Russia is Not the Country you Think it Is

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into the complex geopolitical landscape surrounding Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. Malcolm breaks down the true motivations behind Putin's actions, dispelling common misconceptions about Russia's defense against NATO and the reunification of ancient Russian territories. He reveals how Russia's heavy reliance on oil and gas revenue drives its foreign policy decisions, leading to a catastrophic miscalculation that has essentially resulted in the self-genocide of the Russian people. The discussion also covers the surprising Muslim population within Russia, the country's masterful propaganda tactics, and the potential for a future power struggle that could reshape the global political landscape.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] this also shows me that the argument that this is about self defense for Russia is wrong, or that this is about defense against NATO

Simone Collins: is wrong.

Oh yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self defense capacity that they have. Yeah, if he

Malcolm Collins: was actually worried about self defense, he would, he would have stopped the war a long time ago leaving a government like that in power in the Ukraine was not worth a guaranteed death of his entire ethnocultural group. Yeah. Which is what he is putting in place.

You see, Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them, until they reached their limit and shut down.

Malcolm Collins: Like we should stop sending billions to the Ukraine. Like, Whoa, don't you know that a lot of it is being like funneled back into Democrat politicians pockets and stuff like it.

It's like, yeah, all of that is true, but you would know what we're not sending to the Ukraine right now, our own people.

Simone Collins: Because it's neutralizing what was once a non trivial threat. Not a non trivial threat,

Malcolm Collins: the single [00:01:00] greatest threat to America's geopolitical power for the last century.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited for you to bring some stats to the table. Stats episodes are always the best, but I also want to apply sort of geopolitical knowledge to a world issue that I've noticed, especially within right leaning communities. There's a lot of misconceptions about what's going on and what the motivations are of various players.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I I titled our stupid stream yard room, Russia. I do not think that country means what you think it means, which is. The thing that came across my inbox this week, which I thought was fascinating. So. And very underrated sub stack called axis of ordinary by Alexander cruel is a daily part of my reading routine, even though I have cut pretty much everything else out, sadly, due to workload and whatnot.

Y'all check it out. It's great. He has a lot of spicy links. A lot of it's AI, a lot [00:02:00] of it's Ukraine, and then a lot of, some of it's psychology and science. He'll share a roundup of links with short summaries. Very great sub stack. It's free to subscribe. And he's a very thoughtful person, though I've never talked with him.

I don't know him. But on a recent roundup, a daily roundup that he shared, he shared this about Russia, which very much surprised me. So he starts with a quote from Vladimir Putin. Russia's cultural and ethnic diverse diversity is Russia's strength. Our state was built around the values of multi ethnic harmony.

Then Krull proceeds to write, many people on the political right, admire Russia and see Putin as the savior of white Christendom. What they don't know is that Russia is a higher percentage of Muslims than, say, Germany. And it's not because of an open border policy. Worse, instead of building a wall, Putin has sacrificed thousands of Russian soldiers, not only to keep Muslims in Russia against their will, but to give them Russian passports, which has led to numerous [00:03:00] major terror attacks, such as the Beslan school massacre that ended with the deaths of 334 people, which I haven't even heard of,

at an official event where Putin gifted a copy of the Koran during a visit to a mosque, he noted that the desecration of the Koran is a crime in Russia. Nikita Zurolev, a teenager who burned a Koran, was extradited to Chechnya under Putin's watch. There he was tortured and beaten on camera. In 2015, Putin inaugurated the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, a city where tens of thousands of Muslims fill the street for Eid prayers.

Russia has also introduced the Islamic banking system. P. S. One of Russia's most famous TV hosts, the Jewish Vladimir Solovyov, recently chanted Allahu Akbar in front of Russia's Islamist mercenaries. So I think the biggest thing that really surprised me here was this. This note about Germany that there's a higher percentage of Muslims in Russia than Germany [00:04:00] wild because everyone, you, you have this vision of Russia, which is these blonde bombshell women and these stoic.

Statuesque men,

Malcolm Collins: right? Well, the vision, I mean, I want to be clear, and this is where people get Russia wrong, they get it wrong for a few core reasons. One is, is they are aware that there is this superficial view of Russia. That was the way we painted them as our enemy in the cold war. There's the new view of Russia, which is coming because of.

Putin's PSYOPs campaigns in the West. Specifically, he wanted to appeal to right leaning political groups. And he did that by acting as if he was like this and keep in mind, like we've got nothing against Muslims or anything like that, but what I would say is that the image that a lot of people have of Putin being a Is not correlated with his behavior at all.

Simone Collins: Yeah, he represents a bastion of, well, they say Western culture, Western civilization, but really people are referring to broadly Christianity. If I [00:05:00] had their,

Malcolm Collins: they're referring to like an old school, like homophobic which, which Russia is, I should be clear about that. White centered Christian and And a lot of people, as we point out, I mean, racists are generally dumber than the general population.

So it's very easy to confuse them with these sorts of tactics. And a lot of them have actually been swayed into believing this iteration of Putin and believing his motivations around this war. Because I think the question could be. You could say, well, why is Putin doing all this if his goal is the savior of like old European values and a return to, you know, Christendom and a return to ethno states?

And it's because that's not what Russia is doing. That is not what Why they are invading the Ukraine that has nothing to do with it, this idea of they're not, and a lot of people on the right, I've actually seen believe this like, like a right wing conspiracy theories that there are like Nazis in the Ukraine, which there were, there were Nazi sympathy groups in the Ukraine that were [00:06:00] bigger than in other regions, but they were not it.

Like it wasn't like the country was about to become a Nazi state or something like that, right? This would be the same way that the left will find, you know, somebody making okay signs at a rally and then be like, Oh we're, we're gonna go attack them because the, the, 4chan, that's a long story about how that became a thing in the U.

S. But there are occasional Nazis in like U. S. rightist groups as well, right? If we allowed that to be used as justification for the extermination of those entire populations, like that's quite another thing. And that isn't his justification because that, that's not what he's fighting for, right?

He's not fighting for a return to this whole system. So the question is, what is he fighting for? Like what motivates Russia's foreign policy decisions? When you look at Russia's recent history, and Putin came to power. And even before that, to an extent it becomes clear what's motivating Russia. The mistake is [00:07:00] seeing Russia as a nation state because it doesn't think, act, or is motivated like a nation state.

It is motivated by Like a oil and gas cartel really like a mob that makes the majority of its money from oil and gas, and all of, and when I say the majority of its money, over 50 percent of the state revenue come, in Russia, comes from oil and gas. That's huge. It motivates their every decision. Like I can't, I can't, I can't.

Overstate how big that would be if 50 percent of your state's revenue and the state was a totalitarian state was a single leader was coming from one industry. Basically, that means that that state leader is basically CEO of a company in that industry with no laws that apply to them. Interested in advancing the cause of that industry.

And we can see this because of how much money Putin has been squirreling away. He hasn't been using the money that he's generating to improve, you know, Russia's quality of life or anything like that. He has been taking huge, huge amounts and squirreling it away for his descendants. [00:08:00] So the question is.

Well, where do you see this in, in foreign policy? Right? Well, so first when, when the Soviet union broke up their first goal, and I'm, I'm going to put a video here. There's a great video. If you want to go into this in great detail where they go over that's in way more details, but I'm just going to give you the top notes.

If you find these topics interesting and what to go much deeper on them, as well as look into sources, I strongly suggest a video called Russia's catastrophic oil and gas problem.

Uh, by real life lore, which is one of the best summaries of this particular subject I've seen on the internet.

Malcolm Collins: There's a huge problem with a lot of oil in Kazakhstan because that could be a, a, a competitor to Russia. So, they made a point of owning 42 percent of their oil pipelines and industry, and they're basically a client state, so they don't really worry about them.

And then they ensured that all of the oil that was going out of Kazakhstan was being shipped through Russia, through pipes that go through Russia and out of Russian ports. Azure by Jan also had a lot of oil in the region. But Azure by Jan could only get its [00:09:00] oil out without going through a Russian controlled area or one of their, their enemy areas by putting a pipeline through Georgia, what happened immediately after they put this pipeline through Georgia, Russia invades Georgia.

Okay, let's go a bit further into the future. Wait, what, what,

Simone Collins: what about all that, that news coverage about. Putin having this obsession with Russia's history and this narrative. We're going to get into

Malcolm Collins: that in a second. I'm just going over the data first. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting.

All right.

So then a discovery gets made in the Ukraine that, that Ukraine, it controls Europe's second largest known reserves of natural gas. And almost 80 percent of that is east of the Dnipro river, which is important. So they were then in talks with, they had a deal signed with Shell, Exxon, and Mobil to come in and produce that gas.

Well, that was, was a huge chunk of that that was under those contracts was in the Donbas. That was the region that Russia fought in. First annex a while [00:10:00] back that ended up in validating all of the contracts that they had signed to improve this. And to give you an idea of how much this would matter to Russia right now their primary competitor in that space is, in Scandinavia. And because of that, but, but this coming onto the market would represent 3x what Scandinavia is bringing to the market in terms of a competitor. This is actually sort of existential for Russia to stop because, and a lot of people are like, yeah, but they're not like, they, they do the math.

They're like, okay, but even if they capture all of these reserves and then start selling them, it doesn't. Like it doesn't add to their, their bottom line budget that much. And it's like, bro, you're completely misunderstanding their goal here. Their goal is not to sell it. It's to prevent it from entering the market.

Um, when Russia attacked. They had just gotten the, the Ukraine, they had just gotten a, another pro rest president and things were beginning to look stable enough for the oil companies to begin investing in developing [00:11:00] these, these assets which would have been really catastrophic for Russia.

And we need to, you know, to get an idea of how much Russia. Thinks about this sort of stuff for a while, I think it was up until

yeah, as late as 2005, 80 percent of Russian oil went through the Ukraine brotherhood network. And this was always causing conflict between Russia and the Ukraine because the Ukraine would ask for like charge fees on this. And a lot of conservatives are like, well, the Ukraine was just robbing Russia.

And so it makes sense that they had to go in to gain control of this network. Right. But that's actually. False. Russia had already built by the time the war had started the two Nord Stream pipelines and a separate pipeline that went south around

the Ukraine and they weren't shipping nearly as much oil through the Brotherhood network anymore.

So no, it was not about access to those pipelines. Anyone who is telling you that is lying to you. That's, that wasn't what was causing the conflict anymore. The conflict was the development of these new natural gas and, and so being an oil company that also runs the state, you know, they would, something like this makes sense [00:12:00] if you fundamentally do not care about your citizens, and this is where it gets really interesting and where what Russia did.

become so absolutely insane in the light of what you're hearing. Like, oh, are they building, like, I've heard that he really cares about the history and everything like that and blah blah blah. Russia has a desperately low fertility rate. Ukraine has a desperately low fertility rate. He's basically killing an entire generation of young men.

And, and a much

Simone Collins: more, he must know it, he can't be blind to this

Malcolm Collins: for sure, much more than you would have in a historic context. So it was really fascinating. Like this is the first time in history a nation is essentially genociding itself through something that is really, really interesting about the world.

What one is, is either like two of the most culturally aligned groups in the world. Right? Like he's, he's killing his own people with his own people. Like, if you care about like the Slavic nationality this is the very last thing you would do if you had an IDA fertility rates. I'm, I'm, Peter Zyhan theory, we'll get to it in a second.

It's [00:13:00] also. Probably super wrong. And I, I don't agree with everything Peter Zeihan says. I think he's smart, but I think he's wrong. This is being, well, I'll just get to the theory right now. Okay. Yeah, dive into it. Peter Zeihan thinks that the reason that this war is happening is twofold. One is Russia wants additional population.

And this is their last chance to really make a play for these resources demographically speaking, which is true. And the second is, is they're trying to capture choke points, which are important for invasions into their territory. And they think that by capturing the region of the Ukraine they can capture more of these choke points.

And so they're sort of forced into this war. I do not think that is it. The truth is, is while Russia pretends that NATO wants to attack it all the time. Anyone who has the barest context of reality knows that NATO is a bunch of pussies. They are not going to wage an aggressive war. They may, like, if they were able to loop Ukraine into their dealings, it was because Russia was threatening Ukraine.

Like, NATO couldn't [00:14:00] even get Sweden and Norway in, right? Because of Russia's sabre rattling. You really think they were going to get the Ukraine in? Realistically speaking, no! Like, it's absurd. Like, it's just. Silly, silly, silly argument there. They were forcing to do this because, because he'd kept Sweden and Norway from even joining NATO, which are like hugely culturally aligned with Europe.

Until he did this, which then gave them the cover to join. So no, that they would have, and very obviously that would have been the consequence of this attack. You know, so no, that was stupid as well. That is not why he was doing this. But then the second thing, you know, Is, is to Peter Zeihan's play, okay, so he's going out there and he's trying to capture these choke points, but choke points don't matter in the type of war that he needs to defend against.

The type of war that he needs to defend against are people coming in and assassinating him or people fermenting unrest within his population, you know, that's the way the Western world takes people out. And it's the way the Western world has taken people out for a while at this point, outside [00:15:00] of countries that are You know, that have any way to protect themselves.

Well, he seems duly afraid

Simone Collins: of that as well. We

Malcolm Collins: know. I mean, when we go to countries that like, when we go to war, right, they're often countries that don't have like big formal militaries, they are multiple levels of bow below us in the tech tree in something like Civ Russia is not like that to us, you know, they have nuclear weapons, we're not going to go in and, and, and attack them in that way.

And as such. He needs to focus much more on maintaining local support, which he had done pretty well. Then he needs to go out and try to capture like geographic choke points. He needs to focus much more on the international politics, which he was doing very well. He was bringing So what's going on?

Is he losing his

Simone Collins: mind?

Malcolm Collins: Like, no, we'll get to it. He's not, you know, it was, it was all a economic play for him. But we'll get to the economic play in just

Simone Collins: a second. He's poorly prioritizing is what you're saying. He's

Malcolm Collins: very poorly prior. And it's actually incredibly stupid prioritization. And we can get to why in just a second.

But, you know, [00:16:00] he had won a major victory in turning the U. S. right to become a pro Russian party, and the European right to become a pro Russian party. And I think that he lost that was like basically all of the sane thinkers who aren't just like conspiracy people who believe all the stuff that's being fed to them.

And so, Then we want to talk about like the self genocide of Russia. So Russia is in a very unique position from a global history perspective and that they are able to genocide themselves. See, historically speaking, if I was a country like Russia and I was just sending all of my young men to another country to die and they were dying at the rates that they're dying right now I would have some, Restraint, like I would keep some men home, right?

Because I need to be able to defend the homeland. The way they are acting isn't like that. They are not acting as if they are trying to it's like that famous scene from Gattaca, right? When he goes, I never save any for the swim home. That's my except they need them to make babies. And they are just, dying in [00:17:00] numbers that you would, and this also shows me that the argument that this is about self defense for Russia is wrong, or that this is about defense against NATO

Simone Collins: is wrong.

Oh yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self defense capacity that they have. Yeah, if he

Malcolm Collins: was actually worried about self defense, he would, he would have stopped the war a long time ago and just, you know, stuck on what he had like that. The, the moment that he realized this was going to be a long slog or last year or at any point, even now he should stop because his country is becoming weaker and weaker and weaker in terms of if NATO actually did decide to attack and the rest of the world no longer respects his country as like a place to do business.

Now, a lot of people can be like, oh, but he went into this war. thinking it would be a quick war quick war or long war it still went against his best interests and he knew it wasn't going to be a quick war was in like the first few months of the war so he should have recalibrated he should have stopped sending men to die so you could say oh but he's doing all of this for some sort of like ancient [00:18:00] reunification goal yeah

Simone Collins: back to my what i kept reading about him this had nothing to do with logic it was about A narrative of Russia that Putin is obsessed with

Malcolm Collins: restoring.

Yeah. So there is something in wars called Cossia Belli. And anyone who has played you know, Europa Universalis or Kings Crusader Kings two or three. Cossia Belli is a very important.

You can't just attack a territory without having a reason to attack the territory. Even the U S does this. Everyone does this they make up some logical justification for attacking the territory. He can't say I need to prevent them from getting these natural gas deals done. So what he says is and he had a very strong Kossio belly like Ukraine was from a certain standpoint, unjustly separated from Russia, right?

It's very important when you're examining any war that's happening to not misconstrue the Casia belly for the actual motivation for going into war. Look at something like Vietnam is a great example. The Casia [00:19:00] belly for the war was that we did not want.

Did Vietnamese people to suffer. Under a communist dictator, but the actual motivation for the war was domino theory in fighting against communist expansion.

where they were our primary geopolitical rivals. To put it in another way. A Casia belly is how you explain the war to your heart, but. It's not logically while you're actually spending the billions of dollars, that it actually costs to go into a war. Nor the lives of your people during the war. No. If an individual is looking at this and they're like, come on. A major world power.

Wouldn't go to war just over oil and gas. And here, I, I just have to, like, what, what, what world have you been living in, in the last century? If you think that oil and gas with even a major motivator. In some of America's recent wars [00:20:00] consider that. Over 50% of our government's income is not funded by those industries directly.

Okay. In Russia. It is. And the guy who owns all of those companies, Practically speaking is also the guy who runs the entire government.

Malcolm Collins: Like, I am not Actually against his justification for the war that the justification doesn't make like a historic context of why you can declare wars. It makes logical sense. There was a Russian population in the Ukraine. There was political unrest in the Ukraine that could be tied to Nazi groups. Like all of that can look very aesthetically good.

The problem was. is that as soon as he realized the actual cost of the war, even with all of that justification, leaving a government like that in power in the Ukraine was not worth a guaranteed death of his entire ethnocultural group. Yeah. Which is what he is putting in place. I mean, he will be remembered in history as the [00:21:00] man who killed the Slavic people in the Slavic world.

It is, it is. Did anyone, and this is where like, I'm often like, like people are like, Oh, but he's sort of winning at times and it's like his theory for war. And then we've literally seen this is the Zach Brannigan theory of war.

 The Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see, Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them, until they reached their limit and shut down.

Kif, show them the medal I won.

Malcolm Collins: And that's basically his strategy right now is just wave after wave of a scarce and increasingly scarce commodity for Russians, which is, Human beings, which are dying out in Russia. And you could say, well, you could fix this with some form of like polygyny or something like that among the remaining Russians.

And it's like, it doesn't have a cultural background for that. And I don't see them as. I don't see him as implementing that. I don't see that working now. Yeah. What's going to happen is they've already [00:22:00] lost like basically all of their talent, which is hugely important. If you create an action that makes every man who is like a competent programmer or a competent worker in any extent leave the country, which largely happened the, the exodus of young men from the country was catastrophically large.

You have made your country like in terms of like genetic and cultural selection effects Markedly less competent and less able to compete in where the future of the world is going. And so, you know i'll title this episode something ultra provocative like uh Putin are people who sent for putin are like more pathetic than the people who sent for biden because in truth biden is a better Putin was as bad as Biden is.

At least he's not genociding his own ethnic group. You know, and I'd also point out now, a lot of people are like, why is the U S fighting here? Like we should stop sending billions to the Ukraine. Like, Whoa, don't you know that a lot of it is being like funneled back into [00:23:00] Democrat politicians pockets and stuff like it.

It's like, yeah, all of that is true, but you would know what we're not sending to the Ukraine right now, our own people. Yeah. And people are like, what? The U. S. fight Russian interests? That would never happen. Excuse me, like, is history not taught anymore?

Our last, like, two giant bloody wars, both Vietnam and Korea, were about fighting Russian

Simone Collins: interests.

War that was, you know, really, really big in society was the cold war, you

Malcolm Collins: know? Yeah, all of it. And Russia, if you look at my, my sister in law actually worked in counterterrorism within Georgia for a while.

To clarify, she is an American without any Georgian sympathies. She was just working in Georgia and terrorism because that is where there were more active terrorists when she was trying to learn her chops.

 And I mentioned the Georgia part to show just how much she knows about the geopolitics [00:24:00] of Russia specifically.

Malcolm Collins: And she's an expert in this space and she's like, look, all of the, like, if you look at the actual, like, probability of war between countries, the probability of war between the United States and Russia is still by far the highest in the world.

Of like any major power, like we, the probably the nuclear

Simone Collins: arsenal is that it has

Malcolm Collins: to do with the state control structure, the economic interests that we have and the lack of economic ties that we have, whereas something like a war with China, unless they like literally just go crazy is much less likely because they are so reliant on imports.

For like basically economically surviving. Whereas the same isn't true for Russia. Yeah. I mean, you could see even with all the sanctions, they, because so much of their state is dependent on oil,

Simone Collins: isn't Iran then in a similar Iran in a similar position?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Iran is in a similar position and there is a high likelihood of war between the U S and Iran, which is one of the reasons we're always so like feisty with them.

But yeah, so there was a

Simone Collins: very feisty with them.

Malcolm Collins: There wasn't a high likelihood of a future war [00:25:00] with Iran. Russia. And the fact that Russia has now, and in terms of what wars cost, like, I would encourage you to look at the cost adjusted, like, what did the Korean war cost us? What did the Vietnam war cost us?

And you're too lazy to go and check this, The entire Ukraine war so far has cost us half of what we would spend on the Vietnam war in just one year and keep in mind that the Vietnam war lasted 10 years. And that war wasn't even directly about weakening Russian interests or killing Russians in this war. Russia is literally depleting their own military potentiality. Permanently. No here, you might be saying something like, well, that's quite monstrous of you to use. Ukrainian fighters for us is longterm geopolitical interests. And it's like, they're choosing to defend the territory on their own Russia choosed to attack [00:26:00] the territory on their own. And if you're like, oh, the U S goated Russia into this. Not really, this was almost an entirely self-imposed mistake on Putin's part.

The us up until this point was just being a fairly normal, rational geopolitical actor in this space. Doing the same types of one-sided fel favor deals that we do all over the world every day. This was Putin. Self owning himself in an attempt to maintain control of the oil and gas market while doing something that he felt worked from a, you know, Casia belly situation.

I do feel for the pain of the Ukrainian people who are in this war. But also rationally speaking. If you just look at Russian. Client territories. If Russia does win this war, The Ukrainian people. will live worse [00:27:00] lives than they will live. If Russia doesn't win this war, like they are not fighting for nothing. They are fighting for something meaningful, whether or not you support Russia.

This is just a rational and obvious truth.

Malcolm Collins: For pennies on the dollar, we basically tricked Russia into genociding itself because of a massive miscalculation that they're making. I don't care if 90 percent of that money is going to graft. I don't care if 98 percent of that money is going to graft.

Simone Collins: Because it's neutralizing what was once a non trivial threat.

Not a non trivial threat,

Malcolm Collins: the single greatest threat to America's geopolitical power for the last century.

Like, like, I, I just, people have short memories. They're, they're familiar with who our most recent enemy is and, and a threat that is likely in the future going to become an extremist Muslim power.

And a lot of people are like, what? I'm like, just look at the demographics, man. Like all of the infrastructure in Europe. Like if that's who you're afraid of from those stats that [00:28:00] Simone was talking about, if you're afraid that Germany is going to become an extremist Muslim power Russia's already, you know, getting people like beaten to near death for burning the Koran at like the executive level, they already have more Muslims per capita.

And I, again, have nothing, like, Muslims come in many different stripes and there are lots of groups of Muslims that are very useful to a country and can work well within pluralistic societies. But there are also lots of groups of Muslims that can't. The ones in Russia are the ones that keep doing the terrorism.

How do I know that? Because they keep doing the terrorism. It's a huge problem that Russia already has. There are already efforts to overthrow the government among Muslim extremist groups, and they're often some of the biggest organized military powers within the Russian regime. So if Russia got weak one very likely thing would be one of the extremist Muslim groups that is already military And is mad at Putin for killing their young men for no reason.

If this war fails, might just make a run on the Capitol. And [00:29:00] we saw that with a culturally aligned group with Brugosin. But because, you know, a lot of people in Moscow still support, Putin, a lot of people, you would need sort of an outside cultural group to really do this, and that's why it's incredibly likely that if there is some sort of conflict in Russia, it would be the extremist Muslims to take over.

That would be

Simone Collins: such a, an interesting twist in terms of at least how Americans view Russia because it just, it's so out of left field. It's the last place I would have expected

Malcolm Collins: to have, you know, I mean, Russia regularly gets taken over by, you know, hordes of nomads. That's just like a historic thing that come from within its borders.

Yeah. So I, I, I think that even if that's your take, it's important to like wake up and realize that Russia is not what Putin paints it as was in the propaganda that you are getting as a Westerner propaganda is propaganda. It is meant to manipulate [00:30:00] you. But I want to hear your thoughts.

Simone Collins: I'm just I'm just so surprised.

I don't, I think the weird thing is that despite hearing all this and reading all this, I'm still going to be Russia the way that I did since I was a child watching. What was that show called? Rocky and Bullwinkle. You know what I mean? It's interesting to me how solidified Russia specifically is in my mind, perhaps because of the cold war, which we grew up right at the close of it, or we were born right at the close of it, you know, in the very late eighties.

So it's just weird to me that this, you see, you can say all this stuff, but it's just not going to stick with me. Russians are still going to be Russians. Like

Malcolm Collins: a rightist versus leftist thing. So a great example of this is you know, until fairly recently, a quarter of Germany's power was coming from nuclear power plants.

Coincidentally, right. If they were building the Nord stream pipelines, the green party, which is supposed to care about the environment decides based on like the urging of Greta [00:31:00] Thornburg, who I have reason to believe it gets a huge portion of her funding from Putin and Russian interests the campaign to get those all taken down.

There are many leftist agents, especially within the environmentalist movement that are specifically being elevated and used by Russia for this you know, you know, oil goal. It's not like the Russia only supports rightist politicians. They'll support the Green Party in the way that they're attempting to brainwash populations if that is of utility to them.

Because like, it's insane. Why would you do that?

Simone Collins: Why can Russia be so inept with the war effort, with all this stuff, but then nail propaganda in a way that, at least in our opinion, other nations aren't. And other people who, you know, specialize in national security have been. Insistent that China's amazing at manipulating.

China's

Malcolm Collins: terrible at propaganda. Well, that's,

Simone Collins: that's what we think. But anyway, so we think Russia's masterclass level at manipulating our perception. Why are they sucking at everything else and not this? [00:32:00] Well,

Malcolm Collins: so as to why specifically they're good at propaganda and China is bad at propaganda It is twofold.

The bigger one is they culturally understand us much better. China thinks that they can undermine the average American citizens, trust and faith in the government by pointing out to the average American citizen that their government is like corrupt or bad. And it's like, that does nothing. They're like, look, look at your.

Politicians, they're corrupt and your average American is like, yes, that's like core to our cultural understanding. And they're like no, no, no, no. Look at your country. It did a bad thing overseas. Americans are like, yes, we're taught that in elementary school. The government pays to teach us that. We are very immune to propaganda that is meant, because in China that would be seen as like catastrophic.

GASP Our government did something naughty. They, they did the Tiananmen massacre. They, our politicians are corrupt or don't have our best interests at heart. That would be catastrophic to a Chinese person because I think that way they, they can't model America well. In [00:33:00] Russia and among the populations that Russia uses to do these, these things, most Russians know that they can't really trust their government.

They've known this since communist times. This has been like a part, a core thing within Russia for a long time. So the way that Russia ends up. Doing its overseas political operations is it ends up elevating the extremists on both sides. Sometimes with direct affiliation, sometimes without direct affiliation.

So that's why they're funding both, you know, QAnon conspiracy theories as well as you know, Greta Thunberg. That's why they're funding you know, both far left green party people because they're trying to, and this was found. In the Trump election, a lot of people are like, Oh, the, the election integrity stuff on the left was all phony.

And a lot of it was like, I don't think the, the, you know, this was a phony campaign on the left, but what was true? And we like have the receipts for this is that Russian operatives was in environments like Facebook would start competing protests. And then. [00:34:00] Trick them into like appearing at the same location to try to get them to fight each other This was what Russia was doing.

They were trying to get you Americans to fall into more extremist positions Which is so funny. It's so

Simone Collins: good. That's yeah. Well, that's

Malcolm Collins: how you trick Americans You don't trick them by saying your government hates you you say oh the people on the other side They're actually way more bad than you've been told and all americans know this secretly and they're like, yeah They are more bad and here's what you can do and then they get them in an environment where it causes direct civil conflict This is if you look at something like antifa like if you are a rightist right now and you think oh russia founded some pro trump Stuff I would almost guarantee if you follow the money almost all of the money that antifa is getting is coming from russia They'd say, Oh, it's true.

Marxists was in Russia that are funding them because they're dumb as bricks. And they, and they talk about who their funding is coming from and we know that it's coming from people who they consider true Marxist. Where do they think that's coming from? You know, these are tankies, right? I don't know if people know what a tanky is.

That's a type of progressive that [00:35:00] thinks that the Russian style communism is actually good. And yeah. That's so funny.

Simone Collins: I forgot. And then you said tankies and I'm like, oh, anime girls, but that's still the same thing. No, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: These are people who think like Russia and China. I know, but they also have like

Simone Collins: their avatars online are almost always anime girls.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They, they are funded by Russia. Yeah, I don't know how you don't know that. In fact, I would argue that more money has gone from Russia to create Antifa than has gone to create the pro Trump movement. And people who think otherwise are just blind to what's going on. It is a good thing for us at least that Russia, that Putin has decided to get rid of his own people.

That's not that we couldn't have a productive relationship with the Slavic people. But we would need Very different politics on the ground, and we probably need to turn Russia into a client state of the United States which I think is the best outcome of all of this, given how weak Russia is becoming which, which could still happen if we play specific cards, right?

Even when the power struggle does come for who takes over after Putin. The [00:36:00] U. S. Backed faction wins because I'm, I think that we've sort of gotten over this whole spreading democracy everywhere and understand that, you know, U. S. Favorable you know, dictators within some regions are just going to be more stable and lead to less overall suffering than trying to put democracies in cultures that don't, I mean, Russia is often called a kleptocracy.

But it's not really a kleptocracy. It's a it's a, it's a, it's a stable company.

Simone Collins: Very interesting. Well, I mean, yeah, this was eyeopening for me. So fun

Malcolm Collins: conversation. Yeah. It's going to really piss off some of our watchers. I know that because this is one of those things that a lot of people on the right really have their mind made up about.

And it's such a silly thing. Like, And, and, and, and just, you know, like on other, like we are super pro Israel in the Israel war. Like on other issues, we take the staunchly conservative side, but I don't mind if we're destroying what's left of the communist empire.

Simone Collins: So there you have it. [00:37:00] I love you, Malcolm Collins.

I

Malcolm Collins: love you too.