Hello, welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. I am delighted to be here.

Ruth Ben Giat, professor of history and Italian studies at

NYU, an MS-MBC opinion columnist. Her latest book is Strong Men from Mussolini to the present. She writes the sub-stack lucid about authoritarianism and threats to democracy.

Kind of a relevant subject matter expertise, Ruth.

Yes, I didn't plan it this way, but definitely I wrote strongmen to warn Americans that it can happen here.

It can happen anywhere. I felt I had the skill set from studying fascism for so many years

so here I am. I know you've been on the blog podcast before but I'm not sure we know your origin story

how did this come to pass like how was it that you found an interest in this?

Were you just a Umberto echo fan or what was it that led you to the study of fascism?

Yeah, it's kind of strange because I grew up in Southern California in a beautiful town, Pacific

Palisades on the ocean, so not a place where you think the threat of fascism is around, but it was a place where a lot of refugees

from Nazism, like many years ago, had settled, like my town and towns around it, like famous like Thomas Mann the writer and Arnold Schrenberg composer

So the the grandkids and kids of some of these people were around and I I knew some of them and I just got curious about why people you know what does it mean you had to flee and start over and so I was going to study Germany and then somebody said I started grad school in history and

someone said well why don't you do Italy because it's not studied as much as

Nazism and it lasted twice as long and of course I went to Rome I loved Rome.

So it started there with me as a child also of immigrants,

the closest family member was like a 12-hour flight,

thinking about people who had to flee from their homes and come

sometimes halfway around the world and in fact strongmen a sub-themed of my book is

people going into exile so this is something since I was a teenager

I've been thinking about. You know we do a lot of this kind of the big picture threat

assessment conversations around here and I'm always sort of pulled both ways on this question.

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