Welcome everybody, your Crystal Kylan friends.

Today we're going to be talking to Ruth Ben-Giott, and she is an authoritarianism expert.

And, you know, I've seen some of her interviews.

She's brilliant.

She's insightful.

And I feel like nobody's better to break down where we're at

right now with Trump and MAGA and the empire declining than her. Yeah. And rapidly approaching the

midterms, want to know her thoughts on how that's all going to go. You know, pretty leery myself.

We just actually, Trump just came out and said,

like, I don't even care about the midterms. So tells you he's, he's not worried about the political fallout, even though he's disastrously unpopular, which makes you wonder what they are planning. Absolutely. So by the way, she also has this substack called Lucid. She's the author of a book called Strong men, highly recommend both of those things.

But before we get to her, Crystal, I don't know about you, but all these data center stories, they're just so gross. I feel like it's being forced on the entire. It's like the country is being raped by data centers and and AI tech demons.

It's, I mean, that's like true, you know.

Yeah.

If you look at the polling, people don't want this.

They don't want it in their backyard.

They don't want it in the country.

They want to rein in AI. And yet we're hurtling a million miles per hour in the other direction.

You'll have like, you know, local meetings, city council gatherings where 100% of the people

there are like, let's not put this data center here. I don't want that. And then it just like gets done.

And I mean, obviously, the obvious reason why it gets done is because you have, you know,

these companies are just paying off people who, you know, sit on governing boards and they do the bidding of the companies.

This is why, like, money in politics is the ultimate issue. It really is. Because, like, they can just buy whatever they want. Like, you can either have democracy or you can have billionaires. You can't have both. Yeah. And this is such a great example of that because the billionaires are just like,

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