March 22, 2025 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you didn't understand what they were singing there, there is good reason for that.
We'll tell you why in just a moment.
But first, welcome to tonight's live broadcast of TPC.
It's Saturday evening, March the 22nd.
I'm your host, James Edwards, as our annual march around the world reaches its summit this evening with a stop in Russia.
Indeed, our guest is live tonight with us from Moscow.
But before we introduce him, we have a very special friend co-hosting this hour with us tonight.
It is the one and only Sam Dixon, and he selected the music tonight.
Sam, what were they listening to?
Marga Talyasani, God save the Tsar.
Sam is a friend, of course, who speaks Russian.
Some people who know him well know that.
He had a Russian tutor.
He has visited the country, has a great deal of respect and affinity for its history, its culture, and was there, of course, just a few years ago for the 100th anniversary of the assassination of the Tsar.
And I am going to see, check in with our producers if we have our guest yet.
Okay, one moment.
Sam, tell us a little bit more about why Russia is of such interest to you while I help track down this guest.
Well, Russia is the largest white country after America.
And Russians are second only to Anglo-Saxons in spreading our race, religion, and culture over the world.
Russia occupies almost a sixth of the world.
And they're very important to us.
It's very important that we end these family feuds that are exploited and artificially stirred up by our mutual enemies.
And I think they're very wise people.
I like Russians very much.
I had a wonderful month I spent in Russia when I went there for the commemoration of the murder of the imperial family.
And I had only one unpleasant experience with a communist who was angry because I had a czarist medal on my head and a czarist emblem.
But anyway, I find much to admir the Russians.
They're very tough people.
They're much tougher than we are.
Let's see if our guest is here.
Charles, can you hear us?
Okay.
All right.
We're still working on that, Sam.
So continue to hold forth, my friend.
Well, they're very nice people.
They're brave people.
They're tough people.
One of the things I liked about Russia was that the demarcation between the sexes is appropriate.
The guys were masculine and the girls were feminine.
And despite communism, maybe, I don't, I guess maybe it's a folk way the communists couldn't change.
But I found Russian courtships and dating habits very pleasant.
There's still an romance.
You'd see these boys, college boys, teenage boys going to pick up their girls for a date, and they'd bring them flowers.
And they would sit in coffee houses and hold each other's hands and gaze into each other's eyes.
much more the kind of thing I think existed in America and Britain 100 years ago, but which has now been replaced by a lot of coarseness and a lot of ambiguity about sexual behavior, general behavior.
I could tell you that our guest tonight is going to be Charles Bosman, who is a journalist best known for serving as the editor of Russia Insider.
And it's going to be, I think, Sam, a very interesting discussion, the likes of which others in the American media are refusing to have or don't want to have.
And so I think the interest in getting an eyewitness report on the ground from a man who lives there is obviously fascinating.
And so we will do that as soon as we connect with Charles.
We were just talking to him.
I just got actually off the phone with him.
He's going to try to call the studio directly now.
So Jay and Liz, stand by for that call.
Hopefully it'll be coming in imminently.
And yeah, of course, Sam, this is a guy who has, like you, an American, an all-American, in fact.
His ancestry, like yours, is impressive and dates back centuries, far longer than most, but who also has an affinity for the Russian people and has spent a lot of time over there.
So we have him here now.
So without further ado, Charles Bosman, welcome back to the program.
It's great to have you back.
Well, I'm glad to be back.
And you sound fantastic from the other side of the world.
A little bit delayed, but that is a very clear connection, and I'm glad to have it.
So that being said, Sam Dixon is with us.
We have already introduced you in advance of your joining us.
So let's just get down to it.
And I'll ask you the big general question first, and we will dive into it.
Jay and Liz, we're going to skip all the breaks this hour except for that bottom of the hour break so we can catch up, make up a little bit of time with our guests.
So what is the current situation in Russia, Charles?
You have been there, living there now for, you've been there off and on for a while, but you've been there permanently for the last four years.
So your time there predates the current unpleasantness itself.
What is the current situation on the ground?
Do you mean down in the war zone or here domestically?
Here domestically in general.
Yeah, we'll start there.
Yeah, you know, there's an enormous amount of hope now, huge Trump mania.
You know, some Russians are really convinced that Trump is a savior or something.
He's going to say, you know, make peace.
And so a lot of anticipation that, and just a lot of hope that Putin and Trump can sort of sit down and figure this out.
And everybody here says that it's got to be the two of them, that like the Ukrainians aren't going to do anything unless basically America twists their arm.
All right, Sam Dixon, my friend, I bring you now back into this with Charles on the line as well.
and I'll let you take it from there.
Yes, nice to hear you again, Sam.
Nice to hear you.
Ochin Priyata.
Anyway, getting past the Russian greetings, I'm curious, what do you think the exit plan for Ukraine is?
The reason for Russia from this Ukrainian situation.
The reason I ask is it seems to me that when the war is ended, as we hope it will be, and peace restored between these two brother peoples, the Russians will take back into their country the Russian populated areas of Ukraine.
But that will leave the remnant who will be voting in elections and control the government more skewed towards hostility and people who are hostile to Russia.
I don't understand quite how what are your thoughts on how Russia is going to end this war and close down this situation?
Well, you know, they've always been very clear about this, that what they are not willing to tolerate is a hostile regime on their borders, which is also militarized and sort of, you know, a springboard for further NATO aggression.
So, I mean, basically, one of their positions, and it's non-negotiable, is get a government in whatever remains of Ukraine, which is not hostile to Russia, which is kind of, if nothing else, just neutral, kind of the way Austria was during the Cold War, and that it has no weapons.
Well, I hope that that will not leave a resentful base for the government in the future.
You mentioned Austria.
Due to the origins of this war, unfortunately, our people here in America have rather often simplistic views of things like the Civil War started because the South fire in Fort Sumter, or World War II started because Germany invaded Poland.
And the attitude on this is, well, the Russo-Ukrainian war began because Russia attacked Ukraine.
This is childish stuff.
The roots of wars lie much deeper than that.
And all this was coming to a head.
You will recall, but maybe my early readers, our listeners will not, that Putin proposed to Biden and Zelensky that they use the Austria Treaty of the 1950s as a template,
and that there'll be an agreement that Ukraine would remain neutral, as was done with Austria, that Ukraine would have its own army, which was done with Austria, and that the country would never join any alliance that would remain neutral, and that the country would not allow foreign troops and weapons on its territory.
And Biden said that all the Biden said, well, we agree with all that, but we won't put it in writing.
A classic conman answer.
And the Russians have been deceived into relying on the Minsk Accords.
They were assured by us that we would not expand NATO.
And we proceeded to do exactly that.
And when they complained, we said, well, there was never any formal treaty.
So this is really the origin of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
And, you know, anyway, I'm glad that you mentioned the Austria Treaty because that would have been a perfect template to end it.
Sam, can I just say something?
You know, you said that the origins of wars are complex, but in this case, it's not complicated at all.
And the Russians have made it very, very clear.
It was simply just a continuing NATO encroachment on ever closer to their borders.
The latest few years before this thing broke out in 2022, it was because both the Trump and the Biden administrations were pumping more and more weapons into Ukraine and building up the Ukrainian military to such an extent that it actually presented a threat to Russia.
And there are some people who say that one of the Russians, one of the reasons the Russians moved when they did was because they were anticipating a Ukrainian attack.
And, you know, so it's just, it couldn't be more clear.
Stay away from our borders and don't have any significant military buildup on our borders, and everything will be fine.
But if you keep, you know, sticking your nose in here and provoking us, sooner or later, you're going to get a punch in the nose, which is what happened.
Charles, circle back.
I stand corrected, and I think you're absolutely right.
And I would call you to your, you already probably have thought about it, but most people in America have not, thanks to our wretched news media.
But, you know, Russia took exactly the same position that the United States took in 1962 with regard to Cuba.
Here, here.
And everything that Biden said about Ukraine is a sovereign nation, Cuba was a sovereign nation.
Ukraine has a right to make any alliance it wants to.
Cuba theoretically had a right to make any such alliance.
Ukraine has a right to have anybody on her territory with troops and missiles that she wants to.
Cuba, theoretically, is a sovereign nation.
But we would not tolerate Cuba becoming a landing, a launching base for missiles 90 miles off our border.
It's just the ultimate hypocrisy.
If Biden's so really believe what he said, he should have condemned John F. Kennedy.
All right.
This is a great point, Sam.
And this actually brings me back to something I wanted to be sure to circle back to.
We have a lot of ground to cover with Charles in an hour.
It will not be enough when you're talking about someone who is in Russia.
Now, to be clear, and people who have heard Charles on this program in previous appearances and/or perhaps know his work otherwise, which is entirely reasonable to assume that they would, knows that Charles is an American who is living in Russia and has been there for many years now, several years now, and has a family over there and all of that.
So as an American, though, living in Russia, I want to go back.
Sam was talking about some of the Biden-era policies and some of the statements that Biden had made.
But again, you mentioned that there is Trump mania happening in Russia right now.
So you have sort of literally, Charles, a foot on both continents or in both nations, Russia and the United States.
So I would ask you, certainly there are friends of ours, a vocal, I think a minority, but a vocal minority of American nationalists who are still very skeptical of Trump.
And you probably know some of them and we're friends with them.
But how do you see Trump personally with regards to our positions on the issues vis-a-vis Russia and the United States and how he was being perceived by Russians?
Yeah, so my personal take on Trump is, you know, I'm very aware of the arguments against him that it's all a show and that he's not really going to do anything.
But I don't claim to be able to look into the guy's heart and tell.
So I don't trust him.
I just sort of live day to day.
And if he does something that's good for America, I'll take that win.
Hello?
Yeah, no, we're here.
We're here.
We're here.
Yeah.
If he does something bad, that's going to be bad.
I don't see, you know, he's very, very, very difficult to read and who knows what he's actually going to do.
I mean, I hate his Israel stuff, but I love a bunch of other stuff he's doing.
I think, Charles, that is exactly the way that I see it.
And it's been, that's the way most of our guests have seen it.
You know, 80 plus percent.
There's been a lot of unexpected good, certainly when compared to expectations that we might have had because of the first term.
Since January 20th, though, I think most people who appear on this program are lining up exactly the way you are.
So again, going back to Russia, though, which is what we really want to hear about right now, Russia's very high on Trump.
Yeah, up to a point.
I mean, the other thing about Russians is that they're also very suspicious and they tend to be fatalistic and they don't tend to be optimists, I guess, because they've had a difficult life for the last since the revolution.
So what's that, 100 years or so?
But so they're so glad that it's going better than with Biden, but they're also suspicious of Trump and wondering what his real game is.
So you've got both of it, but in a segment of society, he's really positive.
In fact, I read in the papers the other day that a young couple named their newborn son Trump.
His first name is Trump.
That's interesting for all these exotic Russian names for a Russian couple to settle on that.
That is interesting.
I hope they don't come to regret that one day.
But in any event, Sam, back to you as we continue this conversation with the man from Moscow, Charles Balsman.
Well, I wanted to comment on something that Charles said, and that is Americans have their own psychology.
Every nation has, to some extent, its own psychology.
And Americans don't grasp that.
And we live here on the Western side of the world with no neighbors but Canada and Mexico, both of which are simply jokes compared to us.
And our history, to the extent that we fought anything, has been a matter of easily vanquishing Stone Age Indian tribes.
We won serious family fight between the North and the South in the Civil War.
But, you know, we've had such an easy history compared to other peoples.
And our ancestors in Great Britain had the moat, the English Channel.
Britain has been invaded only successfully, only once in 1500 years.
But Russia sits between the yellow people, the Zholvia Opas, the yellows peril, as my Russian tutor called it, and Western Europe.
She has countries like this, has been invaded over and over again.
She was ruled by yellow people, very cruel Asiatics for two centuries.
And Russians have been invaded many, many times.
And consequently, like Charles said, we would call them paranoid, which I don't think is right, but they're very jittery.
They feel very insecure and feel they have to be very careful to protect themselves.
Whereas Americans can sit here in America and indulge in all kinds of gooey, sweet delusions about other people and everyone's supposed to trust us.
That's the perfect difference.
Yeah, Sam, let me add to that that, you know, it's so interesting to see it in the culture here.
So basically, the Russian state sort of emerged as an entity about a thousand years ago.
Okay.
And ever since then, this country has basically been at war.
Like, you know, there might be periods of peace for 20 or 30 years, but there's always something going on somewhere.
And so it's a very martial country.
And people really have a military mindset and they have these military institutions, you know, with traditions going back hundreds and hundreds of years and, you know, glorious stories of admirals and generals and heroism and sacrifice and struggle.
And they know how to die.
And it's like built into their mindset.
Like a Russian goes and joins, you know, the army or does a military career and he's looking back at six or seven hundred years of people giving their life.
And this is one of the things that the Russians will go into a fight and they'll be like, yeah, I'm willing to lay my life down, but that's what my people have been doing for a thousand years.
And so it's very different from sort of soft, soft, consumerist the West.
And now that we're talking, now that we really live in a globalistic world, which I'm not crazy about, we as American and Anglo-Saxon white people have to recognize that when Russia fought these wars, we need to avoid garbage thought that's prepared for us by the media like Russians are warmongers.
The wars Russia fought, by and large, were great benefactors to our race and civilization.
It was Russia that drove the Turks out of southern Russia and Ukraine and drove the Muslims out and settled there with the Christian white people.
It was Russia that drove the Turks out of Romania and Bulgaria and these areas in the Balkan and liberated the peoples of South Eastern Europe from the Turkish yoke.
It was Russia that toppled the Mongols, the most horrific groups of yellow people that ever lived.
It was Russians who took Siberia and posted our people.
Virtually, the vast majority of these wars were the kind of things that we should identify with.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And, you know, they've never had been gone on offensive wars.
These are always defensive wars, with the one exception being the Soviet period when after World War II, they went into Eastern Europe.
And you could argue that that was basically a military occupation.
Well, after the French Revolution, after the French Revolutionary Wars in 1815, the Russians had really, even more than the Prussians, had won that war.
And their troops camped on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Their troops were in occupation that they could have taken over all of Europe.
And the Tsar took part in the peace negotiations in Vienna.
At the end of those negotiations, the Russian troops just got on their horses and rode home.
Charles, I want to come back with you after the break.
We have about a minute, maybe two, a little less than two, I think, before we have to take the bottom of the hour break.
When we come back, I want to talk about media coverage, specifically directed towards Putin, but Russia in general.
And we'll talk more about Putin and his standing amongst the Russian people.
What really is going on there, not what we hear about what may be going on there from a man who is there.
But with this time remaining before the break, Charles, anything else you want to work in just very quickly?
You slip under the wire about a minute to go.
Yeah, you know, I would say that there's a misconception in the West, even among people who I would describe as my ideological soulmates, is they keep talking about the Ukrainian people.
And, you know, there is no such entity.
Those people are Russians, and most of them, except for the ones in the far west.
And one of the reasons they're fighting so well is because Russians fight well.
So it's basically a civil war.
And Russians keep pointing that out, and they get frustrated that the West seems to think that Ukrainians are some sort of ethnicity or something like that.
It's nothing of the sort.
They've only thought of themselves as Ukrainians for the last 30 years, and that's what fed the indoctrination.
And they're still basically Russians apart.
And if I'm not mistaken, Charles, I mean, of course, you know, when you try to do an assessment of the intelligence of the average American, you can't you can't find the floor.
Most college students would I don't think it's an exaggeration to say most college students today couldn't name the belligerence in the war between the states or the World War II or anything like that.
So to understand what Kiev was basically the birthplace of the Russian people, was it not?
Absolutely.
It was a Russian city, you know, a thousand years ago.
And, you know, 80% of what is now called Ukraine was Russian for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Exactly.
And so to look at this as, in fact, a civil war is much more accurate than what we've been fed.
We're going to talk about the media treatment of this war, of Russia, of Putin, with Charles Balsman, best known as a journalist, having served as the editor-in-chief of Russia Insider Sam Dixon, along co-hosting as well.
Stay tuned, everybody.
Protecting your liberties.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio.
Breaking news this hour from Townhall.com.
I'm John Scott.
The Speaker of the U.S. House says it's a new day in America politically.
Thanks to President Donald Trump.
On the Salem News program this week on Capitol Hill with Tony Perkins, Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson indicates that's the feedback he's getting as he honeycombs the nation.
Yeah, all over the country, everywhere we go, Tony, there's euphoria.
I mean, people are excited.
And I mean, from your average voter to moms and dads who are now feeling freedom again, you've got business owners at every level, large and small, making decisions to expand business.
And they know that help is on the way and it's already begun and they feel good about it.
There's a real sense of excitement, patriotism, and it's a fun thing to go out and talk about and share on the campaign trail.
Speaker Johnson's full interview will be broadcast starting at 10 a.m. Saturday on the Salem News channel.
Also at townhall.com, in an interview this week on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that he will continue to support the deportation of foreign-born visa holders like Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University, whose case President Trump has described as the first of many to come.
We're going to continue to do it.
Bottom line is, you know, if you told us that these are the things you were going to do when you came to the United States, we never would have given you, we should never give you a visa.
If this is what you do once you get into the United States on a visa, we're going to revoke your visa or whatever status you have, and we're going to kick you out of the country.
We don't want those elements in our country.
So not only have we done it, we're going to continue to do it.
And we're going to improve the way we screen people for their visas, by the way.
It's amazing some of these people ever got in here to begin with.
Meanwhile, Khalil has appeared briefly in immigration court at a remote Louisiana detention center, and an immigration judge said a fuller hearing for April 8th.
We're down dropping 268 points, the NASDAQ down 127.
More at townhall.com.
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In addition to co-hosting this hour with us, and we're very grateful and thankful for him doing so, Sam Dixon has also selected the music intros for this hour with Charles Bosman.
We played God Save the Czar to kick off the program.
Sam, just very quickly, what did we just hear?
How glorious is our God in heaven?
You know, a very good version of that in the Episcopal and Presbyterian hymnals, but it was the hymn of the white Russian army in the struggle against what my Russian called the war of alien conquests, but what we call the Russian Civil War.
But it's a very moving hymn.
It's a very fine hymn.
And if I could, I'm going to use that as an intro to ask Charles a question, which maybe he can answer.
When they allowed the first anti-communist demonstration in 1990 and 1991, everyone, and they allowed the first one in Moscow, people predicted that it would go nowhere, that nobody would show up.
National Radio assured us that people loved communism and that people wouldn't show up.
When it happened, 500,000 Muscovites marched through Red Square carrying icons, pictures of the Tsar, pictures of Lenin defaced with fangs and blood dripping off his fangs.
They retained those icons and their connection to Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church and their history.
They retained that in the face of three generations of total indoctrination and vicious persecution.
You could die.
And many times you could die if the police came and found a picture of the czar and icon of your house.
Americans aren't like that.
Hardly one American in 20 knows that half the country despised Franklin Roosevelt.
And many people were actually happy when he died.
We have no memory of that.
Roosevelt is this God now, even to Republicans.
How is it that Russians were able to maintain this connection and memory of what really went on in their history and what they really were in the face of three generations of propaganda and persecution?
Do you have any ideas about that?
Yeah, you know, I've thought about that a lot, Sam, actually.
And it's Russians are incredibly good at passive aggressive behavior and passive sort of resistance.
In other words, they'll try and because they have no option or the situation is hopeless, they will sort of make the appearance of going along with doing something.
But in fact, they'll just sabotage it and, you know, be extremely stubborn about sticking to their ideas and their ways.
And so this was developed into a fine art, you know, an art form in the Soviet Union.
And they take a kind of pleasure in just being kind of like ungovernable.
And you saw this really happen during the COVID episode here.
It was really fun.
I mean, it was just the government really wanted everybody to get vaxxed.
And by the end of the whole thing, about 30% of the population had been, according to the statistics, but a lot of those vaccines were fake.
They were just, you could bribe a doctor and he would like squirt the vaccine into a sink.
It wouldn't be much.
It would be like 20 bucks or 30 bucks or something.
So yeah, they're incredibly resilient that way.
And they have a great reverence for their traditions and what grandparents tell them.
And that's a very wonderful thing to see.
It certainly seems to be able to inoculate themselves from, as Sam said, media-driven propaganda throughout the West and perhaps even through some of their own institutions.
I don't know.
But I want to really make haste here, gentlemen.
We are down now to only 20 minutes, and we haven't even brought up the name, at least only in passing, Vladimir Putin.
And I want to drill into that with Charles Bosman.
Sam, you had a great question on that.
Before we get to that, though, I just want to say this and set this up.
That certainly when the United States allied with the Soviet Union in the war to make the world safe for communism, there was no negative stigma with an American diplomat or head of state interacting with one of history's greatest villains, Joseph Stalin.
But now any sort of diplomacy with Putin's Russia is verboten.
Charles, you're a journalist whose roots extend back nearly to the very founding of America.
But your reputation, your own reputation, has been tarnished and smeared by the American media because you respect the history and the culture of these people and think we should have strong relations with another superpower.
I mean, again, you're more all-American than any of your detractors going back to the 1700s, your family roots to.
But anyway, I figure if Tucker if Tucker can interview Vladimir Putin, then certainly we can interview Charles Bosman.
But why does this media-driven hysteria persist?
We've known you, Charles.
I've known you for a decade now, and you're a stand-up guy.
Yeah.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for saying that, James.
So what was the question?
Why does this media-driven hysteria persist with regards to anything doing with Russia and Putin is very bad and should be frowned upon?
These are an enemy type people, even though we're not at war with them.
Well, basically, I guess, you know, live in this age when all these secrets are being revealed, and it's become clear to a lot of folks that the same people who ran the Soviet Union, or not who ran the Soviet Union, but who started the revolution and ran it for the first 20, 30 years also run, you know, the commanding heights of capitalism, including the media.
And they all pretty much have the same attitude towards, you know, Christianity and nationalism.
And Putin is very much not of the old mold.
And he's just the kind of person that the globalists, let's call them that, just hate, just hate with a passion and far more than Stalin.
Because Stalin, at least, was pushing forward the globalist agenda.
And there were a lot of sympathizers with socialism and communism in the West.
No, no, we know it.
And that's a media and academia and all these other places.
Yeah.
So now Russia is like the sort of original Russia has emerged with Putin at the head, and that is the sworn enemy of these people.
And it's been that way for hundreds of years.
I mean, you know, who else was just vilified and hated and demonized beyond any recognition and completely dishonestly was the Tsar, the last Tsar, but also the preceding Tsars.
Like they've all been portrayed as bad guys.
But there's all this fascinating Russian revisionist history coming out now, proving that those Tsars were fantastic men and real Christian heroes and admirable and successful leaders.
In fact, there's a major documentary film that's going to appear literally in the next week or two in America.
And folks should follow my Twitter account to get the heads up on that.
But it goes into all this stuff, and it's absolutely fascinating.
We're going to get all of your contact information before the end of the hour.
We have a little bit more than 15 minutes.
I mean, this is, again, Russia is just so fascinating.
I think Russia, South Africa, and Germany, more Americans, or at least in our camp, have more fascination with those three nations than any other.
And we'll get that before the end of the hour.
I want to toss it back to Sam now.
Sam, of course, I mean, Charles was talking about the heroic nature of the Tsar.
Certainly, he had a pull with you because you were over there, as we had mentioned a moment ago, a few years ago for the 100th anniversary of his death.
You noticed some things about the Russian people while you were there that reinforced all of your opinions.
And then as quickly as you can, tell us about that.
And then let's get into Putin.
And you have a few questions for Charles about Putin.
Yeah, we move quickly.
But one thing, Charles, I recommend to everybody is if you Google the funeral of the Romanovs, funeral of the Romanovs, you'll be shown the reinterment of the remains of the royal family in their dynastic graveyard or at the portress of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg.
There were members of some royal families that went to be witnesses to that, including a member of the British royal family.
I heard her interviewed, and she commented the same thing that I saw and noted it.
And she said that she was so moved that three generations after the murder of the Tsar and all the propaganda and terror from the Reds, when the plane arrived and the coffins were put on the cars and they went through the streets of St. Petersburg to the burial, the streets were lined with hundreds of thousands of people who fell on their knees and crossed themselves as the royal family's remains were carried by.
And that degree of Christianity and attachment was still there among the Russian people.
Those are the people that have a future.
Those are the people that have a future, Sam.
Yeah, they really are something.
But one thing I want to touch real briefly on, they move to Putin.
One of the things I really liked in my month in Russia and my previous visit is that the gender roles are so appropriate.
The guys are guys, the girls are girls, like I was saying.
Do you see this kind of, I think I asked you before, but do you see the same sort of thing?
It's remarkably different for America.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, Sam.
That's one of the really nice things about living here.
And yeah, it's like America maybe like in the 50s, something like that, you know, or earlier.
And yeah, they never got this woke mind virus.
It never made it into, penetrated into Russia.
I guess it did a little bit through social media, like in the 2000s and so on.
But the Russians, the government got sort of wind of the problem and pretty much stamped it out.
And since the war broke out, it's just completely disappeared.
Because all the young people who are susceptible to that kind of thinking, they basically either left the country or went very, very quiet.
One quick comment on the American media, which was a shocking glimpse of what they really are like.
When Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin, who we're going to be talking about next, the mantra, all the American communities, these news media outlets said exactly the same thing.
Stalin could only have dreamed of getting this kind of unanimity from Russian journalists in Prague.
But the little mantra, the little mantra was, this proves that Tucker Carlson is not a real journalist.
The fact that he was actually in a shadow site proves that he's not a real journalist, unlike the ones in the New York Times and on National Radio, who always do what they're supposed to do.
In all the years this has gone on, I've heard hundreds of interviews with Ukrainians and anti-Assad Syrians on national public radio.
They never had any interview with any of the people that were against the Islamic terrorists that we're supporting in Syria.
They've never had any interview with any Russian who lives inside Ukraine who's sympathetic to Russia.
No interview with Putin himself or any of his ministers, no interview with Russians.
Yet our liberal, the liberal half of our country, they can't see how ludicrously biased this is.
The folklore Bail Bachster under Hitler or Prabhu under Stalin would have blushed to be this bias, not our media.
But tell me about Putin.
I know he's trying to lift the birthright.
I understand also that he has said that he was secretly baptized, as were many Russians, and was given the name of Russia's patron, of Russia's foremost Christian saint, Vladimir.
What is your feelings?
I know you're not a social Putin and you have to sort of read the TVs and think about it, but I also get reports from people in Russian exiles I know and people in Russia that he is suppressing Russian nationalists and he is allowing immigration from the Muslim former Soviet republics.
Is that true or untrue or what can you tell us about that?
Yeah, there is some truth to that and let me explain.
So, you know, Russia has a demographic crisis here as severe as in the West.
And their economy is booming and that booming economy is central to their security.
So they are in desperate need of labor power.
And so they import huge numbers of Muslims from the Stan countries.
And they're everywhere.
You see them in all the service jobs, all the taxi drivers, all the balloonery guys, all the street sweepers.
It's a whole underclass here.
And since they brought these people in, this has caused racial tension, as you might well imagine.
I mean, I think the percentage of them actually in European Russia, in historically white, you know, Russia might be around 15%, but that's still a lot.
And so there's definitely a nationalist backlash against this.
And there is a pretty vibrant nationalist scene here, an alternative scene.
But the Kremlin really tries to tamp this down and manage it because they're very worried about internal division.
And it's super important for them to have a united country because of the challenges they face.
So yeah, they work behind the scenes to try and defuse any of these organizations from getting really big.
There was a really big one that wanted to run for the parliament, become a parliamentary party, which is not that big a deal in Russia because the parliament really doesn't have much power here compared to the president.
And they wouldn't even let them do that.
So yeah, it's very managed in that sense.
But I wouldn't say that it's not the same way it is in the West, where the elites are deliberately trying to pump in as many illegal foreigners as they can to try and destabilize the society.
The Russian elites are quite nationalistic and patriotic, in my opinion, and they're bringing these people in because it really makes economic sense.
And they're not letting them, you know, they have no intention of trying to turn their country brown.
Well, that's encouraging.
We do have to understand that politics, to some extent, is the art of the possible.
And Putin has to have, he can't be an ideological purist.
What is his current standing there, Charles, with regard to the Russian people at large?
He is very popular.
And, you know, so these opinion polls that you hear about, you know, with him popularity ratings of 70% or so are accurate.
And I can tell you that just because I interact with people and I talk to them from all walks of life.
And also I travel a lot.
And I always make a point to ask folks about these kinds of things, sort of everyday Russians.
And, no, he is very, very popular.
And that might be, that's probably partly because he's got a wonderful, you know, propaganda machine working domestically that constantly puts him in front of people in very flattering situations.
And you know what?
He comes across great.
I mean, he's a very politician.
And he comes across, honestly, as a great guy.
And so it's just literally the camera is just following him around and getting him to talk about stuff.
And it just works really well and people like it.
So yeah, he's a little dealer.
And I think, you know, the stuff on the horses.
But then I think they did something.
I can't remember what other head of state it was.
He was recently with somebody, I think, driving around in a car, just laughing, having a good time.
I mean, that's an important thing to break through some of the other things that we've been talking about.
I want to be sure to get to this and then toss it back to Sam with about five minutes left.
If I don't ask this now, I fear we'll run out of time.
So I got to chuckle about this.
You just mentioned your Twitter a couple of years ago.
It was in the summer.
I don't remember exactly what year, three, two or three years ago, four years.
Sam and I had teamed up to interview you before because, again, of Sam's affinity for the Russian people and his knowledge of Russia in general.
We had done this before, Sam and I, with you.
And there was a big hit piece on you in the New York Times.
And they lamented the fact that they couldn't find you.
They couldn't get in touch with you.
They didn't have any contact information for you.
And I think it was just right around the time you had just appeared on our program here.
And so you have a social media account.
So if anybody of the New York Times or anybody else wants to follow you, how can they do that?
Yeah, just I'm on Twitter at C. Bausman.
And I tweet a lot about, you know, there's a phenomenon now of Americans and conservatives from Europe too moving here because Putin signed this new decree making it possible just to move here and get the equivalent of a green card and then citizenship.
And the Russians are really making a play to try and attract whites who are disaffected with what's happening in Europe and America.
And they're aiming specifically for the country, not for anything else.
Yeah, it's super interesting.
And I think it could turn into a major movement over the years.
Well, let me ask you this then.
Is that advised?
Would you advise that?
Absolutely.
You know, I got to say, I came here against my will.
You know, I was involved with the January 6th thing.
I was inside the Capitol building and I had to leave to avoid getting arrested.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was inside.
And that was partly why that New York Times article came up.
Anyway, but as it turns out, it's been an amazing, amazingly positive thing.
And I feel so lucky to have been here these four years.
And I would recommend it to anybody.
And, you know, it doesn't have to be permanent.
I say, look, if you're a young, young guy and you want to get some interesting experience before you settle down, spending four or five years in Russia could be one of the greatest things you ever do and the smartest.
And you might like it so much you want to stay.
Who knows?
And have a family, as you've done.
But this is something, folks, you can find him on Twitter.
There's some beautiful ones over there at C. Balsman.
We'll link to that in our promo for tonight's show.
If you want to find out how plausible or feasible or expensive and what the process would be, maybe Charles can help you give you that information.
Sam, I wanted to give you time for one last question.
We have about a minute left, a little bit more, a comment, a question to you.
I want you to close this and thank you again for joining me for this interview with Charles.
What a great thing it is for Russia to have an institution like the Russian Orthodox Church.
Unlike my own Presbyterian church or Church of Scotland, the Russian Orthodox Church really does seem to seek the interest, the best interest of the Russian people.
What's going on there?
How many people retain their connection to that through the communist regime until its fall?
And what's happening with the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia now?
You know, it experienced this really rapid growth in the 90s and the early 2000s and so on.
And it's plateaued a little bit.
It's still growing.
It's still getting stronger, but not nearly as fast as before.
You know, it's similar to the U.S. There's there's a sort of a remnant of maybe 10% of the population that is really serious about it and really walks the walk.
But that's hard to do in the Russian Orthodox Church.
It's a very demanding religion in that respect.
And then culturally and superficially, you know, 60, 70% of the people identify as Orthodox.
But that means usually that they go to church maybe three or four times a year on the big holidays.
You know, they might say grace, but they're not doing like the hardcore thing.
But the hardcore thing is really, really hardcore and really powerful here.
So it's absolutely fascinating to see it.
I was very touched when communism fell that immediately Yeltsin went and met with the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
What a change.
What a change.
All the brutal persecutions, the execution of 200,000 priests, that there still was a Russian church.
And the first thing that the first post-communist government embraced the historic church of Russia.
Ladies and gentlemen, I just found a link.
You could say it's a miracle.
Yeah, you could say it's a miracle, honestly.
I mean, if you have a Christian worldview, it's a miracle.
There's a church here.
It's so vibrant.
We have a link to Charles Balsman's Twitter account.
As you said, C. Balsman.
That is C-B-A-U-S-M-A-N.
Get in touch with him.
He has a wonderful profile there at Twitter, or X, if you will.
Journalist J6 Refugee, Russian Faith, Russia Insider, monarchist from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
He writes about moving to Russia on his substack, which you can link over to as well at his Twitter account.
It's all right there for you.
Go to thepolitical session.org.
There's a link to it there and the program promotion for this evening's broadcast.
I want to thank again, Charles Balsman, for joining us from Russia.
Charles, wonderful, wonderful interview and guest.
And thanks again to Sam Dixon for enhancing our discussion.
And we'll be back with the second hour right after this.