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Aug. 30, 2024 - Viva & Barnes
01:38:32
Arrest of Pavel Durov & the Attack on Encrypted Apps: Live with Russian Libertarian Mikhail Svetov
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Time Text
We were sitting down to do a puzzle.
And the phone rang, and it was Joe Biden.
And he told me what he had decided to do.
And I asked him, are you sure?
And he said yes.
And that's how I learned about it.
And what about the endorsement?
Did you ask for it?
And he was very clear that he was going to support me.
So when he called to tell you, he said, I'm pulling out of the race and I'm going to support you.
Well, my first thought was not about me, to be honest with you.
My first thought was about him.
To be honest.
I'm going to put together a montage of the highlights of the verbal diarrhea expose that we saw, witnessed for anybody who watched this flipping interview.
I mean, to say it's atrocious is an understatement.
I don't share the view, but I can understand how some people look at Trump when he speaks and have been brainwashed and programmed into thinking they hate everything about him and they're incapable of listening to him.
The difference would be that I'm right and they're wrong, period.
I cannot stand listening to Kamala Harris talk.
It's not exactly vocal fry.
It's this nasally forced sort of faux-intellectual sound of a voice.
It makes me want to puke.
And listening to her lie as the day is long, you look at her eyes, this story's a lie.
Like, I won't swear.
We're not yet eight minutes into the show.
This story is a godforsaken lie.
It's a fabrication that she came up with in her head, probably on the fly.
Hey, we're having a sleepover with my nieces.
Hey, Auntie, can you make us some more bacon?
Oh, yes, because I'm Vice President Bacon Cooker.
Here's your bacon.
Oh, and then the phone rang.
While we were doing a puzzle.
Look at her eyes, by the way.
These eyes are dead, soulless eyes.
And by the way, I practiced law for 13 years.
You all know this.
I'm a very, very good judge of character.
I don't have the body language reading expertise of the behavior panel.
I believe I'm pretty decent.
Judge of character and reader of the body.
And not in the sense that Kamala Harris is typically used to.
Dead eyes.
Pancakes and...
Pancakes and where the hell's this lie going?
Auntie, can I have more bacon?
Yes, I'll make you more.
Look at those eyes.
Dead. Or bacon.
And then we were sitting down to do a puzzle.
Oh, and I look over.
Affirm my lie.
Walls. No balls.
Affirm it.
Oh, it's so funny.
And the phone rang, and it was Joe Biden.
Trauma. Here you go.
You have to set up the sadness with the happiness.
We were so happy eating bacon, making puzzles, and then the phone rang, and we found out that little Timmy, the neighbor's dog, had been run over in the bedroom.
Okay, whatever.
I'm going to do a montage of all this later, but the last part, the last part.
To tell you, he said, I'm pulling out of the race, and I'm going to support you.
Well, my first thought was not about me, to be honest with you.
To be honest with you.
I'm sorry, were you hitherto not honest with us?
My first thought wasn't me.
Bull. Crap, you narcissist, pathological.
My first thought was me.
You better endorse me, Joe.
By the way, none of this happened anyhow because she stabbed him in the back.
None of this happened.
My first thought wasn't about me.
My first thought was about him.
Look at his face.
To be honest.
That's a scowl.
That's an angry, aggressive face right there.
You better believe my lie, Dana Bash.
Okay, anyways, I'm going to do a montage of that later, and I see our guests in the backdrop, and we're going to get into this after I thank our sponsors for the show in a second.
So stay tuned, by the way.
There will be a car vlog of me analyzing the highlights of that barfy McBarf disgusting display of nonsense that we saw yesterday.
Going to make sure that we are...
Do I sound like I'm not on the right mic?
Sounded like that for a second.
I'm on the right mic.
Okay, good.
Just making sure that we're live on vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
We are live on the Free Speech Rumble.
Yes, we are.
Booyah. Oh, yeah.
I don't get ads on Rumble anymore because I bought Rumble Premium.
Best hundred bucks I ever spent.
If you can afford to do it, I'm still getting ads.
I'm still getting ads on YouTube.
Okay. We're live across all the platforms.
Everyone's happy in the chat.
Looking good.
Looking good.
All right.
People, look at...
We don't always have to talk about barf.
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Thank you, Chuck.
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Now, speaking of playing Russian roulette, I swear to you, I didn't plan that, but I did plan that.
It's kind of funny.
Although it's not funny because it's an actual human at the end of this.
So we were live last Sunday.
By the way, I'm going to tell him, the super chat didn't have to be that big.
I read all the super chats and it piqued my interest.
Get a super chat from a so-called Russian libertarian in light of the Pavel Durov arrest.
And he says, can I come on your channel and we can talk about this?
It wasn't quite that elaborate.
Can we talk?
And we've been messaging back and forth all week.
I was like, dude, let's do this because I am extremely curious as to what life is like in Russia under Putin, under prior regime.
And people now have the tendency of thinking, In order to demonize one government leader, Zelensky, it requires lionizing the adversary, Putin.
It's a correlative.
People have sort of forgotten that all government is corrupt, pretty much, to greater or lesser degrees.
But we're going to hear from someone who's a self-described Russian libertarian, now living in exile.
I don't know his story entirely.
We're going to get into it.
And we're going to talk about Pavel Durov arrest, the war on Telegram, encrypted apps, and what life is like under Russia.
Because however bad Zelensky is, does not mean that Putin is correlatively good.
And we're going to get into it.
Svetov is really good.
It's amazing.
I put his description, a bigger description.
Well, first of all, he gave me a summary bio, which is actually I should be doing this every time we have a guest.
And I'm looking at him in the backdrop, and we sort of look the same.
He's just got a little reddish, a little more red hair.
Mikhail, I'm bringing you in right now.
By the way, share the link.
Get this going.
This is going to be amazing.
Sir. Yes.
Hi, David.
Thanks for having me, and thanks, everyone, for joining.
I didn't know in the chat, do we kind of look like mere brothers from another mother?
I have some Russian blood in me.
My grandmother was from, I don't know if it was Russia or the Ukraine, depending on what year you measured it.
Mikhail, okay.
We're going to get into the granular, but for those who are meeting you for the first time, elevator pitch, who are you?
Right, so I'm probably Russia's most prominent libertarian and I...
It came to prominence in 2018 when the Kremlin tried to block Telegram in Russia.
I organized a series of political rallies, some of the biggest in the history of Putin's Russia.
Over 40,000 people attended the biggest one of three that I organized, and we actually managed to fend off censorship.
Telegram is still available in Russia right now.
Since then, I organized a number of libertarian events, and the biggest one was my joint lecture with Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
I'm a Hoppean libertarian, and it was the biggest libertarian.
Lecture in the history of Europe.
Over 1,500 people attended.
There's a video on my YouTube channel, SVTV.
It's actually in English.
It's only got Russian subtitles, but the lecture was in English.
I had a talk with Hoppe as well, a more private one, one-on-one.
I invited Tommy Robinson to Russia.
He gave a speech on one of the conferences I organized, Muriel Rothbard Conference in St. Petersburg in 2020, I think it was.
Over 1,500 people attended that as well.
Yeah, I was really active in Russian opposition scene until I was forced into exile.
Right now, there is a warrant issued for my arrest in Russia.
I was arrested several times.
I spent several months in jail.
I had my house searched.
So it's been tough answering your question, what it is like to be a libertarian in Russia.
It's tough.
We're going to get there in a second because we've got to unpack before we even get there.
The first question that I was going to ask was, well, I know that you're your age.
You were born and raised in Russia.
I was born and raised in Russia.
I was actually homeschooled.
That's a very curious thing about me.
It was very uncommon at the time.
So after fourth grade, I was homeschooled.
And yeah, I grew up.
And I had access to internet since 1996.
So again, it's unusual for people from my generation, but I was terminally online.
I was terminally online back then already.
So you can disclose your age?
Yeah, I'm 39 years old.
Almost 40. I'll be turning 40 in two months.
How many siblings?
What did your parents do growing up?
I actually was born to a very young family.
My parents were students and they just tried to get by.
They were trained medical doctors, but they never actually worked as doctors because at the time there was no money in the profession and they started their own businesses and gained some relative success.
I'm very grateful to them.
It's amazing.
For those of us who don't know this, you're born, it's going to be 40 years ago, so if I do math real quick, it'll be 1984.
I was born in the Soviet Union, yes.
How old are you?
It falls in 89, you're a child, so do you remember the fall of the Soviet Union?
Was it 89?
No, no.
The fall of the Union was in 1991.
I remember it slightly.
I remember 1993 very well.
That's when the coup attempt was happening.
And I actually have a picture in front of the burning White House, the state building that was shot, that was attacked by the Russian military, if you remember the events.
There's so much for someone who has not lived through this or certainly been born there.
How many siblings do you have?
I'm the only child of Russia, which is very common in my generation because back then, life in Russia and Soviet Union sucked.
Dude, your only child homeschooled.
You lived through the fall of the Soviet Union.
What is childhood like after the fall of the Soviet Union?
I forget who I had the discussion with, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, the people who...
It was actually during an interview with Robert Barnes and...
Trigonometry guy, what's his name?
Kevin, Konstantin Kissinger.
Konstantin Kissinger.
Yeah, we're talking about after the fall of the Soviet Union, how people survived in utter chaos.
I mean, tell us what that is like growing up in the wake of that utter chaos.
It was a chaos, but it was a constructive chaos in a way because life in the 80s in the Soviet Union was terrible and everyone was poor and the economy was sinking.
And my family at the time in the 80s was actually very, very poor.
But the 90s, they gave opportunity to a young generation.
So a lot of older people suffered in the 90s immensely.
And that's why you had this backlash in the 90s when Putin came to power.
He used this resentment.
The 90s to build up his power.
But it was a great time for a young person because that was time of opportunities.
That's when big money were made.
That's when people started.
That's when businesses were started that are huge today.
And that's when the opportunities were abundant because basically, just to give you a sense of what Russia was like after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was nothing.
So there was no fast food chains.
There were no retailers.
There were no, like, proper food stores.
They all had to be reinvented.
And all these gave opportunities to people with the entrepreneurial spirit to actually succeed.
And a lot of them did.
But, of course, again, I'm only talking about the younger generations.
Because for people who experienced that collapse in their 40s or 50s, that was the end of the world because they lost everything and they didn't have the time and they didn't have the experience and the spirit to actually reinvent themselves in this new reality.
That's wild.
I mean, it's wild.
Okay, so now, 93, you're eight years old.
Putin comes into power first in 99, 2000.
Yeah, exactly.
He was appointed the prime minister, and then he became president.
So your childhood years are through this chaos.
And then, from what I was explaining, according to some, Putin comes in and reestablishes some sense of order where people actually kind of liked him in the beginning.
For someone who's lived through it, and I don't care if people disagree, but your experience growing through this, was Putin a savior in the early years?
And what's that like going from chaos to what arguably might be called authoritarianism, but that gives a semblance of structure?
So it depends who you ask.
So my family never supported Putin, but I will be lying if I would say that people didn't support him.
He was a very popular president in his first two terms as a president because he brought back not just order, but he brought back respect.
I don't know if you remember Yeltsin very well.
That was the Russian president before Putin.
But he was a global embarrassment.
He was constantly drunk.
He was embarrassing himself in front of the world leaders.
And it actually felt...
Like a humiliation, like a national humiliation.
So when Putin came to power, he actually was very well respected because he spoke fluently on several languages.
So he speaks some English, but he speaks fluent German.
And he commanded respect.
And that's what people lacked at the time, because the 90s, for a lot of people...
Young generation profited.
But for a lot of people, for a majority of people, it was a time of humiliation.
And really, nobody thought that Yeltsin was a good president towards the end of his presidency.
So you're 16 when Putin comes into power.
We're going to ask the obvious question.
You specified your family and you never supported Putin.
Why not?
Because he's a KGB guy and KGB guys, they never change.
You have to have this natural suspicion towards anyone who comes out of agency.
And my family came through.
My family has a history of repressions under the Soviet rule.
So during the revolution, a lot of my relatives were murdered.
Like, very...
Particulous thing about my family, which maybe will not transfer very well to the English-speaking audience, but my grandfather, for example, who was a very accomplished scientist in Russia, he never actually joined the Communist Party, which is unheard of at the time because of his skepticism towards the ideology and towards the agency, the special forces that you had to interview with in order to join the party.
So, to answer your question, my family in particular never supported...
To ask an ignorant question, are there any members who run for Russian government that don't come out of KGB?
Yes, at the time.
And there was a big choice because Putin basically inherited power from Yeltsin.
But there were other candidates.
And one of the better candidates, I'd say, was Boris Nemtsov, who was much more liberal in a classical sense.
And he was much more open to political competition.
And he didn't come out of KGB.
And there was a lot of lobbying for him to become a successor.
But eventually he lost to Putin.
And there's a lot of books written about it, how it happened.
And I'm not sure it's going to be interesting to your audience.
I'm just Googling it.
I see that he's no longer alive.
How did Nemtsov die?
He was murdered 100 meters from the Red Square.
So yeah, it was a big, big deal.
In 2014?
In 2014, yeah.
And nothing to do with the...
Well, it has everything to do with his political work.
He was in opposition to Putin for most of his life, most of his late life, and he was very critical.
And again, I'm not sure how interesting it's going to be to your audience, but he was this link between the popular politics, between the street politics, let's say, and people who talk on the internet, and the people in the government, the people in power.
Because at the time, in the 90s, he actually was in power.
He was the governor of one of Russia's regions, and he had all this like...
Book of connections.
He could have called pretty much anyone in the Russian government.
So he was a very valuable asset to the opposition.
And that was the reason why he was murdered.
Right now, there is no such person.
So basically, the link between the people and the political class is completely cut.
And by the way, I appreciate going to Wikipedia for any description of a political nature is a losing proposition.
But just to give everybody an idea.
Okay, so hold on now.
So you're 16, Putin comes into power.
At what age do people go to university in Russia?
18 years old normally.
17, 18, depends when you start school.
You go to university?
Yes, I did went to university, but I went to university in the United Kingdom.
Actually, I went to university in Russia, but then I transferred to the UK and I graduated university in Nottingham, and that's why I speak English fully.
Okay, well, you speak English, I mean, obviously perfectly.
What did you study, if I may ask?
Political sciences.
So I've always been interested in politics.
That was my passion since really early childhood, to be honest, and I've been doing it since.
Dude, single, you know, what do they call them?
Solo children or single children?
What's the word I'm looking for?
Home school, I don't know.
Oh no, only school, only kids.
It's just, it's one thing to be an only child and then to be an only child who's homeschooled.
Undoubtedly, I would imagine your intellect is going, your early intellect is going to be much more acute and sharp than a great many, especially the neglected fifth child.
So you go to the UK to study political science, and then what, you decide to go back to Russia afterwards?
No, I actually had a big journey.
So I went to Japan after that.
I speak Japanese as well.
I spent four years in Japan, four and a half, to be honest.
Then I moved to New Zealand, spent two years there, and then I went back to Russia and started to do political work.
It was 2015, I think, that I went back to Russia.
And from 2015 to 2021, to the late 2021, yes, I was working in Russia.
What were you doing?
Why in Japan?
Why in New Zealand?
To be honest, because I felt like if I wouldn't do it back then.
Then I would never get a chance to live in an Asian country.
And I wanted to learn an Asian language.
And Japanese was the language I wanted to learn.
And I also had an idea how to make money there.
Because at the time, again, I'm not sure how interesting it is to your audience.
But at the time, there was no shops that actually sold Japanese items, like Japanese computer games, Japanese figurines.
And I felt like there was an opportunity.
I felt like this is how I could have made money.
So I moved to Japan.
I started a small business.
I started to resell Japanese merchandise and it was a huge success.
That's how I made my first money.
The first real money, I mean.
I invested in Bitcoin in 2011 because the first exchange was actually located in Tokyo, MT Gox, if someone remembers.
That's where I invested in Bitcoin and that's how I made even more money.
Did you still hold some Bitcoin?
Yeah, I still hold some Bitcoin.
Okay, so forget it.
That's what provides me some independence, some semblance of independence, yes.
I've got to ask.
It's totally off topic, but look, I wasn't aware of anything.
I wasn't paying attention to anything at all at the time.
How did you believe in the early stages that Bitcoin was going to have a future?
Because I was a libertarian.
It really felt neatly into what I've been saying about politics and the way a world operates at the time.
So basically, I was...
Strong-handed into buying Bitcoin by one of my friends because he said, hey, look, you've been talking about, you know, federal, like central banks, you know, robbing people and how currency should be and how government should lose monopoly on currency.
And here's your solution.
You know, you have to put money where your mouth is.
And at one point I said, yeah, well, I really should because otherwise all I've been saying was bullshit.
And I did.
And I'm happy I did.
That's wild.
That's amazing.
And I know that I would have been like the kid who's like, oh, I doubled up on Bitcoin, sell it, and now go buy a six-pack.
I'm going to lie.
I sold a majority of Bitcoins I bought, but I always held to some.
That's amazing.
I mean, it's amazing in that it's probably been the absolute lifeline you've needed now that you've met legal problems and sent to exile.
Okay, so now you study political science.
This is what I've got to flesh out also.
A Russian, I don't know, you said it was Hobbes Libertarian?
A Hoppian Libertarian.
So, I mean, this is where, like, I don't know what a Russian Libertarian looks like, but let's get into this.
No, you do?
Well, I don't know what they think like.
So, you have this life experience.
It's actually amazing, phenomenal.
After all of this, you decide to go back to Russia in 2015.
I'm trying to put this timeline together with the Maidan revolution, and I don't know if it has anything to do with anything, but it certainly has to...
It was a momentous event.
But in 2015, I returned to Russia for good.
I thought that I was coming back to homeland and I'm going to stay there indefinitely.
But I've been coming and going to Russia throughout me living in New Zealand and Japan.
And I've been politically active as well.
But I was mostly online.
I've been writing some blog posts.
I've been developing libertarian theory in Russian language as well.
So I've never been...
I've always felt like it was my home.
But in 2015, I came back.
It was bound to happen.
Viva's long-lost Russian brother.
I'll ask my grandmother.
Where was my grandmother from?
I have to find out where she was from.
The original last name was Muzikant, which I'm told means musician.
Exactly that, yeah.
Okay, so now this is cool.
So now your political activeness in between...
Have you always remained anti-Putarian?
Have you always been anti-Putin since?
Absolutely always, yes.
I've been always critical of Putin.
Because I felt he was moving the country in the wrong direction.
Even though, again, until 2008, I'd say he was a successful president.
And if he would have left in 2008, he would have came down in history as one of the best Russian presidents.
I have no doubt about that.
But there has always been something about him that tipped me off.
Because I always felt like he would not be able to surrender.
The power.
And because he had this support system of the special forces that actually provided him with a lot of security within the state, I felt that he will not be able to leave.
Unfortunately, I was proved to be right.
Well, okay.
But it's one thing to be critical, and then it's another thing to be...
Well, let's just say if you have PDS, like Putin derangement syndrome...
Compare it to the Trump derangements.
A lot of people do.
A lot of people do.
If you're not critical of the people in power, then I think you're just not doing your job.
Regardless of whether or not you like them, even if they are the people you like, they still do things that they should be better at, or they should be better at certain things.
But let's go with this.
The substantive critique of Putin leading up to 2008, if you acknowledge that he's bringing Russia in the right direction, I guess, what are the substantive critiques, and then where does he go off the deep end?
Until 2008, the substantive critique is that he was slowly curbing freedom of speech.
He was destroying the independent media.
He was forcing them to walk the party line.
I think the first political rally that I attended was in 2003.
My mother brought me there.
2002-2003, my mother brought me there when one of the biggest independent TV channels was dismantled under full pretext by the state.
It was called NTV.
Now it's one of the biggest propaganda mouthpieces of Kremlin.
But at the time it was an independent channel.
And it was getting destroyed by his government, crushed.
And that's what actually made me really act.
You did say MTV and not MTV, right?
Yeah, MTV.
You do know what MTV is.
Of course, of course.
Fair enough.
So then what starts happening in 2008 that puts Putin, in your mind, in a different realm of authoritarianism?
In 2008, nothing happens.
In 2008, actually, it feels like he actually managed to surrender his power, because that's when Dmitry Medvedev comes to power.
That's when they announce that Putin himself, too, will have a successor, and his name is Dmitry Medvedev.
And he's not, again, not the worst guy imaginable.
He was an okay president.
And at the time, it felt like, you know, we actually managed to overcome this Putin problem, that he actually managed to surrender his power, he managed to move on.
Great. But in 2011, that's when the actual, let's say, point of no return happened.
He announced with Medvedev that they actually planned all along for Putin to come back to power because in Russian constitution, apparently, it says that a person cannot be a president two terms in a row, but not two terms in total.
And they used that loophole to bring back, to usher back Putin.
And that's when I felt that things are going, things are taking a terrible turn.
All right.
Well, I mean, that is, okay.
Understood. Now, so he, 2008 to 2012.
How does Russia do under Medvedev?
Russia does fine.
Actually, there was war against Georgia, a local one.
And again, it doesn't matter what you think about it.
It was great, but it was not a disaster.
It's a whole separate topic.
But under Medvedev, Russia was relatively free.
Internet was absolutely free.
And there was some political debate going on.
And a lot of people believed actually that if they're gonna support Dmitry Medvedev really like strongly, Maybe he'll decide to compete with Putin in the election, and then we would have had at least some competition, but he refused to do that.
He surrendered his power clearly to Putin.
And yeah, things took a different turn.
Okay, well, now that's what we have to flesh it out.
It's funny, I'm reading the chat.
There's some people who...
First of all, so the person saying, when am I critical of Trump?
Welcome to the channel.
I'm quite critical of Trump when he deserves it and have been vocally so.
So it's nice to see new faces in the crowd.
People are saying, well, one comment is, what is the Russian constitution drafted like?
Does it say a maximum of two terms or does it say...
No, it says two consecutive terms, but it's been rewritten twice since then.
I'd say there's no constitution in Russia.
There is a document that is called constitution, but the way it's been enacted has nothing to do with the constitutional process.
So it's just a piece of paper.
That sounds a lot like Canada as well.
I don't want to compare Putin to Trudeau because that might be...
That might be even too much of an insult to Putin.
And now, what are the term limits on a president?
Putin's been in power since...
There's basically none.
There's basically none.
So he rewrote the Constitution last time, two years ago, just before the war.
Two and a half years ago, just before the war.
And basically, his terms were reset.
So he can be president for as much as he wants.
Another 14 years, I think.
Okay. Putin comes into power in 2012.
Let's piece this all together.
I think everybody watching is sufficiently familiar with the Maidan revolution and where people believe the origins of the current conflict started, if not well earlier.
So Maidan revolution is complicated, and it was a momentous event in the history of Putin's regime as well, because he really took it personally.
He thought that Maidan was organized by the Western countries, and he is right in thinking so, especially if we talk about the first Maidan.
So the second Maidan is different, and I can actually give a hint to your audience how to tell if the revolution was prepared by, let's say, foreign actors, or if it actually is a...
If you see the flags and the images, they look corporate.
Everyone uses the same insignia.
Everyone is using the same symbols.
That should tip you off.
And I'd say that the first Maidan revolution was actually organized by foreign actors.
The second Maidan revolution is actually more complicated than that.
It is definitely being driven by the local descent.
And you can actually tell that.
And you can actually tell that by seeing who was actually moving the revolution forward.
It was actually Ukrainian nationalists who were never popular in the West.
And the revolution was moving forward despite the Western politicians constantly saying that, you know, guys, you made your point.
You need to back off.
You need to stop, you know, rioting.
Janukowicz, who was the president at the time, heard you and things are going to be different from now on.
The Western European politician was saying that.
So the second revolution, the Pride revolution, the European revolution, whatever it's called in English, was genuine.
The first, the Maidan revolution, to me, felt staged and really prepared by someone outside the world.
I don't think anyone in this audience is going to disagree or contradict.
I think it's probably a well-accepted fact that there was Western involvement, uh, initiation of the first Maidan revolution, which was to basically overthrow the government of the Ukraine, which was more favorable to the Russia than to the West and, um, subvert democracy in foreign nations.
What was the timeline for the second Maidan revolution?
So the timeline was there was an election.
Yanukovych was running for the second term and there were some irregularities in the election process and people just...
There were some irregularities in the election process and then there was an announcement by his government that they are actually to pause the integration with the European countries.
So there was this law that everyone's been waiting that would move Ukraine towards Europe that would allow a closer economic integration and Yanukovych government tried to stave it off.
Yeah, stave it off.
Sorry. And that made people really upset.
They spontaneously, without anyone organizing them, flooded the Maidan Square and started protesting.
So again...
What's the time difference between the first and the second?
I'd say it's almost 10 years.
I don't remember.
I think the first one was 2007.
Let me see.
I don't remember anymore because I'm not Ukrainian.
No, no, I know.
The Ukraine on fire...
The first one was 2004.
The second one was 2014.
Yeah, well, I think it's the second one that, in that time frame, it's the second one that everyone, I think, rightly believes was a West-initiated manufactured revolution.
The first one was manufactured, and there was a lot of help by the foreign actors to ease the transition.
The second one was more complicated.
It got the support of the West after it started, but the ignition was unexpected.
Nobody expected it to happen.
There was no preparation beforehand.
And if you look, again, if you look at the kind of people that actually gathered on the square, if you look at the kind of insignia they used, if you look the way...
They organized.
It looks very different from 2014 or from what happened in Georgia during the Rosa Revolution in, I'd say, 2001?
2000? Yeah.
All right.
And so, I mean, when do the beginning...
So what is your political...
Again, I just want to stress it, not to upset your audience, that just the fact that the revolution started by itself, it doesn't mean that foreign actors didn't get involved after it got started.
But I'd say that the way it looked...
At the time, it felt very natural.
So you're back in Russia in 2015, full-time.
What are you doing?
What's your outright political activism?
I became a member of the Libertarian Party of Russia in 2010.
So I've been active in the libertarian scene for a while.
And I arrived and I actually felt like there's a lot of things that I can do that are not being done.
One of them is opening my own YouTube channel.
I was one of the first political speakers who actually did that in 2015 because I felt like people are not talking to each other and I felt it was important.
And then things just started happening, to be honest.
At the time, there was this big figure in Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny.
He was murdered a year ago in jail.
And he was doing a lot of political work.
and I got in touch with his team, and we were doing some events together.
And then the big event that actually brought me to some fame was the attempt by the Kremlin to block Telegram in Russia when the Libertarian Party, my team and the Libertarian Party, organized rallies in his defense.
It was a massive success, and that's how we came to some notoriety.
What is, I mean, as far as the political statistical breakdown of various parties in Russia looks, what level of support is there for the Russian Libertarian Party?
That's impossible to say right now because Russian statistics are bogus and there's no way for us to spread our ideas, basically.
It was possible in 2015, 16, 17, up until 2021.
I'd say when Putin started to prepare for war.
But libertarian ideas in general are quite popular in Russia for a simple reason.
It's easy to explain to a Russian why nothing good will come from the government.
Russians are naturally skeptical of the government because our government sucked throughout history.
So we had Tsarism first, then we had this Soviet period.
Now we have Putin.
So people understand instinctively that governments are up to no good.
So it's easier for them.
It's much easier to explain libertarian ideas to Russians.
Yes, it's terrible, like all governments are, but relatively speaking, it's been pretty good for the majority of Swiss's existence.
So there's no desire for change, while Russians have a strong desire for change and a strong skepticism towards the government.
So libertarian ideas are quite popular, even if they are not quite understood, because we're unable to do...
Okay, and so now you open up a YouTube channel and you start trying to have political discourse on social medias, and then the tipping point for you, or at least where it starts to get very problematic, Russia moves to ban Telegram.
This is after Russia had already tried to take control of or censor, we're going to get into Pavel Durov's situation, but his first social media company, the Russia Facebook.
Yeah, Facebook's contact.
It was already seized.
It's been seized six years before the attack on Telegram started.
So that company was seized.
It was 2013, I think, that Pavel sells his interest in that and flees Russia.
Earlier than that, I think.
But let me check, just to be sure.
And it's relevant, this story, because first of all, I'd like to know who the president was at the time, if it was...
No, I'm going to say Medvedev or Putin.
Yeah, so, yeah, Kentucky was founded in 2006.
And yeah, in 2014, it was sold off.
Yeah, so you're right.
Sorry. No, no, give or take.
It's the same idea.
You're living in Russia now where there is in Russia a war on the purpose of the taking control of that company.
Is to control the narrative, the flow of information.
There's no other way to describe it.
The speech.
So that company does ultimately get taken over by government interests or government players?
Yes, yes.
Basically, Durov was forced out of being a chairman of Kentucky.
Before that, he was forced to sell a majority of his shares and then he moved to United Arab Emirates in 2014 when FSB, the Russian Special Forces, basically outright told him that they're going to censor political speech in Kentucky and they're going to read the messaging in Kentucky because it's completely transparent right now to the government.
The company's called what?
The first one?
VK. VK, basically.
What is the situation with VK now?
Does it still exist?
It still exists, but you'll be insane if you try to say anything political.
A majority of arrests that are being made against people for writing political contact are being made against users of VK.
So just don't use it if you're in Russian.
VK really is the Russian Facebook where they're arresting people in the UK for making mean posts on Facebook.
It's very cool.
It's a world with which I have absolutely no experience.
The terrible thing is, and I think that's one of the thoughts that I'd like to convey to your audience, is that in 2018 and 2017, we were quite naive and we actually thought that censorship and crushing of political speech was a uniquely Russian problem.
We saw some problems in the West, obviously, and they existed at the time, but The scale was so different that we couldn't imagine that something like what is happening to Pavel in France right now or something like what's happening in the UK right now was actually possible in the West.
So to me, it was eye-opening experience.
And I'm terrified because the war against free speech and the privacy of communication is the global war.
We have to think about it in these terms.
Otherwise, we're going to lose.
I compare it to Trudeau, who I consider to be the worst.
Leader of all time.
He's the worst person of all time for Canada who, you know, they attempt to regulate the internet because it's the only place or the last bastion of free speech, exchange of ideas, and what's the word?
When you coordinate for mobilization.
Organize, yeah.
And they're sort of trying to do the same thing in the States.
I think this is what we're witnessing with Telegram now.
And so what you're describing, some people might not like it because people have been...
In the war of Russia and Ukraine, you don't have to think Putin is a deity to think that maybe there's a legitimate argument that Russia was antagonized into that war based on what was going on in Ukraine and the neighboring countries.
Yes, and it's actually an argument that I've been making in the past years, that yes, there is a strong argument that Putin was antagonized.
There is a strong army that the Western countries were irresponsible in their dealing of Russia in the Ukraine question.
And there is a very strong argument to say that the Ukrainian government was actually helped to increase the confrontation with Russia by the West.
And these are all valid and very strong arguments.
But again, Putin is the one who started the war.
Putin had other means of solving this problem for Russia.
If you mean starting the war, you mean in 2022?
I mean in 2022.
I'm talking about 2022.
I think what happened in 2014, and I know a lot of people disagree with me, is not a war per se.
Yes, it's an occupation, it's an annexation, but nobody died.
That was a unique military operation.
It was against the international law.
You can say all these things.
But the important thing is it was not a war conflict.
And we have to separate these things because otherwise we trivialize what is happening today, what's been happening after 2022.
Because after 2022, some hundreds of thousands of people were murdered.
Millions were displaced.
In 2014, Ukraine lost some of its territories.
I think a single person died, one of the military men who refused to surrender his post.
In 2014.
So vastly different situations.
And the argument that, you know, the war started in 2014 is disingenuous at best.
Just don't make this argument.
It's a terrible argument.
I think you're going to get a lot of pushback on that because I'm not convinced that it's disingenuous or inaccurate.
I mean, okay.
No, again, I'm not defending Putin.
Let's put it that way.
Let's stress that.
I think Putin committed an international crime by annexing the territory.
But you have to distinguish between the international crime and, you know, the breaking of international law and the war.
Because you do not want...
Because people who live in Crimea, they did not experience...
A tragedy.
Nobody died in their families.
They didn't lose their homes.
Some of them became economically better off than they were under the Ukrainian government.
What people experience today and the crime of 2022 when Putin started the war is a different beast altogether.
Let's just not trivialize the war.
No, I don't think anybody's trivializing it, but the only question is you don't war with yourself.
The question is...
You're warring with Ukraine, which is funded by other countries and sending, arguably, people to the slaughter.
And the higher the number, you can blame it on Putin.
You can just as easily, if not more credibly, blame it on Ukraine, or at least Zelensky.
I think if you're going to talk about Zelensky, it's more complicated than that.
So basically, Zelensky is...
He's not the one who's been talking with Russia for a majority of the time when this conflict was precipitating.
He became president in 2000, I think in 2018, 19, just before the war started.
And he didn't have much, most importantly, he didn't have a lot of political experience.
So the story of Zelensky is quite tragic, actually.
So he obviously has some personal characteristics that are quite honorable, right?
He didn't run away when the war started, so he risked himself.
He risks his own security for the country.
This is incredible stuff.
Also, he was elected as an alternative to the corrupt Ukrainian government that existed before him.
Donald Trump, not in terms of personality or his political vision, but in terms of his personal journey, right?
He was an actor, he was a comedian, he never thought about politics, but then all of a sudden he was elected as an alternative to the corrupt political class.
That's an incredible story.
The problem with that for Zelensky and for Ukraine, for that matter, is that when an experienced person becomes a president in such a critical time, he is unable to make sound political decisions, not because he doesn't want to, but because he simply does not have a necessary experience.
And to be honest, we actually saw something like that with Donald Trump during his first term of presidency.
He was an incredible candidate.
He ran an incredible election campaign.
But when he came into office, he didn't actually succeed at a lot of promises that he made.
He was alien to this world.
He was elected because he was alien to the political class.
But for the same reason, he was not capable or versed enough in the bureaucracy language and ways the cabinets work to actually achieve his goals.
Zelensky was in the same position.
He didn't know how the politics worked.
He never thought about politics.
He wasn't even a political blogger or political sciences.
He was a comedian.
And after being elected, he committed a number of I'd say grave mistakes.
But again, I tend to excuse him for these mistakes simply because he was inexperienced.
He was antagonizing Russia and the West.
And the Western politicians were actually, I'd say, manipulating him in a way with not saying him, like, you know, cut it off.
It's going to bring about a disaster.
No, they were using Zelensky and the corrupt Ukrainian government to wage what they wanted to wage by way of proxy war against Russia.
I don't think anybody can possibly disagree with that.
I'm just taking a responsibility off Zelensky a little bit because I really think he's a guy who got over his head.
Take the responsibility off him entirely.
He's a puppet and he's the figurehead to be used to fight the proxy war, plopped into power the same way they're trying to plop Kamala Harris into power.
And I can agree with you that when Trump gets in, he doesn't know how to work the governments, etc., etc.
And whereas I do believe all governments are inherently corrupt because they are.
There's levels of corruption.
We're dealing with Ukraine, which is, I would argue, more along the lines of a third-world country where their primary export was human trafficking before the war, and now they're trying to pretend that the trafficking is as a result of the war, and so we're not talking about the same level of corruption of regimes, although maybe we are, because maybe the American government system is just as corrupt in different ways.
To the point, though, however, you take all the blame or put all the blame on Zelensky if you think he's a free...
He ran and was elected on a campaign of negotiating a peace in the eastern region with Putin.
And then once he gets elected, he gets the nod from Big Brother and the Big Bully, then basically declares war on Putin by basically turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO state.
And so while you think, you know, Putin started the war in 2022, again, it depends on what you consider to be an existential threat.
No, again, I can explain away why Putin started a war, but still, I want to emphasize that he was the one who started it, and you only start a war when you exhaust every other possibility to make your country attractive.
And I think that's my biggest point of criticism towards Putin, is that I think he had a historical chance to actually right a lot of wrongs that the Western governments do today by presenting this alternative civilizational project.
Because everyone understands that the American project is in crisis right now.
The European project is just terrible.
It's not attractive.
And Putin had an opportunity, a historic opportunity, to actually make Russia attractive to entrepreneurs, to make Russia attractive to people getting disillusions with the Western project, which is becoming increasingly left-wing over time.
But with starting the war with fighting, And that's my biggest criticism of Putin.
I can appreciate that.
That being said, I can analogize that somewhat too.
After the failed assassination attempt on Trump, he had an opportunity to really reach out with an olive branch to the people who literally just tried to kill him.
I don't expect people to do that.
I won't hold it against them when they don't or if they don't.
But the difference between Trump in your example and Putin is that Trump at the moment is only responsible for his own political future when Putin is very much concentrated the entirety of power over Russia.
So every decision he makes defines the future of Russia.
So these are quite different situations.
No, they're entirely different.
It's just a question of, like, you know, you say he should have responded.
To say Putin should have responded better to what is now overt Western, I don't know who can not acknowledge it as Western aggression, turning Finland into a weapons depot.
I mean, that's what the West wants.
What purpose NATO even has in the year 2024 seems to be only Russia-oriented.
Yes, talking about NATO and talking about the mistakes that the West did.
And I think the biggest, the gravest mistake was in 2002, actually, when Putin expressed a desire for Russia to join NATO.
And I think this was an opportunity to diffuse this entire conflict for years to come.
I think the West should have provided an olive branch to Putin.
They should have, after they heard this proposition, they should have did everything in their power to actually make it to be.
To bring it to fruition.
But they didn't.
They antagonized Putin further.
And that's what gave start to the conflict that developed into a war two years ago.
And we don't need to agree on all this.
It's interesting to hear a different perspective.
You can argue with me all you want.
I'm very happy to defend my views.
But I'm not even anywhere near an authority of historical perspective.
I know what I have been able to surmise learning from zero when it came to this conflict.
When people learn it didn't start in 2022 and it goes back to whatever we want to make of the Maidan revolution, the Zelensky running on the platform, the West's broader war.
I don't even know what...
If Putin joined NATO...
What does NATO exist for then?
To protect against China and North Korea?
It seems like instead of joining NATO, it dissolved NATO because it doesn't seem to have a purpose anymore.
It has a purpose, and I can give you an example, a political purpose, obviously, because European governments became complacent in not maintaining their own armies.
So their entire social system depends on not having to spend money on a standing army.
And that makes them vulnerable, not just to Russia, but to many malicious actors that they board with.
So they depend on the United States and on the existence of NATO to defend their borders, which they refuse.
To defend themselves.
So that's the reason why the European government's been pushing for the NATO to keep existing.
And obviously it secures the American power over European continent as long as NATO exists as well.
It makes European countries subordinate to the American government.
So the political reason for existence of NATO is there.
And there's a reason why political class refuses to dismantle NATO.
And it has very little to do with fending off Russia.
It has everything to do with sort of dragging on the political project, which is not sustainable long-term.
I'm talking about all the social progress that exists.
I think NATO now, they want to maintain it so they can suck off the teat of the American taxpayer.
Of course, that's what I'm saying.
And the American political class uses NATO as a tool to...
To subjugate the European continent.
But it's a synergy.
And they might also use it as a means of laundering American taxpayer money for the benefit of the military industrial complex, as we're seeing it in Ukraine right now.
So the answer is there.
Why NATO exists, why it wasn't dismantled, because there are political, there are economic incentives for it to keep existing.
And you as a libertarian, if I understand you correctly, you're a libertarian, you should understand how market forces work.
There are market forces in place that perpetuate the existence of NATO.
Yeah, that's market forces or political corruption.
I mean, I'll go along and call it political corruption.
But now we've got to bring it all back because 2018 is the war on Telegram after the nationalization of VK a few years earlier.
And so how do you get in hot water?
When you get arrested and spend time in a Russian jail, I've got questions.
Field it from here.
What happens to you?
Yeah, so we organized several rallies.
Some of them were quite big.
The biggest one was 40,000 people, and everyone can Google it.
Rally in defense of Telegram Russia.
There are a lot of pictures of me giving a speech on the stage in front of tens of thousands of people.
So, just for...
Getting yourself involved in political speech, you get arrested.
And you don't get arrested for a long time.
They do throw you in jail for years today.
The reality changed.
But in 2018, the way they pressured people to...
To stop what they're doing.
They were throwing people in jail like for a month or for five weeks.
And that's what's been happening to me.
I've never spent like half a year in jail, but I've spent several months in jail, you know, on and off when I was organizing political rallies, when I was refusing to negotiate with the mayoral office when they tried to pressure me to cancel one of the rallies.
So, yeah, I've been thrown in jail for doing political work and I had my house searched, my staff confiscated.
It was pretty tough, but I felt like it was worth doing.
And we actually managed to defend Telegram.
It was not just us.
It was also Pavel Durov who invented this quite ingenious system where he was hiding behind Amazon and Google, behind their IP addresses for running Telegram.
So every time government tried to block Telegram in Russia, they were actually blocking all the services that were crucial for the run of the economy.
In the late 2018, the government stopped its attempts to block Telegram, and it's been working ever since.
But just an important piece of information.
In 2018, the government did not have the infrastructure to block Telegram.
It was a different reality.
Politically and on the infrastructural level as well.
If the Russian government wanted to block Telegram today, it has all the necessary capacity to do that without a hitch.
And because Google and Amazon would not defend Telegram anymore, obviously.
So, not to defend Putin, just to maybe poke a hole or at least reflect on the theory, Putin could be more authoritarian or more of a censor of free speech.
By censoring Telegram, but doesn't, you know, could have been more of a censor on free speech by not offering asylum to people who are getting punished for leaking things or whistleblowing in the West.
I mean, I'll just ask the broad question.
Do you give Putin credit for anything?
I do.
I do.
And I think Putin is incredibly savvy as a politician.
He does a lot of things right, even if I don't like them.
And I'm talking about political levels.
So when I'm saying a politician does things right, it means he does things right to secure his power, not for the country or things like that.
And he's incredibly savvy.
And the way he runs his political operation and the way he keeps people loyal to him is incredible.
It needs to be studied because if you don't play on the same level, you're going to lose to him, obviously.
So I give him all.
And I talk about it constantly.
I think it's very important.
And I think he manipulates the...
I think he uses the mistakes that the West makes to his advantage very, very well.
Like the whole Edward Snowden case is an incredible embarrassment for the West.
I just like the idea that the only place where Edward Snowden found refuge was Putin's Russia.
It still infuriates me to no end.
And he never wanted to go to Russia.
Another thing that infuriates me to no end is that...
All these liberal journalists and, you know, speakers in the West saying, like, he's a Russian spy, you know, he sold out to Russia.
Edward Snowden never wanted to go to Russia.
He wanted to go to Latin America, that's where I'm located right now, just to keep himself clear out of this global political war.
He did not want to be in that situation, but his passport was annulled when he was in Russian airport, when he was trying to get out into Latin America.
So every single person who blames Edward Snowden for being stuck in Russia is so incredibly morally bankrupt that it's just like, every time I read it, my blood...
Well, you know, they took Tara Reid also, I think.
That was the other one.
To talk about making embarrassments out of a Western mistake.
So you're saying he's good at being devious.
The question is, when you describe Putin, though, I see him being similar to all other governments in the sense that the power wants to remain in power.
And it doesn't like dissidents, obviously.
Everyone loves freedom of speech until they're in power and people use that freedom of speech to try to take him out of power.
And fine.
Let's just say I don't know if he's on par with or worse than or better than.
Joe Biden when he was there.
Kamala Harris where she wants to be.
Justin Trudeau where he aspires to be.
Emmanuel Macron.
What's that guy's name?
Keir Starmer.
Can I give you an argument here?
And maybe you'll be able to bounce off it.
So Putin is a better politician than people you mentioned.
But he's worse for his country than the politicians you mentioned.
And I'm very much ready to defend this argument.
Because there's a lot of disinformation online.
Talking about things that make my blood boil.
Like on Twitter, constantly, every other month, you have these videos that, hey, this is central Moscow.
Do you notice anything?
No homeless people.
It's clean.
No homeless people.
Yes, beautiful streets.
Corrupt as hell, from what I understand, at the business level.
Corrupt as hell on a business level.
And again, all the cultural problems that the West is facing right now with multiculturalism, you know, the decline of the traditional Western values, Putin has been enacting the same kind of policies inside Russia that the right criticizes in Europe and in the US. And if you look at
his domestic policies, not at his international policies, not at his propaganda, but at his domestic policies, you'll notice that he actually uses the same kind of words, the same kind of propaganda, the same kind of talking points that Emmanuel Macron uses or Angela Merkel.
It's insane that it doesn't somehow visible in the West.
I can't push back on this because I don't know.
I'm just looking at the tax rate.
I can give you an example.
I can give you an example.
Can I?
Yeah, go for it.
And then I'm going to get to the big litmus test ones, but give us an example.
So, Putin, like if you listen to what Putin says about the war in Ukraine, Putin calling the Ukrainian government Nazis in the same way weaponizing the word "Nazism" as the Western liberals do.
Sorry, I actually had a note here, but I have to improvise.
So if you listen to what he says about Ukraine, he talks about The denazification of Ukraine.
He talks about, you know, when Russian forces come into Ukraine, one of the first things he does, and again, it's incredible that it's not discussed right on the West.
He actually reconstructs the monuments to Lenin.
And one of the biggest propagandists of Kremlin, Yevgeny Norin, he actually said that after the Russian forces will reconquer the occupied parts of the Korsk region, that's the part that has been occupied for the past couple of weeks by the Ukrainian forces, they're going to...
Build the most lavish monument to Vladimir Lenin ever to exist.
Because, obviously, Ukrainian government is destroying the monuments to Lenin as part of the decommunization process.
So things like that.
And it's incredible to me that it's not being noticed in the West.
And again, all this talk about Putin being this champion of traditional values.
It cannot be further from the truth.
If you think that, let's say, a Muslim problem in...
Let's call it differently.
If you say that Islamist problem in Russia is somehow less than in the West, then Google Moscow, you know, Muslim festival, Kurban Bayram.
Just look at the images of the central Moscow being flooded by Muslims praying on the streets.
Again, I'm not saying it should not happen or it's like...
I'm not giving you my value judgment.
I'm just saying that if you think that central Moscow is somehow different from central London, you cannot be further from the truth in cultural terms because the same kind of things that are happening in the West.
Well, I think I know enough about this at least to push back, I think clarify.
The demographic, Russia is primarily, whether or not you think it's a good thing, is primarily a white.
No, I think it's a good thing.
I think Christian values are great.
I think it needs to be defended.
You do not have the same mass immigration or mass invasion of Syrian refugees like you have in Germany.
You don't have the same mass invasion from the southern borders you have in America.
So, in a sense, this is part and parcel of why some people...
To be honest, it's just not true.
We have a different kind of immigration.
Yes, we don't have immigrants from Syria and from Afghanistan or Iraq, but we have immigrants from Uzbekistan, from Tajikistan, from Azerbaijan, from Central Asia.
Am I not wrong, though?
Within Russia proper, not that many, even from what I can see are the stats.
They're in the regions which were formerly...
I don't think anybody is going to credibly believe that Putin has an open immigration policy the way Angela Merkel did in Germany and the way they have in England.
I think the reason why immigration has a lesser impact on Russia...
Is that simply Russia is just a bigger country.
So it's easier to flood Sweden or Germany with immigrants and it becomes a problem much faster than Russia.
It's not the biggest country in the world in terms of population, but still 140 million is a lot.
It's like four times more than Germany.
So that's part of the reason why.
Second of the reason, you cannot really...
We rely on Russian statistics, unfortunately.
It's being meddled with, and we don't really know how many immigrants live in Russia.
And just to give you an example, the Western right complains about all these boats swimming to the Spanish border, to the Italian border, to the British border, etc.
Russia has a transparent border with countries of Central Asia.
So anyone who lives in Uzbekistan, who lives in Tajikistan, who lives in Uzbekistan, They can just cross the border.
There is no border.
All this talk about Trump not building a war or the Democrats preventing Trump from building a war between Mexico and the US, well, at least you have some semblance of war.
At least you have the checkpoints.
If someone from Uzbekistan wants to move to Russia without telling anything to the government, he just can do that without any kind of notification.
Yeah, I'm just looking up not that the Muslim population is the measure of the immigration problem.
Yes, yes.
Again, I'm not saying I'm against the immigration.
That's just not the argument I'm making.
We can discuss that further.
No, but I mean, I'm even looking at the actual stuff.
It seems that Russia's 5% Muslim.
France is 10%.
England, I think, is something like 7%.
And so when people use the immigration as a problem or the immigration crisis as a problem, I think they would not be wrong in saying for good or for bad in terms of how they go about doing it.
Russia is not going through what Europe is going through.
Germany, France, and England.
It really does.
And again, I can't stress it enough.
Take the case of Nikita Zhuravel, for example.
Nikita Zhuravel is a Russian blogger.
Not very popular.
He just posted a criticism of the Muslim community in Russia.
He was beaten up by the Chechen forces in the middle of the Russian city.
He was kidnapped.
He was moved to Russia.
He was beaten up again by the son of Kadyrov.
Kadyrov is the tyrant of the Chechnya.
And thrown into jail without any due process, without anything.
And the only comment that the official government did was that, you know, we don't comment on that.
And things like that happen constantly.
It's not a one-off case.
It happens all the time.
Well, not a one-off case versus happening more or less frequently than in other countries.
Set aside the immigration question.
People will pick at that.
Email me or message me afterwards and say, Vivi, you should have brought this up.
Fine. Tax rate seems to be better.
I don't know what the...
Per capita income is not what it is in the West, but the cost of living isn't either.
Traditional Christian values.
Abortion, bringing back traditional nuclear family.
This is what people in the West...
I think...
Yeah, this is what I think likes like Viktor Orban are doing a much better job in stimulating all these things.
When Putin talks about fighting abortion, his heart is at a different place than the American conservative or European conservative.
What he cares about is really increasing the livestock of people he's going to be able to feed off and his government is going to be able to feed off in the future.
That's what concerns him the most.
And if you talk about Putin's version of Christianity, it's actually very peculiar, I'd say.
There was recently a new cathedral.
It's called Cathedral of Russian Army Cathedral, I think it's called in Russia.
In English, let me...
Let me just Google it, really.
Russian Cathedral of Armed Forces.
Just Google it.
And the incredible thing about it, talking about Christianity, is that in its stained glass, there are the communist insignia inside a cathedral.
If this is not Satanism, I don't know what is, to be honest.
So it's a very peculiar version of Christianity.
When you talk about Putin building cathedrals and advancing the causes of Christianity, you have to keep in mind that he's, first and foremost, he's a Soviet man.
He's a...
A person who was brought up in this communist regime, and he is one of the conductors of these values still.
And he really trivialized Christianity to serve as part of his propaganda machine.
And again, as a Christian, I'm offended by communist insignia within the body of church.
I think it's just terrible.
I'm going to have to – I will try to independently look that up afterwards because that is – Yeah, these are all facts.
These are all facts.
I can send you right away.
No, no.
But then it's interesting because facts, then it becomes prevalence, and then it becomes what the steelman argument to that would be, whether it's – Well, the steelman argument for that, I can give you – again, I'm a good faith actor here.
So the steelman argument is this insignia is actually part of the – The history of Russia.
The history of Russia and these insignias are used to honor the people who died in the Second World War.
But you still have a hammer and a sickle within the body of church.
It's fun to do this.
This is not my wheelhouse of information.
This is from Reuters four years ago.
Russia inaugurates cathedral without mosaics of Putin, Stalin.
Let's see what the purpose of this article was.
They inaugurated a huge new cathedral dedicated to its armed forces that had caused controversy over initial plans to decorate the interior with...
See, this is where I mean, like, was it a one incident?
So they got rid of the mosaics.
So the mosaics are not there.
They planned to make mosaics of Stalin, but they removed them.
But the stained glass and the hammer and cyclone stained glass is there.
And you can Google the images and you can show it to your audience.
It's quite incredible.
But again, the steelman argument is these insignias were used to honor the dead in the Second World War.
All right.
And we don't even need to get into this.
It's interesting.
I'm trying to think of what the other elements that we were talking about, Western values, freedom of speech.
I'm not convinced that...
Look, I think there's obviously more freedom of speech in America, despite everything that they're trying to do, because you can tell the president to go fuck himself and you don't get locked up in jail.
I'm not sure that that would be the same elsewhere.
But we actually sort of skipped over.
Back to 2018, organizing protests against Telegram, and then the...
Iron fist of the government that comes down on you.
What are you getting arrested for?
And how did you end up in exile?
So I left in 2021.
That's when my closest associates started to get arrested and people I actually contacted with on a regular basis.
And at one point, a friend of mine, Andrei Pivovarov, he got taken off the plane that was actually...
He's leaving Russia already.
So he was inside the plane.
The plane was on the landing strip.
And then the special forces entered the plane and took him off the flight.
And he spent four and a half years in jail.
He was just released a couple of weeks ago during this big exchange that was in the media.
Let me ask you this.
Did he get arrested?
Did he get a fair trial?
He did.
Not a fair trial.
He got a trial.
He got a trial, but it was a show trial.
And when he got arrested, I actually understood that, again, usually in Russia, you feel these things.
Things are getting really close.
So I decided to leave Russia, and I thought that it was temporary because there was no war yet.
There were elections coming up, and I thought maybe, you know, they were just preparing for the election to get Putin elected for another six years.
So I left, and I...
I would never return because then the war started and then the criminal investigation was opened against me.
And just to give an example of how absurd some of the criminal investigations are, I was basically charged with rehabilitating Ukrainian Nazis for singing a song in Ukrainian.
I recorded a voice message in one of the Telegram channels that I write to singing a song in Ukrainian and that was a material for my criminal investigation.
What were you arrested for?
I was arrested for organizing.
Basically, to organize a political rally in Russia, you have to get a permission from the government.
And if government refuses to give you a permission, then any type of political speech done publicly on the street is considered a violation of law.
And obviously, if you want to, you don't ask the government for permission to organize a rally against the government, right?
These things don't work like that.
So I was organizing, I was ignoring that.
I was still attending and organizing rallies when I felt it was necessary, and I was jailed for that.
Were you blocking traffic when you organized those rallies?
I was not, no.
I'm comparing it to Canada.
I had a good friend of mine who was also a libertarian who was jailed for two years for actually blocking a road, and he just got out of jail a year and a half ago.
What year did you leave in?
Sorry? What year did you leave in?
2021. I was forced to leave.
Wife and kids?
No family?
I have a girlfriend.
We left together.
We've been picking a country for the longest time.
I chose Brazil for a variety of reasons.
When we moved to Brazil, Bolsonaro was the president.
You picked wrong, Mikael.
Yeah, but I picked right at the time.
You see, that's the problem with the governments, that they change.
And I picked right at the time because it was still the height of the COVID era.
A lot of countries were closed.
And Brazil, Bolsonaro famously, did not believe in COVID.
So he didn't close off the country.
And it was one of the very few places I actually could have went to.
And that's how we ended up in Brazil.
And otherwise, apart from the Lula government, it's an incredible country.
And I think the world is going to rediscover.
How great it is once it gets its acts together.
It is wildly amazing how governments can destroy a country in a very short order, no less.
Okay, so hold on.
So now you're in Brazil.
Pavlov is arrested in France.
I'm going to bring it back full circle.
Brazil is going after Twitter, going after its employees, going after Musk.
France obviously is as well.
People are going to disagree with a lot of what you said, and that's what the world is for.
I appreciate that you answer every question.
Transparency and long-format discussion is the most beautiful thing out there.
What do you think of what's going on with Pavel Durov?
Who's behind it, in your view?
Where are they going with it?
Bringing it over to Rumble and Twitter, what do you think is going to happen there?
Yeah, so it is a global attack on freedom of speech.
And the arguments that the French government uses against Pavel are exactly the same arguments that Kremlin used against Pavel in 2018.
Again, it makes my blood boil because I've already seen it happening.
And what upsets me is that it...
The people who are still able to organize, the people that have some political infrastructure, are not doing anything to defend Pavel.
Because I agree with those who say that Elon Musk is next.
They're really testing the waters.
If they can do what they want to do with Pavel, then Elon Musk will become increasingly more vulnerable.
And one more thing I want to say about that.
To me, attack on Telegram is a big deal.
And I don't quite understand why aren't anyone on the West disorganizing, because it's not enough to complain about the left on Rumble and X, the Telegram, etc., to fend it off.
The left keeps winning because they actually care about winning.
The murder of some drug addict in Minnesota sparked year-long worldwide riots.
It influenced election and public opinions all over the world.
But the right refuses to organize, to defend one of the only two or three platforms that actually give them the voice and visibility.
It's truly bizarre.
It's something I don't understand.
It's actually the reason why I was looking to find some access to the English-speaking audience.
This is the biggest argument I wanted to make.
I don't understand why the arrest of Pavel Durov and the attack on Telegram is being met with such, what's the word, help me?
Well, apathy.
I'll answer the question with the trope of the West that the reason why conservatives and right-wingers don't sit out there and protest in the streets is because they have jobs and they have families and they don't have time to go out like the BLM crowds and just...
Pitch tents in the freaking streets because there's a lot of truth to it.
It's a trope for a reason.
A, it's not a tactic that is as prevalent on the right as it is on the left.
B, the second they do it, if you look at January 6th in America, well, then they use it as a pretext to come down on the right.
But I think it's mostly that it's a tactic not adopted just because they're not the same Soros-funded groups that I think are highly inorganic.
And these are all great arguments, but you're sort of describing, you know, the path to your own defeat.
So you're saying that nothing can be done.
So we can't, you know, protest because people have to work.
You can't, you know, win over the narrative because the source spends millions of dollars.
And these are all valid reasons.
But what is your path to victory?
I think it's a different strategy, which has to be, I say, the path of enlightenment.
I want to pretend that I'm...
I'm going to argue that to no end, because you're a libertarian, or at least...
I espouse libertarian values.
I'm libertarian sympathetic.
We can go with that.
Okay, fantastic.
That's enough.
Because the right and the libertarians, they pride themselves on understanding the laws of the market.
But somehow they become incredibly stupid when it comes to talking about politics, because humans are economic creatures by nature, and thus political narrative is shaped by the same economic forces as other human activity.
You cannot...
In your right mind, hope that a group of fanatics...
People who are willing to go against market forces, and there are always such people in politics, of course, but there will never be enough to change the course of events.
Like it is never enough for, you know, one crazy genius to create, you know, an incredible product.
The product will lose out on the market if the money is in the different services, if the money are going to different providers.
The same thing with politics.
If you don't put market forces on your side somehow, you're going to keep losing to the left.
I don't disagree with you on that, which is why I do say you vote with your dollar, you vote with your feet, your eyeballs, and you support the alternative market to the extent you can build it.
So I agree with the market forces, which is why you have to make it not market profitable or not market alluring to be the nutcases blocking streets and wreaking havoc on everybody's lives.
And I don't think the way that you get your point across is by doing what they've done.
It's one of the techniques.
It's one of the techniques.
But I guess my question is, we can complain about Soros spending millions of dollars or billions of dollars in politics all we want, but as long as he does and nobody on the right do the same, of course he's going to win.
Well, I can sort of agree with that in the sense that that's where the Elon Musks and the Peter Thiels come in and to create...
The actual marketplace of ideas, which has been stifled by the left, which is what I think we're at right now.
But the other problem is, like we're talking about right now, if you're talking about a global war on these platforms, which is what it is, and I believe it's something of a global government that's trying to come down, well then, how do you fight against that?
I don't know that it's by...
You organized, again, but you kind of confronted me in saying, like, you know, people on the right have jobs and families, and I agree with that, but without organizing.
And I brought this example of Black Lives Matter movement as an illustration, because that's an important illustration.
The left is wise enough to realize that the war they're waging is a global war, that they're actually amplifying each other's voices in different countries.
Look, I'm living in Brazil right now, and look what happened during the elections two years ago.
The entire left media in the US, in Russia as well, in Europe, in France, in Germany, they were engaging in a...
Propaganda warfare against the Bolsonaro government.
You've read all these articles in New York Times.
They did the same thing with the riots out there that they called the January 6th of Brazil.
They came down with the same authoritarianism.
And so, great, they tried the same tactic and it didn't work.
But it did work, because Lula did win the election, and they tipped the scales in favor of the communist government that is blocking Telegram and Twitter right now in Brazil.
I meant the Bolsonaro supporters afterwards to protest what they felt were the unfair results, did what the left does, and they got their asses handed to them because they don't have the same tools.
Yeah, that's the important argument you make.
They don't have these same tools because you have to organize.
You can't spark a process all of a sudden and hope for it to succeed because you have all these media, international media, local media that is being sponsored by international actors bashing you, spreading lies and disinformation about what you're doing on the streets.
And you lose out because you lose the popular support.
People start to distance themselves from your cause.
And that's how the left wins.
So my argument is when elections were taking place in Brazil, when the election takes place in other countries, it becomes a global cause for everyone on the left.
They support each own, even if they don't agree with each other 100%.
I don't see the same happening on the right at all.
I see that every cause is a local cause.
Like whatever happened in the United Kingdom two weeks ago with the protests.
Sorry, it's not being mentioned by anyone except people on X and on Telegram.
Again, that's something that should warn you about the state of affairs right now.
Nobody's talking with each other.
Nobody knew the libertarian movement was as strong in Russia as it was in 2018.
Nobody talked to me, while at the same time, every single left-wing speaker or personality got international exposure at the same time when we were organizing political rallies.
So, without organizing, With each other, without treating issues of censorship as a global issue, there is no way to win the country back.
You know, I guess as you describe what you mean by mobilization and protests, I mean, I guess in a way, you may not consider it to be the same thing, but we are seeing that in terms of the Bud Light treatment.
Or, you know, when Dan Bongino has 180,000 people watching him every day, that's a mass protest that you'd never get those numbers in the streets happening every day for an hour.
And so you are having that type of mobilization.
It's just an intellectual mobilization, not a foot on the street and rock through a window, which I think is the longer play and the more effective means while you create the parallel economy and the parallel intellectual sphere.
So, I mean, I guess maybe we're saying the same thing, just describing it in different ways or it materializes in different ways.
No, what happened to Bud Light is an incredible example, but again, it's a local story.
The difference between the Bud Light cancelling or whatever you can call it and what the left does is that Bud Light is a local...
Okay, American, maybe Canadian story.
But the left, every issue that left raises becomes a global issue.
And that's how you get BLM riots in United Kingdom.
That's how you get BLM riots in Spain.
That's how you get BLM riots, you know, in Brazil.
Like, there's not a single success story like that on the right.
And I don't think anyone on the right is actually thinking in these terms.
And that's something we should learn from the left.
Yeah, I think, again, I think it's because they don't have the same tools and they don't have the same control over the global institutions.
And it's not, you cannot fight asymmetrical.
You have to seize control.
You have to seize control.
You cannot win without seizing control over certain global institutions.
Who is it?
You have to negotiate from a position of weakness.
Sun Tzu, you know, when you're weak attack.
Oh, geez, what is it?
When you're weak attack, that which is, I forget what the Sun Tzu was, what Art of War had to do with fighting from a position of weakness or with different tools.
Yeah, and I agree with that, but still, you have to work towards creating an institution, like the Social International, you know, or like WEF, the different kind of, like, the left has millions of institutions like that.
The right has none.
No, they don't have very many.
They don't have as many, there's no question about that.
The question is, though...
At some point, I think the pendulum swings so far.
The BLM riots, in as much as the outside world might think they were effective, I think they were actually counterproductive, but over a course of time.
It depends on the time frame that you're measuring this ideological, intellectual battle for influence and control over governments.
We're not at the endgame yet, and it seems like the pendulum is swinging back now.
Ultimately, Pavel, the latest news is...
I think Elon is a much bigger fish because he's protected by his other businesses like Tesla, SpaceX.
He's got the boring company, he's got...
Yeah, but the important ones are SpaceX and Tesla and Starlink, of course, yes.
That's the one I was trying to remember.
So he's protected by these businesses, but he's also weakened by these businesses like we saw what's happening in Brazil right now at this moment.
They arrested the accounts of the Starlink trying to pressure Elon Musk to enact censorship on X. Absolutely scandalous.
And by the way, just notice how little there are news in the Western It's news on X, but it's not news anywhere else.
This is important.
This is how the left wins.
But to answer your question, yes, Elon Musk is next.
And he's next for the very same reason that they are attacking Pavel right now.
And I think a lot of IT guys, people from IT, they are approaching this problem from the wrong perspective.
They say this is an attack on crypto.
Freedom of speech is dependent on cryptography, and Telegram is not the safest messenger in the world, which it is.
Definitely, I think Session is more secure.
But that's not what makes Telegram valuable.
Because Telegram is valuable not because it's a messaging app.
There are millions of messaging apps and they're interchangeable.
Telegram is important because it's an ecosystem and a publishing platform.
That's what they're attacking Pavel Duro for.
Emmanuel Macron in France, he had terrible elections just recently.
And the reason he lost and the reason why the left is actually under siege.
In some countries in Europe right now, it's because the right is organizing on platforms like Telegram, on platforms like Twitter.
And that's what they're attacking with Pavel, and that's what they're going to attack with Elon Musk.
And the blueprint of how it's going to happen is actually being worked on in France and Brazil right now.
So pay close attention.
That's what they're going to do to Elon.
And I'm afraid that Elon doesn't have infrastructure to defend himself once the attack will start.
Let me ask you this.
You're in Brazil.
Do you have any concerns about getting extradited back to Russia with the relationship between Brazil and Russia?
Yeah, I'm thinking about it constantly, but there are no better places where I can be right now because in Europe, Europe is much closer to the conflict, much closer to the war, and it's much harder for me to say things that I think are important about this conflict from there than from Latin America.
So I have to choose.
What's available?
Pick your poison at some point.
Or the lesser of the evils.
Exactly. Michael, let me just read these.
I don't know if these are going to be right on point.
Skunk Hollow Rose Gardens long play flower video.
Okay, so I guess that's Michelle Obama's channel.
We've got, hey, Viva, don't normally do this trying to get to 500 on Elon's site.
Think you could check me out really now on X, trying to throw my hat in the ring there.
Really now?
1-1-1.
Go check them out on Twitter.
Now let me see if there's any questions in our VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com community.
I noticed some people are upset.
They think that I'm a Zelensky shill, which is funny because in the Russia sphere, everyone thinks that I'm a Putin's shill of saying exactly the same words.
I'm not paying attention to the people who are threatening to unsubscribe because of people who I discuss with goodbye, good riddance.
If you think that subscription gives you editorial control over my content and my thought, take it elsewhere.
I was going to go with, here, in our locals community.
This is nothing to do with us, Mikhail.
I'm just going to read it.
It's from Ganthed, who says, have you paid attention to the garbage?
Nate, this is lawyer stuff, is saying about Barnes during his streams, calling him incompetent, stupid lawyer.
Barnes is lying to people.
Okay, Finboy Slick says, can Mikhail tell us more about what Navalny was like politically?
I want to ask you a question about Navalny.
I've mostly just heard of him from the West's favorite opposition to Putin, but I'd love to hear from someone who knew him.
Do you think Putin killed him, or do you think he died of natural causes, or do you think the three-letter agencies out West killed him?
I think it really doesn't matter.
Putin tried to kill him once, and that we know for certain when he was poisoned in 2020 with Novichok.
So he could have died of natural causes, but the kind of jail that he's been kept in definitely was detrimental to his health.
So he was murdered.
I always say that he was murdered.
Was he murdered by the three-letter agencies at an opportune time to...
I forget what was going on.
The prisoner exchange was in the making.
And apparently, the rumor has it that they were actually insisting on Navalny being exchanged and were using him as a key figure.
So they were refusing to engage in the exchange without Navalny.
And that's when, again, rumor has it when Putin decided to murder Navalny.
So the exchange will...
Change, sorry.
And now here's the thing.
People lionize Navalny because he's the opposition to Putin.
Other people say Navalny was just as corrupt as everyone else in Russia.
And right now you're dealing with scoundrels among scoundrels.
So pick your scoundrel.
No, I disagree with that.
So first of all, when we talk about Navalny, I'd like to separate him from his team, whom I think are...
Indeed, corrupt right now.
Why do you get to do that, though, Mikhail?
Again, I'll be happy to elaborate on that.
But let's talk about that.
So I never was employed by Navalny.
I only collaborated him on some of the events that I organized.
So we never have been working together.
But I communicated with Navalny many, many times.
And he was incredibly charismatic.
And I'm not sure what this talk about corruption, really, because he never held an office of power.
He was an advisor to some governor once, but again, an advisor is not a paid role.
It's not a role of power.
But he never was in power to be corrupt.
So in order to be corrupt, you have to hold some office, you know, to exploit.
That's the definition of the word.
He was incredibly charismatic.
He was incredibly open to opposition to his ideas.
He was always welcoming.
Conversation like I had a...
Several points of disagreement with him, very strong points of disagreement, and he was always open to discuss them.
So as a person, I thought he was great, and I'm sure your audience would have loved him if they had a chance to talk to him personally.
Now, when he talks to his organization, that's a different story, the Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Today, it's pretty much a puppet organization by the Western governments, and the people who are in its advisory board are...
Basically, Western politicians and everything that his team says today is actually parroting of the Western positions, which upsets me immensely because he was indeed the biggest political opposition force in Russia.
When did that takeover by the West occur?
Look, I think there was always some influence, but he was a big enough personality.
He was a big enough character to fend off the pressure, to ignore the pressure from his team and from people who were helping him.
And we saw that on several occasions, like the most prominent one.
Again, this gets me back to this point about the left organizing and influencing the politics in other countries.
When Donald Trump was banned off Telegram, his entire team...
I started to defend the decision of the Twitter and defend the Democratic Party.
And they were basically a mouthpiece of a Democratic Party of the US.
And Navalny, he was alive back then.
He said that it is an act of censorship.
It shouldn't be lionized.
That Donald Trump should be protected.
And he said it directly without the wall of text saying yes.
But he was very direct and his team changed their opinion.
And I saw...
This thing's happening.
Again, it's a personal experience.
I can't prove you anything, but I saw these things happening all the time.
So Navalny...
Ascent to popularity in the Russian opposition was very different from what I saw in other countries.
He was not a manufactured person.
He actually was a nationalist at the time when he started his political career in 2010.
He was defending the right of people to have arms.
He was talking against mass immigration.
He was talking for freedom of speech.
He defended and attended the rallies I organized in defense of Telegram.
So he was a great guy.
His team is a whole different story.
And today, Anti-Corruption Foundation, in my opinion, is a shill for the foreign governments.
All right.
Interesting enough.
Let's see.
We got Bill Brown from our community.
He says, just realized I had Legal Friday on Hunley's show from where Viva was on.
I only noticed because I heard Nate's voice and had to turn it off.
All right, guys.
I'm not getting into lawyer fighting here.
Nate and Barnes are big boys and they can take care of themselves and fight among each other.
Although I happen to think that Barnes is more right than Nate.
This is an internal law drama of the YouTubes.
Mikhail, so what are you doing these days?
Where can people find you and how can they support what you're doing?
And what's the message, like a parting message that you have for the world?
Yeah, so I'm mostly active on Telegram and Twitter.
You can subscribe to my news outlet, SVTV News.
On Telegram, we have over 100,000 subscribers.
It's the biggest libertarian news outlet in Europe and I think one of the most read in the world, to be honest, because Reason has a lower engagement than we do today, even though we only write in Russian, apart from occasional appeal that I make to an English-speaking audience.
So I'm mostly a publisher now.
I work as a political speaker.
I have my own YouTube channel, SVTV.
You can watch some of the English-speaking shows that I did with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, with Tommy Robinson, with some of the prominent American libertarians as well.
Those are in English.
And my biggest appeal to the...
Dissident right or to the Western libertarians is start organizing.
You need to realize that the war on free speech, the war on...
The war on free speech is a global war.
And unless you start thinking in global terms, unless you start engaging in what is happening in other countries as well, and I understand it's not in nature of right-wing politicians, it's not in nature of libertarians to think in these terms, but unless you start thinking in these terms, you will keep losing to the left, because the left is organized, the left concerns itself with issues of other countries, they actually invest into politics in other countries, and that's how you get the...
The left voice is amplified all over the world.
The right needs to start doing the same.
Until we do, we're going to keep losing.
Thank you.
It's fantastic.
And whether or not people agree or disagree with you, and I will disagree with you, I sincerely believe that you are sincere.
And it's one thing to disagree or it's one thing to be wrong but sincere versus disingenuous and deceitful.
On that Twitter space, I'm not naming names because I can't remember the names.
There were some people who were disingenuously wrong, and I saw you, and I said, not the same thing, so express yourself, and I think it's fantastic.
Even if the chat disagrees with you, I don't think you're lying, and I don't think you're here to deceive.
Please invite me to have a conversation.
I'm open to discussion, and I'm happy to defend what I said today on Viva's podcast.
Thank you for having me.
It was a pleasure.
And I think we had a fantastic conversation.
Amazing. We are connected.
We are now internet friends, Michael.
So stick around.
We're going to say our proper goodbyes.
Everyone else in the chat.
See you later, locals.
I will see you in a bit.
No after party now, but we'll have a party later tonight or later this afternoon.
Ending now.
Michael, stick around.
We'll talk.
Bye-bye, everyone.
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