intimidating coming on after you when you just covered 40 stories and 14 minutes. >> we tried, we tried to keep people on their toes. >> well done, my friend. thank you. and thank you at-home for joining. us this hour and applebaum is just back from kyiv, from kyiv interviewed the ukrainian president volodymyr zelenskyy in person. president zelenskyy tonight, announcing that russian forces have begun the massive attack that has been expected for a couple of weeks now, targeting eastern ukraine, targeting the donbas, we will speak with ann apple balm coming up in a few minutes. we will be talking tonight about a federal judge striking down the mask rule, the mask mandate on airline transportation and public transportation, an usual ruling from a judge in an unusual place to be making that kind of ruling but it effectively means that the mask rule for public transportation and domestic airline flights is off, is no longer in effect, as

of tonight, we will be talking more about that this hour as well. in politics today, we had another one of those days that feels i guess sort of normal us to now but even just a few years ago, today's politics headlines would have been rejected out of hand as completely unimaginable and over the top. i mean we just saw the defacto leader of the republican party, former president donald trump, give one of his coveted endorsements to a candidate named jd vance, who is running for the united states senate seat in ohio this year, that endorsement from trump was followed immediately, no surprise, by mr. vance launching a huge tv ad campaign, touting the trump endorsement, bragging about how much he agrees with trump, how close he is to trump, how much trump likes him, but then that of course was followed almost inevitably by a former roommate of mr. vance sharing his text messages from 2016, in which mr. vance reportedly told

people how he thought there was a pretty good chance that donald trump was going to be quote america's hitler. i'm not saying trump was trying to be america's hitler or aspires to be, that's what jd vance said. you know, this guy really might be america's hitler. oh, look, got his endorsement, let's put out ads bragging about it. in what world is this real politics? this is our real politics. we learned that today, about mr. vance, just as "the new york times" posted this story about how the trump folks including at least one trump lawyer john eastman are continuing, even now, in their efforts to try to get various states to retro actively decertify the results of the 2020 presidential election, in order to get trump declared the winner of that election instead, and in order to get him reinstated into the white house, now. this is not old news. this is not a re-run, apparently

they are still working on this now. still, in wisconsin, in arizona, in georgia, in michigan, they're trying to get the electoral college tally in each of those states decertified. trump himself is reportedly encouraging it. while of course insisting that everybody in republican politics has to repeat his claims that the election wasn't valid he should be rightfully still be in the white house. him wanting that is one thing. the fact that republicans almost without exception really are going along with it is another. as noted in the times tonight, quote, elected republicans have almost uniformly embraced trump's claims that the vote was stolen. and while that is inherently a backward looking thing toward the 2020 election, it's now 2022, it does sort of tell you how republicans are wired now, when it comes to whether or not they are going to accept election results in the future, and therefore whether we're still governing ourselves as

americans as if we are a democracy. quote, democrats and some republicans have raised deep concerns about the impact of the ongoing decertification efforts. they warn of unintended consequences including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on january 6th, when a mob of mr. trump's stormed the capitol. legal experts worry that the focus on decertifying the last election could pave the way for more aggressive and earlier legislative intervention the next time around. a leading conservative lawyer and for whom george w. bush considered as nominee to be chief justice of the united states, tells thes to im tonight, quote, at the moment, there is no other way to say it. this is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy. trump and his supporters in congress, and in the states are preparing now to lay the ground work to overturn the election in

2024, were trump, or his designee, to lose the the vote for the presidency. not just trump. but his supporters in congress. and his supporters in the states are preparing now, laying the ground work now, to overturn those election results. so we will have the midterms this year, and the next election, either trump is going to be the republican party nominee, or somebody with his side, and if that person loses, the republicans are effectively communicating they will consider the results of that election to be invalid. they will consider that election to not count and they're preparing for that eventuality now. in the late 1990s, in the summer of 1997, to be specific, long-awaited, but still startling discovery was made, in

northern russia. soviet union of course had collapsed. earlier in the decade. by the mid '90s, late '90s, historians were starting to get allowed into the old files of the security services and the soviet government. by piecing together documents held by the soviet era security services in siberia. russian historians in the '90s, for the first time, were able to find a mass burial ground in northern russia. it dated back 60 years. in 1936, 1937, 1938, joseph stalin decided he was going to consolidate his power, consolidate his hold on the soviet union, by executing everybody he thought was in his way. it's now known as the great purge, the great terror. and it wasn't just like eliminating other political elites he thought might be in line for his job, stallen ordered the killing of hundreds of thousands of people by some

estimates more than a million people, and thanks to the records, historians started to get access to, right after the collapse of the soviet union, in the mid to late '90s, historians were finally able to pinpoint a previously unknown site inside russia, in northern russia where as many as 9,000 people had been shot in the great purge and buried. just a huge site. an unmarked site. with hundreds of burial pits, 236 different pits, containing more than 9,000 bodies. every one of them shot, all the bodies just stacked on top of one another, in these 100 pits. all buried on-site in this place that was unmarked and unmemorialized for 60 years. they didn't find it until the summer of 1997. once they found it, they put up these stone, these markers, to commemorate it, they turned it into a memorial, for the victims of stalin, they started to hold

an annual day of remembrance though. after about 20 years, russian president vladimir putin decided that was enough and didn't want any more and broadly decided that stalin got a bad wrap, and what benefit is there if all of this supposed history, all of these stories that make him seem like such a bad guy, that make the soviet union seem so flawed, let's restore the glory, right? sure, millions dead, but those people aren't around to tell their stories anymore so why should anybody tell that story let alone hear it? and so the historian who had first located that site in northern russia, he was arrested. they charged him with being a pedophile. the russian government then announced plans to bring bulldozers in that site. they were going to dig up the bodies and show that this wasn't a mass burial site of stallen's

victim, this must haven't v-been something else entirely, the victims must have been russians killed by foreigners because of course there was no gulag, no great terror, no great purge, stalin was a stand-up guy, russia's history is pristine and anybody who says otherwise is obviously a degenerate, a monster. after the historic who herecally tracked down the records and discovered that site, after he was locked up and charged randomly with pedophilia, they did the same thing to the head of a local museum, who had been theian site caretaker for the site once it was discover and had been vocal in option to the russian government, coming in and digging it up with with bulldozers, he too, they did the same thing with him, and arrested him and charged him with being a pedophile. in both case, the charges were widely believed to be trump and completely false but nevertheless trumpeted on russian state tv and the

association ne were trying to make was, they were trying to make was clear, you want to expose something about russia's very dark past, well obviously you're a degenerate and a monster, not even a regular criminal, not even a criminal person who is just wrong, not even just a regular criminal, but a monster who must be destroyed. that local historian who ran the museum near the burial site, that was like the defacto caretaker for the burial side and spoke out against bulldozing it, it was widely understood that the allegations against him were ridiculous and completely false. but they did their job. they got, it served as pretext for locking him up. he could end up dieing in prison. he ended up dying in prison. never saw freedom again. with those guys out of the way, the russian government has taken down the memorial at the site and redesignated the whole burial site as a sightseeing location, it used to be a heritage site because of the

mass murder and redesignated it now as a national sight-seeing locale. what a nice forest. what a great spot for a picnic. what are all of these big square pits? before he became what he is now, which is basically dictator for loof, in the late '90s, vladimir putin was head of the fsb, head of the fsb when boris yeltsin was president of russia in the late '90s and yelten like lots of russian leaders had a corruption problem and more specifically the problem yeltsin had was in 1991 was there was as from curate in russia who was investigating russia at the highest levels of the kremlin clug yeltsin and his family and for a time it seemed like that corruption investigation might be the outdoing of yeltsin and his family and his cronies. vladimir putin as head of the fsb took care of that problem for boris yeltsin. putin arranged for a very to be

broadcast on national television that showed the prosecutor, or somebody who may be kind of looks like the prosecutor, in bed, with not one, but two young very young females. the video was low enough quality and it was shot from sort of oblique enough angles that you couldn't necessarily tell with the naked eye who, who this grown man was with these girls in the bed, and vladimir putin assured the russian public that he could guarantee that the man in the video was in fact, that prosecutor. and so that was the end of that prosecutor and that was the end of the corruption investigation into boris yeltsin and his family, and in gratitude, or at least in payback, boris yeltsin decided that he would name as the next prime minister of russia, and the next president of russia, that fsb guy who helped him out, vladimir putin. that's how vladimir putin rose to power in the first place in

russia. that's how he got control of the russian government. by generating effectively a false pedophilia claim against just the right guy at just the right moment, that's how he got into power. pedophilia, of course, is the most repulsive of all human behavior. it is so repulsive, it is so evil, that it makes us see red. it is almost literally unthinkable. and it there understandably can make us stop seeing anybody who is even accused of it as our fellow human. anybody abetting it or or even abiding it, basically the same thing, your brain instantly goes to monster, right? understandably. it is the most repulsive of all human evil and when confronted

it, we almost can't process it. and it is a deep dark thing to recognize that about human nature, the capacity of some people for that behavior, for that level of evil, and our collective massive human revulsion and rejection of that evil. but recognizing that, to decide that you're going to try to harness that for political gain, that you're going to make false accusations of that kind, systematically, to reduce your political opponent, to nonhuman status, that is a horrific abuse of its own. and it has become one of the hallmarks of modern authoritarianism. not only in russia but especially in russia under vladimir putin. it is basically how putin got his job in the late 1990s. i've recently been reading about the great purge, the great terror, and specifically, putin's efforts now, to erase

evidence of it, to erase evidence of past russia, past soviet atrocities and it is amazing to me, it shouldn't be, but it is amazing to me that they used false pedophilia charges against gulag historians for that to justify bulldozing that memorial site. but that's what they did. and they did that repeatedly. it's an obvious and frequent enough political tactic in putin's russia, that in 2016, not long after our bizarre 2016 presidential election, "the new york times" ran a feature on how this particular tactic kept coming up increasingly in putin's russia. you see the headline there. foes of russia say child pornography is planted to ruin them. the story of a veteran soviet dissident who had resettled in cambridge england had somebody hack in his community and put child pornographer images on his

computer, images he had never seen and they called the police and the police came in and grabbed his computer and sure enough, they found all of this terrible, terrible, terrible material, which again had been planted by a third party, which was not him. a french citizen living in russia, working in a civil society group in siberia, they did the same thing to him, planned it on him, called the police, they came in, found the planted evidence, and he fled the country. a russian environmental activist who had been chased out of russia for his activism was living in exile in lith ania and working for a group that investigated corruption, the same thing to him, planned the evidence and called the authorities and the authorities found the false evidence, he is ruined. the ideas that europeans and russian opponents of the kremlin are all sexual deviants with a taste for pedophilia is a strange but recurring theme in russian propaganda. so evil.

it's so, like meta level exploitive and evil and base and cynical. but of course they use it, right? because once you have planted that kind of false evidence, once you even made that kind of a false allegation, whether or not you plant the evidence, it's not like a normal political allegation, even a normal criminal allegation, right? but it's about that. it activates our animal revulsion. and if that kind of a charge is made against somebody in politics, it effectively kills that person off, as somebody who can participate in the debate and the argument and the fight anymore they're effectively declassified as inhuman and monstrous and they're gone. vladimir putin has been in power 22 years now in russia, and that particularly sick hallmark of his time in power has been a constant. he has used it against all different kinds of political

opponents. it always works. during the trump years here, we started to get the conspiracy theory cult version of it on the political right, here in america. the q-anon pro trump online cult built its whole bizarre central conspiracy theory around the same kinds of false and fantastical claims that everybody in the world who isn't trump is at lied in some big say tannic pedophilia ring and some day trump will catch them on and bring on mass public executions of all of the democrats and all of the celebrities and finally free from the say tannic pedophile that runs the world, and that's the idea of the cult and on the one hand, it is freakish, it is truly bizarre, it is a conspiracy theory cult and you have to be an extremism anthropologist to understand any

of it. on the other hand, it is remarkably persistent during the trump era in american conservative politics. and it does have this clear political point. which is why authoritarian movement and dictator does some version of this all over the world. it's what some political scientists call eliminationist rhetoric. it is one thing for you to be competing in a democracy, against your political opponents, against fellow human beings who have different ideas about governing and may the best candidate win. another thing, if everybody on the other side of you in politics is inhuman, is a monster, a beast, who we have to protect children from, and must be eliminated if we're ever to have any sort of civilization, right? you don't compete against a monster in an election. you destroy them, right? you call for their public execution. and when it comes to power, the idea that you let one of these

monsters have power, because of something as small and pointless and beside the point of them winning an election, that's unthinkable. the election is much less important than keeping the monsters at bay. eliminationist rhetoric. play with these kinds of false accusation, this kind of false accusation in particular, it is lurid and disgusting and shocking and bizarre. but it is also playing with the worst kind of fire. in terms of what we are capable of, in our underable human nature. because for people who believe these kinds of false obligations, even some who don't believe them explicitly but ambiently absorb that these are the allegations that are circulating about people in politics, that be can used to justify any level of extreme response, any level of violence even in response. that's why it's a dictator's

tactic. that is why it is a fascist authoritarian tactic. to use eliminationist tactics and characterizations like this against your opponent, to make up and use false claims like this to try to wipe your political opponents off the playing field, to have them no longer considered human, to have them considered not only not competitors but not people fit to share the earth with you. that is why this spring, it was more than just disgusting and shocking, disturbing, when republican sitting united states senators and conservative media decided they were going to play that particular card against supreme court nominee judge ketanji brown jackson. judge jackson's record as a human being, as a public figure, as a judge, includes nothing, nothing, nothing that justified the attacks on her, as somehow

soft on child predators, as somehow lenient on child self abuse the way one fox news onscreen headline put, it but making those allegations about her, as radically unfounded as they were, it tapped that q-anon cult energy on the right, it tapped that eliminationist revulsion we experience as humans when that particular accusation is slung at anyone. it attacked the authoritarian purpose, as you designate your political opponent, not just political competitor, and people you disagree but inhuman monsters who must be physically destroyed. and you are seeing that kind of allegation made more broadly and more broadly and more flippantly all the time in republican politics now, we're seeing it for example, in the debate around florida's don't say gay bill, right, everybody who is opposed to that bill, according to florida republican governor's office must themselves be soft on pedophilia, must somehow

themselves be implicated in child self abuse, because you don't want an anti-gay civil rights bill to pass. we are seeing it used more aggressively, more wildly, more flippantly in republican politics all the time, but to see it used inside the united states senate, in the mouths of united states senators, a supreme court confirmation hearing, how did that happen? well, the investigative reporter jane mayor who works at the new yorker magazine has actually tracked that down. she has found the group that originated that disgusting and totally false line of attack and traced them to the building in which she worked and traced to a certain degree that is doable the money to support them and tracked down their overall aim which is to use these tactics and others to try to stop not just a supreme court nominee, to try to stop a nominee here and there to whom they decided they would try to affix this

particular label but they are going to try to stop every single nominee of the biden administration at every level, using any accusation, no matter how much damage it does along the way. jane mayor's new investigation at the new yorker is just posted, it is titled "the slime machine, targeting dozens of biden nominees" in an escalation of partisan warfare, a little known dark group is trying to thwart the president's entire slate and dirtied up judge jackson and claiming credit for actually stopping the nominations of multiple biden nominees with plans for more to come. jane mayor has figured out who they are and how they're doing it. she joins us next. that oddly satisfying feeling when you don't do it yourself.

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you tell me. wah ping. it's reliable and fast. wireless savings so good, even the bad guys love it. switch to xfinity mobile today. and see dreamworks "the bad guys." there's a web site out there that you might have come across, called the bidennoms.com. and i thought it was about the

snacks that biden was nomming on, like an ice cream site but it is about biden nominees for government posts. and it is a web site of a right wing group called the american accountability foundation. and it's not shy about what the group is setting out to do. they say biden noms.com, personnel policy, that those who work in the american people are representative people not the elite allies in corporate america and just like trophies, head shot after head shot after head shot of biden nom niece. -- nominees. some famous but some you have definitely never heard of and what is unique about the group, they're not trying to keep one person who they don't like, or two people they don't like out of a job, they're trying to keep every single biden nominee out of a job or at least to dirty them all up along the way. everybody biden nominated is

going through the confirmation process, and they're going after them, simply because biden nominated them. all of them. now, opposition research isn't new. it's a sort of part of how washington operates but always been thus and this is different and investigative reporter jane mayer at the new yorker has been busy finding them out. quote the american accountability foundation approach represents a new escalation in partisan warfare. rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the group aims to thwart the entire biden slate, meaning every biden nominee full stop. they claim the successfully derailed nation, the comptroller of the currency by beginning up a fake narrative that she was a communist and the federal reserve bird, sara bloom raskin, they claimed a delay in the disclosure of a stock trade is

somehow she abused her position as a previous government employee to obtain some sort of secret financial benefit for herself. it was completely false. there's mud slinging, but then there's this. what's different about this is the wholesale approach to every nominee of the biden administration. and the willingness to levy these attacks not only sort of separate from the facts but separate in many cases from common decency. at a wholesale level. joining us now is jane mayer, chief washington correspondent for the new yorker and author of "dark money," and it is a pleasure to have you here, thank you for making time. >> great to be with you. welcome back and that was a fantastic introduction. i have never heard the phrase eliminationist rhetoric before, but it is perfect in describing what this group tries to do. >> well, thank you, that's nice of you to say, but i mean when i

was watching the judge jackson confirmation hearing and senator hawley and blackburn and conservative media started going down this line with her, it was shocking, because the allegation they were making against her, saying she was soft on sexual abuse of children, was so divorced from the facts and it felt so wrong, but it also does dovetail with these other political tactics that we see in dictatorships and we started to see in the trump air afterthe republican party and it made me wonder who cooked this up and it doesn't seem like josh hawley made it up himself and it seems that you have discovered that this group was the origin story for that false attack. >> hawley had some little helping hands and it was this group, the american accountability foundation, which believe it or not, is a tax exempt organization. you can give money to it and get the tax deduction, while it

snares everybody in sight. and it does, you know, sort of phony research, basically, and pretty sloppy job, if you really look into it, most of the mud that it slung has dissolved when you take a close look but a problem is for a lot of the lesser known nominees people aren't looking very carefully. what caught my eye about it was that i was running a little bit about the nomination of sara bloom raskin, to become the vice chairman of the fed for supervision. she's incredibly well qualified. i mean and very well liked. liked by the banking world also. and had been confirmed twice before to very senior positions at the fed, and at the treasury department, with bipartisan you nam nous support, and suddenly, there were these allegations that were a pretext, basically, that had nothing to do with reality, and that was kind of a

made-up story of claiming that she had an ethical problem. and they didn't really go after her for what i think is the real beef that they had with her, was that she had said a few things about climate change, and how it posed a risk to the economy. so i started looking at this group, trying to figure out who are these people, and of course, it turned out that a lot of the senators were getting their research from this group, and the senators were getting their money from the fossil fuel industry and they needed a pretext to take her down in order to stop the fed from including climt change as one of the things that it might consider as an important economic risk. so anyway, i started trying to find out who these people were. >> you also write about the expensive length to which this group appears to have gone, to come up with these smears for some other nominees including a woman put forward to be comptroller of the currency, the one denounced as a communist, when you described them, like

sending people all over the world, to try to dig stuff up, that they could mischaracterize, and take out of context and use against her and senators sort of, senators avidly digesting it and threw it at her during that hearing, it raises this question of where they're g.e.d. getting the funding to do this, and you've been so good at untang ling ops how dark money works. where were you able to find out where the money for this group comes from and who is doing it? >> well, surprisingly, the financial trail goes back to donald trump. he has a relationship pact with hundreds of, over a hun million in, it and one of those million went from his leadership group to the conservative partnership institute which is an organization on capitol hill, it's kind of like an island in

elba for the trump administration, you have mark meadows working there, and a number of other people from the trurm world up, trump world up, there frida mitchell and it spawned this other group which is the american accountability foundation so it is really an offshoot of the trump world and being funded in part by the trump world. >> jane mayer, chief washington correspondent for the new yorker magazine, untang ling no. these knots one at a time for us. thanks for talking to us about it. >> thanks for having me. >> all right, much more ahead tonight. stay with us. >> all right, much tonight. stay with us

for weeks now, the world is preparing for a huge new russian offensive in eastern ukraine. tonight, ukrainian president volodymyr zelenskyy gave a video address to his country and he announced that that long feared massive russian attack has started. the new ground offensive follows a barrage of hundreds of russian missile strikes and artillery strikes all across the entire nation of ukraine today, but particularly in the east, and he announced that things will get much, much worse in the east. in the besieged southeastern ukrainian city of mariupol, outnumbered ukrainian troops there have taken shelter in this giant steel mill. the soviet union actually rebuilt this steel plant in mariupol to withstand bombings

and blockades after it was destroyed by the nazis during world war ii. this plant is massive. it also has a system of underground tunnels. where the ukrainians say as many as 2,000 civilians are taking shelter right now, along with the ukrainian troops that are mounting their last stand to try to keep that city under the ukrainian flag. as russia starts up this new assault, the u.s. and western allies are ramping up efforts to try to support the ukrainian military, for the first time ever the u.s. is sending heavy artillery to ukraine, 18 howitzers, 40,000 artillery rounds which at the current pace is a week's worth for the ukrainian military, and a how its ser a big modern cannon and the u.s. is about to train ukrainians ho you to use the new howitzers which is important and in addition to the artillery, the u.s. is sending ukraine 11 new helicopters, and 300 drones that are called switchblade

drones, 200 apcs, armored personnel carriers. 10 counter-artillery radars. these latest shipments from the u.s. are a real escalation in terms of what the united states is sending, this is a qualitatively new kind of weapon shipment from the united states but ukraine says they still need more. in an interview a few days ago, with ann apple balm and jeffery goldberg from the atlantic magazine, at his presidential compound in kyiv, he said when some leaders ask me what weapons i need, i need a moment to calm myself because i already told them the week before, it's groundhog day and i feel like bill murray. also, despite the extent to which ukraine has been able to hold off the russian invasion so far, zelenskyy told the atlantic, quote, the optimism that many americans and europeans and some ukrainians are currently expressing about the war is unjustified. if the russians are not expelled from ukraine's eastern province,

zelenskyy said, they can return to the center of ukraine and even to kyiv. it is possible. now is not yet the time of victory. apple balm and goldberg continue, quote, ukraine can win, and by win, zelenskyy means continue to exist, as a dozen if permanently besieged state. only if ukraine's allies in washington and across europe move with alacrity to sufficiently own the country. he said quote we have a very small window of opportunity. again, ann apple balm and her colleague ducted that interview with president delz -- conducted that interview with president zelenskyy at his office in kyiv just days ago. she is back here and joins us live next. she is back here and joins us live next.

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quote, on or off camera zelenskyy conducts himself with a deliberate lack of pretense, in a part of the world where leadership usually implies stiff posture and a pompous manner and signaling military authority requires at a minimum highly epileths he invokes sympathy and he sounds like one of us. that is from ann applebalm writing in the atlantic magazine, they were just in kyiv to interview volodymyr zelenskyy in person and the author most recently of twilight of democracy, the seductive lure of authoritarianism. ms. applebalm, thanks for being here. i appreciate your time. >> thanks for having me.

>> i want to ask you what you thought was most striking and most memorable about your discussion with president zelenskyy, at this time. i want to tell you first though that what has stuck with me, and has kind of made me feel queasy since reading your interview is his assertion that the optimism about ukraine's chances of holding out, the optimism that russia might somehow not win this war is unjustified. hearing that from him has really sort of turned my head and changed the way i've been feeling about this. i wanted to ask if, what you made of that, and if you felt the same way. >> that's obviously the most important point of the interview and why he is doing interviews now, because there is a real gap between the impression that we have here, and the feeling that we're really doing something, we're helping, we're making a big difference and the impression they have there which is nothing is happening fast enough. weapons are respect arriving fast enough. and they're not pushing back fast enough is quite large.

they're trying, to you know, the point of, you know, his comment about bill murray, you know, i feel like it's ground hog day, i keep saying the same things over and over again, they have been asking for harder weapons, larger weapons, more modern weapons for the last several weeks and they know where they are and they know where they're stored and they say they have planes, they can come and get them. but they need, you know, they simply need the bureaucracy to move a lot faster. and that's obviously the most important point of the interview, but the second important point about zelenskyy, is that it is very clear that he is someone who also sees as his one of his most important tasks the re-establishment or really the establishment in the first place of a different and more modern and more accurate image of ukraine, of his country. and he's somebody who is very much in our world. he makes pop culture references that you and i would recognize. it wasn't just bill murray. it was beatles songs.

it was other things. he sees himself as a democratic, leading a democracy. he's a jewish leader of a mostly christian country. but that's not a problem. because he believes in the kind of civic patriotism, not in ethnic nationalism. something very like what americans believe in. and he wants to transmit that as well. and i think he does it successfully because it's true. because he feels it. he believes it. he's saying things that aren't false. and you can tell, simply by his manner, and, by the way he speaks. >> i think it is very helpful to cast this in terms of why he is doing interviews and what the point is of the way he is talking about things and who he is talking to, i think that is an important lens to keep in mind when we're looking at these things. with that in mind, are you persuaded by his argument that enough weapons shipped quickly enough could make a determinative difference, could actually stop russia from winning this war and taking over

ukraine? >> yes, i believe we're really, you know, we're at a very important balancing moment. you know, the ukrainians did chase the russians out of the northern part of their country, they did resist the first attack on kyiv, and they did use extraordinarily creative tactics, and they showed that they need to fight and they want to fight, not just professional soldiers but really the whole population, and friends and friends of mine, who you would not think of soldiers join the territorial army, all kinds of people are doing, whether it is volunteer jobs or computer jobs, working on behalf of the country and i think they show that they, you know, that they care a lot about maintaining their existence. you know, rachel, there's something you said a few minutes ago that really struck a bell, you know, rang a bell in my head, when you talked about this existentialist rhetoric and this eliminationist rhetoric, sorry, this is the kind of the rhetoric

that the russians use about the ukrainian, the ukrainians know it, and they also believe that they're fighting for their country, they know that when the russians take over territory, they don't just take over buildings and land, they're also murdering people, they're deporting people, they're raping women, and so for them, it's, you know, it's an existential battle in which every sen meter of territory matters. and for us in washington or in paris or london, it doesn't mean quite the same thing. and so the speed of weapons delivered dot really matter. >> ann applebalm, staff writer of the atlantic, author of "twilight of democracy" thanks for making that trip and thanks for help can us understand it tonight. i appreciate it. we'll be right back. stay with us. preciate it. we'll be right back. stay with us .. they found me. ♪ ♪ nice suits, you guys blend right in. the world needs you back. i'm retired greg, you know this. people have their money just sitting around doing nothing... that's bad, they shouldn't do that. they're getting crushed by inflation.

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united, or jet blue. those airlines tonight have all announced that masks are now optional on board a plane. now, this is likely to grow, however, because today, a federal judge in flooshd, a trump appointees, struck down the cdc's mask mandate for planes and trains and other public transportation. this ruling is unusual for a couple of reasons. the first is that it comes from a single judge who hasn't actually heard any courtroom arguments about this case. she decided that previously scheduled oral argument set to happen next week were unnecessary, and she canceled the oral arguments and issued the ruling based on written briefs alone. the second reason this ruling is a bit of a surprise is the judge decided that this ruling would be enforced nationally, rather than applying it only to the plaintiffs. which, you know, keep that in mind next time you hear conservatives solemnly intone about how they dislike judicial activism. as of this moment the cdc's mask requirement is not in effect. tsa is not enforcing. it airlines are starting to

follow suit. same thing on amtrak trains and on some local subways, the white house says the justice department has decided whether they want to appeal to try to get the mask requirement reinstated, we have no word on that yet. but we shall let you know. watch this space. that's going to do it for us for tonight. i'll see you again tomorrow night. jonathan lemire and "way too early" is up next. breaking news. ukraine says russia's new offensive in the east is now under way. the governor of the donetsk region reported continuous shelling overnight. we will play for you what the pentagon is saying. and the other big headline we're following, airlines begin to roll back mask mandates after a federal judge ruled that the biden administration had overstepped its authority. we'll get reaction in the white house, when deputy press secretary craig meagher joins us for a live interview. good morning. and welcome to "way too early." on this tuesday, april 19th. i'm jonathan