Robert Evans

Doing as little as possible and grafting off of like the money that should be going to support the Saudi state.

There's a few exceptions to this rule, right?

Mohammed bin Salman, the subject of our episodes, is one.

His father, the soon-to-be King Salman, is another.

And another one of the exceptions to this rule was Mohammed bin Nayef.

Born in Jeddah at the end of August 1959, he had more than a quarter century on his younger cousin.

His father was Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, full son of the great King Abdulaziz and a full brother of two other kings, Fad and the new King Salman.

He was thus a lot closer to the throne from the jump than anyone ever thought that Mohammed bin Salman was going to be, right?

Like...

He just kind of seems like a much better bet as as which one of these guys is going to actually like make it to the high seat.

His father, Nayef bin Abdulaziz, had been nicknamed the Black Prince, and he'd risen to power first when his older brother, the minister of the interior, was assassinated by that other prince who was angry about TV being legal.

I know there's a lot of princes in this story.

And they're all killing each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nayef succeeded his brother, which meant that he was now working directly with the Wahhabists who traditionally had allied with the House of Saud in order to push their hardline fundamentalist policies.

Prince Nayef became what the Brookings Institute described as an arch reactionary, and he was the orchestrator behind many of the kingdom's most puritanical new laws, cracking down on freedom and anything that even hinted of social liberalism.

That's the black prince, right?

He violently suppressed the movement to make Saudi Arabia's monarchy more of a constitutional monarchy, like in the UK, telling one interviewer, I don't want to be Queen Elizabeth, which who does?

yeah oh yeah that would be very effective i would be sure i would be a great queen elizabeth i'd go mad with power and i love corgis yeah so he earned the black prince earned his nickname because of how harsh his policies were to the non-citizen worker population in