Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
And we're back. Welcome back to the Behind the Bastards, Mohammed and Salman episodes extravaganza. Woo. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to introduce these episodes in an exciting way anymore. We're talking about bad people, the worst, and one of them is the current crown prince of Saudi Arabia. When we left off last episode, he had started what was becoming a genocide in Yemen.
Chapter 2: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
He had partied with Pitbull, and he was orchestrating the downfall of his relative, Mohammed bin Nayef, who was the crown prince before him. How we doing, Dave? David Bell, our guest. I'm doing well. I'm doing very well, Robert. David Well is doing Bell. I didn't have a new dream in between these episodes that I could tell you about. That's probably the best.
So it's just the same dream from before. Yeah, that same upsetting dream, sure. Yeah, it was a nice shower. It's upsetting dream to me a little bit. It wasn't sexual. That's good. The more you say it wasn't sexual, the more I believe it wasn't sexual. That's how telling someone something isn't sexual works. It was weird because I don't dream about you often. Thank you.
I wasn't thinking about the fact that we were recording today. And so I'm like, that's interesting. That's interesting that you made a cameo. See, now I'm hurt. Why don't you dream about me often, Dave? Am I not worth dreaming about?
Here's what I'll start doing.
When I go to bed, I'll look at a photo of you every night. That's good. Nothing weird about that. Yeah, thank you, Dave. I will continue to have one dream about you per week where we captain the USS Enterprise together. Oh, ooh. Yeah, yeah. We would do terrible things. We would.
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Chapter 3: How did Mohammed bin Salman consolidate power in Saudi Arabia?
We would. That is not going to end well for anyone on board the ship. We would keep my go-to every time I'd be hit with a moral dilemma or a problem. I'd just go, beam them into space.
Problem solved. Moving on.
Get those assholes into space right now.
Into space.
Here we go. Just a trail of bodies. The Enterprise, that's the ship that keeps beaming people into space. Yeah. They have that one move. I just watched the new Starfleet Academy, the first two episodes, and it is missing that. There's all these bad guys. There's the guy from Sideways on your ship. Just beam him into space. Get his ass. Beam him into space. Beam him into space. Yeah.
So easy.
Come on. Oh, God.
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 4: What were the consequences of MBS's actions in Yemen?
This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to everybody.
They have had this case for 30 years.
I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This show contains information subject to, but not limited to, personal takes, rumors, not-so-accurate stats, and plenty more. What's up, man? This your boy, Nav Green, from the Broken Play Podcast. Look, it's the end of the season. The playoffs are here. But guess what? It ain't the end of your season.
You can always tune in with Broken Play Podcast with Nav Green on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Not a team who ain't going to the playoffs. The Chiefs. It's time to rebuild. Listen to Broken Play with Nav Green from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know who else was in the classic movie Sideways, Dave? Who? Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Uh-huh. That checks out. Yeah, he was one of the two male leads in Sideways. Um... Pretty much, basically, close enough.
So perhaps the key defining characteristic of Mohammed bin Salman that most explains his success within the closed world of the Saudi royal family is simply the fact that he's got energy and he wants to do things. I cannot overemphasize how lazy most of these guys are. I mean, that's America, too, at this point, where it's like, well, are they 80? No? Okay, that's great.
It's like, again, if you go into nepotism with the sons and daughters of Hollywood royalty, where when you get that one guy who's like, he's got the famous name and he's like, no, no, no. I will cover my body in shit and roll around. Does the role want me to be covered in shit and squirming around like a grub? I'll do it. I have no ego about this. I don't give a fuck.
And it's like, well, yeah, you're going to have a career, Nicolas Cage. That was my Lily Rose Depp watching Nosferatu. And I was like, oh, you're willing to do weird shit. Oh, you'll do it. You don't give a fuck. Yeah. All right. OK. We can work with that. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How did MBS manage the religious police in Saudi Arabia?
Yeah. You get to be a star. Mohammed bin Salman is like the Lily Rose Depp of the Saudi royal family. A lot of people have been saying that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in 2016, he continues both the war in Yemen and his conflict with Mohammed bin Nayef, and he launches a new war against one of the most powerful blocs in the kingdom, the religious police. Now, the Mutawa, or Haya, as they are also called, had been seen as almost untouchable by his predecessors, right? These are the police of vice and virtue.
These are the guys who are going around making sure you're not disobeying, like, the religious law, right? Fun police. Yeah. Yeah, these are the literal fun police, right? And the men in his father's generation and MBM's generation would not fuck with these guys, right? Like they were scared of them. They really wanted them in their corner. But by 2016, things had started to change.
More than 65% of Saudis were under 30. And the young men of this generation had grown up with access to the internet and social media. They and their peers shared their frustration with the abuses of the religious police, right? That were talking to each other about how annoying these fuckers were, right?
Right.
They're on the internet. They're like, hey, everybody else is having fun. Yeah. Like, we're learning about fun. Do other countries have fun police? Yeah. In The Man Who Would Be King, Karen House describes the Fun Police's M.O.
For decades, thousands of these men, often self-appointed members of the committee to promote virtue and prevent vice, had roamed Saudi streets carrying a long stick forcing women to cover their heads, herding Saudis into the mosque at prayer time, ensuring all shops and stores locked their door for half an hour at prayer time, and that Western influence like Barbie dolls or Pokemon cards didn't pollute Saudi youth.
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Chapter 6: What role did social media play in the Saudi youth's perception of authority?
His predecessors had tried to curb the influence of religious hardliners but failed, most famously blocking for six years an attempt by King Abdullah to make it legal for women to work in lingerie stores selling underwear to other women. And like the religious ā the hardliner clerics would be like, no, women can't work.
But then the problem is like, OK, so are men supposed to sell lingerie to women? So we have lingerie. Is that better? Yeah. But women can't work in the like, yeah, you know, the lingerie industry was like, guys, please. Come on. You got to give us something. What do we got? We just want to sell you people underwear. What is wrong here? Yeah.
Where King Abdullah had been too frightened to confront the Mutawa directly, Mohammed bin Salman simply ignored their protestations and used his father's absolute power to crush any opposition. The public was wildly supportive of his actions, and conservatives found themselves alone. Perhaps MBS's single most important quality was his ability to understand how the youth of Saudi Arabia felt.
It wasn't just the morality police. Regular citizens knew it was impossible to get anything done through the government without bribery. The poor majority of the country were forced to watch while a handful of princes siphoned away the oil money that was supposed to be funding social programs and infrastructure, right? Like, people are pissed about this. And so...
MBS has a lot of support as he sets about dismantling his enemies, the forces he saw as holding Saudi Arabia and his own ambition back. He later said this of his decision to crack down on the religious police. I am young. I don't want 70% of the Saudi population to waste their lives trying to get rid of this. We want to do it now, right?
And this is, we're going from like the genocide and the orchestrating internal fights with his family where he's the bad guy to like, No, he's in the right side of this thing. These guys suck. It's a broken clock situation.
Yeah, the only thing that will get rid of them is a strong, he's effectively the king, not literally, but is a strong regent who's being like, fuck it, that's not how we do things anymore. Right. I'm in charge. Right. Like nothing else was going to fix the situation because of how Saudi Arabia works. Right. I'm not saying every country is this way.
We don't need a king to deal with the cops in our country. We could just stop having them be immune to everything. But whatever. But it's like when Trump gets something right. It's like you don't have to hand it to him. It's like, yeah, he is right. Those little Japanese trucks are pretty sweet. We should be able to buy those here. We don't need just F-350s.
We could use some little Ks or whatever they're called. Or the Korean, I forget which. Those little bitty trucks. We need little bitty trucks here. He's right about that. Yeah, we need little bitty trucks. Yeah, anytime it's something truck related, he's got like a 50% chance of being right because he seems to just be a guy who periodically sees trucks and goes, ooh, those are cool.
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Chapter 7: How did MBS's austerity measures affect Saudi citizens?
Just get on planes now. We'll figure it out. It works like the 90s again. Just run right up to the plane. Right. But because that's not normalized, them doing that in this case is like, oh, you really fucked up, huh? Yeah. No, you made a mistake. You realized that you were about to be overthrown. Yeah. MBS was not fired after this fuck up, but his popularity and reputation took a major hit.
Perhaps one reason why it was so hard for Saudi citizens to accept any cuts to their benefits was that they'd seen the Al Saud family's personal finances balloon during the same period. And they have a point where it's like, yeah, you guys aren't really working, a lot of you, or you're doing barely a job compared to what you're getting paid for.
But the Al Saud family is worth an insane amount of money, and they do nothing at all, right? Even as the government revenues have collapsed, they continue to be ā the family net worth as the state's finances are in freefall, the Saud family net worth is $1.4 trillion.
Right.
So I get why these people are like, we got to make cuts. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. Oh, the story of everything, right? Where it's like the rich people are like, sorry, you're going to have to tighten the belt. Us, I mean, I need my super yacht. Yeah. Look, man, if I don't like I can only eat one piece of steak per cow and we've got to burn the rest of the cow.
And I'm simply not going to ride on the same private jet twice.
Yeah, I'm not going to cow share.
Yeah, absolutely. Now, I will say one point four trillion dollars is the net worth of the family that is spread. There's 10 like more than 10,000 descendants. Now, it's not evenly split up, right? Right. But it is split up between them, you know, so it's not quite as insane, but it's still a lot, you know? So things are tense, right? Things are tense by mid-2017, yeah.
Yeah, because they basically, it's like, I don't know. It feels like the same vibes of if we were on a lifeboat, and I was like, sorry, I'm going to shoot you because I want all the food. Also, I don't like you. And then you realize there's no bullets, and you're like, sorry, never mind.
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Chapter 8: What led to the arrest of prominent Saudi activists?
What if, okay, hold on. What if I named my apartment that and put it on, got it on Google Maps as free ecstasy town? Because you're right, is that if you do that and then people show up, eventually- There will be free ecstasy. Exactly. It's a problem that solves itself. I'm going to come back in two weeks and start the episode so our friend David Bell has been raided by the DEA.
He flew too close to the sun. That's just so smart. I don't know. That's such a smart idea. I think it'll work. I think it'll work. Anyway. Ads. And we're back. We already did ads. Oh, we did. Are we back from ads? We were back.
Yeah, I thought.
What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? Too much ecstasy. By mid-2017, the king's son was in a very mixed position politically. He'd earned accolades as a reformer for his hobbling of the religious police and his seeming support for some social liberalization. But he was also the author of an unpopular austerity policy.
The king and his son faced increasing resistance, both from the populace and within their own family. M.B.N., who'd made no secret of his critiques of MBS's policies, was an obvious rallying point for resistance. And so on June 21, 2017, Mohammed bin Salman acted to take him down. Karen House writes... That fateful evening of June 21, 2017, Mbien was called to a palace in Mecca.
Once there, his guards were forbidden to accompany him inside. All phones were surrendered to palace guards. Mbien was taken to a room where Turki al-Ashiq, a contemporary and friend of MBS and now minister of the General Entertainment Authority, and others began bullying him to resign.
Denied contact with his men and the painkillers to which he was said to be addicted, he finally succumbed early the next morning after Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca, urged him to obey the king. So that's how he gets rid of his cousin, yeah. Wow. Sheesh. That's abrupt. Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was super abrupt. Yeah.
And by the way, that fella, Turkey Al-Ashiq, who is handling like the torturing of Mohammed bin Nayef, like cutting him off from his guards and his painkillers and like forcing him to resign. The guy who handles all that. Do you know what he got more? He's become famous for doing more recently. Oh, no. Maybe a hint. He's the minister of the General Entertainment Authority. What did he do?
He's the guy who ran the Riyadh Comedy Festival that all our favorite comedians performed at. Oh, my God. Yeah, baby.
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