buffalo, we got yet another example of what happens when you choose that path.
Instead of addressing socioeconomic conditions, instead of addressing furthering exploitation, human suffering, and the type of things that have actually kept people from having more children or taking more chances or, you know, living the lives that they thought they were promised, instead of actually addressing those things, we get conspiracy theories.
And those conspiracy theories radicalize people.
They tell them You don't have food.
You don't have water.
You don't have land.
You don't have power.
You don't have children.
I'll tell you who does.
Those people over there.
Go get it.
As things get worse, This radicalization, this violence, these calls for radicalization and violence, they're going to get worse.
It's a really infuriating, disgusting thing.
But until we recognize what is happening here, how we've arrived at this point, who is making this happen and how they're diverting attention and anger away from themselves by design, until we figure that out, this, this is only going to get worse.
And we have to look this thing in the face and we have to understand exactly what we're dealing with here.
All right, everybody.
Now we're going to go to this interview with Ruth Bengaya, the author of Strongman, Mussolini to the Present.
I really, really enjoyed this interview.
I've been looking forward to getting a chance to talk to Ruth.
For an extended amount of time, for a while now, I hope you enjoy this interview.
We're going to finish with this.
We'll come back for the Weekender episode on Friday.
In order to get full access to that, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Fingers crossed we'll get Nick back on that episode and we'll be able to address this and some other issues.
Until then everybody, stay safe.
All right, everybody.
This is a long time coming.
I've been looking forward to this for a while.
We want to welcome to the show Ruth Bengayat, who is a historian and expert on fascism and authoritarianism.
She is the author of Strongman Mussolini to the Present, one of the best books on the subject, I think, ever, and The Substack Lucid.
Ruth, thank you so much for making time.
Sure, it's a pleasure.
So to get this rolling, I wanted to start with a quote that I think about that you had in The Atlantic, which always is sort of rattling around in my head like a ball bearing and like a spray paint can, which I think it takes a very, very complex issue, boils it down, which is that authoritarianism Almost always emerges from anxieties about male authority and status.
We're recording this in a week or so after the leak from the Supreme Court that Roe v. Wade is probably being overturned this summer.
The GOP and the National Conservatives have started to really build themselves around a cult of masculinity, aggressive hyper-masculinity, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in that direction, because it certainly feels like it's accelerating, it's getting more and more aggressive, and it's becoming more and more overt.
Yeah, it's really terrible, and perhaps inevitable when somebody like Donald Trump, who was a rule breaker in many, many areas, but
Not everybody comes to the White House with over two dozen accusations of sexual assault, a retracted but had been filed accusation of domestic violence by his first wife, Ivana, and just a degree of scorn and hatred and misogyny that is very open that he made into his brand.
And so Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for all of that to come out.
It was like a perfect storm.
He came after Barack Obama, so he was able to mobilize all the racism, but he had very unusually a female presidential candidate.
And if we recall the outpouring of murderous rage toward her.
So Trump legitimized that kind of murderous rage.
So you had not one, but like, Many sitting GOP state and local lawmakers calling for her execution.
So I, as we look back and you wrote about the rallies, I think you had a great thing about that.
They were a powdered keg of, I forgot the phrase you used, but the, the anger at women and the reveling and being able to be a lawless male and breaking the rules and demeaning women was part of the appeal.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things I noticed, and I was wondering if you could talk about this, there is a sense, I think among white men particularly in this country, there's like an aggrievement that like their past power has been taken from them, even though we're still in a very, very strongly patriarchal society.
But it sort of felt like what Trump did and what Trump unleashed was the idea that they could perform in those ways and they could express themselves and they could mobilize around that aggressive sort of masculinity that almost defined itself in opposition to what was happening in culture, what was happening in terms of progress and moving forward.
Does that sound right?
Yes, it is.
And in fact, it's something, the benefit of doing a book like Strongman, where you kind of go around the world for 100 years, you see these patterns.
And one of the patterns is that every time, practically, you have a strongman or a condition for a coup, it's times when there was a lot of feeling that males were aggrieved, that they were losing status.
And the paradigmatic example is You know, after World War One, when Mussolini kind of, you know, you had these disabled men, you had this crisis of masculinity from all the, you know, the deaths in the war, and you had women who'd gained more power.
And Mussolini said to these guys, you don't have to demobilize, you become black shirts, you become, you know, squadrous, and misogyny was built right into that.
So that's very much part of it.
And then I think In our country, four years of Trump who really made men feel, white men in particular, that they would be rewarded for getting away with things.
And I think one point that's really important that I make in the Atlantic article and in the book is that authoritarianism is about constraints to taking away rights, but it's also rolling back checks on your behavior.
And so just as Trump rolled back over 100 environmental laws that allowed big companies to pollute and to break the law with no consequence, he also partly decriminalized domestic violence.
And people forget about that because so many other things happened.
So that you could get away with more types of domestic violence.
In fact, what they did is they said only physical abuse.
So emotional, financial, Psychological, all the other kinds of abuse no longer constituted a crime.
And so this is what I mean, it kind of four years of that, like, unleashed, legitimated, excuse the Roman sirens, the police sirens going in the background.
And, and look where we are now, where there's, as you say, there's really been an integration of a hyper masculinity, aggression, cult into the GOP.
And you know, when I was spending, and man it sounds weird to say the sentence out loud when I was spending a lot of time reading Benito Mussolini.
One of the things that always came around was this steadfast belief which I think is correct.
But also disturbing, which is the idea that so many people in the world think that that life and history only goes in one direction, that it can only progress and grow more and more liberal or open or tolerant.
And Mussolini and the people around him, you know, put their foot down and said, no, it can go backwards and will take advantage of the fact that people think that it only goes forward.
Now that we're looking at the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, we're also looking at the possibility of gay marriage being overturned.
I mean, the past week has been phantasmagoria of just horrors.
The idea of contraception, the idea of, you know, people are even floating the idea of Like taking away, like you were saying, the protections that women have that are just barely on the radar at all at this point.
A lot of people, I think, look at this and say there's no way that they could get away with this.
There's no way that this could possibly happen.
It feels like reactionaries, particularly conservative reactionaries, take advantage of our sort of, I guess, inborn or learned idea that life has to move in one direction.
And it feels Very much like it's being drugged back just violently by every single day at this point.
Yeah, it is because unless you've lived through it before, you take for granted perhaps what you have and it somehow doesn't seem possible that somebody could come along and just take everything away from you.
Even though, rationally, you may read the news and know it happens every day.
The other thing that I think is confusing, or maybe that's not the right word, but to people is that we have a democratic administration, and yet this is happening at the state's level.
And the states are now laboratories of autocracy.
But these are also things that are very old in America.
Going back, this has been on the Agenda since the Moral Majority, the 1980s, and then you have the Kochs, and all of these long-term planners, the people like Leonard Leo.
So you have coming together, you know, what some people are calling Christofascism, like Christian evangelical and non-denominational, you know, radical Christian desire to kind of domesticate women and have a theocracy.
You also have extreme Catholics, of which there are many.
This kind of went under the radar a bit, but the Trump administration had a lot of people in it who were even close to Opus Dei, the extreme Catholic sect.
And those people are not friendly about abortion either, or women's rights.
You had not just William Barr, but Pat Cipollone, the White House lawyer, Larry Kudlow wrote, like a lot of people can, you know, proportionately.
So take all of these things and the Orthodox Jews, and, you know, there's all these kind of fundamentalist type of people who are seeing their moment has arrived, because the political climate supports it now.
And, but it's easy to forget that there are these or you never knew about all these Uh, things that were under the radar.
And so it seems like all of a sudden we're facing a tidal wave.
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up, because that's something that we really do not like really putting our finger on, which is the fact that there is a really weird ragtag bunch of fundamentalists who are working with people who don't care actually about religion whatsoever.
It's actually about the ideology covering up both the grift, but also the power grab.
And I think Trump has been really instructional to show... I mean, Trump is obviously not Religious, he doesn't care about fundamentalism, but is happy to use it as sort of a cudgel or some sort of a bargaining chip back and forth.
And one of the things that these power grabs relies on is some sort of an ideology that covers the action, right?
That legitimizes it, that gives a story to the people involved.
And what I've noticed is not just the people who Want this have been converting to these religions in order to start rolling this stuff back.
But what I would call cultural Christians, like the people that I come from my family, they were like, Well, I don't need to go to church in order to be a Christian, I identify as a Christian, though, they are starting to become more and more engrossed in this, they're starting to go to the churches, they're starting to identify more by this.
And we're starting to see, I think that ideology really cover up the power grab that's happening in the background.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And Anthea Butler, who has a great book about white evangelical racism, was also, you know, saying that this isn't even for, this doesn't even necessarily have to be about abortion.
It's about these other kinds of, that's part of the package of having power.
It's the same where like, you know, All this extremist movements, like in the recent convoy movement, it really wasn't about vaccines and masks.
They become like an alibi, things that trigger people and get them involved, but the actual underlying larger interests are not that.
So yeah, it's, but it, everywhere you have authoritarianism, women become the target.
I think I have a sentence in my book that women are no less the enemy of the strong men than prosecutors and the press.
Yeah, I mean, that checks out.
And listen, I would be remiss.
I've been wanting to talk to you about this for a while.
You know, anybody who really pays attention to this movement, if you actually even listen to what any of these people say, because they're not hiding it anymore, what they're interested in.
You tune into a podcast, you read an interview, you read their writing.
The thing that keeps coming up is Caesarism.
Which is the idea, of course, that we have a system that is buckling.
It can no longer be trusted.
They've always, and this goes back in the authoritarian playbook, the idea is that liberal democracy is weakness.
It allows people from the outside to interfere and it keeps people who are rightfully in charge from being in charge.
I don't think it's a coincidence whatsoever that all of a sudden Caesarism and the idea that we're in like a degenerate culture that needs a strong man to step up and put things to right.
I don't think that's a coincidence at all.
No, and that's part of the pattern, where you have this sensation.
They manufacture a sensation of crisis.
Sometimes it's there objectively, and then they know how to exploit it.
As after World War One or there's certain other times.
Or you have a threat like in Chile before the coup, you had a democratically elected socialist.
And so this became a threat for various factions of society.
But this idea that I alone can fix it, that there's somebody who is going to bring back order.
And it's very interesting because this nostalgia For all of these strongmen, they are very successful in peddling a kind of nostalgia.
So on the one hand, they're, they're seen as modernizers, like they're going to make the country great.
So Mussolini is going to, you know, he built stadiums, and they all have big infrastructure projects.
And yet, it's not just making it great, it's making it great again.
And that's where the gender stuff comes in and the policing of sexuality.
And And because it sends people back to when it was better, it's some kind of fantasy.
And sometimes there's also an imperial, you know, you get into kind of imperialist things.
So Mussolini had the Roman Empire and Putin's pursuing his imperialist dream and Erdogan's obsessed with the Ottoman Empire.
But on the ground for social relations, it always involves a subjugating of certain of certain groups of society under the aegis of policing sexuality.
And so the hyper, it's interesting, the hyper-masculinity, the policing of male sexuality, meaning LGBTQ people, male gays are always sent to prisons, always persecuted, goes with the hyper-masculinity of the straight man.
And the dominion of the straight man, the imprisonment or marginalization of non-straight men, and the subjugation of women.
And it's all part of one thing.
Yeah, and that leads me to the next subject that I think you and I are both keeping an eye on which is Rhonda Santos, and this new sort of phenomenon that's taking place I think the power of the federal government has been purposefully Restricted and demeaned by the exact same donors that you were just talking about for a moment, so much so that now power has been moving more and more to the states.
Nobody besides maybe Greg Abbott has feasted on this more than Ron DeSantis.
I think we've seen him not only take advantage of it, but also revel in it.
I think some of the the actions that he's taken are not only to try and get in front of the pack for the Republican nomination in 2024, but there's also I don't know how else to put this.
There's a sneering joy in it.
There's a bully in DeSantis.
And I think that the National Conservatives, because again, if you listen to them, he is never far from their lips.
They know who he is.
They know that what he's capable of.
But I look at this guy and it literally sends chills up my spine, because this is what a lot of us I think have been afraid of, which is The post-Trump authoritarian who is capable and quote unquote respectable.
And I think that that is the worst case scenario in all of this.
Totally.
He's smoother in the sense that he doesn't have as much baggage.
We don't hear about his, you know, laundering money, sexually assaulting.
He is more measured in his words.
So Trump was loved by many people for his outlaw qualities, but he also, there were a lot of, we know this, there were a lot of Republicans who really were holding their nose and voting for him anyway.
So Ron DeSantis, it's in moments like that, that people like Ron DeSantis, who are just as extreme in a way, but anybody can look better than Trump.
Trump is a criminal in so many ways.
It's quite staggering.
It would take an entire show to list all the areas in which he's a criminal.
So anybody looks better than that, practically.
And so Ron DeSantis, you know, I follow his Instagram and it's really interesting because he's doing this populist thing where, you know, he pops up at diners and fish camps and small restaurants and, you know, brownie factories and he poses with the people.
And it's very effective.
And so there, it's like, this is what all these effective strongmen do.
He doesn't have this nearing, he has the man of the people thing.
But then, you know, the articles I wrote about him did the research.
It's like, there was a quote from a Florida legislator who was anonymous said, if you cross him once you're dead.
And he's like, you know, a couple.
And he's feared and humiliates people and that's the sneering you picked up on.
And what he's doing in Florida is so concerning because he's actually doing executive overreach where he's involving himself with things like appointments to the state Supreme Court and redistricting that governors normally don't do.
It's, you know, so there's that, there's the ideology, there's, did you see that now yesterday he was talking, he declared a Victims of Communism Day.
Now, communism created more deaths than fascism.
So we, I'm not a fan of communism at all myself.
However, we are not going to see also a Victim of Right-Wing Extremism Day celebrated by DeSantis anytime soon.
So he's riding this crest of like the kind of coming together of, you know, legitimizing right-wing extremism.
Cause in fact, he had neo-Nazis saluting in his state.
He didn't say anything about that.
And also he's got the, he's got the whole, you know, contingency in Florida from Cuba.
He knows what he's doing, but he's very capable and that's why he's very dangerous.
And he came on my radar a long time ago and I said, okay, I'm going to start tracking him.
It was just, which is never good news, because just like with Trump, when I was like, doing an, I did an op-ed in January 2016, saying, oh, Trump's gonna have, you know, a personality cult, just like Putin and Berlusconi, if he gets the nomination.
And nobody wanted to publish the thing, because it was too early.
And they were like, what are you talking about?
So the same, like, intuition, I was like, oh, wrong DeSantis, I'm gonna start following him really closely.
Well, on that note, and this is, you know, when when I started going to these Trump rallies, like immediately my antenna went up and I was just like, oh, this is a problem.
And this is growing in a way that, you know, immediately it was like, oh, you're hysterical, this is absurd, he's going to lose this election, it could never possibly happen.
I have been very disturbed over the past six years to watch the people who should be paying attention to this, who should be sounding the alarm.
Occasionally, you'll see one of the major gatekeepers be like, I think maybe this is a problem?
Question mark?
And as we sort of go down this path, I think a lot of our listeners always grow frustrated and they say, when are people going to figure this out?
And in your research in terms of authoritarian trends, it seems to me in my research that it's always too late.
It's always when all of a sudden you look up and all power has been lost and sort of the apparatus of the state has been sort of taken over and is being used as a weapon.
But what, for your money, when do you feel like this might start to change?
Or what can we do to sort of start to not just sound an alarm, which is one thing, but actually start pushing back against this thing?
Well, I mean, the alarm should be now because we are actually losing our rights.
We are losing our right to vote.
It's not just theoretical.
We are losing reproductive rights.
It's happening around the country every single day.
The assault on the electoral apparatus, so it's not just voter suppression laws, all the machinations of how it's gonna be harder to vote.
It's also a purge.
It's called autocratic capture.
It's when you set out to replace the personnel that run the electoral system Orban did this beautifully.
And in our case, you know, you have help from guns, because this is our wild card, 400 million guns.
And so people are armed and they, you know, they threaten people.
And so there's been a whole purge of the electoral system and election judges.
So we are losing our rights now.
And so I don't know, perhaps, when the GOP control, if they win in the midterms, they control Congress, if they do some other machination.
I really don't know what, I don't know what to say, because if January 6th didn't scare people, and some of the, you know, media like the New York Times don't help by burying important stories, if they framed things, I don't wanna, I don't like to blame the media, but that's a little bit of the puzzle.
They're choosing to minimize certain things and use certain language that is not helping people to grasp the situation.
But then you have a hugely effective counter, you know, a propaganda from Fox News.
And I was very struck.
It was recently, it was last month, an article where somebody paid, I think it was 100 people, or I don't remember how many, to watch CNN.
So they paid.
Fox News consumers to watch CNN for one month.
It's not that long, one month.
At the end of the month, they had changed their attitudes toward a lot of things.
So it doesn't have to be written in stone, but right now we're not enough people are seeing the danger.
And unfortunately, the case studies in my book, people don't seem the danger either because they don't want to They don't know what to do.
So this is the famous stories of Jews in Germany who didn't leave, repeated then by Jews in Italy who didn't leave when those anti-Semitic laws started.
Or the last example I'll say is, this is very interesting because, okay, you know, in places where you lose freedom gradually, you think, okay, it'll get better.
But here's a military coup in Chile.
So you leave your house in the morning, go to work or school, and it's democracy.
You come home, if you come home, and you're in a junta.
I mean, it's instant.
But the Christian Democrats, who were the conservatives, they actually thought that Pinochet and the junta were gonna just stay in power for a little while, To restore order and then return Chile to democracy.
And they thought that for many months, even though it was instant, the terror, the concentration camps, it was as fast as, because it's the coup, it was as fast or faster than like Hitler, what Hitler did after the Reichstag fire.
So there's denial, there's disorganization, there's like, These human reactions that recur over and over again, and it means that we are not prepared.
Yeah, and one last thing before I let you go.
You brought up Orban, and I think Orban is, for people who are paying attention, this is a really useful sort of a vessel to watch how this has happened, how it occurs.
Orban, when he quote unquote won re-election, he gave a speech and he said, you know, this is news for Europe and the rest of the world.
This is not the past, but the future.
And there is definitely a feeling right now that there is a trend towards this through corruption, you know, through the buying offer for representative bodies, the, the sort of authoritarian impulse that is promising that it will solve the crises of the moment.
In your heart, in watching all of this, and I have my own feelings on it, but I'd love to hear what you have to say.
Do you think this is something that we're going to be fighting for the rest of our lives?
Or do you feel like there's going to be some sort of a turning point where finally it's like, no, this is put to bed?
Because this feels like it is the defining problem, not of a generation, but sort of a time.
And it does not feel like it's just simply going to flip off like a switch.
No, I think you're right.
I think we're ripe for, you know, a new wave of mass nonviolent protests.
And I recently wrote an essay in my newsletter, Lucid, about this, which interestingly didn't get very much engagement.
And I've written things many times that don't get much engagement about the power of nonviolent protests to actually change things.
I mean, we just had, and what I did in the piece was like, hi, we had the Women's March and it directly translated into victories in the midterms.
This is why I was like calling on that, because we're thinking about our midterms coming up.
And then we had Black Lives Matter.
These are the two largest protests in history, in American history, that directly helped us to get rid of Trump.
So protest connects to elections.
It connects to voting.
So I think we are ripe for that, and not just in the States.
But it is the defining struggle.
And it's also because autocracy is linked to dirty energy.
So at the beginning of Strongman, I say it's an existential threat.
It's not just taking rights away.
It is at this point an existential threat.
So in that sense, you're absolutely right.
It's the defining battle of our era.
Yeah, socioeconomically, I mean, with climate change, we're going to lose resources and land.
And somewhere, somebody has to make decisions about how that gets redistributed and how that gets handled.
And unless there are alternatives to the authoritarian suggestion of how to handle that, it is, I don't know about you, but I think it looks pretty tragic in the making.
Yes, because also, and the people who don't want these problems solved know what I'm about to say.
When you create conditions of scarcity, we're going to have water scarcity, nobody talks about enough, as well as food scarcities, which Putin is also manufacturing right now.
There's a reason he's manufacturing the food crisis.
That is when strong men who are going to fix it and take care of it, because when you have scarcities, you also have more conflict in society over, you know, because resources dwindle.
And so that's a very, you know, dark scenario.
But they, they know that and they help those scenarios to come into being.
All right.
We've been talking about talking with Ruth Vangaya, the author of Strongman and Whose Substance is Lucid.
Ruth, I just want to say thank you for your time, but also just for all of your work.
I think it's absolutely essential and we are just very, very grateful you're out there.
Thank you, Gil, the same way about your work.
All right, Ruth, where can the good people find you?
I have a Twitter at Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
I have a website, which is RuthBenGhiat.com.
And on both those places, you can sign up for my newsletter, Lucid, and I have all my latest media clips and all that.
