The last leader of the USSR dies and receives the endless plaudits of the media.

Joe Biden visits Pennsylvania and spouts absolute nonsense, and Mexican drug cartels dominate the fentanyl

market. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro show.

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at ExpressVPN.com. We'll get to all the news in just one moment. First, you're paying too much for all the things right now. That includes your cell phone service. Now, here's the thing. You've always been paying too much for your cell phone service if you're using AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile because you are paying for a bunch of data you don't actually use. I know they tell you need the unlimited data. You actually don't need the unlimited data. What you need is what pure talk will give you.

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And the media have been just feeding him.

I mean, we are talking the obituaries that would normally be due to a figure like, say, Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. They are being piled on Mikhail Gorbachev. The reason for that is because Mikhail Gorbachev, again, basically made two decisions.

One was a giant mistake and the other he deserves some plotts for.

The giant mistake was believing that he could allow cracks in the facade of the Soviet Union without the entire system collapsing underneath him.

And the thing that he deserves plotted for is not starting a nuclear war at the very end of the Soviet Union's existence.

Those were basically the two things that he did. And the media instead are treating him as sort of an ideological hero, as though he quote-unquote ended the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev by himself would not have ended the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev was a communist. Mikhail Gorbachev is and was a Leninist. If you read everything that he ever wrote, he was a devotee of Marxism, he never stopped being a devouté of Marxism. All that happened in the latter days of Mikhail Gorbachev is that he suddenly recognized that the Soviet Union was too weak to actually prop up this vast sphere of empire,

and he started to essentially allow people to make their own decisions without full-on military

intervention. But that was actually

a late development. In 1986, 1985, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev actually took over,

his early moves were actually quite repressive. The notion that Mikhail Gorbachev was a humanitarian

in some way is not the case. And it seems to me that one of the reasons that the media are

massaging

Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy here after his death is because, and this happened at the time, they don't want to give credit to the actual heroes of the anti-communist movement. People like Margaret Thatcher, people like Ronald Reagan, people like Pope John Paul II. They don't want to give credit to the actual anti-communists who fought communism each and every day. Instead, they would prefer to believe that the Soviet Union sort of was always quasi good-hearted, and at the very end, their heart showed through when they saw that the empire could not survive. They simply allowed it to collapse out of the decency and warmth of their own heart. And you can see that in the coverage from CNN and the New York Times. Here's CNN's obituary for Mikhail Gorbachev. He said, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the former Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, has died at the age of 91. Gorbachev died after a long illness, Russian state news agencies reported. Apparently, the man credited with introducing key political and economic reforms to the USSR and helping to end the Cold War had been in failing health for some time. Again, when we say that he helped end the Cold War, what we mean is that he

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