Pod Save the World - That’s President Sh*thole to you

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Will new facial recognition technology end privacy as we know it? Can Trump scare the Intelligence Community out of testifying before Congress? Why did Putin’s entire cabinet resign and what does it mean for the future of Russia? Then...Russian spies are sneaking around Davos. Anti-war groups are gaining strength in Washington. Press freedom is under attack in Brazil. Hilarious translation errors anger China. How a mustache is exacerbating tensions in Asia, and why Tommy thinks the new Space Force uniforms are genius. Then, Ben talks with New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen about Putin, the latest developments in Russia and her upcoming book about surviving autocracy.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Ditor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, less Iran today. Yeah, yeah, for now. How about that for some good news? Yeah. Here's some topics we love to cover today. There's some creepy new facial recognition technology that made a splash in the New York Times over the weekend. The intelligence community is trying to hide the truth from Trump and the public. We'll explain how. We'll talk about why the entire Russian cabinet resigned, whether spies are lurking in Davos and some exciting new development. in D.C. on the anti-war movement front, and then why mustaches and translation errors are roiling the foreign policy community. Yes. And then Ben is going to interview a fantastic journalist named Masha Gessen. Ben, what the hell you guys are going to talk about? Well, Masha has for a long time been one of the smartest journalists about both Russia and authoritarianism. So we're going to talk about the latest developments in Russia with Putin's latest power grab and how America is becoming more like Russia. Oh, lucky us. Yeah, yeah. Good, good, good. It's not great.

Well, it's been nice knowing you, comrade. Okay. Two quick housekeeping items. In case you haven't heard, POSC of America is going on tour. See where we're heading and get your tickets now at crooked.com slash events. We just added a new Santa Barbara show on April 17th. Presale tickets are available starting Wednesday.

Check it out. Crooked.com slash events. And episode three and four of the wilderness are out. Subscribe and hear from focus groups of voters in the southwest of southeast. And get to hear from Stacey Abrams and more. I listen to episode three. yesterday, and it actually made me very hopeful because these voters are smart and educated and they feel getable.

We just got to convince them to vote for Democrats. Okay, let's get to the news. Let's start with this facial recognition story because a lot of people were freaked out over the weekend when the New York Times published a piece about this new commercial facial recognition software that essentially could end privacy as we know it. This app allows users to upload a photo of anyone, you, me, they can use Google Glass if you're one of those losers who has one of those. And then it can match the technology.

matches that photo with public photos of that person and it can tell you where they appeared. So it could find, you know, it's like Googling a face. It scrapes data from Instagram, Facebook, even YouTube videos, and it's incredibly powerful. I guess it's currently being used by some law enforcement agencies across the country. You have to imagine that a spy service would kill for something like this to do counter espionage. Apparently big tech companies like Facebook and Google have made, could have made this type of software years ago, but they didn't want to because of all the obvious privacy implications. Adding to the creepiness,

the company that developed the technology used it to monitor the reporter working on the article. So she asked some police officers to run her photo in their database. And then soon after, the company called those cops to say, hey, you guys talking to the press? So that was very subtle. One of the founders of the app is a former Giuliani aide,

so that should give you pause. The cyber advisor. Yeah, it was partially funded by Peter Thiel, who was an investor in Facebook and Pallentier. Yeah, loves Orwellian Big Day. data projects. The article notes they've pitched their services to a guy running for Congress named Paul Nalen, who was a literal neo-nazzi who ran in Wisconsin. He was pitched for, quote, extreme opposition research. Wonderful. So obviously, like, look, there's a good side to a

technology that can find dangerous criminals. Sure. No one is opposed to locking out criminals. But the privacy implications of a private database that is exponentially larger than the FBI's criminal database or can just sweep up people who happen to be in the background of a photo or a video are enormous. So, Ben, you know, we've talked a bunch about how the Chinese are using facial recognition technology to suppress and imprison Uyghur Muslims in Western China. It's pretty obvious how this could be of views. Like, what do you think we do now? Is it time? Can Congress just step in and like regulate these companies? Is that the solution? Yeah. So I think we're like a tipping point with the development of these new technologies with artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

there are a lot of ramifications. So you see in China the worst case scenario where there are literally hundreds of thousands of cameras, you know, around Jingjiang province where the Uighurs are. You know, if they see you talking to an imam, they could throw you in a concentration camp for being religious, essentially. And the problem is we haven't really had a debate about this. Now, some of the people say, well, there's some benefits. But the benefits are very much, you know, setting aside the criminal case you made, kind of this creepy, corporatism. So facial recognition technology could allow you to walk into a store and the employees there know who you are and know what kind of clothes you're looking for. Which maybe some people like that convenience. I think that's kind of creepy. And there's also real questions here with U.S.

companies, right, like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, anybody who might be able to develop this technology, do they sell this to authoritarian countries who may want to use it? So, so that's there's privacy in your own life, privacy about what you want corporations to know about you. There's privacy concerns in terms of what would authoritarian governments do with this technology. You can think of the Trump administration and ICE and what they might do with it. And we just need regulation. It's crying out for Congress to get involved here. What I would like to see, and I think what a normal U.S. administration would be doing,

is setting privacy standards at home, but then also working together, say the U.S. and Europe and some other countries, to try to set the baseline. We know Russia and China aren't going to play ball there. But, I mean, we've got to get ahead or at least try to catch up to where the technologies are going and be able to set reasonable expectations for what privacy people can have. And I think random people buying your face and then using it to map out everywhere you've been is not the expectation that most people would have. No, not at all. And it certainly dovetails with the conversation we had last week about the Trump administration's efforts and the Obama administration's efforts to demand that companies like Apple, them a backdoor to all of our texts or chats, anything that's supposed to be end-to-end encrypted. I mean, I can't think of any moment in history where privacy has eroded faster. Yeah, no, and this facial recognition stuff, I mean, if you travel, you'll notice most countries you go into now, they just take a photo of you, and they're getting data when they do it. It's not just security. And so I think this should be, you know, one of the dominant issues

in our public policy and foreign policy discussions, and it doesn't come up that much. I think Warren has been on this a little bit with her big tech approach. But I do think when you look out five, ten years at the dominant issues that are going to decide how we live, this is in the top five for sure. Yeah, right, right after like a burning planet. Yeah, well, yeah, up there. So here's another interesting issue, a little more on intelligence. So once a year, the intelligence community is supposed to testify for Congress in an open setting about all the scary threats we face in the world.

It's called the worldwide threat assessment hearing. It usually features like the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA chief, NSA, FBI, all the acronyms. When we were in office, I remember that the intel people hated it. They hated it because you have to talk about sensitive intelligence in an unclassified setting. You have to try to give definitive answers to questions where we might not have a, definitive response, right? We might not know for sure. A lot of intelligence lives in that kind of gray area of what we kind of think we know. But last year, these hearings got even worse because the intelligence community now works for President Trump and who he believes that reality is whatever

he says it is. So when the director of national intelligence said Iran was still complying with the Iran deal, despite our departure from it, Trump freaked out. Yeah. When they talked about ISIS reconstituting or North Korea building more nuclear weapons, it contradicted his campaign rhetoric. So first, he attacked them on Twitter, you called them passive and naive and said, quote, perhaps intelligence should go back to school. How about that burned? Then he dragged them into the Oval Office for a scolding and later said that they had all been misquoted in public televised hearings.

Right. So this year, the intelligence community is lobbying to have no public hearing as part of these threat assessment hearings. And I just wanted to pause with you on how unbelievably fucked up that is. Right. I mean, their job is to speak truth to power, to. give these policymakers facts with which they can use to make decisions. Yeah.

And like once a year, they share some of that information with the American people and with Congress. And Trump's ego is so fragile that he is convinced them to silence themselves in the face of his Twitter feed. I mean, it's like it's just another way that like he is just massively distorting not just our government, but like reality. Yeah. I mean, he clearly doesn't want them to say what they know. No, because if they testified an open session, you'd learn that North Korea is continuing to advance the nuclear program. You'd learn that Iran is now advancing its nuclear program.

You'd learn that climate change is a national security threat. You'd learn that allies don't trust us anymore. And so he is dealing with reality by trying to suppress it so that he can continue to tell the American people, particularly in an election year, what is black and what is white. And he lies about that. And it shouldn't be lost on us that this is happening in an election year. doesn't want facts to get out in election year. I think I don't really, you know, care much that the I see, the intelligence community doesn't love this hearing. It's their job to testify to Congress.

And the reality is you, if you're an American, listen to this, you know, pay $80 billion a year for this intelligence community. Like, we're paying for it. We deserve to know what they think about things, you know. And I remember this hearing being somewhat useful in setting kind of new baselines. You know, Russia's becoming more of an adversary or Assad's hanging on, like things that weren't great for us, but they were to the truth and people deserve to know them. And again, it gets back to the notion that Congress appropriates this money and taxpayers spend it. And Trump doesn't think that the intelligence community should be accountable to anybody but him. But that's just not how the system works here. How can Congress perform its role of deciding what money to

spend on the intelligence community, deciding what to prioritize if they can't even hear from these people in open setting? It's just one more marker in how they're trying to distort and you know, frankly, permanently change the U.S. government so that it's serving Trump's political interests and not any broader national interests. That new baselines point, I think, is a really smart and important one because a lot of times, like the intelligence community will pour their brains into a problem and then produce something like an NIE, a national intelligence estimate on a subject. It would be like Iran is no longer trying to create a nuclear weapon. And sometimes it takes like an action-forcing event, like a hearing or some other, like, testimony to force them

to update that. And you're right. Like, absent this hearing, we probably wouldn't have updated the American people along the tough issues for Obama. Yeah. No, and you're right. And they forced us to recognize a shifting reality when these guys go out and establish a new baseline. They're going to be less good at, like, predicting exactly what's going to happen. The line of questioning that is usually a waste of time is like, tell us what is going to happen in X Middle Eastern country, right? But they can tell you, you know, what to expect in terms of Iranian behavior going forward, you know, probably that there's more response coming for the Soleimani attack, or they can tell you that North Korea has not made a decision to give up their nuclear weapons. They've

made a decision to continue to pursue them. So I think just getting these key trends out of these intelligence leaders is a useful thing to do once a year. that the members of Congress that are sitting there, but also people who are interested in this, have a sense of what way things are going geopolitically, economically, in terms of our security. Yeah. So one thing I'd love to hear them all explain at this hearing is what the hell's going on to Russia. Yeah. And I'm excited to hear your conversation with Masha later. So last week, Russia's prime minister, our old buddy, Dmitri Medvedev, along with the rest of Putin's cabinet, just suddenly resigned. This resignation and mass came shortly after Putin delivered.

the Russian version of the State of the Union and proposed a bunch of constitutional changes that ostensibly give more power to Parliament, the Duma, the prime minister, and a mostly powerless political entity called the State Council. On paper, that sounds democratic. It's not really about Putin finding creative ways to cling to power. He can't run for president again once his term up is in 2024. So I think most experts believe he's trying to avoid a nasty secession fight while creating new ways to be the de facto leader of Russia in perpetuity.

The changes will be put to a popular vote, but that shouldn't be too hard for Putin since he's consolidated total control of the country. And a bad polling day for him is like 60%. Putin reportedly had hoped to unite Russia and Belarus and become some kind of like KGB decepticon. Mini Soviet Union. Mega leader, yeah. But it didn't happen since then said he's going to lead from this newly empowered state council position with Medvedev as his deputy. He transitioned from president to prime minister back to president. And that was like, what, 2012?

Yeah. And it was pretty rocky. So I think he probably wanted to avoid a dust up like that. But I don't know, man. Like we've talked about a post-Putin world or post-Putin Russia for a long time. And it sounds like don't hold your breath. Yeah. Well, if you're Putin, you know, you've killed your opponents.

You know, you're wildly corrupt. And so you don't think you can give up power. You know, if you are no longer the person in power, suddenly you are vulnerable because of the things you've done. And so clearly there's zero motivation from Putin about like what is in Russia. his best interest. This is whatever he is up to is about allowing himself to stay in power after 24 when he's term limited out as president. And there's kind of three ways he can do that. He can just scrap term limits and stay in power, or he can make a kind of clever adjustment to the system so that if he has to become prime minister again, well, now the prime minister is much

more powerful. And some of this idea of giving power to the parliament could be about making the prime minister the preeminent figure in the system, not the president. And then Putin becomes prime minister. This state council thing that he's talked about too, presumably he'll be the chair of the state council and we'll have the power that comes from that. So to me, the only thing that this does tell you is that Putin is going to try to stay in power after 2024. And look, you know, yes, he'll do well in the polls. I think his popularity, you know, often, you know, it sounds smart to say Putin is so popular in Russia. Like, I think we don't really know because he controls the media completely. They harassed, attain, and even kill oppositionists. There's not independent,

really civil society or journalists to speak of, except for a few courageous holdouts. So we actually don't really know how to measure Putin's real popularity in that country. What we do know how to measure is his intention to stay in the seat of power. And by all evidence, this looks that way. Yeah. I was listening to an expert on regimes like Russia's talking on, I think the worldly podcast on Vox about how these secession fights turned out to be existential for a lot of regimes because like when you have a cult of personality leader like Putin, it very often crumbles once he or she is gone. So it does seem like giving himself a lot of runway to set up this secession fight, finalize it, and do it from a point of maximum leverage is a pretty good idea.

Yeah, you know what's interesting about Putin is that unlike some other dictators in the past, there's no real ideology behind it. So this is not like the Soviet Union where they're communist. You know, it's just about Putin. I mean, I don't think anyone could really describe like an ism that Putin. You know, so that makes it even harder to have a succession, right? Because in the Soviet Union, at least, the idea was they were all committed to the Russian revolution and communism. With Putin, it's just about him.

So imagine being the guy after him. Right. You know, it's not going to work. You know, as soon as Putin is gone, this whole thing is very likely to be either under tremendous stress or to collapse or to be challenged in some way. So, you know, if you're Medvedev, I don't know that you even want the chair after Putin. Yeah. And it does just tell you how much this current model Putin is built is really just about himself and not about any broader objective, even if it was a kind of false

objective. Yeah, you don't want to be the guy who has to fall Logan Roy, you know. Exactly. That's a tough session. I think Kendall's, you can figure that out. Speaking of what our Russian friends are up to. So, Ben, Trump is in Davos, Switzerland right now for the World Economic Forum. Can we just talk about that this guy railed against, like, elites? I know. And he's so fucking craving of their attention that Obama never went to Davos. There's no reason for a president to go to Davos.

He's just, he's measured himself against these people his whole life. Why does he even care? He's the President of the United States. Yeah. I mean, I guess he wants to hang out with, like, other world leaders that we don't have enough to do CEOs and then billionaires who complain about all the problems in the world without ever looking inward to realize that they're a big part of that problem. Yeah.

Economic inequality. But the Bernie and me digresses. So like you noted, nothing meaningful is going to come out of this stupid event. But, you know, Jared and Ivanka might line up their next free yacht vacation. Yeah. So that would be good. And make some contacts for their corrupt business interests. Get some Saudi money.

But this caught my eye. So a Swiss newspaper reported that two Russian diplomats, I did air quotes, had been detained and maybe had posed as plumbers at the World Economic Forum. So the reporting's a little murky. It's hard to know what was right and wrong if it was fact-checked. But it sounds like the Russians got caught trying to spy on said useless Davos elites by posing as plumbers, which just felt very water gatey. And I kind of, I like the familiarity of it all.

Look, I just think that there are two angles here that are comically tragic to me. one is that we keep coming back to the lack of security, right? Like Trump's like jumping on his phone. We had like people in cafes in the middle of Ukraine like talking about Russia policy. Jared couldn't get a security clearance. There was a wild story that popped over the weekend about a guy at the NSA who might have been compromised by Russian hookers. Yeah. I saw that. And look, I don't know if that's true.

But what is clearly true is that this has been a bonanza for foreign intelligence. services. So I'm sure in the past, they would have been like, it's not even worth trying to penetrate the U.S. delegation at Davos because they're all going to, you know, be very scrupulous. Now it's got to be like totally fair game. Then the other thing, you know, building on what I said earlier is like, do you notice like Trump just never travels? Which, by the way, I'm fine with because it can only lead to bad things. But like, you know, we should look up the number of days that like Obama traveled abroad each year and previous presidents and then Trump. He only goes, to like the summits that you absolutely have to. So at the beginning of the year, you look at the

calendar, you're like, okay, have to go the G20, have to go to G7, have to go to NATO. And like, beyond that, he doesn't just visit countries, right? And so for him to go to Davos is really extraordinary. And what is he doing there? And again, the Democrats running, this guy basically constructed a whole populist narrative that was against like Davos elites. But clearly that's who he wants to rub elbows with, you know? And, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, Meanwhile, those people, you're right, are both on the one hand, not exactly fans of Trump, but also the inequality, the climate crisis, the people in that room really wanted to solve those problems, they could do something about it instead of just having panel discussions where, you know,

they talk about all the great things that they are doing. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, tell me more about your corporate responsibility program at Goldman or whatever bullshit. Okay, let's talk about some people who are the opposite of Davos elites who are actually doing really good work. So this is a great story in Politico that you will like if you don't like war. So Politico profiled several new organizations, anti-war organizations, that were able to quickly mobilize after the U.S. killed Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general, with a drone strike. And these groups were able to deliver a message to the media about the need for de-escalation and anti-war. And that stands in pretty stark contrast to how anti-war voices were marginalized and largely drowned out in a run-up to the Iraq war.

One group that they talk about is called the Quincy Institute, which is funded in part by George Soros and Charles Koch, which is an interesting bipartisan alignment of boogeymen. Another group that has grown in size and influence is called win without war. And then there are traditional stalwarts like move on.org or maybe just move on now. Ben, you know, you did an amazing job in the White House of organizing like a lot of outside groups to fight for passage of the Iran deal. And now Republicans and reporters pretended that was somehow like abnormal. Diabolical. Yeah, people who care about your positions to support you. But how important do you think it is to have progressive groups like the Quincy Institute having this outside game and pushing for progressive policies?

I think there's a couple points here that are really worth emphasizing. Oh, and I should have mentioned national security action. Yeah, security action, yeah, my group. They're doing great work. And the first thing is that in a crisis, I think it matters. I think that there was a lot of attention and scrutiny in social media and the media to try. Trump's claims after he killed Qasem Soleimani, I think that the general noise level was concerned about where this was going. It forced Trump to kind of frame what he was doing around,

like, well, I'm trying to stop a war, you know, and that I think it mattered. I think it had an impact. You can never draw direct causation, as we said, if one of those Iranian missiles had killed an American could be in a different story now. But I do think that the ease with which George W. Bush took us to war, that couldn't happen quite the same way now. And you saw Congress mobilizing to try to defund potential war. So there was clearly more pressure against this kind of lurch towards another war in that Iran instance. And I think a lot of that can be attributed to these groups that are organized and know how to deliver messages and know how to reach Congress and have grassroots support that will put pressure on Congress. I also think there's a broader question.

though. And look, part of this is also, let's be frank here, the American people are just sick of this after 20 years of war. So it's great. These organizations are wonderful and deserve all this credit, but part of this dynamic is also just that the public has moved, right? The bigger challenge for the Quincy Institute, I know the people who founded that a lot of them were involved in that orondial effort. So there was this constellation of groups, and some of those people went out and raised the money to form this Quincy Institute, which is dedicated to ending the Forever wars and having more restraint in the use of U.S. military force. And the upheld climb that those guys have is that the think tank community in Washington is incredibly interventionist, you know,

and not just on the right, but some of the center-left groups, and they've taken money from Gulf countries, and they've generally advocated for military interventions or sustaining military interventions. And they're trying to kind of reorient the entire ecosystem of think tanks. And this may seem like, a dumb DC issue, it's not. Because it's also the media, because when the media calls experts, they call the experts from these think tanks. And then the stories reflect the analysis of generally hawkish think tanks, generally,

I think right of center think tanks, who also reflect the opinion of certain foreign governments. The Saudis and the Emirates particularly come to mind in Israel. And so you have this kind of situation where think tanks shape media coverage, shape the kind of cable television. debate, shape opinion pages, and that's a big deal. And that is why, here we are 20 years after the Iraq War and some of the most prominent Iraq War supporters are still the key opinion makers on these things. That's the much bigger mountain that Quincy and some of these other groups are

trying to climb. And I really hope that they succeed, but they're not going to be able to do it alone. No one organization can do this. It's going to take, you know, worldos and people out there who are starting to scrutinize more the claims that show up in new socials. stories and op-ed pages and think tank reports. And one last thing I'd say that was interesting in the Iran case is you saw with social media for all the shit that Twitter and other platforms rightly get, it did allow for people to be skeptical of official claims immediately in very identifiable ways. So like when Judy Miller in the New York Times is publishing stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, there was no similar platform to try to hold that

accountable immediately and say, wait a second. And so I actually do think that. democratization of information, you know, our podcast, not that we're, you know, changing the world here. Well, we're trying to save the world. Hey, you know, one day to time. But, you know, you have podcasts, you've got social media, you've got other forms of media for people to say, wait, this looks like bullshit, that there was some imminent threat. And that, that's new and I think healthy. And frankly, is a reaction to a feeling that the American media has not done a good enough job scrutinizing certain aspects of American foreign policy. Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, like Judy Miller reports in the New York Times that the Iraqis are importing aluminum tubes

that could only have been used for their nuclear weapon. In 2020, you could have some nonproliferation nerd at some... Break that down. The university and be like, actually, those tubes don't really make sense for that. They make more sense for this kind of like Katusha-style rocket, which is actually, I think, in fact, what they were for. And people can retweet that person and suddenly that information is everywhere. And yeah, in a fake news context, that's not great, but you're right. I mean, it's helpful to see. But in the run-upsy-rock war, I mean, you had like Knight Ritter, which I don't know, does it sort of exist anymore, but like reporters like Warren Strobel at Knight Ritter in that team, we're doing amazing work questioning the assertions of the Bush administrations. But to your point about

these think tanks, I mean, there's a super hawkish one called FDD that's just garbage neocon bullshit. The foundation for the defense of democracies that has taken money from some of the most undemocratic regimes in the world. Right. And they were able to take one of their fellows and install that person at the NSC. And pay his salary. And pay his salary, right? That's how much. That's how corrosive this is. Yeah. And, you know, like the Iraq war example is a good one because if you were watching that and you just read the Times story, you know, it would be like, the administration claimed this, some experts say this, some other experts say that, but there's no real scrutiny. There's no real skepticism. And today, if you had none of this other media or these organizations, you would have

had the coverage that we saw on the Times, which frankly was a pretty alarming. It was like Trump claims imminent threat. Mike Pompeo said hundreds of lies were at stake. Some Democrats said they hadn't seen sufficient evidence, but some Republicans said that the Democrats are terrorists. And that was like story you're reading. That's like Louis Gomer orders freedom prize. Yeah, make your own conclusion. Now you can, yeah, you're right. Like arms control won't have a 32 tweet thread about like why this is bullshit. And you know, you've got people mobilizing with when went out war. You've got national security action getting people to sign letters, you know, about why this shouldn't be done. You've got people helping Rokana and Bernie Sanders advocate

for legislation. You've got a movement that is more organized and frankly has more ways to get their voice out. Yeah. And you also have some new highly contrarian news outlets like The Intercept, which brings me to some disturbing news out of Brazil about Glenn Greenwald, who, helped found the intercept. And he's best known for his work with Edward Snowden, exposing all the NSA stuff during the Obama administration. You and I were, you know, adversarial at best with Glenn for a long time. But I think both of us have gone to like really appreciate the kind of reporting that he does on intelligence questions. And so what people need to know is that like he was accused of committing cyber crimes by federal authorities in Brazil. He's done all this work

exposing corruption in Brazil, including top aides of president Bolsonaro. who were conspiring to keep former president Lula de Silva in jail and prevent him from running from office. Glenn's husband is also a congressman who Bolsonaro hates and Bolsonaro's gone after them both. So clearly, like, Bolsonaro is a fascist or a fascist in training. He openly longs for the glorious period of Brazil's military dictatorship. And, like, no matter what you think about Glenn's skepticism about, say, Russian interference in 2016 or, like, issues where he's contrarian, efforts like this in Brazil to silence the press will take Brazil down the path to dictatorship, almost undoubtedly.

Well, look, yeah, I mean, because I'll put it this way. Like, I've got, you know, all kinds of problems with Glenn Greenwald. He's got a pretty massive blind spot when it comes to Russia. But the whole point about a free press is you won't have to want it for everybody, right? So I don't, you know, I'm not, you know, sitting here carrying a brief for Glenn because I love watching his Tucker Carlson appearances about Putin. But I just, you know, he also does some very good work, as you say, exposing corruption. But either way, like, you start silencing independent journalists and using every leverage that you have to intimidate them. If there's not a free press for everybody, there's not a free press by definition.

You're tilting it in one direction. And what we've seen in all these countries that are at various stages of authoritarianism is this focus on the media. And either you try to get control of the media by buying either directly or through your kind of cronies, the major media platforms, and that's how you got like a Fox News here, but that's what Putin did. He essentially took over media for his friendly cronies bought all the TV stations,

and then you try to intimidate independent voices so that more and more over time the information that's reaching people is the kind of state version of information. I think we're farther down that road here that people like to recognize when you look at what 40% of this country consumes and how non-fact-based it is.

But yeah, you look at a Bolsonaro And here's a guy, an authoritarian leader who, you know, wants to gain more and more control. Thankfully, Brazil is not as far down the spectrum yet, so there's some people pushing back. But these individual cases become kind of markers along the way. In the past, dictators or authoritarian, like Bolsonaro, who have been able to plow through those markers usually end up making progress and making headway in trying to consolidate some control of the media. So it's worth fighting battles against that in any case. And it's worth it even if you don't always agree with the person who's being singled out.

Yeah. I don't love some of the newer news outlets on the left that seem to live to attack people who they think occupy the space between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. More than almost anyone else. We're like, I'm glad they're there. Yeah, yeah. Look, and my thing about that is that the problem we have in the media in general, is the absence of facts as a basis for, there are more problems not,

but that's the main problem, right? And actually, this is directly related to that because essentially, if anybody has uncomfortable facts and you want to do away with that, like you're creating a kind of fact-free media that is pushing the narrative of whoever is in power.

And, you know, I think we have to welcome, I don't mind, like, fervently right-wing outlets as long as they're trying to anchor their arguments and some kind of facts. And I'd apply the same standard to the left. And, you know, yeah, thus far, they can be, you know, painful in the expression of their opinion. But as long as we're dealing in facts here, I think you need to welcome all views. Yeah, agreed.

All right, Ben, I have some news that is going to make you so excited. Axios reported that Trump is going to decide in the next few days whether to put forward Jared's long-awaited Middle East peace plan before the March 6th. second Israeli election. So as we've discussed a bunch of times now, Israel is about to go through their third general election, and I think less than a year. And literally the only reason the White House would put this plan forward is to give BB Netanyahu another political favor in advance of the vote because B.B. is dealing with many, many, many corruption charges that provide a huge threat to his rule. Now, I just saw a tweet on the way in, as I was about,

to start talking about this, that Benny Gantz, B.B.'s'i's primary opponent, says that he will annex the Jordan Valley in coordination with the international community. If he wins the March 2nd election, so clearly, Gantz is trying to get ahead of whatever Jared and Trump might say, none of that is good for those who want a Middle East peace process, but probably still a pretty solid net benefit to get rid of a corrupt hack like BBNanyahu. Yeah, I think that the thing about this peace plan, first of all, I thought the peace plan was rolled out at that kind of Grifter Conference in the Gulf, remember that? Oh, yeah. I thought that was the peace plan. Yeah. So, but I guess not. I guess that was literally just Jared. Fri-D chess man. up business. But first of all, Trump is remarkably not held accountable to the goals he sets for himself because people think he's just such an idiot. But most politicians would be. And he literally promised that Jared was going to solve this problem. I'm going to go on a limb

and suggest that that's not going to happen. But we should all remember here that by the goals that Trump himself has set, North Korea denuclearizing, a better deal with Iran, China changing its structural economic advantages, making Middle East peace. Like, he's failing spectacularly. Respect from other countries. Like, he's completely incompetent and ineffective measured against his own goals. And like this is the argument we have to be making here, not just that he's erratic and he tweets scary stuff, but did literally just match up what he said was going to happen with what has happened everywhere.

And it's an utter failure. And there is, I hate to break it to you. There is a 0.0% chance there's going to be Middle East peace as long as Donald Trump is president. I don't believe you. And yet we all pretend like there's some plan or there might be some process. This is all a bunch of bullshit. The plan is to dictate the terms of surrender to the Palestinians to help Bibi Nanyahu get through the next election. Right.

And we'd all be better off just acknowledging that reality. Again, I do think that this is just about Bibi's politics largely. and I don't frankly know how much it helps anymore. Like, I think the Israeli people get it and those people who care that Trump and BB are best friends are already voting for BB. So I think this is diminishing returns each election. You know, it was the goal on heights before the first one.

It was settlements for the second one. Now it'll be some plan. It's a bunch of bullshit, you know, and it's not making anything better. And it's making things worse. I had one journal say to me like, well, isn't true that Trump was able to move the embassy to Jerusalem and the world didn't end?

And so it showed that that wasn't a problem. Like, well, that's only if you think that we don't have a goal of a two-state solution, and which I think most of us think we should have. So the Palestinians stopped talking to the American negotiators after that. Yeah, no, I mean, there have been consequences to this stuff. And you're right to flag that, like, Benny Gans is not going to be some dove on this peace process either, though. But the reality is none of it's going to change unless the United States stops kind of serving as the worst enabler of the worst actions. of the Israeli government.

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of organizations built to be the worst enablers of the worst governments, I want to talk about Facebook for a second. So, Ben, this is an awkward one. Facebook had to apologize after the platform accidentally mistranslated Xi Jinping's name. Did you see this? No, I didn't.

This wasn't a small error. They didn't like mispronounced she as XI or something like that. It occurred when Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader of Burma, posted about Xi Jinping on her Facebook page. And it was translated as, as quote, Mr. Schitthole. Some people wondered if this was intentional. Facebook said it was a technical error.

I guess she's name sounds familiar to words that roughly translate as feces, whole buttocks in Burmese. So this happened right around Xi's two-day visit to Burma. News of the error appears to have been censored in China, so don't worry. No one there was offended. But, you know, Ben, the good news for Facebook is that the Chinese party leadership is known for just brushing off slights, letting things. sensitive at all.

They're never conspiratorial or sensitive, right? It sounds like it's like Siri when you say something and like something totally different comes up or something. And it just happened to Xi Jinping. Like there's almost no one worth it. Like maybe calling Putin like feces, butthole shit base would be worse. But like, could you imagine how much they are trying to get to the root of what happened? Yes.

You know there's like 500 people and some, you know, communist intelligence center in Beijing that are trying to identify this single human who's responsible for this. Pouring through Zuckerberg. personal emails. It is kind of a perfect like place to start the absurdity of our dystopia that you have Aung San Suu Kyi, the fallen leader who's now an apologist for ethnic cleansing through Facebook, the platform that is fueling authoritarianism around the world, hurling this insult to Jijan Ping, who's the leader of the most authoritarian government in the world. There's some novel that could begin with this anecdote slipping through.

the Facebook sensors. I don't think that Chinese take this slightly. Frankly, Facebook is not in China. Even Facebook... Oh, good. Well, China was actually blocking Facebook. And Facebook just gave up trying to even be in that market. But something tells me that they won't be getting it anytime soon after this.

No, me too. Okay, a few final lighter ones, maybe. So we've done a lot of Iran news lately, so we did less this week. But one story that caught my eye was CNN got its hands on audio of a Trump fundraiser where he basically told the attendees more about the Soleimani strike than he told Congress. He said, Solomani was, quote, saying bad things about our country before the strike. And then, quote, how much of this shit do we have to listen to? How much are we going to listen to?

Gone was all the talk of an imminent threat. He also described in detail how the military watched the strike from a drone or a satellite feed. then I can't say I'm remotely surprised that he's boasting about killing people to a group of donors or that he's refusing to talk to Congress. I do recall well all the times we were told that we disclosed too much detail about the Bin Laden operation and how that was going to harm our national security, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there you go. Well, it's terrifying that, I mean, essentially he's saying we assassinated an official of a foreign government

because he said bad things about us. I mean, there are a lot of people who say bad things about it. It's like it matters what the standard is that you use to assassinate a foreign official, even if that person is a terrible person who's done terrible things. And we're now in a really murky place where we have no idea why we assassinated this guy. And I certainly believe what Trump says behind closed doors more than I believe the scripted remarks he reads for the benefit of the New York Times story that he's seeking to dictate. So that's alarming. I also think, like, there's a real trend we've seen here that people should be more pissed off about, which is that people don't think that they're obligated to tell us or Congress anything.

But, you know, John Bolton can go and give closed-door speeches and not fucking testify in front of Congress. Donald Trump can tell the truth to a bunch of donors and then just lie to our faces. Like, people can husband information, you know, for their books. that they don't want to give to the United States Congress. Like, this is so disrespectful of the notion that there's any democratic accountability that you basically, because Trump is monetizing this, anecdote, he's using it to raise money, right?

So all these people are just monetizing, you know, Jim Mattis, God knows what he's been saying on his corporate speaking tour behind closed doors that he won't say in front of television cameras. So you get these people monetizing information that is sensitive to our national security because they want to sell a book or get a speaking fee or raise some money, and then they blow off the United States Congress. Yeah, let's just subpoena John Bolton's book proposal.

Yeah, it says something really bad about our democracy, that Congress comes in after, like, a book publisher or some, like, hedge fund donors of Trumps. The Waste Management Professionals Conference in Vegas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like the annual life insurance conference in Reno, where some dudes are going there to pull slots, and then they have to be shuffled into a ballroom with clubs. close doors to hear Jim Mattis tell them about leadership or something, you know.

This is like out of control. Bragging to donors about the Soleimani assassination, getting people acquitted for war crimes or pardoning them for their war crimes. I was reading last night that George Wallace... And now that guy's on the circuit, by the way. So I was reading last night that George Wallace in 68 or leading up to the 72 election was tried to campaign with one of the leaders of the Maillai massacre. So there is a, you know, a wonderful history in this country of the worst politicians on the planet campaigning with war criminals. But I digress.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two more quick things. So, Ben, I thought that John Bolton's exit from the scene meant that terrible mustaches would no longer be screwing up our foreign policy. But I think in the Trump era, you just have to be more imaginative about all the things that could go wrong. So the New York Times had this piece over the weekend where they reported that Harry Harris Jr., the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, has a mustache that reminds many Koreans of the period from 1910 to 1945 when the Japanese ruled South Korea. So I guess the Japanese governors general rocked this similarly bad facial hair.

And so he's also Japanese American, which undoubtedly is like the real root of all this animosity, right? So it's probably just racist. But people are like holding signs of the mustache at events in criticizing him. And so the history for people that we need to know that is less funny is that there's all this unresolved animosity. from an era when I think like eight million Koreans were forced to fight for Japan or work in factories for their military during World War II.

Many Korean women were raped, forced it to prostitution as a horrific painful history has come back up recently because of some legal rulings about compensation for some of the victims and their families. Normally the United States would help mediate this kind of tension because obviously we want a united front between Korea and Japan. on a whole host of issues, especially North Korea. Yeah. But instead, Trump and our ambassador are more focused on demanding money from the Koreans to cover the cost of U.S. troops there.

So, Ben, you know, like, this obviously goes a lot deeper than mustache. And, you know, I'll be honest, like, I'm a stubborn asshole. Someone told me to, like, cut my hair or do something that I felt was unfair. I'd probably be a dick about it. But it is just an amazing example of yet another problem that somehow we're making worse. Well, yeah. I mean, I think part of it may be animus. for Japanese heritage, which obviously is problematic.

I think part of it is also like we have treated South Korea like shit. Really have. We've done this whole negotiation with North Korea essentially without them, even though it's their security at stake. Trump routinely bashes them for not paying us for these troops that are there when we've benefited hugely from having these bases in Northeast Asia. And just generally doesn't seem to give a shit about South Korea. And the danger for us is not just North Korea.

It's that South Korea basically falls into the orbit of China, you know, And it would be a big problem for the United States if you kind of have a total breakup of our alliances between Japan and South Korea and us, that you have South Korea orienting towards China. You've got North Korea as a nuclear weapon state. Like it's easy to see what the Chinese endgame is, right? Like North Korea has a nuclear weapon. South Korea is becoming more and more in China's orbit. And at some point China figures out how this all ends.

And it ends with like a Korea that is very much looking to them and not to us. And look, in the mustache, I mean, just shave it off. Yeah, just trim it maybe. You know, trim it maybe, or maybe, you know, busier. What about goatee? Yeah, Chuck Totet, throw a goatee on there. Like, I mean, there are different handlebars. Do what Axelrod did.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, you could have like a fundraiser, you know, shave the mustache on TV. Get on Morning Joe. Yeah. You probably get on Morning Joe if you did that. That's like about as good as a guy. For Axa was.

He's kidding. No, just kidding. And actually, Axelrod shaved in my session did raise a lot of money. Yeah, he did. I went to that event,

raised a lot of money for epilepsy research. Yes, you did a good thing. All right, Mr. Ambassador, we solved your problem. Okay.

Last topic is about Space Force. Ben, don't know if you saw, but the newly created Space Force team tweeted out photos of their uniforms

in like the name tape that says, you know, like Air Force, Marines, the hell it says. And they just got roasted on Twitter because the uniform was camouflage. Yeah. Yeah. I think they were just trying to show off like the little embroider patch. It says named for us, like the nameplate. But it was sewn onto a camo uniform, which of course is probably

less useful for hiding in space. Yeah. The aliens will see that one. The folks at space force pointed out that they're not flying space missions yet. And it was cheaper to use existing uniforms for now. Now, I have to say, I think this whole controversy is totally unfair. there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Some astronomers estimate that there are 200 billion planets in the Milky Way alone. Are you telling me that one of those is not camo-colored? It has to be. That's a fair point.

Maybe the military knows something that we don't. Yeah. Maybe the aliens are on like a camo-colored planet. Maybe I took an edible halfway through this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll take an edible later and just think about that for a while. There's definitely life out there. I mean, I'm sure about that.

Do you ever watch, like, the universe on Netflix or any of these shows? They used to have Cosmos. They took it down. I love Cosmos. I used to watch Cosmos all times. Yeah. If I was any good of math, I would have gotten into astronomy, but I'm an idiot. I will say that it is kind of remarkable that we have a Space Force because it's another

of these things where people take it seriously because, you know, it seems serious. But, like, this is just like Trump clearly thinks space is cool. And he could say he created the Space Force. And it sounds like a video game. It's like, you know, we could have dealt with space through the existing military forces. It could be in the Air Force. Yeah, it could be in, you know, so basically this is like Donald Trump won, was clearly in a meeting once where he's like, oh, it would be cool to have a space force. 100%.

And we could call it Space Force. And I could say I created the Space Force. And the whole machinery of the U.S. government has set to work building this thing complete with the patches on the uniforms, just so Donald Trump can go out and talk about how he has a space force. So we can campaign on it. Yeah. Look, I just want more deep space Hubble telescope photos. Those are cool. The thing that drifts by Pluto and sends back pictures.

Oh, yeah. But we could save this fucking planet. I mean, unless we need the space force to try to find the next place to live. But like, this planet is like literally on fire. And instead of spending money to deal with that, where there's zeroing out the money that we spend on global. And by the way, zeroed out. I saw a woman from the Green Climate Fund, right, which is under Paris set up to help help poor countries develop cleaner.

And we gave them a bunch of money at the end of the bomb administration, and sure enough, that was cut off, right? So, I mean, how many hundreds of billions of dollars are we going to spend on the Space Force, and we're not spending anything to mitigate the global climate crisis? Yeah, like, I really respect and appreciate

the work that Elon Musk has done to set up SpaceX and, like, all the talk about colonizing Mars. But I think what people don't read past on that headline is that it would be a miserable existence. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be on Mars. I mean, maybe if they can find someplace we can all go after the whole world turns into Australia

but more likely than not they'll find like, do you watch 2001, speaking of edibles? Like the black, you know, tile that they find on the moon? No. Anybody with me on this? Any Kubrick guys? Yeah, sure enough, the engineers

are in the Kubrick. God damn. So like the, you know, this was the sign that intelligent life is out there but we like didn't know exactly what it was. I don't want to live on Europa. What are the other Jupiter moons? One of them is supposed to be quite nice, I think. Titan?

Titan? I forget. That's the big one. Yeah. I think one of the moons of Saturn is supposed to be quite lovely. Oh. So we could always go there. That's gorgeous.

Well, time to watch more Netflix. Okay. Now that we're done with Stoner Talk for WorldO's, we will have Ben's interview with Masha Gessen from The New Yorker, about all the madness happening in Russia after the break. Okay, so now I'm joined by Masha Gessen. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. She's a journalist and author whose books include The Future's History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017.

Everybody should check it out. It's really an amazing series of stories about Russians and how their lives have changed under Putin and what's happened in Russia. And her next book is Surviving Autocracy, which is coming out this summer. So everybody should definitely check that out. So we have good timing, Masha, to be getting you on the... front end of your upcoming book. So thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for having you. So, you know, you've long documented how Vladimir Putin has essentially taken over the Russian government and made it an extension of his own ambitions. We saw last week, you know, a pretty

surprising series of announcement from President Putin, both about an initiation of some constitutional reforms in Russia and then the announcement from Dmitri Medvedev that he would, be resigning along with the entire cabinet to give President Putin the space to implement these reforms. I mean, stepping back, what do you think this was all about? What do you think Putin is up to here? Well, in some ways, Putin is very easy to analyze because everything he does is about consolidating power. And it was certainly about that. You know, although, I mean, I wrote a column for the New Yorker last week about how difficult it is to use sort of normal political language to describe what Putin does, right? Because the moment I say, you know, consolidate power

or other people have said, you know, a constitutional coup, anything like that, that suggests that, for example, there's power to consolidate, that it hasn't all been already totally consolidated, which is inaccurate, right? Or it suggests, you know, when we talk about a coup or the firing of a government and a new government, it suggests that maybe there's a core of something. some kind of legitimate power or distributed power or something. But none of that is true, right? So in a sense, what he does and what he's done for years now is redundant. But I think that the redundancy, and there's another sort of common misinterpretation,

oh, okay, so if he's doing things that are redundant, then he's paranoid, which I think is true. And if he is paranoid, if he is scared, then he must be weak. and that's a huge mistake because actually, you know, dictators are better off being paranoid. They fall when they become overconfident. And paranoid serves them well. It keeps them in power. So, you know, presuming that he's just going to use these changes to stay in power in one form or another as prime minister, as head of his state council, as president, whatever it is beyond 2024. One of the interesting things in looking at this system is, you know, in past totalitarian systems, there's usually,

usually some ism that it's attached to. You know, the Soviet Union, you have communism, and so you have a party whose logic extends from Stalin through Khrushchev and through succession. In China, Xi Jinping is all powerful, but he's a, you know, representative of the Communist Party. Whereas in Russia, this seems to just be about Putin. It's hard to identify a bigger ideological project other than his own power. I mean, how should we understand what Putinism is and can it survive without Putin? I mean, how much is Russia's government really inseparable from his personality? Would there even be a successor who could carry this forward without Putin? How should we view this compared to other totalitarian systems

that we've seen? Yeah. You know, I don't actually think that Putinism is actually a totalitarian system. I think that it's a mafia state, but it's a mafia state that was built on the ruins of a totalitarian society, of a totalitarian system, rather. And so it has recreated totalitarian society. This is what Russia knows how to do. This is what Russian society knows how to do. So once Putin started really cracking down, totalitarian habits came back. What I mean by that, you know, where the distinction is that is that the lived experience of being a Russian. citizen or resident for the last, say, seven years has been the lived experience of inhabiting a

totalitarian society. But that happens in the absence of a totalitarian system, right? The system, you know, is best described as a mafia state. And one of the distinctions between a mafia state, and, you know, the mafia state flows very naturally from the Soviet state. The Soviet state was in some ways sort of the precursor to the mafia state. It's not an aberration. But one distinction is that the Soviet state, yes, proclaimed to have an ideological project. And the mafia state doesn't. The mafia state occasionally instrumentalizes ideology, like, for example, when Putin occupied Crimea, right? Suddenly there was like a lot of ideological rhetoric for a brief period of time.

And then it's set aside when it's not necessary. And, you know, in a way, the distinction between that and the Soviet state begins to blur, because the Soviet state, of course, did that as well, but just not, you know, not to the same extent. And one thing that I want to also say about that is that, you know, when we think about these very personalized systems, I mean, can Putinism survive past Putin? Probably not. It is highly personalized. Can the mafia states survive? Yes, probably in some other form. And if we think about the history of Russia over the last 100 years or so, you know,

the difference between the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and the Soviet Union under Stalin, was probably greater than the difference between Russia under Putin and Russia under Bresnev. Right. So there's a kind of continuum, and they tend to be highly personalized eras in Russian history. Yeah. Well, and what does this mean then if you're in the Russian, say, opposition, you know, from Alexei Navalny on down, or if you want to be an activist of some sort in a civil society environment that has been closing, if you're an independent journalism, journalists still trying to report the truth. We Americans don't often get to see what the lived experience is for an oppositionist in Russia. How do you think they respond to what is happening? What tactics are available to people who want to consider themselves the political opposition in Russia, given the current trajectory of things? Well, that's a great question. Can one even

consider oneself to be in the opposition? Because, again, again, that's the problem with political language. When we say a word like opposition, it suggests that there's access to media, there's access to electoral institutions, right? That's how we usually use the word opposition. There's access to a public sphere, and there is, in fact, a public sphere to seek access to. None of that is true about Russia. So it's really even difficult to talk about any kind of meaningful collective action.

People mostly have to act individually. And I think that that's the most difficult and painful thing to understand about, you know, what options are available to people. Not a lot of options precisely because it's extremely difficult to act with others. And even when we see protests, yes, there have been a number of fairly large, and, you know, especially if you consider the risks of people coming out to protest. And, you know, they're all risking arrest every single one of them just because they're there. and time in Russian jail. Considering the risks, the protests have been very large, especially last summer in Moscow, but the way these protests come to be is that someone kind of posts on YouTube or on Facebook,

let's protest in this place at this time. And people come. And none of the organizing work, none of what, you know, the infuriating grassroots work where people negotiate how they're going to do this. what their slogans are going to be and what time they're going to do it and what the location is going to be and whether they're going to accept police protection or not and that sort of thing. None of that happens, right?

So there's no politics. There's action. There's individual action, but there's no politics. Yeah, it's just personal choice. Well, and so then looking in from the American perspective, you know, I'm curious what you think as someone who's obviously, you know, thought about Russia your whole life and increasingly about American politics, you know, over the last three years since the election, And, you know, Putin has acquired this image in the United States.

Either, you know, if you're an opponent of Trump, you know, some people see him as this kind of, you know, puppet master, you know, brilliant hand behind the curtain. Others see, you know, if you're a supporter of Trump, someone who is kind of a like-minded fellow traveler, you know, make Russia great again, make America great again, a kind of right-wing reaction to the changes of the last several decades. When you evaluate the American portrayal of Putin, what do you think is accurate and what do you think Americans misunderstand about who we're dealing with here? I think the thing that bothers me the most is this desire to sort of suddenly ascribe to Putin a master plan and incredible expertise in not only electing the U.S. president, but then directing his actions. And I think that's too easy an explanation. I think it's largely inaccurate. And it gets us out of the need to talk about what got Trump elected by Americans. Trump is an American creation.

I'm not denying that there was Russian interference. I'm just saying that even for Russian interference to have worked, Trump has to be an American creation, right? And so when we talk about Trump as Putin's puppet, not only do we give Putin way too much credit and therefore way too much perceived power, but we also avoid having important conversations about our own politics. Yeah. So it's easier to just describe all this to Putin than to recognize that we're the kind of country that could produce Donald Trump. Well, you know, in that vein, you know, we're obviously talking as the impeachment trial is beginning. and, you know, it is very odd to see a trial with no witnesses and that seems designed to get to an exoneration as fast as possible. One of the things I really enjoy in your New Yorker writing is you have the ability to look at America, you know, from the outside in and kind of describe what is happening in America in a way that, as you just pointed out, sometimes Americans are uncomfortable doing. I mean, if you were evaluating this impeachment process at this point as an external observer, you know, as a foreign correspondent, if you will, how do you describe it? Because it does strike me that we're falling into that trap where we don't really have the right language to describe what is happening. So we use the old language, like, you know, there's a negotiation, there's partisanship or whatever. But how would you describe what we're seeing happening right now in the Senate?

Right. Well, I was obviously just thinking about that because that's part of my job is to think about that. And I think what struck me about it today is actually the same thing that struck me about the hearings in the house, which is that there's no way to interpret them outside of a partisan framework. Right. So if I turn on my TV and I'm habitually, and I'm a same thing, embassy watcher, then I see one thing. I see several very intelligent people, you know, making a valiant argument for saving the Republic by conducting a proper trial as required by the Constitution. And I see Republicans stonewalling that because, because obviously they want to just get to an exoneration and they are not interested in learning the truth and conducting an actual trial.

And if I'm habitually Foxwatcher, what I see is several very articulate men making the argument that the Democrats have always wanted to remove Trump from the moment he was elected and that their evil plan has produced an exorbitant amount of paperwork that has now been delivered to the Senate, which by design is unfair, this paperwork and the process that has preceded is unfair and biased against Trump, the legitimately elected president, whom they just want to remove by any means necessary. Right. And I'm not saying that these realities are equally valid.

Obviously, I think they're not. But they're not intersecting. They're not overlapping. There's no Venn diagram that you can draw in which the shadings. meet. And so considering that they're non-overlapping and they're in a kind of equilibrium, you know, one is not going to influence the other. And unfortunately, in an equilibrium, favors non-change, right? We're now stuck with the status quo of two non-overlapping realities in which, you know, in which the one that I happen to inhabit is, I'm afraid, doomed to lose.

Yeah. Well, and how do we think about some of the, and I imagine that you deal with this to some extent in your upcoming book, but how do we deal with what are the forces that help create this equilibrium? And I'm thinking in particular about kind of corruption, right? So if you look at Putin's consolidation of power, you know, the kind of acquisition directly or through cronies of television stations and media and business interests that then in turn supports. funds as politics is central to it. In the U.S., you know, we hear the word corruption thrown around a lot, but I don't think we've fully stepped back and considered, you know, how central it is to, you know, the reality of the Trump presidency that, you know, you have a huge media apparatus, you have business interests that fund Trump, and you have Trump potentially enriching himself in the way that we've seen Putin and other leaders do through their office. How do you evaluate the role of corruption in the sustainment of that particular reality that exists on Fox and that particular kind of brand of politics it has resulted in Trump?

You know, I would actually take it more broadly. I think that there are some terrible ways that we have of thinking about politics and of practicing politics. And one of them is the normalization of the marriage of politics and money, right? Access to the Democratic primary debates was measured in how much money the candidates were able to raise. And we think that's normal. And then along comes somebody like Trump who basically says, well, come on, we know the system is rotten. We know that money buys you power and power gets you more money.

And he's not wrong. I mean, he is fundamentally right about that. Yeah. He opens to be acting in incredibly bad faith, while I think that a lot of people. of other people, most other people in American politics act in good faith. But it is rotten. And I don't think that we can get out of this predicament while maintaining the rotten system. I think that, you know, in some key ways, I'm not arguing that Trump was predetermined, but he's a product of the system. Yeah. And then, you know, we see it creeping into other parts of our society. This was a

small story, but given how much you've written and spoken about the connection between history and memory and politics, I was curious what you thought of the strange item over the weekend about the National Archives, changing images from the Women's March in 2017 to take out images that were critical of Trump. You know, we've seen Trump in the past kind of try to, you know, essentially put forward a totally alternative version of the facts of things that have happened. You know, we've seen totally shifting explanations for large events like, you know, the recent killing of Qasem Soleimani. What did you make of that archives event? And how should Americans be mindful that it's not unusual for leaders of authoritarian tendencies to take aim

at history and memory as a part of their political project? You know, I actually think it's a pretty huge story because this is a federal agency charged with preserving history in records. Yeah. And they go and alter that record. And, you know, the archive first sort of defending their actions, they said, okay, it's not part of the exhibit. It was actually just the display, advertising it, which I think actually makes it worse because

it would be more widely seen than the actual exhibit, you know, as promotional material usually is. But then, to their credit, they reversed course and admitted the mistake. But I think that there was something really telling in the way that they justified their actions. And I think, you know, the way their actions were motivated, which is that they said, we're non-political and non-partisan. And there's an incredible amount of confusion between being non-partisan and being non-political and pretending that politics and political positions don't exist and sort of whiting them from the public record. And I think we see it elsewhere in this country. and we see it, I've certainly seen it in Russia, but I think that there are some very well-intentioned people who are suffering from the extreme anxiety of this polarized and partisan society that we're living in, which does produce this anxiety.

And goodheartedly, they want to avoid this anxiety, they want to spare this anxiety for their visitors. And so they just kind of pretend that doesn't exist. Yeah. Well, they essentially can say they're nonpartisan, non-political when in fact the decisions they're making are entirely political. I would say all decisions are political. Yeah, yeah. Well, you wrote a piece in 2016 that I think is resonant if people want to go back and check it out is in the New York Review of books called Altocracy Rules for Survival. And one of your rules was your institutions will not save you. And I actually remember President Obama saying to me at the very end of his term when we knew Trump was coming in, you know, we're about to find out how strong our institutions are. Now, America did have more kind of evolved institutions than Russia did when Putin really started taking aim at them. But how would you examine the kind of health of American institutions and how they've held up under the very illiberal and abnormal challenge of Trump? I mean, the archives is a good example of an institution, you know, seeking to try to overt controversy and in so doing, you know, going along with what Trump wanted.

We've seen, you know, the Justice Department be pretty compromised, particularly since Bill Barr took over. But how do you look back at that advice you gave that institutions will not save you and measure it against where we are today, three years later? I think I was rightfully pessimistic. I think things are pretty awful. and I think the story of the impeachment is actually, you know, it's a clear illustration of that. I would start at the beginning, which is we have the whistleblower report, right? And the whistleblower report was for a lot of Americans. It was the first time that they really learned that there are actual guidelines.

There's an actual process for a whistleblower in that situation to go through. And I would ask the question, why did it take nearly three years? for somebody to come forward. Like, none of what was exposed in the whistleblower report was particularly surprising. Trump was acting exactly the way that we have seen him act out in public. In fact, he sincerely still doesn't think he did anything wrong. Because, you know, this is an expression of his presidency at its most normal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, and a lot of what was in the whistleblower report was not only known, but actually even reported by the media, but as a kind of minor story, right? We knew the aid was held up. Yeah. We knew that Rudy Giuliani had traveled to Ukraine to press for the investigation into Hunter Biden. And yet it actually takes somebody putting pen to paper to say, this is not normal. Yeah. And that event of somebody institutionally saying, this is not normal, as it turns out, is abnormal during this presidency.

So institutions have not been raising. the alarm and now, you know, now that we have seen how the actual impeachment process is playing out, I don't even think I need to comment on that, right? But we're basically seeing that our institutions are not strong enough to stand up to the force of this presidency. Yeah, yeah, especially when it's backed by a major political party. And one last question I want to ask you, you know, we spent a lot time on this podcast looking at this nationalist and authoritarian trend around the world. You know, you look at parts of Europe like Hungary and Turkey. You look at, obviously, Russia, you see a more assertive Xi Jinping, you see Narendra Modi in India, and obviously Trump here. Unfortunately, I could go on

to Bolsonaro and others. You also see this opposition movement in Hong Kong. You see pockets of more progressive reaction to authoritarianism in Europe. You saw the midterms here in the U.S. how do you evaluate where we are, you know, around the world with this trend, where some of the issues you've been looking at in Russia for the last, you know, two decades, you know, we see very similar playbooks being applied in these different parts of the world. Do you see us entering, or have we entered kind of a new phase of global politics that are defined more by nationalism and authoritarianism? You know, is that one trend that we're seeing globally? Or do you feel like there's, you know, There's still a pendulum that can swing back in a bunch of different places, and we could see a more natural shift from the right to the left in parts of the West and other places around the world. I think we're living through dark times, you know, really, really awful dark times. I do see rays of hope at some places. I mean, like, there's some countries that actually have really visionary leadership that has emerged in the last couple of years, like Jacinda Arden in New Zealand. like Zhurana Kaputovah in in Slovakia, right?

I mean, people we don't spend a lot of time talking about who will happen to be young women with imaginative politics, right? So in my wildest dreams, I imagine that we suddenly awaken as a world and bring in a new wave of leaders like that. They're out there. They're not impossible. Some countries that you might really least expect to do that, have done that. But so I think there's a kind of opportunity in this time of crisis, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

Yeah, we had to find those footholds and build out from them. Well, anything else you want to say about your upcoming book? Since people have the opportunity, I assume, to pre-order that in the coming days. Well, so the book is, obviously, the title refers to my 2016 essay on surviving autocracy. and I kind of try to take stock of where our institutions are and where we are and how much we have changed

as a society in a thousand days of Trumpism. Yeah, it feels like a lot. Well, we'll look out for the book and always appreciate your insights and people should follow your writing in the New York or in other places as well. Masha, thanks so much for joining us here. Thank you, Ben. Great to talk to you.

Take care. Thanks, bye. Thanks to Masha Gessen for joining the show. Ben, I learned a lot. We covered a lot today. Ecclectic. I like it. Yeah, listen, I know sometimes we get a little too, like Trump is bad.

We know that too. Yeah. But he's really bad on a lot of stuff. Yeah. So help us, you know, if there's things you want here covered, let us know, and we'll do our best. Yeah, yeah. There's lots of different regions for us to explore here. Lots of different.

We've done space now, so we can cross that one way. Done space, and we've done feces, whole buttocks in Burmese. So box checked. All right. Have a great week, everybody. Potty of the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller.

It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.