Trump Begs Allies to Clean Up Iran Mess

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I don't like feeling the rough-next morning the next day after drinking, but you were pretty happy with yourself. I was happy with myself. I felt great. From the fairways and Augusta to the first pitch of baseball season in the start of festival circuits, April is a sprint of outdoor celebrations, so excited for the festival circuit. Don't let a rough-next day keep you on the sidelines, drink pre-alcohol to stay ahead of the game and make the most of every sunny Saturday. Go to Zbiotics.com/pstw to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use PSTW at checkout. Zbiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember head to Zbiotics.com/pstw and use the code PSTW at checkout for 15% off. Kristiana Figures was the chief negotiator of the Paris Agreement. This is her advice about the current state of the climate movement. The first thing I would say is knock it off. So where do we go from here? I'm Zainab Selby. Join us for the Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women, a show from Forum Policy, where we tell stories about women creating change and refusing to accept the status quo. Hi friends and fellow students, Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at votefromabroad.org. Look state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to votefromabroad.org now and click Request My ballot and ask to receive it by email. All you gotta do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future, don't delay votefromabroad.org Welcome to Podsave the World. I'm Alona Minkowski and I'm Ben Runes. Tommy Vieter is spring breaking with his family. I mean, I hope you have a great time. Yeah. I don't want to work harder than Tommy, so I'm happy he's on a big issue. Some people work harder than Tommy. It's farm workers day. How could I forget? Well, how could I forget? Those guys are women and work harder, but we love Tommy. Okay. We love you Tommy. We miss you, but I'm gonna fill in today in his absence and Ben, you were remote last week for the show because you were in mammoth with your family. That was my spring break. I went to mammoth this past weekend with my family, and so I remember last week you were like, I just went skiing in a t-shirt, you had this glow, I saw women skiing in a bikini. I saw that too. Are you dead too? Okay. I saw a guy no shirt, just only bib. Yeah. It's a little weird up there. I mean, the funny thing about mammoth for people who aren't Californians is it's kind of only accessible from like L.A. and Southern California. Yeah. So you kind of feel like you're in Los Angeles on a mountain, including the people wearing few clothes. It's a very like laid back Southern California vibe. I'll say that. It's not like you're hoity-toity. There's a lot of edible skiing happening, I think. Yeah. The party scene afterwards. Like the DJ and everything. Yeah. I saw people in like Burning Man, you know? It's a little Burning Man-esque. Yeah. Is that vibe? It's interesting. You know what? It was fun. It was fun. I loved it. All right. We do have more serious business to discuss. We have a great show for you guys today. We will get into all of the latest with the Warren Iran, like the continued mixed messages from the administration, the military build up in the Middle East, the very scary normalization of targeting civilian infrastructure. And we'll talk about Pete Hegseth, personally interfering in military promotions. The Russian government's attempts to block the messaging app Telegram and basically the internet altogether, the latest in Cuba, and a little special treat from former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Ben, who did you speak to for the interview today? I spoke to Nika Kovac, who's been on before she's a Slovenian-based activist who's done a lot of work. She's done work on behalf of reproductive rights across Europe. But most recently, in Slovenia, they had an election we talked about last week, where the kind of far-right authoritarian candidate, Jansa, was widely expected to win. A week before the election, Nika was one of a small group of people who did an investigation and revealed that the Israeli intelligence firm, Black Cube, which has made a performer from Assad officials, had essentially contracted with Jansa to interfere in the Slovenian election. That kind of rocked things. And ultimately, the progressive incumbent closed very strong and eaked out of victory. So we talked about that story. It's a great story of just how did they reveal this Black Cube interference? Why is a group of former Israeli spies intervening in Slovenian politics? They've also done it in Hungary. They've also spied on me. Then we talked about kind of where things are in Slovenia with the election result. What it might say about the election in Hungary, with Viktor Orban, who's coming up. Viktor Orban is very close to Jansa. And then, I think, really importantly, and I hope people listen to this. I asked Nika, who's been involved in a lot of campaigns and lots of different parts of the world. Kind of what her lessons learned are about the best way to fight authoritarianism. And she had a very good summary, I think, of key lessons learned from not just Slovenia, but a lot of work she's done. So people should check it out. Yeah. And I mean, you actually have such a great network internationally, I feel like, of pro-democracy activists. And those are people that you are in touch with all the time that you speak to all the time. So if you want more of Ben's insight from speaking with these people, I just want to also highlight that friends of the pod is something everyone should be. 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And of course, you have a great community of fellow Cricket listeners from across the country. So hit pause, subscribe to friends of the pod right now, Cricket.com/front. Cross country and around the world. There you go. There you go. There you go. And then you get a global audience here at Potsy of the World. OK. Now let's get to Iran. So it's truly impossible to make sense of all the various statements, the threats, the backing off, the contradictions that are coming from the president and his administration on this. So I'm going to do my best here to give you a play-by-play. So I guess just hold on. Hold on. Hold on your seat. Yeah. So as of Tuesday, which is the day that we record this show, their reports saying that President Trump doesn't care about the straight-ahorn moves anymore. We could just walk away from the war before the straight gets reopened. But as you and Tommy discussed last week, Trump initially gave Iran 48 hours to open the straight-ahorn moves. Then last Monday, he extended that deadline by five days. Then last Thursday, he said that he was pausing the period of energy plant destruction by 10 days to Monday, April 6th. And I have to point out too that all along, we're getting these messages from Trump right that the talks are ongoing, that the talks are going very well. At the same time, he will write on true social threats to obliterate Iranian power plants. He also restated his plan to take Carg Island in an interview with the Financial Times. And I have not been in high stakes international negotiations, Ben. I know that you have. That seems to me like a little bit of a counterproductive strategy. Yes. If you're trying to negotiate with someone, but the Iranians, meanwhile, they still don't acknowledge that any talks are even happening, Abbas Ergachi, Runs Foreign Minister, said today in an interview with Al Jazeera that he had received a direct message from Steve Whitkoff. That's President Trump's special envoy, but he denied that the countries were negotiating at all. And so then, that's how we come back to this week. Trump wrote on truth social on Monday that the talks with the new and the more reasonable regime were going great, but that if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be. I'm reading verbatim here from his truth. And if the Hormuz trade is not immediately "open for business", we will conclude our lovely "stay" in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, and Carg Island, and possibly desalination plants, which we have purposefully not yet touched. And then, as we previewed the top of this section by Tuesday morning, the story changed. The Strait of Hormuz is apparently not our problem anymore. President Trump truths all of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran. I have a suggestion for you. Number one, five from the U.S. we have plenty. Number two, build ups. some delayed courage, go to the street, and just take it. You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us. I'm gonna end that very long tie-rate I just gave with a little clip from Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War. He gave his first press conference in 12 days today, this is a little more. - Totally man. - Yeah, where he basically just followed up on what we've been hearing from the president. - I think the president was clear this morning, his truth that there are countries around the world who ought to be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well. It's not just the United States Navy. Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well. He's pointing out, this is an international waterway that we use less than most, in fact dramatically less than most. So the world ought to pay attention to be prepared to stand up. President Trump's been willing to do the heavy lifting on behalf of the free world to address this threat of Iran. It's not just our problem set going forward, even though we have done the lion's share of preparation to ensure that that strike will be open, which is an outcome that the president's been very clear on. - I don't know Ben, if you were just to sit back and think like, my wildest dreams, I'm gonna write this fictional story, would you ever have considered that it would be for us to start a war, create a global economic crisis, and then just walk away until everyone that, it's their problem. I mean, the problem, so many problems with this. But is it, I have no idea what the hell they're doing, and neither do they. I mean, let's just kind of break this into pieces. You've got the negotiations, the straight, and the hexethean demands made on other countries. On these negotiations, it is quite clear that there are no really active bilateral negotiations between the United States and Iran. There's a lot of diplomatic activity. Today, the Chinese and the Pakistanis met to come up with a formula of "Friending the War." We know everybody from Egypt to Turkey, to Saudi have been involved in diplomatic efforts, probably back-channeling happening. But what's very clear is that nobody can believe anything that Trump says. And that most of what he posts on social media has the single-minded intention of trying to calm markets and keep oil prices from going up too high or keep the stock market from going down too much. But every single time he says that these negotiations, Iranians come out and say that there are not negotiations happening. Or yeah, maybe Arachi, the foreign minister, might have gotten like a U-up text from Whitcoth, but there's no formula that anybody is aware of about how to end this war. And part because there's no clarity on what the US objectives are, right? And that leads to the straight. Because when the war started, we were told it was because Iran's nuclear program was two weeks away from a nuclear weapon, which is a complete bullshit. Now we don't even hear anything about the nuclear program. Then, you know, Marco Rubio has been out there saying that the purpose of the war is to destroy the Iranian Navy and Air Force. Yeah, that's a new one. That's a new one. First of all, like, I'm not, I mean, I don't like the Iranian regime, but I don't know how many Americans are like, you know what, I'd really like my government to be doing, like destroying the Iranian Air Force, you know, that can't fly to the United States. Yeah. It's an insane, like, it has nothing to the nuclear program. It has nothing to do with, oh, I forgot, the Iranian people were supposed to rise up and there was going to be a democracy and the former Shah's son was going to go, what happened to that? That's out the window. So no nuclear ambitions anymore. No ambitions to change the regime to a democracy, I'm not saying that would have worked, but we don't hear about that anymore. We hear about the Navy and the Air Force of Iran. But the fundamental issue for the United States is that things are much worse today than when the war started. The main reason for that is that the straightforward moves has been closed and therefore 20% of the world's fossil fuel energy is not getting out, creating a potentially economic catastrophe that I think people have not yet gotten their minds around because it's coming one way or another, even if the war ended tomorrow, we're going to be dealing with the effects of this. So I, as an American citizen, have no idea what the purpose of this war is. Importantly, the Iranians, who are supposed to be the ones that Trump is ostensibly negotiating with, how could the Iranians have any idea? What they're being asked to do when these things keep changing? How can the Iranians trust a negotiation when they've been bombed twice in the middle of previous negotiations? How can they trust a negotiation when Israel keeps assassinating people, including some of the people who would be engaged in those negotiations? So it's just totally incoherent. And now, for him to say, we will walk away from this without the straightforward moves being opened up. In fact, the straightforward moves is being run like a fucking toll road by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was not the case before the war. So Iran's got in a stronger position because of the war. We literally just made everything worse. Yeah, we made the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps like how hold 20% of the world's energy hostage. If we walk away from that, and our only solution is to ask like the rural navy as Peter XS said, the big bad British navy, like as if it's, you know, the 19th century, like those countries are not gonna bail Trump out 'cause he's treated them like shit because he's tariffed them, he's insulted them, he's humiliated them, he's threatened to invade Greenland, why would they come bail Trump out by opening up the straight? And by the way, even if they decided they wanted to do that, do you know how long it would take the Europeans to put together some naval armada to then go down to the straight of our moves and escort tankers? Like months. So none of this makes any sense. And meanwhile, while it's happening, Trump is deploying the 82nd Airborne and all these special forces to the region. So maybe he's just saying all these things about peace to calm markets, but we're gonna have ground troops. We just don't know at this point. And that is terrifying, given the scale of the crisis that we're in, that people that follow this as closely as we do, can make no sense of what the hell is going on. - Yeah. And well, and it's, you know, something we'll discuss more in terms of the ground troops, in terms of the impacts for people in the region. There's projection from the UN development program. It said one month of this work and plunged four million more people across the Arab world into poverty and shave off up to 6% of the region's economic output during that time. And that's just one month of the war. We're in week five of this war. And that's, you know, that's not including all the other global economic impacts that we talked about in the show. And especially last week in our interview. I mean, obviously something is happening, right? Like there were 20 Pakistani oil tankers that were let through. So somebody's talking to the Iranians, but as you mentioned, maybe it's not bilateral talks. I can see how it's also not, you know, the Iranians would want to project an image of strength probably to their people and not say that they're negotiating with the US, even if they were. But either way, it's just, it's so demoralizing to see that nobody really has an idea of what's happening, who's in charge. And so another thing that I want to bring up, though, is the notion of regime change. It used to be focused on bringing some kind of democracy, right, to the Iranian people. First of all, Moustabha Hamini, the former Itola son who's now been put in charge, she hasn't been seen or heard from. The Russian ambassador to Iran did say that rumors that he was being treated in Russia untrue and that he's in Iran, but obviously avoiding public appearances. But I don't know if you've noticed been suddenly the line from the administration is that regime change is just, it's already happened. Yeah, yeah, we have a clip of that. Let's take a listen. We're doing extremely well in that negotiation. But you never know with the red because we negotiate with him and then we always have to blow him up. But we've had regime change. If you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, and wrong then, the next regime is also dead. And the third regime would tell you what different people than anybody yourself with before. It's a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change. And frankly, they've been very reasonable. If there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future, that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world. But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability that that is not the case. There's a little mark. It goes not in the loop, apparently. But are we on regime number three? I was under the impression that regime is a system. It's not just about what individual might be at the top that you're talking to. So, and first of all, I do want to say on the 20 tankers, like, because Trump also went out and said that Iran made this tribute to us of letting - Right, it was a gift. - The gift of President. Eight tankers, before the war, 100 to 135 tankers were going to the straight away every day. So this is such Trumpian logic. You launch an illegal and unnecessary war, create a giant fucking problem. And then when eight tankers get through, you treat it like an achievement. When, like, you should have 135 tankers getting through there potentially in a day. So, like, just spare that in mind. Look, on the regime point, this is Trump, he's finally created a problem that is so big that there's just no way to turn to spin his way out of it. He's so accustomed to bullshitting his way through things and lying about things in ways that he knows will be repeated on Fox News. But just take the regime issue. We assassinated, or Israel assassinated, the 86-year-old Supreme Leader. Well, the 86-year-old Supreme Leader was replaced by his younger and more hard-lined son. The regime is a very important part of the regime. is not Ayatollah Ali Khanenei who's been killed, the regime is called the Islamic Republic of Iran. It's a system of governance that has clerics, that has the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as the most extreme and hardcore version of their security forces, that has Basij militia, that has a military, that has government officials across that country. Just because you kill a bunch of those people does not mean that there's regime change. I don't think Americans thought there was regime change God forbid when like JFK was assassinated. Like the regime is fully in place, and the regime is in some ways weaker, 'cause they've lost a lot of people in capabilities, but in some ways actually stronger, because they are now controlling the straight of our moves and holding the entire global economy hostage. They have now demonstrated that they can regionalize this war and impose such a cost in the United States, that the president of the United States is self-evidently trying to talk himself out of this war, right? And so this is utter bullshit. And there's the problem with it, Alona is that you cannot make policy based on lies. Like he wants us to believe that the regime has changed. He wants us to believe that everything has been obliterated. He wants us to believe that Iran is paying tribute with ships that are going through the straight of our moves, which is closed. Like these things aren't happening. And if you're trying to suit policy to the lies being told by the president, and something as big and complex as a war, when Iran gets a vote, how and when this war ends, Israel, which gets a vote on how and when this war ends, the fact that even if this war ended tomorrow, it would take years, I think, to rehabilitate all of that energy infrastructure that's been damaged and to restart the full supply of energy through the straight of our moves. These are all facts that Trump cannot contend with. And so we're living in this crazy reality where we can all see from the price of gas in this country to the shit that has blown up across the Middle East, to the tankers that aren't getting the straight of our moves. What is actually happening? And you have Trump out there saying there's regime change. We're on the third regime. We're winning. We've already won. We've obliterated everything. When none of those things are true. - Yeah. (upbeat music) - This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace provides all the necessary tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand and facilitate payments, making it the ideal solution for businesses of all sizes. 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You bring all that up, but you can't win a war, run a war based on lies. I have a lot of people who I know who are supporters of Trump or who maybe think that this war is happening for the right reasons because they're afraid of Iran getting a nuclear weapon. And I'm always just trying to think of how do I have a reasonable conversation where I'm really trying to put myself into their shoes, see their perspective, come back with what I think are like rational arguments to express my own. And I think pre-Trump, the American people were also got really fed up too, a feeling like they were lied to by their government when it came to wars with Iraq or with Afghanistan. I mean, I'm sorry, but for 20 years, we kept being told that we were like winning hearts and minds and that things were working when realistically, no, they weren't at all. But now it's just the lies seem so much more in your face. But this is such an important point, and you're right. Let us try to inhabit someone who might support this or support a tougher policy of the Iran. When the last operation at midnight hammer, the last war of the Iran, the 12-day war, whatever you want to call it, when we bombed Iran's nuclear program last year, I could have a sincere policy difference. I could say, OK, I guess I understand, even if I totally disagree, that the best way to deal with the Iran's nuclear program is to bomb it. But I could see that someone else might think that diplomacy is not working well enough. And this is a threat. We don't want to run a nuclear weapon. And so I can inhabit the perspective of somebody who thought that bombing the Iranian nuclear program was a good policy. And then we have a difference of opinion about that. The problem with this war is I don't know what it's about. So I actually can't even inhabit the position of a war supporter, because nobody can tell me what the purpose of the war is. Is it the nuclear program? Is it to install Reza Palavi, is the leader of Iran? Is it to destroy the Iranian navy? Is it to change the regime? Is it-- what is it? It's all of the above, right? Because we felt like it. Well, yeah, essentially what it comes down to. Yeah, or Israel felt like it. And so how can you even inhabit the position of people that are supportive of this when you don't even know what this is? I don't even know, even in Afghanistan or any of these other-- actually, I knew what the Bush administration said. It was trying to set up a new government in Iraq. In Afghanistan, we were trying to keep the Taliban out of power. I don't know what we're doing in Iran. And I don't even know if the President of the United States knows what we're doing in Iran. And that's what makes it impossible to even try to understand it from their perspective. Winning the part that really upsets me is that it's people's lives or it's stake. A lot of people. Yeah, war is not a game. There are already 13 US service members who have been killed around 300. Last I checked who have been injured. And now the New York Times reported that we have over 50,000 troops currently in the Middle East. That's because that's 10,000 more than we usually have in the region. That's because we've sent more there. In addition to the 2,000 paratroopers in the 82nd Air Board Division that were sent last week, several hundred special operations forces. That's Army Rangers and Navy SEALs have been deployed. And the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is considering sending another 10,000 troops, which would likely include infantry, armoured vehicles, and logistics support. I mean, you and Tommy have spoken about some of this already on the show, I just want to go over some of it again, right? Some of the potential ground operations that are on the table, which are the invasion of Carg Island, which is where most of Iran's oil experts go through, exports go through. That island is only 16 miles from Iran's coast. So drones, missiles, those would be a constant threat. If we were to invade Carg Island. Then there's the operations along the coastline of the strait, or on strategic islands to secure the straight-of-hormouse. But we apparently don't care about the straight-of-hormouse anymore. And then there's an operation to seize Iran's enriched uranium, which would be a massive multi-day undertaking involving, per the Wall Street Journal, combat troops to secure parameters, engineers with excavating equipment to search through debris and check for mines and booby traps. Special operations forces with expertise in handling nuclear material, and unless an airfield was available, a makeshift one would need to be set up to bring equipment in and take the nuclear material out. I just want to play you a clip here because I think you have some unlikely people who normally would be war cheerleaders who've been coming out. We've talked about them, but just in reference to all of this potential military action, you have Eric Prince, right? The founder of the infamous military contractor Blackwater, formerly known as Blackwater. I forget what they rebranded to. So this was at a panel at CPAC last week, and I kid you not the name of this panel. It was called Breaking Stuff and Killing Bad Guys, the case for Western military dominance. But here's what he had to say. I counseled as loud as possible against doing this in the first place. I don't share the optimism of the administration that there's going to be a peaceful stop to this. they will burn. it down and my real concern is that if they try to put boots on the ground, force the Straits of Hormuz, you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks. And I don't think people are really prepared for that. I take everything Eric Prince says with a grain of salt, I mean, the guy who's, he's profited plenty off of American military endeavors, but what does that tell you? I was trying to figure out how to not say I agree with Eric Prince, but he's got a point. He's got a point and look, he tends to like to operate in places where it's kind of chaos and there's not like a military force like the Iranians. You summed up well these potential operations. I just make a few points to build on it. In any event where the American military is put onto the ground in Iran, they will face fierce resistance, either from drones and missiles or from some kind of direct combat. The thing that concerns me is that Trump might want to continually be looking for some win, some event that allows him to say, we won. We have Carg Island or we won. We got the stuff out of Isfahan, where the nuclear material is in the center of Iran. And it is entirely in Iran's interest to deny Trump the illusion or the narrative that he won, right? And so therefore, they're not just going to say, up, you got us, you won Carg Island, we surrender, you know, no, they're going to try to kill as many Americans as they can in Carg Island, to take out warships, to bomb our facilities across the region. And this is a country of 90 plus million people. This is a civilization that has survived for 5,000 years. This is a regime in the Islamic Republic that went through nearly a decade of the Iran and Iraq war, losing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and continued to fight. This is not a statement that the Iranian regime is a bunch of good guys. It's a statement that they're not going to capitulate. And Trump just doesn't seem to understand that. And what I worry about with these deployments, as we saw in the run-up to the war, or as we saw the deployments of the Caribbean, they take on a logic and a momentum of their own. We don't send all these people to the Middle East without doing something with them. You know, it just feels ominously like he's going to pick from this menu of like Season Island or Open the Straight or try to get the nuclear material, but that's escalation. And if you boot touch Iranian ground, the Iranians are going to fight like hell. And then we're going to feel like we have to hit them again because they killed some more of our guys. And we just stay in this escalation loop that actually, over time, benefits the Iranians in some ways because they know that they've looked at Afghanistan. They've looked at Iraq. They've looked at Libya. They know that the United States is not going to stay invested in a multi-year ground war in Iran. They know that there's no public support for that. And they're just going to want to try to cause as much damage to us as they can so that we don't do it again. And so this is the fundamental problem. There's not like a Trump keeps wanting like the video game victory, you know, like this island can become the objective, you know, when that's not how the Iranians are going to respond. And in the meantime, Americans, I've said this to you alone offline, but we're not seeing the full damage picture either. The Pentagon is not being transparent. Like we've had facilities hit in Bahrain. We've had facilities hit in Saudi. We've had embassies hit in Riyadh and Baghdad. Like we are taking on huge damage. We don't know how seriously these injuries are. Like I keep learning about injuries from like leaked reports like officials say that there was let me just say so there were 12 troops who were injured on Friday when Iranian missiles and drones hit the Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, which is interesting too because it's like we don't have a military base in Saudi Arabia and like some of the other Gulf countries, but then clearly there's a US troop presence there and can I say one thing about that? Yeah. They destroyed an A wax, which is one of the most expensive planes that the United States has is a radar aircraft and there are reports that they knew exactly where to shoot and that the Russian intelligence that the Iranians may be getting could be improving their capacity to hit things like very specific to hit an A wax, a single airplane on a tarmac, it shows a level of capability and a level of targeting that is better than the Iranians were a month ago. And the New York Times said that many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable. So yeah, this is what we've done and I think just to your point earlier too that you do one thing, it's going to lead to continued escalation, continued escalation, you and I were talking about this earlier before the show that it just feels like mission creep becomes an inevitable thing when you think that some type of military operation is just going to be a quick one and done it never is. And so I just want to hit one more aspect of this war that we haven't gotten to, which is incredibly important, which is of course the civilian harm that's being caused the normalization of the targeting of civilian infrastructure from both sides to, I mean, the list of non-military targets that have been hit is very, very long. We spoke a lot about the girl's elementary school, the start of the war, Iran's Ministry of Science says that 21 universities in the country have been damaged by strikes. And Iran has, by the way, threatened to retaliate by hitting American affiliated universities in the Middle East. Then of course, we've spoken about all of the attacks on energy infrastructure and we've seen hits on water desalination plants, Amazon data centers, airports, ports, steel, chemical and aluminum factories. I mean, this is both sides too, right? It's not just like only one side doing it, but we also then were able to speak with somebody who is in Tehran currently because one of the big problems is we've been hearing so little from people. We see so little from people who are living through this in Iran who understandably I think have very complex feelings about it. And so this is Martin Van Ramstunk. She is the Iran country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. And here's just a little bit of what she told us life in Tehran is like right now. My colleagues are working in the extreme difficult and dangerous conditions to scale up our relief for families that are displaced by the war. We have over 108 workers, which many have been displaced themselves with their families. Nearly every neighborhood buildings are destroyed with surrounding damages. Desperate families tape their windows to prevent shattered glass after a blow. Civilians are paying the highest price for this war. I also lie awake at night and listen to the heavy explosions in Tehran. I am worried about my colleagues and their families. And my living so close to locations under attack. And colleagues have been telling me that the sounds are becoming too much. Even small cities are under attack and nowhere seems to be safe. Yet even in this situation people try to help each other. Conversations now start with inquiring if the other person is okay and still safe. Despite all this doom and gloom, Iranians are still living. We are living in a surreal balance of war and everyday life. And the latest estimates that we have seen, by the way, do show that at least 1,500 Iranians have been killed so far. Yeah. And first of all, in the targeting piece, this is incredibly worrying. And part of what we have seen, and we talked about this for years with Gaza, is that these really defense forces had a view of fighting wars that ignores the laws of wars. We saw them bomb hospitals. We saw them bomb schools. We saw them drop 2,000 pound bombs on apartment blocks to kill one terrorists and God knows how many other people got killed. We saw refugee camps bombed. And basically we saw the laws of war tossed out the window. We saw a serial commission of war crimes by the IDF in Gaza. And if you pointed that out, you got attacked or called names or what have you. But that's what happened. And what's worrying me is that the United States military, which has always held itself to tried, I'm not saying it perfectly, but tried to abide by standards, at first, you saw a targeting error. I would like to believe that, and I do believe that Iranian girl school that got bombed were over 100 children were killed. That was a targeting mistake. But when Donald Trump goes out and threatens to blow up desalination plans and threatens to blow up electricity generation, he is threatening to commit war crimes. The same thing that if Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, we're all appalled in up and arms about it. The same thing that the IDF has been doing in Lebanon and in Gaza. And if we are now in a world in which this is what it's like when nobody plays by the, if you want to know why there are laws of war, this is why. Because it becomes a race to the bottom. Because everybody starts committing war crimes. Everybody starts targeting civilian targets. Everybody starts targeting infrastructure that will have an economic impact and a human impact. And so when Trump says those things, we shouldn't shrug it off. I wish he heard more resistance, including from Republicans, that if the American military starts to act like the IDF has been acting and blowing up desalination plans and bombing. And don't, you know, the universities really pisses me off because then they'll say, like, well, there was some IRGC research going under that standard, you know, how many American universities. Do research for the defense department, are you, are they credible military targets now? Because that's what the Iranians are going to say. It doesn't make the Iranians right. It makes them wrong. But it means that there's a reason why we follow rules because we want other people to follow rules too. And the other thing I'd say is, whatever the objectives of this war are, there are, we talked about the thousand plus killed. Millions of Iranians are displaced. A fifth of Lebanon is displaced. Is anything that is trying to be accomplished right now worth that? We are shattering millions of lives in the United States and Israel. Do you know Americans are inconvenienced because you're paying more at the pump? Imagine if you and your family were living in a fucking tent in southern Lebanon or, you know, in the outskirts of Tehran. That's what we're doing to families. For what purpose? So Donald Trump can get a news cycle win, or so BB Net Nyau can annex southern Lebanon. Like this is, this is, I'm sorry, like I, I told you. I know I respect your, I respect your fashion because it's true. What I would like to happen is for this word and it can end diplomatically. And so if people say, well, what's your solution? My solution is probably a multilateral, probably not the U.S. even leading the negotiations, but some agreement in which the straight-of-form moves reopens. Israel and the U.S. stop bombing. Iran is going to have to get something, sanctions relief. And we can all just, everybody can move on with their lives because the longer this goes on, the more individuals are going to suffer and the more global economic task free is going to be deeper. Well, I, I also think that's just always the problem with a lot of our military exploits as a country, right? As we just tend to be geographically, physically in many ways, economically isolated and removed from it. This is my very awkward and segway that into the next clip I was going to play for you, Ben, because I didn't expect for you to go on such an impassioned rant before. No, I'm really glad you did it because I've been thinking and feeling the same thing all the time. And it's why I think that hearing firsthand accounts are so important, right? And it's one of the things that we talk about this all the time with press not allowed into Gaza that we miss, right? Without a lot of more reporters in Iran, it's the thing that you're missing, which is seeing people who are just living absolutely normal lives a month ago. Yeah, who are now completely uprooted. And I, you know, I was listening to a report on BBC just this morning. And they were talking about like there's these newborns who were four or five days old. And these people used to have homes with all the toys for their kids. And now, as you mentioned, you know, they're living in a tent. And it's not the environment you would want to bring kids into. I want to play this clip for you, which was actually done for the Jesse Waters show on Fox News of Americans, spring breakers. Yeah. So let's just, I guess for a little levity, let's check it out, spring break, 2026. What is the game plan? And my mom is watching. I'm sorry, mom, but I've been getting pretty drunk almost every day. What issue facing America is the most important to you? What bikini I'm going to wear next? Obesity is terrible. Getting a tan on the beach. That's the most important thing in my life right now. If you heard that Donald Trump has been doing recently, we're going to war with Iraq. That's been crazy. What are you doing? Columbia. You got mud around. Yeah, I told us dead. I'm so what? Who? What? What is that? Who the **** is Ayotola? I've never heard that word in my life. Lewis. What's Ayotola? He was a supreme leader of Iran. He's dead. Oh, we killed him. Well, you dead. You killed him. What have you heard about Venezuela? Venezuela? That they beat us in the world. Baseball classic. Have you heard anything else? No. Okay. So, by the way, that went on for a lot longer. And that was just Anisha, you know, cut it down to a nice little bite-sized chunk before we hear. I just want to say that my first, you know, instinct when I saw this video was to, like, to be in defense of our youth because I'm like, you know, they're young. You're allowed to be dumb. You're on spring break. You're allowed to be getting, like, drunk and like, you know, I certainly if you would ask me about geopolitical events when I was like a freshman in college, I probably wouldn't have given you a very, like, salient responses to things, you know, and, and then people evolve and they get wiser and they get older. But man, when we just compare that to what we were talking about, you know, in terms of our isolation as a nation, it's not such a good look. Oh, God. Yeah. I'm not a scolding, you know, asshole. And I went on spring break. I went to Jamaica and, you know, had a good time or whatever, but, I would say that there's something, here's what I would ask people, you know, extending the grace that I don't expect every college kid who's on spring break to be following the intricacies of, you know, a war in Iran. But we are bombing this country. And the two things I would ask are, what is the grace you extend to a 19 year old Iranian or Lebanese college student, right? Like, why is it okay that, you know, we can go around and just break countries and bomb people and kill their leaders and blow up their universities and just think it's charming and wonderful that, you know, people are thinking about their bikini tan or how drunk they're going to get tonight. Like, there's something grotesque about that. But the second thing is, how does that clip look to anyone else in the world who's not American? Like, that's what I just think we really need to consider here because we cannot simultaneously want to be the superpower that runs the world and that, you know, launches all these wars. The reason we can do that is because of what we just saw. Like, the reason we can continue to do stupid things. And by the way, I'd be pissed if I was a 19 year old American who just got deployed to the fucking Middle East. Yeah, right? Because it's not, so now let's now let's defend the military. Like, we keep asking 19 year olds to go fight in South Asia and North Africa and the Middle East. So what? So that these people can get drunk and Jesse Watters can have a laugh about it, you know, so I don't know. I don't know. I feel I don't want to be like a. No, I don't want to try them either. But I feel like actually it's like a dull. It's a failure of all of us. Yeah, like the adults. Touching not their fault. Yeah. It's their parents, their politicians, all of us. It's actually not their fault. We're the ones that are supposed to educate the younger generation. So that's what I was thinking too. Yeah. I feel like these shows always love to make fun of college students and be like, oh, this is what like a liberal arts education is going to get you and this is what happens, you know, with all the universities. But it's on everybody, you know, like the way that you parent, the way that you are raised and educated by your community, you know, all of that is it's all it's everything that builds up over time. And so if this is the way that, you know, our youth are looking at the world or rather like, you know, not looking or thinking about the world that's on all of us. Now, this is a total swerve and we can come back. But like, there is a longer conversation we had about the systematic dismantling of public education in this country since Ronald Reagan was president, the systematic, de-legitimizing of being smart, you know, like elites or intellectuals or, you know, the starving of funds for, you know, state university systems in some cases. If I'm cynical, I would say some of that is by design, because like autocratic right wing parties would like to have dumber populations so that they're easier to control. And that's not even getting into what social media has done, unregulated social media has done. It's too. So I truly, truly, truly don't blame young people. I blame the last 40 years of post Reagan policies that have starved public education and deregulated the kind of technology platforms that kind of lock people into, you know, or even with this current administration, just in terms of like the books that are being banned, right? The dismantling of DEI means also taking out like rewriting, rewriting history. These are connected. All kinds of people. All of that is connected. I couldn't agree with you more. And it's just, it's so deeply upsetting and frustrating, because it's, it's also, it's what happens in other countries, you know, when they try to just erase dirty history so that you have an uneducated population and then you just, a war like this could not have had away with it all 30 years ago. A lot of prep work had to be done to make Americans like be able to tolerate this. 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By the way, actually, I was thinking about that while I wrote this because I was like, oh, am I going to have to say secretary of war? The writing was on the wall when they changed it from Department of Defense to Department of War last September. We all should have known some shit was coming down. Hegseth is better suited to be the idiot interviewing those kids on the beach. That's what he actually is for. On that note, I'm actually not bringing up Hegseth to talk about Iran, but just because you said that, there was a CNN report today that was talking about how Pete Hegseth is apparently like was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the war in Iran with Trump cabinet. And according to one source familiar with Hegseth's current mindset, told CNN, he's very trigger happy. He believes blowing shit up is the best way for him to, for him to keep his job. Well, you know, to your point, the warning sentence have been there, though, because he said he wanted to get rid of rules of engagement. He wanted to be warriors again. You know, like, like, this has been building for a year. Yeah. All right. But so I want to talk to him about a different talk about him for a different reason, though. We've spoken before in the show about how he's undergone this firing spree at the Pentagon, right? Chiefs chairman, CQ Brown, he fired Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be the chief of naval operations. Now he has reportedly personally intervened to stop the promotions of four army officers who were on track to become one-star generals. It just so happens that they were two women and two black men. And then NPR reported that a black colonel and a female colonel were both taken off of a promotion list as well. You know, Pete Hegseth, of course, former Fox News weekend host knows a thing or two about being promoted to powerful positions without being qualified, I think. But what I think is really worth bringing up here, Ben, is that, you know, not only is it unprecedented for the Secretary of War to personally intervene, these people were on these promotion lists because they've been selected by the people that actually work with them, you know, like you're selected by your peers based on your performance and all of that to be promoted. So, you know, it's just mind blowing to me and what unnamed officials keep telling the press because now I think that there's just environment of fear among the Pentagon based on just all of the unnamed anonymous sources that are talking to all the different media organizations is that, you know, they're saying it's just weeding out the people who aren't ideologically compatible. Yeah, but what's even worse about it is they seem to think that just because you're black and a woman, you won't be ideologically compatible, right? Of course. There was no straight-up discriminating. There was no reason to get rid of CQ Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the fact that he was black and made an eloquent video once about racism, right? And we saw him get rid of a lot of senior women, too. So, there's a pattern here of getting rid of black people and women from high positions in military. And just so people understand this, the promotion to a one-star general would normally like the Secretary of Defense would not even be involved in any way, shape or form of that. I mean, keep in mind, one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star, like you're climbing a ladder there. And maybe when you get to the four-stars, you know, like the. Well, he already cleaned house with the four-star. Yeah. Don't forget. And so the fact that he's reaching all the way down there is clearly sending a message. And if you look at the upper echelons of the military, they're getting more white and more male and presumably more manga. And you and I actually did a YouTube about this a while ago, but there are all these warning signs. And they are connected to what we've been talking about with Iran. Because Hegseth has come in and at Trump's direction, the military is far less transparent, like they've got the My Pillow Guy media in the Pentagon press people in the room and they try to kick everybody else out. They. It's whiter. It's more ideologically in line with Trump's agenda. It's not being transparent. I hate to say this. I wish I could just pick on Hegseth, but usually there would be these kind of professional briefings by uniform military about everything that are factual. And we'd see much less of that too. And you know, something like 40 percent, you know, of the military is not white. And so this isn't like some crazy, you know, DEI initiative. It's just the point that like it's something deeply fucked up about saying we're only going to have a bunch of white men run an institution that looks like America and that should look like America. I mean, it's just pure racism and misogyny. Like there's no other explanation for why Pete Hegseth is reaching down and denying people a promotion to a one star general. Well, not to mention it just goes against everything that we think the military is supposed to represent to right that it's it's it's it's meant to represent all of us and all Americans and defend. It's one of the Americans admire about the right. Yeah, exactly. It's meant to be a political which that I mean that reminds me to like I want to bring up another bit about Hegseth, which is that there has been all this reporting that he is injecting so much of his personal faith, Christianity, you know, into the Pentagon too. Like the Washington Post said that every month at the Pentagon, Hegseth hosts evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented. His social media profile and public comments routinely espouse his understanding of Christianity. He's brought clergy from his small Christian denomination to preach at the Pentagon, including a prominent pastor who says women shouldn't have the right to vote. And then last Wednesday at the Pentagon Hegseth prayed for U.S. troops to inflict quote overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ. And then sorry, this is still from the Washington Post. Later that day, his department announced military chaplains would no longer wear their rank on their uniform and instead would wear religious insignia. You know, even that part, like the the military is also supposed to be highly representative of everybody who serves in it, people who come from all different backgrounds and all different religions. And you know, if now if you have a very clear prioritization for Christianity, you know, like you're again dividing, weeding out people. Well, I mean, how would you feel if you were black and the like, how would you feel if you're a woman? How do you feel if you're Jewish? Like, like the message being sent to what is really the majority, the mill, if you add up the people in the military that are not white Christian men, it's probably a majority of the military. How do they feel? So this will harm the cohesion of the military and will harm the way recruitment. Because do you want to sign up for that kind of military? So this is, you know, could have long lasting impacts. I'll also just say, you know, I'm not the Christian of the year over here. Last I checked. No, you're not here just to really bad Jews. Yeah. Well, yeah. But last I checked, Jesus Christ wasn't like a bloodthirsty warlord. Like I thought, you know, blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Like what? This is such a bastardization of Christianity. Like Christianity is supposed to value civilian life. What is Christian about threatening to blow up desalination plants? What is Christian about bombing a girl school? So this is this bullshit, performative Christianity that I doesn't comport with any Christianity I'm familiar with. Yeah. I just want to use this moment since you brought up our old YouTube video to, you know, tell everybody, remind everybody to subscribe to Pots of the World on YouTube because we do additional videos there, Ben and I do stuff every now and then, Ben and Tommy hop on whenever there's big breaking news and we do responses, so don't forget that that goes a long way for Pots of the World. We got to get more subscribers because we're trying to fight the good fight here for progressive media. All right. I want to do an update on Russia, naturally, but specifically, I want to talk about the way that the Russian government is kind of waging a war on its own people and their access to information. Now, there's two major stories there. So the first is that the Russian government has been restricting the use of the messaging app telegram. They're trying to get everybody to squint. which over to a government created op called Max, but no one really wants to use it. 'Cause obviously there's, sorry. - It's literally a good strategy. - Yeah. - It's a good strategy. - You're the Russian and the conversation good. - And I just have to point out that right. Telegram is incredibly popular within Russia. I've seen statistics that more than 76% of the population uses it. Also, the government uses it. They have their, you know, like social media channels on there to put out information. The military uses it to communicate with each other. It's also a way for all kinds of influencers and bloggers to make money. Like a lot of pro-war military bloggers. - Yeah, the same way that there's a TikTok economy here. There's a telecom economy. - Yeah, exactly. It's a huge economy. And so, yeah, just think about the impacts of that if you're gonna take Telegram away from people. And then the second thing that's going on is the Russian government has been increasingly just blocking the internet all together. People are complaining that there's no Wi-Fi around, that there's no cell service, VPNs are getting blocked. It's less so impacting people who work for like, really big companies that have their own servers. But it's inflicting damage on just the way people go about their daily lives, right? Like Russia's a plugged in society. If you want to order food, you want to order a taxi, you want to pay for something with your phone, you need the internet to do all that. And according to Commissioner Sun, which is a newspaper each day of no service, cost Russian businesses as much as one billion rubles, which is $12 million, I also just want to point out, personally, I've been impacted by this because it's just getting harder and harder to communicate with my family. And Russia, we, I don't want to give all my secrets, so I've been doing it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to say it's not max, it's not max, but you know, we communicate, we use video, we use the internet, and increasingly, there is just like really bad service. Sometimes like, you know, we can't really see each other, hear each other, it's just a horrible connection. Or the colleges don't go through it all. And you know, all of that obviously is upsetting and terrifying, not just for me, but I think for anybody who has, you know, family and loved ones, and people that they need to communicate with in the country. But the thing that they're doing is, you know, the Russian government is claiming this is all done under the guise of security. They tell people it's to protect against Ukrainian drones. I also think though it's interesting, 'cause there's a lot of speculation that it's really just Putin becoming completely paranoid after reports saying that, you know, the Israeli is in the Americans like hacked into the street cameras, and that's how traffic cameras, and that's how they monitor the Iranian leadership's moves there. So first before I go a little further, what do you think of the paranoia angle? - I think it feels right to me. I mean, and I saw a crazy, you know, the near-times beer chief in Moscow did a great report on this. And her one of her points was that increasingly, the internet edges are in Moscow. - Yes, and that's a very important point that I didn't mention. - And the reason it's important, as you know, that me alone is that at the internet's out in Moscow, what the hell is going on in the rest of Russia? 'Cause Moscow's supposed to be the connected capital of all the places. - They've been dealing with this for a long time. They've been firsthand feeling the impacts of the war a lot more because it's their men that are going, yeah, to the front. And so Moscow has been the America. It's been the isolated, you know, little island where life has pretty much gone on as normal. And then now the last like month, I think this has really gone on. - And we should say, you know, already the major, you know, Facebook is banned, YouTube is banned. - Yeah. - What's app is banned? And what's interesting to me about this is that, okay, Putin has now moved in the company of like North Korea and to some extent China. But the point is that North Korea never had internet access. The Chinese built this firewall. So they kind of built the system to be controllable and accessible to mass surveillance. - And it's been there a lot. - It's been there a lot. So whereas Russia had an open internet-based society, right? Like they, they were connected, you know, to all the same things we are. And it just, I asked people to imagine all that being taken away. And not just again, your ability to kind of go to, you know, and mytimes.com or something. Your ability to like order food online, your ability to do any e-commerce, your ability to communicate, like you said. I just have to wonder whether this kind of Putin paranoia and desire to kind of wall off Russia entirely and create a total police state there. At some point, there's a combination of that. Casualties, you know, disabled people coming home, like when does this start to tip against him? A lot is going in Putin's favor right now, including the war in Iran, including higher oil prices, including getting sanctions really from the US. So this is more a three or five-year question to me, but like, this has got to be pissing people off. Yeah, well, so I mean, I think that's a really interesting point, right? 'Cause at the moment, people are still too scared for any kind of mass action. I mean, there's been reporting that people have been trying to plan protests and rallies, but they're, unless they're sanctions, like basically allowed and approved by the government, then people choose not to do it. Because then like, it gets a little too risky, but the Associated Press actually wrote about this. And, you know, it's just like so classically Russian in terms of the bureaucratic approach, always making no sense. So they talked about how in one Russian city, officials blocked a rally due to a tree inspection. And others, they blamed snow removal problems or still existing COVID-19 restrictions. And in one location, administrators argue that the reason for the protest didn't exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and then there was this incredible piece, you know, I didn't have the team cut a clip today because it's in Russian, but it was produced by Channel One, which is like a state run news channel there in Russia. And it was like, man, on the street interviews, and it's just talking about like the novel ways people are getting around the internet not being available and Wi-Fi sucking. And it was like, you know, wave down a cab the old fashioned way, like always carry cash on you, download the maps in advance. Yeah, or it's like, you know, go into a cafe and ask if you can use their internet, you know, to like call your mom, it's just, it's so pathetic. Which is, you're to wonder how long that can go on, but just to your point, right? So, there were a couple, there was a recent poll by Lavada, which is a polling organization there, and no way, guys, yeah, the newspaper, they found that three quarters of respondents said that tiredness of war described the mood in the country. And there was a survey that was done, this was like a government sanctioned survey, so it's interesting, but they said the internet restrictions triggered anger in 46% of teenagers. Crying in 15% confusion or irritation in 14% is probably like bad translations, and I didn't read the Russian version. But so overall, 83% of respondents reacted negatively, and that's amongst, you know, teenagers, they didn't ask the adults understandably, 'cause I think it's easy to be like, oh, the teens can't live without their web. But we have to wonder, you know, eventually, this is the like one that could kind of backfire. - I think what it reminds you of is like, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, the war in Ukraine's been trending well for Putin in a lot of ways, right? Like, but that doesn't mean it's trending well for Russians, you know, and a common thread in all these autocratic societies is what may be good for the strongman, or even for like a cabal of people on top of the system, is not benefiting anybody else. Like one thing we all start in common these days, in most countries, is that we're all getting screwed by a bunch of corrupt strongmen who are like hijacked power, you know, and so Putin's success is not the Russian people's success. - Absolutely not. - And you would hope that at a certain point, that leads to some change there. - Yeah. - But it's not gonna happen, you know, tomorrow. - I was thinking about that a lot yesterday, you know, I was the thing about that a lot too, 'cause again, I was relating it back to like Trump and just how still so many Trump supporters kind of just believe in everything he does, you know, and it becomes this kind of like cult celebrity worship around one figure, but then Putin has that too, and so does like, you know, so do so many of the autocratic leaders, but they don't have your best interest in mine. If these are people, if these are people who would stay in power forever if they could, you know, they don't have your best interest in my mind. - Well, just what they're doing, exactly. Like if they're just focused on how to enrich themselves, you know, damn everyone else, they're not interested in what's best for you. And like they're just all the writing is on the wall, you know, like if you're trying to pick a boyfriend, you're not gonna choose the guy that only wants to talk about himself and wants you to make all the compromises, you know, and so it's like the writing is on the wall, people. - Yeah, I hope so, we should talk to my daughters if they're too young for that, but later on. - Later on, I'll give them some tips. A last story here, I want to just do a quick update and get your take on it. So speaking of the Russian President, right? In a strange turn of events, President Trump broke the blockade over the weekend by letting a Russian oil tanker navigate into Cuba, that ship is called the Anatolika Lothkin and it reached towards this morning. Now we've continued to cover this, but the blockade that was imposed back in January, it's thrown the island into a full-blown energy and economic crisis. I think crisis can seem a little bit of a vague term. So yes, and humanitarian crisis. Let me give some specific example of what's going on. Cubans are suffering from frequent and long blackouts, power plants aren't operating. Hospitals have limited power capacity to treat patients. The water supply is disrupted. There's no heater air conditioning. Students aren't able to attend classes because there is no fuel, there's no transportation. That means that, you know, like garbage trucks aren't running, trash is piled up all over the street. Anything that's arrived at the island is stuck at the ports, including humanitarian assistance. And, you know, the Washington Post reported that in extreme cases, people were using donkeys to move supplies from the ports. The list just goes on. And I've seen different estimates here on how impactful this single oil tanker would be, like some people would say that some people have said that it could meet the countries to be on for only nine or ten days. Other people have said like a month or two, either way, it's not a very long time. But Trump did comment on this, on Air Force One on Sunday. So let's take a listen. There's a report that the U.S. is going to let a Russian oil tanker go to Cuba. Is that true? Well, we have a tanker out there. We don't mind having somebody get a boat on because they need to survive. That's what I've reported is true as far as you know. Well, I would say, I told them, if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with it. Do you worry about whether it's Russia or not, what? Do you write them that helps Vladimir Putin, though? I was saying, "How bad might he lose this one boat load of oil that's all in his spot?" If he wants to do that, and if other countries want to do it, it doesn't bother me about, she's not going to have an impact. Cuba's finished. They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership. And whether or not they get a boat of oil, it's not going to matter. I prefer letting it in, whether it's Russia or anybody else, because the people need heat and cooling and all of the other things that you need. I'm just so curious what you think is going on, because we created the humanitarian crisis going on there. Once again, in coherence here, because we created this humanitarian crisis in Cuba, right? On top of the embargo that's in place, on top of Trump's reversal of the Obama air opening that I negotiated, they put this blockade in place. And so the policy of the United States, under Trump, was to do the opposite of what he just said. The policy of the United States has been to restrict any oil and fuel from getting to Cuba, which is leading people to die. I mean, you know, when hospitals shut down incubators, ventilators shut down, right? I mean, this is not without human consequence. And so now he's magnanimous, because he's letting a single-world tanker through his own blockade. And what he's, again, it's like Iran in a sense of, I don't know what we're trying to achieve in Cuba, because in the Cuban government, whatever you think of it, poses no threat to the United States. And it's not even like Iran, again, where there's a nuclear programmer. This is a poor country. It's a poor island nation. And so what is he trying to achieve? And actually, what we, there's increasing reports that they're trying to negotiate with the Castro family. Well, the Castro family, I negotiate with the Castro family. I negotiate with Alhandro Castro, who was a good fifth negotiator, by the way, I'd say, like he, it doesn't mean I grew them by politics, but they always did what he said. It was US that changed the terms of the deal when Trump came in. But what's the point of that? What are we trying to achieve here? He talked about regime change, but to what? And to what end? We don't know why we're blockating this island, and why we let Russian old tankers through and not other world tankers. And it's nonsensical, and by the way, bears saying, Alhandro, this is not what Americans elected Trump to do. Like they wanted lower prices here. Like they didn't want to like change the Cuban Venezuelan or Iranian governments. Like why, like why he's doing this, it flies in the face of anything that, with the exception of like small pockets of diaspora populations, like hardline Cubans, Iranian monarchists, Venezuelan diaspora, like people who clearly have the ear. US military should not be a mercenary force for like a small number of people in diaspora population. But meanwhile, don't forget that we cut all foreign aid, you know, that we're helping people. They might actually help you or date tuberculosis, you know, like you name it. Okay, well, we're not going to leave you on that depressing note. So I'm just going to, I'm going to finish the show here with a reading of a poem. And I'm actually going to read the Michael, our amazing producer is exact language here, because he always writes such funny scripts. He says, Ben, you're a man of letters. So I know that, I know you know the French have had an outsized impact on literature, right? Michelle de Montagne invented the personal essay, The Marquis de Sade, Pioneered, Kinky Pros, and Marcel Proust pushed the very boundaries of what fiction could do. But now we welcome a new member of the pantheon, former president Nicholas Sarkozy to that next exclusive club. Okay, so Sarkozy published a memoir in December of last year. The book is called The Journal of a Prisoner in it. Sarkozy writes about his long stretch behind bars from October 21st of 2025 to November 10th of 2025. Yeah. For the BBC, he was sentenced to five years for conspiring to fund his 2007 election campaign with money from the late Libyan dictator, Momor Gadoffi. But he was released a few weeks into the sentence while he awaits an appeal. And during his 20 days in the clank, he did a lot of reading, writing, found God, because why not? So thanks to Harper's, we have a short excerpt from the memoir to share with listeners. It's translated from French by Laura Treesman and it goes a little something like this. I don't know if I can read all of it with a straight face, but I'm going to try. I am not someone who likes to complain, who seeks pity or commiseration. I don't know how to sulk, still, less how to pout. Sitting down on the unmade bed on my first night in prison, I had a shock. I had never felt, even during my military service, a harder mattress. Not a glass of water, not a coffee, not an ounce of humanity. Never before had I used a treadmill powered solely by my own stride. After someone used to running daily in the Guadabalunya, the contrast was stark. Never had I encountered a more inconvenient shower setup. The meager steam shut off almost immediately as if controlled by a timer. You constantly had to find the button and press it again. It produced none of the usual pleasure. For my window, I could no longer see the sky, a bird in flight or a tree trembling in the wind. I was struck by the complete absence of color. And then, there was the limp damp baguette for the next day at lunch. No! No! I felt myself becoming bold and bold to the sadness. It was as if my heart had stopped beating. I felt on the edge of the bed with a fist. I got the idea of rereading Sartre to see if I would find there the emotions I was living through. There was nothing to elevate the eye, the perspective, the setting. I'm a lover of painting. I appreciate the beauty. Sartre is not made for aesthetics. Are we sure this wasn't satire? No. Sartre Cozy, I had the occasion of being in rooms with him a lot. My favorite thing about Sartre Cozy was he had this interpreter, who was a younger and attractive woman. A lot to say that. But it was kind of the point that I've got French and I've got. The funny thing about it is she would not just translate. She would mimic his gestures. And so Sartre Cozy would gesture a lot. So he'd puff out his chest and she would too, and he'd pound on the table and she would too. That's amazing. He'd pull his lapels and she would too, who's the most bizarre thing. But I was made it entertaining. But he's an over-the-top kind of guy. Really his prison experience. What's amazing about that is all that he's describing is, yeah, that's why you're in prison. We don't. You're supposed to feel the consequences of this, yeah. He's going to like, you know. He thought he was going to get like a cushy used cell, you know? Yeah, like so. You're telling the South of France or something? The penthouse cell. And the fact that this is, he's describing, I'd actually have some more sympathy for it if the guy did five years. I mean, I could do that for three weeks. I could do that for three weeks. Do some fucking pushups. It's like a silent retreat. You know, like people pay for stuff like that to be like blonde off from the world. I don't know. I mean, but it is enjoyable. Oh, God. Well, I didn't make it through all the way without literally like laughing tears, but I hope you all enjoyed my rendition. Next up, we're going to hear Ben's interview with Nika Kovetch. Hey, friends, Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election, register or get tailored support at votefromabroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to votefromabroad.org now and click, request my ballot, ask to receive it by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Alright, I'm very pleased to be joined by my friend, Nika Kovetch, who's been on the show before. She's an incredible activist. She's the leader of my voice, my choice, which successfully, right, Nika, got over a million signatures. The force, the issue of abortion rights onto the European agenda and successfully got the European Commission to commit additional funding for that effort. She's also the co-founder of the 8th of March Institute, a human rights activist. Nika, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, I'm so happy to be here. Okay, Nika. So I want to start with you obviously, or Slovenian, you've been involved in Slovenian politics, supporting progressive candidates and causes. There was recently a Slovenian election, which we talked about in the last episode. But I want to begin with this crazy story of your role in coordination with some other activists and journalists, and the run-up to the election in uncovering the interference and involvement of Blackhube, which is a firm of former Mossad agents that I have history with. They once were spying on me. But you uncovered that Blackhube was interfering in the election. Can you just start by describing what you discovered, essentially, and how that came about? Yeah, so basically like we had elections in Slovenia, a very intense campaign. The authoritarian candidate was so well organized, like they had influencers who are doing like the usual shit that they do by the playbook. And then suddenly, throughout the night, a web page popped up, which was like revealing the corruption in Slovenia. And on that web page, there were like videos of different people. They were called Appendix One, Appendix Two, Appendix Three, which were secretly recorded while speaking about corruption in Slovenia. It was not like a video of actual corruption, like people getting money, just descriptions of how the state function in Slovenia. And when this web page popped up, for me, it was clear two things. Firstly, that it's not a whistleblower, that it's not someone who is just wanting to attack corruption. And secondly, that it is way too well done, that it would be done by anyone in Slovenia. So I got this very suspicious feeling that it's a foreign intervention. And I knew that similar things were happening in 2018, in 2022 in Hungary. And I got this very bad feeling that it is going for like Israeli's work and that there are some firms with a lot of money attacking Slovenia. I started to talk with very good friends, who are journalists. And they had a leak that Janssha met. And Janssha, the far-right populist candidate. Yes. He's the authoritarian, best friend of Viktor Orban. He's in politics for 33 years. And he wanted to get the power back. He lost elections four years ago. And he did everything to basically come to the power now. And we got a leak that basically a group of people speaking in not Slovenian language. They came to him and that they were from Israel and they had a meeting. And journalists had this leak. And when I started to speak, I think there is like a foreign interference. We started to connect the dots. We got information when this meeting happened. We bought an access to flyriders. So we got the information when the private jet from Tel Aviv landed in Slovenia. And then we got the names of the people who are there. And we realized that it is BlackCube. And then things started to connect. And it was this what the fuck is happening in Slovenia moment. In three days, we decided that we will tell the story. And that we will go out with the story. I have friends in Israel who are investigating that kind of stuff for years. And they told me who BlackCube is. And then we made the decision that we will expose private Mohsad in Slovenia. And in one weekend, we prepared a report about this, about the other cases, about what BlackCube already done in other countries. And also information about what they were doing in Slovenia. And what I think it was really important was that we decided that we do it in a very non-traditional way. So it was not just journalists exposing them, not just activists. But it was me, one journalist and another colleague from civil society who had a press conference and we told, hey, like, this is happening. These guys are here. And why they met Yansha, who is paying them? And what the people that are paying them want from Slovenia. And this is how the whole journey of one week of crazyness started. Yansha's first reaction was that he doesn't know who BlackCube is. Then his second reaction was that they need a monument because they're exposing corruption. The third reaction was that he will sue me. Because I'm saying that he's working with them. And after Slovenia national security forces said publicly that they did an investigation and that they were really at Yansha's party. He finally admitted he knows them. And this is when the story started to unfold. And it's the biggest scandal in Slovenia and history. And it's like the biggest attempt to influence our elections. Which is actually really damp, you know? I think Yansha would win, like, so easily. If he wouldn't do that kind of bad shit that he was doing, he would just need a positive agenda. People were quite disappointed with the government that we had and wanted to change. And I think what fucked him up was that he's actually an evil guy who used even more evil guys to help him in Slovenia. And he was not ready that a group of people will expose them. So yeah, I'm going to give a little bit of background for the listeners, too, because of my own history. So for me, way back in 2018, the guardian reported that Blackhub was digging up dirt on me and trying to spy on me. That was news to me. But I subsequently learned all these things. Like they'd contacted my wife. They had fake LinkedIn pages. They had to file on me. They had all kinds of stuff in it. But kind of stuff that was kind of more to intimidate. Like pictures of my apartment or front door, my apartment, or things like that. What was interesting is, in relevant Slovenia, as I went to Hungary a year later when I was reporting my book. And I met all these people that I didn't even know had been, similarly, spied on by Blackhub. But essentially, what I learned is, Blackhub had run a whole operation inside of Hungary to help Victor Orban, where they recorded conversations with someone who was basically just saying, hey, I'd like the European Union to put more pressure on Victor Orban, which, by the way, any activist would say, if they came on this podcast, right? But because it was recorded secretly, it sounded like a secret plan. And guess where the leak was, Nika? It was in the Jerusalem Post, so it wasn't even subtle. But then Orban took this leak, and they called it Soros leaks. And then Steve Bannon started to juice it on Breitbart. And Orban kind of closed this campaign with the idea that George Soros was trying to overthrow the Hungarian government. The point is that there's a history of Blackhub intervening to help right-wing, far right-wing, autocratic people in central and Eastern Europe. The question I want to ask you, because some people may not be familiar with the positions that the current Prime Minister of Slovenia has taken on Israel. Why do you think Blackhub and Israeli intelligence or former intelligence was so interested in helping Jansa, this far right guy, win in Slovenia, and is it tied to the desire to see far right politicians win in Europe, or is it tied to the positions that the Slovenian government's taken on Israel? And what are-- give a little bit background for people on what those positions are. So firstly, I think that it's really important that we say that the Blackhub has always a playbook. Like, they always are having fake identities. They record people, they post this, and they even do not post real stuff. They do these mixtures from videos with a clear intention to basically fake the reality. What we need to know is that they're not activists. They're not people coming to the country and fight for different political opinions. They are a firm, which is making billions out of that kind of resources. They were also working with Weinstein and the operation with Weinstein caused that like 1.3 million euros. So firstly, someone needed to pay them that they came to Slovenia. But what is also important is that they were definitely close with Janssa, because the people who came to Slovenia were like the highest people in this organization. Why is this happening? Because, as you said, our prime minister had a really clear stand on Gaza. What he was saying is that this is a genocide. He was very clear about this. We were one of the first countries who basically made Netanyahu a persona non grata in Slovenia. And it was very, very clear like where we are standing as a country. But on the other also, hand Janssa always is visiting like Israel. He's always speaking nice about Netanyahu. And he's clearly connected with these people. I don't know if this was like an Israeli state operation like in Slovenia. And I also don't want to claim this. But what I know is that there was a clear interest to basically attack the current government and to basically mess with it. But we also need to know that this cost at like hundreds of thousands of euros. Probably this whole operation was more expensive than all the Slovenian elections altogether. And my question is like, who is what's paying for this? Is this the money which came from Hungary? Is this the money that came from some rich people in Slovenia? And why people had such a big interest to do this here? Yeah, I think-- and what we've talked all about this a lot in the podcast, but people just really need to understand that there is this network, this nexus, that extends from Russia and to Hungary, right? Orban is tighter with Putin. He's not a supporter of Ukraine. But then Netanyahu has been very supportive of Orban, despite Orban having some pretty any Semitic. tendencies. But Orban always sides with Israel inside the European Union and against Palestine. And so there's this kind of weird convergence of the American far right and Trump, and Putin, and Orban, and guys like Johnson, and Slovenia, and Netanyahu, like these guys all help each other out. And again, we're not saying it's in Israeli state operation. But we are saying that there were a group of former Assad guys that were getting paid to help Johnson. And also these people like who were in Slovenia were one of the main people who were basically the propaganda machine for the genocide. They were the people who where we can see public statements of them that like the Gaza needs to be like basically cut down from the humanitarian aid that they need to be cut down from like food that they need to starve the whole population there. So I also like we need to know where they're standing ideologically and why they're such a good friends with Janssha. And why they were in Slovenia with such a big passion and wish. Well, yeah. And so there are a lot of questions to be answered. I do want to ask you about the Slovenian election results. So part of what happened here is it seemed like Janssha was going to cruise to victory, like you said. And part because there was a vigorous campaign. And part because of this, in the final week, it turned out that the progressive incumbent won a plurality. He won the more votes in Janssha. However, you know, everybody was under 30% because there are a lot of parties. How do you feel about the election result? And what I know now, it's a coalition formation question. Like, do we have any sense of who's going to be the next Prime Minister of Slovenia? So a couple of things like the first thing was that like people were disappointed by the government, they were disappointed by the cost of living, by the housing situation, by healthcare. And all so like what current governments did wrongly is that they had like Biden's model of campaigning as the role model of campaigning. So the campaign was not hot at all, you know? And it was very hard to make people excited for the elections. Why I think that revealing this story was so important was because it was a reminder of what Janssha is. And it was also showing like what kind of sick methods he's using to go to the victory. What will happen and what happened on the elections is that Gulopp won for like 7,000 votes. It was very intense. And it should say Gulab is incumbent, the progressive incumbent. Yes. And also like right now, we don't know who will be the next Prime Minister of Slovenia. We know that Janssha lost in his big mission. His big mission was to get a constitutional majority. And I think this could happen without all the stuff that happened in the last week. But I think that in Slovenia right now, what would need to happen is that all the parties would need to say we are not going with Janssha. He betrayed the country. He brought like Israeli private Mohsad in the game. And this is a limit. Like if we are Democrats in a sense of like believing in democracy, we cannot collaborate with that kind of person. But they're not saying this like the process for forming the government will last at least a month more. And I wish that the current Prime Minister will stay the Prime Minister. But I cannot say this with certainty. And also another option is that they will not be able to form a government for a couple of rounds and that we will have another elections, which is something that no one is very excited about. Makes you exhausted thinking about it. But we'll follow it. Two more questions that kind of widen this lens a little bit. One is you're obviously involved in Slovenian politics, but you're also involved in anti-authoritarian politics across Europe and frankly around the world. The kind of next big election that everybody's been watching is hungry. Slovenia is often seen as a bell weather too. It's a small country, but it's kind of often been seen as an indicator of where things are going, at least in that part of Europe. It seems like Peter Maggiar, the opposition candidate in Hungary, has the best chance to be Viktor Orbán of anybody since 2010 when Orbán came back to power. I know you have a lot of Hungarian friends. What is your assessment of kind of the Hungarian election, but also does it? Does Slovenia election have any relevance to Hungary in the sense of, you know, Johnson, Orbán or buddies and Jansa just underperformed? I mean, how are you feeling about the Hungarian election? I mean, I'm watching videos from Hungary all the time and it's giving me so much hope because I see people like standing up and resisting and also Orbán is doing a lot of mistakes. They also have spy scandals. They have like different things which are popping up in Hungary and my feeling is that he will end on his own, his own regime and I hope this will happen. Another question which we always have in that kind of countries is will elections be fair and will actually like not be stolen. For Slovenia particularly like losing Orbán in Hungary means that Jansa will lose a lot of money and a lot of funding for the system around him. A lot of media have been bought with Hungarian money in Slovenia. It was always like very connected regime. So we are watching this with a lot of excitement and I also think that like imagine the whole picture of the Europe in three weeks if we have like a centuries government in Slovenia and the centuries government in Hungary like it would mean like a huge change for the Europe and also for the vibe of the whole continent. I don't know what will happen as I said but it's the biggest amount of hope so far and I always hold on to the hope in that kind of situations. Well, we need to hold on to hope right now. Last question we're going to ask you is we've talked a lot on this podcast and you know you're not talked a lot about how networked the far right is, how much they learned from each other, how they help each other. You've already talked about the fact that there's Hungarian money, the buying up media in Slovenia, there's Israeli, you know, Xmasod helping both Orbán and Jansa like there's this, you know, you had Marco Rubio fly to Hungary to endorse Victor Orbán like there's all this synergies on the right. What we need to do more on the progressive side is similarly network and learn from each other and frankly, I think a lot of those types of people listen to this podcast. When you look back on the Slovenian election that just took place, what lessons would you identify that might be relevant to progressives who are mountain campaigns other in politics or civil society in other countries? And if I may ask kind of a leading question, it seems like being aggressive in exposing and revealing that foreign interference is probably one lesson, like don't just wait for the newspaper to print it, you know, people have to go out and do it themselves. Yeah, a couple of things. So this is my second get out and vote campaign and the second campaign where we manage to defeat Janssha at least by the amount of votes. And in both campaigns it was super important that I was spending time with people from other countries that I understood what happened in India, that I understood what happened in Russia, in Belarus, in other places. In on the first campaign it was important because I needed to understand that autoritarians have a playbook and that they always play by the same rules, that they attack the media, that they help other friends, that they attack independent institutions, that they threaten you. In these elections why it was important that I have all of you in my life is because I could recognize the pattern. And I could understand that what is happening it's not a whistle blowing campaign, it's not a referendum about corruption, but it is like fucking foreign interference in elections, which happened in other places and it also happened to my friends. The second thing which I always learn is that we should not be afraid of them. Like we always think that they are so powerful and so strong, but actually these dudes just play by the same like rules, and when you become loud and when you become not afraid and when you start to exposing them, like they get so lost because they don't know what to do because they count on you being afraid. The third thing is that the secret is in big coalitions and that usually in on our side like politicians are not sexy and hot, like it's very rare that you have a candidate. Pedro Sanchez. Yeah, or like you know Mamdani and stuff like but like in general it's you're very lucky if you have a candidate for who you would like go on the street and die for. So we need to create this like hour of making elections fun and important and joyful like on our own. And this is why I really believe that we need to form big coalitions not just with civil society, but also with influencers, with like people who are doing different stuff like with coffee shops, with bars who have the posters, with people on the ground, and also one of the things is that we need to demand from politicians. Like that when we go to the elections and when we vote, people need to have a feeling that there will be a difference and that they are voting for something. And if we don't have this something extra, what I think happened in US and also in Slovenia to certain extent, like it's very hard to do a campaign because people deserve more and politicians need to promise more. And the fifth thing is that expose them and talk about their tactics and their strategies because it's important that people understand. And in our case what was also important that like we were a group of friends. Like if I wouldn't have such a close relationship with journalists who are exposing this and with part of civil society who was with us, like we would never do this crazy and dangerous thing but we did it because we trusted each other and we We did it to protect the country, and also the last thing is that you need to love your country. I love Slovenia so much, and I would do everything for it. And I think that when you love it and when you show the people that there is something we need to protect and care for, they will join you. So at the end, usually things come together. I don't know if it will be the case right now informing the government, but at least we didn't allow BlackCube to fuck around. That's one of the best summaries of the counter authoritarian playbook I've heard. I hope everybody pays careful attention to that. I also just want to say, Nika, I know you've been working like crazy for a long time because you protected and extended abortion rights in Europe through my voice, my choice. You expose this BlackCube operation. You helped defeat Janssa, at least in the vote count, for the second consecutive time. So we're very proud of what you're doing, and I also hope you get some rest. Time for self-care. Let's add that to the list of those. Or did we stop with everything and open a bookstore, huh? Well, you know, as you know that's a plan. I may need an independent bookstore, and maybe we can have one in Slovenia and one in New York or something. I don't know. Yeah, that's good. All right. It's so good to see you. Thanks for joining. Thank you. All right, thanks to Nika, thanks to Nicholas Sarkozy, for giving us the visual of a damn sad beggeg. Thank you, Alona, for stepping in today. Thanks for hosting the show with me, Ben, and Tommy will be back next week, everyone. 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