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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
Foreign It's Thursday, May 14, 2026, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Happy Huntavirus Thursday. So let's get this virus right. You've been hearing humans can't really pass the virus on to other humans, especially not in close contact. But you need some mouse, and not any mouse. You need a specific mouse. We got some of these mice out west, but it's the Argentinian mice. He leaves behind certain things, certain legacies that cause the Junta virus. It is his pee pee and it is poo poo. And how do you get the Junta virus mice poo poo pee pee. That is what the UC San Francisco doctor in a lab coat says in the very first video that came up when I looked at Hunter Virus human
- [00:48]
Franklin Foer
transmission Humans are not reservoir for hantavirus infection. They can get infected by exposure to deer mice, but they're unable to pass. They do not pass the disease from human to human. There's no there have been no documented cases of human to human transmission from hantavirus infection.
- [01:05]
Mike Pesca
Turns out that video from 2013 was wrong. Wrong. Here's the New York Times headline today. Hunter virus doesn't spread easily, but officials may be downplaying risks. The virus is clearly far less contagious than the coronavirus, scientists agree. Even that guy whose maybe opinion shouldn't count. But they have found cases where it is spread among people without direct contact. You have to be in close contact with someone who has a lot of symptoms, say, says Dr. J. Bhattacharya, quoted in the New York Times. But that doesn't seem to comport with the biggest study where in Argentina dozens of dozens of people fell ill after being in contact and sometimes not close contact with other people. Now we should note that none of the 82 health workers who cared for patients during that incident became infected, even though many of them did not wear protective gear. Which seems stupid, but there was a big spreader event and a guy goes to a birthday party, 100 guests there. He leaves after an hour and a half. And then within three weeks of that event, five people at the party become ill. One of them dies. His wife most likely passed the virus on to 10 people at his wake. So six of the 34 cases in the outbreak had no direct contact with those who were ill. And one seems to have been infected at the time, says after simply saying hello. Or as they say in Argentina, hola. As they cross paths, I'm wondering if the exasperations the oh and the la are Worse than the hello, I would think. Maybe the hello is more exhaling. Now, some caveats with the survey. It hasn't been replicated, but okay, that doesn't mean it didn't happen the one time. You don't want to have to replicate it a couple times. It's not like you can infect a bunch of people at a party with Hunter virus and see what happens. So not replicated means there hasn't been another big one like this that we know of. But then again, outbreaks happen pretty rarely. Also, maybe you just want to take the study with a grain of salt because it was written by Argentinians and they don't wear protective gear when they are dealing with Hunter virus. So now I think we should say something like, it is mostly true that humans can't pass it on without direct contact, but there seem to be cases where it can. The Times quotes the head of the W H O Tedros Adenon Gabriel, says who says that it's very difficult to explain to people, okay, this is the exception. This is the norm. When you say the exception, they still might think that it's something frequently happening as well. Oh, so in other words, the biggest problem with trying to tell you something accurate about Hunter virus is that we're all idiots. When we say something rarely happens, we think it means it happens all the time. When we say something is normal, maybe we hear, oh, that's totally abnormal. You know? Public communications experts in the field of epidemiology often seem thwarted by their belief that human beings have a mouse like understanding of words. So we got to get some things wrong in what we say because the people who are ostensibly trying to save for some reason are idiots and don't understand really shallow complexities of could or might. When we say, don't cross the street in heavy traffic, you might get hit on. Obviously, most people will say, I'm definitely getting hit, or there is no way I'm getting hit. All right, forget traffic. Wear your seatbelt. Right. If your car is hit. Oh, okay, so you're saying my car is getting hit. No, I'm saying on the rare chance your car is hit. So you're saying it's definitely not getting hit. Listen, if this is your view of human beings, why would you want to get into a field trying to save them? I think calling the herd with this particular type of species might be what it's called for. And we heard a lot of this thinking during COVID We got to simplify the mask message because people don't understand. Could and might or knows and cover or outside and greatly reduces risk. People don't understand six feet apart because if we said the probably more accurate three, well, for some reason that's twice as confusing as six. And who knows what twice means really? Why side with the people over the mice? Why side with the people over the mice feces if this is what you think of the people? Anyway, the University of San Francisco still has that video up and the US where the top health official is Jay Bhattacharya is still getting it a little wrong. Luckily, the US has quit the WHO where the top health official is Tedros Adnan Gabriel, who is also getting it wrong. I'd say they could get it right. If anyone actually knew the definition of could, which is before listening to the greatest experts in communication, I thought a fairly easy concept to grasp. On the show today, details of sexual abuse in Israeli prison. But first, Franklin Foer is back. He's talking about his Atlantic article purged. And then in most of this part of the interview, we'll talk about the big book he wrote about Joe Biden. I wanted to and beforehand I said, is it all right if I ask you some of these questions, maybe even some harsh questions? And Frank speaking said, have at it, which is what you should do if you want your answers to be understood. Anyway, I kind of said to myself, all right, how should I ask these questions? I'm not going to be unfair. I think I'll ask the questions in the mode of a fair critic or in the mode of someone who chronicled more of Biden's decline than Frank did in his book. So put myself in the mindset of Jake Tapper or Alex Thompson, and I asked the questions and I think you'll benefit from his answers. Frank 4 up next, If your team's communications are messy, customers feel it. Mixed messages, drop threads, slow replies. Ugh. Ugh. Right? That's how you lose momentum. That's why today's episode is brought to you by. Quo spelled Quo, the business communication system built so you never miss a call. So a little about Quo. It's the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews. It works quotas wherever you are, right from your phone or computer, you keep your existing number and just add teammates and minutes and sync with your CRM and let the call routing handle itself as you scale. If you're running a business, you get it and you get how vital this is. Quo isn't just a phone system, it is a smart system. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try quo for free plus 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/gist that's quo.com/gist this is the time of year that makes me rethink my closet. I want to pare it down. Fewer things, better things. It should all be quality, well made, easy to wear. It's why I keep coming back to quints. The fabrics are elevated, the fits are thoughtful. The pricing makes sense. The high quality everyday essentials using premium materials like 100% European linen and their insanely soft flow knit activewear fabric. The best part is that their prices are 50 to 60% less than similar brands. I would say even lesser brands, right? I mean brands that you think are good. Then you wear quince and you're like oh my God this feels great and fits great. I will tell you now about a sweater that I have that I love that is so much my go to that I've had to order a couple of more quint items just to not keep wearing this quint sweater. It looks great, it feels great and I wear it probably too much and it hasn't broken down. No pilling. Refresh your wardrobe with quince go to quince.com/the gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada. To go to Queen C E.com/The Gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/The Gist One great podcast that talks about everything we're going through in our democracy through a constitutional lens is the Oath in the Office. I've been on it. I listened to it. It's hosted by bonafide constitutional scholar Corey Brettschneider, past Just guest and Sirius XM host John Fugal, saying, here's a tip. Future Just guest and the show, which always ranks in Apple's top five in government, has featured guests like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and journalist Dahlia Lithwick and Justice Stephen Breyer and me, Mike Pesca in that company. Smart, accessible, focused on power. Listen to the oath in the office wherever you get your podcast. Also on YouTube with full video episodes every. And now we're back with Franklin Foer, who is the author of the article Purged, in which he details cuts to the civil service and different layers of government bureaucracy in places where it would seem like we definitely need them. Now with some of the cuts, I said to myself, I don't know, maybe we could in fact get along with 8% fewer food inspectors. And I Am quite sure the people may making the cuts didn't really weigh that possibility. If we could or couldn't, perhaps to some extent they were just targeting people who worked in sectors where they didn't care about victims. Maybe the doctor in charge of Mpoke, the people doing the cutting, said, oh, who gets that? Gay men. We don't care about them. But I do think with a couple of these cuts, even Russell Vogt, or someone who was like Russell Vogt times 10, the orchestrator of the cuts, would want in place, say, a tsunami warning system. So my question to you, Frank, is if you fire the person in charge of overhauling the nation's tsunami warning system, are you saying we don't need this? Are you saying we're not going to overhaul the system, or are you saying we'll eventually get a new person on a better, more logical timeframe? Give me in any way the logic of firing that person and what you plan to do next.
- [11:41]
Franklin Foer
So I think that that falls into the bucket where they're just kind of involved in creative destruction that they figure you can. It's the argument that you were making before, it's that this government is never going to reform itself and we just need to bludgeon it into submission. And that means that we're going to have to just fire bullets in every which way. People will get strafed and we'll be able to consolidate and will be able to something like that. You know, the woman who was the project manager and reinventing this thing. Well, you know, we, we do have, you know, we'll still have some tsunami warning systems in place, and it's just not going to modernize at, at the pace that we would have hoped it would have modernized before.
- [12:32]
Mike Pesca
And finally, what I'm looking for is I don't know how you're going to do this. I mean, what you do is a great shot across the bow. And in terms of making people care, people connect through people. So 50 portrait, 50 stories. If you care enough to listen to this interview or read the Atlantic, you're activated on a human level. But there needs to be some systemic review. And I'm sure that it will never be trusted by the people who were fans of the Doge cuts. But how do you know if that's going on? How do you even begin to account for exactly what is lost?
- [13:09]
Franklin Foer
Yeah, I don't, I don't. They're like, there's the Partnership for Public Service, which tracks all of this. And I think it's very hard to come up with an accurate tally. There are lots of people who are involved in Project 2020 Nines, which is how do you rebuild government in the aftermath of all this? I don't think that there's any, you know, I think.
- [13:32]
Mike Pesca
I didn't hear about Project 2029. Are we going to do these every four years? Yeah, we got a 33 and a 37 in the hopper.
- [13:39]
Franklin Foer
We will. And. But I think, you know, I mourn what's lost. That's what this. I mean I did, I produced this as kind of a dirge for the government. That was. And the interesting question moving forward is not how do we hire all these people back? How do we recreate exactly what we had before? I think the interesting project is, is that what's going to have to emerge is going to require, if we want to do some of these things, if we view the government as kind of as an essential implement of the collective will. How do you create something that actually doesn't require as many bodies as we once had? How do you create something that uses technology in creative ways? Because everything, every other part of our society is going to be using AI to do creative things. It's not necessarily my preference but because I, I'm somebody who's kind of char. I mean I was not just charmed. I mean I think like something like the fact that we have the National Geodetic Survey, which was something that I didn't know that it existed before, which is that we had a crew of people who would go out and they would do. They were surveyors, they would survey the coast because the coast, George Washington was. Yeah, the coast was always changing. That GPS, it turns out, is inaccurate because the globe wobbles as it turns and we need to make these subtle corrections. Maybe there's a way to do all of that using mathematical models. Maybe we don't need human beings to go out and do that. In the same sort of way that I like that the government provides libraries and I like the fact that the government subsidizes museums. I also like the fact that we. This is more essential than probably any of those things altogether. I like that there were human beings that were going out and making sure that these things were done properly.
- [15:42]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. Maybe when all the self driving Tesla is drive into the sea because they think it's a road. Maybe, maybe. No, I'm going to say no. There will be no regrets even at that moment. Franklin Ford is a staff writer at the Atlantic. He is the author of the Last Politician Inside Joe Biden's White House. And you know what, that gives me the opportunity to invite him on for a couple more questions about Joe Biden covering Biden, covering his decline. Reflections on that. So when all the books or the book by Allen and Parness, the book by Tapper and Thompson came out and there was this raft of reporting, you know, after, after the debate and it was chronicled, what you say to yourself, did you say as a reporter I missed some of this or did you say what did you say?
- [16:32]
Franklin Foer
Yeah, I mean that's the first question I ask myself is like holy shit, was I, you know, was I bamboozled? Did I miss something for sure. That's the question that I asked myself at first. And as somebody who is, tends towards self flagellation on these questions like, and kind of I, I don't know if you're this type of way as kind of a reporter when somebody, whenever anybody says you get something wrong, my, my initial inclination is to be like oh shit, I got something wrong. And so I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about this and, and, and talking to people. And you know, I, I, I, what I saw when I was reporting on this book was not, you know, my book covered the first two years of the Biden presidency. And I, you know, for sure, like you're, you know, when you talk to people in the middle of a presidency, like the, the inclination is going to be to put the most, those sources are going to put the most positive spin on what they're seeing because this thing is in motion and it's an
- [17:43]
Mike Pesca
ongoing political, your job as a reporter
- [17:45]
Franklin Foer
is to kind of interrogate that and to sift it into and to check it. And during those first two years I just, I actually think that his turn largely happened. I mean this is good, it sounds self exculpatory, but if you read the Tapper book, his turn happened in his, like in his third and fourth years of his presidency. I didn't see, I knew he was old and his age was a theme of my book. And I think that a lot of what his, you know, I think his decline happened in public view. And I don't think that, I think that there is this inclination to kind of pin, you know, the disaster of the 2024 campaign, like is really to me it's like it's not, it's not so much like a scandal about reporting. It's a scandal about Democratic Party politicians not, not, not, not doing what was obvious. Right. And it was a scandal of the, the Biden, Biden family, Biden himself not making the selfless decision to step aside. I did not see in the first two years of this presidency evidence of a guy who was out to lunch. I saw evidence of a guy who was a terrible communicator, largely because of his age. I saw evidence of somebody who had kind of a cranky impatience that I think you could attribute to his age. I saw evidence and reported like, you know, he didn't have the stamina that he once had earlier in his career. But I didn't see any evidence that he was making bad decisions because he was old or that he wasn't cognitively with it.
- [19:43]
Mike Pesca
How much time did you have with him personally?
- [19:48]
Franklin Foer
You know, I had. I was able to go to two sessions with kind of groups of reporters. And in the first session that I had, which was kind of before, while I was reporting my book, I thought he was. I thought he was pretty sharp.
- [20:10]
Mike Pesca
2020.
- [20:11]
Franklin Foer
What was this 2020? Early, very early. 2023.
- [20:16]
Mike Pesca
Okay.
- [20:17]
Franklin Foer
As I was still writing. And then I went, how long was,
- [20:19]
Mike Pesca
how long was the session?
- [20:20]
Franklin Foer
Two hours.
- [20:21]
Mike Pesca
And how many other reporters were there?
- [20:24]
Franklin Foer
Three other reporters.
- [20:25]
Mike Pesca
Okay.
- [20:27]
Franklin Foer
And then the one that I went to six months later, like, I, you know, it was an off the record session. And I thought that he was like, there. He was, he was patchier. Like, for sure that there was a part of it that, where I thought he didn't know how to answer. Like, he was. And it's not so much that he was. It's not that he was, he was, he wasn't with it. He was just like, meandering. And then there was part of it when he was talking about foreign policy where I thought he was really sharp. So.
- [21:00]
Mike Pesca
But it was, it probably wasn't so disparate from what we saw in public. No, he had all those qualities.
- [21:06]
Franklin Foer
Not at all. It was exactly, it's exactly what you saw in public, where I thought, you know, the, the thing that he cared about most, foreign policy. I could see the wheels turning in a way that I actually found kind of genuinely impressive. And then when he was answering a question about economics, he was talking about Jesse Helms's funeral in a way that I thought was kind of, you know, politically malpractice. And, you know, but, but I don't think that that's. Again, I don't think it's that different from what everybody else saw.
- [21:41]
Mike Pesca
Right. So here's a quote from James Jamie Kirchik, and it's interesting. I told you beforehand I'd read you this quote, but after what you just said, I have a different interpretation. Given how much the press valorizes itself for defending democracy, its dereliction of duty regarding Biden's infirmities is a massive failure. To be sure, the Biden White House didn't make things easy for reporters. It's no coincidence that the two journalists granted the most access to Biden, Evan Osnos of the New Yorker and Franklin for of the Atlantic overlook the biggest story of his presidency. But lack of access is no excuse. So I just want to say, before I give you a chance, you wrote a scathing analysis about how Biden will always be remembered for not defending democracy to address the first part of that quote, but also, and I'll let you answer this, even if you were and Osnos were granted the most access, what you laid out is it was almost no access, so direct access. So to me, this is a story of press management as much as it is of even when Grant that the people granted access fell down on the job. But I want you to address that quote.
- [22:51]
Franklin Foer
Well, I think there's. There's like a third. There's a third element of this, which is he made a catastrophic decision to run for reelection. And there's so much anger at him. I feel that anger at him that there's kind of this tendency to retroactively want to punish him and to kind of flog him to the hilt. And I think that it's a story of press management, but I also think that there are various people who, when I interviewed them, didn't tell me stories about whatever Joe Biden sleeping in meetings when I asked them about questions about his age. And then afterwards, when there's kind of not just no cost, but it was kind of a. Like a form of virtue signaling almost to kind of demolish the guy, they. They suddenly emerge with these stories.
- [23:50]
Mike Pesca
And so the very same people, you're saying, the very same people who might clearly have been off the record sources in Tapper's book or even have been on the record. Yeah, afterwards.
- [24:00]
Franklin Foer
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [24:03]
Mike Pesca
When in the Wall Street Journal Linsky and Siobhan Hughes came out with that story, it was in June of 2024. Behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping. It was controversial in the media because they didn't have anyone on the record saying this except his political enemies like conservatives. And that article got blasted for poor journalism. What do you think of the article at the time?
- [24:28]
Franklin Foer
I wasn't. I wasn't sure because it, it just didn't. It again, like you, you know, I basically stopped reporting on this like about a year before. And, and so what I knew just didn't mesh with what they had reported. And so I was, I, it's not that I dismissed it in its entirety, but I was, I was somewhat skeptical.
- [24:58]
Mike Pesca
And there's another interesting thing which is you can see a set of. And let's also note that it's a different time frame, but one can observe a set of patterns. And if those patterns are being described by, you know, a large apparatus up there to prop up Biden and some, maybe cynically or some honestly and the pat. And the patterns are something like bad verbal dexterity. Sure is 86. So not as sharp as he was at 74. But they prime you for looking at this with perhaps excuses or in a way that tends to credit everything you're seeing as understandable, then maybe that affects your reporting. But if you look at the same patterns and see what his Republican opponents would see, which is this is just a guy who doesn't have it and that also can affect your reporting. And I guess it's very hard for a reporter to see through that and to see the basic truth that cuts through what the spin is on how to interpret, you know, human interaction and just the way someone says something, the way someone reacts to a question.
- [26:03]
Franklin Foer
For sure, there's all that. And then there's also, I think it's necessary separate out the questions, which is that the question of like, was he too old to be president at the time? And then was he too old to run for reelection and be president for a second term? And I think that the second, the answer to the second question is like, clearly not right. He was not. He was not. But to answer the first question, I don't think that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that he didn't have the mental acuity to be president in the first term. I don't think that other than the fact that he was a terrible salesman for his own policies, which is, is a dereliction of duty. Right. That is, that's an important requirement of the job of presidency. I didn't see him making. I didn't see him. I didn't see his age. I still haven't seen a whole lot of evidence that his age prevented him from doing his job in, in terms of protecting the national interest or, or looking after the common good. I spent a lot of time in 2024 doing a piece about the diplomacy after October 7th, and I did, you know, it's, it's subtle. Is this is like a subtle sign of decline, which is that when I would talk to. To people, not just American officials, but people in the Middle East, I never, I never heard anybody say, like, he was out of it, that he wasn't able to kind of do the job. But I did notice, and this is very subtle, like I did notice that there were moments where earlier in the story, after October 7th, he was omnipresent. And then I noticed him kind of recede a little bit as we got closer to the middle of 2024. And that. That set off some kind of alarm bells for me just as I was thinking it through. And especially in retrospect, as I kind of internalizing all of these other things, like there was a way in which he was just leaning on AIDS in a way that he wasn't leaning on them before.
- [28:10]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. Because, I mean, right after October 7th, he flies there, he does many press appearances. He essentially gives an ikbin iron Israeli speech.
- [28:19]
Franklin Foer
Yeah.
- [28:20]
Mike Pesca
And that was. Huh. I would say when you say you didn't see evidence, there's this absence of evidence thing. But compelling to me was how he took his eye off the ball of immigration. And what Michael Bennett said to Tapper and Thompson, which is early on, it was clear that this was an issue we had to address and we just didn't. And I couldn't get. I never understood why. I never understood if they have a philosophy. Now, look, there are 100 people between the president and the decision about what you're going to do for immigration. But Bennett saying that, I don't think he's talking his own book. He's essentially a pretty big ally of Biden, to me, was just honestly saying there was a lacuna there. And you can say that the gap is explained by mental acuity. You could also say that it's explained by people in the administration who didn't want to go as hard as they eventually did. Just a little bit. Go ahead.
- [29:24]
Franklin Foer
Because I did reporting on this. And what I found was that early in the administration, he, he hated the issue of immigration.
- [29:33]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [29:33]
Franklin Foer
It pissed him off. And so when it came to a lot of these questions, and he'd staffed his administration with people who didn't agree with him on these issues. And so there was. There was this perpetual clash between people asking him to adjudicate things in a direction that he didn't like on an issue that he considered to be political poison. And what I found was that he would just get rip about this. AIDS would then kind of avoid him on certain things. But it was so hard to have a discussion with him about this issue because of that fundamental tension. And I document this in my book and it was, it was, it doesn't reflect well on him because. Right, but I didn't think it was a question of age as much.
- [30:24]
Mike Pesca
You're saying there's no difference. You could not tell a difference between how the 66 year old Biden would have handled that and the. Whatever he was 84 at the time. Year old Biden would have handled that.
- [30:32]
Franklin Foer
No, I'm sure there is a difference. But I think that being. It's. But it's different saying like you're somebody is kind of cranky and cantankerous and, and like. And just not willing to, to engage on something that he, he views as kind of self defeating to himself and just can't find a way through. Maybe that is a question of mental acuity, but it's not him falling asleep at a meeting and it's not him. It's not him. It's not him having lack of command of an issue. I think he had, you know what his response would be to like get. He would get super angry at cabinet secretaries or aides and he would say, well, give me the data. And he would just, he would get stuck in the weeds of the data because. And get very angry about the data and kind of demand, demand. But it was in what I saw in the White House that was closer dysfunctional to me was that there was this constant response to his anger over these things and that his anger was so. Was pretty disruptive to policy processes, at least as it related to immigration.
- [31:50]
Mike Pesca
That was he angrier than he was 20 years ago as a senator, when
- [31:54]
Franklin Foer
I gather he was pretty angry as a senator.
- [31:59]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:00]
Franklin Foer
You know, he wasn't. He's not. The thing about him as a human being that makes him complicated is that he has both. He can be this total asshole and then he has these other moments of grace that he shows on people and that the staff around him has been there for so long that they, they kind of have. He is this domineering father figure to them. And I think that that makes it harder for them to see some of the aging things. The aging, aging issues as well because they have this fraught relationship with him.
- [32:37]
Mike Pesca
Frank, I can't thank you enough. That was very open, honest and illustrative. Thank you so much.
- [32:42]
Franklin Foer
Thank you.
- [32:50]
Mike Pesca
This is the time of year that makes me rethink my closet. I want to pare it down. Fewer things, better things. It should all be quality, well made, easy to wear. That's why I keep coming back to quints. The fabrics are elevated, the fits are thoughtful, the pricing makes sense. The high quality everyday essentials using premium materials like 100% European linen and their insanely soft flow knit activewear fabric. The best part is that their prices are 50 to 60% less than similar brands. I would say even lesser brands, right? I mean brands that you think are good. Then you wear quince and you're like oh my God this feels great and fits great. I will tell you now about a sweater that I have that I love that is so much my go to that I've had to order a couple of more quint items just to not keep wearing this quint sweater. It looks great, it feels great and I wear it probably too much and it hasn't broken down. No pilling. Refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to Q U I n c e.com the Gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the Gist Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find any anything suspicious like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away. All through text, phone, email or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com Spotify terms apply. We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask. Even in 2026. Enter how to the long standing Advice show an Ambie Award nominated Best Personal Growth Podcast. That's back with new episodes and a new host. And that here's the reveal. It's me, Mike Pesca. Each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond, with help from world class experts who actually know what they're talking about. Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session without the copay or awkward silence. No question is too big or too specific. Some topics how to protect the elderly from scammers, how to take psychedelics therapeutically, and of course, how to emigrate to the Netherlands as a throuple. You've got questions. We'll find the answers, so follow how to with Mike Pesca on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and now the spiel. Several people have asked me what I thought about that Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times, the one about rape and abuse of Palestinians in Israel prisons. I think it's serious and shameful, though there are key elements of it which I do question. I don't know if I question it as much as the Israelis do. Quote. Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against State of Israel in the modern press, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar have instructed the initiation of a defamation suit against the Times. Israel's Ministry of Foreign affairs wrote, they're not going to win. They have enormous burden there. There are some distortions in there. But before I get to those details, I do want to say that it is more than plausible. It almost certainly has happened that among the abuses of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli guards are inserting items into the anuses of these Palestinian prisoners, which is sodomy, which can be certainly considered sexual assault and which needs to stop. Many in Israel agree with that. But the man in charge of Israel's prisons, the National Security Minister, Edmar Ben Gvir, is not one of those. He, and we will get to him in a second, he is perhaps the biggest problem here. He has said that there needs to be a death penalty in Israel against terrorists and also, quote, it's before Ramadan and we are seeing routine activities of the prison service facing the murderous, despicable, cursed terrorists. What we have done here is historic, but we now need something else. Death to terrorists. They need to be executed by hanging, by injection, in an electric chair. The most important thing is to execute them. He does these in videos when he tours prisons which are reminiscent of the Kristi Noem videos at seacot. The Israeli prison officials trot out and throw around Palestinian detainees. To his sheer delight, he bangs on the door of a cell, saying, when this is heard, the prisoners inside will get in a prone position. Look, look. He invites the cameras in. And in fact, the Palestinian prisoners are head down on the ground. It is sickening. And for this person to have so much command over the Israeli prisons tells you something about the rot in those prisons. Now, as to what seems implausible, the very organization that puts forth the biggest critiques of the Israeli prisons, and some might be true, was started and is headed by a pro Hamas sympathizer. Quite clearly, after October 7th, this guy tweeted and there's a translation from the Arabic. Succeeding generations will remember you, the people who poured into Israel and killed 1200 and history will immortalize you as Knightley with a K. Nightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory, Said Remy Abdou. He's the founder of Euromed Monitor, which much of Kristof's reporting was based on. There have been a lot of attention paid to the idea of the Israelis using dogs to rape the palace Palestinians. And many people have looked into this and said this seems to be very, very difficult to believe because it seems impossible to extremely far fetched to document cases of dogs actually being trained to do this on command. Though there have been a couple of cases where dogs have engaged of course in bestiality with a person, sometimes with a person, a young child, their will. And the reason we know this about children is that on three cases medical journals have looked into allegations of sexual abuse where the child said no, it was a dog. And in those cases the investigators did confirm that dogs did do this to small children. It's very, very tough to think about, very tough to think of any country doing this, any people doing this to anyone else. But, but even any dog being trained to do this on command, not just randomly. I'm not ruling it out entirely, but like I say, it seems very, very hard to believe. Another portion of the story that rankled me was Kristof, in trying to burnish his credentials as someone who understands sexual assault, says this. I've had a career covering war, genocide and atrocities, including rape, some in places where the scale of sexual violence is far greater than anything committed by either Hamas militants or Israeli guards and settlers. In the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia a few years ago, a hundred thousand women may have been raped. Mass rape is now unfolding in Sudan. Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment. So this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit. Okay, so from reading that you'd say, well, we give money to lots of money to Israel, so this is why it's in our name. After Israel in 2022, the country that received the most money in US foreign aid, well after Ukraine first and Israel second, was Ethiopia. Israel got over $3 billion in foreign aid and Ethiopia got $2 billion. Now he does use the word security. American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment. And that's true. Our money goes to the Iron Dome and weapons systems and with Israel it goes to humanitarian aid. But come now, money is fungible. And the amount of money we give for one budget item means that you can, if you're the Ethiopian security forces that are alleged to have raped 10000 women in Tigray. You can use that for your war machine. Whenever I bring up the questions of what about Tigray? What about Sudan? What about Facier tableau wiping out of the Bantu population? What about Haditha? Certain kind of person will say, oh, you're just engaged in what about ism? No, I am engaged in pointing out to some extent that in war horrible things happen. Even not in war. If you were a New Yorker, you remember the case of Abner Louima, who was in fact sodomized by a New York PD officer. He least Volpe, Justin Volpe, did at least get sentenced to jail time. And that is not going on in Israel. In a second I will explain a little more about that. But the point is, in war, terrible things happen. And the countries that perpetrate those terrible things don't usually care that much, don't usually expend most of their energy trying to look inward. So when I said Haditha, did you immediately say, oh, that horrible situation where 24 mostly women and children were sprayed with gunfire, lined up against the wall and killed by U.S. marines? Maybe you did, but maybe you said, wait, which one was Haditha? That's my point. The countries that are perpetrating these war crimes don't often look inward. That is typical. And then to some extent to focus on Israel and to focus almost nothing on Tigray, which has a much greater death toll and a much greater rape toll and a quite similar accounts receivable toll in terms of United States largess. It is at least inconsistent. But the main point of my reaction to this was that Israel is doing wrong. They did in 2004 detain Israeli Reservist guards who were about to be charged with severely abusing a Palestinian detainee. And then what happened is that far right protesters and settlers and some lawmakers stormed the prison gates and and they drop those charges. There is no commitment to looking inward, which means in Israel there is a serious lack of what they need to do, which is looking forward. I do believe, because I have read a lot about what Ben GVIR has to say and his idiotic comrade Bezaleel Smotrich, that they have done more harm to Israel than all but four or five of the most competent Hamas commanders. When you read the ICJ set of charges against Israel for genocide, it is replete with some quotes that don't quite get there and some quotes from TV commentators which would be like charging the United States for war crimes based on something that Nick Fuente said. But it's full of quotes of Ben gvir. And the reason that the charges of genocide quote Ben GVIR is that Ben Gavir says legitimately genocidal things and he's not a very important player in the government, but he's in the government. And yes, we understand that this is a marriage of convenience where Netanyahu tries to appeal, although that's falling apart, tries to appeal to the far right. And we also understand that it is a function of Israel being democracy that you have these strange and sometimes disgusting bedfellows. But we also understand he does have high roles in the government, and the government and the country needs to be on the hook and responsible for this irresponsible man. One reason that Israelis always say that they're a good ally and they deserve America's favor is that they're very much like America. They're an open society, they're a democracy, they operate under rule of law. It's a natural ally for the United States values. Well, I say yes, I agree with the intent and sometimes, as in the case of past war crimes and the blind eye turned towards them, it is in fact analogous to the United States experience. But I also, as much as I agree with that as the aspiration, you have to look at the reality. And Israel needs to make these aspirations and attestations of being a progressive society. They actually need to make them true through deeds, which includes the ability to own up to their misdeeds and reform going forward. That's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. Michelle Pescus, COO of Peach Fish Productions. Ben Astaire is our booking producer. Kathleen Sykes, she does the GIST list. And Jeff Craig is our editor and producer for how to Improve G Peru Duparu. And thanks for listening.