The Bulwark Podcast - Anne Applebaum: A New Propaganda War

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Russia, China, and their authoritarian allies are working overtime to poison the idea of democracy everywhere in the world. It's a theme so heartily embraced by MAGA, their messaging is often the same. Plus, coup sympathizer Samuel Alito, Ukraine's high-tech gains and low-tech losses, and our risk of being outflanked by foreign influence in 2024. Join Tim, Sarah JVL in Denver June 21. Gov Jared Polis is our guest. Tickets at TheBulwark.com/events. show notes: Anne's Atlantic cover story Anne's forthcoming book, "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who to Run the World." Tim's playlist 

Hey everybody, it's Tim. We officially have our Denver event June 21st. Go to thebullwork.com slash events. One eagle-eyed listener has already noticed that the event was planned between game six and game seven of the NBA finals, which would only be relevant if the Nuggets win on Sunday. So TBD, maybe that was an accident. Maybe it was on purpose. Here's the thing about the Denver event. Sometimes in show business, we come on and say, hey, it might sell out in order to get people to sell tickets. But in this case, this thing is going to sell out. So if you want to come to our Denver event, you should get tickets ASAP.

We've already sold a bunch and we're going to have a special guest out there in June. It's going to be really great. I'll probably go out afterwards. It's a great time to do a weekend in my hometown. So get those tickets ASAP. One other thing, I made a little goof on yesterday's outro song. I sent Jason Tin Machine by Tin Machine. Tin Machine, if you don't know, that's a David Bowie side project that he took on. The song was good, but was not about red lines and Nazis and far- right agitators, which was in the theme of the episode yesterday.

So I put the song I meant to put on, on the Spotify playlist. So you can go check it out on Spotify. Friend of the pod. Jake has been also creating a mirror Apple music playlist, which you can find as well. So appreciate you guys so much up next. A very serious conversation with somebody I admire a whole lot, Anne Applebaum.

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to welcome back Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic. Her books include Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, The Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, A History, and most recently, Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lore of Authoritarianism, all very uplifting pieces of writing. She wrote the cover story for the June issue of The Atlantic. It's called The New Propaganda War, Anne Applebaum. Thanks for coming back to the Borg Podcast. Thanks for having me. We're going to spend most of the time over in your part of the world, but I'd be very remiss if we did not bring up a New York Times story from last night. Jody Cantor,

investigative journalist at the New York Times, was given some pictures of one of our Supreme Court justices, Samuel Alito's home. On January 17th, 11 days after the attack on the Capitol, he raised an inverted American flag. This was a common sign for the Stop the Steal movement at the time. The Alitos did not deny this in the article. Instead, their response was that there were some mean signs on their lawn and that this was their response to that. I don't know. Given the fact that Clarence Thomas's wife was actively plotting with Donald Trump on the coup, it does seem a little disconcerting. As an authoritarianism expert, it seems a little disconcerting that two of the nine justices on the high court seem at least directionally sympathetic to the Trump coup, no? It does

seem that way. And also, you forgot to note that Alito's first response was to say that it was his wife who raised the flag. So it seems like our issue is really the wives of Supreme Court justices who don't go through any kind of Senate confirmation, and maybe it's time to start. And it looks like we have, you know, in a couple of cases, an issue. Just the upside down flag, to me me is quite shocking. I mean, I suppose if it was some teenagers waving it, complaining about something, I would roll my eyes. But the idea that a Supreme Court justice is outside of his house would put up something that's seen as an anti-American symbol anywhere in the world, anti-constitutional symbol, I mean, isn't his job to defend the Constitution? At some level,

of course, it's trivial. It was some stupid fight with a neighbor and she put up a flag, but it's really quite amazing symbolism. I mean, the person who is meant to be defending the Constitution of the United States, that's actually his full-time job, insulting the United States. It's a new one. Yeah. The timing is also set, right? It's just January, right? It's like, it wasn't like this was some dispute with the neighbors was happening, you know, back in 2007. You know, this was 11 days after the Capitol was stormed. That also, I think, is pretty alarming. The wife blaming, you know, tale as old as time, I guess, with powerful men and the wife blaming, and maybe it was true that it was his wife that did it but you think you'd notice walking in

and out of the front door of his house you can see it even if you weren't actually the person who put up the flag it would have been hard to miss and apparently was waiting there for several days yeah i mean you you joked about how maybe the wives need to go through supreme court confirmation i have been taking a view that like a lot of people just you know i've been dismissive of but i've been saying this for like years now, that I do think that Dick Durbin and the Senate Judiciary Committee should be doing oversight over what exactly, now I'm talking about Clarence Thomas, what exactly Clarence Thomas knew about Ginny Thomas's efforts to help overthrow the election on behalf of Donald Trump.

The response to that is always like, oh, well, you can't blame him for what his wife is doing. It's like, well, I mean, what are they talking about at the dinner table? You know, she's like in the White House plotting a coup and they live together. I don't know. It seems like it would at least make sense to, you know, bring him up for some testimony. But the Democrats in the Senate feel a little, I guess, worried that that's overstepping or they're too concerned about norms or whatever. I don't know. It does feel like more questions should have been asked. I mean, it's interesting how as this process of the Trumpification of the Republican Party continues, we discover more and more loopholes in the Constitution and more things that we thought were rules that turn out to be

norms. You know, it turns out to just be an expectation that the wife of the Supreme Court justice doesn't take part in an insurrection. We just would assume that. And it turns out that there's no law against it. And it turns out there's no way to monitor it, or as you say, investigate it. And you could go down a list of things from Donald Trump not declaring his taxes to Donald Trump allowing anonymous companies to buy condos in his buildings while he was president. Who was doing that? Were they bribes? We don't know. Hotel rooms, signing laws, getting money from Saudi despots. And it turns out there aren't laws against those things because it just didn't occur to either to the framers or to anybody who was writing ethics regulations in the last 50 years that anybody would do stuff like that. And so there's a whole bunch of things that stepping

back, we might have to think about regulating. Right. Well, I want to get into your very eye-opening Atlantic piece on the new propaganda war coming from China and Russia and their allies. But if you wouldn't mind, could we do, can you put on your old foreign correspondence hat from earlier in your career? And can we just do a quick jaunt around what's happening in Eastern Europe over the week?

Because it's been a busy week. It's been a busy week. We've got one assassination attempt in Slovakia, Slovakia. I mean, although it sounds like a nice, you know, little dusty corner of Europe where nothing much happens, actually there have been political or mafia, anyway, murders there before. The prime minister who was shot, he's still alive,

so it's not an assassination, was held responsible for the murder of a journalist several years back, which is how he originally lost his job. So there is a very, very ugly polarization in Slovakia, and there has been violence in politics before. And so it's not as if it comes from nothing. We also had in Poland a few years ago, the mayor of Gdansk, who was a very popular national figure, was also murdered by a guy who jumped on a stage and killed him with a knife. So these things aren't unheard of. And I mean, I think they have some of the same source, which is the aggro and anger that's in politics everywhere. I mean, you think, I know Americans like to think they're exceptional and everything that happens in America doesn't happen anywhere else. But some of the same really ugly politics and the ugly smear campaigns and so on have also

exist. I think they exist almost everywhere. They can be pretty bad in small countries when one party is able to capture the state or to capture a lot of the media. I mean, the mayor of Gdansk was killed after this full-on, many weeks-long smear campaign that was run by state television against him. He was an opposition politician. You know, when you have that level of anger, you can expect stuff like this. And the Slovakian prime minister, Fico, he's like on the left Russia side of the horseshoe, or what do we know about him? So, he's a weird figure. He originally comes from the left Russia side of the horseshoe? Or what do we know about him? So he's a weird figure. He originally comes from the left.

He has recently aligned himself with Viktor Orban and with the pro-Russian piece of European politics. So yeah, I would say he belongs on the left side of the horseshoe, but actually his- Glenn Greenwald of Central and Eastern Europe. Yeah, I mean, he's been accused in the past of having mafia links and of being Eastern Europe. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's been accused in the past of having mafia links and of having being profoundly corrupt. And actually, in Eastern Europe, like everywhere

else, really quite profound corruption and a form of autocratic populism often exists side by side. One of the reasons to undermine democratic institutions in your country and attack the media and attack judges and so on is, you know, to take over the state. And another reason is that if you do those things, then your wrongdoing isn't found out. I mean, Orban is the prime example. So the profoundly corrupt state, profoundly corrupt ruling party, we don't ever talk about that. Instead, we talk about, you know, mean things he says about the U.S. ambassador or his war against gay people or his argument that, you know, Hungary is a Christian state. I mean, Slovakia had picked up that playbook and was going down you know, if you're in the region, I do recommend it. And the U.S. ambassador who is getting insulted, his friend of the pod, David Pressman, by the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, that is, who's going after Orban. He's doing a great job. What about over in

Georgia? There have been huge protests, like 20% of the country or something crazy was out protesting a foreign agents bill that was similar to one used by Putin. It's an attempt to silence media that's not state-run media, I guess. The president is even against it, but the Russia-aligned party in the legislature has a big enough majority to overturn the president. Is that a good summation of what's happening in Georgia? Tell us a little more about that. More or less. I mean, the strange thing that's very hard to explain about Georgia is that the ruling party is backed by a very, very, very wealthy oligarch. I mean, it's almost like he's somehow affiliated with Russia. And he is thought to be behind a kind of slow push to bring Georgia into the Russian orbit. The significance of this is that it's what Putin also tried to do in Ukraine in the 2000s. And the Ukrainian revolution

in 2014, if you remember that moment when people were waving European flags in the 2000s. And the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, if you remember that moment when people were waving European flags in the square, and they stood out in the cold, and eventually the president shot on the crowds, and then he got scared and ran away. And this was President Yanukovych, who was pro-Russian and whose campaign was managed by Paul Manafort, just to bring you a little US connection. That was a similar thing. So one of the Russian tactics in the region has been to, through money and corruption and influence, has been to try and bring countries into the Russian orbit without actually occupying them or, you know, or owning them. And Ukraine resisted it. Georgia resisted it under a previous prime minister, Saakashvili,

who's now in prison and not very well. And now this is a second attempt. And, you know, it's been going on for a long time. I've been involved in conversations about Saakashvili, how to get him out of prison. There are a lot of other Georgian leaders who've been imprisoned also unfairly. But this law turned out to be a turning point because what the Georgian ruling party did was they used more or less the same language that an infamous Russian law uses. And it's a Russian law on foreign agents that essentially is open enough so that anybody can be declared a foreign agent. And in Russia, it's been used to suppress the enemies of the president, whoever they are,

whether they're foreign agents or not. I mean, they're not foreign agents, 99% of the time. And so it's different from our laws. It's different from, I mean, every nation has laws on foreign agents, but this is one that has specifically been used to attack the opposition, to attack independent journalists and so on. And the Georgians recognize that and they call it the Russian law and they've been protesting against it. There was an earlier round of this where the protests stopped the law from being passed. And this is the second version of it. You know, the second time they tried to bring it through. And yes, you're right. The street photographs are incredible. It does look like the entire city of

Tbilisi is full of people. I would guess that the majority of the country would easily be against it. But again, you have an autocratic ruling party the country would easily be against it. But again, you have an autocratic ruling party that's captured a lot of institutions. You have an opposition that's divided. This is a very similar situation to Hungary, a little bit similar to Slovakia, although that's got some other nuances. And you have an opposition that has been divided and hasn't been able to block the ruling party. And the ruling party rules through money, through corruption, through controlling the state. I was talking to a US diplomat a few days ago who has been trying to get the Georgian ruling party to tone down the law or to use different language or to make it

less extreme. And I said to him, I don't think it's really about that. I mean, the Georgians are trying to draw a line one way or the other, and it's's really about that. I mean, this is a, the Georgians are trying to draw a line one way or the other. And they've, it's not really about the law. It's about the symbolism of the law. You know, Georgia is now another front line in the contest between democratic and autocratic political systems. All right. And then the hottest hotspot in that front line, Ukraine, I guess there were blackouts in Kyiv. My understanding is reports that some of the delays in the approved equipment, air defenses in particular, have allowed Russia to have some successful air attacks on Ukrainian population centers.

Obviously, you've interviewed Zelensky. What is your sense for the state of play in Ukraine? I mean, there are two sets of things happening. One, you're right, there has been an attack on a much more concentrated and focused attack on Ukrainian infrastructure. The Russians have found a new way to use old bombs to send them from airplanes. They're called glide bombs that they've been able to use to hit power plants and other kinds of infrastructure. There's also been a Russian offensive, which is happening both in the north and the east of the

country. It did make some headway in the last few days, although the Ukrainians didn't build their defenses right on the border, they built them slightly back. And so now it's slowed down. You know, that's an indication. The original Russian goal, which was to destroy Ukraine and destroy all of Ukraine and make Ukraine unviable, hasn't been abandoned. I mean, that that's been their goal the whole time. Their goal has never been this piece of territory or that piece of territory or, you know, Crimea or some some city in eastern Ukraine that would make them satisfied. And that's why I've been so frustrated by people who actually really since the beginning of the war, but more recently have called for negotiations. I mean, I too am in favor of negotiations and the war will eventually end with a negotiation, but you need someone to negotiate with. And right now the Russians are not negotiating. They're still on there, both trying to take more territory and trying to destroy Ukraine. There is one positive story at the same time, which is that the use of long range American weapons, especially ATAKOMs and other, there's a European versions of the same, have been used

really successfully, even in like the last few days, as we're speaking. They hit an airfield in Crimea, they've hit some other objects in Crimea. Crimea is the kind of military base from which the war is being launched. You know, the Ukrainian drones are still, there was a swarm of 100 drones that took out some military objects in Crimea as well in the last couple of days. The high tech part of the war is still going very well for Ukraine. The lower tech part of the war, which is this, you know, this kind of artillery fight on the ground, and the being able to defend against dumb bombs actually, is not going well. And there the absence of the US aid package for the last six months shows. Any sense for like the feeling among, you know, Zelensky and leaders in Ukraine about like the

state of play at this point now that the weapons are coming? I mean, this has been quite a slog now. I was looking back to when you interviewed him and I was like, oh my God, it was over two years ago. Time is a flat circle. You know, the photographs came up on my phone a few days ago. That's like the two years ago reminder from Apple. A year ago, you were in Kiev. I was like, oh, yeah. So I had exactly that same thought. So it's true that the moment of heroic enthusiasm and improvisation when, you know, we can do anything and, you know, little grandmothers were chipping in with their making pies for the soldiers.

And that moment of the war is over. There is a lot more cynicism and anger in Ukraine. The kind of immense national unity and bravery of the beginning isn't there either. I don't think that means that they aren't going to fight. I mean, it's more everybody now getting used to the idea of a longer time horizon, you know, that we need to be in it for a long time. They're now beginning to recruit people for a longer term, you know, stint in the army. They're beginning to do longer term planning of weapons production, which is, by the way, happening everywhere in Europe, not everywhere, but in many places in Europe. Weapons production is now finally too late, but it's happening. It's kind of cranking up. The Ukrainian companies and Polish and other companies are beginning to do

joint projects. Now they're building this sort of big infrastructure to keep them going. They're not on the verge of quitting. And as I said, when they get technological advantages, which they had for the first part of the war, and they now have in, you know, vis-a-vis Crimea, they move really fast. And you can see there's a, that sort of super creative part of the Ukrainian, whatever it is now, military computer tech class is still active. But the exhaustion of defending the front line day after day, I'm sure it's, you know, it takes a toll. To your article, I mean, this was, it was eye-opening. It's the type of thing that we all sensed, but just the detail and the historic perspective. I just recommend everybody go read the new propaganda war if we haven't.

But I want to talk about a couple of parts of it. I think this was your nut graph. We'll see if I get it right. I think this was the summary of the piece. you wrote that the 2022 COVID protests in China helped explain something else, why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal

ideas. It also requires an offensive plan, a narrative that damages the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it. Talk to us about that offensive plan. Right. First of all, I should say the piece is much of it comes from a chapter in my book, which is called Autocracy, Inc. and is published in July. You know, all the details are there for that reason. Secondly, you're right, the decision to, particularly for the Chinese, so the Russians have been looking outwards for a long time. So the Russians, going back to Soviet days, had a kind of military doctrine that was about, you know, we can win everything more

quickly if we disarm the enemy psychologically first. And so Russian attempts to intervene in US politics and European politics and actually politics in other parts of the world have been going on for a long time. The more recent shift is that the Chinese are beginning to join them. And as you said, the reason is that these are regimes whose main opponents are, of course, domestic. And their domestic said, the reason is that these are regimes whose main opponents are, of course, domestic. And their domestic opponents, whether it's the Hong Kong democracy movement, whether it's those spontaneous protests that took place in 2022 around Beijing and other cities,

whether it's the Navalny movement in Russia or earlier and other movements, they all use the language of freedom, of human rights, of rule of law, of transparency. Again, these are very corrupt regimes. And so invariably, their opponents want to shine the light on where is the money coming from? How does the system really work? And the leaders, Putin and people around him and Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, see these groups and this language as their most important challenge. There's actually a Chinese government document, which has the great name, it's called Document

Number Nine. It was published in 2013. Sorry, I should say a Communist Party document. And it was circulated internally. It leaked at the time. And it lists these seven perils facing the Chinese Communist Party. And number one on them was Western constitutional democracy. And there was also free press in there and civil society and civic engagement and so

on. So they understood that these are the ideas that if they were to spread in China would challenge the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party. So these ideas need to be defeated. And I think this is something that people don't understand about Russia and China. They don't have anything in common ideologically, necessarily. China and Communist Party and Russian nationalism, and for that matter, Iranian theocracy or Venezuelan Bolivarian socialism, these are all very different kinds of regimes. But they have this one thing in common, which is that they dislike us, you and me and everyone listening to the podcast

and the language that we use because they see it as a threat to them. And so over the last decade, we all saw the junk that Russia did in our elections in 2016, but they did them in plenty of other elections elsewhere. We saw them in Poland in 2015. It's very similar. But in addition to that, China has been building this enormous media empire. I mean, it's television stations, radio stations, websites in multiple languages. They've spent billions of dollars in Africa, in Latin America, across Asia. And they use this media empire in some kind of boring traditional ways. You know, there's like TV shows about Chinese-Azerbaijani relations, you know, or some of it has historically been pretty boring. I should also say they have content

sharing agreements with a lot of local newspapers and television stations in addition, but they're beginning to use it in a much more aggressive way. And the example that I use in the piece that was very striking for a lot of people is at the very beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, there was a conspiracy theory begun by the Russians that the real reason for the war was that there was a US biological weapons production plants in Ukraine. And this was called the BioL labs theory. And you may or may not have heard of it. Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, I suffer through the MAGA disinformation media while you're while you're watching RT. So yeah, I've heard of it. But please continue. So the theory was that,

you know, that there were these labs and they were producing biological weapons. It was almost immediately debunked. It was debunked many times. It was debunked in the UN. It was debunked by UN institutions and other international institutions. I mean, of course, there are laboratories in Ukraine, like in every country. Of course, there are, you know, American relationships with some of those laboratories, but there was no network of biological weapons factories in Ukraine, which was what the BioLabs idea was. Nevertheless, that idea went out not only on all the Russian channels, but it went out on all the Chinese channels. So was. Nevertheless, that idea went out not only on all the Russian channels, but it went out on all the Chinese channels. So all over Africa, all over Asia, all over Latin

America, you could actually follow it. You could see it repeated in different places. I mean, I followed a bit of it in Latin America. I was just looking. I checked on various websites to see if they'd published articles about it. And of course they all had. And there was also an echo that in the United States, as you have already noted, the kind of MAGA ecosystem was repeating it as well. And one of the other pieces of the story is that the MAGA ecosystem now picks up and echoes and repeats the stuff that's gone out on the Chinese and Russian and Iranian networks too. What they all have in common is an attempt to portray the autocratic world as safe and stable and predictable, and the democratic world, more than just the West, the whole democratic world, as divided, chaotic, and of course, degenerate, kind of sexually

degenerate and morally degenerate, and in many other ways, degenerate. And this is, of course, a narrative that appeals to the American far right, too. It obviously appeals in MAGA America. The interesting thing when I was reading the piece was this pivot. I mean, it's not a full pivot, right? But like away from, you know, kind of the North Korean style propaganda, this like, you know, the Soviet propaganda of the 80s of, oh, our country is so strong, you know, we're so, everything's so wonderful in Russia, to this, you know, more cynical and nihilistic type of strategy that is focused more on this, like, look at all the horrible things that are happening in America, men's and women's bathrooms, crime is rampant everywhere, you know, these sorts of messages. So, talk about that transition a little bit. If the 20th century authoritarian propaganda, Soviet propaganda, for example, was about, you

know, men with muscles on tractors, you know, bringing in lots of bales of hay and high steel production figures, which, by the way, was easily debunked because anybody could look out the window and they could see that the stuff that was on TV and on the posters wasn't like real life. What the new propaganda does, and this was begun by the Russians, is they don't really bother to say, we're great, we're perfect. I mean, instead, the implication is, and this is just a summary. Tucker does it for them, though, so they don't have to anymore, because Tucker does it,

they're great, they're great grocery stores, etc. That's right. But more or less what Putin is telling people, okay, maybe I'm corrupt, maybe not everything is perfect here. But over there, you know, in America, or in Sweden, you know, or in, in England, everything is much worse. And I use in that piece, I mean, I'm afraid it's a study I've relied on. I think I've quoted it like five times over the years, since it was published a few years ago. There was an Estonian group who did a study of Russian television, and they watched hours and hours and hours of Russian television. And they tracked every single story that was put on about Europe, European countries, and they found they

were overwhelmingly negative and they were overwhelmingly focused on both the culture wars and kind of, you know, if you live in Sweden, social workers will steal your children. You know, if you live in, you know, England, you'll be murdered by a migrant. So it was kind of migrants, gays, the state and moral degeneracy. And that was, and then that's what's over and over and over and over again. So, so don't envy them. Like you think it's better over there because they make better movies and their houses are nicer. And you think they have nice language about freedom and democracy. Forget it. It's all degenerate and failing and bad. And that, and that is now the central argument of Russian propaganda and of a lot of other authoritarian propaganda as well.

And the Russian idea that we are a white Christian traditional state, which also is not true on many levels, if you want to talk about that, is connected to that. You know, we're a stable, normal state. And over there, it's all falling apart and migrants are murdering babies. I don't like that side of migrants, but I do like migrants and moral degeneracy. So, this is maybe why I'm resistant to this propaganda. I want to go to our counter-propaganda efforts, but just really briefly on the Russia and the white Christian state part of it. You kind of wrote a little bit of an aside about the assault on the evangelical church there. To me, it seems like there is like this literal Christian nationalism there. There's a Russian Orthodox nationalism

that's more cultural than religious. And there's a lot of crackdowns on ways that they stray from that. But talk a bit just about that. Russia is completely intolerant of most Protestant religions, and particular Protestant sects have been, you know, are subject to arrest, deportation. I mean, they're seen actually, evangelical Christians in Russia are seen as some kind of Western virus, you know, so they're very heavily repressed. And I should say they've also been very heavily repressed in occupied Ukraine. So whenever Russia moves into Ukrainian territory, if it finds any Protestant church, or actually as well as the Catholic church, as well as the Ukrainian Orthodox church, they will arrest the priest, they will disband the church, the repression is very

high. So the idea that Russia is somehow a, you know, Christian state that Christian evangelicals in America should admire is literally crazy. I mean, it's one of the more bizarre things. And I should say this dislike of Protestants goes back even to the 30s and 40s. I wrote a book about the Gulag that was published a long time ago now. But one of the groups of people who you find in the Gulag in the 30s and 40s are evangelical Christians. So it's a very old thing. I mean, so, you know, not only is Russia not Christian, very few Russians go to church, something like 5% of Russians have ever read a Bible. It's not particularly white. It's a multi-national, multilingual country. It may be

something like 10% Muslim and could be higher. Chechnya, which is a republic inside Russia, a region of Russia, is actually run in part by Sharia law. So, all those fake stories about Sweden now being run by Sharia law, actually in Russia, it's true. There are districts which are no-go zones for the rest of, for other Russians. The portrayal of Putin as some kind of strong Christian leader is utterly false. I mean, it could not be more false. I want to talk about combating this and just think of this, like, how do you get this message about Russia's attack on evangelicals into, you know, American evangelical circles, right? So, we have a counter messaging challenge, both domestically and abroad. You know, you write a little bit about, you know,

we used to have Radio Free Europe back in the day and things such as that. I mean, it was more potent, I guess I should say. You talk about our efforts now and just how they pale in comparison financially to what Russians and Chinese are spending on propaganda. And to me also, it's just like, even those old methods seem very pale to the challenge that we have. And I wonder, to me,

like the Russian and Chinese successes on propaganda wonder like to me like the russian and chinese successes on propaganda at least outside of the country are less state tv it's not like there are a ton of people watching turning on rt or whatever or yalla but um they're very successful on social media right like with the meme accounts and with the you know tearing down and the mocking of american and liberal small liberal institutions. Are we even trying to play in that area, countering them? What does the effort look like on that? So you're right.

I mean, Radio Free Europe is still there. Radio Free Europe, RFERL, it's now called. And it does a really great job. But you're right that in the modern media space in the modern media space I mean when it was the only thing that people could listen to as opposed to that old-fashioned kind of Soviet propaganda and all it had to do was literally tell the truth it would just describe Russian society or Soviet society as it was it was incredibly popular and incredibly effective and in a lot of different places and not just in the Soviet Union.

That doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work for a lot of reasons. It doesn't work because now people don't get their news from the radio. And, you know, of course, Radio for Europe is now on all these different formats as well. But the thing has changed. And it's also true that social media is uniquely good at the thing that the Russians and now sometimes the Chinese want to do because it's a messaging system where it creates conversations not on the basis of, it doesn't seek to create consensus. It doesn't seek to create truth. It doesn't have any systems of fact-checking or not much. Instead, the point of it is to keep you online. That's why these platforms exist. And it turns out that the way to keep you online that works best is to make you very angry, very emotional, very sad, and also what you read

reinforces your existing prejudices. And that turns out to be very good for this particular kind of authoritarian propaganda. And so the counter propaganda, which just says, well, that's not true, you know, doesn't have the same force and effect that it had in like 1950. The US government has floundered a bit in trying to understand how to deal with this. There are a lot of civic organizations and local newspapers and groups and so on, who in particular places have tried to fight back. In the Philippines, there was a coalition that was created of a lot of civic organizations that tried to message in the same way online in order to affect the algorithm. In Taiwan, they've experimented with alternate forms of social media, where they

use social media, for example, to debate a national issue, and they use programs that create consensus rather than division. Taiwan, by the way, is also a really important frontline state in this propaganda war, because the Chinese, I mean, it's their language. And so they play very directly into Taiwanese politics. In the US, we still don't have a broader program either to look out, other than we do now do some exposure of these things. There's a small piece of the US State Department that's dedicated now to exposing and revealing foreign propaganda campaigns, mostly in Africa and Latin America. The platforms have also, over the last four years since 2016, also had begun working with academics and researchers and very occasionally

the government who would give them information about foreign propaganda campaigns. And in 2020, they had a program of taking down what they call inorganic propaganda when they saw that there was a group of accounts, for example, that had been set up outside of the US on Facebook, and they would take them down. Some of that had worked a bit. I mean, it certainly had an effect inside the United States. I don't know that there's been enormous impact around the world. A lot of that has been pretty badly weakened by a far-right pushback against those groups and organizations. So anybody who was involved in 2020 in one of those research projects designed to identify foreign propaganda campaigns

is probably now the focus of some kind of lawsuit or some kind of congressional investigation. So sometimes I go to these things with now that I've put on the white hat with the democracy, the good government groups, and they're having these conversations about how we counter it and get the facts out there. And I think, shouldn't we do what they're doing? I mean, there's this like power of contrarianism out there that they're using to their benefit, right? That it's like the government wants to tell you one thing and we're giving you the real

truth and whether it's about biolabs or something else. And it's crazy because it's coming from these totalitarian states, like they're the real deep state, like preying on people's fear of a deep state against them. And so can't we use that against them? I mean, you can imagine it's a pretty dynamic social media accounts, you know, that would appeal to the left talking about all the social justice crackdowns in Russia and China that would appeal to the right talking about what we were just talking about, about their how they've gone after churches. I mean, there's plenty to work with there. Like, shouldn't we be on offense? Shouldn't we be doing negative partisanship against them? So the question is, who is we and who would organize it?

USA, you know, Hulk Hogan. I don't know. Yeah. So the US government is a pretty bad messenger. Imagine the US ambassador writing stuff on Twitter. It's not a good messenger. I mean, the better people to do this, and there is some of this that happens, and maybe it's not on a big enough scale, but I know of several specific projects that is the better versions of it are done by Russians themselves. So the Russian opposition, basically. Is there one good oligarch? Is there a good oligarch that we can use their money to pay for all this? There's got to be one good oligarch, right? There are a few good oligarchs. They're around. You know, actually, what Alexei Navalny was,

what he was really good at was this. He was good at counter-messaging. His teams did these big investigative reporting. You know, they revealed, for example, the existence of this horrible, vulgar billion-dollar palace that Putin has built himself on the Black Sea. And then they put together a kind of almost Hollywood-level quality video about it, kind of documentary about it. And it was very funny, and they had photographs from a drone, and they had architectural drawings, and they had all kinds of stuff. It was a really powerful piece of film. And they put it on YouTube and it has, I haven't checked in a few weeks what

it is, but it's well over a hundred million hits. That was what they were doing. They were doing a counter message and it was mocking and funny and so earthy. And Navalny himself was a kind of every man figure, sort of ordinary Russian kind of guy with the way he spoke. And so that's what he did. And that's how they thought. I mean, it was partly that they would make these things and then they would go out and be spread on social media. But I remember some polling after one of them came out and very large numbers of Russians had either seen them or heard about them. And so there are projects like that there. I mean, the harder problem is in the U.S. I mean, the U.S in the U S I mean, the U S government is just not going to do a social media campaign inside the U S both because

if they did, they would be smeared by the far right. And also because U S officials aren't used to thinking like that and they wouldn't be good at it. So this is the kind of thing that should be done by civic organizations, by people who care about democracy, by people who care about, I mean, it is done to some extent, but you're right, not at the scale that is necessary. Two different ways of thinking, both about inside the US and then around the world. My ideas from my old oppo research days, my little brain synapses are firing right now. If we can beat Donald Trump this year, maybe I'll turn to this project. Okay. Final question. There's a bunch here we didn't get to, but I do have, before I let you go, I do want

to hear your thoughts on this because there was one little nugget that was pretty alarming from a conversation you had with Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat of Virginia, saying that we're less prepared to respond to foreign attempts to influence the election than we were four years ago. In addition to that, there were some signs based on looking at Chinese accounts that maybe that they were going to be pro-Trump and anti-Biden. I know there's been some kind of question about the Chinese maybe don't even know who they're for in this election. So maybe that's coming into focus. What are your thoughts about the threats

here to the 2024 election from foreign entities like Russia and China? The main reason why we're going to be less good at taking down foreign propaganda is because of this far-right assault on the people who were doing it four years ago. All of the groups and teams who were set up to monitor the internet or to liaise with, you know, with Meta or to talk to Twitter are being sued by somebody right now. The way it was done four years ago will be much more difficult. The social media companies themselves have also changed. Twitter is now not at all amenable to any kind of conversation with the U.S. government or with independent researchers, whether alike, and on the contrary, has allowed Russian propaganda to be, you know, let loose on Twitter. I mean,

I can see it. It's not very hard. If you live in my filter bubble, you see it all the time. So, and of course, the difference between what is a manga account and what is a Russian account, I mean, I don't even know. Sometimes the Russian's English is better, actually. English is better. But you know, there are a lot of weird African accounts that I realize are almost certainly Russian accounts. Anyway, so Twitter is not going to cooperate. Facebook has way toned down. It's I mean, Facebook is now puts a lot of controls on any political messaging at all. But it's also much less interested in this whole subject. You know, and you can see that across the board. You know, YouTubeiktok tiktok has no as far

as i understand it there's almost no way to monitor tiktok at all there's no access to the algorithm there's no transparency nobody really knows who's seeing what on tiktok you know so we don't even have insight into it i mean you know on the question of what we do in the future i mean it seems to me a very basic thing that we are going to need to begin demanding of social media companies, and I'm in favor of a lot deeper changes, but this is a very basic one, is transparency about algorithms. How do they work? There needs to be an understanding. And there should also be a way in which people using social media can affect their own algorithm so that you get to choose what kind of stuff you see. That's something you could regulate. You could force them to do it. And apparently, technologically, this is possible.

But to your point about Senator Warner, you know, yes, the tools that were in place four years ago are now much weaker than they were. And so the chances of whether it's Russian or fake Russian or imitation Russian or Chinese or Iranian or Venezuelan activity on the US internet are now higher and we're more likely to see more of it. In your sense, from the experts you talked to on China, do we think that they have a pony in the fight here this year? It looks like most of what the Chinese have been doing is experimenting. So they're trying to learn how this works. And so they set up their own bots to find out how the system works. The interest that they might have in electing Trump, which is similar to the Russian interest, is that merely by becoming president again, he would discredit American democracy and he would discredit American politics. So regardless of what he says or thinks or does about China or what the Republican Party says or thinks about China. He is a figure of chaos,

and he would be evidence of decline. And so he would play into their big narrative. And their big narrative is democracy is decaying and divisive and declining. And he would be evidence of it. And so I don't know that the Chinese are going to put a lot of money into this or do anything other than experiment. But you can see why from that point of view, he's obviously the candidate that they prefer. Oh, sigh. Okay. Thank you so much, Anne Alphabom.

I really appreciate coming back to the Bullard podcast. The article is The New Propaganda War. The book is Autocracy, Inc. out in July. Can we pre-order? Are pre-orders up yet? You can pre-order right now. All right. Go to Amazon and pre-order.

The big tech company, the one big tech company that's not, well, maybe they are posting a little bit of Chinese propaganda. Pre-order from the Penguin Random House website. Penguin Random House. Okay. Sounds good. Thank you so much, Ann Applebaum.

Hope you can come back later on in the summer and the fall and update us and appreciate you so much. We'll be back on Monday with Tom Nichols here at the Bulwark Podcast. See you all then. Your Atlanta colleague. We'll see everybody then. Peace. The world was on fire

No one could save me but you Strange world desire Don't make foolish people people who do I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you No, I don't wanna fall in love No, I don't wanna fall in love With you What a wicked game to play To make me feel this way What a wicked thing to do To let me dream of you What a wicked thing to say

You never felt this way What a wicked thing to do To make me dream of you And I don't wanna fall in love No, I wanna fall in love with you Nobody loves you like you do Nobody loves no one The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.