Trump's New MAGA Deep State

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Welcome back to Pot Dave the World on Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

We got a Chiefs Eagles Super Bowl, huh?

Yeah,

really giving people what they want there.

You know, my number one sports hate is all mostly New York teams, mostly the Yankees.

But, you know, I'm with you on the Jets.

I'd join you in the Yankee hatred.

But like, Philly's really grown.

I love to troll Philly fans too because they get so mad at you, but they just keep winning.

They're really pissing me off.

Yeah.

Well, the Eagles fans just

seem like they need to like chill out a little bit.

They're very sensitive, but then they throw batteries at like Santa Claus.

Every single Eagles fan seems to be like Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro in the Silver Wayne's playbook, just like a little psychotic, you know?

Like you might say the wrong thing and they just go ballistic.

It's like, okay, guys, it's just a football game, you know?

It's just a football game that they win and we lose.

But anyway, Ben, it's been quite a couple weeks here.

Possibly

in a journey.

We're learning a lot about what Trump 2.0's foreign policy is going to look look like.

So, we're going to spend a lot of time on that today.

We're going to talk about the State Department freezing all foreign aid, domestic spending too, by the way, but that's not our piece of this thing.

We'll talk about the firing of all the non-political leadership at USAID, some major changes at the Pentagon within the U.S.

military,

Trump just beating the shit out of the President of Colombia and the Prime Minister of Denmark for fun, I think.

I'm sort of exhausted already by that.

And then we're going to cover this growing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a huge step forward in AI that has spooked Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and some people in government.

And then some updates on Syria and why we love the French.

And then, Ben, you're going to hear my interview with Peter Beinart about his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, which we both got a PDF of.

Yeah, I've started reading it, and it is incredibly powerful and

fearless.

You know, Peter does not, there's no self-censorship.

No.

He does not mince words.

It's deeply informed, deeply personal.

Definitely worth checking out.

That's why I like talking to him so much and I have so much respect for him is that he has taken some views early on in his career, like supporting the Iraq war, that he is completely apologized for and course corrected in a very public and thoughtful way.

And then on all things serve Israel-Palestine, he's taken views that

you're not allowed to say in official Washington, right?

That have cost him professionally and personally in the form of relationships and friendships.

Sure, financially.

Financially, I'm sure.

And he just doesn't care.

He just has this moral compass where he feels obligated to say what he thinks about this stuff.

Yeah.

Which is very rare in American public life.

Very rare in American foreign policy.

I mean, because, right, if you want to keep getting booked on, I don't know, insert name of

talk show,

you usually don't get to have these views.

You don't see Peter a lot on cable news.

No, and I'm sure, you know, book events of his will be canceled and people will protest them and things.

But it's a guy speaking the truth as he knows it.

So very impressive.

So, all right, well, let's get to this Trump piece of our conversation, Ben, because a lot of big things have happened.

I kind of rattled off a few.

In terms of our mantra of watch what he does, not what he says, the cutting off all foreign aid or freezing all foreign aid, although I think we should assume it's cut until further notice.

That is a huge deal.

So Trump signed an executive order on his first day of his administration putting a 90-day pause on all foreign assistance programs.

People weren't sure if that meant just new stuff or whether it would stop ongoing things, like existing programming.

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, first time I've said that out loud, clarified to all the agencies that this pause applies to even programs where money had already been awarded.

So in practice, what that means is programs that clear landmines and unexploded ordnance were forced to stop working.

That means people in Vietnam, Iraq, Ukraine are now at risk of picking up a clustering munition and having their hand blown off.

And the New York Times pointed out that this puts Americans at risk, too, because unexploded ordnance killed as many U.S.

military ground troops during the 1991 Persian Gulf War as were lost to enemy fire.

It means PEPFAR, a wildly successful program to combat HIV and AIDS around the world, one created by George Bush.

It's credited with saving 25 million lives, has been frozen.

There's reports that you have staff on the ground in clinics who are told not to give out medicines that are like sitting on the shelf over there that were purchased and and distributed to these clinics, but they just can't use them.

There's foreign military financing that goes through the State Department for countries like Taiwan and Ukraine that's now frozen.

They have stopped work on battling a breakout of an Ebola-like virus in Tanzania.

They've stopped monitoring the bird flu in 49 countries.

No way that's ever going to come back to bite us.

And then, you know, just to make sure that like these foreign assistants.

Not good for the price of eggs.

Not good for the price of eggs.

Just to make sure that like, you know, foreign assistance programs were fully kneecapped the new political leaders at usaid

put about 60 of the agency's top career staff on leave meaning that like all the senior career non-political professional staff are just not at the office anymore probably hundreds of years of knowledge yeah it's equivalent of um like firing all the generals in the military basically so ben in the first term like I think This was the kind of thing you might see the Trump people do because they didn't understand the implications.

My fear now is that they know how damaging this is.

They want us to freak out, and that's kind of what this is about.

Like they want the fight, you know, because again, it's like a status quo versus change.

But I don't know, I'm wondering how,

like, what you made of some of these moves and what you thought the most impactful ones were.

Well, first of all, you know, Rubio, we used to call him General Rubio, Secretary Rubio.

Right, Secretary Road.

He keeps repeating this mantra that we're only going to fund programs that directly serve U.S.

interests.

We already know that Trump's view of U.S.

interests are Trump's interests.

And actually, there's a tell in the fact that the only carve-out was for Israel, essentially Israeli assistance and

Egypt, but that's not Israel.

It's for the peace treaty, Camp David Accords.

And so you have to think that this isn't a freeze where they're going to resume at the same level.

This is a freeze with the intention to massively cut a whole range of programs.

And we can guess what, you know, it's all the kinds of things you talked about.

And I think there's a few different angles that people should be concerned about.

The first are there really is foreign assistance that is directly in the national security space, right?

So if there are prison camps in eastern Syria where ISIS members are, you know, there's U.S.

assistance that pays the local employed guards at the prison camps.

You know, there's assistance that is directly tied to kind of counterterrorism missions.

Did you see the reporting on this?

Yes.

Yeah.

That some of the guards just didn't show up to work because they thought their salaries were cut off.

Yeah.

So these ISIS guys, like 10,000 ISIS guys, almost just walked out of the prison.

You don't want that to happen.

Seems bad.

That would be bad, right?

And similarly, a pandemic or an epidemic, you know, we fought

the Ebola outbreak, which Americans freaked out about, that Trump fear-mongered about.

That was largely fought through foreign assistance, through USAID, setting up public health facilities in Africa to stop the Ebola outbreak there so it couldn't get here.

And that worked.

So when you're talking about things like health and counterterrorism, these are things that directly affect American lives.

You don't have to make it a bank shot, right?

Then there are things that, let's be clear, this stuff that Trump does, it seems like a show, if these spending cuts stay in place, people will die because of them.

You know, whether that's people that are not getting HIV, AIDS drugs under PEPFAR, whether that's kids who are picking up unexploded ordinance in Laos that could have been cleared and the unexploded ordinance blows up.

You might not care about that.

But then you're a shitty person and I don't care about you.

I mean, and this is something that I'm going to take to the Trump years.

Well, you know, you care about PepFAR or like that.

You should.

It's a Republican program, too, by the way.

It's George W.

Bush's greatest legacy or by the only good legacy, right?

And so there will be real world consequences, life and death consequences for people because these programs are cut.

And if you don't like...

the United States doing anything as the world's most powerful country for humanitarian purposes around the world, okay, congratulations.

Like, I'm glad, you know,

you're going to feel good that kids are dying.

That's pretty fucked up.

Yeah, well, and just to be a hack member of Congress for a a second, like the they're clearing ordinance from fields in Ukraine that grow things like wheat.

Like parts of Ukraine are the breadbasket of the world.

If those fields are unusable for very long periods of time, guess what's going to grow up?

Yeah.

The cost of wheat, the cost of bread, right?

So there could be a direct impact, although it's circuitous and long term.

Yeah.

And the last thing I'd say is that there, and there's so many things we could say about this, but you often hear people like us talk about, well, this is a gift to China.

I want to be specific about this, right?

And Rubio is the kind kind of person who says, we're in this big geopolitical competition with China.

You go to Africa.

I remember going to Ethiopia where the African Union is, like the kind of UN of Africa.

It's in a building that China built.

China is building shit all over the world.

They're building ports in Latin America.

They're building government buildings in infrastructure in Africa.

They're building technology ecosystems in Southeast Asia.

If the United States withdraws from all of the contributions, these international institutions, all of these development programs in these parts of the world, we, by definition, will have far less influence.

I mean, you just, you don't need to be some national security expert to understand that if suddenly we're not even in the game and you've got China and Russia and other countries that go down to these places and spread some money around,

they're by definition going to have a ton of more influence.

You couple that with things like tariff threats.

It just is going to turbocharge the reorientation of the world towards China.

They have Belt Road Initiative.

They have these development initiatives that other countries want to be a part of.

And if the U.S.

is not offering anything as an alternative,

clearly we are going to lose whatever geopolitical competition Marco Rubio likes to talk about as being in with China.

Well, we are threatening to annex.

some other countries.

Yeah.

So there's that.

Yeah, no, you're totally right.

And Trump's also, I mean, we can see them getting their sea legs.

Trump's getting his team into place.

Secretary General Rubio is now at state.

Hag Seth was confirmed at the Pentagon.

John Ratcliffe is the new CIA director.

So, like, slowly, the pieces are coming into place.

We just talked about how all these senior career USAID staffers got put on leave.

A similar thing happened at the White House to the National Security Council staffers.

They got sent home until future notice, presumably until they can be vetted for ideological reasons.

And then over at the Pentagon, the Department of Defense will once again ban transgender people from serving in the military.

I think in 2018, this impacted like 14,000 trans service members, again, people who want to serve their country, fight for their country.

They're getting thrown out of the military just for bigotry reasons.

The Pentagon is also killing DEI programs and will reinstate and give back pay to service members who are discharged for refusing to take the COVID vaccine.

The CIA released a new assessment about the origins of COVID.

They now support the lab leak theory, but with low confidence.

Just worth noting because I'm sure a lot of people saw this story.

But this is a new assessment.

It's not based on any new intelligence.

It's just an update based on what information they already had.

Though, talking to some people, it sounds like the assessment might have changed during the Biden years and just got released now.

So I don't know.

Once again, this is more like opaque than anything else.

And then finally, Ben, Trump removed the security details for officials in his first administration who were involved in the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and have since been targeted for assassination by the Iranian regime.

Those officials include Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, a guy named Brian Hook.

And here's what Trump had to say when he was asked about this decision.

You can't have a security detail for the rest of your life because you worked for government.

You know, they all made a lot of money.

They can hire their own security, too.

All the people you're talking about, they can go out.

I can give them some good numbers of very good security people.

They can hire their own security.

They all made a lot of money.

Fauci made a lot of money.

They all did.

So if they, you know, felt that strongly, I think that certainly I would not take responsibility.

Fauci catching strays.

I think he also lost the security deal based on non-Iranian threats.

It's worth noting, Ben, that a few months ago, Republicans were attacking Joe Biden for not doing enough to protect Trump from Iranian threats and for not extending security details to other Trump officials who had been threatened by Iran.

I guess now we just Trump wants them all to die.

I guess like my takeaways from this sort of series, this group of personnel things is this is Project 2025.

Yes, yes.

You know, it's like they're vetting all these national security jobs for

ideological reasons.

And on top of that, I mean, it seems like the new plan is just to rip away Congress's role in appropriating all funding and call it a day.

Well, that's the core point here to all this, and it connects back to the foreign aid freeze, which is that Trump is trying to completely centralize all power and control in the U.S.

government in his hands.

And some people will say, you know, the majoritarians, well, he won the election and elections have consequences.

No, that has never happened before in American history.

It's still a constitution.

You know, maybe it happened in the Civil War or something, right?

But the whole point is that things like government budgets and personnel in the system designed by the founding fathers that the Republicans like to venerate was designed to make this a blended responsibility.

A lot of the programs that are funded, that are being frozen, were funded by Congress.

And now Trump is coming in and saying, no, I don't like that.

So that program that's already been appropriated, the money's already been pushed out the door, is just stopped.

The personnel piece you know when we join the NSC what people don't realize the National Security Council in the White House it's about between two and 300 people that coordinates all the actions of the US government on national security the majority of the staff are not political hires they're not people that are hired by a new president they are detailed they're state department or intelligence community or military personnel that are detailed to the NSC and By saying that they need loyalty tests or by firing all of them, that's both troubling because you're creating groupthink and you're creating a political lens through which you look at anything on national security.

You're also, again, as with the USAID, you know, firings or suspensions, you're pushing tons of expertise out the window.

Like we kept in place, a good example, right?

Alyssa Slotkin, and obviously she had to be a Democrat, but I didn't know what her politics were.

She was a holdover from the Bush years.

She worked on Iraq.

She knew the Iraqi politicians.

She knew what was going on in the Iraq war.

Like if we had just gotten rid of her and everybody else, we would have brought people in who had none of those relationships warm, you know?

And so all the people at the working level who manage relations with other countries, you know, they're out the door because Trump wants a bunch of MAGA loyalists in, you know?

And across the board here, I think people need to see this for the massive sea change that it is.

If the entirety of the United States government, very much a Project 2025 agenda, is you have to pass a loyalty test.

You have to be, you know, first and foremost politically committed to Donald Trump and his agenda.

Despite what he says about merit-based expertise is devalued the diversity program is getting killed

you know you talked about this a little bit on PSA if we want a military where you essentially have an increasingly a diverse collection of people the lower down you get just run by a bunch of white men it's a fucking dark thing to think about and it's not going to be good for cohesion in the military it's not keeping good people yeah or keeping good people it's an up-and-out system because then people are going to leave and then what who's going to sign up for the military?

Proud boys and oath keepers or something?

Because they want to be in an armed militia for Donald Trump.

So this kind of transformation of the federal government very rapidly into the image of Donald Trump through money and personnel is

chillingly smart in the way they're doing it because it is Project 2025.

They thought about it.

But

it's going to lead to very dangerous outcomes.

I also just like, just on a practical level, like who is doing work at the NSC right now?

You sent home a couple hundred people like at kind of the director level.

Like these are workhorses.

These are people that are doing 16-hour days and you can't work from home.

Everything you do is classified.

You have to be in a skiff.

You have to be on your high-side classified computer and have access to documents.

Is there just no one at home at the NSC right now?

Are they

scrambling to import new people from agencies that they've already vetted?

I don't know.

Well, and later we'll talk about Congo, right?

The DRC.

Something like a crisis breaks out and none of the people that have been working on that country are there.

You think these random MAGA guys who've gone to the NSC know anything about what's happening there or in Syria for that matter, or know about the like

you, you can't just kind of the reason it's designed like this is so that it's like a relay race where you're taking the baton in full stride.

They're actually stopping completely.

The world isn't stopping, it's going to keep going, and you know, they're going to fall behind.

Mike Waltz is Googling like M23 is bad, question mark.

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At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

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We're also bad starting to see how Trump is going to treat other other countries in this administration and partners around the world.

We've talked a bunch about Trump's desire to take over Greenland.

The Financial Times reported that Trump had a terrible call with the Danish prime minister recently.

Long story short, the prime minister said Greenland is not for sale and tried to offer up more military cooperation or whatever, more access to minerals.

In response, Trump threatened her with tariffs.

So that will help NATO.

And then over the weekend, the United States briefly entered into a little trade war with Colombia after Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro started fighting on Twitter about U.S.

migrant deportation flights.

And like, so that we don't need to relitigate all of what happened there, but basically, clearly Trump wanted this fight and it was a very high-profile way for him to look like he got a win.

And it makes me think that all of these threats to slap tariffs on smaller countries like Mexico and Canada are very real.

It's still not clear to me what he's he's going to do in terms of China tariffs because that will create real economic disruption.

But, like, if you're a liberal or leftist leader out there in the world, like, duck and cover, man.

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, on Colombia, you got a win, which was instead of civilian flights, there are military flights landing in Colombia.

Like, that's the totality of this win.

Congrats.

It's a massive news cycle own.

I mean, just

it's Trump reflecting the stupidity of our news cycle that that is some kind of big win.

I think the common thread we can take away, which is kind of the theme of this week's podcast: what can we learn about how Trump's gonna operate?

Well, he's gonna bully the shit out of small countries, and he's gonna bully the shit out of countries that have left or liberal leaders for kind of MAGA ends like immigration deportations or more alarming ends like territorial expansionism vis-a-vis Greenland.

I mean, everything we're hearing, and I want to thank actually, I heard from some Danish worldos and

clarifying all these points.

But what you can sense is the alarm.

And in terms of the why this matters, again,

there's the obvious point I made earlier, this thing about foreign assistance in China, it certainly applies in Latin America in the sense that

this is a region where China's made a lot of inroads.

Russia has some presence.

If you're Colombia, you might fold on this, but this incentivizes to hell for you to like really ramp up your trade relationship with China.

And I think what people should look for is, I bet you these Latin American countries are going to start to band together, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, particularly these places with left-wing leaders to do more things collectively and to do more things with China or Europe, just anything but the United States.

They're going to try to kind of U.S.-proof their economies and societies to the best they can.

Tragically for our politics, that may not like be evident six months or a year from now, but we're going to look up five years from now and the world's going to look very different.

Europe itself is probably going to go its own way on things like China.

And so this bears watching.

And the other thing is, like, when, you know, there's all this talk about allies, and when do you need allies?

It's for the thing you don't expect.

So if you are breaking NATO and alienating all of Europe by what you're doing to Denmark, you know, the next time we need help.

vis-a-vis NATO or cooperation from some European country, they're going to be less inclined to give it because of this kind of thing.

Trump is

kicking the shit out of Colombia to take deportation flights.

Well, we're going to need their help to fight the cartels if Trump really wants to do that or to deal with the cocaine trade.

And

this is going to come due.

There's going to be a bill for this that comes due.

And Trump is counting on Americans having no attention span or capacity to connect the things he's doing to the outcomes that they won't like.

And that's the last point about tariffs.

Remarkably,

Trump's trade wars with China and decoupling of supply chains with China were massive contributors to inflation under Joe Biden.

And somehow he escaped

any responsibility for that.

This time around, I think it's going to be apparent much quicker with all these actions on immigration and tariffs, which are going to be inflationary.

Yeah, everybody's looking for it at least.

Yeah, I mean,

Petro was kind of designed in a lab to be a...

Trump opponent, right?

He's a leftist, former guerrilla, Marxist guerrilla in his teens.

So I think he was looking for a fight.

I reached out to a Latin America expert friend.

I was like, what do you think happened here?

And he's like, short answer, he's crazy and probably was drunk.

Longer answer, he's having trouble at home politically.

So we picked a fight thinking it would benefit him.

And it did not go well because most Colombians were like, wait, we don't want tariffs.

We don't want to lose visa access to the United States.

This is a bad idea.

But to your point, I mean, it wasn't, Colombia's a long-standing U.S.

ally, but it wasn't just Colombia that was offended by some of these deportation flights.

It was a deportation flight from the U.S.

to Brazil where the guys got off the plane in Brazil and were still handcuffed.

And that went super viral in a lot of parts of Latin America and upset a lot of leaders and the population there and was a real problem.

And then, you know, some of these other Latin American experts I was talking to were telling me that like the Panamanians were excited and eager to work with Trump.

And then he came out of the gate threatening to like invade them.

So everyone's just kind of like reeling and trying to figure out what.

to do.

And it does seem like the only thing Trump cares about right now is deportation.

And I was talking to

Dara Lind yesterday for Padse America, who's an immigration expert, and she reminded me that we have no legal obligation to deport people back to their home countries.

They can just send them to any country.

And it sounds like El Salvador and Naeb Bukele is like, hand up, I'll take in as many migrants as you want, Mr.

Trump, which is just confusing if the first group of deportation flights is supposed to be full of Venezuelan gang members.

Like, where is Bukeley going to put them in these existing overcrowded gangs where there's already like huge issues?

Is he going to build new prisons?

Like, what is he getting in return?

Like, none of it makes sense.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

It's not thought through.

It will have second and third order consequences, whether in terms of

countries aligning against us, realigning.

But also,

this is going to, I think,

permanently,

certainly long term, transform the view of the United States around the world, which has been up and down as it is.

I I think the first Trump term was kind of like, is this the American?

Is it an aberration?

Is this an aberration?

And then it was like Biden.

And they're like, it's not that everybody loved everything Joe Biden did, including us.

But now we are the country that puts people, including children, on military planes wearing leg irons and handcuffs and flies them to random countries.

And you don't ever stop being that country because people think rightly that Americans voted for that, you know?

And I just don't think we recognize that, you know, that makes us Russia and China.

You know, we're no different than we're just a big country that does whatever the fuck we want, no matter how bad it looks, no matter how offensive it is to people.

And

if Americans think that they didn't benefit at all from being a little different than that, then I, you know,

those those great years you want to go back to were the high point of when we were kind of the steward of those rules, you know, in the post-World War II era.

So I just think this is going to be worse than people are contemplating right now in terms of the blowback.

Yeah, speaking of blowback, I mean, Gaza is the focus of my conversation with Peter Beinard, so we'ren't going to dig into that too deeply here.

But we did want to play for you the kind of latest policy float for the future of Gaza from President Trump.

I said to him, I'd love you to take on more, because I'm looking at the whole Gaza strip right now, and it's a mess.

It's a real

you'd like Jordan to have speaking from the people.

I'd like him to take people.

I'd like Egypt to take people.

I'm meeting with, I'm talking to General Osisti tomorrow, sometime, I believe.

And I'd like Egypt to take people, and I'd like Jordan to take people.

I mean, you're talking about

probably a million and a half people.

And we just clean out that whole thing.

Over the centuries, that's had many, many conflicts in site.

And I don't know, something has to happen, but

it's literally a demolition site right now.

Almost everything's demolished and people are dying there.

So I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace.

Temporarily?

It could be either.

It could be temporary, could be long-term.

So that's the President of the United States proposing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

It's straight up ethnic cleansing.

That's the only thing it is.

And it's denying the existence of a Palestinian people,

who date back thousands of years, right?

The people have been living there in that space who are Palestinian and saying, well, because they're Arab, they can just move to some other Arab country.

And, you know, number one, the Palestinians don't want to leave because they know that if they are moved to Egypt or Jordan, they will never go back to Gaza.

And Trump doesn't even pretend it was Democrats.

Nobody believes that they'll go back to Gaza because there are still Palestinian refugees in Jordan, in Lebanon, in surrounding countries who've never been able to go back from

48 or 67 or whatever disruption took place in the past.

So the Palestinian people don't want this.

So it's not like charity for them because it denies their existence and ethnically cleanses their territories.

Secondly, Egypt and Jordan do not want these people.

No, and they made that clear.

These are vulnerable governments that don't have money to pay for this.

I would not be surprised to see a kind of Arab Spring type uprising in either of those countries for different reasons in the coming years.

Egypt, because it's a brittle, corrupt military dictatorship.

Jordan, because, frankly, there's a lot of dissatisfaction with how the Palestinian issue has been handled.

And already two million or so Palestinians living there.

And so you introduce a bunch of new people into that already combustible dynamic.

You could get that kind of instability there.

That's probably why some of the other Arab states are not going to be too keen on this as well.

And then lastly, again,

these people take responsibility for nothing.

I mean, we've talked about the fact that the Abraham Accords that cut the Palestinians out of the deal and was celebrated as this big peace deal by Trump and a lot of people, frankly, ignored the fact that that empowered Hamas because they're cut out of any political process.

They have no hope for a state.

And that leads to October 7th.

I know people don't like hearing this.

It doesn't make it okay.

It makes Hamas is responsible for October 7th.

But causally, if you create no political horizon for people, you incentivize violent resistance as the only means for political organization in the Palestinian territories anymore.

And so we just people don't like to hear this, but we have to name it because it's going to happen.

And Peter actually, in his book, digs into a lot of the data on this, like polling around support for violence against Israelis among the Palestinian population.

And it directly corresponds with times where there's sort of hope of a political accommodation in the future in a Palestinian state and times when there is no hope.

No surprise.

In those moments, support for violence goes up.

But also, I mean, to your point,

we shouldn't be surprised by this, right?

Because remember a year or so ago, Jared Kushner went and spoke to a class at Harvard, started talking about how Gaza was like beachfront property and good for condos and how, you know, it should be bulldozed and you just ship all the Palestinians out to the Egyptian desert.

Like, well, here it is, government policy.

Yeah.

And that's, I mean, that's a very believable plan that's in their heads.

Yes.

That's how they look at the world as real estate, corrupt real estate developers, because that's what they are.

And what Nenyahu would love, because that would be exactly the gift his right-wing coalition wants, and will help him.

They want to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank, and we'll see how that goes.

Fun.

Great development.

Okay, well, let's turn to a very different part of the world, but there's an equally troubling development happening in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC for short, where a Rwandan-backed rebel group called M23 says it has captured Goma, which is a city of over 1 million people in the eastern DRC.

It's right on the border with Rwanda.

So M23 is a rebel group that operates out of the eastern DRC.

It was formed by soldiers that mutinied from the Congolese army back in 2012.

It's mostly made up of the Tutsi ethnic group.

The name M23 is a reference to March 23rd, 2009, which is the date of a failed 2009 peace agreement that these soldiers who mutinied are angry about.

The DRC, the US, and the UN have all accused Rwanda of providing weapons and logistical support to the M23, and in some cases, basically commanding them as a mercenary force.

Last year, Rwanda even deployed 3,000 or 4,000 troops to Congo to support these M23 fighters.

So they're getting even more brazen about it.

The M23 briefly occupied Goma back in 2012, but were driven out and then just kind of lay dormant for about a decade.

But this year, they've made this rapid advance on the city into the Congo.

And on Friday, things got really bad.

The military governor of North Kivu, which is the province where Goma is in, where Goma is the capital, was killed on the battlefield.

On Saturday, the UN peacekeeping mission in Goma was evacuated.

13 peacekeepers had already been killed.

And the UN says that this year, 400,000 people have fled their homes, joining the millions who have already been displaced in eastern Congo.

So officials in the U.S.

and the UN say that they think that M23's goal is now to occupy Goma and do so for the long term so they can exploit these valuable mineral resources in the area.

There are a lot of metals like cobalt, copper, lithium that are key components in electrical vehicle batteries and other green technology and are worth trillions of dollars, literally.

So, Ben, I'll pause there.

I mean, this is, there's a lot of history here we could get into, but it's a very worrisome development because M23 is a brutal group known to commit atrocities, to torture, to rape,

and just do brutal acts to people, including to civilians.

And this fighting is likely to displace hundreds of thousands or millions of people and could risk a wider war across the region and a region that has seen some really devastating ethnic tribal violence over the past decades.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, you said it well.

I mean, this dates all the way back to the Rwandan genocide.

And, you know, in the initial years after that, when Rwanda started intervening in

the politics of the DRC, it was ostensibly to kind of go after some of the remnants of, because

the groups backed by Rwanda and the DRC are Tutsis, and they're going after

the ethnic groups that were obviously participants in the genocide.

But over time, what's become clear is that this is

basically a resource play.

There's tons of natural resources in the DRC ever since the Belgians colonized the place.

It's been exploited for that purpose.

And you summed up, you know,

this is a horrific group that has committed, you know, rape as a weapon of war, mass atrocities.

You could have mass displacement of people, could destabilize that part of Africa more generally.

I think that it also is indicative of a new reality where there's this kind of normalization of territorial expansionism of saying, you know, if you're Rwanda, like, well, you know, now's the time to make our play.

Right.

And the why now question, right?

The why now question, I don't know that that's the exact answer, but you kind of look around and you see Russia and Ukraine and you see Israel and Gaza and you see,

you know, what's happening in Sudan, Chinese are eyeing Taiwan, and then you see the U.S.

talking about Panama and Greenland.

I'm not suggesting that's like directly what's happened here, but this is one more instance where a country is comfortable just erasing the whole norm of state sovereignty that is the most core rule in the world to prevent future wars.

And, you know, we should just be concerned about a world in which it's increasingly acceptable or at least normal for countries to do that.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And just for, I guess, we're kind of shadow boxing the why should I care people now because of the Trump administration.

First of all, obviously, thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people in the Rwandan genocide getting killed is a horrible thing morally, and it's something we should try to prevent.

But also, I mean, disruptions like this lead to mass migration.

They can disrupt neighboring governments, right?

I mean, I think conflict is going to fuel people leaving Rwanda or Congo

and create problems in all kinds of other ways that are not expected, like we saw in Europe after the Syrian civil war.

And it's just like something worth thinking about.

Like these things ripple out in ways that are always negative.

They ripple out.

They ripple out in terms of the flow and migration of peoples, not just into places like Europe, but if

suddenly you start having huge strains on key African economies,

the global economy is connected.

It creates potential financial crises.

It creates ripple effects in that regard.

Obviously, you have the humanitarian impacts of this.

It just contributes to global disorder, which tends to have negative consequences on, again, flow of people, flow of goods, global economy.

And, you know, it's just a...

And

not to be callous about it, because this is not as important as human lives.

There's a lot of natural resources in that part of Africa that Americans depend upon.

Like, where do you think the fucking batteries and your phones come from, or your Tesla comes from?

You know, cobalt mines and lithium mines.

And so this is connected.

Everything is connected.

Yeah.

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

But, Ben, the political news feels pretty bad right now.

We are down bad, as the kids say.

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Also, on the latest episode of Assembly Required, Stacey Abrams is joined by Strict Scrutiny's Melissa Murray to dissect the impact of Trump's sweeping executive orders from renaming Denali to birthright citizenship.

So check that out.

Listen to Assembly Required now.

New episodes drop every Thursday.

You can find them wherever you get your podcasts.

And then, Ben, what do you you got going on?

I got one thing.

I want to be more transparent with people about when I'm going to places that you can show up.

And, Tommy, when I think about listeners to this podcast, I think that University of Oregon students are probably right on that list.

So, I will be in Eugene, Oregon on Thursday, Thursday afternoon at the Knight Center.

Come check it out, Worldos, if you're anywhere in the United States.

Yeah, obviously.

It's Oregon, right?

They must have name everything.

Yeah, it's all Nike.

That's why they have sick.

I love that part of the country, too.

I have to say, I jumped at this one because I don't think I've ever been.

A couple days in the Pacific Northwest is nice.

Hopefully, it's not raining.

I've been to Seattle, I've been to Portland.

I don't think I've ever been in Eugene.

Where's the is it?

I think it's I think you say Willamette Valley.

I always get that wrong.

I always say Willamette.

Is it Willamette?

So I, I, you know, not to, you know, that's where the good.

Speaking of wine, I've done

some Pinot tasting up there.

It's pretty legit.

If you go see Ben

at Eugene, at the college campus there in Eugene, bring a nice bottle of peanut.

I would not object.

Crack it open on stage.

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We talked a lot about competition with China in this show and sort of going forward.

There was a major inflection point in that competition last week when a Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek released a 22-page research paper in an AI chatbot model called DeepSeek R1.

What made this release different from all the other kind of new AI models you keep hearing about, like Llama or Claude or whatever fucking nerdy name Mark Zuckerberg gives them, was that these researchers claimed to have built a model that was nearly as good as the top American-made models like ChatGPT,

but they did so at a fraction of the cost and with inferior hardware.

And plus, on top of that, DeepSeek was released as open source software, meaning experts could look at the guts of how it worked and actually confirm that actually something interesting had happened here.

So, all of this, these developments completely flipped out Silicon Valley, some political leaders, and then finally the stock market on Monday, which saw a huge sell-off of tech company shares, including shares of AI companies like NVIDIA, which makes the top-of-the-line AI chips.

I think they lost nearly 600 billion in market cap that day alone, though it rebounded some on Tuesday today.

But the reason being, American AI companies are spending ungodly amounts of money stockpiling the most powerful NVIDIA chips because they want to train and power their AI models.

And the U.S.

government has put export controls on a lot of those chips to prevent the Chinese from getting them.

And but it seems like despite all of that, this little Chinese startup may have developed just a smarter design or a piece of software that could upend all of the economics of the artificial intelligence industry.

In other words, China may have proven that they can build an AI product on a $5.5 million budget that is nearly as good as the models that required billions of dollars of advanced chips to create.

Now, there's a few reasons to be skeptical.

of this announcement.

First, it does seem deliberate that a Chinese company released DeepSeek the week after Trump did this splashy event where he announced a $500 billion

AI project with OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle.

It seems like they were trying to stick it to him a bit.

And then second, that $5.5 million budget figure is certainly a massive understatement.

Like even the DeepSeek R1 research paper says that the figure does not include, quote, costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, and data.

I understand most of those words.

But also experts think that the R1 model was built off of previous work that this company had done that involved like top-line NVIDIA chips.

And they also seem to have used ChatGBT and other existing models to train it.

That said, all the experts seem to think this is a big deal.

It's a massive step forward in terms of AI efficiency.

And a lot of that stock market freakout came after the DeepSeek app was number one in the American app store, which showed these American companies that

American consumers were like psyched for a cheaper, easier model, and it made them all vulnerable.

So, Ben, long wind up from me.

I wonder what you made all of this and whether you think that egg-shaped venture capitalist Mark Andreessen is correct when he he says that this is AI's sputnik moment.

This is really important,

and I spent a lot of time working on this, and so I'll try to give some context here.

This should not be surprising.

So

it's been clear for

not a year, but many months, that the assumptions that the Biden administration and some of the tech world had made about AI were wrong in that the restrictions on chips, the export controls in place on China were going to somehow cripple their industry relative to ours.

Because China has really plowed a lot of resources into their own indigenous AI.

So they've got really good talent.

So

there are as many, if not more, Chinese people who are really good AI designers and developers as from anywhere else.

They're figuring out, even before DeepSeek, they were figuring out how to train models on less computing power.

So that means you don't need massive data centers with all the fancy NVIDIA chips to train your models to create something like this.

And this kind of proves that theory.

And then importantly,

because of Meta, for instance,

they open sourced their model, right?

So for instance,

OpenAI doesn't open source their model, but when ChatGPT is released, smart people can look at it and kind of reverse engineer it.

Meta went further than that because they're behind.

And so they like open source.

Let's show everybody all the code.

Let's show our work because we love openness.

Because Mark Zuckerberg is

such a good man.

Um, but then the Chinese could just look at that and be like, Well, we don't have all the chips that these guys had to produce the thing, but they're literally showing us how their models work, and so we'll just copy it, you know.

So, this idea, and again, the Biden people did some good work in this space, but I think they've been wrong about this for a little while.

The idea that you could just build a wall around AI and then the Chinese would never catch up was always had a hole in it.

We wouldn't ship them the cows, but they could just get some milk for free.

Yeah, they could get some milk, right?

So, this is what was going to to happen, and it's happened, right?

And

the consequences are that there's potentially a huge AI bubble.

I mean, not to get too much into kind of the Mark Andreessen of this all, he doesn't care about Sputnik, he cares about money.

And the NVIDIA stock price was way up based on the assumption that anybody who wanted AI was going to need all these NVIDIA chips.

Well, maybe not.

And so all these numbers and

share prices were kind of predicated on the idea that you needed to spend $500 billion to build AI.

And it makes Trump's announcement look kind of ridiculous because it suggests that, you know, these guys are just $500 billion to give to Sam Altman to train some models when you got some Chinese engineers sitting in Beijing with $5 million.

And yeah, I'm sure it's more than that, but it's certainly not a $500 billion, like doing the same thing.

And so it kind of upends all these assumptions.

And lastly, to the geopolitical competition point, it suggests that the Chinese have something to offer other countries that is cheaper, right?

So if you're a third country that wants to buy AI technologies or an AI infrastructure, you can either jump through all the hoops of American export controls and buy the high-end stuff that costs 10x more than the Chinese stuff, or you can just go to the Chinese and get some cheap AI.

And by the way, last point, that is what happened with Huawei, right?

Where Huawei is like, hey, we have a cheaper telecom product.

And guess who bought it?

Everybody.

Everybody bought it.

And so this is a big, big deal.

It's a big deal.

And so you're right.

There's some interesting interesting winners and losers like nvidia which it's it's an interesting story they were like a computer game like graphics chip design company and it just turned out the chips they were making were really really great for this kind of ai training and research and these large language models so yeah there is an assumption built into their stock share price that companies are going to buy billions if not trillions of dollars worth of their chips over the coming decade and if that's not the case they are in deep shit or at least people who bought higher in deep shit but for like for companies like say in Apple, that are kind of consumers of AI products or software, like they put it on your phone so you can use it, they might actually benefit from this if it's a little cheaper and more efficient to make this stuff.

So it's sort of an interesting test case.

The one thing you shouldn't do on a deep seek R1 AI model is ask it about Tiananmen Square

or any of the various kind of censored topics in China.

Like that is a, I think, a fatal flaw of some of this software and that it's all censored and built off of censored information systems, et cetera.

But yeah, I mean, it's a pretty impressive, pretty impressive moment.

I don't know about Sputnik.

I mean, the Sputnik thing, it's like everything is.

Andreessen said it's a Sputnik moment.

And I saw Chuck Schumer quoting the Sputnik moment thing.

And then lefty is getting mad at Schumer.

And it's like, I don't know.

Maybe he's calling it a Sputnik moment because Andreessen just wants more money.

Well, that's the point is what does Andreessen want?

He wants more money plowed into AI that he's invested in.

So you call it Sputnik to justify that spending, you know?

These guys all care about competition with China now.

Your point about

the censorship is important.

Ultimately, in the end, a chatbot is going to be better if it's not built with all these kind of CCP censorship things.

But what people have to remember is the vast majority of the uses of AI are not going to be like chat GPT.

No, it's like Google.

Or it's like robots.

It's like industrial efficiency.

It's like making your factory work better.

That's what the Chinese care about, right?

They've got like a one-child problem where they need to replace workers with machines.

And

this innovation suggests that their innovation in other AI spaces is probably pretty good too.

Yeah, fascinating story.

Yeah, it is.

A couple more things from us.

So a couple of Syria updates, Ben.

So first, we saw the European Union has taken some steps forward on sanctions relief for Syria.

They've agreed in principle to ease sanctions on financial institutions, energy, and transportation sectors, but I don't think it's done yet.

They haven't ironed out all the details, but like some progress in the right direction.

Also, there was an interesting report in the Washington Post about how the Biden administration back in December shared intelligence with HTS, this Islamist group that overthrew the Assad regime, about threats from ISIS, specifically the Biden Intel community warned HTS about an ISIS plot to set off a bomb at a Shiite shrine in the Damascus suburbs.

That obviously would have been awful because it would have killed people, but also that's the kind of action that in the past has set off waves of sectarian violence, so very good that it was thwarted.

Now, officials quoted in the story say, this intelligence was mostly shared because of the intelligence community's duty to warn intended victims of an attack and not a sign of a growing relationship with HTS, but it was notable and interesting.

And then finally, Ben, the new Syrian government has apparently canceled its contract with a Russian company that was managing operations at the Tartus port.

This is separate from Russia's contract to keep a naval base in Tartus.

So the future of that military presence, I think, is still up in the air.

But it does seem like a sign of waning Russian influence in Syria, which is something that we were kind of watching since the beginning.

Yeah.

No, and we had said that the Europeans have more incentive to move faster on sanctions relief because, you know, I mean, virtuously, they want the government to succeed.

Probably self-interested, they want Syria to be a place that's more successful.

So some refugees might return home to Syria.

They're also just closer.

But the Russian piece also speaks to the geopolitics of this.

I mean, obviously, HGS and Syrian oppositionists hate Russia.

They bombed them for many years, you know.

And so it does feel like that, you know, this isn't the end of Russian presence in that TARDIS area, but it's definitely trending in that direction.

Hope so.

And then finally, Ben, let's talk about our buddies in France.

They do some things better than anyone else in the world.

Wine, cheese, inscrutable films.

Bread.

Bread.

Cigarettes?

I don't know.

Do we do better cigs?

Maybe they just look cooler.

I mean, they smoke them better.

Yeah.

And they can smoke them in more places.

Yeah.

They also do Outrage and Disdain pretty well, which is those latter two were on full display in this great story from the Wall Street Journal that we wanted to highlight about French President Emmanuel Macron's plan to leave his mark on French history.

So listeners probably remember when Notre Dame Cathedral nearly burned to the ground back in 2019.

Macron promised at the time that he would return the cathedral to its former glory.

And to his great credit, he did.

And they rebuilt it and they did that reopening ceremony recently.

But apparently, that accomplishment is not enough for him.

Macron wants to leave his mark on Notre Dame itself by swapping out some of the 19th-century stained glass that survived the fire with contemporary pains made from an artist pick from a competition that I guess said they said that would give the building, quote, a modern accent.

Ben, you'll be shocked to hear that the French public fucking hates this idea.

Along with pretty much everything else Macron does since he has a 21% approval rating.

French do this better than anybody else to hate their president.

Hate their president.

So over a quarter of a million people signed a petition opposing the idea.

The opposition parties say they're going to block him, and France's chief preservation organization plans to oppose the move through the courts.

There's also a bunch of like memes about what the French pains would be.

Some pictures of

went up online showing stained glass of Macron wearing a crown, and then others of him and his wife, Brigitte, kind of like looking over the nave.

nave.

I'll be honest, when I first saw the headline of the story, I thought Macron was proposing stained glass images of himself in Notre Dame, but luckily, no.

Though I do feel like what he's missing is a political advisor that is just with him all the time who says, do less.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Just do a little bit less.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, I'm sure that he was envisioning.

pictures of himself on the stained glass.

Was that someone would nominate him?

Yeah.

But this is a Macron, as much as any politician I can think of in recent memory, is really excellent at turning wins into losses.

You know?

So the guy gets like a

guy gets a rare win on the Notre Dame construction reopening, and you'd think that that'd be good enough.

You'd think he'd just take it.

Everybody remember well the things he did.

Now people are going to remember like, fuck that guy, he wanted to change Notre Dame.

And like, one issue after another, this guy manages to do this.

He always takes it too far.

You know, it's like, it's like, oh, well, we kind of like that he's like trying to stop the war, but then he like won't stop calling Putin.

And then he's putting out pictures of himself in like sweatsuits like agonizing on the phone and just by the end of that you're like would this guy just stop it with this like everything he does he does like just too much of it god it's so funny also every six months or so i'll be listening to like a bbc world news podcast and i'll hear about the latest kind of uh turn of the dial in a court case against sarkozy there's like three of them ongoing yeah if you thought trump got handed by like the deep state he's awaiting sentencing on one but the really weird case is the one where uh i forget what he did for Gaddafi.

Yeah.

Some sort of partnership.

It wasn't good.

Right before he went to war with him.

Yeah, right before he had Natal fucking bomb the guy.

I think he's still married to Carla Bruni for some reason.

She's still sticking that out with him.

Yeah.

Yeah, true love.

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

We come back.

You're going to hear my interview with Peter Beinhart about all things Gaza and his new book that's coming out.

So stick around for that.

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I am so pleased to have with me today Peter Beinart.

His new book is called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

Peter is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, and his sub stack is called the Beinart Notebook.

Peter, great to see you again.

Great to see you.

Your book starts with a note to a former friend, one with whom you had a falling out over your views about the war in Gaza.

As I read it, it felt very familiar to me.

It felt like a lot of conversations I'd had, although I obviously I'm Protestant.

I feel them in a different, I think, probably less personal way.

But I was wondering, was this a letter to someone specific?

Was this a literary device that told a broader story about some isolation you might feel as a devout Jew and opponent of this war?

Maybe some combination.

But can you tell us about the letter and like kind of what it says about these debates you're having?

Sure.

So, you know, one of the central metaphors in Jewish tradition is the metaphor of family, kind of an imagined kind of extended family.

You know, B'nai Yisrael, the children of Israel.

Israel is the name of the Jacob is given after he wrestles with the angel.

And so, and I was raised that way to think about Jews as a kind of a family.

And

one of the lines the Jews often quote is,

all Jews are responsible for each other.

And so it's really difficult when you're raised that way to look around at what your community is doing, when you feel this obligation for solidarity, especially in the wake of a horrifying trauma like October 7th, when people feel this desire for need for solidarity because they're going through through so much grief and say, I think we're making a terrible mistake here.

Not just a mistake, but this is profoundly morally wrong, what Israel is doing in Gaza.

And when people are looking for solidarity and they're in pain, they often don't take very well to people who they feel like are traitors.

And so I've had this experience, I had it long before October 7th, but especially since October 7th, many people who had been close to me and my family responding with tremendous, tremendous anger at my public opposition to the war and my my questioning of the very basis of the nature of a state that privileges Jews over Palestinians.

And so what I wanted to try to say to them and then more broadly to the reader is I'm not coming as an outsider to this.

I care as passionately about our people and our future, our safety as you do.

And I want to maintain a relationship with you of conversation, but I want to try to make you rethink some things because when our communal leadership is justifying a destruction of a society where the buildings, the universities, the agriculture, the schools, they're all destroyed.

And we think that's okay, or we come up with these flimsy talking points to defend it, like something's gone wrong.

One passage from that letter that really resonated with me, and I felt like I was part of a conversation that I'd been having was: quote, that's why I titled this book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, not Being Jewish After October 7th.

It's not because I minimize that day.

Like you, I remain shaken by its horror.

I chose the former as a a title because I know you grapple with the terror of that day.

I worry that you don't grapple sufficiently with the terror of the days that followed and preceded it as well.

And it just, it made me think of a text chain I have, an endless circular text chain debate about Gaza with a friend that I've had for over a year now.

And I feel like underpinning that conversation is an unstated belief on this other person's side that preventing another October 7th justifies inflicting any amount of pain on Gaza.

And I guess

that's been the hardest thing to kind of wrap my head around, right?

Is that kind of moral assertion that I can't get this person to question?

Yes, that was also what led me to write the book.

I was just going through my life and, you know, maybe like you, I was seeing these images from Gaza.

And I wasn't even seeing the worst stuff, but I was seeing enough and hearing from friends who had Gaza and from, you know, people who had family in Gaza.

And I was thinking, this is one of the greatest crimes of my lifetime, this destruction of this entire place.

I mean, the number of children killed in Gaza just dwarfs the number of children killed in Ukraine.

Gaza now, according to the UN, has the most child amputees of any place in modern history, right?

And there's so many bodies that can't even be buried, you know.

I mean, it's just grotesque.

It's horrifying.

And yet you see good, decent people who are ethical in the rest of their lives, kind people, and then they seem to be just not seeing what I'm seeing.

And so the book, I wanted to interrogate the stories that we tell in the Jewish community, which I think also American politicians tell, which have the effect of justifying what I think is the unjustifiable by essentially not really seeing Palestinians as full human beings.

Because this is the tragedy.

I also, you know,

when the Israeli hostages come out from Gaza, like, thank God, we know their names, right?

Because

their lives are sacred.

They have infinite value.

But we don't know the names of any of those Palestinian kids and other other people who get killed in Gaza, right?

Like they are a faceless mass.

It's like

they are not considered of equal worth.

And that violates the Judaism that I believe in.

Can you tell us, I mean, you talk about these stories and narratives that go back centuries that Jews tell themselves, especially around the holidays.

Can you talk about some of those and how you think it's impacted the debate about Gaza on October 7th?

Yeah, so one of the points that I make is that Jewish tradition depicts Jews in a whole range of different ways because we're human beings so we're capable of all the different kinds of experiences that any other group of human beings are capable of but so often when today when when Jews recount our own stories these are the stories get boiled down to stories of victimhood and survival in which we are kind of history's permanent righteous victims and my point is if you look at the book of Esther for instance which you read on Holiday of Purim which many Jews talk about as a story in which there's an attempted genocide against the Jews.

That's true, but the story then ends with this massacre by the Jews of of their adversaries.

And I think if we saw the complexity in our tradition, then it might help us to recognize that

trying to put Israel and Palestine in this framework in which the Palestinians are the reincarnation of the Nazis or the reincarnation of the anti-Semites in the Russian Empire, because that's always the role that Jews are in, it just fundamentally gets what's going on there wrong.

Because Palestinians are the ones who lack basic human rights.

And if you don't start with that understanding, you're not going to be able to understand the violence that threatens both groups of people there.

And you're not going to be able to actually make everybody safer.

I wondered reading that.

I mean, I'm obviously not of the Jewish faith or the tradition.

I wasn't able to draw from kind of the history you draw from in the book, but it did feel very American.

It felt like the kind of fear and the victimization was not all that different from how a lot of us felt after 9-11.

And the response was, we wanted to see someone punished.

We wanted to feel safe again.

And any conversation about, you know, Susan Santag and the New Yorker, about why al-Qaeda might have attacked us, she was basically run out of the country, any concern about civilian casualties was dismissed.

I don't know.

I wonder if you were maybe being too hard on yourself.

Well, I think the point you're making is so important, right?

I mean, like, we have to be able to make a distinction between justifying and explaining, right?

Because

if you can't explain, you can't respond respond in a smart and thoughtful way for your own safety, not to mention the safety of other people, right?

So

America's response to 9-11, we didn't have the right kind of conversation about why that happened.

Yes,

we said it was evil.

Yes, it was evil.

We said bin Laden was evil.

Yes, that's true.

But we didn't actually have enough of a conversation about the fact that

America's policies in the Middle East were producing a tremendous amount of hatred.

And so America had needed to deal with some of those questions, right?

Even as we had the right to go and try to go after al-Qaeda.

And I think I see a parallel after October 7th.

Yes, the attacks on civilians were fundamentally wrong under any moral system that I can imagine and the abduction of innocent people, right?

But if you don't talk about what life was like in Gaza on October 6th,

you can't understand October 7th.

And if you do try to talk about it without October 6th, the message you end up sending is that Palestinians are just barbarians.

That's just kind of like what they do like to do for fun, right?

And in reality, Gaza was considered an open-air prison by Human Rights Watch.

I quote in the book my friend Muhammad Shahada, brilliant Palestinian writer, born in Gaza.

He says, everyone he knew who grew up in

Gaza contemplated suicide because there was absolutely no hope of actually living an adult life with any opportunity.

And those are not, if you don't deal with those underlying conditions, you're not going to keep Israelis safe.

I wonder, maybe one of the people we argue with might get to the point where they say, okay, it has been long enough.

I can now kind of finally tap the level of empathy you're tapping, and I hear you, and on a mental level,

I understand what you're saying.

But what would you have done differently?

You know, you get that a lot, right?

Okay, what should Netanyahu or the government have done in a perfect world?

Do you have a good answer to that when people press you?

The answer starts with recognizing that the Palestinians are a political problem.

They're not a military problem.

And they're a political problem because you are holding millions millions of people under your control without basic rights.

And if you want those people to stop attacking you violently, you have to create paths in which they can see a path towards their freedom.

And if you don't, you're never going to actually deal with a problem.

I mean, the war has destroyed Gaza utterly, but you know who's still there?

Hamas is still there, right?

And if you even got rid of Hamas, you would get some other group that would attack you because when you kill tens of thousands of people, a lot of people are going to be really angry and want to fight you.

So what would I have done?

I would have let Marwan Barghudi out of jail.

He's the most popular Palestinian leader.

He's spoken about justice and reconciliation in the tradition of Nelsa Mandalah.

He's not an Islamist.

He's a lot more popular than Hamas.

Let him out of jail.

Stop settlement growth.

Stop removing settlements from deep in Gaza.

Stop, start removing the, allow Palestinians to have some basic dignity.

Say you support either a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines, or if not that, that you support giving Palestinians citizenship in Israel.

Give people a vision of their freedom.

And I try to argue in the book that you can see over the last 30 years that Palestinian attitudes about violence against Israelis go up and they go down.

The more hopeful Palestinians are

about their freedom, the less supportive they are of armed attacks.

Yeah, I want to dig into some of that data.

I mean, in the book, you write about Netanyahu coming to power in 1996 by explicitly running against the Oslo Accords, which for those who don't know, were the beginning of a peace process that was designed to bring about a two-state solution.

Netanyahu then accelerates settlements in the West Bank.

Extremists on both sides take a bunch of horrific actions that disrupt the process and it blows up.

But you note that how during Bibi's first tenure, polling that showed, there was polling that showed Palestinian support for violence against Israelis went from 18% in the fall of 1995 to 50%

at the end of Netanyahu's tenure.

I'm not sure what data was, 96, 97%?

99.

99, sorry.

95.

Iraq.

What does that tell us?

I mean,

I think the data is pretty clear there, but.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: What it tells us is something

really basic, I think, which is that most people don't want to kill anybody and they don't want to be killed themselves, right?

They don't want to be in a war, right?

They would much prefer if there was a non-violent path to them being able to live a decent life.

And you can't live a decent life without basic freedoms, right?

And so, in the early years of the Oslo Court, where Palestinians thought that they were on their way to statehood, there was a lot of support for Oslo and not very much support for attacks on Israelis.

There were attacks on Israelis by Hamas because Hamas was trying to undermine the Oslo Accords, which they had never agreed to.

But most Palestinians opposed those violent attacks.

And when Netanyahu comes to power and he increases settlement growth and he basically says, essentially, we're not really going to withdraw from any more territory anymore.

Palestinians begin to feel this whole thing is a fraud.

And so

it makes them more willing to support the violent attacks that continue and then escalate into the second intifada.

Aaron Ross Powell, it also just hammers home to me what a horrible force Netanyahu has been throughout his career in history.

You know, I mean, it's just, you have to wonder on Earth, too, if he's not around, if he doesn't come to power, what things might look like.

Aaron Ross Powell,

yeah, that's exactly right.

But I also think the United States has been Benjamin Netanyahu's secret weapon.

And the reason that America has been, because his political opponents, going back to the 90s, his centrist opponents like Ehud Barak and Saipilivni always saying, We can't get away with this.

If we don't support a Palestinian state, if we continue to do settlement growth and make a Palestinian state impossible, it's going to undermine our relationships with the United States.

And Netanyahu said, Don't worry about it.

It's going to be fine.

The Americans will stick with us no matter what.

And we proved him right.

Yeah, he had us in the palm of his hand from Biden to Trump to everybody in between.

Not Obama.

We didn't like that guy.

Shorthanded there.

What is, I think, kind of remarkable about the book and the conversation we're having right now is that I don't think it would really happen.

Most places in D.C., I imagine this, the tenor of our conversation would be unwelcome

in a lot of places that would normally want foreign policy talks or book talks about important issues.

But you have experienced, I think, firsthand more than most people, how

these issues around the Middle East peace process or a Palestinian state or Gaza or Palestinian rights get policed online and policed by groups like the ADL,

and how you can see someone like Elon Musk get a pass for doing something that looks very much like a Nazi salute.

I don't know what he was doing, but it certainly looked like it, including a pass from Netanyahu himself, while also being very aware that any liberal or leftist critic of Israel would not get the same grace if they had done the same thing, even if it was completely by accident.

Can you just talk about like your experience of that speech policing, the groups involved, et cetera?

It's so upsetting to me.

You know, there's a reason that people are afraid of being called anti-Semitic because a tremendous amount of horror has been committed in the name of anti-Semitism.

And so I'm glad that people are scared about being called anti-Semitic.

But the flip side of that is that if you are a Jewish leader who has this power in your hands to deploy this term, the term is sacred.

You have to treat it with reverence and respect.

You know, Jonathan Greenblad of the ADL, it wasn't him who suffered the horrifying state-sponsored anti-Semitism of the Nazi period or other.

These were previous generations of Jews.

You're trading on their suffering to try to scare people out of having completely legitimate debates about what Israel is doing

because you don't have any good arguments.

So the only way you can win these arguments is to scare, intimidate people into not saying what they really feel.

That, to me, is a desecration of the experience of Jewish suffering, and it's a violation of

the respect that we should treat people with.

If you have an argument, come to the table and make the argument, and

people should be considered innocent of being anti-Semites until proven guilty, not the way around.

Besides, it's just utterly Orwellian to say that someone who believes in equality between Palestinians and Jews is a bigot.

Bigotry is the the opposite of equality.

Bigotry is wrong because it denies human equality, right?

So how can the ADL pretend to be an organization that's genuinely anti-bigotry when basically what they're trying to do is to protect a system of fundamental human inequality?

It's just completely Orwellian, in my view.

Yeah, and it's also, look, I mean, I think anyone who's aware of the history of the Holocaust or the treatment of Jewish people for centuries, like, know the power of that word and what it symbolizes beyond just language, but cruelty and violence and murder.

And, you know, and like I'm a pretty,

I'm a kid of the child of the internet.

You know, I've been on Twitter a long time.

I feel like I have a thick skin sometimes.

But it be getting called anti-Semitic or having someone assume that's what drives your beliefs, like that really hurts.

You know, like

for me personally, my wife's Jewish.

My daughter goes to a Jewish preschool.

When I drop her off, there's like six layers of armed security because of threats.

So it's like something I take very seriously and worry about in my own life.

And even, you know, talking about this worries me because I'm like, I don't know, what if someone who hates me decided to, you know, do something shitty to my family?

But you're right.

I mean, this word just gets, it's wielded like a cudgel, but while also Netanyahu kind of gives like get out of jail free cards to Elon.

Right.

And that, right.

And that's what I think the American media often doesn't understand.

They don't understand why there can be people who love Israel, but really don't like the Jews in their own countries, right?

But you see that all over the place, right?

You see all the, and it's not that hard to understand, which is that these people are ethno-nationalists, right?

So they basically like countries that are run by one tribe,

which has like legal supremacy.

And so they think Israel is great.

They actually want America to be more like Israel.

They're like, great,

one set of laws for one group of people, another set of laws for another.

They have an immigration policy that only lets in people who are like them.

That's awesome, right?

But they don't like Jews in America because, you know what, we don't want that in America, right?

We don't want America to be a white Christian state.

We want equality under the law.

And the problem is that we're not applying that same set of principles about a belief in equality under the law, that states that treat everybody equally.

We're making an exception for Israel.

And then we find, to our horror, that people like Victor Orban and Maureen Le Pen and Elon Musk want to make an exception for America, too, right?

Which puts us in danger.

Yeah.

And if you read the history of the Foundation of Israel, I mean, there's a great book, I believe it's called My American Israel by Amy Goodman, maybe?

Professor at Penn or something.

Anyway, she talks about how...

Yeah, it's being reissued now, actually.

Right.

And she talks about how some of the founding Zionists were actually wildly anti-Semitic because they thought it was an opportunity to send Jews from their country to someplace else.

That's exactly right.

If you don't want Jews around where you are, what better opportunity than to basically have them go some have their own country?

Yeah.

So getting back to today, I mean, I was a pretty harsh critic of Biden's Gaza policy.

You were too.

But I never kind of joined in the chorus of people who,

you know, were attacking Muslim Americans or Arab Americans who said they couldn't vote for Kamala Harris or couldn't support Joe Biden because of that policy,

even though I kind of worried in my heart of hearts that Trump would be worse ultimately.

I give him a lot of credit for helping get this ceasefire deal over the finish line.

But at the same time, Trump just turned back on the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

He removed sanctions on violent settlers.

He's openly talking about ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

What are you watching for in terms of Trump's policy?

And I don't know, what are you expecting?

I mean, this is kind of what I feared, right?

I mean, Trump liked the hostage deal because it makes him look good, right?

Which is the most important thing for him, right?

And he may not get America into war with Iran because he may recognize that Americans don't want wars, which is good, right?

But he...

It's hard to overstate how little of a shit he gives about Palestinian life, right?

I mean,

it matters less than nothing to him, right?

Nor international law, any of this stuff.

So what he said now about the fact that they should all go to Egypt or Jordan is utterly monstrous.

I mean, it's just utterly monstrous.

Like, let's step back, right?

These people are refugees.

Most of their families are refugees from Israel.

They were expelled in 1948.

They lived in this area called, which was Human Rights Watch called an open-air prison.

UN called it unlivable before October 7th.

Now it's been completely destroyed with American weapons.

And so your response is not, huh?

Maybe we should stop sending those weapons to basically destroy this place.

Maybe we should deal with the fact that they lack freedom.

Maybe we should allow them to rebuild.

Maybe we should even allow them to go back to the places their families are from.

Instead, he's like, oh, wow, looks like it really sucks there.

I guess basically we should clean the place out, make them go somewhere else, right?

And there's no reason at all to believe they would ever be allowed to return, right?

So then he's doing the bidding of Smotrich and Bengvir.

And so Smotrich and Bengvir are going to move into the Trump Hotel when they bring settlers into Gaza.

Like, this is monstrous.

I hope one day that I'm lucky enough to see Donald Trump have to answer for this in front of the International Criminal Court.

And by the way, this is kind of like the Jared Kushner plan that he floated at Harvard last year, like clear it out, build some condos.

Yeah, these people care more honestly fucking about condominiums than they care about human life.

Yeah, yeah, they do.

Well, it's hard to feel any hope here.

I mean, like,

I don't want to say like, Gaza, it's a it's a generational reconstruction project in Gaza.

If it gets funded, if it happens, if we get to phase two and three of this ceasefire deal, hopefully we will.

I think if history is a guide, as you talk about in the book, Hamas tends to recruit from the family members of those killed.

There's going to be lots and lots of opportunity there.

Netanyahu is still in power.

Trump stacked his administration full of people that believe in annexation of the West Bank.

Congress in its infinite wisdom now wants to sanction the fucking International Criminal Court, let alone, you know, not go after Netanyahu.

It makes me feel naive forever, kind of like espousing the two-state solution as the answer, but I don't know, man.

I just feel very hopeless.

Like, where do we go from here?

Well, look, I think,

you know,

what do I think is most likely, honestly, what I think is most likely, and it's not going to happen tomorrow, but I think most likely, the most likely thing that's going to happen is that there's going to be what I would call an American-style solution to the Palestinian question, by which I mean the 19th century American solution to the Native American problem, which was basically we destroyed that population.

So it couldn't be a political threat anymore, right?

And I think that given the impunity Israel has in the world today, that's the direction that things are going.

And it's monstrous to watch something that we thought could only happen in the 19th century or the previous centuries happening in our time.

But we have to resist it with everything we have, even though we might not succeed.

And what gives me hope is that there is a movement that's growing for Palestinian freedom.

Now, it's not perfect.

I don't like all the chants.

There are certain things that sometimes there can be a dehumanization of Israelis.

That's true.

But you know what?

There were really stupid fucking champs during the anti-Vietnam War movement too, right?

And there were communists in the civil rights movement who defended Joseph Stalin.

But the basic principle, which is about human freedom and human equality, this is, this is really, really important.

And this movement is bringing, as you know, it's bringing a lot of Jews into it, a lot of young Jews, people from all different walks of life.

And maybe that movement can do what the other great movements in the 20th century did, the anti-apartheid movement, the civil rights movement, the movement against Soviet domination from Eastern Europe.

Maybe it can make the impossible possible.

freedom for Palestinians.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: I mean, I don't want to put more kind of responsibility on activists than other people do on governments, but you write in the book about how in the early days after October 7th, you were kind of scouring anti-war speeches for whether people would condemn what had happened.

And I remember kind of doing the same thing and seeing tweets from, I'm not going to name names, but

very like senior Washington Post reporters who had written books and were people I was impressed by, didn't know, and respected, who were like, you know, I'll reserve judgment on the morality of what happened today.

And maybe this person, maybe the charitable reason explanation is this person didn't have all the information about the horrors and the evils inflicted on civilians and children and women that day.

But it was fucking gross and kind of morally bankrupt.

And I feel like the inability for people to kind of...

just draw the line at like targeting and killing civilians was upsetting.

So I don't know, what would you say to people who feel like, I I know they're more in our camp than kind of the DC blobs version of what they'd like to see happen here?

They want to see Palestinian liberation, but they're worried by some of those chants and turned off by kind of some of the rhetoric you hear that does feel anti-Semitic, not just anti-Zionist, but kind of, I don't know, does diminish and,

you know, push away Jewish suffering after October 7th.

Yeah.

And

I also find that really, really difficult and upsetting to swallow.

But I think we need to also, we need to remember that movements,

we shouldn't sanitize the movements of the past, which is to say, just because people are victims and oppressed, it doesn't make them or their allies pure.

People can still say and do stupid and even kind of even dehumanizing things.

You know, people like, don't forget, you know, the African National Congress's main arrival was the Pan-Africanist Congress.

Their chant, informal slogan was one settler, one bullet, right?

You know, but it didn't mean that blacks and Africans didn't have the right to be free.

And in fact,

in reality, ultimately ended up, everyone being, ended up being a lot more safe once Black South Africans got their freedom.

So I'm not saying

we shouldn't care about this.

We should care about it, and we should call people out if they dehumanize Israelis.

Absolutely.

But we shouldn't allow that to be an excuse for saying that it's okay to hold Palestinians under conditions that even Israel's own human rights organizations are calling apartheid.

Yeah.

Well, listen, Peter, the book is called Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

It's an excellent book.

I highly recommend it to anyone.

And I just want to say to you, I am incredibly grateful to you for your moral compass and honesty on this issue and a lot of other issues, knowing how much of a cost one can pay in professional circles and how much easier it is to kind of go along to get along, whether it's in D.C.

or other places, and support the status quo, rather than deliver some hard truths.

So thank you for writing the book and for doing the show.

Thank you.

Means a lot to me.

Thanks again to Peter Beiner for joining the show.

Who else we got?

Thank you to the French for all the delicious.

Thank you to the French for all the things you're good at.

I hope we don't tariff them.

I just like, remember when

French wine.

I like drinking Bordeaux, you know.

Keep it cheap.

Keep the carve out there for the French wine.

Yeah, thank you for that.

And the

inscrutable French films, too, occasionally.

Yeah.

Sure.

All right.

I don't know.

I watch a lot.

I'm watching more Daniel Tiger these days than anything.

Well, yeah.

Get to Bluey Man.

I get a little tired of Daniel Tiger.

You're telling me.

The kids are always whining about something.

We used to have tigers in this country that could go to school without having nine crises on the way, you know?

Well said.

We'll leave it there.

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