Russia and America have more in common than their betrayal of Kyiv, and we need to push back on this shift.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/blues-for-ukraine

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This week's episode of Next Comes What looks at the meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week in light of Andrea Pitzer's previous experiences in Russia. She looks at what Trump and JD Vance were up to in the Oval Office, as well as recounting the morning she woke up in Moscow on a 2022 trip for book research to discover that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Andrea addresses how disinformation works, why it's short-sighted to condemn a whole identity as evil, and the ways Fox News plays to the worst impulses in citizens of both countries. Putin fans are cheering on what Trump did because in the end, both leaders have a similar view of how to govern and prefer a mafia state to any real democracy. Andrea offers some simple approaches for how to support Ukraine and stresses the need to recognize the way that we, too, are succumbing to competitive authoritarianism here in the US. We have to find ways to stop the destruction of our democratic institutions before there's nothing left of them to save.