Ruth Ben-Ghiat

We shouldn't feel fatalistic.

And it is dispiriting to see all the big media companies bought out and Barry Weiss and all of that.

That's just, it's awful.

But we are on the right side of history.

And no one can take away our ability to message for the things that we feel are important and to help people.

To help by speaking the truth about what's going on instead of being like those white men standing behind Trump deciding to ignore that he's sleeping while we're at war.

Yeah.

Nice to be back with you, David.

That's a great setup, great question.

You know, when we think about, we look abroad, if we're in the States, and we look at Putin and Orban and Erdogan, we have to remember that they've been in power a really long time.

Putin's been in power longer than Mussolini at this point.

And they've had time to do stuff, and the stuff they're doing now was not the things that they could do 10 years ago.

So it's always on a continuum.

If they come into office via elections in a democracy, whatever that looks like in their country,

um it's it's a process of tearing the democratic rights down let's say and we're we're on that continuum um one of the things autocrats do is they hollow out government institutions to make them work for the leader and they kind of uh there's a form of authoritarianism which we're in called personalist rule where like for example the department of justice ends up um

you know, trying to penalize or go after or have vengeance against the leader's personal enemies.

And government is a way, and this has happened in Hungary, for the leader to enrich himself, and not just him, his family,

and his officials and the families of those officials.

So we see that with Howard Luttnick.

The cronies come in, the Jared Kushners, the sons-in-law also play a role.