The Daily Beast Podcast - Putin Will ‘Torture’ His Own People Before Stepping Down

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

The war in Ukraine has made Vladimir Putin one of the most hated figures in the world. But any attempt to remove him from office could unleash more violence inside Russia. Moisés Naím, author of The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century, tells Molly what that could look like in this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. Plus, Molly and co-host Andy Levy listen to a clip of Trump trying to “teach” Joe Biden about nuclear weapons, and they break down Sean Hannity’s “hard-on” for Ronald Reagan. 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 objective. 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. Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode, The New Abnormal. We're so excited to have you here. Today, we're going to talk to Moises Name, who's the author of The Revenge of Power, how autocrats are reinventing politics for the 21st century.

But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy, Molly John Fast, you guys ready to listen to some clips and have some fun? Let's do it. Fun is our middle name over here. So this is everyone's favorite former president offering Joe Biden some foreign policy advice on how to handle the war in Ukraine. Look, Biden, every time he gets up, he says they are a nuclear nation. He should say we are a nuclear nation. And, you know, I rebuilt our whole nuclear arsenal.

Stronger, bigger, better than ever before. It's better and it's bigger than Russia. He should say, we are a nuclear nation and we don't want war and we don't want to wipe out anything to do. and we don't want to wipe out Russia. There's like literally nothing he said there was true. It never is. It never is. Russia has more nuclear weapons than we do.

We don't have more than Russia. Not that it matters. I mean, we both have more than enough. But it's like he can't, like he can't even be honest and truthful ever. Like, why does he want Biden to say we are a nuclear power? Everyone knows we're a nuclear power. What's fascinating about that? this is like it seems like he feels a little bit like he could give him advice, you know,

like he has some advice to help Biden, but that's pretty deranged. Yeah. If you made a list of people you didn't want help from in a nuclear crisis, I think topping that list, it would probably be the guy who created Dilbert and then it would be Trump. Yeah, that guy is crazy, the Gilbert guy. Yeah, yeah, Scott Adams, whatever his name is. Yeah, not that guy. I think those would be my top two off the top of my head.

But yeah, it's just, why is anyone asking Trump what is it, what he would do? Do you remember that in previous centuries, you used to have presidents would never criticize current presidents. Right. They would never say, like, this is how you should do it. It was sort of known as something you don't do, but now, of course. everything is different. Yeah. We talked about this before.

Like the norms, the norms are gone. Right. Nobody's walking into cheers and, and shouting norms anymore. That's right. They're gone. Okay.

So, a woman who I think, Molly, you have some familiarity with one, Naomi Wolf. Oh, dear God. I got a heads up. This was coming. So.

She joined her friend Tucker to talk about the ongoing erosion. of our civil liberties. And this is what they had to say. He'll made fun of Naomi Wool for sounding paranoid a few years ago. No one does that anymore. She joins us tonight.

Amy Wool, thanks so much for coming on. Are you, just as... We make fun of her for being paranoid still. Everybody does. I mean, that's like, I guess Tucker feels he has to say that. You know, it's so interesting because Tucker is so careful about what he says and how he says it. Like, you'll listen to some of his...

I was actually listening to the show yesterday, and they published their transcripts on the Fox opinion side of the site. It's so careful about the way he words everything, but people are still making fun of Naomi Wolf would like to add. And I have a personal horse in this race because when I was about in my early 20s, I had all these children, and my mother loved Naomi Wolf, because Naomi Wolf was very famous at the time, and she used to take her on vacations that I couldn't go on

and spend a lot of time with Naomi Wolf, and Naomi was so famous, and she had written the beauty myth, and she was a feminist, whatever. And I got quite, I think the word is jealous and also extremely irritated because I felt that my mother was using Naomi Wolf to make me jealous, and my mother actually wrote about

in a book called Fear of Dying, where she talked about my rivalry with Naomi Wulf. So in my own way, as much as I hate to see someone spreading vaccine disinformation on television, and I know the effects of it, and I know how tragic it is, I'm happy to see her just completely crash and burn. And I feel that there's a vindication of everything I've ever believed in my life. I give her a hearty, fuck that guy. No, mom. Not the right segment, but you can have it for this.

I have nothing to add to that. You can't top that one. Okay. So another problematic woman on Fox News News, we have some comments from one, Laura Ingram. People are dying. Send them the planes that they need. They want Migs.

Get them the migs. Why don't you pay for them? Now, did he ever stop to think that more people could die if we send Ukraine migs? And I'm not talking about Russians. I mean, the truth is, like, Tucker's the most highly rated and Tucker's the most successful. But she's the scariest. Yeah, I think I know what you mean by that. I don't think she's saying anything super crazy here.

Like there are a lot of people who think that we should send them, well, Poland should send them, that they should be sent Migs. And there are a lot of people who think that that's not the best idea in the world. So, all right, I don't think she's off the reservation in this case. I don't know what that little you pay for it comment was about, really. Well, she's against defense spending, which is a radical move for a Fox News host to be against defense spending. But I'd like to see someone ask her that in an interview. Less money for Raytheon. I mean, here's the joke.

And I feel like this is a constant thing we should be talking about is that Biden, and again, this is neither here nor there. This is just the fact. Republican disinformation tells you again and again that Biden is weak on immigration and weak on military and weak on crime. He has done almost the same stuff that every president has done, you know, since Bill Clinton, which is same, almost the exact same policy, ended this one policy where unaccompanied minors can actually seek asylum. But ultimately, he has been extremely conservative, some might even say not great on the southern border.

He's been extremely conservative about, you know, our military budget is humongous. It's not going anywhere. Raytheon has nothing to worry about. That's for sure. They'll be able to pay those bonuses. The Department of the Interior has been letting them drill, baby drill. I mean, all of this Republican propaganda is based on nothing.

And this is way off the Laura Ingram clip subject, but this is why when people are like, well, you can't nominate Bernie because they'll call him a socialist. Oh, that's exactly what they're doing with Joe. They're calling Joe Biden a socialist. A communist. And he couldn't be any further. You know, he's not even a leftist. I mean, he's his moderate, centrist lib as it gets.

I mean, so lean into it. Yeah, I mean, or at least use it as proof that Russian disinformation is that. Right. Russian, I'm sorry, Republican disinformation is that. Yes. Same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

We now have a clip from another Fox News favorite, one Sean Hannity. Let's take a listen to this. I go back to Ronald Reagan. He provided, for example, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Stinger missiles. Well, that helped Afghanistan defeat the former Soviet Union in the 1980s. Reagan made that happen. Reagan also provided weaponry to the freedom fighters, the contra rebels in Nicaragua, to battle Danielle Nortega and the Sandinistas.

He was successful there. Reagan never put a single American boot on the ground. I love this quote so much. This is one of my favorite. I saw it yesterday, and I was like, Oh, yes. It was like, the brave men and women of the Mujahideem, who were actually,

wasn't that Rambo movie dedicated to the brave men and women of the Mujahideem? I believe it was. Yes. So that didn't end badly at all, arming the Mujahideem, because they didn't eventually. No, no, no, no. They defeated the Soviet Union, and then nothing happened after that. Right.

And Afghanistan, things have been great there ever since. Yeah. And then Contra, what happened with the Contras? I seem to remember the Iran Contras. I mean, yeah, that was great when Reagan was sending weapons to those guys. And that ended great too, right? Well, the funny thing is that he said that, you know, he armed the contras to take down. He said Danielle Nortega, but, you know, he obviously meant Ortega,

who I'm pretty sure is the leader of that country right now. So I'm not entirely sure how well that worked out. Although, to be fair, Ortega turned out to be not the leftist revolutionary that people on the left were hoping for. And he couldn't suck anymore. But that was an unbelievably, a historical sound bite. It was incredible stuff. And it's funny because it's like usually they just walk the edge to say stuff. Right. Like they'll say, well, you know, for example, I mean, actually, we had yesterday to Candice Owen saying that Ukraine never existed before 1970s, or something, which was, or 1982.

I mean, it was some kind of. I think it was the 80s, yeah. Yeah. But usually they sort of walk the edge where you go like, well, it doesn't sound right, but maybe, you know, maybe I'm misremembering this. but this was just like, and for Reagan, I mean, nobody even gets, you know, I guess Reagan is the only president they have that they can be proud. I mean, like they just, the hard on for Reagan will never go away. It's like permanent Viagra. But, like, a lot of times people, they'll say something and you have to like,

you have to look it up to make sure you know that they were wrong. Right. But in this case, it was just like, yeah, I don't have to look that one up. You know, that's, I can tell you off the top of my head, Sean, that, both those things you said, yeah, not even close to true. Yeah, yeah, the brave men and women of the Mujahideem. Yeah, incredible stuff, Sean Hannity. Keep it going, baby. Moise's name is the author of The Revenge of Power, how autocrats are reinventing politics for the 21st century.

Hi, welcome to the new abnormal. Happy to be chatting with you. Thanks for inviting me. So talk to me about how you decided to write the revenge of power, how autocrats are taking over. A decade ago, I published a book titled The End of Power, where I examined the forces that were fragmenting, dispersing, and weakening power around the world and in most sectors of economic and political activity. After 10 years, I have been monitoring what happened, and we saw a profound change in how power is acquired, used, and lost and abused. And so I decided that I needed to examine the forces that concentrate power. So my first book, The End of Power, was about the forces that

dispersed and weakened power, and this one is about the forces that concentrate power. And explain to us what those forces are. Power is being concentrated by a new group of autocrats of leaders that pretend to be or masquerade as Democrats, but in fact, are using the tools of democracy to undermine democracy and concentrate power in their hands and prolong, you know, non-limits to how long they stay in power. And they have a very stealthy, very effective, very brutal often way of doing it. And they concentrate power by using the toolkits that I call the three P's. Which are what?

Populism, polarization, and post-truth. Populism has always existed. It's all divide and conquer, except that in the 21st century it has acquired new potency. Divisions I've used to gain and retain power, making promises that people like to hear and behaving in certain ways in which ideology doesn't matter. Populism is often confused and thought about as an ideology, and it is not. It's a bag of tricks or strategies used to attain and retain and retain. power. And then polarization. We have seen all around the world how societies are dividing in a

bunch of cleavages, identities, interests, and there is a very fierce level of polarization. And all of that, of course, is amplified by the post-truth world in which we live where lies big and small are common and are used to distort reality at the service of these three-p dictators. So give us an example of one of those people. Think, for example, Victor Orban and the president of Hungary. He was democratically elected, but as soon as he got to power, he started undermining the checks and balances that define democracy. He, for example, took control of the National Assembly, the Congress, and managed to get the Congress to support all of his initiatives. And so, you know, for example, he has total control of the media, except that is not

through the state, but through quote-unquote investors that, and in fact, are proxies and cronies of the government. He controls the judiciary. He controls parliament. He controls the media. So for all practical purposes, he is an autocrat, except that he goes out of his way to try to make people think that he's a democrat. Hungary under him has all the trappings of democracy, but in fact is an autocracy. Right. Do you see that in? other countries? I saw it in the United States under Donald Trump. Donald Trump was also a master in using the three peas, the pea of populism, promising and dividing and polarization and polarizing the country and identifying wedges in society, bringing new wedges and creating

new divisions. And of course, he was a master manipulator of information, of lies of propaganda. Okay, so explain to us how we kind of come out of this. Well, it depends in which country you are, right? If you are in Russia, where Vladimir Putin is clearly using the three pieces to wield power and use it and keep it. It's quite different from the United States, where we still have an election coming, where we still have different options. It's very interesting to see how the supporters, Trump's supporters, are focusing on the infrastructure of elections in the electoral machinery. that ensures the integrity of elections and Greece access, and there is no voting, repression and all that.

So all that is also happening quite stealthily. It's very difficult for people, for normal citizens that are busy with their lives, to pay attention to all the very bureaucratic at times, very legalistic, very tricky ways in which they are altering the infrastructure of democracy in the United States. So say you spot this, what's your solution? How do you get out of it? No war has ever been war, no battle has ever been won before identifying it clearly. And I think we are still in the stage in the United States.

We see these kinds of tricks as just part of politics. This is not. This is not politics as usual. This is a direct threat to the democratic nature of the American system. So let's talk about Putin now. Putin has done these things. He's used these three P's to get into power. He's made it so there are no elections.

Once inflation continues and the markets are collapsing right now in Russia, how does someone who runs as a populist who's no longer popular continue on? With repression, with using the tools of repression of the state, it's very interesting how these three P dictators stage elections all the time, including Putin. As you know, democracy around the world has been in a recession. They're drilling the number of countries that are mostly democratic. And yet at the same time that democracy is dwindling, elections are booming.

There are elections all the time around the world, about everything and about everyone, the president, the members of Congress, the judiciary, state and local authorities. So how do you reconcile the fact that democracy is declining? and elections are booming, including in Russia by Putin, that he stages election. Even everyone knows that they are tricked. Well, the explanation has to do with legitimacy. They just need to legitimize their regime. And as you said, Russia and Russia's economy is not going to be in a very good situation in years to come.

And when these populists, these three P dictators end up having a very bad economy that brings people to the streets and there is a widespread protest. As we have seen in Venezuela, as we have seen in Iran, they just repress the protesters and it becomes very risky and very dangerous to be an opponent of the regime. So you think they kill more people? I mean, what does that look like? More oppression? Looks like what we have seen in some of the footage from Russia, you know,

thousands of people being detained. that were streets protesting the war. We have seen it in Iran when, again, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to reclaim an election that was stolen by the mullahs, by the Ayatollahs. You saw it in Latin America. So they essentially repress. You know, they use the repressive capacity of the state to detain, very often to torture and sometimes to kill, as we have seen in Russia.

How do countries go back to democracy? I mean, what are the things they can do? First, recognize there's an emergency. There's a democratic emergency. We have to deal with a new set of dictators that are playing the game in a different way. They are not on your face, but they have a bag of tricks that is very stealthy and very effective, and that allows them to pretend to be Democrats. But then there is no solution than participation, that paying attention, that understanding,

that understanding that living in a democracy does not just require to go to vote once every four or five years. You need civic education and understanding what are the alternatives to democracy and understanding how we need to be better educated and more savvy consumers of the disinformation that circulates in the web. And being more active in terms of understanding how to protect democracy and how, freedom. It has to be a fundamental, non-negotiable value. I just want to push down on that for a minute. So what would that look like in real terms? Participating in the political process, being better informed, being more astute in the usage of the new social media, not believing everything and not resending and retweeting and repeating phrases that may look interesting or appealing in social.

media without really checking what's the source and how truth they are, being less gullible in terms of not believing the lies that these leaders use. How do you do that? I understand what you're saying, but it strikes me that we're a misinformation problem, a disinformation problem, right? We have the platforms like Facebook where you're getting pictures from 2018 and information from R-T and if there's no government regulation of this, how do consumers know what to consume? Well, two things. First, you would be surprised at the percentage of Americans that are not engaged,

that you cannot take for granted that they pay attention or care about the details of democracy that we're discussing or about the nature of the forces that are shaping democracy nowadays. So there is a level of engagement or a level of disengagement or a level of anti-politics, just believing that everything that has to do with politics is crooked, corrupt, harmful to the nation, but they don't care. They're too busy surviving and living their lives to also become active participants. But then there are millions of Americans that are not informed of exactly how their government is functioning and what are the political dynamics there.

The second point you mentioned is a very good one, and that is consumer protection. We have had in the United States for many years government agencies that protect consumers from bad medicines, toxic medicines, bad food or bad products. What we need now is consumer protection for the digital consumer, the person that is on the web and is the victim of all kinds of manipulations, bad influences, and distinctions. Do you see that coming down the pipe? I do. I believe that we will move.

You know, some of these things will never disappear. We will always have bad information on the web and so on. But I believe that on the pipeline are technologies and political changes and new legal ways that will make it harder for those that abuse the Internet and trick the digital consumers. Oh, I hope so. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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