Transcript of Little Dicktator Energy

So are we supposed to start the podcast?

Ready? One, two, three.

Tell the listener what you just told me.

I get so embarrassed when we're not in our studio with Kyla or Seth, because I feel like then it's not embarrassing because nobody sees it but us. But here with all these people out here- Listener, we're in New York City, and we're at a podcast studio that we rent often when we come up here.

Right before we came on, Pumps was like, I feel stupid doing the class.

I just feel stupid in front of other people. When we have a third party in the podcast, I feel so stupid. I feel like it's very immature and childish. And I'm doing it, so I'm the ring leader, rubber-stamping it. And we all know how mature I am, emotionally, physically, the whole night.

But I think I still have to go on with patriots, gay triets, they triets, black triets, brown triets.

Fuck off. I don't mind that. Okay. All right.

Welcome to America's Top DEI podcast, America's Top Mother-Daughter podcast. Fuck you.

Although I do feel like the light in here. I feel like there's no light anywhere else. And then you walk in here and it's your under a microscope, and I'm just like, Fuck. The gals getting all right.

All right, Pam, so what have you had it with?

Okay, what I've had it with, and I hate to be serious, but I have had it with the fact that guns have so many rights in America. They have more rights than women, and they have more rights than children's lives. I have had it with politicians that prioritize NRA, funding versus lives of children, and I don't know when it's going to stop. It's not getting better. I've had it. In a normal world, I would feel like putting a lot of energy into this. But since we're hanging on by a thread with democracy, I feel like it's back burnered. Children should not have to die to go to school, full stop. I don't want to hear about everybody's gun rights.

And that's the thing with Trump's authoritarian play, is these types of things, sadly, have become very normalized, and the American public has become desensitized. And gun violence is something that we absolutely could do something about. It's something that we could do something about. School shootings increase. The semi-automatic capacity capacity that these guns can do, they made them more accessible, not less accessible. And after Newtown, I thought, Okay, we're really going to do something. We're talking about five and six-year-old kids. And Some of them were all huddled in a closet. And within 2-3 seconds, a dozen or more were dead in 2-3 seconds. But politicians and the American society at large has been indoctrinated and propagandized to believe that profits matter more than people. And I have had it with the thoughts and prayer crowd of Got it. Because here's the thing about the thoughts and prayer crowd. You could go to each of them, and they're in the hospital, they have a blood clot at their heart. And you could say, You have two choices, Susie May. You have two choices. You can either let the cardiologist Just come in here and put a stent in your heart and you're going to live.

Or your second choice is you can pray and let God sort it out. The majority of these people would choose science. The majority of these people would choose an option that would fix the problem. And so when it comes to the thoughts and prayer crowd, it's not just with guns. It's with so many things that they use their religion to excuse all of these horrible things that are happening in society. It's God's will. It's this. It's that. I just think these shootings are a travesty. They're a uniquely American problem. I, sadly, when you have this fascist regime that's in charge right now. All you hear from Canks, Cankles McTaco Tits, all you hear Canks say is, Oh, my sons are really good shooters. He rambles on about somebody he knows that he believes is skilled at shooting guns. There's no empathy from this man. This is a completely deranged administration that is going to make America less safe, less economically stable. Our strength in world positioning is eroding by the moment because all he's interested in doing is waltzing into the oval and playing show and tell and having people humiliate themselves, telling him that he's a good athlete, that he's a good decorator.

He has big hands.

He has a large penis. It's just ridiculous. All right, shifting gears. I've had it with the face plant of the USB.

Okay.

Everybody had the USB. They put it on planes. They put it in hotel rooms. I had some installed in my house when I installed an outlet, and now they're obsolete. And I don't know if the USC, I think that's what replaced Is that what it's called?

I don't know. I just know it's the universal one.

I don't know if that replaced it or not, but now the USB, you can't use it. We're talking about airplanes have them. My house has them. Every hotel we stay in has them. And they didn't live very long. I mean, it was a very short time period. And now we are all fumbling around with these new cords, and I don't know who's behind it. I don't know what's going on. I haven't noticed an increase in quality of a charge from the USB to the USC. No, it's worse. And so I don't know what's going on. I don't know if this is an Apple thing. I don't know what the deal is, but it drives me insane.

It drives me insane. And I have the same hattet on my list. Because my habit, though, is with Apple, because they're the ones that are changing my particular devices. And you buy a new phone, you have to get a new charger. And it went from the USB to now whatever you call it, a C.

I think that's what it is.

But the thing is, didn't you tell me in Europe, they're not allowed to change the cords?

I read somewhere that they were moving towards a universal cord. Right.

But we don't have that.

And I don't know what that cord is. I don't know if that's the USC. I don't know if that's the USB. I have no idea what that is. But they were trying to move towards making it a universal cord. But every time we travel, which, listen, we're traveling right now, and it's on the In the plane, in the hotel. Those things don't work. And how long do you think those were installed there? Less than 10 years?

For sure less than 10 years. And now what happens is you have more access to the USB, and then you only have one plug. Well, now you can't use that. So you've got all these other... I'm sick of technology always saying they're doing better, when really I don't feel like they are, because my Apple phone loses charge so fast nowadays, back in my day.

Let's shift gears here, and First of all, welcome to I've Had It. I'm Jennifer.

I'm Angie. H-b-i-c.

All right, let's talk about Canks. That's what we call Donald Trump, short for Muffintop, Cankles, McTaco Tits. So Canks has clearly got dementia, you guys. It's not even open for discussion.

No, I don't even know why we're talking about it. You get these alerts, Trump has a rambling press conference. No, he's fucking having nutball city dementia boy.

So It takes a lot to shock me, but I continue to be shocked at how shameful these people are. I want to specifically direct your and the listeners' attention to the three and a half or. Oh, God. Cabinet meeting that he had, fully televised, where he had, I don't know, 25, 30 people sitting around this conference room table. And they went from one person to the next person to the next person, telling him he was attractive, telling him that he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize. Rfk Jr. In this was talking about wind, which here's the thing about RFK Jr. Is he used to be a huge environmentalist. He was very big. He was an environmental attorney. He was very big about combating climate change, et cetera. I don't know where he lost his way, but in this cabinet meeting, he was talking about wind being super expensive, which is an L-I-E. It's free. It is a lie. And so then he was talking... I think to manufacture is what he was saying.

No, I know, but it's unlimited.

Right. And so he was trying to make this point, which is a lie. And then he further lies and says that all of these whales are getting killed in the ocean from the offshore wind farms. Number one, number two, that's a lie. So we have a couple of lies here. But I want to remind the listener and you, Pumps, that his daughter told the press that her father, RFK Jr, decapitated a whale and tied it to the top of his car and drove somewhere with it. So I'm just sitting here thinking as I hear him say this, How is it that MAGA makes people so much worse than they ever were? Rfk Jr, he's probably got a trust fund that can choke a bull. He can have these little side projects. I'm going to work on the environment. I'm going to go down a rabbit hole of the lie that vaccines cause autism, et cetera. And then he gets more and more radicalized, so much so that what was his main cause as an adult, being an environmental lawyer, he's completely now in the tank for the oil and gas industry and making shit up in this cabinet room meeting.

And the psychology behind how these people become so horrible when they're in close contact with Donald Trump is something to be studied.

Yeah, I want a psychological profile of these people. How You can be so morally depraved and humiliate yourself again and again and again. And they're lying, and they know they're lying. Here was my takeaway on the whales and the wind. Donald Trump says that shit all the time, and it It's crazy when he says it. So I don't know. I thought, Oh, they're trying to make it look like that's a real thing, and it's not a lie, by having him respout it as just part of the glazing of Trump. Here's another thing that RFK said, and I was going to put it on an IHIP news, but I couldn't do it because I can't listen to his voice. It gives me the jeeps. But he said, he was talking about he and Pete's pull-up contest, and he said, Mr. President, you don't have to do it because we all know you shoot a 50 at Bedmanster. And I'm like, Canks has compression hose on and he still has meffon tops. Please do not even alert our attention to what great shape he's in.

Okay, so then this leads me to this, Pumps. So they're all sitting there bullshitting, completely lying through their teeth. Nobody that has seen Donald Trump swing a golf club thinks that he's won all of the tournaments that he claims. We've all seen the video of his catty cheating and throwing the balls down for him. We all know he bankrupted casinos. We all know And according to everybody in his felony case, he stinks to high heaven. So why are all of these people doing this? And it makes me think, is somebody pulling the levers behind the scene and saying, All right, look, he doesn't have that long to live. Fingers crossed, listener. So Kanks is going to drop dead. And so we just need to give him the illusion that he's in charge. We need to give him the illusion that he's so great. Because, meanwhile, we are going to make sure we don't make it to the midterms. We are going to ensure that we have militarized all of the major cities. We are going to send big balls and other Elon Musk protégés to do fuckery with voting machines. So let's just keep him happy and keep him busy, prop him up, have all these press conferences, have show and tell, give him decorating projects, let him pave over the rose garden, because we're going to set this up, because we're going to take down the country.

This is a coup.

I completely think it is, because I don't think Donald Trump is organized, disciplined, or cares enough to orchestrate all of this. First of all, I don't think he's competent mentally to do it. I don't think he should drive a car, which I know he chauffeered around. But if he were my grandfather, I would be like, You can't drive a car. You can't administer your own medication. This is bad. So I think it's the people around him that are pulling all the strings. Stephen Miller, Nazi in chief, I think he's Probably right there. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. I 100 % think they're all focused on how can we militarize the United States between now and the midterms, because we are going to get our asses kicked because people have had it with this crap. But I do not think he is competent enough, even before his mental decline, to pull all these levers. I think it has to be outside people.

I do, too. And the superficial flattery and these charm offenses that they put on, and even the people that have been handpicked to be in the press pool. Nobody asks him about the bruising on his hand. Nobody asks him, it seems like when you walk, you're dragging your right leg, and you can't walk in a straight line. Nobody really asks him, why did you have US military on their hands and knees rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin? Why, since you've met with Putin, he's bombing the shit out of Ukraine even further, even bombing an American factory? He doesn't get these questions by design. And I think a lot of the stuff that he's doing is a propaganda play. But the thing about Kanks is, I think they have him in such a bubble. I think he actually believes he's popular, because when he does these, he says, I have a 90 % approval rating. And then somebody will check him and say, Well, actually, that's only with the Republican Party. You actually are in the low 30s. He starts freaking out. No, no, No, that's not it. He believes it, which makes me think that he's a kept man.

He is kept by very nefarious forces that tell him what he wants to hear. And I think that the placement of JD Vance, Lil Smoky, I think that was intentional by these people, because when you look at the moral faceplant of Marco Rubio, JD Vance, RFK Jr, others. It's unbelievable. When I think about the Secretary of Treasury, Scott Besson, a gay man, a gay man that's made billions of dollars, right? And that it never occurs to them like, Oh, our base are these crazy Shia Christians. These are the people that hate gays, that want white supremacy, et cetera. And they somehow think exempt, just like the Latinos for Trump thought they were exempt. And so it's, sadly, this is the thing that just gets me, pups. We're going to lose potentially our country for that guy, for those people. It's so bad. It's so unbelievable what has happened to this country before Trump even came around. But priming the public for unregulated capitalism, priming the public to value profits over human beings, priming particularly religious people to equate wealth with God choosing you, your currying favor with God if you're wealthy. And how primed they are, and how organized they've been, and how they've helped us get to this fucked up moment, where I believe in this administration, you have a lot of DL, LGBTQ+, closet cases.

No question. I'm talking about Lil Smokey. I'm talking about Moses Mike. I don't know about Lil Marco. I just think that guy... I don't know if somebody has blackmail footage on him or he just decided, You know what? I want to be Secretary of State so bad. But it's unbelievable how emotionally stunted these people are, how unevolved they are emotionally. And we're all going to go down and lose all the shit that we value for fucked up people that refuse to go to therapy.

Well, but There's also an argument that a lot of them are sociopaths. Like, full-on sociopath. I mean, they're not just... I mean, Donald Trump is a sociopath. He's unable to feel feelings like a normal person.

Malignant narcissism.

Malignant narcissism. There's a lot of mental illness. There's a collection of mental illness. I'll tell you who my favorite. First of all, RFK Jr. Is not a fucking doctor. Every time I hear something coming out of him, I'm like, You're not a doctor. I am a lawyer, too. Now I can start diagnosing and telling telling everybody what to do about their health care. Here, please give me a scalpel. Let me do your heart surgery. That makes no fucking sense. But I'll tell you who I really would love to get the psychological profile of, the most of all of them, is Steven Miller's wife. I would love to get her psychological profile the most, because here's why.

It's easy, Pumps. It's a layup. Okay. That is just a layup. Dad didn't meet her emotionally needs as a child fell prey to a sociopathic abuser. You know this, you're a divorce attorney. Clearly, she's MAGA. She's into all of these things. But for her to fall prey to a dysfunctional relationship like that, we all know it comes from inner child issues. It needs not being met by parents. I mean, you and I both did not pick the creme de la creme.

We're not going to win any awards for husband picking.

She's an easier one for me to get. The one that's more difficult is Marco Rubio, who, if you just go, like 15, 16 months ago, had complete clarity on Vladimir Putin, complete clarity that he was a former KGB agent, had complete clarity that Donald Trump was a grifter or con artist, and that he would ruin the Republican Party. It's video after video, campaign rally after campaign rally, meet the press to CNN, to MSNBC, to Fox News. We're talking hours upon hours upon hours upon hours. Now, Marco Rubio is a conservative. I don't agree with him politically, but he wasn't a fascist until recently. That's the thing that I think is more interesting, where somebody for years of their adult life, he was conservative, But not an authoritarian fascist. And then how do you, at midlife, turn into a fascist? That's more fascinating to me. I get Stephen Miller's wife, because we know a bunch of women like that. I mean, I could name 10 that are the wives of that crazy school you sent your kids. I mean, it's just as easy to spot as the nose on my face. It's somebody who devolves.

But I think Marco Rubio, it's about power. I think he thinks, Trump's going to die, I'm going to be the dear leader. He doesn't realize. He's not.

You think he thinks he's going to go from Secretary of State to President?

I think he thinks that in the next election, should we have them, that he will be the primary, the Republican nominee.

That's what I think. And He doesn't do the calculation on it that I have a lot of contradicting.

No, because he's gotten to be the Secretary of State for Donald Trump. And Magga just, whatever you say is long- I think there's something more to it than that. You think he's had some break?

I don't know. I think Quest for Power could be a part of it, or maybe it's just cowardice. Maybe he never even really had conviction about the things he said he had conviction before. It was just a chameleon on all fronts. But that's the part, the autopsy for me, of how many people that I know in my personal life, and I know, listener, you have people in your personal lives. I see the more Trumpy they've gotten, the worse of human beings they've become. It's like once you start caving to immoral things, it opens up Pandora's box, and then you just cave to all of it. And you see it with JD Vance, Lil Smoky. You see it with Lil Marco. And you can just go down the line, listener, and then the people in your personal lives, they've become worse people. They're The morals have become worse. They used to maybe believe in empathy or believed in helping the poor or the sick. And now they will outwardly say, No, I don't think those people deserve help. And there's a real cruelty to And it has been such a cultural shift in the United States of America, from the Secretary of State down to your next door neighbor, who this movement has made people worse and cruel And the only parallel that I can think of is when I've studied World War II and Nazyism.

Because it is such... We're talking 77 million people voted for this man, and they're worse for it. The country is worse for it. Their moral compass is worse for it. And I don't know why people are so quick to bend the knee to such an obvious, objective, horrible person.

Well, and people are running around going, Well, I don't think a dictator would be that bad. They're not getting it. I've seen on the Good Liars, they have people that are like, Well, I mean, I don't think having a dictator would be that bad. They just say it loud and proud.

Yeah. And I think that a lot of those people have a default setting where they themselves have an authoritarian personality. And there was actually a study, a lot of psychologists studied what makes people fall prey to Trumpism. The number one, through line was that they had an authoritarian personality. And so then they fall prey to authoritarian thinking. I think a lot of this, too, when you think about the Old Testament, the Old Testament God, and how jealous he was, and always required all this adoration. The Ten Commandments are all about making sure you don't cheat on God, and you love him the most, and talk to another God, and all of this stuff, before you even get to how to be good to each other. And so I think there's definitely a religious component to all of this, that those people have fallen radicalized to it the quickest. And then the second component to it is that just people that believe in a religious style belief system, that capitalism is far more valuable than human beings. Right. All right. Today, we have, in New York City, we have a guest She happens to be a professor on authoritarians, and her name is Ruth Ben-Ghiott.

Let's get her in the studio, and we're going to have a very interesting conversation with Ruth. Pumps and I need to share with everybody that we have written a book. It's called Life is a Lazy Susan of Shit Sandwiches. And believe it or not, Pumps and I have not always been so rock solid. And we talk about all of our trials, tribulations, most of all are fuck-ups. Yes, because fuck-ups are relatable and a part of the human experience.

I have gotten so much feedback regarding the book that because of my situation with the religion and addiction and all that people relate to that. So I do think there's something to take away that's comforting about it because we've all been in very difficult situations.

And, listener, what we want you to do, this is the It Book for summer reading. So please get your copy of Life as a Lazy Susan of Shit Sandwiches and take a picture of yourself with the book in really great places and tag at I've Had It podcast, and we will share your images with our summer It book. You can buy it in bookstores, you can buy it in the link in our bio. You can buy it at Target, Walmart, Amazon, etc. All the retailers. Happy reading and happy summer. Some might say homes. Com is the best home shopping site. Could it be because it has a sleek, spam-free site or the most in-depth school info? Homes. Com knows every parent wants the best for their kids, so they're the only ones with school and district detail details and reviews from multiple sources, including niche. It may be homes. Com's super comprehensive and transparent agent directory, or maybe it's that homes. Com is the only site that always directly connects you with the listing agent who knows the home best. Perhaps it's because homes. Com has the most in-depth neighborhood content of any home shopping site that's extensively researched to highlight the personality of each neighborhood.

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They have quality therapists, a therapist match commitment. The best thing about it if you work a lot or are really busy or it's difficult for you to get around is the flexibility. It's fully online and you can pause your subscription whenever you need to and switch therapist anytime at no extra cost. Listener, as the largest online therapy provider in the world, Betterhelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with Betterhelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp. Com/hadit. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P. Com/hadded. All right, listener, we have today a professor of, is it authoritarian studies?

History. History. Authoritarian fascism, authoritarian.

Basically, what we're going through right now, she's been studying it her whole life, Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat. She's also a published author and a commentator. I think that this is a very important episode, listener, and it's going to be more academic. But I think the more you can arm yourself with what is going on, the better chance that we're going to have to get through this. Ruth, how are you today?

I'm good. I'm super happy to be here and have this conversation.

Yeah. It's we were talking to another guest how weird it is with what's going on. It's like you're living a split screen. On the one hand, we just saw you before we came in here and we exchanged pleasantries and everything's normal and great. Then you can leave here and look at the news headlines and you see what's happening, that Trump is going after the Fed and the three-hour long schmoose fest in the cabinet room. You think, what on earth is happening?

And clapping Looking for Putin. Yes. And military-looking vehicles on the streets of American cities, all of that. I know. Even though I study this, the split screen is the same for me, obviously. You go to the store, you text with your kid. And then the difference is, I've been studying this for years, I've been able to predict sometimes where it might go and what the examples of history are, and also countries that can help us get through this, and also what we can just do in our daily lives to feel more prepared and to cope with the extra stress.

What's your top red flag that you're seeing right now? I know there are many, but the top maybe three red flags that you're seeing right now.

I think one is that we've never had an American President who's so openly a fan of dictators. Whether they're left wing or right wing, and this is really important because although inside countries, right wing leaders always talk about the radical left, but at the highest level, when you're talking about relations of dictators, they do the same things. Donald Trump is a fan of Putin, and he's also a fan of Xi Jinping. Now, most recently, when the South Korean head of state just went to the White House, Trump lectured him on how great the North Korean leader is, who's a murderous Communist of one of the last failed state dictatorship. So that is new. Even very conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan, he was the one who told Gorbachev, tear down the wall. He was a hero in that regard. So this is totally new. And then going on with that, I'm very concerned about taking away all of the things that maybe we took for granted that government did, disaster relief. My mother's social security benefits were terminated. She's 92 and she has dementia, and I'm trying to get them back for her. So that's happening to many people.

Things that we expected, good things that government did, that maybe we had the luxury in America of not having to think about. Many of them disappearing. And that's also because of what Elon Musk did and DOGE. Doge is still there in 38 government agencies. It hasn't gone away. So that I'm worried about. And then third, because A lot of my book, Strongmen, is about military coups. I really don't like the mobilization, the politicization of the military. We have one of the mightiest militaries in the world that could be very proud of. It was one of the most popular institutions in America. It defends us. To try and have troops policing civilians, which is a goal, apparently, I'm really worried about that.

I'm very worried about that. I see that. And with Trump, I've always thought he's not organized or competent enough to do all this. Like the fake news, like the fake news. He locked in to call it undermining the news, undermining facts. And then I hear you talk. If you'll just talk a little bit about how undermining the judiciary, either radical left judges are doing this, how that leads the American society to come unglued.

I'm so glad you mentioned that, because one of the things that keeps our society together, whether it's just turning out in our communities for, I don't know, our kids' sports games or politics, is trust and a common understanding of rules and respect for authorities. I'm a progressive person, but I have great respect for authorities. And what we're seeing, and this is what autocrats do, is Trump and his colleagues have been trying to discredit every authority that is connected with institutions, but also from judges, prosecutors, and trying to discredit democratic versions of the judiciary, of the civil service. These are people who make government run. They don't make a lot of money. They're heroes in their own way. But also teachers, librarians, any educator, doctors, think of what's going on now. It's going to become harder to get COVID vaccines and other kinds of medical help. So any authority that was respected and people looked up to. Again, I'm going to repeat, the school librarians. Who doesn't like the school librarians? Right. But those all have to be discredited because authoritarian states want to politicize everything and actually disrupt areas like schools and even faith institutions that bring many types of people together.

Okay, so we have him federalizing DC, and he has outwardly said his his ambitions are to move to Chicago and other places. We have him targeting the Fed. He is silencing dissenting economic data. He has loyalty tests, executive overreach, and And then he does this political theater with the Oval Office, how he's made it all bougey in his Marie Antoinette era, if you will. And then he does the cabinet meeting where all the sycophants go on for three and a half hours. So my question is, obviously, all of these things are terrible. But for our listener, and I think probably a lot of our listeners, we have a lot of younger listeners, you probably have parents that identify as, I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. This is a very American thing that you hear a lot of people say, trying to have their cake and eat it, too. I'm not going to get into why I don't think that's a sustainable thing, but a lot of people vote with that. When you undermine the Fed and when you undermine the judiciary for the fiscal conservative voter, what happens to the economy when you undermine both of those things, when a company cannot take a contract to court and try it, and when you have inflated economic numbers, What will happen to what was the bedrock of this country, which is our economy?

What happens to that with these things that I've just listed, Ruth?

Yeah, I'm not an expert on the economy, but again, it's a question of trust. If you undermine find confidence in our regulatory and financial institutions, including the Fed, if you try and politicize them, if you pass measures avoiding Congress and just doing it as executive orders, practically that are harming businesses, all the tariff stuff. Many of the things that are being done are actually allowing China to succeed to the point that The Economist, which is not a progressive liberal rag magazine, had a cover a few months ago that had a blue, as though it was a Maga hat, but it was blue. And it said, Make China great again, because the Economist, specialists in economic policy, judge that what Trump was doing, for example, wrecking the wind, all of the progressive energy, clean energy, it's allowing China to go into those places, to those sectors. Small businesses are going to be harmed. And then also we got to think about ripple effect things. Everything from gun violence to disaster. If you don't have disaster relief because you've cut FEMA and all the other things. Then communities are going to be harmed. People can't go to work.

Also, if people are sick because you have a Health and Human Services head who seems to want to spread disease, right?

It does.

That is going to harm the economy because people are sick. Look what happened during COVID, and it doesn't have to be a pandemic. And so all of these things that are being done, there are people who say they're being done to wreck America, that President Trump, and this is new, is not on the side of America. He is Allied with Putin. That's why he was clapping. And other leaders who are our adversaries, they want America to fail.

With regards In regard to Putin, if you look at what you could say that maybe Russia and Putin are ahead of what Trump's, apparently, what Trump's ambitions are. So when you see the humiliation exercise of Tim Cook, where they come into the White House, the oligarchs, are arriving one by one for Trump's show and tell Trophy hour. It was awful. And they are humiliating themselves. Share with our listener what happened to Putin's oligarchs. What happens once they came in and kiss the Ring. What happens after that, Ruth?

I couldn't believe what I was watching because in my book, Strongman, I have countless... I describe countless situations that are the same, whether it's Mobutu's ministers in the Congo, and they had to wear a certain shirt that he told them to wear. And if they didn't wear it, they would be demoted. So it's like this total control. And the thing about the Strongman is that there is no end to their adulation that they need. They need constant acclaim. And this is universal. It's universal. It's crazy. Mussolini did it.

Did they all bouge up their offices like that, too?

So somebody on social media who was from Central Africa, I don't know this person, but he posted a picture of Trump's redo of the oval office. And I was thinking that it's like a temple to himself because it has all these fake gold, trophy-looking things behind him. And so this person said, Oh, this looks like the office of Bocasa, who was a murderous dictator in Central Africa. And so I went back into my notes and pictures that I had for research on my book, because this is the people I studied, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein. They all have these palaces, and they're full of real, a lot of times it's real gold, but they make them into temples to themselves because their egos are never satiated. And so they have these spectacles where all of the ministers have to say, they go around the table and they say how great the leader is in front of the leader, and it's televised or it's on the radio. And if you don't do it adequately, something bad can happen in a real dictatorship, like a real one-party state, something bad can happen to you. The other thing, and this started with Mussolini 100 years ago, they're so insecure, these leaders, that if you're too competent or you become too popular or too independent, you're going to get demoted.

And so Mussolini had this-Okay, that tracks.

Okay, so I think I cut you off, but I do-No, it's okay. I don't have to give the example. About the Russia. Yes, sorry.

I wandered from the Russia.

What happened to those oligarchs? No, no, no. That's what we always do in podcasting. But the oligarchs, how did it fare for them once they kiss the ring?

So what happens is the leader... You get this thing called autocratic backfire, and it It affects the leader, the country, and the oligarchs because the leader surrounds himself more and more with lackeys, with sycophants. So he doesn't have good information. So he has disastrous policies that backfire and cause ruin for the nation. But the loyalty must be renewed every day. Look at Mike Pence. He was a very faithful Trump warrior, and then look what happened to him, or was almost happened to him on January sixth. So loyalty is renewed every day. And in Putin's Russia, a particularly paranoid leader, a lot of oligarchs have fallen out of windows, or you never want to go into the hospital in an authoritarian state if you've been a critic because you don't come out. Something happens to you in the hospital and you never come out again, or you're minding your own business at home or in the office, and here come the guys and you're out the window.

So once they off the oligarch, does then Putin take this business for himself?

Sometimes. But the purpose often is to show... The reason it's done so publicly, where the person is falling out the window and everyone sees, is that it's a lesson because autocrats- So it's just mob boss stuff. Yes. I have a sentence in my book that there's a big overlap between the methods of mafia bosses and organized crime and authoritarians. It's really dire. For me, having studied this, and it really is a pattern that has happened all over the world, right wing, left wing, I want to stress that, it doesn't matter. So Trump may be, I'm against the radical left and the Marxist. He's doing the same things that communists do. That's important to stress.

That's very important, especially he's starting to... It's really interesting with me, this phenomenon with Trump. We were talking about this before you came on, is how anybody that gets in his orbit becomes a worse person. They devolve. Like Marco Rubio, JD Vance. You can go back just a few months ago, and they have some sense of clarity. But everybody in his orbit just becomes more toxic and worse. Not only that you see around the cabinet room, Ruth, but we were talking about even people we know that what we call triple trumped, voting for him three times. They become- Triple Trump.

I love that.

They become Some progressively worse people. I know we're not a psychologist, but it seems like once you capitulate to it, then it's like Pandora's box of letting all the demons out.

So I have a newsletter on Substack, like who It wasn't. There are like tens of thousands of them, but it is called Lucid, as in L-U-C-I-D, like having clarity. Yeah. And I wrote a piece a couple of months ago that is about moral collapse, how the The purpose of authoritarians is to make you into the worst version of yourself. If you're around them and you capitulate, you become the worst version of yourself because everyone has to come down to his level. Yeah. And think about who, for example, in the military or national security worlds, the people he has gone after, like Mark Millie, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What an admirable person. Well, he had too many scrupules. He was too honorable, so he had to be taken down. Because they don't want examples of honor and decency around for people to emulate. They want instead, that's why they surround themselves with people who either used to have scrupules, and then they broke them. Marco Rubio is a really sad case because we all know back in 2016, and after, he called Trump out for what he was in his opinion. And then Trump managed to break him, and maybe they have who knows how, why.

But now, because he's his man, Marco Rubio has, what, three or four jobs? Yes. He's not just Secretary of State, which is like a giant job. He's also, and this irks me as a historian, he's the head of the National Archives. That's not good. And he's got two other jobs because he's been broken, and so he's safe.

Okay, one thing that I... Just from reading your your books and your letters and listening to you on podcast, I did not realize. I see the rise in misogyny. I didn't put the rise in misogyny together with authoritarianism. And when you When you started talking about that, it was like, What? I might not be the only one that didn't know that. So if you'll just elaborate on that.

I was pretty well along in my book, which is organized around... So it goes over 100 years. Trump 1. 0 is in it. And I got a lot of flak from people, Why did you put Trump in the book? He doesn't belong there. Well, I hope that they see differently now. And it's organized around these tools of rules. So propaganda, violence, corruption. And as I was doing this research, I realized that I really couldn't leave gender out of it because the strong man, it's all about this certain masculinity. And there's actually, I call it the toxic triad of authoritarian gender policy. It's hyper masculinity, which we see lots of. It's homophobia and misogyny. So you have to elevate the man, a certain man, a lawless man, a rogue man, the strong man who dominates everybody. You put women down, and you have policies that do that, like eliminating reproductive, all of that stuff that we know. Then you also are homophobic. In fact, in many countries in Europe. There's also this idea of the natural, also in the States. The natural family has to be a man and a woman, and the man's on top.

Right. So that is everywhere throughout authoritarianism. And again, it's right wing and it's left wing. So I decided to put a chapter in on masculinity, and it's the first book, and I'm a female author, and I felt that was good to do. It's the first book to integrate the gender stuff and say, This is how it works with propaganda. This is how it works with violence.

I think you're so spot on because now you see the data catching up with your hypothesis. Now we see that Gen Z, our children's generation, they have a rise in misogyny that they haven't seen in decades, and misogynistic gender superiority type beliefs. And one thing that's interesting, you talked about the homophobia, and I don't know if you know anything. We'll just get into a little bit of gossip about authoritarians, but we think it's really fascinating that Grinder crashed, Grinder the Hookup, at the Republican National Convention. So these guys are wearing the maxi pads on their ear during the day to their dear leader. Praise Jesus, praise Trump. And then they're going out on Grinder at night. And we are the biggest support. We have huge LGBTQ+ audience whom we call the Gatriates. And so this type of duplicity, have you seen this in any other Dictators you know were closet cases or DL cases? Dl meaning down low? Yep.

Okay.

Sorry, you're a lot cooler than I'm giving you credit. You're just so academic. I love it.

No, I'm also cool. You're cool.

Ruth is cool, listen. Ruth is very cool.

Okay. So the whole Epstein thing going on, I actually have in my masculinity chapter, and it was really hard to write about this as a female scholar. Mussolini and Gaddafi, in particular, had... It's as though Epstein was the head of state. They had sex trafficking, sex gratification machines in their states. Instead of Ghislaine Maxwell, they used secret police to scout for women, to kidnap women, and then spit them out or keep them actually sex slaves in Gadhafi's case. But Gadhafi, who was highly homophobic, he imprisoned gays, he also had male sex slaves who he kept. Some of them he just used, and they were his guards. Others, he kept as sex slaves in his compound. And so this is one example of that. But this is this hypocrisy. And it's a place where there's a meeting often of a certain religious piety that is hypocritical, very distant from, I'm a very faithful spiritual person, this is not it, and misogyny and homophobia. And the idea of the perfect family. It's a lack of authenticity that you're not being your authentic self. You have this whole fakeness around you. A lot of what you're describing, where we're having pieties in the day and we're going on a grinder at night.

There's a certain sadness to that, too. Yeah, definitely. But it's more of this moral collapse because they're persecuting LGBTQ people. It's not just that they're living their contradictions in a passive way. That's their own business. They're persecuting LGBTQ people while they're actually engaging in the things they're saying are depraved. That's what makes it different.

Here's a a nuanced question that I'm concerned about. You see the rise of homophobia in the United States, and just as such a, I would call it just a straight lash, if you will, about what happened with O'Burgerfell, which happened so quickly in all of our lifetimes. It was beautiful, and it was this great thing. Now all of a sudden, everybody's homophobic. Georgia Maloney, the Prime Minister of Italy right now. She always freaks me out because she is very anti-gay, and she has made surrogacy illegal. And so is that more like authoritarian light that then evolves at a slower pace towards what Trump is doing in what, eight, nine months that we've been through? Because that, to me, is very, very concerning when I see that. Of course, I'm overtly concerned about what's going on here, but sometimes I'm like, I just can't read the American news, and I read about her.

Yeah, as an Italian, especially. You know, it's so weird. I was just thinking of her, and then you mentioned her. Really? Yes. Seriously.

What's up with that? Because that's a red flag. You got to keep your eye on that, right?

There are two things. So she, Maloney, and my first specialty was Italy. I lived in Italy for years, studied Italian fascism, so I know all about her. She and this woman who was the first female President of Hungary who had to resign because she pardoned a pedophile. Hello. Yeah. Katalyn Nowak. They are very good friends, and they engage in genderwashing. I didn't invent this wonderful term, genderwashing. It's when you come to a place of great power as a woman, and you say that you're breaking the glass ceiling and you're making things better for all women. And instead, you're doing things that actually take women's rights away and you're very repressive in gender issues. That's part of it. And then you're right, she's very homophobic. And in fact, homophobia is the through line of authoritarianism. I want to repeat that. Homophobia, if you look through history, even now we have women in power. Or there were certain authoritarians at the very beginning. Even Gaddafi, he gave women a lot of rights at the very, very beginning. They're all homophobic, all of them. There isn't a single one. I mean, maybe there's One of your viewers will say, Hey, I know somebody who isn't.

But it is the through line. And so even somebody like Miloni, who is the first. It's a big deal to be the first female Prime Minister. Now, she's a fascist. She was a hard core fascist for most of her youth, as in making Mussolini salutes. Really? Oh, yeah. She came from the neo-fascist party that still believed in Mussolini. Wow. Homophobia, of course, was part of original fascism. Mussolini had a penal colony where he sent all known gay people onto an island. So this is how it is. But this genderwashing, we have to watch out for this because it's actually been the right globally to elevate a lot of women. And so we can think, Oh, well, they're not repressive. They're progressive because there's women at the head. But just think about this genderwashing business. Yeah.

You've explained so many things that we've pontificated so many times. We should have a professor on more frequently. Absolutely.

It just confirms we get it.

Yes, because we- You do get it.

We've Just about this, the women in MAGA. Do you not realize that at some point when you join the group where Pete Hegsas, preacher, said in a CNN interview that he wanted to do away with the 19th Amendment, Pete Hegsas retweeted it and put all of Christ all the time. He endorsed that message, that video. So when you have Caroline Levet with her cross, lying, lying, lying to the American public, I guess they're just so short-sided. You have to realize at some point, those knives are going to be turned on you. It's like the Latinos for Trump. When you're voting for a guy, and at the RNC, it says, Mass deportations now, they're not going to cherry-pick who they deport and who they don't. It's a white supremacist type messaging. We're very familiar with this because we both live in Oklahoma City, which is a very WASP, white supremacist type culture, more so than... I mean, New York is so multicultural, but we understand that component of this really, really well. So that genderwashing, that's really, really makes sense. This episode of I've Had It is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary military magicians.

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Okay, so now I mean, I wake up with this sense of foreboding, and I often think about Ruth. The first time I've met you, but we've talked on the Zoom. But I'm like, when I saw that cabinet meeting, it made me nauseous. I was like, Oh, my gosh, we're here. So the sense of foreboding, how do you soothe yourself with that? How do we come back from this as America? He's done this public disorder. He's mobilizing the National Guard against protests, that thing. So how do we get our country back? How do we come back from this?

I think it's really important to never give in to fatalism or cynicism and think that there's nothing we can do. There are people who say, Oh, you can't outvote voter suppression. But that I don't believe in. It's very, very important to not only get people who didn't vote to register to vote, to educate them, but there's many things you can do. If you don't want to be in the streets, you could phone bank. You can get people registered to vote without being in the streets. It's really important to exercise your voice and get as many people participating in the process and understanding the stakes of what we're going through. I also think having hope is not just... It can seem very like a fantasy, Oh, I'm hopeful. What does that mean? But it's proven actually in history that resistance movements or moral oppositions to authoritarians, they need a hope. They need a sense that we can change the future of the country, that not all is lost. There are a lot of specific things we can do. Like right now, if you have people in your circles who are part of what they call abroad the state security forces, guards people, police, military, retired or active, now is the time to talk to them also about the economic downturn and all of the things we've been talking about.

These can be very uncomfortable conversations. We all have someone in our families or circles who is, I call it, politely dwelling in the disinformation tunnel.

We call it triple Trumpers.

Yeah, triple Trumpers. But it's really important to try because for our own moral integrity, we should feel that we've done something, and everyone has a way to do something. Resistance, which maybe you don't want to use that term. You don't want to say, I'm part of the resistance. I myself don't go around saying, I'm part of the resistance. My way has been to write, to speak out, to give the lessons of history. That's my own thing. Everyone has a way that they can participate. It's really saving our country, saving our communities. There's too much at stake to just give up.

Let me ask you this. Through your studies, have you seen a country, obviously not on the scale of the United States, but that went this far as we have in Trump 2. 0 and was able to correct course off of it? Is there a historical reference for shifting positions on this?

There's no exact parallel because Trump is the only head of state who tried to overthrow the government and had an insurrection and then was not far from being punished, is back. So there's that. There are certain things that make our situation more challenging. But you have the example of Poland. They had eight years of a far-right government, and abortion rights were practically gone. All reproductive rights, highly homophobic. They turned it around. Now, you could say they're better equipped because they had years, they had Nazi occupation, and then they had years of communism. Now, I consider the Jim Crow South was a regional authoritarianism. Yes. But we have never had a national experience of dictatorship. We've never had tanks in the streets. And so people are perhaps not as prepared here. And that's why I've given, I don't know, this point, probably a thousand interviews in the last eight years or so to just do my part. So I think that one of my maxims is never give up on the American people and never underestimate the American people. There's There's a individualism, I think, and a love of freedom and love of liberty that can go different ways, as we see.

But I think that when people see, if things devolve and there are more tanks on the streets and people will have what I'm calling a moral reckoning, I think people will wake up. Many, many people will wake up when their Social Security checks stop coming, when a hurricane comes and the government is absent. And Trump has now made The New Yorker did a whole long investigative journalism. I think he's made over... He's in the billions off of office so far. And the thing that people need to understand is that authoritarians have a totally different mindset about governance. They are zero % interested in public welfare. They don't care about you. They really don't. And they care about enriching themselves from public office and amassing more and more power so they can feel safe. And so when he was campaigning, and I think about this every day, he went to Iowa for the caucus, and it was freezing temperatures. And he told people to come out and caucus for him, even if they were ill. And he said, If you vote and then you pass away, it will be worth it. I remember. And I thought, Here we are.

They don't care care about your life. They only care about themselves. And you could... A psychologist would say, Are they narcissists? Are they just totally damaged people? But I think that as more people see the results of having someone in power and who has, as you said, made everyone around him the worst that they can be, people's eyes will be open and their hearts will be more open to having conversations, to receiving what you have to them. I'm hoping that that can translate into a massive electoral outcome that will start the reversal.

Well, and hopefully, I'm worried because they have federalized DC who would oversee a transfer of power, but they have federalized it, so that's worrisome. But let me ask you quickly about the personality cult, which is in all authoritarians, correct? What is it about the cult that they fall prey to what to me, is such an objectively, you shouldn't listen to anything this man says. He acts like he just got a day passed from the memory care wing of a nursing home, especially recently. What is the draw? Are these people skipped over? Has society failed them? Are they super religious to begin with? Through your studies, what have you discovered about the personality cold?

So these, Donald Trump is actually one of the most brilliant propagandists in history. I know that sounds ridiculous to some people. No, I get that. That's really what I think. No, I get that. The con. Yeah. He's been telling Americans that he loves them. Yes. He told them on January sixth that he loved them. And many times before. Putin sometimes, he doesn't do it anymore with the war on, but he used to tell Russians that he loved them. So they have a way of saying, I alone can fix it. You have been disappointed. You have been left by life. Think of Bukele, who has that gulag in El Salvador. He's wildly popular because he's young and he's vibrant, and he says, I'm going to take care of you. I'm stopping crime. So what if I get rid of Civil Liberties and detain journalists and have a gulag? It's worth it because I love you. And he has spectacles, too. I watch all these guys. So people feel taken care of because they're able to seem authentic. Seem authentic, and they're brilliant messengers. And think about, even though if they're not young, like Modi in India, he's the most followed leader in the world.

The guy is brilliant. Go and look at his Instagram. He even has an avatar of himself, like a virtual thing doing yoga because he supposedly loves these people and he wants them to be healthy. In the meantime, he's jailing journalists, and he's, anything, any Muslim temples, he's getting rid of them, and all kinds of bad things. So It's very difficult to resist the appeal of these leaders if you're a certain person who feels you've been left behind by democracy or you just haven't seen anybody who talks to you like that in politics. So there are things that we can learn from that. We don't want to do the con part, the bad part, but we certainly can learn to message better, to not be afraid of emotions in politics. What if the the love message were delivered by someone who really does love the American people? I think about that a lot.

Yeah. You know what? I saw those emails when he was telling, I love you, and on January sixth, I thought, That is going to turn everybody away from him because that is just way too creepy because his actions and his words do not match.

It didn't turn away. They love it. He got reelected. He got reelected.

I'm just like, It's so phony baloney, but...

It works. Wow. It worked for Mussolini. We're talking 100 years all over the world. It works.

As a historian or a student of history, professor of history, if you were to write The Autopsy, if Trump 2. 0, if we do not, if our hope doesn't prevail and they do a fascist takeover, would you pinpoint the biggest failure of the American government not trying him for his crime? Of trying to overthrow it after 1. 0, not participating.

Yes. There's now a lot of even new studies and places like the Journal of Democracy that show that one of the biggest reasons for what they call backsliding, you have a democracy and it starts to die, is not holding bad actors accountable. It's a basic thing in life. It's like if somebody cheats at your kid's soccer game, what you're going to say, Oh, please, cheat again. You don't do that. And so there's been an absent... They tried. I myself testified to the January sixth Committee. They reached out to hundreds of experts besides the big testimonies we all saw on television. They did an amazing job, left no stone unturned. But there was a lack of political will to then follow through and really do this thing. Then you look at how instead, Brazil has handled Bolsonaro or South Maria. And I look at those cases and I think, Well, that's one of the main places where we took a wrong turn.

Okay, we're going to have a little bit of fun. We always play with our guests, a game called Had It or Hit It. Oh, my God. Welcome to Had It or Hit It.

I would hit it. Had It.

Had It. I hit it every day, sometimes twice a day. Okay, so Ruth, Had It or Hit It, people who take speakerphone calls in public.

Had It.

Had It.

It's so gross. Awful. It makes me crazy.

And it's rampant on the subway and in airports.

And if it's on a long train ride or it's starting on an airplane, I sometimes will politely say something to them.

All right. Had it or hit it, personal space invaders.

Hit it. That's a cultural thing, too. And I guess living in New York, we're all crowded in. It doesn't bother me. It depends if it's creepy be, then had it.

And then the breath. As a woman. If there's bad breath, that's the worst.

In Oklahoma City, because we're so spread out, we have no population density, I really feel it. But you're 100% correct. In New York, just squeeze on the subway, walking down the street, somebody brushes up against you, somebody's right up on your back waiting for the bathroom. It doesn't bother me in the least.

If you're in a car, I come from Los Angeles, so I came from a car culture. And even when I lived in Rome, Italy, I actually had a car. It was really when I got to New York and started on the subway with the crowds, I had to adjust for sure.

Okay. Had it or had it cancel culture?

Both. Can I be both?

I agree with that.

Yeah, I used to think it was too far the other way, and now I think we need to bring it back. There's this shamelessness is running rampant. We need to start canceling these people again.

It's been manipulated by bad actors so that some people who might need to be held accountable or not being.

I agree with that. It has been manipulated.

I was canceled. I was supposed to deliver, it was supposed to be one of the biggest honors of my career, the Bancroft lecture at the United States Naval Academy in the fall of '24. And 17 or 18 Congress people of MAGA people mobilized. They signed a letter to stop me from speaking at the Naval Academy. So I was canceled.

Oh, my gosh, Ruth.

For reporting on history.

I was going to speak about military dictator, what happens to the military under authoritarians. Some of the things we've been talking about here. And that would have been a very important speech. It's not going to speak about Trump because it's a non-partisan environment.

How interesting that they made that inference.

I was canceled.

Yeah, they made the inference. They did. But it's amazing that you were going to speak on that, and they felt the need to cancel you.

Yeah, it was a coordinated campaign. So when I think about cancel culture, I now have to say, I was canceled.

Yeah, for reporting on history. Yeah.

Ruth was canceled. Okay. Had it or hit it. Cancels.

Had it. Had it. You know what's going on with that bruise? We've become like criminologist. Yes. Before the fall of communism, there were all these very old informations firm leaders. Because it was communism, everything about their physical ineptitude or mental incompetency had to be hidden. There were legions of these people who were professional criminologists, and they They analyzed, Oh, he's looking particularly pale today. That's what we've become with Donald Trump, because when you have an absence of transparency, that's what happens.

I think the hand we saw on our other podcast, we have a daily news podcast. There was a picture of Queen Elizabeth II with a very similar bruise shaking somebody's hand two days before she died. Yes. And then we showed... I mean, clearly, he's not in good health, either physically or mentally. And you probably saw the famous where he's trying before he walks down and claps for Putin like a seal, his right leg drags like this, so he can't even walk in a straight line.

Now he's hiding it. Yeah. He's sitting behind the desk.

Okay, last one, Ruth. Had it or hit it, the United States of America?

Hit it. Yay. Of course. I feel I'm a first-generation, and pretty much everything I'm doing now is out of my love for this country and feeling that Each of us can do what we can to save it from a destiny that I know from my studies is not good.

Yeah.

As scared as I am, I have to imagine you're worse. I mean, it really weighs on you.

It does. Sometimes I do a lot of yoga, and I take walks and be with your friends, people you love. My daughter moved back home, and she's 25, and that's a huge comfort to me to be around her. But yeah, and distance yourself from the news. If you feel overwhelmed, you don't have to be following everything. Because if you're burned out, then you're not going to be able to participate in trying to save our country.

Yeah. And, listeners, some of that burnout is what they want.

Exactly. They want us to be burned out and frightened and confused about the truth and exhausted. It's a design.

All right. So let's make it packed. The three of us. If something happens, some health issue, potential possibly death or incapacitated to perform the duties that are required, not mentioning names here, but everybody knows what we're talking about. We're flying to New York to do an immediate podcast live with you to talk about what the next steps would be. What the next step is. Because that's a whole 'nother podcast. It is. What they're doing right now. Yeah. And with his obvious mental and physical decline. But Ruth, this is Listener, this has been your academic episode. Yes. I feel smarter. I feel smarter and better. And you're such a great, non-boring communicator about this. Oh, thank you. And lovely. You are a gift. I mean, truly. Yeah, you do. I was just on every word.

I could have gone on for hours.

All right, listener, we'll see you next Tuesday and Thursday.

I'll tell you what I've had it with.

Let's hear it. I've had it with that. Listen up, patriots, gay-triots, and matriots. We have a new podcast that has dropped. It's called iHip News. It's Monday through Friday, every day, 15 to 20 minutes hot takes on the political landscape of the United States of America, always served with a side of petty grievances.

We are on all the available platforms, Apple, Spotify, Google, whatever you get your podcast and YouTube.

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