A Guidebook for Surviving Authoritarianism

Hey, it's Micah. It's been a minute since our FEMA series came out, and I want our New York listeners to know that we're having an in person event in a couple of weeks. I'll be joined by former FEMA official Mar Anne Tierney. We'll talk about the history of the agency, how it's being reshaped now under the Trump administration, and some other fun stuff we couldn't fit in the show Join us in person at WNYC seven PM on june seventh You can get tickets at wnYc dot org slash events. It's a great opportunity to meet other OTM listeners. We'd love to see you there In a capital city in the British Isles, people are forced to flee their homes. By a mob, anti immigrant violence erupted in Belfast this week, in part stoked by the world's first trillionaire, Elon Musk. Elon Musk writing on X this week onlyn by protesting repeatedly and loudly will there be any change W from WNYC New York. This is on the Media. I'm Michael Loinger. Also on this week's show, two of Network TV's biggest news shows made news president stormed out of an interview with NBC, Let's go quit because I' hadough. And fired sixty minutes correspondent Scott Pelly had words for CBS's new management. There was a thumb on the scale for the president's version of events That was a level of political influence that I had never seen in thirty seven years at CBS Ns Go behind the headlines with us after this WNYC Studios is supported by proof on Broadway Only six weeks left to see the Pulitzer and Tony winning play, the Chicago Tribune says, is one of the best American dramas of the twentieth century, brought thrillingly back to life. Deadline declares. Iowa Debie is utterly captivating in her roaring Broadway debut, leading one of the best casts on Broadway right now. and Etertertainment Weekly raves, Don Cheetle's portrayal is filled with sparks of genius on Broadway through july nineteenth tickets available at proroofbroadway. com. WNYC Studios is supported by Iowa Vett, doogs, Cats, Corn, and Murder. A new documentary about dor. Alan Youunken, a veterinarian who grew up on a farm, started an animal hospital, and navigated surprising chapters, including Murder, Mormons, and a modern Family that helped shaed his life An emotal, funny, and unexpectedly fascinating documentary Rves Savois Fire Dct. Youunken at theQ andA after each screening of Iowa Vett. dogs, cats, corn, and murder, only at Cinema Village, june fifth through eighteenth. tickets at Iowaet. net. This is onn the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. and I'm Michael L Ooaner. This week, Elon Musk took his company SpaceX public in an IPO billed as the largest in history. SpaceX is on track to become the most valuable company ever to go public and make its founder Elon Musk the first trillionaire. You'd think he'd have his hands full with that, but apparently Musk has also had time to write many, many, many racist posts on X some of which helped spark violent riots in the UK over the last couple of weeks. The events this week began on Monday when a Sudanese man was arrested and charged with attempted murder for stabbing a white man in Northern Ireland. The attack comes amid escalating tension over immigration across Europe. A video of the gruesome incident immediately appeared on social media. and then Elon Musk writing on X this week only by protesting repeatedly and loudly, will there be any change The next day, massked vigilantes stormed immigrant homes and businesses in Belfast. In a capital city in the British Isles, People are forced to flee their homes by a mob which was intent on causing havoc and setting fires. It is a shocking reality and a terrifying experience for those who had to grab what they could and run for their lives The week before in the streets of Southampton, England Ager over another knife attack drew anti migration protesters, some of whom turned violent. There' more footage here of riot polace classhing protesters. In that case, a British Sik man stabbed and killed a young white man last December When police arrived at the scene, they mistook the victim, Henry Novak, for the perpetrator and handcuffed him. In bodycam footage, you can hear Novak say he's been stabbed and can't breathe, to which a police officer says. You've been stabbed whereabouts? Lver ye, mate The murderer was sentenced to life in prison, but it was the release of the police bodycam footage that set off the most recent chain of events, spurred in part by posts from a notorious conspiracy theorist Tommy Robinson is the most prominent far right activist in the UK. David Gilbert is a reporter at Wired covering disinformation and online extremism. He says things really heated up after Elon Musk reposted one of Robinson's videos. He has a huge amount of followers online But what he's really expert at is inciting anger, stoking tensions and making it seem as if the UK is under attack from minorities. And what effect did that video that he shared that Elon Musk reposted? What effect did that video have? When he put out a call for people to show up at the police station that night then hundreds of protesters showed up and he showed up with them and he was able to speak to the crowd. Henry's murder is I've spokeen about this for twenty years. Ive said he'll be a victim of a race gang, . e. Pakistani Muslims will be being up a white kid, the police will turn up, they jump on the white kid. Every time I've seen him my whole life They don't And then barely a week later at ten thirty PM on Monday night on a Belfast street, bystanders captured video of the moment a Sudanese man. Hadi Alloaded pinned another man, Stephven Ogilvy to the ground, attacking him with a knife Ogul V is now in a coma after losing one eye and suffering wounds to his neck and face Give me the roadmap of how we went from a bystander video to violence in the streets of Belfast in just twenty four hours As you said, it was ten thirty at night in Belfast. someomeone videoed it. We don't know who they posted it online Exactly one hour later, Tommy Robinson posted the video. That video got six million views A few hours later, Ela Musk responded to Tommy Robinson and then spent the next twenty four hours posting consistently about this case many major U.S accounts on X started amplifying the video when people woke up in the UK on Tuesday morning after the incident by seven AM, people were posting about having protests in Belfast and other cities in Northern Ireland. Far out groups on Facebook started organizing. then Elon Musk posted about the protests said that this is enough. We have to take a stance. People have to push back against this And by seven PM that evening, there were masked men on the street kicking indoors of migrants, setting fire to vehicles, terrorizing migrant communities across Bofast There's very few people who are orchestrating this. Wh much of it is happening on major platforms like X and Facebook The real hardcore organization is actually happening on other platforms in telegram chats, where they are talking about opSEc, they are talking about covering tattoos, wearing nond desescript clothes, covering their face making sure that no one is videoing what they're doing They are not wearing smart watches, that they're not wearing anything identifiable, no digital devices This call for retribution and protest, which quickly turned into a violent attack on immigrant communities in Belfast was effectively the narrative cover for a network of people who in a sort of carefully planned way sprung into action as if they were training for this sort of moment. That is exactly what happened. One of the groups is part of the wider Active Club network, which is a white supremacist network based in the U.S. which has a footprint that's growing across the globe the group that was involved heavily in the kind of planning of these incidents is an offshoot of the active Club movement for teenagers So the idea of this movement is that it's based on fitness and male bonding, but what it's actually doing is facilitating the radicalization of young white males into these white supremacists and often neo Nazi ideologies. Elon Musk wrote, murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their hometown is what's making people angry, not social media He reposted messages claiming that British Prime Minister Kir Starmer hates white people This is just like white supremacist great replacement theory. Right? It has been repackaged recently under a term called rem migration, which is something that has been bubbling up in Europe for a few years and has been embraced by the Trump administration recently So it's this idea that white people are under attack and so therefore we need to kick everyone else out that doesn't look like us Yeah, and last month, you traveled to Porto, Portugal to cover the rem migration conference, which featured some key far right American figures, including the ex commander of Border Patrol, Greg Bavvino And you wrote about the increasing collaboration between American and European far right rem migration believers. How does this international movement fit into the story of what's happened in Belfast and Southampton I was amazed at the number of Americans who had traveled to Porto. figures like Bavino, you had members of the New York Young Republicans Club Jared Taylor, who's a very prominent white supremacist from the US. You had members of Patriot Front. We can link it to what's happening Belfast because the Patriot Front and active clubs in the US have a very, very close relationship So in what we see in the North of Ireland at the moment is these active club networks who have become very involved in what's happening there. They see it as a huge success They are now holding up this as an example of what other groups across the globe in the US. and Europe can do when it comes to fighting back against this claim that they're being replaced. These networks are getting stronger. they are communicating more easily. And I think that's what we saw in Belfast is that spread across X so quickly and they started posting about it saying this is evidence of why we need to have this extremely racist policy of remigration The term rem migration is a very benign term to describe a very, very violent policy agenda What are these people imagining would happen They have a thirty year plan that would happen in three phases. The first phase would see the worst the worst, what we're seeing in the US at the moment where they're trying to deport people who are threat to society of criminal records and are there illegally The second phase would see people who are in the country legally but are not citizens and who have not assimilated and are not whes and they should be sent back to their countries as well The third phase shows is what these people really want they would look at citizens who do not assimilate to the western cultures, traditions, and religions For example, if they are still practicing religions other than Christianity, if they are cooking foods that are not traditional foods in Germany or France or the UK or America then they would be kicked off And who gets to decide what assimilation looks like When I asked Martin Sellner, who was called the gofather of remigration at the conference in Portugal, who exactly decides this, he couldn't really give me an answer Ultimately it comes down to whoever's in power will decide This movement is still relatively fringe in that conference reportter, there were elected officials. a number of them from Germany, some from Spain Speaking at the conference, listening Five years ago, no one had heard about this policy. Now, you have dozens of Americans traveling thousands of miles to go to a conference to listen to it. This was not the first time that Elon Musk has been accused of inciting violence in the UK and the rest of Europe Why is he so fixated on these crimes and European politics What does he want out of this? I kind of ask myself that question a lot The only thing I can think of is that as a result of his posts, things happen in the UK People love him here. People talk this week about how If it hadn't been for X and Elon Musk, we'd never heard about this attack on Stephen Oglev in Belfast, which is patently untrue, obviously, but they believe that he is this truth teller and he is giving them the power to speak I mean, I think he believes the things that he's saying intntentionally or not, it seems like his ability to whip up violence in the streets It likely gives him leverage with I would imagine like European regulators who oversee his companies For a month now, the UK government has been discussing a potential ban of X, which allows users to use Grock AI to create pornographic images of women and minors here Starmer has recently said that he wants to amend a law to require social media companies to take down inflammatory posts in the middle of such riots If I were a lawmaker, I would be thinking This is exactly the kind of thing we can expect. if we try to meddle with Elon Musk's ex, right? Yeah, he knows the power that he has. his repeated attacks on Kir Starmer kind of showed. He clearly does not fear lawmakers or authorities in the UK or the EU I think for years, lawmakers in the EU have been seen as the ones who have been actually holding big tech in the US to account. Ultimately, they find them hundreds of millions of dollars. So what Big tech companies don't care. They'll tie everything up in court for years. and if they do have to pay it in the end That's fine. they can pay it. They've made enough money. I have to ask you, you have been covering disinformation, political extremism for a long time. And a lot of what you write about are figures in the United States But you're an Irish writer, you live in Ireland What does it feel like to watch some of these political movements, figures like Elon Musk Eport some of these political movements to where you live Terrifying really For years when I'd been covering this stuff, it didn't really touch me personally because I wouldn't interact one to one with people in the real world who were kind of believe much of the stuff that I was covering. Like Qanon and Pizza Gade and that kind of thing. Exactly. COVID changed us overnice People went down rabbit holes, WhatsApp groups were set up across the country. People got paranoid and they started to believe everything group of people who started off believing that COVID was a hoax and not wanting to take the vaccine, they've stayed in those groups, but those groups have morphed to become anti immigrant racist groups. I suppose for a long time, I felt insulated to an extent by being so far away from a lot of the people I cover but now I'm actually interacting with them on a daily basis. So it's a big change It's frightening to see what's just happened in Belfast boomering back to the United States Brian Kilme of Fox and Friends this week, said this to Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Mark Wayne Molin on air. They're standing up because their leaders have let them down in their own streets trying to take their country back They want to label them as racist All they want to be is Irish They want Ireland back. I see a lot of the same fights here. Brankenmat is completely wrong a lot of people in the North are incredibly angry about this because this kind of exemplifies a lot of the content that's been posted online about how this is Irish people, nationalists and loyalists uniting to fight back against the minorities and there's been memes going around about how Loyalists and nationalists in the North this is the thing that they're going to unite over That is not true The groups that we see in the streets of Belfast are loyalist groups that want to stay loyal to the British crown They do not want Ireland to be a united country They want to be British. And that's a very key point that is being missed in a lot of the conversations that are happening about what's happening in Belfast this week What should listeners look out for when they're reading coverage of these riots People need to realize why people like Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson are saying the things they're saying And what they're saying in simple terms is that there is a massive global conspiracy taking place wh people are being replaced in their own countries by minorities. In the coverage of this story, that has not been really explicitly called out It's incredibly important to call out what they're trying to do They don't care about Stephen Olevy or Henry Novak Victims families explicitly said we do not want our family members' death or injuries to be exploited Tomyobson and Anina Mus do not care They just see an opportunity to exploit this suffering to push home this narrative. That's something that needs to be more explicitly called out in media coverage when these incidents happen David, thank you for doing this work. Thanks for having me and thanks for talking about this. It's important David Gilbert is a reporter at Wired covering disinformation and online extremism Coming up Firings, testy meetings, tears and recriminations. It's just another day at's CVS News. 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The Economy never stops shifting. Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift. All these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work I'm Kimberlyee Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily ten minute podcast where a team of award winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app This is onn the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Oinger As social media spread disinfo is helping to ferent unrest and ocean away, a stalwart of the old media, sixty minutes, one of the few trusted gatekeepers still standing is being rocked from within It all started a couple weeks ago when CBS newews editor in chief Barry Weiss fired a bunch of staffers from the team at sixty Minutes. Among them, executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharon Alfoni and Cecilia Vega On the same day, Weiss installed a new executive producer at the program. Like herself, he's a former New York Times columnist with no prior TV news experience. All hell broke loose at sixty minutes. Oliver Darcy is the founder of the newsletter Status and a former media reporter at CNN. I can't imagine that CBS management thought this was going to go over well, but I don't believe they anticipate it going this far off the rails. When newly minted executive producer Nick Bilton met his sixty minutes team a few days after the mass firings, Darcy was leaked in audio recording of the encounter. Scott Pelley, the longtim CBS news journalist and the longtime sixty minutes correspondent He was the only correspondent in the room. And he just goes off on Nick Bilton, says he's not basically qualified for his role, says that Barry Weiss is not qualified for her role, says that David Ellison, he doesn't use David Ellison's name, but it's pretty obvious who he's talking about, that David Ellison brought Barry Weiss into CBS newews to kill sixty minutes and that that's exactly what she's doing And I listened to the audio and it was a really extraordinary very tense meeting. What have you learned about the new leader of sixixty Mutes, Nick Bilton Nick came in a little hot if you will He did a bunch of interviews and sounded pretty condescending to be totally frank. In one of the interviews with Semaphore They ask him, what do you think about not having any television experience? Does that intimidate you? And he says no. Basically, if I need someone to push the button to go live on the air, there are people that I can have push the button for me. and very much diminished the role of the people who work at sixty Mutes and what it takes to go on air with the story. If he had not engendered a lot of goodwill just in the rollout, he was at one point telling Scott, Pelly, you don't intimidate me, man, I'm not going to be intimidated by this role. and it sounded very adversarial and that was not really a great way to come in given the trauma the sixty minutes team had just experienced. if you think about it, these are people who have worked together for decades And then they just watched the new boss at CBS News, Barry Weiss come in and fire them without any explanation After their altercation in that meeting, Scott Pelly is summoned by Barry Weiss and some other big wigs at CBS, and he's fired soon after that. He gave a big interview to the New York Times about his side of things H shock and confusion about the whole ordeal. You were just fired from the news organization, which you were at the heart of for thirty seven years. I can't believe I'm hearing those words. which went viral. There was a thumb on the scale for the presidents' version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in thirty seven years at CBS Ns We learned this week that David Ellison called Leslie Stahall, the sixty minutes correspondent. and apologize to her for this had all gone down, suggested or said that this was his top priority and he wanted to make things right. And that's something you wouldn't say if he thought things were okay, right? And the fact that David Ellison, who is Busy trying to convince regulators around the world to approve a one hundred ten billion dollars deal to purchase Warner Brother Discovery is now taking time out of his day clean up Barry Weiss's mess does not seem to bode well for her. Whether this means he will ultimately relieve her of her duties, I think is the open question. And I would not expect anything to happen on that front until Allllison closes his merger because he's not going to to rock the boat with the Trump administration, which very much seems to like the direction Barry Weiss is pushing CPS You reported that since this all went down, Barry Weiss has pretty much left the newsroom. at CBS. She's kind of MIA. My understanding is she has this office suite on the sixth floor of CBS News' headquarters in New York And that Site is where her lieutenants, her top deputies are and that's where she is. And to even get in the suite, it's locked. You have to have a key card that has special access and it's hard to stress. that is very abnormal. for a news executive Typically editors, the editor in chief They are in the newsroom, they're of the people, they are working on stories with the reporters and producers. The only parallel that I can think of is Chris Licht, who is the ill fated CN boss and Christ did the same thing It signals at the very least that she's distant from staff And I think part of it is that she's not trusting anyone around her You mentioned that David Ellison called Leslie Stall, which I think we can interpret as an appeal to her, Bill Whitaker and John Worthheim the three remaining cororrespondence at sixty minutes to like stay put and not walk out. What's the status of the show right now Well, I think they're trying the best to recover and move forward. I mean, they have a fall season to produce, and they're supposed to be working on that right now. These are sixty minute stories. These aren't stories that are turned around in a few hours or a day, like you might see on cable news. These are well researched, they're well fact checked And they often require flying the correspondence to all different corners of the world down for correspondence right now. They don't know who's coming in the door next So it's a mess. Some people have speculated inside the sixty minutes that they're going to have some trouble getting on the air, maybe not for the first one or two episodes, but after that, they won't have many stories in the bank that they can pull from Obviously the state of TV news is not reat But sixixty minutes was enjoying some real success Paramount itself noted that viewership increased by nine percent from the most recent season, and Scott Pelly told The New York Times that the show's digital reach increased by over one hundred percent last year. And yet Weiss believe the show needed to be overhauled It doesn't make any sense. If you judge sixty minutes on any metric, like they were exceeding all the metrics It's a critically acclaimed show. They had just won two Emmys There were no major journalistic disasters that she could point to and say, look, this wasn't really great. We had this really big black eye this season. So nothing there. They were producing solid journalism As you mentioned, they were averaging nine point one million viewers this season, which was a nine percent increase year over year, which is you know, again, in the era of declining linear television reach, that's great. The show's not Staying flat. it's going up It's crazy And they've been enjoying massive success on digital. In fact, the numbers at Scott Pelly, you said were referring to are actually in a press release that Paramount itself put out on may twenty first They said that total video views across social platforms were up one hundred and eighty five percent They said that total engagement with their content on social was up one hundred and thirty seven percent. TikTok numbers, up eighty five percent, Instagram numbers up sixty five percent. They say in here that there were two point five billion views On social media It seems to me that either Paramount was not telling the truth on may twenty first when they hailed how well sixty Mutes was doing on digital or they're not really telling us the truth now as they're trying to find an excuse for blowing up the show This leads to the question that everyone is asking and arguing about, why did they so aggressively target this show On MS now and other liberal media spaces, we've heard that the goal here was to purposefully ruin sixty Minutes and CBS. The goal here is to destroy the brand because that's what's happened. because you have not only sixty mininutes basically gutted like a dead tree from the inside, but you also have this tremendous anxiety over at CBS newews Do you think We're witnessing a grand plan to incapacitate an outlet critical of this administration Or is this just incompetence It could be a mixture of both. It's not just liberal talking headad saying this, it's Scott Pelly It's Steve Croft, the long time sixty minutes correspondent who told me that he never thought he would see that sixty minutes would be, quote, executed by the president of the United States Honestly Even if it's not a direct result, if sixty minutes were not getting under Donald Trump's skin It's hard for me to imagine they would blow up the show because again, by every other metric It's doing really well So the only thing that makes Sense really is that David Ellison, who is doing everything he can to ingratiate himself with the Pident of the United States decided that, you know, something needed to be done about sixty minutes. Now, maybe he didn't say destroy the program. Maybe it was relayed to Barry Weiss It needs to be more fair or open minded to the rest of America, some version of that. And maybe she's just an incompetent manager and just executed this entire thing really poorly. We don't know what happened, but I think we'd all be fools not to believe that Donald Trump Ranting about sixty minutes in public is not also communicating that to them in private And whatever the Ellisonss are telling Donald Trump It's music to his hears because the entire administration is saying We can't wait for you to get CNN next Tom Le at Defector had this hypothesis. I'm going to read from his piece. Weiss is failing at this because she's not actually a propagandist. She's a culture warrior who sees every step of her career as part of a process in which she is bringing her enemies to heal Does that analysis hold water for you I'm not sure. I think that Barry Weiss likes to be a disruptor and I think that's worked kind of well for her on Substack or at least on the internet in general she seems to be someone who generates controversy, which becomes att tension, which gs her numbers and built her following to be bigger. And I think that works to some extent on the internet. But television news is a lot different CBS newews has never been in the public discourse more than it is today And their ratings are still really, really bad I believe that in May, CBS mornings, their Flagshhip morning show, with Gail King, it had its worst rated May on record ever Ever. And her big thing that she's done prior to this was the evening newews, B Tony De Copol, who is her hand picked anchor in that show has suffered the worst ratings of the twenty first century under her watch It's hard to get in her mind, but it just seems to me like she doesn't understand who the CBS newews audience is and she doesn't understand that attention on CBS newews does not translate into ratings the same way it might on the internet Let's zoom out a bit. In twenty twenty four, CBS reported the late show with Stephen Colbert captured seventy point two million dollars in advertising Well, sixty Mutes caught seventy nine point seven million But as Varieties Brian Steinberg reported, advertisers are moving away from both of those formats towards sports, streaming, and live entertainment So Even though sixty Minutes was still making money Is there something to the idea that its future success was not something that CBS could count on, that there was legitimate reason to start shaking up the show Yeah, I mean, there's definitely legitimate reason to be planning for a post linear television future. If you're not planning for that future right now, I think it'd be irresponsible I think the question is how do you do it? And I can't imagine that anyone thinks that Barry Weiss is doing a good job here Do you fire the people who are posting really good digital numbers? or do you say, hey, you guys are doing really good on digital. I saw that we had like a record year across social media How do we do better there? This whole situation is kind of a win win for MGa if Weiss succeeds in kind of turning CBS news into this engine of anti woke content, that's good for the White House. or if it burns the place down and liberal viewers get up and leave like they did with the Washington Post That's just one more critical news organization gone It seems like this political movement wants a news environment where there are no legacy outlets left to do decent journalism where it's all just partartisan content And the best at getting attention wins That's a really good way of looking at it And I think that's why Donald Trump is so happy with the Ellisons. He sings their praises every time he's asked about them. And I think that's why he's so excited and the rest of the administration is excited for David Ellison to be in control of CNN. sixixty minutes is one thing, but Donald Trump, likeike, let's be honest, He has been obsessed with CNN since he ascended in politics more than a decade ago And that's because like authoritarians don't like there being a shared set of facts. They want information chaos where they can plant narratives and not face resistance. And if CNN is no longer fact checking Donald Trump and holding him to account and just is even softer on him That is the entire point of all this stuff. The people losing here are the people who believe in like a news landscape where organizations are tethered to the facts and are able to be profitable by telling the truth And the people who are winning here are the ones that want to destroy our sense of shared reality Oliver. Thanks for staying on top of this story, and thanks for joining us Thank you so much for having me Oliver Darcy hosts the media criticism podcast, Power Lines We reached out to CBS for comment but didn't hear back by time of publishing Coming up, a new guidebook offers a lexicon for navigating life in an autocracy. This is on the media. Economy never stops shifting. Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift. All these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work I'm Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily ten minute podcast where a team of award winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app This is onn the Media, I'm Michael Ooinger. And I'm Broke Gladstone. As Oliver Darcy said, the Trump administration and the MAGA movement would love nothing more than a complicit or at least compliant media. In lieu of that, the strategy appears to be to pollute our current information ecosystem with nonstop, often contradictory verbiage A good example presented itself on Meet the press. They're urging the votes to be counted quickly. That's how they v. crookedsust like' crooked. Y' press is crooked. and meeet the press is crooked. To be fair, I'm not crooked but let's Re Well you play right into their hands Let's continue. You're either crooked or you're stupid. Let You play right into their hands It was a heated back and forth that ended with the president pulling off his mic Let's callall a quit because I've had enough. prompted that Host Kristen Welker had been unusually pushy on Trump's war of choice with Iran changed because you insisted no wars Pris in guarantine no war of us who live through his campaign No that he made that of a centerpiece. He said this. Under Trump, we will have no more wars. The Daily showows John Stewart. And he also sern this? I'm not gonna start workm to stop wars Of course, he also said I'll keep you out of wars So no wars again. We won't have wars again Atimes it can be hard to find the words to describe exactly what's going on since Trump's obfuscations, misdirections brazen lying are unprecedented in our democracy. The frequent frantic declamations of authoritarianism, unbridled corruption, and would be king They just don't capture it. It's happening so fast and frenetically, we haven't had the time to coin words with the specificity required to describe how the wheels are turning That's why Maria Kuznitsova and Dan Storv decided to write a guidebook of sorts. It's called How to Survive Authoritarianism, a Russian's phrase book for everyday life in America, and it'll be out in the fall. Maria and Dan worked as activists and human rights defenders in Russia for about a decade before Putin's crackowns made it too dangerous to stay. They now live abroad in exile I ask them to start by describing a couple of terms which describbe the way that the citizens have to operate under these leaders o Penia, the manual control it's a newer term. it comes from Putin era Russia, whereereas Cellebitna goes back to the times of Iv the terrible And Celibitnee literally means you are bowing so hard that you strike your head on the floor. In Russia, you see it all the time where people who need something as basic as having their road paved in their city. they essentially have to record these Theory messages to Vladimir Putin asking him to intervene and do something about this. I want to add to that that a huge and important part of Cilabitna is humiliation And humumilation in this process is on purpose. There is the example here The showdown in the Oval back with Zelensky When Zelensky was attacked by JD Vans and then by Donald Trump. How can you dress like that? Yes, how can you dress like that? Do you own a suit? You never once said thank you. Exactly There's another one of these terms that I think show the dangers of authoritarianism, at least as a mode of government Phrases And you can say it in Russian, effective manager Kk. They denoted these technocrats within the Soviet systems who would run cities, they would run collective farms, they would run gulags in some cases It is a successful, yet ruthless technocrat, and it became especially popular in post Soviet Russia Th it became really popular. withithin the Putin elite Vladimir Putin and the rest of them being extremely impressed with the Chinese model with the Singaporean model where you have Pretty much zero political life. You have pretty much zero democratic freedoms and liberties. But at the same time you have economic growth, the trains run on time, and the streets are immaculately clean. And this is exactly What we see the contemporary wride in America Pople like Curtis Yarvin, for example, allegedly JD Vance's favorite philosopher People like Peter Theel, this is exactly what they advocate. They advocate for something they call a corporate monarchy. And the argument that these people give is that we need to delegate all our power to the single executive This concentration We'll make sure that the trains run on time, the streets are clean You can walk alone at night and so on and so forth. just Give up your freedom of speech Right. But why the hell then would they be throwing their support behind are incompetent, where the economy is in free fall, the streets are not clean There is civil unrest and the whole thing I don't know how to answer that question, but maybe it can lead us to the idea we haven't talked about yet, which is manual control word Rich know you probablyew What we see right now in America, what we see now in Russia is quite different from what we saw in dictatorships of the twentieth century. Now the regimes are very personalistic and basically You find a person who is charismatic enough to lead the movement and then you deal with all the problems that arise with that Manual control basically means that all of the bureaucrats afraid to make any decisions and every time they have to make one, every decision is just of upstairs till it richher the most powerful person in the country or at least the minister. The problem with such system is that it stops reacting to routine tasks, every task becomes political, and also problems are not resolved on time Local authorities, for example, just didn't even want to react to emergencies because they didn't know if the federal government would approve of that A lot of things about authoritarian regimes are in tension with each other and it's kind of contradicts and tendences and on one hand we have effive managers who are ruthless and who just try to run G up efficiently On the other hand, authoritarianism is often quite chaotic. because it doesn't prevent problems on time And it's actually in that way a fragile system that hurts a lot of people. It also makes a lot of things that should not be political. It makes them political. Again, Fixing the vad, stuff like that There are a couple of Russian phrases that both relate to leaders staying in power longer than legally allowed And the words are in English Hsling and zeroing Castling is Rikirovka in Russian the chess move, right where you Shield your king with your work Putin at one point when he needed to leave the presidency so that he wouldn't be breaking the law. What he did is he created out of thin air replacement for himself. That replacement's name was Dmitri Medvvedv who indeed ended up continuing the exact same policies that war going on under Vladimir Putin. And in fact, it was under Midvediv that Russia invaded Georgia in two thousand eight somethinghing you've pointed out a lot of nations, China, Venezuela They just changed the Constitution to allow them to stay forever And this is what zerine is, Zerine or abnolenia It's just basically canceling your term limits Masha, maybe you could explain it better than I can. Yeah, right. So What Putin did basically was, officially we still have term limits in Russian cononstitution Putin just proposed that Because we are changing constitution substantially in twenty twenty and we had this S a referendum that ran for seven days all over Russia to do that. We kind of reset the terms. So basically the exception of not having two presidential terms only applies to Putin and it will apply again to everyone after. Right. The clock stopped for Putin Basically You wrote about polyechnilogi or political technologists. These are people who exist to maintain the illusion that an undemocratic system is working democratically. Some call that illiberal democracy. Can you tell me about some of the more creative ways Putin's political technologists manag to pull this off The term that we use in the book is electural activities. They are not really elections. They are a performance And everything within this performance isn't about the real policies of the candidates as much as it is about the various trickery that political technologists use. For instance, in Russia, we have something called Dead Souls. Now the Dead Souls, of course, it's the title of the amazing novel by Russian imperial writer Nikolaay Kogol It's a hilarious book. Yes Anyway We actually have many cases in Russia where during the elections or electoral activities, you have people voting again, quote unquote voting And these people They might have died years and years ago, or they may never have existed in the first place. And coincidentally, they always tend to vote for Vladimir Putin or for his favorite party, the United Russia. There's a Russian phrase volume Co Chushchim Zakon, which means everything for our own. For others, the law You know, another phrase Bill B Cellbec . Yeah, giveive me the man and I'll find the crime. And all of these involve In English is called undesirables, also a Russian term Basically, authoritarians start to use law just for their own purposes while still pretending that having some law implemented is a thing of democracy They also start to use law selectively and that's what phrases like Find me a man and I will find you a crime refers to. And we actually have such a prominent example right now in the United States. It's what going on with James Comey And the fact that they're trying now to prosecute him based on an Instagram past that had one hundred likes That gives me wipes of Late Putin's regime actually You just decide who you don't like, you decide who you want to prosecute, and then you find anything on them. people in America don't understand right now is that sometimes this kind of political prosecution Its goal is not to put a person into jail. The goal is to threaten you with the process, and it doesn't matter how this process ends basically deters a lot of people in power from even attempting to say something against the Wanabe dictator So let's turn to infoomoica, basically an information dumpster And it's a phrase that depicts how tyranny can corrupt our perception of reality Basically what Putin's regime decided to do is to create as many versions of reality as possible, to confuse people and to encourage people to disengage In Russian, we use the phrase we will never know the whole truth which means that there are so many contradictory versions out there that it's impossible find what really happened what Russian propaganda does is creating a lot of Cent of low quality. That's what we call infopster everywhere. Hs of channels on all social media. it's on television, it's in newspapers, it's maybe even in the comments and Russians use a lot of troll farms to even engage in that way with people You create so many things that people get confused and when people get confused and overwhelmed, they just disengage The idea here because like I think like people misunderstand that mododern dictators like they want you to believe what they do or they want to put you in prison. No, they actually much better off If you just don't do anything, you stay at home or you emigrate That's where the concept of inner immigration comes in. Inner immigration is when a person who understands the political reality understand that democracy is under assault Anyway chooses to disengage and only spnd time doing the personal things and basically shut themselves from politics. add to inner immigration and to how important apathy is for modern dictatorships and other Russian saying is Mayakataskraoichivon is no and it basically means My house is at the edge of the village And so I don't care what happens with the rest of township. It rhymes in Russian and it doesn't really rhym in English That's sort of the idea. You disengage as much as possible You've said that one of the key principles of this book is that language matters. What was your intention in assembling this phrase book of Russian words