From Al Qaeda to the White House

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Speaker 1 Hey there, it's David Plotts, host of Slate's Political Gab Fest, the longest-running politics podcast.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to Potsey the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
I'm Ben Rhodes. Do you know who had the event after us in the Reagan building after Crooked Con?

Speaker 3 Like the Insurance Association of America or something like that?

Speaker 1 Even better.

Speaker 1 Former General Mike Flynn. No way.
No.

Speaker 3 What's his organization? Is it like a QAnon military coup kind of initiative?

Speaker 1 Coup 2.

Speaker 1 No, so apparently he was the Grand Marshal of the National Veterans Parade in D.C. on November 9th.
So in the lead up to that, on November 7th, the same day as CrookedCon, he was...

Speaker 3 The Grand Marshal of what?

Speaker 1 The Big Veterans Day parade in D.C.

Speaker 3 I would have thought Grand Wizard.

Speaker 1 Grand Wizard.

Speaker 1 So he was honored at a dinner that night in the Reagan building in the same venue as CrookedCon. So for anyone wondering why the thing was like halfway closed, halfway through, that was why.

Speaker 1 Mike Flynn pacing around.

Speaker 3 I'm surprised we didn't have him on a panel. Yeah.
He might have had some insights. He

Speaker 1 might have had us arrested by the Marshal of the Supreme Court or something. So Michael went deep on this.
So the event was MC'd by a woman named Chris D. Clark,

Speaker 1 K-R-S-D-E,

Speaker 1 D-E-E Clark. She was named Mrs.
American 2023.

Speaker 3 Mrs. American.
Mrs. American.
That's more of an identity statement than a pageantry statement.

Speaker 1 Okay, wait for this. So Michael went real deep on this.
So not Miss America. So apparently runners up to the Mrs.
America contest, which I think is like an off-brand version of Miss America.

Speaker 1 So she's an off-brand version of that. So she's like the T-Mu version of Kirkland Vodka.

Speaker 3 She's like the MAGA

Speaker 3 brand version.

Speaker 1 I guess. Yeah.
With the MAGA face.

Speaker 3 The generic MAGA face.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Mike Flynn in the house. Could have come by.
You, me, Roe, Yasmine.

Speaker 3 It continues to be completely extraordinary to me that that guy was a relatively senior official in the Obama administration.

Speaker 1 Just goes to show you that the Democrats.

Speaker 3 National Security personnel people let some slip through the cracks there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, more than a few crazy people at the senior levels of the military. Well, anyway, thanks to everybody that came out to CrookedCon.
Thanks to everybody who listened to it.

Speaker 1 We released it in the feed on Monday. Great event.
Thanks to Niazmeen. Thanks to Roe.
Really just awesome all around.

Speaker 3 It was. I mean, the vibes were great.
The energy was great. It was good to see people in the flesh.
People seemed fired up. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Rodan Yasmin gave a different perspective than we're used to hearing from the kind of wind-up doll Democratic foreign policy type. So that was good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Also, great timing, you know, post-election, pre-shutdown cave.

Speaker 3 Couldn't have timed it better. That was fun, too, to just bask in victory for a couple of days.

Speaker 1 Three or four days of glory. That's all we get.
That's all we're metered out these days. All right, we got a great show for you guys, though.

Speaker 1 We're going to cover Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharra's improbable visit to the White House on Monday and what got done.

Speaker 1 We're also going to talk about Trump's visit last week from Hungarian autocrat Victor Orban. I hope they had a good time.
Did you see the photo of like this right-wing guy named Rod Dreyer and J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance and Orban?

Speaker 1 They all spent like 90 minutes smoking cigars, talking about geopolitics.

Speaker 1 All right, dude. Sounds like a good time.

Speaker 3 I'd rather watch anything else. Sounds like a lot of fun seeing Victor Orban and J.D.
Vance

Speaker 3 sipping whiskey and go.

Speaker 1 I hate migrants. No, I hate migrants.
Okay. We're going to explain why the U.S.
is boycotting the upcoming G20 meeting in South Africa.

Speaker 1 We'll cover the election and the brutal crackdown on protesters that happened in Tanzania. Got an update from Sudan.
Then we'll explain why Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion.

Speaker 1 I love that that's like his kind of

Speaker 1 starting point. Yeah, nice and round number.

Speaker 1 We're going to explain why Trump's demand to be known as the peace president has hit some real trouble this past week, a lot of from a bunch of different angles.

Speaker 1 And then you'll hear a hilarious update from our always hilarious friends over in Saudi Arabia about their not related to the comedy festival. No, not related to the comedy festival.

Speaker 1 This is just about infrastructure week, actually. Infrastructure lifetime at this current rate.
We'll talk about their planned NEOM city and the line building, which wait around for this one. This is

Speaker 1 a good one. And then in a little bit, I'm going to talk with Tara Kabash and Josh Paul.
So I haven't done the conversation yet. I'm letting you guys behind the scenes here.

Speaker 1 They're coming in the studio afterwards.

Speaker 1 But they both resigned from the Biden administration over Gaza policy, and they have now formed a new organization called A New Policy to put together and put forward not settle a smarter, more rational approach to U.S.

Speaker 1 Israel policy. So I'm going to talk about that experience, what it was like to resign, why more people didn't follow suit in their view.
We'll talk about Trump's ceasefire, the

Speaker 1 phase two planning that's happening or not happening as we speak, and much more. So excited about that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I talked to those guys after they resigned and deeply thoughtful, interesting, courageous people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it took real guts. And, you know, it was...
Not a lot of

Speaker 1 profiles and courage looking around. Yeah.
No, no. All right, Ben.
So let's start with Syria.

Speaker 1 So Monday was this pretty extraordinary moment where a former al-Qaeda guy, turned statesman, hopefully, met with President Trump at the White House. No, I'm not talking about Rudy Giuliani.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about Ahmed Al-Sharra, Syria's transitional president. So Shara led the charge to topple the Assad regime back in December of 2024.
Doesn't that feel like it was more like four years ago?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Not one year ago. That's back when he was Jolani.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Abu Jalani, yeah. Better name.
This was his first visit.

Speaker 3 Namdegare is often better.

Speaker 1 Namdeger. I'd be sick of Namdegare.
I mean, I guess then you have to go to Gare, which I don't really want to do.

Speaker 3 But it's

Speaker 3 a name.

Speaker 1 So he was the. Al-Shara's visit to the White House was the first ever by a Syrian head of state.
They had a kind of a rough run of leaders since its independence in 1946.

Speaker 1 But this was Shara's second visit to the U.S. Remember, he was at the U.N.
General Assembly in New York in September, where he did that weird sit-down with Dave Petraeus.

Speaker 1 It was also his second meeting with Trump. They first met face to face in Saudi Arabia several months ago.
Here's what Trump told reporters about his conversations with Al-Shara after they met.

Speaker 5 Yeah, you can expect some announcements on Syria. We want to see Syria become a country that's very successful.
And I think this leader can do it. I really do.
I think this leader can do it.

Speaker 5 And people said he's had a rough past. We've all had rough pasts, but he has had a rough past.
And I think, frankly, if you didn't have a rough past, you wouldn't have a chance.

Speaker 3 It's like comparing himself like getting syphilis at studio 54 Yeah, I was gonna say like just in the bowels of the New York nightclub scene of the early 80s versus

Speaker 3 being in a prison in Iraq for years and fighting at multi-year insurgency.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it camp leatherneck or you know I mean I've had a rough past I you know, I once got like a citation for having a 40 when I was 17 years old.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So the biggest item on Shara's to-do list, besides, you know, making Trump feel like he's a big, important man, was to get get U.S.
sanctions on Syria removed.

Speaker 1 Shah is desperate to attract businesses to Syria and also to get access to the international banking system. On that front, he had some limited success.

Speaker 1 So on Monday, Trump announced the six-month suspension of U.S. sanctions on Syria that are part of this 2019 law called the Caesar Act.

Speaker 1 But as we've discussed before, Congress will still need to act to permanently remove those sanctions.

Speaker 1 A bill to do that has passed the Senate, but it's being held up in the House due to ongoing concerns about the treatment of minority groups in Syria.

Speaker 1 So specifically, there was this really horrible incident back in July where an estimated 2,000 people were killed in the city of Sweda, mostly members of the Druze religious minority.

Speaker 1 Government forces were accused of being involved in that massacre. And there's also been reports of abuse of another minority group called the Alawites.

Speaker 1 President Assad was an Alawite, and sort of that minority group ruled Syria for a long time. So there's been a lot of reprisal violence.

Speaker 1 So while Trump had mostly nice and or weird things to say about Shara, he called him attractive. He's like, oh, look at that hot, look at that hot extremist over there.
He's a handsome guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, I wouldn't.

Speaker 1 Is he handsome? I don't know.

Speaker 3 I don't know. He's aligned.

Speaker 1 If we're like, if we're ranking him in terms of just heads of state.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's not a typoist. He's not that new Dutch guy, but you know.
He's doing pretty good, though. He's not a centimer in.
He's just, you know, he's in the middle of the pack.

Speaker 1 But it wasn't like a total love fest. Like, there was no press conference.
There was no pool spray.

Speaker 1 There wasn't like a Mar-a-Laco dinner

Speaker 1 with the extremist guy. There wasn't a big arrival ceremony.
I think they just sent him in through the side door. But the main deliverables were this sanctions waiver, which he got for six months.

Speaker 1 I think the UN Security Council took Shara's name off its global terrorist list. That must be nice.
And then Shara and Trump, they talked about reopening embassies.

Speaker 1 There was a Reuters report that the U.S. may begin using an airbase in Syria as part of some security pact with Syria and Israel.

Speaker 1 It'll be interesting to see how the old al-Qaeda buddies take that one. And then Shara said Syria is going to join the broader anti-ISIS coalition.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, I don't know, what did you make of the visit, the optics of it or lack thereof, and sort of what they got done?

Speaker 3 I mean, having sat through endless meetings in the White House situation room about Syria, in which we just had no answers to what was a terrible situation with horrific suffering, barbaric Assad regime, a kind of alphabet soup of different extremist groups operating, proxy wars, you know, other countries backing their favorite group in northern Syria.

Speaker 3 I mean, this, you know, it's hard to put yourself back into the place of what a gigantic disaster Syria was for such a long period of time.

Speaker 3 And I think it's just worth maintaining that perspective that how extraordinary it is that this guy...

Speaker 1 One year.

Speaker 3 You know, look, whatever we may come to learn about him

Speaker 3 and whether his autocratic tendencies kind of take hold.

Speaker 3 It is just pretty extraordinary that he went from basically being in northern Syria around Idlib, you know, governing a small slice of land to being in the White House in less than one year.

Speaker 3 I mean, like a year ago today, that guy was like with some fighters, with some like, you know, RPGs and flatbed trucks and stuff, like, and now he's sitting in the White House.

Speaker 1 And like, I kept making jokes about his past, but like he's done a lot of the right things since taking power. And, you know, I think you and I are both on the record of saying the U.S.

Speaker 1 should get rid of sanctions because we want Syria to succeed. Now, there is an open question of whether he will be the next generation of strongman, but like we got to give him a chance.

Speaker 3 No, and when you look, when you when you look at and listen to what he was saying,

Speaker 3 particularly right as he took over, like this guy clearly like read a lot of books like when he was in prison and when he was like,

Speaker 3 I mean, he has like pretty evolved theories of politics. And look,

Speaker 3 I agree with the decision to waive sanctions. I fundamentally agree with the idea, and Trump has a lot more room to do this than Obama or Biden would have.
Imagine them having Al-Shara there.

Speaker 3 The Fox News is ruling out the Brett Baer treatment for this guy.

Speaker 1 Al-Shara is on Brett Baer's show. It's 6 p.m.
on on Monday night, so we haven't been able to watch it yet, but that is a remarkable thing to imagine.

Speaker 3 That whole show would be dedicated to Islamophobic commentators like crapping on Obama or Biden.

Speaker 3 But I think what's fundamental is if we're going to get out of this war on terror page and we're going to get to some kind of, look, I don't expect everybody to have multi-party representative democracy in the way that we used to have in the United States.

Speaker 3 There's going to have to be a place for Islamists. There just is.
I mean, we had this fight all the way back in the Obama years with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Speaker 3 Like, you just, you can't exclude the most popular political movements in each of these countries. And so, I think we do have to get comfortable with that.
And it's in our interest

Speaker 3 for there to be Islamist movements that are capable of becoming nonviolent, inclusive, and tolerant. That would be great.
That's the best case scenario, right?

Speaker 3 That's actually a better scenario than like just constantly imprisoning tens of thousands of people like they do in Egypt, right? Because they're so distrustful of those kinds of movements.

Speaker 3 So, all those reasons, I think it's worth taking a shot on the sky.

Speaker 3 The vibe you pick up in talking to people in the Middle East is like, oh, he seems like pretty autocratic, you know, and like there's a huge delta between him becoming

Speaker 3 a Saddam Hussein-like character and him being an inclusive, pluralistic leader who just leads Syria in the right direction.

Speaker 3 And I just think you have a better chance to influence that if you engage the guy.

Speaker 3 The one thing I will say is I wish that there was like a little bit more focus on creative efforts to how do you rebuild Syria.

Speaker 3 It's such a US thing where it's like, we're going to have him here, away the sanctions. We got to get him in the ISIS coalition.

Speaker 1 And also be nice to Israel. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Exactly. It's like Israel terror.
You know, like,

Speaker 3 let's talk about what this guy and what Syrians are actually interested in, which is how do they rebuild their country? Because it's pretty remarkable that now he's in the counter-ISIS coalition.

Speaker 3 He's like shooting hoops with like American generals.

Speaker 1 The head of CENTCOM and the other guy who runs the Global ISIS Coalition. They were just, you know, just playing some pickup, I guess.

Speaker 3 By the way, he's got a pretty good jump shot. But I just, this is the problem.

Speaker 1 You would say that's the next one.

Speaker 3 We show up and we're like,

Speaker 3 we're here to talk about, you know, Israel and terrorism. And it's just like, I wish we had a bigger agenda.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the history is extraordinary. I mean, Syria was named a state sponsor of terrorism in 1979 and has been there ever since.
We just sanctioned the country to hell,

Speaker 1 understandably under the Assad regime. But by the end of Assad's reign, basically their only economy was creating a drug called Captagon and then selling it to addicts throughout the Middle East.

Speaker 1 As we mentioned, I mean, Shara was imprisoned by U.S. forces in Iraq for five years in a variety of different locations.
He was at Abu Ghraib, Kambuka.

Speaker 1 He got out in 2011, but unfortunately, speaking of the unintended consequences, those prisons were like terrorist grad school where everybody met and exchanged ideas and best practices.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, maybe another good reason not to do it. Do you think

Speaker 1 Assad watched the coverage from Moscow? Oh,

Speaker 1 I was imagining. Yeah.
I mean, he's up to.

Speaker 3 Two great shows, by the way, like a biopic of Al-Sharo I'd watch, and then like just a reality show of Assad's life in Moscow, I would definitely watch.

Speaker 3 But I just on the sanctions, I'm a big believer that you don't keep sanctions in place after the purpose behind the sanctions has expired.

Speaker 1 Of course not.

Speaker 3 You need some way to get rid of these sanctions regimes that are everywhere.

Speaker 3 And I think they should lift these sanctions because like, you know, we put them in place for a different reason at a different time. That reason has expired.

Speaker 3 Literally, the person, Bashar al-Sad, is gone. And look, because if this guy turns out to be a creep, you can always put the sanctions back on him.

Speaker 3 So I'd like to see them go further and just lift at these things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I would too. It's also worth noting last week that when we were in DC, a Hungarian dictator Victor Orban was in town too, along with I think like all of the stand countries.

Speaker 3 They were in our hotel.

Speaker 1 Most of them were at our hotel. Yeah, we should have had a little informal bylap.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 there was like, felt like there were some side deals happening at the

Speaker 3 lobby there. Yeah, some rare earths.
Some rare earths are getting sold to the

Speaker 3 drug influencers, you know, like

Speaker 1 dudes in like sharp suits, ripping sigs everywhere. Yeah.
So Orban was there in D.C. to beg for an exemption from U.S.
sanctions so that he can continue to buy oil and gas from Russia.

Speaker 1 And he got one, at least for a year. Now, Trump, as we discussed, I think, a couple weeks ago, Trump sanctioned the two largest oil companies in Russia.

Speaker 1 He has threatened to sanction any country that buys oil from the Russians. But I guess if you're a right-wing autocrat who goes to CPAC, you get a waiver.

Speaker 1 Or if you're Argentina, you get like a $40 billion bank bailout. So that's just how it goes.
these days. As part of the deal, Hungary also agreed to buy a bunch of natural gas from the U.S.

Speaker 1 And he pledged to buy between $10 and $20 billion worth of nuclear reactors, which I will believe when I see it. Orban also hinted that the U.S.

Speaker 1 might help him get his hands on some EU funds that had been frozen due to democratic backsliding in Hungary, maybe another bailout of his own or a currency swap like the Artinians got, so stay tuned there.

Speaker 1 They also took some time in this spray, that pool spray they did, to shit on Ukraine and suggest that Ukraine could never win the war.

Speaker 1 war, which is a nice touch when you're there finalizing a deal that's going to send more money into the hands of Vladimir Putin to buy bombs to drop on Ukraine.

Speaker 1 Here's a little excerpt from the Orban-Trump bilateral meeting in front of the press corps for you guys to enjoy.

Speaker 6 Affordability is what the American people elected this president to do and he is doing it and you guys refuse to cover it and you refuse to cover that the previous administration created the worst unaffordability crisis in American history.

Speaker 6 And I've been watching the TV all day saying that he doesn't want to talk about affordability. That's what he's working on every day and that's what this administration is doing.

Speaker 7 But you know why they refuse to cover it?

Speaker 7 Because they're fake news. That's why God.

Speaker 3 Can I get heard from them?

Speaker 7 Sure.

Speaker 3 Caroline,

Speaker 7 the Prime Minister would like you to work for him in Hamburg. Please go see.

Speaker 7 Please consider. You know what? That's a very good decision you just made.

Speaker 7 Please don't leave us, Caroline.

Speaker 1 That was Caroline Levitt. I mean, White House Press Secretary again and out of girl from Victor Orban, real fan of the media.
So, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Ben Orban's facing his first major political challenge in what, like 15 years?

Speaker 1 It sure seems like this visit was just a totally unnecessary political gift to him before that election, but I don't know what'd you make of it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's no like vital reason for the President of the United States to be having such a big formal bilateral meeting with the Prime Minister of Hungary.

Speaker 3 And it just kind of continues what we've seen, which is that if you're one of Trump's guys, which is basically if you're on the CPAC circuit, right?

Speaker 3 If you're Javier Miele from Argentina, if you're Nai Bukele from El Salvador, if you're Victor Orban, you know, you get preferential treatment across the board.

Speaker 3 You know, you get exemptions from sanctions.

Speaker 3 We might throw some weight around at the EU to get them to give you money that they've rightly frozen, not just because of democratic backsliding, but because of rampant corruption.

Speaker 3 Like, Orban basically takes that money, it's for infrastructure projects, gives the contracts to his buddies, and they skim like billions of dollars off the top, right?

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 3 Brussels is like, why do we give him this money? And I will also say, like, the thing about the,

Speaker 3 you know, he still has these relationships into Russia. When he came to power, there was a lot of investigative journalism around.

Speaker 3 Seems like there's like some shady business connections with the FSB, the Russian intelligence services, and Hungary, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, if someone, you start pulling back the threads on some of these deals over the years between Russia and Hungary, you know, there's probably more there there.

Speaker 3 But Orban's there to make sure that nobody pays attention to that. Nobody's looking too closely at that.
And he gets exemptions and he can still buy some Russian energy.

Speaker 3 And then he can just shit on Zelensky in the process and kind of replenish his bone a few days. I will say the Carolyn Levitt thing is gross in a number of levels.

Speaker 3 Um, one is it like it's funny with her, like

Speaker 3 she's not that good. She's better than like

Speaker 1 Sean Spicer.

Speaker 3 Sean Spicer and then that other woman who's on like Fox now. Kaylee McNee.
Kayleigh McNay. And actually, honestly, like probably better than Carrine Jean-Pierre.

Speaker 3 But like, what is she? She's just like, he's doing affordability. Like, it doesn't even make sense.

Speaker 1 It's like, dude, your boss just said, like, affordability is fake news and stupid and to fuck off if you care about it. Like, we heard the tape.

Speaker 3 Her role is to perform in front of him and trash people. And then people chuckle.
Like, we're taking this

Speaker 3 seriously. And then, like, have a kind of pretty creepy intervene from Warbunner.
It's like, we would take her, you know? Just didn't.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mentioned like, yeah, Kim Jong-un's like, a good spin. He's like,

Speaker 3 by the way, to like connect the stands to this,

Speaker 3 it reminded me of this bilateral meeting that Obama once did with the president of Kazakhstan.

Speaker 3 And we actually had a Kazakh American on our team,

Speaker 3 and it was a woman, and Obama introduced him to her.

Speaker 3 And because, you know, he's nice like that. And then the guy's like, that is very good.
Well, we give you one. of ours and now you must give us one of yours.
What?

Speaker 3 And what was weird is like, I think he wasn't kidding. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And he was like, who are we supposed to give give him? Like, I hope it's not me.

Speaker 1 But anyway. God, if you're president, you need to deal with some creepy weirdos and pretend a lot of jokes are funny that just absolutely

Speaker 3 a lot of like fake chuckling. But I mean, look, we shouldn't under again, like, we have to like kind of fight against the urge to be like, this is now the normal.

Speaker 3 Like, Victor Orban is like an undemocratic, illiberal, fascistic kind of creep. And that's who we get foot rubbish.

Speaker 1 It's who the right-wing loves. Yep.
He's celebrated in the mega world.

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Speaker 1 Speaking of awkward group events full of heads of state that are probably not that fun, but you got to go to them.

Speaker 1 Trump is apparently boycotting the G20. So the G20 is taking place in South Africa at the end of November.
The U.S. is, I guess, just not going to go at all.

Speaker 1 I mean, Trump had previously said that he was going to skip it. I thought he was going to send JD Vance.
But now the U.S. isn't sending a delegation at all.

Speaker 1 And if you're wondering why, dear listener, it's because of a non-existent genocide against white farmers in South Africa.

Speaker 1 Remember, back in May, the president of South Africa was in the Oval Office, Siro Roma Fosa, and Trump was showing him photos and printouts and videos that he said were evidence of this white genocide.

Speaker 1 But, like, one of the pictures was from the Congo.

Speaker 1 One was just like a video of a protest from five years ago. But those very humiliating errors did not slow Donald Trump down

Speaker 1 or prevent Trump from like railing away on this. He is now boycotting G20.
He's calling for South Africa to be thrown out of the G20.

Speaker 1 We've completely changed our refugee policy in the United States so that we're only taking in white South African farmers. So this is, again, the reality we live in.
So, Ben, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I'm surprised that even they wouldn't just send sad little JD Vance over there. It seems like the net effect of this decision will be to hand the conference over to China and Russia.

Speaker 1 But what do you think?

Speaker 3 JD Vance would have loved to go, by the way. Just lecture everybody.
Just go and lecture everybody about treating white people better in Africa.

Speaker 1 Not invited to dinner.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, look, the crude thing that needs to be pointed out here is it's useful to be reminded every now and then how just fundamentally racist the whole Trump project is.

Speaker 3 South Africa is a big, important country hosting arguably the most important meeting of the year.

Speaker 3 And we're not going in some weird fit of peak because of some Fox News programming about some white farmers who are, by the way,

Speaker 3 we've come full circle to defending the white side of apartheid.

Speaker 3 That's kind of where we're at in 2025. And that's not even that unusual.
It's like, oh, you know, Trump's pulling down the G20 because of the white genocide, right?

Speaker 3 The substantive thing that's important, again, is that the G20, I felt in the Obama years, was the most important meeting of the year.

Speaker 3 It was the 20 biggest economies, although like that there are 20 countries in it that were set up at the time. They were the biggest economies.

Speaker 3 So not all of them are the biggest anymore, like Egypt and Argentina. But nonetheless, they're all there.
And you're meeting to kind of coordinate the...

Speaker 3 the piping and wiring and running of the global economy. You're then using it.

Speaker 3 So we use it a lot to kind of respond respond to the financial crisis and stimulate demand or deal with some emergency economic problem somewhere.

Speaker 3 But we also used it to deal with all kinds of other challenges, right?

Speaker 3 Clean energy transition was a feature. Obviously, Trump doesn't give a shit about that.
Fake news. But also, you know, the Chinese are there.

Speaker 3 You know, the Russians are there when they're not indicted by the ICC. So that's not a problem for Putin.
The major European countries are there.

Speaker 3 Brazil's there, et cetera.

Speaker 3 So you'd use it to have bilateral meetings with all those countries, too, about whatever the other things were on your agenda, because you basically have like a big enough group, 20, and there are usually some other countries invited, that you can get a lot done, but it's small enough that you can kind of see like half the people there and really get a lot of work done.

Speaker 3 And to your point, Tommy, like by us not going to a G20 summit that is in a BRICS country, like South Africa is the S in the BRICS, we are just saying, like Chinese, you run this meeting entirely, right?

Speaker 3 This is your,

Speaker 3 you built this whole alternative world order with the bricks and all these other development instruments.

Speaker 3 Now we're literally taking something from our world order we built and just saying over to you now.

Speaker 3 And whether that's, you know, the Chinese are going to be coming to talk about investment.

Speaker 3 You know, we come to talk about tariffs and kissing Trump's ass. They're going to be coming to talk about like investing more in Africa, like, you know, development financing,

Speaker 3 you know, AI probably.

Speaker 3 By the way, I'd love to see the G20 used to be setting AI norms. Like that's clearly not happening.
So, when Trump does shit like this, you realize it's not just a spectacle and the offense of it.

Speaker 3 It's like the opportunity cost of not being there, what's not getting done internationally that would normally be getting done on things like AI.

Speaker 3 And then also just the opportunity for the Chinese of the world to just say, look, these guys are totally fucking unreliable.

Speaker 1 Do with us. Yeah.
We got a fake white genocide, leads to a boycott of the G20 in South Africa. We got a fake Christian genocide

Speaker 1 that gets you military plans to invade Nigeria. And the Trump foreign policy is like, hey, everyone,

Speaker 1 Tajikistan is joining the Abraham Accords.

Speaker 1 Well, but that's a good point.

Speaker 3 Like, the guy can't bring himself to go to the G20, like the premier meeting of the year, but he can have this fucking cavalcade of people through the Oval Office, right?

Speaker 3 You know, Orban, Al-Shara, the stands, you know, some of which have probably got some corrupt side deals in play. I mean, what are we doing here?

Speaker 1 A little Captagon for crypto deal?

Speaker 3 I mean, this is so funny. He's like, he's, yeah, he's spending so much time on foreign policy.

Speaker 1 He spends too much time on foreign policy, But it hurts me to say it.

Speaker 3 But he's not, most of it is his performative bullshit.

Speaker 1 And he's not accomplishing anything for us. He's accomplishing a lot for himself.
He's getting Don and Eric's calls returned for the resort in Bali.

Speaker 1 But even like Steve Bannon and people are being like, dude, like the craziest right-wingers are saying to Trump, like enough of the foreign policy, focus on the economy, focus on affordability.

Speaker 1 And he just absolutely refuses to do it.

Speaker 3 By the way, also, like, not a great look to have your press secretary like scolding people that you're working on affordability in the bylaw with the Prime Minister of Hungary, who has nothing to do with affordability in the United States.

Speaker 1 Clearly, a waste of your time. But hey, congrats on beating up the Reuters guy.
Yeah, good job.

Speaker 3 Really dunked on Jeff Mason.

Speaker 1 All right, let's turn to Tanzania,

Speaker 1 where hundreds, if not thousands, of Tanzanians are killed, have dead following protests over a rigged presidential election, and hundreds more have been charged with treason for criticizing the government.

Speaker 1 So, President Samia Sululu Hassan won the re-election on October 29th, won in air quotes. She got or claims 97% of the vote with an 87% turnout.

Speaker 1 If you're racking up vote totals in the 90 percentile, that's usually a pretty good sign that something is amiss. And in this case, everything is amiss.

Speaker 1 So running up to the election, Amnesty International documented widespread human rights violations, including, quote, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torture, unlawful killings, and severe restrictions on freedoms of movement, expression, and peaceful assembly.

Speaker 1 The leader of the main opposition party has been in jail since April. The candidate from the second largest opposition party was disqualified disqualified in September.

Speaker 1 And then on election day, the ruling party cut off the internet and they stuffed the ballot boxes. But other than that, free and fair election.

Speaker 1 Hassan's party, the CCM, was formed in the late 1970s after a merger of two existing political parties, and it's basically been in charge ever since.

Speaker 1 In 2021, the president died and Hassan, then the VP, became Tanzania's first female president.

Speaker 1 There was some hope that she might be a democratic reformer, but she's quickly emerged to be a tyrant, which brings us to this recent election where there's just all these just horrifying human rights abuses against protesters and just innocent people who are like caught in the crossfire.

Speaker 1 One human rights group said up to 3,000 people could have been killed by security forces. And then just the individual stories are horrifying.

Speaker 1 I mean, the Washington Post reported out a bunch of details and examples.

Speaker 1 There's a story of this young mom who was just driving through the largest city in Tanzania when she was stopped by armed men and executed in front of her two little kids.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, you know, we've been talking about these Gen Z-led protests over the last few months. I don't know that these protesters have identified themselves in the same way and used

Speaker 1 the Jolly Roger pirate iconography or anything. But the median age in Tanzania is 18 years old.
So it's a very young country.

Speaker 1 And the BBC reported that a third of Tanzanians aged 18 to 25 are unemployed. So it's like similar structural challenges that are leading to this anger.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, Hassan was sworn into office in this closed press ceremony. She blamed foreigners for the protests.

Speaker 1 So it's good to see that she's not struggling to figure out the kind of traditional autocratic playbook early in her tenure as a strong woman, I guess.

Speaker 3 This is a pretty striking situation because, first of all, Tanzania has generally been a more stable country.

Speaker 3 I mean, they've also been governed by one party that dates all the way back to kind of liberation. But it was always kind of like one of the better models of stability, economic development.

Speaker 3 Obama went there. I remember we went there in 2015, and the president Kikwete was like one of these guys that everybody thought was like one of the more positive leaders in Africa.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so, therefore,

Speaker 3 first of all, this election was totally fucking rigged, right? They threw the opposition in prison. Even the election monitors were pretty casual.

Speaker 1 They hesitate to really come down hard.

Speaker 3 They were like, holy shit, this is not

Speaker 3 as bad as it gets. This is like some bad shit.

Speaker 1 The AU was whacking them. Yeah.

Speaker 3 They're getting whacked left and right, right?

Speaker 3 So to me, what's depressing about that is it does show you that this kind of democratic backsliding, I mean, we're so far beyond even that, you know, because everywhere around the world,

Speaker 3 you're just seeing more and more brute force for people staying in power. And that's all the examples.

Speaker 3 If you look around the world, you don't see a lot of positive examples of multi-party democracy or people relinquishing power easily.

Speaker 3 By the way, you didn't see that in the United States after the 2000 election either.

Speaker 1 That's a good point.

Speaker 3 And so that's depressing.

Speaker 3 I will say there was a Gen Z aspect to this because essentially I think that, you know, if you read the coverage essentially and look at some of the better analysts, the resistance was bigger than clearly the ruling party thought.

Speaker 3 They thought they could just do this and people wouldn't really bother.

Speaker 3 And instead, it looks like there was big turnout here and there's big turnout among younger people. Bear in mind, I mean, we covered the Kenyan protest on this podcast like a few weeks ago.

Speaker 3 That's right next door. Kenya has more of a tradition of political protests, but I mean, honestly, watch this trend because we've talked a lot about the global authoritarian trend.

Speaker 3 Now we've seen, and one of the things that characterizes that is it's everywhere, right?

Speaker 3 And we've said, you know, it's from Brazil and Argentina to the US to Hungary to Russia to Turkey to Indonesia, all these different places.

Speaker 3 Well, here, you've had these kind of Gen Z protests in Bangladesh, in Nepal, in Madagascar, in Tanzania, in Kenya, in Indonesia.

Speaker 3 It does just feel like there's something happening out there where younger people in general, they're sick and tired of corruption.

Speaker 3 They don't believe that the future is better than the past, so they don't see a lot of opportunity for themselves.

Speaker 3 They're also, frankly, you know, a generation that had to deal with COVID and a bunch of insanity.

Speaker 3 And it does feel like there's a pent-up feeling that is beginning to be expressed in country after country. There's no reason to believe that's going to stop.

Speaker 3 And the more it happens, it seems like people are watching it happen in other places and say, well, let's do this here.

Speaker 3 And I'd say that's a particularly big warning sign or potentially positive thing, depending on how it goes, in Africa, because their populations are so weighted to use it.

Speaker 1 Explosive populations. It's explosive.

Speaker 3 And on the surface, it looks like, okay, you got all these strong men, and they're kind of, you know, they're the old people like Museveni in Uganda, or they're these new like coup leaders in West Africa.

Speaker 3 But the reality of this thing is that they're sitting on top of these giant population bulges under 25, and they're not creating jobs fast enough.

Speaker 3 And so I just think we're going to see a lot more of this.

Speaker 1 I really do.

Speaker 1 This was not on our rundown for the show today, but there was a story in the Times, you mentioned Kenya, about all these Kenyan moms who had no, these Kenyan women who had no economic opportunity.

Speaker 1 So they got lured into jobs in the Gulf, specifically Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1 And the story in the Times was about women, these Kenyan women who had kids while there, and now their kids are stuck in this horrific legal limbo.

Speaker 1 Like they can't get a birth certificate, they can't get any kind of legal status, so they can't get vaccines, they can't get schooling, they can't get daycare.

Speaker 1 Um, and like a lot of these women had like had got pregnant by another immigrant working in Saudi Arabia, several have been raped, uh, others arrived pregnant and just didn't know it, but now they're in this situation where their kids live in this just sort of like statusless world, and they're not allowed to leave.

Speaker 1 So, the moms can leave Saudi Arabia, but they're not letting the kids. It is like it is harrowing, awful.

Speaker 1 These women are living outside these gas stations, but it just sort of speaks to the total lack of economic opportunities for young people and the links they're going to find jobs abroad and maybe send home some money and like the and how rife it makes them for abuse.

Speaker 3 It's just not there's a degree of inequality. Look, there's always been inequality.
I mean, we had colonialism for hundreds of years, right?

Speaker 3 But it just feels like we're entering a phase where there's something that's just going to break at some point.

Speaker 3 I mean, Elon Musk just became a trillionaire, and yet you've got people that have to go to Saudi Arabia and endure that, right?

Speaker 3 And country after country, you just see that governments' economies don't have the answer to the need for job creation, the need for cost of living reductions.

Speaker 3 And frankly, the only answer out there in the global economy right now and where you find growth is AI,

Speaker 1 which is probably not going to create jobs.

Speaker 3 It's going to take them away.

Speaker 3 So there's just like a ticking time bomb out there that, I mean, shit, I can feel in Los Angeles, pretty stratified place, but I mean, it's nothing compared to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Speaker 1 Or Nigeria, where the population growth is going to be just explosive.

Speaker 1 Okay, so staying in Africa, Ben. So in recent weeks, we've covered Sudan a bunch.

Speaker 1 There's been this horrific attack by a rebel group called the RSF on the city of El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan. Remember, the RSF, they've been laying siege to El Fasher.

Speaker 1 They did it for about 18 months. And the Sudanese civil war has been raging since April of 2023.
So this has been just an ungodly, awful past few years for everybody in Sudan.

Speaker 1 And then there was finally like the Sudanese armed forces left the city of El Fasher, and the RSF took it and the atrocities that have been documented are just ungodly awful.

Speaker 1 There's been some amazing, great coverage that we'd recommend. Check out work by Yusra Elbeger at Sky News.

Speaker 1 The New Yorker had a really comprehensive great piece called the title was Rebels Post Videos of Mass Killings in Darfur as the World Watches that got at how these RSF forces, I mean, there's one guy in particular who was like bragging about having hit his goal of killing 2,000 people.

Speaker 1 Apparently, he sort of became a mini celebrity among influencers from the UAE. It's like just disgusting shit.

Speaker 1 The Times and the Journal have covered all the ways the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, has been prolonging the war, worsening the war by funneling weapons to the RSF.

Speaker 1 So just check out those outlets for doing a great job here. It's hard to overstate how bad this recent massacre in Al-Fashar seems to have been.

Speaker 1 Some have compared it to the early days of the Rwandan genocide, just indiscriminate massacres everywhere.

Speaker 1 If people manage to escape Al-Fasher, their troubles don't end there.

Speaker 1 The Doctors Without Borders says they're seeing a massive hunger crisis in Tuila, which is the closest town, which I think is like 40 miles away.

Speaker 1 70% of the kids there under five are acutely malnourished. 35% are suffering from severe, acute malnutrition.

Speaker 1 The MSF screened like 1,100 adults in Tuila. 60% of the adults were malnourished, about 40% of whom were severely malnourished.

Speaker 1 So we reached out to the Norwegian Refugee Council, who has people on the ground in Tuila where these displaced people who who are able to make it out of Al-Fasher are gathering.

Speaker 1 This is a clip from Shaswav Sarov, the country director at NRC Sudan. Please listen.

Speaker 10 On the way, they have been beaten and at times have also been asked for money.

Speaker 10 When they arrive in Tavila, one of the things that strikes us is that every single individual who's arriving in Tavila

Speaker 10 talks about

Speaker 10 how they have become an incomplete family. Either they don't know where their husband is or their wife is or siblings are or parents.

Speaker 11 A young woman arrived today. She mentioned that when they were leaving Fasher,

Speaker 11 there were bullets flying everywhere.

Speaker 11 And her three-year-old child was on the shoulder of her husband.

Speaker 11 And by the time she realized with all the running, her husband and the child were nowhere to be seen. And then she walked for days to come here.

Speaker 11 But she has no idea where her husband and child are.

Speaker 1 It's just unimaginably awful. And that woman who's survived,

Speaker 1 there's not a lot of resources there because, obviously,

Speaker 1 as you mentioned, newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk destroyed USAID. So a bunch of NGOs are desperately trying to fill even a small part of the void that's left by the U.S.
departing.

Speaker 1 If you're looking to donate to an organization, the NRC, the Norwegian Refugee Council, there's Doctors Without Borders, there's the Sudanese American Physicians Association, there's Save the Children.

Speaker 1 That's just a few. You can look up a a bunch more places like Charity Navigator or other sites, but the need is just enormous.
So just consider it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it's really frustrating and angering to come back to this each week. And there's just this relentless dehumanization of these people that are just trapped in this.

Speaker 3 I mean, in the Emirates, they just... so fundamentally clearly don't give a shit.
You know, they are literally

Speaker 3 funneling guns to this genocidal militia, the RSF, and just vacuuming up gold, you know, that they can wash through the, you know, gold trading post in Dubai or whatever the fuck it is.

Speaker 3 And, and just, you know, not even burdened at all by the fact that

Speaker 1 twice.

Speaker 3 By the way, like, you know, someone, so we're not in a glass house here. Like, we shoveled weapons out the door that were dropped on kids in Gaza.

Speaker 3 Like, there's a contagion to these things where it's just like over time,

Speaker 3 you know, people are supposed to just kind of be numbed to this degree of suffering. And I would like to see, and we, CrooketCon was really, I thought, good at this time.

Speaker 3 Like, it's good because when you're in a crowd, it kind of forces you to make that turn to the positive, you know? And so I want to do that here.

Speaker 3 I just think there's a space to kind of reclaim some basis of morality in politics. You know, nobody tries anymore.

Speaker 3 I mean, nobody's, you know, because I can show me all the polls about how people like Foreign Aid.

Speaker 3 And when's the last time anybody tried to go out there and say, hey, we should value human dignity, human life around the world. We should try to do something about these things.

Speaker 1 It worked 20 years ago in the Darfur region. It was a huge movement.
From the far right to the far left. It was evangelical Christians to

Speaker 1 lefty liberals.

Speaker 3 There is a space out there, whether it's in this country,

Speaker 3 hopefully, you know,

Speaker 3 Democrats or anybody, frankly, but other foreign leaders, like there's a space for people, because you see this in the Gen Z protest.

Speaker 3 I don't think most people like the way things are going in the world right now.

Speaker 3 And one thing to try that nobody seems to be trying is to give a shit again, you know, and not just be on defense, you know, like, well, we don't like migrants either, or like, you know, or we're trying to sit in the lab and develop the talking points and speak to our working class.

Speaker 3 Like, that's, I'm not suggesting that's not important, but like sometimes there needs to be a space for just like a moral

Speaker 3 purpose here. And the world has a huge vacuum.

Speaker 1 Especially in a moment like this, when like

Speaker 1 a genocidal massacre is happening and there's a a moment for moral clarity and sounding the alarm. And I think people, I agree with you.
I think people do care.

Speaker 1 I think young people in particular care.

Speaker 1 And if someone sounds the alarm and talks about what's happening and talks about our responsibility to do something about it, not in a way to make you feel guilty, but like a responsibility to speak out and state the truth and talk about the forces that are making this massacre worse, like the UAE.

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the way they are just funneling arms into this civil war.

Speaker 3 It's so interesting because one of the things Trump has has done is he's shattered all these norms, right? Like, you know, and that would actually get, he will never do this.

Speaker 3 But like, imagine if someone like Trump who doesn't give a shit, you know, you can make one phone call. What if he went out tomorrow and said, you know what, this is fucking bullshit.

Speaker 3 I'm getting all these briefings. These women and children are getting massacred.
And it's just so a bunch of gold can go to the UAE and they can be like a little bit richer than they already are.

Speaker 3 And I'm just not going to sell them anything. You know, I'm going to tariff them 300% and cut off weapons tomorrow if they don't cut this out.
This fucking war could be over, you know?

Speaker 3 It could be over.

Speaker 1 It really could be.

Speaker 1 This was true in Gaza, right? Like we could just shut off the spaghet, stop sending the Israeli arms.

Speaker 1 But if Trump called MBZ, the leader of the United Arab Emirates, and said, stop this right now, or else there will be consequences for you, they would have to listen.

Speaker 3 I think they would. And so there's actually like a weird space to take some of this Trumpian

Speaker 3 impulse foreign policy and use it for good, you know? But we don't see that.

Speaker 1 We're going to take a quick break. But after you listen to this whole show, if you're looking for some more content, check out What A Day.
It's the daily show from Crooked Media.

Speaker 1 They just landed a great interview with Senator Bernie Sanders about why this Democratic Party just caves on the shutdown thing, Ben. It's

Speaker 1 pretty frustrating. But listen to What A Day, wherever you get your podcasts.
Jane Coston is a fantastic host, hilarious person, super interesting, political views, great interviewer. So check it out.

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Speaker 1 Let's sort of talk about where we're at on the whole Peace Watch thing. You know, Trump is constantly demanding the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaker 3 What are we up to?

Speaker 1 Nine wars? Probably 10. Yeah.
You know, I haven't checked in lately, but there have been... So we couldn't cover all of these issues in terms of.

Speaker 3 It doesn't feel like it based on the show.

Speaker 1 No, it does not. So we wanted to just fold kind of four important things happening in the world right now that just speak to the way the President of Peace is making things safer.

Speaker 1 So in Venezuela, regarding this ongoing Trump Rubio regime change operation that's happening down there, this week we learned that the UK has stopped sharing intelligence with the Trump administration about ships in the Caribbean because they think it's probably illegal to murder random people in boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Speaker 1 It stands for reason.

Speaker 1 And also that the USS Gerald Ford, which is the Navy's largest aircraft carrier, is now in the Caribbean along with three Navy destroyers that escort it everywhere and about 4,000 sailors.

Speaker 1 So that sounds very peaceful.

Speaker 3 Sounds like a lot of peace.

Speaker 1 Nobel Prize-y. Speaking of which, Trump constantly demands credit for a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia.
Unfortunately, that deal seems to have fallen apart, at least for now.

Speaker 1 On Monday, there were several Thai troops who were wounded by land mines near this disputed border, which is what this whole thing is about.

Speaker 1 The Thai military accused Cambodia of laying those landmines, which Cambodia denies.

Speaker 1 Either way, the supreme commander of Thailand's military military said, quote, he was halting all agreements until Cambodia clearly and sincerely demonstrates that it will not be hostile.

Speaker 1 On the nuclear front, Ben, after Trump's announcement last month that the U.S. is going to resume testing nuclear weapons, the Russians said they would respond in kind.

Speaker 1 Geez, you know, who could have seen that coming? And then finally, Ben, on Monday, there was a car explosion in New Delhi, India, that killed at least 10 people.

Speaker 1 This happened in this very historically significant tourist area near the Red Fort, which is a famous monument and symbol of India's independence.

Speaker 1 We don't know the cause yet, but India's counterterrorism agency is handling the case.

Speaker 1 Then on Tuesday afternoon, there was a bombing outside a courthouse in Islamabad, Pakistan that killed at least 12 people and wounded many, many more, dozens more.

Speaker 1 Pakistan's prime minister, Shabazz Sharif, blamed India for the bombing, calling it, quote, Indian state terrorism.

Speaker 1 Now, we should note that a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, says they were responsible for this.

Speaker 1 So there's no evidence that these two events in India and Pakistan are connected, except for

Speaker 1 time and the fact that it happened one day after the other. But these are the kinds of events that start wars.

Speaker 1 So Ben, I guess, if Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, it's like, I don't know if my advice right now should be to get to work and start mediating some things or just go away and stop all this Venezuela shit.

Speaker 3 Yeah, look, first of all, the Brits cutting off intelligence, these people follow us into Iraq.

Speaker 3 The Brits are usually pretty lenient about the special relationship. This just tells you how insane and extrajudicial this killing is that the United States is doing in the Caribbean.

Speaker 3 I will say

Speaker 3 all these conflicts, he never solves them.

Speaker 3 He just wants the photo op and he's betting on the kind of stupidity or short attention span of most of the American media that will cover his peace announcement and will never follow up and pay attention to whether or not Thailand and Cambodia are actually not fighting anymore.

Speaker 3 To me, the one that worries me is this India-Pakistan one.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, I mean, it's the most recent, but also that's very scary.

Speaker 3 It's very scary.

Speaker 3 And there's like a bigger dynamic happening in that region, which is that the Afghan Taliban, after years of being, you know, in bed with the Pakistani intelligence service and having a safe haven in Pakistan, well, they're back in charge in Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 They have the,

Speaker 3 there's a, there's a... Pakistani Taliban that it's different, but you know, there are links there.

Speaker 3 And there have been some pretty brutal border skirmishes, including like Pakistan literally like bombing, you know, Pakistani Taliban on the other side of the Afghan border. And, you know, it

Speaker 3 feels like it's getting a little hot there. Now, what's the connection?

Speaker 3 Well, the connection is the Indians, you know, are now building out relations with the Afghan Taliban, you know, and so if you're Pakistan, you're probably like, oh shit, we're going to get flanked.

Speaker 3 You know, we thought the Afghans were our allies, but now they're reaching out to Rad. This is just, I say this, it's a tinderbox.

Speaker 3 You know, you've got Kashmir, you've got this hot and on again, off-again India-Pakistan conflict that involves nuclear weapons. Now you got this Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict.

Speaker 3 I mean, you've got a variety of extremist groups. I mean, the peacemaker here, I know Marco Rubio made one phone call for which Trump declared he'd solved the India-Pakistan conflict.

Speaker 3 But if you just want a sign of how stupid that is, we got another reminder of this week. And by the way, Politically, but also substantively, like Trump fucking owns this thing.

Speaker 3 If you want to go out and claim that you made the ceasefire and you solve this problem and you should get a Nobel Peace Prize, well, when shit starts to blow up, like that's on you, motherfucker.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, where is your peace effort now? What are you getting out of the fact that the Pakistanis nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize?

Speaker 3 They only really did that to fucking troll India and to kind of get you more on their side in the next time they have a fight with India. So are you going to be a trusted interlocutor or not?

Speaker 3 I mean, this is, he's playing with fire with these peace deals, and I don't think people understand that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and look, you know, the last major attack in Islamabad was in 2022. So this hasn't happened in a while.

Speaker 1 And now you have an even more autocratic strongman in Modi who's been stoking nationalism all day, every day for the last however long.

Speaker 1 You've got a weak leader in Prime Minister Sharif in Pakistan who immediately pointed the finger at the Indian government. But really, the military is calling the shots.

Speaker 1 And also, the Pakistani military was distracted at the time of this attack because they were focused on rescuing cadets at this army-run college in South Waziristan near the Afghanistan border who were attacked by militants and were being held hostage.

Speaker 1 So like there's all these reasons for that government to not point the finger at, you know, the TTP or other Taliban forces that are more likely to have done it and to try to stoke nationalism in service of their political project and blame India, which, as you said, ratchets up tensions and makes things really, really unsafe.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So get back out of it.
Good work, everybody.

Speaker 1 Okay, a couple more things, Ben. So

Speaker 1 thinking back to our time in government, do you remember when the British press would just hammer us all the time over all sorts of perceived slights?

Speaker 1 The bust of Winston Churchill is still living there. The bust of Winston Churchill was moved somewhere and everyone was upset about it.

Speaker 3 It was replaced by a bust of Martin Luther King in the White House, but they didn't have the perspective to understand why the first black president.

Speaker 1 Details, details.

Speaker 1 Well, now Donald Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for a billion dollars. So I think that's what the nerds would call the Overton window shifting.
So here's what happened, Ben.

Speaker 1 In October of 2024, the BBC aired a documentary called Trump a Second Chance question mark.

Speaker 1 This existence of this documentary was news to me.

Speaker 1 It seemed like no one really gave a shit about it at the time until last week when the Telegraph, a conservative paper in the UK, published a leaked memo from a former advisor to the BBC board that included a litany of criticisms of the BBC for perceived bias, being too hard on Israel, et cetera, that included criticism of the way this specific documentary was edited.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 remember Trump's infamous January 6th speech at the ellipse?

Speaker 1 They edited it in a way that I think was genuinely bad and misleading.

Speaker 1 Basically, they edited it together, Trump saying, we're going to go walk down to the Capitol with a line 54 minutes later in the speech that said, they have to fight like hell or you're not going to have a country anymore.

Speaker 1 Which, look, we all know what Trump was doing in that speech.

Speaker 1 We all know he's sick to those people on the Capitol, but it makes it sound like even a more direct call by Trump for violence and to take the Capitol by violence. And it just wasn't necessary.

Speaker 1 And I don't understand why someone would have done it.

Speaker 1 So this leak to the Telegraph led to a bunch of former BBC journalists to speak out and ask why nothing had been done earlier to kind of fix the problem.

Speaker 1 And then you had Trump threatening to sue for false, defamatory, malicious, disparaging, and inflammatory edits.

Speaker 1 On Sunday, the fallout was pretty quick. The BBC's director general and chief executive of BBC News resigned, but that did not appease Trump.

Speaker 1 And what makes this all so complicated, Ben, is that the BBC is partially financed by the public, by this fee, a license fee that's charged to basically any British household that consumes BBC content.

Speaker 1 It's about 300 bucks a year. So Trump is essentially threatening to sue the British public and his storied institution in the United Kingdom.
So this seems not great for the BBC.

Speaker 1 Like all news media here in the U.S., the BBC has been just battered by charges of liberal bias, anti-Israel bias.

Speaker 1 It is constantly attacked by conservative politicians in the UK and conservative news outlets like The Telegraph.

Speaker 1 But unlike most US-based news outlets, they get this public funding and they are desperate to be seen as kind of above the political fray, which is all but impossible, I think, in 2025.

Speaker 1 So the BBC has until 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday to respond to Trump's demand for money.

Speaker 1 He's also demanding an apology and a retraction of the documentary, or else he's going to sue for a billion dollars. The BBC board's chairman apologized for the documentary in a letter to Parliament.

Speaker 1 They called the edit an error of judgment, but I don't think they've contacted Trump directly.

Speaker 3 What do you think they do? This is so fucking stupid. I think I hate everything about this story.
I mean, look, did they edit the documentary?

Speaker 3 Fine.

Speaker 3 I don't sit combing through frontline documentaries. I'm sure there's some things in there that I didn't like to edit on, you know?

Speaker 3 I don't sue them for a billion dollars. I just think that this is taking something that, like, the BBC airs like endless content.
There's a number of channels.

Speaker 3 Like, like, I just don't get this, this outrage.

Speaker 1 Well, it's just him being a blindy little bitch. It's so what?

Speaker 3 They edited some documentary we didn't like, like, embarrass him in the telegraph, make them apologize, okay, but like, why

Speaker 3 was the CEO of the BBC the editor on this fucking thing, too? I don't get this. Like, just stop capitulating to this guy.

Speaker 3 I mean, it was weird enough when CBS had to, like, bring in Barry Weiss because they edited a 60-minute interview with Kamala Harris away. Trump didn't like.

Speaker 3 Now, other countries are like, I mean, it literally feels like an American media company.

Speaker 3 Like, other countries are having to like bend the knee to Trump and kiss his ass and apologize and deal with lawsuits because they edited some documentary that literally nobody saw.

Speaker 1 I mean, I can't think of it.

Speaker 3 Because if you think about it, like if you actually want to look at it from Trump's perspective, did this documentary harm him in any way?

Speaker 1 Well, this is the thing that's interesting about this. So the statute of limitations has expired in London.
You have a year to file a suit, but in Florida, you have two years.

Speaker 1 So he's filing this suit in Florida because he can get it under the statute of limitations.

Speaker 1 But also, he's going to have to find some Florida voter who says they saw this documentary and that it harmed them or like harmed their future

Speaker 1 understanding of him. Which just seems impossible.

Speaker 3 There's probably not, there's not a single human being on earth whose view of Donald Trump was changed because of the way this documentary is edited.

Speaker 3 Then I also want to say that the BBC, like they've been working the refs over there, like my whole adult life, the liberal bias over there. And so much of it is just bullshit.

Speaker 3 Like Boris Johnson, like Tory, Nigel Farage, kind of bullshit.

Speaker 3 I mean, mean even on the Israel stuff like now they're so scared of that that they'll have some poor Palestinian on and they'll like scream at the person to like condemn Hamas and to like you know but there's I mean what are we doing here this is a great institution we spend a lot of time talking about British identity on this show if these guys and I say this my brother runs sky news like a competitor and but I'll say like BBC

Speaker 3 is a core to British identity. It's like, it's like up there with like the royal family about what people know and respect about the United Kingdom.

Speaker 1 It existed since 1927. It's an institution.

Speaker 3 And if they're going to tear this thing apart because of like weird Nigel Farage type grievances against the liberal media or telegraph crusades or Donald Trump suing them, like show some spine, some backbone here, BBC, because before you know it, you're just going to be like a, you know, Barry Weiss is going to be running the fucking BBC by the end of the Trump issue.

Speaker 1 It's a side hustle.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, look, this thing has been around again since 1927. It's up for renewal in 2027.

Speaker 1 I think they thought they might have, you know, Kirst Armour might make it a little easier for them to grease things. Now it's gotten complicated and tied up.

Speaker 1 And Trump, there have been a bunch of other BBC controversies. Like they didn't move fast enough to deal with an anchor accusation of sexual misconduct.
That was bad.

Speaker 1 There was the suspension of this beloved soccer commentator named Gary Lineker for criticism of the Tories' immigration policy. There was sexual harassment by another presenter.

Speaker 1 There was this Gaza documentary that you mentioned where it turned out the father of this 13-year-old narrator was a Hamas official and no one knew it, which just opened them up to all sorts of accusations.

Speaker 1 But again, the BBC collected about $7.8 billion in revenue in the last financial year.

Speaker 1 About half of that was from these license fee payments. The rest was from commercial pursuits.
They've got $627 million in cash on the books currently, but Trump wouldn't win a billion dollars.

Speaker 1 It seems ridiculous, but he could clear out a big hunk of that. So they got to fight.

Speaker 3 And to be clear, I have no idea who these two executives are. I couldn't pick them out of the lineup.
They may have done a shitty job. They may have done a good job.

Speaker 3 Some of these other things you said, I followed those controversies and they seem bad.

Speaker 3 But even if they sucked at their jobs, I just don't like the optic of like Donald Trump being like, hey, this documentary that came out a year ago.

Speaker 1 And it made me sad. Like,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm mad about it because someone showed me a thing from the Telegraph. And so now you got to fire it.
Like, it's just, it feels like we're globalizing our own media drama.

Speaker 3 And that makes me sad.

Speaker 1 No, it's not good.

Speaker 1 It's, yeah, it's globalizing just the, in this case legal attacks on the media that's trying to destroy it in service of all these right-wing populists yeah like it's an interesting like commentary about nationalism that someone like nigel farage would side with donald trump in taking a wrecking ball to a british you know institution that is really important and treasured and powerful and a good way for the uk to project power yeah over taking the side of his own country i realize that it's all tied up in his party and his identity and he thinks the bbc is liberal and it's mean to him but they also you know they give the guy tons of airtime so he benefits from the bbc Good luck not having a BBC.

Speaker 3 I'm sure the whole world will be tracking GB news,

Speaker 3 like whatever right-wing rag Nigel Farah should be.

Speaker 1 You can maybe stream if you're lucky. Finally, Ben.
So longtime listeners of this show know that Ben and I are not the biggest fans of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure, Ben, if for you it was the butchering of a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi or the crackdowns and even executions of human rights activists, including women who just wanted to drive a car, or the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Speaker 1 The list goes on and on.

Speaker 1 But the rest of the world, especially the business world, has largely moved on from those things and largely forgiven MBS's transgressions because he offered a full-throated, sincere apology and promised to change his ways.

Speaker 1 That or the trillion-dollar sovereign wealth box.

Speaker 1 So guys like MBS, though, who are ruthless and rich and powerful, they inevitably end up surrounded by yes men who are too afraid to tell them when their ideas are stupid, which brings us to something called the line.

Speaker 1 For those unfamiliar, the line was a planned linear city in the Saudi desert. The full vision for the line was announced back in 2021.

Speaker 1 It includes a structure that would ultimately accommodate 9 million residents, so a linear city, in a 170-kilometer-long building that is 1,600 feet tall and mirrored on both sides.

Speaker 1 So imagine two walls that are significantly taller than the Empire State Building. The building is between those two things, and then repeat that for 170 kilometers.

Speaker 1 So it was obvious at the time, I'm pretty sure we said as much on the show, that this was a ridiculous boost.

Speaker 3 We've been doing this show long enough

Speaker 1 way too long, that this was never going to happen.

Speaker 1 But the Financial Times has a report out about

Speaker 1 specifics about just what a disaster this project has become and why it seems like it has been put on ice.

Speaker 1 So everyone should read it because it's really, it's worth your time and it's too long to summarize here.

Speaker 1 But a few things that jumped out at us: one, the budget estimate went from $1.6 trillion in 2021 to an estimated 4.5 trillion earlier this spring.

Speaker 1 So the design for the line is it's broken up into these modules that are kind of repeated to create consistency in the manufacturing process.

Speaker 1 But the scale of the resources you need for that manufacturing is just unimaginable. So here's a couple examples.

Speaker 1 One ex-employee, he worked on the building's construction said that to make the concrete for the first 20 modules, the contractors would need a supply of cement every year that would be greater than France's annual output.

Speaker 1 Seems like a lot. Someone else told the FTE that the plan would eat up something like 60% of the global production of green steel per year, which obviously jacks up the price of all these commodities.

Speaker 1 A senior construction manager said that for 12 modules to be built by 2030, a 40-foot container would need to arrive every eight seconds, 24 hours a day from now until then.

Speaker 1 And the line was sold like with all this like bullshit, sustainability, environmental protection, kind of branding bullshit.

Speaker 1 It was like, like, they talked about how because it's built vertically, the footprint of the city was so much smaller than a normal city, right? And it was good for the environment.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 people pointed out that in practice, what they were creating was a 500-meter tall, 170-kilometer long wall blocking the path of all these migrating birds. And the wall was surrounded by wind turbines.

Speaker 1 So these birds, they either get chopped up in this like wind energy blender or they crash into the world's biggest mirror before plunging to their death in like a fiery hot desert.

Speaker 1 Um, so that seems bad. And then there's the human element.
So, there's a village in the lion's path that essentially was knocked down.

Speaker 1 And according to this FT report, some members of the tribe protested being evicted, and 15 were sent to prison, some for up to 50 years, and three were executed.

Speaker 1 So, that's how they treated the people who didn't like this dumb idea. So, 50 billion has been spent.
I guess we'll just see if MBS adds to that.

Speaker 1 He did already detonate an entire mountain, so there's some sunk costs, as they say.

Speaker 3 There's all these, you know, often Silicon Valley guys that are super totalitarian, curious, you know, and they like the kind of, well, you can get things done in an authoritarian system.

Speaker 3 Well, this is the counter to that, which is that when everybody has to say yes to every idea that the autocrat has, like you get cluster fucks like this.

Speaker 3 Just to point out a couple things that jumped out to me, Tommy. Did you notice that like one guy said to him to MBS, like, hey, you know, high-speed rail is great.

Speaker 3 We can go from one side of the line to the next in like in 20 minutes or something. And so they started planning to build this light rail because MBS is really psyched about it.

Speaker 3 But it turned out that high-speed rail only works if it never stops.

Speaker 1 They forgot to mention they stopped.

Speaker 3 So like everybody lives in between the two ends.

Speaker 3 But nobody wanted to tell MBS because like he was promised a 20-minute high-speed rail. And so they didn't point out that you can same thing with like getting to the airport.

Speaker 3 It was like, oh, I'm going to take the rail to the airport, airport, but there's not enough room in the railway cars for bags. Yes.

Speaker 3 And so they have to pick up your bags like eight hours before you get to the airport.

Speaker 3 All these little details like this. I'd also just say

Speaker 3 there's a global

Speaker 3 cabal of like management consultants.

Speaker 3 And I honestly, I would bet anything, I don't know this, that the same kind of people that were having like pitch decks prepared for like the Gaza Riviera definitely have a piece of this thing.

Speaker 3 There just must be these people that go around vacuuming up money for like the wild ideas of the super rich or the autocrats around the world because that $50 billion got spent on a lot of things other than concrete.

Speaker 3 It's like consultants, architects.

Speaker 3 MBS is talking to quantum physicists. I was like, why the fuck is he talking to quantum physicists?

Speaker 3 And I'm like, well, maybe a nice side hustle if you're a quantum physicist to go talk to MBS about the line.

Speaker 3 And then the last thing is, even if this worked, which it's clearly not going to do, who the fuck would want to live in a wall in the middle of the desert? No one.

Speaker 1 Literally no one. It's like 25% of the Saudi population.

Speaker 3 Nobody could ever explain to me like why anyone would want, like, even in the beautiful drawings that they made of like this wall with like, you know, trees in it and stuff, you'd be like, well,

Speaker 3 that seems like a recipe for claustrophobia. Seems like I'd be going out of my fucking mind

Speaker 3 inside of this prison.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And there's little basic things like, what if there's a fire? Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I guess we run horizontally.

Speaker 1 The opening of the story is about how they had to create a they want to create a marina where that like the world's largest cruise ship could, I guess, dock in the building for some reason.

Speaker 1 Why, though? Why? I have no idea.

Speaker 3 There's plenty of beautiful places on earth for the cruise ship to dock.

Speaker 1 There wasn't even a marina, so they'd like dig the harbor, but then the water was stagnant, so it would be a horrible health hazard.

Speaker 3 And then wasn't there a soccer stadium above the marina?

Speaker 1 They wanted to build a 30-story glass and steel chandelier, and above that, a 45,000-person soccer stadium.

Speaker 3 This is just, this is beyond. What's after late-stage capitalism?

Speaker 1 Because that's whatever this is. Whatever this is.

Speaker 3 Because, like, who needs a chandelier that big? Like, who wants to even look look at a chandelier that big?

Speaker 1 A Saudi prince, I guess. I also love the anecdote where MBS would show up at like planning meetings with literally a 40 to 50 person entourage.

Speaker 1 And I guess they would just be dead silent as they walked around. And if you liked something, the whole group would be like,

Speaker 1 and if you didn't like anything, they'd all tug at it and like tisk and whack a finger.

Speaker 3 I don't like that.

Speaker 1 But can you imagine the stress?

Speaker 1 Like, knowing what this guy did to Jamal Khashoggi and God knows how many other activists and journalists and opposition leaders in Saudi Arabia, like, imagine, you know, he's, like, not happy about your window mock-up or whatever.

Speaker 3 I just, it definitely feels like not a lot of people are delivering the bad news to MBS on this project, though, because you'll get high-speed rail.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not good.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's actually going to end up being one of those great artifacts of history if it gets like one-tenth of it built.

Speaker 3 And like a hundred years from now, people are going to go on like tourist destinations just to see the like, you know, wreckage of some concrete that was poured in the middle of the desert or something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it'll be like aliens.

Speaker 3 That's what we'll be fine. The birds will be fucking fine.

Speaker 1 The birds.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Imagine the birds. Birds like, oh, I can't fly over this thing.
I guess I'll just fly around it 170 kilometers later. It's like,

Speaker 1 I'm dead.

Speaker 1 All right. That is it for the news portion of the show, but please stick around for my interview with Tara Khabash and Josh Paul.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about why they resigned from the Biden administration over Gaza policy, what they think a better policy looks like, and all they know about the Trump administration's ceasefire deal and reconstruction efforts in Gaza.

Speaker 1 It's a very important conversation, so stick around for that.

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Speaker 1 Joining me in the studio today are Tariq Habash and Josh Paul. Together, they founded and now direct the organization in New Policy.
Thank you both for being here. Thanks to having us.

Speaker 1 Folks probably know of your name, just for context. Both of you resigned from the Biden administration over its handling of Gaza policy.

Speaker 1 Josh, after spending a decade at the State Department, and Tarik was serving as advisor at the Department of Education.

Speaker 1 I want to talk to you about that experience in a minute, especially sort of what it was like and why maybe more people didn't follow you out the door, in your opinion.

Speaker 1 But I wanted to start with just your opinions on what we know about this Trump-Gaza ceasefire deal. I mean, there was a report in Politico this morning.

Speaker 1 They had a leaked PowerPoint presentation about the,

Speaker 1 it's how this, it's about how the administration is struggling to get from ceasefire to phase two of this deal, phase two, including disarming Hamas, the idea of withdrawing from more parts of Gaza, Palestinian governance and reform, economic development, you know, the easy stuff.

Speaker 1 The White House is also reportedly struggling to put together an international stabilization force to secure Gaza.

Speaker 1 There have been all these reports that maybe the plan is to only rebuild parts of the Gaza Strip that the IDF controls, not anything under control of Hamas.

Speaker 1 The Atlantic reported on the plan to create what they're calling alternate safe communities,

Speaker 1 where I guess up to 25,000 Gazans may like live together in these little hamlets, I don't know what to call them, and not be allowed to travel to parts of Gaza under Hamas control.

Speaker 1 So just throwing information at you guys here.

Speaker 1 Josh, back in September, you wrote an op-ed for the Guardian calling the Kushner-Blair plan, reconstruction plan for a post-war Gaza, a moral and policy atrocity.

Speaker 1 Has that view changed since you've learned more about what they're actually planning to do?

Speaker 1 No, not really.

Speaker 1 I think the thing that's changed is it's become increasingly clear that there's, despite this 20-point Trump proposal, really the absence of a plan in terms of how you get to the next phase, there's certainly inputs that are coming, I think, unfortunately, from the wrong quarters, both from business interests.

Speaker 1 I think there's a lot of people who are looking at Gaza and thinking about how they can make money off this. And, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu is doing all he can

Speaker 1 to, if not scuttle this, then bend it to his will, which of course is not the route to a just and lasting peace.

Speaker 1 So I think where we are now is also, unfortunately, taking a leap from the last two decades or 25 years of failed American policy in the Middle East.

Speaker 1 And in particular, where we see the absence of any sort of Palestinian role in this plan and the imposition of governance from the outside, that's what went wrong in Iraq.

Speaker 1 And we have taken apparently no lessons from that. And the war will play for itself.
Yeah, Tark. I mean, there's basically nothing in there about Palestinian self-determination.

Speaker 1 But correct me if I'm wrong.

Speaker 2 That's pretty much right. And to Josh's point, it's the same problem we continue to see with American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Speaker 2 It's always happening in contra to what the actual people are looking to achieve.

Speaker 2 And without having a self-governing system, without giving Palestinians the authority, the ability to speak for themselves. we're going to get this wrong.

Speaker 2 You need to have Palestinians actually at the table. That's Palestinians in the region, that's Palestinians in the diaspora, not a U.S.

Speaker 2 government that is dictating what what they think is best for Palestinians. In the same way, we don't tell Israelis what to do.

Speaker 2 Far from it, actually, we give them complete autonomy to decide what they want to do, sometimes to their own detriment. Why don't Palestinians have that same type of voice?

Speaker 2 Why don't they have that same type of self-determination?

Speaker 2 I think it's actually in the United States' best interest, as well as all peoples in the region, to create that space for Palestinians to be part of the solution.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, so the Washington Post reported that this U.S.-led civil military coordination center has now taken the lead in overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza. I guess on

Speaker 1 one level, it's maybe a little bit of a relief that it won't be as disastrously handled as the GHF, the previous sort of iteration of assistance was.

Speaker 1 But in response to that news, I saw that your organization, a new policy, released a statement that said, quote, the U.S. must avoid a mission creep that makes Israel's legacy our responsibility.

Speaker 1 Can you guys just elaborate on that risk of mission creep?

Speaker 1 And then just sort of what do you think is an appropriate role to make sure that these civilians in Gaza who have been bombarded or starved for the better part of two years actually get the humanitarian assistance?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, first of all, the good news, right?

Speaker 1 Which is that I think it's very clear to everyone that Israel is not the appropriate authority to be in charge of humanitarian assistance going into Gaza.

Speaker 1 It has weaponized that assistance not just for the last couple of years, but for decades, restricting the flow of medicine, of food, of construction materials to the Palestinians.

Speaker 1 And so if there's to be any hope of a successful reconstruction, it has to be taken out of Israel's hands. And the United States is an appropriate partner to play a significant role in that.

Speaker 1 Of course, the downside is that we know how U.S. operations in the Middle East tend to go.

Speaker 1 They start slowly, and then before you know it, you are pulled into something that is not in America's interest.

Speaker 1 And I think we all wonder what is going to happen when the first American soldier gets killed in one of these operations, which seems at some point or other, you know, the more and more we get involved, the greater the risk becomes.

Speaker 1 And then what is the next step after that? What is the long-term plan?

Speaker 1 Again, are we committing ourselves to an operation without an exit plan, without a long-term plan, and without clearly a plan to transition this role to that Palestinian governance and leadership that Tarek was just talking about?

Speaker 1 There's been a Palestinian-American kid named Mohammed Ibrahim who has been rotting in Israeli prison since February, February, for like nine months. He's 16 years old.

Speaker 1 The crime is allegedly throwing stones, I think, in an empty street in the West Bank. It doesn't seem like anyone in the Trump administration has lifted a finger to get this kid out.

Speaker 1 There have been a number of journalists who have tried to raise awareness about the cause. Not enough, I would argue, but it doesn't seem...
to really penetrate.

Speaker 1 You two know far better than anyone about the Biden's administration's failure to use leverage and pressure Israel to do things.

Speaker 1 For all this talk of U.S. leverage, especially the billions in military assistance that we give them, it seems that historically, or at least in recent history, we've rarely used that leverage.

Speaker 1 Why do you think that is?

Speaker 2 I think it's a political problem, plain and simple.

Speaker 2 To your point, Biden had all the time in the world to use U.S.

Speaker 2 leverage to stop the ongoing atrocities that we were witnessing in Gaza, the forced starvation, the continuous bombing of civilian infrastructure.

Speaker 1 We never did anything.

Speaker 2 And I think the reality is that regardless if it fits Democrats or if it's Republicans, there is this entrenchment in U.S.

Speaker 2 politics today and for many years now that has been completely captured by special interests. And the special interests here are extremely wealthy billionaires.

Speaker 2 that are operating in Democratic primaries, that are operating in Republican elections, to ensure that there is an unconditional support to the Israeli government's policies of oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Speaker 2 And I think that is fundamentally the problem that Americans have been watching for years and they have realized in the last couple of years is not working in their own interests.

Speaker 2 These positions that politicians are taking to fail to use US leverage is working against all of our communities and it's something that Americans are increasingly frustrated by.

Speaker 2 We've seen these tremendous shifts in public opinion that don't want to see U.S. tax dollars and U.S.
weapons being used against civilians.

Speaker 2 They want that money to be reinvested in their communities, and they're realizing that Palestine is actually the slit miss test in American politics because there is going to be the establishment in both parties in this duopoly that is going to continue to allow these special interests to dictate to them what leverage should or shouldn't be used.

Speaker 2 And then there are a lot of people who are increasingly frustrated who are going to be running against those establishment-type figures who are going to say, we need a different solution.

Speaker 2 And that means we need to be able to reject those special interests. We need to actually fight for our communities.
And that's kind of what a new policy is here to do.

Speaker 2 It's a change and to break that political chokehold on our politicians in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, I definitely want to ask you more about the organization and the way you can break that chokehold.

Speaker 1 But I mean, are you guys ever surprised that, look, the rights of American citizens don't trump other priorities? Like, this kid's a 16-year-old American kid robbing in prison.

Speaker 1 There's American citizens on these flotillas that the IDF is reportedly bombing, like dropping incendiary devices on drones.

Speaker 1 And seemingly, the United States government, at least under the Trump administration, doesn't say a fucking word. Well, I'm glad you bring this up, right?

Speaker 1 Because, I mean, yes, you know, Mohammed Ibrahim has been in prison now for nine months and is suffering there.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there's been at least 13 American citizens who have been killed by Israeli security forces over the course of the last few years

Speaker 1 with impunity apparently there has never been anyone held accountable for any of those killings

Speaker 1 including of American journalist Srina Bouakler but of other Americans as well

Speaker 1 including for example a an elderly grandfather in his 70s who was you know kicked and punched by Israeli security forces in the West Bank Omar Assad and then left to die which he did if you could think about any country any other country in the world where we had seen over a dozen Americans killed by their security forces, Congress would be raising hell.

Speaker 1 The White House would be on the phone to that government saying, what the hell are you doing? We want to see accountability. We want to see people put on trial.

Speaker 1 We want to know exactly what has happened.

Speaker 1 And in the case of Israel, the opposite is happening, and it's pretty shocking. There's actually a retired U.S.
Army colonel, Colonel Steve Gabovic, of the former U.S.

Speaker 1 Army military policeman, who served in the West Bank for the last few years, who just spoke publicly to say that he investigated one of those killings of an American citizen.

Speaker 1 He took his findings up the chain and he was told, no, we're not going to say that. We're going to follow Israel's version of events here.

Speaker 1 It's, to me, I think one of those issues where

Speaker 1 if we can't even stand up, and, you know, saying this also as someone who served in the State Department for a long time, if we can't even stand up for the security and the safety and the rights of our own citizens overseas with one of our closest partners who depends on us for their defense?

Speaker 1 What on earth are we doing? Yeah. So you guys made both of you this gutsy decision to resign from jobs in the Biden administration over Caza policy.
Can you just tell us, you know, what was that like?

Speaker 1 Was it lonely? Was it scary? Did you, were you surprised that more people didn't follow suit? Tarek, start with you.

Speaker 2 It was lonely. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 You know, I've never actually told the story about like the moment that I decided to resign For me, you know, after

Speaker 2 days of, you know, very dehumanizing rhetoric from the president himself,

Speaker 2 you know, from conversations with colleagues, there was like a particular moment. It was minutes after the first hospital got bombed.
It was El Ahli Hospital in Gaza City.

Speaker 2 And I turned to a colleague, we were in a meeting, and I was like, what the fuck are we doing? And

Speaker 1 she like just didn't know what to say.

Speaker 2 She knew I was Palestinian. She knew that this was an issue that was close to me that had been raising concerns about U.S.
complicity. And she looks at her phone.

Speaker 2 She sees a notification from the Washington Post. And she's like, the headline says that it was a backfiring rocket from Hamas.
And in that moment, I realized there was no amount of humanizing myself

Speaker 2 within.

Speaker 2 the administration with these colleagues that I'd worked with for years because the propaganda machine that always played out that I I had been so familiar with as a Palestinian that our stories, that our voices were never trustworthy enough, that it was always going to be the Israeli official said this, and so that's what we have to go with.

Speaker 2 And in those conversations with senior officials in the Department of Education, in the White House,

Speaker 2 my voice didn't actually matter.

Speaker 2 And, you know, a few weeks later,

Speaker 2 the Washington Post came out with a very thorough investigation, making it very clear that there was no way this is a rocket backfiring.

Speaker 2 This was always an Israeli rocket that had hit a hospital that killed 500 civilians. And that

Speaker 2 allowance of this idea that

Speaker 2 it could have been something else allowed for dozens of hospitals to be invaded, to be bombed. And

Speaker 2 it was very clear that this was a lonely road for me.

Speaker 2 And despite that, I still continued to communicate with many colleagues who were increasingly frustrated, who wanted to take a position, but because they had family circumstances that made it impossible for them to leave, because they needed to have health care, because costs are getting more and more expensive in these cities.

Speaker 2 Like there had to be someone else to raise their voice and to do what I

Speaker 2 ultimately had to do, which was resign and to be public about it. And I don't envy other people for not being able to make that decision, but I do wish there were more people who took that position.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It is really, I mean, galling to think back to those early days when there were these debates over whether medical infrastructure was being targeted and then it was just routine.

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 1 when you'd cite

Speaker 1 the health ministry death toll and people would scream at you and say, it's Hamas run. How dare you? Obviously, they're lying.
And now those numbers are not even disputed.

Speaker 1 And if anything, they're widely perceived to be an undercount.

Speaker 1 But thank you for triggering me.

Speaker 1 Josh, what was your experience of resigning? Can you tell folks what you did at this time? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I worked in the state department in something called the bureau of political military affairs uh which is the part of the u.s government that is responsible for what we broadly call our defense diplomacy uh but essentially it's the overlap between uh military diplomacy and foreign policy um and that includes arms transfers security assistance as well as a host of other functions global humanitarian demining security negotiations with countries around the world

Speaker 1 and so in that bureau where i'd been for over a decade you know there were certainly plenty of difficult issues.

Speaker 1 I went into it knowing that there would be plenty of difficult issues that we would struggle with as we strike a balance, right, as it always is, between America's hard security interests and human life, frankly.

Speaker 1 What was different in this context, I think, were two things.

Speaker 1 First of all, the absolute scope and scale of the harm that was being done so quickly with American weapons and not just American weapons, but weapons that we ourselves were paying for for the most part.

Speaker 1 By the time I left October 18th of 2023, there were already 3,500 people who were killed in Gaza at that point, almost all of them with American weapons.

Speaker 1 The other thing that was different was the absence of debate. In fact, the unwillingness,

Speaker 1 frankly, the top-down direction for there not to be any sort of policy discussion. And if you know the state...
Top-down from whom?

Speaker 1 Certainly from the White House, but in my experience,

Speaker 1 from the Secretary, from the Under Secretary level,

Speaker 1 flipping a process on its head that is normally a bottom-up policy process to say, you will approve these arms sales.

Speaker 1 We will not not discuss uh these these these questions we will not you know listen to your concerns and these these questions are like is this in accordance with u.s law so a lot of it's yes right is this accordance within with u.s law but also even the the more simple question of what the heck are we doing if the whole theory here is for the u.s piece of this puzzle to be the provision of security in order to lead to peace that's clearly not worked that's clearly collapsed so what even are we doing in the underlying policy but also are these arms transfers that we know are going to be used to violate international law, we know are going to cause immense civilian harm,

Speaker 1 should there not be some use of leverage, first of all?

Speaker 1 And should we not also be conditioning those as the law requires, whether it is the Leahy law, whether it is the Arms Export Control Act, there are plenty of hooks that are normally applied, I have to say, in most contexts around the world.

Speaker 1 But in this context, a blind eye was turned. Aaron Powell, I remember those early days.
I mean, President Biden famously went over to Israel.

Speaker 1 You know, there was the embrace with Netanyahu on the tarmac, and the conventional wisdom that was sort of articulated via news reports from, you know, background quotes from officials in the Biden administration was very familiar to me, having worked in the Obama years.

Speaker 1 And the idea was basically, Americans, politicians cannot disagree with Netanyahu publicly. You have to do that privately.
They call it the hug BB strategy.

Speaker 1 The closer you get to him, the more leverage you have. Has that ever worked? Did that work with Biden? Like, did you ever see that leverage

Speaker 1 exerted privately or hear about it? No.

Speaker 2 No. I mean, the level of influence was always coming from the other side.
It was always Netanyahu had leverage over Biden. And not because

Speaker 2 any particular reason that he had leverage, but because

Speaker 2 Joe Biden, because Democrats were unwilling to use their leverage, it gave Netanyahu all the leverage. He was the one that was dictating the policies.

Speaker 2 He was the one that was making decisions about what Israel was going to do when. And it was our weapons.
It was our money.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 we didn't have a say.

Speaker 1 We were completely operating.

Speaker 2 without any sort of oversight, without any sort of real role. Who's the superpower? I think that's always the question it comes back to.
Is it us?

Speaker 2 Is it the United States of fucking America or is it someone else?

Speaker 1 The famous Bill Clinton line, right? Like he walked out of a meeting. Net Yahoo said, who's the fucking superpower here? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, tell me about the organization of New Policy and the Associated Political Action Committee. I mean, what are you guys trying to create? Is it a policy framework and white papers for the wonks?

Speaker 1 Is it political support and leverage all of the above? Like, how are you thinking about that? Yeah, I mean, first, let's just clarify what the problem is, right?

Speaker 1 And Tarek's touched on this, that, you know, the problem we face here with this unconditional, this policy that transcends administrations of unconditional support to Israel is not just a foreign policy problem.

Speaker 1 It's also a domestic policy problem. In my own experience, it is a problem that if you want to give that unconditional military support to Israel, you have to break American law to do it.

Speaker 1 You have to be willing not to enforce American law. You also have to be willing to tear apart the international rules-based order,

Speaker 1 sanction the ICC as not only

Speaker 1 President Trump is doing, but as previous administrations were as well.

Speaker 1 You also have to be willing to sacrifice America's global leadership and credibility because the rest of the world can see very clearly what's happening and the hypocrisy of our approach.

Speaker 1 You also have to be willing to shut down dissent and protests here in a way that is fundamentally un-American.

Speaker 1 And all of that emerges from, you know, that is not a set of policy choices per se, that is a set of political choices.

Speaker 1 And it is, so therefore, we're not a policy organization, we're not a think tank. We are a political organization that is here to fix that political problem.

Speaker 1 And the way we are doing that is through taking this incredible transformation

Speaker 1 and this movement and this energy that we see across Americans of all creeds, of all backgrounds, of all political perspectives who want to see change and driving that into politics in a way that politics, and American politics at least, is designed to respond to, which means lobbying, it means votes, and then separately on Tarek's side of the house, it means money.

Speaker 1 So directly for candidates, for campaigns. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It means that we're going to support candidates that are going to protect American democracy and that are going to fight for U.S.

Speaker 2 policies that actually align with the interests of their voters, their communities, and what's good for America's national interests, plain and simple.

Speaker 2 What we're trying to do is not change where people are. We're trying to meet Americans where they are and bring politicians along.

Speaker 1 It's been extraordinary watching

Speaker 1 people start to rethink this sort of blanket support for Israel. I mean, there's a lot of it on the left, but more recently, there's a pretty serious conversation about U.S.

Speaker 1 support for Israel on the right, including the very far right, the scary right, the literally neo-Nazi right, that is tearing apart the Republican Party as we speak.

Speaker 1 For those who haven't followed this, the kind of inciting event was Tucker Carlson invited this kid named Nick Fuentes on his show, who is, you know, Holocaust denier, misogynist,

Speaker 1 open racist, said Jim Crow was good for black people, like that level of neo-Nazi.

Speaker 1 But I think it has sort of laid bare what was simmering under the surface, which was, you know, young Republicans don't understand the kind of blanket support for Israel.

Speaker 1 And I think they would argue, I don't know if this is fair to say, but they would argue the lack of space to openly debate these issues has led people to more extreme quarters and people like Nick Fuentes

Speaker 1 and voices like his. Do you think that observation or that sort of excuse for the anti-Semitic fringe is accurate?

Speaker 1 And sort of How can a new organization like more openly talking about this help kind of be a pressure valve?

Speaker 2 I I mean, I think there's an obligation on everyone to be talking about these issues.

Speaker 2 And I think what's happening on the right is a function of where American politics has been in terms of what you are allowed to talk about.

Speaker 2 I mean, the repression that we are now seeing in American civil society on college campuses, that didn't start with Donald Trump. That actually started under the Biden administration.

Speaker 2 It was one of the big issues that made my job as a political appointee in the Department of Education almost impossible to do because there was no willingness to actually defend these institutions that were getting called in front of Congress and being berated as quote-unquote anti-Semitic because they were

Speaker 2 allowing schools and their universities and their student and faculty demographics just to have conversations or question existing U.S. foreign policy.

Speaker 2 And so like this idea that, you know, this is only a function of like the far right is actually,

Speaker 2 it's definitely happening.

Speaker 2 That conversation is happening there, but it's happening because there's been this blanket repression about what you can talk about, who you can criticize in this particular moment.

Speaker 2 And I think it's a really dangerous place to be in American civil society because there is an obligation for. reasonable politicians to actually engage with their voters.

Speaker 2 And the more that reasonable politicians ignore what people are feeling and the pain pain that they're feeling, the more likely people are going to lash out and it's going to be a lot less safe for a lot more people.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So when you guys are looking at candidates who you might want to support, what are the kinds of issues? I imagine it's like

Speaker 1 arms to Israel,

Speaker 1 APAC.

Speaker 1 Would you factor in kind of support for the Abraham Accords or at least a more honest debate about what they were and were not? Like, how do you think about this?

Speaker 2 I mean, so we're thinking about a pretty broad landscape of policy questions I think you know all those issues are on the table and they're discussed with candidates I think first and foremost like reconstruction what how you think about Palestinian self-determination and the role of Israel's continued occupation of Palestinian life

Speaker 2 you know what does the role of you know the United States or you know an international community look like in terms of reinvesting in Gaza and rebuilding? What does accountability look like?

Speaker 2 All these are like really important questions. But another big piece of this is making sure that you are identifying people who are going to be successful and being able to win.

Speaker 2 Because at the end of the day, this has been an issue that has far too long been on the fringes in American politics. This is not a far left issue anymore.
This is a kitchen table issue.

Speaker 2 It's a litmus test for Democrats and increasingly so for Republicans.

Speaker 2 And so what we are starting to see is that there are politicians that have been elected for many years start to talk about not taking APAC money, not being paid off by Republican billionaires in Democratic primaries.

Speaker 2 I think that is an important step.

Speaker 2 But I think you also want to make sure that these politicians are actually signing on to bills that are going to condition weapons to a country that is violating U.S. law.

Speaker 2 That is a pretty clean cut, straightforward, in America's interest or not question.

Speaker 2 And if that's a question that you're not willing to answer or engage in, you're probably not a candidate we're going to support.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Josh, one other issue that's that's, you know, it's been a challenge for a long time, but it's getting a lot of attention lately has been settler violence in the West Bank.

Speaker 1 A recent guest on this show, a guy named Jasper Nathaniel with a great sub-stack Infinite Jazz, was over in the West Bank covering the olive harvest, which

Speaker 1 has been a particularly violent time for Palestinian farmers who are trying to go to their olive groves, harvest their crops, and come home.

Speaker 1 They've been attacked by these lunatics, terrorists in the West Bank.

Speaker 1 Jasper posted a video of one of these settlers clubbing a woman, elderly woman, nearly to death, which I think made a lot of news. It's my understanding that

Speaker 1 U.S. weapons are being used in this repression, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, was this something that you felt like you were allowed to discuss when you were at the State Department and working on these arms transfers?

Speaker 1 So this is not an issue that just arose in the last couple of years.

Speaker 1 This is a long-standing issue, and it's certainly one that the State Department is well aware of and has been asked about many times by Congress.

Speaker 1 For example, we know that U.S.-funded and provided military bulldozers are used to demolish Palestinian houses in the West Bank in an act of collective punishment. We know that U.S.

Speaker 1 manufactured firearms are provided for commercial resale to these settlers who then use them for that violence in the West Bank. Or passed out by Itmar Benguer.
Passed out by Itmar Bengavur.

Speaker 1 And that was actually a live discussion ahead of that sale that I myself was a part of.

Speaker 1 This was back in 2022 when actually that same sale was being considered and saying, hey, we should probably not do this. And I was overruled by the White House

Speaker 1 at the time.

Speaker 1 I think it's important to note as well that the settler violence is not just a sort of a thing that happens and a movement that is happening by itself.

Speaker 1 You can overlay where that settler violence happens with Israel's own public transportation strategy for the West Bank, its own infrastructure plans.

Speaker 1 And you can see, and there's a great organization called Breaking the Silence, which is an organization of former IDF soldiers who have are now speaking out who have done this mapping and this overlay and there is very clearly a strategy behind it so I think first of all you know look there is a need to absolutely condemn that violence there's also a need to withhold the means for that violence but there's also a need to withhold the means for the mechanisms that support it.

Speaker 1 And what I mean by that is the settlement enterprise itself, both as a function of Israeli government policy, but also as a function of U.S. funding again.

Speaker 1 And here I'm not talking about government funding, but private U.S. funding.
A lot of the settlements are funded through U.S.

Speaker 1 charitable organizations, which last time I checked shouldn't be supporting what are clearly illegal operations. And yet here we are.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it feels like, I mean, you're right, this has been a long-standing issue.

Speaker 1 It has clearly like been one of the biggest obstacles to the notion of a two-state solution, which I think a lot of people rightly have observed has been off the table, or at least unrealistic for a long time but um it's little discussed i mean it's starting to come to the fore but i'm not entirely sure why why now not earlier

Speaker 2 yeah i mean i i think plain and simple people are realizing how

Speaker 2 israel's policies both in gaza and in the west bank are completely out of sync of what our values are and i think as Americans start to realize this more and more,

Speaker 2 as we see more independent media start to talk about these issues about how you know we're witnessing a lack of democracy actually in how Israel operates, how we're witnessing actual injustice, actual

Speaker 2 state-sanctioned settler violence and terrorism against civilians that already don't have equal rights.

Speaker 2 As we see more people engaging in this de facto annexation, even if it's not an official policy of annexation, it is happening.

Speaker 2 We have seen more and more Palestinian land get stripped from Palestinians. I think people are realizing that, like, we are financing this.
We are creating these problems. It's our job to fix them.

Speaker 2 Whether we like it or not, we are all part of this problem.

Speaker 2 It doesn't mean that you're giving to APAC you're part of the problem, but it means your tax dollars are going to Israel and they are creating these types of problems.

Speaker 2 So we all have to be part of the solution. We all have skin in the game because we're Americans.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just on that, I mean, I think particularly for the Democratic Party, there's a challenge here, right? Because the dogma has been, you know, since Clinton, the belief in the two-state solution.

Speaker 1 And it's a dogma that is rolled out again and again. And it's very easy for, you know, Democratic electeds to say, well, you know, I'm not pro-Netanyahu.
I support the two-state solution.

Speaker 1 But it's Charlie in the football, right? It's been pulled out.

Speaker 1 And when you look at the settler violence, when you look at the expansion of settlements, the expansion of infrastructure, the ethnic cleansing, frankly, of Palestinians from many villages in the West Bank, the...

Speaker 1 you know, way the West Bank is being cut up.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I believe in a two-state solution, but that solution is no longer viable on the ground. Where does that leave me?

Speaker 1 And I think that's one of the reasons why Democrats are now suddenly beginning to really focus on the West Bank because they realize, oh crap, I'm left holding the bag for this policy that isn't going to go anywhere.

Speaker 1 And so there's a lot of, I think this is almost a form of backpedaling and trying to rewind history.

Speaker 1 I fear it's too late. Or at least, yeah, ground the conversation in reality.
So if people are listening and they think, I like what these guys are talking about.

Speaker 1 I want to be a part of this organization or I want to learn more. Where can they go?

Speaker 2 You can go to act.anewpolicy.org slash pod save, actually.

Speaker 1 We can create a special link just like that.

Speaker 1 And what can people do? If they want to help out or be a part of it, what can they do?

Speaker 2 So we also have a volunteer intake on our website. So we have hundreds of volunteers that are already working with us.
We activate people through our advocacy program.

Speaker 2 There's always opportunities to engage with your member of Congress, to engage through political campaigns, to door knock.

Speaker 2 Our organization has the infrastructure to do all of these different things.

Speaker 2 And it's going to take all of us, it's going to take millions of Americans to realign our politics with the values that we care about.

Speaker 2 And when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to Palestine in particular, this isn't just a foreign policy issue. It's in every single issue.
It's domestic policy. It's civil rights.

Speaker 2 It's health care. It's immigration.
It's our neighbors and our colleagues getting abducted off the streets by ICE.

Speaker 2 I wrote about this back in July that what happens in Palestine doesn't stay in Palestine.

Speaker 2 What ICE is doing today, what ICE has been doing for years, but has been expanded under Trump's big beautiful bill, has been this

Speaker 2 effective occupation of our own cities and communities, where I have to go on Google Maps and check and see where the random checkpoints are because there's a bunch of traffic that should not normally be there and go around it because I'm a brown guy that looks like me.

Speaker 2 This is what Palestinians deal with every single day in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. We are importing these policies.

Speaker 2 We're importing their technology that is allowing ICE to be able to hack into our phones and look at our encrypted text messages. ICE trains with the IDF.
These policies always end up coming back.

Speaker 2 And so it's always going to be on us to think about how we solve the problem. If AIPAC is the problem, a new policy is here to be the solution.

Speaker 1 So follow us online, follow our social media. As Tarek said, go to act.anewpolicy.org forward slash pod save.
Sign up for our newsletter. If you are capable of it, do think about contributing.

Speaker 1 But American political work takes money, but more than that, it takes all of us raising our voices.

Speaker 1 And we look forward to working with millions of Americans across the country to translate their desire for change into that real and lasting change.

Speaker 1 Oh, well, look, I bet a lot of people listening will want to do that. Thank you for the work you guys are doing.
Thanks for

Speaker 1 the courage it took to quit a job with no clear path for what it meant for the future and for being here. Great to see you both.
Thanks so much, Shami.

Speaker 1 Thanks again to Tarek and Josh for coming by and we will see you guys next week. Thanks for coming to CrookedCon.
Yeah, that's great. That's fantastic.
Good ass time. Fantastic.

Speaker 3 Good to see everybody there.

Speaker 1 Potse of the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski.
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