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Anthony Kuhn is the NPR (National Public Radio) correspondent in Seoul, South Korea. He has been reporting from Asia for decades, including long stints in China and Indonesia.
Anthony told me all about recent events in South Korea, a country that only became a democracy very recently, but that has vigorously defended its democratic system against the Trumpish former president Yoon Suk-Yeol, who attempted to subvert that system in December 2024 with the declaration of martial law. His trial for insurrection charges began on April 14. If found guilty, Yoon faces life imprisonment, or even the death penalty (although there has been a moratorium on executions in South Korea since 1997).
Anthony also dropped a bombshell at the end of the podcast—or at least a bombshell to those of us not immersed in Korean politics.
* The recording and editing on this episode is a little rough, which is particularly painful for me since Anthony is an NPR veteran: please forgive me the rough cuts!
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by me, Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
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Maria Repnikova is a scholar of political communication in China and Russia. Originally from Latvia, she is an Associate Professor in Global Communication at Georgia State University. She is author of the books Chinese Soft Power and Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism, as well as many articles and papers on related topics.
Now, here we are in the U.S. where the Trump and Musk administration are pressuring and squeezing universities, law firms, and the media, and American news organization—not all but many—are bending the knee one by one to our new authoritarian government. I asked Maria what we can learn from China and Russia when it comes the mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes control and manipulate the news, and how critical journalism can survive in a newly hostile environment.
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Miklós Haraszti is a writer, journalist, human rights advocate, scholar, and erstwhile politician who was born in Jerusalem, and grew up Hungary. He became an opposition activist in the 1960s. He continued to organize politically, and write and publish critical works for the next two decades. His books include A Worker in a Worker's State (1978) and The Velvet Prison (1988).
He participated in the negotiations on the transition to free elections in Hungary in 1989, and was a member of the Hungarian Parliament from 1990 to 1994, after which he spent most of his time as a scholar and university professor, including at Columbia University in New York. He has also served as a UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus as the Representative on Freedom of the Media for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
In this interview we discuss the American parallels with the rise of Viktor Orbán, who was elected prime minister of Hungary in 2010. Since then, Orbán has overseen a transition to an “illiberal, falsified democracy.” There are many lessons for Musk and Trump’s America.
Thanks to Jeff Wasserstrom for introducing me to Miklós.
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
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Elizabeth Becker began reporting for the Washington Post in 1973 from Cambodia. She covered the Vietnam War and the rise of the Khmer Rouge for the paper. In December 1978, together with two other Westerners, she interviewed Pol Pot, the genocidal leader of the Khmer Rouge.
Elizabeth is the author of When the War Was Over, a modern history of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, and was an expert witness in 2015 at the international war crimes tribunal of senior Khmer Rouge leaders. She is also the author of You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women rewrote the Story of War about three female journalists who reported on the Vietnam war, breaking barriers and taboos and blazing a trail for women in media.
In this episode, Elizabeth outlines the story of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and we discuss some of the ways that Washington D.C. under Musk and Trump resemble Phnom Penh under Pol Pot.
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
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Donald Trump likes to insult Venezuela and its people. But Trump has a lot in common with Hugo Chávez, the strongman who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, and is often blamed for the once-prosperous country’s turn away from democracy, and decline into poverty.
In this episode of Rhyming Chaos, we discuss what the U.S. can learn from Venezuela with Parsifal D’Sola, a Venezuelan and advisor in 2019 to the country’s interim government.
Parsifal is the founder and Executive Director of the Andrés Bello Foundation — China Latin America Research Center, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
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Richard Poplak is an author, investigative journalist, and filmmaker based Johannesburg, South Africa. Much of his work has focused on corruption, and especially state capture, which refers to business people using their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making for their own profit.
With Elon Musk’s companies already benefiting from his high-profile role in the U.S. government, this might sound familiar to Americans. There’s a lot else going on in the U.S. right now that rhymes with South Africa’s recent past, and in this episode, we discuss state capture and other parallels in this episode of the podcast.
Poplak is the author of many things, including Ja No Man: Growing Up White In Apartheid Era South Africa, The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World, and the journalistic graphic novel Kenk: A Portrait about notorious Toronto bike thief Igor Kent. He is also co-author of Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa's Changing Fortunes, the co-director of Influence, a documentary film about corruption in South Africa, senior contributor to the Daily Maverick, an extraordinary South African news organization.
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
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Geremie R. Barmé is a Sinologist, historian, filmmaker, translator, and author of a shelf of books on China.
In 1974, in the dying days of the Cultural Revolution, he went to China as a student and occasional farm laborer. He has studied both the ancient and modern history of the country, and observed firsthand momentous changes from the death of Mao to the rise of Xi Jinping.
In this podcast, we discuss the echoes, parallels, and rhymes he sees happening now in Musk and Trump’s America with power grabs and self-coups in recent Chinese history, when the ruler carries out a self-authored coup against the system he is running.
Links
* China Heritage: Contra Trump — American Tedium by Geremie Barmé
* New York Times: Welcome to America’s Fourth Great Constitutional Rupture by Noah Millman
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
Get full access to Rhyming Chaos at www.rhymingchaos.com/subscribe
