Can Germany’s Far Right Be Stopped?

The far right gets a huge win in Germany, Serbia celebrates a war criminal, and Nigel Farage gets caught on camera breaking the law. Tommy and Ben dig into the ultra-right-wing AfD party's historic results in a regional election, what drove it, what it would mean if they actually form a coalition government, and what it says about the state of European politics more broadly. Trump’s dumb and dumber team of negotiators (Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff) return from a busy weekend traveling to Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin, and their first trip to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky on a train they named the “Peace Express.” In Serbia, convicted genocide architect Ratko Mladić is given a funeral fit for a national hero, which doesn’t bode well for the country’s pathway into the EU. The UK's new Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announces a sweeping shift in British policy toward Israeli settlements, and a bombshell Haaretz investigation reveals that Netanyahu received a direct warning from the UAE about a major Hamas attack ten days before October 7th. There are nothing but bad updates in the fallout from the war with Iran, including tit-for-tat strikes, mass polygraph tests at the Pentagon, and the dangerous escalation of the Saudi-Houthi conflict. And finally, a Channel 4 investigation catches Nigel Farage on camera conspiring to illegally solicit foreign donations. At the end of the show, Ben speaks to Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 about what we have and haven’t learned 25 years after the 9/11 attacks. You can request a transcript by emailing [email protected]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.