Trump Reignites the Forever Wars

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Welcome back to Pod Say of the World on Tommy Vitor.

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What you can see is Tommy and I are sitting like three feet across the table from each other, just staring at each other.

Oh, there's no way I'd rather have it been.

We got a great show for you today.

There's lots of things happening in the world.

It's one of those weeks where we could have done two hours, unfortunately.

Today, we're going to explain why Israel has resumed bombing in Gaza and how Netanyahu, who has created yet another domestic political crisis in his efforts to evade accountability for October 7th.

We're going to talk about the Trump administration following President Biden's lead once again in bombing the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

We'll cover the impact of Doge gang gutting the voice of America and some new reporting about the impact of USAID cuts.

And then Trump just got off the phone with Vladimir Putin.

We'll fill you in on how it went and tell you if there's any progress towards peace in Ukraine.

We'll talk about these huge protests in Serbia and why a restaurant chain in China is is going to have to cut a big old check to its customers, Ben.

Surprised for that one.

And then, Ben, you did our interview earlier today.

What did you talk about?

Yeah, I talked to Pankaj Mishra, who is a really extraordinary writer and thinker.

He has a book out now called The World After Gaza.

And so we talked about the resumption of the war in Gaza.

We talked about

the different flavors of anti-Semitism in the world today.

Obviously, the focus on Hamas and kind of campus anti-Semitism, but also the ethno-nationalism and far-right anti-Semitism that seems to get less attention.

We talked about the kind of synergies between Netanyahu and the Israeli right and some of the other right-wing movements around the world, like the Hindu nationalists in India.

A lot of that in today's episode, unfortunately.

Well, a lot of ethno-nationalists in today's episode.

And we talked also about like the global south perspective on not just Israel-Gaza, but...

everything that's happening in the world,

whether or not there's ideas coming from within the global south that might help us find the next global order.

So a pretty wide-ranging conversation.

We've talked about the role of the writer in this world today.

So it was like, you know, put on your thinking caps and stick around for it.

It was a really smart conversation.

Definitely excited to listen to that.

It must be weird to write a book called The World After Gaza and then have the war flare up.

Yeah, the dead.

Yeah, I mean, I shouldn't be laughing, but I mean, essentially, that was my first question.

So we are not after Gaza.

Yeah, no, unfortunately.

So let's start with that.

I mean, some terrible news overnight, which is that Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and launched this massive series of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip that reportedly killed at least 400 people and wounded hundreds more.

I think I saw estimates of over 500 wounded.

Hamas said that at least five senior officials in the organization were killed, as were many children and innocent people.

Israel said the strikes were in response to Hamas's intransigence during the ceasefire extension talks.

Ben, it's hard not to notice that these strikes also come as Netanyahu is in the midst of a domestic political crisis thanks to him trying to fire the head of the Shinbet, their domestic intelligence service, but we'll get to that in a second.

With respect to the peace talks themselves, though, Israel wanted a seven-week extension of the ceasefire in exchange for Hamas releasing half of the living hostages and the remains of half of the dead hostages still in Gaza.

The Hamas position was: no, let's work on phase two of the original agreement we all signed, which would have led to a permanent end to the war.

But as we've discussed many times, Netanyahu does not actually want to end the war because he'll get attacked from the right wing of his political coalition.

And the Israeli position is also basically that Hamas must not have any power going forward, which is understandable after October 7th, but also clearly kind of a hard pill for Hamas to swallow.

So, you know, that leads us to this moment.

In the first phase of the ceasefire, Hamas released 25 living prisoners and the remains of eight hostages, while Israel released 1,500 Palestinians they had in captivity.

So, Ben, this is

a really tough part of the talks, right?

Because, of course, you can understand each side's position.

Israel wants to permanently eradicate the threat of a Hamas attack.

Hamas wants to continue to exist as a political organization, but also as a military wing, and they want the IDF out of Gaza.

I guess where I lose my kind of empathy for the Israeli position is the idea that resuming the bombing campaign is going to do much besides lead to the deaths of innocent people and the remaining hostages.

But I don't know, how are you analyzing Nenya's move over the weekend?

Well,

you summed up what happened in terms of the breakdown of the talks well in the sense that technically Hamas was just sticking to the original agreement, which is that there was this phase one, and then you move to phase two, and the additional hostage releases are tied to making agreements in phase two, which is about kind of the end of the war.

Israel wanted to just extend phase one and

make more exchanges within that framework.

We've talked about this a lot.

I mean, essentially, the real rubber hits the road because Hamas wants the end of the war war and Israel doesn't.

And you can't really move to the next phase unless you're willing to entertain the end of the war and Israel's not willing to do that.

Obviously, there's an inherent tension between Israel having a continued objective of essentially destroying Hamas and Hamas having to agree to this.

So I don't know how you ever cross that bridge unless you're willing to entertain Hamas.

continuing in some fashion inside of Gaza, which they're going to probably do anyway, because there's a lot of support for Hamas.

A couple of things I'd add to it.

In terms of the Israeli political context, you mentioned the kind of uproar over him firing the head of Shimbet, something that's not happened before because of investigations

ever in Israeli history.

So this is not normal.

But also, the Israeli government is supposed to pass a budget by the end of the month.

And if they don't, that's one of the things that can kind of trigger the collapse of the government.

There's a lot of reasons that Bibi needs to kind of return to his tried and true card of like playing to his own far right.

And resuming bombing is a way to do that as ghoulish as that may be and you know the way in which this was broken you know in the middle of the night bombing campaigns literally violating the the ceasefire um

you know just i

obviously we are sympathetic to the idea that there is inside of israel a great degree of fear or opposition to Hamas being in charge in Gaza.

At the same time, there is no way, shape, or form in which there's any risk whatsoever of another October 7th happening tomorrow.

Like,

these strikes did not end some threat that was facing Israelis.

This is punitive.

This is

obviously causing huge civilian harm.

And there's no clear end game other than just more war, more suffering for the people of Gaza.

The last thing I want to say, Tommy, is that Keep in mind this comes on top of weeks now, where we've had a complete cutoff of food and aid getting into Gaza, electricity.

So this is not happening even in a vacuum.

It's happening in terms of an already worsening humanitarian situation.

Yeah, and we wish to just be clear that

this is a decision made by the Israeli government that is not backed by the Israeli people.

I mean, there's some recent polling that found 70% of Israelis want the ceasefire and hostage talks to continue, even if it means Israel releasing terrorists and having to end the war permanently.

So, Netanyahu is just way off sides with the people he's ostensibly governing, including Yardin Bibas.

We've talked about the Beebas family before.

This was the entire family that was kidnapped.

Yardin Bebas' wife and two little children were murdered by Hamas or died in the Gaza Strip.

I'm going to say they were murdered because if you take children hostage, you are responsible for their life.

And if they die, it's on you.

He posted on Facebook, we must stop the fighting and bring everyone home.

So there's this groundswell of support for continuing these negotiations, getting the rest of these hostages home.

I think less than half of the 59 hostages still in Gaza are alive.

Unfortunately, you know, once again, the United States president, President Trump, has enabled the continuation of this war.

I think we've shipped over, what, like $8 or $12 billion worth of weapons to the Israelis.

And interestingly, Ben, I mean, there's a Trump official who had done some direct talks with Hamas, this guy, Adam Bowler, who had been nominated for this Senate-confirmed hostage negotiations or release job.

He seems to have been demoted or his position changed as some sort of special government employee

that is no longer a Senate-confirmed state of the state.

Are you confusing him with Rubio?

Oh, the Secretary, the sort of Secretary of State.

No, yeah, so it's it's it's it's it's confusing i mean it just it's it seems like there's a critical mass of things showing uh diplomacy kind of petering out here yeah it feels like there was this push by trump and and and steve witkoff as envoy to get a ceasefire in place right around his inauguration because they wanted the optic of him coming in and things getting better obviously they wanted some hostage releases but they never really seemed that committed to actually ending the war and they certainly didn't seem committed to addressing the underlying question i mean witkoff said something about two-state solution, but nobody's talking about that right now.

I mean, so I think the questions going forward are, does this bombardment continue?

Do the aid cutoff continue?

That alone is enough to bring massive suffering on the Palestinians.

Do you see, in the context of that bombardment, Trump start to talk about

ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip again, trying to move them into Egypt or Jordan?

There's some noise about trying to find African countries to move the Palestinians to.

That was a little worrying.

There's a question of whether there's a ground invasion, which Netanyahu, I think, would probably want Trump to sign up on.

He didn't care what Joe Biden thought, but with Trump, he probably wants to make sure that Trump's on side with that.

But I think what this indicates is that Gaza is just this kind of open-ended,

I don't want to call it a war, because Hamas isn't really fighting.

It doesn't seem like they've persisted.

They're not even really like fighting back.

I mean, at some point, I'm sure they'll fire some rockets, but there's this kind of ongoing bombardment of Gaza that's just going to be open-ended, maybe stop and start, and actually negotiating some kind of end to this seems to have been deprioritized.

Yeah, and you mentioned it happened during Ramadan in like 2:30 in the morning, so it's terrifying for civilians.

The political crisis that I refer to was Bibi trying to fire Ronin Barr, the head of the Shinbet.

So, this announcement happened suddenly on Sunday.

It's the latest example of Netanyahu demanding accountability from everyone but himself for October 7th.

So, you know, they pushed out the defense minister, they pushed out the IDF chief of staff.

Also, we should just point out the Shinbet has launched launched a bunch of investigations into Netanyahu's staff, including allegations that the Qatari government paid money to some of Netanyahu's top aides.

Seems relevant here.

They're also looking into the leak of sensitive intelligence documents to a German newspaper, which Netanyahu then used to, as a pretext to blow up the hostage talks.

We talked about that at the time, was to build this German outlet.

On top of all that, though, Ben, the Shinbet has publicized a summary of its own failures in preventing October 7th, which talked about their internal mistakes,

not taking seriously enough intelligence about Hamas planning to attack southern Israel.

But they also pointed the finger at political decisions by the Netanyahu government for letting Hamas getting funding from Qatar, for failing to target Hamas's leadership, and then just sort of like general chaos around the Netanyahu's political moves during the judicial coup that we talked about a bunch that just made Israel look weak and divided.

Basically, you know, they're talking about how the Netanyahu government's policy was to contain Hamas, kind of prop them up in some sense to keep the Palestinian movement divided and weaken the Palestinian authority.

That obviously ended catastrophically for everyone involved.

But instead of accountability for Netanyahu, what seems to be happening is he is consolidating power by pushing out other leaders in government, even though a recent poll found that 70% of the country wants him to resign.

However, instead, we're going back to these same tactics

and, you know, kind of pushing out other people in other power centers and consolidating.

So on Wednesday, the day this episode comes out, the cabinet will vote on Ronin Barra's dismissal.

The attorney general, the Israeli Attorney General, said BB can't fire Ronin Bar unless it goes through a process to determine whether doing so is lawful.

We'll see if Netanyahu goes along with that ruling from the AG or else we might have a constitutional crisis brewing.

But I mean, Ben, what did you make of this?

I mean, it's for us now, it's pretty familiar to see like unpopular right-wing kind of autocrats driving countries into a ditch.

But this feels

feels like a real escalation to me and memory holing their own crimes or uh with nenyao's case there's a lot to look at there's literal crimes and then there's him doing everything he can to memory hole his own massive and glaring failures around october 7th you know why was the idf up in the west bank chasing around settlers to commit violence against palestinians instead of guarding that border you know why was all this money essentially used to prop up hamas with nenyao himself telling members of the Likrud party, we want Hamas.

It's a justification for there never being a Palestinian state.

It's a justification for keeping the Palestinian leadership separated.

You know, those are things that he wants to just kind of literally sweep under the rug.

And I think part of what is so concerning here is he has learned the lesson of the last

year and a half that perpetuating this war is a way to constantly keep the political pressure off of himself and to kind of placate the far right that wants kind of an open-ended, brutalist Israeli policy.

Right now, Tommy, we are looking at the bombardment of Gaza resuming.

Israel continues to be in southern Syria, where they've done all kinds of, they've taken land, they've bombed targets.

They are making threats about the Iranian nuclear program.

So there's a potential front there.

Obviously, in Lebanon, there's a tenuous ceasefire on that border.

We're talking like multiple countries where Netanyahu has this capacity to turn the dial up or down.

And every time he feels political pressure, he seems to turn the dial up.

And that's not some conspiracy.

That's literally what's happened the last, you know, whenever he feels politically cornered, something is going to get hotter somewhere else.

Right now, nobody's even fighting back, right?

You know, Hamas isn't fighting back, the Syrians aren't fighting back.

There's a ceasefire in Lebanon.

The Iranians are trying to get into nuclear talks, right?

It's only the Houthis, which we'll talk about in a second.

Except the Houthis, yeah, which teeing this up for the transition.

But the reality is, like, there are more places, including Iran, where this could escalate further.

The more the, you know, the political pressure builds on him, the more you might expect to see him, or the West Bank for that matter, the more you might expect to see him do dramatic things to kind of get the attention off of his own political fortunes.

And he's also, I mean, the man has fought an independent review of October 7th.

What has happened is independent components of the Israeli security state have done their own investigation and reviews into their own conduct, but he has just evaded any real accountability by, you know, a sort of 9-11 commission style look back at how October 7th.

I mean, it's probably why he's at a 70% disapproval rating, but it's just infuriating.

Yeah, but not surprising.

Not at all surprising.

Okay, so Ben, sort of in the neighborhood, let's check in on our own anti-war president, Donald Trump.

So over the weekend, the Trump administration launched a major series of airstrikes on Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, which local authorities say killed 53 people and injured injured nearly 100 more.

Those strikes included targets in the capital of Sana'a.

This came after the Houthis threatened to resume attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which they say are in response, most recently, to Israel cutting off humanitarian support into Gaza.

Listeners probably remember that back in November of 2023, the Houthis started attacking ships in the Red Sea, including U.S.

warships, calling this an act of solidarity with Gaza.

So at the time, the Biden administration retaliated against the Houthis with strikes on Houthi targets, most of which were designed to destroy military infrastructure and anti-ship missiles.

But Trump may have started something bigger here.

Here's a clip of Marco Rubio discussing their plans on CBS News over the weekend.

This is not a message.

This is not a one-off.

This is an effort to deny them the ability to continue to constrict and control shipping.

And it's just not going to happen.

We're not going to have these guys, these people with weapons able to tell us where our ships can go, where the ships of all the world can go, by the way.

It's not just the U.S.

We're doing the world a favor.

We're doing the entire world a favor by getting rid of these guys and their ability to strike global shipping.

That's the mission here, and it will continue until that's carried out.

That never happened before.

The Biden administration didn't do that.

All the Biden administration would do is they would respond to an attack.

These guys would launch one rocket, we'd hit the rocket launcher.

That's it.

This is an effort to take away their ability to control global shipping.

in that part of the world.

That's just not going to happen anymore.

So we're doing the world a favor by getting rid of these guys.

Sounded a little regime-changey to me, Ben.

But then I also noticed Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, said the bombing campaign against the Houthis will end if the Houthis stop shooting at U.S.

ships.

So that is clearly more limited.

But Hegzeth also said,

We don't care what happens in the Yumeni civil war, which is very nice of him.

So, Ben, what do you make of this old but new war from our anti-war president?

Are we back in regime change mode or is this more limited?

I mean, first of all, Marco Rubio,

despite his very best efforts,

sounds like the least tough person on the face of the earth.

You know, you can tell he kind of rehearsed this.

Yeah, he's practicing in the mirror.

And he wanted to sound like a tough guy, and he wanted to say things like, these guys, a bunch of times.

And he literally just sounds like the kind of kid...

That voice doesn't sound like someone threatening Houthis.

It sounds like a kid who ran in from the schoolyard to tell the teacher on somebody else or something.

These guys are trying to mess up international shipping.

He's so careless with his word choices.

I just don't get it.

But anyway, put General Rubio aside for a second here.

The thing that worries me about this is: look,

the Biden policy wasn't the clearest policy in the world.

It was every now and then we'd just go bomb a bunch of the Houthis in their infrastructure.

But part of what is troubling to me is that the messaging from Trump on down to Rubio, and you know, because you know Rubio's on whatever messages he's been commanded to deliver.

So he has to take that shot at Biden.

You know, it just seems to be informed by like our strikes on the Houthis are going to be a little bit bigger than Joe Biden's.

So we can say that they were bigger.

And there's not really any logic if you unpack what he said, because the Houthis have, you know, they kind of stop shooting at ships and then they do.

This is not a new thing, kind of stop and start from them.

They've tied it to the resumption of hostilities in Gaza.

There's no indication that one round of airstrikes is going to like make the Houthis go away or change the fundamental power.

I was talking to an expert today who said he thinks that Trump was almost certainly told by like CENTCOM or some of his military advisors that all we need to do, sir, is take the gloves off, sir, and stop caring about civilian casualties and get rid of these Biden restrictions, sir.

And then we'll take these guys out.

And it's just bullshit.

Yeah.

Like they might be attacking leaders.

They might have found intelligent leaders.

It seemed like they're hitting warehouses or other targets in cities, but I just don't think that they're going to make a material difference here.

And I think what happened to Tommy, you're right.

And like I'm talking to some people, it seems like there were some people at CENTCOM that wanted the more maximalist option that did include, for instance, trying to hit individual Houthi leaders,

like you said.

And sometimes you actually don't have good intel on where those guys are.

Sometimes you might, but like you might kill a whole bunch of civilians in doing that.

And they went, Mr.

Trump, sir, Joe Biden was afraid to take out these guys.

But the reality is that the Houthis are people that live in Yemen.

Like they're not even analogous to ISIS.

The last time Trump wanted to prove he was tougher than someone basically just took the same Obama plan and loosened some restrictions on civilian casualties, which I think is not a good thing.

But the ISIS was foreign fighters, right?

They're not going to go away in Yemen unless you go commit a genocide or something.

They're people that live there.

And so I don't really think, if anything worries me about this, it's

Trump doing the opposite of what he said about getting a set of wars.

In a situation in which you have a war in Gaza, like I said, you've got Syria, like there's sectarian violence picking up there.

The Israelis are occupying southern Syria.

There are people stirring the pot there, and the government can't really get its legs under it because there's sanctions.

Yemen, you've got an active civil war in the Southi thing.

You've got the Iranians, like trying to avoid a war over their nuclear program, but it's not clear whether there's a deal.

Like, this whole region could still, if Trump's impulse is to continue to show that he's tough by like saying yes to the most you know square-jawed general that like calls him sir like we you know this could be the coolest nickname exactly the coolest call yeah would they uh who's our new chairman I forgot the nickname already nailbag yeah yeah yeah I met him in Mosul yeah yeah Erasmataz or something that was our guy that was our guy Nick yeah I mean just to really like hammer home the point you're making about the Houthis living in Yemen I mean they they are They're a tribal group from northern Yemen.

Yeah, they practice a form of Shia Islam and the Houthi movement emerged in the 90s in part in opposition to like Saudi influence and hardline Saudi religious practices.

But then they came onto like the international community's radar in a big way in 2014 when they seized the capital of Yemen, when they forced the Yemeni president at the time to run for his life.

And by 2015, the Houthis controlled a big chunk of Yemen's territory.

And in 2015, the Saudis decided to launch this major military operation to dislodge them.

And that proved to be a catastrophic failure on a military and a humanitarian level.

It led to hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dying either in the fighting and or from the famine.

And by 2022, the Saudis were like, all right, we're good on bombing.

We're going to try to cut a deal.

And,

you know, I think everything was reawakened by October 7th.

Now, like, everyone points out that the Houthis get a lot of support from Iran.

That is true.

It's also, I think, important to say, Ben, that like there are some quarters of the left that embrace the Houthi rebels because they were seen as doing something to end the war in Gaza.

But we should say these are not good guys.

They are authoritarian.

They have kidnapped and killed aid workers.

They've terrorized the population.

Like no one should cheer for them.

But back to the military campaign then, I mean, this expert I was talking to and other people who left the Biden administration have said the same thing to me, which is that by the end of their Houthi military campaign, they realized that like you can't deter these guys.

You can degrade them.

You can take away some other capabilities.

Yes, you can degrade them.

You can set up like defensive infrastructure in the Red Sea.

You can like create a missile defense wall around Israel.

But like really dismantling them is a years-long project with way better intelligence, some sort of ground campaign.

Like it's a disaster.

The Saudis and the Emiratis have fought a war for nearly a decade against these guys with plenty of U.S.

support, and they were somehow stronger at the end of that process than they were at the beginning.

And also, Trump, and this is why the Iran part worries me, in his like truth socialing, which is, I guess, where we announce military operations now, he was like, this is a message for Iran, all caps or something.

And

the Iranians do not control the Houthis.

This is very important.

This is so important.

Like, this is actually not like Hezbollah or something.

They do give them some weapons, and they have.

And maybe they could stop doing that.

I don't think that would impact the Houthis' behavior that much.

They do their own thing, these guys.

And what is Trump exactly saying in terms of the message to Iran, the message that we're going to bomb you next?

I mean, this whole thing

could go sideways pretty fast.

And let's also point out, whether we're talking about Gaza or Yemen or wherever,

we used to think about what we're doing to obviously civilians from a humanitarian perspective, also from like a just multi-decade anti-American sentiment radicalization perspective.

Like this kind of the casual nature of these pretty large-scale bombing.

I mean, these aren't even, these are not like drone strikes,

and people should give us plenty of shit about those too.

But this is like, you know, we're dropping huge ordinance on multiple countries, or we're giving Israel an ordinance to do that.

And I just, I don't know, I don't like where this is probably headed for the Middle East.

Yeah, that tweet from Trump blaming Iran saying you're responsible for anything the Houthis do.

They're not.

They're just not.

Yeah, apparently the Houthis, the Pentagon says the Houthis have fired 174 projectiles at U.S.

Navy ships ships since 2023 and like 150 more at commercial ships.

So they've been firing off a lot of stuff.

And if we're holding Iran responsible for all of that,

that's a problem.

Because to your point, I mean, the Houthis have a high degree of autonomy.

And this Houthi expert was telling me that after the Soleimani assassination, that kind of strategy of more distributed authority and autonomy to their kind of so-called proxy forces seems to have been a policy because it allows them not to have to like have such close ties or create, you know, intelligence channels that can be intercepted, et cetera.

But it has also allowed for a lot of proliferation of missile and drone technology.

Like there's some concern that the Houthis could be sharing this stuff with al-Qaeda or al-Shabaab.

And that's what I mean about terrorism coming our way.

Yeah.

Because if you start to really go after these guys,

they're not going to surrender.

And this, this, imagine Trump after a terrorist attack.

I just, this, none of this makes me feel good.

Yeah.

And then just in terms of Yemen itself, like, there's not a lot of good options to deal with the Houthis right now, but the current plan, if we just sum it all up, is Israel resuming the war in Gaza with $8 or $12 billion worth of additional U.S.

weapons, Trump gutting USAID and cutting off parts of Yemen to humanitarian support.

And now we're bombing the shit out of Yemen again.

And that just like that is catastrophic to the point where even the Saudis are like, do not do this.

Like we went down this path.

The Saudis are going to say that, you know, and the USAID point is really important because in the kind of, you know, pretty dark, contradictory reality of American foreign policy, USAID was a huge donor to addressing humanitarian needs in Yemen.

And now that's gone.

So, a lot more people are going to suffer than even suffered in past bombing campaigns.

Yeah, and it won't be the Houthis, who I think represent like 15% of the population.

It'll be women and kids and civilians who always get hurt.

Yeah, who will blame America?

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Ben, speaking of kind of the gutting of U.S.

power abroad, including soft power, let's talk about the Voice of America.

Voice of America, or VOA, was founded in 1942 during World War II to be a counterweight to Nazi propaganda.

The idea was to provide news and information and cultural programs to audiences literally around the world, while also promoting American values like press freedom, democracy, et cetera.

After World War II ended, VOA's mission evolved into a tool to combat communism in the Soviet Union.

More recently, that mission evolved further.

They are doing programming in the Middle East, Asia.

There's combating extremism, China, Iran, et cetera.

That was until Friday last week.

Trump released an executive order targeting VOA's parent organization, the U.S.

Agency for Global Media, which also funds other U.S.-backed news outlets like Radio for Europe, Radio for Asia, et cetera, combined these outlets to reach 420 million people in 100 countries and broadcast in 63 languages.

The impact of this EO is that nearly all of VOA's 1,300 staff members have been put on paid leave.

Their programming is gone.

It's been replaced by like music or, you know, dead air or whatever.

Trump has installed failed Arizona Senate and gubernatorial candidate Cary Lake to run VOA, just basically with the mission to destroy it.

Ben, do do you want to talk about the mission of VOA and the impact of these new services being eviscerated?

Yeah, so the numbers begin to tell a story.

The over 400 million people in over 60 languages.

And I think what people have to realize is think of VOA as something like a wire service, largely.

Like it's pretty straight news, to the point that we actually used to get shit.

Like, why aren't you doing your own propaganda?

Like, RT is so much better at propagandizing.

But part of the idea behind it is a lot of the places, sure, we can focus on the places where

we're trying to get information into like the Iranian people or places where there's geopolitical tension.

A lot of these are places where there's no other access to straight news, to knowing what the fuck is going on.

That's why you do it in all these languages.

And if you think that that seems like a luxury, consider the fact that we're living in a world in which people are constantly bombarded on social media or through various propaganda channels with garbage.

Right.

And people try to- More important than ever.

Yeah, I know people in Southeast Asia, for instance, who are living in pretty tough places, what Myanmar, Cambodia, places where you have civil conflict or you've got dictators who put out all kinds of disinformation all the time or misinformation, and people could trust a VOA product or a Radio Free Asia product, right?

If you remove that, not only is that just denying

you know, a credible news source to people, it is opening the door for people to be further radicalized or brainwashed essentially through disinformation.

You know, it's just literally pulling the plug on on hundreds of millions of people that rely on this information.

And I think what I find so kind of grotesque about this, to take a step back,

is

to connect what we were just talking about, America First, right?

A lot of us had to be like, well, I can see some of the points Trump's making, you know?

But this is,

he was talking about like the credible version of America First is the forever war.

We fought 20 years years of fucking dumb wars in the Middle East.

Let's not do that.

And we killed hundreds of thousands of people, and thousands of our own people died, and we spent all this money.

Let's not do that.

And that's not what America First turned out to be.

We are still fighting the dumb fucking wars.

We're still bombing people in Yemen.

We're still sending $8 to $12 billion of assistance to Israel to bomb people.

We're upping the defense budget.

That's the only thing that went up in the recent thing that Streamer capitulated to.

What are we cutting?

We're cutting the only good things America does in the world.

We're taking away USAID, all soft power, gone, all of it, right?

We're cutting all of USAID, all of PEPFARB, which is obviously life-saving systems for HIV/AIDS, all of Voice of America and its various cousins.

That is not the America in the world.

Sure, people grumble about foreign aid, but I don't think that's what people were upset about in terms of the excesses of the deep state or whatever you want to call it.

And so that's what is so disgusting about what we're watching is like, we're seeing the methodical destruction of anything good America might do in the world, or anything that might improve people's lives around the world, or anything that might combat autocracy around the world.

And we're not seeing any diminution in, if anything, we're seeing ratcheting up of geopolitical tension with tariffs and military action and all the rest of it.

And before we started recording, you and I were talking about how Deputy Assistant Secretary of Rubio used to really care about a certain component of VOA.

Yes, well, this drives me fucking nuts about Marco Rubio's.

I used to get, I had this argument with him because

one of the bloated parts of

this whole enterprise is something called Radio Marti, which has been broadcasting from basically South Florida, where it supports a bunch of jobs, by the way, into Cuba, right?

And

it seemed like a lot of money to be spending on something that wasn't really working.

The Cubans blocked it.

So it was kind of like a radio station that hardliners in Florida.

Miami liked.

So Rubio fights to the death if Barack Obama wants to cut $1, but then Rubio fucking shuts it all down when he's second.

Turn off the switch.

Turning off the switch, like killing jobs in Florida.

And just to tuck connects and dots with Marco Rubio, right now, you've got Venezuelans being flown into gulags in El Salvador, something that Marco Rubio would have once seemingly objected to.

I thought we wanted to help the Venezuelan people.

We've got, you know, Cubans are not allowed in this country anymore.

It's something that Marco Rubio used to care about.

Like all, Marco Rubio used to complain about conditions in Cuban prisons.

The fucking

El Salvadoran prisons make that look like, you know, a country club.

I mean, this is, this is insane.

What Marco Rubio is single-handedly proving how full of shit he was in just two months.

Yeah, I mean,

on the Salvadoran part, Ben, so on Pase America, we spent a bunch of time digging into Trump's most recent immigration moves.

I do think, like, taken together, they're horrifying and scary, but I think the most relevant part of this for us is Trump using this law from 1798.

All the best laws were written then called the Alien Enemies Act, which they're using to deport Venezuelan men to El Salvador to be held in prison there.

Like literally any Venezuelan male over 16 can be declared a part of a gang and now shipped to El Salvador.

At the moment, these deportations are being blocked by the courts.

Trump is furious about that.

He called the judge who halted the deportations a radical left lunatic and demanded that the guy be impeached.

That statement actually prompted a response from Chief Justice John Roberts, who was like, hey, bud, impeachment isn't how you deal with a ruling you don't like.

You try the appeals process.

You know, like, let's be an adult here.

But, Ben, I mean, this is so scary.

It's scary on its face, but it's also a scary precedent that could be expanded to other groups that Donald Trump does not like.

And to your point, I mean, it's worth reminding everyone just how bad El Salvador's prison system is.

There's a lot of components to this.

2% of the population of the country is in prison because Nae Bukele has put in place a mass incarceration policy where he indiscriminately rounds people up and throws them in jail with no due process.

To your point, I was talking to a human rights expert in El Salvador a couple months ago who said that prisoners in Venezuela have more due process than prisoners in El Salvador under this current system because Bukele declared this state of exception, which is there, sort of, it's like a state of emergency where he suspended due process rights ostensibly to deal with gang violence for like a month.

But then, like every state of emergency, it just gets extended over and over and over again.

And he's used it to sweep people up and indiscriminately throw men into prison.

And now the United States is going to help keep Bukele in power by paying El Salvador money to house prisoners from the U.S.

with no due process.

And there was a point in time where conservatives like a Marco Rubio, like a John McCain, cared deeply about human rights, or at least they talked about it a lot, right?

And that is just,

I guess, is just gone.

I mean, Rubio tweeted something about the Uyghurs the other day, and it made me think about when.

What credibility does he have to talk about that?

Yeah, I remember when Trump, John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, said in his book that Trump not only did not care about millions of Uyghurs being thrown into concentration camps, he told Xi Jinping that it was the right thing to do.

Yeah.

I mean, we're literally subsidizing like one of the largest gulags, if not the largest gulag in the world.

You know, I have to check it to don't know libel suits Bukele, but but it's a big fucking prison where terrible things happen to people.

Horrible.

It's very clear.

I think one way to think about it too, Tommy, is because you guys had a very good conversation on the PSA.

You know, I think a lot about this kind of authoritarian playbook that we're living through.

And I obviously wrote like my last book was about this.

We are.

You're ahead of the curve on that book, unfortunately.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, the whole Orban Trump comparison.

Yeah,

I didn't like that.

That was kind of prescient.

I know.

And so as I think back on that, what's scary about living through it now is in some ways we are so far ahead of, like Orban has never approached this, right?

Like these people that we think of as dictators, in their wildest dreams, they could never think of like randomly deporting lots of people to prisons in third countries.

Because what we're seeing is, yes, Trump is implementing a playbook.

Ignore judges, do whatever you want, install loyalists.

Like we all now, unfortunately, are familiar with that playbook.

But what's scary is when you're the president of the United States, there's things that are available to you that are not available to the Bolsonaros and Orbans and even Duterte's of the world, which are you can pressure countries in Latin America to take all these people and throw them into your prisons, right?

And

so we're seeing, I think Americans have to get their minds around, like, we are not, you know, at the beginning of this, we're kind of pretty late

in the spectrum, which is like there's no constraint on him.

But we're also seeing how, like, Trump, for all of his railing against the deep state, he is using the awesome powers of the American national security state for his authoritarian impulses.

So he doesn't like, he talks shit on the FBI.

He loves ICE.

He loves those military planes that are flying people down there, and he's posting like fascist snuff videos with them.

And we're starting to see what it's like like to have that U.S.

national security apparatus wedded to the authoritarian playbook.

And that's what I find scary about it.

Yeah, it's really scary.

That point about his ability to force other countries to do things that no other dictator would be able to do.

And also, the United States is usually the one calling out other countries and trying to at least to deter these kinds of human rights violations.

Oh, and

we're going to see all kinds of copycat stuff happening around the world.

I mean, you wait a few months to see the ripples of not only USAID being gone and VOA being gone, but seeing other people saying, well, oh, look what Trump's doing.

Like, I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want.

In fact, you're already seeing it, right?

Because once, you know, you have Trump and Elon Musk and others in the government saying that like USAID is a corrupt, you know, organization designed for regime change, that gives every authoritarian around the world the pretext to raid NGOs supported by USAID, et cetera, right?

We'll get to that in a minute in Serbia.

So, one last thing on this, Ben, we've been trying to keep everybody updated on the impact of Trump cutting USAID.

Along those lines, there was a really

well-done piece in the New York Times by Nick Christophe over the weekend.

It had the headline, Musk said no one has died since aid was cut.

That isn't true.

Highly recommend reading this.

He went to Sudan, South Sudan, met with people who are going to die or know of children who died because USAID is gone.

The Times also worked with the Center for Global Development to estimate how many people are at risk of dying within a year.

Here's the stats they came up with.

1.65 million people could die without U.S.

help to fund HIV prevention and treatment.

Half a million could die without vaccine funding.

More than half a million could die without food from America.

Almost 300,000 could die without malaria prevention funding from the U.S.

310,000 could die without U.S.

funding for tuberculosis prevention.

There's also this broader concern about us helping reignite.

drug-resistant tuberculosis strains all around the world.

So that's great.

But look, read the Christoph piece, share the impact on social media.

Like, I don't think we have any hope of saving USAID at this point, but I do think think we need to make these monsters own the impact of what they are doing.

And the only thing I'll say about this is our Ketamine Adult white South African deputy dictator

tweeted out something about how he gets all this hate when he's never harmed a person in his life.

He's going to be directly responsible for the deaths of millions of fucking people.

Millions of people.

Okay.

Children.

Elon Musk is going to be responsible for the deaths of children of so many people that I can't get my mind around it.

And there's going to be a relentless effort by him and all of his like, you know,

I don't know, doge, douchebag, wannabe Elons, you know, to say like, oh, all this irrational Elon derangement syndrome.

Like, I don't know, maybe go talk to the people in places like Sudan who are dying right now because they're not getting nutrition.

The way these guys think they're the victims, you know, you and I were talking about this before.

Oh, I got criticized online.

How dare you?

Tweet at me on the platform I own where I can ban you.

People should be boycotting Tesla.

Yeah, boycott Tesla.

I'm not saying harm Teslas or just do not buy a Tesla.

Don't ever buy anything that Elon Musk makes.

Honestly, for a long time, I like wanted

one of those Tesla power walls at my house.

So did I, yeah.

Because I am actually worried about blackouts in LA.

But there's absolutely no way that I would buy one from Tesla now.

No one should buy anything from Tesla.

He's a terrible person.

Maybe some sort of economic impact will matter to him because these fucking rapacious billionaires actually really care if they're the number one richest or the number number three.

Like, that's how awful they are.

He will care more about that than you will care about the assessment of how many people die because he cut off your CID.

So, please boycott that.

And to all the people who say, well, you know, the climate impact of creating Tesla is incalculable.

He has already done more harm in his couple months in government than good than he has ever done.

Buying your Tesla is

there are other EVs, and

guess what?

It's a drop in the bucket compared to the carmen he's doing.

Cheaper and better made.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break.

But before we do that, Ben, we need to address address something.

We do.

Which is there is a lot of heat in like the comments on the YouTube, on social media, from our Canadian listeners, who I think feel like we've been talking about the tariff war with Canada and some of the political machinations happening in Canada in a way that is flippant.

And so I don't know exactly what we said.

I'm sorry if we offended anybody.

I sort of am confused why would anyone would listen to this conversation and think we are not on your side versus the fucking morons like trying to crush the Canadian economy?

I think that's stupid and ridiculous.

Look, I will apologize to the people of Canada.

I feel your pain.

And I mean that seriously, genuinely.

What I take from it is when it feels like there's a lunatic who's trying to take over your country and destroy your economy, like maybe you don't want the humorous banter about it, which I get.

But bear in mind, like, we're living under this lunatic too.

And sometimes we turn to the dark humor of it all.

Yeah.

But, but I'm feeling Mark Carney's hockey fighting energy.

Like, we dig it.

We love you guys.

We love our Canadian listeners.

And we hear you.

Yeah.

I want to apologize substantially less than Ben.

I reserve the right to make fun of anything.

I'm going to make fun of Mark Carney.

How we survive for being low-key.

We have fucking Donald Trump as our president.

We're trying to survive, guys.

Cut us like you.

No, but

the director and deputy director of the FBI actively hate both of us.

We are

things are bad in the future.

Let's be clear about that.

Let's be clear.

We do not want to tariff you.

They personally are aware of who we are.

We do not want to tariff you.

We liked Justin Drugo.

We had him on the show.

Yeah.

We like Mark Carney, but

we get it.

No one wants this tariff war.

I know it's a very serious thing.

Trump is actively trying to destroy the Canadian economy, and that is insane and stupid.

Let's all fight these lunatics together and not

turning on you.

yourself.

We're on the same team.

Also, fuck Pierre Polyev.

Also, we wanted to tell you about an amazing new podcast from Crooked Media.

We all need a little break from the news, Ben, and we are releasing a new podcast we think WorldOs in particular are going to love and might already love because the first episode is in your feed.

It's called Shadow Kingdom.

God's Banker.

Here's what it's about.

In the summer of 1982, the Vatican's top money man was found dead.

Roberto Calvi, known as God's Banker, I try to do an Italian accent.

Calvi, was embroiled in an infamous money laundering scandal that tied him to an ultra-secretive far-right society, the Sicilian mafia, and the Catholic Church.

His death at the time was ruled a suicide, but the evidence, it told a different story.

For decades, no one could say what really happened until now.

Journalist Nicola Majnoni is following a new lead, one that could finally answer the question, who killed God's banker?

This is a fun, wild story.

It's a little bit sinister, too.

There are Masons involved.

There's some Masons.

Can I say something that was interesting about the last time you're going to be able to do this?

I'm going to feedback on this.

So this is like, you ever like find out that you're communicating with like your parents through the podcast?

No.

Because they listen and they hear something and they, my, my grandfather was a Mason.

No way.

Yes.

Which I had once known and forgotten.

So when I was kind of, you know, throwing some shade at the Masons,

my dad was like, oh, remember, your grandfather's a Mason.

I bet that there's a.

And by the way, he was a Mason in small town, Texas.

So he wasn't like running the world in some headquarters.

He was in like Baytown, Texas.

Yeah.

And look, I also, I assume most Masons were just like part of any kind of fraternal organization that got people together in like a civic way and did things together.

My time in government has led me to believe that most conspiracies don't exist because no one can keep a secret and get anything.

Because the actual reality is kind of the ultimate conspiracy theory.

They're a bunch of rich, powerful people who are controlling the world.

In front of our faces.

Yeah, we look at Elon Musk.

We don't need to consider it.

In the doge cutting all the shit.

So God's banker, you know, Shadow Kingdom.

Yeah.

At least get a good story out of it.

This is a great story because we are living in this horrifying far-right world led led by awful people.

And you can see the beginnings of this far-right movement in Italy take form in this podcast in a way that provides a lot of context for what we're dealing with today.

So, episode one is in the Pod Save the World feed.

You should check it out.

And if you love it, you can hear episode two now by subscribing to the Shadow Kingdom feed wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you don't want to wait, you can binge the whole series today by joining the friends of the pod at croica.com/slash friends or by subscribing on the Shadow Kingdom Apple Podcast channel.

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Okay, let's move on to the Russia because earlier today, Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone about the war in Ukraine.

It's interesting that they previewed this one, Ben, as like Trump has previously suggested in some news conferences that he's talked to Putin a few times since he's been in the White House, but I guess who really knows?

Because they're a bunch of liars.

So NBC News says the call was at least an hour and a half long.

Other outlets said it was up to three hours.

I was talking to some of our team here.

I suspect that's a lot because of translation and also because Putin likes to give long historical rants about his grievances.

I imagine Trump even gets a flavor of that, but who knows?

So the biggest deliverable out of the call is Putin saying he's agreed not to bomb Ukraine's energy infrastructure for 30 days.

What a win.

Trump announced.

At the end of winter, by the way.

He said, like, this is not, I haven't seen this point out on coverage, but they bombed the energy infrastructure in like November, December, heading into the winter.

Guess what time of the year it is?

It's March, April.

Yeah.

Putin doesn't need to bomb the energy infrastructure anymore.

And it also, it doesn't get unbombed.

Like if it's not working.

Anyway, so also Trump, they announced they're going to begin talks about a possible ceasefire in the Black Sea.

It's worth noting that there have been these little partial ceasefires along the way between the Russians and Ukrainians.

Friend of the pod, Max Seddon, tweeted an analysis of Putin's Russian language readout of the call with Trump.

Max's big takeaway is that Putin gave almost no ground.

Putin wants a total end to foreign military support and intelligence to Ukraine.

The readout said that any deal must, quote, take into account the unconditional necessity to remove the initial reasons for the crisis and Russia's legal security interests.

you could drive a truck through kind of the implications of that language, which we can unpack in a second.

The readout also says that Trump and Putin talked about some non-Ukraine topics, including mutually beneficial partnership in economics and security, some sort of cooperation in the Middle East, non-proliferation, and then some shit about hosting hockey games, which I guess means it just effectively ends the kind of sports isolation of Russia.

Which Trump's probably not even aware of.

Yeah.

It's so fucking dumb.

Right.

Well, it'd be great if we have hockey games.

He doesn't realize he's just like removed a huge source of pressure on Ukraine.

It is a big carrot right because like the russians were competing in the olympics under like some non-flag i can't remember what it looked like but anyway it sucked for them they were pissed about it the goon flag yeah the goon flag and now it's uh now they're just back i guess so i guess like look my takeaway ben was i i don't want to criticize diplomacy just because trump is doing it but i think we should be honest that a one-month energy ceasefire is not only not that much given the context you just talked about about the time of year, but also Trump pushed the Ukrainians to sign a 30-day unconditional ceasefire.

And Putin was like, nah, I'm good.

And he also didn't signal any real willingness to give ground on other stuff.

So I don't know what was accomplished.

Maybe Putin agreed to buy a bunch of Trump coin with Russian oil and gas.

Half kidding about that.

But

what were your takeaways from this?

Well, yeah, first of all, in the time,

hearing that brought back, you know,

not great memories of, I sat through probably, I don't know, after the invasion of Crimea up through the end of the Obama administration, I probably sat through five or six of these like two-hour phone calls.

And it makes it sound like a really substantive, robust conversation.

Each side probably spoke three or four times in those two hours because Putin sits there and reads like a 20-minute speech

about literally reads.

Reads about all of his fucking grievances and how hard, what a bunch of bastards the Ukrainians are.

And he gives you a history lesson going all the way back.

Way back.

You know, the, you know, Bulgaria joining NATO and shit.

Ottoman Empire.

And then that has to be fucking translated.

And so you're sitting there and you're like, like, so then we'd put out like, they spoke for two hours.

And I'm like, it's not as cool as you guys think it is.

But anyway, put that aside.

Yeah, I think that what's amazing about this is he's just walking Trump right along his fucking path where Putin is literally taking the things that he would usually have to negotiate at the end of the fucking negotiation, right?

Ukraine can't rearm.

can't have foreign forces there, can't get any intel, you know, can't join NATO, like his whole list.

He's even laundering in his version of history.

You know, he congratulates Trump for not voting for the UN resolution, the General Assembly resolution, calling him the aggressor.

Like, you know, good job, Donald

voting with me in Belarus on that.

And he's trying to pull all these issues forward into the negotiation about the 30-day ceasefire.

And Trump is so thirsty for either a combination of Putin's friendship and some partial news cycle win that he's literally celebrating like a partial ceasefire around just hitting energy targets when he didn't get anything else.

Like, Putin is not moved off of any other position.

Literally.

The only thing Putin can be said to have done that is any different tomorrow than today, if he actually fucking does it, and I could see him just violating it anyway, is this thing about not hitting energy targets.

And then, you know, meanwhile, he's just adding to the list of demands on the Ukrainians.

And this is what happens when you humiliate the Ukrainian president of the Oval Office, cut him off from intelligence and military support, which Putin grabbed.

You notice that?

Like, Putin said, oh, look, see, well, like, you better go back to cutting them off because I saw you did that once before.

You can do that again, right?

So Putin is just like moving the goalpost further and further in his direction.

And we're not negotiating peace.

We're negotiating literally like Russian demands on behalf of Putin.

Well, Putin's moving the goalpost, as are the Trump team.

I mean, there was a week in Semaphore like today or yesterday about how

Trump is considering recognizing Russian control of Crimea.

Now, I don't think there's any like peace deal that ends with the Ukrainian sides fully controlling Crimea.

But why are you doing this?

Why are you considering this now?

I mean, it's just, this is like,

and anybody like, and this is what, like, you made this point last week, and it's true.

Anybody who's ever had any experience with Putin,

this is exactly what he does.

He just tries to pocket every single thing at the table before even entertaining any concession by himself.

And none of these guys have ever.

Trump thinks that, and Witgoff, that like, you know, selling some fucking golf courses in Florida is like akin to like dealing with issues that have been at the subject of war and peace and geopolitical tension for hundreds of years

in Ukraine.

Like these guys have no idea what they're doing.

Putin is in no rush either.

No,

what Russia is here?

The broader context is, you know, we talked late last year, I think in August, about this surprising Ukrainian offensive into Kursk, which is part of Russia, and they occupied like 500 miles, square miles worth of territory within Russia in the Kursk region.

The Russians, along with these North Korean troops, have slowly but methodically battled back and pushed the Ukrainian forces out of Kursk, except for like a sliver right along the border that the Ukrainian forces are now using to keep the high ground and prevent essentially the Russians from entering into another part of Ukraine.

So Putin knows that the momentum is on his side.

You know, the Americans are no longer supporting the Ukrainian side.

He's getting reinforcements from North Korea.

The weapons are flowing from Iran and others.

And so things are just, he's looking good.

So if I'm Putin, I'm thinking, I'm in this job for life.

This dip shit's there for four years.

I'm going to play this negotiation out as long as I can, get whatever I want from it, wait this idiot out, and then play the next guy who's in the job.

And by the way, he also loved, in the Russian readout, they had this language about, you know, Russia and the U.S., you know, consistent with their international responsibilities, talked about this and the Middle East and that.

He's making himself bigger and the United States smaller, you know,

like it's, and, and, and Trump is not even aware that that's what he's doing.

You know, like, it's, oh, God, it's.

Trump ostensibly thinks that the big fish are him and Xi Jinping.

Yeah, you're right.

No, no, now it's like Xi Jinping's the big fish.

And then like Trump is in the second class with Putin.

Great, great.

Okay, let's switch gears here, Ben, and talk about these massive protests in Serbia.

I don't know if we've talked about this on the show before.

No, we should have.

Yeah, you're right.

We should have.

Well, so this past weekend,

hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Belgrade to protest against the government, the government corruption and President Alexander Buchic.

There were reports of up to 300,000 people, which in Serbia is a massive number.

So these are student-led protests.

They've been happening since last November.

There's this horrible incident where a concrete canopy that was part of the newly renovated train station collapsed and killed 15 people.

As often happens with protests like this, though, over time they evolved from being about, you know, outrage about this tragic incident at the Novi Saud rail station to outrage about corruption generally, the lack of transparency about construction of this train station, the treatment of protesters, which include mass arrests of individuals who are on the streets, but also these government-sponsored efforts to harass and violently assault protesters, some really bleak stuff.

There was a video that Ben and I, you saw this weekend of like reports of a sonic weapon being used on protesters.

So pretty awful.

So on Monday, the protesters even blocked access to a Serbian public TV station called RTS because of the way it was reporting on them.

I guess a journalist referred to them, the peaceful protesters, as a mob.

So the president of Serbia, this guy named Alexedr Vucic, he's been in Serbian politics for decades.

In the late 90s, he was Slobodan Milosevic's information minister.

How about that fucking job?

That's a great thing on your fucking CV.

Yeah, so for those who don't know, Milosevic was charged with war crimes and genocide and put on trial at the International Criminal Court.

There was a massacre, a horrific massacre in 1995 where 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by

Bosnian Serb forces.

And Vucic said, quote, you kill one Serb and we kill 100 Muslims, is a quote attributed to the current president.

So charming guy.

More recently, Vucic has been head of the Serbian Progressive Party since 2012.

He was prime minister from 2014 to 2017 and has been president of Serbia.

Not those kind of progressives.

No, yeah.

Yeah, don't let the name fool you.

The name of the party fool you.

Yeah, he's far right.

He's authoritarian.

It's like national socialists.

We're not socialists.

Yes.

Something we unfortunately have had to clarify in the show as well.

He's authoritarian.

He's far right.

He's also someone who he'll mouth like pro-EU, pro-Western sentiment.

I think he gets a lot of credit from the population or has gotten leeway for their economic growth recently.

But like, you know, every autocrat, like corruption catches up to you.

So that gets us back to these protests.

Vucic has blamed the protests on leftist radicals.

He's blaming the United States and USAID.

It's always interesting to note which Americans are dumb enough to regurgitate those kinds of claims by authoritarian leaders, which brings us to a clip from a recent episode of Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast, Triggered, where he interviewed Vucic.

Here's a clip.

We also talk about the protests you've been seeing in Belgrade.

I'm sure the media will cover them only one way.

There's seemingly evidence that they are all tied in some form to the same left-wing actors here in America.

There's even some reported links to USAID.

It feels to me, as someone who's watched this play out in America and with my family, a tragic incident, of course, but it was later weaponized, perhaps like

our

January 6th.

I was saying the same

to my people here.

It was a huge amount of money that was invested from outside,

from different countries,

different foundations.

Well, there's another planned protest in a couple of days.

How much of that is manufactured?

I've read and I've seen and spoken to other people here.

Some of these protests, they're offering kids 100 Euro to show up.

It's a little super cut of Don Jr.

regurgitating kind of right-wing autocrat.

Talking points, I mean, it's worth pointing out

friend of the pod, Rick Grinnell, was like a special envoy for Serbia.

He's become thick with Vucic.

There's all those reports of the Serbian government giving approval to

Jared Kushner or some developer in Dubai, the Trump family to build like a Trump family hotel on the site of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense in Belgrade that was bombed by NATO in 1999.

I think there was something part of the lease said that there had to be a memorial to those injured or killed by NATO.

Yeah.

By us.

Anyway, Ben, thoughts on this protest protest movement and why it is that there's always a nexus between the Trump family and like the shittiest autocrats in the world?

Oh, God.

Well, let's start with like the dumb part and then the good part.

I mean, I'm so fucking sick.

I mean, maybe one good thing that could come from the USAID being shuttered is maybe these guys can stop blaming everything on USCID or something.

Or what they're alluding to, I'm sure, is like George Soros and the Open Society Foundation's, you know, probably that too.

I mean, in February, the Serbian police raided four NGOs.

Um, they said that it was because they had USAID ties, but three of the four had gotten like a small amount of money from USAID, one had gotten none.

None of them are the reason these people are protesting.

And this is the thing that's right.

They'll go and they'll find, you know, somebody got like a $50,000 grant for like new computers from USAID or something.

And suddenly, the reason that there's millions of people on the street, I mean, they assign,

or even open societies, which does great work, but like

if open society, you know, the Soros Foundation was as all-powerful as these people, you know, we wouldn't be in the fucking mess.

Right.

There'd be left-wing governments.

Like,

this is not what is happening in the world, you know?

So I'm just so tired.

The fact that people, they've been on the same talking points about Soros and USAID and foreign funding for 20 years now, you know?

And the fact that people still swallow that shit is such.

Like, the amount of money that the Trump people are going to put in there and their various developments is far more than that came in from USAID or some foundations.

I will say, on a hopeful note, this is an entirely organic student-led movement that is able to get, like, I'm not that good at math, but it's like something like 5% of the population victories.

They're like 300,000 people on the streets.

They're wildly popular, too.

Wildly popular, innovative.

They look like they're having fun.

Message to America.

Like, where are we?

Like, we need to get out in the streets like this.

This is the only thing that has a remote chance of arresting a democratic democratic backsliding is to see this number of people out in the streets.

300,000 people in Serbia is like having millions and millions and millions of people out in the streets here.

And I think my hope is it is showing that there are people in parts.

Serbia is a tough place to protest too, right?

You're taking some degree of risk.

You've got a creepy, pretty autocratic president.

He's kind of kind of like Putin adjacent, right?

This is, you know, hopefully breaking the fear factor for people to stand up against these far-right movements or these kind of corruption.

And it also shows you that the argument, the thing that got people in the streets at the end of the day, was not just about democracy.

It was more about corruption.

It was more about we know these people have patronage networks.

We know that their autocracy is directly screwing us.

It's leading to things like this thing collapsing and that's getting people killed.

And so I think it's a message that this combination of like using corruption as a motivator and using protest as a vehicle is something that can be replicated in other places.

Yeah, I mean, right, exactly.

I mean, Vucic calls the protesters, he says it's a color revolution.

He says it's USAID.

It's total bullshit.

The government allowed a bunch of Chinese companies to renovate this railway like a year ago, this rail station.

And then this giant piece of concrete collapsed and killed 15 people.

So that's why people took to the streets.

And this movement, there was a great, I think it was Al Jazeera did a great piece on the protesters.

They've been organized in a really interesting way in that there's no leader.

Yes.

Like these students will get together.

Just like Hong Kong.

yeah exactly just like hong kong like they'll all get together in some big you know uh

you know hall or something like a big lecture room yeah and they'll put forward ideas and they'll all vote on them and they'd be doing interesting things like walking on foot from for miles and miles from city to city and something like 80 of the population of the Serbian population supports their demands which are pretty focused around like transparency accountability not punishing the protesters supporting higher education so you're right i mean I do think despite what Vucit says, despite what fucking morons like Don Jr.

said, like, this is the way for anyone

to hint living under authoritarian rule.

Well, and one other thing I'd say is that, like, in addition to being specific in their demands, being creative in their tactics, having fun, by the way, it's a good thing to like, it's a fun protest together.

Yeah, it's a movement you want to be a part of.

They also, they made an alliance with labor, right?

And so they have labor unions who have like, you know, their own power bases.

And so that's an interesting way to, like, you start with students, and then you bring in labor and then all of a sudden you bring in other people, right?

Yep, that's exactly right.

Yeah.

Not Jared Kushner buying the old defense ministry building.

What's the corruption that's happening in Serbia?

Is it like a few USAID grants and a few foreign foundations?

Or is it like the massive amounts of Chinese money paying for shitty infrastructure projects, lining the pockets of Vucic cronies while Jared and Rick Rinnell are making real estate deals?

I think there's a little more money on one side than all that.

With the former information minister for the

genocidal war criminal.

Let's just close out this section by listening to a clip of some protesters who spoke to the BBC.

And I'm protesting because they want to live in a safer country, a country without corruption, and a country with a much higher level of democracy.

This corruption has led to many lives being lost.

It's just awful living in this kind of climate in Serbia right now.

I was at every protest in every city.

It was magical to be in Novicad, where it all happened.

It felt like a celebration of democracy.

The protest gave me back the pride I had in my country because of the students who allowed me to hope that things can get better and that we can do better.

So,

not USAD.

No.

Wink, wink, Americans.

You know what to do.

This show is really pointing us the right direction, I think.

Okay, final thing.

Ben, did you know that one of China's biggest restaurants is offering refunds to an estimated 4,000 customers?

Sounds exciting, right?

Sounds very exciting.

Unfortunately, the reason is because a video went viral of a customer standing on a table and pissing into a vat of boiling broth at a hot pot restaurant.

No, no, no.

So these, like, I guess some 17-year-old guys were in a private room.

I'm sure they were hammered.

They listened to this hot pot thing.

It went super viral.

And I guess the restaurant chains like didn't respond forever.

And then finally, like people were not thrilled with the food safety implications.

So they've offered to compensate anyone who is at the chain, a part of the chain's 4,100 orders between February 24th and March 8th.

So I guess justice in the end.

Thank you, CBS News, for all this reporting.

These are the kind of stories we need.

I do have like a general wariness when you go to, I mean, the hot pot here too is not that good, let's face it.

I haven't done a lot of hot pots.

I've done it, and I love anything involving bowls with stuff in it and broth and meat and noodles and stuff, but

it just doesn't look appetizing.

Like there's this, where's this liquid?

Did they bring you these liquids that they drop on your...

I don't know.

Like, this is confirming my worst fears about hot pot.

You know, I, I suppose anything could happen in the kitchen that I don't know about, but the communal space aspect.

I'm excited for the feedback on this commentary because I'm sure people are going to torch us.

But I am so pathetic about spice that, like, if something is like Anthony Bourdain wouldn't look me in the eye, were he still alive and we talked about this because I remember one of my first

early on like first not first dates but like early on in dating Hannah we went to this really cool like new Thai place in DC that did this progressive coursing little syrup yes yeah I was like I was a regular there right on like 14th right yeah they knew me by name there okay and there was no reservation so I had to your scalp start sweating on the second course

I love that place that place was so good by the end of the meal they were bringing me milk after milk after milk because I was like sweating bullets and I just couldn't do it and I couldn't get through it.

And I wanted to eat it so badly because it was so delicious, but I just couldn't do it.

And like no amount of practice makes me better at that, which is why I haven't been like a big hot podcast.

I like spice.

Actually, just to put in a plug nearby, I went and got a, I don't know if you guys, any of the crew back there has been to a land noodle on La Brea and Santa Monica.

Good.

I got the spicy land noodle.

And I was literally, I liked spice, but it doesn't mean you don't have natural reactions.

So I just had tears like coming out.

If someone could have been looking at me and just thinking I was having some kind of breakdown, because I'm literally just crying, but like crying with joy.

If I went on hot ones, by the third wing, my face would look like a fiery.

Well, yeah, this is the problem with the.

And I'd be dripping and the snot and the tears, and it would be, I would never get through it.

At least you weren't.

You wouldn't be eating piss.

Yeah, exactly.

Just to bring this home.

And that's the problem with the hot pot.

And that's the problem with Netanyahu.

I, I, I don't,

sure, people may be triggered by this, so this is just one man's opinion.

Allowed to have an opinion on this.

But, like, I also kind of don't want to cook my own food.

I mean, like, that's why you go out, right?

Like, I don't need to like Korean barbecue for that reason.

That's fine.

Yeah, like, I just you can bring it to me, you know.

Okay, well, we'll, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll go out, we'll get some hot pot, we'll see what everybody says to us.

Okay, we're gonna take a quick break.

When we come back, you're gonna hear Ben's interview with Pankaj Mishra about his book, The World After Gaza.

So, stick around for that.

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Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by Pankash Mishra.

He's the author of the new book, The World After Gaza, also one of our leading thinkers, writers, essayists.

You can read his work in many different places.

Pankaj, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks, Ben, for having me.

So I really recommend everybody read this book.

It's tough, but bracing and fearless and connects so many different threads to answer kind of a question that you pose in the book that I think kind of sums it up.

How did Israel, a country built to house a persecuted and homeless people, come to exercise such a terrible power of life and death over another population of refugees, many of them refugees in their own land?

And how can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore even justify its clearly systematic cruelties and injustice?

Which, you know, I feel like the book sets out to answer that question through everything from intellectual history to political analysis to wrestling with current events.

Before we dive into that, though, it's interesting we're speaking the day after Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza.

And

I wonder what your reaction is to that event, because it feels to me like as shocking as these images are and hundreds of people killed, children killed.

People are so worn down by experiencing this.

How do you connect, being out in the world talking about this book, which is about the world after Gaza, to the kind of resumption of what we're seeing in Gaza?

Well, but it's become more and more difficult

because, in a way, I was one of those people who did not believe this ceasefire would last.

It was extremely fragile, and of course, it was being violated all through these previous weeks, previous four, eight weeks.

But

in any case, I mean, I think,

the

sudden violation of it this morning and the number of casualties just in a single day, I think it's the current figures are more than 150 children,

it still leaves you speechless.

And again, that question, like what strategic objectives, what geopolitical goals are being

met through this kind of indiscriminate bombing.

And it's very clear, again, the answer is that netanyahu is doing this in order to preserve his um at this point weakening hold on power we know that uh he's you know few few steps away from prison and he keeps postponing that that that sort of moment uh somehow and there are people in his cabinet who help him do this and of course there is now the trump administration willing to give him a green light to really whatever he wants to do at this point.

So I think in a way we are in a more kind of desperate stage where the culture and politics of cruelty is now, you know, truly global,

especially after the arrival of President Trump in the White House.

And there is simply no really recourse to any ideas of

sustainable peace or let alone things like compassion or empathy.

Well, I think what's so important about your book is you step back from this and

you look at the kind of narratives and identity politics, for lack of a better way of putting it, that helped produce the moment we're in.

And, you know, I should just say, some people may find this a challenging read.

I hope people read this book who might go into that being inclined to disagree with it.

I think that that's actually the most important reader for you.

So I'm going to go through some of those pieces of it.

And one that you talk about a lot is the interconnection between Israel and the Holocaust and how that has evolved over time.

And I'll tell you, Pangash,

I was very challenged by this because I'm one of those people.

I'm a secular Jew who grew up and my identity was not religious, but it was tied to the Holocaust, right?

We had family in the Holocaust and Israel was a part of the reckoning for the Holocaust and kind of my self-conception, right?

That it was an achievement to have this kind of safe haven.

And yet you kind of build, I think, a pretty compelling case

that

it wasn't immediately, you know, Zionism obviously predated the Holocaust.

And even when the state of Israel was declared independent, the Holocaust did not play as central a role in its identity as it came to do later.

And you kind of talk about, and to quote from the book, this deepening fixation with the Shoah and official Israeli rhetoric and a radical re-envisioning of Israel's identity identity and purpose as a country that would forever be on guard against another Shoah, which I think is a statement that nobody would really disagree with.

Talk about why that,

what,

to kind of tee you up here, you kind of make an argument that that kind of infinitely justifies anything Israel does vis-a-vis security threats, vis-a-vis the Palestinians, that if you are imbued with that kind of moral

mission to prevent another Holocaust,

you kind of have have a certain impunity.

Why did you decide to focus on this piece of the conflict and the Israeli identity?

You know, because, Ben, like many, many people out there, I tended to think that the memory of the Holocaust, at least, you know, as commemorated in Israel, flowed very naturally out of this, you know, extraordinary traumatic experience of it.

And there were survivors who then, you know, transmitted their memories to to their children and and and so within the culture at large that memory was slowly sort of institutionalized in a way but then much to my great shock I discovered that was certainly not the case and that in fact the survivors were treated with great contempt when they first arrived in the state of Israel because they

seemed to project an image of weakness that the leaders of the state of Israel at that point recoiled from because they were invested in a very different image of Israel altogether.

It's this very strong country.

So it's only in the 1960s that politicians turned to invoking the Holocaust as a sort of shared narrative, as a kind of nation-binding glue for the Israeli population.

You have to remember, you know, large part of the Israeli population at that point, in fact, more than 50%,

consisted of people who had come to Israel from Arab countries.

And so they had to be educated into this, you know, European experience and to this European narrative.

So

I think unscrupulous far-right politicians started to deploy the Shoah precisely at the point, again, worth remembering, when in the 1960s, when Israel actually becomes a supreme military power in the Middle East.

So on one hand, you have

this extraordinary military power, which is capable of taking on simultaneously several Arab nation states, several Arab armies, and defeating them.

At the same time, there is this emphasis on the idea that the Shoah happened once, it could happen again, and that you're living in a country that's surrounded by potential Nazis, you know, that

Israel's borders are, as Moshe Dean put it, the borders of Auschwitz.

So this kind of, you know, very deliberately cultivated paranoia.

is something that replaces really, you know, what might have been for some people at at least a memory flowing out of that particular experience.

So what I'm trying to say is in the book is that, you know, individual memory is one thing, collective memory is quite another.

Collective memory is always constructed with very particular

ideological ends.

And that is certainly the case here with the memory of the Holocaust in Israel.

Well, and I want to apply this to a number of things that are happening around the world right now.

So

because basically, you know, part of what follows from that idea is that the risk of

a genocide of the Jewish people, the risk of anti-Semitism,

you kind of show how it transferred from actual Nazis, you know, the German flavor, to kind of putting that on the Palestinians or the Arabs, right?

That even though there was no evidence that they, you know, they never, they weren't responsible for the Holocaust, right?

But what confuses me, Pankaj,

you know, what do you make of the fact that today

the the discourse on anti-Semitism, particularly in this country, tends to focus almost wholly on Hamas or the kind of left, right?

So

Hamas, which did horrific, horrific pogrom on October 7th, but I don't think anyone would think that Hamas is capable of destroying the state of Israel.

But even to go beyond that, you know, college kids getting deported from Colombia because they pose some violent threat to Jews, there's this kind of

zero tolerance for essentially criticism of Israel or solidarity with a certain kind of Palestinian politics.

At the same time that we see a rise of the very far-right ethno-nationalism in Europe and the United States, that I think

actually was the political force that led to the actual Holocaust.

So, what do you make of this redirection that at precisely the time that we see these kind of echoes of the 30s in the rise of ethno-nationalism in the West,

instead of focusing on that, the the entire anti-Semitic conversation, anti-Semitism seems to be focused on either the Palestinians or the Western left.

Well, it's fascinating.

I mean, I think it attests

in a very significant way to the success of the Israeli narrative.

You know, that we are under sort of constant, we live with this constant threat of being exterminated.

And this is a narrative that the state of Israel has very successfully persuaded many other people outside of Israel to believe in, to subscribe to.

So this is why you have this sort of, you know, extraordinary disparity or discrepancy where, you know, Israel is a formidable military power.

You can see that right away, it's, you know, it's engaged in a war with Yemen, with Syria, with Lebanon, and of course, it's bombing Gaza, as we speak, and doing that without any serious military response whatsoever from any of these parties that it's engaged in this war with.

So you have, you know, Israel becoming stronger and stronger, partly thanks to American support, and at the same time becoming closer and closer to far-right formations across Europe, and of course, the United States, the Christian evangelicals.

So, the object of anxieties for many people in the United States, which is the state of Israel, what they have really not noticed is how

in kind of really disturbing ways, this state that they wish to be protective of or sympathetic to has gone down this very dangerous, very sinister path of closer and closer alliances with not only far-right political groups or personalities or governments in Europe, but actually actively, explicitly anti-Semitic movements.

There was a piece on Haaretz only yesterday about this

very, very close links being developed between the state of Israel and various notoriously anti-Semitic organizations in Europe.

So this conversation in the United States seems to be completely detached from these developments, you know, the internal developments within the state of Israel, the rise, the emergence of the far-right, and the fact that the Israelis themselves, the Israeli regime, is today, you know, establishing intimate relations with some of the most powerful anti-Semites in the world.

You also talk about the relationship between

Narendra Modi and Bibi Netanyahu.

I want you to just describe, for listeners who might not be familiar, like what are the overlapping roots and

the overlapping project of the Hindu nationalism we see from Modi and the kind of ethno-nationalisms we see from Netanyahu.

And is this the future of politics?

I mean, because

it feels like that all around the world, there's a different flavor of this, you know?

You know, I grew up in India in a Hindu nationalist family, you know, very sympathetic to Israel, and partly because, you know, Israel we saw as a country that was merciless in its treatment of, you know, potentially treacherous forces such as, you know, the Muslim population of Palestine.

So that was one major sort of source of admiration for us.

And I think today there are many more people in India who feel that way.

You know, Netanyahu has his biggest fan base in India.

And of course, the Modi government is actually an exception within the global south, within Asia and Africa and Latin America, in in having such close relations and i think it's partly because again i think like other far-right formations or ethno-nationalist you know movements and and personalities they see israel essentially as getting away uh doing a lot of things that they would like to pull off but can't so israel really is is is a is a is a great sort of object of envy for them and i think there's a kind of you know ideological affinity of course with the majoritarian ethno-nationalist project.

But I think on a psychological level, there is this great feeling of identification with a country that can be so

indiscriminately brutal and uncompromising.

And that is something they themselves aspire to.

So it works at very many different levels.

It's not just people point to arms sales or increasing trade or India becoming part of some Middle Eastern kind of anti-China group or narrative.

But I think it's also really important to look at these ideological and psychological affinities

between not only India and Israel, but also other far-right groups and Israel today.

Well, if I were to play devil's advocate

and say, from the perspective of a Modi or a Netanyahu

or

any number of these figures, Putin has his own version of this history, Orban, Hungary, lost territory after World War, etc.

I think the way they wouldn't describe it, but I think the way their mind might work is this world is corrupt, it's cruel, it's a tough place.

And you know what?

If we want to survive in this world, we might just need to be cruel ourselves.

You know, that the Indians suffered under the yoke of the British and before that, the Mughal Empire, I guess.

And

the Russians got humiliated at the end of the Cold War.

Obviously, the Jewish people have suffered for centuries.

And you know what?

Guys like you and me might not like it, but this is how the world works.

And if you don't have this kind of ethno-nationalist, strongman-type state, you're going to end up being on the other end of that.

How do you wrestle with that possibility that maybe they're right?

I think, you know, I mean, that's certainly the trend right now.

And it was, of course, a trend

back in the 19th century, you know, the scramble for Africa, all the sort of clashes between imperialist powers.

And then we saw two two world wars in the 20th century.

I think the whole point of countries like India or places where people fought, devoted a large part of their lives to fighting imperialism and fighting for national sovereignty was that we create a new world order with this kind of social dharmanist survivalist mentality which you know causes constant conflict causes forces nations to live in this atmosphere of fear and paranoia,

that we can get away from all that create you know society or international global order based on some shared norms some some norms of civilization so if you want to go back there you know to those dark days of of of you know racial imperialism in in the 19th century kind of naked exploitation naked expansion um well you know maybe these people have a point but if we don't want to go back there and and find ourselves in a third world war, then I think we need to move away from these sort of fantasies of a purified national community, a national community purified of its treacherous elements.

All this

is really potentially extremely violent, not just to the nations themselves, but also to

world peace at large.

So I think

these people may have persuaded some parts of their population that this is the right way but i think you know you can see very clearly a future full of more and more conflict if not catastrophic world war yeah no i the the the history shows it it leads to bad places and i want to ask you about this because uh the world order seems to have unraveled at least as the you know the post-World War II U.S.-led order.

Another core point of your book, which I think,

again, I hope people in this country read because

you make it very persuasively, is that for most of the world's people, right, there's not the same narrative of the last hundred years where the central events were World War II and the Cold War and the Holocaust.

It's actually the story of decolonization, which encompasses, by the way, many Holocaust of non-white peoples and many liberation struggles.

And you're kind of reflecting the perspective,

you know, to use the shorthand that can be problematic, but the global south view essentially, the decolonized world,

is probably looking at what's happening in the U.S.

now.

It's certainly looking at what's happening in Gaza now and see it kind of confirming all of their worst

experiences and perspectives on the West.

Is there a potential, as someone who's written about this in other books too, do you see any potential for

some different kind of concept of order to generate not from within the West, but from within the global south?

What is the potential for something to emerge out of this wreckage of a period of history we're living through in which some of the countries that are generally seen as more marginal to world events but are rising in power and influence, could we see something emerge from that narrative that is

more durable than

the order that President Trump is currently deconstructing?

Trevor Burrus Well, it's interesting you ask that, you know, because obviously India is not the leader in the way it used to be of the, you know, non-West, as it were.

It was once, you know, it had this very morally prestigious position.

The leader right now is South Africa.

South Africa, which is kind of insisting that certain norms be observed.

And for that reason, we know it risked a great deal by going to The Hague, by filing that case.

against the state of Israel.

But again, it comes out of that long experience of fighting against

racist imperialism, of fighting against racial discrimination and saying, look, we can't have this anymore.

We can't have

a nation whose borders have never been clearly defined, that keeps expanding all the time, then periodically bombing people.

So I suppose the South African initiative in recent months, a very risky initiative for which it is being severely punished as we speak

by the Trump administration, is probably probably one sign that within the global south, some of those energies that went into the anti-apartheid struggle or went into the struggle for decolonization, the urge for a new world order, those

impulses, those desires are probably still alive and can occasionally take surprising forms, like the South African case

against Israel, which again I say was a huge gamble, you know, and a huge risk.

And obviously, you know, they are paying the price for it right now.

And one last question.

Another one of your books that I really liked is From the Ruins of Empire, where you detail some of the writers and thinkers from within these parts of the world, whether it's China, India, the Islamic world, who kind of seeded what became liberation movements.

What is the role of the writer today?

Because it can probably feel so overwhelming.

People are on social media, people are in this kind of pretty dumbed-down discourse.

You know, are someone who've written for, you know, the New Yorker, the New York Review books, London Review books, write these books.

How do you think about the role of a political writer in this kind of very

both scary and sometimes stupid period we're living through?

You know, that's, I think, Ben, I sometimes feel like all we can do is kind of keep opening up fresh perspectives, keep exploring experiences that haven't been explored before, persuade people to step out of their, you know, boxes, their silos, their particular narratives, and make them see that there are other ways of understanding this,

other ways of perceiving the world, and try and make them see how the other looks at it,

how people in different parts of the world look at it.

And again, as I said, there are so many histories, and those are the histories that I've been engaging with, that have not really been properly told.

Because who will tell them?

You need a lot of institutions, a lot of institutional power, a lot of cultural power to relate those histories.

And I think as responsible citizens, whether as writers or just ordinary citizens, it's our kind of responsibility to bring those experiences into play to make people think that there is not only just this one story.

There are so many different stories out there.

And

if as writers we can insist on the multiplicity of these stories and the multiple perspectives

that go with those stories, then perhaps we would have made a tiny contribution.

Obviously, we don't have any kind of political power.

We watch as helplessly as anyone else, the mayhem in the world today.

But at least we can make a small difference just by creating this little archive that

people

can look to for some kind of intellectual and even perhaps emotional support.

Yeah.

Well, look, I really appreciate the conversation.

The book is The World After Gaza.

People should read it.

If you have been critical of Israel, you will learn much about the history of how we got here.

If you are supportive of Israel, I think

it's even more important, again, for you to kind of wrestle with some of the difficult questions that are raised in the book.

So, Pankash, thanks for writing the book and thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much, Ben, for having me.

Thanks again to Pankash Mishra for joining the show.

What else should we have?

We'll get a little hot pot.

I do, I love the Korean barbecue in in this area.

Korean barbecue in LA is just

off the chart.

Incredibly good.

What else we eat?

We got good Vietnamese.

I mean, like,

there's pockets of amazing Vietnamese around, you know, the.

I mean, LA's LA's got a good friend scene.

LA's good.

Yeah, we got a good friend scene.

All right, that's it for this week.

Talk to you soon.

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