Mehdi Hasan

speaker

4,624 appearances 9 recordings 7 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 9 Jul

Mehdi Hasan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Rest Is Politics · 552. Trump's Red Card Saga and Germany's Far-Right Machine · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

It was an old fashioned kind of knee jerk response from the media to always treat politics as a sport between two teams, and you're the referee and you're kind of

trying to be neutral in between the two teams.

But, you know, the example I give both to Democrats and to the media is if one of the teams is openly cheating, is picking up the ball.

If you've got a football match, and I mean football, not soccer.

If you've got a football match and one team picks up the ball and starts running with it in defiance of the rules, A, the other team is under no obligation to keep just kicking the ball.

And that's why I say to Democrats, you've got to fight fire with fire if the other side is doing, you know, breaking all the rules.

And B, the referee's job is not to say, well, both teams are to blame for this.

No, the

referee's job is to call out one side.

And I think the media struggled to do that.

And that has allowed the American public to carry on with this, you know, plague on all the houses.

Alistair, you know, this is a populist moment across Western democracy for multiple reasons, partly the economy, you know, partly immigration, all sorts of issues have led into this populist moment.

People don't like the people in power, incumbents across the Western world.

And it's very easy to do a kind of, they're all at it.

They're all corrupt.

And look, by the way,

There are lots of corrupt Democrats.

Money in politics is ruining politics across the board here in the United States.

But the idea that both sides are the same is fundamentally absurd.

One side is openly anti-democracy.

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