Is there something about being a historian on cable news that makes you say absurd things? History Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat joined the Saturday edition of Velshi on MSNBC to warn that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or whoever “Fox News and Murdoc and the GOP elites” support intend to install an autocracy that will make it easier to wage coups. Meanwhile, the election results were said to reflect “reality” because a bunch of candidates won believe the country is for more than just Christian white men.
Host Ali Velshi had asked about “election deniers” like Arizona’s Kari Lake, but Ben-Ghiat wanted to talk about someone else, “But we can’t forget about that and also, the anointment of Ron DeSantis is very worrying to me because he is a smoother and more disciplined extremist and so we can never forget that the ultimate goal whoever, you know, Fox News and Murdoch and the GOP elites protect—protect and proclaim, the goal is to make it easier to have an autocratic system prevail.”
That is not the ultimate goal and Ben-Ghiat either knows that and is trying to scare people or PhDs are too easy to obtain nowadays. Still, Ben-Ghiat continued, “and to convince Americans and we did have a lot of election deniers who won, that elections are too compromised and too corrupt to be a valid way of choosing leaders and that opens the door to coup attempts and other kinds of authoritarian machinations.”
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