Free Republic

Donald Trump carried out crude attacks during his rally in New Jersey. Heath Mayo and Ruth Ben-Ghiat join The Weekend to weigh in on the deeper problem within the Republican party that perpetuates Donald Trump’s behavior.

A New York University professor claimed last week homeschooled students can easily become victims of indoctrination.During an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) book club meeting, Ruth Ben-Ghiat argued the recent opposition against public schooling stems originates with authoritarians who want to indoctrinate their children via homeschooling.One of the reasons that they all go after education and one of the reasons that schools are being targeted ... A big thing is to destroy liberal, democratic models of secular education – get everybody out of the system, put them in homeschools so they can be indoctrinated,” Ben-Ghiat told AFT President Randi Weingarten,...

Analyzing Trump's presidency, a fascism expert argues he tried to use the office to make money. The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat described Trump to Insider as a "dedicated" and talented "grifter." When looking back on President Donald Trump's time in office, Ruth Ben-Ghiat sees someone who pursued a unique goal among his predecessors, one requiring extreme discipline and dedication from the unlikely leader. "Trump's aims as president were totally different from any other president, Republican or Democrat," Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who is an expert on fascism, told Insider. "His aims were autocratic in that he wanted to...

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian at New York University, and the author of the book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” She has studied the backsliding of democracy, from the US to Russia, and elsewhere. In a wide-ranging interview, she told Insider that in light of the January 6 hearings, Trump might have to be prosecuted in order to save American democracy ahead of the 2024 election. In that context, she said that DeSantis could take his place as a populist nominee… “Now, if that does happen to Trump — DeSantis has already absorbed all the lessons of Trump”… “He’s clearly...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is best placed to take Trump's place as a 2024 GOP presidential nominee. An expert on authoritarianism told Insider that's because he's learned all of Trump's lessons. The expert added that DeSantis 'doesn't have the baggage of Trump,' and could rally voters.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat spends a lot of time thinking about authoritarianism. An historian at New York University, she is an expert on the rise of fascism in Italy and, most recently, author of the the book, "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present," tracing the erosion of democracy from Russia to the United States of America. She is keenly focused on what happens when those in power lose their grip on it. "The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure," Ben-Ghiat wrote in a November 2020 piece for The Washington Post. "Nothing prepares the ruler to see his propaganda ignored and his charismatic...

Liberals love to insist they're on the "right side of history," and their confidence crests in the liberal dominance among historians. Just as the liberal media dominate our evaluation of day-to-day developments, liberals count on their historians to dominate our evaluation of the decades behind us. It's not just historians but our taxpayer-funded storytellers, like the insufferable PBS documentarian Ken Burns. On the day before President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, NPR's "Morning Edition" presented him as an American treasure with no partisan bias. So, skip over the propaganda film on Ted Kennedy he made for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which...