 Thank you so much for coming to this live recording. I'm really excited. So this is gonna be two things at once. It's just a set of wide ranging, hopefully really interesting conversations about the state of the world and the rise of populism and how we are going to deal in positive and negative ways with tech and what's going on in Russia and Russia's influence on the United States all at once, but it's also a recording for podcasts. So I'm gonna try and treat this sort of as a life event. So it is like, hopefully, like listening to two episodes of a podcast in succession. So I'll go through the intro and the outro and all of those kinds of things. So I need, I have one favor to ask you. Who of you has listened to a podcast before? All right, good. So I don't know if you noticed this, but at the very end of a podcast, I sometimes, or I always hide a little Easter egg. There's the thing I say, which is sort of sounds a little boring, right at the end, which is, thank you so much for listening to this episode of A Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading a word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them, rate the show on iTunes, tell your friends about it, share it on Facebook and Twitter. First of all, please go and do that. But then I always add one really random line about how we can promote the podcast. And I always run out of ideas. So I want to hear what are the silliest, craziest ideas for how people can go and advertise a podcast. Make a t-shirt. Make a t-shirt, all right. I think I may have already had that, but that is a great one, all right. What else? Set up a botnet. Sorry? Set up a botnet. Set up a botnet, all right. That's great. What else? A podcast on millions of fortune cookies. Oh, nice. I have that, I have that, I did that. You did that already? Yeah, I did that. What else? Graffiti. Graffiti, that's a good one. I think I might have had done graffiti, but I'm not sure. I'll add that to the list. What else? Advertise in the Metro. Advertise in the DC Metro, all right. More ideas. Get the name on a manicure. Get the name on a, what would that look like? It's just like, all right. Who can't have done that one before? Manicure. Manicure. Manicure doesn't fit. What was that? Manicure doesn't fit. Oh, knuckle, the good fight, yeah. All right, manicure slash knuckle. All right, so I'm gonna use, the winners are the botnet and the manicure slash knuckle. Let me just note that for myself, so I don't forget to do that later. I'll talk more directly in a bit. All right, so this is gonna be the botnet and this is the manicure slash knuckle. All right, so I'm gonna do one other thing. I don't know if that'll sound at all good on the actual recording. It might sound silly because we don't have very good ways of recording people, but do you remember the beginning of what I say at the beginning of a podcast? Welcome to the live podcast, well, life is today. Welcome to the podcast with search for the ideas, policies, and strategies that can beat a full-time populist like Donald Trump over the next four years and the next 40. Do you guys wanna shout, and the next 40? Sure. Just, you know, I was a sad kid in high school. Make me feel like a rock star once. All right, let's try this. Welcome to the podcast with search for the ideas, policies, and strategies that can beat a full-time populist like Donald Trump over the next four years. And the next 40. Beautiful. All right. Okay, let's get going. And by the way, please silence your cell phones. We'll have a live Q and A later. Please keep the questions smart and interesting, but brief, no five-minute statements, no denunciations. And sometimes I might mess up and just have to retake something. We'll cut it later, so just bear with me if I have to do that, which I wouldn't normally do at a live event. Ready? All right. Welcome to the live podcast that searches for the ideas, policies, and strategies that can beat a full-time populist like Donald Trump over the next four years. And the next 40. All right, that sounded beautiful. In the last weeks, Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Jeff Bezos and the two companies he owns or controls, Amazon and The Washington Post. The fake Washington News, he said, is used as a lobbyist and should so register. A lot of people have failed to see how dangerous this is or even welcomed the president's attacks. It's only tweets, some say. Amazon really does need to pay more taxes, others echo. But this misses the point. It's absolutely true, but we need to have a serious conversation about how to regulate tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. And there's no doubt that liberals need to make the fight against crony capitalism a key part of the platform. That's not what this is about for two reasons. First, Trump's attacks are politically dangerous. What he's doing is to use state tools to repress speech. And it's not just words, it's not just tweets. We've already seen the regulatory apparatus potentially punish one big company, Time Warner, the owner of CNN, that wanted to merge with AOL and in a very unorthodox move, this wasn't permitted by the Department of Justice. There's a real danger that a lot of corporations and business owners might for pray to what we might call in German, for Raus Islander Gehorsam, anticipatory obedience. They don't know whether they're gonna be punished for letting their newspapers, their television radio stations criticize Donald Trump. And if they don't know that, it might be safer to sell those outlets to other owners or to pressure the journalists not to be too critical. This is something that people like Victor Arban have done in Hungary, effectively making sure that private media stations are actually under the government's control. Secondly, I think Trump's attacks are actually politically, economically dangerous as well. In the short run, a couple of attacks on Amazon are not gonna make a big difference. Amazon's share price has not been very much affected so far, for example. But in the long run, we need the rule of law. We need to make sure that companies do well when they have a good business model, rather than when they're close to a president. We need to make sure that people who are close to power can't exploit those connections in order to extract bribes. And all of that is under threat when the president gives the impression that he's punishing some companies because he doesn't like them. In short, as I recently wrote in my slate column, Trump's criticisms of Amazon are not meant to fight chronic capitalism. They're meant to deepen chronic capitalism in style for freedom of speech. They're punishing a major media institution for the crime of criticizing the administration. And that is obviously very dangerous. But now, it's my great pleasure to introduce today's guest, Cecilia Munos. Cecilia is the vice president of Public Interest Technology and Local Initiatives at New America, here where we're recording this live podcast. Before that, she served in senior positions in the Obama White House, first as the director of Intergovernmental Affairs, and then as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She's also a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award. Welcome to the podcast, Cecilia. Thank you so much for having me. So, in your work at New America, you focus on the way in which technology can be deployed in the public interest. The stated goal is to connect technologies to public interest organizations, to improve services to vulnerable communities, and strengthen local organizations that serve them. There's obviously a lot that can be achieved through those kinds of technologies. Over the last weeks, I think we've also seen ways in which some technologies might be a little naive about the potential negative impact of a work, or they just don't have that much experience with how local communities actually work and how technology might intersect with those. So, I guess I'm wondering what are some of the cultural obstacles you see that stop Silicon Valley from using technology for the very obvious positive impact it could have in your work here? So, there's several ways to understand this, but it helps to give you, I think, a little bit of background on how I came to the work. So, I come from the civil rights movement. I was at a Latino civil rights organization for 20 years and then worked in government. And while I was in government, we created something called the US Digital Service, which was really an outgrowth of the experience we had with healthcare.gov breaking. We learned that government doesn't do this very well. The kinds of things that the Silicon Valley does all the time, government isn't particularly good at. So, this was an effort to recruit people from the Silicon Valley to engage in helping the government do its work. And when that worked, it was really enormously transformative. And one of the insights that I took from that, that many of us took from that, was that the civic sector, the NGO sector, the world that I come from needs this same capacity that we're trying to solve the 21st century's problems with the same set of tools that we've been using for a long time. At a moment when we're in the industrial revolution technology's changing everything. So, the idea is to harness the tools of technology to put them in the hands of the people that we count on to address things like inequality and discrimination. And one of the big obstacles, I think there are really two, is that the NGO world, the sort of civic world, doesn't know what's possible, doesn't think in these terms, is maybe thinking about the dangers of technology, which are very real, but isn't necessarily thinking about how to harness technology and technologists, the people who do this kind of thinking in order to do their work. So that's one obstacle. So when I talk to my friends in the NGO sector about this, they frequently think I mean IT, right? These are the people who are gonna make sure my printers work. That's not what this is. This is a way of thinking and designing and engaging people in human-centered design and making sure that the work that we do is kind of powered through the kinds of tools and thinking that the Silicon Valley uses all the time. So that's one obstacle. And the second obstacle is that, and I mean this charitably, that the Silicon Valley is full of brilliant people who believe they have the tools to solve every problem. And maybe they do, but they don't always understand the problems that they're trying to solve. And very frequently these are folks who don't know what they don't know. Now I say this as a woman, as a person who comes out of the civil rights movement, people like me are not typical of the folks with training in the Silicon Valley. And those folks are less likely to know the kind of stuff that I've learned over decades in the civil rights movement. And so if you're trying to apply this amazing set of skills to solve the kinds of problems that the organizations I used to work with are trying to solve, you're gonna miss stuff. And you could perpetuate problems, you could make them deeper, or you may just be missing opportunities to solve problems. So much of what we're trying to do is something that worked in government, which is that if I got, so as in the Domestic Policy Council, I got to sit at the intersection of these digital teams, the folks from the US Digital Service, and the federal agencies. And when it was up to me to explain to folks at say the Department of Education why they should be sitting down with engineers and product developers in order to do their work, they didn't understand why I was asking them to do that. But if you put a problem on the table and set the really good policy people at the Department of Education to work on it with people from a terrific digital team, the results were really magical. But what ended up happening is that it was like bringing a new set of tools to the exercise. And ultimately the engineers in question and the policy people in question are problem solvers. And for each of those folks at the table, there was a new set of tools that they hadn't had access to before. And that combination turned out to be very powerful. We're trying to replicate that with NGOs, with local governments, and very importantly in the policy making process. So the impression I get when I speak to senior people in Silicon Valley who I think often both are very inspiring in the intelligence and in the way that they do, I think, care about the public good. But the thing that worry me is sort of twofold. First of all, that they have this approach of well, you should just try a bunch of things and disrupt everything. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. It doesn't matter, right? And that's true in the business world. The idea of capitalism is that it's okay for a company to try and do something. And if that fizzles or that burns out, it doesn't really matter because another company will sweep in to sort of fill that gap, right? Well, in public policy, that's not the case, right? If you try something completely new with a school district, and that goes badly wrong, well then the kids who are in that school district are gonna suffer the consequences of that for the whole lives, right? And the second thing that I sort of am struck by is the degree to which people in Silicon Valley and perhaps especially the people who are not sort of 21 right now, but who are 21 10 years ago have just grown up with a self-conception that what we're doing all of the good things go together. We can go and make a ton of money and at the same time we're doing things that are amazing for the world and they're fun to do, right? And now they have to start reconceptualizing themselves saying, oh, perhaps some of the things we're doing can actually really have a negative impact on the world as well, even though we didn't intend that. And when I look at some of the senior leaders who have become under criticism in the last weeks and months and the response to it, I receive them grappling with that, like I've seen them saying, wait, but I thought we were good guys and I know they're quite understood the degree to which technology can have these negative impacts. So in your conversations, in your work, does that make you optimistic about the ability of people in Silicon Valley to sort of actually internalize and understand these two problems? Or do you think there's always gonna be that cultural divide that actually is unbridgeable? We can't afford to assume that there's gonna always be a cultural divide because technology, whether you are excited by it or terrified by it, it is, right? It's happening, our lives have already changed and they're gonna continue to change. So the question is kind of not whether it's sort of inherently good or bad or whether or not the Silicon Valley can adjust. Of course they can adjust, but I mean, the way I think of it is these tools are either, if your lens is inequality, which is very much how I think about things, they're either gonna exacerbate inequality or they're gonna help move people closer together. That latter result isn't gonna happen by itself. You have to be deliberate about it. You have to be trying to leverage these tools in order to address inequality. And the best way to do that, I think, is to make sure that the people who spend their lives working on that and making a difference in closing educational disparities or improving the status of, or reducing disparities in the workforce. Those people need to have access to these tools. They need to know how to leverage them. They need to know how to use them. And the folks who are expert in using those tools need to know what education reformers know. That we're gonna be most successful in the kinds of change that we need to bring about if these worlds come together. And bringing those worlds together is very challenging, but that's the very thing we're trying to do. So one way to think about it is, and this is really an analogy developed by our CEO at New America, Anne-Marie Slaughter, we wanna build a field of public interest technology the way there's a field of public interest law. You didn't, it wasn't always true that you could grow up and go to law school and go work for a human rights organization. We created that field deliberately. And now you can study public interest law in law school. That wasn't always true. And there are careers in public interest law. That wasn't always true. Right now, if you go to get a computer science degree or develop technological training in some way, it's not yet clear that you can go work for some, for an organization that's trying to solve homelessness. But if we- There's not an easy path. You don't know exactly how to do that or to talk to what kind of qualifications to get. Exactly. There's no pathways yet or there are a few pathways. And we've learned in the course of really in the first year of this public interest technology project and talking to people out in the world who are doing this work. We don't really have a great name for this field. They don't quite know how to find each other except through really important organizations like Code for America, which gathers people in local brigades as well as at a summit every year. But it's still very much a field in the making. And that's, if we're successful, you know somebody in the next generation can grow up and become an engineer and go try to solve homelessness. That's the world that we're trying to create. So, you know, when you said quite rightly that sort of some of the big disruptive effects of technology are already happening and unstoppable and they're gonna happen on their own. But there might actually deepen inequality in some ways. The ways that technology might be used in order to address inequality, to solve social problems, that's not gonna happen on its own. That's right. Because the sort of naive hope that I think people did have five or 10 years ago, that somehow every good social course will also have a business model attached to it that actually makes money is probably wrong, right? So when you think about how do you make sure that technology is used for these positive ends, how do you see the sort of three main actors? Business, government and civil society cooperating on that. How much of that will have to be done by civil society? How much of that will have to be done by a government? In both cases, in the case, especially in the case of government and civil society, it's vital that you have people in policymaking roles in doing this work that understand how to leverage these tools and understand how to identify problems, how to fix them. And importantly, this isn't just about preventing bad things from happening. It's also about leveraging these tools to reduce inequality, to promote equity, that these things can be harnessed for good. So I'll give you a couple of examples. A colleague of mine at New America, Virginia U-Banks, has just published a book and I'm embarrassed to say that I'm blanking on the name of it. But it is focusing on the way that technology is being used in public services in a way that's increasing inequities in this undercutting poor people. She's identified a problem correctly and that's the kind of thing that we need to be able to spot and avoid and fix. At the same time, the city of New Orleans is using data and technology to identify what are the neighborhoods that are most likely to experience a deadly house fire? And by using data and technology, they devised the strategy that now the fire department is using. In order to, right, they used to just do outreach to try to get people to get smoke detectors. Now they're using this data to say, oh, we can pinpoint where the deadliest fires are most likely to happen and go knock on those doors and make sure that they have smoke detectors. And within the first quarter of deploying that program, they saved lives and the number of those kinds of deadly fires went down because they were able to use technology to solve a social problem. Both of those possibilities exists at the same time, but you need people in government who can spot the problems, harness the technology for solutions. Equally true for civil society. As you've heard me say, I come from the civil rights movement. We count on those organizations to recognize when there is a problem that is driving inequality, that's creating discrimination, that's undercutting communities of color, communities that are marginalized in some way. So if we expect the NAACP to be able to spot a problem when an algorithm is creating discrimination, they need to have that capacity, they need to have those tools. This needs to be part of their arsenal. And part of, when we were creating this project, the example that I used with Anne-Marie, and we still haven't figured out how to do this yet, but I'm still sure of it, is that the way we're gonna protect voting rights in the future is gonna include the tools of litigation, which we're using now, but it's also gonna include data and technology. We just haven't figured it out yet, but we have to if we're gonna be effective in addressing our public problems. So if I'm going to be sort of pessimistic or cynical for a moment, I fear that the ways in which technology will transform politics are sort of positive in all kinds of smaller and less systemic ways and negative in ways that actually really transform the nature of our political community, right? So some of the examples I used right now are things like how can we use technology to solve homelessness? I don't know exactly what you have in mind there, but I could imagine, for example, all kinds of ways in which the allocation of empty beds and shelters to people who need them is improved and made more efficient and so on. And that would make a tremendous contribution. I mean, any night that somebody spends in a shelter rather than on the street is a tremendous achievement, right? But at the same time, I wonder whether the negative effects are much more systematic so that people don't talk across the divide with each other. They actually wind up in these echo chambers. It's much easier to spread fake news, to incite hatred against outsiders and so on. And so perhaps the systematic effect might end up being that people are less willing to fund shelters for homeless people because they think, oh, these are all sort of people who aren't ethnically like me anyway, or they're all lazy, or whatever sort of myths might come about there. And so you have, on the one side, tech sort of helping to manage a dwindling supply of beds in these shelters. And on the other hand, you have technology actually augmenting the political attack on the kind of cooperation across racial and ethnic and sovereign lines we need in society and on the provision of the welfare state that we need to actually solve those problems. All of those outcomes are possible. I mean, I think that's the point, right? And at some level to take sort of what's most in the news now, at some level, the people who get there first, who figure out how to leverage the technology to accomplish their goals are gonna, at least in the short term, are gonna win the day. And that may be a shorthand way of describing what just happened with the interference with our election, right? So these tools are there, they're not going anywhere, and they're gonna get leveraged. It's really important for the actors of civil society who worry about these things, whose job is to both protect free speech, but also protect equality of opportunity in this country to be able to leverage the same tools and to be able to problem spot and not just, again, to prevent bad things from happening but to be moving first and fastest at leveraging these tools to actually accomplish our common goals. That makes sense. So you work to shift gears a little bit. You work on the domestic policy councils, obviously highly relevant to a populist moment. So I guess, first of all, I was wondering how you see the set of issues that you covered there, which included everything from immigration to other kinds of challenges, like say some of the difficulties faced by rural communities and so on, as connected to the rise of populism and the election of Donald Trump. How do you think that sort of longstanding failures in domestic policy may have contributed to the rise of populism in the United States but also across other countries in North America and Western Europe? Well, I think you can draw a line right through the sort of economic inequalities that have been developing over decades and this populist moment in which we find ourselves. Right, so the, and I worked for President Obama. He talked about this all the time that we were really dealing with decades of ways in which the middle class was getting squeezed, decades of ways in which we were becoming the first generation to worry that our kids weren't gonna be able to surpass us economically and having arrived at that point, and this is really a fresh moment of arriving at that point, it is not inconsistent with history in all parts of the Western world that that creates tensions between groups. It makes us kind of more tribal, more divided, more likely to believe that even as I struggle to make sure my kids can successfully make it to the middle class, that I'm gonna worry that somebody else is getting over or is getting support or getting help that I'm not getting. That kind of tension is always there but it's exacerbated by really decades of ways in which the middle class is getting squeezed and we are feeling the effects of that politically now. Let me jump in there because I think it's an interesting, I would love to get your perspective on this. I mean, some people sort of try to play off the economic cause of populism and the more sort of cultural cause of populism against each other, right? And they say that it's not about the economic causes because say it's not true that poorer people voted for Donald Trump in higher numbers. And wealthier people and there's a sort of much stronger correlation between the kinds of attitudes people have about immigration and so on. How do you see those two things intersecting or how do you see the relative weight of them from your part? Yeah, I think they're related. So my area of deepest expertise is immigration policy. That's what I've been working on the most and the longest over 30 years. You know, you can follow the trend lines really closely over decades. When we get economically insecure is when xenophobia most takes hold. And we are most able to reform our laws in ways which are generous when we're feeling pretty confident economically. And when we are in moments of demographic change and at some level in the United States when are we not in a moment of demographic change? I mean, this is the story of being an immigrant nation. We're always a little uncomfortable with who's coming. And sometimes we, at various points in our history, we have ratcheted down on who comes. You know, the Great Depression is one such period, for example. So you can, I mean, those trend lines follow each other. There are economic insecurities and our desire to control immigration. The fact of the matter is one of the quickest ways to get to economic growth, certainly in this day and age, is actually to expand the number of people who come legally as immigrants. But it's a really hard thing to persuade the country of. Increase people's living standards? Or does it increase economic growth? Because those are two slightly different things, right? It's true that, how does it, how does it go beyond just, you know, obviously you have many more people in the country and those people, you know, have to earn a living and so they sort of add a little bit of economic growth. How does it actually help economic growth on the aggregate? The job creating impact of immigrants is really well documented. So you see large indicators of growth like GDP and reduction in the deficit. And if you look at the numbers, for example, of what the Congressional Budget Office said would be the results of the immigration bill that we tried to pass in 2013. So enormous increases in GDP reduction in the deficit, but also some modest growth in the number of jobs and growth in wages. So in the short term, it's a really effective tool for economic growth that actually can be felt across the economic spectrum. But my point is that it's really hard to persuade people of that. It's hard to move people off of this notion that for each person that comes in, that must mean one less job for a person here. And those concerns are exacerbated by two things. And this is the intersection of the question you asked. They are exacerbated by people's economic fears. Maybe if I'm worried that my kids aren't gonna get ahead, maybe immigrants are the problem here. And they're exacerbated by people's cultural fears. Both of those things can exist side by side at the same time. And, you know why? So I'm, Latina, the 2000 census is the census that showed that we became the largest minority in the country. That's significant demographic change. And we, no matter who the group was, we have always reckoned with that and struggled with that. Dating back to Benjamin Franklin being worried that we were all gonna end up being a German speaking people. He had that concern. And yeah, I'm being concerned that Germans would never integrate and are terrible for democracy. As somebody who grew up in Germany, I sort of think he's right. But I wanna bring out two slightly different things that I'm struggling to think about in the immigration space. The first is where you would draw the line between opinions that you find to be wrong or even unpleasant and views that you find to be illegitimate. So which views on immigration will you say, I really disagree with this. I think having more people come in is good for economic growth and these people don't think that and that's wrong. But you know what the entire type of opinion that's a perfectly normal part of a political process. At what point do you think a set of ideas about immigration actually starts to deny basic American principles, including the respect for, including the idea that you can't accord rights on the basis of ethnicity or religion and so on, right? So that's one kind of thing that I wanna get at in this conversation. The other thing is the distinction between what you think your favorite policy is if we could get everybody to agree and versus what is the policy that we should adopt given that we know how strong a driver of populism immigration appears to be, right? So let's take these sort of one after the other. So where would you say, hey, I really disagree with you on immigration but absolutely that's a fair opinion. You should be allowed to state that proudly in public without sort of being fearful that people will call you a racist or a danger to democracy or anything like that versus where do you say, no, no, no, this now gets into the territory where really that shouldn't be part of our public sphere. Yeah. It's reasonable to have a debate about what the levels of immigration should be. I mean, in some ways, not only is it reasonable, we should be having a debate about what the level should be, right? And that's the Congress's job. And as owners of this democracy, that's our job as a public is to have a conversation and hopefully reach a consensus on how many people we should allow into the United States and who those people should be, completely legitimate and there is room for a diversity of views on that question. Hopefully that debate would be driven by economic evidence but that is I think a proper basis for debate and I have a clear perspective but it's not unreasonable for somebody to have a different perspective. What I, where I think we get into illegitimate territory is when you start demonizing people on the basis of their immigrant characteristics or, right? So we conflate and especially in this moment, we have a president who is conflating people who are foreign, people who are religion that we may feel uncomfortable with, right? And Muslims in particular, he's demonizing. He is characterizing young immigrants as gang members and suggesting that immigrants are responsible for crime when the evidence is really very clear that in communities as immigration increases, crime actually goes down and border communities in this country have some of the lowest crime rates anywhere in the country. So by demonizing the human beings that we're talking about in ways which are have no basis in reality, he's seeking to use, I didn't even know how to describe it, he's essentially demonizing people in order to accomplish a political objective in a way which is harmful. People get hurt as a result of that. And so individuals get hurt, whole communities get hurt and the larger public is hurt when you have entire segments of the community as we have now who are afraid to contact civic authorities when they've been witnesses to a crime, victims of a crime, when they see a public safety hazard, that doesn't just affect them, right? That affects everybody. We have created that kind of climate of fear and division in a way which is fundamentally hurtful, not just to immigrants, but to all of us, but also fundamentally undercuts who we are as a nation of immigrants. So 99% of what you just said, I think there's a very clear distinction between saying, we should have a lot less immigration, even we should have a lot less family-based immigration. I think all of that are things that don't necessarily agree with the legitimate democratic preferences and we should treat them as things to be fought out in the democratic sphere by human selections, right? It's very different to say about a judge of Mexican heritage that she's not really American. It's very different to say an entire class of people, anybody who happens to be Muslim, can't come into this country, right? Those are saying that people of Latino heritage or people who are Muslim can never truly be American and that's a much more fundamental violation of the founding principles of this country. I wanna push you on one point, which is that, you know, and let's leave Trump to a side because I think it's very difficult to construe what he says on any of this in any way, sympathetically. But for example, in Europe, you know, people have fears about, you know, well, some of the Syrian refugees coming in, you know, how do we know they're not terrorists? Now, obviously the majority of people who are coming in are fleeing for their lives in very obvious and real danger and often the people who make this point don't want to acknowledge that and that's terrible demagoguery and should be condemned. At the same time, sort of the response that I'm tempted to give a lot of people who are sort of on the left side of the spectrum are tempted to give of saying, well, just raising those kind of security fears is in itself a legitimate, seems to me to overstep the mark in a certain kind of way as well because of course, we have seen a few isolated incidents in which people who did come in as refugees officially ended up committing terrorist attacks and I can see how a population that feels like, well, we're not really in a position to vet them and so on. How do we know that these terrorist organizations aren't going to exploit that process precisely in order to send people here? You know, that doesn't seem to me to be sort of from the start illegitimate, right? And I wonder whether there's a certain parallel, you know, to security concerns from the United States. Now I agree that all of the evidence shows that immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate and so on. So to say that in general, immigrants are criminals as Donald Trump has said, is not just completely off the marked factually, but also morally disturbing, disgusting. But I can see how people might say, well, look, I mean, you know, there are gangs that are operating. If we have a relatively porous border, how do we know that gangs aren't exploiting this? So how, you know, up to which point is that a part of a legitimate political discourse and where does that cross the line? Well, so the fundamental kind of, at some level baseline job of a government is the safety and security of its people. That is a reasonable subject for conversation, but it's really important for that conversation to be held on the basis of facts and logic and legitimate information as opposed to emotion and especially demagoguery, right? So while on its face and at some level it's reasonable and maybe even important to have the conversation if someone is gonna start from the emotional place and say, like, is it okay to be admitting people from Syria because some of them might be terrorists, you have to break that down and assess why it is someone would start from that impression because of course these are people who are fleeing the very thing that we fear. And certainly I can speak to the United States, I'm more familiar with our processes here, but the refugees that we admit to the United States are more vetted than anybody else. So the likelihood of a problem is lower than it is for the general population. So refugees are vetted very strongly in the United States? They're not vetted very strongly in part. It's more difficult now to get across the border, but we're certainly aware and vetted a couple of years ago when a lot of people came into Germany and other countries in Europe very quickly, and of course it is true that there's people coming across the border to Mexico and the United States who are not vetted as well, right? Well I guess what I'm saying is it's not illegitimate to have the conversation. At some level of course that's where our conversation happens, but what's tremendously important is to give civil society the tools to have that conversation with some degree of fact and to move the conversation away from the realm of fear and emotion and especially demonization and demagoguery because you just can't make good policy that way. And in a way that metaphor may not quite work, but in a way that harkens back to what I was saying in my take at the beginning of the podcast, which is to say that you can condemn the way that Donald Trump has attacked Amazon as being motivated by the wrong thing, signaling the wrong thing, being very dangerous, but that doesn't mean that you can't think that there are some real issues with the way that Amazon is regulated at the moment, right? And in the way I think, you're right, but the way that Donald Trump talks for example about the problem posed by some Central American gangs is not factual, demagogic and very dangerous, which doesn't mean that you can't have a different kind of conversation. Well, yes, and shutting down conversation even when the conversation is on the edge of decency is a dangerous thing in a democracy. At the end of the day, and I think of, so I'm from Michigan, I'm from the Midwest. I think of the neighbors around my, where my dad lives, he lives in the house I grew up in. My head frequently goes to how would I carry out this conversation with these people that I grew up with that I love, but have very different views than I do. At the end of the day, we're all participants in this democracy and we have to, if they wake up in the morning with a fear about somebody with a name like mine, it's important for me to be able to engage the conversation and it's important for me not to shut it down because I miss an opportunity to educate, explain, and hopefully bring that person to a different place. If we, I think it's important on the left and it's important if your community's of color, much as it is painful to hear what we're hearing every day. And I say this knowing that if my daughters were sitting here, they would disagree with me fiercely. I believe it's really important to be able to allow the conversation to happen and to carry it out and to frankly model the kind of respectful behavior that we're hoping to generate. I think that I have more hope for our capacity as a democracy if we are able to do that and less hope if we are not. That seems absolutely right to me. I want to turn to the second half of the thing that I'm trying to think through which is, one set of questions is if you just care about economic growth, about all of those kinds of things, what set of policies on immigration should you institute? Another question is sort of like to what degree should we take into account the willingness of parts of the population to carry those policies, right? And if we institute a policy that we think both morally and economically and so on is the right policy that it leads, let's say to Donald Trump getting reelected or getting elected in the first place, then that's gonna have terrible downstream consequences including terrible downstream consequences for some of the most vulnerable communities in the country. So now the fear here is that we're gonna sort of allow our policy preferences to be pushed down towards things that we really don't like just by sort of a fear of political retaliation, right? So it's tempting to say let's not overthink this and just go for the policies we want because they seem to us to be right. But of course, on the other side, if we do that and it does mean that authoritarian populists have an easier way to some handling our democracy so have an easier way gathering up public anger and directing that against minorities, it seems we irresponsible to not take that into account. So help me make sense of my dilemma here. Yeah, yeah. The short term answer which is I recognize a cheap answer is that the likelihood of policy getting made in the short term is really low. Oh sure, of course. I think my hope for the next couple of years is limited. But that's right. But what that suggests though is that it's important to develop strategies that are looking at a longer time horizon. And this is an incredibly difficult thing to do right now because for everybody I know in the advocacy world like everything is on fire and everybody is engaged in firefighting so it's really hard when you are putting out fires right in front of you to be thinking about how are we setting up for two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. But I also think it's vital to be having those conversations and to figure out how to take this moment and there are tools available this moment in some ways tools that haven't been available before. Like I've been fighting against white supremacists my whole career but lots of people who didn't believe me when I talked about them 10 years ago can see them now. That's a tool. So one question for advocates is how do we use the tools of this horrifying moment to get to a different place where policy can be made that actually reflects who we are and our values and our economic needs. And one of the things that would obviously help immensely and I agree with you that the prospect for that in the next couple of years are not worth pondering too long is some kind of form of comprehensive immigration reform. Now I've heard some accounts and you are obviously deeply involved in these things so you might just disagree with the premise. But I've had some account that suggested that we might have been able to get to some form of comprehensive immigration reform in the second half of Obama's presidency if Democrats have been willing to accept no road to citizenship. And that's one of those cases where I find myself to be really torn because on the one hand I think that people who have lived in this country for a very long time who contribute economically and so on deserve a path to citizenship. That is especially true of people who are brought to the country as children and didn't in any way make a choice in the matter. On the other hand I also think that the difference between being undocumented and having a green card is much, much bigger than the difference between having a green card and being a citizen. And when you add to that the sort of political fallout that this issue being unresolved and festering politically is so poisonous. I wonder whether Democrats should be willing to accept immigration reform that doesn't include a path to citizenship if they get a secure legal status for a very large number of people and if they sort of manage to take the issue of immigration off a political table for a while because people feel like it's been dealt with. So I am certain that that's not why we didn't get an immigration reform and that had Democrats put that on the table we would have faced the same obstacle that we faced. So remember that a bipartisan bill passed the Senate with 68 votes that included reforms to the family immigration system some kind of merit based immigration as well as a long 15 year path to citizenship for undocumented people with strong bipartisan support. The reason it didn't get through the house was not because the Democrats failed to dangle this incentive to the Republicans. The reason it didn't happen in the house was because the Republicans were unwilling to have the debate in the first place. Right, the speaker was unwilling to bring anything to the floor. So we can debate what should have happened had there been a deal space to try to get something through but there never was and that's ultimately the obstacle here is not really a substantive obstacle it's a political obstacle and that obstacle really is that on the Republican side there is a very loud and at the moment ascendant minority which doesn't wanna have this conversation unless it's about walls and throwing people out and shutting the whole thing down. That's the obstacle that's why John Boehner would not bring ultimately bring any bill of any kind to the floor. So at some level I wouldn't mind living in a world where we had that dilemma and we could have that debate but we're not in that world because the Republicans don't have a path forward to fixing this without igniting a lot of yelling from people that right now they don't wanna insight. That's a fair response. I find myself struggling to make sense of whether of whether the election of Donald Trump is the first step towards a slide of democracy towards a form of overtime populism as we see it in countries like Hungary or whether it is sort of a moment that we can overcome and go back to. I don't want you to answer that question which is a large question that I think about over time but a smaller subset of that on which actually by instinct is a little bit more positive than on the little bit more optimistic than on the overall question which is when you think about the story of America's slow complicated journey towards an equal multi-ethnic society, are we now at a turning point at which we really go back in time or is this a sort of short rebellion that'll fade? And on that I guess my instinct is actually a little bit more optimistic than it is on the political side in part because it does seem to me like it's better being a member of virtually any ethnic, religious, sexual minority today than 20 or 40 or 60 years ago, not perhaps in two years ago, but certainly compared to 20 or 40 or 60 years ago. When I compare our situation to that in Europe it seems to me that the bottom line acceptance of the idea that an American can be brown or black and American can be Hindu or Muslim or Jewish is much deeper than it is in other democracies. So I still sort of retain this faith of an immigrant to this country though we might be able to overcome that. And at the same time you see some of the anger in our politics and you see how effectively Donald Trump has weaponized anger against minorities and fears over immigration and perhaps it starts to look naive. So I wanted to get your sort of wide angle view on this. So I think, well I agree with your optimism and I think we are no more at that this last election is no more a turning point than the election of Barack Obama was, right? We thought we had kind of arrived and there was no going back. That was clearly not true. I don't think it's true this time either. But what I take from the 2016 election is that we continue to be the place that elected Barack Obama twice. We didn't stop being that America. But we are also the America that's capable of electing Donald Trump and the same country that enslaved people and interned Japanese Americans and committed genocide against Native Americans. We are all of those things at the same time. And we don't ever stop being that thing because we do something great as I believe we did when we elected President Obama twice or do something deeply terrible as we did with this election. We have all of those currents and our job as owners of this democracy is to bring our best selves to that and fight for what we know we are capable of. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast Cecilia. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying this podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on iTunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. Have The Good Fight tattooed on the 10 knuckles of your two hands. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to TheGoodFightatNewAmerica.org. Thank you. Vladimir, would you like to come up? All right. No, I think we'll trust that the microphone is gonna continue working. Ah, so this is the second, this is the second go-around. Welcome to the second life installment of a podcast that searches for the ideas, policies and strategies that can be to foretime populists like Donald Trump. Over the next four years, let's try that again, there is a little sleepy here. Welcome to the second life installment of a podcast that searches for the ideas, policies and strategies that can be to foretime populists like Donald Trump. Over the next four years. And the next 40. All right. It is a disgrace that Donald Trump has in the last days and weeks congratulated Vladimir Putin, General Al-Sisi on their supposed electoral victories. By the time you hear this, he has probably congratulated Viktor Alban on his clean democratic reelection in Hungary as well. But this is one of those rare moments in which Trump actually is more normal than abnormal, in which he is more the rule than the exception. Because when you look around the world, you see that Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, and Claude Juncker, the President of European Commission, also congratulated Vladimir Putin on his supposed electoral victory. You see that a few days after Germany decided to expel Russian diplomats over the Russian nerf gas attack in the United Kingdom, the German government approved the building of Nord Stream 2, which will increase the degree to which Germany's energy sector is dependent on Russia and make it much easier for Russia to antagonize countries in Eastern and Central Europe because it no longer needs to use the territory to transport gas from Russia to Western Europe. So populists are particularly prone to collaborating with dictatorships all around the world because they see a certain kinship to them. But this is an area in which traditional politicians need to clean up their act as well. We are facing an era of resurgent authoritarianism and it is up to the Angela Merkels and the Claude Junkers of the world, not just to the people like Donald Trump, to actually think about what it would mean to proudly defend our values in that more dangerous world. And when you look at the behavior of politicians across North America and Western Europe, they are very, very far, depressingly far from doing that right now. One of the people who knows, oh, all right, I have to get closer to the mic. All right, hopefully this is gonna be better. One of the people who knows what it means to stand up to dictators better than most is Vladimir Karamurtza. Vladimir is a courageous, influential, and highly insightful opposition politician and organizer in Russia, a longtime associate of the murdered Boris Nemtsov. Vladimir has himself survived a number of assassination attempts and now serves as the vice chairman of Open Russia. Welcome to the podcast, Vladimir. Oh, yes, it's great to be in your podcast. Thank you for having me. So Vladimir Putin just, let's say, had himself re-elected as the president of Russia, seemingly assuring his power for another five years. He was, Judy, congratulated on his quote-unquote election by many world leaders. I have to tell you, if I were in your shoes right now, I'd be pretty depressed. So I know for that you are much more optimistic than I am. If I am, perhaps, an inveterate pessimist, you are certainly an inveterate optimist. So how do you feel about the situation in Russia and the prospects for democracy there right now? Well, of course, the spectacle that we had two Sundays ago on 18th of March, just as every spectacle that's still, by force of habit, called an election in Russia in the time that Mr. Putin has been in power, that's almost two decades now, had as much in common with a genuine democratic election as the brightly painted veneer facades of a Pachomkin village had with real towns and settlements. It's an election in name only. It had no substance, it had no meaning. And I think the best description of it actually was offered by, surprisingly, the official electoral observant mission from the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. And the reason I say surprisingly is because usually diplomats, especially from intergovernmental organizations, are usually cautious and well-diplomatic in the way they describe things, but this statement was absolutely scathing. It was issued the morning after the so-called presidential elections on the morning of the 19th of March. And the head of the short-term OSCE Observer Mission, he's actually a member of the German Bundestag, Michael Georg Link, he said, and I quote almost exactly from memory, choice without competition is not real choice. When the fundamental freedoms are restricted and the outcome is not endowed, elections almost lose their purpose. This is what he said. And he used that word almost again because he's a diplomat. But I think this is actually a very pointed description because for a long time now, elections in Russia have been devoid of the very meaning and the very purpose of elections, which is to empower citizens to freely choose and freely change their government. It's been said that the sure sign of a real democratic election is when you're certain about the procedure, but not certain about the outcome. And for years now, elections in our country have followed the precisely opposite model. Procedures and laws have been shifted constantly to suit the incumbent government, whereas the end result was never in doubt. I'm a little disappointed in my trust and your optimism here. I agree with everything you've said. I'm only beginning, I'm only beginning. All right, all right, go ahead. And so we can talk for a long time about all the different ways that Kremlin has managed to control and manipulate the election process at every stage of the way from obviously, from the government controlling every single national television channels, and which for years have presented a laudatory coverage of Mr. Putin and either ignored or denounced his opponents to coercion and harassment of voters, especially those who depend on the state, on government employment, on government subsistence, people like pensioners, doctors, teachers, those in state and municipal employment, and a lot of people, and millions of people like this in Russia, they're coerced to go, not only just to go and vote, but they have to very often take the cellphone pictures or the selfies with a ballot paper to report to their bosses to show that they voted quote unquote for the correct candidates. There were multiple instances of ballot stuffing on the 18th of March, and one of the big concessions that Kremlin had to offer after the mass anti-Putin protests we had back in 2011 was that they agreed to install web cameras at almost all polling places in the country, so anybody could log on to the website of the Central Electoral Commission, choose the polling place and either watch it live or then download and watch the video recording, where of course it doesn't mean much when you don't have a real judicial system, which we don't have in Russia, that could prosecute election fraud. So on the 18th of March, there were numerous instances of ballot stuffing very openly blatantly recorded on these cameras, people just coming in and stuffing stacks of ballot papers in the box, and nothing was done about it. And of course, very often, we had just plain old-fashioned rigging, rewriting of official votaries. We have several regions in Russia. There's a prominent Russian political analyst, Dmitry Areshkin, he calls them the electoral sultanates. These are regions that report officially Soviet-style 90% plus voting results for Vladimir Putin. I've not met anybody who actually believes those figures reflect the reality, but there are many such regions. But frankly, all of these violations they've all been documented and reported by monitoring groups, including my own organization, Open Russia, which also conducted extensive monitoring around the country. Frankly, all of these violations are irrelevant, because in the most important way... And now we're getting to the optimistic bit. No, not quite. Oh, not yet, oh, sorry, okay. No, next time I'll just start with being optimistic. No, but no, but... No, I'll adjust my expectations. Right, no, I remember this. But all of these violations and abuses that I've just talked about, and we can talk about many more, they are largely irrelevant, because in the most important way, the Russian presidential election of 2018 was rigged long before the first ballot was even cast and the first polling place was even opened. And again, I refer back to that OEC statement, an election without choice. There were two major opposition figures in Russia who were planning to run against Vladimir Putin in 2018. One was Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister, probably the most recognizable face of the Russian Democratic opposition. And the other was Alexei Navalny, the prominent anti-corruption activist who has spent this past year campaigning all across the country. Ironically, he was the only presidential candidate who actually did some campaigning in the country. And neither of them was on the ballot on the 18th of March. Boris Nemtsov, because he was killed three years ago as he walked on the bridge in front of the Kremlin. And Navalny, because he was deliberately barred, deliberately blocked from running with a politically motivated court conviction that was cooked up by the Russian authorities. And that incidentally was already overturned by the European Court of Human Rights. It's not difficult to win an election when your opponents are not actually on the ballot. And when people in the West, including in the Western media and the Western expert community, and you had a brilliant PCI show on this a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago, on this very point, how much of the Western media still kind of talk about this election as if it were a real election. And repeat this Kremlin propaganda line that this vote reaffirmed that Vladimir Putin's so highly popular among Russian citizens. Well, I only have one question to this. Why would such a popular leader be so afraid of having a real election? And it's very important to keep in mind that the so-called popularity of Vladimir Putin was never actually tested, not once, in a free and fair election against genuine opponents. And the point you just made about the congratulations that are followed from Western leaders, this is something that is phenomenally puzzling for me. And we have had this, by the way, for years. This is nothing new. This did not happen just in 2018. For years, we have had the same picture when we have elections in Russia. You have observers from the OSCE and the Council of Europe go to monitor elections as they have to under our membership criteria. And every time, after the year 2000, so according to international observation reports, this is not me saying this is the OSCE and the Council of Europe. The last time we had a more or less democratic election in Russia was in the year 2000. So that's more than 18 years ago now. And even that's debatable, but that's according to them. Every election since then, both parliamentary and presidential, has fallen far short of the basic democratic minimum. And so we've had this astonishing situation when every time observers from OSCE and Council of Europe countries, so from Western democracies would go to Russia, monitor the election and conclude that it was not a free and fair vote. And then the next day, the next morning, you would have the leaders, the presidents and prime ministers of those same Western democratic countries pick up their phones and call Mr. Putin to congratulate. What are you congratulating them on? In fact, they're congratulating him on stealing an election. And this is what we're so again. So I don't understand why they might do that, right? And I think it must come from the fact, I mean, one of it is just sort of cowardice and including intellectual cowardice, right? That it's easier to go ahead with the thing you did last time and there's a script and you just do the same thing again. And that's something that I think we see many institutions doing as we're facing a resurgent authoritarian threat and as we're seeing the rise of populist governments in Western countries and so on. But it's easier to just keep doing what you were doing in the past, right? If in the past you pretended that the prime minister or the president of a country was democratically elected, you'll just go on doing that and treat them like you would somebody who is sort of deserving of that honor, right? But I think there's a sort of deeper second reason, right? Which is that, well, Germany needs Russia because otherwise if Russia turns off the gas supplies to Western Europe, German pensioners are gonna starve in the winter and then the government is not gonna last very long. Germany needs Russia in order to deal internationally with things like Syria and so on. And so it's tempting to just say, hey, you know what, I'm just gonna congratulate them. It doesn't seem to have that much cost and that way perhaps we'll get along a little bit better. And I wonder sort of, you know, I'm trying to formulate the alternative to that because I find that the most effective way of actually changing behavior is to show it as an effective alternative. And so the way that I've put that in the piece that you referenced is to say, well, there's a distinction between you know, not talking to them at all, right? Or denouncing them sort of full throttle. And saying, no, we're going to have respectful negotiations with authoritarian powers. But in those negotiations, we'll make it clear that we're not friends and that we stand for our democratic principles. But yes, we'll sit down at the table. Yes, we'll negotiate about things that different states have to negotiate with each other about. But we will always be clear, as clear that we stand on our principles as Vladimir Putin is, that he stands on his. Do you think that would be a better solution? Do you think that wouldn't go far enough? Do you have an idea about what that would mean? I mean, if you were Angela Merkel calling Vladimir Putin on the day after the election, what would you do? Would you not call him at all? If you did call him, what do you think she should have said? Well, I think that kind of choice that you rhetorically referenced at the beginning of your question is fundamentally a false choice. The choice is not between either you break off all contact, don't talk at all, don't deal at all, or you go completely the opposite way and you legitimize and you dignify and you accept a fake rigged election. And not just accept, but actually congratulate. I mean, this is not a new dilemma, right? This, you know, in the Soviet Union, we also had core and core elections, right? Officially, we had elections every five years. And back then, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, there was also a lot of debate in Western capitals as to how to deal with the Soviet Union and many of the Western leaders of that generation, you know, Jim Ikara, Helmut Schmidt, Varhiji Skardistan, and all the others. They also had these conversations among themselves of how to deal with the Soviet Union and they dealt with the Soviet Union to varying degrees of closeness. Some of them were denounced, criticized by their domestic opponents as being too willing to accommodate with the Soviet regime. Others had differently nuanced positions, but nobody, none of them, none of the Western leaders picked up the phones to congratulate Leonid Brezhnev on winning 99.9% in the official Soviet election. Then why do they do it today? And, you know, you said what would be kind of the way forward combining all of those things? Well, many, many leaders of the past have shown the way forward. And I think a major world government should be able to do more than one thing at a time. And for example, you know, Ronald Reagan, when he was president of the US in the 80s, he on the one hand managed to successfully negotiate arms control with the Soviet Union and on the other hand, he would start every summit meeting with the Soviet leadership by putting down the list of Soviet political prisoners on the table and asking for their release. That should be possible to do at the same time. And, you know, the least I think that can be expected from the leaders of nations and from the heads of state and government that pride themselves on their country's adherence to democratic principles and to the principles of the rule of law is that they do not congratulate a dictator on a sham election victory. And when the US president congratulated Mr. Putin two weeks ago, Senator John McCain issued a very strongly worded statement the same day. And he said that this congratulation was an insult to every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election. And I also have to say that this unfortunately goes a long way back. This is a very bad US presidential bipartisan tradition. And, you know, I think there are few areas of continuity at least in our domestic policies between let's say George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But there is at least one. And that is that all of them tried to be friends with Vladimir Putin. Let's remember George W. Bush looking into Mr. Putin's eyes and getting a sense of his soul. Let's remember Barack Obama declaring a reset in relations with Mr. Putin and praising him for the great work he's doing on behalf of the Russian people. That's a quote. And so in a way, what this president is doing is nothing new. And I will never forget to go back to this issue of congratulating on the, this was the 5th of March, 2012, the day after the last so-called election victory of Vladimir Putin. We had a huge rally on Pushkin Square right in downtown Moscow. This was the next day after Putin claimed victory. And, you know, tens of thousands of people came to protest the fact that their votes were being so blatantly stolen. And I remember we were standing there. All the Russian opposition leaders were on that stage, Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny, Gregorio Vlinsky, many, many others. And, you know, as far as the eye could see, we saw just a huge sea of faces and flags. People, you know, of different political persuasions, but united by the indignation that their votes were being stolen in such a blatant fashion and that their rights were being trampled on so blatantly. And this was the evening in Moscow. There's an eight-hour time difference between Moscow and Washington. And I remember that this was evening in Moscow, so it must have been morning or early afternoon here in Washington. And at the precise time that we were standing there on that rally, we got news that the United States government issued a message of congratulations, not just of Vladimir Putin. That would have been half the problem, but to the people of Russia on having held this election. And I have to tell you, we didn't know whether to take that as an insult or as a mockery. And so what the US president did two weeks ago is part of a long and very unfortunate bipartisan tradition, and nor is it limited to America. Many European leaders did the same. I remember again in 2012, the first three world leaders that called Mr. Putin to congratulate him on his core and core election victory were Erdogan Chavez and David Cameron, the prime minister of Great Britain. And as you just said yourself, the first Western leaders to call Putin this time were actually the president and the chancellor of Germany, Frank Walter Steinmeier and Angela Merkel. And this is all the more ironic since the head of the OSCE election mission that actually publicly announced that this was not a free and fair election is a member of the German parliament. Yeah, no, I mean, all of that is depressing. And I agree with you that it's not either or, right? It's not a matter of either you don't talk to a government at all and you can have no areas of cooperation. You know, all you have to pretend that a sham election is a true election. You can do both things at the same time. But that goes in a way to a larger confusion, I think, in a lot of Western countries about how to deal with Russia, right? You know, I think there's one school of thought that says we should see them as enemies and everything and try to avoid negotiating with them at all and just sort of push back completely, right? There's another set of thought which is quite influential in Europe and used to be very influential in the United States as well for I think it's becoming less so, at least in the opposition, which is to say, well, you know, Putin is just sort of misunderstood and you know, you sort of have an attitude towards him like a social worker, right? He's just sort of a teenager who's acting out, right? And he's a little offended that the West didn't treat Russia as an equal partner in the 90s and 2000s. So we just have to push home a little bit of respect and that'll somehow help, right? I mean, I think clearly neither of those causes of action are the right ones. I mean, is there anything at all that Western Europe and the United States can actually do to help the opposition in Russia? Or, you know, is the dictatorship so entrenched and is any attempt to help democratic forces in Russia in itself going to undermine legitimacy of opposition forces to such an extent as not as being sort of foreign agents or whatever, that there's really very little we can do? Well, first of all, let me make it absolutely clear. We, we meeting the Russian opposition, we never asked, we never asked and never will ask the West or Western governments to support us. That is, of course, a false narrative put out by the Kremlin propaganda. And anytime any of us go to any of the Western capitals to meet the journalists or politician members of parliament or take part in a podcast such as this, you know, Russian state TV trumpets out that we, you know, we're foreign agents, we are engines and foreign influence enemies and traders and all the rest of it, you know, their line is that anytime we come to Western countries it is to ask for money or for political support or to ask Western governments to affect regime change in Russia, whatever other nonsense they come up with. Of course, none of that needless to say is true. We never ask the West to support us, the Russian opposition. The only thing we do ask is that the West stops in effect supporting Vladimir Putin. By first of all, treating him as a worthy and a respectable partner on the world stage which this has been doing for years. And secondly, and that's perhaps even more important by allowing his cronies, the Putin regime cronies to use Western countries as havens for their looted wealth. Because that is what these people have been doing for years. I mean, there's this absolutely phenomenal hypocrisy and double standard that is built right in the heart of the Putin system of power whereby the people, the officials and the oligarchs who make up the Putin regime, these people fundamentally, you know, they attack and undermine and abuse the most fundamental norms of democracy and the rule of law in Russia. But they themselves want to enjoy the privileges and the perks of democracy and the rule of law in Western countries because it is in Western countries that they send their children to schools, that they open bank accounts, that they buy mansions, villas, yachts, you know, keep their wives in their mistresses and all the rest of it. And it's, you know, this is a, so they want to steal in Russia but spend in the West and that is what they have been doing for years. And of course, on their part, needless to say constitutes enormous hypocrisy but on the part of Western countries, in my opinion, that constitutes enabling. Because, you know, for somebody to export corruption somebody else needs to import it. And if you are welcoming the people who perpetrate corruption and human rights abuses in Russia on your soil and in your banks, then you are in effect enabling human rights abuses and corruption in Russia. And the only thing we do ask of the West is to stop that. And it is very heartening to see that in the last few years there has finally begun this movement across the Western world to put an end to this hypocritical practice. And a little more than five years ago, the US became the first country in the world to pass a law that was called the Magnitsky Act that introduced this principle, that if you engage in this type of behavior in your own country, if you engage in corruption and human rights abuses in your own country, you will no longer be entitled to receive a visa, own assets or use the banking and financial system, in this case of the United States. There have been four other countries since that have passed the same laws. They are Canada and the three Baltic states. I always say that the most, the three most courageous countries in the European Union are the three forms of Soviet Republic to the border Russia. None of the old big European countries have done it yet, but we're working with them. And it is heartening to see actually in this day and age that those people who stand up for values and principles can still overcome the cynicism and the real politic. And when the Magnitsky Act was passed here in the US, this was the vote in the House of Representatives was in November of 2012. And on that day, this was November the 16th, 2012, Boris Nemtsov and I were sitting on the balcony here in the US House of Representatives chamber on Capitol Hill watching as they voted on the bill. And it was passed with more than 80% of the votes in the House and then more than 90% in the Senate. And I remember Boris said to me, this is the most pro-Russian law ever passed in any foreign country, because it holds to account the people who steal from Russian taxpayers and who abuse the rights of Russian citizens. And we hope that more of the world's democracies take a lead on this and send a clear message that the crooks and the human rights abuses will no longer be welcome. So you're right that there's a sort of irony there, right? Well, on the one hand, Russian oligarchs and members of the Putin regime actually love the West. That's where they spend a good bit of their time. That's where they park their money. That's where they send their children to go to school and university, right? On the other hand, they are undermining the democratic institutions of the West. And we've seen, obviously, we're still starting to understand the exact extent of Russia's meddling in the US elections, of the Russian attempt to influence elections in France and Germany and other countries, but it's quite clear that it's substantive. So I'm trying to understand what you think the motives behind that are. What is the end game here? Is it actually to undermine democracies in countries like the United States to such an extent that you install dictatorships that can have friendly relationships with Russia? Is it simply to get favorite candidates elected? Is it just to weaken these societies so that they can less effectively stand up to Russian expansionism in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia? What do you think the goal here is and what does that imply for how countries like the United States should respond? First of all, let's clear the terminology. In that question you said several times, Russian meddling, Russian attempts, Russian behavior. I am a former journalist myself, I understand shorthand, but please not use the word Russia when you mean the Putin regime. Those are not one and the same thing. And too many people in the West equate a whole country with a small authoritarian unelected clique that is sitting in the Kremlin. And please don't do that. That's what the Kremlin would like you to do. One of Putin's closest aides, which is Lavalodian who was back then when he said it, he was the deputy chief of staff at the Kremlin. Now he's the speaker of the Duma. He said publicly on the record a couple of years ago, I quote, there's no Russia without Putin. Now to me as a Russian citizen, I can think of nothing more insulting to say about my country. But apart from being insulting, it is also not true because there are many people and many voices and many viewpoints in Russia. And this regime does not speak for us. It's not a democratically elected government. So they would like the whole world to associate Russia with them, please don't fall into that trap. But on the substance of your question, of course we know that the Kremlin has been interfering in elections for years. Now in the first elections they started to interfere with were elections in Russia. As long as Mr. Putin came to power all those years ago, Russia was basically a democratic country. And it flawed imperfect to be sure, but a functioning democracy. Now it's a full fledged authoritarian system. So the first elections they began to meddle with were elections in Russia itself. But then of course they began to overstep the borders and try to do it in other countries. And we know that they've been involved or trying to get involved in political affairs of many post-Soviet states. Of course, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, many others. We know that they've been trying to involve themselves in political affairs of Western European countries. A few years ago there was a multimillion euro loan issued quite openly from a Moscow connected bank to the far right full national party in France, ahead of the French elections. This is what we know from public information. Imagine how many things we don't know for now. And of course, if it is proven that the Kremlin has tried to interfere in the American election in 2016, that would not be surprising at all. Because from that point of view, why shouldn't it? They've been doing it with complete impunity for years. And as for the goal, I think the main goal, well actually the goals are different from country to country. So for example, when Mr. Putin began to attack, this time actually quite physically, literally not figuratively attack Ukraine in 2014. I think the main reason for that was purely domestic. It was not about spheres of influence or geopolitics. That could have been an added benefit from that point of view. But I think the absolutely principal reason for what Putin did and continues to do to Ukraine was that he really did not enjoy the precedent of what happened in Ukraine in 2014. And that is when a corrupt authoritarian strongman was forced out of power by hundreds of thousands of people who came out to the streets of the capital, especially in a country that is so close to Russia, historically and mentally and culturally and linguistically in every other way, as Ukraine is. He really didn't like that precedent. That was an analogy that was too close to home for him. So in my view, he set out to destroy or try to destroy the democratic experiment in Ukraine before it would become a contagious example from his point of view to Russian society. When it comes to what he's been doing in Western countries, I think it's more of an attempt just to sow chaos, to kind of show that, you know, because of course, a lot of people- So I agree with that description, but what's the point of sowing chaos? What's you trying to get out of that? Because obviously, as we know, there is a lot of criticism from people in the West towards what Putin has turned the Russian political system into. There's a lot of criticism to how Putin basically destroyed democracy in Russia and made elections meaningless and all the rest of it. So for him, I mean, that's an old Soviet era tactic actually. So when they were criticized on something then the Soviet government by Western leaders, it would immediately find something wrong in that country and say, oh, but look at yourselves, you know, the kind of, the what aboutism. And this is what they're trying to do, because so, you know, they sow chaos and then they say, oh, look, but your system is not much better than you saying that we have problems, look at yourselves, look at what you have in there. I think that's actually the primary reason for what they're doing. And if you look at the different types of forces they've been supporting over the years in Western countries, there is no consistent ideology to this. So it's not like back in the Soviet times when there were millions of dollars flowing from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to friendly Communist parties in Western countries, here in Western Europe and all the other countries in the world. Now, the Kremlin is supporting whoever it thinks fits its goals at the moment. I mean, it's supporting the far right. As I mentioned, in the case of France, it's also working extensively with the far left, the Communist, the Stalinist. I mean, if you look at the composition of the so-called European election observation mission that went to observe the so-called referendum in Crimea, the annexation referendum in March of 2014, it was actually a remarkable group. It consisted of, you know, people who probably usually don't even say hello to each other. I mean, they had the Stalinists, the Nazis, the Communists, some Greens, all in the same. Some people from the fringe. So it was the case of sort of election observing the mission of the Soviet Union. That was going to say, yes, the referendum was above board. Which is what they did. Which is what they did. And if you look at the same pattern, so, you know, every time we have an election in Russia, there is an official observer mission coming in, usually from OSCE in the Council of Europe. This time, Council of Europe was not invited. The OSCE was. But then, of course, they make a point and they know that there's gonna be criticism from these legitimate international observers. So they always make a point of setting up these fake observation groups. But again, I usually composed of people on the far right and the far left. So on the fridges of politics in Western countries who come in and who say that I remember in 2011 when we had the parliamentary election that was infamously blatantly rigged. And after that, we had hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Moscow protesting. During that election, there was this alternative observer mission that was led by Nick Griffin, who was, at the time, a member of the European Parliament from the UK. He was the leader of the British National Party, the far right, basically fascist party in the UK who came in. And I'll forget, he was featured in Russian state television and, of course, the title said member of the European Parliament, which he was, and he said that I have never seen elections in Britain that were so honest and democratic as what I've just seen here. And then these are the, well, as Lenin called them, useful idiots, nothing changes much in this regard. So I know from past conversations we've had that you don't just criticize me when I slip up and say the Russians rather than the Kremlin, and you're absolutely right to point that out, that is an important distinction. You also are a little impatient when people mention too many kinds of political leaders under the same category, right? So there's a huge distinction that we should always be mindful of between somebody like Vladimir Putin, who has effectively taken control of a media in Russia who has rendered elections there meaningless, who has murdered a number of his political opponents, or at least it is plausible to think that the Kremlin apparatus has had them murdered. And even people, let's say like Viktor Arban in Hungary or Jasław Kaczynski in Poland, who are attacking democratic institutions in serious way, who have undermined the independence of the judiciary, who have turned state television radio stations into propaganda tools, who have for various incentives forced the sale of private institutions into the hands of people who are more critical, who are more friendly to them, but who do allow some critical coverage, who don't give a free and fair chance in Hungary's case to the opposition to run, but they don't straight out outlaw any serious opposition from running. So there's an important distinction there. There's also an important distinction between what Viktor Arban has already done in Hungary and the worrying science in the United States, right? So Donald Trump has said that he would leave people in suspense about the outcome of the American presidential election. He has called for his adversary Hillary Clinton in the last election to be locked up. In the last days and weeks he has suggested, for example, that the Washington Post should register as a lobbyist, which is exactly the kind of regulatory approach to trying to silence the opposition that we've seen in other countries. And yet it's clear that in the United States for now, we do have a very robust free press that for now we can be reasonably certain, despite some of the longstanding challenges of elections in the United States, that we will have free and fair elections, largely free and fair elections in the upcoming midterms. How does your perspective from Russia make you see the danger that American democracy is or perhaps isn't in now? How do you interpret those kinds of warning signs against the background of what we experienced in Russia? Well, first of all, I'm gonna be careful about what I say about domestic US politics. Seems there are enough Russians trying to meddle into it. You are finished here. I don't wanna be one more. So I'll be careful what I say, but I do want to say that, and thank you for raising this point, actually, it's sometimes people rhetorically equate the problems that may exist in Western democratic countries with, for example, what we have in Russia, and there is no comparison. And you said it very well, I think, that the basic fact is that the people who are opponents, radical political opponents of the current US president, Donald Trump, they are sitting in Congress and come November, or rather January, they may well be in a majority in US Congress. The people who are prominent opponents of Vladimir Putin are in prison, in exile, or dead. And that is a fundamental difference. So there is no, in reality, there's no comparison, in my view, about the many problems that may exist in Western political systems, in what we are facing in Russia. Having said that, I do think that it's encumbered on citizens everywhere, in all countries, not to take the democratic freedoms for granted. And I think it's important, I think it's an accepted notion. I'm not saying anything new here, but I think democracies depend on their survival, for their survival on active citizens, so I prefer to stand up for their rights and their freedoms. And I think it's important not to be complacent about these things anywhere. Well, let me push you a bit a little bit, because you've seen that process play out in your country. I mean, Russia never had an entrenched democracy or consolidated democracy in the way the United States now has. But certainly, it was much closer to being a democratic country in the 1990s than it is now. And you saw how an authoritarian leader slowly abolished press freedom, for example. So what signs would you watch for? If you were in the United States right now, what is it that would actually concern you? And what is it where you would say, eh, that's not great, but you know what, don't lose your head over it? Well, we're both historians, and as we know, historical analogies are never exact, but I think there is actually a very close analogy between what Putin did when he came to power in Russia and how he incrementally and carefully dismantled Russian democracy and how Mussolini did it in Italy in the early 1920s. I think if there was an analogy, it is that. And Mussolini himself actually even coined the phrase of how to do these things. He said, pluck the chicken feather by feather to lessen the squawking. So in other words, do it incrementally, do it gradually, not try to do it in one day. I mean, you know, military coups-à-parces. The way these dictators dismantle democracy is they do it in a careful way. And if you look at how Mussolini did it in the early 20s in Italy, and how Putin did it in the early 2000s in Russia, I mean, they followed almost the exact steps, and almost in the same order. What were the steps? So the first thing that Putin began with, and by the way, I think it's important to state, I mean, you were right, that Russia was never, you know, developed traditional democracy, of course, but back in the 90s, and I'm old enough to remember this, unlike now we have a whole generation that grew up under Putin, that does not remember anything else. I'm old enough to remember when we had real elections in Russia, when elections actually mattered, when election results were determined by how people voted. That's a revolutionary concept for us today. I'm old enough to remember when parliaments in Russia had an opposition majority, a majority that was in opposition to the incumbent president. That's unthinkable today. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when national television channels offered hard-hitting criticism of the government and the president. I mean, when Putin came to power in the end of 1999, beginning of 2000, three out of the four nationwide television channels in Russia were not controlled by the government. They were privately owned, and this was his first target. So when he came to power, we have the saying in the Russian language, кто нас обидит три дня не проживет, those who will offend us will not live for three days. Well, almost in a keeping with that saying, on day four, after his inauguration as president in May of 2000, Mr. Putin sent armed operatives from the tax police and the prosecutor general service to raid the offices of Media Most, which was at the time the largest independent media holding in Russia, and the parent company of NTV, which was the largest independent television channel in Russia. And within a year, within the first year of his presidency, he had NTV, Putin had NTV forcefully taken over by the state physically in the middle of the night. They came in armed operatives and seized the studios, kicked the journalists out. And within the first three years of his rule, he had either shut down or taken over every single nationwide television channel in Russia. The last one was shut off actually by the order of the press minister that didn't even keep up pretenses. This was in June of 2003. And- So step one, controlling this. Step one is the media. Step two, and by the way, 2003 was a crucial year because there was no single date when we could say that Russia seized being a democracy and became an authoritarian state because again, he did this gradually and incrementally, but if I were to name a year, it would be 2003 because three different things happened in that one year. So in June of 2003, the government, Putin's government shut down the last independent nationwide television channel, literally pulled the plug switch to signal. The second thing that happened, that was in October of 2003, Mikhail Khorkovsky, who was the richest businessman in Russia at the time. He was the head of the Yuko Soil that was the largest private oil company and who also behaved in a very independent fashion. He openly supported opposition parties, for example, and opposition candidates in elections. He supported NGOs, civil society groups. He supported the project to spread the internet into the Russian regions, especially in the schools and universities in Russian regions. And for a long time, the Kremlin was sending messages to him that perhaps you shouldn't do that. And his position always was, I'm a citizen of my country, this is what I think is the right thing to do, I'm gonna continue doing this. So in the early morning of the 25th of October, 2003, when Khorkovsky's plane made a refueling stop in the airport of Novosibirsk, armed FSB operatives came on his plane, handcuffed him, put him on a different plane, flew him back to Moscow, put him physically in a cage in a Moscow courtroom and put in state TV cameras and paraded the image of the richest man in Russia sitting physically in a cage. As a clear message to everybody else, to the entire Russian business community, that if you behave like him, you're gonna end up like him. So that's step two. That's step two. You remove the sources of support for independent and opposition political activity, which is what they did with Khorkovsky. After him, after his arrest, not a single representative of big business in Russia dared to behave in the way that Khorkovsky did. And by the way, he would spend, Khorkovsky would spend more than 10 years in prison for nothing, for daring to support the opposition, after which he was physically kicked out very much in the way of the old Soviet dissidents who was taken from his prison cell, put on a German plane, actually belonging to the former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietzsche Genscher and physically flown from St. Petersburg to Berlin. And he's now in forced exile. So this was step two. Step three, same year, again, still, we're still in 2003. In December of 2003, we had a parliamentary election in Russia, which was the first election in Russia since the end of Soviet one-party rule that was assessed by international observers as not fair. And the result of that election, I remember that election very well, I was a candidate in that election for the Russian parliament. This was just after we'd graduated from university. And by the way, Yashin and I were in the same university all those years ago. So we graduated in 2003, I went back to Russia, and I ran for that election in December to the State Duma. And this was, the famous description offered by Council of Europe observers was that it was still free, but already not fair. So this was kind of a transitional. So we could still be on the ballot. It was just probably, by the way, a decent description of the last Hungarian election. So the ones we have in Russia are neither free, nor fair. That one in 2003 was, they said it was still free in a sense that we could at least have access to the ballot. I mean, now, as we already discussed, genuine opponents are not even allowed on the ballot in the first place. Back then we were. So I was a registered candidate. Boris Nemtsov was a registered candidate, but it was not possible for us to win. And so in 2003, in December 2003, Mr. Putin basically ejected the genuine opposition voices from the Russian parliament, turning the Russian parliament into what it is to date. Basically a rubber stamp. We're similar to the Supreme Soviet back in the Soviet days. And it was also in December 2003 that the new speaker of the Russian parliament, Boris Grislov, a close confidant of Mr. Putin, said his famous phrase. When he was responding to a question from a journalist about some parliamentary procedure, he turned to him and said, parliament is not a place for discussion. And I think that's gonna be one of the defining quotes about the Putin regime in future history books. And that unfortunately is true. Since 2003, parliament has not been a place for discussion. I spoke recently at a conference, and before me, he was an activist. The person who spoke before me was an activist from Papua New Guinea. He was a pro-democracy activist and he came to speak. And he said that, you know, the situation in our country is so bad, we only have one genuine opposition member in our parliament. And so I came up to him in a break and I said, well, you know, that's one more than we have. We have zero. And so that was step three. And then step four. And by the way, in the step one bit, where we were talking about the destruction of independent media, that was actually accompanied by the destruction of independent judiciary as well. Because one of the ways in which Putin managed to subjugate and destroy independent media is by using the courts to issue, you know, verdicts against those media outlets to kind of give it a veneer of legitimacy. And then the final thing they did in 2004, after the horrendous terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, Putin used that attack as a pretext to abolish direct elections for regional governors in Russia. And so for almost 10 years we had no elections for regional governors in a country that's still officially called the Russian Federation. Since 2012, after the mass protest in Moscow, the Kremlin was forced to reinstate elections for regional governors, but they qualified them with a requirement that anybody who wants to be a candidate has to collect enough signatures from local officials who are of course all subordinate to them, most of them subordinate to the government. So that's another way that they control who is actually on the ballot. So I would say 2003 was probably the year when Russia went from being a democracy to being an authoritarian state. So when I look at this list, right, I mean the first is attacks on the media. The second is to try to remove sources of support for the opposition. The third is elections, trying to render elections unfair even if they continue to be free for a little while. And the fourth then is sort of using events like terror attacks in order to concentrate power in the hands of the executive in certain ways. That's a very good summary actually, yes. Thank you very much. Like you, I'm a historian, I can summarize. Yeah, nothing that's going to be expected from you. It seems to me that, and again, I'm going to be very, very careful not to equate you, right, because there are obviously huge disanalogies. But I would say that there are at least some ways in which Donald Trump doesn't perhaps seem to be plucking each of these individual feathers, but certainly seems to be sort of playing around with them and perhaps trying to yank them a little bit. So talking about the media, right, he is denouncing independent media institutions as fake news, and he has suggested that the Washington Post should register as a lobbyist. He has said that we should have a change in libel laws which would make it much easier to sue independent media outlets. When you look at the second step, remove sources of support, I think that's the way to understand things like his war with Jeff Bezos, who both controls Amazon and in certain ways the Washington Post, right, that he is precisely saying, if you are going to be supporting independent media outlets, you might be punished for that in one way or another. You might suddenly find your core business to be making a lot less profit than you did previously, and arguably that's what happened in the merger of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN, and AOL. When you look at non-fair elections, you had the abortive attempt to have a voter fraud commission that looked into fictitious acquisitions of voter fraud in order to potentially make changes to elections that might be worrying. Now, two caveats. First, we haven't seen an attempt to use some horrendous event in order to concentrate power, and there's been no real suggestions of that, but also hasn't been that event so far. There isn't an obvious moment that Donald Trump could have suggested something like that, but we've certainly not seen that. And he hasn't really gone through on the first three points in anything resembling what Vladimir Putin did. But when you see his willingness to play with attacks on the media, to play with ways of punishing some like Jeff Bezos for supporting the Washington Post, his attempt to play with potentially making elections a little bit less fair, does that concern you? Do you see parallels there, or do you think that's unhelpful? First of all, you're trying again to draw me into commenting on U.S. politics, which I'm going to continue to resist to do, but I do want to say that even in the way you phrased your question, you know, you use the words like said, cold. You could add tweeted or something like that. You know, by this stage, in his first presidential term, Putin had already shut down two of the three independent nationwide TV channels. He'd already gone after the judiciary. He'd already, I mean, and I think I want to go back to how you started this question, that there is, at the end, there is no equivalence. There is no equivalence between things that people say that a lot of people can find offensive or undemocratic even, but they say those things. Look, I agree that there's no equivalence, and that's not the point, right? But when you look at somebody like Recep Erdogan in Turkey, who at this point is a dictator? Oh, there is a lot of equivalence, of course. I was just talking about that. No, no, I know, but you know, you're right that two or three years into Vladimir Putin being in office, it's pretty clear where Russia is headed. Two or three years into Recep Erdogan being in office in Turkey, it's not clear where Turkey is headed, right? In fact, a lot of newspapers in Turkey and Europe in the United States were saying that, hey, he seems to be importing a sort of Muslim form of Christian democracy into the country, and that actually, in many ways, seems to be deepening democracy there. And yet they're worrying science, which we're a little bit like what we've just been talking about, right? So I'm not asking you to sort of comment on the analogy to Putin exactly. I'm asking you to say, you've set out this four-point plan of how people have dismantled democracy. When, let's take it away from the United States, you see the kinds of actions that I've described. Do you think that somebody playing with those actions but not going through is a sign of the strength of the system, or do you think that their willingness to play with those actions should have us concerned about what might happen next? I just fundamentally think, without commenting on a specific individual or any specific party or administration, I just fundamentally think that countries that have centuries of democratic traditions behind them, that have centuries of developing democratic institutions, checks and balances, centuries of developing a democratic culture, which is something, unfortunately, that we in Russia did not have when Putin came to power. That's something Turkey did not have. That's something Venezuela did not have, to use another example of a very close analogy, actually, in the way the regime was structured. I just think any such developments in countries with such strong traditions of democratic governance are impossible. You think they're possible? I do. Well, on that very optimistic note, I hope very much that you will be proved to be right. Thank you so much, Vladimir. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you too have been enjoying this podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on iTunes. Tell your friends all about it. Share it on Facebook or Twitter. Set up a botnet that spams people with advertisements for The Good Fight. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to thegoodfightatnewamerica.org. All right. We are nearly through. We're running a little over. So if people have to run, you're welcome to. So I hope that everybody will stay around and buy one of my books, which I'm happy to sign and have a drink with us and chat. But now it's an opportunity to do a little bit of Q&A. So anybody who has questions to Vladimir or to Cecilia, please raise your hand and grab a mic. Or to me, I'm trying to wiggle out, mostly to the two of them, but I might concede to answering a question or two. Who has a question? All right. My friend. Speaking to her. Do you think that America has implemented it well enough? Are we putting enough people on the list? Or has it met your expectations? Thank you very much. That is actually a very important question because it's not enough just to have them on the books. It also needs to be working. It needs to be implemented properly. And I have to say that for the first few years after the slow was passed, it was being implemented very timidly in a sense that the U.S. government would put low-hanging fruits, if you will, low-level human rights abuses on the list without touching the high-profile people who should clearly have been placed on this list. And I remember the two individuals that we would particularly speak about when we would meet with, for example, members of Congress to talk to them about the importance of implementation now that this law is on the books. The two individuals that were particularly mentioned Ramzan Kadyrov and General Alexander Bestrikin. Now Ramzan Kadyrov is the Kremlin-appointed ruler of Chechnya, Putin's viceroy in Chechnya effectively. And even by the general standards of Putin's Russia, which are not high when it comes to human rights and the rule of law and democratic governance, even by those standards, Chechnya today is a complete black hole. I mean, they have just an absolutely horrendous, so it's a medieval caliphate there, in the worst sense of the word. They have daily killings, tortures, disappearances. There was egregious violations of any basic norms. And this guy who is boasting about being responsible for all of that, he was not initially being placed under the Magnitsky sanctions. And the second person is General Alexander Bestrikin, who is the top law enforcement official in the Putin government. He's the chairman of the investigative committee, which is the equivalent of the FBI in Russia. And this person, of course, in his capacity as the top law enforcement official, he was not only personally responsible for all the major politically motivated prosecutions against opponents of the government in previous years, the Khodorkovsky case, the Navalny case, the Balotne case, goes to Magnitsky case itself. But more than that, a few years ago, he personally, and again, this is a top law enforcement official in the Russian government, a general, he personally drove a journalist, a leading independent journalist in Russia, Sergei Sakalov, deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta. He drove into a forest near Moscow, took him out of the car, walked him into the forest, and said, if your newspaper continues to write what you're writing, I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna bury you right here in this forest. And by the way, ha-ha, I'm gonna be in charge of the investigation, because guess what? I'm the head of the investigation committee. And this is not a dispute. This is not allegedly, or supposedly, he admitted this. And you know, we would say that if you cannot pull people like this under the Magnitsky, then what is it for? And I'm happy to say that at the beginning of last year, the Obama administration designated General Alexander Bastrykin as a recognized human rights abuser under the Magnitsky Act. And in December of last year, the Trump administration designated Ramzan Kadyrov as a recognized human rights abuser under the Magnitsky Act. So progress is slower than we would have liked, but it is there, it is happening. This process is continuing. And we are also continuing to work. And when the Canadians passed their Magnitsky law in the autumn of last year, they immediately produced a very held profile list that included high-profile human rights abuses. By the way, not only from Russia, because all of these laws are now have a global reach, which is what they should be, because if we believe that human rights are universal by their nature, then the responsibility for violating human rights should also be universal. And so the Canadian Magnitsky list included people from Venezuela, from Iran, from Burma, over the Rohingya massacre and so forth. And it did include senior high-profile human rights abuses from the Putin regime. So we are continuing to work with parliamentarians in other Western countries, now in Europe, since North America is done, to convince them to pass these laws in their countries. And just a couple of weeks ago, I was in Copenhagen to meet with members of the Danish parliament. And hopefully we're gonna get the ball rolling on the Magnitsky law in Denmark soon. And in a couple of weeks, I'll be in London to testify the British parliament about the same issue. But it is equally important, and thank you for raising this point, it is equally important to continue working in those countries that already have Magnitsky laws in the books to make sure they implement them properly. I wonder if everyone on the panel could speak to the appeal of both Trump and Putin to 18 to 29-year-olds in America and in Russia. In America, I get it a little bit more just because I live here. There were racist xenophobic people in the 60s. It seems to make sense that we, I mean, it's depressing, but we still have a percentage of our country that can't be eliminated. Many of those people are still around, and they give birth to and raise people who are racist and xenophobic like themselves. And so some of that appeal for a semi-authoritarian racist figure makes sense. In Russia, there was an article recently in the Washington Post, I don't know if you saw it, about how a lot of millennials in the country are supportive of Putin. I don't know what percentages or figures they cited, but there were a lot of these anecdotes of people to say, the Russian soul craves an authoritarian leader, quotes like that. If you could just speak some to that in both countries. Yeah, and I wish I knew what to put this. We are not immune to the kind of that it takes place. No moment of economic anxiety as well as demographic anxiety, but it's also important to put it in perspective. Hopefully it doesn't reflect our direction for a greater moment, but ultimately. Thank you for the question. And before I address your main question, I just want to briefly touch on the point that you ended with, that there is a stereotype out there that is very often quoted, that these Russians, these strange people out there, they're just not made for democracy. They crave for a strong hand and for a stern whip. That's how they, this is one of the most shallow, one of the most insulting stereotypes. I think it's borderline racist, right? Just suggest that there is a people that is just, that has to live under authoritarian rule. By the way, this has been said about many nations in history and all of those are now successful in functioning democracies. But specifically with regard to Russia, that stereotype is often pushed by the people who benefit from it. So by those who do have a strong hand and a stern whip and they say, well, that people, they have to have it. You know, as a historian, I prefer to deal with facts as opposed to stereotypes. And if we look at the facts of the modern history of Russia and going back century or so at least, every time the Russian people could actually choose in a more or less free election between dictatorship and democracy, they always chose democracy. In 1906 in the first Duma election, in 1917, in the vote for the Constitutional Assembly, 1991 in the Russian presidential election, when Yeltsin defeated the communists by 57% to 17, those are the facts, not the stereotypes. And I just think it's really frustrating when people continue to repeat this old line that has absolutely no basis in reality. Authoritarian rule. I thought that was a vote from what it did. I know, I know, I know, it was, yes, absolutely. And you know this, and it's important also to remember that authoritarian rule in Russia has always, and this includes the Putin regime, has always resulted from a suppression of popular will, not from an expression of it. And on your main question about the young people, first of all, there's no way, I didn't see that article in the Washington Post. First of all, there's no way of telling. I mean, there are only two ways to honestly measure public opinion, right? One is elections, and the other is opinion polls. Well, we do not have elections, as we've just been talking about. And as for opinion polls, I mean, how meaningful are opinion polls in an authoritarian state, in a free society? When a lot of people, first of all, don't have access to objective information, because so much of the media is controlled by the government. But secondly, and more importantly, when people inevitably weigh their responses against potential consequences. I mean, you approach by somebody on the street, you know everything that's happening in the country, you know that opponents of Putin that denounce those enemies and traders and put in prison, somebody comes to you and says, what do you think of Putin? What are you gonna say? And this is completely meaningless. And I think the best way to judge the situation in the absence of those reliable indicators is as you said, anecdotal evidence, empirical evidence. And the empirical evidence has been that over this past year, tens of thousands of those young people, the millennials, the people who have grown up under Putin, people who are born under Putin, have been going out to the streets, all across Russia in the tens of thousands to protest against this regime and its abuses and its corruption. And frankly, you know, to go out to, in Russia to protest against the government is not the same as to come here in Washington to protest against the US administration. Now here you are protected by police when you do that. In Russia, you're beaten up by police and arrested and sent to jail for nothing. And yet despite that, thousands of people have been coming out. And most of those protesters have been members of that generation that you describe. The generation that grew up not knowing anything except Vladimir Putin. And I think the fact that so many young people are taking to the streets to protest is certainly a very worrying sign for the Kremlin. I'd not certainly be worried if I were them right now. But I think it's a very hopeful and very promising sign for the future of Russia. There's a question up here. Hi, my name is Catherine. I am on the production team for a podcast for Another Network, which shall remain unnamed. I have two questions. One for Cecilia and one for Vladimir. For Cecilia and my question is, do you think computer science is a science? And Vladimir, my question is... I hope I get something easier than that. I'm clear, you'll decide. So my question is from the former Soviet Union and we talk a lot about the issue that you raised about the hypocrisy of the West allowing Russia and oligarchs to keep their wealth in Western countries while denouncing their politics. And I wanted to know if you think that denouncing hypocrisy is a useful tool. I mean, I find it frankly to be very divisive and potentially not a good way to win support for your cause. I was wondering what you think about that. I actually know even how to begin to answer your question. I really don't know what the answer to that is. What I will say is that the technological skillset that I talk about describes really a number of things from people who are doing engineering and coding to people who are product developers to people who do sort of what I think of as bureaucracy hacking or process design. It's a broad range of skills which we're using which have already had a pretty transformational effect on the lives of everybody in this room. And the point is that there should be and we're hoping to get to a point where there is where that kind of training is linked also to public policy training and vice versa that people who study the making of public policy and the making of law develop elements of this skillset, at least develop some understanding of this skillset. It shouldn't be in separate worlds and vice versa in the same way that there are people who are trained in law schools who are not necessarily interested in practicing law but may be interested in the design of law and in the design of public policy. We understand that as a tool for making public policy. We don't have that understanding for technical skills and we should. So those are the divides that we're trying to bridge. Thank you for the question. Well, of course, there are two parallel hypocrisies here. One is a hypocrisy from those people around Putin who deny their own citizens the most basic democratic rights and then themselves want to enjoy the protections of democratic countries in the West. That's their hypocrisy and I think we absolutely should be denouncing that hypocrisy because as Russian citizens it's our place to do that. The other kind of hypocrisy which I think is the one you're referring to is a hypocrisy from some of those Western governments who on the level of words say that they stand for the rule of law and democracy and human rights but in effect enable the abuse of those norms in Russia by welcoming these people in their money. It is not our place to denounce that kind of hypocrisy. Again, I don't think it's for us to meddle into the domestic affairs of other countries. I mean we do, the most important thing I think for us is just to speak the truth. It's not about denouncing it, it's just to say, okay that's the situation and it is hypocrisy. And it's for voters in those Western countries to do something about it. And I must say that it has been actually very positive and reassuring experience for me over the seven or eight years that I've been involved in this international Magnitsky campaign working with parliamentarians across different countries including here is actually how many, despite the prevailing attitude that everything is cynical, everything is about money, everything can be bought and sold. Despite all of this, it was really heartening to see how many people in Western political circles including in this town, including in Congress, in both parties still care about such things as principles and values and human rights and the rule of law and do this despite the expediency despite often going against the administration of their own party because they believe in those principles. And so when we talk about this hypocrisy, I think it's important not to forget that this is not an all engulfing hypocrisy. Not everybody's like this. Too many people are like this but it is very heartening to see people who are still prepared to stand up for the truth and justice and these are the people that I think represent the best hope for the Western world as well. And I think one of the things that I always think about on the podcast is how we can actually better understand our own principles, better communicate our own principles and then stand up much more courageously than we do. So I think that's a perfect closing note. Please join me in thanking Cecilia and Vladimir for being our guinea pigs today. A new book, The People of West Moxie, is for sale outside. I'm very happy to sign it but more importantly I need a drink and I think there are drinks outside. So feel free to mingle and get a drink. Thank you. That was really fun.