Al Zone Media, Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about it happening well in various places, and given the nature of our digital, interconnected society, it is happening here all the time.
But if you're even casually aware of what's going on in the world right now, it is particularly happening in Venezuela right now. And joining me to talk about the US led and executed kidnapping of a world leader is my two favorite kidnappers, Mia Wong and James Stout.
Glad to be Hererobit, joining you to discuss kidnapping, one of my favorite topics.
Yeah, my lawyers have advised me not to respond to the statement.
Now, given all the people you both kidnapped, how are you just rating this on a technical level as kidnappings go, you know, on a level from let's say the while, if I remember the name of that guy with the plane, would have been a funnier joke. I forgot his name though, No, no, no, he was on a plane, didn't have a plane.
Yeah, that's a reverse kidnapper. He kidnapped, He did on kidnap himself, everyone on the plane.
I was talking about Lindberg. Charles Lindberg. But the jokes, the joke's over. So let's talk about the international crimes our government's doing. Ye did, did and doing.
I'm drinking a white claw, so I've got about the same legal jurisdiction as they have because there is no lawyeh when you're drinking white wall yeah, which I think is the legal argument.
I mean, yeah. So what happened is, while most of us were asleep last Saturday night, the United States, using a mix of special forces like Tier one operators this was like adulta force operation, primarily a whole bunch of helicopters that looked like a mix of Blackhawks and Chinooks, carried out a series of airstrikes on Caracas and kidnapped the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife, killing a significant chunk of their security detail, including thirty two
Cubans who are acting as essentially like military advisors slash security for Maduro. Yeah, he has been taken back to the United States. He's been arraigned in New York. They're charging him with a variety of drug and gun related crimes, including some weird shit like possession of a machine gun under US law, which is really weird. I guess they're arguing that his control of the Venezuelan military counted as a legal possession of an automatic weapon. Yeah, it's weird.
Yeah, And guessing it involves using the machine gun in the furtherance of another crime, because there are specific charges for like NFA violations related to drug things. Sure, but it still seems very weird to tag that on there. Like when what you're doing is kidnapping a world leader, you can't just also be like, oh, and he's got a gun, like when he come on the forces of a country. It's very strange, right.
Yeah.
This also, I think pins into what's really really weird about this. There's two aspects of this that are just what the fuck. One of them is that the legal justification, this is given to Mike Lee from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was that the reason that there were air strikes in the legal justification was protecting US soldiers carrying.
Out the US law enforcement. The military was needed to protect the DEA agents who are actually conducting the arrest, right, is the legal justification.
Yeah, the chances of some kind of due process violation are hot. This all hinges on you thinking that the law is a fixed thing, right, not an instrument of the state and an instrument of power. And I think that a more plausible analysis here is that the law is not a fixed thing. But like in this instance, right, if we go with that line, like the DA people were there to ensure you process and to make the arrest right and in theory I've read that they literally had someone mirandize him, right.
Yeah, which, okay, I want to I do want to put seth the thing curetaux. And this is something that CNN, like when they were reporting on this point. So this is insane because this implies that US law applies in Venezuela.
Right, which it doesn't.
Absolutely does.
That's literally the point. The point of a state is that your law applies inside of your board.
The argument that they are making because Trump directly and and prior to this had called into relevance the Monroe doctrine, right, which is basically stating that everything happening in the Americas
is the purview of the United States. So this was initially uh and they're still arguing that it is kind of a a what President Monroe was using as an excuse for intervening in situations where foreign colonizers were attempting to exert power and colonies they own owned in the Americas or had owned in the Americas, right, And the US is basically saying, fuck you, this is our backyard. Right.
And I think the the argument that they're making now is that that's relevant because Iran and Russia and Cuba all have political and business interests in Venezuela, particularly Cuba.
But in a more broad sense, they're making the argument, and Stephen Miller has made this very directly, that the Americas are all kind of our property and we're perfectly justified in intervening to take resources that we want because we shouldn't have to just accept that a foreign country has different opinions on how those resources should be used in the United States, and that we have no moral responsibility to listen to what other people want in our hemisphere.
It's our hemisphere, and we, meaning the Trump administration, should do whatever we want.
Yeah, And I think there's two kinds of legal effective here things that are important.
One.
I think there's that one, which is, yeah, the American Empire is just saying we are an empire and we could do whatever we want. But then there's also the does the president have the power to do this unilaterally piece of it, which no, he no, like just does
not like this. This is objectively an act of war, right and previously right, A lot of administrations have done things kind of like this, yeah, right, but like everything has been under the fig leaf of the AUMF, right, the two thousand and one Authorization of Use a Military Force, which if you go back and read the document, the actual like AUMF, it's very clear that it's anyone who's related to nine to eleven. Yeah, yeah, and so this
has been used to do interventions in like places. There are things that have nothing to do with this, right, But this is not even that. This is just the president claiming that he can do acts of war.
Yeah, And I guess the justification that they gave was the example they cited was Nat Diego right in eighty nine Panama, Right, But that was that was a war that was operation, like American soldiers died, right. No, Diego went to the Vatican embassy and eventually, I believe you surrounded him. They've like blasted you two him, which is
obviously a war crime. And he eventually left the embassy around negotiated his exit, I guess, but that's a completely different thing to just bouncing into the residence of the president of another country at night black backg.
Like that's also debatably legal, But yes, it was a different Yeah.
Very very much. Yeah, it's also wrong, like.
We're not defending what was done there. I know, this is even more blatant, right, It's like, it's not defending what George W. Bush did in Iraq to be like, at least they bothered to pretend there was a justificate, Like they spent some time really cooking up a justification and some effort, and there's none of that here. They just don't give a shit anymore. Right. That's that you're not being like an means it was okay with Bush. It, you're just pointing out it's even more mask off now, right.
Yeah.
Well, and I think it is different in that, like the invasion of a rock involved Congress, this is just Trump going I can do this, right, And that's really fucking alarming. Yeah that he just is like, yeah, fuck it, I can just do a war now completely by myself. None of you have any fucking power war for me. I can just declare war a thing that is explicitly
in the Constitution, like supposed to be Congress's job. And I think that's really that's another very allowering part of this, because this is I think, by far the most just Trump, pure dictatorshit that we've seen so far, and it's not being treated like that. Yeah, because a lot of sort of like I don't know that there's a lot of people who wanted this something like this to happen, and so they're kind of just not looking at the fact that this is just this is just pure dictatorship shit.
Yeah. I think a lot of people, because they didn't like Maduro, they're waiting to look aside from the means as long as they get the ends they want. But the means are extremely serious here.
Yeah, and I think we should acknowledge, like stop for a second to talk about the Maduro of it all, because my stance is that his legitimacy as president, his personal legitimacy, whether or not he's committed crimes are all
completely irrelevant. Right. I have not, in any of my public facing statements I've been in the past years ago, talked about how I wish the protests had worked to remove him from office within sort of like the context of Venezuelan's actually having their way, kicking him out and
replacing him with something better. But I have not brought up any of that in the context of what's happened recently because it doesn't matter, right, Like, fundamentally, it doesn't matter if Maduro is like completely legitimately elected and the people's hero or a complete fraud and an authoritarian. That has nothing to do with whether or not the US has any illegal or moral justification for coming in arresting this guy and then saying we own the country and
we don't. It's dictator shit, it's fascist, it's deeply wrong, it's bad. Like, there's nothing else to say if you find anyone getting caught in starting to be like, well, but you know, Maduro did this, Maduro did that. That is either a person who is acting in bad faith or a person who has themselves been tricked, right, because
you don't need to discuss any of that. None of that is relevant to what we're talking about here, which is that the US, like this is a violation of international law and all of the kinds of norms that we attempted to put in place after World War two to stop another catastrophe like that from happening, and it is only going to embolden the worst instincts of both
the people running the United States right now. They will continue to try to do shit like this, and it's going to embolden the worst instincts of other leaders around the world. It is comprehensively bad for everyone.
The comprehensive result of this is again the US has annexed I guess Venezuela that Trump is claiming that he personally and his Secretary of State and his Council of advisors are not like now, control and run a country.
Yeah.
This is so evil.
Yeah, and it's very unclear who's going to be doing Because Trump made those that statement, Rubio walked it back a little bit and said that, like, well, we'll be working with the administration in place, which is, by the way, just the same administration that existed before, merely with the vice president taking on the role of president.
Yeah, we should talk about it a little bit.
Yeah. After that backtracked a little bit too, to try and be more in line with the Boss. But it's very unclear what they actually intend and what they mean by saying we're running it, because from what I've read, it doesn't look like Rubio is actually going to be mannered like while he's been the guy taking point on justifying this, I don't think he's going to actually be managed any of this on a day to day basis.
He's got a lot on his plate already. Stephen Miller seems to be the guy who is trying to position himself to actually be the Paul Brimmer in this situation. Who was the guy that the Bush administration put in charge of dealing with of like running a rack after it was taken over.
Yeah, the viceroy.
Yeah, And it's unclear what is Miller going to get that job? Will Rubio wind up doing it. It's looking more like Miller right now, But also to what extent will that job actually be running things? And you know, we'll talk about that in a little bit, I'm sure.
But the kind of cliffs notes of the situation is that there is evidence that came out right after the kidnapping that Baduro's vice president had reached out to the United States previously, like before the kidnapping, to talk about the possibility of taking over the country after giving madear up or him having a managed exile all of that was discussed, and at least per the reporting on it, she was turned down by the United States because they
thought they had a better option, and that option seems to have fallen through largely because the quote unquote democratically elected opposition leader who won a Nobel prize pissed off Trump. It's unclear how accurate that is that by you know, by winning the prompt by accepting the Nobel prize, did she get Eric kick herself out of the job. That's what some reporting has suggested. It's unclear to me how
true that actually is. It seems possible, surely, But at the end of the day, there was this offer made by Maduro's VP that was turned down by the US. And now it seems like, although we don't actually know what's happened to the background, it seems like she's who were working with. So either they came back and said, you know, it will take the deal, or something else
is going on. But she has both made this statements publicly that like, this is illegal, the United States is run by a group of criminals and extremists, and also but we'll work with them. So it does kind of seem to me like she made in fact, be very much in bed with the Trump administration and just trying to like massage this for her public, you know, because there's only so much you can get away with. I don't know.
Yeah, just to be clear on the timeline, Robert, Yeah, the first reporting of that, like Rodriguez option, we want to call it that. Yeah, they call it as well, was in October. That was out before the strike happened, right, and at least in the Miami Herald story they suggested that he had been part of that, so this could be a different thing, but that he had offered to step down over years, right.
Yeah, so I say it looked like there was a period of time where he was talking about like a managed exit, Yeah.
Going to Kato or Turkey or something like that. Yeah, now Rodriguez to Nina, But what would you expect Dlsea.
Rodriguez And yeah, it's unclear. Again, we don't really know. Did they just remove Maduro without having a plan and hadn't really finished talking with her or worked something out. It was the last thing she heard from them, them saying nah, we won't take this option, right, and then Maduro gets kidnapped. Did they work out a separate deal?
That just hasn't been reported on. We actually don't know, And I could totally see her being a stooge for US action here because it keeps her in power and it keeps her safe because Trump very recently threatened her, like after she made statements calling his team a bunch of extremists, she backpedaled and said, actually, if we're where, we'll go in to work with the US, because Trump said,
I'll do something worse to you than I did to him. Like, we don't know if they actually ironed out a set of responsibilities and obligations in back channels, or if we just removed Maduro and are like, all right, well, if we have to kill her, we'll kill her too, Like it's unclear what actually happened there.
Yeah, yeah, So we should also mention so this is being recorded on the night of Monday, January fifth. You're right, every kind of six or eight hours, new conflicting information from the Truck Administration about what their plan is comes out right, which which leads me to suspect they don't have a plan at all, because it keeps changing every couple of hours. So I don't know. But but in case, by the time this comes out. There is some kind
of public deal that's been worked out. That's what's going on. This is all changing extremely rapidly.
Yeah right, and you know what else changes rapidly, the economics of podcasting. Yeah, here's some of that.
These white coats working fowl.
And we're back. James is drinking a bad white claw, which is really I think the information our audience is most interested in. You know, invasions of Venezuela come and go. The US kidnaps people all the time. But James drinking a bad white claw. Let's let's let's actually really check it. James, what's the flavor you're you're experiencing right now?
Let me getting updated to that, bro. But that is green apple?
Green apple?
M oh boy, Yeah, yeah, it's it's foul. I wouldn't recommend it. You're in the.
Market, Yeah that sounds awful.
Don't do it to yourself.
Yeah, it's really the having Delta force kidnap you from your house of beverage.
Yeah absolutely, Uh, that's how they market Actually sweet, that's that's on the can right right. They must have got advance warning, like the time.
Yeah, what did they know and when did they know it? We'll never know, so let's keep talking about Venezuela. Yeah, we should talk about who Rodriguezz.
Yeah, Soguez was vice president and now she is president or will be sworny in its president. I believe she may have already been sworn him by the time you hear this.
She was sworn in I think like a couple hours ago. For the last article I.
Read, So her father was a Marxist gorilla. Her father kidnapped an American businessman, was arrested and then murdered, like torture to death. Yeah, as part of the quote unquie investigation into that. Right, her and her brother are kind
of like a power block in Venezuelan politic. She has really become more relevant, I guess nationally since MyD Like, she did do some stuff with Chaves early on, but like clashed with him personally and I guess allegedly, I mean I wasn't there, but Chaves didn't like that she wasn't deferential to him, and at one point send her home from I think they were in Russia and he sent her home from a a sort of mission that
they were doing their diplomatic mission. Since then, she is assuming a number of roles in Venezuelan government from since twenty thirteen right when Mondora came to power, to include overseeing intelligence at some time, and she has now become obviously president. Right, she has previously worked with like the Venezuelan I guess the analogy would be like Chamber of Commerce, which had previously been seen by like Chubby small as
like a bourgeois enter di I either enemy. Right, she has shown willingness to work with business, So I do wonder if that factors into the US analysis that, like, if she's willing to work with what it looks like the oil companies that they want her to work with, then then they can overlook a whole lot of other stuff, right, which has historically been how the US has approached places with oil. But Yeah, in terms of this, I think
that's probably the sort of TLDR on her career. And I think it is possible that she's willing to do some kind of chuvis more like you know whatever we're going to call this and have us extractive capitalism exists so long as the regime continues to exist. But the way that would work is still something that like I can't really get my head around for a regime which has made so much of its rhetorical legitimacy for so long attacking the United States.
Right right, Yeah, And that's kind of I mean, that seems to be the quandary Delsea finds herself in is she both has to refer to what's happened accurately as kidnapping and the actions of an illegitimate and deeply corrupt regime. And also she can't act that way if what we all think is accurate and she's basically acting as a negotiated buppet of the United States. She can only go
so far. And I feel like she's trapped in kind of a doomed situation, which may be part of what our administration intends is for her to be fundamentally doomed and fail and get coued herself, or you know, we
can replace her when there's protests against legitimacy. Like, I don't know what exactly the game is here, but I think that maybe something that was baked into the equation that like, this is not a functional situation for her, and when she gets forced out, that's something we can take advantage of.
Yeah, it's the reason of analysis, I think. I mean, we yeah, we should talk about the oil, right because Trump has been talking about the oil, right yeah, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I know you said you wanted to mention stuff about like it's not what it might seem on the face of it, right, There aren't giant lakes of oil in Venezuela you can just slurp up and sell.
Yeah.
So okay, it's sort of difficult to explain this all without really getting into the weeds of like how oil production works. But there's different like qualities of crude oil. And most of the Venezuelan stuff is extremely sour. It's really really shit. It's extremely low quality. And when you have oil that's this shit, you can't like refine it into being good, right like that that's just like not how the process works. It just sucks and so it
burns badly. But there is a lot of it. And this also gets back to Okay, so the way that Trump thinks this is going to work is that a bunch of oil companies are going to come in, They're going to do a bunch of like infrastructure development or whatever. They're going to sell the oil and they're going to make one hundred billion dollars that's not really how this works, as it is something that James has pointed out too.
But like, the actual value here is less from actually extracting the oil and more from a having all of these oil deposits on your balance sheet and B there's a lot of value in just having.
Power over it.
Yeah so okay, So oil prices are kind of they're set by a few things, like the price of oil is set by the bottom of the market.
Right.
Part of your profit comes from how how much more cheaply can you refine and extract your oil relative to whoever's doing it the most expensively, like whoever's doing the shittiest job of it. But that a lot of it also is just power. That's what OPEC is, right, And OPEC's ability to raise oil prices has to do with its ability to have all of their member states controlling their oil and controlling the sort of flow and distribution of it. Redistributing who is in power into OPEC is
actually a massive deal. Even if the actual oil here isn't very good, the power over the oil is extremely important.
Yeah.
So this doesn't work in the way that Trump wants it to work, which is like you know, you take the oil wells and you pump the oil out of the ground and suddenly you have money. But it is good for the oil companies that would take over the oil.
Yeah.
He consistently confuses stock price for like the economy slash it business success slash I'm saying, right.
Yeah, I guess one way to think about it is that like taking control of this oil, you're not really make the money off of this oil. You're making the money off of the impact controlling this oil has on the rest of the oil you produce.
Yeah. Maybe if you're someone who sees international relations in terms of great power competition, you're trying to put things in the Russia China bucket or the America bucket.
Yeah, And someone who sees trade, is this like zero sum game where one person wins and another person loses. Yeah, yeah, you know, like as Trump does.
Yes.
And also it is worth mentioning that like a lot of this oil goes to Cuba, yeah, which is really really important for the Cuban economy, which sort of can't function without the stock of Venezuelan oil. Like getting access to Venezuelan oil is one of the things that originally pulled Cuba out of the just hideous economic crisis they were in in the nineties after so eation collapsed.
Yeah, so it's why thirty two, it seems like a majority or at least half of the security forces who died fighting the US and this kidnapping attempt were Cuban because ac to Venezuela oil is an existential issue for the Cuban government. And it's also why Trump stated, unfortunately, probably accurately, that they're not looking at regime change in Cuba because they think that the regime is going to collapse on its own, which it might like, this is an existential problem for the Cuban regime.
But people who aren't aware. I spent a good amount of time in Caracas when I was much younger in Jerrem my undergraduate years at university, and I remember the only medical professionals I ever saw being because people have left right after Chinese mol the only medical professionals I ever saw were Cuban and clear, Cuban doctors are all over the world. One a Cuba's biggest sex words is doctors. But like it was very clear at that time that
like the two states were intermessed. You know that the Venezuela needs things that Cuba has, like those special military advisors and those doctors, and Cuba needs things to Menezuela have, like that oil.
Yeah, and breaking that the way people do norbally see oil as oil is just like liquid cash, and that's not true. It matters the actual materiality of the oil and how it works in the extraction process, and what kind of oil is matters a lot. And this is a scenario where where the oil is going and who has control over it matters more than who's able to sell it, which is very weird, but is how this works.
And Trump doesn't understand any of this. Maybe some of the people around him understand this, but Trump really just is in pure empire brain. They stole our stuff, which I assume someone who wanted this told him, Oh yeah, they stole a bunch of American oil and land. And now he's in just full empire mode.
Yeah. I think that seemings someone has told him at some point they stold us toff.
Well, yeah, and this is after the revolution. A bunch of what was like the property of US and foreign oil companies was nationalized, right, Yeah, because these companies had made deals with the corrupt previous regime and it was not really benefiting Venezuelan's Obviously that oil money has gone on to fit the current corrupt regime and still not
benefited Venezuelan's much. But there was a period of time under Schabz in which, like there were actual social benefits and a powerful state I was providing people with things, which is not to say it didn't have its flaws, but like there was a period of time in which there was a benefit to the average Venezuelan from the fact that their country was so oil rich. And nothing about the current situation is going to change positively for
the average Venezuelan. The profits are going to go from being siphoned from one group to another, but neither of those groups are regular Venezuelans.
Yeah, I think sometimes I will hear this. I have conservatively interviewed hundreds in not thousands of Venezuelan people in the last three or four years, right at the border in the Darien Gap in the US remotely by telephony, et cetera. And like, sometimes you'll hear that like Chabas was trying to do something good and it went bad, or that like it was okay forbid under chavas and then the corruption got out of control. Or even if it was okay until my daughter took parent out, it
was bad. That it doesn't matter, right, it's bad now. But like the things that the poverty I hear about from Venezuelan people is grinding and it is so upsetting. Like I have a great one noess for Venezuelan people. I've made a whole podcast thing about this. But the difficulty they encounter in every aspect of their lives because of sanctions, because of corruption, because of hyperinflation, because of
the glow oil price, like a lot of things. Right, their lives are miserable and this isn't going to change that. They're scared. Right when I speak to people in Venezuela and people with family in Venezuela this week, since this happened, what are they doing. They are not contrary to what an AI video might have made you believe out in
the streets celebrating. Now, they're trying to get enough food to make it through the next couple of weeks in case they have to hunker down in their home right, and it is hard to get any food at the best of times for these people.
In case they're bombed in place, the roads are bombed in case, they're occupied, like they're they're making preparations for being in a situation like Gazans have been in for much of the last several years. Right, yeah, and that's not an unreasonable like who knows what will happen. I hope it's not that, but it's not an unreasonable thing to prepare for.
No, it's not. Our friends when Memo and Robert and I have been a few people in Memo, that's what they said they did after the coup as well, because they didn't know what was going to happen, and they figured they need to be able to sit somewhere safe and stay there. And so yeah, this is not a liberation like I sor Jared Polis of all people being like, oh yeah, liberation. Also using the word liberation generally, Simon Bolivard, who is like the sort of bounding hero of Venezuela,
is referred to as the liberator. So using that phrase about the extra judicial kidnapping the head of state, Right, you don't understand the revenant of that word in Spanish, that's fine, you don't speak Spanish, don't use it. Yeah, but if you're going to use it, especially in this context, like it is crap in the extreme right to see that's the American politician.
So the other I think aspect of this is that, like, you know, if you look at this in a historical tale, the reason Boulevard succeeded was that, like the Haitian Republic gave a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of weapons the go liberate Latin America from the Spanish Empire. And then you know, if you look at what, like what is the US's relation to the closest thing I've been able to So I've been like racking my brain trying to find anything in history that looks like this
that the US has done. And we've done a lot of bad things, but the closest thing I can find to just we sent the army into kidnap a guy and deposed him was what we did to Aristide, who was the former leftist president now former leftist president of Haiti, who we did in fact send in special forces with Canada to just like sort of force onto a plane
at gunpoints and remove from power. So that situation was a little different in that at that point most of the country of Haiti was under the control of a bunch of like dust squad rubble groups. Yeah, which was the US justification. And this is just we just ran into a country and cook them. But I don't know the historical resonances of that are bleak. Yeah, and Jesus Christ, don't call it the liberation, good Lord of liberations.
Yeah, let's liberate our audience from having money that they can spend on these products. All right, we're back. I guess there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about. One of them is I'm seeing a lot of people respond to this by pointing out folks like Matt Walsh or other guys on the right who made statements about Trump being a candidate for peace and all these military interventions.
We're getting into being bad and are now celebrating what we're doing and openly celebrating like colonialism as a good thing. And I'm seeing a lot of folks trying to dunk on these people for being inconsistent. And I can't imagine a bigger waste of your time, none of these people. You have to get it out from the habit of thinking that truth matters. All that matters to these people is power, and they have it, and they have the guns. And you pointing out that they lied to get there,
and that they're not honest, they don't care. They're rich and they're getting richer, and they're powerful and they're getting more power. None of this is about principles. It's about winning, and you just have to understand that if you want to have any hope of beating them, because pretending that they're playing any other game than the one that they're playing is really dangerous. I don't think there's any profit in debating these people directly or confronting them directly about
the inconsistencies of their belief system. I do think it's deeply profitable to talk about the fact that they lied in our liars and are dragging us into another war two regular Americans. And the evidence suggests that this is incredibly unpopular in a way that the Iraq War was it.
People talk a lot about how massive the anti war protests were and how much anti war sentiment there was, but a majority of Americans were broadly supportive of what the Bush administration did in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time that they started doing it. Right, that doesn't mean that the protests weren't real. It doesn't mean that it's not significant that those massive protests happened. But most Americans
were broadly supportive of what the government was doing. That's not the case with what we're seeing in regards to public opinion over what's happening in Venezuela. There was a two day Reuters IPSO survey that concluded Monday, basically immediately after was announced what you know we did in Venezuela, and seventy two percent of Americans who responded said they are concerned that the US might get too involved in Venezuela. Only twenty five percent said that they don't share that concern.
Ninety percent of Democrats shared that concern as well, seventy four percent of Independence even fifty four percent of Republicans. Only forty five percent of Republicans said that they were not worried about the US getting overly involved in only nineteen percent of other voters. So this is really unpopular,
historically unpopular for a military intervention. And the entire bet that the Trump administration is making is that because they're not doing what Bush did in Iraq, they're not knocking out the whole government in debathifying it. They're just kicking out one guy and basically keeping his regime intact. They're just making that regime swear feeldy to the United States.
And their bet is that this will work, right, that the Venezuelan regime will continue to keep the country functioning as well as it was functioning before, which is not great but was not total collapse, and they can start extracting value. And honestly, I feel like that is that's a major motivation for a lot of people supporting Trump, for a lot of people in his administration who have financial interests. For obviously the oil and gas companies he's
trying to get on board. But I don't think money is even Trump's pry, And this is maybe an unpopular opinion. I think the primarys in Trump is doing this is that he wants number one, to show everybody, look, I did what Bush did, but it worked. I did it better. And number two, he wants to show everybody, look, I did what Obama did and took out a big bad guy. Right.
That's where they're trying to craft Madeiro is this major enemy of the United States, this architect of the opiate crisis, this guy who's worse than beIN Laden in a lot of ways, because Trump is still jealous of the fact that Obama got to take out bin Laden right as he sees it, and he wants his own version of that. Trump is doing this, I think primarily for vanity purposes, right. I know that seems shallow and silly, but I really
think that's most of what's going on for him. And I think if the end result of this is that things in Venezuela more or less continue the way they were before, he will call it a win and a lot of people might believe him. And I don't know, it doesn't even necessarily matter if any money actually comes into the United States over this. They'll just lie about it.
You know, some individual Americans will make money, and I think that'll probably be enough for Trump to feel like he got a win and for his pr apparatus to notch this up as a win. And I think that's all he really cares about. And so I do think it's worth really hitting how criminal this is and how harmful this is. But ultimately, what's going to determine whether or not Americans see this as a calamity or not is how well this all works out in the long run.
And that's a really tough thing to even think about because you don't want it to work well because it will embolden Trump to keep doing this and the global harm will be greater. On the other hand, I don't want civil life in Venezuela to collapse, right, So it's it's tough.
Yeah, right, yeah, I don't people to suffer any I mean just around the world too, when like I heard Min online called a meeting in Mihandma when he heard about this because he was worried, right, Like, the paranoia of dictators is about to go through the ceiling, and that's going to result in people being tortured and killed.
It's going to result in people torture, and it's going to result in more countries seeking to get nuclear weapons because they will accurately recognize that that is the only security anyone has. It is understated how much more dangerous what Bush did in Iraq made the world because of how it's made different leaders around the world think about
the possession of nuclear weapons. Right, Iran is fundamentally right in its calculus that getting a nuke will make the regime safer because it might be the only thing that can protect them now. Things in Iran are not looking
very stable right now either. Again, this is another situation where just decades of protest and the weakness of the regime might wind up working in Trump's favor because things are looking pretty gnarly for the Iranian regime right now, and maybe Trump Trump has made some statements since kidnapping Maduro about going into Iran. They very well may do that, but they also may not need to.
Yeah, there's some most sense suggesting that they at least have preparations in place for doing something in Iran, right, which may or they need to do right to obviously move things to point towards Iran, right, But that is an action in itself.
Yeah, that really. I mean, there's a lot that worries me there. But I think they're going to keep fucking around like this as long as they feel like it will benefit them, And right now this feels like a win to them. Yeah, So this is going to function like a drug. They're going to start looking for another hit as soon as the high from this fase.
Yeah, and as soon as they need a domestic distraction.
Right right. A lot of this stuff and the evidence we have so far suggests that people fucking hate this, and we'll probably keep hating this. But it depends on whether or not this all fades out, and if the news is covered is actually maybe it worked right, which will probably be based on really dogshit journalism.
The Washington Post did a preferential offed already.
I think, oh good, Yeah, I'm glad they're helping out our democracy die in darkness. They're going to keep chasing this high and it will wind up collapsing on them eventually. The question is how many countries will have to pay the price beforehand and how much worse will things get? In the United States?
Obviously, yeah, will the price be right when they lose a higher SF team.
Or cash right when Delta Force gets wiped out? When we have a bunch of helicopters down a bunch of Americans? Caption what does Trump do? Then? Do we get a panic? This is kind of where I see like the potential, the scary potential for something like a nuclear January sixth, where like, do we get a panic response that leads to a horrific loss of life? Because Trump sees himself
as being embarrassed? Oh my God, they killed a whole team, Like I have no option but to kill a shitload of people to distract from the fact that I failed here, right, that that does really concern me too.
Yeah, if that happens, you know, there was even if it's not nuclear, right, even it's just conventional weapons on cities.
Right right, right, And yeah, new guy, I shouldn't even bring up the nuclear thing, but like it does concern me.
Nuclear football, right, He's the one who gets right choice right.
This is going to just get more. This is going to become integral to his sense of like self worth that like, no, I did this and it worked in there, and if all his guys get wiped out failing at one of these things, that's not going to go well for anybody.
No, it's not.
We'll have a fun couple hours on Twitter, but it's going to be really bad, really fast.
Yeah. I told very briefly about a couple of implications domestically.
Sure.
The main one is that the DOJ has already fared fro an extension in the case which Judge Bosberg is overseeing regarding the Alien Enemies Act. Right, Yeah, what this will mean for Venezuelan nationals in the United States. It is unlikely that this will mean something good.
Right.
It is unlikely that they will have a country that they would want to return to, and it's possible that it's going to be used to force them to return to it anyway, to a country which is extremely paranoid about US buys. Because someone in Maduro's very close entourage
leaked the entire plan that Trump. Many presidents would not have set this to the press, but Trump did right that they had the entire plans for his house and that they built a replica of it to include They knew he had a safe room, they knew it was steel, and they knew they could cut into it with cutting torches. Someone leaked that information. That means that people coming back from the United States are going to be under scrutiny, right,
and that is not good for them. I don't see this regime stopping sending people back because they're not an alien element anymore. I don't see that, and I can I can see the regime if it does manage when saw Rodriguez at something of a puppet leaning on Rodriguez to accept people removed from the United States, Right, that is extremely concerning and it's not being reported on right because migrants are not front and center where a lot
of American newspapers think about things. But I think for those people, this is petrifying, right the country that you came to to be safe is they're bombing the country that you came from. It's also trying to kick you out, like you are stuck in the middle of this game, and all you wanted was a place to raise your kids where you know they might have a fair crack at a decent life. It's it's heartbreaking for those people.
Yeah, and I think that's probably all we've got to say for now. I mean, I guess I'll address briefly because people have asked, do you see this as like an annexa an Angelus, you know, the annexation of or of Czechoslovakia of that kind of moment, or is this more like the invasion of Poland? And I guess my answer is is its own thing. It doesn't directly graph on any of those other than that where it does
very directly graph. And what is relevant in comparing it to is what happened to the Nazis and to Hitler personally as they started seeing success taking things militarily, they
made some big gambles that were not known. One thing that gets underdiscussed when talking about what Germany was doing in that period of time is how many military leaders within Germany thought that the annexation of particularly Czechoslovakia was a horrible idea because in a head to head fight, it was not clear whatsoever that the Wehrmacht could defeat
the Czech military and their defenses. That was very much in debate, and a lot of Hitler's advisors thought it was a terrible idea because they didn't think they could win, and it wound up not really being a factor because everyone caved and nobody wanted to fight. Which is the problem that we're having right now, right is that nobody
actually wants to confront these people. The Democrats are himming and ahio whether or not the try for impeachment again or you know, there's this this fear of actually directly confronting these people. That is part of what's emboldening them to keep trying shit like this. And what's very relevant to the Nazis is that if this works, and we're talking if this works not in the long run, because they're not going to wait twenty years to see if
this was a good idea. They're going to wait a couple of weeks, you know, maybe a few months, and if it seems like, hey, it worked, the Venezuela's not falling apart, you know, we've got we actually got what we think is a good pr out of it. They'll
try again, and they'll try again. And the Nazis tried again and again until they started making checks that their asses couldn't cash, right, And that is the thing that's relevant, because that is something all fascists have in common, is this confidence that gets them very far in a lot of ways, because if they're willing to gamble and the other people aren't willing to confront them or fight or
gamble themselves, then they'll win by default. But when that stops and people start confronting them, the shortcomings of the state that they've built and of the militaries that they built become increasingly evident. And I do think that's the road that we're on. I don't know where it'll end. I don't know, if you know, Trump could die of a heart attack tomorrow, and maybe whoever takes over will be more cautious. I don't know what's going to happen, but I know that we've started down that road.
Yeah, and that's not a good thing.
Nope.
I guess we should just say because people will be incredibly annoying on the internet. Like saying that it is illegal and wrong to kidnap Madua does not mean that we think Maduro is great, just in the same way as saying the Iraq war is wrong doesn't mean we love Sadam Passayin like no, two things can be bad. People tell you abough, I should grow up.
Like I said at the start, I don't think you have to. I don't think anyone owes you. And if someone is saying, like, hey, you have to answer for these bad things Maduro did when critiquing the US for this, I think that's bullshit and I think you should tell them to fuck off.
Right, it's not the issue AT's take care.
Maduro's personal qualities are irrelevant, as is always the case with this. What we're doing is illegal and bad.
It could happen.
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
You listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.