Live from Texas Tribune Fest Congressman Ruben Gallego details his run for the Arizona senate. Ryan Busse details his run for Governor of Montana. Washington Post Global Opinions columnist Jason Rezaian examines the imprisoned journalists who are locked up abroad.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Joe Manchin says he may run for president in twenty twenty four, even though it chose he will hand the election to Trump. We have such a fun show for you. Today, we'll talk to Democratic primary candidate for governor of Montana, Ryan Bussy about how Democrats can win in red states. Then, live from this weekend's Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas, we will talk to the Washington Post Jason Resian on imprisoned journalists and he knows because he was imprisoned in an Iranian prison for five hundred and forty four days. But first we have Arizona Congressman Ruben Diego on his Senate run. Hello Ruben gayegout, Hello Molly, I haven't seen you in such a long time.
Actually haven't seen you in a long time.
Yeah, I do think we've everd in As the kids say, we haven't been in IRL in a while, right.
We haven't, but we saw each other like a congressional d something fancy.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Welcome back. They get the treatment fly.
So you're running for the Senate in Arizona. Discuss, Well, it's going great.
We kicked off about nine months ago and already we've you know, gone through the state up and down a couple of times to you know, the red states, red parts of the state, the bluest parts of the state, the states have been ignored, some of the hardest places to get to, like the Navajo Nation. Really, it's just been great meeting people and meaning people that remind me of me, Like and I what I, you know, wanted in elected officials when I was struggling to you know, figure out how to pay for school or trying to figure out how to help my family. And what we're hearing is a lot of people out there are excited about this campaign. Is they finally feel that there's someone running that understands what they're going through right now.
One of the things I want to talk to you about was you were an infantryman, like that. I have a kid, Darwin, who's a Republican. Hopefully that he'll that he'll grow out of maybe not, but he's like obsessed with being an officer.
Explain to us you went into the army sort of the American dream.
Sure Marines.
First of all, mari Marines take that very special. I joined the Marines because I wanted to give service back to my country. Yeah, this is before nine to eleven. You know, I'm the son of immigrants. I was able to, you know, really lived the American dream, go to college on scholarships, everything else. I felt, especially as you know, the son of an immigrant, that I owed something to the country, right, and as a young man at that point that what I knew I could do was service, right, and and I didn't.
I never looked for war, never wanted war.
I figured, you know what I could what I can do is I could be a reservist, a Marine Corps reservist, and if something comes up then the country to do a course, then then I'll go to war whatever they want me to do.
So that's what it.
I just went signed up. I wanted to be in the infantry because if you're going to join the Marines, might as well been the infantry. If not, then you know, go there for it's just something else. And I like the challenge. You know, it's tough. You know, for those that are Marine Corps infantrymen, they'll tell you the training and stuff, and even when you're in it's still tough. But the most important thing for me was I was I was, you know, returning service to my country. Now, unfortunately I got sent into Iraq, which a war that I disagreed with, and even there was even worse in terms of what happened with my men and me.
And you lost a lot of your battalion, lost.
My best friends, we lost a lot of in my company, we lost about twenty four marines. One third of everyone's either killed or wounded in that my company, it's a company base out of Lima Company three twenty five, Ohio. But you know, if people asked me, like would you do it again? Like absolutely do it again. Not because I like war, not because I even enjoyed that, but also I could not imagine not being with my men. I could not imagine not being there to do the things I did to make sure they stayed alive, or the opposite that they kept me alive. And I you know, as much as I still carry the wounds of war, I still have PTSD.
I'll have that for the rest of my life. I don't regret my my service to the country.
And you raised your siblings too, I mean like I got to get pay in my mouth. I helped yourself.
She's like that.
But you know, Mom, I had a single mom and she had a job. Got blessed her. She had a job and she had to work. And you know, when you have four kids, the only way you make it through that when you're poor is when you all pull together. And so once my father kind of stepped out of the picture, I had to come to the realization that I had to, as we say, you had to step up through the man of the house and being in being an Latino family.
So that's what I did.
I had to be like a father figure and a brother and a big brother, and so I had to do a lot of the stuff that I when you're at the age of fourteen that most men boys, they take on a little more responsibility than I think most boys are used to. And in some regard it probably was helpful for me because I had to skip stupid teenage shit, because I had to make sure that I couldn't mess up, I couldn't get arrested.
I couldn't like go out and party. I had to take care of my sisters.
Yeah, I had to go to work, I had to get good grades, like all these things that just I could not I did not have the luxury of doing. And you know that really kind of it's say, molded me for a while, but more importantly it me and my family's life easier, right, And that's you know, that was the whole But I guess my whole mentality as a young man then was like I just didn't want to be a burden to the family because there.
Was just a lot going on right now.
So one of the things that Democrats are struggling right now, and I was actually talking to Ron Brownstein about this, and I was talking as upholstered Ben Tulchin about that, is that Democrats are having trouble winning Latino voters.
And that is a really important block here.
You are very successful Latino congressional candidate finger on the pulse, tell us what we're doing, what they are doing, what we're doing wrong.
Well, I'll tell you this, Like Democrats look at the Latina vote and they think about them in the last two months of an election, right instead of thinking about them throughout the whole year.
And what does that mean? Like, yeah, you should start running campaign commercials earlier, but.
Also you should be going on the Luniviton, telemundos and the radio stations, am rail stations, and you should be talking to them ahead of time about what you're doing and why you're doing it. When we talk about Democrats representing the working class, Latinos are working class, right. The wealth of a Latinos decided about how many hours they work. That's something that we forget, right. And a lot of the politicians that go and talk to Latinos are very well spirited, they want to be helpful, but they don't truly understand, right, they don't understand how excited you get when you get overtime. Right For some people, especially like a lot of constituents of the Democrats, you know, they're salary workers.
They don't get overtime.
They're all salary, right, Like Latinos sometimes survive or not survive whether they get enough overtime, they financially survive. And so when we're talking to them, and actually when we're drawing and creating policies, we need to remember that.
Right.
So why does a minimum wage increase matter? Well, the difference between fifteen dollars an hour and nineteen dollars now is huge, right, Whether you're going to be poverty or successful if you're going to be able to have affordable healthcare, huge child tax credit.
Right, I was about to ask you about the child Are you hearing from people on the ground you're going through Arizona?
Are you hearing people missing that child tax credit?
Absolutely they are.
And the fact that we don't talk about it, we don't, you know, like I talk about it, acknowledge I'm on my camera because like number one, if you want to be Latino, it's always great to be pro family.
There's nothing more pro.
Family than a child tax man, a child and financial stability. Right, there's nothing more stressful to a family. It's unfortunately someone that grew up in a household with financial shows there's nothing that you know, can really tear a part of family more than trying to figure out where are the next shoes going to drop? And that's what a lot of people are feeling a lot of Latinos are feeling right now. They just don't know what's going to happen next, Like is my car going to bust? And if that car bust, can I pay? You know, I'm not gonna be able to get to work. Am I going to be able to pay rent. I mean, it's all these things that's right, that's being that's being important. They're living that experience. Yeah, And the problem is that it's not that they haven't lived that experience, but right now they don't actually see the light at the end of the tunnel.
And so that's even more just stressing.
Like when ye as bad as things were when I was growing up, you know, like my first bad and I think seven or eight years was my college bad. My dormer bed, and I remember always thinking, like, you know what, just suck it up, put your head down, keep going. This will all get better, right. I can't imagine, well, I can't imagine what these families are feeling right now. Like wait, I got to keep working and working and working and nothing changes, right. That is that is I think you know that that is so psychologically damaging and it has an effect, and there's a reason why there's a lot of working class people that are giving up on Democrats, but I was just giving up in general, and Latinos aren't exempt from that.
Do you think that the child tax credit, like Cinema was one of the people who was instrumental in having that fail, And you know, whittling down the Yeah Inflation Reduction Act. If you were elected Senator from Arizona, you would be a progressive vote.
I would absolutely be pushing the child tax credit right away. I can't lay the ending of child tax credit entirely on cinema right now, But what I can't lay in the fact is like, when there was a time to fight, she chose to fight for hedge fund managers and private equity managers to get their tax supole instead of saying, you know what, I'm going to fight to bring the child tax credit. That's where her priorities are so messed up that instead of fighting for those that need it, the people that desperately need just a little help and just want to succeed, she went to help those that are already doing very, very well.
And that's the diers between me and her, Like, the people that need.
The child trade are not gonna be my afterthought, They're gonna be my only thought.
Why do you think she was a progressive original?
I look, it's not my place to psychoanalyze her.
We'll do that later on.
Yeah, what do we know is when we're out there talking to voters, they are done with hers they want someone that's going to fight for them. They want someone that they feel is answerable, that talks to them, someone that's understanding what they're going through. And that's that's all we have to do. And at the end of the day, we continue where we are in this campaign, continue having those conversations. We're gonna win. And you know, it doesn't matter who's running.
That's so important and good. What does your campaign look like?
Now?
What's next for you?
You know, we're continue to go where we are. We've built out a great team. We have more than one hundred and twenty thousand individual donors. Average donation is thirty bucks. If you want to give money, go diego for Arizona dot com please. But we're gonna continue, you know, going out and meeting voters. A couple of weeks ago, I drove six hours to the Navajo Nation Fair, you know, picked up my son after after school. I'm eventually going to work a policy on school pickup, school drop off, because that's mayhem, as you know aware.
Yeah, so it was.
It's actually a five hour drive. It was forty five minutes to get out of the school. But we drove up there, got to gallop New Mexico, checked into La Quinta in at eleven am and woke up five am and drove an hour, another hour and a half to the novel Nation Fair, and we proceeded to shake, you know, thousands of hands and introduce ourselves to that community because they vote and they deserve representation.
And they vote yeah Democrat.
And we were the only Senate campaign that was there. And so that's the kind of attitude we're going to have. We're going to be moving around the whole state. You know, red red parts, been in red parts of towns and red parts. We had our townhalls and blue parts gone to the rural areas. We've gone to the Native areas, and we're just going to keep going.
Ruben Diego, thank you.
Yes.
Ryan Bussy is the author of Gunfight and a Democratic candidate for governor of Montana. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Ryan, It's so good to be with you.
Molly.
So you're running for governor of the great State of Montana as a Democrat because you've been on this podcast before, you've written a book, you are a friend of the Pods.
Jesse is obsessed with you in a good way.
In a good way. In a good and totally healthy way. Tell us your backstory and how you have gotten to this decision.
Thanks Molly. I grew up on a ranch, very rural ranch, long ways from any pavement. A lot of the best times in my life were spent with guns in a healthy way. I think a lot of Democrats across the country struggle to understand the cultural connection to guns. For so many people across the country, well, I was one of those kids. I grew up hunting and shooting with my dad and my grandfather. I eventually got in the firearms industry. It was kind of like a dream job for me. And then I figured out that I was inside the industry that was helping radicalize the country. So the good parts for me of firearms ownership were being used and twisted into what I think became trump Ism. I wrote a book about that. I was in the firearms industry for twenty five years, but I wrote a book about that. That's why you and I have chatted before. And I'm highly critical of obviouslyized Republican politics. And I've been a Democrat for a long time, and I think we have to stand up and save the democracy.
So here we are so let's talk about.
What your what Montana looks like right now. You have a Democratic senator running for reelection. You're very small state, but a very red state.
Yeah, I don't think it's as red as people think it is. Obviously, we have Senator John Tester. A lot of people know him, three finger dirt farmer right. He's a good guy and a good friend. But we have a very libertarian, kind of populist purple history in our state. Until just a few years ago, both of our senators were Democrats. We had sixteen years of Democratic gubernatorial rule. So I just don't think it's as red as it looks like. And I think, frankly, I think Democrats have kind of lost the ability to communicate with working folks. And I grew up as one of those folks, you know. I grew up on the ranch and in sale barns and driving tractors. It's time we figure out how to win again, and that's what I'm going to do.
So let's talk about blue governors winning in red states. Because from Kentucky's Andy Baschard to Kansas to right Laura Kelly to Pennsylvania not as red. But I wonder if this phenomenon is todd. We see red governors experimenting with their states, and they're pretty repressive rules. If you look at Florida and Texas, I mean, do you think that helps Democrats?
They are experimenting, right, I mean, and it's borderline fascist, if not over the line fascist. This governor believes that humans and dinosaurs co existed and that humans basically farmed dinosaurs.
Wait, heylo, Hello, humans farmed dinosaurs.
Yes, he's funded one of his pet projects, so to speak, is he funded a creation museum that shows humans and coexisting with t rex is out in the back forty and I'm not making this up. He has funded quite aggressively gay conversion therapy. I mean, you know, we want to take every gay kid in the country and convert them into something that they're not. I mean, it's detestable. I don't know how to check off all the really horrific. Look, they want to completely upend abortion in a women's right to choose here, a women's right to choose our own healthcare. We have a right to privacy written into our constitution, which is a beautiful thing. But they literally want to call a constitutional convention to rip that out. Of our constitution. And so you're right, Republican weirdos and radicals across the country are trying to do things on a statewide basis. They're reprehensible. And if we run the right candidates and run to win, and if Democrats stand up and really espouse our values instead of being ashamed of them, which I think sometimes often happens, we can win these people back. I can tell you you know, reasonable Republicans are very worried about how far off the rails this thing is going.
So how do you run in a state like Montana. You are on the ground talking to people, what are they saying?
If you haven't watched it, you should. It's on Twitter. My launch video has been viewed over a million times, which is amazing. But we run just like the people we are right. I'm not some buttoned down coastal democrat. I'm not some attorney. I grew up on a ranch. I love to hunt and shoot with my boys. The video shows us shooting targets with despicable policies on them.
We are who we are.
We lean into freedom. I don't understand how Republicans have embraced both the word freedom and then all of these politicians who want to rip their freedoms from them. It's craziness. And so I think Democrats have to stand up and give the stark contrast, force the choice, because the choice, I mean it is, we're staring down the barrel of fascism here, and that's how I think we run. And I guess I most often am going to run as a Democrat who cares about winning, because winning this election against these sorts of Republicans it's a dire situation.
Yeah, when you talk to people, though, like what are they the most concerned about?
Well, we've interestingly enough here and here's a path the victory. I know some of your listeners might think, oh, yeah, how are we going to win this? But these Republicans are so arrogant that the first thing they did with a two point eight billion dollar surplus in this state is gave it away to big corporations and tax breaks for the wealthy. And then they were foolish enough to institute a huge tax increase on every single Montana homeowner. Right when have you heard this? Republicans? What have they always said, we won't raise taxes we want Well they did. They raised taxes on every single homeowner and Montana's are pissed off about it. Lots of Republicans are pissed off about it, and that has opened the door to them saying, wait a second, we're just being lied to. Yes, yes you are. There really is a huge path to victory here. It's important though. This guy is a self under He flies around in his own private jets two thousand bucks an hour. You can't run a single Beterom apartment in Bozeman for two thousand bucks a month, but he flies around in a two thousand dollars an hour private jet. He's totally detached from the people. He's going to fund his own campaign. We're going to have to do it little pieces at a time, but we're going to do it.
What are the most important things that you feel like people in Montana want from their governor? I mean, what are the things like do they want rural hospitals? I mean, what are the sort of needs in Montana?
Molly, what's happened here? And it just happened here on steroids and this is you know, Montana is an important state. I know you said we're small, We're a big geographic state, but we're one point one million people. I know that sounds small, not.
As small as Wyoming.
Right, that's right, but we play a big, outsize role in national politics.
Right.
There's famous TV shows as you know, John Betton running for governor there on Yellowstone, there's Montana is really important to people. And what's happened here is just good governance, good basic governance from our state government, which is what's supposed to happen. Fiscal responsibility, staying out of people's lives, not ripping apart our right to privacy or our right to a clean and healthful environment that's in our constitution. Keeping weirdos out of women's doctors' offices, trying to tell them what they can do with their bodies. It's really about that. It's also about keeping equal opportunity in public schools. These people want to trash our public schools and they want to create this kind of Betsy Devas for profit education network, and that's going to leave tons and tons of kids out in the open, you know, without good schooling. So they're defunding that, they're letting real health care fall apart. We are a rural state, yeah, we have, I mean we call it three or four cities, but they're not cities in the way you guys think our cities. Our rural healthcare across the eastern two thirds of our state is falling apart. Why because GM Forte doesn't care about that. He flies over that in his jet.
You know, do you think that like there is a sort of libertarian play for Democrats, right, because, like the this new Republican party is very involved, and like if you look at these Republican governors, you look at DeSantis de Santis or Abbott in Texas has a bounty hunter thing he's trying to do when it comes to abortion. So do you think there's a play to pick up those libertarians?
Yeah, you know libertarians in the state of Montana, we are in a lot of ways a libertarian minded state. We're a live and let live state. We always have been. I know, it seems to people like it's the wild wild West out here. We respect our neighbors. This bunch wants to make us hate our neighbors because apparently who they love or who they want to be, how is that freedom or liberty they want to be in you know, people's bedrooms, which kind of freaks me out a little bit when you look at greg Ganfote's kind of forced weird smile. I think about him being in bedrooms. It's a bit strange to me. They want to take away the liberty of women to make their own health care choices. They want to take away the liberty that comes from a good public school edge Oca, you know, the liberty to make your own way. Yeah, there's a libertarian play. You know, these radical Republicans that have leaned on this word liberty or freedom and then do exactly the opposite, just like you said, DeSantis or Texas Friends or here in Montana. There's nothing libertarian about it. So, yeah, there is a libertarian play.
So let's talk about what your primary looks like.
My primary looks pretty good right now because I'm running a general campaign. I'm running against Janfote from day one.
Yeah. One of the great friends of this podcast is my friend Amanda from Run for Something, and she talks about how important it is the Democrats run in red states and that even if they don't win, which again, there's no evidence to support the idea that you won't win, right because you do have a Democratic senator on the ticket, which also helps. And also you have Jane Forte who has a history. I mean, do you want to talk a little bit about his history.
Well, I don't know how many governors, Well, actually I do know how many governors have body slammery play order for asking him about healthcare.
It's one.
It's this one. Ben Jacob just says, hey, can you tell me about healthcare? And gim Forte flips out and literally starts beating the hell out of him while there's Fox News reporters in the room, and then lies about it, and then the believe me if the Fox News reporters are saying you're wrong. The Fox News reporters then said, no, he's lying about it. He really did body slam the guy. That kind of tells you the sort of unbelievable arrogance of this guy. And again he's like, I told you he's funded gay conversion therapy.
I'm surprised at how stupid he is.
Well, they've misplaced this idea where we all know we had something kind of weird happened in our politics in twenty twenty, Right, there was a wave that washed over some parts of the country.
We were one of them.
COVID was involved, Trump was involved, All this stuff was involved that doesn't mean it's permanent here. In fact, it's not. I have Republicans all the time reaching out to me and saying, I can't take this guy anymore. I got to figure out a way out. My neighbor, he's probably got the world record for Trump flights. He's had one up since June of twenty fifteen. He came over to me the other day and said, Hey, man, I just want to tell you I'm so proud of you run. This is happening to me all the time. I think it's really important that Democrats be genuine and authentic and that we message to people where they are, and let's be square, like a lot of Democrats across the country haven't been very good at messaging our values, and we share so many values with so many Republicans that are frustrated. Right it's very difficult to live in Montana right now because it's so expensive. The average house is four hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Our starter teacher pay is thirty four thousand dollars or fifty. We've got one thousand teacher vacancies across the state. We're not educating our kids. Those are Republican kids too. So we can make a call to those Republican voters and we will and we can win this thing. I mean, I'm going to need help to do it, but we can win it.
So, people listening to you right now, what would it mean to have a democratic governor in Montana?
It's huge right first off, we would put a stop to so many of these crazy policies that are coming out of our Republican majority legislature. Up until Ganefte was elected, sadly, we had a democratic stop gap in Governor Steve Bullick and before him, Governor Brian Schweitzer, who vetoed that stuff. If we don't have a democratic governor, you're going to see you're going to people who are listening to this are going to click on the news or listen to you, and you're going to hear some of the most fascist, repressive, ugly book banning, anti gay like you name it. It's coming. They're going to go after our right to privacy in our constitution. You're going to read about it. So it's a stop gap here. This is a firewall for democracy. They've already tried to do the same thing. The other states have repress voting rights. They've done all the stuff. It's coming here, and it's really important Montana. If for no other reason, you know, people love Montana.
It is the West.
It's the thing that TV shows are made about. It's where you want a vacation. And it's important that we hold the line on democracy.
If you're listening to this podcast right now, what should people be doing if they want to support you?
Well, I need help.
And I know everybody gets tired of hearing about money, and I wish money wasn't in politics, but money is in politics. This guy is worth a billion dollars. He flies his jet around. Last election, he bought the seat. He spent about five million dollars of his own money to buy the seat. He has no limits on his contributions. Montana has a very low contribution limit. It's one thousand dollars per person. We're going to have to buy back the state. It's going to be hundreds or one thousand dollars at a time. Believe me, we are going to do it. We're going to shop the system. We're going to be an incumbent Republican governor and that's going to be a huge, huge deal. But I need help, and my website's bussy for Montana dot com. Bussee for Montana dot com. But I need help, you know, I need a few dollars.
I know this is like a little bit in the weeds, but your media market is actually cheaper than like a DC media market or a New York media market, so it ultimately will actually go far.
Yeah, so the money will go far. And also because we are this kind of small state. People joke like it's just a bunch of little towns with one big, long main street. That's kind of true. In Montana. You go from town to town and everybody knows somebody in the next town or several towns over. And so a lot of my expense in time is going to be on the road meeting people and I am I'm going to go to where they are. So, yeah, we're going to need media help. But it's not like your as you point out, it's not like you're buying ads in La. Thank god, we can really efficiently use the money, and we can use the money for staff and me traveling around and setting down in coffee shops and hopefully quite a few micro brews. I like to do that, or micro here joints, because we have a lot of them here in Montana. But those are the sorts of thing we're going to do, and that's why we're in the race early, because we're going to have to break it down and inspire people.
Ryan, thank you so much.
I hope you will come back before your general.
Well, I'll be on anytime you want. Thank you, guys, and I'll do everything I can to keep Jesse obsessed.
Jason Resian is a writer for the Washington Post Global Opinion section. Welcome to Fast Politics Special Texas Tribune Festival Edition.
Jason, wonderful to be here, Mollie. Thanks for having me.
I'm so excited to have you. And we just met this morning.
We ran into each other at breakfast when I was regaling poor Margaret Sullivan with all of my many moral and ethical journalistic dilemmas. Actually not really, but so I wanted to talk to you. You have been a foreign correspondent. Tell us a little bit about your backstory. So I moved to Iran, of all places, in two thousand and nine. My father was from Iran. My mom is from the Midwest. I grew up in northern California.
It's fascinated by travel and journalism from a very young age, and when I finally had the opportunity to travel to Iran in my twenties, fell in love with the place, fell in love with the culture, realized that this is a really incredible place that is backwards politically and really messed up in a lot of ways, but also has a lot to love about it, and that the way it was reported on in our media was not very insightful. Granular thought to myself, if I can get myself there in the capacity of a journalist, there's gonna be work for me to do.
So.
Fast forward to twenty twelve, the Post hired me to be there a bureau chief in Tehran. I did that for a couple of years until my wife and I she's Iranian, also a journalist, were arrested at gunpoint from our own home, accused of being spies for the US, thrown into one of the most notorious prisons in the world in solitary confinement, subjected to crazy, long interrogations over the most ridiculous allegations. Ultimately, I was held for five hundred and forty four days. My wife was held for about three months, all of them in solitary confinement. And when we were finally released and freed and the negotiated settlement between Iran and the US, I came back to the US and press freedom issues and issues around hostage taking globally have been main beats that I've focused on because, for better or worse, I know a thing or two about both.
One of the things you were saying when we were having breakfast was just that you come out of spending five hundred and forty four days in imprisonment in a notorious Iranian prison a different person.
First of all, I lost and you know we're doing audio here you can't see me.
You look good.
I feel pretty good.
But you know I lost about forty pounds in the first forty days that I wasn't in prison. I kept that off throughout gained most of it back since my wife and I joke that the only thing that we miss about those days is Jason's prison body.
And it's not too late. You know, I'm in Texas. Maybe there's the reason to lock me up, but no.
But you know, I joke about these things because it's the only thing that I can do to kind of make it all acceptable. You know, as I mentioned to you, I feel like I've won the lottery of life experience. That's just one way to say that I've been through some really hard shit and it leaves a mark, and I could sort of wallow in that very easily.
Some people do.
For me, felt like they've taken enough of my time already. I got to move forward and use this thing to propel my life for the good of other people, which makes me feel good. So the short answer to your question is, yeah, it really messes you up, but you know I'm doing the best I can with it.
When you were freed, can you just walk me through what that experience was like.
Yeah, So the day that I was freed, my captors had told me about ten days earlier that I was being freed and the negotiated deal with us. It's very difficult to believe anything that they told me because they told me so many different lives throughout the year and a half. They would tell me that I would spend the rest of my life in prison. Sometimes they would tell me that you're going to be freed this afternoon, and then nobody would show up for days on end. You just redeposited in solitary. They told me I'd be executed. I mean, so, you know, I just didn't know what to believe. And when it finally happened, they said that my wife would not be allowed to travel with me. I learned later at the airport on the way out that she had been a part of this negotiated deal from the very beginning. So she's an Iranian citizen as well. She had been released from prison on house arrest, but they weren't going to let her leave the country with me. And it turned out that the State Department and the Swiss government, who acts on the US's behalf, had, you know, from the very beginning of negotiations fourteen months earlier, included her, and the Iranians tried to pull a fast one right at the end, you know, presumably to try and keep me shut up when I when I got out, And the nuclear deal and all of this stuff was predicated on a whole bunch of things coming together, including this prisoner exchange, and it almost all fell apart in the last hours because the US said, no, Yeggy, resign, that's my wife, you know, no deal. So she's pretty precious.
And then will you just talk me a little bit through getting on the plane, and.
I think it's very difficult for people to put themselves in my shoes. I had chosen to move to this country that is our number one adversary. I had fallen in love with that place. I've met my wife there, I had deep friendships and connections, and my whole career was built in this place. And sitting on the runway in Tehran looking out at the city, you know, it's built on mountains.
It can be sort of ugly city. There's a lot of smog, but there's also a beauty to it.
On the one hand, there was a feeling of real relief and joy, but also of incredible loss closing a chapter in my life. My wife, who you know, almost didn't come on that plane, only had a couple of hours of notice, right saying goodbye to her parents, to her neighborhood where she'd lived her entire life.
It was very, very, very difficult.
It's never going to come back, no, you know.
And the emotions are still seven and a half years later, very mixed. Right, We appreciate everything that was done for us. It never should have happened, though, right.
So the five hostages who are just released, can you just talk about have you talked to them, and also, do you feel your experience can help.
Three of them are.
People who we know publicly. Two of them asked to remain anonymous for the time being. The three whose names were known publicly, I've been communicating with their families for quite a long time. As you can imagine, we're small community people that deal with this. There's several dozen American citizens who are being wrongfully detained in different countries around the world, and that's a pretty small community. Specifically to Iran, it's even smaller, and we were all taken by the same group within Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, probably the same people in some cases, the same cells. So I've tried to put the family members in the shoes of somebody who would be on the ground visiting as much as I could, And you know, I've reached out to them and for me, I've written about all of their cases. I'm not going to be the guy pounding on their door asking for an interview, because you know, people were pounding online and I didn't really appreciate that. So you know, I've just sort of said I'll be here for you however I can be. You know, these are some of the things that I dealt with in those first days and months. Here's some things that helped me. The truth is, they have a really long road to recovery, and they're going to need folks like me who've been through something similar to sort of be their friends. And the same goes for Evan Gershkovich Wall Street Journal's reporter and imprisoned in Russia. Right now, I try and make myself available to any family who's going through this, not just Americans, you know, you know, there's Brits and Canadians, Australians, other Europeans. If there's something that can be learned from from our horrific experience, I want to pass that along.
Can you just talk for one second about the VA and the hospital, the army hospital and how it.
Served So I ended up. I wasn't at the VA. I was in a military hospital in Germany Langtool, Okay.
Yeah.
For me, that experience was very meaningful. You know, it was the first opportunity to talk to somebody who was not connected to the situation but had knowledge of this kind of trauma. I remember when I asked the doctor who I still communicate with, I said, Doc, am, I gonna be okay, right, And he told me, he said, you know, healing is possible, but it's not guaranteed. He's very honest, right, And I said, you know, how do you treat these cases? He said, you know, if you've seen one case, you've seen one case, right, you know, each one of them is different. And you know he might have been blown smoke, but you said, you know, feels like you have the sort of mental makeup to get past this. I encourage you to take time to go slow, to really process the experience before you go out and talk about it publicly, which is really sound advice on the sort of practical, sort of bureaucratic level. You know, there were parts of it which I didn't appreciate, right, I mean, you know these folks work for the FBI. You know, nobody kind of came out and told me that I was talking to FBI until I found that out separately, and then I confronted them and we dealt with it at the point. But it's like, hey, you know what I have just spent the last year and a half being lied to, relentlessly, being kept in the dark about so many aspects of my life being threatened. What I need from people right now is radical transparency. And I've sort of taken that into my livet with my employment situations, with you know, relationships.
I just tell people, hey, look, you.
Know, whatever this thing is that we're dealing with right now, let's just kind of cut to the chase and figure out what it is that you want from me and what I want from you, because otherwise you're putting me back in prison. Everybody feels really bad when I say that some negotiations actor Jessie.
But it's also like the.
Thing that seems and again, I haven't known you for three hours or something, but the thing that seems so striking about you is that you using this. Because I say this as someone who's been sober from addiction since I was a teenager for my life, like, the best thing I can ever do is share my experience.
This is the way I feel about it.
And you know, sometimes people are like, oh, okay, you know, Jason talking about prison again. I'm like, well, you know, what the fuck else am I going to tell you about?
Right right?
I'm certainly not going to tell you how to keep the weight off, right, you know what I mean? Seriously, this is something that I know intimately that is going to be valuable for a select number of people who are going to need that help. Yeah, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, a week into it, this is really sort of funny to say, but people will reaching out to me saying, Jason, you you know you were in captivity.
How am I going to deal with isolating at home?
Like, well, you still got your Internet, you still got Netflix, door Dash, I mean, all that still works.
You're gonna be okay, nobody's trying to kill you.
But I've had, like, you know, I had a series of these and I thought to myself, you know what, I'm gonna sit down and write a column about this, about the things that help, one of the one of the most trafficked pieces I've ever written. Right, because everybody has trauma, you know, there's gradations of it, but like we don't get to decide, you know, whose trauma is more than somebody else's. So if there's something that anyone listening can glean from my experience that makes me really happy, it makes me feel like, Okay, my time on Earth wasn't wasted, and that helps me sleep a little bit better at night. Yeah, and we could all use a little bit more sleep.
Yeah, No, I mean I really relate to that.
As like I can tell you how to get sober and stay sober at nineteen, I can't tell you how to survive in Iranian prison. But it is when you're able to share your experience, it ends up giving your life purpose, I think.
I think so. I try not to be a one trick pony.
I like to write about things that I enjoy sometimes rather than all of this sort of stuff. And fortunately I have wise editors that allow me to explore different ideas and issues. But I keep coming back to this because it's an opportunity to put issues that most Americans don't think about very much on the forefront. I find that if you know, people can be drawn into a story and laugh about it a little bit, they'll remember it. Yeah, so the next time they hear about a journalist who's locked up in the other side of the world, they might give a shit, you know. And you know, it's just sort of this continuity of narrative and process that I've tried to bring to it.
For a long time.
Thank you so much, Jason, This was amazing.
Thanks for having me. I really enjoy it.
No moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly jung.
Fast that Bet Gates is really been sticking to his thub in Kevin McCarthy's eye.
Told me what you saw when he was talking to the buddy Huddy Maria Bartobo this morning.
This morning on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business show, we saw Matt Gates basically say that Kevin McCarthy hasn't done anything, and then Republicans in Congress are out of control and terrible. And then Maria was arguing that in fact, they had done all these things, which again they really hadn't done anything, but they had sort of passed some messaging bills or whatever. And Matt was like, no, haven't. And just to see a right wing opinion host who you know, we've seen that she you know, these are people who have some relationship with the Republicans in Congress and a Republican congressman fighting about the Republican GOP house GOP was really quite a moment of fuck Gray. And so for that the money honey and our favorite botox congressman, it's too much, Matt, It's just too much. And I say this as a frequent flyer. You don't want to have it look completely frozen. They are our moment of Fuckray. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.
Two