No Kings Protests: A Partisan Pro-DNC Circus; The Trump Admin's Escalating Strikes on "Drug Boats" and Militarization of the Caribbean
Pro-DNC boomers were out in full force at the No Kings protests over the weekend. Glenn and System Update producer Meagan O'Rourke discuss the protests and what they reveal about the Democratic party. Then: as the Trump administration continues to blow up "drug boats" in the Caribbean, Glenn warns against accepting new US-backed wars abroad that are being sold under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking. ------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook ---------------------- Download Perplexity’s new AI-web browser, Comet, by heading to https://pplx.ai/Glenn and let your browser work for you. Plus, right now when you download Comet - you get a month of Rumble Premium for free! http://www.1775coffee.com/GLENN to save 15% off your order of 1775 Coffee.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, millions of American liberals gathered in various cities yesterday across the country to protest Donald Trump and to herald the greatness of the Democratic Party and its leaders for exactly that reason.
The theme of that protest being so lame and banal, the protest was composed largely of older white partisan Democrats whose only real cause is if they wish Kamala Harris had one.
Ooh, how radical.
Our producer and social media manager Megan O'Rourke, who we often send to events of this kind because she's so adept at interviewing people and getting them to say all sorts of revealing things, was at one of these protests and spoke with many of the participants there.
She'll be here tonight to share the videos, interviews that she took, and discuss what it is that she saw and heard.
We'll examine other parts of this protest as well.
Then the multi-pronged US campaign to engineer regime change in Venezuela and perhaps other countries in the region continues to intensify over the weekend.
The US rescued two surviving crew members of the last boat that they blew up.
And instead of putting them in jail, they sent them back to their home countries, one in Trinidad, the other in Colombia, which is rather odd behavior.
If these people really are, as the government claims, narco-terrorists rounding Americans with fatal drugs.
Wouldn't you want to put them in US detention as punishment for what they did?
Meanwhile, Colombia's president said the Trump administration was killing fishermen.
And that the real goal of all of this is to take over Venezuela and engineer regime change to have access to and control over their oil.
You don't say.
We'll examine the latest attempt to sell Americans on yet another regime change war.
Before we get to all of that, a couple of quick program notes.
First of all, this Friday night, I will be in San Antonio, Texas, along with Megyn Kelly and Emily Jaszczynski for what is the first stop on Megyn Kelly's nationwide tour.
Her first stop is in San Antonio, Texas.
We'll be at the Majestic Theater starting at 7.30 p.m.
Last I heard there are a couple of tickets left, not many.
So if you're in the San Antonio area and you want to come, it's Friday night, 7.30 p.m.
in the Majestic Theater.
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As you undoubtedly heard, there were millions of Americans, almost entirely American liberals and Democrats, maybe, I don't know, a few people slightly more radical than that, maybe like leftists or whatever.
And they all gathered in different cities, just like they did throughout the first Trump term.
They were branded then the resistance, named after people who actually risked things during World War II in France to fight the Nazis who went underground and pick up arms, rather than just waving signs of George Bush's FBI director, Robert Moeller's, they did throughout the first term.
But this time they're back.
It's basically the same people, and they've rebranded themselves as the No Kings movement.
They're protesting against what they say is Donald Trump's uh concentration of executive power and authoritarian power, in a way, presumably, in their view, has never been done before.
Now, I'm a big proponent of the right to protest.
I think it's healthy in a democracy.
When people go out on the streets and protest, I encourage it.
I think we need more of it.
But the problem with this particular protest movement is that it was just very vapid.
It was just very partisan.
These are all people who voted for the Democratic Party, who voted for Kamala Harris, who voted for Joe Biden.
And they weren't really protesting anything in particular, like any they're not protesting, for example, any wars because they know many Democrats, in fact, most also support those wars.
They're obviously not protesting, for example, Trump's policy of supporting Israel in Gaza because of the fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris also supported that same policy.
And if Kamala had one, certainly would be doing the case now.
And there were, you know, certain policies they they attribute to Trump, like ICE and immigration policies and things of that nature.
But in general, it wasn't as if it were some very value-driven or ideology-driven protests.
It was basically just Democrats who hate Trump because he's a Republican and wishing that Kamala Harris were president.
And if there's any doubt about that, here is what Kamala Harris's husband, Doug Emhoff, who attended the rally, I believe, in Los Angeles, this is in Beverly Hills, I believe, or at least in Los Angeles, he posed next to a woman who was wearing a pink skirt holding a pink sign.
And the sign said, if Kamala had won, we'd be at brunch.
No kings.
Now, this is something that, well, actually, I saw in 2017 as part of these first resistance movements.
They would have signs saying if Hillary won, we'd all be at brunch.
And on the one hand, it's so repulsive and so offensive and so disgusting that if Hillary Clinton had won, or Kamala Harris had won, they wouldn't have to be protesting.
They would be at brunch because so many of the things Kamala would have been doing, so many of the things that Hillary Clinton would have been doing are not just very similar to the things they claim to find so objectionable about Trump, but they certainly would have expanded presidential power.
That's what presidents have been doing since at least the war on terror.
It's not anything specific to Trump.
Trump has taken it, moved the ball, advanced the ball in in meaningful ways, but so has every other president.
So on the one hand, it's it's repulsive to watch people like Doug Emmahoff, and that was, I think, very much a theme of these protests.
Like, oh, if Kamala had been elected, everything would be perfect.
We wouldn't have to be protesting, we'd be at brunch.
Not just like with our families, but at brunch specifically.
That was what a lot of the signs said for those uh post-Hilbert loss marches as well.
But on the other hand, even though it's disgusting, it's actually very true.
If Kamala Harris were president and she were feeding the war in Ukraine and she were feeding arms and money to the Israelis to continue to destroy Gaza, both of which she undoubtedly would be doing, both of which he promised to do, both of which Biden did.
If she were serving the interests of massive corporations, if income inequality were growing, if massive monopolies were continuing to consume American the American economy and eliminate uh competition for consumers and consumer ability, the consumer ability to choose all of what she would likely be doing.
I absolutely believe that very, very, very, very few of these people, not none, but very few would actually be out protesting.
They probably would be a brunch.
Because they don't have any fixed beliefs.
They don't have any real passionate ideas about what government should do.
They're just Democrats.
They just want Democrats to be in office, and they're perfectly happy if that's the case, even if nothing else takes place.
So I believe this sign.
I believe the sign is a very illustrative expression of what it's hard to obviously generalize and talk about all the protesters talking about millions of people, but this was absolutely the ethos of most of them.
And just one word on Doug Emhoff, and then we're gonna get to Megan O'Rourke, who is our great producer and social media manager who actually attended one of these, uh videotaped her interviews with multiple participants, and we're gonna share some of those with you as well as her observations.
But before we get to her, I just want to make a point about Doug Emhoff.
If Kamala won, we'd all be at brunch.
Doug Emhoff, he currently works as a partner in a large Wall Street-based law firm called Wilkie Farr and Gallagher.
It's a massive sprawling law firm, has locations all across the U.S., I presume in Europe as well, I'd bet anything.
There you see the current uh page for him, Doug Emhoff.
He's a partner, a litigation partner.
And the firm is Wilkie Farr and Gallagher.
And there's Doug Emhoff at these protests saying, Donald Trump is a monarch, no Donald Trump, screw Donald Trump.
You know, really like protesting saying we have to stand up to this president.
Wilkie Farr and Gallagher, which is Doug Emhoff's firm where he's a partner, reach an agreement.
It were one of those law firms that capitulated to Donald Trump.
There were many law firms that fought Donald Trump, but Donald Trump at the beginning of his presidency, I think this is one of the most authoritarian things that he did, threatened all these law firms that if you don't sign an agreement saying you'll do pro bono work for fruit meaning free work for our government, you'll do pro bono work when they take clients for free for social causes.
Those social causes has to allow have to align with our administration.
He forced so many of them to take to make anti-Semitism a major priority of their pro bono work, as though that's the major deprivation in the United States is the marginalization of American Jews.
He forced on them an entire agenda that isn't even necessarily theirs, but said if you don't accept it, we're gonna destroy you in so many ways.
He barred lawyers from these with these firms from entering federal buildings, which would include courthouses, meaning they couldn't represent their partners.
He barred them from getting classified access, which they need to in order to represent a lot of their clients, basically threatening to destroy their career if they didn't completely capitulate to his dictates about how they have to operate as a firm or a markable assertion of government power over the free market over private enterprise over lawyers and the job they they want to do and how they want to do it.
And a lot of these firms went and sued and won.
But Doug Emhoff's firm, Wilkie Fart was not one of them.
They were the ones that capitulated to Trump.
So here he is out on the street saying we have to fight Donald Trump at his own law firm, capitulated.
So you say, well, what could Doug Emhoff do?
Well, there are a lot of things he could have done, none of which he did.
And I know that because multiple partners in Wilkie Farr actually left the firm in protest over it, sacrificed, I'm sure, compensation and money, even potentially future career prospects.
But on principle, they left.
They said, we believe this capitulation to Trump's demands, that Trump's demands are so invasive and authoritarian, and that capitulating to them, especially given that we're a huge law firm, very, very wealthy law firm, is immoral.
And they left here from the New York Times, June of this year.
Wilkie Farr partners, unhappy with the firm's deal with Trump, depart the firm for Cooley, which is a separate firm.
Seven partners at Wilkie Farr and Gallagher, a prominent law firm that cut a deal with President Trump to head off a potentially crippling executive order, announced on Friday that they were departing to join a firm that helped successfully challenge one of Mr. Trump's orders in court.
This firm, Wilkie was a target of Mr. Trump's team primarily because it employed a top investigator for the congressional committee That investigated Mr. Trump's role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol by a mob of supporters, according to a person close to the president.
The firm also did work on behalf of two Georgia election workers who had successfully sued Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump's former personal lawyer.
So Trump didn't like it because they represented someone who sued Rudy Giuliani and somebody who uh hired an investigator who worked for the January 6th committee.
But not Doug Emhoff.
Doug M. Hoff didn't leave.
He didn't sacrifice anything to protest what the president does, even though he's out on the street urging everybody else to do so.
According to the New York Times, here's what he did.
Quote, former vice president Kamala Harris's husband, Doug M. Hoff joined Wilkie Farr shortly after Mr. Trump was sworn in.
Mr. Emhoff, who has told others he was making six million dollars a year at the firm, opposed the deal, but has remained at the firm.
So this is so precisely to me the kind of liberal sentiment that so often prevails.
They want to call themselves the resistance.
They want to drape themselves in the gory of risky defiance to power.
But it's all theatrical.
These are theater kids posing as dissidents.
And when Doug Emhoff could have made the most minimal sacrifice, it wasn't even really a sacrifice.
Because his wife is the vice president, because he's so embedded in Democratic Party circles, because he has influence with so many people as a result of being married to Kamala Harris.
Every firm would pay Doug Emhoff millions of dollars.
I worked inside these law firms in this world before I became a journalist.
I know how they work.
If you're that well connected, you can go to K Street, you can go anywhere.
And any of these law firms will give you massive paychecks simply because of the connections you have.
In fact, of all the Wilkief partners, Doug Emhoff is probably among the top, say 2% that could leave most easily.
Probably a lot of very well-regarded prestiged lawyers with big clients could also go if their clients were portable.
So Doug Emhoff could have defied or stood up or resisted Trump incursions without any real sacrifice, but he was just too lazy.
He's like, no, I'm gonna stay here with my six million dollar salary at this law firm, even though they're supposedly capitulating to authoritarianism I find so dangerous that I'm encouraging other people on the street who aren't nearly as wealthy or powerful as I am to go sacrifice in order to stand up for it.
That's the kind of cosplaying and role playing, I think is so often shaping the resistance of the United States.
All right, so we happen to have somebody who has done great work, not just for our show.
She's a social media manager, she's also the producer of remote segments.
Whenever you see Michael Tracy worming around doing all his Michael Tracying, often Megan is there.
She's actually the one who coordinates it, who films it.
But she also has a very successful YouTube channel of her own.
She's very good at speaking to people, very kind of unassuming.
There you see her uh YouTube channel.
It's called Clickbait Wasteland, kind of ironically named.
It's it's actually very substantive interviews and viewing that she does.
It's become quite popular.
She sort of built this big following on YouTube in her own spare time that shows her talent.
Uh she's with us tonight.
She's making her debut appearance on our show, even though she's worked with our show from the very beginning.
I hope she's not too nervous, and I'm excited to hear from her.
Good evening, Megan.
How are you?
It's great to see you in this context.
Hi, Glenn.
It's great to be here on the show in this capacity, I suppose.
Yeah, I'm excited as well.
All right, it's a little weird.
I'm gonna have to get accustomed to seeing you on this particular screen in this particular setting, but I think we can both work through it.
So before we get into the specifics, just tell us what it is that you did yesterday, where you went, kind of what it is generally that you saw.
Yeah, so this was uh the No Kings protest in New York City, and the main protests in New York City was down in Times Square.
Um, I went to one of these kind of satellite No Kings protests that was held up in Harlem, um, kind of at the intersection of like 125th Street and Amsterdam.
And it was kind of ironic because just looking at the crowd, you could tell that these people were not from the neighborhood.
Um, and the median age, I would say was probably around like 65.
And I spoke with the organizer there and I asked her, I was like, hey, I noticed that there's a lot of older people here.
And she said that she organized this event so that people with like mobility issues could attend.
But looking at a lot of the videos of the protests down in Times Square, it also seemed kind of like boomer hour protests.
Um, but this one was especially geriatric, I thought.
Um, So I just went over there to check it out.
I talked to people who were attending the protests.
I was given this list of the chants also if I felt inclined to chant along with them.
There were a lot of great, like, hey, hey, ho ho, um Trump has got to go, or like oligarchy has got to go.
It was actually really quaint, I thought.
Like the energy was, you know, not as intense as like a pro-Palestinian protest, like at Columbia, for example, because these people were obviously older and a lot of them were grandparents, even and they had signs about being grandparents.
So it was just a really great, like uh almost like ethnography of the vestiges of this resistance uh movement.
So um I just went over there and I spoke with people about, you know, why are you there?
Um, and yeah, we can get into what they said, but I think you described it quite well as it's this kind of like, I don't know, theatrical kind of thing that people do to feel better about themselves, but it's not really uh a true resistance, I don't think.
You know, it's uh I guess maybe the word is disturbing, or just I guess to be less dramatic about it, kind of notable is 125th Street in Amsterdam is kind of a storied place in in New York.
It's you know, I think in the middle of Harlem or sort of like you know, in the heart of Harlem.
For a long time, they had this uh newspaper, this kind of alt weekly called the Amsterdam News, which was the voice of kind of more radical left, like black Harlem political perspective that I used to read when I lived there, you know, in the 90s and and into the 2000s.
And you would expect, you know, I can understand in Manhattan, you kind of get, you know, Manhattan is just like it's become increasingly stayed.
It's people who have a lot of money.
Sure, they attracted a lot of people in Brooklyn, kind of like online Brooklyn liberal types.
Um so I can imagine that being a very kind of an all protest, but you look at 125th Street and Amsterdam, it sounds like what you what you had is not a very racially diverse uh composition because a lot of people who live in that area are are black.
It seemed like they were just older white people, almost like these kind of like former hippie types who have become whoever who lost all the radicalism they once had in their youth and are just like a lot of these hippies are kind of Hillary Clinton fans, Kamala Harris fans, fans of the Democratic Party establishment.
Um but it just it it seems as though it's not because there is no radical element on the left or just like an anti-establishment uh radicalism, those things do exist.
It's just that these kinds of protests aren't attracting them, um, is my strong impression.
Do you have a kind of theory as to why?
Yeah, I think that I mean, I just observed this exact phenomenon in talking with these people.
Um I also asked them about the New York City mayoral election because I feel like that's a pretty good litmus test of, you know, do you are you with this kind of establishment Democrat party that I feel like is very emblematic of these no kings protests, or are you looking for some sort of something new, something that's a little more populist?
And, you know, even though all these people would probably identify as Democrats, uh not everyone was voting for Zohar Ramdani there.
Some people said that they were undecided.
Um, and then I also ask people who would you like to see on like the 2028 presidential ticket?
And uh one man told me that he wanted Corey Booker on the ticket.
So that's kind of the types that this uh event attracted.
And I think that first of all, like the way that No Kings is organized, it is pretty like establishment.
It is sponsored by so many groups.
It's not a fringe movement at all, really.
So um it's funny because like these protests, these people really are not in too much like danger of being um surveilled or put on certain lists, even though they may feel this way at this protest.
It's like the most safe kind of protest you could go to, I would imagine.
And um, it was interesting because some younger people were at the protest and they started a free Palestine chant.
And the reaction of the crowd was very like mixed.
Like some people kind of joined in eventually, uh, but it wasn't as strong as the, you know, we hate the orange man, orange man is bad, get him out of here.
Um, so I really do think that it's a generational divide mostly.
Um, and I also think the way that people found out about this was through like more like Facebook groups, maybe more um mainstream ways of, you know, learning about these protests.
It's a very like package for TV almost kind of protest.
You know what I mean?
It's something that you would see on like broadcast TV and I don't know, it really attracts these types who were probably out there in, you know, 2017 at the resistance protests.
You know what bothers me is this idea of no kings in just kind of like a clinical abstract sense is something I really could get behind in support because it ought to be opposed to the concentration of authoritarian power, power that we would consider monarchical, the lack of checks and balances.
And I do think that very much defines the American polity.
You have Congress that basically does not exist for any real purpose.
You know, the president can start wars, can bomb who he wants, can pretty much do anything, even in terms of domestic policy by by executive order, and there's not really any objection.
I think people in Congress like to be social media influencers and and don't really care much about their loss of their power.
And the Supreme Court has in a lot of ways rubber stamp things, although, you know, not entirely the judiciary is still pretty active.
But like you, you see this erosion of checks.
What bothers me though is, you know, I wrote a book back in 2006, like the first book I ever wrote, surely after I began writing about politics.
The purpose of which was to basically say we were rapidly approaching the concentration of monarchical powers, the kind of re-establishment of a king as a result of a lot of these war and terror policies that George Bush and Dick Cheney implemented, declaring the right to ignore Congress to violate congressional law at will as long as they declared national security concerns.
And of course, that worsened and intensified under President Obama.
And so if you were to say to me, hey, we want to go out on the street and kind of call for a restoration of balance of powers for genuine constraints on the executive, I would say, yeah, I'm all for that.
Let's go.
But there seems to be no sense of that context or history here.
Um most of these people probably love George Bush now.
They certainly love like, you know, the kind of orbiters of the Bush Cheney world, like, you know, Bill Kristol and Nicole Wallace and David Frum and these whole types of people have rebranded as resistance liberals.
So they don't have any problem with George Bush and maybe not even Dick Cheney as a result of their the heroine that he spa spawned named Liz, like their national heroine.
And they certainly don't have that sense at all about Obama.
So is it is there any kind of substance or meat to this anti-authoritarian agenda other than we should have Democrats in in power and not Republicans?
Yeah, I mean, I think it is a very partisan protest.
Um, and also like if you think about how the democratic primary was conducted last year, I mean, that felt not like straight up authoritarian, but they're really if you want democracy, like that's where you should be demanding it in your own democratic primaries, right?
Um, instead of having Kamala Harris just throw it in there at the last minute as the nominee.
So I yeah, I do think that these protests have just become about these vague, we want democracy chance.
Some people I spoke to did have more specific concerns about um Trump's use of the military in uh certain cities, and you know, they had more specific things that like complaints about um ice coming into you know outside schools.
Um I spoke to a woman who was a teacher of bilingual students in New York City, and she said she was concerned about Trump's deportation policy.
So some people had like specific things that they could point to, but if you brought up exactly those objections to like war on terror policies or surveillance policies under Obama, they would probably never imagine um protesting Obama and this as clearly as like an anti-Trump protest at his core.
Um, and also when you speak to people about, you know, what do they think about foreign policy as well?
Um again, with on Israel Gaza, some of the people were, you know, very pro-Palestinian.
Others were kind of less willing to comment on that issue.
Um, So it's kind of interesting how, you know, when you really prod these people's ideas, um, they can't really express what they're really upset about, except for this this vague um, you know, we want democracy restored because they have you know grievances against maybe Trump as an individual.
Um that's not to say there's no substantive things that they were complaining about, but it this protest doesn't seem to express those grievances very well to me.
Yeah, my guess is that a lot of the people who were there, as you said, probably were not residents of the immediate neighborhood in Harlem, but instead came from places like the Upper West Side, where that is a lot closer, easier to get to than you know, when there were slipping all the way down to to Midtown.
There's a lot of pro-Israel sentiment on the Upper West side.
I actually debated Alan Dershowitz on the Upper West side last year about whether we should bomb Iran.
I think pretty much everybody who came from anywhere other than the West Side was supportive of me, but all the people who just walked a few blocks from the Upper West side to see Alan Dershowitz were were very supportive of him and wanted to bomb Iran.
So I think that's probably why a lot of people weren't willing to comment on Israel and Palestine.
And I've seen a lot of these kind of protests where there's, you know, as many Ukrainian flags as there are American flags.
Maybe that's kind of worn out, probably has after so many years where people aren't quite as passionate.
But the minute you start waving a Ukrainian flag, you're basically saying I support bipartisan war policy, the CIA, the Pentagon, the, you know, the agencies that uh engage in foreign policy.
And so already you're sort of talking about a group of people who aren't particularly even issue-driven, let alone radical in any way.
All right, let's look at um, I'm gonna try and do as many of these as I can.
I don't know whether I can really withstand them or not.
Um I've seen a couple of them just floating around on your social media accounts on on X and the like, but I don't know exactly when tool we chose, so I may be seeing these for the first time.
So excuse me if I get a little bit queasy.
But I do think it's important to show people because I think it's important, right?
You don't like go in what you know, the internet used to call nutpicking, where you look for the most aberrational or extreme or sensationalized person because you think they're gonna draw attention or make a point.
Like you're pretty much looking to interview people with with the sense of what?
Of kind of just getting a sense for what is there.
Yeah, definitely.
With curiosity and I mean, if I were a true like troll, this would have been like troll central.
Like you could really troll away here if you really wanted to.
But um, these people, they're they're very like well-meaning and earnest.
Yes, very earnest.
Um also I think they probably were a little bit more progressive, I would say, than like if you went to a 2017 um, you know, resistance type event.
Like, I think really Zoran Mondani has changed the I I really hate to use this term, but like the Overton window in New York City.
So there were Zoran supporters there.
The, like I said, the organizer was a Zoran, she had a Jews versus Oran hat on.
Um, and you know, some people said that they really liked AOC, whether you consider her to be truly progressive or not, is up for debate.
Um, so they weren't all like Lincoln project types, but uh that was kind of the overwhelming feeling that I got.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it is worth remembering just in general, New York City is is it maybe not be it may not be Portland, it may not be Seattle, but it's still compared to you know the most large American cities, it is a little bit further to the left.
I mean, it's extremely blue at the very least.
And there are sectors of of of New York that have become, you know, much more left-wing, left liberal than than they used to be.
Uh, the younger sections, the more gentrified ones, the kind that vote for AOC, uh, for example, um, or Zoran, uh, as you point out.
So I think it's it's worth remembering that that it we're not dealing with a very representative city politically, although it's not really as left-wing as most people think, which is why it's such a shock that that Zoran became the nominate.
All right, let's look at a few of these and then we can talk about them.
Let's just go in in order.
LET'S PLAY THIS FIRST ONE.
All right.
So just Are you feeling it?
Are you feeling fired up?
I'm just worried that I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight because that catchy tune is gonna be stuck in my head, and I'm gonna be chanting it at home unknowingly.
You know, I first of all, you know, the composition of the crowd is pretty much what what we we described, which you know it's fine.
Um it is what it is.
It's you know, it's such an empty and banal chant, you know, like this is what democracy looks like.
Like what?
People protesting on the streets.
I mean, I guess a lot of that depends on what they're protesting and how they're protesting.
But what is, and you alluded to this earlier, and I guess I don't know if you you asked people about this, but you know, it's such an odd banner for Democrats to be raising democracy, because not only did they impose a nominee on their own party and you know, basically voters with no votes at all, no one voted for Kamala to be the Democratic nominee.
There was no election, nobody ever voted for her for that.
She dropped out in 206, uh 2020 or 2019 without having a single vote.
So no one has ever voted for Kamala Harris to be the nominee of the Democratic Party, and yet she was.
That's not really what democracy looks like.
You see, this chance is already in my head.
And in 2016, even people like Liz Warren and Donna Brazil, who was the DNC chair at the time, admitted the DNC rigged the entire primary to ensure Hillary won over Bernie.
And then in 2020, Obama did his little dirty maneuvers behind the scene to get everybody to drop out, except for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie, so they would divide the vote and then Biden would would win.
To say nothing of the fact that they spent the last eight years with their primary strategy being trying to ban their primary political opponent Donald Trump from the ballot, and or arrest him and imprison him so that they could win the election over him.
Is if you were to make this argument or some version of it to the people there, I don't know if you did, but how do they reconcile these things?
Yeah, I don't think that they would really be able to.
Um, I think that, you know, they probably enthusiastically voted for Kamala.
There's actually someone waving a Kamala Harris and Tim Wall sign, like from 2024 at the event.
And I mean, granted, there's always like kind of some crazy people who show up to protests and bring whatever they want to like, you know, get on the news or go viral, but um I it seemed pretty genuine.
And so I don't I don't think that they would be able to reconcile this.
Um I mean, I don't think that a lot of people were I'm still like amazed that more people weren't upset by that maneuver by the Democratic Party and how they've repeatedly done this.
Um, and also just like covering up Biden's, you know, cognitive decline for so long, too.
Like, how is that not something out of like Lord of the Rings?
You know what I mean?
I'm pretty sure that was a subplot Lord of the Rings.
So it's it's um yeah, I think it's if you confronted them, they would uh not be able to explain that.
Do you think it'd be like literal smoke that would come out of their head because of the wires crossing?
Or would it just be figurative?
I think they would just kind of go back to their their usual line of argumentation, which is that, oh, Trump is so bad, so therefore the Democrats are shielded from any um criticism.
You know, I I don't think that there was a lot of introspection going on.
Although I again there were some younger people there who I think were maybe more critical of the Democratic Party.
But if you're like showing up to the No Kings protest, and uh, you know, that's basically being endorsed and talked about by all these establishment figures.
Uh, you know, how against the grain are you really going?
Yeah, when you're waving Kamala Harris and Tim Walt Science, and by the way, for what it's worth, in 2016, the entire Republican establishment was opposed to Donald Trump.
He had 10 different political opponents, first Jeff Bush and then Marco Rubio, and then Ted Cruz, behind which all this establishment money, you know, uh assembled and he still won.
And then even in 2024, as the the former president, he ran against five or six different, like reasonably credible officials, you know, senators and governors, people like Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and he won there as well.
So, you know, 2020 was the incumbent president, as is typically the case, he didn't have real opposition in the Republican Party.
But 2026 and 2024, there were very vibrant primaries within the Republican Party, and Donald Trump won both of them freely and fairly, uh, despite the party being opposed to him in many ways.
Obviously, I think there are a lot of authoritarian policies Donald Trump has has enacted.
We've covered them a lot on our show.
But when you look at democracy and elections and the like, it's kind of weighing that.
I would say weighs in in Trump's favor and against the Democrats, at least over the last 10 years.
All right, let's look at another interview here.
Uh here's a person you you were able to speak with.
I was curious, like what you think about you know, the future of Democrats taking money from APAC, whether you think that they should stop doing so.
A lot of people in the Democratic Party are demanding this.
Well, I I listen, all of these, all of these elected officials need to stay in office in order to effectuate the changes that they believe in.
And if that means that they're taking money from various groups, sometimes what they'll do is they'll take money from the people supporting the right, people supporting the left.
And they do what they want anyway.
They do what they think is right.
I think Corey Booker is that kind of guy.
Um just sorry, one last question.
I don't want to keep you.
I was curious if you've been following like the New York City mayoral election, and if there's anyone that you support.
Uh well, the one I didn't support, thank God he's out of the race, that was Mayor Adams.
I never had any confidence in I met him in the Senate when he was in the New York State Senate.
I never had any respect for him.
The between Mandami and Andrew Cuomo, uh, if either one of them got elected, it'll be fine with me.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
Okay.
Thank you.
And you know, I mean, he definitely was like an earnest guy, almost like childlike in his belief in how the politicians and the political system function.
Like, yeah, they take money from APAC, but it's just so that they are able to stay in power and do all the good and important things that they want to do, and they take these people's money but don't really serve their agenda.
They're really just there to help.
And so I want Democrats to take money from everybody.
Exactly.
He actually earlier he also mentioned that um, if you're not aware that we're living in 1933 Germany, that was something else he told me, and so I just wanted to warn you about that.
Um he also though was critical of you know Israel's war in Gaza too earlier and said that he was supportive of the Columbia protest.
So I thought this was such an interesting response that this guy also supported Corey Booker for the Democratic uh ticket in 2028, but he also doesn't really see problems with you know politicians taking money from APAC because like you said, I think he just at the end of the day the ultimate goal is how do we get Democrats in office?
Does it really matter how they get there or what they do once they're there or how those contributions may affect how they are making decisions?
Um I don't know, as long as they're a Democrat, that's fine.
So I think that was kind of his thinking, and yeah, he definitely was stuck in this, you know, older era, I think, of how he thinks about politics, and um he's very, you know, obviously committed to the establishment, as a lot of people there were.
Yeah, I think there's like this misconception too, and I've seen this for decades that if a politician is a black Democrat like Corey Booker, especially if they're from like a predominantly black district, you know, Corey Booker comes from Newark, he makes a big deal of the fact that he still lives there and what he calls a predominantly black and brown neighborhood.
I think there's always this default assumption that they're somehow liberal, and a lot of you know, black Democrats, um, you know, you look at Jasmine Crockett, for example, you know, who's very, you know, flamboyant and loud in her use of language to condemn Donald Trump, but on issues, she's very centrist when it comes to you know, she never, to my knowledge, has really talked much about Israel.
She doesn't really talk about foreign policy, and the Congressional Black Caucus is very, I would say like they're more centrist than anything, you know, very connected to corporate America.
They take a lot of money from there, they take a lot of money from AIPAC.
Um, so I think there's always this assumption, like, oh, if I say Cory Booker, he must be a good safe bet.
He's a black Democrat from New Jersey, kind of seems liberal to me, even though Corey Booker is one of the worst whores for Wall Street and APAC that exists in the entire Senate.
It's just like our cognitive dissonance there to realize that.
All right, let's look at this next one.
Yeah.
So here in New York, I'm curious if you've been following the mayoral election.
Um, is there a candidate that you support?
Actually, no.
No, okay.
Can you tell me um like any of the candidates, I have to say.
And I honestly have not yet decided who I'm voting for.
So are you between like Mamdanny and Cuomo then?
Yes.
I am.
I I wouldn't say I'm between them.
Okay.
You don't like them or in front of them or something because anyway, yes.
I think well it's not.
How can I say this?
I'll find that.
Cuomo has too much experience, and Mamdomi doesn't have enough.
So you're worried about ex-toting like New York.
In terms of like policies between the two of them, um do you lean one way or another?
Well, as I said, I haven't decided.
I mean, you all you asked her, like, do you lean toward one way?
She was like, Are you dumb?
I just told you I haven't decided, which is a completely different question.
Like you could still lean toward one.
Sorry.
But anyway, she seemed nice too.
Uh not really, but a little bit.
But you know, Megan, the one thing I just want to say before I think this is uh those are all the clip we're gonna show, but before I let you go, it's like one of the really interesting things is that for a long time Republicans didn't really know how to attack AOC, and they would talk about AOC like she was some kind of you know, fire breathing radical communist, you know, and they would say, like, she's so far outside the mainstream and she's like this dangerous figure.
And she's utterly not, you know, she's just so pliable, she's such a tool for establishment power.
And it was Marjorie Taylor Green who really understands the reality of AOC better than anybody and understands what makes her so repugnant, which is that it's all branding, it's all fake.
Like she's just uh a fraud.
She's like a tool of the Democratic Party.
She's just there to kind of like make, you know, gestures to being slightly more radical to make young people come to the party.
Like she's really one of the most valuable tools of the party because of that.
And I always, you know, thought, wow, Marjorie Telegrine understands who AOC is and what her role is so much better than most Republicans who think she's some kind of like, you know, dangerous extremist or something.
When she's a careerist, you know, she's happy to fit in to any place that she's in.
And it strikes me that Republicans were talking about these protests in this very same with this very same misunderstanding.
Mike Johnson, for example, called this like a hate America protest, and I think JD Vance, you know, made similar notions about it.
I mean, these people, they're American.
They don't hate America.
They're American.
They're just like Democrats, and they're just having a partisan protest on the street.
And I do think these people were very representative of anything, as you, you know, we talked about before.
You went to like a place that's probably in the you know, 95th pertent percentile of more radical politics than any other location where a lot of these were, and you couldn't have found more banal, you know, kind of uh just you know, very tranquil people in terms of what their politics are.
Is that your was that your impression?
Yeah, I mean, that a lot of them, again, they're just like sweet liberal grandparents kind of.
And uh especially with that woman, I thought it was so interesting her kind of hesitance to um you know say that she supported either Cuomo or Mam Dani, because you know, Mamdani is the Democratic, you know, novity in New York City, and you could just see how he's really causing so many like problems in the Democratic Party because people don't know what to do with him,
even though as you've pointed out before, he's definitely going to moderate and you've seen his kind of stretch, like yeah, he's on the AOC Bernie.
Yeah, yeah, pull back a bit.
Um, and it's really interesting.
Actually, I went to the New Jersey governor or Gubentroyal debate and asked Mikey Sherrill, who she's like one of these girl boss, you know, democratic candidates for governor there.
Um I asked her, you know, why haven't you reciprocated um Zoramamdani's endorsement?
Or do you reciprocate his endorsement?
Yes or no, because he's endorsed her, but she has not endorsed him back.
And she was like, I'm not gonna comment on the New York City mayoral election, um, which is crazy because the governor of New Jersey would have to presumably work with the mayor of New York City, but it's just you can see how you know these kind of people they just can't deviate from this thing that they've always known and how to operate as democrats and how to deviate from the script.
Um and I think that's really apparent in the interviews that I I had with these people.
So yeah, and you know, for I mean, first of all, there is something very kind of pathetic about Zoran offering his endorsement of these party functionaries who aren't going to endorse him back because they just think he's too radioactive or actually dislike him.
But the other part that amazes me is, you know, whatever else you say about the Democratic Party, you see the absence of young people at these rallies.
You have MAGA rally.
There's gonna be a lot of young people.
There's a lot of very passionate followers of Donald Trump of participants in the MAGA movement.
You have a party, uh uh, an event for the Democratic Party, and it's gonna be very hard to turn out young people who just don't this this doesn't resonate with them precisely because it's so tepid, you know, it's so just kind of ambiguous in terms of what it stands for.
Young people aren't gonna go out unless you're Harry Sisson and those types and like protest for the Democratic Party.
Um but what and that's a big flaw of the Democratic Party.
So when you get these candidates like Zoran and this Grant Planter in Maine, who's causing a similar sort of stir among younger people, among people who aren't typically Democrats, who get excited about these races, who want to actually come out.
and everyone has a huge following of young men in New York.
I know exactly what the Democratic Party is missing.
It is amazing to watch them stay in this like archaic era where if you get any too close to somebody who's like on the left, you know, they watched Trump break every single political rule, and they still cling so desperately and fearfully to the rules that have governed their minds about politics, and it's like Bill Clinton, you know.
Oh, you can't go too far left like Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis because then you lose, but then when you moderate with Bill Clinton, you win, and this is not the current political mood.
Exactly.
Yeah, I think they're really miscalculating the way that things are going.
And um, yeah, it will be interesting to see.
I think Momani's probably going to win the New York City mayor election.
I don't know what's gonna happen.
But even you see with the rise of uh, or not the rise of, but Curtis Lewa like has sort of had this surge in popularity among people just because he speaks so plainly, and that's something that people really crave.
And if you have these things like these very pre-packaged no kings protests, if you have Democrats like Corey Booker who just are terrified of deviating from any sort of script, obviously that's not going to resonate with people.
Yeah, especially young people.
I mean, it it's you know, these people all act like, you know, they're they're on the board of directors of insurance companies and they're kind of speaking at some like very cautious group for for some very cautious group of old institutional stockholders, and you feel it.
You know, you feel just the lack of of soul and like spirit, you know, it's just so rehearsed and safe and crusty that, you know, unless you're like 75 and and spending your time watching MSNBC, you're not gonna be attracted to these sort of events or to the movement that they're supposed to promote.
All right, Megan, uh great work as always.
Uh congratulations on your debut appearance on System Update.
I'm certain it will not be the last.
Thank you so much.
See you soon.
Bye.
See you.
Bye.
you All right, listen to me.
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Thank you.
I continue to be amazed at the ease with which new regime change wars can be sold, even to a population that continuously says they oppose them, don't want more of them, want to spend resources on our communities at home, not by changing governments and fixing countries abroad.
And a political movement like MAGA emerged in large part out of that belief, and yet the minute Donald Trump wants to bomb somewhere or wants to change a government, he just barely even bothers giving a pretext, and huge numbers of his supporters go around just reciting the mantra that we need to go do it, that it's the right thing to go do.
And what you see is until Trump does it, nobody's calling for it.
Nobody was calling on Trump to bomb the Houthis in Yemen until he did it.
And then once he did it, huge numbers of his porters said, yeah, we're right to do it.
Let's kill the Houthis.
And then when he stopped after twenty thirty days, none of them complain.
None of them said, no, keep bombing the Houthis.
It's not a healthy political movement.
I'm not saying that Donald Trump supporters do this uniquely.
In fact, I think there's a lot more dissent among Trump supporters to some of these issues, and there is often the case for other political movements.
But you have multiple wars that Donald Trump has initiated, multiple conflicts that he's involved in the United States in.
Unlike in the first term, where he didn't involve the United States in new conflicts, that's not the case already.
It's not even a year, it's fairly 10 months.
And we're on the verge of another.
And this one could be more consequential, more destabilizing, more expensive, bloodier than the ones prior, which is the attempt clearly that the Trump administration is now undertaking to change the regime of Venezuela under the pretext that all we're really doing is combating the drug supply into the United States,
even though, as we demonstrated many times before, government reports, advocacy groups, think tanks, have been issuing reports for years on the source of drugs inside the United States.
WHEN IT COMES TO FENTANYL, VENEZUELA HAS NO ROLE.
THE CUTE COUNTRY IS PRIMARILY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FENTANYL TRADE IN THE UNITED STATES OR CHINA AND MEXICO.
And everybody was saying that when they thought what Trump's policy would be would be to go bomb the drug cartels of Mexico.
He's not doing that apparently.
He wants to go instead and focus on Venezuela and Cuba.
Marco Rubio is lifelong focused.
because And so now suddenly it becomes, oh, the drugs are no longer really a problem in terms of China and Mexico, but Venezuela?
Since when on cocaine, which isn't what Trump means when he says every time we blow up a boat, we save 25,000 lives.
He's talking about fentanyl.
Fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela.
Venezuela has nothing to do with it.
Even cocaine, Venezuela is a trivial contributor of drugs that enter the United States.
And again, when it comes to cocaine and other drugs like that, the question is why is there so much demand inside the United States?
You could work on that.
The drug war has proven over decades to be a failure.
You're not going to bomb your way out of the drug trade.
And that's not the goal here.
That's the pretext to give people to justify another regime change war.
The real goal is to change the regime of Venezuela, to put a much friendlier regime in, to have us stabilize the country in terms of our access to its massive oil supply, its geopolitics, and to exercise more power in the region.
But for what?
How is this going to help you know the people who Donald Trump called the forgotten man and deindustrialized America?
Trump keeps claiming that Maduro has offered basically everything mineral rights, oil rights, anything the United States wants.
And the Trump administration, according to President Trump and sources and stuff at the White House, say they rejected that.
It's been reported that the Trump administration cut off diplomacy with Venezuela, but why?
If Maduro really is offering everything, like, hey, here's all our vital minerals, and here's access to our oil and anything you want, Trump, you can come and have it.
Why did we cut off the uh channels of diplomacy?
Unless Donald Trump is hell-bent, and Marco Rubio, particularly is hell-bent on changing the regime of Venezuela and therefore Cuba, which I believe is what this is all about.
Trump was asked about this is October 17th, so just a couple days ago while he was in the Oval Office, and here's what he said.
That must be reported that Maduro offered everything in his country, all their natural resources.
He even recorded a message to you in English recently, uh offering mediation.
Why should we do this to stop that?
He has offered everything.
He's offered everything.
You're right.
You know why?
Because he doesn't want to fuck around with the United States.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody.
So there you see Marco Rubio on his side, kind of he looks over at Marco Rubio is very self-satisfied.
Marco Rubio's family are immigrants from Cuba.
And like a lot of people who come to the United States who are immigrants from Cuba, they continue to focus on that region of the world, want to use the United States to change the governments in accordance with their own preferences, just like a lot of people embedded with love of Israel from childhood, focus on Israel, want the United States to do that.
And that's a lot of what's going on here as well.
Now the U.S. continues to just blow up boats that are in international waters in the Caribbean.
And every time they blow one up, or at least every time they want to tell us about it, they post pictures of the boat exploding.
Can't see anything other than the boat exploding.
You don't know who's on the boat.
You don't know what they have on the boat, you don't know where it's going or what purpose it has.
You know what we're told about it after they blow it up.
It reminds me a lot of when Obama used to drone drone whoever he wanted in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan.
They would just blow people up.
And then they John Brennan would issue a press release as CIA director saying, oh, we just killed 14 more militants or more terrorists, and there'd be Reuters headlines saying U.S. kills 14 Al-Qaeda militants, government says, or Brennan says, or CIA says.
And they would just mindlessly recite what the government said about these people, even though, as the Biden the Obama administration themselves admitted, usually they didn't know the names of anyone that they were blowing up, or most of the people they were blowing up, they would just blow them up.
They had no idea who they even were, let alone that they were terrorists or militants.
And they would just say afterwards, oh yeah, we blew up terrorists.
Everybody would say, Oh, yeah, good, that's great.
We blew up terrorists, no due process, no evidence, nothing.
Just Obama asserting the right to go around the world, killing whoever he wants, not in war zones, not with authorization of Congress.
And that's exactly what's happening now.
Here is uh Pete Hagseth, the newly named Secretary of War, which I think is much more accurate name than Secretary of Defense.
On October 19th, he posted this to his ex account.
On October 17th, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with the ELN, a designated terrorist organization that was operating in the U.S. Southcom area of responsibility.
The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotic smuggling, was traveling along a known narco trafficking route and was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics.
There were three male neuro uh narco-terrorists aboard the vessel during the strike, which was conducted in international waters.
All three terrorists were killed and no U.S. forces were harmed in the strike.
By the way, Ron Paul, Rand Paul rather, the senator from Kentucky continues to be one of the very few people who steadfastly objected to Trump's uh the the Obama policy of just going around the world killing people and claiming afterwards that they were terrorists with no evidence.
He would object to that many years.
I was doing reporting on that all the time, and Ron Paul was always there denouncing it, and now he's denouncing President Trump's program policy based on exactly the same rationale because the policies are identical.
They use the same legal frameworks, they're both based on the war on terror.
Trump, that's why Pete Hagsteth calls them narco-terrorists.
And in order to justify just killing them without any evidence presented or anything like that.
By the way, uh we have Rand Paul's interview from Fox News where he explained this just in the last couple days.
Can we pull that up, please?
I forgot to mention that, but I'd like to show that we can just show it right from the computer.
It's it no, I know you can just pull it up.
It's like right on Twitter.
Um I just want to show you what Rand Paul is saying because Donald Trump attacked Rand Paul just like he's been attacking Thomas Massey quite viciously.
Here's what Trump said on True Social.
Now, this was about an attack where the families of the people killed insist that they were fishermen.
I'm not saying you should blindly believe that.
But they insisted that.
And uh there's no more reason to disbelieve or believe them than to believe the government of the United States, which is a long history of lying when they kill people.
Here's what Trump said on September 15th, quote, this morning on my orders, the U.S. military forces conducted a second kinetic strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narco-terrorists in the Southcom area of responsibility.
The strike occurred while these confirmed narco-terrorists were from Venezuela from Venezuela over in international waters transporting illegal narcotics, a deadly weapon poisoning Americans, headed to the U.S. These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels posed a threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy, and vital U.S. interests.
The strike resulted in three male terrorists killed in action.
No U.S. forces were harmed in the strike.
Be warned if you are transporting drugs that can kill Americans, we are hunting you.
The illicit activities by these cartels have wrought devastating consequences for American communities for decades, killing millions of American citizens no longer.
Thank you for attention to this matter.
Now, and here's the video Trump posted.
And you'll see here, because there were a couple of, I believe, survivors, you'll see how the boat is just sort of adrift here in this video.
You see, it just it's not really, you see, it's not really speeding anywhere.
It's just kind of, it almost looks stalled.
Like it's kind of just uh floating on the waves that are carrying it.
There you see the boat just looks, it really looks in neutral.
And here you see the radar focused on it, and there the it's yeah, it's on the Twitter feed.
You can find the Rand Paul interview.
It's on Fox.
And there you see it just blown up.
And now the whole boat is on fire.
I mean, it really obviously, you know, exposes the whole explosive the whole thing.
So you would think, I would think that if you're against regime change, if you don't want the US to keep spending money on military actions in other countries on bombs, that at some point you would say, wait, you keep claiming these are like narco-terrorists, incredibly violent narco-terrorists.
Like, how do you know that?
Where's the evidence for that?
And if there's all these drugs entering the United States and killing Venezuela, why did your own government, both the first administration and the second administration, the first Trump administration, the second Trump administration produced countless reports on the origins of fentanyl coming to the United States, claiming that this was China and Mexico never even mentioning Venezuela?
And why did the broader ones about drugs in general entering the United States barely attribute any of that to Venezuela at all?
When did this happen?
When suddenly did we need to now change the government of Venezuela?
Because all the drugs are coming from Venezuela.
Since when?
That was never claimed before.
The President of Colombia is Gustavo Petro.
He's on the left.
He's a critic of American imperialism and interference in his region, like a lot of Latin American leaders are.
And at least one of the people attacked there was Colombian, and the boat itself was not Venezuelan but Colombian, according to him.
This was him talking about the video where the boat was adrift, and that's the boat that the Trump administration just proudly blew up.
And here's what President Petro said about it.
The boat attacked on September 16th was Colombian, had an engine on top as a sign of damage, and was turned off.
Presumably it was in Colombia waters.
And who was there was a lifelong fisherman, Alejandro Carranza, who has not returned to his home.
Alert to the Attorney General of the A Nation.
I request that you act immediately, grant immediate protection to the victim families, and associate them, if they wish, with the victims of Trinidad and Tobago.
And what's the role to initiate legal actions in the world and in the justice system of the United States.
Now, you look at that video, there's no question what he said there about the boat is true.
I don't know if the boat was disabled, I don't know if the engine was injured, but they were clearly installed.
The boat was not headed anywhere, it was not speeding anywhere.
Okay.
I And he claimed that it was a fisherman.
The family has come out and said the same.
I'm not saying you Should believe them blindly either.
But it's certainly evidenced to weigh against the Trump administration's continuous claims presented with zero evidence, zero.
Here's what Donald Trump responded.
This was yesterday on True Social in response to President Petro's statement, quote, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia is an illegal drug leader, strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs in big and small fields all over Colombia.
Now, I should just say here that it's only in the last year, couple years that the left has been able to win elections of Colombia.
Before that, it was a right-wing government for the longest time in Colombia.
They were very close U.S. allies.
The US had a base in Colombia.
We helped Colombia fight FARC and other drug gangs for years and years and years.
Massive military force.
We've been fighting the war on drugs with our military for decades, since Richard Nixon.
And I've asked this question once before, but have you ever heard anyone in the United States who wants drugs complain that they can't get it?
I haven't.
It's a total failure in the war on drugs.
You cannot eliminate or fight drugs through blowing up boats.
And it's not the goal.
Trump goes on.
It is, and so this idea that President Petro who's been in power for like six seconds, is a big drug leader, a legal drug leader, because he's the president of Colombia, a country that does actually, unlike Venezuela, export a lot of drugs, is laughable.
Colombia has always been this, including when the U.S. controlled its puppet government.
Trump goes on, quote, it has become the biggest business in Colombia by far, and Petro does nothing to stop it, despite large-scale payments and subs subsidies from the USA that are nothing more than a long-term ripoff of America.
As of today, these payments or the other form of payment or subsidies will no longer be made to Colombia.
The purpose of this drug production is the sale of massive amounts of product into the United States, causing death, destruction, and havoc.
Petro, a low-rated and very unpopular leader with a fresh mouth toward America, better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won't be done nicely.
So I guess we're threatening to bomb Colombia now or invade Colombia as well.
Again, Colombia has been producing, I mean, does anyone not know this?
Like all the lore about Colombian drug gangs.
There's, you know, mini-series and films about it, and notorious and mythological Colombian drug leaders.
This is not something that just happened in the last year or two.
And the United States has been trying to bomb the drug industry out of Colombia for decades.
How has that worked?
So you have a president who came in campaigning to only focus on the promise on the forgotten man, America first, the communities that are falling apart in the United States, the deindustrialized parts of the United States, no more money on wars and endless war and military and bombing and regime change.
And he spent a month on the Middle East and Israel and Hamas and Gaza, threatening Hamas, engineering uh ceasefire that I hope remains, but over the weekend already, Israel ignored it, claiming Hamas violated it like you knew Israel would.
We're going to get to that tomorrow.
Bombing a hundred different sites, killing dozens of people in Gaza during this ceasefire.
Cutting off aid, they're back to saying they're going to adhere to the ceasefire for now.
And now you have them focused on who's going to lead Venezuela and who's going to lead Colombia and threatening Cuba.
I mean, America is last oftentimes.
From Reuters today, the obvious uh response, Colombia recalls U.S. ambassador after Trump's tariff threat, drug remarks.
So let me just make sure I understand this.
We give money, I have given money to Colombia every year to help them fight their drug gangs and their drug traffickers.
And Colombia, as I said, is an actual major source of drugs that had into the United States, cocaine and other drugs like it.
We don't want to spend that money anymore to help Colombia fight drugs.
We want to save that money.
So no more money to Colombia to fight drugs.
But we're gonna pay for a massive regime change operation In Venezuela, huge amounts of military assets deployed to the Caribbean to menace Venezuela, massive bombing campaigns, monitoring and surveilling their shipping, bombing their boats, a CIA covert operation that Trump has authorized to act inside Venezuela.
Do you know how expensive that is?
And then if we do end up deposing Maduro, as is the goal.
Do you know how armed Venezuela is?
You think Venezuelans are just gonna meekly allow Maduro to be deposed and to have a U.S. puppet installed that we control?
Who's already pro who's already calling Netanyahu and promising her support for Israel?
Who's already saying that if you get me into power, Cuba and other left-ling regimes in the region will fall?
There's gonna be immense amounts of instability and civil conflict at best inside Venezuela, let alone the destabilization of the region, the outflux of immigrants to neighboring countries.
The United States is going to be responsible for all that.
We're going to pour huge amounts of money into fortifying this new government in Venezuela.
And dealing with all the instability that it engenders.
I saw, we'll get to this in a second, but there were a couple of people who survived on these boats, on one of these boats, and instead of picking them up, these dangerous narco-terrorists, these violent, incredibly violent drug gangs members, as as Trump and Heggseth are claiming.
We didn't pick them up and put them in prison as you think we would.
We just sent them back to the to their home countries.
Neither of them are Venezuelan.
They were Colombian and Trinidadian.
And that's not obviously something you would do if they were actually incredibly violent narco-terrorists who have drowned Americans and killed Americans with drugs.
You would at the very best put them in a prison.
You put them on trial and put them in a prison, show evidence of their guilt and put them in prison.
And that's not what Trump did.
And I heard Trump supporters over the weekend saying, oh, well, why should we spend the money to imprison them?
It's like, what?
You don't think anymore that we should imprison incredibly violent drug terrorists?
Because we want to save the money.
It's we should just send them back to their home country to let these incredibly violent drug terrorists continue to engage in drug terrorism, narco-terrorism.
So it's no, it's not worth it to imprison violent drug terrorists, but it's worth it to spend thousands and thousands of times more on regime change in Venezuela on a massive military operation to blow up boats.
That makes no sense, obviously.
Now, as I mentioned, Rand Paul is one of the very few people in Washington in general who stands on principle, Thomas Massey is another.
I don't think it's coincidental that the two members of the Republican Party that Trump is trying most to vilify and remove from Congress are Thomas Massey and Rand Paul, two Republicans from Kentucky.
And Rand Paul went on Fox, and he made all the arguments.
I remember I meet the press.
Sorry, he went on meet the press with Kristen Walker, Kristen Walker, and she asked him about this policy of blowing up boats in off the coast of Venezuela, and Rand Paul said all the things I remember him saying about his opposition to the Obama policy that was very similar.
And I know because I was saying the same things back then, I'm saying the same things now, so I recognize someone's consistent advocacy on this, and Rand Paul is one of the very few people being consistent.
Here's what he said on Meet the Press.
Venezuela, obviously, you've been very focused on this.
President Trump has authorized military strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean.
As you know, so far, more than 20 people, Senator, have been killed in six different strikes.
Do you believe that these strikes against these suspected drug boats are legal?
No, they go against all of our tradition.
You know, when you kill someone, you should know if you're not in at war, not in a declared war, you really need to know someone's name at least.
You have to accuse them of something.
You have to present evidence.
So all these people have been blown up without us knowing their name, without any evidence of a crime.
And for decades, if not centuries, when you stop people at sea in international waters or in your own waters, you announce that you're going to board the ship and you're looking for contraband, smuggling or drugs.
This happens every day off of Miami.
But we know from Coast Guard statistics that about 25% of the time the Coast Guard boards the ship, there are no drugs.
So if our policy now is to blow up every ship we suspect or accuse of drug running, that would be a bizarre world in which 25% of the people might be innocent.
The other thing about these speed boats is they're they're 2,000 miles away from us.
If they have drugs, they're probably peddling drugs to one of the islands of Trinidad or Tobago off of uh Venezuela.
Uh the idea that they're coming here is like it's a huge assumption.
And really shouldn't you have to present some proof?
Um it is the difference between war and peace.
In war, though, you don't ask people's name.
But if they want all-out war where we kill anybody and everybody that is in the country of Venezuela or coming out, that has to have a declaration of war.
It's something that is not pretty, very expensive, and I'm not in favor of declaring war on Venezuela, but the Congress should vote.
The president shouldn't do this by himself.
I mean, it's that is so basic.
I mean, if these people are really drug traffickers, why don't we spend one ten thousandths of what we would spend and just do normal Coast Guard interdictions and pick these people up and put them in life in prison, which is what you do with international drug traffickers if you actually have evidence that convicts them of guilt in the court.
She's gonna go around murdering people because they're in a boat without any idea who you're even killing, and then afterwards have Pete Hexas go, we got those narcoterists, and a bunch of mock people are gonna be like, yeah, the bad guys.
I mean, this is insanity.
This is what leads to every dumb American war.
Exactly this mentality, this leader worship, this just willingness to believe whatever is fed to people.
And, you know, kudos to Rand Paul, since he knows that anybody in the Republican Party in Congress who stands up and criticizes a single thing Donald Trump does is gonna have the wrath of not just Trump, but his billionaire AIPAC funders come crashing down on them.
That's what who's funding Tom Massey's uh the campaign against Tom Massey or three extremely pro-Israel billionaires, including Mary Madelson.
And they'll do that to anybody that Trump wants.
Rand Paul has never been a really steadfast supporter of Israel.
And he can't help but notice that those are the people that Trump keeps targeting for removal.
And maybe it's because he's also mad at them because they occasionally object, such as when Trump is following a neoconservative policy long advocated by people like Marco Rubio and those other neocons of Washington and people like Tom Massey or at least Rand Paul talked thought took seriously the idea that that neocon neoconservatism would not govern our foreign policy anymore, and so they say, hey, I think I'm against this based on arguments they've long made, including about Obama.
Now, as we mentioned, there were two survivors of the explosion of these ships, which is amazing.
The U.S. government has the first ever trillion dollar a year military budget.
We're trying to blow up these boats, little speed boats.
But somehow two people on them survive.
Now, if you believe everything Pete Haggseth has been saying, or Donald Trump has been saying, or J.D. Vance has been saying, all the people on these boats that were blowing up are incredibly violent drug traffickers.
And I should just I wanted to say also about this Rand Paul clip, by the way.
I remembered this today when I actually was watching something that we did.
I was looking for something and I remembered this.
After the first boat was exploded, Marco Rubio was the one who came out and announced it.
And he gave a press conference and they said, where was this boat going?
And Marco Rubio said, We believe it was taking drugs to Trinidad.
Exactly what Rand Paul just said.
These are small boats, they're thousands of miles away from the U.S. shores.
It's unlikely they're coming to the U.S. They're probably, you know, there's drug demand in a lot of other places besides the United States, including in the Caribbean.
And he said they're probably taking it to the Caribbean.
And Marco Rubio said when asked that the first boat we blew up was headed to Trinidad.
The next day, though, Trump came out and said we blew up this boat because it was headed to the United States with drugs.
And then Marco Rubio changed his story and started saying it was headed to the U.S. This is the kind of thing that ought to really provoke your skepticism no matter how much you hate Maduro or commies or whatever is in your mind about why we need to do another war, another regime Change war.
You shouldn't want to be lied to by the government or lured into another war based on claims that aren't the real motives.
Now, as I said, there were two survivors of one of the boats that we just blew up.
And if Pete Hags at the Marco Rubio were telling the truth, and these are dangerous narcoterrorists, incredibly violent, you would obviously want to put them in prison.
After all, they probably have blood of Americans on their hands.
That's not what the U.S. decided to do.
Here from the Washington Post over the weekend.
The U.S. is repatriating the survivors of an alleged drug boat strike back to Colombia and Ecuador.
Quote, the United States is repatriating two alleged drug traffickers to Colombia and Ecuador after military forces attacked their vessel in the Caribbean Sea on Thursday.
It is yet unclear if the multinational crew of alleged drug traffickers has ties to Venezuelan criminals or terrorism groups, but the release, the release of two detained suspects further undermines the administration's justifications, and suggests the crew was released to avoid extended legal scrutiny, experts said.
Colombian and Ecuadorian drug runners are focused on cocaine experts say while the vast majority of fentanyl bound for the US is trafficked through Mexico.
Right, think about what would have happened if they hadn't released them.
And they picked them up, what would you have to do with them?
You'd have to charge them with crimes and bring them to an American court, charge them with crimes, give them due process, present evidence of their guilt, present evidence that these things that are being said about them really are true.
And then if you're telling the truth and you have the evidence, they would go to prison.
We did that with Manuel Noriega in the 1980s.
He used to be our ally, he was the head of Panama, the president of Panama.
We decided we didn't like him anymore.
He wasn't really doing what we told him to do anymore.
So we charged him with drug trafficking, invaded Panama, killed thousands of Panamanians, brought them back to Miami, Noriega, charged him with drug trafficking, convicted him of court, and he uh got life in prison.
Why, if these people are dangerous drug traffickers and narco-terrorists, are you releasing them back to Colombia and Ecuador instead of putting them in prison?
The only reason is is because they're not actually narco-terrorists, and you can't prove in a court they're guilty, and you're scared of what will happen if you have to.
Here was Trump on True Social.
Quote, it was my great honor to destroy a very large drug carrying submarine that was navigating toward the United States on a well-known narco trafficking transit route.
U.S. intelligence, remember when MAGA disbelieved U.S. intelligence?
U.S. intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up mostly with fentanyl and other illegal narcotics.
There were four known narco-terrorists on board the vote.
Two of the terrorists were killed.
This is the one where there were two survivors.
At least 25,000 Americans would die if I allowed the submarine to come ashore.
Okay, somebody tell me.
And then he says the two surviving terrorists are being returned to their countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.
Yeah, you sure about that?
Because the president of Colombia doesn't sound like he's ready to detain and prosecute them.
In fact, he said they were fishermen.
And if it's true that the president of Colombia, President Petro, is this illegal drug trafficker, why would you trust sending a drug narco-terror uh terrorist back to Colombia and have them prosecute them?
You're you're saying that he's President Petro is the leader of these terror games of these drug gangs.
They don't have any interest in stopping them.
None of this makes any sense unless you understand that the real goal is to destabilize Venezuela and new regime change in Venezuela and dominate the region again.
And the amount of people who are just overnight, I saw people walking around today saying, oh, we have to blow up these boats because they have fentanyl on them.
That's what Trump said here, too.
Trump's own government has produced report after report after report after report that makes clear Venezuela has nothing to do with the fentanyl trade.
Trump's campaign promise was to bomb the drug cartels of Mexico, not Venezuela, on the grounds that the Mexicans are the ones importing fentanyl and killing Americans.
But then you wake up one day, Marco Rubio convinces you to go fix the government, fix Venezuela, where his family, the region his family comes from, has a lot of interest in still, as does Rubio.
And you decide, okay, let's go get Venezuela.
We you wanted to do that in the first Trump administration as well, but John Bolton promised you it'd be easy And it wasn't, which is why you got rid of him.
What do you have to do?
Now suddenly you have a new country.
You want a regime change, and you have to convince people, especially your followers to support it.
So what do you do?
You're like, hey, that country is bringing fentanyl into the United States and killing Americans.
And you would think people who think critically would say, What?
You never said that before.
Since when?
Since when is Venezuela bringing fentanyl in?
Or even since when is Venezuela the main source of cocaine?
But he knows people aren't going to think critically.
He knows that if you tell enough people, we're blowing up bad guys, we're blowing up the terrorists, the brown narco terrorists, the traffickers, the kingpins.
They're killing Americans.
That lizard brain kicks in and people start cheering for every time they see a boat blowing up.
They feel strong and powerful.
Like, yeah, we got those terrorists.
I've watched this for 25 years.
And well, back into the Cold War, the same thing.
But with the fall of the Soviet Union, communism didn't work anymore.
Now it's the terrorist, it has to be the terrorist, the terrorist.
It's justified all manner of lies and invasions and wars and bombings and erosion of civil liberties.
It's amazing that it doesn't end.
Everybody watches these tactics, watches them get dismantled and deconstructed and exposed.
Said they don't want more war, says they won't want more regime change, they want to spend the money here at home.
The minute the government says, look over there, more bad guys, we have to go kill way too many people.
Not all by any means, but way too many.
Just start cheering, like feeling like a purpose to blowing people up, even though I have no idea who these people are, as Rand Paul said.
And I confess maybe there was some kind of desire shaping my perception that after watching this for 25 years, people really were at an end of their willingness to tolerate these new regime change wars.
But every time there's a new one presented, and you watch everybody either stand up and cheer, just kind of silently acquiesce.
And you realize how powerful war propaganda is and how immediately you can just shift people's brain on a dime.
And that's what's happening in the case of Venezuela.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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