Pod Save the World - Talks with Iran and covid in India

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss all the latest news out of Iran and the Iran deal negotiations, reports about mysterious directed energy attacks against Americans, the Biden administration’s North Korea policy, a deadly stampede in Israel, fighting on the border of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the fury of Manchester United Fans and more. Then journalist Rana Ayyub joins Tommy to talk about the devastating wave of coronavirus cases in India and how Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is making it worse.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. 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 Ditor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I want to give the people what they want and just start by congratulating you in the New York Jets on drafting a new quarterback, Zach Wilson out of BYU. How are you feeling about this move? I mean, I felt good about Mark Sanchez. I felt good about Sam Darno. Zach Wilson looks young enough to date Mark Sanchez. I even felt, yeah. Well, actually, we should talk about. this for a second. You know, one of the things about getting into your 40s is professional athletes suddenly start to look like, like, children. I know. I hate it. I look young, too. But, like, he looks like, he looks like Ronan. He looks very, very young. He looks like he's 14 years old, but he, I mean, the thing is, he had a really good season last year, but that was it. So, we're basically banking the franchise on one year. But, hey, you know, you're the Jets. You got to

roll the dice and see if the numbers come up something other than snake eyes, you know? See what could happen? Yeah, I saw you guys. also took a safety out of Auburn. That'll make Robert Gibbs happy, a cornerback out of Duke, which I would say is pretty questionable. Someone talked to Reggie Love about that. Well, my Patriots, our draft strategy,

was basically take guys who went to Alabama, starting with a quarterback named Mack Jones, who, you know, I was really hoping for Justin Fields out of Ohio State, but what are you going to do? So, I mean, I have to say, I would probably prefer Justin Fields. But, hey, you know, we'll see what we got. We also got just a badass detackle from Alabama, also named Christian Barmore, who is the defensive MVP of the national title game.

So I'm cool with the strategy of just like to have Nick Sabin gift wrap whoever, you know, Belichick wants. But, you know, look, Tom Brady, 199th pick, right? Julian Edelman, stud-wide receiver for us was a quarterback in college. We got him in the seventh round. So I think the lesson on this is people who grade drafts know less. about the future than almost anyone else in any field. I'm intimidated by the NFL draft because there are these people who follow it year-round. I always feel very poorly informed when I'm watching it and very turned off by Roger Goodell's like bro-y approach to it.

I mean, he brought his dumb chair up on stage. Like he thought that was cool. It's not about you, man. No one likes you. You ruined this thing. Yeah. Nobody wants to see you up there. Anyway, now that we got that critical update out of the way, we have a fantastic show.

We have lots of Iran news. There's an update on those mysterious attacks on U.S. personnel who were serving abroad. It was called the Havana syndrome by some. Seems like that might have been a poor label for it these days. We got Biden's North Korea policy, this horrible tragedy in Israel. Some very great news on the Biden staffing front. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan clashed last week. We'll talk about what happened.

Some more Super League fallout, refugees follow-up, El Salvador, Colombia protests, and the CIA's recruiting efforts. And then, Ben, I talked to friend of the pod and incredible journalist Rana Ayyub about the surge of COVID cases in India right now and the ways in which Prime Minister Modi has made things worse. You were missed. I felt very lucky to get to talk to her because she is just like, I don't know, one of the better human beings. I think we've interviewed on the show and an amazing journalist as well. Yeah, I love Rana. I've become pretty good friends with her over the last year. And I will say, like, she's an indispensable voice and a courageous one. and someone who gets like an incredible amount of awful trolling online. I mean, man, you think, you know, I thought I, you know, got it bad at times.

Like what Rana puts up with from the kind of, you know, pro-mody troll machine there is pretty brutal. So everybody should get her back and listen to Rana and be appreciative that she's willing to put herself out there. It's pretty incredible. Absolutely. And she's going to tell us about some great organizations that are helping people on the ground that will put in the show. notes. If you want to donate, also just follow her on Twitter because she's constantly, you know, literally like going out into, you know, really economically depressed communities, giving out supplies and things of people who need it. Ben, one thing I didn't talk about with her was something

we noticed last week and we're texting about, which was like, in all these Biden statements about the administration's sending aid to India, there was this mention of how it was reciprocal. And so we did some digging. Both of us were like, what are they talking about, right? So we did some digging to find out what it was. And we learned that last year, Trump's strong-armed Modi into allowing India to export hydroxychloroquine to the U.S. So thank God to Herr Trump for that. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, it is, it's actually one of these like small, ridiculous things, right, where you're like, okay, the hydroxy help at the beginning of the pandemic was mainly about, you know, Trump's strange theories of which will look even stranger as time passes. But I think the

other thing that is telling about it is that, you know, Modi's so thin skin that, you know, he needs to make it look like this was reciprocal instead of just like, hey, you know, countries help each other out here. And, and I mean, it's a bit of a window into the psychology there. And I'm glad the Biden team is providing the assistance, you know, but, you know, I'm not sure they need to bend over this far backwards to placate Modi's politics. But, hey, you know, important thing is that they get as much stuff to India as possible. because this is a humanitarian crisis. Yeah, absolutely.

By the way, if listeners want far better takes on all things sports, then we can offer Don't Miss Take Line with Jason Concepcion and Renee Montgomery. This week, they talk with Adam McKay, who is an incredible comedian, writer, podcaster. So subscribe to Take Line wherever you get your pods. And then also America Dissected is back for a third season. Dr. Abdul-El-Said. He's going to talk with scientists, policy leaders, like cultural folks to help you understand new scientific discoveries, mental health issues, COVID, climate change, like so much more.

It's just it's so nice to have a brilliant doctor speak to you in plain language. So subscribe to America dissected wherever you can. Ben, I think we should start with some Iran updates because there's a lot of weird churn out there that it could be connected. It could not, but it's worth, I think, ticking through some of it. So on Sunday, Iranian State TV reported that the U.S. and the U.K. had agreed to a prisoner exchange with Iran that would have involved like trading some America. versus Iranians and then billions of dollars in cash. Biden's team quickly denied those reports, but it did kind of make my ears perk up and wonder if maybe there are prisoner release discussions happening. Separately, an outlet called Iran Wire reported that officers from the Islamic Revolutionary

Guard Corps or IRGC rated President Rouhani in Foreign Minister Zarif's offices. Apparently, this was part of an investigation into a leak of an interview that Foreign Minister Zarif did, where he was critical of the IRGC. We talked about that last week if you want more information about it. Third, Politico published a story that included just unbelievably annoying quotes from Senator Bob Menendez, the Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he seems to question whether any diplomatic agreement with Iran can be trusted at all because of the aforementioned rivalry between the elected leaders in Iran and the IRC.

And then in the piece, Menendez asked all these rhetorical questions about the substance of what the, you know, a new JCPOA might look like, which is sort of annoying to me and odd since I bet he could get those questions answered literally any time he wants by the White House. On Sunday, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, seemed to tamp down expectations about a deal saying the two sides are so pretty far apart. So, Ben, you know, a lot of stuff there, you know, look, my takeaway is it was very frustrating to have Republicans in this political story explicitly saying they're trying to block diplomacy by Biden. And then you have Menendez kind of helping them from the Democratic side. There's also reports in the news about meetings between senior Saudi

and Iranian officials, about maybe diffusing tensions between those two countries. How are you feeling about the prospect of reentering the Iran deal these days? Like, how are you great in this? I mean, I feel pretty good about it much better than like a month ago when we were raising some alarm bells. Clearly there's pretty intensive negotiations going on. And Tony Blinken was just in the UK. I'm sure this was a key topic of discussion. And even that leak that we saw that you mentioned that was on like a kind of pro-Hizbolo television station, it does kind of suggest that there's an awareness that an endgame of negotiations is beginning. Because how I read that leak, Tommy, is that that may be the hardline Iran negotiating position.

And the IRGC may be leaking that because they want to box in the Iranian negotiators to try to get that. You know, that kind of stuff happened before when we were negotiating with the Iranian. So it's weirdly a sign that they've probably made some progress. So I think we're on the precipice here of potentially like the most consequential thing that the Biden team has done in terms of foreign policy, you know, up there with Afghanistan, of course. On the Menendez thing, I mean, I share your extreme frustration here. And look, just to deal substantively with his concerns that he's expressed, okay, yes,

the IRGC does wield a lot of power in that system. But so ridiculous about all these rhetorical questions and expressing all these doubts is that we've seen the deal implemented. Right. Like five years ago when the deal was negotiated and implemented, the very same concerns were raised about, well, could they really deliver? Could they really follow through with the IRG-CB a spoiler? And lo and behold, we have a two or three year period when the U.S. before Trump pulled out of the deal where Iran fully complied, verified by the IAEA, the international agency that monitors the deal by the U.S. intelligence community and military that reported as much to Congress. So these concerns have been addressed in the real world. It's not a hypothetical

where you need to ask these kind of probing ponderous rhetorical questions to prove what a hawk you are. We have a track record that shows it as complicated as the Iranian system is. They have stuck to a deal in the past when the United States was in the deal. And it was only when Trump pulled out that the Iranian started to violate the deal here. I also think that all this activity, and you mentioned the strange IRGC power play there, reminds you that there's a lot of moving parts here because there's an Iranian election coming up. And all the more reason to try to just get this deal locked in and in place, because if you can, and if you miss this opportunity and the window closes, and then you go into an election where the hard line Iran is going to make a hard push,

you could find yourself with much less running room come summer or fall here. then you have right now where there is this window where you can get something done. So positive signs, but again, the hardest push is yet to come. And look, Democrats in Congress need to get in line with this. I mean, there's nothing to be gained from proving your hawkish bona fides by, you know, expressing lukewarm support or mild opposition to something that works that takes the Iranian nuclear issue off the table. And look, you're never going to be as hawkish as the insane Republican rhetoric that we're going to hear about whatever Biden does here. Don't undercut a Democratic president in his first year trying to do something that the previous Democratic president also did that worked, you know?

This, so I think people should, you know, we say it's on domestic policy, but like, should be pressuring Democratic members of Congress to stop this performative, you know, questioning and realize that this is by far the best option available. Yeah, it's so, like, we'll talk about North Korea in a little bit, but it's so frustrating to think back to when Trump was engaging with those talks with Kim Jong-un. And, like, the sort of polls of the debate were, like, Lindsay Graham on the super far right, asking Congress to authorize the use of military force against North Korea to backstop the negotiations. And, like, we can't even get, you know, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee to just, like, full-throatedly come out in support of diplomacy to solve a problem when there is, like, a very clear track record of it. working like a couple years ago. It just drives me nuts. Yeah. And what's also frustrating about this is that when Trump was in office and he pulled out of the JCPOA and the results were clearly so terrible,

the Democratic caucus was pretty united and being critical of Trump. And even opponents of the deal like Chuck Schumer, who's now the majority leader, were very critical of Trump. Well, you know, was that just anti-Trump politics? Or did you not learn? There are actually a lot of commentators, some Republican commentators, you know, Max Boot, you know, hardly a progressive Democrat, we were like, I was a critic of the Iran deal, but it worked and it's the best of all these different options. Like, you can do that. Even people who oppose the deal, right, like Ben Cardin and Chuck Schumer can say, look, you know, we saw the deal implemented and it worked. And we had concerns before the deal about whether Iran would stick to their obligations. But there's a track

record of this working. Don't allow this. The more Democrats, you know, oppose this or express all concerns about it, the bigger of a political story this becomes. And the bigger problem it is for Joe Biden and the more of a drag it is on him, like make this as simple as possible. The Republicans are going to oppose this. Like the Democrats, by and large support it and I think should give it strong support. Biden should come back in the deal. And we can all move on knowing that of all the many issues that Joe Biden has to deal with as president, the Iranian nuclear issue for at least the first term would be taken care of if this deal is returned to and implemented. Yes, knock on wood. Let's hope they have some success in these talks. I want to turn to a Washington

mystery that we've been hearing about a lot over the past few years, which are these periodic reports about U.S. officials serving abroad, coming down with mysterious illnesses. It started with embassy staffers in Cuba in 2016 who experienced a vertigo headaches. They heard piercing noises. Then there were reports of similar incidents happening to diplomats or CIA personnel in places like Russia and China. And then last week, CNN reported that the U.S. is investigating a similar incident with an NSC staffer who I guess felt sick near the White House. And then there was another similar incident with a White House staffer who was walking her dog in Virginia. So obviously it's a big deal if this is some sort of attack, if it's now happening in the U.S., let alone right by the

White House. It was near the ellipse where people used to park. So one of the theories about why people are feeling sick is that some adversary, potentially Russia or China, is using a weapon that harms people by directing microwave energy at them. CNN reported that Trump's team put the Department of Defense in charge of investigating these incidents because I guess the government felt like the State Department and the CIA weren't taking it seriously enough. Politico also, you know, a long piece about this, talks about the challenges of diagnosing these illnesses, including some false alarms.

Like, I guess there was some guys serving in Syria who felt sick after a jog and there was a Russian helicopter nearby and they thought it might be that in a directed energy attack, then they realized it was food poisoning. So there's like a lot of, there's a lot of room for false positives here, especially when you start to think like, oh, this must be happening because someone's attacking us. The former acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, said he views this as an act of war. Politico also reported that defense officials have told Congress they think it is Russia that is the source of the attacks. And they're also getting worried about this happening overseas in places like Syria or Afghanistan. Ben, you know,

we've been talking about these incidents for like five years now. I still have no idea. what to make of them. For a while, this was branded, the Havana syndrome. You've pointed out many times that this was blamed on Cuba and uses a pretext to roll back. Obama's opening there. What do you think, what's your sense of what's happening these days? And like, do you think there's, I mean, just to ask the direct question, is there any chance the Cubans have the capacity to do this in D.C.? Can we rule that out yet? There's zero chance. There's zero point zero chance that the Cubans have the capacity to do this in D.C., in China, where it's been reported, in the Middle East.

I mean, the two things I'd say about this are, like, clearly, a lot of this feels like Russia, you know, and I know there's a lot of, you know, there's been a lot of stuff thrown at the Russians over the years, but everything I've heard out of the government, you know, points to the Russians. People now have begun to say that publicly. And the reality is it's of a piece, right? They have harassed U.S. diplomats. They have done things in third countries like poison people, right? This would be an incredible violation of just how nations interact.

Because if they're trying to so mess with the United States that they're trying to create this fear or this sense that you're not safe anywhere, that's something that we've never seen before. We didn't see it in the Cold War, you know, between the U.S. and Soviet Union. like this idea that they would basically violate the capacity of nations to even conduct diplomacy and operate overseas, I think the U.S. would have to take that incredibly seriously and mobilize a global coalition of countries to go to the Russians and just like, look, this is a line that cannot be crossed here. And there's going to have to be a very strong multilateral response to this

if we can lay out the evidentiary basis that was Russia. I want to say something about the Cuban piece of this. you know, this was, because this is a huge scandal of my mind. This should be a big scandal. The Democrats have control of Congress. They should investigate this. Because what happened is when this originated in Cuba, the Trump people jumped on it, as you referenced, used it to essentially shutter our embassy in Havana, yank out so much staff that we essentially can't even process visas in Havana to roll back Obama's policy changes. I mean, there's two huge problems with that.

The first is that's a huge scandal if they were basically, if they knew that there was evidence that suggested this wasn't the Cubans and this was much bigger than Havana, if because they were so intent on appealing to their hardline Cuban-American base in South Florida that they basically invented a story that this was the Cubans, that's insane. Like that put people at risk around the world. Like, I mean, I really, really, really want the congressional committees that are in the hands of Democrats to pull the threat on this, because if you can establish that the Trump people were aware and investigating and asking the Pentagon to investigate whether the Russians were doing this,

while essentially the public-facing story was that this was in Havana, this must have been the Cuban somehow, therefore we're going to roll back Obama's policies, that is a grotesque politicization national security that I think kind of goes even beyond just about every Trump scandal that we've seen to date. And the other thing is, and you're going to hear me to talk. about this more and more, Tommy. There is a humanitarian crisis in Cuba right now because of the sanctions that Trump put on them that does not get enough attention. That is entirely because of U.S. sanctions. Their economies in the worst shape that it's been since 2005, it contracted by over 10 percent last year. The World Food Program is warning of food shortages for Cuba. People

starving. There's the risk of mass migration from Cuba, people trying to cross the Florida Straits, on makeshift rafts again, back into the United States, people migrating to Mexico. And look, the Biden team has been terrible on this issue so far, not just to not doing anything, but in the language that you see coming out of the White House, basically is like, yeah, this is an important, it's not a priority. You know, what about, well, you know, I get that it's politically difficult, but what, what about the humanitarian crisis that is happening 90 miles from Florida here? The pretext for which was something that we now know was probably totally false.

You know, that the Cubans launchies attack. Wow. I didn't know it's that bad. Those are some really jarring stats. Yeah. It's not good. And it doesn't get attention because it's a small island. But, you know, someone needs to be raising it.

But again, like if Rex Tillerson and all these people in the Trump administration essentially hid behind the Havana syndrome to justify a pointless rollback of these policies under Obama, that's beyond cynical. That's, that's, that's criminally negligent because it put our people in harm's way in other parts of the world. Yeah, Rex Tillerson, who was busy firing half the State Department staff before getting fired himself while currently on the toilet, which we learned. I want to turn to another sort of like major issue Biden's going to have to deal with, which is North Korea because the Biden team announced that they had conducted a three-month review of North Korea policy, finished it, and then Jen Saki offered some sort of general outlines of the new approach. And Ben, I saw a few different takes on the little that they'd put out. And I was curious what you thought.

So some of the reporting focused on the fact that it sounds like Biden isn't looking for one big grand bargain with North Korea, solves all the problems, and he instead is open to cutting incremental deals and more dialogue. One outlet called the policy a rebuke of both Trump at Obama is, of course, the important thing about a plan to get rid of nuclear weapons is whether or not it's a sick burn. Vox noticed that Jen used the phrase denuclearization of the, Korean Peninsula and not denuclearization of North Korea, meaning Biden kept the phrasing that Trump and Kim Jong-un signed at the 2018-Singapore summit. That phrasing is important because it suggests

that an ultimate deal could include North Korea getting rid of its nukes and U.S. troops leaving the Korean Peninsula, so much more of a reciprocal thing. Did anything jump out at you about this, you know, what little policy language was laid out that seemed new or big or different? I mean, from what I heard, it sounds like exactly the right approach on an issue where, let's face it, it's going to be very hard to make progress. I mean, what I heard in the description of the policy from Jen and from Tony, from Tony Blinken, was, you know, this idea that they're open to diplomacy. You know, they're not going to be so stubborn that they're just going to close the door and do all sanctions. I think there was a very appropriate, you know, essentially diplomatic path laid out where this is available. I think the idea of incremental steps is really the only practical approach here.

The North Koreans are not in the next four years in the first term of Joe Biden just going to come out and give up every piece of their nuclear program. So the idea that what you're aiming for is not the kind of huge, splashy thing that Trump was aiming for, which obviously didn't achieve much at all, if anything, but rather kind of some step-by-step process where you're slowing and hopefully reversing pieces of the North Green program in exchange for some confidence-building measures in the U.S. That's the right approach. And the language about denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula is good because, you know, it's about, I mean, that was the language that's been used, you know, previously. There was some language that we flagged on this show about, you know, denuclearizing North Korea that sounded unusual to me because what you're trying to uphold is the norm against proliferation generally, you know?

Yeah. And so, you know, it's not just that we don't want the North Korean staff of nuclear weapons. We don't want, you know, the Korean Peninsula, whether it's the Republic of Korea or North Korea to have nuclear weapons. So from what I heard, it's the right approach. Obviously, it's going to be hard. We should, you know, you get graded on a curve on North Korea because it's not easy to get results, but this feels like the right place for them to land. Yeah, the, you know, the best curve to get graded on Donald Trump discovered, which was you just hold some dumb meeting in front of a lot of cameras and people give you credit for not even coming close, not even beginning to solve the problem.

It's amazing how much, you know, attention that got. for no reason. Like literally nothing changed because of that summit. Nothing. You know, you could have not held that. If you had not held that summit, I don't think anything would be different today than because of that summit being held. No. And of course, the North Koreans did what they always do, which they took umbrage at them getting barely mentioned in Biden's joint session speech. But, you know, so far, I haven't seen a big response. But we'll be watching this one.

Unfortunately, I think, for a long time. Yeah. Let's turn to Israel because Israel announced a day of morning. in an investigation into a really horrifying incident that killed, you know, I've seen estimates of up to 45 people at a holy site in northern Israel. So an estimated 100,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews were at this holy site for a festival. And tragically, as they were trying to exit, some people slipped and they fell on this narrow passageway. And then others were trying to exit above them and it ended up crushing all these people as everyone was trying to exit out of the same

narrow passage. A lot of Israelis are furious that previous warnings about safety at this specific site have been ignored. I think this sort of folds into a broader frustration about, you know, a feeling that some ultra-Orthodox Israelis live by a different set of rules. And then politicians let them do things like host this massive festival when COVID isn't fully eradicated, basically because they need their votes, right? There's no check on that behavior. I'm sure we'll learn a lot more of what would happen through, you know, future investigations. but really I just wanted to raise this and offer condolences because it's just like it's a horrifying tragic scene and something you don't ever want to see.

The accounts of it were just horrifying, like the people describing what it was like to be in that crowd. I mean, I couldn't stop reading it. And I feel, you know, condolences to everybody in Israel and just what a horrific event. And it was also interesting to read the warnings that have been issued, though. You're right, Tommy. Yeah. They were very, like, on point.

It was like there will be a stampede. People will die if you don't address the way in which the site is put together. And it does point to this broader issue that has come up. You've seen this on military service. You've seen this on lots of things in Israeli politics. The nature of the coalition building that we've talked about a lot because there have been so many Israeli elections is such that sometimes these kind of concessions or carve-outs are given to Orthodox parties or on certain policies. And this is a good example of like why you don't do that. You know, like it's in the interest of all people to have kind of a common standard for basic public safety. So, you know, right now,

like the emotion and the feeling should entirely be about those who lost loved ones and those affected. I do think it is worth, you know, people in Israel taking a look at this again. Because, you know, it's not just about whether people are getting preferences. Sometimes it's about public safety. And I should say, like, you know, as we come out of COVID or we're still dealing with COVID, there are going to be different flavors of this challenge. You talk to Rana, a very different situation because India is in the middle of a horrible outbreak, whereas Israel has done very well with its vaccine program. But you had Hindu pilgrimages taking place. Yes, we talked about that. Yeah. And so, I mean, I'm super spreader events.

I get that people want to, you know, particularly when it's religion, people feel compelled to do something that is in line with their belief system. But, you know, when you look at the circumstance in India, too, like, you know, people need to remember. We're still coming out of this. Yeah. And I saw that in Yahoo say, look, it's too early. Right now we should be talking about mourning and not recriminations and who to blame. It felt like every, you know, gun rights discussion we have in the U.S. And I saw a minister who I think was in charge of the event itself, suggesting that what happened was God's will. So I hope that person is fired and that does not go over well. Now, I don't know about but like at some point along the way,

I actually think it was like a post-9-11 thing for me. I actually started really hating big crowds indoors. Like outdoors, fine. Like baseball game where you could like get onto a field or get like, that's not a big deal. But I remember being at a concert in D.C. at the Verizon Center and just like scanning for exits at all the time. I might have been, you know,

I might have taken like an edible too many. But still still the same thing. I will say that it does feel. Again, this is like a, it's an interesting, when you know, when I saw this on the pot outline, I was thinking that people are not accustomed to being in big crowds anymore, you know? No. And because this was the first big crowd event, obviously, of this size in Israel. And it did make me wonder whether, you know, whether we will remember how to be in a giant

crowd. I mean, I've been in, I mean, I'll give you an example. Inauguration day, 2009. I didn't have the best ticket. I was in that tunnel. I was in the tunnel of doom too. Yeah, yeah, where there's huge crush of people that got stuck in the tunnel. Anyway, these things happen.

I guess the word of caution for governments, for worldos, is we're not in good habits of being in huge crowds. So like, we should be extra careful as we kind of reemerge into the wild here. We have not lived in the wild for a long time. We've all been in the zoo of our homes here. So let's be extra careful. Yeah, it's just been me, Hannah, and Luca for a little too long. Ben, I wanted to talk about some really good staffing news for Joe Biden. So first, our friends, Samantha Power, confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 68 to 26.

Fuck those 26 people. That's me editorializing. Not Sam. She's going to lead the U.S. agency for international development or USAID. In that role, she'll be an incredible advocate for getting the world vaccinated, getting U.S. foreign assistance to people who need it. So just an awesome news. Great human being.

Also, Colin Call was confirmed by a vote of 49 to 45 to be Biden's under Secretary of Defense for policy. Somehow, some way, U.S. senators managed to get over their concerns about Collins' past tweets that were mildly critical of Trump administration policies. So, like, two great people in big jobs, I just couldn't be happier for them and for the country. Again, we've talked about Colin. It's absurd that 45 people voted against him, just shows you how broken the Republican Party is. But look for him to be the driving force behind a lot of the policymaking out of the Pentagon. That's what that role does, the Undersecretary for Policy. And Sam, I mean, just a giant dunk that she got that many votes.

That's awesome. It's a lot of votes. I mean, she's going to be at the center of a lot of stuff, including this effort to vaccinate people globally. But I also hope that, like, they really elevate her profile. She's an incredible voice around the world. Like people know who Sam Power is and they love and respect, like the activist community, the human rights community. And usually the USAID administrators are a pretty low profile figure.

I mean, I would use her as a voice. And the fact that USAID's mission is very apolitical, all the better, right? Because Sam Power represents what a lot of people want to see in terms of U.S. leadership around the world, like helping people for the sake of helping people, you know, trying to combat disease, trying to bring electricity to people and have it, trying to combat climate change by helping poorer countries transition to cleaner energy. So, you know, I think this is wonderful news and it really rounds out their team with complimentary voices who bring, you know, in some cases more progressive perspectives or in some cases like Colin, just like deep expertise, but also a

willingness to really fight for what you believe in. You know, Colin got in trouble less for being progressive, but just for being, as we talked about, someone who would fight for the Iran deal, I hope to see a lot of these folks in the public domain, as well as in the room where, as John Bolden says, in the room where it happens. In the room where it happened. Yeah, no, it's also awesome for the USAID workforce because they will have like an inspiring boss who will fight for them. Basically, the U.S. government, USAID just drafted your equivalent of like a David Ortiz,

a no-Marc Garcia, a No-Marcars, a Pedro Martinez. Sam's a big Red Sox fan, so she'll get all of these enormous complex. but those are some ballers. Can you imagine having been in the USAID workforce under Trump? I mean, we talked about the State Department. We should have talked more about like the good people of USAID. That must have been brutal. Yes, truly. And, you know, look, we should talk about development at some point because there's also some reform that needs to be done because a lot of these big development projects get farmed out to contractors. And I mean, I think really trying to empower that USCID workforce, that would be a huge asset for Sam to take that on.

Yeah, totally agree with you. Okay, Ben, I want to talk to you about something that was flagged for us by our incredible producer, Jordan Waller, who frankly, we should just, she refused to do it. We should just, like, force her onto the Zoom because she knows more about this than we do. But there are some reports that officials in Kyrgyzstan said that there was fighting on the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tjikistan last week. They killed 34 people and injured 160. They're really, really awful reports. You know, people's houses were destroyed. Like, I was just watching some radio-free Europe. reports about these funerals, which is awful stuff. These two countries have had frequent skirmishes over disputed land and disputed water resources over the years. But what happened last week was described as the worst fighting between the two countries since they gained independence from the Soviet Union 30 years ago. That independence, by the way, and the lines that the Soviets drew are probably at the root of a lot of these problems. But, you know, this fighting included like civilians, border guards, the Tajik military, so it got very ugly. Al Jazeera reported that it was serious enough that 58,000 people were evacuated from the area. There was concerned that the

fighting could escalate, but the good news is that a ceasefire has held since Sunday. The presidents of the two countries spoke on Friday. The Russians offered to help mediate, I'm sure that will be welcome. Again, I admit to not knowing much about these two countries are really like the stand countries generally, but this was kind of scary. This was scary news. Yeah, I mean, the two things that jumped out to me are just like, we talked a lot about nationalism. I mean, you know, there's there's a disease of nationalism. These, these small disputes that are not getting resolved. They're getting kind of ginned up and dialed up and it can lead to this type of violence. And so it was good to see them turn to dialogue and diplomacy. And hopefully that

can can lessen the tension. I think the other thing that I've tried to do, you know, it was also So yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. You know, these are countries that we don't get a lot of window into. No, especially Tajikistan. Yeah, I was looking around, right? I was trying to find, you know, good information. And you end up finding kind of wire services like you said or Radio Free Europe. But there's some very courageous bloggers in these places.

I think it was just a reminder, you know, like try to seek out and find independent voices who can tell you what's up in these countries. Try to follow them on Twitter because, you know, part of the reason we don't know a lot about these countries is it's not a lot of independent media coming out of there. And so what you get at these kind of, you know, I know if any world or audience may read The Economist, like, you ever come across like that insert where it's like a five-page advertisement for like Kazakhstan, you know, in the economists, you know, like, but that's kind of like what the media is from these places. It's like these kind of advertisements about the economy or the tourism sector. So just this incident reminding me like,

man, we could use better information. But if you dig, you'll find it often on Twitter, frankly, it's one of the things that Twitter is good for. So try to build your own cache of Central Asian bloggers. I'll try to give them some love myself because, you know, it's important that the world understands these places and what they're dealing with. Yeah, that's a really good call. I noticed that Al Jazeera had some really good in-depth coverage. And then, like, they threw to a panel that had a guy in the Czech Republic and a woman in London and a dude in Russia. And I was like, holy shit. Like, what an interesting collection of people.

How do you source interviews to talk about this conflict that quickly and, like, get this interesting panel that all speaks English. It was very impressive. Good for Al Jazeera. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, hopefully, hopefully, like, there can be more storytelling. coming out of these places so that we have a better understanding. Yeah, and right.

And not just sort of like the geopolitics, but like the human beings who are hurting. Ben, speaking of human beings who are frustrated or hurting, I want to talk about some more fallout from the effort to create a European Super League. So on Sunday, Premier League soccer watchers probably saw that about 200 Manchester United fans actually managed to break into Old Trafford, the Manu Stadium, and storm the field, just hours before the game. It was, look, it was kind of funny. They were, like, taking free kicks and stuff.

Like, some cops got injured outside in the protests, and that's awful. But, like, you know, it was kind of motley. It was not as intense as I worried it would be. But these folks were angry about the attempt to create the Super League, which is basically destroyed English Premier League soccer. But they were also voicing longstanding anger and frustration at the Glazer family, who are these, like, Trump-loving American billionaires who have owned,

Manchester United since 2005. They also own the Tampa Bay bucks. And basically, fans feel like the Glazers only care about the value of the team as an asset and not the team itself. I was listening to this brilliant soliloquy about what happened that Roger Bennett, the co-host of Men and Blazers podcast, put out the day of. And he was describing this backlash that you're seeing in European football against, like, the relatively recent influx of money into soccer.

And it made me think about how much corporate destruction of social. sports that we have just kind of acquiesced to here in America. Right? So like we talked about the NFL draft earlier, a bad owner like Dan Snyder in Washington can ruin a franchise for decades, right? Like you deal with James Dolan owning the Knicks. Donald Sterling, who owned the L.A. Clippers was an overt racist. Fans have to deal with like blacked out TV games, overpriced tickets.

Woody Johnson, Trump's ambassador to the UK, is the Jets owner. Right. We're stuck with that guy, you know? Right. Like, you have players like bought and sold, like, pawns. There's no regard for their feeling for the fans. Like, I don't know. I just, I wonder, look, I'm not advocating storming the field.

Like, I don't want to sound glib about this whole thing. It was a terrible thing to watch. I think it was upsetting for a lot of EPL fans. But I do wonder, like, if fans need to, I don't know, we just sort of like are okay with the fact that sports are a business. And that's never going to change. But it doesn't have to be this bad. It doesn't have to be super league bad.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, you know, spoiler, we have more protests coming. I mean, this phenomenon of people just being pissed about the excesses of capitalism is like all over the place. You know, it's global. It's protest against governments. But increasingly, it's protest against, you know, sports, again, we talked about these are, this is something that's important to people's sense of identity, you know. Yes. And when they feel like this thing that is like a key part of their identity, I mean, I know people who like, if you listen, if you ask them to list,

the three or four things about them, you know, they might say their nationality, they might say their religious or ethnic background. They may put the sports team like number three. Oh, yeah. Some people may put the sports team number one, right? This is important to people. And when it's just another commodity, you're just kind of squeezing like a corporate raider, like that's touching people's nerve. And so, you know, there could be more of this kind of protest. Again, not advocating for what happened, but warning more that like, hey, if you don't attention to this. We're going to be seeing more of it. The other thing is, because I was thinking, like, I think sometimes we can overly glorify some past era of slightly more responsible corporate

leadership, you know. I guess I'm about to do that. I mean, it used to feel like, you know, sports teams were owned by, like, business leaders, families from the place. where the sports team was, you know? Right. And so everybody was a kind of all part of the same community. And I'm not saying those people were all saintly. You know, some of them were good owners. And I mean, look, I was a kid in New York, like George Steinbrenner was hardly like a great guy, right? But, you know, the reality, though, is I do think that, you know, there used to be more of a sense, whether it was a sports team, a newspaper was owned by like some business person in the,

in the locality, as everything has become so globalized and antiseptic and divorced from the kind of lived experience of a community, like, you really lose something. You know, you really lose something in terms of like the identity of a place, in terms of, you know, just feeling like everybody has a stake in the success of the team winning, not just the team turning a certain profit. So this is a broader phenomenon. And I would hope we can get back to a place where, whether it's a sports team or any major institution that matters to the identity of a place, that the ownership of that is closer to the people that support it. Yeah.

I mean, look, in this case, you know, Manchester United fans were mad at a guy who literally lives in Tampa. In Tampa floor. I mean, he just views his team as an asset. And I think it has to be, it can't be stressed enough the fact that this creation of the Super League would have destroyed the English Premier League as they know it now. Like, you would have had lesser teams that. rely on the money they make from playing games that get televised against some of the big guys for their existence. And there's a chance they would have gone under. And communities would have

lost the team they love and people would have lost jobs. And like an entire way of life would have gone away for thousands and thousands of fans. And so some little hostage video that your PR firm had you film apologizing to a fan base that you really have no connection to is not going to do it. And like you said, it sounds like these same fans are going to be protesting. again next week. So like, I don't know, like Roger made this point. There's not a lot of benevolent people sitting around, like benevolent billionaires sitting around with enough cash to buy a team like this. But, you know, it seems untenable to have a fan base that despises the ownership quite this much, although I guess Washington football team fans might

disagree with me there because they've been in this boat for a while. So I'm going to veer into a book reference here. Please. And I'll, you know, give my first book plug of the show, we're within a month of the publication date. So please pre-order. But seriously, actually, when I was exploring why people are turning to nationalism, to kind of right-wing nationalism, one of the things that I heard in Hungary that is totally relevant to this discussion is that people's sense of traditional identity was unmoored by globalization, that as everything got globalized and everything became kind of uniform and it came about capitalism, you know, you had less and less and less place to turn, less and less firm ground and underneath your feet,

you know, and so therefore you were riper for an appeal to nationalism, right? And just to draw this out, I'll take it in an American context, right? You know, if your local newspaper doesn't exist anymore. If your local sports team is owned by some billionaire who doesn't live in the city who only cares of the bottom line, and if your local cultural institution has gone under because nobody's financing the arts anymore, like, human beings need to feel like they belong to something. And so part of the political tribalization that we're facing in America, and Europe and many other places is as people are losing these ties to their more local identities, like they're more ripe to find belonging online or in a nationalist movement

or, you know, in India, as you talk to Rana, in a Hindu nationalist movement, a religious-based movement. These things are weirdly connected. I mean, I'm not stretching here from the Super League to nationalism, because again, like, you take away those things that make people feel rooted and anchored in something. They will try to be rooted and anchored in something else. And And that has been a big opening for the Putin's and Trumps and Orbons of the world. Yeah, I was watching this movie on Saturday. It's called Here Are the Young Men. It's this like, it's a drama with like a lot of, if you liked Peaky Blinders, a lot of that cast.

It's Ania Taylor Joy, Finn Cole, a bunch of the guys from it. And it's sort of a story about it. It's like these Irish kids who graduate high school and they do a ton of drugs and they party and they get in some trouble. really it's like a story about some dark things that happen that revolve around culture and what it's taught them about toxic masculinity. And it keeps flashing to like America and sort of American war culture around Iraq and then video games. Right. And it's like sort of the only connection a lot of these kids had was to these like incredibly violent, meaningless cultural events that just sort of celebrated a view of masculinity that was kind of divorced from the reality

of almost anyone's life. Like there were very few actual soldiers. in the U.S. or the U.K. that like these people were actually looking at. It was like call of duty style warfare and violence, right? It was just a very interesting movie and, uh, and well done. And kind of like akin to what you were saying. Yeah, this cultural space is essential to winning the long term struggle for, for democracy, really. Um, because again, if you cannot offer people a sense of belonging, a sense of community, um, it's, it's usually gets directed in the wrong place. Yeah, things get dark fast. Yeah, things get dark fast. So a couple of quick things as we roll through the end of the show. So a couple weeks ago, we talked about how the Biden

administration seemed to backtrack on its commitment to increase the cap on the number of refugees allowed into the country. I just wanted to close the loop on that and let listeners know that Biden has officially lifted the cap to allow 62,500 refugees into the country through the end of this fiscal year, which I think ends September 30th. The fiscal year thing always screws me up. Though that's not the same as actually getting 62,500 people through the vetting process, through the resettlement process, and into the U.S. So, you know, this whole back and forth with a weird kind of unnecessary policy fumble by Biden, but credit to the team for getting to the right place. And credit to the activist community for raising so much noise that they backtracked, you know?

Yes, absolutely. And stay on it because you want to hit that cap and then you want to see it go up to over 100,000 next year. Yes, absolutely right. And then there's a story you flag then, which is some really disconcerting news out of El Salvador. So the Salvadorian president, Naib Buckele, led a successful effort in Congress to purge all of the top judges from the country's Supreme Court. Buckele and his New Ideas Party, they were able to do this because in February they won the midterm elections, were able to secure a supermajority, which basically allowed them to lead this like purge on the final check on their

power, which is the courts. We talked about this back in March, Ben, and sort of fears about this kind of exact kind of power grab would occur. And there's growing concern that Buckely had authoritarian tendencies and might return El Salvador to its time as a military dictatorship. Ben, you had flagged that, you know, I think the NSC staff are in charge of this tweeted about it. I think Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State made some calls. Like, how concerned do you think the Biden team is about these developments? I mean, I think, I mean, you saw Tony call, you know, the day after this was done. I mean, I think they must be really concerned because you cannot deal with the,

the migration issue that they want to deal with without El Salvador being a key part of it. I mean, they're at the center of this. And what's complicated, of course, is, you know, by kind of morphing into something of a right of center autocrat, although his politics kind of hard to pin down, you know, he has reduced some crime, I think, but like you don't have fallen into the old trap that the U.S. has fallen into in Central America in the past, where, you know, you know, you kind of back someone who's increasingly kind of a right-wing autocrat to serve your interests on this case migration in the past used to be anti-communism. So I think the Biden team, it's not, none of this is their fault. You know, like they're just just hard, you know. And I think it points

to the fact that they're going to have some really tough tradeoffs and they're going to have to try to figure out, well, we need to work with these countries. There's no other way to slow the the factors that are driving migration that have also kind of a humanitarian purpose, right? You want to reduce violence. You want to improve standards of living in Central America. But how do you do that while trying to nudge this guy back in a more democratic path? I mean, their work cut out for them. Kamala Harris is going to take this on. I think a key part is just showing up down there a lot, you know, sending high-level people, you know, meeting with a cross-section, you know, not just him, but other figures in civil society.

and just stay on top of it so that there's not a perception that so long as you deal with the U.S. interest in this case on migration, you can kind of do whatever you want. And Tony Blinken, to his credit, his read out of that call was expressing the concern that we had as a country over these steps. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And then speaking of, I think, regional challenges that they're going to stay on top of, we should talk about Columbia quickly because tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Colombia to protest initially it was a protest about a tax proposal by this right-wing government of President Ivan Duque that the unions and a lot of working class people said this tax policy change would have

disproportionately hurt the poor and benefited the rich. This was amazing bad. So the finance minister was asked what the price of eggs was and he answered with a number that was four times less than reality. So when you botch a question that bad, you got to resign and the government actually withdrew the tax plan. But as we've seen, so many times in the past year and a half or so, these protests have continued because they weren't just about this tax proposal, right? There's like a list of frustrations with the government, including something we've talked about before, which is anger that the Colombian government might resume aerial fumigation of cocoa crops, which would hurt farmers. There's also been just

really horrifying violence from the police against the protesters. Dozens of civilians have been killed. You know, I think the UN even weighed in. So this is another one we're going to keep an eye on. And, you know, as like I think the year of the protests really extends into 2021. And there's no sign of any of this slowing down. Yeah. I mean, I think that, first of all, Tommy, and I saw the egg thing. And I was thinking that as someone who hasn't left my Venice neighborhood much in the pandemic, you know, the price of eggs at the air won in Venice is like through the roof.

So I was like, so I would actually err on the upside, whereas this guy aired on the downside. But no, in all seriousness, look, I mean, Colombia has been a very unequal country. The only thing I'd add to this is, you know, Duque comes out of the party of Alvera Uribe, who, you know, many people think is kind of the power behind the power there in Colombia, right-wing guy. And when you referenced this kind of police excess, you know, part of the legacies of the multi-decade conflict in Colombia with the left-wing guerrilla movement, the FARC, is that there was a creation of these kind of right-wing paramilitary forces.

forces that, you know, committed plenty of human rights violations over the years. I mean, I was reading up on these police units, these kind of quasi-perimilitary units, there's a legacy there of kind of right-wing security forces that, you know, clearly also is a part of the dynamic in Columbia. The reality is there's been huge progress in Colombia over the last decade or two in reducing violence and promoting economic growth, but there's massive inequality, you know. And there's still the legacy of some of these conflicts, including in the police forces. And, you know, clearly the Ducke is not done nearly enough to try to address that. May not, you know, be capable politically given his politics of doing it. But the backtrack was good here. But I think it shows there's

this trend we've seen in multiple Latin American countries now of grassroots mobilization. We saw it in Chile to try to address inequality, to try to address kind of structural concerns, including around policing. And I think one thing to watch, and by the way, this is another reason why the Cuba policy, you know, the Biden team kind of thinking they can avoid that is a mistake. A lot of America is kind of shifting to the left here. I mean, if you look at Argentina, if you look at Bolivia, if you look at Lula getting out of jail, if you look at this movement in Colombia, you know, the idea that, you know, under Trump, they thought there were all these right-wing guys, you know, Pinera and Chile, you know, you had for a time,

Mockri in Argentina, who's right of center. Duque is kind of the guy who Trump. Bolsonaro. This is shifting. This pendulum is shifting. And I hope the U.S., the policymakers, you're thinking about Latin America, understand that there's kind of a bit of a mobilization here on the left that we're seeing spread across countries.

And it's not the old school one. This is not like the Cubans pulling a bunch of strings. This is like coming from the grassroots. Yes. Yes. Well said. Last thing before we get to the interview with Rana. So there was a CIA recruitment video that went around Twitter that spawned an infinity number of takes.

I don't know if you saw this Ben. So there's a woman featured in this recruitment video talking about being a millennial, talking about being a woman of color. And that made someone the left feel like the CIA was like cynically adopting progressive language, right? And then someone on the right suggested that talking about diversity in a recruitment video was somehow weak. this take was epitomized by Senator Ted Cruz of Cancun, who said, quote, we've come a long way from Jason Bourne, seemingly unaware that Jason Bourne is a fictional character and that the majority of CIA staffers, like, well over half of the CIA staff spends their days at a desk doing analysis, science and technology, cybersecurity, management.

Like, there's no Jason Bourne running around with the gun that I'm wearing. So, like, there's ops guys, there's an ops side, and then there's whatever. but most of them are like doing stuff at a desk. So I don't know, Ben, like the whole thing just, I did not weigh in on Twitter because Twitter is the worst. But it just, why is it so hard to understand that it's a good thing? Even if you don't like the CIA, you want them to have a diverse workforce, diverse perspective.

You want the entire government to be more diverse, to be, right? Because the old access to the CIA, guess who was running it? White guys from Yale. Yeah. If you're going to use Matt Damon, let's point to. the Good Shepherd, you know? Like, that's actually the folks who are running the CIA, right? Right. Not the Matt Damon and the born identity. Good Shepherd, it's a pretty good movie. People should check it out, by the way. It is. It is. But I think, look, in the second term,

Tommy, so this is after you left, but John Brennan and Avril Haynes, who was the deputy director of CIA at the time, really prioritized diversity and launched some of these initiatives. I'm sure Trump put the kbash on all that. Now Avril's the DNI, Bill Burns, someone who, variety's diversity at CIA, I'm sure. This is good. I mean, we should want, I mean, I can't, you know, the quality of the video, like, I'll leave that to others to, to judge. But, but just the basic idea that they're trying to recruit, they're not trying to brainwash people. Like, we should want the diversity of America to be reflected in the CIA, in every American institution, in the intelligence community. I've always thought it was a huge, huge, huge missed opportunity for the CIA to not

recruit more diverse voices because you want those perspectives to inform how the United States is interacting around the world, including how we're, you know, what the CIA is doing around the world. And I want to say that this should be about gender diversity and ethnic diversity. It should also be about geographic diversity. And sometimes the CIA has been a little over the top and not trusting diaspora populations who I've found to be among the most patriotic Americans, You know, people who are first, second generation immigrant families. So hopefully this is a broad approach to diversity. But, yeah, I'm for it, even if the videos are sometimes, you know, the CIA, as much as the

CIA has been in the popular culture for a while, they're not very good at doing popular culture themselves sometimes. No, they're more better behind the scenes players. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And we come back. We'll have my interview with Indian journalist Rana Ayub about the COVID outbreak in India. and Prime Minister Modi's, frankly, the ways he's exacerbated the problem. So stick around for that.

I am so excited to welcome back to the show, Rana Ayub. She is an Indian journalist, a global opinions writer at the Washington Post, who has recently been doing some really incredible reporting on the coronavirus pandemic in India. And so we are so excited to have her on. Thank you, Rana, for joining. Thank you, Tommy. Always good to be back on the show. Listen, it's always great to talk to you.

I hate the circumstances because, you know, we've been trying to follow the reports about the coronavirus surge in India each week. And it's just, it's devastating to check back in and the numbers go up and up and up. Can you just sort of give listeners a sense of the latest in terms of case numbers and, you know, the hospital capacity to treat patients and just, I guess, what it's like to be on the ground right now in the middle of this surge? Well, Tommy, it's actually a very difficult and trying time to be a journalist in India and not just me, but there are so many journalists out there, especially the young ones. and most of them have not got the vaccine yet.

And neither of me, and a lot of them are these really young, bright journalists in rural India who are reporting the pandemic. It's raging. It's raging. It's devastating India every day. There's not a single part of the country that has been unaffected by the pandemic. The numbers so far are 4,000 deaths in a day. But we hear from a lot of sources, the debt toll could be any time between 5 to 10 times the official numbers that we're talking. about. We are seeing one million cases in three days. That's the number of cases. So,

yes, I mean, right now we are at the, we have even crossed the United States in having the highest number of spike per day. And nobody really, we all knew epidemiologist had been warning about this crushing second wave, about this devastating second wave in India. But the government really was caught napping and which is why we are in a situation like this, that we see this, you see dead bodies, chnucing rules on the streets in parking lots. There was this, there's this young journalist for Arun Sharma who sent me a video from Uttar Pradesh, which is the largest state in the country. And he said that he counted four 56 cipunurals in one day in a single primatorium in a small town.

So you can only imagine those devastation and the scale of, of devastation all across the country. This is like a writer friend of mine keeps saying that, you know, you should not call this a carnage. Like I keep saying it's a crime against humanity. It's a carnage. We said, we are living a Holocaust right now. It's a modern day Holocaust. And yeah, it's just, it's dangerous. It's devastating. Completely horrifying. It's devastating. And I do want to ask you about the government's response in a minute because you've written a lot of brilliant pieces, including a Time magazine cover piece that everyone should read in full. But just, you know, just a lot of the coverage that I've read is focused on cities, on dense

population centers like New Delhi, where I saw, I think, one report where one in three COVID tests were coming back positive. And like you said, I mean, that's probably an undercount when you think about the number of cases. How are people faring in more rural areas that, you know, maybe don't have as much of a media presence? That's, I mean, I really wish, Tommy, that we had more, we spent a lot of our resources on reporting from rural India. I unfortunately have not been able to go there. But there are so many journalists who are reporting who are sending videos.

And the devastation in rural India is on a much larger scale. For instance, a lot of people that I have been speaking to, I lost my own uncle and my cousin in a span of three days. And one of the reasons that he could not be diagnosed on time was the local doctor was treating him and many other people in the villages. A lot of my relatives for Typhol. and not COVID. One, because there is no testing facility

available in the villages. When I spoke to the local doctors, they said, you know, half the time in our villages, we don't even have electricity, there's power failure, we don't have the basic facility we expect us to, you know, have testing mechanism.

People don't even know about an oxymeter. I remember asking my uncle, I said, can you just test it oxygen? He said, how do I do that? As an oxymeter. He said, I don't know. They don't even know about an antigen test. None of them have got vaccinated

because there is so much of fake news that is circulating about the possible side effects of, you know, vaccine, especially in rural India, when there is no penetration of the internet. And even if there is, there is a lot of WhatsApp, you know, they get a lot of these fake news from their own relatives which keeps circulating. And if you take this, if you go to the hospital, you're going to die. Or if you take the shot, you're going to die. There is so much, so much misconception that is adding up.

And the numbers in rural India, I spoke to a, I spoke to a district magistrate. in Bihar, which is another large region in northern India. He said, I can tell you that we're not getting patients. We're only getting dead bodies. And that's the scale of devastation in India. We are reporting, but the visuals that we see on a television set are mainly from New Delhi or mainly from urban cities or Mumbai. But we're not going deep enough.

Of course, right now as, and I don't blame journalists entirely, Yogi Arithanaat, who's the chief minister of the last. largest state in India has put a warning saying anybody who reports about oxygen scars in hospitals, there will be a case that he stood against him. I remember I was speaking with this young journalist yesterday because I wanted the figures and I said, what are you seeing on the ground? And I quoted him for my Washington Post piece. I said, can I please talk about you?

And he said, please do not mention my name. And I said, that's very unfortunately. He said, please do not because I still want to continue reporting from here. And I'm already under a great deal of threat. And you do this. I mean, that is why a lot of reports from rural India are not emerging. And it's important for a lot of us, Delhi, Bombay-based journalists to kind of go to rural India and report from there.

But I can tell you that the scale of devastation is much higher than urban India. And we still don't know what's happening there. God, that's just horrifying. I mean, you know, it really is, it's bringing home, you know, there's this debate in the United States right now about, you know, we have our own sort of anti-vaxxer community and disinformation. It's a lot of is on Fox News. and people like Tucker Carlson who are, you know, sort of talking people out of getting the vaccine.

But it does, like, really hammer home reading your reporting, how privileged we are, how unjust it is that a bunch of rich white countries were able to buy up the vast majority of the vaccine doses. Well, the rest of the world doesn't necessarily have access to these vaccines, including a country like India, that can manufacture hundreds of millions of vaccines, billions of vaccines a year with current capacity. There's this important debate happening about lifting patent restrictions on treatments and vaccines. And like, Ben and I, I think both of us feel pretty strongly that the U.S. government should do that if it would help. They should do literally everything possible to increase availability and access to vaccines.

But, you know, unfortunately, those are longer term solutions to the problem. I wondered if you think there's some thing that needs to happen in these sort of immediate or near term to get this surge under control. Or do we have to go back to lockdowns or what's the answer? See, I can talk about the state where I'm living in Marastra. There is no lockdown, but there is almost everything that goes through a lockdown. So they haven't used the word lockdown as such. But I can tell you that there is at least a 25% decrease in the number of cases. Because, you know, people before this entire, before the search started,

in the month of February and March, people were out in the streets celebrating festivals, going to clubs, as of nothing was happening. And especially I'm talking about, you know, there's one thing this pandemic has revealed in India. I mean, of course we always knew, but this huge class divide, you know, the privilege and the less privilege, the privilege get the vaccine, the privilege are flying to New York, they get their shots of Modena, the privilege are flying in their jets and leaving the country, getting access to hospitals, ICU beds, and on one hand, you have people who do not have the basic access to regular health care. And these are the people who are at the receiving

end of the brunt of India, they are not having enough vaccines, not having, the fact that our health care has collapsed. If our health care has collapsed in the, most like in like for instance i can give you an example of one of the most uh high-profile hospitals in bombay very well the rich uh go which is called lelavati hospital i went there the other day for my own for my own scans there was no space there was no space for the poor there were a lot of people queuing up outside so uh yes that divide is that and the international community really kind of needs to turn its attention to india because whatever help you send us it's it's too little too late.

So you can't have got, and so you really need to concentrate. We can leave politics aside for right now. We just need to save lives. And the world community should understand. I do understand there are, you know, there are diplomatic relationships between countries that can be handled later. This is a crisis. This is a humanitarian crisis.

And if something like this happens in India, how can the world consider itself safe? We are a global community right now. We travel all over the world. So if the virus is surging in India, it doesn't mean it's not going to spread into the world. Second thing, the Indian government led by Praninandis from Adrian Modi, I think his priorities are quite strange. He's building this new parliament building as a priority in the middle of the pandemic. And it's being labeled as essential service.

That resources, I think, you know, these are small things. Like, for instance, there is a report in the magazine in the news website scroll. that we have received, we have received huge aid from countries, but we don't know where is it going. There is no transparency. The states have not yet received it. The states have not received oxygen concentrators. The states have not received oxygen slenders. The states have not received vaccines. So where is, where is that help going, which is coming from the international community. We need transparency and we need journalism to hold this kind of, the kind of government's responsibility and to hold the government accountable.

But everything aside, the Indian government really needs to act because it's too little, too late. The current is spread across the country. We think that mid-May, June is going to be the peak of COVID. If that is going to be the peak, and if this is not the peak, I mean, what we are witnessing right now,

I only read about what's going to happen in the next one or two months. Like, I was talking to a friend last evening, and I said, every morning you wake up, you don't want to look at your phone, because every third message is about some person dying in your imaged circles, somebody in an ICU, somebody on a ventilator, then you don't know how many of us are going to emerge out of this in the next two or three months. So that's the kind of situation we are going through.

So I think at this point of time, the priority of Indians, the Indian political in class, everybody is to pool in all our resources and make sure that people in this country, especially the less privileged. And I'll keep repeating this, the less privileged. privileged. For instance, I keep repeating this. I managed to get a hospital bed for my uncle in rural India using my contacts and my phone calls and calling a minister. I did that because I had access, but those people in villages don't have my access. So while my uncle still died, he still got dignity in his debt by spending five days in hospital. There are people who are lying on

pavements of outside hospitals. And the relatives are not even able to bury them in peace. There's nobody who's attending their funeral. It's not a, it's not a site for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, you know, look, you, you, you talked about the government's response. You talked about written a lot about Modi's response and just, there's so much about this virus and its variants that we don't understand. And it's been so frustrating in the US to figure out, okay, how much of this outbreak stems from seasonality or a new strain or how much is political leadership, right? Like, I live in Los Angeles where the governor and the mayor locked down fast, they kept schools closed, they took

precautions that at times almost seemed like overkill, like shutting up beaches and things. And yet we had a massive surge in January and none of us could really understand it. How are you able, like, how are you assessing, you know, the role of this sort of like double mutation that I'm now reading about and then Modi's role or the government's role in managing or maybe exacerbating the problem? So the muted stream was first discovered in October. October 2020 and the genome sequencing of course, you know, we did the genome sequencing and I think we should have spent a lot more resources on the mutant strain at that point of time itself,

then possibly we could have been well prepared. So this new strain, it's spreading really fast. And initially what epidemiologist said and the specialist said is that while it may spread faster, it might not be fatal enough as the earliest train that we were encountering in 2020. But now what it looks like is that a strain is more deadlier than what we thought. It's, it's, and unlike last year, we are seeing a lot of, a lot of people in the age group of 25 to 50 who are losing their lives. Every day there's somebody who's 35, 31, 32, they're losing friends in our age group. And that was not the case earlier. So this virus is mutating every day.

It's very dangerous. I really wish we had done some more work on the genome sequencing. Probably we could have been able to help it. But one more thing that really stands out is when the pandemic happened, when the virus struck India in 2020 March, nobody could have been prepared for something like this. It just came out of the blue. None of us.

Yes, it revealed the fact that our healthcare structure is just a, mares that we are not spending enough resources and that's not just the Modi government or successive governments in the past but if the government had it experienced last year and because the prime minister was raising so much money to the prime minister really fun and there was so much aid coming in probably we should have been better prepared for the second way but what did the government do the government allowed for the kumb mela which is this Hindu religious festival where in millions of devotees were taking dip without it became a single source of spread up. The Prime Minister of the country and the

homelester of the country, we're holding election rallies in West Bengal, where the Prime Minister and the Home Minister are live tweeting the videos of those rallies where thousands of people are in those rallies without wearing masks. What kind of messaging is

that? So there were two parallel worlds on social media. I mean, we are still not talking about a world outside social media. So on one hand, Indians were trying to help each other, putting up SOS calls to amplify for oxygen for bed. Indians are really helping each other out right now.

Humanity is really standing out. And on the other hand, the Prime Minister, tweeting about the festival of democracy, tweeting a video of a selection rally and how so many people turned up for the rally. And you wondered if this is the same world we are talking about. It is the same country we're talking about because these two images certainly don't reconcile with each other.

These do not look like they're part of the same universe. It's horrifying. And I think it was very heartless on the part of the prime minister to, and which is why when we say it was a carnage and the prime minister enabled a carnage, he enabled it by looking the other way. He enabled it. He could have very well said, you know, of course, elections happened in the United States as well. Of course, we're not saying that. But we did not invoke people to come out in big numbers. We did not invoke religious festivals and put front page advertisements and newspapers, welcoming devotees. When last year, in March when the Tabliqi Jamaat was a Muslim organization, when there were only 500 cases, and they held a small congregation, the Indian media spoke about the Talibanization of the virus. Why was there not a similar coverage

when the prime minister was inviting millions of devotees to take off wholly there. There was not a single, nobody was pointing out about this being a single source spreader. So there, of course, there's a lot of communal aspect to it. The prime minister did not want to put did not want to ban this religious festival because he wanted to keep the Hindu vote bank in mind. He did not want to upset the apple cart and you wanted to have the Hindu votes coming in.

But what did we achieve in the end? In the end, we only have devastation and deaths. And the majority is of the same Hindu audience. So, you know, I think Hindus are under danger, under threat from the Hindu prime minister. Well, the political parallels are so striking to me, right? I mean, because look, thank God Joe Biden won the election. But despite totally mismanaging COVID, despite putting his own voters at risk repeatedly by holding big Republican rallies in some cases indoors, you know, Trump came terrifyingly close to winning

re-election. And, you know, a lot of folks are looking at India right now and talk about how despite, you know, campaigning hard, despite, as you mentioned, Modi himself traveling to West Bengal, you know, emceeing these big rallies and events. The BJP just lost some recent local elections in the area. How do you think we should assess that defeat, given that it's not a traditional stronghold for them? See, the West Bengal has never really been a trajectory of the BJP.

And West Bengal actually became a sort of a prestige battle for the prime minister because the federal minister, Mamta Banerjee, has been very, very vocal. She's been like this, she's been a tough competitor, I mean, she's giving tough competition to Narendra Modi in terms of she's, she's a great orator, she's been, you know, they both are battling each other out. Narendh Moldi has found us match in Mamta Banerjee in a way. So in a way for Narendra Modi became a prestige battle. So in that sense, a man who held 10, 12 election rallies,

his own home minister was Camden, West Bengal for days. They invoked Hindu chants like Jashidram, They spoke about Muslim migrants invading West Bengal. They spoke about the Rohingya crisis. Despite all of that, if Modi did not win and lost really badly in West Bengal, it means that there's only so much polarization that you can kind of use to kind of, you know, win an election despite, which is why, I mean, this is exactly what Trump did in America. He was drumming up supporters and getting them to come out in the street in large numbers.

So that is a real hope, but at the end of the day, what is also disappointing is that he managed to make indoors in West Bengal, which is not exactly the territory of the BJP. So we have to understand that he did make inroads, which means this entire victimhood that he was kind of drumming up in the election campaign, like we talk about the white supremacy in America. So the Hindu victimhood in India that he has been drumming up did kind of find resonance in the voters in West Bengal. He did win Assam, although he did not win other states, which are of course not states which vote for the PCHP. It is, of course, it is of course a big setback for Narendra Modi. But I don't see in the long run in the 2024 general elections for this carnage of what is what you're witnessing right now to impact his electoral prospects. Because Mio Modi is a leader who he knows to play the spin game very well. He knows to play the game of optics very well.

He knows to divide people and he knows to distract people from the immediate issues at hand. Like earlier elections, he said, I'm going to build a grand, grand, grand, grand temple. And of course, one difference between the United States and India is that you have strong and robust institutions and robust media. We don't have that. We have a Supreme Court literally giving orders, which it feels like are always kind of sued Narendra Modi, we had all given points of time, so much so that last week, when hospitals in India, they're petitioning the Supreme Court for oxygen, the Supreme Court kept it for the week later. While, I mean, what can be more important than the lives of people?

The Supreme Court did not listen to those cases. So I think that's the difference between, that's the only difference. And plus, you have a robust media. You have newspapers putting the names of the dead on the front page of your newspapers and calling out for accountability from your president. And we're not doing that yet. There's not a single newspaper headline that says, where is Narendra Modi? Why is he not being held accountable?

Why are tough questions not being asked about, you know, asked of Narendra Modi? There are people who are asking, but that's only being asked by a time magazine or New York Times or Washington Post. But why isn't the Times of India asking that question? It's the leading Indian publication. Why isn't our media, our media, like I remember there was quite a division of social media. media today about that I was kind of painting everybody with the same brush and there are enough journalists working in India. Of course there are journalists working in India. Of course, there are unsent journalists working in India. But I don't see this this, this accountability

that editors should be demanding of, and powerful editors should be demanding of the prime list. I don't see those front page editors. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. Look, we spend a lot of time being frustrated at the right-wing media at Fox News and frankly at like social media platforms, which have made it so much easier to carve off and live in a different reality where COVID's going away and Trump is perfect and everything else. But you're right, we are very lucky to have a robust, dogged, national and local media here that still exists that can dig into these stories. You know, last question for you. You know, I was happy to see that President Biden spoke with Modi on the phone, that there are a lot of contacts at more staff levels and that assistance

is starting to move, even if, you know, you're right, that it was, I think, too slow and other countries have been moving faster. But, you know, if listeners are hearing this conversation, they're reading the stories, seeing the images out of India and, you know, they just want to help their fellow humans. Are there organizations on the ground that you might recommend that they donate to or support in some way? Like, how can people help out if they're listening, basically? Well, certainly. Yes, international help needs to come, but there's, but help needs to to comment from people individually also to multiple organizations who are working on the ground. There is the Hamekund Foundation.

There are multiple organizations which I can mail, which possibly you can put on the show. And that is out. Last year we did a lot of relief work with migrant workers. And this year, we ourselves are planning to kind of set a relief page for patients to pay their hospital bills. Because a lot of people are getting themselves admitted in the last minute, and they're in the ICU, but they don't, but they know that they don't have money to pay for the hospital. hospital fees. So we have been helping a lot of people with the hospital fees. That's something we are looking at. Because we're in a lockdown like situation, the less privileged, especially

the daily wage workers, and that's a huge chunk of the Indian population, have been rendered jobless. They do not have food to it. So we are starting the relief campaign again. We are trying to kind of supply them with food and we're trying to help them with hospital fees. So we will also be setting up something tomorrow and day after and I'll be putting that on my Twitter page. But I also have been putting out a lot of handles that have been helping. I can send you that in an email very, very soon shortly after we do this interview. But it's very important that each one of you was listening in, but just in personally, yes, governments do that. And it takes time. There are, you know, there are so many, it takes time for help to reach countries

and there are so many diplomatic red tapes and stuff. But what you can do is use your bank account to transfer money immediately to people who are on the ground and helping them with oxygen cylinders and hospital fees because at this point of time, India desperately needs every humanitarian hand, every heart that has the ability to help and that will really count for each one of us. And I'm saying this as a privileged Indian myself, we are trying to do our best, but that's not enough. There are the Indians who are so not privileged. I have the privilege of talking to you and telling to you about what we are facing with my internet. and with my connectivity, I'm talking to the people in the United States,

those people can't even speak to their own representatives who they have elected. So please send help. And especially we are trying to focus in rural India. That's what our focus is going to be. We are trying to make sure that we have a lot of, we are trying to establish centers where we can test people, we can set up testing facilities. We can get doctors who can work pro bono with them. We are getting a lot of doctors from cities to the urban areas.

That's something that we have been working on for the last. couple of days and it should be established soon. Do come and go on my Twitter and do, I'll be also putting out a list of all those people who are all organizations who are working individually in India at this point of time. Okay. That's great. Yeah, we'll put all those in the show notes. Ben and I can tweet them all out individually and then everyone should follow you on Twitter because you are, you know, constantly updating people on the situation on the ground. You have highlighted a lot of great organizations that are doing the work and you yourself, I've seen many, many photos and videos of you like in streets helping people handing out supplies. So thank you for that.

It does it does feel like, I know, you call yourself a privileged person, but it's clear to me that you are having conversations with people bringing those voices and conversations back to you and then help sharing them with us. So we're grateful to you for all that work. And it was really great talk with you. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Ron I, you for joining the show. Ben, I have two quick outro items, two little Easter eggs for the listener. One is a blanket pronunciation apology that will apply going forward. I took a lot of shit for, I guess, saying Glasgow, not Glasgow, about the city where the future climate talks are going to be.

I'm sorry, too. And I'm genuinely sorry because I know I'm mispronounced things. I feel terrible about it. I try to do better. But, you know, yes, people write to give a shit. You guys should hear Jordan try to fix our pronunciation. Like, I can hear something perfectly 10 times. and then it just erases in my brain.

I'm not trying to be a dick. I'm just kind of slub from Boston. Also, Jordan points out that this episode drops on Cinco de Mayo, which gives us a chance to do a little well actually about what the holiday actually commemorates. Did you know that Cinco de Mayo commemorates the first Battle of Puebla, which took place between the Mexican army and the French army under the reign of Emperor Napoleon,

the third, who wanted to establish a second Mexican empire, more favorable to the French. the Mexican army beat the French, which may have had impacts on the American Civil War, because the French, if they had won, it would have made it easier for them to come and help those asshole Confederate. So Cinco de Mayo, not a popular holiday in Mexico. It's largely celebrated in Puebla where the battle took place. A lot of Americans think Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Independence Day. It is not.

That is September 16th. I thought it was a day when fraternity brothers drank so much corona that they threw up on themselves. But have you had a corona Rita? No, I haven't, but I'll take it on. I will say it's in a airport. They're great. Yeah. So it's like it's a margarita when you have like a, basically of a beer.

We're basically, we're now pivoting from the helpful information about what the holiday actually is to the to the parody of the. Yeah, it's plain to type. But yeah, it's a margarita with the corona in it. But sorry, go ahead. Well, the one thing I was to say, Tommy, because I have some friends and have done some work over the. years with Global Citizen. And they put on these concerts to raise awareness and money for things. And this May 8th is they're doing what's going to be called Vax Live, which is a concert to kind of generate support and funding and resources for global vaccination efforts. So check it out.

I mean, I'm drawn to Eddie Vedder on the list, but you know, you got J-Lo, you got Selena Gomez, you got all kinds of people. So check it out. Because they do, they do good work. at global citizens. Absolutely. Also, you know, we talked a little bit about Mexican Independence Day or what it isn't today. In the future, we should talk about the Haitian independence movement and its after effects on the Louisiana Purchase and U.S. history because I've been reading this book by Clint Smith that is not out yet. I got a galley of it. It's just incredible. It's about, you know, sort of this history of a bunch of sites.

connected to slavery in the U.S. It was just a remarkable book. So I'll give you my copy when I'm done. Yeah, everybody should read Clint's book. And then also on Haitian Revolution, Mike Duncan's Revolution's podcast, he did like a massive tour through that. I think I plugged it before,

but that thing is just awesome. Yeah. Without the Haitian Revolution, we probably wouldn't have made Louisiana purchase because I think the French army was just decimated by illness and by getting their asses kicked. So it's an amazing. moment history of this.

Like, I don't think I was ever taught it. Nope. Nope. Nope. Definitely erased. Yeah. Yes, absolutely erased. Anyway, that's all for the outro.

Again, blanket apology on pronunciations. Congrats on your quarterback. And talk to you next week. See it. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yelfried, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.