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A
Every once in a while, someone makes something that feels bigger. Not another Hollywood reboot, but a story built on courage, faith and meaning. The Daily Wire did just that with their new seven part series, the Pendragon Rise of the Merlin. Based on the book series by Stephen R. Loughead. It's a retelling of the classic King Arthur legend. The first official trailer just dropped and you should go check it out. In this world, while pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's visions ignite a civilizational rebirth. Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon cycle Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire January 22, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now at DailyWire.com welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Thor Halvorson. Thor is a Venezuelan born human rights activist who founded and leads the Human Rights foundation and also founded the annual Oslo Freedom Forum. Thor has a rather dramatic origin story as an activist which involves his mother being shot by pro regime elements while attempting to deliver a letter to former President Jimmy Carter. But I'll let him tell that whole story in his own words. In this episode, we dissect the four different possible rationales for the current regime change operation in Venezuela. Drugs, oil, geopolitics and humanitarianism. We talk about the differences between regime change in Venezuela and our recent attempts at regime change in the Middle East. We talk about the scope of the humanitarian disaster in Venezuela over the past two decades. We talk about why the New York Times and other left leaning outlets have run so many articles sympathetic to the regime. We talk about Delse Rodriguez, d' Estado Cabello and how the remnants of the Maduro regime are likely to behave in the near future. We talk about why Delsey Rodriguez said the US Capture of Maduro had, quote, Zionist undertones and much more. So without further ado, Thor Halvorson. Okay, Thor Halberson, thanks so much for coming on my show.
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B
Thank you Coleman. It's a pleasure to be on your show. I'm a. I'm a huge admirer of your intellectual integrity.
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A
Thank you. I've. I learned just before we started recording that we crossed paths at my ill fated TED Talk. I guess this was two. Was it two or three years ago now? I think it was two years ago and people might remember the fallout from that. You can read all about it. That's not what we're here to talk about today, but it's cool that you were in the room for that. I first learned of You, I think, on the Fifth Column, I think you've been friendly with those guys for a while. Michael Moynihan, a friend of mine, has been a longtime, ardent supporter of the Venezuelan opposition and has paid quite close attention for many years to that issue. So it comes up on that podcast, and you've been on that podcast. You are someone who can speak with a very high level of authority, both from personal familial experience and as a human rights activist on the issue of Venezuela, there's no one I'd rather talk to at this moment than you. And for my audience members that may or may not be aware of your backstory, I know you've told it a million times, but it's just, it's incredibly interesting. You know, what, the family lineage you come from, what happened to your family in Venezuela and so forth. Can you give a little bit, maybe a short version of that background for my audience?
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B
Sure. It's my pleasure. I was born in Venezuela. My family arrived in the 1530s. And so, I mean, obviously, a lot of people, when they look at my name, they're like, how dare you speak about Venezuela. You are not, you are not originally from there or so on and so forth. It'll be hard to find a Yanomamo Indian who is, you know, engaged in human rights work out of New York. That doesn't mean they don't exist. But there is this, because of this obsession that the United States has with group identity and things like that. It's. It's just been a struggle to, you know, have a voice. If you have a name that isn't, you know, Carlos Rodriguez, My, you know, half my family is of Spanish origin, and the other half is evidently Norwegian. And my Norwegian grandfather arrived in the 1930s in Venezuela. So on my mother's side, my. My family is. Is related to Simon Bolivar, the founder of the independence movement and responsible for the war for independence that brought the liberation of Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, which was named in his honor, and the area that is now Panama, along with, I think I mentioned Colombia and same lineage. My. My fifth grandfather was the author of the Declaration of Independence of Venezuela and its first president. That said, you know, in my family, we always talk about how you don't mortgage your ancestors in trying to seek advantage. So I was always brought up that these are just accidents of history, that I was born into this family. So I believe that people should stand on their own two feet. So I was born there, raised there. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, where I first encountered the concept of political correctness. And that led me to become the founding CEO of fire, the foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is. Which now is called the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And I was there helming FIRE when Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela in an election that he won with a very small amount of votes because the number of people that decided not to vote was stratospheric. So I think he won with around 16% of the people who could vote, and he won a majority of that. And he then set about dismantling the democracy. And he did not run on the idea of establishing a dictatorship and turning it into a socialist dictatorship, ruining the country and seeing the theft of all the oil revenues or mismanagement of that over the next 25 years, him and his successor, he ran on corruption, on anti corruption, and people were sick of the swamp. And I'd say that corruption in Venezuela was probably around somewhere between 5 and 10%, and people did not like it at all. Under his government and his successor, it's more like between 95 and 99%. They really have done quite a job ruining the country. My mother, I was basically not engaged in human rights work other than writing up ads here and there and warning people that Chavez was not what people were claiming and having a few articles written. I was doing other things. And meanwhile, you know, it was very ironic. I was protecting the rights of students at Harvard to speak and to have in their conservative newspaper or the magazine that they had for humor. And meanwhile, journalists were being shot in Venezuela and nobody seemed to care. And in 2004, my mother went to Venezuela. My mother lived in England and she went to Venezuela to celebrate my grandmother's birthday. And that coincided with an election, a referendum on Chavez. And Chavez lost that referendum 80% to 20%. But they switched the votes. So it became 80, 20 in his favor, not against him. And this was a shocking betrayal. And Jimmy Carter, former President Carter, was there to oversee the election. And he left that morning because it was Mrs. Carter's birthday. And even though he was begged to please review these new electronic machines, a company that the government had created, the government had financed to do an electronic election. So my mother and several others got together to deliver a letter to Jimmy Carter, not knowing that he had already left. And groups of armed men working for the government, part of the security forces, shot her. And they did not kill her. But I was in the emergency room thinking, what should I do? What can I do? And first thing I did was I wrote an op ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal about the subject. And that's when I really got my hands into the subject and realized how the existing major human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were just not paying attention. They didn't care. Perhaps it was ideological sympathies for a man who claimed to care about the poor and to be on the left. Perhaps it was something else. Perhaps it was just ineptitude or donors driving Human Rights Watch into doing something else. And so I got together with Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who was in Auschwitz, and Vaslav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia, who brought communism down in that country. He's a very famous poet and a few other political prisoners and decided to create a new organization. And we had a budget of around $230,000 the first year. And it's now been 20 years. And we now are much larger and our focus is exclusively on dictatorships. Venezuela is not our focus. Our focus is all of them. North Korea, China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Algeria, Eritrea, Angola. So we bring attention where it's not very sexy and where the voices are being ignored. And that's the Human Rights foundation. And now, 20 years on, we see the beginning of the end of the Venezuelan dictatorship of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
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A
Yeah, so I remember learning in Amy Chua's book, I think it was World on fire, she wrote 20 years ago, she had a chapter on Venezuela and she wrote that part of Hugo Chavez's appeal was that he claimed to represent darker skinned Venezuelans who had felt discriminated against on a racial or you might say colorist basis with respect to light skinned Venezuelans. Is that true? And if so, that's an aspect of the story that I never hear talked about.
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B
So when she wrote that book, she came to the University of Pennsylvania to speak about it. And I remember that I went with several friends and we handed out flyers before she spoke saying that this is absolutely untrue. This is a complete misreading of what's happening. She was very upset by it. I met her several years later and owned up to it. And we had a long conversation about it. The reality is Venezuela was we have a saying in Venezuela, todos, todos tieneng una Persona que toca tambor otira flechas. So the translation of that is all of us, every single one of us has Venezuelans have in their past an ancestor that either played the drums or threw arrows. And what do I mean by that? We're all mixed race to some extent or another. Venezuela didn't have. Slavery ended in Venezuela with the independence movement. Simon Bolivar wrote the liberation of the slaves. We didn't have this issue. This is an imported intellectual position, imported from the United States, imported from Europe. And Chavez took advantage of it to divide a population that never saw itself as, oh, the light skinned versus the dark skinned. That's absolute poppycock. You can look at the presidents, the congress, people across the board, in government, in the private sector, there's all sorts of people. So the pluralism of Venezuela is this concept has been imposed to try and divide people, to say, oh, and by the way, this may not be the case in other Latin American countries where the indigenous population is massive, but Venezuela, like Brazil, is a country with all sorts. It's a huge mix, mestizos, mulattos, you name it, is there. And it's unique along with Brazil and Latin America and being much more racially diverse. And so we never had this issue.
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A
Okay, so obviously we're speaking because of Operation Absolute Resolve. The American military quite impressively extracted and arrested Nicolas Maduro, brought him to New York City where he, he and his wife pled, pled not guilty to various charges. Are you optimistic about the prospects here? Because, you know, here's what the conversation is in America right now. And by the way, I sort of disagree with this way of framing the conversation, but this is how Americans are thinking about it. We're thinking this concept of regime change has become such a controversial and heated issue right in the American mind. We did regime change in Iraq and we did regime change in Afghanistan and there were unmitigated disasters. And haven't we learned by now that regime change is always and everywhere a terrible idea? And now, once again, for whatever reason, you know, we're doing regime change in Venezuela even though Trump was elected sort of on a promise to end regime change wars. That's where the conversation is. How do you coming at it from the perspective of a human rights advocate and a Venezuelan, how do you see that way of framing the conversation?
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B
Okay, so after the absolute disaster that Iraq and Afghanistan were, from a perspective, from a financial perspective for the United States, where trillions of dollars were misspent, and I completely understand that the United States wants to look inward and solve its own problems. This is, this is basic. But let me answer it with two components to this. The first is Venezuela already had regime change in 2024. Venezuelans had an election and Maduro lost the election. And lost the election by a monumental amount of votes. His opponent got 67% of the votes cast. And he was more than twice what Maduro got. And if you add the amount of people that voted with their feet that left Venezuela because of the conditions under Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez, we're talking about almost 9 million people. If you add the votes of those who left, we're talking about as votes against the government, obviously, then we're Talking about between 85 and 90 something percent of the people rejecting this government. So it's a government that has usurped power. He is not the legitimately elected President of Venezuela. He banned the woman who won 93% of the vote in a primary. That's a staggering number of votes in an open primary. Banned her from running because he knew she was gonna win. And so she picked a stand in. She didn't go to another politician, she picked a stand in, this professor. And so the government took this professor, a woman, a grandmother, and said, no, no, she's banned too, she can't run either. So then she went down the list and picked an old diplomat, Edmundo Gonzalez. And eventually, I think the government realized this woman's just going to keep picking stand ins until we've basically disqualified everyone from running. So they allowed the election to go forward, thinking that they could carry out the same electronic fraud that they've been able to carry out in the past. And without going into details, the electronic fraud was stopped. And at every polling booth there were. Maria Corina Machalo, the leader of the opposition, put together this enormous machine of volunteers using a Google app as a kind of, you know, to be able to record the votes at every polling station, tens of thousands of polling stations, and they were able to tally on their own, you know, what the votes were coming out at as and when the votes happened at every polling station, they closed the polling station and they count the number of votes, compare the ballots with what's on the electronic side of things, and then they create a bill of record. And the bill of record has a QR code, so anyone can photograph the QR code and find exactly in voting center, by voting center what the totals are. And that's how they were able to prove that they won. And it wasn't just the opposition saying that they won. The United States government independently corroborated and the CIA told Joe Biden that, yes, indeed, Maduro lost the election. So one side of the regime change discussion is that the other side is this isn't exactly regime change. This is a law enforcement operation, the legality of which, you know, the courts in the US and elsewhere can talk about, but Venezuela is not a country that has, like Mexico, a drug cartel that may or may not influence the government. Pay off people in government. No, no, no. Venezuelan. It's a cartel that has a government. It's a massive criminal network in charge of a government. So the United States is looking at this and going like, well, this is affecting us. This is a threat to us. This is coming to, to the United States, whether it's fentanyl, cocaine or what the criminal networks actually do. So I think that it's important to look at these things from those two angles.
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A
Yeah, I think the way I'm thinking of it is that you can separate the rationale for US Involvement into three categories. One is oil, one is drugs, and one is, you call it terrorism or sponsorship of terrorist entities. And Trump is talking largely about oil. He thinks like a businessman. He wants to frame every issue in terms of what it's doing for.
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B
He.
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A
Says our country's being ripped off and I'm going to help, I'm going to help us the way a businessman would help a business. I'm going to make oil cheap again for Americans. Venezuela has the largest proven reserves, which we're going to get US Companies back in there and so forth. And I'm no expert on the oil industry, obviously, but I've heard that there are many challenges to that and that U.S. oil companies are only partly optimistic, if at all, about that prospect. But then you have the other aspects here. One obviously is drugs. And in that domain, the case seems to me weaker from the American interest perspective because Venezuela has never been talked about really as the main source of fentanyl, which is the drug Americans most care about and I think are right to care about most. Not to say cocaine is not a problem, but it's a much smaller order of problem.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then there's, you know, the little talked about facts that Venezuela has become very close with China. They've invited Hezbollah into the country, given Hezbollah operatives passports. And I've heard through the grapevine that part of the reason for the timing of this intervention was because America, because Venezuela and China were about to make a pretty big weapons deal. Weapons and oil. And so Trump wanted to thwart that. So. And then I should mention the fourth reason is humanitarian. Venezuela has been probably the worst humanitarian disaster in this hemisphere over the past 20 years.
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B
No. Ever.
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A
Ever, Ever, Ever. In what sense? Oh, in the hemisphere.
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B
So imagine, imagine, just imagine the population of New York City right now. Are you in New York City?
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A
Yes.
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B
Okay. Now look out the window. And imagine that every single person has left.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Or do London, same number of people. The cities of London and New York are the numbers of people that left Venezuela. There's, you know, in Syria you had 5 million people left. A war, a massive civil war. The Ukraine, you have millions of people leaving after the Russians invaded. No one invaded Venezuela. There was no war in Venezuela except the war of the dictatorship against the population. And you have almost 9 million people leaving. That is a dramatic symbol of what that socialism, dictatorial socialism, can do. Now let me answer the part about drugs. So how do people usually measure the drug problem that a country represents? Usually you measure the drug problem based on counter narcotics. And what do I mean by that? You know, the government of Mexico has just seized a ton of cocaine from the Sinaloa cartel. The cartel is doing this. The, the cartel just murdered, you know, several dozen students and buried them in shallow graves. In Colombia, you see the cartels engaging in activity. You don't have that, that counternarcotics discussion in Venezuela. The reason you don't have it is because the government is the cartel. So you don't have anyone seizing drugs and telling everyone that they're making fentanyl or that they've got plants that create the products that are then shipped to Mexico with which to make the fentanyl. And so you've got industrial sized production of drugs in Venezuela that are unaccounted in terms of, like nobody is, is, is, is able to talk about it because it's controlled by the military and by the government. And anyone who's looking at exports into Europe of cocaine, for instance, notices that the price of cocaine has dropped significantly and the purity of cocaine has increased. It's a huge problem to, if you've got a production facility in the jungle in Colombia and you're one of the terrorist, narco terrorist organizations like the ELN or like the farc, you've got some problems in putting together your labs. That's not the case in Venezuela. In Venezuela, it's literally like you will drive by it and think it's a factory. And yet, in fact, what they're doing in there is that the government, just the government of the United States before they took Maduro, they had just struck a fentanyl chemical production plant. So the truth about Venezuelan narcotics and the cartel, that's going to be known. And it's going to be known, I presume, in the next three to six months. A lot of people were saying, oh, this is not true, there's no cartel in Venezuela. It's just like these people are embarrassing themselves and history will prove them wrong. I think that it's only a matter of time before that happens. But I don't know if you had four things. The oil. Let's talk about the oil. The oil has not served the interests of the Venezuelan people. Whether one looks at when sanctions were eased up under Joe Biden's administration and the lobby for easing up those sanctions was a mixture of corrupt Americans and corrupt Venezuelans saying that, oh, the Venezuelan people don't want this and they're the ones suffering from this. That's not true. The reducing sanctions and the oil revenues did not build a single school, a single hospital. It did not go to infrastructure. The country's broken, it's completely ruined. They've siphoned off up to $2 trillion. More than a trillion has been stolen. And that money has gone to pay for a lot of things abroad. And the foreign influence of Venezuela abroad, I think is more than any anyone really has a sense of. And the way to, to address that and why it's important for regional stability is important is this. So up until Chavez took power, the far left, it just did not win elections very often in Latin America. Then suddenly Chavez comes to power and there seems to be this wave of, of populists winning elections, this wave of left wing populists winning elections in Ecuador, in Peru, in Nicaragua, in Honduras. How did this happen? Oh, if you read the New York Times, it's, oh, it's a wave. It's a wave. No, it's not a wave. It's the Venezuelan oil company. The way that the Marxists and the hard left would raise money for elections was usually through crime. It was kidnappings, major kidnappings, which there doesn't seem to be a lot of major kidnappings in Latin America, you know, of the sorts of million dollar ransoms. At the same time they would raise money from drug cartels. And the third was, and that's in and of itself a problem because you've got to get the money. You've got to ensure that it's not noticed by the government and public power and so on. And the third is bank robberies and usually assaults on armored cars. Suddenly you have an oil company, an oil company that is flush with money. That's how they financed elections. In some cases it was the populist, and in other cases it was the central left in Argentina, in Chile, for instance, and there's records of this. There was in the case of Kushner, the person who was in power before Javier Milei. She was the recipient of about $30 million in cash that arrived in suitcases into Argentina. And in one of these instances, the private plane that arrived, a Venezuelan oil company, private plane, someone in. And anyone who wants to look into this, they can just Google Kirchner suitcase scandal, a cash suitcase scandal Venezuela. And there's tons of this information. And this guy was, was getting off the private plane and someone in customs says, what do you have in, in the suitcase? And he says, oh, I have books. And she says, open it. And there's eight hundred and something thousand dollars. He was then detained. He ended up going to the presidential palace. He, he was questioned. And what comes out is he and many others took more than 30 suitcases to the Kirchner government. And that money, I'm sure they kept some of it. She and her husband were very corrupt and that's all come out, but they used a lot of it for elections. So taking away the Venezuelan wallet from foreign interference is a huge thing. Right now the left wing government in Spain is in a massive scandal because Delsey Rodriguez, the current interim president of Venezuela, arrived in Spain with more than 20 suitcases that left her airplane. She wasn't allowed to land in Spain because of sanctions, but nonetheless, she.
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A
Maybe she has a big closet.
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B
Yeah. Yes, indeed, 20 suitcases. And now it wasn't cash, it was gold. And that's a scandal that right now in Spain is hot. And so the influence that Venezuela has had in the world at large in manipulating elections, in foreign interference, in laundering, you mentioned Hezbollah and Hamas to an extent. They didn't just go for passports to Venezuela, they went there. It was the main money laundering center for their fundraising. So taking Venezuela out of this equation is very, very good for Venezuelans, first of all, and for everyone else who's affected by their criminality.
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A
Yeah. So, I mean, it seems to me there's a solid geopolitical reason for all of this. Everything you just described, you can summarize it simply by saying, do we want an illegitimate mafia state which hates America, which allies with all of America's geopolitical adversaries, China, Iran and so forth, to control the largest proven oil reserves in the world?
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B
And they're two hours from Miami. Two hours from Miami.
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A
Two hours from Miami. And also presiding over the worst humanitarian catastrophe in our hemisphere? From that perspective, the way I think about this, and this is what I would say to the anti regime change crowd, is when you look at the Middle east, when you look at places like Iraq and Syria, the set of possible Outcomes gets really bad. These are places that can in a moment devolve into a ten year civil war where hundreds of thousands or millions of people die because they are sectarian societies to begin with. They're essentially tinderboxes that are waiting for the right moment. We saw this in the Arabs in the Arab Spring. It's like a guy selling fruit dies in Tunisia and 10 countries burst into flames because they were ready to burst into flames to begin with. Right now. It's not to say Latin America is a paragon of stability in the world. It's not Europe, it's not, you know, Japan, but it's a lot less volatile and a lot less sectarian. In particular a lot less sectarian than the Middle east and therefore a lot less prone to burst into civil war at the first sign of instability, in my view.
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B
Well, the civil war argument is, is just simply falls flat on its face. The opposition doesn't have any weapons. The citizenry, which I'm talking about the 85 to 90 something percent and I'm sure if that remaining 15% was on truth serum, they'd say that they only voted for the government because, because they receive every month a box with, you know, two packets of rice, some eggs and a few other things because the situation is so bad and people are hungry and the government knew, let's just give them a box of stuff and then they're essentially going to, going to act and do as we say and come out every time we say that there needs to be a march in favor of the government to show that the people are with us. So that part's important if what there may be is mass killing by the government of others. But this takes us to the moment we're in right now, which is someone who is working at a human rights organization is a pretty, pretty important and significant moment, which is the interim government, the machinery of the regime. If you look at the regime as a pyramid, maybe the apex has been removed, but everything else is still in play. The Venezuelan situation does not fit in a classic narrative of national liberation. It doesn't have a dramatic script of the sudden fall of a dictator like Assad. What's taking shape is a lot more complex. It's less luminous and precisely for that reason, more real. The dismantling of the effective power of the regime, followed by a controlled, supervised and functional political transition is what I think the United States is aiming for. And their purpose is not to immediately replace the regime with an ideal order, but instead prevent the collapse of the state, contain the accumulated systemic violence that it's capable of and create some minimal conditions for a viable institutional reconstruction.
- [34:57]
A
Hey, Coleman here. If you're enjoying the show, then you probably care about how political decisions really get made. If that's you, I want to tell you about the new podcast On Notice, produced by the nonpartisan Newsroom Notice. Each week, journalist Reese Gorman sits down with lawmakers for candid conversations, not just about the headlines, but about what makes them tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. On Notice gives you an insider's view of the people shaping policy in the U.S. reese's approachable style has earned him trust on both sides of the aisle, unlocking unguarded conversations that you won't hear in traditional interviews. So tune in to On Notice. That's Notice spelled N O T u S. It's available every Monday wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. So what do you make of some of the coverage by liberal leaning outlets in the West? I'm thinking of the New York Times as a paragon case. They've run articles describing Delsey Rodriguez as a, quote, moderate who stabilized the economy.
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B
How would she be a moderate? She ran the torture center. She literally is in charge of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, the people in charge of torture. Tens of thousands of people have been detained, tortured, harassed, all under her watch. So if that's a moderate, what's an extremist?
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A
In the past few months there was an article saying that Venezuela was bracing for an economic crisis because of the blockade. As if it wasn't in the midst of the worst economic crisis in this hemisphere for the past 25 years. Right. As if just now it's bracing for this oncoming cr. Some of the framing here is really suspect and genuinely, you know, as I've been a longtime critic of the New York Times, I do think it's a great paper in many ways, but it also has long running, great weekend section.
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B
Great style section, very deep blind spots.
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A
But what explains, I mean, these are not stupid people, right? These are not stupid people. They're not people that at least think of themselves as carrying water for a dictatorship. So what's going on?
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B
Well, in my view it's partially some of them are in fact carrying water for dictatorship and in, in part it's just good old journalists who are, are happy to participate in exchange for a, for a payment. And there are a number of people in the United States who have received payments that have been routed from Venezuela. I and I think that that's going to come out sometime in the next.
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A
Do you really think those people are writing articles for the New York Times?
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B
So, you know, there are influencers in the United States, MAGA influencers who took payments. Now, these payments didn't come, you know, they don't come from Delsey's office. They were routed through bondholders and through people who had licenses who wanted the sanctions removed. And so they had this idea that, oh, sanctions is bad for the people. We should do it for the people. Really? That's why you're pushing this? No, they wanted to get their oil licenses because Venezuela was willing to give them massive profits in return for them serving as an influence network in the United States. And I know there's a journalist that's working on a very, very big piece about this very subject. These folks in the United States had back channel communications with the government of Venezuela and with Delsey. Right now, I don't know if they're celebrating or they're kind of concerned that the US Is looking at everything but the influence that the Venezuelans have had. Look, I have it on good authority that the BLM movement was financed from Venezuela. That Venezuelan money has impacted and paid for a lot of these supposed protests in the United States. That in connection with the Singham Network, this billionaire that operates out of China and finances things like Code Pink and the People's Forum in New York, these people are taking positions to make it seem like there's grassroots. You know, hands off Venezuela. You talk to the protesters, and I have, there are no Venezuelans among them. There are no Venezuelans. You've got these people who know nothing about Venezuela. You ask them questions like, what is the national bird? What is the national anthem? What does it say? And oh, hands off Venezuela. It's all astroturfing and it's really quite outrageous. Meanwhile, I have not come across one Venezuelan abroad, not a single one, who says that they are upset because the Trump administration took Maduro and his co conspirator, who is a lot smarter.
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A
Other thing I haven't seen, by the way, is I haven't seen any Venezuelans complaining about if Trump is motivated by oil or not. I've only seen Americans fixating on that motivation because a lot of Venezuelans say, well, whatever he's motivated by, those incentives are pretty much aligned with the humanitarian things we want.
- [40:15]
B
You use the exact word, aligned. Aligned. So the United States is carrying out a law enforcement operation, okay, that aligns with us having a chance to get rid of this horrendous dictatorship that has brought so much suffering and under which, so, look, there was three days ago, I saw horrendous, horrendous testimony by a woman whose son was having an asthma attack. Not in the capital, but in a town in the interior of the country. They couldn't get a car to take him to a hospital because no one had any gasoline. Eventually, they called someone who drove. They got the kid in a car, took him to the hospital. The hospital didn't even have a nebulizer. That's not about sanctions. That's not about sanctions. It's about the government refusing to spend money of the money that they, the oil money that they sell to. Because not selling to the US doesn't mean that they don't sell to China and to many other places, but they're funneling that money into their bank accounts in Singapore, in Switzerland, in Qatar. Qatar is a huge hub for Venezuelan corruption, and a lot of money is deposited there. That kid, they then had to drive him an hour and a half to a different hospital. He died on the way. That was like in the last 48 hours. The suffering is real. The suffering is horrendous and the tales of it. I'm not just talking about the torture and the political prisoners and being hurt for, for people hurt for, for their freedom of expression. I'm talking about people who, you know, you have a newborn and you don't have diapers, you have a newborn and there's shortages of everything. It's quite outrageous. So if, if he wants the oil, well, they're taking the oil anyway. The, the government was taking the oil and doing other things with it and selling it at well below market rates. So if the United States takes the oil and this happens, the, the calculation in the minds of a lot of Venezuelans is this is not a bad thing. Now, obviously, the money that the United States gets from Venezuelan oil, because I saw the President of the United States say that Venezuela is going to supply them with 30 to 50 million barrels of oil, and the United States is going to administer it in favor of the Venezuelan people and to recuperate some of the expenses of the U.S. well, I don't think a single Venezuelan is going to complain about the US Administering that over the crooks in the regime. You know, you know, the Internet is a fascinating place. Delsey Rodriguez, who does not come from fortune, does not have her own money, was wearing a $14,000 dress at her swearing in. Actually, the person who found the thing on the Internet, and it is the same dress, it was a $20,000 dress. And the 21,000. And the ad on the Internet was that it's now discounted to 14,000. I can assure you she paid the 21,000. You have this nest of vipers that has bled the country dry. And Venezuelans are rather pleased with the fact that there is a hope that we're going to see a true transition. And people need to understand that obviously it was not going to be, you know, this criminal coalition immediately being replaced by a democratic government. That just doesn't make any sense. What's happening now is a process of fragmentation. The military, the intelligence service, the cartel and the armed collectives, they're not going to go quietly into this good night. And her job is to do that. I think it's a job that she's going to definitely fail at carrying out. But the US has made it very clear what their expectations are. The most powerful man in the country is not Delsey Rodriguez. The most powerful man is the Minister of the Interior, Dioro Cabello. Cabello is in charge of the armed collectives. There's a $25 million reward on his head and it's her job to arrest him. Good luck to her on that.
- [44:32]
A
Okay, just a few more questions before I let you go. Because you're a very busy man right now, very much in demand, as you should be, and I'm grateful for you giving me your time. I saw online somewhere, Delsey said, I think she said something like the US regime change had the tint or the smell of Zionism about it. And, and she's made many other comments. She seems very interested in the Israel, Palestine conflict and very much on the Palestine side of that. What is the nature of the Venezuelans regime's interest in Israel, Palestine and why have they taken one side of it in that way?
- [45:15]
B
Well, for years you have Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrian dictatorship and all of the bad actors in that neighborhood become chummy with the Venezuelan government. This is something that is utterly alien to Venezuelan history and Venezuelan culture. This has not been the case. Venezuela has never been an anti Semitic country, ever. In fact, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned back a boat full of people who were escaping from Germany, a boat of people who had paid to get out before they got into concentration camps, Venezuela accepted them. That became the Jewish community of Venezuela. Two of these very big boats filled with people fleeing. So it's not right. I mean, do I think that there should be a involvement of the Venezuelan government in the government saying Free, free Palestine is what Delsey and Maduro were saying? Well, what about free, free Venezuela? They cared more about people in Palestine than about people in Venezuela. So for them, it was entirely a political calculation and the creation of alliances that were of use to them. And all of these alliances had one objective, which is to defeat democracies. People don't realize that this is not a function of left wing or right wing. It's a function of dictatorships and their allies fighting against democracies and their allies. And they are all on the same team, whether it's North Korea or as we saw in the case of Russia, North Korea and Russia now working together, fighting in Ukraine, or whether it's China or Iran, or they're all on the side of the let's end democracies. Why do they want to end democracies? Why do they want to expand? Because freedom is contagious. And if people in dictatorship see how people next door are living freely, they're like, well, why can't I have that? Why can't I speak freely? And that is why it's so important for them to control the airwaves, why they shut down media, why they don't allow anyone to protest. And while a single democracy exists, it is a threat to the ccp. It is a threat to Russia. Russia invades Ukraine, in my view, because there are 9 million Russians living there, living in freedom versus what they have in Russia. So it really is a struggle of dictatorships versus democracies. And right now the dictatorships have suffered a huge blow with what has happened. And note, well, everyone expected, and Venezuela lived under this expectation that Russia, China, Iran are protecting Venezuela. Where did that end up? Venezuela spent all this money on Russian airplanes, fighter jets and Chinese radars and all sorts of agreements. You mentioned the agreement with China. All those agreements obviously mean nothing to these larger countries and they're not willing to stick their necks out for Venezuela. So I think that we have a difficult few months ahead. But there will be elections and those elections will lead to a legitimate government that will be able to transform the country. But right now what's needed is stabilization, fragmentation of the existing regime machinery in order to provide the conditions for a democracy. It's not functional. To think that Maria Corina Machado can arrive into this nest of vipers and that everything is going to be fine just because she has the people. No, they are all armed to the teeth and they are very frightened. They're more frightened than anyone else. The political prisoners are being released, supposedly. And once that happens, it's going to be very interesting to see how you're going to be able to have this regime keep functioning with so many people wanting to breathe freely and to express themselves. And when they do express themselves, they will thunder loudly.
- [49:32]
A
Okay, that's a great place to end it. Thank you so much, Thor. And before I let you go, can you tell my audience where they can support your work and where they can support the Venezuelan opposition right now?
- [49:43]
B
Well, I am, as head of the Human Rights Foundation, I'm happy. Any, any, any material support for the Venezuelan opposition or which needs it, logistical support. We will absolutely, without taking a single dollar, transfer it if it says restricted. HRF.org is our website and anyone who, you know, wants to do more can just send an email to our general address, infohrf.org and I'm more than happy to engage with them.
- [50:14]
A
All right. Thank you, Thor.
- [50:16]
B
Thank you.
- [50:19]
C
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