Kleptocrats love buying property, partly because it’s a good way to get rid of a lot of money at once, but mainly because it tends to be both a good investment and gives one a nice place to live. So kudos to the authors of this report for showing which countries aren’t doing enough to keep the kleptocrats out. 

“Real estate has long been known as the go-to avenue for criminals and the corrupt for laundering their ill-gotten gains. Seeking security for their investments, they often target the world’s most attractive markets to place their dirty money,” the report states.

Many countries can be a bit lax about cracking down on these purchases, because they see them as useful investment into their economies. In fact, they have a bad habit of offering golden visas alongside the property to further incentivise purchases, although some countries – including, earlier this month, Spain – have begun to realise these are not the convenient source of free money they were presented as, precipitating as they do housing shortages and rising rents.

TI divided its analysis into two halves, highlighting not just flaws in the anti-money laundering architecture, but also in the availability of data. If journalists, analysts or activists can’t see who owns what, then no one can tell if kleptocrats have been allowed to sneak through the net. It’s worth reading in full, particularly because of the way it shows that these two halves of the problem feed off each other, for good and ill. 

South Africa, Singapore and France get singled out for praise, with the worst performers – Australia, the United States and South Korea – losing out because they were marked down dramatically on the weakness of their anti-money-laundering protections. When it came to the opacity of ownership information, the worst offenders were Japan, India and the United Arab Emirates (surprise! Okay, not at all a surprise).

I hope that this report informs national and international discussions about fighting kleptocracy. But I also hope someone points out that TI needs a better acronym before OREO becomes entrenched. My suggestion for a new name, after literally minutes of intense thought, would be Lax Ownership Of Property Hurts Ordinary Law-Abiding Entities (LOOPHOLE). 

Although I concede that “entities” isn’t a great word at the end there. Neither is “lax” at the beginning, to be honest. 

WITH ‘FRIENDS’ LIKE THESE

While on the subject of acronyms, thank you to a reader for alerting me to the existence of the “Mobilizing and Enhancing Georgia’s Options for Building Accountability,
Resilience, and Independence” bill, which has been put forward by a bipartisan group of US congresspeople. I am a sucker for a daft acronym, and suspect this is the first time a Georgian word has featured in a proposed piece of American legislation. “Megobari” being, of course, Georgian for “friend”.

Georgia has been suffering from political turbulence for some time, with the Georgian Dream political party – backed by the country’s richest man, the Russophile oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili -- cementing control over the country. Transparency International’s Georgian branch has been publishing a list of high-level officials who hold what it considers to be questionable wealth. There are worrying signs that Western companies are happily enabling what’s happening in the South Caucasus. Georgia used to be a rare success story when it came to combating corruption, as well as a staunch Western ally in a difficult part of the world.

We would be fools to let it slip back to its bad old ways, without at least trying to arrest the slide a little, so I hope the Megobari bill makes some progress. “This bill provides Georgian Dream officials with a choice to abandon the would-be dictator Ivanishvili or face sanctions,” said Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina. With the “MEGOBARI” Act now being approved, it marks at least legislative support for Georgia’s EU-leaning democratic aspirations.

WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?

And sticking with acronyms, the House and Senate bills put forward to (under-)regulate the stablecoin industry, and which Donald Trump wants rushed through by August, have the acronyms STABLE and GENIUS, which is witty if you like that kind of thing. 

Back in the latter days of Trump’s first term, Representative Brendan Boyle (Democrat of Pennsylvania) introduced the STABLE GENIUS bill, to try to force the president to undergo a mental acuity test. There’s probably some deep lesson in the fact that an acronym that was intended to mock Trump in his first term is being used to flatter him in his second. But frankly it’s all too depressing to contemplate, so let’s move on.

Though onto a topic that’s also depressing. Here’s an interesting column about how Russian oligarchs are apparently back in the market for New York real estate. It’s been a tough few years for rich Russians, since sanctions have forced them to stay away from their traditional playgrounds in London, Manhattan and the south of France.

But, according to real estate brokers in New York at least, they’re back. “We’re seeing a lot of Russian nationals,” a broker said. “I’ve had five Russians look at properties in the $10 million to $20 million range in the past few weeks -- condos and townhouses.” Over the last couple of years, the broker confirmed, “oligarchs couldn’t buy anything in the U.S., and Putin put pressure on Russians not to buy here or in Europe.”

I’m a little bit suspicious of the claim that Russians are once more hunting for NYC real estate, since I think it would be a foolish oligarch who trusted a large amount of money to there being any stability in U.S. policy towards Russia. But if it is the case, it does highlight some of the issues raised by the OREO (ugh!) index, particularly in the light of the Trump White House’s decisions to scrap much of the anti-corruption architecture. 

That said, I wouldn’t expect much dirty money to be coming from Russians at the moment. Russian buyers have been drying up in Turkey and the UAE, which suggest the Russian economy is not generating the kind of cash that leads to property splurges, not least with U.S. tariffs leading to potentially lower oil prices. In my view, real estate brokers might do better to look more towards the old faithful klepto-gushers of South America and China.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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It's also the current home of Jim Kingman, a Texan lawyer who was invited to the commonwealth in 2023 to act as special prosecutor in a baroque corruption scandal featuring former ex-Governor Ralph Torres, who had been acquitted along party lines in impeachment proceedings in the islands’ senate the year before.

A LESSON FROM SAIPAN

And for Kingman, it’s been basically downhill from there. His attempts to investigate, subpoena or prosecute have been frustrated at every turn by a local elite that’s decided it doesn’t really want him to make any progress. “Where are the feds? Where is the oversight? Where are the ethics committees? Where is the bar? What are we even doing out here?” he asked in a fed-up Facebook post, a year into the corruption trial, with almost no progress made.

With the change in government in Washington, DC, Kingman is clearly concerned about the future of his mission on the islands, and has given an interview to a local journalist who also described the sheer extent of obstruction that Kingman has faced. It’s a bitter read, but it has a defiant tone, a commitment to fighting corruption, that leaves an optimistic aftertaste.

“One promise that I can make is that I won’t quit,” Kingman said. “I can’t promise the desired results in a process I don’t have control over. There is a fundamental change that needs to happen to set up a more sustainable government and that will have to come from the people here. The forces that I have been facing have made it clear that these changes will not be received from an outsider.”

Kingman is just doing his job as a lawyer, but the reason I single him out is that he’s looking pretty unusual among American lawyers at the moment. Faced with hostile politicians, Kingman is choosing to fight. Far better paid, better networked and more powerful lawyers than him are choosing to take a different route and roll over when threatened. 

I’m glad Kingman is sticking to his principles, and wish him luck. If anyone hasn’t read about what Pakistani lawyers did over a decade ago to preserve judicial independence in the face of an interfering autocrat, I highly recommend this piece. Faced with far tougher circumstances than those confronting New York’s white-shoe firms, Pakistan’s lawyers and judges took their struggle to the streets and found that most people are sympathetic to the idea of an independent judiciary that can act as a constraint on a dictatorial, power-hungry executive.

SLOW PROGRESS

Of course, lawyers can take to the streets. But the authorities’ chronic neglect of offices that investigate and prosecute corruption and financial crime has critically hampered their effectiveness. 

The U.K. non-profit “Spotlight on Corruption” has produced a really useful dashboard to track how the British authorities have fared in their efforts against financial crime. Long story short – it’s been pretty bad. If anyone needed proof that underfunding investigative agencies for years and years was an ineffective way to tackle complex criminality, then here it is.

And more evidence has been provided by Transparency International UK’s Ben Cowdock who has produced a fascinating summary of the progress the British authorities are making in reforming its corporate registry. Long story short – it’s not going very quickly. 

With an assessment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on the horizon, the “pressure is on to get Companies House reform right,” Cowdock notes. The FATF sets international standards for tackling money laundering and runs mutual assessments of its members on a regular timetable, and the UK is due to be assessed in December 2027. Before that, however, in February 2026, will be the assessment of the United States and there could be fireworks.

MADE EVEN SLOWER

Donald Trump has just pardoned a corporation for the first time. He decided to cancel the judgement against the founders of a crypto trading company that was fined $100 million last year. Authorities said the fine reflected the expectation that the digital assets industry “takes seriously its responsibilities in the regulated financial industry and its duties to develop and adhere to a culture of compliance.” But Trump appears to have given up on enforcing corporate transparency, which is a central pillar of the FATF’s approach to tackling illicit finance.

“What the getaway car is to a bank heist, the anonymous company often is to a fraud scheme,” said Transparency International U.S. in this useful factsheet of cases in which American shell companies have enabled fraud and financial crime. The Trump administration’s response to this has been to not only do nothing, but to stop what was already being done. There has not yet been a time when the American government has so egregiously flouted the FATF’s core principles. And the U.S. was central to crafting FATF back in the late 1980s, so we are drifting into uncharted and rocky waters. It's hard to imagine the FATF approving of what’s happening, and harder to imagine this White House reacting well to being criticised, so you’d hope the FATF is preparing for the fallout. 

If it is, however, it’s not showing any sign of being ready for battle. Its most recent publication is almost aggressively dull. And the latest public pronouncement from its president suggests that, while she might have some thoughts about the arrangement of the deckchairs, she’s not got much to say about the iceberg up ahead.

I am personally not a huge fan of the FATF, which has been very good at producing documents and very bad at stopping money laundering. In fact, I sometimes wonder if money laundering experts aren’t the modern day equivalent of the self-perpetuating lawyers lampooned by Charles Dickens in “Bleak House”. “The one great principle of the English law is,” Dickens wrote, “to make business for itself.” Still, we might find we’ll miss the FATF if it’s gone. 

AND FINALLY, WHAT IS A KLEPTOCRACY?

I was in Oxford last Thursday to chair an event for Professor John Heathershaw and Tom Mayne, two of the authors of Indulging Kleptocracy, a book about how British professionals have helped foreign thieves and crooks to steal, keep, protect and spend their fortunes. The week before I was in Washington and had lunch with Jodi Vittori, professor at Georgetown University, and author of this recent piece in Foreign Policy headlined “Is America a kleptocracy?”.

These are noted experts on kleptocracy, with lots of very interesting things to say, but they have different definitions of what the word means. In the U.K., Heathershaw and Mayne use it to describe the multinational networks that allow corrupt officials to steal money from places like Nigeria or Kazakhstan, launder it offshore, and spend it in London, the French Riviera or Miami. In the United States, however, Vittori and Casey Michel use it to describe a system of government (like a corrupt version of autocracy, democracy or any other -cracy).

I think these two definitions are the sign of something quite interesting. The United States has so much diversity in terms of how wealth is treated between individual states that crooks and thieves are able to build a kleptocracy within just one country. And the task just became easier, with a specialized team at the Justice Department investigating kleptocrats’ deals and assets now deemed unnecessary by the Trump administration. Not entirely surprisingly, the team’s investigations had irritated some of Trump’s closest advisors and allies.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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It came from Christopher Wylie. He’s a data scientist and the whistleblower who cracked open the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. I had just started working with him on a new investigation into AI. Chris was supposed to be meeting me, but he had found himself trapped in Dubai in a party full of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

“I don’t know if you can hear me — I’m in the toilet at this event, and people here are talking about longevity, how to live forever, but also prepping for when people revolt and when society gets completely undermined,” he had whispered into his phone. “You have in another part of the world, a bunch of journalists talking about how to save democracy. And here, you've got a bunch of tech guys thinking about how to live past democracy and survive.”

A massive storm and a once-in-a-generation flood had paralyzed Dubai when Chris was on a layover on his way to Perugia. He couldn’t leave. And neither could the hundreds of tech guys who were there for a crypto summit. The freakish weather hadn’t stopped them partying, Chris told me over a frantic Zoom call. 

“You're wading through knee-deep water, people are screaming everywhere, and then…  What do all these bros do? They organize a party. It's like the world is collapsing outside and yet you go inside and it's billionaires and centimillionaires having a party,” he said. “Dubai right now is a microcosm of the world. The world is collapsing outside and the people are partying.”

Chris and I eventually managed to meet up. And for over a year we worked together on a podcast that asks what is really going on inside the tech world.  We looked at how the rest of us —  journalists, artists, nurses, businesses, even governments — are being captured by big tech’s ambitions for the future and how we can fight back. 

Mercy was a content moderator for Meta. She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn't sleep. And when she tried to unionize, she was laid off.

Our reporting took us around the world from the lofty hills of Twin Peaks in San Francisco to meet the people building AI models, to the informal settlements of Kenya to meet the workers training those models.

One of these people was Mercy Chimwani, who we visited in her makeshift house with no roof on the outskirts of Nairobi. There was mud beneath our feet, and above you could see the rainclouds through a gaping hole where the unfinished stairs met the sky. When it rained, Mercy told us, water ran right through the house. It’s hard to believe, but she worked for Meta. 

Mercy was a content moderator, hired by the middlemen Meta used to source employees. Her job was to watch the internet’s most horrific images and video –  training the company’s system so it can automatically filter out such content before the rest of us are exposed to it. 

She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn’t sleep. And when she and her colleagues tried to unionize, she was laid off. Mercy was part of the invisible, ignored workforce in the Global South that enables our frictionless life online for little reward. 

Of course, we went to the big houses too — where the other type of tech worker lives. The huge palaces made of glass and steel in San Francisco, where the inhabitants believe the AI they are building will one day help them live forever, and discover everything there is to know about the universe. 

In Twin Peaks, we spoke to Jeremy Nixon, the creator of AGI House San Francisco (AGI for Artificial General Intelligence). Nixon described an apparently utopian future, a place where we never have to work, where AI does everything for us, and where we can install the sum of human knowledge into our brains. “The intention is to allow every human to know everything that’s known,” he told me. 

Later that day, we went to a barbecue in Cupertino and got talking to Alan Boehme, once a chief technology officer for some of the biggest companies in the world, and now an investor in AI startups. Boehme told us how important it was, from his point of view, that tech wasn’t stymied by government regulation. “We have to be worried that people are going to over-regulate it. Europe is the worst, to be honest with you,” he said. “Let's look at how we can benefit society and how this can help lead the world as opposed to trying to hold it back.”

I asked him if regulation wasn’t part of the reason we have democratically elected governments, to ensure that all people are kept safe, that some people aren’t left behind by the pace of change? Shouldn’t the governments we elect be the ones deciding whether we regulate AI and not the people at this Cupertino barbecue?

“You sound like you're from Sweden,” Boehme responded. “I'm sorry, that's social democracy. That is not what we are here in the U. S. This country is based on a Constitution. We're not based on everybody being equal and holding people back. No, we're not in Sweden.” 

As we reported for the podcast, we came to a gradual realization – what’s being built in Silicon Valley isn’t just artificial intelligence, it’s a way of life — even a religion. And it’s a religion we might not have any choice but to join. 

In January, the Vatican released a statement in which it argued that we’re in danger of worshiping AI as God. It's an idea we'd discussed with Judy Estrin, who worked on building some of the earliest iterations of the internet. As a young researcher at Stanford in the 1970s, Estrin was building some of the very first networked connections. She is no technophobe, fearful of the future, but she is worried about the zealotry she says is taking over Silicon Valley.

What if they truly believe humans are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us.

“If you worship innovation, if you worship anything, you can't take a step back and think about guardrails,” she said about the unquestioning embrace of AI. “So we, from a leadership perspective, are very vulnerable to techno populists who come out and assert that this is the only way to make something happen.” 

The first step toward reclaiming our lost agency, as AI aims to capture every facet of our world, is simply to pay attention. I've been struck by how rarely we actually listen to what tech leaders are explicitly saying about their vision of the future. 

There's a tendency to dismiss their most extreme statements as hyperbole or marketing, but what if they're being honest? What if they truly believe humans, or at least most humans, are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us right now. 

In our series, we explore artificial intelligence as something that affects our culture, our jobs, our media and our politics. But we should also ask what tech founders and engineers are really building with AI, or what they think they’re building. Because if their vision of society does not have a place for us in it, we should be ready to reclaim our destiny – before our collective future is captured.

Our audio documentary series, CAPTURED: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover is available now on Audible. Do please tune in, and you can dig deeper into our stories and the people we met during the reporting below.

The post Captured: how Silicon Valley is building a future we never chose appeared first on Coda Story.

Crypto people complained bitterly under the Biden administration that regulators were treating them unfairly, by restricting their ability to do business. Many observers pointed out that crypto people were being regulated exactly the same way as everyone else, and that the reason they were struggling was that their product only makes money if it can break the rules, but the crypto people didn’t agree and responded by spending over $119 million on political donations before the 2024 elections.

MONEY WELL SPENT

The lobbying has paid off. Victorious (and well-funded) Republicans have responded to the crypto industry with a degree of enthusiasm that is positively overwhelming. Supposedly dead under the Biden administration, crypto has been brought back to rude health. “I'm so excited for all of us,” said House Majority Whip Tom Emmer. “This has been a long road to get here. We are on the precipice of actually making this happen. And guess what? That's only the beginning.”

He said Congressmen and senators were determined to get a bill onto President Trump’s desk by August that would regulate the stablecoin industry, thus providing the kind of legal certainty that would allow these “digital dollars” to explode even more dramatically than they already have. A lot of this will be overseen by the Office for the Comptroller of the Currency, which has already moved to scrap the cautious approach of the old days (i.e. last year).

“I’m creating a bright future for banks in America to use digital assets. Financial inclusion is the civil rights issue of our generation,” Rodney Hood, Acting Comptroller of the Currency, told a side session at the conference. “I have removed the sword of Damocles that was hanging over the head of the financial services industry.”

Millions of people lack bank accounts in the United States, and they are overwhelmingly the poorest members of society. Governments have failed to do enough to make sure everyone has access to financial services. And if crypto really could help vulnerable people access banking, then I’d be all for it, but I fear – certainly on the evidence of what I saw last week – it won’t.

Perhaps the most alarming discussion was that concerning World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s own crypto firm. Donald Trump Jr., beamed in by videolink, appeared to be seated on what looked like a white throne. He loomed over the stage like a permatanned deity in an inadequately-buttoned shirt. He explained that he’d only realised the power of crypto after his father had come out as a Republican and the family had all been cancelled. “You put that little R next to your name,” he said, explaining the need for crypto. “And I sort of realized very quickly just how much discrimination there is in the ordinary financial markets.”

The other three founders of the firm, which was created last year, all took to the stage in person. Zachary Witkoff – the son of President Trump’s special envoy tasked with helping to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine – spells blockchain wrong on his LinkedIn bio, and got the dress code wrong by wearing a suit and neglecting to grow a beard. Zachary Folkman, who once ran a company called ‘Date Hotter Girls’, wore a bomber jacket and facial hair, which matched the mood more precisely. Chase Herro was the most hirsute and casual of the lot, in joggers and a white baseball cap, and he explained that they would be targeting ordinary Americans, with the aim of getting them to use crypto to buy ham sandwiches from a bodega, as well as aiming to transform the cross-border payments system with their own stablecoin – USD1. 

The idea that these four nepo man-babies would be given the keys to any kind of financial institution was alarming, but the prospect of them doing so under permissive new regulations and an administration headed by one of their dads, was terrifying. “So one of our biggest goals is to kind of bring everybody back together and realize that this is a free market and, like, let the free market dictate who survives and who doesn't, and who thrives and who doesn't,” said Herro. Trump’s sons, incidentally, have also just invested heavily in a bitcoin mining company. 

WELCOME BACK, ALL IS FORGIVEN

The pace at the conference was frenetic, and every other session seemed to have Congressmen and/or senators explaining how cryptocurrencies would do their bit to make America prosperous and grand. Even three Democrats held a side session called “keeping crypto non-partisan”. No one was listening, though, partly because all the lawyers were talking to each other in the hallway but mainly because the Republican chairs of the Senate and the House banking committees were on the main stage at the same time explaining how America would remain the world’s crypto capital. 

Crypto is Trump’s project now, and no one cares what the Democrats have to say. If you want to see how much the industry has embraced the president’s talking points, check out this comically politicized advert from the blockchain company Solana, home of the $Trump memecoin. Even on X, the backlash was so fierce that Solana had to delete it.

What does this mean for the rest of the world though? American politicians seem to have decided that cryptocurrencies – and, particularly, dollar-denominated stablecoins – are good for America, that they bring business to the country, and help find customers for the Treasury’s debt. Anything that gets in the way of crypto therefore is bad for America. With great power comes great opportunity, as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben might have said if only he’d had more donations from a pro-crypto SuperPAC.

Bo Hines, the hatchet-faced head of Trump’s council of crypto advisers, said his message to any crypto people working offshore was: “welcome home”. 

As for Tom Emmer, even the prosecution of the founders of Tornado Cash – the software that, prosecutors say, allowed criminals including North Korean hackers to hide $1 billion of stolen wealth – was governmental overreach. “We need all that innovation, all those risk takers and creators in this country, that's what is the definition of success. From that you'll get that economic growth,” Emmer said.

There is a terrible irony that cryptocurrencies – an idea much of whose popularity stemmed from the public anger sparked by the deregulation and greed that caused the great financial crisis of 2007-2008 – are becoming a new nexus for deregulation and greed. And I worry about what the backlash will bring when this too collapses. And I worry about all the bad behaviour that will be enabled before the collapse happens.

As Corey Frayer, who served in the Securities and Exchange Commission under Joe Biden, once said: “Crypto is a machine where fraud and money laundering go in one side, and political donations come out the other end.” 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post A crypto government for a crypto nation appeared first on Coda Story.

These seemingly eccentric obsessions with exotic animals reveal a fundamental truth about how power itself works. The zebra collection isn't merely decorative – it's emblematic of a system where the arbitrary whims of the powerful become reality, where resources that could serve many are instead directed toward personal indulgence. Orbán admires Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party, which has steered the country away from EU integration. Trump openly praises Orbán. These men create a web of mutual admiration, exchanging not just tactics but symbols and sometimes even PR consultants – as we learned when Israeli media revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers had orchestrated a covert campaign to counter negative discourse around Qatar. Those same advisers were also tasked with cleaning up Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić's public image.

Years ago as a BBC correspondent in Central Asia, I remember staring with bemusement at a massive golden statue in Turkmenistan of the former president, Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled ‘Turkmenbashi’, the ‘father of all Turkmen’. The statue rotated to always face the sun. We journalists used to dismiss it as the eccentricity of a dictator in a little-known corner of the world. These weren't mere quirks, though, but  early warning signs of an authoritarian pattern that would spread globally.

Last weekend, we gathered voices who have witnessed authoritarianism's rise across continents for our event "The Playbook." Their unanimous observation: the patterns emerging in America mirror what they've already witnessed elsewhere.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who has faced multiple criminal charges and arrest warrants in the Philippines for her journalism, described her own sense of déjà vu watching events unfold in the United States. Democracy dies not in one blow but through "death by a thousand cuts"—media capture, then academic institutions, then NGOs, until the entire society bleeds out, Ressa warned.

Bill Browder, the architect of the Magnitsky Act that holds Russian leaders to account for human rights violations – which he lobbied for after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in Russian custody – mapped how Vladimir Putin perfected symbolic terrorization through selective targeting. He saw this pattern being repeated in the U.S.: "This attack on law firms, as an example, going after Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss... what's the message to every law firm in America? Don't go after the government." He pointed to judges facing impeachment threats and green card holders being threatened with deportation as classic examples of the Putin playbook unfolding in America – striking fear into entire sectors through selective prosecution.

Many audience questions focused on resistance strategies, with particular frustration directed at the Democratic Party's seeming inability to mount an effective opposition. "Why are they so quiet about this?" Armando Iannucci asked, voicing a common concern about the lack of a coordinated response.

Yet Browder managed to see a bright side in America's chaotic, decentralized resistance: "The Putin model is to find the leader of the opposition and then destroy them," he noted. "But if you don't have a leader and resistance comes from everywhere, there's no way to stop it." He pointed to student-led protests in Serbia and Georgia, where grassroots movements without central leadership proved remarkably resilient.

Few know more about resistance than anti-apartheid era South African activist Kumi Naidoo, who served as head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International. While he offered practical resistance strategies, Naidoo also emphasized something crucial: "We have demonized people who do not agree with us," he cautioned. "We cannot move forward in this moment where we find ourselves unless we consciously build bridges to the people that are not with us." This doesn't mean compromising on principles, but rather understanding the genuine concerns that drive people to support authoritarian figures.

"The worst disease in the world that we face,” Naidoo said, “is not HIV/AIDS or cancer or influenza—it's a disease we can call affluenza." This pathological obsession with wealth accumulation creates the perfect environment for would-be dictators, as ordinary people mistakenly see oligarchs not as threats to democracy but as aspirational figures. The zebra-collecting billionaire becomes someone to admire rather than fear.

Every speaker at our event expressed a haunting familiarity with America's unfolding crisis – they've all seen this movie before, even though no one, right now, can possibly predict how it ends. Iannucci, creator of “The Death of Stalin” and “Veep – so, someone who has, literally, written the script – said the current reality might put him out of the job. How do you parody something already so absurd? 

“Trump,” he said, “is a self-basting satirist in that he is his own entertainment." Still, Iannucci underscored why humor remains vital in dark times: "Dictators and autocrats hate jokes because laughter is spontaneous, and they hate the idea of a spontaneous reaction that they have no control over."

Far from mere entertainment, Iannucci argued that storytelling itself becomes essential resistance. He challenged us to move beyond speaking only to those who already agree with us: "We must tell authentic stories which are rooted in reality. And understand that to stand a chance to get through this moment we're in, we have to invest equally on the objective side as well as the subjective side."

As authoritarians build their global networks of mutual admiration, from private zoos to public policy, the countering networks of resistance become all the more crucial.

Maria Ressa's powerful assertion that "when it is a battle for facts, journalism becomes activism" particularly resonated with me. As a journalist, I've been trained in objectivity and balance. Yet we now face a moment where the foundations of free thought that my profession relies on are themselves under direct assault. This isn't about choosing political sides – it's about recognizing when factual reality itself is being deliberately undermined as a strategy of control.

I also found myself enthusiastically agreeing with Kumi Naidoo who emphasized that we must genuinely listen to those who support authoritarian figures, not to validate harmful policies but to understand the legitimate grievances that fuel support for them. From Manila to Moscow to Washington, the pattern is clear but not inevitable. The script is familiar, but we still have time to write a different ending – one where free thought and factual discourse prevail over manipulation and fear.

If you would like to become part of conversations like this one, we have news: we have just launched a brand new membership program connecting journalists, artists, thinkers and changemakers across borders. Join today to receive the recording of this event and access to future gatherings where we'll continue connecting dots others miss.

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Sevastopol is the largest city on the Crimean peninsula, and was stolen from Ukraine by Putin in 2014 on the grounds that it had once belonged to Russia. “It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country,” Putin told the State Duma over a decade ago as justification for the annexation of Crimea, part 1 of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, “that Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered.” Most Western countries do not accept this logic, and have tried to punish people involved, which is why Ovsyannikov was sanctioned by the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

WESTWARD BOUND

Ovsyannikov left Crimea in 2019 for a position in Moscow, but his political career came to an abrupt end after a scandal at a regional airport. He then did that thing Russian officials do and headed to Britain. In 2023, he moved into his brother’s house in London, where his wife and children were already living and attending private school.

Private schools, however, have to be paid for, and prosecutors say that arranging those payments was tantamount to circumventing the UK’s sanctions, so he was charged along with his wife and brother, and this month they went on trial. The alleged wrongdoing is fairly small-scale, but it’s an important test case. We have a few weeks to wait for an outcome, but there are some interesting points to draw out from it already.

The first is about spelling. If you’re trying to avoid notice as a Russian (or a representative of any other nation which uses a different alphabet to ours), it’s an entry-level stratagem to play around with transliteration. It’s noticeable that in the court documents, he uses a different version of his name -- Dmitrii Ovsiannikov – to that favoured by the Kremlin in the good old days, which is a switch between two common transliteration systems. His brother, meanwhile, spells his surname Owsjanikow, which uses yet another. I’m hoping there’s a third sibling, who’s gone all pre-revolutionary with Ovsiannikoff.

The second is about his citizenship. Ovsyannikov left Russia for Turkey in August 2022, which many Russians did after Putin invaded Ukraine, though admittedly most of them had not been senior officials in the occupying administration. He then applied for a British passport, which he obtained early the next year. 

Apparently Ovsyannikov’s father was born in Bradford, in the north of England, in 1950. How did a Yorkshire lad hook up with a Soviet lady at the height of the Cold War? Did their eyes meet over a discussion of production quotas? If there are any authors of “socialist realist romance” among my readers, this could be your time to shine. Ovsyannikov himself is 48, so he must have been born in 1976 or 1977. 

The third and most important thing about his case is whether he should still have been subject to sanctions at all. The U.K. may have continued to sanction Ovsyannikov, but in 2023 he challenged his EU designation and was removed from the bloc’s sanctions list on the grounds that he was no longer in a position of power or responsibility in Russia. Some may think that’s a weak reason, but I am inclined to think sanctions lists should be adapted if people have ceased the offending behaviour. Sanctions are a foreign policy tool, not a law enforcement instrument, and if the aim of the policy has been achieved, they should be cancelled. 

There are lots of oligarchs and officials who would be willing to do quite a lot to get off the sanctions list, much of which would severely inconvenience Putin. It may feel icky, but I think our governments should be open to such deals. The point of all this is to undermine the Kremlin after all.

AND IT’S STILL ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

This is not to deny that it does indeed feel icky to see sanctioned individuals try and evade those sanctions to buy Mercedes SUVs, as Ovsyannikov did. He used his brother as a proxy to buy the car. It reminded me of company owners who nominate proxies offshore to hide the real ownership structure. Since 2016, companies in the U.K. have been obliged to name a “person of significant control”. The idea of the law was to stop people hiding behind opaque shell companies to commit financial crime, but is anyone enforcing it?

Apparently not, since lawyer Dan Neidle has been able to publish a map with the location of 65,000 foreign companies that own U.K. entities, none of which are declaring who is in control of their operations. You can search on the map yourself. There are five companies in the Falkland Islands, for example, and there’s even one in American Samoa: are these remote jurisdictions making late bids to become offshore tax havens?

Just as I was thinking about the efforts of Companies House to rein in fraud, I was still thinking about the use of cash money by launderers from last week. I was reading this article, and I was struck by the claim that the US aerospace sector is due to export $125 billion this year, making it the country’s second most successful exporting industry. 

In 2023, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced 1,326,976,000 $100 bills. That’s not all profit, because each bill costs 9.4 cents to print, and there’s some dispute about quite how many of those go abroad, but serious estimates range from 80 percent to 70 percent. Once you’ve done the sums, you end up with profits from $100-bill exports in 2023 of somewhere between $92.8 and $106.1 billion.

We don’t have the figures for 2024 yet, but the Federal Reserve said it would be ordering between $155.8 and $160.6 billion worth of $100 bills, which would yield profits of somewhere between $109.0 and $128.4 billion. 

Look at that number again: at the top end of the range, that would nudge aerospace into third place, and establish the $100-bill-printing industry as America’s second most successful exporter. Even at the bottom end, it would be fourth, ahead of brand name pharmaceutical manufacturing ($103.3 billion), and quite a lot bigger than natural gas liquid processing ($62.9 billion). Who says the public sector can’t contribute to the economy?

Before someone writes in: yes, I know that banknotes are technically loans made to a government, rather than products sold by the government. But it’s more fun this way, so I’m going with it.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Did a Putin ally evade sanctions to pay private school fees? appeared first on Coda Story.

To set the stage for Orbán’s rise, we start with what happened in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  

The pace of political change in the early 1990s was dizzying, and the forces propelling democracy seemed unstoppable: old political barriers between East and West collapsed; free markets sprang up everywhere and democratic elections were held; a divided Germany was reunited; the Soviet Union dissolved; Europe expanded; and a new global economy seemed to be taking over the world.

These changes caused one optimistic observer to predict that democracy would be the final form of government.  But there were other forces at work, less visible at first, but leading to a very different kind of change. Some effects of the changes listed above included: international companies moving their factories out of Europe to Asia; neoliberal shock therapies cutting social spending in the new democracies of Eastern Europe; social services that had been provided by the old regimes were replaced unevenly by capitalism; corruption broke out as state assets were privatized; economic inequality grew between the new class of oligarchs benefiting from privatization and everyone else; bank bailouts and lending crises shook the financial system; then came the massive flow of refugees into Europe from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa. 

All this led to the rise of xenophobic politics – first in Hungary, then across Europe. It was a populist pushback against disruptive and disorienting changes.

This is when the assault on democracy began, and for seven years I was in the middle of it, in Hungary, where I was president of Central European University.  I saw first-hand how a politician like Orbán could manipulate a populist rebellion in order to take over a democracy and turn it into an authoritarian state. 

When my term ended in 2016, I returned to the U.S. – just in time for the first election of Donald Trump.  Friends joked that maybe I had carried the Hungarian anti-democracy disease back home.  

Hungary has been a laboratory for reactionary populism, years before it spread to the rest of Europe and to the U.S. The 2008 financial crisis hit Hungarians harder than most Europeans and Americans, and many began to feel no better off than they had been under communism. By 2014 a European Commission poll showed that 70% of Europeans distrusted their elected governments – up from only 25% in 2002.  In Eastern Europe people were feeling left behind by the loss of jobs, stagnating incomes, austerity programs and cuts in social welfare – all products of the economics of globalization.  

Hungarians, some have argued, have a deep-seated victim mentality – the product of centuries of invasions by Mongols, Turks, Russians, Austrians, Germans and Soviets – and Hungarian civil society was stunted by outside domination.  On top of that, the country was deeply divided between a majority rural population that spoke only Hungarian and a cosmopolitan minority who were the dominant elite.  

This set the stage for an anti-democratic politician, and in walked Viktor Orbán.

Ironically, Orbán had been a hero of the democracy movement that overthrew the old regime. He had good organizing and rhetorical skills, which he used to stimulate Hungarians’ sense of victimization. He attacked the European Union as “the new Moscow”. He railed against refugees, calling them “a threat to Christian civilization”. He campaigned on the memorable slogan, “make Hungary great again,” and he promised Hungarians that he would rescue them from migrants and foreigners and people of other races and religions. He created a new identity politics by offering the vision of a “Great Hungarian Nation” as a way to prop up a worn out and disintegrating society.  

Orbán boasted that he would build a new form of government, which he called “illiberal democracy” -- an Orwellian term he invented to justify turning his election into a weapon to attack democratic institutions. He maneuvered a narrow electoral victory into a supermajority in the parliament, and paved the way for rewriting the Hungarian Constitution:

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”

Orbán took over the media through government regulation, censorship, and financial pressure -- and today he controls 85% of the average Hungarian’s sources of information.  

He undermined the judiciary and the rule of law by expanding and packing the Constitutional Court, forcing independent judges to retire, cutting back the Court’s jurisdiction and drastically revising the Constitution.

He built a governing base out of a new oligarchy of corrupt businesses who benefited from noncompetitive government contracts, with funding from Europen Union grants to Hungary as a new member state.  The grants totaled nearly 30 billion euros before they were finally suspended when Hungary was held by the European Court of Justice to be violating the EU’s rule of law requirements. 

Orbán attacked Hungarian civil society -- branding organizations that received any support from the US or Europe as “foreign agents”, conducting harassment investigations of critics, and taking away the academic freedom of universities.  

I was running an international university whose mission was to revive academic freedom in Eastern Europe. During the Obama presidency, when the US promoted academic freedom, I was able to protect CEU from Orbán and expand its academic programs.  But when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he endorsed Orbán, and Orbán took the gloves off and started attacking universities, forcing CEU out of the country and taking over others by censoring and dictating what they could teach.

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic, and he’s had an especially large influence on Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”  

Orbán has developed a playbook that’s now kept him in power for 15 years, and his playbook is the foundation for Trump’s Project 2025.  Here are Orbán’s rules for turning a democracy into an authoritarian state – rules that Donald Trump is now working to implement in the U.S.:     

One: take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all dissent.

Two: build your base by appealing to fear and hate and branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.    

Three: use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.

Four: use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate -- especially if you don’t win a majority.

Five: centralize your power by destroying the civil service.  

Six: redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree.

Seven: eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. 

Eight: rely on your oligarchs to supervise the economy, and reward them with special access to state resources.    

Nine: ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.

Ten: get the public to believe all this is necessary, and resistance is futile.

The scope of Orbán’s influence reaches across Europe.  

In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.

Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies. 

Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orbán playbook, but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.  

In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.  

In Germany the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government.  Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20% of the vote, and polls show that 71% of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past. 

Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orbán model.  A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.  

So, what lessons can be drawn from all this? 

One lesson is that populist movements are having a big impact on democracy.  They start as reactions to destabilizing events, like economic or cultural upheavals, and they demand change and democratic reform. It’s important to listen to these movements, to understand their demands, and to show how democracy can give people the ability to shape and adapt to change. Meanwhile authoritarians like Viktor Orbán may seem attractive at first but inevitably suppress people’s voices and freedom, and promote corruption and economic inequality.   

Responding to populism can be done by building coalitions for economic fairness on issues like healthcare, education, taxes and public spending.  There are historical examples of this, like the American Farmer Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers and black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century.  Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.

A second lesson is that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orbán playbook the national flag is hijacked by the authoritarian leader.  The flag of a democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, of a society built on human rights and freedoms and international alliances and humanitarian values. When these soft power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up -- to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Xinping and Vladimir Putin who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump. 

A third lesson is that the ultimate goal of an authoritarian leader is to weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Orbán’s playbook demonizes anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.” This stigma is then enforced by targeting opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties like denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, criminal penalties like prosecution. The result is a hollowed-out shell of democracy – like Orbán’s Hungary.

What about the U.S.?  The US is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism.  It’s thirty times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and its diversity is the source of its economic and cultural strength. The US has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.  Donald Trump won less than fifty percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls. 

This is not a mandate for hollowing out American democracy.  

National polls show that 70% of Americans today see democracy as a core American value.  Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, it’s essential, and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees, and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country, who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy. 

Defending democracy is a long game. For two and a half centuries Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law. These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025, because citizens across the country are beginning to resist authoritarianism. To succeed, authoritarianism requires big government, and Americans have long been opposed to big government. 

Building resistance is hard work and sometimes may seem futile, but every small act counts and many small continuous acts can make a profound difference in resisting an authoritarian regime.  Six decades ago, in South Africa at the height of apartheid, the original Robert F. Kennedy eloquently predicted what would be achieved by resisting authoritarianism:  

“Each time a person stands up, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.”

A version of this piece was first published in Rappler.

Image credits:
Donald Trump and Viktor Orban in the Oval Office. May 13, 2019. Washington, DC. Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban on the sidelines of the Third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on October 17, 2023. Grigory Sisoyev/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.
Xi Jinping and Viktor Orban. Liszt Ferenc Budapest airport, Ferihegy, Hungary.May 8, 2024. Vivien Cher Benko/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

The post The Orbán precedent appeared first on Coda Story.

A WELCOME FALL

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and subsequent public concern about kleptocratic wealth infiltrating the UK, the government pledged to improve Companies House, including by giving it powers to check information, and obliging corporate directors to provide proof of identification. These are baby steps, but they’re already having results: “the companies register shrank during the period October to December 2024, for the first time since quarterly reporting began in the period April to June 2012”.

There were 5,408,707 companies on the register at the end of 2024, which was 19,879 fewer than at the end of September. That was a decline of 0.37 percent, so not a huge deal, though that did not deter some people. “COMPANY NUMBERS CRASH IN BUDGET FALLOUT,” shrieked the tiresome rightwing blog Guido Fawkes, which attempted to claim the falling numbers were because recent tax rises were scaring entrepreneurs away from starting businesses.

There is a strange belief among supposedly pro-business people that the easier it is to create a company, the more economic growth you will get. This is true, up to a point. But after that point, companies are so easy to obtain that they’re registered for the purposes of fraud, money laundering and corruption rather than honest enterprise, which will obviously impede rather than encourage business. 

So it is good that Companies House is finally trying to keep the more obvious malefactors from hiding their identities behind what anti-money laundering expert Graham Barrow calls burner companies. “None of these companies that were got rid of,” he told me, “were contributing anything.” 

Barrow runs a compliance firm called RiskAlert247, which trawls Companies House data in the quest for fraudulent firms with a programme called “Spider Sense”, which spots signs of dodgy behaviour. A mere five-minute demonstration was enough to convince me that the number of companies registered on Companies House has a long way to fall before it starts to reflect the actual quantity of legitimate firms in the country. There are hundreds of thousands of tax-dodging and fraud-enabling vehicles still on the registry although hopefully when new powers are brought in, they too will be winnowed out.

In the meantime, if you’d like a laugh, or simply to see how bad things were before the government got round to acting, look up “JOHN SMITH 3A LIMITED” – registered address 1 Any Road, Area, Anytown, United Kingdom, ZB2 2ZZ – on Companies House, and click on the “people” tab.

ANOTHER WELCOME FALL

The value of all the euro banknotes in circulation peaked in June 2022 at €1.60 trillion, and has been trending infinitesimally downwards ever since. In January this year, it was recorded at €1.57 trillion. This is as it should be: fewer people use cash for payments, therefore people take fewer banknotes out of banks, and so there are fewer banknotes in circulation.

What’s odd, however, is that – for decades – the opposite has been happening all over the Western world. The usage of cash has been in steep decline, but demand for banknotes has remained consistently strong. Although euro printing has begun to decline, it is only a recent phenomenon. The total of euro banknotes out there is still a lot higher than the trillion euros that were in circulation a decade ago. Central bankers call it a paradox, which is their way of saying they have no idea what’s going on.

While the value of euro notes in circulation has fallen, however slightly, the value of British pounds in circulation hit £90.5 billion in the first week of March, up more than three billion from last year, which was also an all-time high. And the value of cash dollars in circulation hit an all-time high of $2.36 trillion in January, which is twice as much as there was in January 2015, and that in turn was twice the total of January 2005. 

Ruth Judson seems to be the Federal Reserve analyst tasked with trying to work out who’s using all the dollars the Bureau of Engraving and Printing keeps churning out. Her latest paper estimates that more than half of them are circulating outside the United States. 

BUT IT’S STILL ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

To me, the most interesting observation Judson makes is that demand for smaller denominations is declining, so the growth is overwhelmingly coming from people wanting more and more $100 bills. My personal theory is that, as money laundering rules have become more stringent, more criminals have turned to storing and moving their wealth in cash, and they naturally prefer to do that in large denominations, because you can get more value in a smaller space. It’s the criminal economy, stupid.

But why are they choosing to use $100 bills, rather than the even more valuable €200 or €100 banknotes? That is a bit of a mystery. Or a paradox, if you will.

Considering the destruction that the White House has wreaked on U.S. anti-corruption work, I should be pleased to see the announcement of tougher anti-money laundering measures. But I’m sorry to say I’m not. The Treasury Department has decided that money service businesses along the Mexican border must now report any currency transaction over $200 in a supposed action against cartels. This is catastrophically misguided. 

At the moment, all currency transactions over $10,000 have to be reported, and that is already producing a colossal deluge of paperwork. In 2023, Fincen received almost 21 million Currency Transaction Reports. Just imagine how many they’ll get now the threshold is $200, and the policy won’t even work at stopping the cartels.

According to the U.S. government’s own figures, Mexican cartels make $19-29 billion a year. They are NOT transferring these profits back home $200 a time via corner stores in Maverick County, Texas. Obviously. Even at the lower end of the estimate, that would involve more than quarter of a million money transfers every day, or more than 37,000 from each of the counties that the Treasury Department is imposing new measures on. 

If they actually wanted to stop the cartels, they should look instead into who’s taking all those $100 bills off their hands, since by their own estimates $25 billion is smuggled across the southern border in cash each year.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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Having spent most of my life watching Putin's Russia take shape, I recognize familiar patterns in American politics today. There is a theory, expressed only half in jest, among some who analyze Donald Trump—as he undermines traditional alliances and creates havoc within the federal government—that he must be a Russian asset. I understand what they mean. Trump consistently parrots Putin talking points, and Russian state media celebrates Trump with unusual enthusiasm. As American presidents, whether left or right, are rarely cheered in Russia, one might suspect some kind of collaboration.

But there is a simpler explanation: Trump and Putin are remarkably similar men who naturally understand each other. No conspiracy required—Trump would feel right at home in Moscow.

This isn't to suggest moral equivalence. Trump, after all, has not waged a genocidal war claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. He aspires to dictatorship but hasn't succeeded in achieving it—yet. He hasn't killed his political opponents or nationalized major companies to enrich his friends. Given America's robust institutions, he is unlikely to ever have the opportunity to do these things. In any case, he likely doesn't harbor such aims—he seems much more jovial than Putin.

Still, the parallels between them are unmistakable:

Both men emerged in the moral ambiguity that followed World War II's short-lived moral clarity. They share a worldview in which only large, feared countries deserve respect. Trump famously told Bob Woodward that “real power is… fear.” In both domestic and foreign affairs, neither operates appears to believe that promises matter or that empathy should guide decision-making. While many politicians behave similarly, few presidents so openly belittle neighboring countries and their leaders as Trump and Putin routinely do.

Both men consider loyalty—even feigned loyalty—to be the only true virtue. Trump's pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists demonstrates his adherence to this principle. Unlike in his first term, when staffers frequently defected or expressed dissatisfaction, Trump now trades competence for loyalty in those he employs, exactly as Putin does. 

Just observe JD Vance's transformation. During Trump's first term, he was a clean-shaven intellectual on a book tour who compared Trump to Hitler. Now, he resembles a Central Asian heir to the throne and his almost comically masculine posturing mimics his boss’s style. This shapeshifting ability shouldn't surprise anyone who read Vance's memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he described his childhood talent for adapting to different father figures. "With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it,” Vance wrote, “I pretended earrings were cool... With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of 'girlieness,' I had thick skin and loved police cars." For men like Trump and Putin, loyalty isn't optional, it's existential, and Vance has mastered the art of becoming whatever his current patron requires.

Both Putin and Trump harbor a profound distrust of democratic institutions. Trump's fixation on the "stolen election" of 2020 mirrors Putin's trauma from his failed bid to manipulate the 2005 Ukrainian election to his advantage. For both men, personal political losses were transformational. In Putin’s case, every challenge to his authority has turned him into a different, usually worse, person. 

It may seem paradoxical that a man who never faces competitive elections changes with each successive term, but it's true – and each iteration is more dangerous than the last. Trump too has changed since his last term. He may still be erratic, may still be a lying, megalomaniacal, overconfident salesman. But those of us who have seen authoritarian evolution up close recognize a fundamental transformation. Trump’s rage at institutional betrayal has calcified into conviction, into a doctrine founded on distrust. The trauma of defeat in 2020 didn't just wound Trump's ego; it convinced him to view the entire democratic apparatus as illegitimate. This shift, this hardening of his position should not be underestimated.

Another thing Trump and Putin have in common is that both believe corruption is universal. I recognize in Trump a mindset common in Russia—indeed, it's fundamental to how power operates in Moscow. Trump doesn't just call opponents "crooked” as a joke, he seems to genuinely believe that graft, and graft alone, motivates everyone. For Trump, corruption is not merely personal enrichment but is the only effective means of governance, of exerting control. This approach makes dealing with Putin convenient—negotiations are simpler when you believe everyone has a price. But I’ve seen in my country how such transactionalism ultimately backfires, creating whole new avenues of institutional corruption that involve orders of far greater magnitude than simple personal enrichment ever could. 

Apart from an intrinsic understanding of corruption, both Trump and Putin also understand, crave and deliberately create chaos. Whether through war, nuclear threats, dismantled treaties, or bureaucratic upheaval, disorder provides leverage. When Elon Musk is tasked with destroying the civil service, the goal is to make government employees more pliable for whatever comes next. The damage, of course, will extend beyond Trump's tenure—after he leaves office, American civil servants will have lost their trust in the entire American system, the whole edifice of government, and it won’t be easy to restore that faith.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality.

Many American observers now hold out hope that constitutional guardrails and democratic institutions will do their job. These observers believe checks and balances will contain Trump's excesses until the midterms or the next presidential election bring relief. They're not entirely wrong—America is certainly better positioned to withstand authoritarian creep than Russia was in Putin's early years. 

America's independent judiciary, free press, federalized power structure, and long democratic tradition provide genuine protective layers that Russia lacked. But I've also seen how institutions crumble not through frontal assault but through slow erosion, as bureaucrats, judges, and legislators become complicit through fear, ambition, or simple exhaustion. 

When I read pundits like Ezra Klein argue we shouldn't believe Trump's threats because his power is more limited than he pretends, I recognize a familiar pattern of wishful thinking. Klein suggests that since Trump lacks congressional control and broad public support, his power exists mainly in our collective imagination of it. This analysis assumes Trump operates within the traditional boundaries of American politics. But that's precisely what authoritarians never do. Those who dismiss Trump's ability to transform America make a fundamental error of perspective. They judge his capabilities by the system's rules, while he succeeds by dismantling those very rules. 

Trump has few constitutional powers, true. But autocrats rarely acquire power through constitutional means—that's precisely why they want to become autocrats: to avoid this hassle. They find cracks in the system—a corrupt judge here, a sycophantic legislator there, a couple of overworked bureaucrats willing to look the other way.

Worse, those who can most effectively prevent state capture are least equipped to recognize it. Trump isn't trying to subdue coastal liberals and activists; he’s going after unelected civil servants, military officers, and corporate stakeholders. Whatever their qualifications, these aren't people prepared for civil disobedience—that's not in their job descriptions. They advance their careers by executing orders without overthinking them, not by questioning authority. Whatever resistance they might offer has been further diminished by Musk's crusade against the "deep state."

Meanwhile, the elected officials who can resist often voluntarily surrender. Many Republican congressmen, whatever their real feelings and opinions, have meekly knelt before Trump's throne. Autocratic systems actively select for the unprincipled and obedient. Compare Trump's second administration to his first—adverse selection is already evident.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality. 

So far, Trump has twice won the most competitive elections on the planet, and Musk is officially the world's richest man, having built businesses few thought possible. JD Vance, in addition to becoming VP by 40, wrote a bestseller at 31. They all have a history of making their ideas come true. If you think the world isn't crazy enough to follow them further into the abyss, you might want to reconsider your assumptions. In my part of the world, at least, it's always been just crazy enough.

Even though nearly every statement Trump makes is false, he remains deeply true to those falsehoods. His fictions, which share so much with those invented by Putin, have given both men control of their nations’ narratives – false or not. So, when evaluating Trump's threat, consider Pascal's wager: If we spend four years on high alert over dangers that never materialize, we've endured unnecessary stress. If we relax and let his worst ambitions come to fruition, we face a potential catastrophe. The first scenario is clearly preferable.

Americans often ask how ordinary Russians can support Putin's regime. Perhaps now you're getting a clearer picture. The path from democracy to autocracy isn't marked by tanks in the streets but by the slow erosion of norms, the replacement of competence with loyalty, and the methodical exploitation of institutional vulnerabilities.

Trump has given us plenty of advance warning. Authoritarians announce their crimes long before they commit them. Even the most unprincipled men hold deep convictions and manifest character traits that rarely change. That's not advanced political theory—it's Russian History 101. The question remains, though, now that we know – what are we going to do?

The post The Shadow Puppet: A Russian’s Warning about Trump appeared first on Coda Story.

BUKELE’S BITCOIN BET

But first to El Salvador. News of the death of its bitcoin project appears to be exaggerated, with the country buying yet more of the cryptocurrency just days after agreeing a $1.4billion deal with the IMF that seeks to “confine government engagement in Bitcoin-related economic activities.” On X, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele posted: “No, it’s not stopping. If it didn’t stop when the world ostracized us and most ‘bitcoiners’ abandoned us, it won’t stop now, and it won’t stop in the future.”​​

El Salvador has many problems – not least excessively high levels of debt and a sluggish economy – to which Bukele has presented Bitcoin as the answer, including by making it legal tender in 2021 and obliging merchants to accept it for payments. Under pressure from the IMF (which says Bitcoin’s “widespread adoption could threaten macroeconomic stability and raise fiscal risks”, without elaborating), the El Salvador government has cancelled those reforms. But Bukele’s latest tweets suggest he’s not given up on his plans.

I don’t think anyone outside the IMF is nostalgic for the days when the lender used to bully the countries of Central and South America. But I doubt the IMF will take Bukele’s taunting quietly, so we’ve presumably not heard the last of this.

Personally, given my interest in financial crime, I think Bitcoin is a bit of a sideshow. It’s clunky, it’s expensive to use, and it’s wildly volatile – all of which mean it’s great for speculation, but not much good as a money laundering tool. Tether, on the other hand, now that is something to keep an eye on.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?

“What El Salvador has achieved, thanks to President Bukele, is truly incredible and will be narrated in history books,” posted Tether’s CEO, the emollient Paolo Ardoino, after Bukele said he would keep buying bitcoin. Tether issues the world’s biggest stablecoin, which is a cryptocurrency that’s worth the same as a dollar, but doesn’t suffer from any of the restrictions imposed by the kind of squares who comply with anti-money laundering rules at banks. Tether, incidentally, relocated its headquarters to El Salvador in January, so technically Bukele’s government is responsible for regulating it (lol).

Unlike Bitcoin, Tether is cheap, easy to use and non-volatile, which is why it’s become a funding vehicle of choice for Hamas, Hezbollah, the gangsters of the Mekong region, Russian money launderers, North Korea apparently, and almost any other baddies you can mention. Also unlike Bitcoin, Tether is a centralised operation, meaning it can freeze its currency if it wants to. The fact that it so rarely did was either a mark of its commitment to financial inclusion, or a sign that it didn’t care about enabling rampant fraud. But it looks like it may be trying to clean up its act.

Because bombshell news: almost three years after the U.S. sanctioned Garantex, a Russian cryptocurrency exchange, Tether finally got around to freezing its digital wallets. Before we get too delighted about the stablecoin’s decision to cooperate (the EU having also sanctioned Garantex last month), this was the result of the US Secret Service – in cooperation with Germany and Finland – working to cripple the exchange’s infrastructure. Tether presumably had little choice but to do what it did. 

In the meantime, sophisticated obfuscatory skills have allowed Garantex to move $60 billion worth of crypto since the US imposed sanctions. Still, there will be many annoyed Russians who will now be on the lookout for an alternative exchange. “We have bad news,” as Garantex announced on Telegram, “Tether has entered the war against the Russian crypto market… Please note that all USDT held in Russian wallets is now under threat. As always, we are the first, but not the last.”

THE CRYPTOCRATS’ LAMENT

If Russians who use crypto are struggling with sanctions, American crypto investors are increasingly annoyed by the suspicion that still shrouds the industry. “None of the federal banking agencies have actually overturned any of the anti-crypto guidance,” said Caitlin Long, CEO of crypto-friendly Custodia Bank. “It is still presumed unsafe and unsound for a bank to touch a digital asset.”

Donald Trump won substantial backing from crypto folks in last year’s election, thanks to his promises to cancel what they felt was excessive regulation of their activities. “We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government,” said Marc Andreessen on the Joe Rogan podcast in November. Remarkably self-pitying, considering Andreessen’s a tech billionaire,

He and his fellows complain about widespread debanking – by which they mean that banks are closing the accounts of crypto companies and/or their owners, because of concerns about money laundering – and the fact there is no appeal process against such decisions. Crypto industry leaders insist the practice is really driven by banks’ determination to smother a competing technology in the cradle, and has unfairly targeted right-wingers. Trump promised to end the practice, but in truth this is a complex issue, and Long’s comments suggest they’re losing patience with his failure to master it.

The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on debanking last month, which featured three representatives of the crypto industry. But the witness who impressed me most was the Brookings Institution’s Aaron Klein who made it clear that the real victims of debanking are not crypto bros, but the kind of people without the money to effectively lobby President Trump.

“Approximately one in ten Black, Hispanic, and Native American households lack a bank account, about five times higher than for whites. Being unbanked is even more likely among those with a disability, with an unbanked rate above 11 percent,” said an excellent 15-page primer he submitted as evidence, which is well worth reading (it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.)

The core of the issue is that banks face onerous regulations, worry about being fined, and therefore can’t see the value in providing accounts to clients who are more likely to cost them money than earn it. Yes, some of those clients work in crypto, but most are poor immigrants just trying to get ahead. (Check out quite how many of the FinCEN enforcement notices relate to convenience stores that cash cheques, rather than multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes, and you’ll see what I mean.)

There is no easy fix to this, but the roots of the problem lie in the global rules against money laundering set by the Financial Action Task Force, which is currently holding a consultation on the issue. Should you have a lot of time on your hands, and an exceptionally high boredom threshold, you can read it. Perhaps you could send in an opinion too. Everyone has known about the problem for decades, and no one has ever been bothered to do anything about it before, but perhaps this time they will. Or perhaps they won’t. 

What we’re still waiting to learn is how the Trump administration intends to regulate crypto, or if it intends to regulate at all, given the investigations being dropped, last week’s crypto industry summit at the White House, and the mooted creation of a national cryptocurrency reserve.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Cryptocrats fear regulation will stymie a new crypto era appeared first on Coda Story.

The first bit to go is the last part of the phrase – “by the corrupt” – because winning elections is the easiest thing for crooks to achieve in a society with well-established institutions. It’s the other stuff that gives the crooks trouble. Once corrupt people are in government, the middle part of the phrase – “for the corrupt” – does not necessarily follow. If the institutions remain run by honest people, kleptocracy not only may not take root, but the corrupt politicians may be pushed out of office by the next election.

HOW KLEPTOCRACY TAKES ROOT

So something I’ve been keeping an eye on since Donald Trump’s inauguration is how the Securities and Exchange Commission  treats Justin Sun. In case you don’t remember him, Sun is a Chinese crypto billionaire who spent $6.2 million on a banana, then ate it.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and eight celebrities (including Lindsay Lohan, which I was disappointed by, being a fan of both Mean Girls and The Parent Trap) with fraudulently promoting crypto tokens. “Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation,” said Gurbir Grewal, head of the SEC’s enforcement division at the time. “This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against.”

Six of the celebrities agreed to pay up to settle the charges at the first opportunity, another did a few months later. But Sun was in no hurry, which may have been a sensible policy. Last week, lawyers for Sun and the SEC wrote to the Manhattan judge overseeing the case asking that it be put on hold, saying they’ll come back with a status report in two months’ time. Now, this may all be procedural and above board, but it also may not be.

By September 2024, Trump began to talk about a new crypto company he was launching called World Liberty Financial. It had the admittedly clever tagline: “Be DeFiant” (DeFi of course meaning decentralized finance, the term for digital peer-to-peer transactions). But Trump’s venture struggled to hit its fund-raising target until it found a cornerstone investor: Justin Sun, who put in $75 million.

“This guy,” said World Liberty co-founder Zak Folkman at a forum in Hong Kong last month, with a gesture towards Sun, who was sitting beside him, “saw that regardless of the outcome, this project is a monumental move forward for the entire crypto community.” It is not yet clear what if anything, besides fundraising, World Liberty actually does, but at the same event, Folkman – who once set up a company called ‘Date Hotter Girls LLC’ – said its success came despite there being “no special treatment to anybody who purchased the token."

Hmmm, about that. Now, it’s clearly not true that the Trump White House is going easy on crypto just because Sun gave Liberty Financial $75 million. The SEC has already dropped a case against Coinbase, and last summer Trump was already telling a crypto conference that “when we see the attacks on crypto, it's a part of a much larger pattern that's being carried out by the same left-wing fascists who weaponize government against any threat to their power.” 

Since his inauguration, Trump has issued an Executive Order promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Pausing the investigation into Sun could just be part of a general reluctance to enforce regulations or crackdown on crypto. And the cryptocurrency Sun founded was not named as part of the national crypto reserve mooted by Trump.  

But the Sun case didn’t ever really have anything to do with crypto as such anyway, and the SEC was always careful to make clear it was charging him for the way he marketed his token, not for the fact of it. “We’re neutral about the technologies at issue, we’re anything but neutral when it comes to investor protection,” said Grewal.

So, from the point of view of people who don’t want the United States to tilt further towards Rajaratnam’s definition of a kleptocracy, it would be nice if the SEC maintained its case against Sun or else made very very very very clear that any decision to drop the case was in no way connected to the fact that he gave the US president’s company a nine-figure sum. It would also be nice if the Trump White House was prepared to promise action against some of the more egregious crypto frauds, but not many people are holding their breaths.

PROTECTING THE PRIVACY OF KLEPTOCRATS

On an unrelated note, it appears that Sun also shares the Trump White House’s, er, particular approach to which kinds of free speech should actually be free. Sun, reportedly, put pressure on a crypto trade publication to take down an article critical of his stunt with the banana. Spending six million dollars on a banana should, apparently, be above reproach. 

Talking of free speech and those who believe themselves to be above reproach: the authorities in the uber wealthy Swiss town of Cologny were not cool about the idea that some journalists might stage walking tours pointing out homes bought with the proceeds of some of the more egregious bits of financial crime enabled by folks nearby.

“The residential area perched above the lake is a popular refuge for certain kleptocrats, potentates and other financial pirates,” the event’s publicity announced, before it got cancelled because the local authorities wouldn’t give permission for it to go ahead. Which is to say: the world may be changing more quickly with each passing minute, but Switzerland isn’t.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Of the corrupt, for the corrupt, by the corrupt appeared first on Coda Story.

OLIGARCHS CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH

It was partly the revelation of how gross the fallen kleptocrats’ greed had been; it was partly the realisation of how complicit Western enablers had been in the corruption of these kleptocrats; it was partly how Russia’s bought-and-paid-for proxies used blatant lies as cover for its annexation of Ukrainian territory; and it was partly the way that corruption had crushed Ukraine’s ability to respond. Ultimately, it was the combination of all four factors working together that convinced me there was nothing more important to the future of democracy than bringing illicit finance under control.

This is why it was so appalling to see the president of the United States repeating the Kremlin’s lies about Ukraine last week. Corruption of truth plus corruption of morals plus corruption of money equals the destruction of democracy.

Now I’m not going to pretend I have any influence over supporters of Donald Trump. Let's face it, not many of them read this newsletter, and if they did, they wouldn’t listen to me anyway. But it has made me think about what needs to be done in response.

The core of Putin-style politics is what he understands winning an argument to look like. When his opponents are too scared, confused, exhausted, or dead to continue, he thinks he’s won. Sometimes he has: murdering anyone who disagreed with him in Chechnya, shattering an entire city, plus driving out hundreds of thousands of people, did indeed pacify that poor, beautiful place, though it did not work so well as a strategy in Syria.

But here’s why the truth is so troubling to oligarchs, and why Trump unleashed his inner troll when Zelensky said some anodyne but true things, because, no matter how loud you shout, no matter how many people you imprison or murder, two plus two always equals four. And “if that is granted, all else follows.”

SO LET’S CONFRONT THEM WITH THE TRUTH

No matter what the trolls say, actual free speech is not just about letting your opponents say what they like, but about creating structures in which everyone can speak, everyone can be heard, and everyone can agree that the point is to arrive at the truth, not to shout louder. A marketplace of ideas, like any marketplace, can’t function without fair regulations.

And if our rulers refuse to abide by those regulations – like Trump or Putin or, in the U.K., former Prime Minister Boris Johnson – then it is everyone’s duty to call them out. So, it was great to see that Josie Stewart, a British civil servant who lost her job for exposing falsehoods told by Johnson’s government about the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, won a tribunal case for wrongful dismissal.

“We can’t have a system that says stay silent, no matter what you see, and forces dedicated public servants to choose between their conscience and their career,” she said. The usual boring people will claim she was part of the deep state or “the blob,” or whatever, but actually Stewart and people like her are a crucial safeguard against corruption.

Incidentally, in Wales, parliament is debating a new law that would mean politicians could lose their seats if they deliberately lie, which is an interesting idea.

LIKE THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DAMAGE BEING DONE BY MUSK

The good folks at Accountability Lab and Humentum have continued their work to assess the effect of Elon Musk’s decision to destroy USAID (all to save the equivalent of around three and a half days’ worth of the U.S. budget deficit). They have responses from 665 recipients of aid funding, and have broken down how much those organisations will lose and what it means.

The money was spread across many areas, but the largest group affected have been organisations that provided healthcare services, followed by those working in “governance” and “anti-corruption”, with the impact potentially catastrophic even for those who didn’t rely on USAID for all of their money.

Here’s another estimate: after one week of the freeze, almost a million women lost sexual health services; after a month, that figure will hit four million. After 90 days, the supposed length of the freeze, almost 12 million women and girls will be denied life-saving care. That means, if previous trends repeat themselves. 4.2 million women will become pregnant without wanting to, of whom 8,340 will die.

Clinics were one of the few places in rural Afghanistan where women could still work, but now that’s gone. “To be honest, it was one of the worst days of my life,” a midwife in rural Afghanistan told Service95. Imagine what other days an Afghan midwife has likely lived through, and marvel that somehow Elon Musk has managed to make it worse. The knock-on effects in terms of increased misery, increased corruption, and increased terrorism are impossible to calculate, and how any of it benefits the United States is a mystery to me.

WAITING OUT SANCTIONS

While the U.K. is talking tough on sanctions, it is unclear what the Trump administration means to do about the sanctions on Russia and its oligarchs as it continues to negotiate peace. I found this UK Financial Threat Assessment nerdily fascinating. Particularly for its description of some of the mechanisms used by sanctioned Russians to evade restrictions on the movement of their money. Take this choice sentence: “Neo-Bank fails to detect that the regular deposits it receives from Global Bank into the account of Seafarer Z are made by Manager Y, which is funded by Company X, and therefore indirectly by the (sanctioned individual).” 

The British government has promised to keep oligarchs with ties to the Kremlin out of the U.K., where they once bought their most expensive toys, including mansions, newspapers and football clubs. But the oligarchs are sitting tight. For instance, superyachts are expensive toys. And Roman Abramovich hasn’t moved his 162-metre monolith for three years. Mooring fees alone cost more than $200,000 a year. If oligarchs are prepared to go to all that trouble just to keep the crews of their yachts paid, what will they do to buy weapons?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Why the future of democracy depends on controlling illicit finance appeared first on Coda Story.

Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War. 

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The Lost Victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises. 

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

Engineering the West's Downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts-  focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment." 

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements. 

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself. 

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Read More

The Club That Wants Russia to Take Over the World: Our 2018 investigation revealed how the Izborsky Club, a self-described "intellectual circle" of philosophers, journalists and Orthodox priests, was working to dismantle Western liberal democracy. Read how they laid the groundwork for today's reality.

The post How the West lost the war it thought it had won appeared first on Coda Story.

Their plan was to hire a “medium sized” private jet, obtain a few shrink-wrapped pallets of banknotes, then get a friend who had been in the US Special Forces to fly them to the Democratic Republic of Congo and pick up 150-200 kilograms of gold. This would then be flown to Dubai, refined, and sold on. He was determined to keep things simple, so wouldn’t be using diplomatic immunity this time, just quickly in and out, and there’d be a few hundred thousand dollars in profit for everyone, including himself and his interlocutor, who was called Martin.

CONFLICT GOLD 

Rwandan-backed M23 rebels continue to advance in mineral-rich eastern Congo. Control of the DRC’s mines is one of the major prizes in the region. Gold is Rwanda’s biggest export, despite it having few if any mines of its own. Westerners’ willingness, for whatever reason, to buy these minerals are thus a major reason the war continues. The man on the train for example.

I did wonder for a while if the whole experience was an elaborate joke. I write about financial crime for a living and I was on my way back from a conference on that same topic. It seemed too much of a coincidence that someone would be discussing an extremely crude example of that very phenomenon two metres away from me. But the longer he went on – and he went on for a good half-hour – the more I came to understand he was just a real prick.

So-called “conflict gold” has been sanctioned by all major Western countries, and my fellow-passenger appeared aware that his trade was risky – “loose lips sink ships, Martin, let’s keep this to a tight circle” – but not sufficiently so that he didn’t broadcast his intent to an entire train carriage.

What was interesting though was the one thing he was afraid of, and the reason he wanted $10,000 from Martin – the risk of Donald Trump putting sanctions on gold while his jet was in the air, since that could upend the market and wipe out their profits.

The U.S. government’s decisions affect everyone on earth, even when they seem technical and unimportant. This is why Trump’s decision to smash the US government’s anti-corruption efforts will ripple outwards, causing misery and distress in places like Eastern Congo. 

WHY ANTI-CORRUPTION POLICIES MATTER 

Here’s an interesting new paper that shows that, if a country is targeted by US prosecutors investigating offences under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (which Trump ended enforcement of last week), the country’s leaders respond by burying their wealth more deeply behind further layers of shell companies. 

“When the United States investigates corruption in a foreign jurisdiction, we find that elites from that jurisdiction quickly and substantively move their money abroad. Using data on 275,000 offshore incorporations, we illustrate that flows are directed to tax havens that have uncooperative relationships with the US,” academics Lorenzo Crippa and Nikhil Kalyanpur concluded.

This may make it look like investigations are a waste of time. If the result of prosecutors’ actions is that criminals not only keep their money but also make it harder to find, then why bother? In fact, the opposite is true: this is a sign that the FCPA is doing its job. No one thinks that stopping corruption and money laundering is possible, unless we can somehow re-engineer humans so we’re not greedy. The aim of legislation is not to stop these practices, but to make them expensive and perhaps not worth the trouble. 

If a kleptocrat has to set up new shell companies, in inconvenient jurisdictions, as a result of prosecutors’ actions, that costs the kleptocrat money and – on the margin – makes some crimes unprofitable. So, Donald Trump is wrong to say the FCPA has been holding back U.S. companies. On the contrary, it has been helping companies by forcing officials to think before demanding bribes. 

Of course, criminals learn to adapt to enforcement efforts. Here’s a fun example from British lawyer Dan Neidle’s Tax Policy Associates, showing how efforts to bring transparency and verification to the UK’s corporate registry is forcing criminals to recruit proxies via Facebook to put their names on the necessary documentation. Upcoming reforms in March that will oblige people to present proof of identity when filing corporate documents will likely lead to an exponential growth in the recruitment of such proxies. 

The ability of criminals to keep finding a way around the law may make it look like the regulations are a failure. But actually the way criminals are having to hide behind ever-more complex screens is a sign of success here too. The transparency of the U.K.’s Companies House, which can be searched for free, allows sleuths like Richard Smith or Graham Barrow to spot what criminals are up to, and force them to engage in ever-more elaborate and expensive forms of deception. 

Sadly, progress on the Corporate Transparency Act, which would start the United States down the road towards an open register has been halted by yet another federal judge in Texas. Back in December, a court in Texas issued a nationwide injunction against the enforcement of the CTA. The U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction. 

But now another injunction has been granted, this time in response to two people called Samantha Smith and Robert Means who own property through companies. “Plaintiffs  will  be  irreparably  harmed  if  they  are  forced  to  comply  with  the  new  law,” the Texas court’s ruling said. 

It's not entirely clear what irreparable harm the law would cause them, though it is ironic that a court case they brought to stop anyone knowing they owned their companies – Sage Rental Properties LLC, and Oak Alley LLC, respectively – means that now everyone does. 

While anti-corruption is stalled in the U.S., the European Union is hurtling towards a bright future when its long-promised Anti-Money Laundering Agency will actually do something. Well, maybe not “hurtling”.  

After a year or two of discussion about where the new agency would be based, the choice of Frankfurt was made, as everyone knew it would from the very beginning. In January, AMLA gained a chairperson. And an office will, presumably, open at some point in the next few months. AMLA’s now going to consult on some “implementing rules” and should choose which entities it will supervise at some point in the next two years or so, before becoming fully operational in 2028. Tremble, criminals, the EU is coming towards you. Very, very slowly.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Trump’s gift to kleptocrats appeared first on Coda Story.

Trump had said that by his deadline Israel should demand the return of all 76 of the remaining Israeli hostages (including the remains of the 35 or so believed to be dead), or "let hell break out". Hamas had earlier threatened to call off the scheduled release of another three hostages unless the Israelis lifted the curbs it said they had imposed on the flow of aid into the battered enclave, especially shelter items. 

Egyptian and Qatari mediators ironed out the problem, as they had done with previous hitches. But, in the meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu's far right government took up the baton Trump had handed to it. In preparation to unleash hell, if "our hostages" were not freed by the deadline, Israel massed troops in and around Gaza. It was left unclear whether Israel was demanding the release of all 76 hostages, or just the 17 due to be freed over the current 42-day first phase of the Gaza agreement, or just the three originally meant to be freed on that Saturday in line with the accord.

In the event, the sixth hostage handover of Phase 1 went ahead smoothly, with three Israeli men, looking as fit and healthy as could be expected given their ordeal, handed over to the International Red Cross and thence back to Israel in exchange for the release of 369 Palestinian prisoners, 36 of them serving long-term sentences and the rest Gazans picked up at random with no charges. 

Netanyahu hates the Palestinian Authority at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said.

As before, and against the wishes of the Red Cross, Hamas turned the handover into a spectacle aimed at conveying the message that it is still strong and in control, with hundreds of heavily-armed, smartly-uniformed fighters, some toting advanced Israeli combat weapons probably seized in the October 7 2023 attack, cordoning off a large square and displaying the hostages on a stage festooned with Hamas banners and slogans. 

With the closing stages of the first phase set to continue (14 more days, 14 more hostages) did this mean that some daylight was opening up between Netanyahu and Trump, who had railed against the release of hostages in "dribs and drabs"? Not really. Trump is clearly in tune with the more vocally extreme elements in the Israeli cabinet, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, but Netanyahu could not simply junk the elaborately-negotiated and signed agreement, especially as the highly-emotive issue of hostage lives was at stake. At the security cabinet meeting where the exchange was approved, he is reported to have told his ministers not to give interviews or mention the Trump plan, to avoid appearing to act counter to the volatile US president.

So the focus shifted to the second phase of the accord, which was supposed to see the release of all Israeli hostages and many more Palestinian prisoners, and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. It would mean the end of the war, with preparations for a third phase devoted to reconstruction. 

Negotiations on Phase 2 were meant to start on February 4, but two weeks went by before movement started in that direction, and the process was clearly going to be fraught. The issue of who would control and govern Gaza had been left open. As the TV screens glaringly showed, Hamas was still very much there and in charge. All attempts had failed to encourage an alternative local leadership, or to posit a takeover by the discredited Palestinian Authority from the West Bank. 

Netanyahu hates the PA at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said on February 17. "I am committed to U.S. President Trump's plan for the realization of a different Gaza."

"Any plan that leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza will be unacceptable to Israel," said Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After talks with Netanyahu, he added : "Hamas cannot continue as a military or government force. It must be eliminated or eradicated."

"The next phase of the hostage deal remains under great threat," concluded Amir Tibon in Haaretz. "It is clear that Netanyahu wants the deal to collapse and the war to resume, and that he is doing everything in his power to make that happen." The collapse of the deal with Hamas would be the only way to enable Trump's "plan" for the US to "take over, own and cherish" a Gaza flattened beyond redemption and devoid of its Palestinian inhabitants, who would be rehoused happily and permanently in "beautiful communities" elsewhere while their Gaza was reborn as an incredible Riviera for others. 

It's a real estate hustler's fantasy that collides head-on with every sanctity and imperative in Arab history and politics. Egypt and Jordan immediately rejected Trump's suggestion that they take in Palestinians from Gaza. Trump was presumably assuming that the several billion dollars both receive in US military and economic aid would leverage obedience. But there are some issues that are beyond pressure and bribery. It would be an existential threat for King Abdullah's Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in particular. He knows that if the Gazans are displaced, the much closer and more numerous inhabitants of the West Bank, where things are already hotting up dangerously, would not be far behind. 

No Arab leader can go down in history as collaborating in a second Nakba, the first being the displacement of Palestinians by the creation of Israel in 1948. The Saudis, who Trump is counting on to join Israel in an expanded Abraham Accord despite Gaza, know this as well as any, and have long made it unequivocally clear that there is no way normalisation will happen without a clear pathway to a Palestinian state. They were further irked by Netanyahu's facetious suggestion that if they were so keen on that, why not establish it in the Kingdom? 

Riyadh set about rallying the Arabs behind a plan to counter the Trump scheme, with Egypt and others working on the details of a formula for reconstructing the Strip without displacing its inhabitants. The key issue is whether Hamas could be induced to stand aside, and who would take political and security control. Whatever the arrangement, Hamas would still be the power behind the camouflage. Would Israel accept such a cosmetic ploy, or, with Trump's backing, go all out to complete its stated war aim of destroying Hamas? 

That would complete the conversion of Gaza into a totally unlivable hell on earth, to which it is already pretty close. If that were to happen and the doors were opened, the bulk of the population might have no option but to stream out for the sake of simple survival. "Give them a choice. Not forcible eviction. Not ethnic cleansing," as Netanyahu said.

If the Gaza issue might produce some Arab pushback against Trump's wilder notions, Israel's ambition to deal with Iran is less contentious, though further conflict is unlikely to be welcomed by the Gulf countries. The Saudis, UAE and others roundly condemned Israel's large-scale attack on Iran on October 26 last year – their relations with Tehran have improved considerably since Trump's first term. 

But Iran is certainly in the crosshairs. After meeting with Secretary of State Rubio on February 16, Netanyahu said that with President Trump's support, "I have no doubt we can and will finish the job." While Rubio said that Israel and the U.S. "stand shoulder to shoulder" against Iran, it remains to be seen whether Trump, who supposedly prefers making deals to making war, would prefer to squeeze Iran into quasi-submission rather than encouraging or engaging in conflict. 

The effect of Israel's devastating blows to Iran's regional allies is being felt strongly in Lebanon, where the new government formed by PM Nawaf Salam onFebruary 8 clearly reflected a new balance of power, with Hezbollah losing its ability to veto decisions it doesn't like. 

The day after the new Lebanese cabinet held its first meeting, Israeli warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut, rattling windows and nerves throughout the city. It was a clear message aimed at Beirut airport, which the Israelis (through the US) threatened to bombard if it allowed flights from Tehran to land, on the accusation that such planes were bringing in cash and possibly weapons for Hezbollah. The airport cancelled the incoming flights, prompting protest demonstrations by Hezbollah followers around the airport in which vehicles of UN peacekeepers were attacked and burned. The Salam government then went further, and cancelled all flights to and from Iran until further notice.

Under the November 27 ceasefire agreement last year between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces were supposed to leave Lebanon by January 27, but the deadline was pushed back to February 18. Though the accord's co-sponsor France insisted the Israelis should then pull out fully, the U.S. did not oppose Israel's decision to retain five strategic hilltop positions in southern Lebanon. Israel also continued to carry out strikes on what it deemed Hezbollah targets in the Beqaa Valley, and on February 17 assassinated a Hamas officer with a drone strike on his car in the Lebanese city of Sidon. The concept of "ceasefire" seemed to be somewhat relative.

Netanyahu hailed Trump as the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. The question now is whether the American president can treat the Arab side of the equation as amounting to nothing.

The post The scramble to reconstruct Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

Except now it is. 

The president of the United States has given that person free rein to commandeer the forum but it’s not possible just to log off. Elon Musk’s tiresome jokes, gross politics, and crass ignorance are no longer confined to X, or even the Oval Office, but have been unleashed onto the world’s most vulnerable people. “Corruption is development in reverse, devastating the outcomes we seek across all sectors, eroding the rule of law, and undermining citizen trust in governing institutions and processes,” said a (now grimly ironic) mission statement from USAID, issued just two years ago. A statement that now can’t be read on its web site because Musk has shut it down.

He has used X and his status as “Special Government Employee” to dismiss the world’s most important aid agency – in words that presumably landed well with his acolytes on X but signified nothing to me – as “a radical-left political psy op.” Just from my own knowledge, I can say this vandalism will benefit no one but America’s enemies and undermine its friends.

A FORCE FOR GOOD

Take, for instance, the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv. It has done more than anyone to cement honesty in Ukraine – which, a decade ago, was arguably the most corrupt nation in Europe – and was 20% funded by USAID. Or the Journalism Development Network, which has exposed corruption and misgovernance throughout Eastern Europe and beyond, its reporting helping considerably to prevent the Kremlin from buying influence. It too was funded by USAID. These projects aren’t just important for informing curious people, banks’ compliance departments rely on news reports like these to assess whether a potential client is a crook or an entrepreneur. Without the journalism that USAID funded, the world’s anti-money-laundering guardians will be blind. 

And that’s not all. The Kurdish guards of a camp for former Islamic State fighters and their families are able to keep it safe, and its inmates fed, thanks to money from USAID. Here’s a USAID-funded programme to combat corruption in sea ports; here’s a story about a radio station in Afghanistan that also received USAID funding. USAID helped spread the practice of democracy into places it had never been. The agency’s $43 billion annual budget may sound like a lot, but it’s less than Musk paid for Twitter before he trashed it, and it’s barely a fifth of the increase in his own personal wealth in just the last twelve months.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, NOT POLITICS 

Of course, not everything USAID has done has been ideal. But there is an incredible degree of idiocy in failing to appreciate that the cheapest and easiest way to win arguments is not to have them in the first place. USAID is the world’s single largest donor for humanitarian causes. Spending money to win friends is a good investment.

“Elon Musk is the world's wealthiest man and right now he seems to be calling the shots with decisions that are literally going to be life or death for the world's poorest people,” said Giff Johnson, the laconic and wise editor of the Marshall Islands Journal, the leading newspaper in a country that is both very aid dependent and very strategically located. Where the United States steps back, China will step forward. “It's an opening for anybody else who wants to fill the gap, I suppose, until Washington decides what it is doing."

On top of all this, the Department of Justice has disbanded Task Force KleptoCapture, which was part of an international effort to make Vladimir Putin’s corrupt allies and officials pay the cost of the Ukraine war. Oh, and it’s decided not to investigate foreign intervention in US politics. 

It is beginning to feel a little like the United States is changing sides here. Or maybe it already has?

THE COST OF HAVING PRINCIPLES

Also changing sides, have been the billionaires coalescing around Trump, particularly Jeff Bezos once described as a “woke philanthropist” for his funding of climate organisations and tuition-free preschools. 

In 1947, Time magazine reported on a 37-year-old Japanese judge called Yoshitada Yamaguchi who, too poorly-paid to live on his salary and too honourable to break the law, starved to death. “It is horrible these days to be married to an honest man,” his widow said.

I remembered that story when reading about how Bezos’ charitable foundation had cut funding for the world’s leading climate standard setter, apparently in order to avoid annoying Donald Trump. “Obviously Jeff Bezos and the tech companies have changed compared to eight years ago,” one source told the FT. It is clearly not reasonable to expect people to starve to death rather than betray the needs of the society they live in, but honestly you’d have thought a billionaire might be willing to go without his elevenses to stand up for some principles? What is the point of having all those commas on your bank statement if you roll over like a whipped dog when someone threatens to say something mean to you?

How different Bezos, and his flexible principles, are from the likes of Guatemalan lawyer Virginia Laparra Rivas, who dedicated her career to fighting corruption and organised crime. She won a prize in London last week for her work and her courage. After five years of harassment, Laparra was imprisoned for two years in 2022 after being convicted of abusing her authority as head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity in Quetzaltenango, in a process that was widely condemned.

“I wonder how many of us who speak about and act in support of the rule of law in the UK so confidently would have the bravery and the principles to do so in a country such as Guatemala,” asked senior judge David Neuberger in a speech at the awards ceremony. 

Or indeed in Washington DC right now?

NO FISH TOO SMALL TO FRY

And speaking of the courage required to take on the powerful. By the time you read this, Transparency International will have published its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, and there will be all the usual hoopla about how Denmark has gone up, South Sudan has gone down, and – oh dear – under Donald Trump, the United States has slipped to – I don’t know – maybe thirtieth? Whatever the actual scores, there will be a map showing Europe and North America in a friendly yellow, while Africa and Asia will be an angry red, just like last year and the year before that.

Please ignore it. The index is meaningless nonsense, in which “corrupt” is just a synonym for poor. And it does real harm, since the CPI’s metric filters into so many of the ways that aid agencies make funding decisions, and companies decide whether to make investments or not. I’m convinced the only reason TI keeps producing it is because everyone talks about it so if we stop, maybe they will too.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Elon the Terrible and the folly of bullying USAID appeared first on Coda Story.

The encounter was jarring not just for its surreal nature - a discussion of political theory amid artillery fire - but for what it revealed about Russian propaganda's evolving sophistication. When I researched the Overton Window after our conversation, I discovered that Russian state media had long been obsessed with the concept, transforming this Western analytical framework into something more potent: both an explanation for social change and supposed proof of Western cultural warfare. Russian commentators didn't just cite the theory -  they wielded it as both explanation and evidence of Western attempts to undermine Russian society.

Over the next decade, I watched this once-academic term slide from Russian state TV screens and the trenches of eastern Ukraine into mainstream Western discourse - embraced by commentators on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

Now we're watching this process play out in real time.  For instance, Elon Musk's handpicked team running DOGE - the new Department of Government Efficiency - are inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 24 with unfettered access to federal systems. A decade ago, putting Silicon Valley twenty-somethings in charge of critical government functions would have sparked outrage. Today, it's celebrated as innovation.

What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

The transformation extends far beyond Washington. When America's president proposes to "take over" Gaza and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," when Musk tells Germans to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, they're deliberately expanding what's politically possible. From Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, from African opinion writers praising Trump's aid cuts as "liberation" to conservative thinkers reimagining solutions for Gaza - each pushes the boundaries of acceptable discourse a little further.

The shift manifests across every domain of power. Inside federal agencies, tech executives now make decisions once reserved for career civil servants, normalizing private control of public functions. On the global stage, raw deal-making has replaced diplomatic principles, with decades-old alliances discarded in favor of transactional relationships. El Salvador's president offers his prisons to house American inmates. Ukraine, fighting for survival against Russia, signals its willingness to trade military support for mineral rights. Even humanitarian aid, long seen as a moral imperative, is being recast as a form of dependency that needs to be eliminated.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has already adapted to this new reality. Their latest analysis simply divides nations into "winners and losers" based on their ability to navigate this new transactional diplomacy and stay on Trump’s good side. No moral judgments, no democratic values - just raw negotiating power.

The Overton Window - or "Окно Овертона блядь" as the Russian commander put it in 2014, mechanically adding the profanity at the end of each phrase like a full stop - offers a powerful framework for understanding how societies transform - not through sudden upheaval but through the gradual shifting of what people consider acceptable.  Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries.

This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook - a calculated strategy of gradually expanding what society will tolerate, inch by inch, controversy by controversy. The goal is not just to push boundaries, but to exhaust resistance, to make the previously unimaginable seem not just possible, but inevitable.

The same mechanism operates in political discourse, where deliberate provocation becomes a strategic tool for reshaping collective perception. Donald Trump is the master of this approach. 

Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries. This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook.

His political methodology isn't about achieving specific outcomes, but about continuously expanding the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Each provocative statement serves as a strategic instrument, deliberately designed to recalibrate social and political norms. When he suggests purchasing Greenland or proposing radical reimaginings of geopolitical landscapes like in Gaza, the actual feasibility becomes secondary to the act of introducing previously unthinkable concepts into mainstream conversation.

The genius of this approach lies in its relentlessness. By consistently proposing ideas that initially seem outrageous, extreme positions gradually become reference points for future discussions. Each controversial statement doesn't just distract from previous controversies; it fundamentally reshapes the political imagination. The goal is not immediate implementation but permanent transformation - moving the entire conceptual framework of what society considers possible.

Russian propagandists were early to grasp its significance, weaponizing the Overton Window theory itself as supposed evidence of Western cultural imperialism. That commander in Donetsk was just echoing what Russian state media had been claiming for years: that the West was deliberately expanding society's boundaries to impose its values on Russia.

A decade later, we're watching this process unfold in reverse. As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine - the transformation of our societies isn't happening by accident. 

Through the years of Brexit, Trump's first win, Orbán's rise, and the growing global polarization, that conversation in the ruins of Donetsk has stayed with me. There was something chilling about a commander discussing political theory between artillery fire - not because it felt academic, but because he embodied how thoroughly manufactured narratives could drive real-world violence. He was willing to fight and die for a worldview constructed by Russian state media about "traditional values" under attack. 

In the end, we are all unwitting participants in this grand narrative shift, our perceptions subtly recalibrated by the very forces that seek to reshape our understanding of what is possible, acceptable, and true. And whether we are shocked by those in power or find ourselves applauding them, we are simultaneously the observers and the changed.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Shattering the Overton Window appeared first on Coda Story.

THE GRAND OLD DUKE OF WASHINGTON

This friend’s experience made me wonder about the lessons that US allies will be learning from the last few presidential terms when it comes to financial crime. Donald Trump marched them all up to the top of one hill in 2016-20, then Joe Biden marched them up another in 2020-24, and now Trump wants them to head off somewhere else entirely. What’s the lesson? Well, obviously, it’s “do the minimum, do it late, and it’s all a waste of time anyway.”

And this is bad, because – partly owing to U.S. diplomatic clout, and partly owing to the global role of the dollar – tackling financial crime or tax evasion without leadership from Washington DC has always proved hard/impossible. And now Trump has sacked 17 inspectors general from key federal agencies, that is independent, non-partisan watchdogs whose job it is to weed out government corruption, fraud and mismanagement. Instead, that effort is being led by Trump cronies and oligarchs like Elon Musk seeking to score political points. It’s going to take a long time before anyone thinks it’s worth listening to the U.S. about combating corruption, no matter who’s in charge.

BUT WHAT ABOUT BRUSSELS?

Is this an opportunity for the European Union to step up and provide alternative leadership? Well, apparently, EU countries are considering buying gas from Russia again as part of a settlement to end the war in Ukraine, so the short answer is “oh my God, no.” This is like a heroin addict who’s kicked the habit deciding to start shooting smack again to improve relations with his drug dealer.

It is, however, February which is when the EU publishes its not-at-all-anticipated biannual “list of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes.” (It also publishes a list in October.) Twice every year, I hope Brussels will have decided to change its longstanding policy and start naming and shaming places that genuinely undermine global work to stop tax evasion. This time around it’s particularly important since Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from participation in a new global tax treaty and undone all the work towards making multinational corporations accountable. Perhaps Brussels could start with tax havens Ireland and Luxembourg?

But, no doubt, the officials responsible for this shameful exercise will do what they do twice a year, every year – name and shame a short list of tiny, irrelevant or diplomatically feeble jurisdictions in an unlovely combination of bullying and virtue signalling. Last time, they criticised Guam, but they did not criticise Delaware; Anguilla, but not the UK; Vanuatu, but not Switzerland. 

I think it’s time I learned from my doctor friend and started ignoring these government missives but I can’t help being an optimist.

AND LONDON?

Speaking of false optimism. How’s the U.K. doing on these issues? The government, keen to raise more revenue, has pushed regulators to encourage growth. The last time a government did this, we ended up with rivers full of sewage and oligarchs buying up London. An early sign of what it might mean this time around came from the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority, which keeps an eye on most of Britain’s lawyers.

The SRA was asked to judge whether a law firm called Discreet Law had acted improperly in suing Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins for defamation after he said on social media that mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was, in fact, a mercenary boss. Prigozhin – who died in a plane crash in 2023, just weeks after attempting to march on Moscow – admitted his connection to the notorious Wagner Group and the case was thrown out.  

To most outside observers, the case was about as abusive as it gets – it had no merit, it was going after an individual rather than organisations, and it was filed in the notoriously plaintiff-friendly UK rather than another jurisdiction. But, according to the SRA, Discreet Law did nothing wrong, which sends a truly appalling message.

“Without a real deterrent to lawfare, deep-pocketed individuals, oligarchs, crooks and kleptocrats from around the world will continue to use our courts to suppress accountability. This foul play will continue to flourish. And Britain will remain a go-to destination for lawfare,” said Labour MP Lloyd Hatton. I sincerely hope that, in their push for economic growth at all costs, Hatton’s Labour colleagues won’t abandon the progress that has been made in trying to rein in London professionals’ desire to be butlers to the world’s kleptocrats.

DEBANKING CHARITIES

While mercenary oligarchs like Prigozhin rarely have trouble finding people in London to protect their interests or launder their money, a report released last week by the Muslim Charities Forum shows that life is harder if you don’t lead a private militia. 

Ever since the 1990s, governments have subcontracted to banks the job of keeping money launderers out of the financial system; and ever since the 2000s, banks have done the same for terrorists. To make sure banks do this job, governments occasionally impose huge fines on them and, as a result, banks are keen to comply.

The trouble is that finding all of the world’s money launderers and terrorists is practically impossible, so banks err on the side of caution. They prefer to kick 100,000 innocent people off of their accounts, than let one person slide through and risk a nine-figure fine. (Unless, of course, the launderer or terrorist in question is really rich). That, at any rate, is what the Muslim Charities Forum found.

Some 68 percent of Muslim charities said they had difficulty opening bank accounts; 42 percent suffered a complete withdrawal of banking services; another 42 percent had been forced to delay humanitarian projects because of delays in transferring funds; and 44 percent said the delays had harmed their relationships with partners.

The specific problems faced by Muslim charities date back to decisions made by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) directly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to demand banks pay more attention to non-governmental organisations working in or for Muslim countries. The actual words were “organisations having the status of a charitable or relief organisation... targeted at a particular community,” but everyone knew what they meant. This was despite the fact that there was no evidence that charities were more likely to fund terrorism than businesses, individuals or countries.

There is desperate need for humanitarian aid in many parts of the Islamic world – not least Gaza and Lebanon, but also Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere – and getting in the way of people that want to help for no good reason is not just harmful, it’s also stupid, because it will alienate people we really want to be our friends.

“Evidence suggests that structural Islamophobia plays a role in these financial challenges, as Muslim-led charities are often unfairly targeted by banks for perceived risks without concrete evidence of wrongdoing,” the Muslim Charities Forum said. “Internal frustrations are high, with charity staff spending excessive time resolving financial issues instead of focusing on core humanitarian work.”

Of the many things that the FATF should reform, this excessive and unreasonable focus on Muslim charities is for me at the top of the list. But it’s easier to go after low-hanging fruit.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Header illustration by Teona Tsintsadze/Getty Images.

The post Why the West is failing to fight corruption appeared first on Coda Story.

AfD has become a serious threat to Germany’s political establishment, with its leader Alice Weidel even leading the race  in one recent poll to become the country’s next chancellor. Weidel, a once obscure figure, enjoys the very loud and prominent support of Elon Musk, who interviewed her for over an hour on X last month and appeared at an AfD rally via video link last week to tell the crowd that there was “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt. “ He exhorted AfD supporters to “be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” 

Many AfD members have in the past called for an end to Germany’s “cult of guilt” over the Holocaust. And Weidel herself, while endorsing that phrase, has said German politics should not be about its past but about “confidence and responsibility for the future.”

When Musk told thousands of Germans they need to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, I reached out to Erica Hellerstein, a brilliant reporter who has spent months investigating Germany's complex relationship with historical memory. In 2023, her story for Coda dived into  the little-understood opposition to Holocaust remembrance inside Germany. 

"What's interesting to me is seeing that view migrate from the fringe of German society to one of the most powerful shadow politicians in the US," Erica told me.

"Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents," Musk declared to cheering AfD supporters, just hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Musk’s own grandfather was reportedly a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist in South Africa - another country that, like Germany, has been celebrated for its post-conflict reconciliation efforts.

To understand today's shifting power dynamics, you have to understand how leaders manipulate our view of the past. The battle over historical memory has become one of the most potent weapons of modern authoritarianism, though it often goes unnoticed in daily headlines. Whether in school textbooks, political speeches, or family stories, the rewriting of history isn't really about the past at all. It's about who gets to control the future. 

No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, who has written the playbook that authoritarians around the world are now following: Close the archives. Rewrite textbooks. Silence historians. Transform perpetrators into heroes.

What makes this tactic so effective is how stealthily it works at first. The rewriting of history begins in intimate spaces - in family silences, in selective remembrance, in subtle shifts of narrative.

We sent Erica to Germany in the wake of America's racial justice protests because we wanted to understand what Europe's model for historical reconciliation could teach a nation grappling with its own buried past. What Erica uncovered was revealing: even as Germans publicly embraced their culture of remembrance, many maintained a studied silence about their own family histories during the Nazi era - much like the buried stories of racial violence she found reporting across the American South. It was in these intimate gaps between public commemoration and private amnesia that she found the seeds of today's shift.

"Silence distorts memory..." wrote Erica Hellerstein in Coda nearly three years ago. She had traveled to Germany to report on its lauded culture of remembrance. Now with Elon Musk telling Germans to move on from their guilt, Erica's prescient piece reminds us why we must interrogate the horrors of history so as not to repeat them in the future. READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

"I don't think it's particularly surprising that someone with Musk's particular brand of grievance politics would gravitate to the AfD's brand of grievance politics," Erica told me, "but it does make me wonder if it will give license to other authoritarian movements to more vocally reject movements to reconcile with the past."

It’s already happening: Argentina's new president Javier Milei is actively whitewashing the country’s brutal period of dictatorship in the late-1970s and early-1980s. And in Hungary, historical revisionism has been essential to Viktor Orbán maintaining his grip on power.  While, in the United States, conservative politicians continue to rail against the 1619 Project and any attempt to teach accurate history in schools.

In Russia, where 70% approve of Stalin's role in Russian history, nearly half of young people say they've never heard of the Great Terror. Years before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine we saw how the Putin regime began to implement its meticulous, systematic erasure of Soviet crimes: “cleansing” history books, culture, music, film, media.  By rewriting the past, Putin's regime cleared the way for future atrocities. When he finally declared Ukraine's statehood a historical fiction in 2022, the groundwork had been laid over decades of perpetuating carefully constructed historical myths. 

Now, as Musk amplifies a view that was once barely whispered in German living rooms, we're seeing  the results of the same erosion of historical memory burst into the mainstream. It’s evident in the support for extreme right wing groups across Europe,

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is how it weaponizes a very human impulse - the desire to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths about our past. As one Gulag survivor told us, of wrestling with this challenge in Russia: "How do you hold people accountable when there are millions of interrogators, millions of informants, millions of prison guards... These millions were also our people."

This selective amnesia creates exactly the kind of buried tension and grievance that authoritarians exploit. From Moscow to Buenos Aires, from Mississippi to Munich, we see how silence about the past can pave the way for power grabs in the present. When Musk aligns himself with Germany's far right, he's not just making an inflammatory speech - he's giving global legitimacy to a movement that understands what Putin has long known: controlling society’s memory is the key to controlling society.

Today, as we witness what Erica calls "the global ripple effect of this kind of embrace of a once-taboo interpretation of history," I'm struck by how the grand sweep of politics often begins in the quiet spaces of our homes. 

The stories we tell our children, the silences we maintain at family gatherings, the questions we dare or don't dare to ask about our ancestors - these intimate choices extend outward, shaping not just our personal narratives but our collective future. 

As Erica put it: “I think it’s so important to start with our family stories - because over time, memory gaps can mutate into memory wars.” And so, perhaps our most important task begins at our dinner tables: facing up to the stories we've been afraid to tell.

The post To control the future, rewrite the past appeared first on Coda Story.

But first, a sincere apology, with the emphasis on sincere.

SORRY

I apologise if Mark Zuckerberg was offended by me calling him an oligarch, as he apparently was when Joe Biden implied it in his valedictory warning. 

Comrade Zuckerberg’s dismay is understandable. Russia’s oligarchs were extremely rich and rapacious. And they have, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, been subject to tens of billions of dollars in sanctions by the U.S., EU, UK and others. Whereas all the lovely Mr. Zuckerberg has done is run a social network that spreads violence, fraud and misinformation and given him a personal fortune currently estimated at $233 billion.

Personally I think we should probably stop using the word oligarch to describe Russia’s super-rich now anyway. Ever since Vladimir Putin cemented his control over the country, not least by arresting the then-very-wealthy Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, Russia’s business leaders do not interfere in politics at all and just do what they’re told. Dictatorships after all only have room for one leader, not a few, no matter how wealthy.

I did wonder, briefly, if I should get in touch with Zuckerberg and explain my position. When I call him an oligarch, I’m not comparing him to people like Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, pals of Putin since childhood. As I said, these days Russia’s wealthiest people, unlike America’s tech billionaires, are cowed functionaries, not strutting kingmakers.

But then I saw a picture of Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos sitting in the front row at Donald Trump’s inauguration, in more prominent positions than his cabinet picks (though many of them are billionaires too).  I’m sure their positioning was intended to make them look like masters of the universe. But they reminded me of those Indian maharajas who were allowed to hold ceremonial positions of honour in the British Empire, as long as they did nothing to threaten London’s control. 

Despite all their ostentatious loyalty, the maharajas ended up being cut off with nothing. So perhaps friend Zuckerberg should actually be grateful that he is being called an oligarch. It assumes that he is, in fact, a strutting kingmaker with his hand on the levers of power, rather than just another brown-nosing billionaire. As Trump posted on his social media network last month: “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!”

If you think the comparison to the British Empire is overblown, I’m not the only one making it. As Oxfam pointed out just last week:

“Today’s world remains colonial in many ways. The average Belgian has 180 times more voting power in the World Bank than the average Ethiopian. This system still extracts wealth from the Global South to the superrich 1% in the Global North at a rate of $30million an hour. This must be reversed.”

NOT SORRY

The world was inching towards a sort of redressal, though not a real reversal, of this situation thanks to the global corporate tax deal pushed by the Biden White House which would have required multinational companies to pay a minimum tax rate of 15 percent. The deal ran the gauntlet of all kinds of special interests and finally, albeit in diluted suboptimal form, seemed like it would form the basis of the most significant reform to global taxation since, well, the days of the British Empire. 

But then along came Trump, who has killed it because it’s 2025 and we’re not allowed nice things anymore.

Frustration with the tax minimising antics of U.S. multinationals had already led to unilateral “digital services taxes” in France, Italy, Spain, the UK, India and New Zealand so the failure of a global deal may not enable a complete feeding frenzy for the not-at-all oligarchs of Silicon Valley. But Trump, who has his not-at-all oligarchs’ backs, has already told U.S. officials to draw up “a list of options for protective measures or other actions that the United States should adopt or take,” if foreign countries are found to be “likely to put tax rules in place that are extraterritorial or disproportionately affect American companies.” No doubt there will be threats of more tariffs to come.

Many activists have long argued that the right forum for global tax discussions is the United Nations, which last year launched a tax convention that is due to report back in 2027. An effective tax deal, though, would need the agreement of the world’s richest countries. That is why I supported the process led by Biden, even though it was so unambitious. But now that’s been torpedoed anyway, maybe it’s time to give the UN bodies a chance, as the overwhelming majority of the countries represented in the general assembly have voted to do. In the words of Irene Ovonji-Odida, the chair of the Tax Justice Network:

“We will all negotiate together to set rules that work for everyone. Everyone except the tax abusers.” 

Only nine countries voted against the UN process. Not surprisingly, they are among the world’s richest – the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Australia, Argentina and New Zealand. These countries, as a Tax Justice Network report shows, are responsible for a vastly disproportionate loss of global tax revenues due to corporate abuse. So it’s up to the citizens of these countries (and funnily enough, I’m a citizen of two of them), to change their leaders’ minds, because they look unlikely to do it on their own.

Sadly, we recently lost a frontline warrior in this very struggle. Elise Bean did more to expose the inner workings of tax havens, unscrupulous corporations and kleptocrats than all but a tiny number of people worldwide. 

First at the U.S. Department of Justice, then with Senator Carl Levin when he headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and finally for the Levin Center for Legislative Oversight and Democracy, Elise was a source of wisdom, positivity, calm and integrity. She investigated and exposed the secrets of Enron, money launderers, commodity speculators, unfair credit card companies and more, and set an example of cross-party fact-based cooperation that was unrivalled. I was not the only person who relied on her generosity and breadth of experience and knowledge for my books and journalism.
Transparency International U.S. called her “the embodiment of effective civil service and a living example of how our government should work”. It seems particularly cruel that she should have died just when the values she represented are needed more than ever.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

Header illustration by Teona Tsintsadze/Getty Images.

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Over the last few weeks the US has been thrown into a tailspin over the impending divest-or-ban law that might possibly block the youth of America from accessing their favorite short-form video app. But if you've only been following the Supreme Court's hearing on TikTok you may have totally missed an entirely separate Supreme Court hearing on whether or not southern American states like Texas are constitutionally allowed to block porn sites like Pornhub. As of this month, 17 US states have blocked Pornhub for refusing to adhere to "age-verification laws" that would force Pornhub to collect users' IDs before browsing the site, thus making sensitive, personal information vulnerable to security breaches. 

But it's not just US lawmakers that are questioning what's allowed on their corner of the web. 

Following a recent announcement that Meta would be relaxing their fact checking standards Brazilian regulators demanded a thorough explanation of how this would impact the country's 100 million users. Currently the Brazilian government is "seriously concerned" about these changes. Which itself is almost a verbatim repeat of how Brazilian lawmakers dealt with X last year, when they banned the platform for almost two months over how the platform handled misinformation about the country's 2023 attempted coup.

Speaking of X, the European Union seems to have finally had enough of Elon Musk's digital megaphone. They've been investigating the platform since 2023 and have given Musk a February deadline to explain exactly how the platform's algorithm works. To say nothing of the French and German regulators grappling with how to deal with Musk's interference in their national politics.

And though the aforementioned Chinese Great Firewall has always blocked the rest of the world from the country's internet users, last week there was a breach that Chinese regulators are desperately trying to patch. Americans migrated to a competing app called RedNote, which has now caught the attention of both lawmakers in China, who are likely to wall off American users from interacting with Chinese users, and lawmakers in the US, who now want to ban it once they finally deal with TikTok.

All of this has brought us to a stark new reality, where we can no longer assume that the internet is a shared global experience, at least when it comes to the web's most visible and mainstream apps. New digital borders are being drawn and they will eventually impact your favorite app. Whether you're an activist, a journalist, or even just a normal person hoping to waste some time on their phone (and maybe make a little money), the spaces you currently call home online are not permanent. 

Time to learn how a VPN works. At least until the authorities restrict and regulate access to VPNs too, as they already do in countries such as China, Iran, Russia and India. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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But even what scrutiny exists fails to pass muster. Elliptic, the crypto-compliance company, has been publishing some frankly terrifying reports about the online marketplace Huione. For those of you who haven’t used its services, Huione is an e-commerce site in Southeast Asia where you can buy data, technology, and money laundering services, and it’s pretty central to the “pig butchering” form of online investment fraud, run from compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia and elsewhere. 

Pig butchering is a term used for scams in which the victim’s trust is gained before they are persuaded to part with their money. Many of the people executing these scams have been forced into the work by organized criminal gangs. As the Elliptic report explains: 

“Those being defrauded are not the only victims. Reports suggest that scam compounds commonly resemble prisons, acting as both workplaces and accommodation blocks and surrounded by tall barbed wire fences and actively patrolled by security guards. They are estimated to house hundreds of thousands of workers, many of whom have been effectively enslaved.”

Although Huione has launched its own cryptocurrency, most traffic on the web site is conducted through Tether or USDT, which is a so-called stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, and extremely cheap to use. Tether is the world’s most traded cryptocurrency. It is also pretty perfect for online criminals, since it lacks the volatility or expense of other forms of cryptocurrency, while simultaneously lacking the oversight from bank compliance departments or law enforcement agencies that using dollars would bring.

Tether says it’s doing a lot to fight financial crime but its name just keeps cropping up in investigations. It was implicated in a money laundering scheme revealed last month by British law enforcement, in terrorist financing, North Korean scams, fentanyl smuggling, and much other criminal activity. So it would be nice to think that the new Trump administration is going to take a hard look at the existing regulatory framework.

But Trump (and his wife) launched meme coins just before his inauguration that, on paper, added billions to their wealth. Musk, a key advisor to Trump, endorses cryptocurrencies. And Howard Lutnick – Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary – heads a financial services firm that not only has done a huge amount of business with Tether but also reportedly owns five percent of it. So, let’s be honest, he’s probably going to leave it alone. No wonder the crypto industry is celebrating.

Under Joe Biden’s watch, Tether was being investigated for its links to illicit finance, including its use by Russian arms dealers. But the future of these investigations is unclear.

BIDEN’S HOLLOW WARNING 

The outgoing president left office with a speech that he should have made four years ago, if not earlier. 

“An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,”he said, while warning of the “tech-industrial complex.”

I lived in Russia when Vladimir Putin became president, and watched over the next few years as he and his cronies, who became billionaires, cemented their control over state resources. They used the courts, the institutions of the state, the media, and more to bully, coerce and jail anyone that got in their way.

Last week I was reminded of how in 2006 the Kremlin used the threat of environmental enforcement proceedings to bully a group led by the oil company Shell into giving up its large stake in the Sakhalin-2 project, worth tens of billions of dollars, to state-owned Gazprom. Shell’s supposed violations of environment regulations were forgotten about as soon as Gazprom had taken control. The people in power cared about the money, not the grey whales and sensitive salmon fishing areas that conservation groups said the project adversely affected.

I see a worrying parallel between this inglorious episode, of a state using its legislative machinery to wrest control of a project, and the troubles faced by TikTok in the United States. I am not here to advocate for social media companies, any more than I am here for the oil majors, but I do believe that in a democracy, the law has to be used fairly, rather than as a tool to force the owners of profitable assets to hand them over. And that is why this Bloomberg headline is alarming – “China Weighs Sale of TikTok US to Musk as a Possible Option. 

President Trump has extended by 75 days the deadline for the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest. He has suggested that the U.S. enter into a “joint venture” with ByteDance, without explaining what exactly he means. And Elon Musk, using his platform on X and his current political heft, said that while he was against a ban, on free speech grounds, “the current situation where TikTok is allowed to operate in America, but X is not allowed to operate in China is unbalanced. Something needs to change.” 

We are entering a dark time if the US starts treating foreign companies in the same way that Putin’s Kremlin did. So, while I agree with Biden’s warnings about oligarchy, I feel about his speech like I felt when Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was a fascist during the election campaign: where’s the urgency? Why didn’t Biden do something about it when he was the most powerful man in the world? 

There’s a parallel in the United Kingdom, where politicians are alarmed about the tidal wave of money that submerged democracy in Washington DC, and worry about the prospect of Elon Musk doing the same thing in London. But they’re not moving urgently to strengthen the electoral laws that would allow him to, and instead talk about maybe doing something in a couple of years.

Here’s the lesson from Moscow: once oligarchs have power, they don’t give it up. The time to save democracy is when it still exists. And giving a speech – no matter how sonorous, or how many references to Dwight D. Eisenhower it contains – is not the same as taking action. Plug the loopholes. Break up the monopolies. Do something.

TULIP SIDDIQ FALLS ON HER SWORD

Meanwhile in Britain, measures to tackle the flow of corrupt money and overhaul the country’s “highly fragmented” anti-money-laundering regulatory system will likely be slowed by the loss of anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq. 

She chose to resign, ironically, after being linked to a corruption scandal in Bangladesh. Shortly before Siddiq resigned, the anti-corruption coalition, a group of NGOs including the prominent Spotlight on Corruption, noted :

“In light of an investigation launched last week by the Prime Minister’s independent advisor on ministerial interests, and developments in separate investigations in Bangladesh, the Coalition concludes that she currently has a serious conflict of interests.” 

Siddiq, a member of parliament since 2015, is the granddaughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president of Bangladesh, and the niece of Sheikh Hasina, who was prime minister of Bangladesh until she resigned and fled the country after weeks of mass protests last summer. Media outlets have reported troubling ties between Siddiq and some business people associated with her aunt, who has been charged with large-scale human rights abuses. One such businessman apparently gave Siddiq a two-bedroom apartment in central London. 

Siddiq insists she’s done nothing wrong but, for a government that has pledged to fight kleptocracy, this was – to be polite – not a good look. Although I suppose it should be a relief that there are still politicians out there with a sufficiently developed sense of shame that their response to a scandal is to resign rather than to laugh.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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Well, Donald Trump’s back in the White House, Vladimir Putin is still waging his horrific campaign against the Ukrainian nation, and too many governments are blaming foreigners instead of oligarchs for the collapsing state of public services. Back in 1993, the then Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin observed, after yet another policy failure, “хотели как лучше получилось как всегда”. Literally translated, it means “we wanted the best, but it turned out like always.” But I’ve never found an English version that fully captures the poetic irony of the Russian original. 

THE NEW CLASS OF MULTI-CENTIBILLIONAIRES

In 2020, I marvelled at the concept of the “centibillionaire,” someone whose wealth was worth more than $100 billion. Back then, the OG centibillionaire – Jeff “Amazon” Bezos -- had just gained his first comrades, ushering in a whole new class of the super-rich.

It’s not even half a decade later, and that already looks hopelessly dated. Pah, everyone and his gran has got $100 billion these days. Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison have already seen their net worth vault past $200 billion, while Elon Musk has more than double that again. This, I think, makes Musk the richest man who’s ever lived, since the previous presumed holder of the title – Mansa Musa, the 14th-century emperor of Mali – owned  a mere $400 billion in current terms, much of which he spent on a spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca.

ONE DOLLAR, MANY VOTES

Wealth inequality will be a major issue this year, partly because the creation of a new class of American uber-mega-super-oligarchs is inherently interesting, but also because – as Elon Musk’s unhinged interventions in British and German politics makes clear – this has real consequences for the rest of the world. 

Too much discussion of inequality focuses on incomes, such as this piece in the Financial Times with the misleading headline “Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has”. If you look at how much people own, however, it’s another story. Since 1977 -- the year I was born, as it happens -- the richest one percent in America has increased its share of the nation’s stuff from 22.7 percent to 34.9 percent. That is a lot of money.

And money is power, as Francis Bacon didn’t say. If you are wealthy, you get a wildly disproportionate amount of attention, which means you can bend laws, corrupt politics, and reshape the world to suit your vision. It’s often said that modern democracy isn’t one man/one vote, but instead one dollar/one vote. In reality it’s worse than that. A hundred billion dollars buys you a lot more than a hundred billion votes.

This must be great for the centibillionaires but, for those of us who believe in democracy as a vehicle for representing the views of everyone, it’s all the more reason to try to build and/or rebuild defences against the oligarchs.

THE TRANSPARENCY BATTLEGROUND

The dirty secret of the international financial system is that the tools used by Putin and other kleptocrats to hide, move and multiply their stolen wealth were designed not for them, but for Western tax-dodgers. Once shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, Swiss bank accounts, trusts and all the other paraphernalia had been created, financial criminals realised that they liked convenience, value and discretion just as much as tax dodgers did. 

Wealthy Westerners haven’t stopped wanting to dodge taxes and scrutiny just because Putin’s a baddie, and transparency measures have proved distinctly unpopular among the one percent as a result. “Sure, I want to stop corrupt crooks from taking over the world via anonymous shell companies, but why should that mean I can’t use them?”

It explains the bizarre ping-pong that was played with the US Corporate Transparency Act at the end of last year. The CTA, passed in the dying days of Trump’s last term in office, obliges states to collect information on who actually owns companies, thus ending the race to the bottom that has allowed Delaware and Nevada, for instance, to demand less information from applicants for corporations than for library cards. This piece of legislation was a big deal. It has taken four years for FinCEN, the Treasury Department’s financial crime experts, to craft the detailed regulations that would make the law a reality, and finally – at the start of 2025 – it was due to start collecting information about who owns what.

The CTA would not actually require this ownership information to be published, it would just be collected and made available to law enforcement agencies. Even that was too much for the improbably-named Texas Top Cop Shop Inc, which sells “tactical gear” to police officers and is suing to stop the CTA.

• “Though seemingly benign, this federal mandate marks a drastic two-fold departure from history. First, it represents a Federal attempt to monitor companies created under state law — a matter our federalist system has left almost exclusively to the several States. Second, the CTA ends a feature of corporate formation as designed by various States — anonymity. For good reason, Plaintiffs fear this flanking, quasi-Orwellian statute and its implications on our dual system of government,” the complaint states.

(Off topic, but, I think we may soon need an international legal treaty decreeing that anyone who calls something Orwellian should lose their case automatically. This might sound a bit, well, Orwellian but a hard line is needed.) 

In early December, a Texas court responded to Texas Top Cop Shop Inc by granting an injunction, preventing the U.S. government from requiring companies to provide ownership information as the CTA demanded. On December 23, a higher court stayed the injunction, and the law was back on. But on December 26, a different panel of judges (who presumably hadn’t had much of a Christmas) stayed the stay on the injunction, and the law was paused again, so the government has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. And that’s where we are at the moment.

LOOKING AHEAD

Offshore tax havens that also sell anonymous companies have long been able to point to the dire state of corporate transparency in the United States and use it as an excuse not to take action themselves. This means secret shell companies are still available for the Russian regime to hide its ownership of oil tankers behind, thereby circumventing Western sanctions and continuing to fund its war against Ukraine. Around a fifth of oil tankers are now in this “shadow fleet”, which poses a huge environmental threat, as well as a financial one.

Just over two years ago, a similar challenge to transparency measures in the European Union managed to halt them for a while. Fortunately Brussels is pushing out a new package of anti-money laundering measures, which would open up corporate registers to journalists and other bona fide researchers. That’s not to say that the EU has become closed to dodgy money, as this troubling investigation from September revealed, but at least it is trying to expose who owns it.

In the year ahead, I’ll be keeping an eye on government efforts to stop financial crime and the legal challenges against them brought by the Texas Top Cop Shops of this world. I suspect there will be many and perhaps, when it turns out like always, an English-language equivalent will be found for Chernomyrdin’s wistful cynicism.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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For years, Silicon Valley's tech moguls have systematically engineered a world where truth is optional, equity and justice are expendable, and facts are toxic waste. By dismantling both fact-checking operations and DEI programs, Meta stands to save millions - with DEI programs already facing cost-cutting measures in 2023, the move shows that the only responsibility Zuckerberg appears to take seriously is the bottom line. The surprising part isn't that Meta has stopped pretending to care about anything but their power and profit - it's that we were ever naive enough to believe they did.

The consequences of this decision will play out globally, and few understand those consequences better than Maria Ressa. The founder of Rappler, was among the first to document how social media platforms enabled the rise of authoritarianism in her native Philippines, where Facebook became so dominant that it "rewired our people's brains." Ressa, a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. says "propaganda is like cocaine - you take it once or twice, you're okay. But if you take it all the time, you become an addict. And we are all addicts today." When she spoke these words at Coda's Zeg Festival last June, they felt like a warning. Now they read like a prophecy fulfilled.

Her warning wasn't just about addiction to propaganda – it was about the deliberate architecture of our digital world. "These tech companies are engineering a world without facts," she says, "and that's a world that's right for a dictator."

The Engineering of Chaos

Tech pioneer Judy Estrin frames the problem in stark infrastructural terms: "Digital platforms mix 'digital water' and 'sewage' in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy and our democracy."

This pollution isn't accidental - it's a feature, not a bug. Meta's announcement, coinciding with Elon Musk's open championing of far-right movements in Europe, reveals a profound transformation in Silicon Valley. Tech moguls who once felt pressured to champion openness and truth are now racing to shed any pretense of responsibility.

It isn't just about catering to Donald Trump and the sentiments of his followers. The shift is about how tech companies view their stakeholders. Where platforms once felt compelled to respond to pressure from employees, users, and advertisers concerned about digital pollution, they've now consolidated power solely around profits. The workforce  that once served as a guardrail for online behavior has been neutralized - a trend Elon Musk pioneered when he bought Twitter. And Meta's move to end its 'Diverse Slate Approach' to hiring and representation goals, while adding Trump allies like the Ultimate Fighting Championship supremo Dana White to its board, shows exactly where power now lies.

The Infrastructure of Authoritarianism

For years, we've analyzed electoral manipulation, documented democratic backsliding, and tracked the rise of strongmen while treating platforms as mere conduits rather than active architects of our political reality. The entire debate around content moderation appears in retrospect to have been a carefully crafted distraction – a game of Whack-a-Mole that kept us focused on individual pieces of content rather than the systemic nature of the problem. As one former Meta employee said, "It's like putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier."

"Facebook's 'fact checking' initiative was at heart always a PR exercise," argues Emily Bell, whose research at the Tow Center at Columbia University focuses on the intersection of platforms, media and information integrity. "Nothing has changed about the platform's mission: to make money from the exploitation of IP and data created for free."

By abandoning civic responsibility, while disingenuously claiming to be acting in the interests of free speech, Zuckerberg and Musk aren't so much transforming their platforms as finally being honest about what these platforms have always been: engines of engagement designed to maximize profit and power, regardless of societal cost. The real shift isn't in their behavior – it's in our belated recognition that no meaningful conversation about democracy can exclude the role of the broligarchy in shaping our information ecosystem.

The Future of Truth

Tech platforms have wielded the First Amendment much like the gun lobby has wielded the Second: turning constitutional protections into a weapon against regulation and accountability. Just as gun manufacturers claim they bear no responsibility for how their products are used, platform owners insist they're merely providing neutral spaces for free expression – all while their algorithms amplify lies and fuel society's most self-destructive impulses.

And we are all complicit. The endless scrolling of TikTok and Instagram, the ease of WhatsApp communications, the ability to instantly connect with friends and family across the globe – these aren't just corporate products, they're now fundamental to our daily lives. But in our embrace of this convenience, we've sleepwalked into a future where the rejection of facts isn't just the domain of authoritarian governments in Moscow or Beijing, but of giant tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Many respected journalists and human rights defenders lent their credibility to Meta's Oversight Board – a body that could review a handful of content decisions but had little effect on the platform's fundamental design or business model. "The Oversight Board is absolutely the wrong problem [to address]," Ressa says. "They tried to call it the Supreme Court for content. Content is not the problem. The distribution and the rate of distribution is the problem. The design of the platform, none of which they have any power over. But yet they were able to get very credible people."

The Path Forward

The solutions we've pursued – from fact-checking initiatives to content moderation boards – have been mere band-aids applied on a deep systemic wound. As platforms poured millions into lobbying and institutional capture (Meta spent $7.6 million on lobbying the U.S. government in just the first quarter of 2024), we settled for superficial fixes that left their core business model untouched. As long as news organizations treat platforms as mere distribution channels rather than existential threats to information integrity, we will remain trapped in a cycle of ineffective half-measures. 

Before journalists point fingers solely at tech platforms, we should also look in the mirror - especially those of us who've made careers out of dealing in facts and telling truths. Journalists, researchers, scientists, educators - we're all part of this story. While tech platforms may at some point be regulated (though good luck with that during a Trump administration), we need to get real about our own role in this mess.

While we must figure out how to work toward systemic change, there is still power in how we choose to engage with these platforms. Every scroll, every share, every moment of attention we give is a choice. By being more conscious about where we get our information, how we verify it, and most importantly, how we pass it on, we can start reclaiming some control over our information environment. Small individual actions - from supporting independent journalism to thinking twice before spreading unverified content - add up to collective resistance against a system designed to exploit our worst impulses.

Those of us in journalism and media must also ask ourselves: Have we been complicit in providing cover for systems we knew were fundamentally broken? Have we prioritized our convenience and digital reach over the integrity of information? Most importantly, are we ready to acknowledge that our industry's survival, and arguably that of democracy overall, depends on confronting these platforms' role in undermining the very foundations of factual discourse?

The answers to these questions will determine whether we can rebuild an information ecosystem that serves society rather than corrodes it. But the very first step towards a society in which facts matter and truth has value, is admitting that the destruction of truth wasn't an accident - it was by design.

*Disclosure: Maria Ressa serves on Coda's Board of Directors.

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Outside powers will try to tug or coax the country in one direction or another. There could be chaos, or stability.

All of that will matter hugely to Syrians on the ground. But strategically, it doesn't much matter: the seismic change is already there. Things will never be the same.

When I arrived in Beirut very nearly 50 years ago, Syria was like a huge, impregnable castle, ruled with an iron fist by Hafez al-Assad. He relied on a raft of competing Mukhabarat intelligence agencies, each more ruthless than the next, and backed by a powerful military.

In 1980, he did the unthinkable. He stretched a hand out to revolutionary, non-Arab Iran and struck an alliance with Tehran in its eight-year war with Arab Iraq, because they both hated their mutual neighbour Saddam Hussein.

For decades that Tehran-Damascus axis was the only fixed element in the region's shifting political sands. It was crucial to the creation of Hezbollah to hit back at Israel and the U.S. after the invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut in 1982.

When the Syrian castle began to crack after 2011 and Hafez's son Bashar was in imminent danger, it was Iran and Hezbollah - and the Russians - who sprang to his rescue.

It worked for a while, up to a point. But ultimately the axis failed. After Gaza, Hezbollah was decapitated and filleted by the Israelis in Lebanon, Iran cowed and isolated, while Russia was being bled white in Ukraine. It only needed a kick from the rebels to bring Assad’s flimsy cardboard citadel tumbling down.

Now the Israelis are systematically destroying any chance that Syria will again be a military power. Its navy, air force and any serious military assets have been taken out by the most intensive airstrikes Israel has ever mounted. Syria is thoroughly defanged.

And so Syria, the dawlat al-mumana'a - the State of Resistance, or defiance of Israel - is forever gone. Even if that resistance was largely fictional. Also broken is the Axis of Resistance that linked Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as distant Yemen, in a ‘Shia Crescent’ made possible because the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed the major obstacle to its formation – Saddam Hussein.

Iran will no longer be able to pump arms and money through Syria to Hezbollah, which survives in Lebanon as a shadow of its former self.

"This collapse is the direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters," crowed Israeli PM Netanyahu. With full U.S. support for this restructuring of the region's architecture (with probably more to come when Trump is back in the White House), the Israelis roam the skies unchallenged. Only Iran and Yemen remain. And for how long?

While most Syrians celebrate the demise of the hated, bloodstained dictator, the Palestinians are left even more alone, at the mercy of the region's masters, and their American enabler, as never before.

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I was at a dinner party in California, when one guest who clearly did not vote for Trump said: “My hope is that there will be such chaos, they won’t get anything done. They don’t seem to have a plan.” 

I’ve heard versions of this analysis a few times since that dinner, both in conversation and in print, and every time it has  baffled me.

Of course there will be chaos. But isn’t that the plan? It certainly seems so now that Trump’s proposed cabinet features an alleged Russian “asset” as national intelligence chief, an alleged sexual predator as attorney general, thus leading a department that recently investigated him for sex-trafficking, and as health secretary an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who does not believe HIV causes AIDS. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense sports a tattoo associated with white supremacist groups, doesn’t believe in women serving in combat or, bizarrely, in washing his hands and has never run anything bigger than a small non-profit. These nominations are designed to cause a flurry of noise and chaos, and this has long been deliberate. 

Disruption, noise and chaos was most certainly Steve Bannon’s plan when I met him in 2019.  I had been invited to speak at the annual Eurasia Media Forum. The vanity project of the daughter of Kazakhstan’s former President Nursultan Nazarbaev, the conference still managed to bring together an eclectic and fascinating group of people. I accepted the invitation mostly because I had heard a rumor that Steve Bannon was going to be the keynote speaker.  

“I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.”

Right up to the last minute, Bannon kept the organizers guessing. Eventually he showed up, wearing his signature black button-downs, one on top of the other, and gave a performance that was equal parts chaotic, thought-provoking, disturbing and entertaining. He was, I thought to myself at the time, perhaps the best public speaker I’d ever encountered. 

After the panel, Bannon agreed to an interview. The three of us – Bannon, myself and British journalist Matthew Janney who was reporting for Coda from the event – rode up the elevator to his hotel suite on the 26th floor of a glitzy skyscraper. Along the way, we chatted about gay rights and racial equality: Bannon was enthusiastically “pro” both. He told me he was worried for his gay friends who had to live in a hostile world. It was the first of many inconsistencies in his approach that we never managed to resolve.

This week, as the initial contours of Trump’s new cabinet take shape, I keep circling back to that experience, that conversation with Bannon and Matt’s insightful piece that emerged from it. 

“Revolution is coming,” Bannon said on the stage in Almaty, addressing his fellow panelists: a former EU Commissioner for Trade and a liberal professor from New York. “You are all finished,” he shouted passionately “From London to Frankfurt to Berlin, you are finished.” According to my notes, at that point the room exploded in applause as he raised his voice, drowning out the EU commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who was trying to say something in response. I listened closely to make out her words. She was saying: “Shouting is not good.” Even to those of us who agreed, her attempted intervention felt beside the point. 

Afterwards, in his suite overlooking the glittering skyline of Almaty, the economic capital of Central Asia’s largest petrostate, Bannon was friendly and engaged even as Matt and I challenged him on some very obvious discrepancies in his arguments and some ironies. Including the fact that he was calling for revolution in a country run by a corrupt elite which allowed no freedom of expression. He shrugged off every one of our counterpoints. What he wanted to talk about was the time he was spending working with the far right in Europe and Latin America. He was excited about the movement he was helping to build alongside Europe’s rising far right political stars. 

To my surprise, though, the one person he really admired, he said, was the person he vilified most: George Soros, bête noire of the global right. “I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.” 

Just weeks ago, Bannon was released from prison, where he apparently taught civics, continuing, I assume, to build that cadre. Bannon, pending further legal troubles, is now a free man and even though he is no longer in Trump's inner circle, he has a voice, a vision and a plan. A friend of mine, inadvertently, is part of this plan: he is on Bannon’s vast retribution list, the list of people on whom he wants to take revenge. 

“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call Mom and Dad tonight. ‘Hey Mom and Dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, last week.  He is excited, he says, for Attorney General Matt Gaetz to start rounding up journalists. 

Bannon built the cadres. They are in power now. And chaos is the plan.

A version of this story was published as a newsletter. Sign up here to be the first to get Coda’s stories delivered straight to your mailbox. 

Disclosure: This article is part of our ongoing coverage of the changing nature of modern day authoritarianism. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, we are committed to transparency about our funding sources. The Open Society Foundations is among our many supporters. We maintain full editorial independence, and our funding sources are publicly disclosed to ensure accountability to our readers.

The post What Donald Trump owes to George Soros appeared first on Coda Story.

“Let that sink in” wrote Elon Musk on X shortly after it became evident that Trump would return to the White House – four years after losing the 2020 election, attempting to overturn the results, facing two presidential impeachments, a criminal conviction and many other criminal charges (all of which will now melt away). 

The post was accompanied by a smiling photo of Musk photoshopped into the Oval Office, holding a sink. 

The last time musk appeared with a sink was in October 2022, when he made a theatrical entrance into Twitter’s headquarters shortly after acquiring the company. That moment, which went viral, was part of Musk's takeover of Twitter, a move that would transform the platform into a hub for disinformation and political propaganda.

Musk was not the only bro excited by Trump’s victory:  Trump’s win is a win for oligarchs, autocrats and their patrons of all shapes and shades everywhere.  There was palpable, genuine enthusiasm in tweets from fellow populist leaders in  Hungary, India, and Israel. The Kremlin’s official response was tempered but there was no shortage of glee from those who speak on Vladimir Putin’s behalf. Few paid any heed to the FBI allegations that Russia was behind bomb threats at polling stations in battleground states, choosing instead to celebrate “victory over Ukraine” as the inevitable outcome of Trump’s election.  “Kamala is finished. Let her keep cackling infectiously. The objectives of the Special Military Operation remain unchanged and will be achieved,” posted Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev, referring, of course, to the full scale invasion.  No wonder that Volodymyr Zelensky’s message of congratulations to Trump sounded like a plea.

“Fuck!” was the headline in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, the weekly Die Zeit. But should anyone really be surprised?  

Liberalism has been on its deathbed for a while, for reasons that are many and varied: from our inability to resolve historic injustices and address the horrendous inequities that are inherent in neo-capitalism, to the toxic effect of America’s post 9/11 wars, to the tenacity and determination of U.S. enemies in the Kremlin and Beijing, and, in sharp contrast to that determination, the complacency and arrogance of individual leaders who represent the collective “liberal” West.

I often wonder whether the decline of liberalism actually began right at the point of its greatest triumph, when after winning the Cold War, the United States encouraged Russia to embrace the wildest, most unregulated version of capitalism imaginable. 

The alternative could have been a “Marshall Plan” for the Soviet Union, a responsible, long term strategy to bring wounded, defeated Russia and its still frightened, traumatized colonies into the Western liberal world. Instead, the U.S. stood by and benefited from unrestrained privatization that bred corruption and  nepotism. 

How does this connect to what is happening in the United States today? It created the foundation not only for modern day Russia but also for  the new geopolitical alliances of oligarchs and autocrats that have now come into full bloom. 

At first glance, that first generation of Gucci-wearing Russian oligarchs has little in common with the fit, fleece-sporting super rich of the United States. And yet, just like the Russian tycoons of the 1990s who accumulated unseen amounts of wealth because no one regulated them, the Silicon Valley moguls celebrating Trump’s victory today have managed to acquire unprecedented riches by skillfully avoiding government regulation. 

The latest, seismic political change is an aftershock from a bigger change that’s shaking the entire world. Because unlike the Russian oligarchs, the Broligarchs of Silicon Valley have not just grabbed untold riches, they’ve created products that none of us can or want to live without. 

Just as electricity changed the way we ate, slept, and worked, artificial intelligence is transforming the very fabric of our society. It’s building on the foundation laid by social media, which has already fractured the very idea of truth, legitimizing and scaling the age-old human trait of believing what we want to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.

Now, as the power and the ubiquity of digital services grow, so does the power of the men behind the monopolies  that have built the digital architecture of our lives. American voters, as Axios pointed out “have just decided – among many other things – that artificial intelligence will grow up in a permissive, anything-goes household, rather than under the guidance of stricter parents.” 

It’s not Donald Trump,  it’s the Peter Thiels, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world who will be making up the new rules that will govern our lives. These men, who have accumulated unprecedented wealth will now be able to translate it into unprecedented political power.

And they got it democratically. The decisiveness of Trump’s victory is sobering and it shows that liberalism, or at least  its current political interpretation, is unable to offer people meaningful solutions to crises that they need resolved. 

“Holy smokes! Literally nothing? Literally not one county?” gasped CNN’s Jake Tapper in the early hours of Wednesday morning as CNN's election map showed that Kamala Harris did not outperform Joe Biden in a single county in Pennsylvania. 

But is this not also just a more dramatic, more globally consequential version of a movie we’ve all watched before?  In Brexit Britain or during countless recent elections around the world, where “liberal” and “progressive” forces  failed again and again to match the imagination deployed by their opponents. 

In 2012, I watched this very same scenario unfold in my own country, Georgia, when people, fed up with the government, voted in an oligarch who made his money in Russia in the 1990s.  It was the country’s first democratic transition of power since the collapse of the USSR and it was applauded by the West as a “step forward” for a young democracy. At the time, Georgian multimillionaire reformer and educator Kakha Bendukhidze, made an astute observation: “We did make a step forward,” he said “But we stepped into deep shit.” 

Very few at the time understood that what he meant was that the country was once again becoming part of an alliance built not on shared principles and values but on oligarchic alliances, criminal networks and the unregulated quest for money,  power and impunity.

Georgia never managed to reverse its course. The oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili,  is still there, still supported by Russia and currently celebrating Trump’s comeback in the United States. The Georgian  opposition says his party rigged the recent elections. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets agree, but they are impotent: the government has passed enough repressive laws to quell any dissent. The tools of democracy that this particular oligarch  used to come to power are no longer available for those who now want to get him out. 

The global authoritarian playbook is effective because it is so simple. One of its core rules is:  use the tools of democracy until you can make them obsolete. The formula works. Overwriting  it will require  bold new ideas and courage to re-imagine how we can collectively defend liberal values in the age of Broligarchy.

The post The Age of Broligarchy appeared first on Coda Story.

That question of whether we will be left behind has stalked this American election. Democrats claim that they are all for old alliances–though of course it was the Democrats under Obama who first signaled they were becoming disinterested in us and wanted to think about Asia instead. Today, the more Trump-leaning Republicans now openly pride themselves that they, in the words of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, “don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” They claim it’s time to think about “America first.”

But what’s at stake here is not just a geopolitical choice between Europe or Asia–a choice that has been debated in Washington for a hundred years. It’s not just a choice between being outward looking or isolationist–a choice that has been debated in America even longer. There’s something else at play, namely, what sort of country America is and what kind of country it wants to become. Giving in to Russian autocracy in Europe is intertwined with giving in to autocratic tendencies at home. The outer and the inner are co-dependent. It’s not just “us” America is leaving, it’s leaving a version of itself. 

I am not unbiased. I grew up in the provinces of the American project. I was born in Ukraine. My parents were political dissidents arrested for advocating freedom of speech and human rights in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s they were exiled, moving first to London, then Munich and Prague. They moved because my father worked in all three places for Radio Free Europe–the US Congress funded stations that aimed to help end the Soviet dictatorship–and he moved as RFE changed its headquarters. Our journey was literally inseparable from America’s mission. In this context America was intertwined with ‘the good’: in the sense of being the Superpower that here, in the region I knew best, aligned itself with basic dignity, truth and self-determination. Across the world–from Latin America to South Asia to the Middle East–America’s track record is often pernicious and often justifiably maligned. But in standing up to Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union it became more than just another shithole Superpower. It could claim to be good too–or at least better than the autocratic alternatives. 

It was the historian Anne Applebaum who first pointed out to me, on a podcast series we worked on for The Atlantic, that this projection of ‘good’ power had a transformative impact inside America as well. Being in an alliance that claimed to support democracy made America more democratic; tamed its own traditions of autocracy. You can see this in the dynamics around the civil rights movement. Part of the impetus for enacting anti-racist legislation was to ensure that America’s self-declared Cold War position as the leader of the free world also aligned with what it did at home. 

In the 1950s, Soviet propaganda was successfully hammering America for being dishonest: backing democracy abroad while oppressing African-Americans at home. America’s allies were dismayed too. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case at the Supreme Court, which rolled back segregation in schools, the Department of Justice filed a brief arguing that the law should be changed not only for domestic reasons, but also because racist laws were causing “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”

Earlier, in 1947, the Harvard professor and leading civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois capitalized on America’s claims of promoting freedom around the world, post World War II, as a way to raise the issue of its lack of human rights towards African Americans at home.

Imagine an alternative history in which America had aligned itself with totalitarian powers in the 20^th Century–Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Or what if the US had just not taken a strong position against them. It may not have copied their systems fully–but it would also have removed part of the impetus for ruling elites to deal with their own autocratic practices.

During the Cold War, Washington defined itself in opposition to the Kremlin. This in turn could have some positive consequences domestically. Now, however, what you hear in both Moscow and Washington can sound all too similar.

In the first decade of Putin’s rule I lived in Russia, and saw how Communist ideology was replaced with a new propaganda playbook. First you seed doubt in the very idea of truth, spreading so much confusion and conspiracies people don’t know who to trust. Then, you obliterate any notion of there being a difference between good and bad with an extreme relativism and a triumphant cynicism. And in this moral and epistemic wasteland you create  propaganda that legitimizes the nastiest emotions: conspiratorial, paranoid identities, and a politicized, theatrical religiosity that has less to do with ethics and everything to do with supremacist groups belonging and the desire for submission to authority and controlling others. And finally, you use all of this as an excuse to engage in strategic kleptocracy, so that the purpose of running the state becomes corruption.

Ever since Putin first fine tuned this strategy, versions of this practice have been sprouting up around the world. Moscow may have lost the global ideological race in the Cold War, but it looks increasingly like it might be on the winning side this time.

Donald Trump has always been the obvious manifestation of the American strain of this phenomenon. But while Trump embodies a post-truth, post-values worldview, it’s left to those around him to rationalize it. JD Vance is the most eloquent. Vance is a successful writer, whose memoir was lauded by liberal critics. He is one of the finest debaters in America. Everyone who meets him says he is clever, pleasant and witty. In many ways he now plays the role that Putin’s eloquent, shape-shifting courtiers played in Moscow. When Trump spread blatant falsehoods about immigrants “eating cats and dogs”, Vance argued that evidence didn’t matter and that it was right to “create stories” if they get “media attention” for what he termed the sufferings of Americans. A total disregard for evidence was reframed as a higher calling–and makes possible all sorts of rollbacks of rights and truths. It makes placing immigrants in detention camps easier. It makes denying the results of elections possible.

Vance’s explanation of why America should abandon Ukraine is also telling. Twice now Vance has made the point that there are no “good sides” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “fairy-tale mindset” to apply categories of  “good versus evil.” Each side is to blame: Russia was wrong to invade, he argues, but Ukraine has corruption problems. Everything is relative.

It’s the sort of extreme moral relativism that Moscow’s spin doctors have long perfected. It goes against what most Americans, and what most Republican voters, think. Evangelicals especially are supportive of Ukraine. But by obliterating the confrontation of good versus evil in Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine, it gives an excuse to erode the sense of right or wrong at home too. This is not about us, it’s about the US.

So where does that leave those of us who still need America? Of course it’s long past time that Europe, or more realistically North Eastern Europe, arms itself and learns to fight. The Ukrainians have shown us how to do it. But  there is no way to avoid America’s role in this fight. It’s still the only superpower that can on occasion wield a blow against evil–if it can still recognise evil.

Part of the work will be the business of skilful and grubby diplomacy. There are many reasons why America–even a triumphantly cynical, utterly relativistic America–should stand up to Russia. Economically, it keeps their main trading partner, the EU, secure. Militarily, it degrades an adversary and keeps the main enemy, China, wary of adventurism. Diplomatically, it creates a global coalition of partners. And just showing American primacy and resolve brings vast benefits including everything from trust in the US dollar to the desire of “swing countries” like India or Saudi Arabia to play along with Washington.

But if we acknowledge that the drama here is not just about its own foreign interests, but also about the battle within America itself, then the field for action becomes bigger. Standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in Russia is part of standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in America. Standing up to bullying, hate and lies in Russia is about standing up to bullying, hate and lies in America. Standing up to Russia’s mafia state turned mafia Empire means standing up to the potential of a mafia state in America.

For those of us who were raised in the provinces of the American project but now dwell or engage with its core, the aim can’t be to simply scrape and beg for security. America made us. And many of us are now literally Americans or integrated into the American conversation. Sometimes those who have come from the periphery see the issues clearer than the capital. If the center has lost its purpose, then it’s up to those who have come from the provinces to help remake it.

The post How to make M.A.G.A. mean ‘Make America Good Again’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Earlier this week, I filed entries from November 28 on, as the scale and fury of the protests against Georgian Dream mounted. On that day, Irakli Kobakhidze, the prime minister, said he was putting Georgia’s bid to join the European Union on ice for the next four years. Georgian Dream, in other words, is pushing Europe away to bring us closer to Russia.

But our country’s constitution promises to attempt full integration with the EU, a promise that Georgian Dream appears to want to break, despite its claims to the contrary. If you read my entries from November 28 chronologically, you will see that I felt motivated and enthused, thrilled that Georgians, after post-election protests seemed to peter out, were out on the streets in greater numbers, determined to assert their rights and protect their aspirations.

Since I filed those entries though, the government has adopted darker, even more repressive tactics. After arresting and beating hundreds of young protestors, the police are now using the same brutal tactics on opposition politicians. Footage of Nika Gvaramia, a prominent opposition leader, being dragged unconscious down the street by a gang of masked policemen has been seen around the world.

The violence is vicious and unrelenting. But Georgians will not be intimidated. We’re not going anywhere any time soon, so watch this space.

It’s 7.30 and I’ve just woken up. Later today, Georgian Dream politicians will open a new session of parliament, a month after a tainted election, and begin a new four-year term as the governing party of Georgia.

I head straight towards the protests outside the parliament building. Protestors have been camping outside since the previous night, even though protests in front of parliament now carry the threat of a prison sentence.

As we wait for Georgian Dream deputies (‘our’ members of parliament) to show up, we ask ourselves if there are enough of us to overwhelm the police if necessary. And will the police wait until it’s dark to take action or attack us during the day? Already, we’ve learned that we can’t impede or block the entrance to parliament and that we cannot prevent deputies entering or exiting the building.

But even this early in the morning, the police are guarding the parliament in heavy numbers. All the gates are reinforced, with metal walls erected behind them. The security measures are so extreme that even the Georgian Dream deputies - traitors - might struggle to get into the building.

Arriving outside parliament, I see the swelling crowds of protesters and feel encouraged that Georgians understand that taking to the streets in significant numbers is our only weapon. There are more of us here today than anytime in the weeks following the election. We need more, though, to join us. We want the people who sold our country to hear our anger through the walls. 

Around noon, Georgian Dream deputies arrived to bluster their way into parliament and declare the session open, even though the opposition parties had staged a boycott. As our legitimate president, Salome Zourabichvili, said, the “Georgian parliament exists no more,” since it “tore up the Constitution.”

By 1.30 pm, someone started banging on a metal wall in front of the parliament building. People rushed to join in. The noise the drumming made swallowed up all the other noises. Then some others threw firecrackers over the gate, causing loud explosions. The Georgian Dream deputies inside sure can hear us now.

Georgian Dream nominates Mikheil Kavelashvili, a 53-year-old former professional soccer player, as its presidential candidate. The current president, who has described the parliamentary elections as illegitimate, has already said she intends to stay in office until the inauguration of a “legitimately elected president by a legitimately elected parliament.” The pro-Russian Kavelashvili was not allowed to become the president of the Georgian football federation because of his lack of a university education. Yet here he is, the pick to become president of Georgia. I think it is safe to say that people expected anyone but him, a man notable nowadays for swearing at the opposition in parliament. It does make a warped kind of sense. He is the perfect puppet for a regime in which ethics and human decency are considered nuisances, a “yes man” placed by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Russian-made oligarch who controls Georgian Dream, to obey Putin's every grim order.

The prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, just announced that Georgia will be halting European Union accession talks until 2028. This comes right after the European Parliament announced that elections in Georgia should be rerun and that top Georgian Dream officials, including the prime minister, should face EU sanctions, a sanctions package aimed at the top of the Georgian Dream leadership, including the prime minister. 

No more Europe! That’s basically what he is telling us. I thought they would just ghost the EU, as they have for so long, and let the relationship wear out, just so they could pretend that they were at least trying. I didn’t imagine this! I didn’t imagine that they would literally change their narrative overnight. If this is not enough to make even the most passive Georgians come out onto the streets, I don't know what will. 

I turn on my TV and see that, in fact, there are protests in front of parliament. There were none scheduled for today. But thousands are out there, more than at any of the recent protests including the one in front of Tbilisi State University in which the police arrested dozens of young people, including 21-year-old Mate Devidze, who faces seven years in prison if he is convicted on trumped up charges of assaulting a police officer.

Today, in contrast, this gathering is not organised by political leaders, it is completely improvised. People just feel compelled to come out, like we used to, until the elections made everyone hopeless. Even the president Salome Zourabichvili is on the streets, asking the riot police who they are working for – Georgia or Russia? She gets no answer. And when she asks why they won’t answer her, their commander in chief, they remain silent. 

Many Georgians have been asking whether we still had any fight left. We’ve criticised the opposition and showed contempt at their inaction. When, we asked, would the people reach their boiling point? From what I was seeing on TV, maybe we were getting there, despite the scary amounts of police and special forces with their shields and tear gas.  

I head out to the protests. The atmosphere is tense but in a good way. Undeniably, there are more people out on the streets than we’ve seen in recent weeks. And, if the police action is excessive, more will come out. That’s what everyone is saying.

Sure enough, around midnight it starts.

The police, advancing from the streets adjacent to parliament, turned water cannons on the protestors. From the very first blast it became apparent that the water was laced with something. People described feeling a burning sensation on their bodies. Many felt they couldn’t breathe. Still, soaking wet in the freezing air, their skin stinging and struggling for breath, the protestors stood in front of the jets of ‘water’. They were not afraid.

But the police were thuggish. They kept advancing, pushing us back down Rustaveli Avenue, beating up and arresting anyone they could lay their hands on. The police formed a line in front of the Tbilisi Marriott, the same location where protestors were gathered back in May, a night on which I, alongside many others, was arrested.

Tonight, I discovered that a friend of mine, Dachi, had been arrested. The police beat him as they dragged him to a police car. I called my lawyer. She was already awake, fielding dozens of calls from people who knew someone who had been arrested.  

As morning broke, the police continued to chase and beat people, to hunt down those who had taken refuge in the shops nearby. The police were brutal, in keeping with what Georgian Dream has to offer to the country.

I managed to get five hours of sleep and then went to the prison, taking food and cigarettes for my friend Dachi. His lawyer told me the police beat everyone who they arrested, some of them so badly that the prison officials refused to accept them, insisting that they be taken to hospital. On cue, an ambulance sped, sirens blaring, out of the prison gates.

After the night’s violence, as I expected, there were even more people out on the street. The police are still brutal. But the sheer number of people makes it hard for them to control the crowds. Fireworks were being thrown. And the police, under the barrage of sparks and lights, were finding it difficult to hold that line in front of the Marriott.

So many people are coming out onto the streets, it was as if the post-election lull, the inertia that took hold of the protests, had never happened. There is an incredible feeling of unity. This is our moment.

By six AM though, the police advanced once more, this time firing rubber bullets at protestors. A group of masked men were walking down Besiki Street, perpendicular to Rustaveli Avenue. Protestors were being penned in, unable to escape ‘police’ intent on violence. There were people on the ground, being stomped on by multiple officers. No mercy was shown. Women were beaten. Old people. Journalists. Children. The police were swearing at people, humiliating protestors as they beat them, seeming to enjoy their work. They seemed to believe Georgian Dream propaganda that we are all anti-national agitators backed by some nefarious combination of the EU, CIA and George Soros.

They are arresting fewer people though. Our prisons are full to the brim with protestors. On November 30, schools, businesses, and organizations around the country said they were going on strike. Videos made the rounds that showed the extent of police brutality. Georgians throughout the country are outraged. In the evening, protestors gather around the offices of TV Pirveli, the public broadcaster, demanding that the media do its job. The protestors will be given airtime, the channel’s executives promise. Later that night, I hear that my friend Dachi is being brought in front of a judge. They want to make space for new prisoners. 

The police have become instruments of state oppression, using pepper spray, water cannons, tear gas, and excessive violence to suppress peaceful protesters. Twenty eight journalists have been injured in just two days and all international human rights norms have been violated.

Still, despite all the horror, I feel positive. Georgians are refusing to be intimidated. Everyone I know who has been arrested and/or beaten, is back out on the streets.

Police violence has had no effect. Even more people take to the streets on the weekend. People are still being arrested. But there are far too many now for the arrests to make a dent. There are fewer beatings, now that so many videos of police brutality are circulating. Firework use has become more targeted and tactical. One legend even managed to rig up a homemade Gatling gun, pushing back a swarm of riot police with a dazzling burst.

Once again, though, at six am, the police make their customary advance. This time though there are fewer men in masks alongside. And as we walk away, the police aren’t engaging, aren’t looking for protestors to beat and bully. Many are speculating about this apparent softening. I just think we’re facing the B-squad, while the thugs rest.

Right now though we take advantage and walk towards Tbilisi State University, managing to occupy and block off one of the most important arteries of the city. Tonight was a win. And we’ll take it, knowing there are many more battles to be fought.

Tonight was historic. It finally felt like we were a properly organized resistance. There were more people on the streets. More medics. More people prepared for teargas. More intelligence. More fireworks. And not least, more courage.

The police, as if acknowledging new realities, became aggressive earlier than usual. Almost as soon as the protestors arrived, the police turned on the water cannons, from inside the parliament premises. At midnight, the water was replaced with tear gas. Protestors were pushed down Rustaveli Avenue, the usual tactic. As they force protestors back, more police like to emerge from side streets, beating and arresting protesters. But this time we were ready, shooting fireworks at the police and neutralizing tear gas canisters as fast as we could. There were seasoned veterans on the front lines, looking out for the injured and coordinating the crowd’s movements.

Exhausted and stretched thin, the police were less effective and on edge. They knew they were in a battle, that we were, for once, returning fire. We even used drones to help us keep tabs on police movement and organize ourselves. We understood that by being mobile, we made life more difficult for the police.

By six AM, as they have every day since the protests began on November 28, the police began to indiscriminately round up and arrest protestors. Many of those arrested, as acknowledged by global human rights organizations, have been severely beaten, their faces rearranged by the vicious riot police. 

I went home. But there were still protestors out there. On TV, I saw a miracle: police circling a group of protestors shrouded in smoke, but when the smoke cleared, the protestors had disappeared. The police, stretching down the avenue, looked confused. I almost felt sorry for them – no sleep, no arrests, and punked in view of the whole country by a bunch of kids they were trying to bully.

The protests are growing in size and scale. We need to keep this momentum, to show the authorities that we have staying power, that we will fight for our rights.

Last night, I found myself on the river bank with about 300 other people. The police have started to crack down harder. They have been arresting opposition politicians as well as continuing to beat and arrest protestors on the street. I was on the periphery of the crowd when I saw a brand new white Skoda with tinted windows, a car normally favored by high ranking police officers, being driven directly at protestors. More and more people across Georgia are coming to understand just how extreme the police violence has been. Protestors who have been released from prison have been talking about being beaten to near death, about being taken to a van far from the cameras and journalists and being tortured. Many have said that the police threatened to sexually assault them with truncheons, others have described in graphic detail the severity of unprovoked beatings. On TV, a protestor said the police put a gun to his head, threatening to blow his brains out if he didn’t unlock his phone.

Since November 28, the protests have been completely spontaneous. People feel they are in an existential struggle. That Georgia is being dragged back into the Russian orbit, even as the majority of people, especially young people, link their future to Europe and think of the European Union as a form of protection against Russian expansionism.

For obvious reasons, Georgian Dream would rather pretend the protests are organized by opposition parties and activists funded by and beholden to Western interests. So now the next phase of the crackdown has begun. The offices of opposition parties and civil society organizations are being raided without warrants. Police are going on fishing expeditions, seizing every electronic device they can. Opposition leader Niko Gvaramia was beaten unconscious and dragged into an unmarked police car. And in a bid to stop the use of fireworks, which protestors have used to defend themselves and embarrass riot police, the revenue service has reportedly closed fireworks shops and is even looking at shops that sell helmets and masks.

This government is revealing its true self and every day it’s turning more people into resistance fighters.

Luka’s diary from last month

With everyone anxiously monitoring the results of the US elections as they came in, it felt today as if I lived in Georgia the state, not Georgia the country. When it became clear Donald Trump was the winner, some celebrated, while others felt even more hopeless. Like many, I worry that Trump’s stand on negotiating with Putin could weaken the US’s position in the region, giving Russia even more of a hold over Georgia than it already has. I really hope I’m wrong.

This is an account of the last couple of days on the street in Tbilisi, as we protest the sham election of October 26. Understandably, the world’s eyes are elsewhere right now, but our battle for our democracy continues.

I'm heading to a protest organized by the opposition where they say they will show us proof of election fraud and present us with a plan of action. I'm so anxious I’m actually shivering. I really hope the opposition realizes that they need to show a united front. The doubts are growing by the day and this is probably their last chance to show us why we voted for them.  Now is the time for them to  honor the trust we put in them.

After just a couple of hours, I’m already back home. To say that the protest was a disappointment would be an understatement. Greta Thunberg might have been there, reportedly wearing a keffiyeh and expressing her solidarity with protestors at this “outrageous development,” this “authoritarian development,” but the turnout was below par. The lack of people protesting, compared to the numbers who hit the street in the wake of the stolen election, was noticeable. Morale, it seemed, was low and people were looking to opposition leaders for answers. 

Instead we got platitudes. “The plan is you.”  “The plan is to fight.” “The plan is to not let Georgian Dream steal our voices.” “The plan is to be out on the streets.” “The plan is to have real democracy.” 

These are not plans! And if the plan is to “fight,” you need a plan, a strategy, for the fight, no? For the young people out on the street, whose blood is boiling, the opposition’s words were demoralizing. Still, I’m going to show up for the protests that are being planned every day. Our protests are going to drag on longer than we would have hoped but we have to find a way to stay the course.

Honestly I feel exhausted. I'm afraid that like many others I'm going to grow cold to the situation and stop feeling anger, stop feeling anything. Already, it feels like life has been sucked out of these beautiful, bright young people, who were once so energetic and vocal. Dead inside, would be the best way to describe how we are starting to feel.

What a difference a day makes. This morning, I woke up to the news that the district court judge in Tetritskaro had ruled that the rights of voters to keep ballots secret had been violated, thus annulling results from 31 polling stations in two constituencies. The lawsuit is one of many filed by the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association and Vladimir Khuchua is the first judge to rule in their favor. He upheld their complaint that the ballot paper was so thin it was possible to read people’s votes through the paper. If the Young Lawyers Association can force enough annulments, the process would require snap elections. After Judge Khuchua’s verdict, Georgian Dream has decided to bundle all legal complaints about voters’ secrecy rights into a single trial to be heard by one judge.

Just as I was heading out to the protest, I learned that the venue had changed. The opposition wanted people to gather in front of the Court of Appeals in Tbilisi. I turned on the TV to see if we had anyone reporting from the courthouse. Sure enough, a crew from TV Formula was there, waiting for protestors to show up. But guess who had got there before them? Half the cops in the city. They surrounded the courthouse and even put a lock on the gate. A gate that is never closed. What a symbolic image that was – Georgian Dream literally locking down our courts.

On my way to the Court of Appeals, I feel much more hopeful than I did last night. Seeing our young lawyers working to overturn the election and seeing that there are judges who will put the law and their principles first gave me some energy and belief. Though it’s still a far cry from how I felt during the protests on election day. Outside the courthouse, most of the protestors were my parents' age. There were some young people, but for once we were not the majority. The atmosphere was calm. Even with hundreds of police officers walking around trying to listen in on conversations. 

At some point, we started a march from the courthouse. Where we were going, though, was unclear. I asked around and no one knew. We were just following, like perfect soldiers. I guess we were tired of thinking for ourselves. Eventually,  I managed to flag down one of the organizers who answered my question. We were going nowhere in particular. We were going to march on Tsereteli Avenue to disrupt traffic. 

To my surprise the people stuck in traffic because of us were not complaining. You could even sense support from them. What became clear to me at the end of the day was that we may have lost the critical mass, but the protests are still alive. We just need a push. We need sanctions. We need our visas revoked, and some bans on our banking system for starters. The only way to bring people back out on the streets is to make them feel uncomfortable and shatter Georgian Dream’s lies about prosperity, economic growth, and euro integration. Everyone needs to understand that over the last 12 years Georgian Dream made more money than we can wrap our heads around. The money it now uses to buy this country.

The fact that western leaders are threatening us with sanctions but are issuing none only helps to push Georgian Dream’s false narrative that they are taking the country into Europe. Sanctions might be the last hope we have left if we want to build up a wave of civil disobedience. Before, that is, they start arresting everyone who dares to speak up, and induce such fear that any change in the future will be impossible.

Luka’s diary from last month

My country officially became a satellite state of Russia. Twelve years of fighting has come to this; a Russian puppet government managed to yet again get “elected.”
These elections have seen unprecedented voter turnouts not only in the country but also abroad. And now it looks like there was some unprecedented voter fraud too.

Waking up this morning I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Months of sleepless nights spent in the streets protesting, that constant paralyzing stress you feel, seeing your country lose a war it has been fighting for over 200 years, all gone! Today, I thought, is the final battle.

While still in bed I immediately checked my phone to get the  morning news. I couldn't wait to vote! It was around  7am when I came across the first video of Georgian immigrants in the U.S driving to the voting location. The image of a U.S highway filled with cars bearing Georgian flags will live in my head for years to come. I felt so proud of my people I started tearing up. Video after video of immigrants voting abroad were coming in by the minute. Lines of Georgian voters stretching for blocks on end in major cities around the world. We were mobilized, we were together, we were going to win! Everyone in the city was excited to fulfill their civic duty and once and for all end Russian rule over our country. 

I came across the first video depicting a fight at one of the voting stations. An observer who was supposed to make sure there was no fraud at his station was getting beaten up by multiple thugs sent there to derail the peaceful processions of elections. These thugs are nothing new. For months the government has been using them to scare journalists, activists and political figures by means of violent physical attacks.

It became apparent straight away that the Georgian Dream was going to try everything not to lose their grip on power. Throughout the day more videos of voter fraud and intimidation started to surface. In one of them you could see a man dumping two handfuls of ballots into the ballot box even though observers were trying to prevent him. That voting location was shut down within the hour. Preventing hundreds from casting their vote. These were far from being the only incidents. Fraud and violation reports were coming in so fast it was hard to keep up. 

But still, everyone kept their spirits high, and remained unshaken. People believed. Restlessly waiting for the exit polls. 
Seeing how mobilized the whole population was despite all the violence and electoral fraud kept our hopes up. The fact that Georgian immigrants traveled over 2000 km to vote at their own expense because the Georgian government did not organize facilities close enough to everyone proved to us that no matter what hurdles you put in our way, we would overcome them.

When the exit polls came in, and we saw that the opposition received  the majority of votes–it felt like a turning point. Some people started celebrating preemptively. The Georgian Dream exit poll on the other hand showed a 10 percent difference more or less in their favor. Next thing we knew, Bidzina Ivanishvili had come on TV to congratulate his party on their victory. So the first images we saw on TV were both sides celebrating based on the results from their own exit polls. Imagine how insane of a sight that was, after a whole day of sitting on pins and needles, we still don’t know who won. 

The only thing left to do is wait for the count. The count comes in with 53% in favor of Georgian  Dream. Which we all know is a scam. So tonight, as of writing this we are still waiting for the ballots to be recounted manually. But we already know that Georgian Dream made it possible for individuals to vote at multiple voting stations so the manual count will still give them the advantage. 

Our elections were stolen, and we know it. A day that started full of hope, quickly turned into despair. What do we do next? Will the opposition present a plan? Do we look to the west? The west, that debated sanctions for so long that now they will hardly affect anything. Do we organize a revolution?

I guess I'll have to wake up tomorrow to see. Today, what I learned is that this was far from our final battle.

It is now day two after the election. Literally! I wrote the top part last night, feeling powerless about the situation trying to feel even for a tiny bit that I was doing something proactive. Today, I don't even know how I feel. My only thought is ’oh shit here we go again.’ Gerogians in New York, are still in line to vote, even though their voices will not be counted. Imagine traveling thousands of kilometers to cast one ballot, only to find out that in Georgia the Georgian Dream gave multiple ballots to its sham electors. It destroys your trust in democracy and in our western partners who we believed in so much. 

I'm watching TV now, eager to see a solution. And all I see is foreign diplomats condemning the Georgian Dream without actually proposing a solution. They are still talking about how a government should not act in this way and that the Georgian Dream needs to take back the results. Moscow doesn't care when you wave a finger. And of course a government should not act this way, but telling them will not change anything. They need to be punished and we need your help to punish them. But still, the only thing we hear from our partners is their shock and outrage. 

Georgia should be an example and a warning to the western leaders, diplomats and policymakers. And hopefully make them realize how little they understand about the power dynamics within the post Soviet space. The balance you once knew is now on the tipping point. You in the west need to listen to your Ukrainian and Georgian counterparts when it comes to Russia because who knows it better than us? You, who live thousands of kilometers away or us the people Russia has tried to subdue for over 200 years? You take time to discuss every single move while Russia acts! That's why sanctions now are 100 times less effective than they would have been 6 months ago. It is time for new diplomacy. A more firm diplomacy. A more active and understanding one. One adapted to the ever-changing modern geopolitical space. Because you can't continue looking at the post Soviet space with the same optics you use to look at your actually democratic countries. When western diplomats talk about Georgia the only point they are conveying is how shocked they are that democracy is not working here. You have to understand that the fight we are leading is for our society to function as democratically as yours. This is something many westerners take for granted. But we have to fight for it. And your inadequacy to act helps further propagation of the Russian narrative about the powerlessness of the west. In hindsight the west should have realized this with their semi useful sanctions against Russia at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.

Please realize that you are actually gambling with real peoples lives that believe in you, and have given you their trust, in Ukraine and in Georgia. You need to prove that the west still holds the power of change. The same power that has been the cornerstone of democracy around the world since WW2. Time for debates, promises and threats is over. It is time for action!

We are back in front of the parliament. Why? Because our elections were rigged and we came out to see what the opposition leaders had to say. I got to the protest at 19:30 and immediately felt something was off. All the previous protests had some kind of electricity in the air, but this time it was different. An unusual mix of fatigue, anger and silent despair. I have never felt anything like this before. All the Gen-Zs who previously were all about peace now wanted to “fuck shit up” even though they all knew that today was not that kind of protest. The closest they got was when they heckled Viktor Orban the Hungarian Prime Minister on his exit from the Marriott Hotel on Rustaveli Avenue by calling him a dick in his own language. He was on an official visit to congratulate the ruling party on their win in the elections.

The first speaker of the night was our president Salome Zourabichvili who was then followed by all the members of different opposition parties. Her speech gave very little hope to our constantly growing desperation.

The post Stolen Dreams: A Diary From Tbilisi appeared first on Coda Story.

But empires are also built from the margins, and no one knows this better than Vladimir Putin. 

This week, Putin scored a huge geopolitical victory when the party the Kremlin was rooting for in Georgia pulled off a seemingly impossible electoral win. 

 “Georgians have won. Attaboys!” posted Margarita Simonyan, head of RT and the Kremlin’s chief propagandist on X. 

“I woke up in Russia. How can I go back to being Moscow’s slave?” a devastated friend texted the morning after the vote. 

The ruling Georgian Dream party, run by an oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili secured a parliamentary majority. Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, earning in the process the nickname “anaconda” for being methodical and relentless at eliminating rivals. 

He moved to Georgia shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and became one of the country’s most impactful philanthropists. He supported culture and arts, paid for hospitals, kept the entire Opera House on his payroll and stepped in every time the government’s coffers didn’t stretch far enough to pave a road or build a school. He was also a recluse, until in 2012 when he set up the Georgian Dream party and scored a landslide victory against Mikhail Saakasvhili, Georgia’s former president whom Putin famously promised to “hang by the balls” and who is currently in jail in Tbilisi.  

Since the 2012 victory, Ivanishvili has been methodically moving Georgia back into Russia’s orbit:  covertly and slowly at first, openly and aggressively in more recent years. 

This caused a lot of friction with the society: Georgians had tired of Saakashvili’s government, which was becoming autocratic, but many were set on a turn towards Europe. For centuries Georgian luminaries have cultivated the idea of Europe as the way of protecting the Georgian language and identity from oppression by its neighbors. The modern Georgian constitution calls for a closer alliance with the west, in particular the EU and Nato. The country’s entire cultural identity is built around the story of struggle against historic oppressors: Persians, Ottomans and, for the past two centuries, Russians. 

By the time Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Georgians were disillusioned in Ivanishvili but they were still shocked when the government chose to openly side with Moscow against Kyiv. Ukraine had stood by Georgia through all of its wars, including the most recent Russian invasion in 2008. The government’s position felt like a betrayal. 

But then the Georgian Dream went even further, passing some of the most repressive Russian-style laws, launching brutal crackdowns on activists, targeting the LGBTQ community and unleashing dirty disinformation campaigns straight out of the Kremlin playbook. By 2024, hundreds of thousands were taking part in regular anti-government demonstrations led by the youth demanding that Georgia stays on its European course. 

This election, the only democratic way of getting the country out of Ivanishvili’s and Russia's tightening embrace, became the most pivotal vote in the country's history since the independence referendum in 1991.  Polls, including traditionally reliable exit polls, put the opposition in a clear lead. On the day of the vote, the turnout was so high that in some polling stations people queued for hours to cast the ballots.  

And yet, the Central Election body announced that the Georgian Dream party beat the country’s pro-European opposition and secured a fourth term. “This seems to defy gravity,” a friend in Tbilisi commented.  

In the next few weeks, the opposition in Georgia will work to galvanize supporters and try to prove that the election was stolen. The list of recorded irregularities is long, and include suspicious discrepancies in numbers, violence and ballot stuffing. Despite the evidence, fighting for justice in courts controlled by an oligarch is likely to be futile. 

The opposition also faces the reality that the Georgian Dream did perform better than anyone has expected, in part at least thanks to an aggressive pre-election campaign that focused on fear: the governing party’s singular message equated opposition with another war with Russia.  Their campaign included billboards that juxtaposed ruins of Ukrainian cities with peaceful landscapes of Georgia.  It proved effective in the country, where Russia still occupies 20% of the territory and memories of the 2008 invasion, as well as previous wars,  are very much alive.

The election results may defy both logic and hope for many Georgians but they align disturbingly well with the broader trajectory of the world. For this is not a story of a rigged post-Soviet election, but rather the story of a larger, systemic game that has been rigged against us all. 

Over the past decade, the interplay of oligarchic alliances, disinformation, abuse of technology, and selective violence have all eaten away at the foundations of all societies. These interconnected trends, often obscured by the noise of our news cycle, are part of a larger authoritarian web that is enveloping the globe, and polarizing our communities from within. Connecting the dots between them reveals a pervasive threat that extends far beyond any single event.

In this rigged game, the losers aren’t just the Georgian opposition and their supporters, but everyone who believes in the value of freedom: whether it is the freedom to speak out without being beaten or imprisoned, or the freedom of a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate. The real winners aren’t the Georgian politicians or even the oligarch who pulls their strings, but anyone who puts money and power above shared values. 

In the case of Georgia, the biggest winner is the Kremlin, who has just won a battle in its global war against liberal democracy.  Ahead of the US elections, there is a warning here too. Georgia has always been the place where the Kremlin has rehearsed its global playbook. 

Throughout the 1990s, it was in Georgia  that Moscow ignited wars and transformed them into frozen conflicts, a precursor to the tactics later employed in Ukraine. As Putin’s Russia grew more assertive, it occupied territories and meddled in elections, using methods that would then spread to Europe and the United States.

It was in liberal, progressive Georgia, where the Kremlin first piloted anti LGBTQ+ narratives, teaming up with the members of the American and European religious right and carefully targeting traditional parts of the society and testing ways to spin marginal homophobia into a larger culture war that  eventually took root in the West. 

Yet, for all the lands Putin has seized and the narratives he has spun, his true success hinges on two tools handed to him by his own adversaries in the West. The first is our information system that is fuelled by social media platforms, which are run on profit-driven algorithms built to spread disinformation, conspiracies, and lies. The second–fueled in part by the first–is the dwindling attention span of those who can and should want to help.

Georgian opposition is unlikely to succeed, unless it gets focused attention from Europe and the United States. But with the tragedy that has enveloped the Middle East, the drama of the US elections and the urgency of the increasingly unsustainable war in Ukraine, events in Georgia will struggle to compete for attention. And yet, the reason empires crumble from the margins is because true resistance always comes from the edges. Helping Georgia bring back its democracy will keep it alive elsewhere.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Guardian newspaper.

The post From the Margins to Power: Georgia’s Elections and the Kremlin’s Empire appeared first on Coda Story.