The Bulwark Podcast - Anne Applebaum: Musk Buys Russia’s Lies

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

The billionaire was duped by Russian nuclear propaganda, but he's not the only one in the West who worries about provoking Russia by helping Ukraine. Plus, Putin's role in the far-right echo chamber, and why Romney stood up to Trump. Anne Applebaum joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. show notes: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/elon-musk-let-russia-scare-him/675282/

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A lot going on. Obviously, we have a major UAW strike. We have the indictment of Hunter Biden by the deep state Biden Department of Justice. That won't change the narrative at all. Apparently, Kevin McCarthy's week is not going well. He's dropping F-bombs. Daring members of his own conference to file you know, file that motion to vacate, just file the effing motion. And meanwhile, back in my home state of Wisconsin, we continue to have this, I would say, rather complicated situation. The Republicans in the state Senate just voted to fire the nonpartisan election chief, a woman named Megan Wolfe, who's apparently, as far as I can

tell, respected by everyone, has bipartisan support. But she got caught up in the whole big lie. And apparently, MAGA demanded a head on a spike, and it turned out to be Megan Wolfe. This goes to court. There will be litigation about all of this. And that could get even messier, because as we know, Republicans are still flirting with the idea of actually impeaching a state Supreme Court justice before she's even ruled on a major case. Now, if you subscribe to my daily newsletter, Morning Shots, you'll see the headline, which is why Wisconsin Republicans might blink, but why they might not. I think they're beginning to realize what a disaster this will be for them politically. The ads write themselves, there will be an absolute firestorm of reaction,

followed by lots of outside money. And of course, money marvelously focuses the mind of Wisconsin Republicans, including the Speaker of the State Assembly, Robin Voss, who earlier this week seemed to back away from the impeachment and proposing a compromise, which was promptly shot down. So he's now appointing a, I don't know, I'll get too deep into this, sort of a blue ribbon task force, which is, you know, when politicians don't want to actually do something, they appoint a blue ribbon task force. He says he's asking former Supreme Court justices for guidelines on impeachment. So stay tuned for all of that. Meanwhile, we have the ongoing saga of Elon Musk and Russia, and we are extremely lucky

this weekend to be joined by Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic, whose books include Red Famine, Stalin's War in Ukraine, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, A History, and most recently, Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, and recently wrote just a mind-blowing piece in The Atlantic, What Russia Got by Scaring Elon Musk. And welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me. You know, this whole Elon Musk story, I don't know whether it's farce or tragedy or just, you know, a terrifying morality play, but the fact that this narcissistic oligarch has so much power, it's one thing for him to be the czar of social media. It's something else for Elon Musk to have the power of life and death, to tell our allies how they can fight and how not to fight. The role

that he's playing, I mean, it's like, how did we get to the point where someone like Elon Musk wields this much apparently unaccountable power? So I think it started as an accident, as so many things do. The war began in February of last year. One of the first things that happened was the Russians took down the Ukrainian internet. Some guys in Silicon Valley and some guys in Kiev said, let's get something else as fast as possible. Somebody thought about Starlink. And to quote, I think it comes from Ronan Farrow's article in New York, someone just said, okay, let's fucking go. People are dying. And they set it up really fast. And nobody thought about what role Elon Musk would play. No one thought he would have a role. So it

wasn't as if this was planned in advance. And Starlink went up. And it's true, when you're in Ukraine, you connect to the internet via Starlink. And that's how it works. And nobody, as I said, didn't occur to anyone that this was important. Normally, it's true if Musk had had a relationship with the Pentagon, and he does have some relationships with the Pentagon now even more so, the contractor sells something to the Pentagon, and then the Pentagon decides what to do with it. So it's not like Lockheed Martin gets to decide how their planes are used, right? Once they sell them, it's fine. This was a much more ad hoc arrangement, right? So no one

thought about Musk being able to decide anything, but it was a direct relationship with Ukraine and some backers of Ukraine. It wasn't a relationship with the Pentagon. Then what happened in September of 2022, the Ukrainians had been working for many months to create sea drones. By sea, I mean SEA, so water drones. I've seen them. They're very cool. They're little black boats. I can say that because photographs of them had been published. And they're packed with explosives and amazing high-tech stuff that makes it possible to direct them and hide them and so on. And Ukraine has no navy, but this is what it has instead. Their first use of these sea drones was supposed to be in September of 2022. And they launched them. And on the way to Crimea, which is where they were heading, because the Russian fleet, Black Sea fleet, is based in Sevastopol, which is in Crimea, suddenly the internet stopped working.

And so their navigation system stopped working. And as I understand it, there were massive numbers of phone calls, some from California, some from Ukraine, asking Musk to turn it on. And there's a discrepancy whether he had actually turned it off or whether it was off and they didn't know it. I don't know which is true, actually. But it is true that people called him and they asked him to turn it on. And it's true that at that moment, he called Walter Isaacson, according to Isaacson, and he said, I've just spoken to the Russian ambassador, and he says that if I turn this on, and if those drones hit the fleet, then the Russians will nuke Ukraine and it will be World War III. Okay. So he didn't turn it on. He was persuaded by the Russian ambassador not to do it. He's not the only one

who's been persuaded by Russian nuclear propaganda not to do something, to be fair. But he had the power to switch on or switch off the system. In any case, the operation was aborted. Didn't happen. Some of the drones came back. I'm not allowed to tell was aborted. It didn't happen. Some of the drones came back. I'm not allowed to tell you how many because they didn't want you to know. But the important point that I had not realized until last weekend when I was in Ukraine is that they ran the operation again. A month later in October, the same team with some of the same drones ran the same operation. They sent a fleet of drones. They sent them to Crimea to hit the Black Sea Fleet, and they did. They hit one very large ship, a few other ships.

They hit a submarine. They took several ships out of operation. And more importantly, they scared the Russian Navy so much that it stayed in port for the following month. Understand that the missiles that hit Ukrainian cities sometimes come from Russian ships. So this is a big deal. If you can get the Black Sea Fleet to stay home, then you save lives in Ukraine. So the point is, there was no nuclear war. There was no World War III. The Russians scared Musk. They prevented him from launching this operation. The Ukrainians launched it a month later using a different communication system, I should say. And it was a huge success and lives were saved. And so the question now, which I'm sure is the one you're interested in, is why did Musk get

to make this decision, you know, which was wrong? And he continues to defend it. I know that you commented on this a couple of days ago. He's created a little video where he's defending his refusal to turn on the Starlink for the Ukrainians, saying, this is the quote, we figured out that this was kind of like a Pearl Harbor-like attack. So they really asked us to proactively take part in a major act of war. I find it kind of breathtaking that he's comparing this to Pearl Harbor. The analogy doesn't really hold up, does it, Anne? It really, truly doesn't. I mean, the Ukrainians are fighting to take back their territory. So the goal of this war is to persuade the Russians to leave. It is not an unprovoked attack on a non-combatant, you know, as Pearl Harbor was, you know, they don't have the ability or the will

to kill lots of civilians. You know, that's not what they're doing. They're trying to take Russian ships and tanks out of commission so that they won't kill Ukrainians. This was nothing like Pearl Harbor. And, you know, as I said, the same attack happened a month later and we don't have World War III. So this is simply wrong. And the fact that he continues to defend it, I think it's- It's obscenely wrong. It's almost as if he doesn't understand what the war is about.

I mean, there's some other quotes from him saying things like, I thought I was turning on Starlink so people could get Netflix and do their online shopping. I mean, okay, I'm sure there are some people in Ukraine who are happy to have Netflix and, you know, do their online shopping, but the internet is really important to be able in this kind of war to be able to defend yourself, to be able to take back your territory. It's not as if they're conquering Russia, you know, they're taking back their own land. A rather important distinction. Huge distinction. I remember the war is over when Russians go home. So that's all that the war is about. Nobody's trying to conquer Moscow. Nobody's trying to have Putin sign a surrender in a train car. Famously, that's how World War I

ended. So none of that. We just need them to leave. Everything that they're doing is designed to make them leave. And the fact that Musk didn't see that is astounding. the examples how Russia has used this nuclear propaganda since 2014 to persuade us not to help Ukraine. I mean, this has really been kind of a central part of Vladimir Putin's strategy that if we do anything well, it's going to lead to a nuclear war. Absolutely. They've been saying it repetitively since 2014. It's why we told the Ukrainians not to defend Crimea in 2014, which was a mistake because it persuaded the Russians to invade again. They had then invaded Eastern Ukraine and then the Ukrainians fought back and then they stopped. It's why Ukraine wasn't really armed in between 2014 and 2022, because people were afraid, you know, if we give them too many weapons, then, you know, that might be provocative.

It's why we didn't give them different weapons systems at different, you know, we didn't give them long range missiles at first, we didn't give them different weapon systems at different, you know, we didn't give them long range missiles at first. We didn't give them tanks, you know, and then eventually we changed our mind, you know, and did. But one of the reasons the war has lasted as long and one of the reasons the Russians were able to build up this vast minefield and sort of system of tank traps they've now built in southern Ukraine. One of the reasons they were able to do that is because we spent so much time worrying about how we would provoke the Russians that we failed to arm the Ukrainians. And what's become clear over the last two years, if it wasn't clear before, is that what stops the Russians is counterforce. Like when you push back against them, they move back. So when you hit the Black Sea Fleet, they stay in their port. You know, one of the things the

Ukrainians thought might happen, they've had a few ships with grain have been leaving their ports, and they thought maybe Russian warships would try and block them. They haven't done that. And one of the reasons why is because the, you know, the C drone guys are pretty clear that if you try and block a grain ship, we're going to hit you with a C drone. So it works. So pushing back against the Russians is how you get the Russians to take a step back. What causes escalation is the perception of weakness. You know, if you don't fight back, then they say, right, we're going farther. This was a lesson that I think people at one time understood, certainly Republicans understood it. But as you point out, like, it seems obvious. I mean, the Russians do this, they make these

threats because, you know, for a reason, it works, right? It deters people. And, you know, back in 2014, you know, Western leaders basically let him take Crimea, as you point out. And this obviously, you know, this sense that you can cow the West also, you know, led Russia to, you know, continue their invasion of Eastern Ukraine. As you point out, all of this buying into that nuclear propaganda was a terrible mistake, because if the Russians had been afraid of the Ukrainians, they might never have launched the full scale invasion at all, right? So this propaganda stopped the West from providing, you know, the weapons that Ukraine needed. Had they given them those weapons, we might not have had a war at all.

Absolutely. You know, the Russians wouldn't have invaded. The Russians thought the war was going to be over. You know, Kiev would be captured in three days and the war would be over in six weeks. They thought we would not help Ukraine. They thought the Ukrainian army would collapse. They didn't expect anything like, you know, this year and a half struggle, which has cost them tens of thousands of lives and untold amounts of equipment and money.

They would have at least thought twice about this invasion if they'd expected a response like this. The point is, is that to deter a bully, what you do is you build up your own forces and you say, if you hit us, we'll hit you back. I mean, that's how nuclear deterrence has always worked. In fact, that's still how it works. You know, why haven't the Russians used nuclear weapons? Because they're afraid someone would nuke them back or they're afraid of some massive conventional response. I mean, it's not because of, you know, it's not because of anything else.

It's through strength that you counter strength. And as I said, it's not a very complicated strategy. And it's one that we have actually followed pretty successfully for several decades regarding nuclear competition with what used to be the Soviet Union and is now Russia. It's just that in the last few years, we've forgotten it, especially a lot of people on the right, the far right, as well as the far left, have really fallen for this Russian nuclear language. World War III, you're going to cause World War III. Trump uses this all the time. And actually, he's been doing it for years. He did it in the 2016 campaign.

And I heard him do it at the time and was convinced that he was either getting it directly from the Russians or from, you know, far right media that is, you know, influenced by Russian propaganda because it's that, you know, he was literally using the same language that was being used on Russian TV. He would just then use it and he would say, Hillary Clinton's going to start World War III. This is obviously what Vladimir Putin wants people in the West to think. You also, though, note that we started off with Elon Musk doing this and how Elon Musk was scared and the West had been deterred. But this is really continued post-invasion. And I guess this is one of the more troubling aspects of all of this, that the West and the United States, the Biden administration has been,

you know, holding back on these long range weapons. You know, we've had these arguments, you know, should we send them F-16? Should we send them, you know, the attack on ballistic missile system? And at each point, it sounds like there was somebody, you know, within the administration who said, well, you know, that will escalate things. That might be dangerous. We don't want to make the Russians too edgy. So all of this nuclear propaganda has slowed the role of the West, even post-invasion, hasn't it? That's definitely true. I mean, it was certainly true of long range missiles, because we were afraid that Ukrainians would use them to hit Russia, Russia proper, which to some degree they have to do because that's where the Russian logistics systems are. Then it turned out

that the Ukrainians were able to do it without our weapons. They can do it with drones and with other things. And they did it. And again, there was no World War III. Same thing with tanks. You know, the Germans had this particular paranoia because the Germans have a lot of tanks that are unused, modern ones. I went to Germany a few months ago just before they made this decision, and people were saying, well, what if a German tank appears on Ukraine? And it'll be like World War II, and people remember Stalingrad or something like that. And actually, what happened was the tanks were painted over with the Ukrainian flag. They're being driven by Ukrainians, and whether they're German tanks makes no difference at all. So there were, people had this imagination about what each weapon system would mean that turned out to be untrue. And as

I said, the result is, you know, we are now slowly, the Europeans are giving the Ukrainians some F-16s, but, you know, they weren't there in time for this summer's offensive. We are probably going to give them some even longer range missiles, these Atacoms, but those also haven't been there for the summer. So, you know, each time we're late and the delays have meant, you know, have worked to Russia's advantage. Yeah, I mean, so these delays have cost lives, I mean, maybe tens of thousands of lives, right? And they've contributed to the loss of Ukrainian momentum. It's had real consequences. Yeah, the war is over when Russia leaves, you know, so the whole point of the war is to persuade them to leave. And the longer they're there, more people die because people die both because the Russians are fighting, but also because the nature of the Russian occupation of Ukraine is so horrific. As soon as they occupied any territory, they rounded up, you know, the mayors and the police chief and the local headmistress of the school. People have disappeared into concentration camps. They've disappeared into prisons. There have been, you know, mass and

random murders. You know, we know about some of them. We know about Bucha. We know about a few others, but it seems to be true in every single place that they've occupied. So each of those occupied territories has become a kind of mini police state. And so literally, the longer the Russians are there, the more people die, just on those territories, leaving out the story of the soldiers. Let me just read you one paragraph that you wrote that sums this up. Think about what the world might look like if Putin's nuclear threats had not influenced our imagination so profoundly. If Elon Musk had not been spooked by Russian propaganda, then some of Russia's fleet might have been disabled a month earlier. If Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin had not been spooked by Russian propaganda, then the Ukrainians might have expelled the Russians

earlier and the war might be over. Death, horror, and terror have been the result every time outsiders hesitated to aid Ukraine, which is just a devastating conclusion when you think about this. Devastating conclusion. It is. And I want to say something in favor of the Biden administration, which has overcome a lot of this, I mean, and has done much more than many people expected at the start of the war and has been very, has been quite loyal to Ukraine. And I'm grateful to Biden that he was a president who remembered enough about the Cold War era and enough about grand strategy to understand the importance of this war, which is really significant, not just in Europe, but internationally. As a, you know, finally, the democracy is standing up to autocratic bullying. You know, I don't want to criticize too much, but it is true that our imaginations were shaped by, you know, decades worth of Russian propaganda about what they would do.

And it turned out that if you just push back, they didn't do it. Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebulwark.com and take a look around. Every day we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com slash charlie. That's thebullwork.com forward slash charlie. I'm going to get through this together. I promise. Now, maybe this is an old story by now, but I'm really struck by the fact that Elon Musk, as a lot of others, might have run into this propaganda in Russian-influenced far-right echo chambers, the ones he's been hanging out in. So let's talk a little bit about why the far-right. I know we've

talked about this before, but what a strange twist in our history that you have the far-right aligned with someone like a Vladimir Putin. Because, I mean, clearly we know where Elon Musk has been spending his time. We know where Donald Trump spends his time, where his headspace is. And this has become a real theme. So how did Vladimir Putin manage to co-opt the right wing, not just in the United States, but globally? So without being remotely conspiratorial about it, No, I think he helped create it. I mean, I think the creation of a far-right echo chamber has been a Russian project for 15 years. So the idea that they would seek to promote extremism and promote extremist ideas and slogans and memes and so on, I mean, I think

they've been doing that for years. In fact, I know they've been doing it for years. I mean, you can argue about to what degree it was them and what degree it was a kind of mind meld of them and the existing far right and to what degree it was just, you know, people were ready for that kind of stuff for other reasons. I mean, I'm not giving them credit for, it's not as if they created this thing, but I mean, they did help. The idea that Western civilization is collapsing, that democracy is a disaster, and that the only thing that can save it is an autocratic or dictatorial power or regime, is an idea that's very comfortable for the Russians, because it's in their interest for democracies to be weakened and to fall apart, you know, because then they have free run of

whatever they want to do. And it's also appealing to a certain group of, as it turns out, Americans, but also Europeans, who dislike their own societies for other reasons, you know, whatever, they dislike modernity, they dislike feminism, they dislike too many refugees, immigrants, whatever it is they don't like about modernity, and whatever they dislike about their systems, you know, they have this alternative, and the alternative is an autocratic one. That is the appeal of Putin and Putin understood that appeal or the people who work for him did. And they've sought to feed that and nourish it. I mean, there's an additional thing, which is the Russia has been very good at selling a completely fake image of itself as a white Christian country defending the world from

Islam. Actually, Russia is 12% Muslim, something like that. And we're not sure of the real numbers. There's a province of Russia, there's Chechnya, which is actually run by Sharia law. I mean, literally it's Sharia law. It's not that fake thing. Oh, Sweden is run by Sharia law. That's not true. And nobody goes to church there and something like 5% of Russians have ever seen a Bible. So it's an absolutely made-up story, but it works on the far right in the way, I think, that the ideal of communism once worked on the far left. Look, our society is terrible, and there's this other alternative society that's better. And there's something like that going on. And the Russians understood that because they have been doing that kind of propaganda

for a century, and they encouraged it. Where do you think the arc is bending right now? Because there was a time not many months ago, I think that you had been writing about the fact that, you know, we were seeing liberal democracy in retreat, we were seeing, you know, authoritarianism, picking up momentum. But I guess, you know, since we're on this subject, as the rest of the world is watching what's happening in the United States, give me your sense of the danger of this feeding into the narrative that liberal democracy just doesn't work, it doesn't get things done, that it has failed. I mean, I hear this narrative all of the time about, you know, that the democracy is under siege, but then some of the defenders of democracy will say, well, yes, but you know, the democracy is under siege, but then some of the defenders of democracy will say,

well, yes, but, you know, the voters are too stupid to be trusted. I mean, if you actually come to the point where you believe that we are incapable of self-government, that I don't know how you support democracy or liberal constitutional order, if the United States turns into this shambolic mess, doesn't that really provide a certain amount of credibility to people who say, okay, we tried that, let's try something different? I mean, of course it does. You know, the undermining of the United States is like the dream outcome for not just the Russians, but the Chinese, you know, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, you know, everybody who has a democracy movement in their country that they want to crush, those groups all look up to the United States. They talk about democracy as a real alternative to their systems or freedom or some other system in which they don't have rule

of law. And the demise of the United States or the United States kind of crumbling into incoherent, semi-catastrophic morass would be an enormous boost to autocracies around the world. So it's almost like, you know, one of the front lines is the war in Ukraine, where we see a democracy clashing with an autocracy. And, you know, another front line runs somewhere through the United States, where people who want to preserve our system or fix it or bring out what they can of it are in direct conflict with people who want to preserve our system or fix it or bring out what they can of it are in direct conflict with people who no longer care about these things. And they'd rather, as you said in your introduction, you know, they'd rather just suspend the officials,

you know, elected officials who they don't like and use minority rule and, you know, legal tricks to impose whatever they want. And that battle is, you know, it's a kind of different version of the same thing that we see in Ukraine. And that battle is, you know, it's a kind of different version of the same thing that we see in Ukraine. And some of the same people are fighting it. I mean, you know, Elon Musk is playing a role in, you know, spreading vile conspiracy theories, in undermining institutions, in encouraging some of the worst features of online conversation. And he's doing that there. And, you know, it's not surprising that someone like that fell for Russian propaganda, because he already lives in a world

where all around him people are advocates of autocracy. It's just that most of the people he sees are Americans, not Russians. I don't know that anybody can answer this question, but, you know, what has happened to Elon Musk? It wasn't that long ago that he was Time Magazine's man of the year, this colossus astride the globe who was sending rockets into space and doing all these amazing things, transforming the way we drove cars. And now he increasingly sounds like someone who is spending time like the troll in the basement, you know, reading these right-wing sites, spreading the most. I mean, we're not just talking about he's become more conservative. I mean, he is in what we used to call the alt-right world here. So I guess this

keeps coming back to the question, was he always like this and the media only just figured it out that we just now are exposing him? Or has something broken in this guy? I haven't read Walter Isaacson's book, which is, by the way, not getting great reviews. I think that we're now seeing the Elon Musk phenomenon that everything Elon touches, you know, turns to crap as well. And what is your sense? I mean, was Elon Musk always like this? Has he just been exposed? Is this just a sign of the times? I was not in the Musk fan club before. I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to him. I didn't, you know, what was sort of was off my issues. And I'm not very interested in space. You know,

I just, to me, it's cold and dark out there. And I don't want to go to Mars, you know, so and I know, my children, for example, think this is awful and they disagree with me and so on, but I, you know, it's just not my, my thing. Maybe he was like this all the time and we didn't notice. Maybe there's another theory that he's, you know, he does a lot of ketamine or some other drugs and something's gone wrong with him. Or maybe it seems like Isaacson's theory, and I also haven't read the book yet, but it seems that Isaacson's theory is he was bullied as a child and now he's on Twitter, he's striking back at, now he's the bully himself. I mean, the only thing to me that's really odd about him is that if you were the richest person in the world and you could do anything you wanted with all that money, would

you spend all your time on Twitter? That to me is the deepest mystery. There's so many other things to do, you know, that you could do. If I had an infinite amount of money, what would I spend my time doing? It would not be Twitter. Since we're still on Ukraine, what do you make of the rather surprise announcement yesterday that Vladimir Zelensky is coming here and he's going to be meeting with Joe Biden and he's going to be meeting with members of Congress? What does that tell you? Why is this happening? So I actually knew he was coming. He's coming to the UN General Assembly and that he's doing because the Ukrainians who didn't have much of a diplomatic service around the world before the war, because they didn't really think they

needed it, belatedly realized that they need lots of relationships with countries in Asia and Africa who are, you know, ambivalent about the war and inclined to be nice to Russia. And so they have been thinking hard about how to make their case in, I don't know, South Africa and India, and even China. And I think the reason why he's coming to the UN is that. Washington, probably he's coming in order to meet with members of Congress to make sure that support for the Ukrainian effort is maintained. As far as I can tell, I mean, I might be proven wrong in the next few weeks, but as far as I can tell, it will be maintained because despite Trump and despite the right-wing echo chamber we've just been talking about, and despite Musk and so on, most of the elected Republicans in Congress continue to understand the reasoning

of this war. They support Ukraine. Some of them have been to Ukraine. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee has been to Ukraine, who's a Republican. So there seems to be continued commitment, but Zelensky may want to meet with people and ensure that that goes on being the case. I mean, you know, for him, these international relationships are pretty existential. You know, it's not just, you know, a shopping trip to Manhattan. Well, and this is a live issue, obviously, in Congress as well, and including, you know, within the Republican Party, where there, you know, is a significant, it's still a minority,

but an anti-Ukraine caucus. There are still some strong voices in support, but nothing is certain going into 2024. So since we're talking about the arc of history, I do think it's interesting. One of the things that really struck me about McKay Coppin's excerpt from his book about Mitt Romney was the fact that Mitt Romney is thinking in terms of this historical arc when most of his colleagues are thinking about, how do I win the news cycle next Thursday? Or Kevin McCarthy is thinking, how do I get through today? And Mitt Romney apparently has a histo map up on the wall, which charts the rise and fall of civilizations over the last 4,000 years and the role of dictators and autocracy. And he

looks at that and he sees how know, sees how strong many of these empires were, but what caused them to fail and how this American experiment, which was kind of a cliche for a while, and now we're sort of realizing, no, it really is an experiment, how fragile it is. And, you know, this is interesting that Mitt Romney thinking about this this, in contrast to, say, the Josh Hollies and the Ted Cruz and the J.D. Vance's of the world, and yet Mitt Romney is leaving. He's going off into exile. So I know you've written about Mitt Romney. So I agree.

It's fascinating. I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about what makes people collaborate and what makes people protest. Only the Atlantic would have let me do this. The first thousand words were about two East Germans you never heard of. And there's a famous, they were brought up together. They were both communists. They both went to East Germany. One of them wound up being the head of their version of the KGB, of the spy service. And the other one was disgusted by the reality of the East German

regime, became a dissident, escaped the country anyway, and wound up years later teaching in the United States. But, you know, the point was, is that here, people who are similar, they have similar backgrounds, and yet they made these totally different moral choices. And so what makes people do these different things? And then the second example I used was Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney. I'm fascinated by this question, by the way. So it's completely fascinating because there isn't anything that predicts it. You know, if you look at the biography of Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, you know, Graham was in the army. He comes from a small town in South Carolina. You know, he has this patriotic upbringing. You know,

you would say, you know, where's Mitt Romney? You know, he comes from a sort of elite family. His father was a politician. He was involved in international finance or, you know, Bain, you know, he was a, you know, he was a rich person, could have had lots of allegiances all over the world. So, you know, if you were going to just guess which one of them was going to be, you know, the suck up Trumpist and which one of them was going to be the brave, you know, the person who tells the truth, you might've guessed the other way around. And yet, no, you know, as I said, there's no rule or prediction. I mean, but maybe it is something, as you just said, maybe it's Romney's interest in

history, his ability to step away from the present to look at his role, you know, in a bigger picture. Maybe that's what enables him to do it. Whatever it is, his personality made it impossible for him, even though as that one reason that article was brilliant, this is the extract from Makai Coppins' book. And I'm, you know, I plan to get the book as soon as possible. But the extract was interesting because it also made clear that a lot of the people around Romney, including his staff, you know, all thought that, for example, he should not vote to impeach Trump. And they were upset when he did, you know, so even his inner circle, you know, wanted him to. Paul Ryan called, called him and lobbied him, said how terrible it would be if he

did this. Yep. Yep. And so even so he had this other impulse that, as I said, maybe it was him thinking about his place in history. Maybe it's because he's, you know, religious, who knows? Maybe it's his wife. I mean, there, you know, there's, there's a comment in the piece about how his wife didn't say anything, but a comment in the piece about how his wife didn't say anything, but was clearly not happy with the idea of him not voting to impeach Trump. I don't know. What makes up a human brain and what influences people to make any decision, there's usually five or six different reasons, right? It's not- There's a moral core to the man.

He has a moral core. You're right. I mean, I was thinking about this as well over the last couple of days that this was not inevitable. He was a mild-mannered Mitt Romney who was never that comfortable in his skin. I talked about this with Ben Wittes on the podcast yesterday. He would put on certain personas when he was severely conservative. And again, I got some pushback when I said this, you know, maybe part of this is that Mormon core. It's a moral core that obviously, I mean, Mike Lee is also Mormon. So we see that that's obviously not maybe necessary, but not sufficient in this particular

case. But there was something about Mitt Romney in terms of his character, in terms of his perspective. And I do wonder, you know, what makes people go MAGA and what makes people break for them? And I do think that at least one of the through lines is this, the sense of history, is the sense of fragility, is the sense of knowing how things played out in the past. There's a reason why I think people who really have thought and studied deeply about what happened in the 1930s and 40s have been reluctant to go along with the MAGA movement. There's a reason why the people who think about their legacies, who think about history, who think about the broad sweep of this, who think about the fragility of liberal democracy,

take a different route. I can't really explain why a Lindsey Graham goes from being John McCain's best friend and being a, you know, outspoken advocate for, you know, America is the shining city on the hill, you know, decides he wants to be a, you know, a Trump spear carrier. But it's also interesting, you know, to think about, you know, why people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney made the decision they did, knowing that it might cost them the position. I mean, I guess it's also the question is, how do you determine in advance who has courage and who doesn't? I mean, none of us really know until we're being shot at, right? I mean, we can talk a good game. You don't know. I mean, I've written about, I mean, this is a somewhat different

subject. I don't mean to make the crass comparison. I've written about concentration camps. I've written about the GULAG. And there's a similar thing. Before people are arrested, you don't know how they're going to behave when they get there because the conditions are so different. Suddenly all the rules are different. Everything's different. Whatever it was you were good at in the real world might not mean anything in this world and become unpredictable. And this is a little bit like this only in the sense that when suddenly the rules are different and what makes you succeed isn't what you thought would make you succeed, you know, then you struggle, you know, how do you, how do you know how to move forward in this new change circumstance? And you just can't predict how, how people behave. I mean, you know, essentially the Republican party is behaving as if it were occupied by a foreign power, you know, and that's essentially, you know, there was a different, suddenly a different set of rules were in charge and everybody had to figure out how to adjust to that.

And some people just adjusted and went along with it. And some people were unhappy and some people were dissidents, you know, and that's kind of what happens when you have an occupation. And that's why I compared it at one point to Vichy. It's a little bit like that. And again, lots of people were mad at me for saying that, because no, it's not Vichy and there aren't Nazis. Okay, but I didn't, as a way of trying to understand what happened. It's a useful analogy.

It's an analogy that I find useful, because Vichy was also a moment when the rules had changed and here you were occupied, and either you could go along with it and continue to live your life, you know, or you could join the resistance and maybe die, you know. And so there was a, those were very hard choices and some people had, you know, sick children and so they couldn't join the resistance. I mean, there were all kinds of reasons that people had why they made the choices they did. But it seems to me the Republicans, certainly the ones in Congress, but maybe some out of the country as well, went through a similar kind of experience. If they had made their career in the party, they had to make a decision about whether to stay in or go out or shoot themselves in the foot and therefore be chucked out of politics. It was not

unlike that kind of decision. Well, it also goes to that fundamental philosophical question, what do you really value? What is really important to you? And it turned out, and again, this comes through in the discussion about Mitt Romney as he's looking at his colleagues. For many of the people in the Republican Party, it turns out that what really, really mattered to them was being in power, having those offices, you know, having the stimulation, being important, being in the Republican Party, it turns out that what really, really mattered to them was being in power, having those offices, you know, having the stimulation, being important, being in the room. This was what was most important to them. Others, maybe people who actually had a life outside of elected office, who knew that the worst thing that could happen to you was not losing an election, had a different perspective. And Mitt Romney and others decided that standing up for these principles was more important to them. But it also, as you point out, you know, this kind of

adversity and the change in the power dynamics really does expose and reveal who you are and what you think about. I mean, so you may think that you got into public service because I really want to, you know, make people's lives better, or I want to spread freedom around the world, or I really want to make this a better world for my children and my grandchildren. But when push comes to shove, what you really want is the office. You really want the title. You really want to be quote unquote relevant. And that's what's really important. And for a guy like Mitt Romney, he's going, and it's not just that he's independently wealthy, but there are other wealthy people who've gone along with all of this. But, you know, in his core, he said, you know, no, what's really

important to me is that I want to actually do the right thing. And even though some of us, you know, rolled our eyes at kind of the Boy Scouts, you know, Sunday school stuff and everything, it turns out that was really important and really necessary to understand who he was and what's happened to him. Yeah. Yeah. That's who he was. I mean, just to take the conversation back to your question about Musk, I mean, we could look at him in the same way. I mean, he's getting something out of having this kind of internet reach and, you know, lots of people are hearing him, you know, and that seems to be something that motivates him, which is bizarre, because if he just made really good electric cars, he would be a hero, right?

But there's something in him that wants something else as well. Even if you say that what he wanted was power, or he wanted influence, or he wanted respect, he had so many other ways of going about it so there was something about the dopamine hit he has of tweeting out poop emojis and being a troll that meets some need in him and i don't know that i'm neither a lawyer nor a doctor nor a psychotherapist so i can't yeah me too i cannot drill down to this well the piece is a must read of the week, What Russia Got by Scaring Elon Musk and Applebaum. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this weekend.

Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.