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1 week ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
There are viral videos coming out of China now of Chinese people mocking Americans, showing off their clean and well-functioning factories and cheap products and telling Americans that they should come out to China and become mules for cheap consumerism: load up on stuff, bring it all back and declare it as “personal property,” and make a killing selling to friends and neighbors. In essence, they’re telling Americans to become shuttle traders…I’ll get to what that means in a second.
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2 weeks ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
Evgenia and I were talking a bit and I was taking some notes for our event tonight in NYC and I ended up typing up a very basic outline of something we’ve been thinking about lately — the connection between the USA and the USSR. Americans think they won the Cold War, and that they defeated communism. That’s true. But it’s not clear that Americans have come out as on top of that conflict as they were led to believe.
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2 weeks ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
We talk to our friend Joe Costello about Trump’s tariffs, democracy, deindustrialization, the Yeltsinification of America, and the innate human desire for a communal life…Joe has unique insights into American politics. He’s self-taught and naturally brilliant and has in the past helped run some very big American political campaigns — including the presidential runs of Jerry Brown and Howard Dean.
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2 weeks ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
We’ve been talking about how with Trump America has entered its own Yeltsin Age. I wrote a bit about the tariffs specifically a few days ago, but there’s one more thing that reminds me of the Yeltsin Mindset in relation to Trump Beautiful Tariffs Plan: His belief in the beautiful power of the freemarket.
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3 weeks ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
We here keep talking about how Trump is America’s Yeltsin. And watching this tariff rollout reminded me of the self-induced shock therapy that was done under Yeltsin’s government in 1990s Russia. I have a few short thoughts I wanted to share.
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3 weeks ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
People compare Trump to Hitler or to Putin. But for us the closest historical comparison is Boris Yeltsin. So today we talk to Jacob Silverman about Trump’s shitcoins and other crypto schemes because they remind us so much of 1990s Russia and Yeltsin’s family corrupt deals.
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3 weeks ago | 
citywatchla.com | Yasha Levine
GUEST COMMENTARY - Lynda and Stewart Resnick—the oligarch pistachio farmers of Beverly Hills—are currently going viral. Influencers are out making tiktoks, tweets, and reels. They’re outraged at finding out that one Los Angeles billionaire family controls more water than Los Angeles uses in an entire year.
The viral interest in their story makes sense. It’s connected to the fact that while fires are raging across the Los Angeles area, there are reports that fire hydrants are being tapped out.
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4 weeks ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
I want to get away from nihilism for a second and talk about what I guess is its polar opposite — the belief in something bigger than you. The last year or so, ever since Israel’s genocidal response to October 7, I’ve noticed Jews have been getting more religious — or at least some have been moving more towards religion. The reasons vary depending on where people stand on The Issue.
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1 month ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
I know no one cares about opsec and privacy anymore, but bear with me…because I feel like I gotta comment on this given that I have such a long history with Signal and the whole gross, spooky world that underpins it. So we got an inside look at how our dear leaders operate in private with the now-public Signal chat logs of them plotting a missile attack on Yemen and blasting out emoji high fives and fist bumps while innocent people are blown to bits and buried under rubble.
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1 month ago | 
nefariousrussians.com | Yasha Levine
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:07Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Evgenia and I talk to Will Menaker about the left-right whiplash of the post-Bernie years. Nihilism, idealism, optimism, the politics of winning, the cultural unity of America’s bipartisan politics, a psychoanalysis of the American beta-bully mindset…we discuss it all. Take a listen! —YashaWant to know more?
