JD Vance’s Global Humiliation

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Every weekday, NPR's best political reporters come to you on the NPR podcast. to explain the big news coming out of Washington and beyond. They don't just tell you what happened, they tell you why it matters and how it might impact you. Join the NPR politics podcast every single afternoon to understand the world through political eyes. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, the vibes are high in Budapest right now. It's your Immaculate. Immaculate. Check out this clip from Sunday. Let's watch. Yeah, the dude with the moves there is reportedly the leading candidate to become the new health minister of Hungary, but he's one of just millions of Hungarians celebrating Viktor Orban's defeat in this past week's parliamentary elections. How much more would you like to hang with that guy than RFK? RFK Jr., our health secretary. Oh, God, I hadn't even thought about it. I may dance like that when RFK Jr.'s out of office. Yeah, instead you'd be drinking just like raw milk. Taking HGH or whatever the hell he's taking. Working out in jeans with Kid Rock. Yeah, none of that sounds very fun. We're going to dig into those election results later in the show, like just absolutely great news story this week that we're going to cover out of Hungary. Good news. We're going to start, though, with the latest from Iran, why the peace talks in Islamabad blew up on Saturday, how Trump's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would have affected the country, would work or more likely will not work. We'll talk about the growing economic effect of the war on the global economy, the online propaganda wars that are being fought daily on the streets of Twitter. Being won daily, not by our side. Not by the Iranians, and how the Legos became a prominent feature of them, along with this associated crackdown on press freedom. Then we're going to update you guys on the Israeli bombardment and partial occupation of Lebanon, along with the peace talks, such as they were in D.C. today. Then we'll talk about Orban's defeat, what it means for Hungary, what it means for the world, the latest election news out of Canada, our neighbors to the north that are also having a good day, and then what that tells us, Mark Carney's ongoing victories, Prime Minister Mark Carney, about how world leaders could or should react to Trump. I think there's a lesson there. There's some lessons. And then, Ben, you did an interview this week. What do we got? Yeah, I talked to Anand Gopal, who is a writer for The New Yorker and really just an extraordinary journalist, has a new book out called Days of Love and Rage, which is a book called Days of Love and Rage, about the Syrian Civil War, and pretty extraordinary, this city in Syria, Manbij, that was under Assad, then a revolutionary council, then ISIS, then Kurds, and so the whole civil war is in this one place. So we talk about what he learned from that experience of reporting that book about not just the Syrian Civil War, but how politics has functioned in the Arab world, how foreign, and particularly U.S. intervention, you know, not worked in that part of the world, what he learned about democracy in writing that book, what we might extrapolate from that experience, you know, vis-a-vis what's happening in Iran right now. So incredibly fascinating book and discussion and also, you know, very relevant, given we are currently in another war, ostensibly to help a protest movement that, you know, I don't think any of us believe we're helping. So check it out. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. He also wrote that amazing piece about, like, the ISIS, family prison, right, and, like, the nightmares in Syria. So one of those New Yorker writers, like Patrick Radden Keefe, who writes something every, like, six to eight months, it's the best thing you've ever read. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every now and then you're like, holy shit, you know, this is, I forgot that a 10,000-word magazine piece can, like, completely knock me out of my house. Yeah, just being grossing and just, like, riveting. Our friends at The Pod subscribers will hear us answer some of their questions from the Discord community at the end of the show, so stick around for that. If you're a subscriber, kirka.com slash friends. If you want to learn more about how to become one, by the way, we're cranking out tons of bonus episodes on the Pod Save the World YouTube page, so please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube if you're not already. We did an episode last week about the tenuous ceasefire agreement. I think a lot of the concerns we talked about there kind of bore out. It feels like a ceasefire in name only. Yes, yeah. And, well, they're not shooting actively, but the straight ain't open. When you subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube, you help us get good information into the YouTube algorithm and displace all the right-wing pro-war garbage from Fox News, Ben Shapiro, 31 Flavors of Asshole. Who's left listening to Ben Shapiro? His numbers are way down, I think. Yeah, yeah. He, I mean, yeah, there's just the audience for kind of neocon, super pro-Israel, pro-war. It just doesn't really exist anymore. Anyway, thanks for subscribing to Pod Save the World as a podcast and on YouTube and sharing it. It really does help out. So let's turn to Iran, Ben. So I assume by now our listeners know that the Islamabad peace talks between the U.S. and Iran failed. The U.S. has now gone from relaxing sanctions, calling Iran to get more oil into the market, remember the jujitsu, to now joining Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. So you make that one make sense, buddy. The failed talks were just one example, though, of where Vice President J.D. Vance got his ass handed to him on a silver platter this past weekend. So that's the small silver lining. It's take wins. Yeah, this dark, dark cloud. Here's Vance talking about the Iran talks in various media appearances. Let's watch. We're looking forward to the negotiation. I think it's going to be positive. We'll, of course, see. As the president of the United States said, if the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we're certainly willing to extend the open hand. One thing I'll say, Brett, is Iranians are very different negotiators. At least those Iranians were very different negotiators than we are in the United States. We go back to the United States having not come to an agreement. If it doesn't happen, I'm blaming J.D. Vance. If it does happen, I'm taking full credit. That is why Trump's a good politician, that part at the end there. I love J.D. Vance talking about Iranian negotiators. He's genuinely learning this for the first time. We're learning more every day. There's lots of news reports about why the talks failed, what was discussed. I suspect that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz was actually Trump's top priority, even though he says it was the nuclear program. That's because it's causing him the most near-term political trouble. However, the Iranians have now figured out that closing the Strait can basically replace all their previous deterrent strategies. Nuclear weapons. They don't need nuclear weapons. They've got the nuclear weapons. Yeah, you can imagine Iran thinking, like, why are we wasting all this money on ICEVMs and nukes and proxy groups when we can just threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz and create, you know, bend the global economy to our will. So there's that. On the nuclear front, though, the U.S., as we suspected, came in with maximalist positions. They said no enrichment ever for Iran. Iran will shut down and dismantle its nuclear sites. Iran has to ship out its uranium stockpile out of the country. Those were positions Iran had already rejected. No surprise that they did. So again, however, we've since learned that during the talks, the U.S. proposed a deal where Iran would agree to a 20-year moratorium on uranium enrichment, along with Iran shipping out its uranium stockpile. The Iranians countered by offering a five-year moratorium, and they said they would dilute their uranium stockpile. The U.S. said no dice. So after 21 hours, J.D. Vance walked out in a huff, even though the Iranians said they thought they were making progress. And here we are. So, Ben, I didn't expect these guys to get a comprehensive deal done in less than a day. That's crazy. But I did think there was a chance they would maybe get a ceasefire extension, given that the war is a political disaster for Donald Trump and MAGA and the Republicans. Obviously, that didn't happen. What did you make of the talks? And boy, it was quite interesting to me that after a decade of hearing that the JCPOA was a terrible piece-of-shit agreement because some provisions sunsetted after 10 years, that they offered a deal that would have sunsetted after 20 years. That seems notable. There's so much. There's so much about these talks that illustrate the incompetence and kind of amateurish approach of the Trump administration. I mean, the first thing I'd point to is just the fact that they thought they were going to do this in a day. I mean, I was a part of those JCPOA negotiations on the Washington end, not at the table, but, you know, debriefing with the team after all these sessions. It took us, you know, two and a half years, I mean, thereabouts, maybe more. Including like the very early like Oman, secret talks all the way to the end? If you do that, yeah, that's two and a half years. And because these are technical matters, you have to narrow differences. And frankly, the issues that they're seeking to negotiate are much broader than the JCPOA, which is just on the nuclear issue. They're trying to bring support for proxies into the negotiations, both missiles, the Iranians are bringing the Strait of Hormuz, comprehensive sanctions relief. And so the idea that J.D. Vance is going to parachute into Pakistan and end the war and resolve all these issues is so fundamentally unserious. And you kind of saw this leaking out that the Americans in those talks were just incredibly imperious. Their version of diplomacy is to show up and make demands. And what's so interesting about that is that that's fundamentally at odds with the actual dynamic in play, which is that the Trump administration, are the ones that have a sense of urgency about reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Right. And the Iranians know that. Yeah. The Iranians, time is on their side. I mean, if you think about it, if the status quo just holds, that overwhelmingly benefits the Iranians. Because under the status quo, and we'll get to the blockade in a second, that is an effort to disrupt the status quo. But under the status quo, they've survived. The regime is in place. They've demonstrated their control of the Strait. They're getting extra revenue from the sanctions relief from jujitsu soybean farmer Scott Besson, the Secretary of Treasury. They're taxing fees on this. Mustafa Khamenei came out of the closet. It's fine. It's historic. No. And meanwhile, what they can see is that Trump, his poll numbers are dropping. Oil prices, gas prices are rising. So what's so weird about this is you don't have to be a genius to see that time is playing on the Iranians. And yet they show up, make a bunch of demands. The Iranians are like, well, those we can't do, but here's some counter proposals. And they're like, fuck you. We're out of here. And it's like, okay. And then what? The Iranians benefit. And so I just, the amateurism and incompetence is really catching up with us. And I should just add to this, like, again, you can dislike, you can loathe the Iranian regime. These are really sophisticated people, right? Just take the foreign minister, Arachi. Like that guy was in all the negotiations over the JCPOA. He knows the intricacies of nuclear programs and nuclear fuel cycles. J.D. Vance doesn't know anything about that. He doesn't know anything about Iran. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner don't know anything about anything except like real estate and shaking down foreign governments for crypto investments or investments in their funds. They don't even know what they're talking about. And they're sitting there. I mean, there's a, and I'm just going to say, there's a racism too. They must just be idiots or we can roll these people or like, again, like just because you don't like them doesn't mean that they're not quite skillful and sophisticated, you know? And so I just left feeling like I don't, I guess the only positive thing I take is that to your point, they understand they're not going to get everything they want. Like the fact that they've already moved to something on the nuclear side that sunsets, you know, they, they, they know, they're not going to get everything they want. They know that they don't have all these cards, but the problem is you have to get creative in finding solutions and, you know, thus far they've not demonstrated it. Maybe they will. Yeah. And Trump, while J.D. Vance was en route to Islamabad, Trump posted this, the following on Truth Social, the Iranians don't seem to realize they have no cards other than a short-term extortion of the world by using international waterways. That's a pretty big card. Pretty big card. It's kind of an ace of spades right there. Yeah. One might call it a straight. One could play that one. Yeah. J.D. Vance, he told Fox News that he didn't think the Iranian negotiators were actually empowered to make a deal. However, there's a very interesting article. I don't think that's true. So there's Iranian magazine, you know, you and I were talking about this earlier. They published this 42 minute discussion about the talks that featured a member of the Iranian media who was with the delegation who offered that perspective. Now, look, again, take it with a grain of salt, but in this, in this clip, in this conversation, the Iranians thought the delegation lacked the technical expertise, the U.S. side to understand the issues. That means that they had a stronger hand, given the fact that they had a stronger hand, given the fact that they had a stronger hand. So they also feel like Trump does not want to go back to fighting. And they also are smart. And they know that 80 percent of Iran's oil goes to China. And if China is suddenly cut off for from the Iranian oil they purchased, that is going to create massive complications for Donald Trump, who has a trip to where Beijing coming up. So it seems like that's another pretty big card. The other card they have to play that we can get into is whether the Iranians talk to the Houthis and they say, hey, we're going to do this. And they also feel like Trump does not want to go back to fighting. The fact that Pakistan hosted the talks, that's Trump's favorite country because they nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize and they invested in, you know, I mean, literally the reason is because they invested in Witkoff and Eric Trump's crypto business. And yeah, and, you know, you can work with some corrupt general who's, you know, been credibly accused of human rights abuses who will just do what you say. But I mean, I'm not, you know, I don't mean for the Pakistanis to catch strays here, but what do they know about mediating talks? Like the Omanis have mediated a lot of talks. The Qataris have mediated a lot of talks. You know, can't mediate between the United States and Iran. The whole thing, it was kind of thrown together because Trump needed to get out of the box he's in. But why would the Iranians do him a favor? Right. I mean, that's what's so crazy. He's just bombed them. He's the Iranian delegation flew to the talks on a plane with like, you know, seats for every one of the kids killed in Manab in that school. Like that didn't seem like they're in the mood to capitulate and give Trump a victory. No, they did not seem like it. So while these talks were happening. In Islamabad, Trump was taking things very seriously by attending an ultimate fighting event in Miami with Marco Rubio, America's top diplomat and the White House National Security Advisor. So again, good to see them focused. On Monday, Trump delivered some impromptu remarks about the talks and about the blockade with the DoorDash grandma. That's one of the strangest things I've ever seen in my life. Just weird. Let's watch. It's weird. Iran, you're marking it down. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And we. They agreed to a lot of things, but they didn't agree to that. And I think they will agree to it. I'm almost sure of it. In fact, I am sure of it. If they don't agree, there's no deal. There'll never be a deal. And we're going to get the dust back. We'll get it back either. We'll get it back from them or we'll take it. Mr. President, as far as the naval blockade is concerned, what's the endgame? Is it to force Iran back to the negotiating table? Is it to open up the straits so that gas prices ultimately come down? Maybe everything. I mean, both of those things. Certainly. And more. We can't let a country blackmail or extort the world because that's what they're doing. They're really blackmailing the world. We're not going to let that happen. Do you think that men should play in women's sports? I really don't have an opinion on that. You don't. I'll bet you do. No, I'm here about no tax on tips. We really are. I'll bet you do. We really are at that stage of the movie where they pull back the curtain and the Wizard of Oz is like a, you know. Yeah, it's not good. Yeah. It's not good. Okay, so to take this, you know, blockade idea seriously, the idea is to choke off oil and gas revenue to Iran to see if we can make them blink and, you know, an economic game of chicken. The way this would reportedly work is the U.S. will prevent any ships from entering or leaving Iranian ports. There's 15 big U.S. warships in the region. They're tasked with running the blockade. The actual operations will span from, you know, intimidating Iranian-linked ships out of trying to get to Iran to possibly board. So, you know, they'll be boarding and seizing ships. The boarding operations, you have to attempt those as far away from Iran as possible because, you know, that would maybe minimize the very high risk for missiles and drones, but there will still be significant risk. And these, you know, the huge, like, Navy ships there, the destroyers, they'll conduct missile defense operations. The other ships will do interdictions. Helicopters would help with that, too. But it's like, this is incredibly risky. It's complicated and risky on a normal day, but that risk goes up exponentially if the conflict resumes in Iran. And the U.S. are just, like, trading shots. And there's also a lot of diplomatic risk, as we mentioned before. Like, 80% of the oil goes to China from Iran. The Chinese have said, we have contracts with these guys. We intend to fulfill them. Like, stay the fuck away from our boats. We'll see what Trump does when push comes to shove. Like, fire on Chinese boats? Yeah, I mean, interdict them, seize them. It's crazy. And then, like I mentioned before, like, Iran has another card it could play, which would be calling on the Houthi rebels in Yemen to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which is a narrow passage between Djibouti and Yemen. that ships have to pass through to get to the Red Sea. And if that's closed, it's a global catastrophe. It's like one quarter of the world's shipping goes through the Red Sea. It's how you gain access to the Suez Canal from the Indian Ocean. It would essentially cut off Saudi Arabia's or severely curtail Saudi Arabia's ability to get the oil out that it's been shipping west via a pipeline. So, Ben, I mean, does this have any plan of working? What do you think about this blockade idea? By the way, Rahm Emanuel was pitching this as his idea, too, when he was in here a couple days ago. I'm not sure how it works. I mean, first I want to say, you know, Trump keeps saying that they can't get a nuclear weapon. Like, they don't have one. They pledged to not develop one in the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. Like, if Trump gets them to commit to not building a nuclear weapon, I just want to set the predicate that that's fucking nothing. And that's something that they've said a million times before. So part of what he may be doing is lowering the bar there. Another thing that is related to the blockade, the Rubio thing is not unrelated to the blockade. Because people need to understand that the normal process is you have a negotiating team. And then the national security advisor has got a team of experts around the table in Washington. And you're going back and forth. And you're seriously considering proposals and counteroptions. What process are they running? How are they making the decision to blockade? How are they giving guidance? It just feels like we're all on a plane and there's, like, no pilot. I think that's unfair. You have J.D. Vance calling a note to Joe Rogan who walks it over to Trump at the UFC fight. And he says, go or no go. Yeah, and this is what's so crazy. But, I mean, on the blockade in particular, like, I just— It seems like Trump fundamentally doesn't understand an obvious thing, which is the Iranians, because he launched a regime change war, no matter what he says, it's existential to them. So if they lose billions of dollars in revenue from some U.S. blockade, if it works— This is if it works. This is the best-case scenario where we actually do make it so that the Chinese can't get the Iranian oil. Well, they don't care. Right. They will sit there for two months. And, yeah, it could be calamitous for the Iranian people that we were supposedly helping, but the regime doesn't give a shit because they're playing for eternity here. They're playing, you know, for their survival as a regime. And they have 100 million barrels or so of oil floating in storage off the coast of Malaysia and China that they can sell. Yeah. To kind of, like, keep themselves afloat. So I saw some commentators—and, you know, again, I hate to, you know, have Rahm catch some strays here, but there are people that are active. They're acting like this is a normal administration, like engaging in normal coercive diplomacy with a blockade. No, these are people who fundamentally don't understand what they started and who they started it with and the fact that all of the leverage in terms of the damage to the global economy redounds to the United States because Iran has already been sanctioned into hell by the United States for 10 years. They know what it's like to live under incredible course of economic pressure. So all you're doing is, like, adding to the misery of not just China but our allies in Asia and Europe who are suffering the consequences and people that are paying for, like, $6-plus gas here in California. And, like, obviously the IRGC, they and their families will be the first ones fed. Yeah, yeah. It'll be the regular people. You're just going to further hurt the Iranian people who will know that it's the U.S. blockading. And this is the other thing. Trump can pretend like he was forced to do this and they were going to attack us or they have nuclear weapons. Everybody else in the world who doesn't watch Fox News or listen to the news, or listen to Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin or whatever that guy's name is, like, knows that Donald Trump started this. It's his fault. It's his mess. They're pissed as hell. Are they pissed at the Iranians? Of course they are for, like, bombing the Gulf and stuff. But they know at core that this is something that Trump fucking started. Yeah, they're not stupid. And the Iranian people know that, too, by the way, that Donald Trump bombed them instead of helping them. And so he just doesn't have the leverage he thinks he does. No, he does not have all the cards. Pod Tape of the World is brought to you by HIMSS. ED is way more common than you guys think. 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That's squarespace.com slash world. One other interesting thing with respect to China, Ben. The New York Times reported that China might be helping Iran by shipping them shoulder-fired missiles, or otherwise known as MANPADS. This intel is described as not definitive, but given that Iran just shot down a U.S. fighter jet with a shoulder-fired missile, it would be a very big deal. Also, our ability to punish the Chinese if they don't listen to what we're saying and, you know, go abide by this blockade is pretty limited, given that the Chinese just won a trade war with the U.S. by cutting off our access to rare earth elements. And guess what we'll need those rare earths for? Rebuilding the stockpile of missiles that we just expended that we would need in a war with China. Not exactly a risk here. And this is why. What Trump is doing is he's just shining a gigantic spotlight on the United States as like a declining empire. Because we exist in this world where we think we can command other countries to do things and not do things. Of course the Chinese are giving them shoulder-fired missiles. Of course the Russians are giving them targeting intelligence. I don't like the Chinese government or the Russian government, but why wouldn't they do that? Because they see that the United States just did something incredibly stupid. They see that we're bogged down there and we're getting weakened by what's happening. It's their ally, Iran, that's under attack. They've seen us arm all kinds of proxies, you know, from. I mean, obviously we've been arming the Ukrainians. The Chinese think that us arming the Taiwanese endangers their security. So you can say to me, "Oh, Ben, that's not the same." Of course it's not the same. I like the Taiwanese better than I like the Iranians. But that doesn't mean that they're not going to do it. And Trump seems to live in a world where he thinks, he thinks he can snap fingers. And again, unfortunately, he has learned lessons from European leaders, from American law firms, university, like all the people that capitulated to Trump, like led him to think that he could do the same thing to Iran or China or whomever. And once you bump up against these adversaries, they're literally been handed a geopolitical gift of a lifetime with this war, if you're the Chinese. Yeah, they have. And we're also getting a lot more data about the economic impact of the war so far. Just some data points. The United Nations has warned that over 32 million people around the globe might be forced into poverty, even if a ceasefire in peace is achieved just because the price of oil has gone up so much. The IMF says the global economy is at risk of growing at its slowest pace since the COVID-19 pandemic. If oil stays at $100 per barrel for the rest of the year, inflation could hit 5.4%. The Philippines declared a state of emergency. They're limiting air conditioning in public buildings and made public transportation free. People are also striking. They're striking to protest gas and diesel prices. There's been gas station employees in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan that were killed in robberies or rage-based assaults because no one can get gas at the pump. The EU is warning that it's going to struggle with low growth and high inflation. And there's this looming jet fuel crisis in Europe that could lead to just mass cancellation of flights. They literally cannot get jet fuel to power their planes. The Saudis, their oil production fell by 700,000 barrels a day last week because of attacks on oil fields. And their pipeline back capacity is now back online, but that's a huge dip. And then an under-discussed part of this, Ben, is a lot of these countries have all these migrant workers. Like the Emiratis have something like 8.7 million migrant workers, according to the New York Times. That's like 80% of the population. Those people are being hurt the most as economic activity falls off a cliff. And so tourism, for example, to the UAE was 15% of GDP in the country before the war. That's like $79 billion in 2025. And that's like $79 billion in 2020. And that's that is down to zero, right? And all these people who work in hotels, or you know coffee shops or whatever have nothing taxis and they're not able to sell send any money back home and they're just getting crushed so of course like the poorest people in poor countries are getting hurt the most the fastest while trump you know laughs about how whatever will be fine yeah i mean that's what's so kind of grotesque and offensive about this is you know and i i you know kind of been a bit perturbed today but it's because of this right it's because like trump seems to think that this is just like another show and another thing he's managing through and he'll muddle through and he'll kind of lose but claim he won and but there are a lot of real people that are losing you know that that are dying or that are suffering or that are suffering a massive economic hardship you mentioned the gulf i we still haven't really seen what's gone on there like there's such censorship of any imagery coming out we don't know what dubai looks like you know we don't know the extent of the damage to gulf energy facilities we keep hearing it's worse than we've heard and we keep hearing by the way to your point about the damage that there are estimates that it could take up to if the war stopped now if no more damage is done it would still take two years for them to kind of crank this machine of energy production up to where it was so there will be a all these things you said and there's a great lay down there will also be a massive tail to this like we're going to be living with the the ramifications of this war for years to come even if it stops now yeah and that is the best case scenario so along with the actual war between the u.s and iran there is a hot propaganda war getting fought online um i'm sure many listeners have by now seen like the disgusting videos that came out of the white house initially that were cutting together real footage of u.s airstrikes on iran with clips from movies and video games um i don't know if those have stopped or not if i just stopped seeing them but they were they're pretty widely condemned um iran's rejoinder though has come in the form of legos uh here are a couple examples let's watch epstein queen epstein queen kissing on the lips living that scene she says never friends with a straight face lie but the files got trumped by the balls now she's on tv saying we were never close but the photos got her looking like the perfect host can't treat another threat another fake attack but we all know why your portfolio's flat you need the market to drop need the oil to crash then you buy at the bottom flip it for cash you don't want a war you want the price to fall fake news on truth social that's your only call you scream open the straight but why though so your rich friends short and watch the money flow fake tweet fake news fake hope fake clock your whole game's a joke make it stop you crush the world then you buy the dip fake war fake tears from your fake lip it's just bangers left and right uh for those listening not watching again subscribe to pot say the world on youtube but the first video featured melania trump it was a reference to her bizarre press conference last week where she was like i did not know jeffrey epstein and like ran away um but the videos were at large kind of span a fascinating range of of messages the most common themes are jeffrey epstein that trump is controlled by israel but some are focused on history uh there were lego missiles bearing messages like for the people of hiroshima and nigeria and for the people of nagasaki or in memory of the american indians or more recently for the children of gaza but the majority of the videos are fully rooted in the super online internet zeitgeist of today the epstein files as we just saw online betting markets and war profiteering pete hegseth being a drunk idiot with stupid tattoos um we should note that we cut out some extremely anti-semitic stuff to make this more watchable uh there's lots of images of like bb net yahoo kind of pulling the strings or controlling trump in some way kind of old times and then we're going to talk about the tropes we don't know who for sure who is making these the first ones originated from an account called explosive news that account has been banned uh from youtube and instagram but the videos are all over twitter and have been amplified by accounts linked to the iranian government and then russian state-run outlets and plenty of americans it's not exactly clear who runs the account uh new york magazine interviewed someone over there via email they claim they're independent but who knows that's what they'd say uh but that according to that article basically these movies were a semi-official account then move into channels aligned with like hezbollah or the houthis then to the russian-linked channels then to the kind of anti-imperialist left channels then they'd be everywhere um but then once the kind of lego format was established i think iran's supporters treated it like a meme and you started seeing uh copycat videos from god knows where i think those ones we just played you were most likely copycat videos and all of it is enabled by ai obviously like use ai to make the videos themselves but i would imagine that these iranian filmmakers are probably using ai to write the scripts themselves to like make them feel as american as possible and plugged into the zeitgeist as possible um so ben i'm like i'm quite confident that the world would oppose this war no matter what for all the reasons we discussed in the first 30 minutes of the show what do you think the impact of these videos has been on shaping world opinion i think it's probably far more significant than we can imagine because let's face it they're pretty fucking good and um and look the you mentioned the snuff videos like the white house version of this was to show snuff videos of u.s planes bombing things who does that appeal to around the world literally precisely nobody outside of israel in the united states like nobody else looks at that and feels good right and so our propaganda is literally only designed to reach the most bloodthirsty fox news viewer in this country or you know in israel um their videos are on offense their videos it's you know first of all it shows a striking level of connectivity to at least the online discourse in the united states around everything from epstein to israel to insider trading to betting markets etc but also what it does is if if iran already you know if basically i think the status quo ante around the world it's the same thing it's the same thing iran's been doing for a long time it's the same thing iran's been doing for a long time it's the same thing iran's been doing for a long time it's the same thing iran's been doing for a long time it's the same thing iran's been doing for a long time what these videos are probably doing particularly with younger audiences who they are seem very designed for right there's a reason no doubt it's hip-hop there's a reason you know it's kind of legos it's clever is no iran is standing in for all of you everybody who's pissed at trump everybody who's pissed at inequality everybody who's pissed at Trump everybody who's pissed at everybody who's pissed at Trump everybody who's pissed at Israel all the things that people around the world are pissed about iran is the vanguard of your resistance right and they're giving them a why right which is the trump is doing this to distract from epstein because he's friends with a pedophile and because the israelis are making him do it now we're not saying we're not saying that's right but like that's what the argument is in the video i i mean if you are compelling if you are a 23 year old in america europe or asia or certainly the middle east you're probably going to be very open to this message and again it's positioning the iranians as the stand-in for global public and men that is potent uh and they're running circles around donald trump and i should just say as an aside it is a little depressing that the irgc and their cutouts have been better at trolling donald trump than the democratic party's been for the last 10 years i know there's also a fake movie trailer called uh straight out of hormuz that one it was um it was not lego it was like ai actors it was like jake gyllenhaal uh as mushtaba hamaneh liam neeson as trump zack alfnakas as a very hilarious scared jd vans uh judy dench as kirstar it's a little better than the kamala harris like six seven uh rapid response account uh sorry don't make me even think about the the other part of the pr war that trump is losing is he decided to pick a fight with a pope with pope leo and you know that was in part verbal and like getting mad at pope leo for saying you know we shouldn't genocide iran like that that's how this kicked off he was asked to respond to trump saying he was going to destroy the entire civilization of iran and shocker the pope didn't think that was a good idea um then trump posted this image of himself as jesus christ i don't know if you saw this you know italian prime minister georgia maloney responded she said trump's words toward the holy father are unacceptable the pope is the head of the catholic church and it is right and normal for him to call out call for peace and condemn all forms of war so while the lego videos are like exploding you know in the online discourse here in the global south i'm sure in the gulf like he's also pissing off all the catholics not only 20 of the u.s citizens but also people in italy people in latin america right who are we not picking a fight with yeah well that's the thing is i think he is he is losing altitude very rapidly i mean first of all the pope guess who's going to be in office after trump the pope right um guess what catholics care about more than you know donald trump's politics like being catholic you know and so he's he's picking he like other i think we are so psychologically broken in this country that we've allowed donald trump to kind of assume a sense that he's like permanent but he's not he's going to be the clock is ticking the sand is running through the hourglass he's rapid losing power and the pope's not afraid of him and and he forces catholics to choose between like their faith and their faith leader and donald trump's truth social fights like he's going to lose most catholics the maloney thing is even more interesting because he clapped back at her and he said something like did he call an italian outlet or something and he said he said you know she wants iran to get nuclear weapon or something and and she said no one believes that then she came back and said there are only nine countries in the world nuclear weapons and the only one to use it is united states so basically fuck off and man this is someone who's a right wing populist who attended trump's inauguration who's his like favorite european i mean she's throwing haymakers at him now i mean i i think it's hard for mary he is so weak internationally right now um he's losing his allies orban has been toppled maloney's breaking with him the catholic church is breaking with him they've got lego videos trolling him like i i it's it's you know he's it's actually this war is the thing that he's jumped into some quicksand and he can't swim out of it by like truth social yeah and when you're kind of like veneer of invincibility gets popped that's when everyone starts taking shots at you and he just seems weakened and you know back to the propaganda though i think one thing that's making as you mentioned earlier making all this propaganda about the war travel even further is how little real information is being allowed out of the gulf yeah you know you mentioned the pentagon is clearly covering up the scope of the damage to u.s bases in the region also to casualties yeah uh the state department has covered up the damage to embassies and consulates we talked about some of that like the saudi uh embassy or consulate building that got hit by two drone strikes and like would have killed hundreds of people if it had been during the day um the u.s has pressured commercial satellite imagery providers to restrict access to images from the gulf and then there's been a crackdown on news reports and social media posts of images on iranian airstrikes within these gulf countries themselves um and then today ben uh on tuesday news broke that a journalist named ahmed shihab aldin this prominent american and kuwaiti journalist was arrested for assaulting the in kuwait on march 3rd after he published an image of a u.s air force jet crashing this was that friendly fire incident early on in the war uh that sent com acknowledged the pilot ejected the pilot was safe but uh shihab aldin has been in detention since that time with limited access to a lawyer he's allegedly being charged with these new security laws that have been put in place to define terrorism as quote spreading terror among the people and quote and then another law that punishes the publication or spreading of false rumors in relation to military entities with the confidence in these entities uh semaphore had a kind of related piece this week about a similar crackdown in the uae including the arrest of a photojournalist on march 17th this is obviously bad news for press freedom generally um and is also just wildly hypocritical of these gulf countries given how many of them have used social media to self-promote like pay influencers dubai yeah you know so it's um it's it's very bad we should say this rest is outrageous and this is an american an equating american right uh last i checked like kuwait's not a country that usually arrests american journalists um what is rubio doing to get this guy out what's yeah what do we care about that um so first is like we should be trying to get his release uh asap but then i i would say more broadly what is so stupid about this is it is so obvious what is happening you don't need to be some expert when when they did the rescue of the pilot we got like a crazy two-hour briefing from raisin cane that chairman of the joint chiefs with every single secret detail of the minutiae of how they got this guy and we can't even get a fucking damage assessment uh of u.s embassies and bases across the region right it's so obvious that they only are putting out good it's like vietnam the height of like the vietnam dishonesty it makes this look it makes that look transparent by comparison we have no idea what are the american casualties are we don't have no idea how injured those people are we have no idea what is the damage to our facilities we have no idea what's going on we have no idea what's going on we have no idea what's going on and what's also so stupid about this is that like i know people in some of these gulf countries guess what i can text with them i've gotten photos sent to me of the destroyed awax plane that costs like 600 million dollars i've had people you know just be like hey here's what's going on i i can't go outside i went outside the other day and like like a drone fell like it's not like we don't know right that shit is getting real in places like dubai it's crazy so the idea okay we won't have pictures like but do you think that means that we're all going to plan vacation to dubai right what are you even covering up people i know it's so self-defeating it really hurts them more than it helps by the way if you want to support a media organization that will never cover up for donald trump or pete hexeth or for you know broken pentagon assets please consider joining crooked media subscription community you get exclusive access to bonus content like pod save america only friends you get a deep dive every week into the latest polling from dan pfeiffer ad-free episodes of our shows including pod save the world and pod save america it is the best thing you can do to help an independent progressive media company like us grow and do more to hold the administration up and running accountable go to crooked.com friends to learn more or you can become a subscriber on youtube by pressing the join button so thank you for doing that uh meanwhile ben so there's another war happening in lebanon israel just continues to level huge swaths of lebanon they're ostensibly going after hezbollah the iranian backed you know heavily armed state within the state in lebanon but the idf is hitting major urban areas there have been huge numbers of civilian casualties and the images and videos are horrifying in addition to bombing beirut the idf has established this like six mile wide that it's you know the the they're calling it a buffer zone but it's an invasion of occupation of south lebanon and they've leveled all these villages there so far 1.2 million lebanese have been displaced over 2 000 have been killed and attacks from both sides have continued through the ceasefire between the u.s and iran uh last week i think we talked about the idea of hitting 100 targets in beirut in this 10 minute window which killed over 300 people a lot of the strikes were i think in broad daylight uh one horrific story among many there was a two-year-old girl who survived a strike on her home last week only to be killed over the weekend when the idf struck her father's funeral so really grim stuff uh 12 idf soldiers and two israeli civilians have also been killed so on tuesday israeli and lebanese ambassadors met in dc for these working level peace talks under the regime change loving eye of marco rubio and what the times of israel called the most senior in-person engagement ever between the two countries uh in their first bilateral talk since 1993 the lebanese government wants a ceasefire israel wants hezbollah disarmed the problem is that the lebanese government can't deliver on either of those things and hezbollah was not at the table ahead of the talks the uss netanyahu for a pause in the fighting netanyahu obliged by pausing strikes on beirut but operations in southern lebanon have continued uh the idf reportedly hit a red cross center on monday a day earlier the red cross at a lebanese volunteer was killed after being directly targeted by an israeli drone so ben i'm going to talk a little bit about the war crimes in lebanon so ben i like i'm obviously for diplomacy but it it's hard not to feel like these talks weren't just for show given that the lebanese government doesn't control hezbollah and given that i don't trust israel's claim that they're fighting hezbollah i'm just gonna say it like i have you seen the casualties like they're they're they sound like they're kids there's medical workers they're either they're you know killing um one hezbollah fighter and a bunch of people around them which is a war crime and they're not fighting hezbollah and they're not fighting them you know uh because there's clearly no proportionality in what they're doing or they have designs on like territory in southern lebanon i mean i don't doubt that hezbollah is a problem for israel it is but like this is just this is i mean if you look at southern lebanon for instance you know one thing is they're not just destroying kind of structures they're rendering it uninhabitable so i saw a statistic that they've destroyed something like 60 000 olive trees um in southern lebanon right they're destroying agriculture the capacity to to live there um is is that the world right now that's okay like uh so i i just i i'm sorry i i i don't see how this is some like credible strategy to like degrade and disarm hezbollah when they're bombing beirut in broad daylight because they thought that you know they're apparently i was reading one report on this they were like the the target list got to like hezbollah hideouts and they figured there are better odds of the hezbollah individuals who like low level i think being in those hideouts during the day so they bombed during the day but that obviously meant people were walking to work they were taking their kids to school like there were tons of civilian casualties with killed and wounded and it's horrific and here's the thing because i'm going to say to the like anticipate some of the pros or arguments even if we probably don't have that many pro-israel listeners left um they'll say well what are you supposed to do you know have you considered the blowback from what you're doing and if you think that i'm you know how long that's going to last and if you think that i'm you know how long that's going to last i think that's like you know a hyperbolic statement hezbollah didn't exist in 1982 the last time israel or not the last time because they've done a bunch of times but when israel you know invaded and occupied and killed a bunch of people in lebanon that gave birth to hezbollah and here we are 40 plus years later and israel's fighting the militia that was created in reaction to israel bombing lebanon yep they're going to be there 40 years from now like like this fighting the next militia that was created because people were pissed about what israel's doing right now so don't tell me this is some genius israeli military strategy where they're wrecking hamas and hezbollah they're they're assuring that they're going to be resistance movements forever and boy it seems probably um beneficial to netanyahu that the longer the war drags on he can't testify in court you know he keeps seeking these like two-week extensions for national security reasons to not testify yeah and he pushes out the election yeah and especially at a time when voters are increasingly in israel are starting to be dissatisfied with his handling of the war it's an interesting coincidence yeah and and so people say me, well, what's he supposed to do about the people in northern Israel who have had to deal with intermittent Hezbollah rocket fire? Not this. This isn't working. This is just bombarding a country. This breeds resistance, right? And so I'm glad they're negotiating, but the negotiations are these kind of unrealistic, like you have to eliminate any vestige of Hezbollah with a government that doesn't have the capability to do that, like you said. It feels like Netanyahu wants, there's going to be election in Israel next few months, and he needs there to be a feeling of war in order to get reelected. And so he makes unrealistic demands that can't be met and then bombs the country when those demands aren't met. And that's not a negotiation. Yeah, no. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Three Day Blinds. At this point, we can shop for groceries, furniture, and even cars from home. So why is shopping for blinds still stuck in the dark ages? It doesn't have to be this way. That's why you need to know. Check out Three Day Blinds. 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When you head to the number three, D-A-Y blinds.com slash world. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Built. Whether you're renting or paying a mortgage, one of your biggest monthly expenses should be working harder for you. That's where Built comes in. Built is the membership free where you live that rewards you with points on every housing payment wherever you live. Built started out rewarding members on their rent. Now, as of 2026, Built members can also earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points you can use towards flights with top travel partners like United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, amazon.com purchases, and much more. They have a long list of things you could redeem your points for. Some great options include gift cards at literally 120 or more brands. There's tons that you could do student loan balances, a bunch of restaurants. They have a built home collection. Then there's just literally amazon.com. You can buy anything you want with this stuff. So it's very, very easy to use your built points. But here's the most underrated part. Built members also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, all while being rewarded at more than $45,000. It's like having a personal assistant baked into where you live. It's simple being a renter and now owning a home. It's better with Built. Join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com slash world. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash world. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. All right, let's switch to the good news section of our show. Yes, it's very good news. As we mentioned at the top, there was a truly historic election this past weekend in Hungary. Viktor Orban, the right-wing populist, wannabe dictator, kleptocratic prick who's been running Hungary for 16 years, got absolutely smoked in Sunday's parliamentary elections. He was defeated by a guy named Peter Magyar, this conservative former member of Orban's party who made the race a referendum on Orban's corruption, his failure to address the cost of living crisis, his ties with Russia, and just general failed leadership. There was record participation, 77%, the highest turnout ever in a Hungarian election. And Magyar's Tiza party will now have a two-thirds majority in the parliament, which is absolutely essential for fixing what is broken in the country, because it means he'll be able to roll back changes Orban made to Hungary's constitution and political system that have entrenched his party's power. Ben, I saw a lot of people online start to kind of yuck our yum by saying, like, actually, you know, Magyar is pretty right-wing. He won't be different. And to them, I just want to say, take the win for like two fucking seconds. Let's celebrate this for a bit, because Orban was the poster child for how you strangle a democracy nearly to death, he made life awful for the Hungarian people. He was a spoiler in the European Union who helped block efforts to constrain the worst leaders in the world, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, his buddies with Trump. Also, this was another example of J.D. Vance making a fool of himself. As we discussed last week, Vance visited Hungary just before the election to stump for Orban, where he whined about election interference from Brussels while doing a little election interference of his own. Ben, I'm sure you've seen the chart of how J.D.'s visit corresponds with the betting market. It's flipped from everyone thinking Orban would win to lose. It's delicious. So here is Vance trying to spin away his loserdom on Fox News Monday. Let's watch. We didn't go because we expected Victor to cruise to an election victory. We went because it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time. So this wasn't about Russia. And fundamentally, it wasn't about Europe. It was about the United States and the fact that he's been a good partner to both me and the president personally, but also to the United States. I'm sad that he lost. We'll work very well, I'm sure, with the next prime minister of Hungary. But it wasn't a it wasn't a bad trip at all because it's worth standing by people, even if you don't win every race. For what it's worth, like if you got a guy somewhere and you want to help him win an election, like by all means, go campaign for him. It wasn't a bad trip because they lost. It was a bad trip because they were stumping for Victor Orban. Or something for anyone. Yeah. But Ben, you've been you've hated Victor Orban for a long time. Go off. Go off, King. Well, look, because I will say. First of all, on Victor Orban and then on the Hungarian opposition for a second. I heard this thing, too. Well, Magyar, he's conservative. Like it fundamentally misunderstands, fundamentally misunderstands what the danger is that Victor Orban represent. It's not just he's conservative. Victor Orban was at the nexus of the far right international. This is a guy that came to power cultivating ties with Putin and drawing from Putin's playbook. And westernizing Putin's playbook, you know, which we've talked about a lot. Consolidating control of the media, packing the courts with far right judges so that they can find in favor of power grabs, enriching a bunch of cronies who finance their politics, you know, intimidating and harassing civil society and NGOs, redrawing parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power, wrapping up in an us versus them nationalist message, building a fucking wall like Victor Orban was building the wall before Donald Trump ran for president. Right. So this guy was at the vanguard. And he was part of a connective tissue to Bibi Netanyahu, very close to Bibi Netanyahu, benefited from some of those former Mossad guys in the Black Cube doing campaigns for him, very close to Putin, very close to Trump. And so Peter Magyar is against all that. He's going to stop all that. Like even if I don't necessarily agree with all of his policies on like taxes and immigration, like he's that's over now. The Hungary is not this kind of connective tissue at the center of Europe, the heart of Europe for all these autocratic leaders to. He's not going to be able to walk around in European politics and Western politics. He's not. You know, this guy was at the vanguard of the playbook that Trump trumps, you know, the more intellectual people on the far right, including J.D. Vance, have utilized. That's why they cared so much. Like, like, let's just look from their perspective. If Peter Magyar is such a conservative, then J.D. Vance wouldn't have been over there desperately trying to help his friend Victor. Right. And secondly, on the Hungarian opposition, listen to them. They are fucking thrilled. And I just want to give a shout out to these people. They weathered 16 years of absolute. Bullshit, especially the people that were activists. Some of them were harassed, some of them were docked, some of them faced criminal charges and like they kept it up and they went from one election loss to another. They kept reporting on corruption. And by the corruption is the thing that really brought our bond down more than authoritarianism. There's a lesson in that for us, you know. And so it is a huge deal. It shows that someone who's an entrenched autocrat with his tentacles in all aspects of politics and society can be literally uprooted like root and branch. And so there's an opportunity to change the constitution and to fundamentally transform Hungary, not into a progressive paradise like this, where the people online need better is better. Better is OK. It's better. Yeah, it's better. Yeah. I mean, Magyar said the country was essentially taken over by an organized crime syndicate. That's how he described it. He doesn't get it, though. He gets it. And since the election, Magyar said he's going to go after what he called the ill-gotten gains of high ranking Fidesz members. He called for the country's president, the prosecutor general, the president of the Constitutional Court. And he called for the president of the Constitutional Court. financial aid package to Ukraine that had been blocked by Orban. Who knows if he'll evolve on those position over time, positions over time. But again, on corruption, here's a clip from a guy named Sandor Lederer, the director of K-Monitor, a Hungarian anti-corruption initiative, who spoke about Magyar's promises and roadblocks he's going to face in tackling corruption. Let's listen. He pledged to establish an asset recovery office to pursue oligarchs who enrich themselves during the Orban system, including the prime minister, friends and family members. That's a key promise as rampant corruption under Orban was one of the most important topics in the opposition's campaign. It united conservative, liberal and left-wing voters behind Peter Magyar and had become increasingly uncomfortable even for Orban supporters in recent years, especially as high inflation, rising housing costs, deteriorating health care system and economic stagnation left millions frustrated by the luxurious lifestyle of Orban's elite and the impunity of the state. However, the tasks ahead of Peter Magyar's government are enormous, and he will have to deliver first results in a couple of months by likely experiencing resistance from Orban's allies and state institutions, and also a significant voter base behind Viktor Orban, who already announced that they are going to protect their achievement. So Sandor was like one of the main characters in my last book. He's just an incredible guy. I mean, he's literally been reporting on this corruption for like over a decade. He's been reporting on this corruption for like over a decade. I think what's like so important there, the lessons that we can draw, that point you made about corruption, like that can unite people left to right, you know, just disgust. I mean, with it's happening as we speak in this country, if you look at Eric Trump, Don Jr., day trading on wars, gilded Oval Office ballrooms, like that stuff actually travels and can unite people across an ideological spectrum. Like that's real populism. That's real populism. There's a real lesson for us in that. And also importantly, like, look, Magyar's going to run into roadblocks. Fidesz, Orban's party is kind of embedded. They own a bunch of the media. It's going to be tough. And we have to accept that, you know, better is going to be good. He may not be able to deliver anything. We're going to have to watch just in the same way that Orban was at the vanguard of building this kind of infrastructure. We should learn lessons as Democrats about how successful or not they are in kind of uprooting the systems of corruption. I'm just going to go on a limb, Tommy, and say that like the Merrick Garland did not do that as Attorney General. But because, again, we have an investment in them. And the last thing I want to say is, look, what does this say about the future of the far right, right, in Europe? Look, it doesn't mean it's all over for them. The French election looms and the national rally there. But I think you see, first of all, what we can say with certainty is that Trump is an albatross on them, right? Which was not the case a year ago. When J.D. Vance was lecturing people in Germany and felt like he had the momentum. Now you got Georgia Maloney like literally distancing herself and taking a wax at Trump because she's a good politician. And she sees what happened to Viktor Orban, you know? And so at a minimum, Trump has made it harder for the far right. So in a weird way, America's helping the battle against democracy by having such a fucking incompetent fascist running our country that it's discrediting the Democrats, small d Democrats have to do in Europe is learn what worked in Hungary. You know, what can we take away from that by waging these campaigns? And by the way, hang these far right parties on Trump. I'd be running against Trump if I was a French politician. Oh, God, me too. Because you got to, there's nothing you can do at this point to fix the cost of living crisis in the short term or like the spike in energy prices. All you can do is message it. And I would be making crystal clear every day that this is Donald Trump's fault. That's what I understand what Keir Starmer is doing. It's like offering, you know, defensive support. We'll get to that in a second. But it's like, hammer this guy. So finally, Ben, let's check in with our neighbors to the north in Canada, where Prime Minister Mark Carney is riding high after winning three out of three special elections this weekend. And Justin Trudeau was looking high at Coachella this weekend, having a good ass time. Carney now is a majority government. So remember, the Liberal Party under Trudeau was really struggling. It looked dead in the water, like the conservatives were going to win. That was until, Trudeau dropped out. Donald Trump started threatening to annex Canada last year. And then Mark Carney came in and rode those threats from Trump and an anti-Trump message to electoral victory, but only to a minority government. So he troubled- What was it? Elbows up? Elbows up. Yeah, yeah. Elbows up. Yeah, a little hockey fight. So now Carney will be able to govern and he won't have to face re-election until 2029, which makes this a very, very sad day for Canada's conservatives led by Pierre Polyev. So back in January, Carney threw some punches at Trump during this like a much heralded speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He expanded upon those themes over the weekend at this Liberal Party's convention. Here's a clip of what he had to say. Let's watch. Hope is not a plan and nostalgia is not a strategy. Canadians are demonstrating just how strong we are. You know, it started quietly. People choosing a wine from the Okanagan over one from California. Anyone had any bourbon recently? The days of our military sending 70 cents of every dollar to the United States are over. We have struck 20 new economic and security partnerships on four continents in just a year. We are on track to double our non-U.S. exports over the next decade. That is $300 billion. We are defending Canada and Canadian values with reliable partners. So it sucks to hear people like whooping in an attack on California wine from a liberal leader from our closest ally in Canada. But like, that's obviously the way to run right now. If you're dealing with Trump, I talked to I went on Posse of the UK. I was talking with Nish and Coco earlier today about all this. By the way, if you're not subscribed to that show, not listening to the show, you're only hurting yourself. It is not a good thing. It's hilarious and funny. And it's hilarious and funny mean the same thing with hilarious and smart and great. So subscribe to Posse of the UK. But for the life of us, we just could not understand why British Prime Minister Keir Starmer wouldn't adopt that same approach, especially when his approval rating is 50 points underwater. Like, what do you have to lose, dude? I honestly, at this point, don't know what planet, you know, Keir Starmer is. I mean, because and here's the thing. Do I like watching like a Canadian banker just like wail the shit out of the United States? It doesn't feel good. But actually, it does feel good because here's why. It is ultimately in our interests as Americans that Donald Trump in his incompetent brand of narcissistic fascism is stopped. It really is. And so the best way to stop it is if everybody, people in this country, institutions in this country, you know, foreign leaders of allies stand up to him and kick him around and cut him down to size, because that that's ultimately what's going to happen. That's ultimately good for us. You know, like I would have liked if Mark Carney picked on a state other than California, but that's fine. That's fine. I get it. You know, like maybe maybe tackle the Oregon Reds. Take a whack at a red state here. But no, seriously, like I'm glad. But what it shows again is time and again, we've seen like if you stand up to Trump, like from the first election that Carney won to Albanese in Australia to, you know, to like everywhere we look, you are rewarded for standing up to Donald Trump. And I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think everywhere we see people kissing his ass in like pathetic, you know, Mark Ruta going on Jake Tapper. And, you know, I mean, that just doesn't I don't know what people want. What timeline are you people in? You know, they want strength and they want to be proud of something, you know, and good for Canada, like good for the liberals. Good for Mark Carney. Good for Justin Trudeau. Coachella look like fun this year. Speaking of things we can be proud of, how about Justin Bieber's kind of polarizing low tech laptop set at Coachella? It's also very funny that he was getting attacked in Canada for using a plastic cup when he tried to ban single use cups. Also, he's tweeting about Victor Orban from Coachella. My advice, I said this on PSA, I would say go to Coachella or tweet about Victor Orban. Doing both is probably going to he's going to confuse everybody. I mean, well, usually you go to a place like Coachella, you're you're let's just say ingesting substances that make you think that I'm going to be in a social media blackout. I'm just saying you're probably not going to want to treat tweet to like, you know, however many millions of people he has about some foreign policy issue. He's got, well, Katy Perry's got a lot more. Oh, yeah, she's got a chill. Maybe they could blend, they could merge social media accounts. And, you know, do they have a nickname? Like a, you know, I mean, like, it feels like they should be like have a Bennifer type. Yeah. I don't know. Tell us, you know, sound off in the discord about what No bad ideas in the brainstorm here. Let us know. We'll talk about it next week. Yeah. Anyway, congrats, Canadian progressives. It's kind of funny because Justin was kind of the right Canadian leader for Trump one and Carney's the right Canadian leader for Trump two. Like we need like a woke Canadian, you know, he could be like, that's what Trudeau was. Right. And now we've got this kind of like hard ass banker. Banker dude. Trolling California wines. Yeah. And, you know, Justin Trudeau's dad hooked up with Barbra Streisand. Now he's with Katy Perry. So here we are. And I guess they're drinking Canadian club up there, you know, or Seagram's or whatever it is. Yeah, whatever they drink up there. I do like, I do like bourbon. Anyway. All right. That's it for me and Ben blabbing about stuff. Stick around though. for Ben's conversation with Anand Gopal about his new book about Syria. It's an incredible book, incredible conversation. Check it out. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Helix. Sleep is the most important thing in my life. When I sleep well, I feel great. I'm in a good mood. I'm happy. I'm better able to work and work out and do all the things. When I get a bad night's sleep, I am pissy and your body hurts and you're not as good at work. It's worse than being hungover. Oh, so much worse. So much worse. Having a great mattress makes your sleep better. It just does. And Helix makes buying a mattress easy. Take this Helix Sleep Quiz and it'll match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. Get free shipping and seamless delivery. 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I'm very pleased to be joined by Anand Gopal. He is a writer for The New Yorker. He's won a national magazine award for his writing on the Middle East. He's twice been a Pulitzer finalist for his reporting. He's the author of No Good Man Among the Living, America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. His new book that we're going to talk about is, Days of Love and Rage, A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution. Anand, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So the book is Days of Love and Rage, A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution. And really what this book does is it traces the lives of a number of people that became involved on the beginning of the Syrian revolution in this city, Manbij, inside of Syria that experienced both the drama of confronting and ultimately, you know, kind of shaking off the war. Off the rule of the Assad regime, but then experienced both a form of direct democracy under a revolutionary council, then a rule of ISIS, then a rule of the Syrian Kurds that the United States and others were backing, and then ultimately, obviously, currently living under Ahmed al-Shara. So it tells the story of the entire Syrian civil war kind of through the prism of people in Manbij. I want to start by asking about your process by which you wrote this, because I was really struck in reading this that we live in a time when we're in a time where we're in a time where, you know, journalism is kind of under siege and this kind of true long-form, in-depth reporting is, you know, kind of disappearing, not entirely, but too much around us and people are getting news on social media. And here you are completely immersed in the lives of these characters who went through this extraordinary ordeal over the course of more than a decade. How did you, because you basically recreate, you know, people's, what's happening in their heads in dramatic events, what's happening in rooms that, you know, people like me, you know, have never been in. How did you go about reporting this and recreating essentially the lives of all these people? Well, I started with just interviewing as many people as I can and eventually settled on the six people who become the principal protagonists of the story in the book. But in doing so, I very quickly realized that when asking about people's memories from events that happened 10, 15 years ago, often they're traumatic memories that people will misremember or they will selectively remember. Of course, I was also interviewing people in the context of the Civil War, so there's contrasting interpretations of events. So pretty quickly, I realized that, you know, by myself, I simply wasn't able to access the level of detail I wanted to be able to tell the story. And so I started recruiting Syrians, other individuals who took part in many of the events described in the book. So people who took part in the events who took part in the revolution against the dictator and hired them as research assistants. And so they ended up interviewing their own friends and families, their own comrades who they shared time on the barricades with. And so that opened up people. They were more willing to talk about more intimate moments to their friends and families. In addition to doing that, I was also able to make use of this really voluminous archive of newspapers and social media documentation that took place throughout almost all the events described in the book because Syria was probably the first social media war. So people were going out and filming things on their cell phones and the country was under dictatorship for 40 years in which there were essentially two state-run newspapers. The dictatorship is overthrown in the city that I describe in the book. And all of a sudden, overnight, all these newspapers appear from left-wing to conservative papers and people are going out into street corners with the mimeographed newspapers and handing it out and reading it. So I was able to kind of get like an almost daily blow-by-blow account of what was happening. So with all of this, both the social media archive, the print media, and then the interviews, we conducted almost 2,000 interviews for the book. I was able to triangulate people's experiences. And so I was always able to get, in any scene, I was always able to get multiple witnesses to it so I could be confident to put it down on the page. So I want to ask you about Revolution itself and in particular, one of the things, that I think is really useful about your method is that we meet a number of your characters kind of before the Revolution. We kind of go back into their lives. And they're really, you know, I don't want to use the word ordinary 'cause part of the point of the book is everybody is extraordinary in some fashion. But in the sense that these are people that, you know, they're vendors running stalls or they're students or, you know, they're not, you know, the elite or they're not people that you would think of as revolutionary leaders. And. What I want to ask about is what sense you got. There's a character, O'Day, for instance, who's one of your main protagonists, who, you know, seemingly you would not think this person is, you know, going to be a leading revolutionary. And yet he finds himself repeatedly in circumstances early in the Revolution where there's a crowd, they're quiet, they didn't know what to do, or they're literally even standing in front of, you know, military police that they know are going to beat them, potentially detain and torture them. And he finds himself shouting, you know, revolutionary slogans down with the regime or, you know. And why do you think it is that some people do that and others don't? Like, why did O'Day find it in him to do that? Because, you know, to me, you always wonder about who has the ability to be at the vanguard. Did you learn anything about what, why him and not other people in the crowd in Manbij, you know, who were willing to do that? - Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think one of the things we tend not to think about often is the nature of character, meaning one's character traits, the virtues one might have, whether they tend to be courageous or loyal, et cetera. And somebody like O'Day, who I would think, when we meet him in the book, he starts as a sort of apolitical layabout, smoking hash on rooftops, et cetera, and slowly gets inducted into the uprising and finds himself, becoming a revolutionary leader. You would have never predicted, I think, beforehand that that's where he would have ended up. But there was always a kind of brashness to him that if one really studied his character prior to the revolution, it may have shown itself in different ways, the way he rejected the tyrannical rule of his father, for instance. And when those personal characteristics are given the right context, sometimes they can become, politically meaningful. And we have another character in the book, Abdul Hadi, who, somebody who comes from a very poor background, always had a chip on his shoulder, somebody who felt festering resentment towards some of the more wealthier citizens of his city, which is a fairly common feeling, but all of a sudden put into the maelstrom of revolution, that character trait of being resentful ends up manifesting in a kind of dark politics as we go on. So I think it's one of those things you can never know in advance what you're looking for. But once ordinary people are thrust into extraordinary circumstances, sometimes these kinds of character traits really shine. - Yeah, and the other, the arc of these characters, let's just take those two. And again, you don't have to read the book to even kind of get why these threads are interesting, but you should read the book. But one of the things you described that is remarkable, and I think not fully understood, is that a place like Manbij, after, the civil war really started, and the Assad regime lost control of some territory, it was kind of, well, it was effectively self-governing with this kind of revolutionary council that your main characters, a number of them participated in. And you could understand the similar impulses to, or the different impulses that could lead those two characters, Odeh and Abdel Hadi, to participate in revolution, but then they become quite different in their orientation when it comes time to govern. And you described, what began as a very idealistic exercise, you know, something that all of us, you know, even who have not, you know, been to Syria could see ourselves and the impulses to, you know, we're going to self-govern and we're going to set up these different councils and it's going to be great and we're going to have freedom. But quickly disputes emerge, you know, and Odeh is the kind of guy who ends up frustrated and disgusted with the whole thing. And Abdel Hadi is the kind of guy who ends up literally like making his own peace with ISIS. And we'll get into that as they come in. I mean, what did you learn about democracy itself and how individuals who've never experienced it act when, you know, the revolution transfers to governance? So when people went out initially to protest against the regime, everybody was marching and risking their lives for this idea of freedom. There was no question in their minds what freedom meant. It was just freedom meant being free from the dictator. As soon as they did free themselves from the dictator, now a new question of what does freedom actually mean in the context of governing oneself arises. And there were some in the city, especially those from middle class and upper middle class backgrounds who articulated a vision of freedom, which was something like we want freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of markets, freedom meant kind of being left alone by the government. And on the other hand, you had people who tended to be more on the poor and working class side of the community who said, well, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, that's great. But at the same time, we're facing an affordability crisis in our city. Bread, which is a basic staple, price of bread was going sky high. Lots of people were fleeing from other parts of Syria to Membij. And so therefore rents were increasing. And so for them, they were arguing for some freedom. So freedom was not just to be left alone, but freedom was to be given the resources to live your best life. And one of the lessons I drew from reporting this out was the way in which democracy really depends on the, maybe the latter conception of freedom, which is one in which people have, have a sense of an equal say, which they can only have, they have enough to eat to have, they can make their rent every, every month. And if they don't, then people will very quickly tend to grow disillusioned with the fact that they don't have enough to eat to have enough to eat. And that's what we're seeing with a kind of very limited democracy while not having a more substantive form of self-governance. And that, that tragically ends in this case with a dictatorial movement, ISIS taking over the city. Yeah. And I, I, what is also interesting is you, you meet these people, they're, they're familiar to us, even if they're, you know, the circumstances, their lives might be foreign to us. They want the same things. They want to fall in love. They want to raise a family. They want to make a good living. They'd like to be free in terms of, you know, they want to be free. They want to be able to say what they want. And we see them living under, you know, a Ba'athist Arab nationalist regime of Bashar al-Assad. We see them living briefly under this revolutionary council that kind of dissolves into factions fighting each other. We see them live under ISIS. And then, you know, kind of CODA is into the Syrian defense forces, democratic forces come in and, and, and then we'll get to the very end of Assad regime. But, but really, you know, we see Arab nationalism, Islam, Islamist chaos, and yet they're the same people, you know, underneath that. I mean, it felt like in miniature what's happened to the region, you know, all these different ideologies imposed on people and them trying to figure it out. I mean, what did you learn about and how did you see the experience of these people in Manbij as representative of kind of the, how these ideologies fail to deliver what people want? And how do you, do you compare them to each other? So, you know, most of the region for 30, 40 years lived under some version of Arab nationalism, which on the one hand was secular. On the other hand, there was a kind of agreement or a social contract that underpinned a lot of these Arab regimes, which is that we will give citizens a modicum of economic opportunities. Usually that meant some kind of minimum welfare state, essentially, in which people could, have some social mobility. Maybe your children could have a slightly better life than you had. A lot, millions of farmers moved from the countryside to the cities and you had the growth of the middle class. All of this happened from the 60s to the 90s. But in exchange for that basic economic opportunity, you had to surrender all political rights whatsoever. So this is the kind of the Faustian pact that was at the heart of all of the Arab regimes. What happens beginning in the 1990s is one by one that that pact gets undone because of widespread privatization of the economies in a lot of these countries. And so now by 2011, people lost a lot of the economic sort of social safety net, and yet they still didn't have any political rights. And that's what was the basis of the uprising in 2011 across the region. And then so Membage then goes through his period of, I would say, like, experimental democracy for 18 months in which they're trying out different, different versions of democracy, I think, kind of more quintessentially liberal democracies, one version, other kinds of participatory democracies. And indeed, there are there are examples of this throughout the region. But one of the things that the liberal democracy failed to deliver to people, not just in Membage, but in the early period of the Arab Spring in Egypt, and in other places was the way in which it didn't always address the needs of more working class people in those communities. So there was a lot of it is about political rights. But not enough about economic opportunities for the poor. And this opened the door for what I would consider more right wing forces to make a plan in this case, the right wing forces were Islamist groups who did promise more economic opportunities for people. And so in that way, Membage kind of tracks the trajectory of the region overall. And, you know, in the backdrop, I mean, you don't focus on the United States that much. But even just listening to your description, it feels in a way like every single thing we exported or imposed failed, you know, like, like the, the Arab nationalism was kind of some of it was an extension of Cold War politics from the West. The privatization certainly was the kind of in vogue idea after the Cold War. The kind of secular freedom and democracy, liberalism that appealed maybe to certain middle class didn't deliver for, you know, people's needs. people's pocketbooks, as you're saying. In the war itself, you know, the administration I was a part of, it felt like everything we did was wrong. You know, if we were not arming the opposition, we were not supporting them. And then when we were arming them, it was not coherent or it was the wrong people. I come away with a sense from my own experience and from reading this of like, we tend to make things worse, you know, even if our intentions are good or even maybe if they're not good, obviously. I mean, how do you evaluate U.S. policy in this region, you know, Syria in particular, but really the whole region, in terms of what would actually be helpful to people? Is it just to butt out or is there something we haven't tried? Like, how do you come away from all your journals? I think the, when people in the region, in Syria in particular, think about the U.S. and American power, there's probably three main features that loom heavily in their imagination. The first is, as I mentioned briefly, is the American mode of capitalism, privatization, kind of very pro-market policies to the detriment of living standards of many people in these areas. The second is the Iraq war. The shadow of the Iraq war looms very large on what happened in Syria for a number of reasons, one of which is that it was out of the chaos and the maelstrom of the Iraq war that ISIS first appears and asserts itself across the border in Syria. And the third is U.S. support of Israel. And so what that meant was there was a period early on in the uprising in which people, and I describe some of this in the book, were debating, like, what should the foreign role be? And some people wanted arms to protect against the bombings from the aircraft. Nobody really wanted boots on the ground, right? But there was a lot of suspicion in these ranks because they said, well, how could it be that the U.S. is supporting Israel, the U.S. causes chaos in the Iraq war? They're not really here to support our interests. Whatever U.S. administration was actually doing, that was perception on the ground. And it's hard for me to imagine sort of turning around sort of decades of distrust just from one particular policy at that moment. So what was much more important was that on the ground, there was a brief period where maybe these rebel groups could have been armed, but very quickly, these groups turned to banditry because they didn't have outside support. And this created the grounds for Islamist groups to come in. Gulf states started to pour in their supporting weapons and fragmented the politics in the country. But at the same time, it's important to remind ourselves that the Assad regime would not have been able to do this without the support of the U.S. and Iran. It would not have been able to do what it could have done if it didn't have its own form of external foreign support from Russia and Iran. From the outside, it seemed like a happy ending when Ahmed al-Shara and his forces marched marched into Damascus and Assad was forced to flee. I'm curious, and you know, you hinted it at the end, you take us all the way up through that, but for the people that you're characters, was that a happy ending? I'm curious, have you been to Manbij since the fall of Assad? And if so, or if you've even just been in touch, what is the, are people hopeful about the future? Do they feel like the revolution in some way succeeded or they just feel like, okay, this is the new reality, we're dealing with it? I did go to Manbij shortly after Assad fell and I was able to talk to some of the characters in the book about their experience. The first thing is nobody expected this to happen. Everyone had assumed that the revolution was completely lost and it had been dormant for years at that point. It was a kind of perfect storm of events that led the regime to collapse. And I think the regime fell more than the rebels succeeded, if that makes sense. And so you have this new rebel group that is in power and they are, I would describe them as would-be authoritarians who perhaps lack the capacity of the previous regime, the Assad regime, to really control the country in the way that the Baathists did. But the experience that tens of thousands of Syrians have of getting a voice through protesting, through building alternative structures of governance, that experience has not been easily effaced. So that while the, the new authorities have committed massacres and they've attempted to delay elections, today there is still freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in Syria. It's embattled, but those freedoms are there. And that is a direct legacy of the revolution. And I think for some Syrians who are more looking in a more generational sense, I think this is not, the struggle for democracy in Syria is not something that just happened for two years in 2011 to 2013. It's something that's going to take a generation or two. And there may be, several uprisings, several forms of social mobilization that will ultimately lead to what some Syrians hope would be a more just democracy. And so these people we meet as young people who are now middle-aged, it's a lifetime's work, not just that moment on the barricades. Exactly. It's a lifetime's work. And they, they themselves perhaps are now tending to their families. They're also conveying the, the memories of what they went through. And there's new generations of activists. When I was in Bembej last, just a month or two after the fall of Assad, I saw, and I described this in the book, I saw a new protest. Yeah. And these are most of the people in that protest had never before protested, but maybe their parents had or their uncles had or their friends had. Yeah. And so you can see them bequeathing this legacy of resistance to regeneration. So just a couple more things. I mean, we're obviously speaking in the midst of the Iran war or the pause in the Iran war. What, what, what do you take from your long experience reporting? And this about, you know, the, the, one of the pretenses, I mean, I don't believe it, but of, of this war was that we were somehow coming to the aid of these protesters and going to end this regime. What, how do you evaluate what's happening in Iran now? And how do you evaluate what would actually be most helpful to the people that we've seen in various movements for change and, and inside of Iran? Well, it's interesting. There are several parallels between what's happened in Iran and Syria because Iranians have risen up repeatedly again and again since 2009 against a very repressive regime. And I think if the reports we can trust the reports out of Iran initially in the very, very early stages was widespread support for regime change. But very quickly people realized exactly what you said that the current war was a pretext and it's not a war of liberation. And more recent reports saying that a lot of people in Iran now after seeing the devastation that the U.S. is causing in that country have reconsidered because and you saw this often in Syria too, that while people are opposed to the dictator, the one thing that's possibly worse than dictatorship is is civil war and the chaos of civil war. And the U.S. intervening in the country without a real plan for what to do on day two is a recipe for chaos and disaster. And I think a lot of, a lot of Iranians see that today. And the last thing I wanted to ask you is just how did your own views about let's say democracy or freedom change in reporting this book? Well, I think in the beginning I had what I would think is a fairly standard view of democracy. Democracy is something that happens when you get to choose your leader or choose your representatives every two or four years. It happens for five minutes and what I saw on the ground is a different kind of democracy in which, there was all these formations were called assemblies and clubs that appeared overnight and took part in the sort of democratic life of the city. And it was it was clear in a kind of microcosm how important the question of who gets the rule is. And if you go back to the original idea of democracy, ancient Greeks demos means non-elites actually. And so democracy is the rule of non-elites. And that means the rule of ordinary people. And you can I think one of the experiences of reporting this book is it led me to reassess democracies around the world in terms of to what extent do ordinary people have power over their own lives and to what extent is it vested instead in billionaires and judges and consultants and others. And I think that's a way to assess the health of a democracy. Yeah. Actually, one other thing I want to ask is it kind of always sticks with you when you read a book like this and I know I think you use pseudonyms right for some of the characters at least, right? Just for a couple. For a couple. How do they feel about, have they read it? I mean, you know, because it's so personal, you know, I mean, I'm just curious. I always sometimes wonder, like, when you have subjects where you go this into their lives and the events are so dramatic. I'm curious what the reaction is of your subjects to the book. Well, none of them are read at start to finish yet, and partly because it's only in English. But I have read out parts, large parts of it to them. After the book came out and I think several people quite moved because they talked to me years ago at this point because it took a long time for the book to come together. And so it brought back a lot of the most intimate memories in listening to these stories. Yeah. Well, I think you honor them by, you know, showing such complete portraits of them. The book is Days of Love and Rage. I truly, you know, can't recommend it enough. Anand, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks again, Anand Gopal, for joining the show. We'll talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski. Our producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our associate producer is Anisha Banerjee. We get production support from Saul Rubin. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes. The show is engineered, mixed, and edited by Jordan Kantor. Audio support by Charlotte Landis. Thank you to our digital team, Ben Heathcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Towles, and Ryan Young. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Adrian Hill is our senior vice president of news and politics. 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