The Daily Beast Podcast - One Theory for Why Bolsonaro Is In Florida

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Despite Jair Bolsonaro https://www.thedailybeast.com/jair-bolsonaro-flees-brazil-to-hide-out-in-home-of-mma-fighter-in-florida, the former Brazilian president is not there on vacation or to protest his election loss to the country’s new President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Ruth joined this episode of The New Abnormal podcast to talk to show co-host Danielle Moodie about the Brazilian insurrection, what makes people choose fascism instead of a healthy democracy, and why she is sure Bolsonaro’s trip to the States is nothing but a ploy to avoid legal consequences. Plus! Co-host Andy Levy is back and chats with journalist Jeb Lund, who tells him all about his alma mater New College of Florida and all the ways Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying to “destroy” it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have for you today.

First, we're going to be joined by Ruth Benjiat, the author of Strong Men, from Mussolini to the present. And she's here today to talk to us about the riots in Brazil, Trump, and the telltell signs that you might be headed towards a dictatorship. Then we're going to be joined by Jeb Lund, a journalist and the co-host of the Christmas Town podcast. He is also an alumni of the new college of Florida, a liberal arts college out of Florida, that Ron DeSantis is growing way too interested in. But first, let's have some fun. Andy, my friend, happy new year and welcome back. Thank you and welcome back to you,

even though you were here the whole week. And happy New Year to you and thank you for taking the heavy load last week when I was down with the COVID. You make it sound like a rap group, Andy. I know, it's good to be back though. Down with the COVID. All right.

East Coast COVID. It's always East Coast COVID for me. Throw your hands up. I would love to say that you missed nothing while you were out. But unfortunately, you actually missed the circus coming into town. I know. I thought I was like hallucinating that there were like 15 votes for Speaker of the House. Did that really happen?

It did. It wasn't just a fever. That was some bizarre shit. Early in the week, I wasn't even up for a penit. attention to it. But by the end of the week, I was, you know, I would throw on C-SPAN and just have it on and just watching Kevin McCarthy absolutely abase and humiliate himself. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but it sparked joy. Marie Kondo told us to hold on to the things that do spark joy. She did. And, you know, this could be, what is it, Shennon Freud, whatever the German term is.

But that is how I felt because watching Kevin McCarthy literally, I mean, what we missed, I guess, from a C-SPAN angle was him actually on his knees begging for votes. But what we did witness is him going back to the same folks over and over again with their shit-eating grins on their faces, just throwing our democracy into pure chaos. The thing that piss me off, Andy, though, is mainstream media referring to the Matt Gates's and the Lauren Bowdo's, as rebels. Yeah. There is nothing rebellious about their behavior. They are elected insurrectionist, and I don't understand why we don't use language and nuance in that way. I should say don't get me started. But look, the media has basically for the past two years, if not longer, has sort of failed us in a lot of ways with regard to what happened on January 6th. And they're just continuing to do it. And it's just we act like it's something that happened in the

distant past or or something that was just a blip on the radar and it's not it's who these people are as you said you know it's definitely who mac gaites it's who lauren bobert is all all of those people who had the little shit eating grins and that's the only thing that made it difficult to be happy about what was happening to mccarthy is knowing that in a weird way was elevating people like gates and people like bobert and and like you said they're being referred to as rebels and it's it's like no, you're not principled. Like, stop acting like these people are principled because they're not. They have no principles whatsoever.

And that's where it got really, really annoying to me, where it was like, and people kept painting comparisons between them and like the squad on the left. And it's like, fuck you. That is the worst possible comparison you could make. Because, look, I know there are people, I know we have listeners who don't like the squad and are not big AOC fans, don't like Elon Omer and people like that. Regardless of that, they do act on their principles. Yes.

And when they disagree with Nancy Pelosi or when they take a stand, they're not doing it for any reason other than they think they are acting in accordance with their principles. You cannot say that about people like Lauren Bobert and Matt Gates. You just can't. It is so far from being the same thing that it really is. It's the opposite of that. It is just straight up grandstanding or it's personal. They just don't like McCarthy. And so I totally with you on that.

There was nothing was more annoying than watching how at least some in the media were painting them. Yeah, because, you know, to your point, if you were to pull Matt Gates aside, which I never would, but if you were to pull Matt Gates aside and say, so what is this all about? What value set are you standing on? They don't have a value set, right? Right. And even some who, they also wanted to paint the rest of the Republicans in the conference as if they were moderates. And I'm like, you have 147 of these people who voted after the Capitol was ransacked on January 6, 2021 to overturn the will of the people.

So what moderates, again, are you talking about, right? You have the crazies and then the ones that know how to read and write. Like, I'm confused. Yeah. And I mean, look, is Marjorie Taylor Green part of the moderates now? Because she was all over Kevin McCarthy trying to get votes for him and running up to him to take selfies and stuff. like that. So these are the people now that are the moderate. Steve Scalese is a moderate. Jim Jordan is a moderate. All these people are insane. It's just that they decided that what was better

for them was to vote for Kevin McCarthy. And Matt Gates and Lauren Bobert, for whatever reason, decided it was better for them to not vote for him. That's all they cared about. This had nothing to do with what was good for the American people, what was good for their constituents, what was good even for their party. It was strictly, it was raw naked self-interest on both sides. And it's absolutely ridiculous and insane to try to pretend it's anything but that. As we're recording this, you know, we're getting ready to figure out whether or not this package that is shifting the rules in the house that essentially Kevin McCarthy gave away everything, the kitchen sink and his liver in order to get a hollowed out gavel to become speaker in name only because the position no longer has any power because of what he is given away just to have a title. So we're getting ready to see transparently all the things that Kevin McCarthy did in his backdoor dealings in order to get this past after 14 failed votes and four days into 2 o'clock

in the morning on a Saturday to have our kind of functional 118th Congress sworn in. Yeah. And the amazing thing to me was when he finally got it, like watching his face and his body language as if he had just won a great victory. And I'm sitting there like, how, how is it possible for a human being to have that little self-awareness? And how is it possible for him to not realize how embarrassing that past week was for him? And for him to be sitting there and acting like, you know, he just won this great victory and he persevered. You just get the sense that he's like, I'm going to go down in history as one of the great speakers and look what I just went through.

And it's like, are you fucking kidding me? Like, first of all, we need to start a calendar to say, you know, or one of those Twitter accounts where it's like, is Kevin McCarthy still speaker? And every day it can just tweet yes or no. Because probably, I mean, look, there's no way he lasts the whole year. And I'd be kind of shocked if it's even close to the end of the year when he's forced out. But the idea that he won, it's hilarious. And if I had the ability to feel compassion or empathy for him, this would be the moment when I felt it. Because he really did. Like, what he went through last week was one of the most. humiliating public embarrassments that I have seen in the political world in quite some time. And I don't know if he even realizes that. And that's what's just amazing.

It's like one of those if a tree falls in the forest things. Like if you don't recognize or choose to ignore the humiliation, did it happen? And I think that every meme says it did. So for me, the best thing that came out of the last four days was recognizing that Nancy Pelosi, left the gavel to the right man. She left the gavel to the right person. Hakeem Jeffries, Kathleen Clark, Aguilar, this new crop of Democratic leadership, they seem up to the task.

And when I watched Kathleen Clark deliver her introduction of Hakeem Jeffries and in doing so said, you know what, all the cameras are on us, right? So here's what I'm also going to do. I'm going to lay out all the things that Republicans have voted against. I'm going to lay out all the ways that the Republicans have never been ready to take over the gavel,

have never been ready to take over this chamber, and list out all the things from lowering prescription drug costs to infrastructure, all the things that they have voted against for the American people. And I thought that it was brilliant, as was Hakeem Jeffries, my goodness, ABCs of Democracy. The contrast between him and McCarthy couldn't have been more clear. Yeah. And look, that was a, I'm sort of, you know, I tend to be, this is going to shock you, I tend to be cynical about good political speeches. And I tend to get really cynical when people are like, this guy's amazing. He's amazing.

I'm like, I gave a good speech. That was a good speech. And there's just, you know, it was kind of a joy to watch. And look, whether that translates into him being a great speaker or not or a great leader or not, we'll find out. But it was certainly, like I said, it was an absolute joy to watch. And I did feel like there's a bit of, he's definitely picked up a lot of Obama's cadences. Yes. And so that was kind of funny watching it.

Just there were certain times when I was like, oh, that's straight up Barack. But no, he did a really good job. I mean, the A to Z thing was really good. And the other parts were also really good. And it was, you know, it would definitely one of the better speeches I've seen since the Obama era. That's for sure. I know there's some discomfort with Jeffreys on the left, and I get it, and I don't think they're completely wrong.

But there are times when you have to put that shit aside. And particularly, as you pointed out, in contrast with the guys on the other side of the aisle, it's just, it really is a breath of fresh air to have someone up there who is actually intelligent and can put words together and can lay out a case. And that's what he did, basically, was lay out a case for the Democrats and against the Republicans. And that's a nice thing to see. And I'm not, this isn't even a swipe at Nancy Pelosi. I don't think she was very good at that. I think she was amazing at other things. You know, I've given her a lot of grief over the years. But I do think she was really, really good, probably one of the

best we've ever had at the backroom stuff and at getting the coalitions together and things like that. That cannot be minimized because that's the nuts and bolts of the job. I don't think she was very inspirational. And I do think that Hakeem Jeffries, from what we've seen so far, is very inspirational. And that's really nice to see. I think that Nancy Pelosi as a person is very inspirational. I think as a woman in politics is very inspirational. But in terms of speechgiving. Right. That's what I mean. And being, yeah, and being that kind of motivator, yeah, I agree with you 100%. Yeah, it's just not her thing. And that's okay. Like, again, she was really, really good at a lot of the other stuff. So I'm not, I'm not minimizing her by saying that. That just, you know, that wasn't her thing. It does seem to be his thing. Yeah. You know,

one of the things that became overshadowed, I think, or maybe it was purposefully done, was as we're watching the fiasco play out on the floor, as we're watching this circus unfold. We also saw the second anniversary of the insurrection. It's been two years, Andy. It's amazing. Since January 6, 2021. Since we saw a plume of smoke over a capital building, since we saw Trump, Maga, insurrectionists build a gallows to chance of hanging the vice president of the United States two years. The architects are still outside of a prison cell. Donald Trump was free and able to announce a run for the presidency.

And frankly, you know, what I expected to see on the news was wall-to-wall coverage of a year ago today. And we didn't get that. And not even at the U.S. Capitol's visitor center. Is there a plaque? Is there any evidence denoting what befell our capital and our democracy two years ago? And so I'm just wondering, have they succeeded? We're watching the whitewashing and the erasure in real time.

We don't even have to wonder what the history books will say because no one's saying anything now and it's only been two years. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I, you know, I don't know if short-term memory is a uniquely, American thing, but it's definitely something we have. And, you know, that was one of the reasons, and I've said this before, that was one of the reasons I thought the January 6th committee was so important is, I think absent that a year ago, we would have forgotten about all this shit. But the committee kept it in our faces and they kept it in the news and they kept revealing more information. And I'm a little nervous now that that's done. I mean, look, we'll see what happens with Merrick Garland,

but, you know, long-term and short-term listeners of this podcast, no, we don't have the most faith in the world in Merrick Garland. But you're absolutely right. It's not only that so many of these people should be behind bars, and it's bad enough that they're not. But on top of that, they were sitting in that fucking chamber. Yes. And voting. And like you said, Donald Trump is, you know, half-acidly running for president. He's a declared candidate for president.

And it's bad enough. that they're not suffering any consequences, but they're not even, they're not paying any price at all, it feels like. And they sit there and they give these speeches and they act like they're proud American. It's like, you're among the worst Americans in the history of this country. And like you tried to overthrow a free and fair election. It doesn't get any more bad American than that. You know, we do that to other countries, not our own. Stop it. And it's just amazing because what we witnessed last week was the bulls. bloodless insurrection, as was said, you know, by a friend of mine, Charles Ellison on WURD in Philadelphia.

He said, these are elected insurrectionists. Right. The FBI only picked up about 900 of them, right? But the ones that were really behind, the ones that were giving recognizance tours and pointing out their colleagues' offices and saying, this is where you can find Pelosi and this is where you can find this person, they're sitting in that chamber and were able to just, you know, no skin off their back, vote in the speaker. Yeah, it's absolutely unreal. And now, of course, we're basically, you know, election denialism and attempted coups is one of our leading exports

now, apparently, because we saw what happened in Brazil, you know, and where the Congress was stormed by Bolsonaro supporters, Bolsonaro who lost and is currently in a hospital in Florida, I believe. This really is living in the past, because it feels like in the past all these dictators There's like the Shah. They would come to America to go to the hospital. And it feels like we're doing that all over again. All the things that they're doing down there in Brazil are basically copycat of what happened here two years ago. And you see the same people here, the Ali Alexander's and the people like that, the Steve Bannon's cheering on what's going on in Brazil, the same way they cheered on what's going on here. And again, no consequences or at most minimal consequences, unless you were one of the peons, unless you were one of the foot soldiers, then you might be in jail right. now. But for any of the leaders of the January 6th stuff, any of the people that fomented it or did anything like that, they're sitting pretty.

You know what's funny is that I didn't realize while watching the chaos unfold in Brazil that people could be arrested same day. That's weird, isn't it? Did you know that? I had no idea. I had no idea. I mean, those cops rounded up a bunch of insurrectionists and put handcuffs on them and had paddy wagons and took them away. Like they weren't able to go back to the Brazilian holiday inn. It was So odd. Yeah, I thought the only way you could do that was by looking through people's Facebook pages like six months later. Yeah. I thought that was the only way you were allowed to arrest insurrectionists. But it turns out in other countries at least, no, you can do it while they're insurrecting. You could actually stop it while it's happening. So weird. Very, very weird. And look, maybe we need to send some of our law enforcement officials down to Brazil for some training. For some training. Yeah, I don't know. It's funny to me that, you know, you can have an ear to the ground and hear rumblings about

dissent against the incoming presidents and think to yourself, maybe, maybe we should do something about that. Maybe we should, you know, up the ante and have our law enforcement, you know, at the ready. But, you know, who am I kidding? It's almost like, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, it's almost like a lot of people in law enforcement were on the side of the insurrections. So weird. You mean the ones that took selfies with them?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know I shouldn't even say that because it's just so out there and so wild. But, you know, that's who I am. I take risks like that. Amazing. Conviety your passion in a business with Shopify. And bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world.

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abnormal by Ruth Ben Guiat, the author of the book Strongman from Mussolini to the present,

and she also publishes a substack newsletter called Lucid. on authoritarianism and fascism. Let's just jump right in. The scenes that we are witnessing

that we saw coming out of Brazil, just a handful of days removed from the anniversary of the insurrection, the attack on our capital on January 6th, 2021. Some in mainstream media were doing a split screen

and it was chilling. It is chilling to think, Ruth, that America is now exporting far-right extremism. So, I mean, first, I want to get your reactions to those images. And then I'm hopeful that you can tell us, how, my God, did we get here? It's really tragic. And basically, they went after the three pillars of democracy in Brazil, the judiciary, the Supreme Court, the Congress, legislative, and the executive, the presidential palace. And they just trashed them and the kind of rage that they had that they're, you know, Bolsonaro has a cult of personality just like Trump did.

And these people had been camping out, some of them had been camping out, trying to get the military to intervene. What's really important here is, you know, when strongmen come in, from the very beginning, they start to cultivate extremists. And that can differ in every country. So, you know, Trump had a big tent for all races, and militia people, and neo-Nazis. And in Brazil, the drama and the reason that Lulet Silva is cracking down so quickly is that they had a 21-year military dictatorship, which tortured thousands, disappeared thousands. And Bolsonaro has been praising this dictatorship for years, and he is an army official.

He appointed tons of military men to his cabinet, trying to buy them off, get their support. So when things like this happen, even though, you know, we don't yet know because it's so new, how many, like we do for January 6th, we now know there were, you know, there were a few active military, a lot of retired law enforcement military in the January 6th crowd. We don't know that yet for the Brazilians. But when they do these things, so they ask, what Bolsonaro did was activate the extremism of all these people who are nostalgic for the dictatorship. So that rage that you saw where they were. They went in there and trashed this and stole, you know, they like, they had this fury, which is scary to see, right? It's your reaction is, I feel sick every time I see January 6th. Oh, yes. I just feel sick to my stomach, right? And that fury is the fury of people who have been, you know, cultivated to hate democracy.

And some of these people really do want to, you know, install both scenarios and have a military dictatorship again. Like people listening at home to this, right? How is it possible that people could want a dictatorship versus having a voice and say in their own government? You know, and it's similarly, I never in my entire life studying politics and working on Capitol Hill and in government. I never in my entire life would have thought that I would have seen a scene like we did on January 6th. But more importantly, an entire movement. that is organized the ideology of one man and not around the collective, the we, the people.

Yeah. How does that happen? So I wrote the book because I wanted to understand these same things. And I wrote it as an American who had studied Italian fascism and more broadly other fascisms for years. You know, how the hell did this happen with Trump? Like I was as scared as anybody else. There are patterns to these things. And so it's often, it's when a country's had a lot of social progress, could be racial

emancipation, gender equity, you know, could be workers' rights, which is big in Brazil. And that's when some people are overjoyed. You know, finally a progressive nation is coming into being. And other people, white males in the Euro-American context, but also in Brazil, Bolsonaro's Italian origin. So this kind of white Christian, he's an evangelical. So they feel their whole status, their world, their civilization is threatened. And in those cases, that's when these strong men who are very savvy with the media,

they're very savvy at relating to people. They have these cults of personality and they know how to be what people want them to be in that moment. And so unfortunately, once people bond to these guys and we're seeing this because both these people lost elections. They're out of office. Yep, both refuse to admit defeat. Yeah. And there they use disinformation from the very beginning. And one similarity is that both Trump and Bolsonaro relentlessly hammered home disinformation about their electoral systems for four years for the entire time they were in office. And what you do with that is you you prep your followers to not believe in the election system in case you lose.

It's like an insurance policy. It's the same thing they do with the press. And it was like Bolsonaro came in in 2019, and I was like I was checking off the list, right? He also started attacking the press because the same thing. They're all really corrupt. And if your secrets start to come out, you need people to already hate the press.

And by the way, the reason Bolsonaro is in Florida, you know, it's not just he sulking there. It's that he's under investigation for various potential crimes. And two of his sons actually were caught trying to enter the Italian embassy in Brasilia to try and get Italian citizenship. So they don't want to stick around. They're all, well, they're all so corrupt. So all of these guys are corrupt.

All of them have to use disinformation and charisma. and seduction to get followers into a state that they will even commit violence on their behalf. And that's what we saw at the Capitol and that's what we're seeing now. I like the word that you just used seduction. I want to ask you this as a person who obviously is an author and is studied, but also utilizes mainstream media in the way that we all do to get our messages out. Do you think that the media as an industry, it becomes lulled under the seduction of strong men in the way that they follow? Right?

Like Donald Trump received headline after headline. I mean, there were cameras on empty tarmacs, right? They have this. So we know that strong men, one of their qualities is the charisma and the ability to galvanize people and to command an audience. But is there. something as well that the media falls victim to that spell? Yes, there is. And part of it is that these guys know how to get, a lot of them come from show business or Bolsonaro came from the military, but the pageantry. And but Bolsonaro, for example, he was stabbed during his campaign

in 2019. And he has to periodically go into the hospital. He just went in the hospital with Florida. But when he goes to the hospital, he poses, he sends live streams and tweets of himself in a gown hooked up to monitors with part of his chest exposed. And they use their bodies very seductively. So the media eats this up. They're clickbait. Right. And it's a very masochistic thing the media does because, again, they're all going after the media. So part of it is their skill.

And they also know expertly, and I have an example. in the book of both Bolsonaro and Trump doing this, they know how to redirect and distract the media. So, for example, there's always a certain timing to what they do. So, for example, Bolsonaro was like under, you know, the media was probing some corruption thing. So he chose that moment to say to a reporter, you have a homosexual face.

Well, what did that do? Everybody went crazy about the homophobia and they forgot, which should be called out, but he used it to distract. And Trump did the same thing when, you remember the whole thing when late Representative Elijah Cummings, where he said your district is rat infested? Yep.

So why did he do that? Because the Cummings was the head of the Oversight Committee that was starting to investigate Ivanka and Jared for using, I think, like personal phones or servers. And he didn't want that. So he started with racism. And so they pull out these tricks. And so the media falls for it.

But the media part of the equation is that the media often, you know, in the states, didn't know how to respond to Trump and fell for his tricks and also had these habits of both sidesism, of, you know, feeling they shouldn't be tough on, they had to be equal, which are not suited for somebody who doesn't believe in democracy. And these whole four years, we've been dealing with having the learning curve of the media, and sometimes at our democracy's expense. And they continue to do this sometimes with these terrible headlines that are both sidesing extremists. So for example, I've tweeted yesterday or day before, every time during this whole speaker saga, every single time a reporter came up to any of these

extremists in the GOP, they should have been asking them point blank to their face on camera about January 6th. Yep, I thought the same thing. But they don't do that because, they want access or they have a different assignment to do. But without that context, constantly being made present, those people are getting off the hook. That's the problem. You know, it's just, on one hand, I want to believe that the media, the mainstream media, is ignorant. Oh, it's a learning curve. Oh, we've never had a candidate like this before. But in your book, Strong Men, this is not new to the world stage, right? This is being, able to utilize new technology to spread the same type of hatred and to usher in ages of dictatorship,

authoritarianism, and fascism that we've seen throughout history. Yeah, but the problem is, and this is just very sad, and it's way beyond the media. What I found is every people who this happens to is surprised. So you could say, okay, fine, certainly the Italians, that was the, because mostly he was the first dictator. Right. And they didn't know any better, right? And in fact, the Marxist Antonio Gromche wrote from his prison notebooks, he's in prison and he's writing and he said we were just overwhelmed. We didn't know what to do. Fine. And then some of them were trying to warn the Germans, you know, you gotta unite against Hitler. No, but that was early. And then I found that every single time, like in Chile, so we're talking about the Brazilian military dictatorship at the same time that my case study is Chile, where they said, oh, we're not going to have a dictatorship like those Brazilians and those Guatemalans. We love democracy. Our military is this and that.

And then what happened? They had one. That was 17 years. So you get to America. And America is particularly prone to this because the big American quote exceptionalism. Yep. You know, oldest democracy. In fact, it's only been a democracy since the 60s in my book, since civil rights.

Mm-hmm. So that is not doing us any. favors. So when these guys, basically the big point is when these guys come on the scene, it's a reckoning of your own mythologies as a nation. The reason I started doing all this media stuff, I mean, hundreds of interviews a year, starting in 2016 and op-eds, is I thought, okay, I have the skill set and I can warn people what's going on because Trump is acting like Mussolini, et cetera. And some people don't want to hear it. Not some. I would say a majority of people. And now for you who was the canary in the coal mine saying, hey, hold on, there's something arrived here,

something looks eerily familiar. You were told, as I'm sure many people were, you're being hyperbolic. This is not the same thing. Yeah. And then there are other kinds of, like, Francis Fukuyama trashed my book in the New York Times. He was in the book, so he shouldn't have reviewed it. But part of the thing was, you know, she should just write about Italian fascism. She shouldn't be making these big claims and, you know, shouldn't be focused.

on leaders, but leaders matter. Leaders really matter because they set the tone. They have leader cults. And the leader cult is very much on display here. These people were camping out in Brazil waiting for their hero to be restored to power to justice. And look how long Trump's been out of office. And he has such a hold, not only on tens of millions of people, still believe his big lie, but Kevin McCarthy, who has to kiss the ring when he accepts him when he's talking about being speaker, oh, we shouldn't doubt Trump's influence. You know, this is also a form of a leader cult that keeps going long after these guys are out of office. So I'm wondering, Ruth, you know, we have a number of cases pending against Donald Trump. We have, you know, the fact that the

midterm elections came and went and everything that he touched went to shit, right? He didn't do the party any favors, right? It's not the man no longer has. The man no longer has. as a matter of fact, it was it was fools gold, his Midas touch, right? So you see these things, these kind of moments, these blips on the radar that have the media say, oh, Trump's hold is fading, right? The fever is breaking. In your research, does the fever ever break or are we destined to be a Chile and Italy, you know, a Brazil? are we destined for our time in the dark?

Well, two things happen. When there's a real dictatorship with like, you know, one party state and stuff, like in the fascist dictatorships, it took being bombed by the allies for people to wake up out of the cult and start cursing the leaders out loud and start. So it really took all that took being bombed. Now, unfortunately, what has happened in our case is when someone like Trump, comes, they spawn imitators. And that's Rhonda Santas, who is, I've been writing about him for almost

18 months now. The first time I saw him is like, the guy is bad news. The guy is such bad news. And he is the quiet extremist who, you know, Trump, some people, again, they think he can't win elections. His hold is still great. And we should never ever discount him. People were saying Bolsonaro was finished and then look what happened. right? But the imitator who learns from the Trump and does him better can prevail. And so in our case, we could have a thing where Trump is just, he has too much baggage. He's a loose cannon. He's got too many investigations. This Jack Smith is ideally suited with his background to assess Trump. And so, you know, Ron DeSantis is equally extremist, but he doesn't have that baggage. So far as we know,

he's not an overt criminal? No, he's doing a lot of sham things. I mean, he's a total performer and con artist in his own way. Problem is no one is as criminal in so many ways as Donald Trump. There is no one else. Only Sylvia Belisconi in Italy, who's also in my book, but he didn't cause an insurrection. So when you have someone who is a sexual assault or a money launderer,

on and on and on, and then anybody else looks okay, And that's why some people are writing these crap, you know, opeds like, oh, Rondosantus is normal. Well, he's not normal. No. So that's what we might end up with. And he'd be like an Orban figure in a nice suit and tie. And, you know, he would never scream about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. You don't do that.

That's what we might end up with, which means our democracy would be indeed highly endangered and partly, look what's going on in Florida, is making it I call him Il Duccia of Florida, you know, Muslim of Florida. That's what we might end up with, but never discount Trump either. I've never discounted any of them. And as a matter of fact, since, you know, Donald Trump came down the escalator, I have been one of the many people saying that the more skillful, polished Trump is going to be America's problem. Yeah.

Is going to be America's biggest problem. And that is DeSantis. And what he's doing, to your point in Florida, Florida is the Petriese. dish of the Republican Party. What works there is that's, it's their testing site. It is their testing ground to see what holds, what people push back against and what they're willing to put up with. Yeah. And so this is why it's talking about before when people refuse to see reality. It's really frustrating that people are normalizing DeSantis. It's like, well, didn't you just learn for God's sake with all what we saw with Trump? Because I remember, this is funny, in January

February 2016, I wrote this op-ed. I said that if Trump gets the nomination, he's going to have a giant personality cult. And I used the cults of Putin and Berlusconi and said he's going to be like them with the personality cult. No one wanted this op-ed. It was like, are you crazy? You know, that's so weird. What do you mean personality cult? We're a democracy. That's like so strange. And so I opened a Huff Post blog that anybody could do, basically. And that's how I published it as a Huff post piece that had no editing or anything because no one wanted this thing. And that's where we started that all of these concepts of authoritarianism, personality cult, lawlessness, they just didn't apply to us. Yeah. And so it's really frustrating that now Ronda Santis is, he's like showing

every sign of what he wants to do and some people don't want to get it. No, because sometimes being exceptional means burying your head in the sand and thinking that you're better than everybody else. Exactly. Ruth Ben-Giott, thank you so much for making the time for the new abnormal. I honestly could talk about this very topic because it's what keeps me up at night for hours on end. Folks, the book is Strongman from Mussolini to the present. Keep being the canary in the coal mine, Ruth, because we need it and appreciate you. Sure.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. New College of Florida is a small liberal arts. school in Sarasota, known for its non-traditional educational methods, including things like narrative evaluations and a contract system instead of grades and GPAs. It's also got a fantastic academic reputation and has been designated as the Honors College of Florida by that state's legislature. So naturally, Governor Ron DeSantis doesn't like it and wants to remake it in his own image, that of a pig man. Jeb Lund is a journalist whose writing has appeared in such places as the Guardian,

Vice, Rolling Stone, Gawker, and the New Republic. He's also the co-host of the It's Christmas Town podcast, and he happens to be a proud alumnus of New College of Florida. So he's here to tell us more about what's going on down there. Jeb, thanks for being here, man. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you. So before we get into what exactly DeSantis is doing, talk to me about your alma mater. What makes new college so special? There's a lot. The original dorms were designed by IMPA and were meant to be anchored or, I guess, platformed out in the middle of the bay, and that didn't happen. Oh, wow. The major buildings that you actually take classes in are former mansions for the Ringling Circus family. So, you know, you can go up a beautiful balustrade with this sort of like Gogh-inflected nature scene with a monkey

on the way to your history class. And then look out on Sarasota Bay and it's this beautiful sort of like neoclassical, sort of like Mediterranean inflected building. It's very lovely. It's also very odd. There are only about 600 students, or at least when I was there, only about 600 students on campus. So it's sort of like an intellectual crucible. You are never far from an argument and you get to know people very intimately and have to work out adult solutions to emotional difficulties and problems because the problems never go away. It's not like going to U of F where if you don't like somebody, well, they're one of like 35,000 people there. Right. But also you mentioned the contract system and sort of the academic structure. There are no

distribution requirements. So if you go in wanting to study something, you can effectively take classes only in that, but because your professors are very concerned about interdisciplinary exposure, you know, even if you're taking a history class, you're going to get a lot of cultural history at the time, including, let's say, women's roles or minority roles, and let's say the garment industry in Lyon in the pre-modern era. So you can burrow down on a topic if you really want, but you're going to wind up learning a lot of things you didn't expect to. But in addition to all that, if they don't have something that you do want to study, you can go and approach a professor who has an academic background in that discipline and build a

syllabus with them. So I was a history major. There were only three history professors and they didn't cover early modern England. I wanted to learn about the Reformation in England. So I put together a syllabus of, I think, 16 books with a professor who was willing to do it. And then I just went in one day a week after having read that book and written a five-page response paper and we'd talk about it for an hour. So if you really had something that was kind of an academic curio that may not even be served by a major institution like U of F. You could find a professor who was willing to take the walk with you and you could pursue that field of inquiry and then you could develop it into a thesis, which you had to write in order to graduate. If you were a like me, a history major, it was about

100 to 120 page paper. If you were a NatSci major, it might have been a lab study that you did and then you wrote up. So it might only be like 30 to 50 pages. But it was a year long endeavor. And if you wanted to go into grad school, that was great because effectively you could take, let's say, your history thesis, if you still wanted to study that particular event or condition, if you went into a master's program, then you'd shrink that from 100 pages down to 30, and that'd be your academic article. And if you still like that and you went into a doctoral program, you could expand it again. And then that would be your doctoral dissertation. So it's a hippie school. I got it. Yeah, but I mean, with real academic credentials, we had something like, I believe, a 90%, I haven't checked

in recent years, but for the longest time, if you graduated new college, there was a 90% rate of completion of your doctoral dissertation. Wow, that's pretty amazing. So what kind of students generally tend to go there, want to go there? Hippies. Oh, okay. Lots of different people. The Diaz-Balarts went there.

So, you know, I went there and I came in as sort of a New Deal Democrat and found myself right of center because there were many people who were avowed anarcho-sindicalists. But also, you know, we got Republican members of the Florida State House and State Senate. and the U.S. House who served in government for 20 years, who went in Republican and came out Republican. My journey there was pretty much, it was the only school in the state of Florida whose application deadline hadn't elapsed. But I knew other people who knew they wanted to go there from freshman year of high school because it was a place where they knew that there were going to be other people like them. Right. Okay, so let's talk about DeSantis because he obviously

doesn't like everything that you just said. And last week he announced he was going to appoint a new board of trustees for the school subject to confirmation by the Florida Senate. They're all pretty much hardcore right wingers. There's a professor from the conservative Christian Hillsdale College. There's the founder of the Faith-Based Inspiration Academy. There's a pro-Trump English professor from Emory University. And most notoriously, anti-trans and anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo. At the risk of asking the insanely obvious question here, what is DeSantis up to? Well, I think that's a four-part answer. Okay. I gave this one a lot of thought, and sort of in order of decreasing likelihood to increasing

likelihood of what utility they hope to get from it, I think number one is let's destroy an academic organization. If you listen to what they're describing new college as and what they want to turn it into, what they want to turn it into is new college. They just want to turn it into their ideologically preferred version. I don't know as if they're going to be able to do that. I think they're going to face, to coin a term that their ideological fellow travelers applied to segregation, massive resistance. I don't know how effective they can be, especially if DeSantis hopes to be out the door in two years. I don't know what kind of transformation they can really enact. The second one is to destroy basically an activist factory. Like I said, people at New College,

a lot of people who go there go there because they knew they wanted to be there for years. They wanted to find a place that would nurture their political commitments and give them the tools to act on that. And so we, as a school, churn out a lot of very effective activists. It may be as little as going to the Publix and there's somebody out there asking you to sign a petition to get Publix to stop purchasing Mount Olive Pickles because Mount Olive uses a lot of migrant labor and has pretty ugly, or at least last I checked, pretty ugly labor practices. So it's a sort of environment where people get used to networking with ideological compatriots and ideological opponents and finding a way to talk to them, finding common ground and finding something that they can do

effectively with that. So getting people to not want to go there to network with other people who are good at this stuff, I think is ultimately beneficial to DeSantis's program. The third is basically, I think they want to engineer a circumstance whereby their enemies generate a constant news of the weird, look at these crazies content column for the news cycle. You know, DeSantis is very good at picking fights with people in the culture war and then doing nothing else. There's very little follow-through from him other than I'm pissing off the people you want to see punished because you don't believe that they should exist or have a voice. And this is that, but also it's the sort of school that's going to generate well-written and voluminous backlash. And I think if you're somebody who's running

townhall.com or The Blaze or Breitbart, maybe they don't put it under the black crime column at Breitbart, but they can put it under, you know, lefty wackos, Marxist students. And I think you're going to get a reliable amount of content under that vertical for about a year. But then along that woke mob line, I think the most effective thing they can do. And I think the thing that they'll be happy doing, if they walk away with nothing more, I think they'd be happy with this, which is make non-white and LGBTQ students afraid and let them know that there is no place in higher education in Florida where they're going to feel safe, where they're going to feel safe, there's an atmosphere, where there is a faculty, where there is a student body that is committed

to letting them know, you're accepted. You belong here like anybody else. And if you're a trans kid and you want to go to a good public academic institution in Florida, you know, U of F is not a bad school. I'm dunking on U of F. But, you know, it's a very good school. You want to be a history major. I would have done fine if I'd gone to U of F. But if I were a trans kid in Gainesville, a place where I have seen a man stand up in the back of a truck bed going 30 miles an hour down the road and throw a full beer can and hit a guy in the back of the head on a bicycle because he was wearing a maroon sweatshirt on game day. It wasn't an FSU UF game day. FSU wasn't even in town, but he was wearing maroon, right? And this guy gets plunked in the back of the head with a natty ice. It was what was probably like 80 miles an hour went flying off the bike. It was one of the most horrible things I've ever seen. I'm sorry it's funny too. But if you're a trans kid and you've got Okay, I can go to a place with a bunch of, you know, crunchy hippies and we're in this weird kind of, we're in a weird circus fortune dynasty's real estate plot next to, you know, a really weird IMPA, Fure bunker inspired dorm. Like, you can go there or you can go to U of F where, you know, people are just getting utterly ripped shit on Saturday night and tear-assing down the street and, you know, screaming at people who look like others. I know what I would want to do for my safety and making it into explicitly an institution designed

to be inhospitable to those people and to the conditions and beliefs that say those people are acceptable. I mean, so much of the rhetoric of the right now seems to be aimed at that. So even if they don't transform the institution, if they make it somewhere where those people don't want to go, so they don't have a home, so they don't wind up being integrated in society as people every bit as much like you and me, I think that they'll be happy. happy with that. That to me seems to be maybe the key here. And that's where you come to someone like Chris Rufo, who is, I think it's fair to say, objectively, one of the worst living Americans. He sort of cut his teeth by knowing absolutely nothing about critical race theory, but portraying it

as anti-white and anti-American and getting idiots to believe him. And he won't like this word, but he sort of transitioned from that to becoming a big proponent of the groomer slur that is now hurled willy-nilly at queer people and at straight people who, you know, aren't bigots. And this seems to me to be right up, as you were saying, to be right up your governor's alley. Like, that's exactly the kind of atmosphere that he wants to foster. Yeah, no, and Chris Rufo is, I think, a perfect avatar for this kind of charlatanism. Because like you said, he has admitted in interviews, like, I don't know what this stuff is. I think the actual quote was, I don't have time for this. I don't give a shit about this stuff. Right.

about what critical race theory actually is. And additionally, he doesn't seem to have many qualms about who his ideological fellow travelers are. I mean, I've watched him yuck it up on Twitter with conceptual fascist James Lindsay, whose I guess big running buddy was one of the the big recruiters for the nexem sex cult. Like, you know, there's not a huge firewall among these people and their opponents if they can effectuate what they want politically. So yeah, now I don't think that there's like any higher spirit to what they're doing other than this kind of opportunism. Again, too, because what they say they want to do with new college is what new college for the most part is. They want to make it a classical liberal arts institution.

How you can possibly be more classical than a college that consciously modeled itself off of the Oxford and Cambridge tutorial system where you have an academic advisors. So what you're saying is that the 15th century is a little too modern for you. You want something really classical. You want one tonsured guy who's sitting in illuminating one book, one page at a time for his entire life, to read to you from that one book, which is the only one he has. Like, maybe that's fine for them. I don't know. I looked up, for example, Hillsdale College, which apparently is sort of what they want to model the new college after.

Right. And I looked and it's a school that has, you know, it has a very strong core curriculum, which I am not opposed to at all. I went to a school that is sort of known for its core curriculum. It's a small school here in New York, Jeb, you wouldn't have heard of it. And when I went there, it was all white males and you throw in the occasional like Jane Austen or something like that. And I know that they have, where I went, they have updated the core curriculum and it is a lot more inclusive now with people of color and more women, not. a hundred percent based on the Western canon and stuff like that. Hillsdale College has done none of that. It's all, it's exactly what you would think it is. It's Plato. It's Aristotle. It's John Locke. And nothing against any of those people. And I'm not suggesting they should be kicked out of the core. It's just that Hillsdale has decided they're never going to add to the core. So it does seem like that's exactly what they want to do here with new college is sort of, as you said, like the 15th century is a little too modern for them. And they really just want to keep it as quote unquote, pro-Western, which of course is code for, you know, pro-straight white male,

uh, and Christian. White male heterosexual, capitalist patriarchy. Yeah. Yeah. And Christian. I mean, Hillsdale is, you know, straight up Christian. As I said, one of the other people on this board of trustees is from this faith-based inspiration academy. It strikes me as a little odd that a school, uh, that is operated by the state should want to be or should be explicitly Christian, but what do I know? Well, I would be curious to see how much Eddie Spear, the founder of the Inspiration Academy, has donated to Ron DeSantis and the State Republican Party and how much they've been involved in Inspiration Academy.

Because, I mean, you can find there are all kinds of academies like that across the state of Florida. Usually their founding date is in line with a Supreme Court case that was against segregation. And they usually have the academic credentials to bolster that. I think by, what was it, by 2012, 500 charters across the state of Florida had already failed. So they'd simply passed a law saying that you could not take into consideration the previous academic record of a person who wanted to open a new charter school because that would prejudice the system against people who were not good at teaching anybody. As for making it like Hillsdale,

I mean, being a reporter on the national political scene, such as I was, the one thing that I think everybody knows what Hillsdale is for is churning out Republican congressional pages and staff. Yes. That's its point. That. And I mean, I met a lot of women who went to Hillsdale and subsequently sort of left that ideological movement. And they were like, yeah, I went there for an MRS degree. I went to learn what my husband knew and then my job was to be a spouse. It's a perfect flip for DeSantis and for people doing this project. Because if you could take an activist factory that sends people to Tallahassee to petition and protest against what you're doing and turn them into people who

go to Tallahassee to enact what you're doing, that's going to solve a lot of problems for you. But the idea that Hillsdale is in any way a better academic institution, I think, is completely fatuous. Yeah. I mean, it seems absurd for anyone to even begin to suggest that. So is there any recourse for alumni that you're aware of to fight back on this? Perhaps a strongly worded letter to the editor, a change.org petition, you know, anything that effective that you can do? Well, I've been looking at what the alumni is sort of debating right now because I'm a member of a couple of, you know, group chats, basically. There's like a Facebook group. And I think the big concern right now for them is because this is an optical battle right now, nothing has been done yet. There's this real hesitancy to go fully on the offensive yet because then it's sort of easy to demonize people at New

College as victims of the woke mind virus who automatically object to these people who haven't even done anything yet. These are fellow academics who simply disagree. You know, why are you mobilizing against them. And I think the real kind of debate is, you know, at what point do you go all in, you know, because there is going to be kind of a point of no return. I do know that they can simply, and this is something that I've seen suggested, and I would also, like I haven't really made up my mind about it yet. I would be in favor of just as an idea. Just ignore them. Go ahead and teach whatever the hell you want and make them come in and arrest you. Make them come in and disrupt your class. Make them stop you. And then if, you know, people question, well, what were you teaching?

hey, look, the syllabus is posted. You can read it. And one of the things I should, you know, stress because of the academic rigor of the place, like, you know, this is a school where I learned a lot about Marxist interpretation of things. I rarely had a professor who thought that that was the correct interpretation. Right. And I've never read more virulent and well-made attacks on Marxist theory than at New College, you know, because we were supplied all the tools for, okay, well, here you can look at this, this way, but, you know, you're also, I'm going to make sure that you read this guy absolutely ethering that first dude. And now you got to make up your mind. And so I think there is a kind of like a nonviolent nobility to just sort of like, I'm going to teach.

I'm going to keep teaching the way I taught because I gave everybody all the perspectives they needed to arrive at their own opinion about this important issue or event in history or a contemporary reality. Stop me from doing my job. Interesting. I assume, by the way, that the Florida Senate will confirm this board of directors slate for. hell, right? I can't imagine why they wouldn't. Yeah. It's gerrymandered all to hell anyway.

Like they've got a hammer lock on things. This is not going to be a thing that costs them their engineered majority. You know, I'm kind of, like as an alum, I'm kind of proud of us being on the national stage in this like iniquitous way. It's like, hey, people are talking about us. You should have been all along. The first time actually that I ever heard about new college in mainstream media came from Glenn Beck.

I think he named it the number two worst college in the country. And just to, you know, so this, this is a project that's been going on demonizing, you know, the liberal arts institutions for decades. But I liked the fact that the first time new college really kind of poked its head over the parapet in this culture war. It was when Glenn Beck was saying it was one of the worst colleges in the country at the same time that he was promoting the thousand-year-leaf, like the greatest history book ever written by Cleon Scousin, who, as it turned out, was claimed to be an ethnic. FBI agent, and he wasn't, he was too crazy even for Jay Edgar Hoover's FBI. If I remember correctly, he was also disliked by the John Birch Society. And even in the 1990s, he was writing history textbooks for high schools that depicted slavery as just a grand old time and called enslaved African Americans pickininnies. This is generally the level of criticism that you're getting and generally the level of academic rigor that you get from the people who put the target on places like New College. They clearly don't care. They don't even read the books that they like. If they did, they would probably go, shit, somebody published that? Oh my God. Excellent. Jeb, thank you so much for joining us. Keep an eye on this and see what other nonsense your beloved governor is getting up to you down there.

Thanks, ma'am. Thank you very much. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. Oh, it's been so long since we've had the ability to do a fuck that guy. I know. I know. So I'm excited. Yeah, it felt particularly difficult because there's just been so much going on. I'm going to go a little off the board. I'm going to go with the governor of the fairly great state of Texas, Greg Abbott, who is whining that he desperately needs more money to address the border crisis down there in Texas.

And he's blaming this on the Biden administration, of course. And he conveniently forgets to bring up the fact that he spent over. $20 million on his little stunts to charter buses to drop off migrants who were not here illegally, this can't be said enough, but to drop off migrants in places like Washington, D.C. and Chicago. And he had absolutely no qualms spending this money, but now he's out there blaming the Biden administration for the fact that he doesn't have enough money to take care of the border. So it's just the absolute, probably not so much in Texas, but here in New York, we have a word for this, and it's chutzpah. And it's just unreal to me that, and it shouldn't be at this point,

because that's who these people are. And hypocrisy means nothing to them. And, you know, if you don't have any sense of shame or anything like that, your own hypocrisy can't bother you. And that's the deal here. But it can still bother us. And just the fact that he would waste his taxpayers' dollars on busing these migrants. to other cities and other states without giving those cities or states a heads up, by the way, because this is all a stunt. And then sit there and say, we need money and the Biden administration is causing this crisis down here. It's just, I don't know what to say about it other than fuck that guy forever.

Fuck him forever. I think Greg Abbott is a piece of shit. And I think that if Joe Biden, I would love him to have a little bit of the dark Brandon that he has been labeled as. be like, yeah, so the store is closed. So maybe you should see if you can get Ron DeSantis to flip your bill or to do something like that for you because you want to spend money on stunts and we're trying to spend money on the American people. So figure it out. Like is what I would love for Joe Biden to say and be like, so Greg Abbott be a lesson to the other Republican governors who want to play copycat, fuck around and find out. Yep. Speaking about fucking around and

finding out. You know, I can't say this enough. And I, I, I said it on Twitter that this is, this is what I said about Kevin McCarthy, that white supremacy looks like a less than mediocre shell of a white man with no soul, vision or purpose beyond faux power, ascend to speaker after 14 failed votes and hearing chance of USA following their display of uttering competence. I think that Kevin McCarthy deserves a fuck that guy to infinity from this planet and the galaxies because he is just an absolute abject fucking failure. Not only does he have no principles, have no values, but his wheeling and dealing got him nothing.

He has a Fisher-Price gavel because he is not anybody's real fucking speaker. He will have no power and he will go down in history as the first speaker to not be elected on the first vote in 100 years. So bravo, Kevin. You made the history books. Man, I forgot about the USA chance and I literally had to change the channel when that happened. That was just, that was one of the most disgusting things I've seen. And it just, it bothered me to no end to hear these people who were. are just as, you know, as we talked about earlier in the episode, just straight up insurrectionists and just sitting there chanting USA because they just elected a shell of a man to a shell of an office

on a 15th vote. Holy shit, I hate those people. But that is literally, that is who the USA is. That's who they've turned this country into. And it is an embarrassment. And they're continuing to export their hate, export their violence. I just, and export their fuckery. All of them, all of them collectively. Fuck that guy. Fuck those guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going.

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