Pod Save the World - Brexit and is Dick Cheney good now? (no)

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

First, Tommy and Ben talk about the ongoing Brexit disaster, Dick Cheney's surprisingly accurate criticisms of Trump's foreign policy, the rollback of Obama-era rules about disclosing civilian casualties, and important updates from Venezuela. Then, Tommy talks with immigration and human rights activist Enrique Morones about his work on the US-Mexico border.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. Ben Rhodes. This week on Pod Save the World, we are rolling out a new segment. It's called Worldos want to know until you tell us that Worldos want a new name for the segment because you don't like being called Worldos. But here's the deal. We're going to solicit questions from you, the listeners. The World Does. The World Those. On Twitter, on Facebook, anywhere you ferment revolution and or spread your fake news. And we will answer one question per week. You can find the answer on YouTube.com slash crooked media or you can hear it on the full podcast after the interviews. So check it out. Send us your questions. The world does want to know and we want to answer. We're here for the worldos. All right. Ben Rhodes is in the house.

I heard a rumor you were over protesting Brexit with David Lamia, but I'm really glad to see her here. Just kidding. Later on in the show, I have an interview with Enrique Moronis, who is the founder of Border Angels, who's been working. for decades to try to help migrants who are coming across the border, help them from literally starving or a dying of thirst. But before that, we're going to take through some of the major issues going on in the world. Ben, let's start with Brexit. I joked about at the top because British lawmakers just rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's most recent Brexit deal by a vote of 391 to 242. So again, not very close. Not a close call. So I guess this means they now start to debate

whether to leave the EU without a deal, a so-called hard Brexit. This is, I mean, again, it's a total mess. What do you think happens now? Well, she has promised two votes. So after this deal going down, the next vote in the British Parliament will be about whether or not to pursue a no-deal Brexit, a hard Brexit, that would just involve the UK leaving the European Union by the deadline March 29th, and essentially potentially having a catastrophic situation where there's a lot of ambiguity about, you know, what their relationship is with the EU. Their economy could really tank.

There's a lot of uncertainty about how they could even get things like food and medicine that are regulated by the EU. It's crazy. It's the scenario that nobody wants. Sounds like you're describing that as well. Yeah, exactly. It's self-owned by the Brits here. I think the general view is that's unlikely to pass. And so then if there's not a vote to have a no-deal Brexit, then she's promised another vote for the Parliament to decide to try to delay this Brexit deadline.

Presumably, if they do that, then they will have to go to the EU and the EU will have to agree. I think most analysts and observers believe that most likely scenario is they get a several-month delay in this and they keep negotiating. However, what's so bizarre about this is negotiate what? The EU is given as much as they indicated they want to give in terms of terms for the Brits related to Brexit. Those terms are not at all acceptable to the Brits because the people who led the Brexit campaign lied to them about what was going to happen. They lied to them about what they could have in terms of leaving the EU and what they would lose. And so at some point, there's going to have to be a reckoning inside of the UK about whether or not they're willing to take the pain that comes along with Brexit or whether or not they will have another referendum on whether or not to actually leave the UK or not. And I think with this delay, it becomes more possible, if still unlikely, that there might be some additional referendum on this.

Like, who's going to step up here in lead? Yeah. How can they align their interests with the EU? If I'm the EU, I'm just fed up and I don't care anymore. Well, and the EU has an interest in demonstrating that it is hard for countries to leave the EU because they don't want other countries to, right? So, you know, it's incumbent on the EU essentially to show that countries that leave have to pay a steep price because, again, they don't want any country that has some drift towards right-wing politics

to just say, oh, look, it's so easy to leave the EU. We'll do the same. So, you know, the EU is not going to throw them this life raft. Then the leadership question is entirely right because you've got Theresa May who clearly cannot bring along her party. She's losing these votes overwhelmingly. They're a hardline Brexit people in her party think she's too soft. The people who want to remain think she's too hard and she's kind of caught in the middle

and clearly she can't bring people together. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labor Party, is not really led on this issue either because everybody presumes that. that because he's this kind of unreconstructed British socialist, you know, he's a Eurosceptic, too. He wasn't a big fan of the EU. He sees it as a bastion of kind of corporate interest. So he's not exactly sticking his neck out on this thing. And so you're looking at a country without any leaders, you know, not in the Conservative Party, not in the Labor Party at the top.

Now, there are excellent people like our friend David Lammy who are leading from within the Labor Caucus and there are other good leaders. but the people who are making the decisions right now, they're either lying to people, so the Brexit people who've said you can get all these benefits while leaving, they're being tentative like Corbyn, because he frankly would probably like to see Theresa May fail at this and have an election that he can win, or there's May who's actually tried to do something,

but, you know, can't deliver. It's a year of self-owned by important governments. And I should add that just so people know what the main issue is that held this up. You may read in these stories about a backstop. The Irish backstop. The bottom line is that Ireland is in the EU and Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom. And because of the EU, there's no real border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. In other words, goods flow across that border, people flow across that border. That is in part how you got peace in Northern Ireland, right? Because you had greater connectivity with the Republic of Ireland.

And what a lot of people are worried about is if you turn that into a hard border again, you could potentially devastate the economy of Northern Ireland. You could potentially even reinitiate some of the conflict in Northern Ireland. But if you keep the open border, then you don't have a real Brexit because there's still a part of the EU that is kind of open to Northern Ireland. And so it points up the impossibility, either you're going to leave the EU or you're not. And the Brexit people want to leave so they want a border. there. And people in Northern Ireland and a lot of people in the UK and in Ireland don't want to have a border again because they're worried about what that would bring about. And

there's no solution. At the end of the day, it's a binary choice. You're in or you're out. And May's been trying to define this kind of in between. And you know what, at a certain point, like they just have to choose here. What a mess. Well, everyone stay tuned on this one because it ain't done yet and feels like this could go on for a while. Yeah. Unfortunately. Okay. This next subject is a difficult one to discuss. So I want to warn listeners in advance, give a trigger warning about some disturbing content, or at least a disturbing question. Is Dick Cheney good now? Oh, God. So here's the context. The Washington Post reported that Cheney repeatedly pushed Mike Pence

on Trump's foreign policy at some gross big donor retreat on like a private island hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. So I imagine like the monopoly man debating an oil well about derivatives or something. But so here's what Cheney said. He criticized Trump for pulling out of Syria in the middle of a phone call with Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey. He said he's worried that Trump doesn't read intelligence or attend the PDB. He said Trump shouldn't have canceled joint military exercises with South Korea. And he criticized a report that said Trump wants to get the Germans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans to pay for the U.S. troop presences in their countries.

Wait for it with a 50% profit margin on top. So Cheney's not wrong, Ben. He's not wrong here. Here's the thing about Dick Cheney. This fucking guy is seeking to like launder his own war criminal destructive reputation. There was yet another point that he said, well, Trump's foreign policies like Obama's. Yeah, that didn't really follow up. Let's just take a step back here and make a point, right?

So Trump has criticized wars in the Middle East. Yes. Yes. He has, right? Obama criticized wars in the Middle East, right? Trump is called for more burden sharing among allies and NATO defense spending. Obama called for those things. So, oh my God, they have the same foreign policy, right?

No! This is the stupidest fucking argument that is out there that I keep hearing. They have both diagnosed that a patient has a disease, right? They both said, okay, there's a patient with a disease. This patient over here has cancer. What should be the treatment? Obama's treatment for that problem of the wars and the overextension was... An apology to her.

More engagement, more engagement, more diplomacy, an Iran deal, a Paris Climate Accord, a real estate department. A real state department. We have to get out there with the non-military aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Donald Trump's solution is to pull back and to be an isolationist, belligerent dick who turns us back on all of our values, right? So, again, Obama wanted to treat the patient. Trump wants to fucking whack the patient on the head and take his toys and go home. This is exactly the opposite distinction. but oh, you know, we're all going to suck on our thumbs here and say, well, isn't this interesting that these commonalities between, you know, Trump and Obama? No. Let's be very clear, okay? Dick Cheney broke this world that we live in. There was no Donald Trump without Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney brought us into a fucking massive financial crisis, a $5 trillion war in Iraq. But is he good now. I'm just kidding. Obviously, I'm just trying to trigger you. Dick Taney's wars. You know, I get, I mentioned this on a past episode, I've been reading Tom Ricks's fiasco, which is about the Iraq war. But so what's so, what's so is. interesting about the book, and that I didn't totally realize, is we often criticize the decision to go to war based on false intelligence. What we don't talk about enough is the fact that they literally had no plan once our troops got to Baghdad. Like the so-called phase four of the campaign where you're supposed to hold and build capacity and restore governments and provide services. Like, we sent our service members to the middle of Iraq with like no plan for how to execute on it. And of course, it turned into disaster. So, and these were supposed to be like

It's like Cheney's brain trust. The uber competent guys, right? Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfe-Welitz-Burl. What were we doing there in the first place? It's ridiculous. Like, how are we going to go back and explain why it is that we invaded a country, Iraq that had nothing to do with 9-11? I mean, the lies about the intelligence, the lie, the bigger question of, like,

why were we invading Iraq in the first place? It's wild. And, like, why is anybody listening to Dick Cheney about fucking anything, right? Because he had a lot. Yeah, I'm more interested in what, like, Christian Bail has to say about American foreign policy than Dick Cheney? Well, me too. And so this is interesting though. So like obviously, you know, the things Cheney is saying aren't the criticisms of Trump aren't wrong. Because they're easy. They're very easy. But this is interesting. Mitch McConnell and Pelosi invited the NATO Secretary

General to address a joint session of Congress next month in an effort to, I assume, underscore our commitment to NATO. Again, like, they're echoing the liberal and the Dick Cheney rebuke of Trump for abandoning allies. And like, is this the only thing that Pelosi and McConnell have ever agreed on? And it's a huge rebuke of the Trump foreign policy? I am worried and have been word for some time that you get these people like Cheney and these never Trump or neocons who see this opportunity for themselves to essentially repair their own reputations by making these common cause with Democrats. I think Democrats have to be very wary about that. Just because we share similar criticisms of certain things Trump is doing, that doesn't mean we share similar views about what the actual solutions are or what

the direction of American foreign policy should be, right? So yes, you're right. I mean, this was the absurdity of like all the things that McConnell has allowed the Senate to vote on. The one where he's allowed a bipartisan review of Trump was on like ending our true presence in Syria, right? Which is like on my list of things that I've worried about Donald Trump, not at the top of the list. I think, you know, look, the Democrats have passed some resolutions to Congress that are embarrassing to. Trump, you know, demanding that, you know, we reaffirming our commitment to NATO. So it's good. I'm glad that, like, we're going to reaffirm that NATO's important and the Secretary General is kind of a symbol of that. But I don't think it's, you know, the end of the conversation about

what needs to happen here, right? I agree. And even the Secretary of General NATO, I mean, Democrats should be wary. Like, he'll, he's been praising Trump for this effort to bolster defense spending. And I actually kind of disagree with them because I think the reason that the Europeans are spending more in defense. isn't because Trump is hectoring them. They're spending more in defense as a hedge against the United States. So, you know, good to back up NATO, but let's, you know, I know politics make strange bedfellows.

Like, I don't want to get into bed with Dick Cheney. No, never. I mean, I think that's a great rule of thumb. In every way you could possibly think about it. Yeah, yeah, that is true. Okay. Different subject. So the New York Times reported that Trump has revoked a rule Obama put in place requiring the

government to make public its estimates of civilian, biosteen. San Diego's killed in airstrikes outside of conventional war zones. So the idea was to try to increase transparency around military actions taking in places where we aren't officially at a war like Iraq or Afghanistan. Ben, you were there when this was put into place in 2016. Can you talk about why Obama wanted to do this and why it was important and what it means for Trump to walk it back? Yeah, I mean, I know this doesn't solve this problem entirely.

And we got some criticism from the left about, you know, the numbers and did the numbers match up with what human rights organizations have. However, there are two very important points here. One is just forcing the government to do this does force greater care in what you're doing. That there's a level of attention to, number one, trying to prevent civilian casualties in the first place. And you'll remember that Obama set the near certainty standard that you don't take a shot with a drone strike, for instance, unless you have a near certainty, even no civilian casualties. We know, though, that in war, tragic things happen, and there are civilian casualties. what he's trying to do is embed in the U.S. government the habits of not only trying to prevent those casualties on the front end,

but doing after-action reports on the back end, having to account for those civilian casualties, in some cases having to provide compensation to people who lost loved ones. And also, I think, it was a healthy process when we released these numbers. Human rights organizations said, well, here's the difference. And we had a dialogue with them about it, right? So if you remove the responsibility on government to account for this, you remove any transparency or accountability. And you also just kind of remove the habits that Obama was trying to embed in the government to say it's our moral, ethical and strategic imperative to try to avoid this and to account for it when it happens. Yeah. And again, like, we shouldn't be surprised that Trump did this, right?

Because he went on the campaign. He said, I'm going to bomb the shit out of him. I'm going to take the shackles off our generals to kill everybody. But that ridiculous chest-thumping assertion actually makes wars worse. Like that was another lesson from Iraq. When our soldiers replied with weapons that were maybe too lethal or too big, like artillery fire in urban populations or when people were indiscriminately rounded up and held the detention operations, that fed the insurgency. It didn't help us win the war. It actually helped us lose it for a very long period of time.

And Trump just fundamentally doesn't get that because he doesn't care and because it's good politics to say we're going to bomb the shit out of Phil and the ex-country that he doesn't like. Yeah. Yeah. And like, just thinking the message is tense of the world. Like, we're not even going to count this anymore. I mean, it says it just just devalues the loss of innocent life. Yeah. We talk a lot about the number of U.S. service members lost in wars, as we should. But we almost never. We should also talk about the number of people that we killed in these wars. I mean, the estimates in Iraq are in the hundreds of thousands. You know, in Yemen with the famine, there's a danger to millions of people.

And look, the U.S. has made, sometimes you don't see the progress because it takes place over decades, but you look at Vietnam, we killed millions of people because we were really just indiscriminately carbon bombing. Because of some of the insistence on a higher standard, we're not anywhere near where we need to be. We're not perfect, but I think anybody would say better than we were in the 70s, right? And so the goal is to move this in the right direction. ideally you'd want to not have to be a word at all, but what Trump has done is he's moved us back in the wrong direction. Two updates on the situation in Venezuela. First, the State Department announced that they're going to pull all remaining personnel out of Venezuela this week,

citing the deteriorating situation and their conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff has become a constraint on U.S. policy. That last part is a little ominous. How did you read that part of the statement and how big a deal do you think it is to take all these guys out? I think it's a big deal. You know, first, it kind of, as we talk about, they've been moving and operating without a plan B in Venezuela. So they recognize Guido, the military doesn't go to him. That didn't work. They tried to get this aid in to embarrass Maduro.

That didn't work, right? And here, you recall that when Maduro said that U.S. submits had to leave, Guido invited them to stay. Well, this is showing that Guido's uncharged in Venezuela. Is he still in Colombia? Yeah, he's been traveling around Latin America. America visiting these other countries to bolster support for his efforts. And the second thing it tells me is Caracas must be very dangerous. And Maduro has been arming these paramilitary groups since January. So the combination of Maduro arming people and then the U.S. moving to the oral sanctions on top of Maduro's corruption and mismanagement has turned this into kind of a failed state. And we are accelerating that process that Maduro had already initiated. And that's the second thing that tells us. me. And then the third thing, as you say, if there was a security concern for the diplomats because of the deteriorating situation, that language about their impediment suggests what we've

talked about as the greatest fear in Venezuela that this kind of U.S. accelerated collapse of the state will ultimately become the pretext for a U.S. military intervention. Yeah. And I want to talk about that in great detail. But just a quick note on this, I mean, apparently there's been no power in Venezuela for like five days, I think. Yeah. The Attorney General Venezuela says that the opposition leader Juan Guido, who you just mentioned, is under investigation for allegedly sabotaging it. You know, it's probably trumped up nonsense.

But this is also a good moment to just make sure people understand that U.S. diplomats serve in really dangerous places for a long time. Like our ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, was still in that country deep into the place descending into a civil war. I mean, these guys are like putting their lives at it. No, Yemen. We've got people in Yemen. We've got people in parts of Pakistan, you know, people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when there was violence.

I mean, we have people. And, we have people. Yeah, Ambassador Chris Stevens. Well, obviously. Yeah. It's a tragic example. And so it's very rare. You remember, Tommy, when you were in government in Juba in South Sudan.

We had diplomats. Literally, as that place is, is a failed state, right? and it's very dramatic to pull everybody out. Usually you go down to what we call essential personnel, which is like a handful of people, just so we can have still an operating footprint in the country. Now we're losing all of that. We're losing all the eyes and ears that comes with an embassy.

And by the way, all the capacity for negotiation. And this just shows that there's no even pretense that we're trying to negotiate something here. We're just trying to force Maduro out. So you alluded to this earlier. So a few weeks back, there were these dramatic images over the weekend of trucks trying to bring aid into Venezuela from Colombia, from Brazil, and they were lit on fire in one instance.

So the media, the Trump White House team, John Bolton, General Marco Rubio, all leapt to blame Maduro's forces for burning the trucks. Well, it turns out that they were all wrong. And it was actually an errant Molotov cocktail thrown by a protester that lit these trucks on fire and led to these dramatic images. So basically everyone, except for some skeptical journalists, got this wrong. And the New York Times did a big piece recently about what actually happened. So, again, like this is a big deal.

And none of this means that Maduro isn't a horrible person. None of this means that he should be running the country. But wars have started because of news like this. Yeah. And I think it does demand that, that number one, people pause. When our media kind of gets, you know, brought on. board essentially with the regime change policy. And I'm not saying it's about all reporters, but there is a danger that you kind of get swept along in this momentum. And there you are on the

U.S. military plane bringing the aid down. And there you are in Colombia with the outpouring of rallies on behalf of Guido and concerts and the drama of trying to get this humanitarian assistance in. And, you know, you have to recognize that like this is a part of a U.S. strategy, right? And it doesn't mean it's right or wrong with the U.S. strategy is. It just means that you have to be careful. I mean, look before the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein is a terrible guy, right? When the full weight of the U.S. government and other countries and opposition figures are behind building a case to oust somebody, that can kind of sweep along the way the media reports on things. Oh, yeah. And that's the first point. Second point is Guido, look, I don't know this guy at all. He's a young guy. I'm sure.

he's probably, he is a better person than Maduro and Venezuela would be better off, I think, if he was the president. But look, when these things become so black and white, that doesn't mean every single person in the opposition is good and every single person who's not with the opposition is bad. And, you know, particularly when people's emotions are being stirred up like this and there's deep polarization and division in the country, like you've got some opposition people throw in Maltaff cocktails too, right? And we have to keep in mind that there are these shades of gray here. And this should be a blinking reminder, you know, that there has to be place for understanding that there's nuance here. And that there's reasons that some people backed Chavez. In fact, the majority of the country backed Chavez when he was elected. It's not just a black and white story.

I can't resist turning to General Rubio's participation as well. People should Google Rubio and German dam. because essentially they're one of the causes of the blackout was a disruption at some major power source

for Venezuela and Rubio tweeted in his hysterical tweeting about Venezuela that the German dam had broken you know him providing his usual thoughtful commentary

when in fact German dam was like the name of the reporter who brings the story but I mean it just shows not a damn named Germany it just shows you that this is a bunch of

you know this can spill over into cynicism and bullshit right amateur hour too. And just because, again, just because it's a, Venezuela's to be better off with them, Maduro doesn't mean

that all the people who are trying to pursue that outcome have the best intentions at heart. Like John Bolton, who is one of the people who was tweeting

about these trucks being sent on fire, like it does not have any humanitarian impulses here. Yeah. He has an ideological agenda against, you know, socialists, as he sees it in Cuba

in Venezuela. So I think, you know, people need to be skeptical and scrutinize these. these things, instead of just swallowing at face value what we're being, you know, fed here by the likes of John Bolton. Yeah, I want to do a little quick down depressing memory lane of wars that have started under false pretenses. You mentioned Iraq. So like the New York Times, some of the stories they reported that they were fed by the Bush administration were enormously

influential in leading us to war and they were in fact complicit. But, you know, in 1964, the U.S. claimed that our Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin came under attack twice from North Vietnamese forces, we later found out that the second attack just didn't happen. But regardless, that incident led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which served as Johnson's justification for going to war from Congress. Go back even further to 1889, Ben. I was just Googling that. Yeah. Remember the main. The battleship, the Maine was anchored in Havana Harbor and it suddenly exploded killing 260 service members. Everyone jumped to blame the Spanish, but it is far more likely, including a study that was done in the 70s, that the ship blew up because of a fire in its cold burner. But

regardless, like, the media ran with it, all the politicians demagogued it, and we soon were at war. So it's just a reminder that the lesson of Iraq and the lesson of Remember the Maine and the lesson of Vietnam is we need to be deeply skeptical of all of these claims and question authorities when these incidents happened because we're really lucky there's video of this Venezuela incident. Otherwise, we may never have gotten the actual facts. Yeah, and I think, you know, regime change efforts, you know, seem to bring out the worst in American foreign policy and government at times. In America, full stop.

Yeah, yeah. And actually, you can, you know, there's a remember the main theory of everything, right? Because that triggered the Spanish-American war, which triggered the de facto American colonization of Cuba, which triggered the Cuban Revolution, which triggered the ideological conflict with the United States in Cuba, which ultimately triggered the emergence of leftists like Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. Oh, God. And so here we are.

It all goes back to this fucking potentially made-up thing with the main, right? But I know, I think people do need to be, put it this way, whenever we're in these situations, the scrutiny is usually on the bad regime and not on the U.S. Yeah. Because that's the common human and American impulse. Saddam Hussein is bad. We are well-intentioned. Well, actually, Saddam Hussein was bad, but it was the U.S. it was lying about the weapons of mass destruction, right? And Saddam was completely contained.

Yeah. And, you know, Maduro is bad. And so therefore the people trying to get the trucks in, or. all good. Well, no, maybe some of them are throwing Molotov cocktails. You know, I, I, there just has to be, you know, because of the history that you're so right to point out, we have to scrutinize ourselves, like, as much as we scrutinize the bad guys in these cases. Agreed. Ben, you have some really cool events coming up. What do you got? Oh, my God. Tommy. So, first of all, to those of you who are in the Los Angeles area. I live in Illinois. Yes, that would include you.

Can I come? You can definitely come. I'm on the board of an organization called the Plowshares Fund. They're a very good organization. Which is a very good organization. They kind of promote non-proliferation and efforts to deal with nuclear weapons. They hate nukes. They do not want people to have nuclear weapons. And I think in life, that is a good policy. So on Monday, March 18th at the Silver Screen Theater at the Pacific Design Center, which is on Melrose Avenue.

I will be on a panel. And wait for this, wait for this. It's Ben Rhodes, Michael Douglas. I did not see Michael Douglas. See that coming? Do you say, I mean, I could have backed into it by saying that I'll be on there with Ted Lou, member of Congress, and Yasmin Silver, who's a wonderful organizer on the organization called Beyond the Bomb. But Academy Award winner Michael Douglas will go as well. He has had a long passion for combating the spread of nuclear weapons. You should go on Michael Douglas's, and I encourage all the worldos out there, to look at the IMDB of Michael Douglas. I will. Don't sleep on Michael Douglas, guys. I won't. I mean, the run that this man had, romancing the The Stone, the game, the War of the Roses, like basic instincts. Great movies.

Who didn't go to see basic instinct when we were kids, you know? So I would check this out. You're welcome to come. Can I make a pitch for you? Yeah. You should consider including Lori Loughlin or Felicity Huffman or anyone caught up in this school bribing scandal just for the press. Yeah.

And then I am flying across the country. And on March 19th, I will be speaking at Colgate University. The College Democrats invited me. We support College Democrats. Absolutely. I'm sure there's some friends of the pod. Colgate, so turn out on the 19th there. Fantastic events. Well, I think that's it for our portion of this, but when we come back, we'll have my interview with Enrique Morones. On the line is Enrique

Morones. He's the founder of Border Angels, which has prevented hundreds and, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals from dying on the U.S.-Mexican border. Enrique, thank you so much for joining the show. Sure, my pleasure. Can you give us a quick overview of what Border Angels does? So Border Angels was an organization that I had the honor of founding back in 1986. And when I founded Border Angels, I'm a native San Diego, a hundred percent Mexican, born and raised in San Diego. A friend of mine from the great country of El Salvador said, Enrique, oftentimes you're collecting things. Like right now in our office, we have donations. How about helping us out where we live?

And I go, where do you live? And she said, Carl's Bad, which is in the north of San Diego, it's a wealthy area. And I go, Carl's Bad. I'd have been a working class neighborhood. And she said, yes, but where I live in Carlsbad, down below in the canyons, there's migrants that live down there. And these are the people that work in the fields. They pick the cots, the lettuce and the tomatoes, et cetera.

So that's how bordering just got started back in 1986 when there was no wall. Ten years later in 1996, that's kind of what put us on the map, because we started going out to the desert to place water because the U.S., which in the 1980s had said, Mr. Gorbachev, Reagan had said, tear down this wall, and then the United States built the wall in 1994. So people started dying every day. So we started going out to the desert to place water. And that's what Border Angels is best known for, but we do a lot more. We visit the day laborers.

We have a shelter in Tijuana. We've been working with the caravans of the people coming from Central America. And a great motivator for me was back in 1994 when I met Mrs. Ethel Kennedy. and she encouraged me to be more open about the work we were doing, et cetera. So now we're more than 5,000 volunteers. We have chapters literally in several countries, mainly across the United States and in northern Mexico. And we're a faith-based organization, not a religious group, faith-based organization, and we say that love has no borders and that love is an action, not just a word.

That is a great way to think about faith and organizing and activism, I have to say. So there have been some recent reports about harassment of people like you and of journalists who are working along the border in Mexico, including literal dossiers being kept on human rights activists and some of your volunteers, I believe, being subjected to screening by Customs and Border Patrol. Can you just tell us what your reaction was to those reports and if they've had a chilling effect on the work you're doing? Absolutely. I have worked very closely with the Southern Poverty Law Center. I know you're familiar with them. Yeah. And as you remember a little over a year ago, there was a tragedy at the University of Virginia where a young lady named Heather Hire was run over and killed by neo-Nazis. The same people Trump called some good people. And she said something during her life, which has always impacted me. If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. And we are outraged. What happened by the CBP here on the San Diego Tijuana border, which is the most cross-border in the world, where they were detaining people and interrogating them for, for, hours, including two of the border angels, James Cordero and Hugo Castro, and they were showing them pictures, and do you know these people, and do you want to work for us, and trying to scare

them and so forth? Well, like I have publicly stated, the more they try to intimidate, the more they try to shut us down, the more we're going to rise up. I remember reading in the history books about the Nazis and Gestapo and the list and the forced marches. We're living that right now here on the San Diego Tijuana border, and it's being driven a lot by that national emergency, which is that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue named Donald Trump. Right. And also by the Border Patrol chief in San Diego, who's out of control named Rodney Scott. And we are working with attorneys, including the ACLU and some of our board attorneys.

We have 11 people on our board of directors for our attorneys. So we're preparing a lawsuit against this type of activity because we've got to stand up. You know, we've got to rise up. And one of my biggest heroes, President Obama, when he was talking about people being upset about things that were going on, he would say, you know, don't be upset. Vote. That's the message we're spreading out there right now because we can never let what happened in November of 2016 ever happen again. And this is direct consequences. The harassment of people crossing the border born in the USA being interrogated. And not only that, when we're putting water in the desert, which I started doing here in 1996, now we have people harassing us out there.

And they're saying, you know, where's your permits? And we're finding water bottles that are slashed, similar to what happened in Arizona with our friends from no more deaths. They have video of the Border Patrol slashing those water bottles. in some of the areas that we leave water, there's only three groups of people out there. The migrants, the Border Angels, and the Border Patrol. And I assure you, the migrants and the Border Angels are not slashing the water bottles. And since we've spoken out about this, and we've shown video of the Border Patrol tear gassing people,

and we know that two children died in Border Patrol custody in New Mexico, et cetera, et cetera, they're mad at us because we're very outspoken about these issues, and we're not going to be silent. Yeah. It is just stunning to me that someone would dump out water slash water bottles that is there to literally keep people alive who are in the middle of the desert. It's just shockingly cruel. Absolutely. And not only that, one of the other things that's happening that's unique along the 2,000 U.S. mile border between the United States and Mexico, 700 miles of that border has wall.

And that was built in 1994. As we know, there has been no new wall approved. The 55 miles that was approved recently is really only the close. of the George Bush Wall, which was supposed to be 700 miles, but it was 55 miles short, not by coincidence that number, and that hasn't been talked about too much, and it doesn't really need to be, is the fact that in the San Diego sector, migrants that jump over the wall, which takes about 20 seconds, they're being forced to walk back to the wall and jump back over into Mexico, forced by the Border Patrol. That's what I was referring to by force march.

That's totally against the law. They're supposed to take them in and then see if they're going to qualify for asylum, et cetera. They're not supposed to walk in them back to the wall and tell them to jump back over into Mexico. So that's happening. The tear gassing is happening. They closed the sacred place that was inaugurated by First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971

called Friendship Park. And you may remember videos of the last few years where we convinced the Border Patrol to open the door and children hug their parents. Well, the Border Patrol chief in San Diego is not allowing that anymore. And so this is inhumane. And it comes from the fact that they feel that Donald Trump has their back.

Right. You know, and he's a purveyor of hate, and it's important that we stand up to that hate, and that's what the Border Angels does every day. Yeah, look, I agree. I think his rhetoric is dangerous. Another way it's dangerous is he describes the caravans of people traveling up to the border from Central America like they're an invading army. I know that you've actually been a part of some of these caravans.

Can you describe what they're like and why they form? Sure. Well, as you know, caravans have been happening since the beginning of time. Right. The exit is from Egypt. You know, those people were on a caravan. The stagecoaches, from east coast,

etc. People travel in large numbers for safety. And the border angels in February of 2006 did its own caravan when we had 111 vehicles traveled from San Diego, friendship park, all the way to Washington, D.C., and back 10,000 miles. We stopped in 40 cities and 20 different states that said, rise up in protest. We're going to rise up against this hate.

But wanting to build more of a wall. by James Sensenbrenner and House Bill 44437, the Minuteman vigilante is shooting people, et cetera. So we did that in 2006. That helped spark the massive demonstrations of 2006, where 4.5 million people took to the streets. That spring, including the May 1st marches, what kicked up again. So we've been doing those types of caravans for a long time. And then the caravans that are in the news today, where people are coming predominantly from Central America, that's nothing to what happened in 2014

when we had 85,000 women and children also from Central America, a lot of them from El Salvador, turned themselves into the Border Patrol on the Texas border. And this is when we had President Obama. And in dealing with President Obama directly, we said, hey, listen, you know,

what the United States should do is have more presence in those countries, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. So if I'm a father and I'm risking, having my son killed in front of me in Honduras, or maybe sending him with somebody, even though I don't know them, to the United States or Mexico. Why don't we have more presence in the embassies in those countries so that father could apply for asylum in the home country?

Right. And know if they're not going to fall apart or not, and President Obama did do that. Also, he did not do what Trump is doing now. The United States is the only country in the Americas that has walls, and it's the only country in the world that separates parents from their children. So these caravans that are coming are not like the caravans that were coming a few years ago when predominantly it was single men coming from Mexico to cross into the United States to work and then go back. That was the pattern for several decades.

Now the largest group that's coming is Central American family units. So it's a mother or a father with a child or two or three. And they're actually trying to get it into that line to plead for asylum, which is an international right. you only qualify for asylum if it's because of violence, not because of hunger. Yet they're coming here and they're trying to do it in an orderly fashion, and Trump is blocking it. Trump is blocking it, and he's not allowing them to do this. So we've been involved in the three major caravans that have come.

As a matter of fact, on the first one that came, my right-hand person in Mexico, Hugo Castro, he disappeared during that caravan. And he happens to have been born in the United States. So I called the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, So they were able to find him. He almost died. He was assaulted.

Nobody knows the details. But the important thing is he's alive. He's alive and he runs our shelter. We have a shelter in Tijuana and he runs that shelter. So the other caravans, we've been supporting them with tents and sleeping bags and food, et cetera. Plus, we have our shelter in Tijuana where we go there on a monthly basis to bring donations. So we continue to say, bienveninos, migraentes, welcome migrants. no matter where they're from, whether they're from Asia, Latin America, Africa, they are welcome,

and we're going to continue to provide a love and care and donations and support to those caravans. The numbers have slowed down a little bit. They're still coming. And undocumented migration, and I've been doing this work for 33 years. I started Border Angels in 1986. Undocumented migration has never been so low. The difference is, as you said, that Trump is, you know, creating out of this, saying there's ISIS members and this and that. That's a bunch of nonsense. Yeah.

The only national emergencies is at 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And those eight words of Trumps, they cause hate action. So you see a rise in children dying crossing the border, but hate crimes against women and various communities. It's unethical, and that's not what this world's all about. Yeah. I mean, certainly you see that hateful rhetoric getting picked up and spread in the U.S. Has Trump's rhetoric changed the way individuals in the caravans are received in countries in Central America or in Mexico along their way to the border?

Yeah, the people that are coming in these caravans that we've spoken to from Central America are from Mexico. They believe that they're going to be the ones that are going to be able to apply for asylum and get through. None of them expect to be that family is going to be separated from their children. None of them expect to be the more than 11,000 people that have died crossing the U.S. Mexico. and border since 1994. Because what happens with these caravans is when they arrive, and they're predominantly arriving in Tijuana, which is right across the border from San Diego, and usually a third of them or so will go back to their home country.

They'll get frustrated and go back because they thought that it was an easy process to get into the United States. Another third will settle in Mexico, like the 4,000 Haitians that are now residents, legal residents in Tijuana. These are Haitians. This was the caravan of a few. years ago. Right. And then, so a third goes back to their home country, a third settle in Mexico, maybe in Tijuana or another part of Mexico. And the other third, they're the ones that are still

going to try to apply for asylum. Some are realizing that the weight is very long, that they're not going to qualify. And some of those decide to jump over the wall, which we do not recommend, but we don't want them to die. So the Trump rhetoric, or when he admitted and then tried to deny it, like usual, that separating the parents from their children was a tactic to discourage people from coming with their children. None of them are being dissuaded because they don't think they're going to be separated from their children. And the Trump hate and so on and so forth, that's universal.

People know about that. But they're ignoring that because, like I said, they're saying, am I going to stay in my home country and watch my children taken from me, forced into gangs or killed in front of me, or am I going to send them north, hoping they may get into Mexico or the United States, or I'm going to join them on that journey? They're going to do what I think most responsible parents will do, is they're going to get their children out of that current situation, praying and hoping for a better one and expecting a better one,

only to be surprised when they get to the border and see Border Patrol agents tear gassing them, the hostility towards them by, you know, that people, people that, you know, when they jump over the wall and so forth the way they're being treated. Most people in Mexico, most people in Tijuana, just like most people in the United States, are loving and kind people. They'll welcome the migrants. But it only takes one or two to stir up trouble, and that's what's happening. Unfortunately, it's not one or two.

It's more than that that are stirring trouble for these migrants that we have seen the, the neo-Nazi group spread here in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. It's a very dangerous time. So we are working very closely with our brothers and sisters. from Central America. I've met with the Council Generals of several of those countries. We have talked about some sort of a martial plan. Mexico is actually doing kind of a martial plan in those countries. The U.S. should do more of that because there's two countries responsible for why the migrants leave. The home country where they're leaving from and the United States. The U.S.

interference in the policies of Central America, the U.S. demand for the drugs. The U.S. interference right now in Venezuela. Those things have some sort of an effect. And believe me, those countries don't want the U.S. interfering in their policies, especially when the U.S. is the number one consumer of illegal drugs in the world. More than 35 percent of the market is caused by the U.S. demand. Number one consumer of natural resources, the number one country in interfering in the policies of other countries, yet the U.S. is 21st in the world in welcoming migrants when you do it per capita. When George Bush invaded Iraq, 650,000 Iraqis died. a million and a half were forced to lead their country. How many were welcomed in the United States?

Very few. And the leading countries in welcoming migrants, like Germany and Sweden, they have nothing to do with why the people left their homeland. So it's a really sad state of affairs, and that's why I, you know, I said, we've got to rise up and protest and take action in a nonviolent manner. And that's what Border Rangers is all about. And these caravans, participating in these caravans,

whether it's the caravans of love, where we go down there and welcome the caravans or the caravans of the people coming from wherever they're coming from and join them to give them support and shelter and whatever help that we can possibly give them thanks to our thousands of volunteers that have joined Border Angels. Well, so last question for you. If someone's listening right now and they want to support Border Angels and the work you're doing, how can they get involved?

The best way to support Border Angels is look at our website, which is borderangles.org. We also have Facebook and Twitter and all of the social media. And then on there, there's a gift registry, there's a go fund me and all that type of thing. And then we have volunteers coming to join us all the time. Or maybe there's a local organization wherever you're from. You know, it could be Catholic charities. It could be the anti-deformation.

There's a lot of great organizations around the world that do a lot of great work. So there's always, you know, they're all in need. We're a nonprofit. We're a 501c3. Well, even though we're really small, you know, we only got like three or four chairs in our office in a working class community here in San Diego. We are known all over the world. Well, thank you for all the work you're doing.

And everyone check out the Border Angels site because it's really important and I'm sure it's needed now more than ever. So thank you for doing the show. Thank you. Love Has No Borders. Welcome to the first installment of World Does Want to Know. There we are. I'm so fucking excited. I'm so glad you're here for this.

This is a monumental day. Okay. You can watch this answer on YouTube.com slash Quicken Media or the full answer will be on the podcast, which you might know already because you're listening to it. So this week, world does want to know about China and North Korea. Andrew asks, we know what the United States wants of North Korea, but what does China as the dominant power in the region want?

Do they want the same goals as us? Or do they want the North Koreans to remain a perpetual thorn in the side of America? That is a very good question. So, Andrew, here's what we do know. The Chinese have backed the North Koreans pretty strongly. since the 50s during the Korean War. China is North Korea's biggest trading partner. They're their biggest source of food and fuel, like absolutely critical things they need to keep the regime alive. North Korea's nuclear ambitions are the U.S.'s biggest priority, like rolling them back

or stopping them from getting a nuclear weapon or more nuclear weapons. And certainly that nuclear ambition has strained their relationship with Beijing to the point where China has put sanctions on them in the past, even at the UN Security Council. But they certainly have to be. haven't taken steps that would definitely stop them from advancing their program. In fact, far from it. It's not clear that they can do that. So ultimately, it seems like China's main goal is to keep the peninsula stable. I think they like the fact that North Korea sits between their border and 28,500 U.S. troops who are sitting in South Korea. And I think more than almost anything else, they want to prevent the North Korean regime from collapsing, which is why they probably won't

sanction them too hard, because if the regime collapses, that could mean hundreds of thousands of not millions of refugees end up flowing across the border into China, which is enormously destabilizing and a problem of four all involved. So that's my sense of things. But what do you think, Ben? Well, first, they probably want their best friend back because Kim is now, you know, playing this game with writing love letters as Trump. It's a great question. One way to answer it too is to just go through what do they not want? What are the worst case scenarios. The worst is a unified Korean peninsula in which the north is essentially swallowed up by the south. U.S. troops are still there, and you have this kind of U.S.-friendly unified Korea on

China's border. Tide for the worst would be a collapse of North Korea and floods of refugees and instability. Both of those scenarios are worse for the Chinese than the status quo where you have this kind of crazy guy running a nuclear-armed country in North Korea. And that's precisely why there's been this problem of getting China's cooperation to pressure them. Because frankly, they're more afraid of some of the scenarios that involve a collapse of North Korea or a swallowing up of North Korea than they are of this destable regime with nuclear weapons. I think in an idea what world, what they would want. They want the United States off the Korean Peninsula, so they want U.S. troops out, and they want a Korea that they can kind of dominate. That's their long-term objective.

you know, and they have reason to believe that they just kind of wait this out. That may be the inevitable direction of things in 10 or 20 years. Yeah. So they're not exactly aligned with our values in our position here. No, and so people should understand when Trump talks about pulling troops out of South Korea, he's literally talking about what the Chinese want more than anything, which is the U.S. out of that region and China being able to dominate. Well, there you go, worldos. Now you know. Thanks, Andrew, for your question.

You are obviously a very smart, good-looking, well thought of in community, young person. You can submit your other questions to World Does Want to know on social media and watch the answer each week on YouTube.com slash crooked media. Thanks again, everybody, for tuning to Pottae the World and World Does Want to Know.

We'll be back next week with more fresh, hot takes. We'll teach us some stuff. We'll rant about some shit. Maybe Dick Cheney will make another appearance. You just never know with that guy. So thanks for tuning in and see you next week.