Netanyahu Gaslights While Gaza Starves

Summary

Pod Save the World: "Netanyahu Gaslights While Gaza Starves" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: July 30, 2025

Hosts:
Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes
Produced by Crooked Media

---

Introduction

In this impactful episode of "Pod Save the World," hosts Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes delve into the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, scrutinize Israeli leadership under Benjamin Netanyahu, examine the political turmoil in Ukraine, and explore recent international diplomatic maneuvers involving Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar. The episode also highlights significant developments within the Democratic Party and addresses defamatory actions against French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron.

---

1. The Gaza Famine Crisis

Current Situation:

The episode opens with a harrowing account of the famine unfolding in Gaza. Tommy Vietor emphasizes the severity of the crisis, stating, “Gaza is starving. Children are dying” (07:00). A United Nations body, the IPC, has reported that “the worst case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” with approximately 470,000 people living in famine-like conditions.

Causes and Blockade:

Ben Rhodes discusses the roots of the famine, attributing it to Israel's total blockade of food into Gaza from March to late May. This blockade was managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli initiative that replaced over 400 UN aid distribution sites with just four hubs. The result has been catastrophic, with over 1,060 Gazans killed and 7,200 injured near these hubs since May (02:10).

Eyewitness Accounts:

Mstislav Chernov shares poignant testimonies from the ground, including that of a young boy who walked 12 kilometers for minimal aid only to be killed by Israeli forces. “He placed his hands on my face, on the side of my face, on. And he kissed me,” Chernov recounts (08:37).

International Reactions and Denialism:

Netanyahu vehemently denies the existence of a famine, proclaiming, “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza” (09:59). In contrast, former President Donald Trump has seemingly accepted the grim reality, though his administration's actions remain ambiguous (10:25).

Tommy expresses cautious hope that globally shared images of the suffering may finalmente compel international communities to act, although skepticism remains regarding the effectiveness of current measures like humanitarian pauses (10:50).

2. Political Turmoil in Ukraine

Anti-Corruption Measures:

The discussion shifts to Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has attempted to consolidate power by moving two independent anti-corruption agencies under his control. This move sparked massive protests, particularly among the youth, signaling a democratic resilience even amidst war (58:17).

Public Response and EU Relations:

Chernov highlights the powerful public pushback against Zelensky’s actions, noting that young Ukrainians, who did not directly experience the 2014 Maidan Revolution, stood firmly against perceived authoritarianism. The European Union has responded by withholding significant funding, emphasizing the critical role of these agencies in Ukraine’s EU integration efforts (59:42).

3. International Diplomacy and Trade

Ceasefire Between Thailand and Cambodia:

The hosts examine the recent ceasefire agreement between Thailand and Cambodia amid a border dispute. Although Trump has taken credit for brokering the ceasefire, Chernov and Vietor express skepticism about the administration's actual influence, suggesting that regional powers like China played a more substantial role (61:54).

Sanctions on Myanmar:

Tommy discusses the Trump administration's puzzling decision to lift sanctions on Myanmar's military junta, despite the ongoing civil war and human rights abuses. Chernov critiques this move, arguing that it undermines international efforts to stabilize the region and benefits China’s dominant role in Myanmar’s rare earth metals industry (65:05).

Trade Talks with China:

The episode also covers stalled trade negotiations between the US and China. Despite high-stakes discussions involving tariffs and rare earth materials, both parties appear intent on delaying concrete agreements. Chernov warns that Trump’s approach may inadvertently strengthen China’s leverage, especially concerning sensitive technologies and Taiwan (68:05).

4. French Political Actions

Recognition of Palestine:

French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France will formally recognize Palestine as a state in September, becoming the first G7 country to do so. Chernov views this as a symbolic but crucial step in the face of Israel’s potential annexation of Palestinian territories (47:08).

Defamation Lawsuit Against Candace Owens:

The conversation shifts to Candace Owens, a right-wing podcaster accused of spreading defamatory claims that Brigitte Macron is a man. In response, Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte have filed a lawsuit in the United States for “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” (77:00). Chernov condemns Owens’ rhetoric, emphasizing the harmful impact of such conspiracy theories (78:17).

5. Democratic Party's Response

Senatorial Actions:

The episode highlights a shift within the Democratic Party, with 21 Democratic senators urging Marco Rubio to stop funding the GHF and 44 Senate Democrats calling for increased aid to Gaza. Independent Senator Angus King declared, “I cannot defend the indefensible Israel's actions” and vowed to oppose US support until Israeli policies change (26:05, 34:06).

Public Sentiment and Approval Ratings:

Polling director Harry Anton notes a dramatic decline in US approval ratings for Netanyahu, particularly among younger voters. Vietor underscores the disconnect between shifting voter sentiments and the Democratic Party’s lagging response, urging for more decisive actions to align party policies with public opinion (34:06).

6. Interview with Mstislav Chernov

Film Insights:

Mstislav Chernov, Ukrainian director of "2000 Meters to Andriivka," discusses the realities of modern warfare and Ukraine’s counteroffensive. He highlights the personal sacrifices of Ukrainian soldiers and the transformative power of immersive filmmaking in conveying the human toll of war (85:31).

Democracy Amidst War:

Chernov praises Ukraine’s democratic resilience, exemplified by young people's protests against governmental overreach. He emphasizes that even in wartime, Ukraine maintains strong democratic institutions and civil society engagement, contrasting sharply with narratives of emerging authoritarianism (97:24).

Technological Warfare:

The interview delves into the evolution of warfare with the integration of AI and robotics, which have changed battlefield dynamics and heightened the dangers faced by soldiers. Chernov expresses concerns about the ethical implications and the future of military engagements (108:18).

---

Conclusion

The episode "Netanyahu Gaslights While Gaza Starves" offers a comprehensive and emotionally charged exploration of multiple international crises. From the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and political disruptions in Ukraine to questionable diplomatic moves by global leaders, hosts Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes provide critical insights and firsthand accounts. Through interviews like that with Mstislav Chernov, the podcast underscores the profound human impacts of geopolitical conflicts and the urgent need for informed and compassionate international responses.

Additionally, the episode underscores the importance of aligning political actions with public sentiment, especially within influential parties like the Democrats, to effectively address and mitigate ongoing global crises.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Tommy Vietor:
  “Gaza is starving. Children are dying.” (07:00)

• Mstislav Chernov:
  “He kissed me. And he said thank you in English, thank you.” (08:58)

• Netanyahu (Clip):
  “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza.” (09:59)

• Angus King:
  “I cannot defend the indefensible Israel's actions... I will advocate and vote for an end to any US Support whatsoever unless... there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy.” (Anonymous Timestamp)

• Tommy Vietor:
  “People know that BB Netanyahu is a bad actor. He's not a good partner.” (28:29)

• Mstislav Chernov:
  “It was an extraordinary example of direct democracy, the best kind of democracy that could be in the world.” (59:43)

• Ben Rhodes:
  “The Prime Minister could be gone tomorrow. It's not going to go back. It isn't going to move to the right.” (Ch. on Democracy in Ukraine)

---

Note: Timestamps are indicated in brackets and correspond to the transcript segments provided.

Transcript

[Tommy Vitor]

POD Save the World is brought to you by American Giant. John, you heard about these tariffs? Oh, have I ever. Prices are going up and up and then we got a crazy man in charge of this country so we never know when it's going to end. Where can I get some clothes that are actually affordable? American Giant, because you know what? Globalized fast fashion. They've complicated the clothing production by sourcing inexpensive component parts all around the world and asking whoever can assemble them the cheapest. Consequently, customers are now facing increased prices. American Giant is about keeping things simple, keeping things close to home. They are not affected by tariffs because their products never left the US Of A. Buying from American Giant supports American manufacturers. I got some great American Giant stuff. I got a super comfortable sweatshirt that's kind of their like OG product. And their T shirts are super comfy. T shirts are great. The sweatpants are great. Don't sleep on the sweatpants. Everything's just nice and well done and like, you know, I've probably washed it 20 times now and it's held up perfectly. It's not like that fast fashion crap that just disintegrates in the washing machine. Maybe these tariffs are a good idea after all.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Coming to a Trump ad near you, mega corporations obsessed with growth are churning out cheap apparel from poor quality materials. Choosing American Giant means taking a stand for hard working people, local communities and quality clothes through American ingenuity and innovation. They went against the current to do better. They believe in a new kind of conscious buying because small changes can add up to something big. And it all started with the greatest hoodie ever made. Then came jeans, T shirts and much, much more. Support American made terror Free clothing at American Giant. Get 20% off your first order when you use promo code [e-mail]. that's 20% off when you use code world@american diant.com. welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

[Mstislav Chernov]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Welcome back to America, Ben. How you feeling?

[Mstislav Chernov]

You know, Pacific time. I'm on Pacific time. I fought a heroic battle to return myself to Pacific time. Just involves staying up late, but it's such a welcoming place to come home to. Tommy.

[Tommy Vitor]

America.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Everything's good here, right?

[Mstislav Chernov]

Everything's great. It's just so nice to come to someplace where there are no problems, there's no anxiety.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, Exceptionalism.

[Mstislav Chernov]

People get along with one another.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's like the late 90s again.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, it's great.

[Tommy Vitor]

We're riding high.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, it's a nation.

[Tommy Vitor]

Okay. We have a horrifying show for you today, mostly because of Gaza. We're going to talk about the famine that's happening as we speak in Gaza, how we got to this point, how Donald Trump, Bibi Netanyahu, the world is reacting, the French are reacting. And we're also going to get into how we hope Democrats might respond in this moment. We'll also talk about a political crisis within Ukraine over a corruption investigation. Very interesting story. Whether Trump deserves credit for brokering a tentative ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia, why the Trump administration lifted sanctions on a bunch of really creepy kind of human rights violating junta general adjacent guys in Myanmar. Not good. It's very interesting to hear you talk about that one, Ben. And then update on the trade talks with China and how sort of spilling out some taco ing, some preemptive tacoing to the Chinese happening by the White House. We'll also talk about why French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have filed a lawsuit against a far right kind of crazy podcaster in the United States. And then, Ben, you'll hear my interview with Mstislav Chernov. He's a Ukrainian director, writer, producer. He just released the new documentary 2000 Meters to Andriivka. So we talked about that. I've interviewed him in the past. He's an unbelievably brave director. This film is extraordinary. I mean, he's literally in foxholes, in trenches with Ukrainian troops on the front lines as they are trying to capture this small village back in 2023 during the vaunted Ukrainian counter offensive.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, I think that sometimes we, you know, are understandably focused on Gaza, Trump, all these things, and we focus on the politics of the war in Ukraine, but we kind of lose sight of what's happening on the front lines, what the Ukrainian people are going through. So I'm so glad that not only do you have that conversation, but people should check out the doc too.

[Tommy Vitor]

And just the humanity of the people involved in the fighting because we talked about this in the interview. It's really weird how every day you log onto Twitter and you see another video of an FPV drone killing either a Ukrainian soldier or a Russian. And so in a sense, we are more inundated with, with like first person views of the horrors of this war. But we are more divorced from the reality and the humanity of it than ever before. And Mstislav literally is like side by side with these guys as they are crawling through mud and in trenches and like looking for these drones, hoping that they're not gonna just, you know, kamikaze them. But he really like centers these people and just the courage, but also just how normal they were. Like farmers, students.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, just guys, you know, defending their country.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. So a really incredible film, 2000 meters to him, Drivka. It's in theaters now. Highly recommend seeing it. Also for our Friends of the POD subscribers, we're going to be answering some questions pulled from the pod Save the world discord at the end of the show. So those of you who are Friends of the POD and get that feed, stick around for that. All right, Beth, so let's start with the situation in Gaza because images that have been coming out in the last week or so of starving children have led to global outrage and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully an inflection point where the international community will come together and say, enough, you know, get aid in, but also, let's just end this war. And just to put it bluntly, Gaza is starving. Children are dying. On Tuesday, a U.N. body called the IPC said, quote, the worst case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease are driving a rise in hunger related deaths. Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City. The World Food Program says that one third of the population in Gaza Gaza is not eating for days on end and roughly 470,000 people are living in famine like conditions. And I think, Ben, what listeners have to understand about this is that there's not an on and off switch for a famine. You can't just give a starving baby, for example, food and then they'll be okay. It requires a long, careful refeeding process. You can overload their systems if you feed them too fast and kill them. And malnutrition also means you're more likely to get sick or you won't heal from an injury or you can have stunted growth or cognitive problems. So that this is, this disaster is going to spill out over years. And aid workers are talking about, you know, they're seeing Israeli forces throwing about baby formula when screening volunteer possessions on the way into Gaza, even though the Israelis claim that they send in 2,500 tons of infant formula. Doctors are also reporting, you know, shortages of IV drips used to treat malnutrition. There's stories of medical professionals being too weak to, to treat people because they're starving too. So it's just, it's horrific. And just to quickly backtrack on how we got here, I mean, you know, Israel initiated a total blockade of food into Gaza between March and late May. Then they put in place this new US Israeli founded and run organization called the Gaza Humanitarian foundation, or ghf. And they put that in charge of food distribution. Every expert predicted it would be a disaster, and it has been. The GHF replaced roughly 400 UN aid distribution sites with four total hubs and, and then forced Palestinians to walk miles through active war zones to get food. Since the end Of May, over 1,060 Gazans have been killed and 7,200 injured near these GHF hubs. And you know, there's been a lot of reporting about atrocities by the IDF or shooting at civilians, horrible stampedes and crowds. And there's been a lot of denialism of those reports and stories. Here are two excerpts from interviews with a former member of US Special Forces turned GHF whistleblower. His name is Anthony Aguilar. It's about his experience staffing one of these sites. The first portion is from a BBC interview. The second part is from an interview with an Israeli expat group called Unacceptable. I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians. In my entire career, have I never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population? Without question, eyewitnessed war crimes.

[Mstislav Chernov]

This little boy from where he came.

[Tommy Vitor]

From walked 12 km to get there, just to get there. 12 km. Look at this boy.

[Mstislav Chernov]

And when he got there, he thanked.

[Tommy Vitor]

Us for the remnants and the small crumbs that he got. And he sets them down on the ground because I was kneeling at this point. And he sets his food down and.

[Mstislav Chernov]

He places his hands on my face, on the side of my face, on.

[Tommy Vitor]

My cheeks, these frail, skeleton, emaciated hands dirty. And he puts them on my face. And he kissed me.

[Mstislav Chernov]

He kissed me. And he said thank you in English, thank you.

[Tommy Vitor]

And he collected his items and he walked back to the group. And then he was shot at with pepper spray and tear gas and stun grenades and bullets shot at his feet in the air.

[Mstislav Chernov]

And he runs away scared.

[Tommy Vitor]

And the IDF were, were shooting at the crowd. So they're shooting to control the population that's along the Morocco corridor. And as they're doing that, they're shooting into this crowd, shooting into this crowd. And Palestinians, civilians, human beings are dropping to the ground, getting shot. And Amir was one of them. Amir walked 12km to get food, got nothing but scraps. Thanked us for it and died. So Netanyahu's response to all this has been, don't believe your lying eyes. Trump, however, doesn't really seem to be buying it.

[Ben Rhodes]

Ben.

[Tommy Vitor]

Here's a clip from Netanyahu Sunday and then Trump on Monday. There is no policy of starvation in.

[Ben Rhodes]

Gaza and there is no starvation in Gaza. We enable humanitarian throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza. Otherwise there would be no Gazans.

[Mstislav Chernov]

We can save a lot of people. I mean, some of those kids are. That's real starvation stuff.

[Tommy Vitor]

I see it. And you can't fake that.

[Mstislav Chernov]

So we're going to be even more involved.

[Tommy Vitor]

Okay. So, Ben, sorry for the long wind up there. This war has been raging for two years. Last week, honestly, it kind of felt like it was endless and maybe would go on forever. This week I'm trying to be a little more hopeful. I'm wondering if we've reached a tipping point and that what people are just seeing that what's happening is evil and just has to be stopped. But I don't know, is that naive? How are you feeling about it?

[Mstislav Chernov]

I feel the same way that you do. I do think it's useful and important that you did the accounting you did, because you and I both have engaged with people involved in this denialism, and we'll have time to discuss that more today, including with the Democrats. But, you know, even if you just listen to this podcast, in addition to the details you laid out about the policy of starvation, it is a policy of the Israeli government to deny food into Gaza. That's a policy of starvation. There are two other points I want to add to this because it kind of anticipates the debate we're having now. The first is how much aid experts warn about these things. We had the head of UNRWA in Gaza, that's the UN agency that did the aid distribution on this podcast, and he said on this podcast that if you make UNRWA illegal, if you cut UNRWA out of the distribution system, which Israel was doing, they're passing laws to the Knesset. It was a policy choice by Israel to eliminate unrwa, that no one else is going to be able to fill this space. And that's exactly what happened. They dismantled UNWRA's capacity to deliver aid. They cut off aid getting in, no aid got in. And you got this horrific Potemkin Gaza humanitarian foundation that everybody warned about, too. So it's not like nobody saw this coming. People were telling us in real time that this was going to happen, and now it's happening. The famine has been unfolding. The same people now who are doing denialism were the kind of people used to say, oh, I keep hearing there's gonna be a famine, you know?

[Ben Rhodes]

Right.

[Mstislav Chernov]

And they were denying that. People were getting more and more desperate for food. And now, lo and behold, people are starving to death. The other thing is we are watching war crimes before our eyes. And guess what? If when Bibi Netanyahu is indicted for war crimes, the reaction of the US Government, and at the time it was the Biden administration, is to attack the ICC and to defend the person who committed the war crimes, that person is gonna think he can act with impunity. And one of the things that is so frustrating is Bibi Netanyahu is literally saying not only is there no policy of starvation, there is no starvation. And I've seen the most cynical things I've ever seen in my life ever, about how, like, maybe this child that you see starving, death has some other disorder, he has diabetes. It's fake news, blah, blah, blah. And so it's all these habits of disinformation and misinformation and lying that we've seen in politics over the last 15 years that have been normalized, that are on display, trying to obfuscate around this now. The reason I'm hopeful is it felt like the last week a bit like when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out in Iraq. Like, by that time, most people who paid careful attention knew shit, this was a really bad idea to read Iraq.

[Tommy Vitor]

That shocked the conscience.

[Mstislav Chernov]

But, yeah, all of a sudden, people, normies who didn't follow this stuff closely were like, what the fuck is going on over there in ira? And not unlike the Tet offensive in Vietnam, too. This feels like one of those moments when people that weren't paying attention or only kind of paying attention, or people who are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the gaslighters all of a sudden are like, wait a second, there's kids starving to death. And I do think that that is something that hopefully it changes the dynamic right now. It has not yet, because air drops are not an answer to this question. But I think it will change the dynamic about the situation in Gaza, about the Israeli government, about the. The morality of supporting the Israeli government going forward. So it does feel like something has changed with these images. And some of that is more and more people speaking out. We can engage the debate you did about whether we should welcome those people out. Of course we should welcome.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, let's get to that.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

But no, I Mean, just on your point about the getting away from the UN to the ghf, I mean, Israel's justification for setting up the GHF is they. They accused Hamas of siphoning off aid. Israel also has like, long standing grievances with unra, the organization at the UN that was distributing aid, including a totally legitimate outrage that there were some UNRWA employees that may have participated in October 7th. But that doesn't justify getting rid of like, cutting off the organization right in their expertise and their ability to distribute aid in Gaza. And also over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the Israeli military never actually had proof of Hamas systematically siphoning off aid from like the, from the UN system. There was, and this was like, sourced to Israeli officials. There were of course, examples of Hamas stealing food, reselling it at massive markups. That's a legitimate problem. But like, moving to this GHF system led to famine, not blowback against Hamas or weakening of Hamas.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, one important thing about UNRA too, because there was this huge effort to kind of really push this narrative that there were these Hamas operatives in UNRWA or these people that had participated in somewhere in October 7th who worked for UNWRA. There are 30,000 people that work for UNWRA because it's everything. It's not just the aid distribution, it's the health and education system in Gaza. So 30,000 people. And because there's a handful of people that may have questionable ties, Israel acts like all 30,000 of those people are Hamas. All of UNRWA's Hamas. Which is not true. The reason that's important is it's both the mechanism, the excuse they use to shut down the aid distribution. It's also the same mentality they use to all Palestinians in Gaza because there's some Hamas people here. They're all Hamas. That kid who walked 12 km and thanked the guy, we're gonna treat him like Hamas. Right? And this is outrageous. And it's not excusable, just cuz, you know, you pointed Hamas for Hamas. There's no war in Gaza happening right now. There's no, like, armies of Hamas fighting back against Israel.

[Tommy Vitor]

No, it's mostly the idf, like detonating, like, leftover IDF shells that Hamas used to detonate buildings. That's why they're leveling so many structures. It's like a lot of that.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah. And we should say, like, you'll see these announcements. Okay, we're gonna resume airdrops. Airdrops. We've also covered this on the podcast. An incredibly inefficient way of delivering aid. You could just driving a few trucks into Gaza would be than airdropping aid. It can be dangerous. Aid can drop on people. It's not an efficient or humane way to deliver assistance. So you're seeing these band aids being put on a problem. But as you said, famine cascades. You know, it's not just getting in some aid, it's you need to get everything in and set up healthcare infrastructure or else thousands and thousands of people are gonna die.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And so, you know, we've seen Israel kind of blame Hamas for the famine. They've also blamed the UN for it. They've sort of like taken journalists to look at pallets of food and they've accused the UN of negligence and failing to get it distributed. But again, the routes to distribute, to get aid into Gaza are assigned by the idf. They're often impassable for trucks. You have to go through crowds or unsafe areas. The military. The IDF has also turned down more than half of the UN's movement requests over the last three months. And these requests can take like 46 hours, up to 46 hours to be approved. And then a lot of the trucks that get in get overrun by crowds because there's no security. So I guess like to all the people that want to blame Hamas or blame the UN, I would just say like it's been 660 days of this war, right? Like Israel, they had an obligation to get a handle on how they were going to feed this population. They just could not let them starve to death. And like it's just, they failed. It's either negligence or on purpose. I don't care. Like the impact is the same. Like people are. Kids are starving to death.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah. I mean they've been warned repeatedly about this. Everybody, you know, put aside unwra, like the irc, the International Rescue Committee, that Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, you know, anybody in the UN system who works in aid has been warning that this was going to happen. If you maintain these siege like conditions around Gaza, and not only did they maintain them after March, they actually made it worse. They cut off more things. They slowed the aid getting in even more. Well, they stopped it. The other thing is, cuz I saw that basically the response of the Israeli government and their allies like AIPAC in the United States was to blame Hamas and to blame the un. The UN was a new one for me, that somehow the UN is refusing to deliver aid when in fact they've crippled the ability the UN to do it through Unwra. But put aside how wrong it is factually, because it is factually wrong. Your reaction to children starving to death is to figure out a narrative of spin else to blame. When you're spinning a genocide, when you're spinning starving kids to death, like you're in the wrong space. You know, like your reaction should be, maybe you have a different way of getting nade in. You know, maybe there's another. It shouldn't be, hey, people are really telling on themselves when they're showing pictures of UN trucks and saying, Ah, see, ha ha, it's the UN's fault. Or when they're again trying to figure out that, you know, whether some kid who died of starvation had some other condition. Right. That is what I think. People who have not been paying attention, who are now paying attention, they're also seeing that spin and they're like, whoa, wait a second. That might have worked like a year ago, but that's not working anymore.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, why don't you get the truck in? So we reached out to two voices, one in Gaza, one who had just been in Gaza, to just sort of get more testimonials from the ground. The first was a nutritionist in Gaza named Rana Soba. She is Medglobal's lead nutritionist in Gaza.

[Mstislav Chernov]

And.

[Tommy Vitor]

And this is what she told us about what she's seeing on the ground.

[Mstislav Chernov]

What we are witnessing today is beyond imaginations. Children are so exhausting that they can no longer cry or express their feelings. They are simply drained. Mother come to us carrying their children, desperately seeking treatments or any kind of nutrition supplies, but sadly, we have none to offer. In addition, the medical staff themselves are now completely exhausting and struggling to continue providing care. Due to fatigue and overwhelming pressure, many children have progressed to severe acute malnutrition with complications. The symptoms have become more severe and evident, including extreme fatigue, exhausting skin rash, and edema. We are seeing children whose bodies resemble skeletons, severely wasted, with extremely loose of weight and muscle mass, unable to move or respond. Some of them are too weak even to cry. The situation is beyond descriptions and we are witnessing truth health disaster.

[Tommy Vitor]

We also spoke with Sarmat Tamimi, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who was in Gaza with medical aid for Palestinians from the end of June to the end of July. He just got back last week. Here's what he told us he saw.

[Mstislav Chernov]

I've seen quite extensive injuries, both related to the bombing on the tents as well as firing on the people seeking aid at GHF 8 points. The kind of injuries that I was seeing was multiple musculoskeletal injuries involving the limbs. I was seeing burn patients related to bombing over the tents, especially the, the children and women who live in the tents. It was very common place to see patients with more than 10, 15, up to 40, 50% of burns in that area. I've seen people with severely malnutrition, ranging from the staff to the general public. I was in Gaza six months back and I was seeing the same staff members that I've worked with them before who are half the weight that they used to be.

[Tommy Vitor]

So that's the situation on the ground. So what's so enraging about this, Ben, is you have all this denialism spin, there is no famine in Gaza. And then you have action by the Israelis government, right? They're now implementing what are called humanitarian pauses, basically like mini ceasefires in three parts of Gaza between 10am and 8pm to facilitate aid. The IDF is also supposed to provide secure routes for convoys. And so on one level, like, sure, that is good, but it just again, goes to show that Israel is in control of aid distribution and has been all along. And the reason Netanyahu took this step or was able to take this step is because the Knesset is out of session for three months, so the right wing crazies in his coalition cannot topple his government. Remember, they only have 50 out of 120 seats in the Knesset currently because of losing some, some parties. And so. And because Netanyahu made this decision on a Saturday when some right wing members of the coalition were observing the Sabbath and couldn't block him. Right. So this gives him this kind of like temporary political reprieve, something he can tell Trump he's doing to deal with the situation. But again, like, it's so short term because long term it's bad politics. Because unfortunately, like last month there was a poll that found that 2/3 of Israelis opposed increasing aid into Gaza. You know, that was before the acute famine, but like, that kind of gives you a sense of where a lot of the Israeli public is in terms of their sympathy for people in Gaza. But also the majority of Israelis would support a negotiated truce with Hamas to get the hostages back. But what Bibi is putting in place right now enrages everyone politically because it's like essentially a short term mini ceasefires, but with no progress on the hostages. Like I was talking to Amir Tibon about this yesterday from Haaretz, and he was like, people are just incensed about how terrible this outcome is.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Well, because his reaction is always just like, what gets him through the next week?

[Tommy Vitor]

Exactly.

[Mstislav Chernov]

So he's thinking about, well, I gotta do a little bit to placate international opinion, but I gotta look over my right shoulder at the far right. I gotta keep, try to keep these images of Gaza away from the Israeli people. Like, like he's literally just, he's like Ray Liotta at the end of Goodfellas, like, you know, driving around, trying to keep nine balls in the air. And actually it's the one thing he's good at, you know. Now it shows the fact that they're doing anything to, you know, whether it's mini ceasefires or letting some dribble of aid in, shows you if there were more pressure, you know, and you talked about this well in psa, but if, if there were cutoffs of military assistance, if there were sanctions on Israeli government officials, if there were UN Security Council resolutions that weren't vetoed by the United would, we'd have a game change. You know, every time that he does get squeezed a little bit, like, he opens the door a little bit to aid, like. And so it both demonstrates that Israel's in control and it also demonstrates that there is leverage. It's just that nobody's used the leverage and we're all kind of like bystanders to Israeli politics. Oh, he's got his problems with the far right. I don't give a shit about that.

[Tommy Vitor]

I couldn't give a shit about, I.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Could give a shit about Smotrich, some genocidal maniac going on, you know, and yelling at Bibi for capitulating on Gaza and cuz what Bibi will end up doing is now there's reports he's going to allow for, you know, the beginning of the annexation of the Gaza Strip.

[Tommy Vitor]

He's going to issue an ultimatum, say like Hamas, you let the hostages go or we're going to fully annex the Gaza Strip.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, you get, we'll let, we'll let aid in if you let us annex the territory and ethnically cleanse them. Like, no, no, this is all wrong. They keep moving the goalpost to explain away or rationalize that they have to do this horrible thing.

[Tommy Vitor]

And by the way, like the broader context, like the IDF is taking a lot of casualties. The casualty count is up to 898. Also, like two well known Israeli human rights organizations, Betsy Lem and Physicians for Human Rights, have now concluded that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide. Imagine the politics and how hard it is for Israeli human rights organizations, even ones that are on the Left who have been fierce Netanyahu critics. You know, that's a, that's a pretty big step. So there's just this chorus opposition. And also, Ben, there's just a big question of where Trump is on all this. As you know, as listeners know, like, I've been trying to sort of build relationships with kind of MAGA types, and I reached, I reached. Well, I reached out to a bunch of them today. In recent days, I've had two people tell me that Trump is fed up with Netanyahu. One said that Trump knows Bibi's using him to get through a political crisis over the ultra orthodox and mandatory military service being exempted from military service, and that Trump resents it. One, you know, look, they may be telling me what I want to hear, but they're both in position to know. A third person told me that he had heard through, you know, talking to folks at the White House, that Trump is very mad about the idea of shelling of a church, the only church in the Gaza Strip still. And that I think that's been reported out. There's this call with Bibi and Trump and also about just the images of starvation. However, then I was talking to somebody else who said, you know, this person had heard the same things about Trump being outraged at Netanyahu in March and April, but then, of course, Trump bombed Iran, which was the number one item on Netanyahu's wish list. So we don't know.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah. And I think that sometimes people misread Netanyahu because he looks thirsty for Trump's approval. Right. So you can think that that's kind of an end that Netanyahu seeks. He doesn't give a shit about Trump's approval. He gives a shit about being able to do whatever he wants to do and stay in power in Israel. Exactly. And so, so long as he can show that the spigot's still on the military assistance, still coming. You know, I can still show up at the White House whenever I want and get a meeting with Trump. So long as that's the case, who cares if Trump calls him in private and yells at him? Who cares if Trump. Trump didn't like him. Biden didn't like him. Obama didn't like him, Clinton didn't like him. Nobody liked this guy. But he, you know, he can say, even though they didn't like me, they all kind of kept the money and the military assistance flowing and used their veto at the security.

[Tommy Vitor]

Netanyahu overtly says that I can handle these idiots back in Washington.

[Mstislav Chernov]

What he's wink, wink in Israel is always like, I'm playing these guys. It's not like these guys sincerely love me. Right? And that's something that I think people miss. And I think the question for Trump too is that he is so short term on this thing that he doesn't realize that he came in, he got a ceasefire, he thought he'd solve the problem. When that ceasefire was literally a phase one ceasefire, like it didn't solve any problem. Everybody knew that this was gonna blow up again. It blew up again. Now he wants to get starving kids off the front page. Cuz let's face it, he does not have empathy. He just doesn't like it how it looks. Even if he does that, then what? I mean, he's the one who's planted the seeds for ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip that Israeli politicians have jumped on. So I think people need to recalibrate. And this anticipates our conversation with the Democrats, how we think about Netanyahu. Our approval of him is not what he's been seeking. What he's been seeking is his ability to stay in power and do what he wants to do.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's exactly right. He doesn't give a shit about what we think or say or want. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Rocket Money. Everybody knows there are things they can do to reduce monthly costs and improve their finances. But who has time to go through all their expenses and decide what to trim? With Rocket Money crunching the numbers for you, leveling up your money game gets way easier. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money shows you all your expenses in one place, including subscriptions you forgot about. If you see a subscription you no longer want, Rocket Money will help you cancel it. Their dashboard lays out your total financial picture, including bill due dates and paydays, in a way that's easier to digest. You can even automatically create custom budgets based on your past spending. Get alerts if your bills increase in price, if there's unusual activity on your accounts, if you're close to going over budget, even when you're doing a Good job. Rocket Money's 5 million members have saved a total of 500 million in canceled subscriptions, with members saving up to $740 a year when they use all the app's premium features. I use Rocket Money. They found a streaming service that I will not name that was like UK based that Hannah and I signed up for to watch like four episodes of something during the pandemic and we just completely forgot about it. Was charging us every month forever.

[Ben Rhodes]

That is.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's just. I have so many like that I can't even. I don't even know. Rocket Money, baby. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.comWorld Go today. That's RocketMoney.comWorld RocketMoney.comWorld It's Carl's Jr. S new queso Crunch Burger. Tortilla strips and queso on a burger. A queso creamy masterpiece. A queso queso pepper jack Cheesy queso crunchy queso Mind blowing charbroiled Queso Crunch Burger combo with fries and a frozen drink for just 9.99.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Okay, so what are you waiting for?

[Tommy Vitor]

I'm not waiting. The new Queso Crunch Burger only at Carl's Jr available for a limited time at participating restaurants. Tax not included. Okay, let's talk about the Democrats. So it does look Democrats. More Democrats are starting to wake up or at least publicly talk about how horrific the situation is. There was a 21 Democratic senators wrote a letter to Marco Rubio urging the US to stop funding the ghf and also some demands about more information about how it's being run. 44 Senate Democrats sent Rubio another letter calling for more aid into Gaza. I know I roll my eyes at a letter too, but like, you know, it's a, it's a show of public concern and opposition. Angus King, the independent senator from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, put out a statement on Monday saying, I cannot defend the indefensible Israel's actions and the conduct of the war in Gaza, especially its failure to address the unimaginable humanitarian crisis now unfolding, is an affront to human decency. I am through supporting the actions of the current Israeli government and will advocate and vote for an end to any US Support whatsoever unless, until there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy, my litmus test will be simple. No aid of any kind as long as there are starving children in Gaza due to the action or inaction of the Israeli government. Strong statement there from Angus King. So look, there's more letters, there's more statements. We're not going to go through them all because again, words without actions are bullshit. But Ben, I kind of ran through my wish list on Podse of America yesterday that I'd like to see Democrats do. Just to quickly summarize it, like cut off Military assistance to Israel. Sanction Israeli government officials who are using genocidal rhetoric or pushing for ethnic cleansing. Support a ceasefire resolution at the un Demand that the international press be allowed into the Gaza Strip. We'll talk about recognizing the Palestinian state, the United nations in a minute. And then, you know, you and I have been talking about this on the show, but like there just does have to be more of an understanding and recognition of the Democratic Party that there has been a sea change in terms of voter sentiment and the party. The elected officials need to catch up. In particular, like rank and file. People know that BB Netanyahu is a bad actor. He's not a good partner. It's not someone that they want to support or prop up politically with military support or diplomatic support. Harry Anton, the polling director at cnn, ran through some Gallup polling on on CNN the other day and found that in the U.S. netanyahu's approval rating went from plus 13 points in 2019 to 23 points underwater in July of 2025. For people under 35, Ben Netanyahu is 53 points underwater. The net approval of Israel is that.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Before, after the Nelk boys. So I'm trying to lighten things up.

[Tommy Vitor]

I'm sorry. Yeah, no, that was a game changing. By the way, I saw one of the Nelk boys did another video of himself. He's like driving his car. He said not only was the interview set up by the White House, but they gave him a list of questions.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Well, there you go. That just shows you Trump may be mad at Netanyahu, but there's still infrastructure.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, but so net approval of Israel's. The military action in Gaza has gone from plus 5 points in November 2023 to 28 points underwater. Under the age of 35, it's a negative 73 net approval. Americans who sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians have gone from plus 48 in October to just plus 5 today. So look again, the voters have moved, the politicians have not. What's your full list of like what you see, want to see Democrats doing here?

[Mstislav Chernov]

I share your list.

[Tommy Vitor]

And you and I talked about it before I went through it.

[Mstislav Chernov]

So then I'll just like focus in on it. And there's a politics piece to this and then there's a kind of basic morality and decency thing. Let's start with the politics, the opening, you know, cuz there are moral reasons and we've talked about them and I'll get back to them. But the opening here is clear. Number one, your own voters don't like this. And you're out of step with your own voters by supporting Netanyahu. And you are supporting Netanyahu just because you criticize him. If you're voting to give him military assistance, you're supporting him. But also Democrats are constantly wondering two things, right? Two questions have dominated the discourse on Democrats since the election. One is how do we reach some of the Trump people? The Trump people are raising their hand, you know, Trump adjacent people like Theo Vaughn type people, Rogan audience, Joe Rogan type people. People that aren't maga, but they're kind of like in, you know, swimming in the pools. And they go back and forth. These people are saying out loud telling us this is fucked up. We don't like this. If you want to reach new audiences, why don't you talk to them about the thing where Trump was full of shit, which is on this issue, where he said he'd end this war. The other thing is Democrats have a problem being seen as authentic, being seen as people who have authenticity, people who will fight for you. Well, if I'm a young person and I see a bunch of Democratic politicians talking about how worried they are about famine in Gaza, talking about how terrible Bibi Netanyahu is, and then they see some of those same Democratic senators literally posing for a photograph with Bibi Netanyahu like a few weeks ago when he was in Washington.

[Tommy Vitor]

Outrageous.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Puffing out their chest, then you're gonna think the whole party's full of shit, by the way. And so this is one where I can't even isolate it to those senators. And you can go look for yourself where they were. It includes some people that usually have pretty strong language about values and stuff. But. But it's not just their problem, it's all of our problem too, because they make the entire party look like we're completely full of shit. So you could be forgiven if you're Theo Von or let's say you're suddenly getting Democrat curious cuz you're disappointed in Trump cause the Epstein files cause the bombing of Iran and cause what's happening in Gaza. And then you look at Democrats and you see they're posing for photos with Bibi or they're somehow criticizing BBB and voting to shovel the military out the door. So what I think Democrats have to be for cutting off military assistance to Israel. They should be for all the things you talked about. UN Security Council resolution, sanctions on Israeli public officials who are engaged in war crimes, including talking about ethnic cleansing for, you know, how about for non Israel led investigations into the murder of American citizens, which happens regularly in the West Bank. For the ICC being able to do its work, I thought were for the rules based order. Right, right. And let's take this to the point of morality here. To end on a more serious note, I think part of what is so destabilizing for us is first and foremost what is happening to the Palestinians and to the people in Gaza. But it's also the sense of what is happening is connected to what is happening everywhere else in the world in the sense that we're living through this age of authoritarianism, we're living through an age of lies, we're living through an age of might makes right. Okay. And the incapacity to take this seriously and approach this from a moral perspective undermines your capacity to say, I'm upset about what Trump's doing with ICE, or I'm upset about the authoritarian trend in X part of the world. It is so selective to carve this out and say essentially because we can. The genocide question is an important one. I don't know what else to call it at this point. You've got Israelis calling it that. Not just those Israeli human rights organizations, but people writing for the New York Times, even if you don't want to use that word, this is a war criminal. Like Bibi Netanyahu is a war criminal. You are posing with a war criminal.

[Tommy Vitor]

Indicted by the icc.

[Mstislav Chernov]

And so to that end, to be specific, I've said this before. I don't know why you take money from aipac. I can't fathom these people at aipac, whoever their social media people are. I made the mistake of engaging the other day. You always feel a bit diminished. But Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders tweeted, criticized Netanyahu said let. They didn't. And AIPAC accused Bernie Sanders, a Jew from Brooklyn, from a family that has people who died in the Holocaust in it. They accused him of blood libel. Blood libel. And you expect me to think that that's okay? That they're big donors to the leadership of the House and Senate and the Democratic side.

[Tommy Vitor]

Can I add a little second thing to your list here of grievances with aipac? Earlier today, AIPAC tweeted to clarify that they had not made a decision not to endorse Congressman Randy Fine. Are you aware of who this individual is?

[Mstislav Chernov]

This fat ass who talks about starving kids today?

[Tommy Vitor]

This is a Republican who called for Gaza to be nuked and told Gazans to, quote, starve away. And AIPAC was like, no, no, no, no, no. We have not ruled out endorsing him. We're still open to it. So it's like when an organization tells you that they are morally bankrupt. Listen to them.

[Mstislav Chernov]

It tells you that the Jewish senator from Brooklyn who knows deeply in his bones the history of Israel and all these things is committing blood libel. But Randy, fine, we'd be open endorsing him. Don't big tent me on this one, because I just would prefer to have people in the tent that are not okay with what's happening in Gaza, you know?

[Tommy Vitor]

Well, let's talk about the tent. Cause this is what kind of got the left all mad at me over on Twitter. It's all like the kind of like, fucking Chapo wannabe people. And like, I'm talking about in this moment, I want the tent to be as big as possible.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yes.

[Tommy Vitor]

And that might involve some really strange bedflows. And look, maybe this is a completely naive hope, but what I'd love to see is the broadest coalition of people, mostly average citizens, coming together and saying, hey, we don't agree on a lot, but let's agree to end this war. And that should include members of Congress too. Like Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted yesterday an attack on Randy Fine. By the way, the guy AIPAC is defending that she attacked him for being, like, inhuman and called what was happening in Gaza a genocide. Imagine if Marjorie Taylor Greene could work with someone like Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie to force a vote on cutting off support for this war, kind of like Massie and Ro Khanna just did with the Epstein files. Maybe you would fail, but I'd love to see it happen. And then, you know, just for Democrats generally, like, I think one thing we all need to think about, or activists generally, is just think about incentive structures, right? Like, I wish politics was all about people always doing the righteous and noble thing, but it's not. It's often about incentives. And I realize that all these Democrats kind of come in late to the party and. And saying, like, I strongly condemn this without doing anything about it. That is too little, too late. It is not enough. That is meaningless. But when you think about an organization like aipac, they have figured out the incentive structure, process. They have a carrot, they have a stick, right? They will. They will quite good at it. They will help you if you're supportive of their agenda, and they will whack you if you're not, and maybe even primary you or fund a primary challenger. And we need a version of that on the left, right? Because if our only approach to People is you're either with us or if you're, if you're with us too late, fuck you anyway. Like that's not going to create an incentive structure that brings the people we need alongside. And part of that is allowing for the tent to be bigger. Like, you know, you and I have talked about this question of whether what's happening is a genocide. Early on, right, When South Africa filed the case, we talked to an expert about the legalities underneath it. Right. We've talked about how there's been genocidal rhetoric. We both said that, you know, when you're talking about starving an entire population. I do think genocide is an entirely appropriate word to use. However, I don't always use the word genocide. I've referred to it as a war often because I think there are probably a lot of people for whom hearing it called a genocide is a bridge too far for them and maybe makes me think that I'm too extreme to be part of their cause. And I want them to understand that you can oppose the war in Gaza even if you supported it a month ago or two months ago or are like a right wing Rand Paul type, like we can all come together and say, you know what, let's just make sure no more children starve to death. That is our goal.

[Mstislav Chernov]

I completely agree with that. And look, politics is about addition, not subtraction, right? And any individual should be welcome to evolve their position to choose to care about what's happening in Gaza. Cuz the goal is to try to save the lives of the people in Gaza. The goal isn't to try to win some argument you had nine months ago. As much as I would like to be, that's just not the case, I think. So on the big tent, I think we should have the biggest tent. Individuals should be welcome. And not everybody's gonna agree. Yeah, maybe they may not agree on the, you know, certainly a genocide definition. They may not agree about, you know, the future. AIPAC is a different category to me though, cuz they're an institution, they're an organization that has shown itself to be hostile.

[Tommy Vitor]

Look, hostile to democracy.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Right, exactly. Like right now, at the same time that this has reached acute emergency, you've got colleges paying penalty fees for letting kids protest. You've got ICE like had picked up somebody for writing an op ed, you know, in support of Palestinian rights. So you know, at the same AIPAC is supporting that, that kind of insidious anti democratic kind of mindset around this issue. And the only other thing I want to say about this, because it's really important, is that I think that some people get uncomfortable with guys like you and me or some of this debate because they want Israel to be the thing that they, like, love about Israel. Right. Their first time they went there, you know what it represents. And here's the. And they hate Netanyahu. And even Chuck Schumer, like, he made this speech about Netanyahu. Here's the problem. Netanyahu could be gone tomorrow. It's not going to go back. We talked about this. It isn't going to move to the right. So unless and until Israel, the government of Israel can show that it's moving away from its policies in the west bank and Gaza, you can't just kind of wish this away or blame it on Netanyahu. This is what is happening and we need to deal with it.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. This is Biden's problem. He's always talking about Golda Meir and.

[Mstislav Chernov]

It'S Golda 50 years ago.

[Tommy Vitor]

And just to be clear. Yeah. Short term, I want a big tent and I want to try to solve an acute crisis which is ending this war. Long term, if you want to primary a bunch of people who took bad positions on this war for too long, have at it. I might support you in that effort. I'm just talking about right now.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Should 2028 Democratic presidential candidates appear at AIPAC? Absolutely not.

[Tommy Vitor]

No.

[Mstislav Chernov]

And they shouldn't get a pass to do it just because it's, like, hard for them not to do it.

[Tommy Vitor]

And you and I ran around. What was that, 2019 with J Street trying to. To say that they would condition existence. Yeah. If it was used to annex the West Bank. Imagine look how far we've come from that.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Seriously.

[Tommy Vitor]

Remember Amy Klobuchar looked at us like we had two heads.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah. Pete. Pete looked like he didn't want to be there. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

And only Bernie was pumped to talk.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Bernie stood up and was fired up.

[Tommy Vitor]

It was fucking great. Well, last sort of piece on this, Ben, is just the international reaction because French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France will formally recognize Palestine as a state of the United nations in September. France is going to be the first G7 country to take the step in one of a number of European countries that have done so recently. Spain, Norway. Ireland's been there for a while. I think there's 147 countries that recognize Palestine, including Russia and China, I believe on the Security Council. On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the UK will recognize the Palestinian state in September unless the Israeli government takes Substantive steps to end the situation Gaza, agree to a ceasefire, make clear that there's not going to be annexation of the west bank and commits to a long term peace process that delivers a two state solution. It's like a long laundry list there. So 255 MPs out of the 650 in the British Parliament have signed a letter urging Starmer to take that step. So over, that's over half of labor mp. So Starmer's a little behind labor there, Ben. Obviously France saying there's a Palestinian state or they'll recognize one, that doesn't make it so, doesn't give the Palestinian people to land, land to live on. But how important do you think the step is symbolically? And what did you make of this kind of half measure by Starmer?

[Mstislav Chernov]

Look, I think it's important to just because look again, whatever your views are of the use of the word genocide, at a minimum there's discussion of ethnically cleansing Gaza, there's discussion of annexing the west bank. The Knesset is passing resolutions about annexing the West Bank. So there's an erasure happening of the, the possibility of Palestinian statehood. And Bibi himself says you'll never let that happen. So part of the reason to recognize Palestine is just to lay it on a marker like we're not gonna let that erasure happen. And I think that's a useful thing. Doesn't solve the problem, doesn't solve the question of borders or who's gonna run the Palestinian state. But I think it's reasonably important in that regard. I think the UK step was a little peculiar to me because it shouldn't be seen as like punitive to Israel to recognize a Palestinian state. It should be seen as like, hey, so you're telling me that if now first of all, I don't think Israel will meet those conditions because they're still not going to commit to some long term process leads to a Palestinian state. So he may be doing it to kind of give them one last chance and there's an inevitability of recognition. But I just don't think it should be framed as like if you were, you know, if things were slightly better in Gaza, we wouldn't be doing this now. The one other thing I want to take on is that they all say they're rewarding Hama. No, again, don't fall into the trap of painting all Palestinians as Hamas. If you're rewarding someone or you're offering hope to someone, it's the desperate people in Gaza and the West Bank. You know, it's not even Hamas. It's the aspirations of people that feel no hope right now and want to see any kind of international support for them ultimately having their own state. So I think it's the right approach, even if it's a long term one. And it's not the answer on Gaza though. I mean, UK would have more impact on Gaza, probably cutting off military aid than recognizing Palestinian state. But it matters.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, I think, by the.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Way, if it didn't matter, then Israel wouldn't get so pissed.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, I did that sort of long list of possible things that, you know, Starmer wants the Israelis to do, like throwing in, start a two state solution process in there. It's like, okay, that just seems like an easy way for the Israelis to just like make up some fake process and play for time. I totally understand the feeling that this sort of like sea change of movement in favor of a Palestinian state in the wake of October 7th feels like Hamas is being rewarded. And I hear that, and there's some emotional truth to that, and there's some factual truth to that, and I totally get it. But I think the context that's kind of missing in that shorthand is that people have been begging Netanyahu from like the very beginning to figure out kind of a day after plan, a governance plan for Gaza, a sort of peace process, set of conversations or something. An alternative to Hamas. Like something with the Palestinian Authority for Saudi Arabia. Yes, exactly. And look, we're not naive here. Like we understand that the politics of talking about a two state solution in Israel right now are impossible. No Israelis want it, not like, not even some of the most progressive ones. But there still has to be some alternative to Hamas if you want to disempower Hamas. And I think that's kind of what these moves by people in Macron are reflecting.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah. And I think that, look, part of the reason why there's been a collapse in Israeli public support for a two state solution, not just since October 7th before that too, is because people like Netanyahu like killed it for so long. And look at the end of the day, in the Obama years, like I was pretty open to, you know, before even recognition, just putting out the US plan for the borders and everything. And you would always hear from the kind of pro Israel crowd, well, you gotta hug Bibi was one thing you heard. But then the other thing you heard was, you know, this should be negotiated between the parties, not opposed on the outside at A certain point, the parties are not negotiating this thing. So if you believe it, then, you know, stand behind your beliefs. If you believe there should be a two state solution, then recognize that outcome them. Because if you just hide behind. We're going to wait for the Israeli government, who is the stronger party here? I mean, so let's save all the cards. Let's not pretend like this is some equal negotiation. If you're pretending like they're somehow going to come circle all the way back around to where Yitzhak Rabin was at the beginning of Oslo, like you're fucking crazy. So either you believe in a two state solution and you recognize it, or none of your talking points mean anything.

[Tommy Vitor]

Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do, Ben, we got some really exciting news to share, folks here at Crooked Media and Vote Safe America. We're hosting a con.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Oh, I heard about the con.

[Tommy Vitor]

Crooked Con. Crooked Con is the chance to join America's smartest organizers and least annoying politicians to strategize, debate, commiserate about where we go from here. Hopefully up. Not a lot to go.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Nowhere else to go, man.

[Tommy Vitor]

See that Wall Street Journal poll? What are we at? 45, 35%. We'll be in Washington, D.C. november 6th and 7th. It's going to be amazing. There's going to be a pod Save America Live at the Warner theater on Thursday, November 6th, then Friday. That's when Crooked Con starts. Friday, November 7th, we'll be at the wharf, joined by some of the most influential names in politics for a full day of conversations, workshops, live podcasts, and much more as we figure out how to build the biggest pro democracy movement. We need to defeat rising authoritarianism before maybe after it's too late. Ben, I'm. You know, I know we've been out to your people about hoping you're.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Oh, really? Am I invited to the con?

[Tommy Vitor]

Of course.

[Mstislav Chernov]

All right.

[Tommy Vitor]

You're my con man.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Plan the con. That's bad phrasing.

[Tommy Vitor]

Con Air.

[Mstislav Chernov]

We should Con Air charter plan.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's good for all the cons.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

No, this will be very fun. There will definitely be some world book content. There'll be lots of really smart, thoughtful people doing interesting panels about things you're going to care about. Hopefully some newsmakers. If you want more information, go to. How about this website, crookedcon.com crookedcon.com crookedcon.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Com I say it fast 10 times.

[Tommy Vitor]

That'S C-R-O-O-K-E-C-O-N.com and we have a discount code that you can use to buy your November 7th ticket early. It's freedom in content. That's it. All one word. All caps. Freedom and content. Discount tickets are limited, so act fast. Crookedcon.com pod of the world is brought to you by Smalls Breaking news. Cats don't care about breaking news. They care about dinner. If it's not our next partner, Smalls, prepare for some aggressive protests on your couch. Smalls cat food is protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients you'd find in your fridge and it's delivered right to your door. That's why cats.com named Smalls their best overall cat food. To get 60% off your first order plus free shipping, head to smalls.comworld for a limited time only. Here's a review from a real Smalls customer. Elizabeth C. Said, my cat was always so so with her usual food, but she is very enthusiastic about Smalls. Her breath is much better and she poops much less frequently. And it does not smell disgusting like it used to. That's a win. Smalls works with the Humane World for Animals. They've donated over a million dollars worth of food to help cats through the Humane World for Animals. And they even give you a chance to donate at checkout, whether you donate five bucks for flea and tick medications or seven dollars for vaccines. And now you can add other cat favorites like amazing treats and snacks to your Smallest order. After switching to smalls, 88% of cats owners reported overall health improvements. That's a big deal. The team at Smallest is so confident your cat will love their product that you can try it risk free. That means they will refund you if your cat won't eat their food. Were you guys a cat family growing up?

[Ben Rhodes]

No.

[Tommy Vitor]

We had like we had a bunch. We had three. Pansy Snooper and Mouse Pansy. Pansy, great name. Great catsy Snoopy mouse. They were outdoor cats so you know they would leave for a long time. They would leave for a while and come back and bring gifts. Anyway, love my cats. What are you waiting for? Give your cat the food they deserve. For a limited time only. Because you are a pod save the world listener, you can get 60% off your first smalls order plus free shipping when you head to smalls.com world. That's 60% off when you head to smalls.Com world plus free shipping. Again, that's smalls.com world. When's the last time you got something that was fast, reliable and affordable? Like almost never, right well, US Cellular home Internet is breaking that streak. You get fast speeds, a rock solid connection and a super sweet price, just $39.99 a month. When you bundle it with a wireless plan. That means you can stream, scroll, shop and binge without lag or crazy bills. It's not magic, just really good Internet. Check out U S Cellular Home Internet Today built for US terms apply. Visit uscellular.com for details. All right, let's turn to Ukraine. So you're going to hear a lot more about Ukraine during the interview I do with Mrs. Slab Chernov. And we should just note, Ben, that Trump has shifted his deadline for Putin to end the war from 50 days to whatever he announced that a couple of weeks back, back to 10 or 12 days now to come to some sort of peace agreement or risk getting sanctions by the U.S. or maybe tariffs or secondary sanctions. So nothing like negotiating with yourself to show Vladimir Putin how serious you are. But there is this growing political crisis within Ukraine that we wanted to dig into today. This mess stems from Zelensky moving two independent anti corruption agencies in Ukraine under his own control, or at least trying to. Ukraine's parliament passed legislation moving the National Anti Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or nabu, which investigates corruption, and another organization called the Specialized Anti Corruption Prosecutor's Office, or sapo, which prosecutes corruption under the control of the prosecutor general, which is a position that's appointed by the president. Zelensky stated reasoning for this reshuffle was that corruption investigations were taking too long. He said that there were Russian moles within the agency as there's a lot of weirdness happening around this. The legislation immediately triggered protests in Kiev and in other cities across Ukraine. You had thousands of people turning out in defiance of martial law, by the way. And just a little history to help explain some of this reaction. These agencies were established after pro Russian and incredibly corrupt former President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in the helicopter on the heels of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which was a movement that overthrew that government. And so these organizations have this history of being powerful actors to go after bad actors, corrupt politicians in the government, including some of Zelensky's allies like his former deputy prime minister and this billionaire donor to his campaign. So this move was not popular on the streets of Ukraine. And it was also harshly criticized by the European Union who called one official called the independent anti corruption agencies essential to Ukraine's EU path. And so ultimately Zelensky a reverse course. He put forward a proposal to reinstate the independence of the two agencies, but some reputational damage was done. And the eu, I think, is still withholding a chunk of some of its funding that it provides for sort of anti corruption steps. So, Ben, I was wondering what you made of this episode, and I had an interesting conversation with Mrs. Lavchernov about it that I can tell you about, and what it says about the state of Ukrainian democracy.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, I mean, this was a boring step, to say the least. And I mean, look, I think part of what's happening here is Ukraine is trying to do two things. Zelensky is trying to do two things. Survive as a state and survive as a democracy. One of the challenges in extreme wartime environments is more and more power starts to get concentrated in the hands of the president. They're not really independent checks from the parliament or the judiciary. There's a lot of deference to the president, who has kind of extreme powers through military command. But at the same time, Ukraine had made a lot of progress over the last decade in creating some of these alternative centers of power, including on anti corruption issues. Ironically, that's what Joe Biden was focused on way back in the Obama years. Right. Remember that? That was back in season one. But. But here it seems like Zelensky was getting annoyed for some reason. Maybe, you know, they were getting too close to some people or it just feels like everybody else who's lecturing me, whether it's Trump or Putin, they get to be strong men. Like, it felt a little bit like, you know what, I'm just gonna try to consolidate some things and consolidate some power. And people noticed it and they took to the streets in Ukraine and in Europe. Now the difficult thing for Zelenskyy is he's sitting there and saying, that's all well and good, but you won't let me into eu, I gotta deal with Trump. But I still think it was the right thing to backtrack.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Because you don't wanna become what you're fighting against. It is still part of the high ground that Ukraine has and still part of its future ambition to kind of be a part of the European Union. If they're going to lose territory, what they're going to gain is a better governmental system, better alliances, better integration with Europe. And don't put that at risk just because you kind of feel like you've got to out strongmen. The strongman.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know what Zelenskyy's motivation was either. The process for how they did this was super rushed and shady. You know, it's Interesting. You'll hear. I'll let you know. Mr. Slav explain it in his own voice in the interview. But he was telling me how what was amazing about these protests is it was really primarily young people who were there, you know, who's reformed of they were kind of pre Maidan or weren't alive for it or around for it. And he told me that he would then sort of check back in with some of the soldiers he'd followed who were well aware of what was happening. And they were saying things like, this is what we're fighting for.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yes. Yeah, that's great.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's pretty inspiring.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, that is inspiring. And. And it's a reminder that this all started in the Maidan in its own way.

[Tommy Vitor]

All right, let's turn to Thailand and Cambodia. We've talked about this, the conflict between these two countries a few times recently. So the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia agreed to a ceasefire starting Monday after this simmering border dispute between the two countries had turned into an all out conflict last week that included rocket fire and airstrikes and had killed at least 38 people. So both sides, you know, accused the other side of starting the fighting. And on Tuesday, military commanders from both nations met at the disputed border and kind of gave their support for the ceasefire, at least for now. Although there's some reporting that fighting is continuing in some of these disputed territorial regions. So the dispute is over. A bunch of stuff. There's, you know, there's colonial era maps that are poorly drawn between the two countries. There's a dispute over which nation controls a couple of ancient temples. There's good old fashioned toxic nationalism kind of at play at all of this. The ceasefire talks themselves were held in Malaysia. There were representatives from the Malaysian government, China and the US in attendance. Trump is taking credit for this cease fire and really all ceasefires being held right now.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Crazy, man.

[Tommy Vitor]

I had an argument with Hannah earlier. Trump took credit for ending it. He said he wouldn't cut trade deals with either Thailand or Cambodia until the two sides reach a ceasefire. And then they reach one and they said that's why it got done. I don't know. What do you think, Ben? Like, it is sort of an interesting use of leverage. I feel like he often knows, like two sides are going to get to a deal, so he makes an announcement to get in front of it. But what did you make of this?

[Mstislav Chernov]

First of all, this rabbit hole, like, you know, props to Michael, our producer, because I've stayed in the rabbit hole. Add to your list that there was Grievances from Thailand about these scams coming from Cambodia. Like kind of ripoff scams. Oh yes, yeah, click on this link.

[Tommy Vitor]

It was an amazing like New Yorker story about that, I think.

[Mstislav Chernov]

No, it's a hu in a couple places. But anyway, put that aside. There are a lot of reasons why this thing kind of flared up. I think when it flared up it also served the political interest on either side a little bit. Thai military wanted to flex a bit, you know, like they don't, you know, they got to embarrass the prime minister. You know, Cambodia has their own autocratic clique that likes to gin people up on nationalism. So everybody kind of got ginned up around a border dispute. But it's not like they were gonna fight some all out. This thing was gonna de escalate. Right? I mean, so first of all, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

I mean the Cambodian military is a third the size of Thailand. They don't have the heavy weaponry. They would have been fucked.

[Mstislav Chernov]

They would've been pretty fucked in this thing. Now that said China has all the influence. Cambodia, I mean, when I was in government, I mean, I remember when we went to a summit in Cambodia, you were there, the peace palace where they had the summit built by the Chinese. We could even have a conversation in any rooms. Cuz the presumption was everything was bugged, everything was wired like the people that have leverage in Cambodia are the Chinese, first of all. And increasingly they've had leverage in Thailand despite it being a traditionally o Sally. So I think you're right. I think Trump, you know, this thing is going to end. It's going to peter out. They're not going to fight a war over it. The Chinese are probably leaning on them. And then Trump comes in and says like I'll tariff you if you don't, you know. No, Trump did not broker some ceasefire here. And by the way, I worry about, sure, tariffs, that's one more tool. But if we're just going to start threatening tariffs over every single thing that every country does, I think it's not as sustainable. We're about to talk about China actually. It's a good segue into the fact that if you start linking tariffs to every other foreign policy issue, you create potentially some vulnerability for yourself.

[Tommy Vitor]

You want to do Myanmar first or China first?

[Mstislav Chernov]

Oh, we can do Myanmar first.

[Tommy Vitor]

I know that's close to your home. This is the Ben's Heart section. Okay, so weird developments coming out of the Trump administration when it comes to Myanmar. So last week the Trump administration lifted sanctions on a bunch of Guys who are allies with these, the generals currently running Myanmar. And of course, these generals are running Myanmar because they staged a Coup back in 2021 where they overthrew a democratically elected government. Government. They're also now fighting a brutal civil war against these rebel groups. And the rebel groups have been winning a lot. So it's, it's a very tense situation. The, the weird backstory in the sanction piece, though, started. So Trump sends out all those tariff letters. I forget what day that was. Or, you know, Liberation Day.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, you don't market, you don't celebrate in your household.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's right. A top general in Myanmar responds to the letter by praising Trump, but also calling for the easing of sanctions, which surprisingly then happened. And the question is why? One reason could be that Myanmar has a big supply of rare earth metals, which are increasingly important because they're used in cell phones, military equipment, electronics, like literally everything. The Trump administration has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to gain access to rare earths. They talked about invading Greenland. You know, it's like the drc. The Congo peace agreement in air quotes was about access to rare earths. Ukraine, he forced them to sign the minerals deal. So it's been a big focus in. The reason the challenge is that China dominates the rare earths industry and has massive leverage over us. More about that when we get the China section. But again, though, a lot of the rare earth, I think all of the rare earth mine in Myanmar flow to China for processing. So there's still this choke point, which I don't know how we're going to get around. But anyway, but here's the catchment. A lot of the areas controlled by the, with these rare earths there are controlled by rebel groups, not the junta. So, I mean, I guess the long game, right, if you're Trump, is like you befriend the military junta, you give them weapons, they kill off the rebel groups, and then you take access to these things. But what the hell do you think was going on here?

[Mstislav Chernov]

I think what's going on is what you said, which is essentially these people are obsessed with rare earths. Trump couldn't even name what they are. Weirdly, a lot of them have to do with clean energy transition too, which he couldn't be bothered to care about, but it's clear in his head. And yes, on paper, and this is an important point on paper, Myanmar is a resource rich country that could be a good alternative for these materials. And so I think maybe the Tatmadaw, the Burmese military, Some of the goons around them, they're these kind of oligarchs who are connected. They get a message back to Trump like, well, we'll sign some deals, and we want to end the war. Guess who wants to end the war?

[Tommy Vitor]

The guys in charge.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah. The military that had a coup, put Aung San SUU Kyi in prison, is now fighting this multifaceted civil war. Here's the problem with. The problem with it is they don't control vast swaths of this land because it's multifaceted. There are ethnic armed groups that have been fighting a civil war against the government for literally 50 years. Right. The Kachin, the Shan, the Karen. You can go Google this. Those people aren't going to, like, like, lay down their weapons to make a deal with Trump. Then there are the democracy forces, the govern and exile people that are also fighting, too. And so the only way you're gonna solve that problem is through a negotiated end to that civil war. But these people aren't gonna lay down their weapons for a Trump trade deal with the generals. Quite the opposite, actually. And they're willing to fight through that. The other thing I'd say is that the generals are always gonna be more dependent on the Chinese than the U.S. so whatever deal you cut, I mean, the Chinese are deeply. They've been their lifeline since the coup and before the coup, and they're also involved in all this trade and jade and rubies. And so this is just a. This is. Talk about a rabbit hole. This is one where Trump is not going to be finding the rare earth materials there. He may not give a shit, and so he's lifting sanctions, but this is not going to be a part of some reverse Belt Road initiative.

[Tommy Vitor]

No, no, this is not going to work out. Okay, well, let's go to China then. So Trump has been very.

[Mstislav Chernov]

He.

[Tommy Vitor]

He talks about trade a lot. I don't know that he's been focused on. He's been talking about it a lot. In the last few days, they've announced, quote, unquote, trade deals with the European Union in Japan. It turns out the more you dig into these deals, like, they are not trade agreements. They're just framework agreements with none of the details ironed out. And you'll also be shocked to learn, dear listener, that a lot of what Trump's team has been selling to the media is, like, just completely made up. Yeah, we can get into that in a bit.

[Mstislav Chernov]

It.

[Tommy Vitor]

But it's still, like, the main event of this trade process is still whatever deal the US Cuts with China just in terms of the scale and the impact. So, remember, Trump first announced a 10% tariff on China. Then in April, there was like this series of tit for tat announcements and tariff rates where I think it got up to 145%, kind of like depending on how you did the math and like whether they all were stacked on top of each other or not. So it's like insane tariffs. Then the markets freaked out, so we paused for 90 days. They extended the pause again, which gets us to today. So on Tuesday, the US And China had their latest round of trade deal talks in Stockholm. No, no breakthroughs were reported, but it does sound like everyone is just very excited to taco again and, and punt the tariff implementation for another period of however long. There has been a lot of speculation, Ben, that Trump is kind of really horny for a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Now, of course, he's denying it. He's claiming he's not seeking a meeting and that he would only go to China if invited because he could not sound thirstier and more like a, you know, some loser middle school kid trying to get invited to a party. But what we're also seeing, Ben, are these kind of like, drips of reporting on all the ways the administration is going soft on China as they try to get a deal and as they try to get this meeting with Xi Jinping. So several news outlets reported on how the US has frozen its restrictions on technology exports to China, especially AI chips, to avoid pissing them off. And now we're learning that the President of Taiwan, Lai Chinda, had to cancel an August trip to several Latin American countries because the Trump administration wouldn't let him fly through the United States. So he was going to go to New York, as the Taiwanese presidents always do. They fly to New York, go to, like, what? I think he's going to go to Paraguay, Guatemala, Belize.

[Mstislav Chernov]

There were countries that still recognize.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes. And then fly home through Dallas and, you know, go to Taiwan. But Chinese object to the visit. And so it looks like the Trump administration put a kibosh on it. Now, Trump's people, the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry, they deny it, but I don't believe it.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Nobody believes. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

So, Ben, I think you and I have talked a million times on the show that we'd long assumed that Trump would sell out Taiwan or any other kind of human rights consideration for a trade deal. I was a little surprised that they he would allow Nvidia to export some pretty powerful AI trips to China. What did you make of this, what we've seen out there.

[Mstislav Chernov]

So this is Trump negotiating with the Chinese is a bit like him negotiating with Putin where, I mean, first of all, we'll come back to the Europe thing because you're right, it's. I don't trust these terms until I read about them. But the Europeans did. It's not, I don't know how much they folded or not, but they definitely didn't stand up to Trump. Right. The Russians and the Chinese do because they don't give a fuck. Right. And. And so just as Russia pocketed things like Crimea, recognition and recognition of these annexed territories before they even started thinking about discussing what concessions they might make, and they haven't made any, the Chinese have pocketed two of the biggest geopolitical questions in the US China relationship. One is US Support for Taiwan. Thus far, the US These may seem like small things, but they kind of canceled some defense dialogue with the Taiwanese and they didn't allow this transit visa, which is kind of standard operating procedure. That is huge messaging to the Chinese that we will trade away our support for Taiwan. Even if you think that that might be a wise thing to do, which I don't. I think bringing it into a trade negotiation is terrible. No, we will deal with this separately. This is where you shouldn't be mixing and matching and we shouldn't be trading market access for our soybeans for like China taking over Taiwan potentially. And one of the risks is if you start making the DPP led government that's the more pro independence party that is in charge in Taiwan, you might actually have the opposite effect of you want. They might feel like we have to move towards independence because we feel insecure, so that's not wise. And then secondly, the Nvidia chips basically starting to dismantle the export controls on and some of the sensitive technologies going in China in ways that will allow them to potentially not just win the AI race, whatever you want to call it, but turbocharger AI industry, so they can proliferate. They can be the AI provider to Southeast Asia, to Latin America, to Africa, in the same way that they were with Huawei. We haven't even gotten to the deal. The Chinese are like, they're sitting there and they're like, well, it looks like the Americans are backing away from Taiwan. The Americans are backing away from these controls on these chips. Again, whether you think that the controls make sense of the Taiwan thing, lumping this all together is playing to the Chinese advantage because they'll make some concessions, they'll let the rare earth materials be on the market, or they'll agree to buy some more of our stuff. And Trump will treat it like a big win. If the Chinese can get out from under these tech controls, feel like that they're back in the driver's seat on Taiwan completely, and feel like they didn't make any truly meaningful trade concessions. This is a huge win for them. And you're right, I think Trump is just dying. Remember the first term, he was so overwhelmed by the protocol because the Chinese are good at like, oh, God, we're making you feel like an emperor. They know how to play because they're autocrats. They know how to appeal to the autocrat. He just wants to go and be feted for days. And he lost his mind over, like, a tea ceremony, long red carpets and beautiful Chinese women bowing to him. And, like, that's all he wants, you know, Questions, what's he going to sell out to get there?

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, he'll sell it. Everything. On your point about the eu, it has been interesting seeing kind of like the day after and the day after the day after reporting on what's actually in this deal. First of all, like, the Ursula von der Leyen and the folks, you know, sort of trying to lead the charge here from the EU, they just have.

[Mstislav Chernov]

The worst possible 28 different members.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Because all these member states. Right. And you've got Viktor Orban, like, attacking her, being like, oh, she caved, Trump destroyed her. Which helps him politically in both directions because he likes to kick around the EU and he likes to kiss Trump's ass. Right. So that's sort of like he's helping drive the narrative. But also, like, the numbers in the deal make no sense.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

The EU says they will agree to 750 billion. They'll buy 750 billion in American energy products over the next three years. OK. Total US energy exports were 318 billion last year. So the EU would need to triple its purchases and the US would basically need to stop selling to any other country because, like, like, we're kind of maxed out on what we can export. So none of it, it's all just bullshit. It's a press release.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Two quick things on this because the Japanese. One is even funnier because the Japanese deny it. They made it, they denied all. But the two things I'm skeptical of. One are any pledge for an investment number, because we've seen this Trump, like, trillion dollars and, you know, with Sam Altman and what, Larry Ellison or something, you know, $2 trillion in the Gulf. The Japanese Softbank. Half a trillion. Like this is all anybody can say a number. There's no there there. But then the second thing is in this deal, it's like we get to put the 15% tariffs on, on Europe. That's a part of what we quote, unquote.

[Tommy Vitor]

1.

[Mstislav Chernov]

I don't want the fucking tariffs.

[Tommy Vitor]

I don't either.

[Mstislav Chernov]

I do want to pay 15% more for like anything kind of Chateau Neuf de Pop, man. It's already like expensive enough. So why is it a win?

[Tommy Vitor]

I know.

[Mstislav Chernov]

To tax us taxing Americans.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's like completely ridiculous.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Hey guys.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. I love the deals that the Japanese trade agreement they, they announced the White House said that the Japanese would create a $550 billion investment fund and then the US would keep 90% of the profits from it. And then the Japanese trade Minister said no, actually 1 to 2% of the 550 billion would be actual investment. The rest is coming from of loans and loan guarantees. So they just, they completely making stuff up.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One zillion dollars investment.

[Tommy Vitor]

Exactly, exactly. Okay, final story, Ben, and sorry for all the listeners, we're going long here.

[Mstislav Chernov]

But you'll be glad you stuck around for this show.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, so we've talked on this show before about a right wing podcaster named Candace Owens. She used to work at the Daily Wire. She got the boot for some rather anti Semitic rhetoric. Now Candace is doing a podcast on her own. She racks up massive download numbers and she is living her best, most detached from reality life.

[Mstislav Chernov]

I assume she's beating us on YouTube subs. Crushing.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes, yes, please subscribe. Pod Save America and Pod Save the world on YouTube. Because people like Candace, Owen, ourselves smoking.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Us smoking the algorithm.

[Tommy Vitor]

When people search for political news, they get her stuff. We're trying to get them factual information. So please subscribe here. But she's also done like a five or six part series, I've lost count actually on her belief that the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, is a man. And now it's gotten to the point where French President Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte have filed a defamation suit in the United States against Candace for spreading, quote, outlandish, defamatory and far fetched fictions that this Brigitte was born a man. Now this is a pretty serious threat, right? Head of state is suing you in court. Like that scared the shit out of me. But let's listen to how Candace responded.

[Mstislav Chernov]

You were born a man and you will die a man. That's the point I'm making. So give us A sample. I'll send my doctors to take your blood. Figure it out real quick. However you want to go about this. Hey, how about just giving us some pictures again of you growing up, you know, raising your children? That would be fine. You're probably hoping, oh, you know, which, this will go away. And at least we'll say we sued her. We'll say we went after her. She'll probably file for this to get dismissed. I'd like to make it to discovery. I think that we owe that to the world. Anyways, you guys, we are revolting against this. We're revolting against the perverts that run the world. And I want to be very clear here.

[Tommy Vitor]

I count you among them.

[Mstislav Chernov]

I think you're sick. I think you're disgusting. And I am fully prepared to take on this battle on behalf of the entire world. Okay, that's what I'm gonna say. On behalf of the entire world. I will see you in court.

[Tommy Vitor]

Imagine Candace sends her doctors to your house like Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Dr. Jordan Peterson coming to collect the samples. So anyway, so Candace says her proof that Brigitte Macron is a man who comes from an investigation by a French blogger named Natasha Ray, who has also been sued in court by the Macron family. All of which say this is not a new story in France. What is new is that the Macron family is tired of Candace's bullshit.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Quite a story. Quite a story. Ben.

[Mstislav Chernov]

What a story. I mean, you know, like, what to add here. First of all, what's interesting to me is how in our current kind of right wing world, which includes the French. Right. I guess, you know, look, Bridget Macron is much older than Emmanuel Macron.

[Tommy Vitor]

24 years.

[Mstislav Chernov]

24 years. It's kind of a weird situation.

[Tommy Vitor]

When they were. She was his teacher.

[Mstislav Chernov]

She was his teacher. Right. So that's that, you know, that raises some, you know, attention.

[Tommy Vitor]

Odd.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Then, so then there were, like, there was this kind of question, is it a real marriage? Right. And so then some the conspiracy theories start where it's like, maybe he's gay and it's that kind of situation or whatever. And somehow we got all the way from that to like, she's a man, you know, like, like, I mean, like, this is what is so weird about the Internet is that you start with like, you know, an unusual situation. She's 24 years older and she was his teacher, and somehow that logically ends to like, she must be a man, you know? Yeah. Which is fucking nuts.

[Tommy Vitor]

I mean, a French journalist named Emmanuel Onizon Told the Guardian. This is one of the biggest fake news stories worldwide in terms of popularity. A billion people have seen it. Like to your point, like this started, it started in 2021. It was sort of this moment of maximum anger at the government in France. Like I think the yellow vest protests were happening. There was a huge amount of distrust of the government and it got pushed by like far right and anti vax forces. But it started as like a random four hour YouTube interview with this journalist, quote unquote, Natasha Ray, whose credentials at the time included working for an essential oils business.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, well, and I just, I don't know about the move to sue though, because in an attention economy, didn't Candace Owens just get like a lot of attention? I don't know.

[Tommy Vitor]

Well, I also. Yes, she definitely did. I mean, man, look, I get just.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Being fed up, you know, if you're.

[Tommy Vitor]

Macron, I got fed being fed up too. I mean, I need to, to dig back deeper into the case. But it's not like Alex Jones has gone away. Right?

[Mstislav Chernov]

You can do your own research.

[Tommy Vitor]

I'm going to do my own research. But I mean apparently the, the theory is that Brigitte Macron was a man named Jean Michel Trogn.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Jean Valjean.

[Tommy Vitor]

Which, but they're, they're, they're saying that she is her older brother. But her older brother's 80, he's alive, he lives in northern France. He grew up with her in four other families. They have a few family that was like well known for having a chocolate business. He was present in public with her at Macron's two presidential inaugurations. Like this is so thoroughly disproven, but it's like she's fucking cling to this madness.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Yeah, I mean, I guess we should have learned when they spent eight years saying our boss was born in Africa.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's right.

[Mstislav Chernov]

But this is a special one they hate. I mean, part of this too is just the loathing of Macron they hate. He triggers people a lot.

[Tommy Vitor]

You know, it's just, it's so wild. Like I guess she just found an audience for this and she dug in and it's like the Epstein stuff, right?

[Mstislav Chernov]

Well, different things intersect. Right. It's anti trans somehow, I'm sure. It's anti Macron, it's anti globalist. She kind of threw in a bit of an insinuation about a global cabal. Right. Of perverts. Right. I mean, I wonder who that might be. Maybe Candace should focus on the real question, which is why Donald Trump was having young girls like they Worked for him. Go work for Epstein. Seriously. That is something that happened today, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

The Trump's new, new explanation for why he and Jeffrey Epstein had a falling out was Jeffrey Epstein kept poaching people who worked for him. And he was pressed on that and he said yes. One of them were younger women who worked, I think, like at the spot Mar a Lago. And it's like, hey, man, did you think to call the cops then? Yeah, because this happened in 2000. Apparently this. This incident where he was. Epstein was poaching staffers. And then in 2002, Trump told New York magazine how much like, he loves Jeffrey Epstein and even said some creepy thing about how he likes women as much as I do, even if they're on the younger side. Yeah.

[Mstislav Chernov]

So, well, but serious point, I wish some of these people and some of them were doing it, but who spent all this time and attention chasing down the Bridget Macron as a man thing, and then they get a pretty bombshell piece of information dropped on Epstein. Maybe pay attention to that actual shiny object rather than, you know, trying to prove that the brother is a sister.

[Tommy Vitor]

Enough wild, wild. Okay, Hardy show for us from us. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, though, you're going to hear my interview with Mrs. Love Chernov. He's an amazing director, writer, producer of a new documentary, 2000 Meters to Andrika. That is incredible window into what the war in Ukraine is like. So stick around for that. This episode is presented by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The House recently voted to defund Planned Parenthood. That's right. They voted to block care, potentially shut down nearly 200 health centers. Without Planned Parenthood health centers, no other provider can fill that health care gap. Over 1.1 million patients could lose access to birth control, STI testing, abortion access, cancer screenings, and so much more. Who would suffer the most? People who already have a harder time than they should getting basic care. Women, people with low incomes, black, Latino and other communities, and people in rural areas. Planned Parenthood is such an important organization. There are so many people in this country whose closest healthcare provider by like 50 miles is a Planned Parenthood clinic. And they are just gonna lose access to healthcare for critical things, cancer screenings, like things that could end their lives because Republicans are politicizing a great organization just because that's who they are. Donate to support planned [e-mail] donate that's planned parenthood.org donate when's the last time you got something that was Fast, reliable and affordable. Like almost never, right? Well, US Cellular home Internet is breaking that streak. You get fast speeds, a rock solid connection and a super sweet price, just $39.99 a month. When you bundle it with a wireless plan, that means you can stream, scroll, shop and binge without lag or crazy bills. It's not magic, just really good Internet. Check out US Cellular Home Internet today, built for US terms apply. Visit uscellular.com for details. I'd like to welcome to the studio Mr. Slav Chernov. He is a Ukrainian director, writer, the producer of the new documentary 2000 Meter Tondrivka, who's on the show about two years ago, I believe, talking about his Oscar winning film, 20 Days in Mariupol.

[Ben Rhodes]

Welcome back.

[Tommy Vitor]

Great to see you.

[Ben Rhodes]

Great to see you again. Thank you for inviting me.

[Tommy Vitor]

So I just wanted to start just. I watched the film on Friday. It was so unbelievably powerful. It affected me physically, like I could feel the film in my body. I've seen a lot of footage of the war in Ukraine on social media because there's so much drone footage and you know, so it's, you know how terrifying it is. But I think the, the first person point of view, the trench warfare, the FPV drones swirling around at every moment, it's just, it's more frightening than I ever could have imagined, frankly. Was like my takeaway. And I just wondered if you could talk about how you filmed the film, constructed the film and, and managed the. The risk involved to being a part of this.

[Ben Rhodes]

Physical presence is something that is always important for me in my films. And you see that perspective of both 20 days in Mariupol and 2000 meters to Andrivka is a personal perspective. It's not only about body cams that we're using. It's also about me actually walking on the ground with the soldiers. And just to recap, the entire film is about this little narrow strip of forest that is squeezed between two minefields and it's leading to a village of Andriyivka that the platoon I'm following has to liberate. So it is a very simple story on the surface. They just need to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and to get there and to raise the flag. But the drama that leads to it, the difficulties, the pain, the sacrifice that they go through to get to their goal is immense. And I do everything in my power to, to bring the audience into that experience. And we are so lucky that the tools of modern filmmaking are allowing us to do so, you know, in order to know what the soldiers are going through. In the First World War, Second World War, all the, all the wars were happening in a 20th century. We didn't really have tools except stories, you know, literature, yes, films, but we could never be there. And here we have a possibility to bring the audience right into the trench, feel the shaking ground, hear the buzzing of the drones above your head and feel fear for your life for every second of the film. It's very intense experience, but it's a very unique experience to do.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean you're, you're physically in dugouts, foxholes, whatever you want to call them, with these men as you're trying to storm this village. I mean, so to, to step back a bit. I mean, the context was, I believe you filmed this in, in 2023 during this counter offensive in Eastern Ukraine. You're following Ukraine's 3rd Assault Brigade as they're trying to capture this village, as you just said. Can you just sort of remind listeners of the context of that moment and kind of like what, what the push was from the west in terms of the so called counteroffensive and this, why this particular mission took on maybe outsized importance.

[Ben Rhodes]

Summer counter offensive of 2023 is at that point was considered as the biggest military operation in Europe since World War II. So it has been prepared over many months. It has been hyped too much, if you ask me, by media. But that's the world we, that's the world we live in. The war is happening not only on the ground, the war is happening in the media space. So it was very much hyped. There were a lot of expectations. And when it started, considering that Russians have prepared for months and months and months, they dug in and they built the defenses. The counteroffensive was going slowly and it was going to quite painfully on all the fronts. The front line is more than, is more than a thousand kilometers and the entire frontline was on fire. And it was a time when we were premiering 20 days in Mariupol. So I would be here in LA, I would screen the film along with Oppenheimer and Barbie and other amazing films that were premiering at theaters. 20 days was also there. So on their own, on its own, it was already a strange experience. But then I would fly back to Europe, cross the border to Ukraine, get a train to the, to Donbas, get a car, get to the trenches to these guys who over time became our friends. And that transition between two worlds was Also on a personal level, so impactful. I really wanted to. These two worlds were colliding inside me constantly. And for me, they were so close. So close. 24, 24 hours away. Right. One day away. And I wanted to bring the audiences closer. That's where this desire of realism is coming from. That's where the distances. This feels film about distances. Right. And that's where those distances are coming from. I wanted these distances to be shorter. And, yeah, the counter offensive was not going well, and it was very hard. But I think the story of this platoon, the fight for this small village that seemed. It was strategically important, but on a bigger scale seemed pretty insignificant. And yet it was a symbol of the struggle and a symbol of hope. When they finally raised the flag, I think that that represents the entire struggle across the front line. And I was looking for something that would represent that wider experience.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, there is this feeling, right, that they are successful. I mean, I don't want to give away the film without like it. The experience of the film is why it's worth watching the film. It's not the ending. But, you know, as you said, they get to this village, they raise a flag, but they raise it over rubble.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Right.

[Tommy Vitor]

They essentially.

[Ben Rhodes]

Now you're spoiling the film.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Was that.

[Tommy Vitor]

Sorry. Sorry. That's okay.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's one of the dramatic turns for us too. When we are shooting, we come to that village and we see there is not even a place to raise the flag. And then, of course, inevitably, you're asking, why was this happening? And then when they do raise the flag, when they come back, and then when you next day see in the news the entire country celebrating another village being liberated, you realize that they didn't just liberate a village. They liberated a name, a symbol. And you realize something very important. That, yes, you can. Can destroy a city, you can destroy a village, but you can't destroy a symbol.

[Tommy Vitor]

Is that how the men you were following felt? Because I've known a lot of people who served in the military, and some of them have sentiments like that. And others felt like they were sent to war for missions that were meaningless. They felt completely demoralized and infuriated by, you know, the task they were asked to do. I'm wondering what they're.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's not how Ukrainian men are feeling. And if you watch the film, you'll see each one of these people we meet, and some of them, unfortunately, lose their lives. But each one of them made a choice to be there. They know why they're there. And There is a scene in a film when it's a battle for 1,000 meters. There's a scene in a film when one of the soldiers in a close combat while fighting with the Russian in the trench nearby, he's shooting, he's screaming his lungs out. He says, why are you here? Why did you come and destroyed my home? And you feel it that he knows why he's there. And in the scene in the end of the film when we see a scene where Ukrainian soldier is talking to Russian prisoner of war after the battle was over, he says, I'm 19. Do you think this was my dream team to. To fight with you guys? But I know I'm here. But I know I'm here. And why are you here? Why did you come here? And the Russian soldier says, I don't know. Yeah, and that's exactly what it is for. For those. For. For those who came to Ukraine and just invaded, they. They came there based on lies, they came there based on their own ideas. But for Ukrainians, it's just defending home. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Can you just talk a little bit about some of the men you follow? I mean, some of them later die, right? I mean, it's tragic. There's some. They're all so young, you know, some live nearby, some live far away. Some were in university. Some never wanted to be a soldier. Some are older than me and have kids. You know, it's an amazing range of individuals. And kind of. It seemed like one of the consistent or you had a very long conversation with one man who was like, do not make me a hero. That was sort of his sole ask of you. And maybe your first and only conversation or first conversation with him.

[Ben Rhodes]

My first conversation with him. And unfortunately, that's the last conversation with him that was ever recorded. And at least that remains for his family. They have a memory of him. And he is so fondly and so softly with love, talks about his family in that conversation. And when we were editing, we wanted to preserve every second of that, but that's. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Because these men are. Yes, they're soldiers, but ultimately they're civilians. And they are. I think one of the experiences that the audience is walking away with, with when they watched this film is that they're just like you and me. They're just guys who yesterday were learning or studying in university, and they were at home, you know, digging well for their family. They were working at the. At the warehouse, and they were just normal people. And then they were. They made a choice. They went to protect the land that I, me, personally, also, that I call home. And that's what we're trying to do in this film. And it's not actually. That's very hard sometimes because we have. With all the great tools of filmmaking, we're still quite limited with time and with material that we have. And the danger here is that. Exactly. Because the audience is so used to violence, the audience so used to see some of these pictures in the social media that they get detached from it.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

So our task in this film was to attach the audience again to humanity of these experiences, to. To the pain of it and to the thrill of it sometimes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's such an important point. I mean, your film, you're in the trenches, but you're so connected to the individuals. You know their names, you know their stories, you know where they're from, what they did, what happens to them. But we're also living this time on social media where every. Every time I log into Twitter, I see either a video of a, you know, Ukrainian FPV or a Russian drone killing some person that I'll never meet or know their name. And I understand why both sides do it. You know, often it's set to music. It's about, you know, showing the might of each, you know, military. But I wonder about the dehumanization, not just for the individuals involved, but for all those who sort of take it in through an algorithm as, like, this spectator, you know, sports. The wrong word, but you know what I'm saying.

[Ben Rhodes]

No, no, you're right. You're right. And it's also how many times people who just start. Start watching the film, then that experience changes, of course, but in the first moments, they feel like they are in a video game. Then the heavy realization that this is reality kicks in. It comes in and then it never lets go. Once you attach to real people, once you attach to their stories, then it will never let you go. You will never see these social media posts again in a way that you've been watching them. And that's another. I hope that's another thing that we will achieve with this film. It's 20 days after screening. 20 days. Some of people came to me and said, I will never watch news again in the same way that I did. And I hope this works for this film too. They will never watch this social media posts again. In the same way, they will always remember that there is a human and there is a human toll behind that. But again, in order to do that ethically, right in Order to. Not to just to be outside and observe and try to connect the audience with that experience. I couldn't stand outside. This film could very much exist in a form of body cam footage, stuff stitched with drone footage, together with some of the sit down interviews. But I know if I adequately and ethically want to tell about the tragedy and sacrifice, I need to be there and experience it and risk my life to be able to speak for them and to be able to say I did everything to preserve their memory when they died. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

There are so many ways that people across Ukraine are contributing to the war effort. There's factories producing as many drones as they possibly can, 24, 7. There's industrial infrastructure backing the entire war effort. And then you see that you meet some of these men who maybe had jobs that were safer, like military police, and made a choice to go to the front line. Why do you think they did that? And is that a common sentiment?

[Ben Rhodes]

The most common answer that I get when I ask them about it, they say, we don't want our children to fight this war. So it is a sacrifice. But I feel, and I see that this is sacrifice not only on the level of civil duty to your country, but it's much more personal level of your sacrifice to your family. The history of Russia invading Ukraine goes hundreds and hundreds of years back. It's not something new. And generations were fighting with Russia before we learned that history. We know that history. And so Russia attacking invading Ukraine again was not a surprise. But what those men feel and keep talking about is that maybe, just maybe, this will be the last time. And that is already a very strong motivation for them.

[Tommy Vitor]

The Western support or the Trump administration's support for Ukraine has been completely incoherent. Right. I mean, one minute he's berating Zelensky in the Oval Office, then we're cutting off weapon shipments and the weapon shipments are back on. Now Putin has a 50 day deadline to get a deal. Now he has a 12 day, I guess, was what Trump just announced yesterday. I'm just wondering what, but how Ukrainians are reacting to or taking in this kind of like madness and incoherence from the Trump administration.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think I would describe it in three beats and all those three beats would be me watching our protagonist in a war zone. They are after the mission for Andriivka. Those who survived went on fighting in Avdiivka, and then they went on fighting in the Kharkiv region, which is near my hometown. And we kept following up, we kept speaking with them. So in the beginning, before the elections, there was hope that something will change. So I saw many Ukrainians, including our protagonists, being quite hopeful for a strong position, whatever that position was, but a specific strong position on. On support of Ukraine or not, or absence of support of Ukraine. But that's. The uncertainty is much harder.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Than actual problem.

[Tommy Vitor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

So then after the elections, after what happened in Oval Office, it was devastating for many. And I again spoke to Fedya. I said, fedya, how did you feel about it? He said, well, I knew we were all screwed, but at the same time I knew that we are not disillusioned anymore. We know that we are on our own. We know that we need to rely on ourselves and on the person that is right next to you and we'll just have to keep fighting until this is all over. So that was like a next step. And recently, because of this back and forth statements, because of again, uncertainty coming back whether Ukraine has support, doesn't have support, or whether Russia has more support than Ukraine, even all those news that were coming from international politics brought to Ukrainians, especially soldiers detaching from use and just keeping to their job, keeping to their narrow strip of land that, you know, those 2,000 meters that they currently need to defend. And that's what they're focused on. Because words don't reach the battlefield, only actions reach the battlefield.

[Tommy Vitor]

What kind of restrictions are there on journalists like yourself and your ability to move and report? In parts of Ukraine, I imagine there's areas where everyone can just go at any time. But to get to the front line, are you. Do you have to be embedded?

[Ben Rhodes]

Depending on the situation, on the security situation, that changes dramatically. In some cases, when security situation is slightly more relaxed, there is more access for journalists. In the cases that are more and more now, we see it on the front line where very precise, long range, sometimes AI driven weapons are being used by Russians. Access to the front line is impossible. Yeah, it would be just impossible to do anything from what we did in 2023. Right now, if I was to try to shoot this film now, I wouldn't survive. I wouldn't be able to do it. So in 2000 meters, in a way, in 2000 meters to Andriyevka, in a way, we see like a lost reflection of the warfare that the world used to have before emergence of AI and robotic systems on a battlefield.

[Tommy Vitor]

Oh, so you're saying even from just the last two years, the proliferation of drones is so.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh yes, it changed so much that sometimes I see that this very same third Assault Brigade that we were embedded with at that point. They now carry some of their assaults completely by unmanned robotic systems. No humans involved at all. So drones in the air, attack drones with FPV kamikaze systems and land drones with machine guns. And those battles are successful. We have examples of them taking over some of the Russian positions, liberating some of the Ukrainian territory just by robotic systems.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's like very terrifying.

[Ben Rhodes]

It is so scary. And you can see how the, the competition is, the competition for technologies is happening in real time.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean it's like a World War I trench style warfare is the scariest thing I could ever imagine until you add in a quadcopter drone with a grenade on it flying into your foxhole or tunnel and what these men are dealing with, dealing with.

[Ben Rhodes]

And it never misses now and you can't jam it anymore.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's just horrifying. Just stepping back a little bit. We talked a bit earlier in the show today about this, the political dust up over Zelensky trying to take control of this anti corruption unit and then kind of relenting and reversing course. I'm curious, like that leads me a bigger picture question about, you know, how people in Ukraine are feeling about Zelensky's leadership these days. Days. I think all of us were in awe of his courage early on. But obviously like governing through a war is incredibly difficult. And wondering what the mood is.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think what happened with the anti corruption agency is a, is a great example of, of what is happening in the, in a political, in Ukrainian political system right now. And you saw that limiting independence of that agency led to big protests on the streets. And what was interesting for me is who came to those protests. Young people from 15 to 25 came there and they protested. And those are the people who haven't even seen revolution of dignity. Something that formed our generation's civilization identity. Right, right. So they came out and they demanded for this agency to gain independence again. And we see that the government reacted immediately on it and is now reintroducing this law, passing the new law that will even strengthen the independence of, of this anti corruption agency, which I feel that is an extraordinary example of direct democracy, the best kind of democracy that could be in the world. When people are not happy with their governments, they go on the street, they protest peacefully, the government hears them and reacts. And to see that happening in a country at war, in a country that has been blamed by, by even friends, sometimes for various reasons, by friends, sometimes for becoming an authoritarian regime, which is absolutely not true. And this is living proof that is not true. People can exercise their democratic rights even in a country that is at war.

[Tommy Vitor]

In a state of emergency.

[Ben Rhodes]

And in a state of emergency, and you see, other countries can use this, can use crisis as an excuse to limit the civil rights or for people who don't go on the streets and don't speak about their opinions to justify why they don't do it. Oh, the country is in crisis. We can't do it. But you can't. And that's what Ukrainians did. So until that relationship between the government and the civil active part of the civil society is continuing to be like that, we're okay.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That is a good, healthy sign, especially the young people. I didn't realize it was such a young cohort.

[Ben Rhodes]

And then hearing the soldiers on the front line watching this and saying, oh, well, well, oh, that's what I'm fighting for. Yeah, that's exactly the generation I'm here for. So that also motivated the soldiers.

[Tommy Vitor]

Oh, wow, that's inspiring. Well, listen, the film is 2000 meters to Andrivka. I could not recommend it enough. It's an extraordinary look at not just the war in Ukraine, but modern warfare, the horrors of it, and what motivates average people to do unbelievably courageous things. So thank you for the film. Thank you for 20 days in Mariupol. It's another extraordinary film, too, that folks should check out.

[Ben Rhodes]

Thank you, bud.

[Tommy Vitor]

Great to see you.

[Ben Rhodes]

Thanks for invitation.

[Tommy Vitor]

Thanks again to Mrs. Slav Chernoff for joining the show and talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Ilona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Saul Rubin is helping out this summer. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our audio engineer. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Toles and Ryan Young. Matt de Groat is our head of production. Adrian Hill is our senior vice president of news and politics. If you want to get ad free episodes, exclusive content and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription [e-mail] friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Plus, find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content and much more. If you're as opinionated as we are, please consider dropping us a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized by the Writers Guild of America. East. When's the last time you got something that was fast, reliable and affordable? Like almost never, right? Well, US Cellular Home Internet is breaking that streak. You get fast speeds, a rock solid connection and a super sweet price. Just $39.99 a month. When you bundle it with a wireless plan. That means you can stream, scroll, shop and binge without lag or crazy bills. It's not magic, just really good Internet. Check out US Cellular Home Internet today, built for US terms apply. Visit uscellular.com for details. It's Carl's Jr's new Queso Crunch Burger. Tortilla strips and queso on a burger. A queso creamy masterpiece. A queso Pepper Jack cheesy queso crunchy queso Mind blowing charbroiled Queso Crunch burger combo with fries in a frozen drink. Just 9.99.

[Mstislav Chernov]

Okay, so what are you waiting for?

[Tommy Vitor]

I'm not waiting. The new Queso Crunch Burger only at Carl's Jr available for a limited time at participating restaurants. Tax not included.