Can Germany’s Far Right Be Stopped?

0:00Ponte the world is brought to you by Remi. I love my job, but it also entails reading about horrible things in the news and various terrible moments in politics. And so yeah, I am no stranger to grinding my teeth and jaw clenching, which is why I love Remi. Remi nightgards are the only FDA-cleared and clinically tested at-home impression kit nightgards on the market. Not only do they help prevent teeth damage from grinding, but they also help reduce jaw tension and facial muscle strain and improve your sleep quality. You get the same professional quality and comfort as a night guard from the dentist for 80% less of the cost by taking your own impression at home from the convenience of your home. Remi saves your impression so you can enjoy the convenience and savings of Remi Club where they ship you a new set of night guards every six months. So here's how it works. After you buy the impression kit, it comes straight to your door, then you follow their step-by-step instructions to get your perfect molding, then you send it back so Remi can craft and ship your custom fit night guard and you can start protecting your teeth. I've been a Remi customer for many, many years now, way before they were a sponsor on this

1:04podcast. I was waking up in the morning with soreness and tension in my jaw and I think I've been grinding my teeth. And so I found Remi. I got a night guard and I've been getting a new one via their club every six months and it's great. It helps me sleep. I literally just don't sleep without it. I highly recommend Remi. Prioritize your teeth this month with Remi by using the code PSTW to get 50% off your new night guard with Remi Club that's 50% off at shopremi.com slash PSTW with code PSTW. Thank you Remi for sponsoring this episode. Welcome back to PODSA, the world. I'm Tommy VTore. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, you are wise to escape Los Angeles. We don't have to disclose where you are. Ben's overseas at the moment. You can disclose if you want. But it's like, it's literally like a rainforest here right now.

2:06It's going to be a hundred degrees on Wednesday and the dew point is basically where it is in a rainforest. That's how miserably humid it is in Los Angeles. When I left it was like pouring like it was a tropical climate too. So that was fun. You had pouring rain and like scorching heat. There's no climate change or anything but no. That's not normal Los Angeles. I remember El Nino sucking this bad. Is it always a huge nightmare? Apparently. Well, this is supposed to be the mega El Nino, right? This is supposed to worsen all the other ones. So buckle up. It's not as fun as that. You move out to LA and New York or never. And I'm like, I've missed New York and I was like, oh, but the weather will be great. And now we can say that. Here we are. Well, Boohoo, LA us our first world problems. We got some additional problems for the part of the first world we're going to talk through today. Starting with some regional elections in Germany that have rocked Europe, frankly, rocked a lot more places than Europe. We're also going to talk about the Trump Emissaries, Steve Woodcoff and Jared Kushner. Their trip to Russia and Ukraine.

3:07We'll talk about the scary resurgence of ultra nationalist fervor and celebration of genocide in Serbia. Some major news updates from Israel, including a policy change by the UK. I'll talk about the latest in the war with Iran. And then finally another massive corruption scandal swirling around far right, British MP Nigel Farage. Lots of UK-focused stuff then. Then you just did our interview then. What are we talking about there? So I talked to Lawrence, right? He's really one of my favorite writers. And he wrote The Looming Tower, which is kind of the definitive book that was about the lead in the 9-11, the failures of the US government and Al Qaeda and its intentions. So we talked about, and he's written a new introduction for that book, by the way. So people want to check it out, they should. We talk about essentially how to make sense of the failures. There's no way to put it up last 25 years. How did the US get it so wrong? Some of his concerns that actually given all the destruction of the US government and the direction of intelligence agencies to focus on weird Trump priorities that we actually might

4:09be complacent. We might be kind of going through the cycle again where we're letting our guard down. You don't think I'll cut it out? How does plotting in the Fulton County Georgia Elections Office? That's not what we're saying. Absolutely. Yeah, or the immigration enforcement division. And then really interesting conversations about how do we learn, how do we see the world and understand it better so that we don't make the kinds of mistakes we made after 9-11? Some of the unanswered questions about the 9-11 attacks, including the potential Saudi involvement that has always been something that bugged Lawrence Wright as well as other people. It's just how 9-11 changed his life and changed the country. It's a good reflective conversation that I think that as we head up to this anniversary, it's worth checking out. Absolutely. Looming Tower is truly one of the best books. Also I think it's one of the things that Hugh would always quizzes you on if you go on his show. Make sure you read that before you go on that podcast. All right, Ben.

5:10Let's start with the weekend's elections in Germany, which were historic for all the wrong reasons, all the worst reasons, really. The alternative for Germany party or the AFD, one 43.8% of Sunday's vote in the Saxony on-holt regional elections. So the AFD now holds 39 of that state's 83 regional assembly seats, which is not a full majority, but it's damn close. In the past, other German political parties have refused to go into coalition with the AFD to keep them out of government to prevent them from governing. That's a so-called firewall policy. It may happen again here, but the AFD is going to try to convince three members of the conservative CDU party to defect CDU's Angela Merkel's party now, Friedrich Merz's party, or they may go into coalition with this kind of fringe leftist party called the BSW, which shares some of the AFD's views on immigration, Russia and the war in Ukraine, despite having communist origins. It's the classic horseshoe. If the AFD forms a coalition, it'll be the first time a right wing party held power in Germany since World War II, and we all remember how well that went.

6:13A little context before people get too freaked out about all this. We are talking about a regional election. Saxony on-holt is a small eastern state of about 2 million people. It has been an economic and population decline for a while since German reunification. It's more conservative and kind of AFD curious than the rest of the country as a whole. Also, even if the AFD does take power, these regional governments have limited authority. They'll be able to control education, school curriculum, policing, some elements of migration policy, which is bad, but it's not like being the chancellor, the chancellor being AFD. However, it's still a really big deal and quite bad. The AFD, for those who don't know, it's an extreme right wing political party. They talk openly about the re-migration of immigrants. They want to segregate disabled kids and refugees into separate classrooms. They want to downplay Germany's Nazi past. They have close ties with Putin's Russia and want to end support for Ukraine. Saxony on-holt is a regional intelligence service.

7:15There's a lot of fear now that Russia could use AFD politicians with access to that intelligence to penetrate the German spy services and figure out who might be spying for Germany. The list of concerns goes on and on and on. The AFD has been steadily gaining in the polls nationally. They did well in this election for a couple of reasons, a bunch of reasons. Many German voters are fed up with this establishment centrist parties that's not an unfamiliar story to anyone who's been watching elections over the last decade. They're also pissed about the economy. They're very mad about immigration and support for Ukraine in the Saxony and Holt region. There is a feeling that the state has been left behind compared to Western Germany. There's major regional industries, like the chemical industry, who have really struggled recently. The AFD did especially well with male voters, voters aged 35 to 59. They turned out an estimated 170,000 previous non-voters. Turnout was 78%, which is massive. Ben Noble here that the AFD has improved across the board and that Germans have seemingly

8:16gone from treating a vote for the AFD as a solely a protest vote against the establishment to now wanting them to actually govern. The CDU, Merch's Party, Chintzler Merch's Party, got routed. He said he was shocked, which is, no, he shouldn't have been, everyone saw this coming. The election would have consequences. We don't know what those will be, but he said he will not resign. The next test for the AFD will be in the Necklenberg, Fropanman regional elections on September 20th. We could see another story like this pretty soon. Ben, thoughts on these elections and the rise of the AFD generally so far? Well, it's not great. You never like to see the far right ascended in Germany. I think there are a couple of reasons that I'd underscore about why to be concerned. Number one, the AFD is really a far right party. I think sometimes people have grown accustomed to say George Mollone, which you got elected to be Prime Minister of Italy. She's been pretty far right, but not like an extreme figure in any sense beyond some

9:19of her kind of hard line immigration policies. The AFD is to the right of Mollone, the AFD is to the right of Marine Le Pen, the AFD. It's got more radicals. You don't have it. They have moderated. Yeah, exactly. They've not moderated. If you look underneath the hood, like these guys, they're not trying to kind of smooth off the rough edges. They're still hanging out with the Holocaust deniers and the kind of neo-Nazi elements. That's why they were designated as an extremeist organization by German intelligence services. Let's be clear. This is not just kind of like a right-wing party that we call far right. This is a far right party. The other problem, so that's bad. That doesn't mean that everybody who voted for them is a far right person. That leads to the second point. The firewall that keeps them out of government. It can't be in coalitions with other governments in the German system is helping them because

10:24what keeps happening is all the parties get together. They keep the AFD out. Those parties get blamed for the fact that the prices are high and the government doesn't seem responsive. Frankly, those coalitions are not ideologically coherent. Merch is governing with the social democrats in the same way that all of Shultz had to govern with the Christian democrats to center right. You're kind of stuck in this doom spiral where the AFD may be kept out of governance, but then that kind of gives them this outsider status, this anti-establishment status, and everybody else is the establishment. That combination of their extremism and this kind of strange situation where the firewall, which I think is necessary or makes good sense in a place of Germany with their history, is kind of collaborating to normalize extremism. I do think that the message to politicians has to be pretty fundamental change in how

11:27you're governing and how you're communicating. You can't just govern by saying the AFD is really bad. We've been through this in the United States. The democrats tried to be Trump is really bad. Look what we got. I think it's time to really question, how can you demonstrate to voters, sure maybe you're not going to win over the most extreme anti-immigrant people, but how can you demonstrate that Merch is really prioritized foreign policy? He's really prioritized defense spending and countering Russia, which is again, that's good, but maybe it's time to put that a bit on the back burner and actually focus on some of these bread and butter issues. Ben saying Germany first. I mean, a little bit. I mean, honestly, not in the AFD version of Germany first, that's the scary version. But I do think that we've seen center left, I mean, Shane, let's plug out of a piece in the New York Times today about the, like, beef of the Democratic Party in this regard. We have this trend of center left parties, or in Germany's case with Merch, center right

12:30parties, sometimes kind of becoming these defenders of the establishment and the defenders of the norms. And you've got to shake yourself out of that and figure out a way to speak to populism, you know? And if you don't, I just worry that you're going to be in a situation where like each election, the AFD is making these incremental gains. And at some point, like maybe not the national level, but certainly the state level, they're going to start winning majority. To your point, I mean, there's a few things. There's like a communications problem, which is the AFD is starting to run much more kind of a young dynamic kind of internet literate candidates that are doing well, and able to sort of sand off the scary edges of the AFD and present a more exciting version of politics that is enticing people, obviously. Merch is your classic German politician. He's kind of like, he's a big head at security summits, but he's kind of old. He looks like a technocrat. Poor him. He looks like a year at a technocrat. Yeah. To your point about the economic stuff, it does seem like he is doing things. He's designed to further piss off working class people.

13:33Yeah. They're pushing, they're talking about raising the retirement age. They're talking about raising the minimum age at which you can retire. They're talking about some sort of tax and health insurance reforms. And meanwhile, like Merch says, you said, is rearming the country and really committed to Ukraine. And people don't like that. And they're sick of the way. The Russian invasion has harmed their economy. And then Trump goes and invades, you know, sorts of bombing Iran and that piles on top of the account. And so we're making it worse. The flip side of that though, in, in, in, in taxing the on-hull, 7.9% of the regional population is immigrants. That is compared to 14.9% nationally. So it's a way lower percentage of the population is actually a migrant. But immigration is still the top concern. And so it's like tempting to be one of the parties that comes in like, you know, Bernie and it's like, well, this is clearly just the working class is getting screwed and to talk about big social services that you're going to provide them, et cetera. But that is not what voters were mad about when you asked them why they voted for the

14:35AFD. They're talking about security and immigration and hating the establishment. There were other leftist parties that were offering them a much bigger social safety net or welfare state and they rejected that in favor of the AFD. So it's like, I think there will be people that try to approach this from like kind of the, you know, the classic lens of like, you know, you got to fight populism with populism. But there is this reality that there's just a lot of people who are not going to be there's just a lot of people in Germany that are rip shit pissed about immigration. A lot of it goes back to Angela Merkel's decision to allow in lots of Syrian immigrants and what year was that 2015, I think. And, you know, we don't either relitigate that, but it's just like clearly that has a very long tail that is helped the AFD go from this kind of like just Euro skeptic party to something a lot scarier and a lot more xenophobic that is really helping get ideas like remigration, which is like, you know, expelling people from the country basically. Mass deportation. A bunch of different ways to the fore. Yeah, look, I mean, clearly Germany, like other countries, like the United States, there's

15:35a feeling that you want to make sure that the borders are secure. It's a little more complicated than you obviously. I do think though that as in the United States, I hear you and like, maybe the answer is not necessarily economic populism, but it is like the manner in which you do politics. Because I think what happens is the immigration concerns get married to this concern that there's just this clubby establishment that is completely out of touch and is just kind of just not focused on what I care about, you know. And if you, there have to be ways in some of it is communications, but some of it is policy and some of it is like how you show up. Some of it is how you acknowledge like what you did wrong, you know, like sometimes you can deal with some of the past mistakes by by speaking more candidly about them. I will say on this Ukraine thing, this is the problem, you know, Trump berating them to spend 5% on defense and now they're rearming and like I'm all for like NATO countries spending

16:39a little more on defense and obviously for them providing some budgetary and other support to Ukraine, but like I think maybe like not maybe that's moving too fast, you know, like the people you're going to undermine NATO, you're going to undermine Ukraine if people are so pissed that it seems like that's all you're doing. It seems like all you're focused on is that because then that kind of ties into this sense. It's just like the United States that like you don't care about us, you care about these immigrants and you care about Ukraine and you care about NATO and you're doing five of your defense plans and I'm just not happy with the circumstance, right? So there's, you know, I don't claim to have the exact formula, but man, if you look at both sholts and murs, they did not seem like the kind of politicians that were like in touch with like what is on the minds of like a working class percent and like Saxony, you know. And so you have to get at least part of the way there to just take some of that support. The only other thing I want to throw into this mix Tommy is that, you know, shit, I mean

17:42we've alluded many times to the kind of weaponization of debates about anti-semitism about anything anybody says about Israel. JD dance, like flew to Europe. This is a thing that happened. He flew to Munich, the place where Hitler had the beer hall put and gave a speech to German saying they had to accept the AFD and then met with the AFD and then Elon Musk endorsed the AFD. Like if you want to talk about any semitism, let's talk about the fact that like the administration of the United States has been supportive of like far right German political movements, you know, like that should be a bigger topic of discussion than, you know, what the latest thing online is that somebody didn't like that somebody said, you know. Yeah. The gradient also like the AFD is a totally incoherent organization if you look into it. Like Alice Vidal, one of their national leaders, is a lesbian and a party that is apparently anti LGBT. She is married to a Sri Lankan woman.

18:43They have adopted kids. Again, they're like super opposed to migration and they're very opposed to gay couples adopting kids. She also seems to spend most of her time in Switzerland. Like, so it's like this is the person that's beating the entire establishment in Germany. Like, how are you losing so badly to these people? And that's the part of the point. And some of this is you just got to do politics better. I mean, because in some ways they don't treat the AFD like a genuine political party, which means that they're kind of not like maybe you have to just kind of start going after these people, not just by saying they're far right and they're crazy, but by some things you just said, like these people are hypocrites, these people are disorganized, these people could never govern, you know, they can capture grievance, not like actually solve your problem. So there's a lot of work to be done here. Alice Vidal also has really close ties with China. I think she spent a bunch of time there. I think she speaks Mandarin. She only talks positively about China. It's just sort of like another kind of weird element to her background.

19:45Again, so this is a flag. Yeah, we had a terrible election outcome. We got another one coming up that we're watching on September 20th. The next national election wouldn't be until 2029, the federal election. But, you know, Merz's political standing is not great right now. So pretty unnerving to see this kind of, you know, like a stability in Germany of all places. You know, yeah, this drift right word at a time when Trump is pushing them to rearm while also undercutting NATO, you said. It's great timing. Maybe they'll be rearmed just in time for the AFD to win the election. Yeah, perfect. Wonderful. That's what we want. Pate the world is brought to you by monarch. Growing up, talking about money always felt taboo. So it's no surprise that navigating it as an adult still feels tough. That's where monarch comes in. The Personal Finance app built to track your entire financial picture from accounts and investments to savings goals and daily spending. It takes the heavy lifting and of tracking your money, giving you the real-time clarity

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22:49Go to SimplySafe.com slash CrookedWorld. That's SimplySafe.com slash CrookedWorld for 50% off. When you order, please write in PodSafe the world and how did you hear about us survey to let them know we sent you. Don't forget, there's no safe like SimplySafe. Okay, also over the weekend, Trump's to fail Peace on Boys Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and then Steve Wicoff, his old golf buddy. Hit the road, they went to Russia and then also to Ukraine. In Moscow, the two idiots met with Vladimir Putin. Wicoff said later, Ben, that he has made about eight visits to Moscow to meet with Putin and his team and that Jared has made three. I'm wondering, what about qualifier kind of confuse me there? I wonder if there's a ninth one we don't know about, and I'd visit. As we've discussed in the past, a lot of those Wicoff meetings were one-on-one with Putin. There was no note taker, no State Department, Russia experts were allowed, and sometimes he relied on the Russian translator to translate for him too.

23:52One time Putin gave Wicoff a painting, which he said he found really moving and emotional. The whole thing is just a weird mess. This was their first visit, Wicoff and Kushner to Ukraine, which is strange. Here's a couple clips of the Wicoff Kushner Zelensky press conference from Keith. Hello, everybody. I just want to disagree with one thing that President Zelensky said, I didn't like the train. I loved the train, President Zelensky. Had a wonderful time on it. It reminded me of my days taking the train to see my grandmother down to Florida, and it was great. Me and Jared had a great time. President Trump comes from the business world, which in the business world you think about things in the context of when, when, how do you create opportunities for both sides to do what's in their interest? Or is negative sum, everyone loses from war. Whereas business and peace is positive sum, and hopefully you can find big benefits from that in a big way. It's just shockingly stupid commentary all around.

24:52Wicoff said he was, quote, very encouraged by the meetings. Jared said he, quote, learned a lot from the trip, glad to hear it. What Jared should have learned is that things are getting worse and worse in worse for Ukraine. They are critically low on interceptor missiles, as we discussed many times, which means the city's are just getting pounded by Russian ICBMs, Russian ballistic missiles. Russian, Russia has been just hammering their energy infrastructure, going into the winter, which means that once again there's a big chance that a bunch of Ukrainians will just have to live in the freezing cold for months on end. Attacks in the Black Sea could lead to global grain shortages. That's something people are very worried about. And then NATO countries are increasingly sounding the alarm about Russian sabotage attacks in Europe, including this recent drone attack in Germany at an airport that was a near miss. The only benefit for Ukraine out of all this bend was that Putin ordered 72-hour pause in air strikes on Kiev while Wicoff and Kushner were there. However, the rest of the country got hammered by drones and missiles throughout. So I don't know, Ben.

25:53Like any thoughts, these guys are so stupid that they're easy to make fun of, but like any thoughts on the value of this trip and continuing to, I don't know, keep these channels open. I'm pro diplomacy in general. I don't know what's come of it. It's hard to do, couple. It's a word on Jared and Woodcoff, because there was a comment that Woodcoff made before the meeting with Putin. It was in like a pool spray, I think, where he's like, oh, you know, you told Putin that he was just talking to the guys outside and saying this, on all these great memories, he's getting this job. We were tired of telling these amazing stories and you'll be there. Yeah, we've got this Florida real estate developer guy who knows nothing about diplomacy, who's living fantasy camp, like all these Trump people are living fantasy. You get to, I'm so glad he had a nice train ride and Ryan would go on a grandma and, you know, the Ukrainians gave him a good meal and he's flattered to be in the same room as Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, Jared sounds like a guy who's like taping an audition tape for like a McKinsey job, like an internship or something. Like this is how we do business. Like these guys are just so completely out of their depth.

26:57You know, they're talking to Vladimir Putin, who's been like on the world stage for over a quarter century, right? Like you really think those guys can be able to like move Putin on issues and then they're going to Ukraine, a country that is rapidly running out of interceptors in part because these guys like help start a dumb war in Iran. So there's just something like the nauseating that's seeing them there. But yes, the problem is we really desperately do need some aggressive diplomatic effort to try to bring this war to an end or at least to get it to some kind of ceasefire because otherwise you're going to have a situation where the Russians are going to escalate in the winter. They're going to bombard Kiev. They're going to try to break them once again. And this time they may have more success because of the low amount of interceptors in just the wear and tear on Ukrainian society. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians will probably respond with like ever more aggressive attacks into Russia at ever more targets like pushing the envelope there, which then raises the stakes of the potential escalation in Europe.

27:57Like this thing is not moving the right direction. I think part of what needs to happen is you need other countries like more aggressively mediating here. Like I'm not sure that the United States is up to this. Obviously, United States has to be brought in. Maybe we can find some actual diplomats at the State Department to sit in with the Europeans and the Turks and the Qataris and whoever else fuck can get in there. But I think we need to take this. This should not be a Jared and Whitcoff like bilateral channel to the Russians bringing in the Ukrainians. They need to multi-lateralize this a little bit more than is the case now. Yeah. Did you see they called their train? Apparently they signed on it. It's a the peace express on the train, Whitcoff and Jared. They're riding on the peace train in the Katz. They're probably told this in a Kat Stevens on their iPhone. Yeah. It's totally absurd. To your point, I mean, the Zelensky meeting was about three hours. There was another set of talks that included National Security Advisor from the UK, France, and Germany. That's good and necessary. But yeah, Trump's policy is basically we're cutting off Ukraine. We're not going to give them more military support. Europe has to do it. So therefore, I feel like Europe should have a much bigger role in the stock.

28:59They should be in the room. Oh, yeah. In the Putin meeting was three hours. Yuri Ushikov, Putin aid said it was constructive and useful, but also that it included a potential joint economic ventures between the US and Russia. You know that's the part that Joe, the Whitcoff and Jared liked because you know salivating that. Putin's been dangling, you know, the sovereign, wealth fund guy from Russia in front of their faces forever long and you know, possible future deals. And they know they have a couple corrupt marks there. And I don't know if you watched the press conference, Ben Richard Engel was there from NBC News. Yeah. He was like, yeah. He was like, why should people have any confidence in your capacity to succeed here? He's like, Gaza's a wasteland. And the Iran war is still going. The Russia Ukraine war is getting more intense. And Jared's like, oh, go, go, go. And he said something about how like Gaza was built by NGOs and terrorists. And has been a dystopian place for a long time, which is a nice way to talk about a couple million people, most of whom. Which is also not true. It's a mean. Yeah. But I don't know. It was pretty demoralizing the whole thing because you, like, they're, Ukraine has certainly

30:00had some momentum. They're kind of deep strike drone campaign has been effective at, you know, increasing the cost on Russia, but it just, it doesn't feel like we're any closer to the end of this war. And again, honestly, I truly believe that like if you had a normal American administration, Republican or Democrat, like this, this, this, this is a nept diplomacy. Like, like, there would, there should be a way to facilitate some kind of multilateral track that is trying to bring ceasefires into play. It's trying to put the issues on the table. Like, they've been at this for almost two years. And they're, they're nowhere further along than they were on day one when Trump said he's going to solve the war, you know? So I really do think that like, maybe the, the grain shortages like last time that brought in more multilateral framework as a whole world cares about that, I just don't have any confidence in these guys, but I do believe in the diplomacy of it all. And I think you got to get other countries in the table. And hopefully, again, like, just keep Jordan work off in the Middle East, not that they're solving that problem. Like, just get some other people from the US government that are normies to, to, to please

31:04do this. I'm not holding my breath. I think it's fair to criticize the Biden team for not having more of a diplomatic track to end the war. But now we're a couple of years into this failed diplomatic effort. And the only thing that Trump administration has not tried is putting more pressure on the Russians. So yeah, I'd like to see them internationalize this and try that. What's your name? Serbia, Ben, where there has recently been a disturbing celebration of the country's bloody history in, in genocidal past. So last month, Reco-Maladic, a war criminal known as the butcher of Bosnia died in prison at the Hague. We're even serving out a prison sentence for genocide. One might think that that would be kind of a solemn, if not embarrassing, moment for the country of Serbia. But instead, it's been the opposite. Maladic's body was returned to Serbia last week. He has basically been treated like a national hero ever since, or like a head of state. His coffin was flown on the government jet. It was carried off the plane by soldiers. Thousands of people came out to honor him. His casket featured parts of his uniform and medals that he wore when he was conducting

32:05the genocide itself. The Guardian reported that the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church said, quote, we know that his name will remain deeply etched in the memory and prayers of the majority of our Serbian Orthodox people who feel and nurture a deep sense of gratitude towards him. And then on Sunday night at a soccer match in Belgrade, the Red Star, Belgrade fans held up a photo of Maladic. They observed the moment of silence and they were chanting his name during the match. Let's watch a clip of that. They could wear a vetch of style on the back. Pretty disturbing stuff. So let's talk about why this is shocking but not surprising. It's shocking because Maladic was one of the key architects of the ethnic lending policy during the Bosnia War that killed over 100,000 people. He was found guilty of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered. It's considered the worst massacre since World War II in Europe.

33:08And he was behind the siege of Sarajevo and all these other horrific war crimes. But it is not surprising because, you know, look, the current Serbian president, Alexander Vuchich, is a far-right nationalist who is himself made genocidal comments in the past, like, quote, for every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims. So obviously he thinks this kind of ultra-nationalist fervor is good politics for him and his party. So Ben, let's just pause there. Like the combination of the AFD winning the German elections, Russia escalating the war in Ukraine, these images from Serbia, they're pretty scary if you're worried about nationalism and far-right politics in Europe. Yeah, it makes you worry about Europe and there are a number of things going on. One is that Vuchich, the leader of Serbia, is one of these far-right guys, is an ultra-nationalist. And you look at that picture, it's like North Korea, like, the uniformity in the stadium. I mean, nothing like having a war criminal, like for a moment of silence for watching the soccer game.

34:11You imagine, like, okay, you get the ear, okay, your son will be holding up his scarf. Like, what are we doing here? It's the psychoship. And this is a thing, first of all, this wasn't a close call with this guy. This is the guy literally carrying out the massacres. Nobody denies this happened, they're mass graves. We know those things happened, right? Sure, there's clearly resentment inside of Serbia, they feel somewhat single-doubt. But that's why you need responsible political leadership to kind of keep a lid on this stuff instead of pouring gasoline on the fires, including, by the way, even the religious leaders, right, ahead of the Serbian-Orderic Church. That's going to have consequences. Like, Serbia wants to be on the pathway to the European Union. Like, that's not happening anytime soon. Like, the EU's not going to let in, and you saw these statements from EU leaders. Like, that is not exactly suggesting you're moving the direction of integration with Europe. Yeah, I look at the review part of that. So the EU statement said, quote, any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial, and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries.

35:13And then the EU Enlargement Commissioner canceled her visit to Belgrade this week. So yeah, this should, I mean, this will likely be a serious roadblock to Serbia getting into the EU anytime soon. Yeah. And look, it is entirely tied to a lot of things happening in the world. Like, it's tied to the rise of the far right around the world and in Europe. It's tied to the rise of nationalism. But also, let's just talk about the fact that, again, he died in the Hague. He was convicted of war crimes. The United States is currently sanctioning the ICC at the Hague for trying to prosecute people for war crimes. Israel has acted with complete impunity in its conduct of war crimes and Gaza. But I'm repudent, it's acted with complete impunity with his conduct of war crimes in Ukraine. Like, it was kind of something, you know, Tommy felt like a throwback, hearing about everybody talking about international law and genocide and war crimes and the Hague. As if they were things that everybody agreed on because they don't.

36:14And if you want to know why it's dangerous to sanction the ICC and to look the other way when Israel commits war crimes with American weapons, it's because you're cracking open the door to things like this because the people in Serbia are probably thinking, well, this is all a double standard. This is all bullshit. They only singled us out. The only way that you really make a norm fortified against war crimes is by applying it to everybody. And the moment you start to say, well, it's only for some people, well, then you open the door to this kind of behavior because I'm sure what's on the minds of some of those people is, wait a second, like how come us because we're a small country, Serbia, we get single that our leaders end up dying in the Hague, but not Netanyahu, not Putin, right? And so again, it speaks to the need to strengthen international justice, international law, across the board. And this should be a project for hopefully not going to be a next democratic president. Yeah, look, Vucic has been in power for I think nine years now. He started as an ultra nationalist, he's on more of sort of in the populist vein these

37:16days, but that DNA is still there. He can't run again for a third term, but he's trying to run for, he was nominated to be Prime Minister. The next election was supposed to be in December of 2027. He used this moment to call for a snap election. And this comes after years of massive protests against corruption. So authoritarian leaders like Vucic are seeing ultra nationalists, genocidal political moments like this as their way of suppressing the will of the people and clinging to power. It is really bleak, scary, scary stuff. Yeah, this is a big story. Because again, it shows you, we talked a lot about 20 years since 9-11, like on a 30 year, every year, since the 90s in Bosnia, it shows you how far we've kind of fallen in a way, right? Because in the way that the system worked, this was the case of the system working. There was a humanitarian intervention. There was a diplomatically brokered agreement to end that war. Then there was international justice against people cared at war crimes.

38:18And now here we are in the world of 2026 and we're celebrating the war criminal, right? And that is a bit of a snapshot of how the international system is unraveled. Yeah, before we take a break, I just have a quick but big announcement for you. The first episode of our brand new series is coming out this evening still counting. Hosted by our friends Nate Silver, Gailin Drewke and Claire Malone is up. It's live. You might remember the excellent data journalists behind 538 and with the midterm, just a few months away, we thought it was time to get them back on the air every Wednesday evening. Nate, Claire and Gailin will dig into the latest in politics and polling to break down what's happening, why and what we can recently infer about what might happen next. They'll cover everything from elections to betting markets to AI with rigorous analysis and hot takes, but no spin or fall sense of certainty. Subscribe to still counting wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Pots of the world is brought to you by Quo. Think about the last time you called a business and nobody picked up. What did you do?

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41:22That's betterHELP.com slash CrookedWorld. Two updates that come from Israel. The first actually is out of the UK in Andy Burnham's new government, where the new Foreign Secretary Ed Milliband announced a major shift in the government's policy towards the occupied West Bank in a speech Tuesday. Let's listen to some of that. The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists. And all too often, the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this, and worse members of it have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians. Now Madam Deputy Speaker, I recognise the gravity of saying this, but the truth is the least the people who face such suffering deserve, and it should be the prelude to justice. Now for a long time, the British government has rightly said settlements are illegal,

42:24but we have remained silent on the question of the legality of the occupation as a whole, which in 2024 the international court of justice concluded was unlawful. Today I announce that the official view of the British government is that the occupation is unlawful. The government believes the unlawfulness of the occupation should be reflected in the economic relationships we choose to have with the occupied territories. So what this means in practice is basically there's an, quote, import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories, action against specific companies and individuals who provide services such as construction, infrastructure financing, or real estate for settlement expansion. I'm reading quotes from him. They also said they'll refuse all license applications for arms and other exports that materially contribute to the occupation, ban the advertising in the UK of illegal settlements. There's going to be some sanctions on extremist settlers, some sanctions on his bullets, finance arm, and then Milliband reaffirmed that he opposes BDS and supports trade with Israel.

43:27This is just about products coming out of the occupied territories. The whole speech is quite interesting. I think it's worth watching. It was framed as an attempt to, quote, salvage the two state solution. And then the UK quickly had some folks following their lead here. So the France and Canada said they'd be joining the import ban about a dozen countries released the letter explaining their intent to, you know, sort of past laws to follow suit. In practice, like this, the ban of these goods from the occupied territories will be very small economically. I think we're talking about like tens of millions of dollars out of over $6 billion worth of trade in 2025. But it's a big deal symbolically, which you can tell from Israel's reaction, which was quite strong. They are closing the UK's consulate in East Jerusalem. They're banning a bunch of British politicians from entering Israel. They are booting the UK from the International Gaza Support Center. And then the crazy wing of the Israeli government, the crazier wing of the Israeli government, the finance minister of Basel of Smotrich, who Milliband mentioned in the speech itself, called for the expulsion of Britain's ambassador in the National Security Minister, it's

44:30Marben Gavir said, quote, it's time for the state of Israel to publicly recognize that the Malveena's islands are Argentine territory under occupation, which the British violently steal from the Argentine people. So he's trying to bring up the Falklands, which is interesting timing here, given that Argentina just announced a criminal case against an Israeli company that's leading the oil drilling project in the Falklands. Then there's a blockbuster story about Netanyahu in October 7th that we'll get into. But then let's just focus on this UK policy announcement piece. How did you make of Milliband's speech and sort of the totality of what they actually announced? I actually think this is a seismic moment. I think this is a huge deal. And not just because of what it means about Israel and Palestine. And because look, this is not going to bring about a two-state solution. But what it does, the United Kingdom, let's be very clear. As usually the close-stall United States has been a pretty stalwart supporter of Israel over the years for them to break.

45:32And Milliband used language that there's ethnic cleansing, that there's terrorism mapping in the West Bank. It shows that there's really nobody left backing Israel and its government than the United States and then kind of a weird eclectic group of kind of Trumpy people. So that matters. Like the West Bank is clearly going to be the main event in the coming years. And this is essentially Europe moving collectively, including the major powers, Britain and France and others, to say this is ethnic cleansing, this is against the law, this is illegal. And once you start down that road, you usually continue down that road. And so I think we could expect to see sanctions for the future. So that matters. It just deepens this kind of isolation that Nenia has created for Israel. But here's why I think it's a bigger deal. Because they're breaking with the United States. Like the United Kingdom does not usually say, you know, this is really important to you and we don't give a shit.

46:33And not only they're breaking with the United States, they're breaking with the United States and bringing other allies with them in Europe to also break with the United States and do this. And that tells me a couple things. One, good for you Ed Milliband, good for you, Andy Burnham. We've been hard on labor party. Like they are not doing the kind of cautious tiptoe around things, approach the curious storm or did where they were trying to kind of flatter Trump and not really weigh in on Gaza and things like this. This is damn saying, like declaring independence. Right. And so this is a big move for the labor party under any Burnham. He's been pretty, he's been a good communicator, but this is him taking a pretty big bold step. Right. And Ed Milliband clearly got in there. By the way, the Jewish son of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, right? So that that that matters. And for those like who look, but you're probably not listening to the show anymore if you're kind of bothered by this policy announcement from the UK, but it's worth listening to the full speech if anything about this rubs you the wrong way because like you said, Ben, he talks about you know Milliband is Jewish. He talked about his deep connection in history with the Jewish state, you know, spending

47:35time on a Kabut's. He calls out Hamas. They talk about sanctions on Iran. He calls out any semitism in the UK and the need to do more to combat it, which is not like it wasn't just throat clearing, you know, it felt like pretty authentic to him. And then he goes into this, as you said, very intense conversation about settler, he's talked about settler terrorism. He said settler, settler terrorism. It's rampant. As you said, he said ethnic cleansing like it was a tough speech. Yeah. Yeah. So that that matters with the Brits. And then also again, this watch in the next couple of years, the Europeans are starting to, they're looking at Mark Carney, you know, they're looking at Trump's political standing and they're starting to go in the other direction, right? And so for them to break on mass, not just the Brits. And you know, it seems like the Brits have some leadership here too, which is something we hadn't seen out of them in a while in that fashion. It's just a sign that the rest of the world is not going to take orders from Trump in the same way that they did the first year. Yeah. And that matters.

48:35Not long for a big election in Israel, which gets us to the second story. So there was an explosive investigative report out this week from Haaretz, the details, this stark warning about a potential Hamas attack that was given directly to Prime Minister Beebe Netanyahu shortly before the October 7th massacre. The gist of the story, and it's a long story, and we recommend reading all of it, is that about a week and a half before October 7th, the president of the UAE, Hamid bin Zayat or MbZ, warned Netanyahu of a potential major Hamas attack on Israel. But Netanyahu just inexplicably did not relay the message to his top security staff. And the warning, it was not derived from like kind of vague intelligence. It stemmed from comments made directly by Yaya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, the mastermind of October 7th, to a guy referred to in the story as coal eyes who served as this intermediary between the Israelis and Hamas.

49:36And this is from the report about some of the specifics of what Sinwar said. Quote, tell the Israelis that if they don't make progress, I'm preparing a huge surprise for them, Sinwar declared emphatically. Here he dropped a keyword for the first time, one that should have triggered red flags. Tell them to expect a Zalzal, an earthquake. In a second meeting, Sinwar says, convey a message to them, the Israelis, that I'm preparing the mother of all surprises, a terrifying operation, something extraordinary. Again, he said the word that means earthquake. Please convey to the Israelis what I am saying word for word, he demanded. So it's a complicated story of like, you know, this getting back to the Israeli security chiefs via staffers who are working for MBC and you know, folks should go read it. But like, basically, Ben, I've lost count of the number of stories that we've read like this about missed warnings by Netanyahu or the sort of Israeli security establishment that could have helped them prevent October 7th. And if you look back, a lot of top defense and military intelligence officials have resigned.

50:37They have taken responsibility for October 7th. Netanyahu is the only one who is not, he says, he's always says like, oh, now is not the time. First, we win the war, then we look back, blah, blah, blah. But this story implicates him directly in the timing of dropping this a month before the election was not subtle. I think the question is, will it have, you know, the impact you'd think it would politically? We don't know yet. This is always bothering me. We've talked about this. There's just something that never felt right about why their guard was so down again. Not having the information to tip into the conspiracy theory that like, Netanyahu let it happen intentionally. It is the case that it never made any sense that Gaza is one of the most surveilled places in the entire world. And the idea that they were kind of caught that flat-footed and didn't respond for hours while it was happening, like it really does demand like serious inquiry. The Netanyahu is not permitted to happen. He is not permitted. He's used the fact of an ongoing war to allude having any kind of commission, any kind of

51:42inquiry here. But there's huge fucking questions about maybe he didn't think it would be that big of an attack, but maybe he thought some attack would be convenient. Like, and if you think that's cynical, we're talking about be be fucking Netanyahu, like the most cynical person on earth. Because now we've heard, you know, the Egyptians warned him. We've heard, the security chiefs warned him. We've heard of reports from inside of Israeli intelligence. It was quite specific about some of the preparations they made for the plan to attack and then he wrote. Yeah. The actual plan, like these are not subtle pieces of warning. This is not like, you know, coming up in the 9-11 anniversary, you know, that one PDB article, the presidential delay briefing to Bush, you know, been law determined to strike in the United States. It didn't really have any specificity. This is like a lot of blinking lights and people telling Netanyahu, hey, they're about to attack you and, and hind doing nothing, right? And that at, at minimum, that was massive incompetence, like anything else is much more troubling. The only other thing that I thought was interesting to me, the report is about NBC doing this.

52:45The Hanbanzai, the United States of America, who's been their best friend, like closest ally, closest friend of the region. This seemed like it came out if not from the Emirates, like the Emirates must have had to confirm it, you know, and it made me wonder whether the Emirates are sick of BB. I mean, I don't know. I'm just speculating here, but it's people who've dealt in the kind of weird machinations of leaks that happened before elections, not saying we've done that. I'm just saying like, that happens out in the world. It suggests to me that maybe the Emirates were okay with this coming out, like right before the election to harm BB. I don't know. We don't know the answer to that either, but like it's worth thinking about because they've tended to have his back and maybe they're just sick of them too. I don't know if it's going to have any impact on him though because he's the guys managed to wiggle out of, you know, anybody who's inclined to believe these things about BB probably wasn't voting for him to begin with, but we'll see. Yeah, the whole story is worth reading. It's quite confusing. Netanyahu gets criticized from every direction in this thing because this guy coalized his intermediary, was part of an effort to try to sort of improve relations between the Israeli

53:49government and Hamas, maybe get to a prisoner release, maybe take some steps on the Israeli side that make life better for the people in Gaza. And what it sounds like, what the reporting suggests is that Netanyahu dragged his feet on cutting a deal with Hamas, a deal with Sinmar, and Sinmar got pissed and issued this warning to maybe, I don't know, threaten Netanyahu, but also you have sort of national security, or try to go Netanyahu into acting. And then you also have national security side staff like Ronan Barr, the Shinbet and others, telling Netanyahu that they're worried about something happening by Hamas, Hamas doing something and that they wanted, sorry, it says, bar recommended an operational method of a fire extinguishing bomb. They co-named for a powerful and sudden attack designed to quickly neutralize a major threat or at least implementing strong defensive efforts in Gaza and the West Bank. So on the one hand, you have Netanyahu getting criticized for not getting a deal done with Hamas that could have improved relations. On the other hand, you have the national security staff saying that Netanyahu was being

54:51too soft on Hamas and not letting them do like decapitation strikes or something to kind of, I don't know, try to deter or prevent some sort of attack. So all around, it's just the worst possible story for Netanyahu, but like you've been, I have no idea if it will matter at all in this election. Yeah, no, we'll see. We'll see. A couple of Iran updates. So the kind of tit for tat air strikes continue. Iran launched missiles at two US Navy ships on Friday. They didn't hit them, but the US retaliated by bombing three Iranian oil tankers. The sent com commander said, let the message to the IRGC be clear. If you shoot at two of our ships, we'll impose an even higher economic cost, taking up three of yours. Trump repeated his threat to maybe bomb pickaxe mountain last week Friday, which I'm sure you know, got a few hue at all excited. Iran said they're going to announce a new restricted zone in punish ships that enter it. It's not a lot of details on that one, but there seems like they're kind of proceeding a pace on their effort to just take control of the street or remove. Trump administration announced some new sanctions, specifically on Iranian airplanes. Again, I don't think that's really, yeah, that'll win the war.

55:52Yeah, they'll have a D day right there. Over the Pentagon, the New York Times reported that 50 people in the military's joint staff were subjected to polygraph tests. This is because of leaks about depleted US munitions, which like in fairness, is a pretty sensitive leak, the kind of thing you might expect to be investigated, but also at the same time then, like think tanks have been tracking this issue way before that war even started. They just use kind of open source data to monitor as best they can the stockpile. So it was already out there, regardless of who may or may not have been talking to the Pentagon, but notable. Over the weekend, the US Energy Secretary Chris Wright seemed to suggest that they've given up on getting a nuclear deal with Iran. He told ABC, there may not be a nuclear agreement. It may simply be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. The problem may await a next administration. So it sounds like that big success is delivering them. Yeah, me too. And then most concerning to me, Ben, the fighting between the Saudis and the Houthi rebels in Yemen keeps escalating. At least 73 people were injured in Houthi strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure sites over

56:56the last couple days. The Houthis say it was in response to previous Saudi strikes, but of course, the Saudis are not preparing to retaliate. This could kick up the civil war in Yemen that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths literally. So very, very disconcerting. But anything in that kind of Iran news jump out of you is particularly important? Yeah, the tip for that stuff just feels very forever worse, which we've been saying. The polygraph thing is actually pretty fucking nuts. I've never heard of kind of mass polygraph of joint staff members. These are like senior members. There's a McCarthyism to this that makes me wonder like, when is the military just going to say, have you no decency, Pete, accept? So the kind of weird, the paranoia and intimidation is just getting weird and weirder and it's only moving in one direction. And I'm curious whether that brings about the opposite result that they want. They're trying to bring them in line. It might have the opposite effect. We'll see. I do agree that the Saudi Houthi thing is the biggest news of all this because if that

57:57becomes like anywhere near like a hot war, it is going to just like further destabilize things. The Saudis, you know, are, are, yes, like frustrated. But at the same time, at the Houthi start hitting Saudi oil fields. If the Houthis start trying to mess with traffic and the Red Sea, all these shortages that we've been talking about that are acute because countries have kind of spent down their reserve capacity to make up for lost supply. Certain refineries have been taken offline. If you just start to see Saudi oil infrastructure get hit, if you start to see disruptions in the Red Sea, prices are just going to get worse for everybody. The global economic impact is getting worse. So that is, that's something to watch because there's nothing good about the more escalating between the Saudis and the Houthis, including obviously for the people of Yemen. Yeah. And what I just wonder is whether the Iranians are watching our political calendar closely and decide to do something to try to kind of jack up. They will. That's very smart. We'll see. Yeah. Finally, Ben.

58:57So corruption allegations have once again engulfed right wing reform UK leader in British MP Nigel Farage. For those unfamiliar with Farage, imagine if kind of an early shitty version of Groc AI wrote a book about Winston Churchill, then you soaked it in Stale Beer and then it morphed into a creepy old man with strong views about immigrants. That's Nigel Farage. The latest scandal comes via this kind of nonprofit investigative journalism organization called Verbatim that was then fact checked and aired by Channel 4. In the report, you got two high up officials in reform. There's a policy guy named James Orren and Farage's right-hand man named Dan Jukes. They are caught on camera conspiring to break British law on political donations from foreigners, like dead derights. The reform staffers, they solicited money from a guy they believed was the British based son of an American businessman. And first they get the American to pay 30,000 pounds for three polls for reform, two of which Channel 4 notes, quote, helpfully galvanize support for the party ahead of the local elections in May.

59:58And those results will run in the daily telegraph and other newspapers without noting reforms involved in it anyway. They also talk about getting a much larger donation, maybe 500,000 pounds, and a range of meeting with the fake father and son with Farage himself. So here is some audio which, in video, which makes it quite clear that everyone knew that they were doing something pretty shady. Let's watch. I wouldn't bring a word of this to anybody, obviously. No, I just want to know why they're doing this. And it's her thing, he doesn't want you to run a lot though. What you're doing right now means that you can, you can contribute in eight, it's an amazing sweet spot, even though it's a beautiful family. Yeah. It's huge impact and they don't show up anywhere in America. You're having a part with the newspaper staff in the newspapers. Yeah, exactly. Is that is it in business interest? I don't know what it is. Exactly. Obviously, the support that we've offered so far had to be necessarily private to sweet.

1:00:59But the mechanism now for the next phase is, we've had some discussion for Dan with James. So no, we... Thank you. Hello. Thank you. Thank you. So this comes obviously as Farage is mirrored in a whole bunch of scandals. We've talked about the five million pound gift that he can't seem to explain that he got from this Thailand-based crypto billionaire, this new investigation and this Blockbuster report may undercut the brilliant Farage plan of dropping out of Congress or talking about a parliament rather and then running against an intergalactic trash can named Ben Face to try and clear his good name. Not sure that one worked, as he hoped. Farage sat down with the BBC to defend himself. If his goal was to remind people that he does not feel shame and will lie about anything, it was a great success. Let's watch a clip from that. Look, my job wasn't as big as mine. My job wasn't as big as mine. My job was to turn up on a lunch, have a glass of wine and shake someone's hand.

1:02:02Did you not know that it was illegal for foreign firms to donate to UK political parties? Of course I know that. But were you just not paying attention to asking the question? No, because I was told he was giving it to a UK family. I was just asked, oh sorry, a family office that was based in New York. He said in your presence, I am not a compliance officer. I was in the middle of the canvassing in the Clackson by election. I turned up. I frankly wasn't even listening. You were listening. I just asked, is it all about board? I was just there to come and say hello. So you weren't listening when you were discussing donations of thousands and thousands of dollars. I was told there was a global family office based in London. As if it's defensive literally. I wasn't listening. Not quite the buck stops here. So the two A's or in juke's, they have stepped down, pending investigation. Farage obviously has not. I don't know, man. How is this not the end of this guy? I mean, it's not just this scandal. It's that Farage in reform are facing a threat from even more right-wing anti-immigrant

1:03:06party, Restore UK. But the corruption is just so brazen. Everything about the story I love. First of all, great work. And more of this. Right. More of this stuff. This is great and trepid, kind of quasi journalism, quasi, Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes movie happening here. For people who couldn't watch this too, it's the most British thing. Every's wearing natty clothes. They're drinking gin and tonics. People are smoking sigs in the footage. They're in red armor chairs. It just oozes this kind of preppiness. Everything you hate about reform, actually. Just kind of rich guys sitting around making crept deals, getting drunk in the middle of the day. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But the core point is, this guy's just hopelessly corrupt. I mean, after scandal of him just taking money from anybody, it goes back to what we're saying about BB2. His best defense is that he was completely incompetent.

1:04:08His best defense is that I show up at meetings. I don't pay any attention. I didn't listen to what I agreed with the person about, which was I was saying, thank you for your foreign donations. They just need to keep driving this corruption narrative to, by the way, because just to be pure political grass tax here, reform UK is being hopelessly corrupt is probably better than saying reform UK is extreme. It's just a managed pure politics because nobody likes corrupt people. Nobody likes people that are double-deal like this and then lying about it. It's a thing that they should run on. I do think that Nigel could make up a lot of his money if he just did more of those cameos. I guess his fees went down, so he needed to go to the Thai crypto guy and the sky and the American billionaire or whatever he was supposed to be. The only way I feel like this doesn't take this guy down or at least down a couple serious pegs is if the rest of the British media doesn't run it. That's one challenge with Farage is he has often gotten the pass.

1:05:10He doesn't get nearly the coverage that the green party head gets despite being talked about as the air partner. They would savage, yeah, come on, Fleet Street. They savage people for tiny things over there. Let's do it. For you to get some things, yeah. This is a no-brainer. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, but when we come back here and hear Ben's interview with Lawrence Wright about the 25th anniversary of 9-11, where their risks still exist from an attack like that and much, much more. So stick around for that one. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online present and drive your success. Squarespace gives you all the tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, expand your brand and facilitate payments all in one place. With Squarespace's collection of cutting-edge design tools, anyone could build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their business. Start with Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI-enhanced website builder to get a fully custom website in just a few hours using basic information about your industry, your goals, and personality

1:06:13to generate premium quality content and personalized design recommendations. Every dream needs a domain. A Squarespace domain makes it easy to define the best name for your business. At one fair, all inclusive price, no hidden fees or add-ons required. This provides everything you need to bring more of your dream to life. Whether that means building a website or adding a professional email service, don't wait to claim your name, invest in your dream domain today. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com-slashworld to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, that squarespace.com-slashworld. Okay, my guest today is Lawrence Wright. His Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower, Al Qaeda in the Road to 9-11. Really is, I think, the definitive account of the lead-up to the 9-11 attacks, wonderful, colorful, heart-wrenching, revealing story, one of many books from Lawrence Wright, of course.

1:07:14The author has a new introduction time to the 25th anniversary of the attacks, which are obviously coming up the next few days. So it's the perfect time to catch up with him. And I, again, encourage everybody. If you have not read The Looming Tower, please pick it up. There's no better book to understand what happened before 9-11. I say that to someone who worked with the 9-11 commission. But Lawrence Wright, thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure. May we have you, Ben? All right. So I was thinking about this a lot. You and I've talked about these events over the years. 9-11, obviously, played a pretty fundamental role in my life. And I read the new introduction a couple of times. And it triggered something that has not at me, as someone who worked in obviously national security, has had interaction with 9-11, even before that time in the White House with the 9-11 commission. And the question is this, even though Ben Laden didn't achieve his kind of stated objectives, kind of overthrowing Arab regimes and driving the United States out of the region, you could

1:08:17mount an argument, couldn't you, that 9-11 is one of the most successful terrorist attacks in history viewed from the vantage point of where the United States stands today, and our overreaction. I mean, how do you assess the impact of 9-11, both against Ben Laden's intentions? And against the outcome that we're living with today? You know, there was a question in my mind, Ben, did Ben Laden win. Of course, he didn't win. I mean, but he triggered this catastrophic, nearly suicidal reaction in our country. And just think about the lives that have been lost. It's been a 3,000 on 9-11, but hundreds of thousands since then. Yes, there has not been another 9-11, but there have been countless smaller attacks.

1:09:17It's not as if the terrorist movement is dead. But the loss of faith in America is the thing that is really striking to me. Country is so divided, we've shed the most important allies that we've had. We're really quite alone in the world in a way that we haven't been in a lifetime of anybody still alive in America. The country is drifting and now being shunned. And the other thing that troubles me is that we're so complacent now where terrorism is concerned as we were before 9-11. Could it be that we have gone so far around the circle that we're back where we were? Unprepared. Our attention is far away from terrorism. And yet I look at especially at the new developments in technology and wonder what Ben Laden

1:10:17would have done with such tools as artificial intelligence and crypto money and easy access to cyber warfare. Those kinds of tools are incredibly empowering to terrorists and to tyrants. And I can't help but feel for all the great things that technology may bring to us. We're going to head to a golden age of terrorism, tyranny, and crime because these tools are going to be very well adapted for those. Yeah, your book obviously trace the story both of Al Qaeda's emergence and its intentions and ambitions and ultimately its success in attacking the United States and also the failures of the United States government to effectively defend the country, the failures of information sharing from the CIA to the FBI. I mean, we don't have to detail them here.

1:11:20But I wanted to ask you picking up on that last point you made is now we're seeing this administration kind of target the intelligence community, you know, the FBI's run by Kashpital, their agents are doing immigration enforcement instead of counterterrorism. The DNI was Tulsi Gabbard and now we've had a musical chairs there. The CIA's Trump seems to have an almost adversarial relationship with. How would you describe informed by your experience of seeing a series of policy and bureaucratic failures before 9-11 in the looming tower? How would you compare the things that concern you about the state of play today when you look at those same agencies, those same instruments of US government power and intelligence gathering and law enforcement as it relates to the different terrorist threat we're facing? You know, it was, I firmly believe till this day, had the central intelligence agency

1:12:23cooperated with the FBI, the 9-11 wouldn't have happened. The agency knew that the two future hijackers were in America and they came in January of 2000 and the CIA found about it in March of 2000. So year and a half they had, you know, knowledge that Al Qaeda was present in America and yet did not tell the FBI. So there's that. There's also the fractures between these two institutions, the FBI and the CIA, not only were they reluctant to share information, they hated the future. They actually hated each other to the point of subversion and that it's hard to account for. For instance, you know, you look back at the bombing of the coal in October of 2000. This was partly a poor planning on the part of the government to park an American warship

1:13:24in Aiden Yemen Harbor, you know, where it's just sitting there as a big prize. But anyway, it had, was it 17 sailors die and the CIA had information about the, they had actually surveilled a meeting in Malaysia and of Al Qaeda leaders and from there several of them went to Yemen and with the plan to bomb the coal. And so that knowledge was also present and hidden. Bear in mind, we already had dead sailors. You know, this was a mass murder. And in my opinion, back starting from then, there should have been prosecutions. You know, the intelligence agencies had to be forced somehow to work together. And it's a pattern that I see in our agencies now that, you know, they are so fractious

1:14:31right at this present time. Not so much that they hate each other the way that CIA and the FBI did before 9-11, but there's, they've been corralled into partisan ventures and they've turned their eyes away from terror and really in many respects away from the main adversaries toward American citizens. And so how can we be prepared for foreign threats if we're preoccupied with trying to control our own population? Yeah. And, you know, particularly parts of the population that really are not the area where you would see terrorism emerging from. Right. I mean, I want to kind of connect this back to where we weren't wrong because I think it's kind of related to how you focus things and get them right now because on the story of the failure to prevent 9-11 was not one of the United States failing to kind of invade

1:15:32foreign countries and remove their governments. And it was as you said, it was like potentially as simple as the CIA sharing information with the FBI better, you know, or having better aviation security regulations as related to box cutters and we could go down the list. And yet the response was to invade Afghanistan, toppled its government and stay there, invaded Iraq, toppled its government and stay there. Because I think some people might hear you and me talking about the need to focus on terrorism and think, oh, here they go again, you know. How do we separate out the need to actually protect the nation to guard against terrorist attacks and not like when did it become and why did it become about your willingness to go fight wars overseas? Like, you know, I remember John Kerry had this almost gath people thought at the time when he said during the 2004 campaign, we need to get back this being a law enforcement problem.

1:16:33I guess you could have said intelligence and law enforcement. But how do you think about where we went wrong after 9-11 and what the right scope of the government's focus on this is where we're not spending trillions of dollars in fighting wars, but we are defending the country? Well, there are several different areas. We can talk about one though that strikes me is that the invasion of Iraq was perhaps the most colossal diplomatic intelligence failure in American history. It's just hard to imagine. America has always had a problem dealing with other countries because we know so little about the world and the world knows so much about us. It's a total, I mean, we're essentially blinded when we go into a country where we don't speak the language. I guess you remember back when we first were going into Iraq and I forgot the reporter's name.

1:17:36He went through the capital talking to legislators and asked them, can you tell me the difference between Asuni and Aishia? Yeah, I doubt it. No way. No way. This is most fundamental division in Islam. And they didn't even know how to answer the question. And yet we're willing to go fight a war in a country that was so far away from our way of understanding. And so we should know more about the world. There's no question about it. There's a big issue. But we should know more about ourselves. We should know that we're not good at this. How many wars is it going to take for us to realize that winning wars is not one of the things that we do well. But damaging our own country is something that we have so much power to do. And America has been badly damaged, just 9-11, but not by terrorists. Yeah. Yeah. Well, part of that too is understanding the rest of the world and also understanding honestly

1:18:45like who we're fighting against. Because clearly Trump does not understand the Iranian government at all. And if you did understand the Iranian government, you would know they were not going to collapse because we bombed them for a few days. And I always kind of bugged me that Bin Laden is having a moment and you alluded to this in the introduction. His vat was of reemerged on TikTok and young people saying maybe he had a point. But I do think that as someone who was reporting on this at the time and wrote this kind of meticulous account understanding and you were traveled to these places, understood, Al-Qaeda. I remember I was assigned by my boss Lee Hamles on the coach of 9-11 commission. Go read all of Bin Laden's fattwas. Because Hamles didn't actually want to understand like what is this about. And whatever we think of Bin Laden, clearly he's absolutely reprehensible violent individual of his actions are unjustified. He was saying for a long time that what he objected to was our foreign policy.

1:19:49And putting yourself back in that time when George Bush was saying they hate our freedoms, they hate what they see in Congress. What we learned from the need to actually separate out that you can try to understand your enemy and put yourself in your enemy shoes without justifying or celebrating them as people may be doing in TikTok. Why do we struggle so hard? And how much of what we got wrong about the response in all of them was about just not even trying to understand why it happened? I think there's an arrogance there that suggests that we don't need to know all these answers to your questions. We have the power to do what our way everyone. And it's true we have a tremendous amount of power. And in a way it reminds me the old cartoon character, Baby Huey. Do you remember? Baby Huey was this 400 pound baby hue carried club.

1:20:52That's the way the world views us. And in many respects, given how powerful and clumsy we are in the world, it's a fair comparison. But I just want to say about intelligence. Understanding the world is what intelligence is supposed to be doing. You know, it's supposed to be gathering information and providing that to policymakers. But in my, when I was roaming around the Arab world in South Asia after 9-11, there were so few Americans or even Westerners in that area then. And I remember in Afghanistan, I was given a briefing by some CIA guy, but he said to me, I'd like to do what you do. I said, what do you mean? Talk to people, he said. And I said, there they are. Go out the door. You can talk to them.

1:21:52I think that on the ground kind of intimacy with another culture is one of the main things that we like. And this true of journalism too, Ben, there used to be news bureaus all over the world, like ABC at one point had like 40 around the world. Now they're handful of news bureaus in the world, American news bureaus. So what happens? Somebody like me parachutes in with no history of a region or was also true is we accept the news that the governments of these other countries are putting out like whatever is on Saudi television. We don't have anybody there, so we'll broadcast their view of it. That's not journalism. You know, that's essentially we're allowing other points of view to dominate our thinking. And we don't have, we need to have independent intelligence gathering both by reporters

1:22:56and by our own intelligence agencies. Yeah, I always, one of my, you know, when I look at the biggest failures of, you know, my time in government, I look at like a Afghanistan. And when I think back, because I've gotten to know a lot of Afghans over the years and every single one of them tells me is any one of us, if you just talk to a smart, normal Afghan, they could have told you you were backing all the wrong people. You're making all the mistakes. And then I thought about it. And in all those rooms I was in, in a situation where people were making decisions about Afghanistan, there are never any Afghans there. It's like if we just talk to these people, maybe we would have avoided that. I mean, I do wonder, you know, a big part of your story takes place in Afghanistan. It feels like there's an effort to kind of just forget that that happened, you know, we're four years after the collapse of Kabul, the Taliban is back in control.

1:23:56I'm wondering how you feel about that. I don't know if you still have contacts there. How do you put in context of all these different pieces of the 9-11 story? Like how do you digest the experience in Afghanistan? And what do Americans, you know, maybe continue to owe Afghans at a time when, you know, down Trump is having iced-to-port people that worked with our military and we're kind of not really doing anything to help a humanitarian crisis there. You know, our longest war, you know, would you have ever predicted that we would have been tied down in a 20-year war in Afghanistan? It's just, and the Taliban was not our enemy. You know, they harbored Al Qaeda, yes, but they were not, you know, our enemy. They were not waging war against America. So from the very beginning, we had no business invading Afghanistan. I remember when I was there, it was a kind of hopeful period. It was a brief enrolude, you know, that they seemed like, you know, they were, the Taliban

1:25:02had been put to bay and, you know, they looked, they were, I remember the sound of hammers and saws, you know, as they were beginning to rebuild. I was very hopeful that that would happen. If there's anything we should get from this, is that we have not got a solution that works. Our diplomacy doesn't work. Our war making doesn't work. So what works? And if you don't have an answer to those questions, don't wage war. You know, you are, it's a catastrophe. And I think it's been so much on my mind recently, the preciousness of all the lives that were lost, you know, tragedy becomes kind of blurred when it becomes so vast, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dead. That's a great loss to humanity. And then of course, the individual loss to families and lovers and so on is just, it's

1:26:05hard to imagine the heartbreak that we spread across the world. Not that other countries have responsibilities, of course, on this, but I, but I look at the, you know, we could easy to think about the $8 trillion that we lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, but all the Americans, the Afghans, the Iraqis who have perished in this experience, it's just a catastrophe that I don't think we've really taken in in part because I don't think we want to absorb the responsibility that we have. Yeah. Well, and I mean, one way, you know, is to also think about the alternative history. Like, what if we didn't do those things? Like what do you spend a trillion dollars on? Right? Yeah. I would America be different today if we didn't make those mistakes. It is, I think it's a profound question. It's not one that is being asked these days and all the things that, you know, even the

1:27:07democratic socialist, you know, their entire agenda could be, could be enacted and there's still be plenty of money for rice and beans. It's just, it's just not, it's, it's a heartbreaking thought to think that we could have spent that money on educating our children and, and, and scientific advances, curing cancer, whatever, we could have been so much better, but we spent all that money so fruitlessly and with such devastating consequences. You alluded in your introduction, you know, as someone who knows as much about, you know, the history of the 9-11 attacks as, as anybody certainly was not, was in the government, and probably more than, more than people in government. You alluded to the fact that we still don't know the full story, right? There's some unanswered questions that people continue to raise about Saudi involvement. Most notably, frankly, we still can't seem to prosecute people for 9-11 because we tortured them and their, their confessions are inadmissible in court. What do you think the, as someone, you know, who's, you know, probably finished your

1:28:09broke with some questions in your mind? What do you think the unanswered questions are? Well, I think there must have been some kind of conspiracy between the Saudi government and, and the operatives of 9-11. To me, the, the, the most damning recent evidence is that cardboard box that was in the FBI warehouse and it had come from the investigation of, it went on by the FBI in England. There were a lot of jihadis living there and they've stored all this stuff in a card, cardboard box and somebody in the bureau was going through to see, you know, cleaning out old stuff that's no longer needed. And there was this box and it full of investigative notes from 9-11. And so he called one of the FBI guys who was still around and said, would you like this box? Oh, sure. Send it over. And inside there is a lot of the material from Omar Abba Yumi who was a 40-something year-old

1:29:17Saudi student who didn't go to class and he was on the Saudi payroll. He is a, he's the guy who met with the hijackers after they arrived in January of 2000 and and sending him. Yeah. Well, he arrived and he met them in a, in a Halaal restaurant in Los Angeles and he said he overheard the Gulf Arabic being spoken, you know, and just cycled up to them and said, let me help you. I'll get you a place in San Diego in an apartment in my building. I'll pay your rent and then some of the, you know, there are these videos and one is of him introducing these two hijackers to members of the Islamic community in San Diego. Now on the 9-11 commission, you might have seen an edited version of that video, but the

1:30:19full version is much more damning and it's always struck me that with the cases never really been made, but they were introduced to the imam of the mosque in San Diego who was in the Hanwar al-Alauqi who became the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Yemen and eventually we killed him. But these kinds of scraps are on the table and by Yumi who has also had, he, there's one video that looks like he's a newscaster standing in front of the Capitol and you know pointing out, you know, and here's the airport over here and so on and you, he's actually giving a stand-up report about the, it appears, a prospective target and there's, whether it's more to it, but the FBI took the box, looked into it, said, oh my, and put it away for years.

1:31:23Yeah. Yeah. And that, you know, this, when we start thinking if we'll ever hold anybody accountable for the errors that took place both in the FBI and the CIA, you know, there's, there's more to the crime than we have, than we have solved. And you know, you rightly point out that Guantanamo is a problem in terms of getting to the bottom of some of this, but there's so much, there's so much that we could know and whether it would require holding not just foreign terrorists responsible with members of our own intelligence community. Yeah. And a degree of transparency that I'm adding to this, so I'm down here releasing all these files today that show that New York City was covering up their air quality. I mean, transparency is something that people usually uncomfortable with. Yeah. Yeah. Last thing I want to ask you is that, because I think this is on a lot of people's minds are really on mind right now. How did, how did 9-11 change your life?

1:32:24Oh my God. I said, there's, there's Larry before 9-11 and Larry after, you know, it was, I guess one thing years ago, I made a vow that I would only do things that were important or fun. I didn't want to have, you know, lose the joy, but at the time, I was sort of drifting and I was thinking about becoming a movie director or something I had, you know, vague dreams of Hollywood and then suddenly I had a mission and it wasn't just a reporting job, you know, it was from the very first day I was on the case and I just knew that this is the most important thing I'll do with my life. And, you know, that afternoon, David Remnik called us with, it was a small group of New

1:33:25Orca writers that he delegated to go out and try to collect stories and he would put it into what became the famous black issue. And I had a good fortune of finding this young reporter named Kurt Jelsen who was a wrote for an investment magazine and he was supposed to have an appointment that day on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center and he for the first time in his life slept through his subway stop and so he got off the next station, ran back to the Trade Center and if you remember the elevators were up a flight of escalator and so he rushed up the escalator, got into the elevator and a woman was coming across the lobby and she was moving too slowly for him and she stepped into the elevator and he noticed it on her ankle she had a roast tattoo and then the plane struck and the elevator doors accordion and nobody knew, I mean,

1:34:34it was a earthquake, you know, it's just nobody could fathom what had happened and Kurt stepped into the lobby and there were objects around the size of a shoe box or office desk, you know, various, you know, probably bits of plaster that had fallen out of the ceiling and his eerie smoking environment, he saw trees and went to get outside and of course it was up a flight of stairs and it was a plaza and so he walked out into the plaza and there were hundreds of shoes and there were objects that he thought were luggage but they were human torsos and his journey to try to get back home to Bronx became the book end of the New Yorker Black issue and I count that as the moment that I became the whatever I am now, you

1:35:39know, that's when I made that decision that that I was all in on this and I had to get to the bottom of it. Yeah, well, we appreciate all the work you've done, it's helped us understand in a strange way led to some of your other work which is interrogated power and what's happening in America and what's happening in the Middle East and everything is kind of in some way a branch off the tree of that decision you made. So people should check out the living tower if they haven't already, check out your other work and we could have talked, I mean there's so many things to talk about this but we covered a lot so thanks so much for joining us. I've enjoyed it quite a lot, Ben, it's good to catch up with you. Yeah, good to see you always. All right, take care. Thanks to get to Lawrence Wright for joining the show and talk to you next week. Potsy the world is a cooking media production. Our show is produced by Alonam and Kofsky, Michael Goldsmith and Inisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Heathcoat, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the writer's guild of America East.