Jamison Foser: This isn't about crime. That's not what Donald Trump is doing. He's seizing power.

Micah Loewinger: President Trump is threatening to deploy federal troops to more cities, and news outlets are falling for his justifications. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Four of MAGA's leading intellectuals just met to debate their visions of a more right-wing America.

Zack Beauchamp: The inter-right argument that they're having is not over whether we should be authoritarian. It's over, just how naked, how aggressive, and how weird that authoritarianism should be.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, why a Ukrainian mayor invited the press to her town in the aftermath of a mass tragedy.

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivsk: When we were burying heroes and when we were burying unknown killed civilians, we did it with the press to record what really happened.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We turn now to the growing presence of the National Guard on the streets in the nation's capital.

Micah Loewinger: The president has seized control of law, order, and security from the city authorities who he has framed as failing liberals.

Donald Trump: The press says, "He's a dictator, he's trying to take over." No, all I want is security for our people.

[chanting]

News clip: Get out of our neighborhood. Get out of our neighborhood.

News clip: You can see in multiple videos federal agents wearing masks during arrests in the District in recent weeks.

Micah Loewinger: The whistles are a new community tactic to alert people that ICE agents are in the area.

News clip: You have to stand up to the people who are telling you to do this because it's wrong.

News clip: Get her out of here.

News clip: "Get her out of here," he says to a neighbor, woken by the commotion.

News clip: You should be ashamed of yourself.

News clip: D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb now suing the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard troops here in Washington as we approach month one of this federal takeover.

News clip: The city's top legal officials saying the surge of troops amounts to a forced military occupation.

Micah Loewinger: The D.C. lawsuit came on the heels of another legal battle in Los Angeles, where some 300 soldiers are still stationed.

Brooke Gladstone: A federal judge says President Trump's use of the National Guard in Los Angeles was illegal. In a 52-page filing that was out today, US District Judge Charles Breyer found the administration broke an 1878 act that prohibits the use of military for domestic law enforcement.

Micah Loewinger: So far, it's not clear whether these challenges will deter the president, who spent the last week posting lies and exaggerations about the Windy City. New attacks on Chicago from President Trump and a new promise to impose federal law enforcement to fight crime on the ground. He said, "Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the world by far." He added, "I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in D.C. Chicago will be safe again and soon."

Donald Trump: We could do that with New York, we could do it with Los Angeles.

Micah Loewinger: The President in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Donald Trump: Maybe Louisiana, and you have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We'll straighten that out in about two weeks. It'll take us two weeks.

News clip: I would like D.C. to be a test case for whether we can go into other cities where far too many people are being murdered and help to drive down the violent crime rate there as well.

Micah Loewinger: Conservative pundit Clay Travis on Fox News last month, who, along with many others in the right-wing press, have been aping Trump's rhetoric.

Clay Travis: We need full military occupation of these cities until the crime desists, period. I think what's scary to the Dems is not the military, it's the fact that they know this is going to work, and that it's already working.

Micah Loewinger: But even coverage from outlets like CNN, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others have been, intentionally or not, making Trump's case for him.

Jamison Foser: The major media narratives that we're seeing are false.

Micah Loewinger: Jamison Foser is a political consultant and media critic. He argues that the press is trying to manufacture consent.

Jamison Foser: By manufacturing consent, I mean, the public does not currently agree with Donald Trump or what he's doing, but the media, in the way they're covering this story, is increasing support for it by suggesting he's trying to fight crime. Everybody would like crime to be lower, even though it's been going down for the last couple years already. It's creating this false reason to support what he's doing.

Micah Loewinger: A recent headline from ABC reads, "58 shot over Labor Day weekend in Chicago as Governor rejects Trump threat to send National Guard." That piece quoted the President several times, but waited until the second-to-last paragraph to offer this context, "Violent crime in Chicago has dropped significantly in the first half of the year, according to official data released by the city. Shootings are down 37% and homicides have dropped 32% compared to the first half of 2024."

The Chicago Sun Times recently put out this headline, "Chicago sees Fewest summer murders since 1965, even as Trump cites high crime." No one's arguing that violent crime isn't a problem in Chicago or in D.C., but why is this context so hard to find?

Jamison Foser: A couple great examples there of really lousy media coverage of this, and the first one was particularly bad because it spent essentially the entire very lengthy argument, telling the story about crime being out of control. Then just at the very end, almost as an aside, "Oh, by the way, crime's actually decreasing significantly." That obviously gives people a very skewed sense of what's going on, but even that second article, which, that's a better headline, it does make clear that crime is falling contrary to Trump's narrative.

Even that is helping Trump. It's keeping the conversation focused where he wants it, which is on crime, as though what he's doing is about crime, but it's really not. Even when the media is debunking some of his assertions around crime, they're still privileging the lie that this is about crime.

Micah Loewinger: Similarly, the New York Times recently ran a headline, "Crime Festers in Republican States While Their Troops Patrol in Washington." I saw some praise for this framing, but I guess it might still run afoul of what you were describing.

Jamison Foser: That's a decent headline for a bad article that probably shouldn't exist. Although it correctly notes that many cities in Republican-led states have crime rates comparable to Washington's, it doesn't really emphasize the logical conclusion to that, which is Trump is deploying troops to fight Democrats, not crime. Then it endorses the legitimacy and really the effectiveness of using military troops to police Americans by suggesting that Republican governors might want this too.

It kind of dismisses what it calls Democrats' rhetoric about the specter of uninvited occupying forces. Like this isn't actually happening, even though Donald Trump has already sent uninvited forces to occupy Los Angeles. That Los Angeles move, by the way, has already been ruled by a judge illegal. In kind of dismissing this as Democrats' rhetoric, that isn't really coming true, that article really drops the ball there.

Micah Loewinger: These crime trends do matter, right? Like, for instance, Trump justified the D.C. deployment by pointing to a surge in violent crime in 2023, though naturally he failed to acknowledge that it's fallen since then and it's nearly half of what it was in 2010. It is going down, and D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser has already thanked the president and credited him with helping crime go down. Maybe it would have gone down regardless. It seems like he's setting the table to take credit and justify more military deployment in the future. No?

Jamison Foser: That's exactly what he wants to do. Even Bowser, there was a Washington Post headline about Bowser's reaction just this week. It was, "Bowser welcomes federal enforcement indefinitely." First of all, overstates what the mayor of Washington, D.C. actually did, which is she issued an executive order that said if Trump's going to keep troops in D.C., local law enforcement will coordinate with them to try to minimize problems. The Post framed that as an invitation, as though D.C. actually wants Trump to continue.

That's a significant overstatement because just Thursday morning, news broke that D.C. is actually suing the federal government over the occupation, saying that Trump has run roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy.

Micah Loewinger: In addition to buying into Trump's framing about crime, you believe that some in the mainstream press have further hamstrung any kind of political response to this occupation by claiming that standing up to the president would hurt Democrats politically.

Jamison Foser: There's this really common media narrative that Donald Trump's actions here are a brilliant political move that sets a trap for Democrats. Here's one from Chris Cillizza and the Daily Beast. "The D.C. Crime Trap Trump is Setting For Democrats," and then a similar one, "Trump Is Leaning in on Crime. Democrats Need a Better Response, and Fast." That's from Politico. Forbes, "Could Trump's Crime Crackdown Help Him Politically? Democrats Blasting Effort Risk Backfire."

Micah Loewinger: Anderson Cooper echoed the sentiment on his show last month.

Anderson Cooper: It's the conflict Democrats face when talking about the policing in the District of Columbia. Do you point out statistics of, "Oh, it's a 30-year low," and thereby sound like you're saying, "Oh, there's not a crime problem in Washington, D.C.," when there's a crime problem everywhere?

Jamison Foser: There's a couple really big problems with that. The first one being, again, this isn't about crime. That's not what Donald Trump is doing, but the second is that there have been at least four national polls released in the last couple weeks that have found more Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of crime than approve of it. Quinnipiac, which is one of the major national polling outfits, found 56% of voters disapprove of sending the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and I should note that's even when the question was framed as an effort to fight crime.

That's a poll question that's biased in Trump's favor, just the same way this media coverage has been. Even then, only 41% of people approved of Donald Trump's actions. This narrative that this is a sure political winner for Trump is another example of the media trying to manufacture consent for what Trump is doing.

Micah Loewinger: The polling question is so fascinating because the way it was framed is effectively, "Do you support Donald Trump bringing in the National Guard to help alleviate crime in these cities?" It wasn't just Quinnipiac. This framing was also put to respondents in similar surveys from Reuters/Ipsos and also AP-NORC. So much of the public opinion is framed, "Do you support the president fighting crime?"

Jamison Foser: Right. If anybody has ever worked in polling or worked on polls, which I have, one of the basic rules is you don't write a question that gives respondents a reason to support one position without balancing it against either a reason to oppose that position or a reason to support a different position. That's what these polls are doing. They're saying, "Do you support Donald Trump's efforts to fight crime?" Even then, the public rejects what Trump is doing.

Micah Loewinger: Yet there is reason to believe that this "setting the trap" narrative around crime has been internalized by powerful, influential people within the D&C. Who is David Shor, and how has he been advising Democrats on how to respond to this stuff?

Jamison Foser: David Shor is a Democratic political strategist and data guru. He's advised Democrats to not talk about this issue and to talk about the economy instead. I think some Democrats have followed his guidance there, and some have not. J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, most notably, has been really forceful in denouncing what Donald Trump is doing and speaking very plainly about it.

J.B. Pritzker: Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

Micah Loewinger: Following that, on Tuesday, MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough pitched a kind of strange idea on his show.

Joe Scarborough: I actually think that J.B. Pritzker should do something radical. I think he should pick up the phone, call the president, and say, "Let's partner up. These are the most dangerous parts of my state. Let's work together to save lives."

Jamison Foser: [laughs] Bad advice. One of the things I've been wanting to see more of for a very long time is prominent Democrats exploiting explicitly call out bad media coverage. Pritzker has done that in basically every significant public comment I've seen him make in the last couple weeks. He's cajoling, urging, almost pleading with news organizations to cover this really clearly and honestly and tell folks the threat that it poses.

Micah Loewinger: In fact, he did that very thing in response to Scarborough earlier this week.

J.B. Pritzker: I refuse to pretend that any of this is normal. I refuse to fall into the pundit trap that demands we sacrifice vital constitutional rights. If it's being done in the fake guise of fighting crime.

Jamison Foser: We all have to navigate the reality that we're in right now, where we have a government that's trying to seize power through an aggressive propaganda campaign. Like, you can't play along with that and succeed.

Micah Loewinger: Why is it so important that we get the language and framing on this right?

Jamison Foser: Because if we don't, you really risk having a country involuntarily agreeing to slide into fascism. By involuntarily, I mean based on false pretenses, not really knowing what they're agreeing to. It goes back to the idea of manufacturing consent, of getting the public to accept something that they wouldn't actually accept if they knew what it was.

Micah Loewinger: Jamison, thanks so much.

Jamison Foser: Thanks so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Jamison Fozer writes the newsletter Finding Gravity.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We just offered analysis of the latest muscle flexing by the Trump White House, the latest attempt to wield power it doesn't legally possess, but to what end? For the big thinkers of the far right, the expanding power of the executive goes far beyond Trump to the ultimate goal of a sustainable "post liberal America." Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, got an unvarnished look at what that might mean when he happened upon a recent panel hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, created to educate and connect young conservatives.

It featured four deeply influential members of the Magaverse sharing their visions for a very different America.

Zack Beauchamp: All four of these people are extremely influential. Chris Rufo has been a leading policy voice in the Republican right, but all of these other people also have influence. There's another Chris, Christopher Caldwell. His work on civil rights has prefigured a lot of what the Trump administration has done with civil rights law and the Justice Department Civil Rights Division. Then you have Patrick Deneen, so professor at Notre Dame. Deneen is an avowed influence of J.D. Vance. Vance went to an event for the book Regime Change when it came out in D.C.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that in Regime Change, Deneen merely proposes replacing liberal elites with conservative ones. I guess Vance liked that.

Zack Beauchamp: He described himself as a post liberal who saw regime change as his purpose of his time in government.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's move to Curtis Yarvin because he may be the most extreme.

Zack Beauchamp: Oh, he is. There's no doubt about that. Yarvin is very important in the tech right scene. People like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk, most importantly. The Washington Post published a piece describing DOGE as being inspired by Yarvin's ideas. He really believes that the purpose of the state should be ordered towards encouraging economic dynamism, innovation, and stratification between better and worse kinds of people. You will hear over the course of this conversation who he believes the better and worse types of people to be.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's get there right now. What did they propose?

Zack Beauchamp: I want to start with what was I think the wildest exchange in the whole interview. It's about 20 minutes in, and Yarvin proposes the schema where there's a pre-modern America and a modern America, and those consist of two different kinds of Americans. One of those groups is basically capable of self-governance and managing their own lives. Another one, the pre-modern America needs the whip hand of community or the state telling them what to do in order to function properly.

He says, "Let's take a--" The exact term he uses is gangbanger in Baltimore. He then starts talking about a system by which churches will be put in charge of this person's life.

Curtis Yarvin: You have to be part of a society, and being part of a society means that you are going to get your welfare check, or however you support yourself from your minister. Your relationship with the state is intermediated through your church. Your minister can drug test you, he can assign you work, and he can put an airtag on you. He can tell you where to go, where not to go.

Brooke Gladstone: That sounds like either being in prison or being enslaved, and not to mention how illegal it is.

Zack Beauchamp: Oh, extremely illegal. I've struggled with exactly how to term it. Slavery, it's not quite right, but it's close. Maybe making somebody into a ward of the church, property of the church, a prisoner of the church. All of those seem rough approximations for what we're talking about. The point is, it is a schema for the state empowering religious institutions to be dictators of individual people. That's what he wants. The rest of the panel says nothing about that? Not in the sense that they don't comment on it.

They have thoughts, but those thoughts are not-- This is incredibly authoritarian and racist, and I can't believe we're talking about this. No one even comes close to using those terms in these kinds of right-wing discussions. Calling someone an authoritarian or a racist has no force. Those terms that have been designed, that have been stigmatized specifically to prevent the recurrence of historical evils, those terms have become destigmatized on the right. They no longer have their force.

Brooke Gladstone: The man you call the moderate on the panel, Caldwell, notes that Yarvin's proposal would probably be stymied by the Constitution.

Christopher Caldwell: We can't establish a religion, and the rules have to be the same for everyone. Whereas I think you're looking at something where you have a two-part country, you're distinction between modern and traditional people. In fact, I think you have to repeal the 14th Amendment.

Brooke Gladstone: Then Yarvin responds.

Curtis Yarvin: Religion, of course, in the original Constitution was established, and the first Amendment was written to allow for the establishment of religion in the states now that is--

Chris Rufo: They had established churches until, what, the 1830s.

Curtis Yarvin: Yes, it went away of its own accord, but it was not forbidden by the original Constitution. It was an interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It's not stated in the 14th Amendment.

Brooke Gladstone: I looked up the Establishment Clause in the Constitution, and it explicitly prohibits the establishment of an official religion. The second clause of the First Amendment immediately follows the Establishment Clause by saying Congress should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the exercise thereof. Is he giving a kind of bizarro interpretation of the Constitution or what?

Zack Beauchamp: Look, it is true that in the colonial era, some of the colonies had officially religions, right or state-sanctioned religions. Some of those persisted after independence, but not for very long. This was not a major part of the American political tradition. It went away, I think, along the lines of the self-understanding of the First Amendment and of the American state, which was that religion is not something to be governed by political institutions. Jefferson was very clear and Madison in their fight over religion in the Virginian Constitution about what their vision was, not just for Virginia but for America.

Brooke Gladstone: Which was?

Zack Beauchamp: Which was a secular state, which is a wall of separation between churches and states, and Washington. There's a very famous letter that he writes a Jewish community in Rhode Island. He outlines his vision of religious toleration not just for Jews and not just in Rhode Island, but for all religious minorities across the United States. To portray the idea of the American Constitution as one that wanted to, for any reasons other than political convenience or to avoid a fight, allow there to be kinds of established religions is to totally misread the character of the founding.

Brooke Gladstone: Yarvin, he started on this idea of giving clergy control over these pre-modern American gangbangers by qualifying it, saying he's coming at it from an un-American angle. He seems deeply taken with the ideas and systems of Elizabethan England, where you would be penalized for not going to church every week.

Curtis Yarvin: You were actually fined, your name was written down in a little book. It was a system of, you would almost call it totalitarian in a way. They certainly did not have a free press at that time and yet Elizabethan society produced the most amazing artistic works of all of history.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, but Genghis Khan had freedom of religion, wrote a legal code, unified a nation, promoted a kind of meritocracy. Dictators can do amazing things.

[laughter]

Zack Beauchamp: Right. This is a characteristic tick of Yarvin's. One that I've noticed a lot in his work is that he throws out these historical references, and he expects people not to be familiar with them because his knowledge of the world is a mile wide and a centimeter deep. perhaps. There's a reason practices like that died out, because they're corrosive of not only a well-functioning society, but of basic human freedom that people want. I don't want to just get on my soapbox and say, "I think Curtis Yarvin is bad," because that lends it a degree of seriousness it ought not to have.

These are not actual arguments, they're the musings, the ravings of a man who is a glorified Internet troll, but has managed to carve out a niche of success for himself by convincing wealthy people in tech that their success should be a model for America. By doing that, he has turned himself into someone who gets invited to these kinds of conversations, and then he changes the conversation. Look, before the ascent of Curtis Yarvin, a gathering of Deneen, Rufo, and Caldwell would be considered a relatively right-wing gathering.

Yarvin, he's beyond what even those people are willing to do. So much of the conversation ends up being a debate between Yarvin and the other three, and yet Yarvin is setting the terms for the conversation. It's not that they're rejecting the authoritarianism, they're really only objecting to this sort of anti-American quality.

Brooke Gladstone: Isn't that the point of this discussion, that true democracy isn't their goal, nor is upholding equal opportunity under the law? They imply, they sometimes more than imply that that's the moment where America went wrong.

Zack Beauchamp: Equal opportunity, yes, but they think that's severable from democracy. It's actually, I think, at the heart of Caldwell's work. For the past several years, he's gone around the world and written about various different right-wing populist movements, but he invariably defines them as actually true exemplars of democracy because they speak to the silent majority, or perhaps the not so, in the case of India, the not so silent majority when it comes to minority rights. His view is that a politics that caters to ethnic majorities is a true democratic politics.

Brooke Gladstone: I see.

Zack Beauchamp: Even if what they propose are restrictions on freedoms that we would see as fundamentally undemocratic.

Brooke Gladstone: Even though the polls all say that a lot of what's been going on, the mass firings at DOGE, the deportations of non-criminal immigrants, the family separations, these are not popular, but these men believe that this is what America wants.

Zack Beauchamp: There's a really telling moment late in the conversation where Rufo and Caldwell, who've mostly been agreeing, get into a fight about DOGE. The fight is not about whether DOGE was a good idea or not. The fight was about branding. The terms are whether it was good for DOGE to bill itself as an ideological purge openly.

Brooke Gladstone: Or an efficiency engine.

Zack Beauchamp: Right.

Brooke Gladstone: Caldwell says--

Christopher Caldwell: It's a much less acceptable story to present to the public than 'we're saving money.

Chris Rufo: You have to accept it.

Zack Beauchamp: That's right. He agrees that it's an ideological purge, what he and Rufo both call systematic extirpation of liberals from the state.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, around the 40-minute mark, the conversation turns to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Rufo worked closely with DeSantis, particularly his attempt to impose state controls on higher education, and he spent much of his conversation singing the governor's praises. His biggest critique, in fact, was that DeSantis erred strategically by running against Trump.

Micah Loewinger: He would have been better off saying, "Hey, I'm very popular. Florida should repeal term limits, and I will rule Florida for 25 years." I think that would have been maybe good. Now impossible.

Brooke Gladstone: Yarvin, without prompting, in the middle of the discussion of DeSantis, adds this nugget.

Curtis Yarvin: I think that one thing that we agree on is that when you're in the pursuit of power, every step you take needs to generate more power. Everything you do needs to make further actions easier.

Zack Beauchamp: Talking about ruling Florida for 25 years, it struck me that Rufo was faulting DeSantis for being insufficiently authoritarian. Setting aside that point, what I found really fascinating was the next thing that Yarvin said. Yarvin starts talking about how what needs to happen is that DeSantis needs to, in his language, 10x or even 100x what he's doing, multiply it by 10 or 100 times, be more and more aggressive. That's what he should have done. He cites an example.

Curtis Yarvin: Can we have a picture of what Ron DeSantis times 10x, Ron DeSantis times 100x? Is Ron DeSantis going to start, for example, a Florida branch of the Boy Scouts where they're the Florida Scouts, where they wear Florida uniforms? That's going a little bit farther than Ron DeSantis has gone, and so when we basically free ourselves from--

Christopher Caldwell: It's a good idea.

Curtis Yarvin: Yes, it's not my idea.

Chris Rufo: It's been tried before.

Curtis Yarvin: It's been tried before.

Zack Beauchamp: I took that as a reference to the Hitler Youth, as you did. But then Yarvin butts in and says, "No, no, no, we should call them the Young Pioneers," which was the name of the youth movement in--

Brooke Gladstone: In Soviet Russia.

Zack Beauchamp: Exactly, and Communist China. [laughs] It's like, "Oh, no, we're not the bad thing that it sounds like we're talking about. We're the other totalitarian thing. That's what I'm proposing."

Brooke Gladstone: When we talk about right-wing policies or pundits on the show, we often get feedback saying, "Why talk about this? Why cover the very conversations you say our guardrails used to keep at bay?"

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, that fight's been lost. These people are all in power now. Rufo, I believe, is directly wielding power, but there's been a significant amount of reporting that he has been working with the Trump administration on some of their purge efforts and their attack on higher ed. The other people. The vice president described himself as a devotee of Deneen's ideological movement. If we can't talk about the people who the vice president reads regularly. He's also said he reads Yarvin, by the way, what are we even doing here?

At one point, at the very end of the conversation, Rufo says something really telling. He says that he believes that the right has won the battle with the left. The battle with the left is won, and now we can go on to have these inter-right arguments. The inter-right argument that they're having in that conversation is not over whether we should be authoritarian. In essence, they wouldn't use that language, but I'd say that's a fair description of the politics that were on display in the conversation. It's over just how naked, how aggressive, and how weird that authoritarianism should be.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, we're now talking in a time when the National Guard is being deployed to democratic cities and a banner of Trump's face is draped over the side of the Department of Labor. On the question of American authoritarianism, do you think we have crossed that line in the sand?

Zack Beauchamp: I don't. I think we're on the way. It's not at all unreasonable to say that the United States can be better regarded as an authoritarian state at this point. The reason I think it's not is because I take a simple two-part test for whether a country is a democracy. Does it have free and fair elections? When those elections are concluded, does the ruling power leave? So far, since Trump has been elected, we've had a number of different sub national elections.

Democrats have done very well, and Republicans have left office when they've lost. Now, you might say, we haven't gone to the midterms yet. Look at what's happening. There are efforts by the Trump administration to weaken the conditions that make an election free and fair. They've gone after certain components of the press, the gerrymandering that's happening in states like Texas, but if you look holistically, those efforts have not systematically compromised the way in which American elections are held.

The majority of the media yet. I want to return to that yet point in a second. We're able to have this conversation and neither of us are afraid of Trump cracking down on our heads because we've criticized the government or of a visit from the tax agencies.

Brooke Gladstone: They've already defunded public broadcasting byt now.

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, that's pretty bad, but you're still talking, right?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, still talking.

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, but the way in which power is determined, the systems for that are still meaningfully democratic. There's a term for a similar system like this. The late political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell calls it delegative democracy. A democracy where, when a leader is elected, they are essentially expected to smash the rules and act however they please, and maybe even commit abuses in pursuit of whatever their movement's goals are. A sort of system of government that he observed happening in the late 20th-century Latin American democracies.

It doesn't always become authoritarianism, but it does in some cases. You can see it as a way station to an authoritarian system. It wasn't always that. Sometimes things might revert to a more traditional democratic system or maybe maintain in that uneasy equilibrium for quite some time. We are a degraded form of democracy, and whether it goes further, whether we take the next step, ultimately, the first real big test will be the midterm elections.

Brooke Gladstone: Zack Beauchamp is senior correspondent at Fox and author of the article The Right Debates Just How Weird Their Authoritarianism Should Be. Thank you very much.

Zack Beauchamp: Thank you. That was wonderful.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the war in Ukraine is being fought on the ground, in the air, and on our screens.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. The news about Ukraine is mostly bleak, but there was a glimmer of hope following the Paris summit this past Thursday because a group of European countries announced that they're ready to provide a "reassurance force" if there actually is a ceasefire with Russia. Vladimir Putin's immediate response was to say that any troops would be legitimate targets if they appeared on Ukrainian soil before an agreement was reached, which he doesn't seem inclined to work on anyway, saying Russia could accomplish its goals militarily, and thus the diplomatic sniping and the conflict grind on.

Veteran foreign correspondent Deborah Amos went to Ukraine earlier this year to hear how Ukrainians are fighting a different war over which side ultimately sets the narrative, tells the story of this war, I mean, the version of the story that prevails.

Deborah Amos: At the front line in eastern Ukraine, the fighting is intense, mostly trench warfare and artillery bombardments. Like World War I, where gains are measured in inches at a staggering cost. At night, drone warfare is the war of the future that expands the frontline west towards the capital as Russia launches hundreds and hundreds of drones and missile strikes.

Clip: Attention. Increased air threat in your area. Proceed to the nearest shelter. Attention. Increased air threat in your area.

Deborah Amos: It's June, and my reporting partner, Joanne Levine and I are spending the night in the bomb shelter of the Radisson in downtown Kyiv. It's a converted parking garage two floors below street level, with rows of beds and beanbag chairs. Ukrainians are advised to shelter in bathtubs, in basements, or deep underground subways. After almost four years of war, a dark humor pervades.

Clip Attention. The air alert is over. May the force be with you.

Deborah Amos: In the morning, we head to a residential neighborhood that took the brunt of the overnight attack. [background noise] Wow. There are no windows left. The balconies are caved in. All you can hear is the sweeping up of broken glass. This is definitely downtown Kiev. A nurse named Olga is shaking as she gives testimony to an official team. She says she headed for the shelter just before the drone hit.

Olga: Medical center.

Deborah Amos: Medical center.

Olga: Surgery Centre.

Deborah Amos: Center here.

Olga: Yes.

Clip: Day by day, attacking civilians, but there's definitely no rules now. They're definitely aiming civilians, and they have no problem with that.

Deborah Amos: At the bomb site, we run into Jeff Belzel. He's the security advisor for our trip. He served in the Canadian army for a decade, decorated for his actions combating the Taliban. Now he advises journalists on personal security and risk management. He says Putin's change in strategy is reflected in the numbers. 232 civilians killed and thousands injured in June alone. This is just one snapshot of the war. Nighttime terror followed by the next day's rapid cleanup.

This is another picture in the daytime, an embrace of normality. It's part of the rhythm of this war. After a night of heavy drone strikes, Ukrainians walk their dogs, jog around the neighborhood neighborhood and go for morning coffee. By the afternoon, in Kyiv's Botanical Gardens, under a canopy of trees, the seats are full for a concert. Classical versions of some 1980s hits. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians say a concert is a kind of cultural resistance. I came to Ukraine to explore the different forms resistance takes here.

I found an example in Bucha, a leafy bedroom community just a short drive from the capital. For one month in early 2022, it was the scene of staggering brutality by Russian forces. Local authorities said 458 bodies were recovered in Bucha that month, the vast majority killed up close. Locals took photos that showed corpses of civilians, hands tied behind their backs, shot at close range. Many bodies were found mutilated and burnt. Girls as young as 14 reported being raped. Russian officials called it fake news, just actors playing dead.

Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, repeated those charges at the United Nations.

Sergey Lavrov: [Foreign language.

Deborah Amos: Despite the denials, Bucha became a symbol of Russia's savage tactics, in part because of the actions of a former city council member.

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska: My name is Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska. I was deputy mayor of Bucha in 2021, 2023.

Deborah Amos: She's known as Mykha. She worked for two decades as a journalist before entering politics, and she understood Bucha's grief. Her husband was killed in 2014 fighting the Russians in eastern Ukraine. When the invaders finally retreated, her town was in desperate straits. She organized humanitarian aid, diapers, baby food, water, and she invited the media in. Other towns nearby suffered equally, but they stayed closed when the Russians retreated, so those names are unknown to the outside world.

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska: Bucha was very open, and people were ready to share the pain.

Deborah Amos: Reporters, domestic and international swarmed the town of Bucha and broadcast what they found everywhere.

Reporter: Ukrainian national police showed us this mass grave in Bucha, saying they believed up to 150 civilians might be buried here, but no one knows the exact number.

Reporter: Like so many victims in the town of Bucha, their identities are not yet known.

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska: When we were burying heroes and when we were burying unknown killed civilians, we did it with the press to record what really happened.

Deborah Amos: Mykha then went to New York to visit the 9/11 memorial and meet with the staff there to ask, how does a town get past a mass tragedy? "Start by honoring the dead," they said. "Start by building memorials." A fountain in front of the mayor's office opened a year ago. It's the backdrop for a memorial with life size posters.

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska: You will see fresh flowers near some posters. That's the way how families are memorizing their killed relatives.

Deborah Amos: Can we go see that?

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska: Okay, let's go.

Deborah Amos: The line of faces paints a vivid picture of enormous loss in one small town.

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska: The youngest person is 1.7 years old. The oldest is 102 years old. They were staying at their houses and they were killed.

Deborah Amos: Your advice is you must embrace the media. You must let them be here to help tell your story. A lot of cities didn't see it that way, but you did.

Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska: I know that sometimes municipalities don't understand that, but that's very important. Without media, we will not be so successful now. Bucha could be the model of Ukrainian success in future after the war.

Deborah Amos: How to measure success? In the short term. Memorials, mental health support, especially for children, collecting evidence and identifying witnesses. After the war, maybe the ones who are bearing witness now will define success. Since the invasion began, the world has seen a barrage of narrative films from Ukraine. Most notably the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, reported and directed by Mstyslav Chernov in 2023. Also that year, the first dramatic film called Bucha that tells the story of Konstantyn Gudauskas, or Kostia, known for his daring rescues during the early months of the invasion.

Konstantyn Gudauskas: [foreign language]

Deborah Amos: We meet the real-life Kostia, a bulky, 40-something businessman with short graying hair, in a basement storeroom he calls his fortress. It's now a hub for his team and his charity Bucha Helps. The fortress is decorated with patches from Ukrainian military units and stuffed to the ceiling with boxes filled with humanitarian aid, toys for kids, cartons of small backpacks he says he's collecting for the fall when first graders go to school for the first time.

Konstantyn Gudauskas: [foreign language]

[00:40:36] Interpreter: We already provided 8,500 children with that.

Deborah Amos: Kostia's background is complicated, like so much of the region's history. In 1947, Lithuania was under Soviet control, and Stalin exiled his Jewish family to Kazakhstan, where he was born. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, Kostia took part in opposition politics, got in trouble, went to jail. He eventually escaped to Ukraine six years ago with just one suitcase. Ukraine granted him political asylum, and he rebuilt his life in Bucha. He created a thriving business, charging Stations for electric cars, successful enough to buy himself a Tesla, his dream car.

He had it shipped from California. The arrival of Russian troops in February 2022 changed everything. He witnessed the horrors of the Russian occupation firsthand. He photographed dead bodies on the street with a hidden cell phone. He volunteered for risky evacuation, rescuing the most vulnerable from the Russian occupation zone, including an 80-year-old Ukrainian composer, his wife, and the family dog. How many people did you save?

Konstantyn Gudauskas: [foreign language]

Interpreter: It's 203 person, but two women were pregnant that time, so now we can count as 205 now.

Deborah Amos: He laughs off the dangers,-

Konstantyn Gudauskas: [foreign language] [laughs]

Deborah Amos: -but some things he cannot forget. He directs us to a traffic circle in Bucha where Kostia recounts the day in March 2022, after a successful evacuation. He was driving back to his home in Bucha when a Russian shell hit his car. This is where you were shot?

Konstantyn Gudauskas: [foreign language]

Interpreter: That's the place where I was driving my car, and then suddenly the Russian shell hit my ca,r and I was unconscious. I don't remember anything after that.

Deborah Amos: Did they ruin your Tesla?

Interpreter: [foreign language]

Konstantyn Gudauskas: [foreign language]

Interpreter: Burned out totally.

Deborah Amos: Kostia's story became the central drama in Bucha, the movie.

[media clip plays]

Deborah Amos: It's a portrait of the unimaginable of terror and sudden death of Russian tanks parked in the backyards of Ukrainian summer homes, of frightened civilians hiding in the basement, running out of food, water, and hope. In the film, an actor playing Kostia calmly approaches a Russian checkpoint in his Tesla. Your identification?

[media clip plays]

Deborah Amos: He is waved right through. The film was shot on location in Bucha less than a year after Russian soldiers were murdering civilians and executing prisoners of war. The identification of the dead was still going on, and so was the wider war. The film had a worldwide premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival and private showings across Europe and even in the US. In Ukraine, the dramatic portrayal of events, still so raw, led to questions in the Ukrainian media and in the film community. Was it too soon?

I wanted to put that question to the film's writer. We meet in a film studio in the heart of the capital.

Julia: Welcome, welcome.

Deborah Amos: It's a bustling complex with room after room of sets, a restaurant, and thousands of props. One of the biggest movie production houses in Europe.

Julia: I'm Julia. Nice to meet you.

Deborah Amos: Nice to meet you. She settles us into a room with a set designed to look like a radio station in New York City. There's a wide window on the back wall with a New York street scene.

Oleksandr Shchur: Hello. Nice to meet you.

Deborah Amos: Are you Sasha?

Oleksandr Shchur: Oleksandr Sasha, yes.

Deborah Amos: 45-year-old producer Oleksandr Shchur, or Sasha, wrote the script. It's his first dramatic film. Back in the day, he was a comedy writer for then comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Oleksandr Shchur: He became the president. I became an independent producer, as a joke, his career a little better than mine.

Deborah Amos: When Russian troops invaded, Shchur said he focused on Bucha because the Russians had already made a documentary with their version of events, repeating the official Russian line that atrocities and Bucha were staged. He found a central character when he read an online interview with Konstantyn Gudauskas recounting his rescues. Impressed by the fact that he'd saved over 200 Ukrainians, Shchur says his movie is part Dante's Inferno and part Schindler's List.

Oleksandr Shchur: He is a foreigner. He could leave Ukraine, he could go to another country, but he decided to stay, to risk his life. For me, this is a very powerful message that nobody can stand aside when such evil things happen.

Deborah Amos: Is this movie for insiders or outsiders?

Oleksandr Shchur: This movie is for both, but I think there are different messages.

Deborah Amos: For the outsiders, he saw his film as an appeal to the court of public opinion. For insiders, those who were actually experiencing the war, he wanted it to stand as a document to the horrors they were living. That audience had a complicated reaction. This wasn't a film about events 50 years ago, like Spielberg's film about the Holocaust. In Bucha, the trauma was fresh. The first showing of his film, Bucha, was in a Bucha theater with an audience of about 100 survivors of the Russian occupation.

Oleksandr Shchur: We ask them two questions. Is this movie truthful? They say, "Yes." The second, "Do we want us to show this movie? Wouldn't this movie traumatize you or your relatives?" All these people, they said, "No. We wanted this movie that everybody in the world to know what happened in Bucha."

Deborah Amos: There are people in Bucha who said, "I can't," or, "Drama is too early."

Oleksandr Shchur: Yes. I know this. For me, this is the main answer. A movie, it's not a monument. If you don't want to watch it, you don't watch it.

Deborah Amos: Many outside the country will watch the movie. With distribution deals for theaters in Germany, Poland, France, Canada, Latin America, and Japan.

Yaroslav Lodygin: Yes, my name is Yaroslav Lodygin. I make documentaries, fiction films. Right now, I'm working on the concept for a museum.

Deborah Amos: Yaroslav Lodygin is a producer, a director and a writer. His one-line social media bio reads, "I was born in dystopia. I now live in Kyiv." Perhaps Dystopia also describes his former job as the head of the state-controlled national television and radio network. He and his team transformed it, including building a modern newsroom that Ukrainians came to trust, challenging Russian propaganda from right next door. He sat down to talk at a cafe called The Idealist about his new documentary, A Faith Under Siege.

Yaroslav Lodygin: A Faith Under Siege is focused on the persecution of Christians by Russians, unoccupied territories, and moreover, the life of Christians Evangelical, especially under Russian occupation.

Reporter: All across Russian-occupied Ukraine, soldiers are shutting down places of worship.

Deborah Amos: Vladimir Putin uses the false claim that Ukrainian Nazis are a threat to Christian value to justify his invasion. Lodygin's film, made with American financial backing and for an American audience, bears witness to Putin's persecution of the Ukrainian church, including the arrest and torture of the clergy. The documentary premiered in May on the Christian Broadcasting Network, the US-based media company founded by Pat Robertson, best known for producing the 700 Club.

Yaroslav Lodygin: Before the very conservative evangelical would be asked, "You want to help Ukraine? You want to United States provide the assistance to Ukraine?" They would say no. Then if they see this movie, they turn their minds completely and they would rather ask their senator congressman to support Ukraine. That's how it works.

Deborah Amos: Putin's Russia has mastered the disinformation game perfected on state television, where every day they construct their own version of this war. But filmmakers like Lodygin believe that you can win if you can tell the story first and tell it well.

Yaroslav Lodygin: We are outnumbered. We have less money, resources, weapons, but we have some ability to tell stories.

Deborah Amos: The battle of narratives defines this war.

Yaroslav Lodygin: We are the products of narratives. It's hard to imagine what would be with the whole concept of justice without this work.

Deborah Amos: Within Ukraine, documentaries don't often find an audience, says Yelizaveta Smith.

Yelizaveta Smith: No, it's obvious that they don't want to see this, and they don't need to see this for now. That's why most of us filmmakers realize that we do films that will stay in time and also that are that important now to show for an audience, and that will stay in time for Ukrainians.

Deborah Amos: This year, the Cannes Film Festival dedicated its programming to Ukraine, premiering three films, including the documentary Militantropos, that tracks profound changes in Ukrainians as their country is torn apart.

Yelizaveta Smith: Milit is a soldier from Latin, and antropos is a human from Greek. This new kind of human is born inside this war.

Deborah Amos: Smith, one of the film's producers and writer, explains the title at a coffee shop. She says the film is about how the ongoing war becomes an internal reality, even for her.

Yelizaveta Smith: Yes, it's my life. I start to count if three years more, five years, or how old I will be, can I make one more baby? Can I make one more movie? Because your future is not anymore in your hands, and it's not fun. [chuckles]

Deborah Amos: The Ukrainians she's interviewed insist that the architects of the invasion must and will be held accountable. This is not negotiable, but for now, justice obtained through the world's courts seems remote. I wondered, can documentaries help people assuage their impatience and sustain their hope, bridge that gap in time between crime and punishment?

Yelizaveta Smith: The amount of crimes in this country is so big. In this way, documentary works a bit therapy.

Deborah Amos: Do you really feel that when you're in the middle of a long interview with somebody who's been through this?

Yelizaveta Smith: Yes, I feel this a lot. When person starts to speak, he needs to be listened. Then you do this work for him just for helping, you know, just for letting people speak.

Deborah Amos: Some lacking a platform, may shout or honk their horns. This is a weekly protest in the capital demanding the release of Ukrainian war prisoners from Russian jails. Every week, Sasha Kirko comes holding a sign that says, "We can't be silent."

Sasha Kirko: We here because of everyone who is in this horrible captivity is our people. We here for everyone because they protecting us.

Deborah Amos: An estimated 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers are still held in Russia. The two nations carried out the largest prisoner swap this summer, with more than 2,000 changed. It's the only positive wartime diplomacy.

Clip: I've been in captivity two and a half years.

Deborah Amos: Former prisoners come here, too, some in wheelchairs, some are amputees, many visibly diminished by the conditions they endured. Mikhail Chapla clutches a picture of himself when he was first released, a gaunt face and haunted eyes. At these rallies, he wears the Ukrainian flag like a cape, as do the other former prisoners gathered around him.

Mikhail Chapla: All these men been in captivity one year, two and a half year.

Deborah Amos: When you see this, when you come here, does it make you feel better that everybody remembers you?

Mikhail Chapla: Yes.

Deborah Amos: Ukraine is desperately fighting for its very survival, but it may not win. If it doesn't, does it matter whether it can claim a moral victory in the memories of those who lived the war and those who merely watched? Wars elsewhere, in places like Serbia or Cambodia, generations still clash over what happened, the atrocities. In Cambodia, many young people doubt they happened at all. In parts of the US, 150 years after the Civil War, the cliché remains that the North won the war, but the South won the narrative, causing no end of turmoil.

This conflict has reshaped the battlefield where memories are turned into history and justice hangs on a story well told. That old adage about war that the victors get to tell the story, Ukrainians aren't buying it. They are determined to keep telling and telling it better than their foe until the pursuit of accountability, of justice, is transformed from a narrative hook, a hero's journey, to a verdict gaveled out and engraved in history.

Brooke Gladstone: Deborah Amos is the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. Her reporting partner on this trip was Joanne Levine. Support for their reporting was provided by the International Women's Media Foundation in partnership with the Howard C. Buffett Foundation.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wong.

Brooke Gladstone: On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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