Pod Save the World - How to handle the Biden docs

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Tommy and Ben discuss the Davos summit, the latest round of Biden documents, the U.K. blocking a Scottish law that would make gender change easier, more Russian attacks in Ukraine, the new climate spotlight on the UAE, protests in Israel, China’s population on the decline, and Italy’s biggest mob boss finally getting caught.  Then, Tommy is joined by The New York Times Brazil bureau chief Jack Nicas to discuss the fallout from the riots, the comparison to January 6th, and what it all means for Brazil’s new president Lula. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, happy Davos week. I look forward to every year. I got you a drunken conversation with a venture capitalist about Web 3. You know, Davos is like the least self-aware gathering of human beings, I think, imaginable. Like, you know, you just, we're living in a massive multi-year backlash to the elitism of globalization. and that's not apparently on their minds as Kristen Sinema and Joe Mansion decamped at Davos to gloat about their, you know, obstructionism.

Headline they just went around at Davos, Cinema and Mansion, high five over keeping filibuster rule. That sounds about right. Yeah. Three cheers for norms. Well, we're not in Davos. We're not on a mountaintop. We have a great show for you guys today. We're going to cover the growing controversy about Joe Biden's handling of classified documents,

a fight between the UK and Scottish governments over gender identity and sovereignty. Ukraine, the UAE and climate change protests over changes to Israel's judicial system or proposed changes at this point. The Italian mobben demographic changes and war protests in China and the blue check mark Taliban. Very fun. That's very of the times that list topics. And then you guys will hear me talk with the New York Times Bureau Chief Jack about the insurrection in Brazil, effort to see accountability and the connection to the U.S.

far right and what comes next. Very smart guy. Yes. Good to get that on the ground perspective. Yeah. There's a great episode of The Daily that featured Jack where he ends up getting a ride from one of the insurrectionists as they're trying to evade law enforcement, which is pretty cool. Yes.

A very foreign correspondent move. Yeah. In another life, that'd be a very cool thing to be. Yeah, I could have seen you doing that. I know. I kind of long for it. Just being like some, some, like a stringer. Bibulus, that's one of my favorite words. And my uncle used, my actual journalist uncle used many years ago, which is just constantly drunk, correspondent in some place in Singapore or something. You'd want to be kind of off grid. Yeah, you'd want to be like in Southeast Asia or something. Yeah, you'd be like sort of a character from a novel. Anyway, so Ben, why don't we start with these Biden documents? Dispatch that one.

Yeah, I think we're going to have to. We kind of have to talk about it. So it's gotten messier. It's gotten more complicated for the White House since last week when we talked. Just to catch people up, they were classified documents discovered in Biden's office at the Penn Biden Center that's in Washington on November 2nd of last year that were found by Biden's lawyers. Those lawyers called the National Archives. They began the process of transferring those documents over soon after the National Archives Inspector General called the Department of Justice to say, hey, this went down. That was public when we talked last week. Since then, we've learned that on December 20th, President Biden's lawyers found more classified records in his garage in Wilmington, Delaware. And then on January 11th, the lawyers found additional classified material in another room in Biden's Wilmington House. I think it was like adjacent to the garage. News reports say that the total number of documents is about 20, 10 at the Penn Biden Center, 10 at the residence. Sounds like one of them was marked top secret. I guess the rest were just like secret level. Last Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel.

named Robert Hur to investigate all of this. So it's going to be a huge pain in the ass. Yes, we'll be living with this for two years. Yeah, and we'll be living with Republican demands for, like, more details about the documents. They want the records to who visited Joe Biden's home in Delaware. So, Ben, again, I sincerely believe the facts are very different here. It's different than Mar-a-Lago. They're far fewer documents.

They sound like so far to be less sensitive. the Biden team notified the National Archives as opposed to fighting it and lying about what they had. But unfortunately, all these weird twists and turns that I tried to tick through in a succinct way are going to make telling that story much more difficult. I'm sure you and I both worked in communications offices at the White House. Sometimes you are left out of decisions and things that are happening in ways that are supposedly to protect you or to protect the sanctity of some process. But in the long run, just fuck everything up.

I think that's kind of what happened here. I bet the press office is tearing their hair out about the fact that this story kind of like dripped out in pieces as opposed to just like dumping it all all at once and getting the story out in one shot. And anything that intersects with a DOJ investigation is just like extra complicated because you feel so constrained. But stepping back, how worried are you or do you think the White House is about this special counsel? being named in particular. Well, I think let's break this into two pieces. Please.

One is the substance of these documents and the special counsel investigation. Then the other is a strategy for how you deal with communications and oversight, right? Yeah. Because they're related, but they're a bit different. Because you and I nailed that Benghazi thing and we put it to bed in like a week. Yeah. So we'll get to that in the second part of the company. We can tell you what not to do.

Let's just like kind of look at what happened, what's a problem and what's different than the Trump situation, right? it's a problem that there were 20 or however many documents that were classified that were at the Penn Biden Center, at the residence, you know, for the same reasons we talked about with Trump. There's a reason why they create facilities for the express purpose of storing classified documents, et cetera, et cetera. So there's not vulnerabilities so that people can't get their hands on it so that there's good recordkeeping. So clearly there was some mistake in how these documents wound up where they did. Now, the differences are, with Trump, there seem to be real intent to take classified documents.

Yeah, based on his own words. Based on his own words. And based on the fact that he was asked to return the documents and he didn't. He lied about the documents that he had said he'd returned and he hadn't. The reports suggest these are a very sense of documents and there are a lot more of them. So both in terms of the intent to take documents, the types of documents and obstructing the return of those documents at the archives, what Trump did is qualitatively different than what we know so far about what happened here with Biden's documents. By the way, we don't even know whether or not Joe Biden knew that these

documents were in his residence or in his office. But we don't know. I mean, so we should be, you know, like what is the special counsel looking at? I think what are the documents? Did Biden know that these documents left the White House or the vice president's residence? did how did that happen, you know, that's something that the special counsel should look at, right? And so that's it. And it's probably, by all appearances, like just a record keeping screw up that is deeply unfortunate and not an effort to kind of subvert the whole system of classification. Part of what was wrong with what Trump did is that he was making a mockery of the whole system. He's basically like, I get to say that, you know, these are declassified after the fact. I get to keep what I want to keep.

By mental decree, yeah. Biden's not saying any of those things. He's not saying I deserve these documents because I was once vice president. And now he's president. He has clearances, but he's still returning the documents. Presumably, Joe Biden could just say, like, I declassify these things right now, so there is no problem. Yeah, yeah.

He has a security clearance. He could use the same idiotic. He's in this world of norms and laws and respect for the system and Trump's not. That's the difference. We all know that's the difference. Yep, yep. We all know politics is going to act like there's no difference that they, both have classified documents. So that gets to the response, right? And to your point, like,

it's very clear to me, and I have a lot of sympathy with the people on the communications team, that they were not dealing with like a full set of facts in some of their initial statements. And whenever there's a discrepancy between what you say at a podium or a statement from the White House press office and then something else comes out, like that creates a problem because people want to exploit that gap. We also know where the Republicans are going to take this? They're going to take this as far as they can possibly go. And this is like the Benghazi example,

where what began as an investigation into the tragic attack in Benghazi became somehow about Hillary Clinton's email server. They want to find the Hillary Clinton's email server of this quote-unquote scandal. So they want the visitor logs, every single human being that ever went to the Penn Biden Center or to Joe Biden's house. They want to connect this to their Hunter Biden thing. They want to connect this to China somehow, I'm sure,

like all of their fever dream conspiracy theories and even crazed the Republican Party today than Benghazi is going to take advantage of any impropriety, any gap between what the statements are and what the fact pattern is to justify a two-year investigation, essentially. Or to discredit any effort to prosecute Trump because they'll say, hey, you can't possibly prosecute Trump, for having classified documents if Joe Biden also had them, even if there are all the differences

we just spoke about. Yeah. The good news is it sounds like Bob Bauer, who's a brilliant lawyer that we both worked with back in the Obama days, is now in charge of all of this. He's like one of the smartest people I've worked with. There is no evidence that there was gross negligence. I'm sure they'll figure it out and find that. The frustrating thing is going to be it's so, the press is going to say, of course,

we know the facts are totally different, but politically it doesn't matter, you know, because I think that they feel some pressure from the right to both sides this. It's an easy thing to say. But that kind of like flattening of these issues where all of a sudden you take out the facts and the context and just act like it isn't relevant because politics is dumb is like I think the opposite of what a journalist should do. And it's going to make us all crazy. It's not great that the Trump special counsel investing in all of this is sort of a nonpartisan guy and the guy put in charge of Biden's investigation is like a Rehnquist clerk and a Trump nominee. Interesting choice. Yeah. That's a bummer. I guess one other met a lesson from Benghazi, from the Obamirs, et cetera. And I think we touched on this earlier when we were talking about oversight, but it bears repeating. If I could do anything different, well, I wasn't in charge of everything.

But like if we could have done something different in retrospect, you alluded to before, like, if you did nothing wrong, which I, I, my, maybe it's my bias to assume they did nothing wrong, you know, we'll have to see. get everything out. Like when you have the information together, just put it out, right? Because what the Republicans are good at is hacking the media's affinity for the drama of drip, drip, drip, drip revelation, document fights, fights over witnesses. I remember early in the Benghazi thing, there was a surveillance video of the night of the attack. Yeah. And some people wanted to just play this video because it showed this how chaotic the scene was. You know, the fog of war.

Right. It showed that this wasn't like an organized military moving in, assaulting a compound. There were guys, I think there was a guy like picking up like maple syrup or something. Like there's just like. Yeah, like Xboxes or something. Yeah. The point being that, but put that aside even just that. The point is that like putting everything out would have been like this was a horrible, tragic thing.

it took us some time to piece together what happened here. Clearly, this facility should have been more secured, and that was a problem that needed to be dealt with. But the point is that by stretching the investigation out for years, because of the drama of document requests and fights and back and forth, it allowed them to treat any new turn of the story as some dramatic thing, even though it wasn't. Or factual errors are all treated as lies and purposeful lies.

Well, yeah, yeah. And so here I just think that like they should not allow this to become the same drama of like a two year. If two years from now or a year not from now, there's still like documents being squeezed out of the White House related to, you know, how they responded the last few weeks. That's that's a loss for them. Like I get all your shit together. And look, this is harder because there's a special counsel. So you have to cooperate with the special counsel too. but there's going to be oversight.

Whatever, man. Just like get your story straight and then get it out because you don't want to be living in this constant drip, drip, drip of revelation where the Republicans hack the media's desire to create the appearance of both sides said something wrong or the appearance of a dramatic like Watergate style investigation of what is probably somebody packed some documents in the wrong box. Yeah. And it seems like what the White House is going to do now is. any questions about this investigation that could ask to the White House Press Secretary at a briefing are going to get referred to DOJ or refer to the counsel's office. That's probably right and necessary. But I do think it's a mistake when lawyers, higher-ups, people in charge cut out the communication staff, not to be mean, but like because they want to keep something close hold because they worry about leaks, that always burns you in the end. You know, it's like, like, press people usually don't leak things for the same reason that janitors don't throw shit on the ground.

Yeah. Then you have to clean it up. They're the ones that suffer the most from it. I mean, look, you and I both suffered greatly because of Benghazi, like, which we didn't want to do because. So I think that the, you could not be more right. And you could feel it from the outside that the, that there are communications people who have to, and this is something that is also missed. by lawyers sometimes or, you know, people that don't have to face the music every day. If you are in the press office or you're the press secretary, you don't have a choice to not

be asked questions. And you have to provide answers. And you either have to say, I just don't have the answer for you. I'll get it for you when I can get it. Or you have to give accurate information. And when you have kind of half the story and you don't know that the other half of the story might contradict something you say, that's when you get rationalized. around the axle. So they just need to stop that pattern, which again, I really don't think is on

the communications people. No, I don't think it's right. So that, you know, they're not, you know, inadvertently extending the story. Yes. Well, I'm sure that's the last time we'll talk about that. Yeah, let's hope so. Okay. Let's turn to the UK then. Sorry to all our non-U.S. too, we're like, why is this being fucking matter, you know? I'm sure they're reading about it, too. So on Monday, the UK government moved to block a Scottish law that would allow transgender people over the age of 16 to have the gender with which they identify legally recognized and then get issued a new birth certificate without a medical diagnosis. This is the first time that the British government has ever used this statute ever since the Scottish Parliament was created in 1999.

The Scottish First Minister, who's been on the show, by the way, Nicholas Sturgeon, called the move a full frontal attack on Scottish Parliament. She's not mince in words. The UK says this bill conflicts with laws that require people to be treated equally across Great Britain. That's our problem with it. The Scottish Parliament says, hey, this is our right to pass a lot that we want. A few thoughts on this, Ben. One, you know, I guess so much for Rishi Sunak and the new Tory government moving away from culture war issues. Nicola Sturgeon is very clear about her desire for Scottish independence. Scotland voted against independence in the 2014 referendum, but I think support has grown enormously since Brexit. I was to say pre-Brexit referendum.

Yeah, pre-Brexit referendum. There's polling now that shows a much higher sport for a Skexit, as they say. The UK Supreme Court is blocking a second referendum vote saying that Westminster would need to give consent for that. But it seems to me that Sunak and the Tories just handed the Scottish independence movement a powerful argument by jumping in and vetoing this law. Kirst Armer, the leader of the Labor Party, says he supports allowing people to declare their own gender, but it's concerns about lowering the age from 18 to 16. So we're sort of in the middle here. But this will now get litigated in the courts. So maybe there's going to be some sort of technical fix. They'll find a way to like make this work for everybody that allows the

bill to move forward. But in the short term, Ben, it just, it does seem like conservatives, even post-Borris Johnson, well, I guess he's not peaceful around, they're willing to piss off all of Scotland. It seems like Wales is not thrilled with this to get into this culture war fight. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. There's a short-termism to the way the Tory party has approached everything from the Brexit referendum on that is putting at risk literally the United Kingdom, right? And so let's pick this culture war battle. They love culture war battles. That's all the toys have really had because they don't have answers for what the post-Brexit economy of the United Kingdom is going to be,

what the kind of post-Brexit identity of the United Kingdom is going to be. They don't know how to explain to Scottish voters who voted overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union, why they kind of crashed out through a pretty hard Brexit as we detail at the time. And so by doing something that may be in the short-term political interest of being on the quote-unquote right or at least, you know, ideologically right side of this issue, they're driving a deeper wedge between England and Scotland. and just saying that we're going to block you from your referendum isn't going to address the fact that this is really getting at the idea of sovereignty. And to say that, well, you don't get to do this because we support, you know, equal laws across the UK. I don't really understand how the Scottish Parliament is empowered on some things and not others. And they come in and make this determination. Yeah, there's this Section 35 of the charter that allows, you know, Westminster to jump in.

But the Scottish Secretary's rationale was that this law could have a detrimental impact on areas reserved to Westminster, such as single-sex clubs associations and schools. So the Tory party is protecting these like all-male, old boy, single-sex clubs full of rich pricks. Yeah. So that they can tell people in Scotland that they can't decide what gender they themselves are. Like I can't imagine like a more who else gets to decide that if not for you, the individual? What a ridiculous thing to block in service of like, I don't know, name some ridiculous club that Boris Johnson are probably a member of. And it does suggest that the trans issue is going to be a culture war issue in more places, right? We've seen it in this country.

We've seen the UK. I think you'll probably see it in Europe. Conservatives are picking this fight. But you see, the one other thing I'd say about this, it's interesting politically, you mentioned Kirstarmer, is that part of what labor needs to do, they lost a bunch of voters in Scotland. Scotland used to be part of the labor base, and the Scottish National Party has been like peeling from labor support over the years. So it's a delicate dance for labor, too, where they need to win back some of those Scottish voters in national elections, even though the labor party is obviously not pro-independence for Scotland. So you feel Starmor trying to thread this needle a little bit. It's a tough one.

Yeah, it seems like, you know, there could be a Scottish, if they can get a Scottish referendum, it seems like they'd be gone. Yeah. And I think that's why you're going to see, you know, what? Westminster doing everything they can to prevent referendum from happening anytime soon. That's wild. Let's turn to Ukraine, some Ukraine-related issues. So over the weekend, there was a horrible missile barrage from the Russians that, among other targets, hit an apartment building in NEPRO, killing more than 40 civilians and

wounding dozens more. At the moment, President Zelensky and his wife actually are using appearances at Davos to continue to push for more weapons shipments and support from the international community, specifically tanks from Germany is really like the thing they're driving for right now. In neighboring Belarus, Ben, President Alexander Lukashenko's government put opposition leader, Svetlana Tikunskaia, on trial for treason. She is living in exile in Lithuania, which has been since the 2020 presidential race, when Lukashenko lost, but still declared victory.

That led to protests. And her husband has been locked into Bella Russian prison since May, I think, of 2020, when he said he would challenge Lukashenko. I also saw Ben that the Australian Open is now banning the people from holding up Russian and Belarusian flags after some guy went to a match between a Russian and Ukrainian player and held up a Russian flag just to be an asshole. So anything jump out of you? How do you have the Ukraine front this week?

Big news? Well, I mean, look, on the weapons front, the tanks are clearly where the Ukrainians are focused and they're having some success. They're kind of prying open that door to getting more tanks, and you feel the drumbeat coming from them. And so I think their interest is clearly getting as many tanks

as they can or armored vehicles as they can over the next couple months in anticipation of all these offenses that either Russian offensive or potentially Ukrainian offensive, probably in the spring, right? And that's a quick timeline to get a lot of these things,

like the timeline of when they need these weapons and when they can even be delivered is a bit of a gap. I think on Belarus, part of what jumps out to me, Tommy, is how much as Russia becomes consumed with the war in Ukraine, some of these other former Soviet republics that have been kind of pushed and pulled between the West and Russia, there's a spotlight on them. So in Belarus, for instance, Lukashenko has to know, in a way, his own fate is kind of tied to the war in Ukraine. Oh, yeah. If this war ends in humiliation for Putin or in the end of the Putin regime, he's gone, right? Some fear factor will break.

Tegan Iskaya in the Belarusian opposition, you know, in a free and fair election, I think most people think they'd win. So, you know, this kind of all or nothing existential, like treason charge, I think it's a sign from Lukashenko that he's all in. Like, his chips are all in with Putin and he knows that he's on the hook. Another place we haven't talked about recently, but you and I have kind of talked offline about a bit, is Azerbaijan. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. It has this blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is this contested region that Armenia claims and has generally controlled. They fought multiple wars over it. Russia is kind of the patron, the military backer of Armenia.

Russia hasn't been able to kind of come to their assistance. And Azerbaijan is pressing its advantage. Right. The Russians are supposed to have 2,000 peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabok as part of this 2020 peace deal that Putin brokered and frankly got a lot of credit for. And now the Azerbaijani's are like, I don't really think they're going to keep those guys there or do anything. And yeah, they're creating all these blockades and other sort of conflicts, their engineering conflicts. That's right. And so I think what does this all mean?

That the fate of a number of countries is tied up in the war in Ukraine. obviously the fate of a lot of things, but Belarus, and whether it stays pro-Pudin autocratic or goes more pro-Western and democratic, Azerbaijan and Armenia and what the balance of power is there, Moldova, a place we haven't talked about that much, but that has this kind of Russian-occupied province of Transnistria, you know, all of these places are, you know, caught up in this war. And it's just a reminder that the ripple effects from what happens in Ukraine are really going to reshape, obviously not just Ukraine itself, but Russia and a number of other countries. Yeah. The other place there have been, you know, massive ripple effects is on energy and energy

prices. So you and I on the show have talked about many these UN climate change summits, the COPS. They are these flawed but important moments where the world comes together to pressure each other to do more to reduce CO2 emissions and combat climate change. Last year, COP 27 was in Egypt, not an ideal location for human rights reasons. Later this year, COP 28 will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a country where 30% of GDP is based on oil and gas. So, complicating matters, Ben, this is a story you flagged. The UAE named a man named Sultan al-Jabere to oversee the summit. He is the special envoy for the UAE for climate change, the chairman of the state-owned

renewable energy company, and the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. It seems complicated to be CEO of an oil and gas company. John Kerry, our climate envoy, great person. Like, actually, someone really cares about this stuff. He praised this choice, said he's got this unique skill set that bridges both worlds. Look, I've never met this individual. My gut reaction was, you know, putting the cop 28 in the UAE, putting an oil and gas CEO in charge of it sounds like on its face, one of the more cynical acts of greenwashing I've ever heard of, though I guess if I step back,

The strategy of investing in green energy solutions long term while pumping as much oil and gas as possible today is kind of also what we're doing, although at a very different scale. But what do you make of this and this guy's selection as, you know, the president, I think, of COP 28 and what it says about the prospects of getting something done? It's complicated. I think there's something cynical about the whole enterprise of having this cop summit in the Emirates, right? I mean, there's a greenwashing feel to it, right? There's a world corrupt kind of vibe to like, you know, going to the belly of the beast, literally, of the global fossil fuel industry for your climate summit. The argument that Kerry would make, that he did make essentially in a statement is like, look, to solve this problem, or we're not going to solve it, but to make progress, we're going to have to enlist everybody, including. the fossil fuel industry, including the kind of cash-rich centers of the global economy like the

Emirates that are vital to a transition to different energy future, all that said, I just think it's the wrong choice to have anybody who is in charge of a fossil fuel company chairing a cop summit. You know, like, and I don't know, like you said, I don't know what's in this guy's head in heart, but even if he is in the right place, I just think there's something cynical as this has kind of shifted towards asset managers and climate finance and all the things we've talked about. Yes, you need that money to move in the direction of clean energy. Putting the same people in charge of pollution in charge of the transition, it just doesn't feel right to me. There's got to be someone else who could play that role. This person and people like him.

should be a part of the solution, a part of the summit. But if you're, how do you say to activists, hey, trust us, these people have your best interest at heart when their bottom line is driven by fossil fuels. I mean, the activists have the better argument on this one, you know, even if you assign all the best motivations to this guy, like the scientists should be in charge of this, or people that have no interest other than fighting climate change should be the people who are in charge of things like these summits. Yeah, I mean, I think the UAE has undoubtedly done a good job of diversifying its economy generally away from just oil and gas, like way better than Saudi Arabia.

Better than Saudis, yeah. But that doesn't mean they're investing that much of their oil and gas profits into clean tech. No, relative to what needs to be happening, it's not even close, right? Or compared to the IRA, you know, the U.S. commitment. Yes, yeah. And so, again, like, you know, better is not good enough, you know, on this issue. on a lot of issues you might accept it. And so I do think that having a spotlight on this,

and look, use it to hold their feet to the fire. Like use it to get, you know, not unlike what people tried to do, activists tried to do around human rights in Qatar, but like, you know, the spotlight on the UE should make the gulf, and this is not to single them out because it should be the case anywhere.

It should make them uncomfortable. They should feel like they have to do more than they're doing to get through the exercise of hosting this summit. Yeah, especially because, You know, it's going to be, once again, a very difficult location for activists to go to, get access to, and to actually protest. Yeah. I mean, the back-to-back of Egypt, like, look, and there's some, there's cases for both. Like, Egypt could, it was an African country that did spotlight, like the grievances of people already suffering climate change. The loss and damage financing.

The Gulf needs to be somehow a part of this solution. I get it. But, like, you know, let's not, this is not something. something to be cynical about, you know. Yeah, the dude who is going to be running the show, I think, is pumping like, you know, a couple million barrels of oil a day, month? Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't want the CEO of ExxonMobil to be chairing cop in the U.S. You know? No. No.

Speaking of Saudi Arabia, do you see all these reports that they had purchased the WWE, the Wrestling Federation? Those were later denied, but that was an interesting little wrinkle to the sports washing coming out of the Gulf. I mean, I think that the ultimate fighting and wrestling, like, there's, there's, there's been long talk that that that's the kind of prime quote unquote sport for for the Gulf to get its clause in. The other thing that came out was just how much of the live-gall tour is owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. I think there's some court document that came out that showed it was 93%

owned by the PIF or whatever it's called and thus controlled by Muhammad bin Salman. I guess that was new information. I always assumed it was 100%. I didn't know that Yeah, I don't know who the 7% share is. Yeah, but it just does mean that like tons of Saudi money is going directly to Donald Trump's pocket. Yeah. So that's great. That's great. Let's turn to Israel, Ben, because over the weekend, speaking of protests, tens of thousands of Israelis turned out to protest, B.B. Netanyahu, the new prime minister, the old but new prime minister, B.B. Netanyahu, his proposed changes to Israel's judicial system.

So Netanyahu wants to severely curtail the Supreme Court's power and the ability to review laws by allowing the Knesset to override. Supreme Court rulings with a simple majority vote, and they want to end the court's ability to revoke administrative decisions by the government. He also wants to give the Knesset control in the governing coalition, control over appointing judges. Taken together, this would basically eliminate the court's ability to provide a check on those in power. Because remember, in the Israeli system, when you put together a majority coalition in Knesset, in their parliament, the Knesset, you then control the executive branch. So there's not multiple checks. It's the people governing both and then the courts who are, you're trying to check here.

So Barack Reveed at Axios had a story with some pretty strong quotes from opposition leaders about this plan. Yair Lepid called the plan a radical regime change that will destroy Israel's democracy. Benny Gantz, former military leader turned politician, called the plan a constitutional coup and said it's, quote, time for the public to go out and rock the country. If Netanyahu continues down this path, the responsibility for the civil war in Israeli society will be his. Wow. Yeah, no, and you saw tens of thousands of protesters.

Look, I mean, first of all, we've talked a lot about authoritarianism, and one of the things that you look for as a sign of where a country is on that spectrum between democracy and authoritarianism is, are there power grabs for like the sake of power grabs? And this is one of those things, right? I mean, this is an effort to dramatically change the power structure in Israel. If you're essentially saying that a simple majority, i.e., the governing coalition, can overrule the Supreme Court on anything, then the Supreme Court is fundamentally neutered. They're just this kind of administrative body that you have a simple majority without checks and balances, you know. And so clearly that's the aim here. And within the Netanyahu coalition, everybody could get a little bit of what they want, right, because some of these ultra-Orthodox or ultra-Nableness. Nationalist parties can pass laws that might not pass muster with the Supreme Court and ran them through.

Someone like Netanyahu can claim powers or he can claim that the crimes that he's supposed to be being prosecuted for right now are no longer crimes. He can he can basically make himself above the wall, right? Yeah, that's a big one. Which is one key incentive here. And I think what does it really add up to too? If you look at Netanyahu's political project over the years, and this is why I think it's not too extreme what Lapid and Gans are saying. about the future of Israeli democracy being at stake, he's basically trying to splinter, divide, and demoralize his opposition, right? And so making the left feel like it's not worth it,

you're going to lose, making some of the Arab parties that vote with the center left and the left feel like, hey, you shouldn't even, it's not even worth engaging Israeli politics because it's moving so far to the right. You guys are kind of on the outside anyway. Just divide and demoralize those people while really energizing the ultra-Orthodox and the ultra-nationalist and his own supporters so that if they just have that one-one-seat majority and they can hold it together, even though it's a kind of, you know, relatively divided country, they have 100% of the power. They can do whatever they want. They can annex the West Bank. They can dislodge the Palestinians. They can pass all kinds of laws around identity in Israel that turn it into a pretty hard line, you know,

non-democratic really state. And so this is kind of the ballgame. Like Netanyahu, this government, as I branded about a couple weeks ago, like, it's all out in the open now, whether it's a Palestinian issue or whether it's these issues related to how Israel's democracy works. And yeah, if he can get this done, he's removed a major check to essentially a pretty fundamentally non-democratic approach to governing. Yeah.

And by the way, I mean, the response to these quotes from people like that. like Gonson-Lapid was right-wing lawmakers called on them to be arrested for treason. Yeah. So like that's not good. I mean, I was listening to this really interesting conversation. I think it was on NPR with, it's kind of Ansel Fever as a reporter for Haretz and some of places. You're talking about how B.B. Denia who just doesn't really care about domestic policy issues. He's like, I want to like stop Iran from getting a nuke and just like be in charge of security stuff.

So he's just happy to hand over, you know, the keys to the sort of education bureau to some ultra-Orthodox person. And he's happy to let Ben Gavir try to wrestle away control of the West Bank from the IDF and from the military. And his legacy is going to be a decade ago we were talking about whether or not there could be a two-state solution. Now we're talking about whether Israel will continue to exist as a full functioning democracy. And you've got, you know, I just saw Ben that Senator Jackie Rosen, a great Democratic senator from Nevada is leading a bipartisan coalition to Israel. And she's telling the government, we will not meet with these far right members of your coalition. Yeah. Like there's going to be some splintering and support from Congress.

Yeah. I mean, I'm going to try to have a very complicated point about really sensitive issues here. Oh, this is a fun one to dance on. But so in because I used to think the same thing about Nenio. Like he's just Mr. Security guy. Like he wants to talk about Iran. Maybe he wants to just be a hard ass of the Palestinians and he doesn't care about these domestic issues. But first of all, I don't think that matters at all because what matters is what the outcome is.

Overshod. And no, but where I was going to kind of dance into a minefield here, early in the Obama years, I remember in 2009, we started to get pressed for the U.S. to kind of more formally kind of recognize Israel as a Jewish state. And that may seem like weird to people. Of course, it's a Jewish state. Well, actually, the way Israel was set up is it was the Jewish state. it was avowedly also like also a secular democracy. It was both things at the same time, right? And it's been under this long return of Nanyahu that that balances really begin to tilt. And what began as, hey, just, you know, recognition as a Jewish state, that kind of evolved over time into like

stricter nationality laws and more restrictions on Palestinians. And so the security issues, particularly around the Palestinians, started to blend with kind of more identity issues. What is Israel? Is it a democracy first or like a Jewish state with different categories for different citizens first, right? And now, as we talked about, you even see a definition from some of these people in the coalition, Nanyas Coalition, to even define what Jewish is, you know. if you're like a reform Jew in the United States, you're not, you know, equally Jewish as others, as Orthodox. And so to me, I think it's too easy to say Netanyahu's only interested in Iran and because like he's changing Israel into something different than what it used to be. Yeah, that's fair.

In service of his security agenda, maybe. Or service of staying in power. And it's, yeah. Exactly. And at a certain point, like, who cares like whether he cares more about Iran? like the practical impact of what he's doing is transforming Israel. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

I think the point that this reporter was trying to make. Great guy. Really interesting. You and I are still standing fresh air. Is that? Oh, absolutely. I'm still listening to Fresh Air, man. It's a great conversation.

So I'm not disagreeing with him. I'm just saying that that almost undervalues how much Nanya is changing Israel. No, that's right. It's right. I guess the sort of the bizarreness of it, of the observation was just like, how much power he's willing to give over to even like the craziest people in the coalition in his country, like literally former terrorists in service of him being in power and him like keeping rain over these, what he thinks are the big things like Iran. And the irony about it is over the last 15 years, what has he really done on Iran? Not much.

He's not gone to war with Iran. He's basically just tried to get the United States to go to war with Iran or to sanction Iran. The real legacy of what BB's last 15 years in power can be seen much more. in Israel than on his Iran policy. Right. Or, well, I guess, helping unravel the JCPOA and convincing Trump to do it. Yeah. It would be the one thing.

Interesting episode for Supreme Court stands because you got, you know, the Israeli effort to essentially gut the power of their Supreme Court. Later in the interview, I do about Brazil. You'll hear about the unbelievable power of the Supreme Court in Brazil has to censor the Internet to basically take a governor of a state and throw them in the penalty box for 90 days. It's remarkable. So, Ben, a couple of quick things on China. So the Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, she's meeting with a senior Chinese official named Lujah in Zurich this week.

They're expected to talk about, like, technology, trade, Taiwan, all the things you'd expect. So Wall Street Journal reported that Yellen and Secretary of State Tony Blinken are both planning trips to China in the near future. I just saw Politico said Tony is going February 5th and 6th. So that does seem like a good sign that China is moving away from like the diplomatic silent treatment that it put in place after Pelosi's trip to Taiwan. Yeah. And, you know, whatever differences we have with China, like given the enormity of these issues and the sensitivities of things like Taiwan, we should be talking a lot. Like, you know, the fact that we're disagreeing is all the more reason to talk. So there's not miscalculation.

So nobody makes a mistake so that you're able to reduce tension. So that's a good sign. Very good sign. The other interesting thing I saw was we talked a lot about zero COVID and the protests in response to it. The New York Times said a piece about how the abrupt reversal of the zero COVID policy has led to mass protests by pandemic control workers who got laid off or had their wages withheld. Basically what happened to the Chinese government stopped testing. They gave up on testing, you know, a billion plus people a couple times a week, if not every day. So the factories that manufacture those tests, the workers that administer them are just being laid.

off. They have nothing to do. They cite a report that suggested that mass testing in cities accounted for 1.3% of China's economic output last year. That was like how massive it was. These layoffs also come as the broader economy struggling consumers and workers who are locked down are now sick. I guess it could be a temporary problem, like once COVID rips through the country and people have immunity. But it is just, I think, remarkable to see big, violent protests again in China, a place where we're, I think, conditioned to expect that doesn't really happen very often. Yeah, I think first it shows like how incompetent.

These were foreseeable problems. You know, we've talked about that they should have foreseen the strain on their health system from inevitably opening up and so she should prepare for the surging cases and they didn't seem to do that. This is another one. Like if you create a whole kind of temporary economy around testing

in a controlled economy, you should be planning to unwind that. It's very striking to me the kind of veneer of competence around the country. communist parties taking a big hit here because they somehow, despite the fact that these are incredibly predictable problems, they didn't use the couple of years, or almost three years of zero COVID, to prepare for unwinding it from the health system to this. Or to get everybody boosted even. They didn't even get like senior. Like apparently the Chinese vaccine need three doses because it just was different technology. A lot of seniors don't have the third. Well, because the

other thing that this demonstrates too, though, is it like individual Chinese, they'll give up a lot to the government. But they are reaching breaking points in lots of different areas, you know. And it's a hopeful thing in a weird way that there's not mind control in China. Like, people are pissed. And we're learning that they're pissed. Yeah. Last thing was in 2022, China's population dipped for the first time since 1961.

I think this is largely, you know, kind of the beginning of a pretty significant demographic change and challenge that dates back to the One China policy. I'm sure death- One-China. What I say? One-Chile policy. Thank you. I'm sure it also, COVID probably plays a role in there as well. But interesting, you know, there's now projections that India will overtake China pretty soon in terms of population.

And this is a huge issue for them, because first of all, as you get higher standards of living and people living longer and then lower birth rates, that means how are they going to support the safety net? for those older people with less workers, right? So you're going to have a situation where growth is going to slow down at the precise time that you need to be generating more to support an aging population. So they could run into real problems, societal problems and economic problems. And it also ties to what we're saying because since relaxing the one-child policy,

they've been trying to get more people to have more kids and people aren't doing it. If you read any one of these stories about this, too, there's always somebody saying like, I'm, you know, Xi Jinping, it's patriotic now to have kids. Right. And they can't make people do things that they don't want them to do when it's that personal, right? Yeah. So it's another sign that the party doesn't have this kind of total control over the citizenry where they can just be like, okay, let's turn up the birth rate. Well, maybe people don't feel like this is the world in which they want to have a bunch of kids.

Real sign of the limits of authoritarian. Exactly. Yeah. Do you see Yelan's also going, Jenny Yelan, secretary is also going to Senegal, Zambia and South Africa. Cool trip. Get on that plane. That's actually like, it's an interesting trifecta. Zambia's been like a good news story in Africa. So Samantha Power like has been like the forefront of lifting up the new president there trying to do the right thing.

So it's always good to see U.S. attention on countries in Africa, period, but like also where there's positive openings for progress. Ben, turning to Italy. The most wanted mafia boss was arrested after. 30 years on the run. 30 years. Good for you, buddy. That's a long run. So this guy, Mateo Messina De Naro, was arrested in Sicily. He was getting cancer treatment.

He was sentenced to life in jail in absentia back in 2002 for a lot of murders that happened under his watch when he was leading La Cosa Nostra Mafia, including the torture and murder of an 11-year-old son of a member of the mob who had turned state's witness. So this guy was fucking evil. His predecessor was arrested in 90s. after 20 years on the run,

there was a great BBC rundown of this arrest and what it meant and how it's such a big symbolic victory for the Italian government because they've always been seen as incapable or unwilling to take out like the top level of the mob maybe because they're working with them.

There's some speculation that this guy was basically traded for something potentially because he's old, he's sick. You know, he's not useful anymore. Italy's current president, Sergio Matarella, had a brother who was murdered by the Kosanostra in 19. It's very personal for a lot of leaders there.

This all got me thinking, Ben, how long do you think you can make it underground? I think I had last 12 to 24 hours before having to use an ATM being tracked on my phone. I'm sure your car could track you. Yeah. Any internet use? Well, that's actually the thing, right? Is it these days, like, it's that much harder? I often, like, think to myself this question of, like, if I had to, like, make it, let's say I was in,

like had to go to like rural Alaska or something, right? And like a cabin hide out. Like how long I could make it there? Before you go insane or you just screw up? Before I go insane or screw up. I mean, I need to stockpile food. You know, like we're talking about canned goods. We're talking about rice.

Like cash. How long could you basically be somewhere by yourself underground? Like, you know, I'd get myself like a few weeks. Not 30 years. I give myself a few weeks. I need some good books, some good content. Yeah, you need some good content. Hannah got really into this show alone.

It was on, like, Hulu or Netflix or something. It was these people get dropped into the middle of the woods and you live by yourself. And they all just kind of like, they starve to death, essentially, and they get pulled out. But they also just lose their minds. But they have nothing.

They don't have, like, books. Well, this guy, I'm sure, I mean, to return to the, I mean, this guy was in Italy, I think, for a lot of this time. Yeah, you had a network. He's probably eating pasta. Like, he had a network. He's probably in pretty nice digs.

I mean. Sounds like he was maybe controlling things still. Yeah. It's a reminder of, like, how entrenched the mob is there. And also a reminder that for all like the movies where you're kind of sympathetic to some of the mocked characters, these are bad guys who do terrible things and destroy our lives. So it's good to see them rolled up. Yeah.

Speaking of bad guys who do terrible things, Twitter CEO Elon Musk, has found an exciting new source of revenue men, the Taliban. The BBC reported that Taliban officials and supporters have started using the Twitter blue feature, the pay for verification feature, to get little blue check marks, a former. Taliban official named Muhammad Jalal even thanked Elon for, quote, making Twitter great again. Donald Trump turned everybody into trolls and not even creative ones, just boring, predictable trolls. Yeah, Elon Musk's desire to, like, own, I guess, the libs or, you know, own the blue check marks is, like, he's finding, like, maybe that it wasn't a reason to spend $50 billion. This is obviously, admittedly a hilariously terrible headline for Musk. Twitter, though, has long grappled with what to do about world leaders on the platform who are newsworthy, who are bad human beings.

But like, I don't know, the Supreme Leader Varan is on there. I don't know. It does seem like a far bigger problem comes from the fact that they have gutted the staff. And that has led to firing all the people in charge of hate speech and harassment outside of North America. I will say, yeah, like for all the, I think appropriate criticisms of Twitter over the years, like, at least they were trying before. Now we're seeing what happens when there's no trying. And yeah, the Taliban just trolling. You know, did you see the new Glass Onion, The Knives Out movie?

I did. So, like, we're going to spoil this. Spoiler. Like, it almost doesn't matter, though. I've seen the director say, like, it's not meant to be like the same whodunit thing. but like basically the the bad guy at the center of it is this Ed Norton character who's like a mega billionaire richest guy in the world clearly modeled on a mixture of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg very much so like kind of blended those two guys and I think what is smart in this movie as social

commentary you know it's also light and kind of fun Daniel Craig and Janelle Monet are fun to watch but is it like some of these guys is not that smart right like like Zucker you know like they're smart about one thing. Like Zuckerberg was smart about writing this code and I guess Elon Musk was smart about like seeing around a corner on a couple of things. But that doesn't mean he knows how to run a social media company. You know what I mean? Very different problems. He's proving every day that just because he had like he did see around a corner around electric vehicles and did see a private industry coming in space probably had a lot of other smart people who built those companies for him. And now we're seeing what happens when he acts like he knows how to run geopolitics and media?

Not good. Yeah, the Twitter's problems are political and human nature and it doesn't seem like Elon's good at either of those things. A couple examples, Ben. So Twitter fired nearly everyone charged with handling trust and safety issues in all of Asia. And then in India, there's a story about how a Hindu nationalist posted about an interfaith wedding and basically drummed up all this really scary propaganda. People were calling the bride. They were calling the groom.

They were harassing their families. They're threatening to kill them, basically. And they had to call off the wedding because no one at Twitter worked there anymore. Like, no one was at home to help them, you know, get the tweet pulled down or to, like, suppress the hashtag or anything. So, like, there is real harm coming from some of these decisions. We just don't hear about it because a lot of it's happening outside the United States or at least North America. No, that's right. And I think what, like, look, here, you know, it's terrible here.

and it's, you know, further toxifying our already toxic politics. But it's going to take a year. But I think what's going to be tragic is going to, you know, the Nigerian election, sectarian tensions in, you know, ex-South East Asian country, you know, like the absence of any content moderation and the open space for anybody to drum up problems is going to really harm. people. And the degree to which Elon Musk doesn't give a shit, you know, tells you a lot about

Elon Musk. It's a real bummer. Last thing, before we get to the interview, I know that, like Donald Trump, you are a huge fan of the Miss Universe competition. That is a joke. I don't know if you saw what the one of the costumes that the contestant from El Salvador was dressed as. No, I miss us. It was an outfit inspired by the country's adoption of Bitcoin. It was a Bitcoin outfit. Bukali. Well, this, I'm glad you, yeah, I was thinking today we haven't checked in on our our favorite crypto bro dictator. Yeah, I mean, I think Bitcoin's kind of just bumping along, and I don't know when his loans will be called due. I think it seems pretty clear that there's no real adoption of Bitcoin by actual people. Yeah. Residents, citizens of El Salvador, I'm not sure if,

you know, the Bitcoin VC world has dried up and reduced the influx of potential investment to the country, but I think she did an outfit that was sort of a traced El Salvador's currency from sort of original to the U.S. dollar becoming involved to Bitcoin. Wait, is she misunir. Did she? I think she was Miss El Salvador competing for Miss Universe. I mean, my hot take on this, too, is it like, Buckely, like, there's a kind of an NBS vibe to him.

Oh, big time. Except he doesn't have trillions of dollars. No, he needs an oil well. Yeah, exactly. Like, he, what is he, he's, you know, he wants to build. this new city, just like MBS wants to build this new city that's the line, right? But what, you know, what is he got? He's got an outfit on Miss El Salvador. Yeah, he wanted to power up with a volcano. I'm reading, I think Ben Hubbard at the New York Times, his MBS biography. It's very interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, no, well, you know, Bikalia will be more like a, like a long-form story in Wired or something. Yeah. The challenge with Bikalia is he's incredibly popular still somehow. Okay. People are pissed about everybody else and else ever and they're not wrong. Yeah, they're pissed about violence and drug wars and et cetera. All right, we'll take a quick break and we'll come back. You'll hear my interview with Jack Nickas from the New York Times. He's the Brazil bureau chief down there. We're going to talk about the insurrection we saw last week.

What comes next? Lula the Silva. All of it. So stick around for that. I am excited to welcome to the show today. Jack Nickas. He is the Brazil bureau chief for the New York Times. He covers a bunch of countries in the region.

I'm incredibly excited to talk to him today. So Jack, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So you have been on the ground in Brazil spending time with people, you know, protesting the election results. You've been hanging out with people who stormed the government buildings a couple weeks ago. I just want to start there, like, and see if I can, you can help me understand the headspace that these people are in. Because, you know, look, before, I don't want to make a comparison to January 6th too early. But those individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol were part of this sort of multifaceted plan to stop the transfer of power. In the case in Brazil, the transfer had occurred.

Congress wasn't in session. It looked just sort of like, you know, violence for the sake of violence in some cases. But I'm trying to understand what the point or the goal was if there was one for these Bolsonaro supporters. I think basically that's been a central question for all of us over the past several weeks because And I think it's a mixed answer. I think for many of the people who stormed the Congress and the presidential offices and the Supreme Court, it was kind of blowing off steam in a way. I think that these people have been very angry over the past two months over an election

that they're convinced was stolen, convinced falsely of this. And I think there was a mob mentality. They saw some people going in and so they were going to go in and do it as well. But I think there are some really legitimate questions over whether or not there was some organized planning, some potential collaboration among security officials. And what we can say, what was a clear sort of objective of the protests that led to the invasion was a demand for the military to intervene in the government and some way or another overturned the election or take control and throw the current president of Lula out.

But all of this is rather incoherent. It's not well articulated. It's a bit confused. But basically, there's a desire among everyone who went into those buildings that they don't like Lula and they want Bolsonaro or something different. Yeah. So look, a lot of people, myself included immediately drew comparisons to January 6th because the imagery and the context felt so similar.

I also try, though, to check myself in these cases. when I make these comparisons because I do think like my time in Washington when I worked in the government, I found that people in D.C. tend to view the entire world through the prism of Washington, D.C., and that can lead to, you know,

myopic thinking and bad outcomes. How are you thinking about the way these two events, January 6th, and what happened on January 8th, are connected or aren't? I think it's a supernatural analogy to make. The images alone are striking and how similar they are.

I mean, these are people who are, you know, draped in their country's colors. They're stomping around the halls of power. They're filming everything they do as they mess things up. And they're all- Smart idea when you're committing crimes. Yeah. Questionable. And they're paying the consequences now.

But they and all, you know, similarly were convinced that, falsely convinced that the election was stolen and they all wanted to do something about it. And they were all inspired by, you know, a fairly similar kind of far-right. sort of populist leader in a way. And I think that it's natural for us, you know, for anyone to make these sort of connections. Now, at the same time, as you've noted, there are stark differences. And Brazil is deeply Brazilian. I mean, it's a, it's a clicheted thing to say, but there's really different things that are driving these people. These are generally different sorts of people. the right wing movement here tends to be,

the Bolsonaro movement tends to be wealthier and more educated, actually than I would say some of the Trump movement is in the U.S. And as you said, there was less of a clear goal over what they were doing. But I think that at the same time, it is a clear illustration that the same sort of, I mean, I wrote about, I call this mass delusion, you know, in my coverage.

And I really do feel like that same affliction that has been a big issue in American politics is clearly a big issue now here in Brazil and is going to be over the next several years because you have a very large portion of population that is living in a different reality. And so much so that they're willing to commit a crime and film it and thought that they were doing the right thing. Yeah. And so, I mean, in January 6th, again, there's no, there's no real question about Trump's role. he spread the election live for months. He told people to march on the Capitol. They did. He tried to go there. He reportedly even assaulted one of his Secret Service members who wouldn't go there.

Bolsonaro was in a different country. He was in Florida at the time. What do we know about his potential role in possible, you know, legal liability? So we don't have any indications at this point that he was directly involved in sort of planning per se. There's been no real reporting that suggested that he, has, you know, had an active role in organizing or coordinating or anything like that. And in fact, in the days prior, in his final days of the presidency, just before he boarded a plane for Florida on December 30th, he recorded what was essentially a farewell address to the nation.

And he said actually that he tried to overturn the election within the four lines of the constitution. He tried to use the Brazilian law and was failed. And then he suggested to his his followers, they kind of move on. He quote said, we either live in a democracy or we don't, no one wants an adventure. And this was, I think, a fairly clear indication from him that he was not going to continue to pursue, you know, some sort of pipe dream that he was going to get back in office. Yet I then went to, you know, the encampment of his supporters outside the army headquarters and they read his address a very different way. They saw all these code words in there and they were convinced that he was going to ride back in and, you know, take the reins of power before Lula took

the inauguration the next day. And though that, it's tough to lay blame on him for their confused thinking. Although, then we have to think about one reason they are deeply confused and convinced that the election was stolen because because Bolsonaro four years had a very concerted and clear and organized effort to undermine the democratic institutions in Brazil. He, you know, over and over systematically attacked the Brazilian electronic voting machines as unsafe, despite no real evidence that they were. He made it clear that he believed the left and the Supreme Court were out to rig the vote against him. And that led to a big portion of the right in Brazil, you know, ultimately convinced that when he lost, it was a stolen vote.

And now in terms of his legal liability, I think that he is in a much worse position than Trump, actually, you know, in terms of his actions ahead of these respective capital riots because of the Brazilian legal system. And so already less than a week after the riot, he was added to a federal investigation into the riots. They're now formally investigating him for incitement of a crime. and there's now discussion over whether or not he could even be arrested before being convicted as part of a preventive prison system that Brazil often uses. And so I think there's a very good chance, and I think Bolsonaro knows this, that he could end up in prison over this.

Man, Orlando sounded pretty good to him all of a sudden. I think you reference this a little bit. I mean, there is this extraordinary power that the Supreme Court has in Brazil to jail people, seen as attacking Brazilian institutions. They can censor social media networks. I think that sounds shocking to Americans, probably. Can you help explain that a little bit? Yeah, it is a huge issue, and it's, I think, going to remain a big issue now that we now see Bolsonaro's fate is in the hands in the Supreme Court and actually in almost one single Supreme Court justice who has emerged as one of the most, if not the most powerful man in Brazil. His name is Alichandri G. Morais. And he basically

has become this champion on the left as a man who is standing up to defend Brazil's democracy. And he has been an extremely aggressive judiciary power in fighting against anyone who is, you know, appearing to threaten the country's democracy. And, but in doing so, I think he has raised some serious questions over whether or not he's overstepping his and the court's authority. So as you noted, you know, I've written about the fact that he has jailed some people using this preventive prison approach. Without a trial, he and the Supreme Court convicted a sitting congressman to jail for what they said was threats against them in the Democratic institutions. He

basically did a live stream in which he did sort of make physical threats against Supreme Court justices. And he also, though, more recently has been unilaterally ordering the tech companies to block and ban people from social media, including sitting members of Congress, very prominent media personalities, prominent business executives. And as a result, this justice, Alishandhi Jumarais, has emerged as sort of like public enemy number one on the right in Brazil. And now he is in charge of the case that is investigating Bolsonaro. And so what I foresee potentially happening down the road is if Bolsonaro faces consequences for this at the hands of Jumiris, half the country will see that is completely legitimate and as a political persecution, and it will only lead to a more divided

country. Man, that seems, yeah, incredibly fraught. So what else do we know about what comes next? I mean, I saw Brazilian members of parliament have apparently been in touch with members of Congress in the United States to help sort of understand the January 6th committee and sort of how we've approached accountability. I saw, you know, the governor in charge of Brasilia where the violence occurred has been suspended. Lula seems pretty pissed.

What do you think happens next? I think, you know, there is, what we've seen with the Brazilian institutions in response to Bolsonaro in the past several months is extremely swift and decisive blowback, basically. They are showing that they are not interested whatsoever in entertaining any sort of threats against what is a fairly young democracy. And, you know, in response to Bolsonaro kind of waffling after he lost and he didn't concede for two days, all the Brazilian institutions stood together and said the election's over. And now we're seeing in response to the riot really swift consequences. I mean, the governor of the federal district that

oversaw, you know, the nation's capital and oversaw the security for the protests that turned violent, he was immediately suspended for 90 days, at least 90 days by this justice to humorize. The two security officials who were in charge of security for the protest have been arrested for potentially some sort of either criminal negligence or potential collaboration with protesters. And Bolsonaro has been put under investigation. We have a congressional, you know, already a formal congressional inquiry has been approved. And I think that and Lula and his justice minister has been very clear that they're going to, you know, pursue anyone who was involved whatsoever.

And that includes not only, you know, more than nearly 1,200 protesters now have been arrested, and now they're looking for the funders and the organizers of the protest, people who weren't even there either. So I think we're going to see a really aggressive, we already have, or I think we're going to continue to see a really aggressive approach to anyone who was connected to this whatsoever. Do you think just sort of like more broadly, I mean, you, I think explained really well how the Supreme Court's actions are controversial and have inflamed some on the right. Clearly, you know, I think leftists are probably furious that, you know, the capital was sacked.

Is there a more moderate middle and a sense of how they're reacting? Like, could this make it easier for Lula to get his agenda passed? Could it make it harder? Is there any sense? It's a good question. It's a good question. Brazilian politics are really complicated because there are like, you know, 20-some-on political parties. And there's all sorts of coalition building and alliances.

And there's something called the Centrao, which is like this big sort of center-right block that controls a lot of Congress. And I think that this riot weakens the both, you know, the right-wing movement in Bolsonaro in a way, because I think there has been clear sort of rejection of this among much of the political establishment that this has just gone way too far. And so that could strengthen Lula for sure. But I also think what is actually going to remain a threat is the strength of the Supreme Court. I think that this institution has become the most powerful institution in the country.

And I think it remains to be seen how they use that against Lula. We should remember historically, Lula was in prison three years ago, by, you know, essentially because of the federal court system. And he was only released because of a Supreme Court decision. And so this institution has tremendous power over politics. And I think we could end up seeing another, you know, another president in prison and how that affects Loula's ability to govern and get people behind him is really an open question. But I think it's going to be, you know, let's just point out

in Lula's first week, Lula on Sunday, his inauguration day stood up and said, my goal is to unify the country. And exactly one week later, exactly where he said that, we had people invading and destroying sort of these nation, these national institutions. And so I think that represents how difficult of a challenge it's going to be for him over the next four years. Yeah. I mean, boy, on top of, you know, coming out of a pandemic, on top of, you know, what people seem to think is a broader global recession, you know, in the next few months. I mean, the amazing thing about Lula is he was the most popular politician in the world.

Right. Right. Right. I remember I think Obama made a joke about it publicly when they were at some summit together. He's like, oh, look, there's a, you know, there's a guy who's way more popular than all that something like to the group. And then he went to jail and not really changed things. And that's what makes Brazilian politics interesting.

Maybe we'll send a president here to jail too. You never know. Last question for you. I am always just sort of struck by the fact that there is all this connected tissue between the right wing in the U.S. and the right wing in Brazil. There's CPAC happening down there. Steve Bannon's super focused on Brazil.

Eduardo Bolsonaro's son is always banging around weird events with the My Pillo guy and stuff. What do you make of that? Why is there such this keen interest and connection between these two right wings? It's a really good and tricky question because I think that it's, you know, when I first arrived in Brazil in 2021, it was one of my first stories was looking at these connections. And there's something there.

You know, there's something fairly substantive to some degree. But I also think there's a danger in us over playing it. I think that some of these guys, I think that the interest is relatively surface level. I think there's a language barrier that is actually an important barrier. I think that, and also I think the Brazilian right doesn't need them as much as maybe you would think. And, but you're right. I mean, kind of, but you summarized it well. There's a couple different players.

I mean, the other thing is Tucker Carlson was down here in Rio, you know, doing an interview with Bolsonaro. and he has had this kind of right-wing provocateur of this guy, Matthew Tierman, on his show, to, you know, kind of rail about Jim Marais and other stuff. And I find his attacks to be sort of misinformed and not, and to be terribly partisan. I think that it's more opportunistic than anything. I am skeptical that there's real substantive coordination and organization that maybe there's trading some notes here and there. But I think a lot of these guys are kind of flying by the sea of their pants. This is just my gut.

But I've really taken a hard look and I'm not sure there's that much of a there there. The other thing is, you know, Jason Miller is another very interested in Brazil. But again, I've spoken to Jason and Jason's down here because he really wants. his social platform get her to do well in Brazil. And it is doing well in Brazil. I don't have any indication that he's having some backdoor meetings with Bolsonaro and really giving him some Trump playbook. Because frankly, a lot of these guys do a lot of this stuff out in the open. So that's my gut and that's sort of what my reporting is suggested, but I'm also not naive enough to think that there may be something more there. No, I think you make a good point. I mean, look, at the end of the

day, the shameless lying in nationalism is not a very complicated playbook. It's about one page. I mean, just a quick follow up on that. I mean, I know that Biden announced or invited Lula to come to Washington, I think at the end of February, maybe. Do you think that, does that benefit Lula? Does he want to do that? Does he want to sort of show more connections with the U.S.? Yeah, I don't see why not. I think that Lula has been critical of U.S. foreign policy in the past and the far left here is critical of the U.S. But he's so popular with his base, I just don't. I think it only serves to benefit him to show that he is a world leader.

I think for many, many years in Brazil, the goal, there's been a real desire for Brazil to be on the world stage and to be a world player and influential player. It is the most important country and most powerful country in Latin America, but it wants to be more than that. And I think him sitting in the White House next to the President of the United States always helps that. and I think that he won't think twice about that.

And in fact, Bolsonaro was not happy that, you know, following Biden's election, that Biden didn't reach out for, you know, well over a year. And it was partly because, you know, Bolsonaro was questioning whether Biden was even legitimately elected. So that was an awkward relationship. Jack, thank you so much for doing the show. Thanks for your great reporting. Everyone should follow you on Twitter because you are one of my primary sources of information about all that is.

happening down in Brazil and also subscribe to the New York Times so they can pay for you know foreign correspondents who do great work thank you Tom appreciate it thanks for having me thanks again to Jack Nickus for joining the show and what else should we be thanking here Taliban Italian cops all the protesters in Israel good for them for getting out there it's good to see people out there yeah I mean these are going to be pretty fundamental issues there for a few years you know I continue to to tip of the cap to, like, Tiger Woods and the people that didn't cave on the live golf tour. I know you mentioned that. I thought of that. Who else? I don't know.

That's all I got. That's all I got. Well, we will talk to you guys next week. Happy Davosing. Yeah. Well, yeah, tip of the cap to all the heroes, you know, roughing it in Davos. Champagne toast. So that they can have panel discussions about the future of our lives. Congratulations. Thank you for that. Yeah. Later. See you. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. Our executive producers are Ben Rhodes and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley News.

Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin and Charlotte Landis are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube.com slash Pod Save the World. And thanks to Saul Rubin for production support.