Ben Rhodes

We got to get more subscribers because we're trying to fight the good fight here for progressive media.

All right.

I want to do an update on Russia, naturally.

But specifically, I want to talk about the way that the Russian government is kind of waging a war on its own people and their access to information.

Now, there's two major stories there.

So the first is that the Russian government has been restricting the use of the messaging app Telegram.

They're trying to get everybody to switch over to a government-created op called Max, but no one really wants to use it because obviously there's surveillance on it.

It literally goes right to the FSP, right?

And I just have to point out that Telegram is incredibly popular within Russia.

I've seen statistics that more than 76% of the population uses it.

Also, the government uses it.

They have their social media channels on there to put out information.

The military uses it to communicate with each other.

It's also a way for all kinds of influencers and bloggers to make money, like a lot of pro-war military bloggers.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a huge economy.

And so, yeah, just think about the impacts of that if you're going to take Telegram away from people.

And then the second thing that's going on is the Russian government has been increasingly just blocking the Internet altogether.

People are complaining that there's no Wi-Fi around, that there's no cell service, VPNs are getting blocked.

It's less so impacting people who work for, like, really big companies that have their own servers, but it's –