Democracy in Retreat

KEVIN MALONEY: According to Freedom House’s latest annual report, freedom around the world has been in decline for 20 years straight. To unpack this troubling trend, I am joined today on the podcast by Yana Gorokhovskaia, research director at Freedom House. Today we seek to understand and define freedom at both a personal and political level. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. Let’s get right to it.

Yana, welcome to Carnegie Council. Thank you so much for joining us.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Thanks for having me.

KEVIN MALONEY: You lead research at Freedom House, and freedom seems to be a buzzword of the moment in both good and bad directions, so there is a lot to unpack today geopolitically in the conversation with you, as an expert in the space, but what we always do on the Values & Interestspodcast is to start with getting an understanding of you, the person. I would love to hear about your own value system, your own moral framework, and who influenced you, then maybe we can bridge a little bit to how you have taken that system into the work you do today.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: I am always happy to talk about myself. That is a nice treat.

I am Russian by birth, and my family and I immigrated to Canada when I was ten. I grew up in Ottawa, I did my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia on the West Coast, and then I moved to the United States in 2016 to be a post-doc at Columbia University. I eventually transitioned to research in the nonprofit space, which is the work that brought me to Freedom House.

Reflecting on being an immigrant twice over now, that experience shaped the way I see the world with values like hard work and humility. My parents both had graduate degrees when we immigrated, and they delivered pizzas and stuffed envelops when I was kid, so working for the things that you want and making a better life for yourself was certainly part of it for me.

Also, I came from an authoritarian country and experienced the fall of the Soviet Union. I was a kid, but I very much remember my grandparents left the Soviet Union as soon as they were allowed in the early 1990s and moved to the United States, and they sent us these care packages in the 1990s with Spam and stuff like that, and we would buy one little yogurt to share among a family of three and that would be a nice treat or bananas or oranges.

That experience definitely impacted me and shaped what I chose to work on. I did my Ph.D. in political science on post-communist politics, why people protest, and also why people participate in elections they know are rigged, which happens all over the world. You have these human rights defenders and pro-democracy activists who participate in political contests that they know are rigged against them. As part of my dissertation work, I interviewed people in Russia who were democrats and running for office about why they were participating in the system. Lots of them talked about the kind of good you could still do even when the whole system was rigged and led by an autocrat.

A lot of that work continues at Freedom House. I have moved away from the specialty of just looking at the former Soviet Union or Russia, but Freedom House’s mission of looking at people’s ability to exercise their rights really aligns with all the things I have been interested in in the past and also my own personal experience and where I come from.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is super-interesting. I love the insight into participating in a system that is rigged. You think about it as a chance to reclaim some personal and political agency even if you know the outcome.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Right, or being able to still do some good. Even when the system is entirely authoritarian, people still need their roads cleared and help finding services. There are things you can still do at the local and regional level that are positive.

KEVIN MALONEY: Even in looking at U.S. domestic politics throughout the years, everybody says that at the municipal level is where things get done. It is where people get along.

That has changed a bit, but my father worked in municipal government for 40 years and he was always beating that drum around the dinner table, so it is interesting to hear that from a non-U.S. perspective, that at the local level pluralism can thrive even if at the top it is dead at the moment.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Absolutely. There are surveys out now of young Americans, 18-to-29-year-olds, who are disappointed in organized politics and maybe even disappointed in democracy and don’t view democracy as the best form of government quite as much as older Americans, but when you look at those surveys more than half of young people participate in some sort of civic politics at the local level and then something like another 30 percent aspire to participate at the local level. So, yes, I think at the local level there is a lot of engagement and pluralism happening.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to pull back the curtain a little bit before we dive into this Freedom in the World 2026 report that Freedom House recently put out. I look forward to it every year and always learn something from it. We talked about the mission of Freedom House a little, but could you walk through how you define freedom as a concept? I want to define that as a framework for this larger conversation today.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: To start with a little background on Freedom House and what it is, the organization is about to turn 85. It was founded in 1941. It was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, who was her husband’s main opponent in the 1940 presidential contest, and the purpose of the organization was to galvanize Americans to become involved in the fight against fascism in Europe. The name is not super-original. The Germans had the Braunes Haus; the Americans had Freedom House.

The mission of the organization has changed over time. In the 1960s it was involved in civil rights and that kind of movement. Since the early 1970s it has done this research work. Freedom in the World has been published annually since 1973, which makes it the oldest index of its kind. We have a lot of imitators now or fellow indices, but we have the honor of being the longest continual index. The index assesses the way that people can exercise their rights, so the lived experience of freedom.

We draw our methodology from all the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we look at whether those rights and civil liberties are impacted by your own government, a foreign government, non-state actors, war, and things like that, so it is not necessarily about government performance. It is about your individual sphere of freedom.

Of course, there is an overlap between freedom and democracy in that you are able to exercise the most freedom in a democracy, but it is not exactly the same thing. Different democracies can have different levels of freedom, and freedom can ebb and flow, and I think that is important because people will ask about the United States or Western Europe, which are democracies, but that does not mean that freedom is perfect in these countries, as we know in our own country.

KEVIN MALONEY: And many times that is the point, right? The imperfection baked into it.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Absolutely.

KEVIN MALONEY: For listeners, I am always trying to tie things back to the work of Carnegie Council. We think about freedom as this value, and we always connect values to principles of action. One of four key principles is what we describe as a moral political principle, democracy along with humanitarianism and multilateralism. This has been key to our work over the years too.

It is interesting to hear about institutional change over time in looking at other institutions. Carnegie Council was founded in 1914, pre-World War I, Freedom House in 1941, in the midst of World War II, and you see these institutions change and evolve over time. Carnegie Council was originally called the Church Peace Union, and it was focused on religious leaders because they were the center of moral and civic life at that time. Over the years we have changed and evolved, so it is interesting to hear that in parallel around Freedom House’s change in mission over time.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Yes, and it continues to change. A lot of our work for the last 20 years has looked at rights online because the digital space has become so important and part of your democratic experience and ability to exercise your freedoms.

I think looking at freedom as a value is the right way to look at it. You focus on the big takeaways in the report, but one of the things I see every year is that the demand for freedom is universal, so freedom as a value is universally held, which is why you continue to see protests in places like Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, this group of Not Free and deeply repressive countries. People there really value freedom and are risking a lot to advocate for it.

KEVIN MALONEY: It goes back to what you said in terms of the lived experience of freedom. We also think about this deeply at Carnegie Council in terms of our applied ethics experience being tied together through universality, the equal moral worth of every person that manifests as pluralism within government.

I think oftentimes we get fed these narratives against universality in one way or the other, but it is interesting to hear your argument: “No, freedom goes to the core of an individual that then can extrapolate out to these systems of governments.”

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Absolutely. I think that is a powerful argument and a good counterargument to a lot of the relativism that we see. I get this asked this question all the time, and sometimes it is very well-meaning. People will ask, “Well, aren’t you just using Western values to evaluate the rest of the world?”

We’re not. First off, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed onto by most countries in the world. It is a benchmark that governments are using themselves; it is not one that we impose on them. Going more deeply than that, these are values and freedoms that people are entitled to and hold dearly just because of the human experience.

KEVIN MALONEY: I have had a number of those conversations over the past few years. I was just speaking with a Vietnamese woman who fled with her family as refugees at the end of the war. She works in the international space but was talking about the pushback on that narrative that is required in terms of Eastern versus Western values and not human values and human rights.

Obviously, I can only stack so many anecdotal conversations. You are the one crunching the numbers and looking at the data, so maybe we can flip to that side in the latest Freedom in the World report, and I can give you the floor to talk about the state of freedom right now and your diagnosis of where we are at in the world.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Unfortunately, working on this report now for a few years, I always come bearing bad news. There are some bright spots always, but the big takeaway is that freedom declined in 2025. That means that rights deteriorated in more countries than improved. In 54 countries they deteriorated, and in only 35 did they improve.

The year 2025 was not just a single bad year for freedom. It was actually the 20th consecutive year of global decline, which means that consistently since 2005 more countries have experienced deterioration than improvement. When you step back, what that has done is really reshape the international system.

The good news is that consolidated democracies, those countries we rate as Free, have more or less endured, so the proportion of consolidated democracies, countries rated Free, have sat around the same mark over the last 20 years. The group of Party Free countries, which are sort of weakly instituted democracies, have deteriorated and fallen into the Not Free category. There are fewer of those countries. On the other side, there are more Not Free countries, more autocrats, and more autocrats that are more assertive, expressing their authority over the international system, which is what we are seeing more and more of.

The bad news is that freedom declined again. The rights most impacted over the last 20 years are freedom of the media, freedom of private expression, and access to due process, and that is all over the world.

But, as I said, there are bright spots. Democracies endure. Over 80 percent of the countries rated Free in 2005 are still Free. The average rating of democracies is about the same. It has only decreased by about 1 percent, whereas the average rating of Not Free countries has decreased by something like 26 percent, so they have gotten more repressive over time.

Of course, democracies are not islands. We are not insulated from what autocracies do, and we have felt that too, at the United Nations and with the number of conflicts in the world. We are living in a different world than 20 years ago.

KEVIN MALONEY: I always find the report extremely interesting, and we will be sure to link to it when we publish this episode.

I also find myself going back to Freedom House’s website throughout the year and checking in on these country-specific reports. It is a great tool in terms of my job when we have visiting dignitaries and people coming through for the United Nations General Assembly and getting an assessment from a freedom and values perspective in terms of what is going on in these countries, etc. I highly recommend everybody check it out.

One of the things I was super-interested in after reading the report was the playbook of autocrats or autocracy. There is always a goal to shrink certain civic spaces or shrink certain institutions or control them. I wonder if you could talk about that traditional playbook and emerging tools that people might not be thinking about or new ways to clamp down on rights around the world. What is concerning you looking forward?

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: The thing that people may be most familiar with is that autocrats have learned how to run elections. There are very few autocrats who do things like cancel elections altogether. What we see instead is that you will elections, but they will be heavily manipulated. They will disqualify all of the opposition. Often it will be done legally in the sense that the electoral commission will say: “Well, you can’t qualify and youcan’t qualify.”

Then they will run the election, which of course they will win, and then they will be the elected leader, and so you have the rise of free but deeply unfair elections. By “free” I mean that you can go to a voting booth and cast a ballot.

KEVIN MALONEY: Basically stand there.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Exactly. So it is free in the sense that it is universal suffrage, but it is not fair. It is deeply unfair. I think we are familiar with that.

What we are seeing emerge now, and this is interesting. I feel a little bit dated because when I was going to graduate school it was a big talking point that governments in Africa had become institutionalized, which means that presidents entered and left office through institutions, so there were fewer violent deaths, coups, and takeovers. They were winning and losing elections, and that was great. That was democracy in Africa.

Twenty years later, we are seeing term limits being wiped out, so governments in Africa and elsewhere, El Salvador, for example, are changing their constitutions so the president no longer has term limits, or the term limits get extended over and over again. This is the next iteration of free-but-unfair elections because now you can just run for president forever, or your term is six years, eight years, ten years, and you have these presidents who are there basically for life. Manipulation of elections is something that we have grown accustomed to, unfortunately, in terms of the authoritarian playbook.

Another thing they are doing is sending “zombie election observers” to each other. Instead of having legitimate institutions be election observers, they are sending from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation or other groups that are created, and they are offering legitimacy to fellow autocrats. They are saying, “Yes, this election was fair. This was well-conducted.” So elections is one area.

Another big area, which we are also familiar with, unfortunately, is the crackdown on civic space and civil society. We have seen the rise of foreign agent laws. We have seen using labels like “terrorist” or “extremist” to get rid of civil society or even the media.

Unfortunately, of course what has happened more recently is that the United States and European governments have rolled back their funding for civil society around the world, which weakens a sector that is under direct attack by autocrats already.

The last iteration that people may be less familiar with because I think it happens in a layer we are not paying attention to on an everyday basis is what is happening at international organizations. Russia, China, and others have learned that the United Nations needs money to do its basic work. They have that money and that expertise, so they are exerting more and more influence.

At the same time, you have the United States and Europeans stepping back from contesting elections at the United Nations, from participation, and from providing financial support. Where democracies are ceding space at these international organizations, autocrats are seizing that space.

The UN regional organizations, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, the European Union, all matter. They do set the agenda and the rules, so our continued participation matters. Unfortunately I think democracies have been weakening in that space and autocrats are becoming more powerful.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is a lot to unpack there. I think this goes again to a narrative issue. People might not understand how their individual lives directly tie to these multilateral institutions both in their domestic experience and also, if you are thinking just from a humanity perspective, that other person in another country who also has two kids and a job. These things are interconnected.

Maybe we could pull on that thread a bit more in terms of the pullback from the international commitments in that space from traditional democracies and the insertion of closed systems into that space. If you are writing the report five years from now, this is the big question in terms of the international system. We are going through a transition, but in the space you are focused on at Freedom House, what does this look like in the future?

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: It looks differently in different spaces. Take The International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), which people may have heard about. I always like to talk about INTERPOL because there are shows and movies. Lots of people think that INTERPOL is this international police force. It’s not. It is an organization that facilitates information sharing between member states and their police forces.

It is set up with a very noble and useful mission, which is that police forces around the world should share information. If your passport is stolen, INTERPOL should list it so that someone cannot use it. If a person goes missing, information should be shared.

But it is an organization based on member states. Built into that organization is the assumption that member states will live up to the standards of the organization, so they won’t issue politically motivated arrest warrants and won’t abuse the institution.

The thing is, they do, so Russia is able to issue INTERPOL notices against dissidents. It is able to issue INTERPOL notices against Ukrainians. China is able to abuse the institution. Turkey has kidnapped people all over the world and brought them back to face trial.

Then you see things like having the INTERPOL annual convention in Ankara a couple of years ago. There is going to be another one in Hong Kong. This is kind of absurd.

That is something where it takes time and commitment, but the United States and other democracies can and should exercise their input into these organizations, and they don’t. It is unclear why. With the current administration there is a lack of interest, but it is a problem that goes back several years, so it is not just about this administration.

KEVIN MALONEY: I guess this goes to a big tradeoff question. We have been thinking a lot about the gaslighting that is occurring right now in politics on both the international and domestic levels, but it almost feels that way if you are going to the conference on freedom sponsored in Hong Kong. What are the tradeoffs in terms of engaging with that or not engaging with that? Do you basically become part of the ruse of a splitting of realities? There is a lot of cognitive dissonance attached to this. It is a real struggle for us right now.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: One of the craziest things from the last few years was the Conference of the Parties about environmental regulation. It was held in Azerbaijan, a famously oil-producing, corrupt autocracy. What are we talking about in terms of measures to combat climate change? Why hold the event there?

Famously a lot of activists and dissidents go to these events to confront states and conduct advocacy. Those people are not safe going to places like Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Hong Kong. By holding these events there and allowing them to be there, we are ceding this space, which is valuable, not just for governments but also for civil society.

KEVIN MALONEY: You talked about transnational repression, using INTERPOL as an example. I want to go back to the systems that allow autocrats to tamp down on populations.

Traditionally we always think about the Russian model, where it is Putin and oligarchs. We are seeing now that there is a new group of oligarchs that see themselves as above the state or not connected to one state individually. Is this something you are thinking about at all in terms of this rise of tech, artificial intelligence, and transnational oligarchs to an extent where it is data and not borders? How are you thinking about the international system within the work of freedom moving forward as it changes and evolves?

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: One of the things we should keep in mind is that America and the Western powers had a foundational role in creating the international system as it is, and built within that system were all these channels of cooperation. Just like INTERPOL these were channels that I think had good purposes behind them. They were there for a reason and they served a purpose.

Unfortunately, the attitude we had was that we were acting on the system, but the system acts on us just as we act on the system, and of course authoritarians have learned. They have learned to tap into INTERPOL. They have learned to be obstructionist at the United Nations or make sure there are not certain votes.

To go back to oligarchs, we have an international banking system, and you have lots of governments invested in taking in money that flows from outside its borders and keeping it safe. There is a whole economy around those financial institutions, and they are not going to turn down money. Unfortunately, that is a link that binds us to autocrats and oligarchs. A lot of Western democracies are home to a lot of illicit cash, and I think it is a political, legal, but also moral choice to say no to that, and we have not lived up to that yet.

KEVIN MALONEY: The transactionalism that is occurring in the geopolitical realm right now paired with the laundering of financial systems is hard to keep pace with in terms of people who seem to be going around the system or using geopolitical upheaval from a transactional perspective. This creates almost a deluge of new moral, political, and financial variables to attempt to account for for people who are doing this type of work.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Right. Another example we can think about is the proliferation of spyware. We used to think of spyware as something only available to really sophisticated states like the United States because it has the infrastructure, but about 20 years spyware became commercially available, so countries that are fairly poor and not abundant in resources can buy pretty cheap spyware and deploy it very cheaply. So you have Turkmenistan using spyware. You have Rwanda using spyware. You have all these countries using spyware because it is commercially available, there is a market for it, and there is a group of companies making money from this.

KEVIN MALONEY: We have been talking a lot about the factors driving down freedom in the world. I want to pivot a bit and talk about maybe an example outside of these traditional Western or Global North democracies in terms of where you are seeing some pushback, some strengthening, and maybe some innovation in the civic space to enhance freedom.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: As I said, every year, despite the global trends, there are improvements. In 2025 we actually had three countries that improved from Partly Free to Free. We had no countries that moved in the opposite direction, which was notable. The three countries were Bolivia, Malawi, and Fiji.

Fiji is an interesting example because it recovered from a coup over the last ten years and has slowly rebuilt its institutions. It has improved judicial independence. As the political institutions have improved, civil liberties have improved. Something similar happened in Malawi. Malawi had a competitive election and a peaceful transfer of power. It also improved the government’s approach to gender-based violence and protection of children.

When we talk about big attacks on freedom, it is like manipulated elections, killing protesters, and shutting down the media, but the reverse of it, the building and strengthening of democracy, is a very slow process. For those of us who have to write interesting reports, it is a little bit harder, but it is happening all over the world.

Guatemala is a good case. Two years ago Guatemala had a very exciting election, but it is also a case that shows you the difficulty of restoring democracy because despite the president’s efforts he sits atop an extremely corrupt system, so for him to actually make real change paradoxically he may have to use undemocratic means to push out the elements of that system, so it is very hard.

You see something similar in Poland with the struggle to recover there, but I think again all over the world civil society is active and innovative technologically. If you think about the Venezuelan election that was monitored a couple of years ago, the level of sophistication there was high. Civil society is using a lot of new technology. It is kind of this arms race, where they are innovating, that gets cracked down on, and then they innovate more.

Also, I think we have to look more broadly about what we consider success. Sometimes success is like criminal reform or improving people’s social freedoms.

KEVIN MALONEY: This goes back to what you talked about as freedom as a lived experience and not some cinematic framing of the United States versus the Nazis, and we landed on D-Day and then job’s done, time to go home. I think a lot of people are still clinging in a way to that framing, but the world is messy in terms of the interconnection but also the sophistication in terms of these political questions right now.

I think the example of the president of Guatemala is interesting. There is a whole literature in applied ethics around moral leadership and the “dirty hands” problem of having to do what you have to do sometimes. There are a number of writers asking, “Well, how do you judge that ethically,” this ends, means, and consequences thing, and a lot of times it goes to almost looking into a person’s soul when it comes to good faith or bad faith, but it does not stop and end there. This is a very complicated ethical question we think about, especially from a leadership perspective. We see the consequences of amoral vacuous leadership versus reflective leadership, and those can turn institutions on a dime if the system is concentrated in a certain way. It is a big ethical conundrum for us here.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: It is also politically tricky because you have to ask yourself: If you don’t deliver results, if you get voted in on a big democratic wave, where people are asking for reform of a deeply corrupt system, and then you are stymied by that system, your hands are tied by the rules, and you don’t deliver, then you are disappointing people’s expectations, and they may not vote for a reformer the next time around. I think it is a big challenge for the leaders who get elected in these countries.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to go back to one side of the coin and then the other. You mentioned before the move from Partly Free to Free. Maybe you could explain the markers of that for our listeners, and then on the other side of the coin the move in the other direction and what you look for at Freedom House.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: As I mentioned, our methodology is derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have 25 indicators. They cover political rights but also civil liberties. Each indicator is scored from 0 to 4, so 4 times 25 and you get a 100-point system.

That 100-point system is then translated into three statuses—Free, Partly Free, and Not Free. There is not a hard threshold to move because we calculate political rights and civil liberties equally when we look at the status. I would say that big moves in political rights usually have a bigger effect on the score, so flawed elections will push a country down, and improved elections will push a country up. On civil liberties it is more of a gradual deterioration.

For the countries that are on the cusp or in that gray zone, one good one I would say is Peru. Peru has moved up and down from the Partly Free to the Free category several times over the last couple of years. Most of that is because they have this deeply dysfunctional political system where there is not good party loyalty, so politicians when they get elected are out for themselves, so you see this constant butting of heads between the legislature and the executive. Several presidents now have tried to disband parliament over and over again, then they get arrested, and impeached.

KEVIN MALONEY: They are pulling a King Charles.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Exactly. The system keeps resetting, so it keeps moving up and down.

On the other side, on the Partly Free and Not Free, Thailand is a good example. Thailand has changed the most in terms of status over the last 53 years. It has gone up and down more than a dozen times. There what you have is a coup that destroys institutions, then you have the slow rebuild of institutions so they come up to Partly Free, then there is another coup and they go down, then they rebuild the institutions.

The last round was really interesting because they managed to have competitive elections, but the party that was elected was a threat to the military and royal institutions, so they used a bunch of legal tricks to disqualify that party from actually forming a government because the senate in Thailand is actually controlled by the military and gets a veto over how parliament is made up. Then they moved to the second-most popular party, but then they had a falling out with that party, so they disqualified that party as well. Thailand was upgraded to Partly Free after the good election, then slowly over the last couple of years they have slid back down as they have destroyed this competitive system that they themselves had built.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think this goes back to the good faith/bad faith engagement. There is always going to be self-interest in building these systems, but as you see in the different countries and different cultures there are threshold moments where it is either acceptable or not acceptable. That is super-interesting.

We spent a lot of time on the report, which is excellent. Outside of the dynamics that are looked at and studied in the report, what other places, institutions, or experts do you think are bringing a lot to the table right now and who my listeners should be looking at in complement to what Freedom House does?

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Oh, wow. Okay. I think we do quite a good overview of the world. We have Freedom in the World, we have our Freedom on the Net report, our Transnational Oppression report. I feel like maybe we don’t talk—even though it seems like we do from the things I have said—enough about the international system, so I would encourage people to read more about that. Alex Cooley had this great Foreign Affairs article recently about how essentially the current U.S. administration is feeding into kleptocracy networks. It was great. It was a reframing of the international system: “Let’s look at it this way: What if these people were just out to make money and that’s it, there is no other reason behind any of this?”

I thought that was great. It feeds into this paper that was published in the summer looking at the Trump administration as a neoroyalist administration, again thinking through the logic: What if we abandoned all of these other frames or lenses we are using and just look at it from self-interest and that they are just there to make money for themselves?

We look at states as the middle grounds, not so much at the international system and not so much very deeply in domestic systems, but I am interested in both. In the United States and other democracies that are backsliding, Sue Stokes has a book out about democratic backsliders, and she talks about the role of polarization in that. It is a super-interesting work because while inequality is obviously important, she talks about how it is used by both right-wing and left-wing politicians and how that drives the decline at both ends. I love that kind of stuff because it is such a deep dive, and I think we all feel that economic inequality probably matters, but how does it matter?

KEVIN MALONEY: That is so interesting. I think so much of this digital ecosystem right now is people in good or bad faith taking other people’s content and monetizing it or running with it or manipulating it. That is an amazingly interesting framework in terms of how you weaponize inequality politically. Is someone who inherently might be struggling financially going to just make this political choice without being manipulated? You and I have talked a lot about agency at other meetings here. I am definitely going to dig into the book, and maybe we will have her on the podcast.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: That would be great. She’s wonderful.

KEVIN MALONEY: It was a pleasure having you here, Yana. I appreciate it, and I cannot say enough to my listeners: Download the report, access Freedom House. If you are working in the international relations space, I save Freedom House on the Chrome tab, so I am always going back.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

YANA GOROKHOVSKAIA: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.