The Daily Beast Podcast - Putin’s Paranoid, Isolated and Trying to Bluff His Way Through

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

In a jam-packed new episode of The New Abormal, co-host Molly Jong-Fast rips into the “contingent of very stupid Republican Congresspeople” who don’t want the U.S. aiding Ukraine before building a border wall here, which makes sense since “the country of Mexico is shelling, Texas and they're using cluster bombs and stud missiles—Oh wait… There is no war at our Southern border, but no one has told Rep. Doug Collins.” Plus, Melissa Moss of the 65 Project explains how that was “set up to protect democracy; by holding accountable lawyers who bring bogus lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results” to account, and breaks down the three sorts of lawyers her group is going after. And the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols considers Putin: "This guy is not a good strategist. He blunders into things… and bluffs his way out, or tries to murder his way out. I don't know how this ends, if he were the strategist that everybody thinks he is, he would find an off-ramp.” 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 Info. 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. What a great episode we have today. Melissa Moss of the 65 Project is going to talk to us about holding accountable the forces behind the stop-the-steel movement. Then we'll talk to Tom Nichols, who writes the Peacefield newsletter at the Atlantic, is the author of our own worst enemy, and he's going to talk to us about the conflict in the Ukraine.

But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. Did you know? I can't even pretend to say it because it's so stupid, but there is a contingent of very stupid Republican congresspeople and also pundits, if you could call it that, who are extremely mad about sending aid to Ukraine. They're very mad because they say Republicans agree to spend $14 billion to defend Ukraine,

but they refused to give $4 billion to defend our border. Oh, it's the J.D. Vance line. And Pizza Jack is in there, too. You know, it's always good. The government found $14 billion for a foreign war but couldn't fund the border wall or basic infrastructure upgrades. I mean, infrastructure, worst person you know, right, meme, like, but they did, we just did pass an enormous infrastructure bill. And then at the bottom of it, Pizza Jack, you'll know Jack Pesobiac is a far right influencer, most famous for pushing. Pizagate and McCrone leaks, if you ever wondered at the bottom of the tree, he says,

you're being played. They love to say that. The country of Mexico is shelling, Texas. Yes. So, and they're using cluster bombs and scud missiles. Oh, wait. Oh, wait. So, wait, so they didn't just bomb the University of Texas at El Paso Hospital?

No. I've got to stop reading Gateway Pundit. Exactly. There is no war at our southern border, but no one has told Representative Doug Collins, y'all know we already have the southern border wall material already paid for it. It's just sitting down there on the border. Let me repeat, the border wall material is already there, all caps. We should use it to build houses for people.

Or anything. Maybe we can send it to Ukraine. If you drop border wall material from the air, you can do a lot of damage. Yes, we should drop that. Yeah, kinetic bombs. Yeah, to stop the war with Mexico. Right. I'm saying give it to Ukraine.

Oh, Jesus, but, you know, so it is a fascinating discovery that the far right has decided that they will not fund Ukraine until they get more money to build a border wall to pursue. us Americans from Mexico? Well, look, I mean, this is part of like sort of a larger picture where the right is sort of, they're a little confused by the state of the world as it actually is, as opposed to how they had been describing it for the past, you know, six years or whatever, where Putin was a good guy and the kind of guy we should look up to. And now they're doing their best, you know, carnival contortioning. act to try to pretend like they never said all of that. And, you know, some of them have come fully

around and they realize what everyone else knew all along that Putin is a thug. And others, they're not anti-Putin. They're anti-Putin. Like, they'll do a lot of blaming America for this war. Right. And saying that, well, have Putin had tried to get Mexico to join the Russia, we wouldn't stand for it as if they're exactly the same things. And as if Putin, like, they also want to pretend that Russia doesn't have NATO members already on Russia's border. Like, this is some kind of new thing, which it's absolutely not. But they're just, the contortions are unbelievable.

Then you go all the way to Madison Cothorn, who I have to say, Molly, I think, and we talked about this once before, you know, your, Louis Gomer to you was always the dumbest member of Congress. And I got to say, it's a tight race. It is a very tight race. We got Thomas Massey who went to MIT spreading Russian propaganda today. It's a tight, tight race to the bottom. But I just want to, I want to say that I think we're finding ourselves in a situation where the far right has been so pro-Pooten.

And now there's a calculus, right? How much do American people watch Putin murdering civilians and bombing hospitals before? they go, like, that guy was Donald Trump's best friend. Right. Like, Donald Trump love that guy. Like, when did they say, like, oh, that maybe Donald Trump is not such a good guy? No, I think that's exactly right. And we now have, like, former Trump officials like Stephanie Grisham going out there on the

view and basically doing apology tours. And part of that apology tour is letting everyone know that Trump indeed both sort of loved and feared Putin and sort of looked up to him. And as she put it, you know, he was sort of admiring of the fact that Putin could just kill his enemies. And, you know, this is the guy who is still to this day, basically the head of the Republican Party. And Putin is the guy he worship, the guy who is now behind the bombing of hospitals and then trying to pretend that they're false flags or fake news and blaming the Ukrainians for the bombings of their own hospitals. It puts the GOP, in a tough spot because as you say, what they're counting on is that nobody will remember this

stuff. And we've talked about this before. They'll get away with it with some people. There's no doubt about that, you know, the same people who can watch Tucker Carlson go from, why should I be, you know, why should I hate Putin one night to like later that week being like, well, Putin is clearly an evil man. And they, and they can just somehow not along with this as they watch him do that. They'll keep those people, but it's always icky to talk about politics in the middle of hospitals being bombed. But it is a problem for them. And part of it's going to be Democrats need to pound this, you know, constantly, this message. Well, Democrats are famously good at messaging, so that should be. Yes, no, absolutely. They're famously good at staying on message and really

communicating. And not fighting with each other. Yeah, perhaps someone can do another state of the union address, a rebuttal. Yeah. And then you've got like, again, you've got like Madison Cawthorne who gave a speech to, you know, the people he's trying to get to reelect him. And he said, his quote was, remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies. And he called Zelensky himself a thug. So he's basically, he's calling Zelensky a woke thug, which is an interesting turn of phrase. And as we discussed earlier. It's a very good name for a white rapper. But the Republicans, as dumb as people like Madison

Cawthorne are, they get that word woke in there every time. And they use it. They use it as trigger words. And as you were saying, Molly, that's what the Democrats need to do with regard to pushing this message that this party was unapologetically pro- Putin right up until the troops moved into Ukraine. And even after that, right? I mean, Saturday. Even after that, yes. Yeah, it was like Putin, you have to admit Putin's a genius. You have to hand it to him. I mean, you don't have to hand it to him.

You certainly don't. You never have to hand it to Vladimir. No. And then you had Don Jr., you know, my dad was really tough. I mean, that's the other scrambling message is that they're also members of the Republican Party who are like, if Trump had been president, this never would have happened. Which is true because Trump would have been like, you want Ukraine, you have Ukraine. I don't care. Where is it?

I can't find it on a map. Is it in Europe? Is it in Russia? Maybe it's part of Russia already. I mean, I don't think anyone, even the biggest Trump be sick of hand, can say with a stray face that they think Trump would have held Vladimir Putin to account. I mean, it's preposterous. It's pretty clear that I think we've talked about this, the reason, you know, that they keep saying, well, this didn't happen under President Trump. And it's like, well, no, because Trump was, you know, openly talking.

talking about pulling out of NATO and stuff like that. And if you're Vladimir Putin, you don't want to do anything to upset that. So you just kind of sit back and let Trump destroy NATO by himself and make things even easier for Putin, you know, when he does decide he wants to go into Ukraine or wherever else he wants to go into. That stuff is just so obvious. But instead, you get, well, it didn't happen when he was president. But you know what is interesting is like, I mean, NATO was sort of like, why do we even have this thing? I mean, during the Trump and Mr. he'd rail against NATO and most people would be like, NATO still exists, you know. And as soon as Vladimir Putin rolled into Ukraine, it was like countries that hadn't been interested in NATO ever.

We're like, hmm, you saw some of these Nordic countries were like, oh, you know. Let's go. Maybe we should join. Yeah. Finland. Finland, yeah. Yeah. But the thing that really is apparent is that Europe is very, you know, you're not.

Europe and the United States and Canada and Mexico, even though they're bombing us. Just kidding. They're not really bombing us. But, you know, all these countries are really committed to this not being okay. Like, I feel like this is not a situation. Putin doesn't find himself in a situation where some countries are like, well, you know, he's a good guy. He means, well, like, you know, NATO is pretty together. There's a lot of, I really do see.

There's a huge sense in Europe and the United States. We're all in this together and we got to stop this. And I think some of that's because Zelensky's been very, very smart about how he's messaged. And he keeps saying, like, this is Putin's stop on the way to Poland. Like, this is his stop on the way to Moldova. Like, this doesn't end with us. And whether or not that's true, who cares? Like, that's a pretty big risk.

Yeah. No, and I completely agree with you. Like Zelensky has been amazing as a messenger. and I don't want to discount his personal bravery in staying there because that is a fact. And taking video from his office. Yeah. But he also, along with that, is showing that he's sort of an amazing politician and he's taking full political advantage of the situation, as he should be.

I'm not denigrating that at all. But like you said, his messaging has been really, really strong. Look, obviously there are things, I mean, he really wants a no-fly zone, which is something that we just probably can't do, at least not, you know, not at this point. But his messaging, he has been on point. And I do completely agree with you, Molly, that I think a lot of what we're seeing in terms of the, you know, the unity from the European nations along with us and Canada and most of the northern hemisphere, at least China accepted. A lot of that is due to how compelling a figure he has become. Just right place, right time. I hate to say that,

he's in physical danger, but in terms of for the world, it may well be, you know, right place, right time for the world that he was the guy in charge and not someone who couldn't get on a camera and know how to know how to play to it and know what to say and stuff like that. So, you know, I do think that he gets a lot of the credit for this. Yeah, I think that's right. And, I mean, I think that what they've done, which has been amazing, is that there is a lot of Russian propaganda and Zerlinsky went in there early. But, you know, we're seeing again, like with the bombing of that hospital yesterday, they bombed a maternity hospital. We don't really know what the

casualties are, but Zerlinsky said there were children in the rubble. We don't know. But there certainly are pictures of enormous holes and women with bloody faces. And one of these pictures, which is particularly haunting of this woman with a bloody face wrapped in a blanket, and then the Russian, you know, the Russian embassy is already saying, well, she was a beauty blogger, and this is a setup. And, you know, so they're already kind of doing their usual thing. Like, they bombed their own hospital, which, again, is like what we saw them do in Syria and what we saw them do in Crimea, which is, you know, remember, they were saying the, the, you know, the resistance is gassing its own people. Like, people don't gas their own people. Like, this is just sheer Russian propaganda.

and it has to be treated as such. Yeah, and it's also interesting. I mean, look, propaganda has always been a part of war and on all sides. I mean, the quote-unquote good guys and the quote-unquote bad guys. But the Russians are really good at it. I might argue that, as you just said, they're not really good at it right now because really nobody believes anything they're saying with the possible exceptions of some useful idiots on the right here. Right. I was going to say, like Thomas Massey.

Greenwald. Yeah, excuse me. But it also is interesting that this is sort of a, like he's basically saying, they're basically saying like the woman you're talking about that she's a crisis actor. And it's just interesting to see how it mirrors a lot of the far right stuff here with the, you know, the fake news. That's fake news and that's a false flag. And, you know, it was, anti-fob was behind the capital, storming the capital. And they're like things that, you know, anyone with a lick of sense looks at and says, that's just the dumbest thing I've ever heard in the world.

But, you know, look, it gets through to some people, and the Russian stuff probably internally affects some people. And they, you know, there are people who will just believe anything their government says in every country. But anyway, so I just, you know, it's just interesting to me how it, like the language they're using. A lot of the language we're seeing from the Russians, like they're talking about how they're being canceled. They're talking about crisis actors. They're basically mirroring the American right in how they talk. And I find that absolutely fascinating. And I feel like it means something, but I guess we can't really say what that might be.

Yeah, I would never want to make a supposition that just because the Russian oligarchs and Putin are using the same language and wording that the Trump Republicans are, that there's some connections, certainly not. You can't say that on the podcast. Melissa Moss is a founder of the 65 project. Welcome to the new abnormal Melissa Moss. Thank you. We're so excited to have you here, and I want to talk to you about the 65 project. Explain to our listeners what it is. So in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump allied lawyers filed 65 lawsuits across the swing states to overturn legitimate election results.

And the finding of the assertions were baseless and they were riddled with false statements. And Republican and Democratic appointed judges dismissed the lawsuits. But the success in the courtroom wasn't the only objective. What those lawyers wanted to do who filed those claims is to try to discredit and disrupt our free and fair elections. And as you know, with the big lie being believed by so many people, they made a lot of progress. But the 65 project has been set up to protect democracy and to protect the threat posed through the legal system by holding accountable lawyers who bring bogus lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results. Because there really is no government function for this. No, and it's all a little tricky in that these claims get filed with local bar associations,

and they are the ones who police their own members. We have filed 10 ethics complaints against the lawyers who supported sabotaging legitimate election results. And to date, we are focusing on the people who there were 80, I think 84 fake election. Mali, and five of them were lawyers. A couple of them for the reasons not worth going into other people who also filed bogus claims. And then insurrectionists. We have filed claims against a couple of the insurrectionists who were lawyers as well. The issues that we're dealing with are really straightforward. When you become a lawyer, you take a code of conduct. You file, you raise your hand and you say, I'm going to tell the truth in court. And I'm going to make sure that the documents I submit in court are truthful. And all of these people seem to have knowingly submitted documents that were not truthful. And they use the court system and their legal training to disrupt a free and fair election. So how do you prove that? We've had some precedents so far that has been terrific, which was in

Michigan, a court case that was filed, and that has already been settled. And that's where Sidney Powell and Lynn Wood and others had their claims reviewed and were riddled with falsehoods. You should know a lot of the claims that were submitted of the 65 were cookie cutters. And they had the same information. I mean, among the things we've learned, like in Michigan, I believe they identified a city in Michigan that doesn't exist. Some of the stuff was that stopping. We're really proud of the people we have helping us with this, Molly. We are actually, we have engaged with and are working with the lawyers who were successful in filing that suit in Michigan.

Also, you know, we're not making this political. This is a really a truly bipartisan effort. We have on our board of advisors the former Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court. court, who was also the president of the conference of the chief justices of the United States. We have a fabulous woman named Roberta Ramos, who was the first woman president of the ABA, American Bar Association. And we have one of the top ethics law professors in the country, a woman named Renee Jefferson. So on top of that, we have two very high-profile Republicans. One of them is Paul Rosenzweig, who has been part of the Federalist Society and as a well-known Republican.

And we are just adding to our Board of Advisors, Stuart Gerson, who was actually the acting Attorney General of the United States for the first six months of the Clinton administration. So it's very bipartisan. It's not, oh, and of course Tom Dashel, who's been known for trying to set up. up a lot of really important bipartisan groups for senators of both parties. So we've made every effort to keep this professional, high level, and bipartisan. Is this very unusual to go after lawyers like this? Or is there sort of a precedent for this? Well, there's certainly precedent. I don't think people have done it with the focus that we're doing. But of course, no one ever had this concerted effort to try to overturn a presidential election.

by filing so many false lawsuits before. So, yeah, it's probably unprecedented, but no one's ever tried to stop an election, a free and fair election before. This will be the only way these people are held accountable, right? Because otherwise they just walk into the sunset, pay some fees, and continue on the next time Trump runs for office. You're absolutely right.

And you're smart to pick up on a key part of what we're doing, which is this isn't just about looking. at 2020, it's about looking to the future and trying to act as a deterrent to both these people and other lawyers who think they can just go into court and file bogus claims and not being held accountable. This is holding lawyers who take this oath accountable for their misdeeds and trying to make sure it doesn't happen in 2022 and certainly in 2024. Give me a sort of a little bit of a landscape. Like the lawyers you're looking at are people, like Clea Mitchell, like Eastman?

There have been already some very serious claims filed against John Eastman. So we're not trying to jump on and do that one as well. There's a great group called Lawyers Defending American Democracy who have filed claims against John Eastman in California. But yes, you're right. So think of it as sort of three buckets to start, which are Trump's inner legal circle, indirectness. So Trump's interlegal circle, let's just go through this, is like Rudy Giuliani.

Right. But once again, his license has been suspended, Molly. Yes. Yeah. Right. So, but Jenna Ellis and Cleena Mitchell and those guys. Yes. And so once again, we're only going after lawyers. We're not going after private citizens. So that's the first bucket. And then the second bucket is the insurrectionist. Correct. And that's like who? William Calhue, who, who has. been charged with participating in the January 6th insurrection and Paul Davis. Those are two lawyers who, same thing, took the code, held their hand up, swore to upheld the Constitution, and violated it by filing bogus lawsuits. And then the third bucket is what? The fake electors. Oh, yes. Can you talk to us about the fake electors? Because I feel like I read a lot about that, but sometimes my eyes glaze over. Can you explain to our,

listeners. I'll do my best. I'm not a lawyer, by the way. Neither am I. And neither is Jesse. It's all good. But here's what we know. We know right from wrong. And we know that we trust that when people go into a court of law, that the lawyers there might have good arguments, but they're not going to lie, right? Right. And so we're hoping that we can hold people's feet to the fire that make sure lawyers are not knowingly making false statements of material fact or law. So what happened with the fake electors, there were 84 people across the United States. I think that's the right number who represented that they were actual legal electors in key states who submitted these false documents. Of those, five of them were lawyers. The five who were lawyers are the ones that were focused on. And so, you know, you and I couldn't raise our hands and just all of a sudden decide to say, well, we're going to be a

fake elector and we're going to make a determination that we can overturn the election results in a state because we've been empowered to do so, especially when we had not been empowered to do so. So it's really holding people accountable for bad behavior. Can you explain a little bit about how the fake electors work? Well, they were just normal citizens, 84 normal citizens, five of them lawyers, who filed papers saying that they had indeed been empowered when they hadn't been. And so it was made up, right? They made it up that they were a true elector and that they had the power to stop and overturn

the election in their states. Wow. That's pretty wild stuff. And the fake electors are these five lawyers, right? Of the 84 fake electors across the United States, we've identified five of them to be practicing lawyers, yes. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. Tell me how does this work now? Well, part of what is the challenge of all this is these claims now go into the local bar association where these people are registered to practice law. And the bar ethics committees, take up these claims and have to make a determination on them. The difference, Molly, and a lot of

what we're doing is that becomes a very private process within the bar associations, as it should be. It's dealing with somebody's liability. Are they going to get disbarred? Are they going to get suspended? Are they going to get fined? And also, by the way, one of the outcomes, which happened in Michigan, are they going to be asked to pay the legal fees that the state or city incurred as a result of these bogus claims? That's another issue that comes up. The ethics committees locally have to make that determination. But what we hope to be able to do is to kind of keep a spotlight in the key states where we know they might be trying to look at more mischief for 2022 and 2024. And we'll be doing that through ads and things within the local bar association, magazines,

the ABA magazines, etc. To remind other lawyers that if you engage in behavior that is false and bogus, there are people watching you, and there are people who will hold you accountable for that behavior. It's fascinating. That was great. Really interesting. Thank you so much, Melissa. Molly, thank you for keeping truth alive.

Well, let's try. We're trying. Tom Nichols is the writer of the Peacefield newsletter at the Atlantic and the author of Our Own Worst Enemy. Welcome, Tom Nichols to the new abnormal. Thank you, Molly. Good to be with you, which we were talking about something more fun. We were just talking about less World War III, more cultural or whatever. We're just talking about how hard it is to talk about this Ukraine invasion. do see it because the thing is, like, the only person who knows how this ends is Vladimir Putin. I don't think he knows where this ends. I think people make this assumption that Putin is some sort of

strategic genius. And I was really glad to see people like Julia Yafi and others. And years ago, Lawrence Friedman, very eminent British strategist, you know, saying, this guy is not a good strategist. He blunders into things. And then he kind of, he blunders in and bluffs his way out or tries to murder his way out. I don't know how this ends. If he were the strategist that everybody thinks he is, he would find an off-ramp. He would say, okay, you know, I've achieved my goals. The Donbass, you know, is now part of Russia. Crimea is now part of Russia. Ukraine will never join NATO, no matter what they say. I'm going to use some Russian trip, blah, blah, blah. But I'm very worried about the reports that he's going to try and up the ante by using chemical weapons. Because now

he has a problem at home. There are thousands of people in jail. There are millions of Russians who are looking at each other saying, what the hell were you doing? The Russian military apparently is having some serious morale trouble because they don't want to kill their brothers and sisters. So in that circumstance, maybe he would try to create a false flag chemical attack to say, well, you see, now I'm fighting for the soul of Russia. I mean, he's improvising. And when you have a paranoid, isolated, not very bright guy improvising, bad things can happen. And, you know, I think we have to really wonder about the people around him and when they're going to say enough's enough. Do you think that's how this ends, though? I mean, I feel like that's sort of the best case scenario

for how this ends. You know, I shouldn't predict anything because if one, there's one thing Russia experts have learned. It's predicting what happens in Moscow going all the way back to 1985 is probably a risky business. One of my old professors saying there's absolutely no chance the Soviet Union breaks apart. I never called him back on that one. I wanted to check back with them. But I don't think it ends with some kind of coup unless, let me put it this way. If something happens in Moscow where Putin is somehow removed, then you will know that something really terrible was about to happen. I don't think. that's the case. I think he kind of ramps this down and tries to stay in power because the people

around him want to stay in power. And I don't know, he finds some way to declare victory here, maybe partitioning the country. Maybe there's a Ukrainian government in exile or Ukrainian government in a rump Ukraine in LeVov or something. I don't know. But there's also the possibility that if he thinks his personal survival is threatened, he will go to extreme measures. Remember, his great fear in life is being the Russian version of Gaddafi. Right. You know, I mean, if he had never invaded Ukraine, we wouldn't be in this position today, right? I mean, he just could have kept on indefinitely. Well, isn't that the irony of paranoid dictators is that they bring about the thing that they fear the most? I've been saying now that the Russian high watermark

of the post-Soviet era, the height of Russian power and influence, is now in the rearview mirror. of about a month ago. Yeah. It's over. I mean, it's Russia, no matter what happen, I mean, even if we avoid a world war over this, Russia is never going to be as powerful as Russia was a month ago. And I don't know if they know that. I don't know if they understand it. I don't know if Putin understands it. I think there are smart people around Putin who totally get that. But, you know, this constant search for security, he could have lived to a ripe old age with, you know, being the richest man in the world and controlling a gigantic country, but he's also been listening to some real cooks around him about, you know, the unity of the Russian people and the Orthodox

church and, you know, all that stuff. Who do you think that is? I think it's right-wing priests and nationalists. Okay. You know, I mean, I'm, it paints, I've, I've been pointing this out more because I don't want. Because you're Greek or aren't you? Yes, I am. Yeah, okay. Can you explain this because I've read about it? I don't want people to think I'm a Russifo. or an enemy of the Orthodox Church. These are right. And I actually have great affection for Russia. And you're Greek Orthodox, which is an enemy.

It's the same religion, yes. Which makes it more painful because this is a fratricidal war. I've read some reporting that, you know, that there's sort of a holy war aspect to this, too, that hasn't been talked about as much. Absolutely. And let me just, you know, reach out and, you know, shame the people on the American right. The patriarch in Moscow who gave a speech on, you know, why this was. was such a good idea, definitely phrased it in culture war terms that were meant to resonate with the American right. Talking about, you know, gay pride parades. Look, let me tell you something.

Across most of Russia, gay pride parades are not a big deal. Not a lot of them. Yeah. That was an attempt to reach out to that whole, you know, kind of American and European nationalist right to say, we are doing the Lord's work here. Meanwhile, the people that are conducting this war have multiple families. They're bigamists, adulterers, kids, you know, scattered around Western Europe, living the wealthy high life. I mean, they are the most decadent, rich class that you could ever hope to find. But apparently, the gays are the big problem. I read about the polygamy that a bunch of these oligarchs have two families. At least, yes. Yeah. It's interesting what you're saying, because I wanted to get to the American right. I read a very good. good op-ed in the, from the editorial board of the Washington Post, where they talked about how this is very destabilizing for the far right. And I actually wrote in our newsletter, the newsletter that you and I, with both newsletter contributors for the Atlantic. And I wrote about how this is

actually a moment where there's very high support for Ukraine and the American right is sort of fumbling on how to message. And, you know, I think they will eventually come back to pro-Pudin, but for now, they're more on the side of sort of normal, like, humanitarian disasters are actually bad. I'm not sure I agree with you, Molly, that they're going to come back. I hope not. There's a little glimmer in all this for me, you know, again, assuming this doesn't turn into a bigger war than it already is. You know, our Atlantic colleague, David Frum, pointed out that Putin has undone, he has done more damage to Russia than any leader since Nicholas II. He has unraveled 25 years of economic development.

And I would add to that that he's unraveled, you know, at least 20 years of his own diplomacy. I mean, he had gotten the world comfortable with him being him. They sort of, you know, we did business with him. People traveled to Russia. They bought the Russians traveled to the West. They bought property. They did all the things they do. But he, what he has done, and I keep thinking back, because I'm old enough to remember,

the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where suddenly, you know, Jimmy Carter began, and I always do this impression for my students and my Cold War course, Jimmy Carter begins in 1977 with a speech at Notre Dame where he says, Americans, having an anodontapha, a communism. And, you know, like, we have to, you know, like we have to chill it with that. And by, and then 19, by 1979, with the Soviets invading Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter's like, we're going to build stealth bombers and trident missiles and MX. You know, I mean, the Russians have the ability. They are the most self-defeat. I shouldn't say the Russians. The Kremlin is like this sort of field that generates stupid decisions in anybody who lives there. And so I think the American right, to go back to your point,

this is so blatant. This is so much in the kind of Afghanistan moment that I'm really heartened to know that as disappointed and as angry as I've been with so many voters, who seem to care about nothing, that even Republican voters have a better sort of moral orientation on this than what our friend Charlie Sykes calls the entertainment wing of the GOP, and certainly more than the hollow opportunistic moral vacuums that are the elected GOP. Yeah, I mean, you're seeing, I mean, I was watching C-SPAN just now, And I was watching Tom Cotton, who I'm no fan of scream at the, you know, the DOD because they're, why are these Migs not getting to Ukraine?

So, I mean, clearly, there are people in this Republican elected sphere that are very much not pro-Pooten. I'm going to pull you back there a little bit there, a little missing on the Tom Cotton Love. No, I mean, I'm not a fan at all. But it was, he wouldn't be saying it unless he thought that the political landscape would support that. Well, except with guys like Cotton, and you're seeing it also with some of these kind of right-wing think tankers, everybody's auditioning. There are a whole bunch of people on the right who are coming out and saying, I'm, okay, you know, this is my redemption. I know I supported Trump and I know, you know, I stood there after Helsinki and I sucked it up.

But now this war, I am going to be reborn and I'm going to, you know, sort of launder myself through this war to say, look at me, I'm really a hawk. I was conservative all along. And I think a lot of that is just plain bullshit. I think that they're doing it. You know, for example, I think a lot of the people calling for a no-fly zone, and I will pointedly exclude some of the people I think really believe in it. I think I disagree, for example, with Gary Kasparov about this, but I think Gary's absolutely sincere about it. Oh, completely, yes. But I think that there are other people calling for this stuff who are saying, you know, it's a cost-free position to take.

Right, because you know they'll never do it. Because you know they're never going to do it. You know that 30 NATO countries are never going to agree to go to war in the era over Russia. And so you can get out there and there's a kind of a frozen cynicism to this of saying, look, I know this war is going to end. Everything's going to be okay. And I'm already planning out my career a year from now where I can say, well, you know, I was a big important conservative person arguing for a no-fly zone. It was all those weak Democrats who wouldn't let me go out there and kick Putin's ass. And I think, you know, this is not a time.

I'm just going to vent here for a second, Molly. This is not a time for people to get out there and be auditioning for jobs. This is a time to be as serious as a fucking heart attack. This is a time. And I don't mean, you know, we can't joke. We can't have occasional laugh. We can't, you know, black humor having studied nuclear stuff for most of my career, you know, little dark humor is the only way to get through dealing with that stuff. But my God, you know, for people to say, well, you know, let's do a partial no-fly zone and let's set up a, you know, a line of, oh my God, you know, it's like we get it. You're looking for a job. You understand. But, you know, this is a time for serious people to propose serious things and not for you to, you know, wave your goddamn resume around. Sorry, was I not clear how I felt about all that? Was I just tell us how you really feel. No, I think that's good. And I'm.

I think it's important, I'm no fan of Tom Cotton, trust me, but it's important to talk about the many machinations that are going on because obviously there's a lot happening behind the scenes. But I wanted to ask you about the nuclear issue. This seems to me like Ukraine has, I think, between five and seven nuclear power plant. They're enormous. I think they're like 15. Okay, but there are big ones. So there have a lot of nukely, a lot of nukes. There is fighting and supposedly I think that Chernobyl has been captured by the Russians and that people are working at gunpoint to keep it going.

I mean, this seems like there could be unintended consequences. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I'm kind of curious to see what happens with the, there's a meeting in Turkey as we're recording this. The Russians, the Ukrainians, and the IAEA are going to meet. But look, one thing to bear in mind about this is that whatever Putin may be thinking, if there is some kind of nuclear accident in Ukraine, it blows into Russia. Yeah. And that's the last thing he needs. So my guess is what the Russians are doing is, again, they're improvising. Let me back up and say, try to see this war the way Putin thought it was going to go, right? He marches in. The Ukrainians all pee themselves. Zelensky screams and flees.

the country, you know, there is this great shame. The Ukrainian army lays down its weapons. Ukrainian women dance in the streets. Right. Throwing flowers in front of the Russian men. And then it's over. So now, because it's not over and because this whole thing has gone to shit, they've got improvised. It's like, wow, okay. So I guess we're going to have to start taking cities and holding them and holding their infrastructure. And I think that's what's going on. As the Russians, look, if the Russians wanted to cause meltdowns, they could have done it all any more, but they weren't. Right. They could do it in their own, right. I mean, they could have shelled Zaparajja.

I'm not like giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt here. I'm saying they are not suicidally insane to try to melt down a nuclear plant that's going to kill all the Russian forces in the area and then blow into Russia. Because, you know, remember, Putin is desperately trying to hide what he's doing from the Russian people. If a bunch of people start getting radiation sickness in central Russia, they're going to notice. I want you just to weigh in on this because it seems like the Russian, army, I mean, we were talking about this just now, but they are much less good than even Putin thought. They're much less good than all of us thought. Right. But I mean, Putin, I think, thought they would do better than they have. Right. So there's a, there's a backstory to this,

which is that the defense minister is a very interesting guy named Shuegu, which is an unusual and he's not actually an ethnic Russian. He's a Tuven. He's from the, he's from Asia. Shoygu is the only guy that has been in the Kremlin without interruption since the fall of the Soviet Union. He worked for Yeltsin. I mean, he's been, he is the only member of Putin's cabinet who has been there for 31 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. So this guy's a survivor. He's very wily. He's very smart, right?

So he comes in and he says, especially after the abysmal performance in Georgia. And he says, okay, I got. this. I'm going to modernize this military. I'm going to get these sons of bitches into shape. There's one of my favorite stories about him, and there aren't that many, but I just came across this one about a month ago. He's never been in the military, by the way. So he takes over his defense minister, and he's walking through the general staff where guys there, the colonels who work there usually wear suits instead of uniforms. And he put out the word, I want everybody in uniform. And he runs into a guy in the hallway in a suit, and he balls him out and tells

to report for duty in Siberia a week later. Now, I guess the colonel's connection saved him, but this was how he approached the job, right? I'm going to kick ass and take names, and we're going to get this, you know, this army back up and running it in shape. The problem is that apparently a lot of the money that was supposed to do that ended up buying, you know, yachts and just kind of went out the window, but also you can spend a lot of money on the military and you can buy these really cool sukoy jets that can do like the cobra spin at the Paris Air Show. Right. But that's not really a good combat maneuver, okay?

That's not, that doesn't really help you if your pilots are flying so little hours that they wouldn't even qualify for NATO to be in the cockpit in a NATO country. Their officer corps is terrible. Their NCOs, they're kind of, you know, sergeants and what we think of as that kind of people who really run the military every day. They're terrible. They're stuck still with a big conscript system, even though they've tried to go to contracts.

And so, Shoiko didn't really fix any of this, and no one could prove that or know it until they went to war in Ukraine. And again, everything just went to shit like in two days. Thank you so much, Tom Nichols. Please come back. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate,

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your podcasts. Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. As we enter our one segment, who is your fuck that guy today? Well, my fuck that guy is a gal. It is someone who was a

governor of a state in the United States of America, and she was also our ambassador to the UN. So I think that narrows it down enough so that we all know I'm talking about Nikki Haley. Now, Bill Salatin has a really good piece on her at the bulwark about her.

about her absolute total hypocrisy regarding Ukraine. She said in an interview about Putin, because she's now blaming, she's basically blaming President Biden for not taking Putin's threats seriously enough. Oh, yeah. That was fast. Yeah.

And she told, she was on a podcast by a guy named Dave Rubin, who was one of the bigger schmucks in the world. Yeah. And she said, when an evil dictator thug says they're going to do something, we need to believe them.

Putin said, was going to take Ukraine and he is. And as Salatin points out, all the way back on January 26th, way, way, way, way, way back, not even two months ago. Yeah. Yeah. She told Brian Kilmead on Fox regarding Ukraine, Putin knows it's costly and he knows he can't do it. This is him leveraging to see what he can get. He doesn't want to expand. I don't think Russia wants to go to war. Yeah, well, that Yeah. I encourage you to check out the article because he goes into point after point after point. And the reason this really annoys me is beyond the fact that I hate the hypocrisy, but we're used to that at that point is, but the reason I take this personally is several years ago when I was part of the SE Cup Unfiltered Show on CNN, HLN,

I don't remember what the subject we were talking about was, but I said that, you know, there was a chance that Nikki Haley could be the only person to come out of the Trump administration with her reputation enhanced. And I guess while I technically wasn't wrong because I said there was a chance, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to take the hit on this one and say I was wrong because whatever she did at the time, she was actually saying things that made sense and that seemed to go against the rest of the administration. but she has now become a full-on toady and it's disgraceful and it hurt me personally. So for that, I give her a fuck-that-gal. Everything Trump touches dies. Yep. The wise man who once said, my fuck-that-guy is, well, yes, I guess it really is the Donald Trump administration in all its glory.

I don't know if you know this, the 2020 was a census year. I thought before it started, like, gee, they're really going to fuck this up. Because remember, if there's one thing the Trump administration does not like, it's counting people who are not them. Right. So I thought, well, they're not going to, they're going to make life real hard. You'll be shocked to learn that the 2020 census undercounted the country's population by 18.8. million people. No. And you're going to be even more

shocked to learn that the people they didn't count I know you're going to just take a breath here. All right. Black, Latino, and indigenous residents. Yes, but at the same time,

the census overcounted the number of white and Asian residents. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. Weird coincidence. These fucking racist assholes didn't count people who didn't look like them. I am just completely shocked. And for that, again, the administration of, you know, these Stephen Millers, they can all go fuck themselves.

You know, it's funny. When I first saw this story, I was like, all right, well, 2020, that was a tough year to count people. I mean, it was pure lockdown and were people getting their mail. And then I read that on top, I forgot. gotten that the Trump administration moved up. They moved up the deadline to finish the counting in a pandemic year of all, like of all times to say you have less time to do this. Well, there's a reason. They moved up the counting. I'm always in awe of the weird coincidences that happen in life. And like, like this is one of them. They moved it up. And

somehow, you know, white people got overcounted and minorities got undercounted. And it's just, Why does this keep happening? It's just all these coincidences. It's a mystery. 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. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.

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