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Jan. 6, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:00:59
Removing Maduro: What is the Point? MAGA Goes Full Neocon: Embracing Lindsey Graham and Imperialism

Who does removing Maduro really benefit? Then: Glenn discusses how MAGA has fully embraced neocons like Lindsey Graham.  ------------------------------------------------- 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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All right, just a little excitement with the connection should be all fixed for now.
So that was the intro.
I do want to talk a little bit about just the facts of what has happened in the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, of Venezuela, the abduction of Nicholas Maduro back to New York.
Because I do think that there are several things that have to be noted about this.
And on Saturday morning, when I woke up and heard the news, and of course it was building, we had done a lot of shows about Venezuela, about the case for regime change in Venezuela that was being made by the Trump administration, the reasons why the pretext being offered, oh, this is about drug smuggling or it's to free the peoples of Venezuela made absolutely no sense or just simply unsupported based on the facts that were being offered.
We've done a lot of shows on it, so it was hardly a surprise.
I did about a 20 to 25 minute analysis on Saturday morning that we put on YouTube where we broadcast it quickly there.
But I'm not going to repeat all that.
So if you haven't seen that and you want to go watch that, you could go and do so.
I do think it's very important to note that this is a war.
And again, I gave the reasons why I call it a war.
If you don't want to call it a war, it's fine.
Ultimately, it's a semantic point.
What I mean is the sending of our military for months as a buildup, the bombing off the coast of Venezuela, the CIA authorization, authorized CA covert regime change and instability operation, the abduction of their country's leader, the killing of his presidential guard, the killing of dozens of innocent Venezuelans throughout Caracas with our bombing campaign, the declaration by President Trump that we are now governing and ruling Venezuela.
When I say war, that's just shorthand for that.
You can call it whatever you want, special military operation.
I really don't know what else to call it.
The reason why this is such an odd conflict is because we just had a presidential election between President Trump and first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris.
And none of this was ever raised.
None of this was ever debated.
None of this was ever proposed.
We did have a discussion about the dangers and the destruction of the importation and smuggling of fentanyl into our country and the number of people that that is in fact killing in the United States.
And there are several ways you could deal with that.
You could try and address demand and try and ask why are so many Americans spiritually broken or broken in other ways that they're so susceptible to addiction.
Or you can work on supply, as we've been doing in the war on drugs for the last eight decades with complete futility.
But during the campaign, the only mention any of this received was when President Trump said, and this part is true, fentanyl is primarily the precursors due from China, and then they get imported as constructed fentanyl through Mexico.
And the solution that he offered during the campaign that people were able to hear and decide if they wanted to vote for it or not was that he was going to drug bomb the drug cartels of Mexico, the place where fentanyl that kills so many Americans is coming from.
Venezuela was never mentioned as a source of fentanyl.
President Trump never once suggested that he would launch a regime change operation against Venezuela.
This was not debated.
It was not discussed during the entire 2024 campaign.
There wasn't anyone in MALGA.
There were no Trump supporters demanding that President Trump do this in the 2024 campaign.
It was a non-issue.
And then there was no debate in Congress.
There was no request for military authorization, authorized use of military force in Venezuela, no requirement of White House officials or administration officials going to the Congress and presenting arguments about how this would in any way benefit Americans.
So it's basically been a military conflict, a war, a regime change operation that has been almost entirely unaccompanied by any reasoned debate.
There have been a few snippets of interviews of White House officials, some phrases and slogans they've offered, some leaks that are constantly changing.
But there's no real sustained debate about a decision this monumental.
It was just done.
And that's why overnight you see huge numbers of Trump supporters who never once talked about regime change in Venezuela.
To the extent they talked about it at all in a generalized way, it was by saying we don't want any more regime change wars.
That was a central plank.
of the American First Movement, a MAGA, of the Trump campaign.
And then overnight, they just turned into the war.
It's really remarkable.
And this is one of the points that I always made from the very beginning when we first started talking about the decision of the Biden administration to finance the war in Ukraine.
And I stressed this, I don't know how many times, definitely dozens, probably hundreds, in all the times that we covered the war in Ukraine.
The only decision, the only question that really matters with any war policy is how does this benefit the American people?
The reason why I was so opposed and still am so opposed to U.S. financing and arming of the war in Ukraine is because I never thought and still do not believe that the provinces in eastern Ukraine, which is what that word is about, Russians or Ukrainians, Kiev or Moscow, some semi-autonomous zone that we can turn it into.
I never believed that that affects the lives of Americans, which is the ultimate responsibility of the government, the supreme responsibility.
For that reason, I never wanted the United States to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a very dangerous war.
I saw huge amounts of danger, huge amounts of costs in human lives and American treasure, possibly in the risk of escalated conflict, which is still very real, and no benefit to the American people.
And that's exactly the same argument here.
Who is benefiting from this removal of Nicolas Maduro?
At best, you can say, oh, I think oil companies are going to benefit.
Chevron's going to benefit.
Exxon is going to benefit.
They now have more unfettered access to Venezuelan oil.
We already had access to Venezuelan oil if we wanted it.
They were willing to sell it to us whenever we wanted to buy it.
They weren't keeping Venezuelan oil from us.
We had access to Venezuelan oil.
But now, presumably, at some point in the very long-term future, once you rebuild the very creaky, rusted infrastructure of the Venezuelan oil industry, at some point, I guess Chevron and Exxon will benefit more in the future.
Do you think any of those benefits, when massive multinational oil companies with no nationalistic oil to the United States start maximizing their profit, you think that benefits the working class people of Pennsylvania or Ohio or West Virginia, coal miners and factory workers in the Rust Belt?
None of this is going to redound to their benefit.
Or we freed the Venezuelan people, even if you actually believed that was our goal, even if you actually believed that that was something that we achieved.
In what way does that redound to the benefit of the American people?
And note that we didn't actually even change the regime of Venezuela.
The entire regime of Venezuela is exactly the same.
We just removed the leader, Nicolas Maduro, his vice president, who's just as much of a hardline, lifelong dogmatist and socialist as he is, assumed the presidency of Venezuela today.
President Trump was very clear.
He doesn't want to install the pro-Western opposition because as he said correctly, they don't have anywhere near the respect and support within Venezuela to run the country.
So we're not dismantling the military or the police.
This isn't like the debaffing of Iraq, the entire governing infrastructure of Venezuela.
In place, we didn't liberate anybody or anything.
That's obviously not the goal.
That's not what we're trying to do.
So what is it that we're trying to do?
And who benefits?
And what way do the American people benefit?
We spent billions and billions and billions of dollars on this months of military, massive military assets deployed to the region, the CIA covert operation.
Who knows what else we're going to have to do there?
We're already threatening future action if the new Venezuelan leaders don't sufficiently do what we tell them to do.
So it's very easy to assume and to envision a lot more.
But even if nothing else happens, what has been achieved for the American people?
All right, let's look at some of the most recent developments because we want to catch you up on the most recent events.
So first of all, President Maduro, former President Maduro, Nicholas Maduro, appeared in a Manhattan court along with his wife today, where they face multiple felony charges of drug smuggling and gun possession charges.
The federal judge who's presiding over their case is a 92-year-old senior judge named Alvin Hellerstein.
When I saw that he was the judge, I was actually shocked.
I practiced in front of him when I was still practicing lawyer in the Southern District of New York more than 20 years ago.
He was extremely old then.
But anyway, he's the judge presiding over this case.
At some point in 2027, there'll be a verdict.
And we're going to have this massive, long trial to try and prove that Nicolas Maduro, while leading Venezuela, was also the head of some kind of drug smuggling operation.
And he was in court today.
And according to the New York Times that reported on the court appearance, quote, Nicolas Maduro, the ousted Venezuelan leader, insisted on Monday that he was still his country's president and had been, quote, kidnapped in the U.S. military raid on Caracas that captured him and his wife two days ago.
Both pleaded not guilty in a lower Manhattan federal courtroom to charges including narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.
During a swear and insult ceremony on Monday, Venezuela's interim leader, Del C. Rodriguez, decried the, quote, illegitimate military aggression of the United States and said that Mr. Maduro was still the country's president.
She also said Mr. Maduro and his wife were hostages a day after she struck a conciliatory tone and offered to work with the United States.
So that's so far what the impact is.
We dragged Maduro into a court along with his wife.
And even though President Trump just a month ago issued a pardon to easily the most documented and destructive drug trafficker in Honduras, just pardoned him and walked him out of prison.
We're now being told that, oh, the real concern here is we want to stop drug smuggling.
I note that fentanyl, which is what kills people in the United States, is not even mentioned in the indictment.
Maduro is not accused of smuggling or importing or exporting rather fentanyl into the United States, just cocaine.
And if you look at the amount of cocaine that comes to the United States, the amount that comes from Venezuela is extremely small.
Fentanyl is basically zero.
So this is not about drugs.
This is not about drug trafficking.
Here is President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he was asked, this was on January 3rd, the day after the operation, who actually is going to run Venezuela.
And here's what he said.
We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.
So we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.
So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.
And it has to be judicious because that's what we're all about.
All right.
So basically the United States is now running Venezuela.
Isn't that something that would have been or should have been mentioned during the election that we just had less than a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago?
Hey, we want to run Venezuela.
We want to govern Venezuela.
Can't even govern the United States.
Here is President Trump also at Mar-a-Lago when asked, well, how is the United States going to govern Venezuela?
We are going to have a military presence there.
We're going to have boots on the ground.
How do you govern a country unless you put a, especially one that has a massive military and police force?
How do you govern Venezuela without putting many, many boots on the ground of American service members?
Here's what he said.
Mr. President, does the U.S. running a country mean that U.S. troops will be on the ground?
How will that work?
Well, you know, they always say boots on the ground.
Oh, so we're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have.
We had boots on the ground last night at a very high level, actually.
We're not afraid of it.
We don't mind saying it.
But we're going to make sure that that country is run properly.
We're not doing this in vain.
This is a very dangerous attack.
This is an attack that could have gone very, very badly.
Could have gone very badly.
We could have lost a lot of people last night.
We could have lost a lot of dignity.
We could have lost a lot of equipment.
The equipment is less important, but we could have lost a lot.
And we're going to make sure that this is proper.
We're there now.
We're ready to go again if we have to.
We're going to run the country right.
It's going to be run very judiciously, very fairly.
It's going to make a lot of money.
We're going to give money to the people.
We're going to reimburse people that we're taking advantage of.
We're going to take care of everybody.
It's very important.
We couldn't let them get away with it.
You know, they stole our oil.
We built that whole industry there.
And they just took it over like we were nothing.
And we had a president that decided not to do anything about it.
So we did something about it.
We're late, but we did something about it.
Yeah, please.
So we're running Venezuela.
We're going to run it very judiciously, very fairly.
We're going to give them a lot of money, the people of Venezuela.
We're going to make them wealthy.
We're going to make them rich.
We're going to make Venezuela great again.
I thought the whole distinction that a lot of Trump supporters are drawing between themselves and neocons is no neocons go and nation build.
They don't just go and take.
They try and build the nation into something.
They try and transform it into something different.
That's exactly what Trump is saying he's going to do.
We're going to govern Venezuela.
We're not just taking their oil.
We're going to govern it.
We're going to run it.
We're going to rule it.
We're going to do it for the benefit of Venezuelans.
That's what he said.
And then, of course, the question is, well, how are you going to do that?
The people in that country, I'm not saying all of them, or even most of them, but a lot of them.
It's a country of 30 million people.
There's a huge contingent of followers of Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro.
These people have been indoctrinated for decades to hate the United States to see the United States as their enemy.
Exactly like Americans are indoctrinated to think about Cuba or Venezuela.
Just as much as Americans automatically assume that those are bad countries, that's how they think about the United States.
They don't want the United States running their country.
Some might.
I'm sure some do.
In every country, there's some people who would welcome a foreign army coming and taking down the government.
There are Americans who would celebrate in the street if some foreign army came and took down the Trump administration.
I promise you that.
They think Trump is Hitler, a fascist.
But there's a lot of people in that country that would fight and are armed and don't want the United States running their country.
But that sounds like nation building.
We're going to turn Venezuela into this fair, justly administered country.
We're going to be governing it.
And Trump said, if we have to put boots on the ground, we're not afraid of that.
We're going to have a prolonged military presence in Venezuela.
Is this remotely consistent with anything that the American First Movement said that it was about that Donald Trump's campaign or candidacy or prior presidency claimed he was intending to achieve?
One of the people who is incredibly thrilled by all of this, who has been a driving force behind it, is someone who not coincidentally grew up in the immigrant, Latin American immigrant community of South Florida, of Miami, and that's Marco Rubio, whose parents came from Cuba.
There are a lot of members of Congress from that area who represent Venezuelan and Cuban immigrants.
They have been long obsessed with having the United States military go and fix their region is how they see it.
And Marco Rubio went on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos over the weekend, and Stephanopoulos asked him about exactly who is going to be running Venezuela and how.
And here's what Rubio said.
President Trump was pretty clear yesterday.
He said the United States is going to run Venezuela.
Under what legal authority?
Well, first of all, what's going to happen here is that we have a quarantine on their oil.
That means their economy will not be able to move forward until the conditions that are in the national interest of the United States and the interest of the Venezuelan people are met.
And that's what we intend to do.
So that leverage remains.
That leverage is ongoing.
And we expect that it's going to lead to results here.
We're hopeful that it does.
Positive results for the people of Venezuela, but ultimately, most importantly for us, in the national interest of the United States, we will no longer have, hopefully, as we move forward here, we'll set the conditions so that we no longer have in our hemisphere a Venezuela that's the crossroads for many of our adversaries around the world, including Iran and Hezbollah, is no longer sending us drug gangs, is no longer sending us drug boats, is no longer a narco-trafficking paradise for all those drugs coming out of Colombia to go in through the Caribbean and towards the United States.
And obviously, we want a better future for the people of Venezuela.
We want them to have an oil industry where the wealth goes to the people, not to a handful of corrupt individuals and stolen by pirates all over the world.
That's what we're working towards, and we intend to use the leverage we have to help achieve that.
Let me ask the question again.
What is the legal authority for the United States to be running Venezuela?
Well, I explained to you what our goals are and how we're going to use the leverage to make it happen.
As far as what our legal authority is on the quarantine, I'm very simple.
We have court orders.
These are sanctioned boats, and we get orders from courts to go after and seize these sanctions.
So that's, I don't know, is the court not a legal authority?
You know, none of that answer doesn't make any sense.
I don't really care about legal authority, to be perfectly honest.
I care, but I know no one else in the United States cares.
We've given up on the idea that we have a constitution that says Congress has to authorize new wars.
We haven't done that for decades.
Nobody really seems to mind.
International law is really just an illusion.
It just means whatever we want it to mean at any given time.
I think it's just best to drop the pretense that there's any legal authority.
But Rubio said we had court orders makes no sense.
There are court orders to authorize a seature, particularly our sanctioned boats, not to go in and remove Maduro and then government as well.
But again, I don't really care about the legal authority because nobody else does.
It's just not a meaningful avenue of inquiry.
But what is a meaningful avenue of inquiry is what he's saying there.
So the way we're going to benefit is we're going to go in, we're going to help the Venezuelan people have a more prosperous future.
Is that what Americans voted for?
They wanted to make sure that President Trump governed Venezuela to make sure that the people of Venezuela prospered.
And then just to give you a sense of how frivolous these pretexts are, the first thing Rubio said is, we want to make sure Venezuela is no longer a crossroads for Iran and Hezbollah, two of, coincidentally, Israel's most devoted enemies.
Iran and Hezbollah.
How is Iran or how is Hezbollah using their supposed access in Venezuela to threaten Americans or the United States?
In what conceivable way are they doing that?
I can understand how if you're Israel, you want to make sure Iran and Hezbollah don't have access, but what does that have to do with the United States?
And it's not even true.
What are Iran and Hezbollah?
This is like WMD level stuff.
And then the stuff about the drug gangs, again, we just went over that.
You can go and read government reports, dozens and dozens of them, think tank reports, all of which we've covered on this show about the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
None of them, none of them mention Venezuela.
None.
Nobody ever said Venezuela was the cause of fentanyl before.
And cocaine, which doesn't even cause a small fraction of the deaths in the United States, a small fraction of that comes from Venezuela.
How are drug gangs going to be magically dismantled without U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela when the reason drug gangs thrive in Colombia, in all sorts of places throughout Latin America, is because there's huge numbers of people in the government profiting and the police profiting and the military profiting it from it.
None of the drug trade is going to disappear.
And the more instability you create in Venezuela, the more you're going to enable drug gangs to thrive.
This is all nonsense, absolute nonsense.
There will not be an iota of fentanyl.
There will not be a gram of cocaine that is impeded from coming to the United States as a result of this action.
Nobody in the United States who wants opioids or fentanyl or cocaine will in any way be impeded from getting it as a result of anything that has been done here.
This is just a drug war, but on a tiny scale.
And it's failed for eight years, eight decades, and this is going to fail also.
Now, the U.S. media and the role that they're playing is their standard role of just being very propagandistic in favor of the U.S. security state, in favor of American wars.
They keep showing Venezuelans celebrating.
They're critical of sometimes of the implementation or the plan.
That's as far as they'll go.
But just to give you a sense, here is Margaret Brennan, who's the host of CBS's Face the Nation, and she was interviewing Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
And what she was angry about was not that they launched this regime change operation, but they didn't go far enough.
Listen to what it is that she battered him about.
But I'm curious because you just described the regime as still in place, essentially.
I mean, I'm curious why the Trump administration decided to leave it intact and only arrest Nicolas Maduro and his wife.
The person who controls the police, the chief thug, Diaz Dado Cabello.
He's the interior minister.
He's been indicted by the United States.
He was in that indictment the administration released.
He's a narco-terrorist.
There's a $25 million price on his head.
He's still in place.
The defense minister who has deep ties to Russia, $15 million price on his head.
He is still in place.
I'm confused.
Are they still wanted by the United States?
Why didn't you arrest them if you are taking out the narco-terrorist regime?
You're confused?
I don't know why that's confusing to you.
They're still in prison.
It's very simple.
You're not going to go in and wrap up.
But yeah, but you're going to go in and suck up five people.
They're already complaining about this one operation.
Imagine the howls we would have from everybody else if we actually had to go and stay there four days to capture four other people.
We got the top priority.
The number one person on the list was the guy who claimed to be the president of the country that he was not.
And he was arrested along with his wife who was also indicted.
And that was a pretty sophisticated and frankly complicated operation.
It was.
It is not easy to land helicopters in the middle of the largest military base in the country.
The guy lived on a military base.
Land within three minutes, kick down his door, grab him, put him in handcuffs, read him his rights, put him in a helicopter, and leave the country without losing any American or any American assets.
That's not an easy mission.
And you're asking me why didn't we do that in five other places at the same time?
I mean, that's absurd.
I do think this is one of the most daring, complicated, sophisticated missions this country has carried out in a very long time.
Tremendous credit to the U.S. military personnel who did it.
It was unbelievable.
And tremendous success.
And today, an indicted drug trafficker who was not the legitimate president of Venezuela, who we don't recognize, the Biden administration didn't recognize, 60-something countries don't recognize, the European Union doesn't recognize, and many countries in Latin America don't recognize.
He was a convict.
He was an indicted drug trafficker.
He was arrested.
His wife was arrested.
Right, but the others who were also indicted are still in place.
The others who were also indicted are still in place.
So that's the point of my questioning there.
But you talked about not being the legitimate president.
You wanted us to land in five other military bases?
No, I'm asking why you chose that this was the limit of the military operation.
But to your point that you just made that Maduro was not the legitimate president.
He was the guy who was claiming to be the president.
Right.
Well, the opposition.
Okay.
I mean, first of all, it's so revealing about the American press corps that the only criticism that she had there was, why didn't you do more?
Why didn't you go abduct more of their leaders?
Why didn't you dismantle more of their government?
That is what the U.S. corporate media does.
In this case, they want more war.
They always are in this posture.
At the same time, in her defense, it is a fair question.
What does it achieve to go in and just grab Maduro and leave the entire remaining regime in place?
If you're actually going to free the Venezuelan people, as you're claiming, if you're going to change the policies of Venezuela, how are you going to do that when you've just elevated to the leadership a longtime loyalist of Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro?
And the entire military and police infrastructure are still in place.
So either you've done basically nothing other than some symbolic move at great risk, you great cost, or you intend to do a lot more.
In which case, this is actually a regime change war.
It's only one or the other.
A lot of people who were trying to celebrate this as the liberation of the Venezuelan people did start to wonder that as well.
What Margaret Brennan was saying.
Wait, where are all the inspiring leaders of the opposition?
The woman who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, Maria Machado, and the supposed winner of the Venezuelan election, Edmundo Gonzalez, member Juan Guaido, who Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi in the first term decided was the real president of Venezuela.
They would address him.
Where's he?
Where are all these pro-Western Democrats who we've been told for so long are going to save the Venezuelan people?
And they assumed, and I think Maria Machado definitely assumed.
You listen to her statements on the first couple of days, like she was addressing the world as if she was Venezuelan's leader.
Where are they?
They're not in power.
They're nowhere near Venezuela or each Venezuelan power.
And President Trump was asked about that.
Well, where is she?
Are you going to make her the president of Venezuela?
Are you going to make Gonzalez the president of Venezuela, Edmund Gonzalez?
And here's the dismissive comments that Trump made that I think shocked a lot of people because who were supportive of this because they were saying, well, what's the point if we're not going to put these people who we claim are the rightful leaders into power in Venezuela?
Here's what Trump said.
No, we haven't really.
Mr. President, on Monday.
I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader if she doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country.
She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect to.
She's a very nice woman.
She's a very nice lady.
That's a nice lady.
She's not either.
She's lovely.
But we're not going to put her in.
Now, in Trump and Rubio's defense, I will say that this is the far more restrained way of going about things.
When the United States went in and tried to transform Iraq, one of the mistakes that a lot of people made, including people who supported the war, was that we tried to go in and basically dismantle the entire Iraqi military to debaith the fayah to change its leadership.
And we left the country with no law enforcement, no power center, a huge power vacuum.
And so on the one hand, I understand Trump and Rubio saying, like, look, we don't want to go in and just like try and remove the entire government of Venezuela and replace it with the new one, or we'll be dragged down in a clock by her.
That's true.
But then if you're not going to do that, if you're just going to leave the government in place, what are you going to do?
Like, just threaten them and make sure that they do your bidding?
You certainly haven't freed the Venezuelan people.
It's the same people running the country.
And there's no way to govern Venezuela and rule Venezuela.
Trump's saying is unless you have a government that you control in place and they don't control that government.
So what is the point of all of this?
And what benefits are going to accrue to the American people?
Now, this has been something that Trump has actually been saying for a while, which is that he thinks that the socialist leaders of Venezuela, once Maduro is removed, are people who he can do business with.
And I guess we'll find out if that's true, but it certainly isn't what the liberation of Venezuela looked like in terms of the people who have been asking for it or the people who claim that Trump got it.
Now, here is Trump on Air Force One on January 4th, because that question that I just asked, who's benefiting in terms of the American people, and what is the point of removing Maduro if you left his government in place is, of course, a question that a lot of people are asking.
And they asked that of President Trump on Air Force One.
And here's what he had to say.
Go ahead.
Now, are you going to demand that Del C. Rodriguez let opposition fingers return or free any political prisoners?
We haven't gotten to that yet.
Right now, what we want to do is fix up the oil, fix up the country, bring the country back, and then have elections.
Now, is it fair?
You better bring the country back.
Otherwise, you're just going to have a mess that's so bad.
It was really bad.
It's going to get a lot worse unless we go in and fix it.
Is the U.S. is the U.S. going to all right.
Let's look at the next video of where Trump is talking on Air Force One.
And here's what he kind of says he thinks is the reason for this regime change.
Before and there, they want to go in to Venezuela, and they're going to represent us well.
He has said in other videos, I don't know if I thought that one was it.
Apparently, it doesn't, but he's been talking about how the fact that we're going to go in and our oil companies are going to go in, that he talked to the oil companies beforehand.
And I do believe that American oil companies or multinational oil companies like Chevron and Exxon and others are thrilled at this opportunity.
I believe Palantir is thrilled.
I'm sure they have been involved and they're going to continue to be involved.
There's going to be a massive shift in resources always to the U.S. security and intelligence and military industrial complex, Boeing and Northrop Grunman, and all of those companies, the oil company, for sure, they're going to all do extremely well.
They've been doing well, extremely well, for the last many decades.
That's been the problem of the United States is that our resources don't go into communities inside the United States.
The educational system has been sucked dry.
People are graduating high school and are barely literate.
There's no healthcare system.
People have no economic security.
This is the whole point of what the Trump movement was supposed to be about.
We were supposed to put resources in the United States into the lives of the American people, not into nationbuilding in other countries.
It's exactly what we're now doing with this war.
And to the extent any Americans benefit, there'll be executives at these massive corporations and banks.
Wall Street is already planning on going and looking for investment opportunities in Venezuela.
None of this is going to redound to the benefit of the American people.
Those are the power centers that have been doing extremely well in the war on terror and through endless war all these years.
Nothing happens positively for the American people from any of this.
And so now we're left with a bunch of WMD-style lies and appeals to our base emotions about why this was necessary.
Look at this unbelievably despicable and manipulative tweet from Steve Witkoff's son, Alex Witcoff.
He's a heritage of the billionaire fortune of his dad, Steve Witcoff, who has become Trump's primary negotiating envoy.
He was trying to go on to social media on X and explain why you should be so happy that Trump went in and took at Maduro.
And listen to what it is that he said.
He exploited a personal tragedy in his family in order to do it.
He said, quote, yesterday, my family would have been celebrating my brother Andrew's 37th birthday.
Instead, he's gone, overtaken by a drug overdose.
Drug overdoses are a national catastrophe and now the number one killer of Americans ages 18 to 45.
It's surreal that on Andrew's birthday, President Trump successfully captured Nicholas Maduro, an illegitimate narco-terrorist with an active U.S. warrant, arrest warrant since the Biden administration.
His drug networks have helped poison an entire generation of Americans.
Anyone who defends Maduro is turning their backs on tens of millions of American families afflicted by this drug overdose crisis every single day.
Alex Witcoff's brother died of OxyContin, an OxyContin overdose.
He became addicted to OxyContin.
OxyContin doesn't come from Venezuela.
OxyContin is a drug that was produced by a gigantic American drug manufacturer and by the Sackler family.
It was an American product made in the United States, distributed in the United States under American laws.
Nicholas Maduro and Venezuela have nothing to do with Alex Witkoff's brother's death.
But that is a huge part of what this deceitful campaign is about is to try and convince Americans that if you know someone who died of fentanyl, you should support this campaign.
But it's a total lie because fentanyl doesn't come from the United States.
It doesn't come from Venezuela.
People are, the drug crisis in America is an American problem.
You're never going to cut off supply through a drug war.
We've been trying that for seven, eight decades.
Our military has grown.
We bomb everywhere.
We go to war everywhere.
Billions and billions of dollars are spent, trillions on major military industrial complex companies, and drugs are as available in the United States as ever before.
That was such a blatant lie that he actually got a community basically saying his brother died of OxyContin.
It had nothing to do with Venezuela.
But this has absolutely been part of the claim.
Now, there has been some preliminary polling data.
And I would be extremely surprised if huge amounts of Americans decided, oh, yeah, we want the United States government to go and change the government of Venezuela.
We want to govern Venezuela.
This wasn't even on the menu.
There was no, at least with Iraq, there was like a year-long, year and a half-long propaganda foundation laid.
Oh, Iraq was going to pass nuclear weapons to Al-Qaeda.
We were going to have a mushroom cloud over our country in the form of the smoking gun if we waited too long.
Iraq was behind Anthrop.
There were a whole series of lies built up over a long time.
These lies were just like barely planted.
They were just kind of like hovering around, not even enough for Americans to even process them.
And just like I always said with the Democrats and their obsession with Russia, I don't believe Americans wake up and think about Russia or Ukraine or care about it.
I don't think Americans wake up thinking that the source of their problems is Nicolas Maduro.
Inflation and stagnant wages and the inability to buy a home.
I don't think people think that that's the fault of Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, that their lives are going to be better by the regime change war.
That's why Americans keep saying they don't want all these wars.
And no matter who they vote for, no matter how often the candidate they vote for says we're going to stop them, they just continue.
Bipartisan foreign policy never stops in Washington.
You can vote and vote and vote, and it will continue to prevail.
That was the lesson of the Obama campaign in the administration.
That was the lesson of the Trump campaign in the administration, unfortunately.
Here is some polling data.
I don't think it's extremely reliable polling data, but it was published by the Washington Post.
Do you approve or disapprove of the United States having sent its military forces into Venezuela to capture Maduro?
40% say they approve, 42% say they disapprove.
Do you approve or disapprove of the United States having sent its military forces into Panama to overthrow Noriega?
So just to give you a sense, the reason why this is so notable, even though it seems like it's split, 40% approve, 42% don't approve, is because usually approval for new wars is at their highest right after the war begins.
That's when the propaganda is unleashed.
That's when our sense of tribalistic unity flourishes most.
When we feel we're being told that we're doing something benevolent, we're vanquishing an evil dictator.
We're freeing the Venezuelan people.
We feel very good and benevolent.
We triumphed.
We went in.
We got Maduro.
That's when war fever is at its highest.
It always descends after that.
And it's the fact that it split right after a new war is remarkable.
Democrats hated George W. Bush in Dickini.
Remember, they thought he stole the 2000 election.
And yet, even at the time of the Iraq War, he had 75 to 80% approval ratings.
Americans united behind him because of this war.
That's not the case here.
And just to illustrate that, the closest analogy of a similar war, similar to the one that Trump just ordered in Venezuela, was George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama in 1989.
Very, very similar.
The leader was Manuel Noriega.
The United States indicted him in court on drug trafficking charges, even though he'd been a longtime U.S. ally.
U.S. forces went in, abducted him, brought him back to Miami, put him on trial for drug trafficking.
And that was actually a much deadlier war.
Thousands of Panamanians died in that invasion.
A couple dozen American troops were killed, more than 100 injured.
And yet, if you look at the polling for that war, do you approve or disapprove of the United States having sent its military forces to Panama to overthrow Noriega?
This was January of 1990.
82% approved, 17% disapproved.
A 65-point difference, 82 to 17, whereas Trump's already underwater at 40 to 42.
And I think the reason is because Americans have been saying and have been told that one of the problems in their lives is not that Nicolas Maduro is in power, but the United States spends all our resources on foreign wars and running other countries.
And now to watch Trump, after being a prime vocal advocate of that worldview, come and say, oh, look at us.
Look at what we just did.
Yes, you don't have the Epstein files and you don't have economic security and you still feel like you're underwater and can't get ahead and your kids can't have a better life than you.
People don't get married.
They can't afford homes.
They can't afford to have kids until they're in their mid-30s.
And then even then it's a struggle.
Don't worry, we just got Nicolas Maduro out of Venezuela, something we never even talked to you previously about, thinking we had to do.
Of course, this is how Americans are going to react.
President Trump is focused in his first year on Israel and Iran and Yemen, Bobbing Yemen.
I'm talking about getting Greenland and changing the government of Cuba and Colombia now and Iran and now Venezuela.
You think this is what Americans voted for?
I know some hardcore, tough guys in MAGA are like, yeah, this is what we voted for.
But this is not what American voters said they were voting for with President Trump.
This is not what his campaign promised.
It promised the opposite.
I've already thought that Democrats are going to crush Republicans in the midterms.
And I think if this stuff continues, it's going to even be worse from the perspective of the Republicans.
And more importantly than the political angle, it's the fact that this is yet another attempt to interfere in the governance of a foreign country.
We're now assuming responsibility for governance of Venezuela.
The best case scenario is that nothing else happens and we've accomplished nothing.
The worst case scenario is that we really take seriously the fact that we're going to govern Venezuela and we're going to fall into one of those quagmires that has destroyed the standing of the United States of the world and the financial security of its people for generations.
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Now, all of this has produced a reaction among, I'm not ready to say the MAGA base, and I think the preliminary polling data suggests that that would be unwise and premature to say, but certainly among prominent MAGA influencers.
And I don't even think it's a case where they're just trying to defend President Trump because it's President Trump, although I do think there's a big part of it.
Everyone knows that if you want to remain in good standing in the Trump world, if you want to have access to the White House or Mar-a-Lago, you need to heat praise on President Trump constantly.
The minute you start criticizing him, you'll be treated like Thomas Massey or Rand Paul or Marjorie Taylor Green or any number of other people as an enemy.
And a lot of people who are leading Trump influencers rely on access to Trump World, to Mar-Alago, to the White House.
They want that access.
And the price for keeping it is that you constantly praise everything Trump does, that you run interference for him, that you tell the followers that you have that you should be happy with what he did, even if it's complete reversal and abandonment of everything that he promised you previously that he would do that you also defended.
So there's part of that for sure.
But I do think it's important to note how potent war propaganda is.
War propaganda is something that I've been watching for a long time.
I've been talking about it for a long time.
It is not just a advertisement tool or a way of pitching things to the media.
It really is a science propaganda.
It's been developed over centuries, especially war propaganda.
And it really is directed to the most primitive visceral instincts that we all have, especially our tribalistic instincts.
As I said before, when a country is attacked by a foreign power, they almost always unite.
That's what you're seeing in part in Venezuela.
A lot of people who don't love Maduro nonetheless don't want to be governed by the United States, don't want to be bombed by the United States.
I watched it in Brazil earlier this year when President Trump announced a whole series of tariffs and sanctions where he said we're going to stop Brazil from imprisoning Bolsonaro.
We're going to stop Brazil from imposing censorship on its citizens and huge numbers of Brazilians after President Louis de Silva picked up the nationalist banner and said, we decide what happens in Brazil.
We're Brazilians.
We decide.
Trump doesn't decide.
He doesn't rule our lives.
And huge numbers of people who don't even like wolf necessarily became resentful that the United States and Trump were trying to impose their will inside Brazil because you are part of a tribe.
Your tribe is your nation.
And we evolve to be part of tribes, to feel a tribal identity.
And you unite with your tribe when it's under attack from external forces.
And that's what war propaganda is designed to stimulate.
It's designed to say you're at war with this other tribe, and you have to unite with your tribe.
And when you are told that your tribe is victorious, triumphant, achieving benevolent things for the world, you feel good about it.
You feel good about it.
I'm not saying, I'm not accumulating myself.
This is a human condition.
That's the part of our brain that war propaganda is intended to target.
And one of the things it does is it allows people to feel strong and powerful.
They get to watch their side, their group, their country, their tribe go and vanquish bad guys, kill bad guys.
And they feel strong about it.
We feel good about it.
We feel brave.
Okay, look at what we just did.
We, even though the guys with the guns and the woman with the guns are not us, they're the ones who risk their lives.
They're the ones who needed physical bravery.
It kind of vicariously spills over to us.
And if we're people who don't feel particularly brave, if we feel like we haven't demonstrated much courage, we're particularly eager to be told that we deserve to feel brave and strong and purposeful.
And that's what war propaganda does.
And it's the reason it's so effective.
And you're seeing so much in the MAGA movement, this kind of like chestbeating.
People are just like walking around like, yeah, we're so powerful.
We're going to dominate the world because we're America.
And even though these same people spent four years, eight years saying, we don't want any more wars, no more regime change wars, no endless wars, stop the U.S. security state, focus on our country.
Overnight, they just transform.
And like I said, I think some of it is jaded and cynical and manipulative and careerist, but a lot of it is earnest in a way that I just described.
And the U.S. government is absolutely deliberately brazenly fostering that.
Here from the U.S. State Department, they posted this image earlier today.
This is our hemisphere.
And President Trump will not allow security to be threatened.
Like, yeah, look at how strong we are.
This is ours.
Not just the United States.
Not just the United States.
All of Latin America, all of South America, all of Central America, the Caribbean, all belongs to us.
And I know some people have been convinced that that's what the Monroe Doctrine says.
That's not what the Monroe Doctrine says.
The Monroe Doctrine doesn't say we're going to go and invade every other country in the hemisphere and take what we want.
It simply says that we believe that no other country has the right to interfere in and assert their will inside Latin America.
That's what the Monroe Doctrine is.
Now, here is Trump on Air Force One, and this is yesterday, and he was asked about what happens from now, not just in Venezuela, but other countries, and he was standing next to Lindsey Graham, and here's what he said.
Yeah, a little bit different.
We have some good people.
We have Senator Lindsey Graham.
Colombia is very sick, too.
Run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.
And he's not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you.
What does that mean?
He's not going to be doing it very long.
He's not doing it very long.
He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories.
He's not going to be doing it very well.
So there will be an operation by the U.S.
It sounds good to me.
Secretary Ruby mentioned.
You know why?
Because they kill a lot of people.
Yeah.
Secretary Rubio mentioned Cuba yesterday in his remarks.
Does the U.S. have a plan?
Cuba will always survive because of Venezuela.
Now they won't have that money coming in.
They won't have the income coming.
Cuba looks like it's ready to fall.
I don't know if they're going to hold out.
But Cuba now has no income.
They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil.
They're not getting any of it.
And Cuba literally is ready to fall.
And you have a lot of great Cuban Americans that are going to be very happy about that.
Are you considering U.S. action in Cuba?
We're not going to.
I think it's just going to fall.
I don't think we need any action.
It looks like it's going down.
No, one of the most important things about that video that unfortunately you didn't get to see because of the way it was clipped was that Lindsey Graham was standing at his side.
And as Trump was saying, we're going to do the same thing in Colombia and we're going to go in.
Cuba's going to fall and a bunch of Cuban Americans like Marco Rubio are going to be really happy about that because their legion still is to that region.
Lindsey Graham was at his side just twitching and all beaming with ecstasy and joy, which he should.
Lindsey Graham has had a vision of what American foreign policy should be for many years.
And even though Trump ran on a platform that was the opposite of that vision, it is now being implemented.
Lindsey Graham is always by Trump's side.
Trump is campaigning for Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham is an America first GOP challenger.
And Trump is raising money for Lindsey Graham and supporting Lindsey Graham because Lindsey Graham and he share a foreign policy ideology, obviously.
And that's why Trump is threatening all of these other countries.
He was also asked about Greenland, and Trump said, yes, we also are going to get Greenland.
Here's what he said.
Do you expect to take an action against Greenland?
Well, I don't want to talk about Greenland.
Let's talk about Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine.
We won't worry about Greenland in about two months.
Let's talk about Greenland in 20 days.
On Venezuela, we talked so much about energy.
By the way, I have to, I will say this about Greenland.
We need Greenland from a national security situation.
It's so strategic.
Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.
We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.
And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you.
You know what Denmark did recently to boost Security in Greenland, they added one more dog sled.
It's true.
They thought that was a great move.
I just say this.
We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.
And the European Union needs us to have it.
And they know that.
I think there's so confusing about.
There you see Lindsey at his side, being all like the little junior varsity mini Trump, beaming with pride about all the wars Trump is threatening to start.
Trump went on to True Social a few days ago.
As you might know, there are protests throughout Iran, as happens in many, many countries, including the United States.
There are clashes between protesters and the police.
Again, as happens in many countries, including the United States.
And Donald Trump decided that it's the United Responsibility of the United States to protect the protesters.
Here's what he posted on True Social: quote: If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is then custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.
We are locked and loaded, ready to go.
Thank you for your attention in this matter.
So we're again threatening Iran, Israel's number one enemy, this time to serve as kind of a domestic police force for Iran.
We're going to protect the citizens of Iran from clashes with their government.
Is that?
I thought we weren't supposed to be the world's police force.
This is like pre-maga, the most basic American resentment.
Why are we the world's police force?
And now Trump's promising to police Iranian protest and protect protesters against the government.
And yet you have overnight these people who, when Trump was saying we don't want more regime change wars, we don't want any more interventions, we're saying the same thing.
And then the minute Trump abandons it, so did they.
The paragon of masculine bravery and courage, Matt Walsh, who works for Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire.
Ben Shapiro often comes up to Matt Walsh whenever Matt is saying things off-key, not serving Israel, not serving the U.S. security state.
And Ben says, Matt Walsh, get back to work.
And this is something that people have observed.
And Matt Walsh gets back to work.
He just snaps his fingers.
And this paragon of masculine courage and bravery who tells everybody how to be a real man like Matt Walsh.
Somebody who's just seen it all.
He's like a hardened war veteran.
He's like stood up.
There are powerful governments around the world, like really grizzled guy who's been through it all.
He's now like a real man.
So he like tells us, what does it mean to be masculine?
Like what is a real man?
Matt Walsh said on January 4th, I totally support turning other countries in our hemisphere into subordinate vassals of the United States.
That's the very definition of an American first foreign policy.
Matt Walsh is a real man, so he turns other countries into his subordinate vassals.
He's like, yeah, I'm so powerful.
I feel so strong as a relative what we did in Venezuela.
When Trump and the Mughal movement were saying they were representing non-intervention and anti-war approaches and only focusing on Americans in the United States, Matt Walsh said exactly the opposite.
Just six months ago, June 25th, he said, we spent the last 25 years bringing freedom and democracy to countries around the globe.
While our own country has been systematically invaded, now our largest cities are run by foreigners and communists.
If you want to know why I'm so avowedly non-interventionist, this is why.
Imagine six months ago.
And again, you're not just any guy.
You're like the paragon of masculine virtue.
You're like the real man who is just filled with bravery, whose entire life is a hallmark to courage.
And six months ago, you're like, I don't want any more intervention.
I'm as non-interventionist as I get.
And then Trump, your leader, and Ben Shapiro, your boss, say this is a really good war.
And then you turn around and you're like, yeah, I want all these countries invaded.
I want them controlled.
And again, I think a lot of this is careers, but I do think a lot of it is also earnest.
People get overwhelmed by more propaganda.
Here's Tim Pohl on January 3rd, 2025, and he's been an outspoken anti-interventionist for a long time.
He said, this is actually January 3rd, 2026.
This is what he posted after or during the invasion of Venezuela.
He said, the U.S. economy is about to boom, tons of free oil heading our way.
Again, I guess based on the premise that if you give access to Chevron and Exxon to Venezuelan oil, somehow all that money is going to flood into the American people.
Like, when has that ever happened with oil company profits?
July 25th, 2019, during the first Trump administration, Tim Pohl said, ending private prisons, ending the death penalty, ending regime change wars.
These are my top three, one of which was ending regime change wars.
And now we're back to a regime change war and he's saying, oh, money's about to fall into the United States.
Here's the utterly brainless partisan Trump influencer Cat Turd, who during the Trump action in Venezuela said Venezuela is now more free than New York City.
March 6th, March 8th, 2025, just a few months earlier, he said, name one inspired regime change, U.S. inspired regime change that hasn't ended an absolute disaster.
So you see this transformation taking place.
The minute Trump orders an intervention, a regime change war, so many of them just get on board with it, even though a few months earlier, before Trump did it, they were saying how steadfastly opposed they were to it because that's what Trump was saying at the time.
And there is, beyond just the kind of primitive visceral efficacy of war propaganda, there is this aspect to it where men who have never demonstrated real bravery in their lives or real courage in their lives,
men who have never taken any risks before, men who feel weak as a result, ashamed of their lack of courage and bravery, they are particularly susceptible to war propaganda because they get that vicarious sense of strength and pulsating power that, as I described before, is otherwise unavailable to them.
You see that with Matt Walsh.
Here's Michael Knowles, who also works for Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire.
And he's really feeling powerful and strong as all of these other women and men that he's cheering for, like raving his pom-poms, who actually went into Venezuela.
And he said, if I were Canada, I'd be on my best behavior right about now.
So Michael Knowles, this little daily wire twerp, who thinks he's very powerful and strong, even though he's never demonstrated any willingness to accept the risk, to confront any power sources, to sacrifice any of his security for any reason, no bravery, no courage at all.
He wants to feel that.
And the only way he gets to is by kind of vicariously absorbing the bravery of others.
And now he just going around and threatening, hey, Canada, if I were you, I would be on my best behavior right now or else you're going to pay the price.
Do you see how psychologically needy these people are and why these kinds of wars appeal to them?
Speaking of weak men who have never demonstrated any bravery and love war as a result of giving them a sense of purpose otherwise attainable, Lindsey Graham wasn't just standing next to Trump on Air Force One when Trump was threatening many other wars, but Lindsey Graham himself did what he always does, which is advocate for and threaten a bunch of new wars.
Here's part of what he said.
So when he first got elected in January, we met, you know, biggest comeback ever.
We talked about life, sir, really?
I didn't feel it was a comeback, actually.
So Mr. First, what is the bottom line is we talked about a drug caliphate in our backyard.
You know, we had Venezuela, we have Cuba, we have Colombia in our backyard.
And these three countries have been condemned ever since I've been in politics.
Joe Biden put a $25 billion bounty on Maduro's head.
Chris Smith, the day he got inaugurated, said, I hope Trump will hold Maduro's feet to the fire.
He did.
So what has he done?
He's going to clear our backyard of a drug cafe.
Countries run by narco-terrorist dictators who murder, rape, send drugs into our country to kill thousands of our citizens to my Democratic friends.
You should be celebrating this.
When Bin Laden went down, I was the first to applaud President Obama.
This was one of the most sophisticated military operations in the history of the country.
What they were able to do was amazing.
They knew we were coming.
We had a good part of the Navy.
And they were able to capture this man alive.
No military in the world could have done it.
And as to this commander-in-chief, he did something people talked about doing.
You just wait for Cuba.
Cuba is a communist dictatorship that's killed priests and nuns.
They've preyed on their own people.
Their days are numbered.
We're going to wake up one day.
I hope in 26, in our backyard, we're going to have allies in these countries doing business with America, not narco-terrorist dictators killing Americans.
This is a big frigging day.
And everybody in the world is thinking differently than they were just a few days ago because of what you did.
By the way, you know.
He's really feeling himself.
I mean, he's really ecstatic.
He's really aroused with this war fever.
This is his dream.
Lindsey Draham's dream has been fulfilled.
I mean, he's been mocked for years as this John Bolton-type, Bill Crystal-type, deranged, war-mongering freak.
But he, his vision is the one that's imposed through the MAGA movement on American foreign policy, and he has every right to be as happy as he is.
But you can see the kind of like just pulsating sense of power.
He's like, I'm going to get rid of this country and that country.
And Trump is standing there next to him because Trump is the vessel for all of this, despite having run on a campaign of doing exactly the opposite.
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