In late August 1992, Randy Weaver and his family were refusing to come down from the remote Idaho mountaintop where they lived. Weaver, a fugitive on a federal firearms charge, has been holed up in a cabin near Naples for more than a year. The government thought Randy Weaver was a dangerous, possibly violent extremist. Randy and his wife Vicki thought the government was an agent of Satan on Earth. When it was all over, three people were dead.
and the government had spent millions of dollars to catch one man. We'll find out why the siege at Ruby Ridge unfolded the way it did, and think about some of the questions it raises. What should we do about white supremacists? Why has the story of Ruby Ridge become an enduring myth for the far right? And whose fault was it anyway? Subscribe to Standoff, What Happened at Ruby Ridge, in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn, Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends?
Woodward and Bernstein are sitting with their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is...
Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break in a Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger.
Wilder and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion and dirty tricks. It's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Muhammad Mahawish loves to eat. His go-to move is to put cardamom on just about everything. He's kind of a foodie. But we called him up because he's also got advice on how to starve. Mohammed learned this skill the hard way. About a year ago, he was living in Gaza City when the food started to run out. He was with his family, his young son, his wife. Sometimes, he says, they would just pretend.
They would chew on some cloth or drink some warm water with leftover tea leaves in it. It didn't fill us up. But it was kind of like the warmth it had kind of tricked our stomachs into thinking something was coming. Another thing I remember, we would tell ourselves and each other stories about food. I remember like once sitting with my father and instead of dinner, we talked about what we would cook if we could like.
If we had like eggs, what kind of omelet would you make? Or like what would be the first thing we eat if the war ends? He would say like things like pizza and chocolate and coffee. And it was this weird mix of pretending and hoping and wishing and remembering and like you lie to your own body because like you have to because it's it's either that or your breakdown.
Eventually, Muhammad and his family got officially diagnosed with malnutrition. He would get dizzy when he stood up. And he was tired. Not sleepy. Just heavy. When it's your own body, it's quieter at first Like even sitting up was work. I would lie down and feel my heartbeat in my bones My stomach stopped growling That was a scary part. At some point, your body just gives up the hunger signals. Also, my clothes stopped fitting. My face got sharp. And I remember one moment in the mirror.
where I didn't recognize myself. After a month of this, Mohammed got his family out of Gaza. And now he can eat anything he wants. It was a salad he really craved in the early days. It took him a while. for food to stop making him sick. To be honest, it's still hard to eat. Sometimes I sit at a table, maybe there is some bread, maybe some eggs and coffee and...
And I can't help but think, you know, like who in Gaza would I give this to first? And now they're surviving on tea and bird seed and animal barley and animal feed. And I'm sitting here like sometimes with a plate that I can't finish. I can't unknow what I know, right? So every meal here, like it comes with a kind of ache. There are two million people at risk of starvation in Gaza right now.
The Israeli-American plan to feed people has erupted chaos, with dozens killed at aid distribution sites, according to Palestinian authorities. This weekend, activist Greta Thunberg was detained. when she tried to shepherd food in through a naval blockade, it certainly seems like Gaza is at a brutal tipping point again. Today on the show... We ask, why? I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.
This episode is brought to you by Planned Parenthood, Federation of America. The state of reproductive rights might feel bleak, but the fight isn't over. At Planned Parenthood, they're holding the line, no matter what. Whether it's birth control, wellness exams... Abortion access, cancer screenings, gender-affirming care, or expanded telehealth, Planned Parenthood continues to provide care, even now. Some lawmakers are trying to end abortion access slash funding people rely on for care.
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where informal and irreverent discussion meet sharp political analysis every week. On our recent episode, Only 100 Days, we had a fascinating conversation with Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond. about the long-term impacts of the DOGE cuts on U.S. healthcare and health policy. What DOGE has done in terms of cutting programs and people, that has immediate consequences and also long-term risk.
that's getting baked into the system that I don't think anyone saw coming. One of those risks is to food safety. They say that they're protecting the food inspectors, but they have cut around those inspectors. Inevitably, there are going to be fewer food safety inspections because there's a smaller apparatus to do it. Join me, along with CBS News' John Dickerson and Emily Bazlon from The New York Times, every week to stay on top of the news without getting bogged down.
Listen to the Political Gab Fest, where you can come for the debate and stay for the cocktail chatter. That's Political Gab Fest, wherever you get your podcasts. To get a broader sense of famine and mass starvation as a weapon of war, I called up Alex DeWall, who's a leading scholar on the subject. He's pretty blunt about what he sees playing out in Gaza.
Would you say Israel is starving Gazans? I would say that Israel is starving Gazans. Alex comes to this opinion after years of study. It started in the 80s at the University of Khartoum. in Sudan. It was there, he says, that he met the real experts in famine and how to survive it. I worked in Darfur and what I found was that the people of Darfur
knew a lot more about what it took to keep themselves and their children alive, to keep their livelihoods intact than any of the relief workers. Yeah, what were the secrets they knew? So the particular thing was grandmothers. So grandmothers who had, when they themselves were young, had survived the droughts and famines of the 1940s had learned all the wild grasses, the wild roots, the tubers, the berries that could be collected and prepared for. And they would instruct their...
their daughters and granddaughters in these particular skills. And this was actually more important. These wild foods were more important in keeping people alive than all the relief food that was provided by the United Nations. USAID and international agencies. Why was that? The food aid arrived late. The food aid was delivered to feeding centres.
that were often overcrowded and unsanitary and people didn't really want to go there because these were places where communicable diseases would spread. And there weren't good services, there wasn't good sanitation, there wasn't good water. They also knew how to go to places in other parts of the region where food and work would be available. So they suffered a tremendous amount, but their survival skills were enormously...
So how long have you been concerned about what's happening in Gaza? Because I actually, I wonder if you were concerned about Gaza before October 7th, 2023. Before the Hamas attacks and atrocities in October of 2023, Gaza was an unusual situation of hunger. It was unusual because the population didn't have signs of malnutrition. There was enough food. But it was a population that was entirely dependent on the goodwill of the...
They knew they controlled every calorie, every drop of water, every medicine that was available for the people of Gaza. That makes them so vulnerable. Exactly. It made them very vulnerable in the way that a besieged population is vulnerable, that we saw in Syria, we saw in Sarajevo, we saw in the Second World War, and so on. And shortly after October the 7th, when Israel imposed a total blockade, it stopped food, medicine going in. It cut off water supplies, electricity.
It cut off trade and movement. It meant that we could be sure that the population of Gaza, as soon as its own... supplies we used up would move very, very quickly into a state of extreme hunger. And indeed, that's what we saw within weeks. I'm getting kind of a Chekhov's gun feeling from what you're talking about, which is...
Food was always kind of a weapon that was on the table. And then after October 7th, it might have seemed like something Israel wanted to pick up. Exactly. There's a long history of... especially sort of colonial and counterinsurgent states, using rations as a weapon, controlling food in order to keep a population that it wants to control on a very, very tight leash.
Perhaps the most famous example within this small, specialised literature on starvation is what the British did in Malaya in the 1950s. They faced a communist insurgency in the rural areas, in the jungles. And the plan that they adopted was one... of creating what they called protected villages. The United States did something very similar in Vietnam in the 1970s on that model. So moving the population to discrete areas.
Moving the population to areas where they could be controlled, where every movement could be monitored. physically separating them from the insurgents. And because they wanted to starve the insurgents, they felt they wouldn't be able to actually... to them fight them in the jungle they wanted to starve them out so they called it operation starvation And in the jungle areas, they had food denial operations. They prevented any food going in. They used Agent Orange.
again like the americans did later to spray the areas where crops could be grown where wild foods could be harvested They tried to encircle them, banning trade going into those areas. And they tried to prevent the civilian population from providing the rebels, the guerrillas, with any food at all. Every item of food that was provided was monitored.
cans would be punctured so that they couldn't then be passed on. The food had to be eaten straight away. Sometimes they would have only hot food served in kitchens, so it was perishable. In some ways, this sounds smart, you know, separating the civilian population, making sure you get food to them, trying to ensure it doesn't go to the people you're fighting. It's smart if it can be made to work. And in the long run, it sort of worked in Malaya, but it took...
11, 12 years for it to work. And it only worked because the British were able to offer a big political reward, which was independence. They promised the Malayans when this war is over. then you'll become independent. And they made it clear that that promise was real, as indeed it was. The problem is this doesn't really transfer very well to Gaza. First of all, the Israelis are not making...
any political promises that the Palestinians at this moment find acceptable. They're not... patients that aren't willing to provide what is needed so the Ghazan population has enough to eat for a long period of time. And it's very, very difficult to isolate the militant armed population from the general population. Famine is very, very traumatic. It involves not just physical, biological hunger, but it involves enormous social stress. So people have to make terrible decisions.
When they're desperately hungry, they often are forced to break terrible social taboos about what they eat to do very humiliating things like rummaging around in garbage to get food. They have to sort of... deny some of their basic social obligation. So they will hide food from their neighbors and their cousins. They will turn away their starving nieces and nephews from the door.
They will sometimes have to make a terrible choice to buy medicine for one child, but not for another child. And it's these everyday terrible humiliations. these very shameful things that live on in the memory. You can see how it would injure generations. Exactly. The other big thing that I learned studying famine in Sudan in the 1980s...
is that when we talk about starvation, we tend to think about starvation as being the experience. But starvation is also the act. It's something that one person does to another. In fact, almost... Every famine of the modern era is man-made, and the gendered language there is deliberate. It's men who make it, and the trauma, the stress, the hardship is felt primarily by women.
You've noted in your writing that food weaponization is a tool of war. It really just relies on two things. First, you have to prevent reports of famine because it's politically embarrassing. And second, you have to have some kind of... carrot to offer the general population in addition to the stick of starvation, essentially. And it seems to me looking at Gaza, you have neither of those things happening.
The world seems to see very clearly that aid is not getting in. And there's no reward being offered for the people of Gaza. I think that's absolutely right. And the aid that is being offered is totally incommensurate with need. the dangerous new aid distribution system in Gaza, which is facilitated by Israel and run by American contractors. Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex, and Money. I talk to a lot of people on my show about sensitive parts of their intimate lives.
One thing I hope I would never do is share someone's personal story if they didn't want me to. That's the topic of a new episode in our feed with writer A.J. Delario. who in 2008 was the editor of the sports site Deadspin. And one of the stories he wrote was about how Brett Favre, the world-famous NFL quarterback, sent a Jet sideline reporter named Jen Sturger messages and allegedly a lewd photo to proposition her.
Jen told AJ about that, but she asked him not to do a story. I remember getting off that call and being like, Jen, I think you just overshared. And I was like, no, it's fine. AJ did the story, it went viral, and is still what Jen is most known for online. In this episode, Jen and AJ talk together about that betrayal, the years of silence that followed,
and the unexpected way they reconnected. And we both do some Googling, basically just like, is this the person that I had burned years ago? And it turned out that it was. And I said, well, I guess this dog will die. You can listen to this episode and all episodes of Death, Sex, and Money wherever you get podcasts.
Randy Weaver and his family were refusing to come down from the remote Idaho mountaintop where they lived. Weaver, a fugitive on a federal firearms charge has been holed up in a cabin near Naples for more than a year. The government thought Randy Weaver was a dangerous, possibly violent extremist. Randy and his wife Vicki thought the government was an agent of Satan on Earth. When it was all over, three people were dead.
and the government had spent millions of dollars to catch one man. We'll find out why the siege at Ruby Ridge unfolded the way it did, and think about some of the questions it raises. What should we do about white supremacists? Why has the story of Ruby Ridge become an enduring myth for the far right? And whose fault was it anyway? Subscribe to Standoff, What Happened at Ruby Ridge, in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
And maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title The Welfare Queen. And her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor. Now, it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others,
and what was done in her name. The great lesson of this, for me, is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are. Subscribe to The Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. So Alex believes since October 7th, 2023, Gaza's been teetering on the edge of famine. But it's worth talking about why the Strip has been able to avoid getting slapped with an official famine designation.
from the United Nations. Alex says each time conditions in Gaza have deteriorated, public outcry has forced Israel to allow some aid in. But the flow of aid has always been temporary. Then there's the fact that delivering aid is incredibly dangerous. If you look at the number of aid workers killed in the line of duty in the last couple of years, more than half of those who die worldwide, well over half, are in Gaza, 10 times as many as in Sudan.
or in Syria in the worst years of the war, or in Congo and other terrible places. And there was a particular attack on April the 1st when Palestinian and international aid workers with the world's central kitchen were killed. And they'd been traveling in a marked vehicle. They'd approved their movement with the Israelis. The Israelis said it was a mistake. But there have been so many of these attacks that the Israelis call mistakes.
that it does look like a very disturbing pattern that the IDF is empowered, is authorised to attack places where aid is being distributed. We are now in a period where aid is getting into the Strip once more. But this time, that aid is flowing differently. An opaque operation backed by Israel, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,
is distributing most of the food. International organizations like the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and the World Food Program have actually refused to work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. which has bypassed their authority in the Strip. United Nations-affiliated organizations say this new system will allow Israel to use food as a weapon and forcibly displace desperate civilians.
One humanitarian aid official even said, we cannot take part in a system that violates humanitarian principles and risks implicating us in serious breaches of international law. Alex, for his part, sees echoes of that British plan to starve Malayan rebels in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's strategy. This is aid that is being controlled. very, very deliberately in the context of an ongoing war campaign of targeted destruction. It just isn't going to be able to do the job.
These private military contractors are not humanitarian profession. They are providing rations, but not enough rations. They only have a handful, less than a handful, of distribution sites. I think you've written that there are four distribution sites, but... You know, the UN, of course, had 400. Exactly. And the new aid givers are not known to the people. So the ordinary people have no confidence in who's going to get what and when.
The Israeli political military strategy is also breaking down law and order. And also, most importantly, this program does not provide several of the key essentials. There's no specialized feeding for children. There's no clean water supply, no sanitation. It's not providing medical care. So it's not providing the full spectrum of what is needed to survive.
Yeah, you point out that this group has said they'll provide 1,700 calories per day per person, which is less than the recommended 2,100 calories per day per person. And really just a little bit more than the 1,560 calories per day per person that was inflicted on people in Minnesota when scientists there tried to study the effects of starvation on the human body. Some colleagues at Crisis Group have actually called this the Gaza Starvation Experiment because it's hard to think of another case.
in which a controlling authority, Israel, has such a degree of control over everything that determines whether people live or die or the conditions within which they live over a sustained period of time and is you know with a kind of scientific precision, trying to calculate how much can we provide, how much can we withhold that will achieve our political and military objectives. It is an experiment.
You've talked about how starvation is humiliating. And this seems just like an extra layer of danger because we've seen shootings break out at aid sites and humiliation. for the people living in Gaza, and it comes after two years of similar experiences. So the one thing that the... Palestinians of Gaza could really hold on to until very recently was the fact that they had social networks.
social ties among themselves and with the aid givers that allowed them some tiny modicum left of control, of dignity. That's been taken away by putting the very, very basic rations of life in the hands of these private military. contractors who are running the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the fact is that they're completely out of their depth.
They're completely in a situation which has none of the means for them to achieve any of those humanitarian objectives. And one of the things that they most fundamentally lack is any... trust from the Palestinians of Gaza. And the result is, as we see, is that these Aid distribution points are becoming focal points for mayhem, for stampedes, for lawlessness and killings.
You know, back in 2016, you wrote this op-ed, and this was a long time ago, but you were so optimistic. It was titled, Is the Era of Great Famines Over? And I wonder how you think about that writing now, because it seems to me you may have been wrong. It's correct. I spent... the first 30 years of my career working on this with a spirit of optimism, because yes, famines were occurring, but they were becoming less frequent, they were becoming less deadly.
And the governments of the world were coming together to say this is not acceptable and passing laws and resolutions at the UN Security Council to stop it. It didn't work out that way. And the reason why my optimism of eight, nine years ago has turned much, much darker into real dread for what is happening and what may yet happen.
is that starvation crimes are being increasingly inflicted around the world and they're being inflicted with impunity. We're allowing people, the men who do this, to get away with it. I have heard. from some people I've interviewed, that, well, at the beginning of the war in Gaza, maybe last year, humanitarian groups got a little out over their skis when it came to talking about famine in Gaza.
They started saying hunger was a real problem. People could starve to death. And in the end, you know, that didn't happen the way people predicted. And I think they've... talked about that as a cautionary kind of tale of don't get too wrapped up in this idea of famine. I do think things are different now, but I do think some people use it as a way to...
look at observations about famine in Gaza and dismiss them. What would you say to someone who says something like that? I would say several things. First of all, There is no single definition of famine. And the degree of hunger and deprivation and trauma that the Palestinians of Gaza have been feeling, they call it famine. And I think we need to listen to that. Second is that, yes, a number of aid groups.
called out famine and it didn't happen. But the reason why it didn't happen wasn't necessarily because they were wrong. It was because the world responded and Israelis let in aid. Aid was...
delivered in response to their warning. But there is a last point, which is that if Gaza had followed the trajectory of most of the... famines that have occurred in recent history, the ones in sub-Saharan Africa or in Yemen, for example, the numbers of children dying from disease by now would have been much, much higher.
And it didn't happen. And the key reason has been that the public health infrastructure, the level of vaccination, the level of actual education among the Gazans about basic public health for children was very high. But the last thing I would say is you can only postpone that terrible reckoning for so long. Just because that... The lethal combination of starvation and disease hasn't hit doesn't mean that it's not hitting now. And I fear that this may be really the last.
the last straw, the last chance that we have to prevent that terrible descent into really appalling mass starvation. Alex, I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show. I can't say it's a pleasure to talk about this, but I'm very grateful for the opportunity to be able to talk about it.
Alex DeWall is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. He's also the author of the 2017 book, Mass Starvation, The History and Future. of famine. Earlier in this conversation, you also heard from Mohamed Mahawish. He's a journalist from Gaza City, currently based in Egypt. And that's our show.
What Next is produced by Paige Osborne, Elena Schwartz, Rob Gunther, Anna Phillips, Ethan Oberman, and Madeline Ducharme. Ben Richmond is the Senior Director of Podcast Operations here at Slate. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. Say, hey, I'm Matt Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.
In late August 1992, Randy Weaver and his family were refusing to come down from the remote Idaho mountaintop where they lived. Weaver, a fugitive on a federal firearms charge, has been holed up in a cabin near Naples for more than a year. The government thought Randy Weaver was a dangerous, possibly violent extremist. Randy and his wife Vicki thought the government was an agent of Satan on Earth. When it was all over, three people were dead.
and the government had spent millions of dollars to catch one man. We'll find out why the siege at Ruby Ridge unfolded the way it did, and think about some of the questions it raises. What should we do about white supremacists? Why has the story of Ruby Ridge become an enduring myth for the far right? And whose fault was it anyway? Subscribe to Standoff, What Happened at Ruby Ridge, in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.