Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/11/26: Did Trump’s Venezuela Attack BLOW UP The Horseshoe?

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Ryan and Emily interview Christian Parenti on Trump, Venezuela and his life story.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This week, on the moment, we take a look at Venezuela's uncertain future in a conversation with two people who have directly advised U.S. presidents. Juan Gonzalez, during the Obama and Biden administrations, we're really good at invading countries. We're very bad at nation building.

In Carlos de Rosillo, during Trump's, two terms. I can guarantee you that nobody in the Trump administration likes Deli Rodriguez. Listen to the moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sager and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role

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to our full shows, unedited, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. Joining us in our get to know a journalist series today is Christian Parenti, a long time reporter, academic, writer, author. He's in DC so we wanted to get him into the studio. We've covered your work here over the years.

of a kind of clastic thinker on the left. That's a fair way, fair way to put it. Is that what they say? Let's go with that. That's nice. Because you never know exactly what you're going to say, which is useful. Thank you. Oftentimes, when people call themselves like an independent thinker,

99% of those people, I can predict with 100% accuracy what their view is going to be on a particular issue, which calls into question just how independent the thinking is. So I think you've got to keep people on their toes a little bit more Because things change like conditions change like ideas evolve like eras become new eras Taylor Swift Taylor Swift yes Her next tour will not be the eras tour won't be the era store and you may think you're still talking about the eras tour like what are you doing You're behind and Christian Parenti would never but you two have known each other for a while So people's intrigue over Christian Parenti may have been peace

during the Ryan Grimmel lore episode that aired a few days ago. And so why don't you both tell us how you know each other and the various misadventures you've been on? Yeah, if people want to skip this part, they can scroll ahead. Actually, yeah, do we have that element?

The Avo, the Avo thing? Yeah, throw that up, because this is such a fun picture. Oh, my gosh. There we are. Oh, my God. That's a throwback. Ryan's haircut has

Not changed. Not changed much. I love that it's black and white. I know it's from like the early odds, but I'll just pretend it's from the same. Avo and Ryan had very similar haircuts. We have the identical haircut. Yeah. Isn't that amazing?

Parenti, you're magging, as the kids would say. It's over my head. I don't know what that means, but I'm hoping it's good. I don't know. You look like you're about to kill someone. Avo and I'm trying to, but failing. No, I'm whizzing middle age. Yeah, so that was 2005.

Okay. Morales, I think we had just landed in La Paz. Yeah. So Morales was flying from Cochabamba to La Paz. He was at the time the head of the coca growers union and had declared that he's going to overthrow, basically, the Bolivian government. And we just happened to be on the flight. You had interviewed him a couple weeks earlier. Yeah.

We had to be on the flight with him. We were interviewing coca growers and other militants throughout the Chapari region. I was down there because, and I told this story last week, I had just, gotten fired. But my boss wanted me to stay on for two months because I had a bunch of like projects. This is that the weed legalization place. And I had bills that were going through the state legislatures. They're like, you're fired.

But these are important bills. You need to stay for like two months until they've gone through the process. And I remember calling you and you're like, or maybe I was an email because you're down in Bolivia. Like you don't owe them anything. They fired you? That's not how this works. You're like, come down here and just do some reports.

on this looming uprising. And the window was closing because it was a very slow siege of La Paz, which is an old tradition. It goes back to at least the 18th century of, you know, indigenous communities, like just slowly gathering and, you know, building the nonviolent siege of the Capitol. And so that was underway. And I remember being like, yeah, you know, you got to get down here because pretty soon the airport's going to close. Because there's only like several ways into the city that's about two miles or whatever above sea level. They can block it. They can block it off. Yeah, they would have little, they made bombs, like, of, you know, dynamite and rocks and nails.

Because a lot of people were still mining, and even if they weren't mining, there was that, you know, even the coca growers had that sort of, like, mining culture with dynamite. Everybody knew how to use dynamite. Yeah, and they were at that point, like, you know, selectively letting trucks. And it was clear that pretty soon it was, you know, nothing was getting in or out. And indeed, the Mesa government at the time did fall from all that. Yeah. And then Minerales ends up becoming president. Yeah. Yeah.

And so we just kind of started in media res there because of maybe that picture itself. But Christian, could you tell us a little bit about how you ended up, you know, in 2005 in La Paz? Like, take us back to the beginning of how your career went in that direction. Okay. I was, well, you know, my father was, he is 92 now, and he is. He's actually quite old. He was an academic and was red-baited out of academia because he was a communist. He was a communist. And so to some extent I inherited the family business of being an intellectual, you know.

I didn't have to do that, but that was sort of, you know, what I saw. And I knew from an early age I wanted to write and I'm also very dyslexic. and I wasn't a very good writer. And around age 19, I was going to a very weird college that later folded under somewhat hilarious circumstances, a place called the New College of California that finally folded when a group of...

Is it related to New College of Florida? No, it's not. When a group of Nepalese hustlers hustled the president for a fake degree and then got caught committing murder, and so they finally, like, the accreditation... A tale is all this time. Yeah, the accreditation...

group came in, it was like, no, we're pulling your license. But anyway, I was on, I hitchhiked out to California at age 19 from Vermont. I couldn't really write. And I met this journalist named Johann Carlyle, who had a little publication called Propaganda Review. And I was helping him out a little bit. And I asked him, like, how do I learn to write? And so the way I learned to write was doing community radio. And he pointed me in the direction of KPFA, which is the Pacifica Station in the Bay Area, which still has a program that trains radio journalists. And a lot of people who ended up at NPR came through this much more left-wing community radio station, which was always that bothered me, that they would come there, get this free education,

and then go on and, you know, sometimes just be stenographers for power. But the deal was they would train you in the evening. It was a pretty rigorous training course, and then you had to work for free, one day a week for a year. And basically what happened is, you know, some people would drop out and not pay their debt and other people would become completely committed and often become full-time journalists, maybe get jobs there. And so that's what I did. I learned to write by doing radio at KBFA first. And then I worked on a radio show called FlashPoint with a guy named Dennis Bernstein that's still going on. And then I moved to New York to finish college at the new school,

which is also now in crisis. And I worked at WBAI volunteering and freelancing, and I had a little paid gig for a while. WBAI is also a Pacifica Station. And its program director at that time was a guy named Samori Marksman, who unfortunately died young of a heart attack in his late 50s. And he was really ariad character from a different era.

He was from some very small Caribbean Island, like Martinique or St. Kitt, something like that. And he was a scholar and a journalist. And I kind of liked that idea, too, being like a scholar and a journalist. And so I had a little, during the Somalia engagement, when U.S. troops were in Somalia, I had a little program once a week, 15 minutes, Somalia watch. So I did radio journalism, and then I finally published a piece when I was in my, I don't know, maybe around 20, 24 or 25 about policing and In Z Magazine and I wrote for Z Magazine for a while and along the way

I you know I think it is yeah along the way it was a big deal It was a big deal and it was it was sort of like It you know there had been a kind of real lull for the left and then Z magazine came along and sort of like oh the left isn't fully dead and And and one of the big stories that I did early on that affected me and sort of helped me along was, I remember I was interviewing Mike Davis, the late Mike Davis, who was an historian of Los Angeles. And I asked him after the interview, I said, any stories you think I should be working on? And this was right after the Cripps Blood Gang Truce and the riots. And he said, yeah, you should do a story about Dwayne Holmes, the guy who started the Cripps Blood Gang Trues.

I was like, and he put me in touch with Dwayne Holmes' mother. And the story of the gang truce was amazing. Everybody thought that the verdict that, you know, Rodney King, African-American Motorist, is beaten by these LAPD officers. Cam quarters are new. Some guys got in the video camera for Christmas and he's filming randomly and he films this beating. And nowadays, it's kind of hard to imagine what that was like because there's images everywhere. But in those days, we're like, whoa, like to see this Veritate images from some person's camera catching this police brutality,

This was incredible. It was really arresting. So there was a trial and all the officers got off. And so then there were massive riots. And right after the riots, a gang truce was announced in Los Angeles. And it quickly spread throughout the country, not all over the country, but there was then a gang truce among the vice lords and disciples in Chicago. There were like truce truces all over the country. So everyone thought that the truce came out of the riots. But the real story was that actually the truce had been worked on for,

almost six months prior to the riots, this guy, Dwayne Holmes who was, he came from Watts and I mean like his story you almost had to, like if it wasn't really you'd think it was like invented. It was like there were these three housing projects in Watts and there were these two Cripsets

and one blood set and they were had this three way fractricidal war they had all gone to school together there had been a paint factory Dwayne Holmes' father had worked in the paint factory. I believe he died eventually. The paint factory is closed It's torn down.

There used to be these 70s era, you know, social welfare programs that called teen posts. And Dwayne said, yeah, well, they closed the teen post when I was about eight or nine. And so we would go on the freeway overpass and throw rocks at cars instead. The paint, you know, the teen post is shut down.

The working class jobs at the paint factory disappear. Eventually, the site of the paint factory becomes a jail. Anyway, long story short, Dwayne Holmes is his cousin is murdered by the LAPD. They're not involved in anything. They come around the corner during a police raid in the Imperial Courts projects, and this guy tiny is shot and killed and left to bleed out.

And Dwayne's mother had raised him, and she is furious. So she starts a group called Mothers Against Police brutality, which involves black, Latino, and Southeast Asian mothers. And as part of that, she says to Dwayne, guys need a ceasefire. And she leans on her son, and he goes, and he communicates through... Was he the gang or was he just... He was a heavy duty, I think, Imperial Courts Crip.

And he was a Crip, I forget which, whether it was Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts, and then the Bounty Hunter Bloods in Nickerson Gardens. And so he communicated through someone in a church to an old friend of his who was on the opposing side. He said, I'm going to come over and talk to you. And they started these meetings. Just a couple OGs. And then every weekend, it grew and grew and grew. And you had these, like, hundreds of these guys who had been shooting each other and killing each other.

This was, like, serious gang violence, late 80s into the early 90s, you know. The murder rate in the U.S. peaks in the early 90s. And, you know, and they're, like, hugging and crying. And they were like, we used to play together as kids, and we're trying to kill each other. And they actually, they signed a ceasefire document. That was their language. It wasn't a true ceasefire. A day before the riots, a day before the verdict in the riots.

And then what happens is a concerted campaign by the LAPD, and I'm pretty sure the FBI, to sabotage all of this. And Dwayne Holmes was set up on a, he was convicted for a $10 robbery that he didn't commit at some, like, peace-oriented, you know, teen event. Sabotage it to lock these guys up. Yeah. And he was locked up for seven years. Jerry Brown, who, you know, was both the youngest and then the oldest governor of California

and also the only governor of California who was the son of a governor was at that time out of office and had been, you know, trying to be a presidential candidate. He spoke at Dwayne's hearing, like, I mean, all sorts of heavy-duty people were like, hey, this guy is a serious community leader. Yeah. And he was, he had to do, I think it was like five of the seven years anyway. But, I mean, those kinds of stories again and again, again, those that first generation of OG gangsters who put down the guns and led this ceasefire,

a lot of them were put in jail, harassed, hounded. So that, I followed that story, and I was into criminal justice. Actually, speaking of criminal justice, I was roommates around that time with Alex Vitale, who's sort of in the news these days around Machmovomondon. Yeah. He's the police abolitionist. Yeah. The book was called. and the end of policing. I continued, my focus was criminal justice because I lived in California and there was a lot of it around.

And I was, you know, I'd been an activist doing Central American Solidarity, you know, getting arrested, not getting arrested, doing direct action. And us lefties had a kind of simplistic analysis of like we'd see these, you know, police actions on the street in the Mission District in San Francisco where I lived in

and we'd just sort of like try to map on some analysis from El Salvador or Guatemala. And it was like, well, this is not, not, doesn't quite work. Like, what, what's going on here? Because these, these gangsters are not in rebellion against the capitalist system.

I mean, they were like wreaking havoc in their own communities. They're capitalists. And, okay, the police repression is repressive, but it's not, this is not a rebellion that's being suppressed, right? So what's going on? And then that led to my first book, Lockedown America.

And I went to graduate school, the London School of Economics along the way. And I also reported from Central America, studied Spanish, there, spent some time with the FMLN because there were very few Americans who had joined up with the FMLN and there was a person from Vermont where I was raised who was a cinematat, who was a videographer who had been with the trade union movements in El Salvador. And then the guerrillas, the FMLN took the capital of San Salvador and held it for two weeks, but they couldn't get

the top army leadership that Stella Major de like board planes from Miami if like if the military leadership had panicked and cracked and left the guerrillas would have taken over the country but and they started bombing the working club first they occupied you know

the barrios and there were the civilians were getting bombed so then they occupied the basically the Beverly Hills Escalone the Beverly Hills of San Salvador but after two weeks of holding the capital they had to fall back into the hills and so a lot of people who had been in the social movements went with them. And so this family friend was one of those people. And long story short,

I managed to make contact with her and then spent some time with the FMLAN. And I went back after the war, you know, after the peace agreements when the crime wave began. And then I went off to graduate school. And so I was always doing journalism and academia. And so my first book, Lockedown America, was sort of drawn from my PhD. But the PhD was, much more specific, it was about anti-homeless policing in San Francisco, and why did that happen? And the answer was because of the deindustrialization and financialization of the American economy and the way that that changes the role of the cities and how cities then are faced with this problem of visible poverty that they have to manage. Because when San Francisco was a light industrial port city,

it didn't really matter if there were homeless people on the street. There also weren't as many homeless people. There were a lot more working poor. But it didn't really matter because it was a different economy, but when it's conventions and tourism, then it really matters. And it's like, if there isn't like tons of money coming from the federal government for social programs and housing, and there is tons of money coming from the federal government for policing, what are you going to do as mayor when there's like hundreds and hundreds of people camped in front of city hall? And you have people saying, you know, we're going to cancel the dentists of America or whatever, are not coming back, you know, if you don't get rid of these people.

It's like, so that was, and then, you know, I could go on. And I wrote another book about surveillance, and then I always saw conflict reporting with something else I did. And then after I got my PhD, I got a series of postdoctoral fellowships. And I took those to the CUNY Graduate Center. And I went to graduate school, the London School of Economics. And I was there doing postdoctoral research. but that's when the war in Afghanistan jumped off.

And I found myself in these, there were great seminars, David Harvey and the late Neil Smith, David Harvey, for people who don't know, is a British Marxist who's been in America for like 30 years. And he's like, you know, he's like the top classical Marxist scholar. He's getting quite old. But, you know, there were some great conversations. But there was also an element of just like being in these seminars

with this like, you know, philosophy, graduate students. And it was like, we're bombing Afghanistan. Like, what, nobody knows anything about what's going on? I was like, I got to get out of here. I got to go. And David Harvey and Neil Smith were kind enough to be like, well, you're supposed to be a scholar. You're supposed to be an academic. But yeah, sure, if you want to go, report. And they'd actually, they, I brought my own funding and then I actually got funding from a big grant that they'd gotten. So they were really, really quite cool about it.

I mean, very few academics would have been like, you want to go to Afghanistan and write news stories, like, and we're supposed to pay for that? They were like, okay, you know, give a shot. Let's do it. A new year doesn't mean erasing who you were. It means honoring what you've survived and choosing how you want to grow. It means giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help. I'm Mike Dolorotcha, host of Sacred Lessons. This podcast is a space for men to talk openly about mental health, grief, relationships, and the patterns we inherit, but don't have to repeat. Here, we slow down.

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It's a new year. And on the podcast's health stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just? depressed. We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health and how the world around

us affects our overall health. We talk about all the ways to keep your body in mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Jorge Ramos. This week, on the moment, we take a look at Venezuela's uncertain future in a conversation with two people who have directly advised U.S. presidents. Juan Gonzalez, during the Obama and Biden administrations.

We're really good at invading countries. We're very bad at nation building. In Carlos de Rosillo, during Trump's, two terms. guarantee you that nobody in the Trump administration likes Delci Rodriguez. Listen to the moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you've been, you know, either protesting against war or covering war, you know, most of your adult life.

Yeah. You know, Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, so let's bring that up to today. So this week, you've got the Trump administration. swooping into Venezuela. Yeah. And snatching Maduro, leaving with him.

Yeah. Apparently they're going to put them on trial, which is a comical idea. I was surprised to see that. Like the indictment is like, I don't know, I don't know about this. Yeah.

Like they've got... Machine guns. They have a gentleman. Yes, they charged. They said they were in charge it with felony possession of machine guns. It's a president of a country. He has a military.

What do you mean? Felony possession. He was on a military base. It's like... You can't have machine guns on a military base? No, it's ridiculous. Yeah. But, you know, they've got a general that they indicted or convicted maybe, you know, a couple months ago.

Who's turned state evidence? It won't be hard for them to find people who, for whatever they're being offered. We'll get up and say what maybe needs to be said to a jury to get that done. Anyway, that aside. How are you thinking now about the Trump administration and its place in the pantheon of, of war versus non-interventionism? Well, obviously, they're much more bellicose than they were the first time around.

There is an element to all this, which is still destructive of the old American Empire. I mean, talking about taking Greenland, that implicitly is threatening NATO. But yeah, no, it's horrendous, it's criminal, this attack on Venezuela. It, you know, trying to figure out what's really going on

is interesting and difficult. Anya Parampal had an interview she did yesterday or day before that was very good where she pointed out that there hasn't been regime change you know it's like she just has a book she has a book out or coming out soon that's right on Venezuela on the 2019 coup right that's right yeah she would be a good interview yeah delsi rodriguez the vice president i mean it seems that her brother Jorge Rodriguez was you know in contact with the u.s i mean there's questions about i mean there was you know they how did this raid go down. And the Trump administration has said they're not going to work with Machado, that she doesn't have the respect. And it seems like they're- After allegedly getting 80% of the vote, like 18 months ago. This could go any number of ways, right? Venezuela could explode. It could fall apart into civil war. There could be like warring factions within the Chavista government. It could hold together. and I don't think the U.S. is going to put boots on the ground

because I may be wrong about that, but I think that would be really insane. I mean, Caracas, I spent a bunch of time in Caracas. In fact, I went down there with another guy who was a roommate with me and Alex was holiday back in the day, a guy named John Marshall, who's now a researcher for United Food and Commercial Workers Union. We did the first story on Venezuela in 99, and then I went back in 2005 and spent a bunch of time there for the nation. And, you know, there are huge parts of Caracas that are under the control of sort of quasi-military,

I mean, quasi-revolutionary militarized gangs, that many of which trace their roots back to urban guerrilla movements in the 70s. I mean, the place is pretty violent. And you hear about the collectivos. They're kind of part of that scene. So an occupation would be insane. Doesn't mean they wouldn't try it. one could also imagine possibly that there is that that uh rodriguez is is going to sort of shift course and that there's a way in which trump could remove i'm not saying this is going to happen

but i could this would probably be the most rational thing for them to do is it's least likely yeah it's to basically like you know you know for trump to pretend that he's like seizing the oil. But, you know, why are, you know, why is Chevron the only firm there? It's because of U.S. imposed sanctions, EU imposed sanctions and UK imposed sanctions. In 2005, when I was there, you still had Halliburton and Slumberg, you know, all these oil servicing companies were down there. These companies are not there because they don't want to get in trouble with the U.S. The Venezuelan government would be totally open to having investment. The reason that Conoco Philips and ExxonMobil had their concessions taken back, i.e. nationalized. First of all, you know,

that was 2005. That was 2007. 2007. And the Venezuelan oil industry was nationalized in 1976, you know, when Google Chavez was whatever, a teenager, early 20s or something. He didn't do it, right? He inherited a nationalized oil industry. But people were talking about, oh, the nationalization of 2007. These were two American firms that had stopped producing. and we're funding the opposition. And the Venezuelan government was like, hey, the deal was, you guys develop these resources and you pay us a cut

so that we can run this social welfare system here. And if you're just going to sit on it, then we're taking it back from you, right? And that was all bound up with the early onset of these sanctions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the arrangement, they would have been allowed to keep their investment, but they just couldn't have a controlling share anymore

so that the Venezuelan government could start. production. So like, okay, we're calling the shots. You guys can still do the work, still get paid. Yeah. I'll keep your ownership. My understanding was like if you go back to the original deal, like, we want you here producing oil. But if you're going to like play games, like you don't actually own this, you know, you have a contract to exploit it. Your contract is not to fund the opposition. Yeah. To get us out to get yourself a better contract. And not to hold these resources off the market. Now you're not not here to like, you know, mess with us. Yeah. Um, so So you could imagine how like the sanctions are removed and Trump is like, we're exploiting

the oil. We're like, you know, going in there and taking it. Whereas the Venezuela is like, we're getting, you know, we're renegotiating a relationship with the United States. We're getting the sanctions removed. Because the sanctions are crushing, you know. So I don't know. Or there could be, you know, that Rodriguez could be going in that direction.

There could be other elements in the military, in the Chavista government that are like, this woman's a sellout. We got to like, you know, put an end of this and have a kudetat. Who knows? Rodriguez herself, I'm curious what you think about her and her family. Her dad was this socialist leader who was killed with CIA involvement, very well-regarded revolutionary. So she comes from this, she and her brother come from this family.

How well-regarded is she? That doesn't always mean that you're going to be a revolutionary. Well, I don't know. I haven't been to Venezuela for a long time, so I don't know. But, I mean, I think that the government still has a lot of support. There have been big protests in, you know, Caracas and other cities demanding the return of Maduro. So, I mean, there's been conflict. I think, you know, probably on the streets, people regard the government well. But that, you know, at the higher levels, there's factions. And I don't, I cannot speak with any authority on that level of massinations. But, but yeah, it's often. and then threatening, you know, the president of Columbia and talking about taking Greenland. I mean, this is all, it's all insane. Now, of course, in the background is China, you know, and, I mean, there's a way in which this seems to be a struggle over, you know, what model of development will be going forward. And, you know, the Belt and Road Initiative, this is China's response to basically the overproduction of capital, the over-accumulation of capital. China is running into the problem that Marx and Engels laid out in the manifesto when they were kids in 1848.

Part of the problem with capitalism is that it's really, really good at producing wealth. And then you have too much money, too much wealth and not enough demand. And you get this crash. He's like, and I'm a crash. It's booms. And it's like, so China has all this excess capital. And they're deploying it through the belt and road of just like building infrastructure. And thereby also trying to like build market.

and connect the world. And the U.S. clearly seems to be about trying to block that. I mean, there's a way in which the Ukraine war is like, you know, centerpiece of Belt and Road initiative is that Eurasian landmass. And so the U.S. through its proxy in Ukrainian government, it's like, well, we're going to light a fire at this end of it. We're not going to let you, like, integrate with Europe geographically.

No, we're going to, like, block you. And there's an element of that here, too, which is like, you know, oh, you're like making huge investments all over Latin America. you're buying more and more soybeans, more and more oil. I mean, the Chinese get like between 8 and 13% of their oil from Venezuela. Not a lot, but not insignificant. It's like 80% of what Venezuela sells typically goes to China. But, you know, there's that which is like, okay, you know,

we're going to sabotage your investment plan. You're going to try and incorporate everybody, you know, and we're going to like smash up your investment patterns. But there's another aspect of it, which is that, you know, the U.S. just doesn't have the ability, short of atomic war, to fight a conventional war against China in the Western Pacific. You know, the level of investment would have to be so much higher in terms of the Navy. I mean, we don't have enough ships to move the fuel for the planes out there. And so there's a realization like, okay, we're, you know, we are rolling back. We are stepping back from the Western Pacific, and that is a Chinese sphere of influence.

And so there's an element of this, which is like Trump, like, with a squid spraying ink. It's like creating this drama of like, oh, my God, this horrendous imperialist bully. And it's like, that's all true. But it's also like a horrendous imperialist bully operating at a much smaller scale than it used to be able to. You know, that global hegemony, that's over. But that's, see, that's very interesting because I was going to ask you about how the Cold War dynamic between the Soviet Union and the United States is in some ways, we're seeing the rhymes of that in what you just laid out with Belt and Road and the United States and China in the United States. And part of the reason, I think the right misunderstands this, part of the reason that you were still dealing with pink tides in Latin America is because there's a lot of anti-American sentiment throughout South and Central America that still exists. I mean, there are a lot of people who like America,

have favorable views towards America, but there's also a lot of fuel for some of these leftist politicians and movements that comes from doing things like regime change in Venezuela. There's a Sandinista in charge of Nicaragua right now. And it's not guaranteed that because you took control of Panama and felt like it was stable for 20 years, that you now have hemispheric dominion.

These things don't necessarily go together. Yeah. And there's also all. a lot of poverty and a lot of inequality, right? You know, I mean, you go like places, like, in Rio or San Paulo, it's like people living in shacks with dirt floors, seeing in the sky above them private helicopters going to elite penthouses. And it's like, you know, you live into those conditions. You're like, really? There's really not enough money to get proper plumbing in this neighborhood?

I don't believe it, you know? And so that never goes away. I mean, you can decapitate and crush and discredit. But then it's like, you know, another 10. 10 years another generation, people being like, why do we have oil? We sell enormous amounts of soybeans. Why don't we have plumbing here? Why don't we have jobs? You know? And China can exploit that. Yeah. And so what does the U.S. get out of blocking China? Like, I hate to put things in, you know, black and white and good and bad. But like, one empire is like building stuff and the other empire is destroying stuff and trying to block the other one from building stuff.

It's like, what am, like, why? Like, what are we doing? I mean, I think that there is a fear in the policy elite of loss of control, that it's, you know, if China gets more and more control, who knows what kind of rules could be imposed on the U.S. And so there's, I mean, there's a, at the bottom of this, and this is something that a certain kind of conservative, like the people that American affairs have been,

pretty good on. Like, I mean, at the bottom of this is a realization that was like, wow, what we in the left would call like the neoliberal turn. This was a disaster. This was insane to export our industrial base abroad, which usually means eventually to China. Mexico, Honduras first, but then to China, was in retrospect, totally nuts, you know, and be like, oh, we've got all this money, you know, and the economics profession, I mean, I'm in an economics department, I'm a professor of economics, even though my degree is sociology and geography, but I teach political economy. But I mean, mainstream economics has a lot to answer for this because they have been saying, this is a great idea.

Yeah. All it matters are prices. All it matters is money and prices. And as long as you have a lot of money, then you can just buy what you need. And it's like, yeah, but what if you have an adversary who has a different philosophy and doesn't care about prices and says, well, you know what? We're going to not sell you rare earths regardless of the price because of just. geostrategic concerns about our sovereignty and our sense of our society as being ancient and venerable and having been pushed around.

And we're in this long-term project of rebuilding our power. And so, yeah, you're right. We could make more money selling you rare earth elements. But instead, we're going to embargo them and bring you to your heel, bring you to the table. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a real decision like, oh, actually, it's not just prices that matter. places, things, skills, all this like process knowledge.

You can't, it's turning out like, oh, you can't actually send manufacturing 6,000 miles away and have the designers and engineers in California be as good. I mean, we don't even quite know why, but it's like, you know, the people who make the stuff and the people who design stuff have to be in contact. They have to see it. It's like, we don't even quite know why, but innovation breaks down with this kind of globalization of supply chains. there's a lot of ways in which the financialization.

In other words, the executives like here in the U.S. have no idea how the product is made. And so before can't like come up with ideas to make it better. Yeah. But the people that would have those ideas are the ones that are like making it. Yeah. Or it might come from the engineers. But the engineers have to like be around the people who are making it and then have to have conversations with them. People making it have to be like, yeah, well, if you did this little different, it's like, oh, okay.

And it can't all be done through documents and Zoom calls and this kind of stuff, right? And then finance, so it's like deindustrialization, financialization, we realize like, oh, that is a path towards sacrificing national sovereignty, right? And so there's left, right, and center concerns about sovereignty. And I think people are waking up. And there's this reactionary, I think, horrible element in the Trump administration, which is responding in terms of your question of why fear China to something very real, which is like, wow. Like, what did we just do? That was totally insane. And it's like, and reindustrialization, you know, that's never really been done.

That would take a long time. There are very, very serious problems that the United States faces, sort of regardless of your politics, regardless of your image of what you want the distribution of wealth and rights and prosperity to be in a country. It's sort of like, oh, we have sabotaged our own development model here. This is actually another interesting dynamic in the Trump administration, because I love your writing on surveillance state and your work on FBI, CIA, the Trump administration, and you've written about this, Trump world more broadly, people like Roger Stone have recently been really critical

and skeptical of the FBI and CIA, which sort of engendered this deep skepticism of the, quote, deep state, the surveillance state, and the intelligence community in Trump world. They come in now, and CIA is operating in Venezuela on the ground. Trump authorizes that they're now using the FBI to infiltrate Antifa groups, which is exactly what people were arguing against in principle, not even just in action, but in principle, that it was dangerous. I mean, the right sounded like the left when it was talking about feds and the proud boys and all of that.

And now they're repeating exactly what they were taking issue with and like the Whitmer kidnapping plot. So I guess that's also something from the Cold War. That's also something that came from the paranoia of the Cold War in a lot of different respects. And I wonder what it's, what you're making of this weird moment where you have a Trump administration doing a Venezuela regime change, but not installing Maria Carina Machado. And then you have them, you know, saying we're, we're done with the deep state, but then also infiltrating Antifa. It's just very weird. It is weird. And I'm not, I don't fully understand it, but there's definitely

not a confrontation with the deep state. It seems like there is, I mean, there's a confrontation with the elements of the deep state like Comey who went after Trump. Right. I mean, it's It almost seems, I have no proof of this, but it almost seems like some sort of deal has been cut, you know, implicitly or explicitly. Which is like, you can get rich with your crypto schemes, you know, basically pay to play right out in the open. You know, you got this cryptocurrency. People want to cut deals with your government or with your private businesses. They buy your crypto. There's nothing illegal about that.

And then you never have a conversation of quid pro quo, but it's like, oh, hey, Saudis or whoever bought a billion dollars worth of crypto, let's like sell them, you know, F-35. or whatever. It's like, I mean, so it's like the Trump's family can do that and they're like going to go after the people who went after them. But like there's clearly not going to be any new church committee here. Right. They're not like dumping documents. I mean, you know, M.K. Ultra files are, there are still redacted M.K. Ultra files. I was just visiting a friend of mine who's a scholar down at University of Virginia. And like, we know there were 130, 149 projects. in which the CIA and academics, usually, in universities, hospitals, jails, experimented with psychedelics, particularly LSD.

But, you know, we don't know the people who were involved. If we had the name of all the scholars who collaborated with the CIA in that, then there'd be a whole other type of historiography that could happen, right? You know, I mean, there's no even discussion about releasing that, but that stuff should happen. Even though there's theories that that's what happened in the Charlie Kirk case and potentially in the Butler case. Like, there are people on the right.

Oh, interesting. That's where they're going. Right. But to Christian's point, like, where is the momentum to actually do something about that structurally? Yeah. There isn't any. There isn't. So that's all, you know, I suppose not surprising.

But yeah, there isn't momentum. And there also isn't, there isn't much demand for it, you know? You know, like, I mean, you know, Matt Taibi was when Trump first came to saying was saying, like, there has to be massive discreet. And then he dropped that. And there's no one, there's no one really on the right who's calling for this. I mean, there was a moment where people were saying, oh, now give us, you know, what you have to trust the public. And you have to just disclose the stuff. And it's like, that hasn't happened.

And there's also, there's no movement. People's saying, hey, where are the documents? There's the Epstein thing, right? But that's only one of the dark spots in the history of the American intelligence agencies, which have not only been abusing people. people in the third world, they have been mucking around in the U.S. And this is the thing like, you know, a lot of good lefties don't like to say that, because you don't want to suggest that elites consider their interests and coordinate.

That would be conspiracy. Other people and other classes do that all the time, but like elites just, you know, they don't do that. And that's about respectability. You know, the professional class lives in fear of losing their jobs. I get it, you know. Yeah. But that's what it's about. And people, a lot of people know about.

but it's like if you say that you sound a little weird and it's like I'm sorry it's the facts that are insane you know yeah and if you're really really really concerned about not sounding at all weird and untoward then you can't talk about certain subjects yeah because they are so weird and untoward a new year doesn't mean erasing who you were it means honoring what you've survived and choosing how you want to grow it means giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help. I'm Mike Dolorotcha, host of Sacred Lessons. This podcast is a space for men to talk openly about mental health, grief,

relationships, and the patterns we inherit, but don't have to repeat. Here, we slow down, we listen, we learn how vulnerability becomes strength and how healing happens in community, not in isolation. If you're ready to let go of what no longer serves you, and step into the year with clarity, compassion, and purpose. Sacred Lessons is your companion on your healing journey. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike Delo Rocha on America's number one podcast network, IHeart.

Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike Deloosa and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanko Wally. And I'm Hurricane de Bolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast's Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early.

Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and to start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health. We talk about all the ways to keep your body in mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection.

We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the I-Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Jorge Ramos. This week, on the moment, we take a look at Venezuela's uncertain future in a conversation with two people who have directly advised U.S. presidents. during the Obama and Biden administrations. We're really good at invading countries. We're very bad at nation building.

In Carlos de Riosillo, we're in Trump's, two terms. I can guarantee you that nobody in the Trump administration likes Delsi Rodriguez. Listen to the moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. It almost feels like by design, some of the stuff they do get so crazy that you sound crazy just talking about it. Yeah, absolutely. Or even knowing about it.

Oh, yeah. Marks you as, hmm, that's kind of a weirdo over there. You kind of know, you know a lot about this subject. That's weird. Ryan, you know a lot about Jeffrey Epstein. You know a lot about Jeffrey Epstein. A lot about Wuhan. Yeah.

Yeah. It's ridiculous. So, find your work at Compact. Where else? I have a piece of American Affairs, kind of academic, gets into questions of deindustrialization, reindustrialization. It's about, it's a review essay. It's about the role of government in the moments of robust development within American capitalism.

But I didn't want me to cut you off. You've got anything else? Well, no, I was just going to ask a quick question about the media. As a journalist who's chronicled a lot of this stuff, new media is, this is a weird, almost revolutionary time. Like, we're here talking on this set and no corporate backing, nothing like that. Is that changing populism? Is that changing? And are there any ways you're optimistic about that?

I mean, we were talking about, you know, like zines earlier. There's something happening. Yeah, I'm, I think that all this new media stuff, this podcast, this, you know, kind of stuff you guys are doing here, I think it's very good. And it's very, it does make me optimistic. And, you know, the legacy media, I'm not glad to see it declined, but, you know, it's full of flaws and outrageous distortions. You know, one, for example, I was just reading the New York Times the other day, and it's like, they described Aaron Siri, who is, you know, when part, I am a COVID skeptic and, you know, I was not in favor of the lockdowns. I was not in favor of forcing this vaccine on people. And so that constitutes sort of like a break with the majority of the left for me and them. You know, and there's an article about Aaron Siri, who's an attorney who's worked with RFK Jr. He sued on behalf of a family that had, a child that they thought was injured by one of seven varieties of polio vaccine. And this polio vaccine had not gone through the proper safety trials that the other six had. And what they

wanted was for this vaccine to be subject to those safety trials. And the way the New York Times put it was like, he's opposed to the polio vaccine. And it's like, first of all, there's no such thing as the polio vaccine. There's like two sort of basic categories. And then like, you know, six or seven other varieties. And it was the one most recent, most experimental that they were saying, don't take it off the market, they were just saying like, make it pass the safety tests

that the other polio vaccines have passed or take it off the market. You know, it's like, the New York Times is lying like that. So, yeah. But it's one of those things that you sound crazy for talking about. Yeah, yeah,

which is why I brought it up because I wanted to normalize it for people because I also don't really care if people think I sound crazy. It's on you. And before we let you, go. As a New Yorker, did want to get your take on Mamdani for a little bit. Yeah. Because he's in the arc of kind of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, like literally kind of emerges out of their movement.

Yeah. But also seems to have reinvented it a little bit to move, you know, to focus on New York. I think Andrew Epstein is One of his A's called the Campaign a Love Letter to New York And you can tell, he really loves New York But leading with the material concerns of New Yorkers Making the city the place that it should be Yeah, great again And while he got attacked for all of his identity concerns

And he would speak in every language he could think of To try to reach voters where they were he did not lead with the kind of language that became popular in the early 2020s among the left So what do you think are his like what do you make of him so far? What like what's he got going for? What are the What does he need to look out for? Well, I'm I'm very hopeful. I think he's he's he's good. I voted for him I I hope that he can get stuff done I mean it's a huge job there's limits to what the mayor can do I worry about some of his early steps. Like there's actually a bike lane.

In my neighborhood in Greenpoint, there is, you know, there were these Uber-funded, there's a group called Transportation Alternatives, and these other kind of, you know, and the transportation alternatives got Uber funding to basically, you know, make war on cars, which is fine. I mean, I'm in favor of bike lanes.

I mean, I voted for Mike Bloomberg when he was a Republican because the Democrat was saying, I'm going to close bike lanes. And I was like, My life depends on these bike lanes. So I'm four bike lanes, but they have really kind of gone overboard to the point where, like, you know, on this main thoroughfare, again, it's like an ambulance can't get around stuck traffic. And so, you know, he immediately went there and he wants to revive this. And it's like some of that stuff just because it's coated green.

Right. It's like it needs a critical second look. I'm worried about the idea of the Department of Public Safety because it's not an all clear cut. that like this is a mental health crisis and this is a criminal justice situation, you know? And there's a long history of the, what criminologists call net widening and mesh thinning, you know. I mean, this is, this is presented as an alternative to the police could very easily become an additional form of police power. That doesn't even incorporate some of the crucial protections like your Fourth Amendment rights, you know. I mean, you know, you social workers show up and they're like, we're here.

to help you tell us what's going on and you say I just assaulted somebody. You know, if it was the cops, they'd be like, hey, you know, you're acting crazy and we're taking you in, you have the right to your right sign. You know, I mean, that's pretty important, you know? And once you come to your senses, maybe you'll be glad that you didn't like, emot, like I just attack these people randomly. It's like, get some meds, like, you know. I mean, and it's also like the, I mean, the problems are so deep.

I'm not sure how this, like, changing the thin end of the wedge, you know, you can do that much. But I'm not saying I'm totally against it, but I would like to just introduce a note of skepticism because I feel that on the left, it's just, it's assumed the cops are a problem. This is a solution. The fact of the matter is the NYPD has become much less violent than it used to be in the 90s. And interestingly, you know, I mean, I think it has a lot to do with the diversification, the diversity of the force. And, you know, I've written critically about, you know, woke politics and the obsession with that. But I just think the reality, I'm always

for actual diversity, but the reality is that the force is less male and white than it used to be. When I was in my 20s in New York City, it was like all these Irish and Italian kids. It's a bunch of guys named Ryan Grim. Yeah. You know, and like...

Ryan O'Leary. And they were afraid of the people and they looked down on them with contempt. There's tons of women. And in New York, the the growing diversity of the force has coincided with declining use of force. Now, there's been an uptick over the last year. The NYPD needs to get much better about transparency. But the idea that this is an out-of-control police force, I mean,

it's not the same force it was in the 90s. And so there's problems with that. And then it's like, I mean, if you have this department of community safety, I mean, do we also have the funding for it? I mean, there needs to be like massive back of the house funding for, for, the mentally ill and drug-addicted people who are unhoused in New York. So, you know, I worry that this could be a billion-dollar jobs program for, you know, DSA-type social workers, and that in the end people are like, you know what, this is a racket, this is a rip-off, what is this? You know? So you got the social workers to take them in, and then the same thing happens as with the cops.

They're back out in a week. Like, what's going on here? So I don't have a solution, but. And my cousin. But I think he's like deep cleaning the subway. You know, he's got energy. He's smart. The idea of building, the idea of, you know, trimming the regulations.

I mean, there are some pretty excessive regulations around building and housing codes in New York City. I mean, it could stand. Now, of course, like. That are often carve-outs for corporations. Yep, yeah, that's true. And speaking of things that the left doesn't want to touch. My cousin in New York has worked in the mental health. departments of hospitals and currently at Harlem Hospital.

And she worked at Rikers for a while. And the point that she's made is that she's like, there's a population of deeply and chronically mentally ill people in New York City that when, whatever they call it, the institutions, the asylum. The institutionalization.

The institutionization were shut down because of abuses within them. They no longer had a place to go. And so and what they'll do now is like well Sometimes you have access to an apartment or like a room Yeah, but they don't they don't want to really stay in that room and or they sleep in that room But then they're basically unhoused during the day around the city And self-medicating with whatever they're with whatever they're on her argument is like you This is a finite number of people like but they are

90% of these calls that the police are getting, they need a place to go. Yeah. And it has to be, has to be serious, has to be well funded. Yeah. It has to be, you know, it's not locked in. Treatment. But, and she's like, it should be like an upstate New York or somewhere.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, the whole, the history of deinstitutionalization is, is beginning to get a second look. I mean, that coincides, of course, with the beginning of austerity, the budget crises and, you know, like, it starts before Reagan comes in, but it's part of that whole, like, you know, gutting the social welfare system. And the left was correctly pointing out, like, these places are horrible. Though sometimes even that was a little nuts.

I rewatched Tiddy Cut Follies, this famous documentary about Bridgewater State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts. And I remember, you're supposed to be like, this place is horrible. And I watched it, I was like, I don't know, it doesn't actually seem that bad. It's probably easy to make them look bad. Yeah, I mean, it's just sort of like, you know. So there's, I mean, it's not those places were without problems. They have problems, but there was a way in which the critique of the left was harnessed by the tax-cutting austerity, right? It was like, yeah, that's great.

You're right. They're horrible. We're going to close them and give that money to rich people. It's tax break, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You know, speaking of austerity, I mean, one thing I would be like to throw into the mix here for the left to think about is, you know, we oppose austerity because it's usually aimed at workers and vulnerable people. But I think there could be a place for left austerity.

speaking as a university professor. The number of administrators in American universities has gone from an average of one administrator per three faculty in 1980 to one to one. And in many universities, they are now more than 50% of the employees of universities are administrators. And many of them are paid a lot of money. Their job speaking from the front lines

of the email receiving teaching profession, It's like their job seems to be to harass people. And it's very clear. I remember the great scholar, a friend Fox Piven said this to me. She is retired now, but she was at the graduate center. She said, yes, I'm there on 34th Street, 35th Street, and I've been to the fifth floor, and it's true, Christian. They have nothing to do. They literally don't.

So, you know, no one ever talks about that. It's like, no, they don't. I think we could do some, like, very, very deep cuts. to the administration of what is a great university system, the CUNY, City University of New York, where I work. So the administrators won't like that, but you know what? I don't like all the pointless emails. You try to unsubscribe and it doesn't work. Actually, it does.

Block sender. A lot of you can just sort of ignore. Filter, filter straight into the spam. Amazing. Well, they'll enjoy this interview. Yes, yes. Everyone will. Great.

Well, thanks for coming by here. Thank you very much. Very much appreciate it. For inviting me. Appreciate it. It was worth it for that picture alone. Yes. That was great stuff, guys.

A new year doesn't ask us to become someone new. It invites us back home to ourselves. I'm Mike Delarocha, a host of sacred lessons. A space for men to pause, reflect, and heal. This year, we're talking honestly about mental health, relationships, and the patterns we're ready to release. If you're looking for clarity, connection, and healthier ways to show up,

in your life. Sacred Lessons is here for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLroach on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanko Wally. And I'm Hurricane Dabolu. It's a new year. And on the podcast's health stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just depressed? Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, I'm Jorge Ramos. This week, on the moment, we take a look at Venezuela's uncertain future in a conversation with two people who have directly advised U.S. presidents. Juan Gonzalez, during the Obama and Biden administrations. We're really good at invading countries. We're very bad at nation building. In Carlos de Rosillo, during Trump's, two terms. I can guarantee you that nobody in the Trump administration likes Delci Rodriguez.

Listen to the moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed human.