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 won.
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 U.S. campaign to engineer regime change in Venezuela and perhaps other countries in the region continues to intensify.
Over the weekend, the U.S. 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 drowning Americans with fatal drugs.
Wouldn't you want to put them in U.S. 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.
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Last I heard there are a couple of tickets left, not many.
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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.
Brunch and Resistance00:11:20
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 Mueller, as 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 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 in 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 won, certainly would be doing the case.
Now, there are certain policies 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 meaningful ways, but so has every other president.
So on the one hand, it's repulsive to watch people like Doug Emhoff.
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 post-Hillary 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 she 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 America and the American economy and eliminate 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 at 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 this sign is a very illustrative expression of what it's hard to obviously generalize and talk about all the protesters.
We're 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 going to get to Megan O'Rourke, who is our great producer and social media manager, who actually attended one of these, videotaped her interviews with multiple participants, and we're going to 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 Amhoff, 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 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, reached an agreement.
They 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 meaning free work for our government, you'll do pro bono work when they take clients for free for social causes, those social causes 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 going to destroy you in so many ways.
He barred lawyers 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, a remarkable assertion of government power over the free market, over private enterprise, over lawyers and the job 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 Farr, 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, but 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.
Hear 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 court 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 hired an investigator who worked for the January 6th Committee.
But not Doug Emhoff.
Doug Emhoff 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 Emhoff, joined Wilkie Farr shortly after Mr. Trump was sworn in.
Mr. M. Hoff, who has told others he was making $6 million 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 Wilkie Farr partners, Doug Emhoff is probably among the top, say, 2% that could leave most easily.
Probably a lot of very well-regarded, prestige 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 going to stay here with my $6 million 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 vapid cosplaying and role-playing I think is so often shaping the resistance to 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.
Harlem Protests Diversity00:14:55
She's very good at speaking to people, very kind of unassuming.
There you see her YouTube channel.
It's called Clickbait Wasteland, kind of ironically named.
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.
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 going to 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.
Yes, this was the No Kings protest in New York City.
And the main protest in New York City was down in Times Square.
I went to one of these kind of satellite No Kings protests that was held up in Harlem, 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.
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.
But this one was especially geriatric, I thought.
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.
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 almost like ethnography of the vestiges of this resistance movement.
So I just went over there and I spoke with people about, you know, why are you there?
And, you know, 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 a true resistance, I don't think.
You know, it's, 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 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 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 into the 2000s.
And you would expect, you know, I can understand in Manhattan, you kind of get, you know, Manhattan is just like has 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.
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 had is not a very racially diverse composition because a lot of people who live in that area 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.
But it just, it seems as though it's not because there is no radical element on the left or just like an anti-establishment radicalism.
Those things do exist.
It's just these kinds of protests aren't attracting them 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.
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, not everyone was voting for Zohar Mamdani there.
Some people said that they were undecided.
And then I also asked people, who would you like to see on like the 2028 presidential ticket?
And one man told me that he wanted Corey Booker on the ticket.
So that's kind of the types that this 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 it's funny because like these protests, these people really are not in too much like danger of being 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 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, but it wasn't as strong as the, you know, we hate the orange man.
Orange man is bad.
Get him out of here.
So I really do think that it's a generational divide mostly.
And I also think the way that people found out about this was through like more like Facebook groups, maybe more 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 2017 at the resistance protests.
You know what?
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 executive order.
And there's not really any objection.
I think people in Congress like to be social media influencers and don't really care much about their loss of their power.
And the Supreme Court has in a lot of ways rubber stamped things, although not entirely the judiciary, still pretty active.
But 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 shortly 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 reestablishment 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.
Most of these people probably love George Bush now.
They certainly love like, you know, the kind of orbiters of the Bush-Teney world, like, you know, Bill Crystal 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 the heroine that he spawned named Liz, like their national heroine.
And they certainly don't have that sense at all about Obama.
So is there any kind of substance or meat to this anti-authoritarian agenda other than we should have Democrats in power and not Republicans?
Yeah, I mean, I think it is a very partisan protest.
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?
Instead of having Kamala Harris just throated 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 Trump's use of the military in certain cities.
And, you know, they had more specific things, like complaints about ICE coming into outside schools.
I just 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 protesting Obama.
And this clearly is like an anti-Trump protest at its core.
And also when you speak to people about, you know, what do they think about foreign policy as well, 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.
So it's kind of interesting how, you know, when you really prod these people's ideas, they can't really express what they're really upset about, except for this vague, you know, we want democracy restored because they have, you know, grievances against maybe Trump as an individual.
That's not to say there's no substantive things that they were complaining about, but this protest doesn't seem to express those grievances very well to me.
Yeah, my guess is that a lot of the people who are 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, in their words slipping all the way down 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.
And 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 very supportive of him and wanted to bomb Iran.
So I think that's probably why a lot of people were willing to comment on Israel and Palestine.
And I've seen a lot of these kind of protests where there's 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 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, I'm going to try and do as many of these as I can.
I don't know whether I can really withstand them or not.
I've seen a couple of them just floating around on your social media accounts on X and the like, but I don't know exactly which one 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 the internet used to call nut picking, where you look for the most aberrant or extreme or sensationalized person because you think they're going to draw attention or make a point.
Like you're pretty much looking to interview people with the sense of what?
Of kind of just getting a sense for what is there?
Yeah, definitely.
It was 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 these people, they're very like well-meaning and earnest.
Yes, very earnest.
Also, I think they probably were a little bit more progressive, I would say, than like if you went to a 2017, you know, resistance type event.
Like, I think.
really Zoron Mondani has changed the, I really hate to use this term, but like the Overton window in New York City.
So there were Zoron supporters there.
Like I said, the organizer was a Zoron.
She had a Jews for Zoron hat on.
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.
So they weren't all like Lincoln project types, but 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, it may be 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 New York that have become, you know, much more left-wing, left-liberal than they used to be.
The younger sections, the more gentrified ones, the kind that vote for AOC, for example, or Zoron, as you point out.
Bernie Endorses Senate Candidate00:15:41
So I think it's worth remembering that we're not dealing with a very representative city politically, although it's not really as off-wing as most people think, which is why it's such a shock that Zoron became the nominee.
All right.
Let's look at a few of these and then we can talk about them.
Let's just go 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 going to be able to sleep tonight because that catchy tune is going to be stuck in my head and I'm going to be chanting it at home unknowingly.
You know, first of all, you know, the composition of the crowd is pretty much what we described, which, you know, is fine.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 it seemed pretty genuine.
And so I don't think that they would be able to reconcile this.
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.
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, yeah, I think it's, if you confronted them, they would 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 usual line of argumentation, which is that, oh, Trump is so bad.
So therefore the Democrats are shielded from any criticism.
You know, 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, you know, that's basically being endorsed and talked about by all these establishment figures, you know, how against the grain are you really going?
Yeah, when you're waving Kamala Harris and Tim Waltzin's.
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 Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio and then Ted Cruz, behind which all this establishment money, you know, assembled and he still won.
And then even in 2024, as 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 2016 and 2024, there were very vibrant primaries within the Republican Party, and Donald Trump won both of them freely and fairly, despite the party being opposed to him in many ways.
Obviously, I think there are a lot of authoritarian policies Donald Trump 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.
Here's a person you were able to speak with.
I was curious, like, what you think about, you know, the future of Democrats taking money from AIPAC, whether you think that they should stop doing so.
A lot of people in the Democratic Party are demanding this.
Well, listen, 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.
I'm just, sorry, one last question.
I don't want to keep you.
I was curious if you've been following the New York City mayoral election and if there's anyone that you support.
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 him.
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, if either one of them got elected, it'll be fine with me.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
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 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.
He also, though, was critical of, you know, Israel's war in Gaza too earlier and said that he was supportive of the Columbia protests.
So I thought this was such an interesting response that this guy also supported Corey Booker for the Democratic ticket in 2028.
But he also doesn't really see problems with 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?
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 older era, I think, of how he thinks about politics.
And 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 black Democrats, you look at Jasmine Crockett, for example, who's very flamboyant and loud in her use of language to condemn Donald Trump.
But on issues, she's very centrist when it comes to, 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.
So I think there's always this assumption, like, oh, if I say Corey 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 AIPAC that exists in the entire Senate.
It's just like a 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.
Is there a candidate that you support?
Actually, no.
No, okay.
Can you tell me 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 Mamdani and Cuomo then?
Yes, I am.
I wouldn't say I'm between them.
Okay, you don't like behind them or in front of them or something because anyway, yes.
I think, well, how can I say this?
Cuomo has too much experience and Momdami doesn't have enough experience.
So you're worried about extreme like New York.
In terms of like policies between the two of them, 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, but I'll be okay.
But anyway, she seemed nice too.
Not really, but a little bit.
But, you know, the one thing I just want to say before, I think those are all the clips we're going to 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 Teller 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 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 Teller Greene 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 just a careerist.
You know, she's happy to fit into 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 J.D. 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 are very representative of anything.
As you, you know, we talked about before.
You went to like a place that's probably in the 95th 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 just, you know, very tranquil people in terms of what their politics are.
Is that your, was that your impression?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of them, again, they're just like sweet liberal grandparents, kind of.
And especially with that woman, I thought it was so interesting, her kind of hesitance to, you know, say that she supported either Cuomo or Mamdani because, you know, Mamdani is the Democratic, you know, novite 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 him.
He's on the AOC Bernie.
Yeah, he's on the AOC Bernie side.
Yeah, yeah, pull back a bit.
And it's really interesting.
Actually, I went to the New Jersey governor or gubernatorial debate and asked Mikey Sherrill, who she's like one of these girl boss, you know, Democratic candidates for governor there.
I asked her, you know, why haven't you reciprocated Zora Mamdani'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 going to comment on the New York City mayoral election, which is crazy because the governor of New Jersey would have to presumably work with the mayor of New York City.
But it 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.
And I think that's really apparent in the interviews that I had with these people.
Yeah.
And, you know, 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 actively 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 going to 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 an event for the Democratic Party, and it's going to be very hard to turn out young people who just don't, 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 going to go out unless you're Harry Sisson and those types and like protest for the Democratic Party.
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, Zeron 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 since like Bill Clinton.
Rise of Plain Speech00:00:52
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 yeah, it will be interesting to see.
I think Mondani is probably going to win the New York City mayoral election.
I don't know what's going to happen.
But even you see with the rise of, 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.
Why Pretexts Fail00:07:45
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's, you know, these people all act like, you know, they're on the board of directors of insurance companies and they're kind of speaking at some like very cautious group for some very cautious group of old institutional stockholders and you feel it.
You know, you feel just the lack 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 spending your time watching MSNBC, you're not going to be attracted to these sort of events or to the movement that they're supposed to promote.
All right, Megan, great work as always.
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.
All right, listen to me.
Just listen.
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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, you know, 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 supporters said, yeah, we're right to do it.
Let's kill the Houthis.
And then when he stopped after 30 days, none of them complained.
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 than 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 apparently 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 countries primarily responsible for the fentanyl trade in the United States are 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's lifelong focus.
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?
Even 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 the people who Donald Trump called the Forgotten Man in 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 inside the White House, say they rejected that.
They don't want 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 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, this was October 17th, so just a couple days ago while he was in the Oval Office, and here's what he said.
Things are happening around the world, I'll say this.
The president has been reported that Maduro offered everything in his country, all the natural resources.
He even recorded a message to you in English recently offering mediation.
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 everybody.
Thank you, United.
Thank you, Bob.
Thank you, everybody.
So there you see Marco Rubio on his side.
He looks over at Marco Rubio, he's very self-satisfied.
Marco Rubio's family are immigrants from Cuba.
And like a lot of people who come to the United States were immigrants from Cuba, they continue to focus on that region of the world, want to use the United States to change 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.
U.S. Military Strikes in International Waters00:15:47
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 whoever he wanted in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan.
They would just blow people up.
And then John Brennan would issue a press release, his 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 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 blow up terrorists.
And everybody would say, oh, yeah, good, that's great.
We blow 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 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 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, the Obama policy of just going around the world killing people and claiming afterwards that they were terrorists with no evidence.
He objected 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 Hagseth calls them narco-terrorists.
And in order to justify just killing them without any evidence presented or anything like that.
By the way, we have Rand Paul's interview from Fox News where he explained this just in the last couple of days.
Can we pull that up, please?
I've neglected to mention that, but I'd like to show that we can show it right from the computer.
No, I know you can just pull it up.
It's like right on Twitter.
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 there's no more reason to disbelieve or believe them than to believe the government of the United States, which has 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 narcoterrorists were from Venezuela, from Venezuela, were in international waters transporting illegal narcotics, a deadly weapon poisoning Americans, headed to the U.S. These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels pose 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 your 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 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 Red 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, exposed the whole thing.
So you would think, I would think that if you're against regime change, if you don't want the U.S. 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, produce 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: quote, 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 was there, who was there was a lifelong fisherman, Alejandro Carranza, who has not returned to his home.
Alert to the Attorney General of the EA 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 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 stalled.
The boat was not headed anywhere.
It was not speeding anywhere.
And he claimed that it was a fisherman.
Now, I'm not saying you should believe the government of Colombia and the claims it makes.
The family has come out and said the same.
I'm not saying you should believe them blindly either.
But it's certainly evidence 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 at Colombia.
Before that, it was a right-wing government for the longest time in Colombia.
They were very close U.S. allies.
The U.S. 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.
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 public government.
Trump goes on, quote, it has become the biggest business in Colombia by far, and Petra does nothing to stop it, despite large-scale payments and 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 a 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 100 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 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 in 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 going to 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 going to meekly allow Maduro to be deposed and to have a U.S. puppet installed that we control?
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-wing regimes in the region will fall?
There's going to 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 people who survived on these boats on one of these boats.
Instead of picking them up, these dangerous narco-terrorists, these violent, incredibly violent drug gangs, members, as Trump and Hexeth are claiming, we didn't pick them up and put them in prison as you think we would.
We just sent them back to their home countries.
Neither of them were 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 America and killed Americans with drugs.
You would, at the very best, put them in a prison.
You would put them on trial, 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, we should just send them back to their home country to let these incredibly violent drug terrorists continue to engage in drug terrorism, narcoterrorism.
So 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, but 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.
Rand Paul Defends Boat Policy00:12:30
And Rand Paul went on Fox, and he made all the arguments.
I remember on 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 off the coast of Venezuela.
And Ren 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 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 a 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 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 Venezuela.
The idea that they're coming here is like, it's a huge assumption.
And really, shouldn't you have to present some proof?
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, that is so basic.
I mean, if these people are really drug traffickers, why don't we spend one ten thousandth 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 a court.
You're going to go around murdering people because they're in a boat without anybody, any idea who you're even killing.
And then afterwards, have Pete Hexas go, we got those narco-terrorists.
And a bunch of mock people are going to 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 going to have the wrath of not just Trump, but his billionaire AIPAC funders come crashing down on them.
That's who's funding Tom Massey's, the campaign against Tom Massey are three extremely pro-Israel billionaires, including Mary Maidelson.
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 in Washington and people like Tom Massey or at least Rand Paul took seriously the idea 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.
When the U.S. government has the first ever trillion-dollar a year military budget, we're trying to blow up these boats, little speedboats, but somehow two people on them survived.
Now, if you believe everything Pete Hegset has been saying or Donald Trump has been saying or J.D. Vance has been saying, all the people on these boats that we're 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.
I actually was watching something that we did.
I was looking for something and I remember 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 Hagseth and Mark Arubio were telling the truth and these are dangerous, narco-terrorists, 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 fentany bound for the U.S. 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 him back to Miami, Noriega, charged him with drug trafficking, convicted him of court, and he 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 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 is 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 terrorist back to Colombia and have him prosecute them?
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, 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.
You wanted to do that in the first Trump administration as well, but John Bolton promised you would 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?
Like, hey, that country is bringing fentanyl into the United States and killing Americans.
And you would think people would think critically would say, what?
You never said that before.
Since when?
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, same thing.
But with the fall of the Soviet Union, communism didn't work anymore.
Now it's the terrorists.
It has to be the terrorists.
The terrorist has 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 wars, 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 Ren 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.
Reminder: Friday Night Event00:01:56
But every time there's a new one presented and you watch everybody either stand up and cheer, just kind of silently acquiesce, you realize how powerful war propaganda is and how immediately it 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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