Pod Save the World - North Korean “Storm Corps” Deploys to Russia

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Tommy and Ben discuss why North Korea deployed 10,000 special forces troops to Russia, reports that Elon Musk likes to chat on the phone with Vladimir Putin, and a Trump campaign memo suggesting that if elected, he should do away with FBI background checks normally required before staff can access classified information. They also talk about new Israeli laws that would cripple aid deliveries into Gaza, the muted response from Iran after Israeli airstrikes near Tehran, increasingly sophisticated election interference from Russia, Iran, and China, the consequences of elections in Georgia and Japan, and a giant feces geyser near Moscow. Then, Tommy interviews NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff about the new documentary based on his book “Separated” that details the inhumane family separation policy enacted during the Trump administration, and the chances of it happening again if he wins. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Is this our last episode before Election Day? We record on Election Day. Yes. I was thinking about that on the drive-in, actually. That'll be a highly anticipated episode. I'm just going to... I want everybody to just be prepared for me to be unburdening myself of eight years of anxiety on Election Day. Yeah. Also, you guys won't have results on Wednesday.

I don't think so you should listen to us no matter what. Yeah, of course. Otherwise, just watching Cornacchi, like, you know, refresh stuff on TV. Refreshing. There are 17 extra votes from... Delaware County. I went canvassing over the weekend, Ben, or I did a bunch of canvas kickoffs. We did Will Rollins, Derek Tran, Dave Min.

It was actually very, it made me feel a lot better. We spent Sunday on the road. Thank you to all the pod listeners, by the way. It came out and did a shift. But if you don't want to go out on Canvas, here's the thing everyone should do. Everybody knows three friends in a swing state. If you think, you know someone in Philly. You know somebody in Georgia.

Text them. Ask them if they're voting. If they're Republican, don't text them. But see if you can get people to turn out who might not vote. See if you can persuade somebody you know. That kind of relational organizing is so much better than like cold calling. Yeah. I mean, you have to remember that if you can get one person to vote, who wasn't going to vote

or who was going to vote the other way, just one person. The margins are so small. Just think of how many people out there delivering one person might swing the whole election. I think about that. Because I've had friends phone banking. I have some friends phone banking through votes, Save America. I definitely plug Votesave America. And, you know, there'll be people who will phone bank for a couple of days, but then they'll get that one person who says, yes, okay, I will vote for Kamala Harris.

Or can you get me a ride to the polls, right? I've had people who've had to help arrange that. And they feel like they did something. You feel amazing. Yeah, you do one vote. You may have to call a lot of people to get that one vote. But my favorite thing is sometimes I try to play Stradjust, and I have a friend who's bilingual. and I said, oh, you should make Spanish language calls to Arizona, you know, because here I'm the strategist.

You know, we've got this problem with Latinos, you know. And she says she calls these people and they're like, can we just speak in English? So, you know, our anxieties are, my anxieties are like infusing even the phone banking efforts I'm encouraging. And we got a lot of anxieties. Yeah. They're just ripping these days. I know. As we were talking coming in, I apologize for being a little tired.

I've been waking up at 4 in the morning. like every night. And then, of course, making the mistake of looking at my phone and then not going to make it. Yeah, we have a rolling ex-Obama hack WhatsApp thread

who are people you guys all know or know of. And that thing starts firing off at my 4 a. Yeah, yeah. That's peak hour. It's not good. It doesn't stop until late, late at night. But, you know,

it's like I want the election over so badly, but then we have to live with the results and I'm not ready for that either. Well, let's hope they're the good result. I hope they're all good. Well, well, Well, with that uplifting intro, we have a very interesting show. We do.

We're going to talk about why North Korea is sending troops to Russia. Let's talk about Elon Musk's little like informal chit-chats with Vladimir Putin. Interesting story there. Cover the implications of Israel kicking out the key UN aid agency out of Gaza. Rudy Giuliani's comments at Trump's fascist Madison Square Garden rally about the Palestinians. Israel's airstrikes on Iran over the weekend, Trump's plan to scrap FBI background checks for those seeking security claims? Crazy story. I can't wait to talk about that. Me too. Like every once in a while, this is a banger. They really surprise you. This is a banger and I bet everybody missed it because

there's so many other things. There's Nazi rallies and stuff, but wait for this one. This is going to be good stuff. Yeah, that's a good one. There's all kinds of foreign election interference happening. And then there were some very big consequential elections in both Georgia and Japan that we will talk about. And then, Ben, I just interviewed Jacob Soberoff from NBC News. He wrote amazing reports and a book about Trump's family separation policy. that book is now the basis of a new documentary with Errol Morris about the family separation policy and sort of the aftermath and the lack of accountability. It is in theaters now. It's available on MSNBC on December 7th. But it was a good to talk to him about, you know, like one of the truly one of the worst periods of the entire Trump presidency, but how likely it is that that will be repeated if Trump is reelected.

And that was 1.0. So the kind of mass deportation they're talking about is. the next level of that. Yes. That was Jacobsi point, which is like mass deportations is family separation on stereo. Yes. Yes. So it's only going to get worse. Okay, let's turn to this North Korea news, Ben, because a couple weeks ago, we talked about some kind of like loose reporting that North Korea might be thinking about sending troops to Russia. I think I speculated that it might have been just to like maintain the equipment that they've been giving the Russians. But now both the Pentagon and NATO are on the record talking about this. So the Pentagon says 10,000 North Korean troops are in Russia for training and that some are

already heading to the front lines to fight. And the NATO Secretary General says the troops are heading to the Kursk region, which is that piece of Russian territory that Ukraine captured in a surprise operation several months back. So they're going right to the front line. The Washington Post says that Kim Jong-un appears to have sent his equivalent of elite special forces unit, including the so-called storm corps troops that have been trained to invade South Korea. Just for context, I mean, North Korea is one of the largest armies in the world, despite not being that big of a country. They've got an estimated 1.2 million soldiers on active

duty, hundreds of thousands, if done millions, more in reserve. But these special forces members are highly trained, highly specialized professional fighters. You know the videos you see sometimes of like shirtless ripped North Korean guys breaking boards? Yeah. Those are the dudes. Yeah, I wouldn't want to mess with those guys. Still, you know, some experts I was reading about, They pointed out that these guys are going to have to adjust to the modern battlefield that includes like FPV drones and all sorts of nightmares. But it's a real problem. And Ukrainian officials and South Korean officials have even higher estimates. I think it's like 12,000 or 19,000 troops, though that might be special forces, guys, and then kind of like enablers, people that do logistics, et cetera.

South Korean intelligence says Russia is going to pay these guys about two grand a month, which is a ton of money in North Korea. so you could see how maybe that makes it politically palatable, not that Kim Jong-un has to worry about a lot of politics. But Ben, you like to talk about World War Watch. World War Watch. That's where we're going to start. We'd like to do that here. We keep an eye on, you know, any and all signals that this war might escalate into World War III. This seems to fall in that bucket.

There's also some reporting that Russia is providing the Houthi rebels in Yemen with intelligence to help them target ships in the Red Sea. The brazenness in the deepening of these alliances is really something. That's right. If you look at the world and think of it in terms of three fault lines of conflict, the war in Ukraine, the war across the Middle East, and the war that is not being fought, but the kind of frozen conflict in Taiwan and Korea, right? This is blending that axis together. So, you know, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran kind of form a group of countries. you know, in addition to the troops being provided, they signed this kind of mutual defense

treaty between Russia and North Korea, totally unprecedented, right? You know, kind of creating a mini little Warsaw pact there. And so you hate to see this kind of blending of different conflicts, different military forces. It kind of scrambles the decks and raises the stakes of geopolitics. And then you're like looking at, okay, what does this mean for the conflict in Ukraine? It's hard to say because on the one hand, if they can replenish their troops, the Russians, with North Korean fighting forces who are competent, it does free them up big time. Because the reports are that these guys might be headed to the Kursk region of Russia, where Ukraine has moved in. The Russians did not do what the Ukrainians thought they were going to do, which is divert a bunch of troops from eastern Ukraine back to defend Kursk.

So it may be that if the Russians can just take Kersk back with some North Koreans, that really frees them up in terms of their management. power advantage inside of Russia. That's the kind of optimistic scenario for the Russians. The other side of this, though, is that these guys may be trained, but they haven't fought in any combat at all. You know, they've been doing drills in North Korea, and are they going to be ready for kind of these battle-hardened Ukrainians or entrepreneurial with drones and things like that? We just don't know. They're interesting reverberations back on the Korean Peninsula, too, though, because on the one end, there's probably a lot in this for the North Koreans. They could be getting food. They could be getting military technology, in addition to kind of

just cold cash, they could have guys coming home who are now trained in a way that the South Koreans are not. You know, they will have seen combat. And so the risk of them may be, you know, you've seen this in past World Wars. Like you've got some experience in one theater and you come back and you try to, you know, push your advantage closer to home. The downside potentially for Kim Jong-un is what did these guys go and they see what life is like even in, you know. Yeah, they get home. They're like, what the fuck? And so there's a risk here. Where's my two grand.

Yeah, which I haven't seen much written. about, and I don't want to be overly optimistic about it, North Greece is incredibly closed society, a police state. But if tens of thousands of guys start coming home and they just saw that, hey, people out in the rest of the world live differently from here, you know, that could be but dicey too. So it's not without risk. But it is definitely a very new and worrying variable that is not getting as much attention as it might otherwise if there wasn't a war in the Middle East and an election. Yeah. And I guess the other question is sort of when when will it top out? I mean, is 10,000 the end? Is 19,000 the end? Will they send more? I mean, Russia has reportedly, by some

estimates, had 600,000 casualties. That includes, you know, dead and wounded soldiers. So that's just an enormous loss for them. And I don't know. If they have a, they've been completely reliant on North Korean artillery for a while now. The question is whether how many soldiers Kim Jong-un is willing to give up. I mean, apparently men are drafted into the military. It's 17 in North Korea. And they serve for eight to 10 years. So there's just like a lot of bodies in Yeah. And again, it's worrying because there's a scenario where Kim Jong-un decides he's kind of all in with this, and maybe there's like 100,000 guys that end up going. In that scenario, too, though, if Russia and North Korea kind of almost melded together in a way, all the sudden, you know, if Putin wants to cause problems for the West, maybe he starts, you know, fucking around in the Korean Peninsula and South Korea. I mean, there's all kinds of ways this could go, and most of them are not good.

Most of them not good. Speaking of not good, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, surrogate for Trump mainly these days. Dipshit as Tams. Hopping around the Dibshut. That Elon and Vladimir Putin have talked on the phone regularly since 2022 and that Putin has repeatedly asked him for favors

like not putting his Starlink satellite communication service into service over Taiwan. I think the sourcing in the story was like European, in, you know, sort of intelligence and diplomatic sources, which was interesting. You have to imagine if the Russians are calling Elon Musk in America, that's got to get picked up by the NSA and others. But European intelligence services, too, though, who probably monitor Russian communications super closely. This story, though, was wild to me.

I mean, look, on one level, like Elon Musk is a child, and you watch him at that Trump MSG event, Madison Square Garden event, and he just loves the adulation and the ecosstroke. And you can imagine getting a call from Putin is that. But also, Elon is something like $15 billion worth of contracts from the U.S. government, including classified work for the Pentagon. Yeah. I don't know how you get away with that. I mean, aren't you going to get asked about those contacts?

So actually, just to start on that, and we'll come back to this in the security clearance conversation, that's the kind of thing that would get you bounced from having government contracts or security clearances. Have you been in touch with an adversary of the United States? I mean, you and I have both been interviewed for other people's security clearances. kind of top question is usually like, has this person been in touch with any adversaries of the United States? I can't think of one more than Vladimir Putin. Has he been reporting those contacts at the Biden administration? I can't imagine he has.

And the thing to remember here is that, yes, I think Elon Musk, if he can be flattered to kind of be on stage with Donald Trump, who's a fucking buffoon, you know, Putin is a smart guy. He's been around the block for 20 years. Clearly, Musk would be flattered by him. and not to kind of play the KGB card, but Putin's a guy that runs influence operations. He's ran agents.

Very good at this. He's literally himself ran agents. And if you look at Elon Musk's track record on Russia, Ukraine over the last year or two, he is floating peace proposals that are eerily resemblance of Vladimir Putin's peace proposals. So, you know, Putin, you can see him on the phone, Elon, I really want to bring this warden,

and then all that has to happen is this. And suddenly that is on X, is on Twitter. And that's a literally Russian influence operation that is reaching hundreds of millions of people. Literally. And Ian Bremmer, who's a security analyst from the private sector, had reported or said in his newsletter maybe that Elon had talked directly to Putin. This was, I think, in 2022 or, you know, a couple of years back. Elon denied it. And then Bremmer, I think, kind of just walked away with it. It seemed like at the time that Bremer's source might have been Elon Musk. But, you know, something weird happened. Maybe he wasn't supposed to say it on the record. But now it seems like that was all accurate. Yeah. And again, the most likely scenario based on the sourcing is some European intelligence

service had been picking this up and worried about it and dumped it out. It makes you wonder why they're worried about it. It's because if Putin is able to kind of run influence through somebody who runs one of the most important social media platforms in the world with a huge following, who also, by the way, is emerging as one of the biggest donors to the next U.S. president, again, not to go all muller she wrote here, but it is what it is. It is real weird. Let's move up this security clearance conversation a bit because we've been alluded to it. So the New York Times reported that there's a memo circulating among top Trump campaign aids that proposes Trump get

rid of the traditional FBI background checks required before his incoming team can get access to classified information. And instead, if he wins, just grant them access to classified materials immediately when he's sworn in. they also want the Trump transition team to use private sector investigators to do background checks during the transition period, not the FBI. This idea is being pushed around by this guy Boris Epstein, who is this goofball, like, low-level press staffer in the Trump White House for, I think literally three months before he quit. Bad Bond villain or something. He's a marble-mouthed goofball. Then he went and he did propaganda for like Sinclair TV.

He wrote like scripts for Sinclair TV. Yeah. And then he kind of wormed his way into Trump's graces by going fully, you know, 20-20 election lie, you know, big lie guy. So let's talk about the ways this is dumb. So the reason the FBI does these background checks is they have substantial resources to do them, A, and B, if you lie to them, it is a crime. So people are incentivized to tell the truth and take the process seriously. Second, I mean, ultimately the president can decide to give anyone he or she wants access to classified information. So it's just, you don't really need to cut out the FBI here.

It just, it seems like they just don't want the Trump people to have to disclose things. And then finally, it's just worth reminding people because we've lived through a billion new cycles that Trump stole highly classified information. Left it by the toilet at his golf club. In 2019, he tweeted out classified photos from a top secret reconnaissance satellite of, I think, Iranian missile. Yes, Iranian missile. It looked like a photo from his iPhone of the PDB. And then remember, Jared Kushner struggled to get a security clearance for months and months and months, then became like the shadow secretary of state, left the administration, got a $2 billion kickback from the Saudis. So these are not the guys you should trust with classified information and no guardrails. Again, Ben, like there's so many stories that kind of are jaw dropping. But this one was just, it was still shockingly brazen. Yeah, there's a few things about this. first of all, it's not like the FBI clearance process is perfect. No.

You and I have mocked it. Yeah, you and I have mocked on this podcast, the drug thing, for instance, which is what, you know, tied me up in knots for a few months, you know, anybody who smoked marijuana is of interest to the FBI. But where is it actually useful? I mean, there are a couple of ways, there are a couple of things that are feature prominently in the security clearance process that people should be aware of if you haven't been through it. The first is, like I was saying, the foreign influence one.

And this isn't just about like whether you've been talking to Putin. This is like financial ties. And so you can imagine that a lot of these Trump grifters like Rick Rinell who's flying around the Balkans doing God knows what, you know, Jared Kushner developing real estate. In Albania while taking two billion from the Saudis. But all these other guys, you know, they're all in bed with these different autocrats and stuff. They wouldn't want their financial dealings with these foreign governments to feature prominently in their investigations because it would raise, questions about whether they can be trusted to be impartial. The other thing, Tommy, I kept thinking about is there's a question that seems ridiculous that is asked in every security

clearance interview. I know what you're going to say. Which is, have you ever been a part of any effort to, has this person ever been part of any effort to overthrow the United States government? That's a hard one these days. And I would always kind of laugh. And they'd be asking about some nerdy friend of ours, you know. But every one of these motherfuckers that was involved in January 6 actually can't get a security clearance based on that criteria. It's so funny. So some of this is just them wanting to kind of make it easier to, you know, short-circuit the process, not deal with the pain in the ass and just get their security clerances. But here's the more insidious thing.

And the way I think this should be seen as a particularly dangerous sign. I don't have been following the transition, but the Trump team has also talked about, and I think they are trying to kind of sidestep GSA, right, the General Services Administration, which is usually the government agency that kind of manages transition. Yep. And privately raise money. money, yeah, yep. To pay for a privately funded transition that is like a 5-1C4, like an organization outside of the federal government. No disclosure. Well, one, that raises concerns of basically

people buying, like Elon Musk could give $100 million to transition and pick who's going to be in the government. But more insidiously, this is Project 2025. If you want to know that Project 2025 is real, it's not something that is just an Heritage Foundation, this is the plan. We are going to set up a shadow transition outside of the government. We're going to get our own people, security clearances and come in and fire all the civil servants and replace them with these ideologues. This is a sign that they are going to do the project 2025 thing if they went. Who's going to do the clearance? Like blackwater? Like what are we talking about here? Probably. I mean, they probably give it to Eric Prince, but you know what?

Your buddies? Maybe they could. No, but you know what it'll be? They won't vet these people. No, they'll Google them. It'll be a fucking boondoggle. They'll raise all this money. They'll pay someone like Eric Prince, tens of millions of dollars. He'll pocket the money. Oh, no. I mean, this is what's going to be. going to happen. Jared's going to invest in a fucking pyramid scheme. Private executive research company. It just occurred to me, Ben, this is nothing to do with what we're talking about. That if Trump wins, someone is going to write an article about Jared Kushner's secret role in the campaign in 2024 that we didn't know about it. And it's going to make us

so angry. Source to people familiar with Jared Navanka's thinking. Yeah. And like Axios or something. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, all right. Let's talk about some much worse foreign news. on Monday over in Israel, the Knesset passed two laws that many experts believe will make it all but impossible for UNRWA to operate going forward. UNRWA is the UN agency that provides aid and other humanitarian services to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, but also the broader region anywhere the Palestinians are living. The bill goes into effect in three months, and it says that UNRWA would not be able to, quote, operate any representative office, provide any service, or conduct any activity directly or

indirectly in Israel's sovereign territory, end quote. The bill also bars Israeli officials from working with UNRWA, which all raises the question, when this law goes into effect, how will the Israeli government coordinate aid deliveries with UNRWA if they can't talk to them? And if UNRWA can't operate in Gaza, what organization will be willing or able to fill the void, given how dangerous it is? Here's a clip of Jonathan Fowler, a spokesperson for UNRWA, talking about the potential impact of this law.

If this legislation is implemented, it will have a direct operational and legal impact on UNRWA's services in the occupied Palestinian territory, a huge humanitarian impact on the people we serve, notably those in Gaza right now, and is likely to expose thousands of the agencies dedicated personnel to harm. In Gaza, we are the backbone of the international humanitarian operation. That's not an exaggeration. No other agency can do what it does without working with UNRWA. And so without UNRWA, that operation will completely unravel, and that's just simply unacceptable. The delivery of food, shelter and healthcare to most of Gaza's population would grind to a halt. And without UNRWA, the 660,000 children in Gaza would lose the only entity able to restart education. So there's also putting at risk the future of an entire generation. Now, beyond Gaza, without UNR, health, education and social services to Palestine refugees in the West. Bank would fall apart, and that includes in East Jerusalem.

So the Yonobos human impacts would be terrifying. And there's also potential consequences of that for stability in the wider region. So massive ramifications here. So as we've discussed previously, Israel has accused UNRAS, some of UNRUS 13,000 employees in Gaza of either being in Hamas or even directly participating in the October 7th attacks. But, you know, the U.S., many other governments, anyone with a brain, has argued. argued that that doesn't justify cutting off the entire agency, given the dire impact it would have. A number of countries, the Spanish, the Germans, the UK, they all criticize the move.

And, you know, the broader context, as we've discussed over and over again on the show, is that Palestinians, especially in northern Gaza, are starving to death. Hospitals are operating with only first aid type supplies. People are running out of food and water. And Israel is still hammering the area with airstrikes. The Guardian reported that the IDF hidden apartment building in northern Gaza. yesterday killing 93 people while 40 are still missing. And then just one last piece of this,

you know, diplomats from Israel, Egypt, the U.S. and Qatar have been trying to restart ceasefire talks. You know, the Egyptians floated the 48-hour pause in fighting for the release of a handful of, you know, hostages from both sides. But there seems to be no hope that Netanyahu is going to do anything before the U.S. election.

But, Ben, I mean, this, this un-ro, you know, last week we talked about how the Israelis just no longer seem to give a shit about any. the humanitarian concerns. This UNRWA law seems to be the biggest sort of turn of that screw. That's right. If you were to add this up, if you take the decision to make UNRWA illegal, you combine it with the fact that aid is just not getting in at all to Northern Gaza and the bombardment of Northern Gaza. And then, by the way, you look at what certain Israeli officials are saying. You know, Ben-Givir hosted, you know, some kind of meeting on settling northern Gaza.

as we talked about. It just feels like this is a kind of coordinated effort to make parts of Gaza, if not all of Gaza, totally unlivable. Like no aid is getting in. These people are not getting food. You have to understand about UNRWA, which we talked about months ago when this first came up, there's been this effort to kind of cast aspersions on the entire organization. It's 13,000 people just in Gaza.

It's not just aid workers and health care workers, teachers. It is embedded in the society. So if you can find a few people and say they were, with Hamas, that doesn't mean that the entire organization is somehow a part of that agenda. It's an aid organization and a lifeline organization, really, for Palestinians. And nobody can take its place. I think this is a really important part, is that, you know, all these other organizations and we've had people on, they can't have an infrastructure of 13,000 people. No. And actually, the U.S. government was so inept in this regard or so hypocritical in this

regard that in part when we were going along with some of the similar stuff, we're like, oh, we'll build that pier, you know, remember the pier that costs us hundreds of millions of dollars and broke apart into the sea? That was the proof that there's not some alternative way to get aid in. And so you have to see this as part of a strategy to literally deny food and basic materials from reaching Palestinians. And we should name that that is against American law. Like the U.S. law says we cannot provide military assistance to a military partner that is blocking and obstructing humanitarian assistance from reaching civilian populations. This UNRILA law does that. Like this UNRWA law should trigger no military assistance going to Israel based on what's written in U.S. law. I'm not predicting the Biden administration will do that, though. No, I'm not either. And there's still, I think, reportedly about 100,000 people in northern Gaza. You know, the need there is incredibly dire. I mean, look, we can't help but talk about the U.S. election.

I mean, our friend, Peter Hamby, went to Michigan for a reporting trip for Puck News, talked to a lot of students at Wayne State University, which is like super young, diverse group, a lot of Muslim American, Arab American voters. And he found tons of single-issue guys of voters. He met, you know, he was there for a day talking to random people. I think he found, like, five people voting for Jill Stein, kids saying they want Harris to lose. you know, again, small sampling, but these are normally people you would see as like the Democratic base, like GOTV targets, not persuasion targets. But, you know, just a reminder that Trump has told donors that he would throw pro-Palestinian student protesters out of the country.

The Washington Post reported that Trump told BB Netanyahu to, quote, do what you have to do when it comes to fighting in Gaza and Lebanon. And he also said that Netanyahu should be targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure with their airstrikes. And then here's Rudy Giuliani talking about Palestinians at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally over the weekend. And the Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old. They won't let a Palestinian in Jordan. They won't let a Palestinian in Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you. They may have good people.

I'm sorry, I don't take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two. Hmm. Good guy. Yeah, it seems like I get a couple of pops before we're on stage, first of all. Has he been sober since the Bush administration? Yeah, I don't think so. But, I mean, that is really a grotesque degree of racism. Taught to kill people, too.

That's just the worst kind of racist caricature that, you know, is absolute bullshit. And it's meant to dehumanize, right? As young as two, you know. And so it's just kind of this dehumanizing rhetoric. And that's, you know, that's, that's Trumpism right there. I mean, they don't see these people at all. And I get the frustrations. And by the way, I share the kind of anecdotal experience that Hamby had of, you know,

talking to an alarming number of people that want to sit this one out. And I get the frustration, but I do think that not just on Gaza, but on a whole range of issues, right? There's reasons to vote for Kamala Harris. But, man, that rudy thing is just a window into just how comprehensive. dehumanizing and how they wrap it all up in this other with the immigrants coming here and saying nonsense. Jordan's got a lot of Palestinians. Millions.

Yeah. So Rudy, as usual, is not particularly informed. I'm on the facts. I hope whatever appearance fee he got is going right to those election workers. Yeah, I mean, yeah, me too. Shout out Mike Gottlieb. Yeah, yeah. Shout out of my godlie.

Yeah, that just, that clip was just one of many examples from that event. There's just so far over the line. The rhetoric on immigration is so dehumanizing. I mean, but, you know, just over on this. I mean, I don't know if you saw this story about one of the best known TV journalists in Israel, a guy named Danny Kushmorrow, who reports for Channel 12 News. He actually helped blow up a building in southern Lebanon. Like, he literally pressed the detonator button.

This guy is a journalist. And it's just, you know, we're not, we're talking with the blurring of lines. Yeah. with what people are supposed to be doing, reporting versus being part of the story. Like, just it's crazy for a journalist to do in any event. But this is also happening as Israeli airstrikes are killing shocking numbers of journalists in both Gaza and Lebanon. And the Israeli government is shutting down Al Jazeera's offices and labeling, literally labeling members, like reporters who are in Al Jazeera, Hamas. Yeah.

So just really, really troubling all over the border here. I think people just don't want to get their minds around the scale of what's happening to some extent. You know, Lebanon doesn't register that much attention anymore. You know, Kim Gattis, who we had on the show, is as good a journalist in Lebanon as there is, is saying that the scale of destruction is worse already than 2006 war, you know, which is thought of as a pretty big war. This kind of decimation of Lebanese infrastructure, obviously the Lebanese economy. And you're right. The thing about that journalist that I keep coming back to is we've said a few times that part of what is so scary about this war is what does it do to the people who are rationalizing it?

What does it do to Israel itself, Israeli society, to be rationalizing this degree of mass destruction and killing in their own neighborhood in Lebanon and Gaza and other places? That's fucking weird that some journalists is detonating a building. I'm sorry. There's no way to say that that's anything but strange. and alarming. And I think sometimes, you know, and similarly, you know, there's, there's an inability to record with how far right Israel's moved, you know, I mean, just to take our election as, you know, a touchstone because it's on people's minds again, something like, you know, in a Channel 12 poll, I think 69% of Israelis favored Trump, you know, to something in the teens or 20s for Kamla,

I mean, that is like a country whose politics have gone their version of MAGA, you know. Yeah, and look, and worse. in terms of the, you know, the war piece of it. Totally. And we're not trying to be naive here. Like, we realize there's, there's, like, jingoism and nationalism and U.S. coverage of, you know, wars that were engaged in, right? I mean, it happened after 9-11, happened around Iraq. But you never saw, like, Brian Williams grabbing the sticks in a helicopter and firing at a target.

I mean, what are we doing here? Yeah, yeah. Nothing good. Real quick, before we go to break, just a little programming calendar update here for Kirk and Media, Ben. So switching things up for this final week. Start your mornings with What a Day for a 20-minute recap, the biggest headlines from host Jane Koston. Excellent, excellent show.

Then dive deeper with new episodes of Potsave America every day. What? Until the results. Who's doing those? Are called, I don't know. Me, us, everyone, maybe just clone Dan. Man. It's going to be long.

It's going to be a lot. But look, we're going to have, if the legal team, if Trump's getting wild with the legal stuff, The strict scrutiny folks jump in and do shows and talk about what's happening there. So keep an eye out. There's going to be lots of podcasts coming out next week. Check wherever you get your pods and on YouTube. And again, this year, you know, one of the biggest issues on the ballot is climate change.

There's a lot of voters who are trying to understand, you know, not just who to vote for, but also very important climate measures that affect the climate we live in. We will help you figure out what props, what ballot initiatives, et cetera, to vote. for if you go to Vote Save America and check out the build your own ballot tool. You can learn who and what is on the ballot where you live. You can fill out a practice ballot with just a few clicks so you're ready to go when you get in the booth. And then you're prepared to cast your ballot for climate solutions on or before November 5th. Your vote matters a lot. Go tovotesafeamerica.com to check it out now. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more

at VoteSaveamerica.com. This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Also been over the weekend, Israel launched its long-awaited retaliation to Iran's ballistic missile attack on Israel several weeks ago. The Israeli military said they hit Iran's missile production facilities. They hit a bunch of air defense systems over three waves of strikes. The New York Times reported that the destroyed air defense systems were protecting several sites critical to Iran's oil infrastructure. They also were defending Tehran's international airport and a missile base near Tehran. So Iran's energy and nuclear sites were spared, but the defenses around a lot of important places were taken out, leaving them quite vulnerable. According to Iran, four soldiers and one civilian were killed.

And then so all eyes turned to what the Iranians were going to do or say about this. The Supreme Leader offered a response Sunday saying the viciousness of the Zionist regime should neither be overestimated nor underestimated. the president of Iran said they would give an appropriate response to the strikes at some time, TBD. The response was more measured than past instances, maybe indicating they won't retaliate again or further escalate. It is worth noting, though, Ben, that the reaction in Israel was far less measured. Even Yair Lepid, who is a centrist opposition leader, was critical of Netanyahu for not hitting more targets. And that doesn't even get us to like what the far right was saying. So I'm going to do something strange here, Ben.

With the caveat of noting that like every time Iran and Israel take shots at each other, it worries me. It's escalatory. It brings us closer to another one of our World War III watches. Yeah. I did think this seemed relatively muted. He basically took out a bunch of infrastructure for the development of ballistic missiles. And then by taking out these Iranian missile defense systems, he basically said to the Iranians, you're naked and helpless now. think long and hard before doing anything else because I could just blow up everything you care about.

But I don't know. What did you make of what happened? No, I thought it was measured. It's certainly relative to the other escalation that we've seen in this war writ large. I do think what was new about this from previous strikes is the proximity to Tehran. Yeah. So it was saying, hey, we're getting closer. You know, we're here.

You know, we've broken the seal in the same way that Iran broke a seal and firing ballistic missiles. at Israel, but it was clearly calibrated to try to end this cycle. And I was thinking why. Obviously, Biden has been counseling against hitting oil fields and nuclear facilities. I think also the IDF, you know, it's had some, there's been some tough fighting in Lebanon, you know, so it may just be a sense of we're in two fronts and do we really want a third. There's another World War Watch that I want to bring into this. What do you got? So in thinking about how Russia is positioned here. And you mentioned earlier the support that Russia reportedly provided to Houthis.

The Iranian regime is a pretty key ally of Russia's. They're providing all these drones that they're using in Ukraine in that war. And if you were to hit the oil fields or the nuclear facilities, that's kind of regime existential. And that's what some of the Israeli right want, go in and try to change a regime now. I don't know. Does that draw Russia in? You know, I mean, we have to start thinking, you know, at some point Putin could you know, the Israelis could push up against Putin, you know. And so I do think all these things are a little kind of more connected than we like to think.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Huh. Yeah, it was kind of something that, because I was thinking about, well, who would, who wouldn't want to see the Iranian regime fall that B.B. might have to think about. And it's actually Putin. New anxiety just dropped. Thank you for that one. It's very good. Okay. Well, speaking of Iran. Let's talk about election interference. Another fun topic here for us as we coast into election. So a lot of new countries are getting in on the action this year. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians. Russia is obviously polling for Trump again. They're doing a lot of their work through disinformation in social media activity,

including kind of like cheap fake videos, like pretend students saying that Tim Wall did something to them. Just nonsense. But they're also making lots of like memes and videos posting them in telegrams. hoping they get disseminated on the right wing. They pit off tenant media, the biggest dipshits in right wing media. They gave them tons of money to make shitty content. There was a big report on all of this in the York Times that talked about the ways, though, that these foreign actors have gotten more sophisticated.

So the Russians are now targeting swing states, Hispanic voters, other key demographic groups that we might normally talk about being targeted by campaigns. Iran created a group called Not Our War, which is designed to influence U.S. military veterans. They're also trying to reach Arab-American voters in Detroit, which we were just talking about, a key demographic for Biden. They must read, or sorry for Harris now. I guess they're reading in Dan's message box. It's too closely here. But it's like a pretty nuanced understanding of American politics. Some foreign governments are using AI to supercharge the efforts. And at the same time, the tech platforms are dialing back any steps to deal with disinformation. And Elon Musk might

be the biggest single spreader of disinformation of anyone, including nation states at this point. Jady Vance was asked about all this election interference stuff when he was on Face the Nation recently. Let's listen to what he said. Well, look, I think a lot of countries are going to try to manipulate our voters. They're going to try to manipulate our elections. That's what they do. I think the bigger question is, what is in our best interest vis-a-vis Russia, not what price Russia should pay for putting out social media videos. And I think what's in our best interest vis-a-vis Russia is in particular for them to stop supporting the Iranians as the Iranians engage in acts of aggression.

And I think when it comes to Europe, it's important for the killing to stop in Russia and Ukraine. I don't think that we should set American foreign policy based on a foreign country spreading videos on social media. I think we should set American foreign policy based on what's in our best interests in the United States. You don't consider that election interference and crossing a red line? I think it's bad. I think it's bad. But social media posts and social media videos, Margaret, you want us to go to war because the Russians made a ridiculous video or paid for it? There are options other than war, as you know, sanctions, other measures. I mean, that doesn't—

This raises a difficult question, Margaret. Manipulating voters, it's part of our democracy. Everything that we've tried, a lot of the sanctions that we've tried, they've gone off like a wet firecracker. I'm not sure that's the term I've ever for, anyway. So obviously, J.D.'s a slippery little shit. He knows that, like, talking about foreign interference, especially Russian interference, makes Trump flip out, so he has to downplay it. But just to, like, try to be honest,

I mean, it's certainly the case that any efforts to punish Russia after 2016 have not deterred them this time. Do you think, I mean, you could argue it as a point, right? Like, do you think that any of the responses in 2016 or up until now have been effective? I think the responses that are effective that were used more in the last election cycle, we're spotlighting the social media campaigns, just trying to inform people, hey, this is Russian state sponsor content. And there was a labeling effort on Twitter, on Facebook last time to do it. You know, I think J.D. Vance, what's funny is how far we've come, because in 2016, they denied it

happened. And now they're like, sure, it's happening. Who cares? It's just a bunch of social media videos. Meanwhile, like, most of the campaign in social media videos these days. So it's a big deal. He's minimizing something that is a big deal. He also has this kind of Vivek take where you can tell what he really wants, like when he's

talking about using them against Iran, and he kind of thinks we're going to peel, rush off, you know, this kind of white Christian anti-cancel culture ally or something, where I think he's wrong about that. Russians are all in with the Chinese and the Iranians and everybody else. But no, I don't, so I think, yeah, we can't overstate that there's some sanction we're going to throw on the Russians that we'll get them to stop. But I do think that like identifying it, calling it out, naming it. And even the stuff they did with RT, you know, which was kind of a sanction, but it was essentially flagging, you know, what it is. And then YouTube, you know, take this down or at least, you know, inform people what's happening. That's worth doing. But we are in a world

in which lots of people are going to interfere in our elections, in part because, you know, after 2016, I was thinking about this. Part of the cost of how that went down is that other countries looked at our national inability to even agree on what happened in 2016. And they're like, oh, shit, I mean, it's fair game. Everybody can medal in the U.S. election. Yeah, the Chinese are like, let's just make them light themselves on fire. Yeah. One more concerning, more sophisticated piece of this that we should mention. So a few weeks ago, we talked about a Chinese hack on U.S. telecom providers that authorities were kind of scrambling to understand.

There was a fear that these hackers were able to access basically the tech platform through which U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies request data or wiretaps from these carriers. So that means, you know, the Chinese potentially knew who we were monitoring or trying to, to monitor. It turns out it gets worse. Now we know that this hacking effort, which has been called Salt Typhoon, targeted the phones of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and parts of the Harris campaign. And the Washington Post reported that the Chinese were able to collect audio from the phone calls of one U.S. political figure. So that is obviously a big deal. It may be the tip of the iceberg. I mean, maybe it could be the case that the number of victims is very low, like under 100, because this access was so good. They wanted to protect it and not.

You know, make it easier to get caught or we just don't know more. But Ben, I mean, it just made me think about what protections are in place now for like campaigns, campaign staffers, candidates. Like, surely these guys aren't using iPhones out of the box from China, are they? I kind of think, Tommy, this stuff is much more widespread and with us than we think, you know. There have been some stories in recent days like, you know, China tries to hack Trump in Vance or China tries to hack both campaigns. Well, yeah, every single fucking day, China and Russia are trying to hack everybody and they're probably getting through sometimes. We're trying to hack them back. And I think you, yeah, and we're doing the same thing probably.

And so I think you almost have to presume, you know, you can go the extra mile and be on signal or something like that. But man, like campaign emails or even, you know, text messages, like I think it's probably pretty compromised. Man, it's scary. Yeah, it is scary. I mean, some of our communications in the O8 campaign, I guess, would have been entertaining to a foreign government. I don't know if they would have been illuminating. Yeah, I mean, look, the Iranians were able to get access to a bunch of, you know, Trump campaign emails and vetting files of J.D. Vance. And none of it seems like it was particularly that important or persuasive.

But, I mean, again, to your point about how far we've come since 2016, that would have been shocking. Yeah. And a massive story back then. It probably would have gotten reported in more places. but now people kind of just shrug at it. Yeah. And again, I think that's because there was this kind of effort after 2016 to, you know, nobody could even agree on reality.

So, you know, people just took with that what they could. Yeah. Speaking of places we're dealing with Russia interference, let's talk about Georgia. Over the weekend, Georgia voted in their parliamentary elections, and the pro-Russia ruling party called Georgia Dream came in with 54% of the vote while the opposition parties got 37.5%. So this translates to 89 seats in Parliament for Georgian Dream enough for an outright majority. But there are a lot of questions about the election itself, which observers insist was not free and fair.

According to the European network of election monitoring organizations, there were a bunch of serious violations, including violence against opposition members, voter intimidation, smear campaigns targeting observers, and extensive misuse of administrative resources. My vote, a Georgian monitoring group also claimed it had ever. evidence of large-scale election fraud. The president of Georgia, a member of the opposition now, called for protests against the results and people turned out on Monday to demonstrate outside of parliament. The election was explicitly framed as a choice between Russia and the West. Georgia has EU candidate status, but Georgian dreams policies have put that candidacy in jeopardy. Some of those policies include refusing to join sanctions against Russia for the war in Ukraine, forcing NGOs with foreign funding to register as foreign agents.

an anti-LGBQ legislation. We spoke with Cornelli Kukaccia, director of the Georgian Institute of Politics to get a little more context about why this matters. If you control Georgia, you control the South Cocos and you control all this middle corridor and also all these pipelines, gas and oil pipelines, and also you control basically Central Asian countries who will not have any other options to transit there, you know, like gas and oil. And more importantly, this is also not good news for Armenia, which is a landlock state. And if Georgia falls, basically, and the West have to withdrew from the region as that's the desire of, you know, like regional powers, namely, you know, Russia, Iran and Turkey, you know, that's

why the initiative so-called three-plus-three initiative, which excludes EU and the United States and NATO from the region, basically. And then basically, you will not have any influence in the eastern part of Black Sea, which is becoming very important, especially after the end of the Ukraine conflict. So only three countries, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Hungary have congratulated Georgia on these results. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban made a trip to Georgia on Monday. He also tweeted, quote, Georgia is a conservative Christian in pro-Europe state.

Instead of the useless lecturing, they need our support on their European path. Very cynical stuff there. The U.S. and the EU have called for full investment. of the election. On Tuesday, the Central Election Commission said it'll do a partial recount of the results at 14% of polling stations. Ben, I can kind of like squint at this story one way and see, you know, the obvious enduring power of Russia and the region. Or I can look another direction and see a Russia that is so weakened that the pro-Russian party in a neighboring country, one that it's Russia currently occupies 20% of their territory. So,

16 years after the war has to cheat to win. Like, how do you see this? I think both can be true in a way, right? It does seem like something happened here. There were exit polls from some media, admittedly opposition-affiliated media that had them winning by a healthy margin, you know. The president cited some of these polls

and suggesting that, you know, and the opposition parties actually got somewhere in the 60s or something in that range. But we just don't know. What's pretty clear here is that they were trying to kind of squeeze through an election result that could then allow them to continue this kind of Russian playbook, right? They're going to end foreign funding for NGOs. They're going to kind of try to de-Europe. I mean, this is why Orban's comments are so cynical.

It's not about moving to Europe. It's about moving away from Europe and towards Russia and kind of becoming like a mini Belarus or something, like an extension of Russian influence in the Caucasus. that's clearly what's happening. The rush or the, you know, kind of friendly oligarch, who is the main decision maker in Georgia, that's what he wants, you know, kind of probably good for business, you know. But the reality is it's pretty clear that that's being rejected by huge swaths of the Georgian population, not just kind of super westernized NGO leaders, but there's huge crowds. I mean, in a small country, these are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people coming,

out, you can tell that this is not the direction people want to go. You know, and eerily kind of reminds you a bit of how Ukraine used to be about a decade ago. And that's, by the way, part of what the pro-Russian politicians are saying. It's not worth it. Even if you want to be more European, Putin will never let us. So he might as well just kind of cut a deal with him and be done with it. What I worry about going forward is just how does this country hold together?

Because clearly, you know, at least half the country does not want to move in this direction. And you worry about civil unrest, you worry about breakdown of order. And so we'll see what happens. But it's very consequential, and there are a lot of brave people in the streets and places like Tbilisi now. Yeah, definitely. Two more quick things. So let's talk about Japan. Over the weekend, Japan held a snap election called by the new prime minister, Shigeru Ashiba.

And it ended very badly for Ishiba and his party, the LDP, which lost its majority in Japan's lower house of parliament for the first time in many, many years. So the LDP still holds the most number of seats, but not enough to form a majority, so they're not going to scramble in to figure out how to form a government. But just to back up a bit, Ashiba took the reins a month ago from Fumio Kishita, who resigned after scandals left the government's approval rating in the gutter. More on that in a minute. But after that change, Ashiba thought, all right, let's capitalize on being the new guy on my momentum. Let's call the snap election, you know, solidify my place here. and it just failed spectacularly. Now, there seemed to be a lot of reasons for why.

The LDP had some campaign finance scandals recently that really pissed off voters. They were basically getting some kickbacks. That was bad, especially as prices started increasing. There's inflation in Japan for the first time in a very long time, but wages remain stagnant. And then after the assassination, former Japanese Prime Minister Shenzhou Abe in 2022, there were a series of investigations into his and other. LDP members ties with the unification church, which is this, you know, let's be honest, weird kind of culty church that hurt the party standing. And then there's just the fact that the

LDP has been in power almost continuously in Japan since 1955. And Japan has dealt with major economic problems for well over 30 years. The short version of that story is Japan had, you know, this huge economic boom in the 80s. American lawmakers were terrified of Japan. Like we talked about Japan, like we do China now, right? They're going to overtake us. Then the bubble burst in the early 90s that led to deflation, economic stagnation, companies, you know, stuck paying down all this debt, people stuck in homes that were steadily decreasing in price every single year. And just the total inability of the government to figure out how to solve the problem. And then on top of that, you have a population that is shrinking and getting older. So I think almost a third of the

country is over 65. Yeah, yeah. Imagine that, you know, that Social Security burden on the younger workforce. So, I mean, just incredible kind of mood music and dynamics to this party sticking around that long, but also been Japanese politics are wild, man. We don't talk about it enough. Yeah, they're very strange, you know, in the sense that the LDP has been this totally dominant force in what is, you know, a democracy. And the one window in which they were out of power at the beginning of the Obama years. It's like 09 to like 12-ish. Yeah, but the opposition was so in experience and governing that there were like four prime ministers. remember in four years.

You know, each time we met with the Japanese prime minister is a different guy. And so that's been the problem is there's not been this kind of alternative, stable place for voters to go. But what you look at with Japan is it has a distinct culture to it, right? I mean, you know, if you go to Japan, you immediately are aware of the sense that, you know, there's a very particular kind of approach to politics and society.

But the question is, will the populism that we've seen in other places in different forms, can that come to Japan? You know, clearly there's a kind of anti-incumbent feeling. Clearly there's a desire for something different. It just hasn't been able to find a home base, you know. So I think what you can take away from this is like dissatisfaction, pretty broad dissatisfaction with the direction of events, what the government's been offering, some of these kind of wifts of corruption across the board, a sense of kind of a ossified party structure in the LDP. What I have yet to see is someone to capture that sentiment and offer. a real alternative.

And it'd be really interesting to see if there's any opening for some kind of more populist message. And we've seen this at the local level in Japan a bit, but can that kind of take hold and kind of shake up what is clearly a pretty tired system over there? Yeah, tired system and also just such a unique economic challenge. Yeah. But I don't know what you do about, I mean, I know they're trying all these different ways to sort of incentivize people having kids.

But, you know, their population challenge is enormous. Yeah, well, one of their answers that they've done a little bit on is, you know, to bring more women into the workforce, too, because there's a pretty patriarchal society. And just to increase the workforce a bit. But, yeah, ultimately, you got to, you know, Japan doesn't let in many immigrants either, right? So that's the other solution is if you're not driving with birth rate, do you open up the door to more migration? I would, you know, as an American, I'm like, that'd be a good idea, but, you know, Japan, again, is not, that's never long history of that. Pretty anti. Yeah. Last story, Ben. So Ukrainians on Twitter were celebrating, you know, a little karma this week. They were sharing videos of what they decided was a burst sewage pipe causing a 17-story high geyser of shit to spray all over a Moscow suburb. Unclear whether it was a sewer or like sewage or dirty water that had broken. But it was definitely disgusting looking and unsightly.

I regret seeing it. I enjoyed this too. Very early, he was showing these. So Russian authorities claim the fountain was actually caused by gas problems process for cleaning gas pipes. And they say it's like, quote, normal and is under the control of specialists. Okay. Sure, yeah. That's normal over there.

You got bigger problems. Yeah, there's a good old gas prom pipe. Nothing to see here. I don't know. Who do we believe here? The kind of like NAFO-Ukrainian disinformation types or there was an anti-Russia Twitter user who tweeted this was, quote, The most accurate representation of Russian society and civilizations since Tolstoy's war and peace. Yeah, I mean, we got to go with the Ukrainians in this one.

I mean, I just love the fact that the positive stories, no, it's just like a burst gas problem pipeline. Like that'd be the good news, right, of what happened. Yeah. Maybe it was just Tucker Carlson broadcasting from Russia again. Yeah. Or it could be like some. super covert operation, right? I mean, pretty good demoralizing covert operation if the Ukrainians just get shit guys are all over Moscow, you know? That's a very North Korea, South Korea moves. It's a way to bring

the war home. Yeah. Maybe the South Koreans can help them do that. Just fill up some balloons like cigarette butts. Drops with your trash on it. Oh my God. These are not funny things. We'll watch more balloons with garbage over more places. Listen, we laugh because our future could potentially be quite bleak here in the next six. Yeah, we have one more week to election day. I'm hopeful. I, I, I'm hopeful to. I'm in like the 50-50 camp. Yeah. But I'm just sort of emotionally preparing myself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? So am I. For like the Rick Grinnell State Department and, uh, oh, God. I don't know, Don Jr. at CIA. This would be quite a show if that's the case. We were talking about this before. Can you, can you podcast from prison?

I don't know. I don't know. You guys looked into this. We could find out. Yeah. It was just, you know, into your iPhone, like, like, a little voice message. We were talking about this a little bit. there's all these kind of like

MAGA TV grifter personalities who come out of the woodwork when he's doing well and if he loses I feel like they will go away. Which one drives you the most crazy? Well, I have to say that like, and I think I mentioned you but to me it's this

new, you know, there's all the greatest hits, right? There's like Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller and Bannon and these guys. But to me, this new influx of tech bros. Yeah. Elon, David Sacks, you know, people whose names I don't know, but they're like, you know,

crypto investors and stuff. And they're kind of intellectual zambonies for Trumpism and their own kind of profit interest. Those guys, being expert on everything is going to drive me fucking crazy. Yeah, me too. I'm there too. Someone mentioned Harlan Hill who looks like... Yeah, he looks very punchable, yeah.

Yeah, looks like a six-year-old put on a bow tie and got books on MSNBC. Bleak, bleak. Okay, with that, we're going to take a... a quick break, we come back. You're going to hear my interview with Jacob Soberoff about his new documentary with Errol Morris about Trump's family separation policy. And the implications it tells us about a second Trump term on immigration. So stick around for that. Joining me today is Jacob Soberoff, an excellent NBC reporter who wrote the book on Donald Trump's family separation policy. It's called Separated an American Tragedy. That book is the basis for a new documentary on the subject directed by Errol Morris. Jacob, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tommy, man. Good to be here. Good to see you. A long time to see. We first met in Iowa in 2007. We're doing a little... I owe you my job. Let me just, I'm going to get in. I wasn't trying to make you tell this story. It's true, though. I was an election reform advocate for why Tuesday.org. Why do we vote on Tuesday? We wanted to move elections from the weekend. Why do we? No good reason. Don't get me started. But it has to do with farming in 1845. It's a law. It's not in the Constitution. You want to just do the pot about this? Because I could do. I could speak about this forever. And I wanted to, we were asking presidential candidates, do you know why we vote on Tuesday to see if we could force a conversation about moving it to the weekend or making it a national holiday. So it's an MTV news event, a forum, and Barack Obama is there doing the MTV event. And I see you. And I'm on kind of the

outside of the rope line. And I said, like, excuse me, sir. Excuse me 27-year-old nerd. And I asked you if I could have a second to ask him a question about election reform. So you brought me in and I ducked under the rope. And I asked Senator Obama, you know, I worked for an organization called Why Tuesday. We're thinking about moving the elections of the weekend. He stopped me right there. He goes, I assume why Tuesday, it was like instantly it registered with him. You know right away. I assume why Tuesday is about moving elections to the weekend instead of on Tuesday. I think we should have all kinds of election reform.

He went into a speech where like my jaw dropped to the floor. I'm like, nobody else even knew what I was talking about. I ran into Joe Biden at a cozy coffee shop in Washington, D.C. And he gave me a whole speech also. But Obama was like the most memorable. Anyway, it's how I got my job at MSNBC. Phil Griffin, the then president of MSNBC, saw the Y Tuesday reel, and in particular loved the Obama interview.

And so, Tommy, thank you for my career. I kind of think that you've done some things after that that have led to your career. Do you see Joe Biden at Java Joe's by any chance? I haven't, not recently. That was the Des Moines coffee shop where they did Morning Joe all the time. Oh, that's right. It's a scene be seen places. Anyway, this is not why we're here.

It's great to see you because you've done some of the most important reporting about arguably the worst part of the Trump era, family separation period. I mean, it was when, according to estimates by the ACLU, more than 5,500 kids were separated from their families. But can you just like remind us of all the details? Like, how did this policy get cooked up and by whom in the Trump administration? Yeah. So like, don't take my word for it. I happen to be there. And I could close my eyes and remember the day is June 13th, 2018, June 18, 2018, Father's Day.

That was the height of the family separation policy. But according to when I say don't take my word for it, the George W. Bush appointed judge who stopped the policy called it one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country. Wow. American Academy of Pediatrics called a government sanction child abuse. Physicians for Human Rights, they won a Nobel Peace Prize. They said it met the United Nations definition of torture. Wow.

And when it comes to how it got cooked up, it was a policy proposal that had been floated during the Obama administration. And it was shot down. My understanding is by Allie Majorcas, who was a lower level official in the Homeland Security Department. at the time now obviously is the Secretary of Homeland Security and Jay Johnson, who was the DHS secretary, and Tom Homan, especially according to Caitlin Dickerson's Pulitzer Prize winning Atlantic cover story and family separation, who became the ICE director, acting ICE director under Trump, was really one who was pushing this. And so when the Trump administration came in, not just because it had been had been proposed before, but because of really of decades of bipartisan, you know, deterrence-based, punitive-based immigration policy. talking about Clinton did the first wave of walls, George W, increased the size of the border patrol under DHS, President Obama deported, you know, more people than any president in history. And then Trump, like it was nothing, was able to separate 5,500 children from their parents because the infrastructure was in place. And it was something that they had talked about,

but nobody in their right mind really ever wanted to touch because of ultimately what it became and what we all saw. But they did it anyway. The thing about it, though, that doesn't make sense to me. I mean, besides the cruelty, which is obvious. I mean, the one thing that every immigration advocate will tell you is that people who are willing

to cross the Darien Gap, which is like a hundred miles of impenetrable forests, no roads, unbelievably dangerous. There's muddy swamps, mountains, river. Like, your odds of your death

are very high. It's one of the most dangerous journeys in the world, all through cartel-held territory through Mexico to come to the United States. If you're willing to do this, that, what U.S. policy is going to deter you once you get there? Nothing. Deterance is a failed policy. And that's not some kind of opinion. It's just,

that's the facts. People continue to come to the United States, despite some of the most punitive cruel. The cruelty was the point is what Adam Surwer, you know, coined around the family separation policy at the time. Possible things you could do to people coming here to seek a better life and to leave really desperate circumstances. And that's why, ultimately, after I witnessed the policy for myself, that's why I want to write the book afterwards, because I still didn't understand how does the U.S. government do something so deliberately harmful to children. And I think Errol Morris, when he read the book, you know, the Oscar winning director shared some of the same questions. And so when we ultimately got connected and talked about the fact that he had read the book,

I saw he had tweeted about it and I reached out to him, I realized that he had similar questions that even sort of went beyond where I left off with the book, which is why we decided to make the movie, and why we want to be talking about this now of any time. And so, I mean, but the amazing thing about this story is the Trump administration invited you and other journalists to come see these facilities where they were keeping these children. What did you see?

How did it impact you, you know, as a human being and a dad? And why, like, did they want you to see the cruelty and report on it? it as part of the deterrence or did they not think it was that bad or no no no that was the whole point um it was katie waldman who is now um katie miller she's now stephen miller's wife but at the time lucky gal she was the junior most press deputy for kirstenielsen and i got a call from her i tell this story in the movie um i was at a kid's birthday party here in l.a i live here and she said you got to get down to the border we're going to do a tour of one of the centers where they're holding the separated kids And I said, can I go another time?

And she said, no, you have to come down right now. So I race down to Brownsville, Texas. I go inside this massive, I think, 250,000 square foot former Walmart that was converted into a shelter for kids. There were over a thousand boys, 10 to 17 inside. Most of them were there only because they've been taken away from their parents when they cross the border. And then, like I said, five days later, on Father's Day, I went to this other processing

center called Ursula, which was sort of the epicenter of family separations, where the separations were occurring. And my first instinct in the facility at the Walmart was, you know, this is incarceration of these children, obviously, but it wasn't what everybody had been, you know, my colleague Chris Hayes was talking about. Jeff Merkley had gone on and said, these children are in cages and that's not what I saw in that first facility. It turns out I was in, I sort of went in the reverse order. That was a shelter where the kids were taken after they were separated from their parents.

But on Father's Day, I saw exactly that. Kids locked up in cages under those Mylar blankets down on. on the linoleum floors supervised by security contractors in a watchtower. And only there, again, because the Trump administration had decided to deliberately rip them out of the arms of their parents. And the sights and the sounds of it are still like they're still with me. And I often think about if they're still with me, what is it like for the children who will live with a lifetime of trauma after having gone through this?

And we're sitting here and I'm talking about this movie and we wrote the book and I covered it for NBC. But ultimately, really, it's those children when their adults are going to have to tell this story if they want to. And that's, you know, it's as American as any other part of American history. We just saw President Biden after 150 years finally and formally apologized for Native American boarding schools, the separation that happened there. How long did it take for Japanese internment camps to go on the register of historic places and become national monuments? It's too long as the answer. How long did it take for us to acknowledge that the United States government sent Jews back to the Holocaust when they were coming here on the St. Louis? Yeah, exactly.

And this is just another chapter in that history. And in the moment, it was surreal to experience. And looking back on it now, it fits sadly so squarely in all of this history, this American history. I mean, you're right that the kids who were a part of this process who were reunited with their families are traumatized for life. But it's unfathomable to me that over a thousand kids still have not been reunited with their families five years later. How is that possible? Where are these kids now? What efforts are being made to write this wrong?

Yeah. This seems like a solvable problem with that number. The Biden administration, to the Biden administration's credit, after. President Biden was elected, he created his task force, the family reunification task force. Do you remember the final presidential debate in 2020? Kristen Welker asked, my colleague asked both President Biden, then candidate Biden and Trump, about where are the 545 kids that are missing at the time? Trump didn't know. And Biden said, you know, it's criminal.

And, you know, we've got to do everything we can to find them. Turns out today the number, I think you mentioned 1,000. I think the number now is between 1,400 and 1,400 kids without conformal. confirmed reunifications. The answer is that that task force hasn't been able to track them down because many of them are still in the United States and their parents were deported without them at the height of the policy and the parents will not respond to efforts. People are literally going door to door in Central America to this day as part of this effort to look for people who were separated in order to try to bring them back under this task force. But the record keeping, which we go into in

the movie, the record keeping was so deliberately shoddy. This policy was so haphazardly And I think that that's sort of a generous way to talk about it, that almost by design, the point wasn't to put them back together. And you can see emails in the film that show that once reunifications were happening, they didn't want them to be happening. They tried everything they could to stop parents and children from getting put back together. And the results are still in the fact that there are so many parents and children separate it today. When you say they, I mean, who are we talking about and why? It's just continued cruelty in the form of deterrence, they think? I think some of the people, I can give you specific names.

But I mentioned Tom Homan already, who's very likely, by the way, the next Secretary of Homeland Security if President Trump, you know, former President Trump is reelected. Matt Albens, who was the senior official in ICE at the time, in the Office of Refugee Resettlement on the HHS side, there was a guy by the name of Scott Lloyd, who was the political appointee, who Errol Morris interviews in the film and was in direct contact, quite. frequently with, you know, you won't be surprised, Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller was in direct contact with political appointees, non-Senate-confirmed junior people making policy and sort of talking to them about what to do. And that's sort of the depth to which the administration had its fingers sort of in all these departments in order to make this policy a reality. When Trump stopped it, it wasn't because he didn't like it or he felt bad about it. He said very clearly didn't like the site, meaning the television pictures or the feeling that he had of seeing that watching the kids separated.

It wasn't because of some grand humanitarian gesture. And in fact, like Kirsten Nielsen has said, he tried to restart it on multiple occasions. You also make the point in the film that despite a lot of promises of accountability, there really hasn't been any. There are no hearings under oath, no real effort to dig deeper into what happened. Why do you think that is? I think because, sadly, people want to know less about the American immigration system. I think it was really easy to, when Donald Trump was president, have a big recognizable target for your outreach. It wasn't bipartisan outrage in the summer of 2018.

It was like a universal outrage. People were in the streets all over the world. The Pope spoke out about this. It was like there was no person with a moral compass who said, what a great idea. that take little kids away from their parents, some of them babies and toddlers, in order to effectuate American immigration policy. And that's why when Biden called a criminal or Merrick Garland in his confirmation hearing said, I can't imagine anything worse, I think that the perception was there's going to be consequences

for what these guys, most of the guys did. And the reality is because immigration again became a political issue for this administration and became something about numbers, both in the American. of people crossing the border, but also they were going to give financial restitution to the families that were separated. And President Biden held a press conference. And Peter Ducey asked them a question about the number. It was several hundred thousand dollars for the families. And immediately the administration backed down. It became, it all became a political liability and a political football because the administration went back to talking about immigrants as data points on a chart rather than as a, from a humanitarian perspective, as we all did at the height of this policy, because we saw people for what they were as they were being torn apart from their their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. And that's certainly not how we have this conversation now. And I think it's largely responsible for sort of vice president Harris is out there right now touting this immigration bill as sort of the Democrat solution to the quote unquote problem at the border. It's one of most conservative

pieces of immigration legislation and generation. And sort of codifies a lot of the stuff that the Trump administration was doing or was considering doing. It's certainly not as extreme and certainly not what the Trump administration wants to do, which is, you know, mass deportation, which is just family separation by another name. But there has been, Alex Wagner said the other night when I was on her show, the Overton window has shifted so much around immigration to the right that the conversation is a completely different one from the height of the family separation policy, which is, which is really sad because I think for a second, everybody kind of had an X-ray vision about how this country treated immigrants and immigration from a policy perspective. And that very quickly went away when it became Democrats versus Republicans again.

Yeah. Well, I want to get that in a second. But also, in terms of what would accountability look like? Because you could imagine hearings and transparency and more information and just sort of like shedding light on what happened. And I think that's very important. But in terms of, I don't know, were there laws broken? Could someone be prosecuted? You know, you saw this with the CIA in torture. You know, the Bush administration's response was basically these people were all following like OLC unions and laws. Right? They were told what they were doing was acceptable.

Is it a similar situation here? That's what the film really grapples with. And it's what Errol Morris is as good, if not better than anybody at doing. He did it to Rumsfeld in his film about Iraq. He did it to all the operators in Abu Ghraib and standard operating procedure. He does it to map. Actamara in the fog of war about Vietnam. He sits him in front of this camera in Territron device that he's created, and you like see

into their souls. And so to me, the most revealing interview in the movie is with Scott Lloyd, who was the direct, the political appointee director of O.R. at the time, who essentially, that's what he says. He's like, I was a backbencher. I just wanted to sit there and kind of be a part of this. And ultimately, Jonathan White, a career official who tried to stop the policy, says that these are not my words, these are Jonathan White's, that Scott Lloyd is one of the

most prolific child abusers in the history of our country because he allowed his department to be used in this way to do this to all of these children. What does accountability look like? You know, I already said that according to the Physicians for Human Rights, what they did meets the United Nations definition of torture. Several people have tried to stand up an international criminal court case around this, and that's gone nowhere. John Mittnick, who was the General Counsel of the Homeland Security Department, in a memo that was attached to the memo that Kirsten Nielsen signed to make this a policy, warned her that you would violate the APA, basically how would they make these rules, and that it would violate due process in the Constitution, but they went forward

with it anyway. And I'm a reporter, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems like they were very well aware that they were running a foul of multiple laws, and nobody has really stepped up. There certainly has not been, you know, I guess, I don't know if it would be low-hanging fruit, but sort of the obvious question I have is, has the criminal division of the Justice Department under the Biden administration opened any kind of investigation and it doesn't look like that at all. Yeah, I can see that. I mean, you're not wrong

that immigration is a top issue in this election. It's certainly all that Trump wants to talk about. Every day. But a question for you about the film itself and the distribution. I mean, MSNBC acquired the film but it's not airing until December after the election. There was a media reporter named Oliver Darcy reported that the president of NBC

opposed airing the film before the election because they were hoping Trump would agree to another presidential debate. Is that accurate? I haven't, I haven't, I haven't heard that. What I know and what I can tell you is, number one, we're in a theatrical distribution run right now. And so I'm grateful for NBC News studios who finance a film with participant and our partners at MSNBC films for getting us out into theaters before the election. We'll be in like 12 or 13 states between the time the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and Telluride and ultimately will air on December 7th.

But as far as the air date, yeah, I'm not going to lie to you. I want this movie to be seen and so does air all by as many people as possible as soon as possible. This was a programming decision that the network made. Why exactly they made that decision? You know, it's sort of a question for the front office. The answer, not for me. But it's not a secret. My preference would be for more people to see it now rather than later.

But I'm grateful for anybody that's going to see this whenever they see it because ultimately, this is an issue that's not going to go away. It very well could happen again under a future Trump administration, but also other deterrence-based immigration policies under any administration that wants to implement them because of what the politics looks like. Yeah, you know, in this moment, it's like when Kristen asked Biden and Trump during the debate. You know, why do you want these things to happen before the election? Because they become a part of the zeitgeist in the conversation. And it resulted in President Biden standing up the task force to reunite the families just as much as it put Trump on his heels to defend it.

Right. And I'd like to hear both Vice President Harris and former President Trump sort of directly address this under the sort of pressure that the media can create by running a piece like this whenever they get to see it. And we're out there. I mean, you know, we're pushing this thing. And I hope that, you know, come December, people will still tune in and watch it then, too. I think they will.

Let's talk about the stakes of the election because if Trump wins again, he will almost certainly bring back some of the ghouls who created this policy like Stephen Miller, who was, you know, at MSG the other day screaming about how Americans are for America's for Americans, I think was his pithy line. Yep. Congress is supposed to draft laws governing our immigration policy, but they have been unable to get anything done for years. Even this, you know, very right-wing bipartisan deal got scuttled by Trump. That means, though, that space gets filled by executive orders, presidential

authority overseeing agencies like DHS, and then any legal action that, you know, Democrats or activist groups might take usually wind up in MAGA-friendly courts. So Stephen Miller's got his whole Americaverse legal now, you know, he basically has stood up what he sees, I think, is a counterpart to the ACLUs of the world to fight back on a lot of their sort of early attempts by the Biden administration to create what they call it a more fair, safe, humane, orderly system. Yeah, they just want to. to gum up the works any way they can't. Yeah. So am I wrong to think, though, that if Kirsten Nielsen is saying that Trump wanted to bring back family separation, I mean, it seems,

stands to reason that he would try to bring it back where he reelected. They're essentially saying that. I mean, I don't think they're making much of a secret about it. I think that, I think that what they really want to do is kind of supersize family separation through this mass deportation program. And mass deportation is just family separation by another name. And that's not, Again, that's not an opinion. That's just a statement of fact. There's an incredible journalist, excuse me, an academic professor at the University of Michigan named Dr. William Lopez, who wrote a book also incidentally called Separated about interior enforcement in the United States, meaning deportations and such. And what the point that he makes is that, you know, more or less, that is family separation as well.

So when you see a thousand to people, 11,000, 12,000, whatever it was in the RNC, I was there on the floor. or holding a mass deportation now signs, those signs really mean family separation. How many mixed status families are amongst the 11 million plus undocumented families that are in the U.S.? And if you're going to go out and institute the greatest deportation program since 1954, when Dwight D. Eisenhower had this operation where it's a name so racist that I'm not going to say it now, but he deported a million Mexicans and some Mexican Americans under that operation. And if these guys want to grow it by orders of magnitude, it's going to do the exact same thing.

even worse. So I saw Tom Homan on 60 minutes on Sunday night. His answer to, well, what if mass deportation separates families? He said, well, all the families can deport themselves altogether. He's talking about American citizens leaving the country. They make no secret that they want to do something like this again. You and I were debating before we started recording whether people really understand what a mass deportation means. Yeah. Because you look at polling and it's like majorities are for it. You know, like I think it's like 56% in like the Pew poll. I could be wrong about that. But smart people I talk to like Carlos Odeo,

who's a really smart researcher and issues. He thinks that people don't really understand what family separation means in practice, especially when like you're pulling the Latino community. But what do you think? I mean, completely agree. The more we talk about this, though, the more it seems like maybe they do know

and maybe a large swath of people really does want to see this. What I always say is, is when you talk about mass deportation, you're not talking about, simply the worst of the worst criminal offenders amongst that group of millions of people. You're talking about our, your neighbors, friends, colleagues, coworkers, people in your community, people you know, people perhaps in your extended family. What mass deportation really means is a wholesale reimagining of what the United States looks like,

what the workforce looks like, what the economy looks like, what it looks like to go to work or to school every day. I don't think that's what people are thinking about when they hear the term mass deportation. I think they think about the doom and gloom scenario painted by former President Trump and people like him, just like they did in the lead up to family separation. Stephen Miller would stand up there. I remember in, it's in the movie in the early part of 2016 in the Colorado ballroom, just absolutely screaming about some of the most heinous crimes possible that could have been committed in the instances he was talking about by an undocumented immigrant. That's the picture they want to paint of all undocumented immigrants in the country.

And so I think they have successfully convinced most Americans that that is what mass deportation means. Picking up millions and millions of people who are like that, millions and millions of people like that don't exist in this country. That's not what we're talking about when we talk about the undocumented population here. Yeah. I mean, Trump today was talking about the death penalty for migrants, undocumented migrants who kill cops. He was talking about creating a restitution fund by seizing the assets of cartels members arrested in the U.S. I mean, sure, things that I'm sure sound good on like a policy platform or, you know, press release. But like in practice, how you're going to do that? It's a fine line in those conversations between him going from there and then him going to Springfield, Ohio, you know?

And ultimately, that's really what the baseline of the conversation is about. It's about a dehumanization, a fact-free sort of telling of the story of immigration in the country by cherry-picking certain statistics in order to create a very scary picture of what's going on in the country. And that's what I say when we talk about this. It takes us out of the realm of a conversation about humanity about people that most, I would say, folks in the United States at some point of cross paths with, if not have close personal relationships with, that make us deeply understand what it's like. I think family separation resonated with everybody because we all have kids or we're kids.

Yeah. We're no kids. And I think that in this conversation about immigration, that's also true. We all know or have family that were or have been around people who are immigrants to this country. But we don't make policy based on that. We make policy based on fear. And we certainly have political debates based on it too. Yes, yes, we do.

Where can people see the movie? It's in theaters now across the country. I think at this point, maybe between now on Election Day and about 10, States. It'll be on MSNBC on December 7th, so I hope everybody tunes in after the election. And we'll be on video on demand after that as well. But for now, go out to the theater. It's fun to go see it in Art House theaters. And it's not a romantic comedy. But I would say it's definitely we're going to check out before the election. Not a rom-com, but an important story. Jacob, thanks for coming in. Thanks, thanks for doing the film. Thanks, Ben.

Thanks again to Jacob for joining the show and talk to you guys next week. I'd just add Tommy real quick this Saturday. The last in our election series drops, and it is on climate change. And that was the one I think that made you the most angry and emotional after recording. Is that fair to say? Stick around to the final commentary for me because, but really actually, when you inhabit the two climate scenarios, Trump and Kamala, informed by a lot of expertise about the tipping point we're at with the climate or already passed with the climate, it's hard to not be

kind of enraged at the fact that we're even contemplating, you know, going with Trump. Totally great. Check it out. it's a really powerful episode. It's a powerful episode. It's a great series. Check them all out. They're all sitting in your feed.

They're in your feed. No excuse. The least you can do, which is listen. Yeah, help us out here. If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more. Consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community

at crooked.com slash friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Plus find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content and more. If you're as opinioned as we are, consider dropping a review. Pods of the World is a crooked media production. Our producer is Alona Minkowski. Our associate

producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, and engineer by Vassili's Photopoulos, audio support by Kyle Segglin and Charlotte Landis. Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Phoebe Bradford, William Jones, Hiro Pahlaviv, and Molly Lobel, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube.com slash Pod Save the World. Before you go, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is here as part of our Anti-Doom initiative. I'm Priyanka Arabindi, and I sat down with Secretary Granholm to talk about how close we are

to running on clean energy. Progressives have made a lot of progress on clean energy in the past decade. Can you walk us through some of those highlights in your mind and the things that really stand out to you as the biggest strides that we've made so far? Thank you, first of all, so much for having me on. I'm so glad to be able to talk about the fact that progressives can really champion that policy is making a difference. And especially with the passage of the Biden-Harris' invest-in-America agenda, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, those laws combined have created an unbelievable explosion of deployment of clean energy.

across the country. So far, we have about 900 factories that have announced they're coming to America or expanding in America to make solar panels or EVs or batteries, 900 communities that potentially have been on their knees and are now seeing hope and opportunity in future-facing jobs. This year alone, we will be building out 30 Hoover dams worth of clean and clean and energy on our electric grid. I mean, solar project, wind projects, you name it. The president and the vice president have this goal of getting to 100% clean electricity on our grid by 2035. We will be at 80% clean electricity on our grid by 2030, and that trajectory will continue to grow. We will see a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions just from these two laws by 2030. Yeah, it's really extraordinary.

Can you, you know, detail some of the effects that this act is having already in these communities? Yeah, let me just give you some examples. In Wyoming, in Carbon County, which was the site of a coal plant, that county now, because of the transmission investments that we have made and because of the wind farm, North America's largest wind farm is now in Carbon County, Wyoming, and that wind is being transmitted to the places where demand is really high, and they are seeing increased, of course, tax revenues, increased jobs, et cetera. They have been transformed. In Moses Lake, what was an agricultural town in the middle of Washington state, they now have four battery factories that are being built for creating the components for batteries for electric vehicles, four of them, hundreds if not,

thousands of people being employed. I mean, there's so many examples. but across the country in pockets that you would never imagine, people are seeing opportunity, and that will only continue to grow. I know another big part of the Inflation Reduction Act are clean energy tax credits. Can you tell us how, you know, those tax credits work and how they've helped American households so far? Yeah, for everybody who's listening, who hasn't taken advantage, perhaps, of these tax credits, this is the time to do it. I mean, these laws are like 10 years long, so there is a longer tail.

You don't have to do it immediately. But honestly, if you've been thinking about putting solar panels on your roof, you can get a 30% tax credit off the top to be able to put those solar panels in. If you've been thinking about doing insulation or installing a heat pump, it's a great option for many people. Tax credits for solar, tax credits to install EV charging stations, tax credits for all sorts of energy efficiency appliances. So much good news for consumers to lower their costs. Definitely. What do you say to people who have written this off or who think it's too late to do anything for the planet? And what does that even mean to be too late? If your garage in your house catches on fire,

does that mean you just sit back and watch it and your whole house burn? Of course not. You start to take action to mitigate the damage, right? And that's what we're doing. So the United States is leading on this. And all of my counterparts, the other energy ministers, they look to what we've been doing. Initially, they were like grumbling because we're getting all of this investment in the United States a result of these. But now they're starting to copy it. And we're like, great. We want as many countries as possible to take this on and to take it seriously. So, you know, the best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The next best time is today. And we are going to continue to plant those trees of opportunity to save our planet. And we've been leading.

And we hope the rest of the world catches up. Absolutely. Secretary Granholm, thank you so much for your time. You bet. Thank you so much for having. me. Learn more about our anti-dome initiative at crookeddea's.org. And to make sure that your voice is heard on everything you care about, please vote.