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Turkey’s president has grabbed a bit more power for himself with the recent arrest of the mayor of Istanbul. The mayor was thought to be one of the few politicians who could challenge Erdogan.

Steven Cook will take us through it.

Talking about authoritarians is one of the things we do here, so strap in for another tale of turmoil on an angry planet.

• Shilling for kagi.com
• “Competitive authoritarianism”
• Negotiating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
• How to court the Kurdish vote while killing Kurds
• A stable of failsons
• “The Turkish Marc Andreessen”
• Why Erdogan hates Pennsylvania
• Disproving McDonald’s Diplomacy, once again
• Leveling a park to build a mall
• How Erdogan processed the Arab Spring
• “Fools, knaves, and rubes”—Oh my!

Turkey Can’t Live With, or Without, Erdogan

Ukraine Has Written a Folk Song About Its Drone

Turkey and Israel are becoming deadly rivals in Syria

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Special for our international listeners, did you know you can now buy a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the low, low price of $5 million sent directly to the U.S. treasury? For decades America’s immigration policies were a boon to its national defense. No one has better intelligence on a rival country than a fleeing dissident with firsthand knowledge.

Times have changed.

Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center is here to talk all about those changes. It’s an episode packed with bizarre anecdotes and interesting tidbits about how America runs now. You’ll learn why evangelical Christians are turning their back on refugees, why China won’t accept deportation flights, and how to navigate the Darien Gap using short form video posts.

• Immigration is a foreign policy tool
• Dissident refugees as a strategic win
• What we know about how the “Gold Card” will work
• “You simply can’t create greencards out of nowhere.”
• How Mexico uses immigration to get concessions from the U.S.
• “At a certain point the people who send you into the blades look like the bastards.”
• Dealing with a dictator
• 20,000 Chinese nationals at the southern border
• The internet has made it easier to immigrate
• Navigating the Darien Gap, one TikTok video at a time

Op-ed: Trump’s gold card visa, explained

Domestic debate, global strategy: Revisiting immigration in U.S. foreign policy

China owns 380,000 acres of land in the U.S. Here's where

Weapons of Mass Migration

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For mercenaries, death is a business. It’s all about finding the right market. Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups have found willing markets in Africa. Journalist John Lechner spent years in Africa among the mercenaries and he’s on the show today to tell us about what he learned.

Lechner tells us how Wagner’s men think the U.S. media killed Prigozhin, why every theater (or market) is different, and the training regimen of a fresh convict recruit. It’s all in his new book Death Is Our Business: Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare.

The threats change…but the mercenaries stay the same.

• Interlinking militant Islam and the rise of modern mercenaries
• Russian mercenaries before Wagner
• Prigozhin rising
• Putin’s Chef was the father of ‘Hybrid War’
• Wagner in Africa
• ‘No one said mercenary life was gonna be easy.’
• Life inside Wagner
• ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’
• You can’t judge intent by results
• The Russian “royal” court is full of self starters and entrepreneurs

The Tip of Russia’s Spear

Death Is Our Business

Pardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill Again

Taliban Bureaucrats Hate Working Online All Day, ‘Miss the Days of Jihad’

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