Ask A Genius 1420: From Cold War Paranoia to Modern GOP’s Kremlin Cozy-Up
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/09
Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.
At Moscow’s Forum of the Future 2050, Errol Musk praised Putin and decried Elon’s Trump challenge. Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner traces U.S. Republican suspicion of Soviet propaganda—from 1930s Hollywood intrigues and Red Scares—to today’s surprising GOP alignment with Russian interests. He warns of Putin’s $300 million social-media influence campaign corroding Western democracies.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I’ll make a more general statement. A pro-Kremlin event, titled the Forum of the Future 2050, was held in Moscow in June. Attendees included Errol Musk, Alex Jones, George Galloway, Jeffrey Sachs, Matthew Brose, Sergey Lavrov, Sergey Mironov, Konstantin Malofeyev, and Alexander Dugin.
Rick Rosner: Wait, is Errol Musk Elon’s dad?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Oy. Okay.
Jacobsen: Errol Musk praised Putin and the city of Moscow. He called Putin, “A very stable and pleasant man” and compared Moscow to Rome in terms of beauty. He was part of a “MAGA in Russia” panel and commented that Elon had made a big mistake by publicly challenging Trump. He suggested Elon’s behaviour was due to stress and stated unequivocally that Trump would prevail in that dispute.
Rosner: I didn’t read the article, but yeah, I saw that. Errol said that working in the White House gave Elon PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s all I know about that. But yeah, Republicans in the U.S., for most of the 20th century, were suspicious of anything to do with the Soviet Union. They believed Russia was trying to control and propagandize us—which they were.
Khrushchev said, “We will take you down without firing a shot—from the inside.” My grandpa, who was pretty conservative around 1970, told me, “Don’t leave your car unlocked—hippies will get in there and shit in the back seat.” He also claimed that hippies were controlled by Russia by the Soviet Union. So for much of that century, Republicans were vigilant against Soviet propaganda, and the Soviets were doing a lot to influence American thought.
We’ve talked about how, in the 1930s, a lot of Hollywood screenwriters were pro-Soviet Union. Partly because we didn’t know the scale of Stalin’s atrocities—slaughtering tens of millions of his people—and partly because if you went to a Hollywood party, there were communist girls there who might sleep with you.
And if you were a writer in Hollywood in the 1930s, it wasn’t exactly easy to get laid. Movie stars could. Writers were seen as schmucks. So, if someone was going to blow you—or whatever—you might listen to their communist propaganda, and maybe you’d write a screenplay that flattered the Soviet Union, that said, “Great things are happening over there.” But along with that came all the red scares—waves of accusations, people getting tarred with the Soviet brush unfairly—because of Republican paranoia that was only semi-justified.
But for the past ten years—especially since Trump—it has flipped. It’s the Republicans now who are cozy with the Russians. They’re so deep in Putin’s pocket that it’s wild. The same kind of propaganda they used to warn us about? They’re now helping spread it. It’s sickening. They’ve become disturbingly pro-Russia.
It’s fucking terrible. It’s corrosive—for the U.S., for every Western democracy. The statistic I’ve heard is that Putin has spent about $300 million on social media propaganda over the past decade. That’s only about $30 million a year, which isn’t a lot in geopolitical terms—but it’s been enough to influence tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions, of people across the U.S. and Europe. It’s divisive, corrosive bullshit. And yeah—I hate it.
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