Pod Save the World - Tucker Carlson Interviews "Putin's Brain"

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Ben and Tommy discuss reports that a temporary ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas may be imminent, that Saudi Arabia has decided to normalize relations with Israel, and that the ICC may issue an arrest warrant for Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu. They also hear from campus protestors in New York, discuss leaked intelligence reports about whether Putin ordered opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death, Tucker Carlson’s interview with a far-right ultranationalist close with Putin, Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s trip to China, why an Iranian rapper got a death sentence, major leadership changes in Scotland, and a dramatic reading care of Scotland. Then Tommy speaks to John McDermott, Chief Africa Correspondent for the Economist about South Africa’s upcoming election, waning western influence in the western Sahel, and the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. You made it back from D.C. without getting absorbed into the blob. Yes, I escaped the clutches once more. I feel like it's like the slowest police chase in history, just the blob kind of crawling after you. Yeah, just slowly oozing around you. Did you do White House correspondence stuff or did you just leave before? No, no, God no.

I got the hell out of it. Yeah, I was not going to. Yeah, people are like, oh, you're sticking around for the White House correspondence weekend. I was like, not if I'm not obliged to beer. You didn't go to the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, all brispring. written garden party or whatever the big thing is. Oh, gosh. Eight years of that was, uh, eight years of that weekend was quite enough. The thing that I never understood was like, people go out on Friday, then they do the dinner.

Usually Saturday night, I think, right? Yeah. Then people still go to this big brunch on Sunday. It's like, aren't you hung over? Well, it's like the wedding. Yeah, it's like the wedding brunch. It should be optional. Should be optional.

It should be optional. I mean, you know, you usually are slipping it off. Except the Sunday that we'd kill bin Laden. Yeah. Which is also after the day after the, White House. That was Apex White House Correspondent. Well, that was not relaxing. Because I remember I went out to brunch that day. And then I came home to my house. And Michael O'Neill, friend of the pod, one of the greatest people we've ever known was my roommate at the time, had multiple roommates.

And Michael O'Neill had scheduled a cooking class to be delivered in our house that day, which was just annoying. As one does. And I was trying to watch a Celtics game. And I actually had a Celtics jersey on. And then I got a call from you, I think, that was like, hey, you should come down to work. Yeah. And I remember turning to people who were there. I was like, Do you guys think I can wear this in or is that just too douchey? Oh, you should have worn the jersey. That's too douche. So luckily I changed.

And then I walked into the situation room and there was a photo of Bin Laden's face with a bullet in it. Well. And I thought, huh, glad I had a couple beers before I came in. Yeah. Ooh, that's new information. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was one of those days.

Well, you know, it was you didn't go to the brunch, I guess. Yeah. You know what I remember about that week before that was I remember you had been working on some speech and Dennis kept like desperately trying to find you. Yeah. to tell you something, but you were a hold up writing the speech, and you were stressed about the speech. And then all of a sudden you weren't stressed about the speech, and I knew it wasn't done.

Speech got postponed, yeah. That was actually interesting because I had been trying to work on this speech for days, and I couldn't find time. And then finally one day I'm like, I'm just not going to come into work at all in a disappear in a coffee shop. And like somehow Dennis found me. He's got ways. He's got sources.

And he called me in for like some meeting with him and Brennan. And it was the most stern, they closed the door behind me. I thought I was going to get killed. I thought it might get rendered somewhere. I mean, it was really scary. It was like in that basement office. John Brennan, like, you know, stone face, like closed the door behind you.

And instead they were like, we have a lead on bin Laden's compound, you know, like very dramatic. That's cool. Well, this is better than the speech I was working out. That's way better than writing a speech. I remember going to Brennan's office in hindsight and seeing a binder this thick on his desk that said something on the cover like a bad-abod-a-bod compound rate. And in hindsight, I knew what that meant. But at the moment, I didn't know what Abadabod was. Some creative labeling.

Anyway, probably Nick Shapiro labeled that puppy. Just kidding. We know you didn't do that. Anyway, we got a great show for you guys today. No bin Laden operations. No. But we're going to talk about some hopeful news for once, Ben, about a possible ceasefire in Gaza. We got some sound from protesters at some of these campuses in New York that we will bring to you.

There's interesting reports of intelligence on whether Vladimir Putin ordered the killing of opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. We'll talk through the major news. at a Tony Blankens visit to China. There's been more reporting on assassinations abroad or attempted assassinations abroad by India's intelligence services, why an Iranian rapper was sentenced to death, a major leadership change in Scotland.

And then you're going to hear my interview with John McDermott from The Economist, who we both have known for years, thanks to my other roommate during the moment of the Bin Laden operation, Cody Keenan. Yes, yes, yes. They met at Harvard, I think, Kennedy School? Smart kids, yeah.

Yeah, smart guys. Smart kids. Anyway, Harvard Economist. John's the chief Africa correspondent for the economist, and we talked about South Africa's upcoming election, the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and the UK's plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and how that might work out. So super interesting interview from a very, very smart and thoughtful journalist. I still have good bohunting in my head now.

How about them, apples? Do you like apples? I had like one friend who went to Harvard and me and my. other buddies would go into the Harvard bars underage and act like we were like local town tuffs, but no, kids went to like Cornell or something. It's all relative. You know, nerds is what we were, and they were too. All right, Ben, but it was very easy to drink underage in Cambridge for some reason.

It was very easy to drink underage growing up in New York City. Well, yeah. So those Irish bars actually, you could be like 16 years old and sitting at the bar. And then some off duty cop would come like, all right, all the kids go out the back door, because the cops would call off and tip off before they'd raid these bars. Oh, really? And so you're just kind of go hang out outside for like 15 minutes, and then they're like, quote, unquote, read the bar, and then you'd just come back in. Corruption for good.

Corruption was good in like the enraged drinking scene. Where was it? Upryside? I guess I get canceled for this, but yeah, up east side, up west side. Who's going to cancel you for drinking when you're 19? I don't give me a break. Yeah, come on. He's a New Yorker.

16. Yeah, yeah. We want to talk about it. Who's on first? That was a great bar. That's a, where's that? That was on, like, First Avenue and, like, 89th Street or something. Okay.

As a Pat O'Brien's. Sure. There's some good ones. A trillion of those. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's get to the show.

So, Ben, like we tease at the top, so some good news at Gaza for once, hopefully. There's all these reports that Israel and Hamas are close to agreeing on a temporary ceasefire and hostage release deal. It would involve Hamas releasing 33 civilian hostages in exchange for a 40-day ceasefire in Israel, releasing some number, maybe thousands of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel. There also seems to be some sort of agreement about allowing Gazans to return to northern Gaza, which is a change and hopefully a breakthrough. So, you know, for months, part of this is pretty grim. For months, Israel had demanded the release of 40 hostages as part of this deal. But they have since, I think, come to the very sad conclusion that some of those hostages died in captivity and they lowered the demand to 33.

But Biden's been pushing very hard to get this done on Sunday and Monday. He talked with the leaders of Israel, Qatar, and Egypt. Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, is in Saudi Arabia or was on Monday for meetings and had this to say about the negotiations. A major effort that's been made over the last couple of months to get to that ceasefire, to get the hostages out. And right now, as you said, Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel.

And in this moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is a us. So, Ben, obviously, you know, the U.S. wants the hostages to come home because we want them to be home. We want to also flood Gaza with aid during any ceasefire. But there's also reports that the Biden team hopes that a ceasefire could lead to kind of a de facto end of the war or at least make it so, so politically difficult for Netanyahu to start things back up or do or pursue this Rafa invasion. Of course, right on cue, Netanyahu said today that he will invade Rafa with or without a hostage deal. Again, for those who don't know, Rafa is a city and southern Gaza, where about a million people are sheltering some estimates, say, up to 1.4 million.

So, Ben, I hope this is just posturing from Netanyahu to appease kind of the right-wing crazies in his coalition who want Arafa invasion no matter what. But I was wondering what you made of that comment from Netanyahu. And I don't know, where is like the hope meter on this ceasefire leading to a permanent end in the conflict? Well, it's the first time in many weeks that there's been any positive messaging coming out. it seems to me, and this makes sense for them to be doing it, that part of what's happening is all the other parties, you know, because you saw a bunch of Arab states in these talks,

you saw a bunch of Europeans in these talks, that everybody's trying to take this window and really press Hamas to accept the terms that Israel's offering. And so there's, you know, pretty coordinated effort to kind of say, this is now a reasonable offer you should take it and sometimes the optimism is part of that it's like we're putting out there that there's a deal you know just and i think good vibes only that the good vibes only you know because they've tried bad vibes and um and the you know the question on the hamas side is you know who is making this deal you know because it it could even be that they've really squeezed the kind of quote unquote political leadership in katar who are people with their own vulnerabilities you know

there's money that can be, you know, gotten, it probably should be anyway, obviously, we should be cutting out that financing. But it's not entirely clear whether those guys can reach down into some tunnel and Rafa and deliver something. And so part of what's being tested is both Hamas's willingness to make a deal at that political level and then their capacity to at this point in the war, you know, implement that deal. And I think the urgency is in part around the Rafa invasion. you want to try to, this is the last window perhaps to do this. I think there's an assumption that a bunch of those hostages are probably in Rafa. And so once you start a military operation there, the chaos and violence of that obviously makes it,

you know, more difficult to negotiate something and may put the hostages at risk. We don't know how these hostages have been killed. Let's hope it works out. I think we should have like a heavy dose of caution with the optimism because so many things can go wrong here. The only thing I want to say that off of Tony's clip, I obviously agree with the onus being on Hamas in terms of this negotiation. I get a little uncomfortable when there's an underlying logic that if Hamas doesn't agree to the deal, well, then the Rafa thing will go forward in the sense that the Rafa invasion shouldn't go forward anyway. It's a bad idea, no matter of way. And this is where we've gotten into a bit of a challenge here, is that it's not as if this military operation is all well and good if Hamas doesn't agree to these hostage releases.

Because, again, purely on the equity of the hostages, it's not rescuing hostages, never mind, obviously, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. And so I do worry a little bit about like a logic train maybe unwittingly being set up that there's no deal. Well, then, you know, there's no choice but to continue this pretty cataclysmous. Mick Mill Trappers. It's a good point. And it's worth remembering that, you know, the last temporary ceasefire deal was in November and then Hamas released 105 hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. That was the last time there was any significant release of prisoners. And over the weekend, Hamas released a hostage video featuring two hostages as proof of life. So it does, there are some sort of like things happening. There's clearly stuff that they're circling closer to some kind of deal,

which would, again, would be great. And in addition to getting hostages out and getting aid in, I, the rationale does hold that, you know, you want to use that calm to try to make something more durable in terms of a ceasefire. The other deal that's being constantly circled in the press is this potential normalization of relations between the Saudi government and the Israeli government. This deal, as reported, would include the U.S. providing like a NATO-like security guarantee to defend Saudi Arabia and the end of the attack. The U.S. would also provide them with some sort of civilian nuclear program. in return, the Saudis would normalize relations with Israel and generally agree to reduce their ties with China and Russia. And then Israel is supposed to commit to what the New York Times described as a, quote, concrete plan for an eventual Palestinian state. We don't know exactly what that means.

You know, you and I press Tony Blinken on this on this show a while back before October 7th. You know, he seemed to really want to assert that it was a firm commitment of some sort, but wouldn't say what exactly. Here's where things get weird, Ben. And so Ha'Aretz reported that Saudi Arabia has already decided to normalize relations with Israel, but is trying to decide whether to do it during the Biden administration or to wait for Trump to be back in office, basically. The sourcing is very thin on this article. It's to an unnamed foreign diplomat. And then there was a report in the Times that suggested sort of the opposite.

It said that the Saudis are eager to get a deal done and they want to do it as soon as they can because they're worried about getting it through Congress. And if Trump is elected, they don't think Democrats will vote for a Saudi Arabia. normalization deal. But everyone is waiting for Netanyahu to agree on whatever concessions are required around the Palestinian state. So then a couple things. Like one, I mean, I guess I still, call me a cynic, I still don't really see the political path for Netanyahu to get these real concessions because I think his ultra right wing, ultra religious coalition cares more about controlling the West Bank than they do taking a trip to Mecca and Medina or whatever, you know, relations with Saudi Arabia. But second,

I mean, I'm trying to put aside my, my anti-Netanyahu, anti-MBS derangement syndrome, which I have, and just figure out what makes this deal worth it sort of in the U.S. interests, because obviously agreeing to a security guarantee for Saudi Arabia is no small thing, nor is providing them civilian nuclear infrastructure. Obviously, if this deal got Israel to agree to the creation of a Palestinian state, with borders and territory and concessions and all the things we think it would take to make it workable, that would be amazing. But how does that get decided without any Palestinian input in these talks so far?

That's my big question. Yeah, on this one, I, you know, another heavy dose of caution, because we keep hearing that we're on the precipice of this agreement. I do think that in before times, right, before October 7th, I think, you know, Saudi Arabia did want this deal.

I mean, that was pretty clear. clearly because they were going to get so much out of it. You know, they were going to get a NATO security guarantee. They were going to, not NATO, but a NATO-like security guarantee. They're going to get a nuclear program. They're going to get probably a whole bunch of arms, shipments and things like that. Kind of the permanent get out of jail free card for NBS, not that he needs it. And I do, you know, I heard from a variety of people over the last year that the Saudi logic was the thing that was in the Times report, that essentially, if they're ever going to make these deals that require congressional approval and a security guarantee would certainly require congressional

approval, their judgment was it better to do with the Democratic president because if, you know, Democrats are less inclined, I think, to vote for... We have a good government gene. Yeah, you have a gene of like, do we really want to commit to the defense of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for forever. And so they felt that Democrats wouldn't want to go against the priority of a Democratic president. Republicans would want to just circle the wagons with MBS and better to do it now. It does just feel like they're trying to hit some crazy air gap here, though, right? Because it's you're not going to do this right before the election. It's already May. Like landing this

plane feels tough tough because number one i'm not sold that we should be giving the Saudis all these things number two i just don't see bb is not for palestinian state and so i just don't understand what credible formulation he's going to agree to and then absent any formulation on palisines state begins to be hard to see what the Saudis are going to get i also don't know what the u.s can substantively get on this china rush a point me either i mean they can make statements like well be friends with you better than them, but, you know, they're going to align with the Chinese and Russians on things that they think are in their interest. And they certainly kind of can't give us permanent guarantees. Maybe they can be like, well, we'll stop buying Huawei for a little while,

but, you know, five years from now, they could buy it. And so I just think that this whole thing, we've always been Abraham Accords skeptics here. If we've learned one thing, I think what we've learned is that the pathway to peace and harmony in the Middle East is not through the Abraham Accords, a bunch of normalization deals between a far right Israeli government and some autocrats. Like I'm less than enthusiastic that this is the place to be putting all our chips,

but hey, we'll see if they pull a rabbit out of a hat. Yeah. If TDS is Trump derangement syndrome, is MBS derangement syndrome, MBSDS? Is that what we have? Maybe I'll just move on. NBSD. Yes, it is.

A lot of is like shut up. Well, but like this specs that pointed, like success here is giving like a NATO-like, security guarantee to Saudi Arabia, which, like, you know, before October 7th, I think a lot of us are like, I'm not so sure about that, you know, just feels like a lot. Feels like a lot. In complicating all of this are reports that the International Criminal Court or ICC may be on the cusp of issuing arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders, including maybe Netanyahu, along with several Hamas leaders, so we'll keep an eye on that. We should note that

there are reports that more aid is getting into Gaza, which is good. It is still too early to say if the famine concerns have gone away, but there are reports that more trucks are getting in. Also, the U.S. has started building that floating period to deliver relief to Gaza, which is projected to cost about $320 million. It would be nice if B.B. would let us save that money and spend it on just, you know, flour or food. Yeah, trucks. Also been on May 8th, President Biden has to certify to Congress whether Israel is complying with U.S. and international law with respect to the use of U.S. provided arms.

There's a lot of reports out there that lawyers are skeptical. that they are. Politico reported that there's a bunch of lawyers, including 20 people that work in the Biden administration that are calling on Biden to halt aid. BZIDF is not complying. Reuters reported that senior officials in government have told Tony Blinken that they don't believe the Israeli assurances about complying with international law are true. So probably some intense meetings happening right now. A lot. And this just shows that, you know, there are consequences for actions. You can't just say we're in an accountability free world and that you can do what Israel's been doing in Gaza for six months and that the ICC won't notice or that U.S. law

deadlines are going to be ignored. You know, there should be accountability. Like if you create a world with that accountability, well, you know, it's more likely that bad things are going to happen here. And I just don't know, you know, we, this gets to the Rafa thing, too, in the sense of Blaming Hamas is absolutely important and essential for Hamas's responsibility for October 7th and for obviously the hostages. It's also the case that things like letting humanitarian aid in are not gifts. They're requirements. You know, under international law, you're required to allow this aid. Under U.S. law, you're required to, you know, comply with restrictions against war crimes.

Like, these are not novel things. And, you know, we're seeing you're going to have consequences if you, if you undertake the kind of military operation that Israel has. Last thing on Gaza. So last week, we talked about protests that have been popping up on college campuses across the U.S. in opposition to U.S. support for the war in Gaza or just the war generally. We got some great feedback from listeners, including from some students at schools like Columbia and NYU who had attended protests. and in many cases were frustrated at how they were being portrayed in the media. So to hear from some of these protesters directly, we reached out to the brilliant and talented Jordan Waller.

Jordan is a former Pod State of the World producer. She's now in school at NYU, and she agreed to interview some NYU and City University of New York protesters on our behalf. Here is a compilation of some of what they had to say. I got involved in the movement because I care deeply about freedom of speech. So whether you're on one side or the other side of this issue, I think it's really important that people be able to put up posters, tear down posters, shout things. I think that freedom of speech is a critical property of the university, and that's how I got involved.

I think what's happening right now at the media is they're either characterizing this as a free speech issue or as an anti-war protest. And I think both of those are wrong. We are here as a part of a liberation movement for the freedom of Palestinians and the end to the genocide in Gaza. We don't think that we're solving conflict in the Middle East through protesting. We don't think that that's what's going to happen. Regardless of any one conflict, why would our endowment be invested in weapons manufacturers and defense contractors? Why would the CEO of Black Rock be on our board of directors? Why?

You know, why are we operating a campus in what is currently a war zone? We're all religious Jews, and we all, as our brothers and sisters in Palestine, from the Jewish community, extremely religious, therefore we are extremely opposed to the Zionist occupation in its entirety. We will never recognize the legitimacy of the existence of the state of Israel, and what they're doing is horrendous and beyond words, and we don't have enough words to describe our hurt and our sorrow and our sympathy for the people of Palestine and Gaza. We have broader aims as well to get a free union to make sure labor relations are better, that makes sure staff being paid properly,

get rid of the adjunctification of the university, where you've got these people working short-term contracts being paid nothing. We see that struggle, that class struggle as part of what is going on in Palestine, and the history of Palestine is also a class struggle. I'm very glad to be here as part of intergenerational solidarity, to see the young people,

to see the students what they're doing and showing the way. The unity between the Jewish students and Palestinians, Palestinian students is just, it shows the future. So you get some students, you got some teachers. As you could hear, Ben, there's a range of different reasons for why people are involved in the protests. Some of them are very focused on ending the war in Gaza. Gaza, others have broader frustrations with school leadership or the government of Israel or even local labor issues.

I like my guy, because actually, you know, my first job out of college, I was an adjunct. Oh, really? CUNY professor. And I was a dues-pay member of DC-37 Union. and nice good benefits that dude's fighting for you through a bank shot 20 years later

we're still doing a lot junk issues but yeah yeah anyway so like I should note as we're recording this things have taken a violent turn in other places students at Columbia

broke into and are now occupying a building there there's been a wave of arrests at schools all across the country including something got really violent like the cops in Texas there's beating the shit out of kids

just a professor that got beat up in Georgia pretty nasty but I think that clip we just played gives you a sense of what you might hear from thoughtful, well-meaning protesters, who you might totally disagree with at these New York schools, but also maybe some who would benefit from being, I think, a little more focused in their demands, but that's just my opinion. Yeah, I think one of the useful parts of that exercise is just getting a sense of the diversity

of reasons that people are protesting. I mean, everybody seems to want to look at these protests and paint it with one brush. Like I 100% support all these people or all these people or any Semites or these people don't get it because of X or these people don't get it because of why. And the reality is if you have a bunch of protest in a place like New York City and then all over the country, like there are going to be a lot of different kinds of people out there. And there are a lot of really well-meaning people and a handful of people with views. A handful of people with their assholes and a handful of people with views that you find abhorrent. But like, you know, the core message here I think is I think free speech is a few speech is. important and needs to be protected. I do think that, you know, the war in Gaza, if there wasn't a war

like that going on, you wouldn't see this kind of mobilization. And so there's at core, even though there are all these other issues that are coming into play, it's fundamentally about, I think, you know, at core people raising legitimate questions about why is the U.S. providing the support and, you know, what kind of policies and universities interact with this issue and can we have some dialogue about it? And where everybody gets into trouble is when they are kind of insisting on the total delegitimization of the people they don't agree with. And so obviously, you know, I think people cracking down on protesters and trying to shut them up and trying to clear encampments right away is not constructive. Nor is it necessarily constructive to go smash a bunch of windows and take over a building and not kind of engage in some dialogue, right? I mean, everybody needs to kind of hear each other.

I have a bias towards supporting protest generally, not just because my views on this particular issue, but because I think it's like if you try to shut young people up, I think we saw what happens. Like, then they feel like they're not heard and they're actually going to protest more or their views are going to become more inflexible. Like, we need to have outlets for people to be heard and to try to influence policy. And the last thing I'd say Tommy, I was thinking about this a lot. You know, you mentioned this last week, the protest that's meant to be. You know, like that that's part of what it does. And I think we as Americans have to recognize including a lot of these Republicans and some of the Democrats who are on a very high horse kind of talking down to protesters, you know, when there's a protest movement in another country that we

sees an adversary, we're usually all for it, right? I was a big supporter of the Hong Kong protest movement. Yeah. For well over a year, they shut down airports, they shut down business districts. They, you know, I'm sure you could find people inside the Hong Kong protests who were bad actors, but by and large, we're like, here's some people making their voices heard, that's a good thing. We have to apply that at home, too, you know? Right. And look, there's lines that you can't cross, like Charlottesville, like, you know, there's little violence, and they're really running people.

Violence is clearly a line, and, but we have this, you know, I really don't like this, the sense that we can't hear this stuff, you know, that we don't. and like certain chance or, like, it's part of being in a free society. Yeah, I mean, I think once a movement like this starts, like the toothpaste is out of the tube, right? This thing is now growing and no one controls it. And it also becomes a magnet for people who are maybe just on the fringe and have other issues. And God knows what they're doing and saying at some of these New York events. I also think free speech is like just unequivocally necessary. And the anti-Semitism we've seen, especially at some of these New York protests,

is really bad and really worrisome and needs to be condemned and fought. But I'm equally worried about the U.S. government getting involved in trying to shut down curtail in any way a bridge-free speech because it's just a bedrock principle. And we can't curtail speech when we don't like it and then demand that it be heard when we do. Right. So, I mean, that's like the giant hypocrisy of these Republicans. They're like, yeah, send Milo Yonopoulos and Ben Shapiro to every campus. But God forbid.

To provoke some snowflakes. Right. Yeah. I mean, any semtism issue should be dealt with too is like, you know, a matter of what are your protocols. What are you dealing with this institutionally? Well, but like you guys talking about this up. I'm just kidding. Protocol being.

I'm just kidding. Yeah, no, but to be specific, like if some guy says, you know, he wants to kill all Zionists, like is there, does that cross some line that triggers? For sure. The problem is this is all ad hoc. You know, it's all like, you know, you kind of see it. assess it based on the moment. And clearly, you know, there needs to be greater transparency about rules and expectations. All that said, though, again, I think you have to, you have to be comfortable

being uncomfortable. You know, on this issue, everybody wants to kind of bathe in the comfort of people agree with them. And I think the value of students is that they make power uncomfortable. And like, ultimately that's the good thing about protests. And, you know, to put on the kind of worldohat here for a second, it's wrong to have, like, police, you know, wrestling professors to the ground in Georgia or, like, rolling horses into crowds in Texas, as we've seen, you don't have to be super online to have consumed some of this content. Don't think for a second, by the way, that that kind of imagery is not going to be repurposed by a Putin, a Xi Jinping, a Modi.

See, it's all the same. And they, you know, and, you know, that's just the reality here. We get on this high horse about democratic values. Well, we have to, we have to model them here at home. And the way in which some of these protests have been dealt with does not feel consistent with democratic values to me. No, no, it does not. But thank you again, Jordan, for-

Yes, as always. For interviewing all this folks for us, making us smarter per usual. Two quick things before we go to break. Mark your calendars for June 25th because Love It, Favro, and my book is coming out. It's called Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps. are already 34% towards our pre-order target, which we hope will land us on the New York Times bestseller list and bump someone awful off of it, like your Coulter's Ann, your Shapiro's Ben, et cetera, et cetera. But when you pre-order, you're not just getting a book and ruining Ben Shapiro's Day.

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legal podcast has finally launched its own YouTube channel. Strict scrutiny is the smartest show in existence about the Supreme Court. It's ruling. and the legal culture around it. To subscribe, just type strict scrutiny into the nearest YouTube search bar and tune in for new episodes every Monday. Okay, a couple updates from Russia. So first, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Vladimir Putin did not order the execution murder, whatever you want to call it,

of anti-corruption activists and opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Obviously, that does not absolve Putin of responsibility. His goons tried to poison the guy multiple times. times, did poison the guy multiple times. But it was an interesting conclusion and interesting to me that it leaked Ben. I don't know what you thought about that. Also, you know, in an odd sign of just how strange Putin's Russia can be, both people close to Navalny and Putin's spokesman Dmitri Peskov basically dismissed the report as stupid and ridiculous. And then so it's also worth noting at the same time two journalists were recently detained in Russia for allegedly producing

YouTube content for Navalny's YouTube channel. Both have also worked as stringers for international outlets like the AP and Reuters. Meanwhile, our buddy Tucker Carlson is back on the Russia beat. This time he interviewed a guy named Alexander Dugan, who's a far-right Russian philosopher who's been called Putin's brain. Tucker framed his decision to talk to a bloodthirsty nationalist by claiming Dugan's ideas were so dangerous that his books were banned and you can't buy them on Amazon. The Daily Beast checked out this claim, and they found that, of course, it's bullshit, and you can buy at least four of Dugan's books on Amazon right now, including one that's been translated into English for your Kindle.

The interview was so weird and rambly that we couldn't even figure out how to excerpt it, so we will spare you that audio. But Dugan seems to think that liberalism and transgender people will lead us to a future ruled by AI robots. So get excited for that. Ben, are you as jealous as I am that Tucker is just like owning this beat? I mean, not jealous of hanging out with Dugan. He doesn't seem like a good guy. I'm jealous of his lovely time in the Moscow metro.

That's true. Yeah, it's a love affair. I mean, I think that the Dugan thing, this is a guy who literally thinks Putin is not like right wing enough, right? This is a guy that is, you know, too. And I think probably what brought Tucker to him is, you know, his daughter was assassinated. By the Ukrainians. Yeah. And so Trucker loves kind of like hoisting the Ukrainians on their partard.

But this guy's just a bunch of bullshit. You know, it's a bunch of like ultra-nationalist, you know, justifying of fascism. It's not like some deep thinker, you know, who's doing his own research about vaccines. Like this is a guy that like propagates in ideologies that are designed to get people killed, you know. And this kind of dance with the far right that Tucker is doing globally is. it just kind of continues to reinforce that there really is an ideology that has kind of come together

and it's kind of a weird pastiche at core it's like a white supremacist right wing Christian ideology but it's weird how it's very 21st century and that like they're mad about cancel culture in trans rights and LGBT and NATO and you know

it is kind of a Christmas tree of of just like far right grievance that Tucker likes and then the only thing shows the danger of it because I don't really care or whether Putin, like, ordered, like, that he be killed on X date. He killed Navalny by poisoning him, wrongfully detaining him, having him moving around this prison system, finally ending up in the Arctic Circle.

He wasn't, you know, getting fed. I'm sure that, you know, you weren't going to get ahead in the Russian prison system by, like, giving Alexei Navalny a blanket. You know, you were going to get ahead by beating the shit out of him and denying him food. And Putin created the apparatus that deliberately killed Alexei Navalny. And so to me, that's kind of almost a side show. Yeah, it was weird that it leaked. I mean, you never know how anything leaks, but it's just sort of surprising.

Yeah, yeah, it is like, yeah, because it's not like we're on the verge of some rapprochement with Putin. No, it seemed like something would be closely held anyway. Russia was also a big topic of discussion during Secretary of State Tony Blinken's recent visit to China, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other top Chinese officials. The Biden administration is increasingly frustrated about China. supporting Russia's weapons industry and supporting their war effort. Here's a clip from Tony doing a press conference during this visit to China. My discussions today, I reiterated our serious concern about the PRC providing components that are powering Russia's brutal war of aggression against Ukraine.

China's the top supplier of machine tools, microelectronics, nitrocellulose, which is critical to making munitions and rocket propellants, and other dual-use items that Moscow is using to ramp up its defense's industrial base. A defense industrial base that is churning out rockets, drones, tanks, and other weapons that President Putin is using to invade a sovereign country, to demolish its power grid and other civilian infrastructure, to kill innocent children, women, and men. Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China's support. In my meetings with NATO allies earlier this month and with our G7 partners just last week, I heard that same message, fuel

ruling Russia's defense industrial base not only threatens Ukrainian security, it threatens European security. Beijing cannot achieve better relations with Europe while supporting the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War. The message seems to be like, stop this or we're going to sanction you. Kind of my takeaway. Yeah, except does Beijing give a shit? I don't know. Like that, I mean, this is the, like, two years ago, when the sanctions regime one place, I think one thing that a bunch of smart analysts said, including on this podcast, is that what was going to create a huge opportunity for China in a way, because China doesn't like the way U.S. uses sanctions to begin with. And they could basically, by ignoring

our sanctions, buy a lot of Russian oil on the cheap, and then kind of turn Russia into a client state, because Russia is now wholly dependent on China for technology. And so there's a lot of advantages for China and this. I don't like it. I wish they weren't doing it. But the reality is they're not going to respond to kind of a moral appeal. You know, Russia is using these inputs to attack Ukraine. And so then it's pressure. And I think what Tony was trying to kind of indicate is it's not just us. It's Europeans too that don't like this. And presumably, like there might be some sanction of certain Chinese entities that are providing maybe some of those things that Tony listed. Like, I think that specific list was a warning shot, and he probably delivered it in private too.

Like, hey, there may be some company that is providing X, you know, input to the Russian economy. They could be sanctioned. But at the end of the day, I'm increasingly the view, Tommy, that we need to find ways that are not just pressure, you know, to deal with the Chinese in particular. because what's the incentive for them to not do this? And again, everything, say I'm squishy and, you know, do your Munich comparison. But, like, if everything is the U.S. going around the world telling people not to do things and sanctioning them? And then what's happening is an entire parallel global economy is developing that has been built to avoid U.S. sanctions.

And they're big countries in that, like China, and like Iran, big energy producer and a lot of other countries that are, you know, that ignores our sanctions, even though they're, you know, our partner and some other things. And at a certain point, like, you have to have some, you know, to put on my blob hat, there's got to be some carrots, you know, not just sticks. If you want to achieve your objective here, which is that China's not going to be scolded into not doing this. Let me Neville Chamberlain in your Munich agreement real quick, because this trip also came, uh, just after Biden signed a lot of this foreign aid bill that included $8 billion to counter China in Indo-Pacific. That was billions in military funding for Taiwan. And then there was the TikTok ban piece of this where that requires the TikTok be sold or spun off by its Chinese parent company. So like I'm glad Tony made the trip where we have to fix relations that haven't been right since the stupid spy balloon bullshit.

Right. I obviously don't want China to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine either. And I want Taiwan to be able to live as an autonomous island. I want the NICS to win the NBA championship. But like you and I were talking about this the other day. this conversation in the Western media gets framed as the U.S. responding to Chinese aggression in the Pacific. And of course that is true. China has, they have an absurd interpretation of their territorial waters, and they claim half of the South China Sea for no reason. They've been building military bases out of islands. The Chinese, quote unquote, coast guard keeps attacking Filipino Navy boats and that's going to lead to a conflict if we're not careful.

But I think if you just imagine you were Xi Jinping for a minute, he's probably thinking, I'm responding. to American aggression because the U.S. has 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, 50,000 in Japan. We got a base in Guam. Now the U.S. is sending Tomahawk missiles to Okinawa. We just negotiated access to all these air and naval bases in the Philippines. There's U.S. Marines in Australia, thanks to Barack Obama, and now Biden just negotiated this big Ocas submarine deal or sent our nuclear subs down in the Pacific region. And so I'm not saying it's wrong to do these things. I'm not criticizing Biden for doing them. But I'm just saying like when you look at all those U.S. military assets laid out on a map, you can see why China feels like they're being encircled

because they are. And that doesn't justify invading Taiwan or sinking a Filipino fishing boat. But it does make you wonder, is the U.S. Navy presence deterring China or is it scaring them into bolstering their own military hardware? Yeah. And I think the answer to that has to be like more of a focus on diplomacy and frankly, even some transactionalism. with the Chinese, I think she, you know, to, we should come back to this because it's a really important kind of probably under discussed giant tectodontic plate underneath the world because people have focused on Ukraine and the Middle East. But essentially, I think, I do think Xi Jinping came in and he was a particularly aggressive Chinese leader pressing those claims in the South

Chinese heat harder, like being a bit more of a hard ass at home, being a hard us across the board. And so the U.S. was going to react to that by becoming a little more. hard us and ourselves. But for people listening who don't follow the intricacies of kind of the foreign policy establishment debates, there was this kind of collective decision made kind of during the Trump years, actually, that it was wrong to engage China. We need to become much more hawkish. We made all these miscalculations that China would become more warm and cuddly. WTO session was a mistake. And there was a lot to that that. There was correct. Like it was the case that it was wrong that, you know, opening up and, you know, working with China,

a bunch of stuff would lead to them liberalizing their system or something. But I think we have now overcorrected a bit here, you know, like, and it's very good, but we, you know, that Biden people kind of re-engaged and Biden did a meeting with Xi Jinping late last year, Tony just went out there. But at a certain point, there has to be a positive agenda. What are we working on? Are we negotiating things? Are we negotiating around AI? We're negotiating around climate change. We're negotiating around the global economy. like this can't just be a like we have a list of things that we demand the Chinese do and they have a list of things that they demand we do. That's a recipe for kind of conflict. There needs to be some

some positivity in the relationship. Yeah. Last piece of this from this China trip. So Tony's trip also took place with another backdrop of all these espionage cases in England and Germany. There's been a total of six people who have been charged with spying for China. And there's growing evidence that China is attempting to influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election. So China's being accused of using spies to influence the democratic processes in Europe, something China experts say is not new, but that awareness of it is growing. Tony was asked about reports of China's attempt to meddle in the U.S. elections by using fake social media accounts to bolster support for Trump. And whether he thought this violated President Xi's commitment, he had this to say to CNN's Kylie Iwood.

President Biden was very clear about that with President Xi, and I repeated that today in my meetings. You repeated what? That any interference by China in our election is something that we're looking very carefully at and is totally unacceptable to us. Look, it's something we're tracking very carefully. I can't speak to these specific reports. I can say that as a general matter, we've been very clear with China, don't do it. But they're not violating the commitment yet, as far as you can tell? Well, again, I'd have to look at the specific reports that you're referring to,

but we have seen, generally speaking, evidence of attempts to influence and arguably interfere, and we want to make sure that that's cut off as quickly as possible. Kylie Iwood from debt of mass, by the way. No big deal. No big deal there. I'm up in my city. Ben, if every country decides to interfere in our elections, Did they accidentally cancel each other out?

How does this work? What do you think? I mean, in an open information space, you know, this is more normalized. And I think China's become more aggressive in kind of information and disinformation campaigns. And it's quite likely that they're bringing that into our election, you know. And the question is at what scale, with what intent. How big a deal. How big a deal.

It's always our part. I mean, ironically, I genuinely believe that the Chinese would prefer Trump to work. because while he's an unpredictable actor who talks, you know, trash about China, he also has kind of a man crush on Xi Jinping and is so disruptive and erratic that he's the best thing for China in terms of their desire to build a parallel world order, right? Their desire to go to Europe and say, hey, the Americans are too dysfunctional to deal with us. Their desire to take things like the bricks and build it into institutions. So I'm sure the Biden people seem sounds like they're seeing some stuff.

that is probably in the information space. But you hear, you know, Tony's warning, and then it's kind of like, well, or what? Like, what is the U.S. going to do if they see this? Are they going to call it? I think calling it out is important, but be at some point, and I'm sympathetic to Tony, we've all been there. At some point, though, you're going to have to be specific. I think naming what the interference is is step one.

And then if it continues, then you consider what consequences. Yeah, and if it's just Twitter bots, maybe it just doesn't rise to the agenda. Also, yeah, I mean, certainly the Chinese note, they could just. buy some of that DJT stock and get Curry Trump's career with Trump. Switching gears, Ben, staying in the Indo-Pacific, though, of course. The Washington Post had an amazing story about the attempted assassination of sick activists living abroad by Indian intelligence services. So we covered a similar but unfortunately successful assassination of a Canadian man, sick

activists in June of last year. But this new report in The Washington Post is about a. plot to kill a man living in New York, and the final instructions were relayed by intelligence operatives, Indian intelligence operatives, to the would-be assassin during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's state visit to the U.S. Think about that for a second. During the state visit, they're like, yeah, off this fucking guy. Luckily, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence services prevented this from happening,

but the post says the plot by India's research and analysis wing or raw. That's like the best intel name out there. It's like a WWE. Raw went all the way to the top, that it was signed off by the head of Ra and that Modi's National Security Advisor was probably aware of the general plan to take out these six separatiffs or activists all over the planet. The Post piece notes that while six separatists were responsible for a lot of violent incidents back in the 80s, including the assassination of Prime Minister and Dera Gandhi,

the threat is now wildly overstated and overhyped by Modi, probably for nationalist reasons. everyone should read the story because it's way too long to summarize here and it's great reporting. But they also mentioned that, you know, law enforcement has had to break up raw intelligence efforts in Australia, Germany, and the UK. So they're doing this everywhere. The post said the Biden administration's response has basically been to get India to deal with a matter internally rather than make it, you know, public with expulsions or sanctions or other penalties. They sent Bill Burns over there to deliver the like stern. We know what you did. Clean up your shit message.

Ben, I know going hard at India right now is complicated geopolitics for all the reasons we just talked about about China. But there's no doubt that if the Saudis did this, people would be calling for the U.S. to sever relations, basically. Or the Chinese did it, you know. I mean, I think that you look, Modi seems to have internalized what you just said, that, oh, because of geopolitics, I can basically do whatever the hell I want. And the fact that he, you know, this was happening during a state visit is the ultimate ultimate. indicator that they feel like they can do whatever they want and there's no consequences. I do think it's not unlike what we're just thinking about China. Like one starting point actually is to just be, is just to blow the whistle on this publicly and put it out there.

You know, like, like, you know, this should be embarrassing that they do this. And they, they didn't like it when, I think this is something good Trudeau did when he blew the whistle on what they did. They flipped out. The fact that they flipped out tells you that they don't want to. it to be known that they're doing this. And so one step that is short of, you know, moving to sanctions or things like this is just being like, hey, wait a second, we're going to expose this because cut it out, you know, as kind of a tactic of dissuading you from doing it. Because the worst thing you want is for them to think they can just start killing people with impunity in

like New York and, I mean, that, we can't tolerate that. And whatever is allowed them to feel that impunity is not okay. No, it's not okay. You don't think they got a raw deal in Canada? I mean, I'm sorry. I'll move on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they got kind of cooked. Okay, let's turn to Iran. Okay, so listeners probably remember back in 2022,

there was a huge wave of protests all across Iran in response to the murder of a young woman named Masa Mini by Iran's so-called morality police. She was arrested for improperly wearing her headscarf, the hijab. I'm sure she was properly wearing it, and these assholes just picked her up, and then they killed her. At the time, an Iranian rapper,

named Tumaj Salahi released music critical of the Iranian regime in support of the protesters. He was then arrested in late 2022 and sentenced to over six years in prison. For some reason, he was briefly released and then re-arrested after publicly saying he'd been tortured in place in solitary confinement for 252 days. So CNN has a great write-up about all of this if you want to learn more. Fast forward to last week. Salahey's lawyer announced the shocking news that his client had been sentenced to death for his protection. participation in these protests, participation, I guess, meaning releasing a music video. Another Kurdish Iranian rapper was also arrested during the protest movement and given a five-year

sentence. So officials in the U.S. and Europe have denounced these sentences. Artists and officials in the recording industry have been speaking out as well. There have been protests in a lot of places all over the globe. But Ben, I just think it's a reminder of, I think the brutality of the Iranian regime, but also how weak they ultimately are. If they think that killing a rapper, for releasing a song about a protest movement is the way to go forward. I mean, it doesn't speak to a country that feels confident in its decision-making here.

Yeah, and they stick to the crackdown, you know, for a year. I mean, part of what this shows is that they're still trying to squeeze and squeeze around the different elements of Iranian society that kind of join that movement. And so, you know, there's a, the Iranian cultural sector,

they're trying to send a message to any other musician in the future that might want to think about doing something like this. And that's what's so abhorne about this. I do think, to your point, you know, this illustrates that, like, the real vulnerability is how they treat their people. And I say that because the Iranians are probably like nothing more than just to be a debate about, like, the recent foreign policy issues in the region. Right, yeah. Like how tough they are in Israel.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. If your objective is illuminating, challenging, confronting. the fundamental nature of the Iranian regime, I do think the most effective, you know, directional challenge to that is around how they treat people, how they treat women, how they treat people exercising speech. And in a weird way, not letting them make this a debate about whether they're standing up to America or Israel or whatever. You know, because sometimes like the people that claim to be supporting human rights in Iran are mainly focused on foreign policy issues. Like what was so powerful about that movement is it was about the regime,

its true character and how it treats its people. And that's where people can continue to focus, especially women, obviously. Yeah. Two more quick things. So in Scotland, Humza Yusuf has resigned as the Scottish National Party leader in Scotland's first minister. His tenure lasted less than a year and ended unexpectedly after tearing up an agreement with the Green Party in a battle with the party's lawmakers over climate change policy and differences in what they wanted to set in terms of the targets going forward. The S&P set one of the most ambitious climate targets in the world. They wanted to cut carbon emissions 75% by 2030 from 1990 levels. But Yusuf said last month that the goals were set before he came into office and were beyond what we were able to achieve.

The Green Party then held a vote of no confidence, a move he did not see. Yusuf did not see coming in one he addressed in his resignation speech, which we have a clip from. Unfortunately, in ending the Butte House agreement, in the manner that I did, I clearly underestimated the level of hurt and upset that caused green colleagues. For a minority government to be able to govern effectively and efficiently, trust when working with the opposition is clearly fundamental. And while a route through this week's motion of no confidence was absolutely possible, I am not well. to trade my values and principles or do deals with whomever simply for retaining power. Therefore, after spending the weekend reflecting on what is best for my party, for the government and for the country I lead, I've concluded that repairing our relationship across the political divide

can only be done with someone else at the helm. I have therefore informed the SMP's national secretary, of my intention to stand down as party leader and ask that she commences a leadership contest for my replacement as soon as possible. So I don't know all the ins and outs of what happened here. I thought Yusuf was a pretty inspiring leader. I mean, the way he talked about family who had been trapped in Gaza was moving. He was the first non-white head of the Scottish government, but pretty shocking development here.

I mean, also interesting to see what this will mean in terms of the S&P support vis-a-vis labor. in the upcoming elections. Yeah. Well, if you listen to him there, I mean, that was a pretty principal statement of resignation, you know,

uh, so he continues to kind of demonstrate a degree of self-awareness and eloquence it is missing in a lot of political life in the world. That said, uh, the two thoughts I had are first, I mean, the stars are just really aligning for labor,

you know, like, um, and I'm not saying that as someone, you know, if you listen this podcast, you know, we're partial to labor.

But, But I mean, the Tories are a complete shit show. Like Rishi Sunak can barely hold that thing together. He's holding it together with dumb shit like this Rwanda deal, which you talk about in your interview. Then, Scotland is somewhere where labor needs to win and made some losses to the S&P in recent years. The SMP seems like it's a bit of a mess these days. And this kind of will reinforce that. So politically, in terms of a UK general election at some point this year, like it feels like this is yet another day.

at a point that suggests labor is going to have a good election. The other thing, which I don't claim to know enough about, right? So I don't want to, but the S&P, it's interesting. It's both a nationalist party, right? And, you know, they supported Scottish independence in the past. And it's kind of a progressive party, you know, and the emissions target, which is pretty fucking ambitious emissions target kind of seems representative of that. And they had some issues, remember around trans issues.

Yes. It does feel like there's a, and again, I don't, I say this is a totally an outside of, the tension between, are you a nationalist party and ideologically left wing party? Like, it does feel like there's a bit of an identity issue that needs to be sorted out within Scotland. Yeah, that's a good point. Because they kind of keep getting into these strange controversies around pretty ideological issues that are not just about, you know, Scottish decision-making and autonomy. Yeah, that's a good observation. but we'll see how this plays out. Okay, last thing, Ben.

So I think I found the Isaac Chottner of New Zealand. Oh, I've been looking for that. So Isaac Schotner, he does these amazing Q&A's for the New Yorker. Well, amazing in part because he gets people to agree to talk to him, who he's clearly going to humiliate. Who's the fucking war criminal that did all the coups in Latin America that he just got? He just had Elliott Abrams? He just had Elliott Abrams.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just said Elliot Abrams. He agreed to do an interview Isaac Chotner. And, like, just finds a way to logic. trap them every time. So the Isaac Chottenner of New Zealand writes for a site called Newsroom. You can find it at newsroom.com.com. N.Z. The literary editor of Newsroom, a guy named Steve Bronius, I'm sorry if I'm butchering your name, decided to interview another guy named Todd Stevenson. Todd Stevenson is an MP in the New Zealand Conservative Act Party, and he was recently named the art spokesman for the party.

One might assume that means he has interest in or knowledge of the arts. One would be wrong. He doesn't know anything about it and he doesn't give a shit. So Steve did this interview and I thought maybe we could do a quick dramatic reading, Ben. So I just sent you a little transcript here. So I'm going to be Steve, the literary editor. I'm in bold. You're Todd.

You're the conservative art spokesman. And Ben is reading this site unseen everyone. I'm not going to do the accent there. Okay, good. What's your experience or knowledge of the arts? I'm going to say, other than as a consumer, very limited. There are some parts of the art sector I'm personally interested in, but, yeah, it's an area I'm wanting to learn more about, and I'm slowly getting to know. I'm conducting, so this is Steve again.

I'm conducting the interview in my hat as the literary editor of the book section at Newsroom. So what about literature? What's your experience or knowledge there? Yeah, I'm going to be pretty straight up with you, Steve. I mainly read nonfiction, to be honest. So it's been a while since I read a novel. What about New Zealand books? That's an area I want to kind of learn a bit more about.

You're delivering the shit out of these, Todd. Are there any New Zealand authors you have read? It's been a long time, to be honest, Steve. I'm just trying to think of the last one I would have read. Can I come back to you on that? But you don't have individual taste yourself, do you? You're kind of an arts ignoramus, really, by your own reckoning? No, I certainly have individual things that have.

I like to go to. We talked about that earlier. You've been to see Hamilton. Well, I was just giving you an example of the things I like to do. What are your tastes other than musicals? That's the main one in the creative sector. And I watch movies. I watch TV. I watch TV says the act spokesman for the arts.

Creative things are on TV. Are they not, Steve? That's my favorite line in this whole thing. So there's really not more to ask you, is there? I mean, you just don't know your subject. Well, that's right. That's great. I have absolutely no more questions for somebody who has absolutely no knowledge of their subject, but I appreciate your time. Yeah. And as I said, Steve, I'm out there trying to learn more. And as I go through the rest of the year, I'm sure I will learn more.

My door is always open to talk to people. That's one thing you'll find about me and all the portfolios I'm engaged in. My door is always open to talk to stakeholders. I think there would be very few people in the arts and literature who could be bothered opening the door to talk to Utah. That's your opinion, Steve. As I said, I've actually had some very fruitful, engagement so far, and I'm looking forward to continuing that and talking to more people in the year. All right. Thanks for your time. Maybe I'll talk to you later in the year, Steve. I don't see why. Bye. I don't know who that's our first and probably final dramatic reading. I don't know who Steve Bronius is, but he's maybe my favorite interviewer ever. Well, I don't know who Todd is, but I know that this right-wing New Zealand party, like, came to, you know, power,

like, trashing Justin Ardern with a lot of, like, disenfirm. and misinformation and misinformation, so we don't like these people. We're still just into stands. This guy is such a clown. The thing, it's actually much longer. He's like, what musicals have you seen? He's like, I saw Hamilton a couple of years ago.

He doesn't read. He only reads, like, nonfiction books about campaigns. He couldn't think of a novel. He couldn't think of the New Zealand author that he liked for a while. They're not exactly building Camelot over there. No, it was not. It was not great.

But, okay, that's it for the news section of the show, it for our Dramatic Readings. when we come back, you will hear my interview with John McDermott from The Economist about a lot of fascinating things happening in Africa, talking about the South Africa elections of the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and how the U.S. is getting pushed out of the cell region while Russia and the Wagner Mercenary Group are moving in. Joining me now is John McDermott. He's the African correspondent for the economist, and actually someone I've known for many

years. Great to see you, man. Thanks for having me on. How are you? I'm doing very well. We were just commiserating before we start. I started recording about life and all things children, but I will, I'll get to the news because that's why people are here.

So this month marks two very different but momentous 30th anniversaries on the continent of Africa. It'll be the 30th anniversary of the first Democratic election in South Africa that officially ended apartheid. And earlier this month, Rwanda commemorated the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I want to ask you about both of those events and as well as some of the ways. as the U.S. standing in influence in Africa seems to have diminished. But let's start in South Africa because you're based there currently. On May 29, South Africa will hold national elections.

The Africa National Congress, or ANC, which is the party of Nelson Mandela, has been in power for all of those 30 years. But recent polls seem to show their support slipping a bit. Are political analysts anticipating a major political shift? And what do you think is driving voter sentiment at the moment? Yeah, the elections on May 29th are going to be a big deal, but I don't think they're going to be the dramatic shift that many were speculating a few months ago. Back then, there were some polls that were suggesting the ANC might be on kind of 40% or upper 30s, which for many political parties would be a fairly decent showing. but given the ANC has never not had more than 50% of the vote, it would have been a disaster. Now I think most polls are showing the ANC closer to 45%, which under the South African system

of proportional representation, which is a bit like Germany or Israel, will require them to get coalition, but that should be fairly doable. So I think the consensus for you at the moment is that they will scrape by, battered and bruised. But in some ways, it's kind of astonishing that they've fallen so far. I mean, in 2019, under President Cyril Ramaphosa, they got 57% of the vote. So this will be the biggest drop from one election to another. And I think this gets to the other thing you were talking about, which is the 30 years of democracy in South Africa, which in many ways, if you're stepping right back, has been something of a game of two halves, which is a bit like, kind of my football as opposed to your football.

And in the first half, so kind of the 15 years from 1994, when Mandela came to power through the Tabo and Becker years, life generally got better for almost every South Africa. Growth was ticking along, not spectacularly, but pretty good. The ANC built up a basic welfare state, and there was a general sense of catharsis after the decades, if not centuries of white supremacy. But in the second half, which coincided with Jacob Zuma, but some of the problems predated him,

things have been pretty bad. I mean, GDP per capita is essentially the same as it was in 2008, and unemployment has gone from kind of horrific to atrocious. And that's had a big impact on how South Africans view the ruling party, and that's why they will take a bit of a battering. I've seen some statistics from the World Bank, which said that South Africa was the most unequal, country in the world in terms of wealth distribution. 80% of the population is black and there is a

35 point gap between black and white unemployment. What, I mean, is the frustration you're seeing in the electorate kind of because of though that glaring inequality and the continued racial divide despite, you know, apartheid ending 30 years ago? 30 years after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains deeply, deeply unequal. And to some extent, what has happened over the past 30 years has been that a minority of the black majority has been able to enter the middle class and to a lesser extent, the top stratum of society.

But the majority has still been left outside of that progress. And interestingly, in South Africa, there's a big debate as to why that is. And for some people, there's something of an original sin that happened back in 1994. Occasionally, you hear this notion that Nelson Mandela sold us out. And I think what people mean by that is he won us political freedom, but not necessarily economic freedom. Now, I happen to think that's unfair, unfair and incorrect. Unfair because a guy who spent 27 years as political prisoner is hardly a sellout. And incorrect because the enduring inequality is partly because of aparthex legacies.

I mean, you don't erase these overnight. Of course you can't. But it's also because of deliberate decisions that ANC has made, especially in that kind of second half of democracy, it's increasingly focused on the kind of redistribution of wealth. the creation of this black elite through various race-based economic policies, as opposed to what it was doing in the first 15 years, which seemed to be kind of trying to grow the economy as a whole and then use the proceeds to build up this welfare state.

And I think that's why you're starting to feel that both economics and politics is hitting a bit of a dead end. Yeah, I mean, it certainly sounds similar to problems that U.S. has had in terms of economic inequality even after Jim Crow or after slavery. Speaking of the U.S., I mean, I noticed that the U.S. in South Africa have been on the opposite sides of some pretty significant geopolitical issues lately. The Biden administration is, you know, the biggest backer, BB Netanyahu in the war in Gaza, whereas South Africa brought the genocide case against Israel at the ICC, or the ICJ, I should say. The U.S. and South Africa have also had some dustups over the war in Ukraine.

last year the U.S. ambassador accused South Africa of providing weapons and ammunition to the Russians. What's your sense about where relations are at the moment between the U.S. and South Africa? It felt pretty prickly for a period. I think there's been something of a course correction in the past few months. I feel like on the American side, there's a realization that South Africa matters. for all its stagnation, it's still the largest economy on the continent. It plays an outsized role in Pan-African diplomacy. And as the case before the ICJ shows,

it's also taken on something of a moral leadership amongst the global south. Now, I think its claims to be able to do that are somewhat dubious, but it's true nevertheless that that's what it's doing. So I think the United States has recognized that and also understands that South Africa for a combination of historical reasons and self-interest will always want to be non-aligned. I think what the United States is trying to do is ensure that it's a genuine policy of non-alignment, as opposed to one that is rhetorically non-aligned, but is actually helping enemies or adversaries of the United States. And I think that's where some of the actions vis-a-vis Russia crossed the line in the eyes of the United States, both with this slightly odd issue of the weapons that may or may not have gone onto a ship near Cape Town, but also, for instance, having military exercises with Russia and China on the same week that Ukraine was commemorating a year of the invasion by Russia.

But I think things have taken a bit of a course correction. and both the United States and the EU seems to kind of be plodding along, trying to make the best of it. That's good. Of course, correction seemed needed. Moving north, the U.S. military just got pushed out of Niger. Chad is reportedly threatening to kick out U.S. troops. Over the past several years, there's been this wave of coups in the Sahel region of Africa. And one consistent feature of them seems to be that an outcome is that Western countries like the U.S. and the French get pushed out or lose influence generally while Russia or the Wagner

group, the Wagner mercenary group, they gain influence. What is your sense of why this is happening and what it says about shifting power dynamics in the Sahel region? I think there's a couple of things going on. So one is security and the other is sovereignty. So take security first. This is one of the most conflict-riddled parts of the world. Before Gaza, nearly 50% of all conflict-related deaths were in the Sahel, and that's excluding Saddam, which I know you've talked about on the show before. So there was always a potential for governments to come to power who could claim, however rightly, to do a better job of providing security than the previous guys. The other aspect, and I think this is often lost in the kind of west-

talk of these countries as part of some geopolitical game is sovereignty. And if you actually listen to any of these millennial military men that are now making up a lot of the hunters in the region, they talk about this all the time. When the coups happen, they tend to be more popular than many people assume. I mean, sometimes the guys on the streets waving Russian flags are plants, but sometimes it is a kind of genuine outpouring of support. And when the Russians have come in in various guises, what are they doing? They are providing security for the regime, and crucially, they're fighting the guys that the regime wants to fight. And often there was the perception that the French or the Americans were fighting the guys that Paris or Washington

wanted to fight. Now, they're also far more willing to commit heinous human rights abuses than Western Bank forces ever were. But to get yourself into mindset of the people that are now running these countries, what matters is that they have partners that are doing exactly what they want. Now, I happen to think all this will end in tears, but there is a certain grim logic

to what they're trying to do. No, that's a really good point. I mean, the US policy was overtly to go after jihadi groups that had designs on attacking the US homeland. So, of course, you know, that doesn't feel like it's in the interest of the host country. You mentioned Sudan. We have talked a lot about the Civil War in Sudan, in particular,

how the United Arab Emirates is feeding that conflict by sending weapons to one of the two warring parties, the RSF, this paramilitary group. On Monday, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas Greenfield, warned that, quote, history is repeating itself in Darfur in the worst possible way. And she said that a major city in Darfur was, quote, on the precipice of a large-scale massacre. She also specifically called out the UAE, as did UN sanctions monitors, who said it's credible that the UAE is funneling arms into Sudan. We should note that the UAE denies providing assistance to any armed group in Sudan. Why do you think the UAE is getting involved in Sudan?

And I know you've been watching how they've been investing in Africa more broadly. What have you seen? I think it's fascinating what the UAE is doing across the continent. And it's part of a broader trend where not just China, not just Russia, but these kind of more assertive middle powers are becoming more influential in many African countries. And I think you have to almost divide the continent in two from the perspective of Abu Dhabi.

There's the horn of Africa stretching into the Sahel. So the horn of Africa is kind of Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, the northeast corner. And that's very much the neighborhood, as perceived by Abu Dhabi. And what it appears to be doing is establishing a series of client leaders. Abi Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, is probably the most powerful of those. But then also there's the warlord that is fighting the traditional Sudanese army, kind of General Hometti.

And I don't know if Ui itself knows what the ultimate objective is, apart from having people who can be their clients in a region which it sees as kind of increasingly important. And going back to the Sahel for a second, I mean, the Sahel kind of bleeds into Sudan through Chad. There's an election in Chad next week, and the UE has been, with the French and the US, they've been kind of backing the strong man there. So it's interesting that in some cases you find the U.E on the side of the United States and the West in Africa. And then some cases you find them on the opposite. And I think that and the fact that Africa is often on the bottom of the agenda when Jake Sullivan or Anthony Blinken or whoever is meeting with Emirati leaders

is why it's been quite complicated for the United States to go hard on the UAE for its alleged role in Sudan. I mean, I think that's weak and cowardly in many ways, but there is kind of other things going on. So if you have the horn on one side, then there's the kind of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa where the UAE is becoming a bit more like a new China. So if it's acting a bit more like Russia in the horn, picking up client states, funneling arms and so on, in relatively stable countries like Zambia, it is becoming an increasingly important source of capital, as in some places China becomes less important. So in mining, for instance, the UEE in addition to the Saudis are becoming the go-to place for investment outside the trade. traditional major mining companies. And from the African perspective, what the UAE offers is a bit like what China has offered for a long time.

It offers money, no strings attached, and speed. Right. Yeah. I think you really can't overstate that speed point compared to, you know, U.S. processes and Congress and funding cycles and, you know, oversight, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure we're a nightmare to work with as compared to someone like the UAE. The last country I want to ask you about is, I mean, we, at the top I mentioned how this month marked the 30th anniversary of the start of the Wanda genocide. For those who don't know, that was when our militias from the Hutu ethnic group massacred, hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi ethnic minority group, along with many moderate Hutu's.

I know you were recently in Rwanda. What did you make of that visit and how a country can recover from an event, that horrific, prevent it from happening again? and also maybe, you know, use the legacy or prevention of another genocide for political purposes, if you're a political leader. It has always fascinated me that you have in Rwanda this incredibly population dense place, so many perpetrators and kind of victims' families living side by side. And I think under those circumstances, how could you not, if you are the Rwanda, and government have a very kind of assertive, let's just say, approach to reconciliation and re-education. And, you know, to some extent it has worked, right? There's not been another genocide. And, you know, anecdotally, people kind of rub along and they complain about the

bossy bureaucrats. But I do think there's been kind of like a massive, massive overreach, which has less to do with preventing another genocide and more to do with perpetuating Paul Kagami's stay in power. I mean, this is the guy that kind of rescued Rwanda from the genocide, and there's a whole series of wormholes down which you can go if you want to learn about what happened during the genocide, before the genocide, after the genocide, causing all the Congo wars and so on.

But there's no doubt that Rwanda, in addition to being, kind of this clean and efficient place nowadays also has a very kind of sinister edge because in the name of the genocide there's also been huge curtailment of free speech going after dissidents, commentators, YouTubers, etc. So, you know, there's going to be elections in Rwanda

on July 15th. And I think the only question is whether Kagami's going to win by 98 or 99% of the votes. Yes, some nice North Korea. Yeah, yeah. nice North Korean numbers. But just to kind of one final thought on Rwanda, which is, you know, in the, you know,

maybe the first 20 years after the genocide, I think a combination of a sense in the West that rightly they didn't do enough to slow or revert the genocide, plus the fact that it was actually an African country that was spending aid money well, meant that people in Washington, Paris, London, forgave a lot of the sins.

Now I think that Western policymakers have largely kind of wised up to the truth about the Kagami regime. But what he's done, and this reflects a kind of change that's happening across the continent, is that he's worked out that geopolitics is changing and that the influence of the West isn't what it was and that you can have kind of these different partners. So he has a close relationship with China, with Turkey, with Qatar, actually as well. And at the same time, he's very, very transactional. So he's kind of helping the French or helping the EU out with fighting jihadists in northern Mozambique. He's doing this kind of,

you know, morally horrific asylum seeker deal with the British. And with the Americans, I mean, he's still a kind of seen as something of a steady security partner. And going back to the Sahel, It wouldn't surprise me if you see some more kind of Rwandan fighters there one day. So I think he's gone from being a bit of a donor darling to being a kind of African master of realpolitik. Interesting, yeah. Final question for you. And I want to ask you about that sinister edge you described in Rwanda in this asylum deal. So the UK is planning to start deporting asylum seekers who arrived via irregular means.

Usually it's via, you know, a small boat from France. I saw this week, I think a top minister, a top Tory minister said they expect to deport 6,000 migrants to Rwanda this year. These are people who almost certainly have no connection to Rwanda. They have no family there. They have no type. These are people from Afghanistan, from Syria, from all over the place. The plan has been controversial to say the least.

Britain's Supreme Court found Rwanda to be unsafe for refugees. So British lawmakers passed a bill that essentially said, actually it is safe and that's how they resolve the problem here. What is your sense of the security climate for migrants who may start to begin arriving from the UK sometime this year? And what do people in Rwanda make of this deal that their government has cut with the UK to take in all these folks? I'm tempted to conclude cynically that there's so much attention on the deal that Rwanda has a huge interest in making sure that these asylum seekers are not mistreated. I mean, it's almost impossible to find out what ordinary Rwandans think because of the fear that they have about speaking truthfully.

What was quite interesting, though, is amongst the Rwandan elite, there was almost a sense of kind of buyer's remorse about the deal. So, you know, Rwanda, I'm not sure how much this gets across in the US, but they're obviously putting a lot of effort into branding themselves in a new way. So they sponsor Arsenal Football Club. They sponsor Paris Saint-Chaman. There's lots of kind of paid advertising in magazines like kind of Nat Geo and stuff like that. Come see the guerrillas. It's all fun. You know, Ellen comes and all that stuff.

So there's a sense in which they want to kind of portray themselves as a kind of, kind of, kind of. kind of luxurious product in a way. And having a lot of heat for being a repressive dictatorship that abuses human rights and will mistreat asylum seekers, isn't that exactly good for the brand? So while I think Kagami is in too deep with it, there's certainly, to the extent that you ever get any dissent in Rwanda, some murmurings that this may have been a bit of a mistake and the underestimated the potential heat they were going to get. Fascinating. John McDermott, thank you so much for doing the show. Everyone should subscribe to the economists because it's just an

excellent publication. Also, you guys have a bunch of great podcasts. Anything else you want to plug? No, that's fine. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks again to John McDermott for joining the show. And I guess that's it for us this week. Thanks to Stephen Todd. Oh, and I have one plug. For those interested in Ukraine. Friday, I'm doing a virtual event for KOR. You know, Sean Penn's charity to start in Haiti. They're very active in Ukraine, as you'll remember, Sean Penn's, originally being in Ukraine at the day of the invasion. Anyway, Friday, it's me talking a bunch of people in Ukraine on the ground, doing good work for them to help support that organization. So you can check it out at KOR's website. Excellent.

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