What A Day - Baghdadi and Blackouts

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died in a raid by U.S. special forces in Syria. President Trump announced the success his favorite way: a press conference that will haunt our dreams. California wildfires are causing massive evacuations and blackouts. We tell you why it’s happening and why it matters, super quick, before we lose power. And in headlines: Rep. Katie Hill resigns, Chance the Rapper’s good sweatshirt, and a will-they won’t-they super PAC flirtation.

It's Monday, October 28th. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What A Day, the Carter III-era Lil Wayne of news podcasts. Let's hope for a milli downloads, folks. This is the first episode of What A Day, so we want to introduce ourselves a little bit. I go by Akilah, obviously, online. I'm a comedian and writer, and I've worked for Fusion, rest in peace, MTV News, and more. Interests include culture, systemic issues, and the internet. And I'm Gideon Resnick. I go by Gideon Resnick online.

I'm a political reporter who has been covering this craziness for almost half a decade now. Most recently, I was writing about Democrats, the left, and the 2020 presidential election. Each day, we'll be sifting through the flood of news to help you understand what stories matter and why. Hopefully, this show makes keeping up with all the chaos and crimes and cool stuff people are doing a little bit easier. All right, so enough about us. Let's kick it all off. We've got some big stories to cover today. The leader of ISIS has been killed by U.S. special forces in Syria. Wildfires are raging in California, and so are power outages. And then we'll bring you some headlines. President Trump announced on Sunday morning that a raid in Syria this weekend has resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,

the leader of the Islamic State, marking a major foreign policy achievement for his administration. According to the president, al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest alongside three of his children after being chased down a tunnel by military dogs. And this is an operation that has been months in the making. The New York Times reported on Sunday that details about the ISIS leader's whereabouts came from the interrogation of one of al-Baghdadi's wives and a courier over the summer. Gideon, the United States has been trying to track down al-Baghdadi since he came to prominence in 2014 when ISIS started taking over regions of Syria

and Iraq. Al-Baghdadi notably used the internet as a means of spreading terrorist ideology and unprecedented ways to radicalize people online. A lot of the conversation has centered around how the president rolled out this announcement. What did he say about the raid exactly? Yeah, the first thing that we learned was from a tweet like most things with the Trump administration. On Saturday night, the president said something very big just happened on Twitter. We had to wait a number of hours until Sunday morning when he had a press conference that sort of went through the details of this raid in sort of graphic and specific detail. The president, borrowing a turn of phrase that he has used for dozens of people in all kinds of situations, said that al-Baghdadi, quote, died like a dog.

Not sure still what the like a dog phrase means at all. And didn't a dog actually die? It seems insensitive. A dog got injured, I believe. So, yeah, but still an odd turn of phrase that he likes to use all the time. Here's a clip from that press conference. This is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was very big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country, a caliphate. Yeah. So this is a part of the press conference where the president is comparing what happened in this raid to previous raids, namely the one

that killed Osama bin Laden during Obama's administration. The president also went on to call bin Laden tall, handsome, and charismatic. Wild. Unnecessary. Yeah, part of this sort of mangled explanation of why he thought what he had done was incredibly important, which it was. Trump handled the moment by making it largely about himself. And like we're saying here, also kind of comparing it to other previous administrations. But drawing that line of saying this was a bigger deal than bin Laden was one of the sort of noteworthy and stranger moments from it. Aside from the spectacle of Trump's announcement and the press conference, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle generally took it as good news. But there are some concerns from Democratic leadership. So what's that about? Yeah, mostly the Democratic leadership has been

raising concerns that Trump did not inform many congressional leaders that this raid was going to take place. He said during his Sunday press conference that he withheld the information because he was concerned about potential leaks, that if he had told all the leaders on Saturday night, perhaps it would have gotten out. Inevitably, the story actually did get out from various sources before Trump had the press conference on Sunday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday that the death of al-Baghdadi was, quote, significant, but the death of this ISIS leader does not mean the death of ISIS. Now, she and the other Democrats were the ones who were sort of expressing the dismay that they were not briefed about how this was actually happening.

The Gang of Eight, the group of congressional leaders from both parties who are normally informed of intelligence activities from the president, were not in this case. Trump did tell two Republicans, one of whom chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. Historically, though, this is done for oversight purposes. Now, these are not exactly equivalent situations, the raid that killed al-Baghdadi and the one in 2011 for Osama bin Laden. But when Obama ordered the strike to capture and kill Osama bin Laden in May of 2011, the House Intelligence Committee chairman at the time, Republican Mike Rogers, told reporters that the administration had, in fact, been keeping them updated. All right. So this is an important moment.

But what does al-Baghdadi's death mean for the future of ISIS? Trump made destroying ISIS a huge focus of his administration, but do we have a sense of what impact this is actually going to have? Yeah, it say that threats of these terrorist groups are not necessarily completely eliminated when the leader of the terrorist outfits are killed. That was the case with bin Laden as well. Though the important context to here is that part of the broader Trump, you know, foreign policy mission has included earlier this year, U.S. backed forces declaring victory over the caliphate after ISIS had controlled a landmass that was once the size of Great Britain, once, you know, obviously huge in the region of Iraq and Syria. Also, as Spencer Ackerman, national security reporter for the Daily Beast and others

have pointed out, al-Baghdadi would not have even risen without the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and destabilization of the region. So Democrats and Republicans both have trumpeted these kinds of successes with language suggesting that they are turning points before. Right. But meanwhile, it's, you know, it usually ends in or doesn't end. It's like a forever war that wages on and on and on and keeps producing these kinds of extremists. Right. And critics of the president's recent decision to withdraw American forces from Syria are also saying now that an operation like the one that killed al-Baghdadi lends credence to the idea of even having those troops there in the

first place. And a Sunday New York Times report suggested that the removal of those troops led the Pentagon to actually speed up their plan for what was described as this kind of risky night operation. So it kind of seems like given the early responses now, Republicans are more likely to give Trump some cover on foreign policy where they were fairly angry in the weeks before this. But we're going to continue to track this as we learn a bit more about the raid and what happens in the next coming days and weeks. Today's sponsor is Babbel, the language learning app that will get you speaking a new language with confidence. I've always wanted to learn, like, literally any language.

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All right, so I'm going to give you some bad news and some good news. Uh-oh. The average down comforter is filled with the feathers of 12 live plucked geese. Yes, innocent geese are harmed to make the filling of your comforters and pillows. In fact, the traditional bedding industry has harmed animals, consumed excessive amounts of water, and polluted our oceans and air for decades. Yikes. Thankfully, though, this is the good news. Buffy is here with earth-friendly, animal-free bedding that helps you rest easier. Instead of herding geese for feathers, they make their comforter and pillow

fill out of recycled bottles instead. They also use super soft eucalyptus fiber, which not only takes 10 times less water to produce than cotton, but is more breathable and cool to the touch. So you can sleep at the perfect temperature all night long. Now you can feel smug about making good choices while you get snug. Take $20 off your Buffy order with code WADPOD. That's W-A-D-P-O-D at Buffy.co. More than a dozen wildfires are burning up and down the state of California, causing 180,000 people to evacuate their homes. Over the weekend, Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E, announced that it would cut off power to nearly 3 million of its customers in California to prevent the spread of more fires. The power shutdown is the largest planned blackout in California history and not the first time PG&E has cut power this season in spectacular fashion. This is a situation that spans many different issues, from climate change to housing policy to bad infrastructure.

Akilah, why is this problem so bad right now? Yeah, so part of it is climate and the other part is humans. A little bit of context. Around October of every year, California's dry climate is met with intense winds. They're called the Diablo winds in the northern part of the state, the Santa Ana winds in the southern region. And that is the math equation for wildfires. Dry heat plus wind equals fires. This has been the case forever, but what's different now is the size, scope, and frequency of the fires. One report from Columbia University found that climate change has doubled the areas affected by forest fires in the last 30 years. At the same time, California humans are making

the fire problem worse in a few key ways. So more people are building houses in rural areas and in the mountains of California, which are more prone to fire. A large part of this is due to the housing crisis in the state that has displaced millions of people from the cities and the suburbs. Those people require electricity, obviously. So you effectively have winds knocking down electrical wires that didn't used to be there that ignite the brush and cause fires where there used to be fewer. And then there's PG&E, California's largest electricity company that powers much of Central and Northern California, as you know. The company has been super poorly managed and is actually now in bankruptcy court. And they've definitely fallen way behind on replacing old power lines

with new fire resistant ones and clearing the vegetation that puts power lines at risk for causing fires. And it's not the kind of thing you can make up sort of once you fall behind. So power line maintenance is one of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country with roughly 25 electrocution deaths per year. So obviously they're not trying to add that to their already crappy report card, you know? Right, right. Okay, so PG&E is choosing to turn off a large part of the grid so that they don't start fires. Kind of their only option at this point since they're broke and fixing the grid is expensive and slow, and as you just mentioned, dangerous. But when it comes to implementing the power outages, how are they doing?

Okay, so let's explain why PG&E is shutting off the power at all. Last year's big fire in California was known as the Camp Fire. It caused billions in damage. It killed at least 85 people. And Cal Fire, which is this government organization, investigated and found the company responsible for starting the fire. There are reports that PG&E may even be responsible for one of the big fires that's raging currently. PG&E's solution for all of this is shutting the power down. They just don't want to be at fault in the future. That's their move. PG&E actually already did the power down earlier this month,

and it didn't go well. There was very little warning to residents. Some found out with only 24 hours notice that they'd have no power for up to a week. Mass power outages are a huge issue for people, not just inconvenient, but potentially dangerous for vulnerable populations like the disabled, nursing homes, police stations, and people with refrigerated medicine and electric

medical equipment. They had to figure out how to get backup generators. And even more insult to injury, the PG&E website went down, so no one was available for comment. You know, there's a really great essay that I read from Sarah Miller, who experienced the outage firsthand on the outline.com. It's titled, I've seen California's future and it's dark. I highly recommend it. She talks about what it's like to be in the middle of it without a plan and God love it. Yeah, maybe that'll help me figure some stuff out myself. This is obviously a disaster in California and has enormous ramifications for the country's most populous state. But what do people take away from this on a national or even global level? Yeah. I mean, when we're talking about the crisis around the climate changing,

this is what it looks like. It's not like Waterworld. It's like one day you're just out there. Right. Like it starts like this. It's a lot of people in the woods without power. Then, you know, maybe a few years later, it's Fury Road. But this is the beginning. So what's happening in California right now should serve as a warning that no one, no company, no government is really prepared for how quickly things are changing. So my advice, I guess, is make this a voting issue and not just in like a 55 hour presidential town hall about how paper straws suck and, you know, wind turbines, like a real voting issue. I mean, you can fight climate change by voting for candidates that accept it as a scientific fact. You can make your neighbors safer by supporting more affordable housing initiatives in urban areas. Yes, even in your neighborhood. And you can fight climate

change by voting for candidates that want to modernize our infrastructure and our power grid. Also, if you are in California, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services is a really great resource if you're displaced, need debris removed, need financial help and more. That website is wildfirerecovery.org. And now let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Representative Katie Hill announced her resignation yesterday amid allegations of inappropriate relationships with her staffers. There will now be a special election in her Los Angeles County swing district.

Hill won her seat in 2018, beating out a Republican incumbent, and her resignation means that the seat could flip back. The week ahead in the impeachment inquiry will include the first depositions of White House officials, so it's a good time to buy stock in popcorn. The big one is scheduled for Thursday, when investigators will hear from National Security Council official Tim Morrison. Morrison was on that July 25th phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky and should have all the hot goss, maybe even who Zelensky has a crush on. In his Saturday Night Live monologue this weekend, Chance the Rapper gave a shout out to the ongoing Chicago teacher strike while wearing a Chicago Teachers Union sweatshirt. Chance also donated $1 million to Chicago public schools in 2017. So it's good to see him finally putting his mouth where his money is. Joker is now the top grossing R-rated movie of all time. Now, we had a funny joke about this,

but woke culture just won't let us say it. This is a gritty podcast now. Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared on 60 Minutes last night to talk about the tightening primary race and the state of his campaign finances. Biden is the kind of broke where you do things you said you'd never do. Last week, he softened his opposition to super PACs after starting October with only $9 million in the bank. I didn't change my opinion. I didn't look. They're able to go out and do this period. I cannot stop them if I wanted to stop them. Our condolences to Joe Biden, who is getting reverse mugged by super PACs. And those are the headlines.

That's all for today. We're new, so if you like the show, make sure you subscribe, give us a rating, leave a review, and shout about us on horseback to all the town folk like Midot's Paul Revere's. Hear ye, hear ye. By the way, if you're into reading

and not just menus like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash newsletters. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And that's why you should contribute to my super pack. What A Day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Special thanks to Sarah Lazarus. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.