Pentagon Covers Up Iran War Casualties

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Then one way that politicians sometimes try to humanize themselves or soften their public image is by getting a dog. You know, I don't need to tell you this. They're great. Companions, they're cute, they're cheaper than kids.

So we had FDR, he had his beloved Fala, Nixonette checkers. The Biden said those German Shepherd took care of biting everybody. I'm not sure about those guys. Yeah. I don't know about those ones either.

Ever seen a politician quite embrace their pet as lovingly as this. Let's watch. Voice that your decision to defect to one nation is dragging you further into a place of intolerance and racial discrimination. You're defending your leader, but are you really comfortable with where she is taking

you? Okay, that was an Australian politician named Barnaby Joyce, viewers in this guy before Ben. Yeah. No, that's the first.

Okay. He's a fan favorite. So he's a charming fellow. He's now a member of the right-winged one nation party but not long ago. He served as deputy prime minister of Australia, he's also leader of the National Party.

Ben, believe it or not, this is not the first time the Barnaby Joyce has declared his

love from man's best friend on national television. Check out this clip from 2015. The next issue, which is a gentleman by the name of John Christopher Dept, 51 years old, otherwise aka Jack Sparrow. And he's decided to bring into our nation two dogs.

Basically, he looks like he snuck them in. We found out he snuck them in because we saw them taking it to a poodle groomer. Now, Mr. Dept has to either take his dogs back to California or we're going to have to use the nasum. If we start letting movie stars, they'll be in a mysterious man alive twice to come into

“our nation then why don't we just break the laws for everybody?”

So it's time that pistol and boo dug it off back to the United States. Maybe if you threaten to kill dogs and TV, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to have one in the future. That's my idea. I'm not here to like defend giant app, but I'm here to defend pistol and boo.

That was a pretty hard swarve to nuke him. Do you remember this when this happened? I feel like there's a live feed of his apartment. I remember being the pandemic, but no, it was 2015. When I googled it, it was referred to, I guess, as the war on Terrier.

It's funny because I remember this pandemic too. I think any truly bizarre thing that involves like bringing stuff into a country, I just so see with the pandemic, but hopefully pistol and boo made it out alive. Yeah, no, I think they made it okay. I mean, what happens Johnny Depp wrote his dogs to Australia?

We did because the proper quarantine protocol, having been there recently, they take it quite seriously, but you probably don't need to threaten to kill them. You can probably just ask them nicely to leave. I think they're okay though. Also been in 2024, the Daily Mail ran a video of Joyce.

He was taking a phone call, he was on the street, he fell off a potted plant around midnight.

He landed on his back and then just lay there and did the phone call.

This is midnight in Canberra, and some bystander walk by and filmed it. And she said that she talked to the Daily Mail, and this is an actual line from the story that I wanted to read you. This is Barnaby Joyce's wife said her husband was not referring to her when he called

“someone a quote, "dead fucking seward," during the phone call, then she said, "I think”

he was calling himself one. He likes to self-flagulate." Yeah, sounds like a colorful guy, you know? Yeah. I'm not sure I'd bring him anywhere near positions of power and responsibility though.

No, no, I. Look, this started as a cold open on one funny video, and then I went way too deep on Barnaby Joyce because I missed a world cup. I should've been watching like Cabo Verde versus Switzerland, but instead I was YouTube being this asshole.

Yeah, I somehow, the algorithm is not feeding me Barnaby, but maybe now it will. And I'll get to keep up with his various vendetta's against animals and other living beings with any luck, with any luck. All right, we got a great show. We're going to cover the major escalation fighting between the US and Iran over the weekend.

There were multiple US casualties, accusations that the Pentagon is covering them up. And then a couple of signs this war could be escalating even further, so a lot of bad news on the Iran front. They were going to talk about a state department report on Cuba and how it's being used to smear and potentially target left-wing individuals and organizations all across the

country.

“We'll talk about politics in the prediction markets, like calcium and polymarket, the wildfires”

in Canada, and why Trump is punishing our neighbors to the north.

We'll get it to the first couple of actions by New British Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

And then we will end by taking the piss out of some right-wing candidates and organizations in the UK. Always fun, bud. You see, CPAC started in Britain. I know, with some funding coming from the Trump administration, too.

Oh, really? How much they come? They're new international aid budget includes some line items for like right-wing think tanks and places like Britain. Are you kidding me?

Glad to see we're on that side. Yeah. We're like zeroing out HIV/AIDS funding for kids. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. We'll give it a list of shots. That's great.

“Finally, you're going to hear my interview with Alexi Sorkin, he's from the Kiev independent.”

We talk about the security situation Ukraine. This recent series of massive ballistic missile strikes by the Russians on major cities across Ukraine. We'll talk about the latest on Ukraine's missile defense capabilities, including President Trump giving them a license to manufacture patriot missiles in Ukraine and to how long that

might take. Talk about the strikes by the Ukrainian side on Crimea on Russian oil and gas infrastructure. And then this major fallout from President Zelensky firing his defense minister, which led to huge protests in the streets. I should note, though, Ben, I spoke with Alexi before we learned that President Zelensky

had fired Aleksandr Searsky, who is the commander-in-chief of Ukrainian armed forces. So there's actually a huge development since I did that interview this morning. Yeah, not good to fire the defense minister and the commander when things seem to be going well too. It's politics in Ukraine are pretty volatile right now.

Yeah, volatile politics. It's a very interesting conversation in an interview because the defense minister, Fedorov, like 35 years old, the Syroski is 60, so this is a generational fight. It's a debate about tactics and technology and accusations that Syroski was running kind of like a Soviet era military strategy while Fedorov was developing all these new drones

and accountability and database targeting. It's very interesting. And the political fallout is huge. There's a lot of people think Zelensky may have fired Fedorov because he viewed him as a political threat.

It's a rival. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, a lot to watch there.

Lots of watch. And I run, except all the attention, but it doesn't mean there's none other work on that. And no, it did make me feel badly that we had not covered Ukraine as much recently. It's like just the agenda fills with a crisis after crisis and it's like almost easy to forget there's this four year running nightmare of a war in the background.

I mean, it's not easy to forget for anyone in Ukraine or on the front lines. It's just like so much on our platter. All right. So we have this terrible news over the weekend from the war in Ukraine. We got the death toll for the US service members from that war is now increased to 18.

So first of 10, it's Tyler James Fien and private Isabella Gonzalez were killed by an Iranian ballistic missile attack on a US-based in Jordan. Private Gonzalez was 19 years old.

It's always like heartbreaking when you see how you use your service members are.

A third service member is presumed dead remains were found sort of at the blast site, but that person has not been identified yet publicly. The Pentagon also announced that another US service member in Iraq was killed during a controlled detonation of an unexploded ordinance from an Iranian drone. I would like to better understand what happened there.

It sounds awful and it should kind of thing that should be avoidable. But I don't know. We'll learn more. On top of that, nearly 100 service members had been injured in the conflict since July 7th. So the past couple of weeks.

The Pentagon says the vast majority of those injuries were, quote, minor concussions, however,

So we've since learned that the base in Jordan that was targeted was hit several times over

“the course of 24 hours, dozens of soldiers were injured, destroyed a bunch of helicopters.”

And the question becomes how does Trump respond on truth social he posted, quote, every time Iran kills an American soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over. This directive has been passed on to the Secretary of War, Pete Hexeth, chairman of the Joint Chiefs Daniel Kane in every leader in the military and quote, the Pentagon has hit targets in Iran for about 10 consecutive nights now, Iran at the same time has been hitting

U.S. targets, or targeting U.S. sites in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, warningly it seems like a lot of these Iranian air strikes were targeting radar and missile defense systems, which if successful could make the bases even more vulnerable, of course, in Jordan they were managed to hit the barracks that sound like they were barely fortified at all, leading to these casualties.

Iran has also hit some tankers in the strait or hummus.

So Ben, let's start with this question of, or issue of transparency around U.S. casualties from the Pentagon. They deny that they're withholding casualty information. They're kind of huffly saying, like, we're not going to release anything that might tell Iran that their targeting is going well or help them operationally, and they're

also arguing they have no obligation to release information about kind of minor injuries. What's your reaction to that? So listeners, regular listeners will know that we've been talking about this for months, that there's a lack of candor about the damage that's being done in terms of the injuries to American surface members, the damage to U.S. bases, military facilities, and embassies.

This has been very clear, Tommy, one because, you know, if you talked to anybody in the Gulf or any of these countries that are being attacked, they'll tell you that there's far more significant damage than is being reported by the Pentagon or that's being seen. But the other thing, Tommy, is that you and I used to be responsible for this, you know, like you stepped over sea the communications around what was going on in wars.

And this nothing about this field is normal.

“And I think what people need to bear in mind is that this has been a process, right?”

We covered kicking out the Pentagon press corps, so they're not people actual journalists. You've got, like, you know, the Mike Lindell pillow, my pillow guy has a, you know, correspondent to the Pentagon briefing room, not like the actual journalists resources. So you're not getting the kind of reporting from people there. You're also kind of getting these very opaque statements.

You know, you either get some insane Pete Hegcess statement about, you know, we've won the war for the thousandth time, or we've destroyed the entire Navy. Or you get this kind of very minimal statement from the Sent Com Central Command that is running the war that will report a death and make kind of a vague illusion to injuries without any detail about the nature of those injuries.

And look, the reality is this is just an effort to hide the cost of the war from the American

people, like they do not want you to know how much damage has been done to our facilities, how much that's going to cost to repair, which could run well into the many billions of dollars. They don't want you to know the extent of the injuries of service members. They don't want you to pay attention. They want to be able to do whatever they want to do without any accountability.

And normally also, Congress would be holding hearings on these matters and forcing answers information out to the public, but because the Republicans control both has the Congress, the very spare hearings that we get yield very little information. And when it's like headset, you get this kind of performed bullshit from him. So this is by design.

This is what it feels like to have an authoritarian system leading you into a war that is illegal that nobody wants. They have to conceal the information because the more information gets out about this war, the less Americans want any part of it. Yeah, it's like normally these kind of numbers are just like updated on a website.

It's supposed to be very routine and kind of technocratic done by professional public information officers when in the US military. It's hard not to feel like data like this would not be being withheld because it seemed to contradict statements by Trump and by headset and by events that we have eviscerated their missile capability and the Iranian military's decimated blah blah blah.

“It's also, I think, relevant that a lot of these strikes happened in Jordan.”

You know, the Journal of Wall Street Journal noted that Jordan is among the most permissive countries in the Arab world when it comes to allowing US spaces to operate from their territory, a bunch of other countries in the region have shut down US access to their airspace at times to try to prevent us from doing private event, Trump from doing stupid things to escalate the war.

So it seems like the targeting of Jordan is deliberate by Iran and is probably an attempt to change public opinion within Jordan about US participation and cooperation. Yeah, and bear in mind that there are 50,000 US service members scattered across this region, by the way, like I think, far more than as necessary and that's something that a future democratic president should look at.

target set. If the United States is hitting things instead of Iran at increasing pace and scale,

“you know, which we can talk about. But they have in their target list, they've got US”

basis facilities anywhere, there's US military personnel, they've got the Gulf States and the kind of, you know, they want to extract a cost on both the global economy. So, you know, hitting things like energy infrastructure and obviously closing down the state of Formus. But also just, you know, if something gets hit, I've noticed, you know, if a desalination plant gets hit inside of Iran, like they're hitting one in Kuwait, you know, so they're seeing the entire region

essentially as as presenting targets that in their mind match up with what is being done to them. And they show that there are all these different ways of carrying a cost. So the other thing we should point out to me is that we've burned through a lot of our missile defenses. We have less today than we did at the beginning of the war. That's a finite resource. I think we get comfortable with this idea that we can just shoot everything down. Well, we can't for two reasons.

One, contrary to everything, the Trump and headset and Rubio have said, they clearly maintain a significant ballistic missile capability. I saw, you know, potentially over 2,000 ballistic missiles and they're able to reproduce them. They have obviously a significant drone capacity. And so if they're maintaining these capabilities and we have less and less defenses, and we have to make judgment calls right about where to put them. Well, stuff is increasingly going to get through.

And so the more this war goes on, the less capable we are defending. And then lastly, when you

“see the precision targeting that they're doing in places like Jordan, you have to think that”

in addition to Iranian intelligence, they're probably getting intelligence from the Russians too, because they seem to know where to hit things with a degree of precision with other ballistic missiles or with drones. And so this should be worrying. The longer this war goes on, the more American casualties there's going to be, the more damage is going to be to US allies. The more it's going to create rifts, they want to create divisions between not just public opinion in those countries,

but governments in the US. So the Iranians use a Trump phrase again, have a lot of cards here. And it just doesn't seem like the Pentagon has taken any steps to harden in the infrastructure where these service members are living and staying and working. I mean, it's just shocking to me that you could be serving in Jordan and living and basically an unprotected barracks that could be hit by a ballistic missile. And it should nothing's been done about it in the last year.

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in the Bobbleman website, which is how ships get in and out of the Red Sea. We talked about this

“last week. The Saudis bombed this Houthi target. We both were like why the fuck would they do that?”

They've had a basically a ceasefire in place since 2022. And now, in the least surprising news possible, you have the Houthi's threatening retaliation. So the reason this matter so much, it's that when the straightaway move was closed, the Saudis were still able to export oil by shipping it west through a pipeline to the Red Sea side of the country and exporting it that way. And if the Houthi's managed to prevent the Saudis from exporting oil, it would remove several

million more barrels of oil per day from the market. And then it could create serious long-term

problems for the Saudi producers if they have to lock in their wells. That's obviously a long with the long ways off, but it's something they're thinking about. I'm sure. And the impact would be even greater if the Houthi's block were to tear other shipping through the Red Sea. Earlier today Trump has asked about this. He said the Houthi said it actually done anything yet, but he's a liar and time will tell. Yeah. The other major escalation risk was going outline,

hopefully, for us via a leak to the Wall Street Journal. So here's the lead of that story, quote, Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of Iranian enrichment centrifuges into the tunnel's deep inside a mountain-less fall. Israeli and U.S. officials say a development that would heighten concern that Tehran could reconstitute its nuclear program. So that story says these materials were moved after the 12-day war when the U.S. and Israel first bombed around

the nuclear site. Trump was asked about this pickaxe mountain concern during a press conference on

“Tuesday. Let's watch. Do you believe that Iran has moved your centrifuges into pickaxe mountain?”

And when you say we're not done yet, what is left to finish? Well, I think that they may have, we don't have it on record. All we do is read the fake news, you know, we see the news is so wrong so many times. So, you know, maybe this one they have, right? But it's okay. It doesn't mean anything unless they have the material. You're talking about the centrifuges. Yeah, it doesn't mean anything unless they have the material. They don't have, we follow the material. That's where the action is.

And we'll be hitting that area very probably pretty soon. And there's not a, not a thing they can do about it. Normally I wouldn't say that. If I thought they could do something about it,

I would never say that. But we'll be hitting that area pretty soon. And very heavily.

Interesting logic training there. It's like it doesn't matter. But we're going to bomb it anyway. I guess now they could move it. They prevent that from happening, but here we are. So, but the broader problem with Trump's threat there, DeBomb pickaxe mountain, is that experts believe these facilities could be between 300 and 450 feet under solid rock. It is not clear whether even the US bunker-busting bombs that were used against the previous nuclear

sites could reach these areas. James Acton, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Nuclear Policy Program at an interesting Twitter thread about this question of whether the bunker-busters could hit pickaxe mountain. He said there's a debate about how deep the biggest US bunker-buster can actually burrow into rock before exploding. And the range is presumed to be 60 feet to 200 feet, which again is not deep enough to get to the deepest parts of pickaxe mountain. So it's not

clear that this work. He also pointed out this strike at Fordo was only effective because of a hit of ventilation shaft. And then even then they had to drop 14 of the massive ordinance penetrator weapons to finish the job. So, big picture, we don't know if pickaxe mountain could be targeted. We don't really know what's happening within it because the IAEA does not have access to the site because Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and got rid of IAEA access. So Ben,

not the most subtle leak here from these really interesting. The Trump decided to just comment on it and preview an air strike. But what did you make us? First of all, there's two governments with massive credibility issues. So every time you see a leak of Israeli intelligence

about the Iranian nuclear program, this is a bit of a boy who cried wolf, right? Like it's always

some pretext for why the United States needs to get deeper into the war. And so this one may be true, but like we for Prime Minister Netanyahu say for like well over a decade that Iran was like, you know, two weeks away from the nuclear weapon. So it feels like the leak clearly had an interest to pressure Trump to do something. And then it bears repeating that Trump has said that the Iranian nuclear program is obliterated after the 12-day war, you know, and now he's non-sensical.

It's not just a nuclear program is not just a nuclear fuel. The nuclear dust, which he's referring

“to there, I think, with the material. That's the product of the nuclear program. Nuclear program”

is the scientist, is the centrifuges, is the Iranian that you mind and put into the centrifuges. And then it's the fuel, right? And so you can't say we've obliterated the program. They just had centrifuges and their fuel and their scientists. What exactly have we done here? The logic

country multiple times now. If you count the 12-day wars at different war, and we've been bombing them for months now. And they've got centrifuges in a mountain. They've got the nuclear fuel summer. We don't maybe we know, maybe we don't know where that is. It just shows that they don't

have strategy because the reality is. We can have all these conversations about, you know, massive

“ordinance penetrators. These bunker-busting bombs. The only way that you're going to verify”

we get that material or those centrifuges out is either with a nuclear deal in which their international inspectors who can go in and verify that. Or it's with NASA's amounts of US ground forces going in and getting into a real fighting war on the ground. And I don't think there's any appetite for that whatsoever. You cannot fix these problems from the air. This is the problem with their whole war strategy. And so if you look at what they're doing, you know, they seem to be trying to

bomb infrastructure associated with the IRGC. I don't think the IRGC looks like they're ready to capitulated anytime soon. They're willing to weather more of that. So that's not going to work.

Then Trump's saying, like, if every American kill, we're going to kill a bunch of people or

blow up a bunch of stuff. Let me tell you, like, however upset you are and you're about American service members being killed, like vengeance is not a war strategy. Like it's a horrible way to think about targeting, you know. And so these guys just, yeah, they just don't know what they're doing. Yeah. And it's very clear what the Iranians are doing. They're just holding the line. If we can survive and stay in power and demonstrate that we control that straight, it doesn't really matter

how much damage Trump tries to do to their economy or to bombing in the vicinity of their nuclear program. They have a nuclear program. They control the straight and they're still in power. And one last thing in this pickaxe mountain piece, Hugh Hewitt, who's kind of a right wing, kind of not kind of right wing commentator who kisses Trump's ass, big Nixon van. He's a video host on the Salem radio network. He's obsessed with pickaxe mountain. Trump was on a show the other

day and he was asking them about it. I noticed Ben there was a Wall Street Journal report recently. That's over the weekend. On the stunning amount of money that Israel is spending on

“PR propaganda to try to fix its image. I think the total amount for 2026 is $700 million.”

One of the people they've hired is a guy named Brad Parscale. He was Trump's former campaign manager.

I think he has a $45 million contract. Parscale is not only has his own kind of like company.

He is also the chief strategy officer at Salem Media. And his contract for Israel involves, quote, integration of narrative messaging into Salem media network properties. So one has to wonder is Israel telling Brad Parscale to tell people like Hugh Hewitt to ask about these issues? Because there's a whole lot of money flowing around that suggests that might be the case. Just one question I have. Entirely possible and in line with how Israel approaches messaging. Like the

closer you can get to decision makers. And this is the thing about like the foresail nature of right wing media. Like we've seen the Russians do this. We've seen the Russians literally buy influencers in the United States. Now frankly not new for Israel to be doing something similar. But it just goes to show in a fractured media environment like how vulnerable we are as a society to like Israel dumping a bunch of money into Trump cronies and suddenly Hugh Hewitt is like laundering

“potentially. We don't know for sure. Israeli narratives are really interests. You should bomb”

this mountain. I mean it just every now and then actually there's an anecdote that kind of illustrates how absurd the times are they win. It is plausible. Again, we don't know for sure that like Israel pays Brad Parscale and then Hugh Hewitt is trying to do targeting Trump on a show. Like that is fucking nuts that we even can entertain that as a possibility. And meanwhile, the finance minister Battle of Smotrich, he had a quote that he gave to some media or some outlet in Israel after

their like national security conversation last night where he said of the warner on. The state of Israel has no interest in joining the contained confrontation between Iran and the United States. The current situation is the best one for us. We know. We know buddy. Good for you guys. I mean this is exactly the fuck these guys. Like this is exactly what you worry about, which is what do they do? They dragged the United States into this war because B. B. Danielle is like I can't say that. I'm just kidding.

What is it? Okay. Okay. Okay. Y'all that. Okay. Y'all that. Okay. Y'all that. Okay. Y'all and the like let's okay. They had a very persuasive briefing. Smotrich is like confirming and like how dare you. Yeah. And they convinced Trump to do this dumb thing. And then it's like now the U.S. is in, oh, we don't have to be a part of this anymore. I mean, give me a break. If you ever needed more evidence that we need to rethink the entirety of this relationship with this completely maniacal government.

It's, it's, it's Smotrich who would have been cheering Israel joining the U.S. on the front end. And now it's a go. We can take a step back. Let these guys let them do it for us. Meanwhile, last I'm going to run. Trump's going to try to jam some Iran connected legislation through Congress. There's the NDAA bill, which is the annual bill authorizing Pentagon programs.

Trump has also requested another $87 billion in Iran supplemental funding. Hexaf and Chairman of

“Joint Chief Stan Kane were up on the Hill today talking about it. And just want to point out to anyone”

who works on Capitol Hill or any members of Congress listening that as you decide on how to vote on this stuff, I wanted to flag an economist, you go of poll for you that shows that the Iran war is the least popular war since polling started. How about that for a stat? It is a minus 30 approval rating, a stat which the economist notes the Vietnam war didn't hit until six years in. Again, for context, the Afghanistan war started at 90% support. And it took 13 years to dip below 50%

approval. Breakdowns by group. The Iran war is 84 points underwater with Democrats. It's 52 points underwater with independence. It only is a 72% approval among mega Republicans in his 25 points

underwater with non-mack of Republicans. So it's hard to imagine a more clear cut vote than this.

Vote no against any funding, any support for this conflict, a period. This is the biggest new brand in the world. And the only two things that add are that there's

“mega numbers too. There's a tiny, tiny portion of those people that actually support the war.”

The constituency, now that Lindsey Graham is a long way. They just support Trump. We're down to like you, you it in Ben Shapiro. Yeah, it's exactly right. Like so most of those bad voters probably don't support the war. They're just, if they're asked something that Trump is doing, they say they support it. Right. So there's not a lot of depth to that support. There's not a lot of people that are like, yeah, we really

got to finish the job in Iran. Like you don't, right, we can't set anywhere. Not a lot of mega shots. You were like, look, we got to get pickaxe Mountain. I've been saying that all along. This is really important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like in the diner, you know, like the Trump West Virginia diner is saying like, you know what, I really vote for Trump. I vote for Trump, so you could take your pickaxe Mountain. Can I afford my even bill? No. Do I want

“a bomb pickaxe Mountain? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's how I do with the world. It's important to me.”

But the other thing is like, who alert this like out there wanting to spend a truly enough dollars in defense period? Like, like, so if part of the concern is that you're like, not voting for the overall defense package, because you're blocking this. Well, you shouldn't vote for that. Like, nobody should vote for a truly not dollar defense budget. I think it's at a time when we have such massive needs. It's crazy. It's time to completely reverse this premise

you have to vote for defense spending. It'll be held accountable. We should start holding people accountable for the fact that they want a truly not dollars in defense spending when everything else in this country is going to shit. Yeah. It's nuts. All right. Let's switch gears Ben because something really weird is happening at the state of Robin early this week. We want to talk about it. They released this 100 page report titled Cuba, the capital of 21st century communism.

It claims that for over 70 years, quote, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that is infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government and had backed left-wing terrorism on, on these days, it has backed left-wing terrorism on American soil. So the report lists people who it calls front groups and fellow travelers of Cuba. It's like groups like Code Pink and the Democratic Socialists of America or

DSA. It mentions a bunch of prominent leftists in, like, Democratic leaders by name, streamer Hassan Piker gets a shout out Zoran Mamdonis in there. The report was released shortly after a Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a quote, "ministerial on the resurgence of political terrorism." Rubio speech at the ministerial focused almost exclusively on what he called left-wing terrorism. Independent journalist Ken Clip and scene noted that a White House press release about

the event said quote, "far left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for geotist terrorism." Ben, I watched Rubio's speech and I noticed this one line, which was, "They despise the West because the West is great." It was like identical framework to, like, the Bush era, you know, they hate us because of our freedom, bullshit about Al Qaeda. So Ben, so now there's no freedom. We're just great. We're just great.

I guess. So Ben, this weird report in my mind seems to be merging two different strands of work. The first

is the work to build this legal structure to designate lefties or leftist groups or even just Democrats as terrorists or terrorist organizations and then go after us with counter-terrorism authorities. We shall remind ourselves that in the US that includes killing people. The second is the Marco Rubio Passion Project of trying to force regime change in Cuba, but doing it by punishing an entire island an entire civilian population full of people through this energy blockade. By merging the two,

they have created a kind of de facto new leftist blacklist that would make Joe McCarthy proud. And then there's this attempt to create like an intellectual framework and legitimacy

it was ripped from a liberty university student's term paper or something. It's sort of this like slap dash kind of pop history from a slightly paranoid right-wing perspective although often about like real historical events. But then it ends with this absolutely crazy stretched like six degrees of Kevin Bacon style guilt by association conclusion which says quote many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history from the George Floyd riots to the rise

of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses can be linked in some way shape or form to Cuban influence. You know your argument is strong when you include the words in some way shape or form. Of course we also know that like pro-terrorism activism means on college campuses means like kids who are upset about you know children getting bombed in Gaza.

“Yeah, that's what crimes. Yeah. So Ben, I genuinely don't know what is more”

worrisome. The State Department whipping up this document as kind of a pretext to go after liberals or Marco Rubio and his minions sincerely believing that Fidel Castro's ghost is behind every corner and responsible for like people being upset by watching George Floyd get murdered live on you know their screens by a cop. What did you make of the State Department Blacklist in this kind of broader effort to criminalize leftist thought or like somehow link it all to Cuba? I think there's a

few different things going on here and I say this is something that used to like be in charge of Cuba

policy the second Obama term. The first thing is that Cuba poses absolutely no national

security threat to the United States whatsoever right full stop. I mean I saw the the Cubans aren't penetrating American society like the they even know these people can't keep the lights on like the idea that Cuba's running like networks all over the country like is absolutely fucking absurd. It's just not true but because they have no pretext for why they would launch a military operation in Cuba regime change operation Cuba or still even no pretext for why they're starving

Cubans to death or causing people to die because ventilators get turned off when their power out is just because of our blockade. There's no Cuban nuclear program so they have to kind of create this facade, this bullshit idea that they pose some kind of you know danger to our society. It's not true. It is fundamentally not true like just because people in America have leftist views doesn't mean that they're like agents of the Cuban government in any way shape or form.

The second thing that's going on here Tommy is a lot of projection and I'm just going to name this.

The United States has done what they are alleging Cuba does. I know this because when I was in Cuba I started looking at all these crazy USAID programs and like you know generally we're supportive of USAID I think a lot of people at USAID would agree with me. There are all these line items we used to just give I found money that was just sent to PO boxes in Miami right and with no specific specificity about where that money was going to end up. Like the United States

and like you could say from a pot you know someone might say from a human rights perspective direct funding for dissidents in Cuba is something we should do. But some of the seem to go you know was just more beyond that. It's just like creating funds that could go to oppositionists

“or efforts to undermine the government. Remember there was some I mean if you want to go down”

take a trip down memory lane there were even programs that became public. The associated precedent a bunch of reporting during the of army years about like I think was Operation Chaos and we were going to use social media to kind of so chaos instead of Cuba and undermine the government which was by way before they even had a lot of internet access in Cuba so it was pretty dumb way to spend money. So so this is classic right wing projection like the Cubans must be doing

the things that we do to them you know and so we're going to call that out. Right never mind like

the historical stuff if you want to go back even deep I mean their report goes way back and you know there's all sorts of efforts to take out the Del Castro and they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're they're yeah so those two things are about the pretext to after the Cubans that then the last thing is when you the point

you made is we this whole and teeth of thing we should not treat as a side show it is it the foreign governments it's absurd that anybody showed up at that conference like I would host a six situations yeah I would hope that you just can say no to that because this could lead to dark places like we are we have two plus years of Trump left and if you listen to like

“rhetoric not just Rubio but Steven Miller gives him like bloodthirsty speech like I do I think”

they're going to start like droning DSA members in the United States Democratic Socialist no but if they do start freezing bank account if they start treating it like a terrorist threat on some insane nexus to Cuba or anything else yeah like we could you know see them trying to shut down civil society shut down opposition or does investigate them right I mean a bunch of a bunch of lefties went to Cuba and all of a sudden they came back and they were under investigation right and it was

leaked to some news outlets and Ray was on hiker was one of yeah yeah yeah it's a mess it's definitely

this stuff is happening started was an NPSM7 I think was the directive to kind of start

“beginning this process and you know obviously Charlie Kirk's assassination has been the pretext”

for a lot of it in this idea that it was a leftist or lefty conspiracy and cash betel was at that symposium so there's a lot of kind of worrisome data points there. Let's turn to another worrisome development the Trump era frankly which is this reporting recently about the online prediction market gambling and politics so the most recent kind of eye popping headline at least to me Ben was about Trump's teleprompter operator this guy Gabriel Perez he's under investigation by the CFTC for allegedly

making over $100,000 betting on Trump's speeches so for context for folks like on these prediction market apps like Polymarketer Colchee you can place bets on stupid shit like what words Trump will or will not say in a speech so I looked on Colchee right before we started recording you can bet on whether Trump will say or not say 28 different words or phrases during his White House Correspondent speech on Friday they give it a 45% chance that Trump says Barack Hussein Obama so if you bet a

hundred bucks he says that the payout is $210 if you want a little more risk a little more upside Ben Calshee has a seven percent chance that Trump says Epstein see about a hundred bucks you can win 1341 that's your payout with your bet included but if you're the teleprompter guy right you have access to the final final version of the speech right before it is delivered which is obviously insider information you also know you know in real time if he's skipping words so like

Trump is an undisciplined mess and apparently Perez would cash out his bets mid-speech if Trump skipped a line in the prompter which I bet made it pretty fucking easy to find him and snuff this all out associated with this news the Wall Street Journal had a big piece on prediction markets generally in Washington I had some again eye-popping detail it said three anonymous accounts on polymarket made over six hundred thousand dollars by correctly betting on when Trump and

Iran would agree to a ceasefire deal it that freaked out the White House and led them to send around a memo prohibiting the use of insider information to bet the journal also says the Congresswoman Annapulina Luna of Florida tipped off a mega-influencer named DC Drainow that Trump was gonna pick JD Vance as his VP nominee so that he could bet on it and then she later mocked him for not betting more so that's all sounds like they're all taking this very seriously

uh the Senate recently passed a resolution banning lawmakers and staff was sensitive to affirmation from prediction market betting but I would not bet on the administration taken any action in part because Donald Trump Jr. it's a paid strategic advisor to both calcium and polymarket you might be wondering perfect yeah it's weird that two competitors would pay the same guy yeah it is unless you think about it um so Ben it's interesting like kind of hearing these organizations

defend themselves they have a bit of an incoherent view of insider information they say like well

“you know insider information gets into every market and that's what sort of like makes the data”

better and more perfect and more useful on the one hand but on the other hand they're trying to ban it or people from profiting off it there's so obvious like the natural security implications of some of these bets I mean we talked about it in the Venezuela context someone made a bunch of money a special forces guy made a bunch of money betting on whether Maduro would be deposed it seems like that would be a bright let red warning sign for the Venezuelan government if this were

to happen again but I what did you make of this story and just like you mentioned as a former speechwriter like just being able to place prop bets on what Trump would say or Obama would say in our case I mean this is one of the central things that they're doing right because like you already have the stock market which is the kind of more you know dignified version of prediction markets

right and now you have these platforms and and the reality is like there's been like all this smoke

for I mean they're running as a ledger that Kushner and Whitkoff right and that's saying I trust them but they made billions of dollars like investments or bets on future markets related to the progress of negotiations the prediction markets are just a crude or way I mean

“look I'll just be blunt like when I was when I think about what I knew when I was in the White House”

you know I knew what Obama was going to say I was a speechwriter I knew when we were going to roll out new policies we knew when special operate you know we knew when den Laden was going to be targeted right we knew when air strikes might take place like we knew all this information never you know not not not the word the purest people I'm I think that I would have said the same thing about the Bush people I don't I don't think they were sat there and just like

used all this information like make bets the system this the corruption is not a bug like I feel like we end up seeing like the teleprompter operator we end up seeing the special operator who made

the bet on the midter operation the the richer people and more powerful people and I'm not going

to name them because I just don't know but like just use your head right trump family members or

cutouts right so it's not like them having to place the bet there's so many ways in which

all like we're living a society where powers increasingly consolidate information has always been

consolidated and now these people can just get rich off these information and and like I'll hate to be a killjoy like we just should shut down I don't know why we need these platforms like I haven't been like I doesn't seem like sports gambling is going that well either not to that's a whole other conversation but like it's the people that end up losing it's like at the casino it's like the high rollers like tend to be fine it's like the people that are like

betting their you know paychecks because they can't afford groceries because of trump's war

“then losing yeah I mean look these things apps call themselves prediction markets but I think like”

80% of the betting that takes place is sports betting so it's just an end around yeah to get around state laws um as we are kind of hitting the gas on these products and there's all this lobbying by these prediction market apps and there's so much support within the White House frances blocked access to polymarket betting website um I think this happened last week because they're worried about people losing their money gambling in Brazil has been named a public health

crisis it was legalized online gambling was legalized in 2018 it's now seen as like the fastest growing and most lucrative market I think it was 9.2 billion in by they're viewing it as at 9.2 billion dollar market by 23 and in 2024 online gambling losses in Brazil drove an estimated 1.8 million people into debt so it's like it truly is a crisis down there in the US like a

political batagon polymarket double to just over 4 billion during the first three months of the year

“compared with the first quarter of 2025 according to this data provided to the Wall Street Journal”

by a non-profit called anti-corruption data collective um but it's just like the admit the the opportunities for abuse and insider trading I mean it's like it is a feature not a bug here yeah it's obvious and what you know what you're getting is not just the kind of rank corruption you know decisions might start to be made because we've seen this in all kinds of gambling right this is why like the world series gets thrown like 1990 like you start to make decisions

for the purpose of making money off the bet not making decisions that are best for American interest or the American people like that that that's the kind of thing that is probably clearly already happening you also get who you'll get people who go into government for the exp or politics for the express purpose of stepping on things like prediction markets right right I mean there's so many things this is such a slippery slope if I was a member of Congress

like focusing on shutting these things down or at least putting like really thick guard rails around them with very high penalties for people that violate them like it's a no-brain yeah I agree Potsay of the world is brought to you by Simply Safe for the longest time I thought having a

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the improbable becoming possible unfettered Wall Street greed corruption in decades of government deregulation culminated in 2008 with most severe global financial crisis since the Great Depression. It would take another three years for the left to cultivate a mass response in the fall of 2011 thousands of people answered the call to protest they rage against a rig system that it utterly failed tens of millions of Americans and tried to create their own anti-capitalist village in a

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this series offers a reminder about the power and limitations of collective action. To listen, search for Future Hindsight wherever you get your podcasts. A couple more things, so at the FIFA World Cup final, the Trump was there, he was in this box, and one of the clips showed him talking with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. They apparently discussed the wildfires in Canada. We're almost two million acres of burned in Ontario and as a result, smoke is spread across

the country and it's the parts of the US and New York in particular, or bore the burn of it last week in the Midwest and the Great Lakes have also been impacted by the smoke. So Trump got asked about what he and Carney specifically talked about. Here's a clip of him explaining what he said to Carney and then a response from Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Let's watch. I told him, I mean, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air, our air has been

poisoned. We can help them well, but maybe they should pay us some damages or something or

he should do some tariffs. I've never remembered this happening over the last four or five years

you saw starting to take place. I've never remembered that happening. They're not managing their fires properly. You got to remind President Trump that there's 3.9 million acres burning in the United States right now. And if we had resources, we would send them down to our closest friends and allies. So as you heard there, he threatened to tariff Canada up, he has they've wildfires. Then, surprise the prize been on Monday. The Trump administration rolled out new 50% tariffs

on more than 500 Canadian goods. Nearly all of which are actually covered under the USMCA trade agreement. The Trump negotiated in the first term. The New York Times says that the tariff targets are about 2% of the entire trading relationship between the US and Canada. The tariffs won't go into effect until August 19th. They are almost certainly in attempt to ratchet up pressure on Canada in advance of USMCA talks. Although so far, the US has only been renegotiating the deal with

Mexico while excluding Canada from those conversations. But then, I mean, just like setting aside

a potential economic risk of doubling down this trade war with Canada for a second,

can you just imagine if your house was on fire and it was burning for the third time in four years and your neighbor walked over and yelled at you because it was blowing smoke on his house and then threatened to send you a bill to pay for it. I mean, it's just like the most insanely tickish thing I've ever heard of by life. Yeah, and it's, you know, Doug Ford pointed out the fact that we have lots of wildfires. But if you pull the camera back here, the United States most of the rest of the world

has made an argument for, I don't know, going on 20 years that the United States as the principal emitter of fossil fuels created climate change as much as any other country and that the United States should be paying kind of reparations, should be paying these countries that are, you know, Pacific islands that are losing their coastlines, all these countries that have unbeatable air because it's so hot and like South Asia. The United States rejects the premise and we had a green

climate fund in the Obama years. So we did think we had an obligation to pay to mitigate the effects climate change. But look, it's not mystery. I mean, part of what's a fucking frustrating by watching

Trump. He's like, well, it was never happened before. Last few years, it's been really hot and we suddenly

“have all these wildfires. Oh, yeah, that's what every climate scientist has told you almost got.”

It was going to happen if we didn't take stronger action due with climate change because if you're climate policies on top of, you know, many years, obviously of burning fossil fuels, this problem is getting worse exponentially. Like climate change, we don't talk a lot of, it's fucking hot, you know, like, like, like, like we've talked about the heat wave in Europe. Like we had the French guy cooking eggs, like, you know, with with with with no stove, like we've got wildfires in Canada. And so for Trump

to stand up there and say, oh my God, it's hot and there are these wildfires. And I mean, because if I'm Canadian, Canadians, you know, aren't going to have a clean bill of health either on on on carbon emissions, but it's a lot less than us. So he'd have a lot more standing, you know, if he was actually doing something about the underlying problem, which is climate change. No, instead of making it exponentially worse. But except except now we're saying, like,

“the solution to this is what Americans should pay higher prices because that's what tariffs are, right?”

Yeah. So you, you Americans have to pay higher prices to punish the Canadian. I'm like Canadian, like, it's like for some random things, like liquor, hockey sticks, milk. Also, listeners are probably wondering, like, I thought this Supreme Court, like curtailed his power to leverage these these tariffs, that is true. They curtailed the IEPA authority that he claimed to have had, but this was done under section 338 of the tariff act of 1930, the so-called smootholly

up to a 50% tariff on import to a country, just sort of like, as a king, there's no process.

“There's no USTR investigation. There's no cap on the rate. There's no limit for the duration.”

It's just like something he can do. So he now he's terrorizing Canada. Then over in the UK, our friends have their seventh prime minister in about 10 years, so welcome to the party prime minister Andy Burnham. We have extensively covered, you know, former Prime Minister Cure Stormers, political demise. We've covered Burnham's attention from Mayor of Greater Manchester to the Labour Party leader, so we're not going to do that again here, but let's talk about what

Burnham is done in the first couple days. So he gave his first speech as Prime Minister,

basically, met with a king drove over, kind of created the staff and then gave quick speech. He said he wanted his government to be a circuit breaker for Britain. He promised a new political and economic model, the devolution of power out of London, back to other parts of the country, particularly the north of the country, and he promised to lay out a 10-year plan for the country, although we haven't seen that yet.

“In his first cabinet meeting, he talked about cutting taxes on electricity bills,”

he talked about getting ending rough sleeping, which is homelessness in the UK. I did three foreign leader calls. He called Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Ukraine in Ursula von der Leyen. He named a bunch of folks to his cabinet, so some names folks probably know that the Chancellor of the Exchequer role went to John Healy. He was the guy who's surprised people last month when he resigned his care-stormers to fence secretary, because the

budget for the defense investment plan was well short of what he thought he needed. I did make me wonder, Ben, whether Healy kind of was promised another larger increase in defense spending, or if that was just kind of a fight from a bygone era, but I guess we'll find out. Ed Miliband, the former Labour Party leader, is going to be foreign minister. Shabbat Ahmad Mood is going to keep her job as home secretary. She's the only kind of major

position to stay the same. She's seen as like tough on immigration. West treating who made a lot

“of noise about running for Labour leader, and then prominently resigned from his job as health”

secretary is going to be defense secretary. He is more kind of the conservative and Labour, and then Angela Rainer is back in the cabinet after resigning last year for a very kind of dull scandal

about on pay taxes. On top of that, though, after those officials, he basically purged the entire

stormer government, including some kind of big names like Rachel Reeves, some familiar names to this show, like David Lamy, who is the deputy leader. He got rid of some talented people, so people that were seen as great managers and just kind of technocrats. It just seems like he basically wanted to wipe this slate clean and start over. Alster Campbell, who is a Tony Blair's right hand man for a decade now, and it's a great podcast to rest his politics.

Pointed out that if you look at the kind of top three jobs, John Healey, now the Chancellor of the X-Shaker, was kind of the tip of the political spear, and when he resigned as defense secretary, a lot of analysts thought, like maybe that was a cut that didn't kill Starmer in the moment, but he was going to bleed out from eventually. Then you had Milaban was apparently the first person to tell Starmer to resign to his face, and Shabana Mood did the same right after,

and they got the top job, so it does seem like you know Bernie's pretty ruthless and rewarding people that helped take down Starmer, but what do you make of the new, the cabinet slots so far, kind of what you've heard him say and do? In addition to just like yeah, we're cleaning the slate, it's my show, I'm getting rid of the Starmer people. They're kind of ruthless ambition that has been on display from Andy Burnham, which is sometimes you've got to want someone who's an

alpha, like ambition is part of politics. The problem is what you see is you see a lot of politics

and very little vision. So it's kind of like well Ed Milaban's, he's the left-wing guy, originally Ed Milaban wanted to be Chancellor of the X-Shaker, that's like the guy running the finances, but he was seen as too far left, so it's like well we'll give Milaban the foreign office, that's kind of like a nice perk, you know, and John Hilly, he's kind of like safe pair hands, you know, maybe the markets will feel okay about that guy, and then we'll keep our hard line immigration

person at home office, and it doesn't feel like there's a vision behind this cabinet. It feels like it's managing labor politics, and we don't want to be too far left, but we're going to give a left something, and you know, and that's, it's a little disparaging, you know, because that these huge problems and Britain, again, what is this all about? Like what is any Burnham want to do? He seems to be a better politician than Kirstimer, like both like I said,

you know, he really went after it, but also he's a better communicator. Sure, you know, like he may get some points for like wanting to develop power to the north of England, that's kind of, if you're an American, that's kind of like saying we need to focus more on, you know, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, right? Fine, but like what does it mean in policy? You can set some offices up there, he's going to spend some more time up there, he'll give better speeches,

he, he's spoken from number 10 with Adapodium, but like I still feel like we don't know what any Burnham wants to do, and the reason why I should this matter to us, you know, beyond just to be care about our friends there, it's also because like if they don't get this right, like

United States, and that would be bad for everybody. So we have a stake in these guys doing well

enough that Farage can't get in there. We're going to need more detail and more vision. I want to, you know, obviously give him a chance, but the earlier returns are, it seems like he's

“doing a lot more politics than anything else. The only thing I say to Tommy is like,”

to your point about this, you know, the normal photo ops you meet the King and then you, you kind of go in number 10 and you meet the household staff, like these people have had seven, it's crazy. You know, couples, you know, come in and live there, like it used to probably be a huge event every five years. Like the new, but now it's like, there we go, like, Tony Blair is there for a decade. I know it's crazy. Yeah. Do you see that Burnham said he was going to

open like a number 10 office in the north in Manchester. Yeah. Yeah. It just seems like a nice press release, but like, what does that mean in practice? I'm going to have a separate staff. It's like an American president saying, we're going to have a, you know, a Wisconsin, White House. Right. I mean, it's so political. It's like, we have a political problem in Northern England. I'm from there. You know, any Burnham's nickname is the King of the North, like,

great. Fine. That makes people feel like, you know, more connected to the government, Manchester,

“or Northern England. Okay. But like, what are the policies that are going to fall off in that?”

We still don't really know. We'll find out. I agree that I'm, I'm very worried about the right

wing and I don't for us. But let's just have some fun with them for the time being. So first of all,

shout out to Liz Trusts who just pulled off the first CPAC Great Britain. For those lucky enough, not to know what CPAC is, it's a huge right wing, kind of annual political conference. It started out in the U.S. as this place where the fringe crazies gathered every single year and now it just evolved over time to be basically the maga base of the party, even though CPAC stars has faded a lot recently, because the guy who runs it is a weird creep. But like any good

cancer CPAC has metastasized and spread and is now infecting political systems all over the world, because there's like a CPAC Hungary, CPAC UK, CPAC, etc. So that brings us back to the CPAC conference great and great Britain. Check out this video then that was taken by journalist named Latika and

Bork, just to get a sense of the absolutely electric vibe at this event.

Well, we had more seats at the 815 times on the Aspen security room. We had more seats at the 815 times on the Aspen security room. We had more seats at the 815 times for the Aspen security forum that started at 9. Yeah, we actually sanctioned the sanction. The New York Times reported the day three of the conference had about a hundred people total in the audience, not so far

“as with the headline. I think he had a much bigger crowd of much bigger, it's like 300 to 400.”

Ron DeSantis was supposed to speak, but had to cancel due to I think bad weather, canceling his flight. So it could have been worse for those 11 people in that audience. The British conservative magazine, the spectator called the event, quote, empty, comma miserable, downright weird, an author named William Aconson, a man who wants a right wing government also said quote, being cursed with vision, hearing insanity meant enduring an event that made trust his premiership look like a

model of tact and foresight. He also called that Yankee brains slop barely repackaged for UK audience, stomach churning to watch tickets for the event ranged from 100 pounds to 10,000 pounds for the full VIP treatment. Ben, do you think we might get invited to speak at that one, next year? Do you think we're getting invited to speak at Aspen? I don't know, but like, maybe, yeah, we'll see. I think that, um, but we're so interesting because like the idea that just because something

works in the United States, it's going to like work everywhere. I mean, it worked in Hungary because Orban put like a ton of resources behind it. This is the problem. Liz trust cannot front your fucking conference. What are you guys doing? Exactly. How, how, like, get, get the cabbage or the lettuce or whatever it is? Well, but this is a, you know, we used to monitor her podcast and that's still exist or if Michael, our producer, just, you know,

kind of phone off and then her last episode was two weeks ago and it did have 2,500 views. Well, but this is the reality, this, this person seems to have like a bottomless well of her willingness, you know, Trump doesn't, you know, has a bottomless well of not being shamed. You cannot humiliate Liz trust. Like, she's still up there being like, this is great. It's so great to see this crowd of, you know, a few dozen people, you know, she's really

remarkable figure. I can't think of someone who's been so thoroughly willing to kind of be humiliated over and over again, you know? Yeah. Like, whatever she comes to the act of the CPAC in the U.S., she gets similar, kind of, half asleep audiences. It's not like she's paying for this. So,

will write a check for for something like that. You know, that's actually the thing that's scary. He's like, even when it doesn't work, like they can still get the funding for it. That looked like a conference room that was associated with a casino outside Dallas or something. That was just out of the bleak bleak looking venue there. Speaking of Nigel Forage Ben. So, when you were out on my vacation, Ben, I talked with Medihosen about Farage's

farce of a bi-election that he's running in. This is in Flecton, a region called Flecton. So, what happened was Nigel Forage was caught red handed taking gifts and not declaring them,

including five million pound gift from this crypto billionaire that lives in Thailand.

“I think five million pounds. Do I say billion, five million pounds? I think that's six”

point seven million dollars. It took it from this crypto billionaire who lives in Thailand. The story for why was all over the place. It was for security. Then it was a gift. Then it was like a, you know, payment for campaigning. Like, none of it makes sense. It's quite just brazen corruption. And the good thing about that story is it woke up the fucking British press finally, and they started to dig into this guy. So, that also led Parliament to start investigating

Forage. So, it sounds like the strategy here is to kind of avoid and end these investigations. Forage resigned from his seat in Parliament. He triggered this bi-election which happens on August 13th that he is now running in. He claims that the election results in this new super-right wing area, by the way, that he should wind hands down no matter what was sort of renderer verdicts on the allegations against him. He said, "People have clicked and be the judges of my actions."

But all the other parties surprisingly, the major political parties, they saw this as the first

that it was and they decided to not run candidates in this election to not lend it any kind of legitimacy. So, that means Nigel Farage is running against 33 absolutely just random people. Mostly, they are like kind of unknowns or weirdos, but there is one shining star in the field as name is Count Binface. Count Binface claims to be a 6,000-year-old intergalactic space warrior from Planet Sigma 9. He's a perennial candidate in the UK. He is run for mayor of London twice.

He's running in a bunch of parliamentary elections, including against Boris Johnson, and then most recently Iranians are guy, Andy Burnham, up in Nicarfield. Let's hear from Count Binface himself. Let's watch.

“First question, why would an intergalactic space warrior want to stand to be the MP for Clapton?”

Why not? It's a good question. Tell me about your manifesto. What can you offer the people of Clapton? Have you ever been there? No, because I understand from the current incumbent, that is part of how you do the job. So, I deliberately stayed away. Is that how it works?

You've said that you will cut my taxes and raise everyone else's. How much tax can I expect to pay? Yeah, well, let me just clarify that I will cut your taxes and raise everyone else's. Maybe that absolutely plays. They're not just yours, mate. It's for everybody. This is a blanket thing. I will cut your taxes and raise everybody else's. Okay, so how much will I pay? A reasonable amount, but just less than everyone else. Okay, and how much will everyone else?

“A little bit more than you. What is your appeal going to be to the people of Clapton?”

Well, I'm not Nigel Ferdage. So full butterflies. International policies, nationalize a tale, build at least one affordable house, thigh nurses, pay to that of ministers, rename London Bridge after Phoebe Waller, bring back sea facts and of course move the hands dryer in the gent's toilets at the Crown

and Treaty Pop Oxbridge to a more sensible position, because as you can imagine, that's a national issue. You can see those from a bunch of interviews he did a couple on the BBC. There's an LBC interview there was a couple more. Count Binface for those who were listening and not watching. He's basically dude in a Star Wars outfit with a trashcan on his head. Under the trashcan is the man named John Harvey, he's a comedy writer. He's been doing variations on this character since 2017. He's currently

not doing that great in the polls. Again, it's a very right-wing district. It's a very reformed district.

Count Binface is at 5% odds on Calshy. But there is always hope, Ben. I want you to know I

reaped out to him to see if we could book him on the show. He's not DM'd me back yet, but I really hope he can get a US exclusive with Count Binface. He may be the hero we need at this difficult trying time. There's something kind of like Monti Python asks about that that I appreciate. Absolutely. Absolutely. He has great comedic timing. I'm not Nigel Farage pause. It's also like, I don't know. I just, if any country is going to elect a Count Binface over just a

listener up in Clackton. Maybe tell your friends vote Count Binface. Like everybody turn out.

Like the the farce is the point. Nigel Farage is a joke. He's making the joke of your politics, your system, your campaign finance system, your laws and vote for Count Binface to send him a message. I mean, and to be entertained for the coming years. Imagine Count Binface at Prime Minister's

“question time. It'll be incredible. Would he be allowed to wear the whole bit, you think?”

It's a good question. It might be discriminatory to not allow him to have his binface. Yeah, that's a really good question. I'll all ask some people and follow up for next week. Okay, that's it for Ben and my portion of the show, but please stick around for my interview with Alexi Sorokin from The Key of Independent. Again, we talk about the security situation in Ukraine. This huge protest movement, resulting from Zalenski firing his defense minister.

We talk about missile defense capabilities, the kind of offensive strategy of the Ukrainian side. So really interesting conversation. So check it out. Stick around for that. This podcast is brought to you by Wise. The app for international people using money around the globe. When it comes to sending money abroad, many providers claim to offer free fees and competitive rates, but don't be fooled. This can be code for inflated exchange rates. With the Wise account,

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My guest today is the deputy chief editor for the Keeve Independent, Alexi Sorok and welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining. So I wanted to start with some reports about the security situation in Ukraine at the moment. I saw a bunch of reports over the course of the week that last weekend was one of the largest

“ballistic missile and drone attacks on Ukraine since the start of the war. Is that accurate?”

Can you talk about the impact of what that does to your day-to-day life if you're living in Keeve or anywhere in the country? Well, I would go as far to say that the last month, month and a half, was probably the earliest and the harshest in Kiev. Ukraine is currently lacking patriot air defense missiles. And Russians know that. So what's happening now is that they're using more and more ballistic missiles that are hard to shoot down to target different sites across

the city over the past month, over 60 people were killed in Keeve, 60 civilians by Russian missiles.

Obviously this has a tremendous impact on your day-to-day life. People have to basically

they don't sleep, they have to go to shelter, they have to understand that because ballistic are also really fast, the air rate is not timely enough, so people don't have time to prepare themselves for an attack. So you can be in the kitchen, cooking something, or you can be in bed, and then you hear ballistic missile hits something near your house. So that's the everyday life in Ukraine right now, and obviously it's tremendously affecting people's morale, but also they're just

well-being. And I saw, and this was on Twitter so correct me if I'm wrong, that the Russians attacked a metro station where people are known to shelter recently as that accurate. Yeah, so there's one of the metro stations. Well, basically metro stations are the best bomb shelters in Keeve. Obviously they're deep underground, and a lot of people sleep in the metro when they know there's going to be an attack, and one of those metro stations was hit.

It's actually regularly hit by the Russians because it's in a neighborhood that's being tremendously affected by Russian attacks, and yeah, it's dangerous even in a bomb shelter right now. Yeah, you mentioned Ukraine desperately needs more missile defense infrastructure like US Patriot missiles. At the same time I know that Ukraine has been incredibly innovative when it comes to developing missile defense drones to take out Russian drones. So I saw President Trump recently

It will probably take years for that to lead to, you know, weapons on the battlefield. How significant do you think that licensing decision was in your mind? Do we know that it actually happened yet versus just Trump kind of saying stuff? And more broadly, how do you think

“Ukraine is managing and evolving to deal with the threat of these missile and drone attacks?”

Well, there's multiple questions. I'll start from President Trump. Well, President, if he doesn't change his mind and then near future, then it's a really good decision, right? Because obviously, there's a bottleneck in production. A lot of countries are now awaiting Patriot missiles. Lockhead Martin is not producing enough, and if Ukraine is able to produce those Patriot missiles, obviously it will take time. It'll take half a year, a year, maybe, to

begin producing. But if that happens, then Ukraine is not going to be dependent on the United States, right? And this will be a tremendous boost for Ukraine's air defense. And adding to that is that unfortunately, unfortunately, the Patriot missiles are the best in the world, right? So no other

“country has anything like that. So Ukraine can innovate drones. Ukraine can produce missiles.”

Ukraine can do a lot, right? But unfortunately, air defense is the most sophisticated weapon. And if we're talking about Ukraine, it currently doesn't have air defense systems. So it has interceptor drones, which can affect incoming drones, but it doesn't have systems to combat cruise or ballistic missiles. While Europeans, for example, the Sampti, IRIS missile systems, they are good in battling cruise missiles. But in terms of ballistic, the only system that is known

to down those kind of missiles is the Patriot system. And unfortunately, that's something that Ukraine currently doesn't have. Yeah. At the same time, Ukraine has been going on offense. There has been this military campaign to target and isolate Crimea. I know there's been strikes in Crimea itself. There's been strikes on ships in the Black Sea and the sea of Azov. Can you

“kind of talk about how that campaign has evolved in the last couple of weeks in what the goal is?”

Well, I would not call it probably offense because the situation currently is a bit different in a sense that on the battlefield Russians are still advancing. So in the Eastern part of the country, Russians are still using infantry troops to just continue to attack Ukraine to gain more land.

While Ukraine is waging an asymmetrical warfare, basically using drones to target Russian logistics

and Russian oil refineries and so on. So there's two ongoing campaigns. One is the long range or deep strikes, basically using long-range drones. Sometimes it's basically a plane with explosives to attack oil refineries, deep inside Russia. Those planes can go 1,000, 1,200 kilometers. And basically the main goal here is to inflict as much damage on the Russian economy as possible so that it's too expensive to wage the war against Ukraine because obviously Russia is still

on oil and energy export country. So that's the first campaign. The second one is middle-sry

campaign and here the Hornet drones are making a difference. Basically these are the drones that

target Russian troops and logistical centers in between 100 and 253 hundred kilometers. So basically the goal here is to force the occupied parts of Ukraine to be cut off from Russia and for the Russians to not be able to provide troops logistics and oil and so on to those areas, basically forcing the Russians to back down. And I would say that this started somewhere in mid-May and it had a tremendous impact on morale and Ukrainians feel that this is something that can

make the victory or a favorable outcome of this war possible. I noticed recently there was a strike by Ukraine on the Russian equivalent of Amazon.com. I saw this military official said it was

because Russian soldiers were buying basically drone component parts from this side therefore they

believed it was a legitimate military target. I'm wondering if you believe that explanation or if this was partly maybe a strategy of bringing the war home to people in Russia and bombing a website or shopping resource they use often and spreading fear that way of disrupting their lives. Well I think disrupting Russian's lives is a positive kind of outcome but it's not the main one

which is an interesting name and we went on the website and we actually googled to buy a drone or to buy components for military stuff and you can just go on the website and I welcome you to just go and search this website and yeah you can buy military hardware you can buy

military equipment, dual use goods and basically it's used for the military as well right.

I like it's a complicated question right because obviously it's hard to definitively say

“is it a legit target if it sells both clothes and drones but that's what was happening and I would”

say that Ukraine deliberately hit those two factories will storage facilities as kind of warning for the Russian kind of civilian and the Russian kind of non-military sector to be careful would help in the military because basically Ukraine says okay look if you sell drones and grenades and help the military we're going to go after you and so don't do it and I think that this warning

is something that Ukraine is trying to bring to the Russians got it did you pick up anything on the

website where you're there like a quadcopter or anything now I think the shipping is shipping that's a problem yeah understood I want to ask you about this political crisis that's you know been engulfing President Zelensky over the last couple of days so for listeners last week as Zelensky fired his defense minister Mikalo Fedorov is been clashing with Ukraine's top general Alexander Searsky but then thousands of Ukrainians took to the street to protest a decision into

man that Fedorov being reinstated can you explain this clash and why you know I see a lot of analysts saying that this is not just about two individuals this is about generational disagreements over tactics and technology and maybe even like political threats to Zelensky doing a short explanation or long explain I want whatever you think is the best explanation okay let's hope well

well basically like the experts are correct so every July President Zelensky has this one thing of

just causing a political crisis of his own making the last July was the same thing I don't know

“what's what's with him in July but so yeah so in January I think Mikalo Fedorov was appointed”

as the defense minister and he brought this basically new approach right he he was he's kind of the drunk guy he's he digitized a lot of civilian infrastructure but also the military so he is seen as a modern progressive young official who can who's bring change right obviously he wasn't successful in doing everything right but for example he he was the one who helped spearhead the middle spray campaign he he was the one who actually had a plan right so if in short it's a young

progressive guy would plan and obviously that's something that's looked upon favorably by the population which is tired it the population's gased there's a lot of problems with how Ukraine is doing this war for obvious reasons right and then you have the military command which is known for top-down kind of approach, micromanagement some people say that it's Soviet style I would not go as far as saying that but obviously there are many problems right for example one of the main

problems is that the the military command and Mr. Serzki is known to like infantry attacks even now right they they have for example there is this unit called scalar which is now blown out of proportion all the mobilized people now go not all of them but like many of them are drafted specifically into this unit and people say that it's not effective right so there's two visions of how Ukraine can continue this this war right the same on the street goes that a small

“Soviet army can't defeat a big Soviet army right and that's what Ukraine has to be asymmetrical”

Ukraine has to innovate Ukraine has to change and unfortunately President Zelensky took a pretty not wise decision and he decided to change the defense minister there's there's multiple explanations why he did it because this kind of the old command had a conflict with the defense minister and Mr. Fedorov also wanted to change defense procurement how it's run and so on so he he ousted the defense minister and apparently the president's office didn't expect people to rise up

expect people to start protesting happened this July and and the problem right now is I'm not sure

“when when this is gonna air slowly okay so based on like right now the situation is as follows right”

Zelensky is inclined to change a source to change the military leadership to kind of appease the protesters and and hopefully for him the protests are ended right what he's not willing to do

is he's not willing to reappoint Mr. Fedorov as the defense minister because basically

ego problem right if you if you made a mistake the wisest thing to do is come out and say sorry I made a mistake but if you're a president then probably that you're not gonna do that so I get we get that over here in America don't yeah I'm not gonna explain that yeah so he proposed according to our sources Mr. Fedorov was proposed different posts in government he was proposed

“being an advisor to the president that be prime minister like basically everything possible”

but not the defense ministry which Mr. Fedorov says that again according to our sources doesn't make sense because he started some reforms in the defense ministry and he only wants that post back and so here there is a stalemate and obviously the next protest is scheduled for Friday and obviously in this window of like two three days we'll see if either side but just July mess yeah yeah I don't get it I don't know why I do it but before I get to my last question

for you you're obviously doing an amazing work reporting on all these issues covering the war

you're doing it you know under the threat of bombardment from the Russians how can international listeners support you support what you guys are doing at the independent is it subscribing is it

“sharing clips like what's the best way well basically we're reader funded right we currently have”

34,000 paying members the membership stars from five dollars a month we we strongly recommend supporting independent journalism in Ukraine we rely on our readers for support so if you have the means if you have the desire to support independent journalism we would be really grateful for

for your support well it's worth the money you guys are doing amazing work last question for you

earlier this week Ukrainian law enforcement released this video of a package bomb exploding outside this monaco home of someone who's described as Ukrainian oligarch the blast nearly kills this man it's severely wounds his girlfriend wounds her son I believe I don't know if it's his son or her son the suspected bombers believed to have been contracted out for the hit and later killed by Ukrainian intelligence officers what the hell is happening here can you

help me sort of unpack the layers of this story well this is yeah this is the weirdest sub plot in Ukraine currently so obviously there are several versions right we we don't know what exactly happened so this man who you're alive he's a Ukrainian sketchy businessman from the early 2000s who left the country who had problems with the law here who is basically and citizen of Cyprus now and he's in a bunch of shady shady stuff right what happened is he was sanctioned by Ukraine so

there's definitely he has a really bad reputation the the problem here is that because he's involved in so many shady stuff including business in the occupied territories which he denies and also some illegal call centers and so on it's hard to establish right now what's the main reason for someone to to blow him up in Monaco obviously it's absolutely wild story that the assassin was later killed in Ukraine a middle-aged woman who apparently was just

paid to to plant something and she's obviously not the main culprit here so currently there's two people in prison in Ukraine actually one of them was a member of Ukrainian security services and the official official kind of version right now is that it's kind of a business conflict and those people were paid to basically organize on assassination we don't have more details right now we obviously are covering this but there's a whole problem I would say in multiple countries that

some kind of shady shady businesses taking place and obviously that's something that is worth investigating

both by law enforcement by but by journalists as well yeah crazy crazy story well it's that's a

“great reason to support the key to independent become a subscriber and Alexey thank you so much for”

joining the show I really appreciate it thank you very much thanks again to Alexey's

wrote good for joining the show and we'll talk to you guys next week positive the world is a

“quick immediate production our show is produced by aluminum and coffee Michael Goldsmith”

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