I love watching Dr. Ben-Ghiat’s interviews. She’s well-informed on authoritarianism and what to look out for. She’s been spot-on in comparing Trump to a certain other German authoritarian dictator from the 1940’s.

I have the utmost respect for Ms Ben-Ghiat and her work. She clearly has a deep understanding of the cultural pathologies that comprise fascism, and we're all learning in real time what she's spent her career studying: that these pathologies are always close to the surface even when they're not actually visible. She speaks about fascism universally being marked by a combination of exaggerated masculinity, misogyny, and a violent hatred of homosexuality. I think of this aspect as a fetishism of a type of superficial masculinity, and I'm old enough to have seen this become more and more obvious over decades in the US even as our broader culture has become more open and more tolerant. Masculinity fetishists see this tolerance as weakness and react with the only tools they have, ever-more exaggerated displays of masculinity, of physical strength; trending towards violence. In reality this is really only a projection of their own weakness and their own insecurity about their own personal human value in an evolving culture. Thus, "my way of life" is being threatened, they think, without understanding that their way of life has always relied much more on the intellectual and scientific advances that our open liberal democracy has cultivated and not much at all on the superficial "masculine" values they've taught themselves to idolize. I think Ben-Ghiat's work is extremely valuable today and it's critical that we help spread it. Our media are not helping; they have become a big part of the problem. It's on the rest of us.

If Trump Senior has 5 kids by 3 wives and is traveling south at 50 mph, and Trump Junior has 5 kids by one wife and is traveling west at 40 mph, how many indictments until the 2 men meet in prison?

Matt Gaetz must have misunderstood when he was told people use Venmo to make minor purchases.

This is so important to understanding Donald Trump!

Trump has a sale on a Trump Club Sandwich. A trump sandwich consists of toasted white bread, with an orange glaze on the outside, it's full of baloney and spam, with Russian dressing and a small pickle on the side. You can substitute the pickle for a small mushroom head for $130K.

Thankyou very much !

Thank you

Ruth is King!!! 🌊🏄‍♂️🪷

Please talk about Project 2025!

Too much concern with one individual, and a disregard for the ideas - both justified criticisms and dangerous solutions.

Ruth, please have a safe house for yourself in New Zealand.

I have watched a few of this wonderful lady's videos about the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. Most people do not have 20 minutes to watch a video that warns people about Project 2025. A five minute video would reach 10 times the people that a 20, 30, 60-minute video would reach.

Yup. he is dangerously unstable.the end

Apparently having 20+ personalities, is not enough for them!

here's how I describe losing democracy and rule of constitution to people. Its like hiring somebody to work on your car or house with no estimate of cost or contract, no estimate of how long its going to take, or what condition its really going to be in when you get it back . and it gets worse. when the original guy(trump) is gone, somebody else will take over and get the same deal and you will have no say in it. democracy and constitution are like a work contract between the governed and the government.

November is going to be great

At the 12 min mark she talks about people not knowing about how dictatorial the gop is. Well at dinner just now my not very political fried didn’t know about the gallows and “hang Mike pence” chant. She’s a baseball fan. So in all the tv she watches she never saw or heard about that!!!

Vote blue down the election ballot as if your life, freedom, and democracy depend upon it, because it does. 🤘😎👍💙🌊🇺🇸

pish

And an organization of 10,000 Michigan police officers just officially endorsed trump. This isn't getting enough coverage.

Our bamboozlers want us to see the world in ways which are simple. To get a large, diverse group of people to see their world in the same way requires the teaching of a few very simple ideas. In England the ideas of ‘our island race’, the monarchy, and the myths of British history give the illusion of a shared unity and purpose to a people with very different backgrounds and interests. It is an illusion of unity and shared purpose, not a real unity and purpose,because throughout British history British subjects without power and wealth - the poor, the working and lower-middle classes, the Scots, Irish and Welsh, the colonials, the colonized - have been used by the wealthy, powerful and privileged to establish, maintain and increase their wealth, power and privilege. The huge spaces of America and the immensely diverse groups of immigrants required even simpler ideas to hold Americans together as a group with a common picture of the world. These simple ideas are God, family and the flag. The idea of God is used in the way that the Russians use the concept of the State - something which overarches everything, which explains in general everything but in particular nothing (to say that God causes everything does not explain how, say, lightning is caused), and which cannot be questioned. Surveys of religious belief in the USA show that around 96 percent of people profess a belief in God, a much higher percentage than that in Britain.30 The concept of the family is honoured in the breach. The number of single-parent families is significant and increasing.31 Just as British television promotes the myth of unity in a society divided by class by telling many sentimental stories about the aristocracy, so does American television tell many sentimental stories about families. We watch many stories about the lives of amiable dukes and lovable parents and children, but very few stories, sentimental or otherwise, about single black women struggling to bring up their children in poverty, or about teenagers abandoned by their families and struggling to survive. The British can understand and share the American simple notions of God and the family, but they find it hard to understand how the American flag, the Stars and Stripes, is treated by Americans as an icon. Simon Hoggart, writing in the Observer, tried to explain this to the English when the burning of the Stars and Stripes became such an issue: Unlike ‘LA Law’, hamburgers and pop music, American patriotism doesn’t really export. Which is why the current flap over the flag is so puzzling to us foreigners. If you’ve not been keeping up, the trouble began in 1984 when a young man called Gregory Johnson was arrested for burning an American flag outside the Republican convention in Dallas, the while shouting, ‘America, I spit on you.’ (Even his defenders describe Mr Johnson as a contemptible worm, presumably to demonstrate their own patriotism …) Anyhow, he took the case up to the Supreme Court, which ruled last month that flag-burning was a form of free expression and so protected by the First Amendment. You’d have thought the Court had just declared matricide legal. Other decisions, which diluted equality laws and allowed juveniles and mental incompetents to be executed, were forgotten as the horror sank in. George Bush, with his famous tin ear, said he accepted the Court’s ruling, then after lunch with his vicious little campaign manager, Lee Atwater, changed his mind, declaring that his love of the American flag was ‘visceral’ (though, to extend the metaphor, presumably in need of an artificial laxative). He has proposed an amendment - the first ever - to the Bill of Rights, making ‘desecration’ of the flag an offence. The Bill of Rights may be the noblest document ever used to govern a country, and one wonders why this political time-server, with his wretched consultants and sheaves of opinion-poll print-outs, thinks he has any right to change it. A few brave folk argued that a First Amendment which gives the untrammelled right of free speech - unless it upsets someone - isn’t worth the parchment it’s written on. Others pointed out that flag-burning laws are most popular with the kind of regimes which always need fresh reasons to lock people up. But they’ve been pretty well howled down, led by Congressmen who spoke through the night, desperate to get their ersatz outrage on the record. Few will dare to vote against the amendment. This extraordinary, emotional attachment to the flag is hard for us to understand. We’re used to seeing the Union Jack on shopping bags, underwear, smirched on football hooligans’faces, even on Reebok shoes which are made in Korea by a US firm. Americans address the flag when they recite the pledge of allegiance. (I once saw a six-foot-high Californian raisin clad in brown polyester pledging, while trying to put his hand over where his heart ought to be.) Their national anthem is all about the flag. On a beach last year I watched a family pitch camp with deckchairs and a cooler - then solemnly take out a flag on a telescopic pole and stick it in the sand, perhaps as a guide to confused submariners. Commerce and the flag are unfailingly united. No shopping mall is complete without one. And the bigger the flag, the more likely it’s to be found flying bravely over a used-car lot. Every schoolchild is taught elaborate rules for handling the flag, which mustn’t touch the ground or fly at night. Even the old Confederate flag, the ‘Stars and Bars’, is revered in the South, where it flutters over two state houses, to the anger of black people who see it as an emblem of slavery. The flag isn’t just a symbol of America but its embodiment which of course is what made it worth Gregory Johnson’s while to burn it. Thanks to all the fuss, flag immolation has now become quite fashionable in some circles. This year, our last Fourth of July, it rained most of the day. But the kids went to the parade, and waved little flags kindly provided, in the interests of trade, by the local estate agents. In the evening, we had friends around for the traditional barbecued spare ribs, and saw the wonderful fireworks at the Washington Monument from the roof of our house. That seems to me to be a celebration of America’s virtues, pleasanter and healthier than frothing over a flag.32 The furore about the burning of the flag epitomizes how the State bamboozles us by denying us the expression of our own truth, and, indeed, denying that we have a truth. Yet for all of us our own truth is that we have a dilemma from which we cannot escape. This is that we need some sort of government, some sort of organization, which will deal with the affairs of the group to which we belong and provide the services which we, both as a group and as an individual, need, yet, whatever form of government we have, that government will, at times, fail us and, through its laws and inadequacy, frustrate and inhibit us and consequently anger us. Good governments, like good parents, accept the truth and legitimacy of our anger. They let us express our anger (freedom of speech) and they take what we say seriously. Bad governments, like bad parents, refuse to accept that we have any right to be angry and they show us that they regard our anger as proof that we are mad and bad. We are punished and silenced. Unfortunately, most governments are bad governments, but what else could they be, for the people who comprise such governments have little of the second kind of intelligence, the wisdom of understanding themselves and other people. They were brought up by parents and teachers who, in showing them that they could not have everything, educated them according to the principles of containment and moulding, that is, bamboozled them.

I only watched 2 minutes of garbage; you guys have no idea, do you? I hope Trump is elected again to save America otherwise you guys are finished!