Chatter: The ERAS Tour (Ben’s Version) with Benjamin Wittes
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2023
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On April 13, 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes conducted his first “special military operation” at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. Now, Wittes is conducting these protests abroad on what he calls the ERAS (Eradicating Russian Ambassadorial Sleep) Tour. In his conversation with Katherine Pompilio, one of Lawfare’s associate editors and this week’s Chatter guest host, Wittes talks about his most successful special military operation yet, dealing with international law enforcement, NATO’s impact on Baltic countries, the American versus European understanding of the war in Ukraine, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
- Ben’s Substack Dog Shirt Daily
- Ben’s speech at a rally in Stockholm
- The work of Nikita Titov
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.9 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:35.5 | Welcome to chatter. I'm Katherine Palmpilio, associate editor of LawFair. This week, the |
| 0:40.5 | eras tour with Benjamin Woodes. We were sitting literally opposite the building that had once |
| 0:49.1 | eradicated Estonian sovereignty and we were projecting the flag of a country that Russia is now trying |
| 0:58.9 | to eradicate their sovereignty. Estonia is an extremely forward-leaning pro-Western state, but it does |
| 1:08.7 | that while having a Russian population that is not sympathetic to the West at all. The ultimate |
| 1:19.0 | thing that the special military operation represents is the invasion of Russian territory using |
| 1:27.1 | only light in a fashion that is harmless to humans, but symbolically extremely offensive. |
| 1:39.6 | Benjamin Woodes, welcome back to chatter. How are you? I am about as exhausted as I have been in a very |
| 1:47.1 | long time, but exhilarated and are winding up this crazy mischief adventure and very delighted with |
| 1:59.1 | how it's gone so far. Yes, you've been bopping around. Where are you calling from right now? |
| 2:05.5 | I am right now in Oslo, in Norway, where I am going to be for less than 24 hours. |
| 2:16.3 | I am here, I arrived by train this afternoon and will conduct a, as best as I can tell, entirely illegal |
| 2:30.8 | projection operation against the Russian embassy here this evening and assuming I do not get |
| 2:39.9 | arrested and I am prevented from doing so, I will be on a flight to Iceland tomorrow where I will |
| 2:50.8 | do the same thing in Reykjavik. Amazing. I am a little nervous, but let's get into that. |
| 2:57.9 | So you are on your personal, or not your personal, but you are on your eras tour. I think it's |
| 3:04.0 | personal. Okay, you are on your personal eras tour. I think we can call it my personal eras tour |
| 3:09.5 | at this point. Well, the Taylor Swift eras tour, when she re-records our album, it's the |
... |
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