Pod Save the World - Jesus take the wheel (before Trump does)

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

Tommy and Ben talk about abortion rights globally, President Biden’s trip to Europe for G7 and NATO meetings about Ukraine, WNBA star Brittney Griner’s detention in Russia, Afghanistan, free speech in India and the national security implications of Tuesday’s explosive January 6th committee hearing. Then Tommy talks with journalist Peter Beinart about the human rights issues swirling around President Biden’s upcoming visit to the Middle East. 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 Potta of the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm still Ben Rhodes. Ben, so good to see you again and to be back in the USA. Welcome back to the USA. I was in France. Nice. It was bookended by some political events. I was there for the parliamentary elections.

I was there for the presidential elections. So we kind of covered. Maybe you and I were both interfering. We were doing a little foreign interference. We were passing out thumb drives. It was interesting because I got home and all the coverage here was all about Le Pen and the far-right success. but the coverage in France were just brutal headlines for for Macron. It was like the headlines were like ungovernable and one was just the slap.

And it was all like very sad photos of like part of his head looking down. But yeah, it was then bookended by the Dobbs ruling. And I could hear people walking around in the streets talking about how fucked up it was, which was embarrassing. It's always embarrassing to be an American when shit like that happens. But I mean, with McCrone, what's interesting is it like you could sense it like there was like obviously. relief that he beat Le Pen, but people wanted him to, like, suffer, you know, politically. Yeah, they did. They didn't want him to feel like he was validated by getting reelected,

and that's kind of what I took away from that. Yeah. And it was also nice that, you know, was walking around the street in Paris and looked at my phone and there was a tweet from him basically condemning the United States for the Dodds ruling and for backsliding on Roe. So we're going to talk about all of this today. We're going to talk about abortion rights around the world. We're going to talk about some major updates from Ukraine and Russia, including the key news from the G7 and the NATO summit that's happening as we speak. WNBA star, Brittany Griner's ongoing detention, the earthquake in Afghanistan, the horrific death of dozens of migrants near the southern border, a crackdown on free speech in India. And then last minute edition here, Ben, we got to talk about today. It's just explosive January 6 committee hearing.

Never seen anything like that. No, that's a, it's a new one for me. Oh, the new one too. President lunging at his Secret Service detail. Trying to choke out his secrets. Trying to lead the violent coup. You know, this is not the most important point, but, like, of the people you should probably not try to choke out, like, Secret Service agents pretty high up there.

The person, like, charged with protecting your life, yeah. I mean, just shows you that's someone who's really popped whatever screws they have left. It creates a kind of a philosophical question. If the person who's your charge with saving their life tries to kill you, what do you do there? I feel like I'm in Philosophy 101. Well, I mean, what's interesting is. to me about it too is that he clearly wanted the Secret Service to function like some

like presidential guard and some dictatorship you know. Very much so. They're like they don't carry out an institutional role. They're just kind of like like a Roman emperor's guard that like takes on his enemies and like let's armed people come in. I mean, we'll get to it. But. Absolutely right. The world angle is that, you know, this is what happens in other places. Yeah. Well, it's just sort of like imagine if we were watching these hearings in the UK and AG seven country and how, what what we would be saying. Yeah. But Ben, before we get to that,

if you're looking for a fantastic new podcast, check out Crooked Media's editor-in-chief and the host of Rubicon. Brian Boitler's new show, positively dreadful. You know Brian, you know his tweets. You know that he can be a little bit of a half-glass empty guy. This is his attempt to find some hope.

The first episode is fantastic. He's joined by Representative Jamie Raskin to talk about the loss of his son and the insurrection and how that changed him and how to balance realism and hope today. It's a great show. New episodes of Positivity Dreadful premiere each Friday. You can find it on Apple Podcasts. By the way, if you're not listening to Mother Country Radicals, I am. I am,

you are only hurting yourself listener. Don't hurt yourself. The listener out there who hasn't subscribed and downloaded these two shows yet, I know. I can actually see it on your phone right now. So click over, hit pause. This is like a Snowden throwback. Yeah, I'm Snowden, everyone. Also, more importantly, look, we talk about Ro, a ton in this episode. You're angry. We're angry. Let's actually do something about it. So there's a ton you can do. You can support patients who need abortions right now. We can elect pro-choice candidates in 2022. We can build progressive majorities over the long term through organizing. Everything you want, all the resources you need, all the organizations that you can get involved with to help are available at vote saveamerica.com slash row, ROE. Again, Votesaveamerica.com slash Rowe. Check it out. Lastly, I'm going to talk with Peter Bynard about President Biden's upcoming trip to the Middle East and all the human rights considerations raises. So stick around for that as well. All right, so Ben, in the wake of the Supreme Court's

decision to overturn Rowe, we want to talk about just how much of an outlier this makes the United States when it comes to abortion rights. I mentioned President Macron's statement criticizing the decision. He was far from the only one. Boris Johnson, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and UK called the ruling a big step backwards. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called it horrific. There were protests across Europe. These are our closest allies, right? I mean, and then, you know, just some numbers of the 36 countries that the United Nations defines is develop economies.

All but Poland and Malta allowed abortion at a woman's request until Friday. Now we are grouped with Poland and Malta on this list of countries that have far lesser rights. It's a little more sense of sort of like abortion access globally. most European countries allow abortion within the first trimester. Last year, Mexico's Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it's unconstitutional to penalize abortion. We talked about this in the past on the show. In 2020, Argentina legalized abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. Japan allows abortion in cases of rape or risk to the woman's health, but it's some very

backwards rules requiring women to get their spouses consent to obtain an abortion, obviously, in the Middle East and in large parts of the continent of Africa. There are some pretty severe restrictions on abortions. The Center for Reproductive Rights has a great map if you want more details. But here's the key point. The U.S. is backsliding on abortion rights and then now puts us in the company of a number of authoritarian countries that already have severe restrictions or also backsliding as well. So, you know, Ben, the U.S. is about to balkanize in terms of abortion access. But, I mean, like, you pointed out this connection.

Like, how are you feeling about sliding to this slot next to Poland when it comes to access to basic human rights like health care? And, like, how do you think that ties into this broader? crackdown on human rights and freedom we've seen in Poland in so many places. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's really important. First of all, it's just kind of notable when your company's like, you know, Poland and I think Nicaragua has taken steps to roll back abortion rights recently. But what it speaks to is, you know, where governments think that they can take away fundamental human rights, like they are moving an anti-democratic direction.

In both Poland and the United States, there's a religious component introduced to it. In Poland, it's a right-wing Christian government. And, you know, same thing here. We have a constitution that does not have the word God in the Constitution. And now we're using, you know, essentially what is a religious movement? Let's face it. It's not originalism. That's a legal justification for, like, an effort to impose other people's religious views on the majority.

It's white Christian nationalism. Yeah. And so I think the core point to step back and think about this is you have a minority imposing its will on the majority. in service of like a white Christian nationalist ideology, right? And that is that is a piece of a piece of democratic backsliding. You know, it's taking away rights, but it's also enshrining a kind of minaritarian view, you know, where the minority, this court represents the views of kind of about a third of the country. And yet in all aspects of American life going forward, they can impose their will in the majority. So that the democratic deficit place that we find ourselves in

that's really frightening is we have a court that could be in place for decades that clearly feels no restraint in moving into different areas of people's lives, whether it's guns, abortion, the environment, voting rights, all these areas. Controception, gay marriage. Pretty fundamental areas to, like, American life where they are now feeling like the views of minority should be more important than the views of majority. And that's a democratic crisis. And that's how we describe it was happening in Poland.

in any other country. I'm so anxious for when the Supreme Court rules on this climate change case and what it could mean for our ability to just get anything done. Yeah. I mean, it's going to set up this perennial situation where you're going to have like local and state fights with the federal government on just whether you can act responsibly. And then one thing I'd say globally, I'm glad that you highlighted some of the access issues in places like Japan. Because even in France, like, okay, if McCrone wants to get on the right side of this, there's a lot that could be done to increase access to reproductive health care and equity around reproductive health care. So maybe if we're going to awaken like the linkage between abortion rights,

reproductive health care and human rights and democracy, maybe like the good that could come out of it in other countries is fortifying and expanding the right. Well, you know, France actually, you know, some lawmakers put forward legislation to enshrine respect for abortion into the country's constitution. So I think some lawmakers are seeing this sort of right-wing wave coming and trying to get ahead of it. Get ahead of it, yeah. Okay, that is incredibly dark in an issue we're going to keep following.

You know, President Biden, you know, sort of responded to this decision out of the court and then had to jet off to Europe. So we're going to cover that now. He is there for G7 in NATO meetings where the focus is Russia and Ukraine. The G7 wrapped its meetings in Germany on Tuesday at some lovely Bavarian. It looked like some Bavarian spa. Yeah, it was like the sound of music or something. So the G7, by the way, is Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.S. in the UK. The big headline coming out of that summit is that the nations are an explorer

imposing a price cap on purchases of Russian oil. As we've all experienced at this point, gas prices are through the roof. Imposing a cap on the price of Russian oil would ensure that the Russians are profiting off of the war because even as the Russian oil export volumes have fallen, their revenue has climbed thanks to higher prices. This is an idea that's been kicking around for a while. The details have not been worked out. It's going to take a while to figure it out. But these leaders also pledge to spend $4.5 billion to counter food shortages as a result of the war. There was also the mandatory family photo ban of the leaders before this mountain. Now, they looked a little disheveled. I don't know if you noticed this. Look like they had a few drinks. Some of them had a few drinks.

Like the giveaway is that, you know, some people drink and some don't. Yeah. So like Joe Biden's not a drinker. He looked like normal. Ty was on. Boris Johnson looked like he'd just been in a lockdown party in number 10. Twitter told me it was a post-dinner photo, and I'm just going to say, yeah, Boris Johnson looked like he was eight reaslings deep. You know, he had been just slothed. Now we know what was going on, you know, during the pandemic. I just, yeah, a question for you besides that.

Do you think that this price cap, this oil price cap idea is kind of a tacit admission that Western energy sanctions kind of haven't worked and that they are hurting foreign consumers more than the Russian government if you've got these revenues up or it. any other G7 hot takes? Yeah, I think that that is true in the sense that when, you know, because of the war itself, right? And so like the responsibility with Putin. And then obviously the sanctions become part of that picture.

That's driving up the price of oil. So the stuff that Putin is still able to sell, even though he can't sell to as many customers, is bringing in greater revenue. And we've seen these reports of the Chinese kind of backfilling and even the Indians backfilling some of the sales of oil. And so that leaves you with what options. It leaves you with, you know, the diplomatic efforts to try to stop other nations like China and India from backfilling that oil and then trying to manage as best you can their capacity to drive up the price, you know, in those sales. But I think we have to be honest. Like it's going to be quite hard,

you know, like manipulating the global price of energy is not something that even the G7 can really do. If this can make any positive difference, around the margins, good. By all means, try everything. But I think we should not have overly high expectations about how much you can accomplish this way. I think the food issue, on the other hand, was really glad to see them focusing on that because they really can make up some of the difference in like grain and other goods that are going off the market. So hopefully they can blunt that, not just an inflation issue, but more like a humanitarian issue. Yes, that is a huge issue that's going to get even more problematic very soon. So Biden, I think, is probably en route to

Spain right now for the NATO meetings. The Allies will reportedly discuss ways to bolster defenses in Eastern Bloc NATO countries, the closest countries to Russia. And they're also going to decide whether to increase this NATO quick reaction force from 40,000 troops to 300,000, so an eightfold increase. Pretty significant. And they will also likely try to make progress on pushing forward Finland and Sweden's bids to join NATO. Turkey have been the hold up there. There's some reports just before we started recording that may have been resolved. I'm not sure if it's totally resolved yet. The U.S. officials say the U.S. will buy Ukraine a new advanced missile defense system. There was a report in the times over the weekend then about just how much Western troops and intelligence agencies are in Ukraine, helping Ukrainian troops, providing them with intelligence support.

The piece talks about how most of this activity is happening outside of Ukraine, but there are a few dozen NATO troops working inside Ukraine along with U.S. CIA officers who are mostly in Kiev coordinating intelligence support. So none of this was surprising necessarily. I think you and I both early on talked about our assumption that there was probably. like some sort of covert side of the war and this sort of stuff happening. But the NATO meeting, the details in that time story, I do think it shows, again, like, every time we talk about this, we're deeper in the fight. There's more ways to get escalate. It's just a bit unnerving.

Yeah. I think that there's, like, structural things that are happening, and then there's, like, the tactical things in the war itself. I think it's worth stepping back and considering just some of the big structural changes that are happening in kind of the global order in the last few days and weeks. So you have the EU come out and announce that it's extending EU candidacy membership to Ukraine and Moldova. It's a big change, right? Like the big deal might take a while for Ukraine to get in the EU.

But like when you consider that the starting point for this whole crisis in 2014 was, you know, a protest movement in Ukraine that chased out a corrupt Russian puppet because they wanted to be closer to Europe, that's a big step. Then you have Finland and Sweden, you know, beginning the process of joining NATO. does seem like they reached some trilateral understanding with Turkey, whatever the transaction was for Erwan, somebody paid it. Yeah, somebody probably paid off his kid or something. It is. Big structural change there, Finland and Sweden coming to NATO. You sound like Elizabeth Warren when you said. Yeah, big structural change, right?

It's good. And then you have on the energy side, even some of the G7 conversations about moving Europe off of Russian energy dependency, really kind of moving them a little closer to the U.S. too. That's a big structural shift. So this is changing the global order in ways that are bad for Russia, right? NATO, the EU, who the supplier of European energy is. But then on the tactical level, it's harder because the Russians are making these kind of incremental inch by inch gains. And there, I think the question is that Times article speaks to probably a big distinction

within NATO where there's some countries that literally have commandos in Ukraine, according to that article, not the U.S., but other countries, it said, had special forces. The U.S. has CIA in there. We're providing battlefield relevant intelligence. There's like Ukrainian military units with like tablets. Using U.S., yeah, tablets. Like like iPad, basically to target Russians. Like that's in the fight, right?

And you have the U.S. moving some of these longer range artillery. And then clearly other NATO countries not doing it. So what we won't get public readouts of the NADO Saman on is the brass tax of like, okay, who's going to be pouring in the heavy weapons and who's worried? I'm sure some voices are raising caution about like, hey, like, we're like broadcasting the New York Times that we're giving battlefield intelligence to kill Russians and all these weapons and CIA. And, you know, you are living with a permanent state of some degree of risk of escalation. Yeah. And so look, I mean, to that point, I mean, Putin greeted the G7 by launching a missile strike on a shopping center with apparently more than a thousand people inside of it.

He also struck Kiev several times, including a kindergarten playground. So Putin is just stacking up war crimes at this point. The fight, as you mentioned, in the eastern Ukraine is just a war of attrition. I've seen estimates of up to 200 Ukrainian casualties per day. And the artillery fire in fighting is so relentless that I was listening to a podcast where experts were debating whether the Russian military might actually run out of shells at some point. Spoiler alert. It's like not for a year. So unfortunately, that's not going to be our solution here.

But you've got these more sophisticated U.S. and NATO weapons systems getting incorporated into the fight as soon as the Ukrainians can get. trained up to use them. But again, it's going to lead to incremental gains and, you know, take time to affect the outcome. I did see that President Zelensky reportedly told the G7 leaders that he wants the war to be over by the end of the year because he's worried about the cold making it, you know, the conditions, I guess, even harder for his troops and that he doesn't want to negotiate with Russia until they've consolidated the Ukrainian positions. Ben, you know, I get, I think, where Zelensky is coming from here. But that is going to be just a horrific six months. I mean, for the Ukrainian people, for the countries dealing with these food shortages, we mentioned

earlier for energy consumers all over the world. I mean, that's, six months is a slog. Yeah. And you could have a situation where precisely because of that attrition, you know, the Russians push a little bit further and then they kind of stop, right, because they need to replenish and they need to like let their forces rest. But then they kind of resume again, you know, once at a time of their choosing. And meanwhile, the Ukrainians don't appear like they want to negotiate in a position where they've lost more territory, right? And so I think you're going to have the main question here is different timelines. Like Putin's got his own timeline, which is clearly designed to take as much Ukrainian territory as he can and divide the West through this attrition.

Zelensky is trying to find a moment where they have some success probably, just like Putin is, and taking back some area. but he's going to need a lot of heavy weapons for that. And then the U.S. and NATO has this timeline of like, at a certain point, do you try to push for diplomacy here? And those timelines are not converging. No. And I think what happens is you get towards the end of the year, the food shortages become more acute, political instability spreading because of food shortages. Elections start to, you know, have consequences from the inflationary pressure. This is going to get harder before it gets any better.

Yeah. The politics are going to get way harder, especially for, I think, for President Biden. Yeah. Staying in Russia for a minute up on a separate topic, we saw WMBA star Britney Greiner for the first time in a while this week. She appeared in a Russian court Monday roughly four and a half months after she was arrested for allegedly being in possession of vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in Russia. At that hearing, she was ordered to remain in Russian custody for the duration of her trial. And her detention was extended for six months. So if convicted, Griner could face up to 10 years in prison.

So, you know, Ben, it's just been hard to watch this slowly evolve. I mean, clearly this is a hostage situation. It has been for a while. Griner was arrested just after the Russian invasion. The State Department now is the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs handling the case. You got the Russian media speculating about her getting traded in a hostage swap for Victor Bout, who is this notorious arms dealer, supported terrorists, is serving 25 years in prison. You and I, I mean, we didn't really talk about the case much on this show initially because everyone was saying people around her were asking folks not to really talk about it.

They're trying to resolve it quietly. Obviously, that calculus has changed. So I just wanted to talk about it today to like, you know, sort of acknowledge her plight, her struggle that her family is going through. There's this awful story about her wife trying to contact her through the State Department. No one was there to answer the phone. And I'm just very worried about how this gets resolved. Yeah. And this is, you know, like this is arguably the greatest or one of the greatest basketball players in the world, right?

And very prominent American. And I think what, you know, the specific charge is the kind of thing that, you know, you have to think, okay, would the Russians have really detained her and held her? That, you know, I don't know what the facts are around that, but like would they really gone through with detaining this very prominent person for a pretty minor offense? or allegation, absent the geopolitical circumstances. And that was the question that was kind of unclear at the beginning, because what you want to do is quietly resolve this. And, you know, and that clearly didn't happen. And now that this is in the public eye, and now that you have these kind of noises out

of Russia around exchanges, well, suddenly that's no longer like a normal legal process. If they're talking about exchanges and stuff and that's percolating up, suddenly it's it's using this person as leverage at a time when the U.S. government has very little means of affecting that beyond some kind of exchange. And we saw the exchange before for the other American who was held inside of Russia. So it's a scary moment for her and her family and her wife. Like it was just a horrific story about not being able, you know, someone not being at their desk essentially when she was supposed to be connected for the first time by phone to Brittany Griner. So it's one of these things where there's no there's no good options for the U.S.

government because it's probably either wait and see or like a really unpalpable exchange that kind of validates the hostage shaking, right? So it's a perennial challenge. Perennial challenge. And probably Putin wants to maintain some sort of leverage wherever he can. Yeah, just any little bit he can get, you know. He's just a monster. Pod Save the World is brought to you by AG1. It is now easier than ever to start your day off right with 75 high quality of vitamins, minerals, and whole food source to superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens in a single scoop of AG1. AG1 is an NSF certified for sport.

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Turn to Afghanistan, because there was a devastating earthquake there last week, they killed at least 1,000 people, injured thousands more and destroyed more than 10,000 homes. On Tuesday, Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State said that the U.S. provide $55 million in aid for Afghanistan. But obviously, that's not going to cover it. And, you know, I think we both wanted to raise this because this disaster underscores a couple of things. First, the Taliban can't govern. No. We never, right, they have no infrastructure and to adequately respond. There were reports of them dispatching, like, religious leaders to areas where people needed food and medical help. I mean, it's just disaster. And then, too, I mean,

it underscores again under the just horribly unbelievably dire situation that nearly half the country is in. I mean, there's like 19 million people who are struggling to find food on the brink of famine. And, you know, none of us like the Taliban. Their rule is as bad as expected. The rights of women are being trampled on people who worked with the West are being murdered. But, you know, I guarantee you that Taliban leaders are eating well. You know what I mean? And average people are starving to death. And so I don't know. I just hope that maybe this can be a moment where the U.S. and other countries rethink the current sanctions regime. There's some reporting in the Washington Post today that Biden's team is having talks of the Taliban about releasing some of Afghanistan's seized bank

reserves. But it just feels like this is very urgent. And U.S. sanctions are hurting innocent people. It does. I mean, and this natural disaster like compounds like a dire humanitarian circumstance that we have something to do with. We have something to do with it for the decades of war. We have something to do with it because of the withdrawal. We have something to do with it

because of the sanctions. And I just see no strategic, tactical or moral reason for these sanctions. Because what, like you always have, with these sanctions,

like, you always have to think about what is the objective behind them. What are we trying to do? The objective isn't just to show that we don't like the Taliban. There are a lot of people

we don't like around the world. We try to kill them for 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. there's a lot of people like around the world. Like we don't, sanction everybody we don't like. And the reality is, are these sanctions having any influence whatsoever on the Taliban and their behavior? Well, no. And if fighting a war for two decades against

the Taliban didn't influence their behavior, I don't know why some economic sanctions would. And the reality is, like you said, it's clearly not hurting them. It's not preventing them from being in power. If the U.S. fighting a war didn't prevent them from being in power, the sanctions aren't going to do that. And meanwhile, you are hurting ordinary Afghans. and you're making it harder to get assistance to them. You're just generally hurting the economic circumstances in the country. And so as strange it may seem like, it's not like you're lifting sanctions on the Taliban. You're lifting sanctions on the Afghan people who are being punished because they're governed by the Taliban.

And I think that this earthquake highlights the fact that these people have suffered enough. Our policy should be about, yes, maintaining our counterterrorism interest there. it should also basically be about how can we make life a little bit better for the Afghan people. Yeah, the African people who are hurting because the Taliban are in power because Trump cut a deal with them. Yeah. To basically get us here. Yeah. I mean, the U.S. had something to do with. Like, that's a really good point you make, right?

Like, if Trump makes a deal with the Taliban to kind of bring them in from the cold, Joe Biden de facto goes along with that deal by completing withdrawal and part on the logic that that was a deal. if we will deal with the Taliban to kind of help facilitate their return to politics and then say, but we're going to keep all these sanctions. There's an illogic to that. Yeah. Trump called the Taliban leader. Mike Pompei was meeting with these guys in Qatar.

Mike Pompeii was like hanging out with these guys in Qatar. I mean, the Obama administration was negotiating with that. Like, look, it's time to move on from this disaster structure team. To continue down this sort of pretty dark little section here of U.S. policies. Unfortunately, the war is like not. The world is not collaborating with lightness. Yeah, no, it's not. And nor is this next story.

I mean, sort of U.S. policies leading to humanitarian disasters. Their reports on Monday, 50 migrants were found dead in the back of a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas. And it's believed that all of them were left there by smugglers, that these individuals were originally from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras. It's not the first time that authorities have found, like a gruesome mass grave like this where people were essentially baked alive in the back of an 18-wheeler in someplace like Texas or Arizona. And I just, I raise this to just remind everyone how, you know, desperate people are to get to the United States, how broken the immigration system has been for decades and how that empowers smugglers who have no regard for human life. And this is the cost. You know what I mean? These are the people who pay the consequences.

It's not just about politics or the border or Title 42. It's like human beings, women, children in the back of this truck in the most agonizing death, you could imagine. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, and we've already done on abortion, but one of the things that we can do on this show is like to try to look at the United States from the perspective of a different country in the same way that we look at events in other countries. And I said to you, Tommy, when I saw this news, I thought about how we in America sometimes look at the refugee crisis in Europe, right?

And we think of it as something different than our southern border, right? So when we hear about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean or people trapped in containers on ships because human traffickers put them there and suffocating and families dying. We think of this as like a refugee crisis for Europe. But the reality is like we have a southern border that is totally broken. We have people, some of whom are political refugees, they're leaving political violence, some of whom are coming for economic reasons, some of whom are coming because they want to be reunited with our families, but because we've not been permitted to rationalize and fix our border in our immigration system for decades because like the Republican, the Republicans,

party would rather weaponize like a broken border than actually try to pass laws to because you should be setting up orderly processes for like how do you process political asylum claims like what is the pace of legal migration like how do you deal with family reunification because those things are not being dealt with through the law and through like additional resources for things like asylum judges you are empowering the human traffickers who can profit and you know the only thing you're counting on to prevent atrocities like this is, you know, either catching the human trafficking networks or just hoping that they're more humane. Like, this is not sustainable, right?

And these are families. Like, picture your kids in those conditions, like literally. 170 degrees. Baked to death, you know? Like it's unfathomable humanitarian tragedy. And the last thing I want to say is like, did you see the Greg Abbott statement? No. Greg Abbott tweets the governor of Texas, Joe Biden, this.

is on you, right? And like, just like, it's your fault because you blah, blah, blah. And it's like, imagine that that's your first reaction. You're the governor of a state where dozens of people, you know, ordinary people were found dead. And, and your first reaction is like, Joe Biden, this is on you. Like, these people have lost their fucking minds, never mind their moral compass. It's just so dehumanizing. I mean, we almost- Using these people as a prop. Yeah, we almost have to laugh about like the Republicans who are like, oh, you know, caravans are coming to the border. with Ebola and ISIS, right?

Like, that literally happened. But it is, you know, it's completely dehumanizing. It's making people into isms. It's making it all about fear. And that avid statement folds right into that. Yeah. Politics and fear. Yeah.

And no interest in actually solving the problem. No. They want the border to be broken. I mean, they want this to be the mess that it is. So they can demagogue it. Yeah. The election was stolen and, you know, the craziest candidates out there, like that woman running for Kerry Lake, I think,

running for Arizona governors. you know, running on the platform of the election was stolen, we're going to send the National Guard to the border. Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. Thanks.

Yeah. Wonderful. Switching gears a little bit. Here's the story. You flagged Ben that we should just keep an eye on. So in India, a prominent human rights activist was arrested and faces charges of fabricating evidence against Prime Minister and Render Modi. She had spearheaded efforts to hold a bunch of government officials accountable for sectarian riots

back in 2002 that killed thousands of people, mostly Muslims. At the time, Prime Minister Modi was the governor of the region in question where this sectarian violence occurred. There has long been questions about what he did or didn't do to foment or stop the violence. I think the bigger question here, an issue here, Ben, is whether this signals a broader crackdown by Modi on journalists, civil society, political opponents. What are you hearing from folks in India? Well, first of all, like, this question of what happened in the Gujarat riots when Modi

was the governor of Gujarat is. It's not like a new question. No. The U.S. and other governments had restrictions on Modi, travel restrictions. He was sanctioned because foreign governments thought that he was at a minimum, like, witting of and helped incite some of this violence, right? So this is not like some crackpot theories from some anti-Mody journals. Like, the world pretty much accepted that Narendra Modi did something wrong as governor of Gujarat at this time. And it was just kind of a question of how far on the spec.

spectrum, he did something wrong, right? Now, the other thing is, you know, Ron Ayyub, who we've had on this a podcast, a friend of mine, fearless journalist, she wrote a book called the Gujarat files, which she literally detailed and gathered evidence around Modi and his circle's complicity here. And part of what you're seeing in India is this kind of massive uptick, steady uptick, really, of the demonization of Muslims and the kind of takeover of the apparatus of the state by the Modi government. And they're kind of of willfully beginning to target individuals like this. And I do worry about like Rana because, you know, the same kind of, you know, crazy, I mean, corruption of yet another Supreme Court, right?

It shows you how, you know, right-wing leaders focus on the courts could be used to punish her. And the other thing I saw from Rana recently is like Twitter reached out to her and was like removing some of her content because it violated like the Indian government's restrictions around publicizing some of this stuff, right? And so Elon Musk, all the free speech stands on Twitter, like, do you care about the fact that this is being used to weaponize the targeting of journalists and activists in India? Like, where's the free speech crowd when it's a right-wing nationalist who's the one seeking to stamp out the free speech? Because what would you see is this broad crackdown on Muslims, on journalism, on civil society in India. And it just doesn't get a lot of attention because there's some geopolitical discomfort in spotlighting Modi.

as someone who's violating these norms. Yeah, and, you know, I'm sure that people like Elon Musk and others want to do big business. I bet Tesla's got a lot of business there. So it's a good deal. At least they want to. If Mr. Free Speech, Elon Musk, will he put his free speech advocacy above whatever business interest he has in that very large market? I don't know. I'm not hopeful.

Time will tell. My guess is no. So you're right, Ben, there are these sort of lingering questions about Modi's role in the Gujarat riots. I'd say that after today, there are fewer questions about Trump's role in the interruption in January 6th? Good transition. Yeah. I mean, fucking it. So there were a bunch of other issues we wanted to cover today.

We were going to talk about Boris Johnson threatening the tear up part of the post-Brexit trade deal that he signed with the EU, these ongoing protests in Ecuador, this horrific attack on the LGBT community in Oslo, Norway. But then we watch these hearings, and I just feel like we have to discuss what happened. Because, frankly, like you said at the top, I mean, these events were happening in other country. We would fear for the future of that country as a democracy. Yes. Yeah. It was like, it was one of the craziest two hours I've ever seen. The sole witness was a woman named Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked for then cheapest staff,

Mark Meadows at the White House. Quick summary. I'm going to just to do a couple of these. We'll pause, talk about it. I'll do some more. I mean, so the, maybe the wildest anecdote we learned was that Trump was so desperate to go up to the Capitol on January 6 that he tried to grab the wheel of the presidential limo from a Secret Service agent.

When he was restrained, he choked the guy. yelling, I'm the fucking president, take me to the capital now. Sounds like a two-year-old tempered interim. Trump knew the crowd on January 6th with armed and could turn violent, but wanted security measures loosened because, quote, they're not here to hurt me. Mark Meadows said that Trump's reaction to hang Mike Pence, that chant was, quote, he thinks Mike deserves it. I mean, we could stop there, and that would be one of the most shocking hearings or things ever put under oath that I've ever heard. Yeah. I mean, there's so much to this. And the first thing I want to say is like we were talking before, but this witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, you know, it's important for people understand why a 25-year-old would be like the most credible witness for all this. For sure. Because like that job, you work for the chief of staff, you're the aid to the chief of staff. We had the same position in the Obama White House. I'm sure Ron Clean, Biden chief of staff has the same person now. Like, that person sees everything. Everything. Everything. All the gossip. All the.

I mean, I used to always be friends with those people. You don't fuck with those people. You don't fuck with those people. But here's the reality. Like, there's a real estate reality and a paper reality. The real estate reality is the second floor of the West Wing has very few offices, right? It's a national security advisor, the Oval Office, like the White House Chief of Staff, and a couple of the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, right, which in Trump people was like Jared.

Yeah, like defiled by Jared Kroeder. Now, so you're on this hallway, literally, you're down the hallway from the Oval Office. So you literally see everybody's going in and out of there. Like if the people come out and it was a bad meeting, like you're the first desk where someone stops to gossip about it. They're all familiar with you. So they trust you. They gossip with you. They tell you what's going on.

You're in a very elite little club. You know because you know both the senior officials and you heard her talking about like Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel. But you also know the valet. In the other assistants. Yeah. And the other assistants and the dude has to clean up the plate that Trump just flew on the floor. You know the Secret Service guys. He barely threw his burger against the wall and there was ketchup stuck on it.

The Secret Service guys who stand there, right? and see everything, right? And you also see all the paper, right? Who, like, the president's schedule, the president's private schedule, like who's trying to get in to see the president through the chief of staff. So just set up that this woman knows exactly what the fuck she's talking about. Everything. And probably took some notes.

Yeah, well, felt that way. It seemed like she took notes, right? Wouldn't you, though? I mean, if you saw that shit. At some point, I'd be like, I need some leverage to get out of this shit. But then, like, what she saw was literally, okay, we've established a January 6th yearings, that there was a legal process to develop the coup, right? This is like the Johnny Sman thing.

Then like there was this kind of ramp up pressure on Mike Pence to like do the coup. And then when Mike Pence wouldn't do the coup, there was this backup plan to basically incite an insurrection to intimidate them to do the coup. And what we learned today is like Donald Trump, not only did he know that, not only was he trying to literally take the mags away so more armed people could get on the mall and march down to the capital. he wanted to join the violent coup. Like he wanted to go and he wanted his

West Wing moment of like marching up the Capitol steps with the fucking QAnon Shaman, what the fuck it is? Like he wanted to be there with those guys with his like feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk. Like this like how much more evidence do we need that he's guilty of trying, of like many, many crimes? Also Mark Meadows is in trouble.

I mean there's testimony that Meadows was like totally checked out. He's on his phone like playing Wordle when he's getting briefed about like weapons, the likelihood of violence. And then apparently he was trying to go to the insurrectionist planning meeting happening at the Willard Hotel. And then he had to get dialed into it. Mike Flynn, former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, pleaded the fifth when asked if violence is justified. And if he believes in the peaceful transfer of power, believe the fifth? Kind of a weird thing.

Can't answer that. We got the White House counsel saying he had serious legal concerns about Trump marching to the Capitol and saying, quote, we're going to get charged with every crime imaginable. Lastly, we learned about ongoing efforts to intimidate witnesses by the Trump team. I mean, this fucking blockbuster hour and 55 minute hearing happens. And then Liz Cheney's like, and by the way, sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, you know, little breadcrumbs for the next one. People are maybe even texting. Yeah. Witnesses telling them to shut up in like Bob terms, which you're going to jail if you did that.

Oh, they'll find that text. Well, if DOJ gets off its ass, because side note on that, like Mark Meadows was clearly at the center of all this. And the fact that DOJ decided to enforce the subpoena against Peter Navar and see Ben and your favorite podcasters, but not Mark Meadows. My guys, I know. Hello, DOJ. Like, after today, might we please enforce the subpoena on the guy who actually knows all this stuff? But the other thing is like, to your point, like, we have the crimes. Then the other piece, the only piece you left out, Tommy is like all of them being like, hey, can we get pardons for all of our crimes?

Oh, yeah. And members of Congress, too? Meadows wanted a pardon. You don't ask for a pardon if you didn't do the crimes. and then because they don't want to be caught having done the crimes, you have them literally trying to, like a mob boss. The messages she got that Liz Cheney dangled out there were like, you know, we know you're going to do the right thing today.

And, you know, Trump is going to be watching. And if you want to stay in our good graces, like this is like mafia shit. But that's kind of how authoritarian movements are. They run like mafias, right? Like you need to enforce loyalty. You need to punish dissent. You know, you need to reward. being a sycophantic collaborator.

So it's just all on ugly display, but it was pretty well done. I mean, as you like maybe what they're, I mean, I'm not like a Liz Cheney stand by any stretch, but like telling that maybe the Democrats needed like a like a Cheney to come in and just like reckonball these people. Let's address this Cheney thing head on. Every scholar, expert, experienced person, journalist, foreign and domestic that you read that talks about the way to fight fascism, says you need to build the largest coalition possible from the socialists to the never Trump Republicans. You don't have to love Liz Cheney.

You don't have to like her dad or think the war in Iraq was a good fucking idea to think she's running a good hearing. Can we all just be adults and like hold two things in our heads at one time and say she's doing a pretty good job here. I hate her policies over there. I'm an adult so I can have both those ideas.

Look, I love how you put it because like as someone who I'm sure you could go back and find Liz Cheney circa like 2014 calling me like an Iatola or something. Like if I was living in 1930 Germany and it was like the social Democrats weren't getting along with like the conservatives and was like we can't possibly unite with them against this guy Hitler and his crackpot group of people like like I'm sure those people live to regret that.

Yeah. I'd like anybody who wants to fight the fascist to to be a part of like the emergency movement here. Yeah, let's let's all fight the fascists. Then we can get back to fighting with her about everything else in the back. Like we love to we love to circle the wagons. and then shoot inward. Yeah, yeah.

We're so good at it. Democrats are really good at that. It's like, yeah, oh, you want to rally against Trump? Well, you didn't support, you know, Medicare for all being phased in in one year instead of five. Like, guys, come on. Let's just like, like, this is like real fascism. No, this is like. This is like, Trump trying to take the wheel and drive us to the Capitol.

He wanted the secret service to function like, like, yeah, like this Praetorian Guard. It's totally insane. I just, it's remarkable. I mean, I guess the question is, you know, will this. Wait, wait a second. Play out, play out how it would have happened. What does he do? It's kind of interesting.

Like, what if the Secret Service had been like, okay, and Trump goes up there? And like, yeah, does he just march in there and say what? I mean, it's a big play. I literally think it would look like Benito Mussolini, like, walking up the steps of the Capitol and crossing his arms and they're parting the seas because they do love him. It would have looked like really fucking dark. And that's what he wanted. Didn't Naid Bukali do this? Didn't he, like, stormed the military into Congress when he wanted some law passed?

Yeah, and it worked. Yeah, I mean, look, it's great. company you're keeping there, Don. I mean, I do the question now is sort of like, I don't know, we've seen like seismic testimony against Donald Trump clearly trying to conspire with, you know, the Ukrainian government to get dirt on Joe Biden and holding up military, like all these things sort of like have not gotten enough Republicans to break. The question now is whether there's blood in the water in terms of, you know, the Republican primary electorate. Like, there's a lot of musings about, yeah, uh, uh, Ronda Santas right now. And Ben, I saw this today. I,

Dan Pfeiffer shared this with us in the attempt to trigger us. NBC News reported that Mike Pompeo's political action committee is running a new digital ad in Iowa in South Carolina about religious freedom. So we are going to have to deal with that asshole running for president. But maybe it's a sign that they see some weakness here with Trump. Yeah. If noted Trump sycophant, Mike Pompeo is like, you know, taking that step, they're beginning to look past Trump, right? Mike Pompeo has an extraordinary opportunity here to potentially drive up his numbers from 1% to 1.5% in Iowa, New Hampshire. Watch it. Don't sleep on. Don't sleep on Mike, right? Like, all that- He didn't get that lap band surgery or whatever for no reason. Like, he's been preparing for this thing.

All that genuflection before Trump, that raising money in the State Department, the Madison dinners, the like piping into the RNC from Jerusalem. Like, that might get him, that might crack 1%, right? He is so delusional if he thinks that there is going to be a constituency for whatever it is. Rex Tillerson could probably get more write-in votes than Mike Pompeo. But I do think that, like, it'll be interesting to watch whether something cracks here. I do want to just come back because I'm mindful of, like, the context of the show. National security, like, think of the national security danger of the United States of America from the president of the United States of America on January 6th.

Yeah. Relative to, like, again, I know this has been said. before, but like, if one ISIS terrorist tried to run into the Capitol with one weapon, like, we'd all, like, they'd be having hearings about that still today. Like, like, the President of United States wanted to lead a violent assault on America democracy. I mean, you- And Republicans are, like, sitting this one out.

You've made the point about all the secrets that Jared Kushner has in his head that he could sell. I mean, think about what Mike Flynn knows. Yeah. Every covert action program. Every special access program over at the Penn. I mean, but like, look, Pompey. was like a terrible guy.

Yeah, but not cases like Mike Flynn is a bona fide lunatic. Yeah, yeah. You know, who? Bad higher under the Obama case. Who was it that pushed him so hard? I feel like it was like, someone at the Pentagon was like, this is a guy.

He was a star in the Pentagon. Yeah, no. Like Petraeus. It wasn't like anybody. Yeah, he was a McChrystal guy, you know, which is interesting because I actually, McChrystal is a honorable guy, right? Yeah, I respect him.

Yeah, yeah, I really do. But, but, yeah, these people know a lot. And, you know, does any, think that Mike Flynn's not sharing that knowledge with like the likes of Steve Bannon. Yeah. You know. Great. Good stuff. Okay. We're going to take a quick break and we come back. We'll have my interview with Peter Bynard about President Biden's trip to the Middle East. So stick around for that.

I'm thrilled to welcome back to the show of Peter Bynard. He's the editor at large of Jewish currents and the author of the fantastic Bynart notebook on Substack. Peter, it's so great to talk with you again. My pleasure. The last time we talked, we were talking all about NATO expansion. and how in some ways it wasn't the best idea. The world has changed a little since then. I think that was in January.

Yes, not for the better. Not for the better, significantly worse in every way. Well, very different set of topics today. So thank you again because, you know, no one's, no one better to talk to on these issues. President Biden's heading to the Middle East in midchalai. He's making stops in Israel and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, you know, he's attending kind of like the dream summit for the Saudis, This is the Gulf Cooperation Council as well as the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan.

It's very much a home game for them that he's Biden will be attending. He's expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or MBS, the homicidal leader, future leader of the kingdom. I guess then Biden goes to Israel and meets with whoever the hell is in charge of the Israeli government at that moment. Kind of a joke, but not really. And then Biden also meets with Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. and then, you know, this trip has raised a bunch of human rights questions that I wanted to dig into with you.

But first, just a little blocking and tackling. I mean, can you just help listeners understand what the latest sort of machination is with the Israeli government and how this Biden visit works if the government has been dissolved? Like, does he meet with Yair Lepid if he's the caretaker PM? Do you think Biden will try to do something to, I don't know, buck up someone like Lepid and help push back on someone. like BB Netanyahu. Like, how would you think about the politics of this? I mean, my sense is that the fundamental politics of this is that Biden just had to go to Israel sometime in his first term, right?

And he certainly couldn't go to Saudi Arabia without going to Israel, right? Because as you remember, Barack Obama got in all kinds of trouble for going initially to give that speech in Egypt and not going to Israel. So I think in some ways it was almost kind of like, well, we got to go here at some point. And if we're going to go to the seat of Saudis,

we certainly have to go. So I don't think they knew that the government was going to fall. What it looks like is that there are going to be new elections in late October, early November, probably. And the weirdness of the coalition government that they had was that once Naftali Bennett, once the government fell, the caretaker would be Yer Lepid, who had been the foreign minister, who was supposed to take over, you know, a couple of years from now. So I don't know how much. I'm sure Biden would, you know, be desperately. unhappy if Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power to kind of torment him for his last a couple years as president in the way he tormented Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But I think he

has to obviously be pretty subtle about how much he tries to help the Ilipeed, given that the Israelis will, well, Netanyahu's forces won't take kindly to him interfering too overtly. Yeah, no, I mean, look, BB Netanyahu historically a subtle guy would never interfere in U.S. elections, would ever, like, go to Congress, right, give a speech. Not to Obama. Yes, that's right. He can dish it out, but he doesn't like to take it. No, no, that's right.

So there's a bunch of human rights issues are swirling around this trip, including the murder of two prominent journalists. The first is Jamal Khashoggi. We've talked about Khashoggi a lot on this show. He was executed by the Saudi government in 2018. And then more recently, a beloved Palestinian-American journalist named Shireen Abu Akle was almost certainly killed by an Israeli soldier in May when she was reporting in the West Bank. Peter, can you just tell listeners a little bit about who Shereen was,

what the Israeli government response has been, this is a calls for an investigation that they're killing? And then do you think the, do you expect the Biden administration to push the Israelis on transparency in this investigation? And do you think they should? Yes, I think they absolutely should. You know, Shereen Abuakla was a really iconic Palestinian journalist, someone who had been on TV for a long time who was just extremely well regarded. You know, tragically and horrifically, a lot of Palestinians get killed all the time in the West Bank. And it usually doesn't barely even makes it into the U.S. media.

This was one person, partly because she's an American citizen, and partly because she was such an important person where it's kind of broken through. And the, as you say, all of the news, you know, all the journalists around her said that it was, it was, that she was shot by Israeli troops. We don't know that she was specifically targeted by them, but all the evidence points to the fact that it was Israel that did it. And all the evidence suggests that it is very unlikely

that if Israel does an internal investigation, that anyone will be held responsible given the history of Israel's own internal investigations. And by the way, I wouldn't say that's not unique to Israel, right? I don't think America has a very good record in this regard. If you want a serious investigation, you can't have it be done by the same entity that actually killed her, right? The same government, the same military. And I think it's particularly important for this reason.

She's an American citizen, and one of the fundamental questions that we are struggling over in the United States essentially has to do with the nature of American citizenship. What progressives are arguing is that we are a country where every citizen should be considered equal. We know that that's not the vision of Trump and the Republican Party, right?

For their vision is there are different levels of American citizens, right? They're white Christians, and there's everyone else. So if you, the Biden administration essentially says, you know what, we're not going to take Shereen Abu Akla's murder as seriously as we would some other American who wasn't Palestinian. What you're actually doing is you're giving in to the Trump vision of what American citizenship actually means, which is that it's an ethno-nationalist religious category. It's not a legal category. And that's, I think, really dangerous. Yeah. And listen, Shireen is like Tim Russert plus Diane.

And she is a famous, revered, beloved, you know, I've heard people talk about how kind she was, how gracious. Like, she's a beloved figure in an American citizen. And what's interesting is, like, I don't see a lot of debate happening about whether Biden should be visiting Israel or not, given that this situation hasn't been resolved, given that the Israelis are stonewalling an investigation into the shooting of Shereen Abu Ackle, until their demand is that. the Palestinian Authority turns over the bullet that actually killed her that was dug out of her skull, which is obviously, I think, an absurd precondition to start an investigation. You could go interview a bunch of people. You could look at video footage like the AP, the New York Times, Bellingat, a bunch of folks have done investigations into that. But there is a lot of debate about whether Biden should go to Saudi Arabia at all. And I just do think that that's interesting.

Right. I mean, the problem is that we've gotten into this habit of the United States where we say, listen, we represent democracy and freedom and all those good things against our adversaries, the Russians and the Chinese. And when it comes to Ukraine, the litmus test for whether you really believe in democracy is whether you're going to take our side against the Russians. Fine, right? But then when it comes to Israel, right, which human rights watch, amnesty international, the same human rights organizations that we rely on to basically legitimize the view that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is really, really horrible, and what China is doing in Hong Kong and are really, really, really, really horrible, right, that we look to, and also Israel's own

main human rights organization, Betelam, when they call Israel an apartheid state, we just kind of put a big bracket around that and say, well, we're just not really going to look over there, right? And so other people around the world look at us and say, come on, you're total hypocrites. You're thinking, you're saying that you're going to say that we don't really believe in democracy because we're not taking your side on Ukraine. Well, how about us saying you don't really believe in democracy because you give $3 billion in unconditional military aid to a country that for more than 50 years has held millions of people as permanent non-citizens under military law. And so Joe Biden may not want to deal with the difficult politics of taking on Israel.

I totally get that. But you can't pretend that the rest of the world is just going to put on its blinders just because you've decided you have blinders on this subject. Yeah, it's hard up there on that high horse sometimes. So on this question of going to Saudi Arabia, and Biden's meeting with Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown Brints, who is, you know, we know from reports about U.S. intelligence directly responsible for ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Where do you land on whether Biden should make this visit? You know, I mean, it's interesting.

Everyone knows this is about energy and asking the Saudis to pump more oil. When pressed on it, though, Biden basically says, well, I'm trying to get to a broker a Middle East peace deal, which I'm not sure I necessarily. believe that. But where do you land on this trip generally? Well, I've also seen some reports that suggest, I mean, I'm not an energy analyst, but that the Saudis don't actually have that much oil that they can actually pump out right now. I think there are a number of things. I think it's partly that the Biden administration does want to build on the Abraham Accords. I think they're under a lot of pressure from Congress to do that.

I think it would be good politics to do that. I don't really think, to be honest, that makes the world a much better place. I mean, basically what you have is an alliance of a lot of really repressive governments that are getting together to help one another repress each other. You know, Israel is helping the Saudis and the Emirates, the Baccharides, the Bacranes repress their own citizens. There also, it's important to remember this. It's not just that Saudi Arabia is authoritarian and brutal at home. Saudi Arabia is a regional wrecking ball in terms of efforts to promote democracy around

the region. This is something that you and Ben have talked about a lot. I mean, they were intimately involved in the coup in Egypt. They've been involved in the coup in Sudan, the coup in Tunisia. Every place that the democracy in the Middle East fails, you can generally see the Emirati and the Saudi fingerprints on it. So this is the kind of regime that we're going to. I'm not saying that the Biden administration should not have anything to do with the Saudi government. That's probably unrealistic.

But I don't think you need to actually go and kiss the ring. I think they're doing that partly because they want an alliance against Iran. And that's partly because they weren't actually willing to, I don't think they were willing to move boldly enough to. restore the Iran nuclear deal. And I also think it's because they have this very Cold War posture vis-à-vis China. And that gives MBS, Mohamed bin, this kind of leverage to keep saying, well, if you're not, if you don't give me everything I want, I'm going to go over to the Chinese side. I think it's partly a product of this kind of Cold War mentality that is really taken over the Biden administration. You know, it's interesting you brought up the pressure to do more on the Abraham Accords.

there is some speculation that something more will happen there. Maybe the Saudis will create some sort of reproachment with Israel. I guess, you know, the Abraham Accords are often sort of reported on as de facto good because, you know, we do want, look, obviously we want countries in the Middle East to have better relations with Israel, to have less hostile relations to not be sort of in these cold wars. That is a good thing. But there is some question to your point earlier about. marrying up autocratic regimes and the Abraham Accords maybe becoming kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card that absolves you of previous sins like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And that worries me. Absolutely. Again, this is the point that I've heard you and Ben talk about before,

but one of the things that's happened is that because of the Abraham Accords, you essentially have the pro-Israel organizations in Washington, APAC and their other groups, essentially now being very, very pro-Saudi, very, very pro-Emarotti, and essentially carrying water for these really, really brutal regimes. Remember, also, we grease the wheels of this by sending these very advanced F-35 planes to the Emirates, who are really bad actor across the region, by giving Morocco permission to basically annex Western Sahara, which is complete violation of international law, by undermining the very fragile transition to democracy in Sudan. And I think that the The justice question here, which is the fundamental one, you know, peace without justice isn't

something which is really that valuable. Ultimately, what makes peace sustainable and valuable is when there's some kind of justice. The questions of justice here are justice for the Palestinians who lack the most basic rights and justice for the people who suffer under these brutal regimes. You know, we've talked about Jamal Khashoggi, but there are many other dissidents in Bahrain, in the UAE in Saudi Arabia who are being brutalized by this. And what the Abraham Accords do is it actually makes it much easier for all of these regimes to not have to respond to the desires of basic rights from their people. And I would even go as far as to say that in the long term,

I know this is not a conventional view. In the long term, I'm not even sure this is going to be good for the relationship between Israelis and people in the rest of the Middle East. And I'll tell you why. If you remember one of the reasons that some people in the Middle East hated the United States so much, why? Because they saw that the United States was helping to prop up their brutal dictatorial regimes, right? Well, so now a lot of people in the Middle East can see that Israel is helping to prop up their brutal dictatorial regimes, right? Including through this kind of surveillance software that they sell that helps these regimes find and then torture dissidents.

Over the long term, I'm not sure that that's actually going to bring us to the, the true kind of peace and reconciliation that we want between Israelis and other people in the Middle East. I think that's a really important point to surface and not one that I think I've heard anyone else make, frankly. All right, I'm going to be a hack for a second. That's kind of my home base. Try to play devil's advocate. See if I can convince you. You and I both just watched two hours of a January 6th committee hearing where we saw that, you know, Donald Trump was basically one secret service member away from storming the capital himself. You know, like all the people who poohed the insurrection, poohed the couped the coup are a lot of egg on their face these days, a lot of

ketchup on their face if Donald Trump was throwing the plate. So you're Joe Biden. You're getting told by your pollsters, your political advisors. The gas prices don't go down. We are dead. Going to get destroyed at the midterm. This might happen anyway, by the way. Then Biden's going to lose the presidency. We're going to usher in a second Trump term. Isn't that a worse outcome for human rights than going to Saudi Arabia, kissing the ring, bringing gas down 50 cents a gallon, and I don't know, trying to salvage something here. That's my hack attempt at an argument. No, I think, you know, I thought a lot about this because this is the kind of argument that can come up in so many different circumstances, right? When you're talking about, obviously, the Democratic Party

is a better party for democracy and many other things in the Republican Party. And so one can often get into this logic of, well, if this is what the Democrats need to do, even if it's pretty ugly in order to try to be able to survive politically, then one should support it. I guess where I come down is that's just not my line of work. I mean, I'm not a political strategist. I'm a journalist. You know, I write for a living. And it seems to me my job is in a tiny, tiny little way to try to kind of like create some countervailing pressure on the other side, right, against all of the pressure that Joe Biden's feeling from, you know, all these Republicans who basically couldn't give a darn about the rights of Palestinians or Saudis, for that matter, because all they want is basically,

you know, some country to basically help us against Iran and kind of do our bidding in this global Cold War. And so I think that there may be other people for whom those conversations make sense. But I think it's, to me, if you're a journalist and a writer, it's a little bit dangerous to go down that rabbit hole because you kind of lose your moral bearings a little bit. I hear that. Peter, here's another pitch for you. So if you really want oil and gas and more of it on the market, I've heard just through the grapevine that Venezuela and Iran have access to that as well. What about being nicer to them?

Yes. And I think that I want to be clear what the argument here is. Right. It's like there are other options. People would say, yeah, but like their governments are totally abusive and brutal and authoritarian, too. Absolutely. But I think part of what gets lost often in these conversations is, the distinction between having relations with a bad government and arming a bad government, right?

I don't have a problem with the U.S. having normal diplomatic relations with bad regimes, whether they're in Iran or Venezuela or even in Saudi Arabia. Now, we should try to use our efforts to try to promote human rights. I think it's right. And if there's a broad-based call amongst those people in those countries for sanctions of some kind, we should listen to them, especially if those are not, sanctions are going to be targeted against a small number of people, not the whole population. But what we're doing in Saudi is actually arming this regime.

We've been doing it for many years now, even as it produces this horrendous humanitarian situation in Iran. And one of the reasons we are more dependent on Saudi Arabia and they have more leverage over us is because we have no relationship with the government of Iran. I think we'd be, and I think what Obama was going for, I think, was to have a kind of more normal relationship. We weren't going to be allies with Iran.

We certainly were not going to give them weapons for any goodness sake, but to have a more normal relationship would mean that the Saudis and the Emirates had less leverage over us. And I think that would be a much better policy for U.S. interests. And I actually also think it would be a better policy for human rights in general. Peter, this is why everyone should read Jewish currents in the Bynart notebook on Substack, because you're going to see great journalism, read great journalism, and get exposed to ideas that aren't the conventional kind of blobby thinking in Washington. So thank you for coming on today for talking with me. I always read your stuff.

I always learn something, and I really appreciate it. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks again to the January 6th committee for dropping that surprise episode on us. Yeah, yeah, that was like a pretty good bonus episode. That was a good bonus. Thanks to Peter Byrner for joining the show. Ben, I was off for a week.

I asked you for book recommendations. I started one of the La Care books. I forget the name of it. You recommended. The Smiley Trilogy. So, Ticker, Taylor. honorable schoolboy and smiley's honorable school boy is what I've

Love that one It's fantastic so far Stick with it by the way It gets better Okay no I'm into it I'm into it I first read a book called The Flag and the Cross

Which is about white Christian nationalism And the threat to American democracy Because I was like Beatriz Yeah fun The good news about it It's short it's like three hours What was your best meal

I mean you've been in France The best meal So we went to So Hannah's sister His sister is dating a guy husband for a while Who's French It's great

So we travel like a local. Love that. So we were like just in Paris for a night. And then we took a train to this little place called Ilderet. It's an island where like a lot of locals go, a lot of Brits go. And you basically like ride a bike around and you go to almost a literal shack. And you get seafood that like came out of the water like over there. You drink, you know, a glass of bottle of wine that costs seven euros and all the muscles.

And it's better than like Chateau Nuf de Pup. Swear to God had both on this trip. And like the best lunch I've ever, best, one of the best meals I've ever had in my life. was just like all seafood, uh, the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu. And, um, it was the best. That's some real eat, pray, love show. It was the best.

And it's also like, you know, sometimes when you're abroad and you can't speak the language and you just kind of feel like an asshole. Yeah. Because like, even the French I kind of know in my head, when, when pressed, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go right to fake sign language. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or you speak English with an accent. Yeah, and you, you feel like an idiot because like in every other country, people speak English.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I always feel like a dumb ass. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, Melanie's boyfriend Roth. Like, he's from Straussburg. He's like fluent English, French, German, knows some Spanish. He could probably dabble in Italian. I'm like, God damn it. This guy's like handsome and cool and knows seven languages. And I'm just like dead weight over here.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you got a podcast. You got two podcasts. You got two podcasts. There is something tough about telling people, you know, they ask, what do you do for living? You're like, I'm a podcaster.

It's hard to explain. In some cultures, it doesn't translate, you know? Like, it's like radio? Yeah, yeah. Sort of. It's radio on your phone. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

People seem to like it, I guess. Yeah. My mom subscribes. Anyway. Apple or Spotify or anywhere else. Yeah, wherever else you want to hear my bullshit. All right, talk to you guys next week. See it.

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