 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. What's wrong with Tucker Carlson? Just Asking Questions. I'm Zach Weissmuller, Senior Producer for Reason. My co-host is Liz Wolfe, Associate Editor at Reason. Hey, Liz. Hey, Zach. Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson took a trip to Moscow, and he really seemed to like it. He released videos of himself gushing about a subway station, going grocery shopping, getting a piece of chocolate cake from a knockoff McDonald's, and even chatting with the president for a couple hours. That would be Vladimir Putin, whom we should not assume just killed his political rival, Alexei Navalny, in prison. Tucker Carlson assured Glenn Beck on a show yesterday that you're an idiot if you think that. To help us analyze the Putin interview, understand what it is Tucker Carlson might be up to, and discuss the latest developments in Russian-U.S. relations, we're welcoming Michael Moynihan, journalist and co-host of the Fifth Column Podcast and former senior editor here at Reason. Michael, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. First question I have for the room is, did Tucker Carlson do anything wrong simply by sitting down with Putin? Because that's been a little bit of the discussion. That's what kind of Tucker Carlson has floated out there a little bit that he kind of anticipated that people were going to attack him just for talking to Putin. I don't think there's anything wrong with just talking to Putin, but let's start there. Michael, what do you think about the idea of a journalist like Tucker Carlson going to Moscow, sitting down with Putin? I don't know how much of a journalist he is, but the act of sitting down with Vladimir Putin is something that I envy Tucker for. I would love that opportunity. I've been into a few government offices in Moscow to interview people, and that process was amazingly difficult. Most people don't even try. Megan Kelly interviewed Vladimir Putin, and I think it's great that she did. She also interviewed Alex Jones, as did I. Nobody cares about me. They care about Megan Kelly, and she got a lot of stick for that for the idea that you platform somebody. We used to just call that interviewing them, but platforming somebody. You've already brought up Megan Kelly, though I do agree that she is absolutely delightful. Along those lines also, there was a controversy around Errol Morris making a documentary about Steve Bannon, which I thought was a great documentary. You sat down with Steve Bannon, too, right? I sat down with both Steve Bannon and Errol Morris. Errol Morris told me that he couldn't find a distributor for his movie. Errol Morris, the most famous documentary and probably short of Ken Burns in America, couldn't find a distributor for the Steve Bannon movie because it was Steve Bannon giving his ideas. When I sat with Bannon, it was the only time I've ever stopped an interview. I didn't stop it because he said something. It was too long. We ran out of cards. You're filming these things on cards, and it was for an HBO documentary that I was doing, but he didn't stop talking, and he was endlessly fascinating. The guy is very, very bright. He's wrong about everything, and he identified me as a libertarian unlike many libertarians do. He sneered every time he said it, which brings me back to Tucker Carlson because I interviewed Tucker Carlson for a reason a long time ago in which he professed his rock-ribbed libertarianism, and at the time, he was a fellow at the Cato Institute. That's probably an organization he'd like to blow up at this point. It is totally fine to sit down with him, and I'm happy that he did, but as expected, the interview was completely useless. Do you think it was of much use? When we were prepping for this, Zach wanted to give Tucker credit where due to Evan Gershkovich's question and pressing Putin on this. This is the Wall Street Journal reporter who is imprisoned in Russia right now, and Zach was sort of like, well, credit where due, whereas I'm a little bit more in the camp of he didn't do... We didn't really find out anything new about Putin's headspace, in my view, based off of the Tucker Carlson interview, and yeah, the Gershkovich pressing was, I guess, semi-balzy, but it didn't really do much, I don't think. Well, let's play the Gershkovich clip and then talk about it a little bit. Ian, could you roll that? Evan Gershkovich, who's the Wall Street Journal reporter, he's 32, and he's been imprisoned for almost a year. This is a huge story in the United States, and I just want to ask you directly, without getting into the tales of it or your version of what happened, if as a sign of your decency, you would be willing to release him to us and we'll bring him back to the United States. We have done so many gestures of what good will out of decency that I think we have run out of them. But we have never seen anyone reciprocate to us in a similar manner. I think what makes me, and it's not my business, but what makes this difference is the guy is obviously not a spy, he's a kid, and maybe he was breaking your law in some way, but he's not a super spy and everybody knows that and he's being held hostage in exchange, which is true, with respect, it's true and everyone knows it's true. So maybe he's in a different category. Maybe it's not fair to ask for somebody else in exchange for letting him out. Maybe it degrades Russia to do that. You know, you can give different interpretations to what constitutes a spy. But are you suggesting that he was working for the U.S. government, or NATO, or he was just a reporter who was given material he wasn't supposed to have? Those seem like very different, very different things. I don't know who he was working for, but I would like to reiterate that getting classified information in secret is called espionage. So I don't know, I mean, it just, it did strike me, you know, Tucker has taken a disturbing turn as of late in my mind, but that moment was, it was almost like the old journalist, Tucker, like, coming through for a minute to me, and like, I don't know, I just think it does take some balls to repeatedly press Putin on that question. It was the last question he asked. Yeah, I think you are. I mean, look, it was a good question. The follow-up question was even better than the initial question, but it's the last question he asked. I mean, he's making sure that he secures his interview before he asks anything tough, and the whole point of an interview is to be tough from the beginning, and he didn't do that, and there's a million things about his own country of Russia, and I use that word in air quotes. He's not the president of Russia. He's the dictator. He's an actual dictator. People who soft-pedal this are wrong. There's no independent judiciary. You cannot say what you want. The number of people, the number of artists who have spoken up against the war in Ukraine who have had to exile themselves or have been exiled to the Gulag are too many to count. I mean, an American was arrested yesterday in Moscow, a ballerina who is of Russian background and is in LA because she gave, and this is according to the Russians, this is not our interpretation of this, $51 to a charity in New York that supports Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees, I believe, is actually their remit, but $51, and she is facing life in prison in Moscow. This is not a country that is, you know, Viktor Orban's country, there's opposition. I mean, not a government that I like, but there's a lot of people, who can still say Viktor Orban is an asshole and not go to prison in Hungary. That is not the case in Russia. So Tucker Carlson has the opportunity that most of us don't have, and I think he squandered that opportunity, but I will agree with you, Zach, that the question was good. If he started with that, I'd say, oh, God, this is actually going to be a good interview, but he ended with that after allowing Putin to filibuster in a absurd version of Russian history for about 30 minutes. You know, there was another clip that I want to play of Tucker Carlson. He's pressed about these very questions that you raised, Michael, about why didn't you bring up any of the human rights abuses, any of the repression. It was at the World Government Summit where Tucker was kind of reflecting on the Putin interview, and he gives a defense of his interview style, and I'm curious what you think of this defense. So Ian, could you roll that clip? You should challenge some ideas. For instance, you didn't talk about freedom of speech in Russia. You did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about the restrictions on opposition in the coming elections. I didn't talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about exclusively. Those are covered, and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following. That every leader kills people, including my leader, every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry. That's why I wouldn't want to be a leader. That press restriction is universal in the United States. I know because I've lived it. I've had a lot of jobs, and I've done this for 34 years and I know how it works, and there's more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States, but there's a great deal in the United States. At a certain point it's like people can decide whether they think, what countries they think are better, what systems they think are better. I just want to know what he thinks. That was the whole point. What's your reaction to that? Where does one begin? Every syllable varies, stupid and offensive in almost every way. First of all, the false equivalence is a real pain, but you start with this idea where when he was got this interview, he did a little piece to camera on the top of the hotel in Moscow. I think that's the Trump hotel too, by the way, where the accusations and the steel dossier supposedly took place. But he's up there and he said, no one is doing the job. No one is actually interviewing him. Of course, all the people who have wanted to interview him have been asked, and we're getting nowhere. So for him to say that everyone asked that question but start the entire process of the interview, teasing the interview by saying nobody talks to him except for me. I mean, you can't have both of those thoughts in your head at the same time because you're the one who gets that opportunity. Nobody has, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, and you don't ask anything. But the equivalency, all leaders kill people. Okay. That's the way that that is broadly true. But that's saying that there's no difference between homicide and manslaughter. You could say Joe Biden kills people because America eliminated some Houthis last week. But that's not the same thing as poisoning somebody who is a meek little journalist or a rather strong and robust opposition leader. That's not the same thing. The idea is that all types of death that you could ultimately be blamed for are the same. They are not. The idea also that there is censorship in the United States is utter fucking bullshit. Excuse my language, but it's unbelievable that I did a thing when Navalny was murdered. I went to every major Russian newspaper, all of which are controlled by the Kremlin. There wasn't a mention in any of them for two days. Look at Steve Rosenberg, one of the bravest journalists out there who's the BBC's correspondent in Moscow, speaks perfect Russian and has interviewed Putin. You want to see a real interview? Go watch Steve Rosenberg interview Lukashenko in Minsk in Belarus. It's amazing that he was not assassinated right after the interview. But Steve Rosenberg just doesn't care. He knows what his job is. He's been allowed to stay as the token opposition in Russia. He actually went over the newspapers, too, and said there was maybe one or two paragraphs. But of course, people don't get their news from just state newspaper. Older people do, obviously, in Russia. But there was no mention anywhere, none. I mean, that's forbidden by the government. Tell me an example of that in the United States and I will tell you why you're wrong. The thing that has been really bothering me about this is there's an entire contingent of anti-war libertarians who are taking this Tucker sound bite and really running with it. And to me, it strikes me as so either stupid or dishonest, I'm frankly not sure which it is, because it's this complete erasure of degrees. The scale at which this is happening also matters a lot to me. For example, a case that tons of people have been in my mentions all day today and then a whole bunch last week about how, oh, Tucker's so wrong about press freedom in the US and all these things. And it's like, first of all, Zach and I talked with Stella Assange, Julian's wife, merely months ago on this podcast. So this is something that we're reporting on, we're interviewing the relevant people. We would love to secure an interview with Julian Assange himself. He's in prison in Belmarsh and so currently Stella is who is able to do us. I'm sympathetic to his cause. I do not think he should be imprisoned for publishing this material. Absolutely. But to some degree, the thing that was bothering me so much about this, what we have engaged with Julian's case and been reporting on it is the fact that the scale at which this type of thing happens in each country when we're making comparisons also matters a ton. The Assange case is completely unacceptable that, by the way, the Trump Department of Justice was the one that's trying to extradite him. But it's completely unacceptable that that type of persecution and encroachment on press freedom is happening in the US. Also, it sticks out to some degree because it's a rarity compared to what happens under Putin's regime. To me, these degrees matter even if I oppose it always and everywhere. I think it's worth looking at just the data on this to figure out how bad is Russia? Is America like Russia light? I don't think so because every single pick your freedom index and it's going to rank Russia at the bottom. This is the 2023 index of economic freedom which is done by the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation gives Russia an overall score of 53.8 and ranks it at 125. Nigeria is right above it. I love that. Nigeria is right above it. Niger is right below it. Very low property rights, judicial effectiveness, business freedom. The only thing that seems to be good at all is trade freedom went up a little bit. I don't know if that's because of opening up more trade with China or something like that. Labor freedom also went up because they're no longer relying on Soviet slave labor. So props to Russia. They're doing great these days. They're very proud. Here's reporters without borders. The 2023 index puts them at 164 out of 180. Here's just a couple of highlights. First off, we're going to talk about the most privately owned independent TV channels or banned from broadcasting except for cable entertainment channels. That means no BBC, no Euro news, no France 24. There's many laws relating to freedom of expression that have been adopted in recent years including defamation and fake news laws were amended in order to incorporate them into the penal code at the start of the COVID-19 when Russian armed forces or any other Russian state body is now punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Look, we've had some problems with, you know, we've had our lodged our complaints with the way social media moderates speech and so forth but we're not in a situation where you're getting 15 years for criticizing the federal government. So it's worth just dwelling on the data and there's one more here. This is the Democracy Index which is put together by the Economist Intelligence Association or Institute and this is just showing kind of the all the following indices of democracy. We link to all our sources so if you want to dig into how they arrive at all these you definitely should but my point in that is you don't have to cherry pick anything to find pretty broad consensus across the globe that in terms of freedom Russia is not the US is not biting at Russia's heels or anything. The Soviet Union used to do something funny in occupied countries to the same so for instance, East Germany they had a Christian Democratic Party they had an SPD, the Social Democratic Party I mean they weren't real parties but they had a fake opposition and the parliament you'd give one seat in the Volkskammer to like the SPD or the CDU or something and it was just a complete joke. The same thing was true in Russia until recently with Medium so you had three places Rain TV which is an interesting documentary but it's not a great documentary but it gives you a lot of background on how that came into being Echo Moscow the radio station which is off the air now too and the guy who started and ran it was a very old white-haired journalist who just says what the Kremlin wants him to say at this point and the newspaper which is where Anna Politskaya was a reporter and she was shot in the head for reporting on war crimes in Chechnya and keeping in mind I always find it incredible that the so-called anti-war people who don't appear to be opposed to war always particularly when it comes to Ukraine Putin solidified his power in 2000 with the Second Chechen War and what created the Second Chechen War was a series of apartment bombings in Moscow in the outskirts of Moscow killed 250 odd people there was one that was that was about to blow up and it didn't happen but it was a training exercise that's what the people were seeing if you look at that case there's a number of people the Economist has reported on this conspiracy theory that seems to be true and a number of very, very serious people have reported this Alexander Litvinenko reported on this that it was blown up those apartment buildings were blown up by the FSB with the purpose of launching the Second Chechen War and then solidifying Putin's power Litvinenko reported that and then he was poisoned in England in a foreign country by members of the FSB in the Duma Alexander Lugavoy who is the man who actually poisoned him is in parliament, in Russian parliament in the Duma as a member of the United Russia Party as a member of Putin's party that was his reward for killing somebody on foreign soil who dared to write about the apartment bombings I mean there are a lot of people that love conspiracy theories, Tucker loves conspiracy theories he's on even gone 9-11 now JFK RFK aliens vaccines I mean it was the only episode of this show that I watched and I was like oh this is pretty fun I didn't believe it but it was pretty fun but he doesn't believe this I mean why not this conspiracy which is one that is more consequential than any other that I can think of, particularly for the peace in the Middle East in the region of Russia all of this solidified Putin's power and allowed him to obtain more and more power if you've seen the early 2000s there was a sense when when George Bush said I looked into his soul and then of course John McCain very famously said I looked into his soul and I saw KGB which is more accurate than what George W. Bush said but there was a point in which you know okay this is the way Russians rule this is the way Russia always has been it's never been a democratic country it had a very very brief experiment with democracy in the 90s and it was sort of disastrous and as it went through the 90s Boris Yeltsin became more authoritarian and then handed the keys to Vladimir Putin who by the way the interesting thing gives him the keys to and he's old and drunk and infirm at this point and calls him on the night of his election victory he's the self-appointed you know he's going to take over for Yeltsin and he never called him back this is an incredible thing this video of this they were filming a documentary in the rage that existed in Boris Yeltsin at the time he's like he didn't call me back I mean you kidding me he's like I'm waiting for his call it's like no no this was once he took the reins of power there was no giving up on the reins of power he was not loosening that grip at all and in doing that of course you have to shut down all independent media you have to arrest and kill everybody inside I mean the number of people that have been poisoned I mean Navalny was poisoned Viktor Yushenko was poisoned because he was someone that was drifting towards the west in Ukraine Vladimir Karamurza who I've actually spent some time with Peter Varyslav who was the kind of manager of Pussy Riot who I've also spent time with and is a very fun guy was also poisoned the Scree Pauls in London were in Salisbury were poisoned defectors from the KGB so it's funny when you saw people like who's this guy David Sacks I guess online said you know why would he bother killing Navalny how did he want it did Sacks pedaling this stuff too now of course yeah he's a big Ukraine deserved it kind of guy but this attitude is somebody who comes from people who have not read a thing or know nothing about modern Russia and there are people that are close to Putin that are not his enemies who have confirmed this that the thing is when you betray the motherland they will go to no lengths to no ends everything they possibly can to punish you for it and that happened two days ago in Spain and I don't know if anyone notices the man who was he was a helicopter pilot in the Russian Air Force and he flew his helicopter to Ukraine and gave it to them and said I don't want to fight in this war that's an anti-war person by the way I don't want to fight in this war and he was shot I think 12 times in Spain assassinated yes I mean this guy I mean he's gone it's done what's done is done the Skripals I mean the Skripals was convicted of giving secrets to MI6 10 years previous they found him and they killed how is it that Tucker and so much of the anti-war libertarian contingent and also big parts of the conservative movement how is it that they're also enamored with Putin do you think they are unaware of this they still fancy him after all of this is established I don't think they do it's a reflex of contrarianism it's a contrarianism I mean look if Donald Trump was president when the Russians launched their invasion of Ukraine Donald Trump has said a number of times that what he would have done was that he would have gone harder he's a claim that he would bomb Moscow if Putin didn't get in line it's the same thing about Ukraine they never would have done it because I was president that's one of his lines but if it had I would have done something even more dramatic so if that had happened I think it would all be on board I don't think it's an ideological thing to this because very very hard to divine the ideology of Putinism I think there is that thing where you know they like the kind of conservatism, Papukannon said this a long time ago that they're anti-gay stuff he loved that you know they were drifting towards back towards the state church that he loved so there is that kind of social conservatism but beyond that I think it's just a reflexive kind of anti-americanism it was funny in that interview we don't have this clip but there was a point where Tucker Carlson was kind of trying to bait him into like declaring how like based in Christian Russia is he's like well you know there's a lot of religions here and we try to respect that and then later Tucker's like you know is this like more of a spiritual war this global war we're having and he's like no not really it's just politics I mean you see what he's doing in this though I mean he's absolutely playing with him and he enjoys that level of power after the interview he's asked by somebody on NTV or Channel 1 in the interview and he says I thought it was terrible I got nothing from it and I thought he asked me softball questions he was humiliating the guy he was also talking about how he hopes like Biden wins right like there's a certain amount of weaknesses like screwing with everybody and sort of casually mentioning how Tucker was rejected from the CIA during the interview it does make me wonder you know I guess to put on a conspiratorial hat like do you think that someone like Tucker Carlson had enough security around him like could some just his behavior afterwards was so strange which we're going to get into in just a minute but like is it possible something like did happen to him there I don't think so I mean I always hear about Compromat and all of that about a possibility I went to Russia in 2018-19 and I was advised immediately to get a burner phone to get a burner email account never log into your email account in Russia everything is being listened to everything is being watched they can hoover up absolutely everything and I presume that he was smart enough to not bring his phone that they could actually duplicate it and you know have all of his messages and things like that I mean keep in mind that there's spyware you can actually just send to somebody and you don't have to click on anything because it's kind of Israeli stuff that just embeds in your phone and starts sending information back to the host computer but I don't think that he anything like that happened there is something very strange about this though there is something very strange about wanting to impress the people who bring you there there's nothing you can do about it there's literally nothing you can do about it you can say I'm going to be tough I'm going to be there but you know Paul Hollander who's a historian I mentioned all the time in the fifth column he's written multiple books about this particularly his most famous one is called political pilgrims about people in search for the better society and usually it's Americans and Brits going to China going to the Soviet Union going to Cuba and Nicaragua etc and he talks his whole chapter on the tour and what happens once you get there and how important the tour is how they know exactly how to handle you and show you just enough opposition to show you just enough don't do it the North Korea way it's not believable if you do the North Korea way like you know we can't stop overfilling our grain quotas I mean isn't this insane it's like no no we have problems here but look at how great everything is I mean I don't Tucker's not an independent actor in Moscow because when you see that supermarket for instance and you say how amazing everyone lives look at these subways I did something that I mistakenly the other day when I was reading up then on the apartment bombings I went back to this because I was just thinking about this with Tucker and conspiracy theories and I think it's raison was the name of the town it's just southeast of Moscow so it looked at the apartment buildings on google maps and then I did google street view in this town it literally looks like nothing has changed since 1960s it's a Soviet dump and I apologized to anyone who's listening who lives there but I'll tell you what it does not look modern it does not look post-soviet it looks pre-soviet in so many ways and everyone looks grim and miserable and this is the stuff that Tucker is not going to see because when you try to go and say I'm going to go visit you know memorial the dissident group that's been shut down by Putin by the way and what did memorial do incidentally this is not about Putin they were an organization that did incredible archival work of people that were killed in the gulag and killed by the Soviet Union and killed by Stalin and it's an incredible organization memorial was shut down because the past has to be controlled to not just the present and if you went to see somebody like that if you were Tucker Carlson you wouldn't last very long they would make it very very clear that that was not allowed or they would interfere with it in some way so you're not you know on your own I mean when I was in Russia I had to get a visa through the government and that requires a lot of very specific stuff. The other thing I mean I've made this point in a few different places and for whatever reason people continue to not really grok it but like you know I was recently in Bucharest, Romania and you know you get a car and you venture outside of sort of main city corridor okay suddenly it feels like the shitty Romanian rust belt right like I'm literally I was like breastfeeding my child on the side of the road in rural Romania and there's just these like almost like zombie apocalypse looking people with like clearly haven't had dental care in the last two decades or whatever like literally since Ceausescu was in power like they haven't had you know brushed their teeth and I'm just sort of looking and it's like well I've seen a lot of different forms of poverty around the world but like if you just came to Bucharest and you just saw the you know film production crews and went to some of the nice restaurants then went to that like cool cocktail bar down there you would have no clue that this type of thing is happening an hour away and that's not just Romania right like it's a gazillion you know whole countries or formerly shithole formerly communist countries that are like that and that's just the side of it that I really wish people would pay some yeah I mean I spent like four days in St. Petersburg Russia on vacation so you know probably not that much less time than Tucker spent in Moscow and but just in that amount of time period of time and I was just there to see things you notice right away that there's a lot of it's like there's this really grand architecture but like you get close to stuff and it looks kind of dingy and then like yes driving back just to the airport you just see like desolation so it just raises the question to me you know it's almost cartoonish the way that he put together these shorts like it's over the like the style today well let's play the subway one because I just want to comment on the way this is the music the score is incredible so he enrolled the subway clip for us the question is how's it doing now there's no graffiti there's no filth no foul smells there are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you on to the train tracks and kill you no it's perfectly clean and orderly and how do you explain that we're not even going to guess that's not our job we're only going to ask the question and if your response is to shout at us slogans dumber than the slogans we used to call Soviet and mock that's not really an answer like what the hell is going on here the hills are alive with the sound of communism do you notice by the way he did soviet in air quotes which is pretty funny for somebody who is by the way that montage ends on a shot of like a portrait of Lenin so there's a relief of Lenin in there but also you might have noticed the name Kiev is in the name of the station and there is a plaque beneath Lenin which is that final shot of that which is about the eternal friendship between the Ukrainian and Russian people and I imagine that that was on purpose I'm not entirely sure if that was a little easter egg but you look at all these other images which are classic constructivist Russian images of lantern jawed men with flags and you know there was a subway that was built with slave labor people from the gulag can you break this down for us Michael because you and Liz are in New York City the subway can be pretty shitty so why does Moscow have this beautiful artwork and New York City doesn't I mean well we didn't have Joseph Stone we did have the WPA in these public works projects which actually tried to create socialist art in New York City and it became very controversial to go back to the 1930s during the New Deal and you know Diego Rivera creating this big communist memorial in the middle of New York City and people objecting to it but the reason this happens is dictatorships can create things like that yes I mean let's be honest about it North Korea has less crime than New York City do you want to live in New York City in these types of places you can round up bumps you can just do all kinds of things them far outside of the wall to some degree I am frequently a critic of NYPD and I think most libertarians are there's absolutely situations where they use excessive force on all kinds of people doing things that we might dispute whether or not they should be considered crimes right NYPD definitely airs in some ways but by and large they're not rounding up bums and putting them in trucks and imprisoning them for a really long time or sending them to forced labor camps that's not how bums and junkies are disposed of in New York part of the criticism is that they're not really disposed of at all right like we had this big push to do away with institutionalization and to some degree you know we could kind of trace some of our current predicament to that right like and you know maybe lots of New Yorkers are not comfortable with those trade offs but these are trade offs either way you slice it right or private despair but it's not like you're doing away with despair all together I don't think yeah there's no Thomas saws in Russia I don't think the interesting thing about this is what he's essentially saying I mean but he's not saying in so many words because it's kind of you know camouflaged in so many ways is that this isn't a this isn't a policy thing right I mean even if this were true it is not true there's an enormous amount of crime in Russia there's an enormous amount of poverty in Russia there's homelessness in Russia there you know at the last phase of the Soviet Union alcoholism in Russia by the way also so that was the out in the middle that was the big public works thing in 1985-86 when Gorbachev took over it was like it was an anti-alcohol campaign because alcoholism was so bad and alcohol was so cheap it's the only thing you could get plentifully in the Soviet Union so there's a lot of that but why isn't it apparent right there well I mean you are you talking about the Putin regime talking about the Russian character I mean why because it all exists why do you not see it in the subway well it's a police state number one number two you know imagine what would happen if this news story which got a lot of press in New York City of this these two NYPD cops that were set upon by a bunch of migrants right and they were arrested and no bail they were released and then a bunch of them committed more crimes imagine something like that happening in Russia obviously it wouldn't and I can hear the Tucker's of the world saying what shouldn't happen here yes they shouldn't happen here but the sort of tweaks around the edges of what could make the city life better is not the answer to that is not to all power in the state I don't understand people who are quote-unquote conservatives or libertarians especially believing that the way the state controls everything in Russia is something to be applauded or I give you one example of this when I was in Russia I was with Vitalik Buterin the guy who created Ethereum and he was and he's a Russian that speaks Russian perfectly met with Putin actually the day before I met him and was denouncing Putin yesterday this is somebody who doesn't care he has family there his parents moved after the fall of the Soviet Union to Canada but when I was with him we went to a um it was a technology park I guess is what you call it outside of Moscow and I was talking to the guy who was like you know our handler and he's like this is our competition with Silicon Valley and at one point I asked him I was like do you realize that you've done the government has done this and you guys have a very poor record of the government creating big technology projects like we have in the United States Silicon Valley was created by some people like Sergey Brin Russians who were allowed through the magic of the free market to create it and they were still doing this they were still trying to create in a centrally planned way it's not a communist country but it's still that central planning instinct in like is this the country that people like Tucker Carlson want to live in good god I would escape immediately it's hard to believe that it is again just from my very limited experience being there it's like you walk around and sense right away I think most of I would love to drop like airdrop like all of Tucker Carlson's fans into Moscow or St. Petersburg for a day just so that they can see the disconnect between what he's presenting and the reality of like day-to-day life that you can observe I think there's probably other countries that maybe have good public transportation or something like that that you could point to as better challenges or I mean this is part of why like the Lee Kuan Yew like the Singapore argument drives libertarians so crazy because that I think more reasonably grapples with the trade-offs of okay we're having incredible results and yet they've cracked down on you know migration to such a significant degree they cracked down on all manner of petty crimes of libertarians called victimless crimes and yet they have pretty good results by a lot of economic freedom and like economic development metrics and so that I think presents more of a thorny thing reasoned did a magazine piece by Mike Riggs maybe three or four years ago that really broke down a lot of the state capacity libertarians sort of interest in Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew so I recommend that to anybody who's interested but at least that is a better example of this it's like Tucker Carlson picked full examples of yes a place that's orderly but a Potemkin village only on the surface right the thing that's so confusing to me is I'm not a New Yorker bearing my head in the sand and saying I love the current state of our subway system I love the MTA right like I am simply saying there are so many tweaks we could do like actual enforcement of laws right like cracking down on fare evasion or you know cracking down on like public urination in the subway systems or public smoking inside the subway like that we already have laws on the books that NYPD by patrolling these stations could choose to enforce and that would probably get us half of the way there to what these people want that doesn't require having a complete police state does it how often do you see a rat that size pulling a giant Cheeto or whatever it was in that video that's like honestly not infrequent literally every day yeah like people think the rat stuff is exaggerated and it's like it's absolutely not there is a weird thing here now and I think it's kind of this inflection point with people who are you know we're in the libertarian orbit Tucker being one of them and a number of these kind of nat cons were in the libertarian or orbit in this inflection point is like what kind of society do you want to live in because you still talk with that the same cadence of the libertarian but you talk about when you talk about Singapore I mean talk about El Salvador I mean Bukele is somebody who people I mean it's a bitcoin country we're gonna we're gonna do bitcoin and he speaks english and he's on twitter and he's funny and he's a bit of a troll and there are no civil liberties left in that country but it's got results yeah I mean he solved a lot of the cartel problem but at what cost right now we can't deny that that it has been successful but yes that's the thing at what cost and I think there's a lot of people who in the past really cared about liberty and now are very willing to mortgage that for safety for you know nice subways and you know and also you know shopping carts that don't move when they which I think was probably invented in America because we've had it for years but it shows you that a guy it's that whole fucking video by the way was George Bush and the scanner at the supermarket hold on let's let's play that video Ian could you roll the grocery clip Tucker's trip to the grocery store so a long standing feature maybe the longest standing feature of cold war propaganda in the west was the Soviet grocery store no products no choices shoddily made things and it wasn't actually propaganda it was real so we thought it would be interesting to take a look at a contemporary modern day 2024 Russian grocery store two years into sanctions alright there we go so I guess you put in 10 rubles here and you get it back when you put the cart back wow so it's free but there's an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment hold on I also other besides the George Bush thing that you're alluding to there where it's like wow I've never seen such technology it's also like you're demonstrating that like there's low social trust so you need this like coin to make people return the carts I don't know exactly what the point is exactly right I don't know why no one pointed this out so I get the first person I've heard point is that it's like that exists because people steal the carts that doesn't exist in like you know rural Norway they expect people are going to leave the cart I was literally just in rural Norway and I must say this the shopping experience of the grocery store was horrible it's I mean I lived in Sweden for many years it's very high trust but like disgusting people I mean that's the thing that's really confusing about all this is that you're going to go back to the European grocery stores and then you come back to America and it's like oh thank god we're finally in the land of abundance again I go to any European country not just the shitholes and I'm like yes well it's funny because there's a very very specific reason for this you know the reason for this video is going to the grocery store because as he makes very clear at the beginning I mean Tucker plays a dumb guy in a lot of this stuff but he's obviously a very smart guy and he understands and remembers the grocery store stuff and you know the debate between Nixon and Chris Jeff but there's a story that very few people mention and it's you know a few books will mention but Yeltsin. Are you about to say Randals? No I'm saying Yeltsin in 89 and I think it was Clearlake Texas I think it was Clearlake. Oh no the Randals grocery store in Houston where Yeltsin comes and he looks at the popsicles and he's like oh he's at Randals. Okay not mentioned nearly enough is it after he leaves this grocery store he's on a flight I believe to Florida and he says to some I can't remember if it's his aid or something and he's like we're doomed it's over like we have lost and this in going to the Randals in Houston and thank you Liz for correcting me on the name of the grocery store that this was you know indication that there was there was nothing left for the Soviets at this point and it was the wheels were coming off of it but there's a reason he's like you know they now they won they have better grocery stores than we do and you can get all this for $100 for your salary that is I want to keep rolling the clip for a second because there is like to your point Michael that this there's you know an intelligence to Tucker Carlson and maybe a playing dumb like there's a level of economic illiteracy here that I find hard to swallow so let's play the rest of the clip because I went from unused to legitimately angry so we were guessing what this would cost everybody hears from the United States by groceries and we didn't pay any attention to the cost as we were just putting in the cartway we would actually eat over a week and we all came out around 400 bucks about 400 bucks it was $104 US here and that's when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn't matter as much as you thought corruption if you take people's living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation and they literally can't buy the groceries they want at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you're a good person or a bad person you're wrecking people's lives in their country and that's what our leaders have done to us and coming to a Russian grocery store the heart of evil and seeing what things cost to now people live it will radicalize you against our leaders yeah not really like when I look at this is just the numbers right here when you look at per capita hold on yeah median income by country I pulled this from world population review which compiles world bank data and on the left you see medium income for the US is about 24,327 for Russia 563 and this is all in what's called international dollars so it's like imagining an international currency that kind of adjusts for inflation rates that are differing across the globe so just in like a sort of standardized like currency there almost three times the median income in the US and it's just like a very strange like misunderstanding of how I don't know exchange rates work but he doesn't misunderstand it, that's the thing I think he's expecting that his viewers will and at the end of the day it's a great celebration of media freedom and capitalism in the sense that media freedom allows Tucker Carlson to have a show on cable and there's no fairness doctrine you can have fox news and then when you leave that you can be free on the internet to subscribe and make money from Elon Musk or wherever he's making it and also the amount of money that he's made allows him to have no clue about basic things like how a shopping cart works that there are these very basic technologies that he's marveling at which is again a very very weird backwards celebration of what is great about America is that he became a very wealthy man because we have a free press he became a wealthy man off of the free press and you cannot do that in Russia to have any level of wealth in Russia you have to express extreme fealty to Vladimir Putin and as a matter of fact they did this very publicly including people like Mikhail Kordakowski and Boris Berezovsky they had a television program in which Putin and early in his tenure had all of the members of the oligarchy surrounding him on television in warning them you do things for us now you don't do things on your own and Kordakowski went to jail Berezovsky went to London and hanged himself ultimately some people say it was the FSB I think he probably did hang himself but the people that didn't play ball were killed or exiled that's the difference Tucker between how you became rich and how you become rich in Russia Is Tucker like I'm interested obviously we can't define Tucker's motivations here but I keep coming back to this question of is he lying is he misleading people why would he be doing this how deliberate is this all really and the thing that I keep coming back to is the fact that the grocery store thing first of all strikes me as really funny because I would imagine Tucker being as rich as he is and having seemingly the infrastructure that he has in his life as a servant provided hiring a personal assistant I would imagine that he's not out there doing the family grocery shopping I would imagine that part of the reason why his naivete is showing when he's in this grocery store is because either he has a bunch of people who do this for him or he gets his groceries entirely delivered but I would imagine he's pretty out of touch with what the actual standard American shopping experience is he's just trying to curry favor his middle American conservative viewers for whom this is much more of a reality but the thing that I keep coming back to is that's my theory and then also he made some weird comments recently about really the reason why he's so interested in really listening to Putin is in part because with all the escalations between the US and Ukraine and Russia he's really worried about the possibility of entering another war and since he has so many children who can be drafted he's such an ardent war opponent and US entanglement opponent because he really has personal sake of the matter okay you actually do any digging and that's not true Tucker does not have four children who can be drafted and does he even have four children he has two that are of the age and they're both women they're girls boom right there yeah right but like he's just lying he's saying the reason why I'm so interested in this is because I'm quaking with fear that my children could possibly be drafted and that's just not true his kids are safe and so how much of this is deliberate obfuscation and attempting to basically say the things that he thinks his 55 or 60 year old average viewer in rural Indiana want to hear there's a thing that people you know on MSNBC when they're talking about the MAGA types and you know audience capture and how Fox News are just they're smarter than this and they're giving these people red meat and they're too dumb to understand they're being lied to and the people who are doing this are lying to them the you know the broadcasters themselves are lying to them to Nash D'Souza or Tucker Carlson they're missing something very big and if you go back to the fellow traveler movement you know in the US from kind of 19 basically 1917 to 1991 I mean it was especially bad in the 1930s there's something that you notice and what you notice is that they absolutely believe it and they're absolutely lying so they're lying and telling the truth about their own belief Tucker believes this stuff but he knows that he's giving a picture that is shall we say incomplete but does he believe the kind of politics that he's spouting now I have from multiple very good sources that he absolutely does believe it and that this is not a money grab I mean Tucker Carlson comes from the you know Swanson frozen dinner fortune I mean his name is Tucker Carlson his brother's name is Buckley I mean these are people that are as bad as Waspie and or Swedish I guess I like that he didn't break his uniform even while traveling right he still looks like he's like wearing sparrows right yeah well yeah weekend in the Hamptons that was the most put on thing in the past was when he was wearing a little bow tie but no I think he believes the general idea of it and I think it's I think that there's a point at which you become somebody from the other side this is what I'm waiting for this is where I think that maybe audience capture will come in and not actually publicly saying something like this but you can think of a number of people one in particular Tulsi Gabbard she was a Democrat she was ran as a Democrat and you know is essentially not a Democrat anymore and there was a story today that Donald Trump is even considering her as his VP candidate that I saw it this morning I mean I don't know how true that is but it doesn't strike me as odd but getting to that point I wonder if the same thing will happen with Tucker I mean he has you know Max Blumenthal on a show on Fox he has all of these people that are in the kind of Chomsky I left when it comes to foreign policy he really doesn't like capitalism he really doesn't like free markets he has a very very obvious authoritarian streak that I always associated in the 20th century with people on the left actually I mean it's examples of it on the right but mostly on the left so I wonder that this ideological journey takes him to the other side and that this might be a very honest natural journey I don't know how it happens because one of the things about being a conservative in the 1980s and 1990s where Tucker kind of came up was understanding what the kind of sycophantic pro-soviet left was engaged in I mean he knew that I mean he wrote about it I mean he worked at the weekly standard in the mid 90s he you know go back to everything that he wrote he was a very talented journalist he's not anymore but he was a very very talented writer and you know I always point out that one of the most impactful stories in 2000 and the George W. Bush's campaign was the Carla Fay Tucker story which was the woman on death row that George Bush mocked he mocked Carla Fay Tucker to Tucker Carlson who wrote about it for George magazine I mean he was breaking news stories and having impact and I don't know if that got boring or something but I think that he is has an early onset version of something I call ideological dementia I mean I didn't see it with so many people as they get older they become you know January 6th types they become super ultra mega types or they become you know lunatics on the other side I mean there's a certain point where you just start not caring anymore your kids have grown up you've made your money you don't have to couch out anyone and you just become a little more susceptible to extremism I think that's where he is yeah he I mean he's he is the living embodiment of the horseshoe theory and it's like where the horseshoe ends is just authoritarianism it doesn't matter if it's right or left exactly and that's where indistinguishable sometimes yeah and the you know apologies for the Soviet system like this could have been like Bernie Sanders 20 years ago you know he went on its honeymoon famously to the Soviet Union and you know in contrast to the the weird thing that happened and tragic thing that happened this last weekend was talking of Alexei Navalny who in contrast to Tucker Carlson actually was exposing uncomfortable realities about Russia which is why he was so hated I mean I don't know how much people know about Navalny but part of his rise to fame was as someone who would post these exposés on digital media, youtube and part of his strategy was to build a profile for himself because he thought if he got famous enough they wouldn't be so likely to knock him off obviously he died this weekend but I think he's become a potent symbol we'll see how long you know he lasts as that kind of symbol and I've got a clip that I have to kind of exemplify some of the American reaction to that especially on the political rights but I get into that I'd love to hear your reflections on Navalny Michael I'm just a man of uncommon bravery I mean the word bravery is something that we throw around pretty loosely these days but you know when we look back at things like the Holocaust like the hideous Soviet experiment why did more people not stand up well because bravery is a very rare commodity it's a very it's not a very common thing people think that they would be that person they almost never would myself included and you know I don't accept myself in any way I mean this is the man who went back to Russia after being poisoned by the Kremlin I'm sorry to say that you know the lunatic Putin lovers can pretend that's not what happened it's obviously what happened and he went back and he knew what was going to happen to him long ago I recorded a video about you know what to do in the event of his death normal people don't do that you know if there's a couple of these examples in Russia most of them have very cleverly fled the country and I don't blame them I mean the girls women in pussy riot who I've known a bit over the years you know they have their media zone out which where they do incredible reporting like they just saw something the other day where they're confirming the number of people died who have died in the Ukraine war part of the Russian forces only with stuff that they can verify and they're up to almost 50,000 only with things they can verify there's no publicly available data there's no stuff in newspapers they're counting graves they're finding things on instagram and facebook of funerals and things so that's the country that these people are praising where people have died in that idiotic war and keeping in mind that about 15,000 people died between 1979 and 89 in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which basically crippled the Soviet Union Putin's a man who has control why does Navalny go back and know look his idea was that yeah maybe if I'm this famous they can't do much to me it wasn't an Oscar it wasn't that Navalny documentary I mean that was exactly the position that Putin finds himself in the number of people have been poisoned the number of people have been shot the number of people have been imprisoned I mean it's incredible that one of his most sort of well-known opponents and I think probably most effective was shot in front of the Kremlin like you know 50 yards from the walls of the Kremlin what is the world to do I mean nothing he knows that so why not stop I mean it's like why would you stop doing this if you can steal in everyone sees you stealing but they don't ever arrest you or prosecute you they keep stealing I mean that's essentially what he's doing and you know killing somebody whose opponent is sending a message to everybody who would dare oppose him because I mean look one of his own creations one of his former chefs was you know running the Wagner group tried to have a little revolt and guess what happened to him oh come back we'll make we'll make peace we'll talk it out and then get up in a helicopter and it blows up you know two weeks later mechanical engine problems it's not about getting you can silence them by putting them cyber in it's about scaring the ever-loving hell out of your citizens and anybody would oppose you yeah I mean you know Navalny's widow and family of course says that this demonstrates the fear that the Putin regime has that they felt like they had to act at this moment that he's vulnerable going into the election which will not be a real election election right like that would be a time for Tucker to actually use scare quotes to great effect he only chose to use scare quotes Soviet and corruption also did you catch that one you should have watched one of Navalny's videos of both Medvedev and Putin's palaces that they live in and they're incredible videos and I mean there is I think it was that David Sachs Joker who has remade himself as a you know Russia simp Ukraine expert saying that you know he wasn't popular anyway now there's a there's a in Russia there's a reason that people say this I mean you talk about Gary Kasparov who I've interacted with a lot over the years who you know ran and was gonna he actually wasn't popular at home you know much like Gorbachev running in the first election after after the fall so you know he wasn't popular at the time either but Navalny actually was popular closest you got to any pressure on Putin which made him freak out with those marches in Moscow which were very very big by almost all standards and you look at the number of views that those videos that Zach was just mentioning had I mean tens if not hundreds of millions both in Russian and in English and you know to say that somebody is not popular shows that somebody who says that believes everybody lives in a society like they live it's very hard to be popular when the any leavers of the state are not not available to you the media is not available to you the idea of public opinion is not really even just it's not a coherent concept in a culture like in a political system like Russia dictatorship I mean you can't go on TV and debate things there are debate programs in Russia in which everybody agrees on everything and they're insane to watch Navalny is not on those shows would he have been popular if he was on the very very charming guy very witty guy a very smart guy if he was on there challenging the regime who is killing their sons and sons and daughters their sons very traditionalist in a weekend only the sons are dying in Ukraine but there if someone is challenging that on television you bet your answer would be a lot more popular than he was when he was murdered I recommend the documentary because you also get a sense of his charisma and the sort of his political acumen his ability to perfectly tap into the issues that are pissing off people on the streets and you see some of that play out and so if you're going to you know speculate as to whether this guy had some viable movement or not in the absence of you know it being crushed by the state at least watch the documentary and try to evaluate that yourself Moynihan you can breathing some fire you know in David's axis direction but what about Glenn Greenwald I mean I'm being serious here I haven't really followed what he's writing about this stuff but I will I mean I know what he said in the past yeah there's just a little bit of Tucker Carlson fondness and sort of like there's an entire contingent there's an entire contingent of people and I think David sex is definitely one of them and I also see this among like the Dave Smith's whole crew of little followers where there's this you know a lot of cheerleading of Tucker's comment you know about how all all leaders kill people that's why I wouldn't want to be a leader and I've definitely said some more than others Greenwald jumping aboard this a little bit and you know I mean now you know they're so like we just talked about Alexei Navalny and what he's been up against there's also been Donald Trump saying that he's just like Navalny let's get yes he's a he's a form of Navalny let's let's look at that for a second during this campaign a huge amount of your time has been spent in court in the courtroom in New York and so forth now in this New York Civil Fraud case this Judge Arthur Angaron ruled against you for almost a half a billion dollars it's a lot of a lot of it is a form of Navalny it is a form of communism or fascism um I mean is this is Trump in the same situation as Navalny I think that you have to do the throat clearing and say that the kind of lawfare being used against Donald Trump I oppose in almost every way I think this will be thrown out an appeal I mean I mean how could it not if you if you actually look at the case that's not that's not something that Navalny had access to by the way an appeal they don't that didn't happen in Russia you couldn't appeal as poisoning or his prison sentence or his being murdered in prison it is Arctic Circle Penal Colony right I mean this is the by the way you notice something that I noticed when I saw Trump in Detroit about four months ago at a union thing where there was actually no union people there it was really funny I did a piece on this and I was surprised when I was sitting there in the kind of pen of journalists when he said fascism because it's very classically Trump thing he has no idea what that means doesn't care much like the people in MSNBC who say I don't know what it means either but it's it's a bad thing and so he picks it up much like fake news was a Hillary Clinton thing that became a Trump thing so I think it's hilarious at the end these like this is fascism but the Navalny stuff is like you know because two things happen do you just flatten degrees there's no degrees of anything you know he's being screwed and I'm being screwed there are people who are opposed to him there are people who are opposed to me if that's the way you think I mean I expect all Trump to think like that he's running for president I mean does he believe that and who knows what the guy believes but if you are actually convinced by that and I have talked to people who I respect who are convinced by it and say well he's not entirely wrong he's not entirely wrong but in every society throughout you know history political you know there's been politics involved in legal cases and trying to destroy people etc I mean this is common in UK I mean you can see the same things happening to Boris Johnson you know with the COVID inquiry there is to destroy the conservative party I'm sure that there are a lot of people who want to destroy the conservative party I'm sure that a lot of people think that's a great thing to do would be a great byproduct of this inquiry into the COVID stuff this would be a great byproduct and the inquiry is into Donald Trump it's kind of never ending and I think a lot of these trials that Trump is going through are complete horseshit and I think that there's a lot of sensible people on both sides who believe that to believe that you know killing somebody in prison poisoning them running their family out of their native country that there's something that's even equivalent in the US is ridiculous I don't think any serious person would actually think that some of the people that you've brought up Liz that draw these equivalencies I think what they're attempting to do and I've got some sympathy for some of their positions that yeah we should be people should be paying attention to what's happening to Julian in the past you know maybe there have been mistakes in the past in terms of moves that were made with NATO over the preceding decades that led up to that moment that could be analyzed to adjust US foreign policy like all this stuff to me is a totally legitimate debate the way that speech is being let's say nudged by all concerning stuff especially as we're heading into an election here but the conflation of these things the danger that I see with it is that then you become unable to recognize when it really is happening if you see if you're equating the worst case scenario in another part of the world to a situation that's not here you're just losing people who can see that reality so you need to say huge to what is actually going on and keep a sense of proportion in mind it's also just fucking untrue that's the main problem here you look at the actual details of the civil fraud judgment against Trump and yes it's mostly horse shit that he will possibly be forced to pay that have seen him out of money more than $300 million and then there's interest tacked on to that and yeah that will probably be appealed it's a little bit tough to prove that the lenders were harmed to the degree that I guess one would need to be in order for this to really stand and to hold and I could understand making the case that banks need to do their due diligence and really this type of inflation of asset value happens all the time but also Trump did stuff wrong right like he lies in every area of his business dealings and the only thing that this case did was just confirm that and bolster that he lied about the square footage which sometimes square footage is more an art than a science but like he lied about the square footage to a pretty significant degree of his Trump Tower apartment he's lied about whether or not Mar-a-Lago could be converted into residential use upon selling which is something where there's a deed restriction in place right like all of this just establishes and you actually go through the details a pattern of just like not being totally honest toward the lenders who he was working with however like that is not the most heinous of all crimes in my book and I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to not be Trump's sink of fans or you know addled with we lost your audio there yes I have crazy dogs in the background but like you don't have to be a total Trump's sink of fan or somebody who has trumped arrangement syndrome in order to say hey Trump does some things wrong but there's definitely this pattern of political persecution playing out with some of these cases against him and we're not really keen on that happening either but a more prudent way of handling this would be to run a good election against him and handle things that way and instead for whatever reason that like middle ground level has just been lost I mean it's been stunning to me watching people on both sides sorry to both sides it but just kind of losing this sense that Trump does things wrong sometimes but also perhaps we don't need to be throwing the book at him to such an obscene degree it's I agree with almost all of that and you know people tend to lose focus on the fact that Donald Trump has done a lot wrong this is not as if Lexi Navalny didn't do anything that would be considered illegal or wrong in the United States but yeah no it's the the sort of relativism allows people to not have a conversation it's so when you say Navalny was killed and you've been sycophantic to Vladimir Putin in his regime the response is well what about this I mean you know it's a what about him is a stupid thing but the perniciousness of it is that it changes the debate you don't have to have a conversation about Vladimir Putin and what Vladimir Putin is doing you can say well you know I mean we do the same remember Trump said the same thing to Bill O'Reilly when Bill O'Reilly was talking about Putin he said you know we've done bad stuff too well that's not what we're talking about let's first talk about what Putin has done that's bad what Russia has done that's bad etc that kind of you know it's all the same look we see an analog on the left and I've been bitching about this since 2016 or 15 with Trump the fascist and you look at the search terms and you know those Google charts and it just pops right up at around 2016 2017 Trump is a fascist and you have a guy like Tim Snyder a historian of fascism a guy who knows quite a bit about this and a guy who I lost almost all respect for because what he's saying is like there's things that are alike right you know it's the cult of personality that's what fascism does right calling the media the enemy of the people that's what fascism is it's just enough alike but by degrees it's not even close right I mean prior to the Nazis taking power there was bloodletting on the streets between the communists and the Nazis people dying dozens I mean this does not happen in America I mean we had January 6th and we thought somebody was killed by a protester and it was a you know a heart attack or something it turned out to be but that's not what's happening in America but you know there's enough stuff that looks when you lay it next to each other kind of similar yeah but you have to leave out all the details for it to be like this is the scale of it too right like it comes back to the what we were talking about earlier right like this is we're talking one January 6th situation not this type of thing happening on mass and becoming normal every day yes yeah completely different yeah and having a political process that deals with it and I think that you know that the judicial process has been overdone to be honest but I can say that and that's a perfectly legitimate thing to talk about and I don't worry about my family being run out of New York City or run out of America yeah do you at least for now at least for now do you have Moynihan I just want to before we wrap I want to ask do you have any sort of like grand animating theory about why Tucker Carlson is doing this and what the value what the purpose of his little Moscow tour really was um I mean it's hard to say one of the things I think that is pretty common to Tucker Carlson and to you know Beatrice Webb in the 1920s or you know any people who went and saw the show trials and which was the most unbelievable like obvious perversion of justice that was made a Hollywood movie about showing that it was a great thing called Mission to Moscow I mean people are willfully blind they really don't want to believe these things but they know they're true right and they everyone who saw what was going on the Soviet Union knew what was happening and they came back and they lied about it they lied about it when they were there too but there's something about a kind of adversarial culture like you know being Tucker Carlson here is like you leave Fox and he becomes even more adversarial to the to the mainstream culture and one of the ultimate things to do there is to be pals with or make videos about Vladimir Putin and everything that you know is wrong there's a certain satisfaction that people get in that and they get followers that way too whether you're doing it on purpose or not saying oh you think you know what happened on 9-11 you think you know what happened at Pearl Harbor you think you know that there was a man on the moon whatever it might be you think you know what's going on in Russia I went to Russia it's not what they're telling you people love telling an audience that it's not what they're telling you that's I mean whether it's pandemic or any of this nonsense that you see on on YouTube and I I mean I can't stand the fact that YouTube and people like that try to take this stuff down because it's not only just playing whack-a-mole but it encourages people like that I'm happy that Tucker Carlson is out there saying things that ultimately make him look foolish but I think that kind of adversarial position in the culture of being the adversary is something that really appeals to him because he's too smart to think that this kind of nonsense that he's spouting about Russia is even close to being true well with that Michael Moynihan thank you so much for talking to Reason thank you both for taking questions podcast feed every Thursday subscribe wherever 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