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Dec. 2, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:19:43
Trump Admin Preparing for New Regime-Change War Against Venezuela

Glenn dissects the Trump administration's blatant lies and justifications for waging a regime-change war against Venezuela as the U.S. continues to strike alleged drug boats.  -------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Good evening.
It's Monday, December 1st.
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.
I was about to say, you may notice that we are not in our normal studio, but actually this is sort of our normal makeshift studio for the next couple of weeks or so.
We are intending to improve a couple of things, including the internet connection and the audio.
I think both of which are satisfactory for the moment.
They should over the next course of the next couple of days see a significant improvement.
I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving break.
I know that all of us did.
We're happy to be back.
One last note is that there are many, many, many dogs in the immediate vicinity of me.
And usually, you know, they are System Update fans, so they tend to be very respectful of the show.
I believe they'll be very well behaved, but they do get agitated when we talk about issues like regime change wars that upset them.
And so I can't make any promises.
But if you hear them, it's just them chiming in with their opinions.
All right, tonight, it does seem quite clear now, and that's because the Trump administration is essentially saying so, that the United States is on the verge of yet another regime change war.
It really is a little bit belated to say that we're on the verge of a regime change war.
We have engaged in all sorts of conduct to destabilize Venezuela, to try and threaten and pressure its longtime president, Nicolas Maduro, to leave, including threatening him with death and with imprisonment if he doesn't leave.
We've been engaged in all sorts of military action, bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela, authorizing CIA regime change operations inside Venezuela.
So the war has already begun.
But when I say we're on the verge of a regime change war, what I mean is a regime change war that looks like a war that involves attacks on Venezuelan land, not just sea, bombing attacks, possibly U.S. armed militias or even the U.S. military itself engaged in ground operations.
A lot of people believe that there's no way to dislodge Maduro without that.
Obviously, the U.S. government had to do that when it came to Iraq.
And there's so many things to say about this.
We're going to look at all of the implications of not just the fact that it's the Trump administration doing it and many Trump supporters supporting it, but all of the utterly insulting justifications being offered as to why this war is both justifiable and necessary.
I wish we'd not talk about it, but we're clearly on the verge, on the verge of another regime change war.
And then there is a very important voting process underway conducted by the site Stop Anti-Semitism, which really isn't a site at all, even though they like to pretend to be.
It's just really this one crazy woman, this extreme Israel fanatic who pretends to be an organization called Stop Anti-Semitism.
She spent the last two years to great cheers from a lot of the pro-right, pro-Israel right, getting all sorts of people fired across America for the crime of criticizing Israel or saying pro-Palestinian things.
It's basically a cancel culture site.
But each year they announce the 10 finalists for anti-Semite of the year.
They just announced those 10 finalists, and we want to take a look at it and figure out who really is the worst anti-Semite there, which anti-Semite should win the crown for 2025.
And what does this list tell us about what anti-Semitism actually means and what it doesn't mean.
All right, before we get to all of that, a few quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
When it comes to this new regime change war in Venezuela that has been underway for weeks and that is about to get started genuinely in earnest, it really is hard to know where to begin.
There's so many preposterous claims being offered by the Trump administration, but also by supporters of the Trump administration to cheer for this regime change war that really merit so little attention because they're just insultingly deceitful on their face.
It's exactly the kind of regime change war that we've seen so many times come and go and create bloodshed and destruction and utterly fail to serve anyone's interest other than the tiny elite that Donald Trump promised he would separate from American foreign policy.
It's this kind of regime change war we were promised would never be fought again.
None of it makes any sense, neither the justifications nor the plan for what's about to happen.
Everything that we're being promised, almost certainly the opposite is it's impossible to avoid the topic because it seems very clear that we are going to do whatever is necessary to remove the government of Nicolas Maduro and replace him with a government, a sect, a faction that has vowed to be a puppet of the United States and Israel.
That's just the reality of what's about to happen.
Here's Donald Trump himself over the weekend announcing the following: quote: To all airlines, pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers, please consider the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela to be closed in its entirety.
Thank you for attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.
Now, in case you're wondering why there's a lot of resentment toward the United States, it's because we go around all the time giving lectures about the rules-based international order, how Russia has to be indicted at the International Criminal Court for their violation of the rules of the international order.
We constantly are calling other countries rogue states or violators of international law.
And here, the president is just out of nowhere, just kind of because he feels like it's declaring all airspace over Venezuela closed.
And there, in fact, is no commercial aviation or aviation of any kind above Venezuela because the president has basically threatened the world.
You cannot fly over Venezuela anymore because we're about to go and attack and bomb it.
There's no congressional approval for this.
The White House hasn't even asked for a declaration of war, which the Constitution requires, hasn't asked for congressional authorization to use military force.
If you're interested in what the legal justification is, as if that matters, they're basically using the 2001 and 2002 laws that were enacted in the wake of the September 11th attack that initiated the war on terror that was supposed to be about authorizing military force against al-Qaeda that justified having the president kill anybody he wants, invade whatever country he wants, bomb whatever a country he wants, as long as he claims he's doing it to stop terrorism.
That's what George Bush used.
That's what Barack Obama did to go all over the world, bombing and droning.
And then people would say, well, there's been no declaration of war.
And Obama would say, oh, well, we have all these authorizations to use military force after 9-11.
And people would say, yeah, but that was for al-Qaeda.
And they would say, no, no.
And you're using it to bomb groups that didn't even exist as of September 11th.
And the Obama administration said, no, no, it's way broader.
It's just against terrorists generally.
And that's why it was necessary for Trump to call not just Venezuelan drug gangs, but the government itself narco-terrorists because he's labeling them terrorists and then using the post-9-11, 2001 war on terror legal framework to start a new war that he never mentioned during his campaign that the American people have not ratified either in polling, which shows they're opposed or through their elected representative in Congress.
But we fight wars without abiding by constitutional process all the time.
It's just all vested in the president.
He starts wars when he wants.
As a matter of fact, in case you're a Democrat or a liberal and thinking about complaining, in 2011, when Barack Obama involved the U.S. in a NATO regime change war in Libya, along with France and the UK, not only didn't he seek and have congressional authorization, the House of Representatives, which was controlled by the Republicans, actually voted against providing authorization for the use of military force in Libya.
They voted no.
And Obama ignored it and went ahead and did it anyway.
It was already underway when the Republicans did it.
They weren't very serious about enforcing it.
They could have cut off funding for the war.
They never did.
It was really just a symbolic gesture.
But nonetheless, they did vote to deny authorization to use military force.
And Obama just went ahead and ignored it.
So this whole constitutional republic and the foundation of how wars were supposed to begin, the founders talked a lot about this, about why it was important to have Congress declare wars.
It was because there should be no wars started unless the American people consent, given how directly it affects them.
This was back in the day when people thought Americans would be drafted into the war, but at least there's higher taxes.
We suffer economically.
We deprive ourselves of all sorts of things when we spend our resources on war.
So the founders said, well, we can't have war or something that consequential unless the American people approve it.
And they have to approve it through their elected representatives in Congress.
It wasn't just some bureaucratic requirement.
There was an actual rationale why the founders required that.
But basically, Congress renounced that power, don't want to have that power.
It's too politically risky to vote for against wars.
So they've renounced it and put it in the hands of the president.
Now the president just starts wars whenever he wanted.
The issue is, is that Donald Trump ran on a certain foreign policy.
And although there were different conflicting impulses within these foreign policy platforms that he campaigned on, one thing was for sure, we were going to stop regime change wars.
This was the type of war that he said was the classic signature of the destructive neocons and interventionists that have destroyed the country.
He gave multiple speeches throughout 2024 about the evils of neoconservatism, the need to expel them once and for all from the halls of power and the halls of government, because he said they were sending our resources not into American communities to improve the lives of American citizens, but instead into the pockets of Raytheon, General Electric, and Boeing to go and change the governments of other countries.
Remember all that?
That was a foundational view of the American First Movement.
And you have a few people in that movement who took it seriously.
Marjorie Taylor Green, for instance, today said, no regime change.
Let's fix healthcare for Americans, not regime change in Venezuela.
Which until about seven seconds ago in the Republican MAGA movement was a totally uncontroversial statement.
But now that Trump wants to go to war in Venezuela, it's time to throw aboard every principle.
And you had big MA accounts denouncing Marjorie Taylor Greene as a liberal.
I guess it's now being a liberal to say no more regime change wars.
Let's use resources at home.
We're back to the neoconservative model where everybody is a weakling if they oppose American wars.
If overthrowing Nicolas Maduro and changing the government of Venezuela is such a vital, pressing national security need, why didn't Trump do it in his first term?
Why didn't he campaign in 2024 on his intention and the need to do it so the American people could have decided if that's actually a war that they think is really not just in their interest, but necessary somehow to secure the American way of life?
John Bolton wanted to overthrow Nicolas Maduro, promised Trump it would be easy in the first term.
And when Trump saw that it wasn't easy, that's when he fired Bolton.
Obviously, John Bolton is a big proponent of the war in Venezuela.
So is former Vice President Mike Pence.
So is Lindsey Graham.
So is Tom Cotton.
So is Elliot Abrams, one of the supreme old school neocons from the Reagan era who got the U.S. involved in countless wars all throughout Central America?
This is a pure neocon policy justified with neoconservative ideas.
We're going to be greeted as liberators.
We're going to overthrow despotism in Venezuela.
We're going to free the Venezuelan people.
They're going to thank us and be grateful to us.
And there's going to be peace and prosperity and stability flowing through the region.
How many times have you heard that over the last 25 years?
How gullible or eager to be deceived do you have to be to believe that that's now going to be the result?
That we're going to go in and violently remove a government that has been in power for decades that may not command the support of the majority of the population, but commands the support of millions of people in that country who are willing to fight for their sovereignty to not have the United States come and impose a government.
How can anyone think this is going to be easy or quick or clean or worth doing from an American perspective?
But that's exactly what's happening.
Here's the New York Post.
November 30th, which was yesterday, 11 U.S. warships and 15,000 troops are now in the Caribbean as Venezuelan tensions escalate.
No, I don't want to say Trump's about to commit American troops with boots on the ground, but I will say that unless they manage to pull off a deal where they convince Maduro to leave power voluntarily and leave the country voluntarily, it's extremely difficult to see how we can accomplish anything in Venezuela with no American boots on the ground other than just inflaming the whole country through the air bombing and start a massive civil war that will endure for a long time that will create massive instability in that region,
all sorts of migration problems for the United States, which they thought we were trying to solve.
And then there's a question of this claim that Venezuela is sending migrants into the United States or smuggling drugs into the United States.
Remember the whole thing about how the southern border is closed?
We don't have migrants coming in anymore to the United States.
And at the same time, Venezuela has been taking back their migrants.
When we deport people from the United States who are Venezuela and back to Venezuela, Venezuela accepts them.
So from an immigration perspective, how does this make any sense?
The southern border is closed.
There's no flow of migrants from Venezuela into the United States.
We're deporting not many, but some people back to their countries if they're in the United States illegally and Venezuela is taking them.
How is going to Venezuela and creating a civil war and massive upheaval and bombing and destruction going to do anything to benefit Americans from a Immigration perspective, other than caused huge numbers of people to want to flee wars as they always do and come back to the United States.
Here is the Washington Post on something that I know a lot of people are going to dismiss because it involves things like war crimes and the rules of law and laws of war.
A lot of people get bored by that.
Like, yeah, who cares?
No limits in war.
You want to go to war with Hamas?
Just flatten all of Gaza, kill tens of thousands of kids.
Who cares?
We heard a lot of that over the last two years.
But the whole idea of bombing boats in Venezuela with no evidence presented that these people are drug dealers, that even less evidence that they have any intention or ability to go thousands of miles to the United States to smuggle drugs into the United States, which is the only justification we're being given for killing them.
Several of the people we've killed at least seem like clearly to be fishermen having no relation to the drug trade.
We've had Rand Paul on our show and he talked about how if you think a boat has drugs on it, smuggling it into the United States, it's very easy what you do.
You don't start a war over it.
You go and you interdict the boat through the Coast Guard.
You board the boat.
You interject and board the boat.
And what he said is that at least in 25% of those cases where the Coast Guard suspects there's drugs on board and interdicts the ships, it finds there's none.
And when if there is, they arrest the people, put them on trial, prove in a court of law that they're guilty and put them in prison.
But there's other aspects of this drug claim as well.
But as far as these blowing up boats, kids is concerned, the Washington Post reported on November 28th, Pete Hegseth ordered the first Caribbean boat strike officials, and the order was to quote, kill them all, meaning blow up the boat and make sure they're all dead.
So if you blow up the boat, obviously you disabled the boat.
It can't come to the United States anymore.
There's no drugs anymore to take the United States.
The boat is disabled.
If there are survivors desperately clinging to life in the ocean, just make sure go and kill the go kill them too.
It's the most basic law of war.
You don't kill incapacitated soldiers.
You don't kill incapacitated enemies who are surrendering, who are wounded.
You don't disable a military force and then walk through the field seeing everyone's moving and put a bullet in their head to finish them off.
These are called war crimes under every metric, not just some like left-wing soft.
Everybody understands this to be a war crime.
And there are Republicans, Trump supporting Republicans in the Senate who are saying this as well.
Here's what the Washington Post reported: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation.
Quote, the order was to kill everybody, one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern.
For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed.
As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt.
Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The special operations commander overseeing the September 2nd attack, the opening salvo in the Trump administration's war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere, ordered a second strike to comply with Hegset's instructions.
Do you people familiar with the matter said?
The two men were blown apart in the water.
So these are two survivors of a ship that's no longer operating.
They're clinging to life on the wreckage of a ship.
And the United States Secretary of Defense, who calls himself the Secretary of War, said, go murder them too.
Extinguish their lives also, even though they obviously don't pose a threat anymore to the United States.
Donald Trump was asked on Air Force One about this.
And here's what he said.
And if there were two people around, but Pete said that's it now.
Does that mean I have great confidence in that second strike?
I don't know.
I'm going to find out about it, but Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.
Do you have any concerns about how those boat strikes have been carried out at all?
Very little, because you can see the boats.
You can see the drugs in the boats.
And each boat is going to be sponsored by 25,000 Americans.
So they do an amazing job.
All right, so it's a little hard to hear that audio on Air Force One with the plane noise in the background.
But basically, Trump was asked about this report.
And Trump said, I don't think Pete did this.
Pete claimed he didn't do it.
Although a lot of reporting suggests that's exactly what happened.
And Trump said, for those of you who are Trump supporters who may want to defend this, he said, this isn't something that I would support.
The first strike is fine.
You don't need to go and slaughter all of the survivors of the boat, of the boat, of the boat explosion.
How does this have anything to do with legitimate use of force or war?
I guess we're at war with Venezuela.
I don't know why we're at war with Venezuela.
The argument is they send migrants to the U.S.
They don't send migrants to the U.S. Dozens of countries around the world have immigrants trying to come to the U.S. and have immigrants come to the U.S., not because the government is sending them.
It's because the people of these countries perceive correctly that they have no economic future in their countries.
The United States has suffocated Venezuela, choked it off from the world economy like it did with Cuba, put sanctions on every aspect of it.
And there's huge numbers of poor people in Venezuela who have no jobs, who have no economic future, and so they come to the United States.
We're going to go to war with every country who has sent immigrants to the United States or where immigrants have come from.
Talk about endless war.
We're going to be at war forever.
And then the idea that not just drugs have come from Venezuela, but also that the government has sent drugs itself, something that was never a claim ever made by the U.S. government previously until about six weeks ago when they needed a pretext for regime changing Venezuela.
And by far the most destructive drug in the United States, fentanyl, has nothing to do with Venezuela.
Even cocaine, a tiny portion of it comes from Venezuela.
We've been waging a war on drugs in this country for decades, bombing other countries, bombing, going to war with allied governments and places like Colombia against drug gangs.
Never made even a dent.
Anyone really believe that we're going to remove the government of Nicolas Maduro and that's going to have anything, any sort of non-trivial benefit for the flow of drugs into the United States?
If anything, there's going to be instability that will benefit the drug gangs, that will make it easier to smuggle drugs out of Venezuela.
Here is the White House press secretary defending the fact that there was a second strike on this boat that killed the two survivors, even though Trump said he didn't think it happened and wouldn't have done it.
Here's Carolyn Levitt, the White House press secretary today, asked about this, defending that second strike.
So that's why you've seen a drastic difference in this administration's policy with respect to the last.
And it's one of the many reasons the American public re-elected this president and support this Secretary of War in conducting these strikes.
To clarify, Admiral Bradley was the one who gave that order for a second strike.
And he was well within his authority to do so.
So I guess Trump's denial is trying to say that it wasn't Hegseth who did it.
It was the commander who did it, kind of dumping responsibility on him, even though lots of reports from inside the Pentagon say it was Hex Seth himself who ordered it.
Here's the New York Times yesterday.
Lawmakers suggest follow-up boat strike could be a war crime.
Quote, top Republicans have joined Democrats in demanding answers about the escalating military campaign the Trump administration says is aimed at targeting drug traffickers.
There was a quote from Senator Mike Turner that we don't have, but and others as well saying, if there was an attempt to kill survivors, to kill people who are already vulnerable, unarmed, no longer posing a threat, that's a classic war crime.
It's the Republicans of the Senate who want to investigate this.
Now, this is all before we even get to the issue of the invasion of Venezuela, the bombing of Venezuela, the regime change war in Venezuela, all of which is coming.
But I do think it's important to take note of what this prelude has been.
Because even if you just blindly believe that the Trump administration is telling the truth, that everyone we've blown up is a drug dealer, even if you don't need any evidence for that, you just put your blind faith and trust in the U.S. government because of its long history of telling the truth about war.
There's still the question of whether it's legal to do that.
Jack Goldsmith is a right-wing legal expert, a professor at Harvard.
He worked inside the first term of the Bush-Heney administration inside the Justice Department at a very high level, where he approved a lot of the most controversial war on terror policies.
He also objected to a few as well.
I say that just to point out he's not exactly a liberal.
He's not certainly on the left.
He's a very pro-executive power, pro-use of force, legal theorist.
He's not opining on the merits, just on the legality of how the president can use force.
And he wrote an article this week entitled A Dishonorable Strike.
And I just want to read you a couple of paragraphs from it.
He said, quote, this is an old principle of the laws of war.
The Hague regulations of 1907 state that, quote, it is especially forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given, meaning you're just going to kill all your enemies, even if they surrender, even if they give up their arms.
You're just going to slaughter them all no matter what.
The 1863 Lieber Code, the famous U.S. government rules governing military conduct during the Civil War, provides, quote, whoever intentionally inflicts additional wounds on an enemy already wholly disabled or kills such an enemy or orders or encourages soldiers to do so shall suffer death if duly convicted, whether he belongs to the Army of the United States or is an enemy captured after having committed his misdeed.
And the currently governing DOD manual on section 5.9 states clearly that persons, quote, placed towards the combat may not be the object of attack.
The manual defines horrors to combat to include, quote, persons otherwise incapacitated by shipwreck.
In short, if the post facts are correct, it appears that special operations forces committed murder when, quote, the two men were blown apart in the water, as the post put it.
Here is the Republican Senator Mike Turner from Ohio on CBS News talking about why he believes it's an extremely grave crime to have had this second strike to kill two people on these boats who were completely disabled and incapacitated by the first strike.
The Washington Post is reporting that before the strike on the very first suspected drug boat in September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that everyone on board be killed.
And then when two of the 11 people on board survived, a follow-on strike was ordered to finish them off in the water.
Now, some law of war experts are saying that that was illegal, that killing people who are no longer able to fight is a war crime.
What is your view and what questions do you have for the Pentagon?
Congress does not have information that that had occurred.
Both the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and ranking members have opened investigations.
Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious.
And I agree that that would be an illegal act.
That is not the legal opinion or the information or the legal justification, the acts that have been described to Congress that are being undertaken in this.
There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific and the legal justification that's been provided.
But this is completely outside of anything that has been discussed with Congress, and there is an ongoing investigation.
One of the problems with all of this is that Pete Hegseth, who rechristened himself the Secretary of War, even though under our law, he's still called the Secretary of Defense, although I do think it's a much more honest and candid description of what this department does, seems to have a very adolescent view, like kind of just a very giggly, childish view of violence and killing people.
In response to all this concern, not by Ilean Omar and AOC, but by members of the military, by long-term Republican members of Congress who have fought in wars and who take these codes of war seriously, he's posting cartoons that are designed to depict himself as really tough and powerful.
Here's one of the things he posted over the last 24 hours.
There you see him.
That's from his ex account, a classic Franklin story.
Franklin targets narco-terrorists.
And you see a little turtle figure on a U.S. helicopter blowing up boats that are filled with drugs, even though there's absolutely no evidence that those are what's in the boats that the United States has been building up.
Now, one of the things that ought to concern you, no matter how convinced you are that removing Maduro somehow is a good thing for the lives of people in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Iowa and Arkansas, and that it'll somehow benefit the lives of the forgotten man and woman on whose behalf Trump said he was running.
Even if you're convinced of that, you ought to be concerned about the outlandish, contradictory claims being offered to justify this new war.
Here's something the president said in New Jersey on September 14th.
Are you going with us?
Are you going with us, Maggie?
I'm with you.
Good.
On the Lamore Venezuela, the Pennsylvania Venezuela strike on the boat, people.
Are you concerned that Maduro might escalate something?
What's illegal are the drugs that were on the boat and the drugs that are being sent into our country and the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs?
That's what's illegal.
Do you think he's not telling the truth?
This whole time, up until about four seconds ago, when we're talking about the problem of drugs entering the country, the problem was fentanyl, and the countries that were blamed were Mexico and China.
That was a big part of why there was all this anti-China sentiment.
They're sending fentanyl into our country.
What was discussed during the campaign was bombing the drug cartels of Mexico.
Nobody claims, I shouldn't say nobody, there are people who are just lying now and saying that fentanyl is coming from Venezuela, and that's why we have to do this.
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, made that lie in the Wall Street Journal, affirmed that lie that oh, we need to go and take out Maduro because of all the fentanyl deaths in the United States, even though, again, Venezuela has nothing to do with fentanyl.
We've shown you the government reports on this, all kinds of reports over and over about this.
That's why nobody ever talked about war in Venezuela when talking about fentanyl.
Trump claimed that 300 million people died of drug overdose in the United States last year.
It's an extremely odd claim, given that if you look at government reports here from the CDC, you see the total number of drug-involved overdose deaths from 1990 to 2020.
And the highest number is less than 60,000.
And if you see here at the top, this blue line, which by far is responsible for the most, the greatest number of overdose deaths, it's all synthetic opioids other than methadone.
And it says primarily fentanyl.
Fentanyl is what's killing Americans.
Here you can see if you go down, you have cocaine, which is this blue line all the way at the bottom.
It's killed fewer than 20,000 people, which is the only type of drug that you could link to Venezuela, but it comes primarily from Colombia.
Remember, Pablo Escobar and FARC and all of the drug militias that we've been waging war on with what had been our long-term right-wing allies in Colombia never made a dent in the drug trade.
So even if you want to say, oh, well, it's because of drug deaths, overdose deaths, this is all from fentanyl.
There's nothing to do with Venezuela.
And even if you think cocaine is now suddenly the big problem, even though no one's been saying that, very little of that comes from Venezuela.
Here is the JAMA Network joint point analysis of drug overdose rates.
And you can again see it's nowhere near 300 million people.
This one at the top is all drugs.
And you can see the number of overdose deaths in the United States is actually declining rather precipitously, headed back to 2020 levels, 2019 levels.
By far, the biggest number continues to be this orange line here, which is opioids, which again are people consuming fentanyl-lace heroin or oxycontin or other types of opioids.
Again, primarily fentanyl.
That's the vast, vast, vast majority of deaths from overdose.
If that would really concern you, you would go after fentanyl, not Venezuela.
The next number of deaths is methamphetamine.
Again, now it's a small number.
It's on decline.
And then at the very last line, is cocaine.
Cocaine causes the fewest amount of overdose deaths of the major drugs.
You don't go to war over drug overdoses and do so because small number that's actually hasn't increased very much at all.
Going back to 2015 levels, maybe it's gone up some, peaked in 2023, and now it's headed back down.
Anyone who believes that the war is about anything like this having to do with drugs is thinking very irrationally, to put that as generously as I can.
Here is the CDC, and this is a 12-month ending number for drug overdose deaths in 2025.
Trump said 300 million people died of drug overdoses last year.
Here you can see the number of total drug overdose in the United States for the year ending January, December 2024.
That would be about 70,000.
Again, you see the number declining, probably because there has been successful efforts about fentanyl and combating fentanyl.
So we're not suddenly going to war and removing Nicolas Maduro because of having anything to do with drugs.
But that is the claim.
That is the primary claim.
And of course, it's very sensationalistic.
It's very provocative.
It's tribalistic.
Maduro is evil because he's sending in drugs that are killing our kids and our citizens.
You're like, oh, wow, that sounds bad.
It's like, Saddam Hussein needs to be taken out, not because he's a bad guy for Iraqis, but because he's developing chemical and biological nuclear weapons.
He's going to give it to al-Qaeda to kill us all.
And we're just like, wow, that's terrible.
That's like a direct threat to us.
We didn't think Al-Saddam Hussein.
It's just, it's the most insultingly banal.
They might as well just accuse Maduro of having weapons of mass destruction.
It'd be easier and it would be more convincing than all this.
Here's Marco Rubio a week ago justifying why we're blowing up the drug boats and angling to remove Maduro.
Well, I mean, the question is, bottom line, these are drug boats.
If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States.
But does it matter if it's in the United States?
Well, these are all in international waters.
Did we do a strike in the United States or if we're the well, that's a different matter.
Now you're talking about a law enforcement matter.
In this particular case, there are people traveling on international waters headed towards the United States with hostilities in mind, which includes flooding our country with dangerous, deadly drugs.
And they're going to be stopped.
And that's what's happening.
And in the case last week, you saw there was a submarine.
It was a submarine.
It was a submersible.
That's a drug boat all the way through.
We know what these boats are.
The president just said it.
We tracked them from the very beginning.
We know who's on them, who they are, where they're coming from, what they have on them.
and uh they have no idea who's on these boats they have no idea who's on these boats It is exactly the same thing that was happening when Obama would go and kill a bunch of people at a wedding party.
And afterwards, they would release a press lead saying, oh, we just killed 14 militants.
And Reuters would say, U.S. drone strike kills 14 militants, White House says.
No evidence presented, just claims.
And then when I was at the intercept, we were able to acquire the drone papers.
My colleague Jeremy Scahill and others reported on those.
And these were internal FBI documents and other Pentagon documents that revealed that when they killed people, nine times out of 10, they had no idea who they were killing.
That is the same thing here.
And even if you knew they were drug boats somehow, even though these are small speed boats, you have no idea that they're headed toward the United States.
Why would you, that's such an inefficient way to send drugs to the United States.
But again, the way you're never going to eliminate the drug problem or even make a dent in the drug problem through the war on drugs, through warring to get rid of the drug trade.
That's been tried for 60 years, 70 years.
It hasn't worked.
Have you ever heard anyone inside the United States say, oh my God, there's a war on drugs.
I can't get this drug I want.
Drugs are everywhere.
The only way to ever solve the drug problem is to address the question of why there's so much demand inside the United States among Americans for drugs.
That's a lot harder of a question, a lot harder problem to solve.
You have to solve the material deprivation and spiritual crisis in the United States that causes people to turn to drugs.
Instead, we're going to get a bunch of theatrics about blowing up boats and then lies about how we're taking out Maduro because that'll stop the flow of drugs into the United States, none of which is going to happen.
Here is the Drug Enforcement Administration report.
This is from 2025.
And this is a report that is designed to depict what the real threats are to the United States in terms of drugs.
That's what the DA report is about.
There's no mention of Venezuela in here, except with respect to human trafficking.
There's zero attempt to connect Venezuela to fentanyl or even significant amounts of cocaine.
This is the government's own report, the DA's own report.
None of this is real.
These are lies.
These are pretexts for the war.
And if you want to cheer the war, don't cheer the war based on things that you know aren't true.
Here's CBS News, which is reporting something actually amazing.
The whole Trump presidency, the whole Trump campaign, was built around a few issues.
One was stopping regime change wars and using resources for the United States.
The other was to stop the flow of immigrants into the United States.
And yet, Venezuela says that the U.S. unilaterally suspended migrant registration flights after Trump called for the airspace to be viewed as closed.
So we were sending a bunch of Venezuelans back who were in the country illegally back to Venezuela.
But because of this war, because Trump closed the airspace, there's no more deportations back to Venezuela.
So we've stopped deportations of Venezuelans in the country illegally.
Does that sound like fulfillment of the objectives of the Trump movement to put a halt to deportations in order to launch a regime change war against Maduro that's going to serve the interest of everybody we were told that was feeding on like vultures American foreign policy for so long?
Speaking of which, here is one of Trump's most vocal critics and by the former ambassador under the Obama administration to Russia, Michael McPhaw, who has been running around for four years screaming, we need more war against Russia.
Russia just did the most unspeakable, monstrous act.
They invaded another country that hadn't attacked them.
Here's Michael McFaul lending his support to Donald Trump and to the invasion of Venezuela.
Quote, Maduro is an illegitimate leader.
He lost his last election.
He needs to go.
So you can see the kind of people and whose mentality are driving this war.
Here's Mike Pence, the longtime Republican establishment hack and warmonger who was Donald Trump's vice president in the first term.
He went to acts today and said, Nicolas Maduro is a dictator with no legitimate claim to power.
Nicolas Maduro must go.
Now, one of the things I talked about before in the context of Marco Rubio, who is clearly a driving force in this new war, a war he's long wanted.
He's long wanted a war to get rid of Castro.
He's long wanted a war to get rid of Maduro.
Marco Rubio's parents are Cuban.
They came from Cuba.
Marco Rubio grew up in the Cuban community in South Florida, which I know very well.
I grew up in South Florida, close to that Cuban community.
There's a big Venezuelan immigrant community, very similar as well.
And most of those people, I don't have most, but a huge portion were in the United States.
We gave them asylum and then citizenship.
And again, I grew up near them.
I can tell you, there was no English being spoken in these communities.
Huge numbers of them didn't bother to learn English.
And the reason was, even though they were in the United States, they were giving citizenship in the United States, they never really thought of the United States as their country.
They thought of the United States government and the U.S. military as their own private militia.
They wanted, just like there are a bunch of American Jews who are trained since birth to have fealty to Israel and want the U.S. government and the U.S. military to go be used to serve Israeli interests.
There are a lot of people who grew up in these Cuban and Venezuelan immigrant communities, like Marco Rubio, who believe that the United States government is their own, the United States military is their own private militia.
And the goal is to go to their countries where their families are from or where they're from and remove the governments they don't like and put in the governments they prefer.
And that's what a lot of those Cuban immigrants in that community thought was that they were just in the U.S. temporarily.
That's why they never learned English.
They thought as soon as Reagan and then Bush and then Clinton and then Bush II went and got rid of Castro for them, they could all go back to Cuba.
And you have huge numbers of Venezuelans, Venezuelan immigrants, Venezuelan in the United States, Venezuelan exiles, who were all on deck saying, go and liberate the Venezuelan people.
It's what we all want.
Just like they had all the Iraqi exiles and saying, please go take out Saddam.
We all want that.
And the Libyan ones saying, go take out Gaddafi.
The Syrian ones saying, take out Assad for us.
We all want that.
You'll be welcome to the liberators.
You have the Ukrainian ones saying, go fight our wars for us.
Now you have the Venezuelans popping up and saying, we all want you to take out Maduro.
Free us from Maduro.
Why is it the United States military's role?
Why is it the U.S. government's role to go change the governments of these countries?
The answer is because there are a lot of people in power like Marco Rubio who have fealty to that region.
Another one of the people like that is Congresswoman Maria Salazar.
Her parents are also Cuban immigrants.
She grew up in the Cuban community in Miami.
And she was on CNN yesterday justifying why U.S. service members should go risk their lives to change the government of Venezuela.
And here's part of what she said.
President has made very clear specifically to Maduro that he has to go.
So the president is trying to avoid any type of armed conflict.
It's the Maduro regime who's trying to stay in power and continue harming our country in many levels, as you said.
National security, drug trafficking, lack of democracy.
So Maduro has a very long list of very bad things that he's done in the last 25 years.
Oh, Maduro has done really bad things.
Like Saddam did really bad things, like Gaddafi did really bad things, like Assad did really bad things.
I thought we were done with this.
How many of these do you have to sit through and cheer for only to realize that you've been lied to, both about the motive for the war as well as the likely outcome?
How many before you'll stop believing it now?
As I said, the Trump administration in the first term thought about regime changing Maduro because it was John Bolton who really wanted to hear from NBC News, July 13th, 2022.
This is shortly before Trump fired Bolton.
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton admits to planning foreign coups, quote, pressed about his involvement.
Bolton cited an unsuccessful effort attempt to oust Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro during the Trump administration.
Sorry, that wasn't that was when Biden was president.
Bolton was looking back and saying, Yes, I was trying to push Trump to engage in coups in the first term, including in Venezuela.
This is something Marco Rubio has won forever.
For a long time, MAGA thought Marco Rubio was a warmonger, a neocon, the kind of person that the American First Movement was against.
Then Trump picked him associated as Secretary of State.
Mark Rubio was one of those never Trump people, ran around calling Trump a take over the Republican Party of Reagan and change it.
But then Marco Rubio got to be Secretary of State.
Trump decided he liked him.
Marco Rubio is now in his ear.
He's national security advisor.
And he's getting all his wishes for all the wars he wanted from that region.
His family is from.
Here in 2019, when that push was being made by John Bolton, Marco Rubio said this: quote, devastating headlines around the world today for the quote hashtag Maduro crime family.
Their international isolation will grow.
The routes for evading sanctions will shrink.
And the willingness of many nations to support stronger multilateral actions to dislodge them has increased dramatically.
In February of that year, Marco Rubio, in the context of Venezuela being discussed, posted what he was hoping for with Maduro.
He posted the image of Mu Mar Gaddafi after the U.S. joined France and the UK.
That was the picture of Gaddafi on the left when he was in power.
And that picture on the right was when he was being beaten and gang raped to death on the streets of Tripoli.
And obviously, that's what Rubio was with great arousal fantasizing would happen to Maduro.
He on the same day posted this picture of Manuel Noriega, the former U.S. ally, who had been the president of Panama, close U.S. ally, close CIA ally.
We turned on him, decided that he was a drug dealer.
We invaded Panama under Bush 41, killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Panamanians, lost a couple hundred American troops, brought him to Miami, put him on trial as a drug trafficker, arrested, convicted him, put him in jail.
Congratulations.
That's why you can't get cocaine in the United States.
That's why you couldn't from in the 1980s.
Notoriously, there was no cocaine in the United States from the 80s to the 90s because of what we did with Manuel Noriega.
It worked so well.
And we're going to do it again.
Once we get rid of Maduro, if you like cocaine, get your last snorts in because cocaine is about to disappear from the United States when we get rid of Maduro, when we put in our puppet regime in Venezuela.
No more cocaine in the United States.
Sorry.
All right.
Last one.
Here is Marco Rubio posting the image of Nikolai Czechescu, the former dictator of Romania, who was with his wife, taken away at a revolution and then executed.
I believe they were hanged or shot.
I think shot.
Anyway, these are the kind of fantasies Marco Rubio has had for a long time about the region that his family comes from.
Now, in addition to claiming that there were 300 million people who died of drug overdoses last year, a number that, to put it mildly, is inflated by many multitudes.
Trump also made this claim.
This reminded me a lot of that statistic Nikki Haley offered during the presidential campaign when she was arguing why TikTok needed to be banned.
And she said, for every 30 minutes that you spend on TikTok, you become 18% more anti-Semitic.
You're just like, what?
Where did you grab that statistic out of your ass from?
If I go watch TikTok for 30 minutes, I'm going to get 18% more anti-Semitic.
What happens if I watch it for a whole day?
I'm going to be like 1,200% more anti-Semitic.
And then the next day, again, they just invent statistics out of nowhere.
Here's Trump saying what happens every time he blows up a boat.
Do you have any concerns about how those boat strikes have been carried out at all?
Very little, because you can see the boats.
You can see the drugs in the boats.
And each boat is responsible for killing 25,000 Americans.
So they do an amazing job.
They said, you know, we're getting here.
Just look at the numbers.
The amount of drugs coming into our country by sea is infinitesimal compared to what it was just a few months.
How do you make it happen here?
And each boat, think of this.
Each boat on average is responsible for the death of 25,000 Americans.
Each boat that they blow up, those tiny little speedboats, are responsible for the death of 25,000 Americans.
I showed you the statistics from the government agencies, the think tanks that track overdose deaths in the United States.
The total deaths for cocaine overdose in the last two years was barely 25,000.
Fentanyl deaths were 60,000, 70, 80,000.
Boats from Venezuela don't have fentanyl.
But even if you wanted to pretend they did, oh, they're full of fentanyl, these boats.
Each one that we blow up would have killed 25,000.
You don't even get close to that number.
Even with fentanyl overdoses, and fentanyl doesn't come from Venezuela.
They're just making up numbers, just total bullshit, concocting numbers out of their ass.
Like happens every time that they need to sell a war.
And people are like, wait, I don't understand.
Why do we need to risk our lives and our family members' lives and our service members and pay for all these bombs and drones and kill people and bombing?
How does, since when does Maduro affect my life?
I told this story before about what I, what I really liked about what Marjorie Taylor Greene said, because a lot of people snickered at her as though it were so unsophisticated.
In reality, it was exactly the truth that isn't sophisticated because it's not intended to deceive.
It's just a very simple, straightforward expression of how people in her district think because they have much more common sense than the people who sell wars to the United States.
It was when Joe Biden was bombing Yemen all throughout 2024 and Trump said, why is Biden bombing Yemen?
You don't need to bomb Yemen.
You just pick up the phone and talk to the Houthis and resolve it.
You don't need to kill all these people.
No one from MAGA objected to that and said Trump.
No, you're wrong, Trump.
We do need to bomb Venice.
We do need to bomb Yemen.
We do need to kill the Houthis.
But then Trump gets into office and within two months, he's restarting Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen and bombing Houthis.
And Marjorie Taylor Green said, people in my district don't even know what a Houthi is.
They don't think about Houthis.
They've never met Houthis.
They don't think Houthis are threatening their lives.
Why are we bombing Houthis?
You think people in the United States think that their lives are plagued by Nicholas Maduro being in charge of Venezuela?
You think this war is for them?
It's to benefit American citizens?
No one can really possibly think that.
And I'll just say this before I just delve into this last point or two, which is that I can promise you, there are a lot of Trump supporters who have been saying, no more regime change lawyers, no more regime change warriors, no neocons.
Spend our money at home.
And now they're like, yeah, kill the narco-terrorists.
Does anyone have any doubt about the following?
Let's imagine a situation where there was pressure on Trump to go to war in Venezuela.
Let's say like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, who was still in the Senate and some of the warmongers in the Democratic Party joined together and said, we want you to go invade Venezuela and change the government of Venezuela.
Let's imagine if Trump said, no, I'm not going to go do that.
Those are the regime change policies that have plagued our country, put us into debt.
I'm not going to go start a war to change the government of Venezuela.
That's not for us to do.
Let's imagine a world where that happened.
Do you think there's even one single Trump supporter now cheering Trump's new war in Venezuela who would be criticizing Trump and saying, how dare you stand up to the neocons and the warmongers and refuse to go invade Venezuela?
No, they'd be cheering him for that.
If Trump opposes bombing Yemen, they cheer that.
If Trump starts bombing Yemen, they cheer that.
If Trump says, I'm not going to go to Venezuela and change the government, they would cheer that.
If he says, let's go to Venezuela, we have to change the government, they cheer that.
Obviously, not all Trump supporters are like that.
A lot of them have objected.
Marjorie Teller Green is one of them, which is why Trump wants her out of Congress, drove her out of Congress.
Thomas Massey ran Paul.
Rand Paul's against the regime change war in Venezuela.
He has to go too.
And it's not just Trump supporters.
I mean, I've been working as a journalist for 20 years.
I've seen four changes of administration.
I started with Bush and Cheney, went to Obama, went from Obama to Trump 1, went from Trump 1 to Biden, now Biden to Trump 2.
And every single time you watch these partisans denounce policies when the other party is in power, say, we're going to get into power and not do that.
They get into power and do it.
And suddenly they start cheering the very policies they pretended to oppose.
So it's not just the Trump movement that does that, but it's just cult-like behavior.
And a lot of it, that's what you're seeing.
And Trump is counting on that.
Trump knows that his supporters are angry about Epstein.
They're supporting about the cost of living.
They're angry about, a lot of them are about supporting Israel.
They're angry about a lot of things.
So it's like, let's give them bad guys.
We're going to blow up bad guys.
We know everybody likes to cheer that.
People get a sense of self-esteem and purpose.
And that's what you're seeing a lot of.
Anybody who is inclined to believe that this somehow has to do with the flow of drugs into the United States should be embarrassed for all the reasons they've already said.
But it's like Trump is almost like conducting a game, like an experiment.
How far can he rub the faces of his own supporters and the fact that he's lying to them and see how they just refuse to realize it?
Because just a few days ago, claiming that we have to go to war in Venezuela because Nicolas Maduro, even though no one ever said it before, is some mastermind, sophisticated drug dealer.
Trump just pardoned one of the most malicious and destructive actual drug traffickers from that same region, Latin America.
He pardoned them.
The president of Honduras, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted with ample evidence, not just that people in his country were sending drugs into the United States, but that he himself was overseeing the drug trafficking ring and benefiting from it.
And the U.S. arrested him and put him on trial and he was convicted.
And Trump announced a pardon of him just three days ago as he's pretending that he's concerned about the drug supply into the U.S. from Latin America that he has to go to war with Maduro over it.
He just pardoned the person who was actually flooding the United States with drugs.
Here's Trump on True Social, November 28th.
And by the way, he's also, as he's doing this, he's also interfering in the Honduras election, telling Honduras: if you vote for the candidate I want, we're going to give you a lot of money.
And if you don't vote for the candidate I want, we're going to withdraw our support.
Here's what he said: quote: If Tito Asfora, who's the mayor of Honduras' largest city, wins for president of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his policies, and what he will do for the great people of Honduras, we will be very supportive.
If he doesn't win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad because a wrong leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is.
Tito will be a great president, and the United States will work closely with him in order to ensure the success with all of its potential of Honduras.
Additionally, like by the way, I will be granting a full and complete pardon to former president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is in Asphor's party, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.
This cannot be allowed to happen, especially now after Tito Asphora wins the election when Honduras will be on its way to great political and financial success.
Vote for Tita Asforah for president and congratulations to Juan Orlando Hernandez on your upcoming pardon.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Make Honduras great again.
So we're pouring lots of money into Honduras.
Trump is promising to pour more money into Honduras, wants to make Honduras great again.
And as part of this little scheme to control the elections in Honduras, he decided to pardon one of the most toxic and destructive narco-terrorists, if you will, that the United States has caught in the last however many years.
Here's the United States U.S. Attorney's Office from the Southern District of New York in June of 2024.
Quote, Juan Orlando Hernandez, former president of Honduras, is sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute more than 400 tons of cocaine and related firearm offenses.
Here's the U.S. district court, an American court, federal court in the Southern District of New York, issuing their sentencing memo for why they're imposing a 45-year term on Hernandez.
It's obviously a very significant prison term.
The court said this: quote, following a three-week trial, the defendant was convicted of one, participating in a conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, two, using machine guns and destructive devices in furtherance of his drug traffic offenses, and three, participating in a conspiracy to carry and use machine guns and destructive devices in furtherance of his drug traffic offense.
The proof underlying this conviction laid bare that the defendant and his co-conspirators played a vital role in flooding the United States with cocaine.
That's who Trump's pardoning, the guy who was flooding the United States with cocaine.
While, on the other hand, the same day, he's telling you we have to start a new war in Venezuela because Maduro is flooding the United States with cocaine and we can't tolerate that.
The court went on, quote, for more than a decade, the defendant abused his political power to operate Honduras, a country of roughly 10 million people, as a narco-state.
The defendant's rise was fueled by millions of dollars in drug money from some of the largest and most violent cocaine traffickers in the world.
To accomplish this, the defendant protected his co-conspirators from arrest and extradition, allowing them to spend to send at least 400 tons of cocaine to the United States to commit unspeakable act of violence and to cause rampant destruction in Honduras through their violent narcotics trafficking.
The defendant was propelled to power with drug money.
Some of the most prolific violent traffickers in the world were his partners and political allies.
Those include Ardon, the National Party mayor of El Parazo, who admitted to trafficking 250 tons of cocaine and his role in 56 murders.
And it even includes Chapo, the head of the Sonola cartel, who trafficked over 1,000 tons of cocaine to the United States and who personally supported the defendant with a $1 million bribe.
And it was even his own brother who was personally responsible for two murders, and it was the defendant's own brother and Confederate and corruption and crime.
This is all reported at the time here from the New York Times.
October 2019, El Chapo was said to have given a million dollars to the Honduran president's brother.
You can't possibly believe this is a war to stop the flow of drugs.
I just, I can't believe anybody who ever has watched my show, has ever read an article I've written, would allow their brains to believe that in light of all of what's happening, what you can see in front of you.
So the question is, why?
Why are we going to this war?
Why do we want to change the regime of Venezuela?
Could be just a coincidence, but it seems significant to me.
The Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and we tend to love to go to wars in countries that have a lot of oil.
You know, like Iraq, Libya, and now Venezuela.
Here is Reuters in July of this year.
Quote, Chevron is granted restricted U.S. license to operate in Venezuela, sources say.
So there's been a lot of effort on the part of U.S. oil companies to basically exploit Venezuelan resources for the profit of American oil companies as opposed to using it for the people of Venezuela.
Exactly what was happening in Libya.
Gaddafi wanted to use oil resources to benefit Libyans instead of allowing French and British oil companies to extract it all and profit themselves.
So Gaddafi had to go.
Here from Bloomberg in August of this year, Venezuela rejects the start of Exxon operations in the disputed areas.
Now, in case you think I'm being conspiratorial or believing that the U.S. fights wars for oil and this is like a left-wing troop or whatever, here's the aforementioned Maria Salazar, one of Congress's most ardent supporters of the invasion of Venezuela, who coincidentally, her parents are immigrants from Cuba, like Marco Rubios, and they care a lot about having the U.S. military go fix the countries that they care about, take out the leaders they just like, put the ones in that they like.
Here she is on Fox saying why this war would be a good thing.
This is not going to be hard.
80% of the Venezuelans voted for the opposition.
You have 8 million Venezuelans in exile.
We're talking about the largest reserves of oil in the world that will be doing business with the American oil companies.
And that is something that I have made very sure that they understand American companies in Venezuela for the next 100 years.
All right.
Well, you heard it.
Now, on some level, I appreciate that candor more than the whole bullshit about drugs being smuggled in the U.S. or even worse, like, oh, where Maduro is illegitimate.
He wasn't elected.
We can't tolerate that.
We have to go to free the Venezuelan people.
We don't, we're the United States government.
We fight wars to take away, to remove dictators and free people.
It's like President Trump just sat with one of the world's most savage, repressive autocrats, the Crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salon in the White House, and heaped more praise on him than he ever heaped on anybody.
He did the same when he visited Kakar and United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
The United States fights more wars to overthrow democratically elected regimes, governments, and install dictatorial regimes than the other way around.
We don't fight wars to free their oppressed people of the world.
We love dictatorships as long as they do what we tell them.
Now, here is Maria Corinna Machado, who's the leader of the opposition.
Somehow she was given the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
I don't know what she supposedly did for peace, but the Nobel Peace Prize is given to people who serve the interest of Western governments, especially the American government.
And she called Netanyahu and said, as soon as I get into power, I'm going to be a huge ally of Israel.
Congratulations to Venezuela for that important step.
But she also has been promising the U.S. access to all of Venezuela's resources.
Here's what she said on the triggered show.
Forget about Saudi Arabia.
Forget about the Saudis.
I mean, we have more oil.
I mean, infinite potential.
And we're going to open markets.
We're going to kick off the government from the oil sector.
We are going to privatize all our industry.
Venezuela has huge resources: oil, gas, minerals, land, technology.
And as you said before, we have a strategic location, you know, ours from the United States.
So we're going to do this right.
We know what we have to do.
And American companies are in, you know, super strategic position to invest.
This country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.
You know who's going to make a lot of money?
Not the Venezuelan people.
She's going to make a lot of money.
I can guarantee you that.
Exxon and Chevron, they're going to make a lot of money.
None of it's going to go to the American people.
None of it's going to go to the Venezuelan people.
It's just, again, the use of the U.S. military as a private militia to benefit a tiny number of people, none of whom were supposedly the people that Trump's presidency was going to serve.
Now, this is to all say nothing about the fact that these regime change operations don't work.
It's incredibly complicated to violently remove a government.
And just, you think, what do you think the people of Venezuela are going to do who support who supported Hugo Chavez, who was very popular, who support Maduro?
There's millions of them.
No matter what you think of Maduro, there are millions of Maduro supporters.
They're armed and people unite against foreign invaders.
This is true of every society on the planet.
You think they're just going to go away and welcome the Americans as liberators?
Or this woman, she's going to float in, be behind walls of massive security?
You think they're just going to all be like, okay, I guess we have a new president now, thanks to the U.S. government.
We'll be greeted as liberators.
It'll take just a few weeks.
By February, we'll have a flourishing democracy.
All things we heard about Iraq and Libya.
Again, how do you believe any of this?
One person who was very clear-eyed about all of this at the time that the Trump administration and John Bolton were trying to overthrow Maduro in 2019 when Mark Arubio was getting excited, posting all those gruesome images.
Her name was Tulsi Gabbard.
She's a vocal opponent of regime change wars.
And she went on Fox News to explain why overthrowing Maduro and imposing a new better regime from our perspective in Venezuela would be wrong and disastrous.
Here's what she said.
Here now, exclusively, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a combat veteran and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
What's your reaction to that?
You heard Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president there.
What we are hearing is an increased saber-rattling intention saying the United States needs to send in the U.S. military now to wage yet another wasteful counterproductive regime change war.
And once again, it's being done under the guise of humanitarianism.
When we look throughout history, every time the United States goes into another country and topples a dictator or topples a government, the outcome has been disastrous for the people in these countries.
That's why we should use our leadership in the world to try to broker a diplomatic solution, working with countries like Russia that have great influence over Venezuela so that there is a peaceful outcome.
Because I can tell you as a soldier, Martha, I've seen firsthand the high cost of war and pushing for this civil war, pushing for the use of military force will only end up with more suffering and death and disaster for the Venezuelan people.
What to speak of increasing these tensions that threaten our own national security?
Anytime we're in this situation where you have tensions being ratcheted up and this conflict being pushed closer and closer between nuclear-armed countries like the United States and countries like Russia and China, this is something that poses an existential threat to the American people.
Amen to that.
Whatever threat you want to pretend Venezuela or Maduro poses to the United States is going to be massively outweighed by the harms and costs and dangers and threats that are going to be assumed by the American people yet again from yet another regime change war, the instability in the region, the refugee crisis, the amount of money we're going to have to pour into that country to try and stabilize it, the amount of money that the operation has already cost and will continue to cost,
the never-ending growth of all the U.S. security state agencies and the private contractors like Palantir.
All the things we were promised would be overthrown and subverted are just being strengthened.
Not only didn't Donald Trump ever talk about the regime change war in Venezuela, even though it's supposedly now so vital to our national security, during 2024, he spent all of 2024 ranting and raving against the evils of what he called the neocons and the interventionists who just can't stop starting new wars, even though it destroys American financial security and the fabric of our society.
I could spend the rest of the night showing you speeches that he gave along those lines.
Here's just one.
This was in October of 2024 when Kamala Harris was dragging Liz Cheney around with her everywhere she went, including in Michigan.
Brilliant move.
As though Kamala Harris were her, as though Liz Cheney were her running mate.
And here's what Trump had to say about all that.
And I don't blame him for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter's a very dumb individual, very dumb.
She's a radical war hawk.
Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?
Let's see how she feels about it.
You know, when the guns are trained on her face.
You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee, Will, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.
But she's a stupid person.
They're all warhawks while they're sitting comfortably in Washington.
Let's see how they respond when they are the ones who are facing the barrel.
Now, I do have to say, I remember when CNN and those types tried to pretend Liz Cheney did the same, that Trump had somehow threatened to execute Liz Cheney by firing the squad when he said that.
When he so obviously said nothing of the kind.
He was making a point that liberals have made for as long as I can remember about chicken hawks and people who send others to war but don't go to fight the war themselves.
And let's see how they would change their mind if they were the ones getting shot at.
Like a totally common argument against war hawks and warmongers that Trump made.
And somehow in the hands of CNN and Liz Cheney, that became, oh my God, he threatened to execute me.
But you see what the kind of thing that Trump was saying.
I guarantee you, Liz Cheney supports the war in Venezuela.
I don't have to look.
I haven't looked.
I guess it's possible, therefore, she doesn't, but I would stake anything on the fact that she does.
All of her like-minded warmongers do.
That's what this war is.
It's an expression of that ideology that Trump promised to vanquish.
One thing I just want to say, we don't have this clip, but I just want to summarize this clip before we end the segment, which is Trump was asked on Air Force One yesterday why he was simultaneously claiming we needed a new war to stop drug smuggling from Latin America while at the same time pardoning one of the worst drug smugglers, the one, the president of Honduras.
And Trump said, Look, it's totally unfair to say that the guy is a drug smuggler just because the country that he's the president of has people who are trafficking drugs.
That's not right.
Okay, he's the president of Honduras, and Honduras has a bunch of drug gangs bringing drugs into the U.S., but that doesn't mean you got to accuse the guy of being the president of the drug trafficker just because you're a president.
You can't be put in jail because somebody in your country does bad things.
It's like, do you not understand that that's exactly what you're saying is true of Maduro?
But that wasn't true of the guy that you're pardoning.
He was actually directly involved, partners with, financial allies with, recipients of profits from the most notorious Latin American drug dealers.
He was in the business of being a leader of a drug cartel.
He actually ran a narco-state.
That was true of the president of Venezuela that Trump just pardoned or is about to pardon.
There is no reason for this war other than the fact that Marco Rubio and a bunch of people like him have long craved to control the region their family is from.
And I'm sure there's a bunch of oil people in Trump's ear saying, hey, we're going to make a lot of money on this.
None of this is going to redown to the benefit of the American people.
They're going to pay for it.
They're going to die in it, as always.
It's just, as Michael Tracy once said, you'll never go broke betting on the continuation of bipartisan DC foreign policy.
And that's exactly what this all reveals.
All right.
We had a second segment plan about this very exciting contest to see who will be anti-Semitic of the year.
But since the voting is ongoing throughout the week, we can cover this tomorrow or whenever we want time permitting.
We thought it was important to dedicate as much time as possible to this new war.
Just lay out all the facts for you and hope that most people understand why this is utter folly, why what the government's claims are utterly deceitful, insultingly so, and what really is going on here.
And at the end of the day, what's really going on is a complete repudiation of everything that Trump and his supporters defined as what the American first foreign policy would be.
There's just no way to dispute that, even if you want to argue with anything else.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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