Pod Save the World - Trump vs Team USA

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss the criminal charges against Trump’s inaugural committee chair Tom Barrack, President Biden's meeting with the prime minister of Iraq, why the Israeli government is attacking Ben and Jerry's, Xi Jinping's visit to Tibet and tons of Olympic news. Then Tommy talks to journalist Fadil Aliriza about why the Tunisian president dismissed the prime minister and Parliament.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POTS of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, today's episode is for people who love Team USA only. Yeah. So if you're the 45th president of the United States or one of the assembled Maga Aryan youths he spoke to on Saturday who booed the women's soccer team, we need you to log off, delete the episode. Hit up the Russian Olympic Committee. Yeah, the Rock podcast. The Rock is ready for you.

Yeah. Yeah, we got a team for you. Get the fuck out of here. We don't want you on this show. But for those of you who love America, we have a fantastic show here. Lots of jingoism, as you just heard. We will also cover some international legal trouble for the former chair of Trump's inaugural committee. The Iraqi Prime Minister visited Joe Biden in the Oval Office.

We'll talk about some of the announcements out of that. Why people are flipping out about Ben and Jerry's ice cream in the most exhausting way possible. I have a special committee. Jerry Garcia, yeah. Jerry Garcia, Chunky Monkey. Xi Jinping visited Tibet. People are manipulating the weather, plain God, if you ask me. And then we have lots of fun, Olympic news. And then our guest today is Fadal Alariza. He's a fantastic journalist in Tunisia who's covering the recent political machinations that some people are calling a coup.

We talk about why people are protesting what folks make of the Tunisian president's decision to fire the prime minister, dissolve parliament, and generally kind of take over a little bit. So stick around for that. Good episode. God, this is good. We got a lot going on, Ben. This topics, yeah. Want to start with something cathartic? Yeah, let's do it. Tom Barrick.

Yes. Not good. Not good. Fresh legal trouble in Trump world. Not surprising, but not good. Yeah, this isn't any of that dated, you know, impeachment legal trouble. This is fresh right off the vine legal trouble with an international flavor, so it works for us. So Tom Barrack is a former chair of Trump's inaugural committee.

He was charged with illegally lobbying the Trump campaign and the Trump administration on behalf of the United Arab Emirates. Barrack was also charged with obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. It's bad. The gist of the legal problem for Tom Barrick is that you are allowed to lobby on behalf of a foreign government like the UAE,

but you have to register first as a foreign agent with the Department of Justice or else you get in big trouble. And it sounds like Barrick didn't do that. And then he put a lot of his work in text pen, emails. They all found their way to prosecutors. I think the one you liked the best was

I nailed it for the home team. Yes, yes. Well, I mean, there's a theme here, right, which is these guys, you know, Trump and his cronies, you know, wrap themselves in America first, you know, neo-fascist rhetoric. Yet they root against America's sports teams. The home team is the Emirates. They're consistently working on behalf of foreign interests. I mean, I think here the couple things that jumped out of me. First of all, like the scale of this, right?

There are a bunch of FARA cases where people are doing stuff and they don't register and that's bad. As a foreign agent registration act. Exactly, right? But this was like this guy was inserting language into Trump speeches. He was kind of boasting about his advocacy for villain of the pod, Mike Pompeo, like getting in there in front of the Emirates. You know, he was, you know, we talked on the podcast at the beginning of the Trump administration. If you took a list of things that the Emirates would want from the United States government, that was basically what the Trump foreign policy was.

They're blockading Qatar for a little while. So they blockaded Qatar. They embraced Mohammed bin Salman. The first overseas trip by Donald Trump, the President of the United States, was to Saudi Arabia. They embraced Sisi, Trump's favorite dictator in Egypt. They subsequently backed up Muhammad bin Salman after the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. all the insane things are happening in the Gulf, like the Lebanese Prime Minister being taken hostage. You know, I haven't forget about that.

They escalated support for the war in Yemen, the Saudis and Iranis. So it literally the foreign policy was kind of subcontracted out to Abu Dhabi in Riyadh. And clearly, part of the reason why was not Donald Trump's kind of longstanding expertise on Middle East issues. No. Clearly, it was an effort to kind of curry favor with the Gulf. autocrats who have a lot of money, right? And so to me, the two issues that demand further exploration here are who else was on the take here? I mean, again, Jared Kushner, as we know, was WhatsApp buddies with all these guys in the Gulf, right?

Like, what promises were being made, what real estate investments were being made. This really does merit further investigation because it feels like the evidence is hiding in plain sight that the entire foreign policy United States was kind of corrupted. Oh, never mind the withdrawal from the JCPOA. the Iran nuclear deal that the Emirates and Saudi isn't like, you know? Yeah, and also, like, so I was talking to someone who used to work at DOJ about this. It wasn't clear in any of the charging documents, but what the payment was to Barrick. Tom Barrack, by the way, is a billionaire.

Right. And made, though, gobs of money in the Emirates. So it was probably like investments, right? Yes. So again, I nailed it for the home team. That was a quote when he read a bunch of UAE provided talking points in a TV interview. He also apparently pushed for himself to be the U.S. ambassador to the UAE or a special envoy. to the region he pleaded he pleaded innocent uh but was freed from jail after paying a 250 million

bond so they were really worried that this guy's like got a private jet got a bunch of buddies in non extradition countries like we may never see him again i guess there were two other guys charged one fled the country in 2018 after his interview with law enforcement hasn't been seen again so barrack must have known this was coming i mean like do you i guess that's my question to you ben like do you think barrack was the uae's ace in the hole or like is this the typical the iceberg? No, that's the thing. So not only is there the question of like just whether there was other, you know, illegal activity in terms of corruption, but, you know, one of the interesting things about the story is you saw a bunch of people dunking on Barrick and maybe people taking

shots of Trump. What about the conversation about the extent of the influence that the UAE has in Washington? There was a lot of noticeable silence on that because it is an incredibly far-reaching influence operation that this relatively small country runs in Washington on a regular basis. They pour money into think tanks. They pour money into lobbying. They pour money into speaking engagements for former officials who might be future officials. They pour money, obviously, to buying weapons, and then the defense contractors are kind of in the pocket of the Gulf and advocate for their interests. And some of this is legal, right? It's not illegal to do a bunch of stuff I just said. But I felt when I was in government, like there was something gross about this.

I remember, for instance, like I used to constantly detect the Emirati line criticizing our foreign policy in the media and in the kind of think tank industry. And then you'd read in certain publications, you know, spotted at the lavish Wolfgang Puck as the chef party at the Emirati ambassador's residence. And then there's a list of like everybody who was trashing us, right? That is like verbatim, by the way. It was like always Wolfgang Puck. No, it was always. Yeah. And so literally.

Because you a sense of the money. Yeah. Like you have like, you know, journalists or think tankers or former officials or members of Congress, like robin elbows parting it up, you know, with the this kind of opulence, right, that is funded by the Saudis and the Maraudis. And, you know, like, this was like a real problem for us. Like, I couldn't, I couldn't, like, even with the megaphone of the White House,

I couldn't compete with the megaphone that, like, the UAE had in Washington. And this is like the least well-kept secret in Washington here. So it's not just Barrack. And I should say it's not just the illegal activity that he was engaged in. Why is there so much influence from basically autocratic countries that don't necessarily have the same interests that we have, you know? And they've spent a lot of time and a lot of money convincing everybody that we do have the same interests. It's somehow we need to have tens of thousands of troops to counter Iran in that region and all this stuff.

Like, you know, hopefully, and I'm not that hopeful, but I would like to think that pulling the threat on this case and others might at least force a reckoning and at least a greater degree of self-awareness of the fact that, because, you know, the funny thing is the Amaranis, in a weird way, I don't blame. them, like, why wouldn't they do this? You know, like, they're good at what they do. This is how they do business comes down. This is how they do business. It's not, in a weird way, it's not like their fault. We have to police ourselves. Yeah, exactly.

Like, we have to be mindful that if somebody is spending this much time, effort, and money to try to persuade you to do what they want you to do, that that's an influence operation. Right. Not necessarily, you know, what's in the best interest in the United States. We'll see how this plays out. really rich guys tend to get off on these charges. Fair is a weird law. It's inconsistently enforced.

It's kind of confusing. So I don't know how it'll play out. But it was instructive to learn all the things he was deeply involved in at the different moments along the way. And it does. And it does connect to what you're going to talk about later in the pot on Tunisia. Like, we know for a fact that the Saudis and Emirates, because they were very open about it,

helped subsidize the coup that brought Sisi back into power in Egypt. And there's a lot of indications. that the Saudis and Emirates are very supportive of what's happening in Tunisia now. Yeah, I asked about that. Their bots are active and all this stuff. And so this is like, you know, if you care about democracy, these aren't just countries that are autocratic in their own countries. They have been subsidizing autocracy across like a pretty broad swath of territory in the

Middle East to North Africa. Yeah, let's stay in the Middle East and turn to Iraq because on Monday, President Biden that with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Qadimi in the Oval Office, they laid out a plan to shift the U.S. military mission in Iraq from some combat role to an entirely advisory and training role by the end of 2021. The U.S. currently has about 2,500 troops in Iraq. It seems like that number won't change much. There were some initial reports out of Iraq that made it sound like the prime minister might come to Washington and demand that all U.S. troops go home. I think that was a bit of a garble. It was more about, like, defining what they do there. Then, you know, back in

2011, you remember this well. President Obama declared the end to the combat mission in Iraq before having to send troops back in 2014 to deal with ISIS. How significant do you think this announcement is that like the mission is shifting just formally to the training role? On the one hand, it's kind of an indication of where we are in the ISIS campaign, right? That there's not a feeling that there's such a threat from ISIS that U.S. troops, U.S. Special Forces kind of need to be out there engaged in combat operations. operations. So that's a positive sign, right, that the security situation has improved there. I don't know if the troops are basically just staying there and they're kind of on bases,

you know, it's not like a seismic shift or anything. But I think what it does point to is, and you know, you look at Afghanistan by contrast, right, and how bad it looks there. You know, Iraq has a lot of problems, a lot of dysfunction. a lot of Iranian influence and a lot of intercommunal rivalry and, you know, some questions about, you know, how democratic the government is. But, you know, there's some signs of progress and stabilization taking place there. And the hope is that over time that can lead to Iraq evolving into a more normal country, which it hasn't been since the U.S. invasion. So I think this is like a, you know, a sign of modest progress.

And hopefully, you know, we can build on that with the Iraqis and other countries that support Iraq to, you know, finally try to have this country emerge from what has been a pretty awful decade plus. Yeah, truly awful. Okay, Ben. Unfortunately, now we have to talk about ice cream. I did not want to talk about this. But here we are. Here we are. Here we are.

Yeah, I wrote and deleted a lot of tweets about this. Yeah, it's just anyway. So here's the back story. Last week, Ben and Jerry's, yes, the ice cream company, they announced that they would no longer sell their products in the occupied West Bank because the company felt that doing so was inconsistent with its values and support for social justice movements. The ice cream will still be available in Israel.

It sounds ridiculous even saying this out of life. The ice cream will still be available in Israel proper, but Ben and Jerry's will not sell their products in the West Bank, presumably parts of East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights. You might hear this and think, good for them? that's a small but principled stand for an ice cream company, you might think, I don't give a shit, it's ice cream. I'm guessing you didn't hear this lay down and think any of these quotes. Ben and Jerry's quote, has decided to brand itself as the anti-Israel ice cream, or that the decision was, quote, a new form of terror, or that this was, quote, a shameful surrender to anti-Semitism.

Those are quotes from the Israeli Prime Minister and Fali Bennett, President Isaac Herzog and Foreign Minister Yair Lepid, the Moderate, describing Ben and Jerry's decision. Many of them tried to link it to the BDS movement, the boycott divestment and sanctions movement, because I guess it sounds boycott-like, although it's not really. Ironically, several Israeli politicians, including disgraced former Prime Minister,

Bevin & Yahoo, called for a boycott of Ben and Jerry's products. So whatever. Republican U.S. Senator James Langford of Oklahoma, even called on his state to block the sale of all Ben and Jerry's. So, Ben, like, this insane overreaction is why neither of us, I think, wanted to deal with this. It took less than a week to go from, like, sales of ice cream to, you know, a company founded by two Jewish men being potentially banned from Oklahoma. So in summary, like, what these guys did is not BDS. I have no idea if ice cream sales will help the Palestinian cause.

Right before we started recording, I read a story that said that Israeli government has formed. special task force to pressure Ben and Jerry's to reverse their decision. I guess what they're doing maybe is trying to make this as painful as possible for Ben and Jerry's and intimidated other countries from companies, I mean, from following suit. I don't know. What did you make of this? First of all, the Israeli government's response is kind of telling on itself because they're saying Ben and Jerry's that they're not going to sell ice cream in Israeli settlement. in illegally occupied Palestinian territories under international law. The Israeli government, not Beninjuries,

is the one that's saying this is a boycott of all of Israel. They're basically saying that all of the settlements are part of Israel, right? So that is problematic to say the least. There's some logical challenges there. The logic train then suggests that, okay, therefore, you're kind of de facto annexing all of the Palestinian territory by saying that, If someone refuses to sell ice cream there, they're refusing to sell it in Israel proper. That, to me, kind of reveals the fundamental tension here, right?

Which is that Israel wants to be viewed as a full democracy, while also wanting to have the capacity to indefinitely rule, govern, have authority over the Palestinians, right? So there's that problem, right? then there's this question of the insanity of mounting a maximum pressure campaign. Ben is quoting from an Axios headline. Yes. Scoop Israel launches maximum pressure campaign against Ben and Jerry's. Now that may be tongue and cheek, but it is the language normally reserved for Iran. Well, and Lapid said something along the lines of, you know, there's all these states that have passed BDS laws and I'm going to call on all of them to go after Ben and Jerry's, right?

And, you know, what is this really about? I mean, I remember when at the end of the Obama administration, we abstained on a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli continued Israeli settlements. And Israel went, like, completely nuclear, you know, and they concocted, you know, conspiracy theories about information they had about what we were doing behind the scenes to do this. And they attacked, you know, people like me who, like, were out being spokespeople for these decisions. decisions, even though it was like the end of the Obama administration, Trump was coming in, Trump was already embracing them, this resolution was not going to change anything, right? And a friend of mine who's a very smart and astute analyst on Israeli policy said to me, you have to understand the Israeli mindset of deterrence, right?

And I always thought this was like a really interesting comment. He's like, everything that they do is meant to kind of have maximum deterrent, right? Raise the cost on you personally. Yeah, so if you look at, you know, at the most extreme version militarily, like the Gaza war seems, all these Gaza wars seem excessive, you know, like it seems like why do they have to destroy all this infrastructure to get at Hamas? Well, it's to impose the maximum cost on a whole range of people, including, and it's in civilians to kind of send the message, it's not worth, you know, opposing us militarily,

which, again, that's like a, you know, that's a, you know, that's a, you know, that's a, like a conventional military deterrent strategy. It's not totally out of left field. However, what's interesting about Israel is they do the same thing kind of diplomatically in American politics if they sense some threat, right? So what they see is there's a growing movement on the left in this country to question U.S. support for the Israeli government, to question why certain businesses are operating in Israeli settlements, for instance. And so what they're going do is they're going to take one brand that everybody's heard of. And then everybody already thinks of as kind of lefty, right?

I mean, it's been in juries. Like a couple hippie guys. Like, had a great idea out in Vermont. And, like, you know, I've been to the factory. Didn't they support Bernie to? They did they support Bernie. They're deadheads. Like, there's tie-dye, like the whole thing.

So everybody kind of already thinks of these guys is kind of lefties. Well, they sold the Unilever in like the 80s. Yeah. It's like that's a corporate conglomer. Now it is. But like, you know, the- No, totally. The ethos of the company.

And so they're just going to nuke. these people like to send a deterrent message to any other company or person who might consider having an opinion on these things that we're going to make it so awful for you. And look, in looking at it, the judgment is, okay, that might be very effective or might invite a backlash, you know? And I think it's actually probably effective, you know. But I also think that the facts on the ground, as we've talked about, are it's becoming increasingly obvious that Israel has no interest in a two-state solution. And so they keep trying to make the conversation about anything other than what are the circumstances for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, in Gaza,

in the West Bank. If the conversation is about that, that's a very awkward conversation for them, if the conversation is about BDS, or frankly, if they're kind of tarring anybody who opposes them as any Semites, like, that's a different conversation. Look, I totally agree. I'm sure there's boardrooms who might be considering a similar decision or course of action who think, man, that's a lot of smoke. I don't want to deal with that. But to be clear, this is not BDS, this is not a new form of terror.

This is not anti-Semitism. It's ice cream. It's also kind of an... It's offensive to, I mean, victims of terrorism. There's a boy who cried wolf thing here. It's like anti-Semitism is a real problem in the world. Terrorism is a real problem in the world. Ice cream is not that.

Yeah. No, well, that's the thing is antisemitism. I honestly, like this makes it harder to focus in on the very virulent and problematic anti-Semitism on the right and elements of the left these days. Totally. If you're saying that Ben and Jerry's, you know, not selling some ice cream in a West Bank settlement is anti-Semitism. I can't get it.

half baked in my kibbutz. Like, give me a break. And here's the thing that bothers me about this. And it bothers me with how broad they paint this, you know, BDS movement with it. Like, I don't like anybody trying to force Americans or anybody else with a matter to self-censor. You know, it's in the same way that I don't like, you know, China, trying to tell the NBA, they can't have an opinion about Hong Kong. I don't like the Israeli government trying to tell Ben and Jerry's.

They can't have an opinion about selling ice cream in the West Bank. Like I like we should be able to make our own decisions about what we buy and where we sell things and what we say about stuff. It does have that feeling that like sort of like maximalist we're going to come down on you like a ton of bricks vibe that we saw with China and the NBA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just like you better just shut up about anything having to do with again, not just what's happening in Israel. This is not about what's happening in Israel. This is about what's happening in the Palestinian territories in, in Israeli settlements. deep into the West Bank. I mean,

what, they, is it really, is it really such an Israeli national interest that, that Cherry Garcia be available to settlers? Like, I don't, I don't think so. If I were there political strategists, I would say, take a couple pitches. You know, you don't always have to swing, for God's sake.

It's fucking ice cream. So last week, President Xi Jinping of China became the first Chinese leader to visit Tibet in 30 years. The occasion, a happy one, was to mark the 70th anniversary of China, invading and occupying Tibet, so I'm sure they were thrilled to see him. According to Chinese state media, she told local officials to push Tibetans to identify more with the, quote, Great Motherland, Chinese people, Chinese culture, and Chinese Communist Party

and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He also reportedly said that rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will only occur when people follow the party. She visited some cultural and religious sites, which is odd since the Chinese Communist Party is not usually a big fan of those kinds of things. Tibet has been under the control of the Chinese Communist Party since 1951. Not invited to meet with Xi was the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, who was in exile and called a dangerous separatists by the Chinese government. This is Xi's third visit to Tibet in his career.

I think he went in the 80s. He went a couple years ago when he was vice president. Ben, what did you make of this? I just, I didn't know what to make of it beyond to feel like it was kind of ominous, given the ongoing cultural genocide happening to the Uyghur. but I don't know, what was your take? I mean, I think that Xi has been, you know, the Chinese Communist Party's spent many years, decades, you know, trying to repopulate Tibet with more Han Chinese,

trying to discredit the Dalai Lama as some kind of terrorist separatist, trying to claim that they have the right to determine who the next Dalai Lama is, trying to eradicate the kind of cultural and linguistic and religious tradition, of the Tibetan people. Like this was kind of before Hong Kong and before Xinjiang in the Uyghur situation, this was the first,

you know, one of the first areas where you saw them trying to kind of impose a uniform identity on territory where there were, you know, ethnic and religious groups that believed different things

and spoke different language and had different traditions. And to me, I think what's, you know, particularly eerie concerning about this visit at this time when you see China being much more aggressive, the Chinese Communist Party, that is, is like you look at what's happening in Xinjiang, you look at what's happening in Hong Kong, and then you look at Taiwan, you know, and the message

consistently, right, is like we are going to determine everything that happens in the space that we claim as part of China. And, you know, we don't care about international opinion. Oh, by the way, in Tibet, they have basically silenced. Remember there used to be like a whole movement around Tibetan freedom concerts. Like you and I are old enough to remember like the BC boys. Stickers on cars. And the Dalai Lama was an icon. Well, you know, they've kind of snuffed that out. Like nobody really raises Tibetan human rights anymore. And the Dalai Lama is very old and doesn't have the same cachet, in part because they've bullied people into no longer meeting with the dilemma. And so I think, you know, the example of Tibet, unfortunately, it's an example of what

they would like to see happen in a lot of other places, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. And at a certain point, you know, the question is, in Taiwan, is that going to cause a conflict? And in Hong Kong, how far are they going to go? And they've already suggested that they're going to go as far as they've gone everywhere else, you know? Yeah. Let's do a good. news story in terms of a political transition and close the loop on a political crisis in Samoa that had been basically gripping the country since May. So here's the good news. Fiam Ane Naomi Mata Apha will be sworn in as Samoa's first female prime minister. She won the

election back in like April, but the ruling party, the guys she beat, did everything possible to keep her from taking office, including locking the doors of the parliament and denying her entering through the building on the days she was supposed to be sworn in. They did this kind of ad hoc swearing in ceremony on the lawn. The crisis finally ended when a Samoan court of appeals told them basically to cut the shit and let her formally take over the government this week. Interestingly, Ben, one of the first moves she will make is to kill a Chinese-backed port development project that costs like $100 million.

So I'm sure Beijing is not thrilled about that. I wonder if they'll start sounding off. But, you know, some good news here. Yeah, I mean, the stop the steel movement in Samoa didn't go all the way. No, it didn't pan out. And look, this is going to continue to, you know, we mentioned this before, but this is going to be characteristic of these small Pacific Island nations where China wants to throw some money around and then have a total say in their politics. And, you know, they're going to be kind of caught in between this U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry. And what you just hope is that, that as in this case, they can make their own decisions and that the rule of law can hold. So positive story here for Samoans. But it's going to, you know, it's not the end of the story. It's going to continue to be a challenge. I'm sure China is not going to. and its effort to try to exert influence in this. Yeah, that sounds right to me.

Okay, well, now I'll do a little more positive. A.E. Because I don't know if you saw this story, but scientists in the UAE have literally figured out how to make it rain. They fly drones. Well, they already make it rain. I mean, yeah.

Tom Barrett. They fly drones into clouds. The drones release some sort of electrical charge, which makes it rain, which is pretty cool. It sounds a bit like playing God, but it's pretty cool, and it could be important for a country like the UAE that faces a severe,

drought in the middle of the desert, sinking water tables. I guess there's similar cloud seeding technology that's used to make it snow in some Western states, though it's a different technology that basically they sprinkle like dry ice into these clouds to try to make it so. Not clear if it's all that effective. I don't know. I guess I'm just happy to see one of the craziest government conspiracy theories come true that we can control the weather. I mean, that's not every day. I, you know, and again, you know, the Emirates, you know, we've criticized them. I mean, they have definitely been at the tip of the spear of a lot of innovation, too. Here's the, I'll be the, you know, the cloud and the, because I've been, I've been, like,

particularly terrified of climate change recently. Oh, yeah, all day, every day. And I was, you know, looking into some of these efforts to affect the weather, right? And I think in Russia, for instance, they're doing the same thing to make it rain to kind of put out some fires and things like that. And one of the challenges that might emerge is as individual nations get this capacity to control the weather and understandably use it, right, to deal with drought or what have you or put out fires. I don't think there's a full understanding of how that affects kind of broader weather patterns. Yeah.

Because like the weather doesn't tend to recognize national boundaries, you know. And so there is another area where there's going to have to be international cooperation. for these kind of weather-altering technologies so that, like, one country isn't, you know, inadvertently or intentionally screwing another. But for the time being, welcome the innovation. Clearly, we're going to need all of it to deal with climate change, but we're also going to need to make sure that it's not compounding other problems. Yeah, no, controlling the weather, what could go wrong? I went down a bit of a rabbit hole in this, and I guess the military, the U.S. military, experimented with weather as a weapon in Vietnam. They wanted to make it rain to screw with supply routes.

I'm not sure that would have worked. And then in 1977, there was a treaty banning the use of weather modification for military purposes. So the more you know. So, you know, there you go. I mean, because with climate, you know, the models are right in terms of what they're predicting in terms of the warming of the planet. But where the models seem to have underappreciated the effects of climate change is on how the weather patterns could be affected in ways that could lead to more extreme weather events. Yeah. Yeah.

Like the flooding we saw in China. I mean, if I didn't put that in the show, because it was really hard to figure out what the real numbers even are. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just astonishing. Astonishing floods. Okay, Ben, so we're going to transition

to our Olympics segment here. I want to make sure you saw that I'm now an Everton football fan, an EPL fan, thanks to Roger Bennett. So a friend of the pod, Michael O'Neill, sent me a random box of swag, including this mug. So here we are. Thank you, Michael. Nice.

Shout out. Olympics. Lots of news this week. First question, what's your favorite thing you watch? I have to say, like, the Olympic watching experience has been transformed somewhat by having kids, and it's very cool to have kids and, like, be introducing them to the Olympics for the first time. So me personally, like, I was really into watching, like, our Alaskan swimmer, like, crush it and win a gold medal.

That was cool. I was really into watching our women's volleyball team is just fucking badass. But my kids, like the dressage came on, right? And we were joking about this before the pod, but like normally kind of switch the channel or I like. Yeah, you make a Mitt Romney joke. Yeah, yeah, Rafalka, you know. But like my daughters, like could not get their brains around these giant dancing horses, you know. They're cool.

And so suddenly it's a good example of how when you have kids, like your whole experience of sports and media changes, like I'm sitting there. watching and kind of appreciate, I guess I'm inviting some shit here, but like just kind of watching my kids freak out because, and what's cool about is part of what I love about the Olympics is like, there are people that like all they do is learn how to make like some horse dance. Now granted, I know this is kind of a privileged sport, but like across the board, like volleyball is the same thing or water polo or all these things. Like the amount of time that people have put into doing these somewhat obscure things is very cool to me. And then like the number, watching volleyball, you just realized how many like six foot five to six foot seven men and women there are in the world who can just hammer a ball like a hundred miles an hour.

Yeah. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Well, I've to say too, I was kind of like I enjoyed watching the men's basketball, even though we lost and don't at me. This is not a Trump comment because I was kind of proud as an American. like, that everybody else has gotten so good at this game that kind of we created is kind of of a weirdly validation of like, it will take that. Like, you know, like, now, granted, I think they're going to figure it out.

Like, I'm waiting to like, you know, the U.S. team to find the other gear here. Yeah, I bet they will too. I kind of like the weird sports. Like, I don't need to see, I just watch the NBA finals. I don't need to see more basketball. But like, do you see any handball? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or you kind of like just leap into some air.

and gun the thing. I watched a little rugby last night, and I pissed a lot of people off by saying that the rules are incomprehensible. I stand by that statement and the edible I took while drafting it. But I admire how tough those people are. They're just like, I don't know.

It's like football without paths. They're just crushing each other. It's very impressive. We are at the point of the Olympics, though, where I'm like, okay, I've seen enough swimming probably. Yeah, yeah. I'm not, I can't do it. Yeah, I mean, there's a, but the Tunisian.

That was really, Yeah, I mean, like, that's the kind of moment that can only happen at the Olympics, right? Where, I mean, same thing with like a swimmer from Alaska, right, where there's, like, I think, one 50-meter pool in the whole state. But, like, for a Tunisian guy to win, you know that everybody in Tunisia is, like, freaking out about that in a good way. So everyone should check out this video. So he's an 18-year-old Tunisian guy, Ahmed Hafnui. He won a surprise gold medal in a 400-meter freestyle. He had the slowest qualifying time.

of all eight people in his heat, but he managed to pull it out. And there's a viral video of his family back in Tunisia, basically, like, filming themselves, watching the race, and they lose their mind. And it's, like, the most pure, awesome thing. Yeah. There was a viral video of, you know, the people in Alaska watching Lydia Jacoby when, including, like, her classmates and everything.

People, like, freaking out and then cuts to her parents and they're crying. And I'm kind of, like, kind of tearing up. I'm kind of, like, it actually, to go back to where we started, like, made me so pissed about it. like Trump and this culture war stuff entering the Olympics. Because I remember as a kid, like feeling like we were all backing these athletes. Can we just like all find unity in sports here? That's what the Olympics are supposed to be about.

It's not supposed to be like a venue for your culture war. Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't know if people saw this Phoenix rally. Trump raised the women's soccer team losing to Sweden. He said it was because of wokeism. He got them all to boo them. It's just like, it's so hard for me to get over a president of United States, rooting against an Olympic team, rooting against America. And the sort of feeling of political impotence that comes from not immediately knowing that we can use that clip to bury his political career.

Like in a just world, that's what would happen. Well, and because like in a weird way, like I, like we're talking about Tunisia, which is obviously going through a bunch of shit right now. But like, it makes me happy that other countries are so pumped too. You know, like, I obviously want the U.S. athletes to win. I'm usually rooting for them, obviously, unless, like, they're just not in the competition. But, like, I'm happy for the other countries when they're totally psyched, particularly if it's, like, a small country. Like, the Philippines. Like, Philippine Weightlifter won the gold medal, and it was, like, the best thing to happen to the country to learn.

That's just cool. Yeah. I'm into it. I mean, let's go to a question I think some people might have, which is why the Russian team has such a weird name. The Rock. The Rock. And they can't use their country name flag or answer. them. So the short answer is because they're cheaters. And never forget that. They're a bunch of

cheaters. The Russia Olympic committee team or the rock, they're using that name because it's part of their punishment for using PEDs and conspiring to cover up the evidence of that PED use at the Sochi Olympics. The penalty extends through the 2022 Winter Olympics as well. So these Russian athletes who weren't part of the doping weren't subject to the suspension can still participate, but just in this weird, confusing way. Ben, do you think this is, I don't know, to me, this doesn't seem like much of a punishment for like a bunch of people taking steroids in a systematic way and covering it up. I don't know. They're still basically competing. Yeah. I mean, and just so people get the fact that this was like a next level cheating shit, you know, like Putin as bond villain kind of thing.

You know, the Russians were hosting the Sotchi Olympics. The Russians all have like this kind of fixation in the Olympics, obviously Putin does himself. And yeah, a lot of athletes are, you know, doping. This was the most systemic thing. Like the Russian intelligence services were like brought into this scheme to like help, you know, falsify test results. Like this was like, you know, industrial scale doping. This wasn't just like a bunch of people were taking stuff. This was like, in a way, the athletes were not the guilty people because I, It seemed like they didn't have a choice. It was like, it was kind of like the Russian authorities, like, you must win.

We will dope you and we will falsify results. And the FSB is going to be involved and all this stuff. So, yeah, I, on the one hand, you don't want to punish athletes, but on the other hand, you're right, like, apart from the fact that they have to play like Chichowski instead of the Russian national anthem and they have a weird name, there's not like that much of a punishment, you know? No, they got a cooler name. They're the rock now. The rock is, it's kind of ominous. It's very fitting the geopolitical moment that the Russians are there, even though they cheated. They're still allowed to participate.

And they had this kind of scary name. You know, like, I don't know. There's a similar dynamic happening with Taiwan, which has to use the title Chinese Taipei. So this dates back to an agreement they made with the International Olympic Committee in 1981 that lets Taiwan compete. but it skirts the issue of whether Taiwan is a sovereign nation. I do, how do you think that's going to play out in 2022, although maybe Taiwan won't have any, when the games are in China, the winter games,

although I don't know if they have any winter athletes, we'll see. Well, I, you know, I tell this story in the, and after the fall, which we should buy it then, but my book, which is one of the young Hong Kongers I talked to said that the first moment when she kind of began to freak out a bit, it was in the 2012 Olympics, there was a Hong Kong kind of pop star who expressed support for like Hong Kong athletes who were participating in the Olympics and got like trolled on an industrial scale by like millions of Chinese internet users.

And it seemed like there was a state hand behind that, like it was kind of information campaign. And she kind of had to apologize because kind of the message was you won't be able to sell your records in China. And it's like this infection of, again, sports with politics is really fucking annoying. And why can't the Taiwanese athletes just like participate as they would like to participate? I'm sure they think of themselves as Taiwanese. Like Chinese Taipei doesn't mean anything to anybody. Yeah, I think it's insulting to them.

Yeah, yeah. The other thing I'm just preemptively anxious about is what Donald Trump is going to tweet. I guess he can't tweet put on this stupid blog about. about Simone Biles, who pulled out of the gymnasters competition, citing mental health issues. I also was reading more about her decision, and ESPN had a pretty good article on it that was talking about how, like, the stuff she does is just so insanely hard that if you're not really, like, mentally, fully there, you can really hurt yourself. And that might have been part of why she was shaken and didn't want to compete. I don't know. Yeah, so I've got to a roller coaster of

emotions since my wife woke me up at four o'clock in the morning because she was a gymnast. I don't if you know that. She was a competitive gymnast, right? So she's like deep on gymnastics, right? And so I see this vault go wrong. And Anne is like, that doesn't, that was way off. Like it wasn't just like a not a good vault. Like she was pulled out of it kind of? She was not, she didn't do her move right in the air and that could have been dangerous. And she was even surprised that she was even able to land. And then she pulls out and I'm like, I thought about this all day. And I have a take, right? And I know not everybody needs a take on everything.

You're right. The Bo Burnham rule. Oh, listen, I quote Bo Burnham not directed at you. I just directed at Twitter. Here's my take, right? Because you made one point that is absolutely true, which is I'm already dreading the culture warification of this. But I'm going to connect Patrick Ewing to Simone Biles here, which is a strange take. I'm here for this journey.

Right? Because this is a different cultural aspect in how it interacts with sports. I love Patrick Ewing growing up, right? He was great basketball player. The Knicks were really good for like a decade. They made the finals a couple times. You never won a ring. Right.

And there's this new culture where, like, if you don't win a ring, you're like a failure. Yeah. You know, like you, this kind of rings culture in the NBA, like Barclay, Ewing. These people are total failures. Like, never mind, he had a great career. He's like, you know, an all-star, a dreamteamer, like, gave a lot of jewelry to a lot of people, right? So in Biles won this boatload of gold medals in Rio, right? And it's like there's a goat culture now, right? Where it's like, no, no, you have to like you have to just get better and better and better.

And she was doing things because Anne's been telling me like that you're not kind of supposed like you're like you could break your neck if you don't land like her moves the right way because they're so far and beyond what a normal human would do. right? Clearly, like, something in the culture was pushing this extraordinary athlete who's already like the best gymnast we've seen to just do stuff that was well beyond like what like a human should be asked to do. It wasn't like good enough like that she just win gold medals, right? And it puts her in a position where she knows if she's not on that day, she could really hurt herself, right? And so what is she going to knowing that she's not on and like there's something not right in terms of how she's feeling or how she's thinking, is she going to compete in multiple events

where she could have like a really catastrophic injury? Like, how did we get to a point where she felt like she had to do those things? Yeah, the Carrie strug or joined her that you're saying, like, well, she competed with like a broken ankle. Well, is that good? Do we want little kids competing with broken bones? Yeah, I don't know.

The playing hurt thing is tricky, right? Because, like, you know, like some of the iconic moments, right, are people playing a hurt. to my Ewing point, it's just like in listening to her give interviews leading into these Olympics, it didn't feel like there was a ton of joy and how perfect she felt like she had to be, you know? And why can it, like, why can it be good enough she's just like the best gymnast and can win gold medals? Like she clearly, like, felt pressured to ascend to some level that is probably beyond what any human being should. even do, you know? And so that, that's my weird take as I thought about this of just like,

there's clearly something that was pressuring her to kind of go beyond, like nobody else in the competition even tries to do anything like the things that she does. Like, couldn't she just do a routine and win a gold medal? Like, it's not her fault. Well, this isn't her fault. I do think she's pushing herself to do the biggest, baddest, hardest routines, right? She's a fucking super competitive person. But then everybody gets into it. And it's like wants to see her be like super. superhuman, and it's kind of like, like, why can we just see athletes be humans and win competitions? Yeah. I'm all for, like, shitting on highly paid professional athletes when fans feel like it,

because that's kind of like part of the bargain, right? Like, you get tons of money, you get adulation, you, and in return, people can say terrible things about you on Twitter, and that's kind of the deal now, even though it's a little bit gross. I do think the Olympics are different to me. I mean, the women's gymnastics team has, like, kind of transcended the nether. normal Olympian status, right? They're not like a person you hear about for a couple weeks every four years. They're like stars. They're celebrities. They're really cool. And rightly so. They're incredibly good. But what's, but I think what I'm trying to say is I don't think they owe us any, like,

you don't owe it to people to compete if you don't feel like it's safe for you. You know, where I like, so I think people can be disappointed. You can be sad. You don't get to see your compete. But I think like, I'm just, I am preemptively worried about the culture war shit for the same reasons you are, that, like, someone's going to attack her for the mental health reasons or something, and it's going to create a conversation that is, like, deeply unhelpful. I mean, we'll step back and pot say the world is, you know, not the best venue, we're not the best, you know, cultural critics, but like... Disagree.

Yeah, yeah. But the, the, there's something about U.S. women's gymnastics where the perfection demanded of these young girls, because it starts on their girls, by an, and, you know, entity that refused to protect them against sexual predation. A disgusting organization. Disgusting organization. And then, like, you know, insist on them becoming goddesses every four years because they have to be the heroes in the face of Summer Olympics all the way from Mary Louretton, you know, my earliest memory to today. Like, there's just something off about that. And that's where I get it.

Like, just something was kind of propelling. this extraordinary athlete to feel like it wasn't good enough that she was the best gymnast, that she had to basically be like an astronaut, you know, on the vault, you know, like that made it dangerous for her to perform on a day when she didn't have it, you know? And, you know, she actually, in one of the articles I was reading, cited the fact that the Larry Nasser abuse revelations, who was the trainer who abused so many of these young girls, and the fact that the organization didn't have her back, and yet she's, like, told to go out there and perform for them

and do the risky things. I mean, what I first heard about what happened, that didn't occur to me that I read more about what she said. I was like, well, of course. Like, why would she trust, give a shit about want to do anything for this organization? I'm not saying her country. Yeah, yeah. I'm saying this Olympic committee that didn't get their backs.

And the common thread to connect this all is like, we should have our athletes back. You know, like one last point to tie together some pods of the world threads here, like if they let the athletes use marijuana, which is legal, like might address, you know, like chill them out a little bit. Like, I'd like to be seeing this sprinter. She carry, Richland. Yeah, I'd like to be seeing her running this week too, you know.

You know the weed thing is just so stupid. Just so stupid. I don't get it. I don't get it. Okay, Potta of the World fans, Ben and I are watching some of the women's 59 kilogram weightlifting. I really like the way they set this up. Yeah. It's cool.

It's like a dance floor. Yeah. And also, by the way, like, suddenly we're using the metric system. Yeah, that part kills me. I can't do this math. What is 59 kilograms? It's heavy. It's heavy.

130 LBs. I couldn't let that. So is that the weight of the athlete? Like that Venezuelan is jacked. Got it. Got it. Weight class of the person lifting. We got a multiple Soviet.

republics in this uh like soviet union used to just crush this i remember when i was a kid like oh god yeah so we got like we got an armen we got a turkmen like yeah see this is amazing to me this brett oh oh oh oh sorry zoi so that was a hundred and ninety one pounds she just didn't get it up oh see that is so scary to me i i have dislocated my left That thing would just fall down on top. Three times. Yeah. Like, I would just be done.

Yeah. I don't know how you do this. No. Yep. Yep. Yep. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Boom. Boom. Oh, mic drop. There we go. Does it matter if you move? These are the sports where you see videos of people just passing out midway through. Well. Oh, my God.

I would pull every muscle my body if I even tried to pull that up off the ground. Oh, okay. Venezuela's ant. Whoa. She's amped. This one is for the glory of Maduro. Nice nails. Solid green nails. Yeah.

Pretty cool overall uniform colors. Yeah, everything about this is good. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Not good. And she threw it up overhead and behind her, which terrified. I don't know a lot about the sport, but I don't think you're supposed to do that. No. Oh, God.

Oh, like, I... I don't know how you do that. I feel like my arms should fall off my body. It's hard to watch. Okay, that's probably enough Olympic time. Thank you, listeners, for indulging us. Yes, thank you. When we come back, you will hear my interview with Fadl Alariza.

We're going to talk about what's going on in Tunisia, whether it's a coup, what the grievances are, but the protesters are on the streets. So stick around for that. I am very excited to welcome to the show Faddle Al-Lariza. He's a journalist. He's the founder and editor-in-chief of Mechal, which is an English and Arabic-language news outlet covering Tunisia. And he's also a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute. He's calling in from Tunis today. Faddle, thank you so much for doing the show. Sure. My pleasure. So on Sunday, the Tunisian president suspended the legislature, fired the prime minister, a bunch of other members of government. Can you give us sort of like the backstory here? Why did he do that? What was his reasoning? And how has the reaction been so far? Yeah. Well, it depends on how.

how far back you want to go, but that day, there had been large protests. People had been calling for the government to step down for Parliament to be frozen. But there's been a sort of a health crisis that the government really has been on top of. You've seen one of the worst death rates in the world per population in recent weeks. At a time when the government hasn't really done much, you've seen the Prime Minister actually at a luxury hotel, you know, just two days after the worst death rates, and that was leaked by an anti-corruption watchdog group. Was that like a sting operation? They found him at this luxury hotel after he just skipped town?

Well, very unfortunately, the tourism minister, I'm sorry, not the tourism minister, the transportation minister did share it on his Instagram. Yeah. But also this group also, I watch, which is the local chapter of Transparency International, they get a lot of whistleblowers as well. So they had information, I think, in advance. And they wanted to make a big deal of it. And I think there's, in a democracy, it's good to have accountability for, you know, officials,

particularly public officials who really can't afford to stay at this five-star hotel that they were at on their salaries. So, I mean, that was just one very blatant example. But, you know, for months we've seen the response to COVID has been very punitive. There's been lockdowns, you know, economic activity has slowed down at this stage. time you've seen the government raising prices of basic consumer goods as they're in the middle of negotiations with the IMF, trying to maybe show the IMF that they're serious about economic reforms. So there's a series of factors that all played into this. Parliament itself has been extremely unpopular and getting less popular year after year. You've seen less and less people

turning out for parliamentary elections. A lot of people just don't think that parliament really is the place where, you know, democratic politics is happening. So, This all filtered into Kaisa'i himself stepping in and saying that, you know, I'm going to interpret the Constitution as this is an emergency situation. And Article 80 of the Constitution gives me the power to do these things. Now, obviously, there's been people who disagreed with his interpretation, and that's sort of being played out now between different groups of people. But I can tell you, the initial response was jubilation.

There were people who felt, you know, this was long overdue. They had felt like their government had stopped listening to him, that there was not really anything being done by the community government to take care of people's basic needs, whether that's health care, transportation, economically. You know, you've just seen case after case over the last few years of that being the case, and particularly with this last government.

So, you know, in my neighborhood, I went out, it was way after curfew, and everyone went out 10, 15 minutes after the president's speech. There were thousands of people in my neighborhood to celebrate with fireworks, and, you know, they're shouting freedom and hounding their horns. And, you know, more than I've ever seen in the peak of rush hour. So that's just to give you a sense of the immediate reaction.

Yeah. Well, it's good to know that idiot elite politicians who get themselves in trouble on Instagram is kind of a universal thing at this point. So even before this big decision over the weekend, my understanding is there were like a whole bunch of series of demonstrations and protests. What were those protests about? Was it similar like, you know, sort of economic? and COVID-based grievances, or do they have a different flavor?

Like, how would you describe them? I mean, we've covered all different kinds of protests in the last couple years. You know, we've had protests of people who, for example, are against police repression. There has been police repression of particularly the poor neighborhood. There was just a month ago, there was a little over a month ago, there was a young man in the poor neighborhood of CISN who died in police custody. And his family said that police have actually beaten him on the head. He bled to death and then they dumped him on the side of the road.

And that's something that it's not the first time that we've seen young men killed by police. There's been particularly young men from poor neighborhoods or poor regions of the country. That we've seen quite a few. There's even a couple websites that have tried to list them all out. And you rarely see police facing justice for that. So that's, you know, that's one example of some of the protests, but definitely economic issues. I mean, the fact that you had these sort of punitive lockdown measures, curfew, you've had a curfew for in place for months at a time, hasn't really affected the spread of the infection rate of COVID. So, essentially, it was for that, but, you know, the net effect was that particularly, you know, cafe owners, people who work at cafes, you know, there's sort of a knock-on effect in the economy where people are really suffering as a result of that.

particularly as prices of basic goods are going up. You know, we've seen about seven, eight years of the dinar, the local currency devaluing as well. So people aren't getting as much as they were, while at the same time wages are stagnating. So those are some of the economic issues, some of the police issues. You know, there's some neighborhoods feel completely cut off from other areas of Tunis because there's no public transportation,

and that's gotten worse and worse with increasing population, but not an increasing investment in public transportation. So that's, you know, I could list several of them out for you, but that's just sort of a sense of the anger that's been building over time. And I would also remember that just remind maybe listeners, you know, in 2011 there was the revolution. You know, there wasn't a lot of resolution for the people who were, who had gone out and done the revolution,

who were injured by security officials at the time, right? There was about 300 people or more who were killed by security officials, And there wasn't really justice for them. There wasn't really state acknowledgement of them. A lot of them, the families of these people who they call martyrs, the people who said, you know, these are the people who freed Tunisia from a dictatorship. Their names weren't published, for example, in official Gazette. There was no sort of follow-up on health care for people who had been injured.

So that's another series of protests that we've seen as well. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to hear you describe the sort of, you know, a series of grievances of people on the streets for the economic concerns, how they were treated by police, like things that are, local and specific. Of course, the coverage in the United States is, was this a coup attempt? What does it mean for the future of democracy in Tunisia, right, which was seen as this one's good story that came out of the Arab Spring? Do you think those are important questions? And are they things that people are also talking about in Tunisia or is the West just like

naval gazing as we always do? Not as much in Tunisia. Definitely not as much question about coup or not. You know, are people, I would say most of the people I've seen who are upset about what Kaisai did in calling it a coup, I would say first and foremost, the Anatha Party, the Islamist Party that was the biggest party in Parliament. They've directly been disenfranchised by this decision, saying, you know, you can't actually come into the Parliament. We're suspending work for a month. They say a month, you know, obviously some people are skeptical about that, but that's what the President said. It's for a month. You know, the head of the Parliament, the Speaker of

the Parliament is the head of the Anata Party, Rashid Khanushi. So, He tried to get into the parliament. They wouldn't let him in. So definitely their party feels that this is a coup. A couple of the other parties that had been in a coalition supporting the government, they are saying this is a coup. But among ordinary Tunisians, not really. And even other institutions.

We've seen institutions coming up with their response. People had to take some time. I think a lot of people were caught off guard by the president's decision. They were trying to figure out, okay, watch our position on this, whether it's unions, civil society groups, you know, other institutions of the state. And, you know, most of them haven't used the word coup because they're, they still want to be able to say, you know, we understand that there's been actually a very popular decision that's been taken. So we want to respect the popular will, but we'd like to see it within limits.

We'd like to see constitutional limitations to that. And I think, you know, when I see the U.S. coverage about, you know, is this a coup, isn't this a coup, or people who are just, you know, immediately jumping in. saying it is a coup. I think a lot of them may be thinking of the Egypt scenario from 2013. Egypt's a place where, you know, the military is extremely embedded in society economically. You know, they have quite a lot of political power. In Tunisia, it's not quite the case. I mean, the military has traditionally been seen as a lot more neutral politically. They're not nearly as hated as the police. The police are seen as much more of the repressive arm of the

former dictatorship. And in many ways, even till today, you know, people still see police as quite repressive. But Army sort of has this aura about it of being a little bit more independent. You know, there is, you know, people from around the country are conscripted. So people sort of do their time in the military. It's not necessarily seen as being separate from the people as much. And the fact that Kai Saeed, the president, is not a military guy. I mean, he's a constitutional law professor who spent his many years teaching as a law professor.

before he joined politics. So that's another factor. Now, is it a coup or is not a coup? I mean, you know, it's still an open question. I think, you know, depending on whether this is something that happens for a limited time or not, you know, there's definitely valid critiques to be said, but it's not the main debate, I think, that's happening in Tunisia. Yeah, no, like, the Obama administration got kind of wrapped around the axle on this

specific question about Egypt because, you know, if it is a coup, it does trigger a bunch of, you know, means that cut off our ability to provide military assistance and other things. So it is a relevant question in Washington, although clearly not the one that's being talked about most on the streets. There's also, I mean, while we're talking about sort of the international role, if there is or should be one, I've been reading a lot of reporting about what, if any, role foreign governments might play and help resolve the situation or push and prod in one direction, right? There's talk about the U.S. doing stuff. I think Tony Blinken made a call yesterday, the Secretary of State,

Saudis, the UAE, Turkey, Egypt. Do you feel like countries are kind of moving in, taking sides and, you know, pushing an agenda? And, you know, is that welcomed, not welcomed? Like, what's the, what's the response to that? I think it's unavoidable. I mean, Tunisia is a small country. And so, and particularly since, you know, this symbolic power of a democracy in an Arab country, you know, This is something that particularly counter-revolutionary forces after the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings detested, right? I mean, whether it's Gulf countries that fear themselves to see sort of democratic movement, there's certainly maybe co-ideologies among Turkey and the Anatha Party from the sort of political Islam trajectory that they both are on. So, you know, we're seeing statements, but we're not seeing intervention so far.

I wouldn't be surprised if the president himself had reached out to Tunisia's regional allies, maybe even further apart to let them know what he might take as a decision. I think that would probably be sort of wise from a real politic perspective. But I would be a little bit skeptical to think that there's intervention at this moment. And I don't see any intervention maybe or from the U.S., from the Gulf, from Europe, as doing any good in this moment in Tunisia right now. And there's certainly things that people could do, you know, other countries could do.

I mean, for example, you know, the COVID crisis really does require extra help at this moment. And it's an easy way that I think, you know, countries can be seen as helping Tunisia at this moment because it's a far worse and deadlier situation than the political crisis given the death rate, given the lack of basic materials, given even still a lack of vaccines, despite some new donations. We talked to the WHO representative in Tunisia saying actually Tunisia has the capacity to make vaccines.

They have the infrastructure to do it if there was technology transfer. So those are some of the things that I think definitely the international community could be helping on without necessarily jumping into the politics just yet when, you know, Tunisians themselves are still trying to figure out what does this mean, where to go.

You know, the institutions, there is quite a long history of like independent institutions. So even if this president and concentrate a lot of power around himself, you know, he's not going to be able to, you know, wipe out all of civil society groups, all of the unions, all of the student groups, who are very, very jealous of their independence

and have had 10 years to really experience what, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of the press are like. You know, that's not going to go away without a fight. So I think a lot of people are saying, let's just wait and see. Yeah, that's good advice, less politics, more Pfizer shipments.

How about that? Yeah. You mentioned freedom of the press. I saw the Tunisian police had raided Al Jazeera's office, took some of their equipment reportedly. Was that a specific attack on Al Jazeera, part of a broader crackdown on the media? Do you know? It's hard to tell. You know, I would think it's quite plausible that because Al Jazeera had been getting quite a big platform

to a Nakhda party and to Rasha Dhanushi, that this is not disconnected from trying to make sure that there's one narrative coming, you know, about what's happening. or at least not as narrative, that Nath's narrative doesn't win out. That may also be like that there was fears of maybe, if not there were to mobilize into the streets, that there could be some violence in the streets. You know, we saw a little bit of violence yesterday

in front of the parliament very early in the morning. We saw like some stone throwing between Anata supporters who had gathered there and some pro-Kaisa, the president's supporters who had gathered there. But it was just around parliament. It wasn't sort of spread further than that. So it may be that that's the case. But of course, you know, me as a journalist, I'm also very worried about freedom of the press or even even Al Jazeera, whether I agree or disagree with what Al Jazeera Arabic is doing, which, you know, to be blunt about Al Jazeera Arabic has a much stronger political line than Al Jazeera, English, particularly in the region.

But regardless, you know, the national journalist syndicate, which is in no ways Islamists or friendly with Natha, you know, they condemned it. And they said, you know, we will also defend the rights of journalists. think that this is an appropriate way to deal with journalists. And I think that's also the journalists themselves sort of stretching their muscles in case they have to find themselves in opposition towards the president now that he's gathered powers as well. So yeah, definitely something to watch out with. But I would say attacks on the press did not begin with the rating of the Al Jazeera Arabic. Unfortunately, we've seen quite a lot of attacks on journalists. We've quite seen the detention and arrests and prosecution of bloggers, far,

far more than journalists. Perhaps they have less of immunity than journalists who, you know, have quite a good union and quite a good network. And obviously, you know, networks abroad as well to sort of raise the alarm when they do find themselves at the mercy of the authorities. But bloggers, people who just blog on Facebook, but happen to be blogging about, you know, things that whistleblowers in different departments, different ministries have told them about different corruption allegations. We've seen several of them, you know, arrests and detained, and, you know, human rights organizations have written good reports on that. And that's, That's not something new.

So, you know, certainly let's be concerned about freedom of the press in Tunisia, but it's not a new thing. I think it's something that even in a democracy, even with a functioning or maybe partly functioning or even dysfunctioning parliamentary system, these things are things that we should all be vigilant about. Good advice. Speaking of supporting the press, where can listeners find your work, support your work, find you on Twitter, give them all your handles?

Sure, yeah. We're writing at michael.org, which is both English and Arabic. We're doing even actually more English than Arabic content. We're trying to fill a void with some of the, you know, just very professional journalism, talking to all sides, having them all in one article, something that we're not seeing necessarily in even the Arabic and French press here. So, yeah, if you want to learn more, we have, you know,

please go through our back catalog and we have, you know, coverage of all different types of things, whatever sector you're looking at in Tunisia. Cool. Well, Fadl, thank you so much. This was incredibly helpful for me personally and understanding what's going on, and I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for the good questions. I enjoyed it. Talk to you too. Thanks again, Devottle, for joining the show. Thanks to the Olympics for giving us a lot to talk about. I should be thanking. Patrick Ewing. And I'll say when they... He also brought a lot of love to Dan Fyfer to joy to Dan's life as a Georgetown guy.

And just to like, because this occurred to me, after the fact, Ewing, because of this Rings culture thing, tore his Achilles when he kept playing hurt, in the Eastern Conference finals in the NICS title run where they didn't make it because he felt like he had to be out there right in a way. So like it's kind of like

that's, there you go. The obligation to play hurt when you were like just deeply wounded or, who is the wrong word, deeply injured, or only able to be out there because of injections and pills,

that is really troubling. Well, yeah, a lot of the NFL. Like there's an opioid problem in the NFL. Right, right. Give him weed. It's, healthier than giving him Perkins said.

Sure is. Yeah. Talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer.

Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.