“What is this fight all about? This war is for our right to have our children be like us and not like them,” Simonyan answered when questioned about the investment that Russian civilians should feel in a war that they were told would last just a couple weeks but has spanned nine months and cost over ten thousand Russian lives.
Simonyan then spoke of her time as a student in the United States in the early ‘90s. “30 years ago, when I myself studied in the States, it seemed we are so similar. And we really were alike,” Simonyan recalled, “It was just beginning then – the very first gurgles of now already boiling ultra-liberal borscht – they were so small then, it was hard to notice them.”
What was the harbinger of this warm, brothy, cultural apocalypse? Why, David Crane’s megahit sitcom Friends, of course! “Let me remind you that the first episode begins with the main character (Ross) who enters, confused and sad,” said Simonyan, seemingly forgetting that most episodes of Friends began with Ross entering, confused and sad, “Why is he confused and sad? Because his wife left, left for a woman, discovering after several years of marriage that she was a lesbian. And all this is shown so sympathetically: she seems to be right, but he is not quite right.”
Warner Bros. Television