Trump Is Humiliated by China

the world is brought to you by Helix.

I just took a little trip, saw some family, stayed at Airbnb type situation.

They did not have Helix mattresses.

Oh.

Wow.

Did I notice the difference?

You got to sleep on a Helix.

You got a great mattress.

You go to a non-Helix.

You can tell.

I have become pickier about hotels because my bed at home is so comfy.

Yes.

Yes.

You sleep worse.

You don't get as much rest.

You have back pain.

It's just the worst.

Helix knows there's no better way to to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home.

That's why they offer a 100-night trial and a 10 to 15-year warranty to try out your new Helix mattress.

Everyone is unique and everyone sleeps differently.

That's why Helix has several different mattress models to choose from, each designed for specific sleep positions and feel preferences.

So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body?

Take the Helix Sleep Quiz and find your perfect mattress in under two minutes.

I took the Helix quiz.

I no longer remember what mattress I was matched up with because I just don't know.

I don't name my mattresses, but it's a great, super comfortable one.

It's in our guest room.

Everyone loves it.

Everyone wants to sleep on that thing.

Don't get anything else.

I got the Don Lux.

Don Lux.

I love it.

She's a great one.

And your personalized mattress is shipped straight to your door free of charge.

Go to helixleep.com/slash world for 27% off-site-wide.

That's helixleep.com/slash world for 27% off-site-wide.

This offer is exclusive to Pod Save the World listeners.

Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helixleep.com/slash world.

Welcome back to Pot Say of the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Summer is over.

Football is back, Ben.

Do you feel like I do?

I feel like I'm a little kid still.

Like, there's something in my DNA that makes me depressed after Labor Day because, like, summer's over.

I kind of feel like I have to go back to school or something.

But we live in LA.

We don't even have to do it.

The weather doesn't change.

We're grown adults.

Nothing changes in our lives.

Nothing.

My kids are back in school.

Lizzie went to school today.

It was a little emotional in my house this morning, but all is well.

I don't know why.

She said,

we were just a little late in my house this morning.

Yeah, we're a little late.

Per usual.

We're recording this

episode, a day-late recording on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, to accommodate for the holiday, to let everyone enjoy themselves.

Thanks.

Sorry for any inconvenience, but trust me, the products is better this way.

It's worth the wait than if we were talking yesterday.

It's worth the wait.

Also, Ben, apparently we have an apology to make.

Really, we have a lot of listeners who listen to both Pod Save the World and New Heights, the Kelsey Brothers podcast.

So apologies to anyone we offended and thank you for listening.

Please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube so that we can grow big and tall in one day.

Book Taylor Swift.

Yeah, don't think I don't read those DMs.

And, you know, if we hit a certain YouTube subscriber level, I don't know what we have to set it at, Tommy.

Maybe I'll grow a beard.

Oh, Jason Kelsey.

Okay.

That's good.

Could you do a...

I have no hair on my head, but I could do a Jason Kelsey beard.

It's a peculiar thing.

Will you pop the top at a playoff game in Buffalo?

Yes, I would do that as well.

I'm happy to pop the top.

And I will shotgun a beer with you.

Yes, we'll.

We'll shotgun beers, too.

I'll shotgun beers all day long.

All right, we got a great show.

Maybe we won't marry Taylor Swift, though.

No, it's too late.

We should have asked her for a date on our podcast.

Maybe she's one of those listeners who crosses over.

I should have made her a bracelet.

The book has been closed on that era, as they say, over there.

All right, we got a great show, Ben.

We're going to cover the huge geopolitical implications of the summit that Chinese President Xi Jinping just hosted in China.

We're going to walk you through what was said, what was announced.

We'll talk about the optics, how the event was just one long rebuke of the United States and Donald Trump.

We'll dig into how Trump has infuriated Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and driven the Indian government closer to the Chinese government.

Great work there, everybody.

Nice job.

And then we're going to take a step back and look at the Trump administration's record on all things China and whether the policy implementation has proven to be as tough as as the campaign talk.

We're going to cover Tuesday's U.S.

military airstrike on a boat in international waters that was allegedly carrying drugs and gang members.

It's a huge deal.

Seems a predicted here on this podcast.

Predicted here, predictable.

Seems like there's going to be some real trouble ahead on that front.

We're going to update you guys on the latest from Gaza, including the new ethnic cleansing for profit plan that is apparently circulating in the White House, according to the Washington Post.

We'll cover the horrible earthquake in Afghanistan and how that impact has been compounded by by U.S.

policy, both in terms of gutting USAID, but also the refusal to work with the Taliban in any way.

And just generally paying no attention to Afghanistan.

Yeah, just not caring.

There's a similar horrific landslide in Sudan that we'll talk about a little bit too.

And then finally, we're going to walk you guys through some recent really interesting reporting about how Trump's golf buddy termed envoy for everything, Steve Witkoff, is just kind of a disaster.

Yeah, who could have seen that coming?

Who would have thought that Mar-a-Lago golfing and some real estate transactions in Florida and like a crypto scam business doesn't prepare you for high-stakes international negotiations?

Talking with Putin.

And then you're going to hear my interview with Jasper Nathaniel.

So everyone should check out Jasper's sub-stack, Infinite Jazz, J-A-Z.

He covers Israel.

A great title, right?

I'm just thinking of starting a sub-stack.

We may need the World Hos to workshop a title for my substack.

We can do a namestorm.

Yeah.

We'll get a whiteboard out.

No bad ideas in a namestorm.

Okay, yeah, yeah, that's great.

So Infinite Jazz is taken.

That's Jasper.

He covers Israel, Palestine.

He's got a particular focus on the West Bank.

It's a great primer, I think.

This conversation is a great primer for anyone, and so is the Substack, for anyone who

wants to understand what is life like for Palestinians in the West Bank as compared to settlers, to understand the settler movement, why it's accelerated in recent years, and how settlement construction has all but killed off the two-state solution and hope for the creation of a Palestinian state.

It's hard to to say out loud.

People get upset with you.

They think you're being a doomer.

But you'll hear in the conversation that there's a lot of facts on the ground that are pretty tough to unwind at this point.

You don't want to deny American politicians those talking points that they can hide behind.

That's true.

Yeah, that's the most important thing about the two-state solution.

What other talking points will Democratic politicians have to justify their blanket support for Athen Klanze?

Well, we have that briefcase that someone bought in 1973, I think.

And when you flip it open, all the dust comes out and you go,

off the talking points, and you just read them verbatim.

But, Ben, also, I just want to tell folks, so I wrapped this interview yesterday with Jasper, and then everyone in the studio started talking about how he was easy on the eyes.

So, yet another reason to check out the Pod Save the World YouTube.

I didn't know that.

And subscribe.

I will watch.

Look, I'm not telling you, but I'm telling you to check it out.

But also, please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube.

Right-wing assholes are killing us on YouTube.

And when people search for like Trump Gaza, they find Ben Shapiro talking about how great everything is.

And we would like them to find good, accurate information about what's actually going on.

So, Ben, you remember that feeling in middle school when all your friends have a sleepover and you find out about it, but you're left out?

Yeah, it's not fun.

That's basically what happened to Donald Trump over there.

Especially after you tariff them.

Yes.

Just taking like one candy from your friend every time they came over.

So, when Trump was busy not being dead, apparently, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted leaders from 20 countries for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SEO summit.

The summit was in Tanjin, China.

It's about 90 miles southeast of Beijing.

All the coolest countries were there.

All the coolest leaders were there.

You had Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masood Pazeshkian, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, all the stands.

You had fitness influencer and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

He rolled into China just in time to catch Wednesday's military parade.

With his daughter.

With his daughter, which is very interesting.

Apparently, she's shown up at like 30 public events now.

She seems like the 12-year-old's successor in waiting.

That's a scary gig.

Imagine being 12 and being like...

You know what I was thinking about?

I mean, not to jump ahead here, but imagine wanting to date her.

No.

I mean, how could any guy...

I mean, you know, you're going to get killed, right?

Yeah.

Talk about fuck around to find out.

So, Kim Jong-un, he showed up for the military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II.

That parade included all all kinds of cool military stuff that will make Trump very sad that he missed it, like hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, new underwater drones, you know, it's like real envy there.

We just had tanks at our military parade.

And then again, Kim Jong-un traveled in a souped-up train car, which will make Joe Biden very sad that he was not there.

So lots to cover.

We're going to break into the chunks.

First, the substance of what was said and agreed to at the summit, the optics and the messaging and what it sends to the world, then how Trump has destroyed his relationship with Modi and the Indian government and pushed India closer to Russia and China.

Then we'll kind of like measure the Trump record, as I said.

So, Ben, just quick and dirty on this, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a regional security organization founded in early 2000s by China and Russia.

It's expanded to about 10 members.

Do you think it's fair to say the SEO is like China and Russia's version of creating a Western alliance like NATO, or is that too much of a Euro-focused way of thinking about it?

Well, it's not a collective defense treaty like NATO where you have to come to the defense of the other.

It's Article 5.

But it's essentially like one of the forums that they have, along with the BRICS, to get their team together to figure out how to work around U.S.

sanctions, how to work against U.S.

foreign policy, how to kind of construct an international order that is not so dominated by the U.S.

and Europe.

So, you know, yeah, they've made some pretty good use of it over the years.

Yeah, especially this weekend.

And so, like you just signaled, like a lot of the focus this weekend was on criticism of the U.S., especially especially trade policy and tariffs.

In his speeches on Monday, Xi critiqued hegemonism, the Cold War mentality, and bullying practices, so all very clear shots at the U.S.

There were a couple of policy announcements, some like vague commitment for member states to cooperate on developing AI, talk of setting up a development bank to reduce their dependence on the dollar.

We've kind of heard this pitch before.

China pledged like $2 billion in grants and loans to member countries, which is nothing in the grand scheme of thing.

We'll see if that bears out.

And then Xi ruled out this pitch for creating a more just and reasonable global governance system.

Five principles include sovereign equality, abiding by international rule of law, practicing multilateralism, advocating the people-centered approach and focusing on taking real actions.

I'm sure Taiwan and China's many neighbors in the South China Sea were swayed by that.

There's a new Siberian gas pipeline between China and Russia.

There was a communique that condemned U.S.

aggression against Iran, but said nothing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So, Ben, like, we don't know anything about side deals cut by any of these countries, but did any of the speeches or policy announcements jump out at you as particularly significant?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think people really do need to wake up here.

I mean, we're, what, seven months into the Trump administration, and this kind of meeting is already happening.

I mean, you know, wake up, people.

This is what happens when you insult the rest of the world and treat it like garbage and demand that they pay terrorists and nominate you for the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is billions of people being represented by leaders in Beijing at a show of strength by the Chinese congress.

Like 40% of the world's population or something.

I mean, so this is not marginal stuff.

And so this matters.

And this is, I think, the continuation and the acceleration of a movement away from the United States.

All of these leaders say nice, flattering things to Trump to try to get the tariffs down.

Maybe they do a little deal under the table for some Trump coin or whatever the price is of corruption.

But then they go do this.

Then they go put their lot elsewhere.

And in terms of the policy announcements, I think all of them matter.

AI jumps out to me.

The Chinese have just about caught up to the United States in the development of artificial intelligence.

We've talked about this a little bit, but the U.S.

thought, well, we have these companies, we've got, you know, OpenAI, and we've got all these other big tech companies like Meta and Google and Microsoft.

You've been Sam, your Musks, Elon.

Yeah, but what the Chinese have done is they have a tremendous amount of talent because they actually have STEM education in their country.

They've They've been prioritizing this for many years.

They've been pouring money into AI.

They've figured out how to do AI with less computing power.

We'll talk about the NVIDIA chips in a minute.

And why this matters is, number one, the Chinese could basically achieve parity, could achieve AGI.

That's when artificial intelligence tips over into super intelligence on basically the same timeline as the U.S.

But just as importantly,

is China going to become the supplier of AI or is the US?

Who is going to be selling AI products products to the rest of the world?

That's really, really important

because that's important in terms of economic opportunity, but it's also important in terms of geopolitical influence.

Because if you're the AI supplier, don't think that that doesn't come with some back doors and strings attached.

Or right, and just think about the data that it would be trained on, right?

If you think ESPN is getting slapped around for not putting the nine-dash line on the screen or whatever, like wait till the AIs are trained on China's vision of the world and territory and Taiwan and Hong Kong and everything else.

That's right.

Exactly.

So that's one big announcement that jumps out because I think that's real.

I think that the Chinese are going to be willing to export their AI quickly.

They're focused on things like robotics and industrial efficiency that is frankly more useful to countries than

chatting with your companion, which is what Americans tend to do with it.

Tell me I'm great.

Second thing is, remember all the geniuses like J.D.

Vance and David Sachs and all the

guy we covered, what was his name?

Vivek.

Ram Swami.

Remember he was...

What happened to that guy?

Yeah, one of them was busted.

He's running for governor or senator?

Well, you remember their theory was that we were going to peel Putin away from China because he's white, basically, and he wants to be a part of the West.

Well, this cements the reality that China and Russia are completely intertwined.

Yes.

Geopolitically, infrastructure-wise, economically, technologically, Russia is relying on China.

So that

play is over.

And, you know, remember, that was a big part of the Trump foreign policy, and it's a complete and utter failure.

And then I think this stuff about the dollar matters because what these countries are figuring out how to do, they're not necessarily replacing the dollar as a world's reserve currency.

They are figuring out how to increasingly sanctions-proof their economy.

Russia has been able to completely withstand these sanctions.

They don't give a shit when we threaten more sanctions.

That has no meaning to them.

The Chinese are sanction-proofing their economy, and that matters because if they do invade or blockade Taiwan, we're not going to be able to impose much of a cost on them.

And then, yeah, $2 billion is much, but already China through the Belt Road Initiative has made all these countries come dependent on them for loans, for investments, for infrastructure.

So what we are seeing is the cost of having a complete fucking autocratic fascist lunatic as President of the United States who's insulted the whole world.

And so now they're making parallel technology supply chains, economic supply chains, resource supply chains.

And Xi Jinping does not seem in the slightest bit intimidated by Donald Trump.

Quite the opposite.

No, no, yeah.

$2 billion is not a lot, but it's also happening as we destroy USAID.

So there's context here.

Yeah.

So like the optics in the visuals of this event were not subtle.

It was Xi Jinping was center stage.

Like he's the conductor of this global orchestra that the U.S.

is not a part of.

And he coordinated this series of middle fingers to Trump and the U.S.

policy.

That includes shots at Trump's tariffs, hence the language about bullying practices and protectionism.

You had Putin just like swanning around the summit, you know, this convicted war criminal.

But he was telling his usual lies about the origin of the war in Ukraine.

He is, as you said, making a mockery of U.S.

sanctions just through his presence.

Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, they recreated the Trump-Putin photo from the Alaska summit where they hung out in the presidential limo.

Although Modi, when he tweeted out a photo of it, had a camera inside the car.

So he kind of like one-upped it.

And then Putin and Modi literally held hands as they walked into one of the meetings.

Not something I'd want to do.

The hand holding, like, I don't want to touch anyone.

Putin, you know, well, Putin's kind of a slippery hand.

You could could have some, well, right, and there could be some sort of isotope or something that like kills you six days later.

Um, then there was like uh Putin, Modi, she were kind of yucking it up together in a bunch of b-roll.

Yep, uh, they're they're a new thrupple, it's a great b-roll from this thing, great b-roll.

Um, and then if you look at like the Modi Twitter feed, again, he's just pushing all these images out, so they're not hiding anything, there's no like kind of delicate dance, it's like here I am.

Um, and then uh you got Iran was there, Kim Jong-un rolls in on his train, so those guys add to the kind of like rogues gallery vibe of the event.

But both those countries are key arms suppliers for Russia that have been critical to his ability to sustain the war in Ukraine.

Remember, North Korea has been a source of artillery shells.

Iran gives Putin drones.

So it's very significant that they're there militarily.

And then Trump Ben got asked about all of this on Wednesday.

He was doing a bylap with the president of Poland.

Here's his answer.

I was very surprised.

I watched the speech last night.

President Xi's a friend of mine, but I thought that the United States should have been mentioned last night during that speech because we helped China.

When they did what they did, I thought it was a beautiful ceremony.

I thought it was very, very impressive.

But I understood the reason they were doing it and they were hoping I was watching and I was watching.

My relationship with all of them is very good.

We're going to find out how good it is over the next week or two.

So I'm not owned.

I'm not owned per usual.

We'll find out in a week or two.

So Ben, again, like just to check ourselves, like the SEO summit, all summit, it's like stage-managed propaganda, right?

Like that's part of the point.

These guys being together doesn't mean they agree on everything or with each other or coordinating, right?

Like India and Pakistan are part of this event.

Like they don't agree on a lot of stuff.

So we don't want to overreact.

But like you, I did feel like there was something different about this event.

The timing, the anger over the tariffs, Modi kind of really leaning into his relationship with the Chinese and U.S.

competitors and with Russia.

It just, it seemed different to me.

Yeah, first of all, Trump probably is jealous and got on the phone with Pete Hag Seth because he probably wished that the U.S.

troops in the parade goose-stepped as well as the Chinese troops did.

They were stepping.

But let's put the fascism aside for just a moment here.

On the Ukraine point, you know, Kim Jong-un met with Putin, reaffirmed his support for the war in Ukraine.

He basically got a big reaffirmation of support for his Ukraine policy.

Now, compare that to NATO, where they basically have to beg Trump and call him daddy and nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

And he still doesn't provide arms to Ukraine.

No security game.

He humiliates Zelensky, right?

So Trump, you know, basically treats Zelensky like a piece of garbage when he comes to the Oval Office.

And then Putin goes, and he's got a bunch of really powerful people validating him.

So the message on the war in Ukraine is that this guy, Putin, actually has a stronger alliance behind him than Zelensky does right now.

And that's a real thing.

This Modi piece is hugely important.

Successive U.S.

administrations for decades have basically invested in a strategic relationship relationship with India, a defense relationship, a commercial relationship, an economic relationship, a technological relationship, in the hopes that this very big swing country of well over a billion people, a massive market, you know, obviously hugely strategically located on the Indian Ocean there,

would tilt in the direction of what used to be the world's democracies, the U.S.

and Europe.

Well, this was Modi

not being shy at all in response to Trump treating him like garbage.

I mean, this is just a rule of human behavior.

Some people think foreign policy is really complicated, sometimes it's not.

If you treat someone like shit, they're going to cozy up to your adversaries.

And there's Modi signaling, hey, I'm actually moving in the direction of this team, not your team.

And that is a massive tectonic shift if that is something that is actually going to go forward.

And we'll explain why, because it's way dumber than you think.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

It couldn't be dumber.

And so we have to take this very seriously.

And the other problem, and this is why we really encourage you to continue to join us every week, is that the U.S.

political and media ecosystem does not seem to be able to hold Trump accountable for any of this.

You know, if this kind of thing had happened when Barack Obama was president or Joe Biden was president, or a normie Republican, there would be like a freak out about how we've squandered our leadership in the world.

Fox News, Kairos.

Fox News would be going.

Humiliation.

Fox News would be playing this B-roll in a loop, right?

But for whatever reason, like just Trump's utter failure on Ukraine diplomacy, utter failure geopolitically, his tough talk with China and no follow-through, like he just, it doesn't stick to him because nobody has any expectation for him.

But we're going to look back 20 years from now and be like, wow, that's pretty amazing that this guy came in and basically in a few months, you know, ceded all

semblance of U.S.

leadership, whatever you think of U.S.

leadership, the one thing that's clear is the rest of the world is no longer on board with it.

Yeah, before we get to the Modi thing, did you see that there was like a hot mic moment that someone kind of clipped and shared on Twitter this morning?

It was like CCTV in Beijing.

They captured Putin and she talking, and they were talking about living to be 150 because you can get like synthetic organs or organ transplants.

And it's like, I've often wondered what she and Putin might talk about.

And this perfectly tracks.

Apparently it's the same thing that people are talking about, like the tech bros at the first camp at Burning Man.

But I just say that

the other thing I just want to say is that Trump always says this stuff like she likes, she does not like him.

None of those people like him.

And there's something really sad and pathetic about the fact that these people are literally coming together with the express purpose of trying to humiliate Trump.

And he's still like, they like me.

She likes me.

I like them.

Like, guess what?

Kim Jong-un doesn't like you.

Narendra Modi doesn't like you.

Xi Jinping doesn't like you.

The Iranians don't like you.

Yeah, I mean, like, they don't like Trump.

And it's kind of very strange that because he's constantly surrounded by sycophants, that he assumes that these other world leaders feel the same way about him that like, you know, Stephen Miller does.

And that's just not the case.

Exactly.

So as you mentioned, like the unraveling of the Trump-Modi relationship, the U.S.-India relationship is fascinating and really, really important.

And just for context, like every president for decades has invested a lot of time and attention into the U.S.-India relationship because it's been obvious for decades that India was going to be an economic powerhouse.

Like it was true for Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump.

And Trump and Modi, they did seem to get particularly close.

They had sort of a shared, you know, populist, authoritarian.

Yes, exactly.

Trump spoke at that howdy-modi rally in Texas.

Remember that?

It was just like huge rally in Houston in 2019.

And Trump was just on stage the whole time, just hanging out.

Modi endorsed Trump in 2020.

But in recent weeks, like whatever goodwill had been built up seems to have just gone away.

Over the weekend, the New York Times kind of detailed the backstory of that unraveling.

A lot of it stems from Trump trying to take credit for a ceasefire deal between India and Pakistan.

So, listeners probably remember back in May, we covered this.

There was a brief but very serious armed conflict between India and Pakistan.

It included airstrikes by the Indian military deep into Pakistani territory.

Pakistan attacked Indian military bases.

There was like a drone battle.

It was like really serious, scary stuff.

But after four days, India and Pakistan's military heads, they like got on the phone, they brokered a ceasefire.

But right as they're deciding to announce it, Trump front-runs the announcement and takes credit for it.

And that claim was bullshit, but the Pakistani's were like, whatever.

They loved it.

Yeah.

We're like, we'll play along.

Because it made them like this equal partner to the Indians.

Exactly.

It looked like America was on their side.

Exactly.

And so, like, you know, the Pakistanis even put forward Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But this was obviously a non-starter for Modi for reasons we'll get to in a second.

But clearly, like...

Someone on Trump's team must have told him, hey, India's

not happy about you taking credit for this ceasefire.

but it didn't slow him down.

And according to the Times, it got to the point where Trump even called Modi directly and on the phone suggested that India should nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, which like geopolitics aside, Ben, it's just insane.

Like imagine on a human level, there's two people on this phone call.

Both of them know that Trump absolutely did not broker this ceasefire, let alone like fully resolve the conflict between India and Pakistan.

But Trump is pushing Modi to give him the Nobel Peace Prize or nominate him.

It's just like, it's an insane thing to do, just on a human level.

So Modi says no, fast forward to last week.

Things are now so bad that Trump has slapped a 50% tariff on India.

And on Labor Day weekend, Trump was complaining that our relationship with India is, quote, a totally one-sided disaster.

So, you know, Modi, while Modi was hanging out in China,

Trump was just whining about him on Twitter.

And in parallel, Xi Jinping saw this growing fissure between the U.S.

and India.

He decided to start some quiet outreach to the Indian government.

Bloomberg News reported that she she sent India a letter.

That was received well.

That led to more dialogue and visits and a thawing of tensions that had been quite bad since this violent border dispute back in 2020, which we covered at the time, too.

It was like these guys fighting at high altitude.

Like 20 Indian soldiers died.

Remember, there were reports of

them hitting each other with like baseball bats and shit.

It wasn't good.

It was crazy.

Anyway, so it was like a very deep wound that was difficult to heal between these two countries.

Took five years, but Donald Trump made it happen.

So thanks for that.

So, Ben, do you just want to give some context and help explain to listeners why Trump claiming that he brokered this ceasefire was so enraging to Modi?

And then just like the broader stakes of this, of this rupture?

Yeah.

So you have to remember, right?

I mean, India and Pakistan are, you know, dating back to the partition of India, which led to over a million deaths as Muslims moved to Pakistan and Hindus moved to India.

They've basically been enemies ever since then.

And Kashmir has been the flashpoint.

They both claim this territory as their own and they've never been able to resolve it, and they fought multiple wars over it.

And they all kind of follow a similar pattern where there's a flutter-up, there's an exchange of violence for a period of days, sometimes weeks, and then it kind of peters out because

especially since they both obtained nuclear weapons in the 90s, you know, you don't want to go too far over the precipice here.

So there's a deeply unresolved issue here of Kashmir and deep antagonism between India and Pakistan that is kind of central to their national identities as well.

This is not just like a,

side dispute.

This is kind of core to their identities.

And it's not just the leaders.

I remember you and I were both watching Indian TV during this period, and the bloodlust for war on every channel was

it's kind of shocking.

It's like Fox News pre-Iraq war on steroids.

Well, and you'll remember, because there was a pretty horrific terrorist attack on a bunch of Indian tourists in Kashmir.

And so there was a horrible terrorist attack that precipitated the hostilities that then kind of reached the point where they were going to de-escalate.

And literally, it doesn't seem like anything happened other than like Marco Rubio lobbying in the routine phone calls that any U.S.

Secretary, I mean, if

Joe Biden was president, if Barack Obama was president, if Bill Clinton was president, if George Bush was president, the U.S.

would have done the exact same thing and would not have taken any credit because to do that would be to humiliate India because India is the bigger and stronger power.

So for them, they're the ones climbing down, which was the right thing to do, but they're the ones climbing down without having like, quote unquote, defeated Pakistan.

And so for Trump to come in, it makes India, which is a very proud country of over a billion people, feel humiliated if it's like they're in the same weight class as Pakistan and the U.S.

told them to stop it and Trump should get a Nobel Peace Prize.

It is absolutely humiliating to Modi that Trump did that.

It was a big issue in Indian politics.

It was a big issue in the Indian media, like you said.

Like the people that usually like Modi, the kind of MAGA of India, they were pissed about it.

And the more Trump talked about it, the Pakistanis were basically trolling India when they're nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

So Trump doesn't even understand that this isn't just an inconvenience to Modi.

This is like totally humiliating.

It totally offends the national sensibility.

Whatever you think, by the way, I don't like this kind of antagonism that they have for Pakistan and vice versa, but it is what it is.

And so he completely stepped in.

And purely because of his ego and vanity and because of something that everybody knows isn't true, he didn't broker anything.

Like there's no agreement.

There's not a piece of paper.

There's nothing that the U.S.

did other than make the routine diplomatic phone calls.

But because the whole world has to play along with this Nobel Peace Prize fiction, he's putting at risk a relationship with a country of well over a billion people.

The other thing I'd say is, Tommy, I was in meetings with Modi in the late Obama years.

This is a man with a deep, deep skepticism of China.

He's worried about China.

They're a big neighbor.

They have a bigger economy.

He's been trying to catch up to their economy and hasn't been able to do it.

They've had these border disputes.

His natural inclination is actually to get closer to the U.S., to get closer to Europe, to get closer to the Gulf Arabs.

And we're literally shoving him in the direction of China.

That's how big of a self-own this is.

And again, like, it's amazing that this is kind of a secondary story that, you know, basically pissing off like a hugely strategic country.

One political point I want to make in front of the Pad Rokhana has made this point.

Indian Americans have been trending conservative, right?

A lot of these people bought into the Trump Modi bromance.

They kind of like the Hindu nationalism and they kind of want to be a part of some MAGA adjacent space here.

Well, I hope you have some buyers' remorse if you thought that Trump had some sincere desire to improve U.S.-Indian relations because he doesn't.

So again, this is not a...

straight politics show, but every vote matters.

And I would hope that there are people in the Indian American community going to their Trump curious or Trump supporting family and saying,

what the fuck?

This is the wrong bet, guys.

It was the wrong bet.

And also, like, Trump has been much harder on India than anybody.

Like, why are we sanctioning India or secondary sanctions on India over buying Russian oil, but not the Chinese?

The Chinese buy a lot more oil from the Russians than the Indians do.

So none of it makes any sense.

And like the stakes, as you mentioned, are huge, man.

I mean, like, India's got nukes.

The U.S.

wants to deepen this partnership with India.

Like, we want to sell them weapons, for example, and have them not buy them from the Russians.

This put that this at that is at jeopardy now.

I think 40% of generic drugs are manufactured in India.

So it's like huge ties between the two economies.

And I think like figuring out how Trump resolves this trade dispute is hard.

It's hard to see the path forward because Trump wants expanded access to U.S.

agricultural products, especially like dairy, soybeans, corn, and wheat.

But this is another massive political problem for Modi because something like 40% of jobs in India are tied to agriculture.

So that's hundreds of millions of people.

And Indian farms are tiny.

Like it's like, you know, one one-hundredth the size of the average U.S.

farm.

And so that means that Indian farmers, they don't have the scale or like the technology that U.S.

farms do to drive down costs.

And so if Trump forces cheap U.S.

ag products into India and Indian farmers are put out of business, Modi won't just lose an election.

Like he might get driven out of the country.

You know what I mean?

Like there would be a populist uprising.

And also the Indians won't let in genetically modified food crops, which is like most U.S.

corn and soybeans.

So that's a big hurdle.

And then on top of that, like to add to the list of irritants, Ben, Trump invited Pakistan's Army Chief of Staff to the White House.

The Indians didn't love that.

They named this random goober, Sergio Gore, to be the U.S.

ambassador to India.

He was doing like personnel, which is just like, it's confusing.

Apparently, Trump was planning to go to India in the near future.

Now he's not.

The crackdown on foreign visas was a big deal for India because I think one in four foreign students in the U.S.

are from India.

So there's just like a lot of ways where

we're poking at these guys.

Yeah, one other problem for us, too, is that the U.S., because we have such shitty STEM education, because it's been defunded by Republicans for years, and now we're getting with the Department of Education, we're wholly dependent on Indian and Chinese foreign students to sustain our technology base, our AI, things like that.

So that could hurt us too.

And look, one thing I want to say about this is look, I'm no fan of Modi.

Trump, I think, assumed because these other guys are like strongman, autocratic nationalists like him, that they'd get along.

The thing I've always been worried about is nationalists are ultimately nationalists.

Whether you're Modi or Bibi or Putin or Xi,

If you're a hardcore nationalist, you're not going to bend to Donald Trump's will because you actually believe in the nationalism.

And I think another mistake that Trump has made is the people that do kiss his ass and nominate him for Nobel Peace Prizes are the leaders of like small countries that can't stand up to the U.S.

And so they're like, if you're the leader of Azerbaijan or Armenia or Pakistan, you're like, oh, I'll nominate the guy for Nobel Prize.

But guess what?

Leaders of big countries don't need to do that.

And so what Trump is realizing is, you know, nationalism trumps like shared autocratic tendencies, you know, and Modi is always going to bend in the direction of Indian nationalism.

He's not going to make these concessions to Trump that like some small country would make.

Right.

And he probably feels like he probably feels like he tried, right?

There's like, how many Trump towers now in India?

Like, they've done all the bribing.

Yeah, I think they had Ivanko over there.

Like, they've done all these things.

Come on, help it out.

So, Ben, we've been talking about how the world's kind of revolved around China and Chinese President Xi Jinping for the last few days.

So, we wanted to do a big picture check-in on like the U.S.-China relationship because there is this bipartisan consensus in DC that U.S.

competition with China is like the most important issue going forward.

And then Trump spent the majority of the campaign accusing Joe Biden of being soft on China, pledging to get tough.

And so we wanted to sort of like check in on how that's going.

In the first few months,

things looked pretty dicey.

Remember that in mid-April, I think the U.S.

tariff rate on China was almost 150% after there was these escalating kind of tit-for-tat tariffs with the Chinese.

But then Trump tacoed, there was that meeting in Geneva where they all sort of agreed to hit pause for a while.

And in that moment, I think Xi Jinping realized that like Trump mostly just wants a deal and he wants de-escalation and was not willing to watch the markets crash.

But there's more examples than just that.

So in July, the Trump administration refused to allow the president of Taiwan to fly through the U.S.

on a trip to South America.

That was not the best signal for China hawks who want the U.S.

to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.

It's also been, I can't think of a single comment from Trump about like Hong Kong or human rights or the Uyghurs.

And so that is like not something I expected, but it is a concession.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Which Marco Rubio used to be the number one

leader on.

Big cheerleader.

I guess Lil Marco checked his principles a little more ago.

Went quiet.

And then in August, Trump announced that the U.S.

would allow NVIDIA to sell its H-20 chip in China in exchange for the U.S.

getting 15% of the sales revenue.

That reversed a decision that the administration had made in like a couple months earlier to block the sale of that specific chip because these chips are powerful tools for training advanced artificial intelligence and large language models.

So the revenue just that we would get from 15% of these H20 sales is like de minimis when you consider like the size of our debt.

But allowing China access to these chips is a big deal in the AI race.

And just for context, and we can dig into this deeper, but the H20 chip is not like the cutting-edge chip.

That's kind of this Blackwell series.

And it's weaker in raw compute to the H100 series, which is kind of the next one up.

But it is pretty powerful

and is much better than what China could get from non-U.S.

sources.

So it was a big concession.

And then just to make things more confusing, I think the Chinese refused the H20 chip, citing some security concerns.

Now they're hoping they get like a downgraded version of the Blackwell top-tier chip.

So whatever.

We'll get into it in a minute.

And then a bunch of Trump's most ardent supporters are furious because like a week or two ago, Trump revoked a previous decision to revoke like half a million visas for Chinese students.

And instead we'll let 600,000 Chinese students come and study in the U.S.

over the next couple of years.

So, Ben, throw any other data points into the mix here, but when you sum all that up, like it's pretty accommodating.

Accommodating.

These are actual concessions, you know.

And

look,

if you compare it to Biden, for instance, he's softened the policy in a number of areas, right?

On Taiwan, Biden was more forward-leaning in arms sales to Taiwan.

You know, we're canceling defense dialogue.

Constantly saying we would go to war.

By the way, I'm not even agreeing with all these things.

You know, like Biden was more out there on Taiwan.

It's just funny the thing, Back, that we covered it like four times.

But I'm like, you're this careful policy.

You're damn right I'd go to war.

Carefully ambiguous policy owned over decades.

And by like, fuck yeah.

I'm the guy.

But anyway, put that aside.

But on the chips, for instance, the Biden administration built over years this kind of net of what are called export controls that restrict certain investments or technologies from going into China.

And it was all designed to kind of preserve this lead for the United States on AI so that we'd be the first to develop the cutting-edge language models, that that would allow us to kind of figure out what this technology can do before the Chinese have it, and that that would also make us the most likely supplier to the rest of the world, like I was saying earlier.

So, look, he's not only allowed things to continue to happen that he said he would stop, like foreign students.

And look, I'm glad that they're foreign students come here, right?

But he's made like very substantive concessions to Xi Jinping, right?

For no reason, seemingly.

Well,

the only substantive reason is Xi Jinping, I think, was ready for this trade war, unlike the first time around.

And that one of the weapons that he realized he has, and because he's developed it, is this monopoly of critical minerals.

And so she was like, All right, you want to tariff me?

I'm going to turn off these absolutely essential components for your military industrial base, for your technology base.

And Trump folded like a tent when he did that.

It also seems to me like the tech guys, like the NVIDIA guy, like whoever else, got to Trump and were like, hey, we need these students here.

Because so people understand, to just go deep on the chip thing for a second, the Chinese, over the last decade or two, have made a huge bet that they're going to reorient their economy economy around technology, particularly AI and quantum computing, which is the next thing coming down the line, and clean energy.

And they actually allowed for a lot of hits to Chinese growth and a real estate bubble.

They kind of took a lot of pain to kind of reinvest in these spaces.

Now, when it comes to AI, you need several things.

You need capital, and the Chinese have that.

The government plows money into this.

In this country, it's like private capital.

And in China, it's the government.

So they've got that.

You need talent.

China probably has more talent because they've literally, in the same way that they like train athletes to win gold medals, they've been like training engineers to service their AI.

They got a lot of people.

The one area where the U.S.

had a

and data.

You need data, obviously, to train these language models to feed into these language models.

Chinese obviously have a lot of data.

They got data for days.

They got data for days.

They got over a billion people and they collect everything on everybody.

So they've got plenty of data.

So they've got data, they've got capital, they've got talent.

The one area where they've been behind is they don't have the computing power that the U.S.

has, the chips, the data centers, all those things.

Now, they were finding workarounds on that.

They were figuring out ways to kind of take open source models like Facebook in their stupidity decided to release their Llama large language model so everybody could see it.

Well, the Chinese stole it.

That's how you got DeepSeq was out like a few months later, right?

But to give them the compute power is to essentially say,

sure,

it's like giving steroids to someone who's like running right behind you.

It's a bizarre concession to make.

And I just don't understand why you would do it other than I think Trump is kind of in bed with these AI guys.

I don't know what is going on underneath the table.

Sure, there's 15% revenue to the U.S.

Treasury.

God knows what kind of crypto investments are happening.

I don't know.

This is, yeah, I don't know.

Apparently they made like, what, $5 billion this week on their new crypto launch?

So this is.

Congrats, Mr.

Trump.

This guy, you know, Trump goes and demagogues China and talks tough about it in like Ohio, and J.D.

Vance talks about like a civilizational struggle, and Steve Bannon, like beats his chest for seven hours on the War Room podcast, and then Trump just gives the Chinese everything they want.

Yep.

Yeah,

it's not good.

So

bad grade so far, Mr.

Trump.

Yeah.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but Ben, before we do, I want to tell you a new show.

Do you like Money, Murder, Betrayal, and Revenge?

I like revenge.

It's entertainment.

I like revenge.

Oh, okay.

This is the unbelievable true story of the United Mine Workers of America, the son who took on a dangerous union boss to avenge his family's murder.

This is the newest season of Shadow Kingdom called Coal Survivor, hosted by Niccolo Manoni.

It digs into the rise and fall of the United Mine Workers of America under Tony Boyle, once the most powerful and corrupt labor leader in the country.

At the height of America's Coal Wars, it's a political thriller wrapped in a courtroom drama and every detail is real.

Catch the latest episode on the Shadow Kingdom feed wherever you get your podcasts, or better yet, Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now.

Join friendsofthod at crooked.com slash friends.

Pod Tape World is brought to you by fast-growing trees.

Fall is planting season.

Did you know that many plants and trees actually do better when planted this time of year?

I did not know that.

But you have to know where to start.

That's why I love fastgrowingtrees.com.

Doesn't matter if you live in the sunny south or if the air is getting chilly where you are, their plant experts can help you find the perfect fit for your space.

They have all the plants your yard needs, like fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more.

Fast-growing trees makes it easy to get your dream yard.

Order online and get your plants delivered directly to your door in just a few days without ever leaving home.

They're alive and thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy.

All plants and trees are locally grown in the U.S., ensuring they will thrive in your yard.

So a lot of people here at Crooked Media have gotten amazing trees and plants from fast-growing trees.

We've got some fruit trees, some ficus.

The readout is they look great.

They're easy to keep alive.

You get a little help, some instructions on how to keep them alive, how to treat them.

It's a lot easier than going to a nursery and walking around where no one actually helps you and you've no idea what's going on.

You don't know what to buy.

And if you've got a big yard, a small yard, no yard, they've got over 6,000 plants that fit any space, from indoor plants to fruit trees to full-sized privacy trees and more.

No need to spend your life searching like Ponce de Leon.

Their 14-point quality checklist ensures you're getting the best quality plants possible.

Each plant is cared for individually based on its needs, from watering routines to the amount of sunlight, giving your plants the care they deserve from the time they start growing to when they ship to your home.

I think I'm confusing the tree of life and the fountain of youth.

I think Poncelion wanted the fountain of youth.

But maybe it was also a tree of life.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sounds right.

Sure.

This fall, they have the best deals for your yard, up to half off on select plants and other deals.

And listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code world at checkout.

That's 15% off at fastgrowingtrees.com using the code world at checkout.

Now is the perfect time to plant.

Use World to Save Today.

Offer is valid for a limited time.

Terms and conditions may apply.

Check out the link below or in the show notes and support the show.

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?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arrizona.edu.

All right, Ben.

As we predicted, the global war on terror and the war on drugs have officially merged.

On Tuesday, Trump just kind of casually announced during an unrelated thing about the Space Force that the U.S.

military had carried out an airstrike on a boat that he said had departed Venezuela and was carrying drugs and 11 quote-unquote trende Aragua narco-terrorists.

The White House even released a little snuff film of the airstrike on Twitter that you could all watch.

At the time said that

something was, whatever was fired at them was either from an attack helicopter or a Reaper drone.

Our listeners probably will not be surprised that we've gotten to this point.

We've covered this from the beginning.

Like on day one of Trump 2.0, the administration released an executive order saying drug cartels could be designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

Then in February, the State Department designated Trende Aragua as a terrorist group.

The New York Times reported that Trump signed a secret directive telling the U.S.

military to use deadly force against cartels they deemed to be terrorist groups.

And then, Treasury, the Treasury Department, designated a group called Cartel of the Sun as a terrorist group and said it was headed by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials.

So, they've been kind of like constructing this legal framework, like such as it is, for months now, legal in air quotes.

But either way, like militarizing the war on drugs like this is a huge deal for a bunch of reasons.

I mean, first of all, it just goes without saying Congress has not authorized military action against Venezuela.

Important to mention.

It doesn't matter if you call them a terrorist group.

This is just not how you deal with drug traffickers.

Like, normally, the Coast Guard would interdict the ship.

You would arrest the people on it, or at least interview them.

And what Trump authorized here was a summary execution for a criminal violation.

And then, you know, just again, broader context, like the U.S.

has moved all these naval assets south to the southern Caribbean.

That includes like amphibious assault ships, thousands of sailors, thousands of Marines, which has Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, sounding the alarm about a possible invasion.

And, you know, I've talked to some experts this morning, Ben, who said that, like, it's also freaking out a bunch of other countries in the Caribbean.

Because remember, not long ago, Trump was talking about taking back the Panama Canal or whatever.

And so, you know, this kind of rhetoric rhetoric is going to color how every leader in Central and South America views this major troop deployment, especially when you consider the broader history of U.S.

intervention in Latin America.

So here's a clip of Trump talking about this airstrike today, again, during that bilateral meeting with the president of Poland.

On the boat, you had massive amounts of drugs.

We have tapes of them speaking.

It was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people.

And everybody fully understands that.

In fact, you see it.

You see the bags of drugs all over the boat and they were hit, obviously.

They won't be doing it again.

And I think a lot of other people won't be doing it again when they watch that tape.

They're going to say, let's not do this.

We have to protect our country and we're going to.

Venezuela's been a very bad actor.

So Ben, you know, clearly he's excited to talk about this.

He announced it Tuesday, talked about it again Wednesday in this press conference.

My fear is that Trump is going to love the kind of media and political reaction to this first airstrike and demand more.

And before long, we will be talking about airstrikes in countries directly.

Yeah,

I have concerns

because I feel like this is the merger.

You're the one who coined the phrase that I really like of this is the war on terror meets the war on drugs.

I'd add a third component.

It's the war on terror meets the war on drugs meets the kind of American fascist immigration policy.

Because if you remember, Trendo Aragua and the Venezuelan government was like the basis for the Alien Enemies Act being used to deport people to El Salvador.

They're directing this gang.

And in fact, actually, the courts have found against this because

basically the legal theory, for those who don't remember, was that the U.S.

is at war with Venezuela, and so therefore we can deport Venezuelans because we're at war with them.

It's an invasion, yeah.

Well, now we're actually kind of beginning to go to war with them, you know.

So I don't know, you know, how much that factors into the decision making here, but it does seem like there's a big target on Venezuela in particular, and Maduro in particular, kind of like and reminiscent of like, you know, an OG American military intervention when we went into Panama to like arrest Noriega for drug trafficking.

Now, Venezuela is a much bigger country.

Maduro's created like a, it claims a militia of over 4 million people that are ready to fight.

Which he says, yeah, you deployed them.

So he says.

Look, I do just kind of worry that Trump...

wants a kind of state of war to exist in this hemisphere as part of the legal justification for his immigration policies too.

Maybe I've got a bit of a technical hat on, but it's

probably not.

Stephen Miller would probably go there, right?

So that's something to watch.

Do they kind of begin to bring their immigration policy into this kind of state of war?

Then you worry about, like in the war on terror, once the U.S.

starts like blowing things up,

we tend not to stop.

You know, this is highly unlikely this is the last boat we blow up, right?

And we'll end up blowing up boats that are not,

you know, we'll wind up killing civilians.

That's the thing.

Intelligence gets things wrong all the time.

Like, what happens when we blow up a boat full of innocent fishermen?

Yeah.

Now, keep in mind, too, this is a dumb fucking way to fight drug traffickers.

Look, so long as Americans want drugs, people are going to find ways to get drugs here and sell them.

I mean, maybe Trump could call up his buddy Elon Musk and ask him where he gets his drugs.

Because, like, there's plenty of fucking drugs in this country.

And blowing up individual boats.

It's a drone burning, man.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, I mean, blowing up individual boats is not going to like stop drugs from coming to this country.

It's just not anymore.

Deter them.

Yeah, any more than the war on drugs did.

When you can make billions of dollars selling drugs in America, you're going to find ways to get drugs here, right?

I mean, we've learned that for decades.

This isn't going to work.

It's just a stunt, but it's a stunt that risks militarizing the region.

And then the last piece is...

Yeah, this slippery slope idea that the more we're militarizing our relationship and hemisphere.

And by the way, this boat wasn't coming to the U.S.

Apparently it was going to like Trinidad or something.

But the more you're militarizing it, the more, you know, maybe militarizing a conflict with Venezuela or a regime change war against Maduro or taking the Panama Canal or suddenly you're taking shots in Mexico.

You know, like this thing could grow across the hemisphere in ways that are really dangerous and scary and bad for individual people and will do nothing for the drug trafficking and will do a lot to strengthen Trump as an authoritarian leader in this country.

And just it's worth saying, like in the past, you know, the U.S.

has done a ton of work with countries in Latin America to do drug interdiction, but we've cut off cooperation with countries when they did things like this, when they like shot down planes that were suspected of drug running.

Now we are just releasing snuff videos of drone strikes on boats.

And where does that end?

Because you know how many boats are moving around with drugs?

I mean, it's a scary thing to think about.

It really is.

It really is.

So one we will be watching.

Also, Ben, you know, so we talk a lot about Israel and the West Bank later in the show.

so we're going to go a little shorter on Gaza today, but that doesn't mean a lot hasn't happened since we last recorded.

The first update that was just worth sharing with you guys is that the Washington Post had a long story over the weekend.

It was a report on a 38-page document that lays out the actual plan for the U.S.

ethnic cleansing and takeover of the Gaza Strip to make it the quote-unquote Riviera of the Middle East, as Trump famously said, whatever, how many months ago.

This is called

the Gaza Reconstruction Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or Great Trust.

It calls for Gaza.

I know it's so fucking dark.

It calls for Gaza to be put in a trusteeship administered by the U.S.

for about 10 years or minimum of 10 years.

During that 10-year period, Palestinians would have two choices.

A, you quote-unquote voluntarily depart for another country, TBD.

We can talk about where those countries are in a bit.

You get a cash gift of five grand.

and four years of rent subsidies, or you get to be confined in a quote restricted secured zone.

So basically, this is like ethnic cleansing with a cash stipend.

But to make it more like tech douchey and dystopian, people who own land in Gaza would be given a, quote, digital token to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new AI-powered smart cities.

AI-powered smart cities.

So the plan proposes like this could get so much worse.

There's like a road circling Gaza called the MBS Highway, Mohammed bin Salman Highway.

There's an Elon Musk.

Which I don't think he's agreed to.

I don't think he wants that.

Yeah, I don't think he wants that at all.

There's also an Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone.

Again, Mr.

Musk is, I think, on the outs.

But so initial financing of the plan.

Update the slide deck.

Yeah, guys.

Update your slide deck.

It's not that hard to do PowerPoint these days.

But so the initial financing of this plan comes from the trust taking ownership of about 30% of Gaza that is publicly owned and then using that as collateral.

So again, it's like just a land grab.

And then the plan claims the scheme would see a 4X return over 10 years through all this investment.

But again, like ethnic cleansing for profit.

So the security piece would come from Israel and Western contractors.

They'd provide security for about a decade, at which point local police that are trained during that time would take over.

That trust, the great trust, would also govern Gaza during that period.

We think this plan was talked about in a White House meeting last week that included Jared Kushner and Tony Blair, whose think tank has been connected to this proposal.

The report comes, this report in the post comes as Israel is preparing another major assault on Gaza City.

That's the place where the famine is the worst.

And as part of that assault, Ben, Israel has announced that they're going to end humanitarian pauses that were supposed to allow a flood of aid into Gaza City to save people who are starving to death.

So I guess Netanyahu is back to a policy of starving kids to death.

No one tells Barry Weiss and the team over at the Free Press.

Maybe they have some pre-existing conditions we could dredge up quickly.

But Ben, also on Monday, the International Association of Genocide Scholars said publicly that Israel is meeting the legal conditions for genocide in Gaza.

So 86% of the group's 500 members voted for the resolution.

So Ben, like big picture, obviously Gaza reconstruction is like a massive generational challenge.

Like no one is arguing with that.

90% of structures, housing stock is destroyed.

The entire area is littered with unexploded ordnance that will have to be cleared.

There's bodies trapped over endless piles of rubble.

There is no infrastructure.

There's no water, right?

Like there's nothing.

You have to rebuild it all.

And Netanyahu has refused to engage on any of that reconstruction or how Gaza would be governed after the war.

But like Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, digital token, AI, douche, mumbo-jumbo.

It's like, this is one of the most dystopian documents I've ever heard of.

It is.

And I do want to I want to talk about the genocide thing for a minute here because look,

a majority of genocide scholars are at a determination of genocide.

It's not really a debate anymore among experts.

If you're not American or Israeli, too, like you overwhelmingly believe a genocide is happening.

I went back and decided to look at the last Trump administration's determination of genocide.

You may remember that they made a determination that there was a genocide happening against the Uyghurs, right?

It's an interesting thing to consider because nobody ever suggested that the Chinese Communist Party was trying to kill every Uyghur.

They weren't.

They were sending them to re-education camps.

It was horrible what they were doing.

The reason that Mike Pompeo made this determination is he said, quote, we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party state.

And again, not by killing them, but through, quote, the eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group.

How is this not the erasure of a group?

They lived in Gaza.

A substantial amount of them were killed, starved, wounded.

All of their homes were destroyed almost.

And now you're saying that they have to leave.

That was ethnic cleansing.

That is the erasure of a group, right?

And so people need to realize that just because, I mean, this is genocide by PowerPoint, you know, presentation, right?

When you're talking about literally ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip.

That's what's happening.

And it is this kind of spooky dystopian convergence of AI and crypto and this idea that money can solve any problem and get these people out of the way.

And this kind of new Abraham Accords order, right?

You know, because the Gulf Arabs, by the way, aren't even signed on to this because they know politically, it's dangerous for them.

So you basically got a bunch of people like, you know, from Tony Blair to Jared Kushner kind of speaking for the future participation of these Gulf Arabs because they're the ones with the money.

But it's all these awful forces that have converged in the Trump administration with absolutely no regard.

Who are the Palestinian voices that are participating in these discussions, right?

I mean, you're literally having conversations about the future of a whole people without them.

They're not asking for digital tokens.

They're not asking to live in AI cities.

They're asking to like live in their homes, you know?

And Jared Kushner's role here tells you a lot, too, because this guy's been kind of on the margins, but he's been vacuuming up money all over the world.

He's getting getting kickback from the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Qataris or like sort of sovereign wealth funds or investment companies tied to those governments.

That's right.

And the last thing I'd just say about this is

when Trump floated the Gaza Riviera thing,

everybody kind of chuckled.

This is a reminder that this Trump administration, they tend to end up doing the crazy things that they say they're going to do.

Well, and that announcement also gave the political space to every right-winger in Israel to come out in support of the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which is something they had not done before that.

That's right.

So, I mean, that's there's a direct line from Trump making that comment to Trump posting that weird AI thing with like statues of Elon Musk to this PowerPoint presentation.

And so, like, take this very seriously.

This is the actual plan of what they want to do in Gaza over the objection of any Palestinians and over the objection of pretty much every country in the world other than the United States and Israel.

Man, I was watching and Tony Blair, I guess, whoever he seems to be.

What is he doing?

I don't understand what he's doing here.

I was watching something.

It was Jeremy Diamond at CNN.

It's doing some really great coverage of Gaza and all things sort of happening in Israel.

He had a piece yesterday, and he just somehow got footage of this mom like fleeing with her two kids.

And it was like a little boy, and she was like holding a little boy's hand, and the little girl was running ahead.

And she had one of those mini mouse backpacks.

And the girl was so little that it was almost dragging on the ground.

And I just saw that.

I just could not not think about my two kids and being a mom in Gaza City.

And you're just like, there's literally nowhere for you to go.

Everywhere is getting bombed.

Everywhere is occupied.

You've been told to relocate countless times at this point.

There is a fucking full-on famine.

Right.

And we were told that Netanyahu cared and he was going to allow this aid into Gaza City to turn it back.

And, you know, like all these American officials and members of Congress seemingly believed him.

And now they're just turning off those humanitarian causes and again, going back to this starvation policy.

Yeah, all these Democrats, senators like Corey Booker, posing for photographs with Netanyahu as recently as like a few weeks ago.

And the only other thing I'd say about the kid thing, because I was thinking about this, Tommy, too, is that imagine the trauma that parents are going to have for the rest of their lives.

Imagine how you'd feel if you couldn't.

keep your child safe.

Your whole reason for existence.

If your whole reason for existence is to protect this child, then you can't.

What that does to people psychologically.

I mean, it's not the kind of thing that goes away with a crypto coin or something.

No, no, you're Bitcoin bullshit.

I mean, yeah, the deprivation, look, we're so focused on killing and starvation, but the deprivation that we don't talk about for Palestinian communities, like these kids haven't gone to school in the world.

Just the trauma.

The kids haven't seen a dentist or a doctor or something.

Just bottomless trauma that they'll be dealing with for the rest of their lives.

And to think you can move them around like pieces on a game board to South Sudan.

To Libya, Ethiopia,

South Sudan, Indonesia, Somaliland.

All places where there have been wars.

I mean, these are all, most of these places have been hot war zones in the last decade.

It's just, it's the most mortally dangerous.

They're moving them to another war zone.

And by the way, Steve Wickoff's out there saying that he thinks the war is going to end by the end of this year.

This Gaza City offensive is not even scheduled to be done by the end of this year.

And meanwhile, Bibi Netanyahu is like calling up all these reservists.

And by the way, you're building the largest, if you do build the Gaza Riviera, you're building the largest terrorist target in the world.

I just, I literally, that was my, my head went right to that too.

Like, the ISIS recruiters, the Hamas recruiters, the Hezbollah recruiters,

this plan is what they've dreamed of.

Yeah.

This confirms every single

argument.

Well, I don't want, I mean, it doesn't make them right, but like,

this is literally like a cartoonish version of like a white supremacist colonial superstructure.

Like, I don't know what else you can call this, you know?

It's just horrible.

Pode of the World is brought to you by Built.

Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, Built makes it worth it.

Built is revolutionizing how millions think about paying rent by rewarding their members with points and exclusive benefits around their neighborhood every single month.

By paying rent through Built, you earn flexible points that can be redeemed towards hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next lift ride, and much more.

But it doesn't stop there.

Built is about making your entire neighborhood more rewarding.

You can dine out at your favorite local restaurant and earn additional points, get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios, and enjoy exclusive experiences just for BILT members every month.

Built is turning a monthly expense into an opportunity to earn rewards and discover the best that your neighborhood has to offer.

Your rent is finally working for you.

Earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by going to joinbuilt.com/slash world.

That's j-o-i-n-b-i-l-t dot com/slash world.

Make sure to use your URL so they know we sent you.

Comcast Business High Five Hotline.

I signed my business up for the five-year price lock guarantee, and I can't stop high-fiving people.

That's perfectly natural when you sign up for Gig Speed Internet and Advanced Security.

Locked in at a great rate for five years.

Really?

That's great news.

High five, everybody.

The Comcast Business Five-Year Price Lock Guarantee is back, but only for a limited time.

Sign up today.

High five.

Ends 9-21-25 for new customers with qualifying bundles.

Current customer eligibility varies by service and area.

Guaranteed rate applies to monthly service charge, excluding taxes, and fees.

Other restrictions apply.

A few other quick things.

It's just worth noting that the administration, the Trump administration, is not allowing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and 80 other officials into the U.S.

for the U.N.

General Assembly, which starts next week.

The State Department's going even further by denying visitor visas to almost all holders of Palestinian passports.

So, again, you're not allowed to participate in any talks about the future of your country.

Trump had some thoughts about Israel during an interview with the Daily Caller that were worth noting.

He said, quote, Israel was the strongest lobby I've ever seen.

They had total control over Congress, and now they don't.

He also said, quote, they're going to have to get that war over with, but it is hurting Israel.

There's no question about it.

They may be winning the war, but they're not winning the world of public relations, you know, and it is hurting them.

End quote.

So per usual, Ben, Trump says stuff about the Israel lobby controlling Washington that would get all of us labeled an anti-Semite by Jonathan Greenblatt and all these fuckers.

Where is Jonathan Greenblatt?

They don't say a word about it.

Jonathan Greenblatt, why don't you go on TV and have a viral moment yelling about Donald Trump's comments on the Israel lobby?

Maybe what would help.

And by the way, one more thing on this because it always drives me nuts.

It's not a public relations problem, it's an actions problem.

It's a kid's getting killed problems.

I hate it when people are like, well, Israel's got a real PR problem.

No, they have a problem that they've killed tens of thousands of people.

The problem is slaughtering.

It's not a good PR strategy.

And starving them to death.

That's the problem.

Yeah, it's a policy problem.

And then last Thursday, Ben, an Israeli airstrike hit the Ahouthi government meeting in Yemen, killing cabinet members and the prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi.

The Wall Street Journal reports that al-Rahawi's role was largely administrative with little political authority.

The leader of the Houthis is actually still alive and kicking, and the military arm was unaffected by the strike, but it did set off this big conversation about whether the Israeli government had assassinated the prime minister of a sovereign nation.

And we know that the president of Iran barely survived an Israeli airstrike during the 12-day war.

So this is now a trend.

Yeah, I mean,

first of all, this isn't going to wipe out the Houthis.

I mean, you're not going to militarily wipe these people out.

Like, they live in Yemen.

They're a substantial number of people.

And yeah, it's just,

you know,

the people that

get off on this stuff think it's great.

But

you're just going to go around killing people in this region indefinitely in every country forever?

I mean,

that's not security.

It reminds you of like our kind of failed Al-Qaeda policies, where every six months, the Al-Qaeda number three would get killed, and everyone talked about how influential that person is, and then the group just metastasizes.

I know we're going long, but two more things we should talk about.

So, it's just been a horrible week for natural disasters.

In Darfur, Sudan, a landslide hit a whole village, killing at least a thousand people.

And there's been some just devastating news and images out of Afghanistan where there was a 6.0 magnitude earthquake.

It hit the eastern part of the country.

Kunar province, which borders Pakistan, was hit hardest.

But like entire villages, structures made with mud bricks were just flattened.

And this is a very remote, mountainous area.

These landslides were blocking roads.

There's no equipment.

There's a shortage of helicopters that has made rescue efforts difficult, if not impossible.

So the official number of dead as of this recording on Wednesday morning is over 1,400 people with 3,000 injured.

But those numbers are going to go up because there's just tons of villages and communities that haven't been reached yet, let alone like kind of been accounted for.

So we reached out to Ilaha Omar, executive director of the Uplift Afghanistan Fund, who's been working on relief efforts there.

Here's what she had to say.

This earthquake is definitely not happening in isolation.

Afghanistan is in its fourth year of drought, crops are failing, and hunger is widespread.

At the same time, We've witnessed this recently.

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been forcibly returned from Iran and Pakistan, swelling the number of displaced families.

Even before this earthquake, 22 million Afghans already needed humanitarian aid.

And the hard truth is, the international community, including the U.S., has sharply reduced aid to Afghanistan.

US

assistance has dropped from nearly 3.8 billion in 2022 to 767 million today.

What that means is hundreds of clinics have closed, medical airlifts are grounded, and food programs are cut back.

For women and girls in particular, this is devastating because without female medical staff, they often can't get access to care at all.

The shortage of female doctors and nurses means many are going untreated.

Amid this devastation, what inspires me most is how Afghans themselves are leading the response.

In a country often defined by conflict, what I'm seeing is compassion, solidarity, and extraordinary courage.

So we're going to put a link to the uplift Afghanistan website in the show notes.

If you want to check out what the work they're doing, maybe contribute financially or some other way.

But Ben, it is just, it's so, it's so gutting to see a natural disaster like this and then know it is compounded by U.S.

policy decisions like gutting USAID or just the utter refusal to figure out a way to work with the Taliban.

Yeah, I mean, normally USAID would be like the tip of the spear in disaster response.

So, what you're hearing from Malaha in that clip is that there are people that are going to die or people that are not going to get aid because of the decision to gut U.S.

assistance, to gut USAID, and to basically ignore Afghanistan after the collapse four years ago.

And,

you know,

given our fingerprints all over Afghanistan, that's just a complete moral failing.

I will say, Uplift Afghanistan is one of the groups that is able to work with people who are on the ground.

So if people do want to support, that's a good mechanism to do that

because they know the people that are there.

Yeah, and that's going to be the hardest part, right?

Like finding someone on the ground to work with.

And the Sudan piece of this is also just so bad.

I mean, they're like years into the civil war.

You have hundreds of thousands of people who have escaped to the Darfur region to these camps, like literally like 300,000, 400,000 people in a camp.

And then there are these horrible landslides and monsoons, and no aid is getting to them to begin with.

So there's already a famine.

There was a massive cholera epidemic.

There's no medical care.

I mean, it's just like, it's just so unfair what happens to the most, you know, the people in the worst position.

And again, when USAID gets cut by Big Balls and Elon Musk, and people laugh at Democrats having a press conference and running the USAID, and they see it as a political issue,

these are deaths.

These are preventable deaths.

You can prevent a mudslide or an earthquake, but you can make sure that there's resources for people who are dealing with it.

People in conflict guns are always more vulnerable.

So we remember there's going to be a long tail to what Elon Musk and Doge did.

Yep.

Final topic.

So as listeners know, Trump promised to solve the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.

It is now September 3rd.

The war is now worse than ever for Ukrainians.

The White House, like they threw together this Alaska summit with Putin, the big meeting with Trump and Zelensky and the Europeans, and they promised all this follow-up, like a bilateral meeting between Russia and Ukraine, and maybe a trilateral meeting with Russia and Ukraine and the U.S.

We were told we'd see details of a security guarantee for Ukraine.

And here we are weeks later, Ben, and like literally none of that has happened.

So what is going on?

Obviously, a lot of this stems from bad strategy.

It stems from Donald Trump only caring about headlines and not follow-up or substance.

But it is also increasingly clear that Steve Witkoff, Trump's golf buddy, turned envoy for everything, it's just kind of an idiot.

So So we gave Witkoff a bunch of credit, and the benefit of the doubt early on when Trump got the Gaza ceasefire over the finish line.

But things have gone downhill everywhere since.

Politico and Reuters did some deep reporting on the impact of Witkoff's incompetence that was worth highlighting.

So a lot of the challenges stem from process.

So apparently, Witkoff takes meetings with Putin or other leaders one-on-one.

At least once he used Putin's translator and didn't bring his own, which is insane.

At least once, Witkoff didn't bring a standard State Department note-taker to his meeting with Putin.

And that led to huge problems because back in August, you had Witkoff telling Trump, telling European leaders that Putin was prepared to withdraw from parts of Ukraine and offer major concessions to end the war.

Specifically, Witkoff had told them that Putin said if he got to keep the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, he would withdraw from Zaporizhia and Kherson, which would have been like a kind of a shocking major concession.

But then, apparently a day later, Marco Rubio had to call those leaders back and do cleanup and say, actually, Putin just said he wouldn't demand that the West formally recognize Zaporizhia and Karazon as a Russian territory, didn't offer to withdraw troops.

It's a big change.

And that confusion, I think, led to the rush to Alaska summit and, you know, all we've seen since.

And then Politico talked with 13 people, both U.S.

officials and foreign officials, who have dealt with Wickoff.

And here's some of what they reported.

One, Wickoff won't meet with or consult with experts, and he doesn't have a lot of stuff to help him.

And the staff he has often doesn't know where he is or what he's doing because he just camps out in the West Wing while his team is at the State Department, kind of like wondering what's going on.

He apparently pops in and out of meetings, like goes to the high-profile stuff, and then quote, fucks off to his life again, end quote, meaning he's not engaged in like the day-to-day grinding work of diplomacy.

And it also means in practice, other U.S.

government officials don't know where he is, don't know what he said, don't know what he heard from Putin at a key meeting.

And then they say Wickoff reportedly doesn't read his briefings daily, doesn't even check his government emails sometimes, some days.

And the story said that even the Russians have gotten annoyed at Wickoff at times because he is unable to accurately convey Putin's messages and views to Trump, though I would note that the Russians specifically chose Wickoff to be their guy and iced out Keith Kellogg, who was supposed to be the envoy in charge of ending this war.

So Ben, of course, like the only thing that matters at the end of the day is results.

If Wickoff gets good deals over the finished line, I will praise him.

It's pretty disconcerting to read this and know that this guy is not just trying to end the war in Ukraine.

He's also in charge of Gaza and all these other big projects.

It's pretty extraordinary when you consider the fact that he's sitting alone with Putin in a room.

And Vladimir Putin is someone who probably has more,

whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, I don't think much of him as a human,

probably has more diplomatic experience than anybody in the world.

And Steve Wickoff's experience is like, you know, some real estate properties in Florida.

You know, I mean, you can chuckle about it, but

the common thread of, I think, our whole whole conversation today is these guys, these Trump guys kind of created a bit of an illusion of competence because they came in and they moved so fast and they did so much stuff and people had to kind of kiss up to them.

And there was that kind of short-term ceasefire in Gaza because BB was giving Trump a little gift on the way in.

But actually, if you pull the camera back, what you see is just stupendous incompetence and lack of qualification.

And it's not hard for Steve Witkoff to grab an expert.

You know, take your pick from the State Department, from the Defense Department, from the CIA.

Like, there's a lot of people in the U.S.

government.

And by the way, they don't even have to be like, you know, Archon experts.

I'm sure there's some MAGA-adjacent experts.

The fact that this guy is so casual about conflicts as serious as the war in Ukraine or in Gaza.

And just because he, you know, lathers Trump up and talks him about the Nobel Peace Prize and plays golf with him at Mar-a-Lago, he's managing these accounts.

It's truly extraordinary and competence.

And you made the right point, too.

Like, Kellogg was appointed the envoy.

The Russians literally selected.

Witkoff was supposed to be the Middle East envoy.

And the Russians literally selected him and iced out Kellogg.

And Kellogg's only allowed to talk to the Ukrainians.

And if you can't even pass messages back and forth accurately, I mean, that's like the lowest common denominator of what a diplomat does.

Last thing that's just worth pointing out is that Steve Witkoff's son is in this crypto business with Eric Trump and Don Jr.

What is it?

World Liberty Financial.

And so he's all, you know, that's part of what's going on too here: is like the Witcoff families.

Why else do you need to meet alone?

Yeah, exactly.

You can talk about stuff like that, right?

You can have a little crypto conversation, you know?

A little sidebar.

Yeah, I mean, like, to your point about the experts, like, you don't have to do what they say.

No, just to say that.

But you should meet with them.

You should hear them out.

Yeah.

It's like apparently RFK Jr., not only did he not listen to the vaccine experts, he refused to even have conversations with them.

He wouldn't talk to the people at the CDC.

It's like, also, you see, JD Vance kind of lost his mind about this story on Twitter, like wrote an op-ed, which does tell you that, like, Witcoff's feelings matter to Trump.

So, there's some real sensitivity there.

But, like, I don't know, man, get your shit together.

Yeah, I mean, the just picking envoys for the Mar-a-Lago membership roles is probably not the best way to staff a government.

No, but no, it is where we are.

It is where we are.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and when you come back, you're going to hear my interview with Jasper Nathaniel about life for Palestinians in the West Bank and the death of the two-state solution.

Stick around for that.

Pod Take the World is brought to you by Sundays.

Sundays is fresh dog food made from a short list of human-grade ingredients.

Sundays was co-founded by Dr.

Tori Waxman, a practicing veterinarian who tests and formulates every version of each recipe.

Sundays contains 100% all natural meat and superfoods and 0% synthetic nutrients or artificial ingredients.

Dog parents report noticeable health improvements in their pups, including softer fur, fresher breath, better poops, and more energy after switching to Sundays.

Look,

Luca loves Sundays, and I know that very well because the Favaros give their dog Leo Sundays as well.

And every time we go over to their house, she sprints in there and eats all of Leo's food as fast as humanly possible.

I've never seen a dog eat food faster in my life, which tells you that it tastes good.

Unlike other fresh dog foods, Sundays does not require refrigeration or preparation because they're air-drying process, just pour and serve.

Cancel or pause your subscription anytime with our 14-day money-back guarantee.

Every order ships right to your door, so you'll never worry about running out of dog food again.

It's so easy to store.

It's easy to serve.

It doesn't smell.

It's none of that goopy wet food stuff.

It's just great food for your dog.

Sent to your house and made easy.

Get 40% off your first order of Sundays.

Go to sundaysfordogs.com slash world or use code world at checkout.

That's sundaysfordogs.com slash world.

Use the code world.

Comcast business high-five hotline.

I signed my business up for the five-year price lock guarantee, and I can't stop high-fiving people.

That's perfectly natural when you sign up for Gig Speed Internet and Advanced Security, locked in at a great rate for five years.

Really?

That's great news.

High-five, everybody!

The Comcast Business five-year price lock guarantee is back, but only for a limited time.

Sign up today.

High five!

Ends 9-21-25 for new customers with qualifying bundles.

Current customer eligibility varies by service and area.

Guaranteed rate applies to the monthly service charge, excluding taxes, entries.

Our restrictions apply.

I'm excited to welcome Jasper Nathaniel to the show.

On his sub-stack, Infinite Jazz, he writes about Israel and Palestine with a particular focus on the West Bank, which is going to be the focus of our conversation today.

Jasper, good to see you.

Thanks, Tommy.

Great to be here.

So for nearly two years,

there was October 7th and the subsequent military campaign in Gaza.

And that has gotten the most media attention and, frankly, focus on this show, I think, understandably.

But what has been happening in the West Bank, I think, is incredibly important in terms of any hope for a future Palestinian state.

So I'm excited to dig into the details with you today.

But I think we could just start with some basics for folks who are coming at this

new.

Can you describe the status of the West Bank under international law and then what it means when you or I or when people hear someone refer to the West Bank as an Area A or Area B or Area C?

What do those demarcations mean?

Yeah, so the West Bank is

it is legally under a military occupation.

You know, Israel is obviously the military.

They're the occupier or the occupying force.

The Palestinian people are the occupied.

And that's important because that actually has to adhere to the Geneva Convention and Hague and all sorts of laws.

And what those laws amount to basically,

the military occupation laws, are that the occupier is a temporary occupier.

They are not allowed to put any routes down.

They cannot transfer their population there.

They can't build their own infrastructure there.

Everything that the occupying force is doing has to be for either the well-being of the occupied people or for Israel's security.

And so, you know,

to state the obvious, they've gone, Israel has gone far above and beyond

beyond those laws, what they're allowed to do.

And that is

why like the settlement movement is fundamentally illegal because the settlement movement is about building Israeli villages and homes in a place that is not theirs and where they are legally not allowed to do that.

The areas A, B, and C that you mentioned, this was a later development after or during the Oslo's Accord II in the mid-90s.

So basically,

That this is a really important thing because this is something you see people getting wrong all the time on Twitter and everywhere else.

Nothing changed about who owns the West Bank.

It still is Palestinian land under a temporary military occupation.

What the Oslo Accords II did was it divided up the West Bank into these three different areas for who would have basically administrative and security governance

responsibilities over them.

And so the vast majority of it, something like 60, 66% maybe, is Area C, which is under full Israeli administrative control and security control.

Area B is Palestinian Authority administrative control.

technically split Israeli and Palestinian security control.

And then Area A is technically supposed to be all Palestinian administrative and security control.

I think an important thing to keep in mind here, Tommy, is that,

I mean, there is certainly like a correlation between where the Palestinians live and like what area it is.

But for the most part,

the Israeli military goes wherever they want.

You know, they go into area A, B, C.

It makes no difference to them.

And, you know, that is sort of like the theme throughout the entire history of the West Bank is

they come to some agreement, they negotiate something, and then the

settlers or the military in the West Bank just act like the rules don't apply to them pretty much instantly.

Right.

And then another big picture question, like, can you just describe in broad strokes kind of the difference in quality of life if you're an Israeli living on an Israeli settlement or if you're a Palestinian living in a Palestinian community, and then the kind of difference for the two groups when it comes to rights, especially freedom of movement?

Well, I think the word for it is apartheid.

I mean, there's two sets of laws and two

sets of everything, basically.

So just to give you like one example, Israel controls all the water in the West Bank.

Most of it is from the Jordan River, but there's different springs and other bodies of water.

Israel has systematically

created dams and reservoirs and basically rerouted all of the water away from Palestinian villages and into settlements.

The roads, I mean, it's the same thing.

Like all the sort of direct, easy access highways are for Israeli only.

I mean, you literally cannot go with Palestinian plates.

Everything is just more inconvenient for the Palestinians.

There's literally two sets of a different criminal justice system.

The Palestinians there are subject to military law,

which,

as

many people may know, doesn't actually require having charges against somebody.

So you can just arrest somebody under what's called administrative detention, and you just tell the judge, this is a security threat.

It would be a security threat to even reveal the evidence that we have against them.

And then they get to just lock that person up with no

due process.

Israelis, on the other hand, to the extent that settlers are ever arrested, which is very, very, very rare,

they are under Israeli civil law.

So just everything is different.

All the laws are different.

In terms of quality of life, I mean,

I'll say it was bad.

It's been bad for decades for the Palestinians.

I mean, you know, they are living with a military that has set up checkpoints to make their lives difficult.

And, you know, they need to get permits to get to the hospital in Ramallah from Jericho or whatever.

So just everything's a pain in the ass.

But basically the sort of cruelty of all of it got turned way up in 2023, both when the new government, the new Nanyao government came in and then also after October 7th, obviously.

Yeah, and that new government's got some really odious right-wing figures in it, like this guy, Basil Osmotric, who we should dig into in a minute.

But so I think that context is really important just in terms of helping people understand what we're talking about when people talk about a two-state solution or the creation of a Palestinian state.

Because the West Bank, the territory, the physical territory in the West Bank, would be the core of a Palestinian state.

And over time, Israeli settlements have carved up the West Bank in a way that is often referred to as a slow-motion annexation.

And at this point in time, those settlements make creating anything resembling what we would think of as a contiguous state basically impossible.

Can you give us sort of like explain how we got to this point?

Because I think it is hard for people who hear this constant talk of a Palestinian state to

reckon that with like the reality of what the West Bank looks like and the role that Smotrich and other kind of right-wing settler movement leaders have played in that process.

Yeah, so I think the

right way to think about it is that the settlement movement as an entity as a movement is actually I mean it's independent from the Israeli military it is not technically you know like a branch of the Israeli government

and for years there the

settlement ideology was not necessarily perfectly in line with the Israeli government or with the Israeli military and so you see these videos from

maybe even 10 years ago, 10, 20 years ago, of the military going in and dismantling an illegal outpost that settlers had built, which is basically when they just decide to build a new settlement without getting authorization from the government.

And so a lot of the

settlers, Smotrich included actually, were sort of like running around the hills of the West Bank, just building outposts and kind of being chased around by the Israeli government to some extent, who, you know, at various points like wanted to maintain order at the very least.

Whereas the settlement movement has just a sort of one, you know, one focus, and that is on annexing the entire West Bank, ethnically cleansing the entire West Bank.

That's an insane concept, by the way.

We should pause that.

Like, imagine you get with a group of your buddies,

you grab a couple like tents and stakes, and you just run to a community where you don't live, where you have no foundation, and you just build some sort of like ad hoc community on the top of a hill.

That is, I think that would sound insane to most people.

Yes, and I think that that's a really important point to like pause on for a minute because

that is actually the biggest change in the last two years is that the

maybe I'll just take a step back and explain sort of the Smochrich takeover and then it'll lead into that.

So basically like the military occupation of the West Bank in a weird way has provided some insulation between the Palestinian people and the most extremist right-wing Israelis and the settlers in particular.

And what I mean by that is it's not to say that the Israeli military in the West Bank has ever been a benevolent force.

In fact, I think it's been just the opposite for pretty much as long as it's been there.

But

the military has lawyers, and these lawyers...

you know, ostensibly on some level, have to adhere to international law.

And people might hear that and laugh, be like, yeah, what does Israel care about international law these days?

But like the fact is,

there were these sort of bureaucratic procedures that the military was going through for decades to prove that it was sort of like within the guidelines of Geneva and The Hague.

So in that sense,

these guys like Smotrich, who were running around the hills trying to build these little outposts, they were constantly in violation of international law.

And so the military would often chase them around, basically, and try to stop them because they had their own way of building illegal settlements in alignment with the way the government was doing it.

So Smochorch understands from a young age that actually like his dreams of taking over the entire West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria because

it's the, you know, the old kingdom of the kingdoms of Israel from the Old Testament days.

So it has this real like biblical value to them.

He understood that actually the military occupation is the biggest thing in the way of us being able to take over the entire West Bank, more so than the Palestinians who are actually living there.

And so

what happens in February 2023, and this is a part that I think most people don't know about, because everybody knows that after October 7th, the violence got much worse there.

And I think it's understandable why.

But what happened before that, basically, was after Nenyahu

has to build this coalition with these far-right leaders to have a majority governing coalition um smoteric and ben gavir i think people know a lot of these names by now um they're they're two of the guys that just instantly become ministers smoteric is the finance minister which obviously you know that's like the treasury secretary in america um

But the other thing that happens is Smotrich works out a deal with the defense minister, who at the time was Joav Gomant.

And it's pretty murky exactly how this happened, but it was almost certainly, you know, Nenya who sort of like gifted this to Smoterich on a promise that he would like behave in some different ways.

And so Smotrich

becomes literally an additional minister in the Ministry of Defense.

He's not now, Smotric is a civilian.

He wasn't even allowed into the Israeli military because he was a terror supporter.

But he suddenly is just given this arbitrary role as additional minister in the ministry of defense.

And what he then does is he basically builds an entire shadow government inside of the military that sort of takes begins routing all of the decisions around building settlements around demolishing Palestinian villages around infrastructure and it routes it away from those military lawyers who had been a pain in the ass to him for all these years and just sends them straight to these settler ideologues like himself and so After that happens, basically all of the guardrails that had been on the settlement movement because of of the military occupation and these nominal laws they had to adhere to are just gone.

And so

the reason this is so significant is because

technically and legally, the West Bank is still under a military occupation, but it has effectively just been taken over by settler ideologues who have no respect whatsoever for the international law.

And so that is even before October 7th, why you saw this crazy acceleration in settlement building and why, you know, soldiers

suddenly became emboldened and were becoming more violent.

And then basically, October 7th happens, and Smocherch immediately, immediately begins framing what happened,

the Hamas attack, as

no different from what the Palestinians in the West Bank would have done.

There's this quote from him where he says,

the Nazis in Gaza are the same Nazis in the West Bank.

They want to throw us into the same sea.

So he's immediately trying to collapse the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

So then that allows him to basically use the security justification to supercharge everything that he's already been doing.

And so that sort of like fundamental bureaucratic change in the way the West Bank is governed from the military to Smocherich, paired with this new justification, you know, after October 7th, security, that is what has allowed things to just go absolutely, the settlers to go absolutely wild in the West Bank to, you know, these these like unprecedented land grabs, 60 Palestinian villages being chased off their land, over a thousand people murdered in the last two years.

So that's the sort of backdrop in how that all happened.

Yeah, and these like kind of individuals who are fringe players, right?

Like Smotrich was from the Religious Zionism Party, Ben Gavir was from the Jewish Power Party.

Parties that were so far right and so extremist and so willing to adopt violent tactics to further their political ends that they were seen as sort of out of bounds in the Israeli political system for a long time.

But Netanyahu needed them to get back into power in 2022.

And Israel has a proportional representation system, which meant, you know, his like who party didn't have enough seats in the Knesset to get to the 50% threshold that you needed to form a government.

So he goes in league with all these right-wing nuts.

And now those guys basically have him by the balls, right?

So anyone listening thinking, like, well, you know, isn't Netanyahu the one really in control of this?

Like, well, kind of, like, he put together this coalition, but, you know, if Smotrich or Ben Gavir kind of pull the plug on it, then he's thrown out of power.

And, you know, we won't belabor all of it, but he's also got a bunch of legal troubles coming down the pike that he wants to avoid accountability for by staying the prime minister.

I think it's also worth mentioning that, you know, Netanyahu has pretty much always supported the settlement movement.

He's not, it's not his own, like his life's mission to take over the West Bank as it is a Smotrich or a Ben Gavir or a number of other ministers, actually.

But he has rubber stamped virtually everything they've done.

And, you know, right now they're talking about some sort of a formal declaration of sovereignty.

So like, I just, I don't want to let...

Nen Yahoo off the hook, like, you know, the inmates are running the asylum or something, because on some level, like, yes, the government has been taken over by these right-wing fanatics who have this incredible power and pretty much veto power on everything when it comes to the war in Gaza.

But, you know, Nenyahu is, is, he's, he's more, he's a politician.

He has, you know, international diplomacy concerns and, you know, his corruption trial, obviously.

But I think that he's pretty much like in favor of ethnically cleansing the West Bank.

He just has these other sort of considerations as well.

Yeah, his passion project has always been bombing Iran.

You know, like

we all have things we love and there's things you do for work.

And I think bombing Iran was the thing he loves.

But you've written about how, you know, because of this context on the ground that we just talked through in terms of the West Bank getting carved up, and frankly, because of the state of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion after October 7th, talk of a two-state solution is almost akin to climate denial.

Can you make that case for us?

Yeah, I mean,

so basically, like,

for the purposes of this argument, we're going to like put aside your view of what happened in 1948 on the sort of legitimacy of the Jewish state or the Zionist project, and even what happened in 1967.

Forget all the different competing historical narratives and just look at today.

So basically the

strategy that the settlers have had is one of what they call facts on the ground.

And what facts on the ground, what they're referring to is,

we can change laws, we can have new politicians come in, we can do this and that, but ultimately it's going to be what is actually happening on the ground.

That is going to be what drives policy or what drives the

sort of diplomatic situation more than anything else.

And so, even if there have been laws preventing these illegal outposts from going up and settlement expansion, they've still done it.

And, you know, they have they have now over 100 settlements,

somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 settlers.

They've cut up the West Bank into, you know, it's basically a sea of Israeli territory with little like dots of Palestinian villages.

You know, they're now basically severing it in half with the

E1 build and cutting off East Jerusalem.

So the point is, like

they're literally just, there is not a Palestinian state.

Like there couldn't be one.

I mean, yes, there could be a sort of theoretical Palestinian state, or they could be recognized by the UN.

But I think when most people talk about a two-state solution, they're talking about a Palestinian state next to a Jewish state of Israel.

And my question to these people is, where is this Palestinian state that you're talking about?

And

the only real answer is basically, you got to get the settlers out.

And that's the part that I think is like climate denial.

I think when people hear settlers, they might picture like, you know, guys on the Oregon Trail or

something.

Like, we're talking about three quarters of a million heavily, heavily armed, well-organized

people who have built entire cities in the West Bank.

And they have, they, you know, not for nothing, they have the full backing of the Israeli government.

So, this idea that you're going to get the settlers to leave the West Bank, I mean, it would take a

massive war to get them out.

And frankly, if there ever was a war, I mean, the Israeli government would be backing them.

I don't know how there would ever be a civil war to get them out because that's just not where the country is.

So, the point is, like,

I think it's nice to, you know, imagine these two states side by side.

I happen to think that for a long time, politicians who are sort of, you know,

very pro-Israel, but want to maintain a sort of

like a look of being also for Palestinian humanity and self-determination and these things.

I think the two-state solution is just the sort of like thing they fall back on to maintain that they do support Palestinians.

And I think that it's completely disingenuous.

And it allows them to not have to answer the difficult questions about what are you going to do about the fact that is no Palestinian state.

There's 750,000 settlers there.

They have the full backing of the government.

They have tens of thousands of guns.

Like, what are you going to do about all those things?

And when you just talk about a two-state solution, you get to skip all those questions.

And so, you know, my feeling is for any politician who wants to,

you know, claims that they are pro-Palestine or at least like for Palestinian humanity, which I think is hopefully a democratic position, like we can't let them just say, I'm for a two-state solution anymore, because that to me is just a move to obfuscate the reality of what's actually happening.

Yeah, look, I think there's probably different categories.

I think for some, it's just like decades of political muscle memory in the thing that you are all for.

And it's also sort of like the hopeful version of a very bleak situation is you sort of hope that through this process of negotiations, there can be some sort of swaps of territory on each side that will lead to the creation of borders.

and a Palestinian state that probably, let's be honest, probably was never envisioned as having a military right or having the sort of full sets of rights or power that the Israeli government would have, but that could exist as something independent and on its own.

And then I think there probably is a category of people like you just described who are just kind of defaulting to saying they're for a two-state solution to avoid having to answer questions about or entertain, frankly, the much harder reality that you are describing, which has gotten exponentially worse, not only since October 7th, but in the past few weeks, there was this announcement of the E1 settlement, which you mentioned just now, which essentially will carve the West Bank fully into four pieces and not allow it to connect it anyway.

Yeah.

And,

you know,

again, it's just like,

you know, you mentioned the outpost thing before, or you mentioned like anybody who imagined just like you and a group of friends running to some town that that wasn't yours and just setting up a tent and like

that is now policy like they're they have it down to a system where basically these settlers will set their set their sights on a particular palestinian village that they think is vulnerable um a lot of the time it's the bedouin community shepherding villages and you know these places are unarmed they do not have any weapons they have no way to defend themselves and they go and they build an illegal settlement right next to the village and then they do these nightly pogroms these are the videos you see of them going in and setting cars on fire, you know, smashing windows, going into homes, occasionally shooting and killing people.

And that is now government policy to be able to do that and use that as a way to

drive the Palestinians off the land.

So, like, that, what I just described, is so far from a two-state solution.

I mean, it's the opposite.

It's quite literally a policy of violent ethnic cleansing.

And so, I just like, I want to know

who are are the people in Israel even that would be driving this thing forward?

No, I think that's fair.

And I'm sure their listener is probably screaming at the phone right now, reminding me that religious fanatics running into communities they're not from and setting up outposts is also how this country was formed.

And yes, of course, you are right, but it's probably why the United States supports the Settler Project.

You've also written, though, about how just like the evil ways bureaucracy is being leveraged in the West Bank, including laws governing archaeological practices in the preservation of antiquities that is being used to further solidify Israel's hold on the West Bank.

Can you explain that?

Yeah, okay.

So

there's two different routes that the

sort of pro-annexation bloc in Israel, the settlers and whatnot, two different routes that they take for this silent annexation.

One of them is from inside of the West Bank, basically chipping away at Palestinian Authority control,

chipping away at degrading their finances and basically just like softening the Palestinian authority, literally the PA, but also just like their authority or ability to govern across the entire West Bank.

So with archaeology, what they've done is they passed

It was actually an executive decision about a year ago or a year and a half ago that just suddenly said

archaeology sites in the West Bank.

Israel now controls not just the ones in Area C, but also the ones in Area B.

Those are also ours to govern now.

The entire West Bank is basically an archaeology site.

I mean, this is one of the most historically rich places on earth.

There have been dozens of civilizations that have been there.

The ancient Israelites were one of them.

There are many others.

There were Islamic ones.

There were pagan ones.

There were Samaritans before there even were Jews.

And so when you just You pass this sort of like narrow, it sounds like this narrow antiquity saw, like, okay, they just

took control of these archaeological sites in area b we're talking about entire towns that are not now not able to build homes that are now not able to access their you know water resources or um they just can't do anything all they're basically like archaeology has been used as a zoning tool so so then the the second way that

they're going about this annexation is

not chipping away at the Palestinian Authority, but actually chipping away at the military occupation, like I mentioned.

And what that looks like is basically trying to take Israel's laws, like the laws that govern civil life in Israel, and make them the law in the West Bank, too.

And so this big thing that's happening right now, which is being framed by...

I think like people who just don't know any better, but also disingenuous people as a fight over archaeology, is actually a fight over dismantling the military occupation and just absorbing the West Bank.

And so what's happening is basically there is a governing body in in the West Bank called the Israeli Civil Administration.

This is technically part of the Defense Department, and it is the body that oversees like administrative things in the West Bank, including overseeing archaeological sites, all the zoning laws.

This new law that is sort of matriculating through the Knesset right now would take control of archaeological sites away from the Israeli civil administration and give them to the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

So again, on paper, it's like, what's the big deal?

Authority over archaeological sites transfers from one department to another.

The big deal is that now

the

Israeli federal government suddenly takes control of huge swaths of the West Bank.

And that is just like, again, you know, you're chipping away at the military occupation.

And the way they think of it is they're trying to erase the green line that separates Israel from its occupied territories so that the settlers can just be considered citizens like everybody else.

Israeli law governs the West Bank like it does in Israel.

And archaeology, frankly, it's always been a very strong weapon for Israel to displace and oppress Palestinians.

But now they've really sharpened it into a tool that they're using to just,

you know, further sort of erase the green line and bludgeon the Palestinians.

Yeah, it's the steady erosion.

One last question for you.

So we've talked on this show before about your great reporting about a 16-year-old Palestinian American boy named Mohammad Zahir Ibrahim, who has been in prison for six months for allegedly, I think, throwing rocks on an empty street.

I'm not sure how that's a crime in any way.

Can you tell us a little bit about this case and if there's any updates?

Yeah, so Mohamed Zahir Ibrahim, he's a Palestinian American.

He is first cousins with Saifola Musalet, who was beaten to death in July.

Their moms are sisters, so literally first cousins.

Basically, in February,

him and and a couple of kids were, you know, out being kids and like threw some rocks on just on an empty street.

There was nothing going on there.

And that later that night, the Israeli military basically burst into each of their homes,

masked and bound the kids and took them to Israeli military detention.

They were then interrogated and I've seen the interrogation videos.

They are trying to get them to say that they were throwing rocks at cars or throwing rocks at people, but there's no evidence that they were and nobody said that they were.

But anyway, you know, like I said before, you don't actually need a charge.

So they have not been able to charge Muhammad with throwing a rock at somebody or even at a car or property, but they still just said we're going to keep him anyway.

So he has been held for six months in, he was in Megiddo, which is an Israeli military detention center famous for torture, for starvation.

By the way, the Israeli prison system is overseen by Ben Gavir, who just openly brags about starving them, taking their beds away, sticking eight or 12 prisoners in a four-person cell.

This kid weighed 100 pounds.

He's down to his lawyer, last time she was able to speak to him, which was months ago, says he's below 70 pounds now.

He's contracted scabies.

He has not been able to speak with his parents once in six months.

And I think it's pretty clear that

Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, probably any number of people could just make a phone call and say, hey, you got the 16-year-old kid in there.

He's an American.

You have no charges on him.

You have no evidence that he did anything wrong.

Just let him go home.

His parents are worried.

No one even noticed.

His parents are worried that he's going to die.

And the thing is, you don't even have to hold anybody accountable, which pains me to say it because there are so many people who need to be held accountable for Israel's crimes and for the crimes of the settlers.

Like in the case of Seifola, they need to arrest the people who beat him to death.

But in this case, you don't even have to do that.

You just have to quietly let him out.

And

it is just beyond me how a 16-year-old American being imprisoned, tortured, starved in a place where just last month, somebody his age died, just dropped dead mysteriously.

They have not returned the body yet.

Why, Why, there's not a bigger push to get this kid out.

I mean,

right now, he's supposed to be in Florida.

He was supposed to be in Florida this summer working at the family ice cream shop with his cousin.

His cousin's now dead.

He's in prison.

And it's just, it hasn't broken through.

And so, you know, if I may,

I'm guessing that there are a lot of people in Washington who listen to this show.

And I just want to like, you know, give a

potential political layup for any of you.

You could rescue an American teenager from prison, from

a dungeon, essentially, who's being starved to death.

You could make a phone call and probably get this kid out.

And I think people would be really happy about that.

I mean, we've all seen the polling that, you know, more and more people are supporting Palestine and are becoming critical of Israel.

This is just such an easy one.

Just get this kid out.

You can even go take a picture with him after.

And it's just like, you know, I say it's beyond me why it hasn't happened, but it's obvious why it hasn't happened because, you know, Palestinian Americans are not considered real Americans.

Our government just does not care about them.

And so, yeah.

Yeah, no, it's a horrifying case.

You brought it to my attention through your reporting.

I know that, you know, Congressman Greg Landsman and some other Democrats who are in Israel had raised it with Ambassador Huckabee and with the Israeli government.

I had hoped that that might lead to something prying loose in this case.

I don't know what needs to happen.

Does it need to be 500, you know, every single Democratic elected official in the country calling?

Does it need to be one Republican calling Huckabee and pushing for this?

I'm not sure what we need to have happen here.

I think that it basically needs to become enough of a nuisance for them that they just decide to make the call.

Whether that is because every Democratic lawmaker in the country is calling the embassy every single day, or if it's because we actually get like some of the,

I hate to say it, but like a Marjorie Taylor Green or one of these like America firsters to call Huckabee and they would already have his ear.

But it basically needs to become like, okay, we got to just deal with this thing because it's a problem for us.

And, you know, credit to Landsman and, you know, Senator Merkley and Van Hollen actually just met with this family last week when they were in Ramullah.

But it's just, there has not been a sustained push to get him out.

Like there, like frankly, like there was to get the Israeli-American hostages out of Gaza,

which we heard about every single day on the news.

And we know that, you know, both Biden and Trump were putting enormous resources towards trying to get them home.

And it's just not happening here.

And

I think that, listen, this kid could die.

This kid could die.

A lot of kids have died in prison there.

And then we would have an American kid who died in an Israeli prison.

And I think that, you know, every American politician should want to be on the side of getting him out.

Yes, absolutely.

So hopefully people are listening and might lob in a call to Marco Rubio's State Department or Huckabee's office or

Call your representative and demand that they call the embassy and they call the State Department and say that you have to push to get Mohamed Zahir Ibrahim out.

I have more information about it on my sub stack, which you can find.

Yeah.

Well, everyone should check out Jasper's Substack, Infinite Jazz J-A-Z.

It's excellent, excellent coverage of Israel, Palestine, the West Bank, all kinds of fascinating things.

Jasper, thank you for doing the show.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Tommy.

Take care.

Thanks again to Jasper and Nathanael for doing the show.

And thank you guys for enduring us, coming out a little late this week, but I promise you, our brains are in a better place this Wednesday.

Worth the wait, guys.

It's worth the wait.

You're welcome.

Potse of the World is a crooked media production.

Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski.

Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith.

Saul Rubin is helping out this summer.

Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes.

The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Jordan Cantor is our audio engineer.

Audio support by Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolles, and Ryan Young.

Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

Adrian Hill is our senior vice president of news and politics.

If you want to listen to Pod Save the World ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.

Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers, and other community events.

Plus, find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more.

And if, like us, you're opinionated, leave us a review.

Our production staff is proudly unionized by the Writers Guild of America East.

Comcast Business High Five Hotline.

I signed my business up for the five-year price log guarantee, and I can't stop high-fiving people.

That's perfectly natural when you sign up for Gig Speed Internet and Advanced Security.

Locked in at a great rate for five years.

Really?

That's great news.

High-five, everybody!

The Comcast Business five-year price lock guarantee is packed, but only for a limited time.

Sign up today.

High-five!

Ends 9-21-25 for new customers with qualifying bundle.

Current customer eligibility varies by service and area.

Guaranteed rate applies to monthly service charge, excluding tax exemptions.

Other restrictions supply.

Carl's Jr.

is the only place to get the classic Western bacon cheeseburger.

Those onion rings?

All that bacon?

That tangy barbecue?

Well, have you tangled with spicy western bacon?

Can you ride out the jalapeno heat?

Take a pepperjack punch.

For a limited time, it's high time for a spicy western reintroduction.

Rankle the best deals on the app.

Only a Carl's Jr.

Available for a limited time.

Exclusive app offers for registered My Rewards members only.