Pod Save the World - Explosions in Beirut

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

Tommy and Ben talk about the enormous explosions in Beirut, why Cuba has become an issue for Congresswoman Karen Bass in Biden’s VP selection process, Biden’s 2000(!?!) campaign foreign policy advisors, why US troops are leaving Germany, the upcoming election in Belarus, why the Department of Homeland Security was collecting “intelligence” on activists and journalists, why Spain’s former king is in trouble, how schools are coping with COVID, climate change and Bangladesh, Afghanistan and TikTok.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, Ben, we are guestless today because there's just so much going on in the world that I didn't even think we could fit it after the news section today. So the biggest thing that happened this morning, we're going to talk about this massive series of explosions in Beirut. We'll talk about why Cuba has become a big issue for possible VP hopeful Congresswoman Karen Bass in the VP vetting. We'll talk about Biden's massive group of informal foreign policy advisors, why U.S. troops are leaving Germany. There's a big, a election coming up in Belarus, a place we don't talk about enough. Trump goes around the Senate to install a truly awful person at the Department of Defense. The House Intelligence Committee is investigating DHS and why they're collecting intel on journalists. Spain's former king is in trouble. We'll talk about what's happening with schools around the world, some climate change news, Afghanistan, and an update on TikTok, the most important thing of the day. But Ben, before we get to the news, we have even bigger news here at Podt, of the world. Your new podcast, missing America, the trailer is live. It's about to be in the world.

I'm very excited. Yeah, no. I mean, for the world those out there, you know, first of all, love that you guys let us do this every week. And I would really love for you guys to check out this podcast. So basically what happened, you know, as you know, listening, I'd pop up in different places around the world the last couple of years. And what I did, Tommy, is I was meeting interesting progressive activists, political leaders around the world. And everywhere I went, I got this sense of what was happening in America's absence and all these problems that we've talked about have been getting worse, you know, the spread of nationalism, authoritarianism and disinformation and unaddressed climate change. And I started basically just recording interviews before I even came up with the concept for this podcast. And it evolved into this idea of what if we showed people, you know, through these voices globally and also through some of the leading thinkers on foreign policy here in the U.S., just what's happened to the world without America. without America being America, without America even trying to lead. And I think what you'll find is a very cool show that sets the stakes for the election, frankly, in terms of what happens if we continue down this path? And what can we do about it, though, if we have the chance of a new president? Yeah, it sets the stakes for the election. But also, it's a show that's about America's absence in the world, but it's not about Trump, right? It's about all these major systemic problems that normally America would be helping lead the charge to solve, but it's not right now. And I think it's such an interesting wind.

into authoritarianism and the way internet platforms have changed different countries. But also, the thing I love about the show is you don't leave us despondent. You introduce us to all these activists, some of whom you've heard on positive world, but some of whom you'll meet for the first time, where these young, inspiring, hopeful, incredibly brave people who are leading the charge for democracy and progressive values. And it's just, it's such a cool window into events around the globe, different governments, politics, people. It's just an incredible show.

Yeah. And I think what I liked about doing it and hopefully what people will like and listening is to do this through storytelling instead of just commentary, which is, you know, we talk about nationalism. When we have friend of the pod, David Lammy, like literally just kind of walking us through. What happened? How do we get to Brexit? Through the lives of people he knows, right? Or we talk about Burma with respect to Facebook. Like, how did it end up being the case that Facebook became this massive tool of disinformation that helped fuel. the ethnic cleansing, right? So you get the story that illuminates the problem, but then we want to leave people with hope. So each episode basically is the best activist I could find, many of them

young around the world, together with some of the people, I think, who were populated by the administration kind of talking about, well, what do we do about these problems? And so hopefully it leads people feeling like they have a better sense of what's going on out there, but also a better sense of like who's on the right side of these things and how do we get their back? Yeah. Well, everyone should check it out. Subscribe today. Missing America. The trailer is live. You can get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

You will love it. It's a limited series. You will learn a ton. Highly, highly, highly recommend it. Okay, let's start the news today with this explosion, these explosions in Beirut. They occurred at a port that was about a mile away from the prime minister's residence. The second of these two blasts was massive enough to send a literal shockwave for miles that was smashing windows, flipping cars, like massive explosion. The video of the aftermath just looks like post-apocalyptic, and we can only hope that people are, you know, relatively safe, able to get medical treatment in the midst of a pandemic.

This happened at around 7 p.m. Beirut time. Some early reports said that one of the buildings that exploded contained fireworks. And in some of the videos of this incident, you could see what looked like colorful explosions in that first fire. Lebanon's head of general security said the second blast was a warehouse containing some sort of highly explosive. material. It's going to take a while to figure out what exactly happened or how many people were hurt or killed, but it was very bad. Lebanon is in the midst of an economic freefall, for lack of a better description. I mean, their currency has collapsed. Efforts to get them an international bailout have completely stalled. There have been mass protests, and of course the coronavirus is, you know,

ravaging the region. Ben, there's a lot of speculation already that this was some sort of Israeli covert action or a Hezbollah attack. The Israeli government is out there denying it already. I've not seen a statement from Hezbollah. But I just, what do you make of this? And what do you think we should, I don't know, what do we take away from seeing an explosion this massive in a major international city? Well, you know, the first thing you think is just how awful this is for the people of Beirut. I mean, talk about people who suffered, you know, civil wars, huge refugee inflows, terrorist attacks, wars with Israel. I mean, there's, there's just been enough suffering already in that city, and so it's horrible to see this.

I think, you know, I saw a lot of armchair explosives experts and conspiracy theorists on Twitter. Me too. Please don't rush. I mean, I get why people, you know, it's Beirut, right? So something explodes and you think that it's probably got a political purpose behind it. And, you know, that's not impossible. But the initial statements from the Lebanese government, at least, seemed to suggest that

it was a form of explosive devices at the port there. So I think we have to let this run its course. But I will say consistent with our conversation about Lebanon a couple weeks ago, the economy is already in freefall. And Beirut is beyond the hub of that economy. You know, Beirut is the lifeblood of Lebanon. And, you know, at its best of times, it's been a commercial hub for the entire region. But it was already suffering. And I have to expect that this will create huge economic disruption on top of that, never mind the cost of rebuilding. And so, really, really, really hope that the international community, you know, we don't use that phrase much anymore because it doesn't really exist, but that, that, you know, other countries step up. I mean, normally I'd say, I hope the U.S. steps up. Maybe we will because there's a nexus to Iran and that's all this administration seems to care about. Europe steps up, but people in love not need our help just as they need our thoughts right now. And so in addition to getting the bottom of it, let's also make sure that we're doing what we can help them recover.

Yeah, great advice. And something we'll be watching, I'm sure, talking about next week. Let's turn to the vice presidential search for a minute because Congresswoman Karen Bass is facing a bunch of questions about Cuba. So Congresswoman Bass, as listeners know, she's one of the many women being vetted to be Joe Biden's VP nominee. One issue that has come up and has come up in subsequent reporting is her views on Cuba and some of the visit she's made to the island over the last few decades. So, Ben, it seems like there are two separate. issues here, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong. First, like, there's a trip she took to Cuba in the early 70s when I think she was literally a teenager, like 19, with a group called the Venceramos Brigade. I said that terribly. The Atlantic did some reporting on this. They described the participants in that trip as basically a group of young American leftists, but they described the brigade itself as, you know, the focus of Cold War era, Washington and anxiety about communism and concerns about the group's connection with domestic terrorist groups like the Weatherman. Bass herself in an interview described that trip to Cuba as a combination of Habitat for Humanity

and a party. So like not really all that radical, just like something a high school kid might do. The second part is a broader criticism from people like Marco Rubio who say that Karen Bass has an affinity for Fidel Castro. And I can already see Ben putting his head in his hands. They, you know, they point to her many visits to Cuba over the years as somehow nefarious. They really took Umbrage at a statement she released when Fidel Castro died. Karen Bass has done a lot of work on U.S. Cuba policy in Congress. She fought to normalize relations and was part of the delegation that visited Cuba with President Obama in 2016.

So, Ben, two parts to my question here. The substantive question is, like, what do you make of this criticism of her connection with the brigade and allegedly, you know, having Castro, affinity for Castro? And then on the politics. Politico ran a piece this week about how Marco Rubio is considered the shadow secretary of state for Latin America. My question two for you is, do you think we will ever have a point in our lives where major foreign policy decisions aren't made by genuinely stupid people like Marco Rubio based on parochial Florida political considerations? So, yeah, there's a lot to unpack here.

And I should say, I interacted a lot with Karen Bass over the years, almost exclusively on Cuba. So I'm familiar with her thoughts on this. So first of all, in the brigade, you know, it has a name brigade, so it sounds like guerrillas. but that's not what this is. Karen Bass says, this is kind of a service, glorified service project. And people have to remember

that in the Cold War, in the 60s and 70s, right, when black people in this country were dealing with structural racism and you had all kinds of movements around that, you know,

the Cubans constantly tried to position themselves as in solidarity with African Americans. They were, you know, would go on to fight a war against the apartheid regime

in South Africa at the same time that the United States was best, backing the apartheid regime in South Africa. I'm not suggesting Cuba has a perfect record on race relations, but the reality is a lot of African Americans felt some affinity for the solidarity that was shown by the Cuban government in those years. Again, it doesn't mean that Cuba was a perfect regime. It's just that you have to understand the psychology of a 19-year-old black

woman in this country, right, who sees people who are at least, you know, acting as if they're on their side in these broader structural racist issues around the world. It's not at all that extraordinary that someone of her profile might have felt, you know, some connection to Cuba in that circumstance. More importantly, on the politics of this, you know, I really, really, really want to call bullshit on this continued stigmatization of Cuba. First of all, what are we talking about as it relates to U.S. national security? This is an island of 11 million people, right?

like this is not some superpower. It is built up into, like, you would think that this was the height of the Cuban Missile crisis. Here we are in 2020. And the reality is Marco Rubio is a consistent apologist for president of United States who was elected president with the support of Russia, a much more significant adversary of the United States. Marco Rubio is a consistent defender of hacks like Rick Grinnell, who was an unregistered

agent of the authoritarian who governs Hungary, who's seeking to break apart. the Western Alliance, the Transatlantic Alliance. There are all kinds of shady characters in the Trump administration with ties to foreign governments, including foreign governments who are deeply adversarial to the United States. And none of those people get scrutiny from the Marco Rubius of the world. And frankly, the American news media still treats Cuba as if it's in some super bond villain category of U.S. politics for what reason? Because there are two neighborhoods in Miami that have a bunch of hardliners, including people who fought in the Bay of Pigs invasion, who every election cycle kind of gin up this sense that if you are not towing a certain

line, that you're delegitimized from even having a point of view on Cuba. What is that policy rendered? It has rendered 60 years of failure, an embargo that's done nothing, but cruelly, cruelly punish the Cuban people, condemn them to a life of poverty, and just push Cuba. further and further away in the United States and into the arms of people like Russia and people like China here. So the politics and foreign policy of this is completely insane. And whatever decision that Joe Biden makes about his vice president, this should not be a part of it. We have to reject the framing of issues like Cuba that is constantly determined by people like Marco Rubio and not by common sense. And this is what drives me crazy again and again.

What we were doing at the end of the Obama years was opening up this policy so the lies of the Cuban people could be improved. And frankly, so that Cuba wouldn't continue to be aligned with Russia and China, but could integrate more into the rest of the hemisphere here. And that was beginning to work at the end of the Obama administration. You saw more travel down there. You saw greater private sector in Cuba. That also creates more opportunity for the Cuban people. You know, anybody who listens to this podcast knows that I'm the friend of authoritarianism. I just think that you have to evaluate things based on the merits. And the merits are this policy is not working. And if you want to help the Cuban people, open up. You know, don't like triple down

on some dumb embargo because that's what suits Marco Rubio's politics. You don't think that red baiting like five or six decades later is a good idea and a helpful thing in our politics? No, and it's been it's also been catastrophic in Latin America. Like we detail ad nauseum on this show. Like, like, there's been more scrutiny of Karen Bass taking a trip to Cuba when she was 19 than the fact that there's special forces guys, like in prison in Venezuela who were carrying out a coup. Like, whatever happened to that? Like, you know, can we... Ben, Elliot Abrams still works for the administration on a Venezuela policy, right? I mean... Who sponsored death squads. Like, this kind of red-baiting view of Latin America has gotten us

into a ton of trouble, has heard a lot of people, and it's garbage. And people shouldn't, you know, stroke their chin and think, well, is this disqualified Karen Bass? Bullshit. This is not disqualified Karen Bass. Frankly, I think she was a great partner of the Obama administration. the Obama Biden administration on Cuba, had the Cuban people's interest at heart, which Marco Rubio never seems to do. I should add, by the way, Karen Bass has actually been to Cuba.

Marco Rubio's never even been there. And if you go there, it's impossible to ignore the extreme poverty you're looking at and the desperation those people feel to have some connection to the United States. Yeah, and she said so herself. And it sounds like she came to that realization

on her first or second trip in the 70s when she was a teenager. When she saw Fidel Castro speak and was like, not entranced by his propaganda, right? She came back to the United States, a deeply racist place at the time and ran for office and now as a distinguished member of Congress. I mean, give me a break. And it's all quite simple. Like, you've got these hardliners in Florida who want to consistently punish the Cuban people because what they really want is to overthrow the Cuban regime and go back

down there and run the place. And then you've got the hardliners in the Cuban government, which included Fidel Castro, who, by the way, did not support the opening that would negotiated between Barack Obama and Raul Castro when I was the chief negotiator, Fidel was a critic of that process, right? You got these Cuban hardliners, too. And we have to kind of get a policy that is not driven by the hardliners on both sides of the Florida Straits, a policy that is about the Cuban people and the American people who have a shitload in common, right, and want to be better friends and want to have more connections. Like, that's what Karen Bass worked for, and that's ultimately going to be good for Cubans and good for Americans. And that's what

this is all about. It's not about how the press loves to have like a scary Cuban communist 70s kind of throwback narrative to things. Yeah, stop making foreign policy based on super narrow old, dated political considerations. Ben, let's talk about Biden's foreign policy and a little more depth here because foreign policy magazine had a report that kind of like triggered me on your behalf because they talked about how Joe Biden has an informal working group of foreign policy and national security advisors that is now over 2,000 people with 20 different working groups. And I believe it was part of your role to sort of manage these kinds of groups in 2008 with Dennis McDonough. So let's just take an example to explain to folks how this works.

So you have a Europe team that's developing like Europe specific policy. So there's a hundred members on that team contributing ideas and writing and doing other work. But it's led by three former Obama administration officials, including Julie Smith, who is Biden's deputy national Security Advisor from like 2012, 2013. She has tons of experience at the Pentagon and think tanks, incredibly experienced smart person. And so people like Julie, like the leaders of these working groups, send up those ideas to an even smaller working group of people who we all know well. Julie's also part of that like kind of top circle of foreign policy advisors. Julie Smith, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Neverell Haynes, Brian McKeon. They get that information to Biden when appropriate.

And so there was some debate in this article, Ben, about whether the point. of these working groups is like just to manage people and manage egos and make you feel connected or to really provide advice to Biden. And, you know, again, I'd love to hear your experience of dealing with these committees back in 2008. So correct me if I'm wrong. But the thing I actually kind of remember was getting to the White House and being surprised by how much those campaign policy papers were truly roadmaps for the work we did. Like, I don't know why I thought that there might be some sort of like real policy, you know, process that happens once you get to the the White House, but in fact, I think that stuff was critical. Now, it might not be part of the

campaign discussion between now and Election Day, because we're busy debating whether you should like huff hydroxychloroquine or whatever. But I do think it will help him govern. Yeah, I mean, like the way these groups work, I mean, everybody wants to be involved in a presidential campaign and particularly one that is a winning campaign that wins the nomination and it could win the presidency. the reality is, you know, when you're on a campaign, the only thing that you're really commenting on is the stuff that is front burner in the news, you know, so Russian bounties on our troops, election, interference. Yeah, if some Karen Bass is a nominee, like you'll be dealing with Cuba. But the reality is, there's not a lot of interaction between core campaign staff and what the candidate is saying and these types of groups. They can be useful in supplying materials for, like, debate prep. So there'll be a foreign policy debate. And you'll put together a thick briefing book that gives background on all the issues, and these kind of groups can turn out papers to do that. Frankly, they can be valuable kind of as surrogates. You know, you want people out writing op-eds, writing letters to the editor, answering key questions from certain constituencies,

diaspora groups in this country who care about a certain region, for instance. And these groups can kind of take some of that work on and do that. But they're not that fundamental to the operation. And frankly, they become large and somewhat unwieldy. And they end up pitching a lot of, I mean, I remember like a lot of pitches like, if only the candidate could write this article for, you know, on the need to rejigger the force structure of X or something. And it's like, guys, that's not what's going to swing this election, you know. But you're right. The reason that they're particularly important is that they become both, you know, a pretty

good guide for who might end up populating administration. So it's an indicator of the types of people that you could expect to fill out a Biden and a C, a Biden State Department, a Biden Pentagon. And then, yes, some of the work that is done in these types of groups and some other external efforts feed into the transition. And then what happens is in the transition team, they're kind of both making decisions about who to put in jobs, but they're kind of calling all the work that has been done to think through what do we have to do from day one on X policy, right? So the way I think about these groups is look at them as an indication of the types of people who will be in a Biden administration and know that the work they're

doing, yeah, is going to probably be more useful to a transition team than to the end game of a campaign, with maybe the important exception of the debate. Yeah, that's a very good insight into how these things work and how helpful they're going to be. And man, 2,000 people is a lot. But I'm glad that, like, you know, when you think about how many individuals you need to, to populate, like, senior positions across the U.S. government, it's actually not that many. So I'll give you, quick example, Tommy. Like, Susan Rice chaired these externally. Mike McFall ran the Russia group.

You know, he ended up being our lead Russia guy. Jeff Bader ran the Asia group. So, you know, that's an indication that they don't matter tremendously to the campaign, but they do matter to who's going to govern. Speaking of Europe-based decisions that Biden might have to make if elected. So last week, Trump officially announced that the U.S. is going to withdraw 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany, which, and then he's going to kill. cap the force level there at 25,000 troops. He's threatened this before. Last week, he finally

decided to do it, but now we have more details. Fifty-four hundred troops are going to be redeployed to other countries in Europe, specifically Belgium and Italy. The rest will go home to the U.S., and then ultimately it sounds like they're going to redeploy back to Europe. So that'll save money somehow, I guess. It's going to cost billions of dollars to build these guys new housing and facilities in these new locations. Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense slash lobbyist future in previous, tried to argue that this decision is strategic. It's about repositioning forces, you know, to deal with Russia, blah, blah, blah. Trump, as always, gave up the game.

Like, when he was asked, he went back to one of his favorite whiny lies that Germany doesn't pay their 2% feed in NATO, which is not how NATO works, no matter how many times he says otherwise. He's also talking about a commitment by NATO allies who spend 2% of GDP on their own defense. And if you really care about that, CNN pointed out that Italy and Belgium spend an even smaller percentage of GDP on defense than Germany. Germany does 1.38% Germany. Italy, 1.22%. Belgium is less than 1%. Ben, noted liberal Mitt Romney called Trump's decision a grave error, a gift to Russia, and a slap in the face to Germany. Ben, I didn't initially realize that this plan entails

moving the U.S. military's European command headquarters from Germany to Belgium, a ostensibly to co-locate it with NATO HQ, which I guess on an org chart could make sense. They will also move Africa Command or Africom, which is also in Germany, somewhere else, TBD. I know that's confusing that Africom is in Germany, but it just is. The good news is this is going to take a long time. If Biden wins, he can reverse it. But, Ben, like, how do you think this is being received by Germany, by other European allies? And, like, have we ever figured out why Trump hates Germany so much?

Like, first he sends Rick Grinnell over there to be their ambassador, like the worst person ever to have to deal with. Now this. Is it just like an issue with Merkel, do you think? Yeah. So, I mean, there's no reason to do this. Like, this never arrived out of a process of consultation with Germany or NATO allies or some internal process in the administration. Trump was always out ahead and just kind of announcing this. And what feels like happened is like Trump kept announcing this.

And then finally, Esper and other people had to kind of scrambling. and come up with both a plan and some kind of post facto justification for it. To take it piece by piece, it's not about 2% spending of GDP on defense because Belgium and Italy don't spend that much on defense. So that's bullshit, number one. Number two, it's a massive gift to Russia. They want to create divisions between the U.S. European alliance and the core of that alliance is the U.S. German alliance, right? And so they want this sense that the U.S. is not a reliable partner that the U.S. is pulling back, cut a deal with us, don't count on them. And that's something that they're going to take to each European country that you can't trust the United States anymore,

so you should look to us, right? It's not about cost cutting for the U.S. because, as you said, the costs of doing this are going to be enormous and just moving troops around, building new infrastructure, moving headquarters. I can't even imagine how expensive it is to build the new headquarters, given all the intelligence and communications and other things that go along with that. So this makes- Well, you know the military. They're known for their efficiency and big construction projects, right? Yeah, and keeping the cost down, right? Yeah, keep the cost down.

This makes no sense, which leads to your point, which is like, there's no other than the fact that maybe Trump has some self-loathing issues given his German heritage. He seems to have it in for Angela Merkel, I think, because she's something that he's not. She's respected all around the world, and she's smart and she's capable and she's a woman, right? And those things together, a smart, capable, respected woman, seems to drive him absolutely insane. And the fact that he's literally like subjugating U.S. national security interests to his loathing of Angela Merkel while doing, like, if Vladimir Putin made a list of like 10 things he'd like to see the U.S. do, this would be on the list. And so after the whole Russian interference thing, everybody thought, oh, is the quid pro quo going to be that we lift sanctions? No, this is like more valuable than lifting a few sanctions on Russia.

Like, this is what they want. They want the unraveling of the U.S. German, U.S. European alliance. Yeah, like, I'm open to, like, someone saying we need a process where we reconsider U.S. force posture anywhere, including in Europe. This clearly isn't that. I mean, I think he announced this initially right after Merkel said she wouldn't show up to the G7 in Washington, DZ, because the coronavirus was raging across the country. Like, this is impulsive. This is expensive. On the Russia piece, there is some speculation that some of these troops might get redeployed to

Poland, which is even closer to the Russian border, so I'm sure they wouldn't love that. But like, this creates a process and the appearance, not even the appearance of a rift, it creates a rift between NATO allies and the U.S. and Germany specifically that, as you said, is a gift to him. Yeah, no. And you're right. Like if someone wanted to initiate a process and do a strategic review of U.S. force posture in Europe, fine. That's not what happened here, you know.

They worked backwards from him wanting to screw Merkel, you know. And yeah, it'll hurt the German economy where these people are. It'll hurt Germany's own kind of planning around its own national security and how that operates. And the distribution lines for U.S. military deployments into the Middle East or Afghanistan run through Germany. So we'll disrupt those all because of personal peak. And we've talked a lot about how Trump, you know, personalizes foreign policy to get himself reelected, right? This is just as bad. The idea that you're going to make a major disruptive decision that's going to impact the entire NATO alliance. just because, like, you didn't like that Angela Merkel didn't want to come to your G7 summit in the midst of a pandemic that you wanted to invite Vladimir Putin to? Like, this is insane that we have a president who makes decisions like this, and we can't lose sight of that. We should not lose sight of it. It is not normal.

It is not rational. Let's stay in the region and talk about Belarus because they have a presidential election on August 9th. The current president, Alexander Lukchenko, has been in charge for 26 years, thanks to various forms of election rigging and other dictatorial behavior. This year, though, he's facing some tough competition. On July 30th, the only remaining opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikka Noveskaya, which I can barely pronounce, but I can a little bit thanks to Jordan Waller, our fantastic producer,

held a rally that was reportedly attended by 63,000 people, which some observer said was the biggest political gathering in Belarus since the country's independence in 1991. Stelana's husband is a prominent opposition leader and blogger who is planning to run for office until Lukashenko tossed him in jail in June. So that's how he deals with opponents normally. So then she stepped up and ran herself. So it sounds like she's a total badass. Belarus shares a southern border with Ukraine in a long eastern border with Russia.

And Russia looms large in their politics and everyday life. Last week, Belarusian authorities detained 30 Russians in the country and accused them of plotting terrorist attacks. Not really clear what the truth is there, but a lot of observers think this is some sort of last-minute distraction to change the conversation from the disastrous handling of the coronavirus, the economic fallout, et cetera. Russia and Belarus signed what was called a union estate agreement in 1999, which is supposed to increase their political and economic ties.

In practice, what it is meant is that Russia gives Belarus cheaper, energy and subsidize energy, and then they slowly try to get them to become a Russian province. They bring them more under their control. Ben, we wanted to raise this. You flagged this one for a couple of reasons, I think. There's a very interesting opposition movement happening that is brave and worth talking about and could oust a long-standing dictator. There's also concern, I think, that Russia could decide to do to Belarus, what they did to Ukraine and Crimea, and no matter which way this election goes, just say, fuck it, let's annex it. What do you think people need to know here, like, what's at stake in terms of this election?

Well, I think they, first of all, should see that people in Eastern Europe broadly are getting more and more fed up with nationalists and autocratic regimes, right? And we talked about the Polish election where the opposition came very close to winning that election despite many aspects of it, not exactly being free and fair. But, you know, Lukashenko has long been seen as the most dictatorial leader in Europe. You know, he's a post-Soviet strong man, very close to Putin, not a lot of freedom. So for people to be taking to the streets like that and to be risking their lives and freedom in this way shows you the depth of opposition and frustration with Lukashenko and the sense that, you know, people want something different. And it puts the

lie to this notion that everybody, you know, is so comfortable just having these national strongmen in charge, they're not. And so I think it should be seen as both movement in Belarus, but also an indication of a kind of global frustration with corruption and nationalism and autocracy in these places. And we should be on their side. I do think geopolitically, you know, Putin is long, I think, wanted to reconstitute as much of the Soviet Union as he can, right? So we know he'd like to swallow parts of Ukraine, if not all of it. We know he's already tried to swallow up provinces of Georgia. You know, they're currently occupying two provinces of Georgia that they previously invaded. And Belarus is right along that line of former Soviet republics that Vladimir Putin would probably prefer to see

in Russia. And so I think there is also a concern that if the instability grows or if an election is somehow permitted to be relatively competitive and free and fair and goes to the wrong way for the Russians, that, yeah, you might see the same move you saw in Crimea or in Georgia when they moved into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two provinces of Russia occupies, you could see Russian efforts to destabilize, if not outright, seek to control what happens in Belarus. So worth being on the side of the people in the streets and worth being concerned about how Russia might deal with this instability as well. You know, I don't know if I've seen the State Department or the White House or anyone comment on this election or talk about Lukashenko. It is interesting

going back and doing a bunch of research for this segment and reading like Ann Applebaum stories from pre-9-11 calling on the world to look out for how he's. he was trying to steal elections. And then like decades later, these, these terrible, you know, dictators are just still there. And there's still a problem. And they're still destabilizing entire regions of the, of the planet. Yeah. And what's so striking, right, is we just talked about how Trump hates Angela Merkel, you know. And by the way, wants to maybe move some of those troops to Poland, rewarding a country governed by a far right increasingly autocratic political party. like part of what Joe Biden's going to have to do if he's elected is get America on the side of the people who are sick of this kind of leadership in Eastern Europe, get America back on the side of small democracy in that part of the world, and recognize that people like Angela Merkel are best friends in that effort. And people like Lukashenko are the problem.

Yeah, agreed. He is the problem. And we'll keep an eye on this election, which is coming up again on August 9th. So pretty soon. Ben, I want to follow up on a story we talked about, a couple months ago. It was a guy named Anthony Tata, who's a retired general and Fox News pundit who Trump nominated to be the Undersecretary Defense for policy, which is the number three job at the Defense Department. So Trump names this guy and reporters at CNN quickly start going through his Twitter feed and they realize that he is completely unhinged. He called Obama a terrorist leader. He suggested that former CIA director John Brennan should kill himself or become a sex slave in prison. Very nice guy. He made all kinds of, yeah, Islamophobic, conspiratorial tweet. just like garbage, a bunch of retired generals who would endorse them, pulled their endorsements.

Like it was a nomination in trouble, enough trouble that last week, James Inhoff, the climate-denying senator from Oklahoma, gigantic asshole, canceled Tata's confirmation hearing 30 minutes before it was supposed to start. So then over the weekend, the White House decided to once again give the finger to the Senate and the Constitution by appointing Tata to an acting position at DOD, which will then start a process that will allow them to install him as the acting under Secretary of Defense for policy, i.e. the job he was nominated for, but without ever having to get confirmed by the Senate. Ben, I expect no moral leadership for the Republican Party, but I do expect them to care deeply about power, specifically their own power. And I am continually surprised that they are willing to

abdicate that power, to turn over their authority to provide advice and consent on nominations to the White House. It is truly pathetic. Yeah, I mean, right now, we've got acting people in all these places, meaning they're not confirmed by the Senate, meaning they don't have the legitimacy they should have. That's the case at the Department of Homeland Security, where this kind of B-list, fascist, Chad frat-paddle is like the lobbyist in charge of that huge sprawling agency. We've seen how well that's worked out in our streets. For some time, we had an acting DNI, which allowed noted non-intelligence expert and Twitter troll Rick Rennell to do all manner of bad things under the cover of being in charge of the intelligence community, not confirmed by the Senate.

Now, this job, again, is the most important policy job at the Pentagon. It's the number three job after the Secretary of Defense and the deputy, but the Deputy Secretary of Defense mainly looks at like the budget and acquisitions and things like that. This is the person driving the policy train for the United States military, the most powerful military, and history of the world. And he's a complete and utter nut job, right, with deep, malevolent and xenophobic and racist views. So it's a complete end run around how the constitution set this up that you give advising consent to the Senate on important nominations like this. It's of a pattern of doing that that we've seen has been destructive. And it makes you

worried about what the hell is this guy going to do? And again, if the Biden people win this election, they're going to have to have a plan for how to dislodge these people as quickly as possible because can you imagine what they'll be doing in that transition period when they have like a couple months to get all their pet far right things done? Oh my God. I mean, it could be real, real chaos here. And so it's something worth watching before the election, but in the transition, what all these acting so-and-so's are doing, I think is going to have to be a subject of a lot of scrutiny. Let's pray there's a transition. Chad Frat-Pattle is, is Chad. Chad Wolf, former lobbyists who is helping clients get things from the TSA where he previously worked.

Let's talk about Chad Frat-Paddle for a minute. So the House Intelligence Committee announced it's going to investigate why DHS, Robert Holland Security and Chad Frat-Patel, compiled and disseminated intelligence reports about intelligence reports about Protesters and journalists in Portland, Oregon. Last week, the Washington Post broke the story about DHS compiling these Intel reports on the press. What they did, what DHS did been, it seems to be like, Part stupid, part scary. The stupid part was like summarizing tweets by reporters and disseminating them as intelligence, which is okay.

And then, but they were also singling out activists as members of Antifa in trying to connect, like, U.S.-based anti-fascist movements to the war in Syria. So according to a report in the nation by Ken Klippenstein, the DHS report about some of these journalists included the fact that one left-wing podcast host covering the protests had traveled to Syria to fight against ISIS. So here's why this is so trouble. Trump is out there calling protesters terrorists, right? And this DHS product shows that this agency is surveilling American citizens and trying to draw these specious ties to foreign organizations

in a way to make it legal. Weirdly, they are also trying to connect Antifa with Kurdish ideology and make that sound bad when the Kurds have been longstanding U.S. allies who until recently, when Trump completely fucked them over, were our most important allies in the fight against ISIS. So this obviously comes after months of protests in Portland, the deployment of these unidentified like DHS goons to squash the protests or make them worse for the cameras. And now, you know, there have been a couple nights of relative calm, I think, since the federal agents pulled back. So, you know, Ben, I've been reading a lot lately about the church and pike committees and the way they investigated illegal intelligence community activities in the 50s,

60s and 70s. Where do you think this one ranks? Where do you think a compiling Intel dossiers on American protesters and journalists ranks in that kind of, you know, world of bad. I mean, it blows through every constitutional red line in our democracy and what they're doing in Portland and compiling this intel. And look, some of it can feel Keystone Copsie. It's like a bunch of people who want to feel like their intelligence, you know, their operatives or something. So normal press clippings are kind of given the veneer of intelligence. So I wouldn't overreact to that. What we saw, though, is that where that mindset leads, which is this kind of fascist militia in our streets. And I think the bigger conversation that we should have, Tommy,

is whether DHS makes sense. You know, it's in, I tweeted, you know, that it's time to think about breaking up DHS. I got a lot of pushback from people who I know who've worked in DHS. But the reality is the excesses of Trump show the danger of having a department like Homeland Security that takes all these different functions, immigration, customs and border, transportation security. And wraps it up in some massive securitized bow with a lot of power. And I think we've seen where that can lead in terms of excess. And I think the problem is, yes, if they're well-meaning people at DHS, it can run well. But you have to create government with the worst-case scenarios in mind, in some cases. And I think that there are other problems of securitizing things like this. Because if you basically

put immigration in the same category that you're putting counterterrorism, which is under this DHS umbrella, well, that's how you get ice, right? And the excesses of ice feel a lot like the excesses we saw in Portland here. It's this hyper-securitized kind of intelligence community mindset to what should be kind of routine functions of government. And so I think we do need to consider, and the Biden people probably won't go this far, whether DHS makes sense or whether you break it up. And when you break it up, we're not saying abolish it because you're going to need to continue to have those functions. But whether immigration should be how. somewhere else other than in the Department of Home and Security that is also dealing with terrorism and intelligence gathering because you see how that can all get conflated into kind of this proto-fascist state, you know, where you've got militias and intelligence gathering on reporters. Like this is this is the problem of having a massive post-9-11 bureaucracy that was built before people thought these things through. Yeah, it's unwieldy at best, dangerous at worst.

Yeah. Hey guys, we have some good news for anyone looking for a little retail therapy, courtesy of your friends here at Crooked Media. We just put tons of new items on the Crooked Store. They're on sale for up to 70% off. That's a good deal. They're friends of the pod teas. Just call Congress merch. There's Love It's Gay for Democracy Tank and lots more.

It's our biggest sale of the year. Get them now before they're gone for good. Shop now at crooked.com slash store. Let's turn to something a little later here because, Ben, you are a lot of. Ponce of the world's official royal palace correspondent. So I'm very excited for you to weigh in on this one. Spain's former king, King Juan Carlos, could be in legal trouble after the Spanish Supreme Court open an investigation into whether he's been engaged in money laundering. Specifically, they're trying to figure out why in 2008, a Panama-based foundation connected to King Juan Carlos

or former king received $100 million from the Saudis. And they want to see if that money was connected to a contract that had been won by Spanish companies, to build a Saudi high-speed rail project. Juan Carlos abdicated the throne to his son, King Felipe the 6th in 2014. He's been mired in scandal for years. One notable example was when this asshole was busted going fucking elephant hunting with his mistress in Botswana in the middle of the financial crisis. Spanish unemployment was at 24% when he decided to go shoot Dumbo and then he broke his hip

and they had a truck his old ass back to Spain. BBC reported that former King Juan Carlos is leaving the country to live somewhere TBD, but he says he'll help out prosecutors whenever he's asked. Yeah, I'm sure. It's been a long fall for grace for this guy. He's credited with helping steer the country towards democracy in the 70s and the 80s after the death of General Francisco Franco, Spain's brutal nationalist dictator. Ben, the New York Times points out in their cover,

it's that it's been hard out there for a royal these days. You got Prince Andrew in Britain tied up. up with Jeffrey Epstein, the former king of Belgium is in some trouble for, you know, fathering a child out of wedlock. Crazy idea for you. I don't mean to take away your livelihood. What if we didn't have kings anymore? Maybe that would be good.

Yeah, it hasn't been a great run other than, you know, the Queen of England who, you know, stands above all these other royals. But I will say, what is the function of these people anymore? I mean, it's just like, you know, I get it. symbols of national unity. That was somewhat important in pivotal moments like, yeah, transition away from Franco and Spain. But at the end of the day, then they just kind of become these kind of rich people, you know, living somewhat off the state in this kind of rarefied place. And again, there may be a place for them. I think at a minimum, there has to be a way to kind of step back and

think about, like, what is the actual value of the ex-rural family and ex-country? And it may be different in each country. I do think that the common thread, though, in a lot of spaces is corruption, right? And, you know, we're just getting a tiny glimpse of, you know, if this same scrutiny was applied to all manner of leaders around the world, like what would be discovered. And I do think for people who care about good governance, people who care about fairness and justice, corruption should be a bigger international issue in like transparency and tracking money laundering and illicit money, because you're going to find a lot more of those kind of $100 million deals than just this one with this royal. So the policy

that I'd like to see in addition to kind of all these countries stepping back and considering, do we need the king or queen? And if we do, like, what are they actually doing? Like, what is their function is more dedicated efforts to uncovering corruption schemes like this? Yeah. Hold on to your Swiss bank accounts, boys. We're coming for you. Let's talk about schools internationally for a minute because the UN Secretary General warned that the world is facing a, quote, generational catastrophe in the largest disruption of education ever due to the coronavirus. According to UNESCO data, more than a billion students in more than 160 countries are impacted by school closures. I know this is near and dear. Do you Ben personally? Some examples from our

hemisphere. So on Sunday, Bolivia canceled their school year entirely because it's unsafe to students in classrooms and it's impossible to pivot to distance learning in a country where rural areas have no internet access. So that's an example of how. you know, disadvantaged countries are getting hurt disproportionately by this virus. 30 million students in Mexico are going to start the year with remote classes. Many of them will have to get instructions from television, like special programming on TV because they don't have the internet or radio in more rural places. Another interesting story out of Israel.

Israel tried to go back to in-person classes and it was just a disaster. The New York Times had a piece of they detailed how an outbreak at one Israeli high school mushroomed and led to hundreds of new COVID cases among teachers, parents, other relatives. The Israeli officials say the lesson is that even if COVID seems under control, you still need, like, everyone wearing a mask, social distancing, like ventilation squared away to make it work. You know, these are agonizing decisions for these schools, for these parents and government. And I understand, you know, where the Secretary General is coming from on this argument about education just being lost for kids for a year. But, you know, the Israeli example is instructive.

They had 100 new infections a day when they reopened, and they still couldn't keep things under control. We're the richest country in the world. We have 60,000 new cases a day. People won't commit to wearing masks. So I just like, I don't know how anyone is going to solve this problem if we fail to do so. Yeah. And look, I think, you know, not an infectious disease expert, I am a parent.

And I have lived with the experience that schools are like petri dishes for spreading all manner of germs. So they're in close proximity. They're touching each other. So even if kids don't get as sick as older people do from COVID, I think, you know, the more we learn about this virus, they can get it and carry it. And, you know, the Israel experience demonstrates that it can contribute to a much more rapid spread of the disease. I think, you know, one that suggests needing to be very cautious about reopening schools and airing on the side of of not if you don't have any confidence that you can control the spread. But then secondly, I think it raises the issue that we've been so focused on basically how do you weather the

onslaught of COVID and how do you get to a vaccine. They're all manner of other public policy issues that are going to be playing out for years, right, in terms of what happens if you lose a school year? Like, you know, we're talking about most of the world, Zoom learning is not an option in places where people are dealing with extreme poverty, right? And so how do you make up for that education gap? And how do you account for the fact that people are losing a half a year or a year of schooling? What is the mental health impact on children from having this level of disruption in their lives? These are all questions that we're just beginning to wrestle with.

And I think it shows that even if in the best case scenario, we get a vaccine and things can kind of begin to resume at some point next calendar year, there's going to be a tail to COVID in the education space, in the mental health space, and obviously in the economic space that is going to shape the next three to five years of public policy for the U.S. and the world. And better that we kind of share best practices and learn from one another around the world, then we're all dealing with these kinds of things in isolation. Right now, we're all dealing with these things in isolation as countries because there's nobody trying to lead a global response.

I hope that we can get to a place where we're thinking. thinking in a more cooperative manner about what's working with kids, what's working with mental health effects, and what kind of public policies can be replicated in different parts of the world. Yeah. Another issue that's going to have a long tail is climate change. So quick note out of Bangladesh. So there have been a normally heavy rains in Bangladesh that have flooded at least one-fourth of the country. According to New York Times, an estimated 24 to 37 percent of the country is submerged in a million homes are submerged. It's part of a recent pattern of more severe rains, more frequent flooding that experts believe is tied to climate change.

You know, this report is important because it makes the connection that those least responsible for carbon emissions are among those being hurt most by the consequences. It cites one analysis that found the world's richest 10% are responsible for 40% of total environmental damage, including climate change. And that climate change had reduced incomes in the world's poorest countries by 17 to 30%. countries impacted by climate change or severe weather events are now deeper in debt because they have to take on loans to pay that off. So, Ben, I know the Paris Climate Accord was supposed to provide $100 billion in aid for some of these countries that hasn't materialized. I know this inequity was a big part of those Paris negotiations. Are there good ideas out there for like how to remedy this injustice or help mitigate countries like Bangladesh that have absolutely no way of paying

for what's happening to them? Yeah. And, you know, first of all, this is a common thread. individuals in the U.S., and there was a good story in the Times magazine this weekend about how black people in this country are much greater risk of negative environmental effects because they are, you know, because of their economic status and because of other kind of housing segregation, living in more dangerous areas, that same dynamic is played out around the world, where the poorer you are and the browner you are, the more likely you are to face the effects of extreme weather events because of either your own lack of infrastructure, your lack of capacity to deal with it. Most extremely, you've got Pacific Island states that had nothing to do with

the problem of climate change who could disappear because of it. You mentioned the Paris Accord. There was supposed to raise this $100 billion as a beginning of an effort to provide a fund to help mitigate the effects of climate change for poor countries and help them transition to renewable energy quicker. You know, we, the Obama administration started to make good on the U.S. pledge, Trump has given zero dollars to the green climate fund. He's zeroed it out. And when the U.S. does that, other countries are let off the hook. I mean, normally what would be happening is the U.S. would be contributing to that and then going around the world and leveraging our commitment to get other countries to do more. So I think a starting place is you just have to recapitalize that

effort. And you just have to have a major international effort to contribute to funds that help mitigate the effects of climate change. And by the way, this is basic fairness on the one hand, the richer countries that created the problem have, I think, a moral responsibility to do this. But they also have a practical interest in doing it. One, because if you have a collection of failed states, that's going to lead to the kind of migration and refugee flows that Western countries end up complaining about and then end up destabilizing our politics, right? Better to try to get ahead of that. But two, because if we want poor countries to develop in a cleaner way to give us a fighting chance of dealing with climate change, then you're going to have

to help them do that. The money's not just going to appear. And this just shouldn't be for governments alone. I think that the private businesses and philanthropy that is focused on climate, and that's a growing field, needs to focus on this as well. It can't be something that is secondary to, you know, transitioning to the U.S. economy because this is going to keep happening again and again and again. And I cannot stress enough, like you can't separate out. There are 80 million displaced people in the world right now. The largest number of displaced people that we've ever had recorded, ever. And people don't like that. People don't like, you know, refugees coming to Europe. Okay. Well, you got to do something about it then because they're going to be 180 million people displaced

soon enough if we don't try to mitigate these effects. Yeah, agreed. A couple quick updates out of Afghanistan. So the first is that there were at least 29 people dead, 49 wounded after an 18-hour assault by ISIS fighters on a prison in eastern Afghanistan. In the process, hundreds of prisoners escaped. The second is that on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did a video call with Mullaburator, who's the Taliban second in command. It's their second call, I believe, in four weeks. Presumably, this is an attempt to jumpstart the stalled peace talks. I wanted to combine these two news items because Afghan officials argue that these ISIS attacks and Taliban attacks are actually connected that they're helping each other, like the one on this prison.

U.S. intelligence officials say there's no evidence to back up that claim. But clearly, like, Afghan government officials and probably, logically, a lot of the public think it's true, which makes it dicey for Pompeo to keep FaceTiming his, like, Taliban buddies. Even stranger, like 24 hours later, the State Department had not released a readout of Pompeo's call. And I just cannot fathom or stress enough how dumb it is to let the Taliban frame the coverage of your phone call with the U.S. Secretary of State. So, you know, Ben, we want these negotiations to work. What do you make of this strategy? I am at a loss here.

I don't know. I don't get it. Well, I've been doing this a lot less frequently on the pod, but I do want to just surmise, speculate, what a member of the House of Representatives Mike Pompeo would have been saying if the Secretary of State in the Obama administration was like FaceTiming the Taliban on a regular basis, not reading it out and cutting out the African government. I mean, the hypocrisy knows no bounds, right? But I think more fundamentally, this is the problem with their whole policy, which is it seems to sideline the Afghan government and the Afghan people in their effort to resolve the conflict.

Is the Taliban dealing with ISIS? I mean, why wouldn't they be? I mean, just because you want troops out of Afghanistan doesn't mean that the Taliban are suddenly good guys. Like these collectively are people who've carried out scores of suicide bombings, shot up maternity wards. They'll do anything to achieve their ends. And I think that the point is that the center of our policy in Afghanistan has to be dialogue with the elected government of Afghanistan, who have security forces that we've trained that are fighting the Taliban, and Afghan civil society that we've invested a lot of time and money in over the years as well. And what's so bizarre about this policy is there's this kind of rush.

to kind of do an end run around them directly to the Taliban. And that's clearly not working. I mean, it might have been worth testing that proposition, but that proposition has not borne out. Yeah, that's what I don't get. Yeah, never mind the fact that it's been months. Yeah, it's been months. And Tommy, what is to show for this peace deal? Like, what can we say is to show for it? I mean, the only thing you could say that there is to show for it is reduced Taliban attacks on U.S. forces. But if your policy objective is to get the Taliban. and the Afghan government to talk and forge a peace agreement so that we can fully get out. Zero progress has been made on that.

But by the way, in this Trump did an interview with Jonathan Swan from Axios for their HBO show. And, you know, there's been a lot of, you guys should watch it. Swan did a good job because he asked basic follow-up questions. Like when Trump said, people say you can test for the coronavirus too much, Swan asked, asked, who says that? When he said, when Trump replies, read the manuals, read the books. Swan's like, what books are you talking about? So we did a good job, but it's also like basic.

Don't let the guy fucking bully you. But again, Swan pushed him on the Russia bounty story and whether they were paying Taliban like militants to kill the U.S. troops and whether he'd raised the issue in a recent call with Putin. Trump said no, they didn't talk about it. He again lied and said the intelligence never reached his desk. And then he also said that he wanted to get down to 4,000 to 5,000 troops left in the country on election day.

So like everything the Republicans used to accuse us of doing signaling. a withdrawal timeline, right, not being conditions-based, et cetera, is exactly what this policy is, but you just, you don't hear the chorus of doomsday Republican voices like Mike Pompeo or Lindsay Graham that you heard every time Obama tried to end a war. Yeah. And, you know, and doing it on the timeline of election day, look, what military timeline has election day on it? You know, like, General Eisenhower, like, didn't have election day as the day for D-Day here, you know. And I think that the overarching tragedy of this is the Afghan people themselves who've just been totally screwed over time and again. And everything we should be trying to do in winding down

our military involvement in that country should be about giving them the best fighting chance to have a future. And that effort is not going to run via FaceTime calls with the Taliban. That's got to come through conversations with the Afghan government and Afghan civil society. And I just really want to see that as the basis of policy if there's a Biden administration. Last thing for the show today. So last week we talked about TikTok, the insanely popular short form video app that has raised privacy concerns because it's owned by a Chinese company. Last week, Trump said he was going to ban TikTok before he then said he would give Microsoft until September 15th to buy the company from ByteDance, the Chinese parent company. So in a fun little corrupt authoritarian twist, he also demanded that the U.S. government get a cut of the sale.

I don't think there's any legal mechanism to actually do that. But like, okay. Ben, you know, like we talked about this last week, a lot of people, smart people are making the case that banning TikTok is dumb, that we should regulate them instead. Others say hell no. China bans Twitter and Facebook. So why should we give them market access? This is a basic fairness question. I don't know how this is going to play out. It does seem to be pissing off a lot of young people. really hope they will channel that outrage into registering voters and getting their friends involved in politics. But who knows? We'll see. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting about like forcing a sale is it does kind of foreshadow this world where there's this kind of bifurcated technology, like half the world is using American-owned technology and the other half is using Chinese-owned technology, maybe some, you know, European pockets somewhere within there. And so that's, you know, that's one way this could go. But,

that feels like incredibly disruptive to a lot of countries and obviously disruptive, you know, even just for social media platforms that people use here like TikTok. And again, it's just like there's no thought being put into this policy. It's like Trump doesn't like China and doesn't like TikTok. So it's like, oh, we'll ban TikTok. Like that seems to be the thinking here, you know, not like it should start from, okay, what are the concerns about TikTok? Like articulate those. What is it that you're seeking to? Have we gotten any explanation, by the way, of why we're banning TikTok? You know, I mean, if there's, maybe there's a good reason, but nobody's told it to us, you know? So it's left to us to guess, you know, like, well, is it data concerns? Is it back doors?

Like, we don't even know what the concerns are. So it just feels totally ad hoc, right? And that's what's missing is like a methodical approach to like, what are the vulnerabilities? what are we what can we not live with in terms of vulnerabilities of chinese own technology and how do we address those vulnerabilities and that's not what this process is at all um and yeah the tic-tock stands should make their displeasure known um and hopefully through like not just funny videos but through organization um funny videos are great by the way but through organization and and and you know getting people to vote if you're even if you're not old enough to vote that doesn't mean you can't do that uh on your own time yeah agreed

That's all we got for today. I got a new recommendation for the world is out there. I'm reading Robert Draper's new book on how the Iraq War came to be, came to be sold. That's about as far I am. It's fantastic. I highly recommend it. I can't remember the name. But it's really good.

It's called to start a war. To start a war. And same thing. I'm looking at it. And I talked to Draper Fort. He was not the obvious choice to go back. examine that, but I think when you do, you'll realize how much the Iraq war and the way that it was sold and the false pretenses has a lot to do with where we ended up today. I mean, obviously,

foreign policy-wise, it can massively destabilize the Middle East and took a lot of lives in Iraq and strengthened Iran and ultimately, you know, created ISIS as the successor at al-Qaeda in Iraq, but also just because of the distrust it sowed in people in our politics and our institutions and the news media, right? The collective failure. of government, intelligence, and the news media, which is the story that Draper tells. You know, it created some of the conditions that led to Trump because you could come along and say everybody's full of shit. And, you know, Iraq was, you know, exhibit A for why everybody was full of shit. So it's worth revisiting.

We've had a tough run since Watergate to today. Yeah, yeah. You've seen better days. All right, that's it for today. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We'll talk you next week. Thanks. POTS of the World is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller.

POTSave the World is mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our amazing digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmel Kohn, Narmelkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes and videos every week.