Pod Save the World - The French President and General Flynn had a bad, bad week

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

Tommy and Ben Rhodes discuss General Flynn's trial and what the hell he was doing for the Turkish government. Then they discuss new Senate reports about Russia's propaganda efforts, China's muslim internment camps, and updates from Syria and Afghanistan. Then French journalist and activist Rokhaya Diallo joins to discuss the Yellow Vest protests in France.

Welcome back to Potsave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor and I'm here in studio, Ben Rhodes. Yeah, good to be here. Who you know, you love, who is excited to talk about General Flynn with me today. I'm excited. I've been waiting for this my whole life. Me too. Later in the show, I talk with Rokaiya Diallo, who's a journalist, author, filmmaker, and activist in Paris who Ben met in 2017, I think. Yes, she was at our Obama Foundation Summit and she really got a lot of attention in France for activism, you know, progressive voice on many issues in France and perfect to talk about, you know, what's actually happening in this yellow vest process.

Yeah, she helps us understand the Yellow Vest movement in France, which has been roiling the nation, as we would say, in an American headline writer for like six weeks. Yeah, yeah. It's actually a pretty big deal that could bring down a presidency or lead us to major changes. We don't know. Yeah. Listen to interview and you'll find out. But, Ben, we have a lot of interesting things that tick through today.

General Flynn was supposed to be sentenced today. Yes. But after a little bit of back and forth, some. extraordinary back and forth to the judge. Yes. That process was delayed. Yes. Which is interesting.

But so, you know, there are a lot of crimes that General Flynn is alleged to have committed. He's Trump's former national security advisor. He's a former three-star general who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency before essentially getting fired early by the Obama administration. One thing that he is in trouble for is unregistered lobbying for Turkey. That is a no-no. His group, the Flynn Intel group, receives a total of 500. $130,000 for its work.

Just a quick refresher for all you lobbyists out there. When you lobby for a foreign government, you need to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. If you don't, it is a crime. Flynn was not very coy about his lobbying. He wrote an uphead for the Hill that was published on Election Day attacking a cleric, a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania, whom the Turkish government has accused of helping instigate a failed coup.

The goal was to, I guess, persuade members of Congress or the administration to extradite Gulen. So Ben, who is, am I saying his name right, Fethullah Gulen? Yes. And why are the Turks so eager to lock him up as General Flynn might say? Yeah. No, and, you know, there's a grab bag of criminality with Flynn, and so we can start with this crime. So Gulen is a cleric that used to be an ally of Erdogan, right? So they kind of came up in Islamist politics in Turkey. And at a certain point, Gulen emigrated to the United States, and he lives like in Pennsylvania, something

of a recluse. In like a senior center or something. Yeah. What's it doing? Just another guy in the mountains in Pennsylvania. But the reality is that there's the, he has these followers in Turkey who are prominent, have been prominent in the education system and the justice system and became political opponents of Erdogan's, right?

And Erdogan had a big falling out with Golan and hated the guy. Then there was this attempted coup, right? Which seemed to implicate and involve some of these followers. followers of Gulen and Turkey. Now, that coup was wild. Let's pause.

That was July of 2016. I remember watching just jaw dropped these tanks rolling through the streets. It was like a legit, you know, old school coup attempt. Didn't they steal some F-16s and things? They were flying like the parliament. It was a wild. It was a wild thing. Erdogan is on his plane,

facetiming a message to the nation saying, stand up and resist the army. Like, yes, it was. I can't imagine the kind of meetings you were doing. No, it was a crazy day, although they did have it in hand pretty quick. And so what happens after this is that Erdogan decides that Gulen is responsible for this coup.

This is why this is important. This wasn't some fringe issue, right? It's easy to look at this and think, oh, Flynn just signed up, got paid $600K to lobby for the extradition of some weird cleric. This was like one of the leading foreign policy issues of 2016. I remember being in meetings with Obama and Erdogan, where Erdogan would roll up like a lawyer with all these, like, you know, those big, folders have that lawyers have that can like fold out. Coridian folders. Thank you. And he'd have all these documents and he'd give them to us.

He'd literally dramatically give them and say, this proves that, you know, you need to send me Gulen, right? And Obama would say to him and did say to him, look, in our system, unlike maybe yours, I can't just decide to like extradite some guy who hasn't been charged of any crime by a judge. I can ask the Justice Department to review all of your evidence and make a determination about whether we can extradite him

because he's a U.S. person. He's a lawful resident in the United States. We don't just render people to third countries where, by the way, Gulen would probably be tortured and killed. Yeah. So the Justice Department looks at this and decides that, no, that actually there's not any evidence that directly implicates Gulen and what happened in Turkey. There's no basis to extradite him. So what's really important to note here about Flynn is the Justice Department had made a determination that, no, there wasn't enough here to extradite the guy. So Flynn is not only signing up as a foreign agent, he's basically signing up for that foreign agent to try to reverse the actual finding of the Justice Department and come up with some other reason to extradite this guy, right? So just like Mike Flynn undermined our national security with Russia, he's really trying to undermine the rule of law here because he's trying to say, well, I support extraditing this guy, even though our own legal system has not found any reasons to do so.

How would you engineer a coup in Turkey from Pennsylvania to be? begin with. I mean, like, I guess I, you know, I've read a little bit about Gulen and Erwan's falling out, and I think it's like 2013. But I just, is this just all a pretext to get him back because he wants to take out his enemy? Well, you know, everybody should read, there's a great Dexter Filkin's piece in The New Yorker about Gulen a couple years ago. I mean, there's one part conspiracy theory, one part truth, right? Again, the truth is there are people in Turkey who have been followers of Gulen who are opponents of Erdogan, right? And it does have a bit of a feeling of like a secret society, right? Like people kind of meet underground, they have conversations,

they listen to audio tapes of Gulen's, you know, sermons over the years. So it does have this following. But Erdogan has projected this onto like a much grander conspiracy theory. He used to call Gulen a terrorist. He'd call him Turkey's bin Laden to us. And he really said without evidence, that Gulen was really pulling the strings on all this stuff. All the political opposition that Erwan faced at home was because of Gulen. Why would Erdogan do this? Maybe he in part believes it. Maybe he also just, it's the bitterness of having someone he fell out with.

But also, it's convenient for Erdogan to say, I have no real political opponents at home. I just have these crazy Gulenists. In other words, there is some real opposition, Erdogan. He's an authoritarian, right? There's secular opposition. There are people who just don't like the direction he's leading Turkey in. It was convenient for Errdwan. to say, no, I'm the only legitimate political leader in this country, and all my opposition

are these kind of cultish, goulinist, filing orders from a guy in rural Pennsylvania that suited his political narrative at the time. And so Flynn is essentially signing on for an effort to extradate a guy without any legal basis to do so and to basically validate Erdogan's view of the world in politics in Turkey, which is that, you know, this is a vast, you know, gulenist conspiracy orchestrated by this old guy. Man, that's nuts. So, okay, so Flynn's arrest did not stop these efforts by the Turks to get Gulen back. This week, like yesterday, Turkey's foreign ministry said that the U.S. was working to extradite

him back to Turkey. I guess Sarah Sanders was asked at the podium today and said Trump will look at the Gulen extradition. This is what's so fucking crazy about this, right? Is it you don't go shopping for an extradition. You know, like you don't go to another country and say, hey, we'd like you to gin up some reason to arrest this person who is legally in your country and extradite him to us. Like, you have to be found to have committed a crime. There has to be a basis to arrest this guy.

And the way the Turks have treated this is like, yeah, we know you couldn't find any reason to extradite this guy, but you, Trump, seem to be hostile to the independence of the rule of law in your country. Why don't you just, like, render this guy? And let's be very clear about what we'd be doing. We would be rendering a guy without any basis in the law to a country where He will likely be tortured and killed. Like, that is not something we should do. He's dead. Yeah.

He's dead. Man. Whatever you think of Gulen. That is dark. There should be legal protections, you know, that extend to people live here. And I think, like, this context, I mean, it's interesting in its own right, but it's also, I think, helpful context for all the weird late stage general Flynn defenders who were coming out of the woodwork today around the sentencing. Like, this guy was willing to take a half a million dollars to help try to send someone who our Justice Department says is innocent back to a country that would torture and kill him. Yeah.

That's not a good guy in my book. No, and again, if the Justice Department finds reason to arrest somebody, then all by all means extra to him. But, like, that hasn't happened here. It's been years. And they're still looking around, you know, for personal profit for reasons to do this. Yeah. I mean, so this Flynn sentencing is delayed.

We'll see what happens here. He's been cooperating with the Justice Department to the point where Mueller's team said, no, don't give him any jail time, despite serious crimes that we've been talking about, including Lyme, the FBI multiple times. Before we walked in here, I was reading. the 302 reports, which are what the FBI fills out when they interview someone like General Flynn. Is there anything else about this matter that you want to get off your chest? Yeah, no.

Look, let's also remember Mike Flynn lied about, what he lied about is he talked to the Russian ambassador, Kiesliak, about, you know, not paying attention to the fact that we, the Obama administration, who were in charge of the government at the time, were going to sanction Russia, you know, indicating they'd make some deal later. And also about how they should vote on your own security council resolution. I think what is notable here, right, is that Mike Flynn was speaking to the representative of the Russian government, knowing full well, by the way, that that Russian government had just interfered in our election to help electrum. Oh, yeah. Right. Against the actions of the U.S. government that is sanctioning that Russian government, right? There's a lot of suspicion about why he would do that.

Let's also remember that, like, part of the reason why there's been so much focus on this is let's just assume that the Russian ambassadors' communications are probably monitored, right? I'm not revealing anything, but like... It was reported. Flynn is probably talking to a guy, and our intelligence community is going to get a record of that conversation. So what's been so telling about this, right, is Mueller would only extend this, you know, recommendation of no sentence and choose not even to prosecute the turkey stuff, right,

if he's getting something really, really good from Flynn, right? There's no other reason for Mueller to give Flynn's such. a pass unless the not just the nature of the cooperation, but the stuff that he's giving is very, very valuable. And what Mike Flynn would know is, well, who told him to talk to Kiesliak? Was it Donald Trump that directed him to talk to the Russian government about working against U.S. interest? Did they discuss the Russian interference in the election? Did they discuss the cover story that they'd be using for the Russian interference in that election? And if you look at this flurry of activity in December, it sets up the entire obstruction of justice case, right? Because

Trump comes in, and when do we see him start obstructing, right? According to Comey, it's he pulls Comey's side and says, oh, let this Flynn thing go, right? After Pence, you know, got caught lying about it, right? And then he fires Comey. The origin of this is all the Flynn thing. So what's clear is that Donald Trump is very nervous about what Mike Flynn might have told Bob Mueller, and that Bob Mueller thinks that whatever Mike Flynn told him is so important that he's willing to recommend no jail time, even though the guy's a criminal.

I think that suggests that in this web of context he had with the Russian ambassador that our intelligence community would have dead to rights, he must have done something quite extraordinary that Bob Mellon knows about it and that you and I don't know about yet. And it's all could have avoided. Barack Obama said to Donald Trump, the one person you shouldn't hire is Mike Flores. Don't hire this guy. He is just not in the right place. Let's say on Russia for a minute because this is just a weird week or a couple of weeks really of like the legal system and government agencies catching up with news reports. that we all read years ago. This week, two new reports were prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee that said

that Russian influence and propaganda efforts were essentially on every major social media platform. They specifically targeted African Americans to try to suppress the vote and divide the African-American community, and that this effort continued long, long after the election. Notably, we learned that the Russian troll farm loves Instagram, so they're like us. Russian Instagram posts received 187. million engagements dislike. It was also notable that Google barely cooperated and seemingly made it as difficult as

possible for the investigators to understand how YouTube was used. So that sucks. Facebook took a lot of shit. Google shit too, so YouTube. So I guess here's my question to try to push this forward. The Russians clearly don't care that we've uncovered all of this stuff. Zero fucks. Right?

Yeah. You mean, you could kind of match up their covert, Instagram, Facebook propaganda with the garbage that's on RT, their overt propaganda channel. all the time. So Russia doesn't care. Trump doesn't care. No one's stopping anytime soon. We're going to see this again in the next election. So like, what the hell do you think we should do about it or the platforms should do about it to try to prevent, you know, communities in the United States from having their votes suppressed or being targeted or, you know, all the things we should expect to happen in 2020? Yeah, no, that's a really good question because what we're seeing

is that the Russians, you know, they find the places where there's already polarization or there's already some weird right wing meme and they just plow content into it and jack up the anger. I think that what the platforms need to do is you should be able to have some capacity to know where the information that you're looking at is coming from. Like if you're looking at something that's been shared on Facebook, they should, you know, the analogy I use Tommy is like Wikipedia, right? Which is a user control platform as a step where, It says whether a source is verified or not.

And if there's some content that just pops up there that looks weird and nobody puts a footnote, it says this can't be verified, right? There should be some similar mechanism to be able to verify where content is coming from. And if it's coming from Russia, and what we learned in the Facebook investigation, they saw that this was coming from Russia and did nothing to warn people, right? At a minimum, there should be a capacity to let people know where certain content is coming from. It should be relevant to the user of that information that it's originated from Russia, right? Right. Especially if you're representing your organization or your page as a U.S.-based, say, Black Lives Matter activist site.

If that's coming from a troll farm in Moscow, that should be noted. They should be able to code things in a way. Look, I'm not the coder here, but that alerts people to where content is coming from, right? you should at least be able to know who is trying to make you unhinged and angry about things or who's trying to stoke division in our country. Other governments have done this, by the way, and European governments have worked with their broadcasting and tech companies to say, let's share information together and flag certain content for people.

Notably the French, right? Yeah. And they've said, like, if we catch you doing this multiple times, we will pull this stuff down, right? And look, we had a similar conversation with the tech companies about ISIS, right? That they were putting all this radicalization propaganda online, and that we had the capacity to work with them to flag certain content, and that ultimately the companies had to set their own standards,

but they pulled a lot of stuff down. I don't know why we should be giving a pass to a bunch of Russian troll farms to randomly be weighing in on matters of social division and political polarization in the United States. Yeah, it's not. Not a good trajectory. And let's be honest, their profit margins are helped by this, right? Like, what gets ad dollars is clicks.

That's right. And anger gets clicks. So the Russian troll farms help a lot of these tech companies make some money. That's like the awkward truth. Yeah, not good. I want to turn to China quickly because there's been some reporting on this issue, but not nearly enough given, I think, the magnitude of what we're seeing. The State Department is on the record saying that China has detained at least, at least 800,000

and possibly more than 2 million Uyghurs and other members of Muslim minority groups in northwest China in basically internment camps, concentration camps, whatever you want to call it. That is a staggering number. They are apparently being detained without any actual charges. The families don't know where they are. And the goal is to essentially brainwash them, force them to renounce Islam, embrace the Chinese Communist Party and, you know, go with the doctrine. So even more disgusting.

On top of that, there was a report today. that these prisoners are being forced to manufacture products that get sold in the U.S., you know, sweatshirts, whatever, sportswear. This is a staggering human rights abuse. How should the West be responding to a situation like this? Right now it seems like silence. Yeah. Well, and first of all, like Tommy, imagine if we could actually see it.

You know, there are journalists in front of this and pictures of it. I mean, part of what's so chilling here is that it doesn't get a lot of, much attention in part because China doesn't let you see it, right? And, you know, you've rightly called a lot of attention to the situation with the Rohingya. In a relatively nearby place, by the way, from Western China, ethnic cleansing taking place, people in camps, the numbers here are even larger than the numbers of Rohingya, albeit it's more kind of systematic. I think the analogy is also Tibet, right, where the Chinese systematically over many years just destroyed the culture and in kind of any sense of independent language and culture and religion among the

Tibetan people, or have tried to at least. They're clearly trying to do the same thing here. I think the West should one do more to expose what's happening here. I'm sure the U.S. government has overhead pictures of these places, has information. We should be publicizing that information. I think we should be presenting that information, you know, at the United Nations and just trying to shine some spotlight on this because China thus far has avoided any scrutiny for it, that would be the initial and obvious place to start. And then you can go beyond that and try to identify particular people involved who may be subject to certain global sanctions regimes because of violations of human rights. I think you can call for kind of commissions

of inquiry, the UN Human Rights Council. But the first step has to be on shining a light on this. Yeah. I mean, one shout out to an organization that's done some great work on this issue is the BBC. they did a report in October called China's Hidden Camps where they were able to do something, basically what you described then is like they took commercial satellite imagery and they were able to overlay the before and after pictures. And you see the scale of these camps.

I mean, there are thousands of meters long by thousands of meters wide. I mean, you know, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of people living in these individual places just prisoner. Yeah, and I mean, you kind of don't think that things happen like this in the 21st century, like up to 2 million people in camps, right?

Try to imagine if this was happening in some other part of the world to some other religious minority, right? Oh, if Iran did this, we would have invaded yesterday. If Iran had camps with, like, you know, anybody, we, you know, this, and it does present the most difficult challenge of our time, which is that, like, China is trying to prove that an authoritarian model can work, you know, that you can get away with all this stuff. as long as your economy is important and is big enough. And thus far, the chilling answers, they have gone away with them.

Yeah. Another major story out of China. There is a massive Chinese communication technology company in China called Huawei. It's the second largest smartphone maker in the world, I think after Samsung. The CFO of the company, who was also the daughter of the founder, was detained in Canada a couple weeks back on suspicion of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. So to summarize, Chinese company, apparently breaking U.S. sanctions on Iran, detained in Canada, massive diplomatic problem. My first reaction upon reading the news was, oh, shit.

Because Huawei is not just any phone company. They are seen by many in the U.S. intelligence community as an extension of China's military. We don't trust their products. You wouldn't let anyone who worked at the CIA use a Huawei phone because there's an assumption that they could build a backdoor into it or monitor those. what did you make of those reports? And what do you think that the end game is here of detaining someone who is so clearly connected to the very top of the Chinese government? Yeah.

I mean, first of all, I don't really think, I don't buy the sanctions saying. I buy that they are violating sanctions, right? But the way in which you go about enforcing sanctions is not usually to start by detaining the daughter of the CEO and the CEO. You impose a fine. Right. You call, you know, there's something that's more aggressive about this. And the Trump administration, including the President of the United States, himself kind of alluded to the possibility that this could be leverage in the trade negotiations, right?

So this seems to be at the nexus of concerns about Iran, but also the kind of China trade dispute that's taking place. And it sets a very dangerous precedent to be using people as chips like this, right? Because what we saw is the Chinese already detained a couple Canadians, right? they could start randomly detaining anybody for violating Chinese laws. They're holding a couple American college kids, I believe, right now. Yeah, they could just, because it's not hard to find some Chinese law that somebody violated, particularly if it gets into politics, right? So the dangerous game that they're playing is that suddenly people become pawns in these great power test of strength, like the trade war.

I think the bigger context here is on the tech stuff with Huawei, the Trump administration and some of their kind of national security hawks are trying to say, we don't want Huawei or any Chinese tech companies anywhere near the supply chain that we depend upon, right? Because they'll infiltrate it, right? And so they're trying to kind of cut off Chinese tech from the supply chain that America depends on, but that horse has left the bond. Feels tough, yeah. It's just like Foxcon is pretty important. Yeah, it sounds really, you know, it sounds like a policy you can design in a room, but it's hard to exist in real life, right? So all these agendas are intersecting here in this one case.

And I got to tell you, though, like, I was just up in Canada. They're in this terrible position, right? Because, like, they're asked to arrest this person by us. They cooperate very closely with our law enforcement, so they probably pick this person up. Then they got the Chinese detaining Canadians. And so Canada's a good example of a country, and this is going to happen more and more. If we get away from a system where countries kind of follow the rules and abide by the norms, where you're going to have like countries like Canada

they're just stuck between the US and China fighting it out here, you know? Yeah, it sounds like the Chinese might have already cut off talks about a trade deal with Canada. Yeah. They're feeling the repercussions as we're trying to stiff the Canadians on trade deals. And not a lot Chinese business people are going to want to travel to Canada right now when they're just arresting random Canadians.

So I mean, to me it felt like you've been in the situation room like a crazy extradition like, or not crazy because again, I'm sure there's some underlying crime. It's just the extreme step of detaining this high-profile person, you know that that wouldn't happen without some white house process. Yeah. Even if it originated in DOJ, they would call the White House and be like, hey, you know, what do you think about doing X? And there'd have to be some White House-led

process to make a decision to detain this person. And again, to not do something if it's an wrong sentence violation, like imposing some huge fine on them first. Yeah, I think one thing that people probably don't understand is the degree to which a single individual can become a massive foreign policy challenge. Right. I mean, two U.S. hikers were taken hostage in Iran. There was an incident when we were still in the administration like 2011 or 12 where a Chinese activist sought refuge in a U.S. diplomatic facility. And there were some months of negotiations about how to get him back to the United States. I mean, it can become all-consuming for a relationship with a country and and also take up a massive amount of mind share for administration.

And that, yeah, and that means the basic point here is if this was really about getting leverage and trade negotiation, I think this is a really dangerous thing to have done. If it's really about a sanctions violation, we'll look at it. And usually there are ways of addressing that without starting some dominoes of countries like China picking up, you know, U.S. and Canadian people in response. Yeah, not great. Two pieces of war news, you know, those places where U.S. service members are still fighting despite the fact that Trump's aides tell the press that he doesn't believe in the

mission and he will never seemingly visit them. The Washington Post reported that U.S. troops will now stay in Syria indefinitely. So I guess that's the stated policy these days without any real debate or oversight from Congress. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, this week, the U.S., the Taliban, the UAE, and the Saudis and the Palestinians are holding peace talk. So, you know, that's hopefully good. I'm curious what you think about sort of the state of both of those wars. And if, like, a liberal activists listening to this show are trying to figure out what's happening or how we can maybe become more activist and, I don't know, push them to a conclusion, what they should be doing. Well, first of all, do you remember when we used to get criticized, I have to do this at least

once every conversation? Sure, sure. Because Obama didn't care enough about the mission, you know, like his speeches weren't. His heart wasn't there. He didn't, like, rip his shirt off and have an American flag tattoo so his heart wasn't the Afghan mission. Can you imagine if we'd actually sent you out to say to the president? us. Well, he doesn't really believe in the mission. That's why he doesn't visit the troops.

It's appalling. It's appalling, right? On Syria, keeping troops there matters a lot, and we have no idea what they're doing. I mean, like, has anybody provided any explanation about how many troops are there and what they're actually doing? And so the first point is, we just need some transparency on this, because troops can stay in a place, and that can lead to kind of mission creep, right? So they went there for one reason to dislodge ISIS. That's been done. What are the they're doing now? Maybe they're participating in the reconstruction. What happens if there's an insurgency there? What happens if there's, you know, conflict with Iranian proxies in southern Syria? Are they going to get kind of caught up in that? So I think there's more of a danger than

people think that the longer our troops stay there, the more we end up kind of buying other missions for them. At a minimum, the Democratic House, and this is what activists can do, should insist on and can compel greater transparency. How many troops are there? How long are they there for? What is their mission? You have to come here before Congress and the American people and explain this. By the way, like, what is the extended legal basis for keeping them there? Great question. So these things all need to be aired.

And, you know, thus far, this administration has awarded that. Despite Trump campaigning, right, on a platform member, he was going to get us out of these wars. What the hell are we doing there? He's escalated all of them, right? And he said publicly a couple times that he was going to get all our troops out of both places, but then walked it back, I guess. Nothing happens, right? And the mission creep just grows. And then in Afghanistan, here I think activists need to be making the case that with a Democratic

Congress and with a Democratic primary about to begin, people need to be just taking out the case that we need to get out of here. There are people who are going to serve in Afghanistan this year who weren't even born when the conflict started, right? And there's diminishing returns here. And this idea, I mean, I'm glad that we're engaged in peace talks. I think the challenge is we had kind of a mindset among some of the people who worked on Afghanistan when we were there that, well, we have to show the Taliban that we're willing to stay forever

in order for them to make a deal. Right. And that was, so basically you have an endless justification to have troops there in support of the diplomacy. I think the Taliban has shown that they're not going to go away just because we're there, you know. And ultimately what you need is the Afghans to arrive at some accommodation amongst themselves. Right. And so I think we can and should support that diplomacy. I don't think we necessarily have to

accept the logic that we have to signal our willingness to engage in a perpetual war in Afghanistan just to have a diplomatic process underway. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it was Petraeus or General Petraeus or somebody floated the prospect of a Korea-style force posture in Afghanistan, which would mean tens of thousands of troops for, what, 60 years? In a place where the people don't really seem to want us there, that. Let's keep in mind that the Koreans were like, let's, you know, it's great to you here. And I mean, in Afghanistan, we haven't had troops there without people wanting to try to kill them, right? And that presents a danger. And that also kind of demonstrates it. This model, we've made a, I mean, you've heard me in the past talk about the blob, right? I love that the blob is just a term everyone uses now. It's a thing now, right?

It doesn't even always get ascribe to you. It's just sort of a defined thing. I should have trademarked it because I see all these people say, well, someone wants, said the blob, but, you know, this was about the group think around military interventionism in the American foreign policy establishment. One of the assumptions that the blob makes is there's a direct correlation between the presence of U.S. troops in the country and things being better in that country, right? As if like, well, if we just had more troops in the country, things would inherently improve in that country. And in fact, the recent evidence, you know, and this is, by the way, no disrespect to the troops because their mission is to go kill people or

blow things up or destroy things. But the notion that just keeping a certain number of troops in a place for a certain time is going to inherently improve the situation there. No, in fact, our troops can become targets for insurgents. It can become motivators for insurgents. They can attract foreign fighters. They can exacerbate sectarian conflicts because different sects are playing one off the other. It can facilitate corruption because a bunch of grifters like Eric Prince show up and are like getting fat on the hog on the contracts, right? So, you know, again, whether it's in Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq, let's not repeat the mistake of just thinking, you know, this is a mathematical equation and U.S. troops in

country makes things better, and X number of U.S. troops will make things X times better. Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that, like, that's not necessarily the case. We had 150,000 troops in Iraq at the heart of the war, and that was as violent a time as there was in Iraq, right? Yeah, not good. Ben, that's all I had. Anything else on your minds? No, I'm debating the in-and-out truck downstairs. The In-N-N-N-Out burger downstairs was was quite good. I highly recommend it. You'll regret it.

I currently regret it. But, you know, it was the last time we had a big in-and-out I didn't know they had a try. Is that a new thing? That's a new thing. It's a today thing.

Our office or park area is trying to make everybody get to know each other. So there's in and out and there was a raffle. Okay. Well, that's, you didn't need better options around here.

Yeah, I think Michael won something in the raffle, our producer, Michael Martinez. Oh, that's, I've never done. Congratulations. It was like a Minions, USB? Minions USB.

Yeah. I wouldn't put that on my computer. is it a Huawei Minions? You know whatever Ben and I went to a million like G20s G8s like foreign summits

a lot of people were handing out USBs all the time Yeah yeah yeah yeah It was not a party favorite bag With a USB And like a listening device Yeah I did in it

You and I Don't plug that in it Both on the trip after we went to China Where like our phones just started Suddenly like doing strange things And like speaking to us and Chinese Like we had to turn in our phones at the end. Not good.

Not good. This stuff about the Chinese hacking and using Huawei is true, I should add. Yes. And we should do something about it. I just don't know if like starting a slippery slope of high-profile detentions is the way to go about doing it. Yeah. Our moral standing got challenged by Mr. Snowden too. But that's a conversation for another day.

Yes. Ben, thank you so much. And now the conversation with Rekiah Diyalo. On the line from Paris, France is Rekiah Dialo, a journalist, author, film. filmmaker and activists. Thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for inviting me. So I think for the last six weeks or so, a lot of us have been paying attention to the yellow vest movement in France. I'm curious how you would describe that movement, both the makeup of the protesters themselves and the reasons that people are out on the streets seemingly every weekend

protesting. Yes, it started on November 17. Actually started from a Facebook group of people. who were angry because the government announced the rise of the price of the fuel. And most of the people who were angry were the ones who don't live in urban neighborhoods, but who need to use their car on a daily basis. And the feeling that they have was that the government was putting more taxes on their back than on the back of the people who are the wealthiest. So from that Facebook group, they announced a protest in the streets of France on November the 17

and the protests happened everywhere in France. So it was not only in Paris but also in various neighborhood and there were dozens of thousands of people out in the street. Because I think that one of the main reason is that Emmanuel Macron, our president,

is perceived as the president of the elite and people feel like they don't, it doesn't really connect with them. Yeah, I was going to ask you that. I mean, some of the factors you mentioned are very important. I think most Americans probably don't realize that I think gas is about $7 a gallon in France, so that is definitely eye-popping and that a lot of these people who live in rural areas really need their cars to get from place to place.

But from my reading, and please correct me if I'm wrong, I mean, it seems like there's also a reaction to Macron's policies and then a feeling that he is elite and maybe arrogant. How much do you think that plays into it, if at all? To me, that has played a major role. The thing is that the first thing, the first measure that Macron decided to vote, to push, when he was elected, was to ban to cancel a tax that was meant to, you know, to make rich people, the richest people, the people who are really, really wealthy, to pay to pay. It was a tax that has been ongoing forward. decades that was really, you know, meant to push the wealthiest people for solidarity. So he can't

solve it. And, you know, having that, and at the same time, the president deciding to rise the price of the fuel. And the fact that, you know, when being on the ground, he has had very negative interactions with people, for example, a few months, a few, yeah, a few weeks ago, he met a man who was unemployed and who told him that he was having a heart. time finding a job and the president just, you know, look at him and said, you know, I can just find you a job crossing the street. I'm sure that I'm going to get you a job if I cross the street with you. And I was, you know, that was really offensive. And he has done that repeatedly to different people. And that was perceived as someone, because Macron has never experienced any problem. He's never

been unemployed. He comes from a very, you know, middle-class high family. He was wealthy before being a president. So people feel like he don't really realize how it is to live on the minimal wages and having trouble finding a job because, you know, he's never been elected. He succeeded in being elected as a president the first time he tried. So that's one of the reason why that measure, that measure was perceived as something that was just targeting the poorest people and that was motivated by the fact that Macron didn't understand how it was to be a French with minimum wages. That is fascinating. I mean, what's interesting about what's happened is Macron seems to have backed down very quickly and offered concessions.

I think I read he offered maybe 8 to 10 billion euros worth of tax cuts and benefits increases, and then he suspended the gas tax increase for at least six months. Do you think that that's enough and do you think it's likely? to satisfy protesters? I think it may have been enough if he decided to cancel that measure

quicker, like, because he, you know, it took like three or four weeks before he decided to speak publicly because he didn't, so he didn't say nothing in front of the French citizens before, you know, three weeks. And at the end of the day, it was like,

so you thought, you, you waited three weeks for people to be in the street, violence to happen, including police brutality, to make people understand that it was possible to give up, you know, at the very beginning.

So I think that it's not, I don't think it's enough. I think that the protests will stop, for sure, on the ground, but that now there is, people understand that they have the power, they have a power that they didn't realize before. And I think that it's,

play a role, you know, in the upcoming years. And it will be very difficult for Macron to govern because people on the ground understand that they have, you know, they can really pressure him. They can pressure the government. And they didn't realize that they have so much power. You wrote a great piece, I believe, on Al Jazeera.com, where you talked about a whole bunch of different elements of this process movement. But you also wrote that the yellow vest movement shouldn't be interpreted as a public rejection

of policies to address climate change. Could you talk a little bit about why you believe that and what policies you think should or could be pursued to address climate change that might actually have public support? Yes, because I thank you. Thank you for the peace. I didn't say that the rise of the fuel was meant to support the transition to, you know, energy. And the thing is that people are not against policies that would support the climate, you know, the measures to prevent the climate change. but they feel like maybe the solidarity should involve more, for example, the companies that pollute much more, or maybe having a tax on terrorism that is a fuel for planes would be more maybe just,

because people who travel by plane, it's not like in the U.S. where people travel by planes for short distances. In France, people who travel by plane are not the same ones, are the ones, are the ones who, you know, they belong to the wealthiest part of the society. So maybe if he at the same time decided to make the biggest company, the fuel for the plane, contribute, you know, be part of that whole policies against climate change. Maybe that would have been perceived differently. So it's not a movement against ecology, against the protection of environment. But it's in favor of the fact that everybody, you know, should be involved in that effort.

That the effort should be spread all over the people and not only on the people who really need to, who really have to count each euro that they get. Yeah, probably good advice for any country trying to enact climate change policies. Yes, thank you. President Macron is fairly young. I think he's 40, his party. very new. And he seemingly won in part because the alternative was a far-right candidate from the National Front Party, which has a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, just horrible history,

in current and presence. I saw some reports that Marine Le Pen's party, the National Front, is encouraged by the protests, encouraging the protesters, and they see opportunity in the sort of upheaval. Does that worry people at all? Is that something you're seeing as well? Actually, Emmanuel Macron, he was elected because there was a rejection of all the traditional parties. He started a party just a year before running for the presidency. And he said it was neither from the left, no from the right. And he was representing, as he said, a new word. And I think that that's one of the reasons why people elected it,

because they wanted to get rid of the old, you know, the old-fashioned politicians. and I wanted to have a new person, a new face, who is like his party, he's about to be 41, to represent them. And I think that the other reason why he was elected is that on the second turn of the election, he was facing the national front, which is the far right, and many people rejected the far right more than they applauded Emmanuel Macron. So once it was elected, people realized that he was following the same new liberal agenda as the the former presidents, and there have been much disappointment because he hasn't been running in a very new way. There are not that many new policies, so that's the reason why they have been a disappointment and kind of rejection. And now, to that now, the far right who has never been

elected in France, seems to certain people to represent the kind of new alternatives. So I'm afraid that The failure of Macron, I don't know how it's, how it will be, you know, in four years, but for now, it will favor the National Front, especially because we have European election in the next year for the European Parliament, and the polls are showing that the National Front, the Parite, is doing very, very well. And she, Marine Le Pen, who is the head of the Farite, hasn't been very vocal, because she knows she doesn't need to say anything. Whatever happens against Macron is positive to her because people won't go back to the old parties and many people feel like they need to try something new

and the only thing new that hasn't been tried and that is visible today is the far right. So I'm afraid that the rejection of Macron lead to the support of the far right, which is very, very negative, as you said, because the history of the party is rooted into anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant, anti-minorities in general, and the new people of the party have been able to wear a new mask that doesn't display those sentiments that much. Yeah, that's unnerving. So I guess my last question for you is I'm curious, and this might be hard to answer, is where do you think things go from here?

I mean, certainly, it seems like the number of protesters, on the streets each weekend has been going down. Macron has provided some concessions, but maybe not a sufficient number. But there's also a challenge where it doesn't seem like there's a centralized protest leadership that he can negotiate with and really make sure that all parties are satisfied. So I'm just curious how you think this will end or, you know, if it will end. It's very difficult to predict because, you know, have you asked me like a month ago if there would be such a movement against Macron,

would never have guessed that such, you know, a movement would happen. So what I think is that it will be very difficult for Macron now to govern, because we've seen that there was, you know, it was, he wasn't, because he was elected, when once he was elected, he wanted to present a very strong face of a government that wouldn't, wouldn't, uh, wouldn't, uh, maybe, uh, maybe, uh, care about whatever people said that would follow his agenda, whatever happens. And now we know that he's not able to do so. So I think that it will be difficult.

But at the same time, the positive things from all that is that people, you have people who are very isolated, who went in the street, and all the protest that were around the rendezvous make people conscious of the fact that they could go together. And I don't think that it will create a new party, but you have probably some people who get into politics and try to be elected. And there is a new consciousness in the population of the fact that they can have a voice and they can get together to think about how, to think about their destiny.

So maybe the next step should be to rethink the Constitution and the fact that we are now on what we call the Fifth Republic and many people in politics think that maybe we should think of a sixth republic in order to maybe involve more, to make the citizens more involved in the way we govern France. So maybe that should be the way we could, you know, have a step further to what just happened. Because I think that people need to have the feeling that they have a voice, and that the way our Constitution is framed now don't really allow that.

So maybe that should be the next step. That would be a good next step. Rekiah Diallo, thank you so much for joining the show for helping me understand what's going on. I think you left me on a hopeful note that there's a whole bunch of people that now realize they have political power and they'll be listened to. That's a good thing, right?

Exactly, exactly. That's the most positive things that come out from everything. Yeah, well, if you see Steve Bannon, just deport his ass immediately, because that's a different direction. we don't want it to go there. Yeah, hopefully not. Thank you again for doing the show.

I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks again to Rukai Diallo. Thanks to Ben Rhodes for talking through this weird week in the world. If you like the show, please share it.

Tell your friends. Like us in the iTunes store, wherever the hell you call it, wherever you get your podcasts. And talk to you next week.