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In this Article, Tomasz delves into the complexities of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and shines a light on the insidious presence of tyranny in today’s world. Through his analysis, Tomasz uncovers the troubling spread of authoritarianism in countries such as China, Taiwan, Iran, Turkey, Hungary, North Korea, and beyond, revealing the urgent need for vigilance and action against this growing threat.

This article is the transcript of a podcast done regularly by Tomasz Nadrowski. . Please excuse any transcript errors in this article.

Welcome to Tyranny Today, the show by Gregg Stebben and Tomasz Nadrowski. We are recording it on March the first, 2023. If today is March the first and it is not a leap year. Then yesterday it was February 28th, and February 28th is a very painful date for all the Taiwanese people. In 1947, the Chinese Army fired on a Taiwanese demonstrator.

And in the subsequent period of white terror, the Chinese occupiers murdered 30,000 Taiwanese civilians. To this day, this incident shapes Taiwanese people’s perception of Chinese mainland a topic to which we will certainly return one day. Now, however, February offers some other sad anniversaries. Last week, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the outbreak of the Third World War, we were served with yet another vote condemning Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

I have to say that last week, a day before the vote, I was quite despondent. Swiss TV showed Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez trying to drum up support for the vote in front of a general assembly hole. A couple of blocks from where I. And the hall was half empty. It is hard to say if this was the result of overall war fatigue of the complete lack of charisma of the Portuguese Secretary General or maybe of a boycott by nations that are happy to tell the Russian Chinese line.

It was probably a combination of all. The year before the shock of the invasion jolted even the most indifferent observers into various levels of alertness. Antonio Gutierrez does not really wield the power that one of his predecessors, Doug Ham once deployed, but who has Hamer’s Hyper Activism led the organization to overreach in the Democratic Republic of Congo, thus showing limit.

To what the UN can do. His Nordic predecessor Telia, was considered an American poem by the Soviets Ham’s successor. Uant from Burma had some qualified successes, as had, uh, Peruvian secretary Paris Deja Court. Walheim was controlled by Soviets, who, unlike the cia, were aware of his Nazi pastor all. While Egyptian Bres Buttross galley labeled ironically in the whole of Geneva as Secretary, secretary General was outgrown even by the two major conflicts in the otherwise fondly remembered Placid 1990s ion KA glit comfortably on the tail of the era with the millennium development goals and Korean banyon oversaw the organization that elected to deal with more pedestrian or sometimes more long-term.

Like the UN reform, climate change, corporate responsibility, and even L G B T rights. And now this shock Gutierrez wasn’t ready for his world in a more than the Greens in the German coalition. They’re all doing their best in adjusting to this newly divided world. But the day after gut’s speech, the actual vote didn’t come as badly as I.

The vote was 141 in favor of the resolution condemning Russia 32 Abstentions and seven against the seven votes against were not surprising. In addition to Russia, four of these countries have Russian troops under soil, Syria, erea, which is home to a Russian Navy base. Belarus still notionally independent, but with about 20,000 Russian troops on its t.

And Mali, the Russia Waner Group, uh, has now edged out French troop. In addition to these four countries, North Korea voted against the resolution, but Ang has always been a paragon of property, so probably nobody noticed. And then we have Daniel Ortegas Nicaragua. Ortega the great survivor, managed to sell his country to China some two years ago, and visibly needs to hedge the associated risks by occurring favor with la.

For us. Ortega earned his Outkast status during the latest election cycle, which led to mass incarceration of opposition figures, and dozens of extra judicial killings in Nicaragua. Since then, the regime has tightened this crew persecuting the Catholic church, which as many times before in Central America is again standing up to the autocrats, a sadly recurrent theme and the extraordinarily violent history of this part of the.

By the way, on YouTube, you can watch the footage from the last great military parade in the former German Democratic Republic, an entity that we used to call in Switzerland, Deutsche Republic. It is from early 1989, and among the dignitaries standing next to ish Hanukkah and Fidel Castro and Nicola and some others, there is also the youthful Daniel Ortega qui.

Interestingly, another China’s vessel and fellow survivor from the previous Cold War hunk of Cambodia voted in favor of the UN resolution last week, and that’s quite interesting. As a young energetic man, hun Sen was initially Vietnams stooge in the struggle against the Hamara Rouge, but he later managed to tweak his position and attract Chinese money to a country that is forever condemned to be dominated by either Vietnam.

Or Thailand or China. And currently it is China and this arrangement seems to give the vessel states some freedom, at least on issues outside China, such as Ukraine. It is a list of abstentions. However, there is probably more interesting than those that backed Russia. And here there are some disappointments for Russia, starting with China, Iran, and the Defiant Kazakhstan, whose ruler knows what Ukraine’s lost or Belarus’s disappearance could mean for the territorial integrity of his huge country.

The world’s ninth largest bay area. The more independent was Pakistan, but also Kurgestan abstained. Stan’s sovereignty is not assured, given that the country’s debt to China, which amounts to 30% of gdp, makes it the sixth largest in the world and quite unexpectedly. Cuba also abstained. Has Russia stopped deporting sugar or what things are even less rosy for Moscow in Europe?

All the usual fence sitters, including Hungary, Serbia, and Turkey, voted in favor of the re. So did various neutrals including Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, but also Israel and Georgia. Georgia that De Kremlin has been trying to court as well as Cyprus. He to a reliable offshore account for Ill-gotten gains from east of Donbass, but an alarming 32 countries abstained half of them in Africa.

Last week I dwelled quite a bit on the shameful case of South Africa, which is staging navy man with Russia and China for the first anniversary of the invasion of. Maybe instead of posturing, Pretoria should pay more attention to its power generation crisis and mass load shedding, which according to Sam, may further undermine the very fragile social fabric in the country.

But there is more to the un vote than South Africa, and I thought it would be useful to dive into the analysis of how the prevailing Chinese narrative successfully exploits human propensity for cognitive distortions. First let us, asks ourselves what cognitive distortions are. Cognitive distortions are various mental filters that we commonly employ to deal with the complexity of informational environment.

When used repeatedly, they appear in a form of, uh, persistent bias to process incoming information once adopted, they’re quite difficult to. We call them collectively distortions because they misguide us into believing something for which there is no definite proof. Some of these biases are of logical nature as humans are not inherently logical machines.

Others are built around the connection between the cognitive and emotional aspect of information processing. In other words, as we develop attachment to a specific way of functioning and the outcome of the processing is judged adaptive. We continue to function this way and will defend the stance even in the face of disproving evidence.

Oh, so I have not yet seen any Nazis in Ukraine. Well, I should just look a little harder. And how do we judge the outcome of such distorted belief formation as adaptive, for example? Because the adopted filter allows us to make the incoming information fit another preexisting component of our belief.

It’s the confirmation bias. The whole process makes the use of cognitive resources more economic and the resulting consonants is perceived as pleasant, as opposed to dissonance, which would be disorienting and sometimes not even comprehensible. For example, a left-wing progressive person who supports L G B T rights will find it incomprehensible that there are gays amongst say the neo.

In other cases, the confirmation bias could be socially sanctioned. We are social animals and we enjoyed a company of those who agree with us. We feel safer this way and we feel validated. This is the magic of the social media eco chambers, a phenomenon which exploded over the last decade. And of course, it leads to groupthink, which is really bad for institutional decision making.

Something that dictators, such as put. Tend to forget about when they consolidate power successfully and then make one mistake after another. So just to repeat, some cognitive distortions stem from common logical fallacies while others result from the intertwining of cognitive and emotional aspect of being in the interpretation and judgment of various inputs.

Some four decades ago, psychologists back launched the first study into cognitive distort. In his research, he identified several common biases, including overgeneralization and catastrophizing independently Israeli researchers. Kaman Anderski launched prospect theory and studied people’s responses to prospective losses and gains.

The proponents of this theory discovered several cognitive biases interfering with the profit and loss calculus. The results of the study destabilized the absolutist assumption of human beings as rational agents, which is a crown assumption for the study of economics. Kahneman eventually earned a noble prize in economics for his research, even though he’s actually a psychologist.

Various typologies of misguided thinking have been proposed since the pioneering research by Arn Beck Neurolinguistic programming grouped cognitive mistakes into three broad categor. Deletion through selective attention distortion by misinterpretation of inputs and generalization via attribution of particular experience to an entire category.

The Russell Chinese anti-Western propaganda is exploiting our propensity for each of these three categories of biases. Sam, some of this propaganda filters into the echo chambers of the extreme. . That’s the case of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green in the US of the knuckleheads from Deutschland in Germany, or Marine Lapan in France.

They find also fertile ground with the extreme left. That’s the case of Jeffrey Saxon Noam Chomsky in the us in Germany or whatever hardline grandchildren there may be of in France. This is not to say that all these people deeply believe in the nonsense they profess. Some of them may also be incentivized to promote their biases on a broader arena.

So we may not know if these examples are due to genuine conviction built on cognitive distortions, or whether in some cases Chinese or Russian money speaks. So let us go through these three broad categories and lace them with some example. Let me start with the first of the three categories. There is deletion.

Deletion is an exercise in mental economy first, much belief formation relies on deletion in general, uh, giving the overwhelming amount of information that humans must process. The inputs must be first, um, decoded and filtered. This is achieved by ignoring certain details and by focusing selectively on others.

The process of selective omission relies on recurrent shortcut. Two of which are particularly prevalent. The first one is called availability heuristic, and here we pay excessive attention to a particular fact or event if it’s easier to recall. This may be because it’s more visible, better publicized, or more recent or simply fresher in our mind for some reasons.

For example, because of the associated emotional content, typically we give too much weight to recent experiences extrapolating trans, which are often odd with long run averages or probabilities. For example, when Russian propagandists pushes back against the alleged Western neocolonialism, he or she exploits the fact that many people today remember George Bush’s misguided adventures in Iraq better than the Soviet invasion of Afghani.

The second shortcuts is the so-called representativeness holistic. We have a tendency to treat events as representative of some previously identified class or pattern. This heuristic is used to judge similarity and membership in a class. , this is essentially pattern spotting, right? It gives us a, a sense of familiarity and bolsters the belief that we have diagnosed the issue.

The mechanism doesn’t deal well with randomness, for example, which may be actually a more prevailing feature in the universe than we are ready to admit. And according to this model, colonialism in Africa and Asia by Western. Is central to the concept of colonialism. While Russian, colonialism of Central Asia or Eastern Europe, or for that matter, ottoman, Turkish colonialism in the Balkans, the Middle Eastern, north Africa are somewhat less central to the concept of colonialism.

What are some concrete examples of deletion in the Russell Chinese narrative? A perfect example is offered by the treatment of Africans. In that version, the U S S R was only good. Why? Because of Soviet influence at the time, which coincided with the decolonization effort. Soviet supported many leftist gorilla movements, in particular in Southern Africa, in Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, and Rhodesia.

And after last decade of the 1990s, Russia is back with weapons again in Mozambique, but more often in West Africa. We’re the same Wagner. Which is accused of atrocities in Ukraine is actively supporting military regimes, not least in Mali, which now votes in unison with Russia and the UN Africans therefore are led to believe that the West was invariably bad and colonialists, while the U S S R was good, helping them against the bad colonialists.

Not a word here about the invasion of Hungary or Chicho, Slovakia or Afghani. And who cares about civilians bombed by Russia and Syria, or about 150,000 people killed in Chetna. That’s what deletion is, and convenient truths are cut out irrelevant. By the same token, the political religion in South Africa is that African National Congress, the A n C has always been good.

Forget about endemic corruption, about Winnie Mandela’s death squads in the townships about political murders in South Africa and abroad, or about fights within. It’s just good. Period. Polarization is an extreme case of deletion. This is where the two ends of the continuum are presented as the only alternatives.

No shades of gray, no nuance, no hesitation. The world in black and white, nothing in between. This often appears as a false binary choice. Foisted on geostrategic, riv. China’s trying may be less successful these days to paint Japan as a country stuck in the binary choice between pacifism, whereby it accepts China’s dominance and militar, which led Japan to the ultimate CST of 1945.

It is, of course, a false dichotomy, but both the left an extreme right are prone to such polarizations, and of course, most conspiracy theories are based on some form of de. Why? Because the world is a complex place. Global economic system is very complicated, and in times of crisis, when events accelerate, we do not see clearly through the fog, and so we are prone to simplifications, especially if our cognitive resources are limited.

And they may be limited because of age, stress, fatigue, or group pressure. And so simplistic explanations are preferred in those explanations. All complexities deleted alternative hypothesis are not even considered, and very often one dark force pulls the strengths. Historically, it was either the Jews or the Freemasons or the Vatican or Goldman Sachs or what have you.

It’s not to say that some of these groups. Or not well organized and may be occasionally influential, but it’s a long shot to claim their omnipotent, not to mention responsibility for all sorts of nefarious acts. Since the last great financial crisis, George Sos appears as this ultimate bogeyman, especially for the conspiratorial, right?

Soros with his dirty fingers in every pie, Meg pie and sci-fi, which really must make him an extraordinary busy man, American once as well, his son. And honestly, I couldn’t detect any superhuman qualities, but hey, he’s Jewish and Eastern European and American, which makes him very, very suspect.

Okay, so much for the deletion. The second row category of cognitive bias is distortion. In its narrow definition, distortion is the process of misrepresenting sense data and modifying them by instantaneous interpretations of the input for. With implicit questions, is it good or bad? What does it mean for me?

Are they part of my tribe? The reasons for such misrepresentations are quite profound. Humans do not treat the surrounding reality as a set of unrelated objects. Rather, we advance for life by treating any identifiable object or fact is either a tool or an. Everything with an object hood is banned to our intentionality.

Distortions are quite complex and more complex than deletions, and we have plenty of examples in the Chinese and Russian propaganda. One common form of distortion operates by loosening the commonly accepted link between the signified and the signifier. Now, just to recall, the signified is the semantic content of a term while the signifier is the material surface form.

So the sound of a word or an image, or even facial expression, signifier expresses the signify, right? The. The Paramount example these days is provided by the way in which Chinese media portrayed the Russian invasion. We all know that Russian media call it a special operation, and by using the term war one risks between five and 15 years in jail.

In China, the term adopted by the Communist Party is Ukrainian crisis. yg, not a war, not invasion, not a rape, but just a crisis. This way, China averse to resolve the. If you distort the accepted link between the signified and the signifier, and then repeat the new link in a specific context, a certain number of times it begins to sink in and function as a newly accepted concept.

This is, after all, how language evolves, how we expand our vocabulary, not only when we learn the foreign language, but also in our own language. A term such as chat, G p t didn’t exist in common everyday English six months ago. G P T. This acronym may have surfaced as a signif. Sometime before, but without any commonly accepted signified.

Now it has it well, for the Chinese people. It’s the same with Ukraine. No crimes, no tragedy, no death, no destruction, just a crisis. . Another form of distortion is creation of concepts. With no correspondence to. We generate a signifier that doesn’t just distort its common link to a signified because there is no signified to start with.

Such. An example is China’s peace initiative for Ukraine. It’s, um, generating facts by words. Of course, if Xi Jinping or actually do travel to Kiev to discuss it with Zelensky, the signified will cease to be empty. It’ll have some. But let’s not forget that Xi Jinping has refused to speak to his Ukrainian counterparts since the beginning of the war, while he has been in recurrent contact with Putin, not the use of the signifier peace in the Chinese Peace Initiative.

During Cold War I, the term peace was commonly abused by communist. The U S S R encouraged his followers around the world to fight for peace. As if the oxymoron nature of the two terms, fight and peace somehow didn’t jar the cluster, didn’t mean anything by itself, but it did allow users to dig a rhetorical trench between the left who were allegedly in favor of peace and everyone else.

And during the Cold War ceasefire, that is roughly between 1991. 2022 Chinese Communist professed the peaceful rise of China, a term containing another empty signified given communist China’s history of aggression against Korea, Tibet, India, Taiwan, Vietnam, and even the U S S R. The third broad category of cognitive bias is generalization.

generalization is the process of making general conclusions about an event by attributing a single instance of experience to an entire category of possible events. This adaptive mechanism is useful in many learning processes and it speeds up belief formation. Epistemically, we live by categories, but ontologically, there is no guarantee that any single experience actually belongs to a given category.

In addition, the definition of what rules a given category or. May be incorrect rather than being mutually exclusive. For example, categories could have fuzzy boundaries and have various degrees of membership. On a personal level, generalizations may be responsible for stereo stereotyping, for prejudice, and even certain phobias and some form of generalization used in propaganda are very, very crude.

One such example is, what about it when a South African expert was recently asked on deutche? Why Pretoria can’t condemn Russia’s invasion. She answered by rolling out a rusty weapon of the leftist worldwide. But what about George Bush’s in Iraq? Obviously, none of Bush’s mistakes in Iraq or elsewhere justifies Putin’s murders in Ukraine.

But what about is are not sufficiently sophisticated to deal with? Let me give you another example. When the Swiss authorities recently revealed that Moscow Patriarch Curiel was a K G B agent, my Putin, his friend, protested that this was an isolated case and certainly not corroborated. And quickly dug out a revelation from the 1990s that car’s predecessor Alex, say second, was also a KGB agent.

And in fact, you probably cannot run the so-called Orthodox Church in Moscow without being a secret policeman. It’s like a precondition for the job. Hearing this, Mike Putin’s friend felt sufficiently disarmed to fall into a very predictable What about this? He asked Now what about Pope Francis? How was he elected?

Do we really believe it was a free election? Yes. I know you’re chuckling. Uh, setting apart the issue of how prayers help with the outcome of the conclave, my dear friend, forgot one important historical. Since at least 10 77, so almost a millennium ago when Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV Atoned and asked Paul Gregory Thei for forgiveness.

The Western Church has been independent of the secular authorities. This Cephas arguably helped with the development of alternative sources of power in the West and eventually paved the way towards the development of the rule of law. At least that’s the view of eminent historians of government, such as Se Finer or Francis Fukuyama on the other hand in the East, and that includes both Byzantium and Moscow.

The system has been one of Caesar papers. Whereby it is the secular authority that retained power over the Lesal leadership, including appointments and oversight, no separation of the state and the church. There were some attempts to reform it in Russia, for example, by Patriarch Nicon in the 17th century, but there were crushed.

In other words, in the east, the church has remained the branch of the government defacto, if not necessarily always the yura. Uh, while in the west, the roles bif. Half a lifetime ago for Christianity, half a lifetime ago. One common type of distortion is the free use of personal pronouns. Like you. They, we, for example, the Chinese Communist Party is now commonly cloaking itself in the we of the global self.

This is visible in 0.4 of their are so-called peace initiative for Ukraine. The they is finger pointing at the Irid dentist West. And another point of the initiative, which criticizes Cold War mentality and exclusionary blocks. Russian neotel are very good at this pronoun generalization. For example, the we of the anti-fascist struggle in the 1940s means Russians, which usually serves to transfer the numbers of Soviet war victims to ethnic Russia by putting the sign of equation between Soviet and Russian.

But the same first person, plural, pronoun, looks very different when memory of Stalinist crimes is brought up. Then suddenly it’s not Russian. Why? Because Stalin wasn’t ethnically Russian. So it’s not us. Georgians did it them. Another form of distortion is also detectable at the Syntec level. From the logical perspective.

It involves the so-called composition fallacy. So, If some Chinese people are rich, then Chinese people are rich, right? A good example is the pervasive Russian propaganda paints Ukraine as hopelessly corrupt. It is effective because when my friend Greg, the co-author of this podcast, first got involved in the anti-war activity on the side of Ukraine a year ago, he was actually quite concerned about the risks to his image due to the commonly held view of Ukraine as being corrupt.

Now, there is no doubt that there is corruption in Ukraine as there is in Russia, China, or the United States. Uh, something we discussed with Greg on this show about a month ago or so. But to know that there are instances of corruption in a country X does not equate with the statement that the country is corrupt.

When you hear someone generalizing such attributes and paint an entire country or a large category of people as such, B l R to the hidden political intention in another, but similar example, Ukraine’s closest Ally Poland often suffers from being labeled as antisemitic. Now, this stems from the true.

Tragic fact that anti-Semitism existed in Poland historically, and to this day, many people there held such views. But it’s different from calling the entire nation anti-Semitic, which again betrays some specific political project in this case, directed at a nation that has more righteous among nations at the ad Vahe than any other country.

Many of such generalizations are cases of hasty induction. What does it mean to function inductive? It is when our brains use generalization to conclude a rule from few cases or even from one case. Philosophers have long had problems with induction and advocated deduction instead. Still, the problem with C logistic deduction, which is the opposite to induction that is from general rule to a specific case, is that we don’t actually learn anything new from that.

On the other hand, if I see heavy clouds in the morning, I’m gonna take an umbrella, and that’s what it means to function inductively, which is what we do in our life all the time. induction is useful and can be based on solid assumptions. The problem we face when dealing with propaganda is that they love exploiting inductively weak cases.

If Russians find a Ukrainian p o w with questionable tattoos on his body, they are certain to exploit this, and this won’t be to prove that this particular prisoner is a fan of say, black Sabbath, but rather the point will be that he’s a Satanist and therefore the entire Ukraine nation is a nation of Satan.

This is actually a true case as the Russian propaganda has now moved from deification of Ukraine to desalinization of Ukraine and maybe even of Moldova. You would think that there are limits to hyperbole, but obviously there are not. In another example, the other day, Russian TV also said about attacking Australia, a St of Ukraine.

The reason some parent in Australia partly took her child to watch a burlesque. What is the inductive statement on the Russian tv? Look, the West is Roten. They force the L G B T Q S T R V P N S ideology on children here. We have to fight the west. We can’t allow our children to be subject of the Western ro.

So a single keys captured and amplified by the propagandist is projected inductively as representative for all of us with Sterns, all of us, or at least at all the wombats and rules gathering around billabongs, down under beyond the qu exotic antics of the domestic media in Russia. We can ask the question, how come these narratives are so much more successful in some geographies than in others?

Why is it that so many countries of the global South miss the simple truth about this war that the world’s largest country is attacking its smaller neighbor to take over its territory and destroy its people? Why is the simple truth too complex to appreciate? There may be many answers to it, but one of the reasons could be the relative ubiquity of the Russian and Chinese diplomatic.

Sge LA excluded from the westerns has hit the African trail really hard in recent months, and Russia has maintained a very active diplomatic corpse on the black continent. By contrast, Ukraine has only five embassies in Africa and is no match for China’s effort to paint the west in well black colors.

But if Ukraine with its limited resources cannot really promote its vision of the world, maybe it’s ally. And not even all allies, let us assume for the moment that many West Africans would reject French advice. Indias are historically conditioned to reject British view, and Indonesians are unlikely to listen to the Dutch.

But the pro Ukrainian alliance is not exclusively composed of former colonial powers. Countries such as Korea, Poland, Norway, or Canada, can play an important role here, despite whatever one can say about Poland’s internal problems. In recent years, the country remains one of Ukraine’s conscious allies and can maintain moral high ground in a debate with South Africa’s shameless government, and it has arguments.

Back in 1980, south Africa’s g d P was 60% larger than po. And many polls immigrated to South Africa at that time. Today, poll GDP is 74% higher than South Africas, and the joke goes that the central European nation could take millions of persecuted to join the Ukrainian diaspora. Other South Korea is an even better example.

That economic success does not have to be positively correlated with Despotism. This is the case in. In fact, most third world countries have more in common with Korea than with China in terms of their population size, dependence on alliances, presence of external threats and untapped potential. Seven decades ago, many of them were richer in South Korea.

The problem with South Korea and with Poland is that both have been too obsessed with their immediate neighborhood, and for a good reason, North Korea and Russia respectively represent a clear and present. Both countries have a deeply embedded inferiority complex directed at another larger neighbor, whether it’s Japan or Germany, but there are members of the international Coalition and should do more outside of the region.

Scandinavian countries are already doing this kind of job, and Japan remains the largest provider of ODA self-power and institution building in the Eastern hemisphere. Today, the populations of poor countries of South and Southeast Asia trust Japan much more than China, whose debt trapped strategy has in recent years squeezed many of those economies.

None of this means that the unwinding of the years of Chinese and Russian propaganda will be any easy. We may be aware of the biases, but like everyone else, we too fall into their pitfalls like everyone else. I myself am personally subject to cognitive, distort. . My tendency is simply to reject apriori views that are fascist, communist, racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacists, black supremacists, sinus ris, or any tribal centrist Islamic terrorist or antiterrorist.

Nazi jingo is chauvinist and such. Like without giving it a second thought, I have to pay particular attention to pars between views against which I can argue and actions, which I condemn or even combat. And if I let my cognitive distortions delete, generalize, and. I may miss out on the extraordinary wealth of knowledge that the opposing views, even bigoted views sometimes, and I stress sometimes bring, it’s often painful, always exasperating and it’s sometimes exhausting.

But by remaining in touch with Russian and Chinese supremacists by occasionally glancing and the gutter level clown ship of Marjorie Taylor Green, I’m reminded of how the other side of the barricade. and honestly, they’re not particularly smart. Now, why do we have to know what they think? And to answer this, let me close with a personal recollection.

When in the depths of Stalinism, my mom was forced to study Russian language at school and rebelled against it. My grandmother admonished her, my dear daughter. You have to know your enemy. I think it’s a lesson that hasn’t lost its validity since the era of mankind’s most murderous. Have a great week.