04 March 22
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Asked about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman said, “If that’s the way we did things, Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list.”
MBS had already developed a reputation for ruthlessness. In 2017, he rounded up hundreds of members of his own family and other wealthy Saudis and imprisoned them in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel on informal charges of corruption. The Khashoggi murder fixed a view of the crown prince as brutish, thin-skinned, and psychopathic. Among those who share a dark appraisal of MBS is President Joe Biden, who has so far refused to speak with him. Many in Washington and other Western capitals hope his rise to the throne might still be averted.
But within the kingdom, MBS’s succession is understood as inevitable. “Ask any Saudi, anyone at all, whether MBS will be king,” a senior Saudi diplomat told me. “If there are people in Washington who think he will not be, then I cannot help them. I am not a psychiatrist.”
His father’s eventual death will leave him as the absolute monarch of the birthplace of Islam and the owner of the world’s largest accessible oil reserves. He will also be the leader of one of America’s closest allies and the source of many of its headaches.
I’ve been traveling to Saudi Arabia over the past three years, trying to understand if the crown prince is a killer, a reformer, or both—and if both, whether he can be one without the other.
Even MBS’s critics concede that he has roused the country from an economic and social slumber. In 2016, he unveiled a plan, known as Vision 2030, to convert Saudi Arabia from—allow me to be blunt—one of the world’s weirdest countries into a place that could plausibly be called normal. It is now open to visitors and investment, and lets its citizens partake in ordinary acts of recreation and even certain vices. The crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts, and invited notably raw hip-hop artists to perform. He has allowed women to drive and to dress as freely as they can in dens of sin like Dubai and Bahrain. He has curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious police. He has explored relations with Israel.
He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s critics—not regicidal zealots or al‑Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: “When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.”
For about two years, MBS hid from public view, as if hoping the Khashoggi murder would be forgotten. It hasn’t been. But the crown prince still wants to convince the world that he is saving his country, not holding it hostage—which is why he met twice in recent months with me and the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg.
In our meetings, the crown prince was charming, warm, informal, and intelligent. But even at its most affable, absolute monarchy cannot escape weirdness. For our first meeting, MBS summoned us to a remote palace by the Red Sea, his family’s COVID bunker. The protocols were multilayered: a succession of PCR tests by nurses from the Royal Clinics; a Gulfstream jet in the middle of the night from Riyadh; a convoy from a deserted airstrip; a surrender of electronic devices; a stopover at a mysterious guesthouse visible in satellite photos but unmarked on Google Maps. He invited us to his palace at about 1:30 a.m., and we spoke for nearly two hours.
For the second meeting, in his palace in Riyadh, we were told to be ready by 10 a.m. It also began after midnight. The halls were astir. The crown prince had just returned after nearly two years of remote work, and aides and ministers padded red carpets seeking meetings, their first in months, with the boss. Neglected packages and documents had piled up on the desks and tables in his office, which was large but hardly opulent. The most obvious concession to high taste was an old-fashioned telescope on a tripod, its altitude set shallow enough that it appeared to be pointed not at the heavens but at Riyadh, the sprawling and unsightly desert metropolis from which the Saud family has ruled for most of the past three centuries.
At the outset of both conversations, MBS said he was saddened that the pandemic precluded giving us hugs. He apologized that we all had to wear masks. (Each meeting was attended by multiple, mainly silent princes wearing identical white robes and masks, leaving us unsure, to this day, who exactly was present.) The crown prince left his tunic unbuttoned at the collar, in a casual style now favored by young Saudi men, and he gave relaxed, nonpsychopathic answers to questions about his personal habits. He tries to limit his Twitter use. He eats breakfast every day with his kids. For fun, he watches TV, avoiding shows, like House of Cards, that remind him of work. Instead, he said without apparent irony, he prefers to watch series that help him escape the reality of his job, such as Game of Thrones.
Before the meetings, I asked one of MBS’s advisers if there were any questions I could ask his boss that he himself could not. “None,” he answered, without pausing—“and that is what makes him different from every crown prince who has come before him.” I was told he derives energy from being challenged.
During our Riyadh encounter, Jeff asked MBS if he was capable of handling criticism. “Thank you very much for this question,” the prince said. “If I couldn’t, I would not be sitting with you today listening to that question.”
“I’d be in the Ritz-Carlton,” Jeff suggested.
“Well,” he said, “at least it’s a five-star hotel.”
Difficult questions caused the crown prince to move about jumpily, his voice vibrating at a higher frequency. Every minute or two he performed a complex motor tic: a quick backward tilt of the head, followed by a gulp, like a pelican downing a fish. He complained that he had endured injustice, and he evinced a level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the standards of Middle Eastern rulers.
When we asked if he had ordered the killing of Khashoggi, he said it was “obvious” that he had not. “It hurt me a lot,” he said. “It hurt me and it hurt Saudi Arabia, from a feelings perspective.”
“From a feelings perspective?”
“I understand the anger, especially among journalists. I respect their feelings. But we also have feelings here, pain here.”
The crown prince has told two people close to him that “the Khashoggi incident was the worst thing ever to happen to me, because it could have ruined all of my plans” to reform the country.
In our Riyadh interview, the crown prince said that his own rights had been violated in the Khashoggi affair. “I feel that human-rights law wasn’t applied to me,” he said. “Article XI of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that any person is innocent until proven guilty.” Saudi Arabia had punished those responsible for the murder, he said—yet comparable atrocities, such as bombings of wedding parties in Afghanistan and the torture of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, have gone unpunished.
The crown prince defended himself in part by asserting that Khashoggi was not important enough to kill. “I never read a Khashoggi article in my life,” he said. To our astonishment, he added that if he were to send a kill squad, he’d choose a more valuable target, and more competent assassins. “If that’s the way we did things”—murdering authors of critical op-eds—“Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list. If you’re going to go for another operation like that, for another person, it’s got to be professional and it’s got to be one of the top 1,000.” Apparently, he had a hypothetical hit list, ready to go. Nevertheless, he maintained that the Khashoggi killing was a “huge mistake.”
“Hopefully,” he said, no more hit squads would be found. “I’m trying to do my best.”
If his best is not good enough for Joe Biden, MBS said, then the consequences of running a moralistic foreign policy would be the president’s to discover. “We have a long, historical relationship with America,” he said. “Our aim is to keep it and strengthen it.” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have called for “accountability” for Khashoggi’s murder, as well as the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, due to war between Saudi Arabia and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The Americans also refuse to treat him as Biden’s counterpart—Biden’s peer is the king, they insist—even though the crown prince rules the country with his father’s blessing. This stings. MBS has lines open to the Chinese. “Where is the potential in the world today?” he said. “It’s in Saudi Arabia. And if you want to miss it, I believe other people in the East are going to be super happy.”
We asked whether Biden misunderstands something about him. “Simply, I do not care,” he replied. Alienating the Saudi monarchy, he suggested, would harm Biden’s position. “It’s up to him to think about the interests of America.” He gave a shrug. “Go for it.”
Also risible to the crown prince was the notion that his citizens fear speaking out against him. We need dissent, he said, “if it’s objective writing, without any ideological agenda.” In practice, I noted, dissent seemed to be nonexistent. In September 2017, MBS ordered a boycott of Qatar, citing the country’s support for the Iranian government, the Muslim Brotherhood, al‑Qaeda, and other Islamist organizations in the region. His tiny neighbor suddenly transformed from official friend into official villain, and those expressing a kind word toward it disappeared into prison.
These sentiments, apparently, did not count as objective or nonideological. Qatar, MBS said, was comparable to Nazi Germany. “What do you think [would have happened] if someone was praising and trying to push for Hitler in World War II?” he asked. “How would America take that?” Of course Saudis would react strongly to Nazi sympathizers in their midst. Three years later, however, the countries reconciled, and the Saudi government tweeted out a photo of MBS and Hitler—that is, Qatari Emir Tamim Al Thani—wearing board shorts and smiling at MBS’s Red Sea palace. “Sheikh Tamim’s an amazing person,” MBS said. The fight between them had been no big deal, “a fight between brothers.” The relationship is now “better than ever in history.” The dissenters remain in prison, however, and I do not mean the Ritz-Carlton.
As for the actual Ritz-Carlton prisoners: They had it coming, the crown prince said. Overnight he’d rounded up hundreds of the most prominent Saudis, delivered them to Riyadh’s most lavish hotel, and refused to let them go until they confessed and paid up. I said that sounded like he was eliminating rivals. MBS looked incredulous. “How can you eliminate people who don’t have any power to begin with?” If they had power, he would not have been able to force them into the Ritz.
The Ritz operation, MBS said, was a blitzkrieg against corruption, and wildly successful and popular because it started at the top and did not stop there. “Some people thought Saudi Arabia was, you know, just trying to get the big whales,” MBS said. They assumed that after the government extracted settlements from the likes of Alwaleed bin Talal, the kingdom’s richest man, corruption at lower levels would resume. MBS noted, proudly, that even the minnows had been hooked. By 2019, everyone “understood that even if you steal $100, you’re going to pay for it.” In just a few months, he claims to have recovered $100 billion directly, and says that he will recover much more indirectly, as dividends of deterrence.
MBS acknowledged that to outsiders the Ritz operation may have looked thuggish. But to him it was an elegant, and by the way nonviolent, solution to the problem of vampires feasting on the kingdom’s annual budget. (An adviser to MBS told me that one alternative his aides had suggested was executing a few prominent corrupt officials.) During the months that the Ritz served as a prison, the kingdom’s financial regulator was essentially made king pro tempore, to devote the full power of the government to bleeding the vampires dry. But the Ritz guests had not, MBS said, been placed under arrest. That would imply that they had entered the court system and faced charges. Instead, he said, they had been invited to “negotiate”—and to his pleasure, 95 percent did so. “That was a strong signal,” he said. I’m sure it was.
The Saudi throne does not, like the British throne once did, just pass to the next male heir. The king chooses his successor, and ever since the founding king of the modern Saudi state, Abdulaziz, chose his son Saud as crown prince in 1933, each king has chosen another son of Abdulaziz. (He had 36 sons—with multiple wives and concubines—who survived to adulthood.) All were old enough to remember the camels-and-tents days, before extreme wealth, and they ruled conservatively, as if to lock in their gains. Even the shrewdest and most ambitious kings accomplished little. Abdullah, who took power in 2005, began as a reformer, but much of the momentum of the first half of his reign was lost as he doddered in the second, and the royal treasury was looted. (One notorious alleged thief in the Ritz, a major figure in the Royal Court, was said to have stolen tens of billions of dollars during His Majesty’s decline.)
Salman, the current king and at 86 one of the youngest of Abdulaziz’s brood, saw the perils of unchecked gerontocracy and anointed a successor from the next generation. His choice of Mohammed was not obvious. King Salman’s sons include Faisal, 51, who has a doctorate in international relations from Oxford; and Sultan, 65, a former Royal Saudi Air Force pilot who in 1985 spent a week on the space shuttle Discovery as a payload specialist. Either of these competent and educated men, citizens of the world, might have been a natural successor. But Salman had an inkling that the next king would need a certain grit and fluency with power that cannot be acquired in a seminar or a flight simulator. The new generation, born into luxury, tended to be soft, and the next king would need to be a modern version of a desert warlord like his grandfather.
Outside the immediate family, Salman considered his nephew Mohammad bin Nayef, who is known as MBN, appointing him crown prince in 2015, when he was 55. As a spymaster and security official in the 2000s, MBN had led the country’s domestic war against al‑Qaeda, and in the process had become well connected with counterparts in Washington and London. In 2009, MBN was injured when an al‑Qaeda bomber packed his underpants with explosives and approached him at an event.
Foreign governments considered MBN a safe pick: old enough but not too old, a proven fighter, respected overseas. But for Salman he was merely a throne-warmer for his son. (MBS had held no high office prior to his father’s coronation and needed a couple of years as defense minister to burnish his CV.) In 2017, Salman fired MBN. When you fire a prince, you fire all those who staked their fortunes on his rise; among the opponents of MBS are foreign governments who had planned for the reign of King MBN, and Saudis whose wealth and influence flowed from him. MBN’s chief adviser, Saad al-Jabri, fled to Canada. He alleges that MBS sent a team there to kill him. MBS’s government alleges that al-Jabri stole a massive fortune and is bankrolling efforts to defame the crown prince. (Both parties deny the claims.) “MBN survived al-Qaeda,” al-Jabri’s son Khalid told me. “But he couldn’t survive his own cousin.”
Others have suggested Salman’s younger brother Ahmed, a well-liked former deputy interior minister, as a throne-worthy alternative to MBS. Ahmed reportedly opposed MBS’s appointment as crown prince. In 2020, he was arrested on suspicion of treason.
Having consolidated power, MBS focused on Vision 2030. He is exasperated by the rest of the world’s failure to acknowledge how well it has gone. “Saudi Arabia is a G20 country,” he said. “You can see our position five years ago: It was almost 20. Today, we are almost 17.” He noted strong non-oil GDP growth, and reeled off statistics about foreign direct investment, Saudi overseas investment, and the share of world trade that passes through Saudi waters. The economic success, the concerts, the social reform—these are all done deals, he said. “If we were having this interview in 2016, you would say I’m making assumptions,” he said. “But we did it. You can see it now with your eyes.”
He was not lying. Between my first visit to Saudi Arabia, in 2019, and this conversation two years later, I had gone to the movies in Riyadh and sat next to a Saudi woman I had never met. She wore jeans and canvas sneakers, and she bounced her bare ankle while we watched Zombieland: Double Tap. When I first visited, I ate at restaurants that had cinder-block walls dividing single men on one side from women and families on the other. These were sledgehammered down—a little Berlin 1989 in every restaurant—and now men and women can eat together without eliciting so much as a sideways glance from fellow diners.
Many of the crown prince’s most persistent critics approve of these changes, and wish only that they had come sooner. (Khashoggi was such a critic. When I met him in London for brunch, shortly before his death, I asked him to list MBS’s failings. He said “90 percent” of the reforms were prudent and overdue.) The most famous Saudi women’s-rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, campaigned for women’s right to drive, and against the Saudi “guardianship law,” which prevented women from traveling or going out in public without a male relative. Al‑Hathloul was thrown in prison on terrorism charges in 2018—after MBS and his father had announced the imminent end of both policies. In prison, her family says, she was electrocuted, beaten, and—this was just a few months before Khashoggi’s murder—threatened with being chopped up and thrown in a sewer, never to be found. (The Saudi government has previously denied allegations of torturing prisoners.)
Al-Hathloul and other activists had demanded rights, and the ruler had granted them. Their error was in thinking those rights were theirs to take, rather than coming from the monarch, who deserved credit for having bestowed them. Al-Hathloul was released in February 2021, but her family says she is forbidden from traveling abroad or speaking publicly.
Another dissident, Salman al-Awda, is a preacher with a massive following. His original crime, too, was to utter publicly a thought that would later be shared by the crown prince himself. When MBS began squabbling with his counterpart in Qatar, al‑Awda tweeted, “May God harmonize between their hearts, for the good of their people.” He was imprisoned, and actual harmony between the two leaders has not freed him. His son Abdullah, now in the United States, claims that his father, who is 65, is being held in solitary confinement and has been tortured.
Saudi authorities say al-Awda is a terrorist and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is supported by Qatar and intent on overthrowing the monarchy and replacing it with a theocracy. (The Muslim Brotherhood plays a bogeyman role in the Saudi imagination similar to the role of Communists in America during the Red Scare. Also like Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood really has worked covertly to undermine state rule, just not to the extent imagined.) Al-Awda’s defenders say he is being punished for daring to speak with a moral voice independent of the monarchy’s. He faces death by beheading.
Would MBS consider pardoning those who’d spoken out in favor of women driving and normalization with Qatar—both now the policy of the country? “That’s not my power. That’s His Majesty’s power,” MBS said. But, he added, “no king has ever used” the pardon power, and his father does not intend to be the first.
The issue, he said, is not a lack of mercy. It is a problem of balance. Yes, there are liberals and kumbaya types who have run afoul of state security—and perhaps some could be candidates for a royal pardon. But some of the others in his jails are bad hombres indeed, and pardons cannot be meted out selectively. “You have, let’s say, extreme left and extreme right,” he said. “If you give forgiveness in one area, you have to give it to some very bad people. And that will take everything backward in Saudi Arabia.”
On one side are liberals, tugging on the sympathies of Westerners; on the other, Islamists who are also opposed to the monarchy. Letting this latter group out would not just mean the end of rock concerts and coed dining. They would not stop until they brought down the House of Saud, seized the country’s estimated 268 billion barrels of oil and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and established a terrorist state. In private conversations with others, MBS has likened Saudi Arabia before the Saud family’s conquest in the 18th century to the anarchic wasteland of the Mad Max films. His family unified the peninsula and slowly developed a system of law and order. Without them, it would be Mad Max all over again—or Afghanistan.
Still, the crown prince’s argument—that if he extended forgiveness to good people who deserved it, he would have to extend it equally to bad people who did not—struck me as bizarre. Why would one require the other? Then I realized that MBS was not saying that the failure of his plan to remake the kingdom might lead to catastrophe. He was saying that he’d guarantee it would. Many secular Arab leaders before him have made the same dark implication: Support everything I do, or I will let slip the dogs of jihad. This was not an argument. It was a threat.
Ali Shihabi, a Saudi financier and pro-MBS commentator, told me that the changes in Saudi Arabia could be compared to those in revolutionary France. An old order had been overturned, a priestly class crushed; a new order was struggling to be born.
The priestly class in particular interested me. The brand of conservative Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia—called Wahhabism, after the sect’s 18th-century founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al‑Wahhab—once wielded great power and enjoys at least some popular support. I asked Shihabi if MBS really had diminished the Wahhabis’ role. “Diminished their role?” Shihabi asked me. “He put the Wahhabis in a cage, then he reached in with gardening shears”—here he made the universal snip snip gesture with his fingers—“and he cut their balls off.”
In France, revolution worked out just as badly for the House of Bourbon as it did for the clergy. (Diderot famously wrote that the entrails of the priests would be woven into ropes to strangle kings.) The House of Saud wanted the anticlerical revolution while conveniently omitting the antiroyalist one. I wanted to see how that alliance between monarch and sansculottes was working.
Vision 2030 made modernization easier to observe now than it would have been just a few years ago. Until October 2019, tourist visas to Saudi Arabia did not exist. Then the Saudis realized that to attract crowds to the concerts they had legalized, they’d need to let in visitors. Overnight, a visa to Saudi Arabia went from one of the hardest in the world to get to one of the easiest. In minutes I had one valid for a whole year. My flight into Riyadh was packed with foreigners attending Stan Lee’s Super Con. Ahead of me in the passport line I saw Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk, on his way to an autograph signing.
The new system arrived so fast that the first visitors were like an invasive species, an unnatural fit in the rigid social order of the kingdom. For years, almost every non-Saudi in the country had needed a document called an iqama. It was a sort of license to exist: Your iqama identified your Saudi patron, the local national whom you were visiting or working for, and who controlled your fate. Every Saudi patron had his own patron, too—sometimes a tribal leader, sometimes a regional one. Even those bigwigs paid obeisance to someone and, eventually, by the transitive property of Saudi deference, to the king himself. Saudi Arabia, MBS explained, “is not one monarchy. You have beneath it more than 1,000 monarchies—town monarchies, tribal monarchies, semitribal monarchies.” The iqama guaranteed that every sentient creature fit into this scheme of Saudi society.
MBS batted away my suggestion that this system is antiquated and might be replaced with a constitutional monarchy—one where citizens have freestanding rights not granted by a monarch or a demi-monarch. “No,” he said. “Saudi Arabia is based on pure monarchy,” and he, as crown prince, would preserve the system. To remove himself from it would amount to a betrayal of all the monarchies and Saudis beneath him. “I can’t stage a coup d’état against 14 million citizens.”
But he has already forced that system to adapt. Nearly every day someone asked for my iqama, and I had to explain that I had none. They reacted as if I’d told them that I had no name. Renting a car, buying a train ticket, checking into a hotel—all of these interactions left some poor clerk baffled. But in the new Saudi Arabia I was free to wander, to listen, to overhear.
In Riyadh I found, effortlessly, young people thrilled by the reforms. Like the other major Saudi cities, Dammam and Jeddah, Riyadh has specialty coffee shops in abundance—little outposts of air-conditioning and caffeine, in an environment otherwise characterized by heat and boredom. Many of the Saudis I met professed a deep love for America. “I spent seven years at Cal State Northridge,” one told me, before rattling off a list of cities he had visited. He was one of several hundred thousand Saudi students who’d attended U.S. universities on government scholarships in the 2000s. “I studied finance,” he said. “But I never graduated. I had a wonderful time.” He listed his American friends, who had names like Mike and Emilio. “I drank and did too much meth, and my grades weren’t good.”
“Is it possible to do just the right amount of meth?” I asked.
“When I came back, I stopped.” He looked out the window of the coffee shop at the parched cityscape. “This country is the best rehab center on the planet.”
Now he was studying again, at a Saudi university, and planning to open his own business. He had already attended concerts, and he said his fondest wish was to listen to music in the open air and smoke a joint—just one, he promised. He asked if I thought that would happen. I said I did not think that was explicitly part of Vision 2030, but he’d probably get his wish. Later, with him in mind, I asked the crown prince whether alcohol would soon be sold in the kingdom. It was the only policy question that he refused to answer.
In another café, in the northern city of Ha’il, a man pointed to a mural, freshly painted, of the Lebanese singer Fairouz, her hair flowing beautifully over her shoulders. Next to her were her lyrics (in Arabic): “Bring me the flute and sing, for song is the secret to eternity.”
“One year ago,” he said, “that would not be possible.” By “that,” he meant pretty much everything: a woman’s hair; a celebration of song; a celebration of a song about singing; and, on top of all this, the music playing in the café as we spoke. Before the rise of MBS, every component of this scene would have violated long-standing canons of Saudi morality enforcement. The religious police, known in Arabic as the hay’a or mutawwi’in, would have busted the joint. They used to show up in ankle-length white thobes, their beards curly and unkempt. They yelled at people for dressing immodestly, or thwacked at them with sticks to goad them to the mosque for one of the five daily prayers. For the flagrancy of the Fairouz sins, the café’s managers would have been detained, questioned, and punished. “Screw those guys,” the man said, in a succinct expression of the most common sentiment I heard about the religious police.
Encounters with the hay’a have provided many an appalling story for foreign visitors. When Maureen Dowd of The New York Times went to Riyadh in 2002, the hay’a spotted her in a shopping mall and objected to being able to see the outline of her body. Her host, the future foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir, pleaded with them, but they were unimpressed by his status as a prominent diplomat, and she fled to her hotel room. “I fretted that I was in one of those movies where an American makes one mistake in a repressive country and ends up rotting in a dungeon,” Dowd wrote.
I told one of MBS’s advisers that the religious police had been an international PR problem. “May I be impolite?” he asked me. “I don’t give a fuck about the foreigners. They terrorized us.” He likened the religious police to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, operating with unchecked authority. (The religious police’s official Arabic name dates back hundreds of years, but still sounds Orwellian in English: the Committee for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.) Anyone who wished to drag down a professional or political rival could scrutinize him for sins, then call the religious police to set up a sting. Or the hay’a could flex its authority on its own, either for political reasons—toppling a prince they disliked—or for recreation.
“The religious police were the losers in school,” Ali Shihabi told me. “Then they got these jobs and were empowered to go and stop the cute girls, break into the parties no one wanted them at, and shut them down. It attracted a very nasty group of people.” The Saudi diplomat told me that he did not miss them, and that Saudi Arabia had needed someone with the crown prince’s mettle to get rid of them. “When someone hits you because he does not like what you are wearing,” he said, “that is not just a form of harassment. It is abuse.”
MBS ordered the religious police to stand down, and one of the enduring mysteries of contemporary Saudi Arabia is what these thwackers do, now that they are invisible on the streets. Fuad al-Amri, who runs the hay’a in Mecca province, confessed to me that since the reforms, one of his main activities has been vetting his own employees, to ensure that they aren’t fanatics loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood.
MBS’s grandfather King Abdulaziz founded the modern Saudi state with the support of the clergy. But he also cracked down on them, hard, when they outlived their usefulness. MBS has recounted a famous anecdote about his grandfather. In 1921, Abdulaziz attended the funeral of the most senior religious scholar in the kingdom. The king told the assembled clerics that they were dear to his heart—in the Arabic idiom, “on my iqal,” the black cord that holds a Najd headdress in place. But then he warned them: “I can always shake my iqal,” he said, “and you will fall.”
For the past 50 years, Abdulaziz’s successors have taken a softer line with the Wahhabis. The Saudi clerical class’s power grew, and their imprimatur mattered. In 1964, they sealed the fate of the inept King Saud when his brothers Faisal and Mohammed sought and received religious approval for ousting him. To oppose the religious conservatives was risky. Peter Theroux, a former National Security Council director who worked on the Saudi portfolio during the 2000s, recalls being aghast at the vicious sermons still being preached by government-paid imams years after September 11. Theroux told me he confronted a senior Saudi official about the sermons. “You know,” the official apologized, “the big beards are kind of our constituency.” The rulers of Saudi Arabia put almost no limits on the speech or behavior of conservative clerics, and in return those clerics exempted the rulers from criticism. “That was the drug deal that the Saudi state was based upon for many years,” Theroux told me. “Until Mohammed bin Salman.”
Who could resist cheering on MBS as he renegotiated this relationship? One of MBS’s most persistent critics in Washington, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, told me the concerts and Comic-Cons in Riyadh have not yet translated into defunding Wahhabi intolerance overseas. “When I’m traveling the world, I still hear story after story of Gulf money and Saudi money fueling very conservative, intolerant Wahhabist mosques,” he said. A hallmark of traditional Wahhabism is hatred for non-Wahhabi Muslims, whom the Wahhabis view as even worse than unbelievers for perverting the faith. With little modification, Wahhabi teachings can lead to Osama bin Laden–style jihadism. Murphy said he thinks that isn’t over. “The money that flows from Saudi Arabia into conservative Islam isn’t as transparent as it was 10 years ago—much of it has been driven underground—but it still exists.”
Yet after spending hours in MBS’s company, and in the company of his allies and enemies, I was convinced that neutering the clergy was not just symbolic. He was fighting them avidly, and personally. “The kings have historically stayed away from religion,” Bernard Haykel, a scholar of Islamic law at Princeton and an acquaintance of MBS’s, told me. Outsourcing theology and religious law to the big beards was both an expedient and a necessity, because no ruler had any training in religious law, or indeed a beard of any significant size.
By contrast, MBS has a law degree from King Saud University and flaunts his knowledge and dominance over the clerics. “He’s probably the only leader in the Arab world who knows anything about Islamic epistemology and jurisprudence,” Haykel told me.
“In Islamic law, the head of the Islamic establishment is wali al-amr, the ruler,” MBS explained. He was right: As the ruler, he is in charge of implementing Islam. Typically, Saudi rulers have sought opinions from clerics, occasionally leaning on them to justify a policy the king has selected in advance. MBS does not subcontract his religion out at all.
He explained that Islamic law is based on two textual sources: the Quran and the Sunna, or the example of the Prophet Muhammad, gathered in many tens of thousands of fragments from the Prophet’s life and sayings. Certain rules—not many—come from the unambiguous legislative content of the Quran, he said, and he cannot do anything about them even if he wants to. But those sayings of the Prophet (called Hadith), he explained, do not all have equal value as sources of law, and he said he is bound by only a very small number whose reliability, 1,400 years later, is unimpeachable. Every other source of Islamic law, he said, is open to interpretation—and he is therefore entitled to interpret them as he sees fit.
The effect of this maneuver is to chuck about 95 percent of Islamic law into the sandpit of Saudi history and leave MBS free to do whatever he wants. “He’s short-circuiting the tradition,” Haykel said. “But he’s doing it in an Islamic way. He’s saying that there are very few things that are fixed beyond dispute in Islam. That leaves him to determine what is in the interest of the Muslim community. If that means opening movie theaters, allowing tourists, or women on the beaches on the Red Sea, then so be it.”
MBS rebuked me when I called this attitude “moderate Islam,” though his own government champions the concept on its websites. “That term would make terrorists and extremists happy.” It suggests that “we in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries are changing Islam into something new, which is not true,” he said. “We are going back to the core, back to pure Islam” as practiced by Muhammad and his four successors. “These teachings of the Prophet and the four caliphs—they were amazing. They were perfect.”
Even the Islamic law that he is bound to implement will be implemented sparingly. MBS told me a story, reported in Hadith, about a woman who commits fornication, confesses her crime to the Prophet, and begs to be executed. The Prophet repeatedly tells her to go away—implying, the crown prince said, that the Prophet preferred to give sinners every chance at lenience. (MBS did not relate the end of the tale: The woman returns with indisputable evidence of her sin—a bastard son—and the Prophet acquiesces. She is buried to her chest and stoned to death.)
Instead of hunting for sin and punishing it as a matter of course, MBS has curtailed the investigative function of the religious police, and encourages sinners to keep their transgressions between themselves and God. “We should not try to seek out people and prove charges against them,” he said. “You have to do it the way that the Prophet taught us how to do it.” The law will be enforced only against those so flagrant that they are practically demanding to take their lumps.
He also stressed that none of these laws applies to non-Muslims in the kingdom. “If you are a foreign person who’s living or traveling in Saudi Arabia, you have all the right to do whatever you want, based on your beliefs,” he said. “That’s what happened in the Prophet’s time.”
It is hard to exaggerate how drastically this sidelining of Islamic law will change Saudi Arabia. Before MBS, influential clerics issued fatwas exhibiting what might charitably be called a pre-industrial view of the world. They declared that the sun orbited the Earth. They forbade women from riding bikes (“the devil’s horses”) and from watching TV without veiling, just in case the presenters could see them through the screen. Salih al-Fawzan, the most senior cleric in the kingdom today, once issued a chillingly anti-American fatwa forbidding all-you-can-eat buffets, because paying for a meal without knowing what you’ll be eating is akin to gambling.
Some of the clerics may have given in because they were convinced by the crown prince’s legal interpretations. Others appear to have succumbed to good old-fashioned intimidation. Formerly conservative clerics will look you in the eye and without hesitation or scruple speak in Stepfordlike coordination with the government’s program. The minister of Islamic affairs and guidance, normally an unsmiling type, now cheerily defended the opening of cinemas and mass layoffs of Wahhabi imams. I liked him immediately. His name, Abdullatif Al Asheikh, indicates that he is descended from a long line of stern moralists going back to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself. I told him I had seen the Zombieland sequel in his country, and if Woody Harrelson reprised his role in Zombieland 3, I would return to Riyadh so we could go to a theater and watch it together. “Why not?” he replied.
Mohammad al-Arefe, a preacher known for his good looks and conservative views, mysteriously began promoting Vision 2030 after a meeting with MBS in 2016. Previously, he had preached that Mada’in Saleh, a spectacular pre-Islamic archaeological site in northwest Saudi Arabia, was forbidden to Muslim tourists. God had struck down the civilization that once lived there, and the place was forever to remain a reminder of his wrath. The conventional view held that Muslims should follow the Prophet’s warning to stay away from Mada’in Saleh, but if they absolutely must pass through, they should cast their gaze downward and maintain a fearful demeanor toward the Almighty. Then, in 2019, al-Arefe appeared in what seemed, to me, like some sort of hostage video, filmed by the Saudi tourism authority, lecturing about the site’s history and inviting all to enjoy it. If he was displaying a fearful demeanor, it was not toward the Almighty.
In the smaller cities it isn’t clear how quickly modernization is catching on. I visited Buraydah, the capital of Qassim, the most conservative part of the country. In two days, every woman I saw wore a black, flowing abaya. I attended the opening of a new shopping mall and showed up early to watch the crowds arrive. The sexes separated themselves without discussion: women in the front, all in black, near the stage where children recited poems and sang; men, in white thobes, in the back of the audience and on the sides. The process was unconscious and organic, but to an outsider remarkable, as if salt and pepper were shaken out onto a plate, and the grains slowly and perfectly segregated themselves. Cultural practices decades or centuries old do not yield suddenly.
Taif, a city an hour outside Mecca, was once the summer residence of the king and his family. The Prophet is thought to have visited there, and many Muslims supplement their pilgrimages to Mecca with side trips to other sites from the Prophet’s life. The Wahhabis have, historically, treated these visits as un-Islamic and reprehensible. Whenever pilgrimage sites have fallen into Wahhabi hands, they have methodically and remorselessly destroyed them by leveling monuments, grave markers, and other structures sacred to Muslims in other traditions.
One morning I took a long walk to a mosque where the Prophet is said to have prayed. On arrival I found a building in disrepair, fenced off by rusty wire, with parts of it reduced to rubble. A sign at this site, posted by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, noted in Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, and English that the historical evidence for the Prophet’s visit was uncertain. It suggested, further, that “to feel an adoring reverence or regard toward these places is a kind of heresy and fabrication in religion,” an innovation not sanctioned by God that “leads to polytheism.”
Later, I met Mohammad al-Issa, formerly the minister of justice under King Abdullah and now, as secretary-general of the Muslim World League, an all-purpose interfaith emissary for his country. In the past, Saudi clerics inveighed against infidels of all types. Now al-Issa spends his time meeting Buddhists, Christians, and Jews, and trying to stay ahead of the occasional surfacing of comments he made in less conciliatory times. I asked him about the site, and whether Saudi Arabia’s new tolerance—which he emphasizes so energetically overseas, with non-Muslims—would apply domestically. He assured me that it already did. “If in the past there were some mistakes, now there is correction,” al‑Issa said. “Everyone has the right to visit the historic places, and there is a lot of care given to them.”
“But the signs are still up,” I said.
“Maybe they are there to remind people to be respectful,” he suggested. “You see signs like that at sites all over the world: ‘Don’t touch or take the stones.’ ”
But these signs are not meant to preserve the ruins. They are there to remind you that you are wicked for visiting at all.
The day after my trip to the mosque, I stopped by a Starbucks in Taif. It was early afternoon. When I pulled the door handle, it clunked—the shop was closed for prayer, just as it would have been if the religious police had been enforcing prayer times.
As I waited outside alone, a small police truck pulled up behind me. The police officer salaamed me, and I responded in Arabic. Only after a short interrogation (“What are you doing here? Why are you here?”) did he discover that I was American—not, as I think he suspected, Filipino—and apologize awkwardly and leave. It took me a minute to realize what had happened: The religious police have stood down, and the ordinary police have stood up in their place. The conservatism in society has not gone away. In some places, it has just undergone a costume change.
These lingering manifestations of intolerance illustrate what MBS’s critics say is his ultimate error: Even a crown prince can’t change a culture by fiat.
Belated realization of this error might be behind the grandest and most improbable of his projects. If existing cities resist your orders, just build a new one programmed to do your bidding from the start. In October 2017, MBS decreed a city in a mostly uninhabited area on the Gulf of Aqaba, adjacent to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the southwestern edge of Jordan, and the Israeli resort town Eilat. The city is called Neom, from a violent collision between the Greek word neos (“new”) and the Arabic mustaqbal (“future”).
At present, little exists but an encampment for the employees of the Neom project, a small area of tract housing. Regular buses take them to shop in the nearest city, Tabuk, which is itself a city only by the standards of the vacant, rock-strewn desert nearby. (If you recall the early scenes of Lawrence of Arabia, when a lonely camel-borne Peter O’Toole sings “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” to the echoes of a sandstone canyon, then you know the spot.) The ambitions for this settlement are vast. Neom’s administrators say they expect it to attract billions of dollars in investment and millions of residents, both Saudi and foreign, within 10 to 20 years. Dubai grew at a similar pace in the 1990s and 2000s. MBS said Neom is “not a copy of anything elsewhere,” not a xerox of Dubai. But it has more in common with the great globalized mainstream than with anything in the history of a country that, until recently, was remarkably successful at walling off its traditional culture from the blandishments of modernity.
For a few hours, the Neom team showed me around and made grandiose promises about the future. Neom would lure its investors, I gathered, by creating the ideal regulatory environment, stitched together from best practices elsewhere. The city would profit from central planning. When New York or Delhi want to grow, they choke on their own traffic and decrepit infrastructure. Neom has no inherited infrastructure at all. The centerpiece of the project will be “The Line”—a 106-mile-long, very skinny urban strip connected by a single bullet train that will travel from end to end in 20 minutes. (No train capable of this speed currently exists.) The Line is intended to be walkable—the train will run underground—and a short hike perpendicular to its main axis will take you into pristine desert. Water will be desalinated; energy, renewable.
So far, Neom is less a city than an urbanist cargo cult. The practicalities can come later, or not at all. (The projected cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, a huge sum even for Saudi Arabia.) But many good ideas look crazy at first. What struck me was that Neom’s vision is really an anti-vision. It is the opposite of the old Saudi Arabia. In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an entrepreneur’s nightmare. Riyadh has almost no public transportation. No matter where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. No one in Neom mentioned religion at all. Even Neom’s location is suggestive. It is far from where Saudis actually live. Instead it is huddled in a mostly empty corner, as if seeking sustenance and inspiration from Jordan and Israel.
Seen this way, Neom is MBS’s declaration of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy on behalf of his country. Few nations have as many carried costs as Saudi Arabia, and Neom zeroes them out and starts afresh with a plan unburdened by the past. To any parts of the kingdom that cling to their old ways, it promises that the future is everything they are not. And the future will wait only so long.
During the 1990s and 2000s, Saudi Arabia was a net exporter of vision, but it was a jihadist vision. The standard narrative, now accepted by the Saudi state itself, is that the kingdom was seduced by conservative Islam, and eventually the jihadists it sent overseas (most famously Osama bin Laden) redirected their efforts toward the Saudi monarchy and its allies. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.
“A series of things happened that made the Saudis realize they couldn’t keep playing the game they had been playing,” Philip Zelikow, a State Department official under George W. Bush and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told me. The years of violence that followed 9/11 shocked the Saudis into realizing that they had a reckoning coming, though only after jihadists began attacking in the kingdom itself did the government move to crush them. What the Saudis did not have was a plan to redirect the jihadists’ energy. “They needed to have some story of what kind of country they were going to be when they grew up,” Zelikow said. Jihadism would not be that story. But there was no immediate alternative, either for society or for the individuals attracted to jihadism. Saudi Arabia was left to do what most other countries, including the United States, have done, which is to imprison terrorists until they grow too old to fight.
Last year, Saudi officials informed me that the crown prince had a new plan to deprogram jihadists. One morning they sent a convoy of state-security SUVs to my hotel, and with lights flashing, we left behind the glassy skyscrapers of the capital and continued along one of the straight, hypnotic roads radiating from Riyadh to nowhere. An hour later, we turned off at an area called al-Ha’ir and went through a security checkpoint.
Ha’ir is a state-security prison, run by the Saudi secret police, which means that its prisoners are not car thieves and check forgers but offenders against the state. They include jihadists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State—I met at least a dozen of each—as well as softer Islamists, like Salman al-Awda, the cleric.
We drove past the checkpoint and through the gates, into a windswept compound coated in a film of light-brown dust, like tiramisu. We were met by the director of state-security prisons, Muhammad bin Salman al-Sarrah, and what appeared to be a television crew of at least half a dozen men, each bearing a microphone or a camera. I worried about what would happen next. Newsworthy events inside the walls of terrorist prisons tend not to be good. Lurking in the background were several bearded men in identical gray business suits.
Al-Sarrah, it turned out, was a real jihadism nerd, and over tea we reminisced about various luminaries in the history of Saudi terror. After this small talk, he invited me to join him in an auditorium that could have been a lecture hall on a small college campus. Shutters clicked as the cameramen followed.
In the auditorium, the men in suits took the stage. Their leader, a man named Abdullah al-Qahtani, explained that he and most of the others in the room were prisoners, and that they had a PowerPoint presentation they wished to show me about the enterprise they were running in the prison. The camera crew was made up of prisoners too, and they were documenting my visit for imprisoned members of jihadist sects.
What followed was the most surreal slide deck I have ever seen: a corporate org chart and plans for a set of businesses run from within the prison by jihadists and other enemies of the state. Al-Qahtani spoke in Arabic, translated by an excitable counterpart nearby.
The org chart showed CEO al-Qahtani at the top, with direct reports from seven offices beneath him, among them financial, business development, and “programs’ affairs.” Under the last of these was another sub-office, “social responsibility.”
Al-Qahtani explained that 89 percent of the prison population had taken part in the program so far. In a way, it was like any other prison-industry program; in the United States, prisoners staff call centers, raise tilapia, or just push brooms in the prison corridor for a dollar an hour. But the Ha’ir group, doing business as a company called, simply, Power, was aggressively corporate and entrepreneurial.
Al-Qahtani and the interpreter took me to a small garden, where prisoners cultivated peppers under plastic sheeting and raised bees and harvested their honey to sell at the prison shop, in little jars with the Power logo. They operated a laundromat and presented me with a price list. The prison will clean your clothes for free, they said, but staff and inmates alike could bring clothes here for special services, such as tailoring, for a fee. I could see shirts, freshly laundered and pressed, with prisoner numbers inked into the collars. Each number started with the year of entry on the Islamic calendar. I saw one that started in 1431, about 12 years ago.
Almost all the men wore thick beards, and many had a zabiba (literally “raisin”), the discolored, wrinkly spot one gets from pressing the head to the ground in prayer. Some of their products were artisanal and religious-themed. They led me into a tiny room, a factory for the production of perfumes for sale outside the prison, and to another room where they made prayer beads from olive pits.
“Here, smell this,” a former member of al-Qaeda commanded me, sticking under my nose a paper strip blotted with a chemical I could not identify. I think the scent was lavender. Another prisoner, at the Power-run prison canteen, offered me free frozen yogurt. As I walked around the prison, the yogurt began to melt, and my interpreter held it so I could take notes.
Strangest of all, I found, was Power’s corporate nerve center—a warren of drab, cubicle-filled offices. The employees wore uniforms: suits for the C-suite executives and blue Power-branded polo shirts for the mid-levels puttering on their computers. They had a conference room with a whiteboard (at the top, “In the name of God, the most gracious, most merciful” was written in Arabic, and partially erased; the rest was the remains of a sales brainstorming session), a reception desk, and portraits of the king and the crown prince overseeing it all.
Nothing is stranger than normalcy where one least expects it. These jihadists—people who recently would have sacrificed their life to take mine—had apparently been converted into office drones. Fifteen years ago, Saudi Arabia tried to deprogram them by sending them to debate clerics loyal to the government, who told the prisoners that they had misinterpreted Islam and needed to repent. But if this scene was to be believed, it turned out that terrorists didn’t need a learned debate about the will of God. They needed their spirits broken by corporate drudgery. They needed Dunder Mifflin.
My hyperactive interpreter, who had been gesticulating and yapping throughout the tour, was no ordinary jihadist. He was an American-born Saudi member of al-Qaeda named Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hamdi, now 41, emerged from a pile of rubble in northern Afghanistan in December 2001. His dear friend, pulled from the same rubble, was John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. Hamdi spent months in Guantánamo Bay before being transferred to the U.S.; he was released after his father, a prominent Saudi petrochemical executive, helped take Hamdi’s case to the Supreme Court, and won (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ). Hamdi was sent back to Saudi Arabia on the condition that he renounce his U.S. citizenship (he was born in Louisiana and left as a small child), but the Saudis decided he needed more time in prison and locked him up for eight years in a facility in Dammam, and for another seven in Ha’ir. He is due for release this year.
Hamdi guided me like a kid showing his parents around his sleepaway camp. He explained that Power is part of a larger entity at the prison, known as the “Management of Time” (Idarat al-Waqt)—a comprehensive but amorphous program meant to beguile the inmates out of bad ideas and replace them with good ones. It involves corporate training, but also gathering the inmates together for song and music, for poetry readings, for the publishing of newspapers (I snagged a copy of the Management of Time News), and for the production of TV shows. I watched a room full of men sing a song they had written, “O My Country!,” and show videos in which they extolled the government and the crown prince. Al-Qaeda and ISIS forbid most music and revile the monarchy. Like so many other Saudis, these men seemed to have swapped their religious fanaticism for nationalist fanaticism. One wondered what they really believed.
Al-Sarrah followed close behind us, and I shot him a look when I heard the name of the program. One of the most famous jihadist texts, a playbook for ISIS, is “The Management of Savagery” (Idarat al-Tawahhush). It is a deranged manual for destroying the world and replacing it with a new one. That was what this program was doing in reverse: replacing the jihadists’ savage appetite for an imagined future with an appetite for the real, the now, and the ordinary.
I told Hamdi that I had corresponded with his friend Lindh, who served 17 years in federal prison in the United States before his release in 2019. Our correspondence had led me to believe that he was just as radical as ever, and that his stay in prison—spent in solitary study of Islamic texts—had confirmed his violent streak and converted him from an al-Qaeda supporter to an ISIS supporter.
“Really?” Hamdi asked, before venturing a guess as to why. “The United States doesn’t know how to deal with Muslims. When I was in Afghanistan, I had extreme thinking.” Going to a Saudi prison helped. “The difference is that in jail [here] we have a program. You want to explode the thinking we have in our brain. For 17 years he was alone.” The Saudis filled Hamdi’s time. They managed it. “We didn’t have time to read the Islamic books … We didn’t have time to do anything but work to improve ourselves.” He was a specialist in Power’s media department, and could now produce videos of passable quality.
“I didn’t know what a montage was,” he said. “I didn’t know what a design was.” We were driving to another part of the prison with al-Sarrah in the front seat and Hamdi and me in the back. “Now I am professional!” he said. “I am a complete montage expert!” He pointed at al-Sarrah, who smiled but did not speak or even look back. “All thanks to this man! The government opened this for us! Now I am in a car! Talking to you! Normally! Peacefully! No kind of problems!” Upon release, he said, he might work for his father’s company, or even (this was his dream) go into film and television production. I wondered what it might be like to have a co-worker like Hamdi, with, shall we say, an unconventional work history, and a penchant for extremism and Osama bin Laden that he swore up and down had been thoroughly replaced with a love for film and video production and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. I was pretty sure Hamdi would be a better colleague than John Walker Lindh.
At the prison I asked many inmates how they could trade jihadism for these worldly things, which surely amounted to frippery compared with the chance to die in the path of God. They laughed, nervously, as if to ask what I was trying to do—get them to leave the prison and kill again? They were mostly still young, and they yearned for freedom. That they no longer wanted something thrilling and extraordinary was exactly the point. It is possible to have too much vision, or the wrong kind—some of them had gone to Syria, barely survived, and had had enough vision, thank you very much. “We don’t want anything but a normal life,” one told me. “I would be happy just to go outside, to walk on the Boulevard in Riyadh, to go to McDonald’s.”
“I went to Syria because I was offered to take part in a dream, the dream of a caliphate,” said another. Ali al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, a bookish man who had been with bin Laden at Tora Bora, told me he now recognized such dreams as counterfeit. What, he asked, is the point of a big, exciting dream when it is a false one? A small ambition that can actually be fulfilled is preferable to a big one that cannot. He looked me steadily in the eye, like he was trying to convince me and not himself. “Vision 2030 is real.”
America must now decide whether that vision is worth encouraging. Twenty years ago, if you had told me that in 2022 the future king of Saudi Arabia would be pursuing a relationship with Israel; treating women as full members of society; punishing corruption, even in his own family; stanching the flow of jihadists; diversifying and liberalizing his economy and society; and encouraging the world to see his country and his country to see the world—Wahhabism be damned—I would have told you that your time machine was malfunctioning and you had visited 2052 at the earliest. Now that MBS is in power, all of these things are happening. But the effect is not as pleasing as I had hoped.
In 1804, another modernizing autocrat, Napoleon Bonaparte, arrested Louis Antoine, the duke of Enghien, on suspicion of sedition. The duke was young and foolish, and no great threat to Napoleon. But the future emperor executed him. Around Europe, monarchs were shocked: If this was how Napoleon treated a harmless naif like the duke, what could they expect from him as his power grew, and his domestic opposition dissolved in fear? The execution of Enghien alerted the most perceptive among them that Napoleon could not be managed or appeased. It took a decade of carnage to figure out how to stop him.
Enghien’s schemes wouldn’t have stopped Napoleon, and Khashoggi’s columns wouldn’t have stopped MBS. But his murder was a warning about the personality of the man who will be running Saudi Arabia for the next half century, and it is reasonable to worry about that man even when most of what he does is good and long overdue.
For now, MBS’s main request to the outside world, and especially the United States, is the usual request of misbehaving autocrats—namely, to stay out of his internal affairs. “We don’t have the right to lecture you in America,” he said. “The same goes the other way.” Saudi affairs are for Saudis. “You don’t have the right to interfere in our interior issues.”
But he acknowledges that the fates of the two countries remain linked. In Washington, many see MBS’s rise as abetted, perhaps even made inevitable, by American support. “There was a moment in time where the international community could have made it clear that the Khashoggi murder was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that we weren’t willing to deal with MBS,” Senator Murphy told me. The Trump administration’s support, when MBS was at his most vulnerable, saved him. “If MBS ultimately becomes king,” Murphy said, “he owes no one bigger than Jared Kushner,” Trump’s personal envoy to the crown prince. (“You Americans think there is something strange about a ruler who sends his unqualified son-in-law to conduct international relations,” one Saudi analyst told me. “For us this is completely normal.”)
Some still hope that MBS will not accede to the throne. “Only one of the last five crown princes has eventually become king,” Khalid al-Jabri noted to me, optimistically. But everything I see suggests that his ascent is certain, and that the search for alternatives is forlorn. Two of those four also-ran crown princes were sidelined or replaced by MBS himself. The other two died of old age.
The United States needs its partners in isolating Iran, and MBS is a stalwart there. And even domestically, he remains in some ways the right man for the job. He is at least, as Philip Zelikow reminded me, not a ruler in denial. “We wanted Saudi leadership who would face their problems, and embark on an ambitious and incredibly challenging generational struggle to remake Saudi society for the modern world,” he told me. Now we have such a leader, and he is presenting a binary choice: support me, or prepare for the jihadist deluge.
MBS is correct when he suggests that the Biden administration’s posture toward him is basically recriminatory. Stop bombing civilians in Yemen. Stop jailing and dismembering dissidents. The U.S. might, on the margins, be able to persuade MBS to use a softer touch—but only by first persuading him that he will be rewarded for his good behavior. And no persuasion will be possible at all without acknowledging that the game of thrones has concluded and he has won.
Many of the exiles I spoke with said their best hope now is that the crown prince will mellow, and that elder Saudi wise men will keep him from destroying the country with rash decisions, like the fight with Qatar, or the murder of Khashoggi. MBS does have a sense that being capricious and impulsive can be costly. “If we run the country randomly,” he told me, “then the whole economy is going to collapse.” Others had tried that strategy: “That’s the Qaddafi way.”
King Salman has instituted measures ostensibly intended to force his son to govern more inclusively after Salman’s death. He changed the law of succession to prevent the next king from naming his own children, or indeed anyone from his own branch of the family, as his crown prince. I asked MBS if he understood that to be the rule, and he said yes. I asked if he had anyone in mind for the job. “This is one of the forbidden subjects,” he said. “You will be the last to know.”
When he is king, however, the rules will belong to him, and to ask him to abide by them against his wishes will be about as easy as negotiating from your suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
A crown prince with a subtler mind and a gentler soul might have implemented MBS’s reforms without resorting to his brutal methods. But it is pointless to consider policy in a state of childlike fantasy, as if it were possible to conjure some new Saudi monarch by closing your eyes and wishing him into existence. Open your eyes, and MBS will still be there. If he is not, then the man ruling in his place will not be an Arab Dalai Lama. He will be, at best, a member of the unsustainable Saudi old guard, and at worst one of the big beards of jihadism, now richer than Croesus and ready to fight. As MBS told me, to justify the Ritz operation, “It’s sometimes a decision between bad and worse.”
Since reality has handed us MBS, the question for America is how to influence him. This question is practical rather than moral: If your moralism drives him into a partnership with China, what good will it have been? A fundamental principle of Chinese foreign relations is butting out of other countries’ internal affairs and expecting the same from them. Certainly Beijing will not reprimand him for his treatment of dissidents.
In effect, both the Saudis and the Americans are now in the Ritz-Carlton, forced to bargain with a jailer who promises us prosperity if we submit to his demands, and Mad Max if we do not. The predicament is familiar, because it is the same barrel over which every secular Arab autocrat has positioned America since the 1950s. Egypt, Iraq, and Syria all traded semitribal societies for modern ones, and they all became squalid dictatorships that justified themselves as bulwarks against chaos.
Twenty years ago, Syria watchers praised Bashar al-Assad for his modernizing tendencies—his openness to Western influence as well as his Western tastes. He liked Phil Collins; how evil could he be? By now most everyone outside Damascus, Tehran, and Moscow recognizes him as Saddam Hussein’s only rival in the dubious competition for most evil Arab leader.
MBS has completed about three-quarters of the transition from tribal king with theocratic characteristics to plain old secular-nationalist autocrat. The rest of that transition need not be as ruthless as the beginning, but MBS shows no sign of letting up. The United States can, and should, make the case that Saudi Arabia’s security and development will demand different tools going forward. It might even suggest what those tools should be. But it probably cannot make MBS use them.
A more pragmatic approach is to make sure that the reforms he has instituted stick, and that the changes in Saudi culture become irreversible. The opening of the country and the forcible sidelining of a crooked royal class—these are hard changes to undo, and they bind even the absolute monarch who decreed them. Granting women driver’s licenses was ultimately a smooth process. Taking them back would disrupt millions of lives and sow protest across the kingdom. American influence can acknowledge and encourage such changes.
Sometimes this is how absolute power relaxes its grip: slowly, without anyone noticing. In England, the transition from absolute monarchy to a fully constitutional one took 200 years, not all of them superintended by the most stable kings. MBS is still young and hoarding power, and everyone who has predicted that he would ease up on dissent has so far been proved optimistic. But 50 years is a long reign. The madness of King Mohammed could give way to something else: a slow and graceful renunciation of power—or, as with Assad, an ever more violent exercise of it.
An apartment building hit by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, is seen on March 2. (photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
Mariupol mayor warns that his city faces a ‘humanitarian catastrophe'
West of Mariupol in Kherson, a regional capital and the first major city to fall to Russian forces, a city council member said Russian equipment and soldiers were “absolutely everywhere.”
And in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Russian troops have fired cluster munitions into at least three residential neighborhoods, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Friday.
The number of casualties caused by more than a week of fighting has been impossible to verify. The U.N. human rights office said Friday that at least 331 civilians had been killed, while Ukraine’s emergency services put the number of civilian fatalities much higher, at more than 2,000. A U.N. statement said most of the casualties had been caused “by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multi-launch rocket systems, and missile and airstrikes.” Russia has acknowledged the deaths of about 500 of its troops, while Ukrainian officials claim that as many as 10,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or captured.
Russia’s seizure of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power facility, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, came after shelling that set part of the complex on fire, raising fears across Europe of a catastrophic accident. The U.N. nuclear watchdog reported that the blaze had not affected “essential” equipment and that Ukraine’s regulator reported no change in surrounding radiation levels. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tweeted that the Energy Department also had seen no elevated radiation readings.
“The plant’s reactors are protected by robust containment structures and reactors are being safely shut down,” Granholm wrote. Even so, the blaze sparked international alarm and underscored the perils of a war fought around nuclear sites.
In Mariupol, Russian forces have been engaged in a “bombardment of critical civilian infrastructure” aimed at forcing the city to surrender, a senior western intelligence official said.
The city’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, said officials were hoping that talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials would establish a “period of silence” to restore utilities such as electricity and water. “Our key task is to provide Mariupol residents with food and essentials,” he said in a message posted online by the city council.
Kherson, meanwhile, faces a “global catastrophe” if a humanitarian corridor is not opened soon to allow civilians to be evacuated and for food and medicine to be delivered, the secretary of the city council said.
“In Kherson, we are running out of food — literally, we can still last for maybe three, four days,” the city council secretary, Galina Luhova, said by telephone. “We’re running out of medicines, we’re out of baby food, we are running out of diapers, and we are running out of first aid in hospitals.”
The Russian blitz to take Kherson may have revealed a larger strategy in southern Ukraine, where the Pentagon has said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces have been the most successful in gaining territory.
Clashes have spilled over into nearby Mykolaiv, a major city that feeds the Black Sea. Russians may want to capture Mykolain as a lane of advance to Odessa, the strategic port farther west. The Russian military may use the city as a way to support and reinforce any future amphibious landings at Odessa, a senior U.S. defense official said Friday, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Biden administration.
With the conflict now in its second week and Russia sending nearly all of its assembled military power into neighboring Ukraine, satellite images are providing glimpses of the scale of the invading force, as well as the devastation the fighting has wrought. Analysis of satellite imagery by the U.S. firm Maxar Technologies shows bridges and roads damaged and homes destroyed in towns and cities across the country.
In Chernihiv, a strategic northern city on a highway that links the Ukraine-Belarus border with to Kyiv and where a fierce battle has been waged in recent days, the images show damaged roads, bridges and homes. Some factories appear to have been leveled. On Friday, Chernihiv’s regional authority said in a Facebook post that Russian strikes killed 47 people, including nine women.
The images also continue to show a long Russian armored column north of the capital, Kyiv. That enormous convoy has remained stalled because of what western officials say are logistical challenges and fierce resistance by Ukrainian forces
The column, consisting of combat and logistics vehicles, “is now likely supporting attacks directly into the city from positions that Russian forces maintain on Kyiv’s northwestern outskirts,” the senior western intelligence official said Thursday, adding that Russian forces were more likely “to prioritize encircling the city in the coming days rather than a direct assault on it.”
Alarm over the fate of Ukraine’s cities has intensified amid growing evidence that Russian forces are indiscriminately targeting urban centers.
“We have seen the use of cluster bombs and we have seen reports of use of other types of weapons which would be in violation of international law,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels on Friday.
In its report Friday, Human Rights Watch said it had documented the use of cluster munitions on the basis of two witness interviews and the analysis of 40 videos and images. Some of these sources show the “explosion signatures and rocket remnants” consistent with the delivery of cluster munitions from 9M55K Smerch rockets, the group added.
Because of the indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions — they scatter over a wide area small bomblets that could explode even after the fighting has ended — Human Rights Watch claimed that Russia may have committed a war crime by using them.
“Using cluster munitions in populated areas shows a brazen and callous disregard for people’s lives,” said Steve Goose, the arms director at Human Rights Watch. “If these deadly acts were carried out either intentionally or recklessly, they would be war crimes.”
The United States, which is out of step with many of its allies in abstaining from a treaty banning cluster weapons, has said for days it cannot verify they are being used by Russians in Ukraine.
Oath Keepers member Joshua James, left, provides security for Roger Stone on Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)
“I really want to get out of here,” Stone told an aide, as they were filmed at the hotel by a Danish camera crew for a documentary on the veteran Republican operative. Stone said he feared prosecution by the incoming attorney general, Merrick Garland. “He is not a friend,” Stone said.
Stone allowed the filmmakers to document his activities during extended periods over more than two years. In addition to interviews and moments when Stone spoke directly to the camera, they also captured fly-on-the-wall footage of his actions, candid off-camera conversations from a microphone he wore and views of his iPhone screen as he messaged associates on an encrypted app. Reporters from The Washington Post reviewed more than 20 hours of video filmed for the documentary, “A Storm Foretold,” which is expected to be released later this year.
The footage, along with other reporting by The Post, provides the most comprehensive account to date of Stone’s involvement in the former president’s effort to overturn the election and in the rallies in Washington that spilled over into violence on Jan. 6.
Stone privately coordinated post-election protests with prominent figures, and in January he communicated by text message with leaders of far-right groups that had been involved in the attack on the Capitol, the footage shows. The filmmakers did not capture conversations between Stone and Trump, but on several occasions, Stone told them or his associates that he remained in contact with the president.
Stone has refused to give testimony and evidence to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, citing his rights under the Fifth Amendment. Last week, he sued members of the panel to try to block them from using a subpoena to obtain his telephone records.
On the day of the attack, as he packed his bags, Stone told the filmmakers the riot was a mistake and would be “really bad” for the pro-Trump movement.
On the eve of the 2020 election, however, he seemed to welcome the prospect of clashes with left-wing activists. In a recorded conversation, as an aide spoke of driving trucks into crowds of racial justice protesters, Stone said: “Once there’s no more election, there’s no reason why we can’t mix it up. These people are going to get what they’ve been asking for.”
Stone declined requests for an interview. In response to questions, he said in an email that he had no involvement in the Jan. 6 riot. “Any claim, assertion or implication that I knew about, was involved in or condoned the illegal acts at the Capitol on Jan 6 is categorically false and there is no witness or document that proves otherwise,” he wrote.
Without providing specifics, Stone accused The Post of employing “a clever blend of ‘guilt by association,’ insinuations, half truths, anonymous claims, falsehoods and out of context trick questions.” He suggested that video clips of him reviewed for this article could be “deep fakes.”
“You attribute things to me I never said,” Stone wrote, without citing any examples.
Stone moved quickly after Trump’s defeat to help mobilize the protest movement that drew thousands to the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021, The Post found. He privately strategized with former national security adviser Michael Flynn and rally organizer Ali Alexander, who visited Stone’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in late November 2020 for a dinner where Stone served pasta and martinis.
A few hours before the Jan. 6 attack, the video shows, a member of the far-right Oath Keepers group — who has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy — was in Stone’s suite at the Willard. Other rooms in the same hotel were used as a “command center” by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and other advisers involved in the fractious battle to overturn the election. Stone was not part of their effort, the footage indicates, and he said he feared that top organizers were trying to exclude him from the rally.
Stone used an encrypted messaging app later in January to communicate with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who is also charged with seditious conspiracy, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, the footage shows. Prosecutors have said that Rhodes erased some messages from his phone before it was taken by the FBI.
A federal judge considering lawsuits filed against Trump by Democrats and Capitol Police officers over the Jan. 6 riot said in an order in February that Stone’s connection to Trump, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers may prove to be “an important one.”
Stone did not permit the filmmakers to record him for a 90-minute period covering the height of the violence on Jan. 6. A Stone aide blocked a cameraman from entering his hotel suite, claiming that Stone was napping, the cameraman said. When he eventually got inside, Stone was speaking on his phone.
After he left Washington, Stone lobbied for Trump to enact the “Stone Plan” — a blanket presidential pardon to shield himself, Trump’s allies in Congress and “the America First movement” from prosecution for trying to overturn the election, according to the footage and additional documents reviewed by The Post.
But the plan, along with a bid by Stone to win pardons for other Trump backers including convicted mobsters, was ultimately thwarted by White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Stone said in several conversations that were filmed.
“Clearly, Cipollone f---ed everybody,” Stone told Steven Brown, a friend then in federal prison in Oregon for a fraud conviction, during a call on Jan. 19, 2021. Cipollone was aware of Stone’s requests for pardons and opposed them, according to a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters.
“See you in prison,” Stone wrote that evening in a message to another Trump associate.
In an Inauguration Day call with a friend, Stone directed his rage at the man who had confided in him and consulted with him for decades, denouncing Trump as “a disgrace” and expressing support for him to be impeached. “He betrayed everybody,” Stone said.
Stone, 69, has been a combative Republican strategist for almost half a century. He became notorious for dishonest political attacks when Watergate investigators revealed he was paid to carry out “dirty tricks” for President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, though he was not charged with any crime.
Stone frequently complained to the Danish filmmakers about reports that inaccurately called him a “self-described” dirty trickster, but he remains unapologetic for doing whatever necessary to win.
“One man’s dirty trickster is another man’s freedom fighter,” he wrote in his 2018 book “Stone’s Rules,” a collection of career lessons including how voters will believe a “big lie” if it is kept simple and repeated often enough.
Stone has been friends with Trump for more than 30 years. He worked as a consultant to Trump’s businesses in the 1980s and served as an informal adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign. That year, Stone founded the “Stop the Steal” initiative to fight efforts by some Republicans to wrest the presidential nomination from Trump at their national convention.
Stone’s relationship with Trump took on a lower profile after it came under scrutiny by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who probed Stone’s communications regarding Wikileaks after it published hacked Democratic Party emails. Stone was eventually convicted on charges of impeding a congressional investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He was sentenced to three years and four months in prison, but Trump commuted the sentence in July 2020. The filmmakers followed Stone as he sought a full pardon.
Stone said in his statement to The Post that its questions for this article were “typical of the Washington Post’s coverage over the last two years in which your newspaper insisted that I was a Russian Intelligence asset in league with Wikileaks to aide the Trump campaign — a lie.”
A day before the announcement that Stone’s sentence was commuted, the Danish filmmakers’ footage shows, he told his staffer Enrique Alejandro that Trump should use the powers of his office to reject official results in that year’s election and secure victory in the courts with help from federal judges who owed him fealty.
“It’s going to be really nasty,” Stone said at home on July 9, 2020, predicting that Democrats would try to steal the election. “If the electors show up at the electoral college, armed guards will throw them out,” he said, apparently referring to ceremonial meetings of electors in state capitals.
“ ‘I’m the president. F--- you,’ ” Stone said, imagining Trump’s remarks. “ ‘You’re not stealing Florida, you’re not stealing Ohio. I’m challenging all of it, and the judges we’re going to are judges I appointed.’ ”
On election night, Nov. 3, Stone attended a party in Fort Lauderdale thrown by an associate. In a speech, Stone urged Trump supporters to prepare for a disputed result, echoing Trump’s own statements.
On Nov. 5, as vote counts in key states slipped away from Trump, Stone coordinated a response during a rapid-fire succession of calls. As the filmmakers drove him to his makeshift office space in a strip mall near his home, Stone told one associate to create an account for hunting election fraud on an encrypted email service to avoid surveillance.
Dictating text messages, Stone told an aide to resurrect his Stop the Steal campaign. He predicted to another aide that his brand was about to be “quite a bit hotter” as a result, adding, “We’re going to raise money from Stop the Steal — it will be like falling off a log.”
That day, working from a desk in his office and surrounded by Nixon memorabilia, Stone directed aides to recruit retired military and law enforcement officials for Stop the Steal. He told them to monitor a group chat on the app Signal titled “F.O.S.” — friends of Stone. Tarrio of the Proud Boys was among the group’s members, a later shot of Stone’s phone showed.
In his statement to The Post, Stone wrote, “Your assertions regarding my text messages or Signal messages only proves the leaking of the partisan Jan 6 witch hunt or illegal methods of collection on your part.”
On Nov. 5, Stone drew up a Stop the Steal action plan that was visible on Alejandro’s laptop in footage captured by the filmmakers. As protesters were mobilized, the plan said, state lawmakers would be lobbied to reject official results. That tactic later proved central to Trump’s efforts.
Also that day, Stone had a 15-minute call with Flynn, the video shows. He told Flynn they could “document an overwhelming and compelling fraud” in each battleground state and urged him to spread the word on social media. That day, Flynn, Trump’s campaign and his sons Donald Jr. and Eric began using #StopTheSteal on Twitter.
Stone and Flynn discussed the need to coordinate with the White House and oppose demands by Republicans in some states to stop counting votes. “Our slogan should be ‘count every legal ballot.’ Much better messaging. More positive,” Stone said. After an inaudible response from Flynn, Stone replied: “Well, we both know he often does things he shouldn’t do.”
That evening, Trump gave a speech from the White House briefing room. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he began.
The filmmakers returned to Denmark on Nov. 5 and were away from Stone as Trump’s efforts gathered momentum. Demonstrations spread while Trump and his advisers lobbied state lawmakers to intervene, as Stone had proposed.
Though he had privately ordered a revival of his Stop the Steal initiative, Stone publicly played down his role. Stone, who was then still seeking a pardon, wrote in a Nov. 30 blog post that he was “not a participant” in any of the organizations using the Stop the Steal name in 2020.
Much media focus instead fell on Alexander, a young right-wing operative who had launched his own Stop the Steal effort and was traveling the country addressing crowds with a bullhorn. Stone acknowledged in his post that he had met Alexander, but he stressed that he was merely talking to anybody who could help fight election fraud.
Their connection ran deeper than Stone let on. The pair had been photographed together at several Republican events in prior years. During a small Stop the Steal protest in Atlanta on Nov. 20, Alexander patched Stone in via phone for a speech in which he thanked “my friend there, Ali,” cellphone video from the scene reviewed by The Post shows. Eight days later, Alexander visited Stone’s home for dinner.
On Dec. 19, Trump announced on social media that a “big protest” would be held in Washington on Jan. 6. “Be there, will be wild!” he wrote. The next day, WildProtest.com, a site Alexander used to promote plans for the rally, was registered.
On the evening of Dec. 23, the White House announced that Trump had pardoned Stone for his convictions in the case brought by Mueller. Alexander celebrated on a live stream, promoting the Jan. 6 rally and boasting of what he and Stone could achieve “now that we can work together publicly.”
“Roger’s fully in the fight now,” Alexander said. “Roger wasn’t allowed to be fully in the fight. We’ve taken the leash off the pit bull. So, this is something Roger and I have been planning for a long time. And, finally, he’s off the leash. So, you know, it’s a knife fight, and your two knife fighters are Ali Alexander and Roger Stone. And you either fight with us or you get slashed.”
An attorney for Alexander, Paul Kamenar, told The Post that Alexander and Stone were “friends and brothers-in-Christ” but had no part in the violence on Jan. 6 and did not anticipate it. “Ali has never participated in a literal knife fight nor advocated one,” said Kamenar.
Stone was added to the top tier of the lineup for Alexander’s Wild Protest, which eventually joined forces with a parallel Jan. 6 organizing effort led by Women for America First.
By Dec. 30, Stone had launched a Jan. 6 fundraising drive, urging supporters to help fund the rallies and pay for private security. The fundraising page suggested donations of up to $2,500, which could be made to recur.
The effort raised about $40,000, according to a person familiar with it. The funds were directed to an online account in the name of a lawyer who has worked extensively with Stone, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters.
In early January, the filmmakers rejoined Stone as he and thousands of others poured into D.C. for rallies aimed at pressing Vice President Mike Pence and Republicans in Congress to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
Stone stationed himself close to the White House at the five-star Willard, which at the time was a hive of pro-Trump activity. He took Room 500, a one-bedroom suite with a living room.
Elsewhere in the hotel, Trump’s outside lawyers, including Giuliani and John C. Eastman, ran their separate command center from another one-bedroom suite. Alex Jones, the Infowars founder, was in one of the Willard’s higher-end suites, where he met with Flynn and Stone on Jan. 5, photographs posted online show.
In his statement to The Post, Stone defended the efforts to press Congress to reject the election result. “When Hillary Clinton sought to stop the certification of Trump’s election by the Electoral College in 2017 the Washington Post found it neither seditious or illegal,” he wrote. A handful of House Democrats unsuccessfully raised objections to the certification of Trump’s 2016 win.
In the evening on Jan. 5, Stone appeared at the Rally to Save America at Freedom Plaza, near the Willard. He told the crowd he would stand with them “shoulder to shoulder” the next day, in what he called a fight between good and evil.
In his remarks, Alexander thanked “my friend Roger Stone” for his guidance. “I am here to say it couldn’t be done without Roger Stone,” Alexander said.
Stone was transported and guarded on Jan. 5 by multiple Oath Keepers, the filmmakers’ footage and other video posted online show, and four Oath Keepers escorted Stone back to the Willard after his speech at about 8 p.m.
Two of the Oath Keepers who were with Stone, Joshua James and Brian Ulrich, were later charged with seditious conspiracy after allegedly storming the Capitol. James pleaded guilty this week and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors. A third, Mark Grods, admitted in a plea deal that he traveled to the D.C. area from Alabama with two guns and joined fellow members in the Capitol riot.
At about 8:50 p.m. on Jan. 5, after the Danish filmmakers had left him, Stone exited the Willard again with his bodyguard, off-duty New York City police officer Sal Greco, a live-stream video shows. Their destination was unclear, though Stone had said he had a 9 p.m. appointment to have his hair dyed.
An attorney for Greco declined to comment.
Early on Jan. 6, as thousands gathered on the Ellipse just south of the White House, Stone tended to a side business: helping felons get requests for pardons on Trump’s desk before he left office. Stone’s activity was part of a bustling market at the time, in which well-connected lobbyists, lawyers and others brokered large fees to seek clemency for their clients.
In his Willard suite, away from the camera but still wearing a mic, Stone spoke on the phone with a man representing someone named Henry. The man said they were “willing to pay up to $100,000,” but stressed: “Everything would have to be legal.”
“Actually, it is legal,” Stone said of such arrangements, accurately.
“If I didn’t have a really good chance of getting this done, I wouldn’t take the money,” Stone said, claiming he was to meet officials involved in the process that evening. “I’m going to have a little bit of input into the final list,” he said.
Over the previous several months, the filmmakers had recorded Stone working to obtain pardons for other felons. In an October 2020 call with one prisoner’s representative, Stone stressed the influence of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and aide. “I’ve got to know that Jared’s got the paperwork and he ‘gets it,’ ” Stone said.
Stone drew up a detailed proposal for Trump to pardon Brown, the friend then in federal prison with whom he spoke about Cipollone in front of the filmmakers. Brown had been sentenced in 2018 to more than five years in prison over a $12.5 million scheme to defraud film investors.
Brown declined to comment.
Stone argued Brown’s case in a letter to Trump that he began drafting soon after the two met at the president’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 27, 2020. The filmmakers recorded Stone as he typed, and his screen and a draft of the letter were briefly visible.
Stone reminded Trump that he had asked for names of clemency candidates who had been “persecuted because of their support for Trump.” Brown served as a labor coordinator for Trump’s 2016 campaign, Stone explained. Stone told aides he was not paid to lobby for Brown, who ultimately was not pardoned but has since been released from prison.
In a social media post soon after their Dec. 27 meeting, Stone wrote that he had advised Trump on “exactly how” he could remain in power and prosecute Democrats for stealing the election. The post was erased on Dec. 28.
Stone was billed by organizers as a top-tier speaker at the main rally on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. But in the end, he did not appear. His aide Kristin M. Davis was filmed apparently struggling to reach organizers by phone to secure VIP access, and Stone said in footage that they could not otherwise get from the Willard to the stage.
Stone claimed to aides that organizers he did not identify were conspiring to exclude him. Among the organizers were associates of former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who had angered Stone by testifying against him at his trial in the obstruction case.
A spokeswoman for Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.
The filmmakers told The Post that Stone appeared to change his plans after an encounter in the Willard lobby around 10 a.m. with Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner working in Giuliani’s command center at the hotel. The filmmakers began recording their conversation but were forced to leave by hotel staff. It is unclear what was said.
“When we stepped outside, Roger had changed his mind,” said Christoffer Guldbrandsen, the director. “Now he didn’t want to go to the Ellipse to see Trump speak.”
After Kerik left, the footage shows, Davis griped that Kerik had previously misled her by saying he would be dealing with a personal matter away from D.C. that day. Stone appeared to fear he would be publicly snubbed by the organizers. “The point is, I don’t want to be turned away. That’s what they want. You don’t want to reach for something and not get it,” Stone said.
In a brief interview with The Post, Kerik said Stone told him that Stone was “not invited” to the rally and did not want to go. Kerik said that the trip out of town was actually on Jan. 5, the previous day, and that Davis may have been mistaken.
James, one of the Oath Keepers seen guarding Stone, told a fellow Oath Keeper late on the morning of Jan. 6 that the speaker he was protecting was “angry because he was not getting VIP treatment,” according to an FBI report filed to court. The speaker’s name was redacted in the report.
The Danish filmmakers’ footage shows James inside Stone’s suite and in the hotel lobby with Stone’s bodyguard, Greco, during the hours before the riot.
Around noon, as Trump began his 71-minute rally speech, Stone watched on TV in his hotel suite with a group of guests including Pastor Mark Burns, a faith adviser to Trump. Stone told Davis he had complained to Julie Fancelli, the Publix supermarket heiress, that organizers had prevented him and Infowars’ Jones from making it onstage.
“I just caused a little problem for them with Julie Fancelli,” Stone said. “I just told her, ‘You spent 300 grand and neither Jones nor I are speaking.’ ”
Fancelli gave $300,000 to Women for America First, The Post previously reported, along with another $350,000 to two other groups that promoted the events. “One of my biggest donors financed this whole thing,” Stone explained to one guest. “They conned her.”
A representative for Fancelli did not respond to a request for comment.
At about 12:40 p.m., some of Stone’s guests left his suite. Stone’s team and the filmmakers agreed to separate for lunch and then reconvene two hours later. Stone planned to speak at a smaller rally near the Capitol later that afternoon.
But as the filmmakers ate in their hotel room, they saw news footage of a riot escalating at the Capitol. Around 2:30 p.m., Guldbrandsen headed out to capture the scene while Frederik Marbell, the director of photography, rushed to Stone’s room.
“Kristin Davis opened the door and said that Roger was taking a nap, so I couldn’t film,” Marbell told The Post.
Outside the room, Marbell attempted to reach Stone by text message starting at 3:03 p.m. The messages went unanswered for 24 minutes, when Stone responded and offered to go to Marbell’s room.
By about 4 p.m., with the Capitol in chaos, Stone had still not arrived at Marbell’s room. Marbell returned to Stone’s room and began knocking. About five minutes later, room service arrived and Marbell snuck inside, he said.
“Roger was not taking a nap. He was on the phone with someone,” Marbell said.
Stone condemned the riot to the filmmakers at 4:18 p.m., saying: “I think it’s really bad for the movement. It hurts, it doesn’t help. I’m not sure what they thought they were going to achieve.”
In the same breath, however, he suggested that the violence was the inevitable result of election theft. “When you can’t get a fair and honest judicial opinion, when you can’t get a fair, honest and transparent election, when your legislative process is constipated by fear and threat,” he said, trailing off for a moment before slightly misquoting former president John F. Kennedy. “Those who make peaceful progress impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
Stone had said he expected to attend a meeting with administration officials on pardons that had been pushed back to 6 p.m. because Trump had “ruined the schedule for the day.” But following the riot, Stone and Davis left D.C. for the private flight.
Before Stone left the Willard for Dulles around 5 p.m., he paused for a photo in front of a hotel TV showing coverage of the riot.
“This proves we had nothing to do with this today,” Greco said.
Back in Florida, Stone lobbied for the Stone Plan, which called for Trump to preemptively pardon Republicans including Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio), all of whom tried on Jan. 6 to delay or block the certification of Biden’s victory.
The Post reviewed a Jan. 16 draft of Stone’s plan, which he shared with the filmmakers. Stone did not say whether he had consulted the lawmakers, and some told The Post that he did not. A Cruz spokesman said, “Senator Cruz has no idea what Roger Stone says or does.” A Jordan spokesman said, “Mr. Jordan has never spoken to Roger Stone about pardons and he never sought a pardon because he did nothing wrong.”
Months later, Gaetz’s campaign paid $20,000 to a Delaware firm formed by Stone, campaign finance reports show. The reports said the payments were for “strategic campaign consulting” but did not give additional details. A spokesman for Gaetz did not respond to a request for comment.
Speaking to the filmmakers, Stone likened Trump’s obligation to his followers to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s responsibility to rescue Jewish people from the Holocaust. He said copies of the plan were given to Trump and banner-name right-wing media figures.
Stone was filmed telling a friend over the phone that he had pressed Trump to enact the plan in two telephone conversations, adding that he raised the cases of “Gaetz and others” during the second call.
“I believe the president is for it,” Stone told the filmmakers on Jan. 15. But, he said, the plan faced resistance from “lily-livered, weak-kneed” officials in the White House Counsel’s Office.
The person who confirmed Cipollone’s opposition to the plan said he particularly objected to preemptive pardons for Republicans in Congress who had not been charged with crimes nor sought pardons themselves.
A second person, who was an administration official at the time, said Trump was considering at least some of Stone’s pardons, but added that Stone’s candidates were among many Trump was considering during a frenzied time. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss government deliberations.
Stone’s plan also proposed a pardon for former Seminole County, Fla., tax collector Joel Greenberg (R), who had been indicted on charges that included the sex trafficking of an underage girl. The previous month, Greenberg had written to Stone to ask for help securing a pardon and they discussed a potential $250,000 fee, the Daily Beast has reported. The report said that Stone denied interceding on Greenberg’s behalf.
Later in 2021, Greenberg agreed to a plea deal and to cooperate with investigators on inquiries into possible sex offenses allegedly involving Gaetz, previously a friend of his, The Post and other outlets reported. Greenberg’s attorney said he declined to comment. Gaetz denies any improper activity with underage girls.
On Jan. 15, Stone told the filmmakers he endorsed a proposal — one that was then not publicly known — for Trump to install Jeffrey Clark, a loyal senior Justice Department official, as attorney general. Stone outlined a scenario in which Trump would order acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden. When Rosen refused, Stone said, Trump would oust him and appoint Clark.
“Clark, I think, would carry out the order of the commander in chief,” Stone told the filmmakers. News that Trump had indeed considered replacing Rosen with Clark was made public a week later.
Stone’s pardon wish list also included Michael Sessa and Victor Orena, former members of the Colombo crime family serving life sentences for murder and racketeering convictions in the 1990s. Their attorney, David I. Schoen, has also represented Stone.
Stone told the filmmakers he hoped to persuade Trump to hire Schoen to represent him in his Senate impeachment trial on charges of inciting an insurrection. With Schoen advising Trump, “all that pardon stuff is easy,” Stone said. (After Trump left office, Schoen did join his defense, and Trump was acquitted when less than the required two-thirds of the Senate voted to convict him.)
On Jan. 17, Stone and Schoen exchanged text messages about their talks with Trump. “I think you will hear from the president shortly,” Stone wrote. Schoen reported back that he spoke with both Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, saying the president telephoned him for what he called a “long call” and a “great call.”
Schoen told The Post that the calls with Trump and Meadows were focused on him joining Trump’s impeachment defense team. A spokesman for Meadows did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for Trump acknowledged questions from The Post but did not provide responses to them.
But as Biden’s inauguration neared, Stone’s plan met stiff opposition from White House lawyers.
Schoen told Stone in a text exchange on Jan. 18 that Trump had called him again but was hesitant to commit to pardons. “He started to go down that road, but stopped,” Schoen wrote, adding that Trump “sees he is stymied by cip,” referring to Cipollone.
Stone’s top priority was protection for himself and Kerik, who had been previously pardoned by Trump for felonies including tax fraud before he worked on the effort to overturn the election.
“At this point I’d be happy if he pardoned me and Kerik again,” Stone told Schoen later in the same exchange, claiming Trump “would take no heat for it whatsoever” as he had pardoned them before.
“But time is running out,” Schoen wrote.
Kerik told The Post he did not know about Stone’s effort and did not need a pardon because he had done nothing wrong.
The following afternoon, Schoen sent Stone a link to a new CNN report: Trump had been talked out of issuing preemptive pardons. The Stone Plan had failed.
“This was a free home run that could have saved a lot of loyal lives,” Schoen complained. He also lamented the president’s refusal to pardon the former Colombo crime family members, noting they had been “vocal Trump supporters.”
Schoen told The Post that he never asked Trump to pardon anyone and was not aware of Stone’s plan for multiple pardons. Schoen said he did try to get Trump to read an article he’d written that said the former Colombo family members deserved pardons.
“Maybe one reason I wanted him to see the article was so that he could have the people who handle pardons look into it,” Schoen said in an email.
That evening, as the filmmakers recorded him puffing on a cigar in a smoke-filled Fort Lauderdale bar, Macabi Havana Lounge, Stone commiserated via Signal with an associate. “Now hearing that Bannon [is] getting one,” the associate wrote to Stone in a message that was visible in the footage.
Later that night, the White House confirmed it: Trump had pardoned Bannon, who was under indictment on federal fraud charges. The decision enraged Stone, who called Bannon a “grifter scumbag” and two expletives while he was filmed.
At home on Inauguration Day, wearing a microphone but out of view, Stone ranted to Alejandro about Kushner, whom he also blamed for his plan’s failure. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, had recently bought a $32 million lot on Indian Creek Island, a gated village in Biscayne Bay off Miami, and rented a condo nearby.
“In two weeks he’s moving to Miami,” Stone told Alejandro, before whispering: “He’s going to get a beating. He needs to have a beating. And needs to be told, ‘This time we’re just beating you. Next time we’re killing you.’ ” Aware the filmmakers were nearby, Alejandro urged Stone to say he was joking. “No, no, it isn’t joking. Not joking. It’s not a joke,” Stone replied.
Later that day, in a car with the filmmakers, Stone returned to the subject of Kushner during a call with a friend named Tom. Stone said Kushner needed to be “punished in the most brutal possible way” and would be “brain dead when I get finished with him.”
Stone told Tom that Cipollone was “a target” and that he would spend money to advertise Cipollone’s home address, which he apparently did not do.
And Stone unloaded on Donald Trump, saying he had betrayed his friends, deserved to be impeached and was the “greatest single mistake in American history.”
Stone added that Trump might be vulnerable to prosecution by federal authorities in Manhattan after declining to preemptively pardon himself.
“A good, long sentence in prison will give him a chance to think about it, because the Southern District is coming for him, and he did nothing,” Stone said.
Though months later he would support a possible Trump bid for the White House in 2024, on Inauguration Day he mocked the idea. “Run again! You’ll get your f---ing brains beat in,” Stone said.
After ending the call, he turned to the filmmakers. “Obviously if you use any of that, I’ll murder you,” he said.
State-level efforts to protect the right to abortion and reduce the cost of obtaining the procedure are, in large part, a response to a forthcoming supreme court decision which could gut abortion rights nationally. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
An upcoming decision by the conservative-leaning court could overturn Roe v Wade and imperil abortion rights nationwide
State-level efforts to protect the right to abortion and reduce the cost of obtaining the procedure in states such as California, Rhode Island and Vermont are, in large part, a response to a forthcoming supreme court decision which could gut abortion rights nationally.
The landmark 1973 supreme court decision in Roe v Wade guaranteed pregnant people a constitutional right to obtain an abortion, invalidating dozens of state abortion bans that were in place at the time. However, many states never passed their own laws affirming a right to abortion.
Now, the newly conservative-leaning US supreme court looks willing to gut the right to abortion as it prepares to decide on a new case, called Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. A decision in the case is expected in June.
If the court overturned Roe v Wade, it could return the issue of abortion to states, many of which have not updated their laws in decades or are actively hostile to abortion and are ready to enforce bans or severe restrictions.
In the event the US supreme court reversed Roe v Wade, 26 states would be certain or likely to outlaw abortion, while just 15 states and Washington DC have laws to protect abortion rights.
“Conservative legislators clearly feel they have the legal support to continue to pass abortion bans and restrictions,” said Elizabeth Nash, interim associate director of state issues at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research center. Nash said researchers see “a real trend around abortion bans, including comprehensive and early bans”.
“Part of the issue is we simply have fewer progressive state legislatures than we do conservative ones,” said Nash. However, she is optimistic about efforts to affirm abortion rights and expand access in progressive states.
“Over the past several years we have seen more action in state legislatures to protect abortion rights than we had previously,” she said. “We look at 2019 – you had states from Illinois to Maine to Vermont and Rhode Island all looking to add statutory protections,” for abortion rights, momentum that has continued as threats to Roe v Wade have mounted.
Right-leaning lawmakers have long used abortion to rally their base, while protections conferred by Roe v Wade meant abortion was often ranked as a low priority for left-leaning voters. As a result, abortion rights legislation has languished for decades, even as rightwing politicians passed hundreds of restrictions.
Recent congressional efforts to codify the right to abortion in statute failed in the face of Republican opposition. Though the Democrat-led House of Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act last year, which would have banned medically unnecessary restrictions on the procedure , the bill died in the Senate this week.
The bill required 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Democrats hold 50 seats, and Republicans universally opposed the measure. They were joined by one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
“We should have codified Roe in state law around the country,” said Liana Cassar, a Democratic state representative in Rhode Island. “But there was a belief we weren’t at risk – we weren’t at risk of losing access to abortion.”
That has changed since Donald Trump was able to confirm three justices to the supreme court, tipping the nine-member bench firmly to the right.
Now, left-leaning lawmakers are seeking to pass more protections for abortion. New Jersey became the first state in the nation to pass an abortion-related law in 2022, affirming the right to terminate a pregnancy and ordering a study of the barriers low-income women face to obtain the procedure.
In February, Vermont lawmakers voted to move forward on a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to abortion and contraception. The measure – the first of its kind in the US – will appear on the ballot in November, and voters in the state are expected to approve it.
Rhode Island affirmed a right to abortion in state law in 2019, but left in place restrictions that banned the state’s employee health insurance and Medicaid, a health insurance program for the poor and disabled, from paying pay for abortion. Lawmakers are now working to allow Medicaid to pay for abortions and other services.
“This is a racism and a classism issue,” said Cassar, the sponsor of Rhode Island’s legislation. If passed, Rhode Island would join 15 other states that allow Medicaid to pay for abortions.
In California, the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, commissioned a Future of Abortion report, in part to examine the repercussions of abortion bans in neighboring states.
If the US supreme court allows states to ban or severely restrict abortion, a recent Guttmacher report found the number of out-of-state people who could find the nearest clinic in California could increase from 46,000 to 1.4 million overnight – a nearly 3,000% increase.
“Folks can fall into the thinking that advocacy, aggressive advocacy, to expand abortion access is not necessary,” said Onyemma C Obiekea, policy analyst for the Black Women for Wellness Action Project, a reproductive justice group which helped steer the Future of Abortion committee. However, potentially devastating supreme court rulings have, “really shifted that”.
One of the first recommendations lawmakers are tackling from the report would aim to further protect California residents from the high cost of abortion. California’s Medicaid program already pays for abortions. A new bill would end out-of-pocket costs for people who seek abortions and have private insurance.
That could reduce the cost of terminating a pregnancy by hundreds of dollars for about 9,600 of the 23,000 California women who seek abortions in the state each year, reducing the number of people who face high costs by 41%, according to the California Health Benefits Review Program. The bill would only impact people whose private health insurance is regulated by the state. The health insurance plans of about 5.7 million Californians are regulated by the federal government.
Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to protect abortion rights are taking place in so-called “purple states” such as Michigan, where – like Vermont – a coalition of reproductive rights groups are pushing a ballot initiative to provide a right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Currently, if the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, it could allow a 1931 law banning abortion to be reinstated. To get a question on the 2022 ballot Michigan groups need to collect more than 425,000 signatures, according to the Detroit News.
Michigan has Democratic governor but abortion rights legislation has no realistic chance of moving through the Republican-controlled statehouse, which prompted a drive to put the question to voters. The chances of the initiative succeeding are unclear. An initiative to legalize abortion in Michigan failed in 1972, just one year before Roe v Wade was decided.
In all states, powerful opposition to efforts to expand abortion rights and access has come from Christian anti-abortion organizations, the Catholic church and aligned Republicans. In just one example, the Catholic church has been among the most vocal opposition to Cassar’s bill in Rhode Island.
Even if more progressive states pass and expand access to abortion, millions people in states hostile to abortion would face insurmountable challenges to obtaining a legal abortion. This scenario is currently playing out in Texas, where state lawmakers have successfully enacted a law that bans abortion before most women know they are pregnant.
States like California are just “too far away” for many of the people who live in conservative southern states that are most likely to pass harsh abortion bans, said Michelle Anderson, state organizer with the Texas-based and Black women-focused reproductive rights justice group the Afiya Center.
“The bottom line is that abortion bans do not stop abortions,” said Anderson. “They just make abortions less safe, and this is especially true for Black women.”
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, speaks after being nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court at the White House in Washington, D.C., February 25, 2022. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
For the past two years they've been "building this grassroots movement toward the support of President Biden's campaign promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme court," says Reign, who is best known for the creation of the #OscarsSoWhite movement.
"Yes it's been two years," Williams adds in, "but it's been a long time coming that we had any kind of representation."
That long wait finally ended when Biden announced his pick, bookended by Black women, Vice President Kamala Harris and SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
"I mean, chills, goosebumps," says Williams.
"The her-story written today alone is epic," says Colander.
"It's pure joy," says Tignor.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Votes Matter, says the whole thing — the announcement, listening to Jackson speak — made her more emotional than expected.
"I had this big smile on my face, while at the same time I could feel these tears," she says.
Brown took a second to sit in the weight of history. "I thought about all of the Black women who had been denied that opportunity," she says.
It wasn't just the historical moment that struck Alicia Graza, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter, when she heard the pick was Jackson. It was this judge in particular.
"There's never been a Black woman on the Supreme Court," says Garza, "but the bigger issue is that there has never been a person on the Supreme court with a background like hers."
"Public defenders are the civil rights lawyers of our generation"
Garza lists the accomplishments that make Jackson a unique pick, including "taking on Donald Trump and a long record of taking on sentencing reform." Jackson would also be the first sitting justice to have served as a public defender, and the first to have defended poor people since Judge Thurgood Marshall.
Brandon Woods, chief public defender in Alameda County in California and one of only two chief Black public defenders in the state, says that "public defenders are the civil rights lawyers of our generation."
"She's fought for people who have no one else to fight for them," Woods says. "We're literally fighting for people's freedom everyday."
"We have a very unique perspective and unique exposure to the criminal legal system," he says, especially when it comes to issues of race.
Public defenders have a front row seat to how race plays out "in jury selection, in racial bias and prosecution, in corrupt and abusive policing and in draconian sentences," Woods says.
"Too many judges at every level, including the Supreme Court, simply adopt the view of the prosecutor or adopt a position of law enforcement," he says.
Woods also knows what he sees as a positive, may be used against her in the confirmation process. "If anyone's going to be able to hold ground and to put up a fight for our civil rights, it's going to be a Black woman, a Black woman public defender," Woods says.
Preparing for the backlash
"Regardless of how prepared she is, regardless of how brilliant she is, we're going to see attacks on her character," says LaTosha Brown.
Brown says when you are fighting for civil rights you celebrate the win and then you prepare for the backlash. "She doesn't deserve that, but I'll just say, you know, we are ready for the fight."
Brown says she and other civil rights advocates are preparing to have Jackson's back. "Black women all across the country have been organizing," Brown notes. We've been educating the community. We've been putting ourselves in position to call those that are in power, to let them know that in this particular moment that she is not standing alone."
"Part of our work will be educating the public," Brown says. "And then part of our work is really recognizing that we're in an era where the Republican Party has embraced racist tropes. We are prepared to protect and defend her name, and to actually call out racism."
Racist responses to Jackson's nomination have already come rolling in, with Fox's Tucker Carlson questioning why Jackson's LSAT scores have not been shared, implying that not sharing them was abnormal, when previous white nominees have never been asked for their test scores.
Brown says she worries the dog whistle and outright racism will only get louder as we approach the confirmation hearings, scheduled for March 21st.
Impact on Voting Rights and Getting out the Black Vote
A lot of the work Alicia Garza does these days with her organization, Black Futures Lab, is to mobilize Black voters. Garza says their most recent polls show Black voters' support for Biden is continuing to decline. "We are seeing a deep dissatisfaction with how the government is functioning right now" she says. "Black folks are not relieved or recovered from the 'rona."
There is a clamor for political action that is not happening — more COVID recovery, criminal justice reform, addressing white supremacy and changing the filibuster so legislation like voting rights has a fighting chance of passage.
Charlane Oliver, the co-founder of Equity Alliance, notes, "We're past that moment when we could have gotten voting rights passed."
The Nashville voting rights advocate adds, "Black folks came out in droves during a pandemic to elect a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate."
But then little happened.
"I think people are exhausted," she adds. "People are fatigued and quite frankly, depressed about the outcome."
Oliver says right now she doesn't feel like the fulfillment of this one campaign promise — of a Black woman justice — will be enough, when so many other promises or priorities have been left to languish. "I am not sure if this will be enough in terms of a Black woman being on the Supreme court," she says "to mobilize and motivate voters to go to the polls in the midterms."
Even if voters do go to the polls, Oliver says the biggest obstacle in Tennessee is gerrymandering. "Redistricting was the last frontier in terms of us having a voice in Congress and they split Nashville three ways and broke up our democratic representation," she says.
They are fighting those Republican drawn maps in court.
Which is another reason this nomination matters, and also isn't enough, Oliver says. Because in the end it will likely be the courts who decide whether to protect or further dismantle voting rights across the country.
Garza say Jackson's nomination is a good start.
"We need to change the balance of power on the Supreme Court so that we can establish and entrench rights for everybody," she says. "It's not just about putting a Black woman on there. It's about putting a Black woman on there with a vision for how it is that we save this damn country."
Brandi Colander, with sisterscotus.com, says she believes this nomination can shift momentum for voters, especially Black voters. "They're exhausted," she acknowledges, "but we are also doing that work to mobilize and we're getting the feedback that this is a very big win, in terms of feeling seen."
Sitting together with the women she's been organizing with for this to happen, Colander says nothing can dull the moment. "On this day, the joy of actually feeling seen, no one can take that from us, despite what other things may play out over this process," she says.
LaTosha Brown says this nomination reflects back an even bigger picture — what regular folks can make happen when they push, advocate and fight. "This is something great that Biden did, but this is what the people did," Brown says.
"This is what we made happen. And so we're going to organize, really using that frame of the possibilities that exist when people operate in the fullness of our power," she says.
'Learn from our mistakes, Joe, but pay special attention to what we got right.' (photo: Getty)
Since we’re clearly heading into a new Cold War, if not a hot one, how appropriate today to hear at TomDispatch (via Andrew Bacevich) from, of all people, John F. Kennedy. He was the president of my youth, the one I thrilled to see once upon a time (even if at a great distance) giving a speech in New Haven, Connecticut. He was also the one who, on October 22, 1962, I was terrified to hear tell us all:
“Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island [of Cuba]. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere… We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth — but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”
Nothing could, of course, have rallied me or most other Americans for such a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union because we all sensed then that, after such an Alamo, there would be no Texas; after such a Little Big Horn, no Montana; after such a Pearl Harbor, no Hawaii. Thank the literal heavens above, it didn’t happen and I’m still here to remember it. Instead, Kennedy mobilized young Americans for what he called “a long twilight struggle” in distant lands, launching us on a bitter war in the hinterlands of Southeast Asia he wouldn’t live to see end in an American defeat almost a decade and a half of staggering destruction later.
Jack Kennedy was not just the youngest American president ever elected to office, but our briefest one in office. I can still remember sitting in the basement of my college dorm watching on our communal television those ad-less (yes, truly!) days of prime-time coverage between his assassination and his funeral.
He was only 43 years old when elected and 46 when assassinated. In presidential terms, Joe Biden could have been his grandfather, having left Donald Trump in the dust as the oldest president ever to enter the White House. So, for our youngest to offer advice to our oldest may seem to run against the grain, but remember Jack Kennedy experienced the original Cold War when both he and it were relatively young. He should indeed have something to tell us as this country’s leadership seems to be heading ever more deeply, from Asia to Europe, into the grandfather of all cold wars. But let TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, take you into the netherworld on what, increasingly, seems to be a netherplanet.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
I send greetings from the other side — and no, I don’t mean the other side of the aisle. I refer to the place where old politicians go to make amends for their sins.
Apart from our shared Catholicism and affinity for sunglasses, I suspect you and I don’t have a lot in common. Actually, that may not quite be true. After all, your family and mine have both experienced more than our share of tragedy and you and I both did make it to the top rung of American politics.
Forgive me for being blunt, Joe — may I call you Joe? — but after more than a year in office your administration clearly needs help. Having had ample time to reflect on my own abbreviated stay in the White House, I thought I might share some things I learned, especially regarding foreign policy. Sadly, you seem intent on repeating some of my own worst mistakes. A course change is still possible, but there’s no time to waste. So please listen up.
I’m guessing that you may be familiar with this timeless text: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
I no longer have any idea what prompted my aide and speechwriter Ted Sorensen to pen those immortal words or how exactly they found their way into my inaugural address. No matter, though. People then thought it expressed some profound truth — a Zen-like aphorism with an Ivy League pedigree.
Its implicit subtext, though, totally escaped attention: If negotiations don’t yield the desired results, it’s time to get tough. And that turned out to be problematic.
Fearing Fear Itself?
Candor obliges me to admit that, politically speaking, my administration made good use of fear itself. If my run for the White House had an overarching theme, it was to scare the bejesus out of the American people. And once in office, fearmongering formed an essential part of my presidency. The famous Jack Kennedy wit and charisma was no more than a side dish meant to make the panic-inducing main course more palatable.
Here’s me at the National Press Club early in the 1960 campaign, sounding the alarm about “increasingly dangerous, unsolved, long postponed problems” that would “inevitably explode” during the next president’s watch. KABOOM! Chief among those problems, I warned, was “the growing missile gap, the rise of Communist China, the despair of the underdeveloped nations, the explosive situations in Berlin and in the Formosa [i.e., Taiwan] Strait, [and] the deterioration of NATO.”
Note the sequencing. Item number one is that nuclear “missile gap,” with its implications of an Armageddon lurking just around the corner. It was my own invention and, if I do say so myself, a stroke of pure political genius. Of course, like the “bomber gap” that preceded it by a few years, no such missile gap actually existed. When it came to nukes and the means to deliver them, we were actually way ahead of the Soviets.
President Eisenhower knew that the missile gap was a load of malarky. So did his vice president, Dick Nixon, the poor sap. But they couldn’t say so out loud without compromising classified intelligence.
Even today, people still treat my inaugural address — “The torch has been passed,” etc. — as if it were sacred scripture. But when it came to putting the nation on notice, the Kennedy-Sorensen fright machine really hit its stride barely a week later during my appearance before a joint session of Congress.
“No man entering upon this office,” I said with a carefully calibrated mixture of grace and gravitas, “could fail to be staggered upon learning — even in this brief 10-day period — the harsh enormity of the trials through which we must pass in the next four years.” Then came a generous dose of Sorensen’s speechwriting magic:
“Each day the crises multiply. Each day their solution grows more difficult. Each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger, as weapons spread and hostile forces grow stronger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that — in each of the principal areas of crisis — the tide of events has been running out and time has not been our friend.”
For eight years, Ike had been asleep at the switch. Now, in a mere 10 days as chief executive, I had grasped the harrowing magnitude of the dangers facing the nation. Time running out! The enemy growing stronger! The hour of maximum danger approaching like a runaway freight train!
But not to worry. With a former PT-boat skipper at the helm, assisted by the likes of Mac Bundy, Bob McNamara, Max Taylor, brother Bobby, and a whole crew of Harvard graduates, the Republic was in good hands. That was my message, anyway.
Okay, Joe, now let me come clean. In the months after that, we hit a few bumps in the road. Having promised action, we did act with vigor, but in ways that may not have been particularly judicious. (Had I lived long enough to finish my term and win a second one — that was the plan, after all — things might have been put right.)
So, yes, the CIA’s Bay of Pigs Cuban debacle of April 1961 was an epic snafu, although as much Ike’s fault as my own. Viewed in hindsight, my escalation of our military involvement in Vietnam, that distant “frontier” of the Cold War — thousands of U.S. troops test-driving the latest counterinsurgency theories — wasn’t exactly the Best and Brightest’s best idea. And the less said about my administration’s complicity in the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem the better. That was not our best day either.
You didn’t know Bobby, but when my brother got a bit in his mouth, he was unstoppable. So I will admit that he got more than slightly carried away with Operation Mongoose, the failed CIA program aimed at assassinating Fidel Castro and sabotaging the Cuban Revolution.
If given the chance to do it over again, I also might think twice about ordering the deployment of 1,000 Minuteman land-based ICBMs, a classic illustration of Cold War “overkill,” driven more by domestic politics than any strategic calculus. Mind you, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command was lobbying for 10,000 ICBMs so it could have been worse! (In the things-never-change category, I hear that your administration is quietly pursuing a $1.7-trillion upgrade of the U.S. nuclear strike force. Does that form part of your intended legacy?)
The Limits of Fear
Learn from our mistakes, Joe, but pay special attention to what we got right. Yes, fear led us to do some mighty stupid things. On occasion, though, fear became a spur to prudence and even wisdom. In fact, on two occasions overcoming fear enabled me to avert World War III. And that’s not bragging, that’s fact.
The first occurred in August 1961 when the East German government, with the approval of the Kremlin, began erecting the barrier that would become known as the Berlin Wall. The second took place in October 1962 during the famous Cuban Missile Crisis.
On the first occasion, I did nothing, which was exactly the right thing to do. Doing nothing kept the peace.
As long as East Berliners (and by extension all East Germans) could enter West Berlin and so flee to the West, that city would remain, in Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s words, “a bone in the throat” of the Communist bloc. Dividing Berlin dislodged that bone. Problem solved. Khrushchev got what he wanted and so did I. As a result, the likelihood that Berlin-induced tensions could trigger a great power conflagration eased markedly. True, the outcome might not have pleased East Berliners, but they weren’t my chief concern.
On the second occasion, I employed skills I learned from my father Joe. Whatever his reputation as an appeasement-inclined isolationist before World War II, my dad knew how to cut a deal. So while Mac, Bob, Max and the rest of the so-called ExComm were debating whether to just bomb Cuba or bomb and then invade the island, I called an end-around.
Using Bobby to open a back-channel to Khrushchev, I negotiated a secret compromise. I promised to pull U.S. nuclear missiles out of Turkey and Italy and pledged that the United States would not invade Cuba. In return, Khrushchev committed to removing Soviet offensive weapons from that island. As a result, both sides (along with the rest of humanity) got a rain check on a possible nuclear holocaust.
Let me emphasize, Joe, that the theme common to both episodes wasn’t toughness. Both times, I set aside the question of fault — the U.S. not exactly being an innocent party in either instance — in favor of identifying the terms of a resolution. That meant conceding their side had legitimate concerns we could ill-afford to ignore.
This crucially important fact got lost in the grandstanding that followed. I’ll bet you remember this comment, reputedly from my secretary of state Dean Rusk, about the negotiations with the Soviets over Cuba: “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” That invented quote supposedly captured the essence of the showdown over Cuba. The truth, however, was that Khrushchev and I both stared into the abyss and jointly decided to back away.
As for Berlin, Ted Sorensen wrote me a great speech to give there (“Ich bin ein Berliner,” etc.). In it, I pretended to be unhappy with the Wall, when in truth that structure allowed me to sleep well at night. And, of course, my memorable star-turn in Berlin created a precedent for several of my successors to stage their own photo-ops with the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop. (Don’t count on Kyiv offering a similar opportunity, Joe.)
You’ll never get me to acknowledge this on the record, but in both Berlin and Cuba I opted for “appeasement” — a derogatory term for avoiding war — over confrontation. Not for a second have I ever regretted doing so.
Just Say No
You may be wondering by now what any of this has to do with you and the fix you find yourself in today. Quite a lot, I think. Hear me out.
I inherited a Cold War in full swing. You seem to be on the verge of embarking on a new cold war, with China and Russia filling in for, well, the Soviet Union and China.
I urge you to think carefully before making the leap into such an unmourned past. Whatever your political advisers may imagine, displays of presidential toughness aren’t what our nation needs right now. You’ve extricated us from the longest war in U.S. history — a courageous and necessary decision, even if abysmally implemented. The last thing the United States needs is a new war, whether centered on Ukraine, the island of Taiwan, or anyplace in between. Military confrontation will drive a stake through the heart of your “Build Back Better” bill and kill any hopes for meaningful domestic reform. And it may also boost your predecessor’s prospects for making a comeback, a depressing thought if ever there was one.
You probably caught this recent headline in the Washington Post: “With or without war, Ukraine gives Biden a new lease on leadership.” The implication: perceived toughness on your part will pay political dividends.
Don’t believe it for a second, Joe. An armed conflict stemming from the Ukraine crisis is likely to destroy your presidency and much else besides. The same can be said about a prospective war with China. Let me be blunt: the leadership we need today is akin to what the nation needed when I steered a course away from war in Berlin and Cuba.
And please don’t fall for the latest propaganda about growing “gaps” between our own military capabilities and those of potential enemies. Take it from me, when it comes to endangering our security both China and Russia trail well behind our military-industrial-congressional complex.
“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” A nice turn of phrase that. Damned if it doesn’t turn out to be a sentiment to govern by as well.
Joe, if I can be of any further help in these tough times, don’t hesitate to call. You know where to find me.
Sincerely,
Jack
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.
Some marine biologists say that big projects to clear the oceans of plastic are a waste of resources. A plastic removal system operated by The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit, is shown here. (photo: Ocean Cleanup)
Many scientists worry that flashy efforts to clean plastic from the ocean do more harm than good.
In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 8,400 pounds of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100 million on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an infamous region in international waters, between California and Hawaii, that’s polluted with plastic waste.
Richards and several other marine biologists quickly challenged the group’s claim. On Twitter and in media reports, they said that the plastic looked too clean to have been floating for a while in the ocean. There should have been a more visible build-up of marine organisms like algae and barnacles. In response to those allegations, The Ocean Cleanup explained that water in the garbage patch lacks nutrients that marine life needs to grow and shared other reasons why the plastic looked so clean (which some biologists again rebuffed).
On its face, The Ocean Cleanup’s approach to solving one of the hardest environmental problems appears to be a worthy one. But the whole squabble raises a bigger question about cleaning up plastic in the open ocean: Is it even a good idea to begin with?
Everyone can agree that plastic waste is a scourge. Between 2000 and 2019, plastic production worldwide doubled, reaching 460 million metric tons — and only a small fraction of that gets recycled. The rest is burned, buried, or ends up in the environment, including the sea. Some estimates suggest that by 2050, there could be more plastic in the oceans, by weight, than fish.
But some scientists think that cleaning up the open ocean is a futile, and perhaps even harmful, endeavor. Several marine biologists told Vox that existing methods, including The Ocean Cleanup’s strategy, are inefficient and often produce pollution themselves. Plus, this approach can kill sea creatures — the very animals these efforts are ultimately trying to protect.
Ocean cleanups also do little to address the core of the issue: our dependence on plastic and the steady stream of waste it produces. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on,” Katie Matthews, chief scientist at the nonprofit advocacy group Oceana, told Vox. “We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”
With a challenge so large, and at a time when climate change and commercial fishing are also threatening marine life, it might seem unwise to shoot down any ideas that could help. But marine scientists told Vox that there are plenty of other solutions that are far more effective — or at least, less controversial — than open ocean cleanups.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t actually a patch
The problem with cleaning up the open ocean starts with a pervasive misconception — that there are enormous blobs of trash floating out at sea just waiting to be scooped up. News stories in the 2000s popularized this idea by referring to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an “island” of trash. Even today, a Google search of the “patch” reveals images of large expanses of floating waste.
The so-called patch isn’t so much an island as it is a soup, however, in which broken-down bits of plastic are like pepper flakes. Much of the waste is pea-sized or smaller and floats below the surface. That explains why, when you’re there, “it just looks like ocean,” said Melanie Bergmann, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who last visited the region in 2019. The same is true for a handful of other marine garbage patches, which form around gyres — systems of rotating currents.
This is one reason why ambitious ocean cleanup efforts are often inefficient, said Richards, the marine scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography; the large pieces of plastic are spread out and much of the rest is impossible to retrieve. Plus, only about 1 percent of the plastic we dump into our oceans ends up in these kinds of patches (it’s still somewhat of a mystery where the rest goes). So even if ocean cleanups were more efficient, they wouldn’t make a significant dent in the overall waste problem.
Some scientists are also concerned that ocean cleanups could even make certain environmental problems worse.
Ocean cleanup operations can harm marine life
The Dutch inventor Boyan Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013, when he was 18. Since then, the organization — which counts Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and tech billionaire Peter Thiel as funders — has tested a few different devices to retrieve waste from the garbage patch. Most of them didn’t live up to the hype.
Today, the organization collects plastic by dragging a shallow net between two large ships. According to Matthews and Richards, the method is not unlike trawl fishing, and so it faces the same problem of bycatch — marine life caught by accident.
It’s hard to collect free-floating plastics without ensnaring fish, turtles, and other animals, said Bergmann, who did her PhD dissertation on bycatch. These creatures often die, even if they’re thrown back into the water, she added. Some scientists also worry that open ocean cleanups harm the organisms that make up an ecosystem right below the ocean’s surface.
Matthias Egger, a scientist at The Ocean Cleanup who has a PhD in marine biogeochemistry, told Vox that the group’s approach is “the complete opposite of fishing.” The net is shallow and moves slowly, so that fish can pass underneath it, and there are escape hatches if they get caught, he said. “The main reason why we do what we do is to help marine life,” he added.
The Ocean Cleanup has consulted fishers to make a system that doesn’t catch sea life, he said, noting that it’s still in the research and development phase. However, the group said it has caught a small amount of marine life in its nets before, including sea turtles (which may have been dead before entering the net).
Some marine scientists also point out that using large ships that run on fossil fuels to drag nets through the water pollutes the air and the climate. Two vessels operated by The Ocean Cleanup, for example, release 600 metric tons of carbon dioxide for a month of cleanup, according to the nonprofit — equivalent to about 130 cars on the road for a year. Egger said The Ocean Cleanup aims to develop a system that doesn’t need to be towed by large vessels. Until then, the group says it will offset its carbon emissions and work with its shipping partner, Maersk, to develop more sustainable fuels.
Ridding the sea of plastic with an approach that burns fossil fuels — which are, themselves, used to make plastic — raises additional questions about efficiency, Matthews said. Why not put that investment into something like beach cleanups? “People walking up and down a beach has no carbon footprint,” she said. “The return on investment is much higher.”
Egger agrees that beach cleanups are valuable, but says that conservation isn’t a zero-sum game. Funding The Ocean Cleanup doesn’t necessarily siphon away money away from other projects, he said. Plus, he added, there’s more value in removing plastic in the ocean, where it’s already harming sea life, than picking it up on the beach.
The real way to clear the ocean of plastic pollution
Ultimately, solving the problem of plastic waste requires that companies produce and use less plastic, experts said. Single-use plastics like bags and takeout containers — which have boomed during the pandemic — should be the first to go, Matthews said. “We have decided to use something that lasts forever for something we only need for five minutes,” she said.
Governments around the world have been making progress. Many US cities, including New York and Chicago, ban or tax plastic bags. The European Union went as far as banning single-use plastics outright last summer. And just this week, delegates of the United Nations began working on a global treaty to eliminate plastic waste. “We have seen tremendous progress on negotiations toward an internationally legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution,” the executive director of the UN environment program, Inger Andersen, said in a February 28 statement.
Even if successful, the most ambitious efforts to limit plastic production won’t happen overnight, so there’s still a place for cleanups. “I don’t think that anyone would tell you that you should never pick up trash,” Richards said.
Most researchers agree that coastal cleanups are effective. In 2020, volunteers removed 5.2 million pounds of plastic from beaches around the world in a single day. Perhaps the most beloved solution, however, is Mr. Trash Wheel. Floating in the mouth of the Jones Falls river in Maryland, it’s a simple machine that intercepts waste heading for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. (Mr. Trash Wheel is something of a celebrity in the DC-Baltimore area and part of a “family” of similar trash wheels in the region.)
“There are lots of low-tech tools that get plastic before it reaches the ocean,” said Miriam Goldstein, director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, who studied the garbage patch as a graduate student (and has previously criticized The Ocean Cleanup). “Those are highly effective and efficient and cheap.”
Nicholas Mallos, senior director of the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas program, agreed. While there’s “absolutely a role for technology,” he said, the science is increasingly showing that removing plastic from rivers and coastal areas is the best and most efficient approach to reducing plastic waste.
The Ocean Cleanup deploys similar river trash collection systems, but the group still sees a place for cleaning up the open ocean. Even if we rid beaches and rivers of plastic, Egger said, there will still be waste floating out at sea and harming marine life. “We should work together on solving this rather than having these arguments,” he said.
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