Ted Rall: Hey there. I’m Ted Rall, and I’m here for DeProgram along with
John Kiriakou. He’s the CIA whistleblower. I’m the editorial cartoonist.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for joining us on the Rumble feed, on the YouTube feed, and everywhere else. You’re listening also to people just listening to the audio. We appreciate you too. Please like, follow, and share the show.

Lots to talk about today, as always. We talked about that this might happen,
John. I didn’t think it would happen this fast.

No way. The UK is almost certainly going to recognize Palestine at the UN General Assembly this September. Well, that’s our lead. We’re going to be talking about interesting news out of Iran, where Iran’s leading the way in abandoning US tech, namely GPS. And, you know, we could see a lot more of this kind of thing coming in the very near future from all over the world.

Super interesting, look into the future. Is Israel losing the American right? The evangelicals who’ve been their loyal supporters, Marjorie Taylor Greene is criticizing the Gaza war as genocide.

John Kiriakou: She’s right, of course, but it’s amazing to hear her and people like her saying anything like that.

Ted Rall: Two CIA-related stories that there’s no way I’m going to let you off the hook,
John, from talking about. Tom Sylvester is out at the CIA, and Sandy Grimes, the lady who caught Aldrich Ames, died at the age of 80. We’ll talk about her legacy, and we’ll talk about breaking news and anything else that comes up. And, of course, if you have questions, please put them into the feeds, and we always pick up on them and post them and talk about them.

But we’ve got lots of stuff to talk about. So Keir Starmer, he kind of gave it, some people are interpreting this as a wussy move, but he basically said he’ll recognize Palestine in September unless Israel comes to its senses and agrees to a ceasefire. They’ve been the ones who’ve been breaking all the ceasefires up until now. And, so, you know, obviously, Israel’s not going to do that. So by definition, the UK will join France. And there’s a whole passel of other countries who are interested in doing it too. So let’s get to it.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. Let’s start, if you don’t mind, with Tom Sylvester. Oh, thank you very much, Marble. Let’s do Tom Sylvester. I just want to get this out of the way because we have so much to talk about related to Gaza. Tom Sylvester is the CIA’s deputy director for operations. And in that position, you can argue, he’s the number three or number four official in the CIA. He’s in charge of all CIA operations around the world. This is a job that every CIA case officer aspires to. And by all accounts, he’s been very popular among the rank and file.

Well, if you’ve been the deputy director for operations, your final preretirement job is normally that you’re named station chief in London. That is the one job that everybody in the CIA aspires to. Everybody wants to be the station chief in London. So he was named station chief in London several months ago. But over the course of those several months, he gave an interview to Tim Weiner, who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of several books on the CIA. There’s one coming out soon called The Mission that several outlets are excerpting. And, apparently, CIA director
John Radcliffe didn’t like the fact that he spoke with Tim Weiner. Now, normally, the director of the CIA will instruct his officers to work with authors, especially with Tim Weiner. But whatever it is that Tom Sylvester said, it apparently pissed people off. And so the job was unceremoniously yanked from under him.

John Kiriakou: He will not be the CIA station chief in London. Director Radcliffe informed MI6, apparently, yesterday that Sylvester will not be the CIA station chief in London. And so today, Sylvester announced his retirement effective immediately. He’s just going to take his pension and go home. Now most of the time, senior officers, even if they’re disgruntled, will keep their mouth shut. The fact that he’s already spoken to Tim Weiner makes me think the story’s not over. We’re going to hear more.

Ted Rall: So my father worked in government, specifically in the US Air Force, for years at the upper echelons. And he told me, and
John, tell me if this is correct, that usually when you know you’re about to retire, that’s your one chance to vent and blow up. You know, you’re going to retire anyway, and you’ve had stuff that you wanted to say. You’ve got one big thing you want to do. Someone you want to blow up, some boss who was an asshole. And then this is when you do it. And then you retire, and they can’t get you. Is that basically what happened here?

John Kiriakou: 100%. And I’ll tell you my own experience. My last tour, when I resigned from the agency, was at the United Nations in New York. And my station chief, Mary Margaret Graham, and I did not like each other, not even a little bit. And so a couple of days before I left, she threatened me with putting out what’s called a burn notice against me. Oh, yeah, I saw that TV show. She threatened me with a burn notice. And I laughed at her. I was in her office, and, of course, she had her little witness there, the chief of operations, who was just a little dwarf. So I said, I’m not afraid of your threats. Burn notice? I said, come on. You forget that when I made this recent recruitment, you congratulated me by telling me to take petty cash and go get myself a blow job. I said, what do you think the Washington Post would say about that or the New York Times? Because as God is my witness, I’m going to call them and tell them. And she immediately backed off.

Ted Rall: Wow. So, by the way, I do want to answer, maybe you can answer this question. Marble is asking, why is London a desirable post? It’s like the top post, right?

John Kiriakou: It’s the post because you get a gigantic mansion to live in. You get a chauffeur-driven Jaguar limo that they drive you around in. You have the largest entertainment budget of any station chief in the world. Nobody’s trying to kill you there. And MI6 is the closest alliance, intelligence friendship in the world.

Ted Rall: Yeah. So it’s analogous to, in the State Department, right, ambassador to the Court of St. James. It’s the same kind of thing. It’s the job.

John Kiriakou: Exactly right. It is the job.

Ted Rall: I mean, even editorial cartoonist, like New York Times, you know? It’s like that, right?

John Kiriakou: And so, Hans, I absolutely positively did not. I’ve never paid for it in my life, and I’m proud to say that. So although we all pay for it in different ways.

Ted Rall: That’s what my working girlfriends used to tell me. Nothing’s free.

John Kiriakou: But even at lower levels in London, like, I’ve spoken about this operation I did with Christopher Steele back in February. And my counterparts in the station, who were, you know, just whatever, GS-12, GS-13, GS-14, they were living high on the hog too. You’re living in Knightsbridge or you’re living in Paddington in this beautiful mews house, and that life is good. And like I say, people aren’t trying to kill you on the way to work. Gotta love that. Refreshing.

Ted Rall: How, by the way, what do you think of Tom Sylvester, and what do you think of Tim Weiner?

John Kiriakou: You know, honestly, I like them both. Tom Sylvester was an inspired choice to be the deputy director for operations. The guy’s been a station chief, I don’t know, six times, seven times all around the world. He was a specialist in Soviet and then Russian operations and really quite the good ops guy, career-long ops guy, spent almost his entire adult life overseas. Tim Weiner, I actually have a great deal of respect for. I gave him an interview for his previous book about the CIA, and he treated me with great respect.

Ted Rall: So I read that book. It was a solid read for sure. It’s a solid read. And it won the National Book Award, which is a very big deal.

John Kiriakou: Very big deal.

Ted Rall: I mean, it’s definitely not a fun read, unfortunately. And that’s my kind of idea of a fun read. But it doesn’t, you know? I mean, I love that kind of thing. But the prose doesn’t sing, but I would say it’s worth it.

John Kiriakou: It’s a little bit on the dense side, but he footnotes the daylights out of his books. I appreciate that. He backs up everything he writes. It’s quite impressive. And then his books are, like, 800 pages long.

Ted Rall: I’m a sucker for those long books. I’ve been hearing that word counts are dropping at books. Like, 100,000, 120,000 words used to be a standard fiction book. Now 60 or 80,000 is closer to a novella because people’s attention span is so short, but the biographies and political nonfiction are still the outlier. They’re getting longer and longer all the time.

John Kiriakou: Can I answer Eric, who’s asking real quickly? Eric, the rule on the Peace Corps was written in granite. There could be no contact whatsoever between the CIA and the Peace Corps for several reasons. First of all, everybody already accuses the Peace Corps of being CIA. So it’s dangerous enough. Secondly, the Peace Corps has no protection. They’re out there in the sticks. You’re out there in the sticks doing God’s work, and there’s nobody to protect you. So we were not permitted to even, like, say hello if we ran into somebody from the Peace Corps.

Ted Rall: I mean, honestly, that is a good rule that you guys had because, you know, it’s to me, the analogy is the journalism, the journalist embedding programs. I’m violently opposed to them. And as soon as that started in Iraq, anytime you went anywhere, the locals would say, well, you’re just with the US soldiers. You’re a propagandist. I can’t trust you. Why shouldn’t I kill you? And it’s like, I mean, it’s so dangerous. And then, you know, as a journalist, the only weapon you have is your camera or your laptop. That’s it. You’re on your own. You’re really like your dick is waving out in the wind. I mean, it’s bad.

Ted Rall: So do you want to talk about Sandy Grimes, or should we save that for later?

John Kiriakou: Let’s do Sandy Grimes.

You know, Sandy Grimes is another kind of legendary figure, and she never really set out to be. Sandy started off as a secretary, in the days when I think she started back in ’67, is what I read. But those were the days when women were not permitted to have leadership roles. Not just leadership roles, they were not permitted to really do anything of import. They were only secretaries and clerks, file clerks. So she started off as a secretary and then rose up to be one of the greatest mole hunters in CIA’s history. And she’s the one who caught Aldrich Ames, one of the most despicable traitors in modern American history. So, and she was totally unsung. She didn’t even inside the building, if you would say to somebody, hey, so which one of these people over here is Sandy Grimes? Nobody would know because she wasn’t about the fanfare. Her job was to find the mole, and by God, she found him, and he got life without parole. I remember George Tenet saying one time in a meeting that Sandy had gone to him. George, of course, was the director at the time. And Sandy said, I’ve identified him. It’s Aldrich Ames. And it just so happened that George had to attend a White House briefing at which Ames was a participant. And George said that he just couldn’t look Ames in the eye. He knew he was a traitor, and he knew that he was going to be arrested in just a couple of days. And so he was determined only to look at Ames’ shoes so as not to give himself away. And he said he couldn’t help but to see that the shoes were, oh, the shoes that OJ Simpson wore, those, like, $500 shoes.

Ted Rall: Do you remember what those were? Oh, God. I don’t remember what those were.

John Kiriakou: I had never heard of them at the time. Well, neither had I, but they’re like Prada shoes.

Ted Rall: Yeah. Yeah.

John Kiriakou: And then a couple of days later, that’s always the thing, right?

Ted Rall: I mean, these guys, these moles, they have too much money. They’re living too high. That’s what attracts the wrong kind of attention.

John Kiriakou: Absolutely.

Ted Rall: I’m going to Google it real quickly. OJ Simpson’s shoes. And while you’re doing that, let me just bring in Robbie to talk about Bruno Magli.

John Kiriakou: Bruno Magli. That’s it.

Ted Rall: Robby’s shoes. Let me bring in producer Roobby. Guys, we just have to ask you a quick little favor, and we’re going to explain this to you. Okay. Robby’s our producer, Robby West, who I’m going to see next week in Montana. So we basically are trying to get some money here. And with the existing audience that we have, if we can get people to go over to Rumble and watch us on Rumble, same exact experience. There’s a live feed. It’s exactly the same thing. Instead of YouTube, which pays not nearly as well,
John and I will have a little easier time paying our bills every month. Serious. You want to explain it?

Robby West: Yeah. No. For sure. Thank you all for popping me on. Alright. So just real quick, I’m going to try to make this as precise and not boring as possible. So YouTube pays you based off of ads. And, basically, whenever you click on a video, whenever an ad pops up, they will literally throw a few pennies to Ted and
John here onto the channel. What I’m working on doing is getting DeProgram into the Rumble content creator program, and I want to do that for a couple of different reasons. One, Rumble is a free speech platform. So what does that mean? It means that Rumble will not one day decide that
John and Ted are being too controversial and pull the plug. So if you like
John and Ted, go to Rumble and listen to them, and they’ll be uncensored. Second, Rumble pays you based off of your watch hours. On YouTube, watch hours mean nothing. So it’s kind of like TV or radio. So the more people that watch, what happens is that they get paid literally hundreds of dollars per hour watched as opposed to maybe 6 or $7 over on YouTube. And like Ted was saying, the experience is exactly the same with one big exception. When you’re on Rumble, if you want in the creator program, they have to do five hours of Rumble-only premium content. So what does that mean? If there’s a topic that’s particularly controversial that you’re all interested in hearing, then you can see it live on Rumble and be able to continue supporting them and be able to help them pay some bills. I mean, y’all know what’s going on with them. Y’all know that they lost their income. So while we ask, y’all go over to Rumble, drop some follows. We have thousands of people here watching on YouTube. If only, I do not kid y’all, if 20% of y’all do what we’re asking, it would make a radical change financially for Ted and for
John. That’s all I got for you. Now drop the link in the chat.

Ted Rall: The chat, it’s in here. It’s rumble.com/c/deprogramshow. But you can just go to Rumble and just search for DeProgram and Ted Rall or
John Kiriakou, and you will find it. Robby, thank you so much for that. Okay. Sorry for the ad, guys. I mean, it’s like we’re getting to be like NPR.

Ted Rall:
John, anyway, you were saying about Sandy Grimes.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. So here she catches one of the most prolific moles in modern American history. And then the next day, she came into work and just went about her normal job looking for the next mole. So I felt bad when I saw she died. I didn’t realize that she was 80 years old, but God bless her. She was really one of those unknown heroes, those unsung heroes at the CIA. You know, every once in a while, the CIA will give out something called a Trailblazer Award. I never understood these things. And most of them will be, you know, white men who were station chief, like, in Havana when Batista was overthrown, or station chief when the last guy was pulled out of South Vietnam on the helicopter. And then they’ll toss one to somebody like Bonnie Hirschberg. I worked for Bonnie in the office of leadership analysis. Bonnie was a terrific analyst. She was an okay manager. What trail she blazed, I will never ever understand because she was just kind of a typical run-of-the-mill manager. But then you have people like this who are unsung. But, anyway, that’s the CIA today. Lot of news coming in with the CIA today.

Ted Rall: What is, before we move on from her, I mean, what are the personality traits that are required to catch a mole? Like, what skill set is required? I mean, it’s not, we have to navigate. Also, you’re, in the case of an Aldrich Ames, you’re bringing down someone who’s got title, position above your own. You can see a lot of institutional resistance. No one wants to hear it, right?

John Kiriakou: No one wants to hear it. And I’ll tell you what, there are no bigger secrets than the counterintelligence center at the CIA. That’s a very important question you’ve asked, Ted. The mole hunter at the CIA has to be somebody who is obsessed with secrecy to the point where you don’t even talk to yourself, like, in your own head. Like, for me, I’d be, I’d go to the credit union and say, I’m taking you down, Ames, you bastard. You know, I would never fit in in a position like that. And you have to not really care about people telling you, shut up, Kiriakou. Like, you just don’t like games because you don’t like his politics. You don’t like the cut of his jib. This is personal. You’re going after a good patriot, someone who’s doing God’s work for America, and you’re being an asshole. That’s right. And listen, somebody in counterintelligence is akin to somebody in internal affairs in a police department. No one likes you.

I’ll give you an example. On my first, at the end of my first full week at the agency, my boss walked me around both the new headquarters building and the old headquarters building just to point out where everything was. Here’s the cafeteria. Here’s the credit union. There’s medical services. This, in the lobby of the new building, is all glass, like, a glass atrium, and they have windows. And one window says health insurance, and one window says life insurance, and one window says sports tickets. And then there were a couple of other windows. He said, this is where you go if you want to buy baseball tickets, basketball, hockey, football tickets. And then there was another one that said, well, I shouldn’t say what it said, but it was the window that you go to if maybe you have a little bit of a drinking problem or you’ve got a problem with your credit or maybe you’re taking care of your elderly parents and it’s too much of a burden. He told me, don’t ever go to that window. I said, why? It’s nice that they do things like that. And he said, because the people at that window work for counterintelligence, and they don’t give a shit about your elderly parents. They want to know if you’re in a bad enough spot that you’re going to turn mole.

Ted Rall: So this is a little bit like, in the Cultural Revolution, let a thousand flowers bloom, where the Chinese Communist Party said, oh, we’re opening up ourselves to criticism. You know, all you academics, all you people who might be accused of being counter-revolutionaries, step forward. The party’s a big tent. We want to hear from all of you guys, then you step forward. Good. Off to a May 4 farm. Nobody ever sees you again.

John Kiriakou: That’s right.

Ted Rall: Wow. That is some dark cynical shit.

John Kiriakou: That was my first week. I’m like, holy shit. I never even went in there to buy a ticket to the ball game. I was just afraid of somebody just seeing me go in there.

Ted Rall: You can, that’s what Ticketron is for. Or Ticketmaster, whatever the fuck it’s called now.

John Kiriakou: That’s exactly right.

Ted Rall: Oh, man. That is so dark. Alright. Should we talk about Palestine?

John Kiriakou: You were right, Ted. You were right about Keir Starmer, and, frankly, I didn’t think he had the guts to do it. But then he kind of made a half step, if you don’t mind my taking over the conversation.

Ted Rall: Please.

John Kiriakou: He said, we’re going to recognize Palestine in September unless the Israelis let food in and are nicer people about it. It’s a decision designed by committee. You can tell that.

Ted Rall: Absolutely. And, you know, but I think it’s probably very easy to agree to. It’s kind of like, well, okay. Fine. I mean, the Israelis are not going to do this. I mean, it does have kind of, I mean, I don’t like it either because I feel one of the commenters, deep down in the thread, pointed out that really, this recognition should just be based on, not as a reward, a punishment for Israel, but it should just be a statement of self-determination for the Palestinian people.

John Kiriakou: Couldn’t agree more. In the original documents that led to the creation of Israel, and there’s even a YouTube video of Harry Truman talking about this, it says that Israel is going to be created today, whatever, 1948. And Palestine will be created as an independent state pending further discussion. Okay. That was 1948, and we’re still talking about it.

Ted Rall: Now that said, there are 153 nations. I guess it’s going to be 155 soon. Australia is apparently getting ready to pull the trigger. Luxembourg is getting ready to pull the trigger.

John Kiriakou: I didn’t see that one.

Ted Rall: And there’s a whole parcel of other European countries that are Croatia, Spain.

Yeah. Spain’s already in.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think, basically, it’s like you said, it’s going to be just the Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and Italy who are going to be out with the US. What a motley crew.

Ted Rall: And, you know, but so yeah. No. It’s a big deal. I mean, I think the pressure built so fast on Starmer. That’s what I mean, I knew it was going to happen. I just didn’t think it would happen this quickly.

John Kiriakou: And you know what started it was these pictures that ran in the BBC of starving children. That just opened the floodgates. I really believe that.

Ted Rall: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that. Someone brought it up, and I apologize because this was further down. But I’m glad that someone asked about this question. So, there was this very one particular photo of this one kid who was really, really, really sick and with these haunting eyes. And you could see why this particular photo went viral. And the New York Times and other corporate media organizations have walked that back, obviously, in response to Zionists who’ve complained that the kid, aside from suffering from starvation, also had other diseases at the same time. So therefore, but those other diseases are not wasting diseases. But the kid was really, really sick, and he’s starving. So, and that’s why he was at the hospital.

Ted Rall: But, you know, look. To me, it’s kind of like, well, what do you make of that? My answer to that is I think it’s the last gasp of a dying regime. I mean, I think Israel is in real trouble now.

John Kiriakou: I agree. And I don’t think that they really realize just how deep they are. I saw an interview. Well, maybe you saw it too. It’s Tucker Carlson’s latest interview. It just dropped, and it’s with
John Mearsheimer, who is absolutely freaking brilliant. And Mearsheimer essentially said that. He said that the Israelis just don’t realize how deep they’re in. And on the contrary, they’re talking about this concept of a greater Israel, which includes the bottom third of Lebanon, the southern third of Lebanon. It includes another 50 miles inside of Syria. It includes the entire West Bank, and it includes the Gaza, I’m sorry, the Sinai Peninsula. It’s like, wait a minute. You guys should be thinking about your survival here and about your country falling apart because you’re carrying out a genocide, and you’ve got people who are in government talking about greater Israel. Mearsheimer made another important point. And this is how unhinged the American evangelical Christian community is, where you’ve got the likes of Ambassador Huckabee or Speaker of the House Mike
Johnson saying that Jesus wants us to support Israel and Israel’s policy. Well, last week, Israel’s policy was to utterly and completely destroy one of the last surviving Christian villages in the West Bank, drive out all the Christians, and steal their land. So you’re saying Jesus wants the Jews to drive out the Christians? And that’s what we’re going with? It makes absolutely no sense at all.

Ted Rall: So many Americans don’t know how many Christians there are in Palestine. A lot of them. By the way, though, I do want to say, you know, one of the things you wanted to talk about was the split now, the growing split on the American right over Israel. And I do want to be fair to Ambassador Huckabee. He’s the US ambassador to Israel. He went to the West Bank and visited that town that’s been repeatedly attacked by violent fascist settlers, probably most of whom are from, like, my neighbors from Brooklyn.

John Kiriakou: They’re from New Jersey and New York. And those scumbags who’ve been murdering, raping, and pillaging over there.

Ted Rall: But at least he went there, and he expressed concern, and he was, I think, turned off by what the settlers were doing. They showed up. Joe Rogan, who I think is unfairly characterized as a right-winger, but he’s boycotting, apparently, he’s not allowing Bibi Netanyahu to come on his show. Bibi wants to come on. I mean, I think they’re losing the thread, the Israelis. I mean, we’re talking about a country that is uniquely right. It’s the only country that’s currently on the face of the planet that owes its existence to the United Nations. It’s the only complete welfare state that owes its entire economy to the United States of America. It’s ignoring the UN and its resolutions. It’s ignoring public opinion in the US, the taxpayers who are paying that bill to the Israelis. I mean, these people are biting, chomping, stabbing, and hacking at the hand that feeds them. And, you know, I mean, they’re a rabid dog. And I wrote a column this week that’s called “Israel No Longer Has the Right to Exist.” And the argument that I’m trying to make here is in the community of nations, there are some things people can’t tolerate. Like, when Napoleon disrupted Europe, all these disparate powers who had competing interests got together to defeat him even though they hated each other. World War II, the US and the USSR were not buds, but they had to come together to fight Nazi Germany, not to stop the Holocaust because the US certainly didn’t care about it. Certainly, the Russians cared more about it because it happened in their territory. But they came in and got together because Nazi Germany was so militarily aggressive and violent and out of control and disruptive. They just had to be put down like a rabid dog. Imperial Japan the same way. That’s exactly the scenario that we have now with Israel. They’re such a destabilizing force in the Middle East. I mean, literally, even if you count Iran and the Axis of Resistance and all the shenanigans they had going on with the Houthis and all that. It’s nothing compared to Israel. Just in the last few months, they bombed Iran. They overthrew the government of Syria, and now they’re bombing the new government that they installed. I mean, these people are nuts.

John Kiriakou: They are nuts. And, you know, I have to say, where did I just see it? Thank you everybody, first of all, for going on to, there it is. What nonsense says USA sex predators flee to Israel? Oh, boy, are you right. So listen to this. I was in prison with a pedophile, this disgusting, horrible pedophile. He had graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School, and he was an attorney in Moscow. To make a very long story very short, he was an aficionado of the ballet. And so he offered to pay the tuition for a twelve-year-old Russian boy, but he insisted that the boy live with him. The parents were like, oh, I don’t know about that, but they were poor. And this kid was, like, a once-in-a-generation gifted ballet guy, and so they allowed their twelve-year-old to move in with a guy, Ken, Kenneth. So, twelve hours later, Ken was raping this kid, and this went on for five years. Finally, the kid told the FBI what was happening. They issued an arrest warrant. By then, Ken was back in Philadelphia where his parents were exceedingly wealthy, big humanitarians. They donate to the museum, whatever. He ran immediately to Israel, and the Israelis would not extradite him because the US would not. The Israelis don’t extradite Jews. It’s a law in Israel. They don’t care what he’s accused of. They’re not extraditing any Jew. So we asked for the extradition. They said no. And then Interpol came up with an idea that was absolutely genius. I love when I hear about these brilliant operational ideas that people come up with. This was my favorite thing to do with the CIA was just to sit around thinking up ideas with my colleagues. They decided to sponsor a ballet show in Cyprus, and they used a dummy email account to email him an announcement of the ballet to lure him. And they lured him to Cyprus, and they grabbed him at the airport. And the Cypriots extradited him. And he got twenty years. He’s still in that bastard. But the Israelis will not extradite Jews. Period.

Ted Rall: That’s pretty gross. I mean, I just, yeah. I think, look, I think we’re done here. So, what’s going to happen? I mean, by September now feels really far away.

John Kiriakou: It does. I agree. And it’s not, it’s four and a half, five weeks.

Ted Rall: So the UN is going to come here to New York and fuck up all the traffic, and no one’s going to be able to move. Every year. In that traffic, it’s going to be a lot of new allies of or at least friends of Palestine.

That’s right. How many countries do you think it’s going to be? It’s going to be like our migration over to Rumble. Everyone’s subscribing over there. Palestine’s signing them up.

Oh, and by the way, I did want to ask you a little bit about this statement that broke. I don’t know if you had a chance to hear it because it just happened right before we went on the air. But Arab and Muslim states, a member of the Arab League, the EU, and 17 more countries have supported a declaration signed at a UN conference that was hosted by Saudi Arabia and France that basically is calling, this also includes Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. They’re calling for Hamas to disarm and give up power and basically turn over all authority to the Palestinian Authority, which, of course, is Mahmoud Abbas who’s, what, 92 or something like that.

John Kiriakou: I always say he’s sixteen years into a four-year term.

Ted Rall: Nice. He and Zelenskyy have a nice democracy. They’re working on this. And, anyway, so they, yeah. He’s over there. So Mahmoud Abbas, the sort of head of the, I guess it’s like the Vichy kind of government of the West Bank. They’re corrupt. They don’t really do anything. But, basically, that’s what all these countries are calling for. Like, they don’t want to recognize Hamas. I mean, that’s not going to happen, right? I mean, because, first of all, that’s Fatah, and they can’t rule in Gaza. The Gazans don’t want them.

John Kiriakou: No. The Gazans have made it clear by voting Hamas in and the PA out. The PA is not the answer to this problem. You know, Haaretz, two or three weeks ago, ran this article saying that one of the things that’s being discussed, and I think it isn’t actually being discussed. I think they just put it out there to see what the reaction was going to be, was to have Hamas disarm and then to have Saudi Arabia administer Gaza while Israel continues to actually own Gaza. And then after a day, nobody really commented on it.

John Kiriakou: And can I say something too about Cyprus, this thing that the Israelis said about Northern Cyprus being an Israel problem? They mean something actually contemporary on that. The Greeks, I am utterly ashamed to say that the Greeks and the Cypriots are 1000% pro-Israel. And the reason that they’re pro-Israel is several-fold. Number one, it’s because the Israelis and the Turks hate each other. So if the Turks hate Israel, then the Greeks have to love Israel because the Greeks hate the Turks. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The other reason is because the Cypriots are sitting on an ocean of natural gas, and it stretches into Israeli waters. And so the Greeks, the Cypriots, and into Palestinian waters, Gaza waters. And just like one little vein into Lebanese waters. So the Greeks and the Cypriots don’t have the money to lift this gas, but the Israelis certainly do. And so the three countries have entered into this joint venture that’s already well underway to lift this gas, and it’s going to make Cyprus one of the wealthiest countries in the world over the course of years.

So we just, I’m not going to say celebrated, I’m going to say commemorated the fifty-first anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The Turks invaded Cyprus, killed thousands of Cypriots. Seventeen American citizens are still missing from the Turkish invasion fifty-one years ago.

Ted Rall: Yeah. This was the seventies. 1974.

John Kiriakou: And, I never understood what Turkey was after, besides just territory. There were a lot of moving parts in this thing. So these were literally the final days of the Greek military dictatorship. And as it was in its death throes, it overthrew the democratically elected government of Cyprus and installed a strongman by the name of Nikos Sampson, who had been an assassin in sort of his previous life. So Sampson announced a military dictatorship in Cyprus. The Turks saw that as the green light to invade and overthrow Sampson, which they did in a matter of days. So the democratically elected president returns to Cyprus. He’d only been in exile a week, and the Turks never left. And they’ve just kept one third of Cyprus, the northern third of Cyprus. So what we’re seeing here with the Israelis saying we have a problem with Northern Cyprus, there is no such thing as Northern Cyprus with a capital N. The Turks call it the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. It’s not recognized by any country in the world except Turkey. It’s Turkish annexed or Turkish occupied Cyprus is what it is. And so because the Israelis and the Greeks and the Cypriots are all in business together, the Greeks and the Cypriots went to the Israelis and said, hey, we need your help on Cyprus. You need to say the right thing about the Turks. And so the Israelis hate the Turks like the Turks hate the Israelis, so they jump in on the side of the Greeks and the Cypriots. It’s awful.

Ted Rall: Let’s, I do want to answer this question by Gadna. Why would anyone trust Saudi Arabia to administer Gaza?

John Kiriakou: They wouldn’t is the short answer. They wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.

Ted Rall: Okay. Yeah. Can we explain what happens with countries recognizing Palestine? It’s really, I mean, it is symbolic. It doesn’t change the facts on the ground. And there is the concern that, you know, in the case of the future Republic of Palestine or the present Republic of Palestine, depending on how you want to look at it, it’s divided. There’s two governments. There’s the Hamas government and there’s the Palestinian Authority. That’s kind of an issue because you’re supposed to know who you’d be able to talk to. But, you know, I guess, that’s not being, but, I mean, what happens is it’s legitimate. So the big thing is if you’re a country that has a deal with Israel or is thinking of making a deal with Israel, once you recognize Palestine, you have to go through all of your trading agreements and everything that you have with Israel to see if anything in there is wrong or illegal or challenging to Palestine. So a good example of that would be, let’s say, Israel produces wine. They produce it in occupied territories, for example, in the Golan. Very high quality. I’ve had this treason wine. It’s really good.

John Kiriakou: It’s quite good.

Ted Rall: So the Golan wine, for example, you would not, if you’ve recognized Syria as an independent country, which most of the world does, well, you can’t import that wine into your country. And it’s just a million little things like that. And they add up. And there’s more to it than that too. If there’s a genocide taking place in your country, and you’re recognized by another country, you can call their ambassador and say, listen, I need your help. There’s stuff that we need, we need your cooperation. Can you help us with intel? Can you stop, derecognize Israel? There’s lots of stuff. Like, suddenly, the doors are open. You’re not isolated.

Ted Rall: It reminds me a little of a strange meeting I had with the Afghan ambassador to Uzbekistan during the Taliban period, and this was in February. So he was a Northern Alliance guy. So he had the embassy in Tashkent. And so I asked him, like, well, you know, technically, you’re supposed to be getting support from the US. And he said, oh, yeah. He goes, we’re supposed to be. And I said, what kind of support do you get? And he opens up his desk drawer, pulls out a yellow envelope, and he’s like, here you go. I open it up, and inside, there’s a map of Afghanistan. And I’m like, it’s just, and he goes, that’s the only support I have ever gotten from the US government. Like, that’s it. And I go, well, it’s a pretty good map but it’s out of date. He said the Soviet ones are better. And he’s like, and I was like, so how do you pay for all this? And he was hemming and hawing. And I was like, you guys mine rubies. And he’s like, yeah, in Badakhshan. So that’s how they were subsisting.

Ted Rall: But I mean, so I don’t know. I mean, what do you think? Is it, what’s the practical meaning of recognition for the Palestinians?

John Kiriakou: I think it opens the door for Palestine to be a member state in a lot of different international organizations, which gives them a voice on the international stage that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. It makes them eligible for financial aid, both from international organizations and from individual countries. And, you know, we used to have a Palestine liaison office here in Washington. Donald Trump closed it in his first term and expelled the Palestinian diplomats. I would love to see Palestinian diplomats on the circuit again in Washington or in London or Madrid or Canberra or anywhere else where they’re recognized. It’s important.

Ted Rall: And they could eventually have, like, one of those rotating seats at the Security Council, at the UN.

John Kiriakou: Exactly right. So they would be the representative of the Asia group on the UN Security Council. Oh my God, could you imagine? Huge. Absolutely huge. When I was at the CIA, it was Libya’s turn. And we went apeshit over the notion that Muammar Gaddafi would be represented on the United Nations Security Council. And so we started this international lobbying effort, and we got the Asia group to deny seating Libya on the Security Council, and Egypt got it two terms in a row. Ridiculous. Because there were no other countries in all of Asia that should have been represented on the UN Security Council.

Ted Rall: By the way, really, I think good point here from Skye. After September, the US will be the only permanent member of the Security Council not to recognize Palestinian statehood. That is a very good point. That’s a very important thing. Israel’s going to be a pariah. The question for President Trump and for the United States, and really, frankly, Trump, we shouldn’t pick on him on this because Democrats are equally guilty of having supported Israel.

John Kiriakou: Absolutely.

Ted Rall: And this whole genocide started under Biden, and he encouraged it, and he funded it, and he armed it. So, you know, Trump just happens to be holding the bag right now. But the question for the US is going to be, do we want to be at the pariah table with little Israel, or do we want to be with everyone else?

John Kiriakou: Well, you know, in these votes in the UN General Assembly, it’s not just us and Israel. It’s also Nauru and, occasionally, Costa Rica and one of those little countries in the Pacific that I can’t pronounce. So we’re not always standing alone. Like Vanuatu.

John Kiriakou: Vanuatu. Where would we be without Vanuatu?

Ted Rall: I think Vanuatu is the closest to the international dateline. So on New Year’s Eve, they always are like, well, Vanuatu celebrated twenty-three and a half hours ago. You’ve seen that.

Unbelievable. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’ll answer you a little bit on this question. I’ll be in New York City Labor Day Weekend. How bad will traffic be for the UN?

Ted Rall: Horrible, except if you’re sitting on the Upper East Side. The East Side in Manhattan is terrible. If you’re, like, somewhere else, honestly, if you’re up, like, I’m on the Upper West, I had a UN badge, and I had trouble getting to the office even with the UN badge. And I was walking, so it’s going to be bad on the East Side.

John Kiriakou: Stay away from the East Side.

Ted Rall: Yeah. And it’s always, it’s kind of like in general. That’s good advice anyway. Labor Day, but all the rich people will be gone. So in other neighborhoods, it’ll kind of help. It’s kind of like a great time to visit town. And the weather should be a little bit better.

Oh my God. So alright. What do we think of Gaddafi? I love that question. I think Gaddafi was super, I mean, no one got screwed more than Gaddafi, right? I mean, he, and what happened to him is so important as a lesson for other rulers. I mean, George W. Bush said, listen, you know, if you drop your nuclear program, and if, you know, we’ll cut a deal with you, we’ll bring you in, we’ll legitimize you, we’ll forget all about Lockerbie, the whole nine yards. And then he did as asked. And the next thing you know, Hillary Clinton comes in as Secretary of State. There’s this radical jihadi movement out in Eastern Libya, in Benghazi. And the US finances it, runs interference for it, provides air support with NATO, and we helped kill Gaddafi and get him sodomized on live television.

John Kiriakou: My boss, Steve Kappas, deputy director, the associate deputy director for operations and a mentor of mine, flew out to Libya to meet with Gaddafi and Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, who actually graduated from the University of Michigan, and convinced him to give up his weapons of mass destruction programs, saying, you don’t want to end up like Saddam Hussein. We’re going to kill Saddam Hussein, he told Gaddafi in 2002. We’re going to kill him. You don’t want to end up like that. Just give up your weapons of mass destruction, and everybody’s going to live happily ever after. And Gaddafi gave up all his weapons programs, a rube. And we allowed him to be killed anyway.

Ted Rall: And he got played.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. He got played. We just lied to him. And then, you know, the way he was killed was so horrific. It was so grotesque.

Ted Rall: And people think that’s just the locals who did it, but that’s not true. I mean, it was a US drone that fired a missile at his motorcade and maybe at his car specifically, but his car was driven off the road. He and his entourage were forced to flee. They hid in a drainage pipe, a culvert kind of thing. And then the jihadis found him and killed him.

Ted Rall: Yeah. So, yeah, let’s talk a little bit about, do we want to talk about this? I mean, what’s so remarkable about the mass shooting that took place at 345 Park Avenue here and 51st Street is that it’s not remarkable. You know, this guy came in, he claimed, it reminded me of the shooter at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966, the Texas watchtower shooter. He suspected there was something wrong with him, that he was hearing voices and having violent urges. And in his suicide note, he requested that his brain be examined for signs of trouble. In fact, they did find a tumor that was pressing up against his amygdala. And that’s, so this guy yesterday, his suicide note said that he believed he had CTE. I don’t know if he had ever been diagnosed formally or not. He was a high school football player. He went to the NFL building HQ, and basically went to the wrong floor, killed four people, including an off-duty New York City police officer who was working security at the desk. And, you know, the thing is, though, it’s one of those things where if you say, well, what could you possibly do about it? I mean, I think nothing. I mean, you know, guns are legal. AR-15s are legal. They’re, we’re washing them. They’re all over the place. You know, he drove here from Nevada. He parked in front of the building in his BMW and walked in. I mean, this can and will happen over and over again. And it’s almost like all you can do is just shrug, and I think that’s what’s so remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is. And, you know, he apologized in the note that he left, which just, to me, made it that much more sad.

John Kiriakou: Mental illness, whether it’s caused by CTE or something else, is a horrible existence. And he really believed that he had CTE, and he really believed that it was because he played football in high school.

Ted Rall: So it seems to be kind of a political act, basically.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. It is.

Ted Rall: It is. It’s a political act.
John, should we talk about this story out of Iran? So, obviously, the Iranians are still smarting from their twelve-day, fourteen-day war with, I guess, twelve-day war with Israel. And they’re licking their wounds, but their nuclear program, whatever it was, appears to be largely intact. But the Iranians took note, and they’re starting to think, and they obviously are investigating what happened. And part of their investigation finds that their GPS was manipulated by the US or Israel or some kind of other bad actor to screw up their targeting abilities. This might help explain why they were so caught with their pants down and unable to defend themselves and fire back against the Israelis who had complete command of the skies over Iran, which blew me away.

John Kiriakou: This has been a rumor really since the twelve-day war that something was wrong with the GPSs. You’re not allowed to use Waze in Iran because Waze is owned by an Israeli company. But any GPS, the Iranians were right.

Ted Rall: Waze was purchased by Google. It’s now part of Alphabet.

Ted Rall: Correct. It was founded by an Israeli company. That’s right. So I always hated it. I never understood it. I didn’t understand, like, how the interface makes no sense to me. Maybe you have to read from right to left or something.

John Kiriakou: Maybe. But I think they’re worried about GPSs in general now just because they believe, probably rightly, that the US and Israel have the technology to interface with the satellites and target Iran.

Ted Rall: Well, there are satellites, right? I mean, Bill Clinton, this was military and covert technology until Bill Clinton decided to publicize it, I think wisely. He was convinced that this was going to open up all sorts of technological innovation, and it has. I mean, if you think about something like real estate listings, you can see a map of where the house is or whatever. It’s amazing. But that technology, it’s American, and it can be, and was, weaponized against the Iranians. So now they’re looking for a Chinese or other alternative. This story is not about Iran. This story is about the US having technological dominance. And that dominance being undermined by the US’s willingness to weaponize that dominance for short-term gain, losing sight of the long-term impact, which is that if you come off as a non-neutral arbiter, you’re not, the rest of the world isn’t going to want to trust you anymore, and then you’re going to lose your advantage. I mean, you know, we invented the phone. That’s why our country code is one. We have, I mean, this is exactly, it’s analogous to the dollar. We weaponized the US dollar. So now Russia, everyone else who’s thinking, well, one day, I could fall afoul of the United States. You don’t know. And then they could just decide to turn off the spigot and screw us and steal our reserve currency. Like, we can’t have that. So, you know, we’re getting SWIFT or all these systems that if you want to control them and take a little piece, you can’t, like, put your thumb on the scale. I mean, the example I’m thinking of is, like, how did Constantinople become rich? Well, it’s right on the Bosphorus, and they just collected tolls from the Silk Road and just waited for ships to go through, and everybody had to pay. And what made it work was they let everyone through, and they charged everyone. If they had started to say, like, fuck those Sogdians, let’s nail them, then that would have worked. Other people would have been like, well, we have to overthrow Constantinople, or we have to do an end-run. We have to figure another way. The US just doesn’t, I don’t know. It seems really, really shortsighted.

John Kiriakou: Very, very shortsighted. And we had the same conversation last week about sanctions. Countries have gotten to the point where sanctions just simply don’t hurt them anymore because we’re so heavy in the way we levy sanctions against countries that they’re forced to come up with a way around them. And let me interrupt our conversation for one second. Just as we were going on the air, Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, announced that Canada would recognize Palestine.

Ted Rall: Holy shit. That’s amazing. I just had a little tingle there in my upper back. That’s so great. It’s happening.

John Kiriakou: You’re right. There’s a hole in the dike.

Ted Rall: The flood, and it’s coming. It’s a seismic shift. It’s a tsunami.

John Kiriakou: It is.

Ted Rall: And Canada is also, I mean, diplomatically, a very important country. I mean, you know, Canada is the country that when you’re a backpacker and you want to travel to, like, you’re an American backpacker and you want to go to Afghanistan and not be thought of as an asshole, you wear the Canadian flag on your backpack. Canada is considered neutral.

John Kiriakou: I did that. I sewed a Canadian flag on my backpack in ’85. Everyone thinks Canada is chill.

Ted Rall: I’m wondering what Canada’s strike means here. Canada is following orders. From whom, I wonder?

John Kiriakou: No. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Ted Rall: Yeah. Well, you can pipe in. We’ll put that up if you reply to us. But yeah. So, exactly. Houdini is like, always say you’re Canadian overseas. Like, oh, like, yeah. I like hockey. But yeah. So we’ll see what happens here. Oh, so, yeah. So there’s so much cynical cynicism here where I’m not buying it. These elites that back to the other side already can’t do good. Look, it’s not because they’re good people. It’s because they read polls. And, like, they know that basically the world isn’t this, I mean, if they were good people, they would have come out against this shit on October 8, 2023. I mean, you know, this is like, because it was already obvious what the Israelis were going to do from within hours. I mean, they were having a great time. You know, they were looking forward to it.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. So, you know, I wonder if some of this is a swipe at Donald Trump too from the Canadians. I wonder.

Ted Rall: It could be. Well, they have reason to be pissed, right. I mean, I don’t know. I’m not ruling out that Donald Trump is going to distance himself from Israel. I don’t think he’s going to, like, recognize Palestine, but I think the weapons flow has to come to an end.

John Kiriakou: It does. Alyssa Slotkin, some people have mentioned Alyssa Slotkin in the chat. She’s the senator from Michigan, former CIA colleague of mine. Alyssa’s complicated. She’s Jewish. She was not endorsed by any of the Jewish groups in America in her campaign, but she won. She won relatively easily in a year when Donald Trump carried her state. But she said that she would be willing to vote for a cutoff of offensive weapons to Israel. That’s not going to happen. We saw a week ago, there was a vote to cut off offensive weapons to Israel, and it got, like, six votes in the House. So it’s just not going to happen.

Ted Rall: Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen quickly, but I think by Christmas time, we’re going to see some movement. It’s going to slow down or something.

John Kiriakou: Do you think that if it keeps happening, if country after country, not including, of course, Hungary, Italy, Germany, the United States, but if these other countries continue to recognize Palestine, do you think that this could threaten the Netanyahu government?

Ted Rall: Yeah. Because somebody’s going to have to take the blame for losing the international community. And that has to be Bibi, right? I mean, I did a deep dive into Israeli opinion polling, as you know, because you read my column. And 76.5% of Israelis, as of June, totally have no problem with the genocide. They’re like, okay with it, and they don’t think that the needs of the Palestinians and their misery should even be taken into consideration in military planning. So this is, you know, let’s be clear here. Even what passes for the Israeli left, they’re not demonstrating against the genocide. They’re demonstrating because the hostages haven’t come home. And also they don’t like Netanyahu and his corruption. But that’s what this is about.

Right. So looking at it from the standpoint of the Israelis who basically have their heads up their asses while the whole rest of the world is appalled and disgusted with them, and they don’t see it. But I do think, from their point of view, if they’re involved in an existential battle to expand Israel, dry and get Gaza for themselves, which obviously all Israelis aren’t stupid, they know that’s what this is about. And that project is going to be deeply hampered by losing US and international support.

Ted Rall: Yeah. Who else are you going to blame? I mean, you can’t a la carte it and say, well, this is Ben Gvir, but not Netanyahu. It’s like, it’s all of them. The government’s got to go. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be replaced with liberals. There aren’t any anymore in Israel.

John Kiriakou: No. If there’s a ceasefire, does Bibi go to prison?

Ted Rall: Well, if Bibi is out of government, goes to trial. And then probably he goes to prison, I think.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. And this is a good point. Oh, thank you, Candace Drake. Thank you very much. Where did I just see it? We’re getting so many comments I can’t keep up. HubDroid, Mixtene. Don’t think they can admit wrongdoing on anything. It’s a mountain of war crimes. That’s exactly right.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. Well, that’s for sure. And that’s why Netanyahu can’t risk not being prime minister.

TedRall: Here’s a big question for you. You know, back in the old days, people like Idi Amin would go into exile in places like Saudi Arabia.

John Kiriakou: I saw him in Jeddah in the vegetable market. What? I was like, oh my God. That’s Idi Amin. And he was there with his wife, like, taking care of ears? Seriously.

Ted Rall: Right? What a monster. You know, there’s a famous story. I forget if it was Time or Newsweek, but one of them interviewed him, and on the back porch of his presidential palace, he was presented with a plate of human ears with tomato garnish and said, like, this is a delicacy in our country. Would you like one?

John Kiriakou: Oh my God. I remember reading an article once saying that in a conversation with a reporter, he was talking about the saltiness of bushmeat, and he said monkeys are salty. Leopards are very salty, but nothing is as salty as a human being.

Ted Rall Yeah. He was a famous cannibal. Did you ever see that movie with the French brothers? It’s in the Criterion Collection. It’s just called Idi Amin Dada. It’s one of the most amazing films. It’s a documentary.

Ted Rall: So this is an amazing film. Right? So basically, for six months, these two French brothers were given unfettered access to Idi Amin. They followed him everywhere. And this was right after the Entebbe mission by the Israelis.

John Kiriakou: Their nephew’s brother was killed. And it had changed him, apparently.

Ted Rall: Yeah. Idi Amin, like, for the filmmakers had his army recreate the Entebbe mission, and they bring out helicopters and shit. You got to watch it. It’s like, and also, he swims. Is it the Zambezi? He’s swimming, like, next to crocodiles and, like, every morning. And he, like, pushes them out of the way. Like, get out of the way, you fucking rascals. And but the most, to me, the, it’s completely, you can’t take your eyes off it. But the best moment for me is that there’s a cabinet meeting, and you could hear the air conditioner, like, rolling. And he’s going around the room, and it’s kind of got that sort of East German kind of decor, like, you know, sort of that Lives of Others kind of vibe. And he’s like, okay. So the secretary of territory, minister of transportation, sorry, minister of education, you’re doing a good job. Keep it up. Defense, everything’s looking good. He’s going around, and he’s like, transportation. And the guy starts quivering like a leaf. And he’s like, you know, the service in the, still getting complaints about the bus service in the capital. Just, you have my number. My four-digit number, and he tells it, like, 3224. You, I tell you. You have a problem. You call me. Morning, day, or night. You get it. Have you ever called me even one time? You never call, and nothing ever gets better. And then the scene cuts, and there’s the guy’s body floating in the river. It says, the next day, transportation minister so-and-so was found floating in the Zambezi. I mean, it’s unbelievable.

Ted Rall: But, anyway, so okay. Well, so does Bibi Netanyahu, can he fly to, would the Saudis take him in as the prime minister of a Jewish state?

John Kiriakou: Never. No. Never.

Ted Rall: So there’s some decency. There are limits. There are rules.

John Kiriakou: And you know what? I think that the reason why they wouldn’t ever do it is because their own people would overthrow them if they did something like that.

Ted Rall: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. No. He’s more likely to end up, you know, in the US.

John Kiriakou: I was in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia one time. Now this is twenty years ago. And I saw Pervez Musharraf and his wife just window shopping up and down King Street. He’s like, so this is where you ended up, you war criminal.

Ted Rall:  He’s a yeah. I could go on about him. You know, because, I’ve, you know, I’m a commentator. I don’t really break news. The news that I broke ever was the Pervez Musharraf coup. So I was down the street in Islamabad, at a cafe just eating. And there was, I just gotten down the Karakoram Highway, taking, like, three or four weeks with my friend. And so we’re, like, hanging out. We finally arrived in Islamabad, and there’s gunfire down the street. And, you know, small arms fire. And so I asked the waiter. The waiters always know everything. I said, what’s going on? He goes, oh, they are overthrowing the government. I’m like, what? He goes, yeah. Nawaz Sharif, he is finished. Like, he is, like, he will be killed. I’m like, what? It’s like, right now? It’s like, yeah. That’s them now. So I got up with my camera and went and took a bunch of photos and talked to some soldiers. And, indeed, like, Nawaz Sharif’s in the van. Like, while I’m talking outside. I’m like, outside the van, they’re taking him off to be tortured. They did torture him. And, so, Pervez Musharraf, you know, and I knew because when we came down the Karakoram Highway, we saw Taliban soldiers all over the place, and we were stopped at a checkpoint. And we’re like, and they’re like, oh, you’re in Afghanistan. I’m like, this is the KKH. We’re not in Afghanistan. We’re in Pakistan. And the guy starts joking, and he goes, sometimes Afghanistan comes to you. And, because Pervez Musharraf came to power by an alliance with the Taliban. And he allowed the Taliban to enter Northern Pakistan to go as proxies to fight the Indians and basically say, we didn’t attack you guys. We don’t know anything about it. It was called the third Kashmir war with the Kargil conflict.

Ted Rall: You know all this. But this is for the audience. My God. And it’s like, yeah, fucking Pervez Musharraf. I mean, after 9/11, Pakistan was so responsible for what happened to us more than any other country. Do they get justice? No. They got a raise.

John Kiriakou: Nope. That was it. They got a raise. And like every exiled Pakistani leader, he’s now in Dubai, which is exactly where, what was her name, went? Prime minister, oh, come on. We were just talking about it last week. Why am I having a, which country? Pakistan.

Ted Rall: Oh, Bhutto.

John Kiriakou: But, yeah, Prime Minister Bhutto and her husband, back and forth between Pakistan and Dubai, presidency and exile, crimes against humanity and all that stuff. Lovely fellows all around and ladies.

Ted Rall: Yeah. She’s dead. Musharraf’s dead. They’re all dead now.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. A bullet to the brain is what did her in.

Ted Rall: Yeah. Well, that it is, I mean, Pakistanis are spicy. It’s a tough gig.

John Kiriakou: Across them. No. It’s a tough gig.

Ted Rall: I mean, every moment I was in Pakistan, I had the feeling that a riot could break out any second. Someone could just walk down the street and start screaming something in Urdu. And the next thing you know, people are out there with sticks and shit, and you had guns out there. Like, it’s on. And you don’t even know what’s going on.

Ted Rall: Alright. So alright. Where’s Hamid Karzai?

Hamid Karzai is still in Kabul living happily next to the Taliban, and he’s got balls of steel.

John Kiriakou: But his brother’s got a restaurant in Baltimore. If anyone wants to go check it out, it’s actually pretty good.

Ted Rall: I do like Afghan food quite a bit. But not the Afghan food there for the most part. Just because it’s, no.

John Kiriakou: The Afghan food in America is head and shoulders better than any Afghan food.

Ted Rall: Cuban food sucks in Cuba. It’s terrible in Cuba. Like, how much zucchini can you eat? Or boiled chicken. And bad yellow rice.

Ted Rall: Alright. So take on Imran Khan.

John Kiriakou: I actually like Imran Khan. I liked and respected him. His problem is that anytime he has a problem, whether it’s riots in the streets or an ingrown toenail, he blames the United States.

Ted Rall: I think we’re going to leave that there for the deprogramming for today. Just a reminder to everybody, in case you missed it, it would mean a lot to
John and me, and in the most important way, which is to say financially. If you guys were to watch this same exact show, the same exact way over on Rumble instead of YouTube, you know, obviously, if you can’t for whatever reason, we love you on YouTube too. But we get paid a zillion times more over on Rumble than we do. It’s pennies in comparison on YouTube. There’s no comparison. So, you know, if you go over to Rumble and just watch us exactly the same way, it’d be much appreciated. You don’t have to remember this weird URL. Just go to Rumble and search for
John or my name, and or the show, and it’ll come right up. And so thank you very much. We’re here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, eastern time. We’re going to be going in two weeks to a Monday through Friday schedule. So, hopefully, you guys will stick around for that. We love this show, and we love you guys. We have the best fans and the best watchers and viewers. So and we’re fans of you guys too. So it’s a mutual admiration society.

John Kiriakou: Anyway,
John, always a pleasure. Hang in there. And is, always is. Time flies?

Ted Rall: It does. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Oh, Canada. That’s right. Kudos to the Canadians.

 

Ted Rall: Good morning. I’m Ted Rall, and over there is Robby West, filling in for Manila Chan, who’s off spelunking. You’re watching the TMI Show, the Ted Manila Information Show, for Monday, July 28, 2025. Thank you so much for joining us.

Robby West: Good to have you, Ted. I just want to give a big shout-out and thank you to the people over on YouTube. We hit monetization over there on Saturday.

Ted Rall: Woo-hoo! It’s been a long time coming.

Robby West: We came through. My wife, I am pleased to announce, was the one-thousandth subscriber to the TMI Show.

Ted Rall: Really? Was that intentional, or was that a coincidence?

Robby West: Oh, it was 100% intentional. I said, “Hey, you need to do this.” Being the nice wife that she is, she actually subscribed. The very first show that popped up for her was the story we did about a whites-only community in Arkansas, which, my wife being Black, she thought was kind of, what’s the word, crazy.

Ted Rall: The story we did or them doing it?

Robby West: A little bit of both. She was just like, “What are y’all doing? This is crazy.” Keep in mind, we live in Montana, which is probably the whitest state in the entire country.

Oh, it is. We’ve got some Native Americans scattered in, but for the most part, it’s pasty white like me. I think a lot of that has to do with winter being here nine months out of the year. But, you know, it is what it is.

Ted Rall: There’s definitely some history there. Everyone, thank you so much for joining us. Please like, follow, and share the show. We again thank you for the monetization, but it’s just the beginning. It literally starts out with pennies.

Yep, and then it moves on to single-digit dollars. On YouTube, you don’t start to see real money until you get 10,000 or more subscribers. We’re at a thousand. We’re like a baby show, but we’ve been doing this for the better part of a year, ever since we got banned by the sanctions from our last gig. It is what it is, but here we are. Let’s get right into the headlines. There’s, as always, a lot to talk about.

Ted Rall: New York City is about to face a huge influx of ICE raids and agents. They’re going to flood the zone, according to DHS. Protesters are gearing up, so we’re anticipating a clash like we saw in LA between Angelenos and ICE, but here in New York. There are protests scheduled for today, both in the middle of the day and this evening after work. I think things are going to heat up, really, in the outer boroughs. It’s not about where the official protests are going to happen.

Robby West: Robby and I will talk about that. We might even disagree. There might be some disagreement. You never know.

Ted Rall: The Trump administration is deporting an old IRA veteran who’s been living peacefully here in the US for over thirty-five or forty years. He’s a great-grandfather, but Trump’s decided that now he’s a terrorist, even though all had been forgiven, and there’s peace in Northern Ireland. They’re going to deport his sick old self back to Ireland. Thailand and Cambodia have agreed to a ceasefire. We’re going to talk about what that means and what was the role of Trump’s tariffs in this border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia. It’s so strange. Finally, this would have been a Manila topic, but I’m curious to see what you have to say about the way people manage their time. There are people like me who are really obsessive about finishing a task. I can’t be interrupted. You can’t talk to me while I’m working on it. Then there are people like my mom, who was a teacher and could be writing something while three students were talking to her at the same time. She was the ultimate multitasker. There’s a new study out talking about what they call monochronic and polychronic people. You might want to look that up if you’re interested. That’s our show, so let’s get to it.

Robby West: Imagine that we had jaws.

Ted Rall: First, it was LA versus ICE. Now it’s NYC versus ICE. The Trump administration announced that ICE agents are about to flood New York City to crack down on undocumented immigrants. Over the weekend, protests took place across the United States over Trump’s immigration policies and Trump’s one big beautiful bill. Under the one big beautiful bill, ICE will become the biggest military or police force in the United States. I’d say paramilitary because that’s really what they are. Demonstrators say they believe the bill will hurt working-class families of all races and are calling for the whole thing to be repealed, which is not likely to happen. The protests are happening after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced last week that the DOJ, the Department of Justice, is suing New York City and Mayor Eric Adams over sanctuary laws.

Just to bring this back a little bit, a year ago, Eric Adams was facing federal corruption charges because he is corrupt. The Trump administration said, “We will make those charges go away if you agree to cooperate with ICE and not enforce your sanctuary city laws.” Adams said, “No problem. Come in and take any brown people you want away, but not me because I’m brown.” They did that, but now, even so, Trump is still suing him because now he wants the unenforced law to go away as well as the enforcement. The lawsuit is alleging that the city’s sanctuary policies are still interfering with the enforcement of federal immigration law. It should be pointed out that last week, an off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer was essentially assassinated in Upper Manhattan. Another protest is scheduled for 6 PM at City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan tonight. Humphrey Bogart’s line to a Nazi officer in Casablanca comes to mind: “There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.” Robby, here’s the deal. It’s always hard to anticipate protests or how intense they will be or not be. This could all fizzle easily. But my gut tells me this won’t fizzle. ICE is coming to the nation’s most liberal city, with 11% Republicans, as we were talking about before the show. They’re going to go to the outer boroughs—Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens—that have tons of immigrants, many of them undocumented, and some green card holders as well. For the most part, these are big minority communities. They’re going to come in there, and those neighborhoods are very protective of themselves. They’re going to get some support from leftist, full-fledged US citizens. I think it would not be shocking—in fact, it’ll be shocking if there are not violent clashes between ICE and New Yorkers in the coming week.

Robby West: I’m sure you’re right. To my detriment, I’ve never been to New York. I’ve never been to LA. Just a couple of questions because you’ve been to both. You live in New York right now. Which city seems to be feistier? Which one has the more volatile population? If it comes down to brass tacks, which population is more likely to stand up and actually fight, LA or New York?

Ted Rall: I spent a lot of time in LA too. I’ve lived in LA, not as much as New York. I know New York a lot better, but I’ve worked in LA. I was at the LA Times. I was at KFI radio in LA. I would rate them about equal. They’re both equally feisty. New Yorkers really don’t like nonsense. In both cases, we tend to view things on a very personal level. When you live in close contact, elbow to elbow on the subway, in a city of eight million people, more so than Angelenos. Los Angeles is a city of neighborhoods where it’s grids separated by big boulevards. Inside those grids are very individual neighborhoods that are like a city within a city, and those people feel a bond to one another. New York also has neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves, but our affiliations are like, if you’re a fellow New Yorker, I tend to feel bonded to you regardless of your race if you’re in trouble, just because it’s such a hard, expensive city to live in. It doesn’t always mean we stick together.

Robby West: Here’s the interesting part about this that I don’t understand about your city. Mamdani ran and won primarily because of the cost of living in New York, specifically rents and wages not keeping up. He ran on economic populism. So how can you, on one hand, say you’re being priced out of the city, which is true, that your wages are not sufficient, which is true, and that the rents are screwing you, which is true, while at the same time, go to war for a demographic of people that’s directly responsible for higher rents, lower wages, and pricing out of the city? You said New Yorkers famously don’t tolerate bullshit. Isn’t that the definition of bullshit? You want people to stand up and fight to protect the same people who are screwing them.

Ted Rall: Robby, as you know, we’ve talked about immigration, and I agree with you that the law of supply and demand indicates that the more workers you have coming into the country, the more it has a downward effect on wages overall for everybody. In a city like New York, though, it doesn’t feel like your job prospects are being harmed by immigration. Let me explain why. First of all, there’s no place in the country that’s easier to find work. There’s always a job—maybe not a good job, but there’s always work. That’s why people live in cities—it’s easier to find work.

Robby West: Sure, you have work, but do you have a living wage? For example, I could go to Alabama and work on a cotton field because I’ve done that. Finding work’s not the problem. The problem is finding a job that will pay me a wage so I can provide for my family. If I’m competing against the entire third world, how can I do that?

Ted Rall: That’s the issue. Everybody’s experience is unique to themselves in New York and everywhere else. My general sense is that if you’re looking for work here, you can probably find a job that, by national standards, pays well. It’s not hard to find a $20 or $25 an hour job in New York City—almost anyone can, without a fancy degree. Psychologically, most New Yorkers don’t view Mexicans or other immigrants as hurting their job prospects. They’re taking entry-level jobs, like in the kitchen of a restaurant, that most white New Yorkers, for example, wouldn’t want anyway. There’s also the sense that, even in New York City, I ought to be able to earn $25 an hour and pay my rent. Those wages aren’t really that unreasonable. The rents are unreasonable. I’m paying $5,100 a month in rent—that’s ridiculous. If you saw my apartment, you’d say, “Okay, Ted, that’s a nice apartment,” but be serious. If I said it’s a $2,000 a month apartment, you might say that seems about right, or maybe $2,500. The “rent is too damn high” resonates, whether it should or not, in New York.

There’s a sense of community here too. This is the traditional gateway to immigration in New York City. Everything about the city reminds us—we have the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Ellis Island is right here. We have tons of recent immigrants, people who barely speak English, but their kids all speak English, and we know them. Unlike a place like Montana, we see the immigrant experience every single day. I go to my falafel place and get a shawarma from a Palestinian guy who speaks English but also Arabic, and his kid is at Cornell, totally Americanized, skateboards, and everything. That’s the immigrant experience—we see it every day. If they were going to Rikers Island and picking up members of Tren de Aragua involved in violent crimes and deporting them back to Venezuela, no one would care. We have homegrown criminals; we don’t need to import them. But that’s not what’s happening here. When you’re going into a restaurant in Queens and rounding up a hardworking lady who’s just trying to make ends meet, it doesn’t seem right. The way ICE comports itself has a huge effect here. This is a city where you worry about crime. If you have random dudes with police jackets bought on eBay, driving around in vans, wearing masks and balaclavas in 95-degree heat, kidnapping people without identifying themselves, they’re going to get a reaction.

Robby West: Of course. I don’t support what ICE is doing, but I oppose the way they’re doing it. A police force is not an army.

Ted Rall: It’s not a police force either. It’s a paramilitary force, the kind of thing the United States hasn’t traditionally had. The KKK would’ve been an example of a paramilitary force—vigilantes. This is the kind of thing you see in third-world dictatorships, where you’re crossing a border, and some guy’s like, “Let me see your passport.” I’m like, “Who are you? You’re not wearing a uniform, you have no official status, you just have a shitty grin.” That’s not getting you anywhere with me.

Robby West: I agree. I support the mission ICE has, but I oppose the way they’re doing it. They should be able to go in, wear a uniform, identify themselves, say, “This is who I am, this is why I’m here, you’re here illegally, I’m sending you home,” and they should have just cause.

Ted Rall: Just cause is that if someone’s here illegally, that’s it. You can’t just approach someone and say, “Oh, you have brown skin, prove you’re an American.” We don’t have an ID law in this country. Well, we’re about to deport an old white Irishman, so let’s drop the race card because that doesn’t really fly. We know the raids have mostly been about profiling, not about specific evidence like, “Robby El Westo is here illegally, reported by his wife who doesn’t like him anymore, let’s go check him out.” That’s okay—they’re following the law. But how they do it matters. They should start with the baddies first.

Robby West: Here’s why they’re not going to—because the prison complex gets paid by having that body in that cell. Let’s pretend that’s not going to happen because it’s not. Another question, Ted, showing my ignorance here—I’ve never been to your city. In South Texas, with its high Mexican population, they turned out in overwhelming numbers to support Trump because those legal Mexicans oppose illegal immigration because it’s driving down their wages. Are you seeing that same effect in New York? Are the legal immigrants happy about these mass deportations because it’s going to increase the money in their wallets?

Ted Rall: It’s a mixed bag. There’s always a tendency for older legal immigrants to pull up the ladder into the treehouse and say, “We got ours, and we don’t want to share now.” There’s definitely some of that. Most people who are legal immigrants in the United States did not come here legally. Most overstayed visas, had fake green card marriages—nobody came here really legally. The people who came across the Bering Strait didn’t come here legally. The people who came to Ellis Island showed up without a visa because they wanted workers and paid them nothing. It was just like what happened with Biden.

Robby West: But here’s the big difference. With Biden, you come across the border, and it was legal. Non-enforcement does not make it legal. A president is not a king. A president cannot repeal law; he can choose not to enforce it. He can say, “Come in, wait here, we’ll process you later.” Then a new president comes in and says, “You’re going home now, your time is up.” Of all Trump’s many flaws—and there are many—I’m not a Trump supporter. I’m a right-winger, but I’m not a Trumpie. I fully support Trump on his mission of deporting illegal immigrants, full stop.

Ted Rall: We have a viewer question worth talking about. Backside of Nowhere says, “I’d really like to know why ICE isn’t busting employers of the undocumented.” Because they’re bribed. There was a really interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times about a company, I think in Kansas, that hired a lot of undocumented workers and was trying not to. They subscribed to E-Verify, which checks if someone is authorized to work in the United States. This company was like, “We did everything, we don’t want to hire illegals, we used E-Verify.” But a lot of illegal immigrants have fake IDs or stolen IDs—identity theft. ICE came and arrested a bunch of their employees, and it almost destroyed their business entirely. They asked the federal government, “What should we do to avoid this happening again?” They were told, “Just keep using E-Verify.” Even businessmen trying to do the right thing and follow the law aren’t being helped by the government to figure out a system that works. If there was no demand, there would be no issue.

Robby West: One of the reasons this is such a major issue is that both political parties are guilty. Reagan granted amnesty in the eighties with the promise from Congress that they would secure the border—it never happened. Republicans want cheap labor, Democrats want votes. The ultimate loser, as Larry was talking about last week on our show about economics, is the American worker because immigration deflates wages, while inflation drives up the cost of living. Neither political party cares, and that’s where you get a Donald Trump. If Donald Trump fails, mark my words, it’s going to get violent. I don’t want that to happen, but it will.

Ted Rall: Speaking of violence, I want to issue this warning: the federal government should not come to New York this way. Come correct, or don’t come at all. Don’t come here with ICE, with armored personnel carriers and goon squads. New York doesn’t play. We’re not going to tolerate it.

Robby West: It fizzled out in LA—what makes New York different?

Ted Rall: It’ll probably fizzle out here too, eventually, because getting tear-gassed is no fun, and we don’t have an organized left to keep it going. But it’s going to be ugly optics.

Ted Rall: The president seems really interested in provoking visuals that he thinks will play to his base—sending in the goon squad into sanctuary cities like LA and New York, showing liberal protesters with their signs running away from tear gas. He doesn’t care about the support of New York and LA, which he doesn’t have anyway. Is this really playing with the right-wing base? Polls show Trump is losing ground and is underwater now on the immigration issue, which was a super strong issue for him. If he’s perceived as kicking ass and deporting like crazy, why is he losing ground there?

Robby West: With the Trump cultists, sure, they’ll cheer it—they’ll get the Benny Johnsons and those types. But people on the right, like me, on the populist right, understand what this is. This is Trump trying to deflect from Epstein. He’s trying to change the conversation. It’s not just him keeping a campaign promise. He’s only deporting a third as many as Obama did, but there were no optics. Obama didn’t send goon squads to major cities; he went to places like Arkansas to a chicken plant nobody sees. This is all theater. I’m telling the people on the right, this is a distraction. Trump’s had a really bad couple of weeks—there’s a major split, probably a civil war, in his base. Yesterday or Friday, when John Kiriakou was on Redacted with Thomas Massie, that’s the split right there. That’s what has Trump doing this—he’s trying to change the conversation.

Ted Rall: I’m not sure this is that, but if it’s playing that way, in politics, perception is reality. I

Robby West: f I were President West and my campaign promise was to round up every single illegal migrant, I wouldn’t send in an army to do it because it’ll just drive people underground and cause a problem. I would make the economic case. I’d address the country: “The reason why your wages suck is the same reason why sand is cheap. The dignity of labor no longer exists. Your work is not worth what it should be. Meanwhile, our government is $37 trillion in debt, and we’re paying for it by printing more dollars that further devalue every dollar in your pocket. So I’m hurting you two different ways.”

Ted Rall: Let’s talk about that IRA veteran. The Trump administration is deporting an 82-year-old former leader of the Irish Republican Army, who has lived peacefully since the end of the resistance against the British occupation of Northern Ireland. Gabriel Megahey, 82 years old, lived in New York City for decades after Northern Ireland gave up its fight for freedom. A June 20 letter from the Department of Homeland Security warned that his parole was being terminated thirty years after he and other IRA members were allowed to stay here in the USA. The Belfast native was convicted in 1983 in Brooklyn federal court for conspiring to buy missiles to shoot down British helicopters amid the violent clashes in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. At the time, the feds considered him the officer commanding of America and Canada for the IRA. Megahey, known by the nickname “Skinny Legs”—you don’t get to choose your nickname—was described by then-US Attorney as the most culpable of these defendants, part of a network of men who sought to use this country as a base for terrorist activities.

Megahey, who first moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1975, insisted at his sentencing, “No one wants peace more than us.” He got out of prison in 1988. Megahey and four other IRA members were allowed to remain in the US as part of the Good Friday Accord, the April 1998 agreement that ended decades of violence in Ireland. Now a grandfather of 14 and great-grandfather of five, who moved to Delaware in 2019, he is reeling after DHS warned that he’ll be fined and criminally prosecuted if he stays in the US. The letter stated, “DHS is terminating your parole. Do not attempt to unlawfully remain in the United States. The federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.” Megahey, who relies on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to pay for expensive medicine to treat his heart, faces the loss of benefits. He declined to comment but said he had no regrets: “I’d do it all again, but I wouldn’t get caught next time.”

Robby West: There’s something to be said for honesty, I guess. The way I see this is double jeopardy. He went in, did his time, and was allowed to stay. I’m a hardliner on immigration, but I also value civil liberties. He’s already been punished—what’s the point? He’s an old man. Some people try to find ancient Nazis, 102 or 103 years old—what’s the point? Just let him be.

Ted Rall: In the case of the Nazis, you could say they were free eighty more years than they deserved to be and don’t deserve to be free one day longer. But what about this guy? I completely agree with his cause. Northern Ireland should not be part of the UK—it should be part of Ireland. Anyone who looks at a map can see that. The IRA’s cause was just and noble, and the only problem is it came to an end because they lost. The war ended, the resistance lost, the oppressors won. The IRA didn’t kill Americans—they killed Brits. It was a resistance army. New York was very supportive of the IRA in the eighties. I remember going to IRA bars where they tithed a percentage of the profits to the IRA. I was laughing at the idea that this guy was trying to buy missiles in New York City—what was he thinking? It was a wild place in the eighties, but holy shit.

Robby West: If I were going to reconstitute the Confederate army, I wouldn’t go to New York City to do it. I’d try somewhere else—Pakistan’s a good spot. I smell a computer-generated letter. DHS went through everyone who’s ever been convicted of any crime and has a green card or served time, and they’re like, “We can technically revoke your parole.” They’re doing a sweep without taking individual cases into account. The dude’s 82—it’s basically a death sentence.

Ted Rall: Ireland has national healthcare—he’ll be fine, but it’s absurd.

Robby West: He’s already been punished. If you’re going to deport him, do it then, not now. He must not have gotten his citizenship, or this couldn’t happen. He’s a green card holder. I’m a hardliner on immigration, but the dude’s already been punished. Double jeopardy is called that for a reason. The government doesn’t have the right to take your property, life, or liberty after you’ve paid your debt to society. They don’t get to do that twice.

Ted Rall: Anamondo Rake says, “I don’t think this immigration show is for Epstein; Tulsi and the Russia show is for Epstein.”

\

Robby West: The Russia show—Americans have kind of lost the plot with it. They’re bored with it, to be honest. This is about catching headlines on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. It’s about showing American troops on the streets of an American city clashing with American citizens for the benefit of illegal immigrants. It’s all to generate headlines. He’s trying to change the conversation—it’s a distraction.

He needs to create that wedge. The fact that Cenk Uygur and I are agreeing on anything is absolutely insane. To make sure that agreement ends, he’s doing this. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Ted Rall: By the way, completely out of left field, from the YouTube feed, Tony J says, “Civil fortitude is still pretty common,” and Backside replied, “Civil forfeiture should be unconstitutional.” Absolutely. Civil forfeiture is a multibillion-dollar-a-year business for American government agencies, mostly law enforcement. They sit on the side of the highway, wait for people to drive by with fancy cars they want to add to their police department, pull them over on a pretext, and if they find cash, they say, “You have a lot of cash, you must be involved in something illegal.” They impound your car and cash, never charge you, but keep the property. You have to go to court to get it back, and it often costs more to hire lawyers than it’s worth, so people walk away. It’s a disgusting practice. The US Supreme Court has expressed concern but hasn’t put an end to it, and they should. That is theft.

Robby West: Where’s Mamdani on all this with ICE coming to the city and immigration? Is he over the morning?

Ted Rall: We’ll hear from him. He’s going to be anti-ICE. Even anti-illegal immigration New Yorkers aren’t going to be into ICE acting the way they are. Only 1% of New Yorkers will defend ICE. If you show up and arrest someone who’s undocumented, fair and square, like a man, wearing a uniform, no mask, they’ll have more support or at least tolerance. That’s not how they’re doing it. Mamdani’s going to have to thread this needle carefully because the real estate interests are already up his ass over Israel and stuff. He’ll have to express concern, show support for the detainees, while not coming out as pro-illegal immigration because that’ll be a bad look. He’ll have to find a middle ground.

Robby West: Is there a middle ground? Either you support open borders or you don’t.

Ted Rall: There is a middle ground. You could say, “A nation-state should control its borders, but we have a history of not doing so for a long time. If people are already here, we don’t want to disrupt their lives and destroy families. If you can prove you’ve obeyed the law and done everything right, we’ll provide a path to citizenship, but we’ll start controlling the border today.” That’s a middle ground.

Robby West: If that’s the case, I advocate for deporting every single illegal immigrant to New York City. God be with you.

Ted Rall: At this point, we could probably use the population since so many people have left. Let’s get into this situation in Southeast Asia. Thailand and Cambodia have agreed to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in a breakthrough to resolve deadly border clashes that entered day five. According to the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, who chaired the talks as head of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations regional block, also known as ASEAN, both sides have reached a common understanding to take steps to return to normalcy. This is not a peace accord, just a ceasefire, with details to be worked out later. The Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Manet, and Thai acting Prime Minister, Phumtham Wechayachai, have agreed to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire effective from midnight local time in Thailand and Cambodia on Tuesday. This border clash has been an ongoing controversy since the French drew the border in 1907. There’s a variance between the text of the original border agreement, which favors Thailand, and the map that goes with it, which favors Cambodia. Cambodia wants to go with the map, Thailand with the text. At issue are several thousand acres that include key Buddhist temples, so they’re fighting over religious stuff too. Trump threatened both countries with sky-high tariffs starting August 1 if they didn’t agree to a ceasefire. Cambodia has almost no trade with the United States, so they didn’t care. Thailand has a lot of trade with the United States, so they did care. Cambodia agreed because they’re the weaker side. Thailand’s fielding F-16s against Cambodia, which just has artillery. It’s a very poor country compared to Thailand. Everyone had a motive to come to the table.

Robby West: Cambodia is war-torn, landlocked, with no natural resources. It has good tourism—Angkor Wat is breathtakingly spectacular. Have you been there?

Ted Rall: I have. It’s stunning. It was very dangerous when I went. I went on a bus full of tourists, and the bus after mine was raided by Khmer Rouge fighters who killed everyone on board. It’s important to catch the right bus.

Robby West: Pol Pot was just a nut. Does the government control most of Cambodia’s territory now, or is it still lawless?

Ted Rall: The government is weak, but it’s not a failed state, and there’s no civil conflict now. The Khmer Rouge are finished. The Vietnamese finished them off.

Robby West: The Vietnamese don’t get credit. No Western country would take out the trash with the Killing Fields and genocide, so the Vietnamese did it, just four years after defeating the United States.

They kicked major ass. If you have a veteran army, you might as well use it before you lose that knowledge.

Ted Rall: Arguments about punctuality are common, but experts say they’re often about something else—the different ways we relate to time. Social scientists have worked for decades to understand our varying approaches to the clock. In the 1950s, anthropologist Edward Hall coined the terms monochronic and polychronic to describe different cultural attitudes toward time. In Northern Europe and the US, which Hall called monochronic societies, people emphasize deadlines and work sequentially, completing one task before moving to the next. In Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, polychronic societies, people are more comfortable shifting gears in the middle of a task and less rigid about sticking to a schedule. In those countries, if you ask, “What time does the bus leave?” they might say, “Oh, 3:00,” but it could be 6:00, 7:00, or maybe not until tomorrow.

Hall’s insights have inspired generations of organizational theorists and management experts. While he originally made observations about societies, others have noted that people’s individual time-use styles vary within a society. Studies suggest that people are most creative, motivated, and productive when they can work in their preferred style, whether dipping in and out or focusing laser-like on a single task. Becoming aware of your own relationship to time can make your life easier and help you negotiate conflicts with those around you. One way to gauge your time value is to notice how you respond to interruptions. If you’re preparing a presentation and a colleague calls to talk, do you pick up and say you’re busy, or make time for what might be a twenty-minute conversation? If you’d send that call to voicemail, you’re likely monochronic, said Donna Ballard, a chronemics expert at the University of Texas at Austin. People who manage their time as a series of tasks to tick off a to-do list live by the clock and prioritize obligations over relationships during work hours. For someone like this, an interruption is almost by definition irritating, said Alan Bluedorn, professor of management at the University of Missouri and author of The Human Organization of Time. Polychronic people give primacy to experiences and relationships that don’t always fit into prearranged schedules. The other day, a cousin of Ms. Kelch was visiting from out of town, and although she had an assignment for work, she put it off for a day to go on a hike together. Not every deadline is truly urgent, she said. When interruptions come up that I feel are valuable enough, it makes me reprioritize.

Robby West: Monochronic here for sure. Especially when I’m working, as you know, I tend to have busy days. If I’m editing clips or making videos, that’s always when my wife comes in and says, “Hey, Robby, let’s talk, we need to connect on an emotional level.” It’s like, “No, we really don’t. I need to get this done.” I’m behind on the TMI Show, Deprogrammed, or DMZ—I’ve got stuff to do. She asks, “When are you going to be done?” I say, “1:00 in the morning. I have time for you between 1:00 AM and 1:30 AM.” That’s my day—that’s your window. My wife, as y’all know, is Black, and she runs on what’s called CPT—Colored People’s Time. 2:00 might mean 2:15, 2:30, or maybe 2:40, but never early.

Ted Rall: I’m familiar with Black People’s Time. When my mom and I visited the Caribbean for the first time, in Turks and Caicos, we arrived at the airport in Providenciales. A guy comes over and says, “Do you need a taxi?” We said, “Yes.” He says, “Wait here.” My mom’s like, “Where’s he going?” I said, “He’s going to see if he can find more people to take several groups at once in his van.” She’s like, “How long is it going to take?” I said, “Probably a while—it’s like herding cats.” She’s like, “Can’t we go now?” I’m like, “Do you know how to drive the van? Do you have the keys? We have to chill. You’re on island time. Enjoy the ocean breezes and relax because it’s not going to change anything.” It would help if there were Mai Tais. My

Robby West: wife is early if it’s something really important, like picking someone up from the airport—she’s always there early. She’s a medical coder, so she has deadlines and quotas. That’s great.

Ted Rall: My ex-wife was a chronic optimist. I’d say, “Meet me downtown at such-and-such time.” She’d show up late, and I’d ask, “What time did you leave?” She’d say, “Twenty minutes ago.” I’m like, “It’s a thirty-five-minute trip. Why did you leave in twenty minutes?” She’d say, “There was that one time I made it in twenty minutes.” That one time requires perfect synchronicity of the subway gods. In the real world, you have to allow extra time for delays.

Robby West: Your ex-wife would’ve fit right in here in Montana. There are no subways, but you could be delayed by a bear or a herd of cows stopping on the road. Cowboys will drive them out, so there’s not as much man-made obstruction. A bear might take a crap in the middle of the highway—it happens—but you can drive around it or take pictures. Being an optimist with travel is good in the summer. Wintertime is different—if a drive normally takes twenty minutes, you better figure an hour because it’s cold, the roads are icy, people spin out, and you have to go slow. My default setting is “on time is late.” For my wife, especially her family, on time is way too early.

Ted Rall: As Shakespeare said, “Know thyself.” It’s really important. When I get interrupted in the middle of a task, especially tech stuff where I’m thinking about five or six things at once, it’s maddening. It’s like, “No, no, no, leave me alone.” I need large blocks of uninterrupted time. I don’t understand people like my mother, who could talk to six people at once. I’m a very single-minded, task-driven individual. You give me a task, and I do it.

Robby West: My boss, the same lady I ripped into a couple of months ago, asked during my review, “Robby, what can I do to make your job more enjoyable and help you be more productive?” I said, “Tell me what you need me to do and stay the hell out of my way.” That’s in my review. She asked, “What support do you need?” I said, “The support I need is for you to stay the hell out of my life.” That’s it.

Ted Rall: That is support. I don’t think polychronic people are bad—they’re better suited for certain jobs, like air traffic control. You can’t have someone like me saying, “Wait, I’m working on this one thing, I can’t step away.” That wouldn’t work.

Robby West: A hundred percent. Polychronic people tend to be more artistic, able to process more information faster. It makes me jealous, but that’s not how God made me. I’m a single-minded dude—I think about one thing at a time, solve that problem, then move to the next.

Ted Rall: That’s how I am too. Robby, that leaves it for today. Thanks for sitting in for Manila Chan, who’s off spelunking. She should be back tomorrow. I’m Ted Rall. Please like, follow, and share the show as much as possible. Vote early and vote often.

Robby West: Thank you so much for being here. Bye.