Hey everyone, this is moderate rebels. I'm Ben Norton. My co-host, Max Blumenthal and I did a lengthy live stream with the journalist Yasha Levine. This is part two of our discussion, which you can listen to as a podcast or watch on YouTube. And in this section, we talk about Russia, Russian politics, and the candidate,

that rather the political figure that many of you have probably heard of, Alexi Navalny.

He is all over the Western corporate media.

Western governments have been openly supporting him as one of the leading

voices in the opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. So we talk about who is Alexei Navalny?

Yasha Levine was born in the Soviet Union, and he spent a lot of time living and working in Russia.

He knows the country very well. So we talk with him about Russian politics, about

what's actually going on in the country in terms of the power struggle between Russian oligarchs

and the actual politics of Alexei Navalny. And, you know, this is a guy with a very xenophobic,

racist history of right-wing nationalist politics.

We look into that.

We talk about his neoliberal economic philosophy.

And Yasha discusses the fact that Alexei Navalny

has his own oligarch backers

and how he doesn't actually represent

in any way a diverge from the neoliberal consensus, but rather

he represents another faction of the Russian oligarch class.

So without further ado, here is our interview with Yasha Levine.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

Ever.

I don't care what the facts are.

Why are we going to sit down and talk to these, quote-unquote, moderate rebels?

...