Pod Save the World - TMZ at the DMZ

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

The latest rumors and news about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s health, and what we know about a possible succession process. Iran launches a military satellite and Trump tries to use the Iran nuclear deal to put in place more sanctions. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro could face legal trouble. New Zealand eliminates the coronavirus while doctors in the UK race to produce a vaccine and major countries come together to discuss how to accelerate work on treatments. The latest in Afghanistan and Navy Capt. Brett Crozier might get his job back. Then journalist Rana Ayyub talks with Ben about life in India during COVID.

Welcome back to Potsave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, good to see you. Yeah. This long distance potting is kind of wearing on me a little bit though. Yeah, yeah, no, it's living your entire life through Zoom is kind of wearing on me a little bit, but that's a whole other story. Yeah, no more Zoom calls. They've really lost their charm in about like a month. I know. It was like, it was really cool for like the first few weeks and you're like Zoom happy hours with your friends and stuff. And now you're like, yeah. Why am I talking to a bunch of disembodied heads in boxes on a screen. I know. It makes me miss the phone. But we digress with our complaints. So we got a big show today. We're going to start with all the latest news out of North Korea. Is Kim Jong undead?

What do we actually know? What's a rumor? What happens next? So we'll spend some time with that. And then there's a bunch of Iran news this week. They have launched what they called a military satellite into space. They are also getting threatened by Mike Pompeo with more sanctions. So we'll explain all of that. There's some potential legal trouble for President Bolsonaro in Brazil, which would be bad news for Mr. Trump. It's one of his favorite dictators on the planet. And then we have some good news about efforts to eradicate the coronavirus and much, much more. And then, Ben, you did our interview today. Can you talk us through what we're going to hear? Yeah, you know, we've talked about Modi and India on this show, and there's nobody better to talk to us about that than Rana Ayub,

who's a writer for the Washington Post global opinions, but also, you know, a pretty fearless independent journalist who's been kind of exposing the authoritarian nature of Modi and the Hindu nationalist movement in India for a long time now. And some of our listeners may remember she was profiled in a really amazing Dexter Filkins' New Yorker piece about India. So we talked to her about COVID-19 in a country where so many people are just struggling to get by and where social distancing is much of an option, as well as what Modi might be doing to take advantage of the crisis through his own politics. Yeah. She is fearless and an incredible advocate. So do not skip that interview. And one quick thing before we get to the news. So we announced a new show this week that we're working on

with an incredible journalist named Patrick Radden, Keefe, in partnership with Pineapple Street Studios and Spotify. It's called Wind of Change. And the question that it will explore is, is one of the most famous songs of all time that was the anthem for the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Was that written by the series? And Patrick will take you on this journey that talks through this mystery, that talks about the long history of the U.S. government and the CIA, meddling in foreign cultures and promoting artists and books and activists and films. It is one of the most gripping stories I've ever heard. I have thought about the story nonstop since Patrick first pissed it to us.

I could not be more excited for people to check it out. So search for wind of change on Spotify. you're going to be able to binge it there and then it'll start coming out on May 11th. So don't miss that. Ben, you in particular are going to love this one. Yeah, this is like my ideal content. Maybe we can have a sequel on right here right now,

the Jesus Jones classic that I also associate with the end of the Cold War. But I'm really, really excited about this. All right, me too. Season two is ready to go then. Okay, let's go to North Korea. So, Ben, the noise around like this Kim Jong-un situation, it's getting louder, it's really getting more confusing.

So we do a bit of a roundup of reports and rumors, then see if we can, like, fact-check it as best we can. So first, reports and rumors. So a bunch of outlets said Kim Jong-un had some sort of heart procedure, and that it might have gone poorly, and that it left him in a vegetative state or, like, a coma, or some sort of serious situation. TMZ, fan favorite here in Los Angeles, they even got in on the speculation game. They aggregated some foreign media reports and suggested that Kim was dead. So good to see they're getting into foreign policy news. We need more of it.

Yeah. On Saturday, Reuters reported that China sent a team of doctors and diplomats North Korea, presumably to help Kim. So that gets us to Monday of this week. Trump gets asked about these reports. He cryptically said he has a very good idea about Kim's condition, but he can't talk about it. But, quote, I just wish him well and that the world would hear more in the not too distant future. Previously, Trump had knocked down a CNN report that the U.S. was monitoring intelligence showing Kim was gravely ill.

He called it a fake report, said it was incorrect based on old documents, but, like, I know, take his denials for what they're worth. So it does seem to suggest that Kim is still alive unless Trump is wishing a dead guy well, which, you know, happens to the best of us. So we'll find out. On Monday, a South Korean minister said publicly that the South Korean government has enough information to say there's nothing unusual about Kim's health. So it seems like they're knocking it down. North Korea watchers, of which there are many, they spent a lot of time looking at satellite imagery of North Korea and they track Kim's movements. They notice what they think is Kim Jong-un's personal train at a compound on the East Coast, not in Pyongyang. Yes, Kim Jong-un rides around

on a personal train. These satellite watchers also say they haven't noticed like unusual military movements for things you might associate with a transition. So, you know, last week, you and I talked about how Kim Jong-un skipped his grandfather's birthday celebration on April 15th. That was like the big event that got people talking. Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea is his grandfather. He's treated like a god. His birthday is Christmas. The 4th of July. It's all rolled into one. So it's a very notable absence. you know, Ben, a long windup to say who the hell knows what's happening. But you and I were both at the White House back in 2011 when Kim Jong-il died. He died of a heart attack on a Saturday. North Korea announced it via state news on a Monday. A few hours later, they announced Kim Jong-un was going to be in

charge. Maybe the most notable thing at that time was that everyone was caught by a surprise, including the Americans, the South Koreans. Apparently the entire North Korean foreign ministry office, a defector said later that he and his team learned about it on TV. So I wonder if we could start there, Ben. Like, what do you remember from that time in 2011 from both like Kim Jong-Yil's death and from that leadership transition? Well, there was like a brief period of uncertainty. You know, he died relatively quickly after this heart attack, Kim Jong-il did.

Brief moment of certainty where you saw all these indications that something was happening. I think we put out a statement, you know, that was kind of a placeholder that we saw these reports, but we wanted to wait and let the North Koreans announce the death of their leader. And, you know, in part because we didn't want to get it wrong, but, you know, in part because we didn't necessarily want to inject ourselves. And then what happened, right, is that Kim Jong-un becomes a successor. He'd been anointed, but he was kind of totally unknown to us, Tommy. And I remember we had this, a ton of meetings trying to speculate about what would happen. And there were some people who thought Kim Jong-un might be more beholden to China because he

was a young leader without a lot of experience. You know, there were some people who rightly anticipated that he might kind of go his own way and be a difficult character. But what happened really is, let's face it, none of us, for all the North Korea watchers, you know, predicting what's going to happen inside of a totally closed society like that is difficult. What ended up happening is Kim Jong-un showed his true colors of the course of the next year so as he started to kill any potential rivals, including the uncle that everybody thought might kind of control him on behalf of China, because this uncle was somewhat close to the Chinese. So again, I think if there's a lesson there, I think it suggests that if there is some kind of succession, it's likely to be

bloody. You know, there's likely to be purges in order for whoever emerges to consolidate power. But like you said, we don't know. We seem to know enough to know that there's something wrong with Kim Jong-un, or else you wouldn't have missed these events and you probably wouldn't see this degree of speculation and even Asian media. But really until we get some smoke signal here, we just don't know for sure. The degree of circulation,

even among very senior and serious journalists, is pretty hilarious. Like the AP had a full report on past disappearances by North Korean leaders. Yeah. Like, I guess in 86, there was a report in South Korean newspapers that Kim Il-Sull. was dead and then he showed up like a couple hours later to meet a foreign delegation at the airport.

In 2004 there was a big explosion at a train station at like a depot between China and North Korea that was just hours after Kim Jong-il passed through. So there's all these attempts at like I guess cremlinology. I don't know what we're doing here to like try to figure this out. But it is, it's funny to watch. Yeah. And like nobody knows. Like nobody who's predicting on Twitter has any idea.

maybe the U.S. has some intelligence about this. Trump's comments seem to suggest he seen something. But that intelligence might not even be definitive. It may just be that Kim Jong-un hasn't been seen for days, that there are people around him who have shown unusual behavior or, yeah, the report that the Chinese may have sent a medical team. So everybody's trying to piece together these shreds of information, but really we don't know.

Wait, wait. Have you been watching the Michael Jordan? documentary? Yeah, of course. Have you seen the part about how Dennis Rodman went on a bender that was supposed to be 48 hours and then just extended? Yeah, yeah. Maybe what if they're together? This could just be really an epic bender. Maybe they're like in Macau somewhere. Joking aside. So like a friend of the pod, Asia expert Danny Russell, who's been on the show a bunch of times and knows more about this than anyone I know, had a great piece in the Los Angeles Times that everyone should check out about like what comes next and then the big challenges. So,

Danny smartly points out that the succession process in North Korea is very unclear because their political system, as Danny describes it, is a Frankenstein-like mashup of models. It's a religious cult. It's a sopranos like crime family. It's a monarchy. It's a Leninist dictatorship. So there's not like a roadmap you can look to about how the process should work. So again, we're speculating. Kim Jong-un's oldest child is, I think, 10 years old. So presumably too young to take over. So it should have to be someone else. people are talking a lot about Kim Jong-un's sister, who has taken more of a public role recently. Kim Jong-un had his brother Kim Jong-nam assassinated back in 2017, as you referenced earlier. I guess there's another brother who was sort of iced out of all leadership positions, and like Kim Jong-yil thought he was kind of a wimp or something.

Danny notes, as you just did, that it's been six years since Kim executed the uncle that was supposed to ride hurt on him and points out that five of the seven senior officials who walked with Kim Jong-un in his father's funeral procession are dead or disappeared. And of the two who remained, they're in their 90s. So, again, long wind-up to say, who knows? But like, here's what we do, though, and what I want to ask you. So, one, Trump invested a ton of time personally into one person, Kim Jong-un. And, like, so far, that has bought North Korea a lot of time to develop nukes and missiles and has gotten us nothing. It also means that like lower level diplomats are often ignored or iced out because there's this senior level communication that they prefer. Two, North Korea has dozens of nuclear weapons.

And, you know, those things getting sold or falling to the wrong hands are the gravest threats maybe to our national security period, you know, second to a pandemic, actually. But so Ben, I want to ask you about that nuclear piece for a second. Like what kind of contingency planning do you think is happening at the Pentagon right now or in Beijing? for what to do if this government falls, if those nukes go into the wrong hands, like if things break bad? It's a good question. You know, because I think there's different scenarios, right? There's a scenario where the sister emerges. There's a scenario where, you know, we said last week it's kind of a misogynist patriarchal society, so maybe a general emerges instead of the sister. Maybe somebody puts himself forward as kind of a regent for this 10-year-old kid.

I mean, but there is a scenario. where it kind of collapses like a house of cards, you know. I don't think that's the most likely scenario because the elite in that country are pretty invested in the current power structure. But I think the nightmare scenario as horrible as, you know, this kind of dictatorship obviously is, and as much as you like to see that change, if the place just collapses and you have all these nuclear weapons, that is the type of scenario that was sometimes discussed in the situation room as a contingency that we had to be worried about. And frankly, it's a contingency that we should probably talk to China about. And when it comes to the nuclear weapons, I frankly don't think the

United States even knows where all those nuclear weapons are. You know, I don't think we have a clear sense of the entirety of this nuclear program. That's part of the reason why it was so strange that Trump didn't press more for inspections or access to these sites or even just the understanding of what the breadth of the North Green nuclear program is. Remember, he got nothing from these negotiations other than this personal relationship with Kim Jong-un. I think that the Chinese probably have more, you know, specific contingency plans perhaps than even we do, given that this is right on their border. There could be massive flows of refugees into China from North Korea. And they probably have better contacts, obviously, in the North Korean military. So I do think there are probably,

you know, plans on the shelf in both Washington and Beijing. I think the Chinese, frankly, if there's a complete state collapse would be more positioned to do something, given their kind of military alliance with North Korea, their history and proximity. Man, that inventory point is a really good one because an inventory of their nuclear arsenal was supposed to be like the first thing you got in a negotiation. And Trump didn't even achieve that. So I was thinking to myself, I wonder if they're sitting in the Pentagon with like 40 contingency plans for Navy SEALs to go to different parts of the country to like take those

things by force and pray to God that they don't run into Beijing's version of the Navy SEAL, but maybe that's not even possible. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, look, and this is not getting anything sensitive, but I'm just sure that the U.S. Forces Korea, like our military command in South Korea with the South Koreans, has versions of contingency plans. I do just think it's not like Iran, right, where we really know, you know, okay, they've got this one nuclear facility called Natanz. They've got this other nuclear facility called Gohm. If hypothetical, those were more advanced, and they are not because the Iran nuclear deal set them back. But if they were and the regime kind of collapsed there, you'd be watching those two sites

very carefully. In North Korea, I think it may be the infrastructure of their missile and nuclear program is likely more spread out and we don't know all of it. And that's what you'd look for in some collapse. And frankly, if there's a real kind of civil war or at least an elite kind of competition, are people trying to take control of nuclear weapons as a part of that competition? You know, so there are a lot of scenarios and the worst ones, for the short term, at least, are ones where these weapons are falling out of any kind of command and control.

Yeah, that is the horror scenario. It is notable, though, that, you know, they have dozens of nukes in North Korea, and Trump is just wishing them well and hoping for the best, and they continue to hammer away on Iran who doesn't have nuclear weapons. So let's talk about Iran for a bit. there's a couple stories in the news worth getting into. So Iran last week put into orbit what it calls a military satellite. Arms control experts watch these quote unquote satellite launches carefully because many

believe that they're just ways of testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology. And if you think about it, right, the goal in both cases, you shoot a payload of some sort into orbit, whether it's a satellite that then orbits the earth or a warhead that comes back down on a target. It's very similar technology. Iran used a mobile missile launcher in this case, which is a significant technological advancement that caught people by surprise. This is by no means Iran's first attempt at a launch. Longtime, Pod Save the World listeners probably remember the time last summer when Trump tweeted out a classified image of a photo of a failed space launch like from his PDB, seemingly in an effort to brag about or take credit for its failure.

So that was cool. Iran's missile program is concerned that the U.S. for a very long time, and there have been many news reports over the years about ways that the U.S. or the Israelis or some international effort has tried to sabotage them with faulty parts and all these sorts of things. Mike Pompeo called the launch deeply troubling. He said that technology could be used in nuclear weapons delivery systems. The U.S. Space Force commander, General Raymond, called the satellite, quote, tumbling webcam in space, unlikely. providing intel, which I thought was pretty funny. So hours after the launch, Trump then tweeted that he instructed the U.S. Navy to shoot down, that's in quotes, and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea. So this is a response to another year's little problem of these little Iranian ships harassing U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf. So I've taken literally

as an order that tweet would significantly loosen the rules of engagement that normally determine when and how a Navy ship can take lethal action. He also seems to think that. boats can fly, which is a bigger problem. But, you know, Ben, just like stepping back on both these, like, how significant do you think this military satellite launch is? And if these are or are not new rules of engagement for Navy ships, like, can you describe to folks why the harassment from these ships or the flashpoint in this area is seen as such a area of tension? Well, the good news is there might not be a war because Iran, to my knowledge, has not developed a flying ship. So there's nothing to shoot down there. Thank God.

Look, they have a ballistic missile program. I mean, part of what this demonstrates is that sanctions are not stopping their ballistic missile program. I mean, there's this kind of wishful thinking that informs the entire Trump strategy of sanctions upon sanctions, that the sanctions will somehow bring them to their knees. And the reality is the Iranian government has always found money, no matter how many sanctions they're under, to make sure that they're still investing in their missile program and their nuclear program. And that's why you know, you want a nuclear deal in place to roll back the nuclear program so that there's not a warhead that they can put on that missile.

And you also, frankly, would have wanted to follow on the Iran nuclear deal with further negotiations about the missile program. And so what Emmanuel Macron, the French president, for instance, had been proposing around the time that Trump pulled out of the Iran deal is you take the Iran deal as a foundation and then you negotiate another deal that addresses the ballistic missile program. And ultimately, that form of negotiation is the only way you're going to deal with this. And instead, we're in this endless cycle of provocation where everything Trump does invites an Iranian response. And so you get missile launches like this.

You get resumption of nuclear activity and all the rest of it. What was also evident in that tweet is it came after a Fox and Friends segment. Come on. Really? Yeah, about this launch. Of course. So, you know, the internet slews did a pretty good job of reconstructing the timeline of Trump, kind of acting on a recommendation from Fox that you attack the Iranian Navy.

The John Bolton, by the way, has also been putting forward. I mean, look, the reality is that the Iranians have these kind of small ships that kind of harass, we've seen them harassed tankers, we've seen them come too close to U.S. naval vessels at times. and there's this kind of fantasy on the far right in this country, you know, that basically we can just sink all these ships and send some message to Iran. Again, I think that like everything else that's happened between the United States and Iran the last two years,

like, were we to take that action and start sinking Iranian ships, you'd inevitably see an Iranian escalation, and then we'd be right back where we were in January on the brink of a real war here. And so put it this way, it makes no sense to respond to an Iranian ballistic missile test, potentially by just sinking some ships. And by the way, killing the Iranians, presumably who are on those ships. It's just another sign that this is not a strategy of Trump's. This is just like a series of actions that make him somehow feel good and meet his political test of showing how what a tough guy is.

But all the Iranian behavior is getting worse across the board measured against what the U.S. objectives are. Yeah. So another like pretty interesting Iran story I saw was according to New York Times, Mike Pompeo is preparing a legal argument that says the U.S. is still part of the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. And that might make you think, oh, great, they saw the error of their ways. They're going to return to sensible, constructive diplomacy instead of, you know, assassinating Qasem Soleimani or whatever. Sadly, no. Here apparently is the play Pompeo is trying to run. So there's an embargo on selling conventional arms to Iran that was part of the Iran deal. This ban on small arms is set to expire in October. So Pompeo apparently wants to put forward a UN Security Council resolution that would extend

that conventional weapons ban indefinitely. So friend of the pod, Wendy Sherman is in the New York Times piece quoted explaining why she doesn't think this will fly. She said at the time when they passed this provision, the Russians didn't want a conventional arms embargo to begin with. And you know, they only agree to one with some sunset provisions. So here's a where this re-entering the Iran deal piece comes back in. So the strategy, I guess, is for the U.S. to put forward this resolution. You extend the arms embargo. And when the Russians veto it, the U.S. will say, well, we're still a party to the JCPOA, and we're going to invoke the so-called snapback provisions and put in place these broad-based UN sanctions on Iran that were there in place,

thanks to Obama, before the Iran deal was passed and went into effect. And this is understandably, I think, using to the Iranians because they point out how vocal Trump and Pompeo have been that they have pulled out of the Iran deal. But Ben, I mean, you know this deal inside and out. How important is this arms embargo that they're fighting over? And like, how do you think allies in Europe or the Russians or the Chinese will respond to an effort to just put in place these broad-based sanctions from pre-2015? Unfortunately, the listeners at home can't see me violating the face-touching rules to just rub my temples and complete exasperation. Where to start?

So first of all, we did insert, and frankly, it was kind of a coup of the negotiating team, this provision that if there was, if one of the members of the P5 plus one, the permanent five members of the UN Security Council who would negotiate the deal, kind of determined that Iran was in violation, that there could be a snapback, a reimposition of the UN sanctions on Iran. However, the United States formally withdrew from the JCPOA gave formal notification to the parties of the Iran deal that they were leaving the JCPOA. And so the idea that we have any kind of credible leg to stand on to utilize the provisions of the JCPOA to make other countries reimpose multilateral sanctions is like completely laughable. complete and utter bullshit, and nobody's going to go along with it. Nobody's going to join us in

suggesting that the U.S. can reimpose multilateral sanctions on its own when it's not even a party to the JCPUA. I think another point here is that this arms embargo, leaky does not begin to describe it. Russia doesn't even acknowledge that it exists. Really? It's not like Iran hasn't been able to purchase any conventional weapons because of this arms embargo. And you know, the Chinas and Russia of the world find ways to have their, uh, relationships with the Iranian military, never mind, you know, the North Korea's of the world here. So yeah, it's been a useful tool, I guess, and constraining the number of places that Iran could, can purchase certain things, you know, but, but I, once again, this is like the theology of the Iran opponents

in the U.S. who are constantly just looking for some other sanctions. to throw out the Iranians as if that's going to make any difference. You know, I mean, think of the contradiction that's implicit in what Pompeo is doing, not just wanting to use the JCPOA when you've been out of it. What about the contradiction that we're constantly being told how scary Iran is, how powerful Iran is, how they're on the brink of, you know, taking over the whole Middle East and not, you know, the whole world. But this arms embargo is really working, you know, it's really squeezing them.

I mean, this is not the point here, guys. And the things that Iran does that are troubling, it's nuclear program, it's missile program, it's done, you know, around any, you know, arms embargo anyway. And so even if they were successful at snapping back these sanctions, then we'd have to enforce them. Are we going to enforce sanctions on like a French bank that does business with Iran or like a German company that buys oil? Because like that's the extent of these sanctions, right? It would be like broad-based energy sector stuff. Yeah, and some of that's already kind of frozen.

You know, a lot of the activity from the West, right, has already been frozen just because the U.S. is imposing sanctions. But if you were going to go around the world and start enforcing this, it would also be how are you going to stop like a potential Russian shipment of arms? Right. Like how far are we willing to go to physically enforce this? And again, I think this is just Pompeo, you know, picking yet another. fight about yet another aspect of Iran policy that the, you know, hypothetically, if they extended to some arms embargo, what would be materially different anyway from how things are now, you know, not much other than the U.S. going around the world and having yet another thing

that it can bother other countries with. Yeah, weird. Okay. Well, we'll keep watching that one. Yeah. Let's talk about Brazil because there's some bad news there for Trump's, you know, one of his favorite authoritarian leaders, Yair Bolsonaro of Brazil. So the Brazilian Supreme Court has authorized an investigation into allegations of corruption and obstruction of justice by Bolsonaro. This comes after a guy named Sergio Morrow, who is the former justice minister,

accused Bolsonaro of attempting to interfere with police investigations to protect his supporters. Two of Bolsonaro's kids whose two sons are under investigation for embezzlement. So this is pretty close to home for Bolsonaro. The Washington Post notes that if true, these allegations could form the basis of an impeachment trial. And a recent poll shows that 57% of Brazilians support impeachment. And unlike us, the Brazilians are big fans of impeaching presidents.

Bolsonaro would be the third one removed from office since the 1980s if this happened. All of this is happening as Brazil deals with just a massive COVID outbreak. So, you know, I don't want to get my hopes up too high, Ben, that, you know, Bolsonaro will go down. But when I look around the world, I think Bolsonaro, if you total up, like, attacks on democracy, rule of law, exacerbating climate change. Like, he's got to be one of the top, what, three, five, ten most dangerous leaders on the planet right now? Bolsonaro, I mean, yeah, particularly in the sense of, like, his capacity to take what is a very big democracy and drag it into this authoritarian column while doing grave damage to,

the environment, right, with the destruction of the Amazon, which could be irreversible damage to climate change, not to mention, you know, kind of just the rights of the Brazilian people. I think what's been so telling to me about this and why it feels to get made very well threatened him is, first of all, he hasn't been hugely popular since he took office. There have been these corruption clouds around, particularly his sons. And this COVID-19 response has been an absolute disaster, you know, I mean, he makes, you know, he's definitely giving Trump a run for his money. it. What's interesting to me is that it seems like some of Brazil's political class is

beginning to anticipate Bolsonaro's collapse, right? So this kind of latest spat really began when the justice minister in Brazil resigned because he got no fight with Bolsonaro about essentially whether or not Bolsonaro could fire the national police chief, which is ostensibly supposed to be under the auspices of this justice minister. The reason I point this out is that this justice minister, he's a bit younger, he's, you know, probably foresees himself having some form of political future. He had been involved in the prosecution of Lula, the previous Brazilian president who's a political opponent of Bolsonaro's. It feels like, unlike here in the U.S. where Republicans haven't begun to jump ship, some of these latest developments feel like people kind of realizing

I don't necessarily want to go down with the Bolsonaro ship, you know, and so I'm going to jump off. And that's why you get resignations like this. That's why you get investigations and calls for impeachment in a way that we haven't seen certainly beyond outside of the Democratic Party here in the U.S. So it does feel to me like perhaps in part because of his completely incompetent COVID-19 response, Bolsonaro is on pretty shaky ground. Yeah, let's hope. So I will look little good news.

So New Zealand announced that they have basically a little bit of, eliminated the coronavirus following an intensive period of social distancing. So that means that there is currently no widespread community spread happening. But obviously it'll take vigilance to keep it that way. Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was quick to stress that this is, you know, the virus is like a burning ember of a fire. It could reignite if they're not careful. But New Zealand is moving to a less strict version of their lockdown. It'll allow for more travel. It'll allow more businesses to open up, maybe schools open up. New Zealand had 1,122 cases and 19 COVID deaths. So, you know, good news story here, Ben. It must be nice to live on a literal island where you can,

you know, lock the place down pretty easily with a smaller population. But this is also, I think, an example of great political leadership and doing the right thing quickly. Yeah. And I want to say, I'm glad we have this opportunity because I need to apologize to all my Kiwi friends, people of New Zealand. It's been pointed out to me on various platforms that for some reason I continually say Jacinda Ahern, which I have no idea why I do that. But now I'm using this opportunity to say, I do know it's Jacinda Ardern. I have certain pronunciation texts that World Those have. Yeah, I do too. Yeah, World Those have held me accountable for them. So I want you to know I am accountable and I'm sorry for that. In part because she's just such an astonishingly positive

example for progressive leadership, that it can be nationally unifying, extremely competent, values-based, and deliver results. Granted, it's an island. They have a manageable challenge in terms of the scale of their population and their geographic distance, but nevertheless, she's taken every step right, the deployment of testing, the public messaging that she did, the modeling of behavior, the application of social distancing. I think it is going to be, we've said this before, but it cannot be stressed enough. we need to be learning from other countries that are handling this better than we are. And we now have multiple examples, some of which are democracies, some of which are not.

So it's not like it's all restricted to one political system. And here, I think what we see is a nation that marshaled all of the different strategies, again, the deployment of healthcare equipment, of testing, of social distancing, of kind of responsible, clear communication from leadership that then is enabling the incremental reopening of the economy. You know, that's clearly the model that is going to get us off of Zoom and back into life. Unfortunately, what it feels like in the U.S. is some individual states are learning from New Zealand, but not all 50 and certainly not the federal government. Yeah, that's right. That's totally right. Some more good news that might allow us to get back to a non-Zoom life.

So a group of scientists at Oxford University were able to build on this previous round of clinical trials that they'd already completed and are going to test a potential coronavirus vaccine on more than 6,000 people by the end of next month. The formula that they created, I guess, worked well on monkeys and a trial done in Montana. So this is exciting. They obviously need to prove that it's safe, that's effective in humans, and then long term produce like literally billions of this vaccine. But it is great news that this big UK study is underway because it can inform all the other research that happens in R&D, et cetera. Also last week, you pointed this one out to me, Ben.

World leaders pledged to accelerate work on COVID testing and drugs and vaccines and then share them. So this effort includes the French, the German, Spain, South Africa, a bunch of countries. The U.S. infuriatingly did not participate in this WHO effort because I guess, you know, Trump would rather blame the World Health Organization than like, you know, get in the game and address the problem. So the effort generally is rightly focused on the need to figure. out equitable distribution of treatments and vaccines. You don't have a situation like we did

with the HIV-AIDS where it was like completely survivable in the United States, but wiping out people across Africa. You know, Ben, this brought me back to the conversation we had with Sam Power a couple weeks ago that like institutions, organizations like the UN, the World Health Organization, the G7, the G20, they are only as effective as member states make them. And our president just seems determined to gut them for political reasons, even if improving them would save lives or prevent a future pandemic. And like it just, it drives me crazy. Yeah, no, I mean, normally the U.S. would be right in the middle of this kind of effort. Because, you know, again, all the World Health Organization is is the sum of its parts, right?

And we have been traditionally the biggest part of the World Health Organization. And, you know, what all these efforts point to, right, is that there's kind of, you know, just like the virus is the Great Equalizer recognizes no borders. the search for treatments and certainly for a vaccine will be more effective if it's coordinated across borders and if the best scientist of every country are pooling research and lessons learned and trying to figure out ways to surge this type of capacity. Because there's also two steps of this, Tommy, right? Like the first is we'd love to get to a vaccine. And again, you'd want the best minds in the world to be collaborating on that. But then also, how is that

vaccine going to be scaled up and distributed around the world? You know, if it's developed in one country, does that mean that it only starts in that country? How do you ensure that there's adequate scale? How are people going to feel in some countries if, you know, everybody else is getting vaccinated in a certain part of the world and they're not? I mean, especially if like all the vaccines are being produced in India and China and those people can't afford to purchase them or aren't given them by their government. That's a deeply fucked up situation you could see. Yeah. These are scenarios that they require very careful. international collaboration and coordination and some sense of protocols that are developed. And again,

like in the absence of the U.S., it's interesting to see how the international community functions. It's kind of the European countries and like a South Korea and Japan, you know, talking intermittently to China and India and the U.S. just sitting on the sidelines. It's very strange to see. Hopefully, you know, our election is going to be kind of in mid-stride here. And, you know, hopefully the U.S. is able to rejoin those efforts after the election. Because we've also already seen the problem of not being a party to these efforts. So, for instance, the WHO had over a million tests available in February. And, you know, the Trump administration made the decision not to take those testing kits and

develop our own. And that contributed to the testing failures in this country, right? So we're not winning by being outside of the international processes. Like, we're losing on every minute to use Trump. language that we're losing on every metric of cases of deaths of lack of testing. And it's a shame we're not a part of this, but I hope that this all goes well. And ultimately that'd be in our interest, too. Yeah, absolutely would. Good for all of them for stepping up and doing this. It's very important. It's also like it's nice to see leaders like Merkel and Macron and others like stepping up and

pushing the agenda when we're absent. Yeah, it's just like it's mildly kind of reassuring that they're out there, you know, doing things. And that Jacinda Ardern is out there like doing things. And that just Cinda Arden is out there like doing things. And, you know, and we're getting there state by state, right? But not collectively. Let's talk Afghanistan for a minute. So I saw a report this week by NBC News that Trump complains almost daily to his team about the fact that U.S. service members are still deployed in Afghanistan and that they're now vulnerable to catching the coronavirus. You know, AID say he's also angry about the lack of progress in peace talks with the Taliban. So both very legitimate things to be angry about. Some stats. So as of Monday, the average.

Afghan Ministry of Public Health reported about 1,700 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at 57 deaths. But from other reporting I saw, I think that's probably charitably talking about 10,000 people getting tested in a country of 35 million. So I put no stock in those numbers. And given how weak Afghanistan's public health system is in like basic lack of sanitation, I think a massive outbreak is probably not a question of if. But when, they also share a very porous border with Iran. So you're seeing big flows of Afghans who had.

found work in Iran now coming back home to Afghanistan because the economy has been decimated by COVID so they're probably bringing it with them. So anyway, Trump is right to be concerned about a potential outbreak. But this withdrawal desire does seem to be driven by as longstanding and again understandable desire to get out of Afghanistan. So by comparison, you know, we have troops in Italy, we have troops in Japan, South Korea. You're not seeing the same withdrawal discussion. But we are currently pulling troops out of Afghanistan. So the Pentagon says we'll be down to 8600 troops in Afghanistan by July. Zalme Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan who's been in charge of the diplomacy,

is still trying to get the Afghans and the Taliban to talk to move forward on prisoner exchanges and other like sticking points in these negotiations, but it's going very poorly. The Taliban have rejected calls for a ceasefire because of the coronavirus. They rejected a request that there would be a ceasefire for Ramadan. instead they're like increasing attacks on government forces. So Ben, this was my thought experiment for you. Like you're Ashraf Ghani,

you're the president of Afghanistan. You know your position is politically tenuous because there are these months of instability after disputed election. The pandemic is ravaging your country. It's literally infected dozens of your own staff members and your own palace. The Taliban is targeting you.

Your benefactor, the Americans have, repeatedly signaled that they just went out as fast as possible. Mike Pompeo just flew over to yell at you and said he'd cut aid. Like, what's your next move? Do you just move to cut a bad deal with the Taliban? Do you flee to Europe and live in Paris the rest of your life? Do you panic down the Russians, the Chinese? Like, this seems like an existential threat. Like, what do you think he might do here? Yeah, like, talk about like the worst job in the world. Like, I don't know why anyone would want to be president of Afghanistan. Rural. And, you know, Ashrafgani doesn't come across as like this big power broker. I've been in a lot of meetings with him. He's kind of a technocratic,

soft-spoken guy coming out of the international development world. I mean, look, I think, first of all, we should be concerned about our troops. We should be concerned about the Afghan people, who Trump is clearly not particularly concerned about, given that lack of infrastructure. There's an absurdity to all this. I mean, you mentioned that we'll be down to 8,600 troops in July. for all the rhetoric from Trump about ending these wars and stuff, that's about the number of troops that were in Afghanistan when Obama left office. Yeah. You know, and Trump just surged them, a surge he clearly, you know,

I'm not even sure why he did it at the time. And now we're just getting it back down there. And here's what I take away from this, Tommy, is it's notable that when Trump feels like he's made a decision, even on something as complex as withdrawing troops from someplace, he kind of just expects it to happen right away and doesn't see the picture that it fits into and this is what happened in Syria

where we all talked about like we could agree with the idea that you want to draw down these forces but the way he did it was he just kind of made an announcement and expected them out like the next day and then literally that's what happened they get yanked out and there's terrible consequences

and then we kind of send them back into a different part of Syria to guard an oil field I mean this reminds me that where it's like he thought okay there's a deal with the Taliban it's done get the troops out but of course the details matter and the Taliban's not following through on its own commitments and this isn't really leading to any peace and it's like all these deals like like with kim yong un he meets him problems over well kim yung un just keeps building nuclear weapons and building missiles that's what the taliban did they made a deal they just they're kind of basically ignoring it

They're pocketing all the kind of good feeling around it from Trump and waiting for us to withdraw. And there's Khalil Zad out there trying to salvage something from this and keep this somehow together. So again, what needs to happen is this kind of careful diplomacy that continues to ensure that this withdrawal is both orderly but is accompanied by the political steps that we're supposed to happen separately. Because if I'm Ashrafgani, yeah, what I start to be doing is looking. looking to China, looking to Russia. If I can't get a backstop from the United States, I'll get a backstop elsewhere. And, you know, it becomes, you know, a very different kind of negotiation and reality for him. But I think that's where this may very well head.

Yeah. And, you know, there's been sort of a long-time interest from the Chinese and others and, like, rare earth minerals and things they have there. So there's a lot of reasons countries would want to exploit the country in ways that are very sad for their future. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The Afghan people, like, for the last 40 years, are the ones who end up getting screwed. Yeah, of course. Two more quick things before we get to your interview.

So we've talked previously about all the ways that Trump was warned about the coronavirus, even when he was talking it down publicly. One of those was through classified briefings, including the President's Daily Briefing or PDB, which is, you know, the most important intelligence product in the U.S. government that gets briefed to him every morning or should be. So the Washington Post did some additional reporting on this subject and found it's much more extensive than we knew before. U.S. intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus and more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for Trump in January and February. So early on, the post wrote that for

weeks of PDB traced the virus spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion's transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences. That was a quote. So everything you needed to know is in these PDB pieces. They also note in the Washington Post report that Trump routinely skips reading his PDB. He's only briefed on it orally two or three times a week because he just seems to think it's a waste of his time. So Ben, you know, like we knew Trump had received warnings. I guess we just didn't know how often and how comprehensive it was. This report really makes clear that this was not in any way an intelligence failure.

This was the Trump administration, Trump himself, actively ignoring clear warnings. I mean, these briefings go to him. They also go to the national security staff. They go to cabinet secretaries where relevant. And the briefings we're talking about were January, February, right? February 26th was the day he said within a couple days, we'll be close to zero cases and the day after, you know, and then it will be down to none. So anyway, like, this is well-trodden territory. But, like, when you see the volume of it, it just reminds me how scandalous it is.

I mean, it's a dereliction of duty that directly led to people being killed. it is like a 9-11 style failing. It should be investigated by the Intel Committee, potentially a 9-11-style commission. I mean, it's just, it is unbelievable. Yeah, you know, so I got the PDB every morning for over seven years. Because as you say, it goes to, you know, several dozen people actually get the written PDB.

And I'll come back to that in the second. And then like a small group of us, I know, like five, of us would sit down with Obama and literally his first meeting of the day. So people understand, and this isn't, because Obama was so great, this is just how any normal president, I think, would normally do things. Bush too, yeah. Yeah, Obama would get a written version of the PDB in his residence in the morning. So first thing he's reading in the morning is his PDB. The first thing I'd read every single day when I got to work was his PDB. Then we all meet together. And it really does shape your day. You know, there's a crisis and you're being briefed on it every morning.

that leads to all the other meetings that take place, right? So, you know, we sat down and I remember the Ebola case very clearly, I learned about Ebola and the PDB, you know, so suddenly it's like there's X many cases in Africa. We're watching this Ebola outbreak, and it's suddenly now it's one more thing that's on the list of things that you're kind of thinking about and talking about. And then when it doesn't go away, when you see, you know, a repeated briefing that this is getting worse, then Obama says to Susan Rice, you know, stand up a process. And suddenly there's an interagency set of meetings happening with the Pentagon, the State Department, but also the CDC and the NIH.

And that's how the Ebola response started to crank up. And it all starts in the PDB. And then it flows to what is the government going to do about this warning it's getting from the intelligence community? And Trump, you know, because he has it, you know, we treated almost like a reality show when he attacks the intelligence community and says they're wrong about Russia and it's a hoax and they're the deep state. he doesn't need briefings and kind of chuckle at the reports that he likes pictures and can be. Right. But now we see why that matters, you know, because apparently if he was acting and just even taking the minimal actions that you would take, I mean, at an absolute minimum, Tommy, even if he did nothing with this information, he at least should not have been lying to us,

right? Because what we know, and I think what any investigation has to stack up is what was Trump being told, and then what was he saying publicly the same day? He was literally acting like this was going to go away, cases were going to go down to zero, calm the stock market, the Chinese are handling this right. At a time when we now know he was reading or being briefed the opposite, it's mind-boggling. To your point about how this scandal doesn't even begin to describe it, it's not only that he didn't take any responsible preventive measures to deploy tests to get ready, but he was actually saying the opposite of what he was being told by the people who,

knew what was actually happening, you know. And that, you know, I think when the history of this is written, January and February of 2020 are the months that are going to be the most maddening because that was the time when he had warning, which is what the PDB is warning. And not only did nothing, but did the opposite of what he should have done. Yeah, completely squandered it. It is so frustrating. Someone flagged for me, a conversation I did for this show with Susan Rice in 2017.

And we spent about five minutes talking about Ebola in the next pandemic. And it was clear how searing that experience had been for her. And we're going to clip and somehow share the piece of this interview because it is precedent. She talks about how like, what do you do if a flu like virus emerges? Do you shake hands? She's talking about every expert says it's inevitable. And like obviously all of that information translated into the pandemic plan that was left for the Trump team, the pandemic position that was created the NSC. It's just like the number, it's like every problem with Trump, the number of

blinking lights that were ignored, it just stacks up so high that it almost distracts you from how unbelievable any single one of them was, if that makes sense. And you know what bothers me, Tommy, is you alluded to this. A lot of people get the PDB, right? You know, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, the White House Chief of Staff, National Security Advisor, I got his deputy National Security Advisor. You know, again, it probably runs into the dozens because it's usually kind of cabinet level, deputy cabinet level. We all know like Jared got it. Yeah. Like right, all those people wanted it and they didn't give a shit about protecting intelligence. They all got it. And so the point is that these people knew this too. You know, like these people who work for Trump, Pence was getting

it. So like it's not just Donald Trump. It's not like a briefing to one person. They were all lying to us, or at least in their silence they were lying. Like I, the ethical and meaningful and moral failure of any official in this government who was getting those briefings and being silent about them or calling it a hoax or parroting whatever Trump's talking point of the day is or going out like the White House did repeatedly as late as I think March and saying that this virus was contained. Again, like it's the normal language of scandal doesn't apply because it's it's not like one mistake.

It's the character of this entire White House, you know, coming to bear on the biggest public health emergency in a century. Yeah. It's a refusal to do any work, listen to any experts, and then a willingness of all of these monsters to cover up for whatever he says for political purposes and deny facts and, you know, mislead the nation is, it's a scandal. Okay. Last thing, which is some good news, goodish news. We talked about the story of Captain Crozier and the U.S. Theodore Roosevelt a couple of times. So Crozier was the Navy captain who sent that desperate letter about a COVID outbreak on the aircraft carrier he commanded. He then got relieved of his command.

He caught COVID. He's been quarantined ever since. And then the acting secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modley, handled the situation so badly. He flew to the ship in Guam. He insulted Crozier over the loudspeaker to his own men and women he was commanding. Motley then resigned because he just screwed it up. So the latest on this saga is that the. Navy leadership has recommended that Captain Crozier get his old job back.

And I guess this decision is sitting with Mark Esper, who's the Secretary of Defense, who's reviewing it. I think the reason why is that General Millie, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wants to do a full-blown review of the incident first. I think that's part of the original sin of Crozier being relieved. They didn't do this review. They just like fired, they got rid of him because they thought that's what Trump wanted. And I bet Millie is thinking, like, it was a mistake to fire Crozier before a review the

first time. let's just do one this time. So hopefully this is trending the right way. But, you know, like it does seem like they clearly know they need to write this wrong. The Navy does because almost a fifth of the Theodore Roosevelt's crew caught COVID-19. The bad news, Ben, is according to CNN, that there's another ship with nearly 50 sailors who are sick. It's the USS Kid. It's a Navy destroyer. They've tested less than half of the ships roughly 330 sailors and a huge percentage of them have it. So again, just like this is not a problem with one ship that was in Guam or the Navy specifically. It does seem like it's a crisis that could sweep through the entire armed forces.

And I don't think we're hearing a lot of discussion about mitigating it, about like preserving force readiness, about all the things you would think would be top of minds right. now. Yeah, I mean, I think the good news here, as you alluded to, is like, it's always hardening to see some institution take corrective action, you know, at a time when institutions have been failing left and right, like, to see an injustice kind of at least appears like it's going to be remedied. And frankly, you know, if they want to run a process, that's like what an institution should do. I do think at point, you know, what Crozier said that was so powerful, right, is that if the U.S. was like in a war or something, like they'd stay on the ship and risk having COVID. But

we're not, you know? And what that acting Navy secretary said that was so offensive in part was like they should act like they're at a war because China's out there and they're bad. No, like, we're not in a war. And frankly, you know, that these ships certainly have to be deployed to. And in this context, I think the safety and health of Americans in uniform needs to come first and foremost ahead of whatever you know, mission that might be compromised by doing that. Because it's not worth losing an American service member for some mission that is not absolutely essential here. And so I think the principle that I would hope is applied is that the health and safety of Americans is paramount here. Yeah, agreed. Okay, we'll take a quick break. And then when we come back,

we'll have Ben's conversation with Rana Ayub about how COVID's affecting India and Prime Minister Modi generally. I'm very pleased now to be joined by one of the leading really journalist voices in the world and a Washington Post global opinions writer, Rana Ayyub. Rana, thanks so much for joining us from Mumbai and Ramadan Mubarak to you. How are things doing there? Hi, Ben. I mean, great to be joining this, Ramzan Mubarak to you and all to all the viewers. As I talk, I mean, we haven't slept in the last two nights.

We have been doing me and two other volunteers. Besides the reporting that I'm doing, we're also doing relief work from across the city. and specifically in Dharavi, which is Asia's largest slum with a population of 1.25 millions. And it is estimated that about 25% of that population, which is the poorest of the poor, could be infected. And, you know, in places like this where people live in clusters and these slums, that you cannot really ask them about social distancing. That concept really doesn't work. So the virus is spreading rapidly in India.

We have 30,000 positive cases. But what's really distressing is not the virus as much as the starvation and the hunger and the poverty that the migrants and the workers and the laborers and India fear could kill them before the virus does. So me and two other volunteers, we decided to take the things in our own hands, you know, trying to help a few pockets here and there. We raised a funding drive on Keto, which is this platform. and, you know, we are raising money. Every day we are going to the, you know, collecting, buying daily essentials and supplying it to families. Between the last three days, we have held about 3,000 families, but that's what we're doing.

I'm besides the journalism that we're all doing, I think we're all multitasking. So we're all exhausted. We talked about this on the show a bit when the lockdown was ordered by Modi. I was wondering in a country with such population. and density and such extreme poverty in places, did the government take any precautions or was there any work done to mitigate the fact that it's basically impossible for people who don't have access to food and water and live in very close proximity to each other to follow these guidelines? I mean, what is the government doing to deal with that risk of poverty and hunger?

I mean, the prime minister gave a speech on live television and he gave it. Indians just about four hours before he announced the lockdown. Now, in a country of 1.3 billion, out of which 60% of the country lives below the poverty line, not everybody has their refrigerators stocked. I mean, here there are people who are daily wage earners who have just enough to eat three meals in a day. And the prime minister gives about two or three days notice for the country to cheer, come on their balconies and cheer the efforts made by the government. But just gives about four hours for people in the country to prepare. So I don't think the prime minister and the government led by Mr. Modi

was prepared to handle this crisis. What we saw on television was, you know, this everyday, you know, the prime minister trying to distract saying you get on your balconies and you ban your utensils and you light your candles. But you have to understand that most people in India, especially the poorest lot, do not even have balconies to stand on. So you are still addressing the upper middle class and the middle class. You are not addressing the poor of this country who do not even have a television sit.

So the moment this lockdown was announced, I remember within five minutes, I stepped out of the house and there was total chaos on the streets. You know, everybody was, you know, there was chaos buying and everybody was in a frenzy and there was nothing like social distancing. And the poor were just staring and the poor just did not even have anything. enough money to buy the meal for the next day. The PMKs, which is basically the prime minister's initiative to raise funds for the poor, there's a new story that came yesterday that the fund will not be audited.

Now, that's more like what, you know, it's a very Trumpian thing that, you know, how can the prime minister collect funds and to the tune of billions of rupees and not be and not have any accountability for that money? when millions of people in this country are going hungry. We have visuals of thousands and thousands of laborers across the country, walking to their hometowns in scorching sun, walking for 24 to 48 hours a day without food. So I think the country was extremely ill-prepared for this.

And even now, while we are in lockdown, a lot of work is being done by the NGOs, the non-governmental organizations, the activist, the human rights, workers. These are the ones that you see on the streets as opposed to the government officials. For instance, I was in Dharavi today and, you know, the slum, which I said has a population of 1.25 million, it has not been cleaned for the last one week. There has not been a single sanitation worker because they believe that if they go and clean the area, they will test positive. Now, that

happens because that area has the poorest of the poor population and they have just been led to die. And there are migrant workers who tell me that they don't have food. And the moment they step out to beg or borrow or ask for money, the police beats them and they ask them, they're asked to leave. So at this part of time, they have an uncertain future. And do you have any sense of, is there any accurate reporting or data about how widespread the disease is itself? Or does that data just not exist right now? Well, that data really doesn't exist right now because India is not really testing as much. We are testing about 250

individuals per million and that's very little. So when the Prime Minister of the country says that we do not have as many cases as we expected it's because we are not testing as many people. For instance, two weeks ago, Mumbai, the financial capital of this country, had

50 corona positive journalists and these are people who are just reporting on the streets and these are people who have access and privilege. So if these people, if 50 journalists test positive, you can imagine the number of people in this country who are susceptible to the virus who could actually be asymptomatic and could actually be COVID positive. And we're still talking about urban India. We still do not have figures for rural India, which is a big part of India. We still do not know what are the

measures, what are the testing samples in those areas, how many individuals are being tested in villages. Because I think the priority for the country at this point of time is that, you know, The villages do not need testing. The villages need food. So at this point of time, there's no data specifically to say that, you know, this is the percentage of Indians who could possibly, you know, be positive in the next couple of weeks or months. But so right now, India stands at 30,000 cases.

But when I spoke to health workers and when I spoke to officials in the government, in all the record conversations, they said that the figures could go, I mean, you could easily multiply it five times and that's the figure that we have for India. and India has not peaked yet and the maximum number of cases will only be sometime in June and July. And when you go out to deliver food and support and supplies and things, what do you see?

Do you see people abiding by social distancing measures? Is that impossible in the slums? Or are you seeing people who are affected by the illness? What are your impressions? So there are two India's been. One elite India, upper middle class, India where social distancing, is observed and one is the underprivileged India where social distancing is a luxury,

which they cannot afford, which is being imposed on them against their will because they know they are being beaten. But some place spaces we still go out, especially when we go out in Dharavi, there's nothing like social distancing. I mean, there is a small little, I mean, there's one room and there are eight people in the house and there is one bathroom for 100 families. how do you maintain social distancing when there is no sanitation facilities, when there's no soap, when there is no water 24 hours a day, how do you expect the basic levels of sanitation

to be maintained? How do you expect social distancing in these spaces? So I think even it's it's kind of obscene actually when I talk to them about social distancing because these people are talking about hunger and then you tell them you know what can you can you practice social distancing in this cluster because they're just people crammed. Every house has like, the slums have common walls and they're literally living into each of those houses. So, and they're crammed, they're living in clusters. So social distancing is only being practiced in the elite upper middle class in India,

which is, and mostly the urban cities. And so you've obviously reported a lot on Prime Minister Modi and his recent steps. And we've talked about this a bit on the show. You mentioned the fund he set up, has no oversight. Are there other steps that the government is taking that concern you that could be additional powers that he is assuming in a crisis that he might not give up?

Do you worry about that? What Mr. Modi is doing is not different from what Victor Urban is doing or what Nekhanyahu is doing or what other world leaders are doing in a crisis is that he's using draconian measures to silence voices of dissent and critical. criticism, you know, that have been very vocal in the last couple of months, especially with the Islamophobia, the virus of Islamophobia, which is much more rampant than the coronavirus in the country. So in the last three weeks itself, India's finest journalist have been slapped with the draconian terror charges with the Unlawful Act Prevention Act for reporting

the truth in Kashmir. And this is just last week, two of India's brightest journalists. One of India's leading editor, Siddhartha Rajan, who runs an independent website called The Wire, he has been issued there is a case against him for allegedly reporting fake news, which is actually genuine news by the Indian state. Another columnist, Ram Buha, had his column removed from a leading newspaper Hindustan Times because that column was critical, that editorial was critical of Modi government's measures, the relief measures that he has taken to mitigate this. So Mr. Modi is using every possible draconian measure to silence voices of dissent

and to distract the attention of people from the immediate concern and the immediate concern being poverty and hunger. So what he's doing right now is, I mean, even at this point of time, the kind of Islamophobia that we have seen. I remember when the virus spread in the first two weeks, Mr. Modi's union minister for minority affairs called Muslims, said that Muslims were calibanizing the coronavirus

and for the union minority affairs minister to say this I mean that that had the effect the government wanted to there was every almost it is given now in India the narrative in India right now is that

Muslims are spreading the virus and wherever there is you know wherever there are maximum positive cases it is because of Muslims and this is not a conversation in the lower middle class or the uneducated sectors. I'm talking about this conversation is happening about in regular Indian households, in upper middle class households, on WhatsApp conversations. The narrative is that Muslims are behind spreading this virus in the country. And when you have the ministers in the

ruling government, when you have cops giving these statements and when Muslims are being apprehended and arrested for allegedly spitting on people to spread the virus, and you have dozens of fake videos doing a round of Muslims misbehaving and our television news channels which basically are towing the line of the Indian government are an

extended propaganda arm of Mr. Modi. So you switch on Indian television news channels and it's nauseating to see one of India's leading news channels India today had a graphic of the virus with a Muslim skull cap

and that graphic went viral and there are news channels which are running headlines about the Muslim virus, from the China virus to the Islamic virus in India. And the Prime Minister, who's very, very vocal on Twitter, he's very vocal in the various videos that he uses to spread his messages, has not once lashed out at these people or has not once admonished his own ministers and people who he follows in social media to stop making these. these comments or, you know, advised or has given a warning to these news channels. So I think

it's more, I've never seen more, I've never seen a more serious case of Islamophobia in India as I see it right now. And I remember just in the first week of virus, I posted something on Twitter. I said, what, what can a virus get in a morally corrupt nation? And Indian liberals hauled me over the course for saying that. And I said, unfortunately, that's a true. because in a country where people are being killed, ministers and the government are giving hate speeches which leads to a carnage and the innocent are arrested. The virus, we have already killed a population.

It's a morally corrupt society. Even through a pandemic, we are identifying people by the close and by their religion. And that's state-enabled. It's a state-enabled propaganda. Yeah, yeah. So basically, it's just all the trends that we're already taking hold in India have just become more pronounced in the pandemic, it sounds like. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, what makes you, I mean, you're also out there, you know, doing your kind of private relief efforts.

I mean, we even followed people protesting some of the steps that the government's taken recently. I mean, is there a civil society or a sense of solidarity that gives you some hope amidst what is a very difficult to? situation? So just before the country announced lockdown, you would know that there were protests happening in the country against the citizenship bill that directly affects the 200 million Muslim minorities in the country and there were nationwide protests happening. And Mr. Modi has silenced all voices of dissent. Of course, there are dissenting voices and there were people protesting and there were people protesting in millions just before the lockdown. But this, But this pandemic has come in handy for Mr. Modi to silence all voices of dissent.

Anand Tel Tumere, who's one of India's leading intellectuals and civil rights activist, was arrested amidst the pandemic. And he's the man who, you know, who's one of India's leading civil rights activist, Dalit rights activist, who's been working for free speech, who's been working against the Citizenship Amendment Bill. Some of India's finest academics have been behind bars in the last six. months on the charges that they were conspiring to kill the prime minister of the country, for which they have absolutely no proof.

So what does give me hope are the common people of this country, the students of this country who came in big numbers, a lot of the Muslim population for the first time. I mean, you never seem, I mean, there have been majoritarian decisions taken by Mr. Modi in the last six years, but never before has the Indian Muslim really stepped out of the House to protest against Mr. Modi's draconian anti-Muslim agenda as it had in the last couple of months. So I think we do have voices of dissent, but Mr. Modi is trying to make sure that the voices are diluted with this propaganda that he has spread in the country, that these voices are actually anti-nationals.

You know, they are people like us, journalists like me who write for the Washington Post, are writing for the Washington Post because we are trying to de-legitimize India's position internationally. You know, when a Time magazine doesn't cover on Modi or when the economist wants a cover on Modi, the journalists become anti-nationals who are basically CIA agents

who are out there to delegitimize and, you know, give Mr. Modi a bad name. So the number of charges and defamation cases against journalists in India in the last six years, I think it's just phenomenal. the number of, I mean, at this point of time, we don't really have voices of dissent in India. We have few of them, but most of them are behind bars. You know, most of our lawyers, one of our finest lawyers are behind bars right now.

And they are languishing in jail for the last three or four years. So, I don't know. My hope is the people of this country. My hope are the people who have been donating to our charity drive, which we have been doing in the last four days. And it's so heartening to see, you know, when I started this drive four days ago and Keto, which is this platform, I really did not think that the Indians will actually come forward to help the poor. But it reveals that there is hope for the country.

You know, the kind of support that we have received for the relief campaign and the relief work that we have been doing shows that there is hope for the country. But it's not from the leadership. It's from within the people. It's from the dissenting voices. It's from people who disagree with the government. So there is hope. I mean, I'm an optimist, so I think we live in hope. I live in hope.

Well, thanks for giving us this picture. And if our listeners wanted to support any of your relief efforts, is there a way that they can do that? Sure, they can write. I mean, we have, you know, the Keto website, and the Keto is this platform where we are raising funds. It's on my Twitter. They can also write to me on Rana.orgia.orgia.com

where we are, you know, collaborating and perhaps helping people as much as possible, because that is the need of the hour right now to help the poor of this country because we fear that the virus will not kill them. It's the starvation and the hunger that will kill the people of this country. So it's extremely important that we get all the help possible. Great. Well, thanks so much, Rana. It's terrific to talk to you and really wish you the best of luck in these circumstances.

Thank you so much, Ben. Great talking to you. Thanks again to everybody for listening this week. Thanks to Rana Ube. Ben, thanks to you. How are you doing on the haircut front, by the way? I feel like it looked like Colin Firth preparing to play a pre-year-old. prisoner of war in a movie. I'm just a ragged piece of shit. So I did, you know, someone with very

little hair, it actually is more important to cut your hair more frequently or else you start to look very weird because like clumps come in in the wrong place. So I actually ordered these clippers that I'd never used before, right? Oh no. And the first time I tried to use them, they just basically started to pull not just the hair, but like my scalp off my head. Oh. Like the most pain, like whatever setting was off. So my wife, who's much more handy than I am. I have the curse of, you know, knowing nothing about how to fix anything. She fixes this. And I have to say, I did buzz my head by myself for the first time and didn't, you know, come out looking too crazy here. So I may be having a silver lining for always looking for hope.

I may come out of this not having to pay for haircuts anymore if I can figure out how to just buzz my own head, which is not rocket science, but it's something that coronavirus has forced me to do. do. No, that's a good one. It's a good time saver. Favro used to just like straight up buzz his head. And one morning, uh, before coming to work, he realized he had missed a spot. So we like ran back in to like quickly fix it. And he didn't realize that he had left the setting on zero and not like a four or whatever he normally used and just like hammered a giant ball patch into the back of his head. And then it had to come into the Senate office in like 2006 or whatever. And Obama just let him know that he was not looking good. As like a, you know, segment of the population.

that like has lost hair throughout my 20s and 30s. I remember when Fabry used to shave his head. And I always found it like offensive, an offensive luxury that people with good hair shave their heads. You know, it's like, don't take it for granted, man. Words to live by. Don't take anything for granted. Don't take anything for granted.

We're learning that. Take stock of what you have in this world right now because you could be imprisoning your house the next week and never know. Yes. Anyway, good show today. Talk to you soon. Yeah, talk soon. Pot Save the World is a product of crooked media.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seglan is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.