journalists-from-california

"We must... enact measures that reflect and reinforce the bedrock democratic principles of transparency, accountability, and solidarity. That means... instituting a... rigorous procedure for vetting presidential candidates, including disclosure of financial records and foreign and domestic business interests. We must... hold elected officials and candidates responsible for the language they use. Rogue statements, such as Trump's... boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters, should have consequences."

"[T]he speed at which this is happening and the... concentrated push... doesn't have any parallel in situations where leaders came to power through elections. ...[T]he early Putin.., Orbán or Erdoğan ...didn't move at this speed. This resembles more [like] after there's been a coup."

"People have to have circumstances that... they can't deny any more. ...[S]ometimes it takes a lot, like in the 1930a and 40s, the only thing that got some people to stop worshipping Hitler and Mussolini is when the Allies bombed them and they saw the destruction; ...or just... . It could be a pandemic, so Bolsonaro in Brazil is in trouble... Trump, one of the reasons he lost was the pandemic: criminal mismanagement. ...[P]rosecution is very important because some people worry, "Oh, if we prosecute Trump it'll cause a civil war" but the history shows that the only thing that bursts the bubble of a personality cult in the long run, is to see that these people are not... immortal, because these guys set themselves up as... gods. ...[T]hey're untouchable, "...Only I can fix it" ...[W]hen they are prosecuted, it happened to Berlusconi.., with Pinochet in Chile after he left office; that's the thing that leads a lot of people to turn their backs on them, when they're finally put to justice. So that they are human.., they are mortals after all."

"We're living in a time of intense of these past regimes... including to remove their violence, so... Putin erects statues to Stalin, but then sends historians and others who comment on the s into penal colonies, and Amazon... sells t-shirts that say, "Pinochet did nothing wrong"... [etc.] ...I wrote it as an American watching Trump... holding rallies... s, and institutionalized lying, and I wanted to document and figure out this experience with some history. ...[I]t's the first book to put Trump's presidency in the context of 100 years of authoritarian rule."

"The irony cannot be lost... government officials have used their positions to muscle out a scholar of authoritarianism from a prestigious lecture, aping the very tactics of censorship and political intimidation... associated with authoritarian states."

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a distinguished historian of and a prolific political commentator, belonged firmly to the alarm-bells camp over the past four years. Less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, she wrote an article titled “Donald Trump and Steve Bannon’s Coup in the Making.” Her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, elaborates on... the ways ambitious strongmen can damage or destroy democratic regimes. The book features Trump prominently, but it sets him in a rogues’ gallery of authoritarians and would-be authoritarians ranging from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to late-20th-century dictators like Augusto Pinochet, Moammar El-Gadhafi, and Idi Amin to present-day populists like Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro."

"A leading expert on authoritarianism and history professor at New York University, Ben-Ghiat is the author of numerous books on Italian fascism, including... Strongman: Mussolini to the Present―which compares Donald Trump to Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet, among other dictators. She... has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump, regularly connecting his temperament and viewpoints to... dictators she studies. Ben-Ghiat had been invited by the Naval Academy’s history department to deliver the Bancroft Memorial Lecture... which... would focus on "what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule." ...[H]owever, the Naval Academy canceled the lecture ...after the urging of Congressman ..."

"Welcome to the shock event, designed precisely to jar the and civil society, causing a disorientation and disruption among the public and the political class that aids the leader in consolidating... power. ...Trump gained power legally but... intends to shock or strike at the system, using the resulting ...chaos and flux to create a ...government... beholden only to the chief executive. ...Bannon has repeatedly talked about "destroying the state" in the name of securing power for "an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment." Besieging your targets until nothing makes any sense―giving them no time to absorb or recover from attacks―is a time-tested strategy in the history of... authoritarian takeovers. ...It's now being employed at the pinnacle of American democracy. ...With all the emergencies going on, who is bothered ...about ...Trump tax returns, or ...his ties to Russia?"

"[F]or 100 years authoritarian leaders have invested in propaganda to convince people to believe their lies, to participate in their corruption, and accept their racism and violence as normal and necessary. ...Personality cults are key to success of authoritarian propaganda. ...20th century cults depend on mass-media... -mobilization and... -surveillance so the leader can seem omnipresent... [P]ropaganda is a set of communication strategies... to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is. ...From Mussolini's ...newsreels to Trump's and Bolsonaro's use of Twitter, authoritarians have had direct communications channels with the public... and... pose as authentic interpreters of the . ...Strong men disappear people, but they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals. ...All 21st century authoritarians suppress climate change science because it discourages the plunder of s that generate profits for them and their cronies."

"[[Ivana Trump|[H]is first wife]]... said that he had two books... one was Art of the Deal... which was ghost-written, and the other was Hitler's speeches, so he's very interested... in autocrats, and learning from them, but he doesn't read, so... it's a factor of having a similar personality... He wasn't in office to govern. He wanted to dominate people. He wanted to make money off of the presidency. ...[T]hey have similar personalities, and that's one reason they do similar things ...[T]hey ...very early ...start talking about violence. They start demonizing the press. They want to turn the public against journalists and make them political enemies, so that if anything comes out about their corruption, nobody will believe them. ...So there is this playbook that they use... [I]n the book I isolate these tools of... violence, , corruption, the myth of national greatness... and show what stays the same, and what changes over 100 years."

"I happened to see a video of... presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally. I saw him rouse the crowd to perform a loyalty oath... barely concealing the condescension for the crowd... I heard him talk about roughing up protesters and the media, and then.., "I could stand on 5th Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose any supporters." As a historian of authoritarian regimes... this was deeply familiar... This was a trial... to test the public, political elites and the press to see how... they would tolerate... extrajudiciality and violence. Authoritarians always tell you what they're going to do to you... [T]his is part of their politics of threat. Here was Donald Trump telling Americans... in January, 2016, that he approved of violent methods, could be violent himself, and considered himself above the law. The reactions..: a few expressions of incredulity... and a lot of "That's just Trump being Trump." ...Trump was following ...the authoritarian playbook, which most Americans ...were not familiar with. So I decided to educate people ...more than 60 op-eds ...[and] over 80 interviews to familiarize journalists with this ...analysis, and warn the public and decision-makers ...[P]ersonalist regimes..: the leader's personality.., obsessions.., quirks.., have an outsized influence over domestic and foreign policy. ...[H]is obsessions sometimes become state policy. Think of Hitler and the Jews... [T]he bad judgement caused by one of his worst character flaws, not wanting to take any criticism, can end... in ruinous situations and catastrophe for the nation, as... with Mussolini and Hitler... Trump is not fit to serve as leader... of American democracy, but he is... eminently fit to serve as the leader of an authoritarian state. ...[H]is impulsiveness, his mix of fragility and , ...his lack of empathy... and most disturbing, his willingness to... lead the country into ruin, to save his power and his source of personal enrichment, map 100%... on past authoritarian leaders' character[istics]. ...We have valuable knowledge to strike back, and yet, we haven't been doing it."

"[A] really important thing is the predominance of... survivalist ideologies. Great replacement theory is one... [T]o motivate people to... do violence, or... embrace the big lie, and to be corrupt, because that's a form of corruption: embracing election denial. You have to convince them that there's an existential threat, that they're in mortal danger... [T]hat's what Great Replacement theory does. That's... all this discourse on democratic cities as crime-ridden dens of anarchy... Giorgia Meloni... [H]er version of Great Replacement theory isn't just... demographic change and more non-whites being born (a more passive thing). She... believes... there's a plot by the EU and George Soros to flood Europe and Italy with non-white immigration... depressed wages of white workers and... extiguished white Christian civilization... Donald Trump is also a specialist in this, where on January 6th he said, "If we don't fight... we won't have a country any more!" The specter of obliteration. Instead of the obliteration that could come through climate change, you deny it and have a different kind of existential threat... affecting the white male minority, and you harness that rage."

"Trump wasn't just in office to wreck American democracy. He... was there to... detach America from a democratic world order and insert it into this developing autocratic order... [T]he reason he admired openly, publicly all autocrats: friendly... with Orbán.., admires Xi, and... attached to Putin... [A]ll of his campaigning against NATO.., digs at the EU, talking about globalism... is of a piece. It all relates. ...[W]hat Trump was able to do with the GOP, ... already going... in an authoritarian direction, but ...not ...pro-Russia. ...Trump managed to take the GOP and make it his personal tool... changed its ideas and sympathies about Russia.., that's... extraordinary. ...[T]hat's part of this big picture."

"[A]t a time when we face climate, health, food and other crises, the priority of authoritarian states is never public welfare, but maintaining stability... keeping the leader in power. ...[S]trongman leaders don't just endanger democracy, ...they pose an existential threat to humanity. ...[Y]et hundreds of millions ...embrace authoritarian lies and violence, so we need to understand why[.] ...Strongmen is about ...looking back in history, globally, for patterns ...[I]t ...put[s] Trump's America in historical perspective. ...[F]or 100 years charismatic leaders ...at moments of uncertainty and transition ...often come from outside the political system. Many... have a past in mass communications. ...They communicate with their followers in ...ways that seem original and thrilling. ...[A]uthoritarians ...appeal when societies have made ...gains in gender, class or racial emancipation and equity.., [and] sooth fears of the loss of male domination.., elite privilege, ...the end of white Christian "civilization." ...[C]ertain categories of enemies recur: ic peoples, Jews and Muslims, LGBTQ communities, indigenous people and more ...the throughlines of persecution. [A]uthoritarians get a boost from conservative elites... their most important promoters and collaborators... afraid of losing their privileges... often thinking that he can be controlled, and that never works out... They strike... the "authoritarian bargain"..: prosperity for... the elites in return for loyalty and toleration of... violence and suspension of rights."

"Trump's repeated elevation of dictators as models of leadership should be understood as part of a re-education strategy: conditioning Americans to see authoritarianism as a superior form of government to democracy. That is likely why he is explicitly making strongman rule his brand, telling Americans it is in their interest to allow him to save them from the supposed chaos and crime of democracy and give them an orderly authoritarian world under his control."

"Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen...will serve as a guidebook for navigating through this ongoing authoritarian turn in American politics. In examining the political tendencies, as well as dictatorships, of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi, and Augusto Pinochet, among others, Strongmen answers... questions perplexing... many... [and] brings to the fore stories of resistance, many based on personal interviews that give hope and encouragement. ...Ben-Ghiat’s historical evidence is repeatedly complimented with references ...to her authoritarian playbook... making it ...easy to see what such disparate figures as Berlusconi, Putin, and Trump share in common. Firsthand accounts from survivors of autocracies are interspersed... adding poignancy to the horror... [S]ocieties... faced with extreme ideological polarization and inter-communal tensions can either succumb to authoritarian forces or stop the cycle with , solidarity, and love. In... the United States, this may seem simplistic and even impossible, but these are what strongmen fear the most, and... keeping hope alive is an act of resistance. In clarifying the authoritarian formula, Strongmen is an exhortation to appreciate and collectively protect our fragile democracy."

"American voters should take Trump's enthusiasm for autocrats seriously. He is previewing the kind of leadership he will pursue... and doing his best to re-educate Americans to tolerate―or worse, even desire―an approach to governance that, wherever it has unfolded, has created despair and division―and often placed nations on a path to destruction, as with Germany under Hitler’s guide. [[w:Autocracy|[A]utocrat]]s... disregard... human rights and human dignity and... attempt to persuade people that it is in their interests to support governments that take their rights away. This seems to be Trump’s project... [N]o authoritarian has ever relinquished power once he gains it..."

"The mainstream media, the established media, doesn't always do the best job or the most comprehensive work in explaining why they're out there and what they're doing."

"A blog is a different medium source, an electronic medium where you control what goes on there without an editor or an organization that has to pay for the infrastructure to get that word out there."

"A video blogger would be someone who maintains a blog and puts video on it that they create."

"The title of my blog is The Revolution Will Be Televised."

"My point of view is probably that there's a lot of people expressing civil dissent right now."

"In much the same way that a newspaper is a medium for someone who writes for The New York Times."

"Many aspects of her private life continue to remain a mystery, including whether or not she married and had children. The origins of her unusual first name also remain unknown."

"Toast is bread made delicious and useful. Un-toasted bread is okay for children's sandwiches and sopping up barbecue sauce, but for pretty much all other uses, toast is better than bread. An exception is when the bread is fresh from the oven, piping hot, with butter melting all over it. Then it's fantastic, but I would argue that bread fresh out of the oven is a kind of toast. Because I'm an asshole and I refuse to be wrong about something."

"Climate change’s growing urgency demands nothing less than our seat at the table — for the sake of our children and the seven generations to come."

"We need to imagine new frameworks for law and policy that articulate with specificity what Native people envision as a more just system, one that accurately represents our interests. This can best be accomplished by reinforcing the inherent sovereignty of tribal governments — recognizing our nationhood and political relationship with the U.S."

"I think if you are looking at decolonization as the framework for correcting these historical wrongs, giving land back is really the bottom line. But I also think it’s more than giving the land back: I think you have to restructure the legal system too."

"The more we can distinguish our political existence from a race-based one, the better."

"New frameworks of justice can be realized as we speak into existence a habitable future for life on this planet."

"Given the habitual whitewashing of history and dismissal of tribal nationhood, Indigenous peoples are not adequately acknowledged in environmental justice policy and the law. Maintaining a measured separateness helps avoid historical erasure and the tendency to conflate Indigenous peoples with other settler and immigrant populations. It also moves lawmakers and the public toward a better understanding of environmental justice and tribal self-determination."

"How do you restore Indigenous authority to their ancestral places? By considering all kinds of possibilities and alternative land arrangements, including shared governance."

"we have this concept of privilege that we understand through the lens of race, which again is also highly inadequate because the settler-colonial project was not about racism. It includes it, it involves it, but land theft and genocide was for acquiring land for the sake of land itself, not for the exploitation of bodies in the same way that chattel slavery was. So, these are really two big, different animals, and the problem is that they get conflated. When we talk about subsuming Native issues of justice under this umbrella of race, it is in a way that does harm and disservice to Native people and makes illegible Indigenous struggles for decolonization and justice."

"Environmental racism is not broad or deep enough to understand the history of genocide or land theft in this country, which of course is the original environmental injustice for Native people."

"that is what settler colonialism does: it works really hard to hide itself, because its goal is to constantly disappear Indigenous people, and that doesn’t square with democracy and justice. That’s why we have this whole matrix of mythologies and lies about the foundation of this country that doesn’t get to the genocide and land theft, and that is the elephant in the living room in the U.S."

"We have to talk about policy and specifics as we look at the big picture of Indigenous liberation, because ultimately we have to engage with the hegemonic powers. Thereʼs no getting around that. Plus, how are you going to implement all these great ideas without tribal governments?"

"for us as Native people, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not what we are working towards. It has to be anti-colonial. Any diversity and equity or anti-racist work that doesn’t include an anti-colonial commitment just perpetuates further erasure. We need to have the language for that."

"everybody takes for granted that equality under the State is what everybody wants. For Native people, that has never been their goal. Vine Deloria in 1969 said in his book, Custer Died for Your Sins, that “what we need is a national leave-us-alone policy.” He wrote his book in the middle of the Civil Rights, Black Panthers, and Black Power era, and he was very clear that what we want is not what you want. We don’t want equality, we want our treaties to be honored and our territories to be protected."

"White liberal environmentalists are who I write to. They are ultimately my audience because they need to understand historical context, and then once they do, this context can re-shape their projects and how they work."

"On the national level, the Green New Deal is a step in the right direction toward building environmental justice into climate change policy. And as Iʼve written about elsewhere, there are steps that can be taken to “Indigenize” it, thus making it more responsive to Indigenous issues. This would include explicit recognition of Indigenous nationhood and political relationships to the US (not based on race), and the affirming of TEK as a methodology for tackling climate change. The GND is modeled after FDRʼs New Deal, which is always celebrated as progressive action that lifted the US out of economic depression through infrastructure development projects like dams and extractive industries that put people to work. Whatʼs far less acknowledged, however, is how much environmental and cultural death and destruction all that development wreaked on Indian country. We see a similar pattern occurring globally in the realm of “sustainable” development, which has given rise to a modern global land rush that impacts Indigenous communities the most. Ultimately, unchecked capitalism is the problem and we need to heed the research that connects cultural diversity with biodiversity if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."

"Since 2008, the rights of nature (RON) approach has helped activists in Ecuador, Bolivia, India, and New Zealand imbue nature with legal rights in much the same way American courts have given rights to corporations. These laws have been instrumental in protecting ecosystems inherent in natural landscapes like mountains and rivers. Ecuador in 2008 and Bolivia in 2009 went so far as to rewrite their national constitutions to include RON in their legal frameworks. This new language is based on Indigenous worldviews rooted in right relationship with nature and buenvivir, the good life. New Zealand (known as Aotearoa to the Maori, who are the Indigenous people of New Zealand) did not amend their constitution but instituted other legal mechanisms to grant personhood to the Whanganui River and Te Urewera National Parks in 2013. Following the In a neoliberal, market-fundamentalist world, a federal government controlled by conservatives has historically meant deregulation and the prioritization of industry over the protection of the environment."

"One of the least known and studied aspects of US history involves the centuries-long trade in Indian slaves. Only in the last decade or two have scholars begun in earnest to piece together and analyze the trade in Indigenous bodies introduced by Christopher Columbus from his first voyage to the New World in 1492."

"Although federal law acknowledges the inherent sovereignty of Native nations through centuries of treaty relationships and often works in partnership with them through shared power, it is nonetheless a restricted form of sovereignty animated by imperialist legal foundations: the doctrine of discovery, domestic dependent nationhood, and the plenary power doctrine. These doctrines control Native peoples' lives and resources via intense regulation by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, meaning that Native people are more legally managed than all other people in the country, and arguably unconstitutionally contrary to the original treaty-based relationships. These are all constituent parts of what constructs the US domination-based legal paradigm."

"Europeans brought with them a worldview that was built on the domination of the natural world. We find ourselves, as a result, in the middle of a sixth mass extinction event. And so how do we shift that? This is where indigenous knowledge is so important. Native people understand the world in a whole different way. We understand ourselves as related and part of this web of life. We have to change our relationship to the natural world. And this is where Native people and Indigenous knowledge have so much power to effect that change. Part of indigenizing environmental justice is infusing environmental justice with this indigenous worldview, with traditional ecological knowledge so that we can create these changes."

"From an American Indian perspective, we're all on the reservation now. In the past few decades it has become crystal clear that, as "the people," our common enemy is the entrenched corporate power of Big Oil and other toxic industries that buy political influence to protect their own corrupt interests in collusion with government, all in the name of democracy. This has come at the expense of countless marginalized people world-wide. In the US, that has always meant Indigenous people, other people of color, and those having low incomes."

"The imperialist roots of federal Indian law present daunting obstacles to justice for American Indians. If American Indians are to experience real environmental justice-which means not only ending the poisoning of their environments but also regaining access to and protection of their sacred sites and ancient territories-it means confronting a "state built on the pillars of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy." The confrontation must occur at all levels, from the individual to the institutional, and ultimately dismantle the legal, social, and policy frameworks that uphold an ongoing system of domination. Indigenizing environmental justice in these ways goes beyond a distributive model of justice."

"It begins with settler institutions (including science-based institutions) engaging Indigenous people in all their conversations, and the recognition of cultural and political sovereignty. Itʼs a simple matter of respect. And given that we have some tangible knowledge about how to effectively manage lands, draw on that. Just stop bypassing Native people as if we donʼt exist or as if we have nothing of value to contribute. I call it un-erasing Indigenous people. Of course the erasure is everywhere, but some places are more intense than others. California is one of the places where erasure is the most intense."

"Most people don’t realize that Native Americans are the only people who didn’t have religious freedom in this country. Our religions were outright banned beginning around 1883."

"This concept of “indigenizing” environmental justice acknowledges that the way we understand environmental justice is far too narrow to fit for Native Americans. Environmental justice is about the fair and equal distribution of environmental risks and harms that disproportionately expose communities of color. But that depends on understanding all communities as equal as ethnic minority communities. And this just does not fit for American Indian people and communities because American Indians are not ethnic minorities. American Indians are nations with territories, sovereignty, and jurisdiction and entirely different histories that go back millennia on the land as well as histories of colonization, which is not true for any other population on this continent."

"for Native people, we are people who are surviving genocide. To be Native today is to have survived a 95 percent genocide. Maybe that’s something to take heart in. I don’t know how else to think about it. I think the reason that we survived is because of our unending resistance. We just kept going. And so here we are. Now we are at the point that we are leading the resistance movement — the environmental resistance movement, the climate justice movement. Native people are the forefront of it. Maybe it’s because of the fact that we have survived this total devastation."