Hello everyone, and welcome back to People Juwan and Old Podcast.

I had this episode slotted for way later in the year, but the subject matter suddenly seemed so relevant and so timely that I shifted everyone around to get this episode out to you.

Today I'm interviewing Alexander Rajavan, the vice president of Counter foreign malign influence at Deaf 9 Solutions Counter foreign malign influence.

Wow, what a mouthful is basically fancy language for when foreign governments try to do coercive, deceptive or criminal activities to influence another country's attitudes, perceptions, or behaviors.

It's information warfare, basically.

Alexander, whom I call Sasha, also happens to be a very dear friend.

We met on the same AJC delegation, traveling to Japan in 2023 and being 2 Ukrainian Jews.

We hit it off instantly, obviously, and I have been so grateful for his friendship since.

Born in the United States to two Jews from Ukraine, Sasha is a multilingual, interdisciplinary gremlin who synthesizes his theater background and legal training as an intelligence, policy, media and film analyst.

Specializing in, as I mentioned, information warfare.

He regularly speaks about democratic counter disinformation legislation and the importance of cultural production in information warfare.

He believes that humanity's education is key to democracy, success in the information, and is always surprised when information warfare is fought without understanding culture.

Sasha also teaches in lectures on Soviet and post Soviet information warfare history, tactics and strategy, and moonlights as a published translator.

Now the title of this episode is inflammatory, but sadly I don't think it makes it any less true.

Sasha walks us through his conclusions after years of doing work in his field on why we are where we are today as a society and what we can expect or what can be done about it.

Because let's be honest, something is off and it's been off for a while.

It was certainly off following October 7th, but what Sasha argues is that it went off the rails way before then, that the paradigm shift really happened in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine and the global climate fundamentally changed offline.

Sasha joked that he's been nauseous for 11 years because this feeling that we're all in together now, it started for him in 2014.

You will hear Sasha make his points and you can decide if you agree with him or not.

But what I want to draw your attention to specifically is the idea of postmodernism that Sasha introduces.

Postmodernism is a mid to late 20th century intellectual, cultural, and artistic movement characterized by skepticism towards universal truths, the rejection of grand narratives, and emphasis on subjectivity, relativism, and the influence of culture.

It basically argues that everyone's entitled to their own views, things are only true and moral because we say they are, and so on and so forth.

I'll add my own opinion here that postmodernism deprives us of purpose.

And because if truth is subjective, then what's the point?

What is the point of striving towards anything, really, if nothing matters?

This is the subconscious belief of so many people today, of so many college students today.

And I'd like to argue that this belief is directly contradictory to what Judaism asks of us.

At its core, Judaism believes that each person is born with a divine soul, and that soul has a unique purpose that only you can fulfill.

That's why Jews often believe that the world would not be complete without you in it.

And as we live through life, it is our mission to find our soul's purpose so that we may fulfill it.

Now, not everyone gets the privilege of doing this.

Some people leave us too soon.

Accidents happen.

This is more of a Kabbalistic viewpoint, but here the idea of reincarnation is introduced.

If your soul could not fulfill its purpose in this life, it can attempt to fulfill it in another.

To me personally, this is an objectively better way to live.

To live with meaning, to live with a notion that your life matters, is an objectively better way to live.

And Sasha explains how postmodernism, coupled with some other key events has spiraled us into this landscape that we are currently in.

War, demoralization, challenging economic environment.

It does feel like we are approaching some kind of rock bottom.

And I know that many Jews talk about this time being eerily similar to the pre Holocaust era.

And we're discussing this with Sasha.

Not to complain or create fear, even though Lord knows I love a good fetch, but rather I think the faster we accept our circumstances, the faster we can start to activate ourselves to do something about them.

I do want to mention one other eerie thing.

Sasha and I recorded this episode last week, last Wednesday, a mere few hours before Charlie Kirk was assassinated and everything Sasha talks about the demoralization, the aggression, the talking points, the radicalization.

We saw it play out in real life just a few hours later.

It's freaking weird to have a conversation with someone that manifests in a real act, a real crime, just a few hours later.

It's a really strange feeling.

If you take anything away from this episode, I want it to be one thing.

In the episode, Sasha refers to it as saying good morning to the people around you, but I would like to broaden it to be acknowledge the humanity of others.

You live in a real world with real people.

You don't live in your phone or on the news.

Acknowledge the real people in your life.

Acknowledge your neighbors.

See their humanity and extend a warm hand even if you disagree with them.

This is a Jewish value.

This is a human value, and this is a universal truth of life, despite what postmodernists would like you to believe.

Please enjoy this episode.

Hello Sasha, welcome to People You Want to Know podcast.

Where?

Where am I?

Who are these people?

What are what are we doing?

I am so excited to chat with you.

Thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you for having me.

We're I don't know where your policy is on dating, dating these sessions is but we are recording on September 10th, the morning after the night when 19 Russian drones entered Polish airspace and then Polish and allied NATO air forces had to not had to, but they shot down four of the 19.

And now we're being treated to a parade of condemnations and expressions of care and of how this is unacceptable and more of the language that we've heard for over a decade now in the face of in the face of war.

So I'm I'm mad.

Are you mad?

Are we here to be mad together?

Yes, I'm always mad though.

I think that is just the constant state of being that I'm in these days.

Well, that's, that's the problem, isn't it, right.

Every day is a personal is a personal affront to each of us.

We are, we are in a permanent state of outrage.

And the trick is harnessing that outrage into actual action and to not be not let the outrage be born of surprise.

What's happening in the world is predictable right now.

It's all outrageous, but none of it is unforeseen, which makes it all the more infuriating when when it actually happens.

That's that's my mindset.

I'm mad.

Just a little light hearted start to our conversation here.

There are so many things to pick your brain on, and before we dive into your work around politics and policy and information warfare, I want you to start by telling us a little bit about yourself.

What do you do and how did you get there?

The self aggrandizement segment.

I was born in Philly in 1992.

My family emigrated from Ukraine.

You and I are.

We share 2 ancestral homelands actually, and one actual homeland.

My family's from Kiev.

They immigrated in 91 in August as the Soviet Union was disintegrating.

I was born here a year later as a sort of a emotional pick me up and I didn't speak English until I was 7 because you know, Northeast Philly, there's there's no need you can get by speaking one of a variety of other languages.

In my case, it was Russian.

I got involved with theater in school and then I went to college and I had too many interests and I liked too many things.

But I ultimately settled in as a theater and film and media studies double major, from which I naturally, 10 years later, wound up in the realm of information warfare and national security.

It's an obvious pipeline in my mind.

It was actually was logical every step of the way.

So I'm graduating College in in December 2014.

Russia invades Ukraine, and I can't go to be a part of Maidan because I'm busy be finishing college and preparing for what's next.

So I resolved that I need to get a legal education, go to law school.

At that point, however, I had already gotten a gotten into a master's program in communications management.

What does that mean?

You actually, I think, know what that means.

It means whatever the hell you want it to be.

So I went and did comms grad school.

Everybody else was focusing on corporate comms, preparing to go into traditional communication structures.

I was writing about media ownership policy and the role of the Ukrainian oligarchs in Ukraine's war, information war with Russia.

After that, I did go to law school, never had any intention of taking the bar, didn't study for the bar, hated most of the dakshina courses that I was forced to take.

And while everybody else was preparing to be an attorney, I was training as a lawyer, as a policy analyst and legislative aide, focusing specifically on how democracies can use the law legislative instruments to counter foreign malign disinformation information efforts.

And it was really funny every time that I explained that to somebody in law school because typically the response I would get is, what the hell are you doing here?

Why are you in law school?

And I would have to give them this whole launch feel because even even as early as in college, yes, I am a theater from the media studies double major.

I love the stage, I love the arts, but the entire time I was focusing my research and writings on the historical relationship between the arts and information warfare.

The singular best seminar I've ever taken across all three academic 10 years was called Theater History Seminar, which was this this walk throughout the centuries of the relationship between the arts and war and politics and geopolitics and, and theater and and literature because they ultimately they are related, for better or for worse.

There is a pervasive lack of understanding of that in strategic decision making today or what what approach is strategic decision making?

And for my money, that's a massive part of the problem.

OK, let's dive right in.

It's no secret that the origin of the narrative around anti Zionism heavily originated from the Soviet Union, and it was the Soviet Union that developed the blueprint for separating Jews from Zionism and using Zionism as a justification to persecute Jews.

And later that blueprint was also shared to the Middle East belief if I'm not mistaken.

Can you tell us a little bit more about this?

Ukraine and Israel in the year of our Lord 2025 are fighting on 2 fronts of the same war, the root of which is ultimately, I mean, what's now coalesced into this, this more or less coherent axis of evil, this modern axis of evil for the 21st century.

But as far as the information war goes, I would argue that the for all you Buffy fans out there, the big bad is indisputably the Kremlin is indisputably Russia.

You see where all of the world's bad guys flee when their regimes suddenly come crashing around them.

You have Dodiq in in the Kremlin right now, you have Yanukovych.

And in Russia you have Assad fleeing to Russia on October 8th.

You have Hamas's leadership fleeing to Russia.

When the the war between Israel and Iran was happening earlier this year, there were reports that Iranian leadership was preparing to flee to, you guessed it, right.

So again, this all goes back to the point of what's not surprising about evil today.

We've gone many decades past the banality of evil.

But that assessment wasn't wasn't bound to the 20th or 21st century.

This has always been the case.

The authoritarian playbook hasn't changed in not even centuries, but in millennia.

And so Ukraine and Israel are fighting on 2 fronts of the same war.

You're right.

Soviet anti Zionism existed.

It exported it successfully to the Middle East.

Soviet curation of various anti Israeli elements in the Middle East are well documented and we don't have the time for me to give an overview of all of them here.

But Russian anti-Semitism, The Kremlin's use of anti-Semitic narratives and tropes is much it goes farther into history than that.

It goes farther in the 20th century.

And you could charitably say that it began with the Pale of Settlement under Catherine in the late 18th century, right?

The Pale of Settlement, which was this enforced policy that all Jews in the Russian Empire had to, to be relocated to the western reaches of the empire, right to politics, to Belarus, to, to Ukraine.

Beyond that, things progressed with with the rest of her, her family line with the rest of the Romans right under and Nikolai the first.

There was systematic systematized anti-Semitism, unfair taxation against Jews.

It forced drafting of people who shouldn't have been enrolled in the army, et cetera, et cetera, things.

Then it got slightly better with his son Sandra the second.

But then you know, Alexander the second was called the Liberator.

He ended slavery in Russia.

He ended serfdom.

He was buried partly by the Jews because they they actually for the first time acted and valued a Russian tsar.

And then he was assessed, of course, by counter reformist elements.

His son Alexander the third comes to power and he begins counter reformations to find the face of everything his father had actually accomplished.

And then things reached an apotheosis with the final Russian star with with Nikolai the second, who in addition to continuing his father's counter reforms against his grandfather, was an out and out member of the Black Hundreds who were a reactionary, royalist, deeply anti-Semitic force that was responsible for a slew of pogroms throughout western the Western Empire, which was in Ukraine, etc.

I love that every SAR after the their father tried to do the opposite of what their father did, which I find very hilarious.

Oh yeah, the entire Russian line, there's a whole lot of back and forth.

I mean, I didn't say anything about Paul, right?

Catherine's son.

So the empire finally crumbled with a lot of Jews taking part in the revolution.

So in Bolshevik revolution, throughout the civilian union you have waves, surges of anti-Semitism, you have the doctors plot under Stalin, you have the fight against cosmopolitanism.

You have beef and anthropos curation of those anti-Semitic elements in the Middle East.

And then the Soviet Union fell apart, right?

The Russian Empire crumbled yet again, but it didn't finish falling apart.

And and the fact that it Russia that exists today is this geopolitical Frankenstein's monster that doesn't really belong as a, as a single geopolitical unit, right?

Because what?

What do Yakutia and Buryatia and Taparstan and Moscow have in common other than a passport?

And even that they share with the likes of Steven Seagal and Gerard de Bagdier, right?

Which credit is not mine?

The credit for that joke goes to in 2014.

Everything changed, right?

China and the Middle East and Russia are all participating in the information war.

But the face of modern information warfare was fundamentally changed paradigmatically in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Because overnight, when Russia went into Crimea and Luhansk and Benetsko Bliss, everything in Russia's information environment changed.

Suddenly, everything became about Ukraine.

Russia lived and breathed Ukraine, and 11 years later continues to live and breathe Ukraine.

The specific term that Russian propaganda started using was Azuda banderafsi.

I said that Ukraine and Israel are fighting on 2 fronts of the same war, and largely narratively that's a function of how the Kremlin itself has framed things this term Azuda banderafsi.

So it's a portmanteau that translates into English as the first word zid, which in English is a four letter word that begins the letter K.

That's a pejorative for Jews that I will not be saying out loud because my grader will kick me from the session.

And the second part of the word is Bandera in English, it would be like a Bandera ITE supporters of Bandera, Stefan Bandera, who was a Ukrainian nationalist who fought against the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

He fought against the Soviet empire and so.

I'll add that it's also used as a pejorative towards Ukrainians.

So it's basically, I think what you're trying to get to Sasha is showing that the information were framed at they grouped together Jews and Ukrainians as a pejorative to find a scapegoat for this conflict.

That's exactly right.

So in 2014, overnight after the Maidan, after the Ukrainian revolution, 2014, when they ousted Yanukovych, they ousted Russian puppeteering of Ukraine's politics.

The Russian response to that was that, well, Ukraine is controlled by this Judeo Ukrainian narco junta that's also indirectly controlled by the CIA.

They're also the, the full version of this.

I mean, it expands, right You if there's the narco component to it, right?

They, they accuse everyday Zelensky of being a cocaine addict.

There's the, there are warlocks, you know, it's a warlock narco junta.

So there have been reports of in 2022 or relatively early in the war, there was an instance in which Russian forces occupied a position that was held by Ukrainian forces before and they staged it to look like the Ukrainian forces were engaging in the occult there.

So they drew a pentagram on there.

They threw in like a black witchcraft books.

And then they they used that to to reveal that you see the assault battalion, it's full of full of Necrovans.

So what you said is absolutely on the money.

Per the Russian propagandists own logic for their narratives, Ukraine is controlled by this band of Judeo Ukrainians or Ukrainian Jews, and by extension, Ukraine and Israel are focus points.

They're these bastions not only of democracy against the thoriotarianism, of civilization against barbarism of the past against the present or vice versa of the present against against the past of civilization against anarchy, but also of malign Jewish identity against not that against the onslaught of the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians and Hamas and their terrorist proxies.

So by the Russians own logic, if we buy into it, Ukraine and Israel are they've been united narratively in the front against Russia.

Which is complicated by the fact that there are many Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union from Russia to Israel who operate.

Some of whom operate as a sort of 5th column within the country and who support political entities that are typically far more conservative than the alternatives.

Some of whom have advocated for tightening relationships with Russia.

But Russia itself doesn't view Israel as an ally.

You can see that in the endemic anti-Semitic narratives and tropes that have come out of Russian nightly news and headlines since October 7th.

All of which is to say that anti-Semitism in 2025 has a globalized and coordinated nature.

And it is fundamentally a national security issue from the West because the target of Russia's and Iran's and China's anti-Semitic talking points in messaging.

It's not the Jews exclusively, it's democracy.

It's the erosion of democratic institutions and and our ability not just to defend ourselves, but to fundamentally govern ourselves.

That is the purpose of our authoritarian adversaries deployment of these narratives.

How do these narratives become so powerful?

Is it a volume thing?

Is it a duration thing?

Why can't we seem to out yell these people that we are right and they are wrong?

The answer is yes, right?

The answer.

The answer is all of the above yes and message, messenger channel and volume in in strategic communications all need to be carefully calibrated.

Russia's strategy and the information war after 2014 changed from what it was in Soviet times in the 20th century, right in the 20th century was surgical strikes like with the narrative that the United States is behind the AIDS epidemic in in Africa, right that originated as A and originated as a Russian as a Russian operation that changed in 2014 precision strikes were replaced with throw everything at the wall.

See what sticks?

The problem with a lot of Western thought when it comes to freedom of speech and information warfare is that, and you see this in for example, 20th century American common law, the remedy for bad speech is more speech.

You drown it out with with good speech, with correct speech to condition people to think properly, to behave in polite society that is at odds with today's technological, geopolitical, and strategic realities.

Because Russia isn't out there to take over the marketplace of ideas.

Its goal is the destruction of the marketplace per SE.

The purpose of anyone narrative that comes out of Russia isn't for everybody to believe that one narrative, right?

It's the target of the Kremlin has always been truth itself.

Here I can launch into my spiel about postmodernism, which I'll try to shorten for the purposes of the session.

In the second-half of the 20th century, postmodernism becomes the dominant philosophy in the West.

And for most people, unfortunately, they limit themselves to two axioms from which they string together an incoherent syllogism.

So those two axioms are everything is relative and everything is artificial.

And fueled by those two theses, most people arrive at the conclusion that all views are equally appropriate.

Everybody is entitled to their own opinion.

The right truth is relative institutions and expertise are artificial and therefore inherently malign expertise.

Ortiz is bad.

And we ride this train of of pseudo logic to its pseudo logical conclusion in which we currently are wallowing because we see polarization, we see increased radicalization, we see the degeneration of common meeting right.

People use the same word, but they're talking past each other.

Nobody knows what it means.

What is a liberal?

What is a moderate?

What is a conservative?

None of this means anything anymore.

You have on the left of center in the United States, you have liberals fighting leftists.

On the right you have their own inter clan wars throughout Europe, you do have populist demagogic movements gaining ground, and you have the center struggling to carve out its own niche because of the aforementioned lack of strategic mission.

Right.

Even if they're saying the right things, which not all of them always are, there's not a whole lot of follow through.

It's also a solution for the wrong problem, right?

If you're saying that someone like the Kremlin, their goal is to not control the marketplace of ideas, but remove the marketplace from existence.

Entirely.

Right then, trying to fill the world with good information or correct information is solving the wrong problem.

It's optimizing for the wrong outcome.

Exactly, and so the response to the spread of anti-Semitic narratives isn't holed up.

Actually, Jews are great.

Jews don't control the banks.

I mean, yes, that that has to be an element of a strategy right now, right?

But in the information warfare in the the professional cognitive security space field right now, there's this hot, new, hot new concept called whole of society response, which is not new.

It shouldn't be new.

But thank God we've arrived here better late than never.

The people are talking about what this whole society response to authoritarian malign information warfare should look like and anti-Semitism as an inherent component of authoritarian information warfare.

Right?

I mean you hit like it's not just Russia like you were saying.

China started parroting Russia's anti-Semitic narratives in America.

We saw that in 2024, last year when the TikTok ban was on the docket, and suddenly TikTok became the cesspool of anti-Semitism because China perceived that deploying anti-Semitic tropes to discredit US attempts to ban to regulate TikTok was an effective way to undo that attempt at regulation.

Why was it effective?

Well, why is anti-Semitism still around 4000 years later?

Right, but this is a pretty audacious claim to say that in order for TikTok not to be banned they just, you know, produce a bunch of anti-Semitism.

What's the connection?

The connection is that they saw it as an effective way to galvanized TikTok subscribers who are typically younger in age.

Many of them are fully within that postmodern paradigm, right?

Poorly and poorly understood postmodern paradigm.

People who would likely describe themselves as progressives and many of whom you know on Twitter that they would have and their usernames has to handle, you know, in the extreme case of red triangle, otherwise a watermelon or a Palestinian flag.

OK so you're saying it became more inconvenient to turn TikTok off when TikTok had such a strong presence that they've created?

They created that strong presence by gathering everybody together on anti-Semitism.

That's how they brought the masses.

Anti-Semitism, like any coordinated conspiracy is intended to activate the populace and this anti-Semitism did just that right on October 7th, not even on October 8th you had protesters against Israel in the West on October 7th, while the corpses were still warned in in the kibbutz just just outside of Gaza.

So the deployment of anti-Semitism it by activating the populace, bringing them like raising arms against the the government.

That is the effectiveness of of anti-Semitism liquid today.

And technology only makes it all the faster to do that, and all the more difficult to regulate or combat in any systemic or in some cases even legal ways.

So let's go back to the solutions that you started touching on earlier.

What do you think we can do given that we know the problem and we know what the intent is?

What are some of the strategies that you've seen work?

For my money, to quote West Wing, education is the silver bullet.

What does education mean?

Right.

How does that manifest?

This is yesterday we had the report that a 12th grader, what was it?

Only 1/3 of 12th graders are reading at.

Was it 1/3 of 2/3 of 12th graders are reading at?

Did you see the numbers?

Yeah.

OK, whatever it was, the number is, I don't know if right.

It's not shocking, It shouldn't be surprising.

It's simply outrageous.

It is investing in precision, in strategic precision, in linguistic precision.

It is accurately describing what it is that we stand for and how to get from from A-Z.

We have not had in the West a grand strategic vision for arguably 25 years, arguably 35 years, right?

In 1991, the Soviet Union falls apart.

We did it.

Time to go home and everybody relaxed.

Want to jump in to ask about that.

I think that's a product of also what you talked about, which is the relativism that we have come to as a result of the liberal ideals that we've embodied right in the last decades.

The fact that we have encouraged all this liberal thinking that all ideas are equal and everybody's entitled to an opinion.

And I can think what I want to think that has prevented us from knowing what we stand for.

But I wonder, pseudo liberal?

Yes, but did we choose that or did someone push us in that direction is what I'm not clear on.

It was exploited, right?

So at first we chose it again.

In the 20th century, postmodernism became the dominant mode of thought in the West, and in 2014 Russia struck.

That was the major philosophical vulnerability of the West that was right for exploitation.

And that China and Hamas and Russia and Iran, all of them are using because everything is equally valid.

Why is authoritarianism any worse than democracy?

The best emblem for this.

In 2014 RT changed this logo right?

RT is Russia's main international propaganda arm that's been banned in parts of Europe.

RTS slogan changed from whatever was before, which was something like Discover Russia right?

RT was originally created in 2008 as this window into Russia.

You can look at how ordinary Russians are living and maybe it is less.

It was.

It was intended as a propaganda arm, but it wasn't explicitly maligned at the time.

2014, its slogan changed with it, Russia's information war paradigm changes, and the slogan became question more.

You don't have to trust us, but you can't trust them.

You can't trust anybody.

There is no such thing as truth.

We live in a you have chosen to live in a postmodern world.

Let's embrace that wholeheartedly and and this way you get Hamas being the Champions against the protest rife democratic Israel.

Well, yeah, because it's like, are they terrorists or are they freedom fighters?

It's like a.

Real brand terrorists when we can call them terror affected individuals.

I'm being very facetious here.

They're just resisting the conditions that were placed upon.

Them.

But that's exactly it, right?

It's this narrative of meta narrative of resistance against Western imperialism.

China, Russia and Ron and Hamas have turned the narrative on its head.

They've said the black is white and White's black.

They said that the West is out there that's this bastion of imperialism.

Ukraine is run by Judeo, Ukrainian fascists.

Israel is oppressing the people of Palestine, not Hamas, not the terrorists that are denying them the humanitarian aid that they rightly serve.

This is the the backwards environment which we live.

And it was, it was all enabled by the postmodern thought.

It was all enabled by the radicalization polarization that grew out of that.

And so right now, how do we fix it?

We have to strike at the, at the root causes.

We have to.

So geopolitically, that means the destruction of our adversaries domestically.

It means figuring out a way to heal our fraying societal ties, combating polarization, combating A stymieing radicalization, because if we can't even talk to one another in a manner that's mutually intelligible, we're not going to be able to stand up against against authoritarian aggression.

And what we'll see is what we're seeing right now in response to 19 drones invading Polish airspace, we're seeing condemnations.

And Rome is undefended, right?

Rome is undefended to.

Barbarian holes.

And prayers, thoughts and prayers.

You know, Susan Collins trademark.

I'm very concerned.

How do we come together if our political system, for example, America, benefits from the polarization?

In what way?

We have a two party system and by riling up the most extreme voters on either side who are the ones that show up to the polls, that's how a certain president gets elected.

The reality is most of America has a centrist point of view, but also at the same time, most of America doesn't vote in all of the elections that matter in changing the reality for our country.

And so my theory has always been that if everybody voted, we wouldn't be in this two party system.

Instead, we have the most radical people throughout the country voting consistently at all levels of government, causing us to be in this position where we have really conservative or really liberal policies and no one between.

There are issues that are not partisan.

For example, children should be safe in school from guns.

Bad people should not have guns.

People that need abortion should be able to get them.

These are things most people would agree on, but that's not how our society operates.

Yeah, on the subject of semantic degradation, right, I would push back against your qualifying them as as liberal versus not liberal.

It's it's, it's more of a scale than that.

There's leftist, there's liberal, there's conservative and then there's rightist.

But I think the answer is implicit to your question.

It's already in there.

You're talking about electoral reform, right, Because there there are two major problems.

America is immune to mathematics at the presidential level.

There are at least 2-2 bits of major electoral reform that we need to see through and we see.

So first in states that have introduced ranked choice voting, RCV, Alaska, Maine, New York of the city, you have ranked choice voting as a ward against more extreme candidates because it is more resembling of a of a European parliamentary system than our traditional two party system.

And the other, the other bit of electoral reform is the Electoral College, which, which is an artifact of the 18th century that was created there as a, as a backstop against extremism.

And that today is, is actually directly conducive to it.

So all I can do is agree with you say that yes, this is another reason why we're mad today.

And for all of you out there who don't know what the popular vote compact is, I would look into it and read up on ranked choice voting.

Sort of sidestepped away from anti-Semitism, but it's all indirectly linked.

I think they took us down a difficult rabbit hole here because the reality is we're not changing our government and elections anytime soon.

So I'm sure that there are some other things we can do to create coherent narratives within America to gather the population against radicalism.

Can you walk me through some of those?

You know, back in college when I was walking down the street and I saw people in their headphones and not people my fellow college mates, like people sometimes in my classes walking by me either staring at their phones or in headphones or none of the above and just staring at the ground and pointedly ignoring me.

My little way of combating against societal praying was staring people dead in the eye and explicitly like challengingly saying good morning.

And often they would look up at me and at first they would be surprised and then they'd typically they'd smile.

What is this?

It's human connection.

You know, I, I alluded to this in answering one of your other questions.

The, the technological component in facilitating the rise of extremism polarization, right.

The radio led to Hitler partly television debates resulted in Kennedy beauty Nixon, the Internet, social media specifically have contributed massively to that degradation of of of language of common meaning.

And so finding finding these human touch points, these points of tangency between us, I think is an easy way to to start healing the fabric of our society.

And it sounds highfaluting, right?

It sounds like, oh, you by talking to my neighbor, we're going to fight against extremism.

Well, yeah, like you just said, most of the country is centrist.

Most of the country does not believe in extremism.

And when encountered with it at a national level, they typically voted out.

They vote against it.

They vote against what they perceive to be the more extreme of the two, regardless of whether that's actually true of what they perceive as the most extreme of the two or however many choices we have, what each of us can do here.

Let me say this, after February 24th, 2022, which is when the full blown invasion of Ukraine began, I thought that the Ukrainian administration adopted a very effective talking point, which is everybody is on their front.

Every single person is on his or her front.

Nobody is not participating in the war effort.

If you're a grocer, you have to keep selling products.

You have to keep paying taxes, right?

If you're a psychologist, obviously your work is very important right now.

If you're going to school to study, please study your chosen field so that you can contribute to the country later on.

It was this national rallying effect that we aren't seeing in the United States right now.

People here are too sad and too far removed from the trials of the world, despite the fact that it's the 21st century, the world is very small.

What happens in Melbourne necessarily effects what's happening in Chicago, either economically or geopolitically.

And the war that we're in right now, and I say we because we are in this is World War Three, right?

Gary Kasparov said this as soon as as soon as things began.

And we are in World War Three.

You have the Axis of evil that has lined up that is aggressively pursuing its geopolitical goals, which really are the retention of their own power.

It's not like they're brewing companions.

At best, they're not true allies, but they are arrayed against Western democracies which have proven themselves not decisive enough in combating the threat.

I've always said that the problem isn't that our enemies are playing well.

They're not.

I keep saying they're predictable.

I can get up every morning and write that day's major headlines in Russia.

It's obvious exactly down to the punctuation mark, what it is that they'll be saying or what it is they'll be talking about and the lines they'll be pushing through on TV talk shows that evening.

The problem isn't that they're playing well, it's that we're playing even worse.

And so the way to do that is to acknowledge or come to the realization that each of us is is on his or her own front.

It is to look for human connection in the face of technological distancing, in the, in the face of, you know, the norms of communication online being so radically different from what what it should be in real life.

But you see that this, this brazen, cavalier rejection of responsibility online, rejection of pulley tests has bled over into real life.

Because what unites, if we're going to look into back to politics, we're looking into horseshoe theory.

Now, what unites the far left and the far right, The center isn't just a specific ideology when it comes to policy positions.

It's also a champion of certain modes of behavior, of polytest right, of of decency and courtesy in human interactions.

Any, any recent college grad who's looking for a job knows that not being a Jackass will take you a long way in life if you're not horrible to people.

You know, if you say good morning and you thank people for their time, that should be how society is built.

And get to quote Seinfeld now, We live in a society, but the far left and the far right are united in their attitude, that common courtesy, common decency, which here is another function of that postmodernist paradigm.

They're false, and in that falsehood is inherent weakness.

And so if we are, instead of being polite to each other, we choose to be assholes to one another.

That's more honest somehow.

It's this warped attitude towards how the world is structured, and it is largely what contributes to the rise of populist demagogues worldwide.

So how do we combat that?

We choose another path.

We choose the opposite.

We choose dialogue with those who can be convinced and those who are too far gone, who are, who have completely succumbed to the brain rot of that that is being exacerbated by authoritarian adversaries.

We figure out another way to deal with them, right?

That's the dialogue doesn't work with everyone.

One mode of communications isn't the right solution to every audience.

You're in strategic comms.

You know this.

You know what audience segmentation is.

What I'm curious about is to deliver on everything you're saying here, there has to be some massive level of orchestration between media, politics, reform, cultural zeitgeist.

I would bucket arts and humanities in there, like the kinds of films that are being made, the kinds of plays that are being made and the lessons that they teach us.

A lot of films and plays today that are up and coming always talk about how like, well, that's life and you never know what you're going to get, so you might as well just live.

How are you going to live?

You know, like, nothing's explainable and everything sucks, so we can just smile and be happy.

Which again, relates back to the postmodernism that you're talking about.

So how do you think these things get so orchestrated that they become culture?

Well, do you subscribe to a grassroots vision of the world or a top down vision?

Afraid it is top down, but that sounds very conspiracy theorist.

No, no, no, no.

I don't mean, I mean in how we respond to it is the most effective method bottom up or top down and it's a company both.

It's both, yeah.

But how did it become this way?

It also became from both.

You know this culture came from top down and from bottom up.

No.

I mean, it progressed over decades, right?

Culture doesn't happen overnight, but it starts somehow, it breaks out, and there's a large enough segment of the population that goes along with it.

And then you have actors to try to actually take the reins and do something with it, which is what Russia did with Western culture in 2014.

How many years do you think it will take to unwind this then?

Because we always go through seasons right throughout history and we have precedent for something like this.

History Cyclical.

Absolutely.

And, you know, my mom and I were talking about that this morning.

There needs to be some sort of breaking point.

There needs to be an inflection point because the West still doesn't have a leader capable of breaking through.

Yeah.

That, like, it's both grassroots efforts need to be currently taking place, you know, each of us trying to repair frayed social fabric.

But there needs to be a leader to come through and to start curating the culture that we are all yearning for in America.

I think there's a misalignment between how different classes of society currently see what's electorally advantageous.

You have, you know, the, the groups that say one thing you have political, you have, you have political operatives of another generation of another time that are failing to grasp what is about to happen.

You know, there's a there's another shutdown in Congress looming, and it is likely to follow a different playbook than than the one from several months ago did.

It took decades to de Nazify Germany.

And in Germany there was Nazi culture for all of 12 years.

In Russia, for example, the Putin regime has been in place for 25.

How many more decades is it going to take place?

So we can use a simple heuristic that it will take twice as long as it took Nazi Germany.

I don't know.

It might be accelerated somehow.

It might be twice as long.

It might be a few times as long in the United States.

This gravitation towards extremism, the generation of public courtesy of public Paul tests arguably began in the 90s.

You have people attribute this to Newt Gingrich and we've seen how far we how far we've come since then.

Certain politicians in the United States, current body politic, I would argue, are not the cause of what we're seeing.

They could certainly be a catalyst of of radicalization, but they're not a 'cause they're a symptom.

They wouldn't have been possible had it not been for eroding institutions, had it not been for for leaders who were unwilling to stand for what they and the majority of the country believes in.

This can really quickly take us back to the writings of Edmund Burke on the role of the elected official of representative democracy.

Is your role to fully be a function of the will of the people or are you being elected as a leader, as the smartest right, as the smartest among your peers, as the most competent among equals?

And so your opinion on on the direction of the country should have greater weight than that of others.

I don't know if the postmodern, the pseudo postmodern paradigm can stomach such an approach to governance.

I certainly think that that should be the case.

And I imagine that the role that you see for yourself in this is encouraging organizations to take on the right strategy to start to chip away at the problem that we have in front of us.

Yeah, In my work, we advise our partners, our allied governments, which are civil society, intelligence services and military, on what is going on in information environments worldwide and how to affect them effectively.

Right.

You have a lot of students in college and beyond.

In grad school, they come to me and like Sasha, you're an analyst to deal with information warfare.

That sounds great.

I want to do what you do.

And my response is usually cool.

What are you doing?

What's your specialty?

I'm a Polysign econ double major.

And my simple response to that is that's, that's wonderful.

You're a gift to society.

You are probably unprepared to do the work that I would, I personally would need you to do in my daily life, analyzing from the inside what's going on in different information environments.

If you come to me and you tell me that you're an expert on, say, Columbia, I want you to be able to sit opposite me and debate 19th century Colombian literature with me for two hours.

If you can't do that, you're not going to be able to analyze with the degree of actionable nuance that I would want in order to be able to go into Colombia and to pick out an audience and communicate with it effectively.

Postmodernism is an era of intertext.

There is so much intertext in the world.

Like how do you explain to analysts that in Ukraine the word bhavovna, which in Ukrainian means cotton, became a euphemism for explosion because there was a ill advised attempt by Russian special security services, secret secret services, to fabricate a Ukrainian communication about explosions?

But the problem is that in Russian, the word the words chlapuk and chlapuk are homographs.

They're written identically, but chlapuk means loud bang or clap and chlapuk means cotton.

And so they obviously use Google Translate which translated loud bang which also spelled like cotton into the Ukrainian as the Ukrainian word bahuvna which only means cotton.

And then that became a meme in in the information.

How do you how do you explain the importance of that right to people?

You need to know the language, you need to know that.

You need to know the text literature and beyond.

This reminds me of the documentary about Navalny where they tried to hack somebody, tried to hack Russia's, you know, some of the politicians computers.

And one guy, his password was Moscow 123.

So it was really easy to hack.

And then once he knew he got hacked, he like changed his password to like Moscow 123 exclamation point.

We're not dealing with geniuses here.

That's also like it goes to show.

Looking back since 2014, which is when you'd say there's been a major paradigm shift for us, I'm curious what information warfare tactics have been most surprising, unexpected, interesting to you?

Yeah, that's on the tale of me staying for 15 minutes.

That nothing is surprising that it's all predictable.

No, I'll say that China's turn towards anti-Semitism I should have seen coming and and that actually came out a little out of left field for me and in hindsight makes more sense.

And we should be expecting all of our adversaries to be dipping into anti-Semitism, right?

We've seen how again, anti-Semitism is coordinated, globalized and state sponsored.

The major disseminators of anti-Semitism today are states, which is why in 2025, anti-Semitism isn't this organic xenophobia.

It is a coordinated intentional tactic in the global information environment and the choice by, in my opinion, state actors that weren't obvious employers of these narratives and tropes to employ those narratives and tropes.

That caught me off guard perhaps more more than anything else, because when it comes to Russia, like like I said, I can write everything that they put out in a in a day, in a week and a month in China.

In China's information behavior, there is also predictability to it.

But their choice like overnight bam we're doing anti-Semitism to save TikTok.

Like, oh, oh, all right.

Anybody listening to this, they're going to say it makes their brain hurt because there's so many dimensions of this that are all intertwined.

And you can't really, yeah, you can't really fix anything at the same time because you've got the component of time, you've got the component of morality, component of politics, component of language.

There are many dimensions contributing to the circumstance that we are in today.

Is there any anything that gives you inspiration or hope?

It's the knowledge that this is unsustainable.

It's that the pendulum does eventually wind down and settles in the center.

The good guys always win guys.

We're good.

I mean, it really is that like, look, as early as the 2000s when the Russian opposition started describing the Kremlin's behavior, they started using a metaphor.

Not a metaphor, an analogy from Lord of the Rings, right?

If you are in post 2006 Russian information or Russian speaking information environment, you know that the Kremlin, the Moscow is often called Mordor.

And after 2022, that analogy became even more salient because down to the military tactics, right?

Mordor overwhelms its enemies with the works.

Russia overwhelms its enemies with works, not with quality of fighting.

And so this framing is instructive and also critical for understanding how so many in Ukraine view the current war, the World War, and how so many of us who are taking part in it also choose to view the world.

It's not that it's, it's black and white, right?

But if this war, in which Ukraine and Israel are occupying 2 fronts, is a war of good against evil, And I subscribe to the to the theory that throughout history, good always prevails, light has to win.

Light always does win.

And so even if it's not entirely clear how to get from here to there right now, even if the West is largely leaderless and we had some candidates who could have emerged as a new Churchill or Thatcher or or Reagan, but nobody has yet, I choose to believe that light will win.

But the only question is how many?

Like you said, it's time.

How many lives will have to be lost by Western inaction and Western dithering before the light does once again emerge victorious.

But if we choose to believe anything else, then there's no point fighting.

I like that.

That is a powerful message and we got to get it together, folks.

In conclusion, we got to get it together.

Got this.

Bring it in.

Team on three Sasha, how can people connect with you on social media or otherwise and learn more about your work?

They can't.

No, I'm kidding.

Not on social media.

I'm on LinkedIn.

They can try to find me on LinkedIn, and other than that, they're welcome to go to.

They can read my writings on def9.com, on our news and analysis hub, where I curate interdisciplinary cross sector views on information warfare.

I publish something typically on the rooster Ukrainian war every every second Tuesday of the month.

Every 4th Tuesday on the month my my good colleague and friend writes a piece about a a Latin American country analyzing what's going on there, synthesizing literature, cultural production and geopolitics all in one and and economics.

Fascinating read.

So you can find not only me out there, but you will also find me there.

Thank you.

And I have one final question for you.

It's one that I ask every single guest.

Who would you like to nominate for people you want to know?

Nominations.

He knows nothing of this, but I'd suggest you talk to my my good friend and a fellow Access Global board member with the AJC, Ilan Hazam.

You know, we're talking about, well, we're people.

People be out there talking to the we're talking about anti-Semitic narratives and tropes.

People be out there talking about space lasers.

Well, I think a long could could tell you a little something about space lasers and the need for interdisciplinary cross sector Jewish collaboration in the face of authoritarian aggression.

So that's my nomination.

Thank you so much.

That is excellent, cognitively demanding and wonderful.

Thank you Margarita for this and hopefully some people will be inspired to action, if only to greet their neighbors in the morning.

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