Russian Dissidents Warn: US Turning Into Authoritarian Hellscape

Hello Friends,

This week's episode is VERY long, so I'm going to shut up and get out of the way.

Our interview with the authors of How to Survive Authoritarianism is in this week's episode. Their book will be out for you to buy at the end of September.

Full Transcript

(Just a note to readers: This transcript was autogenerated by Riverside.fm, and then I fed it into Claude Haiku 4.5, using Duck.Ai to prevent Anthropic from using the information to train its system. The text was then formatted for AP style. So it may not sync perfectly with the audio, or the wording may be slightly different. I do NOT like using any AI / LLMs; however, I am currently time and resource constrained. So this is the fastest, best way right now for me to get these transcripts done. As soon as we can, we'll hire a human.)

BJ Mendelson (00:00):

Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of Privacy Tips, the sister podcast for Stupid Sexy Privacy. I'm your host, BJ Mendelson. Today's show is made possible by our friends at DuckDuckGo. So if you enjoyed what we do, check out their DuckDuckGo subscription. It comes with a simple and easy to use VPN, identity theft protection, data removal service, and more. Additional information can be found at DuckDuckGo.com/subscribe. Some features and offerings will vary based on your location.

Now my friends, Stupid Sexy Privacy has wrapped and you can find all of the episodes online at stupidsexyprivacy.com. All you have to do is click or tap on the word "episodes" when you visit the website.

The purpose of Privacy Tips is to give me an opportunity to read from my version of how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. You'll be able to purchase the professionally recorded audiobook, which is way, way better than what I'm giving you, in about a month. We don't have a date just yet.

As we go through the book here on Privacy Tips, my version is a little different—reading it to you kind of like the director's cut, which has just a little extra content that didn't make the final cut for the finished professional edition that Kiff VandenHeuvel is going to read for you, and that you'll be able to purchase in the not too distant future. We'll share with you the occasional interview with experts in fighting fascists and weirdos. This week, as promised, we are joined by Dan Storyev and Maria Kuznetsova, authors of "How to Survive Authoritarianism."

Usually I'll do a little explainer here, but we're still in the very beginning section of the book. So if you're following along on stupidsexyprivacy.com, if you click or tap on the word "book," you can find "How to Protect Yourself from Fascism and Weirdos" completely free.

And if you're listening to this episode, just go over to where it says "do this third," then press play and you'll get to hear me read that section to you. So I'm just going to read that section, and then on the other side of it we're going to come back with the interview. I hope you enjoy the show.

Book Excerpt

(You can read the full book here for free.)

BJ Mendelson (03:12)

If you have something in your home that's connected to the Internet, now is the time to ask yourself if you need it. If you don't, unload it. You don't want to create an opportunity for fascists, weirdos and people who fund them to spy on you. One thing that can go is any home assistant like Amazon's Echo. Just make sure to deregister your Echo from your Amazon account and factory reset the device before unloading it. And if you can—not everyone can, but if you can—join me in boycotting Amazon.com and cancel Prime. Get your books instead from Bookshop.org when possible, your audiobooks from Libro.fm, and everything else from your local stores.

If there are any additional internet-connected devices you're planning to get rid of, search for the appropriate way to disassociate yourself from that device first. If you want a non-U.S.-based search engine to use instead of DuckDuckGo, I recommend Qwant, which is based in France.

If you can't find what you're looking for at DuckDuckGo, that's when you can try Searx.

Searx is a search engine of all search engines, with plenty of publicly accessible instances for you to use. Those public Searx instances can be found at searx.space—S-E-A-R-X.space. If you ever need to do a deep search on a potential date or just a fascist or weirdo who's harassing you, Searx is the place to start.

You can use the following search terms on most search engines when it comes to people. Make sure to search first without the quotation marks and then with the quotation marks. Using quotation marks around your search term tells the search engine you want those terms as they appear on a page, as opposed to how the name may appear in general on the web. So here's just how to do it without quotation marks. I'm going to give you the search terms that you can use. Most of you listening to this—or some of you listening to this at least—know all this, so just hang with me if you don't, because you'd be surprised at the stuff that we take for granted in terms of what people know.

For example: first name plus last name; first name plus last name plus city plus state; first name plus last name plus arrest. That's a big one. First name plus last name plus social media—you can try general social media or be more specific with Instagram, for example. That's without quotations. And then you could just do the same with quotations. So: "first name plus last name," in quotation marks. And again, the difference is: when you use quotation marks around your search terms, you're telling the search engine you want those terms as they appear on a page. Without the quotation marks, the search engine is just going to look all over the web. Hopefully that makes sense. If not, you can always get in touch with us at bjmendelson.32 on Signal.

While detaching from internet-connected devices, we want to pay special attention to your car, especially the automotive head unit or infotainment system—the automotive head unit in your car that you may have just rented and to which you may have just synced your phone. If you're renting, don't do that. Don't do it either when you're borrowing someone else's car.

If you're trading in your old car, make sure your information is completely wiped from the infotainment system before doing so. Head units collect an intrusive amount of data. Car manufacturers then sell that information to data brokers and other parties like your insurance company, which can cause a hike in your monthly premium. Those data brokers also provide information to government agencies such as the FBI.

Now, if it were true that—quote—"all my information is already out there, so there's no point in protecting my privacy"—nah, nah, nah, nah. You know, when people say that nonsense, the FBI wouldn't need to buy this data from data brokers. But they do. So this idea that everything is out there and everyone has access to it anyway, so why bother? It's nonsense. Don't believe it.

In assisting at one federal agency on a case, I can say it provided most of the documents they needed because the agency did not have access to them. And this was a major, major law enforcement agency. And like the IRS, this agency did not have the staffing or resources to examine all the stuff we gave them because of budget cuts from the Trump administration. So as scary as any federal agency may be—such as ICE—remember that ICE is heavily funded and resourced, while virtually every other agency has been destabilized and decimated by fascists and weirdos. This will become important later on when we talk about the Freedom of Information Act, better known as FOIA.

When buying a new vehicle, you can purchase from the dealer an additional head unit, or ask them to toss one in as part of the purchase. What you want to do is install that second, unused head unit before you sell your car. For maximum privacy, you can give cash to a trusted person to purchase a vehicle on behalf of a trust or multiple nested partnership corporations that you set up. But this requires legal assistance to pull off, so we can't advise you on how to do this in different states, as the process differs. We just want to let you know it is something you can do.

Another thing you can also do is seek out cars built before 2016, because they're less likely to have the components that invade your privacy.

If you're renting a car, use an auxiliary cable or an auxiliary-to-USB-C cable that connects your phone to the car stereo. The most secure kind of phone you can own is one with a headphone jack, because you can plug a microphone blocker into it from Miclock. If you don't have a headphone jack, you can still get microphone blockers from Miclock with more common USB-C input. They're not as effective because phones like the iPhone come with multiple microphones, for example, but they can still be useful. If you've ever had a sensitive conversation with someone, and if you ever need to have a sensitive conversation with someone, make sure all phones are turned off and placed inside Faraday bags first.

And for those of you worried about your phone or apps listening in on your conversations: while microphone blockers are not a perfect solution, they will at least help put a stop to that specific form of eavesdropping if you use them.

If you own a car, find an old phone, factory reset it, and leave it in your car to connect to the stereo system or the car manufacturer's app if it has one. This phone, if you choose to pop in a Mint Mobile SIM card, for example, can also provide a phone number to use instead of your real one. But don't ever buy a used phone. Repurpose your old devices whenever you can. There's nothing wrong with buying used; it's an inexpensive and environmentally sound thing to do. But when it comes to used smartphones and laptops specifically, you're potentially inheriting any legal problem that may come with those devices. If you need a phone that's just for your car, get the Moto G budget smartphone. We will recommend this phone throughout the rest of the book.

You can also repurpose your dating phone, discussed later, to be your car phone or your portable music player and podcast player. There are fewer places more sacred to your average American than the inside of their car. Unfortunately, cars are now giant computers with wheels—ones with less security than the Waffle House. So we have to take what information they gather seriously.

Only Subaru, as of this recording, allows any American to opt out of this information gathering and sharing, although their opt-out doesn't cover third-party devices like Starlink, which is owned by Elon Musk. We'll get to him later.

Our Interview With Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev

BJ Mendelson (10:26)

Thank you both for joining us. This book was a lot of fun. This is "How to Survive Authoritarianism" and I'm here with the authors. Would you both like to take a moment to introduce yourselves?

Maria Kuznetsova (10:37)

Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Maria Kuznetsova. I was a dissident in Russia. I worked for many years in human rights, specifically helping political prisoners. And after that, I had to leave Russia and I moved to the U.S. to study at Harvard.

Dan Storyev (11:01)

Howdy, thanks for having me. My name is Dan Storyev. I am a Russian American. I grew up in between Russia and the United States, and shortly before becoming a writer, I used to be a conflict correspondent and I'm also a recovering academic, if you will. And now I write books.

BJ Mendelson (11:26)

Yeah, and I had a lot of fun with this, but I don't think fun was necessarily the intention. So—

Dan Storyev (11:34)

Mm-hmm.

BJ Mendelson (11:34)

Tell us a little bit about the book in general, because the way it's structured, this interview will be a little different. Typically I'll read everything and try to ask really concrete questions, but this is more like a great glossary of terms that are maybe familiar to Russians living under the fascist Vladimir Putin—for Americans who may not realize that we're about to experience the same thing. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of the book.

Dan Storyev (12:02)

Right. So this actually starts with basically an Instagram story. I saw Maria post this thing, and this was at the time when all these plainclothes ICE agents were grabbing people on American campuses. I'm sure you remember the extremely famous Mahmoud Khalil case.

Funny enough, this started with an Instagram story. You might remember the time in the United States when people were snatched on university campuses by plainclothes officers—the extremely famous Mahmoud Khalil case and then Rameza Osturk in Boston, I believe. And I saw Maria post about this, saying that she realized that her friends on campus—because Maria was at Harvard at the time—they don't have the vocabulary to describe these people. Like in Russia, we have a distinct word, actually several distinct words, to describe these plainclothes officers. We call them Eshniki, we call them Silviki. That kind of stuff. But in English it doesn't really exist. And I remember talking to my Oxford friends at the time, and they were also like, "We have no idea how to describe what is happening. Like we understand that something's wrong, but we just don't have the cultural wherewithal to really describe it, to really articulate this." And this is something that kind of sparked this conversation that Maria and I started having. And I said, "Well, why don't we pitch this to the New York Times?" And that's how the New York Times op-ed came about. And after that, the lovely people at Libright contacted us and asked whether or not we want to write the book.

The main purpose of this is to help people who are finding themselves in the middle of a rapidly authoritarianizing society and they don't have the narrative tools to describe what's happening around them. And describing what's happening is extremely important because only if you can name something can you then proceed to combat it. Sorry, this was a very long answer, but Maria, please fill in the gaps if I left any.

Maria Kuznetsova (14:54)

Yeah, I would only add that I was in the United States when the last presidential elections happened, and I immediately felt the shift. It was not just about all the news and new restrictions coming, but there was a new sense of fear on the streets of Boston and at Harvard University campus. People started to look around more because they thought that maybe there were plainclothes police coming. People started to be more depressed; some people started to disengage more. There was a sense of despair that I actually found very interesting because it felt to me, as someone coming from an authoritarian society, like, "Guys, it's actually time to act. You still have time. You still have opportunities. But I definitely see that you don't understand how important it is to act right now, not to lose momentum. Because with authoritarian societies, the more you wait, the more sacrifices you will have to make to get things back on track."

BJ Mendelson (16:16)

I think that's well said. And that brings me to some of the terms that I highlighted throughout the book. You mentioned, Maria, that the first presidential election featuring Trump was in 2016, and so "troll factories" was definitely something according to the Mueller investigation that was utilized by Team Trump or people closely associated with Team Trump. And I was hoping you might be able to tell us a little bit about the term "troll factories" as it appears in the book.

Maria Kuznetsova (16:45)

Dan, do you want to start, or should I?

Dan Storyev (16:47)

Right, yes, of course. So I can start a little bit and then hand it over to you. Troll factories were initially created—well, okay, wait. Let's take this from the top because this is complicated. Troll factories is actually a very complicated story because we don't necessarily know where the first troll factory was created.

This is something that has been popularized in the former USSR, in Russia as well as in Ukraine. We're not sure whether or not the Russians or Ukrainians were the pioneers here. We know that, for example, the United States employed troll factories in its covert campaigns all around the globe. We know that China has a troll factory. We know that Saudi Arabia has a troll factory. I think the activists there call it "the flies." And in China it's called the "Internet Water Army."

Now, what troll factories are in essence—at least what they sort of used to be initially—they are these government-funded facilities or facilities funded by shady operators, on which I will elaborate a little later. In these facilities, you have people who have actual contracts and their daily job is to go online and push a certain ideological narrative on social media. That's kind of the genesis of troll factories.

What happened in Russia and elsewhere is that troll factories became this sort of necessary tool for a wannabe political operator. For example, you might remember this charming gentleman by the name of Yevgeny Prigozhin.

BJ Mendelson (19:03)

Yes.

Dan Storyev (19:03)

Right. The former restaurant owner who then proceeded to become a warlord and then tried to do a coup—a mutiny, whatever that was—in Russia. And then—

BJ Mendelson (19:22)

Sure. Right.

Maria Kuznetsova (19:23)

Mm-hmm.

Dan Storyev (19:24)

He was promptly blown up by Vladimir Putin. So Prigozhin was actually famous for having a robust troll factory somewhere on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, and specifically for being very influential in the covert campaign to influence American elections in 2016. That was Prigozhin's operation. But at this point, you have a situation where a bunch of regional governments—for example, regional governors—have their own troll factories. These could be like five or six people.

This is something that leaves the domain of just being a singular institution that the state controls. Rather, you might end up with a situation, which is what happened in Russia. You have a lot of different political operators, and each of them has their paid trolls. That is something that then bleeds into civilian life as well. You end up having people who build entire communities around these completely fake narratives. These people are not paid. They don't have a contract. They don't work at an actual physical troll factory. But they need a friend online, or they find specific narratives that are pushed by these actual nefarious trolls. They find these narratives interesting, and so they end up building their identity around what is essentially a huge psyop. This is really important to understand when you're fighting, as you put it on your show quite succinctly, fascists and weirdos. These guys love to create a coherent narrative. These guys love to basically throw some money into a narrative which otherwise wouldn't have been picked up. And wouldn't you know it, in a year or so, first you have a couple of guys on their payroll typing away at the computer, propagating certain pro-fascist propaganda. But a year from then, you have a bunch of people who are unpaid, but they're still committed to the flag of the troll factory, so to speak.

Maria Kuznetsova (22:25)

Yeah, let me add to what Dan said. I think the main thing you need to understand about troll factories is that because it's actually real people writing real narratives, obviously they have themes and instructions, but because it's real people writing real things, it's often very hard to sustain.

A lot of us, especially if we believe in democracy and freedom, still have a really good impulse to engage and listen to other people and find a consensus. But what happens when you meet trolls is that they want you to engage. All of our good democratic instincts around looking at what other people think actually fail us. It's kind of similar to, you know, like even in probably medieval societies there were people you paid to follow the king and pretend that they liked him.

BJ Mendelson (23:41)

That's an excellent way to put it. Is there a term that might be in the book that describes those people?

Dan Storyev (23:53)

You mean the followers of the troll factories? In a way, I mean, actually, before we go into this, because we do have a really good term I want to talk about—but before going into this, I want to talk about something that troll factories end up doing. And this might be a little counterintuitive because our book, in many ways, is about resisting authoritarianism through understanding it further. But what our book also offers is an unflinching critique of many movements which oppose authoritarianism, right? Because we have been part of the anti-authoritarian movement in Russia, and I mean we are still part of the Russian anti-authoritarian dissident milieu. We have seen many pitfalls of that.

And so something that I think is worth mentioning is that in the book, in that particular entry, it's not only about troll factories. It's also about "elf factories." Elf factories were an enterprise that I think Maria could talk a little more about. It was an enterprise that was set up by Russian opposition and exile basically under the same logic as a troll factory would be. It was the same kind of operation in which people were actually paid to participate in pushing certain narratives online—only they were pushing kind of anti-Putin narratives, right? Anti-Kremlin narratives.

And a question that comes up here is: well, is this something that is worth doing? Is this something that would actually create a meaningful and sincere narrative? Or is this something that just turns our info space—our internet—into a struggle between several narratives, and all of these narratives are kind of botted, funded, and astroturfed one way or the other? That is a real problem.

So if I can bring a Saudi example here: in Saudi Arabia there is a similar dynamic where they have the pro-government troll army and then the anti-government movement calls itself the "bee army"—right, you know, the bees, like the little honey-bringing insects. The problem is that you might end up falling into a sort of groupthink that forbids you from thinking outside of the box. You end up being hung up on one particular narrative. You've seen that in the United States as well. I mean, you have seen a lot of what came to be derogatorily called "blue anon," right? And of course, most of that is just derogatory nonsense. But there is a grain of truth there. Sometimes, if you get overcommitted to a narrative while you're trying to combat a troll army or troll factory, you end up overplaying your hand a little bit.

I don't know if Maria wants to add to this.

Maria Kuznetsova (27:44)

Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing about the way troll factories work in Eastern Europe is that everyone is using them. It's well-documented.

BJ Mendelson (27:53)

Yes.

Maria Kuznetsova (27:54)

Vladimir Zelensky had troll factories supporting him. Maybe he was not involved in them directly, but they were supporting him. What Dan mentioned about elf factories—stories about Russian opposition employing very similar tactics to the Russian government. It's kind of a "war justifies the means" mentality. Ukraine has a lot of similar things targeted at the Russian populace right now. So it always comes to the question: can you use such methods if you believe your goals are right, if you believe that your propaganda is good? But at essence, what troll factories and elf factories do to our internet is that you now cannot trust anyone. It's especially true now with the rise of AI and AI-generated content. Basically, in the end, it just makes everyone distrust everyone.

I still see a lot of people in the American segment of the internet being sincerely engaged in conversations. That's not what happens in Eastern Europe anymore. In Eastern Europe, unless you see that it's a verified person with a real name, you automatically assume they're a troll and that they're paid to do this. In the end, it's also a mechanism that destroys the fabric of society and makes finding real compromise much more difficult.

BJ Mendelson (29:45)

Right. And that brings me to this other term: "We'll never know the whole truth."

Maria Kuznetsova (29:50)

Yeah.

BJ Mendelson (29:51)

So that kind of builds on this, right? What I'm hearing is that the troll factories shatter our shared reality, which creates this level of distrust to the point where people will say, "Well, we're never going to know the whole truth." We spend a lot of time on troll factories, which is really good, but just in the interest of time, let me ask: how far along do you think the United States is compared to where Russia is now?

Maria Kuznetsova (30:25)

Okay, so I've been living in the U.S. for the last two years, and I also have a lot of dissident friends from other countries who had to move to the U.S. in exile. One interesting thing that we see, that people without authoritarian experience, I don't think, realize, is that the current Trump administration is doing so many things right when it comes to going in an authoritarian direction as quickly as possible. It seems to me that they've studied the playbooks much better than pro-democracy movements studied theirs. They have plans, they follow the plans, and I don't see anything similar to that on the pro-democracy side. Which actually makes me worry a bit because a lot of things that I see happening—for example, with the prosecution of Jim Comey—I often have a feeling that such things shouldn't be happening right now, that it's too early in the authoritarianism of the United States for this to be happening. But it still does. Which actually at times feels like some of the things that they are doing right now, Putin has never dared to do in 10 to 15 years of his rule.

I see a lot of parallels, actually, with the late Putin regime—much closer to the war in Ukraine rather than with when Putin was just starting. Which is again very worrying. I do have a lot of trust in established American institutions of free speech and also the court system. But it still means that there is no timeline where everyone can comfortably wait for years. In authoritarian societies, we all know that the best moment to protest and to resist is right now. Because now, maybe what's going to happen to you is you're going to be detained for a few hours after a protest and then be let go. Maybe someone will call your workplace, or the police will try to call you and ask about things. But that's about it. But in a few years, there is a very likely possibility you're going to be prosecuted for memes and posts that intelligence agencies are going to have much more power over you.

One of the things that we talk about in the book, and that is something a lot of people talk about with Nazi Germany, is that people often wait until police come after their group and they don't help other groups survive. But again, the reality is that we need to support each other and help everyone who is prosecuted right now because we all are going to be next.

Dan Storyev (33:38)

Yeah, the thing about this is we don't have a clear answer of how far away the United States is because in pretty much the history of political science, we don't really have an example of a well-developed democracy—and not just a well-developed democracy, but the United States, the cornerstone of liberal democracy in the world today—descending into tyranny. Russia is a very different case because it could never quite develop a fully functioning democracy. So it was way easier for the tyrants to seize control.

But when I look at the United States, I see so many warning signs which, like Maria said, it seems like they're speedrunning the damn thing. I'm looking at, for example, the Antifa terrorist designation. And this is the exact thing that we talk about in our book where we talk about the so-called "toxic statuses," which is what Putin's Russia really kind of pioneered. You select a specific group of people that you don't like for political reasons, and you assign them, you brand them as legally terrorists. Russia has three different tiers of that: terrorist and extremist, undesirable, and foreign agent. And there are so many things that they've declared undesirable or extremist. For example, they declared the American Center for the Study of Salmon—like salmon, the fish—as extremist.

BJ Mendelson (35:27)

Okay. Yes.

Dan Storyev (35:28)

For whatever reason, they also—but this is, you know, this is all fun and games—declared the entirety of the LGBTQ+ movement as extremist. They called it the "international LGBT movement." So that's extremist; that's considered legally extremist in Russia. And what this means is that if you wear rainbow earrings or if you work at a gay bar, you may be legally liable for that. And that's what actually happened. I think there are three people now who are being tried, or if they're not in prison already—I haven't been following that case in Russia—for working at a gay bar.

And you see the same kind of playbook play out in the United States with the Proud Boys case, where people were accused of supporting a terrorist organization, in part for wearing black clothing, which in the mind of the prosecutors is associated with Antifa. One of them actually received a sentence—and I mean they received insane sentences, like something like hundreds of years.

BJ Mendelson (36:52)

Yes. Basically life sentences. Yeah, essentially each received life sentences in that case based on Signal messages that some forgot to delete, and yes, as you mentioned, the clothing and very, very suspect claims.

Dan Storyev (37:06)

Mm-hmm.

BJ Mendelson (37:07)

That were made against them.

Maria Kuznetsova (37:08)

Can I quickly add something?

Dan Storyev (37:09)

And one of the guys received it for moving a box of anarchist zines.

BJ Mendelson (37:14)

Zines. Yes.

Dan Storyev (37:16)

Yeah, think about that. This is literally what we've seen in Russia just a few years ago.

Maria Kuznetsova (37:17)

Really?

BJ Mendelson (37:22)

Yeah, Maria, please.

Maria Kuznetsova (37:23)

I just want to add one more thing here. So I don't think it's obvious that if you engage in political activism you may be prosecuted, but what happens in Russia and what's already happening in the U.S. is that the same thing can happen to commercial organizations and businesses that cross the government's path.

One of the organizations that Russia calls extremist is Meta, the company that owns Facebook and WhatsApp, because a lot of Russians use them to avoid censorship. What happens in the United States is that Anthropic declined to cooperate with the Pentagon on giving full access to new Claude for potential war crimes documentation in the future. Anthropic was designated a supply-chain risk, which is basically also a political toxic status being leveled against a business.

BJ Mendelson (38:23)

Yes. Yeah, and they've continued to make efforts to bully and intimidate Anthropic since then. We only have a few minutes left, so I wanted to ask you both real quick: Is there a particular term that, if you had to pick one to give to an American right now who maybe doesn't realize what's happening, what would that term be?

Maria Kuznetsova (38:50)

There is a term in Russian that comes from the times of Stalin's purges: "Give me the man and I will find the crime." This means that authoritarian governments choose their targets first, and then they just find a pretense to prosecute them. A lot of political repression, especially in more savvy and more educated 21st century contexts, comes from seemingly non-political criminal charges. You can be prosecuted for alleged corruption, or for, you know, even just filling out your taxes wrongly, or your contract expired and we just didn't extend it. "Sorry, it's not political prosecution." We see that already happening with late-night American television hosts. And what we really need to understand is that this prosecution is political in nature, but it will pretend not to be.

We really have to look into the root of things and not be fooled by what it says formally. And because that's, like, again a distraction tactic that comes back to the internet of things and troll factories, where the goal is just to confuse people and give a lot of different versions of events so that we don't see so clearly that it's political.

Dan Storyev (40:33)

Right. I mean, I think for my part, there are just so many terms I could list. There is Siloviki, which is this kind of "men of power"—a special caste that the government relegates the monopoly of power to, and then they wreak constant terror on the citizenry. I mean, that's what ICE is doing now, more or less. And then there is also budgetniki, or "the budget people," which is when you create essentially a population that is dependent on you financially. And so they kind of vote basically in whichever direction you tell them. This is something that I think Elon Musk was trying to create with his campaign in Wisconsin. Then there is "near abroad," which is kind of how you conceptualize all the countries in your sphere of influence—where it's abroad but not quite. This used to be a specifically Russian term, but as the Washington Post revealed, I think about a year ago, it was actually used in a Department of Defense memorandum—an internal memorandum—toward, I believe, Canada and Panama.

But something that I kind of want to leave the listeners with is nadezhda umiraet posledney, which is a beautiful Russian saying that basically translates as "hope is the last thing that will die." And I think this is something that is important to keep in mind when you are finding yourself in a dictatorial moment, in a moment when tyranny is darkening around you. Very often, the only thing that you will have is hope, and you need to make sure that this is something that dies last—or ideally doesn't die at all.

BJ Mendelson (42:38)

Where can we find the book? It's out in September. Where can we find your work? How can we support what you're doing?

Dan Storyev (42:43)

Well, you can follow me on social media at @Storyev. It's my surname. I'm most active on Twitter, unfortunately, but hoping to become more active on Bluesky. In terms of the book, it will be sold wherever you get your books, starting on September 29th in the United States and sometime in early November in Europe and the U.K.

BJ Mendelson (43:23)

Today's episode of Privacy Tips was recorded in Hollywood, California, and is sponsored by DuckDuckGo. It was written, produced, and hosted by me, BJ Mendelson. Before we go, I want to give a shout-out to the production team at Stupid Sexy Privacy, which includes Andrew Van Voris, Rosie Tran, and Amanda King. And of course, our friends at DuckDuckGo.

If you enjoyed today's show, we hope you'll take a moment to leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening. This won't take more than two minutes of your time. You see, we have this crazy goal, and we need your help to achieve it: we want 5 percent of Americans to be 1 percent better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdos. Leaving us a review can help make that happen. That's because your reviews will help other people find the show. So please take a moment to leave us a review, and we'll see you next Thursday on Privacy Tips.