Immigrants as a Weapon

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:01 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. We recorded this in bed over a week ago while we were in Miami — mostly for our ourselves…to talk through some ideas and concepts. We weren’t going to release it. But I gave it a listen and I thought we had a great conversation — genuine pillow talk before going to bed.

"The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give." —Philip K. Dick, "Our Friends from Frolix 8” Not all is well in the Dick-verse. As you know, we are a family of total Dick Heads. Yasha introduced Evgenia to Philip K. Dick years ago, and she’s become an even bigger Dick Head than him.

We record an emergency ep to talk about Sean Baker’s sweep at the Oscars with his new film Anora. We talk about Sean Baker’s sentimental style and his “changemaker” interest in stories of marginalized people. He comes from good New Jersey suburb but the only layer of American society he’s interested in are the lower classes — the delivery workers, trans prostitutes, third rate porn stars, strippers, poor immigrants.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:35:13 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. We continue our discussion of Red Scare’s turn into a real red scare platform. We have been doing deconstruction of their rhetoric on Twitter the past week, which has been going viral and has been drawing all the nastiness and poison of the Red Scare universe to the surface for everyone to see.

On this third anniversary of the war in Ukraine, I want to repost an essay Evgenia wrote a few months after it all started. I reread it today, and even now, all these years later, it provides a necessary and mostly missing background — both political and cultural and historical — to understand this conflict…well, at least from the Russian side. You won’t read anything better. —Yasha I was shellshocked by the war like everyone else.

We talk about my recent epiphany that the scary and volatile world of Russia that I grew up in post-collapse in the 1990s might be the future of America, rather than a distant, embarrassing past that I used to think was irrelevant to my new life here. Turns out I’m a time traveler of sorts. I am from your future.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experience in the suburbs and my realization that suburban sprawl forms the national character of America. Some people responded critically to what I wrote, saying — people are forced to move to suburbs because city life is too expensive. Yes, I agree. This is true in some cases, especially considering there are so few actual cities in America to begin with. But I think it goes deeper.

Evgenia and I talked about The eXile and Matt Taibbi on our Red Scare ep — about how the Red Scare girls took a very similar path as Matt, starting out avant-garde and eventually transforming into MAGA-Musk reply gals. Anna and Matt now run in the same political circles…and do humiliating Fox News shows together. Matt, top left. Anna, bottom right.

Trump’s Templar head of the Pentagon did a press conference about the administration’s plans for negotiations with Russia over Ukraine — and it’s been causing some waves.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -2:00:04 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. We talk about the rise and fall of Red Scare, America’s once-coolest Soviet immigrant podcast. They lost their edge. We’re #1 now. Want to know more? The Secret Power of Lex Fridman Konstantin Kisin's KGB Konnektions …other eps — and subscribe! Discussion about this podcast Bedtime stories with Evgenia and Yasha. Bedtime stories with Evgenia and Yasha.