Chapter 1: What are the early influences on Mohammed bin Salman's rise to power?
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we continue to talk about Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family with our guest, David Bell. Welcome back to the show, Dave. It's been a little while between our first and last recordings. Yeah. Between the first recording and this one. Have you been?
I got COVID. Not currently, but I got it. Yeah. I also, Robert, last night, I had a dream about you.
You had a dream about me? Say more. Upsetting.
Okay, so my dream was that we were taking a shower together in bathing suits. Hot. That's good.
That makes it TV appropriate.
Yep. Then I had to poop in the dream and left the shower.
Okay, Dave.
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Chapter 2: How did Mohammed bin Nayef's background shape his political career?
Dave. Where are we building to here?
This is the dream. This is the dream. And I went to the bathroom. Is it the dream?
Is it the dream? Is it the dream?
Yes, because when I woke up, I didn't have to poop in real life. So I was like, oh, thank God.
That wasn't like. It's just a dream.
Yeah. I had to poop in the dream. So I left the shower and Alex Schmitty was in the bathroom.
Our other old roommate.
Making coffee in the bathroom.
And that was the dream. Classic bathroom coffee.
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Chapter 3: What role did the U.S. play in Saudi Arabia's internal power struggles?
And that was the dream.
That doesn't sound like a good one.
It wasn't bad. It was fine.
I don't know that I'd call that fine. Well, Dave, thank you for telling the audience about your upsetting dream. I'm sure no one's going to be weird about it among our listener base. People who are going to react normally to your shower story.
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Chapter 4: How did the war in Yemen impact Saudi Arabia's political landscape?
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who me the saudi royal family you know because they're all they're basically aside from the billions and billions of dollars in oil money and the fact that they don't have to work and the fact that an entire country are basically slaves to them you know they're just down-to-earth regular guys like tim the tool man taylor from the show that maybe 20 of our audience remembers
Yeah, the guy, the criminal guy, Tim Allen.
Yeah, Tim Allen, a simple everyman who runs a television show out of his house. Anyway, so one of the few, as we've stated, most of the young princes are not super productive individuals, right? They're mostly spending their time kissing ass to try and get a better cut of the family fortune.
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.
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Chapter 5: What strategies did MBS employ to consolidate power?
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?
Who does? You know what? I might take it. Yeah. She had like a nice house. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How did the Yemen conflict evolve into a humanitarian crisis?
Well, not now. She had some corgis, you know. This actually came up on Margaret Kildroy's show before. And we decided I would make a great Queen Elizabeth because I would just fire myself and dismantle the monarchy.
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 the kingdom. So it was noteworthy when his son, M.B.N., we've got M.B.S.
and N.B.N., and they're about to be rivals, made his debut as a public person, spurning his own country in favor of the West. So he doesn't go to school in Saudi Arabia. He's not interested in attending a school in the Arab world. Instead, he goes to like the oppositest part of the world he possibly can. Portland, Oregon. I know.
I was going to guess Portland.
Portland shows up. You're going to guess what?
I was going to guess Berkeley. But yeah, I was close.
No, he goes to fucking MBN, goes to Portland, Oregon for college. He attends both Lewis and Clark College and Portland State University.
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Chapter 7: What were the consequences of Saudi Arabia's military actions in Yemen?
Incredible. Yeah, really funny. He does not graduate from either. Most articles will say that he's a graduate of Lewis and Clark or of PSU. Neither is true. I can't even confirm that he got a degree. Everyone says he's got a BA, right? The book Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia by Stig Stensley claims that he studied for his master's degree in political science and graduated in 1981.
Although, again, no one says where. Everyone says he went to Lewis and Clark at PSU and he got a degree, but nobody says where the degree is from. And we've confirmed it wasn't either of those colleges. I don't know. Yeah, Lewis and Clark College, a guy that Mohammed bin Salman sparred with came here. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe not the best ad. Yeah.
So, yeah, I don't know that he actually did graduate. Stig writes that he took, quote, courses on security issues with the FBI from 1985 to 1988 and trained with Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist units in London from 1992 to 1994.
Chapter 8: How did Mohammed bin Salman’s decisions affect his relationship with the U.S.?
In 1994, he began working regularly with his father, Interior Minister Nayef in Riyadh. And I think this is a situation where he's probably not that great a student. I don't think he would have qualified to have special training with the FBI in Scotland Yard based on his own merits.
But because he's a prince and he's someone who is going to be a big part of the Saudi state, when he expresses, I'm interested in anti-terrorism work, right? I'm interested in training with Western law enforcement organizations and counterterrorism. They're all like, well, this is our chance to have a man on the inside.
This is our chance to have a guy in Saudi Arabia, not like a spy, but a guy who we know is like a friend to us, who we feel like we can trust, as opposed to this regime's kind of a black box to us otherwise, right?
It helps with your cred. It's just good- I get it where it's like, all right, you might not, you might not be. It's like when the X-Files had Stephen King wrote an episode and they're like, well, he probably doesn't know the show, the voice of the show, but he's Stephen King. Let's throw him on there.
And he didn't, you know, that episode wasn't the best. It was really, it was also heavily rewritten. Yeah, it would have had to be. Yeah, it's about a haunted doll. Yeah, they should have let Mohammed bin Nayef write an episode of The X-Files. Oh, yeah. He was training with the FBI in the 90s. He could have done it. He must have been watching The X-Files, right? Oh, yeah. Weren't we all?
He must have an opinion on Fox Mulder. Oh, yeah. So it's unclear to me how much the elder and younger Naif coordinated here. Because remember, his dad, the Black Prince, is this guy who's very much lockstep with the clerics and is focused on, we need to crack down on anything that seems like someone having fun in the kingdom, right? Whereas his son is like, I'm friendly with the West.
I went to Portland for fucking college. I'm training with the FBI. He's putting out into the world at least image of he's much more of a liberal guy. He's much less of a hardliner, right?
Yeah. Bet he knows where to get some great acid. He probably did at one point. Yeah. Like there's several places in that list where I feel like he knows how to get good acid.
Yeah, the FBI Academy. I bet they had some great shit. Oh, yeah. So it's hard to say to what extent is this. He and his dad are kind of working together, knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach out to the West and can seem like he's modern and someone who can
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