The Daily Beast Podcast - How Zelensky Went from Jackie Mason to Winston Churchill

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Nearly two weeks into Russia’s invasion, News Lines news director and Daily Beast editor at large Michael Weiss joins the pod to explain how and why the Ukranians have defied everyone’s expectations except their own. Plus, Steven Brill of NewsGuard looks back at his group’s conversations with Facebook. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. One interesting show we have today. Michael Weiss, who's the editor of Newsline magazine and host of the Foreign Office podcast, will talk to us about Russia's war with the Ukraine. Then we'll talk to Stephen Brill of NewsGuard about the current media landscape.

But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly Jong Fest. Another day in our dystopia. But you're back with us, which of what is important. You're healthy, and you're here to talk with me about, we're on day 12 of the war in Ukraine. Day 12. My God. It feels like it's been a fucking year of, like, watching the most horrible images in the world.

I mean, it does. I can only imagine how it feels for the people in Ukraine. It's been 12 days, which apparently, Molly, has been more than enough time. for a lot of people to change their tune. Yeah. So this is an important, and I think somewhat strange, situation the Republican Party finds themselves in. Donald J. Trump, big fan of Vladimir Putin.

Some might say an unapologetic Putin fanboy since 2015 when WikiLeaks hacked the DNC campaign, the DNC headquarters and started the DNC servers, the DNC servers, and started releasing Hillary Clinton's emails and John Podestos. And around that time, Trump continued to play up WikiLeaks. He said things like, I love WikiLeaks. He was always sort of all over WikiLeaks. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

Well, it has to be. I don't know what else it could be. Right. I mean, that's the only thing that makes sense. it's interesting, like, if you go back to the timeline of it, right, he said, you know, Russia, if you're listening, do you remember that? Oh, yeah. And then we fast forward to WikiLeaks, and then he loves WikiLeaks, and then he wins the election, and then he says, actually, it was Ukraine. Right.

Who was involved in the election, and not Russia. Right. So pretty much since 2015, I mean, actually, there's a tweet that he did. in 2013 when he was going to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant where he said maybe Putin and I are going to be best friends now. But Trump has really been a big unabashed fan of Putin's. Yes. Well, look, I mean, this is not important in the long run, but you mentioned that 2013 tweet where he said maybe Putin and I will be best friends. And you have to give him credit for actualizing that. Like he put it out there and it happened. They became best.

Do you think he's read the secret? I don't think. Yeah, no. I mean, seriously, you know, this is, shoot your shot. Isn't that what the kids say? Yes, it is. You know? You're both terrible people.

Hostile work environment, Bali. Yes. So Trump finds himself on the wrong side of this war. As Putin continues to bomb civilian houses, kill children, and do what is a page of his playbook of what he did in Syria and what he's done in other countries that he's taken over is just carnage. We're seeing this here in Ukraine and we're watching it on television. So Trump has, Trump gave a speech on Saturday night in New Orleans to a group of 250 very bigwig GOP donors. And in this speech, he said, you know, maybe we should just go to war with Russia. He also mused about painting the American planes with Chinese.

The painting the planes with the Chinese markings is just, I don't. I don't even know how to discuss that, honestly. Beyond the fact that it's just an absolutely dumb idea, it violates so many international laws that I think you would need like five CVS receipts to even cover all the international laws that that would violate. And also, by the way, would put us at war with China. I feel like he didn't think this one through, Molly. that's my sense here is that he was speaking off the cuff

and this was not something that he had had a lot of late night bull sessions about, which is, you know, what he generally does at Mar-a-Lago, my understanding is that he gathers the best and brightest and they discuss... The thought leaders. Yeah, exactly, and they discuss, you know, the big issues of the day. The key here is that for a lot of years, since Trump got elected,

the Republican Party became very, very favorable to Vladimir. or Putin, which is a far cry from, you know, Mitt Romney correctly saying that, or, you know, Russia was our number one geopolitical foe in his debate with Obama for which he got roundly derided, which, you know, but that's a whole different story. But the point, the point I'm making here is there was a big switch in the Republican Party. And, and suddenly you had, you had the party. And it's, you know, it's lapdog media, the right wing media ecosystem, suddenly deciding that Putin was actually some kind of, you know, he was an avatar of manliness.

Because he was a white supremacist, really. Yeah, well, because he was a white supremacist and took his shirt off, which apparently means something, I don't know. And this continued right up until around, like you said, 12 days ago or maybe even like nine or 10 days ago. Yeah, Saturday was when he started, yeah. But I'm saying it was a couple days after. when you suddenly started seeing this little change in the rhetoric from,

from Republican officials and from leader of the Republican Party, Tucker Carlson. And, you know, and then now they're sort of all on board with Putin is a bad guy again. Most of them anyway. They were the, you know, there are the holdouts. Yeah. Yeah. But the majority Republican Party view now seems to be that Putin is a bad guy, which is, as you said, that's a big. switch from not only, you know, six years ago, but from two weeks ago.

Yeah. It's a strange and fascinating development. I think also worth noting that this is happening all around the world on the far right, because a lot of members of the far right, like Marie Le Pen in France and others have devoted themselves to Vladimir Putin. So there's a sense in which this is a real sea change. They have, they can't, you know, even. they can see the writing on the wall that this war is something that no one wants and that it's going to be not great but Erdogan too is or Erdogan's not on board either I will not give them any credit whatsoever because what what they're now realizing is that they could be next yeah yeah so it's pure self-preservation for them it's not like they had some kind of moral

great awakening or anything like that they just finally realized oh shit this guy that we've been idolizing for all these years doesn't really feel the same way about us. Yeah. That is, it really is like you do, I mean, there's a real opportunity here for Democrats to message about how democracy is good and how you shouldn't play footsy with autocrats. I don't think they will. But it's clearly a lesson that the far right is learning. Yeah. And the other part of this is, and we've talked about this before, is the memory holing that they try.

to do. And as much as they will get away with it with like their base, we can't let them get away with it sort of writ large. Like Kevin McCarthy, early Monday morning said, he tweeted, just as the United States should have supplied weapons to Ukraine sooner. We should speed up the sale of weapons to Taiwan, blah, blah, blah. It's like, really? We should have supplied weapons to Ukraine sooner. You backed Donald Trump when he held up shipments of Javalin and other weapons to Ukraine because he wanted his little quid pro quo dirt on the Biden, you know, the Biden crime family or whatever that he thought. And then now suddenly you're Ukraine's biggest ally? No, you cannot get away with this.

And, you know, you can get away with it with your constituents because, let's face it, they voted for you. They're not the brightest. But they can't be allowed to get away with this in the broader picture and in history and whatever. Like, it's an overused phrase like history will not remember them well or history will not speak kindly, whatever. But we have to make sure that history does not speak kindly of people like Kevin McCarthy. I do think in the long term that that's super important. And we can't we can't let them keep getting away with it because they do in the short term.

Yeah. I mean, I also think that there's a sense in which the Republicans are not, they're not talking about the impeachment, because the first impeachment, not the second impeachment. The first impeachment involved, you know, Trump holding Zerlinsky hostage, subjecting Zerlinsky to Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Igor Furman. I mean, the man, like, talk about, like, no wonder he doesn't think that being bombed is such a big deal. He had to deal with those three guys.

I mean, like, It has been such, you know, the man has been through so much. And, you know, he held up the White House meeting. He held up to this. And now he's saying, you know, Obama gave them blankets and I gave them missiles, right? Missiles that Congress had already, that he was supposed to give way before he tried to hold him up for political influence. And I think there's so much, you know, mainstream media is always trying to present things in an unbiased way. But the problem is when it comes to Trump, everything is so insane that.

presenting things in an unbiased way is actually biased. Yeah, but the thing is also, there's a way to present things in an unbiased way, but you have to be biased towards the truth. And you can't do the some say this and some say that thing, which is the, that's the general formulation. Look, I used to make fun of this on Fox News. I would make fake things and I would say, well, some say yes, but others say no. That's the kind of stuff we get when that is not unbiased.

Right. Because if the correct answer is yes, like if it's two plus two equals four, some say yes, but others say no, that's not unbiased. You can't just do that. Like, you know, you have to say, well, no, two plus two does equal four. And look, I know Trump had his perfect phone call and all of that, but this stuff has to be brought up and it has to be brought up as the truth that it is, as the facts that they are. Yeah, it's really frustrating when it's done in the fake unbiased way, which is. just to report both sides equally. Speaking of things that are not necessarily that need to happen, where the fuck is Merritt Garland? Everyone's going to get mad at me for saying that because you're never allowed to question Merritt Garland, just like Bob Mueller, you must have faith in the system. But say I didn't have faith in the system. Why would you ever do that? Just since my previous experiences with Robert Mueller, what then?

Molly, I think the thing is, I think there are, you know, there are a lot of species that during the winter, they hibernate. Yes. Maricus Garlandis might be one of those species. And it may be that as the weather warms up, he decides to, I'm sorry, get off his ass and do something about this. Because, you know, there's now, the Republicans are trying to say that, well, with Merrick Garland, if they prosecute Trump, if they go after, if the Justice Department goes after him, you know, criminally, it's going to trigger a political nightmare. I don't give a shit. And Merrick Garland should not give a shit. It's not, that's not his job. His job is to

follow the facts and his job is not to worry that if he files a lawsuit against, you know, or if he files charges against, against the former president, that the Republicans are going to be outraged. Fuck their outrage. You know, they had every opportunity to stop all of this and, and they went along with it. And, you know, they are, in a sense, they'll all end up being unindicted co-conspirators because they just, they just completely went along with it and enabled it. But I'm so tired of hearing people like Lindsay Graham warn against this. Like, sit the fuck down. I mean, give me a break. Like, this is not a reason to not go after someone. If they committed a crime, they should be tried.

They're presidents. They're not kings. Last I checked, we, like, we sort of fought a war to not have a king so that the leader of the country would not be above the law or would not be the law. And I feel like we should kind of stick to that plan. It's worked out. We've kept it going for a couple hundred years, and I think we should stick with it. Well, also, if Democrats are not going to hold Trump accountable, we've seen Republicans will

not. So the idea that somehow Democrats shouldn't either, I mean, what is the hope then that just democracy holds one more time and we get through this thing? Yeah, that seems to be the hope. And it's just – and the other thing is, you're right. Obviously, Republicans aren't going to hold them accountable. They're part of the problem. But the thing is, if everything he's done, if there is stuff that rises to the level of criminal wrongdoing, which it increasingly seems. clear there was, and he's not even brought up on charges, what does that tell future presidents

that they can do whatever the fuck they want? Yeah. No, the whole thing is preposterous. This point you made, Andy, I think is really good because I recall recently Matt Schlapp one of the leaders of the conservative movements that were not conservatives, where people were in love with the founding of this country, and I'd love for them to remember that part of the founding of this country. Yeah, it was kind of a big deal back then, if I remember correctly.

I mean, I wasn't, you know, I'm old. I wasn't, I'm not that old. I wasn't there for the, for any of the big signings, you know, the declaration or the Constitution. But I seem to remember it being a pretty big deal in 1776 that we didn't want a king. I mean, Schlapp is like a famous sycophant, so, you know. But, Andy, what was the bag to card to say I did like? It was not as much fun as you would think, actually.

The wine was, was disappointing. It was not a good year. And there was not a lot of bathing back then. So it was really, you just wanted to. You signed your name and you got out as fast as you could. Michael Weiss is the editor of Newsline Magazine, host of the Foreign Office podcast as well as a Daily Beast editor at large. Welcome to the new abnormal, Michael Weiss.

Thank you, Molly Jungfest. It's a pleasure to be here. So explain to us a little bit about how you got involved in covering Russia and Ukraine. So I, in 2011-ish, I want to say, I founded a website called the Interpol. which was designed initially to translate content from the Russian language press into English to better acquaint Americans and English speakers with what's going on in Russia. This had followed from the largest protest movement Russia had seen since the end of the Cold War, the so-called Bolotna protest against Putin's re-election.

Or sorry, actually, it was stolen Duma parliamentary elections that began it. And this was kind of Alexei Navalny's helmed movement. So anyway, when the war in Ukraine began with even before the war, the Euromidan, the protest movement in Kiev. We're talking about Crimea here, 2014 war. Before Crimea was seized by the Russians, you know, the demonstrations that rocked the capital of Ukraine against Victor Yanukovych, then Ukraine's president, who had reneged on a promise to sign the association agreement with the European Union. We decided my team and I, look, instead of just translating stuff, why don't we cover what is turning into? a revolution in Russia's next-door neighboring country. And then when it became a military conflict, we just did sort of 24-7 coverage. So long story short, I've been going to Ukraine at least once

or twice a year for the past eight years. And I have noticed it's sort of strange for me because every time I've gone there, I've come back thinking, this is such a remarkable country and remarkable people. And, you know, they all tell me that they're going to win. I've done a lot reporting abroad. I was very immersed in the Syrian revolution, the Syrian Civil War. And I heard lots of claims of bravado and hubris coming from opposition movements over the years, including, by the way, the Russian opposition. And so I kind of had this cognitive dissonance between, okay, the Ukrainians are telling me X. Western analysts and Western think tankers are telling me why. I have to say, in the last 10 days, I think the Ukrainians were right about themselves in a way

that we were not, meaning that the Western imagination has underrated them and underestimated them quite badly. And you see this now. I mean, the world is completely inspired by their resistance, completely inspired and shocked in a good way by their president who went from being like the Jackie Mason of Ukraine into Winston Churchill within the space of about 72 hours. And I think one of the reasons that everyone wants to support them diplomatically, financially, militarily, is because they've held out. You know, this was their capital was meant to fall in a matter of hours, if not day, and Zelensky was meant to be assassinated. And, you know, here we are day 11. He's still alive, still in firm control of his armed forces. And Kiev is, you know, surrounded, but it is not

fallen. It has not been breached by the Russians. So I want to talk to you about this because it seems to me that some of what is pretty clear is that Russia did a pretty good job of plugging their military. And now that we're seeing it in action, it's really not as good as we thought it was, not that we thought it was so great. Well, I mean, a lot of people did think it was so great. And look, in fairness, you know, the Russians have been, I mean, the term Potemkin comes from Catherine the Great and, you know, that period. I mean, and they are past masters at trying to pass off something that on the surface looks to be quite robust and shiny and new. But deep down is just as susceptible to the kind of rot and corruption and backwardness and inefficiency that has frankly

plagued all state institutions under Putin for the last 22 years. So in hindsight, it's not so shocking that Russia's military has succumbed to exactly the same problems that everything else in Russia has succumbed to, whether it's the financial markets or small businesses, et cetera, et cetera. But look, this is not to say that Russia still can't win, and it's certainly not to say that they won't escalate in a manner, which frankly, they're already doing. I mean, if you look at the images out of Kharkiv in the northeast, it's reduced to rubble. They're doing it. They're doing it. So they're using heavy fire. Yeah, artillery mostly, but also Ascander missiles, rockets, and if you believe the Ukrainians, thermobaric bombs. Do you believe that? Look, I have to say, I mean,

everything that comes out of any government organ, I take with a pinch of salt. But I will say that a lot of open source analysis, there's a blog called Orix, which is, I just got off the phone with a former U.S. Army colonel and a former diplomat, actually, who says that he's refreshing that blog every 20 minutes, because literally within the space of about five minutes, they increased the number of Russian military vehicles or hardware that has either been damaged, destroyed, abandoned, or captured in usable form by the Ukrainians. And we're now approaching like almost a thousand pieces, everything from tanks to BTRs to Pansir anti-aircraft systems, which I don't know what the price tag is for each one, but it's in the tens of millions. So I mean, Russia is losing everything.

Yeah, how much of the Russian army is engaged in Ukraine right now? Because I think it's a much higher number than we have been told. Well, so it's about 190,000 troops. And originally it was believed that Russia was relying on contract soldiers, which is to say people who kind of volunteer and sign up rather than conscripts of people who've been drafted. But now it appears that what they've done is they forced a lot of conscripts into becoming contractniki. So like basically they said, oh, you're in the draft, but now you need to sign this piece of paper to say that you're here willingly. Because what they don't want to happen, and this is kind of the big fear politically, socially inside Russia for Putin, is the phenomenon of what's known as Cargo 200. So Cargo 200 is

the euphemism for dead bodies coming back from the front. This is what ended up really destroying the Soviet Union after the war and occupation of Afghanistan. One of the reasons that a lot of Russian opposition figures, journalists, activists were beaten to a pulp. Or in the case of Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, shot in point-blank rage right outside the Kremlin, was that they were focusing on cargo 200 coming out of the occupied territories of Donbos, you know, Russia's dirty war that's been waged in eastern Ukraine for the last eight years. So a lot of conventional Russian forces who had deployed there, they simply, vanished from the face of the earth. Their families inquired, where were they, you know,

did they fall in the line of duty or combat? I mean, what happened? And the Russian government was trying violently so to hush this up. So I think, you know, if the Ukrainian MOD is even partially right. Now, what they're doing, and I've been stressing this on social media, the West is conflating in their reportage on this, casualties and fatalities. The Ukrainian MOD refers to personnel taken out by which they mean casualties, absent POWs, because they they put POWs in a separate category. What is the definition of casualties? People who have been killed, people who have deserted, people who have been injured, or people who have been captured. So if you minus the POW figure, the Ukrainians say their casualty, the Russian casualties is

11,000. Now, that may sound very, very high, and that may sound propagandistic. But again, we're not just talking about slain soldiers. We're talking about people who just fucked off, right, and, like, abandoned all their equipment. If you look at the social media, videos and images that have been verified by sources like Orix is really, really good. Just think of, you can almost do the math yourself. I mean, the average crew for a T-90 tank, the average crew for a BTR or whatever the designation is, the average crew for an anti, or an air defense system.

If these things have been abandoned in good working, serviceable order, then where are their crew? They ran off into the woods. I mean, they've just deserted, right? The Ukrainian stats, I have to say, I mean, surprisingly so, I think, because, you know, I'm a journalist. I try to approach whatever any government says skeptically. But I think they are closer to the reality.

Certainly closer to the reality than anything the Russian MOD has said. I mean, according to them, they've only lost about 500 soldiers. That is grossly, grossly undercounting what I'm just seeing with my own eyes. It would make sense that Putin's heightened sort of aggression towards the media would signal that he's actually not doing as well. Like, if he were doing well, why would he need to completely lock down all of the journalism about it? Well, exactly, because state media and they would rely on the force multiplier effect of Twitter and Facebook, etc., etc., to, you know, propagate images of burning columns of Ukrainian tanks and, you know, captured Ukrainian soldiers and all of that. But it's the opposite that he fears, which is that this has been largely a defeat.

certainly not just in terms of logistics, but at the tactical level. I mean, I'm talking, I'm not a military expert. I'm approaching this journalistically. So whenever I have a question about military stuff, I ring up people who are in the army who know what they're talking about. We ran a story at New Lines, the publication I'm news director of by Mike Nelson, who is former army and really, really smart and has kind of a scholarly bent on tactics and strategy. And he said, yeah, this isn't just about, you know, the wheels of armored personnel vehicles, kind of. of busting out or getting stuck in the mud. At the tactical level, I mean, they've been playing this really, really poorly. I mean, I heard, and I haven't verified this, but the source for it was Christo Grosev from Bellingat, you know, the guy who's unmasked all the assassins from Scribalt and Navalny. And he told me, and Christo actually has sources inside the Russian government who are leaking stuff to him, which is another thing I want to come to in a minute, if you don't mind. But anyway, he said that, you know, in a tank regiment, they will have four or five different models of tanks, which is just the most stupid thing you could possibly do because you have technicians who are there to service these tanks and they have them, you know, in need of spare parts and all that. And you're working with four or five different models. It makes no sense. You stick with one model for a regiment, right? But it's happening because their military is very, is very degraded and not. It's just, you know, it's the defense minister, Sergei Shaiou, who promised Putin kind of the moon. And after the 2008 Russo-Georgia war, which did not.

go very well for Russia. Their performance was quite poor. The idea was, let's modernize our armed services. And so, you know, what the Russians did is they held their road shows and their expos, Rosabodon Export, which is their arms export company, state-owned, obviously. We'd go around the world showing off all this bright, shiny new kit, drones and, you know, electronic jamming equipment and all this stuff. But now you see, like, fallen out planes from the sky or helicopters with civilian hobby-store GPS systems installed in them. So it's obviously, look, you know, I mean, the Russians in the military have cut corners. No doubt there's been rampant thievery because all sectors of the government are susceptible to that.

And, I mean, the look on the defense minister's face in the last few days kind of tells the whole story to me. This is an embarrassment, a colossal one. So here's a question for you. I want to get going with the plane. So there has been reporting, and you. are involved in the story, too, that the Polish would give the Ukrainians planes. Yeah. And then they would get planes from the United States that would be more modern.

Can you explain this to me? Like, doesn't Putin know that the Ukrainians are getting weapons from the NATO alliance? And why is it important that they get Polish planes that are older? Yeah, look, you know, there's this fear of, escalation in arming and supporting Ukraine. But as I pointed out on Twitter, that red line of escalation has been crossed so many times already. We're talking in an outmoded language. I mean, Turkey, for instance, for the past several months has been supplying Ukraine with the Beirachtar TB2 drone. Now, these drones are actually quite good, and we've seen what they can do on various

battlefields. In Libya, they turned pansier Russian anti-aircraft systems into scrap metal. They were put to devastating effect on behalf of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh War last summer. They've been used by Turkey in Syria to essentially destroy all of Bashal-Assad's defensive capabilities in Idlib and the northwestern provinces areas of Syria. And now they're being put to really great use by the Ukrainians against Russian forces in Ukraine. That's a very high-level air defense system that a NATO member state has been supplying. They are still supplying them. I've seen based on flight tracker data, aircraft cargo planes leaving from Ankara and landing in Poland, which is becoming essentially the logistics hub for resupplying the Ukrainian armed services.

So this idea that sending Ukraine new jets would be some kind of escalatory red line that we mustn't cross, I think is a bit silly. Putin, of course, knows, for instance, when a javelin, US anti-tank missile takes out a Russian tank and kills all of its crew. You know, what's the American line on that? Wasn't me? Well, you're the guys who supplied the weapon to the Ukrainians and they just use it to kill Russians, right? Same thing with the British in-law anti-tank system. So now the idea is this, and I did a reported piece on it, because what happened was, it seems when Joseph Rale, the EU foreign minister, got out kind of ahead of his skis and said, we're going to be sending the EU as a matter of policy will be financing and sending weapons to Ukraine, including fighter jets.

Everybody got themselves into a tizzy and said, wait a minute, how are they going to send fighter jets and where? And then everybody started Googling the inventories of various countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, that have fighter jets that are compatible with the Ukrainian Air Force. So remember, I mean, a lot of the countries that are in NATO that joined only recently, but used to be in the Warsaw Pact or former Soviet satellite states, they're still equipped with Soviet-era avionics, right?

So Poland has got an inventory of about 26 MiG-29 fighter jets. Now, these are multi-role aircraft. So they can hit things on the ground. They can shoot air-to-air missiles to intercept other fighter jets. So they're pretty versatile machines. Now, what's funny is the Poles have also got a stock of F-16, U.S. manufactured multi-roll warplanes. But the Poles prefer their precious migs because they're just more accustomed to flying them.

and their technicians are more accustomed and, you know, better versed at maintaining them. So the issue from what I understood from high levels in former Polish military officials is, yeah, we've got them, but we don't necessarily want F-16s in exchange for them, because what are we going to do if Russia starts mucking about our borders, as they have been in the past, you know, flying into Polish airspace or close to it, etc, etc. But now it looks like, look, Zalinski has played this, I think, masterfully. Yeah, he really has. No doubt he was sincere about give us a no-fly,

zone. But it was also, I think, a savvy political move because you start at the top of your shopping list. Give me a no-fly zone. Well, NATO can't do that because it means NATO goes to war with Russia. And then you really do get into the territory of where it jeopardy for World War III or some kind of nuclear engagement. Okay, well, then the second level priority is if you're not going to give me a no-fly zone, give me the plane so I can build my own no-fly zone. So he had this call with U.S. congressmen and senators and convinced everyone, as far as I can tell, that this is what's necessary. So now the wheels are in motion. Anthony Blinken has authorized NATO. Wait, what's necessary? A no-fly zone? No, no. Provide me with the jets.

Right. He's smart. Is he asked for more than he can get? Everybody got up on cable news, including MSNBC's Richard Engel and, and, you know, Ukrainian-American diaspora members saying at what point, you know, can we allow the slaughter to continue without imposing no-fly zone? So the debate was had about a no-fly zone. But morally, morally the argument was with the Ukrainian. So then you just down cycle to the next level of what we could be doing to help. And the answer is, Ukraine still has a viable air force. They still have contested airspace. I mean, I was told that within 30 minutes, Russia would destroy all of Ukraine's air defense capability. All the jets and helicopters on the tarmac. Twelve days ago. That was 12 days ago. And they're still flying their own

sequoys in the sky, right? In addition to the TB2 drones I mentioned. So now if Poland sends the mig 29s, I mean, I forget what the order of battle is. They could have air supremacy. Correct. It's secure their own airspace without NATO's fingerprints being on it. Exactly. Why aren't there more drones given to Ukraine? Well, I mean, I actually think there will be. Again, you know, if the Turks have managed not to, you know, Putin came up with his list or he had his cronies come up with the list of hostile or unfriendly nations based on, you know, the level of support offered to Ukraine. And noticeably absent from that list was Turkey, which, as I mentioned, has been giving Ukraine probably the most decisive piece of weaponry in its inventory, the Beirachtar

drone. So Turkey has managed this weird, fine line knife walking. Sorry, that's a mixed metaphor and a terrible one. But you know what I mean? Like Erdogan and Putin have been frenemies for a while. So they're at war with each other or at proxy war with each other in certain places, but they get on in other respects. And that hasn't seemed to send the Kremlin into, you know, DefCon 1 mode with respect to Turkey. So look, it's only a matter of time, I think, before other Western nations say, this is an existential struggle for Ukraine. The world is very much united on this. I mean, you've seen now even the Chinese abstained from the UN Security Council Resolution, or I'm sorry, the UN Resolution, it was a General Assembly one, denouncing Russia's aggression. Putin is running out of friends and allies in this respect. And look, if we can arm Ukraine to the point where it holds out and is not only able to defend itself, but eventually turn this into a campaign of counter offenses, in other words, pushing back against the Russians, booting them out of territory that the Russians have now contested and have marched into, then that could well be a game change. Okay, so I just want to know where does this go. I mean, is this Syria,

we're going to watch this go on and on a humanitarian disaster. Eventually, does NATO intervene? No, NATO is not going to intervene. I mean, people just have to, yeah, I'm sorry to put it like this. They just have to get it out of their head. Ukraine is not a NATO member state. It cannot invoke Article 5. NATO has intervened in non-NATO member states, but never in direct military confrontation against Russia, which is, I think, I used to think it was the second world's largest nuclear power, but I think it's technically got more nuclear warheads. than even the United States does. So that's off the table.

But there are other things, creative solutions, I guess, as they would say, that can be done, including covert training for a possible insurgency. I got off the phone just an hour ago with a guy who is the deputy commander of a resistance movement that is currently active in Ukraine and is operating now behind enemy lines in Marupol, in Sumi, and in other parts of the country where the Russian forces have entered. and he told me that he's actually got members of this resistance movement currently embedded within conventional military structures of the Ukrainian army. And he said in the event that those structures or units are destroyed or they're pushed back, my guys will basically just take off their fatigues

and put on civilian clothing and become guerrillas. And they already had the training and know how to do diversionary tactics, which is to say sabotage, blowing things up. So, you know, the CIA is really good at training up people to do stuff like that. I'd be surprised if they weren't doing it already. And as I said, I mean, there's a lot in the Western arsenal that can be handed over to the Ukrainians. And yes, obviously, there's bureaucracy, there's paperwork. Congress needs to approve the F-16 backfilling for the Polish Air Force. But everything is moving so quickly now, Molly. Like, I'm actually shocked at the speed with which these things are transpiring. I mean, you know, really crippling sanctions on Russia passed within

the space of a few days. If you'd ask me that two weeks ago, I would have thought you were crazy. Oh, that's so interesting. Well, thank you so much, Michael. You have to come back. I will come back anytime, happily. Stephen Brill is the founder of NewsGuard. Welcome to New Abnormal, Stephen Brill. Thank you. Good to be here. Can you explain to me? You're a long-time journalist how you got to NewsGuard. Sure. It was really a matter of thinking about a way legitimate journalism could be understood and appreciated online.

The way I think about this, and when I first talked about this with my partner, Gordon Krovis, this is the way we talked about it, is that, you know, right now, if you walked into a library, you'd see books and magazines neatly arranged, you know, by subject matter. You could pick up the book. You could read the book jacket and learn something about the author, know who the publisher is. And best of all, there'd be a librarian there who could tell you, well, if you're interested in, you know, learning about the debate over the minimum wage, this author is conservative. And if you're going to read, you know, her essay about the minimum wage, you may also want to read this essay by a liberal author so that you'll get a balance and you'll

have a sense of, you know, what the two sides are. This author won the Nobel Prize. This author has done this. So you have a sense of the credentials. You know what you're reading because the librarian is telling you, you know, something about your sources. The librarian is, you know, the librarian isn't blocking anything. But now imagine if you walked into a library and instead of books neatly arranged, instead of a librarian, you just had a, you know,

10 million pieces of paper just flying around in the air. And you plucked one out of the air and you started reading it. You wouldn't know who wrote it. You wouldn't know who's financing it. You wouldn't know what their credentials are. You wouldn't know what the agenda is. You'd have no idea about the credibility

of that source. That's the internet. That's your Facebook feed. That's your Twitter feed. That's your Google search. That's your Bing search. It's just a bunch of headlines. And you don't know much about who's behind those headlines. And the idea of NewsGuard is to make some sense of that, to give people an understanding of what they're about to read or see, not to block anything, but to just give people straight information about the reliability and trustworthiness of what they're about to read. It's not so much piece of paper as people screaming at me all the time about Hunter Biden's laptop from hell and various other things. It seems like social media companies, especially Facebook, have tried really hard not to become publishers. ergo they don't moderate content

and they allow the algorithm to radicalize. You are actually sort of helping Facebook try to moderate their content, right? Yeah, two responses. First, you just sort of contradicted yourself in the sense that you said, you know, they don't moderate anything. They're not really publishers.

And then you refer to their algorithms. No, I said they don't want to be considered publishers. I think they are publishers. Right, because their algorithms are the equivalent. Are publishing things. Only, you know, they're completely, you know, unaccountable and non-transparent. Right.

No, no. I think Facebook has a lot of copability for where we are. Right. So if you step back and think about it for a minute, there are actually four entities. There are four companies that rate the reliability and trustworthiness of news. There's Facebook. There's Google slash YouTube.

And, you know, also. Twitter says that they do that. And they do that with their algorithms. And the, you know, the real problem is if the Daily Beast wanted to know how it's rated in terms of reliability and trustworthiness as compared to, let's say, Vox, it would have no idea. You know, the editor of the Daily Beast would have no idea. They wouldn't know whom to call to find out. And if they got someone on the phone at Facebook, what Facebook would say is, well, we can't tell you that. And we also can't tell you how we do it because we told you how we did it, you would game our system. On the other hand, the fourth entity, NewsGuard, is exactly the opposite. Everything is transparent. Everything is done by

human beings. If you read one of our nutrition labels, you will see at the bottom who the authors are and how to contact them. You can see in our nutrition label exactly how we applied the nine criteria. We call everybody for comment before we issue the rating. If they change something or if we've got something wrong, we change it. We want people to game our system, unlike an algorithm. We want news sites to say to themselves, well, gee, if I had a corrections policy, which is one of our nine criteria, I'd get a higher newsguards score. Right. And some 20% of the 7,000, 500 sites we've rated have done something to improve their score, which we love. But as you pointed out, you know, Facebook doesn't want to do that, not only because they don't want to be

considered, you know, publishers and be liable for the decisions their algorithms are making, but also because, as we have found, their business model is to get people to go down rabbit holes after the most unreliable and heated, you know, misinformation. So it would spoil their business model. When we started the company, when we had the idea for the company, Gordon and I talked to people at Facebook because we figured, as you just expressed, that they'd be the most natural. Right, because they need it. We talked to senior executives there who said, this is a great idea. You should do it. It'll take us out of our misery. We've tried with algorithms to do this. We can't do it. We spent billions of dollars trying to do it. We know we can't do it.

And one of the senior executives there even helped us raise money by encouraging investors. If these guys build this, we're going to use it. Unfortunately, we did not talk to the two most of senior executives who vetoed the idea of Facebook using us. Wait, so who are they? Well, who are the two most senior executives at Facebook, Harold Sambor, and Mark Zuckerberg. And they were the ones who said no content moderation. Apparently, because anybody else said yes. So apparently they said no. And luckily, we have licensees, including Microsoft, for example, including the largest ad agency holding companies, which used NewsGuard to help keep their advertisers off of misinformation

and to put their ads onto legitimate news sites that are included in the massive inclusion lists we have developed so that advertisers who want to, who want to support legitimate journalism, including journalism serving minority communities, you know, local news, you know, startups. They can advertise there using our inclusion lists and can use our exclusion lists to make sure they're not on what we reported last week, where the 116 different news sites that are propagating, you know, misinformation and disinformation about Ukraine. So let's talk about this for a second.

You have a content moderation system that could stop fake news on Facebook. Sure. We've had it. Yeah. You could do it in a minute. And it's a, you know, a content moderation system in some ways makes it sound like more than it is. What it is is it's approximately 40 people who were experienced a journalist who work for NewsGuard, who read and review and rate the various websites. Now, it doesn't take a genius, but it does take something more than an algorithm to figure out that a headline on a website that refers to, you know, Nazi armies advancing against, you know, Russian peacekeepers in Ukraine.

is maybe not a reliable website. It's interesting because it seems like we're seeing Facebook sort of tried to do this a little bit when they put together a fact-checking board, but they included the Daily Caller, which is, I mean, a very extreme right-wing news source started by Tucker Carlson. Well, they've been started by Tucker Carlson, but it has really amended its ways recently. I think they get a green from us, a low green, but a green. Yeah. That's super interesting to me. And this service could be on Facebook. It could also be on Twitter, right? Yeah. It seems like Twitter does a little bit of a better job with content moderation. Do you agree with that?

No. Tell me why. Because they let, you know, crazy unreliable, you know, sites on the left and crazy unreliable sites on the right be cited in, you know, massive amounts of their feeds. And I'm not saying they shouldn't be cited. We don't believe in. blocking anything. I'm just saying they should come with some information about who these sites are. For example, there's a chain of local news sites called Courier Newsroom, which is secretly financed by, you know, PACs on the liberal side of the aisle. You know, they're Democratic contributors who contribute to a PAC that finances these sites that are posing as local news sites. And if you go to their about page, it says we were a nonprofit and we were formed to fill the vacuum caused by the decline of local newspapers. Well, that's very nice, except that what these sites do is they promote, in their case, you know, Democrats who are in congressional districts that are at risk. Now,

there's a site on the other side of the aisle, which does the same thing for conservatives and right-wing politicians. What's it called? It's called metric news, I think. Okay. Right. So that should be noted as what it is. It means equal misbehavior on both sides. I mean, I'm going to push back here. There's certainly some, but you have an entire right-wing ecosystem devoted. I mean, the Fox News, echo chamber, there's nothing like that on the left. But you have an entire left-wing ecosystem, which is Courier Newsroom. You know, the Daily Cause has has all kinds of material on it that is not vetted by anyone. At least they disclose what their agenda is,

which is more than, you know, the courier local, you know, local news sites do. But there's ample blame to spread around here. Yes. I obviously have a horse in this race. But anyway, continue. I'm going to push back, but it continues. Well, you don't see it that word, but you're wrong. I mean, the fact is if you take a proportion of sites, you know,

there are more sites, there are more conservative-oriented sites just as a general matter than there are liberal-oriented sites. But pretty much equal proportion of them on each side gets greens and reds. Yeah, but, I mean, you have, you have things like the Washington Free Beacon does not exist on the right, on the left. I'm sorry, there is no Washington. I mean, there is a Washington Free Beacon to Wall Street Journal editorial page to Tucker Carlson, you know, a food chain that does not exist on the left. Now, it may happen organically, but it's not the same thing. Well, that's your opinion.

It just happens to be wrong. Okay. Well, we will agree to disagree on this, but it is the service you're doing here, I think, is important. And I'm curious to know, do you think that there will be, that eventually what we saw with the Russian, Ukraine, we're seeing a lot of misinformation, videos and photographs and all sorts of. of stuff. Do you think that this will, and Facebook has been a little bit better about de-platforming RT. Is that true or not? Yeah, they have, but we put out a report this morning that said that Google and Facebook announced that they were de-platforming RT and Sputnik, but there are now 116 sites that

we've identified that are publishing the same stuff. Oh, interesting. Can you explain to us what some of those sites are named? Well, one is a name that's familiar to a lot of people, which would be Pravda. Then there's another one that's called Veterans Today, which sounds great, right? Who's Against? So there are all kinds of different names. There's one called Southern Front. And these are sites that, you know, again, they're not really, you know, subtle about this.

They refer to Nazi armies when they're. They talk about the Ukrainian soldiers. They refer to how Ukraine has never been a country. You know, all the usual stuff you're now hearing. And the point is that rather than block this stuff, it should be labeled. I mean, you know, I'd like to read Russia today. I'd like to see what they're saying. But I'd like to know who it is, who is saying it and who it is who is financing.

Places like the gray zone, are they Russian? I don't know what the gray zone is. There seem to be other RT arms that are. Oh, yeah. There's a, you know, Zero Hedge, for example, publishes a lot of Russian propaganda. Whether they're paid to do that by the Russians or whether they're doing it on their own, you know, we don't know.

But they seem to, you know, parrot a lot of this stuff. It's really rampant. And the thing about the Russians is they've been doing this for years and years. One interesting story about RT, you know, RT, you know, RT used to be called, you know, Russia today. Then they decided, well, let's just call it RT so people won't really know what it is. RT was what they figured out was rather than have a cable television channel, which could be deplatform going to the cable systems, they were going to dominate YouTube.

And they started that, you know, several years ago. And about two years ago, I think it was they became the first video channel on YouTube, news channel to have more than a billion views, a billion views. And when they did that, they celebrated with a special program on RT YouTube. And they had the content officer of YouTube come on their program for the celebration. And he said, the reason RT is so popular on YouTube, the reason you guys are so popular is you're authentic. Everybody knows this isn't propaganda. that you're really authentic. This is the chief content person at YouTube.

So that gives you some sense of the news judgment of people, you know, at YouTube and at Google. Well, that was, that's very depressing. I mean, I just read an article advice about how there are memes that are being shared. I'm sure you've seen this, where they talk about other war, you know, other military strikes that are going on. in the world, which is true, but that they originate from Russia too. For sure. They are really good at this stuff. They've been doing it for a long time, and they're really good at it. I mean, so to give you another example of how good they are, the way RT got so many viewers on YouTube, you know, they did videos of car crashes,

of hamsters on a hamster wheel. They did all this really cute or viral stuff. They amassed zillions of viewers, and then they started doing the propaganda. again, once they had the viewers. And there are examples of that online where we identify sites that are sort of innocuous local news sites. And the first tip off we have is we can't figure out who is financing it. And we can't figure out what the business model is because they're just doing, you know, news. There was one based in Buffalo, New York during the 2020 campaign. And before the campaign, this site was just basically plagiarizing news, you know, from other local news sites, you know, in that area. We couldn't figure out why it was there, you know, they didn't have any

source of income. Why were they doing this? And then as the election got closer, they started doing all kinds of misinformation about the election, stop the steel stuff and stuff like that. There's all of that going on because, you know, again, the really good news about the internet is that anybody can be a publisher. Bad news about the internet is that anybody can be a publisher. So interesting. Thank you so much for joining us. Happy to do it. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from the Daily Beast tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to

retake power. Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts.

Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. We come to our segment. One of our segments. One of our, oh, no, wait, it's our only, it's our only segment, yeah. No, it's really our only segment. Who is your fuck that guy? Well, my fuck that guy is someone who went and spoke at a church in Brooklyn over the past weekend.

And you would think, Andy, that's a nice thing. A guy went and spoke at a church. Why would you say such horrible things about a person who spoke at a church? And the answer to that question is because the guy in question is a guy named Andrew Cuomo, who used to be governor of this state. And he got up and said he was going to tell his truth. and said that he was taken down by, wait for it, cancel culture. No, no, no, no.

And it's just no. And then he ended his speech by saying, God isn't done with me yet, which I'm pretty sure is a threat to the people of New York. But the idea that this guy can get up there, I mean, go away. Like how are you not just going away? There is no reason for you to be in public ever again.

And that includes restaurants. There are a lot of delivery services that will deliver to wherever the hell it is you're living now. And you don't have to show your face in public literally for the rest of your life. And that would be a good thing for the people of New York and for humanity as a whole. Just go away. You're an inveterate sex pest. People died in nursing homes because of you. You're a horrible human being who treats people abysmally.

and you have absolutely no redeeming qualities. Other than that, I like you. Honestly, Molly, fuck that guy. Can I just say one thing? It's funny because... Because you were a long-time Cuomo defender, Molly? Well, I recanted. I was a one-time Cuomo defender, but I recanted...

I know. I know. We have forgiven you. We have forgiven you. I think it's interesting because I was reading this week that another terrible white... guy is also looking to make a comeback. Who is that? Anthony Wiener.

He is trying to make a comeback, the only person possibly worse than Andrew Cuomo. What kind of comeback is he trying to make? He's got a radio show with Curtis Slewa. Oh, well. And then there was a piece in some reputable paper. Oh, New York Magazine about him. That man, can't stop getting second chances. Do you want to know who my fuck that guy is?

I do, actually. I thought it was Anthony Weiner, but now I'm very curious. No, it is the worst dentist in Congress. You know what rhymes with dentists? White supremacist. Rentist. There's a terrible dentist in Congress. I've spent more time thinking about him than I would like. His name is Dr. Paul Gosar, DDS. He has now been censured by both Congress and Congress,

and other dentists. But I know you'll be shocked to hear that he has a past. A lot of white supremacist interactions. We thought he had just come to it later in life. But in fact, he is ideologically. He deeply sucks. I mean, I guess he is. No, he's still on his committee assignments and everything.

So, yeah, your Republican Party sucks. And I give him a hearty fuck that guy. Remember not that long ago when he and Marjorie Taylor Green spoke at that Nick Fuente's white supremacist conference, and Kevin McCarthy and other people said there's no place for this in the Republican Party, and then they never talked about it again or did anything to them. Yes, I seem to remember that. Well, Marjorie Taylor Green is at least not on her committee assignments, which is something. Yeah. And I haven't, I believe McCarthy has basically said that if they take the house back, that'll change. No, if they take the house back, I'm telling you,

there's a real chance you have a Jim Jordan as speaker, a Marjorie Taylor Green as, you know, Jardie Whip. I mean, you could have, the whole thing could go beyond crazy. I mean, there's no reason for it not to go. Nope. Completely insane. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on

your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh and our star-studded the Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.