Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela? And is there more information you can share about these strikes on the alleged. Well, I can't do that. I authorized for two reasons. Really. Okay. So yesterday, President Donald Trump admitted [00:00:17] that the CIA is operating in Venezuela. At his direction. And usually, you know, historically speaking, that's not a thing that presidents usually just admit to. So now let's hear from Trump's two reasons for sending the CIA on what we can only assume is a regime change mission. [00:00:34] Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. They came in through the, well, they came in through the border. They came in because we had an open border policy. And as soon as I heard that, I said, a lot of these countries, they're not the only country, but they're the worst abuser. [00:00:51] And they've entered there. They've they've allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, mental institution, people from mental institutions, insane asylums emptied out into the United States. We're bringing them back. But that's a really bad. [00:01:07] And they did it at a level that probably many, many countries have done it, but not like Venezuela. They were down and dirty. And the other thing of drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela. Well, according to reporting from the New York Times, [00:01:22] thanks to Trump's authorization, the CIA would be able to take covert action against Maduro or his government, either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation. So, speaking of a larger military operation, yesterday, Trump showed [00:01:39] his administration's hand once again. Here's the clip. Take a look. What's the next step in this war on cartels? And are you considering options? Are you considering strikes on land? Well, I don't want to tell you exactly, but we are certainly looking at land now because we've got the sea very well under control. [00:01:57] He's looking at land now. So The New York Times has reported that the US military is currently drawing up plans to escalate the conflict with Venezuela, including but not limited to, striking inside the country on the land. Meanwhile, 10,000 US troops are currently gathered in the region. [00:02:16] So the question is why? Why are they there? There are three main reasons. So the first is that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has long wanted to take action against Maduro. He is the architect of the regime change policy that you are seeing play out right now. [00:02:31] And he thinks that toppling Maduro will weaken the government of Cuba. So second is that the Trump administration wants to counter the influence of China in the region. Maybe too little, too late on that front. And that policy is also manifesting in the tens of billions, [00:02:49] billions with a B dollars that we are sending to bail out Argentina. So there's a lot of different countries involved here, probably even more than we've already mentioned. And the third reason is to help out American corporations. So that is what special presidential envoy Richard Grenell [00:03:06] has been working on for months. He's been trying to negotiate diplomatically with Venezuela. So here's reporting we have from The New York Times says Grenell has tried to fashion a deal that would avoid a larger conflict and give American companies access to Venezuelan oil and, [00:03:22] you know, oil. It always just seems to come back to the oil. Right? It's really hard to to get away from oil anywhere you go on the planet, it seems. But the Trump administration recently did cut off diplomatic negotiations with Venezuela. So we'll end by taking a look at the CIA's track record [00:03:40] when it comes to regime change operations in and around Latin America. So in 1954, the agency orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, ushering in decades of instability. The CIA backed Bay of pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 ended in disaster, [00:03:59] and the agency repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro. That same year, the CIA supplied weapons to dissidents who assassinated Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic, and the agency has also had its hands in a 1964 coup in Brazil. [00:04:18] The death of Che Guevara and other machinations in Bolivia. A 1973 coup in Chile, and the contra fight against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s. That is a lot. That is a lot going on between the United States and all these various Latin [00:04:34] American countries right now. Trump is targeting Venezuela. That is who he has decided to go after. And his main reason for going after Venezuela that he's citing is that he's going after these drug traffickers and these drug cartels. And he doesn't like that the the, the nation of Venezuela [00:04:53] is being run by a domestic terrorist. He has decided that Maduro is a terrorist and that their cartel running a government right now, and that's what he's trying to get out of power. And the thing is, though, Venezuela is not really like the primary drug trafficker [00:05:09] that's getting drugs from their country into the United States. So that alone is a little bit disingenuous. On top of that, it's really I believe it comes down more so to the oil. There's a ton of oil in Venezuela. And also I'm going to just throw this out there. [00:05:26] There's a lot of oil right next door in Guyana, which is where my family is actually from. So this is something that I pay a lot of attention to. And Guyana is an interesting country because it is geographically in Latin America, but culturally it's not. We're kind of in a limbo place. That's why like my family is from there. [00:05:44] So it doesn't usually get looped in there. But we also had a coup in Guyana during the JFK administration. So all of that, there's a lot going on geopolitically here. Brett, what do you make of this? Also, real quick, I do want to mention that Trump is a lot [00:06:00] of what he's doing right now is illegal. He doesn't have any kind of congressional approval to do anything like invade another country with our military. So. Right. What do you think? Yeah. This is mostly just geopolitics at play. When Trump first off says that, like, this is a drug issue [00:06:18] that I do not buy for a single second as the reason we're doing any of this. He's like, we're being flooded with Venezuelan immigrants. Then why? I don't see why we need to invade Venezuela to change the regime to do that. I'm not going to be someone who gets pulled into the trap of thinking [00:06:35] that one side has to be good, and the other side has to be bad in a conflict. So I'm not just going to say because Trump doesn't like Maduro, Maduro must be good and Trump must be bad. But this thing where we're like, we got the sea all taken care of because [00:06:53] we bombed like three boats off the coast. Everything is going great. Well, the Four star general in charge of that stuff, today announced he's going to be resigning because of. [00:07:08] Reportedly, according to the New York Times, tensions with Pete Hegseth. They're not getting along. It's not going well. And it's tough with these, like, Latin American issues. It dates back to, like, President Monroe. That's how far back it goes. We have this thing. [00:07:25] Sebastian Gorka hilariously said on Newsmax the other day, we believe in something called the Monroe Doctrine. Originally, the Monroe Doctrine said, all right, America is in like this side of the world. And so we don't want any other countries. [00:07:41] We don't want the Europeans fomenting some kind of horrible discord on this side of the Pacific or this side of the Atlantic. And that started that way. But as you as you just went through, like lately it's been I just kind of want [00:08:00] to prevent communists from taking over on this side of the world, as America's the one who raids all of the resources that exist in South America for our own benefit. And if the country in charge, if the people in charge of any given country [00:08:18] aren't going to play ball with us in handing their resources over to American and American allied investment, well, then we're just going to secretly get rid of that group, or we're going to fund the guerrilla organization that is fighting against the leftist [00:08:36] governments of those countries, or right wing governments, as long as they don't play ball with us. So that's one thing. And look, the the apotheosis of this is the Cuban missile crisis, where Russia was buddy buddy with Cuba and trying to move nuclear missiles into Cuba. [00:08:53] Now, depending on whose side you're on or if you're agnostic, there's a lot of allegories or a lot of comparisons to our relationship with Russia, to our relationship with China right now. Like at that time, America had a bunch of military and nuclear bases right by Russia. [00:09:10] Russia was like, maybe we'll put some in Cuba, and suddenly we'll be kind of like, you know, 50 over 50 on this and America, 13 days of your parents thought they were all going to die from nuclear war. Okay. But now you have to add the China thing in there. [00:09:26] China has this initiative where it's like one belt, one road. I think it's just taking myself out of what side I'm on. I think it's brilliant. And I think it's like so hilarious because they're just like, we want to have trade. [00:09:42] We want to replace America as the people in charge of the world, partially motivated by the fact that, you know how they got touchy about Cuba with the whole Russia thing. Well, we're a little touchy about America having military bases off our coast [00:09:57] as far as the eye can see. And every and we're like building and China's like we're building islands so we can have military bases comparable to those that America solidified in the wake of World War Two and beyond. So what they're doing is kind of as America pulls an old American CIA [00:10:17] type thing in Venezuela. China's just sitting there being like, we got a nice little crew of people we're putting together that might be able to take over the world. We got some really good fundamentals in our economy where like, our manufacturing is cheap, people have to come here. [00:10:34] Maduro just got a cell phone from XI Jinping that he literally was like neo shit. Like, that's not me being racist. That's him taking out a phone from Huawei, being like, I, you know, I talked to him on the phone. Anyhow, XI XI like he actually acted it out because they essentially have [00:10:52] a bat phone made by Huawei, which most likely just to show how adept China is. And I'd say nefariously in this scenario, like most of those chips are probably based on American technology. So this whole risk board is is developing. [00:11:08] America is like we run this side of the Pacific. Stay the hell in the Atlantic and stay the hell away. We can do whatever we want. Obviously trying to get the largest oil reserves in the world [00:11:24] and access to it in Venezuela. But the means by which Trump is going about it. Just remind the rest of the world, like this is what America does. Can't you just do what China does and say? Like, do you need a road? You need an airport, you need some kind of infrastructure. [00:11:39] We did stuff like this with the Egyptians and the when we were trying to get them to be on our side and away from the Russians, when there was like the whole Israel Sinai Peninsula thing going on. We negotiated all that, that that's the kind of statecraft that [00:11:56] you really need, people who are good at it and knowledgeable about it to execute. And I'm sorry I've talked for a long time, but I'm trying to like put it all together. But the people in charge of our statecraft are not the deftest. It's Donald Trump and it's Pete Hegseth, and it's Marco Rubio, [00:12:13] who I have a lot of really amazing, tight, close Cuban-American friends. Like, I'm sure there's part of that that's just like, there is no way I'm letting these godless, evil communists. He's the one that's kind of leading this, this whole charge to to do regime change [00:12:29] because America failed in preventing regime change in Cuba. And there's a long lasting legacy, probably something that's very near and dear to Marco Rubio's heart. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned China obviously quite a bit there, but, yeah, the Belt and Road Initiative, basically what that is, is they would go [00:12:48] to these countries and say, you know, you started to explain, you know, we'll build you some infrastructure and in exchange, you know, we'll, you know, just make large investments in your country. And then we have access to that country. And they have done this all around the world. And this has been going on for years, and they haven't been [00:13:04] entirely covert about it. They're just doing what they're doing and they're saying, oh, yeah, you know, we're giving them money, we're helping to build roads, and this would benefit us and benefits them, and everyone's happy. It's it's a pretty controversial program because a lot of those countries that they [00:13:20] accept investments from China, they become beholden to China in a lot of ways. So it's not always a good deal for these countries. But a lot of times, and I've said this before, whenever you consider that there are several major big players on the world stage. So let's say you have the United States, Russia and China, [00:13:38] maybe you can throw India in there. A lot of these other smaller countries will kind of align themselves with the with the different countries. And here in the United States, I don't know if people really like grasp this, but for those smaller countries, they don't care which of these giant empires [00:13:55] they align themselves with because like, all the empires are terrible, all of them have the good with the bad, but they're really just thinking, saying I'll align myself with whoever helps me out the most, right? So the United States, especially American citizens, they have this idea that we [00:14:11] align ourselves with these countries. And the countries that align themselves with us are countries that believe in democracy, and they believe in what we're selling, and they want to be more like us and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's all this ideology behind it. But then, you know, like what we're seeing with Argentina right now, [00:14:26] they're just selling their, their soybeans to China instead of to us because it doesn't matter. They're just they just need a buyer, you know? And all these countries, including the United States, are just as bad on the world stage. So there's a lot going on. And you mentioned the risk board. It is very, very complicated and everything is is intertwined. [00:14:45] And then whenever you consider oil and gas and that becomes like a whole other level of geopolitics that just like is underlying the entire thing. So every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true. But it does keep you updated on our live shows.