Israel’s Plan to Flatten and Occupy Gaza
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Welcome to Pod Day of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, all the way live from Singapore. You look very international right now. I mean, you know, Q International Hotel Room could be anywhere. But yes, good morning. Good Wednesday morning, Tommy. It is Wednesday morning in Singapore, which I love, by the way, because you can walk two blocks in any direction and eat a bowl of noodles. But I'm here for a philanthropy summit. I'm here to help support the...

Obama Foundation and its remarkable leaders here who I had dinner with last night. So yes, coming to you from the other side. Did you see Donald Trump attacked the Obama Presidential Library in his Oval Office meeting? Yeah, I woke up to that. I actually didn't see the specific report, but yeah, I'm probably not doing any favors for it by saying I'm

I'm here on its behalf in Singapore. Yeah, well, you're fine. He basically accused all the construction workers in Chicago of doing land acknowledgments and screaming their pronouns and not hammering in nails or something, so it's going slow. It was very, very stupid. Regardless, Ben, today's a tough day for me, a great one for you, even if it's a different day, because the Knicks beat the Celtics in overtime in Game 1 of this playoff series, and Boston losing 1-1 at home, I don't like that.

No, you never like to let the other team steal game one. I have to tell you, Tommy, I was up yesterday morning watching this and sports is so funny because I was so invested. When the Knicks came all the way back from 20 points down, I was like, oh,

you know, I always feel fear the worst as a Knicks fan. So I was like, you should first as where they're going to, exactly. I first, as where they get blown out. Then then we came back. I was like, Oh my God, if we come all the way back and lose, then that'll be awful. And so as it's like a hundred, a hundred, I'm sitting there, I'm not like a particularly religious person. And I'm like, everything has been so bad.

can I please just have this one nice thing? Like that was like, I was like praying to whatever force in the world could deliver the Knicks a victory. So I'm glad that worked out for me. I'm still a little afraid of you guys, but less afraid than I was two days ago.

Yeah, we got time. We'll come back. Good game. Just don't take 63 pointers. I don't understand if you're like Jason Tate or Jalen Brown. Just dribble towards the basket and shoot it. You don't need to pull up. Especially if you're bricking them. Yeah. Also, Ben, I want to say thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the Pod Save the World YouTube page. We've been putting up a ton of content on that channel recently, including we did a YouTube exclusive segment on reports that Trump had actually waved off Trump.

an Israeli plan to bomb Iran's nuclear infrastructure. We did a segment last week about Mike Waltz getting fired as national security advisor and Secretary of Middle Management Marco Rubio getting offered the gig. So please subscribe to the Pod Save the World and Pod Save America YouTube page if you don't mind, because we're

We're cranking out originals over here and big picture, Democrats are getting crushed by Republicans on YouTube. And when you guys subscribe and you help us grow the channel and that helps us get good information from a progressive perspective to people who are just searching for political news. And if they don't get it from us, they're going to get it from Ben Shapiro. So we really appreciate you subscribing.

So today we're going to cover some big stories. We got the chaos that is now engulfed, not just Pete Hegseth over the Pentagon, but a big chunk of Trump's national security team. We're going to talk briefly about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's visit to the Oval Office, the Israeli government's horrible new plan for Gaza.

Trump's maybe real, maybe sort of bullshit deal with the Houthi rebels in Yemen, some sort of ceasefire elections in Australia, the UK, Romania, and Singapore, bit of a mixed bag there, how the German government almost toppled before it was stood up earlier today, and why Trump officials are mad about the treatment of the far-right AFD party in Germany. Then we'll do a quick update on tensions between India and Pakistan, and then we will

preview the Papal Conclave in the best way we know how. And then, Ben, have you done a mock draft or filled out your Papal bracket yet? No, I haven't. Get that in. Yeah, like I'm just reading up on the Mel Kiper big board about who the Cardinals are I should be watching.

I wonder if Shador will drop in this draft, too. Time will tell. And then, Ben, you just did our interview at like, whatever, 6 a.m. or whatever Singapore time it is. What are folks going to hear? I talked to Clayton Weimers, who's the executive director of Reporters Without Borders in the U.S., and they released their Global Press Freedom Index article.

last week around Global Press Freedom Day. Spoiler alert, Tommy, it's not going well for press freedoms around the world. Bummer. But what was really interesting in this report and in this interview was talking about the kind of economic impact

hurricane that has hit journalism globally as you have, you know, social media, you know, taking over media deserts, but how authoritarians are increasingly interacting with that. And, you know, Trump is doing this in the U.S. now where essentially they're seeing what's happening in terms of vulnerability and how they're using that to kind of further kill independent journalism or turn it into, you know, part of their authoritarian playbook. So we kind of cover that in the U.S. and also how it's affecting things globally. We talk about Gaza and what it

means when the US kind of totally turns a blind eye to any accountability for the killing of journalists in places like Gaza and the West Bank, and kind of what people can do, like what kind of independent journalism is necessary. Also, importantly, the funding cuts for USAID and VOA, Voice of America and overseas broadcasting. So not a great picture, but I think people need to get smart on this so they understand both what's happening, but also how to support independent journalism in this country and globally.

Excellent. Everyone should check that out. It's a very, very important topic. I think under-discussed when it comes to the rise of authoritarianism. And your mention of the Gaza piece of this reminded me that our friends over at Zateo News have a documentary coming out called Who Killed Shireen? about the

the execution by the IDF of this famous Palestinian-American journalist and the total lack of accountability for it during the Biden administration. So I'm looking forward to watching that. And we talk about that case like on the interview, yeah, as an exemplar of the wrong way to do it, you know, in terms of accountability.

Absolutely. Moral failing there. All right, Ben. So let's start with the chaos in Trump's national security team, because I do think it's like a big evolving story. As I mentioned at the top, Mike Waltz is out as national security advisor. Rubio was given the job on an interim basis and is now technically secretary of state, interim national security advisor, acting USAID administrator and acting archivist of the United States. So that makes a lot of sense.

Waltz will be nominated to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. I look forward to that confirmation hearing. There's a bunch of new reporting about why Waltz got fired since we talked about this last week on YouTube. It sounds like part of it was obvious, like Trump never got over the Signalgate fiasco and the weeks and weeks and weeks of bad headlines that followed. But additionally, The Washington Post reported that Trump was pissed at Waltz

for coordinating with the Israeli government before Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit to the White House back in February. I guess Waltz and the Israelis were talking about military options to target Iran's nuclear program when Trump wanted to try diplomacy first. And that pissed him off. Also, as we've discussed, it sounds like the rest of the White House just thought Mike Waltz was a moron and they hated working with him and they wanted him out.

J.D. Vance went on TV, I think it was with Brett Baier on Fox, and tried to describe Waltz's firing as a promotion because the job is Senate confirmed. I believe there's something like 1,300 Senate confirmed jobs, Ben. So we all had a good laugh at that. And here's Trump talking about these personnel moves on Meet the Press this past weekend. Mr. President, was that move a punishment?

No, I just think he'll do a nice job in the new position. Marco's doing an outstanding job. No, Marco won't keep Marco's very busy doing other things. So he's not going to keep it long term. We're going to put somebody else in. But I think Mike was, as you know, he's a fine guy and I think he'll do a very good job. Knows the countries, knows leadership. And I think he'll do a very good job at the United Nations. And in the meantime, Marco's really doing something special.

And it's going to work out very well. We're hearing some potential names. Stephen Miller's name, one of your longtime most loyal aides. His name has been talked about as a potential national security adviser. Is he someone you're looking at? Well, I'd love to have Stephen there, but that would be a downgrade. Stephen's very...

Stephen is much higher in the totem pole than that, in my opinion. Can you tell us who the frontrunner is right now? Well, I have a lot of people that want it. I will tell you, I have everybody calling. Everybody wants to be a part of this administration. So at some point, we'll, you know, probably do that. You know, there's a theory. Henry Kissinger did both. There's a theory that you don't need two people, but...

I think I have some really great people that could do a good job. So calling Walt a fine guy is such a brutal description unless he meant fine and like he thinks he's hot. But Ben, so this change at the White House for the National Security Advisor position comes as this chaos around Hexeth just won't go away. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hexeth made at least a dozen signal chats.

where he talked about sensitive information, including one where he told aides to, quote, inform foreign governments about an unfolding military operation. In that story, the Pentagon tossed Hegseth's military aid under the bus and told the journal that he was the guy who shared classified information with Pete Hegseth's wife and brother. But despite this mess, Ben, like you can hear in that Meet the Press clip that Trump just doesn't really seem to think he needs a national security advisor or NSC staff,

um i don't know maybe he just thinks he's uh the genius behind it all well i think he does i think he's his own national security advisor and you know he wants to have kind of these personal emissaries like steve woodcoff flying around the world who have a direct line back into trump rather than having a national security advisor coordinating the state department defense department the intelligence community the risk of that is the kind of chaos in the government right because

the National Security Advisor's job, which is, you know, with all due respect, I mean, the UN ambassador job is more important in Democratic administrations, but in Republican, particularly Trump administrations, it's a massive demotion. It's a joke. Because the National Security Advisor coordinates the UN ambassador, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense in terms of developing policy and implementing policy. Or if there's a crisis, like some of the things we're going to talk about today, you know, India bombs Pakistan.

Who convenes the meeting in the national security in the situation room to figure out how to respond to that? Right. So there's just a huge vacuum in terms of being able to deal with particularly a crisis or being able to implement an objective. I worry, too, about.

the authoritarian playbook of this all, right? Because part of what you want to do, if you want to truly consolidate power, you essentially debilitate the kind of normal workings of the government. You pull all decision-making into the office of the president, and then you just deal with loyalists, you know? And that kind of brings us to the Stephen Miller and Hegseth of it all,

I, Stephen Miller, to me, is the scariest guy to be in this job. First of all, it's kind of weird that Trump would think being national security advisor is a demotion from Stephen Miller being deputy chief of staff for policy. Right.

There's some weird world where Stephen Miller is in charge of both domestic and national security policy, which is scary to me. But I think the particularly dangerous thing about a guy like Miller is he is someone like the Project 2025 people who've looked at how to use national security authorities, right? So kind of post 9-11 authorities,

to, you know, deport people to El Salvador and gulags or to impose tariffs. Like these are not things that have a lot of legal basis or any legal basis, say in the case of terrorists, but they're using these emergency authorities, right? And when we think about the more extreme examples, you know, delaying an election or something or deploying the military in the streets,

all of that would be based on a, you know, quote unquote national emergency, a national security emergency. And so that's why I don't want guys like Miller who've actually thought about that to be in, and that'd be a signal, an alarming signal. And lastly on HEGSAT,

is a lot of people say to me, you know, when Trump threatens to invade Greenland or, you know, Canada, which we'll get to today, or take back the Panama Canal, like, well, would the military actually do that? Well, you see Hegseth kind of purging generals and now wanting to kind of get rid of 20% of all generals.

You know, what the Pentagon looks like in two years versus what it looks like today, you know, could be very different if they basically are trying to build a MAGA military or maybe within the military, like a MAGA wing that they can count on for some of their more far-fetched things. However, I will say with Pete Hexeth, he's one of those people that has kind of gross incompetence and...

lack of any kind of discipline makes me kind of assures me like on the one hand it's kind of scary that nobody's like running the Pentagon or but but the other and it's maybe a good thing that like the guy who might be in charge of trying to turn the military into something that would invade Canada is like a guy who seems to day drink and

has a makeup studio and is firing his own, like, you know, longtime loyalists. Everybody. Yeah. Everyone around him. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I guess his inability to plan is helpful. Although Trump amazingly, amazing moment on Meet the Press, Trump did actually rule out

a military invasion of Canada. So I guess that's reassuring, but you're right about Stephen Miller. I mean, he's like declaring it a national emergency that the latest Indiana Jones movie was filmed internationally. So God help us if there was something that really did happen. But I'm glad you brought up the India-Pakistan conflict

tensions as an example of why you want a national security advisor and a secretary of state, because right now we'll get to the substance of this in a bit, but like Marco Rubio should be calling his counterparts in India and in Pakistan and trying to calm things down. He should then go to the region and try to like

be there and kind of like physically prevent a military escalation. And then the national security advisor should be sitting in Washington and running a process for contingency planning and like where to get other parts of the national security establishment involved. Like, you know, if Hegseth wasn't a moron, he would be calling his counterparts in both India and Pakistan and telling them to chill out. Maybe Trump makes a call like, right. You'd have to staff that. You'd have to develop a package for what the message looks like, what, what, you know, threats could look like.

Um, but Rubio just can't do both at once. Like that's not even a shot at him, even though I love taking shots at him. Like nobody can physically do both of those jobs. Yeah. Like, and this is a good example, right? So, and you, you set this up well, Tommy, but like the national security advisor would kind of convene this meeting in response to something like this, this, the intelligence community would, uh, brief everybody in that meeting and the situation room about, Hey, what do we know about what's going on? You know, uh, in India and Pakistan.

then you'd make a plan for diplomatic engagement, which by the way, would include outreach from people like the State Department and Marco Rubio to India and Pakistan, but also to all the other countries. They're called the Chinese. Yeah, called the Chinese. Other countries that have influence in India and Pakistan, you'd be trying to make sure that everybody's kind of speaking with one voice because India doesn't want the US kind of coming and mediate it, but they

If they're hearing the same message from lots of countries, that's helpful. The military has contacts, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling the chief of staff of the army or the military in both India and Pakistan would be part of this. Diplomatic security, like what are we doing to, you know, secure our diplomatic facilities in India and Pakistan in case all hell breaks loose here, right?

Thinking through worst case scenarios, right? Who's watching the nuclear weapons? You know, there's a lot of stuff to be doing. American citizens, like, you know, what services need to be surged to support American citizens who are in a potential conflict zone? I don't think that's happening. Or if it's happening, it's not, you know, being coordinated. Marco Rubio, as a national security advisor, can't like both run that process, brief the president and be the secretary of state. You just can't do that, right? No.

Doesn't even have a deputy. And everyone else is just a mess. I mean, you know, last week, Reuters published this photo of Mike Waltz from a cabinet meeting where you could see the screen of his phone. And on it, he was using this app called TeleMessage. TeleMessage is an Israeli developed app that was sold to some U.S. company called Smarsh. I guess that's the actual name. Waltz and other administration officials use this app to archive their signal chats and

to, I assume, comply with the Presidential Records Act, which says you have to archive all of your communications and correspondence. But some hacker told a news outlet called 404 Media that he was able to hack the telemessage app in like 15 minutes and pull the names and contact info for hundreds of US government employees. So great work there. Again, the operational security is strong. Reuters reported that

in the first few days of the administration, Pete Hegseth may have halted military aid shipments to Ukraine without first telling the White House that he was gonna do it. So that is kind of a shocking process foul. Again, would be good to have a national security advisor sort of coordinating these things. And then finally, Ben,

I just wanted to play a quick clip for you in case you missed it, except you probably sleep when this happened. Newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office today. Here's a quick excerpt of how it went. - As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. - That's true. - We're sitting in one right now, Buckingham Palace that you visited as well. - That's true. - And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign last several months, it's not for sale, won't be for sale.

ever. But never say never. Never say never. So, you know, Trump's talking a little less tough these days to our Canadian friends. You know, he was talking shit about Justin Trudeau, but less so to Mark Carney there.

I mean, like Carney's like brushed this guy back, you know, and Carney's got a pretty strong mandate from the Canadian people. Again, as we've discussed, I think, you know, Carney appears to have threatened to dump U.S. bonds in ways that could and treasuries in ways that could significantly impact the economy. And he just, you know, he's not being bullied. I mean, you know.

Compare Mark Carney to like US law firms, you know, like that approach works. Capitulating to Trump does not work, you know, and Trump is is so incapable of dealing with someone kind of punching him back that all he can be is like, you know, we never say never, you know, like that's hardly that tough, you know.

Yeah, he spends a lot of time yelling about Biden or Trudeau, not so much as counterparts. There was a great episode of this podcast and YouTube show called Pablo Torre Finds Out about how Wayne Gretzky's relationship with Donald Trump

and his refusal to just come out and say, like, hey, Canada will never be the 51st state has caused all these Canadians to be furious at Gretzky. And it goes into the weirdness of Gretzky sitting in a box next to Kash Patel during those two games when Ovechkin tied and then broke his scoring record. Highly recommend it, Ben. It's right up your alley. Yeah, the...

the MAGA international celebrities jet set. It's the weirdest collection of people, you know? It's a weird crew. Like Wayne Gretzky. If you're like the greatest hockey player of all time, why do you want to hang out with like Kash Patel? Like, I mean, even if your politics turn in the wrong direction, like it's just, there's something so like,

I don't know, lame about it to use a... Yeah, it's weird. I guess Patel's like a big hockey player. He plays on some, you know, club team in D.C. Oh, yeah, I'm sure he's like, you know, the great one, you know, Cash Patel. Gretzky, I think, like became a Trump buddy after he retired and was living in New York probably like

chasing around the same crew of women. Do you think Kash Patel is having hockey games? You remember how Putin used to have those hockey games where he would win against like pro players, like 72 to nothing or something. Do you think Kash Patel like organizes scrimmages at the FBI where he has to be allowed to score, you know? So according to this report, apparently Kash Patel has like a standing Sunday night game and some of the reporting around it

I think they talked to some of the players on his team who said that the FBI knows not to bug him during this period. And boy, that's not how the FBI director job operated back in our day, Ben. Also, Kash Patel lives in Las Vegas. So the fact that he's like going to D.C. still for his club hockey game, obviously, is a lot of reasons to be in D.C. But it's worth watching. It was eye opening.

I'll take it out. Anyway, a couple additional Trump things. So the Washington Post reported that the CIA may be planning to reduce its workforce by about 1,200 jobs via early retirements or buyouts. I'll be honest, I'm not that worked up about that one. The agency probably shrinking a bit. Pete Hegseth announced something similar. He's going to clean out some of the senior leadership at the

Pentagon. He's telling the military to cut 20% of its four-star generals, and he's telling the National Guard to get rid of 20% of its top positions. Here's our boy, Pistol Pete, talking about this plan in this weird video that the Department of Defense released via Twitter. We're back with more DOD reforms. This one is General and Flag Officer Reductions. That's the official title. My title is Less Generals,

More GIs. So it used to be a ratio of one general to 6,000 troops. Today, it's one general to 1,400. More generals and admirals does not equal more success. Now, this is not a slash-and-burn exercise meant to punish high-ranking officers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This has been a deliberative process, working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff with one goal, maximizing strategic readiness and operational effectiveness by making prudent reductions in the general and flag officer ranks.

Stirring stuff. Those watching on YouTube may notice that Hegseth filmed this video with like a two-camera shoot, but they still had this former TV anchor reading off a piece of paper, not a teleprompter, which just seemed like very dumb. Come on, guys. The Pentagon's got to have a teleprompter over there. Again, Ben, on the substance, I don't think I'm that worked up about a reduction of four-star generals if it's done...

as described, but I do worry about these cuts being just cover for an ideological purge. Also some related bad news, the Supreme Court just said that Trump can ban transgender service members. So that is obviously terrible. - The worst thing about this, and I alluded to earlier, but to be specific,

The worst things Trump could do involve the weaponization of the U.S. military. So the deployment of the U.S. military to quash dissent in this country, the use of the U.S. military after an election that Trump or the Republicans used to

You know, I mean, we know after Trump lost last time that, you know, there were proposals to use the military under the Insurrection Act or some other kind of authority to kind of seize control. Right. You know, or overseas. Right. Not just Canada, but like the U.S. military being ordered to like seize the Panama Canal or seize Greenland. The trans I don't think the U.S. military would be willing to do some of those things in its current form.

If the 20% cut to general officers is a precursor to a broader purge and the promotion and elevation of a leadership that is in Pete Hegseth's image, then all of a sudden, the military in two years,

when Trump may want to do some of those things is scarier, right? And look, maybe they'll just do parades on Trump's birthday. That's a different thing. But that's the only thing that I'd be worried about there. You're right. Like, I'm not sure. There can be less four-star generals. That's fine. Like, I'm not, that doesn't stress me out. So the question is, is that a part, though, of a bigger project? Then the other thing I just say on the CIA piece, same thing, I agree with you. Like, but there's a difference between early retirements. But we saw in USAID, they were firing people that were overseas and leaving them there.

If there are CIA officers who are serving overseas who are like shit canned and kind of the rug is pulled out from under them, guess who's going to be approaching all of those CIA officers? China, Russia. And they have sources, you know, human sources whose lives, you know, obviously are at stake. So again, there's a smart way to like, let's have some early retirement, downsize the force. And then there's a dumb doge way, like we saw in USAID, that would be potentially dangerous.

Yeah, that's very, very well said. You said, I believe you mentioned military parades, Ben. I got some news for you then. Trump is finally getting the military parade he has always dreamed of. So on June 14th, we will all be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army and Flag Day.

and Trump's 79th birthday. So I'd rank those from least to most important. The parade will cost an estimated $45 million. It will include more than 50 aircraft, 150 military vehicles, and 6,600 soldiers. Here's Trump talking about his birthday parade again on "Meet the Press." -We're gonna have a big, beautiful parade. -A military parade? -Yeah, sure. -Okay. -We're gonna celebrate our military. We have the greatest military in the world. -What's the price tag? Do you know? -People --

Peanuts compared to the value of doing it. We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world We have the greatest army tanks in the world We have the greatest weapons in the world and we're gonna celebrate it if you look at Russia they celebrate Victory Day if you look at France I was talking to a Prime Minister McCrone and he says yes as Victory Day Victory Day and I say Victory Day for what World War two I said well I

We had more to do with winning World War II than any other nation. Why don't we have a victory day? So we're going to have a victory day for World War I and for World War II.

I think the Russians lost a few more guys than we did. Are we going to parade a submarine into D.C.? Is that what he's saying there? I mean, excited for this little North Korea style celebration? Well, that's the thing. It's easy to kind of chuckle at this and because it is kind of like his insatiable need for validation, you know, requires him to stand and watch like missiles being driven in front of him. Yeah.

But like, there's a serious point to this, which is like this, there's this kind of slow motion frog boiling into fascism that we've been going through for 10 years. And

And like, I just don't want to be in a fucking country where like the leader sits on a parade stand and watches some fucking missiles go by in front of him. Like that's what happens in North Korea. And sure, it happens in some other places that like are not as scary as that. But like, that's what this is about. Like what is more fascistic than a leader on his birthday wanting to see some missiles driven on trucks in front of him? And so it sucks that we have to live in that kind of country.

It does suck. I do think a powerful, confident country does not have to parade its missiles. You just kind of know you have them and you pray you never have to use them. That's kind of the approach I would prefer. We're going to take a quick break. But Ben, if you care about the country, and I know you do, and you're looking for a great book to read, check out When We're in Charge, The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership by Amanda Lippman. It's out on May 13th. It is the playbook you have been waiting for if you want to get more involved in politics.

Amanda is the co-founder of Run for Something. She spent years helping launch young political careers. Now she's sharing the insights that will help the next generation of leaders make an impact without burning out, which is quite hard these days. So you can pre-order it now at crooked.com slash books or wherever you get your books.

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All right, Ben. So per usual, we got nothing but bad news out of Gaza. On Sunday night, Israel's security cabinet voted to greenlight a plan to gradually reoccupy and then hold Gaza indefinitely. Netanyahu is trying to spin this as part of some pressure campaign to get to a ceasefire with Hamas. But his far-right coalition is thrilled in talking about these as a long-term solution. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said, quote,

We are finally going to conquer Gaza. We are no longer afraid of the word occupation. Remember that Gaza was fully occupied by the Israelis for decades and they withdrew in 2005. Smotrich was also asked about a plan from another far-right lunatic minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir, who proposed permanently blocking all humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Smotrich, when asked about that comment or that plan, said,

Quote, I do not disagree with him morally, but practically the world is not going to allow us to starve to death. Two million people in Gaza and quote, absolutely chilling, unequivocally genocidal language right there. This plan will go into effect on May 15th, unless Israel and Hamas reach some sort of deal first.

That date coincides with the end of Trump's trip to the Middle East. Next week, I think he's going to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Here are some of the details of Netanyahu's new Gaza plan. So everyone living in Gaza will be displaced and pushed into southern Gaza, the Rafah area. It's about 2 million people. The IDF will flatten all remaining buildings and destroy Hamas's tunnel network.

The plan envisions all humanitarian relief being distributed by some new international foundation and by private US companies. I assume we're talking about private US security contractors, but I'm not entirely sure. The United Nations, every international aid organization has already said

they will not be a part of this plan. They think it is terrible. And to pull it all off then, Israel will have to mobilize 70,000 reservists, most of whom have already served for close to a year after the October 7th attacks. This Gaza plan from Netanyahu is wildly unpopular. As Axios noted in their great reporting on all of this, recent polls show that between 60 to 70% of Israelis

oppose occupying Gaza, and a majority want a deal to free the remaining 24 hostages and end the war. Then I reached out to a friend in Israel just to get a sense from this person of why this is all happening now. And he said, quote, Trump has given up and lost interest and now BBC is a free hand. And that rang pretty true to me, even if, you know, Steve Witkoff or others on his team are well-intentioned and really want a deal. It does seem like Trump is like, I don't know, whatever, do what you want now.

Well, yeah, I mean, even Steve Wyckoff, this is like far down his punch card, right? I mean, he's got he's got the Ukraine negotiations. Then he's trying to negotiate a new Iran deal there. I mean, Trump's trip to the Middle East. He'll want something to announce next.

Between Iran and maybe some Saudi normalization deal with Israel that tries to cut out the Palestinians or has some kind of weird language about some future Palestinian state and addressing the humanitarian situation in Gaza, clearly Trump could give a shit about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. And it doesn't seem to be the thing that is getting Steve Witkoff on planes and flying to the region in the same way that even the Iran talks are.

And look, I mean, what we're looking at is the kind of slow motion ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They're just moving millions of people back and forth into smaller and smaller enclaves while bombing them and starving them to death and denying them medicine so that if you're sick or wounded, you will die.

and then making plans to reoccupy parts of Gaza. And then there's movements to start building probably settlements. And they'll say, we have to build settlements in the Northern Gaza Strip as a buffer or something. But what's happening is

is the destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza and just making life so miserable for them that they might someday leave. But nobody wants them, right? So it's just an absolute calamity. And the fact that

That there's nothing kind of stopping it. There's not the U.S. is obviously not going to stop it. You know, global condemnation doesn't seem to matter. Just kind of points to kind of a totally broken international system.

Yeah, totally broken. Just another sort of update coming out of the same region. So we've talked a lot about the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Listeners probably remember they've been firing missiles and drones at Israel proper and its ships in the Red Sea in protest of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Over the weekend, the Houthis actually managed to get a missile past Israel's missile defense systems. And that missile struck near a Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv.

The Israelis responded by destroying Yemen's international airport and by hitting the main port at Hodeidah. However, earlier today, Trump in the Oval Office announced that his team had negotiated some sort of truce with the Houthis.

Axios said that Marco Rubio's boss, Steve Witkoff, although if Rubio has four jobs now, Ben, is Witkoff his boss four times over or just at state? I don't think he takes the same interest, Witkoff, in the National Archives position. So maybe Marco can focus on that, you know.

Okay, that's a good call. So regardless, it sounds like Wyckoff cut some deal with the Houthis. It was brokered by Oman. But it sounds like this deal is only – it basically says we will stop – we, the U.S., will stop bombing the Houthis and the Houthis in return will stop firing shots or missiles or drones at U.S. ships but not at Israel. So none of this is confirmed. We'll see if this thing holds.

Big picture, it's probably a good thing if Trump, much like Biden before him, figures out that you cannot bomb the Houthis into submission and he instead opted for diplomacy. But it does feel like a bit of a I'll believe it when I see it hold for several weeks. That's right. I think that Trump, again, is worried about his trip, like he doesn't want to go over the Middle East and have something going on with the Houthis. That's what he really cares about in terms of his own image.

They were worried about how expensive the thing was. I mean, the U.S. was using some pretty expensive hardware in that bombing campaign and not really achieving anything in terms of degrading the Houthis that much, certainly not stopping their capacity to launch that kind of attack on Israel.

But yeah, I'd rather we stop bombing them. So that's good. But whatever they try to spin here, like nothing is different after this bombing campaign than before the bombing campaign. You know, so what was that about other than, I don't know, Trump wanting to bomb some people, you know, and it just shows you the pointlessness of the whole enterprise. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if the Houthis stop firing missiles at any ships in the Red Sea, obviously that would be a win. If they stop firing missiles at Israel, that would be a good thing. But we'll see if that's the case. Yeah, I remain skeptical that that's going to hold beyond Trump's trip, you know. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see. All right, Ben, we had a bunch of elections that we wanted to cover. So we're going to kind of tick through a few of them here. First,

We'll start with Australia. Per usual, our friends in Australia bless us with some good news. Anthony Albanese from the Labor Party crushed the opposition, the very confusingly named Liberal Party, which is very conservative. So for the purposes of this conversation, just remember, Labor good, Liberal Party bad. The outcome was surprising for a few reasons. First, Albanese...

Badly lost a 2023 referendum about Aboriginal rights, which was seen as a warning sign for his administration and political standing. Then he was trailing in the polls for a long time. And then just historically speaking, it's rare for an Australian party in charge to pick up seats going into a second term. So but...

regardless of all those headwinds, like something clicked for labor and they went from holding 78 seats out of 150 in Australia's house of representatives to holding around 86 seats. They're still counting the votes. We don't know an exact number, but it was a,

clearly a, uh, improvement. We wanted to reach out to an actual Australian to get his take on what happened. So here is a clip from our friend, uh, Dan Illick. He's a climate activist. He's a comedian. He's the host of a podcast. Uh, it's called a rational fear. It's very funny and excellent. Let's listen. Coming into this election, November, December, the liberals in the coalition were riding high on a sentiment of Donald Trump. And they were looked like they were pretty much going to get in. The polls were not good for labor. Uh,

They even were copying Donald Trump's homework. They came in with very similar policies. They were going to do a Department of Government Efficiency. They were going to rip up immigration. They were going to destroy the renewable energy transition. The problem when you copy Donald Trump's homework is that he's not the smartest kid in school. And Australians, we're all compelled to vote.

And we are great at smelling bullshitters. And we know when somebody is bullshitting us. Come January, something was happening in America. Something to do with tariffs. And then everybody kind of smelled that. That was terrible. We saw the chaos that the Department of Government Efficiency was causing in America. And we were like, I don't think we want that here. And gradually, the whole of the electorate started to...

back away slowly from the coalition towards Labor and were like, hey, sorry we were looking at that other guy. Maybe there's something with stability that we actually like. Maybe there's something about our record low employment and our slowly coming down inflation that is comforting. Australians have gone, oh, we'll

You know, we don't want more uncertainty. Thanks. I think we'll just kind of stick with what we've got. And this government, the Labor government, are very good at not doing much. They are very astute governors when it comes to doing things very slowly over a long period of time. And I think given our electoral cycles, only three years, I think Australians

I want to see what else this Labor government has got. Great, great summary there from Dan. I was listening to a bunch of Australian podcasts, Ben, where I heard a bunch of analysts talk about how this wasn't –

we don't want to make this about ourselves, about America. This was not the Canadian election where, you know, voters were responding to Trump trying to annex them. But it does sound like there was a sense that Australians kind of looked at our politics and looked at some of the things that Peter Dutton was saying. And they were like, you know what? This brand and vibe sucks. And we're just like, we don't want that. And by the way, like in Canada, Peter Dutton, the right wing liberal party opposition leader, lost his own seat, a seat he had held since,

2001. So a great outcome. What were your big takeaways from this? Tommy, I just want to point out, we don't do a lot of like victory laps on this podcast about, I mean, the most important victory lap is for the Australian people, which Dan did. But like, we've been talking about this potential Trump effect for weeks now. So it's always nice to see like the news analysis piece pop up in the feed. That's what we were talking about a few weeks ago. But there's really two things that jump out to me.

that do connect to us, but obviously this is above all about Australians, but these things are not inconsistent. One is, yeah, Trump is a really unstable guy. Tariffs are destabilizing the global economy. There's weird shit going on. And that kind of helps a competent incumbent, you know? And that's what the Australians have. But the second and more interesting thing that you and Dan talked about, but that really bears kind of emphasis is

is it's not just who can stand up to Trump or who can deal with uncertainty. It's that Trump is discrediting a whole brand of politics in the kind of advanced economies of the world that these guys like Dutton and Polyev in Canada are

kind of looked Trump-lite-ish, and people don't want that. They're seeing, you know, shit. If we take a risk on that, maybe it would feel good. Maybe I don't like these technocratic labor guys. But you know what? If I vote for this right-wing guy because it might feel good to punish these people, I might end up with outcomes like what the Americans are going through, you know? And I think that is a kind of intangible problem

you know, part of global politics now. So, and this Dutton guy was a fucking right-wing asshole. You know, this wasn't just kind of some center-right guy. Like, after the Australian liberals, you know, lost the last election, they kind of had that same kind of debate about, you know, the direction of the right-wing party that we,

the Republicans had in 2012, you know, should we tack to the center or should we go further to the right? And they went much further to the right. And it is very good for Australians and for the world that that guy not only lost the national election, but he lost his seat because people start to need to get the message that we don't want this.

Yeah. And I think Australians are traditionally a little more centrist than even we are probably. Ben, last thing on this. The AP had a story about how after voting on Saturday, many Australians had what they call a democracy sausage. Have you heard about this?

No, but I saw some great, some Australian world. Those are sending me some great pics of like Australians, like voting in their bathing suits and stuff, which is awesome. Yeah, I saw that too. So the democracy sausage, um, insert Bill Clinton joke here. Um, according to the AP, it is a grilled sausage wrapped in a slice of white bread topped with onion and ketchup. I guess democracy sausage vendors camp out at polling places and sell these things to

like everywhere, including at polling places for citizens abroad. This apparently began like as bake sales in the 1920s. It evolved into the democracy sausage iteration in the 1980s as people had access to portable barbecue grills. But voting is required by law. So it happens on a Saturday in Australia, which makes total sense. It's a family affair. People bring their kids, the dog, whatever. And it'll be at like some local high school and there'll be someone with a barbecue hawking a bunch of sausages out front.

And I tweeted like, is this a real thing or is this a dumb thing that Americans talk about? Because it sounds funny. And a bunch of Australians replied to me that like, oh, no, democracy sausage is the real deal. And so maybe next election we should go and snag one. It literally sounds what bandit the dad in Bluey would do on Election Day is just like stand outside flipping a bunch of democracy sausages. So I'm fully on board with this. I kind of.

one of the, I keep in mind different quintessential worldos out there, like an Australian progressive eating a democracy sausage and voting to kind of kill the far right in Australia is like kind of our, right in the, like the core of our listenership. So congratulations to everybody.

Yeah, those are the best. All right, Ben. So now I'm going to try to lump together a couple of races that didn't go quite as well. First, there was a parliamentary election by election in the UK and in the US, we call it a special election. It was for a seat that was vacated by a Labour Party member who I believe punched a constituent.

I remember reading this listeners correct me if I'm wrong, but this dude assaulted a constituent. So they had a by election. Nigel Farage is far right reform party won that seat by six votes over a labor candidate, literally six votes in reform also did extremely well in a bunch of local elections.

crushing the Tory party in a lot of cases. So that is ominous for the trajectory of politics in the UK generally, but also for Keir Starmer and the UK Labour Party. And then things got pretty Trumpy in Romania. George Simeon is a Euroskeptic 38-year-old big Trump fan. He won about 40% of the vote and is expected to win the runoff election on May 18th.

Last year, listeners probably remember this far-right weirdo named Colleen Georgescu came out of nowhere to win the first round of the presidential election. But then Romania's constitutional court annulled the result because of alleged Russian interference. And then they banned him from running again. So in this election, Simeon actually cast his ballot with Georgescu, I think, together in solidarity. Fun facts about Simeon. He's banned from Ukraine and Moldova.

Cool. His comms director used to work for Andrew Tate. Very fun. He's against military aid for Ukraine. He's anti-vax. He wants to buddy up with Georgia Maloney once he takes power. Also, this little tidbit from the Wall Street Journal jumped out at us. Quote,

To bolster his nationalist message, he has used stage actors to impersonate people from Romania's medieval past, including Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure who was the basis for the character Dracula, which is actually pretty badass. And Romania's president has a lot of sway over military matters and foreign policy, so this could have pretty big implications for the

EU and NATO. And in the interim, Romania's prime minister has resigned because his party got smoked. So some pretty big changes in Romania. Ben, thoughts on this kind of cacophony of voting we just talked about?

Yeah, I mean, the Romanian piece is alarming, but it's been feeling like it's been building in that direction for some time. But I mean, what you don't want to see, you know, we've already seen in places like Hungary and Slovakia, like, you know, is the kind of contagion of the normalization of far right people actually, you know, not just being protest votes, but

winning, you know, and we saw this in Austria too, right? So the big European countries like Germany and France, you know, they've been kind of beating back this trend, but you're just starting to see like these small countries really matter because one, they can gum up the works in European institutions. Two, they can kind of, again, normalize this as a successful form of politics, but also to take to the UK and

Yes, we in this podcast, we want left parties to win or center left parties to win.

it's kind of scary to me that reform is overtaking Tories, right? Big time. I would rather there be like, you know, center-right parties that I don't disagree with that are not fucking crazy that can hold the line. I would rather like a Mertz in Germany is the, you know, the CDU, you know, center-right party chancellor than the AFD, the fucking Nazis, right? And that's what's scary to me about reform is that if they can become the right-wing alternative to labor,

their chance of actually winning and then having a MAGA, whatever version agenda of that in the UK is, is that much higher.

Yeah. And we're going to get to Germany in one second. Lastly, on elections, Ben, Singapore had an election. The ruling People's Action Party wanted a landslide further tightening their grip on power. Any thoughts from there on what just happened? And please don't get caned with your comments. No, I've been here. I mean, people did think that this was genuinely a good result for the ruling party.

in part because it upped the vote share from the last election, right? So they've been kind of diminishing their vote share and it went up. And frankly, when you talk to people here,

Like what you hear is that the Trump effect really did matter because Singapore's economy and I think this is quite interesting. Singapore's economy is really dependent on globalization. Right. And so tariffs are a big danger. Instability is a big danger. And there was a sense that like, hey, the ruling party, obviously, these guys have been around forever, essentially, since the founding of the country.

But they are kind of competent hands that can guide us through like the stormy period. So the Workers' Party opposition, you know, didn't make the inroads that they might have thought they would have made, say, six months ago. I will note, Tommy, that

The campaigning period in Singapore, I learned while I was here, is nine days. Oh, my God. So it is not the two-year-old. Canada was 37. I was like, dude, that sounds incredible. Well, I said, you know, somewhere between the two-year cycles we have in the U.S. and nine days is a much more rational, yeah, let's probably closer to nine. It's like a three-month period. So I will say that. But this was definitely a vote for kind of stability and familiar leadership here. Thank you.

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All right, Ben, so two stories out of Germany that we wanted to mention. The first is that earlier this morning, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany's center-right Christian Democratic Union or CDU party, suffered a shocking historic defeat in the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. Remember, in February, the CDU won the most seats in Germany's federal election. Merz and the CDU entered into these coalition talks with the Social Democratic Party or SPD. They announced a coalition agreement in early May. And so this vote today was supposed to be like a formality.

Mertz just needed a majority of the Bundestag representatives to vote for him to be chancellor. And the combined CDU-SPD coalition currently controls like 328 seats. So it seemed like a foregone conclusion. But when the first round was tallied, Mertz only got 310 votes, which is six short of the 316 he needed.

And this just shocked everybody. It shocked Mertz. It shocked the media. It shocked foreign diplomats. Angela Merkel was like in the chamber watching it all go down. I think there was a party scheduled for afterwards. And it was a secret ballot. So we don't really know what happened or who voted what way. I reached out to a Bundestag member who was part of this discussion.

government coalition and this person said that it was actually that they believe it was Mertz's own party members of his own party making life hard for him people who are pissed like they didn't get a job or That wanted to send a warning to Mertz and for some reason they just decided to vote against him But for a few hours this morning the world was left wondering if this new stable seeming German government was about to collapse on itself before it got started and

And Germany could have been forced to have new elections. And that likely would have seen the far right AFD party do even better and improve its margins. So luckily, that didn't happen. The Bundestag scheduled a second vote. Merz is now chancellor. He got 325 votes. But man, like pretty surprising, Ben, that Merz's own party would want to hobble and humiliate him before he takes power. And it really makes you wonder about the quality of his political operation if they didn't see this coming.

Yeah. I'm not a Mertz stan, right? I'm more of a social democratic flavor in German politics. But we need Mertz to succeed in some respects. Like we need him to beat back the far right AFD. We need him to help figure out how to stand up to Putin and be a part of the solution in supporting Ukraine. And this is just not good. Like it's like you can't

And beginning your tenure with a kind of unprecedented failure to kind of go through the ceremonial victory procedure is not a good sign about your capacity. To your point, like this is parliamentary democracy. It's akin to like not whipping votes right in the U.S. Congress and not knowing that you've got a problem on the horizon. So, you know, it is a question about his political operation, but also, you know,

The AFD has been raising a lot of noise, by the way, helped out by people like Marco fucking Rubio about, you know, get to that because basically the AFD is bitching about being, you know, treated as a non mainstream party. And and this will help play into their narrative. I think that there's something fishy in German politics.

that, you know, they're excluded and maybe that's why Merz couldn't get votes. So it also worries me that it kind of plays into the AFD narrative about something being wrong with German politics. Yeah. So on this AFD narrative. So last week, Germany's domestic intelligence agency designated the AFD as, quote, an extremist endeavor, which makes it easier for German intelligence to conduct surveillance on the AFD and presumably its members.

Previously, the AFD had been designated by German intelligence as a suspected extremist group. The intelligence agency that announced this decision, it's called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It's a very cool name for an intel agency. They said they did a three-year review of the AFD party and that, quote, the AFD's ethnic and

dissent-based understanding of the people, which devalues the entire population groups in Germany and violates their human dignity. That was a key driver of their decision, along with their anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views. So the AFD is the second largest political party in Germany right now. This ruling could restart a debate about whether the AFD should be banned.

though that process would take years. The designation, though, as you mentioned, Ben, of the AFD by this intel agency in Germany, it seemed to enrage the Trump administration. Marco Rubio called it tyranny in disguise. J.D. Vance tweeted something and got very mad online. I saw the German foreign ministry was tweeting back at Rubio saying this is democracy. We have learned from our history that right wing extremism needs to be stopped.

So Ben, I don't know, I feel torn on this one. Like on some level, if German intelligence thinks that the AFD is full of dangerous extremists, they should obviously say as much. There's obviously a very dark history here that they're trying to avoid repeating, but that history includes

spying on German citizens. And that part makes me uncomfortable too. Banning the AFD entirely, I think seems likely to just backlash spectacularly. And you'll see people migrate to some new party that is also extremists. And I just like, I think you have to beat these people at the ballot box. But what did you make of this move within Germany and then the Trump world's completely over the top seeming response?

I think that my like I'm I'm more sympathetic to what the German government is doing here than I even probably would have been like a few months ago because of what we're living. January 5th. Well, yeah, because in part, though, Tommy, I as you know, as an effort to kind of understand the worst versions of where things can go. I've been reading a lot about how the Nazi party came into power.

Me too. What are you reading? I just finished a book called The Meaning of Hitler, which is like, you know, about essentially by Sebastian Hafner, which is try to understand him. Sebastian Hafner also wrote a great book called Defying Hitler that was contemporaneous and it was about being an individual and watching the country getting taken over. And I read The Rise of the Third Reich, which is about how did Hitler come to power.

That's the mother tome, right? I'm reading The Wages of Destruction, which is the making and breaking of the Nazi economy. It's from 2008, Adam Tooze, who's an economist that gets into all the economic forces that led to the rise of the Nazi party. It's really interesting because it really just narrows in on, you know, not just like the inflation piece of it, but all the underpinnings of the Nazi ideology and how it allowed for such extremism.

Well, and it was a convergence of some familiar things. I mean, not to turn this, but like it was a mixture of like a very extreme ideology with, you know, deep, deep anti-Semitism as a part of it. And a kind of stab in the back narrative about World War I. But also the familiarity is, you know, hey, there's high inflation. People are angry. You know, they're moving to the extreme right or the extreme left. There's polarization. There's a capitulation by like institutions and by industrialists.

to the Nazis. Point being, and the reason this is relevant is like, it should be the case that fucking Germany has some pretty extreme guardrails against the far right coming back to power. That should happen. I support that, you know, in a way that I probably wouldn't think it was the right thing in, you know, another...

country that doesn't have that history. They should go the extra mile to keep these people out. And the reality is some of these people are extremists in the AFD. There was like a coup attempt in Germany. Remember? That was foiled like just a matter of years ago. By AFD people. And I'm not saying that's everybody in the AFD, but those people are in the AFD. And if they're seeing that, they should fucking deal with it.

And we should start to take this as a threat that it is like, this is not about like people I disagree with on policy winning elections in certain countries. It's about literal like Nazi descendants. And I don't mean like ethnically descendants, but ideological descendants of Nazism in places like Germany. And the fact that the U S government that does not comment on the Marco Rubio does not comment on small D democratic issues in a lot of places, right? It,

All the oppressed people around the world, right? Obviously, Gaza is the most extreme instance of this. There are people being repressed in many different countries around the world. And the fact that they choose to speak out about the ethno-nationalist far right in fucking Germany is terrifying to me.

And it should be Americans should be furious about this. Like people's grandparents fought the fucking Nazis on the fucking beaches. And we now have people and who's secretary of state and vice president United States who are trying to defend them in Germany. Like what is going on here, people?

Sorry to rant there a little bit, but how can this not? And one more thing. We hear about anti-Semitism all the time. Some college kid chants like river to the sea and we're going to deport people in this country. These are the anti-Semites that you need to worry about, the far right people.

Some scary ones. Do you think there was like a German, Salina Zito, in like 1932 saying we should take Hitler seriously, but not literally? Yes. Yeah. Talking about all the angry, you know, economically disadvantaged Bavarian farmers. The Bavarians are mad about the price of eggs, you know. And guess what? The Bavarians were mad about the price of eggs, but it doesn't mean that that was like, okay.

Yeah, because they were wheel bearing around cash to try to pay for them. Well, we're going to watch this one. Yeah, it is very weird. Like J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio. These guys are like primarily animated by this defense of the AFT, which, again, we talked about the AFT a bunch on the show.

But, you know, Marine Le Pen, like the far right in France, thought the AFD was too extreme. Like this is not this is not an edge case. You know what I mean? This is not like CPAC. These are like scary Nazi people. This is not Pierre Palliev or Dutton in Australia. These are the extreme right people in Germany. Yeah.

All right. So, Ben, two more quick things. Last week, we covered the terror attack in India-controlled Kashmir and how it has dramatically ratcheted up tensions between India and Pakistan. If you want to go deeper on that topic, check out last week's show. But shortly before we started recording, India's armed forces released a statement saying they had launched a military response to this terror attack.

This is from the Indian government statement, quote, a little while ago, the Indian armed forces launched Operation Sindur, hitting terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir from where terrorist attacks against India have been planned and directed. Altogether, nine sites have been targeted. The statement says no Pakistani military facilities were targeted and that, quote, India has demonstrated hostility.

considerable restraint in the selection of targets and method of execution. Hard to confirm if that's true with the limited information we have available. A military spokesman in Pakistan said, quote,

Pakistan will respond to this at a time and place of its own choosing. This heinous provocation will not go unanswered. So now I guess we all sit and kind of wait. Hopefully the escalation here will be measured in like adjectives in press statements and not like, you know, volume of ballistic missile strikes, but serious stuff. One to watch like top of the list of World War Three watch at the moment. Yeah. Surging to the top of the list. I mean, I, I, I, I,

I would note that the Indians in their statement kind of said, justice is served. They were clearly trying to- Yeah, they're trying to close the book. They're trying to close the books. Like, you know, we got attacked. Now we just bond a bunch of stuff and it's over. Now the ball's in Pakistan's court, unfortunately, in the sense that, you know, if they do something in response and India... So you just have to manage this risk of escalation. You just have to hope that...

reasons it's so dangerous if one thing goes wrong, right? Like if one target ends up being something that is more consequential than is intended, if a plane is shot down, you know, this could ratchet up and they're nuclear armed powers. So this is not a surprise, but it needs to be managed. And I just don't think there are many external forces that are kind of doing enough to urge de-escalation. I mean, that's, I'm sure what everybody's saying, but

I mean, it's really up to the Indians and Pakistanis to just climb down from this precipice.

Yeah. And as we talked about at the top, diplomatic work like this requires effort and creativity and a lot of thought and, you know, a staff that's capable of executing. And I just don't know that Trump has that right now. You mentioned on last week's show that in a previous instance of the escalation between India and Pakistan, there are times when the Pakistanis will like fire a missile at nothing into the woods and be like, yeah, we killed a bunch of Indian troops. Hopefully that's the outcome here and we all can just

chill out, but we'll see. And then finally, Ben, the Papal Conclave is going to start on Wednesday, May 7th. So the day this episode comes out, I'm not Catholic. You're not Catholic. I don't know shit about the church. I don't know shit about most of the cardinals who are running to be the next Pope, but people are betting on it. So here's what the smart money is telling us. So Polly Market has odds for the top four candidates sort of as of this recording. And

So the first one is Pietro Parolin, 26% likelihood of becoming the Pope. He's seen as a compromise candidate. He's the current Vatican Secretary of State. That's my guy. That's your guy? That I met with when I went there to normalize relations with the US and Cuba. I spent like a couple hours with that guy. Great guy. Oh, fuck. Great guy. So the New York Times called him a quiet, plotting Italian who was deeply cautious. Does that jive with your experience? Sounds like a good time. Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe that's what he was doing. I mean, actually, the funny thing, Tommy, is that we went and the Cubans met with him first. He was the secretary of state of the Vatican, right? So essentially, they're a foreign minister type. And so they know they're hosting the meeting, but they don't know how much progress we and the Cubans have made.

And the Cubans go in first because he wants to meet one at a time with us before meeting together. And when the Cubans come out and we go in, he's kind of shocked because we're going to normalize relations. He didn't know all this. Oh, yeah. It's like a real deal. Yeah. And he's like, are you really – you guys are normalizing relations? He had to confirm it with me that this was really happening. I was like, yeah. And he kind of goes through the list of things. We're going to exchange prisoners. And he looks at me and he goes –

"Who are you?" And then he goes, "Does John Kerry know about this?" It was kinda like, "Who are you, young man?" - Like Pietro, it's me. - Yeah, hey, you know. - Oh, that's a great story. Well, maybe he owes you, do you a favor, you know? Send you some specially blessed holy water or something?

You can get that at the Vatican, by the way. You can get some holy water. We'll talk some business opportunities. Okay, so we got Luis Antonio Tagla at 22%. He's from the Philippines. He'd be the first Asian pope. He's viewed as a liberal for a cardinal, kind of more in the Pope Francis mold. Time calls him a cardinal influencer with an active presence and dedicated following on social media. So question has been, can he bypass the MSM gatekeepers and TikTok his way into eternity? I think we're going to find out.

Then we got Matteo Zuppi at 10% odds, seen as a continuity candidate. The Italian progressive is known for his work with the poor and with migrants. He's also the Vatican's envoy for Ukraine. Sky News referred to him as a street priest, which I'm going to choose to believe means he's first in line for every Supreme drop, but we'll see. And then we got Pierre Battista Pizzabala, which is

- God, great names. - Amazing, 10%. - Great names. - Yeah, so Pizza Bala's service is in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Cyprus.

His time away from the Middle East and from the Vatican and his relative youth seems to have diminished his chances, but he's fluent in Hebrew, which is pretty cool. He's got by far the best name of all the dudes we've mentioned, but are Catholics ready to elect a Jewish priest? We don't know. Actually, he's not Jewish. I'm just kidding. But, you know, it's cool that he speaks Hebrew. It's cool that he's living in Israel. It actually seems like maybe there'd be some continuity there of giving a shit about Gaza. That'd be great. So, Ben, per The Economist, Roman banking houses were taking bets

on the popes as far back as 1503. The Vatican, as the conclave starts, will reportedly cut off phone signals in the Vatican City. They'll use signal jammers around the Sistine Chapel to prevent the news from leaking. The last two conclaves lasted about two days. Are you going to put some money on this bad boy?

I mean, I guess I'm going to go with my guy, Cardinal Parolin, just because he's like the only one I've, you know, would have been in the same room with. I will say, Tom, you know what's funny to me? Is there's that running joke on like Twitter that, you know, everybody's, you know, something will happen and everybody's a pandemic expert. And then in this one, like, because a bunch of people saw the movie Conclave, like they think they really know the inner workings of the Vatican, you know? And I would just say, yeah.

You know, that's a little context in color, but like we don't know what's going on inside the freaking conclave here. God only knows. In terms of the process. God only knows. You're right, actually. God only knows. God only knows. 135 cardinals are eligible to vote, as we mentioned after Pope Francis died.

Francis elevated 108 of them. So 80% of the vote will be from cardinals who owe their jobs to Pope Francis, which makes me hopeful that we might get some sort of continuity with him. Yeah, a little progressive Pope. We want to keep the tradition of the progressive Pope here. Yeah, that would be good. 22 were selected by Benedict, five by John Paul II. Again, cardinals under 80 years old get the vote.

There's one vote on the first day, then there's up to four votes every day after. You need a two-thirds majority to elect a new pope and see that sweet, sweet white smoke. So time will tell. Yeah, we'll see. Wrapped attention. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Clayton Weimers about the state of press freedom, both in the U.S. and around the world. So stick around for that.

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UVA Darden, not business school as usual. All right, I'm very pleased to be joined by Clayton Weimers, who's the executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA. Clayton, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So we wanted to have you on to spotlight, obviously, the

grim picture for press freedom globally. It was recently World Press Freedom Day and Reporters Without Borders, which is a great organization in the U.S. is part of the broader family of organizations to protect press freedom around the world. You released your annual World Press Freedom Index and probably not surprising to people, it's not a banner year for press freedom around the world.

But I want to go through some of the factors with you about what is happening here in the United States and globally. But first, I just want to ask you, what is your takeaway about kind of the top line from this report? You described the global state of press freedom as difficult. I think, you know, that that that's probably an intended understatement to some extent. But what do you look at in terms of what the index shows about the trend line globally for press freedom?

Yeah, in a word, the trend is bad. Press freedom has been trending downward for a number of years. And in the 2025 index, which we just released, we hit a new low point. You know, people might be familiar with the color-coded map that we use where bad countries are red, good countries are green. The global average of all the countries' press freedom scores has gone into the orange zone for the first time. That's that difficult index.

indicator that you mentioned. And so that's a first for as long as we've been measuring press freedom. We've been doing the index since 2002. And we're seeing a decline on all the indicators that we measure. But the one that seems to be driving the biggest pullback here is the economic indicator that we measure. And that's because, you know,

We've seen the marketplace for the news media kind of crumbling all around the world as advertising revenue shifts more towards the tech giants instead of the news media. But we're also seeing governments turn increasingly towards economic pressure as a means of controlling the press.

So we still see a lot of assassinations and arrests of journalists all over the world. But the more sophisticated, if you will, regimes are turning to economic pressure as their preferred tool for controlling the narrative. Yeah, I want to I thought this was really interesting and probably, you know, to to people that don't follow this issue closely enough.

Maybe the most interesting part of the report, right? Because people are familiar with, you know, the threats from Trump about fake news. And we'll talk globally about obviously some of the more extreme violence and risks that journals face. But just to focus on the U.S. for starters.

How do you assess the state of press freedom in the U.S.? You have us clocking in at 57th out of 180 countries, which is, you know, not exactly near the top of the rankings. The trend line has been going negative. But on this balance between economic impacts, right, you know, the kind of death of local journalism, the kind of vacuuming up of media space by social media platforms that, you know, kind of don't compensate for

the journalist who produced the original source material. How do you balance that as the difficulty versus, you know, Trump's

targeting specific media organizations or cutting off funding for VOA or Radio Free Europe? You know, how much is a Trump effect and how much is kind of the structural economic piece? Or are those connected, as you just indicated at the end of your last answer? Is Trump kind of coming in behind some of the already difficult economic circumstances for news media?

They're definitely connected. I think Trump understands this idea of using economic pressure pretty well. You look at some of the media companies that he's singled out or targeted. He's targeted CBS, which is owned by Paramount. And Paramount is trying to undergo a pretty complicated merger right now that the U.S. government has a lot of power to slow down or halt altogether. And Paramount has made it pretty clear that they would rather make a deal with Trump than

over his 60 Minutes complaints, stemming back to an interview that he alleges they doctored with Kamala Harris. They would rather make a deal with the Trump administration in order to facilitate their other business transactions than go to war over the First Amendment and the rights of the reporters who work at 60 Minutes. There's been a similar deal discussed with Disney, which would rather not be in the president's crosshairs if they can avoid it,

But that comes at the expense of the reporters doing journalism and ABC News. And obviously, Trump understands that he can put these companies into a bind here where they have to make a decision between the much more lucrative parts of their company that are making them a ton of money.

And the news media part of their company, which, let's face it, is not making a ton of money. And that's the other big factor here, which is that for the past decade, we've seen massive layoffs in the media industry, thousands of journalism jobs just gone every year. There's an estimate that every week, two local newspapers in this country close, and they're not being replaced.

And now add on top of that the added economic pressure that's also political pressure from the Trump administration when he does things like threaten the funding of public media.

He wants to cut off all the media, all the funding that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting gives to NPR and PBS. But at the end of the day, what the effect that that has is it cuts off the funding for the local independent affiliates all around the country. And it's disproportionately going to harm

media outlets that are serving rural communities, places that are already at risk of becoming news deserts or may already be news deserts. And so the impact is really going to be felt on the ground. It's not going to have a primary impact on the DC offices of NPR. Yeah. I mean, we try to talk about kind of the authoritarian playbook around the world on this podcast. And

This is familiar to me in terms of leaders weaponizing revenue to kind of further accelerate the collapse of media or using other tools to kind of try to punish or compel positive coverage.

You write that this economic fragility piece in your report is hitting is a threat to the media and 160 out of 180 countries. So that's a pretty high percentage. How much do you see what is happening here now that you just described kind of Trump coming in behind these economic pressures and

as part of a playbook that you're also seeing in other countries that are shifting towards authoritarianism? Like, how do you understand this combination of economic fragility and increasingly autocratic leadership globally as a phenomenon that is worldwide? Or do you see different countries have quite different flavors of economic fragility and authoritarianism?

The playbook is not new. We have seen this play out in several countries before, most recently in places like Hungary and Turkey, and before that in Russia on an even more extreme scale. But it's also a two-way street.

The Trump administration takes inspiration from some of these regimes, but it's also impacting the way other governments are behaving towards their press. The world takes notice when the United States government says with a loud, clear voice, we no longer defend press freedom, not here and not abroad.

I'll just give one example. In Serbia, the Ministry of Justice raided the offices of SRDA, which is the largest fact-checking organization in Serbia. And in justifying that raid, they put out a press release that says –

We know that SIRTA received a grant from USAID, and we know from Elon Musk that USAID is a criminal organization. Therefore, we have to go in and investigate money laundering because clearly they're taking money from a criminal organization. So they're not even making us work hard to connect the dots here. They're just very clearly taking the cues from the Trump administration.

Well, and you to kind of take this in the direction of some of the more violent and extreme threats to journalists and how that connects to how the U.S. does or doesn't advocate for press freedom. Obviously, one of the more extremely dangerous places to be a journalist is been in the Middle East, particularly in Gaza and the West Bank. And in addition to the Palestinian journalists who've been killed covering the conflict in Gaza, there's

We've seen in recent years, even before October 7th, a journalist like Shereen Abu-Akhla, a Palestinian journalist, killed in the West Bank after multiple investigations determined, killed by an Israeli sniper.

no accountability, really. And the U.S., under Biden, seemed to kind of not want to talk about it. And what is the risk of that? When other countries see

seeming double standards on where we speak out against threats to journalists or where we demand accountability for violence against journalists. Does that have an effect of promoting either impunity or suggesting some degree of kind of hypocrisy and when and where the U.S. chooses to raise its voice about press freedom?

Yeah, impunity is something we talk a lot about in the press freedom community. UNESCO has a statistic that something like 88% of crimes against journalists never receive any kind of justice. And the pernicious problem of impunity is that it just encourages more bad behavior if no one's being held accountable. Shereen Abu-Akhle, I think, is a prime example because not only was she

clearly killed in what was a crime against humanity. She's also an American citizen. And the U.S. government really did everything it could to sweep this issue under the rug, did not want to raise it with Israel, with Bibi Netanyahu. It really echoed a similar message

assassination of a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who was killed during the Trump administration, was a legal resident of the United States. And the Trump administration simply did not want to push the Saudis for any accountability there. These kinds of episodes send a clear message to the bad actors who would do this again, that they're not going to suffer any kind of repercussions.

And then so it's maybe not surprising, it's shocking, but not surprising that the United States also has failed to stand up for the hundreds of journalists who have been murdered in Gaza, many of whom, you know, as the RSF can document were killed while doing their jobs as journalists.

who were clearly marked as journalists or traveling in vehicles that were clearly marked as press, were wearing press vests, were holding microphones, were doing everything they could to make it clear that they were press and were targeted nonetheless. None of them have had justice for their murders.

And meanwhile, the Israeli government has continued a blockade against Gaza. International journalists can't get in and can't tell the story. How many times have we heard the Israeli government say something akin to, well, you can't trust the death toll that the Gaza health ministry puts out there because that's just a Hamas propaganda tool and they're not trustworthy.

If you really believe that, let the journalists go in and figure it out for themselves. Let independent investigators come to their own conclusions. But they haven't done that. Yeah, you don't have capacity for any international journalist to be there. But also you have this kind of

You know, the Israeli government claiming that anybody who claims to be a journalist is Hamas when, you know, as you can say, you can document. And the claims are laughable, too. I'm thinking of one in particular where after the fact they accused a journalist of having been an engineer for Hamas and they pointed to a specific project he had supposedly worked on. He would have been about eight years old at that time if he had really had. That's a pretty that's a pretty far fetched claim to be making.

Yeah. Well, it's just one other global piece that emanates from the United States, because I think it is important. You know, you obviously have the cuts to VOA, the Voice of America, and kind of international broadcasting generally. But I think people also aren't aware that, you know, USAID is,

funding reaches a lot of support for independent journalism in other countries. People may say, hey, that sounds sketchy. Why is USAID funding journalism? But as someone who's kind of worked on this, this is often money that kind of passes through other entities that are more impartial.

And is meant to train journalists, is meant to help be a lifeline in poorer countries where there's not a lot of revenue, as we talked about economic fragility for journalism. What do you see as the impact of this kind of U.S. retreat under Trump from any funding source whatsoever for Radio Free Europe or Asia, for VOA, for USAID and its journalism partners? Yeah.

It is just a massive gift to authoritarian censorship regimes like China, like Iran, like Russia, who are just giddy at the prospect of being able to come in and fill the void that's being left behind by US leadership in these spaces. I think you brought up a really good point, which is that sometimes people get a little squeamish when they hear about the US government funding media projects. And I think that's an understandable reaction.

The key to remember here is that, you know, that funding was going towards things, like you said, like safety training. I know of one program in particular in South America that was training journalists to

be safe while reporting in the Amazon on issues like illegal mining and illegal foresting, and what are the best practices for reporting out from remote areas where you don't necessarily have a connection to the outside world. That program just stopped. They didn't have the money to keep it going anymore, and they're not going to be able to start it up again, even if by some miracle the funding gets turned on again. It's just over.

A lot of funding was going to Ukraine to help their beleaguered press who are covering an extremely bloody war. So this money goes towards worthy causes. We can have a conversation about whether or not the United States needs to be funding all of these things, but simply cutting off the funding overnight through the entire field into chaos...

And like I said, has completely opened the door to, for example, the Chinese Communist Party, which has no qualms about going in and setting up outright propaganda outlets. And

One case, I know that the airwaves that VOA was once broadcasting over have now been taken over, thankfully by the BBC, which is another state broadcaster, so it could be a lot worse. But that's kind of the point here, is you can't just turn this back on.

easily once you shut it off. The world will move on. Plus, when you're talking about Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, these public interest broadcasters who are basically like public media, but for the rest of the world, their audience is not going to trust these outlets anymore because they're just going to assume, well, if it got turned back on, now this is just pro-Trump propaganda from the U.S. government.

Yeah. And people, you know, probably don't realize the reach of these entities, dozens of countries, dozens of languages, hundreds of millions of people. Now, we focus on, you know, the kind of grim outlook economically and politically.

What did you find bright spots? I mean, would you point to places where, hey, this is kind of an interesting way of responding to the economic pressures on journalism in X country or region? Or this, you know, we saw this positive trajectory in a particular country. Like, where do you see not only bright spots, but approaches that might be replicated to kind of push back against this alarming trend?

Yeah, well, once again, Norway is at the top of the list for, I believe, the eighth year running. They're actually the only country where on all five indicators they got are good ratings. So they're green across the board. You know,

We can't all be Norway, though. Norway is a very rich country that has a very strong democratic tradition and very strong legal protections. But the bottom line of what they're getting right here is that there is robust funding for independent media that is independent of any sort of political handling, which is really the key. Because you can have robustly funded state media, but that's no good for press freedom because it's just PR for the government.

You need to have money flowing to journalists to do the work independently of outside influence. The problem in a lot of countries is not necessarily that the media are under the boot of the government. They might just be overly influenced by corporate owners, or there just might be too few voices or too few outlets out there for enough pluralism to exist. And so the public is just starved of enough different points of view.

We try to take a really holistic view when we're measuring press freedom. That's why we do these five indicators. We do a lot of qualitative and quantitative data. We survey media experts in all 180 countries that we're researching. And we try to get a really, really robust picture of everything that's going on because

And traditionally, we think of press freedom as being about the arrest of a journalist, the killing of a journalist. But increasingly, the problems facing journalism are a lot more existential or systemic because there's a lot of countries where a journalist isn't being killed, but journalism is being killed. And it's being killed by things like a digital information space that is rigged against journalism because the algorithms are burying it.

Or it's being killed by a crisis of trust between the public and the news media, and so people are turning away from journalism as a source of information. By the way, these are factors that are really driving down the U.S.'s score, so it's not all Trump necessarily. It's a variety of things that are contributing to an erosion of press freedom. Yeah.

Something that's been happening in the United States for the past decade, frankly. When we started doing this in 2002, the United States was ranked 17th. Now we're at 57th. You can't blame that all on Trump. Also, it's worth noting, all of this data from the index was collected last year in 2024. So everything that's happened under Trump since he took office in January, not part of this index, which is the scary part because it could get so much worse.

Yeah, probably not. I wouldn't be betting on a huge surge for the U.S. in the rankings next year. Well, look, Clayton, thank you so much for joining us. I would encourage people to think about these issues because if journalism and press freedom does get kind of strangled in the way that we're seeing, we really will be living in a world without any prospect of shared truth, reality or accountability.

I'm actually just, you know, coincidentally, Clayton, been reading a book about Vietnam, classic, right? A bright shining lie. That kind of reminds you that if journalists didn't tell us the truth about what was happening to Vietnam, the US government sure as shit wasn't going to, right? And that could be the kind of world in which, you know, we seem to be headed. So people should...

definitely check out the World Press Freedom Index. People should support Reporters Without Borders. People should support independent journalism if you can. If you're getting news on social media,

Think about what the original source is, and if the original source is an independent journalistic news outlet or anything that can be supported, try to do so so that you're not just paying Mark Zuckerberg with your ad revenue on Instagram or your data. You're actually supporting the raw material. So I didn't mean to give a speech at the end there, Clayton, but I just want people to think about this issue and encourage it and want to thank you for the work you're doing.

Well, I appreciate it. We need more evangelists for journalism because, I mean, let's face it, without journalism, we don't have a democracy. Yeah, that's right. We really don't. We just have people who are powerful and who try to tell us what to think. All right. Thanks so much, Clayton. We will keep in touch and wish you the best. Great. Thank you, Ben. Thanks again to Clayton Weimers for joining the show. Thanks again to you, Ben, for logging in from very far away. Yeah. How long is that flight?

It is one of the longest flights in the world. It's like 16 hours. And I actually, you know, my kids were really interested in this question of like, what is the longest direct flight in the world? And New York, Singapore and LA, Singapore are in the top 10 for sure. Do you like go...

over the top? Like, how does this work? I was trying to like, like I was looking at the in-flight map, you know, and I almost kind of didn't understand where we were flying. Like, like, like it was like, like, yeah, you're definitely going like under, you know, and it depends on which way you're like turning the world, but you're going over some serious ocean there for a long time.

Yeah, I bet that always makes me a little nervous. Exactly. When you look down, when the in-flight map is just the circular earth, but it's only water, you know, Pacific Ocean is a pretty big place, you know. Yeah, you're reminded the Pacific Ocean is pretty big. Maybe you can grab onto some of that garbage patch. We floated out in the middle of it if things go bad, but you know, you never know. Anyway, fly safe. You'll be fine. Great to see you and talk soon.

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