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The speech might have been rambling and emotional but its motivation was clear. And it immediately created a quandary for many West-blamers and Putin-understanders. How would you square your belief in national sovereignty and the effective declaration by the Russian president that Ukraine shouldn’t have any?

On the left Russia stood as a flawed bulwark against imperialism, on the right against the supranational machinations of the New World Order (the EU, Nato, the UN, whatever).

I don’t call these western apologists for Putin traitors, or fifth columnists, or paid agents of Russia. They’re none of those things. I note that as of today, courtesy of Putin, these people all look foolish.

But if the Moscow autocrat follows through the logic of his own words, then things may get very difficult for us all. A price will be paid, economically certainly and possibly in something more precious.

It will be Putin’s doing but there will be an increasing number of voices raised blaming our own governments and institutions. Voices that must be heard but must be countered.

On March 11, YouTube’s parent company Google announced that it would block Russian state-backed media globally, including within Russia. The policy was an expansion of an earlier announcement that these channels would be blocked within the European Union. “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events, and we remove content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy,” Google said in a statement. “In line with that, effective immediately, we are also blocking YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded media, globally.”

That could leave many millions of Russians cut off from independent news and content shared by opposition activists like Navalny’s team. (It would also effectively delete 75 million YouTube users, or some 4% of the platform’s global total—representing a small but still-significant portion of Google’s overall profits.)

Part of the reason for YouTube’s survival amid the crackdown is its popularity, experts say. “YouTube is by far and away the most popular social media platform in Russia,” says Justin Sherman, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative. The platform is even more popular than VK, the Russian-owned answer to Facebook.

Today, YouTube remains the most significant way for tens of millions of ordinary Russians to receive largely uncensored information from the outside world.

Still, Sherman says the situation is volatile, with Russia now more likely than ever before to ban YouTube. For an authoritarian government like Russia’s, “part of the decision to allow a foreign platform in your country is that you get to use it to spread propaganda and disinformation, even if people use it to spread truth and organize against you,” he says. “If you start losing the ability to spread misinformation and propaganda, but people can still use it to spread truth and organize, then all of a sudden, you start wondering why you’re allowing that platform in your country in the first place.” YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.

On the same day as Navalny’s channel posted the video about Matviyenko, elsewhere on YouTube a very different spectacle was playing out. In a video posted to the channel of the Kremlin-funded media outlet RT, (formerly known as Russia Today,) a commentator dismissed evidence of Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities. She blamed “special forces of NATO countries” for allegedly faking images of bombed-out Ukrainian schools, kindergartens and other buildings.

“YouTube has, over the years, been a really important place for spreading Russian propaganda,” Donovan said in an interview with TIME days before YouTube banned Russian state-backed media.

In July 2021, the Russian government passed a law that would require foreign tech companies with more than 500,000 users to open a local office within Russia. (A similar law passed previously in India had been used by the government there to pressure tech companies to take down opposition accounts and posts critical of the government, by threatening employees with arrest.)

The heightened risk to free expression in Russia Experts say that Russia’s ongoing crackdown on social media platforms heralds a significant shift in the shape of the Russian internet—and a potential end to the era where the Kremlin tolerated largely free expression on YouTube in return for access to a tool that allowed it to spread disinformation far and wide.

While Foote and some librarians are fighting for these books to stay on shelves, others disagree and are fighting to keep them off."I felt that I had a duty as a parent, because this type of material is so over the top in terms of inappropriateness … I felt I had a duty as a parent, to warn other parents and to bring it to the attention of the school board, because quite honestly, you know, I didn't know at that moment who's making these decisions as to what books are put into our school library," Stacy Langton, a Virginia mother and co-founder of Mama Grizzly, a conservative grassroots organization that she says aims to protect "our children's learning environments."

In other states, including North Carolina, Maine and Missouri, Republicans have begun campaigns targeting books that deal with segregation and racism.However, according to an American Library Association poll, 71% of Americans are opposed to banning books.

"It's just really important that we understand that just because we read something or watch a TV show or read a newspaper article, it doesn't mean we personally or our students are going to go out and enact anything they read about. Books just have ideas in them, and ideas cause us to think, and we can use our own minds to make critical decisions. And as educators ... we train students to ask critical questions like, 'Where did this data come from? And who wrote this? What is their point of view?'" Foote said."And I think that if parents considered that point of view, then they would understand that we're all in this together as partners," she added.

With the Ukraine war entering its second month, few Indian newspapers and mainstream commentators have bluntly questioned the government’s decision to refrain from condemning Russia, except Subramanian Swamy, a senior member of Modi’s BJP who sometimes criticizes his own party’s foreign policy.

After interpreting the divine probabilities, Prakash analyzed the earthly politics at play.

This month on IndiaTV, a pro-government Hindi-language channel, the celebrity astrologer Acharya Indu Prakash presented an hour-long Ukraine special in which he predicted 96 percent good fortune for Biden and 99 percent for Putin. The likelihood of nuclear war, he calculated, stood at 37 percent.

This week, Swamy wrote an unusual op-ed in the Hindu newspaper condemning India’s neutrality as “tragic” and urging his government not to “crawl for the goodwill of Russia.” Even if the Indian right felt a “growing resentment” about liberal American lecturing on everything from the government’s promotion of Hinduism to its Ukraine policy, it was India’s duty to side with the West, Swamy said in an interview. “Whether we like the Russians or not, invading a sovereign nation in the 21st century in a 19th-century-style war is outrageous,”

The invasion “was the last resort for Mr. Putin, he was left with no options,” Prakash told viewers. “Even now, attempts are being made to create this narrative that Putin is engaging in a bad war.”

Putin was acting with restraint even in the face of NATO expansionism, Prakash said. “Russia gave Ukraine warnings, Russia provided a safe humanitarian corridor for evacuation, Russia observed cease-fires and Russia tried its best to act with humanity,” he said. “This is what the movement of the planets say.”

they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.

where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills.

the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment

By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis

here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices.

“There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,”

this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

the idea that reading all kinds of books is enjoyable is not the one kids seem to be receiving.

Longer books, for example, are considered less “fun”; in addition, some librarians, teachers, and parents are noticing a decline in kids’ reading stamina after the disruption of the pandemic.

we need to get to the root of the problem, which is not about book lengths but the larger educational system. We can’t let tests control how teachers teach: Close reading may be easy to measure, but it’s not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling

Teachers need to be given the freedom to teach in developmentally appropriate ways, using books they know will excite and challenge kids.

Kids should be required to read more books, and instead of just analyzing passages, they should be encouraged to engage with these books the way they connect with “fun” series, video games, and TV shows.

But the earlier form of teenage life was physically more precarious — more drinking and driving, more actual sex with actual bodies, more pregnancy, more violence.

When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, air travel plummeted, and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began to cut jobs and encouraged workers to take buyouts or retire early. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees companywide — including some with decades of experience.

Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respected the company and its employees and wanted Boeing to succeed.

“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference last week.

In late 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in bigger monthly pension payments, which were tied to interest rates, according to the union that represents them,

“We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise, and we proposed some workarounds, but the company blew us off,” Ray Goforth, executive director of the union, said in a statement, adding that he thought the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower-paid entry-level engineers and technical workers.”

the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members had dropped sharply in recent years. The proportion of its members who have less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.

I’ve spoken to in-house editors and publicists who are more inundated than ever, unable to give each of their titles the attention they deserve. Their submissions and workloads have increased even as marketing and editorial resources for individual titles have tapered off.

In the corporate world, output seems to be becoming more and more of a percentage game. You throw a bunch of products against the wall, see what sticks, and write off the ones (a vast majority) that don’t.

What a remarkable change it would be if corporations would allow their employees to do the best job they can with each book that the company has chosen to buy, rather than allowing them to flail

I had always thought that “discoverability” was a unique problem for books because so much browsing happens online rather than in carefully curated physical stores, but the world of streaming TV and movies has begun to catch up

What do corporate publishing and streaming have in common? They’re very often run by people who don’t engage with the products they put out.

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard

With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio

It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally

He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal

he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.

From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government

it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.

Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.

the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.

Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.

As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.

As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat

After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.

It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?

The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.