The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3622 - What Orban's Loss Means for Anti-Fascists; Iran's Endgame w/ Jason Stanley, Mohammad Ali Shabani

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Welcome back to The Majority Report   On today's program:   JD Vance suggests that the U.S. is willing to engage in "economic terrorism" against Iranians. As if we haven't been doing that for years through sanctions.   Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) is asked on Newsmax how long he thinks Americans will be willing to pay higher energy costs as a result of this war in Iran. Marshall answers, "can you imagine in World War 2 telling the president you only have so many days to kill Hitler".   Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and publisher of the Front Left Newsletter on Substack, joins the program to discuss Viktor Orban's election loss and what it means for anti-fascists globally.   Mohammad Ali Shabani, editor of Amwaj.media joins the program to discuss the failed negotiations between the U.S. and Iran and what could come next.   In the Fun Half:   Harry Enten presents polling showing massive collapse in Trump's core demographic - non-college educated whites.   Emma takes a deep dive into the Door Dash Grandma saga. TLDR Door Dash and the Trump team send a GOP operative to deliver the president some McDonald's in a stunt that falls very flat.   Dr. Oz tells Don, Jr. about Trump's belief that Diet Coke kills cancer cells. Where did Trump get this notion? Well, because Diet Coke kills grass so obviously it kills cancer cells.   Scott Wiener, candidate for Nancy Pelosi's seat in California's 11th district, is a tall glass of disappointment as he tries to manipulate people into thinking that he is not accepting AIPAC and AIPAC-aligned donations.   all that and more   To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: DELETEME: Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/MAJORITY and use promo code MAJORITY at checkout. SUNSET LAKE: use coupon code 420 to save 30% sitewide at sunsetlakecbd.com The sale ends April 22nd at midnight Eastern time. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com

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Sale ends April 22nd at midnight eastern time. See their site for additional terms and restrictions. and now time for the show. Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Tuesday, April 14th, 2006. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the

heartland of America. Downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, author and publisher of the front-left newsletter on Substack on the rise and the fall of Orban and what it means for Maga. Also on the program today,

Muhammad Ali Shabani, journalist and editor of Amwaj Media, a platform focusing on Iran, Iraq, and the GCC countries with an update on what our blockade on the blockade really means. Meanwhile, Trump says the U.S. military has blockaded

the Straits of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia, pressing Trump to drop the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and China may have already run through the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. That's kind of symbolic for the 21st century.

Uh-huh. Meanwhile, I can't even remember his first name anymore. Swalwell. Eric Lowe. Who cares? To resign from Congress and Garcia to follow and maybe a new wave of expulsions from Congress.

This, as the House returns, seeking to end the longest DHS shutdown ever. Meanwhile, Trump deletes truth post that claims he's, and claims he's not Jesus. He's just a doctor. immigration judges fired after blocking deportation of pro-Palestinian students U.S. trying to quash the Inter-American Human Rights Commission from its Caribbean boat targeting investigation and the burgeoning anti-data center movement oust four incumbents four incumbent city council members in a small Missouri town.

All this and more on today's majority report. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. It is. Newsday Tuesday, although we had a newsday Monday. We're a breaking format. It's fun day Tuesday. Yeah, sure.

It doesn't rhyme, but it'll still be fun. Breaking our strict format rules. Exactly. Exactly. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us. We got a lot to get to. It's hard to say.

but it's quite possible that J.D. Vance might be the most sort of like beleaguered guy in the administration right now, because one gets the sense that he is seeing his prospects to become the 46th president to be exclusively a function of Donald Trump's health. Now, I would imagine that's not a bad bet if you're J.D. Vance. But this guy has always, I think always probably growing up been a very unlikable guy. And he's awkward around people. And it really does seem like somehow he got the short end of the stick. He was sent to negotiate with the Iranians. who knows what he was willing to give them or not give them, but it was Donald Trump basically trying to figure out

how he's going to get a taste of whatever money is going to flow in any direction. But here is J.D. Vance. Accidentally admitting something that probably you shouldn't say out loud, I would imagine. A little guy called Freud. On Fox News last night. Yeah, here he is. trying to, I don't know, backfill.

When it comes to weapons of war, what they have done is engaged in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. They basically threatened any ship that's moving through the streets of Hormuz. Well, as the President of the United States showed, two can play at that game. And if the Iranians are going to try to engage in economic terrorism, we're going to abide by a simple principle that no Iranian ships are getting out either. We know that's a big deal to them. We know that applies additional economic leverage.

And again, Brett, the president wants the Iranian people to thrive and succeed. He has had his negotiation team put on the table a serious proposal. The ball is in Iran's court. Did we make progress? Yes. But we're going to find out from the Iranians whether we can make that ultimate bit of progress that gets us to a big deal. In other words, if you're going to wreak havoc on the world's economy, we're going to weak havoc on the world's economy.

Two can play at that game. And I like how he admits that if they engage in economic terrorism, we'll also engage in economic terrorism. You know what is typically associated with terrorism is acts of violence on civilians. And you guys actually started off with the

actual terrorism by bombing a girl's school, killing over 160 girls, double-tapping it, attacking their energy infrastructure. Which is also terrorism? Exactly. Attacking their bridges because potentially some materials to make a weapon go over bridges on occasion

and acting like that's not a war crime. You guys started with actual terrorism and they're responding with economic leverage. Yeah, you've been doing the economic terrorism. And geographic. I'm pretty sure they have maps in the White House. They might have been able to foresee some of these things if they saw like geographically

what the Strait of Hormuz actually looks like with Iran and to its north, the fact that there's the Caspian Sea that there's no NATO presence over, no U.S. presence over where Russia can send them weapons in a pretty much unfettered fashion, making this much more difficult than Trump thought. Like, there's one thing to blockade Cuba, an island, and try to starve that population. It's another thing to do it to a country with Iran that has a variety of different trade routes and is a country of 90 million people, and it's highly mountainous and complicated. And probably, I think it's safe to say, and well,

Well, this is a good question for Muhammad al-Shabani, who's going to be coming on later in the program. They've been planning for the potential of this. You know, none of this is going in a surprising fashion, except for apparently to the Trump administration. But Iran has likely been preparing for this potential. I mean, this is the potential that they have probably been preparing for for decades. probably since the Iran-Iraq war, this is the one thing that they knew potentially could happen. It was the one place where they knew they had leverage, and it was the one response to this would be, we're not going to allow for your boats to get out and sell oil either.

Now, CNN reported about two hours ago that a Chinese or a boat, a Chinese tanker, has passed through the blockade, unclear where that Chinese tanker had filled up with oil, but theoretically they would have passed through the Iranian blockade and probably maybe paid them. But it remains to be seen. CNN reported that from Dubai, but yeah. Okay, so it filled up from Dubai.

and it's possible Iran did not blockade that boat, but it doesn't seem, the logic of what the Trump administration is doing is a little bit hard to follow. But again, we will see. We're going to do the thing you've been doing, and I hope you're unprepared for it. Now, as the Trump administration sort of fumbles around and tries to figure out how they can justify any of this to their own base and to the own Trump voters who were like, you said you weren't going to do exactly this. This is exactly what you said you weren't going to do. The Republican Party, meanwhile, and let's also be clear, the Republican Party would be sweating this a lot more. if the opposition party, if the leadership of the opposition party was not going on television and saying, Trump's chickening out, he isn't, he isn't really fighting a good war against Iran.

No, I'm such small portions. I mean, exactly, exactly. I mean, this is the point is that we have a leadership part, the leadership of the opposition party is not opposed. to a war against Iran. To the extent that he is making moves that are contrary to what Trump wants, it is because his entire party is largely against this war as well. And so Chuck Schumer is out there essentially, you know, he's playing the game, except for it's quite obvious that he's bet against his own team.

But here are Republicans still scrambling. even without having the leadership of the opposition party essentially put this burning tire around the necks of Republican lawmakers, they still can't figure out what they're supposed to say about this. How long do you think Americans will be willing to pay the higher energy costs while we are confronting Iran? I mean, obviously, we know why we're paying it, but how long do you think we're going to be willing to keep paying it?

You know, that's an interesting question. I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War II. Could you imagine, you know, trying to tell the president, look, you only got so many days to defeat Hitler or defeat Japan. We have to do it until we get the outcome that we want. I hope it's weeks and not months. But at the end of the day, Americans are going to be safe. There's a certain, and that's a senator, Republican senator, like, invoking Hitler and World War II, to like this is like borderline Holocaust denial. Like I mean, it really is just really shameless.

Not just Holocaust denial. I mean, it's a world war denial. It's denying every single dynamic that gave rise to Nazis and fascism in Europe and inverting it as if we're not the bad guys going to war on behalf of the state committing genocide, borrowing tactics from the Nazis proudly. we are Japan in this instance if you want to go and turn around like that. If Chuck Schumer was not in favor of the Iran war in some fashion or another, he would come out and say, we've just had a sitting Republican senator saying that this war, we're engaged in with Iran, is equivalent to a war where the world lost 80 million people. 80 million people.

Is that what we're going to do? We're going to wage this for, three and a half years until 80 million people are dead. We killed Hitler, according to Trump. How many Hitler's are in Iran? Like, we killed all of their leadership and nothing changed. Does that mean like there's a whole wave of Hitler's? Still more Hitler's there.

They're all Hitler, apparently. But he wants to liberate those Hitler from being Hitler by killing them, but some of them can be liberated through just seeing killing. and then they'll no longer be Hitler. Do you remember when Iran bombed the United States to start this conflict? Oh, yeah. Back in 1941, I think it was in December 7th of 1941. I mean, this is just like these are knocking, you could knock these things down like ducks if there was a leadership of the Democratic Party calling out like this is a senator.

This isn't some backbench, you know, congressman. This is a senator. Yeah. And saying that people have to bear economic pain, when Trump came into office saying he was going to fix the economy and no new wars. And now the message is like a year and a half later, the economy is going to have to suffer because of the war that I've started. Yeah, be patriotic like me. Really says a lot of what Trump thinks of his own voters. I mean, do you remember in the early day,

of World War II, when FDR went to a boxing match, went to like a prize fight and partied with his secretary of state during World War II. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. When does the rationing start? When are we going to start hoarding copper? And when are the pennies? I guess we're getting rid of the pennies so we can save there. But when do we start getting all of the copper out of all of our coins? I mean, that's what those true social screeds are. Instead of the fireside chats, we have toilet truths from the Mad King. Let's start with the draft.

Unbelievable, these lunatics. In a moment, we're going to be talking to Jason Stanley. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, author and publisher of the front left newsletter on substack, on the implications of what we can learn from. Orban's defeat in Hungary. And then we'll be talking to Muhammad al-Shabani, journalist and editor of Amwaj Media, a platform focusing on Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf countries. First word from our sponsor, delete me, makes it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online when a time when, obviously, surveillance, and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

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Take control of your data. Keep your private life private. By signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our audience, get 20% off your Delete Me plan. When you go to join DeleteMe.com slash majority, use the promo code majority at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to join delete me.com slash majority and enter the code majority at checkout. That's join delete me.com slash majority. Code is majority. I'm going to take a quick break in a moment. We'll be talking to Jason Stanley before we do.

I just want to send out my condolences. We have lost a member of our Majority Report community. who has been a member of this community for at least now 15 years, I think it's been, at least. Binder Dad, Matt Binder's dad, passed today. He was a frequent I-Mer, obviously a huge supporter of his son when he was on the show, and he chimed in with a lot of great comments and we would see him at every live show that we did in Brooklyn

and around here for years. He was a very fun guy and a nice guy. And so I just want to send condolences to Matt and his family. Absolutely. And may his memory be. a blessing and we're going to give him a show far. This is to

Binder's that. Thinking of you, Matt Binder and the whole family. We're so sorry. All right. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back in just a moment. We are back, Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland, on the Major Report. It's a pleasure to welcome back to the program, Professor of Philosophy

at the University of Toronto, author and publisher of the front left newsletter on Substack, Jason Stanley. And I guess we had on in 2019, but it seems like it was not that long ago. But, and you've written a piece and you've been like sort of involved in Hungary, sort of pre-Orban and watched the rise of his soft authoritarianism. And it's sort of like running out of gas, I guess, in some way.

But let's, I mean, talk about for us. your experience in Hungary prior to Orban? Yeah, so I first came to Hungary, went to Hungary in 2009, when Budapest was like the new Berlin. It was the cosmopolitan, cool, cheap capital that everybody kind of was looking to as the next place of cool after Berlin. Not everybody, but a good number of people. Central European University was flourishing. It was a new University in the downtown Budapest, beautiful new buildings, academics from all over the world were coming there. Central European University unusually for a European university was attracting faculty from all over the world. They recruited Tim Crane, a leading, a named chair and philosophy

at Cambridge University, which is very unusual for a continental university. So it's really they Dan Sperbert, a top cognitive scientist from a colonel au la Saperieer. They were recruiting leading academics and in this beautiful campus in downtown Budapest. And, you know, there were there were cool, cool bars with LGBTQ nights. And, you know, it was just like a cool place to be. And one felt like the future was hungry. And then 2010 came. I returned. I was running a summer school at Central European University. Kind of everybody wanted to be involved in Central European University. And then I came back in 2010

to run another summer school after Arbonne won. And the mood was like entirely different. It was like, somber. And he had just run this really anti-Semitic campaign against George Soros. We forget now, but the whole world was shocked and revolted by Orban's campaign against George Soros, which was nakedly anti-Semitic. This was back when people understood that when you railed against globalists, cosmopolitans, liberal humanitarian values, the LGBT community, this was mostly shorthand for anti-Semitism. This is when everyone did this.

What was it about, what was going to be? going on there or what was embedded in Hungarian society that things could turn that quickly? Well, Hungary is a very, there's a rural urban divide in all of our countries, you know, that rural urban divide, and we see it in the United States, you know, when people say about New York City, like the safest city in the United States, oh, it's dangerous and, you know, decadent. And so that was very real in Hungary, that rural urban divide, the decadent, you know, it was the, but what it was what Orban discovered was the formula of owning the lips. That's what he discovered. He discovered that you could get people to hand over their material future. You could

get them to hand over their children's future, their jobs, their security in order to make university professors sad. Like, you know, he discovered that cultural politics of, like, sacrificing the future of a country so that people could gain pleasure in watching, you know, quote unquote, liberal elites, that is, you know, college professors making $40,000 a year. Liberal elites feel bad. So that's really what he discovered is that, like, let's, let's, you know, Was there, I guess what I'm asking is, I mean, if someone was to ask me, like, how did we get Trump?

I would say it's a combination of anemic growth after the financial crisis and the sort of like maybe the sort of the offshoring of industry and the hauling out of cities. And then I would also say co-mingling with a lingoingling with a law. long history of racism in this country. And, um, and those two things sort of like came together and it ignited, uh, on some loving that got us Trump. I mean, you know, he didn't win with all the votes, but, but, you know, he had enough at that point. Was there other factors, uh, in, in Hungary? Yeah. No, I don't think there's, I don't think that those worldwide, I don't think there's one single explanation for the rise of global fascism. I think, you know, to tell that story of economic decline and failure of institutions globally, you have to explain the Sweden Democrats rise,

the rise of the Swedish fascist party, one of the first or second most popular party in Sweden, by saying Sweden's economy failed or nothing like that happened in Sweden. So it's not the global, there isn't one single global explanation. Hungary was, you know, was a struggling Eastern European country that was in the EU and was rising slowly. So it wasn't like there was, yes, the financial crisis hit. But I don't think that was that was a significant. Just general frustrations that Orban figured out, here's how we exploit.

And what cultural, it was cultural politics and scapegoating. It was the attack on de, well, the attack on woke. It was, it was latent anti-Semitism. It was, it was telling people, it was treat, when I got there in 2019, 2010, it was all about like the loss of greater Hungary. You know, so we talk about the Nazis rising with the Great Depression, but you got to remember that it was also the Treaty of Versailles. And the Treaty of Versailles in the 2010 election was front and center. It was Treonon. It was it was it was the it was the loss of greater Hungary.

That was right. It was those very classic fascist themes. It was George, it was anti-Semitism and trianon and the and the and the loss of greater Hungary. Those were the themes. And so it was we're going to make Hungary great again. That's literally what he ran on. So it was it was literally the mythic past of fascism that we were once great. And then immigration, then he vilified, this was well before the Syrian war. It was, you know, but he vilified immigrants. He talked about white Christians being the most persecuted group on earth. He pioneered the cultural politics that. That is Trumpism. But isn't it also true that these ideas only have a salience with a certain population

if there is a failure economically, and that's what history tells us. I would posit that, you know, well, we could go back and forth on that. But just where those issues become more politically powerful, it seems to me like in, you know, 2010 and after the Great Recession, there was a failure to adequately address class politics in general. So then you have a more simulated politics of keeping immigrants out, even though Hungary never really had an immigration issue prior to this. You get a convenient scapegoat. And Orban can go in there and rail against globalists, of course, with the anti-Semitic undertones, but blame a

economics, a gesture towards an economic system of kind of global cooperation or cooperation with other European countries as the failure as opposed to, you know, say, broader capitalist forces being the failure. Yeah, I mean, I am, Emma, I'm very sympathetic to that explanation in the United States. I would say it's some, I do think the financial

crisis played a role in Hungary, without a doubt. But the EU was helping Hungary. So, you know, the globalist structures were, Hungary relies on EU money. And this isn't just 2010. This is four straight elections that Orban won with this politics, all the while, while other European countries were economically rising and leaving Hungary way behind. And generally, I think Sweden is a good example to look at. I think, you know, Swedish fascism rises because of sort of purely cultural vilification and racism. So Hungary, I think one can't, you know, I don't think one can turn away from the fact that Hungary has a deeply, socially conservative Christian base that's rooted. in the old right and Horty. Remember, Orban is bringing back Hungarian sort of the structures of

Hungarian far right nationalism very explicitly. So I don't think, you know, I'm not sure how much, you know, Hungary had a rich base for anti-Semitism. Hungary had a rich base for this cultural politics. And remember, Peter Maigar is right way and conservative. Right. He's a, he's a He's not, he's not like some type of progressive. I was just about to say, like he, we replaced a sort of a fascist with like a just less fascist guy on some level. He's a social conservative. Yeah.

And so, so you have to, you know, you have to, and he ran completely on corruption on saying, I'm dropping all the anti-LGBQ stuff, dropping all the Islamophobia, and just saying, And look at what that was covering up for. And so, you know, I think that we have to accept that on some level, there is a percentage of the population, at least in the West, I mean, probably everywhere that is like just really open to scapegoating segments of the population. Okay. when did banon so banon sees this and this is also the era in the years that follow before trump runs is the era that bright part which banon um was a partner of with bright part goes international and uh they start like trying to like they're adopting in many respects there's sort of like a symbiotic

relationship going about both ways with, I think Breitbart opened up in Europe and then, you know, all around the world in those like five years after, you know, from like 2010, maybe to 15 or something like that. And Bannon brings back these ideas. Is that right? Well, I think that Orban, Orban ran, if you look back at the 2010 campaign and you look at the world's reaction, which was horror, people were like, wow, this is like really explicitly fascist and anti-Semitic. And now you look back at that campaign and you're like, wow, that's just Trumpism. So, you know, attacking Soros going after private businesses for essentially DEI, you know, pro-LGBQ policies like DeSantis did with Disney. But Hungary became hungry, this inconsequential small, poor European country becomes the country.

becomes the kind of global center for the banon for the global fascist project. They use taxpayer money at the Danube Institute to, and government-funded think tanks to bring in conservatives, Rod Dreher, journalists, right-wing, far-right intellectual. He was the crunchy, what was the, the crunchy conservative at one point, that guy, Rod Dreher? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he moved to Budapest and, you know, as a fellow. So they, so they were like, you know, Tucker Carlson, everyone's visiting and they're using government money to support, to support this global network and they're exporting Bannon's, they're exporting Orban's techniques. So what we're living through in the United States and it's national humiliation for us because Hungary, is not a country you want to emulate. Destroying the country using scapegoating and, you know, and targeting, destroying universities,

destroying all the great institutions, using, you know, anti-wokism as an excuse, and then pocketing profits while everyone is chortling over the suffering of the scapegoats and the cultural elites. So this was the buying of the media. So, or 80% of the Hungarian media is owned by Orban's allies. The government sort of forced that.

This government pressure campaign on the media that we're seeing in the United States, Larry Allison buying the media, that's all the attack Orban's tactics and obviously the attack on universities. Can you make a... explicit this concept of soft authoritarianism and what why is some error why not why the soft authoritarianism always turn into hard authoritarianism uh and why did some start at soft and then go to hard as opposed to hard and hard great um i think the concept we that is super useful here is my colleague, Lucan Way's concept of competitive authoritarian, competitive authoritarianism. Steve, Steve Levitsky and Lukon's Way concept of competitive authoritarianism.

So they look at a country like Russia is just an authoritarian, hard authoritarian country in your terminology. So competitive authoritarianism is when you've got gerrymandered seats, control of the media. Control of the media is so powerful in Hungary because Hungary is a much less educated country, and most people just speak Hungarian. So if all the Hungarian media is owned by the Hungarian, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, orban's allies, then most of the population who only reads Hungarian can only read that. So it becomes really important to have presses outside the country who publish in Hungarian. For instance, my book, how fascism works, that's sold very well in Hungary, published in 2018, was transgender. It was

translated into Hungarian and sold in Hungary was published by a French press that translates Hungarian stuff, stuff in Hungarian, and sells it in Hungary because it's harder for a Hungarian press to do that. So competitive authoritarianism do things like that. You buy up the media, you put pressure campaigns on presses. So the elections are not free and fair. Democracy isn't just majority vote. You know, the people of North Korea are going to vote. You know, the people of North Korea are going to for their leader every time because the press is not free. You need a free press to have a democracy. Competitive authoritarian system is when you don't have a free press,

you have pressure on the election systems, the ruling party controls the election apparatus, but you still have elections. And so you can beat an autocrat in competitive authoritarianism, but you have to have an overwhelming win like we saw just now in Hungary. You can't beat an autocrat. and competitive authoritarianism with a 2% or a 3% win. You need a 10% a 15% win.

And that's what we saw in Hungary. A win so overwhelming that, you know, Hungary would be ejected from the European Union if they tried to do anything about it. So that's what we need here. I want to ask as to why that happened in a moment. But yesterday, I think it was yesterday. It was revealed by Peter Magyar, I guess the prime minister elect, that Hungary has been bankrolling CPAC. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. That's what I said. Hungary has been bank. That's what I referred to earlier, that Hungary has been the bank account for the global fascist right. That's why these far right journalists and intellectuals can go to Hungary and get. get paid, that they've been using Hungarian taxpayer money. And remember, Orban is in Putin's pocket. So, you know, he explicitly is in Putin's pocket. So CPAC has been bankrolled by Putin's lackey.

What's just stunning is, like, you know, we've spent the past couple of weeks mocking Dave Rubin. I don't know if you're familiar with these names. I hope you're not, you're not, just for your own sake. But Dave Rubin and Rob Schneider, maybe you know him as the copy guy from Saturday Night Live, all of whom would just return from Hungary, you know,

also J.D. Vance, you've heard of him. I mean, all of them going to Hungary ostensibly to sort of, I guess, help or Bon, or just to visit or to, you know, I think it, I can't help but think, like, it also sort of like, when

Tucker Carlson went through that period of time, where you sun your anus, red light under your testicles or something to that effect, all sort of like. Hardcore fascist politics, right. Hardcore fascist politics. So what? So, and I get the idea of like you need to have a 10% or 12% win here. We have that same dynamic, you know, in various gerrymandered states across the

country. And there's going to be, you know, Trump is going to deploy more and more things that are going to make it, make the actual will of the people, muted in some fashion in the way it shows up in the votes. We don't know exactly how, but it might make it harder to vote in some places, might shut down certain pulling places. I don't think they know exactly how yet. I think they're in the planning stage now. They're trying. They move so fast. I think they think we're going to shut this midterms down in some way, but I don't think they've totally figured out how yet. What was it that, what was it that that that got that 10, 12% to vote against Orban? Was it just that they got tired of it? Is there a natural sort of like, or was it that the nature of an Orban is so corrupt that their, that Orban's agenda doesn't.

doesn't really have time to placate the people because he's running out of time. He wants to live the good life, I guess, after office. I mean, is that what it is? Because I feel like that's what's happening with Trump on some level. I mean, no, I don't think, or I think Orban's going to continue because he has, he has stacked the courts. He has, you know, I think he might, he will try to come back. And I don't think he's going to walk off into the distance. I might be wrong about that, but that's just my prediction. I think that it was, I think it was a 14% win. I think it was that finally, and Magia was very effective here, people saw, like, like, Orban ran on, you know, it was all great replacement theory. We're going to build up the white race. Like white Christians are under threat. We're going to build up the Hungarian family. And Hungary collapsed. All these fascists, like Trump is destroying the United States. They destroy their own countries. And, you know, the Hungarian birth rate was at its lowest in ever last year. And, and, you know, and fewer live births than in modern history, I believe,

20,000 less than when he was elected. So people saw, I think, and this is what Magyar just relentlessly focused on, rather than his socially conservative beliefs, that all the scapegoating is just there to rob the nation, to build giant villas for Orban's family, to enrich himself, his family, and his friends. And it just became more and more obvious that the cultural politics was just utter rubbish, that the cultural politics just was a meaningless way to, it was meant to sort of,

people got sick of owning the lips. They finally saw through owning the lips. They're like, wait, maybe, maybe I actually want a country more than I want to see some, you know, lower middle class college professor squirm. You know, maybe I want a future for my children. It just became so obvious that Orban's kids and his son-in-law and family were packing their bank accounts with Hungarian taxpayer cash and state contracts that people finally saw through it. They finally saw through that the cultural politics is just the smokescreen.

It's really hard to imagine a, the leadership of their country, of a country's family profiting off of these things. I can't, I can't even imagine what that must be like to experience. Well, so there, I imagine, I mean, I hope, I know a few people, but I would imagine that there is lessons to be taken here because I think socially speaking, Hungary is far. more conservative than the United States. And so if Magyar was able to sort of like say that, we're going to focus on material, material issues and corruption issues, we don't need to get bogged down. I mean, he's been, you know, at least in terms of that speech anyways, fairly, you know, relatively speaking, like, you know, live and let live.

Absolutely. Absolutely. He put it aside, and that's what we're going to have to do. The fascists don't bicker among each other about, you know, I mean, they don't agree with each other. I mean, some of the support, some Trump supporters, you know, hate immigrants. Other hate Trump supporters hate trans women. You know, they don't bicker amongst each other. They know they have differences. We're going to, you know, to defeat this. billionaire, this movement that is meant that use the scapegoats to enrich the billionaires. I mean, that's the only minority I really don't like. We're going to have to have that kind of solidarity. We're going to have to say, okay, we disagree on some issues. And by solidarity, I don't mean kicking to the curb our trans fellow citizens or kicking to the curb our immigrant neighbors. No, Magyar didn't do that.

Magyar didn't do like, you know, join in on the scapegoating. No, we're just going to have to put that aside. Put our differences aside and focus on the real enemy, which is the billionaire class and the corrupt international cabal of tech fascists and the real international cabal that is using this scapegoat politics to destroy our countries and ruin our economic futures. And I don't think Magyar is out there saying he hasn't been out there saying, you know, socially convilifying, you know, acting on his beliefs that alienate Hungarians who don't agree with him. He's been focusing on saying, let's get the rule of law back. Let's, you know, we need social

conservatives to defeat the fascists. They have to recognize that they're being played. Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, author and publisher of the front-left newsletter on Substack. Thanks so much for your time. We've got to make it a shorter time until you're back because I have a feeling we're going to be revisiting this topic in a myriad of ways. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much, you guys. It was a great discussion. All right.

We're going to take quick break when we come back. Mohamed Ali Shabani, journalist and editor of Amwaj Media, a platform focusing on. on Iran, Iraq, and the GCC countries. We'll be talking about the blockade upon blockade that we have at the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks so much for your time. We are back, Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland, on The Majority Report. It's a pleasure to welcome to the program, Mohamed Ali Shabani, journalist editor and editor, I should say, of Amwaj Media platform focusing on Iran, Iraq, and the GCC. countries.

Muhammad, welcome to the program. Where to start? There is a blockade, and then there's a blockade ostensibly blockading the blockade. And the latest report is that China was able to run,

I don't know, both blockades or one blockade. Give us your sense of where we're at at this point. And then we'll talk about what supposed happened during the talks? Okay, so I think the number one thing to consider is what has Iran actually done in Hormuz? I think there's a lot of ambiguity about that, and we've seen this ambiguity also being expressed

by President Trump. For instance, he himself is saying he's not quite sure whether Iran has actually mined the two main kind of lanes that run through it. So the one thing to consider is that Iran hasn't actually deployed major surface vessels in this maritime choke point. So there's no major military being deployed telling ships don't move past it, right? So Iran is mainly acting through threats and also through public messaging. The number one inhibitor of kind of maritime transit right now are actually insurance companies.

Insurers are saying we're not going to insure ships passing through that under these conditions. No way. Trump administration tried to kind of preempt that by saying we're going to offer $20 billion worth of insurance cover, right? That's not even near enough. Some economists have put to figure at $300 billion that they're saying no ship is going to move past that straight under these conditions.

And who's going to think they're going to get paid by Trump? I mean, honestly. I mean, seriously. I mean, like anybody, I wouldn't bet a billion dollars that I'm going to get paid by Trump. And that was after he had offered for the Navy to escort these ships, which would have been a death sentence to a bunch of U.S. personnel.

So again, the number one thing to consider is what has Iran actually done to blockade this straight? And the realities that hasn't really done much, hasn't really deployed forces. There are no major surface vessels out there. It's just by saying basically insinuating that we have capabilities. And those capabilities are fast attack boats, marine drones, mines. But just the other day, again, Trump himself said that, you know, we have to kind of stop traffic through one of these lanes. Iran may or may not have minded straight. Iran doesn't know where it left the minds.

How much sense does that make? So, you know, there's a lot of ambiguity about what Iran has done. So that's number one. And we should say that ambiguity only helps from Iran's perspective because the insurance companies don't want ambiguity. Of course, I mean, uncertainty, I think, is the number one enemy of any business. And I think Iran has caught up on that. and not to go kind of segue away from this,

but essentially this is partly a consequence of the sanctions regime on Yvon, which has let many companies, insurers, bankers, et cetera, to over-compli with regulations or to be over-cautious, right? So insurers right now, they're saying there's no way in hell we're going to insure any major ship. What if there's a spill?

What if there's environmental degradation because of a ship being hit? And we have to pick up the tab. We're not going to do that. We're not going to do anything. And it's not just insurance companies He's kind of making that argument. We also see the same kind of line of reasoning from European governments.

The UK Prime Minister just yesterday said essentially, yeah, we're going to have this conversation later this week with France, with other European governments, going to be dozens of governments being represented, but none of them are going to do anything until the conflict is over. Right. So this is the kind of essence of it right now that Iran, we're not quite sure what Iran is actually doing.

What is the blockade? How does it look like? To me, it's mostly invisible. We have some military bases coordinating the passage of, some ships. We have reports about how some of them are paying tolls, right? But what Iran is doing, again, is very ambiguous. So mindful of all of that, what has the United States done? What is the U.S. military doing? So they're saying, AscentCom is coming out saying we have 10,000 forces, we have over a dozen surface vessels, we have all this aircraft that's going to patrol, make sure

that nothing goes in or out of Iranian ports. Here's a reality. Yuan's southern coastline is 1,800 kilometers long. Not how long that is, this is the size of Europe, the size of Western Europe. And about 20% of the trade that goes through that coastline is already smuggling. This outside state control,

half of it controlled by RGC, right? This huge amount of smuggling. A lot of these kind of ports which facilitate trade is, again, irregular. We don't really know what goes in in and half the time. What I mean by we is, us observers. Mindful of all of that,

We also have third-party actors like China, like India, like Russia, which have their own arrangements with Iran. And the Chinese have gone out and said, essentially, we have commitments to Iran. We're going to honor them. We don't care what others say. We're not going to allow anybody to interfere in our commitments or prevent us from carrying them out, right?

So this notion that 10,000 forces are going to police a coastline that's the size of Western Europe is just, to me, I think, practically, if you look at, it doesn't really make much. sense. It's going to, you know, logistically, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Just going to say logistically, technically, it's very difficult to enforce. That's all. No, I was going, I was interrupting you for a second. Because, you know, I've also been thinking a lot about the, the, how Russia is able to still trade weapons with the Iranians, via the Caspian Sea, outside of the, the auspices of the, of the, of the west or their kind of surveillance, or their

to understand what's going on. Iran also, one, if you could actually reflect on that dynamic and expand on it a little bit more because I'm so curious about it, but two, Iran still hasn't played the other card that they have here, which is the Houthis in Yemen. Talk about coastline that is controlled. The Houthis have the control of a large swath of Yemen's coastline, which means that if they want to, they can choke off another. trade route in the Red Sea. And Iran is still kind of sitting on that possibility as another leverage point against the United States. Absolutely. That's one of the things that I think many experts in Iran have highlighted that apart from this issue with doing an eye-to-eye strategy, that if

U.S. Navy is going to basically blockade Iranian ports that Iran will respond by attacking Gulf Air ports. That's number one. Number two is this essence of third-party actors like China coming in and putting pressure on the United States to basically back off when it comes to certain types of trade that they're not going to allow the Trump administration to impede their own commitments or the fulfillment of their own commitments.

The third part is what you're saying, which is about Yemen. And if we look at what happened last year, the Trump administration entered about two months of war with the Houthis, right? And that stretch of coastline is less than a tenth of Iwan's hope. coastline. Just for a perspective. It's tiny compared to you. And Trump administration gave up on that after two months. And basically said, we're going to sign a peace deal with the Houthis and get out. That's what happened last year. So again, this notion that they're going to police coastline as size of Western Europe with 10,000 soldiers, you know, I'm just saying, good luck.

Even before all of this, 20, 30% of the trade was irregular. It was smuggling. Only thing that's going to happen is basically legal trade is going to become illicit. That's number Number one. Number two, I think what's going to happen is that Iran, essentially, because of its geography, he has over a dozen neighbors, right? So Iran is not an island. It's surrounded by land, as he pointed out. Russia is through the north through the Caspian. They also have over the central Asia, through the caucuses. They don't have a shortage of neighbors, so to speak, and what is the United States going to do about that? I think not really much. They already have tried their best over the past decades through secondary sanctions, try to go after banking, logistics, insurance. That has a really work because clearly one still goes after it. So what, what do you think the Trump administration thinks it's doing? I mean, like, the, it is, it seems so obvious that the, that Iran has all the cards here. Like, they've lost already what there was for them to lose, it seems to me. Like, right? And, and so, and so, So now they have really nothing else left to lose per se.

And the United States is not, you know, 10,000 troops that we are blockading a blockade. And we're really unable to turn off the Iranian spigots, as it were, because they can go many other different directions. what is it that is your sense that the Trump administration thinks it's doing outside of like trying to bail water and keep the stock market from sinking too much? I mean, there are two different ways of looking at it. Number one is that they want to apply more pressure. And it's driven by the same kind of mindset that we see, not just since Trump took office a year ago, but also the same thing under his first time. He pulled out from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal when it took office in 2017 and 2018 he pulled out and he imposed what's called the maximum pressure campaign.

So there is this notion that we can, the United States can modify Iran's behavior by applying maximum economic pressure, right? So I think that's kind of the backdrop. And we're seeing a continuation of that. First, you had maximum economic sanctions that didn't really achieve the policy objectives they had. Then they went to war. they don't achieve the policy objectives either.

So now they're going to have maximum, maximum pressure economically to see if that works. Before that's even really been instituted, we're seeing some reports that Trump may resume bombings again. So it's kind of basically just trying out anything to try to achieve these political objectives, which haven't been reached so far. That's one way of looking at it,

which is just basically repetition of the same behavior. Because humans, I think, are creatures of habit. The second thing is, it could very well be that they're on their verge of science, a deal with you want. And by announcing this blockade, knowing that this is not going to last because, again, what I explained logistically, just so difficult. I didn't even bring up the transshipment part.

For instance, if a ship were to go to, I don't know, Iraq and then go back to Iran, then back to Iran, how are you going to try, how are you going to basically track all of that? It's impossible. You don't have enough resources to do that. But I think it could be that he wants to announce a major draconian kind of step, massive pressure tactic, and then knowing that it's not going to last. knowing that America's own Arab allies are opposed to it, because right now, nothing is going through hormones right now, right?

No oil, not Iranian oil, not Arab oil, nothing, right? That he may then turn around and say, you know what, we have a deal, and we have a deal because I pressured Iran, because I took this extreme step, and this is kind of his off-frame, his exit. We don't know. It could go that direction. What do you know about what? I mean, I suspect the option B makes the most sense, it seems to me. I mean, the one sort of like, I guess it was sort of more of a rumor, but the idea that, and supposedly what I'm reading now is that in the negotiations that failed over the 21-hour marathon run that J.D. Vance did.

one of the um one of the uh the u s demands was shared revenue from the toll that iran would now institute for the strait of hormus and to me the first thing i thought was like okay this is this is the ask and the fallback is going to be okay you keep all the money but um you have to have preference for trump bitcoin trump uh crypto it's accepting those. Like, I've seen that, that rumors that world financial crypto issues will be accepted by Iran as a toll. And at the end of the day, like, the only thing that I can understand, the only thing that makes sense to me about this is that somehow Trump is putting money in his pocket or Whitkoff's pocket or Kushner's pocket or their kid's pocket, I mean, or all of their pockets. What's your sense of that relative to what is being reported as some of the demands by the U.S. of Iran? So about the tolls in themselves, if we consider what's out there in the media, which is that Iran is looking at potentially instituting a toll of $1 a barrel. And $1 a barrel would be considering that usually prior to the war, it was about 20 million barrels a day passing through that straight.

So just basic math would indicate that the annual revenue would be about $7 billion, right? And this has to be shared with Oman because Oman is the others, what do you call it, the other country that has ownership of this state. So these waters are not international borders. They're shared by Oman and anyone. And Oman has made clear he doesn't want to charge any tolls. So just the toll in itself, it's a massive legal political headache for everybody involved, right? I'm not quite sure whether it's going to hold, but Iran is, I think, is pitching it as a means to extract reparations because it knows there is no other way for Iran to receive operations.

There's very few ways. Already, the Iranian government estimated losses from this war at $270 billion. There are other estimates out there that put it way higher than that. So this has been very costly for Iran. This hasn't been a cheap war at all. But what you bring up about this notion that Trump administration may want to cut in any kind of toll system that may be set up. Interestingly, I've heard some claims that supposedly one of the crypto company linked to Whitkoff's son, somehow that he was involved in the payment of one toll, but then I actually checked with one usually very well-informed regional security source.

And he said that's bogus. Alex Whitkoff is not involved. his company is not involved in the kind of collection of a toll. For obvious reasons, there are so many legal political risks. And also keep in mind, sanctions are still in place. You don't want to run a file of sanctions, right? So, again, I think just looking at this toll system, I think even if it is instituted,

against the objections of Europe, against the objections of the Gulf War Up States, the actual revenue that will come from it is about $7 billion annually. And if you look at the scope, of Iranian oil exports, right, if sanctions were to be lifted. It's 10, 20 times that. Iran's foreign exchange reserves around the world over $100 billion.

So it's a kind of drop in the water. But the main value of those tolls, I would think, is political. It's just a means for Iran to say that we managed to extract reparations. And why do I bring up reparations? It's just to argue for its public that we stood against the United States. We were not defeated. We also managed to get compensation. And apart from all of this, there was a bigger conflict in the Gulf

about 30 years ago, is Iran-Iraq war. It went on for eight years. Iraq was backed by the GCC countries. United States was back in Saddam in some ways, at certain points during the conflict. It caused up to $1 trillion in losses for Iran. Iran didn't manage to get a single centiparations,

not from Iraq, not from the GCC. And to add insult to injury, Iraq, a few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, in 1991 invaded Kuwait, right? So Iraq has actually paid all of its reparations to Kuwait, over $50 billion. And he finalized the final payment for those reparations last year. So Kuwait got paid. Iran never got paid.

He's been attacked now not just by the Iraqis, but also by the Israel, by the U.S. He wants to have something to show for, right, to kind of say that we were attacked, we were the aggrieved party here, we were not the aggressor. We need to have some kind of compensation. This is, I think, mainly a domestic function. Do you have another follow-off? want to fall up on the on the other demands of the u.s around uh both the existing enriched uranium and the it seems to be an argument about a timeline for how long Iran will not enrich uranium i've seen

like five and 20 years what what's your understanding of that uh aspect of it so much of what of what happened in Pakistan was a repetition of the negotiations in Geneva, which were held on the eve of the Israeli U.S. attack. That was back in February. And during those negotiations, based on the reporting we did,

Iran was willing to forego enrichment for a period of about five years. And the Trump administration, apparently with Koff, he kind of went back and forth, according to Iranian sources. He first came up with seven years, and then Iran

kind of showed a bit of flexibility on that. And then in the final session, after a phone call with Trump, again, this is based on what Iranian sources are saying, Woodcock suddenly turned around and said 10 years. And at that point, there was an explosion in the room. They didn't come to a deal. And Iran, apart from this argument

about the extent of this enrichment freeze, also said essentially that they offered no stockpiling. What's meant by no stockpiling is that it doesn't matter how much you enrich for what period of time. If there's no accumulating, right of nuclear material there's nothing for you to make a bomb right that's what the oman uh foreign minister had had said the day a couple of days after the start of the war that that that that iran had put that on the table yeah you can't make a bomb if you don't stockpile you only are using it

in perhaps a nuclear reactor i mean a nuclear power plant uh because it gets diminished as uh as you go for yeah so that that was the kind of iranian line and the u. us didn't think it was good enough and they attacked. So now here we are a month and a half later and the conversation that had in Islam about the sticking points, the way I've understood it from the sources I've spoken to is essentially, they are essentially the same. Number one is the timeline for this enrichment freeze. And keep in mind that Iran has not offered to freeze uranium enrichment for over two decades. The last time Iran agreed to something like that was in 2004 for a period of couple of months. So if Trump even gets five years of enrichment freeze, that's a massive

upgrade compared to Obama's 2015 deal, right? You just keep this in mind. But apparently there's pressure, I think, from Israel that even the 20-year timeline that they put forward in Islam is not good enough for Washington. It's really kind of pressure, saying that, no, we just want zero enrichment, period, and that's it. And the second sticking point is the fate of Iran stockpiles of 60% enriched uranium and it also has stockpals of 20% in rich uranium. And this is quite technical. The 20% enriched uranium basically can be used for what's called the Tehran Research Reactor. Ironically, it's a U.S. supply facility that was provided by Washington under the time of the

Shah. So it's a very old facility, about 67 years old. And the 20% enriched uranium would be used to fuel that facility for the coming kind of seven, eight years. And then there's a question that's 60%. Yvonne is saying, essentially, we can address your grievances or you're concerned by down blending it, right? Far lower than 60% purity. So 90% is what you need for a weapon.

And they're saying, we can take it down. We can take it down to, I don't know, three and a half. And the Trump administration is saying, no, you've got to hand it all. And then in the middle of all of this, we have the Russians also coming now and repeating their offer, which is that we can hold on to it as a third party. Problem with the Russians is that nobody trusts it, not Iran, not the U.S. So here we are kind of repeating Geneva. And the question arises, what was the purpose of this war?

What was the purpose of this $270 billion worth of damage? Thousands of people killed. All this disruption, inflation, gas price. What was the purpose of it? Right? I don't know. I think that's one of the questions that are kind of arising. Many experts are having difficulty answering.

Well, you mentioned Israel. I mean, like we have to kind of talk about the colonial elephant in the room, I guess. Like the Israeli lobby and their push for this war across presidencies, finally getting what they wanted. There was a poll I saw from Hebrew University of Jerusalem that showed that two-thirds of Israelis currently opposed the Iran ceasefire, which is almost the same when you look at American public opinion in who opposes the war. But who's calling the shots here? It's in many ways the Israeli government at least sold Trump on this war. And the reporting indicates that he was high on his own supply after Venezuela. And so Netanyahu comes in, tells him it's going to be easy.

And there you go. But what you're seeing here, like this kind of moves into a question I have about Europe and what this could mean about Europe's relationship, both with the United States and Israel, because they're being impacted. disproportionately because the United States has its own kind of domestic capacity with oil and gas. Europe has been in dire straits in many ways because of this. And you see figures like Maloney criticizing Trump over the Pope thing and his criticisms of the war. And you also see different European leaders saying, we're not going to support this. NATO is not supporting the blockade.

though Trump is trying to bully them in public, does this accelerate potentially a break from a European military, both deference to the U.S. and Israel and also dependence on it, because they may look for more multilateral relationships that are a bit more stable? That's a good question. I think Europe, as you say, rightly, has been one of the biggest losers in all of this. its interests are not being considered, I think, by anybody. They don't have a seat at the table. In Islamabad, we had a number of countries there,

which were not announced in the press. There were a number of countries from the region, Arab states, which were in Pakistan. And this was not publicized. Europeans were not there, to the best of my knowledge. Do you know which ones? I know, but I can't go into that. But the Europeans, to the best of my knowledge, were not there.

They were not represented. One of the first things that happened because of this war, was that Russian oil was unsanctioned, right? So you have this situation, bizarre situation where the Trump administration is bullying India for well over a year to get them to stop buying Russian oil, right? And finally managed to do it. Modi finally signs off on it and says,

okay, fine, I'll do what you want. Get rid of these tariffs, these kind of penalty tariffs imposed on me because of this Russian oil. And then the Iran war begins. And I think it was about a week or two into it. And suddenly they said, you know what? No, no, no, please.

please we would like you to buy Russian oil because if you don't buy Russian oil we're going to have a huge problem in the market we're going to have shortages because we have this shortage because it's Iran war that we expected to take three days and now we have a problem and that was the number one thing

I'm not even going to go into the fact that they also waived sanctions on Iranian oil so Iran in effect has achieved more sanctions relief from this war than any negotiation in the past 10 years that in itself is remarkable but apart from yeah It is what it is.

Do you have a sense of where the GCC or any of the individual GCC countries or any of the countries in that region, maybe the ones who were in Islamabad, where they have been through the timeline of this war? Because I mean, I think like it's quite clear that Netanyahu's like long term desire to, to attack Iran played a part in this. But I don't know what made the Monday different from the Friday. It seems to me, I mean, I just have to believe that Trump is making money on this in some way or somebody who has influence with him in terms of his wallet said, now we're going to do this because it doesn't make any sense in any other way. I mean, he could be, Vince, this is easy, but like all of these 180s don't make any sense other than like somebody said, like,

oh, there's a billion dollars for you in this. And then all of a sudden he's like, I don't care what up. We've been doing it. Let's do it. But where I'm just curious to the extent that there's any sort of like potential financial payoff for Trump, my best guess would be that it would come from one of those other states in the region. But what's your sense of where they have been on this attack through prior to the attack to now? So I think first and foremost, GCC is not a monolith. It's six different members.

And I think prior to the war, you had countries like Oman, countries like Qatar, who were very much opposed to any kind of military confrontation. And we saw this in the fact that they try to mediate and try to come up with a deal, right? the interlocutor, even in Geneva, was in fact, Oman. Because Iran and the U.S. were at least officially not speaking directly. I think the Saudis at that point had tried to have it both ways.

They, I think, wanted Iran to not get away with not being hit. At the same time, they didn't want all out war. And then you have February 28th, that Israel killed Iran's supreme leader, massive air strikes, and the U.S. also joined. joined in. And I think Iran then had a choice. Either they're going to show rationality, pragmatism. And what do I mean by rationality and pragmatism? So the U.S. military budget

last year was $997 billion. The Israeli budget is $46 billion. So combine it's over $1 trillion of military spending annually in part of these two countries. Iran's annual military spending is $8 billion. So you're outfunded or outspent by a factor of 130. The rational thing to do is don't poke the bear, take the hit, cut a deal, cut your losses whenever you can and walk away. That's what usual, I think, rationality would dictate. But I think Iran's rationality or giving away its rationality in recent years only invited more attack. I think that's the conclusions that the military leadership kind of came to. The more we give away our rationality, the more we have to concede.

So the most rational thing for us to do is to appear irrational. Now, what is irrational? It's to attack six countries at the same time, knowing that your annual military spending is $8 billion. I'm going to attack them anyway. I don't care. So when this began, it wasn't just that Saudi Arabia was attacked. You also had attacks on Qatar.

Because why? Qatar is home to the forward headquarters of SENTCOM, U.S. Central Command. It's the main military headquarters in the region. Even Oman, a mediator, has come under limited attack. Of course, then you have Kuwait, U.A.E, etc. So after these attacks, and I should add a caveat, which is that reporting indicates that there is a strong likelihood

that U.S. military used the territory of some of these states to attack you on. So it's not just that they were completely innocent bystanders. This is not verified 100%, but there are reports out there. The New York Times has written about this. They pointed to, for instance, Kuwait or Bahrain as potential sites for where the United States carried out as initial strikes using land-based ballistic missiles.

But that's beside the point what I'm trying to make essentially now, which is that in the aftermath of this war, even if you look at countries which were inclined to be less hawkish on Iran, if you talk to officials from those countries, countries like Oman, countries like Qatar, they're saying that relationship is not going to be the same

after this war. And there are a number of reasons for that. You know, one of which is, obviously, they tried to mediate and they got hit. Right. That's the obvious one. Another thing is, I think the intra-era kind of dynamic where they just look bad. Imagine if you're Qatar now, and basically all these years, you try to say to Saudi Arabia to the UAE, your rivals, that your approach towards Iran is wrong. We should be talking to Iran.

We should be mediating. And then we got hit anyway. And it's not the first time they've been hit. They were also hit last June, right? Iran attacked Qatar last June as well. And there's another country that attacked Qatar last year, which is Israel. So Israel bombed Qatar in September, ostensibly targeting Hamas negotiator in Doha. And that was a huge shock to the Gulf countries because it was the first time that they were bombed by Israel, right?

All this time, Netanyahu was telling these Gulf Arab leaderships that, no, no, I'm your friend. I can defend you against Iran. We should ally together. But no, no, I'm going to bomb you now anyway. So that's caused a huge problem for them. That's why you saw steps like the sudden move towards finalizing this Saudi-Pakistani bilateral defense pact. And then you also saw now, again, just to kind of conclude the kind of dynamic I've had right now in the aftermath of this war, I think that there's still going to be divisions within the GCC because they're inherent. They have huge differences over a number of issues, Saudi UAE, Qatar UAE, etc.

But I think when it comes to relations with Iran, it's not like they're going to go back to what they were. Out of these six countries, I think Oman is the most likely to try to resume a normalized relationship. But I think the others will find it difficult. And I think Iran knows this. It's going to cause damage to Iran. Under these sanctions, for instance, one of Iran's windows to the world economy has been the UAE. It's going to be very difficult for Iran to replace the UAE as a conduit, for the conduct of trade, for instance. So I think now the focus will be on the lifting of U.S. sanctions, and for that, you do need a deal.

You may not strike the deal this week or next week, but at some point this war has to end. And the ideal condition for Iran is to have a negotiated end to this deal, right? It results in a deal, ideally on better terms than what the United States offered in Geneva. Because, again, what is the purpose of this war? if you end up back to where you were in February, right? You need to have something to show for. Iran's got to play the long game, right? So if perhaps this UAE relationship is not going to resume in the same way that it did before,

but look at these other options that are opening up. I mean, with the United States looking like this belligerent party and with Iran exercising its leverage and finally kind of just being forced to be in a position where they can use their geography as leverage, I would imagine that they're thinking about long-term trade relationships that they didn't think were possible before. Of course, I think in the longer term, it's not just about using geography, it's also about using technology.

For instance, crypto. These are medium-term, long-term kind of shifts that we may be seeing down the line. But I think in the immediate term, given Iran's massive economic challenges, Even prior to this war, huge chronic inflation about 40%, high percentage of unemployment, sanctions were punishing the economy, and add $300 billion worth of damage to that.

We already seen reports about millions of job losses because of this war, because it's not just that factories have been bombed, et cetera. The internet's been shut down mostly for about five weeks now. And there are many online entrepreneurs in Iran. You'd be shocked, astounded by the number of people who make a living out of Instagram anymore. So just the fact that they've been offline for five weeks, that's disrupted a lot of things in the economy. And to be able to plug all of these gaps, they would need sanctions relief. The most immediate remedy, I think, would be the unfreezing of Iran's own assets abroad. As I mentioned, there's over $100 billion of Iran in foreign exchange reserves outside Iran. If Iran can leverage access to these reserves, it can be a short-term kind of assistance to the economy. But I think in the longer term, they do need to normalized banking relationships. And for that, you do need a deal at some point. Well, let's hope that the scenario in which you expressed that Trump was

blockading the blockade, as it were, as a way of providing him an exit ramp is, is correct. Muhammad Ali Shabani, the editor of Amwaj Media, we will link to that platform. much. This has been incredibly enlightening and educational. I really appreciate it. And look forward to talking to you again soon, but hopefully, perhaps with this in the rearview mirror. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right, folks. We're going to take quick break. Head into the fun half of the program, wherein we will have fun. I have to skedaddle for an appointment. But Emma will be non-skidaddled.

I will be seated. Yes. And there's a lot of stuff on that. The DoorDash Grandma had been rolling last night. It's also kind of depressing, but, you know, hits on all of these different points about American society. It's like a kaleidoscope of all of our societal ills in this country. Some folks have asked how they can. can send messages of condolences of support to Matt Binder, whose father, Alan, or Binder's dad,

as you may know him as, passed away today. You can head over to Matt's Patreon and support his work or, you know, send a note there. And we'll put a link to that in the, YouTube and podcast descriptions. And it's patreon.com backslash Matt Bender. That makes it easy. Also, don't forget justcoffee.coop. Fair trade coffee, hot chocolate, use the

coupon code majority, get 10% off. Matt. Yeah, left reckoning. Clayton Tucker running for Egg Commissioner in Texas, a very interesting conversation, not just about farmers, but also about how he can stand up to the rollout

of data centers with that elected position in Texas. So with the recent news of, it was in Missouri, right? The folks threw out a bunch of data center supporters. You can do that in Texas. So check out this interview. And yeah, this is coming up right after the show today. So in just about an hour. Okay, folks.

See you in the front half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking in the majority report. Wait. Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday.

Yeah, I think you need to take over for Sam. That's police, sir. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause you right there. Wait, what? You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a twerk, sushi, and poker with the boys. That's what we call bids.

Dwar sushi. I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean. Free speech. That's not what. we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it because I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Tu-twerp? Oh, sushi. I'm sorry, I'm losing my fucking mind. So what's offered with twerk? Yeah. Sushi and poker with the boys. Logic. Twerp. Susie and poker with the voice. Boy, boy,

I think I'm like a little kid. I think I'm like a little kid, kid, I think I'm like, a little kid, I think I'm like, people just don't understand. So I'm not trying to be a dick right now, but like, I absolutely The U.S. should be providing me with a wife and kids. That's not what we're talking about here. It's not a fun job. Twirp. That's a real thing. That's a real thing.

Willie Walker. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real fit. It has like the weight of the world on the shoulders.

It was so much easier. When the majority report was just you, you were happy. Let's change this up. Now, shut up. You don't want people saying reckless things on your program. That's one of the most difficult parts about this show. This is a pro-killing podcast. I'm thinking maybe it's kind of we bury the hatchet.

Left is best. Trump. Violet twer. Don't be fooled. Incredible theme song. Eye bumbler. Emma Viglin. Absolutely one of my favorite people.

Actually, not just in the game. Like, period.