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On the Media
The UK’s Violent Riots Were Stoked by Elon Musk and a Global Far-Right Network
00:51:12
The trillionaire's role in Belfast; chaos at 60 Minutes; and how to survive authoritarianism.
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Hey, it's Micah. It's been a minute since our FEMA series came out and I want our New York listeners to know that we're having an in person event in a couple of weeks. I'll be joined by former FEMA official Marianne Tierney. We'll talk about the history of the agency, how it's being reshaped now under the Trump administration, and some other fun stuff we couldn't fit in the show. Join us in person at WNYC 7pm on June 7th. You can get tickets@wnyc.org events exc. It's a great opportunity to meet other OTM listeners. We'd love to see you there. In a capital city in the British Isles, people are forced to flee their homes by a mob. Anti immigrant violence erupted in Belfast this week, in part stoked by the world's first trillionaire, Elon Musk. Elon Musk, writing on X this week. Only by protesting repeatedly and loudly will there be any change. From WNYC New York, this is ON the media. I'm Michael Loewinger. Also on this week's show, two of network TV's biggest news shows made news. The president stormed out of an interview with NBC. Let's call it quits because I've had enough. And fired. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley had words for CBS's new management.
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There was a thumb on the scale
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for the president's version of events.
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That was a level of political influence
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that I had never seen in 37 years.
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CBS News.
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Go behind the headlines with us after this.
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On the Media is supported by USA for unhcr, the UN Refugee agency. In Ukraine, Sudan and around the world, war is tearing millions of families from their homes. Despite funding cuts, UNHCR continues to provide protection, shelter and emergency relief to displaced families in more than 120 countries worldwide. For more information, visit unrefugees.org media this
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is on the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
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And I'm Michael Oenger. This week, Elon Musk took his company SpaceX, public in an IPO billed as the largest in history.
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SpaceX is on track to become the most valuable company ever to go public
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and make its founder, Elon Musk, the first trillionaire. You'd think he'd have his hands full with that. But apparently Musk has also had time to write many, many, many racist posts on X, some of which helped spark violent riots in the UK over the last couple of weeks. The events this week began on Monday when a Sudanese man was arrested and charged with Attempted murder for stabbing a white man in Northern.
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The attack comes amid escalating tension over immigration across Europe.
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A video of the gruesome incident immediately appeared on social media. And then Elon Musk writing on X this week, only by protesting repeatedly and
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loudly will there be any change.
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The next day, massed vigilantes stormed immigrant homes and businesses in Belfast. In a capital city in the British
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Isles, people are forced to flee their
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homes by a mob which was intent on causing havoc and setting fires. It is a shocking reality and a terrifying experience for those who had to
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grab what they could and run for
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their lives the week before. In the streets of Southampton, England, anger over another knife attack drew anti migration protesters, some of whom turned violent.
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So more footage here of riot police clashing with protesters.
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In that case, a brief. A British Sikh man stabbed and killed a young white man last December. When police arrived at the scene, they mistook the victim, Henry Novak, for the perpetrator and handcuffed him. In body cam footage, you can hear Novak say, he's been stabbed and can't breathe, to which a police officer says, you've been stabbed.
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Whereabouts?
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Don't think you have, mate.
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The murderer was sentenced to life in prison. But it was the release of the police body cam footage that set off the most recent chain of events, spurred in part by posts from a notorious conspiracy theorist.
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Tommy Robinson is the most prominent far right activist in the uk.
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David Gilbert is a reporter at Wired covering disinformation and online extremism. He says things really heated up after Elon Musk reposted one of Robinson's videos.
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He has a huge amount of followers online, but what he's really expert at is inciting anger, stalking tensions and making it seem as if the UK is under attack from minorities.
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And what effect did that video that he shared that Elon Musk reposted? What effect did that video have when
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he put out a call for people to show up at the police station that night? Then hundreds of protesters showed up and he showed up with them and he was able to speak to the crowd.
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Henry's murder, I've spoke about this for 20 years. I said, you'll be a victim of a race gang. That is Pakistani Muslims will be beating up a white kid. The police will turn up. They jump on the white kids. Every time I've seen him my whole life, they jump on the white kids. And then barely a week later, at 10:30pm on Monday night, on a Belfast street, bystanders captured video of the moment a Sudanese man, Hadi Aloded pinned another man, Stephen Ogilvie, to the ground, attacking him with a knife. Ogilvie is now in a coma after losing one eye and suffering wounds to his neck and face. Give me the roadmap of how we went from a bystander video to violence in the streets of Belfast in just 24 hours.
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As you said, it was 10:30 at night in Belfast. Someone videoed it, we don't know who. They posted it online. Exactly one hour later, Tommy Robinson posted the video. That video got 6 million views. A few hours later, Elon Musk responded to Tommy Robinson and then spent the next 24 hours posting consistently about this case. Many major US accounts on X started amp amplifying the video when people woke up in the UK on Tuesday morning after the incident. By 7am people were posting about having protests in Belfast and other cities in Northern Ireland. Far right groups on Facebook started organizing. Then Elon Musk posted about the protest and said that this is enough. We have to take a stance. People have to push back against this. And by 7pm that evening, there were masked men on the street who are kicking indoors of migrants, setting fire to vehicles, terrorizing migrant communities across Belfast. There's a very few people who are orchestrating this. While much of it is happening on major platforms like X and Facebook, the real hardcore organization is actually happening on other platforms. In Telegram chats where they are talking about opsec, they are talking about covering tattoos, wearing nondescript clothes, covering their face, making sure that no one is videoing what they're doing, that they are not wearing smartwatches, that they're not wearing anything identifiable, no digital devices.
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This call for retribution and protest, which quickly turned into a violent attack on immigrant communities in Belfast, was effectively the narrative cover for a network of people who in a sort of carefully planned way sprung into action as if they were training for this sort of moment.
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That is exactly what happened. One of the groups is part of the wider Active Club network, which is a white supremacist network based in the US which has a footprint that's growing across the globe. The group that was involved heavily in the kind of planning of these incidents is an offshoot of the Active Club movement for teenagers. So the idea of this movement is that it's based on fitness and male bonding, but what it's actually doing is facilitating the radicalization of young white males into these white supremacists and often neo Nazi ideologies.
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Elon Musk wrote, murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their hometown is what's making people angry, not social media. He reposted messages claiming that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer quote, hates white people. This is just like white supremacist. Great replacement theory. Right.
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It has been repackaged recently under a term called Re Migration, which is something that is being bought bubbling up in Europe for a few years and has been embraced by the Trump administration recently. So it's this idea that white people are under attack and so therefore we need to kick everyone else out. That doesn't look like us.
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Yeah. And last month you traveled to Porto, Portugal to cover the Re Migration conference which featured some key far right American figures, including the ex commander of Border Patrol, Greg Bovino. And you wrote about the increasing collaboration between American and European far right Re Migration believers. How does this international movement fit into the story of what's happened in Belfast and Southampton?
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I was amazed at the number of Americans who had traveled to Porto figures like Bavino. You had members of the New York Young Republicans Club. Jared Taylor, who's a very prominent white supremacist from the US you had members of Patriot Front. We can link it to what's happening in Belfast because the Patriot Front and active clubs in the US have a very, very close relationship. So in what we see in the north of Ireland at the moment is these active club networks who have become very involved in what's happening there. They see it as a huge success. They are now holding up this as an example of what other groups across the globe in the US and Europe can do when it comes to fighting back against this claim that they're being replaced. These networks are getting stronger. They are communicating more easily. And I think that's what we saw in Belfast is that it spread across X so quickly. And they started posting about it saying this is evidence of why we need to have this extreme, extremely racist policy of remigration.
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The term Re migration is a very benign term to describe a very, very violent policy agenda. What are these people imagining would happen?
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They have a 30 year plan that would happen in three phases. The first phase would see the worst of the worst. What we're seeing in the US at the moment where they're trying to deport people who are threat to society of criminal records and are there illegally. The second phase would see people who are in the country legally but are not citizens and who have not assimilated and are not white and they should be sent back to their countries as well. But what the third phase shows is what these people really want. They would look at citizens who do not assimilate to the Western cultures, traditions and religions. For example, if they are still practicing religions other than Christianity, if they are cooking foods that are not traditional foods in Germany or France or the UK or America, then they would be kicked out.
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And who gets to decide what assimilation looks like?
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When I asked Martin Sellner, who was called the godfather of re Migration at the conference in Portugal, who exactly decides this, he couldn't really give me an answer. Ultimately, it comes down to whoever's in power will decide. This movement is still relatively fringe. In that conference in Porto, there were elected officials, a number of them from Germany, some from Spain, speaking at the conference, listening. Five years ago, no one had heard about this policy. Now you have dozens of Americans traveling thousands of miles to go to a conference to listen to it.
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This was not the first time that Elon Musk has been accused of inciting violence in the UK and the rest of Europe. Why is he so fixated on these crimes and European politics? What does he want out of this?
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I kind of ask myself that question a lot. The only thing I can think of is that as a result of his posts, things happen in the uk. People love him here. People talk this week about how if it hadn't been for X and Elon Musk, we'd never heard about this attack on Stephen Ogilvy in Belfast, which is patently untrue, obviously. But they believe that he is this truth teller and he is giving them the power to speak.
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I mean, I think he believes the things that he's saying. Intentionally or not, it seems like his ability to whip up violence in the streets, it likely gives him leverage with, I would imagine, like European regulators who oversee his companies. For a month now, the UK government has been discussing a potential ban of X, which allows users to use Grok AI to create pornographic images of women and minors. Keir Starmer has recently said that he wants to amend a law to require social media companies to take down inflammatory posts in the middle of such riots. If I were a lawmaker, I would be thinking this is exactly the kind of thing we can expect if we try to meddle with Elon Musk's ex. Right?
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Yeah. He knows the power that he has. His repeated attacks on Keir Starmer kind of showed he clearly does not fear lawmakers or authorities in the UK or the eu. I think for years, lawmakers in the EU have been seen as the ones who have been actually holding big tech in the US to account. But ultimately they've fined them hundreds of millions of dollars. So What? The big tech companies don't care. They'll tie everything up in court for years and if they do have to pay it in the end, that's fine. They can pay it. They've made enough money.
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I have to ask you, you have been covering disinformation, political extremism for a long time and a lot of what you write about are figures in the United States. But you're an Irish writer, you live in Ireland. What does it feel like to watch some of these political movements, figures like Elon Musk export some of these political movements to where you live?
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It's terrifying, really. For years when I've been covering this stuff, it didn't really touch me personally because I wouldn't interact one to one with people in the real world who kind of believed much of the stuff that I was covering.
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Like QAnon and Pizzagate and that kind of thing.
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Exactly. Covid changed us overnight. People went down rabbit holes. WhatsApp groups were set up across the country. People got paranoid and they started to believe everything. That group of people who started off believing that Covid was a hoax and not wanting to take the vaccine, they've stayed in those groups, but those groups have morphed to become anti immigrant racist groups. I suppose for a long time I felt insulated to an extent by being so far away from a lot of the people I. But now I'm actually interacting with them on a daily basis. So it's a big change.
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It's frightening to see what's just happened in Belfast boomerang back to the United States. Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends this week said this to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen on air. They're standing up because their leaders have let them down in their own streets
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trying to take their country back.
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They want to label them as racist. All they want to be is Irish. They want Ireland back. I see a lot of the same fights here.
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Brinkenmead is completely wrong. A lot of people in the north are incredibly angry about this because this kind of exemplifies a lot of the content that's been posted online about how this is Irish people, nationalists and loyalists uniting to fight back against the minorities. And there's been memes going around about how loyalists and nationalists in the north, this is the thing that they're going to unite over. That is not true. The groups that we see on the streets of Belfast are loyalist groups that want to stay loyal to the British crown. They do not want Ireland to be a united country. They want to be British. And that's a very key point that is being missed in a lot of the conversations that are happening about what's happening in Belfast this week.
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What should listeners look out for when they're reading coverage of these riots?
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People need to realize why people like Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson are saying the things they're saying. And what they're saying in simple terms is that there is a massive global conspiracy taking place where white people are being replaced in their own countries by minorities. And in the coverage of this story that has not been really explicitly called out, it's incredibly important to call out what they're trying to do. They don't care about Stephen Ogilvy or Henry Novak. Both the victims families explicitly said, we do not want our family members death or injuries to be exploited. Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk do not care. They just see an opportunity to exploit this suffering, to push home this narrative. That's something that needs to be more explicitly called out in media coverage when these incidents happen.
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David, thank you for doing this work.
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Thanks for having me and thanks for talking about this. It's important.
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David Gilbert is a reporter at Wired covering disinformation and online extremism.
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Coming up, firings, testing meetings, tears and recriminations. It's just another day at CBS News.
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This is on the media.
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And I'm Michael Olinger. As social media spread, disinfo is helping to foment unrest an ocean away. A stalwart of the old media, 60 Minutes, one of the few trusted gatekeepers still standing is being rocked from within. It all started a couple weeks ago when CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss fired a bunch of staffers from the team at 60 minutes. Among them, executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharon Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. On the same day, Weiss installed a new executive producer at the program. Like herself. He's a former New York Times columnist with no prior TV news experience.
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All the hell broke loose at 60 Minutes.
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Oliver Darcy is the founder of the newsletter Status and a former media reporter at cnn.
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I can't imagine that CBS management thought this was going to go over well, but I don't believe they anticipated it going this far off the rails.
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When newly minted executive producer Nick Bilton met his 60 Minutes team a few days after the mass firings, D' Arcy was leaked in audio recording of the encounter.
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Scott Pelley, the longtime CBS News journalist And the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent, who is the only correspondent in the room, and he just goes off on Nick. Bilton, says he's not basically qualified for his role, says that Bari Weiss is not qualified for her role, says that David Ellison. He doesn't use David Ellison's name, but it's pretty obvious who he's talking about, that David Ellison brought Bari Weiss into CBS News to kill 60 Minutes, and that that's exactly what she's doing. And I listened to the audio, and it was a really extraordinary, very tense meeting.
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What have you learned about the new leader of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton?
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Nick came in a little hot, if you will. He did a bunch of interviews and sounded pretty condescending, to be totally frank. In one of the interviews with Semaphore, they asked him, what do you think about not having any television experience? Does that intimidate you? And he says, no. Basically, if I need someone to push the button to go live on the air, there are people that I can have push the button for me. And very much diminished the role of the people who work at 60 Minutes and what it takes to go on air with a story. If he had not engendered a lot of goodwill just in the rollout, he was at one point telling Scott Pelly, you don't intimidate me, and I'm not gonna be intimidated by this role. And it sounded very adversarial. And that was not really a great way to come in, given the trauma the 60 Minutes team had just experienced. If you think about it, these are people who have worked together for decades, and then they just watched the new boss at CBS News, Bari Weiss, come in and fire them without any explanation.
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After their altercation in that meeting, Scott Pelley is summoned by Bari Weiss and some other bigwigs at cbs, and he's fired. Soon after that, he gave a big interview to the New York Times about his side of things. His shock and confusion about the whole ordeal.
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You were just fired from the news
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organization which you were at the heart
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of for 37 years.
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I can't believe I'm hearing those words which went viral. There was a thumb on the scale
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for the president's version of events that
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I felt was a level of political
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influence that I had never seen in 37 years. CBS News, we learned this week that David Ellison called Leslie Stahl, the 60 Minutes correspondent, and apologized to her for how this had all gone down, suggested or said that this was his top priority and he wanted to make things right. And that's something you wouldn't say if he thought things were okay. Right. And the fact that David Ellison, who is busy trying to convince regulators around the world to approve a $110 billion deal to purchase Warner Brother Discovery, is now taking time out of his day to clean up Bari Weiss's mess does not seem to bode well for her. Whether this means he will ultimately relieve her of her duties I think is the open question. And I would not expect anything to happen on that front until Ellison closes his merger because he's not going to want to rock the boat with the Trump administration, which very much seems to like the direction that Bari Weiss is pushing.
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Cbs, you reported that since this all went down, Bari Weiss has pretty much left the newsroom at cbs. She's kind of mia.
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My understanding is she has this office suite on the sixth floor of CBS News headquarters in New York. And that suite is where her lieutenants, her top deputies are and that's where she is. And to even get in the suite, it's locked. You have to have a key card that has special access. It's hard to stress that is very abnormal for a news executive. Typically editors, the editor in chief, they are in the newsroom. They're of the people they are working on stories with, the reporters and producers. The only parallel that I can think of is Chris Licht, who was the ill fated CNN boss, and Chris did the same thing. It signals at the very least that she's distant from staff. And I think part of it is that she's not trusting anyone around her.
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You mentioned that David Ellison called Leslie Stahl, which I think we can interpret as an appeal to her. Bill Whitaker and John Wertheim, the three remaining correspondence at 60 Minutes to like stay put and not walk out. What's the status of the show right now?
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Well, I think they're trying the best to recover and move forward. I mean, they have a fall season to produce and they're supposed to be Working on that right now. These are 60 minute stories. These aren't stories that are turned around in a few hours or a day like you might see on cable news. These are well researched, they're well fact checked, and they often require flying the correspondence to all different corners of the world. They're down four correspondence right now. They don't know who's coming in the door next. So it's a mess. Some people have speculated inside the 60 minutes that they're going to have some trouble getting on the air. Maybe not for the first one or two episodes, but after that, they won't have many stories in the bank that they can pull from.
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Obviously, the state of TV news is not great, but 60 Minutes was enjoying some real success. Paramount itself noted that viewership increased by 9% for the most recent season. And Scott Pelley told the New York Times that the show's digital reach increased by over 100% last year. And yet Weiss believed the show needed to be overhauled.
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It doesn't make any sense if you judge 60 minutes on any metric, like they were exceeding all the metrics. It's a critically acclaimed show. They had just won two Emmys. There were no major journalistic disasters that she could point to and say, look, this wasn't really great. We had this really big black eye this season. So nothing there. They were producing solid journalism. As you mentioned, they were averaging 9.1 million viewers this season, which was a 9% increase year over year, which is again in the era of declining linear television reach. That's great. The show's not staying flat. It's going up. It's crazy. And they've been enjoying massive success on digital. In fact, the numbers that Scott Pali you said were referring to are actually in a press release that Paramount itself put out on May 21. They said that total video views across social platforms were up 185%. They said that total engagement with their content on Social was up 137%. TikTok numbers up 85%. Instagram numbers up 65%. They say in here that there were 2.5 billion views on social media.
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Hmm.
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It seems to me that either Paramount was not telling the truth on May 21st when they hailed how well 60 Minutes was doing on digital, or they're not really telling us the truth now as they're trying to find an excuse for blowing up the show.
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This leads to the question that everyone is asking and arguing about. Why did they so aggressively target this show on Ms. Now and other liberal media spaces. We've heard that the goal here was to purposefully ruin 60 Minutes and CBS.
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The goal here is to destroy the brand because that's what's happened. Because you have not only 60 minutes basically gutted like, like a dead tree from the inside, but you also have this tremendous anxiety over at CBS News.
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Do you think we're witnessing a grand plan to incapacitate an outlet critical of this administration, or is this just incompetence?
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It could be a mixture of both. It's not just liberal talking head saying this. It's Scott Pelley. It's Steve Kroff, the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent, who told me that he never thought he would see that 60 Minutes would be, quote, executed by the President of the United States. And honestly, even if it's not a direct result, if 60 Minutes were not getting under Donald Trump's skin, it's hard for me to imagine they would blow up the show because again, by every other metric, it's doing really well. So the only thing that makes sense really is that David Ellison, who is doing everything he can to ingratiate himself with the President, United States, decided that something needed to be done about 60 minutes. Now, maybe he didn't say destroy the program. Maybe it was relayed to Bari Weiss that it needs to be more fair or open minded to the rest of America, some version of that. And maybe she's just an incompetent manager and just executed this entire thing really poorly. We don't know what happened, but I think we'd all be fools not to believe that Donald Trump ranting about 60 minutes in public is not also communicating that to them in private. And whatever the Ellisons are telling Donald Trump, it's music to his ears because the entire administration is saying, we can't wait for you to get CNN next.
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Tom Lay at Defector had this hypothesis I'm gonna read from his piece. Weiss is failing at this because she's not actually a propagandist. She's a culture warrior who sees every step of her career as part of a process in which she is bringing her enemies to heel. Does that analysis hold water for you?
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I'm not sure. I think that Bari Weiss likes to be a disruptor. And I think that's worked by kind of well for her on Substack or at least on the Internet in general. She seems to be someone who generates controversy which becomes a tension which grows her numbers and builds her following to be bigger. And I think that works to some extent on the Internet. But television news is a lot different CBS News has never been in the public discourse more than it is today. And their ratings are still really, really bad. I believe that in May, CBS Mornings, their flagship morning show with Gayle King, it had its worst rated May on record ever, ever. And her big thing that she's done prior to this was the evening news with Tony Decopol, who is her handpicked anchor in that show, has suffered the worst ratings of the 21st century under her watch. It's hard to get in her mind, but it just seems to me like she doesn't understand who the CBS News audience is. And she doesn't understand that attention on CBS News does not translate into ratings the same way it might on the Internet.
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Let's zoom out a bit. In 2024, CBS reported the Late show with Stephen Colbert captured $70.2 million in advertising, while 60 Minutes caught 79.7 million. But as Variety's Brian Steinberg reported, advertisers are moving away from both of those formats towards sports streaming and live entertainment. So even though 60 Minutes was still making money, is there something to the idea that its future success was not something that CBS could count on? That there was legitimate reason to start shaking up the show?
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F
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely legitimate reason to be planning for a post linear television future. If you're not planning for that future right now, I think it'd be irresponsible. I think the question is how do you do it? And I can't imagine that anyone thinks that Bari Weiss is doing a good job here. Do you fire the people who are posting really good digital numbers or do you say, hey, you guys are doing really good on digital. I saw that. We had like a record year across social media. How do we do better there?
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This whole situation is kind of a win win for maga. If Weiss succeeds in kind of turning CBS News into this engine of anti woke content that's good for the White House. Or if it burns the place down and liberal viewers get up and leave like they did with the Washington Post, that's just one more critical news organization gone. It seems like this political movement wants a news environment where there are no legacy outlets left to do decent journalism, where it's all just partisan content and the best at getting attention wins.
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F
That's a really good way of looking at it. And I think that's why Donald Trump is so happy with the Ellisons. He sings their praises every time he's asked about them. And I think that's why he's so excited. And the rest of the administration is excited for David Ellison to be in control of CNN because 60 Minutes is one thing, but Donald Trump, let's be honest, he has been obsessed with CNN since he ascended in politics more than a decade ago. And that's because like authoritarians don't like there being a shared set of facts. They want information chaos where they can plant narratives and not face resistance. And if CNN is no longer fact checking Donald Trump and holding him to account and just is even softer on him, that is the entire point of all this stuff. The people losing here are the people who believe in like a news landscape where organizations are tethered to the facts and are able to be profitable by telling the truth. And the people who are winning here are the ones that want to destroy our sense of shared reality.
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Oliver, thanks for staying on top of this story and thanks for joining us.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Oliver Darcy hosts the media criticism podcast Power Lines. We reached out to CBS for comment but didn't hear back by time of publishing.
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Coming up, a new guidebook offers a lexicon for navigating life in an autocracy.
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A
This is on the Media.
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D
The economy never stops shifting, markets move, global trade gets to disrupted and policies shift. And all these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work. I'm Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily 10 minute podcast where a team of award winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app.
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A
This is on the Media. I'm Michael Ohinger.
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D
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. As Oliver Darcy said, the Trump administration and the MAGA movement would love nothing more than a complicit or at least compliant media. In lieu of that, the strategy appears to be to pollute our current information ecosystem with non stop, often contradictory verbiage. A good example presented itself on Meet the Press. They're urging the votes to be counted quickly.
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C
That's how they vote in crowds.
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A
They're crooked, just like you're crooked. Your press is crooked and Meet the Press is crooked.
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C
To be fair, I'm not crooked. But let's really.
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A
Well, you play right into their hands. You're either crooked or you're stupid. You play right into their hands.
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D
It was a heated back and forth that ended with the President pulling off his mic.
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A
Let's call it quits because I've had enough.
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D
What prompted that? Host Kristen Welker had been unusually pushy on Trump's war of choice with Iran.
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E
What changed? Because you insisted no new wars Because
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B
I didn't guarantee no war.
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A
All of us who lived through his campaign know that he made that kind of a centerpiece. He said this, under Trump, we will have no more wars.
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D
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart.
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A
And he also said this. I'm not going to start a war.
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B
I'm going to stop wars. Of course, he also said this, I'll
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D
keep you out of wars, so no wars again.
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A
We won't have wars again.
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D
See what I mean? Sometimes it can be hard to find the words to describe exactly what's going on, since Trump's obfuscations, misdirections, brazen lying, are unprecedented in our democracy. The frequent frantic declamations of authoritarianism, unbridled corruption, and would be king. They just don't capture it. It's happening so fast and frenetically. We haven't had the time to coin words with the specificity required to describe how the wheels are turning. That's why Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storiev decided to write a guidebook of sorts. It's called how to Survive Authoritarianism, A Russian's Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America. And it'll be out in the fall. Maria and Dan worked as activists and human rights defenders in Russia for about a decade before Putin's crackdowns made it too dangerous to stay. They now live abroad in exile. I ask them to start by describing a couple of terms which describe the way that the citizens have to operate under these leaders.
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B
The manual control, it's a newer term. It comes from Putin era Russia. Whereas Chelybitnaya goes back to the times of Ivan the Terrible. And Chelybitna literally means you're bowing so hard that you strike your head on the floor. In Russia, you see it all the time, where people who need something as basic as having their road paved in their city, they essentially have to record these teary messages to Vladimir Putin asking him to intervene and do something about this.
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E
I want to add to that that a huge and important part of Chulobitna is humiliation. And humiliation in this process is on purpose.
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B
There is an example here, the showdown in the Oval, back with Zelenskyy, when Zelensky was attacked by JD Vance and then by Donald Trump.
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D
How can you dress like that?
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B
Yes, how can you dress like that? Do you own a suit?
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D
You never once said thank you.
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B
Exactly.
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D
There's another one of these terms that I think show the dangers of authoritarianism, at least as a mode of government. The phrase is, and you can say it in Russian, effective manager
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B
they denoted these technocrats within the Soviet systems who would run cities, they would run collective farms, they would run gulags. In some cases. It is a successful yet ruthless technocrat, and it became especially popular in post Soviet Russia. But then it became really popular within the Putin elite, Vladimir Putin and the rest of them being extremely impressed with the Chinese model, with the Singaporean model, where you have pretty much zero political life, you have pretty much zero democratic freedoms and liberties, but at the same time, you have economic growth. The trains run on time, and the streets are immaculately clean. And this is exactly what we see the contemporary right in America. People like Curtis Yarwin, for example, allegedly J.D. vance's favorite philosopher, people like Peter Thiel, this is exactly what they advocate. They advocate for something they call a corporate monarchy. And the argument that these people give is that we need to delegate all our power to the single executive. This concentration will make sure that the trains run on time, the streets are clean, you can walk alone at night, and so on and so forth. Just give up your freedom of speech, Right?
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D
But why the hell then would they be throwing their support behind a clear incompetent, where the economy is in free fall, the streets are not clean, there is civil unrest and the whole thing. I don't know how to answer that question, but maybe it can lead us to the idea we haven't talked about yet, which is manual control. That word.
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E
Rudy, what we see right now in America, what we see now in Russia, is quite different from what we saw in dictatorships of the 20th century. Now, the regimes are very personalistic, and basically you find a person who is charismatic enough to lead the movement, and then you deal with all of the problems that arise with that. Manual control basically means that all of the bureaucrats are afraid to make any decisions, and every time they have to make one, every decision is just kicked off upstairs till it reaches the most powerful person in the country, or at least the minister. The problem with such system is that it stops reacting to routine tasks. Every task becomes political. And also problems are not resolved on time. Local authorities, for example, just didn't even want to react to emergencies because they didn't know if the federal government would approve of that. A lot of things about authoritarian regimes are in tension with each other, and it's kind of contradicting tendencies. And on one hand, we have effective managers who are ruthless and who just try to run gulag efficiently. On the other hand, authoritarianism is often quite chaotic because it doesn't prevent problems in time, and it's actually in that way, a fragile system that hurts a lot of people. It also makes a lot of things that should not be political. It makes them political again. Fixing the vote, stuff like that.
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D
There are a couple of Russian phrases that both relate to leaders staying in power longer than legally allowed. And the words are in English, castling and zeroing.
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B
Castling is in Russian, the chess move, right, where you shield your king with your rook. So Putin, at one point, when he needed to leave the presidency so that he wouldn't be breaking the law, what he did is he created out of thin air, replacement for himself. That replacement's name was Dmitry Medvedev, who indeed ended up continuing the exact same policies that were going on under Vladimir Putin. And in fact, it was under Medvedev that Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, something you've pointed out.
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D
A lot of nations, China, Venezuela, they just changed the constitution to allow them to stay forever.
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B
And this is what zeroing is. Zeroing or abnormalia. It's just basically canceling your term limits. Masha, maybe you could explain it better than I can.
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E
Yeah, right. So what Putin did basically, was officially, we still have term limits in Russian constitution. Putin just proposed that because we are changing constitution substantially in 2020, and we had this severed referendum that ran for seven days all over Russia to do that, we kind of reset the terms. So basically, the exception of not having two presidential terms only applies to Putin, and it will apply again to everyone after him.
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D
Right? The clock stopped for Putin.
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E
Yeah, basically.
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D
You wrote about politechnologi, or political technologists. These are people who exist to maintain the illusion that an undemocratic system is. Is working democratically. Some call that illiberal democracy. Can you tell me about some of the more creative ways Putin's political technologists managed to pull this off?
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B
The term that we use in the book is electoral activities. They are not really elections. They are a performance. And everything within this performance isn't about real policies of the candidates as much as it is about the various trickery that political technologists use. For instance, in Russia, we have something called Dead Souls. Now, the Dead Souls, of course, it's the title of the amazing novel by Russian imperial writer Nikolai Gogol.
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D
It's a hilarious book.
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B
Yes. Anyway, we actually have many cases in Russia where during the elections or electoral activities, you have people voting. Again, quote, unquote, voting. And these people, they might have died years and years ago, or they may never have existed in the first place. And coincidentally, they always tend to vote for Vladimir Putin or for his favorite Party, the United Russia.
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D
There's a Russian phrase, svoim sio cushim zakon, which means everything for our own, for others, the law. You know another phrase?
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B
Bilbi chelavek bilby Chile.
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D
Yeah, give me the man and I'll find the crime. And all of these involve what in English is called undesirables, also a Russian term.
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E
Basically, authoritarians start to use law just for their own purposes, while still pretending that having some law implemented is a thing of democracy. They also start to use law selectively, and that's what phrases like find me a man and I will find you a crime refers to. And we actually have such a prominent example right now in the United States. It's what's going on with James Commie and the fact that they're trying now to prosecute him based on an Instagram post that had 100 likes. That gives me vibes of late. Putin's regime, actually, you just decide who you don't like. You decide who you want to prosecute, and then you find anything on them. What people in America don't understand right now is that sometimes this kind of political prosecution, its goal is not to put a person into jail. The goal is to threaten you with the process. And it doesn't matter how this process ends. It basically deters a lot of people in power from even attempting to say something against the wannabe dictator.
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D
So let's turn to infopomoika, basically an information dumpster. And it's a phrase that depicts how tyranny can corrupt our perception of reality.
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E
Basically, what Putin's regime decided to do is to create as many versions of reality as possible to confuse people and to encourage people to disengage. In Russian, we use a phrase, we will never know the whole truth, which means that there are so many contradictory versions out there that it's impossible to find what really happened. What Russian propaganda does is creating a lot of content of low quality. That's what we call info dumpster. But it's everywhere, hundreds of channels on all social media. It's on television, it's in newspapers, it's maybe even in the comments. And Russians use a lot of troll farms to even engage in that way with people. You create so many things that people get confused. And when people get confused and overwhelmed, they just disengage the idea here, because I think people misunderstand that modern dictators, they want you to believe what they do, or they want to put you in prison. No, they actually much better off if you just don't do anything. You stay at home or you emigrate. That's where the concept of inner immigration comes in. Inner immigration is when a person who understands the political reality, who understands that democracy is under assault anyway, chooses to disengage and only spend time doing the personal things and basically shut themselves from politics.
- [49:19]
B
To add to inner immigration and to how important apathy is for modern dictatorships and other Russian saying is, and it basically means my house is at the edge of the village, and so I don't care what happens with the rest of township. It rhymes in Russian and it doesn't really rhyme in English, but that's sort of the idea. You disengage as much as possible.
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D
You've said that one of the key principles of this book is that language matters. What was your intention in assembling this phrasebook of Russian words?
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E
Okay, so I moved to the United States a couple of years ago, and when Trump came back to power, I started to see a lot of similarities with what I knew from Russia. I also started to have my American friends ask me for advice on how to live in such circumstances. And very early on, people started to understand that the dynamics has changed, but
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D
they lacked a language that they could apply to the consequences and the techniques of the people who oppose democracy.
- [50:32]
B
That's the thing. Russia existed for so long, for literal centuries, under the boat of authoritarian regimes. And Russians have developed this special language which allows us to talk about authoritarian developments and which also allows us to talk about them in the open without actually being thrown in jail. That's a very important component of this. And so I Remember watching in 2025, the detention of Rameyza Usturk, who was a PhD student at Tufts University. She was detained for her pro Palestinian stance. She was kidnapped by masked, plain clothed agents out in the open, just snatched up and dragged away. When you grow up in Russia, these kind of images, they immediately resonate with you just instantly. And we have the exact vocabulary to describe these plain clothed officers, right? We call them Sylvie Key or Eshniki. We have this vocabulary to describe a dictatorship and Americans just don't. And this is exactly why we wanted to write this book, so we could help our American friends name the things happening around them. Because naming something is the first step towards resisting it.
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D
Well, thank you both very much.
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E
Thank you.
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B
Thanks for having us on.
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D
Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storiev are authors of the upcoming book how to Survive A Russian Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America. It comes out in the fall.
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A
That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong, with help from Ella Walsh. Travis Manning is our video producer.
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D
Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering help from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by wnyc. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
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A
And I'm Michael Oinger.