Byline Supplement — Upcoming News Meeting with Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Byline Supplement — Upcoming News Meeting with Ruth Ben-Ghiat
And my Byline Supplement interview with her from today on ‘Toxic Strongmen’
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“Many autocrats have gone after their own families — it's them or nothing, because they are fanatics. They are in their own way fundamentalists — political fundamentalists — and they are the church. They are the gods of their own religions.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Many of you support me here at Bette, as well as the reader-funded newspaper I work for in the UK — Byline Times and Byline Supplement. And I have met so many of you through our mutual support of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s work at Lucid.
It’s my great honor to share with you that Ruth will be joining Byline Supplement’s news meeting on Nov. 8, at noon ET. If you already support Byline Supplement, you will have received your invited today. If you would like to attend, please consider subscribing to Byline Supplement, and supporting a small global team of investigative reporters.
Here is an excerpt from my Byline Supplement interview with her:
In weekly meetings with New York University Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat for members of her Lucid substack, I asked her what lessons from her book Strongmen — Mussolini to the Present does she consider most critical to the current temperature of the world.
Without blinking, she said: “Never appease autocrats, shut them down.”
At that moment, an embarrassing and dangerous spectacle was playing out in the US Congress. Those of us who report on these times are aware there are pro-Kremlin, MAGA Republicans engaging in a massive criminal cover up for their roles in the January 6 Insurrection.
What appears to be chaos and incompetence — a messy affair to elect a Speaker of the House — is actually an obfuscation of sedition and an intentional weakening of America — a pleasing of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
In our disarray, the centre cannot hold.
Ben-Ghiat said we can never appease autocrats because it sends the wrong signal to other nefarious world leaders…
I hope you can join us at the news meeting on Wednesday!
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