today's panel is anne applebaum and ian bremer. an is a pulitzer prize winning historian whose latest book is "twilight of democracy." and ian is the founder of the global risk consultancy. anne, this is a part of america you know very, very well. your book about russia "the gulag" won the pulitzer prize. what is vladimir putin up to? does he intend to invade ukraine? and if not, what's the game plan? >> so sadly, i don't have any profound insight into putin's brain, and i cannot predict what will happen. if you look at the situation rationally, a russian invasion of ukraine would be insane. putin my get to kiev quickly but then what? he would occupy a country that doesn't want to be occupied indefinitely, he would live with a guerrilla war and violence for many years. i talked to several people in russia who don't even believe something like that would even be popular in russia . >>> on monday the united states said it would not send any diplomats or any other officials to the beijing winter olympics set to begin february 4th. the

joining me again, anne applebaum and ian bremmer. ian, this move with china does seem to be part of a kind of expression of the balancing act that the united states is now trying to play with china. on the one hand, athletes are participating in a sense the united states is participating, but there won't be any government officials there. it feels like an effort to metaphorically have the same policy towards china, which is some deterrence, some toughness but at the same time recognizing the reality it's a big trading partner. >> and recognition if biden loses votes at home and he's seen too soft on china, like they did in 2020 as a consequence of the whole biden asia trope. so they did move ahead with a diplomatic boycott. but frankly it's not just that the athletes are still going. there's no economic going or sponsors to pull out of the olympics. we've seen a number of different signs, small but matter, that show the american and chinese are trying to find ways to cooperate when it's clearly in the company's best national interest

it's by staff writer at the atlantic, ann applebaum. also with us is prize winning columnist and associate editor of the "washington post" and msnbc political analyst, eugene anderson. the new piece is entitled "the new puritans" and it discusses the rise of mob justice in today's culture and its long-term effects, and you write in part, this, the modern online public's fear, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid idealogical prisms and arguments of 280 characters favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. but the online sphere has come to dominate many culture institutions, universities, museums. they sometimes impose the equivalent of a lifetime scarlet letter on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors. this is a story of moral panic, of cultural institutions policing or purifying themselves in the face of disapproving crowds. the crowds are no longer literal, as they once wer

i think we are seeing arguments of this a variety come people like anne applebaum and others are saying the generation of people that were alive during world war ii in europe dies off, many of the younger generation who don't have personal expense with warfare don't quite understand what it means to have nations fighting it out or other battle zones around the world where the citizens know what it means to have any tanks coming to your city and be under occupation. but many people in many parts of the world don't have personal experience with this. what i would say is when people have personal experience with something to remember it and when they don't it tends to be forgotten. >> i think those are terrific point and we will dive into that a little bit in our further discussion. i do want to switch now to sandro to speak about some of the key themes he speaks about in your book, , tricky because u dive very deeply into some of the core sort of structures that are fraction in our country, making it more difficult for us to kind of find community, it's built on our history, the inequity

we're joined by ann applebaum, an's teamed author of books democracy related. what does this is a about his bigss on ukraine and do you think the biden administration's pushback has been strong enough to deter him to date? >> so to be very clear and to echo susan, it's extremely dangerous the language that he uses and he has been using it for some time because of course there's no logical reason why russia should invade ukraine. ukraine does not threaten russia. nato does not threaten russia. nato is a defensive alliance. everybody who works in the russian military knows that that so putin is using the threat of the past of the cold war as an excuse to prepare his people for invasion or another set of games around that. for him this is a justification. it explains both why he should still be president, he's somebody who is famously corrupt, most of the population knows that. his popularity has been declining rapidly. living standards in his country have been going down so why should he, by what legitimacy does he remain in power and his argument is because i'm

. -- anne applebaum. our hope is that -- morely was the director of the initiative to reinvent government during the clinton administration. he is the co-author of three books on millennials and generational change. there is a lot to cover as we explore what makes young americans take. some 45% of the popular asian still growing is the subject of our discussion tonight. we will examine why politicos and others are studying them. let's get started. morely: thank you. i always introduce -- appreciate when people introduced me and tell them that i have been in federal government. it is my biggest failure in life. there you are. you can change what happened. i will be moderating a discussion on america's youngest voters. why they are a catalyst of change and targets of suppression. for that purpose i have the great pleasure of introducing you to our two speakers tonight who can tell you all you need to know about the subject and if they don't, you can ask questions of the q&a function thereon. after all that,

as the journalist anne applebaum wrote earlier this month, memorial was investigating stalinism in the past preciselyw because they wanted to block the return of stalinism in the present. toward that end, memorial helped create public monuments to stalin's crime. they also began investigating modern russian human rights violations in the present, most dramatically in moscow's campaign against rebels in chechnya. it's a mission that has not mixed well with the increasingly authoritarian rule of vladimir putin who has been cracking down on dissidents and civil society for years now. and now, after more than 30 years, the russian government has succeeded.au 0 they have shut down memorial, russia's largest and most prominent human rights organization. ostensibly, memorial's crime was not properly abiding by russia's foreign agent law under which the government had essentially branded memorial as a tool of foreign actors working or trying to undermine russia. but state prosecutors were not shy about the real beef with memorial, that it makes russia look bad. in fact, one prosecutor said of