Fact Check: Trump Regime, Orwellian Rhetoric, and Ukrainian History in Video Interview

I'd be I'll be honest. I think I'd be the greatest guy in Minnesota history. >> It's kind of hardball with the Midas

touch network. We are beginning to see the Trump regime's game plan for the November midterms, at least

rhetorically. A couple themes stand out. The first and most consistent is the undermining of Americans' faith in our

elections. We've talked about that a lot here and we'll continue to, but the bottom line is that the regime needs to

both manufacture crises that can justify interfering in elections, and it needs to sow enough doubt about their outcomes

that it can challenge the results when it loses. Case in point. >> And you know what they do? They cheat.

How many votes do we need? How many votes? That's why they take their time. How many votes do we need? Okay, here

they are. It's honestly it's terrible. We're a third world country with elections.

>> Everything is projection with Trump. We literally have him on tape asking to find enough extra votes in Georgia to

steal an election. There are other themes emerging as well. Of course, we have the tried and true tactic of

demonizing minority groups, trans people, immigrants. I'm from Ohio and the lies that Trump and Vance have

spread about the Haitian community in Springfield and everywhere, they're horrific. And then there's the latest

rhetorical attack, which honestly should come as no surprise. Without Trump, the communists will take over America.

>> So they're turning communist themselves, becoming a communist party. These are not social democrats, these

are hardcore, godless communists. They're godless communists. All communists are godless.

They don't believe in God. This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion.

250 years ago. This is a major threat to our country. >> I don't need to tell you how absurd this

is. The idea of communism has become a bogeyman for this administration with no real meaning behind it. It's the Trump

regime that has been moving to seize the means of production in industries like chip-making and AI. Trump, not the

Democrats, strong-armed companies like Intel into granting the government ownership stakes. Again, everything is

projection with this president. In his prophetic novel 1984, George Orwell wrote about the inversion of language

itself, the way authoritarians twist words and command us not to believe what our own eyes are seeing. The fact that

the Trump regime is doing this with the idea of communism itself, that's as Orwellian as it gets.

I spoke with Andrea Chalupa about this. We've had Andrea on before. She's an author, journalist, and filmmaker whose

work traces a through line from Stalin's Soviet Union to Putin's Russia to Trump's America. She now hosts the

Gaslit Nation podcast, where she argues that authoritarianism abroad and at home share the same playbook. And she has a

new graphic novel out, Mrs. Orwell, about George Orwell's fascinating and equally accomplished wife who originated

the idea for his groundbreaking novel 1984. Here's our conversation. Andrea, thanks so much for joining me

today. I don't often get to say what a beautiful book and mean it literally. I usually mean it

in a literary way, but this is literally a beautiful book. What made you choose to go with the the graphic novel

approach, and how did you find You're going to have to help me with his name pronunciation, Bram Ravel?

>> Bram Ravel is the brilliant illustrator of my new graphic novel, Mrs. Orwell, >> Yeah.

>> which tells the story of George Orwell's marriage through these crucible moments with his brilliant Irish English poet

wife and muse, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and we enter their marriage through these life-or-death moments that produce great

enduring works of art. We meet them when they're young in this whirlwind romance and they get swept up fighting fascists

in the Spanish Civil War, where Eileen literally saves his life and on and on it goes. And so, I, as a journalist, as

a historian, I chose the graphic novel for this because I also produced and wrote the film Mr.

Jones about the Holodomor, Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby,

Peter Sarsgaard, and directed by the great Agnieszka Holland. And in Mr. Jones, you see the young idealistic

journalist Gareth Jones risking his life and career to sneak to go into Ukraine, report on what Stalin was doing there,

and come out and blow the lid on this huge story, and then pay the ultimate price of it. He was mysteriously

murdered. But as you see in my film, there's this mysterious writer by the name of George Orwell who's writing the

words of Animal Farm that narrate Gareth's journey to get the truth out into the world, reminding us that the

truth cannot be killed. So, where Gareth left off, Orwell continues. And that is exactly the work that all of us

independent journalists, analysts, are doing today. We're working together in coalition to get the truth out into the

world because the truth ultimately prevails. The truth is so powerful and strong it doesn't need a champion, but

we willingly are its champion because it's so great and profound and powerful, and that is where our power lies. And

so, I wanted to continue the story of Orwell because when I was researching him, getting into his head, I had to

create him as a character. The great Joseph Mawle, who played Uncle Benjen on Game of Thrones and so many other

brilliant characters, Joseph Mawle is notorious in the industry of being extremely selective with his roles. The

casting director warned us he might not sign on to play Orwell. Sign on he did, and when he was on set, we were it was

like Orwell Comic-Con. Like we were nerding out over like the psychology of Orwell. And I so I had to live and

breathe Orwell and in doing so I fell madly in love with his wife. In fact, George Orwell was just the gateway drug

to Eileen who I think is even the more tenacious and interesting character. Eileen came from a Irish literary

family. Her brother was a beloved Irish journalist in London. They say that she took after him. She studied literature

at Oxford. She was among the earliest women to graduate from Oxford. She went up against J.R.R. Tolkien who himself

took the trauma of the Great War that killed many of his friends and turned it into enduring profound works of art in

Lord of the Rings and so on. That is who Eileen studied literature under. And then she embraced this new radical field

called child psychology. Imagine that children are more than just you farm hands. You know, the British

had a saying like children should should be seen not heard. Child psychology turned that all upside down and Eileen

embraced it. In fact, she wanted to create a thesis on how to measure the power of a child's imagination. Like

that's how dream like she was. And Orwell's first breakout novel that made him finally rich and famous was Animal

Farm, a children's book. And Eileen's descendants credit her with practically writing it. So I go through this graphic

novel and cinematically with the brilliant illustrator Bram Raval who's based in Barcelona, Spain. So the

Spanish Civil War sections really as you can tell it can really pop. It's a very personal for him those sections. And we

tell the story of this extraordinary marriage that George Orwell ultimately was a band name and that there was two

of them, Eileen and Eric Blair. Eric Blair was Orwell's real name. The two of them against great odds being

defiant, refusing to give up against Soviet censorship. There was a There was a Soviet spy embedded in Britain's

government that killed an early publishing deal for Orwell. And instead of letting that get to them, they just

kept redoubling their efforts, kept kept going, kept going, kept kept going. And that is how they ultimately got these

lasting works of art out into the world that gave us an entire new new outlook, a new language for understanding what

these tyrants are trying to do to us and how to ultimately stop them. >> And 1984 in particular is such a

a prescient work given the time we're living in now. And it was previewed by Eileen. I mean, she wrote The End of

History 1984. Wait, was that the name of her poem, her dystopian poem? >> Yes, before she even met her husband.

>> in 1934, right? She wrote this before she even met George, his his pen name. And

uh I'm glad you described them as a team because so often relationships like this get described as a parasitic or

cannibalistic. And you know, George Orwell had his faults, but they were very much in the crafting of things like

this, Animal Farm in particular. They they were a team. >> 100%. And I think the book is a reminder

for all of us to find our team and to cherish our team. >> Hey, it's Ken with a quick break and a

favor to ask. As many of you know, I travel to Ukraine often to report on what's going on there. One of the units

that has taken really good care of me is the 34th Coastal Defense Brigade. They have asked for help with a fundraiser to

upgrade a motor for one of the boats that conducts evacuations along the Dnipro River. Every dollar helps and

every cent of every dollar goes towards this cause. Valor Media is covering all the admin costs so you don't have to.

Please check out the link below and consider pitching in to support this extraordinary Ukrainian unit. I've seen

them in action. Trust me, they've earned it. Appreciate the help. Click the link below. Thanks.

>> What drew you to this apart from your research in Ukraine? Were you anticipating the moment we're living in

now where, you know, Orwellian language and insights are so necessary for understanding America today or did you

just get lucky {slash} unlucky? >> So, George Orwell is actually in my family to an a certain extent. So, I am

I'm Ukrainian-American. I was born here, but my mom and dad were born in World War II refugee camps where they spent

the first five years of their lives. In my mother's refugee camp, there were copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm

translated into Ukrainian circulating circulating among the Ukrainian refugees. This When was this?

This was So, George Orwell very poor, on the verge of death, fighting to get Animal Farm out in the world finally,

Eileen passes. She dies on the operating table. >> Yeah.

>> Um and Animal Farm is published after she dies. And the publisher in in the UK even

withholds the publication so as not to offend our ally Stalin. >> [snorts and laughter]

>> And a group of Ukrainian hipsters stranded in a World War II refugee camp find a copy like learn about Orwell from

BBC radio from the British >> have been the original hipsters. >> Exactly.

>> It's going way back. >> So so they're learning English, listening to radio, reading the British

press, and one of them hunts down Orwell's home address in London. Orwell is newly widowed rais- a

single father raising their infant son, and he gets a letter in flowery broken English from a Ukrainian refugee writing

to him saying, "Who are you and how did you know the truth of what we lived through? And by the way, we're

translating your book Farm into Ukrainian for all of our family and friends to read. And so Orwell was

overjoyed. He actually thought that this was the way to bring down Stalin. He He wanted to get all of these copies

translated into Ukrainian and to Russian and and smuggled behind the iron curtain to help wake people up. And so he wrote

to these Ukrainians a beautiful letter that is considered today his most personal statement of why he wrote

Animal Farm. And that became the published preface of the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm made by these

refugees. My uncle, as a teenager, picked up a copy in the canteen. And so when my mother's family immigrated to

New York City by ship, they can only take what they could carry. And so they took with them Orwell's Animal Farm. And

one of the first things my grandfather did when they landed in New York was they contributed money to open up a

Ukrainian printing press and continue the journey of getting their story out into the world. So I I read about this

in my So Christopher Hitchens mentions this briefly. I followed the thread of this story even

deeper and it it turns out that I had crossed paths with this Ukrainian refugee. His name was Ihor Shevchenko.

He founded the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute where I studied before he passed.

And before I I I I studied there and then I I parachuted off alone into Ukraine thanks to the Harvard Ukrainian

Research Institute, which this Ukrainian hipster founded. And he himself, Ihor Shevchenko, went on to be a Indiana

Jones-style scholar that unearthed all of this extraordinary research proving that Ukraine's Byzantium kingdom, the

Kievan Rus, was far more influential in history than Western scholars understood. Ukraine's Kievan Rus, which

Russia stole its name from, by the way, my my like didn't even exist. It's just some

backwaters and Kiev Rus in Kiev. And if you go to Kiev today, as you know, Ken, there's massive statues to the founders

of the Viking founders of Kiev Rus. Kiev Rus married their their princes and princesses all across Europe. Of France,

of Hungary, Denmark, and so on. You know, those you know, what would become those nations, showing that Ukrainian

blood is all over the royal houses of Western Europe. And again, Moscow did not even exist.

>> Yeah. >> And the whole And the centuries later, Muscovy starts poaching some of the, you

know, priests and and professors and and so on from this kingdom to eventually form up and become the hot-headed

teenager we know of today known as Russia. >> [laughter]

>> Right. >> And so I wanted to just to share quickly. So, in my in my film, Mr.

Jones, um that's how Orwell enters the script. That's why I chose to put Orwell there

because of this family connection of having George Orwell down Animal Farm in my family. And when I was struggling

to get the film made, I was having dinner with my uncle who had picked up this copy of Animal Farm in the refugee

camp. And I told him, "Yeah, I I discovered this crazy story about Orwell and the Ukrainian refugee camp edition

of Animal Farm." And my uncle looks at me and goes, "I have a copy of that book." And my aunt gets up from the

dinner table, goes to his bedside where he still kept it, and gave it to me. And now I have it here in my home in

Brooklyn. And there's only 2,000 copies believed to be in the world because the majority were seized by the Allied

soldiers and destroyed as anti-Stalin propaganda. >> That was an excerpt of my conversation

with Andrea Chalupa. For the full interview, check out my Substack. The link is below. Thanks.

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