This is the Unregistered Podcast, and I'm Thaddeus Russell.

This is a show about ideas, people, and behaviors that are considered inappropriate,

out of bounds, or beyond the pale.

The things you're not supposed to talk about if you're a schoolteacher, a college professor,

a businessman, a politician, a businessman, a politician,

a parent, a neighbor, or even a podcast host. These are the things you're not supposed to say

or even think if you're a good liberal, a good conservative, or a good citizen. Each week,

I'll interview a person who has something bad to say. They might be a

journalist or a professor. They might be a porn star or a drug dealer. They might just be an

ordinary person with an ordinary job who doesn't care about the rules of polite society.

I'm not interested in breaking the rules just to be a troublemaker.

I'm interested in people who break the rules of conventional thought

and to expand the scope of what is possible to say in our society.

I'm interested in people who make me think.

Since 1991 in the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has attempted to overthrow the governments of scores of countries around the world, especially in Eastern Europe, not through military interventions, but by what it is called the promotion of democracy.

This is my interview with Gerald Susman.

I am pleased to say that I am joined from Portland, Oregon, by Gerald Sussman, who is the author of this book, Branding Democracy,

U.S. regime change in post-S.-Soviet Eastern Europe, which came out many years ago, but it is

as relevant to today's news as any book you will find, because to me, it explains in large

part, in large part, why the war in Ukraine is happening, which has everything

to do with the United States, actually. But we will get into that. So Jerry, before we started

recording, I told you that we've had two other guest speakers in this course. We had Norman

...