Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University.
She knows a dictator when she sees one, and she explains what fascism is, with specific historical and contemporary examples, in the excellent question and answer video, above.
Ms. Ben-Ghiat also has a really good substack/blog.
Here is a bit from a recent post:
...Trump has worked hard for a decade now to encourage moral collapse among Americans. In 2016, two months after he boasted, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump raised the issue of changing collective behavior to favor violence and cruelty. "Part of the problem...is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore," he said when security guards treated protesters at a campaign rally too politely for his tastes.
The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level, and Trump realized that “giving permission” to Republicans to be their worse selves was key to his domestication of the party. He made Republican elites complicit in his criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and then shocked them into submission on Jan. 6 by targeting them for physical harm...
Her stuff is very well worth a follow and I will get it, and a number of other new blogs/sources up on the crawl soon - it's just a bit of a pain these days as I have to dig into the creaky old blogger code to do it.
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