Pentagon Covers Up Iran War Casualties

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All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click "Request My Ballet." Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org Welcome back to POD SAVE the World of Tommy Ketor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Then one way that politicians sometimes try to humanize themselves or soften their public image is by getting a dog, you know, I don't need to tell you this, they're great companions, they're cute, they're cheaper than kids. So we had FDR, he had his beloved Fala, Nixon had checkers, the Biden said those German shepherds that kept biting everybody. Not sure about those guys, yeah. I don't know about those ones either, but I've never seen a politician quite embrace their pet as lovingly as this. Let's watch. The choice that your decision to defect to one nation is dragging you further into a place of intolerance and racial discrimination, you're defending your leader, but are you really comfortable with where she is taking you? What? My feet. Sit down. Sorry, dog. Okay, that was an Australian politician named Barnaby Joyce, is he this guy before Ben? Yeah. Nope, that's the first. Okay, okay, he's a fan favorite, so he's a charming fellow. He's now a member of the right wing one nation party, but not long ago, he served as deputy prime minister of Australia, he's also a leader of the national party, but Ben, believe it or not, this is not the first time that Barnaby Joyce has declared his love for a man's best friend on national television. Check out this clip from 2015. The next issue, which is a gentleman by the name of John Christopher Depp, 51 years old, otherwise, AKA Jack Sparrow, and he's decided to bring into our nation two dogs, basically looks like he snuck them in. We found out he snuck them in because we saw them taking it to a poodle groomer. Now, Mr Depp has to either take his dogs back to California, or we're going to have to use the name of them. We start letting movie stars, even though they've been the sexiest man alive twice to come into our nation, then why don't we just break the laws for everybody? So it's time that pistol and boo dug it off back to the United States. Maybe if you threaten to kill dogs on TV, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to have one in the future. That's my idea. I'm not here to defend John Depp, but I'm here to defend pistol and boo. That was a pretty hard swirve to nuke him. Do you remember this when this happened? I feel like there's a live feed of his apartment. I do. I remember being the pandemic, but no, it was 2015. When I googled it, it was referred to, I guess, as the war on Terrier. It's funny because I remember this pandemic, too. I think any truly bizarre thing that involves bringing stuff into a country I just associate with the pandemic. Hopefully, pistol and boo made it out alive. Yeah. No, I think they made it. OK. I mean, what happens? Johnny Depp brought his dogs to Australia. We did go to the proper quarantine protocol. Having been there recently, they take it quite seriously. But you probably don't need to threaten to kill them. You can probably just ask them nicely to leave. I think they're OK, though. Also been in 2024, the daily mail ran a video of Joyce. He was taking a phone call. He was on the street. He fell off a potted plant around midnight. I'm assuming he had a few. He landed on his back and then just lay there and did the phone call. This is about midnight in Canberra. And some bystander walked by and filmed it. And she said that she talked to the daily mail. And this is an actual line from the story that I wanted to read you. This is Barnaby Joyce's wife said her husband was not referring to her when he called someone a quote, dead fucking seward during the phone call. Then she said, I think he was calling himself one. He likes to self-legulate. Yeah. Sounds like a colorful guy, you know? Yeah. I'd want him anywhere near positions of power and responsibility, so we know. No, no, no. Look, this started as a cold open on one funny video and then they went way too deep on Barnaby Joyce because I missed the world cup. I should have been watching like Cabo Verde versus Switzerland, but instead I was YouTubing this asshole. Yeah, I somehow, the algorithm is not feeding me Barnaby, but maybe not Will. And I'll get to keep up with his various vendettas against animals and other living beings. With any luck. With any luck. All right, we got a great show. A major escalation fighting between the US and Iran over the weekend. There were multiple US casualties, accusations that the Pentagon is covering them up. And then a couple of signs this war could be escalating even further, so a lot of bad news on the Iran front. Then we're going to talk about a State Department report on Cuba and how it's being used to smear and potentially target left-wing individuals and organizations all across the country. We'll talk about politics in the prediction markets, like Kalshi and Polymarket, the wildfires in Canada. And why Trump is punishing our neighbors to the North. We'll get it to the first couple of actions by new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham. And then we will end by taking the piss out of some right-wing candidates and organizations in the UK. Always fun, Ben. You see, CPAC has started in Britain. I know. With some funding coming from the Trump administration, too. Oh, really? How much think of them? Their new international aid budget includes some line items for right-wing think tanks in places like Britain. Are you kidding me? Glad to see we're on that side. Yeah. We're like zeroing out HIV/AIDS funding for kids. Yeah. Okay. Okay. We're giving it to Liz Ross. That's going. That's great. Finally, you're going to hear my interview with Alexi Sorkin. He's from the Kiev Independent. We talk about the security situation in Ukraine. This recent series of massive ballistic missile strikes by the Russians on major cities across Ukraine. We'll talk about the latest on Ukraine's missile defense capabilities, including President Trump giving them a license to manufacture Patriot missiles in Ukraine and how long that might take. We talk about the strikes by the Ukrainian side on Crimea, on Russian oil and gas infrastructure, and then this major fallout from President Zelensky firing his defense minister, which led to huge protests in the streets. I should note, though, Ben, I spoke with Alexi before we learned that President Zelensky had fired Alexander Sirsky, who is the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, so they're actually a huge development since I did that interview this morning. Yeah, not good to fire the defense minister and the commander. When things seem to be going well, too, it's politics in Ukraine are pretty volatile right now. Yeah, volatile politics. It's a very interesting conversation in an interview because the defense minister, Fedorov, is like 35 years old. The Sirsky is 60, so this is a generational fight. It's a debate about tactics and technology and accusations that Sirsky was running kind of like a Soviet-era military strategy while Fedorov was developing all these new drones and accountability and data-based targeting. It's very interesting and the political fallout is huge because a lot of people think Zelensky may have fired Fedorov because he viewed him as a political threat to us. It's a rival. Yeah, exactly. So, a lot to watch there, because Iran sucks up all the attention, but it doesn't mean there's another war going on. I know. It did make me feel badly that we had not covered Ukraine as much recently. It's like just the agenda fills with a crisis after a crisis and it's like almost easy to forget. There's this four-year running nightmare of a war in the background. I mean, it's not easy to forget for anyone in Ukraine or on the front lines. It's like so much on our plate here. All right. So, we have this terrible news over the weekend from the war in Ukraine. We got the death toll for the U.S. service members from that war is now increased to 18. So, first lieutenant Tyler James Fien and private Isabella Gonzalez were killed by an Iranian ballistic missile attack on the U.S.-based in Jordan. Private Gonzalez was 19 years old. It's always like heartbreaking when you see how you service members are. A third service member is presumed dead, remains were found. at the blast site, but that person has not been identified yet publicly. The Pentagon also announced that another US service member in Iraq was killed during a control detonation of an unexploded ordinance from an Iranian drone. I would like to better understand what happened there. That sounds awful, kind of thing that should be avoidable, but I don't know, we'll learn more. On top of that, nearly 100 service members have been injured in the conflict since July 7th, so the past couple of weeks. The Pentagon says the vast majority of those injuries were, quote, minor concussions, however, they had been far from candid about casualty figures, which we should dig into. So we've since learned that the base in Jordan that was targeted was hit several times over the course of 24 hours. Dozens of soldiers were injured, destroyed a bunch of helicopters, and the question becomes how does Trump respond? On truth, social, he posted, quote, every time Iran kills an American soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over. This directive has been passed on to the Secretary of War, Pete Hexath, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Daniel Kane in every leader in the military, end quote, depending on his hit targets in Iran for about 10 consecutive nights now, Iran at the same time has been hitting US targets or targeting US sites in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Warningly, it seems like a lot of these Iranian air strikes were targeting radar and missile defense systems, which, if successful, could make the bases even more vulnerable, of course, in Jordan, they were managed to hit the barracks that sound like they were barely fortified at all, leading to these casualties. Iran has also had some tankers in the strait of humus, so then let's start with this question of, or issue of transparency around US casualties from the Pentagon. The Pentagon, they deny that they're withholding casualty information. They're kind of huffly saying, like, we're not going to release anything that might tell Iran that their targeting is going well or help them operationally, and they're also arguing they have no obligation to release information about kind of minor injuries. What's your reaction to that? So, listeners, regular listeners will know that we've been talking about this for months, that there's a lack of candor about the damage that's being done in terms of the injuries to American surface members, the damage to US bases, military facilities, and embassies. This has been very clear, Tommy, one because, you know, if you talk to anybody in the Gulf or any of these countries that are being attacked, they'll tell you that there's far more significant damage than is being reported by the Pentagon or that's being seen. But the other thing, Tommy, you and I used to be responsible for this, you know, like, you have to oversee the communications around what was going on in wars, and this, nothing about this feels normal. And I think what people need to bear in mind is that this has been a process, right? We covered kicking out the Pentagon press corps, so they're not people actual journalists. You've got like, you know, the Mike Lindell pillow, my pillow guy has a, you know, correspondent in the Pentagon briefing room, not like the actual journalists' resources. So you're not getting the kind of reporting from people there. You're also kind of getting these very opaque statements. You know, you either get some insane petexess statement about, you know, we've won the war for the thousandth time or we've destroyed the entire Navy, or you get this kind of very minimalist statement from the sent, sent-com central command that is running the war, that will report a death and make kind of a vague illusion to injuries without any detail about the nature of those injuries. And look, the reality is this is just an effort to hide the costs of the war from the American people. Like they do not want you to know how much damage has been done to our facilities, how much that's going to cost to repair, which could run well into the many billions of dollars. They don't want you to know the extent of the injuries of service members. They don't want you to pay attention. They want to be able to do whatever they want to do without any accountability. And normally also, Congress would be holding hearings on these matters and forcing answers information out to the public, but because the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the very spare hearings if we get yield very little information. And when it's like Hegseth, you get this kind of performative bullshit from him. So this is by design. This is what it feels like to have an authoritarian system leading you into a war that is illegal that nobody wants. They have to conceal the information because the more information gets out about this war, the less Americans want any part of it. Yeah, and it's like normally these kind of numbers are just like updated on a website. It's supposed to be very like routine and kind of technocratic done by professional public information officers when in the US military. It's hard not to feel like data like this would not be being withheld because it seems to contradict statements by Trump and by Hegseth and by Vance that we have eviscerated their missile capability and the Iranian military is decimated blah, blah, blah. It's also, I think, relevant that a lot of these strikes happened in Jordan. The Wall Street Journal noted that Jordan is among the most permissive countries in the Arab world when it comes to allowing US spaces to operate from their territory. A bunch of other countries in the region have shut down US access to their airspace at times to try to prevent us from doing private event, Trump from doing stupid things to escalate the war. It seems like the targeting of Jordan is deliberate by Iran and is probably an attempt to change public opinion within Jordan about US participation and cooperation. Yeah. And bear in mind that there are 50,000 US service members scattered across this region. By the way, I think far more than is necessary and that's something that a future democratic president should look at, but it's hard to secure. But the Iranians have figured out is they have a very broad target set. If the United States is hitting things inside Iran at increasing pace and scale, which we can talk about, but they have in their target list, they've got US bases facilities anywhere there's US military personnel. They've got the Gulf states and they want to extract a cost on both the global economy. So, you know, hitting things like energy infrastructure and obviously closing down the straight-of-form moves. But also just, you know, if something gets hit, I've noticed, you know, if a desalination plant gets hit inside of Iran, like they're hitting one in Kuwait, you know, so they're seeing the entire region essentially as presenting targets that in their mind match up with what is being done to them. And they show that there are all these different ways of carrying a cost. So the other thing we should point out, Tommy, is that we've burned through a lot of our missile defenses. We have less today than we did at the beginning of the war. That's a finite resource. I think we get comfortable with this idea that we can just shoot everything down. Well, we can't for two reasons. One, contrary to everything that Trump and Hegseth and Rubio have said, they clearly maintain a significant ballistic missile capability. I saw, you know, potentially over 2,000 ballistic missiles and they're able to reproduce them. They have obviously a significant drone capacity. And so of their maintaining these capabilities and we have less and less defenses and we have to make judgment calls, right, about where to put them. Well, stuff is increasingly going to get through. And so the more this war goes on, the less capable we are defending. And then lastly, when you see the precision targeting that they're doing in places like Jordan, you have to think that in addition to Iranian intelligence, they're probably getting intelligence from the Russians, too, because they seem to know where to hit things with a degree of precision with other ballistic missiles or with drones. And so this should be worrying. The longer this war goes on, the more American casualties there's going to be, the more damage there's going to be to U.S. allies, the more it's going to create rifts. They want to create divisions between not just public opinion in those countries, but governments in the U.S. So the Iranians to use a Trump phrase again have a lot of cards here. And it just doesn't seem like the Pentagon has taken any steps to harden the infrastructure where these service members are living and staying and working. It's just shocking to me that you could be serving in Jordan and living in basically an unprotected barracks that could be hit by a ballistic missile. And nothing's been done about it in the last year. Pots of the world is brought to you by Quince. Summer is all about relaxation, which is why I always reach for Quince. They're comfortable. Well-made essentials are the perfect everyday staples to live in all season long. Quince is 100% European linen pants and shirts are breathable, easy to throw on in the summer upgrade, your rotation needs starting at just $34. Their T's are so soft, you'll never want to take them off and the lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly what you want when summer nights cool down. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for exceptional quality, not brand markup. The other day, I saw some cool shoes on the internet and I looked at the price. 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Don't let stigma stand in the way of support start therapy with BetterHelp, sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/CricketWorld. That's BetterHELP.com/CricketWorld. Let's talk about some of those escalation risks, Ben. There's a couple in my mind first. On Monday, the Houthi Rebels in Yemen threatened to put in place a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia and the Bobbleman substrate, which is how ships get in and out of the Red Sea. We talked about this last week. The Saudis bombed this Houthi target. We both were like, why the fuck would they do that? They've had a basically a ceasefire in place in 2022. Now, in the least surprising news possible, you have the Houthi's threatening retaliation. The reason this matter so much, when the Strait of Hormuz was closed, the Saudis were still able to export oil by shipping it west through a pipeline to the Red Sea side of the country and exporting it that way. At the Houthi's managed to prevent the Saudis from exporting oil, it would remove several million more barrels of oil per day from the market, and then it could create serious, long-term problems for the Saudi producers if they have to lock in their wells. That's obviously along with the long ways off, but it's something they're thinking about, I'm sure. The impact would be even greater if the Houthi's block were to tear other shipping through the Red Sea. Earlier today, Trump was asked about this. He said the Houthi's hadn't actually done anything yet, but he's a liar and time will tell. The other major escalation risk was outlined, hopefully, for us via a leak to the Wall Street Journal. Here's the lead of that story. "Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of uranium enrichment centrifuges into tunnels deep inside a mountain last fall. Israeli and US officials say a development that would heighten concern that Tehran could reconstitute its nuclear program." That story says these materials were moved after the 12-day war when the US and Israel first bombed Iran's nuclear site. Trump was asked about this Picac's mountain concern during a press conference on Tuesday. Let's watch. "Do you believe that Iran has moved nuclear centrifuges into Picac's mountain? And when you say we're not done yet, what is left to finish?" "Well, I think that they may have. We don't have it on record. All we do is read the fake news. You know, we see the news is so wrong so many times. So, you know, maybe this one they have, right? But it's okay. It doesn't mean anything unless they have the material. You're talking about the centrifuges. They don't have, we follow the material. That's where the action is. And we'll be hitting that area very probably pretty soon. And there's not a thing they can do about it. You know, normally I wouldn't say that. If I thought they could do something about it, I would never say that. But we'll be hitting that area pretty soon. And very heavily. Interesting logic train there. It's like, it doesn't matter, but we're going to bomb it anyway. I guess now they can move it. They prevent that from happening, but here we are. So, but the broader problem with Trump's threat there to bomb Picac's mountain is that experts believe these facilities could be between 300 and 450 feet under a solid rock. It is not clear whether even the US bunker-busting bombs that were used against the previous nuclear sites could reach these areas. James Ackton, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program at an interesting Twitter thread about this question of whether the bunker busters could hit Picac's mountain. He said, there's a debate about how deep the biggest US bunker buster can actually burrow into rock before exploding. And the range is presumed to be 60 feet to 200 feet, which again is not deep enough to get to the deepest parts of Picac's mountain. So, it's not clear that this work. He also pointed out the strike at Fort O was only effective because he hit a ventilation shaft. And then even then they had to drop 14 of the massive ordinance penetrator weapons to finish the job. So, big picture, we don't know if Picac's mountain could be targeted. We don't really know what's happening within it because the IAEA does not have access to the site because Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and got rid of IAEA access. So, Ben, not the most subtly careful in the Israelis. Interesting that Trump decided to just comment on it and preview an air strike, but what did you make of this? First of all, there's two governments with massive credibility issues. So every time you see a leak of Israeli intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program, you know, this is a bit of a boy who cried wolf, right? Like, it's always some pretext for why the United States needs to get deeper into the war. And so, this one may be true, but like, we've heard Prime Minister Netanyahu say for like well over a decade that Iran was like, you know, two weeks away from the nuclear weapon. So, it feels like the leak clearly had an interest to pressure Trump to do something. And then it bears repeating that Trump has said that the Iranian nuclear program is obliterated after the 12-day war, you know. And now he's nonsensical. It's not just a nuclear program, it's not just a nuclear fuel. The nuclear dust, which he's referring to there, I think, with the material, that's the product of the nuclear program. The nuclear program is the scientist, is the centrifuges, is the uranium that you mine and put into the centrifuges. And then it's the fuel, right? And so you can't say we've obliterated the program. They just had centrifuges and their fuel and their scientists. What exactly we've done here? This, the logic train of this would lead Americans to say, you're telling me that we've gone to war with this country multiple times now. If you count the 12-day war as a different war. And we've been bombing them for months now. And they've got centrifuges in a mountain. They've got the nuclear fuel summer. We don't, maybe we know, maybe we don't know where that is. It just shows that they don't have strategy because the reality is, we can have all these conversations about massive ordnance penetrators, these bunker busting bombs. The only way that you're going to verifiably get that material or those centrifuges out is either with a nuclear deal in which there are international inspectors who can go in and verify that. Or it's with masses amounts of U.S. ground forces going in and getting into a real fighting war on the ground. And I don't think there's any appetite for that whatsoever. You cannot fix these problems from the air. This is the problem with their whole war strategy. And so if you look at what they're doing, you know, they seem to be trying to bomb infrastructure associated with the IRGC. I don't think the IRGC looks like they're ready to capitulate anytime soon. They're willing to weather more of that. So that's not going to work. Then Trump saying like if every American killed, we're going to kill a bunch of people or blow up a bunch of stuff. Let me tell you, like however upset you are and you're about American service members being killed, like vengeance is not a war strategy. Like it's a horrible way to think about targeting, you know, and so these guys just, yeah, they just don't know what they're doing. And it's very clear what the Iranians are doing. They're just holding the line. If we can survive and stay in power and demonstrate that we control that straight, it doesn't really matter how much damage Trump tries to do to their economy or to bombing in the vicinity of their nuclear program. They have a nuclear program. They control the straight and they're still in power. And one last thing on this pickaxe mountain piece, Hugh Hewitt, who's kind of a right wing kind of right wing commentator who kisses Trump's ass, big Nixon fan. He's a radio host on the Salem radio network. He's obsessed with pickaxe mountain. Trump was on a show the other day and he was asking him about it. I noticed Ben there was a Wall Street Journal report recently. I think it's over the weekend on the stunning amount of money that Israel is spending on PR propaganda to try to fix its image. I think the total amount for 2026 is $700 million. One of the people they've hired is a guy named Brad Parscale. He was Trump's former campaign manager. I think he has a $45 million contract. Parscale is not only has his own kind of like company. He's also the chief strategy officer at Salem Media in his contract for Israel involves quote, "integration of narrative messaging into Salem media network properties." So one has to wonder is Israel telling Brad Parscale to tell people like Hugh Hewitt to ask about these issues because there's a whole lot of money flowing around that suggests that might be the case. Just one question I have. Entirely plausible and in line with how Israel approaches messaging, like the closer you can get to decision makers. And this is the thing about like the four-sale nature of right-wing media. Like we've seen the Russians do this, right? We've seen the Russians literally buy influencers in the United States. Now, frankly, not new for Israel to be doing something similar. But it just goes to show in a fracture media environment like how vulnerable we are as a society to like Israel dumping a bunch of money into Trump cronies and suddenly Hugh Hewitt is like laundering potentially. We don't know for sure. Israeli narratives are really interest, right? You should bomb this mountain. I mean, it just, every now and then, actually, there's an anecdote that kind of illustrates how absurd the times are that we're in. It is plausible. Again, we don't know for sure that like Israel pays Brad Parscale and then Hugh Hewitt is trying to do targeting with Trump on a show. Like that is fucking nuts that we even can entertain that as a possibility. And meanwhile, the finance minister, Basil Lowe Smotrich, he had a quote that he gave to some media or some outlet in Israel after their like national security conversation last night where he said of the war in Iran, the state of Israel has no interest in joining a contained confrontation between Iran and the United States. The current situation is the best one for us. We know. We know, buddy. Good for you guys. I mean, this is exactly the fuck these guys. Like this is exactly what you worry about, which is what did they do? They dragged the United States into this war because beeping in. Yeah, I can't say that. I can't say that. I'm scared. Okay. I'll get y'all on Twitter, you'll get y'all there. I'll get y'all on Twitter, like let's, oh get, they had a very persuasive briefing in these white contrusions, like how dare you? Yeah, and they convinced Trump to do this dumb thing. And then it's like, now the US is in, oh, we don't have to be a part of this anymore. I mean, give me a break. If you ever needed more evidence, then we need to rethink the entirety of this relationship with this completely maniacal government. It's this, it's, it's Smotritch who would have been cheering Israel joining the US on the front end. And now it's a go, we can take a step back. Let these guys, let them do it for us. Meanwhile, last second around, Trump's kind of trying to jam some around connected legislation through Congress. There's the NDA Bill, which is the annual bill authorizing Pentagon programs. Democrats are currently blocking the $1.15 trillion NDA Bill to pressure Trump to end the war. Trump has also requested another $87 billion in Iran's supplemental funding. The Hexath and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Cain, we're up on the hill today talking about it. I just want to point out to anyone who works on Capitol Hill or any members of Congress listening that, as you decide on how to vote on this stuff, I wanted to flag an economist Yuga of Poll for you that shows that the Iran War is the least popular war since polling started. How about that for a stat? It has a minus 30 approval rating, a stat which the economist notes, the Vietnam War didn't hit until six years in. Again, for context, the Afghanistan War started at 90% support and it took 13 years to dip below 50% approval, breakdowns by group. The Iran War is 84 points under water with Democrats. It's 52 points under water with independence. It only has a 72% approval among Maga Republicans and is 25 points under water with non-Maga Republicans. So it's like it's hard to imagine a more clear cut vote than this, vote no against any funding, any support for this conflict, a period. This is the biggest no-brainer in the world and the only two things that add are those Maga numbers too. Like, there's a tiny, tiny portion of those people that actually support the war, right? The constituency, now that Lindsey Graham is no longer with us, we're down to like Hugh Hewitt and Ben Shapiro. Yeah, it's exactly right. So most of those bagabotters probably don't support the war. They're asked something that Trump is doing, they say they support it, right? So there's not a lot of depth to that support. There's not a lot of people that are like, yeah, we really got to finish the job in Iran. Like, you don't, you don't sense that anywhere. Not a lot of Maga Chugs who are like, look, we got to get Pickax Mountain. I've been saying it all along. This is really important. Yeah, yeah, there's people sitting in there. Yeah, like in the diner, like the Trump West Virginia diner is saying like, you know what? I really voted for Trump. I voted for Trump so you could take care of Pickax Mountain. Can I afford my heating bill? No, do I want to bond Pickax Mountain? Absolutely. That is how I view the world, that's important to me. But the other thing is like, who in earth is like, out there wanting to spend a truly enough dollar of an offence period? No one. Like, so if part of the concern is that you're like, not voting for the overall defense package because you're blocking this, well, you shouldn't vote for that. Like nobody should vote for a trillion half dollar defense, but at a time we have such massive needs. It's crazy. It's time to completely reverse this premise that you have to vote for defense spending or else you'll be held accountable. We should start holding people accountable for the fact that they want a trillion half dollar of defense spending when everything else in this country is going to shit. Yeah, it's nuts. All right, let's switch gears, Ben. Because something really weird has happened at the State Department earlier this week. We wanted to talk about it. They released this 100 page report titled Cuba, the capital of 21st century communism. It claims that for over 70 years, quote, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government and had backed left wing terrorism on, and they say it has backed left wing terrorism on American soil. So the report lists people who it calls front groups and fellow travelers of Cuba. It's like groups like Code Pink and the Democratic Socialists of America or DSA. It mentions a bunch of prominent leftists in like Democratic leaders by name, streamer Hassan Piker gets a shout out, Zoraan Mamdani's in there. The report was released shortly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a quote ministerial on the resurgence of political terrorism. Rubio's speech at the ministerial focused almost exclusively on what he called left wing terrorism. Independent journalist Ken Clipenstein noted that a White House press release about the event said, quote, far left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity. The world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism. Ben, I watched Rubio's speech, and I noticed this one line, which was they despised the West because the West is great. It's like identical framework to like the Bush era. They hate us because of our freedom, bullshit about al-Qaeda. So Ben, now there's no freedom. We're just great. We're just great. We're just great. Yeah, mega, I guess. So Ben, this weird report, in my mind, seems to be emerging to different strands of work. The first is the work to build this legal structure to designate lefties or leftist groups, or even just Democrats, as terrorists or terrorist organizations, and then go after us with counterterrorism authorities. We shall remind ourselves that in the US, that includes killing people. The second is the Marco Rubio Passion Project of trying to reinforce regime change in Cuba, but doing it by punishing an entire island, an entire civilian population full of people through this energy blockade. By merging the two, they have created a kind of de facto new leftist blacklist that would make Joe McCarthy proud. And then there's this attempt to create like an intellectual framework and legitimacy around the work. So the first 60 pages of the report are like this history lesson that feels like it was ripped from a Liberty University student's term paper or something. It's sort of this like slap dash kind of pop history from a slightly paranoid right-wing perspective, although often about like real historical events. But then it ends with this absolutely crazy stretched, like six degrees of Kevin Bacon-style guilt by association conclusion, which says, quote, "Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses can be linked in some way, shape, or form to Cuban influence. You know, you're argument is strong when you include the words in some way, shape, or form." And of course, we also know that like pro-terrorism, activism means, on college campuses means like kids who are upset about, you know, children getting bombed in Gaza. - Yeah, that's where crimes. - So Ben, I genuinely don't know what is more worrisome. The State Department whipping up this document as kind of a pretext to go after liberals or Marco Rubio and his minions, sincerely believing that Fidel Castro's ghost is behind every corner and responsible for like people being upset by watching George Floyd get murdered live on, you know, their screens by a cop. What did you make of the State Department blacklist in this kind of broader effort to criminalize leftist thought or like somehow link it all to Cuba? - I think there's a few different things going on here and I say this to someone who used to like be in charge of Cuba policy, the second Obama term. The first thing is that Cuba poses absolutely no national security threat to the United States, whatsoever, right, full stop. I mean, I saw the, the Cubans aren't penetrating American society, like they have no, these people can't keep the lights on. Like the idea that Cuba's running like networks all over the country, like it's absolutely fucking absurd. It's just not true, but because they have no pretext for why they would launch a military operation in Cuba, a regime change operation in Cuba, or certainly even no pretext for why they're starving Cubans to death or causing people to die because ventilators get turned off when they're power out because of our blockade. There's no Cuban nuclear program, so they have to kind of create this, you know, façade, this bullshit idea that they post some kind of danger to our society. It's not true. It is fundamentally not true. Like just because people in America have leftist views, doesn't mean that they're like agents of the Cuban government in any way, shape or form. The second thing that's going on here, Tommy, is a lot of projection, and I'm just going to name this. The United States has done what they are alleging Cuba does, right? I know this because when I was in Cuba policy, I started looking at all these crazy USAID programs, and like, you know, generally we're supportive of USAID. I think a lot of people at USAID would agree with me. There are all these line items. We used to just give, I found money that was just sent to PO boxes in Miami, right? And with no specificity about where that money was going to end up. Like the United States, and like you could say, from a pot, you know, someone might say from a human rights perspective, direct funding for dissidents in Cuba is something we should do. But some of this seemed to go, you know, was just more beyond that. It's just like creating funds that could go to oppositionists or efforts to undermine the government. Member, there were some, I mean, if you want to go down, take a trip down Remry Lane, there were even programs that became public. The Associated Press did a bunch of reporting during the Obama years about, like, I think it was Operation Chaos that were going to use social media to kind of sew chaos inside of Cuba and undermine the government, which was, by the way, before they even had a lot of internet access in Cuba. So it was pretty dumb way to spend money. So this is classic right wing projection. Like the Cubans must be doing the things that we do to them, you know, and so we're going to call that out. - Right, never mind like the historical stuff. If you want to go back even deeper. I mean, their report goes way back. And, you know, there's all sorts of efforts to take out the del Castro and-- - There's a Cuban report-- - Operation Mongols, I mean. - Yeah, yeah, Bay of Pigs invasion. Like, you know-- - Yeah, that's a little thing. - Yeah, so those two things are about the pretexture after the Cubans. Then the last thing is when you, the point you made is, with this whole Antifa thing, we should not treat as a side show. It is the foreign governments. It's absurd that anybody showed up at that conference. Like, I would hope that people- - It's like 16 nations. - Yeah, I would hope that you just can say no to that because this could lead to dark places. Like, we have two plus years of Trump left. And if you listen to like rhetoric, not just Ruby, but Stephen Miller gave some like bloodthirsty speech. Like, do I think they're gonna start like, droning DSA members in the United States, Democratic Socialists? No. But if they do start freezing bank account, if they start treating it like a terrorist threat on some insane nexus to Cuba or anything else. Like, we could, you know, see them trying to shut down civil society, shut down opposition. - Or just investigate them, right? I mean, a bunch of lefties went to Cuba and all of a sudden they came back and they were under investigation, right? And it was leaked to some news outlets. - Hassan Piker was one of them. Yeah. - Yeah. It's a mess. It's definitely one to watch. It's really concerning. And it's building on this kind of body of evidence that this stuff is happening, started. It was an NPSM7, I think was the directive to kind of start beginning this process. And you know, obviously Charlie Clark's assassination has been the pretext for a lot of it. And this idea that it was a leftist or lefty conspiracy. And Cash Mattel was at that symposium. So let's just say yeah, there's a lot of kind of worrisome data points there. Let's turn to another worrisome development, the Trump era, frankly, which is this. Reporting recently about the online prediction market, gambling and politics. So the most recent kind of eye popping headline, at least to me, Ben was about Trump's teleprompter operator. This guy Gabriel Perez, he's under investigation by the CFTC for allegedly making over $100,000 betting on Trump's speeches. So for context for folks like on these prediction market apps, like Polymarket or Colchee, you can place bets on stupid shit, like what words Trump will or will not say in a speech. So I looked on Colchee right before we started recording. You can bet on whether Trump will say or not say 28 different words or phrases during his White House correspondent speech on Friday. They give it a 45% chance that Trump says Barack Hussein Obama. So if you bet $100, he says that. The payout is $210. If you want a little more risk, a little more upside-ben, Colchee has a 7% chance that Trump says Epstein. So you bet $100, you can win 1,341. That's your payout with your bet included. But if you're the teleprompter guy, right? You have access to the final, final version of the speech right before it is delivered, which is obviously insider information. You also know, in real time, if he's skipping words, so Trump is an undisciplined mess, and apparently Perez would cash out his bets mid-speech if Trump skipped a line in the prompter, which I bet made it pretty fucking easy to find him and snuff this all out. Associated with this news, the Wall Street Journal had a big piece on prediction markets generally in Washington. It had some, again, eye-popping detail. It said three anonymous accounts on polymarket made over $600,000 by correctly betting on when Trump and Iran would agree to a ceasefire deal. That freaked out the White House and led them to send around a memo prohibiting the use of insider information to bet. The journal also says that Congresswoman Annapalina Luna of Florida tipped off a mega-influencer named DC Draino that Trump was gonna pick JD Vance as his VP nominee so that he could bet on it, and then she later mocked him for not betting more. So that sounds like they're all taking this very seriously. The Senate recently passed a resolution banning lawmakers and staff with sensitive information from prediction market betting, but I would not bet on the administration taking any action in part because Donald Trump, Jr. is a paid strategic advisor to both Calci and Polymarket. You might be wondering. - Perfect. - It's weird that two competitors would pay the same guy. Yeah, it is, unless you think about it. So Ben, it's interesting like kind of hearing these organizations defend themselves. They have a bit of an incoherent view of insider information. They say like, well, you know, insider information gets into every market and that sort of like makes the data better and more perfect and more useful on the one hand, but on the other hand, they're trying to ban it or people from profiting off it. There's so obvious like the national security implications of some of these bets. I mean, we talked about it in the Venezuelan context. Someone made a bunch of money at Special Forces guy, made a bunch of money betting on whether Maduro would be deposed. It seems like that would be a bright, red warning sign for the Venezuelan government if this were to happen again. But what did you make of this story and just, you mentioned as a former speechwriter, like just being able to place prop bets on what Trump would say or Obama would say in our case? I mean, this is one of the central things that they're doing, right? Because like you already have the stock market, which is the kind of more, you know, dignified version of the prediction markets, right? And now you have these platforms. And the reality is like, there's been like all this smoke for, I mean, there aren't any of the ledges that Kushner and Whitkopf, right? - To call for that. - I'm not saying I trust them, but they've made billions of dollars like investments or bets on future markets related to the progress of negotiations. The prediction markets are just a crude away. I mean, look, I'll just be blunt. Like when I think about what I knew when I was in the White House, you know, I knew what Obama was going to say. I was a speechwriter. I knew when we were going to roll out new policies. We knew when Special Operations, you know, we knew when Bin Laden was going to be targeted, right? We knew when Air Strikes might take place. Like we knew all this information. And never, you know, not that we're the purest people. I think that I would have said the same thing about the Bush people. I don't think they would have sat there and just like used all this in front of our information to like make bets. The system, the corruption is not a bug. Like I feel like we end up seeing like the teleprompter operator, we end up seeing the special operator who made the bet on the manure operation. The richer people and more powerful people, and I'm not going to name them because I just don't know, but like just use your head, right? Trump family members or senior officials or billionaires who are in that cabinet have probably greater capacity to have cutouts, right? So it's not like them having to place the bet. There's so many ways in which like we're living in a society where power is increasingly consolidated. Information has always been consolidated. And now these people can just get rich of these information. And look, I'll hate to be a killjoy, like we just should shut down. I don't know why we need these platforms. Like it doesn't seem like sports gambling's going that well either, not that's a whole other conversation. But like it's the people that end up losing. It's like at the casino. It's like the high rollers like tend to be fine. It's like the people that are like betting their paychecks because they can't afford groceries because of Trump's war that end up losing. Yeah, I mean, look, these things apps call themselves prediction markets, but I think like 80% of the betting that takes place is sports betting. So it's just an end around to get around state laws. As we are kind of hitting the gas on these products and there's all this lobbying by these prediction market apps and there's so much support within the White House, France has blocked access to Polymarket's betting website. I think this happened last week because they're worried about people losing their money. Gambling in Brazil has been named a public health crisis. It was legalized. Online gambling was legalized in 2018. It's now seen as like the fastest growing in most lucrative market. I think it was $9.2 billion in by they're viewing it as a $9.2 billion market by 2033. And in 2024, online gambling losses in Brazil drove an estimated 1.8 million people into debt. So it's like, it truly is a crisis down there. In the US political betting on Polymarket double to just over $4 billion during the first three months of the year compared with the first quarter of 2025, according to this data provided to the Wall Street Journal by a nonprofit called anti-corruption data collective. But it's just like the opportunities for abuse and insider trading. I mean, it's like, it is a feature not a bug here. Yeah, it's obvious. And what you're getting is not just a kind of rank corruption, you know, decisions might start to be made because we've seen this in all kinds of gambling, right? This is why the world series gets thrown in like 1919. Like you start to make decisions for the purpose of making money off the bet, not making decisions that are best for American interests or the American people. Like that's the kind of thing that is probably clearly already happening. You'll also get people who go into government for the exp-- or politics for the express purpose of betting on things like prediction markets, right? I mean, there's so many things, this is such a slippery slope. If I was a member of Congress, like focusing on shutting these things down or at least putting like really thick guard rules around them with very high penalties for people that violate them, like it's a no brainer. Yeah, I agree. [MUSIC PLAYING] Pots of the world is brought to you by Simply Safe. For the longest time, I thought having a home security system that haven't alarmed that Blair's only after someone breaks in that always seemed too late, giving the intruder a chance to grab whatever they wanted and flee before the police could get there. That's where Simply Safe comes in. 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We're almost two million acres have burned in Ontario and as a result, smoke is spread across the country and it's the parts of the US and New York in particular bore the brunt of it last week and the Midwest and the Great Lakes have also been impacted by the smoke. So Trump got asked about what he and Karney specifically talked about. Here's a clip of him explaining what he said to Karney and then a response from Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Let's watch. Remind President Trump that there's 3.9 million acres burning in the United States right now and if we had resources, we would send them down to our closest friends and allies. So as you heard there, he threatened to tariff Canada because they have wildfires. Then, surprise, surprise, been on Monday, the Trump administration rolled out new 50% tariffs on more than 500 Canadian goods, nearly all of which are actually covered under the USMCA trade agreement. The Trump negotiated in the first term. The New York Times says that the tariff targets are about 2% of the entire trading relationship between the US and Canada. The tariffs won't go into effect until August 19th. They are almost certainly an attempt to ratchet up pressure on Canada in advance of USMCA talks. Although so far, the US has only been renegotiating the deal with Mexico while excluding Canada from those conversations. But Ben, I mean, just like setting aside the potential economic risk of doubling down this trade war with Canada for a second, can you just imagine if your house was on fire and it was burning for the third time in four years in your neighbor walked over and yelled at you because it was blowing smoke on his house and then threatened to send you a bill to pay for it. I mean, it's just like the most insanely dickish thing I've ever heard of my life. Yeah, and it's, you know, Doug Ford pointed out the fact that we have lots of wildfires. But if you pull the camera back here, the United States, most of the rest of the world. Has made an argument for, I don't know, going on 20 years, that the United States as the principal emitter of, you know, fossil fuels created climate change as much as any other country. And that the United States should be paying kind of reparations, should be paying these countries that are, you know, Pacific islands that are losing their coastlines. All these countries that have unreadable air because it's so hot in like South Asia, the United States rejects the premise. We had a green climate fund in the Obama years, so we did think we had an obligation to pay to mitigate the effects of climate change. But look, it's not mystery. I mean, part of what's so fucking frustrating by watching Trump. He's like, well, it's never happened before. Last few years, it's been really hot and we suddenly have all these wildfires look, well, yeah. That's what every climate scientist has told you. You almost got it. It was going to happen. If we didn't take stronger action to do with climate change, because of your climate policy, on top of, you know, many years, obviously, of burning fossil fuels, this problem is getting worse exponentially. Like climate change, we don't talk a lot on, it's fucking hot. You know, like, like, like, we've talked about the heat wave in Europe. Like, we had the French guy cooking eggs, like, you know, with, with, with no stove. Like, we've got wildfires in Canada. And so for Trump to stand up there and say, oh my god, it's hot and there are these wildfires. And I mean, because if I'm Canadian, you know, Canadians, you know, don't have a clean bill of health either on carbon emissions, but it's a lot less than us. So he'd have a lot more standing, you know, if he was actually doing something about the underlying problem, which is climate change. No, instead of making it exponentially worse. But except, except now we're saying, like, the solution to this is what Americans should pay higher prices, because that's what tariffs are, right? So you Americans have to pay higher prices to punish the Canadians. I'm like Canadian hockey sticks like random things like liquor, hockey sticks, milk. Also, listen to probably wondering like, I thought the Supreme Court, like, curtailed his power to leverage these, these tariffs. That is true. They curtailed the IEPA authority that he claimed to have had. But this was done under section 338 of the tariff act of 1930, the so-called smooth, holly tariffs, which had never been used before. But it gives the president the authority to impose up to a 50% tariff on import to a country, just sort of like, as a king, there's no process, there's no USTR investigation, there's no cap on the rate, there's no limit for the duration. It's just like something he can do. So he now he's terrorizing Canada. Then over in the UK, our friends have their seventh prime minister in about 10 years. So welcome to the party, prime minister Andy Burnham. We have extensively covered, you know, former prime minister, Cure Starmer's political demise. We've covered Burnham's ascension from Mayor of Greater Manchester to the Labour Party leader. So we're not going to do that again here. But let's talk about what Burnham has done in the first couple of days. So he gave his first speech as prime minister, he basically met with the king, drove over, kind of greeted the staff and then gave a quick speech. He said he wanted his government to be a circuit breaker. For Britain, he promised a new political and economic model, the devolution of power out of London, back to other parts of the country, particularly the north of the country. And he promised to lay out a 10-year plan for the country that we haven't seen that yet. And his first cabinet meeting talked about cutting taxes on electricity bills. He talked about getting, ending rough sleeping, which is homelessness in the UK. I did three foreign leader calls. He called Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine and Ursula von der Leyen. He named a bunch of folks to his cabinet. So some names folks probably know that the chancellor of the ex-checker role went to John Healey. He was the guy who's apprised people last month when he resigned as Kira Starmer's defense secretary, because the budget for the defense investment plan was well short of what he thought it needed. I did make me wonder, Ben, whether Healey kind of was promised another larger increase in defense spending, or if that was just kind of a fight from a bygone era, but I guess we'll find out. Ed Millaband, the former Labour Party leader, is going to be foreign minister. Shabbat in my mood is going to keep her job as home secretary. She's the only kind of major position to stay the same. She's seen as tough on immigration, West streeting who made a lot of noise about running for Labour leader, and then prominently resigned from his job as health secretary. He's going to be defense secretary. He is more conservative in Labour. And then Angela Rainer is back in the cabinet after resigning last year for a very kind of dull scandal about unpaid taxes. On top of that, though, like after those officials, he basically purged the entire Starmer government, including some kind of big names like Rachel Reeves, some familiar names to this show, like David Lamy, who is the deputy leader. He got rid of some talented people, some people that were seen as great managers, and just like kind of tectocrats. It just seems like he basically wanted to wipe this slate clean and start over. Alistair Campbell, who is a Tony Blair's right hand man for a decade, now it's a great podcast, the rest is politics, pointed out that if you look at the kind of top three jobs, John Healey, now the chancellor of the ex-shaker, was kind of the tip of the political spear, and when he resigned as defense secretary, a lot of analysts thought like maybe that was a cut that didn't kill Starmer in the moment, but he was going to bleed out from eventually. Then you had Millaban, who was apparently the first person to tell Starmer to resign to his face, and Shabbana MacMood did the same right after, and they got the top job, so it does seem like you know, Bernan's pretty ruthless and rewarding people that helped take down Starmer, but what do you make of the new, the cabinet slots so far, and kind of what you've heard him say and do? In addition to just like, yeah, we're cleaning the slate, it's my show. I'm getting rid of the Starmer people. They're kind of ruthless ambition that has been on display for many. Bernan, which, you know, is sometimes you've got to want someone who's an alpha, like ambition is part of politics. The problems what you see is you see a lot of like politics and very little vision. So it's kind of like, well, Ed Millabans, he's the left wing guy. Originally Ed Millabans wanted to be chancellor of the etc. That's like the guy running the finances, but he was seen as too far left. So it's like, well, we'll give Millabans the foreign office. That's kind of like a nice perk, you know, and John Healey, he's kind of like, safe pair of hands, you know, maybe the markets will feel okay about that guy, and then we'll keep our hard line immigration person at home office, and it doesn't feel like there's is a vision. behind this cabinet. It feels like it's managing labor politics, and we don't want to be too far left, but we've got to give left something, and that's a little disperiencing, because there are these huge problems in Britain. Again, what is this all about? Like, what does any Britain want to do? He seems to be a better politician than Kierstarrmer. Like, both, like I said, he really went after him, but also he's a better communicator. Sure, you know, he may get some points for wanting to devolve power to the north of England. That's kind of, if you're an American, that's kind of like saying we need to focus more on Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, right? Fine, but like, what does it mean in policy? You can set some offices up there, he's gonna spend some more time up there. He'll get better speeches. He's spoken from number 10 without a podium, but like, I still feel like we don't know what Andy Burnham wants to do. And the reason why should this matter to us, you know, beyond just that we care about our friends there, it's also because like, if they don't get this right, like Nigel Farage's party, fascist running the UK, just like we do here in the United States, and that would be bad for everybody. So we have a stake in these guys doing well enough that Farage can't get in there. We're gonna need more detail and more vision. I want to, you know, obviously give him a chance, but the earlier your turns are, it seems like he's doing a lot more politics than anything else. The only thing I say to Tommy is like, to your point about this, you know, the normal photo ops you meet the king and then you kind of go in number 10 and you meet the household staff. Like, these people have had seven, it's crazy. - You know, couples, you know, come in and live there. Like, it used to probably be a huge event every five years to meet the new, but now it's like, here we go. - Tony Blair was there for a decade. I know it's crazy. It is crazy. Do you see that Burnham said he was gonna open like a number 10 office in the North? - In Manchester. - In Manchester? - Yeah, yeah. - It just seems like a nice press release, but like, what does that mean in practice? Like, you know, have a separate staff? - It's like an American presence saying, we're gonna have a, you know, Wisconsin, you know, White House, I mean, it's so political. It's like, we have a political problem in Northern England, I'm from there. You know, any Burnham Zick name is the king of the North. Like, great, fine. That makes people feel like, you know, more connected to the government in Manchester or Northern England, okay, but like, what are the policies that are gonna fall off of that? We still don't really know. - Well, find out. I agree that I'm very worried about the right wing and I feel forage, but let's just have some fun with them for the time being. So, first of all, shout out to Liz Truss, who just pulled off the first CPAC Great Britain. For those lucky enough not to know what CPAC is, it's a huge right wing kind of annual political conference. It started out in the US as this place where the fringe crazies gathered every single year. And now it just evolved over time to be basically the MAGA base of the party, even though CPAC stars has faded a lot recently because the guy who runs it is a weird creep. But like any good cancer, CPAC has metastasized and spread and is now infecting, you know, political systems all over the world because there's like a CPAC Hungary, CPAC UK, CPAC, et cetera. So that brings us back to the CPAC conference, Great Britain. Check out this video then that was taken by a journalist named Latika and Bork just to get a sense of the absolutely electric vibe at this event. (upbeat music) (applause) - Oh, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the third final day of CPAC Great Britain. It's fantastic that we will get vaccinated. We have a vaccine impact in the morning. - Ooh, boy. - We had more seats at the 815 time slot of the Aspen Security Forum. - We had more seats at the 815 time slot for the Aspen Security Forum that started at nine. Yeah, we actually-- - The sanctioned. - The sanctioned. The New York Times reported the day three of the conference had about 100 people total in the audience. Nigel Faraj was the headliner. I think he had a much bigger crowd of the much bigger, it's like 300 to 400. Ron DeSantis was supposed to speak, but had to cancel due to, I think, bad weather, canceling his flight. So it could have been worse for those 11 people in that audience. The British Conservative magazine, the spectator called the event, quote, empty, comma miserable, and downright weird. An author named William Atkinson, a man who wants a right-wing government also said, quote, "Being cursed with vision, hearing, and sanity meant enduring an event that made trust's premiership look like a model of tact and foresight." He also called it Yankee Brain Slop Barely Repackaged for a UK audience stomach churning to watch. Tickets for the event ranged from 100 pounds to 10,000 pounds for the full VIP treatment. Ben, do you think we might get invited to speak at that one next year? - Do you think we're getting invited to speak in Aspen? - I don't know. - Yeah, we'll see. - Maybe if we don't talk about it, I am. - I think that it's so interesting because the idea that just 'cause something works in the United States, it's gonna work everywhere. I mean, it worked in Hungary because Orban put like a ton of resources behind it. - This is the problem. - Liz Trust cannot front your fucking conference. What are you guys doing? - Exactly. - Like get the cabbage or the lettuce or whatever it is. - Well, but we used to monitor podcasts, I don't know if that still exists or if Michael R. Producer just, you know, kind of fun. - He's fallen off the bed. - The last episode was two weeks ago and it did have 2,500 views. - Well, but this is the reality. This person seems to have like a bottomless well of her willingness. Trump doesn't, you know, has a bottomless well of not being shamed. You cannot humiliate Liz Trust. Like, she's still up there being like, this is great. It's so great to see this crowd of a few dozen people, you know, she's really a remarkable figure. I can't think of someone who's been so thoroughly willing to kind of be humiliated over and over again, you know. - Yeah, and like, whenever she comes to the CPAC in the US, she gets similar kind of half asleep audiences. It's not like she's paying for this. So like, it just shows you that they have such deep pockets on the far right that there's someone who will write a check for something like that, you know. Like that's actually the thing that's scary. Is it like, even when it doesn't work, like they can still get the funding for it. - That looked like a conference room that was associated with a casino outside Dallas or something. I love the bleak look and venue there. Speaking of Nigel Farage Ben. So when you were out on vacation, Ben, I talked with Medihocin about Farage's farce of a bi-election that he's running in. This is in Clackton, a region called Clackton. So what happened was Nigel Farage was caught, red handed, taking gifts and not declaring them, including a five million pound gift from this crypto billionaire that lives in Thailand. I think five million pounds. Do I say a billion, five million pounds? I think that's $6.7 million. Took it from this crypto billionaire who lives in Thailand. The story for why was all over the place. It was for security, then it was a gift, then it was like a payment for campaigning. Like none of it makes sense. It's just brazen corruption. And the good thing about that story is it woke up the fucking British press finally and they're starting to dig into this guy. So that also led Parliament to start investigating Farage. So it sounds like the strategy here is to kind of avoid and end these investigations. Farage resigned from his seat in Parliament. He triggered this bi-election, which happens on August 13th that he is now running in. He claims that the election results in this new super right-wing area, by the way, that he should wind hands down no matter what was sort of renderer verdicts on the allegations against him. He said, "People have clacked in be the judges of my actions." But all the other parties, surprisingly, the major political parties, they saw this as the first that it was and they decided to not run candidates in this election to not lend it any kind of legitimacy. So that means Nigel Farage is running against 33, absolutely just random people. Mostly they are like kind of unknowns or weirdos, but there is one shining star in the field. His name is Count Binface. Count Binface claims to be a 6,000-year-old intergalactic space warrior from Planet Sigma Nine. He's a perennial candidate in the UK. He has run for mayor of London twice. He's run in a bunch of parliamentary elections, including against Boris Johnson. And then most recently he ran against our guy, Andy Burnham, up in Makerfield. Let's hear from Count Binface himself. Let's watch. Well, first question, why would an intergalactic space warrior want to stand to be the MP for Clackton? Why not? It's a good question. Tell me about your manifesto. What can you offer the people of Clackton? Have you ever been there? No, because I understand from the currency incumbent that is part of how you do the job. So I deliberately stayed away. Is that how it works? You've said that you will cut my taxes and raise everyone else's. How much tax can I expect to pay? Yeah, well, let me just clarify that. I will cut your taxes and raise everyone else's. We don't absolutely clear. They're not just yours, mate. It's for everybody. This is a blanket thing. I will cut your taxes and raise everybody else's. OK, so how much will I pay? A reasonable amount, but just less than everyone else. OK, and how much will everyone else pay? A little bit more than you. What is your appeal going to be to the people of Clackton? Well, I'm not Nigel Ferrage. It's a full manifesto. In national policies, nationalize a tale, build at least one affordable house, diagnose his page of that of ministers, rename London Bridge after Phoebe Waller, bring back C-facts, and of course, move the hands dryer in the Gents toilets at the Crown and Treaty Pop outspread to a more sensible position. Because as you can imagine, that's a national issue. So as you can see, that was from a bunch of interviews he did. A couple on the BBC. There was an LBC interview. There was a couple more count binfays for those who were listening and not watching. He's basically dude in a Star Wars outfit with a trashcan on his head. Under the trashcan is the man named John Harvey. He's a comedy writer. He's been doing variations on this character since 2017. He's currently not doing that great in the polls. Again, it's a very right wing district. It's a very reformed district. He's got bin faces at 5% odds on Kalshi. So, but there is always hope then. I want you to know I reached out to him to see if we could book him on the show. He's not DM'd me back yet, but I'm really hoping we can get a US exclusive with Count Binface. He may be the hero we need at this difficult trying time. There's something kind of like Monty Python ask about that that I appreciate. Absolutely. He's great comedic timing. Like who? Yeah. I'm not Nigel Farage. Pause. Pause is helpful. It's also like, I don't know. I just, if any country is going to elect a Count Binface over just a clown like Nigel Farage, it is the UK. I don't know what we need to do. I hope we have like one listener up and clacked in maybe. Tell your friends vote Count Binface. Like everybody turned out. Like the farce is the point. You know, Nigel Farage is a joke. He's making a joke of your politics, your system, your campaign finance system, your laws, and vote for Count Binface to send him a message. I mean, and to be entertained for the coming years, you know, I imagine Count Binface at Prime Minister's question time. It'll be incredible. Would he be allowed to wear the whole bit, you think? I know. It might be discriminatory to not allow him to have his bin face. Yeah. That's a really good question. I'll ask some people and follow up for next week. OK, that's it for Ben and my portion of the show. But please stick around for my interview with Alexey Sorokin from The Key of Independent. Again, we talk about the security situation in Ukraine. This huge protest movement resulting from Zelensky firing his defense minister. We talk about missile defense capabilities, the kind of offensive strategy of the Ukrainian side. So a really interesting conversation. So check it out. Stick around for that. [MUSIC PLAYING] This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people, using money around the globe. 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You can get the right exchange rate, the best exchange rate every time. It's just a seamless experience way easier than going to a cash exchange place, or dealing with the ATMs. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com, terms and conditions apply. U.S. voters abroad have you got your ballot yet? Go to votefromabroad.org and click request my ballot. Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. [MUSIC] My guest today is the Deputy Chief Editor for the Keeve Independent. Alexey Sirokin, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining. So I just wanted to start with some reports about the security situation in Ukraine at the moment. I saw a bunch of reports over the course of the week that last weekend was one of the largest ballistic missile and drone attacks on Ukraine since the start of the war. Is that accurate? And can you talk about the impact of what that does to your day-to-day life if you're living in Kiev or anywhere in the country? Well, I would go as far to say that the last month, month and half was probably the deadliest and the harshest in Kiev. Ukraine is currently lacking patriot or defense missiles. So in Russians to know that. So what's happening now is that they're using more and more ballistic missiles that are hard to shoot down to target different sites across the city over the past month. Over 60 people were killed in Kiev, 60 civilians by Russian missiles. Obviously, this has a tremendous impact on your day-to-day life. People have to basically-- they don't sleep. They have to go to shelter. They have to understand that-- because ballistic are also really fast, right? The air raid alert is not timely enough, right? So people don't have time to prepare themselves for an attack. So you can be in the kitchen cooking something, or you can be in bed. And then you hear a ballistic missile hit something near your house, right? So that's the everyday life in Ukraine right now. And obviously, it's tremendously affecting people's morale, but also they're just well-being. And I saw-- and this was on Twitter, so correct me if I'm wrong-- that the Russians attacked a metro station where people are known to shelter. Recently, is that accurate? Yeah, so there's one of the metro stations. Well, basically, metro stations are the best bomb shelters in Kiev. Obviously, they're deep underground, and a lot of people sleep in the metro when they know there's going to be an attack. And one of those metro stations was hit. It's actually regularly hit by the Russians, because it's in a neighborhood that's being tremendously affected by Russian attacks. And yeah, it's dangerous, even in a bomb shelter right now. Yeah. You mentioned Ukraine desperately needs more missile defense infrastructure, like US Patriot missiles. At the same time, I know that Ukraine has been incredibly innovative when it comes to developing missile defense drones to take out Russian drones. So I saw President Trump recently agreed to allow Ukraine to have a license to domestically manufacturer Patriot missile interceptors. It will probably take years for that to lead to weapons on the battlefield. How significant do you think that licensing decision was in your mind? Do we know that it actually happened yet versus just Trump kind of saying stuff? And more broadly, I mean, how do you think Ukraine is managing and evolving to deal with the threat of these missile and drone attacks? Well, there's multiple questions. I'll start from President Trump. Well, President, if he doesn't change his mind in the near future, then it's a really good decision, right? Because obviously there's a bottleneck in production. A lot of countries are now awaiting Patriot missiles. Lockhead Martin is not producing enough. And if Ukraine is able to produce those Patriot missiles, obviously it will take time. It'll take half a year or a year maybe to begin producing. But if that happens, then Ukraine is not maybe dependent on the United States, right? And this will be a tremendous boost for Ukraine's air defense. And adding to that is that, unfortunately, unfortunately, the Patriot missiles are the best in the world, right? So no other country has anything like that. So Ukraine can innovate drones. Ukraine can produce missiles. Ukraine can do a lot, right? But unfortunately, air defense is the most sophisticated weapon. And if we're talking about Ukraine, it currently doesn't have air defense systems. So it has interceptor drones, which can affect incoming drones. But it doesn't have systems to combat cruise or ballistic missiles. While Europeans, for example, the Samp-T iris missile systems, they are good in battling cruise missiles. But in terms of ballistic, the only system that is known to down those kind of missiles is the Patriot system. And unfortunately, that's something that Ukraine currently doesn't have. Yeah. At the same time, Ukraine has been going on offense. There has been this military campaign to target and isolate Crimea. I know there's been strikes in Crimea itself. There have been strikes on ships in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Can you talk about how that campaign has evolved in the last couple of weeks and what the goal is? Well, I would not call it probably offense, because the situation currently is a bit different in a sense that on the battlefield, Russians are still advancing. So in the eastern part of the country, Russians are still using infantry troops to just continue to attack Ukraine to gain more land. While Ukraine is waging an asymmetrical warfare, basically using drones to target Russian logistics and to Russian oil refineries and so on. So there's two ongoing campaigns. One is the long range or deep strikes, basically using long range drones. Sometimes it's basically a plane with explosives to attack oil refineries deep inside Russia. Those planes can go 1,000, 1,200 kilometers. And basically, the main goal here is to inflict as much damage on the Russian economy as possible so that it's too expensive to wage the war against Ukraine, because obviously Russia is still an oil and energy export country. So that's the first campaign. The second one is middle of it. right campaign and here the hornet drones are making a difference. Basically these are the drones that target Russian troops and logistical centers in between 100 and 253 kilometers. So basically the goal here is to force the occupied parts of Ukraine to be cut off from Russia and for the Russians to not be able to provide troops logistics and oil and so on to those areas basically forcing the Russians to back down. And I would say that this started somewhere in mid-May and it had a tremendous impact on morale and Ukrainians feel that this is something that can make the victory or a favorable outcome of this war possible. I noticed recently there was a strike by Ukraine on the Russian equivalent of Amazon.com. I saw a military official said it was because Russian soldiers were buying basically drone component parts from this site. Therefore they believed it was a legitimate military target. I'm wondering if you believe that explanation or if this is partly maybe a strategy of bringing the war home to people in Russia and bombing a website or a shopping resource they use often. It's spreading fear that way, disrupting their lives. Well I think disrupting Russian's lives is a positive kind of outcome but it's not the main one. It's kind of a bonus I would say. We actually went to, so the company is called Wildberries which is an interesting name. And we went on the website and we actually googled to buy a drone or to buy components for military stuff and you can just go on the website and I welcome you to just go and search this website. You can buy military hardware, you can buy military equipment, dual use goods and basically it's used for the military as well. It's a complicated question because obviously it's hard to definitively say is it a legit target if it sells both close and drones but that's what was happening. And I would say that Ukraine deliberately hit those two factories, well storage facilities as kind of warning for the Russian kind of civilian and the Russian kind of non-military sector to be careful with helping the military because basically Ukraine says okay look if you sell drones and grenades and help the military we're going to go after you. And so don't do it. And I think that this warning is something that Ukraine is trying to bring to the Russians. Got it. Did you pick up anything on the website while you're there? Do you like a quadcopter or anything now? I think the shipping is a problem. Yeah, understood. I want to ask you about this political crisis that's been engulfing President Zelensky over the last couple days. So for listeners last week, Zelensky fired his defense minister Mikalo Fedorov has been clashing with Ukraine's top general Alexander Searsky but then thousands of Ukrainians took to the street to protest a decision in demand that Fedorov be reinstated. Can you explain this clash and why? You know, I see a lot of analysts saying that this is not just about two individuals. This is about kind of generational disagreements over tactics and technology and maybe even like political threats to Zelensky. Doing a short explanation or long explanation? I want whatever you think is the best explanation. Okay, that's hard. Well, basically, like the experts are correct. So every July, President Zelensky has this one thing of just causing a political crisis of his own making. Last July, it was the same thing. I don't know what's with him in July. But so yeah, so in January, I think Halofodorov was appointed as defense minister and he brought this basically new approach. He was he's kind of the drone guy. He's he digitalized a lot of civilian infrastructure but also the military. So he is seen as a modern progressive young official who can who's bringing change, right? Obviously, he wasn't successful in doing everything, right? But for example, he he was the one who helped spearhead the middle straight campaign. He he was the one who actually had a plan, right? So if in short, it's a young progressive guy with a plan and obviously that's something that's looked upon favorably by the population, which is tired. The population is gassed. There's a lot of problems with how Ukraine is doing this war for obvious reasons, right? And then you have the military command, which is known for top down kind of approach, micromanagement. Some people say that it's Soviet style. I would not go as far as saying that, but obviously there are many problems, right? For example, one of the main problems is that the the military command and mr. Syrsky is known to like infantry attacks, even now, right? They they have for example, there's this unit called Skella, which is now blown out of proportion. All the mobilized people now go not all of them, but like many of them are drafted specifically into this unit. And people say that it's not effective, right? So there's two two visions of how Ukraine can continue this this war, right? The saying on the street goes that a small Soviet army can't defeat a big Soviet army, right? And that's what Ukraine has to be asymmetrical. Ukraine has to innovate. Ukraine has to change. And unfortunately, President Zelensky took a pretty not wise decision. And he decided to change the defense minister. There's there's multiple explanations. Why he did it? Because this kind of the old command had a conflict with the defense minister and mr. Fedorov also wanted to change defense procurement, how it's run and so on. So he he ousted the defense minister and apparently the president's office didn't expect people to rise up, people to take the streets. And so the similar situation that happened last July when he didn't expect people to start protesting happened this July. And the problem right now is I'm not sure when the one this is going to air. Okay, so based on like right now, the situation is as follows, right? Zelensky is inclined to change the military leadership to kind of appease the protesters and hopefully for him the protests are ended, right? What he's not willing to do is he's not willing to reappoint mr. Fedorov as defense minister because basically ego problem, right? If you if you made a mistake, the wisest thing to do is come out and say sorry, I made a mistake. But if you're a president, then probably that you're not going to do that. So I get we get that over here in America. Yeah, I'm not gonna explain that. Yeah, so he proposed, according to our sources, Mr. Fedorov was proposed different posts in government. He was proposed being an advisor to the president, that be prime minister, like basically everything possible, but not the defense ministry, which mr. Fedorov says that again, according to our sources, doesn't make sense because he started some reforms in the defense ministry and he only wants that post back. And so here there's a stalemate and obviously the next protest is scheduled for Friday. And obviously in this window of like two, three days, we'll see if either side budgets. July mass. Yeah, I don't get it. I don't know why I do it. But before I get to my last question for you, you are obviously doing an amazing work reporting on all these issues covering the war. You're doing it, you know, under the threat of bombardment from the Russians. How can international listeners support you, support what you guys are doing at the independent? Is it subscribing? Is it sharing clips? What's the best way? Well, basically we're reader funded, right? We currently have 34,000 paying members. The membership stars from five dollars a month. We strongly recommend supporting independent journalism in Ukraine. We rely on our readers for support. So if you have the means, if you have the desire to support independent journalism, we would be really grateful for for your support. Well, it's worth the money you guys are doing amazing work. Last question for you. Earlier this week, Ukrainian law enforcement released this video of a package bomb exploding outside this monaco home of someone who's described as a Ukrainian oligarch. The blast nearly kills this man. It severely wounds his girlfriend wounds her son, I believe. I don't know if it's his son or her son. The suspected bombers believe to have been contracted out for the hit and later killed by Ukrainian intelligence officers. What the hell is happening here? Can you help me unpack the layers of this story? Well, this is, yeah, this is the weirdest subplot in Ukraine currently. So obviously, there are several versions, right? We don't know what exactly happened. So this man who in life, he's Ukrainians, catchy businessmen from the early 2000s, who left the country who had problems with the law here, who is basically a citizen of Cyprus now, and he's in a bunch of shady stuff, right? What happened is he was sanctioned by Ukraine, so there's definitely he has a really bad reputation. The problem here is that because he's involved in so many shady stuff, including business in the occupied territories which he denies, and also some illegal call centers and so on, it's hard to establish right now what's the main reason for somebody to blow him up in Morocco. Obviously, it's absolutely wild story that the assassin was later killed in Ukraine, a middle-aged woman who apparently was just paid to plant something, and she's obviously not the main culprit here, so currently there's two people in prison in Ukraine, actually one of them was a member of Ukrainian security services, and the official kind of version right now is that it's kind of a business conflict and those people were paid to basically organize an assassination. We don't have more details right now, we obviously are covering this, but there's a whole problem, I would say, in multiple countries that are at war, where there is part of the society, is working in a gray zone, and there's some kind of shady businesses taking place, and obviously that's something that is worth investigating both by law enforcement, but by journalists as well. Yeah, crazy, crazy story, that's a great reason to support the Kiev independent, become a subscriber, and Alexei, thank you so much for joining the show, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks again, Alexei, for joining the show, and we'll talk to you guys next week. Podsay, the world, is a cooking media production. Our show is produced by Alonam and Kofsky, Michael Goldsmith, and Unisha Bonerjeev. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethkote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffett, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proud of the unionized with the Writer's Guild of America East.