Pod Save the World - John Bolton’s sh*tty book

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

Tommy and Ben talk through some of the explosive revelations in John Bolton’s book, from supporting the construction of concentration camps in China, to thinking it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela to his approach to North Korea and Iran. They also cover news about climate change, Chinese cyberattacks, the ongoing saga of Capt Crozier, the latest with the Coronavirus and an update out of Afghanistan. Then Tommy is joined by Hamed Sinno, the lead singer of one of the biggest bands in the Middle East, Mashrou’ Leila, and an influential LGBTQ rights activist.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I think we're going to have a little bit of fun today. John Bolton wrote a book. He did. To come out the day we recorded or the day after? I think it leaked like the day or day after we recorded, yeah. Who cares? He's an asshole. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to go through some of the biggest policy explosions in that book. We're also going to talk about some troubling news about climate change, allegations that China is mounting massive cyber attacks against the U.S. European Union in Australia. An update on Captain Crozier, the latest out of Afghanistan, some coronavirus news. And then we have a very cool interview today with a Lebanese rock star named Hamid Tanu. He is a singer. He's a songwriter.

He's one of the biggest rock stars in the Middle East. And he is also a global LGBTQ plus activist. So a different interview that is very exciting for us here at POTS of the World because, Ben, we usually don't get to talk to, like, cool people and musicians. Well, they're cool people, but they're not rocks. Stars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true.

A lot of goons. Yeah, it's cool if you're like really into talking about like missile throw weights and like centrifuges and stuff. Then we kind of, then we geek out. Who am I kidding? It's like my preferred topic. Anyway, one quick housekeeping item, which is that to celebrate pride, join us for Crooked Media's first and hopefully last annual at home Pride parade.

The last part is the at home part. It's a live virtual event featuring a bunch of crooked media hosts and special guests who raise money for LGBTQ organizations, including. groups on the ground right now fighting for trans lives. So please tune in to Crooked Media's YouTube channel on Wednesday, June 24th at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. It'll be 90 minutes long. Love It bought glitter. It should be fun. But check it out. Let's talk about John Bolton because it's been quite the week for foreign policy news thanks to former national security advisor John Bolton's book. So Bolton has spent just months fighting with the Trump administration over the release of this

humble, self-effacing, modestly titled memoir, the room where it happened. How does that rank next to duty in some of the other books for you? You know, there's a whole genre of self-serving book titles. The room where it happened, I think, is making it a hard run at duty

for number one here. Yeah, when you're ripping off Hamilton, it kind of shoots you forward. So the White House has argued that this book contains classified information. They took Bolton to court in an effort to block publication. Bolton says it's wrong,

that he made all the changes that were asked of them. So here we are. I bet there's some listeners, Ben, who don't really know who John Bolton is. So I figured it might be useful to quickly remind them. So, you know, this guy has been advocating for terrible foreign policy ideas

for several decades. He was an assistant attorney general for Reagan in the 80s. He had several jobs at the State Department, including the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control International Affairs. And, you know, bizarrely in that role, he basically fought against all arms control agreements and then became known as one of the architects

of the Iraq war. So way to be John. In 2005, President Bush made Bolton the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but he had to do so via recess appointment, which means you don't get a vote. You just get put there for a temporary period because Bolton couldn't get confirmed by the Senate. Even Republicans were opposed to him. He's a definition of a warmonger. He's called for regime change in Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, North Korea. You know, Ben, I feel bad. I'm probably leaving out a couple of countries. Cuba. Cuba. You're forgetting my Cubans. Oh, good call. Yeah.

Yeah. He accused him of having biological weapons when there was no evidence that that was true. Yeah, cool. Another good checkmark for him. He, Bolton served as Trump's national security advisor for 17 months starting April of 2018 before getting shit canned in September of 2019. Since then, I guess he's just been typing away. Ben, did I leave anything out?

Like, do we capture the essence of Bolton? What else do folks need to know? Well, just like he was supposedly working on arms control and dismantling arms control agreements. While he was at the UN, he was basically trying to destroy the United Nations. He famously once said that's true. The United Nations could lose 10 floors of the building in New York and it would make any difference and basically went up there to attack the very institution that he was supposed to serve the United States at. And importantly, Tommy, a mentor to friend of the pod Rick Grinnell. Oh, no way. That's right. Yes. John Bolton hired Rick Grinnell as his spokesperson at the

United Nations, thereby launching him to the center of this kind of right-wing, aggressive, self-serving neocon foreign policy, dystopia. And now we have Rick Rennell as, you know, recently acting DNI and also bizarrely our ambassador to Germany, where Rick Rennell is taking a page out of the Bolton playbook and trying to destroy the U.S. German relationship as ambassador. Wow. Well, he did learn. He's a fast learner, I guess. Yeah. Both are also fixtures on Fox News. So that's kind of them. So, Ben, I think we'd start with China because to me, those are some of the most explosive things we learned.

We have talked about China's treatment of the Uyghurs on this show several times. They're a Muslim minority group in Western China. The Chinese government has put an estimated 1 to 2 million Uyghurs into concentration camps that they specially built for them, where they are reeducated, tortured, sometimes disappeared forever in a systematic attempt by the state to erase their religion in their culture. It is a crime against humanity. It is the most horrific thing happening potentially in the world today. In the book, Bolton says that during a meeting with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, Trump told him that he should go ahead with building these camps and that it was exactly the right

thing to do. So just in case you doubted Bolton's recollection here, Trump did an interview with Axios a couple of days after the book came out. And he said in that interview that he didn't put sanctions on the Chinese government over their treatment of the Uighurs because he thought it would interfere with trade talks. So that's one thing we learned about him in China. Bolton also writes that Trump explicitly asked the Chinese for help in the election. He wanted Xi Jinping to buy soybeans and wheat because it would help him get votes in the Midwest. In exchange, Trump offered to lift tariffs. So, Ben, let's just start there. Look, I want to just point out quickly that Bolton did not threaten to quit over any of this. The time he prepared a typed copy of my two-sentence

resignation letter, that's a quote, was when Trump considered meeting with Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister. It was not when his boss came out as pro-concentration camp. Yeah, I mean, let's just say that none of this redounds to John Bolton's credibility or integrity, because as you say, he went to work every day on behalf of these policies, and the only breaking point for him was not getting his full shooting war with Iran. But these are useful things that we're learning from the book. I think of the China pieces, a few things stood out to me. First, just, you know, the extremity of a U.S. President endorsing concentration camps. Impossible to imagine anybody who's ever occupied the office before. And probably just about anybody serious who's ever run for president before,

who could sit there and say it was a very good idea to build these concentration camps. And again, just in case people don't fully appreciate just how grotesque this is. You know, I spent some time, Tommy, talking to the Human Rights Watch researchers who've gathered a lot of anecdotal and firsthand accounts of what's been happening in Jingjing province where the Uyghurs are imprisoned. You can get thrown into prison camp for basically anything that suggests that, you know, you're Islamic or that you want to have your own identity, essentially, separate from the Chinese state. So people who've grown beards, people who've downloaded sermons. you know, people who've literally stopped smoking because that could be a sign of moving in line with Islamic practice or quit drinking. You know, you don't know the thing that you could do that can land you in a camp. There are surveillance cameras all over this province designed to create this

kind of techno-tototelitarian state meant to stamp out any independent Uyghur identity. This is a crime against humanity of epic proportions and Trump goes along with it. Secondly, the trade talks. We were supposedly in this trade agreement, and we've talked about this, but not in a while, to address kind of structural behavior by China that is unfair. They steal intellectual property, for instance. They steal trade secrets. They give enormous subsidies to Chinese companies, thereby not giving a level playing field to international companies, and on and on.

Trump was supposed to, and if you listen to his advisors, be addressing this through his tariffs. What is confirmed, and, you know, frankly, was evident. anyways, Trump doesn't care about any of those things. He doesn't care about solving actual problems. He was basically using these tariffs, which are creating massive economic disruption here and in China and around the world, to get commitments from Xi Jinping to buy things from places in the United States that are useful to his reelection. So buy soy beans, buy products from Midwestern states that could help him for his reelection. Think of it this way. Donald Trump risked the entire American and global economy cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs based on assessments, just so he could pop up

at the beginning of an election year and say that he got China to buy some soybeans. So he's hurting Americans to get this kind of help for China for the optics of his re-election campaign. And it also shows, again, as John Bolton should have testified at the Ukraine impeachment hearings, that as with Ukraine, Donald Trump is more than happy to ask any foreign government, including China, who's supposed to be his biggest enemy, for help. to get reelected, essentially turning the foreign policy, United States, into an extension of his personal interests. So it's a damning indictment across the board on the issue China that Donald

Trump said he was going to run for re-election on. Yeah. I mean, using the entire government for personal gain is a theme of the book. I do think that being pro-concentration camp is one of the most morally depraved things I've ever heard in my life from any government official. Thank God that Donald Trump was not president when Adolf Hitler was rising to power. because, you know, Nazi comparisons are fraught, but I do think throwing one to two million people in a concentration camp is a crime against humanity. It's a horrific deed. It's something the world should be calling out every day. And we are just not. He is conspicuously silent on this. Yeah. The U.S. should be organizing other countries to address this. And instead, we're giving this guy

not just a green light. We're patting him on the back. Yeah. Okay. Let's turn to Venezuela. So as I mentioned at the top, you know, Bolton was, you know, leading the charge before he got to the White House and while he was there for regime change in Venezuela. You guys might remember the time Bolton was photographed with a notepad that said 5,000 troops to Colombia. That was very subtle. So he's a nut. I guess my point is that, you know, Bolton is the last guy that I would go to for, you know, policy advice when it comes to Venezuela. But, you know, in this case, what we're relying on here is just Bolton taking good notes. and Bolton quotes Trump as saying it would be cool, that's a quote, to invade Venezuela,

and that it was really part of the United States. That's also a quote. Bolton also writes about how Vladimir Putin easily got Trump to sour on Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who, you know, if you don't remember, was a man Trump literally invited to be his guest at the state of the union speech. And so in the most obvious psychological operation ever, Putin compared Guido to Hillary re-clinton. And like, just like that, snap your fingers. Trump was rethinking whether Nicholas Maduro was the guy because he seemed stronger. And then in that same Axios interview I mentioned earlier, Trump seemed to walk back his support for Juan Guaido. And he said he was open to meeting with Nicholas Maduro, who until then had been the sworn enemy of this administration. And then they

walked that back again because, you know, a bunch of Florida papers started writing it up and they're worrying about the Venezuelan vote in South Florida. So anyway, Ben, Did we learn anything about the Venezuela policy? Anything surprise you in this chapter? I mean, I don't want to say it surprised me, but I think what it confirms is how catastrophically schizophrenic our policy is. So essentially, Donald Trump acting on the recommendations of people like John Bolton and out of a political interest of appealing to hardline Cuban-American and Venezuelan Americans in Florida

organizes a whole bunch of countries to recognize Juan Guaido as the president of Venezuela, right? So a very dramatic move to essentially recognize somebody else as the president of the country. Piles sanction after sanction on Venezuela, which is hurting the Venezuelan people, harming them as well as a Venezuelan government, right? Threatens to go to war. And you see Trump, you know, the worst kind of mentality of the United States towards Latin America, oh, we can just kind of go have a war down there. This is really a part of our country anyway. He's giving representation to all those things.

And then he kind of got bored with it. And so everybody else is hanging out on a limb, right? General Marco Rubio, Juan Guaido, the Venezuelan opposition, all these other Latin American countries that we got to recognize Guido. Everybody's kind of charged out on this limb. And then Donald Trump just kind of cuts the limb off because he loses interest in it. in part because Vladimir Putin, who basically has been propping up Maduro, gets in his year. I mean, that's basically where we are in Venezuela.

And to me, the reason this is relevant is not because this is new information, but hopefully because all of these people down in Florida who've basically, you know, taken this, you know, bought into this hook line and sinker that Donald Trump is some tough guy in Venezuela, like if they don't now know that none of this was on the level, that it's all bullshit, the result of the policy is that Russia and China are much more influential in Venezuela today. Maduro is much more entrenched today because everybody's seen Donald Trump lose interest and we've had this kind of Keystone Cops policy with like the coup that we've talked about. If that doesn't get the attention of voters in Florida, that maybe this kind of, you know,

Fox News, hard line approach because Maduro is a socialist and because they're aligned with the Cubans makes no sense, then really nothing will. So I hope that the outcome of this is to kind of discredit this line of thinking that people like Rubio and Bolton sold on Trump that Trump never really went along with. And we can get back to a kind of a sane Venezuelan policy that doesn't hurt the Venezuelan people. And that's the other thing is that once again, is there any consideration given to the people on the other end of these policies? I mean, they're all treated like kind of interesting Washington parlor games and do we go to war or not or what have you. there are people suffering because of our sanctions. They're people that we could be helping with a better policy.

And there's just no evidence from this book, from either Bolton or Trump, by the way, that they give a shit about what happens to human beings. Yeah, it doesn't seem to really come up. Two other main areas that jumped out of me were North Korea and Iran. So when it comes to North Korea, Bolton basically confirms what we all kind of suspected, which was that Trump had no plan or goal for his talks with Kim Jong-un at the Singapore. Poor Summit. Bolton says, basically, Trump just cared about the number of reporters that were there. He, like, kept counting the cameras or whatever. He also said Trump rejected a bad proposal from Kim that would have entailed a piecemeal destruction of North Korea's nuclear infrastructure. And in doing so, he basically said, you know, if I accept this, I'll never get reelected, which, you know, Ben, obviously going to the talks with no plan is a big mistake. I have to say, I'm less bothered by rejecting a proposal by outlining your political reality to another head of state. who probably doesn't even understand the concept of politics, but whatever.

A related moment with Iran was, in June of 2019, Iran shot down a U.S. unmanned drone. Bolton was just chomping at the bit to launch a massive retaliatory strike. And Trump agreed to do it, but then called it off at the last minute because he was brief that it could kill a lot of people. And Bolton quotes him saying, too many body bags, not proportionate. Bolton calls that, quote, the most irrational thing I ever witnessed a president do. Ben, am I wrong that Donald Trump looks good here? Like in both these areas, he's in favor of diplomacy.

He's not for a disproportionate military response. I mean, I feel like Bolton did a little self-own in this situation. Well, I think on North Korea, Trump doesn't look good because essentially he's playing with the most highest stakes imaginable, you know, nuclear weapons. the future security of a U.S. treaty ally in South Korea and also Japan. And literally, all he cares about is the optics back home and whether he gets a good photo op and a lot of press attention. Yeah. I actually think, yeah, the North Korea section to me is a huge indictment of the American media more than anything else because they went along with this.

The Singapore summit was treated like some massive historic breakthrough when anybody could tell at the time that nothing was actually accomplished. You might forgive them for doing that once, but it happened again at the demilitarized zone. Like in the book it suggests, you know, again, that Bolton knew nothing was going to come of this, but Trump knew that it would be good, you know, press back home. So to me, the indictment of North Korea is actually the American media for buying into this. On Iran, I, yes. I mean, I think what's clear is that, you know, Trump didn't want to get into a new war. Now, what I fault Trump with is he went along completely with the Bolton Fox News view of Iran where we tear up the Iran nuclear deal and we get on this escalation ladder

and we pile up sanctions, which as we talked about leads logically to the brink of war. But I think Trump knows politically like getting into a war would be deeply unpopular back home. And so each time he's kind of stared over the precipice, he's pulled back a bit. And he's had some luck, too, by the way, in terms of things not spiring out of control both times. But it is very telling about the mindset of John Bolton that he could witness all the crimes and misdemeanors that we've talked about. And yet the thing that was like the breaking point, the thing that he thinks is the worst thing an American president could do is not killing hundreds of people in Iran. And again, here Trump is actually is paying attention to people, but I actually don't think

it's so much the people. I think it's the Trump knew that if we did that there'd basically be a war and he didn't want a war. So part of me, you know, yes, I'm happy he didn't do the war. I think it was probably also for his own political calculus more than anything else. But it does just show you how much, you know, Bolton and a bunch of other people kind of glommed on to Trump because they could see that his kind of Fox News view of foreign policy, we talk tough, we yell and scream about how terrible and the Democrats are, how weak Obama was. you know, we have our villains that we can put on TV in Venezuela, the socialists, and Iran, the Muslims.

That's kind of the Trump view. And then there's these neocons like Bolton, who have much more hard-edged views of actually wanting to do the wars in these places and do the regime change. And those things kind of got attached to each other. And that made for a comfortable marriage for a while, but ultimately, you know, broke apart. And the fact that the breaking point for Bolton was that he couldn't get a war, I think, is a pretty damning revelation. Yeah, Fred Kaplan from Slate pointed out in a review of the book that there's a passage

that shows that Bolton's actual position on the Iran nuclear deal or renegotiating the Iran nuclear deal for a stronger version was that he didn't just oppose the JCPOA. He opposed any deal unless there was a regime change. He basically opposed any deal with this Iranian government. So that, I think, just shows how bankrupt their criticism. of the Iran nuclear deal were in the first place and all, you know, oh, you know, the claims about, you know, it's about enrichment or timelines or whatever. No, it was about, it's a regime change strategy, you know, dressed up as just anti-Obama. Yeah, no, it just shows it was disingenuous,

because actually they would claim publicly it's not a regime change strategy. We just want a better deal. And then we'd have these endless arguments over like what, you know, levels of centrifuges could be installed in 10 years and what the nature of inspections were about things that happened, 10 years ago. But what John Bolton and Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmab and Salman have won it all long was a regime change policy. They've been lying about that saying it was about a better deal. The book confirms that all the debates that took place basically from 2015 to 2020 were not on the level here. The other side of these debates, really what they wanted is regime change. And how that wasn't evident to Trump when it was kind of evident to,

everybody else is beyond me. Why Trump was surprised to find himself consistently on the brink of war with Iran when everything he did was a part of a regime change policy. Again, I'm not surprised, but it once again confirms that Trump doesn't think these things through, really. Yeah. So final thoughts on this book, we didn't really talk about, you know, these Ukraine allegations that were part of the impeachment trial because it's just too frustrating.

In interviews promoting the book, Bolton said he thinks Trump would pull out of NATO in a second term and that we would. we got even closer than many people realized in the first. Bolton argues that basically the whole government has been corrupted. It's now just pushing Trump's personal agenda. It is about as damaging a book as I can think of that has been written, especially while the president is still in office. It also seems like Bolton could be in some real legal trouble for publishing classified

information. I haven't read the whole thing, but it would be pretty remarkable if Bolton skipped the impeachment hearings to write this book and then he loses all the revenue from it or has even worse legal issues. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, well, to your point about Ukraine, he basically says it was a quid pro quo. I mean, basically says it in so many words. And, you know, that again, the Republican defense was always, we don't have a first-hand account of somebody saying that. Again, that matters because they were making disingenuous arguments. It's striking to me how many things across the board

so many people are willing to say things that they know to be bullshit, basically, just to get through something instead of having a legitimate debate. I think with the book, what's more likely than anything is that Bolton doesn't actually see any of the proceeds from this book. What the government can do, this happened, by the way, to previous books. They can basically block Bolton from profiting off it, which is great. But I think it's damaging because John Bolton is a known commodity to Trump voters. He's been on Fox News for years. And so it's one thing for you and I to say, you know, it's horrible that Trump didn't speak out about the concentration camps. He asked China for help in re-election.

He doesn't know what he's doing and on and on. But when John Bolton says it, I think people will listen to him in a way that, you know, they don't listen to us if they're Trump voters. And that's something that's not going to go away before the election. And I think that matters. Yeah, I totally agree. I still think people don't need to buy this book. They can read about it, you know.

If you want to buy a book, Friend of the Pod, Masha Gesson's book, Surviving Autocracy Out Now, which is probably a more apt book. Yeah, yeah. a plug, but it's in stride because it's a more apt takedown than, yeah, John Bolton's depicting the autocracy. Yeah, don't buy John Bolton's book. He's an asshole. But I agree. I've seen lots of data that suggest that swing voters are more moved by conservative figures or conservative outlets. So you will see him featured in a lot of ads. All right, let's talk about some other stuff. So, you know, we've been understandably focused on the coronavirus, the election, like, protests,

but some very real and scary things are happening when it comes to climate change. So over the weekend, a town in Siberia that is north of the Arctic Circle, really far north, hit 100 degrees. It's the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. The average June high in the area is 68 degrees. This leads to snow, ice melt, permafrost melts. There's more forest fires. It becomes this, you know, cascading, compounding chain of events. So, you know, as hard as it is to like worry about another thing right now, this is going to be the most important thing. The next president deals with full stop and is yet another reason why we need to get Mitch McConnell the hell out of the way in the Senate. Yeah, and tell me what this tells me, you know, we were going back and forth

today about how scary this is, is that if you look at these projections of where climate change might be going, and then you look at data like this, it might be accelerating much more rapidly than even the more dire predictions of climate change currently forecast. So this thing could be in an exponential spiral already. And what worries me is, look, we're in a country right now where the government can't get its act together and people can't even wear masks to deal with a pandemic that is here right now, right? Climate change is the next pandemic. We're basically in February. You know, the pandemic has escaped. It is moving around. We can see it. The scientists are warning about it. And, you know, are we going to be the country that couldn't lock down and have

people wear masks to deal with it? Because in order to deal with climate change, we're going to have to transform the entire global economy and change some aspects of our own behavior. It's a very direct analogy here. And I hope that one of the lessons that we take from the pandemic is better to listen to the scientists and do something before the absolute worst happens because we're getting warning sign after warning side, including these temperatures in the Arctic, that those dire forecasts from climate scientists might actually even be conservative in terms of what's coming. Yeah, it is incredibly scary. Look into it, talk to your friends about it, make people climate voters, because it's just so important. Make it a voting issue. And you're right, without a Democratic

Senate, nothing gets done with the Democratic Senate. A lot could get done. Yeah, so we need it all. Another issue that caught our eye been was this week, a top European Union official accused China of conducting cyber attacks on hospitals and health care institutions during the coronavirus. They also called out China for spreading disinformation about the disease. And then last week, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, announced that Australia was facing a series of sophisticated cyber attacks. He didn't name China directly in his remarks, but his staff did it on background. So, but I'm not totally sure what was going on here.

But it was notable and interesting to me that Australia and the EU went public with these allegations. What do you think this strategy is there? Like, why go public with this stuff? Well, you know, first of all, with Australia, they had called for some investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and not in a kind of a Trumpy way that the Chinese cooked it up in a lab, but just simply like what happened here. And the Chinese didn't like that and lashed out at them. And then these cyber attacks happened. I think in Europe, you know, we've seen and heard about pretty substantial disinformation campaigns around this. And I think countries have been seeing this for a long time. They've been increasingly concerned about China becoming more aggressive,

both with respect to cyber attacks and with respect to disinformation campaigns. I've talked to a lot of Europeans about this. And part of what I hear about is that, boy, we really wish the United States actually was helping to lead the response to this. Trump, for all of his rhetoric about China, is notably absent from, you know, essentially trying to organize like-minded countries around the world to deal with this. And I think part of what's happening here is that countries recognize that if you raise concerns alone, the Chinese will punish you. You know, so if one country, one European country by itself raises concerns or if it was just Australia, then the Chinese would squeeze them. They'd use economic, you know, tariffs or other forms of economic sanction. You know, they would

essentially squeeze those countries. And because China is so big and powerful now economically, they have a lot of leverage. The only way to try to stand up to China is for a whole bunch of countries to do it together. You know, so I think you see the EU doing it as a block, you know, doing it at the same time that the Australians are doing it. What really needs to happen, you know, if there's a Biden presidency, is you need to have the U.S., the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, whatever team we can put together to raise these concerns together so that you're in a big enough block that the Chinese can't play you off each other, can't punish one of you, you know, can't intimidate people into silence on these things. Because essentially, you know, we can't live

in a world where China is just able to launch cyber attacks against any country that doesn't go along with its, you know, let's face it, phony line, or is, you know, essentially distorting our political and media environment with probably more sophisticated disinformation campaigns than even what we saw from Russia in 2016. So that's what we have to get to is a global response to this. Yeah, another reason to win the election. So we wanted to close a loop on the story of Captain Crozier. He was the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt who was fired for warning about the spread of the coronavirus among his sailors. That ensuing controversy led to the resignation at Thomas Motley, the Secretary of the Navy. Initially, it seemed like the Department of Defense

was going to reinstate Crozier, presumably because like a thousand sailors on his ship all got sick, and it seemed like his warnings were prescient, not something to be punished. But the military did this deeper investigation into his conduct. Now they say that Crozier didn't do enough to stop the spread of the virus in the first place until he won't get his command back. So I don't know what to believe here, Ben. I've used to think the Navy took these kinds of investigations very seriously. They were willing to be self-critical.

now this just feels like a mess, but that is the latest as far as we know it. Yeah, it doesn't feel right in any event because the only reason that if they are determining that he didn't do enough, even though he's somebody who warned about it, the only reason we know that is because they fired him for warning about it, you know?

So there was kind of an original sin to this whole thing, which is they punished a guy for, you know, warning about the spread of COVID. And when they were embarrassed by that, they launched this investigation. It does show you how much, you know, when Trump is in charge, like, it's hard to know what to trust coming from the government, you know, the Justice Department, now the military, certainly the State Department under Pompeo, you know, like, I just don't know.

And I don't know that I will ever know. Yeah, I don't have a lot of confidence. So the Voice of America reported that Afghanistan's security forces have suffered the most casualties in one week since the beginning of the war in 2001. So according to these numbers, 291 Afghan troops were killed and 500 were wounded after the Taliban carried out 422 attacks in 32 provinces. You know, it's notable then because the U.S. troop level has gone down from 12,000 to 8600.

The U.S. has been pushing for a ceasefire between the Afghan government and the Taliban and us that would allow for peace talks. But the Taliban had made clear in word and deed, that they will basically only reduce attacks on American forces and not on Afghan forces. And the peace talks are just completely stalled. So obviously, U.S. casualties get more attention than casualties of other countries back in the U.S. press. But I think given how directly responsible the U.S. is for the situation in Afghanistan writ

large and how likely it seems that the Taliban could end up running parts of the government, we just thought it was worth mentioning today, what do you think happens here? I mean, do the U.S. and NATO continue to withdraw? Like, what is the right move? Because this seems unsustainable. Well, look, I think if you believe, you know, I think as you and I have argued in this podcast said that we need to be winding down our military engagement in Afghanistan, there's always a degree of risk, right, around the Taliban being in control of parts of the country.

I think that what you didn't need to do and don't necessarily need to stay invested in is is this deal with the Taliban that cut out the Afghan government. I mean, why give the Taliban the legitimacy of a phone call with Trump, of a meeting with Pompeo, they're a counterterrorism partner, you know, those of us kind of language that was being used, that they're going to help us fight terrorism. We kind of put the cart before the horse here, you know.

That deal, I mean, clearly the Taliban sees that as a flashing green light to, like, accelerate its offensive. against the Afghan government and, you know, try to win a civil war. And I think what needs to happen is actually the negotiation that should have happened, which is between us, the Taliban and the Afghan government, you know, to get to some form of ceasefire or to get to some kind of political settlement about how the country is going to look as the U.S. withdrawals that brings in other countries that have influence here. And their countries even that have some influence on the Taliban, obviously Pakistan first among them. It just feels like that work has a,

been done, I'm sure people are trying to do it. I'm sure people are working this really hard. I don't want to suggest it's easy. But I do think that the kind of Taliban-centered approach to pursuing peace in Afghanistan isn't working. And it has to be broadened out. The discussion has to be broadened out, both inside of Afghanistan and with other countries. Because otherwise, there's this kind of sense that we've given the imprimatur on the Taliban as a legitimate actor at the same time that they're killing Afghan security forces that we trained, that we armed, that we asked to do this fighting. And that, I think, is not the way that you want to see this end. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Just a quick, like, global coronavirus update. So the World Health

Organization said that the largest single-day increase in global cases happened on Sunday with more than 183,000 new cases reported worldwide. 60% of those were from North and South America. Brazil led the charge with 55,000 new infections. The U.S. had 36,000, and India had 15,000. Part of this is more testing. Part of this is lags in the way data is reported, so it can at times come in in batches, but none of it is good. Even countries that have done a very good job managing the crisis, like Germany,

have seen some spikes, albeit at, you know, a way smaller scale, and hopefully it'll be manageable, but it's notable. I mean, Brazil is a true disaster. they are the only country besides the U.S. to have more than 50,000 deaths. Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina are seeing big surges as well. There's reports today, Ben, that the European Union countries are starting to open back up and reconsider travel bans they have in place, but they may have to continue to ban travelers from the U.S. because we've done such a shitty job containing the virus.

I imagine Canada will have to make a similar decision at some point, too. So I don't know, man. It's looking bad. It's bizarre to me that the global financial market, are still seemingly kind of like blowing this news off. It feels like we're back in February again, but that's the latest. Yeah, I do think if you look at it, it's striking that the European Union generally has really bent the curve, you know. And so if you look at the EU like, you know, a Japan or South Korea, and the EU had a much more dramatic spike than, say, Japan or

South Korea, they bent the curve in a way that we just haven't. And in fact, the cases in the U.S. kind of mirror the cases in the EU until clearly Americans just didn't take it as seriously, probably, you know, park because of the messages they're getting from political leadership. And then, you know, Bolsonaro, you see obviously not taking it seriously in Brazil. And we've had concerns that similarly in Mexico, that Amlo wasn't taking it seriously. And so when you have the biggest countries in our hemisphere, you know, the U.S. and Brazil and Mexico, kind of dropping the ball on this, there's enough movement of people, right, around the hemisphere

that it just puts us in a more difficult position than Europe where they are on top of it. So to me, this is something to watch because you basically could have much greater loss of life, obviously, and just a longer challenge with reopening. And so therefore, potentially more economic damage to in our hemisphere, But the other thing is, frankly, like the global supply chains, global travel, none of that can all resume if you're going to have spikes in certain places.

The fact that Europe may have to have a travel ban from here because we can't get our act together, well, a lot of economic activity, you know, depends upon travel between the U.S. and Europe. And so until it just shows you that because not every government has been able to be on top of this in the way that the model governments have, like South Korea or New Zealand, that until there's a lot of. a vaccine, you know, things are not going to be fully back to normal in the global economy. And I totally share your mystification. I mean, the fact that the markets thus far have not reflected this fully shows you in part how much, you know, the markets, you know, are looking at wealth on computer screens and in portfolios and not... Or just the Fed pumping money in it.

Yeah, and the Fed pumping money, you know, like mainlining money into the markets. But underneath that, if small businesses, I mean, I recommend everybody read this piece in the Atlantic today about how this could be a depression. Because it basically, you know, as small businesses fold because consumers can't spend because people don't have money or people have coronavirus fears, I mean, there's all kinds of factors that could make this a very deep and lasting recession directly tied to the inability to stamp out the virus in a timely fashion. Yeah, the initial response, you know, it wasn't perfect, but they put a lot of money in a lot of people's hands. And I think things weren't as bad as we expected, but you're going to have to re-up that. And that's temporary. Yeah, for temporary and things are not looking good in a lot of states. Last thing before the interview.

So this was a fun one, Ben. So the State Department did a telephone briefing call because they were designating four Chinese news outlets as like foreign entities, right, that, you know, that are not free press. basically the point of the call was to like extol the virtue of press freedom and draw this contrast with China where they have state run media. A reporter from Reuters tried to ask about John Bolton's book and they muted his line. So this is how it went. That's not what this call is about the department's postwoman Morgan Ortegis said in response to the question, AT&T, can we mute that line? that was there's like just no sense of irony with these people hypocrisy irony they don't get it yeah well i mean like first of before we can get into the substance like these conference calls

remember these conference calls like um i don't know how many of these i did Tommy and like you ran some of them but it's basically you know how you communicate with the press you know like there's an AT&T operator someone like you is kind of moderating the thing there's a hundred reporters on you're sitting at a speaker phone i i don't know how many times i sat in this sit room with a bunch of, you know, NSC goons and did that. But look, it's how you are able to go deeper on things. And, you know, normally it's like you have your normal press briefings, which they don't really have at the State Department anymore. But then you have this to supplement and provide more information and give people an opportunity to ask questions. And I think what's

so striking to me is that they don't, look, the irony is obvious, right? In the same way that Tom Cotton was calling for sanctions on China for its treatment of protesters in Hong Kong, the same day, that he was writing an op-ed calling for the military to be deployed against peaceful protesters in the U.S., we watch that and think, like, do these people not get it? It's not that they don't get it. It's that they just don't care. You know, like, they don't care that it reeks of hypocrisy.

They don't care that they're going to be shamed for muting somebody on a call about press freedom. But I have to tell you that every reflection I've done about like American farm policy what we do in the world and all the stuff we talk about kind of leads me back to one key point, which is if we don't get our shit together home, like none of this matters, you know.

We can't advocate. We can put all the sanctions on China. We won for Hong Kong. But if we're not living our values here, it doesn't matter, has no credibility. You know, nobody around the world will follow it. And on issue after issue, these guys just don't seem to understand

that there's, it's not just about what's right and wrong, that should be enough. But it's also about like you're totally ineffective if people see you as hypocrites, you know? Yeah. And yes, hypocrisy's always been a part of American foreign policy, but they've made it the total of American foreign policy. Look, that's a very thoughtful and high-minded answer.

What offended me was just how fucking stupid they are. Like, it's really easy to not answer a question. Just like, just brush it off. You don't have to say 18-T, mute the line. What are you doing? Get your shit together. You're on a conference call, by the way. It's so easy.

It's not like you're on camera and like it's, it's so easy to just talk through a question. Just, you know, hey, you know, we don't have any comment on that. We'll get back to you. Well, you're right, the incompetence. You know, you don't know what's crazier. Like the autocracy or the incompetence, you know, it's like Bill Barr firing people that don't know that they're fired and won't allow him to find. You know, like they just, they're just not even good at it. Not even good at it.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, well, my conversation with Ham, Sunu. He is the lead singer and lyricist of one of the biggest rock bands in the Middle East and a global LGBT rights activist. So stick around for that. My guest today is Hamid Sunu. He's the lead singer and lyricist of one of the biggest rock bands in the Middle East from Mashra Laila and a global LGBTQ activist. Hamid, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. How close did I come to getting the band name correctly? Nowhere near, to be honest. I listen to you.

say it 45 times. I listened to podcasts of you. I listened to an interview you did with your friend from high school and I still managed to just butcher it. It's Meshroa Laila. Oh, Jesus Christ, I'll never be able to. Right. I mean, close enough. So listen, thank you so much for do this. Like, first of all, we don't get a lot of rock stars on this show. We're usually talking about, like, the nerdiest shit you can ever imagine. So I hope you're willing to indulge just like a couple music questions since obviously the band and your music, it's so core to who you are and the things you care about. So just for folks who aren't familiar, like you sing about political corruption, women's rights, religion, sexuality, subjects that might be considered taboo or risky to sing

along to or listen to in a lot of places. Do you think that taking those subjects head on is why the band got so popular or do you guys just, you know, play your asses off? It's a tricky question. Okay, well, I guess before I get into that, thank you. I don't get called a rock star very often, so that's awesome. Yeah, I don't know. It's a tricky question because, honestly, off the bat, I'm inclined to say from what I see from our actual audience that, yeah, the subject matter tends to resonate with them. I'm sure a lot of people value that the same way. I value that when, you know, when other writers write about stuff I give a shit about instead of just like, sorry, I don't know if I can curse or not. Curse away, please.

But on the other hand, I mean, I think it's safe to assume that, you know, systemic racism and homophobia and transphobia and sexism clearly suggests that addressing that subject matter is to no one's advantage, right? I'm sure the world would be much more comfortable with people that didn't question the status quo in any way whatsoever. And I think the band's history with getting banned from so many places and sort of, of being at the top of our game for quite some time and still not getting signed, et cetera, et cetera, et , et cetera, suggests that, you know, that stuff is actually not necessarily work to our advantage, but it's very much worth it, I think. Yeah. I mean, to your point, I mean, your performances, I think, have been shut down or censored in places like Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, others. I mean, do you think that the modern accessibility of music in social media can get around that kind of censorship?

Or does that still have a big impact on what you're doing? Well, yes and no. Does it stop us from connecting with our audience? Yes, at least in as far as our primary means of connecting with that audience goes. We're stage performers. Not being able to access stages where we can actually connect with our audiences does totally. suck, right? Obviously, the music still gets through.

The internet is a very difficult place to police in that sense. But the other thing is that it also just makes the band's sustainability much more difficult, right? At this point in time, as a musician, your primary source of income is actually gigging. And when you can't gig, then, you know, that takes a pretty decent hit. Add to that that when you're constantly banned from so many places, it also makes you something of a leper. So it's very difficult to end up getting other sources of income, like brand endorsements and stuff like that, because people don't necessarily want to associate themselves with someone who's been deemed controversial. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure the coronavirus really helps make everything a lot easier. Totally, yeah. Life has been amazing for musicians everywhere ever since the pandemic hit. I have a couple of friends who are touring musicians. And I think they are both so depressed to not be, you know, in front of audiences. and playing and also so confused by what people do at home all week. Like, what is this job? Why am I not somewhere else on a Friday?

They don't get it. Definitely. I don't know. For me, the last part didn't change much. I honestly just sort of never really left my house before this started. It's just impossible to make music right now. When you've dealt with censorship, I mean, has the industry helped you? Have they been supportive?

Do they look away? Like, what's the general response? I think the industry is very much a reflection of the society that it's, immersed in. So you get the same variety of responses that you would get from the society that the industry is embedded in. We've had a lot of sort of homophobic musicians and bigoted musicians. I mean, even over the last week since Sarahigazi's death, like the stuff that's come out of the music scene in the Middle East has been somewhat disappointing in places and then somewhat heartwarming in other places, there's a sense of solidarity. There's also the other end of it. The big players themselves,

you know, the record labels and whatnot, they tend to operate the same way they do everywhere else, where they're not going to stir the pot when that doesn't benefit them. Yeah, that makes sense. So I'll just like turn to the U.S. for a minute. I mean, in the U.S., you often have people calling out countries in the Arab world for their treatment of women or the LGBT community. and sometimes those are good faith concerns. Sometimes they are bad faith and they're twisted up with their own bigotry and Islamophobia. Do you have thoughts on how to put guardrails around those conversations so that they are appropriate and helpful and focused and not just a vehicle to give Americans another reason to fear people who are far away or feel different?

Right. Well, I guess, I mean, it's a tricky question, right? Because on one hand, I do think it's important. for all of us to step a little bit outside that sort of established American version of identity politics where we're only allowed to address, quote unquote, our own business, right? I don't think that's necessarily fair. I think it's on some level even perhaps like anti-intellectual. At the same time, I think there always needs to be a question of what context are these questions being asked in, right, knowing that there's a whole very complicated history of these questions about the Middle East in

particular being deployed to justify imperialism, how are we playing into that game, right? What is the point of this conversation? And also, are we approaching this conversation as though we've arrived? Because I know from, you know, even the last year and a half of living in New York that this is not a country that has sort of, you know, again, within quotations, arrived to any form of social justice that is necessarily worth emulating on any level, on, you know, when, you know, it comes to LGBT rights, when it comes to women's rights, when it comes to, Jesus, I mean, racial justice, I can't believe this conversation is still happening, but that it needs to still

be happening. I mean, obviously, when there's so much going wrong in this country and we've, you know, sort of elected a Nazi to run the country, why are we having these conversations about other places, right? What does that mean? Yeah, get your own house in order kind of first conversations. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you is because, you know, one of the points of this show is, like, we talk about foreign policy and we talk about activism. And we want people to understand that you don't have to be in government to change a bad policy. You don't have to, you know, be an elected official to do something meaningful, right? There's people like you. There's people like Amal Clooney who is, you know, defending human rights at international courts. I mean, what kinds of like work have you seen or participated in, either. in the U.S. or abroad that you think has been an example of some really effective activism or an organization you think that people should look into or get behind if they care about you know sort of helping with groups pushing for progressive values around the globe.

Right. Honestly. Big question. Yeah, no, it's a huge question because I feel like there's no way to direct people's attention towards certain organizations and not others without getting in trouble, right? Yeah, I know. I know that feeling. It's also like where do you start when you, when you start looking at the world of NGOs and, you know, other organizations working towards pushing for more freedom. Where do you start? Right? It really depends on, I guess, everyone should sort of go online and look for something

that they can support. But, you know, it's sort of like you were saying, you don't have to be in office to get stuff done. Most of the time, that's actually a way to, unfortunately, being an office is a way to make sure you don't get stuff done, right? So much of what we've seen happen in the U.S. alone over the last month is stuff that happened through people on the ground and organizations and informal collectives that have been trying to push this conversation forward. Something that started with just regular citizens on the street ended up pushing a platform that could resolve a lot of the police problems that we've been seeing in this country forever. Right? Just even like the mere fact that the, that the questions that were raised in Minnesota were raised, the possibility of completely taking apart the police system there, let alone defunding, but just the fact that the question was even raised is already such a push. I'm not saying it's enough, but it's something that was entirely done by just people who weren't in power. And there's so much to do there. There's also, I guess,

I guess the thing is it's very easy to sort of to say that the way to address injustice is to try and remedy the structure alone. And I am someone who fully believes in the importance of changing the structural framework that we operate in. But there's also a question of, well, how does that structure sort of sediment into every second of our lives? experiences, if you're, I don't know, someone who's totally removed from these things, like a business accountant, there are still questions about racial justice and gender justice that permeate your workplace, right? Even addressing those is important. People tend to just assume that these are things that can only be resolved on a policy level, and they're not. There are conversations that need to be happening all the time. There's community

support, I find, has been really important for the Arab queer community much more important, actually, than attempts at larger policy change. Does that make sense at all? No, it does. I mean, listen, I hear you struggling in real time, both in this conversation in your writing, around the efficacy or the value of speaking out, of optimism, of representation, I mean, I heard you tell a story about the first time someone recognized you, a stranger. It was to yell at you, right, that you were like bastardizing the language or something bigoted and shitty, right? But on the other hand, like, when you look back in history, I mean, representation does matter, right? I imagine you must also hear from people who think I never thought I could be openly gay in Lebanon or New York until I heard your music or saw you guys play.

I mean, it does seem like it's a pretty meaningful, important thing for a lot of people. It is for obvious reasons, right? I mean, so representation in the arts as a whole other conversation, right? I guess I'm going to focus on Lebanon with how I answer this, although I do think this fully applies everywhere, especially in the U.S. Sure. And I don't think that like sort of tokenizing version of representational politics that is often employed here as a solution. is necessarily effective. Still better than what's going on in Lebanon.

So growing up in Lebanon, I never saw queer people with agency in any form of cultural production. Right? In music, we didn't exist.

On TV, we only existed as a punchline. In movies, we only existed as a punchline or something to be afraid of. In the news, queer people were, always mentioned in line with sort of Satanism and this weird moral panics that would take over the country. And so when I was trying to wrap my head around my sexuality or trying to understand

what it meant to subscribe to that in this world, what mattered most of me was being able to look for others like me. Right. And that's not something that we can sort of write off ever. It's so important. It's so important to just like see other people survive. It's often also just not a question of being able to see people survive or being able to see people break a glass ceiling or whatever. Sometimes it's, again, to go back to the case of Lebanon, right now, that kind of representation is so important because of the internet and because of what that means for

the archive, right? So there's a whole history, I'm sure. of queer musicians in the Arab world and of feminist discourse and Islamic revisionism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but all that stuff gets written out of history because history is always written by the victor. And right now with the internet, representation takes this whole other dimension where it's basically this undeniable testament that we exist, right? That people can't erase anymore. I'm in the middle of this like online war right now where people again, sorry to bring up Sarah Higazi again, but people are trying to delete her Arabic Wikipedia entry because the Arabic editors for Wikipedia are

like full-on fundamentalists and they keep blocking any kind of like progressive editors. Wikipedia has chosen not to comment on this and they keep deleting people's public callouts. But erasing queer history, like that is basically what's been happening for all of time, right? And right now, representation in this world is impossible to race that easily. So that's another thing, I guess, that's, you know, a non-policy way of contributing

the conversations. Yeah. No, absolutely. And there's probably lots of little straight kids who look up to you in the band and think, wow, they're incredible. I want to be like them. just because they like your music, you know what I mean, it's, it's important. I mean, I hope so.

I know so. You've mentioned Sara Hagazi a couple times. I should tell listeners who she is. So she was a fan of yours. She, of the band, she lost her life to suicide. She had been arrested, tortured by the Egyptian government after flying a rainbow flag. One of your shows in Cairo in 2017, she later received asylum in Canada, where she took her life. You wrote an incredibly moving post in response to her death.

You've been organizing vigils in her memory, as you just described, you know, you've been fighting with shitheads on the internet to keep her name and her legacy alive. Is there anything you want to tell listeners about her or, like, challenge them to do in the wake of her death? Honestly, I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around the whole thing. But I guess right now what's most striking for me is that this is one of those instances where because of the publicity around it, everyone knows. And that sort of really slapped me in the face, that everyone saw this, right? And people seem to be okay just moving on. And that part is just really difficult for me to grasp right now that so much of my personal narrative about why. people are so dismissive of oppression has been to just like excuse people under the premise that

well, maybe they don't really see what's happening, right? And therefore it is my job to really show people what's happening. But we saw someone die because of the amount of torture that they were subjected to because of the pain of being, you know, being exiled. We saw someone die. The whole world saw it. And people kind of just moved on. And that really just gives me a lot of pause. It gives me a lot of pause right now. It gives me a lot of pause because of the fact that we live in the world after COVID where basically everything is being re-evaluated because we live in the world where, you know,

there's a racial reckoning happening in the U.S. And people just saw this and kept walking. I don't know what to make about. Honestly. Yeah, that's got-ritching. I mean, in Egypt, I mean, being gay is not explicitly illegal yet. The LGBT community is often persecuted by the government. I mean, do you think that this is just all part of a strategy by C.C.'s regime to punish people?

I mean, what are they trying to do here? Is it just, you know, pushing this sort of patriarchal, conservative political view? Well, it's interesting, right? because again, okay, so this is the other thing. And I'm not going to take credit for this line of thought. It's very much something that I saw on someone's page. Her name is Sonia Renee Taylor. She's this incredible writer.

And she was writing about whiteness. But in her line of thought, the question around LGBT rights is always about the rights of, you know, that. those communities instead of questioning why the oppression is happening, right? So even the question you just asked me is tricky, right? Because even I haven't thought in those terms for long enough, we don't invest as much time thinking about why the world is oppressing these people. Instead, we end up thinking about why these people deserve rights, and that already dehumanizes them, right?

So I honestly don't know how to answer that question. I don't know how to answer the question of why is the world and the Arab world and Cici's world so bigoted. I don't know how to answer that question. I know that it flares up. It's not consistent and constant. It comes and goes. And often when it comes to oppressing the non-heterosexual and non-gender-neutral and non-gender normative communities. It is done in the wake of some sort of government failing, right,

where suddenly the police will crack down on those communities and it'll go viral all over the internet. And it's just a way for the government to safe face and make it look like they're safeguarding this sort of collective morality and safeguarding essentially the country's masculinity quite often. And that tends to happen right after. And that tends to happen right after they mess up somewhere else. That at least was very clearly the strategy in Lebanon in the early 2010s. Otherwise, I think the region is very invested in maintaining the power of a very patriarchal, heteronormative understanding of what Islam is and what identities are allowed under that.

Although there has been a very long history of people trying to make space for feminism in Islam and trying to make space for queer liberationism in Islam, the region is politically invested in writing those histories out, right? So that oppression is politically instrumental right now for maintaining the power of the people who are in power, those being straight men. Right. My last question for you, I mean, obviously, you know, Lebanon has had a pretty amazing several months. You know, you saw all these people out into the streets, you know, powerful people toppled. I mean, what do you want Americans who are listening to know about Lebanon?

And like, what's your hope for the sort of the future of the people there and for better governance? It was tricky, right? Because, I mean, reading the news this morning was scary. It was frightening. actually. Things seem to be taking, things seem to be spiraling downwards really fast in Lebanon. Really, really, really, really fast. Financially, economically, the country is in ruins, absolute ruins right now. Because of a very long history of corruption that was maintained with the assistance of American foreign policy. And that's one thing that people in the U.S. do need to remember that U.S. intervention in the Middle East

oftentimes is really not what we hear about when we're in the U.S. right? We're all under this assumption that you know we have troops deployed in the Middle East because we're giving them freedom and democracy and human rights and it's really like if that were the case why is this government supporting Cici's government right? Why is this government supporting the Jordanian government? Why is there so much money being pumped into these tyrannical regimes

when we then make it look inside the U.S. like, well, we're only there because we're helping out and making sure people are safe. And that's really not the case. The history of American foreign policy in the Middle East has produced so much terror for foreign Middle Easterners. And that's going to take a very long time to come back from. And right now what's happening in Lebanon is, you know, I'm not saying it's the fault of American foreign policy at all, at all.

But it's in there somewhere. Yeah, no, I think people probably don't. I mean, a lot of us recalled the Iraq war, as we will forever. But I think people probably don't totally understand that like post-World War II and even pre, I mean, the CIA kind of treated the Middle East like its sort of political chessboard to play with. And it had pretty disastrous consequences that spilled out over a long period of time. I mean, thank you so much for doing the show. I really appreciate it.

Everyone should check out the music. respect your activism. Is there anywhere they should look for you guys? They want to find your music, find things you're working on? I guess Instagram, like the rest of it. That's such a basic response, but like, yeah, I guess we post more stuff on Instagram. We haven't updated our website in years. I don't think anyone uses those anymore.

No, they don't. It's all Facebook and Instagram. And I don't know Snapchat. Who the fuck knows? Anyway, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for doing the show. I really appreciate it and have a good day. Thank you, you too. Thanks again to Hamid for doing the show. Ben, thanks to you for reading some of John Bolton's book. I know that's not something I would wish on my worst enemy.

Yeah, well, I got the PDF. I just wanted to be very clear, which, by the way, I got from like four people. So many people were sending me that. I not downloaded it because I assume they're all viruses, but also I don't want my brain to rot from John Bolton's nonsense. But I did read the coverage. Yeah, I wonder, I mean, I guess he wrote it himself. I mean, that was fast. I mean, I have to say one thing for the guy. There's got to be like a book chop shop, right, where people like Sarah Huckabee go to just like have someone write a book for them

that they immediately mark it and get Trump to retweet and they make a quick buck, right? Because like these people are just cranking these things out. Like it sounds like Bolton did no actual writing. There's no narrative. There's no characters. It's just like a dump of his notebook, which he may or may not have illegally kept. But the rest of these things are just garbage. So I wrote, I ghost wrote a book once.

in 2005, it was like the memoir of the two guys who co-chaired the 9-11 commission. And after I did, and it was like a with Ben Rhodes deal, though. They gave me the credit. But I started to get all these offers to write, goes to write books for politicians, for Democratic politicians. I mean, I must have had like three or four offers in the next year. And I didn't do it because I saw myself, you know, waking up in 10 years and being that chop shop, you know, being that guy that like every center,

who's contemplating a run for president, you know. Yeah. And wants to write some book like, you know, my fight or, you know, the duty to fight three. The duty to fight for the middle class or the middle class is the middle of my priorities or, you know, born to be in the middle class, you know. Yeah, Joe Menton. I didn't want to. Lieberman. Yeah, exactly. I just didn't go down that road. I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad you didn't either. That would have been a very different, very different ending for you. Yeah. That's all I got. Yeah. We'll talk to you all next week. Pottae of the world is a product of crooked media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.