← The Bulwark Podcast
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- [00:00]
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- [01:13]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bull Work Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Tuesday, January 6th. Somehow it's been five years from the day that we'll forever provide the images that def the Trump era. Or at least that set of images. Who knows what we got ahead of us the next three years? Bill Kristol and Tom Joslin have a retrospective on that over on the Bulwark Takes feed. You should check out. Do go send some love to my pal Michael Fanone and the other January 6th cops if you get the chance on their various social media feeds. Today's show, we're going to focus on what's happening in the present day, our current troubles. We got a double header. In segment two, I talked to a man the Trump administration is trying to detain and expel from the country and separate him from his American family because they don't like his speech. But first, Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He's also the author of the book Everyone who Is Going is the United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis. Welcome to the show. What's up, man?
- [02:08]
Jonathan Blitzer
Hey. Good to see you. Thanks for having me.
- [02:10]
Tim Miller
Good to see you. I don't know if you know this, but your book has been invoked by three guests. Maybe two or three guests. Peter Hamby.
- [02:17]
Jonathan Blitzer
It makes me very, very happy.
- [02:19]
Tim Miller
Frank Foer. I don't remember all the people that mentioned him. I just think that how you got into that with everyone who's Gone is you tell this very complex story through individual narratives in a way that I think is really compelling to people because, man, it can become a slog to read about the Northern Triangle and all of our troubles that's led to the border. But I want to talk about the book in a little bit, but I want to start with Venezuela, which you've been reporting on more recently, of course. So let's just dial it back like a month before the. That, you know, the coup that we just engaged in with Maduro and talk about the lead into this, the bombing of the drug boats. You were writing about this, the New Yorker writing about how there's this bigger agenda at play which has obviously come to pass. Talk about just like what was happening in that period and how you think it ties to where we are now.
- [03:09]
Jonathan Blitzer
Well, basically what we started to see was in the beginning of September of last year, the US started bombing these boats that were allegedly transporting drugs through the Caribbean Sea. And then later, eventually the bombings began in parts of the Pacific Ocean. And the logic anyway that the administration put forward was that this was a matter of national self defense, that, you know, drugs are a scourge in American life, that overdoses have been up. This is a necessary action taken by a sovereign government in the United States to act international waters to, you know, prevent drugs from reaching the United States. No aspect of that explanation or rationale actually makes sense or is legitimate really in any way, starting with the fact that, you know, if you are concerned with drug overdoses in the United States, which we have every right to be concerned about, that has to do with fentanyl. Fentanyl does not travel through the Caribbean. The Coast Guard has not interdicted any fentanyl shipments coming from South America, the United States. So right out of the gate, that idea that this was somehow about trying to stop the flow of drugs to the United States made next to no sense. If you kind of dig a little bit deeper, it also turns out that the cocaine that does pass through the Caribbean and parts of the Pacific tends to have as its destination Europe, not the United States. Again, just raising immediate questions about the kind of pretense of what this was about.
- [04:34]
Tim Miller
Bad news for Ibiza and Mykonos.
- [04:37]
Jonathan Blitzer
Right. It's going to tough situation there. But, you know, again, like in the kind of classic fashion with this administration, you know, you kind of get a stated rationale and almost immediately it just, it kind of comes ap. Which then raises the question of, okay, well, what was motivating that? And, you know, I think that there are different kind of theories of how that stuff came to pass to begin with. It almost goes without saying, but we need, I guess, to keep repeating it. You know, this is an immediate violation of international law. There was no, you know, congressional authorization for those strikes. The people on these boats were basically just judged by the US to have had a reasonable connection to the drug trade, but there was no proof. Typically, what would happen is the Coast Guard would arrest people suspected of transporting drugs and bring them to the nearest country, and they would investigate. That's not what happened here. So, you know, immediately this causes major legal repercussions. And what was happening inside the administration was there was a kind of tussle for primacy in this debate about how the US should engage in the region generally, but most specifically with regard to Venezuela. So there were elements inside the Trump administration that have always set their sights on regime change in Venezuela. Most obviously, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Trump himself has been a bit of a fair weather regime change advocate inside his own administration. During Trump won, he. He loved to talk tough about the idea of overthrowing the Maduro regime in Venezuela, but was uncomfortable with actually committing American troops or resources to that effort. And then there were other players. There was Rick Grenell, Trump's special envoy, who actually was advocating a more concilia approach with Maduro in Venezuela. You had someone like Stephen Miller, who. And this was kind of one of the revelations in some of my early reporting, something that I had not expected, having spent a lot of time writing on Miller over the years. He was a main player in a lot of these discussions, really pushing for more of these strikes, boat strikes in the region. And I think a lot of that had to do with a kind of whole confluence of interests he has on immigration, on demonizing immigrants as criminals, as drug smugglers. He had pushed the administration to invoke the Alien Enemies act back in March of 2025. And the whole logic of that, again, you know, extraordinarily tenuous and baseless logic, but the logic of that was that the Maduro regime was essentially conspiring with a Venezuelan prison gang called Renderagua to send Venezuelan migrants into the United States to sow division. And a law like the Alien enemies Act of 1798 has been invoked literally three times in history, always during wartime. The start of 2025, the United States, needless to say, was not at war. But the logic that Miller and others inside the administration were operating under was that mass migration constituted a kind of foreign invasion. The idea of These bombings also, I think for the Millerite wing of the administration, kind of addressed that set of issues. But in any case, all of this was happening at the same time that the US was ramping up its military presence in the region, moving aircraft carriers to the Caribbean from the Middle east, trying to up the ante and threaten Maduro with this buildup of milit military force. And then for months, basically, we saw, as the administration went back and forth, Trump said that he was going to depose Maduro, then he backtracked and tried to get Maduro on the phone. And you kind of saw him hemming and hawing for a bit before this sort of suddenly came to pass earlier this month.
- [08:06]
Tim Miller
I think that tenuous connection you're talking about, though, is super important because it is how we got here and it relates to how your book, which focuses on the Northern Triangle countries and the mass migration there from El Salvador and Guatemala and the gang violence that does tie into their rationale for Venezuela. And I think that in a lot of ways, I know they started with the deportations to El Salvador, then that ran into problems. We've covered a lot here. I think they wanted to take action against the Mexico cartels. It's a lot more complicated than the bombing of these boats. And so they found here, you know, a possible foil, you know, for advancing this kind of broader anti immigrant, anti migrant. And now they're calling it the Don Row Doctrine worldview of how to deal with, with this region. Steven Miller does an okay job of trying to explain that tenuous connection in a, in an interview yesterday with Jake Tapper. I want to listen to that. And since you've been, since you've been covering him, you can help translate for us what he's trying to say.
- [09:03]
Jonathan Blitzer
Sure.
- [09:05]
Imran Ahmed
The Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Doctrine is all about securing the national interests of America.
- [09:10]
Tim Miller
For years, we sent our soldiers to.
- [09:13]
Imran Ahmed
Die in deserts in the Middle east to try to build them parliaments, try to build them democracies, to try to give them more oil, to try to give them more resources. The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert.
- [09:27]
Tim Miller
Ourselves and our interests.
- [09:29]
Imran Ahmed
With that apology. This whole period that happened after World War II, where the west began apologizing and groveling and begging.
- [09:38]
Tim Miller
I don't even know honestly what you're talking about right now.
- [09:40]
Imran Ahmed
It's a. What I'm talking about, Jake, is the idea, by the way.
- [09:44]
Tim Miller
You do.
- [09:45]
Imran Ahmed
I know you love doing that smarmy thing, Jake, and I was hoping to be better than that. This Time.
- [09:49]
Tim Miller
Okay. Maybe you can help explain for Jake and for Stephen what it is that he's trying to talk about there.
- [09:54]
Jonathan Blitzer
You know, I have to say, kind of in a perverse way, the last 24 hours have helped me. I don't know if understand is the word, but sort of see the Miller position in all of this a little bit more clearly. You know, a lot of us, like, are trying to kind of connect different dots. Whether those are like ideological points, whether those are historical points, whether they're psychological questions, you name it, to try to explain what the current administration's sort of outlook is or what its rationale is at any given moment. And I, like many others, yourself included, I know listening to you and reading you that it's like this administration kind of frustrates any effort to actually make logical sense of a lot of its particular policies. It was helpful for me in a way, to hear Miller kind of talk in these terms, in these kind of civilizational terms. There isn't, I don't think, any really clear logic, aside from this feeling of deep and abiding aggrievement, feeling that our country has somehow been overrun, that people like Miller have somehow been dispossessed, that the last several decades of American history have been characterized this again, flying in the face of all historical evidence by concessions and apology. And so, you know, it's funny because when I first started talking to people with knowledge of these boat strikes, I was astounded and really shocked by how haphazard the rationale was that initially it was explained to me as there being an intense interest inside the administration from people like Miller to bomb fentanyl labs in Mexico as part of this broader so called war on the cartels.
- [11:27]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [11:28]
Jonathan Blitzer
That is wrongheaded and senseless for all kinds of reasons, but at least in a kind of very rough sense is a notional response to a problem involving fentanyl in the United States. But in short order, even Miller, in an administration where basically there are no guardrails at all, even Miller was essentially brought to heel or told when he had tried to advance that idea that bombing cartel readouts in Mexico would cause massive problems with the US in terms of its relationship with the Mexican government. The Mexican government is actually quite collaborative and cooperative with the United States. It's doing all kinds of things that it doesn't like to advertise all that much that are in the service of American interests.
- [12:07]
Tim Miller
Like what?
- [12:07]
Jonathan Blitzer
The United States largest trading partner just in terms of helping actually intercept migrants traveling to the US Border. All of Those kinds of things. In fact, to my mind, over the years, one of the through lines that kind of dictates what we see at the US Southern border. Obviously, mass migration is a complex international phenomenon that in the US we tend to only talk about in terms of the US border. But one of the kind of big factors that impacts at any given moment, the number of people arriving at the US Southern border, is the role that Mexico plays in intercepting them as they travel through Mexico. And that's been something that different administrations have leaned on the Mexican government in different ways to get different sorts of enforcement results. And so Miller was essentially told this would be intensely counterproductive to start bombing Mexico. It would have all kinds of adverse consequences. Obviously, Mexico shares a border with the United States. And the way it was explained to me was essentially that Miller and others said, okay, well, we want to do something bold, we want to do something unprecedented. We want to do something kind of utterly shocking. Let's bomb something else. And I honestly, when I first heard that, I thought I had misunderstood. You know, you kind of, you hear that from someone and you think like, okay, you must not have visibility into the actual deliberations, because that is simply too basic.
- [13:19]
Tim Miller
We're going to bomb something in Central or South America, we just got to figure out what it is.
- [13:23]
Jonathan Blitzer
Right, right. And that was essentially, it got explained to me in the context of Venezuela being a country run during the Maduro years by a brutal dictator. There's no question an international pariah, someone who completely invalidated the results of a democratic election, which he lost by an overwhelming margin in 2024. He's cracked down on the population going back to 2013. Eight million people have fled Venezuela since basically Maduro took office. The country is in a state of shambles. And I think in part as a consequence of all of that and the idea that there has been an ideolog push in certain conservative circles in the administration and in the administration's orbit, there was a feeling that Venezuela could be an easier target somehow, that there wouldn't be the kind of international repercussions if actions were taken against Venezuela, that Maduro didn't have international allies, they didn't share a border with the United States. And so this kind of slap dash approach to these boat bombings started, which, you know, to my mind, it was never clear, frankly, how those boat bombings actually were meant to be a part of the broader ideological vision for regime change in Venezuela. I mean, that was also running on a parallel track. You know, the likes of Rubio were Trying in different forms to pressure Maduro to leave office, something that basically would never happen. Maduro would never negotiate his own ouster. To go back to this kind of what the Miller logic or sensibility is in all of this, it's a feeling of, you know, wanting to take out American aggression on people in the region. And I think the fact of the military in American daily life has really become, I think, one of the hallmarks of the current administration. At the same time that we're watching the start of these boat bombings in the Caribbean, you're also seeing armed federal immigration agents and US Troops in cities like Los Angeles, in cities like Chicago conducting immigration raids. And the idea is that all of this is somehow part and parcel of a broader kind of security push by the US US Government to rid the country of immigrants and to kind of assert itself in the region. But I mean, really beyond that, it's hard to actually make sense of.
- [15:30]
Tim Miller
Well, that does make sense. Like, it's this alignment of these different rationales. Right. Like, Marco has a very ideological, you know, rationale for what he's doing. But the aggrievement, as you mentioned, is what ties this all together. Right. Like, that's why I played that clip. And the Steven Miller Jake chapter thing goes on forever. Because it's like. It's like this idea that Since World War II, things have been bad for America is so crazy. It's like the greatest period of prosperity of any country, country or any culture in world history. And Steve Miller's like, but we've given too much of our riches away. It's crazy. But this aggrievement is then manifesting as a desire to assert supremacy, dominance, bullying over other groups. Right. And obviously, groups in the region and immigrants are the main target of this. And so as a result, it's going to be countries where these immigrants are coming from who are in our region. There are a lot of kind of theories out there. I've been listening to a lot of people talk about, oh, it's an Epstein distraction, or, oh, it's Trump wanting to do this with the military control. And it's easier to define it as Stephen Miller's aggrievement and his bigotry and his micro phallus, resulting in a desire to want to assert dominance in this way and assert dominance for the dominant American culture, white American culture. Not to get too woke here in the post, but that just is what it is.
- [16:51]
Jonathan Blitzer
Right? Right. Two thoughts on that. The first is, I think that's all well taken. I Also think that there's an element of this just being a kind of product of different personal interests inside the administration aligning in a kind of just coincidental way almost to ignite this particular action. So there are different players. I mean, Miller is not the only player. Miller is a significant player and one whose role is far more significant than I would have frankly expected. Certainly given track record in Trump, one I always thought of him as being primarily US focused. He obviously has a much bigger role in really everything in the current order of things. But there's also, you know, there's Rubio, who's got this sort of intensely ideological vision for the region. There's, you know, Hegseth at the Department of Defense, who, you know, is pretty much the opposite of the guardrail that previous holders of that role have nominally been.
- [17:42]
Tim Miller
He literally just wants to bomb shit.
- [17:44]
Jonathan Blitzer
Quite literally push up, you know, and to like be on Miller's good side and so on. There's kind of Trump who's got this sort of oil. Interesting, but it seems like a very fuzzy understanding of what oil extraction from Venezuela would actually look like. You know, so there are all these different things that are kind of shifting within the administration.
- [17:58]
Tim Miller
There's a lot of corruption happening in the administration. But just in this case, like, I think he wants to say we took the oil because the other guys are dumb. And again, it's going back to this, asserting dominance and supremacy. I don't think that like Rex Tillerson is in his ear saying, I can really make a few bucks if I get down to Caracas. There's other situations like that in the administration with the corruption. But I don't think that is what's happening here.
- [18:19]
Jonathan Blitzer
You know, look, I don't, I'm not like particularly plugged into the oil issue per se, but like, the thing that I, what I've essentially read and what seems, you know, compelling and persuasive to me is this fact that, sure, you know, American oil companies would be delighted to have access to Venezuelan oil reserves. That said, these are also massive corporations that are risk averse. And a climate that is as unstable and unpredictable as the current one is not a perfect invitation for any sort of business proposition. So it's a very confusing set of circumstances. The only other thing I wanted to say, and because I appreciate your kind of broader framing about this in terms of like Central America and now the Venezuela question, you know, as someone who covered Trump one and as someone who obviously spent a lot of time kind of looking at the relationship between the United States And Central America going back from the 80s to the present. You know, the thing that really defined the Trump administration's rhetoric on immigration and that really conditioned a lot of its policy during his first term was the idea that, you know, all immigrants are criminals. And at that moment in time, the preponderant sort of identities of immigrants showing up at the US Southern border were Central Americans. Central Americans coming from the northern triangle of Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. And so, unsurprisingly for someone of Trump's bent and outlook, he made the gang MS.13, a Salvadoran street gang that actually began in the United States, into public enemy number one. And that became a kind of topic we heard about ad nauseam, that was meant to explain any and all policy decisions taken vis a vis immigrants in the United States. You know, you fast forward to Trump too. The complexion of who is showing up at the southern border has shifted by then. And what we're starting to see in much larger numbers are Venezuelans, which reflects an ongoing decade long trend of millions of people fleeing the collapse of Venezuela. And so during the Biden years, you have a large number of Venezuelans showing up at the US Southern border. And the Biden administration, we can talk about response in different ways, some reasonable, some inept. We can go into those details. But the point is like, unsurprisingly for Trump and his acolytes, who's public enemy number one now? Another gang, this gang Venezuelan. And so you go from Ms. 13 kind of dominating the political rhetoric from Trump during Trump 1 to train Naragua, dominating the political rhetoric during Trump too. And in the case of Trend, it's fascinating for someone like me who essentially had to sort of bone up on this gang, which I had really know nothing about and which, you know, over the courses of my reporting, I realized a lot of US Law enforcement officials knew next to nothing about. I mean, it was a gang that didn't have the kind of deep history entwined with the United States that a gang like MS.13 had. The identity markers were different. And so in the early days of the Trump administration, of the current Trump administration, when the government was rounding up Venezuelans and branding all of the members of Trendrago without any evidence, without any due process and so on. If you looked at some of the documents the US Government was using to identify so called Trend gang members, they looked like documents just repurposed from efforts to identify Central American gangs. And if you talked to experts in Venezuela, they would say, well, this is nonsensical. I mean, this is A prison gang that doesn't operate in the way that a gang like MS.13 historically operated. And yet the US law enforcement apparatus is seeming to suggest that it does.
- [21:32]
Tim Miller
So I don't know if you saw this Time story this morning about a kind of a related foul up or whatever a purposeful foul up is by the administration, which is the alleged Cartel de los Solis. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. Absolutely. I guess that phrase Cartel de los Solas, based on that reading I've done this morning, is essentially just kind of like saying crony capitalism. It's just a term, a pejorative term for corruption within a government. But our government, Marco Rubio and the Treasury Department, Scott Besant, declared the Cartel de los Solos a terrorist organization that Maduro was at the head of and as part of. Again, the rationale for using these tools like the Alien Enemies act, now that Maduro's here and is actually enough to go to trial, they've backed off that this Cartel de los Solas doesn't actually exist. And it's like very reminiscent of what you were just talking about with Trenda Aragua, which was just coming up with a pretextual rationale for doing what they wanted.
- [22:32]
Jonathan Blitzer
I mean, I think I read that Times article too, with great interest. I started to go through the actual indictment because in the article the reporter makes the point that I think in the initial Maduro indictment as a narco terrorist back in 2020, there were something like 20+ references to cartel de los Soles. And now there are like two references to it. And the references are much more attenuated because in effect, as you say, I mean, that is a phrase that actually was used kind of colloquially in Venezuela as a reference to the corruption military powers that were, you know, running the country and skimming off the top. And, and so of course, right, you know, the US in preparing this big case against Maduro, is going to kind of lard it up with these incredibly striking, by the way, because it doesn't take much to portray Maduro as a bad actor. He is a terrible actor. You know, you don't have to put spin on the ball, but you know, the administration has always actually done this, particularly with Nicaragua. That was in fact, the technical rationale from the administration when it invoked the Alien Enemies act in March of 2025 was to say that the gang Trendragua was actually controlled by Maduro, which US Intelligence agencies even under Trump couldn't substantiate. And people who raised objections inside the intelligence Agencies were, you know, reassigned, fired, resigned, et cetera. You know, these kinds of fictions of lies, of, you know, blurring of actual factual distinctions have actually conditioned very specific policy outcomes.
- [24:04]
Tim Miller
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- [25:58]
Jonathan Blitzer
Definitely. I mean, just to say, first of all, kind of leaving aside the Trump administration's current course of action, just to take a moment to kind of analyze the quite complex question of what you do in a scenario without Maduro, there's the Venezuelan opposition which won elections in July of 2024. The problem with the Opposition isn't that it lacks a popular mandate that it very clearly has had. The problem is the powers running and controlling the country right now refuse to acknowledge that popular mandate because it.
- [26:29]
Tim Miller
Machado was on. Machado is the woman that was leader of the opposition was on Hannity last night, and she said Trump has not called her. Yeah, Trump has not called her. And she did say she was willing to. To share the peace prize with Trump. Now, I don't know if she's been briefed fully on Trump because he's not big on sharing. That shows you how desperate the situation is from the opposition that they feel like going on Hannity to beg is the play.
- [26:52]
Jonathan Blitzer
No, it's a great point. Her case has, in fact, always been really complicated because the opposition, the Venezuelan opposition at different points over the years, has been discredited essentially for not being able to bring about the results that any Venezuelans would want, which is, you know, a change in regime. And so one of the things that has always distinguished Machado in particular is her belief. And this doesn't seem to be wrong really, by any stretch. In fact, it seems right on that the only real way to oust Maduro is to depend on the direct intervention of a foreign power like the United States. The problem, of course, is that that ties you to an administration like the Trump administration, and particularly to Trump himself, who is not a reliable partner really, in any sense. But it's interesting because, you know, Machado has spent a lot of time and a lot of political capital really trying to appease Trump, to flatter him, to feed him the kinds of lines and arguments that his administration could make use of. For instance, you know, in. In February of 2025, she could be heard on Don Jr's podcast Talking about how Maduro ran Trenderagua, which again, is not accurate, but to her way of thinking was a kind of necessary way of pressuring the US Administration to take action, knowing that that's the kind of thing that motivated people like Trump and Miller and others inside the administration to concern themselves with what's happening in Venezuela. And so, you know, if you talk to experts, say a month ago or two months ago about their sense of what might be brewing, a common concern that you'd hear from a lot of them is that the Venezuelan opposition is in this real b. Because if Trump doesn't intervene, well, here the opposition has invested all of this capital in trying to align itself with Trump, and they can't keep his interest for long. The other issue then, of course, is, okay, so then he does intervene and what happens, and in this case, it's essentially cast Machado aside in favor of Delsey Rodriguez, who is a strange and fascinating person for the administration to be elevating right now because she has been Maduro's vice president. And so if your argument is, and this is not an unreasonable argument, that the Maduro regime was illegitimate, you have now removed Maduro to replace her with his number two, who was implicated in all of the misdeeds of the regime. And so obviously that raises profound questions about what it means for you to have intervened in the first place. Was it just a matter of you personally wanting Maduro out? As a matter of fact, of personal pride? Because clearly the regime itself persists. And in fact, and what we're seeing even already, and this was wholly predictable, by the way, is that the regime only gets tougher and harder line in circumstances like this because now they're backed into a corner. And so one of the things that we're seeing now in the immediate aftermath of this handoff to Delsey Rodriguez is that Maduro had prepared essentially a kind of, I don't even know really what you call it, a kind of emergency declaration type order given all of these, all of the saber rattling from the United States, all of the military buildup, the beginning of actual CIA maneuvers taken inside the country to essentially crack down even further on the Venezuelan population on the grounds and classic kind of authoritarian power grab, that any critics of the regime, any people who weren't directly aligned with the regime's interests, were somehow supporting the intervention of a foreign power. And so now, in a truly painful and scary development, you're seeing Delcio Rodriguez preside over a further crackdown. Basically, the hard line is only growing tougher. And this was exactly the thing to be concerned about that, okay, you remove, you remove Maduro. The regime always was going to be able to survive without him. The key players, the head of the Defense Department in Venezuela, the head of the Interior Ministry, they remain in their places. They're the ones who have control over the military. Delsey Rodriguez is now in this kind of fascinating and impossible position of staying in this position in trying to hold the line to keep those factions at bay and to make them feel like no one's coming after them. And yet now, according to Trump and according to Rubio and according to Miller, she's answerable to the US to do whatever the United States wants. And so there's obviously the collision course between what the United States wants and what the military in Venezuela would want or what the interior minister would want, but that's the situation we're now in.
- [31:18]
Tim Miller
And I guess her bet is new boss, same as the old boss. They can do all the crackdowns, all the corruption they want because Marco Trump don't care about that as long as they just create safe passage for some oil companies to come in.
- [31:33]
Jonathan Blitzer
That seems to be the administration's logic. I mean, I don't know for her, I mean, she's an. She's a very interesting person because she has widely been regarded, I mean, interesting person, I should say, under, under these circumstances because she's been widely regarded for years as being one of Maduro's staunchest loyalists. So, you know, she was handpicked for her job as vice president by Maduro himself. Her brother was Maduro's principal political strategist who presided over the National Congress and who was responsible for basically forcing through the fraudulent election of 2024. And so this is someone who is a true believer really in every sense. And sure, she has a reputation for political kind of ruthlessness and for Machiavellianism and for survival, but she is someone who has been a chavista through and through. She is an ideologue and has been one for her whole life. And in fact, there are additional personal reasons for why she would have this outlook. Her father was tortured and killed at the hands of a Venezuelan government that was very pro America, pro United states in the 70s. And it said that she's always harbored this anti American and anti kind of old school Venezuelan political establishment view since then. So this is not someone who would be a logical choice if the United States was interested in ousting Maduro for questions of, you know, democratic legitimacy, say, or for that matter, for increased US power and stake in the country.
- [33:01]
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- [34:01]
Tim Miller
So it's interesting to see yesterday Elliott Abrams, who you report on, who's been had his hands in the region since the 80s and was Trump's Venezuela envoy in the first term. Trump 1.0. He was basically saying this is like the worst thing you could do, which is interesting. And I'm wondering, it doesn't seem as if there have been any lessons employed here from the period that you write about going back to the 80s. And obviously this is no situation exactly the same. But thinking about what our involvement in El Salvador, Panama, et cetera. And so I was wondering what your reaction was to Abrams and then kind of also how this latest action ties to all the stuff that you were writing about.
- [34:44]
Jonathan Blitzer
I mean, Elliot Abrams is just, God, it's incredible that he's sort of still in the mix. And I remember thinking that during Trump won as the Venice, he was kind.
- [34:53]
Tim Miller
Of sharp on cnn. I thought yesterday, I didn't say, I.
- [34:55]
Jonathan Blitzer
Didn'T say, oh, God, yeah.
- [34:56]
Tim Miller
I mean, I actually don't know how old he is. I'd have to Google it. He's got it. But he's gotta be in his 80s, right up there. Yeah.
- [35:02]
Jonathan Blitzer
I mean, I don't know specifically, but way up there. Yeah, for sure. The reason why for people like me, and you're alluding to this, but the reason why for people like me who've spent some time trying to understand the history of Central America, why we recoil at the mention of Eliot Abrams is he was a key player in the Reagan administration who basically did everything he could to deny that the Salvadoran military regime, which the United States was backing in all kinds of ways, with money, with arms, with military advisors, was engaging in any sort of wholesale large scale abuse against the population, even though there was all of this overwhelming evidence of massacres, of tortures, of disappearances. And so he had that role all through the 1980s, which also had an immigration implication too, because he famously said, among, among other things, he famously said that, you know, Salvadorans at the time who were seeking asylum in the United States weren't really legitimately fleeing persecution, they were so called economic migrants because I can't remember the exact quote verbatim, but something to the effect of who wouldn't want to come to The United States, it's the best economy in the world. And that, you know, for someone like me and for others who are, you know, historians and experts in the region, it's particularly jarring that thought, because one of the most striking things that happened in the early 1980s was the United States had recently passed the 1980 Refugee act, which for the first time codified the idea of refugee and asylum practice in American law. And the idea was to actually provide some very concrete definitions for what persecution meant, such that the US Would legally be obligated to protect people when they showed up in the United States seeking asylum. And all through the early 1980s, despite the fact that people fleeing El Salvador and Guatemala had what would widely be considered textbook cases for political asylum, repression at the hands of the government, persecution based on their identity, based on their political beliefs and so on, all of their applications were rejected because the United States was supporting the regimes that were repressing these very people seeking protection in the United States. And if the United States were to recognize and legitimize the asylum claims of those being abused by an American ally, that would tacitly mean acknowledging the abuses committed by an American ally. And so, you know, Abrams was right in the middle of all of that. I think one of the ironic things for me now is people like Abrams, harder line voices, even like a John Bolton type figure, and others from Trump, one who did have an ideological view for the. The need to oust Maduro, now find themselves in this strange position of being unhappy with what the outcome has been, because in Trump 1, at least the logic of it, at least the rationale for it, was that the Maduro regime was anti democratic, that there was a need for the United States to help restore democratic rule and order in the country. And the idea now that you would Alice Maduro and replace him with Delsey Rodriguez flies in the face of all of that kind of ideological grandstanding that I think motivated a lot of the hardliners during Trump 1. So, you know, you put yourself in the mind of an Elliott Abrams or a Bolton or, you know, any of these, any of these figures with that particular bent. Frankly, Rubio, too, although he's not in a position to be able to admit this, and it's deeply uncomfortable, I think, for all of them to see, okay, finally, the desired outcome that a lot of us were pushing for and that a lot of us got kind of muzzled on in Trump won has finally come to pass. But the result hasn't been that the United States is working with the Venezuelan opposition. Instead, it's that the US has just essentially presided over the transfer of power from Maduro to Rodriguez. The regime persists, and nothing has really changed in any appreciable way.
- [38:42]
Tim Miller
Abrams, just for a little fact check, is 77, and his quote was, who was surprised to learn that migrating to the US to get a job is more common in El Salvador than in Bulgaria? So in the case, there's no difference. I do think that it's revealing sometimes my new left friends, as I mentioned earlier in Venezuela, they think it's kind of similar that Trump is a new boss, same as the old boss situation with Reagan, because of all the atrocities that you laid out that the Reagan administration's foreign policy was complicit in. And whether intentions matter at all, I think is certainly up for debate. But I do think that a lot of those figures are willing to make these sort of sacrifices in service of this broader kind of belief that expanding democracy through the world, that neoconservatism view, would work. And it didn't. So I think that explains Abrams and Bolton dissenting from this. Their policies, which obviously didn't work and led to a lot of suffering, were undergirded by a desire that they thought that you get to the other side and that you have this liberal democracy that proliferates. And unfortunately that doesn't happen.
- [39:52]
Jonathan Blitzer
I wasn't around when these guys were really kind of like in the midst of their intellectual formation. But even just time in archives and reading and interviewing people, one of the things that really comes through is that the force of this ideological belief that animated U.S. policy during the Cold War, that it is a matter of existential survival, that we have to limit the spread of leftism in the region. And you look even at a government like Jimmy Carter's, which was much more pro human rights in a kind of general sense, and which I think there were a lot of distinctions to be made between Carter's foreign policy in Central America and Reagan's. But one of the through lines is a shared belief that the spread of leftism posed a real existential threat to the United States, to the wider region. And that motivated a lot of this behavior. And it's one of the reasons why, I think, I think it's fair to say this, that someone like Reagan, on the issue of immigration generally, if you listen to some of his speeches, if you look at some of his policies, they're actually, you know, by and large, pretty accepting of immigrants and immigration generally. You know, there's a kind of parlor game that, like Immigration historians like to play of like, you know, taking a quote from Reagan, taking a quote from George H.W. bush, taking a quote from Bill Clinton, taking a quote from Obama, and kind of like scrambling who says what? And like asking you, all right, who said this?
- [41:11]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [41:11]
Jonathan Blitzer
And oftentimes the more whatever liberal sounding voices are, Reagan and George H.W. bush and Clinton sounds actually much harsher. But the belief then anyway. And one of the ways in which I think you saw really bad policy outcomes, inhumane policy outcomes from the Reagan administration in the immigration space was with regard to asylum and refugee practice, because it was shot through with this geopolitical bias.
- [41:34]
Tim Miller
This takes us back to the Miller quote at the beginning. This is what he's talking about in the post World War II thing he saw. The Trump administration policy is a direct rejection of that Reagan Bush mindset. Yeah.
- [41:44]
Jonathan Blitzer
And I think it's interesting. I think the anxiety over the spread of leftism over the years has been replaced over an anxiety over the spread and movement of people. And that's a much more kind of racialized question. It's a much more subjective question. It's a much more diffuse issue. And I do think that that's what motivates, you know, again, like, if you look at this in rational terms or whatever, aspirationally rational terms, you know, you have a country like Venezuela where, you know, 8 million people have fled since. Since 2013. It's completely redefined life and politics all across the region. It really only started to impact the United States in profound ways during the Biden years. But like all across the region, in Colombia and Peru, Brazil, Chile, all across the region, it's had very concrete consequences. The collapse of Venezuela, I think that for this administration, that activates all of these predispositions toward militarism, toward repressive behavior. I'm amazed, actually, to see, in some ways, the alien enemies logic. I had initially understood the invocation of alien enemies to be a kind of outside in logic of making a wild and unsubstantiated claim about Maduro running Trendragua in order to justify the crackdown on Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States. But it turns out that that kind of fervor also radiates back outward. And if you believe that, in spite of the evidence that disproves this, if you believe that Maduro is that kind of actor and that mass migration does represent a hostile foreign invasion, then on the continuum of that distorted view, it is only a matter of time before you actually engage in warlike behavior with Venezuela.
- [43:37]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And I'm interested your take on this, having kind of lived with all this going back to the 80s, because I, I'm. This is not my case for war like behavior, but I hear, and obviously both on the isolationist right, but also from left folks now that like, our lesson from all this should be that we should not be involved and kind of mind our own business and keep them there. But your point of like that story of how like the Asyle crisis going back to Carter all the way through now leading to real issues in America, like, to me says that, like, we all kind of rolled our eyes at Biden giving Kamala the root causes portfolio and the Biden administration. But like, that is actually right at some level. I think that the US has to figure out some way to engage in the region that deals with this because leaving Maduro to his own devices does create real domestic issues. Where are you on that kind of discussion?
- [44:32]
Jonathan Blitzer
I think that that's right. I don't know what a kind of enlightened US Foreign policy or involvement in the region looks like.
- [44:38]
Tim Miller
Kind of like real communism hasn't been tried. Enlightened, heightened engagement with Central America has not yet been tried.
- [44:45]
Jonathan Blitzer
There have been. There have been moments, you know, like the kind of root causes strategy. I mean, it's become sort of a political punchline because it was essentially divorced from any actual meaningful political commitment. You know, it was the sort of thing that you tossed to Kamala as vice president. It was the kind of thing that you, you know, invested some. Some amount of money in. That was a kind of drop in the bucket given US Investment in the world and whatever. But it wasn't something that, that, you know, any administration took all that seriously. And I think part of the reason for that is the political discourse in the United States around immigration is just so, you know, utterly devoid of sense or reason or fact, you know, that it's very hard. You know, it's a hard argument. In a kind of climate like this, or even in a climate, you know, turn back the clock 10 years, it's very hard to keep people's attention. You know, what. What a kind of more enlightened approach to longevity and sustained livelihoods in the region would look like is the stuff of years and decades of investment, of multilateralism, of acknowledgment of things like climate change, of acknowledgment of things like the inevitability of mass migration. You know, these are things that, you know, in political terms are all. Have all become non starters. You know, if you talk to, you know, policy experts, they're full of ideas, they're brimming with ideas about different things the US can do to deal specifically, say, with, with, you know, the inevitability of increased mass migration or finding ways of tamping down on the, the negative effects of climate change that are forcing people to leave, or, you know, taking policy stances that are, you know, more critical of authoritarian regimes and that find creative solutions for responding to those things. You know, the Biden administration, for all of its mishandling of so many things, you know, you take a situation like the elections in Guatemala in the summer of 2022, and, and you had actually an incredible outcome where the country elected a left leaning institutionalist and the powers that be within the country essentially tried to invalidate that result. And the United States, which has the ugliest track record of any country imaginable, in Guatemala specifically, having literally sponsored a CIA backed coup in 1954, actually I thought handled itself relatively well in trying to support the outcome of that democratic election. Again, though, you know, what does that mean a year down the line? What does that mean two years down the line? What does that mean when the Biden administration gives way to the Trump administration? You know, it's just, it is such a mess and it is such a tangle. It is hard to know exactly what the right outcome is. But I think, you know, in the case of Venezuela, for instance, you know, speaking to Venezuelans living in the United States, all of the people I report on regularly, you know, I'm texting with them kind of just continuously, but particularly in the last several days. And all of them, to a person, describe a feeling of intense relief and satisfaction on seeing Maduro ousted. I mean, that's just, you know, full stop.
- [47:44]
Tim Miller
Sure, for good reason. I mean, he's caused unimaginable harm and damage and human suffering and all this. Like Americans sometimes we're just like, we're so narcissistic and so focused on our own issues. You know, I had a lot of which I understand I had a lot of comments yesterday because me and Bill were talking about this and expressing that view. And people are like, no regime changes more important in America than is Venezuela. And I'm like, nobody hates Donald Trump more than me. But actually, no, like, literally 8 million people have had to flee Venezuela. Like they're starving, dying, that, you know, so I understand that relief. But then it's like, okay, what lessons can we learn to actually make that be fruitful?
- [48:17]
Jonathan Blitzer
You know, I had a really, I had a really kind of emotional experience with a family that lives in Aurora, Colorado. Venezuelan family from the state of Aragua in Venezuela. You know, no relation to the gang, but again, like, in our landscape, you know, being from. Good luck. Yeah, exactly. Good luck. Saying it from.
- [48:34]
Tim Miller
Get that off your travel document.
- [48:36]
Jonathan Blitzer
Seriously. And, you know, Aurora is a city, you know, it's right next to.
- [48:41]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I'm from Denver. Yeah.
- [48:42]
Jonathan Blitzer
Oh, yeah, right, of course, of course. So, all right, so you're. I mean, you're fully read into this, of course. But, you know, Aurora in many ways, for Trump was the beginning of this idea of Trinder Agua taking over American cities. The first place where he, you know, went on the stump and talked about the alien enemies act was Aurora. You know, Denver, as you know, was the city that accepted the largest number of Venezuelans per capita across the entire country during the Biden years. You know, 40 plus thousand people. I spent a lot of time there reporting various things, and there was a family I grew close with and I remained in touch with. And the mother and father were there with their two daughters, and their son was still in Venezuela and was eventually going to come to the United States himself. And they described to me and shared text messages and videos of the moment in July of 2024 when Maduro lost that election. And they went along with thousands of other Venezuelans in Aurora and in Denver to a particular parking lot, a target parking lot in Denver, or I guess it was technically in Aurora to, you know, sort of celebrate, to, like, protest the regime, which it was already making moves to invalidate the election result papers. Exactly. Simultaneously, their son had taken to the streets in Venezuela, and the mother, being a mother, was totally panicked that her son was out on the streets protesting against this famously repressive regime. And I was just, I was fascinated by the kind of geographic dislocation. Like, they're, you know, the mother and father are, like, out protesting the regime in an Aurora parking lot. Their son is out protesting the regime in Venezuela. They're doing it simultaneously. They're sending each other messages. That sense of intense, this anguish is real. And immediately after the operation, the capture of Maduro, I was texting with them, and they said, for us, this is great. Now they're in a situation like hundreds of thousands of other Venezuelans living in the United States right now, of the most alarming precariousness. I mean, I worry about them. One of the reasons why I'm constantly texting with them is I worry about them. You know, the administration, the Trump administration has shown that it doesn't much care for whatever provisional legal status immigrants here have. And these people fit exactly that bill. I mean, these are people who have actually, you know, they had tps. The Trump administration has invalidated tps. They had work authorization through an asylum application. The Trump administration has been canceling those work authorizations. Some of the people who were sent to seekot the prison in El Salvador actually had legal status. Some had legal status in the form of temporary protected status. Some had been admitted as refugees. Others had pending cases. I know know you did a lot of great advocacy around Andrij, who had a literal pending immigration case before a court. And none of that mattered to the current administration. And so there's kind of this split screen that all of these families are living right now of kind of continued uncertainty about what this all means for them. Obviously, you know, they're not naive. They see what this administration is about, but there is this personal feeling of like, okay, the person who has run our country into the ground is now no longer in it.
- [51:45]
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- [52:46]
Tim Miller
All right, last thing. I'm way over already, but in your book, everyone who's gone is here. No, it's not your fault. We're just gonna be brief which folks should go read. But the thing that the story that struck me the most, I knew who Oscar Romero was, but I hadn't learned about him. And he struck me as such a bulwarky figure in a way, in that he was a conservative, basically priest or an institutionalist at least. Maybe not an ideological who gets thrust into radicalism in El Salvador trying to do what he thought was right, to fight for people that were being tormented and tortured by the regime. And I'm just wondering if you could leave us briefly with a little anecdote about that and maybe we can have you back another time to go longer on El Salvador.
- [53:26]
Jonathan Blitzer
Yeah, no, I'd love that. I'd love that. Romero is. By the time I started researching the book, Romero had already been sainted. So it was a kind of household name in Latin America and in the world, and was the kind of person who, you know, you'd see portraits of him on the walls of, you know, priests and pastors in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Mexico, you name it. But I think one of the most important things that he started to do as the country was tipping towards civil war in, you know, the very end of the 1970s, early 1980, before he was assassinated, was every Sunday in his sermon, he would dedicate the final part of his sermon to essentially deliver a kind of human rights bulletin, because at that moment in time, there were disappearances, there were killings, there was torture. You know, all of these things were happening at the hands of the government, and there wasn't a kind of clear way of even registering what was going on, who was being disappeared. And people would begin to come to him to share some of the facts that they would learn, either of loved ones or of people. They interacted with the person who is the kind of principal figure in my book book, a truly special man named Juan Romagosa, who was actually a family friend of Romero's growing up, and a kind of incredible thing, was a medical student. And there was one moment when he, during his medical residency, was operating in a surgical ward in a. In a hospital just outside of San Salvador, and a student protester was wheeled in who had been gunned down in the middle of a protest, and they performed an emergency surgery on him. He comes out of the surgery. It's successful. Juan, my subject, is sitting next to him in the hospital room as he's coming out of this surgery, and he hears the marching of Salvadoran National Guardsmen coming down the long hallway. They burst through the door and open fire and kill this student. Juan is hiding under the bed. The bullet casings are pinging off the floor next to him. And he saved one of those bullet casings and brought it early the next morning to Romero at his church in San Salvador. And I would encourage anyone to listen. The Romero trust actually has all of Romero's sermons, you know, digitized, and in many cases, the actual audio of them, which is an incredibly moving thing. Even if your Spanish is shaky, you can just hear the fervor in his voice, and you can hear, I mean, people burst into spontaneous applause. It's an extraordinarily moving experience to listen to.
- [55:51]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I was really moved reading about it, and then I went on a Romero deep dive because it was. I just, I was under the impression. Impression that he was, like, a lefty liberation theologist. Right. Like, growing up as conservative Catholic. It's just like that was kind of what was. And that's why I thought he was famous throughout the region and he had friends who were. And it's, you know, reading about your book and elsewhere, and it's, like, interesting to, like, kind of see him as, like, not being the person who was, like, a movement activist but was thrust into it so passionately, and then he ends up getting killed. It's just. It's a. It's a really moving story, his life. So I appreciate you. I want to go way deep on el. I'm sure El Salvador will be back in the news soon enough, and so we can have you back. Does that sound good?
- [56:31]
Jonathan Blitzer
I look forward to it. I look forward to it.
- [56:33]
Tim Miller
All right, everybody. Thanks to Jonathan Blitzer.
- [56:35]
Imran Ahmed
Go get the book.
- [56:35]
Tim Miller
Everyone who is going is here. Up next, Imran Ahmed.
- [56:56]
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- [57:57]
Tim Miller
All right, we are back. He is the founder and CEO of the center for Countering Digital Hate, it's Imran Ahmed. And the Trump administration is not too fond of him, and I want to talk to him about that. How you doing, buddy? Happy New Year.
- [58:10]
Imran Ahmed
Happy New Year to you, too. It's been an interesting week or two.
- [58:13]
Tim Miller
Sounds like it. So for folks who haven't seen this, here's my brief backstory. Then I want to hear you tell us exactly what happened. But just before Christmas, you were one of five Europeans barred from the United States by the State Department. Marco Rubio said all five of you are trying to, quote, coerce American platforms to censor American viewpoints they oppose. This is based on your work at the center for Countering Digital Hate. You're married to American citizen. Have American kid live here. That's, I guess, the gist. Why don't you explain to everybody what exactly happened and anything I missed there?
- [58:43]
Imran Ahmed
That's pretty much the whole story. When it comes to the government, all we've really heard is a press release and then a few tweets from a relatively junior political appointee which said that I was one of the five. In the original press release, they hadn't mentioned my name and cue enormous confusion on our side because the explanation they had was initially that, you know, they, they sort of trail this a little bit. They said the European Commission find X. And so we're going to take action against Europeans, but I'm British and we're not in the European Union after Brexit. So I thought, well, that can't be right. This must be nonsense. And then they said they're going to take revenge on comp. On organizations that had caused X a headache. And I thought, well, I thought Elon Musk wasn't popular anymore in Washington. And I mean, that is First Amendment protected advocacy. That's exactly what the First Amendment is there to do is to allow people like me, a fairly innocuous researcher and advocate from Washington, to speak truth to the most powerful and richest man on the planet. So really the last two weeks has just been a state of eh.
- [59:56]
Tim Miller
Yeah. So I want to talk about that advocacy to explain to folks, but just like, like on the basics of the legal standing, are you concerned that they might. And I guess a judge has blocked their efforts to detain you. But I mean, did you go through a period where you're concerned that you might be detained and deported or what have you heard from the federal government? Where are you at in that? Just on the basics of what's happening?
- [60:19]
Imran Ahmed
Yes, we were very worried that I Would as other green card holders who have been targeted for. For cancellation of their Greek cards and deportation. Typically, the playbook for the administration has been to detain them violently and to transfer them to a favorable jurisdiction, usually Louisiana, where they've got favorable courts and a favorable circuit. And, you know, to have the pictures of someone in chains and. Well, A, that would be gross, grotesquely disproportionate and B, it would be, I mean, just insane. So I got in touch with my attorneys and luckily enough, because they'd been trailing this in the press, we put together a team of attorneys. So we had Roberta Kaplan, Robbie Kaplan, one of the best trial attorneys in America.
- [61:13]
Tim Miller
Chris Clark, she's been on the show. Yeah, she's great.
- [61:15]
Imran Ahmed
She's amazing. And she defended us in a court case with Elon Musk, which I'm sure we will come on to. But Chris Clark, Norm Isen from Democracy Defenders and the ACL advising as well. And we filed on Christmas Eve in the Southern District of New York for a temporary restraining order stopping the government from arresting or detaining me. And that was granted, actually, just shortly after midnight on Christmas Day. So literally the best Christmas present I could have wished for.
- [61:48]
Tim Miller
And this just came out of nowhere for you. Were you expecting that the administration might target you had you heard anything from the State Department? And it's pretty crazy that just like out of nowhere you see a news story and hear a statement that the government might be trying to revoke your green card.
- [62:04]
Imran Ahmed
Look, it's shocking, isn't it, to be with your family and then to be rushing into court. When I heard about it, I was prepping my lamb recipe for Christmas Day because my in laws were in town from Oklahoma and I wanted to do my famous roast potatoes and my famous shoulder of lamb, but no, that I didn't get to do that. So it was shocking, but it's not surprising. And the reason why it wasn't surprising is because we faced as a nonprofit that studies social media platforms that identifies when they create harm, that studies AI platforms increasingly these days as well. And we look at the harms on an individual basis. So stuff like eating disorder content and self harm content for kids on a societal basis. So the spread of antisemitism and on a national, a sort of a political basis of the impact on our democracy as well of the unfettered, algorithmically accelerated spread of disinformation and hate and what that does to our democracy, what that does to the values that underpin our democracy. We know that that incurs the Wrath of some very powerful people. So Elon Musk has sued us before, and we beat him in court. He has a particular problem with me. He keeps calling me a rat and calling us evil on his platform and has targeted us again and again. So it wasn't that surprising, because the truth is that we've realized that the cost of us doing our advocacy has actually been some really insane responses from some of the most powerful people in the world.
- [63:44]
Tim Miller
Truly crazy that these supposed free speech absolutists were motivated to go for Donald Trump because of their concerns about threats to free speech, are literally trying to deport somebody with an American kid and wife and a green card because of their free speech, because of their advocacy. And it's just almost too preposterous to even point out. But we must talk just about. For people who don't know, what exactly was it that caused Elon's ire?
- [64:11]
Imran Ahmed
Well, the really simple reason is that we actually did a study when he took over the platform. Now, he said when he took it over that if you had unfettered hate speech on the platform, it would become a hell scam. And we said, well, yes, you're right. Let's go and check if that's actually happening. So we did a very simple study where we looked at how many times are the most offensive terms against African Americans, against Jewish people, against LGBTQ people being used on his platform. And we found, for example, that the N word, the use of it, tripled globally on his platform after he took over. Now, that research was on the front page of the New York Times. It led to him losing $100 million, he said, in advertising. His Trust and Safety Council resigned because of the article. He said there was a whole bunch of business reactions to it. He actually didn't sue us for defamation. He sued us because he said, the act of doing research on my platform is illegal under the terms and conditions of my platform. And we. He took us to court in California. He wanted $10 million. What he actually got was the case dismissed in the first instance. A scathing ruling by the judge saying, you are using lawfare to try and silence the First Amendment rights of a nonprofit organization that's holding you accountable. And the. The. The court actually US costs. They gave us a slap ruling. So, you know, Elon doesn't take slaps in the face very well.
- [65:30]
Tim Miller
Your organization, your advocacy is, you know, encouraging the platforms to do what?
- [65:35]
Imran Ahmed
Yeah, so in our. I mean, we call the center for Countering Digital Hate. Tim, because when I started the organization, six, seven, Years ago. It was in the wake of the very rapid rise of anti Semitism on the political left in the uk And I'd been a Special advisor in the British Parliament to the Shadow Foreign Secretary, he's currently the Northern Ireland Secretary, a guy called Hillary Benn. And I was so horrified by what I was seeing. The rapid rise of this digital anti Semitism, but also then the assassination of my colleague Jo Cox, who was a mother of two, by a far right terrorist in the uk. But actually since then, we've looked at a whole array of different harms, whether it's been, you know, eating this sort of content online, the stuff that really hurts our boys. So body image stuff and encourage them to use steroids. We've looked at AI platforms. We just recently did a study showing.
- [66:29]
Tim Miller
The Lux Max thing. You're not good with the ads telling teen boys to put a hammer to their jaw so they can have a better jawline.
- [66:37]
Imran Ahmed
I mean, we studied the world's biggest Incels forum. We downloaded 1.2 million posts. We built a custom LLM to go and look at what they were talking about. We, we, we actually found that the feeder forum for, in for this Incels forum was a looksmaxing forum. So the guys that set up this Incels forum set up a looksmaxing forum too, which if you Google the term looks maxing was that it was like the number two result on Google. So young boys are being encouraged to believe that their body isn't good enough, that their face isn't good enough. They Google looks maxing, they go onto this forum and then they, then they transition from there into an incels forum forum. This Incels forum we found had some of the, I mean this is not a very nice topic to talk about. This is kind of my job. You know, they were having a debate in the year worth of posts that we looked at over whether or not pedophilia was an acceptable way of getting sex. And they decided it was. So they changed their rules from you're not allowed to sexualize children. You're not allowed to sexualize prepubescent children. Now what we were doing there was identifying a real threat to young women all over the country, all over the world. Because these guys were thousands of them from all over the world, but primarily American, but you know, again, present in, in every country you can think of. So this is kind of important work that needs to be done by someone that honestly the platforms themselves should be doing. Like what we're essentially doing is red teaming them because they're too lazy and feckless, and they don't bear the consequences of the costs that they impose on the rest of society when they fail to do their jobs, fail to enforce their rules, when their algorithms amplify the most pernicious content, the most dangerous stuff. So we're having to do that for them and then encouraging lawmakers to take up the problem. And we've been really successful in doing that. Here's the irony, Tim. When I moved to America, it was the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, that identified how useful we could be. So I worked with them, with Pompeo, with Ilan Carr at the State Department on antisemitism. I appeared on stage with them. I received an O1, an alien of extraordinary ability visa from the Trump administration for my work on identifying these kinds of harms to our society in terms of increasing hate, in terms of hurting our kids. And I've been doing that work without problems until the advent of big tech, big money, and the influence they've had in Washington in recent years, where they're really fighting back against the movement for accountability.
- [69:11]
Tim Miller
You're telling the story. It's hard to look at this any other way, as basically, they're trying to deport you for your speech as a favor to Elon. That's it. As a favor to Elon, who's the biggest donor to the campaign. That's what's happening. You were working with these guys and the last time, and now they want to deport you.
- [69:27]
Imran Ahmed
I think that's almost certainly true. And he calls himself a free speech absolutist, which makes it so frustrating. I'm very British. I try very hard not to be grandiose about these things. But I do not think there is a better example right now than my case of the hypocrisy of the censorship narrative that's been pushed by people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and others, because they claim that people holding them accountable is censorship. They claim that criticism of them is censorship de facto. And it's been taken up by some politicians who, frankly, do know better, because I don't think that any of these people aren't smart. I think they're very, very smart, well educated people, many of them lawyers themselves, who understand what censorship really is, which is where the state uses a threat of overwhelming force to force you to be silent. And what we do is advocacy, which is classic First Amendment protected work. What the government is doing right now, threatening me with deportation for my advocacy, that is classic censorship. And I do find it extraordinary that Elon Musk, who goes on and on about censorship, and I'm not saying he's a political genius or a philosophical genius, he's clearly not sure, but for him to go on about censorship and how he's being censored by nonprofits when he is cheering. When Rubio made his announcement, Elon went out, immediately, went, this is great, and then put heart emojis everywhere. And I'm thinking, well, you are a exposing yourself as an enormous hypocrite. And I hope it just, it quietens down all this censorship nonsense, because this is censorship, not advocacy.
- [71:15]
Tim Miller
I 100% agree with you on that. While I have you. Can we have maybe a slight disagreement for a second? Can we hash something out? I don't want you deported or banned from travel over this. I do wonder, though, as we sit here now and you kind of look back on that seven years of the work that your center has been doing, I'm having second thoughts about the whole disinformation, advocacy efforts and just what the emphasis on it should be. To me, it seems like obviously there's been a backlash to it. There's a period of time where having advocates send to Facebook and take down this, take down this is one big game of whack a molecule. And the result was it didn't really get rid of that much. And it did create a backlash against it that led us to today. And I think that a lot of, if you look at kind of whatever you call it at the bottom of a post, where you post a fact check underneath it, I'm skeptical of whether that has been that helpful. I'm wondering if you look back on any of this over the last seven years and you think about the strategies and things, think that maybe there are areas where things went a little overboard or areas where you might want to. You would do things differently.
- [72:27]
Imran Ahmed
I would completely agree with you. Let me split this up into three parts. So this first part is the stuff that we don't do, like fact checking and putting stuff underneath. And there's really. The reason we didn't do that was because there was really strong psychological research to show that fact checking doesn't work, that there's a backfire effect, that it actually can entrench the original belief. And there's a lot of work being done on how do we do that in a more effective way. There's inoculation theory. There's a guy called Sander van der Linden, which is an extraordinary name, but is real, at the University of Cambridge who runs their fake news unit. And he has done some cool stuff on that, but that's not our field. Yeah, there's a second bit which is the attempts that have been tried in good faith by people trying to deal with a different thing, which is not about individual bits of content, but about systems which systemically advantage wrong information, hate things that induce a powerful emotional reaction. And on platforms that reward emotional reaction with engagement, that, that systemically biases them towards actually amplifying. And, you know, platforms always choose what content wins and what content loses. It systemically biases them in favor of bad information. Now that's something that Zuckerberg himself acknowledged with a, a chart that he, he sort of showed that, you know, he plotted out like how bad content is, how violative it is, and how much engagement it gets. And it showed that the lower. You know, it's only when you get to the edge of being breaking their rules that engagement starts to really peak. And you will know this too, because you have to advertise and market this. You know, like, I hear you guys talking about it all the time. Like, you know, we have to put the headlines on there that are a little bit emotional reactive because they get the click.
- [74:15]
Tim Miller
I wish we didn't have to put my Mr. Beast face on the YouTube videos. Okay, I would rather not. But just. It is what it is.
- [74:23]
Imran Ahmed
But we all know it's true. And so like. And sure, you guys have tried to weaponize those, that algorithmic fact, the way that these platforms work now, we've tried lots of different things to deal with that. And what we've settled on as an organization is exposing the ways in which the algorithmic bias, this is causing real world harm to people and then putting the question to people, well, how can we use transparent? So CCDH's policy platform from the very beginning has been what we call the STAR framework. So we said that better platforms are transparency. So transparency of the algorithms, transparency of how you enforce your content decisions. You know, if you're going to remove content, tell someone why. If you're not going to remove content, tell them why. Accountability. So there needs to be bodies that can ask tough questions and get real answers. And that was in part looking at those Senate hearings where, you know, people would go up and ask about finsters and everyone would roll their eyes and go, oh my God, that guy literally has never used the Internet.
- [75:22]
Tim Miller
Yeah, right.
- [75:23]
Imran Ahmed
And then responsibility, which is that if you cause harm to someone, you should have to bear the cost for it. And that negligence law is a fundamental aspect In American law. I mean, clearly I'm British. When I moved to America, yeah, I.
- [75:37]
Tim Miller
Get a little bit nervous when I hear the British voice. I'm like, I don't want the cops coming in because they didn't like how mean my tweet was. All right, you know, that's the thing that gets me a little nervous.
- [75:46]
Imran Ahmed
But don't forget, British cops carry truncheons, not guns. So, you know, it's not that dangerous.
- [75:50]
Tim Miller
Even still. Even still, I don't know, it gets my backup when I start seeing some of the European speech laws. Gets my back up a little bit.
- [75:58]
Imran Ahmed
But when you move to America, you realize that basically it's a very litigious culture. And that's in part because of the way that your litigation system works, that if I sue you and I lose, you still have to bear your costs. That's not true in most of the rest of the world, where if. If I sue you and I lose, I have to pay your costs as well. So it's a disincentive to frivolous litigation. So America has a much more litigious culture. It's also how you have essentially, Europeans regulate, Americans litigate. And so actually a lot of positive change and accountability and better and more safety and everything else has happened because of the presence of a litigation culture. And what we said was, well, why is there only one industry that is free from the possibility of negligence law being applied? And in America, that's due to a very old piece of law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 1996. And there's a bipartisan effort to change that at the moment. Senator Graham's leading it in the Senate, but it's, you know, 10, 10 senators have signed up already, and we expect more to over the coming months. But, you know, that's what our platform was. So we said, look, don't deal with it at a content level. Deal with it as systems level. Stop having systems that cause real world harm because of the ways that they operate. And so, yeah, I think that you're right. I think some of the. The older ways of dealing with content itself were really, really counterproductive sometimes or ineffective, you know, at best. And what we actually have always looked at is the systems as an organization.
- [77:37]
Tim Miller
All right, as long as you're not coming to arrest me for shitposting Imran, we're on the same page, okay? Because that's core to my identity here as an American.
- [77:47]
Imran Ahmed
All right, yeah, look, being an asshole is a fundamental human rights of anyone and Being shown to be an asshole. The question is freedom of speech versus freedom of reach, right?
- [77:59]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [78:00]
Imran Ahmed
And I think that that's something that Elon's acknowledged when he bought Twitter, he said, like, we want to give freedom of speech to everyone, but not freedom of reach to people. So we're going to max down rank their stuff. That's not what's happened in practice. You know, Mark Zuckerberg's talked about it, everyone's talked about it. So I think we're all sort of in the same space here. The question is, they've all said that this is a problem, but they don't do anything about it. And what we are very good at is providing the evidence that they're failing to do something about it.
- [78:26]
Tim Miller
It.
- [78:27]
Imran Ahmed
And that's what pisses them off, is that we're actually really good at showing evidence of how their claims are actually lies.
- [78:37]
Tim Miller
This can be really important. And reforms on the systems are going to be really important. As it gets way more complicated with AI, I hope we have a chance to keep talking about it and that you're able to be here in our country with your family. Any thoughts and next steps? How's your wife and kid dealing with all this?
- [78:53]
Imran Ahmed
My wife is really robust. So she sent me a note on the. On Christmas Eve as I was heading out to court and to speak to my lawyers, and it said, I love you. These people.
- [79:09]
Tim Miller
Hell yeah, she's from Oklahoma, Tim.
- [79:13]
Imran Ahmed
Like, this is. She's American.
- [79:15]
Tim Miller
American Mama Grizzly is what we call that. Yeah, that's good. Good. I guess in Oklahoma it'd be more like, I don't know, what is the predator of the Oklahoma plains? I'm not sure listeners can suggest.
- [79:27]
Imran Ahmed
My wife scares me.
- [79:29]
Tim Miller
Please keep us posted on this case. Is there anywhere people can go to help support, advocate what you're dealing with?
- [79:36]
Imran Ahmed
Yeah, look, CounterHate.com is our website and if you are able donate.comterhate.com is somewhere where you can help us make sure that we can beat this and that we can continue to advocate, continue to put out research and continue to engage in what is the most important debate in America today, which is what do we do about social media platforms not dealing with content, but dealing with systems and accountability.
- [79:56]
Tim Miller
All right, that's Imran Ahmed. Fuck these people going after you. Appreciate you very much. Appreciate Jonathan Blitzer as well for being on the show. What a show. We'll be back tomorrow with one of your old faves. See you all then. Peace.
- [80:14]
Imran Ahmed
You very, very much.
- [80:18]
Tim Miller
Cause we hate what you do, and we hate your whole crew, so please don't stay inside. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.