Pod Save the World - Biden ends one war, will Israel and Iran start another?

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss the cyberattack on an Iranian nuclear facility, Biden's plans to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by September 11th, whether MBS spent almost half a billion on a forged painting, violence in Northern Ireland, escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine, sports nationalism and more. Then Ben talks to journalist Afua Hirsch about how Boris Johnson's government has embraced racism and the complicated legacy of Prince Philip. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I was going to start this by trying to award you the second ever champion of freedom award, which was given from Senator Rick Scott to Donald Trump this weekend. But I forgot my tiny little silver trophy. I left it at home. I apologize. Yeah, yeah.

It's like the participation trophies I used to get in like Little League, you know. I think Dan Pfeiffer called it a fascism participation trophy on Twitter. Yeah, that's very, very, very funny. We have a lot going on. Today is actually the hardest time I've had in well over a year in terms of like with you guys trying to think through like what makes it onto the show and what doesn't because there's so much going on. So where we all landed on, the POTS of the World Brain Trust was we're going to talk about cyber attacks on Iran and what it means for the nuclear negotiations, some big news from Biden on Afghanistan, why progressives are pushing the Biden team to do more in Yemen, some scary tensions. in Northern Ireland that's spilling out into media. We're going to talk about Tom Brady because I felt like it.

Fake art, escalating tensions with Russia and China, Facebook, Mike Pompeo, the situation in Uganda, and why Japan is very excited about golf at the moment. And then, Ben, you did our interview today. You guys were raving about how good this one. Please tell everybody what they're going to hear. Yeah, everybody should definitely stick around to hear the interview with Afwa Hirsch, who's a British journalist and writer and commentator. we talked about the recent report that found that there was no racism in Britain.

That is unbelievable. Yeah. Afwa didn't agree with that. We talked about Prince Philip, British identity, wide-ranging, very fascinating conversation. And actually, there's an article up on cricket.com by Missing America alum Zarlau Shalamsai, also about the British report. So we've got total coverage, multi-platform coverage of this outrageous report today. But Afwa's great. You should check it out.

I there were like real-time rave reviews coming in on our iMessage thread so i cannot wait to hear this um a couple quick housekeeping things so if you can't get enough of hearing me a yap a couple times a week i was on rubicon this week with brian boitler talking about some of the many foreign policy challenges biden is facing in the first hundred days rubicon is just it's an awesome show brian's talking about all these like big ticket issues that are there are biden trying to deal with quickly so check it out and subscribe and then ben uh just in time for summer crooked dot com, our store is selling our first ever pool float. It just says, it just says vaccinated in lots of fun colors. So you can, you know, piss off that anti-vaxxer in your life. You can virtue

signal in a new way. If you want to go to crooked.com slash store, you can get them before they're gone. So just an update for all the listeners. It's a great, like, post-Trump virtue signal. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. And also, hey, it's doing your part to get rid of this pandemic. So why don't we start with Iran? Because, You know, last week, teams from the U.S. and Iran were engaged in these indirect talks about getting back into the 2015 JCPOA or Iran nuclear deal. The talks were happening in Vienna. They're representatives from Russia, China, France, Germany, and the UK, trying to sort of shepherd them along. And the readout from those talks was basically no big breakthrough, but pretty positive, right?

So then things start to get a little dicey. First, there were these reports that Israel attacked an Iranian ship that was connected to the IRC. Then on Sunday, there was reportedly a major cyber attack on Iran's main nuclear facility at Natanz that may have damaged thousands of centrifuges that Iran uses to enrich nuclear materials. So the Iranians very quickly accused Israel of orchestrating the attack. They said they did it to screw up the talks. Biden's Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is in Israel right now for meetings and did a public event with Netanyahu on Monday. So today is Tuesday morning, Iran announced that they're going to begin enriching uranium.

to 60% purity. This enrichment talk get a little wonky, but the thing listeners need to know is that 90% enrich uranium is considered weapons grade. So Ben, you know, a lot of movement here. Two questions for you. First, I mean, it does seem pretty likely to me that this cyber attack was timed to happen during these talks, but you tell me if you agree or disagree. And then second, what do you make of Secretary Austin having these very public meetings with BBNN Yahoo in Israel in the wake of, of a cyber attack that everyone thinks Israel did, that seemingly Israeli officials are taking credit for in the press? I mean, doesn't that kind of make it a little harder for us to engage diplomatically

if this stuff's happening? You think? Yeah, I, and first of all, the Israelis have not been, I mean, I think we should more than assume Israel did this. They've been doing all the wink-wink kind of confirmations on background and then saying very kind of opaque, tough things in public. And look, this is a big deal to launch a cyber attack at Natanz. First of all, the Iranian response is a significant escalation.

They've not done this before. They've not enriched up to 60 percent before. So this is a significant ratcheting up of their nuclear escalation. I've seen some of the dead-end maximum pressure guys online saying, well, the Iranians would have done that anyway. Well, they haven't done it before. So, like, there's a cost to this. tit-for-tat escalation. Then on the timing, I mean, there's so many overlapping things that make

the timing problematic. First, you've had the very high-profile launch of these discussions in Vienna that by all accounts went well. Second, you had Lloyd Austin in Israel, right? And so putting him in a really impossible position because the question is, did the U.S. know about this in advance? You have to think we didn't. So did they just spring this on them? Like, hey, hey, welcome to Israel. We just launch a cyber attack on Natanz. And then third, you have, you know, Israel in its own unsettled political environment because they had an election, not sure who's going to form the next government. And, you know, perhaps this is Netanyahu kind of fluxing in a space that he likes to go to when he's in political danger. So, like, of course this makes things more complicated. And people

should know, like, sure, this will set back their Natanz facility. But by like a period of months, And meanwhile, if Iran comes back, enriching at a higher level, they will have more than made up for the fact that this cyber attack set them back a little bit. And so the whole reason to have a diplomatic deal in the first place is, you know, with these kinds of attacks, you can periodically set back the clock at one Iranian facility or another. But because the Iranians know how to do this, they know how to enrich uranium, they can just set that up somewhere else, you know. So it's not, I think it's important to make the argument that, that, you know, this is, we won't. want to solve the problem. We don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon and that this is not the way to do it. And I think that given that Biden has signaled he wants to come back into the deal for Israel to kind of be taking an action that clearly would suggest, you know, that would be harder. You know, that's laying down a marker. Yeah, I'm glad, you know, you sort of preempted my follow-up question, which is I bet there are listeners who are sitting here listening to us thinking like, hey, isn't it a good thing that Iran's centrifuges are broken, right?

Like, didn't we read news reports about the Obama administration maybe doing similar stuff? Like, what would you say to them about why, you know, a cyber attack isn't the path forward here and instead it is these negotiations? Well, because at the end of the day, like, we looked at this hard in the Obama years. How, I truly believe. I mean, and this is the thing about the opponents of the Iran deal act like somehow we were on Iran's side in this. Like, no, I want Iran to not have a nuclear weapon for a million reasons. what are the ways of doing that? Okay. One is these kind of cyber attacks that can target very specifically a certain facility, crash some centrifuges, sent the back. Iran has more than one

facility where they enrich uranium, where they can operate centrifuges. And also over time, you know, this incentivizes them to build secret facilities. So you can't solve the problem through cyber attacks. The same thing is also true with military attacks. Our military assess that even if, you know, you just bombed the heck out of their nuclear facilities, you'd set back their clock basically a year because, you know, then they just need to rebuild their nuclear facilities and plug in the centrifuges again. And if they go, you know, all out to try to dash to a weapon, they can do that quickly. So that leaves a diplomatic deal that essentially puts in place an entire infrastructure of inspections and monitoring regimes where you're verifying that Iran is taken

several steps backwards in terms of, you know, they were shipping all their stockpile out of the country. They were only, they were not enriching anywhere near to 60%. They were submitting to these types of inspections. That's just a more durable way to solve this problem, you know? I think some people would also say, well, you know, doesn't this help in the negotiation? Like, you set them back and they may be hungrier for a deal. Like, I just don't think that's the way you get something done. You know, I think the Iranians are more likely to escalate in response. to this action and then feel like they're trading down from a higher position themselves. So, you know, a lot of uncertainties here, but this is just not the way I'd want to design

the diplomacy that it was trying to get back into the nuclear deal. Yeah, I mean, certainly the Iranians historically have responded and escalated to attacks on them that they perceive. Also, historically, like the most durable efforts to denuclearize a country have been when those countries choose to do so. Otherwise, they can just figure out a way to try it over again. And one other thing, Tommy, like on the Obama thing, and we can't talk about obviously specifics of stuff that was sensitive at the time.

What I will say is I don't think that's the way to solve the problem, right? So I would not support that. But also, there was no existing nuclear deal at that time. You know, like there is an existing joint comprehensive plan of action, JCPOA that they're just trying to return to. In 2009, 10, like, we were nowhere near that. Yes, that's a good point. Let's slide over to Iran's neighbor for a bit. So on Tuesday, the Washington Post broke the news that President Biden plans to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11th, 2021. That's the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. Biden is expected to officially announce this news on Wednesday, April 14th, so the day this episode comes out. There is currently between 2,500 and 3,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and there's up to 7,000 international, mostly NATO troops. It sounds like Biden's team landing. on this withdrawal date and this decision because they know they can't meet the May 1 U.S.

troop withdrawal deadline that was negotiated by Trump. But these peace talks that they've been trying to push forward are still going nowhere. So they seem to think that by announcing the September 11th date, they can split the difference. They can delay the withdrawal, which at this point is probably logistically impossible, but not provoke the Taliban into resuming attacks on U.S. forces. Ben, I'm guessing that all these NATO forces will come out shortly after the U.S. forces do, because they rely on us for a lot of logistical support. There was a line in this post story that said that, you know, some U.S. counterterrorism assets will be positioned outside of Afghanistan to remain capable of striking extremist groups in the country.

I assume that's talking about some sort of drone base nearby. I don't know. So, Ben, I guess my reaction to this news is I am extremely worried about what happens after we withdraw, but that I think this is the right decision. Like, so, you know, I'm worried the Taliban could gain territory. I worry about the stability of the Afghan government. but I've also seen no evidence that a continued U.S. presence will help solve those problems. And I've seen some people argue that the U.S. being there actually makes everything worse.

Any thoughts from you on, you know, this policy decision or the symbolism of trying to, you know, tie this withdrawal deadline to the 20th anniversary of 9-11? Yeah. I mean, I think, first of all, people in, you know, particular progressives should understand that this is like a really big and bold decision by just. Joe Biden. I mean, yes, Trump set this deadline, but, you know, Trump said it like as he was walking out the door and, you know, did not remove all troops. And that's the huge step. The big step is to get to zero troops. So this is not just an extension of Trump. Like Biden had to be the one to take that decision. And I'm certain that the military was cautioning against it. I'm certain that people were warning probably correctly that there's all kinds of negative scenarios that could play out. There will clearly be criticism from, you know, parts of the Washington establishment.

So this is a pretty big move by Biden. And to me, it suggests that he's willing to go pretty far in challenging certain conventions to try to end these post-9-11 wars. So that just, I think that needs to be fully understood and appreciated, you know, wherever you come down on it, just that this was a big, big effing deal. I think, look, I think, and knowing they're thinking, talking to some of them over the periods of time leading up to this, I think that their basic judgment is, look, there's enormous risk leaving in the next few months. There's a risk of Taliban takeover of much of the country. There's a risk of humanitarian backsliding, obviously. But I think the tragic conclusion that they reached that I think is likely the right conclusion is those risks would still be there

six months from now, one year from now, two years from now, three years from now. They're frankly the same risks that I heard about when we had these debates at the end of the Obama administration. And I think the symbolism of 9-11 is them saying, you know, after 20 years of this, we have to recognize that there's no perfect end to this. There's no way that we can exit Afghanistan. without inviting a significant degree of risk. And again, I think that's a tough call to make.

But if you want to end these wars, you're going to be confronted with those types of decisions. And the last thing I'd say is the Afghans that worked with us, the Afghans who built civil society organizations or went back into government or women's rights groups, those are the people, right, that you worry about. And I think whatever we can do, obviously, we'll probably continue to pay, subsidize essentially, the Afghan security forces with training and arms and financing. But I think whatever diplomatic efforts we can put into trying to protect the gains in certain areas like women's rights is got to be top priority. And in a way, your diplomacy has to only get more intense as you're leaving. You'll never fill the gap of having troops here. But at the end of the day, the critics of this decision have to face the

question, what were 2,500 U.S. troops going to do anyway? I mean, how were they going to somehow tip the balance of Afghan politics in a way that we've been unable to tip the balance of Afghan politics with even more troops in the past? And I think for Biden, I'm sure what they're also thinking is like, hey, look, we're trying to pass a multi-trillion dollar bill to, you know, rebuild America. This message is, you know, we're winding down this war and we're, we're focusing on on obviously this massive domestic agenda they're pursuing. And, you know, you can see the salience of why they chose a 9-11 date for that. Yeah. You can also sort of say, look, bin Laden's gone. I mean, the threat of al-Qaeda and that part of the world is lessened. So, you know, they're

not saying mission accomplished. I don't think anyone will say that ever again in history, but certainly like 20 years into it, I think it's hard to figure out why exactly we're still there. I mean, related to, you know, the comments you just made about needing to help people in Afghanistan, especially those who have worked with us along the way, there's a related issue is refugees. And I saw, you know, so in February, Biden announced he was going to raise the annual cap on refugee admissions to the U.S. to 125,000 for the fiscal year that starts on October 1st. that's up from a cap of 15,000 at the end of the Trump administration. But I saw this article about how activists are trying to figure out why Biden hasn't yet

signed a presidential determination to make it official. Because without that official act, the old Trump policies are still in place. I guess it's been eight weeks since that announcement and still there's no determination getting signed. Do you have any sense of what might be going on here? Like, why announce a refugee increase, but not? sign the paperwork that kind of makes it happen. Yeah, I don't understand this one. And it's troubling because there have even been refugees who thought that they had kind of flights booked to the U.S.

turned away. So these are human beings caught up in this. And if this is the lowest year of refugee intake, which if the current course continues, Joe Biden will take in less refugees than any any president in recent memory. That's completely against the commitment that he made. I can only guess it, you know, it takes time for them to kind of staff up the government and get their people in place and maybe that connects to this. But I think they need to accelerate this. And I think on Afghanistan, look, I think that, you know, Afghans are probably frustrated, angry at the United States with good reason for the not just 20, but 40 years of our interventions in their politics. And I'm not suggesting that, that, you know, all the Afghans who are now in danger or have been, frankly, in danger a lot in the, recent years would choose to come to the United States. That said, I think the United States has a moral obligation to basically let in anybody that, you know, worked with us, that worked on behalf of the types of, you know, values that we were seeking to instill in Afghanistan. Look, don't get me wrong. I hope that people stay and that there's a pathway for those values

to be protected in Afghanistan. I also just think that as in Iraq and other places, like we do have an extra obligation here to do our part. So there's this global issue with refugees. And then I think they should be looking specifically at, you know, what special programs can be put in place if Afghans are in danger, if the security situation deteriorates. Yeah, agreed. The other area where you're starting to see a lot of frustration from progressives is Yemen. So, you know, the context is, you know, for the last six years, and we've talked about this several times, there's been this horrific war in Yemen. One side is led by the Saudis, and at times has been backed by the U.S.

The other side is a group called the Houthi rebels, which have, who have received support from Iran. The results are this ongoing fighting and humanitarian disaster for the people of Yemen. The latest estimate from the U.N. is that 400,000 Yemeni children under five could die of starvation this year unless there is an urgent intervention. So in February, President Biden said that U.S. would end all support for Saudi offensive operations in the war in Yemen. But now 41 progressive members of Congress are asking President Biden to clear.

verify what exactly that means, right? Like, they want to know what support has been cut off. And, you know, Ben, you and I have the same question when we talked about this for the first time. Many of those same members of Congress also want the Biden team to pressure Saudi Arabia to stop blockading a key Yemeni port because that's preventing ships from delivering fuel. And without fuel, without oil and gas, cars can't transport food, hospitals can't run their equipment, right? It's just like a horrible situation. There was a powerful op-ed in the Washington Post last week by a Yemeni American woman named Imam Sala, who's been on hunger strike since March 29th to protest the Saudi blockade and just generally raise awareness about the war. Ben, the Biden team hadn't responded to that letter

from these members of Congress yet. I think it had been two or three weeks. Numbers are frustrated. Do you have a sense of what's going on here? I mean, how much leverage do you think the White House has when it comes to trying to force the Saudis to end the, this blockade. And why not just, like, more clearly lay out, like, this is what's stopped when it comes to military support, and this is what's still ongoing? Yeah, I think they have a lot of leverage because, again, I think the Saudis cannot conduct a lot of basic military actions without some U.S. support. And the Saudis, obviously, are a huge purchaser of American arms. So I don't know why you couldn't just say, like, you're cut off unless

you stop this. You know, I mean, it's as simple as that. And I don't know why not to do that. Because as you point out, you know, there are people who are dying right now because of the lack of humanitarian access. There's, you know, famine risk constantly in Yemen. And so every day that goes on that, you know, some military objective of the Saudis with this blockade is clearly not being met. Do whatever you can to just put this to an end. Because even as there may be complexities and negotiating some political settlement in Yemen, the starting point should be humanitarian assistance getting into the country.

That's the kind of thing that everybody should be able to get on board with and agree with. And again, I mean, part of what I can only guess at is they're staffing up. I mean, I think people don't fully appreciate the extent to which very few Biden political appointees are in place. Now, that said, you have the State Department, the Defense Department, you can still govern effectively. But this too feels like they made a pretty big commitment and they need to catch up to it. Yeah.

And I would imagine that a lot of the pressure on Muhammad bin Salman is better presented to him behind the scenes through direct channels versus, you know, publicly airing it out in the press. I mean, I'm guessing, but he seems like kind of a dug-in guy. I wouldn't mind publicly airing it, though. I wouldn't mind it either. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's air some Saudi grievances while we're here, shall we? So this is my favorite story I read in the news this week. So apparently a documentary is going to air on French TV, like I think this week or next

week, called The Savior for Sale, that alleges that a painting called the Salvatore Mundi or Savior of the World by Leonardo da Vinci that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman purchased for $450 million in 2017, apparently it's a fake. I didn't realize there's fewer than 20 Da Vinci paintings in existence. and that when this one was auctioned, Christie's called it the greatest artistic rediscovery of the last 100 years, maybe not. But then some experts at the Louvre did an analysis on the painting,

and they determined that it was produced in Da Vinci's workshop and then maybe touched up by him, but not produced by Da Vinci himself. They think it was one of his sort of close assistants. MBS, Mohamed bin Salman, has reportedly been keeping the painting on his 440-foot megayat, as one does, because we know that seawater is good for priceless.

works of art. Apparently this documentary says that MBS try to pressure the Louvre into saying the painting was authentic so that he wouldn't be humiliated by the fact that he bought this fraud. The Louvre refused. This has created tensions between Saudi Arabia and France. So I'm not pro-art fraud, but, you know, this couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I don't know. Every now and then, the law fraud is not a bad thing. I mean, this would make a great movie or like TV series or something. I mean, There's so many things about this. Just the fact that someone would buy $450 million painting suggests that there's

something wrong with the global economy and inequality. Paging Elizabeth Warren, yeah. Exactly. Where's the wealth tax on MBS here? The kind of vanity of both buying that painting and putting it on a yacht and then trying to squash the Louvre telling people who actually painted it. But I think the only other thing I'd point to is that, you know, addition to everything else, MBS has tried to cultivate, you know, particularly domestically, but also to foreign audiences,

like a bit of a veneer of confidence and capability and competence. And, you know, this clearly undercuts that, you know, like buying a $450 million fake painting, like isn't exactly in line with the idea that you're the modernizer who's going to bring this reform that's going to, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom in Saudi Arabia. So, you know, you can see why this is kind of a risky thing for him. But to me, it's just highlights the absurdity of any system that facilitates a man buying a $450 million fake painting. You might as well buy like some NFT and like some video of LeBron dunking and, you know, declare that it's somehow authentic. To your point about this would make a great TV show, have you seen, there's two Netflix series that are sort of about art fraud or art

heist right now. One is called Made You Look. That's about someone making fraudulent art and like selling fake Rothcos and stuff into the market. And then there's another series that just came out called This Is A Robbery, which is about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, which is fantastic, because, you know, it took place in Boston in the 90s. The accents are unbelievable. The various, like, mob ties and speculation is great. It's just like a great, unsolved mystery. I highly recommend it. Boston accents mixed with art theft is right up your alley. Yeah, for me, like, right, Those are all my rush and zones. Okay, we'll talk to Boston East.

We'll talk about Northern Ireland. So for a little over a week... That's a great transition. That's the best transition we've had in weeks. Thank you. I guess Boston would be Ireland West, but you know, who's counting? So serious voice now. There's been nightly rioting and violence in Northern Ireland that has led to, I think,

dozens of arrests, injured dozens of police officers. And it's created concern that the 23-year-old Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of fighting in Northern Ireland could be, you know, unraveling a little bit. So I'll try to explain some of the reasons why, and we can see if we can figure this out. The first is Brexit. So the unionists, the mostly Protestant part of Northern Ireland's population that wants to remain part of Britain, they feel abandoned by Brexit. They feel, like, insecure about their place in the UK and angry about new border checkpoint.

So listeners need to remember that post-Brexit, Ireland remains part of the European Union, but Northern Ireland is part of the UK, which is no longer a part of the EU, right? So once Brexit happened, both sides had to figure out how to create some sort of semblance of a border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, when in fact, one doesn't exist. You can just like hop up one side of the road to the other and you're in the other country. So the approach they ended up taking has created supply disruptions, shortages of goods in Northern Ireland and, you know, things that you can understand why they would piss people off. The other piece of the puzzle here seems to be COVID.

So in June of last year, police in Northern Ireland allowed about 2,000 people to attend a funeral of a former top IRA official, the IRA for folks who don't know, is a paramilitary group that fought for full Irish independence from Britain. So attendees at this funeral included members of Sinn Féin, which is a political party that represents the Catholics, and one time was seen as the political wing of the IRA. So obviously a huge funeral in the middle of COVID broke the rules, but the police decided not to prosecute. anyone, which when that news came out last week, led to unionists feeling like, okay, there's one set of rules for the Catholics in Sinn Féin, and there's another set of rules for Protestant unionists. That seems to have been enough to disrupt this fragile peace agreement, and it led to, like, a bus getting hijacked, a journalist getting beaten up, Maltaugh cocktails getting thrown, like General Mayam. So we've got Boris Johnson has condemned the violence, so did leaders in

Northern Ireland. But since the violence has mostly been from Protestant communities, and there's concern about essentially retaliation from Catholic communities. So Ben, just a couple thoughts I had as I dug into this. One, the Brexit part of this is not only predictable but predicted. It's just so frustrating to see it play out. Two, more and more, I'm worried that COVID is going to have like unforeseen harmful geopolitical impacts in ways that we will never see coming and will have a that will be nearly as long as the financial crisis, and this could be an example. And then three, this is just like a random aside, but when you read about the troubles and you hear about them described, or do you hear about like Sunni-she attentions, it's always described

as sectarian in nature. But it really, when you dig into it, this is really about power. It's not about religion. And I think maybe calling it sectarian can sort of mislead us and could be besides a point. Anyway, that's the background. What do you make of what we've been watching here? And how confident are you that Boris Johnson is the man? to solve it. Well, look, I think a lot of this is rooted in Brexit, right? Because essentially, as you described, because they didn't put the hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland, they basically have a customs border between

Britain and Northern Ireland. And that's making a lot of people uncomfortable. And it's probably making the unionists feel pretty insecure, you know. And so then any additional event is on top of a, uh, uh, uh, that insecurity. And, you know, at the same time, and you'll hear this conversation with Afwa in the interview, we talk about the fact that the Brexit drive was overwhelmingly English, right? And so keep in mind, right, that even Britain is England, Scotland, Wales, and then

Northern Ireland makes the rest of the United Kingdom. And this British nationalism that we've seen is really largely like an English nationalism. Yeah. And so if you're Northern Ireland, you're seeing less and less of yourself, you know, in the politics of the country, particularly post-Brexit, even if you're, you know, a Protestant and a unionist, you're, again, still feeling a little uncertain. So I hope that what the baseline can be is can a full court press be brought to bear by community leaders and by partners like the United States. or involved in the Good Friday Agreements and hopefully by Boris Johnson's government and other political parties and movements in the UK to just not go back to violence here. Like there are some hard issues that have to be worked out around border and the relationship between Ireland and Northern Ireland in a post-Brexit world. But you really hate to see it, you know, devolve in any way,

shape, or form to violence. Because once there starts to be that kind of reciprocal violence, it's hard to get that back under control. And so, you know, I just hope people kind of take a step back from the brink here. But at the same time, like, there's a long-term question that still has to be answered in Northern Ireland about the future politics of the country. But let's do it peacefully. Yeah, man. And also, you know, Northern Ireland is not a huge population. But, you know, we're talking about, like, I think 3,000, maybe 3,600 people were killed in this violence.

I mean, it was really pretty horrific. But yeah, to your broader point, I mean, God, leaders like Boris Johnson or BB Netanyahu who just like punt hard problems down the road for short-term, you know, political fixes, I mean, they just drive me crazy. Here we are. And it shows you that there's always secondary effects to this kind of nationalism. You know, like if your politics is dependent upon a kind of exclusionary form of nationalism, like you, I'm sure Boris Johnson and the Brexit people didn't think that this was part what they were doing, but it was part of what they were doing because they kind of blew up this

delicate, you know, but successful peace effort that was, you know, significantly helped by the fact that Britain was in the EU. So it's yet another reason to bear in mind that nationalism may make for short-term political gain, but in the medium and long-term, it tends to cause a lot more harm than good. Yeah, very well said. Can we talk about football for a second? the American brand or the American brands okay good I mean it's a world though vibe on this podcast you're right you're right yeah American football now so I know that no one has any sympathy for for New England Patriots fans especially a jet fan like yourself yes but it's been a rough week slash a couple years for us Ben because on Monday Julian Edelman star wide receiver announced his retirement before that we had to watch

Tom Brady and gronk win a Super Bowl in Tampa yeah all places So, you know, even though Tom abandoned me and had that weird maga dalliance, which I did not love, I still have some love for the guy, right? Like, I grew up with him. I rooted for him for decades. But that was why, that residual love is why last week I was confused and upset when I looked at my Instagram. And I saw that Brady had posted this bizarre pro-cutter, the country in the Middle East, propaganda

video on his account. And so I tried to figure out why. This appears to be Brady's second trip to Cutter. each trip has included some work for a nonprofit called Best Buddies, which helps people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Now, that is unequivocally, without question, a great cause and good for Tom for supporting the organization. I'm sure his visit probably came with, you know, Cutter cutting a big old check for Best Buddies, right? But it was also a family vacation that they thoroughly documented on social media in ways that promoted Cutter's image. And I would be willing to bet Ben,

that from private jet to hotel to food, it was all expenses paid. I'm guessing here, but I think it's an educated guess. Now, the reason Cutter would want someone like Tom Brady or Giselle to visit is to burnish their image ahead of the 2022 World Cup and to deflect from the fact that Cutter's workforce is mostly foreign and that those workers are often subjected to slave labor-like conditions and that many workers have already died building structures for this World Cup in 2022. This also reminded me when Saudi Arabia paid a bunch of Instagram influencers to come visit them and gave them lavish vacations in the wake of Jamal Khashoggi's murder. But I mean, I guess, you know, the point for Tom and Giselle is

don't let rich autocrats use you. And at a minimum, like, I don't know, Ben, maybe educate yourself a bit before posting like literal propaganda videos on the Instagram account. I don't know. The Patriots are going to suck this season. So I don't even know why I brought this up. I don't know. Well, as someone has been resentful of Tom Brady for a long time, like, it, you know, this was a little less upsetting to me. But I have some Katari friends, like, but this is like a country with like a few hundred thousand citizens and like two million expat workers or something. Like, of all the places you would go in the world to do your charitable work, like, I don't know, the cutter would be like at the top of my list. And,

and yeah, like, you can't help but look at that and just know that there was some price tag behind it. You know, Tom Brady, I mean, again, people, they're wonderful things I'm sure to do in Qatar, but I mean, the guy could go anywhere. You know, this guy. They're so rich. I think Giselle's more rich than he is, probably. Yeah. And so the idea that there wasn't some financial component to this trip, you know, I'm sorry, I can't imagine that that's the choice he made. And it's just kind of gross, right? Because it, like, there's no problem going. But like, there's a subtle politics to the message, right, like in reading it, like countries that are dealing with, like, human rights challenges, like the treatment of these foreign workers who are, like, building

stadiums at slave labor at times. Like, there's a subtlety to, like, having a huge influencer come and just talk about how wonderful everything is. And I've seen this in other countries. I've seen, like, you know, other influencers, musicians, athletes do this. Like, this is, this is, it. It's a pretty interesting industry, you know, because you get paid a lot of money. Whether it's like, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the performers, you know, like singing at Gaddafi's parties, right? I used to read about that. Or whether it's like soccer players partying in Dubai and posting a lot of Instagram about it. I mean. Or a point you've made or like four star US generals paid to give a speech in some golf country. Well, so this is a thing, right? So this, like, on the one hand, it's like,

it's a free speech world in the sense of like if someone can get paid to go do something like that, like they can do that. But I think people don't realize how relentless the machinery is, particularly in the Gulf of essentially rewarding people who say nice things about you. And that has a political purpose behind it. It's not to promote tourism. It's to distort your human rights record and to get negative attention off of other things that are happening in your country. And that to me is where it obviously becomes problematic and more problematic when you're also influencing U.S. foreign policy. But Tom Brady's not doing that. Thank God. Yeah. And it's what I'm sure he would say what, you know, they were nice to me. I'm trying to

further cultural ties. I get it. But I'd say like they probably made a bunch of charitable donations. They were probably nice people to him and his family. And why is it not their right to essentially have a PR campaign? Because like you could argue that America does its own versions of this too. There's just something kind of gross about this influencer space, particularly when, you know, it seems like the purpose is to, like, don't pay attention to the human rights concerns over here. Look at this beautiful Instagram. Yeah, just, you know, pay your own way and then maybe post about the cool camel ride, but also post about concerns about the labor and environmental standards for workers building

this, you know, 2022 World Cup facility. Yeah. It seems like a simple answer here, especially when you're a hundred millionaire. Well, yeah, and which athletes, not Tom Brady, but like, do in America, too, here. We're not suggesting, like, you only single out, like, Gulf monarchies for criticism, although there's plenty to criticize. But, like, American athletes use their platform to spotlight injustice in this country. Oh, yeah.

Like, they should, there's no reason they shouldn't do that abroad, too. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, Ben, so I combined two, you know, major issues that have been on the back burner, but are starting to simmer a bit. These could have been our lead stories, but, you know, there's just so much going on. So the first is that there's this major buildup of Russian forces on the border of Ukraine. Ukrainian officials say Russia has 41,000 troops at its border with eastern Ukraine and 42,000 more in Crimea, the Ukrainian territory that Russia invaded in 2014.

It's a major buildup. It's a major topic at meetings happening, I think, today between the U.S. and NATO officials in Brussels. Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, in the head of NATO, called Russia's actions provocative. and they express support for Ukraine, but it's not entirely clear what that means. CNN reported that the U.S. is considering or has already sent war ships into the Black Sea to show support for Ukraine and send a message to Russia earlier this morning. The Russians warned the U.S. to essentially butt out, don't send ships. So not great.

The second big issue is China and Taiwan. Again, Tony Blinken over the weekend was on Meet the Press. Chuck Todd asked him if the U.S. was prepared to defend Taiwan militarily from China because Tony is so new at this, he's going to take a hypothetical question and declare war on the Chinese. So Tony expressed concern about these increasingly aggressive actions by China towards Taiwan. He reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to make sure that Taiwan can defend itself and try to warn China against using force. In response, on Monday, China sent 25 military aircraft into Taiwanese airspace. A lot of people viewed that as, you know, given the middle finger to the U.S. and the international community,

I think, you know, the truth is that China has been, I think, doing a lot of these kind of air incursions on a daily basis for the past several weeks. So, Ben, you know, I lump these together again because, you know, getting drawn into a military conflict with Russia or China is really the worst case scenario. I'm curious what you make of, you know, both of these escalations, if there's one that worries you most. I mean, I guess you could probably argue that, you know, Russia and Ukraine never really stopped fighting after 2014, but, you know, still a big buildup. China's behavior is not new, right, per se, but it's getting worse. But like, how do you rank these when you think about, okay, you're in Biden's situation room, like these are two problems that are presented to you, which one is getting attention from you?

I mean, look, I think that the Russia thing worries me a ton because, you know, the one thing we've learned the last decade, right, is don't assume Vladimir Putin won't do the worst thing that you think he might not do, right? I mean, he annexed Crimea, invaded a part of eastern Ukraine. And, yeah, I mean, I can give you a lot of reasons why I think it'd be crazy for him to invade Ukraine with this mass force. But he may do it because he's Putin and because he thinks he can get away with it, because he thinks he would win that war. And he'd, you know, dominate Ukraine and he'd further embarrass the West. And, you know, whatever his reasons are, like they're in line.

with the direction he's been going. I think that Taiwan thing, it feels like the Chinese obviously are absolutely committed to bringing Taiwan back into the fold, as it were, from their perspective. And Xi Jinping is like the kind of leader that wants to get that done, you know?

Yeah. You know, that's the, I've tried to think through this, like, why would they do this? The time seems to be on their side. But Xi Jinping just kind of seems like the kind of guy who, for history, once like the big feather in his cap that he did this. Now, the flip side of that is Xi Jinping probably envisions being in power for like 20 more years.

That's true. So I see this, I don't see the Taiwan one as urgent, but I see it as a real issue that we're going to be spending a lot of time by talking about in the coming years. I do think, Tommy, just stepping back when I saw this on the outline, you know, Russia massed on the border of Ukraine, saber-rattling and the Taiwan's Straits. The Iran issue with Israel hitting Natanz and the Iranians potentially ratching up the nuclear program and maybe the risk of an Israeli-Iranian conflict that we get drawn into. Those are three like real wars. I mean, like real conventional, you know, not counterinsurgencies, you know, not counterterrorism missions. And this bears watching. It makes you uncomfortable to see that many, you know, kind of fault lines where an earthquake could go off. And it does feel a little bit,

I usually don't subscribe to the, like, they're testing the new president. It does feel a little bit, though, like, you know, Trump was such a shit show. The U.S. was perceived in decline. Biden comes in and he says, like, we're back, we're back, we're back. It does feel a bit like the Russians and the Chinese, the Iranians and the Israelis as our friends. I want to be very clear as I separate them in terms of the tight, they're not an adversary, but they're testing in their own way. Or, you know, that's part of what's happening here. And so how Biden manages this, hopefully obviously trying to avoid conflict, but also trying to avoid things like Russia invading Ukraine, is going to be a huge.

Again, I hate to use a word test because in the political press, it makes it seem like the U.S. has all the power, but it's going to be something that they're going to have to spend a lot of time thinking about and working on. And it's not easy. I don't envy them that task. No, I don't envy them either. Did you see, I think it was BuzzFeed. I also had an interesting piece about how far-right extremists in the U.S. are viewing the conflict in Ukraine as, like, essentially, a war zone where they can gain combat experience and, you know, fight with a bunch of neo-Nazi fascists and then bring that training back home to the U.S.

So, you know, I'm glad that the American Taliban has a war zone to go to where they can, you know, figure some things out and come back here. That's great for all of us. Yeah, Ukraine has become this kind of weird laboratory of international everything, you know, right-wing, you know, neo-Nazis and oligarchs and spies and Rudy Giuliani. You know, if I was Ukrainian, I'd just be like, can you all just get the fuck out of our country? You know, like just get the hell out of here, man. Like, just trying to be Ukrainian, you know? Yeah, it's just a beautiful place. I just want to hang out in Kiev and in Mbini.

That's too bad. Sorry, guys. Sorry, Ukraine. Okay, a couple more things. Let's talk about Facebook for a minute. So there was a great investigation by the Guardian. And they found that Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to post misinformation or harass political opponents, even after that behavior was identified internally by Facebook. So basically, this report found that Facebook has gotten better about taking action when there's a likelihood of major media attention around some inauthentic activity. But it's happy to let things go. in a small or non-Western country. So the Guardian's primary source was a former Facebook employee named Sophie Jang, who said that politicians at places like Honduras, Azerbaijan, the Philippines, Tunisia, many other countries are able to exploit a loophole that allows them to create fake pages and create fake engagement on posts that boost the government or they can attack their rivals. And look, you know, I think listeners to this show have probably heard us be pretty hard on Facebook at times,

you know, express our frustration with the very, harms that have been caused by the platform. But even when I'm ranting about them, I usually feel like, okay, I have some empathy for how difficult some of these challenges are, right, like with a couple billion users. This doesn't feel like one of those cases because it seems like the company is making the choice not to ruffle feathers in, say, Albania or El Salvador or Poland, because it's easier not to piss off the government without really pausing to think, okay, how does this broken political discourse harm the people living in those countries? And, you know, you look at some of those countries and they have really gotten pulled way to the far right. They're entering sort of

fascist zone. And it really is pretty scary and sucks. So wanted to highlight that one. Yeah, I think what the reason it's worth highlighting and coming back to this is that it suggests that the whole Facebook ethos and model is just to in every way, shape, or form avoid pissing off like governments and powerful people, which is a complete recipe for your platform. being totally manipulated by governments and powerful people for bad ends. And very real human beings suffer the consequence. They suffer violence. They suffer corruption.

This is real stuff. I mean, I remember when I was reporting on a piece that I wrote on Burma, you know, I talked to a bunch of activists there, including people who are in the, you know, kind of tech sector there. And, you know, I've just talked about this before, but they said that Facebook had two employees in Singapore responsible for Burma, and they only traveled there like a couple times here. But the only reason they traveled there was to check in with the government just to make sure that the government wasn't upset with them. It wasn't like they were traveling there to check in with civil society

and like, or they drenning up hate campaigns. Like their whole model is kind of keeping governments happy, powerful interest happy. And there's this kind of self-censorship of doing the right thing. And again, if they were just refused to do the right thing, they have to be regulated. You know, like, that's when industries get regulated. If they are a threat to public health and safety in this country and around the world, you know, they should have the opportunity to take corrective action themselves. But this story points that even when they have mechanisms that they could use,

they choose not to use them, you know? And that's why I think the conversation about regulation needs to continue here. Got to happen. Got to happen. Let's turn to Uganda before we get some lighter items. So in late February, I interviewed a guy. named Bobby Wine for the show. Bobby Wine's a musician turned opposition leader turned presidential candidate. We talked about how Uganda's current president, President Musevini, has like rigged the last

several elections. He's cracked down on dissent. Unfortunately, things have gotten even worse since that conversation. Bobby Wine is now essentially under house arrest. He says that over 600 of his supporters have been seized off the streets, arrested, in some cases tortured, some cases murdered. Many of these individuals had been like just collecting evidence of vote rigging in the last election, or they were picked up for the crime of wearing a red hat that has been popular among Bobby Wine supporters. So President Museveni, he's really like a military dictator. He gave a speech recently where he acknowledged arresting 242 people and he acknowledged killing a few, but he said they were all terrorists.

And it's like typical autocratic bullshit. But what really depressed me in reading about this, Ben, was there was some military spokesman who said, yeah, this is the same kind of policing that the U.S. and the UK have used, which, you know, our war on terror comes back to bite us over and over again. Folks in the U.S., you know, we should care about this because, one, we care about human rights globally because the U.S. provides Uganda without a billion dollars per year of assistance, and there's no doubt that that money is helping fund this crackdown. So I guess I would just say to listeners, like read up on this, post about it on social media,

like all your members of Congress, asked them to speak up because, you know, Bobby was very explicit in our conversation, that press attention, especially international press attention, helps him stay safe. So we're going to stay on this issue. Absolutely. And just bears repeating, like, it's easy to look at Lukashenko in Belarus and be like, oh, Putin-back dictator, or it's easy to look at any number of the autocrats at the Chinese support, you know, Hunsen and Cambodia. Well, look at Egypt. Look at Uganda. These are like among the very largest recipients of American assistance. And I just think that has to change. But for now, I think the best thing we can do is keep attention on this. Yeah. You have been very consistent on the need to elevate human rights,

and I think every day it is proven to be more true. So a couple later things before we get to your interview, Ben. First of all, the worst Secretary of State in history, Mike Pompeo, has become a paid Fox News contributor. Big news. What a shock. He's going to join Kaylee McAnney, Larry Cudlow, and Lara Trump in the stable of paid Trump administration hacks. What interesting twist on this, Ben? So failed Secretary Mike was supposed to speak at that GOP fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend where Trump got the little silver dish. But he canceled at the last minute. I saw some speculation in Huffington Post about whether Pompeo suddenly realized this created an

ethics violation with Fox. I don't know. My guess is he doesn't care. No. No. No. But are you excited to see more of Mike on Fox? I mean, like, if I ever achieved the August heights of Secretary of State, I would hope

that I'd have something more to. show forth than Mike Pompeo, and I'd hope I'd have something else to do other than be a paid contributor to Fox. I say that as a contributor to MSNBC. I know, but I was not the Secretary of State. I was not contemplating a run for the presidency of the United States. I mean, it just shows you that these people have nowhere to go. I mean, he literally has, clearly has ambitions to be president of the United States of America. Yeah. And it's just, it's so, so telling that, like, the thing you do in Republican politics is go on like daytime Fox and like attack, you know, Joe Biden's Iran policy. I mean, it's pathetic. He's a troll. He's a troll. The other fun thing we

saw was, you know, we hear it at Ponce de the World. We are suckers for a good old fashioned crazy propaganda video. And the president of Turkmenistan really delivered for us this week. Why don't we roll that clip? So the president decided to go for a bike ride. For some reason, he was greeted by hundreds of people and matching track uniforms who are forced to either stand and clap for him in unison or sing songs for him. And then I guess just trail him on his ride. As exciting as that was, you know, I wouldn't recommend it to visit anytime soon. But I don't know, where does that rank for you when, you know, when you think about Turkmenistan propaganda versus North Korea? They have a little work to do still. Well, I mean, this is a country where the former dictator renamed the months of

the year. I think he named one after his mother. So I, I, kind of got fascinated by this. And then my wife, Ann, went to Turkmenistan and said it was the strangest, I mean, beautiful place, very nice people. We should always be clear to separate the people from the absurdists we're talking about. But she said it was fucking weird. I mean, they built a giant sophytel and nobody was in it. But the government basically paid to have a Sophie tell so that like if five people needed rooms, they wanted to have a luxury hotel, you know, is that kind of thing. I mean, it was just kind of weird, gaudy stuff. But, yeah, that's, you know, keep an eye on Turkmenistan if you indulge in, you know,

propaganda absurdities, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Finally, some fun news for Japan. So on Sunday, a guy named Hideki Matsuyama became the first Japanese man to win a major golf tournament when he won the 85th Masters tournament. Matsuyama is a 29-year-old guy. he's now ranked 14th in the world. This is a huge deal for Japan where golf is very popular.

And success in sports is why you're like celebrated by the culture. So I've been reading a bunch of profiles of Matsuyama. He sounds like an interesting person, but he's very shy. A recent profile of him noted that he seems to have no hobbies or interest in acquiring them, which was funny to me. And then in 2017, he surprised the press by announcing that he and his wife had had a kid when most of the reporters in the room didn't even know he was married. I guess Shinso Abe made Matsuyama play golf with Abe and Trump when Trump visited Japan in 2017.

I know, I know. I hope the impending media attention isn't too overwhelming for him because the Japanese press is super intense. But I'm very happy for the Japanese people. I think it's awesome. I love the Japanese people so much. And I remember fondly, like, you know, as a Met fan, we signed Hideo Nomo. remember the pitcher, who had first success for the Dodgers. And man, like, I went to games.

And, like, the Japanese-American community, like, came out of the woodwork. And then there were, like, the press coverage of NOMO's games in Japan. You would look up at the press box. And there'd be all this, like, Japanese press up there, like, furiously covering some, like, May day game that the Mets are in. And they're, like, the worst team probably in the NL East. They opened a bureau in Seattle when Ichero was there. The entire bureau. I love it.

I have so much respect for it. Like one of their guys or women now, Naomi Osaka is obviously dominating. Yeah, James Issaq is awesome. I love how they just get behind it. Like, it's cool to watch. Like sports nationalism is the best nationalism. It's very fun. Yes, let's all be, yeah.

Let's channel it there, right? Furious sports nationalists. God, yeah, I'm excited about the Olympics. I know that they're, whatever. The ones in Japan are pretty cool. And there's questions about whether Matsuyama might actually be like the guy who lights the torch. he's like a huge hero now.

So that's very, very cool. Last thing before we go to the interview, I have a quick recommendation for the WorldO's. I was watching a show on HBO Max the other day called Exterminate All the Brutes. It's by a director named Raul Peck. And what it seems to be, I'm only one episode in, is kind of like a retelling of, you know, like fairly recent, like five, six hundred years history that isn't just told

through the perspective of the winners, through the colonizers, through the people who end up in charge and is trying to sort of understand what it was like to be a Native American in the U.S. or an innocent person living in the Congo when the Belgian showed up. It twists and turns and it's this winding, fascinating history

that was very cool. I'll check it out. That sounds good to me. It's actually not a bad segue into the interview too, given how we talk about history and history of empire. So once again, your transition game, is good today. You know, I'm working on it. So when we come back, we'll have Ben's interview with

Afwa Hirsch, so stick around for that. I'm really pleased to be joined by Afwa Hirsch, who is a journalist, a columnist for The Guardian, and a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, where we will be welcoming her. And she's also the author of British, which is the best use of parentheses in a book title. But people should check this out. It's British on race, identity, and belonging. Afwa, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me. So I want to begin with this report that came out recently. We talked a little bit about it on this podcast, but basically Boris Johnson's government released a Sewell report on racism in the UK that basically determined that the UK is not structurally racist and in fact can be a model for other countries.

So obviously this has drawn a lot of criticism, but the Boris Johnson government and the authors of the report have really. you know, kind of double down in its defense. Just to start here, can you talk a little bit about, you know, just given that we have a large American audience, too, like, what, what is this report? And how could it, how could, how could something that is so kind of obviously wrong have such like a high level imprimatur, you know? So this government, which is really well known for its hostility to anti-racism, and I know Ben, you will have had some personal experience of this because the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson,

was formerly the Foreign Secretary and Barack Obama was just one of many victims of his casual racism when he said that he was anti-the British Empire because he was Kenyan. And it's that kind of normalising of the idea that you can other people of colour, that you make their nationality, whether they're American or British conditional on their good behaviour, on them agreeing with your terms as a government that really perpetrates very problematic ideas. So that's the history. Boris Johnson made, talked about piccaninnies with watermelon smiles. As foreign secretary, whose job was to conduct diplomacy with African countries, it was really extreme. So now he's the prime minister and he's become prime minister at a time when among all the other kind of existential

events we've been facing as a nation in Britain with Brexit and coronavirus, there's also been obviously this shift in the mood around understanding racism, a sense of urgency or needing to tackle racism. And that created a real problem for the British government because they have a long history of not wanting to tackle or even acknowledge it exists. So they conveniently put together a committee of people who have an equally long track record of denying the existence of racism and gave them a mandate to investigate whether structural racism exists. And hey presto, their report delivered several months later says, don't worry. we have the solution to the problem of racism.

It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. Therefore, we don't have to fix it. And it would be ludicrous if it wasn't so serious. And, you know, the commissioners they appointed is actually a really interesting story because they then had to find people who appear to be members of these communities to give it the appearance of credibility to lead this commission. So they went around looking for black and Asian people who were all.

known for denying the existence of racism. One of the commissioners, Tony Sewell, was a journalist at the Voice newspaper, which is Britain's oldest black newspaper, which is where I started my career in journalism as a teenager. So I've known him since I was 14 years old, and that's quite a long time ago. I know you couldn't be able to tell then, several decades ago. And he has had a reputation, I would almost say, a notoriety for being the kind of token-backed person who internalizes racist tropes for all of that time. So the idea that he was led to chair this committee, that other people who either have a track record of denying the existence of racism or just have no background in understanding racism, you know, a space scientist, people who may be very

respected in their fields, but are known for looking at outer space for reason. It's quite different from having an authoritative grasp on what can be quite complex ideas about structural and systematic racism on earth. Yeah. So that's the report that we've got. It says that structural racism doesn't exist. It includes treasures such as the paragraph described the upside of slavery, which concludes that, you know, even though there were some negative aspects of the slavery, Britain perpetrated against several million Africans, the good thing was that those who were trafficked to the Caribbean became more British and that really was a benefit. So it has no credibility. And one by one academics associated with their expert. who were alleged to have contributed to it have distanced themselves from it. And I do think it's going to backfire on the government because it really is so lacking legitimacy.

But at the same time, I don't think we can be dismissive of it because it's a very cynical attempt to really hijack the question of diversity, of progress towards racial equality. And the Conservative Party positioning themselves as the party that says there's a binary. Either you accept racism exists, and that means you have a victim mentality,

and you're not interested in progress, or you believe in your capacity to achieve progress and change, and the condition of that is that you deny that structural racism exists. There is no middle ground. It's one or the other. And here we are presenting you

with an opportunity to deny racism, but see yourself having potential to succeed in Britain, become more British. And I think it's an attempt to say to people who are sick of talking about racism, you know, all black, rich people, people, we're sick of it. I'm only ever called by the BBC when they want a debate about whether

racism exists anymore. And the idea that I would spend my productive hours in quotes debate with a racist trying to persuade them to recognize my humanity is exactly the frustration I feel that even being asked to do that, I think, is where a lot of black rich people are. So of course, it's a nice idea that we could just say racism is done and this is a meritocracy now. But it's ludicrous. And you don't solve a problem by pretending it doesn't exist. And I think that there is enough of a critical mass of the electorate that know that now, that this will not work. And that is my hope. I mean, when I look at that and then I look at the recent efforts around, you know, the anti-protest laws and even the way that the debate over things like statues played out, it feels like the

Boris Johnson government, though, is more than happy politically to divide. and kind of provoke, you know, there's almost provocation in the extreme nonsense of this report. Obviously, the restrictions on protests cut at like a core principle of democracy. It feels like the government is, you know, not unlike the Republican Party here in the United States, finding that this is the political ground they do want to fight on. Is that a fair impression? It is a fair impression. I think there's also been quite a calculated strategy in which political leaders, and actually of several parties, have concluded that the electorate has a number

of racist ideas and that you can only become electorally successful by either appealing directly to those ideas or avoiding countering them. And, you know, one of my biggest disappointments, to be very honest with you, is that the main opposition party, the Labour Party, which has many MPs with an incredible track record of standing up for these principles of equality, the right to protest, is being led by somebody who hasn't had the courage of his convictions to take a firm stance.

And I think I'm talking of Kirstama, who's the Labour leader, who I know personally, because I used to be a barrister at his chambers and work closely with him, and he's incredibly committed to human rights and has had a remarkable career of championing fundamental rights and protections. but I think that there is this, I believe, mistaken perception that in order to capture the mainstream vote,

you can't appear to be taking a stand for these rights. And that really concerns me because, you know, as a progressive voter, as a black woman who is completely committed to equality and anti-racism, I feel very politically homeless at the moment. And I think many British people share this sentiment right now. And it seems as, you know, as current events remind us on a more, more and more regular basis, how pervasive these problems are, it seems that we have less

leadership to look to to offer us a way through them. And that is just a very disheartening experience right now. And, you know, it feels a lot like what you've been going through in the US. But it's difficult to see a way out for us. And that's because some of these are really long-term structural questions, you know, leaving the EU, which I think many of us, it's not so much that we're so passionately committed to being European. or even being part of the European Union. It's the terms on which we left, the rhetoric surrounding our decision to leave,

this incredibly nativist, far-right ideology, that nothing good can come of it. And it's also the long-term, I believe, structural decline of a nation whose whole sense of self-confidence and importance in the world is based on having had an empire, which it no longer has.

Unless Britain finds an alternative to its core identity that's not based on colonial exploitation, this long-term sense of decline will continue to corrupt and toxify our politics. And that is my real concern. I haven't seen anyone with the courage to really challenge that and move it in a fundamentally new direction. Well, this is something I really wanted to talk to you about. And I'll preface it by saying, I have a whole book coming out about the problems with American identity to some extent.

So I know I'm in a glass house. But when I look at Britain, I do wonder, you know, so this. question of national identity post-Brexit in the sense that you had an empire and then you had this kind of heroic struggle in World War II. And then you had this kind of Cold War identity that we all kind of shared, right? We were on one side of the Cold War. But Britain now feels like a country that, you know, and Americans forget, it's, you know, it's not just England. You know, it's England, Wales, Scotland, you know, Northern Ireland. You have a monarchy, which is we'll get to in a minute here, that is clearly not exactly got its finger on the pulse of the times.

You've just left the European Union kind of removing yourself from that identity. And so these debates that you've been provoking so wonderfully in recent years feel really important, both in terms of the justice and equity that you're raising, but how would you define, what does it mean to be British? You know, as an American, I'd probably talk about our founding documents and our democracy, which we haven't lived up to. But what would you describe what a British identity is? And how would you define the kind of contest that is happening around it these days? Yeah, it's always so interesting to compare Britain to the U.S. in that respect.

And we don't have a written constitution. We do have a constitution. That's something that's often misunderstood. But it's not written, and especially not written in a single document. It's a number of documents, you know, the Act of Union with Scotland, the Human Rights Act, the Magna Carta, which dates back to the medieval period. So it's this kind of a hodgepodge of documents and a lot of it is unwritten, these conventions, the convention surrounding the role of the monarchy, a lot of very arcane norms and rituals that are just remembered and orally passed down. So it's much harder for ordinary people to grasp and understand. But I don't think that's the real problem with Britishness. It's interesting actually that, Through my research, I found that actually the idea of Britishness is quite an imperial construct, because people who are white British often don't identify as British. They identify more with their nation.

So they're English. They're Welsh. They're Northern Irish. And if they're Northern Irish, there's a further breakdown as to whether they are Protestant or Catholic or they're Scottish. And these are all very distinct identities. And actually, the people who were taught to feel British were. people in the empire because that was the only place that Britishness actually meant something. So, you know, my mother who was born in Ghana, which used to be the Gold Coast, a British colony,

her first passport described her as a British protected person. So ironically, the real British people, I think, many of them are these imperial citizens who came to the motherland, as they were told it was, with this idea of Britishness. And certainly during the Brexit referendum and the campaigning around leaving the European Union. I heard a lot of older, especially white boaters saying, I'm not British, I'm English, you know, and anyone can be British. Any brown person can come here and get a British passport. But we're the English. We're a tribe. It's almost like these are tribal identities associated with this imagined idea of the indigenous white, which is also a fallacy because there were Africans in England before there were English people in England.

The English are actually quite a recent immigrant group of Germanic origin, but that doesn't tend to go down very well with today's white population. So I think that there are some real holes in the content of what Britishness means. And I don't think that's necessarily a problem. We could be having a moment of renewal and really asking ourselves, what does it mean to be British? What is included in the content of this identity? What future do we imagine? But instead, I think we're defining it through exclusion, you know, through separation from Europe, through the alienation of people who are regarded as immigrants. And this is a real difference from America, I think, because America has a sense of itself as an immigrant nation, a nation of immigrants,

even though Britain is also a nation of immigrants, there's this created idea of indigeneity, which is also quite recent, created during the Victorian era to justify the empire. But people really believe it, and there's the sense of us and them, we're the indigenous, and you are recent immigrants, and you will never be truly of this island. And that is certainly something as a black British person growing up in this country all my life. My Britishness has often been treated as conditional. If I say things people don't like, they say, why don't you go back to where you come from? You know, and that's, it's actually interesting for me because that's something that's been said to me more times that I could count, you know, weekly on TV and life dates.

Go back to the part of England that you're from. Yeah, well, I'm always like, you can buy my train fare, yeah, back to Wimbledon, which is where I'm from. But it was only in the last year that all of these encounters with people like Pierce Morgan and other proponents of that view got recirculated on social media with them telling me to go back to where I came from. And suddenly there were petitions calling for them to be sacked from their jobs. And so for me, that really revealed a shift, the thing that was normal that people said all the time to a black or brown British person.

Now they still say it, but there is this groundswell of disconnect. intent that that is not an acceptable thing to say. But I think, you know, as long as we don't come up with an idea of Britishness that allows British people to feel included, it's not going to be sustainable. How can we compete with the great nations of the world, for whom diversity is at the core of their competitive advantage if we exclude and alienate all of the people who came to Britain because they believed in Britain, you know, they were conditioned in the era of empire to look up to Britain. So no matter how problematic that ideology is, the reality is, the reality is, the reality is, the reality as it exists. Many of us, and I include myself, had parents who were incredibly patriotic towards

Britain, were educated to look up to British culture. And it was a huge shock to them to come to Britain and realise that British people were hostile to them and actually had complete ignorance about them. And because we are second and third generation descendants of them, we are still regarded with the same suspicion and hostility, which no matter whether you're born in Britain, no matter how many generations you are, you're still asked where you're from. And if you say something that people don't want to hear. They tell you to go back there. And I wonder, you know, we all saw the, you know, Prince Philip's story play out this week. And, you know, I know the BBC canceled all of their programming. And, and I was just kind of wondering, knowing you and

having a lot of friends, you know, who are people of color in Britain. What is it like, you know, you have someone like Prince Philip who, on the one hand, is, you know, part of this institution that is in everybody's life and is something that everybody shares in common who is British. And there's something wonderful about that in a way, even though it's deeply strange, too. But at the same time, he's a symbol of the empire and of, you know, putting aside even his own person, like that's tied to histories of subjugation. And then you add on, you know, this is not a guy that was on the anti-racism train What is it like to participate in that kind of national mourning of a figure, you know,

who is your Duke of, you know, Edinburgh, but it also, you know, comes with a lot of baggage. I mean, this for me, is the real missed opportunity for the royal family because all my life, and it's true, there's this cognitive dissonance. You grow up with these people. They're part of your identity as a British person. They're omnipresent. You know, it's difficult to communicate if you don't live here. and day out, how much a part of daily life the royals are. They constantly dominate the media.

And you feel a connection to that because it's what you're used to. But because they have always represented the idea of white supremacy in a very visceral way, you know, throughout my life, they weren't seen to be socializing with, marrying, having children with anyone who was not white. They may have had black servants, but they weren't socializing or mixing with people who looked like me, who had names like me. And I think many white British people had this nostalgic relationship with them, a kind of wishing we could go back to the days

when everyone in Britain looked like them or had their heritage, never mind that they're a very diverse group of Europeans in their ancestry, with actually African heritage in there as well. But I think that when Megan Markle, when it was clear that she was going to marry into that family, it seemed like an opportunity for the royal family to actually be less alienating to black British people,

to say that you can see us as a symbol of Britishness that does not exclude you, that isn't mutually exclusive with your idea of Britishness. I'm not sure that would have worked personally for me, but I think it was an opportunity for the institution to show that they embody the ideals, they claim to rule over. Britain claims to value diversity, meritocracy. social mobility, all these things. And that was an opportunity that was so profoundly missed.

And actually, instead of starting to embody those ideals, I think the royal family proved to many people that they really are not ready to change and represent progress. So, you know, when it comes to the death of someone like Prince Philip, I think there is this real mixed emotion that, you know, somebody has died and old man has died. He's a fascinating historical actor. I mean, you know, he's the personification of the European heritage of his family.

His DNA was used to identify the remains of the Romanovs who were murdered by the Bolsheviks. His life is a reflection of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. His marriage is a legacy of victorious project of unifying European royals. It's so interesting. But this idea of forced mourning that I should feel some personal loss because these people represent my identity is something that I really have to push back against. And it's very difficult to talk about this in a vacuum because if I'm seen to not be partaking in this system of force mourning, going back to what I was saying earlier, it's evidence that

I'm a bad immigrant, that I'm not really British and I hate this country and I'm disloyal and I'm unpatriotic. And I should go back to where I've come from. Yeah. And I should add that you have a piece coming out in The Guardian. This will run Wednesday. so people should check this out. You know, so what, I mean, to take this in more, you know, proactive direction, what would it mean for Britain to address these issues, right? I mean, what, if someone had done this report correctly, if the rural family had, you know, taken on board the opportunity that you point out

they missed with Meg and Markle, what are the types of changes, whether they're policy changes or societal changes, do you think are most important here? It starts with an admission of British history. And that might sound academic, but it's really practical because, for example, the royal family have never acknowledged that they ruled over an empire, which was explicitly based on a white supremacist ideology, the idea that British people were racially and civilizational superior and that they should civilize, subjugate and exploit other races.

That was the overt ideology of the empire in living memory. Britain has built itself off the back of that exploitation for centuries, and that's present in every sector when it was finance, academia, the arts. There is no institution, historic institutional sector of the economy that doesn't have that rooting in the colonial model and imperial exploitation. And because that's never been challenged and there's never been a break, there's never been a moment where Britain said, we did this. There's never been a civil rights movement. There's never been a normalization of the fact that

this deep structural unfairness exists. And because we haven't had that, there can't be policies that are grounded in a true understanding of the extent of the problem. So I don't see how we can have any policy. You know, there may be some policies that help, but that would be luck because they are not grounded in really understanding the history and origins of these problems. And instead of doing that, It feels like we're moving further in the other direction. You know, after Megan Markle gave her interview to Oprah, Prince William came out and said, you know, we're not racist. That we're completely not racist.

And, you know, anyone who works in anti-racism as soon as you hear, someone say, I'm not racist. We're totally not racist over here. Yeah. Not racist. And then suddenly the front pages of our papers were full of pictures of him hugging black people. I mean, it was just so cringeworthy. Yeah.

But there is this complete deep intransigence, unwillingness to admit what our country is founded on. And, you know, to this day, you get rewarded in Britain by receiving an honour from the Queen, which is named after the empire. The message being, as a black person, if you want to be recognised for your work, the condition is that you need to celebrate the exploitation of your ancestors. It is that overt. And yet, if you say that, you're still accused of being obsessed with being a victim. So we're locked in a complete gridlock. And the only way we can move forward is from some kind of admission of what's happened here. And it's not subtle events.

It's very, very recent living memory that has affected all aspects of life. So it doesn't really seem to me like a huge amount to ask for. Yeah. No, I mean, you can't move forward without understanding your history. The last question I want to ask you is that given these challenges, gaps, how important is the global solidarity here in the sense that you have a block-guised matter movement? In the U.S., we've talked to activists in places like France who are fighting against police violence and structural racism. But how important is the interconnection between these movements?

Do you feel like they're connected? Could they be better connected? Are you coming to USC to connect us? It's part of the idea because as a black, British person, I think I've always looked up to the ways in which the African American community has a narrative, has a coherent. identity is organized. You know, we don't have any equivalent to HBUs. We don't have an idea of ourselves as able to create our own institutions. And that's partly because Black Britain has a very different story. Most Black British people, you know, have more recent stories of immigration by choice, not by force. You know, they come from very disparate parts of the world. But at the same

time, I think because of that relationship with Empire, many Black people came to Britain thinking they could just integrate. And even though that didn't happen, it's made it harder to achieve a coherent sense of blackness and unity. So I think that there's so much we can learn from the African-American mentality and the audacity of creating, organizing, fundraising, building that I just see, you know, every generation in my lifetime. But one of my frustrations with America in general is that I feel as if there is not enough understanding of the links that you will have to the rest of the world. And I know I'm preaching to the choir with you, but when I hear about racism in America, when I hear Americans speaking about racism in America, they very rarely

connect it to the history of empire. America was part of the British Empire. The same racism that we experience as Africans or Caribbean people in Britain was taken to America by white British people. And there's such a common origin story. And there's so much similarity in the resulting institutions. And our foreign policy, yeah. And our foreign policy. And so there is such an opportunity to make those connections. And instead, I feel like we often are very inward looking.

And that feels by design, you know, it's a kind of divide and rule. Imagine if you linked the black diaspora, if we all had a sense of our shared struggle, if we were all organized, how powerful. a movement that would be. And I can see that it's not in the interest of established systems of power to facilitate that on the country. But I think we as people who are aware of this and who are interested in this history and in this moment really have a responsibility to look outside of our own communities and see the links and the similar work. A good example of this is reparations because the momentum that I see in the US in the movement for reparations at the moment has so much

in common with the momentum in the Caribbean, for example, where there is international litigation demanding reparations from European colonizing nations. And it feels as if those movements are happening in a much more disjointed way than they should. And I'm not trying to flatten these into a single narrative. I know that they're different experiences and different cultural and economic problems, but at the same time, there is a common origin. And so it makes sense to at least have that awareness of the common response. Yeah. Well, I hope conversations like this kind of move us and not just in that direction.

Thanks so much. People should check out Afwa's book, British. Read her and The Guardian, follow her on Twitter. You'll be smarter and wiser person for doing it. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Ben. It's a real pleasure. Thanks again to Afwa Hirsch for joining the show.

Thanks to HBO Max for making a bunch of cool stuff. Netflix, too, for all these weird art heist shows. I don't know. Any new books for you? Yes. So Tommy, and this could be a tease for potential future guests, but I've been reading The Committed by Vietin, who also was the author of The Sympathizer. Awesome. Great novel, amazing story, spy novel, novel about politics, but above all, like just an incredible human story that he tells and indelible character that he's invented. So that's my current novel right now. Oh, that's good. I just started Reaganland, which is like the most recent Rick Pearlstein, you know, sort of look at the history of conservatism in the U.S.

They are big, meaty books. This is why I think it's like 800 pages again. I'm excited about that. I'm also going to read Hunter Biden's memoir because I was listening to his interview on Mark Marin show. And like, like, like, I've been a Marin fan for a long time. I probably haven't listened in a couple of years because, like, other stuff was going on. But like Marin, as, you know, someone who's been in recovery for a long time, having this conversation with Hunter Biden about, you know, his experience over the last few years in drug use and alcohol abuse was really, it was a pretty amazing conversation. And it had a lot more empathy than, you know, like any political news reporter would have had. And I don't know. It was just, I highly.

recommend it. I'll check out that podcast too. Because I mean, like, I had that feeling of watching that play out where you're like, dude, this guy's like a human being. Like, I, like, what is going on with this guy underneath all this politics and attacks and addiction? And it sounds like he, he exposes that in a pretty raw way. Which, you know, I think I have a lot of admiration for and better to channel his, you know, his voice into that, you know, than, well, then just about anything else be doing, I think, because it's very helpful to other addicts to be able to see that and empathize with it. So definitely worth checking out. I mean, I just can't imagine losing your brother, who is your best friend, your rock, the person who, like, got you through everything, having all these substance to use problems.

And then having the Trump family just be the most vicious, cruel fucking people on the planet who basically thought they could humiliate you and your father out of him ever running in the first place. Right. And it's like Don Jr. still makes fun of Hunter on his Instagram every other day for just for being an addicts, as if that's not like a human failing that could happen to every single one of us. And it's got to be tough having like, okay, your father's this wildly successful politician. Like that's already hard for a lot of people to deal with. Then your brother is this hugely successful political figure. So before you even get into the tragedy, like that's just hard, right? And then you layer on the fact that your brother dies after having lost, you know, your mom.

I mean, just the guys had a lot cards stacked against him. So it's good to see him out there, you know, trying to channel that in a constructive direction. Yeah, say your piece. Don't let these other people define you. That's bullshit. Okay, that's it for us this week. But we'll talk to guys next week. See you.

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