True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 68: Raid in Macuto
Aired: 2020-05-15
Duration: 01:10:14


=== Striking Out On My Own (05:18) ===

[00:00:00]  You won't let me go into my ideas, so I'm on strike.
[00:00:04]  I'm on strike, Liz.
[00:00:05]  No, you're not, because I'm not the boss CPU.
[00:00:08]  Well, I'm not striking.
[00:00:10]  I'm just striking out on my own, is what I mean by that.
[00:00:13]  Because my last two ideas, which our listeners will not have heard because we're cutting them, weren't apparently up to snuff for the pair of bosses I have here.
[00:00:24]  I just, I'm not sure they were appropriate.
[00:00:27]  It's there, it's, it's, okay, well, that can be argued, but I, you know, but by not being sure if they're appropriate, you're also not sure if they're inappropriate.
[00:00:37]  That's true.
[00:00:38]  That's actually one of my, I have to say, that is one of my favorite rhetorical tricks when people are like, and, and therefore this may happen.
[00:00:48]  Then you're like, yeah, so that means it may not happen.
[00:00:51]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:00:52]  Or people are like, I think you're stupid, but then it's like, flip that around.
[00:00:56]  You also might, you also think I'm smart.
[00:01:00]  You know?
[00:01:01]  I don't know if that's.
[00:01:04]  Okay, sure.
[00:01:06]  If you leave any wiggle room, I'll wiggle right in there.
[00:01:08]  I'll arm around in you.
[00:01:11]  Oh, I don't think that's the right way to put that.
[00:01:14]  I'll take a mud bath in your mind.
[00:01:16]  It's people, people are always saying shit to me like, you know, that may be not okay to do.
[00:01:27]  Like, you shouldn't do that to people on the bus.
[00:01:29]  I'm like, but it also might be okay to breathe on the back of someone's neck on the bus and touch their shoulder to test their reflexes.
[00:01:38]  Doctors text your reflexes.
[00:01:40]  They're strangers.
[00:01:42]  That's why they call you Dr. Brace.
[00:01:44]  That is why they call you.
[00:01:47]  Good morning.
[00:01:48]  You were talking about this the other day.
[00:01:50]  Is if I would absolutely, if I could, I would absolutely buy a fake degree or not a fake degree, a real degree from a degree mill or whatever that made me a doctor.
[00:02:03]  I'm not a real doctor, but I.
[00:02:06]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:07]  Just so you could say it.
[00:02:09]  Yeah, because being a doctor isn't like, it's like not a bureaucratic thing.
[00:02:14]  There's no like, you don't get a doctor's, I mean, you do get a medical license.
[00:02:17]  You, you mean, yeah, you're talking about not medical license.
[00:02:19]  You mean like a PhD?
[00:02:21]  A PhD, which, you know, if I just put it like on my name plate on my office, I would have to get an office, but like on an office door, you know, no one's going to be like, oh, can I see your medical?
[00:02:31]  They see Dr. Belden.
[00:02:34]  Which sounds great, by the way.
[00:02:35]  Sounds fantastic.
[00:02:37]  What would you get your PhD in?
[00:02:39]  Oh, what's an annoying one?
[00:02:42]  Evolutionary psychology.
[00:02:46]  I would also get it in, oh, what's the one like whatever, whatever Lindy West has.
[00:02:52]  Like, I would just get them.
[00:02:54]  It's all sociology.
[00:02:56]  I get a double in sociology.
[00:02:58]  And I fuck it.
[00:02:58]  If I can get multiple, like if there's like a, like a, what are those, like a coupon deal or something, I would get two in society.
[00:03:06]  Like a buy one, get one.
[00:03:07]  Exactly.
[00:03:08]  Well, I would want to get three if I'm getting multiple ones.
[00:03:11]  Okay, buy two, get one.
[00:03:12]  I'm free.
[00:03:13]  Yeah, I would get two in sociology and one in PE.
[00:03:18]  I don't think you get a PhD in PE.
[00:03:21]  It's the one school subject you can't get.
[00:03:23]  I know, it doesn't sound real to me.
[00:03:49]  Hello, Brace.
[00:03:51]  Greetings, Liz.
[00:03:54]  How are you doing?
[00:03:55]  I'm doing okay.
[00:03:56]  I'm thinking how I was, I either went through, this is almost too embarrassing to share, but I don't think it was me.
[00:04:03]  I think it was my friend went through.
[00:04:05]  It was my friend, Ian, in middle school or maybe elementary school, went through a phase of saying salutations to people he met.
[00:04:13]  Oh, no, that's terrible.
[00:04:14]  That's terrible.
[00:04:15]  That's rough.
[00:04:16]  So salutations, Liz.
[00:04:18]  Salutations to you, Brace.
[00:04:21]  I guess we should introduce, say hello.
[00:04:24]  This is Trudon.
[00:04:25]  Welcome.
[00:04:25]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:28]  Come on, Dante Brace Berden.
[00:04:31]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:04:33]  And before we start the episode, I just want to send a sincere thank you to everyone who listened to our last episode, which is an interview with Maria Farmer.
[00:04:43]  If you haven't listened to it yet, I highly recommend that you pause this, do a little rewind, go listen to that episode.
[00:04:54]  And also, on top of that, to thank everyone who has been donating to her GoFundMe as she continues to fight cancer.
[00:05:01]  We've raised a lot of money for her, and I've seen a lot of that come from listeners of the podcast.
[00:05:07]  And I sincerely thank you all for that.
[00:05:10]  Yeah, that is opening up your hearts and opening up your wallets.
[00:05:14]  Thank you very much.

=== Drone Mercenary Described (13:52) ===

[00:05:18]  We have rather less sympathetic figures that we are dealing with today, I feel like.
[00:05:23]  Yeah, we're getting back into the mix here, aren't we, Briece?
[00:05:26]  Yeah, but to start this off, you know, have you have you, are you familiar with the world of contracting?
[00:05:36]  Do you mean like 1099s?
[00:05:39]  It's it's yeah, it's like that, except for no, it's not like that.
[00:05:44]  It's a little different than that.
[00:05:46]  Contractors are people who are used to be known as mercenaries.
[00:05:51]  Oh, you mean military contractors?
[00:05:54]  Yes, yes.
[00:05:56]  The real PMCs, private military contractors.
[00:05:59]  Yes, that's the only people we should be talking about.
[00:06:03]  Who often made up of people who get out of the army or even better, the special forces, and turn their mission, let's say, to less, well, actually, pretty much equally ignoble tasks.
[00:06:16]  So you go from basically guarding oil rigs in the army to guarding oil rigs in a private army, but you're getting paid like four times as much.
[00:06:26]  Yeah, so why are we talking about this this week?
[00:06:29]  Well, there was some big news in the PMC discourse, an explosion within the PMC discourse in the last two weeks.
[00:06:41]  There was what looks to be another attempted coup in Venezuela.
[00:06:47]  And this one is, if you can believe this, this one is even worse than the last ones.
[00:06:53]  Yeah, it's like, it's like, you know, you always kind of try to find a little like tragedy farce metaphor that you can use with some of these historical situations, but it's like increasingly just like farce, farce, bigger farce, more farce, farce of farce.
[00:07:10]  They're farcing up the place.
[00:07:11]  Awful.
[00:07:12]  To start, two most badass professions.
[00:07:16]  A bounty hunter.
[00:07:19]  Sickest profession, bar none.
[00:07:21]  Sure.
[00:07:21]  You got Boba Fett of the Star Wars space opera.
[00:07:28]  You got various cowboys and outlaws.
[00:07:33]  You got kind of any guy who's just seen a target out there, ascertained whether it was a high value, mid-value, or low-value target, captured that target and turned it in for a high reward.
[00:07:43]  Second most badass profession, mercenary.
[00:07:47]  Yes.
[00:07:49]  Who are, well, where's the, do you have any examples?
[00:07:53]  You got that fucking, actually, none of these guys I'm about to describe are very badass at all.
[00:07:57]  You got that skinny British loser bitch, Simon Mann, of executive outcomes.
[00:08:03]  You got myself, which basically can be described the same way, though we did many other things.
[00:08:10]  You got basically every Brit who stepped foot into any part of Central Africa between like 1940 and let's say 2010.
[00:08:24]  Okay, so why are we talking about these two guys here?
[00:08:30]  These bounty hunters and mercenaries?
[00:08:32]  Well, one of the smartest men in America, whose name I'll reveal later, of course, it is highly classified secret, despite him having done many high-profile interviews before his mission started, was like thinking one day.
[00:08:48]  He was like, dude, what if I combined the two coolest professions into one?
[00:08:53]  What if I became not just a bounty hunter, not just a mercenary, but a bounty hunting mercenary?
[00:09:01]  And due to that, he unfortunately himself, which is a smart move, did not partake in this seaborne raid, but he did engage his forces in a seaborne incursion into the north of Venezuela waterside.
[00:09:20]  I'm not familiar with the military terms for those.
[00:09:22]  Anything I just described there.
[00:09:26]  Okay, okay, okay, okay.
[00:09:27]  So we should say what we're talking about, to be clear, is last, was it last week, week and a half ago?
[00:09:36]  The third, yeah, about the Eides of May, as we call it.
[00:09:42]  Yes.
[00:09:44]  There was an attempted coup in Venezuela.
[00:09:48]  Now, it seems like everybody has settled on calling this a coup.
[00:09:52]  And it does technically qualify as a coup, I think.
[00:09:55]  People do.
[00:09:56]  Coup attempt, yeah.
[00:09:58]  But this is probably the worst attempt.
[00:10:01]  There's been a lot.
[00:10:02]  I'm a big, you know, I read, I read up on things, read about a lot of failed coups.
[00:10:07]  Coup Master General.
[00:10:09]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:10:10]  Captain Koo over here.
[00:10:13]  This is possibly.
[00:10:14]  A couomer.
[00:10:15]  A couomer.
[00:10:16]  Precisely.
[00:10:17]  Precisely.
[00:10:18]  I have never seen one done so poorly yet.
[00:10:21]  So magnificently.
[00:10:24]  I mean, it's almost as if they were like, they played a video game and said, let's just do it like that.
[00:10:32]  Yes, yes, yes.
[00:10:34]  So these group of guys attempted to enter Venezuela from the sea in a boat and were immediately captured by fishermen, engaged in some sort of combat with police, although that seems to have possibly been mostly one-sided.
[00:10:51]  Eight of them were killed, two of them were captured, and their raid ended literally before they stepped foot onto the soil of Venezuela.
[00:11:00]  Yeah, I mean, it really was like, it's like Keystone rent a cops.
[00:11:06]  It was, no, this makes the Keystone cops look like a high, like myself, like a high-profile mercenary.
[00:11:12]  We need like a kind of like Latin music version of like, but it's like they just jumped in a boat and then were immediately caught.
[00:11:24]  Like immediately.
[00:11:26]  Oh, and according to reports, we're incredibly seasick and not having, I mean, it's difficult to, you know, and these were not, these were not very, you know, expensive looking boats, let's call them.
[00:11:38]  They were certainly not the boats called for in the contract, which we will be discussing a little bit later.
[00:11:43]  But it all came out that a bunch of more people were caught, you know, and more people have been successfully caught in the following, in the days following, that it seemed like there was a group of conspirators who fucking suck shit at their job.
[00:12:05]  Yeah, it's a real triumph of the Failson economy.
[00:12:09]  It's my God.
[00:12:11]  Like this is one of their highest moments.
[00:12:14]  Yeah, it's a real big moment.
[00:12:15]  And so we're of course talking about Silvercore, who our listeners might have seen in the news.
[00:12:21]  And we're going to get into what exactly went down with this, you know, quote-unquote coup attempt.
[00:12:29]  And we'll get into why that, you know, is maybe a complicated term to use.
[00:12:33]  But before we get to that and all the all the fun details that that requires, we kind of have to give some background here.
[00:12:40]  And I don't know how many of our listeners are familiar with, you know, the history of U.S. or attempted U.S. interventions in Venezuela, not just from last year, but even before.
[00:12:56]  So check out, I'm going to do something really annoying.
[00:12:59]  Venezuela, pronounced Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
[00:13:04]  I'm the kid.
[00:13:04]  I was doing a bit where I was just going to read from the Wikipedia, but no, You didn't do the bit.
[00:13:10]  You got to hold the bit longer.
[00:13:12]  I couldn't hold the bit longer.
[00:13:13]  No, because you were too embarrassed because you thought people were going to think that you weren't doing a bit.
[00:13:17]  So you turn off it.
[00:13:18]  What if they turn it off?
[00:13:19]  No, that's what I'm here for, baby, to keep it going.
[00:13:22]  Okay.
[00:13:23]  So, all right.
[00:13:24]  You guys all know what Venezuela is.
[00:13:26]  Many of you are paid in currency from there to do various things like, you know, give weapons to Hezbollah, to sell oil to, you know, the bad guy from Modern Warfare 2.
[00:13:40]  You know what I'm talking about.
[00:13:41]  Venezuela, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
[00:13:44]  I'm just talking about coups since the 90s there.
[00:13:47]  There have been several.
[00:13:49]  All of them failed.
[00:13:53]  So the first one would start off by our man Hugo, who Ugo.
[00:13:57]  I can't do the Ugo.
[00:13:58]  Hugo Chavez in 92.
[00:14:01]  We sound stupid saying Ugo.
[00:14:03]  I definitely, yeah.
[00:14:04]  Whenever you do the accent and you don't like.
[00:14:08]  I respect people with accents too much to attempt to do an accent of their accent.
[00:14:13]  That's what I say.
[00:14:14]  And it's just like with doing it with one word, it's like, come on, give me a break.
[00:14:17]  Yes.
[00:14:18]  It's no.
[00:14:19]  Anyway.
[00:14:19]  Well, Hugo Schweitzer.
[00:14:21]  No, Hugo Chavez in 1992 tried to overthrow the government with all his paratrooper buddies.
[00:14:28]  He failed.
[00:14:28]  They fucked up by letting him go on live TV and be like, sorry, guys, stand down.
[00:14:33]  Everyone's like, this guy is sick.
[00:14:35]  Beret looks great.
[00:14:37]  They toss him in the clink.
[00:14:39]  You know, everybody knows what happened later.
[00:14:41]  98, he wins the election.
[00:14:43]  America was not too happy with this.
[00:14:46]  No, no.
[00:14:47]  Very much not happy.
[00:14:50]  No, because Hugo Chavez, of course, they thought they were like, damn, we won the Cold War.
[00:14:55]  Socialism's over.
[00:14:57]  Psych, bitch.
[00:14:59]  Hugo Chavez is coming in.
[00:15:04]  He starts enacting a bunch of different reforms because obviously Venezuela is a poor country, but it made a lot of money for the oil industry.
[00:15:12]  So my man goes on TV in a referee's uniform with a whistle and starts blowing the whistle and in between naming the directors of the oil company PDVCA.
[00:15:28]  And he fires the entire board.
[00:15:30]  This is actually what Tushort was talking about when he called on everyone to blow the whistle.
[00:15:36]  People were not too happy with this as obviously, like most South American countries, America had quite a lot of influence there.
[00:15:42]  And basically every guy you can think of from like, I think it was like even the Archbishop of Caracas to every business leader, every politician that opposed him, tried to coup him and install the head of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce as the president.
[00:16:03]  Right.
[00:16:04]  Well, yeah.
[00:16:04]  I mean, yeah.
[00:16:06]  That's typical.
[00:16:08]  I mean, Chavez really knew how much he was going to need to control.
[00:16:13]  I'll just say that.
[00:16:14]  Like he understood the kind of political stakes or, you know, at hand and that, you know, everyone kind of had to be neutralized if he was going to be able to enact any of the reforms that were necessary to pull the Venezuelans out of poverty.
[00:16:31]  And he was right.
[00:16:32]  So, but he gets captured or he turns himself.
[00:16:34]  He calls Fidel and he's like, Fidel, am I going to have to, like, you know, he knows what happened at Allende.
[00:16:40]  He's like, do I have to shoot myself?
[00:16:42]  Or like, what's going to, like, I don't know.
[00:16:44]  I don't know what I had to do.
[00:16:45]  I think I'm going to kill myself.
[00:16:46]  And Fidel is like, do not self-harm my brother.
[00:16:49]  I support you.
[00:16:50]  You're valid.
[00:16:51]  Turn yourself in and live to fight another day, which he did.
[00:16:56]  He was not in jail for very long.
[00:16:57]  The coup failed.
[00:16:58]  He comes back like a champ.
[00:17:01]  In the interim between 2002 and now, there have been a series of blundering coup attempts, assassination attempts that have all gone pretty badly.
[00:17:14]  You know, Chavez, of course, dies in 2013.
[00:17:17]  And then those who make the targets put the target on Maduro.
[00:17:21]  The ones against Maduro have gotten even weirder.
[00:17:24]  I think my favorite one was the drone strike from the attempted drone strike a couple years ago, where they just sent in what looked to be guns attached to drones.
[00:17:37]  Yes.
[00:17:37]  And we're going to try and just shoot him from, you know, from these flying drones, at which point, it was like the Venezuelans looked just as confused as everyone else.
[00:17:48]  Like you guys really thought this was going to be, this was a thing to do?
[00:17:51]  Well, it was like a drone suicide attack, basically, but the drone just blew up midair.
[00:17:56]  Which, like, I'll be honest, drone suicide attacks are real.
[00:18:00]  Like, ISIS uses those or they drop grenades from them.
[00:18:05]  But these guys, I feel like, I don't know, they could have not blown the drone up.
[00:18:12]  It was 40 feet in the air away from Maduro.
[00:18:14]  I mean, I'm glad they, I'm glad they fucked it up.
[00:18:16]  The guy who did that, by the way, fled the country and will reappear in this story a little bit later.
[00:18:22]  But everyone, I will note that everybody, when that happened, literally said Maduro did it.
[00:18:28]  Yeah.
[00:18:30]  Well, that was all the Western press.
[00:18:32]  All the Western press came out and said, I can't believe he's doing all these theatrics, trying to show that there are, you know, that attempts on his life.
[00:18:41]  This is ridiculous.
[00:18:43]  What are they doing?
[00:18:44]  I mean, it was, yeah, classic victim blaming.
[00:18:48]  But that's like you always see that with stuff about Venezuela is that like whenever something like this happens, or as we'll see later, like a shipment of weapons in Colombia gets discovered, you know, Venezuela will be like, look at what happened.
[00:19:03]  You know, there are attempts, you know, on the, on the, on the government and the Venezuelan national sovereignty or sovereignty.

=== Macron's Clone Theory (13:23) ===

[00:19:10]  Excuse me.
[00:19:11]  I always do that.
[00:19:13]  And then the Western press is like, no, look at this guy.
[00:19:15]  They're making up these plots.
[00:19:17]  He's he's just trying to bolster support by blowing up a drone 40 feet above a military parade.
[00:19:24]  Right.
[00:19:26]  Which we'll see that that is not exactly, people should take a little more stock in what Mr. Maduro says.
[00:19:32]  Yeah.
[00:19:33]  Yeah.
[00:19:33]  So there were other coup attempts.
[00:19:35]  There was something about there, you know, they had tried kidnapp.
[00:19:40]  There was kidnapping plans that were foiled.
[00:19:43]  There were, you know, we're going to take hold of the palace and assassinate everyone in there.
[00:19:52]  Those were all foiled.
[00:19:53]  So this has been going on, you know, on and off since about 2013.
[00:19:58]  Up until, you know, I guess our listeners are probably most familiar with the attempt last spring.
[00:20:06]  Yes.
[00:20:07]  Or what began last spring, correct?
[00:20:09]  Yes.
[00:20:10]  So, well, let's talk real quick about a guy named Juan Guaido.
[00:20:14]  Now, listen, there is no Truanon style guide.
[00:20:17]  That is how I am pronouncing his name.
[00:20:19]  I thought it was, yeah, Guaido.
[00:20:21]  Guaido.
[00:20:22]  Well, Guaido sounds a little cooler, actually.
[00:20:24]  Maybe I'll do that.
[00:20:25]  Yeah, Guaido.
[00:20:26]  Because wouldn't the accent, I mean, I don't, I don't know.
[00:20:30]  Wouldn't the accent do the accent?
[00:20:32]  No, wouldn't on the O, wouldn't it denote that the emphasis would be on the second syllable?
[00:20:38]  Or maybe I'm wrong.
[00:20:39]  Liz, I just pronounced, mispronounced sovereignty.
[00:20:43]  And now you're like, oh, the accent goes this way.
[00:20:46]  So you're doing math to me, baby.
[00:20:47]  I can't take it.
[00:20:48]  That's not math.
[00:20:49]  That's romance language.
[00:20:51]  So there is some, yeah, there's some really good stuff on Guaido's background on the gray zone.
[00:20:56]  But one thing that I found was really interesting is a little throwback to our episode with Lily Lynch.
[00:21:01]  There are rumors that he might have trained with Canvas in Otpur in Serbia in the early 2000s.
[00:21:09]  So our friends raise their little hands again.
[00:21:12]  I got to say, real quick, before we talk more about what happened last March and our man Guaido, our man on the ground, Guaido.
[00:21:22]  Brace and I were talking earlier today about all this stuff.
[00:21:24]  And it really is funny that like all of these guys, these like empty suit guys that, you know, get put up by either bankers or shady sort of, as you'll, as you know, we'll talk about shady business dealings and conglomerates that are propping up new leaders of countries or whatever.
[00:21:44]  It's like, they all look like they come from the same managerial school.
[00:21:49]  They're just like completely and totally like you can just replace one with the other.
[00:21:55]  Like, what is the difference between Guaido, Mare Pete, Macron?
[00:22:00]  They all kind of look the same.
[00:22:02]  Do you know what they're saying?
[00:22:03]  I will say that.
[00:22:04]  It's weird.
[00:22:04]  It's like they all have the same haircut or something.
[00:22:06]  I don't know what it is.
[00:22:07]  It's all the same energy.
[00:22:08]  If we're doing a number system, though, and I'm not saying that Guaido and Pete are sixes, because I think, I mean, they're like, whatever number they are.
[00:22:16]  No, I'm saying like if they're like, if they're fours.
[00:22:20]  See, yeah, okay.
[00:22:21]  I'm a body fascist.
[00:22:22]  So if Guido, if Guaido and Pete are fours, Macron's a five.
[00:22:33]  No way.
[00:22:35]  No way.
[00:22:35]  Get the fuck out of here.
[00:22:38]  Okay, I'm going to put Pete and Macron.
[00:22:41]  I'm going to say they're five and I'll put Guaido at five and a half.
[00:22:47]  Wow.
[00:22:48]  This is astounding.
[00:22:50]  This is, again, my theory of women gets demolished every single time I talk to one of the representative of the specimen.
[00:22:59]  This is astounding that you think Guaido is more handsome than Macron.
[00:23:03]  Anyways, I can't.
[00:23:06]  I don't actually.
[00:23:08]  To be honest, I don't find that.
[00:23:09]  Did you rank them half a point higher?
[00:23:11]  My whole point is that, well, I mean, Macron and Mare Pete are also not the tallest men, we'll say.
[00:23:20]  Yeah, okay.
[00:23:21]  And anyway, my whole point is that it's like they all give off like it's like some kind of McKinsey, like, I don't, like, they all just like come from the same egg or something.
[00:23:37]  I don't know.
[00:23:38]  They're like birthed from the same place.
[00:23:40]  They're all twins.
[00:23:40]  It's like the movie, what is it?
[00:23:43]  Multiplicity, where there's just like all of them multiplying.
[00:23:47]  They're clones.
[00:23:48]  McKinsey, Dolly the Sheep, all of this.
[00:23:51]  Okay, I'm picking up what you're saying.
[00:23:53]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:23:54]  Yeah, I understand.
[00:23:55]  The true and online is that literally Macron is a clone.
[00:24:01]  Maclone.
[00:24:02]  No, don't do this.
[00:24:04]  So back to the back to the sunny shores of Venezuela.
[00:24:09]  Everybody, so if you had not heard of Macron at the beginning of 2019, you would be the same.
[00:24:14]  Macron.
[00:24:15]  Macron.
[00:24:16]  Excuse me.
[00:24:16]  God damn it.
[00:24:17]  Fuck.
[00:24:18]  Out of Guaido.
[00:24:19]  If you had not heard of Juan Guaido in January of 2019, then you would be the same as about four out of five Venezuelans.
[00:24:29]  This guy was a nobody.
[00:24:30]  This, like, imagine, imagine if like there was the similar situation happened here as happened in Venezuela.
[00:24:38]  And all of a sudden, in like 2014, someone's telling you that Tim Kaine's going to be president.
[00:24:43]  You're going to be like, I don't know.
[00:24:44]  I don't know who that is.
[00:24:45]  I think it's even less than Tim Kaine.
[00:24:48]  Actually, yeah.
[00:24:48]  Yeah.
[00:24:49]  It would be, it literally would be Mayor Pete.
[00:24:52]  Yeah.
[00:24:52]  But like, you know, four years ago.
[00:24:56]  There's some interesting stuff, like I mentioned on his background in the gray zone.
[00:25:00]  I don't have the actual article name in front of me, but you can just Google it.
[00:25:03]  I think about Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal.
[00:25:06]  But there is, I keep calling him, I'm going to call him Macron.
[00:25:10]  Guaido's resume has one of the most baller things I've ever read on it.
[00:25:15]  He fucking went to George Washington University.
[00:25:18]  And that synchronicity, right?
[00:25:20]  Not a synchronicity in the Jungian sense, but that beautiful development that this guy would not only go to George Washington University, but be the George Washington of the new Venezuela.
[00:25:31]  Honestly, it means a lot to me.
[00:25:33]  He emerges as the leader of basically the entire Venezuelan opposition.
[00:25:38]  He is declared president by himself on January 23rd of 2019.
[00:25:46]  And you know what he did the night before?
[00:25:49]  Sexy little phone call with Mike Pence where Mike Pence was like, you should become president tomorrow.
[00:25:54]  Yeah, so wait, let's back up for a second.
[00:25:56]  So I think we should make it clear that when we say the Venezuelan opposition, who are we talking about?
[00:26:02]  Because one of the reasons, and I think this, this like can't be overstated, but one of the reasons why these coup attempts in Venezuela and indeed like other, I think plenty of other U.S.-backed coup attempts are unsuccessful is because there actually isn't like stable and ready opposition kind of in the waiting.
[00:26:30]  Right.
[00:26:31]  Like there really isn't, like domestically speaking, there is not a strong opposition to Maduro's regime.
[00:26:39]  I think that's fair to say.
[00:26:40]  No, they're super fractured.
[00:26:42]  I mean, you know, you like, it's, it's, it's, there's, you know, there's guys who want to institute neoliberal reforms and there's guys who want to institute neoliberal reforms, but also fascism.
[00:26:52]  And so they all hate each other.
[00:26:54]  They're all corrupt.
[00:26:55]  They're all, I mean, there have been more stories about corruption plaguing the Venezuelan opposition in the past year since this vote for fluffle happened than there, I think, that there have been about stories about corruption of like the actual governing party.
[00:27:10]  Yeah.
[00:27:10]  And I think one of the like key things to remember too is that Maduro, you know, even for his faults, which I mean, I don't know.
[00:27:18]  I don't really have much to say.
[00:27:20]  I don't want to get into that.
[00:27:22]  But, you know, he still very much has the support of the Venezuelan military, which makes a coup nearly impossible, I would imagine, if you can still maintain that support.
[00:27:35]  Yeah, there's been some high-ranking defectors.
[00:27:38]  But with the weak opposition.
[00:27:40]  Exactly.
[00:27:41]  Yeah.
[00:27:41]  Like there'll be like a couple guys.
[00:27:42]  There was like a couple of guys who defected around this time early last year, but there was no great flood like people were predicting.
[00:27:49]  I mean, there was all these articles about how, oh, the military is secretly against him and everybody's going to come over to the opposition.
[00:27:56]  And then that never materialized.
[00:27:59]  So yeah, so basically, yeah, so back to the story.
[00:28:03]  January of last year, there's election.
[00:28:06]  Maduro wins.
[00:28:09]  Immediately, everyone says, or by everyone, I mean, like, you know, the United States and, you know, European countries say, I don't know if you did.
[00:28:21]  I don't know if you won.
[00:28:23]  And lo and behold, here is Juan Guaido ready to say, thanks to, I guess, his phone call with Mike Pence, that actually he is the rightful president of Venezuela, even though he did win the election.
[00:28:36]  He did not win the election.
[00:28:37]  In fact, I believe he actually only won 20% of the vote when he was elected as a MP.
[00:28:46]  So he starts off basically a three-month festival of protests, which range everything from marching the street to a really ill-fated military coup, basically, or an attempted coup.
[00:29:02]  At one point, Guaido tries to lead an uprising, I believe in April, from a military base that just fails.
[00:29:08]  And I remember watching it on TV, like watching it play out.
[00:29:12]  And I was like, oh shit, like this is it.
[00:29:13]  Like this is.
[00:29:14]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:29:15]  Like we're watching this play out in real time.
[00:29:17]  This is like the 80s or 70s or something.
[00:29:20]  We're watching a coup in South America back by the U.S., you know, done by the military.
[00:29:24]  But it turns out it was basically just done by one unit in the military.
[00:29:29]  Yeah.
[00:29:29]  And this is where the famous photo of him holding the cell phone comes in, right?
[00:29:33]  Oh, he photographs it like shit.
[00:29:36]  Where he just is looking and he's like, oh, it's like, you know, freeze frame, freeze frame.
[00:29:42]  Wonder how I got here or whatever the meme is.
[00:29:45]  But the U.S. does a good job on their end.
[00:29:49]  Guaido, unfortunately, fails to hold up his.
[00:29:51]  So what the U.S. does is they no longer recognize Maduro or the Venezuelan government as the government of Venezuela, which is, you know, that has happened a few times before.
[00:30:03]  I believe that happened with Afghanistan after the Taliban took over various other countries as well.
[00:30:07]  But they recognized Guaido and a bunch of countries, I believe around 60 countries, followed suit, which that's 100% cuckolds, by the way.
[00:30:20]  That is the most cock shit ever.
[00:30:23]  America has long had Venezuela under pretty intense sanctions.
[00:30:28]  I think something like $35 billion in assets are frozen, which is insane.
[00:30:34]  Yeah, and they've done more than that.
[00:30:35]  I mean, they've also interfered with Venezuela working with other countries' banks, trying to repatriate gold.
[00:30:43]  Famously, they blocked that.
[00:30:45]  They blocked other kind of oil deals or tanked their chance or like, you know, manipulated pricing in the oil market in order to tank Venezuela's ability to sell their oil to other buyers, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:31:01]  We're very cunning that way.
[00:31:02]  Famously got Saudi Arabia to fuck with the prices in order to undercut Venezuela, which really did fuck them over.
[00:31:10]  Yeah, it did.
[00:31:11]  I mean, I'm sure every single person listening to this will remember all those news stories about this unfolding humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
[00:31:18]  And there is a humanitarian crisis.
[00:31:20]  I mean, I hate to use that term because it's the term that they use.
[00:31:24]  But there is a crisis there.
[00:31:26]  A lot of people have left.
[00:31:29]  But a lot, large part of that is due to these really crippling, intense sanctions put on them by the U.S.
[00:31:36]  Yeah.
[00:31:36]  And, you know, if you, if our listeners have heard our episode on Iran, you would, you kind of understand what we mean by U.S. sanctions and how they function.
[00:31:48]  Yeah.
[00:31:49]  And so I don't know if I'm sure many people remember, although this by now, hopefully you've blocked out of your memory.
[00:31:56]  There was the aid on the border issue.
[00:32:00]  So the U.S., imagine if you have a country that the U.S. is like, we want to destroy you.
[00:32:05]  And then all of a sudden one day the U.S. was like, hey, check it out.
[00:32:08]  We have three military planes filled with unidentified aid packages.
[00:32:13]  We're parking in a foreign country you have bad relations with.
[00:32:16]  You have to let this in.
[00:32:17]  Right.
[00:32:19]  I would say no.
[00:32:20]  Well, funny enough, Maduro did.
[00:32:23]  Yeah.
[00:32:24]  And then the Western media said, look at this.
[00:32:27]  He's starving his people with the aid that we're like by not giving them the aid that we are offering.

=== Richard Branson's Cynical Aid Gambit (15:47) ===

[00:32:34]  Isn't this so?
[00:32:35]  Can you believe what he's doing?
[00:32:36]  Look at this madman.
[00:32:39]  Well, this was like a rare moment of like pure bipartisanship.
[00:32:42]  It made my heart swell in the American government where you had people who were like, you know, I don't, I, I don't like Trump or like, you know, really anti-Trump like politicians and stuff really fall in line behind him.
[00:32:54]  Even the New York Times was like, to mess it, I'll call it, with joy, talking about how Trump was being so nice.
[00:33:04]  And to be honest, it was not that much aid.
[00:33:06]  I think it was $20 million worth of aid, which, I mean, coming from the U.S., not a ton.
[00:33:11]  But you like, to put it cleanly, like, if this was you, you also wouldn't accept this aid.
[00:33:17]  And the fact that I would hope not.
[00:33:19]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:20]  If you do, you're a punk bitch, to be completely honest with you.
[00:33:26]  It's ridiculous.
[00:33:27]  I mean, it's coming from an enemy and it's aid used in a really cynical way.
[00:33:32]  And there was international organizations, I believe the Red Cross was like, don't do this.
[00:33:36]  Don't politicize aid.
[00:33:38]  Don't use aid as a weapon.
[00:33:39]  Like, this is not what should be done.
[00:33:41]  But the border was closed to it.
[00:33:44]  Yeah.
[00:33:45]  And so, do you remember that guy we hung out with that one time in the Bahamas?
[00:33:50]  We did the Parasalian thing.
[00:33:52]  You guys remember that?
[00:33:54]  Can you refresh my memory?
[00:33:56]  When we went with Obama.
[00:33:58]  Oh, we did this.
[00:34:00]  Richard Branson shows up.
[00:34:05]  Yeah, so, okay, what is Richard Branson doing as part of this story?
[00:34:11]  Richard Branson, he put on those live aid concerts.
[00:34:16]  He does that stupid fucking airline.
[00:34:18]  He hangs out with Brock.
[00:34:19]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:19]  Okay.
[00:34:20]  Okay.
[00:34:20]  Richard Branson.
[00:34:21]  He's the, he's the, you know, mega gabillionaire owner of Virgin Airlines, Virgin Airways.
[00:34:29]  Which, by the way, I'm not allowed to fly on.
[00:34:34]  Yeah, okay, okay.
[00:34:35]  I thought you were, uh, you were passenger number one.
[00:34:39]  Yeah, but when I was like 13.
[00:34:43]  And then after that, they're like, oh, shit, no, you're good.
[00:34:46]  All right, all right, all right, all right.
[00:34:47]  So anyway, Richard Branson, you know, I think you could call him an oligarch.
[00:34:53]  I don't know.
[00:34:54]  I think that's fair.
[00:34:55]  Absolutely.
[00:34:56]  Yeah.
[00:34:57]  So Richard Branson, yeah, he's, you might recall from his fun and glorious photographs with President Barack Hussein Obama parasailing in the Bahamas.
[00:35:15]  But he, yeah, he's a big fixture in Venezuela and actually other South American countries as well.
[00:35:23]  I believe in Bolivia and Uruguay too.
[00:35:27]  Partly because Virgin, you know, we should be clear that Virgin has a big bustling telecom business.
[00:35:35]  Yes.
[00:35:36]  Virgin Mobile.
[00:35:37]  Yeah, and part of that business, you know, they've been looking at places to expand.
[00:35:43]  And would you believe it, South America offers a lot of opportunity in that market?
[00:35:50]  You know, I thought he just had such compassion for the Venezuelan workers and peasants.
[00:35:55]  I kind of thought he was going to bring back Virgin Megastore.
[00:35:57]  That's why I would let him in.
[00:36:00]  Yeah, I guess, yeah, Maduro would have no choice but to open the borders and in fact facilitate that.
[00:36:06]  By the way, I wouldn't be able to shop there either, nor would I be able to use Virgin Cellular Network.
[00:36:11]  I'm legally barred because I am, well, you know what I'm talking about.
[00:36:18]  So Richard Branson does a move, which actually, you know, it's very easy to make fun of, but it's actually pretty smart.
[00:36:26]  He sets up a fucking concert on the border.
[00:36:31]  And it is not well attended.
[00:36:37]  If you look at pictures from it, they're all taken, like pictures of the stage are all taken like pretty close to the stage in the audience.
[00:36:44]  Because if you zoom out a little bit, there's like maybe a thousand people there, which is not great for a festival.
[00:36:50]  Wait, so why did he hold this festival?
[00:36:53]  Well, this was to pressure Maduro and his horrible tyrannical socialist government to let the aid in.
[00:37:03]  He did it alongside a Colombian entrepreneur, which, I mean, no disrespect to the Colombian workers and peasants.
[00:37:10]  Again, probably a pretty bad guy named Bruno Ocampo.
[00:37:15]  By the way, I want to make clear too.
[00:37:16]  We talked about Branson and the islands earlier.
[00:37:20]  Branson's Island was literally the one next door to Jeffrey Epstein's.
[00:37:24]  So you know what kind of caliber of man we're dealing with here.
[00:37:27]  They were trying to raise money to give aid to Venezuela.
[00:37:31]  Their goal was $100 million.
[00:37:33]  And I'll be honest with you, I did not spend more than like 20 minutes looking for this.
[00:37:37]  But it's not clear how much they ended up raising.
[00:37:42]  They raised about $2 million in the first few days.
[00:37:47]  But it's also not clear if that was from any people either, because the whole thing was sponsored by Argos, which appears to be a British grocery chain.
[00:38:00]  So, yeah, so they have this concert.
[00:38:03]  Branson, you know, like we said, Branson has his own interests in Venezuela.
[00:38:09]  Guaido shows up.
[00:38:11]  He's there at the concert.
[00:38:12]  He's vibing.
[00:38:13]  He did ecstasy and fucked in a tent.
[00:38:16]  Oh, God.
[00:38:17]  Disgusting.
[00:38:20]  And then a couple weeks later, something happens, right?
[00:38:24]  With some aid?
[00:38:26]  Yes, I'm sure many of you recall that horrible picture of the bridge closed off into Venezuela with the cargo containers on their side blocking it off.
[00:38:36]  Of course, that bridge was presented as having been closed off specifically so aid couldn't be let in.
[00:38:42]  It actually was closed off since 2015 when relations with Colombia soured a lot.
[00:38:48]  But there was a truck that burned.
[00:38:51]  Yeah, so this is from the New York Crimes.
[00:38:57]  This is what they had to say.
[00:38:58]  Vice President Mike Pence wrote that the tyrant in Caracas danced as his henchmen burned food and medicine.
[00:39:06]  Ooh, Ugabuga.
[00:39:08]  The State Department released a video saying Mr. Maduro had ordered the trucks burned, and Venezuela's opposition held up the images of the burning aid reproduced on dozens of news sites and television screens throughout Latin America as evidence of Mr. Maduro's cruelty.
[00:39:24]  Maduro has lied about the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
[00:39:30]  He contracts criminals to burn food and medicine intended for the Venezuelan people, wrote John Bolton.
[00:39:37]  A man who cares very much about the people of South America.
[00:39:42]  American officials also noted that whatever the circumstances, ah, that's like a fun little like, whatever the circumstances, they held Mr. Maduro responsible because he blocked the aid trucks that day, punishing Venezuelans in need.
[00:39:58]  Maduro is responsible for creating the conditions for violence, said Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the NSC.
[00:40:04]  His thugs denied the entry of tons of food and medicine.
[00:40:09]  His thugs, by the way, while thousands of courageous volunteers sought to safeguard and deliver aid to Venezuelan families.
[00:40:20]  Now, you notice at the end a little bit of hedging on the exact language used there, whatever the circumstances.
[00:40:27]  That is because, as diligent citizens pointed out, and the out, you know, to great public outcry, that it was in fact the Venezuelan opposition that burned the truck.
[00:40:40]  They threw a Molotov cocktail from their side of the border and set the truck on fire.
[00:40:46]  Okay, wait.
[00:40:47]  So you are saying that the State Department lied, saying that Maduro was responsible when there is video evidence that, and eyewitness evidence, that it was actually the opposition who burned the aid trucks that were sent as sort of like basically hostage negotiation for opening the Venezuelan border.
[00:41:11]  Is that correct?
[00:41:12]  Well, in response to that, I would like to quote John Bolton, who himself is quoting Malcolm X when he says, by any means necessary.
[00:41:42]  so on the border was a little guy Well, actually, I have no idea how big he is.
[00:41:48]  He could be tall.
[00:41:48]  He could be like, you know, Liz might say little.
[00:41:51]  A guy named General Cleaver Alcala.
[00:41:55]  Sorry, I can't pronounce anything.
[00:41:57]  For God's sake, woman, stop laughing at me.
[00:41:59]  Stop mocking me.
[00:42:02]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:42:02]  I pronounced an extra right that time.
[00:42:04]  So jokes on you.
[00:42:06]  Okay.
[00:42:06]  So hanging around the border like a fucking asshole was a guy named Cleaver Alcala.
[00:42:12]  Now, he was a former buddy of Hugo Chavez who, like a bitch, turned fucking tail and started, you know, actually, I have no idea why he quit, but he had a falling out with Maduro and I think 2013 split across the border.
[00:42:27]  And you know those coups we were talking about earlier?
[00:42:29]  Yeah.
[00:42:30]  He had been hanging out with those fucking soldiers.
[00:42:34]  Because so if you do a coup in Venezuela and you split to Colombia for like one month, the Colombian government is like, oh, cool.
[00:42:41]  Great to have you aboard.
[00:42:42]  And then like, you know, maybe a couple weeks go along.
[00:42:45]  They're like, give me your gun.
[00:42:46]  You have to live on the street.
[00:42:47]  Right, right, right.
[00:42:51]  So there's a whole lot of ex-Venezuelan soldiers.
[00:42:54]  I think about, estimates about 1,300 hanging around in border towns and in the capital of Colombia.
[00:43:00]  And, you know, they got a lot of time on their hands to perfect their schemes.
[00:43:05]  Because, you know, they ain't going away.
[00:43:08]  No, no, no.
[00:43:10]  Well, yeah, they're actually, yeah, they are very poor, often living on the streets.
[00:43:14]  I mean, there's a ton of articles about how they're basically treated like dogs by the Colombian government and just by people who live there in the first place.
[00:43:23]  And Alcala sees a prime, let's say, group of people to start recruiting from.
[00:43:29]  Exactly.
[00:43:31]  And that is where Silvercore comes in.
[00:43:34]  Little note, though, on March 24th of this year, so just like a month and a half ago, William Barr, who, by the way, keep this in mind, represented the defendants in the Iran-Contra scandal and got bushed apart in all of them, charges Maduro and five other people with narco-trafficking, places a $25 million bounty on Maduro's head, and I think like 10 million apiece on everybody else's.
[00:44:04]  One of the guys they charge is not in the Venezuelan government, but is in the events of opposition, Cleaver Alcala.
[00:44:12]  Yeah, and now he ends up turning himself into the DEA, doesn't he?
[00:44:16]  Just shows like that is turning yourself into the American DEA is internationally, the most bitch move you can do.
[00:44:25]  Yeah, so let's we'll, we'll return to our little friend in in a bit, but because I have some questions about perhaps, what kind of deal they worked out there, maybe we can, you know, do some pontificating on some, on some possibilities.
[00:44:44]  I love to pontificate but um, so at this moment we're talking, we we need to reintroduce Silvercore at this point in the story, correct?
[00:44:57]  Yeah, so Silvercore is like I was saying earlier.
[00:45:01]  It is a military contracting company.
[00:45:03]  This guy by this guy, Jordan Goudreau who, if you can't tell by the very francophilic name there I don't know if that's the way word you would use, but the francophilic name a Canadian well, Canadian born.
[00:45:16]  Yeah, these are the real PMC.
[00:45:18]  This is what we're always talking about.
[00:45:20]  You know, beware the PMC.
[00:45:22]  The PMC are actually our natural class enemies.
[00:45:25]  We don't let the PMC infiltrate.
[00:45:27]  There's no cross-class coalition that you can form with the PMC.
[00:45:31]  We're talking about private military contractors, and so there's a lot of big ones out there.
[00:45:38]  We got you know.
[00:45:39]  As you know, and many of you know this, this podcast is part of the Blackwater Podcast Network.
[00:45:45]  You know, Liz used to work as a secretary for executive outcomes.
[00:45:48]  I, of course, have done a lot of what they call wet work in Yemen.
[00:45:52]  Play of you made me a secretary in the joke.
[00:45:55]  What, what do you?
[00:45:56]  What, what do you?
[00:45:57]  I'm sorry no, Liz was in a death squad in Angola.
[00:46:01]  You like that one better?
[00:46:02]  Yeah, that's better.
[00:46:03]  Oh, fucking hell, I do not understand women.
[00:46:07]  So this guy, so you know this podcast, this podcast opinion on scammers is what Liz, they rule.
[00:46:13]  We fucking love them.
[00:46:15]  Yeah, and so, all right, I get it.
[00:46:17]  Jordan Godreaux did try to kidnap, uh and and bounty hunt uh, Nicholas Maduro, the president of Venezuela.
[00:46:24]  Yeah, I don't approve of that, but the thing is we wouldn't love him if he had succeeded, because he wouldn't be like a shitty con artist.
[00:46:31]  If he had, he'd be a good con artist, which we don't like.
[00:46:34]  Those guys that's like uh, you know, WOLF OF WALL Street guys.
[00:46:37]  I'm not a fan, um.
[00:46:40]  So So this guy in, well, first of all, you know, whenever a guy has just like a weird ass thing in their past like this, you know they fucking rule.
[00:46:48]  Because in 2013, the army investigated him for $62,000 of fraud and housing stipends, which is a classic moron scam.
[00:47:00]  Yeah, he, I don't think he had to, he didn't have to go to jail or anything, right?
[00:47:05]  No, which is also a class.
[00:47:07]  Well, usually if like the scam artist does like two months and he's got fines or anything.
[00:47:14]  No, no, no.
[00:47:14]  He got off.
[00:47:15]  He got off good.
[00:47:16]  And he is, he is, again, I love this guy.
[00:47:20]  He struck, he thought at least he struck gold when, you know, after all those school shootings in, I believe that big one in Florida, I can't remember which one it was called because there's been so many since then.
[00:47:31]  He had the fucking idea.
[00:47:33]  He was the guy that was like, what if we get our veterans who we love to dress up like teachers and then stand armed in every single school in this country, ready to dispatch with violent force a child?
[00:47:48]  Yeah, so he was the one who came up with the brilliant, brilliant plan for addressing the scourge of school shootings in Florida by dispatching armed guards to every classroom.
[00:48:03]  So fucking cool.
[00:48:05]  There's a lot of video.
[00:48:06]  I mean, Silvercore's website is still up.
[00:48:09]  You can look at it.
[00:48:10]  It's beautiful.
[00:48:12]  Really well designed.
[00:48:13]  I love the branding.
[00:48:14]  Uh-huh.
[00:48:15]  It's like if Terminator was like, it's like if Terminator put on an affliction t-shirt.

=== Operation Silvercore (15:25) ===

[00:48:21]  And Silvercore 2 is such like Blackwater, Executive Outcomes, all these other companies are named something kind of evil.
[00:48:28]  Silvercore literally just sounds like an insurance company.
[00:48:31]  That's so bad.
[00:48:32]  It's a terrible name.
[00:48:33]  Life insurance company even.
[00:48:35]  Yeah, no, yeah, really does.
[00:48:36]  The Silvercore Silver Plan.
[00:48:39]  So he was, much like myself, a special forces man in the U.S. Army.
[00:48:46]  And actually, it looks like he was an okay soldier.
[00:48:47]  He had three bronze stars, which, you know, I've got four, whatever.
[00:48:51]  Nobody's counting.
[00:48:52]  But decorated for bravery in the Army for a long time.
[00:48:55]  Gets out, becomes a contractor in Puerto Rico, which me, and decides to start his own in 2018.
[00:49:02]  Yeah.
[00:49:03]  Somehow this fucking dude, and not even somehow, this dude does get hooked up with the Venezuelan opposition because he rolls his ass down to Bogota, which is the city of Colombia.
[00:49:16]  Why are you guys looking at me like that?
[00:49:18]  Bogota?
[00:49:19]  Is it Bogota?
[00:49:20]  Yeah.
[00:49:24]  Bogota.
[00:49:27]  He goes himself.
[00:49:28]  He rolls his ass down to Bodega Bay.
[00:49:31]  No.
[00:49:32]  And this is, I think this is in May of last year, right after all these coups, or no, excuse me, March, right after like a bunch of these coups happen and fucking fail.
[00:49:41]  And he rolls into one of the most fertile grounds for scam artists that I think there have ever been.
[00:49:48]  I believe it was a meeting, a various sort of convention, basically, unofficially at the Marriott in B.O.G.O.T.A.
[00:49:57]  Filled with the opposition, defected army soldiers, and of course, General Alcala.
[00:50:05]  Our old friend.
[00:50:08]  And they decide to go into business together.
[00:50:11]  Yeah.
[00:50:12]  So, but they meet someone else, don't they?
[00:50:15]  A man named Keith Schiller.
[00:50:18]  Now, Keith Schiller, this is where this story gets very weird, I think.
[00:50:23]  Right?
[00:50:24]  This is kind of where Bryce and I started to lose our minds when this was going on, where we were like, what is going on?
[00:50:29]  So Keith Schiller is one of Trump's bodyguards.
[00:50:34]  I think he's like his main guy, from what I can gather.
[00:50:38]  Like he's like, he's been with Trump since before presidency.
[00:50:43]  And he's also like kind of like, I kind of, the only way I can think of these guys is like, they're like mindset men.
[00:50:51]  Oh, 100% mindset guys.
[00:50:53]  Yeah.
[00:50:53]  Yeah.
[00:50:53]  They're like, they're all up in their mindsets and their nootropics.
[00:50:58]  Like, you know, again, I've mentioned this before.
[00:51:00]  You know, the ads you get if you're a guy where it's like someone in front of a bunch of cars telling you that you need to read his book on how to be a billionaire?
[00:51:08]  And you're like, man, maybe I'll do it.
[00:51:09]  This is the guy that's like, definitely, I'll do that.
[00:51:11]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:51:12]  I'll do that.
[00:51:13]  So Keith Schiller takes a meeting basically with the Venezuelan opposition, you know, let's use that term loosely, last year.
[00:51:24]  And they kind of look up or look into what they can do to kind of work together in beefing up Guaido's security.
[00:51:34]  Yeah.
[00:51:34]  And in the meantime, Guaido had retained the services of notorious fucking asshole.
[00:51:40]  Just Google this guy and you'll know what I mean.
[00:51:42]  A guy named JJ Rendon, who I would like to render him to a third country, possibly a ship off the coast of Poland or maybe a house in Syria.
[00:51:56]  JJ Rendon, who is another member of the opposition.
[00:51:59]  And they talk about, like, let's say methods to remove Maduro and beefing up security for Guaido.
[00:52:06]  So Schiller and Godreau hook up.
[00:52:10]  They both hook up with their guys in the Venezuelan opposition and Alcala.
[00:52:16]  Alcala starts having them make the rounds in Pogoda on the border of Colombia, border towns of Colombia and Venezuela, introducing him to, in my mind, these are guys that weigh 40 pounds and are like looking through the trash for dead fish.
[00:52:31]  These are basically defected Venezuelan soldiers who probably need some money.
[00:52:35]  Alcala's like, guys, I got 300 fucking dudes in camps ready to rock.
[00:52:40]  They are highly trained men.
[00:52:42]  They are, you know, fiercely loyal and they are ready to come and help you fucking bow.
[00:52:47]  Wait, I don't want to do the brace noise here because it seems inappropriate because we're talking about Maduro.
[00:52:52]  But he's like, they're ready to go fucking take out Maduro.
[00:52:56]  And so they basically help, they have Godreaux basically sign on as a contractor to train them.
[00:53:04]  The contract itself is insane.
[00:53:07]  Yeah, so the contract was recently leaked.
[00:53:14]  Pretty much immediately as soon as the story came out.
[00:53:17]  Yeah.
[00:53:18]  So there's a couple things in the leaked contract, military contract that Silver Corp signs that we need to go into.
[00:53:30]  Well, first of all, the contract fucking rules because it's like, it's a contract to overthrow the government of a country and half of it's plagiarized.
[00:53:42]  Yeah, by plagiarized by from a website called Masterclass, which I don't know if people are listening, if our listener base or our listeners are familiar with Masterclass.
[00:53:59]  It's basically a Netflix for like rich people hobbies.
[00:54:06]  It's like, okay, we're going to pay like $150 a year and you can take acting classes from Kevin Spacey or cooking classes from Alice Waters or whatever.
[00:54:20]  So I don't know if this guy was taking classes from like Jerry Bruckheimer, but it's very confusing why.
[00:54:27]  I would like to know why they went with copy pasting the Masterclass terms and conditions.
[00:54:35]  It fucking rules.
[00:54:37]  Well, there's, yeah, there's a couple.
[00:54:39]  There's one sort of pre-contract that Guaido, it appears, did sign, although now he's waffled back and forth.
[00:54:44]  He'd said he'd never heard of these guys.
[00:54:46]  Now it looks like he definitely has heard of these guys.
[00:54:49]  But it certainly does look like Guaido's signature.
[00:54:52]  And then there's the second contract, which is fantastic.
[00:54:55]  It basically says that Silvercore is going to get paid $212.19 million to overthrow the government of Venezuela.
[00:55:06]  It gives them about 45 days to train and arm the army and they train and arm like a private army to do so.
[00:55:13]  And it fucking rules.
[00:55:14]  There's at point point one, section seven, you can find this whole thing on the Washington Post website.
[00:55:20]  It says the administration can make the payments in barrels of oil.
[00:55:25]  Yeah, so if for some reason, It notes that if for some reason the payment in dollars is insolvent, they would be paying in barrels of oil.
[00:55:37]  Yeah.
[00:55:38]  And it says that following the completion of the project, investors will have a preferred vendor status with the new government of Venezuela.
[00:55:45]  So you might think, like, investors, are there people investing in the overthrow of the government of Venezuela?
[00:55:51]  Well, if you, yes, there very much are.
[00:55:53]  Yes.
[00:55:55]  Well, you might be like, well, why does it say investors?
[00:55:59]  Like, it couldn't be that, you know, you really have investors involved in planning the overthrow of a sovereign government.
[00:56:08]  But you would be wrong because absolutely they were looking for people to put money in backing this contract.
[00:56:16]  And in exchange for it being successful, they would have obviously a very good relationship with the new Venezuelan government.
[00:56:23]  But it looks like here, they would actually have some pretty big, substantially, let's say, beneficial oil rights.
[00:56:32]  Yeah.
[00:56:33]  Yeah.
[00:56:34]  There's some other weird parts in this contract that we need to mention, which is that it seems as though they had planned to have an entire media team there at all stages of the operation, quote, to record documentary style footage and gives the signers of the documents what is called first right of refusal for the purchase of the copyrighted,
[00:57:03]  like basically video documentary footage.
[00:57:06]  Now, there is no, it's not clear yet if there was a camera team accompanying this Operation Gideon Raid.
[00:57:15]  But that fucking rule, I do wonder if that's taken from the Masterclass one as well, but I guess not.
[00:57:22]  No, I don't think so.
[00:57:25]  That fucking rules.
[00:57:27]  There's a list of targets of forces that they're able to target.
[00:57:31]  Now, they involve FARC and the ELN, which are two Colombian left-wing paramilitary groups, but also our old friends, Hezbollah, which is a big sort of canard for the U.S. government when it comes to Venezuela.
[00:57:46]  They're always talking about how Hezbollah has, you know, all these forces in Venezuela.
[00:57:50]  I have seen zero proof of this whatsoever.
[00:57:54]  But you can basically, if you want to attack a country, you can basically just say Hezbollah is hanging out there, and then you can do it.
[00:58:02]  But it also notes that you can target illegitimate Venezuelan forces, which would appear to mean the Army and Navy and Air Force of the actual government of Venezuela.
[00:58:14]  It's insane.
[00:58:16]  Yeah, we should also point out an attachment K, which denotes Silver Core's commitment to equal rights, which I found very good of them to put in.
[00:58:25]  Silver Core USA Inc. Strive to create a diverse project team, inclusive across gender, ethnicity, age, disabilities, and national origins with emphasis on Venezuelan citizens.
[00:58:38]  That's nice of them.
[00:58:40]  I'm struggling to think of what, I feel like, no disrespect to our disabled brothers and sisters out there, but not, if you're doing like a paramilitary death squad, feel like that's just virtue signaling.
[00:58:58]  So to back this up, so this contract, so not only is it laying out totally bare the kind of like protection for the financial interests, the kind of, you know, what Silvercore was, you know,
[00:59:13]  agreeing to do, you know, as it kind of, you know, launched this coup attempt, but also that they were going to film a documentary of it and they completely plagiarized almost half of the contract from a streaming website service.
[00:59:32]  It's so hard to wrap your head around.
[00:59:34]  There's some other really weird stuff involved in the raid, too.
[00:59:38]  I mean, it like so little of it makes sense to me that like, you know, at first, a lot of people, and myself included, were like, okay, this has to be like some CIA cell that got caught.
[00:59:49]  But like, for the first time, I believe in my podcasting career, I have to say, I do not think this was the CIA.
[00:59:59]  But so the like lunacy and insanity surrounding Silvercore, it doesn't like end with this contract because we need to talk about their social media profile.
[01:00:11]  It is, in a word, fucking sick.
[01:00:16]  It appears that Goudreau was just using it as his own for a while, which you should definitely not do with any sort of organization you're involved in.
[01:00:25]  You should never use it as your own social media profile.
[01:00:29]  I think it's incredibly unprofessional of him.
[01:00:32]  Yeah.
[01:00:33]  So on the 3rd of May, Silvercore USA actually tweeted strike force incursion into Venezuela, 60 Venezuelan to American ex-Green Beret at Real Donald Trump.
[01:00:49]  Which is one of the most classic Twitter tags of all time.
[01:00:57]  It appears that he was a little bit optimistic about how many Venezuelans actually were with them.
[01:01:04]  I've not counted 60 yet, but maybe the government will arrest a few more.
[01:01:10]  One thing I was confused about is, of course, there were two Americans with them.
[01:01:14]  And actually, let's deal with that first.
[01:01:16]  These two Americans got arrested too, Luke Denman and Aaron Berry.
[01:01:20]  Aaron Barry, who, by the way, is a friend of the pod, or at least pod adjacent, because he is very much into QAnon.
[01:01:28]  So perhaps they told him that there was some, I don't know, tunnels under the ground in Venezuela there.
[01:01:33]  And they actually ended up with Maduro reading these guys' passports and military IDs off on television that night.
[01:01:41]  Yeah, so you might recall from the top of our show, we've been going all over the place, but all these guys are captured.
[01:01:48]  Some of them killed.
[01:01:50]  Two of these guys captured.
[01:01:52]  And Maduro on national television, on Venezuelan television, holds up their passports and one of their military IDs, I believe.
[01:02:01]  And it's like, these are the terrorists who are trying to attempting to enter our country.
[01:02:08]  I will say, if you're planning on joining a paramilitary death squad in a foreign nation, do not bring your passport with you.
[01:02:16]  Seems like a kind of rookie move.
[01:02:18]  Yeah, so they are, I believe they are trying to arrest George, or they're basically Venezuela is trying to arrest Goudreau and Rendon, I believe.
[01:02:33]  And they've already charged Denman and Barry with conspiracy.
[01:02:39]  I think terrorism.
[01:02:41]  I think terrorism.
[01:02:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:44]  Sorry, I don't have it in front of me.
[01:02:45]  Terrorism, conspiracy, probably weapons-related charges, etc.
[01:02:50]  So this has been just, yeah, it's not even a failed coup, fail-sun coup of unbelievable proportions.
[01:02:59]  I mean, people have been, I mean, people have taken to calling it Bay of Piglets, which I think is a pretty good thing.
[01:03:04]  Oh, that's very gentle after an appellation.
[01:03:07]  But Bay of Pigs was like a surgical strike compared to this.
[01:03:11]  Yeah.
[01:03:12]  At least there was like the promise of air support for those guys.
[01:03:16]  But this was, I mean, Goudreau himself went on TV.
[01:03:24]  Actually, let me rephrase that.
[01:03:26]  He went on YouTube and gave an interview the day that this operation happened where he was saying that the opposition had in fact failed to pay him and that he was pushing ahead for the love of the game.
[01:03:40]  Oh, brother.
[01:03:41]  And he was asked why he named it Operation Gideon.

=== Important Lessons from Interventions (02:18) ===

[01:03:47]  Because a little background on there, it would have made a lot more sense for these guys to just walk into Venezuela.
[01:03:54]  There was quite a large border with Colombia.
[01:03:58]  Much of it, of course, is unguarded and forested.
[01:04:01]  But they chose to go on boat.
[01:04:05]  I think something to keep in mind, though, is that actually most coup attempts fail.
[01:04:12]  And I think that, like this is, a lot of people don't, or I don't know, maybe have a hard time kind of internalizing this is that, you know, the US government CIA, however we want to say that, but the US government, you know, depending on how you want to maybe make this tally has attempted to overthrow, you know, maybe like 66 government, or attempted to overthrow government,
[01:04:41]  66 times right um, and has only succeeded a handful of times right.
[01:04:49]  You've got Iran Guatemala Congo Indonesia, Chile off the top of my head.
[01:04:55]  You know, obviously there's.
[01:04:57]  I guess you'd add a couple more to that list.
[01:04:59]  But um, you know it is really hard to do and this is kind of what I mentioned at the top of the show or previous in the show is that one of the biggest problems they have with Maduro um, and that of course they have with Chavez, is that he there isn't as big of a um opposition or as a strong of an opposition internally.
[01:05:24]  And in within the military as there needs to be in order for something like this, even as ridiculous as this failson coup is, in order for it to even take hold.
[01:05:36]  Right, it's not like Iran um, you know, in the 50s.
[01:05:41]  It's not like um, Indonesia in the 60s, where there were kind of worrying or even, you know, as we've talked about, a lot on the show in the Post-Soviet countries.
[01:05:52]  There's you've got like a decade for all these guys to kind of like rework themselves and reestablish themselves in, you know, in kind of increasingly destabilizing nations.

=== Important To Remember (02:26) ===

[01:06:06]  So I think it's like important to remember.
[01:06:08]  Those factors are important to remember, I think, when we talk about, like the history of the, of the CIA and the US government in interventions, and you know, that doesn't stop them from trying, don't get me wrong, they love to try, and even more so they love to it seems like kind of just pay off or spend money here there wherever, just in case something does work.
[01:06:31]  It kind of seems like, oh yeah, they're hedging their bets.
[01:06:35]  That's what?
[01:06:35]  Hedging your bets is right sure okay, they're hedging their bets.
[01:06:40]  I mean it's it's, it's U.s.
[01:06:42]  Has a lot of money, and so sometimes you toss some money at some things that might not work out, but if they do, it pays big.
[01:06:49]  That's right.
[01:06:51]  Um, I do think though, that Guaido's time is coming to a close really, you think so yeah, I feel like I I don't know this might have been.
[01:07:01]  You know, this is the move of a desperate man, Because a less desperate man would probably have more than eight soldiers.
[01:07:08]  Well, I think 10.
[01:07:10]  I think we're going to see him.
[01:07:11]  We're going to see a second act, I believe.
[01:07:14]  He should take up like baseball or whatever, like when Michael Jordan went to the leagues.
[01:07:18]  Oh, yeah, like interim season?
[01:07:20]  Mm-hmm.
[01:07:21]  Like he should take up something else, come back stronger.
[01:07:23]  Yeah, I think, yeah, well, and in a couple years, we'll get, he'll do, he'll finally get his documentary, The Last Dance.
[01:07:29]  Mm-hmm.
[01:07:31]  I think we're going to see Guaido on the TED Talk circuit.
[01:07:35]  I think we're going to see him at Davos.
[01:07:38]  I'm excited to see him speaking at Davos.
[01:07:41]  My dad actually saw Kerensky speak once.
[01:07:44]  Really?
[01:07:45]  Yeah, in New Jersey.
[01:07:47]  Really?
[01:07:48]  Yeah, he doesn't remember anything from it when he was a teenager.
[01:07:52]  That's a great story.
[01:07:53]  So maybe someone, maybe, maybe, how about this?
[01:07:56]  Maybe your grandchildren, when they are teenagers, will see an old ass, useless, ineffective loser man give a speech in New Jersey.
[01:08:06]  And that's the solid five and a half promise.
[01:08:24]  Socialism.
[01:08:27]  So Liz, I've been telling you, I think we can get knighted by Maduro.

=== Knighted For Favor (01:41) ===

[01:08:32]  I think.
[01:08:32]  Oh, yeah.
[01:08:33]  This is your new scheme.
[01:08:34]  Tell me about this again.
[01:08:36]  I heard my friend Jembo told me about a guy she knows who got knighted by Nicholas Maduro.
[01:08:41]  And I can't stop fucking thinking about it.
[01:08:43]  Okay, is this a real person or is this just a thing that she talked to on the internet?
[01:08:49]  No, this is a real dude she knows that's real.
[01:08:53]  Okay, okay.
[01:08:53]  He is, he is, he's like a, he's like some DSA guy.
[01:08:57]  Went down there on an official trip, which is a little, you know, I'm not sure why certain other people weren't sent, but, you know, much respect.
[01:09:04]  And he got fucking knighthood from Nicholas Maduro.
[01:09:07]  So here's my problem now.
[01:09:09]  What?
[01:09:10]  I question Maduro's leadership if he's knighting DSA members.
[01:09:16]  Well, he could be using him for like some sort of mission, damsel.
[01:09:20]  Hopefully not the Grail.
[01:09:21]  If I do find out it's the Grail, there's going to be some big problems.
[01:09:25]  But you know, I often knight people who I try to get to do me favors.
[01:09:31]  Yeah, like who?
[01:09:32]  None of your business, but let me just say there's a lot of dames out there who've got the imprint of a blade on their shoulder.
[01:09:39]  Oh, brother.
[01:09:40]  Okay, with that being said, we should wrap this up.
[01:09:46]  Okay.
[01:09:47]  Well, I don't know.
[01:09:52]  A lot of dames out there saying that too.
[01:09:54]  My name is Brace.
[01:09:56]  Jesus.
[01:09:58]  My name is Brace.
[01:10:01]  No, no, we're not cutting that out.
[01:10:03]  My name is Brace.
[01:10:06]  I'm Liz.
[01:10:07]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:10:11]  And we will see you next time.
[01:10:13]  Bye-bye.