Chapo Trap House - 516 - Time Cuba feat. Brendan James & Noah Kulwin (4/20/21)

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

Get tickets to FRQNCY1 Festival here: https://frqncy.live/frqncy1 Some more info about the festival and how it works here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/50090694 Brendan and Noah return to the show to discuss BLOWBACK, SEASON 2. We talk about the history of the Cuban revolution and the American response, the involvement of the mafia and U.S. clandestine services, and ongoing tensions in U.S.-Cuban relations. Then, we have classic reading series wherein Thomas Friedman reflects on two decades of being wrong about Afghanistan. Get flat, folks! The new season of Blowback is on Stitcher Premium, and you can get a month free if you go to stitcher.com/premium, select a monthly plan and use the promo code: BLOWBACK. Once you sign up you can listen on your browser, or you can download the Stitcher app on your phone.

Hey, everybody. Quick announcement before we start the show. We've got an extra long double-stuffed, super-sized episode of Chapeau coming at you real quick with the blowback boys. But we have another announcement. Will, how excited are you for our upcoming live show? It sort of feels like I'm being born again, born again of the new flesh in the new world that will have live concert events and podcast recordings available in our new flesh, our newly vaccinated flesh. That is right, everybody. We are playing a live show, and it is streaming to everyone

online through a new platform called Frequency, FRQ NCY. This show is Saturday, June 5th, and it is part of an entire festival that we are headlining in conjunction with put together by Dan Beckner, a past guest from Wolf Parade and the Bottleman podcast. We're playing as part of a lineup that includes us every time I die, which I know you are very excited to see. They fucking destroy. Oh, my God. I mean, I will venture into the pit for the every time I die show at Frequency Fest. We hate movies. Zola Jesus, Tinder Live with Lane Moore, Pom Pom Squad, Stay Inside, Throwing

Fits, The Downtown Boys. Of course, our friends, Episode One also playing. Felix has told me what the pitch is for the Episode One show, and it sounds very funny not to miss. I know what the Episode One is going to be about, and you're in for a treat if you like things that are happening in Felix's brain of this past two weeks, but I'm also very excited for the Choppa live show. We have something very fun planned for our first live show back. It's going to be a very cool, fun live show that even if you're not in Brooklyn, you can see anywhere in the world live. See anywhere in the world. It's streamed live over Frequency.Live, FRQNCY.Live. Pick up

your tickets. They are just $15 and that gets you access to the whole day's events. Five bands, five pods, and that pre-sale price is only good through this Saturday, and the tickets are going to go up till $20. So go over to Frequency.Live. I'll have all the info in the episode description as well as a link to a Patreon post that describes the show a little more. This festival is going to be very cool, very special, and we are excited to be playing it. So I think that's enough of a pitch for today. Choppo is saving live music and comedy. Onward. Yes, we are. Onward. And here is the show.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's blowback season two. It's back. More blows for the gang joining us blowing out your back. So the return of blowback means the return of punished producer Brendan James and Noah Colwin. The blowback boys are in the house today. Gentlemen, this season it's Cuba or Cuba, as you might say, after spending so much time studying this island nation, but 50 miles off the coast of Florida. The other, you know, a lot of people may not know about Cuba, like people who listen to this show, people who are younger. You probably know it as its other name. It's name in Spanish, Puerto Rico. Yeah. This is an important lesson before we dive into any specifics. So thank you, Felix,

for that. Yeah. No, you're welcome. Well, I would like to begin today's episode by sharing just two tweets here from a gentleman by the name of Bill Crystal. You may remember him from such atrocities as the war in Iraq. But I'm going to begin with these two tweets because I think it forms a phantom thread that connects blowback season one and two. So I'm just going to read here. This is courtesy of Bill Crystal from just the other week. One reason I'm for DC statehood, the growth in size of the Republic and our distinctive manner of growth, admitting states with equal status, has always been a sign of our vigor. 60 years at 50 states is enough. Time for

DC, Puerto Rico, Cuba in parentheses. As soon as it's free, one or two more. Okay. And then the next one here is he's quote tweeting the announcement that Raul Castro will be resigning as head of the Cuban Communist Party on the 72nd anniversary of Fidel Castro's admission that according to this, what he had secretly always been a Marxist Leninist and that Cuba was going to adopt communism. So Bill Crystal here says, straightforward from here, number one, Castro quits. Number two, we offer Cuba sanctions relief and investment contingent on political and economic liberty for the Cuban people. Number three, free and fair elections are held. Number four, a free and democratic Cuba applies for US statehood.

Number five, El Estado de Cuba. That sounds great. Why are people mad at him? But what I got to say, this is Bill Crystal saying this, and he's saying this as part of his current political project, which has been parasitically grafted onto the Democratic Party for their benefit because of DC statehood. But does it ever end for these people? It's been like 60, 70 plus years now of basically war on Cuba, and then of which the war in Iraq was but one interlude in this unbroken chain of these same people wanting to liberate Cuba for the benefit of America. So I just want to begin there. What's your reaction to Bill Crystal here?

It's an interesting thing because if you go back, as we do in our second episode where you kind of really start the deep dive, the narrative, you can find almost the exact same language and sentiment in the 19th century from Thomas Jefferson to, we have a quote from, Noah, who else did we quote in the beginning of the show? Oh. Stephen Douglas. John Quincy Adams. John Quincy Adams.

Yeah. And then of course, many people occupying less powerful positions than them that wanted to just make Cuba part of the US empire. And it was openly declared in that very 19th century way where there was not a concern about the niceties of ideas like sovereignty or national determination or independence. Bill Crystal is one of those people who in 2021 operates off those same sort of premises without even trying to make it sound like we're looking to just collect more little neocolonies and imperial outposts. So it's a weird thing to see after all this research, especially into the early kind of lead up to the Cuban Revolution, to see such similar statements and ideas. But it's not even been 60 years, as you say.

Well, it's been really hundreds of years at this point of this desire to just scoop up that island and do what we want with it. And with Cuba policy, the name of the game in the US is continuity, right? Like the current chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is Bob Menendez, Cuban American Democrat. And in the 1990s, he occupied the same position, and he was able to throttle things to such a degree in the direction of the Cuba lobby. And by the Cuba lobby, I mean the people lobbying against normalization with Cuba, there's a lot of, I think, small ways and big in terms of literal people continuity from five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years

ago, 50 years ago even. One thing I'll say also is that one of the historical tidbit, one of the exiles kind of of the white upper crust of Cuba, of Cuban society in the 19th century, many of those types of people were open to the idea of America annexing Cuba. It was seen as a far superior alternative to Spanish rule at that point by, again, this class of people. And one of the people who were pushing it, who was pushing it, was quite literally the guy who invented the phrase manifest destiny. So Cuba is both in rhetoric and in material history connected to all of these ideas.

But I mean, ever since the Cuban Revolution, like with Fidel Castro and Cuba being a communist state, I mean, it's just, it has been an obsession of the US intelligence and national security and state department, like community, whatever you want to call them. I mean, this has been a thorn in our side now for a long time. And it's just like, I think more than anything, like the crimes of the Cuban Revolution are the fact that it succeeded. Yep. You're not allowed to do that. Revolutions are supposed to be successful and then immediately betrayed by their leaders and become communist or whatever so that they're bad. And then we need to go back in and correct them and save them. And that was not allowed to happen

in the case of Cuba. And the dry run for the Bay of Pigs was really the coup in Guatemala in 1954, only a couple years earlier, in which the CIA successfully overturned a really just left leaning government that was looking to distribute a little bit more land to the long-suffering peasants and workers of the country. And so when the Cuban Revolution happened, the American government thought, well, we'll just do that again. And the same literal, literally the same people were involved, Alan Dulles, Richard Bissell, they had all gotten the band back together from Guatemala. And it didn't work in Cuba. So then even more insidious plans as people will, of course, here on the show, and I think a lot of people are vaguely aware,

even more insidious and further reaching things were designed because, as you point out, well, it was especially for the Kennedy brothers in particular, like on a personal level, it was humiliating that this revolution would not go away and that it would not simply seed the ground as everyone is expected to do once the United States says it's time to stop. Well, you mentioned that on the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, not even Eisenhower believed Castro to be a communist, but that doesn't really matter when it comes to U.S. policy and planet. Right. I mean, the thing that ultimately sort of pushes the U.S. towards the definitively pushes the United States government over the

course of 1959 and 1960 from sort of this kind of lukewarm perspective on Castro himself and the July 26 movement to just firmly against the revolution is the fact that the revolution starts to get serious about the things that will benefit the Cuban people, you know, chief among them land reform, which involves nationalizing lots of, you know, like property across the island, including holdings, you know, vast holdings of American companies like, you know, United Fruit, for example, which, you know, is another throwback because United Fruit was one of the parties interested in the Guatemalan Revolution a decade earlier. Here's what I would say about that, an idea of particularly Fidel's personal ideology

and how any of the communism rumors factored in. I think, I mean, Raul Castro, his brother, was by all accounts definitely a communist at that point. Che Guevara was an identified Marxist. He integrated into like the proper Communist Party relatively late, but he identified as a communist. Fidel played things very close to the chest. I don't know if it's totally important whether or not you can pinpoint when he, you know, fully matured into communism or not. He certainly wasn't broadcasting himself as one and in fact was telling people he wasn't one. But the communists were a good, you know, portion of the people fighting with the Fidel istas at the end of the victory of the revolution. And I think more significantly, whether or

not Castro was secretly a communist or even if others around him were communists, which they were, that wasn't like made up by the CIA. It was the fact that the Soviet Union, this world communism, capital C communism, which in present company, I think we can agree was not the demonic force that the Americans thought it was at the time. Regardless of that, it was not involved in the Cuban revolution. There was not a Soviet intelligence officer sent to Cuba until late 1959, a guy named Alexei Aksiev. And he got there and said, I don't know what the fuck's going on. And Moscow was actually very cautious in dealing with the early days of the Cuban revolution, because they didn't really know what was it

going to turn out socialist. Was it going to be like too ambitious as a socialist project? This stuff was completely irrelevant to the Americans in the months before, before any Soviet official was even on the island. Because what they knew, whether or not Moscow would become closer to Cuba or not, was that the Cubans had liberated themselves from being an American neocolony. And they were starting to do, as Noah mentioned, land reform. And alongside of that, they could smell it in the air, that there were a lot of other things probably coming down the pike in which the government of Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries, they would not play ball. I mean, they left Guantanamo there, because

if they tried to attack Guantanamo, they would have been obliterated, obviously. But they were in almost every other area, they were proving themselves not one of the American lackeys or scumbags that had been president or premier in Cuba for decades and decades until the revolution. I mean, ironically, you say that Castro wouldn't play ball, but when indeed he could play ball. In fact, ball was life for Castro. And I'm talking about baseball, folks. I misspoke. I misspoke. I think he also, I think he also had some basketball. He could do.

He could do. He could do. But he was a prospect for, I think like there's a thing about him being a prospect for the pirates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a pitching pitching prospect for the pirates. I mean, like he's look, he's I believe that he was absolutely better than I ever could be at pitching baseball, but I don't think he could have gone pro. Just just having looked

at the tape. He wasn't like a Trump. No, no, no, like a Donald Trump. No one broke down the scouting tape. Yeah. No, I like there's no way he's getting in the majors of that. No, like I I'm sorry. Some of us care about the baseball almanac or whatever, you know, I was I was hard at work at the season and Noah was like, yeah, I'm doing research and he was just like, I'm just like, making like, I'm telling you that like I'm reading and

it's just like spreadsheets and spreadsheets of like Cuban baseball leagues from 1955. Yeah. It pissed me off a little bit. But okay. So this moment of like the Cuban revolution is victorious and it immediately catches off guard both the United States government, the Soviet Union. And I mean, what did that mean? Like immediately dealing with the reality of this for U.S. policy planners and but like also for the people of Cuba themselves, like what did the Cuban

revolution mean for them practically when it happened? Well, immediately after the revolution, there was still this kind of afterglow in which there was no open class conflict that was kind of on the agenda. There were bourgeois, you know, elements that had wanted Batista gone. And they wanted, you know, honest government, honest business, a lot of kind of liberal bromides. And they started to get them to their discomfort because, you know, the most extreme example of cleaning up the sort of business or entrepreneurs in Cuba involved cleaning up the casino and

hotel scene that was run largely by elements of the American mafia, as everyone knows from Godfather too. This will become a major thread in American history. Pay attention. We will get to that. Yeah. Don't forget this detail about who was kicked out of Cuba and what was one of the major outside of like, you know, very, very valuable like crops like fruit and sugar and coffee

and things like that. The other major industry was, of course, tourism, i.e. gambling, prostitution and organized crime. Getting sugar. Yeah. So it was it was it was a scene in which there's sometimes it's exaggerated. It's a little caricature that like all of Batista's government revenue was mafia stuff. It wasn't just that there. His government itself was a racket.

Yeah. Exactly. But but the mafia was deeply, deeply involved in building up the revenue base in Havana and in particular. And there were favors done really even before Batista, if people don't know, Valencia Batista was the dictator in power by the time of the Cuban Revolution. But there have been lots of scumbags. Some of them were more, you know, in liberal garb.

Others were just as brutal as Batista, like a guy named Geraldo Machado in the 30s. But all this is to say, well, that this out with the old and with the new was was very was very kind of oceanic. And everyone at first felt like, great, we're going to get, you know, liberal civil rights. We're going to get fair, fair decent government. That started to complicate in the early months of 1959, because you had basically an increasing fork in the road between more radical, or if you like, you know, nationalistic, left leaning nationalistic people like Castro or full on communists or socialists like Raul

or Che or people in the Cuban Communist Party, who were saying, we need to really make a clean break and we need to do land reform, which will take away the property and the revenue streams for a lot of American bigwigs. And they will be angry about that. We will offer them compensation, but we will not give them this land, which is being squatted on and just, you know, obviously, they were just rent seeking psychos who were exploiting our country. There were a lot of moderates in the government who had fought against Batista.

Some of them were military commanders, some of them were respectable politicians who said, I don't know about this. We're going to get a lot of nasty responses from the Americans if we start to carry this stuff out. And that's an important point to sit with for a moment, because, for example, in Guatemala, one of the things that the CIA, you know, really overestimated going into their whole, you know, like as what Brendan's sort of describing, what amounts to the American government's response in early 1960, in January of 1960, the plan that will ultimately become the Bay

of Pigs invasion gets set in motion. And the model that they were working from was this model in Guatemala, and what allowed them to succeed in Guatemala, as the historian Perro Glajesus sort of points out, was not that the U.S. had, you know, created this really successful, you know, band of counter-revolutionaries or revolutionaries really to fight back against our Benz's government, it was that the psychological warfare that they had so thoroughly, you know, eliminated any morale or will to fight for the Guatemalan government on behalf of its soldiers that it collapsed. So the sense of, you know, I think what these moderates were sort of referencing or feeling,

it's a sentiment that sort of, you know, is the decisive sentiment, I would argue, and I think Glajesus definitely argues in the failure of Guatemala before, so it's a really sort of, you know, critical fork in the road as to whether or not the Cuban revolution can live or die. In other words, you can draw two lessons from Guatemala, I'm not saying this is exactly how they were discussing it, but you had the radical saying, or you had the moderate saying, look what happened there, our Benz, the president of Guatemala, wasn't even particularly, you know, died in the wool communist and the Americans overthrew him, we don't want to risk that,

lose all the gains we've made by getting rid of Batista, which everyone agreed was a good thing in progress. The radicals were more saying, well, why don't we get to a position where we don't even have to worry about what America thinks or wants to do? Because if we stay in that position, we'll never make any real gains for our country, and you know, I think history would probably give them the edge, and so what starts to happen and culminates in May of 1959 is land reform is passed, and that means that these more ambitious and increasingly openly socialist elements of the revolution win.

But that also causes the moderates to become one of the first waves of counter-revolutionaries to say, well, this is all being somehow run by Moscow, even though as we said, the Soviets weren't even there yet. And then you start to see a more divisive character to the revolution that probably was, I mean, it had to happen. And so to answer your- That's what Ted Cruz's dad had to believe, right? Yeah, exactly. People like that.

Yeah, so he could go and kill JFK. Oops, sorry. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Oh, shit. But also, so then at that point, we're starting to talk about a clear straight line toward a more openly ideological and left-wing revolution. But it's not that really even the radicals wanted that.

They were not claiming to be building a communist island in the Caribbean in those early days. So whether or not they would have gotten there more gradually, we'll never know, because there was just such a violent reaction, literal reaction, forces of reaction, against even a relatively tepid land reform. Yeah, I mean, you keep using the phrase land reform. And like anytime that- Anytime those two words pop up together, like someone in Langley or Foggy Bottom, no matter what level they are in these departments, is like a siren is glaring wherever they see it.

And like that was the case, I mean, it became locked into this like inevitable cycle of reaction and like the planning for a war that like everybody thought was going to come. And like, I mean, certainly, to discuss this in light of the fact that whenever the Cuban revolution or Fidel Castro is discussed in this country, it's almost always in the context of like even if it's like liberals being like, oh yeah, well, you know, I kind of agree with certain things, but I think we can all agree like all of his horrible political repression and imprisoning and torturing and execution of dissidents in his own country is, you know, so awful that we can't abide even the victories or successes of his revolution.

I mean, it's just that like all this violence or repression or whatever, I mean, however you want to look at it has to be understood and take place in the context of which from the absolute beginning of all of this, this relatively small and poor nation was immediately in the crosshairs of like probably one of the biggest, most well organized and most violent force of counterrevolution and, you know, war essentially from the very beginning. We obviously our show focuses on the first several years after the success of the revolution in 59. So we're looking at that initial stretch, the origins of this of this covert war that

still goes on. And I don't want to speak obviously for anybody, it's a key part of our show that we don't want to be claiming to speak for anybody. We interview many guests who are from Cuba, who live in Cuba, many of whom were there for the revolution. We'll let them speak for themselves about what they feel about, you know, the political situation in Cuba, I would argue it's heavily caricatured in the United States. You could run through any litany of things that probably a lot of chapel listeners know

about how we are the biggest incarcerator of anybody on the planet. It's fairly rich to be saying that Cuba is some kind of horrifying nightmare compared to the United States. We can leave all that aside for now. If you look at, as you say, well, why there might have been such a result, Castro was not even particularly gung-ho about clamping down on counter-revolutionary elements. It was really the Soviets, perhaps from some experiences of their own. In 1961, really, even into 60, he was still trying to resist this.

They started to say, look, you either got to do this or get ready to pack your bags because they are coming for you. And they were right. And so we can talk about, in a totally different context, what that means today, and a lot of people like to skip all of this stuff. But I think what we're trying to do, one of the things we're trying to do with the show, is definitely provide the context in which some of that stuff happens. And I would still argue it's caricatured by American commentators.

I mean, we play a lot of Jake Tapper in that first episode because he won't shut the fuck up, even in just an introduction to a guest. I think it was Raphael Warnock. He's browbeating him on how his church in the 90s invited Castro to speak. Let me ask you about one of those attacks, because Senator Lefler keeps mentioning on the campaign trail an incident from 1995 when you were a youth pastor at a New York church which hosted a speech by Fidel Castro. Now, you've said you had nothing to do with that invitation.

But just to clarify for our viewers, did you attend the speech? And do you understand why there are so many people who view Castro as a murderous tyrant and not someone to be celebrated? Without even bothering to maybe ask, why would it be that a black church in America would invite Castro to speak? Also, I'm pretty sure Fidel Castro was going to speak there as part of the celebration of Fidel's visit to Harlem previously in 1960 that was like sent shockwaves throughout the third world and throughout black America.

Yeah, he shined a light on conditions of inequality in America by doing that. Which is a detail listeners will hear about in the show about the significance of Fidel stay in Harlem in 60 during UN General Assembly. To also add on to Brendan's point, I guess, I'd also like to say that one of the things that's really underplayed about this is just how much of it is all still ongoing. Like, yeah, you can book a direct flight from JFK to Havana now and you couldn't do that a decade ago. But at the same time, the embargo, which has been in place in 62, is still ongoing.

And as for these questions about why is it that they don't have the same rules around free speech that we do, well, to give you one example about the kinds of stuff that our government continues to do to destabilize foreign governments, the State Department during the Trump years put together this white paper that was the State of Human Rights and the State of Liberty or whatever in Cuba in 2020. And so it was assembled by the Trump administration. That much we know. But it was released by the Biden administration.

They chose to release it in March at the end of March. And this white paper is just filled with a lot of very specific details and incidents that are often sourced back from news outlets like, for example, Cubanet, which happens to be a nonprofit news website funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the US government. So there's a degree to which we are continuing to wage siops, whether or not we call them something else now is a different story, but we're doing the same thing 60 years later. And it's been an unbroken line with just varying degrees of intensity.

So for the moment the revolution happened, and then even before that, Cuba had always been a choice jewel in the US empire. And ever since the revolution happened, it has been the subject of an intense covert war. Can you talk about how all of that got ramped way the fuck up when what we call the Cuban Missile Crisis happens? But they call it, what is it, you said it, they call it the Caribbean Crisis? The Soviets called it the Caribbean Crisis, at least in several sources that I saw.

Because, and this is an interesting thing to break down, not to read too much into it, but I think it's an obvious point of interest that each side calls it something different. We call it the Cuban Missile Crisis because there you go, you got the blame right in the name. Cubans, missiles, the Soviets, crisis. Soviets call it the Caribbean Crisis because for them, and I would argue this hems to the narrative of our show a bit more, the crisis doesn't start magically in the year of 1962 when suddenly there are missiles there.

It starts back when the Americans were beginning to cause a ruckus in the Caribbean because of the Cuban Revolution, engaging in terrorism against Cuba, engaging in, as we said, psychological operations and attempted invasion just the year before, and so forth. And that was really the beginning of a crisis that began to escalate things, not the decision of saying Nikita Khrushchev to send defensive weapons to Cuba. Finally, the Cubans pretty much tend to call it, in most sources, the October Crisis. And I mean, one way you could read that is that it was really just one of many crises every month that they could identify since coming under the fire of the Americans after

their revolution. So, yes, I think that tells you a bit already about our idea of an objective sense of what the Missile Crisis was, but even before the crisis, what kind of precipitates it is Operation Mongoose, and I don't want to spell too much out before our show has the chance to, but Mongoose and the unprecedented level of CIA, State Department, and just executive branch coordination in trying to topple another government, particularly one so close geographically to America. It was telegraphing that another invasion was coming, and they were trying other things.

They were trying to decapitate the revolution through assassinations. They were trying to maybe cause a mass uprising, although no one really believed that was going to happen well after the honeymoon period that we described earlier. Most of the population still overwhelmingly supported the revolution. Of course, most of all, the peasants and the workers, but there was still hope held out that there would be an uprising against the revolutionary government. That is the proper context in which to understand why there was a buildup to a nuclear confrontation in the fall of 1962.

And also, the idea of nuclear brinkmanship as geopolitical strategic policy was something that the Americans first did. It's something that we set in motion in August of 1945. We moved the battery of Jupiter missiles to Turkey, which was about as many miles away from the Soviet border as Cuba was from the American. Absolutely. But I would even argue, like the historian Marty Sherwin, who we interview in our show, he makes a really good point that you go back even further, and there are Japanese and American

historians who've basically come to the same conclusion, which is that you look at what happened in August of 1945, which is that America drops one atomic bomb, Stalin declares war on Japan to go ahead and invade, and thus neutralize this, what would otherwise have been a very effective anti-communist outpost in their view. And then the next day, the Americans drop another bomb, and Japan does an unconditional surrender. And so what the Americans had showed is that they were the one government. They are the only government in history that has been willing to use nuclear weapons to

achieve policy ends with their detonation, and what was the cause that they motivated that was motivating them? It wasn't beating the Nazis. It wasn't defeating the Japanese in any meaningful sense. It was ultimately about preventing and defeating communism. And that is like that animating thrust. I mean, when you think about then, you get to a moment in 1962 where the Americans are ready to invade Cuba or something, I think that 17-year trajectory is something that

also often goes really under-examined, and I'm really glad that we'll get to talk about a bit later on. Well, I mean, okay, so like you said, this is a cascading series of crises invented by America and directed at Cuba and the Cuban people. And just about one year before, you bring up, they called it Operation Mangus, which we have alluded to many times on the show, but this is just shorthand for what would become the Bay of Pigs and what would become something much... It's like a stand-in for something much, much bigger in American history, of which Cuba

only plays an inciting role, but an ancillary one. What was it about the Bay of Pigs and the failure of the Bay of Pigs that became such a baroque part of the CIA's own internal mythology? I mean, it's a scary spiral to go into, of course, because there is a mythology probably within the agency, both its liberal elements and its more right-wing elements, that of course, they had prepared this invasion, and if only Kennedy had called in the second airstrike, this kind of fabled element of the invasion that we'll get into on the show. It doesn't really matter, really, for the purposes of this discussion, what that means.

There was a big chickening out by the Kennedy brothers. And ever after, the idea that covert operations needed to be a lot larger in scope, needed to be better funded, needed to have greater autonomy and greater secrecy whenever there was oversight. This is also around the time that we leave almost a comparatively, I don't know what to call it, earlier, even naive era to move in from the Richard Bissell zone and the Allen Dulles zone into the Richard Helms zone, because what came after the failure of the Bay of Pigs was the beginning of an entirely new level of CIA shenanigans all over the world.

And I think that the Bay of Pigs was that inciting incident because it was such a spectacular and public humiliation. Not only for the individuals involved, whether they were in the CIA or not, Adlai Stevenson famously was made a fool of at the UN because he was insisting that the Cubans were telling tall tales and then, of course, the entire world saw that that was a lie. But that it was such a public humiliation really meant that I think the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department, all of them realized that they had to play it much meaner and much more deadly and not let anything like this ever happen again.

So Mongoose came after the Bay of Pigs, but it was that answer to the Bay of Pigs that then mutates into just the way of doing business in general, which is a really truly global scale of covert war and resort to anything that gets the job done to destroy any alternative to American-dominated international capitalism running each and every country, we can try to get it. And this, during this time, the Cuba, as a specific department, it's viewed as the hotbed of communism that in the form of chastroism is going to get exported to the rest of Latin America.

And so there is this enormous concerted effort to, I guess, part of the way that they go about, I think, kind of containing Castro and containing this whole scourge is by making Cuba present everywhere, right? So one of the things that I learned, for example, in reading through a lot of the writings of CIA officials and other historians of the period was that there were Cuba case officers stationed at CIA stations all around the world. And it was because, so you'd have a CIA station chief in Germany would have had somebody specifically dealing with Cuba stationed there.

And it's a sort of sign that both how, I think, it's a sign of how seriously they were taking Cuba and how much they wanted to stop Cuba directly, but it's also a sign of how fearful they were or how fearful they made themselves be over the possibility that Cuba could, quote unquote, infect other things, and thus it was a scourge that had to be stopped, a contagion sort of thing. And thinking of the incidents of the Bay of Pigs and then the Cuban Missile Crisis, and as it relates to the Kennedy brothers, who are certainly no two great heroes in this story or anything like that, but what did they see with their own eyes as it regards

the conduct of their own generals, state department, and intelligence agencies during these two events that sort of, I don't know, shaped their perception of this beast at the heart of American power that is something that is not entirely in the control of the commander in chief, shall we say. Without giving too much away, I think that one of the things that is really, really interesting about an episode like the Missile Crisis is that it is, you know, like as Braden sort of says in episode one, it's probably not a good idea to reduce history to like a collage of discrete events and individuals, but there are moments in which all of a sudden, like

you have things come to a head and individual personalities and individual characters can actually matter a great deal. And I think one of the things that is very interesting about JFK is how it shows about what happens, how even an American government, what happens when somebody who, you know, possesses an individual character, unlike that of the people who came before him or who is placed in a situation where, you know, he realizes the advice that he's getting is so shitty that perhaps he's got to have a different idea. And I think that that to me is sort of like was, you know, the thing that I learned and

was most interested in, in engaging with the stuff during that period was like sort of learning about how those, you know, at least as it relates to the personality of those two guys, Bobby's a little more nuts and kind of in his own special way. It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I struggle with exactly how to characterize the Kennedys in this story because I don't think it's a smart thing to take the narrative that the CIA is a rogue agency and that we just, you know, it's a government within a government and that the U.S. policy would

be pretty good and humane if it weren't for the CIA. And that's the real secret that everyone needs to understand. I don't think that's true. I'm persuaded that, you know, the CIA is perhaps a entitled and bratty but ultimately subservient arm of the U.S. government, just like it says it is. And so when you have, you still, at the same time, you have an issue where clearly John Kennedy was increasingly isolated, even as the president, from the agenda of the rest of his government, at least the part of his government that decides the real stuff.

And the CIA was certainly a very, very, very important group that he had alienated. So it's not to give JFK some kind of heroic or even sympathetic sheen, but you do want to understand conflicts within the ruling class. You do want to understand conflicts within the kind of upper crust of an empire and exactly what these small, even small differences are and how they can result. You know, and to give one example, like, you know, it's been fairly, you know, people have, I think, pretty fairly decently established that Joe Kennedy had points in one of the same Havana hotels as Sam Giancana and or one of the other mob figures there.

But the thing is, is like, that's not necessarily by itself, something that should be taken as like, you know, like part of the 40 chess game of the situation or whatever. But to what Brendan says about like a ruling class, that like, this is actually like a fairly expansive cast of characters and people who often do have conflicting and overlapping with, you know, material interests. And that isn't worth like, you know, being like, ah, bah humbug or hand waving, if anything, I think it's worth, you know, sort of confronting head on. Well, I mean, you mentioned Sam Giancana, but I mean, as it relates to the CIA, I mean,

like, you know, we're not the first people to make this observation, but like you mentioned there's sort of like a, a bratty but still subservient, you know, part of what is the apparatus of like US state power. And you know, if they weren't there, we know what would take its place would not necessarily be, you know, humane or shall we say accommodating to economic systems that run contrary to capitalism. And what it does provide is like a, an institutional format through which basically organized crime can take place and organized crime that's controlled by, you know, America's wasp elite or America's ruling class, like, and then, and then his subcontract act subcontracted out to people

like Sam Giancana, like the actual organized crime or what we think of as like the mob. But like the CIA is really just the American government's mafia, basically. This should be a good drop, Chris, of the time Tony Soprano goes on the rant about how the Conagies and the Rockefellers, they need to work or be, so there we were. But some of us didn't want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay a tag and preserve the things that meant something to us, honor and family and loyalty. And some of us wanted a piece of the action.

But yeah, yeah, I mean, organized crime, we're really not touching on this as I feel like I'm I'm style biting the Christmas zone here, because you guys have talked a lot about how the CIA is essentially one in the same with organized crime. There's a reason that you find them interacting so much in in episodes like this, because they both operate on the same principles, they both are unaccountable, and they are both friends to the people on the quote, right side of the law, to a degree far, far more than I think, you know, a lot of media or culture tends to tends to show us. And what what better example of that than the time that the government, which was not

just the CIA, Kennedy knew that we were working with Giancana. His brother certainly knew because his brother was directly his brother was directly briefed on it. I actually interviewed Bob Blakey, who was work directly under Robert Kennedy, and was later the chief counsel for the House Select Committee investigation into the King assassination. And he was, you know, his the way he described it to me was that like when you know, he would have never known that RFK knew like, you know, was doing all this other like Mongoose stuff and plotting when he learned and he was present for telling him that, you know, Giancana had

been involved in you with the CIA plotting or whatever. You know, there's a real it is like a there is something very funny. I'll tell all of that. But it contaminated Bobby Kennedy in particular. It contaminated his role as, you know, chief lawyer, as attorney general, because there was a very embarrassing episode in which the FBI found out about a lot of the CIA stuff with the mob. And J. Edgar Hoover told Bobby Kennedy, you know, I'm finding a lot of these organized

crime figures that you say you want to get out of labor. I'm finding that some of them have been, you know, interviewed by your office in a kind of job interview situation for taking out a certain leader of a certain country. And Kennedy was furious, but it didn't mean that he wasn't still interested in essentially carrying out that agenda. He just as any, you know, spoiled rich kid, you know, wouldn't want, he didn't want to be made to look like a fool in front of all of his new kind of fancy powerful friends. So there's a very sort of strange and ultimately kind of baffling relationship when it comes

to the Kennedys and the rest of this effort to topple the Cuban Revolution. Well, I mean, that's one side of this story, which is like how this covert war on Cuba, as far as like the American Empire goes, took on a life of its own and became a kind of stand in for, you know, the entire Cold War itself and like this something evil at the heart of America. And also, but like, here's the thing, as far as Cuba goes, like all their clownish assassination attempts and like, you know, counter revolutions or whatever, none of them fucking worked. Like they were all an embarrassment to America and like didn't stop them from trying.

But this has been, like I said, going on 60, 70 years now, from the other side of the story, it's a story of success and victory over America and the CIA. So to get into that side of the story, you guys did talk to a lot of Cubans who were, you know, either a part of the revolution or, you know, just living in Cuba today. Like, what does the Cuban Revolution mean to some of the guests that you interviewed for this show? Well, I would say that, for example, one of the guests, our friend Marta, she, it was fascinating hearing her speak about it because it's honestly not even something she told

us that she's had to think a lot about. It's obviously been part of her DNA since the time she was a little girl when the revolution happened. So thinking of it, much like any person in any country thinks about why they're proud to be, you know, from wherever they're from. With that said, she's also an incredibly intelligent, you know, sociologist and can put a lot of this stuff into an interesting way of thinking about it. So she told us that once the honeymoon period that we described was over, she realized that

the enemy of the Cuban Revolution was the main enemy was starting to become the United States. And someone who had come, as she did, from a middle class background had listened to, you know, American culture and seen American movies and kind of was being brought up to be a Cuban American, Cuban-American, even if she didn't live in America. It changed her entire view of what America was, just as anyone reckons with the reality of the difference between America's rhetoric and its symbolism and what it actually stands for in the world when the chips are down.

And so, yeah, I mean, she's one example where she threw herself into the revolution. She was not from a particularly humble background. She was solidly middle class professional. Her family didn't own property, but they had the university educations and the titles. And she did not leave, like many people of her class. She stayed and became a lifelong revolutionary, and a big part of that was, you know, recognizing that this was something that was doing a great deal of good for the masses. This was something that was hated by America, not because it was crushing freedom, but because

it was cutting into, you know, the bottom line and things like that. And Fidel Castro and his brother and the revolutionaries and other revolutionaries like Celia Sanchez and Heidi Santamaria and other figures of the revolution, they're thought of as you would expect as founding fathers, if you like, founding fathers and mothers and people. And instead of front loading all of the mistakes or all of the shortcomings as we do here, as you'd expect, they tend to front load the successes and the achievements. And it's bizarre to them. We've shown them the episodes ahead of time.

And they, for example, Marta likes how we kind of start to chip away slowly at the caricature and make, hopefully, make people understand more and more why that is just completely alien to someone, not everybody, but to, I would say, most people who have lived and breathed the history of Cuba over the past 60 years. And so she's just one example. Part of that caricature is this notion that, you know, Cuba to this day is like a uniquely impoverished and unfree country because of the Cuban revolution. But, I mean, like, that's, I mean, it is still, you know, by comparison, yeah, a pretty

poor country. But, like, in terms of the successes of the Cuban revolution, I mean, compare the average standard of living or education or healthcare, for instance, of the average Cuban person to the comparable countries in the Western Hemisphere that have been successfully subverted by U.S. policy. I think to take it one step further, I mean, yes, we do try to touch on in the first episode the data points you don't often hear discussed in reference to Cuba, because, in fact, the World Food Program of the UN, you know, has reported that the revolutionary programs did

a lot to combat hunger and poverty. This actually, I think they say they virtually eliminated it. That doesn't mean that everyone's dining out all the time on five course meals, of course, because it is still a poor country. We like to investigate why it has had such a hard time developing the embargo from what was once Cuba's largest trading partner might have something to do with it. The covert war that has tried to undermine the Cuban economy for 60 years in more violent ways might have something to do with that as well.

But even with all that said and done, we thought about doing this, and I think we can say now that we're probably not going to do it, we thought about doing a bonus episode, not only about the Guatemalan coup and how that happened and how it was kind of a prelude to Cuba as a story, but I was going to do an episode about what happened in Guatemala after the coup and what happens in a country where the U.S. gets its way and what happens when there is an incredibly pro-American freedom-loving government or whatever in power, and the gruesome history of what happened in Guatemala once something that was even more tepid than the Cuban Revolution was cast away is a genocide of 200,000 people, chiefly indigenous people

of Guatemala, and a non-stop cycle of violence that did not conclude, vaguely speaking, until the 90s, and even now is suffering all kinds of horrible after-effects. That is something that could not happen in Cuba because of the revolution. Then people want to talk about how there were some political prisoners in Cuba while they was under attack by the United States for 60 years. The idea that that was somehow a nightmarish, totalitarian country with Guatemala, one of the most pro-American regimes in history just around the corner, is an insult to people's intelligence.

I think that why does the insult persist then? If that's the case, I think in part it's because, much as it might sadden me to say, but I think that people have repeated a lie about the fundamental character and nature of the Cuban Revolution for so many years in our media, in mainstream politics, that they've come to internalize it so fully. I think that breaking the kayfabe, not dissimilar to Israel lobby conversations in my experience, I found Cuban-American diaspora politics and Israel diaspora politics to be fairly similar in this way.

I think that a lot of people are just, there's an incredible resistance to conceding not only were we wrong, we took the side of the bad guys. In fact, some of us may have been the bad guys, and that's a bitter pill to swallow. Yeah. I mean, to bring it all to the present moment, and as we started talking about this unbroken continuity in US policy towards Cuba that surpasses party, and it certainly surpasses Donald Trump to Joe Biden, because you know what you mentioned at the top about these ongoing efforts to essentially propagandize and subvert and wage covert war on Cuba economically

or otherwise remain unabated. The main centerpiece of that is this embargo, is the sanctions that Cuba continues to live under. By the way, continues to live under after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, because the Soviet Union was their biggest economic partner. I mean, the trade with the Soviet Union was like all they had, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, it's actually almost more impressive that the revolution maintained its goals after that even throughout the entire Cold War.

Yes. The special period is what it's called in the 90s, and it is outside of the immediate purview of our show, because it was so much later than the events were covering, but we will talk about it at some point in some level of detail, because shout out to Helen Yaffe. We interview her in the show, but she wrote a book called We Are Cuba, and it's about how the revolutionary government survived the Soviet collapse. It is a very fascinating book, and it gets into, of course, contemporary stuff as well. I would highly recommend it.

But yes, I mean, we spoke to another person, Bill Fletcher, who had visited Cuba, and he mentioned when he met with Fidel, talk about issues of culture in Cuba and Afro-Cuban stuff, and sort of the state of combating racism was why he was meeting with Fidel. But he said Fidel told them, when the Soviet Union collapsed, everyone said that we had 10 months left, and it's been 10 years since they said that. So there was a complete defying of expectations after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it's also, however, where a lot of setbacks happened. I mean, inequality is something that I think people, racial inequality is sometimes something

that people who are trying to win an online argument will throw at you to just completely dismiss the revolution and say, well, there's still racism. That's very true. Like most countries on Earth, Cuba still confronts major problems of racism. However, one of the biggest backslides that happened during the special period, because Cuba was economically isolated, was that the relatively impressive record of egalitarianizing education, employment, and all that stuff that had been won by the revolution, not completed, but made a lot of progress on, that was reversed during the special period.

One of the main ways that happened was cash was allowed to come back from family in Miami and Americans, and many of those people were white and upper middle or upper class. So it flowed back into Cuba to largely white and then better off people on the island, which increased inequality. It didn't sustain a level of egalitarianism, obviously, and so there were also market mechanisms that were introduced to survive in the 90s now that it was much harder to plan and rely on a steady economic agenda. That also introduced more inequalities, because you go by the market, some people win, some

people lose. And so, if anything, the argument is that we see what happens when we start to liberalize, so-called, the economies, much as happened in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, inequalities, racial and economic and otherwise creep back in fairly quickly. So it did survive in the 90s at a great cost, but it's still here, and as people probably have picked up in the news, the Communist Party just had its eighth Congress, Raul has stepped down as secretary. There is a new generation of leadership, and especially if you look around some other

places where the Americans are still trying to meddle, Cuba's doing pretty stable. It's confronting a lot of problems. I mean, they have their own COVID vaccine that, unlike America, they're going to give for free to the rest of the world if they want it. Yes, and they have made those, I mean, we should say about COVID, there was a pretty bad upsurge in cases earlier this year, and we talked to some of our friends as to why that was, some interesting reasons. It seems like basically some people just did not abide by the quarantine strictures, and

a lot of people had come back from abroad. The government's trying to get it back under control, even still. We're talking about, I think, in total several hundred dead, and the case number versus the mortality number is really something to take into account. That's a ratio in which the American case is not very impressive. In the Cuban case, it still is. The fact that they are developing their own vaccine, which, by the way, the US embargo has made it very difficult for them to do because they need disposable medical equipment

that it's hard for them to get because of the embargo. This is the transition of power to which Brendan is referring to earlier. It's part of this, there is, Cuba is in the middle of this multi-year process that was democratically approved by the Cuban people in 2019 in a referendum. This commits them, they voted to commit themselves to socialism in an election with 85% turnout, but also, it is this sort of, they are, like obviously, rural Castro has left the government. I think people tend to read a little bit too much into the personality of that decision, and also there is the American media in general because Americans aren't super plugged into

what's going on. The American media has its own set of biases when it's looking at Cuba is not always most reliable on this stuff, but this transition is real, and at the same time, it's also occurring when Cuba perhaps has not been in this precarious position as it has been since the special period. Last year, the Cuban GDP shrank by 11%. Imports were reduced by 40%. This is a combination of COVID, but also the Trump sanctions that he was able to add.

He was, in January 2021, earlier this year, as a fuck you out the door, he added Cuba to the State Department list of state sponsors of terror, a bullshit list, by the way, but like the Cuban government is- Also not to interrupt, but I think the reason that they used was that Cuba supports Venezuela, and that's a terrorist government, and that's why they're on the state sponsor of terrorists. Awesome. We are literally punishing countries for having friends, and it gets to this insane fucking degree where we're torturing this island, and we have been very effectively

for many, many years, and even at this moment of global precarity because of the pandemic in a lot of ways, we have a new administration, and what has the messaging been thus far? After all of this Trump-Ra-Ra bullshit, and after the Obama steps towards normalization, steps toward, but not actually taken, it's been disheartening, frankly. That's always the thing with Biden, is I feel like people are very tempted to talk about how Biden is, I mean, just by the weakness of his comparison points, other presidents that we've had since about, yeah, really 1980. Yeah, he's, I guess, like the most effective best president in some ways of our lifetimes,

but I think that totally obscures people from talking about the Blinken State Department, and the overall Biden foreign policy view, which is not even really a departure from Mike Pompeo. No. Yeah. We spoke to some of our guests, and we said, hey, what do you think about Biden? Like are people in Cuba optimistic? Because of course, Biden was VP when Obama started to open up stuff, and Obama went to

Cuba. I mean, that was seen as very significant at the time, even if it was just the beginning, so the opening salvo, and people we spoke to, some were more skeptical, but everyone wants the embargo gone, and I think every humane person should want the embargo gone, but I felt like it was a bit of a bummer to let, if they hadn't seen it, to let them know that Jen Psaki had said the day before, we don't consider Cuba a priority. And there is, on top of that, there is also the fact that the only condition, the only thing that theoretically inhibits any sort of diplomatic discussion is the fact that

the American government does not respect the legitimacy of the Cuban revolutionary government. Like the American government, we do not accept that the Cuban people have decided as a people to do what they have, and we've decided that the pretext is that they don't have a democracy that conforms to our standards, which it's true, but who's responsible for that? And also, compare that to the collegiate states that America has a problem with. Is Cuba less democratic than fucking Qatar? Of course not. No, no, don't even compare it to the Gulf states, compare it to America.

Like how fucking democratic a country do we have here? Like in terms of the ability of the average citizen to, like, affect change in its government, like, I mean, I'm sorry, I think the average Cuban is playing a better hand than the average American. Again, I don't want to fall into the position of appointing anyone here, spokesmen, for all Cubans. We're not trying to do that, but I would say, okay, I am Cuba, but you just look, just look on a, let's say, one very important measure.

How has their government moved on a pandemic sweeping the earth? Did they move on it in a way that makes you think they care about what happens to their people or not? I think whatever you want to say about other parts of their system, which I would probably, you know, pick some people up on, just look at that alone. And then look at the way that it was handled in America, and then honestly, it's still being handled. No one gives a shit on the upper levels of American government or society about how this

pandemic affected anybody below a certain tax bracket. And they never will, because that's not, that's not the priority, and there's no democratic accountability there. And you could apply it, of course, to a lot of other issues as well. So yes, I just want to say the Blinken State Department, I think he personally had a call with Guaido, you know, and it's just like, so there's another thing I had to ask him or a guest, I was like, does that encourage you, you know, unfortunately, like that the first fucking person they're going to talk to in, in the region is this loser that like

even the loser, even this, even the Western European squishy states have said like, yeah, we don't fuck with him anymore. He doesn't. He is unemployed. Guaido is unemployed. He does not have a job. They arguably never had a job. They tried to make him look cool the last time he did like a counter state of the union,

and they like did Christopher Nolan color grading on him. And for a second, like I seriously thought he was a call of duty, you know, Cold War DLC cutscene, because I was just like, they made it, they're going, they're trying so hard he now looks CGI. And no one, obviously no one, no one cares about that guy except for the US State Department. I mean, look, so what if, so what if the leader of the opposition in Venezuela is a hologram? Yeah, whatever. I still think that we have to stand with democracy and human rights.

I mean, one thing. You're my only hope. One thing that I think is worth just making a quick note about though, this point about like, you know, respecting the legitimacy and how we can't do it, like, that's all that's on the table. And the only reason that the Biden administration doesn't do it. And this is, you know, like what you can get from talking to anybody in the Beltway with like, you know, a lanyard down to their knees or whatever, like, it's because of the political

costs, right, the short to medium term political costs, which are imaginary. Everybody imagines that, oh, Florida is going to backslide when in fact, like kind of, you know, intuitively, actually, when you open up, like, you know, normalize things, people tend to not have such, you know, intense feelings of hatred between one another and so on. And I think that there is like a kind of, there is a degree to which like people in Washington have convinced themselves of a very cynical discourse in which they expect you listener to be a participant, and it's to buy their bullshit.

And it's to say that like, you know, that like, oh, we just can't do it because we risk, you know, Florida and everything. Florida's presidential primaries three weeks from tomorrow. And tonight Bernie Sanders campaign is generating a lot of controversy here because of comments he made about Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Well, guess what? Florida voted Republican in the last election. It didn't mean shit.

Like these arguments did not hold water before and they don't now. Yeah. No. And I stopped thinking about Florida when Andrew Gilliam started his, the greatest year any Democratic politician has ever had, where he would do five interviews a week that's like, we need to kill Maduro. And then a year later, it's like he's doing interviews about how he's by, I, yeah, I was just thinking about, do you remember when they tried to do the Juan Guillardo challenge?

I kind of remember the phrase, but I don't know what that means. It was like Marco Rubio and all these people are like, check it out. It's the Juan Guillardo challenge. And they were just like taking like the shittiest, like Facebook guy selfies of them in gray hoodies with the hood up. And it was like, who do you think is going to do this? Like who thinks this is cool? And also, what is that?

That like, it's like, feels like a little bit miscast, Trayvon Martin kind of thing. Yeah. Sort of. It's like Florida politicians, especially. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. No.

Juan Guida's challenge is get stuck trying to climb over a fence and then get your picture taken. I bet Juan Guida has been stuck in an elevator. He really exudes that. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. But just to keep it somewhat light and contemporary for one more second, we did use in an episode

the Trump speech to the Bay of Pigs vets where he came and I know what was it, he like gives him a speech. Oh, he says that there is. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. What was the event? It was like.

It was honoring. It was like honoring the Bay of Pigs. Normally he doesn't. This is funny because normally he doesn't like honoring losers of military conflicts. I know. It's odd. Well, he goes up. He gets up and he's like, he makes them wait, obviously.

And then he gets there and he goes up and it's, I don't know if this is for sure, but it's possible he doesn't even know what the Bay of Pigs was like the way he's talking about it. Almost certainly not. He doesn't know what it was and he goes like, he goes like, um, he says like, uh, you, uh, you endorsed me in the 20, uh, 2016. I have the award on a wall. I was honored to receive the endorsement of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association in 2016

and they gave me a beautiful award and I have it very proudly on a wall of great importance to me. He says it's on a wall of great importance to him, which is underrated, underrated Trump line, a wall of great importance to me. Yeah. That is, yeah. I think that that is a testament to our research ability with this season was that we found a Trump quote that made a slap that was new that we didn't know about.

And then, and then he goes like, and uh, you, you want a free Cuba and you will have that today we declare America's unwavering commitment to a free Cuba and you will have that. You will have that very soon. We're glad to be joined. They will have it. Mike, won't they? Huh? It's happening very fast.

Actually. You will have that very soon. You will get that. You will get that. And then he goes, I'm going to give it to Mike because Mike Pence is here and he's very much with what you're all about. He's with you and is very much interested in a lot of the same things. I think you're going to see about what you're interested in.

And it's just like, he has no idea who these people are and not give a fault. No. Save the pit bulls, folks. I promise. Realistically, there's like five Mar-a-Lago members in that crowd, you know, like, but then Pence gets up and he's got zero swag and he's just like not, he's just saying, you know, listen, we're going to keep Cuba. It's, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, it's going to be a Cuba Libre.

Yeah. He turned into Bill Clinton and then he said that. And then he said, and then he says, like, you were, you hit the beaches greatly outnumbered by Castro's socialist forces. And it's just like, he has to get socialist in there and cut you, really. But I just imagine being one of these, what, like 80 year old or 90 year old Bay of Pigs guys and you're looking up and you got Trump saying, like, yeah, he's, what you people are all about is just so good.

It's great. It's fantastic. I love it. And you're just like, do you admit that this is a huge joke on you or not? I don't know. You keep the dream alive. I don't know. Yeah.

No, these guys, these guys have been living now. Yeah. 70 plus years of keeping the dream alive. Our government indulges their fans. Yeah, absolutely. Like we, we literally have had make work programs funded by our government for decades to keep right wing Cubans employed. Like one of the problems, it's very interesting, our government, when Cuban exiles were leaving

Cuba and coming to settle in the United States, you know, like obviously we now know that like they transformed Miami, what was once, you know, you know, Jewish pensioners became with the arrival of Cuban Americans, like a major city and a major power player politically speaking. There were actually Cubans who were exiles from the island fleeing, you know, fleeing cast or whatever, who were encouraged by the US government to move like anywhere but Miami. And you know, like, so these people like the Brigadistas, the people who were watching Trump speak, like they have been living in a Trump-like sphere of delusion for decades,

funded by our government. And the government knew that, you know, that was a possibility when they were congregating as a community, you know, funded by the government and so on, organized around any cast or activity in Miami. But yeah, so, so, so Trump, so Trump's speech to them, Trump's speech to them is a fun one that we play in the show. Well, actually, let's take a moment now to transition out of Cuba talking into the present moment.

I was thinking, if it was okay with you guys to just do a classic chapeau reading series that is very much in the vein of all we're talking about. I mean, this is an example of imperial brain rot and like sort of similar to being caught off guard by Cuba, you know, like what happens to like our policy planners and our best and brightest when our sort of self-image of invincible, righteous power comes smack up against reality. And I'm talking, of course, about the now long, long overdue announcement that America is leaving Afghanistan and that, you know, did we win the war? I don't know.

What do I tell my kids? What do I tell my son? Did you see the worst threat of all time? Oh, yeah, I did. It was the military wife. Yeah, it was like military wife who's like, Afghanistan's been like a member of my family who I hate. This has been really hard for me, and I don't even know if I feel anything at this point.

And she was like trying to find a way to like connect like connect any tragedy she had to Afghanistan, even though like, yeah, she has a ton of military family, but none of them died over there. So she was like, Afghanistan's the reason that I had to bury my father alone. And it's like, you're like, you're like, my parent died, no way. Yeah, no, but it was there's one part where she's like, I consider Fatma like a member of my family. And it's like, I was just, she's like, she's probably like getting letters in this poor

Afghani woman or Afghan woman. It's like, she's just reading it in her mind in an onchimima voice. Well, it was just that was it like put me in such a bad mood. Like I like, I think that like, the like sort of like, the sort of like attempt at like Third Worlderism by Americans is like usually pathetic, and just like clownish and like, no one in those countries like gives a shit if an American does that. But like, I did understand it then I was like, Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, fuck this lady. Well, this is this is this reading series is very much in the vein of the same kind of

like weepy histrionics. And like I said, just pure imperial brain rot. And it could not come from anyone other than, you know, the US Empire's most, so we say witty, charming, and clear thinking individuals. And I'm talking, of course, about Thomas Friedman, New York Times, New York Times with Panache, New York Times opinion column, Thomas Friedman, the headline, what Joe Biden and I saw after the US invaded Afghanistan. Back when we visited back when we visited in 2002, there was hope that America could

help make the country better. So let's just let's just dive into the mind palace of Thomas Friedman. Beginning here, he says, I was not surprised that Joe Biden decided to finally pull the plug on the US presence in Afghanistan, back in 2002, it was reasonable to hope that our invasion there to topple Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies could be extended to help make that country a more stable, tolerant, and decent place for its citizens, and less likely to host jihadist groups. But it was also reasonable to fear from the start that trying to graft a Western political

culture onto such a deeply tribalized male dominated and Islamic fundamentalist culture like Afghanistan's was a fool's errand, especially male dominated. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, I mean, Thomas, I mean, if this was clear to you then you certainly weren't sharing it in your columns about what a fool's errand this all might turn out to be. And in fact, much of this column is actually and takes a place of a diary he supposedly

kept during this time. And he goes, Biden was torn between those hopes and fears from the very start. I know because I was with him on his first visit in early January 2002 to post war Afghanistan. It was just weeks after the major fighting had subsided and the Taliban were evicted from Kabul. He goes, I kept a diary in the months after 9 11, including of that trip and published it and published it in 2002 with a collection of columns from that time in my book, longitudes and attitudes.

That's my favorite Jimmy Puffin album, King Kong, King Kong ain't got shit on Thomas Friedman and his diary of thoughts and columns that he fucking cashed out for a book deal, reprinting his longitudes and attitudes and attitudes. Oh, that's like 20 million dollars for that. Can I just say by the way that I walked by the coffee shop around the corner for me the other day and there was a copy, I was like, that book's been there like every day I passed by. What is it?

And it's just a copy of the world is isn't it flat hot and crowded? That's the one. That's him. Right. And the world is flat. He has two books about flatness. He said flat twice. Yeah.

Well, because flatness is good. Flatness. It's okay. Matt, we already like established this, but his metaphor doesn't work because the whole point of a sphere is that two points on a sphere closer together than any point on a flat plane. I don't know what that means. It's geometry.

The point is that he doesn't get it, but it was, but it was on the, it was on the counter and I don't know if it's like a book that someone was so displeased with, they just left at the cafe and didn't even take with them. They're using it to make, they're using it to make sure that little tables don't wobble. They just wedge a treatment under there. Yeah. They just use it as a doorstop. But yeah, I just thought that was funny that of all books, it was Tom Friedman anyway.

He goes on here. He goes, they were my thoughts, not Biden's, but we were seeing the same things and sharing many of the same first impressions, which in many ways persists today. So like, yeah, he's going to share. I am Joe Biden. He's sharing his diary. He's sharing his diary. Contact your, contact a doctor or a family member.

If you were having the same thoughts and perception as Joe Biden. Oh no. Yeah. He started, he started, he started just bringing milkshakes everywhere. Biden, Biden opens a like a local sort of like imams meeting by calling him hay fat and then just launching into a horrible tirade. He gave my, he gave my mom his class ring, they're both 63. The diary entry began.

We flew to Islamabad and then grabbed the UN relief flight into Bagram, Arabic. I'm just, I'm just imagining Thomas Friedman getting visited by like the Black Lodge where they're like, the good deal is here, write it in your diary, Thomas. Yep. So he goes here, don't put on the ring, Joe. We flew to Islamabad and then grabbed the UN relief flight into the, into Bagram Air Forest Base, 50 miles from Kabul, also known as the major, one of the major hubs of us is a torture regime was carried out at Bagram Air Forest Base.

But he goes here, I stayed at the house being rented by the New York Times, which had only slightly better plumbing, but a friendly group of Afghan drivers and cooks who kept the fireplace roaring and the raisin pilaf and warm Afghan bread on the table. I mean, this is just like, this is like tin tin in the Congo. I mean, this is like, Thomas Friedman, he's just like our, our loveable Afghan servants kept us, kept us adorned and within their, in their local fabrics and warm rice pilaf. And this was written now. This isn't even in 2002, right?

No, no, this is his diary from 2002. Oh, it's his diary. This is his thoughts at like the height of all this. Yeah. But he's publishing it. He's publishing it now. He's just, he goes, uh, my first impression of Kabul, it was ground zero East. We might as well be doing nation building on the moon.

I wrote in a column I published that week. I just love here. Like, like I said, this is all like a column being written at the time. These are his diaries from 2002 when he had hope for Afghanistan. And this is what he's saying about it. He's like, yeah, this country is like a pile of shit. This country, this country's like the moon. Yeah.

I can't wait to go home. This country's like the moon, although some of its friendly moon people, uh, feed me Bryce Pila often. They don't even have magic cards here. This is taking forever. God. Okay. So, so he's, what, what's the point he's driving to?

I'm fascinated. So he goes here, uh, uh, I'm just, I'm skipping ahead around. This is, this is back to the diary. He goes, my heart told me to write that America must remain here for however long it takes with however many troops it takes to repair this country and provide a minimum level of security so we can get on its feet again. It was the least we owed the place, having already abandoned it once after the Soviet withdrawal.

We didn't have to make it Switzerland just a little bit better, a little freer and a little more stable than it was under the Taliban. I just love how fucking racist this all is. Like just glides right over and he's like, look, it's never going to be Switzerland. Okay. Yeah. If we can just make these stupid moon people, um, a little less of a violent and, uh, you know, a little bit better, just a little bit more stable, you know, like, I know we

all know this now about, about Friedman. This is just who he is. But every time we, like, Will, you came on last season, we read from him during the Iraq war and it's just, it always, like it's, it's being born again, listening to the way a little, we should have made it just a little bit better and a little bit freer, like how many teaspoons of better, what is the measurements he's going on here of all these general words? It's infuriating. This is like, it's like, I prefer the guys who like, it's, this is the same thing as

the guys who were like, everyone who's like the first reply to Eleanor Omar, like the dark universe, Jeff T. Dricks, who were like, why don't you tell that to your god, Allah? Yeah. There is a part of the constitution that says that no one can be an Allah style individual. Yeah. But it's like the same thing. Yeah. This is just like the same bullshit.

So he also is saying that this is a moon based place. Yeah. He goes here, this is, this is once again from Thomas Friedman's diary. He goes, Tom Friedman's first rule of politics, never trust the country where a new minister has the picture of his favorite dead militia leader, not the country's interim president over his desk. So he was just like, yeah, we were trying to, we were trying to make the place a little bit better, but like immediately government ministers didn't have photos of Hamid Karzai

over, like on their desk. This is a list he's writing himself. Yeah. So Thomas Friedman's rules and he goes, it seemed to me that the tribal warrior culture ran so deep in this place, it would be hard for any neutral central government to sink real roots. As I contemplated that militia leader's picture, I wondered to myself, when were the good old days of government in Afghanistan before Genghis Khan, before gunpowder?

How about right before we started getting involved? I mean, like before we invented all of these, these sort of groups that he hates so much and thinks that it's the moon, it's the moon, Islamic jihad moon base. But I'm weirded out by him writing, like in the third person, his own list of rules and suggestions. Rules and regulations for stealing candy. Yeah. I was just going to say.

No, fuck. Sorry. Sorry. Rules and regulations for stealing opium. Yes. I hope at least. Yeah. So he goes here.

I read, I wrote in my column that week that I lingered one evening in the famous bookstore of the Intercontinental Hotel, which had an amazing collection of books on Afghan history. As I really explored the country, Tom, he's at the hotel bookstore, I went to the fucking guest shop. Yeah. I went to the gift shop at the Intercontinental, the green zone, not even trying because as I perused, it's not even the cab driver. It's worse than the cab driver.

As I perused the shelves, I wrote, I was struck by how many books had Afghan wars in the title. I picked up one called A History of the War in Afghanistan and discovered it was a part of a too thick of a thick two volume set that covered only the years 1800 to 1842. I was also struck by the collection of postcards offered in that bookstore, one in particular. It was a two part picture. One part was of a shell ravaged building and the other part of a damaged hallway with the roof collapsed and rubble strewn all over the floor. The caption read, Afghanistan, the looted and destroyed Kabul Museum.

That is the sign of a country too long at war when it is producing postcards of the rubble. It's like, this is Thomas Friedman writing in 2002 on the precipice of another 20 years of the US being at war in that country. Yeah. Also, if you're being sent as a professional journalist to a country and then find yourself surprised in the gift shop by books about that country in detail, why are you in the country on this E-America mission?

It was his premier foreign policy correspondent. He probably makes like 500 grand a year. Well, with the speaking fees, I mean, his wife is a billionaire too. Yeah. I mean, as always, Google Tom Friedman House. Yeah. Thomas Friedman shirt off. You may like what you see.

This is one, you want to talk about like Thomas Friedman mixed metaphors, I just, I highlighted this sentence just in the middle of an otherwise boring paragraph. He goes, he writes here, could the future bury the past there or would the past always bury the future? Oh, no. This is like young adult writing. This is so bad. This is like, it's a combination of that and like Benny Johnson's Fort Hood food blog.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Felix, you bring up Benny Johnson. Okay. Listen to this paragraph. This is, once again, back to the diary. He writes here in 2002, I looked around the room at the Special Forces A teams that were

there and could see America's strength hiding in plain sight. It wasn't smart missiles or night fighting equipment. It was the fact that these Special Forces teams each seemed to be made up of a collection of black, Asian, Hispanic and white Americans. It is our ability to blend those many into one hard fist that is the real source of our power. Yeah. One of our fists.

You got the blacks, Asians, Hispanics, white Americans, together, that's America. This is precisely what Afghans have not been able to do in recent decades and it's left them weak and divided and prey to outsiders. So it was their inability to come together to form fucking Special Forces death squads. I mean, shit, if they had Special Forces death squads, they had all the training from us. Why couldn't they do it? They could project force anywhere in the world. They may have visited Thomas Friedman before this fucking war even started and they could

have. Yeah. It's just a projected force outwards. Yeah. Tom Friedman walking up to like Hamid Karzai's brother who was the opium trafficker and being like, do you have any like black guys here? You're like a Chinese guy or something because I have this idea of that Special Forces paragraph. He says, reading that particular passage 20 years later, I confess that I wonder if we

had become more like the Afghans and not the Afghans more like us. Our diversity is only our strength as long as we can forge out of many one. And lately our parties and politics have become so tribalized, it's not clear anymore that we can do that. I mean, this is like the dumbest version of like white man's burden. He's just saying that like, oh, the Afghans are making us more like moon people than we are making them more like Swiss people. But all of these dying transmission of the AI that writes Tom Friedman follows.

But all of these little pirouettes with the, I'm going to make the one thing switch with the other thing in every sentence, this is like very Pete Buttigieg, like, you know, the bigness of our differences is smaller than the bigness of our similarities or whatever. He's just, every sentence is that. But about Afghanistan. It reminded me of how Kerry and sex in the city writes. I wondered, was, were we the ones who needed a tribal meeting? Well, it's again, Will, though, again, everything he's writing down is like, why this isn't

good, and then he says he went off home and wrote in support of the war. Yeah, strange thing to be writing now or admitting now. He goes, I like the idea of like his editor being like, you know what, Tom, I want you to try and, you know, maybe go back to like, go to and see what you wrote then. Let's try for an introspective one this go around. And then like, this is when he came back with just one of the worst things ever. It was like, I tried to look within myself and all I saw was the abyss. Yeah.

So he goes on in his diary to describe what happened when him and Joe Biden tried to leave the country on like a military cargo plane and they got like, the guys are like, oh, we have orders that like, we can't put any civilians on this plane. So in his diary, he writes this, getting out of Afghanistan turned out to be harder than getting in, which I hope will not be, which I hope will not be a metaphor for U.S. operations there generally. Oh, my bad. It turned out it was.

All right. I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess that in like 10 months from now, we're still in Afghanistan. Joe Biden, I mean, Tom Freeman is going to use this as a callback. I'm like, something tells me. I don't know what. So they're, yeah, it's going to rock because he's going to be like, yeah, I was actually, I was right.

Yeah. I was right about myself being wrong. Yeah. You know, it's actually interesting, you know, it's very interesting when you consider the flatness of how correct I am, which is flat all the time, which makes us the world when it's interconnected matters so much more. Yeah. So, yeah.

And so like now he finally brings in like a little, little reminiscing about, about Joe Biden, about sleepy Joe Biden, because like he front loaded this whole column with like me and Joe's time in Afghanistan. We're best friends. Yeah. I was about to ask like, where is Biden? If he's with Biden comes in here and he goes, I ended up lending Biden my satellite phone to call Secretary of State, Colin Powell via the State Department Operations Center.

A satellite phone. To see if he could help. Yeah. Oh, by the way, I'm just, I'm just a journalist here in Afghanistan and I have a satellite phone that connects me directly to the State Department Center of Operations. Yeah. You know, like it's like George Clooney and the fucking peacemaker, what a peacemaker or whatever.

Thomas Friedman probably shouldn't even have like a regular phone. Yeah. He should probably just have a Jitterbug. He gets a J, it's, what's that thing for old Jitterbug? Jitterbug. Yeah. He gets a Jitterbug. So he gives Joe Biden his, his satellite phone that he just has and he goes, this is Joe

Biden because you connect me with Colin Powell, Biden asked the State Department Operator a few minutes past, Colin, Colin, Hey, it's Joe Biden. Yeah. I'm standing here on the runway at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, trying to get out on a military transport and they're telling me that the Pentagon is ordered that no civilians be let on the plane. I'm sorry to trouble you, Colin, but could you give us a hand here? Powell told Biden to hold on for a minute when he, while he tracked down Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld

was in church. So Powell tracked down his deputy, Paul Wilpowitz, and he goes, there were a few more minutes of phone calls to CENTCOM headquarters in Florida before Powell came back on the phone with Biden. Joe, said the Secretary of State, let me talk to the air traffic controller there. I mean, this goes on for another three paragraphs. Fascinating. This is so cool.

I feel like I'm there. Grandparents across the country are emailing this to their progeny. Do you think there's like a guy who's like, he's one of those YouTube guys who's thing is like, he's obsessed with air traffic controls, and he's the only newspaper article he's ever read. This one's for you. This is awesome. Yeah.

I mean, actually, I do kind of want to look, it is always, it is really funny always to look at who genuinely, like whenever like Samantha Power writes something for like the evil blog or whatever, like, and then it's like who actually shares it, like on Twitter, like who's like boosting it or whatever. And it's always academics, like always, like it's professor somebody. But I am curious who would be the kind of person to share this. So like, they get on the airplane, they get on the airplane and then they land in Pakistan. And then this is what he says here, he says, talking to the U.S. airmen at, uh, uh, Jaco

Baba, I'm not even going to say it, just say, just say at an air base. Yeah. Okay. It's pronounced San Luis Obispo. So talking to the U.S. airmen at insert Air Force Base in Pakistan was an eye-opener. One of them told us, we don't have a flight to Afghanistan that doesn't get shot at by small arms fire from inside Pakistan, somewhere near the border. But Pakistan is our ally in this war, we said.

Tell that to the Pakistanis who live along the Afghan border. He shrugged. It was one of those moments when you realize as a journalist that there are a million stories going on in and around this larger war story that you have no clue about. It was one of those moments when you get an inkling that you were standing on a story with a false bottom. You get an inkling that you were standing on a story with a false bottom. Is the bottom of the ground?

The bottom is his absolute dog dick ignorance about the world. I went to Afghanistan thinking I was a bratty verse top. And then on the plane with Joe Biden, I learned I was actually a bottom. It is cool because I am now looking on Twitter to see who is sharing this article. And one guy is like, his profile is like a federal government picture. And it's like, distinguished diplomat in residence, retired diplomat, et cetera, et cetera. So this drivel, this brain slurry from the head of Tom Friedman is actually passed around by serious grownups.

Oh, sure. No, no. Yeah. You remember that woman, Kelly Magsman, who is like, she works for the Blinken State Department now, but she had the tweet that was like, Hey, I'm a liberal Democrat, but Elliot Abrams is a good guy and he's been held accountable for the bad stuff he did. Oh, yeah. Which gave a great insight on what holds accountable activities.

I like the idea of like Elliot Abrams being held accountable and it not involving a scene from the Wicker Man. Yeah. Like, I would look at like just like bullshit articles she would write and yeah, I'm fascinated by that side of Twitter where it's like, not even like, even like, yeah, like the worst like Natsack Daily Beast journalist or whatever has some like guile and knows how to like to vaguely imitate like a prospector joke and shit for like, you know, whatever dumb argument they're in.

Yeah. But like these people are just, they have none of that. They're just, they don't have any of like the irony affect and it's, yeah, you look at their bios and I've gone psycho enough to like go to their LinkedIn's and it's always like, yeah, like, head of child molestation and golden stash and shit like that. By the way, you say the Daily Beast, I share, I share your, you know, general take on the Daily Beast, but I guess it was them that just the other day helped break that. The whole Taliban, talking about Afghanistan, the whole Russia Taliban bounty thing was not

true. Didn't happen. You made it up. Yeah. Totally. This one's a story made up by a writer. It's a made up tip. It's a total fabrication.

It never happened. I think the Daily, well, I should clarify. Like I think the Daily Beast is like very editorially bad, but obviously like, I mean like every place is every news company is bad and every news company also has like people who are good, who work there. Yes. Yes. And that was a good report.

And I had to go back and just queue up the Rachel Maddow segment where it's just like, now we know, now we know that this was happening because it's in the New York Times and we know the President Trump didn't care or worse was he a part of it. And it's just like this 20 minute long expose over nothing didn't even happen. People were saying it didn't happen at the time and it's on TV and I'm watching it on my screen because it's on TV. And now we learn it was all, it was all completely made up. Amazing.

So just to close out, Thomas Friedman's, you know, Proustine Reverie about a fucking war that he's, you know, feels slightly convicted. He's like, I can't help but feel responsible for the last 20 years of fucking bloodshed in this country. Did I do that? So that was Joe Biden's at my introduction to Afghanistan. When I interviewed him last December, a month after his election as president, we got talking informally about the Middle East and he asked if I remembered our trip to Afghanistan and

all the craziness at the end. I'd never forgot it. I told him clearly neither had he, our nation's, remember that one crazy trip we took? You know, it's a little, what a wild ride it's all been for, for America as it relates to Afghanistan. That part is also like totally made up like that, but like that, that, that like he, like he was like, Hey, do you remember our trip to Afghanistan and Joe Biden and like definitely thought he was someone else.

That much is true. Also just that paragraph was just him in a lot of words saying, I asked Biden about, does he remember the trip? And he said, yes, like that's, that's not a paragraph, but why would you, why would you include that? Of course. Well, not of course that he remembers. It's unlikely that he did.

It's just so strange. Like this is what he's paid to fill up the space with. So we now know that he's going to try to like tie it all together here and he says here, our nation's effort there was worth a try. Our soldiers left it all out on the field and that's what matters as long as people had fun. Yeah. That's literally what George W. Bush said at the end of the Iraq war, when like in the

same day, I believe we talked about this in episode 10 of last season on the same day that he got the shoe thrown at him. Oh yeah. He's also speaking to troops and the troops are, you know, he's like saying, like, you know, we, we, we try like his, his reasoning was effective like we tried and because we tried, we didn't fail and because we didn't fail. Yes. He says because we tried, we didn't fail and because we didn't fail, he doesn't quite

say it, but because we didn't fail, we didn't, because we didn't fail. We won. This is basically what he's trying to do. Yeah. And then the, and then the National Guard did not like seize Washington, DC. So that's right. And that's true. And, and, and then like, you know, and then you just, you're like, whoa, and like everybody's

like going crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It was awesome. Sorry. So Will, is there one more? Our soldiers and diplomats were trying to make it better, but it was never clear they knew how or had enough Afghan partners.

Yes. Maybe leaving will make it worse, but our staying wasn't really helping. That's big of him to admit after 20 years of this shit. Thank you, Tom. Yeah. He goes, our leaving may be a short-term disaster and in the longer run, who knows? Maybe Afghanistan will find balance on its own like Vietnam. The time will tell.

To quote, to quote Andrew, time will show. Maybe it will find. This article should have been called time will show. So like, you know, maybe I'll just imagine like not knowing who Tom Friedman was and reading this article and like getting to the end of it and just like, you know, like, like what was that? Like, it's something unpredictable and in the end, I hope you had the time of your life. Oh goodness.

Yeah. Well, I mean, in a strange, and I don't actually mean this kind of way. It's comforting that Tom's still there doing what he always did, offering the eternal mustache. Meaningless, meaningless drivel that no one really reads, but it keeps getting published. I guess a lot of people read it, but no one learns anything. I do like, it did make me feel good to hear this. Like, I used to like, when I was younger, I would like get mad at Tom Friedman shit. And now it's like, oh, I love him.

There he is again. I mean, it's, it'll be a shame to, it'll be, it'll be a sad day when they put him out to pasture. Finally. Yeah. I'll be upset. Just in closing here. He says, maybe Afghanistan will find balance on its own, like Vietnam or not.

I don't know. And then he just says, I am as humbled and ambivalent about it today as I was 20 years ago. And I'm sure that Biden is too. You were never ambivalent about this Thomas and said, suck on this. That's a direct quote. That wasn't very humble. Yeah.

But this, well, what's this? He doesn't specify. Right. Being ambivalent. Yeah. It's actually, I think you guys just aren't being very flat about it, but that's just true. Yeah.

We need to get flatter. My goal this year is to get flatter, but that's, that's, that's a dizzy. I don't want to take over the reins here, but will, I did mention to you, it's, it's in this, this general sort of zone. I wanted to mention a movie I watched that I don't know if any of you have seen. Has anyone here seen The Soldier by James Glick in the house? No. No.

It's by the, this is the guy who did the exterminator, the exploitation movie with Robert Ginty apparently. It's kind of like a bad death wish. And this is a movie that I highly recommend because the plot is something I've never thought of before, which is that rogue KGB agents, this is the high, it's like in the seventies. Rogue KGB agents, it's like steel and nuke and say that they're going to blow up Saudi Arabia unless the United States goes to war with Israel. And then the United States does go to war with Israel because they don't want the oil to get blown up.

And then there's like a secret, there's like a, there's a secret CIA agent called The Soldier who is like cartoonishly powerful and it's just like, they're like, after the Bay of Pigs, we got a guy who, you know, would make sure bad stuff wouldn't happen and he can do anything he wants, which is like the opposite of what you would do if there was a thing that got out of control, you'd like be more top down centralized. But he's called The Soldier and he's playing by Ken Wall and he, he fixes everything. And it's really, really, it's not a terrible movie, but it's really, really dumb. And the only, the only demand the terrorists have so that they won't blow up the oil, which

means the US won't have to go to war against Israel, is that Israel withdraws from the West Bank. That's all they want. And in the whole movie, everyone's like, well, we can't do that. And it's just like an absolute non-negotiable, non-negotiable thing that cannot happen. And everything flows from that. And there's a scene where, I remember Will, I think we watched Tenet and there was that line where he's like, this super bomb will blow up everything and the woman is like,

what about my son? Oh, she goes, even my son? Even my son? No, yeah, Robert Pattinson explains, he explains that like, if Kenneth Branagh is allowed to do this, it will instantly like, just like negate reality, like everything that's ever existed or ever will exist will just cease to be, it will be nothing. And Elizabeth DeBecchi's character is like, even my son? That was a remake of this scene where it's a really long, like, lazy Susan table shot

where the entire Israeli leadership, now that they know, you know, they're being asked to withdraw from the West Bank and are going to get nuked by the US instead of doing that. They're talking about what to do. And a guy says, so what could this bomb do? And then another person says, it would blow up, it would blow up, it would make be a nuclear explosion in the Middle East and destroy Saudi Arabia and its oil. And someone says, what would that mean? And it's just like, it would, it would do that.

It would blow up the country and then there'd be no oil and it's just, it's like, this is the top brass of Israel. And then in the finale, the Israelis set up a ramp so the soldier can get to 88 miles per hour and jump over the Berlin Wall into the, quote, Russian side of the city. And then it ends with a freeze frame on the Statue of Liberty with like, breakfast club music playing. That's a 1982. It's really fun, it's called The Soldier and I will say the one really cool part of it

is it's a Tangerine Dream soundtrack and they do a really great job. So that part is basically holding up the entire movie. Well, this is, I will, I will put the soldiers jumping to the top of my queue, but you give us the perfect segue to go out on actually. So yeah, well, it's been a mega long episode today and it could be no, it could be no way else when the blowback boys are in the cut. But you mentioned the Tangerine Dream soundtrack for The Soldier. I would like to mention the Brendan James soundtrack for blowback season two.

And we are going to play out with the original, an original score written by Brendan James. This is but one track on what will be an original score album to blowback season two. This is Brendan James doing his absolute best John Carpenter impression. And I say that with like the utmost regard for both you and John Carpenter. This is Jupiter missiles by Brendan James from the soundtrack to blowback season two. It's about Cuba this time. All right, gentlemen, till next time. Bye.

For many peoples, these were the first gods, the greatest of the deities, the king of all gods, Jupiter.