Pod Save the World - King Trump Welcomes King Charles

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

The US-Iran ceasefire is holding, but the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the global economy is teetering on the edge of disaster, and America's precision weapons stockpile is badly depleted after repeated conflicts with Iran, with experts warning that it could have grave consequences for US readiness in the event of a conflict with China. Meanwhile, King Charles becomes the first British king to address Congress as the UK tries to use a royal charm offensive to paper over major differences on Iran, Mali's military government teeters on collapse after coordinated terrorist attacks rock the country and drive out Russian mercenaries, and the CIA's covert operations in Mexico blow up into a sovereignty crisis for President Sheinbaum. Also covered: more US foreign policy corruption (fun!) after Eric Trump lands a $24 million Pentagon contract and a member of US special forces is arrested for betting on military operations in Venezuela. Then Ben talks with Federica Vinci and Nick Antipov of Democracy Hub about their Anti-Authoritarian Toolkit that provides strategies to defeat autocrats worldwide.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, episode title, and episode date.For Friends of the Pod, the guys answer questions about North Korea’s nukes, what other parts of the world we should be keeping an eye on, and the latest scandal engulfing the New England Patriots.Preorder Ben’s book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches  and subscribe to his Substack here.

Welcome back to POTTA of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Ritz. So, Ben, I genuinely thought Trump might stage some sort of like traumatic military operation for the day after his widow's correspondent speech to match the 2011 Obama bin Laden operation weekend. I didn't see this coming. No. Not that it was staged. No. But it was bad. But it was dramatic. Not that it was staged. I, uh, it was bad. First of all, it's always bad. Violence is bad. Violence is bad. Violence is bad. Don't you hate feeling like you always repeat that line?

Yeah. No shit, it's bad. When was it ever not bad? And by the way, you're just, it's idiotic, it's wrong, and it doesn't do anything to help what that guy seemed to say he cared about. No, it's going to help Trump politically. I did think that I'm just going to go there, Tommy, like the, this is not a Trump point, actually. You know I've been at dinner a lot of times, and I feel bad that that was like an unsubly. settling potentially scary situation.

It is also the case that that ballroom is about like a football field walk down a densely carpeted hotel room, past magnometers, down a flight of stairs or an escalator into a heavily secured cavernous ballroom. And so let's just say some of the media is putting itself at the center of this as if they survived like, you know, the battle of the bulge was that. that was a part of the discourse that, I mean, yes, I expect the Republicans to cynically blame Jimmy Kimmel or whatever, and that's always frustrating. But like the number of people that acted like they just went through, you know, like literally the Battle of Bulge here was

that much to me. Look, I don't blame the reporters for being scared. I would be scared chilless if all of a sudden there's gunshots going off. But like the Republicans who were trying to compare what happened over the last weekend to Butler, like that's a crazy comparison. A bullet hit his ear. Yeah. As you said, this guy was nowhere near. He wasn't to the max. Yeah. If he'd done this thing like 30 minutes earlier, he might have had a lot of people in range to fire at.

You never know. That's the scary, like, scenario. Well, this guy clearly had no idea what he was doing. I mean, look, there are serious questions, actually, that are interesting about why they're keeping these kind of security breaches, close calls. By the way, there were a bunch in the Obama years. Bullets hit the White House. Bullets hit the Truman balcony. Didn't someone throw a grenade, like it got pretty close?

to Trump or to Bush at one point, too. This event, we should just say, is not a very secure event. No. It actually is in the ballroom. I guess from the Secret Service standpoint, they secured that ballroom. That's where the president's going to be, right? The president doesn't walk in through the mags. He comes in through like an underground parking garage or something and is suddenly in a secure ballroom.

But the Capitol Hilton is this gigantic complex that anybody's staying there. Like, they don't have to be attached to the dinner. It can wander through the lobby. And there's all those little sub-parties. on the exterior ring. It's like not sure that this event, like this event is already past its expiration date. Oh, yeah, it's cursed. And now it's like this is another point that like maybe don't have this event at this big

non-secure hotel where lunatics can walk in off the street. And yeah, you may secure the ballroom, but somebody could get that secret service agent, you know, thank God there was a bulletproof vest. Yeah, it's weird. By the way, thank you everyone who subscribed to pot to The World on YouTube, wherever you get the show. pledge to you to never attend the White House Correspondence dinner. And also, if we do, and there is an incident, we will point the camera outward. Atward. Atward. We'll show you what's

happening. Not our old-ass faces. Real quick. Are the Red Sox worse than the Mets? I think the Mets are worse. We just fired like our entire staff. The Mets have scored two runs or less and I think more than half their games and have nine wins. Okay. And the biggest payroll in Major League Baseball. Somehow that's bad. That's really bad. Speaking of bad, do you see, Trump's going to put his own face on the U.S. passport, maybe? I do not, yeah. I'm going to check. I carry around a passport wallet in case I need to flee at any moment.

And I'm going to check my expiration date. Mine's coming up. And it looks like mine extends past the Trump administration. So I do not have to get a Donald's Trump passport. Okay, you're good to go. That's some live podcast. That's good. That's hopeful for everybody.

So great show today. We're going to start with the peace talks or lack there of between the U.S. in Iran, what the end game for this war might actually look like. We're going to talk about the latest data about the global economic impact and then more data and concern about the dwindling U.S. munitions stockpiles. We'll also cover Vice President J.D. Vance's very subtle attempts to spin and duck accountability for this war. Have you caught this at all? Have you seen any of this? Yes. Oh, are you kidding. I delight in it. This is what the algorithm is feeding me. It's not giving me the White House Correspondent Center. It's giving me like J.D. Vand's so funny. I talked to some Naga people.

when I was in D.C. last weekend who were all remarking on how brazen advance is spinning. And all the others around Trump are spinning how opposed they were to this war. We'll get to it. We're also covered the latest from Lebanon. Then we're going to talk about King Charles's trip to the U.S., the highlights, the lowlights, the bizarre sexual innuendo, his speech to a joint session of Congress. I can't wait for this. Which is actually kind of funny. Then we're going to talk about the spiraling security situation in Mali after the government came under attack from an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group over the weekend. we're going to share with you some more examples of egregious corruption of U.S. foreign policy because it's an endless story. And finally, a wild story about CIA operations in Mexico, got drug cartels. There was a tragic car accident.

Mexican president Claudia Shanebaum's kind of delicate balance between sovereignty and nationalism and dealing with Donald Trump. So very fun for her. And then Ben, you did an interview today. What did you talk about? I did. There's a group called DHub Democracy Hub that is releasing an anti-authoritarian toolkit. This is an effort to learn from activists around the world about what's working in the fight against authoritarianism. So I took two people watching my friends, Federica and Nick,

who are both activists themselves, who helped put this together. You know, we talked about the value of this kind of exercise, how they went about it, some of the lessons about how to do social media better, how to have networks of influencers, how to kind of mobilize people, how to do a kind of distributed form of organizing where you're not trying to control the message everywhere, but you're trying to give people enough guidance that they're coordinated, but enough freedom that they can run campaigns that make sense where they are. So lessons learned that can be applied around the world for how to fight authoritarianism. Got to give them the D-Hub.

Got to get in the D-Hub. Those dictators. Excellent. Definitely going to check that out. All right, let's start with Iran. So this U.S. Iran sees far as kind of holding, right? But there's 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium. Still sit in Iran.

Strait of Huss is closed. Huge parts of the global economy are just paralyzed. and there's seemingly no end insight. Other than that, it's good. On Saturday, Trump canceled his negotiating team's trip to Pakistan. We're going to listen to a clip from him explaining why. Probably heard that we canceled the trip. We have all the cards.

We're not going to spend 15 hours in airplanes all the time going back and forth to be giving a document that was not good enough. And so we'll deal by telephone and they can call us anytime they want. Again, we have all the cards. They have no military. left practically. They have no leaders left. We don't know who the leaders are. Nobody knows who the leader. I don't think they know who the leaders are very important. We're not going to be traveling 15, 16 hours to have a meeting with people that nobody ever heard of. Traveling takes

too long, too expensive. I'm a very cost-conscious person. They are fighting with each other. It's tremendous infighting. They're probably fighting for leadership. In many cases, I think they're fighting not to be the leader because we knocked out two levels of leaders. but I'll deal with whoever we have to. Interestingly, immediately, when I canceled it, within 10 minutes, we got a new paper that was much better. They offered a lot, but not enough. I love this idea that the cost we're all worried about

is like J.D. Vance's Ryanair ticket to Islamabad. Axios reported that Iran has offered a more limited deal. Maybe that was referencing there. That would reopen the Strait of Homoos if the U.S. ends the blockade and ends the war. It punts all the nuclear talks down the road. That's nothing. It feels like a problem. I suspect this is going to be the kind of deal

Trump ends up being forced to take. But interestingly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio came out of his post-Iran war hiding wherever he's a witness protection program he's been in since he went to the sticks on Capitol Hill and was like, Israel made us do it and then ran away and then didn't speak again for a month. But here he is on Fox News,

kind of shitting on the kind of deal we just described. Let's watch. What they mean by opening the straits is, yes, the straits are opened as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission or will blow you up and you pay us, that's not opening the Straits. Those are international waterways. They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to

pay them to use it. The Straits is basically the equivalent of an economic nuclear weapon that they're trying to use against the world. And they're bragging about it. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening, Markis. Yep. Seems like they're doing it. And guess what? They weren't doing that before the fucking war. Yeah. Also, it sounds like they have a lot of cards as described. by Mark Rubio. So, Ben, as we all know, there's nothing better in life than when you have, like, shitty plans, like some shitty dinner and it gets canceled. So Iranian informant Surabas Arachi, he used that time he got back to flight of Russia, he went to see Vladimir Putin. He told Russian state media that Iran is, quote, standing up to the world's greatest superpower and that the U.S. is a request to talk because it has, quote, not achieved a single one of their goals and that Iran is considering whatever they put forward. Putin said, quote, we'll do everything that serves your interest and the interests of all the people in the region in order to ensure that this piece is achieved as soon as possible. Also, I'm sure you caught Ben, the German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz, weighed in saying that, quote,

an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by the so-called revolutionary guards, that nation being ours. On Tuesday, Trump posted this weird message on true social. He said, quote, Iran has just informed us that they are in a state of collapse. They want us to open the Hormuz trade as soon as possible as they try to figure out their leadership situation, which I believe they'll be able to do. I love the idea of some Iranian official is calling Trump being like,

uncle, sir, you did it, you got us. I think that message was sent one minute before the stock market opened. So, congrats to everybody who had some futures trades put down. So, Ben, two things. I'm curious what you make of Arachi's trip to see Putin in the Russian role. Like Russia could be trying to facilitate a deal. Putin could be trying to sell some weapons. Either way, he seems to be saying, I'm here. I'm a player in this. You got to deal with me too. And then on the end game, like the Trump administration seems to think that their leverage is keeping the blockade in place long enough. so that Iran runs out of storage for its oil and basically has to shut down its wells and kill off its own industry. It's not clear how long that would take, how much storage capacity they have left. And ultimately, this is a game of economic chicken that will crush Asian economies, poor countries, the Iranian people, but probably won't matter to the IRGC because they will enforce their will at gunpoint. So I don't know. I don't get it, but what do you make of this play? I think we just have to name because sometimes our media is incapable of doing this. what a complete abject fucking failure, catastrophic decision this was by Donald Trump,

and that he can't spin his way out of that. On the eve of the war, he was talking about regime change and destruction of the nuclear program entirely and getting, you know, reining people rising up. None of these things have happened. Remember he wanted to pick the next Supreme Leader? He said, you know, Ghalybath, the Speaker of the Parliament, remember we were describing him as hot, you know, just like America's hot, you know, like he said. option. He clearly has decided because he's been so humiliated and he's failed so miserably and was

led down a rabbit hole by Bibi Netanyahu that it was so destructive. He's just trying to grasp. This is a man, Donald Trump, that like 10 days ago, we did an emergency podcast because he told the world that there was a deal and that the straits were open forever and they were going to get rid of the dust and all these things. None of that was true. And so like it's hard to even, now he's clearly decided that his narrative is going to be their leadership is so disrupted that they don't know he's in charge.

The foreign minister is the same fucking foreign minister that was meeting with Whitkoff and Jared before the war. And he's in Russia. How is this guy saying that there was regime change when Abasarachi is literally

the same guy showing up representing the same regime with the Supreme Leader's son and then they start dunk on how hurt he is? Well, he's the fucking Supreme Leader and he's 30 years younger than his father was. And the IRGC is calling the shots.

And even little Marco has to acknowledge that they're running the straight of four moves. So we need to just create some space to just, this is not sane. This is failing, right? Now, let's move on. Like, what happens now? I think you're right. This is hurting everybody at this point. Like, it's hurting the United States.

Like, it is hurting our economy. It's hurting the Iranian people. It's hurting the global economy. Everybody wants out of this war. And the question is, who is just going to decide that they can, spin, like Iran won this war. Like the IRGC, like status quo ante, now controls the straight of Hormuz. And if the big concession they have to make down the war is opening up an international

waterway that was open before the war, like, I think that they take that position. Donald Trump is just trying to figure out how to spin his way out of it, that it's a win, even if he doesn't get them to, like, make a whole bunch of concessions of the negotiating table. And if you look at Putin, he can smell that this is a humiliation of the United States. He's trying to insert himself into this. He's trying to kind of play the role of peacemaker. Trump is the crazy man who starts wars now. Do you see that some Russian super yacht worth like a half a billion dollars just kind of cruise through the Strait of Hamuz this week?

Yeah. No, I or GC left it alone. Yeah. Putin's flexing. This is Putin and Xi are looking at this and they're like, this is going to have geopolitical reverberations for a generation. The Gulf countries are splitting apart and hedging and going to move in the direction of Russia and China. The Iranians are like their, you know, their closest ally in the region now controls a, straight. That's a, you know, Russian China want that waterway open. So like, I think they're probably

telling the Ryan's like, hey, can we wrap this thing up? But at the same time, they're going to be thinking about how can we take advantage of the fact that the United States was just revealed to be incapable of collapsing the Iranian regime with military power. Yeah. Well, yeah, when your opponent shoots himself on the foot, it's a good time for a road race. Yeah. So the Axios, a couple of, like, data points to back up what you were just saying. Axios has a report out this week that Trump aides are concerned. He's getting drawn into a frozen conflict where the U.S. will just be forced to keep a ton of military assets in the Middle East to enforce this blockade while the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for months and harms the global economy.

Like, yeah, guys, yeah, that's what's happening. Reuters had a report that the U.S. intel agencies are studying how Iran would respond if Trump just declared a unilateral victory. I think what's going to happen. Definitely what's going to happen. And I think they want to know if, like, these guys will kind of walk away and let it be or if they're going to dunk all over and I guess we'll find out. Meanwhile, I mean, the economic cost is going up.

So gas prices on Tuesday in the U.S. rose to their highest level in four years. So the average gallon is now 418. But outside the U.S., as we've talked about many times, the economic impact is massive. So some data points. In China, car sales are down. The cost of plastics are up because they're petroleum based, and that has led to factory shutting down. People are out of work. There's been riots. According to the Financial Times, the IMF forecast that the economies of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar will contract this year, the latter by up to 8.6 percent, while growth in Saudi Arabia and the U.A. will slow but remain in about 3%.

The U.A. The U.S. might have to provide the UAE with a currency swap line to help them bail out of some financial difficulties. There's cooking oil shortages in India. Interest rates are going up around the globe. The world's largest condom maker is increasing prices by 30% because of supply chain issues. And then today, Ben, the UAE announced it would be leaving OPEC, the oil cartel. So the UAE is the third largest producer in OPEC that's going to leave OPEC with 13%, less capacity. I think this is probably less of an economic impact than just sort of like another sign of the UAE and Saudi Arabia splitting on a bunch of stuff. Yeah. And the reshuffling of alliances that you were just hinting at. But what did you make of that move from the Emirates?

So I think like the global economic fallout is going to be profound and long lasting and is going to lead to this continued hedging the countries you're doing. How can I protect myself against the United States? Like first it was terrorists and now it's this war. Like how can you? have supply chains that are more secure and not vulnerable to like some crazy thing Donald Trump might do. And so every country is going to make their own calculation. Now the UAE one is really interesting. So OPEC has generally been this cartel of major oral producers that produces about a quarter of the world's fossil fuel energy. And the Saudis have generally called the shots. And the Saudis like to keep prices high because it keeps their coffers filled. The UAE has a more diversified economy. and therefore they care less about necessarily,

like keeping the price at a certain point, they want to produce more. They would like to expand to more markets. They want to get the most out of, by the way, oil while they can because they see the writing on the wall down the line, it's going to be a clean energy economy. So they have some short-term interests in having some freedom of action.

But the main thing I think that's happening here is that the Emirates, like, or the leader of the UAE is Muhammad bin Zayed. He used to be super tight with MBS, Mohan bin Salman. They've had a massive falling out that we've talked about in the last couple of years. It's manifested in almost the two militaries that went to war together in Yemen, fighting each other in Yemen. They're backing different sides of the Sudan Civil War. The Emirates are kind of all in with the Abram Accords and the Israelis and much more, you know, hawkish on Iran.

The Saudis, no fans of the Iranians, but, you know, have been a little bit more hedged, right? And so I see this as a personal thought. between MBS and MBZ that is fascinating. If anybody could ever make the, you know, like a Netflix show about those guys falling out, I'd watch that. But it's also this kind of geopolitical splitting. Like the Gulf states tried to project this kind of unified front

through the Gulf Cooperation Council, the GCC. And that's Qatar, UAE, Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain. They're now moving in different directions. And again, it mirrors what's going to happen globally where every nation is just going to increasingly in this kind of crazy, dangerous nationalist, transactional world, kind of look out for itself. The Emirates want to, like, you know, produce more sell without having to, like, check it through OPEC. The Saudis are trying to kind of keep

prices up to fund MBS's Vision 2030 and all these things. Yeah. Some fake city somewhere, yeah. Soccer teams. But it's emblematic of an unraveling set of global arrangements. And I think that the Iran war will be seen from history as as a massive accelerant on the kind of unraveling all these different institutions and ways of doing things. And part of that unraveling are institutions or the belief from other countries that the U.S. can or will protect them. Yeah. And now there's increasing data about concern that the U.S. can't protect itself because of these munition shortages we've talked about in the wake of these repeated conflicts with Iran. So there's some more data on this. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. They released a report

that walked through some numbers. Then there was some great reporting. It was first Alex Ward at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times added to it. The major concern, is not that we're going to run out of bullets in this war. It's about the next war, especially if there's one with China. For example, let's start with Tomahawk missiles or T-LAMs. These are precision, long-range cruise missiles that usually get fired from ships or submarines that could be as far as 1,500 miles away from the target. The U.S. launched at least 1,000 of them against Iran, which is about 10 times the number of the Pentagon buys every year for the low, low price of $3.6 million each. It'll take years to replace them at current rates, but also, Ben, they require

rare earth elements and other like advanced electronic components that China has proven they can choke off and in previous war games about a conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, they found that the U.S. exhausted supply of Tomok missiles in a couple days or weeks. So with a supply already down, that's not good. There is a similar missile, a missile used in similar to use cases called the Joint Air to Surface Standoff missile. The U.S. has used 23 percent of that stockpile. These are fired from planes, but they cost Again, $2.6 million each. We fired about a thousand attack of missiles in this war. Remember, there was a hot debate over whether the U.S. should give Ukraine attack of missiles.

So those are offensive weapons. And then again, we're running out of interceptor missiles for missile defense systems. That includes a third of what are called SM6 interceptors, nearly half of the SM3 variant, more than 50% of Patriot interceptors, and 80% of THAAD interceptors. That's a lot of jargon and gibberish. Just know that the prices on those bad boys range from $4 million. to $28 million a pop depending on the missile and the variant. All together, some U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that wholly replacing those stockpiles could take up to six years.

So that's a long-term problem that will take a while to fix. And that is apparently one of the things worrying J.D. Vance, who once again dispatched his minions to the Atlantic to tell them... Jacob Reese is concerned. Yeah, some fucker, about the war from the stockpiles to the accuracy of information Trump is getting from people. Hegsef and the Pentagon. Again, Ben, I'm just, I'm blown away by how brazen these leaks are. Like, how is this not pissing Trump off? But what do I know?

It just shows you that for all the facade of Trump's a genius and we blew up the Iranian Navy or whatever, they know that this war has been a disaster. Because the degree of ass covering here through leak is, you know, even by Washington standards, it makes you blush a little bit. I think when you look at costs, like I just focus on the practical, literal costs and then the geopolitical costs. On the practical costs, like these numbers are, these are billions and billions of dollars. Like, that is ACA subsidies that are not going, you know, that's real healthcare that people need. Those are, that's nutrition assistance. That's like, God forbid,

we ever do get our shit together for like a universal basic income. Like, we just spent billions of dollars and are going to have to spend another round of billions of dollars to replace things that Donald Trump and Pete Hexeth could fire off in a six-week excursion, Isn't that what Trump called it? Mm-hmm. To do nothing other than close the straight of Hormuz so that you can then try to reopen it again and declare victory. And, yeah, we blew up a bunch of Iranian things and we killed an 86-year-old Supreme

leader. But the amount we spent is, like, more than what was once the annual budget of USAID, which did tons of good all around the world. Which we heard that was so wasteful, right? That's a really good analogy. Then I just want to, like, hone in on the geopolitical cost because it ties in what I was saying about countries having to make different decisions. What you'll often hear from the national security types, you know, people, you know, I like hung out with a lot over the years, that all these munitions, all these systems are really important, you know, in Asia, right, to deal with China and North Korea.

And sometimes people hear that and they think, oh, you war mongers, like, you want all these weapons to fight the Chinese. No, they're there as a deterrent. Like, you want those weapons in place to prevent a war, you know, so it's like, hey, this looks super scary if you're China. you're thinking about invading Taiwan or you're Kim Jong-un, you're thinking about making move on South Korea. Like the Americans have all these fancy systems. We don't want to fuck around with that. Let's just take the one case of South Korea. South Korea is getting hit about as hard as anybody because of shortages, right?

They have shortages of petrochemicals. They have shortages of plastics. They have potential disruptions, like to all manner of different industries from this war. Like they're suffering economically, never mind a higher fuel prices. Meanwhile, the country that was their... you know, closest ally of the United States also moved the missile defense systems. They were protecting them from potential North Korean nuclear attacks. Yeah, we yanked a THAAD system. We moved that to the Middle East because we needed that for our Iran War. We moved these other

munitions. So we simultaneously left them more vulnerable to the nutcase like chain smoking autocrat that lives to their north or to the Chinese and ruin their economy in the process. If you're South Korea, aren't you going to start making some other decisions about maybe you need to cut your own deal with the Chinese or the North Koreans? If you're Taiwan, how are you feeling about the American security umbrella protecting you against a Chinese invasion? So this stuff is going to reverberate for years. And Trump can spin and J.D. Vance can leak. It can't change that. Also, when the U.S. put that fad system in South Korea in the first place, the Chinese flipped out.

And they did all this economic retaliation. They essentially banned Chinese tourists from going to South Korea and, like, crush the tourism business in the entire country. So, yeah, they got screwed on the front end and they got screwed on the back end here. One other just dumb thing, Ben, did you see, remember that guy, Paolo was Zam Poli, who we talked about a couple weeks ago? Yeah. It was like the old, like, 80s buddy that Trump would, like, hang out with it 54 or whatever. It was like some modeling agents. They used ICE to deport his wife or X-W or something.

Yes, mother of his child. Good guy. Nice guy. Apparently, he has been recommending that FIFA kick Iran out of the world. Cup and put Italy in. Did you see this? I saw this. Because FIFA needed to be further corrupted and politicized.

And even the Italians were like, no, this is completely stupid. What are you talking about? Well, first of all, the Italians flaming out of the World Cup. I mean, the Italians himself said, we don't want to, like, get in this way. But also, like, what, I hate that, like, FIFA's already debased itself so much. They gave Trump that fake Peace Prize member, that corrupt guy who runs FIFA. Did you see this item today that he, like, demanded he wanted a motorcade in Vancouver as if it was analogous to the Pope or the President? Infantino did?

Yeah, he threw a hissy fit because the Canadians wouldn't give him a full motorcade on scale of like the President of the United States of the Pope or something. Anyway, break, break. Part of what I find so disgusting about this is like, can't sports be like the last refuge? Just go away. Like just like you start politicizing sports this way where it's like, not that it's always been pure. it's not. You did a whole podcast on how corrupt the World Cup is. But the idea that you're literally going to say like,

hey, we don't like the Iranians because Trump decided to go to war with them. So we're kicking them out of the World Cup. And you know, everybody likes the Italian. So let's put them in there even though they flamed out in the European division. Come on, man. Let's watch the World Cup. Like the Iranian, even if you hate the Iranian

regime, like the soccer players didn't have anything to do it. Also, they earned their way on that stage. It's like bad news bears, man. Let them play. Let them play. Finally, Ben, And on paper, there is still a ceasefire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, but in practice, it's not really a ceasefire. It's more of like a de-escalation of the fighting that is still very much ongoing, just a lower intensity. For example, the Lebanese government said 14 people were killed in Israeli attacks on Sunday. And Israeli soldier was announced that he was killed on Sunday. Two more were wounded on Monday. And the IDF has ordered a bunch more communities to evacuate, including ones outside of the current evacuation zone. So the war seems to be expanding. The leader of Hezbollah said they would not, quote, relinquish its weapons or defenses, meaning they won't disarm. Listeners also might have heard about the killing of a woman named Amal Khalil. She's a well-known journalist for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Aqbar.

She was driving with a photojournalist colleague in Southern Lebanon. The car in front of them got hit by an Israeli strike. So they took shelter in a nearby building. They were wounded. And they tried to get help. But an hour and a half later, the building they were in was struck again. When the Red Cross tried to help her and her colleague, the ID. F fired on them and they were forced to turn back.

So Kahl is also reported receiving a death threat that she attributed to the IDF back in 2024. So this is just like this is one of those incidents that would have been, I think, a global scandal before the war in Gaza. But now it almost feels priced in because the Israelis killed so many Gaza-based journalists that people are almost numb to it. Yeah, I mean, I spent some time with this one because it was so egregious. I mean, she's a well-known journalist. And she's trapped under rubble for hours, and these Israelis are literally, like, striking the rescuers trying to get to her. I mean, this is like an assassination. It's indefensible.

They know who she is. Like, they have such total surveillance control over that part of Lebanon. They know exactly who she is. She's obviously also wearing press. They murdered this woman in front of the whole world and don't expect any significant outcry beyond people who are already upset about these things. And that's outrageous, you know. And it does, I just, I do wish, like, there's a, like, a very admirable instinct in among the U.S. journalists to advocate for journalists in danger around the world. But it's usually journalists endangered inside of geopolitical adversaries of the United States, you know, advocating for Venezuela and Iranian journalists or Iranian journalists or Russian journalists or certainly any American journalist.

But, like, these people are doing the same job as you. And yet you just, like, I, and I'm not. Some journalists have been outspoken about these things. I'd just like to see, like, more voices raised because this is, like, this is what, this is the worst case scenario. You're talking about political violence. I mean, this is literally saying that, like, if we, because I, some people I saw then say, well, she worked for, like, a newspaper, media outlet. Like an extremist paper that was, that was sympathetic to Hezbollah. So what?

She's a fucking journalist. Like, I don't like. Extremist Israeli newspapers tied to, like, the idea of like, do you can't kill her. people. Yeah, I don't like Fox News. I don't think anything like bad should happen to those people. Like, like this is, that's a, that's actually the most deranged possible explanation. I agree. Like, so we just now assassinate journalists. So you're admitting you've killed? Yeah. Yeah, it's like, what are we talking about that? Yeah. It was a horrible, horrible story. It reminded me of Shereen Abbaakla, another famous, you know, Palestinian American journalist who was killed during the Biden administration and no one did shit about it.

Nothing. And it pisses me off to this day. Today's show is sponsored by Strawberry.Me. You don't have to be unhappy at work to want something more. Success doesn't just happen in the most successful people in the world. Don't figure it out alone. They have mentors, coaches, and people guiding them every step of the way. That's where Strawberry.Me career coaching comes in. Career coaching through strawberry.

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those are the backdrop and the mood music for King Charles' Ford of the US. The visit is technically part of the America's 250th birthday celebrations because no party is complete without an aging monarch. Charles and Camilla visit is a thrill a minute. They attended a garden party. They looked at a beehive. Then there's a literary event marking the 100th birthday of the children's character, Winnie the Pooh. Really? Yeah. How about that? No word. I like Whitney. If they'll speak with Prince Harry or victims of Jeffrey Epstein's

abuse. A lot of calls on Charles to meet with some Epstein victims and talk about his brother maybe, but anyway. So this all comes, though, as we've discussed, Prime Minister Kirstarmer is under attack from Trump on a daily basis for not fully backing or participating in the war with Iran. Recently, there was a report about retaliation. There was a leaked memo, Pentagon memo that was floated, they talked about punishing the UK and the refusal to further participate in the war by revoking U.S. support for their possession of the Falkland Islands, it's a very 80s response there. This has also kicked up endless hand-wringing and discussion of the special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. The Financial Times reported that the U.K.'s

ambassador to the U.S. told some students recently, quote, I think there probably, I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel. He's not wrong. Charles also became the first British king to address a joint session of Congress. His mom, the queen did so in 1991, but Trump laid out the distinction in his remarks. Here is some of what he said. With the spirit of 1776 in our mind. we can perhaps agree that we do not always agree. As my Prime Minister said last month,

ours is an indispensable partnership. We must not disregard everything that has sustained us for the last 80 years. Instead, we must build on it. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time and the United Nations Security Council was united in the face of terror, that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people.

From the depths of the Atlantic to the disastrously melting ice caps of the Arctic, the commitment and expertise of the United States armed forces and its allies lie at the heart of NATO. I pray with all my heart that our allowance will continue to defend our shared values and that we ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward looking. America's words carry weight and meaning, as they have since independence. The actions of this great nation matter even more. So as you could hear there, Charles didn't totally shy away from policy differences on climate change or NATO or Ukraine. And for context, I think it probably sometimes seems to Americans like the royals are distinct from the government or kind of float above it. In practice, that's not the case.

Like a royal visit like this is planned by No.10 Downing Street. His speech is thoroughly vetted, if not written by the government. It is functionally indistinguishable from a, you know, prime minister's visit. They just know that Trump loves the royal family and cares more about them and hopefully won't be as much of a dick. So that gets you to me to my question, Ben. I just, I guess I'm, I'm still, like, obviously the shooting attempt thing on Saturday that, like, kind of changes the vibes around all the stuff and you're like walking on egg shells for a while. Probably a couple weeks. Yeah.

But like, again, I don't get why Starmer's office sent King Charles in the midst of this war when Trump's calling Starmer, Neville Chamberlain every day saying he's no Winston Churchill, just like humiliating the guy left and right. When we all know that, I don't know, maybe a snub would lead to some actual fallout on policy. but like failing to push back on Trump is hurting Starmor politically, and he just looks so weak and hapless. And I'm wondering when is labor going to cut the court on this guy? It's a fucking disaster. It is destroying the labor party. It really is.

I mean, the reason Trump keeps coming back is because he smells weakness. Like this is the most obvious thing in the world to see. Kier-Starmer presents as the weakest guy. He presents a scared of Trump. Even when he stands up to Trump, he seems scared about doing it. It's like half-hearted always. Just, yeah, why is, you know, King Charles is here as part of like the Starmer planet to charm Trump. Like, it's, they're literally threatening to like try to give the Falkland Islands to their buddy Javier Miele down in Argentina.

Like they've so little respect. And the lesson time and again is like Trump will respect you more if you punch him in the face, you know, than if you are continually scared of him. He's just going to keep coming back. I think the sad thing about that speech is every clip that we played is absolute pablum. Like we've heard this for, you know, our whole lies in politics. 80 years and NATO is important.

They sound downright edgy, you know? Right. The fact that it sounds edgy that King Charles is like, and we shouldn't turn inward and let's cooperate and NATO is important. And we support the brave. the brave people of Ukraine, like, like basically the most anodyne things that you'd expect from your, like, liberal friend online, like, sound like, you know, King Charles is picking fights, you know. And that's a, that's, that's, so if Starmer's fault is his weakness, that speech is in, is a good

capsule of how much Donald Trump has reordered the world in a year and a half. Because we're not for any, the United States is not for any of those things. We're not for NATO. We're not for 80 years of cooperation. We're not for like looking outward. We're not for agreeing to disagree about things. Like that's crazy that we're so extreme that he's like he's like talking to your like his completely alcoholic family member and saying like remember how much fun we used to have

taking walks together. We're for drinking after five. We're for not being drunk at breakfast. Yeah. That's a really good point. I previewed some sexual tension at the top. So Trump did this event. They like welcome Charles to the White House and he gave a little speech.

And Trump said something like how we was talking about his mother and how she would say, look at Charles. He's so cute. My mother had a crush on Charles. Charles is 77. Trump is 79. Well, I would say also though that seeing Charles up there, you know, he looks so young compared to Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I mean, it's good to have a young, vigorous man up there.

Young sausage fingered gentleman. Trump also couldn't help but do like a Churchill bus shout out. There was a funny. Because he's so online. If you get the reference, you're too online. You are way too online. Speaking of state visits Ben, CricketCon is back. And bigger than ever, get your calendar out.

Pause the podcast. Pencil in, a trip to D.C., November 5th through 7th. Bigger stages. Bigger stages. Hotter speakers, maybe even King Charles. Probably not, though. There'll also be live taping of shows you know and love. A lot more.

Go to crookedcon.com to sign up for updates. It'll be fun. We had fun last time. Actually, I really like CrookCon. I had a great time. We had a good ass time. We did a fun panel. Okay, let's talk about the security situation in Mali. So over the last several years, we have covered this wave of coups across northern Africa, especially the Sahel region, started in Mali in 2020, and Guinea in 2021. It's a little outside of this Sahel, but you get my point. Burkina Faso in 2022, then Niger and Gabon in

2023. These were distinct events across a large geographic area, but there were some common threats like anger at corruption, weak and ineffective governance, anger at foreign military presences, especially the French and the threat from Islamist extremist groups. And as its process went on... With a little Wagner group sprinkled. Yeah, well, it went on, the French and the U.S. security forces. We got pushed out of the region. The Russians came in.

At the time, it was the Wagner mercenary group. They got renamed after their boss had a little aerial accidents. Isn't that crazy thing that happened when Pergosen tried to have a coup? against Putin, marched on Moscow, and then mysteriously. Thought he's going to get away with it? Funny, a grenade went off in his airplane. That's a thing that happened. It's how crazy last few years have been.

It's wild. And then they named the Wagner group. They called it the Africa Corps, which is what it's called now. So in 2024, the military leaders in Mali, Rikina Faso, and Niger, they pulled out of ECOWAS, the regional alliance. They formed their own little alliance. And I think, Ben, it's fair to say that the U.S. French approach that predated all of this was a disaster.

Like terrorism in this now was getting worse. not better. The security extremist situation was getting worse, not better. But things now in Mali are really, really bad. So over the weekends, an al-Qaeda-elect extremist group called J&IM, they launched this coordinated series of attacks across Mali, including the Capitol, Obamacow. They attacked the president's house. They attacked and killed the defense minister. There were militants, like videos of these militants, just driving around big parts of the capital with no real opposition. And these J&IM fighters also attacked the Russian troops, the Africa Corps troops, who have proven over time to be worse than useless partners against his counterterrorism partner, in fact, probably helped fuel the insurgency by just

killing lots of civilians. In the past few days, the Russians, they got pushed out of some key parts of Northern Mali that they had helped retake back in the day. So it's a total humiliation. So this is very bad. This group, J&I.M, they were established in 2017. It's considered an al-Qaeda affiliate, but in this case, they also coordinated with the separatist group representing the Toreg ethnic minority. It's a traditionally nomadic group that got screwed out of political representation by French colonial lines because they got divided up and they had no one, no political representation. So they have been, you know, basically waging an insurgency ever since. It got all got way worse again. And MoMA Gadoff used to hire these Torrug fighters.

And with Libya collapsed. Many of them returned to Mali in Niger with their Libyan weapons and supercharged that insurgency. So another reason why that adventure. Obama yours was a disaster too. So, Ben, I guess the question is, like, you see these images on TV. They look scary. It's horrible for the people living there, especially women and girls. I wonder how much of a threat it poses to the U.S., whether J&I.M. is just focused regionally, whether we should worry about them being more expansive like al-Qaeda

and whether there's anything the U.S. should be doing about it. I mean, yeah, first of all, I do think that, you know, Mali was a place where, you know, around, in the aftermath of Libya, in part, and also just in part because of, you know, some extremist elements, like around 2012, 2013, things were getting very hairy there. And it was a French intervention, literally, you know, French Special Forces went in. They kind of pushed out these jihadist groups. They kind of formed the kind of backbone of propping up a government there.

And then, you know, there was kind of this model where the U.S. had some counterterrorism capabilities. You know, we had drones and, you know, intelligence gathering and probably a light, footprint of some special forces in that region. And then the French were kind of the bigger footprint training, security forces, things like that. Clearly didn't work. You know, was a little too self-interested, created, you know, its own forms of corruption. And you described, well, the dynamic of these coups. I guess, like, Tommy, I, I'm sure that there's some nexus to some people with wider ambitions beyond this part of Africa. But at the end of the day, I think one of things we've learned about these countries is like these are, at the end of the day, inherently like

local dynamics, you know, that there are, there are militias, some of them are more extremist, some of them like buy into like an Islamist ideology that is like repressive. But I think part of what has kind of contributed to the factors that have, you know, made this region more radicalized and violent is seeing every group of armed guys in land cruisers as like ISIS, you know, Kor or Osama bin Laden. What is needed are strategies and approaches that fit these countries and deal with their politics. And I don't claim, I've seen it's tremendous in humility. I don't claim to know the exact formula to bring to Mali. I don't think it helps.

Look, I could be proven wrong. Maybe this will become the next iteration of ISIS. I just don't think that's right, though. I think that these countries have internal dynamics and need different solutions, rather than being seen as like a front in a global war and terror. Certainly hasn't helped just have the only security relationship between the U.S. and these countries to be like intelligent sharing or selling them weapons. Like fed the conflicts, not solving.

And I know I'm about to offer a solution that is not currently available, but I think that it also didn't make sense for the former colonial power to be the one that comes in because that feels an awful lot like colonialism if you're in Mali, right? This is why you need a United Nations. Like this is why you need credible international institutions that can do like retro 1990s era missions like multinational peacekeeping and conflict resolution. negotiation like this is a proving and by the way it'd be good if the african union did some that which they don't because they don't really function either and so i i think what's really needed is is is multilateral systems and institutions yeah and until then uh not great yeah until then i think it's going to be this kind of game of thrones yeah pretty bad pods day the world is brought to you by or a frame or a frame is the perfect mother's day gift to

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All right, I want to update you on corruption in the administration. So last week we did a big section on this, the rampant corruption within the Trump administration and how it's hurting U.S. national security. He wanted to follow up because there were some examples that were so egregious and absurd that it was just worth highlighting again. So first, Ben, this is just a quick clip of Fox businesses Maria Bartaromo, congratulating Eric Trump after his company was awarded a $24 million contract from the Pentagon. Let's watch.

And the company's chief strategy advisor, Eric. Trump, President Trump's son. Congratulations to you both. Thank you so much for being here. So Eric Trump is like, apparently like the cheap advisor to a robotics company. And she's like, oh, that's totally normal. Like, so thank you, Maria, for that, that hard hitting journalism. And then also been, we had discussed previously how some anonymous person had made more

than $400,000 by Betagon Polymarket that Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro would be deposed. Sure enough, it happens. That guy cashes out. It turns out that the individual involved was a master sergeant with the U.S. Army Special Forces who participated in the operation itself. He apparently was also not the brightest bulb on the tree since this guy transferred the money to Polly Market and back via his own Coinbase account, which is the U.S.-based crypto company that verifies your identity.

So you're going to get nailed there, buddy. Not hard to track that one. So that said, Ben, I am going to place a bet on Polly Market that that guy gets pardoned after watching these comments from Trump. Are you concerned that federal employees are betting on these prediction markets and potentially getting rich? Well, I don't know about it, but was he betting that they would get him or they wouldn't get him? It sounds like he was betting on his removal from office that Maduro would be removed.

That's like he was involved in the operation. That's like Pete Rose betting on his own team. It's a little like Pete Rose. Pete Rose, he kept him out of the Hall of Fame because he bet on his own team. Now, if he bet against his team, that's not. would be no good, but he bet on his own team. I'll look into it. So the indifference.

It's still 80s, man, like Pete Rose references. The indifference there could be also, because Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to both Polly Market and its number one competitor, Kalshi. So good stuff. Both of these things speak to a tip of an iceberg of corruption, right? And we get into this in the anti-authoritarian toolkit, the need to spotlight corruption, but also to explain it. So the Eric Trump thing,

there is a degree of corruption happening with the Pentagon budget that we have no idea. 1.5 trillion dollars. If the Democrats get control of Congress, I would burrow in here because they want a $1.5 trillion defense budget. You know, you got Eric Trump suddenly getting in the drone game, you know, and getting contracts from the federal government that his father controls and its father's sycophant at, you know, Pete Hackseth is like in charge of this Department of War. But it's not just that. All these tech guys, like, who suck up the Trump, you know,

Alex Karp, the head of Palantir, like all these defense tech guys, you know, probably with Peter Thiel investments and stuff, like they're just feeding at the trough. Yeah. And they're just, the stuff they're throwing, you know, Eric Trump's way is a ton of money to you and me, a few hundred million dollars here, billion dollars there. These guys are probably walking away with tens of billions of dollars in contracts, right? So we've got to look at the defense budget. And then on the polymarket stuff, this is like, you know,

It reminds me of like Abu Ghraib where, you know, like this guy is guilty as hell, but they're going to punish the service member. But how many people were making bets on polymarket do you think, you know, it's a or how many people are shorting oil markets before Trump posts something, right? I hope to God that there is some investigation by the SEC or some New York State authority on the stock market manipulation, the oil market manipulation, because otherwise, like, what's the point of having these agencies? Well, and do you know, I don't even know the answer is.

Why isn't every Democrat like campaigning to shut down all these prediction markets? I don't know. Are they? I think some are. Honestly, I've not dug into everybody's platform on this, but I think it's a terrible idea. Every single Democrat should be for showing. You cannot find a more acute manifestation of corruption than the people that controlling the government have the capacity to bet on their own actions on a prediction market.

And most of the actual business on these platforms is just an end run against state bands on sports betting. That is like their primary revenue. So yeah, it's a terrible idea. I do not support it. Finally, Ben, let's turn to Mexico. So because U.S. involvement there in a counter-cartel operations, they've created this huge headache for Mexican president and Claudia Shanebaum. The story starts on April 19. So the two Americans and two Mexican investigators were killed after their car reportedly plunged off a cliff. I don't really, it's hard. Like, I feel like there's more to the story we don't know. Yeah. I mean. Do they just drive off the edge. Something happened? Yeah. Yeah. It's like so there's so much we don't know.

Yeah. But they were returning from a drug bust operation on a meth lab in the mountains of northern Mexico and the state of Chihuahua. So it has since been confirmed by some U.S. officials who spoke to the AP, among other news outlets, that they were CIA officers. This created big political and legal and foreign policy problems for Claudia Shanebaum. Under Mexico's constitution, foreign governments cannot conduct law enforcement or intelligence operations on Mexican soil. It's very sensitive, at least not independently they need to be with the government or registered. It's a very sensitive sovereignty issue. It dates back many decades.

There have been all these terrible incidents. And this became an intense focus under President Lopez Obrador, who a couple of years back, like 21 or 2020, passed legislation further restricting foreign law enforcement and intelligence agents in Mexico. So again, fast forward to when this story broke earlier this month, Shane Bob initially says that she was not aware that American officials were participating in the operation. She's basically held to that story. So far, she's, like, asked the U.S. for more detail or clarification, but mostly blamed officials in Chihuahua and threatened to reprimand them. It, I think, has helped that the governor there is from the opposition party. So, Ben, I'm trying to, like, again, trying to figure out how to read this. Did the U.S. really not tell the Mexican federal government about this operation or register these individuals?

We don't know. Was this, like, a don't ask, don't tell situation where the U.S. is doing a lot of stuff? Shane Baum gets told some general strokes, but not all of it for deniability on the specifics. Like big picture, it's like definitely an example of how she is trying to balance between nationalism and sovereignty and then all the things Trump is demanding because as we've talked about before, Trump has threatened to conduct airstrikes on cartels in Mexico on Mexican territory. There's reports that the CIA has been flying surveillance drones over Mexican territory.

God knows what else the CIA and the DEA are doing in Mexico that we don't know. about. And so shame bomb's trying to fend off these crazier ideas while like not getting tariff to hell. What did you make of this story and how I like to read between the lines? I thought it was really important. I mean, the suggestion out of the fact pattern that we see is that there were two CIA agents that were down in this state in Chihuahua and they were not there under the approval of the Mexican federal government that maybe they'd made some side deals with local officials or the governor and that they were in some operation and then something went wrong. And I do wonder how the car plunge off a cliff.

And by the way, a reason for that could be that the U.S. thinks that the federal officials are corrupt and the state officials are on the up and up so they go around them. I don't know. Yeah, it could be that they think that if we tell the federal officials, they'll tip off the cartels or just faster to deal with it. Or it's kind of like how we deal with, I don't know, hypothetically like Pakistan. you, you know, it's just rough out there and we're just going to have to do what we have to do. And, you know, we'll let them know generically. We're doing stuff over here in your tribal regions, but, you know, we're not going to tell you about what we're doing.

Now, here's why I think this is important. If there are these two CIA guys doing this, that tells me that this is happening. This is not the only place that they're probably CIA guys. That's my assumption, too. And so it suggests to me that we have moved the War on Terror paradigm into Mexico, where you've got on the ground CIA presence, some of that is partnered with local security forces, some of that may be freelance, some of that may be coordinated with the government, but that there's a kind of much more active confrontation with drug cartels.

Now, people may say, well, that's good, we're fighting drug cartels. The war on drugs paradigm and the war on terror paradigm, neither of them have worked. And so fusing them is a little disconcerting to me. And I feel like I saw this and I thought, you know, and I was saying this to our producer Alona before we recorded like, we've like Mexico dropped off the war list. You know, it's like, well, Cuba, Greenland. Good point, yeah. This kind of reminder, like this, I think Mexico is going to come up more.

And this question of what are we doing? Are there covert operations happening? Are there CIA operations? Could that lead to military action against the cartels directly? And then related to that, what does this mean for Claudia Shanebound? Because she does not want to have that happen. She's made very clear she doesn't want U.S. military engagement in her country. And one way to do that is to look the other way and just kind of, you know, not pay attention to what the U.S.

government may be doing. But this episode makes that kind of untenable for her because she doesn't want to look feckless, right? And not in charge. And so it's going to create potential, you know, difficulties for her. to manage through too. This is one of those stories you put a pin in and say, I have a feeling we're going to be talking more about Mexico. I have a feeling that there's more happening in Mexico than we're seeing. Yeah. And like so far, she's given Trump a lot of concessions. Like she extradited a bunch of drug leaders for prosecution. She put National Guard troops on the border. I think she slapped a big

tariff on the Chinese to be in line with U.S. tariffs. She cut off oil shipments to Cuba. So like she's given Trump a lot of what he wants. But even when there have been. in major cartel operations, like the takedown of that guy El Mancho that we talked about a while back. Trump's reaction wasn't to praise them necessarily. It was like he got mad at the images of violence and chaos that were on TV afterwards and started demanding that the Mexican authorities do more. So she's like just in this squeeze.

And, you know, there was an interesting piece. I think it was a Wall Street Journal. Had a great profile on her in this moment and like all that she's doing to manage this guy. He talked about how she has a security meeting at 6 a.m. every day. Then she does this 7.30 a.m. press conference every day. and then just like works into the night. Like she's like just grinding. And is getting pressured by Trump,

but also getting pressured by President Lopez Obrador for like political benefactor, mentor, who is, you know, on paper left the scene, is writing a book, but he's pressuring her to break with Trump, to cut deals with China, to cut deals with Canada, demanding more nationalism.

And she's like met with Trump once but had nearly 20 phone calls with the guy. So there's clearly all this behind the scenes, like, management happening and a relationship that actually seems genuinely cordial. But, you know, as you know with Trump, like, you're always one comment away from the thing being abandoned. Yeah. No, she's just trying to manage through it. And she's been firm with Trump when she needs to be. I like Claudia Shamed Bam a lot. And by the way, Amlo, you know, Lopez Overdo, her predecessor,

kind of rich for him because he was pretty chummy-chummy with Trump too. Like he was like Mr. fellow populist. I'm just a leftist populist. But I get it. Like he's reflecting the kind of left-wing nationalism that you would expect from that political party in Mexico. I should just say, the problem is that this strategy won't work. Like the drug cartels are deeply entrenched. Trump's not going to defeat them in two and a half years with some CIA apparitions. You know, like, and if people want to what to do, I mean, Ricardo Zuniga has been on with both of us to talk about this. I mean, a strategy that far more aggressively just kind of goes after all their money sources. Like they depend on global financial networks. They have.

sprawling business and empires that go beyond Mexico. They control ports, you know, in different parts of the world. Like, there are other ways at trying to shrink the cartels. By the way, you could legalize drugs in this country to kind of take away the revenue that goes that way. I personally favor that. But, like, you're not, this isn't going to work. Like, the idea that, like, some CI operations, Mexico is a big country, like, the drug trade

is decades established. Like it employs tens of thousands of people. Like you're not going to beat them with like CIA operation after a CIA operation. We're just killing off leaders. Like the kingpin strategies don't seem to work. They create chaos. They create... Look at this to hell that we just talked about.

We killed a lot of terrorists there, you know? Al-Qaeda number three. Down again. Yeah. It doesn't always work. All right. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview about how to fight authoritarianism.

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you'll get an exclusive starter pack containing the elite bomber seasonal unit which has a value of $25. Offer valid for the next 30 days. Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by two friends of mine. Federica Vinci is a program coordinator and Nick Antipov is a project associate for Democracy Hub, DHub, a group that works to counter-authoritarianism,

they have created an anti-authoritarian toolkit, which is going to be a resource that activists and political leaders can use to defend against and ultimately overcome autocracies. So we're here to talk about the release of that project that I've had some interface with over the years. just a couple brief notes about you guys. Federica is also a board member for the Volt there Foundation. She worked on campaigns. She's increased women's participations in politics. Nick is a co-founder of Makeout a project on gender sexuality and anti-discrimination in Belarus that empowers the LGBTQ community there.

Has also been an activist against the authoritarianism in Belarus. And I met you both because you were both also Obama Foundation Europe leaders. So Nick and Feda, thanks for joining me today. Thank you, Ben. Thank you so much, Ben. So before we get into the toolkit, I do want to just kind of introduce people a bit to your journeys. And I guess I'll start with you, Fedda. Talk about how did you come to DHub?

How did you take a journey from being kind of a politician to someone who's more in this kind of activist space? Thanks a lot, Ben. So I still remember the moment in which I had. I realized that authoritarians were organizing all around the world. I was leading a transnational political parties. It still exists. It's called Volt. And I remember that at one moment, all different authoritarian slash far right parties

were presenting in different countries around Europe a piece of law that forced women to listen to the heartbeat of the fetus before abortion. And I was shocked because I could see that, like, in, and they were presenting it in Hungary. And then at the same time, they were presenting it in Italy. And at the same time, they were presenting it in Spain and in Portugal and in France. And we on the other side, we were trying to organize a transnational political party. And we didn't even know how to make people talk, people that didn't talk the same language. They didn't speak the same language.

And I was like, there must be something here that they are doing, that we are not. So while I was thinking about this questions, I was also the deputy mayor of my hometown. Back then, I was doing politics at the local level. I come across D-Hab, or whether better D-Hab, Nikakovich that we both know, comes across me. And she talks me about these organizations that had as main aim the objective of creating a democratic playbook. So something that people that were fighting for democracy could use and replicate exactly in the same way that authoritarianes were doing for their own autocracy. So I thought that this exactly made sense. And when she came to me and she asked me to join D-Hub, I was like, look, I've better.

on my own skin that we needed something like this. And I was really more than happy to join this fight and starting writing, I mean, starting producing and working with those people for the authoritarian toolkit. Okay, so Nick, you had like a different experience. I think Federer you described well the kind of awareness of this right-wing, far-right authoritarian kind of coordination. Nick, when I met you, you were dealing with a much more kind of visceral form of authoritarianism. Lukashenko, the autocratic leader of Belarus, has cracked down the opposition.

You literally had to kind of exile at first to Lithuania. Describe your journey from being in Belarus running an organization to D-Hub. Yeah, thank you. My journey, yeah, my journey to the D-Hub, it's a bit different. You know, born in and raised in Minsk and under the regime, Lukashenko, going to schools, washed with all propaganda. And somehow I found this, I don't know, courage and some, I don't know, meeting in a way that something is not right.

Something is that doesn't make any sense. And obviously maybe it's connecting with my, with my sexuality and queer identity. I found this idea of liberation. Inside me, liberation of my sexuality, liberation of my community and liberation of my own country. because back then I didn't understand how everything is so connected and the fight for LGBTQ plus rights it's also the fight for for for democracy and now five years later yeah I lost kind of I lost my country I lost my lost my ability to see my loved ones lost my lost my meaning basically you know to to influence on my community and to try to push it

And living now in Berlin, I kind of realized, especially I realized that when, especially when Trump started getting into power, people sometimes started talking about, oh, my God, this is new world order. And then I was like, wait, wait a second, is it? Or maybe it's already authoritarian playbook, which already was built and actually just transformed in a new wave. So I kind of was happy that my journey and my journey of like a small community also in a country, which sometimes also overlooked in the big politics, I tried to take all the lessons from all these years of democracy defenders in my region and kind of also share it with my community and community worldwide.

So yeah, at the D-Hub now we're creating this Ontario Taurian toolkit, which connect all practices in some kind of readable and hands-on, hands-on book and not book, and it's an only publication to make sure that we have all the knowledge and all the strategy how to fight back. So, and eventually I hope it will bring my region to democracy. So I've interacted with you guys through DHub, and so people understand, you know, essentially you're a network that works with, you know, small D democracy activists, not just in Europe, but around the world. I mean, it's a global perspective that you're taking on this authoritarian challenge. All three of us have interacted with in our own ways. You know, I've dealt with Trump here in the United States from the perspective of politics and media.

Feda, you've been a politician and activist yourself kind of feeling the rising tide of a certain kind of far-right politics. in places like Italy, Nick, you had the most firsthand experience of losing, you know, at least for the time being your country. How do you describe the process by which you put together this anti-authoritarian toolkit? You know, who did you talk to in order to put it together? And I guess to begin, Feta, with you, can you explain? I want to start pulling out lessons. One that we talked about when I saw you in Costa Rica was putting broccoli in the rice.

I like that you guys try to have these, you know, phrases that they're punchy and clever, but that actually speak to something important. Like, how do you get from talking to a bunch of activists to a point like, put broccoli in the rice? Thanks so much for the question. So basically, we, as you were saying, we're activists ourselves. And we started from our own people to start understanding what was the ground. So what were we talking about when we were talking about rising up our Italians? What was their playbook?

And from people like Cass and from our own contact, we started to talk to talk with other activists. First, to understand what was the playbook of authoritarianists. And from this, the authoritarian playbook was born. But then we didn't want just to give another diagnosis of how the world was working. We really wanted to get into how do we fight them. So we started talking with activists from literally all around the world. We have case studies going from Thailand to South Africa to Kenya, to Argentina, talking with them about what were the different strategies and tactics that

allow them to win possible authoritarian. Also because here, I think it's important to say that we're talking about elected authoritarians. So people that almost fairly win the elections, but then get into power and dismantle the institutions of democracy from within. So we needed to understand first, how do we do in order not to have them elected? So how do we win elections? But it was not just about election, it was about building movements, it was about creating an opposition inside different parliaments. So we started talking with people that managed to do it successfully. A good example with this, of this where, for example, our friends in Brazil or our friends in France, where they just beat the far right and the parliamentary elections a couple of years ago. So we started talking with these people and they gave us different strategies and tactics in order to fight back.

back. And one of the strategies and tactics is exactly what you were talking about, which is the strategy of broccoli and rice. So what we do here is that within our volume of the children comms, which I happen to have it here, we talk about several tactics that can fight authoritarian and we have a grand strategy. One of the tactics, for example, is network of influencers. And when we talk about broccoli and rice, we ask these influencers that might talk about several things like makeup or gossips. We ask them to put into their pages some piece and beats of political contents in order to start shaping the idea of the people that listen to them

and that see them on social media in a democratic way. This is a play that authoritarianes have developed so well all around the world. An example is Buckele, who has more than 1,500 YouTube or Facebook pages that talk about everything and include his politics in his social media, we need to start doing the same and we wrote it exactly that how do you do it within your own people, within your own communities to put broccoli, so things that people might not generally like politics into the rise, so the nice content about makeup so that you start changing the discourse yourself. Yeah, no, it's a really important point because after the last election, I mean, this is why we're on a podcast,

So it's one of the reasons I brought up this point. After the Democrats lost in 2024, there was this kind of pretty predictable freak out. Oh, Trump won, you know, by going on all these podcasts. You know, Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan and people like that in the United States. And the Democrats are like, maybe we have to go on the podcast too. And I think what they missed is, you know, Joe Rogan is a comedian and a UFC commentator, right? He's not, he didn't start in politics.

like he started with the rice. The thing that people were attracted to was his kind of curiosity and his background and he's funny, they think, or whatever. And then, you know, that gives him more credibility in some ways. You know, politics is downstream from culture, as you would say, to the, to, when he has a political conversation, he's built up a credibility with the audience. And I think that's an important message for us. Now, this is one of many, you know, lessons you have embedded.

Nick, I want to ask you, though, to this question of messaging, you know, one of the things that Trump and other authoritarianists have done is they kind of talk about a corrupt system and then they themselves are phenomenally corrupt. And we've seen corruption become, you know, a tool that has worked against authoritarian. It just worked against Victor Orban and Hungary. what lessons do you take from how corruption can be a way of going on offense against authoritarian's and what other lessons are there about the forms of messaging that can help drive arguments

against authoritarian's you're kind of trying to control in some ways the media space? No, it's a good question. I think, you know, it's also very, I need to point out that the authoritarian populism rises not because people love it, but also because democracy failed to meet their needs. They're talking about corruption also because of it. But the problem with authoritarian is that they changed. And yeah, maybe they no longer

arrives with tanks and stage coups, but now they build popularity and wins these elections. But the problem with people not realizing that once they elected, they erodes democratic institutions. They destroy independent media and concentrate power and weaken civic spaces. So they slowly like a frock in slowly heater water by the time you realize it, you are already in autocracy. Building this toolkit, we wanted to show that the time that progressives needs to learn also. And sometimes we are also doing wrong. And when we're talking about democracy, we not need only to defend democracy, but we also need to renew it.

And, yeah, these 10 volumes, as Federer mentioned, there are two core volumes. Yeah, they are authoritarian playbooks, which helps identify under the standard of authoritarian tactics, and democratic playbook, which brings together the all best knowledges from all our sector of our toolkit. But talking about, yeah, talking about public conversation, yeah, I think the progressives needs to change how they do it in the digital environments. Because the authoritarian's, actually, they are the first one who understand these spaces, and they have clear advantages, like Buckelia, as mentioned in El Salvador, or even in

even Orban in Hungary, but he lost. Yeah, I mean, this is, influence no longer works through the single message or messengers, but through ecosystems. And this is what we did in our, that actually is mentioned in our authoritarian playbook, that we need to put a broccoli into rice or working with influencers. This has to be renewed. And our message needs to be. also simple. We need to stop be very preachy. Yeah, so that's my thought about the changes.

And Fedra, what do you take, I mean, there's a lot in here. What would you want to highlight for people as some of the key learnings that you're seeking to kind of spread to other like-minded people? People are asking us whether we want a different way of doing politics. And this is what we're thinking about when we talk about the anti-authoritarian toolkit. So we are bringing new practices. into what has been hold and talking about the several lessons that can be learned. First of all, as Nick was saying, is how do we manage digital communications? So we were talking about putting broccoli in the rice, but this is not the only thing. We need to, for example, have networks of influencers, change the way in which we talk about politics,

come and talk about real values. You were talking about corruption before Ben. There is one thing really important that I want to say about corruption. Authoritarians use corruptions as their main enemy from the other. side. So when they're discovered as the corrupted one, this is the moment in which they start losing. One of the things that we have to do is exactly exposing this corruption and see how the moral authority from which they're coming to expose the other side as corrupted, it's actually the one that it's breaking them because they're not. And an example that you were giving about Magier and

Orban, well, Marger won exactly because he managed not only to expose this corruption, but also to go on the ground and he visited like more than a thousand little places during his own campaign so that while he was attacking on the other side, he was meeting people one by one and building a vision. This is another thing that we have seen in several campaigns that really worked, like the Mandami campaign. We're not talking just about exposing what it's wrong from these software retireants, we are also giving people a vision of what is it the word that we would want

and that we would like. So all of this together with working with the whole digital ecosystem, and what I mean by that, we generally think that democracy is protected either by politicians, either by journalists, either by civil society. What we say here is that we, what we say here is that we don't have, those are not three words that work separately. We need to put together the whole democratic ecosystem that is built on these different pillars and make, and let them work in a way that they support each other. We have one whole volume and place on how the political side can actually

work and collaborate with civil societies and journalists in order not only to win campaign, or to expose corruption, to expose the authoritarian place. And so be stronger together. This is, I think, something new that we have seen with all our researches and interviews, that it is the moment in which we have the whole democratic system working together that we can actually win. And everything can be found in our website, anti-authoritarian.com. So if anyone listening to us is interested, you can just go and give a look to what we're putting up together

at anti-authoritarian.com. And so you've got, I mean, just to pull out the things we've talked about, you know, the idea of building networks of influencers, the idea of engaging people on the things that they're interested and then working your way into politics. That's the broccoli into rice. They need to spotlight corruption to kind of turn the tables on the authoritarian. They need to show up everywhere, like you said, Magyar did, to get out into the field, to go to places maybe that progressives haven't been showing up before.

Nick, are there any lessons that you want to add to that from the work that you've done about how do you mobilize people? How do you get people out to actually vote? And also one other thing that you guys have is examples of where this worked. Are there case studies? Are there places? Fedet mentioned, you know, Mammani in New York. We've talked about Hungary. Are there places that you would spotlight where we can learn from progressive successes against authoritarian? Of course. The whole toolkit is designed to be adapted. We always say that take that works for you, adapt the rest, and use whatever in whatever you are. So I wanted to, you know, when I just wanted to amplify this is the huge of work which was done by not only by the DHA, but by democracy defender worldwide because we spent almost two years and talking with doing like 100 interviews with the people like real people who was fighting for democracy who fought or who lost in their battles and and we really wanted to create some kind of not a publication this is not a publication this is uh it's a it's a hands-on resource designed to be uh uh uh um a you

by the people right now. I cannot say right now that there is something which we can work, for instance, in United States or it was the best what works in Hungary or in Poland. But the thing is like people can connect. We are as progressives sometimes losing the hope that we can win. and we finally have something which can help us to continue. I, coming from the background, when I don't need a hope, I always say that I don't need a hope to continue to fight and to resist.

This is what I was taken from the queer community in Belarus because we were, we were, we were existing before this concept of hope. So now, I think when we have this material, cereal which can be used and implemented in different societies or different regions. That's kind of impressive. This is what we, this is what we wanted to do. And also this is like nonstop process. This is like the toolkit will be updated. The toolkit will be like we will be updating through our website. It's a podcast. It's our video. It's everything. So Feta, just to give you the last word here. What do you think about, I take Nick's point that essentially what you have is a bunch

of different ideas taken from around the world. Here are some strategies and tactics that have worked that might be either replicated or adapted to other places. So I take your point, Nick, that it's not going to be exactly what happened in Hungary or New York City is going to work in Italy, for instance, but that there are lessons you can take and then apply. And that just there's something empowering about the sharing that you're doing in that regard. Do you, when you look around the world the last couple of years, the time you were working on this, where did you see democratic campaigns? I don't mean the democratic part in the U.S. or Italy, for that matter.

I mean, you know, small D-democratic campaigns. Where do you see the most innovative strategies that we can be learning from in the battles to come? Let me add something on exactly that, not only the most interesting strategies, but what a TK is needed for. So as Nick were saying, as we're underlying, we cannot take place and exactly use them in one country. But I give you a very specific example of a play that I thought was extremely interesting. And now people like me in my own country or like a person, one of the people that wrote to the Antitore then I took it, Augustine is right is using in his country is the play of distributed distributed organizing. So this was a play that was developed from one of our friends

friends Saradourio in France right before the parliamentary elections in in France a couple of years ago. So Macron calls for elections three weeks before the actual elections. So people didn't really have the time to organize around the elections and understand what they could do. So what they did is that all of these people came up into a into a zoom call and they started organizing in order to have a get-up-the-vote campaign and also to understand who they had to move in terms of candidates to allow for the Front National not to win. And so what they developed was like a central team that was like very, very small and there was not

controlling, but this central team was basically managing the communication of what is it that they can communicate to people that it's going to work and then share the messages with thousands of organizations influencers, people that could actually move the base, and so that this message could get to a wider public as possible in a way that was not coordinated, I mean, that was coordinated, sorry, but that was not controlled. So the main part of the message was there, was developed by a central team,

but then everybody from influencers to organizations could adapt this message and communicated in the best way that they needed to in order to reach their own target. And in this way, they managed to do these two things, develop a huge DOTV campaign, that allowed them to not have the Front National and so the far right party in France win, but also to then have a massive influence on candidates, so which were the candidates that needed to go down

in order for have at the local level, let's put like this, in order not to have Front National win. And they did it. And so now what we're trying to do here in different countries for elections that are coming, it's sort of like replicating the same play, but in a more organized way. So we are adapting this play,

And we're trying to put together from now, influenza, civil societies, journalists that want to have a specific topics, to talk about for the elections, and then have a GOTV campaign run on these topics that will be supported, or we hope we're going to be supported by Central Left Party slash Democratic parties that go against the far right. So what we did here was taking the example of what we used, what was used in France and worked, re-imagined, wrote it in the AATK into the anti-authoritarian toolkit as a play, so a tactic. And then now activists like me are taking it, changing it and adapting to their own national country context. And this is just one idea, but on anti-authoritarian.com, people are going to find 10 volumes on 10 different topics, all of them would place and more than 150 cases of what

worth in different countries and literally and how to so how can you do display from one to seven steps including tips to make it work in your own context so the idea is that really this is something live we want people to take it use it make mistakes but at least try and have something from scratch like from to start from because I remember that as an activist it was really hard because you had no idea from where you had to start and now at least we have something that tell us, those are the things that are working around the world. You can take it, you can change them, you can use them. This is what we're looking

for. Yeah, no, I think the distributed organizing is an important point. And I mean, it resonates here in the United States because I think Democrats sometimes are trying to figure out the perfect set of talking points or, you know, the one message that's going to work across the country, or are we moving to the left or to the center? But the idea is if you have some core arguments, and core values and core anti-authoritarian messages like, you know, Trump is wildly corrupt and is actually looting the government for his own purposes, not trying to fix a corrupt system, that you then allow for a coordinated dissemination of that messaging that, you know, Zoroamam Dani is going to have one message in New York City, but James Tolerico is going to have a different

version of that message in Texas. There'll be a common DNA, but there'll be this distributed organizing where it's different in different parts of the country. And that's kind of part of what needs to happen around the world. I mean, just to wrap this up, I'd just say the main thing is that there needs to be coordination among politicians, activists, civil society, even sometimes journalists, as you say, independent journalists, but also just among like-minded people around the world. Because the far right has been very networked, very coordinated. You guys have experienced that in your own lives and work. we're all experiencing that around the world.

This is a starting point for trying to create a kind of living resource for people. So, again, we'll put this in the show notes. I encourage people to check out the anti-authoritarian playbook, the toolkit, and Dhab in general. So Nick and Federica, thanks so much for the work you've done on this and for joining us today. Thank you, Ben, for having us. Thank you so much. Thanks to Nick and Federica for coming on the show, and we'll talk to you guys soon. Podsafe World is a crooked media production.

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