Black Bag Inc. feat. Abby Martin (E354)

Summary

QAA Podcast – Episode 354: "Black Bag, Inc." feat. Abby Martin

Release Date: January 8, 2026
Hosts: Jake Rockatansky, Julian Feeld, Travis View
Guest: Abby Martin

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Episode Overview

This episode, opening QAA’s 2026, confronts one of the most extraordinary news events in recent memory: the U.S. military’s capture and rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, dubbed "Operation Absolute Resolve." With celebrated journalist and documentarian Abby Martin, the hosts dissect the operation itself, its dizzying implications, the subsequent information war, and broader lessons about U.S. power, media propaganda, and imperialism. The episode blends reporting, analysis, and dark comedy while drawing on the personal histories of the hosts and their guest to shed light on the deeper context around U.S. interventions in Latin America.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. Opening Reflections & New Year's Resolutions

• [00:44–03:42] The hosts riff on the wildness of current events and their own attempts at optimism. Julian, Travis, and Jake exchange New Year’s resolutions, with humor on “becoming more autistic,” Travis getting into Filipino martial arts, and reflections on reading people and internal anxieties.
• Quote:

  “If the last year has taught me anything, it’s like, how tame my expectations were for this second Trump admin.”
  — Jake [01:34]

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2. The Operation: What Happened in Venezuela

• [06:30–09:37] Travis summarizes the facts: on Jan 2/3, 2026, the U.S. executed airstrikes and a special forces raid to seize Maduro and his wife from a secure compound in Caracas. Official death toll: at least 56. Both are now in U.S. federal custody in New York.
• The operation involved 150+ aircraft, months of preparation, and intelligence from CIA assets.
• Quote:

  “As of this recording, Nicolás Maduro and his wife are in US Federal custody ... while the case proceeds. Now, all that's very insane, but what really helped escalate the insanity is Trump's remarks after it...”
  — Travis [08:34]

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3. Escalating Presidential Rhetoric & Doctrine

• [09:37–12:25] The hosts detail President Trump’s open celebration and the announcement of the “Don Row Doctrine”—a reassertion of “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.”
  • Trump signals possible interventions in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and even hints at “taking back” the Panama Canal and eyeing Greenland.
• Quote:

  “He’s trying to become, like, the leader of Gastown from, like, the Mad Max universe.”
  — Jake [11:45]

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4. Information War & Disinformation Blitz

• [12:25–18:18]
  • Rapid flood of AI-generated fakes: doctored photos/videos of Maduro’s arrest and celebrations in Venezuela.
  • Most viral: A video of supposed “jubilant Caracas crowds” that was actually shot in Santiago, Chile.
  • Elon Musk even boosted some of these AI fakes.
  • Propagandists both for and against the U.S. try to jam the “information zone.” AI “flood the zone with shit” techniques are rampant.
• Quotes:

  “It takes zero effort to make a fake. So you could just make 20 of them ... and overwhelm the information space.”
  — Travis [14:13]

  “Propaganda for the Empire would be like: ‘We black bagged him. Here’s the perfect black bag photo. AI, please help.’”
  — Julian [13:38]

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5. Resurgence of Election Conspiracy Theories

• [19:45–24:49]
  • Far-right and QAnon circles claim Maduro’s capture is “Trump’s revenge” for 2020, linking back to false narratives about Smartmatic/Dominion manipulating U.S. elections—a claim lacking all factual basis.
  • Trump himself amplifies these rumors on social media, leaning into the conspiratorial base.
• Quotes:

  “Benny Johnson claimed that, quote, Nicolás Maduro might be Trump’s final revenge for the election theft of 2020.”
  — Travis [22:27]

  “They’re still talking about 20 fucking—speechless.”
  — Julian [24:15]

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6. Absorption of QAnon Language by the State

• [25:37–26:39]
  • Official government social media (e.g., Dept. of Labor) starts posting QAnon slogans (“Patriots in control”) alongside Trump’s own posts, further blurring the line between conspiratorial propaganda and state messaging.
• Quote:

  “If you opened a movie about a dystopia, this would read as overwritten.”
  — Julian [26:26]

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7. Interview with Abby Martin: On-the-Ground Context & Media Myths

7.1 Media Propaganda vs. Reality

• [28:29–34:23]
  • Abby describes her experience reporting from Venezuela, how even seasoned media critics are not immune to propaganda, especially when anti-Maduro/anti-Chavez claims are repeated by both mainstream outlets and NGOs (e.g. HRW, Amnesty).
  • The narrative of “starvation, dictatorship, and repression” is nearly uniform in the West—even among "liberal" media.
  • She critiques the “humanitarianism” paradigm as another form of soft imperial power.
• Quotes:

  “Being there on the ground gives you a much different clarity ... before I went, even I believed some of the propaganda. And I’ll explain why.”
  — Abby [34:23]

  “Humanitarianism is an inherently colonial idea…”
  — Julian [40:36]

7.2 Deep Context: Personal Stories & Power Structures

• [45:39–72:56]
  • Both Julian and Abby share first-hand and family connections to Venezuela, explain class politics, diaspora dynamics, and how elite/expat anxieties become “the” news in the West.
  • Abby details opposition violence in the streets, media cover-ups, and exposes how many deaths in protests were wrongly ascribed to Maduro’s forces.
• Quote:

  “You have the right to not like a leader … The point is, if you’re spending half your tweet—or even part—saying this after a Geneva Convention war crime, you are part of the problem.”
  — Julian [38:43]

  “It was so specific who you talk to, if you talk to a woman covered in jewelry, screaming she has nothing in her fridge... another block away, a young Chavista saying: ‘No, it’s an economic war.’”
  — Abby [79:48]

• Abby surfaces the reality of opposition violence:

  “When they found out Mike and I were working for Telesur, they sent a virtual lynch mob...thousands of people telling me ‘You will be lynched. We will lynch you.’ Who talks like that if you’re not a fascist psychopath?”
  — Abby [64:37]

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8. History of U.S. Intervention & Chavismo Explained

• [85:03–99:06]
  • Abby and Julian detail the neoliberal collapse (“Black Friday” 1983), oil shock, and U.S.-backed regime change efforts. They explain the Bolivarian Revolution, Chavez’s rise as a response to mass immiseration, and decades of U.S. meddling to prevent redistribution.
  • Venezuela’s unique direct-democracy innovations (frequent referenda, constitutional rewrites, grassroots assemblies, food distribution projects) are contrasted with Western “managed democracy.”
• Quote:

  “People think Cuba has a one-party system because they’re under siege, but they have a huge democratic base of governance.”
  — Abby [92:02]

  “The PSUV [Chavez/Maduro’s party] was an embodiment of the sovereignty and independence movements originating from Simon Bolivar...throwing off the shackles of colonialism in Latin America.”
  — Abby [55:33]

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9. Back to the Raid: What Now?

• [100:09–104:14]
  • Discussing the details known about the U.S. operation, Abby emphasizes the scale of force, possibility of local collusion, and the 20-year buildup of pressure on Venezuela. Trump’s global message: open pursuit of resource extraction by any means.

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10. What’s Next? Spiral of U.S. War, Escalation, and Accountability

• [104:30–106:44]
  • Abby warns of the “open season” this precedent sets for future interventions (Colombia, Mexico, Greenland), and laments the normalization of war crimes by bipartisan U.S. regimes.
• Quote:

  “Where does it stop? That's what I’m wondering. Is this not grounds for impeachment? ... He’s drunk with power and impunity, and if no one stops him, he’s going to do Colombia. He’s already talking about Mexico, Greenland, annexing...”
  — Abby [104:30]

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11. Earth’s Greatest Enemy: U.S. Military as Global Threat

• [108:28–115:43]
  • Abby discusses her latest documentary, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” which uncovers how the U.S. military is not just an apparatus of violence but the world’s largest single institutional polluter, fundamentally linked to global ecological destruction.
  • Every international climate treaty, she notes, explicitly exempts military emissions.
• Quote:

  “US imperialism is Earth’s greatest enemy, because what it is, is a protection racket. The US military is a protection racket for resource extraction. That’s what it always has served as, and that’s what it continues to serve as.”
  — Abby [109:04]

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12. Media, Movies, and Narrative Control

• [113:09–114:44]
  • Abby reveals direct censorship and editorial influence from the Pentagon on Hollywood and even documentary representations of the military.
• Quote:

  “Anytime you see the military in TV or documentaries...they have final say and editorial rights on the script.”
  — Abby [113:38]

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13. Closing Thoughts & Call to Curiosity

• [116:00–117:17]
  • The hosts and Abby reflect on how, despite grim events, trying to “do their best” and remain curious—and skeptical—is essential to resisting propaganda and learning the truth.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Propaganda:

  "We are being asked to look at a larger structure and take it all into account ... attempt to figure out what does it mean to be human on Earth in 2026."
  — Julian [42:08]

• On Direct Experience vs. Received Narrative:

  “When I was there ... the government actually had extreme restraint ... opposition guarimbas were very violent ... Half the deaths were caused directly by protesters.”
  — Abby [59:28–60:38]

• On U.S. Power:

  “This is an ongoing genocide ... 500,000 people every single year die due to sanctions and embargoes alone.”
  — Julian [42:08]

• On Democratic Innovations in Venezuela:

  “... Meetings of thousands from local barrios ... mass discussions and democratic meetings ... they can continuously vote on a new constitution, on new referenda that get included.”
  — Abby [92:49–93:57]

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Summary Table – Important Segments & Timestamps

| Segment | Topic | Timestamps | |---|---|---| | 1 | Episode/Political climate intro | 00:44–06:13 | | 2 | Venezuela operation facts, press complicity | 06:30–09:37 | | 3 | Trump’s post-raid announcements & doctrine | 09:37–12:25 | | 4 | Information war, AI-generated disinfo | 12:25–18:18 | | 5 | Election conspiracies recycled | 19:45–24:49 | | 6 | QAnon language in official comms | 25:37–26:39 | | 7 | Interview: Abby Martin, ground reality vs. propaganda | 28:29–44:44 | | 8 | Context: Media, opposition, and U.S. patterns | 45:39–72:56 | | 9 | History of intervention, Chavismo, democracy | 85:03–99:06 | | 10 | On the raid itself, what’s next | 100:09–104:14 | | 11 | Escalation/future threats | 104:30–106:44 | | 12 | Abby Martin: "Earth’s Greatest Enemy" doc | 108:28–115:43 |

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Further Resources

• Abby Martin’s “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”: Find screenings, streaming info, and resources at earthsgreatestenemy.com.

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Final Takeaways

This episode serves as both a real-time primer on the Venezuela raid’s meaning and a critique of U.S. imperialism, media complicity, and the difficulty of sorting truth from spectacle in the digital age. Through Abby Martin’s reporting and the hosts’ personal histories, the show counters dominant establishment narratives, urging listeners toward skepticism, curiosity, and structural analysis—rather than falling for personality-driven propaganda or AI-fabricated “celebrations.”

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"Get curious. Question which Venezuelans you’re seeing, whose interests are being served, and who is narrating the events for you—and why."
— Julian Feeld [33:50]

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For more: visit QAA’s Patreon and check out additional deep-dives and related mini-series on Cursed Media.

Transcript

[A]

Sam, if you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast. Episode 354, Black Bag, Inc. Featuring Abby Martin. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky.

[B]

Julian Hasta. La Victoria Siempre Field, and Travis View.

[A]

Well, folks, Happy New Year.

[B]

Happy New Year.

[A]

And nothing fucked up has happened within the.

[B]

No, we're fine.

[A]

A couple days.

[B]

No, we're just having fun.

[C]

Remember the start of last year? It started with that other special force, operator BL himself, up in Las Vegas in a cyber truck.

[A]

And then my city caught on fire.

[B]

If I. If I can quote, I feel like Batman or Halo.

[C]

Yes. I was like, oh, this is absolute insanity. What a crazy way to start a year. But. No, but, boy has gotten crazier.

[B]

I feel like even us who are, like, in the business of, like, things getting more and more insane, especially in the news environment, we still are shocked in ways that almost puts us in that category where it's like, no way Donnie's gonna wriggle his way out of that one. Like, we're failing. We're failing.

[A]

If the last year has taught me anything, it's, like, how tame my expectations were for this second Trump admin. I sort of figured that it would kind of end up like the first one, that he'd be sort of hampered by investigations, and it would just kind of be sort of the performative as they sort of try to, you know, make him look more alive, you know, as the years. As the years ticked by. But, like, no, no, I feel I was so wrong in my expectations and that I really, you know, as Abby says later in the interview, like, you know, a couple of years ago, if you had said, oh, Trump's going to get a third term, I would be like, ah, that's just like, you know.

[B]

Yeah, I think. I think there is something to look at there. Yeah. Jake. Yeah. Thanks for bringing it up. Our guest is Abby Martin. We are obviously going to be covering the most insane news item that has dropped into our laps, like, in the last few days. We're back. It feels good to be back. I think that all of us are glad to be back podcasting and are grateful for our audience.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

We love you guys so much. Yeah. And, yeah, like, all I have to say is, like, I have some New Year's resolutions. Like, they are to fuck a lot more. You know, just. Just be, like, just be very, very sexual this year. Eat, like, new McDonald's burgers. Discover. Discover the menu. I guess I would say, like, If I was being Joey's world tour about it.

[A]

Learn the UI a little bit more, and then, Um. Travis, do you have any New Year's resolutions?

[C]

Uh, you know, it's a cliched one, but, like, I am. I am trying to get, like, be a little bit more disciplined about my exercise routine. You know, I go hiking. Like, I need to, like, like, push myself a little bit more. I've been getting into, like, Filipino martial arts. You know, it's with the.

[A]

Oh, cool.

[C]

With like. Yeah, the. The rattan sticks and stuff. And that's. That's good. Stretches my arms real well, so. Yeah, yeah, that's. I mean, it's a. It's a. It's a cliche for a reason, but, boy, yeah, I'm getting up in the year, so I need to. I need to move a lot more to keep things from falling apart.

[B]

Travis, I think you're going to be a really meaningful and powerful part of the movement. Thank you for. For. For that. Like, we need your body to be strong, and we need you to be kinetically violent in a Filipino style.

[C]

Okay, great.

[A]

I think my. One of my resolutions for this year is to stop trying to, like, like, read people's facial expressions.

[B]

What? You're trying to become more autistic?

[A]

I just. I am. So I think maybe it's because I went to, like, act school or so. Or did, like, theater. Theater as a kid that I'm always kind of, like, trying to figure out what's in people's heads.

[B]

That's it. It's getting in people's fucking heads. And then you're talking to yourself.

[A]

It's like, what are they thinking? And, like, what are they. You know, what do they think of me? What you're. What are they. What are they going to think of me? You know, that kind of stuff.

[D]

But.

[A]

But it also boils down to looking at somebody and going, oof, they hate me. Actually, that's a look of hate. You know, I think I'm. I'm wanting to leave that behind a little bit more in. In 2026.

[B]

Yeah. I think as. As you kind of like yourself, well, you realize that maybe part of the way you talk to yourself, like, is getting in someone else's head and then using their voice to somehow justify it.

[A]

So using their voice to also talk.

[D]

To you, like.

[A]

Your own voice isn't enough. You need two, three, four voices in addition to your parents that are talking shit to you at all Times.

[B]

That's right. 2026. Baby, we're back.

[A]

No, it's going to be. No, it's, it's, it's going to be. I don't know.

[B]

I don't think we can use adjectives that describe something as good in this moment, but I will say that like, yeah, I have hope and I appreciate you guys. I appreciate our audience and I appreciate our guest, Abby Martin. And I think that this is going to be a good first episode to launch the year and sorry that it took us a little bit of time to, you know, get back, but. Okay. Is it okay if we take 10 or 15 days off, like to love our families?

[A]

We're so tired. I'm so tired. I can barely announce the. Barely announce the military operation. I didn't really do anything about Hes Geth and.

[B]

Okay, well, I use a voice like, you know, in the way that we're describing before we launch into, into our little opening, you know, segment that will then lead to the Abbey Martin interview. I will say that if I were to do the Trump voice, I'd be like, oh, wow, that doesn't sound right. I really hope one of my. Fucking hell. I really hope one of my arteries clogs up. I really, I would love to have Julian me with a high powered.

[A]

All right.

[C]

Come on. It's like this is, this is embarrassing. In light. In light of Jake's well honed, well practiced impression. This is weak sauce.

[B]

I know, guys, I'm sorry.

[A]

Yeah, I didn't terrorize you guys in the tour van for nothing.

[B]

I think I'm getting worse.

[C]

Let's lay out just sort of the bare facts of the situation. So on the night of January 2, early into January 3, US time, the US launched what they called Operation Absolute Resolve, combining strikes around Caracas with a special operation to seize President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from a fortified location. Reuters of the Washington Post both describe months of preparation leading up to the raid, including rehearsals on a replica of the the compound and intelligence support, including CIA assets tracking Maduro's movements.

[B]

Travis, I heard this conspiratorial claim that the Washington Post was one of two of our major newspapers that knew about this before and hid the information until it was after the operation.

[C]

Anything on that's very unfortunate.

[B]

What was the other one? New York Times.

[C]

Oh, New York Times.

[B]

Interesting.

[A]

Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So the.

[B]

Yes, Jake, they knew the claim is 24 hours.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

They were like, guys, get your MacBooks ready.

[B]

Oh, no, I just think it was the, it was like the, you know how like they used to have like a Washington like press? What do they Call it like the people who are there to ask.

[A]

The press pool.

[B]

Sure, yeah. So this was just a CIA press pool and obviously the, the New York Times and Washington Post representatives, like deep inside Langley, they were just like, no problem, sir. Yes, sir.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yes, sir. Yes, sir, Commander. Yes.

[A]

That must have felt so cool, like going home that night and like whispering with your loved ones and being like.

[B]

Hey, you know what's going to happen?

[A]

You know what's going to happen?

[B]

You know what's going to happen? We're going to do an irreversible thing that is essentially the equivalent of every American imperial lie being printed on our dick, balls and asshole as our whole pants fall off at the middle of Times Square. Awesome. I love it, folks.

[C]

Reuters says that the operation involved more than 150 aircraft launched from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere. As of this recording, the official official Death count is 56 people. At least 56 people.

[A]

That's like, that's, that's dozens. Yeah, that's a lot of people, you.

[B]

Know, to my colleagues in the struggle, we have lost 56 people.

[C]

As of this recording, Nicholas Maduro and his wife are in US Federal custody in New York. Both pleaded not guilty at their initial appearance arraignment in Manhattan Federal Court on January 5th, and they are being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center MDC in Brooklyn while the case proceeds. Now, all that's very insane, but what really helped escalate the insanity is Trump's remarks after it, which he just, just, he just, he's really, he really has a real interventionist hard on right now. It's like he's been talking about, like what he calls the Don Row doctrine. He said American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again while floating or refloating pressure campaigns against multiple countries. He has argued that the US Needs Greenland for national security, citing Russian Chinese activity. And the White House has said that options for acquiring it are under review, including the military. He has attacked Colombia's President Gustavo Petro as sick and views that a US operation there sounds good. He has warned Mexico to get their act together about drugs and cartels and said that he has offered to send U.S. troops.

[B]

Read the Oswaldo Zavala book Drug cartels do not Exist and enjoy, folks.

[C]

He has claimed that Cuba looks like it's ready to fall, tying that to Venezuela's oil lifeline.

[B]

Oh, wow, I wonder what happened to Venezuela's oil lifeline.

[C]

He has continued his earlier line about reclaiming or taking back the Panama Canal, often framed around Chinese influence and beyond the Western Hemisphere. He has warned Iran that if authorities violently kill peaceful protesters, the US Would come to the rescue, saying that the US is locked and loaded, all alongside periodic nods to pass expansion talks, such as making Canada the 51st state. So this. This obviously boiled his old blood. He's very excited about that. It's very disturbing and sick. Jesus Christ.

[B]

I mean, obviously, yeah, we don't need to call Donald Trump stupid. We all fudgeing know. But this sentence really rules American dominance in the Western hemisphere. Will never be questioned again. Like, listen, we all knew. A lot of people knew what. What has happened, or I guess the history. But if you don't want it to be ever questioned again, you just literally opened. I think probably everybody in the entirety of Central and South America are currently questioning exactly that.

[A]

Yeah, he's like, we're going to build a big GI Joe base in the ice. That's what we want. We're going to build a lot of snow castles, secret bases. I was wondering what he could possibly want with Greenland, but if it's to build, like, a big surveillance, like, country.

[B]

No, no, it isn't. It isn't. They already have that. It's Pine Gap. It's. It's in Australia. It's part of the Five Eyes coalition. No, no, it's. It's oil, dude. It's oil. And they. And. Which is insane because even if you're like, the most cynical, dark fucking soul, like, extractor, Imperialist cunt. They started fracking again. We're doing, like, offshore fucking drilling. Like, drill, baby, drill. That was the whole thing. And now he's like, we also need Greenland. We also need. We also need Venezuela. We need everybody. We need everything. And it's like, what are you using the oil for at this point? Like, do you feed on it? Are you Baron Harkonnen? Do you need your fucking bath changed, dude?

[A]

He's. He's trying to become, like, the leader of Gastown from, like, the Mad Max universe.

[B]

Well, no, but that. That. That invol involved an actual lack of gas. This is. It's like watching someone who's lost control of their hunger. They're just ravenous and they also just fed to total completion. It's just like. It's psychotic fucking. There's never gonna be ever enough. It's the ultimate individualistic, like, final state. It's capitalism at its final state. It's consumerism at its final state. The Buddhists call it the realm of hungry ghosts. Desire will never end, my friend. You know? So, yeah, I'm Gonna. I'm gonna do some yoga with Trump, and I think we can fix all of this.

[C]

Within minutes of President Donald Trump announcing Maduro's capture, in the early hours of January 3, a flood of disinformation hit social media. Video clips and images, many of them AI generated or a purpose from unrelated events, started circulating. Now, I want to be clear. I live through, you know, the. The Iraq war and those events. I know you don't really need AI tools or social media in order to, like, you know, spread propaganda about a military action like this or to manufacture consent, but I think this is interesting because this definitely the most significant news event since the start of the AI era. And it's just interesting to see what. What that looks like.

[B]

Jon Stewart voice and half baked. Have you ever done the Iraq war on Twitter?

[C]

So I think one reoccurring sort of like, thing you saw was like, just this. These. These AI generated videos and images depicting false reactions and Maduro's kidnapping and exfiltration. For example, there was a doctored arrest photo which went viral, appearing Durrell being escorted in handcuffs by two DEA agents. In the fake photo, they have their faces blurred, and this is a dramatic scene that never actually occurred.

[B]

Yeah, because he's. He's kind of smiling. It's honestly, like, what's so funny is that they're creating propaganda for the Empire. And there's two ways to see this, right? It's like propaganda for the Empire would be like, we black bagged him. Here's the perfect black bag photo. AI, please help. The second one is like, maybe we could get him to smile in it, and then we could, like, claim something like, he already knew, like, this man was already working with us. Or like, there's different aspects to this, I think, that are worth being examined, which is that AI generates an image that is interpretable from, like, various different, like, lenses. But more than anything, it just takes up the space. It just takes up the space. It just jams everything up.

[C]

I think. Yeah, this is. I think one of the biggest sort of, like, consequences of AI sort of like, disinformation is that it's like, it's easier than ever to just flood the zone with shit. Is that, like, it takes zero effort to make a fake. So you could just make 20 of them in a, like, you know, like, like five minutes. And so all of a sudden, like, you know, it's. It's be so much easier to overwhelm the sort of the information space and sort of like, smother out any real information.

[B]

Travis I'm doing a little bit of like, kind of technical research and trying to get like a numbers figure here. How many Twitter accounts that are posting this shit, that are getting hundreds of thousands of like, views and retweets? What percent of those do you think is run from the actual psyop division of either JSOC, the DoD or the Army?

[C]

I don't know, Travis.

[B]

I need an estimate.

[C]

I don't think you do.

[B]

Well, I, I definitely do. I have a lot.

[C]

I think they have plenty of useful idiots who are willing to do this thing without actually being traceable to like, you know, their South Carolina or wherever they have the, the base there.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fort Bragg, Virginia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you know what? Fair, like obviously huge cop out, but since we're like, you know, friends and appreciate each other, I think we should keep going with the script.

[C]

AI tools were also used to churn out these short videos reporting the show Maduro's capture and some clips shared on TikTok and Twitter. Still images of the arrest were animated or stitched together to create the illusion of video footage. These fabricated arrest videos amassed hundreds of thousands of views within hours. And many trace back to digital creators on Instagram and TikTok who specialize in AI content. So there's like all these people who are like, all like, who are like, hey, I'm like a AI specialist. Like they're trying to create this information because like, that's like, attention for them. That's how they build an audience is making these fakes.

[B]

Joe Rogan voice Jamie, could. Could you bring up the AI company's source of funding?

[C]

Now, perhaps the most emotionally potent fakes were these videos that. That falsely seemed to show ordinary Venezuelans rejoicing in the streets at Maduro's downfall. One compilation video in particular went viral, claiming the show jubilant crowds in Caracas crying tears of joy and thanking the United States. In it, an elderly woman seen kneeling and clutching a Venezuelan flag, sobbing as on screen text proclaims, venezuelans take to the streets to celebrate Maduro's downfall. Young men and other snippets shout, the dictator finally fell. And another elderly woman exclaims her gratitude to Donald Trump. So this totally bullshit. But even Elon Musk amplified this video by retweeting an account called Wall Street Apes.

[B]

This is the point where I will say, this is an episode I'm very proud of. I think it's an episode that will probably shock you and I will just refer to what we talk about later regarding what you just Said Travis.

[C]

Not all the viral celebration clips were pure deepfakes. Some were just like, misrepresented footage. In one case, a video circulated on WhatsApp and Facebook that purported to capture Caracas residents cheering from their AP windows at dawn. The camera panned across, like, high rise buildings while unseen crowds supposedly shot.

[B]

Travis. Travis. How were they able to afford dawn? I thought that. I thought that the shelves were, you know, stripped of dawn. How are these Venezuelans trying to pretend to be hungry and they still have dawn?

[A]

Yeah. Only afternoon and sunset and sleep.

[B]

Yeah. That's all you fucking got. I mean, come on, this is a tight economy. Like, like, tighten your fucking belts.

[C]

So there was a fact check by the Spanish outlet Ife Verifica that revealed that this video was not shot in Carac, but actually Santiago, Chile. And there's, there's lots of. There are a handful of other examples of this where they show just, I guess, like Latino people celebrating, as they said.

[B]

Like, well, you know, people.

[C]

That's. That's. That's what is. That's what it was, basically.

[B]

Latino people.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Are Americans, like, sometimes aware that, like, everybody else, like, outnumbers them on Earth? Like, are they aware that, like, both China and India are over 2.6 billion? Do they ever think about how Central and South America, like, outnumbers them? You just don't. Yeah, it's just like, you see, like, like the map is actually, like, America. And like, it's like, would you like to pay 399 for the DLC to find out if there's any other countries?

[A]

Yeah, I think most people go, no.

[B]

Nah, man, I'm good, man. What the fuck? I hate dlc. I heard they. I heard they, they. They made the titties smaller.

[D]

Oh.

[A]

All the women, they've got hair under their arms in that. In that expansion.

[B]

They didn't even shave the underage dlc.

[A]

Oh, my God. Jesus Christ, dude.

[B]

Come on, Ma. The joke's not even.

[A]

Come on, man. No, no.

[B]

Steam is literally publishing underage girls. No. Yes, Steve Steam is publishing underage girls and Donald Trump is a pedophile rapist. No, no.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

My jokes are not even edgy anymore.

[A]

No, no, that's.

[B]

My whole job has been robbed.

[A]

No, I'm just. I'm just. I'm just saying. I'm just saying.

[B]

Yeah, it's a bit too much for our audience in 2016 and if we're. Or 2020.

[A]

Oh, you went back.

[B]

Oh, is it.

[A]

Gave up the ghost.

[B]

He went back too much because we're, like, happy New Year.

[A]

No, it's just I think Americans overall, like, we have to live with such cognitive dissonance that.

[B]

God bless you.

[A]

Any kind of, like, expansion of perspective. Yeah, I think is inherently not taught to us.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. But this is reading like, the. Like an article where it's like, IDF soldiers are experiencing ptsd. It's like, of course.

[A]

Yeah, of course.

[B]

Oh, ah, pardon me if my. My, you know, sympathy mechanism hasn't been activated.

[C]

Now, in addition to all that, some prominent pro Trump commentators are reviving false 2020 election conspiracy theories by claiming that recent US action against Venezuela was revenge for an alleged plot to steal the 2020 election via voting technology companies.

[B]

Travis, I don't have a joke here. I think that everybody involved needs to be okay.

[C]

So especially they were targeting smartmatic. So the founders of smartmatic were born in Venezuela. However, the company was founded in Boca Raton, Florida.

[B]

Yes, they're all fucking Guzanos. Like, they're on your side, you fucking piece of shit. You dumbass.

[C]

But some claim that the company had deep ties to the government of Venezuela, which is not true, and that the technology was used to rig the election in 2020.

[B]

I'm sorry. If we needed to research deep ties, do you think that it would just take us one night to black bag and helicopter somebody if there was some such a intense operation? Wow, these people are so sophisticated. Let's go back to the Cold War. Like, Russia is doing MK Ultra. We got to do it first. I see a pattern.

[A]

They're like, you got to unzip the bag from this side because if you. The zipper can get jammed if you unzip it from the other side. So, yeah, you're going to want to make sure it's facing away from you when you black bag the president.

[B]

Yes. Dude, I was waiting for it. I was like, I. I don't. I'm waiting for where it's gonna go. But I do like that, like. Like a really bad, badly translated guide to using an actual black bag. And it's like. And it's like, yeah, it's like, this is the cheapest Amazon black bag. Like, we used to have to pay a bunch of money.

[A]

Yeah, I was just, like, building on the fact that it's like months and months and months. They're like months and months and months just to send the biggest, like, psychopaths with, like, the most kills under their belt, like, you know, into a compound like, slaughter 40 people.

[B]

And, yeah, I know that, like, this is. There's no point talking to these people as if they're in good faith, right? Like, we're not talking about people who are accidentally pushing a lot of this stuff. A lot of it is very intentional, whether it's for their own growth, which is the best, by the way. The best way to create a truly fucked up state is to have a bunch of people who are thinking, I'm going to make a bit more money if I can get this to go viral. And I'm also reading where the state is and if the state is controlling the algorithm a little bit, even a little bit, which would be crazy because, you know, the guy running Doge is the owner of Twitter, that would be crazy. So obviously I'm not trying to be conspiratorial, but they are doing it without any knowledge of, like, the kind of central operation. Right? So, like the whole like, yeah, that's on a need to know basis. Like, you used to actually have to say that to people, but now they're just like, well, I'm going to make like, I don't know, fucking 600 more bucks this month on Twitter if I post the thing that it used to, you know, in like, 1955, like, the US had to pay tons of money and, like, actually get an artist to do.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

For example, the MAGA commentator Benny Johnson claimed that, quote, nicholas Maduro might be Trump's final revenge for the election theft of 2020 yourself.

[B]

Benny Johnson, you fucking. Fuck you.

[A]

Oh, boy.

[C]

Absolute insanity. Doesn't make any fucking sense. And then he went on to say this.

[D]

Ladies and gentlemen, Smartmatic and Dominion voting.

[A]

Systems were the voting systems being used.

[C]

At this time, time, and in these states and all around the world. They are Venezuelan by design and by.

[B]

Systems and storage facilities. And through their actual technology, these systems I have on extremely good authority can and do rig elections around the world.

[D]

Now, how does this lead us to.

[B]

The arrest of Nicholas Maduro? Well, Nicolas Maduro knows where all the.

[C]

Bodies are, because Buried Venezuela is effectively.

[A]

Just a proxy state that was being.

[C]

Run by Russia and China and Iran.

[B]

They were running operations here against America.

[A]

Using, yes, the election rigging technology.

[C]

So obviously absolute madness. But Trump himself got in on the action by amplifying a video promoting the smartmatic conspiracy theory. QAnon promoter Jordan Sather had to say this about Trump amplifying that video.

[A]

Trump shares a video about Dominion smartmatic machines rigging US elections last night, then shares a screenshot from drogo, essentially confirming that it's no cool coincidence he is posting on such matters right after Maduro is captured. Drugs may be an issue in Maduro's capture. But I think the real reason, and here's the key words, he thinks the real reason is that Venezuela was being used to launder election rigging technology by the deep state. Will Maduro be handing over goods to Trump about smartmatic slash Dominion voting systems and their election rigging?

[B]

I am. They're still talking about 20 fucking speechless.

[A]

Like five years ago.

[B]

They're fucking baking like the speech that includes the final solution. Like they're taking Mein Kampf and being like, well, what can we learn about this? And it's like, you got what you wanted, right? At least admit either you don't want this or don't make it. Fuck you.

[A]

Yeah, if it looks bad for us. Somehow I'm thinking that the real reason is something that's actually kind of aligns with the thing that I happen to, I happen to talk about in my videos.

[C]

But I think it's interesting how Trump is like, continues to signal to this most conspiratorial base, like just on truth, so social. But like his hasn't said this like publicly like in press pools, but just online. He keeps saying like, yeah, that's what's, that's why I'm doing this. I'm gonna blow the lid off of the election rigging of 2020.

[B]

Oh man.

[A]

He's like, good idea. I should have thought of that. But it now it's true.

[B]

I have a joke, but it's so unhinged that it would have, it would require so many beeps. Not because I'm just like adding to the same joke, but just because it has so many moments that need to be beeped that I can't, I can't even tell it. So you know what, if you're my.

[A]

Audience, you reach out to him privately and he'll tell you the joke.

[B]

If you're a QA listener, you can crowdsource this one. You can figure it out for yourself because it's never even going to exist because I can't say it. I can't say it.

[C]

Fantastic. So what's more than that? Official government accounts on Twitter have started to just straight up post like QAnon slogans. For example, on January 4, like the day after this operation, the Department of Labor account posted a close up image of Trump's face and the world words, patriots and control over it, which is like just absolutely a QAnon phrase. So it's like, ah, just not, not. I mean, it's not. Trump has, has posted QAnon shit over and over and over. Again, but, like, recently, like, yeah, now these. These official government outlets, government accounts have been doing it too, which is disturbing.

[B]

I think they've done way worse than post QAnon. I'm sorry. Like, there's the new government account, like, tone and just, like, communications and.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

It makes QAnon look like. You know, how we. We've described it rightfully as a blood conspiratorial movement.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

This makes that look like fucking child's play. This is like an actual fucking psychopath. It's like, if you opened a movie about a dystopia, this would read as overwritten.

[A]

I actually don't think anybody wants what is happening, but they're so far in.

[B]

A lot of people want what is happening, Jake. A lot of people want what is happening. And they've. They've wanted it for, I would say, at least 100 years, but we can probably go beyond that. Man, I wish they didn't. Right. Like, of course, like, most people are just focused on their lives, but the fascist project is a very long project. And I just. I'm going to say, you know, I'm going to drop a couple references. Like, I think it's important to look at Paperclip and early NATO leadership and just, like, the kind of through line like here. Like, and maybe actually ask yourself as well, like, why are we such good friends with Germany and Japan so quickly? And yet. Okay, at this point, Travis has cut me off. I'm talking to you from a side channel. This is not even the QA podcast anymore. Thank you for subscribing to my new PayPal. I've been banned, actually, from the United States and from our Patreon.

[A]

He can barely speak because the cane that's dragging him off of the stage is clinching his vocal cords.

[B]

Yeah, speaking of a cane driving us off the stage, I mean, I think we might drag off this intro from the stage and give place to our interview. What do you boys think of that?

[C]

Sounds like a plan.

[B]

Awesome. Ha ha ha. Enjoy. We're joined by Abby Martin. She has a long history of journalism, oftentimes journalism that is hard to find for some reason. And her latest project, of course, the Empire Files, is probably where you can find her for broader podcasting. And then, of course, she's a filmmaker who has recently released and is currently on a. A tour promoting her movie Earth's Greatest Enemy. Abby, welcome to the podcast.

[D]

Thank you so much for having me. It's a great honor to be here.

[B]

It's a great honor to have you on and I feel like despite my inability to take care of logistics and figure out a way to have you as a guest, like in the last seven years, I feel like there couldn't be a more appropriate moment to have you step on.

[D]

Absolutely, dude.

[A]

Yeah. I feel like I know you without having ever met Wise.

[B]

Is that. Cause I've talked about her so much.

[D]

Is it because we just talked. Yeah.

[A]

And. Well, we just did talk and we did see each other on camera for a little bit. No, just because, you know, of like Julian very early on introduced me to your work. You know, I'm also a big fan of Mike, you know. Thank you.

[B]

I know. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's just like I like the bundle.

[B]

Yeah. I'm not gonna get too sidetracked, but I met Mike at a Halloween, Halloween party. And the only reason that that we like started talking is because he was the only person at the whole party that recognized I was dressed as David Icke and he was dressed as Spider Man.

[A]

Oh my God, that is so funny.

[D]

He had an easy one.

[B]

Yeah. I started talking to him. I was like, wait, I kind of recognize this guy's voice or whatever. Anyways, that's how I know Mike. And who also works on Empire Files and Abby, Mike Prisner, of course you're familiar with if you're a listener. He did the incredible two parter Tulsi Gabbard and we've also had him on for various other pieces of great reporting.

[D]

Anyways, and you know what, how great is Tulsi?

[A]

And Tulsi, she's going on. She's doing great things.

[D]

She's doing great. You know, all of that was just so.

[B]

Everything that she said was so worthy of listening to. And now. Okay, let's not get sidetracked on that. We are here to talk about the fact that the United States of America, in an unprecedented move, even probably defeating the. The what people consider the dark era of the CIA that led to the Church Commission have helicoptered into a sovereign country. They used technology to suppress radars and surface to air missile defenses and they black bagged a president after killing what is estimated right now to be between 40 to 80 people, including some civilians. They kidnapped him and his wife. And this was of course the President of Venezuela and his wife.

[A]

And they bopped both their heads. Heads, sorry, they bopped both of their heads.

[B]

No, as far as I know, I don't know about any of that. But I know that his wife did does have rib injuries from what was probably a very violent JSOC operation involving canoeing. Everybody except for the presidential couple.

[A]

All I know is that I like rolled over in bed at like 10:15 this morning and opened CNN briefly. And it was like military officials say Maduro and was wife bumped heads trying to flee. And I'm like, oh, yeah, right, bumped heads.

[D]

Don't forget. It was self defense though.

[B]

It's like it's three, it's like three stooges. Their heads bonked together.

[A]

Yeah, it was like, it was like first they were able to escape the initial military assault, but they were both taken out by two swinging paint cans that, that a child launched.

[D]

It was like a home alone, like set up. It was like one of them is running down this way. The other one ran into him. Can you believe these guys?

[B]

Maduro has micro machine injuries on his, on his toes.

[A]

Oh my God.

[B]

Okay, all right, come on, let's. All right.

[D]

It's serious. Not a joke.

[A]

I turned back over and went to sleep. I was like, this is so up. Can't even deal with this process. I, I, I really can't process it. Like I was, I'm actually really looking forward to this episode. So you guys can like explain to me and make me feel worse or better or same as I did before the episode, either up to you. But please, what's going on?

[B]

To give a little bit of context just for listeners who maybe are familiar with our catalog but are not familiar with this issue. We've covered similar issues in the Secret History of Anti Communism Jakarta method episode. Obviously we've covered American interventionism in the past. It's not our main thing, but there are times in history where I think that it's worth hitting Travis and then bullying him until he lets me do something like this.

[A]

Well, I mean, it's added to the paranoia for sure.

[C]

I think it was like, this is, I think I'm really interested in conspiracism, but you can't really understand it outside the context of, you know, government corruption and covert action and, you know, criminal organization. I think that's, that's necessary for the, to understand some of the more wilder beliefs that emerge from, from the U.S. sort of like media sphere, 100%.

[B]

So Abby, you know, you have a very long history to give some context for listeners who might not know you on. I were talking about this topic with you. You have a long history of reporting on interventionism around the globe, including specifically interventionism in Central and South America. And you know, you're, you know, a specialist, but not just that you, you've done work on the ground there. You have actually done what a lot of our media refuses to do, which is just go and actually check if the adjectives and the way they're framing something makes any sense if you base it on something on the ground. Right. It's very easy for us to just say, hey, this foreign nation is insert. Whatever. Why. Why even pay attention to it? You know? And I think that. That we're seeing this a lot in the media reaction to this, where people are having to open their sentences with, well, of course, we all know that. And I just have one thing to say to those people. Fuck yourself. And get. Actually, that's not.

[D]

That's.

[B]

That's rude. Get curious is what I'll say.

[D]

Right.

[B]

So, Abby. Yeah. You have. You, you know, you have a lot of experience, including on the ground experience in several South American and Central American countries doing reporting, interviewing people directly, and being present for social movements that are often depicted as, I don't know, some sort of astroturfed or authoritarian brainwashing operation. So I just wanted to open with that. I want you to tell me what does it feel like to have had those experiences, maybe even get into the experiences, and how does that play into your perception of what's happened and what we're about to discuss?

[D]

I mean, being there on the ground obviously gives you a much different clarity, because before I went on the ground in Venezuela, even though I had had this knowledge and ideology and I had already studied in depth about the history of US Colonialism and ravaging and pillaging South Central America for centuries, I still in part, believed some of the propaganda. And I'll explain why. Obviously, as a media critic and someone who's been studying media propaganda for decades, I take everything with a grain of salt. And of course, you have to approach everything with a very critical mind, especially when you see the unanimity between. Between the liberal sphere and the conservative sphere of the corporate media parroting the exact same thing. For example, when you look at the media today, you will not see any media outlet that is subsidized by corporations talking or basically dissecting the propaganda put out that this is a dictatorship. There are extrajudicial assassinations, the political repression is dire, people are starving, da da da da da, this, that, and the other. And you're never going to see any differentiation between that core narrative that underpins the regime change. All you're going to see is kind of a distinction between, hey, this have not been the way we wanted to go about it. Like, maybe there should be some sort of process for this. Brazen coup. I'm horrified and disgusted looking at the capture. I guess after watching and being gaslit by the genocide for three years to now just have everyone kind of just swept up into this propaganda narrative and just have a redux of Iraq, Libya, everything. Well, Maduro's this. But what can you say about the Venezuelans dancing and celebrating the streets? It's like, didn't we learn, like this. Is this anecdotal nonsense? Which Venezuelans are we talking about? Which ones?

[A]

Yeah, they say this every time that they're out in the streets.

[B]

Yeah, of course. No, no, it's never, it's never too late to do the exact same thing over and over and never look into something. I would say, yeah, I was quite shocked and I've been quite shocked. And we'll get into this in a bit. I grew up partially in Venezuela. I spent two years living there as a teenager when I was 14 and 15. And I've also returned there many times over. I have family roots there. And that's something that we'll get into in a little bit. So it's true that the way that this is talked about has been shocking. Obviously there's the aspect of like disinformation where you're just going to post like a video of some other crowd gathering and being like, look how they're all celebrating the thing we did. Or straight up AI where it's like, look at this. Purely constructed by GPU in some fucking.

[D]

Data farm that Elon Musk was literally sharing.

[B]

You know, it's supposed to be, of course, a Venezuelan grandma crime, you know, about how happy she is that this man has been removed from office. And we're not here to be clear. I'm not here first to equivocate on whether this action was correct or not. This is not an action that has an excuse. No matter what the math is on the money behind it, or even the intentions of American empire or even what you think of a specific leader. There's no excuse for doing this. This is the behavior of what Americans have accused people for years of being. Authoritarian, axis of evil, fascist, all this shit. This is purely an expression of that. And so I'm not here to kind of like equivocate on, on any of that.

[D]

No, no, I think, I think that this is where Kim Jong un, I would have the exact same response. It's like we can talk all day about the Bolivarian Revolution and Maduro and the legitimacy of, of the presidency. That's not the point at all.

[C]

The point is not the point that.

[D]

We should not allow this lawless insanity and this aggressive blueprints of black bagging a foreign head of state.

[B]

Yes. Which is a very western idea. Right. It's like, well, we're actually trying to figure out the finances and the ethical conversation around doing something that is literally listed in the Geneva Convention as a war crime and a crime against humanity. And we're going to ignore the fact that we're talking about an insanely unilateral power structure where One country has 800 plus military bases all around the world outside their territory, and the other has at the tallest, second place, place 20 to 30 is the estimate for Russia. So we need to just kind of keep that, I think, that larger structure of understanding in place so that we understand why these conversations and why the media is being dishonest by framing it. And it's not always dishonesty because sometimes they're just going, well, I don't like this leader. Fine, great. You have your right to not like a leader or like a leader or not like their policies or like a policy. The point is, if you're spending half your tweet or even part of your tweet saying this after somebody did a clear Geneva Convention war crime, you know, in contravention of like basic sovereignty of another country, you are part of the problem. You, you are advertently or inadvertently, you are opening the conversation saying, there's a version of this. That's okay. There is no version of this that is okay. So I will open with that and then I'm sorry, I got a little carried away. So. Yeah. Abby. Yeah. Please resume answering the previous.

[D]

No, I think it's really, I think it's a very, very important point. And it is amazing to see how the diaspora of certain countries are exploited and weaponized. I mean, look at the Cuban diaspora. Look at the lobby here. How the undue influence of the Cubans.

[B]

Well, you don't like Gusanos? The beautiful Gusanos.

[D]

You don't like the Gusano, baby?

[B]

No, my favorite is like the, the. It's like for me, when I, when I hear gusano or when I hear someone like that talk, it's like I just hear the beautiful boaters. Like, it's like a Trump. Like, it's like they're all just like on a yacht somewhere and they're like, well, my opinion about this. And it's like no one gets, gives a shit. You have no material interest in this. And the only thing you ever do is call for a violent military intervention. By the most powerful colonial power in the world. So yeah, yeah, yes, yeah. It's frustrating.

[D]

They're worms. I mean, it's crazy that that is the perspective that's given the most weight. I mean, it's not crazy, it's very obvious. But it's just so amazing that I see well intentioned people, people who are, are liberals who get very confused about this notion because no one, one likes tyranny, no one likes dictatorships. Right. We all want freedom. And so it's very confusing when you see these terms thrown around and, and without any. It's so obfuscated and obviously purposefully so. So I want to just explain why I was captured by some of the propaganda because it wasn't just cnn, msnbc, it wasn't just the New York Times. It was literally going by nutshell.

[B]

It wasn't.

[D]

It was Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that were parroting these claims from the opposition that I just took completely at face value.

[B]

Yeah, there's an NGO structure, of course. These are ways to launder what they call soft power. This is not something that I'm just kind of theorizing about. This is documented and factual information about the choices that were made by these organizations and their evolution from a more violent. Well, actually maybe we're back there, but a more violent soft power of the 60s and 70s to the softer approach. Approach these days where what you do is you go in there as a human humanitarian. And the idea of humanitarianism. I did want to take a little moment to address that. The idea of humanitarianism is inherently flawed. It means that you are outside of the project of well being for a community. You do not exist within that society. I don't think nation is really like interesting in this case, but I mean a group of people that have common interests and relate to each other and are wanting to live good and safe and happy lives. Humanitarianism is an inherently colonial idea, which means that you can give charity if you're nice enough, if you're liberal, if you have that kind of goodness in your heart to go to another country and essentially provide, let's say, medical supplies or food or whatever. Right. But it kind of ignores the idea that that is an inherently condescending approach to the world. And what it masks, that condescension masks the fact that these countries are often dealing with two prongs of the same interests. Right. So you'll have the NGOs coming, coming in that are all funded and run and staffed by people that I've gone to school with like in, you know, whatever, like Europe, United States, like all of these kind of quote unquote, first world nations and the Western world in general, and this kind of power structure that we exist in, this imperial core, and at the same time, the government and the military of those same countries is actively destroying and killing aspects of their infrastructure. They're killing people for having ideas. And they're at the very least using the international structure of money, which by the way, is a structure that was built in the wake of World War II and is centered around, of course, the central currency, the dollar. They're using that structure to buy. And this is not my claim. This is the Lancet, which is, I think all well meaning liberal white people will agree the Lancet is a good outlet. But the Lancet estimates that 500,000 people every single year die due to sanctions and embargoes alone. This is an ongoing genocide. This is not some new piece of like dropping news. This is not. There's nothing sensational here. We are being asked to look at a larger structure and take it all into account and attempt to figure out what does it mean to be human on Earth in 2026 and moving forward, how can we find meaning moving forward and figure out how? Our tweet. How are we going to word our tweet?

[D]

Well, I mean, I think that you just laid something out really devastating, which is that's the status quo, is that.

[B]

No, it's completely invisible.

[D]

Yeah, just. Just being killed for no reason because of this economic asphyxiation. Yes, but it's not just the NGOs that are fit within the structure of what you're talking about. It's also leaning heavily, and I think this is just a natural extension of that apparatus that you just explained, Julian, is that all of these people who go and work, who are loyalists or working on behalf of USAID or ned, they go to these countries and then they just consult with opposition figures and they liter take those claims at face value, sitting sometimes just in hotels because Caracas is so dangerous and that, you know, when the murder rate was the highest, they didn't want to walk around and talk to anyone. So they just literally take it at face value and print it.

[B]

Yeah, it's complete. It's complete horseshit, by the way. Like, I've walked downtown Caracas and been around there and I saw the arrival of Chavismo and I don't want to kind of like get too far ahead of myself, but the way these foreign countries are depicted, people do that joke about Hollywood movies having the yellow what do you call it? Like, the Mexico lens or whatever, where they just suddenly, like, the plot is happening in Mexico, and for some reason, all the scenes are kind of yellow. Yeah, we are. To simplify it, we are blind. And we are blind sometimes by choice, sometimes because our lives are difficult, because we are actually oppressed by our own upper classes within our country structure, but also because we are fed nonstop movies and we're told, stay busy, stay moving. And we're. We're told stories about these countries that I've seen the. The stories that we tell ourselves now from this country. Right now, I'm in the United States, but I've seen those stories from within the actual country that the story is about, from other white people telling me the thing. And it's. It's. I think you. You get this kind of dissociative, or at least, like, if. I think if you're curious, you'll start to look into things. I'd put it that way.

[A]

Well, it's crazy, too, because, like, when this whole thing went down, the thing that got talked about the most, or at least that I saw on social media, was like, oh, look how many outfit changes. It was like, whoa, look at the rip. And, yeah, look at the fit.

[D]

And like, how.

[A]

How did he do that for everything's aesthetic.

[B]

It's nothing.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, we're so normalized. I was thinking when you guys were talking about, like, they literally came in they black bag, this guy. I remember I had a neighbor of mine who also got black bagged when we were children and taken to, like, a different country to go to, like, you know, troubled youth camp. And I was like, wow. I was like, black bagging is so Norma. Like, we do it to the kids to, like, take them to camp, you know? Like, that's like. Like, he got. He, like, got carried out in the middle of the night, kicking and screaming.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it was like, yeah, yeah. And the parents stand, oh, we're so sorry.

[B]

Yeah. And then 20 years later, you're like, oh, it was Synanon, and these people are, like, murderous rapists. Does this sound familiar? That. That maybe right now we could have a perspective that would actually match the fact that every 20 years we find out that 20 years ago the whole fucking structure was. Was run by murderers and rapists who blacked out bag people. Maybe you want to, you know, open a history book that wasn't written by someone who's lived their entire fucking life in the Harvard yard trying to sleep with underage students.

[A]

But we're. Yeah, we're so far from even. I think the general people, especially if you're online, are so far away from, from even recognizing.

[B]

I think it's outside of our range of understanding.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like if you, if you are a victim of propaganda and this includes everybody. I'm not trying to say like, you know, everyone. Everyone knows I love to bag on Americans, but everybody is capable of. And there's a moment where you're going to see a weird divergence in what you're experiencing and what you're being told. And at that point you can either, either choose to be curious, you can choose to investigate. Sometimes you have professional tools to do so. Sometimes you're a journalist, sometimes you're a documentarian, sometimes you spend years of your life writing a book about it, whatever. Sometimes you're just a citizen and you're going to get to that point. And I think that's the point of divergence where I would say trust your curiosity at the very least. And on this show we've had a lot of moments where we're like, well, sometimes curiosity just means you go on YouTube and you start to believe that there's a plan to save the world and that Donald Trump is actually undercover destroying the pedophile, like, pet of our cabal. Right. Sometimes curiosity means that. And sometimes this idea of like citizen journal journalism, it's been perverted a million times over. So we just, I think it's important after maybe 700 or, I don't know, fucking, what have we done? 800 episodes?

[C]

800 plus. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

To just, to just make a distinction there.

[C]

Right.

[B]

We are not saying, saying like, do your own research in the QAnon sense. We're saying, have you considered that there are other talented and dedicated journalists that exist in other countries that maybe are worth quoting more than the Washington post guy collecting $600,000 a year who has never visited the countries he's covering. Have you considered that? That's my challenge.

[A]

I think you should keep bagging on Americans, actually.

[B]

We deserve, I mean, well, there'll be plenty of that. Don't worry.

[A]

They don't teach us anything about other countries, like in school growing. They're in square dancing. I think there's like a Euro trip where you have to plan like a vacation to Europe or something. And that's kind of the big 8th grade project. You don't really learn anything about other. I mean, the most I knew about Venezuela like, you know, up until like kind of recently maybe shamefully, is like that. That's where they. The spider. Sorry.

[B]

That's where the.

[D]

What?

[B]

No, finish it. Finish this. Go on, spider.

[D]

Go on.

[B]

Come on, Jakey.

[D]

That's what Jerry Manley.

[A]

Jerry Manley goes in arachnophobia. He goes to Venezuela to photograph the giant spiders, but then he gets bit and they send it back to Conniva. And that's how. That's how arachnophobia happens is that the house spider mates with a Venezuelan spider, supposedly biggest in the world. Size of a dinner plate. Huge spiders in Venezuela.

[D]

You guys, this is, you know, the whole America first Maga. Yeah, that's the whole chuds who love. You know, they hated regime change. Trump was the peace president. Tim Pool just said, you guys, the US economy is about to boom because tons of free oil are heading our way. Is this the baby brained insanity that like these people actually think this is how the economy.

[B]

I'm very. I'm very. I'm very sorry to tell you, Abby, that it actually is because the people who determine stock prices and the price of materials in our economy are exactly like him. And so if they get excited, price go up. If they change their feelings, go up. If they change their feelings, DXY go down or up. They change the value of the dollar based on their sentiment. So yes, we're a nation of. And it's not just the United States, but an empire, I'd say of like stupid babies who are. Our feelings are dictating the price of fucking flour for people who can't afford it. And for us, it's like it's something that we pull up on an app and that we trade.

[A]

Yeah, we're a nation of men in tight little hats and the hats are cutting off the circulation.

[B]

Come on. Come on, guys. I was to trying. I was trying. Come on, everybody. I was trying to be. I was trying to not alienate our American audience. We have an American on the podcast. We have Adam.

[D]

Yeah, come on, you guys.

[B]

I mean, Jake. Jake, Rock.

[A]

I'm American. Jake.

[B]

Yeah, we have an American on the podcast. We have Travis view. Who are you calling a trader?

[D]

Wait, Drake.

[B]

I'm the only non American. So I'm. And I'm the one calling for some restraint so that we can continue to cover the actual specifics of what we're doing. Let's please try to get back on topic. Abby, we'll stop interrupting.

[D]

Okay, so let. Let me get on of top topic by explaining to you why I was hoodwinked. Because before I went. Because. Let me just full transparency, you guys. I was selling a show for Telosur. Telosur is a Latin American conglomerate of I think six different Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba. It was created as a counterweight to just the corporate media hegemony that was dictating the futures and narratives for these Latin American countries that were coming out of the shackles of colonialism and this savagery from for centuries. So I, I was proud to work with Telesaur, but I was also very crystal clear and wide eyed about what the fuck I was stepping into. And I wanted to really prove my editorial freedom and integrity because I knew that if I just went there with some rosy lens, I would never be taken seriously again. So I went there with the motive to basically tell exactly what I saw on the ground. I didn't have any handlers and I went completely independently. And what I was most shocked by is that before I went this was when the opposition won the first election since Hugo Chavez. So I think within 20 the opposition couldn't get enough power or popular support to actually win any elections. And the corporate media had been painting Chavez, subsequently Maduro, as not only a narco trafficker, drug kingpin. This is what Hugo Chavez warned us about. He said that they were going to apply the Noriega method to him, which was exactly why we invaded Panama.

[A]

Can you guys quickly explain what you mean, what you mean when you say the opposition? I'm just like, I know nothing.

[B]

That and the Noriega method, please. Yeah, yeah, ok.

[D]

So. So Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset that we were friends with, kind of similarly to been lauded, not the rapper.

[B]

Yeah, Jake, come on.

[D]

And then anyone who remembers, I mean they probably, it's probably been so memory hold to Americans, but the US invaded Panama in a bloody invasion. There's still mass graves being found today. And this was under the pretense, the absurd pretext that again similarly to Maduro, that this was like taking down some sort of drug trafficking operation and that Noriega was this drug kingpin. So it's just a very disgusting redux of just overt colonialism that that caused such devastation in the country that people are still have remembrance stays digging up bones of the relatives. And Americans don't even know that that happened because it's just a dime a dozen. But for the entirety of this situation, the advancement of the Bolivarian Revolution, the corporate media has been saying the same exact thing, that it's a dictatorship, that he's a thug, that people are starving. It's always been the same narrative. Even though the Jimmy Carter center, which you know, monitored the freedom of Elections all around the world. Said in 2012, I think that Venezuela had the freest election in the world, the most transparent electoral system in the world. So whatever is happening today, you can't look at it in a vacuum without looking at the demonization of these people, of basically every leftist leader in Latin America. And it's always the same script, no matter what. So when I went there, I was like, oh my God. This was when the opposition. And to explain what the opposition is, there's a lot of opposition to obviously the Bolivarian movement. However, none are strong enough to gain enough popular support to mobilize the masses in order to win elections. Okay, so the PSUV is Maduro's party. That's the strongest left base in Venezuela and they have millions and millions of chavistas who will die for the revolution.

[B]

Yeah. To give people some context in a country that maybe Americans are less propagandized about, this is the equivalent of the Partido Trabalhador in Brazil. And the last two presidents that have existed, including the current president, have been imprisoned and tortured at different times. But Bolsonaro personally oversaw the torture of Dilma Rousseff and then the removal from power with these kind of corruption charges. So we're talking about, you know, like oftentimes a battle or a battle or a struggle, I'd say, between people who have literally been the torturers and people who have gone to jail, been tortured and then still, still have the, the incredible dignity and nobility to participate in an electoral process after experiencing things that you and I will never even begin to understand. Like having your genitals electrocuted.

[D]

No, this is like ISIS style savagery for decades. I mean. Yeah, basically like that. I mean it's like ISIS style executions, murder, cutting, beheadings of. It's like really, really insane what U. S trained mercenaries and people were doing to these, these countries. Wide scale massacres. This was like when they talk about the Monroe Doctrine being revived, like to them it's a funny joke.

[B]

It's the don row.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, like to them it's like, oh, haha, we want to like impose our hegemony on the, on our hemisphere. But it's like to, to Latin America, that's isis. Like that is their isis.

[B]

Yeah, you're being, you're being told like part of your family is going to disappear and we're going to rape and kill them.

[D]

Yeah, it's like, you want to talk about the Jakarta method, like that's when this was happening.

[B]

But to Donald Trump, it's an AI created cartoon that portrays him stepping over South America, which I'm not joking, that literally was posted by the White House account.

[D]

No, it's, it's disgusting. It's disgusting. So the PSUV was an embodiment of the sovereignty and independence movements originating from Simone Bolivar and the entire. Just throwing off the shackles of colonialism in Latin America. So you had the, you know, the emergence of the pink tide, the reclamation of, of sovereignty from these left or left leaning leaders. And Hugo Chavez was probably the most powerful one because he just had so much stamina, he had so much popular support and he transformed economy. He really did. And he lifted millions of people out of poverty.

[B]

Before we progress down a description of Hugo Chavez, which we have to do, I think we should just go back for one second and give the context that Hugo Chavez was not a person who started to appear on TV and then people loved this guy and then his ideas were listened to. He was part of an integral movement and never a kind of the single figurehead, like, I don't know, like, I guess Donald Trump of a kind of a visual spectacle that then yields a set of policies that are kind of invisible to the people. But then also. Let's go back before we get into Chavez, to the opposition that I think. Yes, just to finish that. Yeah, finish that, yeah.

[D]

So the opposition, I mean, when we talk about the opposition, there's a lot of factions obviously and there is a lot of left opposition now to Maduro just because of the effects of the crippling of the economy, the sanctions. It's been absolutely devastating. And so.

[B]

Well, yeah. Have you ever been to a DSA meeting? Like it's going to be like a Trotsky is being really annoying and arguing with a Maoist and they're both from Portland.

[D]

But when we, when we talk about the opposition, it's like we're not, it's not to paint them with a broad brush, but I would say the strongest faction of the opposition that would fill the power vacuum if the psub was forcibly removed from power would be fascism. And it's a right wing power vacuum. When we're talking about Maria Machada and Mundo Gonzalez, this is a woman who, you know, won the Nobel Peace Prize, who just dedicated. She's like throwing it at Trump because she desperately wants to be the new president and he's just like, she can't manage the country. This is a woman who represents exactly what we're talking about in 2002 when Hugo Chavez was, was couped at the Barrel of a gun during the Bush administration. And he was kidnapped for three days. Maria Machada and all of these people that you still see milling around today had the Carmona Decree ready to go. The Carmona Decree was basically to dissolve the constitution and sell every last drop of oil along with every single other, you know, vestige of natural resources and sovereignty to multinational corporations. Corporations. And so this woman represents exactly what the opposition represents, which is just complete fire sale, privatization of everything and a removal and eradication of the social gains, which would leave millions of people into destitution and poverty again. And also potentially sheep for the slaughter.

[B]

Sorry, what do you mean by. By. By sheep for the slaughter?

[D]

Because these people are targets of political violence, actually. So when we hear that, you know, Maduro is this thug who goes and just assassinates political opponents. Actually, when I was there, I found that the opposition, armed to the teeth. We're talking about an opposition party that has received tens of millions of dollars through usad, through the US Government channels, including Maria Machota for decades. These are people who are armed, who actually do commit political assassinations, who do firebomb, maternity clinics, schools, socialist enclaves that represent the psu. I saw it firsthand.

[B]

Yeah, I don't think the average American would think, hey, you know that Juan Guaido guy that Nancy Pelosi paraded in front of Congress and allowed to make a speech? His movement, which was a minority movement, set three people on fire in the street, on video and killed them. They immolated three people.

[A]

That's crazy.

[D]

And they said, hey, black guy, this is what we do to Shavistas. And they lit him on fire.

[A]

And he's friends with Nancy Pelosi.

[D]

Oh, Juan Guaido was like, dude, he was. I given like a speaking tour.

[B]

I know she's got big knockers, Jake, but come on, why did.

[A]

Come on, why does nobody else know this?

[B]

Well, please reference earlier in the conversation.

[D]

Yeah, but before I went, it was the height of the protests. 200 people were, quote, unquote, killed in the streets by Maduro's forces. I kept seeing over and over again on like CNN and all these other news networks that this one of Maduro's like, armed forces was going and just running over protesters. Like, literally, I kept seeing this, this image and my mom was just like, holy shit, why are you going there? Like, please don't go there. You're going to die. And I was just like, I'm going to go find the truth, mom. And so I like one when you're there and I'm in the middle of these protests and I was like, I'm going to go talk to these opposition protesters. I'm going to go in the middle and actually find out what the hell is going on. What you realize is that the government actually had extreme restraint. These opposition guarimbas were very violent. They were setting up giant flaming barricades. I saw opposition protesters armed, by the way, they have homemade arms, that they were shooting and killing people. Half the deaths were caused directly by protesters. Field executions, running people off the fucking freeway with these flaming barricades. I saw them commandeer an 18 wheeler, drag the guy out, take over the car. Holy shit was insane. And it took hours and hours for the government to respond at all. And when they did, they just, you know, they threw tear gas at us. And I was like, oh, my God.

[B]

Well, yeah, no, no one's going to pretend that the government is effective. Let's be honest. Government. Government takes some time. It's. It's hard for structures to respond. But I don't think that many people know that this is like the actual documented on the ground reality, supported by a video and facts. And if you step out of some of the sources that you are familiar with, and I'm not talking about going to follow Joe M. Or, you know, QAnon guy on, on YouTube. I'm talking about like, again, people like you, Abby, who, who were there on the street. And to. To give some context for Americans here, I guess, equivalent of, let's say, and this is a tiny micro example, what if Antifa had set on fire three different MAGA supporters in like, like, broad sight, and we watched them burn to death. What do you think the media would say? Because they're already saying it without any body count. In fact, there's an opposite body count where we're being asked to believe that someone like Kyle Rittenhouse is allowed to shoot two people just because he later will find out that they had a criminal record. Which I'm not defending them as people, but we're talking about a dissociation and a kind of, like, divergence of coverage and treatment that is so extreme that it's hard sometimes for people in the west who live in these countries to even begin to grasp it. You are going. You're gonna. You're gonna become covered by us. We're gonna call you a conspiracy theorist. QAA is gonna cover you, dog. If you, if you go to parties, no one's gonna wanna hang out with you.

[D]

There's tons of protests and, and, and I'M not trying to say that there are not legitimate protests like there are. The point is that the government allows them, like because our media tells us the government represses protests. They'll kill you if you have a difference of opinion.

[B]

That would be crazy if they did that.

[D]

Insane.

[B]

That'd be crazy if America, like repressed protests. I just saw a video of someone arrested on the street while she's talking about how she doesn't.

[D]

Oh yeah, that was amazing.

[B]

Maduro was supposed to be black bagged and the, I think it was black bags. A large American outlet. But two, two guys just step up, they go, yeah, you're being arrested for, you know, obstructing a path or whatever. So you're watching an image, right, where a young, young woman, a young woman of color in the United States is being pulled off a sidewalk, having an interview with a mainstream American platform and charged with like, you know, ridiculous weird shit and taken away, just disappeared again. And who knows what the fuck the, the, the rest of that process looks like. But this is the story that we are told about everywhere else in the world. That's how they do it.

[D]

Yeah, but, and, and I, and I looked through Julian, but what I was telling you is I looked through the death records because I kept hearing this number that was repeated BY, by the NOS, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, 200 people killed by Maduro's forces, just repeated without question. And so I actually found out more than half were killed by opposition forces. I looked through all the death records. They were including 13 people who died getting electrocuted, looting a bakery as being murdered by Maduro.

[B]

Yeah, Jesus, that's kind of tragic because I do think, I know it's, you're trying to get some bread and then.

[D]

You'Re trying to get some bread.

[B]

Hey, all your homies, all your homies are gone.

[D]

That was a, that was a, yeah, sad mass, mass casualty event. Not Maduro's fault, I would say. But what was interesting is that my colleagues who also were working for Telosaur, you get hammered in these opposition protests and people are just like, who are you with? You know? And if you say Telosaur, you could get killed and lynched on the spot. So I, I, I, I was safe because I was just like, I'm American. Like, I'm American. And they're just like, oh, okay, great. Like, we're being murdered, we're being repressed, we live in a dictatorship. And I'm just like, okay, so what, you know, who are you? What do you want? And they're Just like I want to be an entrepreneur, I can't be a business owner in this country. That was what one guy told me as he was like holding grenades. And then, and then my friend later they found out she was working with Telos and they actually shot her in the back. She had a bulletproof vest on. They tried to kill her and then they just kept throwing like fire. They, they got her in a ditch and then just tried to set her on fire. They doused a Global Vision journalist with gasoline and tried to light him on fire. When they found out that Mike and I were working for teachers Telesaur, they sent a virtual lynch mob. I have thousands of people telling me, you will be lynched, we will lynch you. Who talks like that if you're not a fascist psychopath?

[B]

What do you mean? Like, in terms of like you're receiving thousands of messages online saying we will lynch you and kill you. Like we did that? Yes, it's very reminiscent of like if you read the Jakarta method, like Jakarta is coming thing that became a kind of right wing graffiti that they would put on the wall. And it was a reference to a 1 million person genocide in Indonesia which we've obviously we've covered and had Vincent Bevins on. So yeah, there's that kind of, of course, because there's so much, I think, information about like actual physical, direct violence. Like we kind of tend to ignore other forms of threats and violence that are constantly repressing and discouraging anybody from looking into this, speaking up about it, becoming a journalist that might care about this. So yeah, you're saying thousands of people were threatening your life personally online.

[D]

And it was really scary because I was like, this is a rabid, like psychopathic reaction for really reporting the truth. And I was like reporting exactly what, what Maduro's forces were doing. Like I reported the deaths that, that the soldiers committed. I reported it all.

[B]

So let's prove that, that we're, you know, being extremely fair here. You looked into the death records, you looked into the specific situations. What percent of the deaths that were reported constantly across all western media and parroted by everybody, what percentage of those actually could be fairly attributed to Maduro, which is of course a president who has a military. So we're talking about a big scale here.

[D]

Yeah. Like Padrino's forces. Yeah, I mean, basically I would say 30. Around 30%.

[B]

Okay, well that's interesting.

[D]

And guess what? The vast majority of those soldiers were prosecuted and arrested.

[B]

Really?

[D]

Yes, absolutely. Because they were such extreme examples. I mean it was Such an. It was such a national scandal and it was such an international scandal that they had. I mean, I don't know if they would have. If it was. Wasn't. But, like, the point is that they were. And that one video that I told you about of the car that was running over someone that they kept showing over and over again on the news. What you didn't see in that video, right before they showed us the video was a protester throwing a molokatava cocktail and actually lighting on fire. The guy driving the car, the guy was on fire. Literally.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[D]

It's like the scene in Manhattan cannot make this up.

[B]

It's like the scene in Manhunter where the guy's like, rolling down the hill in the. In the. But then if they. Imagine if. Yeah, the scene in Mantur, it's like it's a guy on fire in a wheelchair and. But they cut it. So you never see the guys on fire in a wheelchair. They're like this poor guard at the entrance of a parking lot, like, was assaulted. Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. Yeah, let's keep going.

[D]

No, I mean that it was a horrific situation and very startling. And as I was in Caracas, I kept hearing also that the media is totally controlled, that you can't say anything, you'll be arrested. The vast majority of media in the country is opposition controlled. So when I say opposition, it means big business, business owners. You know, it's the same thing everywhere. But it's like, it's crazy that this narrative is peddled when it was the exact opposite. All I saw were newspapers being like, Aus Maduro, like Padrino's the equivalent of Hitler. And I was just like, what in the hell? What is going on?

[B]

And so I will. I will start to give some context in my own personal experience here. You know, I lived in Venezuela when I was 14 and 15, and then I lived in Brazil for the remaining three years of high school before I graduated and went to the. The beautiful nation of Canada where I found snowboarding and marijuana. But before that I was there, right? And my environment was definitely not a leftist environment. And that's not to bag on my family. It's just like that just wasn't the vibe. Like you read the English speaking paper and you kind of just said the stuff that everybody was saying to each other in fear that the people that you're talking about are going to take your house and not allow you to, like you said, run your business or whatever. My family to kind of work back a bit. Little, Little Bit there. When I was probably about five years ago, before my grandfather died, he was in his late 80s. I found out something that I cannot believe it took me that long to find out. My grandfather, as soon as I was conscious and again, living in Caracas, Venezuela. My grandfather was a person who, you know, and again, like, respect for addicts. I have my own struggles with addiction and alcoholism, but my grandfather was someone who drank rum first thing in the morning because he couldn't afford the whiskey anymore and would just fight with a family, family at the dinner table. And, you know, he was never like, I guess like a wife beater or anything like that, but it was just the vibe was rancid. And his job was taking around other Americans in Venezuela to fish for rainbow trout in this lake. And so I was like, well, that's. Those are my grandparents. But then I was always like, why.

[D]

Why are we here?

[B]

Why is my. Yeah, why are we here? Like, why is my family like, like white people here? Like, I kind of like, just. I don't know. I'm sorry, but as a teenager, I just didn't have enough curiosity. I just hadn't put it together. But when I. When I was way, way, way later in life, my grandfather. So true. I was like, pussy. That's the only thing I'm thinking about. But no, so, like, way, way, way later, fast forward. My grandfather is now in a state of, like, kind of advanced alcoholism. He's had a big kind of crisis regarding his health, and he's again, rip, I love you, man, but this was a man who was past 80 and drooling and making very little sense at this point. But this was the first time in my whole life, after probably 35 years, that I found out something about my grandfather that I probably. I can't believe. I didn't know because my mom never told me. There's a lot of silence. There's a lot of silence in these kind of generations of expats and people who were involved in, like, colonialism and stuff. And anyways, my point is, we were there with my sister and her boyfriend, and her boyfriend literally did like a, like, we're having small talk type shit to my grandfather. He said, hey, what, like, what are you in? Like, do you do, like, you know, just. Just being respectful. And my grandfather said, well, I was the head of petrochemical for Monsanto in South America.

[D]

And you're like, oh, God, I thought you were a trout farmer.

[B]

Well, not even. It's not that I ever thought that his politics were good or that we didn't have some roots in the situation or anything, but I can't believe it took me. And I was probably mid-30s at this point. I'm, you know, I have my own politics. Like this is, you know, I actually at that point I had already written a novel set in Venezuela. Like I, Right. You know, like I, I was curious about this thing, but this had never come up in my entire family history on any dinner table or, or through any of that before. And it, it came up because a total stranger who by the way, my sister does not see anymore and I love her new husband. Love you, buddy. But yeah, this was like a totally innocuous moment where I was like, I'm visiting my grandfather in his late life. Like, you know, he's doing bad.

[A]

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

[B]

Yep, go ahead, Jake.

[A]

This boyfriend came in and just kind of like blew up the lore and then.

[B]

Oh, he didn't just blow up the Lord, he blew it up in the most stupid innocuous way possible. Like, hey, so like what's your background? Like what do you do? Which I obviously like. You don't really talk to your grand grandfather like that, right? You're not like, you're like, what, what industry are you in?

[D]

What industry are you in?

[B]

Yeah, but I never, I had no, I had no experience of that because by again, by the time I was conscious and aware of things, the reality on the ground in Caracas at my grandparents home was that my gr. Grandfather was unfortunately very much captured by his alcoholism. And he did rainbow trout farming like shit. And it wasn't farming. It was like, like let's take gringos out on the boat so they can catch some trout type thing, you know. And because he could speak two languages, like that kind of gives you the skills that you need for that.

[A]

That was like his like endgame sort of thing. But like early game was the Masanta.

[B]

I just didn't know. That was all I knew. That was all I knew. That was my first experience. And my grandmother was running. I think this is actually an interesting little story. My grandmother was running a pine pirate video rental thing. Like what if Blockbuster was entirely pirated and she was at the time doing Betamax, Betamax and VHS of English speaking movies and selling, or not selling, renting those to other expatriates, other, you know, people who spoke English, living in Caracas. So that's where I first watched Parenthood, which shocked me for life.

[D]

Nice.

[B]

Yeah, very shocking movie. I was like, divorce exists. What the fuck?

[A]

I would love to see what her.

[D]

Collection looked like, yeah, your grandma sounds awesome.

[B]

Oh, my God. It was like Death Star level shit. Like, it was like this little room downstairs that, like, was almost, like, circular. And it was just like all these VHS and Betamaxes that were like, written by hand. Like, there was not a single. There was no cover art. That was all just.

[C]

And I.

[B]

As a kid, you're like, I don't even understand what I'm looking at. Like, you don't really fully grasp it. You're just like, I just watched Ace Ventura for the first time. It's so funny.

[A]

That's awesome, man.

[B]

So, anyways, so that's my family history, and I. I think it speaks to my own personal experience on the ground there. And the fact that I found out way later that, like, yeah, the family history was way more complicated than I thought. And when they saw Chavez begin to be a social movement before any election, before any kind of quote, unquote, socialist or communist government in the United States, I heard about this, man. This word to me, Chavez. I heard about it directly from the mouths of my grandparents and my parents, who would be like, this man is a thug. And he has. He has a. He has, like a standing army. And a week ago, with batons, they. They started, like, beating and killing people. And I think he might take over the government and we might have to move away from the country because he's going to take our house. Which I'm like, I don't know. Like, you guys seem like you're living in a kind of unstable situation already. Like, I'm, you know, I mean. But at that point, because of ancient wealth and the way that white expatriates exist, that house was owned. So at least they had that right. So even if the situation was all fucked up and my grandmother was, you know, like a pirate, like vhs, Betamax renter, it was maybe the only thing they knew that they still had. And they were fearful. And I don't. I'm not trying to sit here and blame them or something. I'm just expressing what happened. They were fearful that someone would take away the only thing they really knew and owned the house. And so I didn't know anything else. I didn't have any education around intervention. That happened a little bit later. But I was very aware of this. And one of the things that always marks me to this day, pre civismo, pre the, you know, this country's falling apart economically, quote, unquote, and these guys are mismanaging it and all the John Oliver style, like, bullshit that you hear, but is also obviously part of the. Like you said, Abby, the message, the message that everyone hears, I remember reading every day, the one I think was the main English speaking newspaper and what shocked me and kind of like made me curious was on the COVID of the newspaper they showed the exchange rate between the dollar and the Bolivar every single day. And they showed it because it was news, because it could change drastically. And we were already in a deflationary spiral. And that deflationary spiral, which we now you'll hear in the media, was blamed on Chavez and Maduro, whatever. That movement already existed to a point where everyone accepted it as totally true. In fact, I remember my father exchanging dollars versus Bolivars in front of the bank because went into the bank you got a worse exchange rate because there were dudes in front of the bank being like, well, within three fucking days I'm going to make money if I just give you an even better exchange rate than the bank. So I am not saying this because I have ideological beliefs. I'm talking about a direct experience. I know I'm very defensive about this, but that's because people will be very, very dismissive of a lot of this information.

[D]

Right?

[B]

And what this traced back to, once I looked into it, was an event called Viernes Negro, Black Friday. It happened in nineteen, eighty three. That was the Euros born. What happened that day was, and again, I'm not a specialist of this stuff, but I will say that what happened that day kind of functionally was that overnight the Bolivar, which is the currency in Venezuela, it depreciated by 50% overnight. So think about this like you wake up the next, you wake up tomorrow and everything you have in your bank account, everything you own, is worth half as much. And then if you look into it, you find out that the American interests, the oil companies and the upper class of Venezuela, which of course are the what you know, the opposition movements like CORE and you know, always resistant and fearful of any kind of redistribution of wealth. They were told early. So they were able to, through the financial system, make a ton of fucking money. But every normal Venezuelan that didn't have that privilege woke up from one day to the next and everything was they owned was worth half as much. And everything they needed to buy to feed their children was costing twice as much. And that's. They called it, they call it Black Friday. And I'm sorry, but I don't think most Americans even know about that. And that happened way before Chavismo 83. By the time I'm talking About Chavismo. I'm like a young teenager, like 14, 15. Yeah, so we're talking way before.

[D]

No. And it just kept getting worse because the value of the currency just always kind of arbitrary because of the influence of the US dollar. The fact that so much of the country's inflation is just due to the exchange rate anyway with the US dollar and it enters through selling oil. And so the sanctions, I mean, you're putting the economy into complete freefall. And the lack of that context of what sanctions did is just a story.

[B]

This was pre sanctions. The economy was ready.

[D]

Which is. I'm just saying it. Think about how much.

[B]

Oh my God. Yeah, of course. And then the sanctions happen and then everyone gets to blame the government. But I'm talking about the fact that a decade and a half or so before we had any, any government that could be described as even REM remotely left wing, they already experienced a 50% over fucking night inflation event. And that inflation event. If you're trying to blame people and be like, well, you know, I mean, hey, I'm not saying we should black bag Maduro, but he's not great at the economy. Can we have some fucking perspective? The only reason I know this is not cause I read a bunch of books and shit. I mean, I guess I did research it later, but. Cause I was there. I was there, right? And I experienced it. And so yeah, parapolitics guys have a field day with my grandfather, grandfather's thing. Look into it or whatever and blame me of being, I don't know, like controlled by something. But I just, I wanted to. Before we continue, Abby, just give my direct personal experience as a person growing up.

[D]

No, I think it's such an important point because it's another blanket generalized narrative that you hear all the time that there's this huge economic collapse that Venezuelans are, are eating cats and dogs because they're starving. They're eating trash. Actually, can you imagine like the anti poverty like propaganda that you would have to actually believe that poor people are literally eating trash.

[B]

Eating trash. What? They had postmates and they were ordering McDonald's.

[D]

It's so extremely offensive.

[B]

Yeah, it's insane. It's like, it's like the darkest, like darkest form of like racism and incuriosity. You don't care, but you care enough to be like, oh, those black and brown people there. Yeah, they're fuck, they're trash eating. They're rat eating sub humans. This is like the same logic that has fueled every genocide. And also, so yeah, of course you can't trust them. You can't listen to them.

[D]

Yeah, they're given a sandwich and that's why they vote for Maduro. It's like, wait, which is it? He stole the election or that they're bribed to vote for him? Like, well, that.

[B]

That depends. Is the sandwich a combination of ham and cheese and has it been, like, slightly toasted so that it's melted? Because I would absolutely would give my vote. I haven't been given anything for my votes in any of the Western countries.

[D]

I know, I wish. I know. It's like, where's the Soros trap? I mean, but, but in 2016, I mean, yeah, like this absurd narrative about the inflation rate and stuff. It's like in 2016, the economy exchange rate doubled. So again, like, we're talking about, we're talking about like a. Yeah, like a 500%. I don't know, it's just insane. It's like in less than a month. It's like, this is evidence of an economic war.

[B]

Oh, oh, of course.

[D]

This is not a normal situation. And so I went there thinking I was going to, you know, it was going to be complete destitution, like poverty, everyone's. I mean, I didn't really think that, but I was just like, what am I going to find? And it's so specific who you talk to, if you talk to, you know, a working class. Like, I'm not trying to paint everyone with a broad brush, but I'm just saying it was very, very, like class lines. Very obvious. I would talk to a woman covered in jewelry, screaming at me that she has nothing in her fridge and that Maduro is a dictator. I talked to someone else another block away who's a young Chavista who was just like, no, it's complete. She was like, you can go eat food anywhere. She was like, it's an economic war. And I wasn't, I wasn't just like anecdotally.

[B]

Oh, no, I've seen, I've seen examples.

[D]

I've seen the footage with, yeah, economists. And I've, I talked to them about what exactly was going on. It's fascinating what they did because business owners decided to withhold certain products to. To make them scarce. Toilet paper, like paper products, for example. There's still like an opposition figure who runs the paper product industry. And so they were able to manufacture a crisis of a lack of toilet paper. And so that's the narrative that gets spun out of control in the rest of the world. They're like, oh, my God, look at this insane despot who can't even, like, give his people toilet paper. It's just, like. It's actually disgusting.

[B]

I would just like to say this is a merifat logic, because just buy a bidet and you'll use, like, almost no toilet paper.

[D]

Yeah, exactly. Why are we obsessed with. With wiping our ass with toilet? It's like, dude, the COVID thing, too. It's like, wow.

[B]

I'm joking. Of course I'm joking.

[D]

It's crazy. No, no. But no, it is kind of crazy. During COVID everyone was like, we got to get the toilet paper, like, killing each other over. It's like, okay, whoa. Like, you don't just get a. Take a shower, dude.

[A]

I was in, like, a big red department store a couple weeks ago.

[B]

He's talking about Target folks, and.

[A]

Well, I'm trying not to say the names anymore because I've. You've. You've scolded me in the past.

[B]

Re.

[A]

Advertised.

[B]

No, no, you got to keep the name in if you're. If you're. If you're telling us a horrible truth, please.

[A]

Okay, yeah, I guess that's true. And there was, like. I don't know. There were. I was walking through the aisles or whatever, lost probably, and I heard this guy on his phone, and he was like. He was like, yo, bro. He was like, shells are cleaned out at Target, dude. There's nothing here. And I was, like, looking around, and I was like, it looks fully stocked to me. Like, I. Like, I couldn't under. Like, I couldn't see what he. He saw, but he was like, oh, bro. Like, he was like, bro, dude, there's nothing here. And I was like, plenty of toilet paper. There was plenty of paper towels. I didn't know what he was talking about.

[B]

This is not an inherent evil that exists naturally among the American population. The majority of the American population is working class. So it's not a blame on people who, I don't know, believe this or think this or even are the person that Jake overheard at Target, it's the fact that I think we live in a bit of a dissociative state where we have everything we need in so many ways. But then if, like, let's say you don't have a bank account or you're homeless, like, you have the same conditions as someone living in extreme poverty while you get to look at the shelves that are stocked, but then you still have people who can buy and are on their phone. Like Jake said, being like, I can't see nothing.

[D]

I can't See? Nothing.

[A]

Yeah, it's like, oh, they don't have. They don't have the toilet paper endorsement by those three bears that are constantly rubbing their asses in the water.

[B]

He's talking about Charmin, by the way. People should. We should get rid of Charman and Target.

[D]

Unless they pay you.

[B]

Unless they pay me. If you reach out and I'll change my editorial approach.

[D]

I mean, there's so much to say about, like, yeah, like, you could debunk this propaganda all day. But the problem with it is this kind of tendency, especially from Americans and Westerners, to have the kind of chauvinist, imperial attitude, attitude where they think that it's their ordained right to do this shit around the world. Brazen criminality, complete lawlessness. And this is exactly what happens when you don't hold war criminals to account, when you coddle and protect torturers and war criminals. This is why the Democratic Party basically incubated the situation. This brand of global fascism that Trump is perpetrating and has is drunk with power and impunity. He has not been stopped. The Gaza genocide was allowed to go unabated. It still continues. So this is what happens. These things become normalized and they take it one step further, as you have, because of the lack of response and calls for restraint from the eu. They were basically just saying, now's not the time to even talk about legality because Maduro's got to go.

[B]

The information environment, obviously, is. Is going to be a big part of what we cover. I want to get now into Chavismo and the ultimate arrival of Maduro and what led to our government black bagging using, you know, JSOC Special operations forces, which you might have heard about on our Fort Bragg cartel episode. So let's continue in history. I think that, like you said, like, you can't defeat this stuff because we're not talking about an idea, right? Like, if Abby and I get on this podcast and we circumvent everybody else and we go on an ideological campaign to convince you of something, there's still going to be. There's still going to be the fact that we're just affecting what you believe about something. What we're describing and what we're trying to cover in this episode, and I would say, in general, this is like a life project for me, is the actual power structure and material reality that is happening in these places. And it doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter if you're QAnon or liberal. It does not change the structure. Your Belief does not change structure.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

I mean, if you look at Palestine today, it's such a naked mission of colonialism. Very, very obvious. Right. And we have to look at Latin America in the similar lens and framework of those conditions. Like you're saying, I mean, we're talking about 500 years of colonialism. And like every other colonized country, they suffered genocide, they suffered repression, I mean, brutality. I mean it's an, it's a legacy of underdevelopment. And that's. When you look at, you know, there's a lot of critique of why they didn't try to diversify their economy and not have just oil as the main export. But that's, that's the legacy of underdevelopment. That still every formerly colonized country today is that they have to first lift the people out of poverty with their main resource and then they can work to diversify.

[B]

So Cuba is a great example of that. Just to kind of double down on that. Cuba used to be a diverse agricultural country that was then converted to a uniquely sugar essentially economy under, you know, like slave owning upper class people with the backing of of course, the United States and the Western powers. But before that the soil was totally different and they did not focus on sugar. The reason they focused on sugar is because the stock market said sugar is worth money. So suddenly they were like, well fuck, why do, why are we even growing food? Why are we doing anything? Right? Everything, everything's sugar now. And guess what? We're going to make these people work in the fields and get sugar and then we're going to sell it on the international market, the very international market that is behind the sanctions that are starving and killing people because it's worth more than, I don't know, whatever would feed the local people. I mean, we're so beyond that, I guess, in that moment. But yes, just so people understand how that transformation occurs and how then people get the kind of temerity to talk about these countries and say, oh well, why are they focused on one crop? Like, seems weird that they're just doing oil, oil. And it's like, do you, do you know why that happened? Like the, the crude. Have you looked at stock go up of crude?

[A]

Well, and, and us as Americans, you know, we really just don't want to think about maybe we're on the bad team. You know, like that's the sugar and.

[B]

You want your oil. Literally?

[A]

Like, yeah, literally. Well, and they spend. So they've spent such a good, good amount of time getting us to like, I don't know, base our entire belief system, system on, like, which president we think is, like, the better guy or the better girl, when in actuality, you.

[B]

Know, the power structures are almost never throughout at least recent American history, but probably even ranging back, never affected. Right. So whether you vote for Obama or George Bush, the financial structure and the power structure and the exploitation structure changes by, like, tiny fragments.

[A]

Yeah. I think that's why we spent so much time being like, well, you're worse, or like, you're worse is because, like, we don't want to realize how collectively bad we all, you know, that what we're all a part of. And so this.

[B]

You're not. You're not. You're a good American. Based on whether you step away from this episode believing one thing or another, ignoring the.

[A]

Right, right. Exactly, exactly.

[B]

The fundamental underlying structure of everything that determines power.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, especially just that chauvinism where you think that you have the right. I mean, again, it's like all of these. All of these things that you can apply. Maduro can be applied to Trump in spades. So it's just completely absurd. But, yeah, I mean, the neoliberal doctrine that ruled, you know, in the interim just completely put Venezuela into poverty. It was in a complete, total economic collapse, as you articulated, Julian, before anything resembling socialism manifested. So. And people were rising up in protest in the late 80s, and there was a massacre of estimated 4,000 civilians under this martial law guy, I forget his name.

[B]

You'll hear like, Venezuela is the richest country in the. In South America. Why are they starving? And the reality is, because that evaluation that they're rich is based on the fact that they discovered that they had oil reserves and that everything that existed before, like, you know, like the arrival of Chavismo in The late, like, 90s and early 2000s, was based on the idea that you're a rich country if you have a bunch of resources. But where do those resources go? They get extracted. They get extracted by multinational companies. I went to school, in fact, in Venezuela. Ooh, I'm gonna give another parapolitics like, moment for them to take me out online. But, yeah, I went to school with people who. It's like you meet a kid and you're like, oh, I'm making friends with this guy, and he's from Texas. How did you get here? And it's like, oh, well, my dad works for Exxon and he was offered a full package where you get to go to the most expensive school, you get your house paid for, and you're here Working for Exxon. But you're in Venezuela, so is that part of how we establish wealth? I do think that if you're talking about richest country in the world and you are a media outlet, or richest in South America and you're a media outlet, you might want to look into, like, some of these fucking details.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, it is crazy. Just the anecdotal evidence that people just use to be like, well, Venezuelans are celebrating, so that's all we need. It's like, okay, well, then you have a brain of a fucking child because of an infant. I mean, it's insane. It's like, which Venezuelans, which diaspora? What. What are you. What are we talking about here?

[B]

What are you saying? It's just another, like, two or three sentences that you see repeated everywhere. And you tell yourself while you go to bed going, ah, fuck, man, I should stop ordering so much food online and start going out a bit more.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, it's basically the country was in complete economic collapse. These neoliberal austerity measures were imposed, and it increased poverty dramatically. And so you saw this uprising against it. Civilians were massacred under martial law. It was in this rebellion and anger that Chavez emerged as a leader. And it wasn't just Chavez as a figurehead, like you said. It was, was the transformation of this poor country in this mass socialist movement that. That mobilized this huge majority of people that never had a voice. And it was in an era of extreme inequality and exploitation. I mean, this was the era that had reigned forever in these people's minds. And so to have that reclamation of identity and sovereignty and independence and rights and a voice that they never had before, I mean, that's. That's what was so amazing. And you see the New York Times, even back when, when the coup happened, the first coup with the Bush administration in 2002, when they had kidnapped Chavez and tried to impose this business leader, but they actually wrote, a would be dictator has been stopped. Like, that's what the New York Times line was.

[B]

I mean, you can, like, look up the New York Times article where they're glazing Hitler. So I'm not super surprised. Like, you know, and I'm not.

[D]

But it shows you that they've always said this. It's like, oh, no, he would have been a dictator. It's like, what are you talking about? You know what I mean?

[B]

Yes, exactly. So I. I think that one thing that's really interesting here and important, because I think that I'm in a debate club and I think I want to make my point really more profoundly is when we talk about democracy, right. We talk about how Chavez and Maduro are part of an undemocratic system because you don't see the head of the country change every four or eight years or whatever the system is. Right. How was democracy manifest on the ground to include the poor that had been exploited for a long time and had never had any say in anything? Definitely not elections. But even more than that, they had no levers to control the economy or their material condition.

[D]

And this is, this is a really crucial aspect of this conversation which is that we consider democracy as this end all, be all notion of what Americans think of it as, which is voting every two to four years in elections, I guess that are just this dog and pony show, multi billion dollar operation. It's completely fake because the candidates are, are handpicked. They represent a very small margin of like the, you know, differences. It's like it's all very stage managed. In Venezuela, people think, or even in Cuba for example, I mean you could argue that Cuba has a one party system because they are a country under siege, but they have a huge democratic base of governance, self governance and also of just like mass discussions and democratic meetings.

[B]

Like so, yeah, tell us about the structure of exactly how that actually manifests. Like bring us to the room where that happens, the room where those people are gathered. Yeah.

[D]

I'll tell you what I saw. I mean I went all across Venezuela and not just in Caracas. I went all in the small municipalities, I flew all over the countryside and I saw meetings of thousands of people from local barrios, from just community hubs getting together to discuss.

[B]

Barrios are the equivalent of favelas. They're the poorest and most destitute.

[D]

Yes. And so these people would come out en masse. It was something that I had never seen before before in my entire life. I mean it was people who were coming out with the intention of working together to overcome this economic war, the problems with the economy, all of these things. It's the ingenuity and creativity of people working democratically together in these mass organizing centers. I have never seen anything like it. Mass rallies.

[B]

How did those mass rallies functionally affect the state of the constitution or the laws which I think we can agree as Americans, we have almost no control over. We cannot change our constitution. We can barely change our like I guess you vote yes or no on prop whatever, but it's very hard to change anything. And you look around and you go, these are unfair, but we can't change them. How was this feeding in directly to how the structure of power and society worked?

[D]

Yes, I mean everyone can be involved in this process and it is amazing that they can continuously vote on a new constitution, on new referendums that get included and adapted to their constitution. So I'll just give you one example of how the community mobilized to actually over overcome a large consequence of US asphyxiation on the economy, which is the clap system. This was a system where they tried to circumvent the economic war and the deprivation of food because of the lack of staples because of these big business owners that were perpetrating this economic war in the economy.

[B]

So oil, flour, toilet paper owned by rich, wealthy local landowners, withheld on purpose to create the illusion that there is an issue with basic functioning and how we're able to feed ourselves in, by the way, the richest, supposed richest country in South America. Like why can't these people just farm locally and then feed themselves? Right. Like seems pretty straightforward because of these people. So. Yes, please. So they addressed that.

[D]

Yeah, no, it's a Trump esque right wing billionaire who owns Pilar. Basically, if I'm remembering correctly, it's the, it's the, it's the company that runs all these foodstuffs that they had to subsidize themselves. It was this mass effort with millions of people to distribute these clap baskets and make them available.

[B]

What are clap baskets?

[D]

It's a basket of exactly those food staples that you're talking about to try to subsidize the lack of what people were receiving because they were the victims of this, of the sanctions.

[B]

It would be the equivalent of identifying the poorest people in the country and the government having a policy that is elected by the people to put together the basics that you need to survive so that even if you're like the poorest American in let's say Detroit, you're still going to get the biggest basic foodstuffs and you're not going to have malnutrition in your family and you're going to have like basic dignity.

[D]

Yeah, I mean it's crazy to think that 6 million, that's when I was there. So that was 10 years ago. 6 million households had already received these regularly. Like, like, just think about the organizing effort that needs to be made to make something like that happen under such extreme conditions.

[B]

What do you mean? We have fema. We have fema.

[D]

So it's like you can, you can, you know, a country under this kind of war and siege from the largest military empire in the world. It's actually fascinating that they had so many elections and that they tried to be so transparent and democratic and work willingly with the opposition for the last 20 years. So like I said, when the opposition finally won an election in 2017, the constitution gave the PSU or gave the ruling body the ability to create an alternative structure because the opposition literally shut down the government. Once they won a portion of the government, they shut it all down and they refused, refused to work with Maduro's party.

[B]

And alternative structures are the type of thing where you go, well, our government's not feeding us or taking care of us. Yeah, it's been like this for decades. Are you familiar with this, American? Or at least if you're working class, you might be. But you say, hey, what if we locally organized to create a kind of alternative to Congress or an alternative to this kind of supposed representative democracy so that we can put in place a system in which our families are actually fed.

[D]

Exactly. And that's what the Constituent assembly was. It was an alternative body that was trying to bypass the veto power that the opposition held to just totally stifle any sort of progress at all and veto every single thing that was going on.

[B]

Why did that veto exist?

[D]

Because the opposition finally won support.

[B]

What I mean is, why were they able to, for example, affect whether somebody didn't have food in some barrio?

[D]

Right?

[B]

Like, why was there any kind of, like, lever for them to control the condition?

[D]

I mean, that's a really good point. I don't. I don't know exactly why, like, the particular laws they were trying to block, but they were really trying to just create a stalemate where the government couldn't do anything at all.

[B]

And they refused to participate.

[D]

Yeah, they couldn't. They refused to participate even though they were begging them to. So the Constituent assembly was their way to say, look, everyone can be a part of this process. We beg the opposition to be a part of this process. But the opposition wanted to paint the picture to. To the world that it was a, you know, as a dictatorship, that the Maduro wouldn't work with them. It was just completely manufactured, even though they had to really. I mean, when you're talking about democratic participation, you should see, I was there during the Constituent Assembly. The, the amount of people who were motivated and mobilized in the streets was incredible. I've never seen anything like it. And that's why when you see selective outrage or whatever, anecdotal evidence of people celebrating, it's like, what about the thousands of. Of people in the streets in Venezuela who are demanding the return of Maduro, who are demanding.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, your quiet despair. Your quiet despair is not worthy unless a camera is pointed to you by a media company owned by a wealthy person. Right? So.

[D]

But it's like every year there's massive democratic initiatives, not just with these regular meetings of, of rigorous debate and, you know, ingenuity of how they're going to do all these things collectively, together, communally, but beyond that, there's constant referendums, there's constant abilities for the entire country to, like I said, change the Constitution constantly. What a novel idea. To constantly amend the Constitution to be more inclusive, to be more adaptive to the fucking year 2026.

[B]

Okay, so I think we, we've provided enough context here. I think that you and I are angry enough. I think that we can say that we've covered now Chavismo, both your meters.

[A]

Are full, you're both blinking red.

[B]

That's right. Yeah, exactly. We're about to pull, we're about to press a button to make our super happen. Yeah, no, so, so we've got Chavismo, we've got Maduro. And again, I'm not going to stoop to the point of criticizing a leader that was just black bagged. And the reason for that is not that I don't have criticisms, it's because you can check anywhere else. Okay? So if you need, if you need that, you know what it's provided. And we're not talking about like, are you the best manager? Are you the best person who's come up with the best alternative thing? Did you determine the right food items for the basket? This is shit. This is shit. You can actually criticize people. This is what we should actually criticize our politicians about. The conversation about Donald Trump should be, what are the items in the food basket that you're providing the bottom 30 or 40% of people here so that we don't have malnutrition in the richest country in the whole fucking world. So, okay, we've made that point. I think we can get to the point where America sends, you know, their Fort Bragg coked up savages to kill people and black bag a president.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's crazy.

[B]

And I'm relying on you, Abby.

[D]

I mean, you pretty much laid it out at the beginning. I think that we don't know much because everything is kind of a fog of war. We don't know if there were loyalists that helped make this operation happen. I think that what's obvious is when you have the full brunt of the military empire coming at you in a special forces operation, there's nothing much that you can do. Like, there's nothing, not much that you can do to stop it. We already know that. You know, at least 50 people did sacrifice themselves to try to stop this, but, you know, what were they supposed to do? They immediately took out the missile capabilities to take down any of the helicopters. And then they, they did the cleanup operation. And then when they were retreating, obviously they weren't going to shoot in any helicopters thinking that Maduro could be in them. But this has been basically just an escalatory addition to a 20 year project. You know, Biden did have a $50 million bounty on Maduro's $50 million international bounty.

[B]

That, that looks like some shit from red Dead Redemption 2, where it's like this guy dead or alive, and it says, how much money, how much money.

[A]

From a well is he going to give it to Trump then?

[D]

That's what I was wondering. Maybe Trump did this to get the money from.

[B]

No, no. I have a great theory. 25 million, right? 25 million. But, you know, I like to think, I like to think that because of JSOC and because of these operators, we might have some millennial homeowners if Trump gives them the 25 million. So I think that's kind of inspiring and I think that we're being critics here.

[D]

A lot of free oil coming our way, baby.

[A]

I was going to say, I'll tell you what we can be pretty sure of is that, you know, in a couple years or like six months or so, there's going to be a movie about this with like, Claire Danes, and it's going to make all the operators look so awesome.

[D]

Oh, totally.

[B]

Stas ablando de Clara Danes. The great, inspiring Latina activist Clara Danes.

[D]

Gal Gadot will be playing the fucking. And you'll see Maduro hitting the. Yeah, the three stooges, like capture.

[B]

Okay, yeah, sorry, we have to move on. But I love how they'll rarely give the full names or they will and they just expect people to not pay attention. But it's like, we're cutting now to Venezuelan Wagner Hitler Smith. We're coming now to person on the.

[D]

Ground in Venezuelan, Pinochet junior. I mean, it's crazy. It's like, yeah, you see, Biden already had that demon. Democrats have been just as complicit with sowing the seeds for this. You had Obama setting up that extraordinary national security threat in 2015. They were overseeing the increase of the sanctions regime. But of course, Trump took it one step Further, because you had the old guard of the neocon wild gang of the Elliot Abrams and John Bolton, right, who tried to do the silver core like coup, like all those disasters that happened during Trump's first term. Yes. So insane that the installation of, of.

[B]

Juan Guaido, remember that weird coup American, remember? Didn't you see that in the news where it was like, oh, Silver Corps can't keep track of. Tried to get there, but they got intercepted by fishing boats and it turned out that the contract signed with them was signed by all the major opposition figures that the United States has been working with and funding, by the way, to the tune of $50 million every single year.

[D]

Insane. Insane. And that failed, obviously. But that's like they were all so blatant about that and so open and even so surreal to live through the Iraq war propaganda and the manufacturing of consent for that, which was over a year of just the tediousness of the media trying to sell us that Saddam had ties to 911 and that WMDs existed. It's like there is no pretense, there's no pretext at all. This cartel delos solos thing fell apart immediately. They already dropped that completely.

[B]

Oh, my favorite new one. They had to admit that an entire. They invented an entire cartel so they could black bag this guy and it fell apart apart within days. I do feel like it's kind of nice to see things work less well.

[D]

And it's like there could be a silver lining out of this, which is that they might be so scared to go through the full regime change war because they know they'll get fucking trounced because of the guerrilla capacity of these barrios that have been training for 20 years. I mean, there's 6 million at least, people who are armed. And we're not talking about the actual established armed forces. These are people who've been training for exactly this in guerrilla warfare tactics. Tactics for 20 years.

[A]

Jesus.

[B]

And I wonder why they had to do that. I mean, it seems like you might have to look to the last, you know, decades in South America to understand why guerrilla warfare might be necessary to even just maintain control of your own country and get to choose your own leader.

[D]

It's insane. It's insane. And now we're dealing with the situation where people are just pontificating and having these intellectual debates about, oh, Maduro's legitimacy and if Maduro was good or not, instead of, there's a maniac who just black bagged a foreign president. He needs to be fucking put on the Hague. Yeah, put on trial for war crimes. Like, how is he not impeached? Where's the articles of impeachment? That's what I'm wondering. Is this not grounds for impeachment for a president? It's sick, because as he. He's drunk with power and impunity, and if no one stops him, he's going to do Colombia. He's already talking about Mexico, Greenland, annexing. I mean, where does this stop? Where does it stop?

[B]

I guess that's what we call a rhetorical question.

[A]

A rhetorical question.

[B]

You know, we're all listening to a podcast and having fun together. That's an incredibly good point. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think. I don't know. Do you think that there's something that we haven't covered in the kind of lineage that led us to this moment? Because, again, like you said, there's a lot of fog of war right now. There's a lot of different people putting out bullshit. So we're going to get more visibility over what's happening internally to Venezuela and even internally to the American government and their interventions there in the coming day is we're not trying to be a kind of, like, breaking news war podcast. But do you think that we've not covered something in that? Because I want to move on to Earth's greatest enemy.

[D]

I mean, I think it's going to be hard to tell. Like you said, we're not soothsayers, and we don't know what Trump's plan is. I mean, you know, even if you look at the neocon agenda for Iraq, it's like, clearly their plan was not to be in a quagmire for 10 years. It's like they thought it was going to be a cleanup operation. He did the press conference on the aircraft carrier. I don't think Trump has a plan. I think his plan is chaos, and that that's good enough. And it's all trophies and photo ops and, you know, potentially they will go through it depends on how sadistic and psychotic they're willing to be. And the bar is set very, very low for, like, anything logical. So anything is fair game at this point. That's why it's like, I don't think anything's out of the realm of belief. Like, if you were to ask me four years ago, would Trump try to get a third term? I would say that that was, like, hyperbolic nonsense pushed out by libs. But now I'm like. Like, I. Yeah, I do.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Yeah, I do.

[B]

Yeah, I would. I Would say that the, the failed. The failed editor in chief of Vanity Fair is. He danced on video a few too many times on TikTok and I have black bagged him and his parties are no longer hot.

[A]

What do you guys think would happen if like a super elite squad from like another country, like, showed up on a couple of helicopters.

[B]

Oh, come on.

[A]

Landed. Landed in the front of the White House. Landed on the front of the White House. Took out like all the Secret Service guys, 40, 50 guys, whatever, and then like put Trump into the job and like flew him away to like a prison. So, like, what would happen? Like, like, like what would happen? I mean, I can't even begin to wrap my head around. That's why we're so disconnected. I'm just trying to make the point. We are so disconnected. We. We are so the bad guys that we can't even fathom that ever happening. And it never would. It never would because.

[B]

Because locally, somebody, before we let them.

[A]

In our space to do something.

[B]

The reality is that Americans aren't inherently bad people. Of course not. That's. My argument is quite the opposite. The American person, on average is not an inherently violent and evil person. Just like you could probably actually. This argument's gonna be a bit weird, but it's like at every point before, the worst things that have ever happened, right? Like you have Hitler's Germany, shit like that the average person is thinking about, like, how do I fill my pantry? Yeah, they are not thinking about this shit. Americans are not. This is not the American people. We are talking about a ruthless, over educated generations long project to create a global economy of exploitation that is a neocolonial, you know, kind of follow up.

[A]

Cabal. Cabal, if you will.

[B]

Well, come on now, Jake. You can't have the only Jewish guy on the podcast say, you know, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

[D]

You know, this already really serves, though.

[B]

Yeah. Podcasting Patreon.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, Patreon. I mean, yeah, go, go ahead, give your. Give your big pitch to how it ties in and I. And I'll take it away.

[B]

Yes. So, Abby, you know your new movie, obviously you have worked on movies in the past. You had a movie called Gaza Fights for Freedom that you released some years ago before, certainly before the last three or four year, like I'd say concentrated acceleration of an ongoing genocide. But now your latest movie is called Earth's Greatest Enemy. And can you tell us what Earth's greatest enemy is and what the central thesis of this movie is? And then Also how people can go watch it and support your project.

[D]

Fraud led by Tim Walls. That's the greatest enemy that we're seeing right now, Somali fraud. We all gotta fucking tackle it before it kills us all.

[B]

God, if we weren't funny, like, we'd have no hope out here.

[D]

It's. We have to just laugh at how insane this is. I mean, I just have to laugh a bit. Look, it's. I spent five years with my husband and partner, Mike Preisner, wondering how had no one synthesized the connection between war and the environment. And we heard those statistics floating around about the US military was the largest institutional polluter, bigger than 140 countries. And we were like, oh my God, what does this mean? And then when you realize that all these international climate treaties literally exempt not just the US military, but all countries militaries from their totals, it's a total farce. And so we, we tried to just quantify emissions. We went into this project just trying to quantify emissions, and then we realized every stone unturned is another documentary. The amount of pollution that the US military produces on a daily basis is unquantifiable and is literally going to destroy the planet. So not just the arsenal, the maintenance of the arsenal of a global military empire, just having the machinery, the tanks, the jets, the Pegasus is these flying gas stations, just having that and cleaning the engine parts, dumping toxic waste into the open atmosphere. We're not even talking about war. The effects, the supply chain, all of that shit, just the arsenal is going to kill the planet. Just the maintenance of an arsenal this big, then when you take in the actual application of the weaponry, war, I mean, there's still dead zones from World War I because of just small armaments. So, you know, we, we go to countries from all over the world to look at the receiving end of US imperialism, whether it's Guam, Okinawa, Alaska, and just all the bases are dumping zones for indigenous people and killing zones for the soldiers that, that served there. So what we tried to do is prove the thesis that US imperialism is Earth's greatest enemy, because what it is, is a protection racket. The US military is a protection racket for resource extraction. That's what it always has served as, and that's what it continues to serve as.

[B]

Wait, are you saying that Trump might have, like, let it slip that it was about oil or something?

[D]

Exactly. And so when you see this, this admittance that, you know, this is just about seizing the oil and tamping down on, you know, basically left and socialist movements, it's. It's because they want economic hegemony, they want US capitalism at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun. I mean that's what it always has been, but it's so clearly neocolonial and he talks about it all the time, the Don Row doctrine. This is what he is admitting. And so this fossil fuel infrastructure, when they talk about greening the military, when you see people like Elizabeth Warren being like, oh, we're just going to slab solar panels on bases or hybridize these Brussels Bradley fighting vehicles. What they don't explain is that you cannot green a global military empire. Military empire, it's not habitable with a healthy planet. You just cannot have and maintain a global military empire. And it's not just the maintenance of the arsenal. It's the great power competition. It's the fact that Russia and China constantly have to amp up their nuclear weapons, their arsenal to try to match our game theory, our inclusion, encroachment, the pivot to Asia. It's everything. They're killing everyone. Everyone is being killed by US imperialism.

[B]

I mean that sounds grim but have you considered that in 2027 we're going to get a meme, a meme called.

[D]

The final Saludon And Barron Trump will be profiting off the meme coin, off the Don Khan coin.

[B]

So you meticulously cover this once again going on the ground like to actual like weapons manufacturing conferences and, and also of course gather the necessary documentation and fact based kind of argumentation that is at the core of Earth's greatest enemy. Which is a feature film, right?

[D]

It's a feature film, yes.

[B]

Where can people find and support this?

[D]

Right now I'm on a director's tour in Europe, I'm going to Australia, Canada and I'm also across the US until March and April. We're hopefully putting it up on streaming in April. But we have to go through a lot of legal issues first with the military. Hopefully all's above board there. Don't get sued.

[B]

I don't like the sound.

[A]

Well, they'll be easy. They'll be easy.

[D]

Yeah, that'll be easy. That'll be easy to fly through.

[A]

Those will be those guys. They'll be the easiest.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to get, you got to get sign off so you can feature them, you know.

[D]

But it really is amazing and astounding because you go through, you know, you go. I went through the Pentagon to try to get a sit down interview with one of these guys and what I was told through the Pentagon Entertainment Media division based in Hollywood, California was that don't like that name is that anytime you see the military in TV or documentaries, it's not just Jack Ryan. It's literally any documentary that you see a military official, they have final say and editorial rights on the script.

[B]

Guy told me that seems weird.

[D]

And I was like, wait, that's weird. I was like, how do you. How can you edit what I'm gonna say? I was like, if such a large component of what I'm gonna say is your response, like, how does that work? And he was just like, well, he was like, usually it's not a problem, but sometimes it is. And he was like, and we have to make those changes. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool.

[B]

Like, sometimes it is. What.

[D]

What.

[B]

What was your name then? Do you have, like, an address and, like, a phone number? And, like, do you.

[A]

Who are you?

[D]

But it's like, it's never been more naked.

[B]

Yeah, that's why it's falling apart. Yeah, it's falling apart.

[D]

Yeah, it is falling apart. This is the last gasp. This is the last gasp.

[B]

It's also the greatest. I think that, like, sometimes we tend to go like, well, Donnie's losing it now. Or like, oh, the American empire's like, the mask has fallen. This won't be solved or resolved in any way by masks falling or what you believe.

[D]

Right?

[B]

So. So we are dealing with something. I'm very real and very tangible and. But that's. That's shocking. And I. I mean, there's a whole other episode, obviously, that Jake. Jake did cover it briefly in another episode about the relationship between the entertainment industry and the military, but. So you were making this movie. Sorry, go ahead. Where are you. Where can people. Yeah, yeah.

[D]

I mean. And it perfectly plays into Venezuela, just so obviously. So it's like they're talking about just rampant pillaging of Venezuela because it has the largest oil reserves in the world. World. And this is. It's necessitated by the expanse of our military. Our military is this big in order to store fossil fuels around the world. That was the first extra. Extraterritorial military bases were literally coaling stations which turn to oil reserves so that it necessitates the size of the military and then the continuous expanse and extraction of fossil fuels because you need to power our military. I had generals telling me point blank, we need the oil. It's a joke that you're talking about alternative energy. We need oil, baby. That's what it's all about. So it's so obvious and laid bare. This is the fossil fuel infrastructure of the Military empire and the US military goes around the world. The barrel of a nuclear armed gun threatens the planet to bow down to its dictates. And that's the only reason why Venezuela is on the receiving end today. Check it [e-mail], bring me to your city. I'm doing virtual Q&As and we hope to release it on Earth day before.

[B]

Awesome. I can't.

[A]

Let's go.

[B]

I can't wait to see you soon. I know that you have a screening in Orange county, which is a great place to tell people about this.

[A]

Yes. The perfect place.

[B]

Can't wait here in Orange County.

[A]

The perfect place. If you dress up in some Fox Racing gear, it'll make the message a little easier to swallow.

[B]

Yeah. So we're going to put all those links, obviously, you know, in the episode description. Abby, you know, I mean, I can't say enough about your work. I think it's very valuable and I really thank you for making the time to come and talk to us, especially at such a pivotal time, I think, in honestly, human history. But also, of course, Americans understanding of why the. Their government is able to get to a point where they can black bag somebody like that, like a president, which is not going to lie. I'm still under a little bit of shock.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, I'm not so cynical.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's not. It's not. It doesn't feel good. And that. And, and does. I don't feel better after talking to you. I do have a little bit better context, though, and understanding of what has taken place leading up to this. Because as you said, so much of the information we get is, you know, the editing out of the guy being set on fire before he drives through the crowd. You know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah. Well, Jake, Jake, you know, like this episode actually isn't going out on anything and you don't have a podcast called qaa. This was actually a kind of organized operation, just a sample where we're just talking on Google Meets to convince you of something.

[A]

I've got a lot of friends who care about me a lot and love me.

[B]

We're going to be very nice to you.

[A]

Okay?

[D]

I. All right, dude. Well, dude, thank you so much. What an honor. It was so much fun.

[B]

Yeah, it's so glad that we finally got to do it. And I think we did this moment as much justice as we can do as just, you know, again, just people, people out here trying to fucking figure out what the Hell is going on and how we can not head towards disaster as quickly.

[A]

Everybody just trying to do their best, you know.

[B]

Absolutely.

[D]

Some better than others, including Stephen Miller.

[B]

Thank you. Thank you, Abby. Really appreciate it.

[C]

Thank you.

[D]

Thank you guys so much. You guys rock.

[A]

Bye. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.comqaa and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a second premium episode for every free one. Plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.

[B]

Damn. Well. Did we create a network or something? Like did we expect.

[A]

We did something new finally after seven years.

[B]

Oh, we thought about how we want to bring you the best and the deeper.

[A]

We had an opportunity. We had an opportunity to. To launch this network called Cursed Media. And there's two series now on it. It's a different thing. It's different from Patreon.

[B]

That's wrong. Jake, I'm gonna fact check you Travis style. We've got two series that have been created since the inauguration of Curse Media. We've actually got them whole archive of series. This is including Jake's excellent Spectral Voyager that he did with Brad Abrahams, the Man Clan podcast with Andy Kelly and myself, Julian Field, and of course, 20 whole episodes of Travis Fuse. Insanely good trickle down. I recommend, like, honestly, the. The price is worth it just for that.

[A]

There's a lot of good. There's a lot of good content there.

[B]

But if you're not doing it for that and you're looking. Looking for new content, you're getting three miniseries a year for the yearly fee.

[A]

That's $24.99.

[B]

Christ, I hate money.

[A]

But, but. No, no, no, it's fine.

[B]

It's fine. Target and our listeners.

[A]

No, no, no, no, no.

[C]

Jesus Christ.

[B]

Oh, no. Should we try to get their addresses?

[A]

No, he's ruining it. He can't do it. He just has. He fundamentally feels uncomfortable plugging. Plug our own shit. Me too. But I could power through it because the content so good. Especially the new series first from Liv Science and transition and Dr. Annie Kelly. Truly Tradley deeply. Six episodes of each.

[B]

Give her her PhD respect.

[A]

Truly, truly Cool shows that are sort of branching out from our typical coverage of the melting, if you will.

[B]

Dude, honestly, the melting needs to involve ways more nude, beautiful people. The melting sucks that the melting doesn't include any good picks.

[A]

Okay, but. But if we're trying to plug the Curse Media thing.

[B]

Oh, yeah, we're still plugging. Yeah, right. Yes, Jake, please take it away.

[A]

But I think that's what we're trying to do is that we, you know, there's only so much. And we will continue, believe us. We're like the. The quartet on. On the Titanic. We will continue, obviously, of course, to do QAA until the ship, you know, fully sinks. And by that I mean Los Angeles breaking off in the great quake of 32 and sinking into the ocean. But this cursed media gives us a place to. To expand content and explore more specific, deeper dives into topics that aren't sort of bound by conspiracy theories, politics, while also providing the QAA flavor, obviously, that you know and love. We can't make it not us somehow live. Liv can't make it not live. And he can't make it not Annie.

[B]

Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, and then Jake, of course, you know, to. To kind of break the fourth wall. Just dropped some sort of drink. I'm assuming it's one of those really sweet American, like, kind of Starbucks drinks.

[A]

No, I made it myself. I actually, I made. I made coffee at home.

[B]

Man, it's crazy.

[A]

2026 spilled.

[B]

Nonetheless, honestly, respect, I will say that we are like the quartet on the top Titanic, except we are like the Black Eyed Peas playing the original version of let's Get It Started in here. Yeah, I knew that made you laugh.

[A]

Oh, well, I love it. I love a good Black Eyed Peas joke.

[B]

Yeah, that's what we're doing here.

[A]

So. Happy New Year.

[B]

Happy New Year. Thank you for listening and I appreciate you personally as a person who I don't know is listening to this. Unless you're listening this to like, study me or something. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

If you're listening out of. If you're listening out of spite, you've got better things to do.

[B]

Yeah. Come on. Also, it's been a long episode.

[A]

Come on. This is the year that you stop. Hate listening to the pod.

[B]

I think that's. That's true for people, but it's not true for agencies.

[A]

Yeah. I love, I love you guys. I'm really, really excited, really excited to kick off this new year.

[B]

I hope Virginia is really nice this time of year.

[A]

Why?

[B]

Don't worry, they'll realize.

[A]

All right, well, until next week. May the deep dish bless you and keep you.

[B]

We have auto queued content based on your preferences.

[A]

It's a disaster. We gotta fix the country fast. Companies that you talk to about dealing with Venezuela.

[B]

Maybe Mr. L could talk about that. Are there any other corporations, entities outside.

[A]

Of the oil business? Well, the oil business, yes, but outside, yes.

[B]

Howard, you want to. You have steel, you have minerals, right?

[A]

All the critical minerals, they, they have a great mining history that's gone rusty.

[B]

So steel, aluminum.

[A]

But mineral, I mean, this is all.

[B]

It's a rich.

[A]

It was once upon a time one of the great economies and cultures of.

[C]

The world, and it was destroyed.

[A]

And now President Trump is going to.

[B]

Fix it and bring it back for the Venezuelan. But it's not easy.

[A]

It's really gone bad.

[B]

But it's got potential.

[A]

What maybe any rare earth minerals?

[B]

They have rare earth, but everybody has rare earth. Rare earth is not rare.

[A]

What's rare is the processing.

[D]

We got.

[A]

We're doing processing plants all over.

[B]

There's no such thing as rare earth. The rare earth is everywhere. What isn't everywhere is the processing of rare earth. And we have a lot of places going up right now.