History Professor Answers Dictator Questions

I'm Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

I study authoritarianism.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Tech Support: Dictators.

[upbeat music]

@systmkumar999 asks,

Bro, WTF is fascism?

Fascism is a one-party state, classically,

with an all-powerful dictator at its head,

meaning no more separation of powers,

no independent judiciary.

Mussolini, in the 1920s,

coined the term fascism.

He also said, Everything in the state,

nothing outside the state.

So the state reaches into areas that in democracies,

the state has no place.

There's no more trade unions except the state unions.

Employers and employees were in the same union,

and that tells you what kind of union it was.

Fascism is also classically expansionist.

The conquest of territory, imperialism,

is intrinsic to fascism.

There is no sense of fascism without violence.

Fascists truly believe,

whether it's Hitler or Francisco Franco in Spain

or Mussolini, that violence is the way you change the world.

They declare one category of person as an enemy.

Could be a racial enemy, as in Nazi Germany.

It could be a political enemy,

as it was in Italian fascism

and for Francisco Franco in Spain.

But that enemy must be exterminated.

So the state organizes itself

around the practice of violence,

and regular people are trained

to become vigilant and informers

and use violence themselves.

So violence is at the very core of fascism.

Malice Liddel asks,

Why is Putin shirtless in so many of his pictures?

Putin takes up where Mussolini left off

in using his body as an emblem of strength.

Mussolini stripped off his shirt,

he was the first leader ever to do that on camera,

and that stood for Italy's strength

and dynamism and modernity.

This idea of the dictator being the man

everyone should look up to is very old.

It goes back to the fascist years.

This is a period cartoon making fun of Hitler.

Goebbels, his propaganda minister,

was depicting him as a kind of demigod.

Dictators and authoritarians pose as the macho men,

but they also create a climate in their countries

of a kind of lawless masculinity

that says that a real man should be able

to have anyone and anything he wants

without asking for consent.

And so Berlusconi created such an atmosphere in Italy

of misogyny that the United Nations issued a special report

after he had been in and out of power for a decade,

saying that there was grave risk to Italy's women

because of the rise in domestic violence

and hate crimes against women.

Thabang asks, What defines a dictator?

It comes from the verb to dictate.

That gives us a clue.

So a dictator is somebody who wants to get his way,

doesn't care about public welfare,

often is very, very corrupt,

steals from the people,

manipulates people through propaganda.

They don't agree with the separation of power,

so the executive power becomes overwhelming

in a dictatorship.

A dictator is a leader who wants absolute power,

someone who does not want his authority

to be checked by any institution,

and so he proceeds to take those institutions apart,

to void them of all people who are not loyalists,

to create his state in his own image

and make everything be about him.

@AngelOuma5 asks,

Dictatorship, authoritarianism, autocracy.

Are the three forms of governance really different?

Authoritarianism is a political system

that often is dictatorship.

You can have civilian dictatorships,

like the fascist dictatorships.

You can have military dictatorships.

Nowadays, some of the authoritarian leaders don't correspond

to the one-party dictators of earlier times,

like Mao or Hitler or Stalin.

Autocracy is another name

for the political system of authoritarianism.

We have democracies where you have voting rights,

and the will of the people translates into the leadership.

An autocracy's where the leader does their best

to stay in power

no matter what the people think.

Kozloski from Reddit asks,

How do dictators maintain power

when it seems that most of the country is against them?

Dictators use the authoritarian playbook.

The playbook is while you're running for office,

while you're building up your power,

you wanna discredit journalists.

You wanna call them fake news

or vermin or communists,

and authoritarians do this

because if evidence of their corruption comes out

or their violent acts,

they need the public to not believe the press,

to think the press is lying,

so there is no other voice telling the truth,

the truth is gone.

The Nazi term was the lying press.

Today we talk about fake news.

Many dictators use what today in Russia

is called the firehose of falsehood.

This is a high volume of lies, half-truths,

conspiracy theories

because conspiracy theories are as old as propaganda.

The fact that Jews were supposed

to be controlling the globe,

that was a fascist conspiracy theory.

Dictators also maintain power

by creating an atmosphere of terror, of intimidation,

whether it's physical violence against enemies of the state

or today, they harass people with lawsuits,

with smear campaigns,

they try and ruin you,

because the goal is to get you to self-censor,

then you're doing the dictator's work for him.

AvJ164b from Reddit asks,

What are the differences between a fascist dictatorship

and a communist dictatorship?

They do many, many things in common.

They have an all-powerful leader

with a personality cult.

They use propaganda.

The difference is in who the target is.

So, fascists go after leftists.

And although National Socialism

and Italian fascism took originally,

at their very beginnings, from the left,

as soon as they constituted into parties,

their main enemy was the left.

The most consistent targets of Nazism and fascism

were communists and socialists.

So, fascist dictatorships are anti-communist.

Obviously, that's one huge difference [chuckles]

from communist dictatorship.

There, the targets,

the enemies, are counter-revolutionaries,

anyone who's going to put the march of the revolution

into jeopardy.

And so Mao killed millions and millions of people,

justifying it as getting rid of counter-revolutionaries.

JAnderson asks,

What are the most common personality traits tyrants

and dictators possess?

They are narcissists,

meaning they care only about themselves.

Dictators attract attention and adulation

because they tend to be very charismatic,

so they're very good performers,

they're very good orators.

They will do anything to preserve their power.

For example, Benito Mussolini,

the first fascist dictator,

in 1924, he had his main political opponent killed.

And in order to escape an investigation,

he declared dictatorship.

Dictators tend to be paranoid.

They construct something called the inner sanctum,

and this is an inner circle of advisors,

and very common is that it includes family members.

There's a whole history of sons-in-law

being given important positions from Benito Mussolini,

the fascist who had his son-in-law as foreign minister.

Pinochet used his son-in-laws

and put them at the head of the privatization agencies,

so they made a lot of money.

They also end up in this kind of cocoon

where they start to believe their own propaganda

and stop making good decisions.

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022

without consulting his military

or his economic specialists adequately.

And so the military had huge losses

at the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.

More generals died than since World War II at the beginning

because Putin did not listen to criticism

and objective feedback.

Dictators don't have any moral code.

They will ally with anyone.

Think about Hitler, the fascist,

allying temporarily with Stalin, the communist.

Think about today,

Xi Jinping, the communist,

allying with Vladimir Putin,

the far-right leader.

So that old Machiavellian saying

the ends justify the means

perfectly sum up the dictator's personality.

@vulpeculaejoon asks,

Why do dictators have statues and pictures of themselves

all over the countries they oppress?

Dictators have giant egos,

but their secret is that they're very insecure.

The rules of personality cults have not changed

for a hundred years.

You have to be the man of the people,

you speak in a plain language,

you connect with the people,

but you've also gotta be the man above all other men,

the man who's untouchable,

the man who's kind of like a God.

So they build statues of themselves

to give a sense of this godliness,

of this omnipotence.

So the statues are their way of saying,

I'm gonna be here for a thousand years.

So dictators want to be omnipresent.

They have so many reminders of themself in every way,

rituals, statues, books, photographs,

and they become kind of inescapable.

Take the Heil Hitler salute in Nazi Germany.

Anytime you went into any social context,

you had to perform it.

You both used your hand to salute,

but you had to say out loud Heil Hitler.

This brought Hitler into the conversation,

into every conversation,

even though he was not physically present.

And what you were doing is saying you were submissive to him

and wishing him good health.

This corresponds to the desire

of the dictator to be everywhere,

and people should not have social relations

without the dictator being part of them.

And that's also

why their populations get really sick of them.

Mr. Cornfield asks,

How do dictators come to power?

They can be appointed,

as the classic fascists were.

Mussolini was appointed by the king.

German elites,

politicians brought in Hitler.

Nowadays, dictators can come

to power initially through elections

and then become dictators.

For example, Vladimir Putin,

when he was put into place,

he was backed by the oligarchs.

At the beginning, he was not an all-powerful dictator.

It takes people years to amass enough power to do that.

About 75% of authoritarian regimes

in the 20th century were created through coups.

A group of soldiers and generals,

they just take power.

These can be civilian coups or military coups,

but the point is that they impose themselves

on power forcibly.

@GeorgeForester17 asks,

WTF is a, quote, 'self-coup d'etat?'

A self-coup is a variety of coup

when the leader is already in office.

Perhaps you are the leader

and you've lost an election.

Well, you just refuse to leave.

That's what Nicolas Maduro did in Venezuela.

That's what Donald Trump tried to do

through the January 6th insurrection,

but in that case, it failed.

President Yoon of South Korea declared martial law

instead of having to be impeached.

In that case, it was promptly dismantled

and he is under detention.

The same thing happened in Peru in 2022.

President Castillo was about to be impeached,

so he refused to leave,

he tried to have martial law.

It was, again, very swiftly taken care of

and justice was served.

The joke was that President Castillo

started his day as president

and he ended it as a prisoner.

It's very important to find perpetrators

of self-coups accountable.

This next question is from Kye.

Did y'all know Hitler tried to overthrow the government

during the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923

but failed and was jailed?

I did know,

and it's important for everybody to know this history now.

So Hitler tried to overthrow the government.

He was put in jail in 1924.

That's where he wrote Mein Kampf.

When he came out,

he was ranting and raving with his racist diatribes.

He was not taken seriously,

although several German states did prevent him

from speaking publicly because of his hate speech.

But then he promised to obey the constitution

to get those bans on his hate speech removed,

and he proceeded to build up the Nazi Party over the 1920s.

And then the Depression hit

and social unrest increased.

The left parties increased,

and so Germany elites in 1933 decided to appoint Hitler,

who by then was the leader of an increasingly popular party,

to get rid of the left for them.

So the German elites who brought Hitler into power

thought they could control him

and use him to get rid of the left.

And then the rest was history,

where they were not able to contain him

and he ended up controlling them.

Midwest Momma says,

Many dictatorships criminalize abortion.

China, Russia, several others

say it's a woman's duty to breed

as many children as possible for the state.

That's correct, and we can ask why that is

throughout history.

Dictatorships, even in the case of China

where they had a one-child policy for many years,

have now started to reverse this.

And dictatorships in particular

that have fantasies of national purity,

of designing a perfect race,

or of having more, as Viktor Orban says,

Hungarian babies to combat the number of immigrant babies,

all these different reasons are why many dictatorships

and authoritarian states encourage the right kind of women

to have babies.

Along with the political opposition,

journalists, LGBTQ people,

women have been the enemy of the strongman.

And every regime acts

to take bodily autonomy away from women,

take their agency away,

and criminalizing abortion,

and rolling back or getting rid

of reproductive rights is part of that.

This next question's from Karen.

[beep] Sake.

Do Americans want to live in a dictatorship?

Many Americans have no idea what dictatorship entails

but have been convinced that democracy is failing them

and have seen dictators held up as superior role models.

They have been conditioned by the media,

by President Trump

to feel that autocrats,

that dictators, whether it's Xi Jinping,

whether it's Vladimir Putin,

are superior brands of leaders.

Studies have shown all over the world

about 30% of the population holds authoritarian leanings

that are often expressed in parenting styles,

in how they think about authority.

Are you kind of a mini dictator at home

or are you a collegial, collaborative type?

These people can get activated

if a demagogue comes on the scene.

For almost 10 years now,

Donald Trump has appealed to certain groups

who are more comfortable with authoritarian context.

He created a big tent for every kind of political extremist,

every kind of racist,

from people who were Southern racist to neo-Nazis.

Those people who already have authoritarian views

on the world can be very seduced

by a politician who comes and says,

I am a strongman.

I will decide things for you.

I will bring order into society.

And it becomes a natural meeting

of that kind of person

with that kind of leader.

And so together,

all of this created an environment

where many Americans felt

that they could see themselves

in some kind of political system that's not a democracy.

Ssharkboy from Reddit asks,

How did dictators actually make their money?

The history of dictatorship

and the history of corruption are completely entwined.

At their extreme,

you have something called kleptocracy,

that is when it's a state of thieves.

An example was Gaddafi in Libya,

where the leader and his cronies were stealing

from state agencies.

They were expropriating private citizens' factories.

They were taking over state agencies

and funneling the money to Swiss bank accounts.

The same thing is true of Putin's Russia,

which is a fully formed kleptocracy,

where Putin and his cronies kind of plunder, for example,

Gazprom, the state energy conglomerate.

They take profits out of state agencies.

So instead of working for the people,

the agency works to fund the dictator.

And the money today goes less to Swiss bank accounts

than to offshore accounts.

For example, Vladimir Putin,

after 20 years in power,

is now one of the very richest men in the world.

So, dictators make money in an illegitimate fashion,

which is why they use propaganda,

violence, repression

to make sure that none of their secrets come out.

BasedMikeLee writes,

Name a fascist dictator

whose agenda entailed limiting the size,

cost, and power of government.

Well, Senator Lee, there is one,

Augusto Pinochet,

the bloody military dictator of Chile

who came to power through a US-backed coup

and made Chile a laboratory of neoliberal economics,

privatizations, deregulations, cutting social services.

And at first, this provided a boost to the economy,

mostly to giant corporations,

including American corporations.

But within a few years,

it caused bank failures, massive hardship,

and people went into debt.

And so the long view is that we can think of dictators

as always expanding the government

and causing a lot of waste and bloat

in the process, actually,

but even when they cut the size of the government,

it doesn't end up well.

Johnson Tao says,

I don't understand.

Why do people support dictators?

It can seem strange that people support dictators

who take their rights away,

because what dictators want you to do is not only betray

other people, people in your communities,

you're gonna inform on them,

you're gonna look the other way

when your loved ones get taken away by the secret police,

they also want you to betray yourself,

they want you to lose your moral compass to self-censor.

Dictators are very skilled at posing as saviors,

at creating crises or exploiting crises

and then posing themself as the solution.

Whether it's an economic crisis

or the perception of social unrest,

one of the classic dictator narratives

for a hundred years is that only the authoritarian is going

to keep people safe against the threat

of immigrants coming across the border.

Now, there's a grain of truth always to this

because immigrants do come over the border.

But what dictators do is say

that immigrants are coming over the border

to rape our women, to take our jobs,

to dilute our population

because they're the wrong skin color and the wrong faith.

And so the same excuses for a hundred years are used

to justify their national purity campaigns.

Mussolini used to talk about black, brown,

and yellow people, that's his words,

coming across the border and having too many babies.

These are old narratives,

and they work because they make people fearful,

fearful for their security, for their family.

And then the dictator is there to say,

I alone can fix it.

Snow Flake 100% pure Masshole says,

Why is he even having rallies?

He's referring to President Trump.

US presidents don't have rallies.

Dictators have rallies.

Hitler had rallies.

Authoritarians love adulation,

and they love opportunities to perform.

Because rallies are an occasion

where people come out in mass numbers to show their loyalty,

and what dictators care about more than anything

is people showing loyalty to them on camera.

And so that's one reason,

whether they're right or left

or anti-colonial or imperialist,

they all have rallies.

Early on, Joseph Goebbels,

who later became Hitler's propaganda chief,

he realized that Hitler was terrible in a studio,

he was wooden.

He needed the energy of crowds to come alive,

and that's why Goebbels hit on this idea

of having rallies nonstop.

And that has remained a feature of dictatorship.

Think of Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo,

constantly had rallies where he dressed up.

His thing was being the leopard,

he sat on a throne.

These are shows of power and omnipotence.

Here's a question from the PoliticalDiscussion subreddit.

Does the internet improve democracy

or enhance the potential for dictatorship?

The internet is a double-edged tool.

It has allowed dissidents

who are operating in repressive context

to have new audiences they would never have had,

such as the protestors in 2019 in Moscow

who live-streamed on Twitter themselves getting arrested,

having millions and millions of views.

However, the internet has allowed dictators to centralize

and speed up the circulation of their propaganda.

Now, this goes back all the way

to the beginning of authoritarianism.

Smart dictators, savvy dictators,

have always known how to take the latest media technology

and use it to their advantage.

So Mussolini used news reels,

and he was a great performer.

Hitler had that crazy ranting voice,

so he was very effective with radio.

Modi of India, when he first ran for office,

and he's the most followed leader on Instagram

in the world right now,

he used holograms,

so he could be in a hundred different cities

at the same time.

Up through Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump,

who use social media very, very effectively.

So the internet is a tool

like other tools before it,

however, the internet has the ability

to hugely increase the volume of propaganda

and the circulation of propaganda.

@Eharding_2000 asks,

Is Orban a fascist?

Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary,

has fascist qualities.

But today, in the 21st century,

fascism looks different.

You have elections,

you keep them going,

but you manipulate the system by control of the media,

by control of the judiciary

and the election apparatus

to make sure that the election goes out your way.

Orban has become a hero to the new right

because he has perfected what we call electoral autocracy.

You keep elections going,

but you find ways to get the results that you need.

So that's different from old school fascism.

Orban has gotten his cronies

to buy important media properties,

so it's indirect control of the media.

And you control the electoral system.

You hollow out the institution

so that everybody's loyal to you.

So these are things that go back to fascism,

but today they take place within a multi-party state.

One continuity of Orban

with classic fascism is trying to grow the population

but only some people are encouraged to have babies,

white Christians.

Immigrants are not encouraged to have babies.

Indeed, he's trying to get rid of immigrants

and have them deported.

Another continuity is homophobia.

LGBTQ people have been legislated bureaucratically

out of existence,

and that goes back to fascism.

Anybody who does not fit those roles

of what they call the natural family,

one man, one woman, both straight,

does not have a future in Hungary.

@onsy_xx says,

Pinochet was evil, but he made Chile what it is today.

Benevolent dictator?

I study dictators.

I do not believe any dictator is benevolent

because the definition of a dictator is someone

who represses the popular will.

There's no voting in a classic dictatorship.

There's no free press.

If you are an opponent of the regime,

you'll be sent to jail or killed.

That's not, to me, the definition of benevolence.

@Tyler_E_Harris asks,

Honest question,

but why did dictators even bother

to hold elections they're just gonna rig anyway?

Today, dictators keep elections going,

and so we often call them authoritarians

rather than dictators.

But they rig the system through colonizing the media

so the opposition's message can't get there.

They'll put a prominent opponent under house arrest.

That's what Vladimir Putin did with Alexei Navalny,

who was extremely popular.

He sent him to jail so he couldn't be a candidate.

So, the new system is called electoral autocracy.

You hold elections,

but you use all these tricks to make sure

that they're not free and fair elections.

You can even, once you feel you've amassed enough power,

hold an election

and then just refuse to recognize the results

if you have lost.

And we have several examples of that recently,

the biggest one in Venezuela,

still playing out today.

Maduro, who lost an election to the opposition,

refused to leave office.

In 2023, we had Bolsonaro trying to have a coup

because he was claiming he actually won the election

when he lost.

And in the United States,

Donald Trump claimed that he won the 2020 election

when he did not.

Epic Thundercat says,

At what point do we start calling

what Elon Musk is doing inside our government a coup?

As a historian of coups,

I consider this to be a situation

that merits the word coup.

So coups happen

when people inside state institutions go rogue.

This is different.

This is unprecedented.

A private citizen, the richest man in the world,

has a group of 19-, 20-year-old coders who have come in

as shock troops and are taking citizens' data

and closing down entire government agencies.

When we think of traditional coups,

often perpetrated by the military,

you have foot soldiers

who do the work of closing off the buildings,

of making sure that the actual government,

the old government they're trying to overthrow,

can no longer get in.

What we have here is a kind of digital paramilitaries,

a group of people who have taken over,

and they've captured the data,

they've captured the government buildings,

they were sleeping there 24/7,

and elected officials could not come in.

When our own elected officials are not allowed to enter

into government buildings

because someone else is preventing them,

who has not been elected

or officially in charge of any government agency,

that qualifies as a coup.

Pat Barry - Despondent American asks,

How do the oligarchs

who help authoritarians come into power fare

after the dictator has what he wants?

Does he ever turn on them?

Oligarchs are immensely wealthy and powerful individuals

who can help to change the political environment

by putting certain candidates in office.

This was the case with Putin.

He was chosen to run for president in 2000 by oligarchs.

One of the pillars of authoritarianism

is what's called authoritarian bargains.

These are deals that leaders make with powerful people.

They could be oligarchs in the media area,

in finance, in business.

They could also be faith leaders.

Some faith leaders are so powerful

to be almost like oligarchs.

And so these people team up.

The dictator needs these people to legitimate them,

to tell the rest of the population,

because they're so influential,

that this guy is actually okay.

He may be violent, but he's our guy.

The problem with this is, inevitably,

when the dictator has seen

that the oligarch has outlived his usefulness,

they will throw them under the bus.

Early oligarchs who brought Putin to power,

he tried to then colonize or seize their assets.

And if they didn't agree to give him their assets,

he tried to jail them or they had to go into exile.

There's been something called sudden Russian death syndrome,

where many, many powerful elites connected

with the energy industry have fallen out of windows

or gone into a hospital and never emerged again

because Putin is cleaning house.

Tanveer Hassan asks,

How can a dictator be good for a nation?

Dictators certainly want to be seen

as being good for the nation,

and many people become fans of dictators

because dictators are into infrastructure,

they have huge egos,

they want to be identified with grandiose public works.

Mussolini built sports stadiums,

he built miles of railroads,

and the myth was that he made the trains run on time.

Hitler built the Autobahn, the high-speed highways.

Today in Turkey,

Erdogan has very large construction projects

such as the Istanbul Canal.

And so there's a sense of modernity and things happening.

The problem is,

when you don't have a free press,

nobody can be tracking with accurate statistics

how these big public works are affecting the economy

and what kind of corruption is happening behind the scenes.

So dictators can attract a lot of support

by people who fall for the appearances.

Look, he's doing things.

Other people are not doing things.

The dictator gets things done.

However, it's only later that the economic

and social outcome of those big projects comes to light.

Alex Grech asks,

Why do dictators love Trump?

We know that Trump loves dictators.

He even has talked about exchanging love letters

with the leader of North Korea,

not someone you would often think of

as a particularly sentimental type.

Do dictators love Trump?

That's unclear.

Dictators are transactional, they use each other.

If dictators are loving Trump at the moment,

it's because they think that he can be an ally,

that they can get something from him.

If we take, as an example, Vladimir Putin,

he and Trump have a good relationship,

and yet he allows Trump to be mocked on Russian television

as a useful fool.

So this is an example of them using each other,

which is what dictators know how to do beautifully.

@EricyWaren asks,

Why do dictators always blame media, opposition,

foreign countries, and terror groups?

Dictators are expert

at creating a sense of existential dread.

So it's not just polarization.

We don't agree, but we're in the same framework.

We agree to disagree.

They go for what I call survivalism.

It's me or you,

and only one of us is gonna survive.

This is what the Nazis did with the Jews.

This is what racists everywhere do with non-white peoples.

They create a sense of existential dread

that this group must be attacked

and, sometimes, in the case of genocide,

must be removed from the face of the earth

in order for our country to have peace and safety.

Often the enemy is a foreign country,

and there's a long history of dictators saying

that their countries have been victimized.

Mussolini talked about Italy as victimized

by more powerful countries, democracies,

up to Xi Jinping,

who has a long history of talking

about Chinese victimization by the West,

or Vladimir Putin,

Russia's victimization by the West.

And so these are very powerful narratives

that can justify foreign invasion.

The dictator says, We've been victimized.

It's time for us to protect ourselves

by getting more territory.

Here's a question from Magic.

Is Xi Jinping a dictator?

Not only is Xi Jinping a dictator,

the communist system only permits dictators.

But Xi Jinping is becoming more of a dictator.

This is one way we can track how dictatorship expands.

Is your personality cult becoming more prominent? Check.

Xi Jinping's cult is becoming more prominent.

Are you trying to rehabilitate past dictators

to kind of bolster your own glory?

Check.

Xi Jinping is talking a lot about Mao

and styling himself as the inheritor of Mao.

Here's a question from Peter Quince.

Why do dictators and wannabe dictators

always want more land?

That's kind of in the nature of being the dictator.

You always want more power.

You always want more control.

You also want more assets.

You want more natural resources to exploit

if you're corrupt.

The same narratives get put forth over and over again.

Narratives is national purity.

So for example, the Nazis,

it wasn't enough to have conquest of Germans.

You had to go into Austria because they're our people.

Or you have these myths of national unification,

and that's being used right now by Xi Jinping, a communist,

for Taiwan, that Taiwan must be China

because it needs to be reunified,

as though it was part of China to begin with.

The same with Putin and Ukraine,

that they called the conquest of Ukraine a reunification.

So these are imperialist justifying narratives,

and dictators use them over and over again.

So it's no surprise to find President Trump,

a man of authoritarian leanings,

having come back to power and becoming an imperialist,

talking about Canada becoming the 51st American state,

talking about taking control of Greenland.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thank you for watching.

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