| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The Trump administration deposes Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in a shocking and astonishing mission by the United States military. | ||
| Plus, is the Iranian regime going to fall? | ||
| And governor of Minnesota Tim Walz announces he is not running for re-election in the wake of gigantic fraud allegations. | ||
| First, we are only five days into the year. | ||
| If this weekend was any indication, this is going to be a year where you want the news as it happens, not tabloids, not clickbait, actual news, actual facts, well informed in real time, and analysis from the most trusted voices in conservative media. | ||
| This is why the Daily Wire exists. | ||
| You get serious investigative journalism uncovering domestic issues like fraud in Minneapolis, real reporting on major international developments like the U.S. operation in Venezuela. | ||
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| Well, folks, we are here, 2026, and it's going to be a huge year as this year develops. | ||
| You're going to hear about all the exciting things that we have planned here for you at Daily Wire. | ||
| It's more than we have ever done before by a very, very long shot. | ||
| But I want to start this year by talking about some big predictions for 2026. | ||
| 2026 is the year of clarity. | ||
| All the veils are going to fall. | ||
| People are going to show you who they are. | ||
| Now, that can be scary. | ||
| Sometimes it's difficult to deal with the realities of life, the realities of people you once trusted showing themselves to be something else. | ||
| It can also be surprising and heartening because sometimes people show themselves to be a lot better than you thought they were. | ||
| But this year, events in the United States and the world more broadly are going to unmask nearly everyone. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because I think we are on the precipice of something pretty big. | ||
| And when big things happen, when the world becomes more chaotic, people reveal themselves. | ||
| Adversity reveals character. | ||
| And we're about to experience some adversity as Americans. | ||
| Where will that adversity come from? | ||
| Well, it could come from the international sphere. | ||
| Adversity may spring from China's authoritarian ambitions against Taiwan or its global desire to expand power bases from Africa to Latin America. | ||
| Already, we've seen some politicians and commentators shying away from revealing the realities about China, fearful that doing so could undercut their delusional vision of a world in which America in retreat is somehow good rather than harmful. | ||
| Adversity could arise from the continued conflict between Russia and Ukraine or from Russia's growing ambitions in the region and globally. | ||
| Many figures are already revealing themselves in their views of Russia, often evidencing shocking blindness toward what Russia is, what Russia wants, up to and including full-scale propagandizing on behalf of a tyrannical regime steeped in hatred of the values of the United States. | ||
| Adversity could come from Iran's continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and international terrorism, or its desperate desire to stave off internal regime change, or from its propaganda arms in Qatar and elsewhere, pushing anti-Western, anti-American bull. | ||
| Many politicians and commentators are already showing themselves willing to do anything and everything on behalf of such regimes, up to and including flying cover for radical Islam. | ||
| Adversity might emanate from chaos in our southern hemisphere, where rogue states like Venezuela were pursuing deeper relations with our enemies until President Trump acted, as we'll get to in a moment, or from Europe, where unchecked immigration, combined with regulatory overreach, threatens to doom an entire continent to stagnation and disarray. | ||
| Could come from any other variety of sources on the foreign front. | ||
| The world is a chaotic place. | ||
| It's a more chaotic place when America is weak, as many on the left and the right wish to make her. | ||
| Adversity will arise domestically too. | ||
| Adversity may come in the form of economic turmoil. | ||
| While the economy right now appears to be in pretty good shape, nobody knows how the current AI investment cycle will play out in the short term. | ||
| And economic turmoil brings with it political vultures. | ||
| Already, we've seen some conservatives turning away from defense of free markets in favor of statism that seems more familiar from the left. | ||
| And we've seen leftists embracing the most extreme versions of wealth seizure and collectivist centralization. | ||
| Adversity will certainly originate in the size and scope of our massive and bureaucratic government, which provides extraordinary obstacles to American achievement and overwhelming support to people who are willing to steal from their fellow Americans. | ||
| Adversity will certainly come too in the form of reactionary posturing. | ||
| Lies told by the left will be mirrored in lies told by the right, and vice versa, resulting in a continued spiral of conspiratorial polarization totally disconnected from the actual lives of most Americans. | ||
| Already, we've seen cynical politicians and morally corrupt commentators spew untruths in pursuit of algorithmic momentum, and that is definitely going to accelerate this year. | ||
| Politicians and commentators reveal themselves in how they react to adversity. | ||
| So, do they react by telling you the truth, no matter how much their audience might dislike it? | ||
| Or do they lie to you by telling you the things they think you want to hear? | ||
| Do they react out of principle or out of convenience? | ||
| Do they recommend coalitional solidarity at the expense of basic decency and integrity and truth? | ||
| In other words, do they treat you like a sucker or do they treat you like a citizen? | ||
| Of course, it's an election year, and that means that we're going to be swamped by lies and prevarications, by a lot of politicians who promise the moon and deliver nothing. | ||
| We'll be swamped too by commentators who suggest that political failure results generally from a lack of Nietzschean will rather than the complicated give and take of normal day-to-day politics, and who say that if you get more outraged, conspiratorial, and angry, somehow our politics will improve. | ||
| How will we, Americans, react to that adversity, that onslaught of cultivated resentment and Machiavellian manipulation? | ||
| The American Republic is founded on the one hand in a fundamental supposition that human beings are capable of discernment, of acting morally when faced with adversity, of preferring truth to comforting falsehood, of recognizing our own fallibility. | ||
| And the American Republic is founded on the other hand on the reality of human nature's darker side, our tribalism, our vanality, our selfishness. | ||
| All of which, when put together, is why our founders preferred a republic of checks and balances rather than a Francoist dictatorship or a pure democracy. | ||
| It's why James Madison wrote in Federalist 51: Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. | ||
| The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. | ||
| It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. | ||
| But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? | ||
| If men were angels, no government would be necessary. | ||
| If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. | ||
| In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this. | ||
| You must first enable the government to control the governed and, in the next place, oblige it to control itself. | ||
| So, in the end, it's up to us. | ||
| We have to become better at discernment. | ||
| We have to act with humility. | ||
| We, the American people, must discern who is telling us the truth, even when we don't want to hear it, and who is lying to us out of audience capture or political expediency or sycophancy. | ||
| We have to work to preserve the checks and balances of our system, even checks and balances that might seem to deprive us of temporary power. | ||
| If we don't, we risk an authoritarian centralization that turns against basic freedom. | ||
| What's more, we risk an arrogance about our own nature that surely turns to disaster, even if our side seems to have that temporary upper hand. | ||
| Most of all, we have to remember this: people who promise utopia, an end to adversity, an end to the chaos and turmoil of life, so long as you give them your trust and your power, are providing you a Faustian bargain in which you receive neither utopia nor freedom. | ||
| Those who tell you that your future is not in your hands and who encourage you to surrender whatever is left of that future to a demoralizing conspiracism, those people are lying to you and they are lying to you for their own gain. | ||
| And you deserve better than that, and we all deserve better than that. | ||
| So, let 2026 be a year of clarity. | ||
| Let people reveal themselves for who they are and believe them when they show you. | ||
| And may we all approach the adversities of whatever comes our way with the courage, conviction, and decency that make America truly great. | ||
| We'll get to everything that just went down in Venezuela in a moment. | ||
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| Okay, now on to the news of the day, which is the news of the year, which is not saying a lot since we are only a few days into the year, but my goodness, the president of the United States has begun 2026 with a bang, literally a bang, because over the course of the last couple of days, the United States deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro by sending in American troops to essentially extradite him to the United States. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, by the time the sun rose in Caracas, this would have been Saturday morning, Nicholas Maduro's nearly 13-year grip on power had ended. | ||
| In handcuffs, blindfolded, wearing a gray sweatsuit, he was on a U.S. warship on his way to New York City to face narco-terrorism charges following a five-hour operation. | ||
| What happens next isn't clear. | ||
| We'll get to that in a moment. | ||
| The mission, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, was the culmination of months of secretive planning and a series of mixed signals that allowed the United States to preserve the element of surprise, even though the incursion at times seemed inevitable. | ||
| Starting late this past summer, intelligence personnel began tracking what Maduro ate and wore, where he lived and traveled. | ||
| And they were helped apparently by an asset within the Venezuelan leader's inner circle, according to administration officials and others familiar with the operation. | ||
| We'll get back to who that source was, who they were likely working for, because that has implications for what happens next. | ||
| Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations rehearsed and rehearsed, practicing how to extract the Venezuelan president inside a replica of his fortified compound. | ||
| Apparently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller met regularly to discuss the mission. | ||
| Trump's advisors were torn about the wisdom of a military operation, and they offered conflicting statements publicly. | ||
| Military officials told Trump any mistake could result in embarrassing failure. | ||
| And they warned that some members of the conservative base would be outraged, even if it was successful, which we'll get to again in a moment, because there are some pseudo-conservatives who are spending today fulminating about the great evil of the United States taking out one of the worst dictators on planet Earth and certainly the worst dictator in the Western hemisphere. | ||
| President Trump ultimately concluded that Maduro, indicted in the United States, needed to face justice and that his supporters would still back his decision, which, by the way, is true. | ||
| Apparently, there was a plan in place by late December. | ||
| Trump tried to pressure Maduro to basically go into exile on his own. | ||
| He refused. | ||
| The U.S. thought about doing this on Christmas and also on New Year's Day, but the weather prevented it. | ||
| And then finally, at 10:46 p.m. on Friday, Operation Absolute Resolve was a go. | ||
| Here is General Dan Raisin Kane detailing the operational details for Absolute Resolve. | ||
| Last night, on the order of the President of the United States and in support of a request from the Department of Justice, as the President said, the United States military conducted an apprehension mission in Caracas, Venezuela to bring to justice two indicted persons, Nicholas and Cecile Maduro. | ||
| This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, was discreet, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January 2nd and was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation that, frankly, only the United States military could undertake. | ||
| Our interagency work began months ago and built on decades of experience of integrating complex air, ground, space, and maritime operations. | ||
| While the past two decades have honed the skills of our special operations forces, this particular mission required every component of our joint force with soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians working in unison with our intelligence agency partners and law enforcement teammates in an unprecedented operation. | ||
| According to the Wall Street Journal, the United States sent overwhelming air power for the operation that included F-18s, F-22s, F-35s, EA-18 Growlers, E-2 Hawkeye Command and Control Aircraft, B-1 bombers. | ||
| They were tasked with dismantling and disabling Venezuela's air defense systems, which they did highly successfully. | ||
| Again, Russian defenses were being used by the Venezuelans. | ||
| Apparently, the Praetorian Guard from Maduro was Cuban. | ||
| He is propped up by outside regimes or was. | ||
| The helicopters, which carried an extraction force and law enforcement officers, at some points flew only 100 feet above the water during the flights into Venezuela, which is astonishing. | ||
| One U.S. aircraft was hit during the operation. | ||
| It remained flyable. | ||
| It returned home safely. | ||
| U.S. forces sustained some injuries. | ||
| No Americans were killed, according to President Trump. | ||
| At 2:01 local time, according to General Raisin Kane, a U.S. Delta force team arrived at Maduro's compound. | ||
| As they approached, the U.S. helicopters came under fire, and American forces then responded with overwhelming force and self-defense. | ||
| U.S. special forces arrived inside Maduro's compound. | ||
| They exchanged gunfire with Venezuelan personnel. | ||
| Probably some of those people were Cuban. | ||
| Maduro and his wife attempted to flee into a steel-reinforced safe room. | ||
| They were unable to close the door in time. | ||
| They gave up and they were taken into custody by the Justice Department. | ||
| President Trump announced the strike at 4:21 a.m. via Truth Social. | ||
| He said, Quote, the United States has successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the country. | ||
| This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement details to follow. | ||
| There will be a news conference at 11 a.m. at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Here are some of the images from the makeshift situation room that was set up at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| As you can see, it's Pete Hegseth. | ||
| That'd be the CIA director John Ratcliffe and the president of the United States who are sitting in this makeshift operations room watching this thing play out. | ||
| Another picture, of course, of the president of the United States looking on as the operation takes place. | ||
| And then you have the president flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and John Ratcliffe, the leader of the CIA. | ||
| An excellent top team here for the president of the United States, as the success of the mission would seem to suggest. | ||
| Maduro was then brought aboard the USS Iwo Jima, wearing a Nike tracksuit. | ||
| And of course, they have the ear and eye blackout on him, so he doesn't know quite where he is. | ||
| There is tape of him being escorted by a swarm of agents in New York onto the tarmac. | ||
| Any attempt by New York Mayor Zorhan Mamdani to prevent all of this was unsuccessful. | ||
| Here was Nicolas Maduro being escorted onto American soil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In what looks like a maybe a gray or blue sweatshirt. | |
| We saw him a little bit earlier on the image that the president posted, blindfolded and handcuffed. | ||
| And it appears maybe he's still blindfolded in a gray sweatshirt, which would likely come off as blue given the daylight scenario, the lack of daylight. | ||
| Maduro has been transferred to a Manhattan federal courthouse early on Monday, where he is set to appear on charges related to cocaine trafficking. | ||
| Here is the tape of his perp walk at the DEA New York City headquarters. | ||
| As you can see, here he is being walked through. | ||
| It's an astonishing thing what the president of the United States and the U.S. military just pulled off. | ||
| And first of all, let's just be clear: the U.S. military is so badass, it's astonishing. | ||
| I mean, truly amazing, truly, truly amazing. | ||
| As the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, F-A-F-O, Nicholas Maduro had been taunting the United States for a very long time, and it turns out that President Trump is not one to be taunted. | ||
| Here is the Secretary of Defense. | ||
| Nicholas Maduro had his chance, just like Iran had their chance, until they didn't and until he didn't. | ||
| He effed around and he found out. | ||
| Well, fair enough. | ||
| Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed that idea. | ||
| He said, listen, when President Trump says a thing, he means he is going to do the thing. | ||
| But I want to be clear about one thing. | ||
| Nicolas Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this. | ||
| He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers and chose instead to act like a wild man, chose instead to play around. | ||
| And the result is what we saw tonight. | ||
| The other message here is the following. | ||
| You have a guy, like many people around the world, they like to play games. | ||
| You have a guy who decides he's going to invite Iran into his country, is going to do the confiscation of American oil companies, is going to flood our country with gang members, is going to take Americans prisoner and try to hold them for hostage and trade them like he was able to do with the Biden administration. | ||
| Basically likes to play games all this time and thinks nothing's going to happen. | ||
| And I hope what people now understand is that we have a president. | ||
| The 47th president of the United States is not a game player. | ||
| When he tells you that he's going to do something, when he tells you he's going to address a problem, he means it. | ||
| This does have major implications for America's pursuit of its own political interests around the world, because what it means, the president is not one to bluff. | ||
| This is the second major military operation pursued by the Trump administration that involved essentially a few hours of American force, resulting in catastrophic consequences for America's enemies. | ||
| The first, of course, was last year when the president authorized that B-2 bomber flight into Iran to take out the Fordo nuclear facility, totally upending geopolitics in the region with one airstrike. | ||
| And now what he's done with Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. | ||
| President Trump explained exactly what he is doing. | ||
| And again, I have been saying for a very long time that President Trump's foreign policy is not isolationism. | ||
| Anyone who has been telling you that it is isolationism is lying to you, lying to you. | ||
| By the way, their view of foreign policy also happens to be wrong about the world, just as a matter of reality, which we'll get to in a little while here. | ||
| The president was on this program before the election, explaining that his foreign policy is peace through strength, that he pursues America's interests in muscular, realist fashion. | ||
| He's not interested in long-term hundreds of thousands of troops occupying place. | ||
| He's not interested in Iraq-style occupations, but he is interested in pursuing America's real hard interests in the world because that does put Americans first. | ||
| He has always been clear about this. | ||
| Anybody who, again, has been lying to you about this was doing just that lying to you. | ||
| Well, here's President Trump explaining why he just did what he did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why is running a country in South America, America first? | |
| Well, I think it is because we want to surround ourselves with good neighbors. | ||
| We want to surround ourselves with stability. | ||
| We want to surround ourselves with energy. | ||
| We have tremendous energy in that country. | ||
| It's very important that we protect it. | ||
| We need that for ourselves. | ||
| We need that for the world. | ||
| And we want to make sure we can protect it. | ||
| Why, I mean, it's almost as though the president understands that the United States exists on a globe. | ||
| And on that globe are many other countries. | ||
| And we have interests in what happens in those other countries, including in places like Venezuela, or, for example, in Iran, or for example, in Taiwan, or maybe even, for example, in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. | ||
| It turns out that the United States is the world's dominant hegemon, has interests in a lot of different areas. | ||
| That doesn't mean that we should, of course, be in full-scale occupational war mode in all or any of those areas. | ||
| It does mean that pretending that an America in retreat, that retreats inside its own borders, makes Americans safer and more prosperous, that is a lie. | ||
| And that's something the president of the United States understands. | ||
| Here is the president also explaining over the course of the last 48 hours that, as opposed to Afghanistan, we are no longer a laughingstock, that Joe Biden made us a laughing stock, that Joe Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan likely led to the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And President Trump says, listen, if our policy is indeed, as the Secretary of War says, FAFO, then fewer people are likely to FA. | ||
| Compare this to Afghanistan, where we were a laughing stock all over the world. | ||
| We're not a laughingstock anymore. | ||
| No, we have the greatest military in the world by far. | ||
| We have the greatest equipment, military equipment in the world by far. | ||
| He is not wrong, of course. | ||
| Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on pretty much all of the Sunday shows and was grilled by a wide variety of reporters, many of whom were very critical of President Trump for not doing anything about Maduro during his first term. | ||
| Watching everybody flip and suddenly become Maduro defender. | ||
| This is President Trump's magical gift politically. | ||
| Whatever he does, a bunch of people always have to come out in opposition to it. | ||
| Always. | ||
| It doesn't matter if he deposes a murderous dictator like Nicolas Maduro. | ||
| Some people still have to be upset about it. | ||
| Well, here was the Secretary of State explaining that actually this is in the national interest of the United States. | ||
| So now there are other people in charge of the military and police apparatus there. | ||
| They're going to have to decide now what direction they want to go. | ||
| And we hope they will choose a different direction than the one Nicolas Maduro picked. | ||
| Ultimately, we hope this leads to a holistic transition all the way around in Venezuela, societal, political, all of that. | ||
| We're in favor of all of that. | ||
| But right now, we have to take the first steps. | ||
| And the first steps are securing what's in the national interest of the United States and also beneficial to the people of Venezuela. | ||
| And those are the things that we're focused on right now. | ||
| No more drug trafficking. | ||
| No more Iran has beloved presence there and no more using the oil industry to enrich all our adversaries around the world and not benefiting the people of Venezuela or frankly, benefiting the United States and the region. | ||
| President Trump has called this the Don Rowe doctrine as opposed to the Monroe Doctrine. | ||
| I got to say, I kind of love. | ||
| Here's the president of the United States. | ||
| All of these actions were in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy, dating back more than two centuries and not anymore. | ||
| All the way back, it dated to the Monroe doctrines. | ||
| And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot. | ||
| By a real lot. | ||
| They now call it the Donroe Document. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Everything's branded. | ||
| Everything's branded. | ||
| It's pretty hysterical. | ||
| Okay, so to go back for a moment so people even understand what the hell is going on. | ||
| Who is Nicolas Maduro? | ||
| Why does any of this matter? | ||
| So Nicolas Maduro took over for the strongman, Hugo Chavez, who had transitioned Venezuela from an oil-rich democratic state into a socialist dictatorship, totally oppositional to the interests of the United States in 1999. | ||
| Hugo Chavez died in 2013, and Nicolas Maduro took over as his successor. | ||
| There has not been a real election in Venezuela for a quarter century because of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. | ||
| He was responsible for tens of thousands of extrajudicial executions, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. | ||
| Typically, I don't cite the UN as a source. | ||
| But when the UN is critical of left-wing dictators, it's probably true because the UN is, in fact, run by people who are friendly to left-wing dictators as a general rule. | ||
| Health and hunger crises have likely cost hundreds of thousands of lives. | ||
| Infant mortality skyrocketed under the Chavez and then under the Maduro regimes. | ||
| Between 2013 and 2021, when Maduro was already in charge, GDP per capita in Venezuela dropped by 75%. | ||
| 75%. | ||
| In 1999, GDP per capita in Venezuela, this is just before Chavez took over, was about $4,000 per year. | ||
| By 2021, it was $1,500 per year. | ||
| Today, it is still under $3,000 per capita. | ||
| And there's no excuse for this because, of course, Venezuela is one of the most resource-rich nations on earth, rich in gold, rich in oil. | ||
| Oil production dropped from 3.2 million barrels of oil per day in 1999 to 850,000 barrels of oil per day. | ||
| Again, that is a 75% drop in oil production. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they nationalized the oil industry. | ||
| They barred American companies from trafficking in oil, from drilling, from ownership in the oil industry, which meant less production. | ||
| Because when you nationalize things and then you hand over all the proceeds to your cronies, it turns out things become wildly less productive. | ||
| Hyperinflation then set in because the government didn't have enough money to pay for all of the services it had promised. | ||
| So it just started printing money. | ||
| Over the course of the Chavez and then Maduro regimes, nearly 8 million people, it's like 25% of the entire population fled Venezuela. | ||
| In terms of international geopolitics, Maduro was an ally of all of America's enemies. | ||
| He made common cause with Russia. | ||
| It was Russian weapons that were supposed to provide air cover for Maduro. | ||
| Obviously, that failed. | ||
| They had shipped the Russians into Venezuela systems, including the S-300 VM and Buk M2 missiles, none of which did any good against American forces. | ||
| China, of course, is a major patron state of Venezuela. | ||
| They lent them some $50 billion repaid in crude oil. | ||
| China has some natural resources, but not a lot of oil. | ||
| They get a lot of it from Venezuela and a lot of it from Iran. | ||
| 70% of all Venezuelan oil exports went to China. | ||
| Obviously, the Iran, China, Russia, Axis is very involved in Venezuela as well. | ||
| Not only, as you heard the Secretary of State mention, does Iran actually have fighters in Venezuela? | ||
| Hezbollah actually does work in Venezuela, but Iran sent Dilowins to process its heavy crude, and Venezuela paid in gold. | ||
| Iran manufactures suicide drones in Venezuela as well. | ||
| Okay, so those are all reasons why the United States has an interest. | ||
| And that's leaving aside the massive drug trafficking into the United States, the massive migration north that has happened because of misgovernance in Venezuela, the fact that Venezuela is a sponsor state of Cuba, which of course exists very short distance from the United States. | ||
| So what comes next? | ||
| Well, first we have to sort of determine what happened here. | ||
| So there are a couple of models for changing regimes in Latin and South America. | ||
| One model is what I think we just saw in Venezuela. | ||
| The other model is what we saw in Panama. | ||
| So a lot of people are likening what we saw in Venezuela over the weekend to what happened in Panama under George H.W. Bush. | ||
| So there was an invasion of Panama that happened under George H.W. Bush, in which Manuel Noriega, who was the dictator of Panama, was arrested, brought to the United States, charged. | ||
| And then the regime in Panama was essentially overthrown. | ||
| Noriega ended up being tried and convicted in the United States on charges of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering and served 20 years in the U.S. and then was extradited to France. | ||
| The basis for invading Panama at that time was that Noriega had declared a state of war and the U.S. had declared a response to an imminent threat. | ||
| There were about 35,000 Americans living in the canal zone. | ||
| And so the United States took significant action. | ||
| We had 13,000 troops in the Panama Canal Zone in the first place because we built it. | ||
| And we added another 14,000 troops. | ||
| And then we didn't just depose Noriega. | ||
| We swore in Guillermo Andara, who was the winner of the 1989 election as president and dismantled the entire Panamanian defense forces and replaced them with the Panamanian public forces. | ||
| So that is not what happened here. | ||
| What happened here is a large-scale airstrike in Caracas, the use of special forces in order to extradite Maduro and the vice president, who is, in fact, a hard-nosed socialist Machiavellian player named Delsi Rodriguez, who is as bad as Maduro in nearly every way, except that may see reality, maybe more pragmatic than Maduro. | ||
| She was immediately sworn in and is apparently expressing willingness to cooperate with the United States transition. | ||
| So what this looks more like is a palace coup. | ||
| And that brings us back to that statement in the Wall Street Journal that there were sources who were close to Maduro who were giving the United States information. | ||
| Would not be a surprise at all at all if those sources were very close to Del City Rodriguez, the vice president of Venezuela. | ||
| Now, if Rodriguez remains in power for a long period of time without granting America her interests in Venezuela, then that's the way you can judge whether this is a success or a failure. | ||
| Do things change in Venezuela? | ||
| Now, President Trump surprised a lot of people by saying that, for example, the opposition leader in Venezuela, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, would not be the new leader of Venezuela, at least in the short term, Maria Machado. | ||
| So President Trump was asked about Machado. | ||
| He said she's nice, but she doesn't have the support. | ||
| Oh, I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. | ||
| She doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country. | ||
| She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect. | ||
| Okay, so what does he mean by that? | ||
| He doesn't mean that she doesn't actually have the quote-unquote respect. | ||
| What he actually means is that she does not have control of the military apparatus. | ||
| And absent the United States inserting tens of thousands of troops to overthrow the Venezuelan military, the United States instead is going to put extraordinary external pressure on Del Codriguez to initiate change. | ||
| If he had immediately come out, for example, and said we're going to put Machado in place, that might have started a civil war in Venezuela. | ||
| It may have required massive American interventionism on the ground. | ||
| So right now, the Trump administration is going to try and work with Del Codriguez to effectuate that change. | ||
| Rodriguez, for her part, is already virtue signaling to all of her socialist friends. | ||
| She's saying the Zionists did this. | ||
| What can't the Zionists do? | ||
| My goodness. | ||
| I mean, really, pretty incredible at everything, apparently. | ||
| But she's doing that. | ||
| She's, of course, saying it's terrible that the United States took Maduro out. | ||
| Wink, wink, nod, nod. | ||
| In reality, it seems as though the Trump administration is going to use external pressure to get Del Codriguez to open up the oil industry, to maybe make some democratic changes, to transition toward a more orderly system. | ||
| Here is President Trump suggesting the United States is running Venezuela. | ||
| And again, people are taking this at face value. | ||
| People are suggesting this means that Marco Rubio is now dictator of Venezuela. | ||
| What President Trump, I believe, means that the United States' external pressure on Venezuela will cause the new regime leadership to work with us. | ||
| And if they don't, there's more where that came from. | ||
| So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. | ||
| And it has to be judicious because that's what we're all about. | ||
| We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela. | ||
| And that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. | ||
| It's their homeland. | ||
| We can't take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn't have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind. | ||
| And so what he means there is we're going to keep our boot on the throat of Del Codriguez and the administration there. | ||
| And again, he's warning her. | ||
| He says, listen, if you don't do what we want you to do, then maybe we'll do it again, right? | ||
| We're not, we don't want boots on the ground there, but if you don't do what we want you to do, then there might be boots on the ground. | ||
| We're not going to telegraph what we're doing. | ||
|
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Does the U.S. running the country mean that U.S. troops will be on the ground? | |
| How will that work? | ||
| Well, you know, they always say boots on the ground. | ||
| Oh, so we're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have. | ||
| We had boots on the ground last night at a very high level, actually. | ||
| We're not afraid of it. | ||
| We don't mind saying it. | ||
| Again, that is him saying F around and find out. | ||
| Marco Rubio was asked by Kristen Welker over at NBC about President Trump's comments on quote-unquote running Venezuela. | ||
| And here's what the Secretary of State had to say. | ||
| Concerning policy, the policy with regards to this. | ||
| We want Venezuela to move in a certain direction because not only do we think it's good for the people of Venezuela, it's in our national interest. | ||
| It either touches on something that's a threat to our national security or touches on something that's either beneficial or harmful. | ||
|
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And are you involved in that transition? | |
| So obviously I'm very involved in this. | ||
| Well, of course, I mean, I think everyone knows I'm pretty involved on politics in this hemisphere. | ||
| Obviously, a Secretary of State, a national security advisor, very involved in all these elements. | ||
| The Department of War plays a very important role here, along with the Department of Justice, for example, because they're the ones that have to go to court. | ||
| So this is a team effort by the entire national security apparatus of our country, but it is running this policy. | ||
| Okay, so again, Secretary of State Rubio, by the way, coming off amazingly well in all of this. | ||
| I have to say, this is a huge moment for Secretary of State Rubio. | ||
| President Trump suggested that, yes, there are some hard American interests at stake here, including oil. | ||
| It is pretty amazing that President Trump just says all the quiet parts out loud. | ||
| And frankly, I think it's good. | ||
| Yes, America has an interest in Venezuelan oil that we opened up in the first place. | ||
| Let us be clear, it was American companies that opened the Venezuelan oil industry. | ||
| Here's President Trump saying this. | ||
| In addition, Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets, and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars. | ||
| They did this a while ago, but we never had a president that did anything about it. | ||
| They took all of our property. | ||
| It was our property. | ||
| We built it. | ||
| Okay, he's right about that. | ||
| He says that it is a priority for the United States to rebuild Venezuela's energy infrastructure, and that will create gains in the economy for Venezuelans, which, of course, is true. | ||
| President Trump was also asked what happens next. | ||
| And he said, listen, it's not just Venezuela. | ||
| Countries had better start doing what is in America's interest, or there might be changes there as well. | ||
| He was asked about the country of Colombia, and he had these comments. | ||
| Colombia is very sick, too. | ||
| Run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. | ||
| And he's not going to be doing it very long. | ||
|
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What does that mean? | |
| and cocaine factories. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think you've asked them. | |
| It sounds good to me. | ||
|
unidentified
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See if you're reviewing it. | |
| You know why because they killed a lot of people? | ||
| He is right about that. | ||
| He also says that Cuba is on shaky footing, which, of course, it is. | ||
| They required a lot of Venezuelan money in order to prop up that regime as well. | ||
|
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Are you considering U.S. action in Cuba? | |
| I think it's just going to fall. | ||
| I don't think we need any action. | ||
| It looks like it's going down. | ||
| It's going down for the count. | ||
| You ever watch a fight? | ||
| They go down for the count. | ||
| And Cuba looks like it's going down. | ||
| Okay, so, you know, again, fascinating to watch all this play out. | ||
| Now, there are some people who have asked the legal question. | ||
| What is the legal basis for this? | ||
| So let's be clear. | ||
| When people say there is a violation of international law, no one cares. | ||
| There is no such thing as international law. | ||
| It is nonsense. | ||
| It is nonsense because there is no enforcement mechanism. | ||
| You know what international law really is? | ||
| The law of the jungle. | ||
| The reality is that the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. | ||
| That is the law of international relations. | ||
| There is no alternative to it. | ||
| All attempts to establish some alternative to it have failed, which is why self-defense is necessary and why a strong military is necessary for powerful Western states and why a stronger America in the world is better for the world. | ||
| I saw a hilarious post by somebody who said, well, now that we've done this, what's to stop China from morally attempting to take Taiwan? | ||
| I wasn't aware that China was balanced by our moral strictures. | ||
| If they were, I don't think that they would be China, actually. | ||
| I don't think Russia is waiting around for our opinions. | ||
| They're just doing what they want. | ||
| And the thing that stops them is us, not our moral suasion. | ||
| On a moral level, by the way, taking out a communist dictator who has impoverished his people and destroyed his country is, in fact, morally superior to taking out, say, a democratic leader in another country who is not doing any of those things. | ||
| Sort of bizarre moral relativism that has set in on both the horseshoe left and the isolationist right is pretty astonishing to watch. | ||
| There's the question of American domestic law, like on what basis was the United States supposed to do this domestically? | ||
| Should Congress have been notified? | ||
| So the Secretary of State says we couldn't notify Congress without endangering the mission, which of course is true. | ||
| And it is a short-term mission. | ||
| And the War Powers Act, Congress has 60 days once notified about some sort of war action to sign off on the war or defund the war. | ||
| This is a military intervention, but it is not, in fact, a full-scale invasion or a complete quote-unquote war on Venezuela. | ||
| It is a mission that was successful, and now we'll see where it goes. | ||
| Here's Marco Rubio explaining. | ||
| We call members of Congress immediately after this. | ||
| It was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on. | ||
| It was a trigger-based mission in which conditions had to be met night after night. | ||
| We watched and monitored that for a number of days. | ||
| So it's just simply not the kind of mission you can call people and say, hey, we may do this at some point in the next 15 days. | ||
| But it's largely a law enforcement function. | ||
| Remember, at the end of the day, at its core, this was an arrest of two indicted fugitives of American justice, and the Department of War supported the Department of Justice in that job. | ||
| Now, there are broader policy implications here, but it's just not the kind of mission that you can pre-notify because it endangers the mission. | ||
| Secretary of State Rubio also put up a statement on Twitter saying that Maduro is not, in fact, a legitimate government. | ||
| He is not the president of Venezuela. | ||
| His regime is not the legitimate government. | ||
| Maduro is the head of the Cartel de la Solas, a narco-terror organization which has taken over possession of a country. | ||
| He's under indictment for pushing drugs into the United States. | ||
| Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, put out a similar statement saying that Maduro is going to face the full wrath of American justice, that he has been charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States. | ||
| They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts, according to Pambondi. | ||
| According to the Barr memo, which is a very famous memo written by William Barr about the Panamanian change of regime in 1989, the argument was that the president can order the FBI to investigate and arrest individuals in foreign countries, that the UN Charter is a non-binding advisory document that is secondary to domestic law, and that there are no Fourth Amendment protections to apply to foreign citizens abroad. | ||
| Jonathan Turley has a good piece over at Fox News explaining why this doesn't run up against legal guardrails. | ||
| Democrats, of course, are whining about all of this. | ||
| You know, after Barack Obama bombed Libya, after Joe Biden got us involved in funding Ukraine, like there are a lot of things that have happened here that would amount to warlike action under various Democratic presidents that did not end with congressional authorization. | ||
| So the shoe is on the other foot. | ||
| Let's be real about this. | ||
| The idea that Congress is the war-declaring body at this point in American history is just not true on an effectual level. | ||
| And it hasn't been true for decades, really since World War II. | ||
| So as Jonathan Turley points out, Noriega does not have any sort of diplomatic immunity. | ||
| He says legally, Trump has the upper hand in this case. | ||
| Maduro will replay arguments from the Noriega case, but he has very little actual basis for that in law in terms of his legal extradition. | ||
| Well, the international reaction is predictable. | ||
| All the countries that love Maduro are very upset, and everybody else is pretty happy that Maduro is gone. | ||
| Venezuelans around the world are very happy he's gone. | ||
| some footage of Venezuelans celebrating from around the world. | ||
| Now, again, you have the huge crowds, not a giant shock. | ||
| Venezuelans everywhere despise Nicolas Maduro and Ugo Chavez for having destroyed their country. | ||
| Hilariously, there was a Chinese delegation there to meet with Maduro on Friday morning, and they were stuck in the country while all of this was going on. | ||
| Whoopsie, it didn't go amazing for them. | ||
| Meanwhile, the EU president Ursula Vonderlaine put out a statement saying that they stand by the people of Venezuela, quote, following very closely the situation in Venezuela. | ||
| We stand by the people of Venezuela and support a peaceful and democratic transition. | ||
| Any solution must respect international law and the UN charter, yada, yada, yada. | ||
| Well, you didn't do anything. | ||
| So between international law and the UN Charter and five bucks, you could buy a cup of coffee, or you could wait for the United States military to do the thing that all of you have been too spineless to do for a full generation of humans. | ||
| Kiera Starmer, the socialist prime minister of the UK, he emphasized that the UK had no involvement in any of this. | ||
| What I can say is that the UK was not involved in any way in this operation. | ||
| And as you'd expect, we're focusing on British nationals in Venezuela and working very closely with our embassy. | ||
| And so we will want to talk to the president. | ||
| I will want to talk to allies. | ||
| But at the moment, I think we need to establish the facts. | ||
| Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is very upset because there is not a dictatorship on earth that is antithetical to American interests the Russians do not support. | ||
| They put out a statement, quote, in view of the confirmed reports about Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his spouse being in the United States, we strongly urge the United States leadership to reconsider their position and release the legitimately elected president of a sovereign country and his spouse. | ||
| He is not legitimately elected. | ||
| He is, in fact, a narco-terrorist criminal. | ||
| He is a dictator of a country who has ruined his country. | ||
| And listening to the Russians jabber on about the legitimacy of elections in Venezuela is like O.J. Simpson talking about spousal love. | ||
| Meanwhile, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a condemnation as well when they weren't apparently watching out the windows of their hotel as America just took Maduro out. | ||
| Quote, China is deeply shocked and strongly condemns the U.S.'s blatant use of force against a sovereign state in action against its president. | ||
| Man, somebody should talk to Hong Kong. | ||
| Such hegemonic acts of the U.S. seriously violate international law. | ||
| Oh, the Chinese invoking international law. | ||
| Well, you know, chaining up the Uyghurs and threatening Taiwan. | ||
| And they threaten peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region. | ||
| China firmly opposes it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| China, which has spread chaos all over the planet throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. | ||
| We call on the U.S. to abide by international law. | ||
| This, by the way, should, for those who care, be a good and informational point about the uselessness of international law. | ||
| If Russia and China can invoke it to their own benefit, it is not worth the paper that it is printed on. | ||
| Meanwhile, Mexico's president, Claudia Scheinbaum, condemned all of this. | ||
| The Mexican government put out a statement, again, calling on the United States to, quote-unquote, respect international law. | ||
| Listen, any international law that says that Nicolas Maduro must remain as the dictator of Venezuela, forcing his people to eat dog in the streets. | ||
| I think that's bad. | ||
| I'll put it out there. | ||
| I don't think that that's law that is worth its salt. | ||
| And then, of course, Mexico's Claudia Scheinbaum urged the United Nations to act to help de-escalate the situation. | ||
| President Trump did respond to this. | ||
| He said, you know, she's a nice lady, but the cartels run Mexico, so she can sit down. | ||
| Well, it wasn't meant to be, and we're very friendly with her. | ||
| She's a good woman, but the cartels are running Mexico. | ||
| She's not running Mexico. | ||
| The cartels are running Mexico. | ||
| And we could be politically correct and be nice and say, oh, yes, she is. | ||
| No, no, she's very, you know, she's very frightened of the cartels. | ||
| They're running Mexico. | ||
| And I've asked her numerous times, would you like us to take out the cartels? | ||
| No, no, no, Mr. President. | ||
| No, no, no, please. | ||
| Well, I mean, again, he ain't wrong. | ||
| And putting America's enemies on notice is a great way of making them do the things that are in American citizens' interests. | ||
| The Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Qatar, which is effectively the press agency for Iran, expressed its own deep concern when not stuffing its money into the pockets of a wide variety of political figures. | ||
| Quote, the state of Qatar expresses its deep concern over the current developments in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, calling in this context for restraint, de-escalation, and the adoption of dialogue as the appropriate means to address all outstanding issues. | ||
| Well, part of that is because, of course, Qatar has tried to act as a go-between. | ||
| As always, they insert themselves as a go-between between notorious regimes in the United States and then pretend they're useful, which they typically are not. | ||
| And then they say that they are ready to contribute to any international effort aimed at achieving an immediate, peaceful solution. | ||
| Oh, isn't that nice? | ||
| Isn't that nice? | ||
| That's just delightful. | ||
| Meanwhile, domestically, the horseshoe reaction has begun. | ||
| AOC and MTG linking up hands. | ||
| Those of the acronyms, linking up hands, quote, is Alexander Ocasio-Cortez. | ||
| It's not about drugs. | ||
| If it was, Trump wouldn't have pardoned one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world last month. | ||
| It's about oil and regime change. | ||
| And they need a trial now to pretend that it isn't, especially to distract from Epstein and skyrocketing healthcare. | ||
| Okay, so her theory is that this is a gigantic wag the dog, which of course it is not, and is not going to, quote unquote, distract from things like healthcare costs. | ||
| That's silly. | ||
| Hey, I'm unaware. | ||
| I mean, I understand she likes socialism, like really, really likes socialism. | ||
| But if you were smart, if you're on the left and you were smart, you would say, yeah, it's actually quite good that Nicolas Maduro is gone. | ||
| I've been reliably informed by all of our Democratic socialist friends that Venezuela is a bad example of a socialist republic, that really they want Norway or Denmark. | ||
| And yet, so many of them are out there defending Nicolas Maduro today. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| Meanwhile, isolationists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are out there trying to make hay. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene, again, it is amazing that all you have to do to earn strange respect from the press, you can be the dumbest member of Congress, which Marjorie Taylor Greene assuredly was. | ||
| Truly a dumb human. | ||
| And the media will treat you as that until precisely the moment at which you yell at President Trump, at which point you become a worthy guest on Meet the Press to discuss foreign affairs. | ||
| Quick, Marjorie, name five countries in South America. | ||
| Go. | ||
| Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene on Meet the Press. | ||
| And, you know, you want to know something? | ||
| After this regime change in Venezuela, I fear that we're going to see jobs just move south because we're already hearing about big corporations lining up their trips to Venezuela for the next big business opportunity that exists while Americans sit here with no options that are going to provide them with good paying jobs and affordable health care. | ||
| So her economic theory is that by opening up the oil fields of Venezuela to American development, we're going to lose American jobs. | ||
| This is her stupid idea. | ||
| This one? | ||
| She also put out a statement, by the way, and I only point this out because she is indicative of a strain of pseudo-Republican thought that really is just a chaos agent inside the Republican Party, mocking President Trump. | ||
| She says, quote, we are running Venezuela now. | ||
| And then she put up the hand-to-face emoji, America first, you know, sarcasm. | ||
| And then she put out a statement suggesting, quote, in 2024, we voted for America to stop being the world's police funding foreign wars and murdering innocent people and funding fraud scams and foreigners brought let in America. | ||
| We voted against America last, so it's America last now to actually secure America's oil interests in Venezuela or to relieve the pressure on Venezuela so that, you know, millions of Venezuelans living in the United States might be able to go back to their home country. | ||
| So, you know, I suppose that if this is the direction that they want to move, they can. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Green linking up with AOC, not a shock. | ||
| Here's the horseshoe. | ||
| Meanwhile, Rashida Tlaib is yelling at President Trump, suggesting it's a war for oil. | ||
| Here's the thing: that doesn't work when the president of the United States just says, yes, actually, oil is in our interest. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
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Another American regime change war. | |
| And what's more disgusting about this is they're not even hiding it anymore. | ||
| It is about oil. | ||
| And most likely, Trump and many of his donor base are going to benefit personally from this. | ||
| And even more shameful is the fact that I work with colleagues now being a member of Congress. | ||
| I see it firsthand. | ||
| Colleagues are going to be very silent or pretend they're against us or won't even support the war powers resolution before them, primarily because they benefit personally, not only through stock ownership, through war manufacturing and private defense contractors, but many of them get direct donations from these oil companies. | ||
| My goodness, what terrible dictatorship will she not uphold? | ||
| Truly, it's incredible. | ||
| Meanwhile, Zorhan Mamdani, the mayor of New York, put out his own statement. | ||
| Quote, I was briefed this morning on the U.S. military capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. | ||
| No, you weren't, doof. | ||
| No, you went, I was briefed. | ||
| You went on Twitter like everybody else. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure that the Trump administration called up Zorhan Mamdani and they're like, Zoron, we need to tell you about what's going down in Venezuela right now. | ||
| And then he said, unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation is an act of war and a violation of federal and international law. | ||
| Man, somebody should tell him about what Hamas did on October 7th. | ||
| This blatant pursuit of regime change doesn't just affect those abroad. | ||
| It directly impacts New Yorkers, including tens of thousands of Venezuelans who call the city home. | ||
| Okay, so Mamdani is claiming this is bad for Venezuelans. | ||
| I suggest you take a poll of Venezuelans in New York and see how they feel about all of this. | ||
| Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer demonstrating his own hypocrisy, the Senate minority leader, here was Chuck Schumer in 2020, chiding President Trump for not being harsh enough on Maduro. | ||
| And then here he was yesterday chiding the president for taking out Maduro. | ||
| And the president brags about his Venezuela policy? | ||
| Give us a break. | ||
| He hasn't brought an end to the Maduro regime. | ||
| The Maduro regime is more powerful today and more entrenched today than it was when the president began. | ||
| It was reckless. | ||
| It was dangerous. | ||
| And looking at the president's demeanor, he didn't even seem to be aware of how dangerous and reckless it is. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| Maduro is an illegitimate dictator, but launching military action without congressional authorization, without a credible plan for what comes next is reckless. | ||
| I don't know, just call it a drone strike from Barack Obama, and he's fine with it. | ||
| These people are pathetic, truly. | ||
| Bernie Sanders, who again has never met a socialist dictator he does not adore, put out a long statement that I will not read the entirety of because it's boring. | ||
| Quote, Donald Trump has once again shown his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. | ||
| This guy does not get to talk about the Constitution. | ||
| There is no one with more contempt for the Constitution than Senator socialist Bernie Sanders. | ||
| The president of the United States does not have the right to unilaterally take this country to war, even against a corrupt and brutal dictator like Maduro. | ||
| The United States does not have the right, as Trump stated this morning, to run Venezuela. | ||
| Congress must immediately pass a war powers resolution to end this illegal military operation and reassert its constitutional responsibility. | ||
| Well, cool. | ||
| The operation's over. | ||
| I mean, that's fine. | ||
| Trump's attack on Venezuela will make the United States and the world less safe. | ||
| Less safe. | ||
| Explain. | ||
| Truly. | ||
| So Bernie Sanders goes on. | ||
| This brains are in violation of international law. | ||
| He's a green light to any nation that may wish to attack another country to seize their resources or change the governments. | ||
| Again, this is the idiot logic. | ||
| So I noticed that Russia attacked Ukraine without us doing anything about Venezuela. | ||
| And that, in fact, us withdrawing from Afghanistan contributed to that. | ||
| I noticed China making some pretty bold moves around Taiwan, and they weren't waiting for us to do anything about Venezuela. | ||
| Idiot logic from idiots. | ||
| Truly, truly amazing. | ||
| And of course, not restricted to people on the left. | ||
| I offer you the genius of foreign policy analyst John Mearsheimer in November of 2025, somebody brought forth consistently by Tucker Carlson as an expert on foreign relations, who says that the United States is incapable of toppling Maduro. | ||
| I argue in my book that, you know, land power is usually the way you have to go when you go to war against a country. | ||
| And I think that's true here. | ||
| I think, you know, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. | ||
| How did we do it? | ||
| We had to invade Iraq. | ||
| And then we had to search around the country, find the guy and kill him, and then do social engineering. | ||
| Do you want to do that in Venezuela? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| And I don't think Trump wants to do it. | ||
| It's not what his base wants to do. | ||
| So all this is a long way of saying, I find it hard to believe that he's going to do anything substantial from a military point of view against Venezuela. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to work out a deal with Maduro because just, you know, a pinprick type attack is not going to buy him very much. | ||
| And people will point that out to him. | ||
| And therefore, it just makes more sense to back off, cut a deal. | ||
| Probably should keep listening to the schmuck, who hasn't been right for, you know, 20 years or so. | ||
| Or maybe we should listen to the guy who said in October that the only people who want regime change in Venezuela are Globo Homo. | ||
| Oh, yes, here we go. | ||
| Nicolas Maduro and his government are very left-wing on economics, not on social policy, by the way, which is kind of interesting. | ||
| In Venezuela, gay marriage is banned. | ||
| Abortion is banned. | ||
| Sex changes for transgenderism are banned. | ||
| It's one of the very few countries in the entire hemisphere with those policies. | ||
| It is on social policy, not defending the regime, just saying one of the most conservative countries in North or South or Central America. | ||
| Only El Salvador really comes close, which is much smaller, of course. | ||
| And by the way, the U.S.-backed opposition leader who would take Maduro's place if he were taken out is, of course, pretty eager to get gay marriage in Venezuela. | ||
| So to those of you who thought this whole project was Globo Homo, not crazy, actually. | ||
| So apparently Donald Trump, JD Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, Pete Hegseth, new additions to Globo Homo happening every day. | ||
| Yeah, by the way, the reason that Venezuela is socially conservative is because it is Catholic and abortion has been banned in Venezuela since 1926. | ||
| So yeah, that was not because of Nicolas Maduro and his wonderful social conservatism. | ||
| Some of us were saying, who gives a sh about that particular point, you know, a few weeks ago when referring to Nicolas Maduro, one of the worst dictators in the Western hemisphere. | ||
| Joining me on the line is Daniel D. Martino, born and raised in Venezuela. | ||
| He has lived through the consequences of Maduro socialism firsthand. | ||
| He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a PhD candidate in economics at Columbia University. | ||
| Daniel, thanks so much for taking the time. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| So why don't we begin with what people should know about the rule of Nicolas Maduro? | ||
| What was Venezuela like being in Venezuela? | ||
| You're from Venezuela, obviously. | ||
| What was life like under Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro? | ||
| Well, it was a slow but very obvious transition away from being really almost a first world country to being a third world country. | ||
| From you, you know, can purchase everything you need to having to line up and then from having to put your fingerprint in a government scanning machine at the grocery store so that the cashier could tell you what you're allowed to purchase based on your government quota. | ||
| It's, you know, I call it high-tech communism because at least we had fingerprint scanning machines unlike the Cubans. | ||
| They only had pieces of paper. | ||
| So, you know, things like that, no water, no electricity, the internet becoming rarer and rarer. | ||
| And then ultimately, just extreme poverty. | ||
| You know, my family went from making $2,000, $3,000 a month to $100,000. | ||
| So when you look at what the Trump administration just did, obviously the taking of Nicolas Maduro back to the United States, the deposing of him, but the leaving in place of his vice president for the moment. | ||
| What do you think the future looks like there? | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of questions about the fact that the opposition leader Machado was not put in place. | ||
| It doesn't seem as though she had the level of support in the military that would have allowed for that. | ||
| My supposition right now is that the United States is working with the vice president of Venezuela, who is a socialist dictator herself, would be dictator herself. | ||
| Her brother runs the Venezuelan Assembly. | ||
| They're both pretty dire characters, but it seems to me that what the United States is basically doing is ratcheting up the pressure on the number two and saying, if you don't do what we want, then we'll do the same thing to you that we just did to Nicolas Maduro. | ||
| You have to moderate. | ||
| You have to allow the United States to pursue oil interests, allow American companies to work in Venezuela and then transition toward democracy. | ||
| Is that your read on the situation? | ||
| Yes, but it's important that the transition to democracy happen very quickly. | ||
| Because if it doesn't, what is Del C's goal? | ||
| Del C's goal is to lengthen this process until Trump leaves. | ||
| And then why would an oil company invest in Venezuela so that when Trump leaves, Del Crisis? | ||
| And it's important to give some background on who Del Can Jorge are. | ||
| Del C's father, Jorge Rodriguez Sr., was a terrorist, a Marxist terrorist who kidnapped an American CEO for three years. | ||
| And that's why he died. | ||
| So Del Can more than Maduro has been brainwashed since he was born into this evil. | ||
| And so, but what I do trust, I gotta say, I do trust Secretary of State Marco Rubio. | ||
| He knows this issue very well. | ||
| Trump gave him charge of this whole situation. | ||
| He knows who Del Codriguez is. | ||
| He knows their tactics. | ||
| The question is: will Del C and the rest of the regime do the right thing? | ||
| Will they leave peacefully and hold new elections or give power to Maria Corina and her team in the next couple of months? | ||
| Or will there need to be a second strike? | ||
| So, when you look at what the United States just said, obviously, Maduro being gone makes an enormous difference. | ||
| You're seeing celebration in the streets. | ||
| The assumption seems to be on the part of Venezuelans that there will be this sort of transition. | ||
| But as you say, the next step matters an awful lot. | ||
| The president of the United States doesn't have the desire, presumably, to put hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of troops into Venezuela. | ||
| What do you think the prospects are of the kind of change coming from the Rodriguez regime that the United States was unable to achieve from the Maduro regime? | ||
| Well, I think that they thought at the beginning, to be honest, that Trump was bluffing. | ||
| They didn't think he was going to do this. | ||
| They didn't think he was going to be successful. | ||
| You know, many presidents have threatened this. | ||
| Maduro just had nothing to lose. | ||
| He was protected by Cubans, as we saw. | ||
| Most of the people who died were Cuban, were not even Venezuelan. | ||
| They were Cuban security guards, which is exactly what we had been worrying about for so long. | ||
| And so now the question is: Del C understands there's a credible threat on her life and on those around her. | ||
| Will she take all her riches and go to Russia? | ||
| Which country will welcome them? | ||
| Maybe Russia won't, right? | ||
| Maybe they're afraid to go to Russia. | ||
| Maybe we'll be Qatar, their pal. | ||
| Maybe it'll be some other place. | ||
| I think it would be very useful for the Department of State to negotiate with a foreign dictatorship other than Venezuela to give safe haven to these people. | ||
| Take all the money, really. | ||
| Look, as a Venezuelan ben, they can take everything, all the money. | ||
| A country does not become rich because of its natural resources, even though obviously it helps. | ||
| It becomes rich because of its freedom. | ||
| And that's what we need to achieve. | ||
| So I'm happy to let them get amnesty, but they need to leave and transition orderly. | ||
| And if not, I absolutely would support, of course, a second strike. | ||
| So I was speaking with Daniel DiMartino. | ||
| He has a great piece over at Daily Wire called Why Venezuelans Are Dancing in the Streets. | ||
| And he is from Venezuela originally. | ||
| Again, this is a pretty amazing piece of news to come out over the course of the last couple of weeks. | ||
| And we all have hope that the Trump administration is going to follow through and ensure that the first sprigs of freedom actually turn into a forest here as opposed to being eviscerated by the current regime. | ||
| Daniel, thanks so much for the time. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
| And meanwhile, is this having an impact in other places on earth? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So there's a lot of roiling in Iran right now. | ||
| Protests have been ongoing for the last week and a half. | ||
| There's basically no water. | ||
| There's no electricity. | ||
| People do not have the basic necessities of life because the Ayatollah regime is a terrible regime. | ||
| And so riots have begun once again. | ||
| Apparently, some 41 people have been killed in these riots so far. | ||
| The president of the United States said if Iran goes around killing protesters the way that it has in the past, there will be consequences for that. | ||
| And again, do I think that the president means hundreds of thousands of people from the U.S. military occupying Tehran? | ||
| No, I don't because I'm not a moron. | ||
| And people who tell you that that's what the president means are once again lying to you. | ||
| But if the Ayatollahs feel as though they cannot crack down on the protesters because there might be an F-35 that takes out an IRGC facility, well, then maybe that regime has some troubles as well. | ||
| We're watching it very closely. | ||
| If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they're going to get hit very hard by the U.S. | ||
| Well, that seems to me, again, a good piece of American foreign policy, assuring America's interests in the Middle East. | ||
| Apparently, according to the Times of the UK, Iran's Ayatollah, Ali Khomeini, has a backup plan to flee the country if his security force failed to suppress protests or desert, according to an intelligence report shared with the Times. | ||
| Khomeini, by the way, is 86. | ||
| My guess is that there is a lot of searching going on by Western powers for some sort of number two or number three in the IRGC to depose Khomeini and move to some sort of transitional regime in Iran. | ||
| That would not be a surprise at all. | ||
| Meanwhile, in the other big news of the day, Tim Walz is dropping out of the gubernatorial race. | ||
| Man, what a fall he has had. | ||
| So he went from the hot new thing selected by Kamala Harris as her VP candidate to making a goof of himself on the national stage to going back to Minnesota, where it turns out that actually people are upset with him because he has presided over the mass defrauding of the Minnesota taxpayer. | ||
| So Tim Walz today announced that he would not be running for reelection in Minnesota. | ||
| The Calci markets, Calci is a sponsor of the program. | ||
| The Calci markets suggest that Amy Klobuchar is the likeliest next nominee for Minnesota governor by the Democratic Party, with Keith Ellison running a distant second. | ||
| That makes some sense. | ||
| Amy Klobuchar is well-liked in the state of Minnesota. | ||
| Tim Walz announced he was ending his campaign for re-election. | ||
| According to Axios, he had announced in September that he would run for an unprecedented third term, but he has bad approval ratings and a lot of intensified scrutiny into fraud in statewide programs. | ||
| House Speaker Lisa Demuth on the Republican side of the aisle was looking at possibly running there because of that weakness. | ||
| Again, all of that followed on a video from an internet personality named Nick Shirley. | ||
| He basically drove around Minneapolis looking for child and daycare facilities that were being funded by government money, trying to find out whether there are actually any kids there. | ||
| Now, there's not actually anything new there per se. | ||
| I mean, he went around and the video is pretty evocative. | ||
| It's unclear exactly how many of these facilities have children. | ||
| Some of them presumably do. | ||
| There have been reports from places like the Minneapolis Star Tribune that some of the facilities, in fact, do have kids there, that he went during off hours, that they didn't let him in because he was a stranger. | ||
| You don't let kids in, you don't let strangers in the daycare facilities. | ||
| Apparently, some of the 10 daycares, the YouTube content creator blasted for having no children, invited reporters in to see for themselves. | ||
| That does not end, however, the gigantic scandal that is the amount defrauded from the Minnesota taxpayers. | ||
| However, the Minneapolis Star Tribune did say that seven of the facilities that Nick Shirley visited had been cited for safety and administrative violations within the past four years, some of them dozens of times. | ||
| One of them that featured in Nick Shirley's video was a place called Quality Learning Center. | ||
| Hilariously, the sign was misspelled, said Quality Learing Center. | ||
| It had received 121 violations in the past three years alone. | ||
| Five of the facilities that Shirley visited were meal sites for feeding our future, which was, of course, the pandemic fraud scandal that resulted in 50 convictions. | ||
| The manager of Quality Vearing Center then tried to claim that Shirley came outside of operating hours. | ||
| They've been operating for eight and a half years. | ||
| And I think most hilariously, one of the members of a Somali-run daycare facility came out and said their documents had actually been stolen. | ||
| Whoopsie, somebody broke in and stole the exact documents necessary in order to prove that they weren't defrauding the federal government. | ||
| Bottom line here is that the amount of fraud in Minnesota based on these gigantic state programs has resulted in a pause on a funding stream that provides $185 million in annual aid to the state's daycare centers because of federal investigations into Somali-led fraud in the state of Minnesota. | ||
| According to the New York Times, more than a dozen schemes have come to light in Minnesota in recent years, many of them involving people of Somali origin. | ||
| Prosecutors say the schemes have cost taxpayers billions of dollars. | ||
| The scandal has rattled Minnesota politics and drawn the ire of the White House. | ||
| And again, Shirley's video brought attention to a thing. | ||
| Some of the claims made are so far unsubstantiated. | ||
| Some of them, however, have led to further substantiation of the fact that many of these daycare facilities are at the very least poorly run bleep shows that should not be on government funding. | ||
| And to be fair, in a sentence I will rarely say, to be fair to legacy media, all the way back in October 2024, there was a piece from CNN titled, As Fraud Scandals Erupt in Minnesota on Governor Tim Walz's watch, Accountability is in short supply. | ||
| Quote, when confronted with troubling examples of waste, fraud, and abuse, some state agencies working under the administration of Democratic Governor Tim Walz repeatedly minimized or dismissed the allegations, according to the state's nonpartisan auditor, Judy Randall. | ||
| So Walls has presided over extraordinary fraud in the system. | ||
| And now Tim Walz is not running for re-election, which is in fact one of the proper solutions politically to truly running this thing like a bleep show. | ||
| Alrighty, folks, the show continues for our members right now. | ||
| Much more to get to, including, is there going to be another government shutdown at the end of this month? | ||
| Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member. | ||
| If you're not a member, become a member. | ||
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| Click that link in the description and join us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What was it like, Marlon, to be alone with God? | |
| Is that who you think I was alone with? | ||
| Marathon, I knew your father. | ||
| I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. | ||
| All men know of the great Taliesi. | ||
| You are my father. | ||
| The gods should war for my soul. | ||
| Princess Garris, savior of our people. | ||
| I know the bull got offered you. | ||
| I was offered the same. | ||
| And there is a new part at work in the world. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| A god who sacrifices what he loves for us. | ||
| We are each given only one life, singer. | ||
| No, we're given another. | ||
| I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower. | ||
| He's waiting on a miracle, and I think you can give him one. | ||
| Trust in Yezu. | ||
| He is the only hope for men like us. | ||
| Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Light. | ||
| Great Light, Great Darkness. | ||
| Such things mattered to me then. | ||
| What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies? | ||
| You, nephew. | ||
| The sword of the High King. | ||
| How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield? | ||
| Still clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you. | ||
| I cannot take up that sword again. | ||
| You know what you must do. | ||
| Great Light, forgive me. |