If you were to switch on Soviet television and there are only two TV channels, you would

have seen this kind of like single, very boring male head telling you how great everything

was that there's one truth that the Communist Party controls and there would have been no

debate and no entertainment of any real kind of worth.

If you were to switch on Putin TV while I lived there, it would have been the opposite.

You would have seen debating shows which were really quite influenced by Jerry Springer.

They were like full of like, there would be some crazy right wing dude screaming about

the need for ethnic nationalism and some old sort of red faced communist guy going, no,

no, the working classes all that matters and some always either very ugly or a feat liberal

who was saying, no, no, we should be more like the West.

And it took you a while to work out that actually all these parties were controlled by

the Kremlin and in some cases created by the Kremlin or definitely given very, very strict

ways that they could operate by the Kremlin.

I mean, it sounds like when Fox News has liberals on.

So the way Tucker Carlson does that, by the way, is very similar.

Tucker Carlson is very interesting in that in that sense out of the Fox panoply and that

he does welcome a debate.

He just has an idiot or sort of a very foolish, easy to defeat caricature of a liberal

one who then, yeah, becomes the enemy that you want to define yourself against.

I'm John Favreau.

Welcome to offline.

Hey, everyone.

...