Pod Save the World - Pentagon Covers Up Iran War Casualties

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

More US casualties in the war with Iran, the State Department's new neo-McCarthy Cuba blacklist, and the UK gets a new Prime Minister while CPAC Great Britain flops.Tommy and Ben discuss reports that the Pentagon has been covering up the full extent of casualties associated with the war with Iran, the impact of the Houthi rebels potentially getting involved in the conflict, and Trump’s threat to bomb a new Iranian nuclear site. The State Department released a new report blaming everything Marco Rubio doesn’t like on Cuba, and the guys read it* so you don’t have to! (*skimmed it) Then they discuss the national security risk from prediction markets, Trump’s decision to slap new tariffs on Canada as its forests burn, and new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first days in office. Finally, the guys take you to the first CPAC Great Britain, and discuss Count Binface’s deep-space bid to defeat Nigel Farage. Then Tommy speaks to Oleksiy Sorokin, Deputy Chief Editor for the Kyiv Independent, about the latest barrage of Russian ballistic missile strikes and protests in Ukraine over Zelensky’s military staffing decisions.For a transcript of this show, email [e-mail]

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That's 55% off at shop, remi.com slash PSTW with the code PSTW. Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode. Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, one way that politicians sometimes try to humanize themselves or soften their public image is by getting a dog. You know, I don't need to tell you this.

They're great. Companions, they're cute. They're cheaper than kids. So we had FDR, he had his beloved Fala, Nixon had checkers, the Biden's had those German shepherds that kept biting everybody. I'm not sure about those guys, yeah. I don't know about those ones either. But I've never seen a politician quite embrace their pet as lovingly as this. Let's watch.

It's that your decision to defect to one nation is dragging you further into a place of intolerance and racial discrimination. You're defending your leader, but are you really comfortable with where she is taking? liking you. I think. Sit down. Sorry. It's a dog. Okay.

That was an Australian politician named Barnaby Joyce. Have you ever seen this guy before, Ben? No, that's the first. Okay, okay. He's a fan favorite. So he's a charming fellow. He's now a member of the right-wing One Nation Party, but not long ago. He served as deputy prime minister of Australia.

He's also a leader of the National Party. But Ben, believe it or not, this is not the first time that Barnaby Joyce has declared his love for man's best friend on national television. Check out this clip from 2015. The next issue, which is a gentleman by the name of John Christopher Depp, 51 years old, otherwise aka Jack Sparrow. And he's decided to bring into our nation two dogs basically looks like he snuck them in. We found out he snuck them in because we saw them taking it to a poodle groomer. Now, Mr. Depp has to either take his dogs back to California or we're going to have to euthanize them. If we start letting movie stars, even though they've been the sexiest man alive twice to come into our nation, then why don't we just break the laws for everybody?

So it's time that pistol and boo bug it off back to the United States. Maybe if you threaten to kill dogs on TV, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to have one in the future. That's my idea. I'm not here to, like, defend Johnny Depp, but I'm here to defend Pistol and Boo. That was a pretty hard swerve to nuke him, you know? Do you remember this when this happened? I feel like there was a live feed at his, like, apartment. I do.

I remember it being the pandemic, but no, it was 2015. When I Googled it, it was referred to, I guess, as the War on Terrier. It's funny because I remember it as a pandemic, too. I think any truly bizarre thing that involved, like, bringing stuff into a country, I just associate with the pandemic. but hopefully Pistol and we made it out alive. Yeah, no, I think they made it okay. I mean, what happens was Johnny Depp brought his dogs to Australia.

We did go through the proper quarantine protocol. Having been there recently, they take it quite seriously. But you probably don't need to threaten to kill them. You can probably just ask them nicely to leave. I think they're okay, though. Also, Ben, in 2024, the Daily Mail ran a video of Joyce. He was taking a phone call. He was on the street.

He fell off a potted plant around midnight. I'm assuming he had a few. He landed on his back and then just lay there and did the phone call. This is about midnight in Canberra. And some bystander walked by and filmed it. And she said that she talked to the Daily Mail. And this is an actual line from the story that I wanted to read you. This is Barnaby Joyce's wife said her husband was not referring to her when he called someone a, quote, dead fucking C word during the phone call.

Then she said, I think he was calling himself one. He likes to self-flagellate. Yeah, it sounds like a colorful guy, you know. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'd want him anywhere near positions of power and responsibility, though. No, nor not. Look, this started as a cold open on one funny video and then they went way too deep on Barnaby Joyce because I missed the World Cup. I should have been watching like Cabo Verdei versus Switzerland, but instead I was YouTubeing this asshole. Yeah, I somehow, the algorithm is not feeding me Barnaby, but maybe now it will. And I'll get to keep up with his various vendettas against animals and other living beings. With any luck. All right, we got a great show. We're going to cover the major escalation fighting.

between the U.S. and Iran over the weekend. There were multiple U.S. casualties, accusations that the Pentagon is covering them up. And then a couple of signs this war could be escalating even further. So a lot of bad news on the Iran front. Then we're going to talk about a State Department report on Cuba and how it's being used to smear and potentially target left-wing individuals and organizations all across the country. We'll talk about politics in the prediction markets like Kalshi and Polly Market, the wildfires in Canada, and why Trump is punishing our neighbors to the north. We'll get it to the first couple of actions by new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, and then we will end by taking the piss out of some right-wing candidates and organizations

in the UK. Always fun, Ben. Do you see CPAC started in Britain? I know, with some funding coming from the Trump administration, too. Oh, really? How much they give them? Their new international aid budget includes some line items for, like, right-wing think tanks in places like Britain. Are you kidding me? Glad to see we're on that side. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So we're like zeroing out, you know, HIV-AIDS funding for, you know, kids. Okay. Okay. We're giving it to Liz Truss.

That's how it's going. That's great. Finally, you're going to hear my interview with Alexi Sorkin. He's from the Keev Independent. We talk about the security situation in Ukraine, this recent series of massive ballistic missile strikes by the Russians on major cities across Ukraine. We'll talk about the latest on Ukraine's missile defense capabilities, including President Trump giving them a license to manufacture patriot missiles in Ukraine and sort of how long that might take. We'll talk about the strikes by the Ukrainian side on Crimea, on Russian oil and gas infrastructure. And then this major fallout from President Zelensky firing his defense minister, which led to huge protests in the streets.

I should note, though, Ben, I spoke with Alexi before we learned that President Zelensky had fired Alexander Searski, who is the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces. So they're actually a huge development since I did that interview this morning. Yeah, not good to fire the defense minister and the commander. When things seem to be going well to, it's, politics in Ukraine are pretty volatile right now. Yeah, volatile politics. It's a very interesting conversation in an interview because the defense minister, Federov, is like 35 years old. The Syroski is 60. So this is a generational fight. It's a debate about tactics and technology and accusations that, you know, that Syroski was running kind of like a Soviet-era-era military strategy while Fedorov was developing all these new drones

and, you know, accountability and sort of database targeting. It's very interesting. And the political fallout is huge because a lot of people think Zelensky may have fired Fedorov because he viewed him as a political threat. As a rival. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So a lot to watch there. Iran sucks up all the attention, but that doesn't mean there's not another war going on. I know. It did make me feel badly that we had not covered Ukraine as much recently. It's like just The agenda fills with a crisis after crisis. And it's like almost easy to forget. There's this four-year running nightmare of a war in the background.

I mean, it's not easy to forget for anyone in Ukraine or on the front lines. It's just there's like so much on our plate here. All right. So we had this terrible news over the weekend from the war in Ukraine. We got the death toll for the U.S. service members from that war is now increased to 18. So First Lieutenant Tyler James Fian and Private Isabella Gonzalez were killed by an Iranian ballistic missile attack on a U.S. base in Jordan. Private Gonzalez was 19 years old. It's always like heartbreaking when you see how YonD service members are.

A third service member is presumed dead. Remains were found sort of at the blast site, but that person has not been identified yet publicly. The Pentagon also announced that another U.S. service member in Iraq was killed during a controlled detonation of an unexploded ordinance from an Iranian drone. I would like to better understand what happened there. That sounds awful. The kind of thing that should be avoidable, but I don't know, we'll learn more. On top of that, nearly 100 service members have been in. injured in the conflict since July 7th, so the past couple of weeks. The Pentagon says the vast

majority of those injuries were, quote, minor concussions. However, they've been far from candid about casualty figures, which we should dig into. So we've since learned that the base in Jordan that was targeted was hit several times over the course of 24 hours. Dozens of soldiers were injured, destroyed a bunch of helicopters. And the question becomes, how does Trump respond? On truth social, he posted, quote, every time Iran kills an American soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over. This directive has been passed on to the Secretary of War, Pete Hexeth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Daniel Kane, and every leader in the military, end quote. The Pentagon has hit targets in Iran for about 10 consecutive nights now. Iran at the same time

has been hitting U.S. targets or targeting U.S. sites in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Worryingly, it seems like a lot of these Iranian airstrikes were targeting radar and missile defense systems, which, if successful, could make the bases even more vulnerable. Of course, in Jordan, they were managed to hit the barracks that sound like they were barely fortified at all, leading to these casualties. Iran has also hit some tankers in the Strader Hummus. So, Ben, let's start with this question of or issue of transparency around U.S. casualties from the Pentagon. The Pentagon, they deny that they're withholding casualty information. They're kind of huffly saying, like, we're not going to release anything that might tell Iran

that their targeting is going well or help them operationally. and they're also arguing they have no obligation to release information about kind of minor injuries. What's your reaction to that? So, listeners, regular listeners, will know that we've been talking about this for months, that there's a lack of candor about the damage that's being done in terms of the injuries to American service members, the damage to U.S. bases, military facilities, and embassies. This has been very clear, Tommy. One, because, you know, if you talk to anybody in the Gulf or any of these countries that are being attacked,

they'll tell you that there's far more significant damage than is being reported by the Pentagon or that's being seen. But the other thing, Tommy, he's like, you and I used to be responsible for this. You know, like, you just have to oversee the communications around what was going on in Moors. And this, nothing about this feels normal. And I think what people need to bear in mind is that this has been a process, right? We covered kicking out the Pentagon Press Corps. So they're not people, actual journalists. You've got like, you know, the Mike Lindell, My Pillow guy has a, you know, correspondent in the Pentagon briefing room, not like the actual journalist with sources. So you're not getting the kind of reporting from people there. You're also kind of getting these very opaque statements. You know, you either get some insane Pete Heggsest statement about, you know, we've won the war for the thousandth time or we've destroyed the entire Navy. Or you get this kind of very minimalist statement from the Centcom Central Command that is running the war that will report a. death and make kind of a vague illusion to injuries without any detail about the nature of those injuries. And look, the reality is this is just an effort to hide the costs of the war from the

American people. Like, they do not want you to know how much damage has been done to our facilities, how much that's going to cost to repair, which could run well into the many billions of dollars. They don't want you to know the extent of the injuries of service members. They don't want you to pay attention. They want to be able to do whatever they want to do without any accountability. And normally also, Congress would be holding hearings on these matters and forcing answers, information out to the public. But because the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the very spare hearings if we get yield very little information. And when it's like Hegset, you get this kind of performative bullshit from him. So this is by design. This is what it feels like to have an authoritarian system

leading you into a war that is illegal that nobody wants. They have to conceal the information because the more information gets out about this war, the less Americans want any part of it. Yeah, and it's hard. Like, normally these kind of numbers are just, like, updated on a website. It's supposed to be very, like, routine and kind of technocratic done by professional public information officers within the U.S. military. It's hard not to feel like data like this would not be being withheld because it seems to contradict statements by Trump and by Hexeth and by Vance that we have eviscerated their missile capability. And, you know, the Iranian military is decimated, blah, blah, blah. It's also, I think, relevant that a lot of these strikes happened in Jordan.

You know, the Wall Street Journal noted that Jordan is among the most permissive countries in the Arab world when it comes to allowing U.S. spaces to operate from their territory. A bunch of other countries in the region have shut down U.S. access to their airspace at times to try to prevent us from doing, probably to prevent Trump from doing stupid things to escalate the war. So it seems like the targeting of Jordan is deliberate by a. Iran and is probably an attempt to, you know, change public opinion within Jordan about U.S. participation and cooperation. Yeah. And bear in mind that there are 50,000 U.S. service members scattered across this region. By the way, like I think far more than is necessary.

And that's something that a future Democratic president should look at. But it's hard to secure. What the Iranians have figured out is they have a very broad target set. If the United States is hitting things inside of Iran at increasing pace and scale, you know, which we can talk about. But they have in their target list, they've got U.S. bases, facilities, anywhere there's U.S. military personnel. They've got the Gulf states and the kind of, you know, they want to extract a cost on both the global economy. So, you know, hitting things like energy infrastructure and obviously closing down the state of Hormuz, but also just, you know, if something gets hit, I've noticed,

know, if a desalination plant gets hit inside of Iran, like they're hitting one in Kuwait. You know, so they're seeing the entire region, essentially, as presenting targets that, in their mind, match up with what is being done to them. And they show that there are all these different ways of carrying a cost. So the other thing we should point out, Tommy, is that we've burned through a lot of our missile defenses. We have less today than we did at the beginning of the war. That's a finite resource. I think we get comfortable with this idea that we can just shoot everything down. Well, we can't for two reasons. One, contrary to everything that Trump and Hegset and Rubio have said, they clearly maintain

a significant ballistic missile capability. I saw, you know, potentially over 2,000 ballistic missiles and they're able to reproduce them. They have obviously a significant drone capacity. And so if they're maintaining these capabilities and we have less and less defenses and we have to make judgment calls, right, about where to put them, well, stuff is increasingly going to get through. And so the more this war goes on, the less capable we are defending. And then lastly, when you see the precision targeting that they're doing in places like Jordan, you have to think that in addition to Iranian intelligence, they're probably getting intelligence from the Russians, too,

because they seem to know where to hit things with a degree of precision with either ballistic missiles or with drones. And so this should be warring. The longer this war goes on, the more American casualties there's going to be, the more damage is going to be to U.S. allies, the more it's going to create rifts. They want to create divisions between not just public opinion in those countries, but governments in the U.S. So the Iranians, to use a Trump phrase, again, have a lot of cards here. And it just doesn't seem like the Pentagon has taken any steps to harden the infrastructure where these service members are living and staying and working. I mean, it's just shocking to me that you could be serving in Jordan and living in basically an unprotected barracks that could be hit by a ballistic missile.

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So there's a couple in my mind first. On Monday, the Houthi rebels in Yemen threatened to put in place a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia in the Babel Mandeb Strait, which is how ships get in and out of the Red Sea. We talked about this last week. The Saudis bombed this Houthi target. We both were like, why the fuck would they do that? They've had basically a ceasefire in place since 2022.

And now in the least surprising news possible, you have the Houthi's threatening retaliation. So the reason this matters so much is when the Strait of Hormuz was closed, the Saudis were still able to export oil by shipping it west through a pipeline to the to the Red Sea side of the country and exporting it that way. And if the Houthis managed to prevent the Saudis from exporting oil, it would remove several million more barrels of oil per day from the market. And then it could create serious long-term problems for the Saudi producers if they have to lock in their wells. That's obviously a long way's off, but it's something they're thinking about, I'm sure. And the impact would be even greater if the Houthis block or deter other shipping through the

Red Sea. Earlier today, Trump was asked about this. He said the Houthis hadn't actually done anything yet, but he's a liar and time will tell. Yeah. The other major escalation risk was kind of outlined helpfully for us via a leak to the Wall Street Journal. So here's the lead of that story. Quote, Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of uranium enrichment centrifuges into tunnels deep inside a mountain last fall. Israeli and U.S. officials say a development that would heighten concern that Tehran could reconstitute its nuclear program. So that story says these materials were moved after the 12-day war when the U.S. and Israel first bombed Iran's nuclear site.

Trump was asked about this Pickax Mountain concern during a press conference on Tuesday. Let's watch. Do you believe that Iran has moved nuclear centrifuges into Pickax Mountain? And when you say, we're not done yet, what is left to finish? Well, I think that they may have, we don't have it on. record, all we do is read the fake news. You know, we see, the news is so wrong so many times. So, you know, maybe this one they have right, but it's okay.

It doesn't mean anything unless they have the material. You're talking about the centrifuges? Yeah, it doesn't mean anything unless they have the material. They don't have, we follow the material. That's where the action is. And we'll be hitting that area very, probably pretty soon. And there's not a thing they can do about it. You know, normally I wouldn't say that.

If I thought they could do something about it, I would never say that. But we'll be hitting that area pretty soon and very heavily. Interesting logic train there. It's like, it doesn't matter, but we're going to bomb in any way. I guess now they could move it and prevent that from happening. But here we are. So the broader problem with Trump's threat there to bomb Pickax Mountain is that experts believe these facilities could be between 300 and 450 feet under solid rock.

It is not clear whether even the U.S. bunker busting bombs that were used against the previous nuclear sites could reach these areas. James Acton, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program had an interesting Twitter thread about this question of whether the Bunker Busters could hit Pickax Mountain. He said there's a debate about how deep the biggest U.S. Bunker Buster can actually burrow into rock before exploding. And the range is presumed to be 60 feet to 200 feet, which again is not deep enough to get to the deepest parts of Pickax Mountain. So it's not clear that this would work. He also pointed out the strike at Fordo. was only effective because a hit a ventilation shaft.

And then even then, they had to drop 14 of the massive ordinance penetrator weapons to finish the job. So big picture, we don't know if Pickax Mountain could be targeted. We don't really know what's happening within it because the IAEA does not have access to the site because Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and got rid of IAEA access. So, Ben, not the most subtle leak here from the Israelis. Interesting that Trump decided to just comment on it and preview an air. air strike, but what did you make of this? First of all, there's two governments with massive credibility issues.

So every time you see a leak of Israeli intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program, you know, this is a bit of a boy who cried wolf, right? Like, it's always some pretext for why the United States needs to get deeper into the war. And so this one may be true, but like we've heard Prime Minister Nanyahu say for like well over a decade that Iran was like, you know, two weeks away from a nuclear weapon. So it feels like the leak clearly had an interest to pressure Trump to do something. And then it bears repeating that Trump has said that the Iranian nuclear program is obliterated after the 12-day war. And now he's nonsensical.

It's not just a nuclear program is not just a nuclear fuel, the nuclear dust, which he was referring to there, I think, with the material. That's the product of the nuclear program. The nuclear program is the scientist, is the centrifuges, is the uranium that you mine and put into the centrifuges, and then it's the fuel, right? And so you can't say we've obliterated the program. They just have centrifuges and their fuel and their scientists. What exactly would be done here? The logic train of this would lead Americans to say, you're telling me that we've gone to war with this country multiple times now, if you count the 12-day war is a different war, and we've been bombing them for months now, and they've got centrifuges in a mountain, they've got the nuclear fuel somewhere.

Maybe we know, maybe we don't know where that is. It just shows that they don't have a strategy, because the reality is, we can have all these conversations about, you know, massive ordinance penetrators, these bunker busting bombs. The only way that you're going to verifiably get that material or those centrifuges out is either with a nuclear deal in which there are international inspectors who can go in and verify that. Or it's with massive amounts of U.S. ground forces going in and getting into a real fighting war on the ground. And I don't think there's any appetite for that whatsoever. You cannot fix these problems from the air. This is the problem with their whole war strategy. And so if you look at what they're doing, they seem to be trying to bomb infrastructure associated with the IRGC.

I don't think the IRGC looks like they're ready to capitulate anytime soon. They're willing to weather more of that. So that's not going to work. Then Trump's saying, like, if every American killed, we're going to kill a bunch of people or blow up a bunch of stuff, let me tell you, like, however upset you are and you are about American service members being killed, like vengeance is not a war strategy. like it's a horrible way to think about targeting. It's a way to ask for it. And so these guys just, yeah, they just don't know what they're doing. Yeah.

And it's very clear what the Iranians are doing. They're just holding the line. If we can survive and stay in power and demonstrate that we control that straight, doesn't really matter how much damage Trump tries to do to their economy or to bombing in the vicinity of their nuclear program. They have a nuclear program. They control the straight and they're still in power. And one last thing on this pickax mountain piece, Hugh Hewitt, who's kind of a right-wing kind, not kind of, right wing commentator who kisses Trump's ass, big Nixon fan. He's a radio host on

the Salem Radio Network. He's obsessed with Pickax Mountain. Trump was on a show the other day and he was asking him about it. I noticed Ben, there was a Wall Street Journal report recently. I think it's over the weekend on the stunning amount of money that Israel is spending on PR propaganda to try to fix its image. I think the total amount for 2026 is $700 million. One of the people they've hired is a guy named Brad Parscale. He was Trump's former campaign manager. I think he has a $45 million contract. Parscale is not only has his own kind of like company. He is also the chief strategy officer at Salem Media. And his contract for Israel involves, quote, integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties. So one has to wonder, is Israel telling Brad Parscale to tell

people like Hugh Hewitt to ask about these issues because there's a whole lot of money flowing around that suggests that might be the case. Just one question I have. Entirely plausible and in line with how Israel approaches messaging, like the closer you can get to decision makers. And this is the thing about like the for sale nature of right wing media. Like we've seen the Russians do this, right? We've seen the Russians literally buy influencers in the United States. It's now, frankly, not new for Israel to be doing something similar. But it just goes to show in a fractured media environment, like, how vulnerable we are as a society to, like, Israel dumping a bunch of money into Trump cronies. And suddenly Hugh Hewitt is like laundering, you know, potentially, you know, we don't know for sure.

Israeli narratives or Israeli interest, right? You should bomb this mountain. I mean, it just, every now and then, actually, there's an anecdote that kind of illustrates how absurd the times are that we're in. It is plausible. Again, we don't know for sure that, like, Israel pays Brad Parskal and then Hugh Hewitt is trying to do targeting with Trump on a show. Like, that is fucking nuts that we even can entertain that as a possibility. And meanwhile, the finance minister, Basil L Smotrich, he had a quote that he gave to some media or some outlet in Israel after their like national security conversation last night where he said of the war in Iran, the state of Israel has no interest in joining the contained confrontation between Iran and the United States. The current situation is the best one for us. We know. We know, buddy. Good for you guys. I mean, this is

exactly the fuck these guys. Like, this is exactly what you worry about, which is what did they do? They dragged the United States into this war because Bibi Nanyahu is able to persuade. I can't say that. I'm just kidding. I mean, of course you can. Okay. You'll get yelled out on Twitter. You'll go yell that. I'll get yelled at like, let's, okay, they had a very persuasive briefing. Smotridge is like confirming it. Like, how dare you? Yeah. And they convinced Trump to do this dumb thing. And then it's like now the U.S. is in, oh, we don't have to be a part of this anymore. I mean, give me a break. If you ever needed more evidence that we need to rethink the entirety of this relationship with this completely maniacal government, it's this, it's, it's,

it's Motrich, who would have been cheering Israel joining the U.S. on the front end. And now it's like, oh, we can take a step back. Let these guys. Let them do it for us. Meanwhile, last second, Iran, Trump's kind of trying to jam some Iran-connected legislation through Congress. There's the NDAA bill, which is the annual bill authorizing Pentagon programs, Democrats are currently blocking the $1.15 trillion NDAA bill to pressure Trump to end the war. Trump has also requested another $87 billion in Iran supplemental funding. Hegsef and Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Dan Kane, we're up on the Hill today talking about it. I just want to point out to anyone who works on Capitol Hill or any members of Congress listening that as you decide on how to vote on this stuff,

I wanted to flag an economist UGov poll for you that shows that the Iran War is the least popular war since polling started. How about that for a stat? It is a minus 30 approval rating, a stat which the economist notes, the Vietnam War didn't hit until six years in. Again, for context, the Afghanistan War started at 90% support and it took 13 years to dip below 50% approval. Breakdowns by group. the Iran war is 84 points underwater with Democrats. It's 52 points underwater with independence. It only has a 72% approval among MAGA Republicans and is 25 points underwater with non-Maga

Republicans. So it's like it's hard to imagine a more clear-cut vote than this. Vote no against any funding, any support for this conflict, period. This is the biggest no brain in the world. And the only two things that add are there's MAGA numbers too. like a there's a tiny, tiny portion of those people that actually support the war, right?

The constituency, you know, now that Lindsay Graham is no longer worth this. Right, they just support Trump. We're down to like Hugh Hewitt and Ben Shapiro. Yeah, yeah, it's exactly right. Like, so most of those bag of voters probably don't support the war. They just, if they're asked something

that Trump is doing, they say they support it, right? So there's not a lot of depth to that support. There's not a lot of people that are like, yeah, we really got to finish the job in Iran. Like you don't get sent to anywhere. Not a lot of maggots who are like, look, we got to get picked. Axe Mountain. I've been saying it all along. This is really important to me. Yeah. Yeah. People are sitting in there.

Yeah, like in the diner, you know, like the Trump, West Virginia diner saying like, you know what? I really voted for Trump. I vote for Trump so you could take care of Pickax Mountain. Can I afford my heating bill? No. Do I want to bomb Pickax Mountain? Absolutely. That is that's how I view the world. That's important to me. But the other thing is like, who on earth is like out there wanting to spend a trillion half dollars in defense, period? Like, so if part of the concern is that you're like not voting to the overall defense package because you're blocking this. Well, you shouldn't vote for that. Like, nobody should vote for a trillion and a half dollar defense budget at a time we have such massive needs. It's crazy.

It's time to completely reverse this premise that you have to vote for defense spending or else you'll be held accountable. We should start holding people accountable for the fact that they want a trillion half dollars in defense spending when everything else in this country is going to shit. Yeah, it's nuts. All right. Let's switch gears, Ben, because something really weird has happened at the state. Department earlier this week. We wanted to talk about it. They released this 100-page report titled Cuba, the capital of 21st century communism. It claims that for over 70 years, quote, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a

campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government and had backed left-wing terrorism on, they say it has backed left-wing terrorism on American soil. So the report lists people who it calls front groups and fellow travelers of Cuba. It's like groups like Code Pink and the Democratic Socialists of America or DSA. It mentions a bunch of prominent leftists in like Democratic leaders by name. Streamer Hassan Piker gets a shout out. Zoran Mamdani's in there. The report was released shortly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a quote,

ministerial on the resurgence of political terrorism. Rubio's speech at the ministerial focused almost exclusively on what he called left-wing terrorism. Independent journalist Ken Clippincene noted that a White House press release about the event said, quote, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity. The world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism. Ben, I watched Rubio's speech, and I noticed this one line, which was, they despise the West because the West is great. It was like identical framework to like the Bush era. You know, they hate us because of our freedom, bullshit about Al-Qaeda. So, Ben.

Except now there's no freedom. We're just great. We're not free anymore. They hate our greatness. MAGA, I guess. So, Ben, this weird report in my mind seems to be merging two different strands of work. The first is the work to build this legal structure to designate lefties or leftist groups or even just Democrats as terrorists or terrorist organizations and then go after us with counterterrorism authorities. We shall remind ourselves that in the U.S., that includes killing people. The second is the Marco Rubio Passion Project of trying to refer. forced regime change in Cuba, but doing it by punishing an entire island, an entire civilian population full of people through this energy blockade. By merging the two, they have created a kind de facto new leftist blacklist that would make Joe McCarthy proud. And then there's this attempt

to create like an intellectual framework and legitimacy around the work. So the first 60 pages of the report are like this history lesson that feels like, it was ripped from a Liberty University student's term paper or something. It's sort of this like slapdash kind of pop history from a slightly paranoid right wing perspective, although often about like real historical events. But then it ends with this absolutely crazy stretched like six degrees of Kevin Bacon style guilt by association conclusion, which says, quote, many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history from the George Floyd riots to rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses

can be linked in some way, shape, or form to Cuban influence. You know your argument is strong when you include the words, in some way, shape, or form. Of course, we also know that, like, pro-terrorism activism means, on college campuses means, like, kids who are upset about, you know, children getting bombed in Gaza. Yeah, about war crimes. Yeah. So, Ben, I genuinely don't know what is more worrisome. The State Department whipping up this document as kind of a pretext to go after liberals or Marco Rubio and his minions sincerely believing that Fidel Castro's ghost is behind every corner and responsible for like people being upset by watching George Floyd get murdered live on, you know, their screens by a cop. What did you make of the State Department blacklist in this

kind of broader effort to criminalize leftist thought or like somehow link it all to Cuba? I think there's a few different things going on here. And I say this is someone who used to, like, be in charge of Cuba policy, the second Obama term. The first thing is that Cuba poses absolutely no national security threat to the United States whatsoever, right? Full stop. I mean, I saw the Cubans aren't penetrating American society. Like, they have no – these people can't keep the lights on. Like, the idea that Cuba's running, like, networks all over the country, like, is absolutely fucking absurd. It's just not true. But because they have no pretext for why they would launch a military operation in Cuba. Cuba, a regime change operation in Cuba, or certainly even no pretext for why they're starving Cubans to death or causing people to die because ventilators get turned off when their power outages because of our blockade. There's no Cuban nuclear program, so they have to kind of create this, you know, facade, this bullshit idea that they pose some kind of, you know, danger to our society. It's not true. It's fundamentally not true. Like, just because people in America have leftist views doesn't mean that they're like agents of the Cuban government in any way, shape, or form. The second

that's going on here, Tommy, is a lot of projection, and I'm just going to name this. The United States has done what they are alleging Cuba does, right? I know this because when I was in Cuban policy, I started looking at all these crazy USAID programs, and like, you know, generally we're supportive of USAID. I think a lot of people at USAID would agree with me. There are all these line items. We used to just give, I found money that was just sent to PO boxes in Miami, right? With no, with no specificity about where that money was going to end up. Like the United States, and like you could say from a pot, you know, someone might say from human rights perspective, direct funding for dissidents in Cuba is something we should do.

But some of this seemed to go, you know, was just more beyond that. It's just like creating funds that could go to oppositionists or efforts to undermine the government. Remember, there was some, I mean, if you want to go down, take a trip down in memory lane, there were even programs that became public. The Associated Press did a bunch of reporting during the Obama years about like, I think, was Operation Chaos, and we're going to use social media to kind of soak chaos inside of Cuba and undermine the government, which was, by the way, before they even had a lot of Internet access in Cuba, so it was a pretty dumb way to spend money. So this is classic right-wing projection.

Like, the Cubans must be doing the things that we do to them, you know, and so we're going to call that out. Right. Never mind, like, the historical stuff, if you want to go back even deep. I mean, their report goes way back. And, you know, there's all sorts of efforts to take out Fidel Castro and disabled Operation Mongo's, I mean. Yeah, yeah, Bay of Pigs Invasion. Like, you know. Yeah, that little thing. Yeah, so those two things are about the pretext you're after the Cubans. Then the last thing is when you, the point you made is this whole Antifa thing, we should not treat as a side show.

It is the foreign governments, it's absurd that anybody showed up at that conference. Like I would hope that people like. It's like 60 nations. Yeah, I would hope that you just can say no to that because this could lead to dark places. Like we are, we have two plus years of Trump left. And if you listen to the rhetoric, not just Ruby, but Stephen Miller gave some like bloodth speech. Like, do I think they're going to start, like, droning DSA members in the United States, Democratic Socialists? No. But if they do start freezing bank account, if they start treating it

like a terrorist threat on some insane nexus to Cuba or anything else, like we could, you know, see them trying to shut down civil society, shut down opposition. Or just investigate them, right? I mean, a bunch of a bunch of lefties went to Cuba and all of a sudden they came back and they were under investigation, right? And it was leaked to some news outlets. Hassan Piker was one of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a mess. It's definitely one to watch. It's really concerning. And it's building on this kind of body of evidence that this stuff is happening starting. Was NPSM 7, I think was the directive to kind of start begin this process. And you know, obviously Charlie Clark's assassination has been the pretext for a lot of it. And this idea that it was a leftist or lefty conspiracy. And Cash Patel was at that symposium. So there's a lot of kind of worrisome data points there. Let's turn to another worrisome development, the Trump era, frankly, which is this, uh, reporting. reporting recently about the online prediction market, gambling, and politics. So the most recent kind of eye-popping headline, at least to me, Ben, was about Trump's teleprompter operator, this guy,

Gabriel Perez. He's under investigation by the CFTC for allegedly making over $100,000 betting on Trump's speeches. So for context for folks, like on these prediction market apps, like polymarket or Kalshi, you could place bets on stupid shit like what words Trump will or will not say in a speech. So I looked on Kalshi right before we started recording. you can bet on whether Trump will say or not say 28 different words or phrases during his White House correspondent speech on Friday. They give it a 45% chance that Trump says Barack Hussein Obama. So if you bet $100, he says that. The payout is $210.10. If you want a little more risk, a little more upside Ben, Kalshi has a 7% chance that Trump says Epstein. So you bet $100, you can win

$1,341. That's your payout with your bet included. But if you're the teleprompter guy, right, you have access to the final, final version of the speech right before it is delivered, which is obviously insider information. You also know, you know, in real time, if he's skipping words, so like Trump is an undisciplined mess, and apparently Perez would cash out his bets mid-speech if Trump skipped a line in the prompter, which I bet made it pretty fucking easy to find him and snuff this all out. Associated with this news, the Wall Street Journal had a big piece on prediction markets generally in Washington. It had some, again, eye-popping detail.

It said three anonymous accounts on Polly Market made over $600,000 by correctly betting on when Trump and Iran would agree to a ceasefire deal. That freaked out the White House and led them to send around a memo prohibiting the use of insider information to bet. The journal also says that Congresswoman Annapolina Luna of Florida tipped off a mega influencer named D.C. Drano that Trump was going to pick J.D. Vance as his VP nominee so that he could bet on it. and then she later mocked him for not betting more. So that sounds like they're all taking this very seriously. The Senate recently passed a resolution banning lawmakers and staff with sensitive information from prediction market betting, but I would not bet on the administration taking any action,

in part because Donald Trump Jr. It's a paid strategic advisor to both Kalshi and Polly Market. You might be wondering. Perfect. Yeah. It's weird that two competitors would pay the same guy. Yeah, it is unless you think about it. So, Ben, it's interesting, like kind of hearing. these organizations defend themselves. They have a bit of an incoherent view of insider information.

They say like, well, you know, insider information gets into every market and that's what sort of like makes the data better and more perfect and more useful on the one hand. But on the other hand, they're trying to ban it or people from profiting off it. There's so obvious like the national security implications of some of these bets. I mean, we talked about it in the Venezuela context. Someone made a bunch of money. A special forces guy made a bunch of money betting on whether Maduro would be deposed. It's like that would be a bright red warning sign for the Venezuelan government if this were to happen again. But what did you make of this story and just, you mentioned as a former speechwriter, like just being able to place prop bets on what Trump would say or Obama would say in our case? I mean, this is one of the central things that they're doing, right? Because like you already have the stock market, which is the kind of more, you know, dignified version of prediction markets, right? And now you have these platforms. And the reality,

is like there's been like all this smoke for, I mean, the Iranians have alleged at Kushner and Whitkoff. Right. Good call. I'm not saying I trust them, but they made billions of dollars like in investments or bets on future markets related to the progress of negotiations. The prediction markets are just a cruder way. I mean, look, I'll just be blunt. Like when I was, when I think about what I knew when I was in the White House, you know, I knew what Obama was going to say. I was a speechwriter. I knew when we were going to roll out new policies. We knew. We knew. We were going to roll out new policies. We need. We knew when special operate, you know, we knew when bin Laden was going to be targeted, right? We knew when airstrikes might take place. Like, we knew all this information. Never, you know, not that we're the purest people. I think I would have said the same thing about the Bush people. I don't think they would have sat there and just like used all this inside of information to like make bets. The system, this, the corruption is not a bug. Like I feel like we end up seeing like the teleprompter operator, we end up seeing the special

operator who made the bet on the Maduro operation, the richer people and more powerful people, and I'm not going to name them because I just don't know, but like just use your head, right? Trump family members or senior officials or billionaires who are in that cabinet have probably greater capacity to have cutouts, right? So it's not like them having to place the bet. There's so many ways in which we're living in a society where power is increasingly consolidated. Information has always been consolidated, and now these people can just get rich of these information. And look, I'll hate to be a killjoy. Like, we just should shut down. I don't know why we need these platforms. Like, it doesn't seem like sports gambling is going that well either, not to, that's a whole other

conversation. But like it's the people that end up losing, it's like at the casino, it's like, the high rollers, like, tend to be fine. It's like the people that are like betting their, you know, paychecks because they can't afford groceries because of Trump's war that end up losing. Yeah, I mean, look, these things apps call themselves prediction markets, but I think like 80% of the betting that takes place is sports betting. So it's just an end around to get around state laws. As we are kind of hitting the gas on

these products and there's all this lobbying by these prediction market apps and there's so much support within the White House, France has blocked access to polymarket betting website. I think this happened last week because they're worried about people losing their money. Gambling in Brazil

has been named a public health crisis. It was legalized. Online gambling was legalized in 2018. It's now seen as like the fastest growing and most lucrative market. I think it was 9.2 billion. And they're viewing it as a $9.2 billion market by 2030. And in 2024, online gambling losses in Brazil drove an estimated 1.8 million people into debt. So it's like it truly is a crisis down there. In the U.S., political betting on polymarket doubled to just over $4 billion during the first three months of the year compared with the first quarter of 2025, according to this

data provided to the Wall Street Journal by a nonprofit called Anti-Corruption Data Collective. But it's just like the opportunities for abuse and insider trading, I mean, it's like it is a feature, not a bug here. Yeah, it's obvious. And what you know, what you're getting is not just the kind of rank corruption. You know, decisions might start to be made because we've seen this in all kinds of gambling, right? This is why like the World Series gets thrown in like 1990.

like you start to make decisions for the purpose of making money off the bet, not making decisions that are best for American interest or the American people. Like that that's the kind of thing that is probably clearly already happening. You'll also get who you'll get people who go into government for the, or politics, for the express purpose of betting on things like prediction markets, right? I mean, there's so many things, this is such a slippery slope. If I was a member of Congress, like focusing on shutting these things down or at least putting like really thick guardrails around them with very high penalties for people that violate them. Like it's a no-brainer.

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result, smoke is spread across the country and it's the parts of the U.S. In New York in particular, bore the Brunneville last week, and the Midwest and the Great Lakes have also been impacted by the smoke. So Trump got asked about what he and Carney specifically talked about. Here's a clip of him explaining what he said to Carney and then a response from Ontario premiered Doug Ford. Let's watch. I told them, I mean, you've got to stop these fires from coming in and, you know, poisoning our air. Our air has been poisoned. We can help them. We'll help them. But maybe, They should pay us some damages or something or we should do some tariffs. I've never remembered this happening.

Over the last four or five years you saw it starting to take place, I've never remembered that happening. They're not managing their forests properly. I'm going to remind President Trump that there's 3.9 million acres burning in the United States right now. And if we had resources, we would send them down to our closest friends and allies. So, as you heard there, he threatened to tariff. Canada because they have wildfires. Then, surprise, surprise, Ben, on Monday, the Trump administration

rolled out new 50% tariffs on more than 500 Canadian goods, nearly all of which are actually covered under the USMCA trade agreement that Trump had negotiated in the first term. The New York Times says that the tariff targets are about 2% of the entire trading relationship between the U.S. and Canada. The tariffs won't go into effect until August 19th. They are almost certainly an attempt to ratchet up pressure on Canada in advance of USMCA talks, although so far the U.S. has only been renegotiating the deal with Mexico while excluding Canada from those conversations. But Ben, I mean, just like setting aside the potential economic risk of doubling down this trade war with Canada for a second, can you just imagine if your house was on fire and it was burning for the third time in four years

and your neighbor walked over and yelled at you because it was blowing smoke on his house and then threatened to, like, send you a bill to pay for it? I mean, it's just like the most insanely dickish thing I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, and it's, you know, look, Doug Ford pointed out the fact that we have lots of wildfires, but I, I, if you pull the camera back here, the United States, most of the rest of the world has made an argument for, I don't know, going on 20 years that the United States, as the principal emitter of, you know, fossil fuels, created climate change as much as any other country. And that the United States should be paying kind of reparations,

should be paying these countries that are, you know, Pacific islands that are losing their coastlines, all these countries that have unbeatable air because it's so hot in like South Asia. The United States rejects the premise. And we had a green climate fund in the Obama years, so we did think we had an obligation to pay to mitigate the effects of climate change.

But look, it's not a mystery. I mean, part of what's so fucking frustrating by watching Trump, he's like, well, this never happened before. The last few years it's been really hot, and we suddenly have all these wildfires. Well, yeah. That's what every climate scientist has told you. You almost got it. It was going to happen if we didn't take stronger action to deal with climate change because of your climate policies on top of, you know, many years, obviously, of burning fossil fuels.

This problem is getting worse exponentially. Like climate change, we don't talk a lot. It's fucking hot. You know, like, like, we've talked about the heat wave in Europe. Like, we had the French guy cooking eggs, like, you know, with no stove. like we've got wildfires in Canada. And so for Trump to stand up there and say, oh, my God, it's hot. And there are these wildfires.

I mean, because if I'm Canadian, Canadians, you know, don't have a clean bill of health either on carbon emissions, but it's a lot less than us. So he'd have a lot more standing, you know, if he was actually doing something about the underlying problem, which is climate change. No, instead of we're making it exponentially worse. Except now we're saying, like, the solution to this is what Americans should pay higher prices because that's what tariffs are, right? Yep.

So you Americans have to pay higher prices to punish the Canadians. Unlike Canadian hockey sticks. It's like random things, like liquor, hockey sticks, milk. Also, listeners are probably wondering, like, I thought the Supreme Court, like, curtailed his powers to leverage these tariffs. That is true. They curtailed the AEPA authority that he claimed to have had. But this was done under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, the so-called Smoot-Hawley

tariffs, which had never been used before, but it gives the president the authority to impose up to a 50% tariff on import to a country, just sort of like, as a king, there's no process, there's no USTR investigation, there's no cap on the rate, there's no limit for the duration. It's just like something he can do. So now he's terrorizing Canada. Ben, over in the UK, our friends have their seventh prime minister in about 10 years. So welcome to the party, Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. We have extensively covered, you know, former Prime Minister, Kier Starmar's political demise. We've covered Burnham's ascension from Mayor of Greater Manchester to the Labor Party leader. So we're not going to do that again here.

But let's talk about what Burnham has done in the first couple days. So he gave his first speech as Prime Minister. He basically met with the King, drove over, kind of greeted the staff, and then gave a quick speech. He said he wanted his government to be a circuit breaker for Britain. He promised a new political and economic model, the devolution of power out of London, back to other parts of the country, particularly the north of the country. And he promised to lay out a 10-year plan for the country, that we haven't seen that yet. In his first cabinet meeting, he talked about cutting taxes on electricity bills.

He talked about ending rough sleeping, which is homelessness in the UK. He did three foreign leader calls. He called Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine and Ursula von der Leyen. He named a bunch of folks to his cabinet. So some names folks probably know that the chancellor of the exchequer role went to John Healy. he was the guy who surprised people last month when he resigned as Kier Starmer's defense secretary because the budget for the defense investment plan was well short of what he thought it needed. It did make me wonder, Ben, whether Healy kind of was promised another larger increase in defense spending

or if that was just kind of a fight from a bygone era, but I guess we'll find out. Ed Miliband, the former Labor Party leader is going to be foreign minister. Shabana Mahmood is going to keep her job as Home Secretary. She's the only kind of major position to stay the same. she's seen as like tough on immigration. West Streeting, who made a lot of noise about running for labor leader, and then prominently resigned from his job as health secretary. He's going to be defense secretary.

He is more kind of the conservative in labor. And then Angela Rayner is back in the cabinet after resigning last year for a very kind of dull scandal about unpaid taxes. On top of that, though, like after those officials, he basically purged the entire Starmer government, including some kind of big names like Rachel Reeves, some familiar names to this show like David Lammy, who is the deputy leader. He got rid of some talented people, some people that were seen as great managers and just like kind of technocrats. It just seems like he basically wanted to wipe the slate clean and start over. Alster Campbell, who is a Tony Blair's

right-hand man for a decade. Now it's a great podcast. The rest of his politics pointed out that if you look at the kind of the top three jobs, John Healy, now Chancellor, DX. Checker, was kind of the tip of the political spear. And when he resigned his defense secretary, a lot of analysts thought, like, maybe that was a cut that didn't kill Starmor in the moment, but he was going to bleed out from eventually. Then you had Miliband was apparently the first person to tell Starmor to resign to his face. And Shabana MacMood did the same right after. And they got the top job. So it does seem like, you know, Burnham's pretty ruthless and rewarding people that helped take down Starmor. But what do you make of the new, the cabinet slots so far and kind of what you've heard him say and do?

So in addition to just like, yeah, we're cleaning the slate, it's my show, I'm getting rid of the Starmer people, the kind of ruthless ambition that has been on display from Andy Burnham, which, you know, is sometimes you got to want someone who's an alpha, like ambition is, like, ambition is the problem is what you see is, you see a lot of, like, politics and very little vision. So it's kind of like, well, Ed Miliband's, he's the left-wing guy. Originally, Ed Miliband wanted to be Chancellor of the X-Cector. That's like the guy running the finances. But he was seen as too far left. So it's like, well, we'll give Miliband in the foreign office. That's kind of like a nice perk, you know. And John Healy, he's kind of like safe pair of hands. You know,

maybe the markets will feel okay about that guy. And then we'll keep our hardline immigration person at home office. And it doesn't feel like there's a vision behind this cabinet. It feels like it's managing labor politics. And we don't want to be too far left, but we've got to give left something. And, you know, and that's a, it's a, it's a. It's a little dispiriting, you know, because there are these huge problems in Britain. Again, what is this all about? Like, what does any Britain want to do? He seems to be a better politician than Kirstarmer.

Like both, like I said, you know, he really went after it, but also he's a better communicator. Sure, you know, like, he may get some points for, like, wanting to devolve power to the north of England. That's kind of, if you're an American, that's kind of like saying we need to focus more on, you know, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, fine. But, like, what does it mean in policy? You can step some offices up there. He's going to spend some more time up there. he'll give better speeches. He's spoken from number 10 without a podium. But like I still feel like we don't know what Andy Burnham wants to do. And the reason why should this matter to us, you know, beyond just that we care about our friends there, it's also because like if they don't get this right, like Nigel Farage's part, the fascist running the UK, just like we do here in the United States. And that would be bad for everybody. So we have a stake in these guys doing well enough that Farage can't get in there. We're going to need more detail and more vision. I want to, you know, obviously give me. a chance, but the early returns are, it seems like he's doing a lot more politics than anything else.

The only thing I say, Tommy's like, to your point about the normal photo ops, you meet the king, and then you kind of go in number 10 and you meet the household staff, like, these people have had seven, you know, couples, you know, come in and live there. Like, it used to probably be a huge event every five years. Now there's like, now it's like, here we go. Tony Blair was there for a decade. I know, it's crazy. It is crazy. Do you see that Burnham said he was going to open like a number 10 office in the north in Manchester in Manchester yeah yeah just seems like a nice press release but like what does that mean in practice are you going to have a separate staff it's like an American president saying we're going to have a you know a Wisconsin you know white

house right I mean it's so political it's like we have a political problem in northern England I'm from there you know any burn's nickname is the king of the north like great fine that makes people feel like you know more connected to the government in Manchester or Northern England, okay. But what are the policies that are going to follow off of that? We still don't really know. We'll find out.

I agree that I'm very worried about the right wing and Nigel Farage, but let's just have some fun with them for the time being. So first of all, shout out to Liz Truss who just pulled off the first CPAC, Great Britain. For those lucky enough not to know what CPAC is, it's a huge right-wing, kind of annual political conference

that started out in the U.S. is this place where the fringe crazies, gathered every single year. And now it just evolved over time to be basically the MAGA base of the party, even though CPAC stars has faded a lot recently because the guy who runs it is a weird creep. But like any good cancer, CPAC has metastasized and spread and is now infecting, you know, political systems all over the world because there's like a CPAC Hungary, CPAC UK, CPAC, etc. So that brings us back to the CPAC conference in Great Britain. check out this video, Ben, that was taken by a journalist named Latika M. Bork, just to get a sense of the absolutely electric vibe at this event.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the third and final day of seeing that great question. It's fantastic to have you all here this morning. We have an action-packed morning. Oh, boy. more seats at the 815 time slot at the Aspen Security Forum. We had more seats in the 815 time slot for the Aspen Security Forum that started at 9. Yeah, we actually did. Sanction, the sanction event. The New York Times reported that day three of the conference had about 100 people total in the audience. Nigel Farage was the headliner. I think he had a much bigger crowd,

although much bigger is like 300 to 400. Ron DeSantis was supposed to speak, but had to cancel due to, I think, bad weather canceling his flight. So it could have been worse for those 11 people in that audience. The British conservative magazine, the spectator called the event, quote, empty, comma miserable and downright weird. An author named William Atkinson, a man who wants a right wing government also said, quote, being cursed with vision, hearing, and sanity meant enduring an event that made trust his premiership look like a model of tact and foresight. He also called it Yankee brain slop, barely repackaged for a UK audience, stomach churning to watch. Tickets for the event ranged from 100 pounds to 10,000 pounds for the full VIP treatment. Ben, do you think we might get

invited to speak at that one next year? Do you think we're getting invited to speak at Aspen? I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, we'll see. Maybe we don't talk about it anymore. I think that it's so interesting because like the idea that just because something works in the United States, it's going to like work everywhere. I mean, it worked in Hungary because Orban put like a ton of resources behind it. This is the problem. Liz Trust cannot front your fucking conference. What are you guys doing? Exactly. How, like, get the cabbage or the lettuce or whatever it is. Well, but this is that, you know, we used to monitor her podcast. I don't that still exist or if Michael our producer just, you know, kind of finally. He's fallen off a bit. But last episode was two weeks

ago and it did have 2,500 views. Well, but this is the reality. This, this person seems to have like a bottomless well of her willingness, you know, Trump doesn't, you know, has a bottomless well of not being shamed. You cannot humiliate Liz Truss. Like she's still up there being like, this is great. It's so great to see this crowd of a few dozen people, you know, she's really a remarkable figure. I can't think of someone who's been so thoroughly willing to kind of be humiliated over and over again, you know. Yeah. And like whenever she comes to the CPAC in the U.S., she gets similar kind of half-a-sleep audiences. It's not like she's like- Who's paying for this? So like it just shows you that they have such deep pockets on the far right that there's someone who will write a check for something like that.

You know, like that's actually the thing that's scary. Is it like even when it doesn't work, like they can still get the funding for it? That looked like a conference room that was associated with a casino outside Dallas or something. That was just a bleak, bleak looking venue there. Speaking of Nigel Farage, Ben, so when you were out on vacation, Ben, I talked with Medi Hassan about Farage's farce of a bi-election that he's running in. This is in Clacton, a region called Clacton. And so what happened was Nigel Farage was caught red-handed taking gifts and not declaring

them, including a five million-pound gift from this crypto-billionaire that lives in Thailand, I think five million pounds. Did I say billion? Five million pounds. I think that's $6.7 million. It took it from this crypto-billionaire who lives in Thailand. The story for Y was all over the place. It was for security.

Then it was a gift. Then it was like a payment for campaigning. Like none of it makes sense. It's just brazen corruption. And the good thing about that story is it was. woke up the fucking British press finally, and they're starting to dig into this guy. So that also led Parliament to start investigating Farage. So it sounds like the strategy here is to kind of avoid and end these investigations.

Farage resigned from his seat in parliament. He triggered this by-election, which happens on August 13th, that he is now running in. He claims that the election results in this new super right-wing area, by the way, that he should win hands down no matter what was sort of render a verdict on the allegations against him. he said, quote, people of Clacton, be the judges of my actions, right? But all the other parties, surprisingly, the major political parties, they saw this as the farce that it was, and they decided to not run candidates in this election to not lend it any kind of legitimacy. So that means Nigel Farage is running against 33, absolutely just random people.

Mostly they are like kind of unknowns or weirdos, but there is one shining star in the field. his name is Count Binface. Count Binface claims to be a 6,000-year-old intergalactic space warrior from Planet Sigma 9. He's a perennial candidate in the UK. He has run for mayor of London twice. He's run in a bunch of parliamentary elections, including against Boris Johnson.

And then most recently, he ran against our guy, Andy Burnham up in Makerfield. Let's hear from Count Binface himself. Let's watch. First question, why would an intergalactic space warrior want to stand to be the MP for Clacton? Why not? It's a good question. Tell me about your manifesto.

What can you offer the people of Clacton? Have you ever been there? No, because I understand from the current incumbent, that is part of how you do the job. So I deliberately stayed away. Is that how it works? You've said that you will cut my taxes and raise everyone else's. How much tax can I expect to pay? Yeah, well, let me just clarify that. I will cut your taxes and raise everyone. else's. I mean, they're absolutely clear. They're not just yours, Meg. It's for everybody. This is a

blanket thing. I will cut your taxes and raise everybody else's. Okay, so how much will I pay? A reasonable amount, but just less than everyone else. Okay, and how much will everyone else pay? A little bit more than you. What is your appeal going to be to the people of Clacton? I'm not Nigel Farage. It's a full manifest. National policies, nationalize Adel, build at least one affordable house, Thai nurses pay to that of ministers, rename London Bridge after Phoebe Waller, bring back Seafax, and of course, move the hound dryer in the gents' toilets at the Crown and Treaty pub Uxbridge to a more sensible position.

Because as you can imagine, that's a national issue. So as you could see, that was from a bunch of interviews he did, a couple on the BBC. There was an LBC interview. There was a couple more. Count Binfe is for those who were listening and not watching. He's basically dude in a Star Wars outfit with a trash can on his head. Under the trash can is a man named John Harvey. He's a comedy writer.

He's been doing variations on this character since 2017. He's currently not doing that great in the polls. Again, it's a very right-wing district. It's a very reformed district. Count Binfaces is at 5% odds on Calci. But there is always hope, Ben. I want you to know, I reached out to him to see if we could book him on the show. He's not DM'd me back yet, but I'm really hoping we can get a U.S. exclusive with Count Binface.

He may be the hero we need at this difficult trying time. There's something kind of like Monty Python-esque about that that I appreciate. Absolutely. He has great comedic timing. Like, like, I'm not, I'm not Nigel Farage. Pause. Pause. It's also like, I don't know, I just, if any country is going to elect a Count Binface over just a clown like Nigel Farage, it is the UK. I don't know what we need to do.

I hope we have like one listener up in Clacton maybe. Tell your friends, vote Count Binface. Like everybody turned out. Like the farce is the point. You know, Nigel Farge is a joke. He's making a joke of your politics, your system, your campaign finance system. your laws, and vote for Count Binface to send him a message. I mean, and to be entertained for the coming years.

You know, I'd imagine Count Binface at Prime Minister's question time. It would be incredible. Do you think? Would he be allowed to wear the whole bit, you think? It's a good question. I know. It might be discriminatory to not allow him to have his bin face. Yeah, that's a really good question.

I'll ask some people in follow up for next week. Okay, that's it for Ben and my portion of the show. But please stick around for my interview with Alexi Sorokin from the Key of Independence. again, we talk about the security situation in Ukraine, this huge protest movement resulting from Zelensky firing his defense minister. We talk about missile defense capabilities, the kind of offensive strategy of the Ukrainian side. So a really interesting conversation. So check it out. Stick around for that.

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experience, way easier than going to a cash exchange place or, you know, dealing with ATMs. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com terms and conditions. apply. My guest today is the deputy chief editor for the Kiev Independent. Alexi Sorokin, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining. So I just wanted to start with some reports about the security situation in Ukraine at the moment. I saw a bunch of reports over the course of the week that last weekend was one of the largest ballistic missile and drone attacks on Ukraine since the start of the war. Is that accurate? And can you talk about the impact of, you know, what that does to your day-to-day life if you're living in Kiev or anywhere in the country?

Well, I would go as far to say that the last month, month and half, was probably the deadliest and the harshest in Kiev. Ukraine is currently lacking patriot air defense missiles, and Russians know that. So what's happening now is that they're using more and more ballistic missiles that are hard to shoot down to target different sides across the city. Over the past month, over 60 people were killed in Kiev, 60 civilians by Russian missiles. Obviously, this has a tremendous impact on your day-to-day life. People have to basically, they don't sleep, they have to go to shelter, they have to understand that, because ballistics are also really fast, right? The air raid alert is not timely enough, right?

So people don't have time to prepare themselves for an attack. So you can be in the kitchen cooking something or you can be in bed. And then you hear ballistic missile hits something near your house, right? So that's the everyday life in Ukraine right now. And obviously it's tremendously affecting people's morale, but also they're just well-being. And I saw, and this was on Twitter. So correct me if I'm wrong, that the Russians attacked a metro station where people are known to shelter. recently, is that accurate?

Yeah, so there's one of the metro stations. Well, basically, metro stations are the best bomb shelters in Kiev. Obviously, they're deep underground, and a lot of people sleep in the metro when they know there's going to be an attack. And one of those metro stations was hit. It's actually regularly hit by the Russians because it's in a neighborhood that's being tremendously affected by Russian attacks. And, yeah, it's dangerous even in a bomb shelter.

right now. Yeah. You mentioned Ukraine desperately needs more missile defense infrastructure like U.S. Patriot missiles. At the same time, I know that Ukraine has been incredibly innovative when it comes to developing missile defense drones to take out Russian drones. So I saw President Trump recently agreed to allow Ukraine to have a license to domestically manufacture Patriot missile interceptors. It will probably take years for that to lead to, you know, weapons on the battlefield. field. How significant do you think that licensing decision was in your mind? Do we know that it's actually happened yet versus just Trump kind of saying stuff? And more broadly, I mean, how do you think Ukraine is managing and evolving to deal with the threat of these missile and drone attacks?

Well, there's multiple questions. I'll start from President Trump. Well, if he doesn't change his mind in the near future, then it's a really good decision, right? Because obviously there's a bottleneck in production. A lot of countries are now awaiting Patriot missiles. Lockhead Martin is not producing enough. And if Ukraine is able to produce those Patriot missiles, obviously it will take time. It will take half a year, a year maybe to begin producing. But if that happens, then Ukraine is not going to be dependent on the United States, right? And this will be a tremendous boost for Ukraine's air defense. And adding to that is that, unfortunately, unfortunately, the Patriot missiles are the best in the world, right? So no other country has anything like that.

So Ukraine can innovate drones. Ukraine can produce missiles. You can do a lot, right? But unfortunately, air defense is the most sophisticated weapon. And if we're talking about Ukraine, it currently doesn't have air defense systems. So it has interceptor drones, which can affect incoming drones, but it doesn't have systems to combat cruise or ballistic missiles, while Europeans, for example, the Sampi, iris missile systems, they are good in battling cruise missiles, but in terms of ballistics, the only system that is known to down those kind of missiles is the Patriot system.

And unfortunately, that's something that Ukraine currently doesn't have. Yeah. At the same time, Ukraine has been going on offense. there has been this military campaign to target an isolate Crimea. I know there have been strikes in Crimea itself. There have been strikes on ships in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Can you talk about how that campaign has evolved in the last couple weeks and what the goal is? Well, I would not call it probably offense because the situation currently is a bit different in a sense that on the battlefield, Russians are still advancing.

So in the eastern part of the country, Russians are still using infantry troops to just continue to attack Ukraine to gain more land, while Ukraine is waging an asymmetrical warfare, basically using drones to target Russian logistics and Russian oil refineries and so on. So there's two ongoing campaigns. One is the long range or deep strikes, basically using long-range drones. Sometimes it's basically a plane with explosives to attack oil refineries deep inside Russia. Those planes can go 1,200 kilometers. And basically, the main goal here is to inflict as much damage on the Russian economy as possible so that it's too expensive to wage the war against Ukraine because obviously Russia is still an oil and energy export country.

So that's the first campaign. The second one is Middle Strike campaign. And here the Hornet drones are making a difference. Basically, these are the drones that target Russian troops and logistical centers in between 100 and 250, 300 kilometers. So basically, the goal here is to force the occupied parts of Ukraine to be cut off from Russia and for the Russians to not be able to, provide troops, logistics, and oil and so on to those areas, basically forcing the Russians to back down. And I would say that this started somewhere in mid-May, and it had a tremendous impact on morale, and Ukrainians feel that this is something that can make the victory or a favorable outcome of this war possible. I noticed recently there was a strike by Ukraine, on the Russian equivalent of Amazon.com. I saw as soon. Military officials said it was because Russian soldiers were buying basically drone component parts from this site.

Therefore, they believed it was a legitimate military target. I'm wondering if you believe that explanation or if this is partly, you know, maybe a strategy of bringing the war home to people in Russia and, you know, bombing a website or a shopping resource they use often and, you know, spreading fear that way, disrupting their lives. Well, I think disrupting Russians' lives is a positive kind of outcome, but it's not the main one, right? It's kind of a bonus, I would say. We actually went to – so the company is called Wildberries, which is an interesting name. And we went on the website and we actually Google to buy a drone or to buy components for military stuff. And you can just go on the website and I will. welcome you to just go and search this website. And yeah, you can buy military hardware. You can

buy military equipment, dual use goods, and basically it's used for the military as well, right? It's a complicated question, right? Because obviously, it's hard to definitively say, is it a legit target if it sells both clothes and drones? But that's what was happening. And I would say that Ukraine deliberately hit those two factories, well, storage facilities, as kind of a warning for the Russian kind of civilian and the Russian kind of non-military sector to be careful with helping the military, because basically Ukraine says, okay, look, if you sell drones and grenades and help the military, we're going to go after you. And so don't do it.

And I think that this warning is something that Ukraine is trying to bring to the Russians. Got it. Did you pick up anything on the website while you're there? Do you get like a quadcopter or anything? I think the shipping is pretty expensive. It's a problem. Yeah, understood. I want to ask you about this political crisis that's, you know, been engulfing President Zelensky over the last couple of days. So for listeners, last week, as Zelenskyy fired his defense minister, Mikolo Federov,

Federov has been clashing with Ukraine's top general, Alexander Siersky, but then thousands of Ukrainians took to the street to protest a decision and demand that Federov being reinstated. Can you explain this clash and why? I see a lot of analysts saying that this is not just about two individuals. This is about kind of generational disagreements over tactics and technology and maybe even like political threats to Zelensky. Do you want a short explanation or a long explanation? I want whatever you think is the best explanation. Okay, that's hard.

Well, basically like the experts are correct. So every July, President Zelensky has this one thing of just causing a political crisis of his own making. Last July, it was the same thing. I don't know what's with him in July. So, yeah, so in January, I think, Mihalafoddorf was appointed as defense minister, and he brought this basically new approach, right? He was, he's kind of the drone guy. He's, he digitalized a lot of civilian infrastructure, but also the military. So he is seen as a modern, progressive, young official who can, who's bringing change, right?

Obviously, he wasn't successful in doing everything, right? But for example, he was the one who helped spearhead the middle strike campaign. He was the one who actually had a plan, right? So in short, it's a young progressive guy with a plan. And obviously, that's something that's looked upon favorably by the population, which is tired. The population is gassed. there's a lot of problems with how Ukraine is doing this war for obvious reasons, right? And then you have the military command, which is known for top-down kind of approach, micromanagement.

Some people say that it's Soviet-style. I would not go as far as saying that, but obviously there are many problems, right? For example, one of the main problems is that the military command and Mr. Sersky is known to like infantry attacks even now, right? They have, for example, there's this unit called Skela, which is now blown out of proportion. All the mobilized people now go, not all of them, but like many of them, are drafted specifically into this unit and people say that it's not effective, right? So there's two visions of how Ukraine can continue this war, right? The saying on the street goes that a small Soviet army can't defeat a big Soviet army, right? And that's what Ukraine has to be asymmetrical.

Ukraine has to innovate. Ukraine has to change. And unfortunately, President Zelensky took a pretty not wise decision, and he decided to change the defense minister. There's multiple explanations why he did it, because this kind of the old command had a conflict with the defense minister, And Mr. Fedorov also wanted to change defense procurement, how it's run, and so on. So he ousted the defense minister, and apparently the president's office didn't expect people to rise up, people to take the streets. And so the similar situation that happened last July when he didn't expect people to start protesting happened this July. And the problem right now is, I'm not sure when this is going to air. Okay, so based on, like, right now, the situation is as follows, right?

Zelensky is inclined to change Sersky, to change the military leadership, to kind of appease the protesters, and hopefully for him, the protests are ended, right? What he's not willing to do is he's not willing to reappoint Mr. Fyodorov as defense minister because basically ego problem, right? If you made a mistake, the wisest thing to do is come out and say, sorry, I made a mistake. But if you're a president, then probably you're not going to do that. Oh, we get that over here in America. Yeah, I'm not going to explain that part to us. Yeah, I'm not going to explain that.

Yeah, so he proposed, according to our sources, Mr. Fedorov was proposed different posts in government. He was proposed being an advisor to the president, deputy prime minister, like basically anything possible, but not the defense ministry, which Mr. Fedorov says that, again, according to our sources, doesn't make sense because he started some reforms in the defense ministry and he only wants that post back. And so here there's a stalemate, and obviously the next protest is scheduled for Friday. And obviously, in this window of like two, three days, we'll see if either side budgets. July mess. Yeah, yeah, I don't get it. I don't know why I do it. But before I get to my last question for you, you are obviously doing amazing work reporting on all these issues covering the war.

You're doing it, you know, under the threat of bombardment from the Russians. How can international listeners support you, support what you guys are doing at the Independent? Is it subscribing? Is it sharing clips? Like, what's the best way? Well, basically, we're reader funded, right? We currently have 34,000 paying members. The membership starts from $5 a month.

We strongly recommend supporting independent journalism in Ukraine. We rely on our readers for support. So if you have the means, if you have the desire to support independent journalism, we would be really grateful for your support. Well, it's worth the money. You guys are doing amazing work. Last question for you. Earlier this week, Ukrainian law enforcement released this video of a package bomb

exploding outside this Monaco home of someone who's described as a Ukrainian oligarch. The blast nearly kills this man. It severely wounds his girlfriend. Wounds her son, I believe. I don't know if it was his son or her son. The suspected bomber is believed to have been contracted out for the hit and later killed by Ukrainian intelligence officers. What the hell is happening here? Can you help me sort of unpack the layers of this story? Well, this is, yeah, this is the weirdest subplot in Ukraine

currently. So obviously there are several versions, right? We don't know what exactly happened. So this man who, Yirma Liev, he's a Ukrainian sketchy businessman from the early 2000s who left the country who had problems with the law here, who is basically a citizen of Cyprus now, and he's in a bunch of shady stuff, right? What happened is he was sanctioned by Ukraine, so there's definitely, he has a really bad reputation. The problem here is that because he's involved in so many shady stuff, including business in the occupied. territories which he denies and also some illegal call centers and so on it's hard to establish right now what's the main reason for somebody to blow him up in monaco obviously it's absolutely wild

story that the assassin was later killed in ukraine a middle-aged woman who apparently was just paid to to plant something uh and she's obviously not the main culprit here. So currently there's two people in prison in Ukraine. Actually, one of them was a member of Ukrainian security services. And the official kind of version right now is that it's kind of a business conflict and those people were paid to basically organize an assassination. We don't have more details right now. We obviously are covering this. But there's a whole problem, I would say in multiple countries that are at war, right, where there's part of the society, right, is working in a gray zone and there's some kind of shady, shady businesses taking place.

And obviously that's something that is worth investigating both by law enforcement, but by journalists as well. Yeah. Crazy, crazy story. Well, that's a great reason to support the Keeve Independent, become a subscriber. And Alexi, thank you so much for joining the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks again, Alexi Sorokin for joining the show, and we'll talk to you guys next week. Pots say the world is a crooked media production.

Our show is produced by Alona Mankovsky, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethkoat, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffat, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Her staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.