Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/7/26: Europe Freaks Over Greenland, OnlyFans Visas, Epstein Iran Contra Explained

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Krystal and Emily discuss Europeans freak over Greenland, Saagar loses it over OnlyFans visas, Epstein Iran Contra explained.    Blowback Pod: https://blowback.show/    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.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you,

please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, 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. Turning now to Greenland, there's some all eyes on Greenland after the Stephen Miller appearance with CNN. Let's take a listen. Greenland should be part of the United States. The president has been very clear about that.

That is the formal position of the U.S. government. Right, but can you say that military action against Greenland is off the table? It would be military action against Greenland. The Greenland has a population of 30,000 people, Jim. The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark? The United States is the power of NATO.

For the United States to secure the Arctic region to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously Greenland should be part of the United States. And so that's a conversation that we're going to have as a country. That's a process we're going to have as a community of nation. You can't take it off the table that the U.S. would use military force to seize Greenland. You can't take it off the table. I understand, Jake, I understand you're trying very hard to, which, again, is your job. I respect it.

It's great to get exactly the headline, right, that catchy headline. I'm trying to get an answer to question. That says Miller refuses to rule out. The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There's no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you're asking of a military operation. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland. Okay, so that is the declaration from Stephen Miller. C2, though, let's put that up there on the screen. Margo Rubio calming the waters, going before lawmakers, saying, guys, the actual

aim is to buy Greenland. We don't want to doubt play military action, especially after a whole bunch of Europeans freaked out, because Stephen Miller's wife tweeted out this image. Let's go to that one up there on the screen, please, just to show everybody. Showing, is that the Kennedy Center that I see right there? Sorry, the Kennedy Channel. I thought that she had superimposed that on top of Greenland, and I thought it was going to be even more ridiculous. But that is Greenland there pictured in an American flag,

inviting all kinds of freak out from the European powers, though they do want to buy it now from Denmark. So your general reaction, Ryan, especially in the context of this whole Russian raid, which just took actually place, or this Russian interception, just took place off the coast of Iceland in the North Atlantic. So I want to know how MAGA plans to build a wall around this.

We don't need a wall around Greenland. It's called the ocean. Who's going to get there? I don't know. In a boat? Who wants to come to Greenland? It's in the middle of nowhere. Very few people who could even make it there.

I mean, look at the amount of wall you'd have to build there. You don't need a wall, right? There's, as he said, there's only 50,000 people who live there. But what if the Venezuelans get to Greenland and then they're in, then they're in a territorial United States. You know, if any 20 from Venezuela can sail a boat from Venezuela to Greenland, you can stay. You can stay. That's what I would say. That is such an impressive journey.

That's like Shackleton's journey. Ice foot, dry foot. That's only real ones will understand that reference. I will say, by the way, I think buying it is a good idea for the people of Greenland. So we were talking about this. 30,000. Yeah, what's the math? So the actual population is $56,000. So, I mean, why wouldn't, give them $2 million, all right? Give them $2 million each. Because you have to make up for the fact. Well, we have to make up for the fact that these people do have free health care. And they have a decent enough life. I will say, just reading a little bit about Greenland and their relationship with Denmark. It is genuinely tenuous. The U.S. history with Greenland goes way back. We can go and put C6, please, up on the screen. I was reading this last year. when the whole Greenland thing was becoming a big talking point. So in 1868, under Secretary Stewart, he actually commissioned this report called a report

on the resources of Iceland and Greenland. And here's what it wrote, quote, by location it belongs in the Western Hemisphere as an insular dependency of the North American continent. I've heretofore expressed the opinion we should purchase Greenland. And in fact, the circumstances, which we ended up recognizing Greenland, I had no idea, is we ended up purchasing the U.S. Virgin Islands from, I believe, whoever it was controlled, Denmark at the time. And it's because we needed it for power projection with the Panama Canal and as a coaling station. Like coal.

Right. And then it ended up becoming a problem because the Danes surrendered during World War II in 1940. They could no longer protect Greenland. And so FDR actually went in and put, yeah. We were like, we got this in recognition that it's critical to U.S. because they didn't want the Nazis to come in and put a base on Greenland and use it as some sort of submarine base for operations against the United States or against New York Harbor or any of this.

And so the U.S. actually came in, protected Greenland, but then eventually gave it back because the theory at the time, there was a serious debate about this, is whether we should give Greenland back to Denmark. They were like, well, if we keep Greenland after we just fought a war against territorial aggression and we're denouncing Soviet territorial aggression in Western Europe or Eastern Europe, it would be a little bit contradictory. So we have to give it back. But it has been a live issue for since 1868. I personally think we should buy it to get around

any of the NATO problems. I do think the Arctic concerns, especially with the whole melting ice and, you know, the sea channels and all that. It's very interesting. I'm the guys, this is totally independent of Trump and all this. I've just, I spoke. to a few Arctic experts about a year ago when all of this was going on. They're like, you look, Trump idiocy and all of that aside, this has been kind of a thing now for the United States for a long time. And actually, in the context of melting ice caps, it makes it more viable in terms of shipping lanes. But no, I do not support territorial, explicitly invading Greenland. I think we should make it worth the Greenlanders while. They have free health care.

They've got a decent enough thing going, although they want their own independence from Denmark. They don't love being a colony either. Let's do some free trade compact or whatever, pay them all $2 million each, make it tax-free, make them all filthy rich, and then it'll be a win-win situation. If I did my math right, it's about $112 billion to give $2 million to all $56,000. That's one-ninth of the – that's like one-ninth of the Pentagon budget. Yeah, it's not. No, actually, no, that's one-tenth of the Pentagon for one year. The fact that it's already a colony of Denmark, to me, like, strips away a lot of the –

kind of moral balance of it where it's like it's hard to get too worked up about something that's already a colony of something we don't have too much time but I do want to say that because I've been dying to dunk on the Europeans for this. Can we put the C5 up there on the screen is that these European leaders when Trump

extraordinary had did the extraordinary rendition of Maduro they were all like basically supportive of the operation you know they said oh we want a democratic transition and all that and I was amazed by it because for four years these people have lectured me about how other countries can't just go in regardless of whether it's in their sphere of influence and knock off the

I mean remember how much they freaked out when Russia tried to kill Zelensky how many different times this is a horrible violation of international norms but they're the ones who recognize the fake Guido government and are proposing some grand democratic transition by force it's like can you really Europe lecture us about territorial integrity whenever you're openly supportive of the Venezuelan operation and then bleeding about Greenland because yeah as you said it's a colony which they don't even want the people of Greenland necessarily to be part of Denmark now when I say that I'm not saying they also want to be part of America but they're explicitly one of the leading parties in Greenland is like we want to be our own country we don't want to be ruled by all of you and the Danish are like oh well this would be a horrible violation of NATO integrity. And let's put up C4 real quickly because there's an interesting line in this statement,

joint statement from France, Germany, all the usual suspects. It finishes. Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland. Right. Oh, right. Wait, wait. And them only to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.

It's like, what's Denmark have to do with this? Hold on a second. Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark to decide. Like, come on, what are you doing here? Right. Yeah, that makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, do you know the story of Greenland, like how it eventually came to be colonized by the European powers?

It's crazy. Like, if you, okay, as I remember it and people might, people might get me, you might have to fact check me. It starts with, I think it's Eric the Red. And it was like his son, like, murdered somebody and went to, I think went to Iceland. And then that guy's son also murdered somebody and was banished. And he went to Greenland. And it's like because of that, because back in like six, the years 600 AD years, again, I apologize. I know I'm getting a decent amount of this wrong. But it's roughly correct that Denmark has a right to Greenland. And again, you know, by the laws of territorial, you know, integrity. Wouldn't Sweden have it if it was Viking? No, but that's my whole thing is that it, Denmark was not even a country when all this was happening. It was being governed. Or it was part of it. Kingdom or any of that. Like it was, so that is the basis of their claim to Greenland. And then when it mattered in World War II, they literally gave it up and America gave it back. And what the U.S. could do is just threaten to take the Ozempic patent. Oh, Novo Novon

No, no, no, no, no, the Danish should threaten that. Remember that. Because at one point, you know, actually it's a less of an important company. I mean, the U.S. could threaten, be like, oh, to take the patent. Yeah. We kind of already are because they've lowered the price. We actually nukes the stock of that company, interestingly enough. Anyway, you and I have spoken far too much here about Greenland. And we will return. Perhaps we shall return. It's for the greenish people. That is for the greenish people. I agree. If anybody ever wants to read a great story about the U.S. Expedition, Greenland's, I think it's called the Greeley Expedition. I read a book about that one. Oh, it was gnarly. Truly gnarly. People starve into death and possible

cannibalization. Okay, let's get to visas. Let's turn now to Visa's extraordinary Bro Show content that we have to go and put into this is this is the downfall of the republic right here this is actually if anything no this is the honest reflection Ryan of who we are yeah let's go and put this up here on the screen influencers and only fans models dominate u.s. extraordinary artist visa so there's a specific type of visa called o1b visa for quote exceptional creatives which is now exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic for talent managers and creators and a 50% of these visas now Ryan according to the financial times are being granted to influencers and only fans models. Only fans models

in particular dominating because you have to be able to prove commercial success and high number of follower count. And who, of course, makes more money than people who are selling naked photos of themselves to degenerate weed-delected young men here in the United States. I mean, it's an extraordinary business model. I guess you have to give the ladies credit, right, for, you know, I mean, is there anything better than a foreign woman coming to America, you know, selling naked photos of herself, charging extraordinary amounts of money to our deracinated marijuana gambling-addicted population, morbidly obese, and then buying such photos, enriching these people so that they can buy mansions in South Florida and in Palm Springs. I guess it's the American dream, right? I guess it's the American dream. It's bleak. It is. Yeah, what are your thoughts? Because you seem like one of those decriminalized sex work people at the same time.

So perhaps you support this. This is the logical end point of your libertarian culture. Right, but I'm not a libertarian. No, libertarian. Okay, fine, libertine culture. You're libertine culture. See, I don't want to criminalize any of this stuff. But I do believe in kind of social and community stigmatization of this kind of thing.

And actually, what I learned in researching the history of drug use is it really isn't criminalization that gets kind of use and abuse under control. It's community stigmatization. It's like if you take the crack epidemic, for instance, and you saw this repeat itself over and over that after about seven years of a new drug that doesn't have like immunity in the community. So like all this, you know, crack comes in. It's like, whoa, this is amazing. This feels incredible. And so it just rips through everything because everybody's loving it. And then within a short amount of time, people start to see the negative effects of it.

And the idea of the quote-unquote crackhead was actually useful to the community. Because people coming in were like, I don't want to be that. And the community was saying, like, that's not a good thing. and you then you then see like a decline in use because there builds up an immunity kind of and then a new drug comes. Do anything social stigma is downstream of law though? Not necessarily.

Not necessarily, but it doesn't have to. My point is it doesn't have to be. We did not criminalize tobacco, but we stigmatized it and we crushed use of it. Yeah, but we also had a lot of laws that, let's say, didn't allow them to advertise, banned it in places. So that would be, Yeah. That would be my preferred place where there was enormous, well, the gambling, my God.

Like, we never had a debate where we legalized gambling. Yeah. And all we can do is just thank Chris Christie in the U.S. Supreme Court. Just did it. I agree. But like, so you tell you a bunch of rules that would say, here are the, here's the advertising rules, here are the rules on who can do it. The age restrictions is very similar to tobacco. And then try to socially through the government and just through our social channels and our and the bonds that we have with each other say, don't do this. Like, this is not a good thing. And, and you just admitted that the laws are very important. I mean, this is why, look, everybody hates on prohibition. But not locking people up. Let's remember, during prohibition, the amount of alcohol consumed dramatically went down. Everyone's like, oh, what about the mafia? I'm like, well, we had a lot of Italians that just entered the

country as well. You know, prohibition also did? Is it produced the smuggling route from Mexico into the United States, which the cartels now run. Okay. I mean, again, if, let's say perhaps if we had not imported an entire mafia culture into the United States, might have been a little bit different. But, you know, at the same time, like, whenever we look at this, if you combine our libertine, libertarian economic capitalist policy with libertine culture, you get the worst of all worlds. And that's what, that's the world that we're living in.

That's why we need a more social democratic. And we're celebrating this. Yeah, but even then, if you, it's like, this is kind of, again, you need Confucianism. Like, you need a full-blown, like, in my, opinion, with this current culture, we have irreligiosity, which is going through the route, we have debt, you know, all these other problems. Just materialism itself is not going to be the answer. Like this, if anything, we're going to be giving or having even more money,

which will be spent on all of this, like, disgusting industry. Like, you have to have some level of enforcement, and I don't know why we have lost the ability to distinguish between good and bad. I actually think it's one of the most interesting left-right debates is, like, left, the left for like 10 years just refused to believe like this is good or this is bad it's like no weed is bad gambling is bad drugs are actually bad um now that doesn't mean you should be locked up forever porn is horrible like it's a bad thing it's called a vice for right but they don't but there's been no acknowledgement of it's like oh live and let live it's like no we should not live and let live that's a disaster actually uh because that means that we have no like social connection

or anything and so the explicit like granting celebration and now uh government power that these porn companies and only fans models, which I guess are getting like extraordinary preferential treatment from the government, I think is horrible. Can we put the next element up here on the screen? This has been, I mentioned this before we left, but you remember, and you'll love this,

the whole debanking thing. The debanking report put out, they put out a report from the Treasury Department where they're like, oh, these big banks, these horrible banks won't do business with porn companies. And Ryan, as you know, banks have no morals. They don't care if you're in porn. The reason they don't do business with porn is because they're deeply worried that the companies themselves, which have a horrible track record,

of complying with CSAM regulations and with revenge porn regulation, and in fact, dramatically encourage both. And that's the reason why they don't want to do business with the porn. They don't care whether you're selling porn or not. This is the same thing that happened with Onlyfans. They're like, well, we're kind of worried that you don't have nearly enough regulation whenever it comes to that. And it's the same thing with market injuries and complaining that the banks are being unfair to crypto companies because the founders were Trump supporter. It's like, no, it's because they're pretty, because the crypto companies refuse to, like, give any information that they aren't just used for money laundering. Yeah, exactly. We think you're doing money laundering.

Can you demonstrate to us that you're not? I get it. And they're like, no, we can't demonstrate that. And they're like, okay, then you can't use our banking services. And they're like, ah, it's because we like Trump. Yeah, it is difficult because like the, what I've heard, is that a lot of the way that KYC laws are written encourages monopolization, like in the banking sector, is because it's easier to regulate, right? If you have a big-ass bank, then they're obviously going to have all these money laundering control. Like, I understand at a conceptual level, but yeah, it was weaponized rhetorically to basically say, actually, no, we shouldn't really have. We should allow these banks to, or we should pressure these banks to do business with everybody. And in this case,

you know, they're using it like it's some, you know, like grand ideological thing, when in reality, again, the banks don't do business with them for a very good reason. And in fact, we should encourage the banks not to do business with them. These are bad industries, like explicitly. The government should not be out there saying, you must, you know, oh, we cannot survive as a nation, you know, if we don't allow the porn companies to get bankrolled. So I don't know. I think it's disgusting. And in particular, I think what shows you the more, even more difficulty of all this is the rise of AI. Let's just put this final segment up here on the screen. Ryan, I'm sure you saw this over the last few weeks. It's disgusting. GROC is undressing children

at the request of people who are on Twitter who are just replying with images, first of all, just from a revenge point perspective, even if you're an adult woman, it's disgusting. I mean, you can't allow that to happen. They're like posting images of random women and saying, put them in a bikini. And it even works whenever. is used against children, which we have, we're not even going to show you the examples. But, yeah, I mean, this is the end point of, like, where we're getting, where all the money and all of that is- Brock has a bunch of Pentagon contracts and, like, yeah.

Like, this is ridiculous. Right. And beyond that, it shows you how difficult it is for the technology to immediate, like, people are like, oh, it's just one time, it's like, no, it happened for weeks. It took a while, though, where's the law? Is the DOJ going to do anything about it? And worse, you know, technology is value neutral. The value comes from you and I. And the only way for you and I to express value on top of these companies is through the government. We have no other type of system.

We can't just socially be like, oh, we're not going to use GROC because it's like it doesn't happen. So that's why I think that the law is very important here. And just, yeah, this explosion of the only fans content creator model. I mean, I'm sorry. Like, we don't need more of you here over here. Can we at least all agree on that? Like, even if you're rabidly pro-immigrant, it's like under what basis is this good,

it would make you an extraordinary talent and benefit to our society? We had for years a legal and a social stigma against the dramatic embrace of all this. And instead, now we have a culture of like, oh, it's all good. All money is green. Right. It doesn't matter. And this is the world that we live in now.

Okay. It's bleak. That's bad. All right. So with all that, we have. the blowback boys standing by. Let's get to it. Recently at Dropside News, when you put up G3 here, we put out a story, Mercosier saying to myself, the headline Epstein, Israel, and the CIA,

how the Iran contraplanes landed at Les Wexter's base. We covered it previously here, but it looks at, it looks to answer the question of how did Jeffrey Epstein get his start, and where did he make his money, and what are his links to the intel community? So after that piece came out, Noah Cole one, who's the one of the co-founders, the co-hosts of the Blowback podcast, reached out and he was like, you know, we've got this new episode, this new series on Angola that actually talks a bunch about this. And it is, it's truly fascinating. I got to look at the premium. It's out now. So I highly recommend that people listen to it.

But it tells the story of Angola. Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in Africa is one of the kind of most under-discussed parts of it. It's also the thing that got him famous because in 2002 he took Clinton to Africa.

It's also the thing that shows that he is a person who has always had his finger on the pulse of where money and power kind of flows in our global society. Now, Emily was going to be on here today and actually I think she listened to the whole blowback series.

to get ready for it. Sagar subbed in for him. Yes. So we're going to, Noah and I are going to educate Sagar on what's going on here. So Noah, thanks for joining us.

You would need two or three hours to do justice to this conversation. Luckily, your podcast series does run, though at least that long. But we'll do what we can to date. So thanks for joining us. Good see you, man. Hey, thank you for having me.

Really appreciate it in all the kind words. And so let's let's throw up, actually let's throw up the map here because you have an interesting part where you say like the CIA began its briefings of the White House just with a map. Well, it was actually, it was, so this was CIA director William Colby, who is addressing the NSC. And the account of this meeting comes from an ex-CIA officer named John Stockwell. Right. And Colby is explaining what's going down in 1975 in Southern Africa by telling the National Security Council at that time the most important national security policymaking body. And he says, this is a map of Africa. And this is Angola. And these are the good guys. These are the bad guys. And then these guys we don't know too much about. But that is. how the highest levels of Washington initially were apprised of what Angola was and what it meant at the beginning of what became a secret CIA covert action, or at least near the start,

if not the very beginning. And I think that's an appropriate way to kind of start a segment about Angola for an American audience, but it's a truly embarrassing way for the United States to start its own kind of involvement in the region. And so in that in that map, people saw South Africa, which at the time was apartheid South Africa, and which at the time occupied Namibia, which was just to its northwest there. Namibia had been the victim of a Germany's first genocide in the early 20th century. And after that South African, South Africa ended up occupying it and it's fending off, off an insurgency to throw South Africa out of there.

North of that, you've got Angola. North of that, importantly, you have what was then Zaire, which is a Democratic Republic of Congo, which, and we've talked to, Emily and I interviewed, the guy who wrote the recent biography of Patrice Lumumba, his assassination plays a critical role here as well because the CIA's man, Mobutu, coming into Zaire, Zaire plays a huge role in the history, as you talk about here, because it allows for the CIA

and the insurgents and its backing to have a base of operations to kind of constantly mess with Angola. The reason that this is interesting today, I think two reasons. One, Cuba and Venezuela, because I think there's actually a shadow there, but also Jeffrey Epstein. So let's roll the Jeffrey Epstein portion of, I think this is episode eight or so. This is season six. And then we'll unpack this. So let's roll that clip. One particular irony of the scandal was that when Eugene Hassanfus had been shot down over Nicaragua,

he had been flying a plane for a CIA front company called Southern Air Transport. As it turned out, the MPLA government in Luanda, which was fighting the CIA, was also contracting with Southern Air Transport, having very few options for air. cargo in Angolan skies. Apparently unaware of the company's history reports the LA Times, the Soviet and Cuban-backed Angolan government in 1984 paid Southern Air Transport to run a busy airlift that kept two Lockheed L-100 cargo planes flying nearly around the clock, according to Diamond Industry sources. The Angola contract accounted for about 65 percent of Southern Air transport's income, end quote. Luanda, after learning more about Southern Air, promptly canceled its dealings with the airline. But while Angola's business with Southern Air was done, one of the CIA's

most notorious proprietaries or front companies lived on. A decade later in the mid-1990s, Southern Air Transport relocated to Columbus, Ohio. There, it fell into the control of Les Wexner, CEO of the parent company of Victoria's Secret and Abercrombian Fitch. Wexner used the airline to bring merchandise from Hong Kong to the States, and the person who reportedly arranged the sale and relocation of Southern Air Transport. Epstein, Les Wexner's financial advisor, suspected spy, reported blackmailer, and convicted pedophile. So Jeffrey Epstein brings this CIA-backed airline after it's done with its Iran-Contra business to Columbus, Ohio to work for Les Wexner. And then, interestingly, and you can put up G3B,

we had reported this in our piece that after, you know, after it was done in Columbus, and right it right as the kind of CIA IG report is coming out and exposing that it actually was doing the things that we now understand that it was doing. They sell, they declare bankruptcy, but before that they sell half their planes to a UAE-based airline, which does business in Angola. And it begins, they begin again trafficking blood diamonds. And so in the middle of all this the entire time is Jeffrey Epstein. And so at one point he had said, you know, that how did you make your money? He told a journalist, guns, drugs, and diamonds. So before we get into all of the Epstein part, which is utterly fascinating, and let's talk a little bit about the Cuban element

of this. Because, sure. So the MPLA, which is the kind of socialist government, you know, after the Portuguese leave, you know, they're consolidating, they're consolidating control. The South Africans feel like having a leftist anywhere in southern Africa is a threat to apartheid. And so they start to invade. They're blocked, shockingly, by Cuba. So what was Cuba's current situation and what advantage was there at all to Cuba intervening militarily in Angola? There was none. Which is wild.

I mean, in a longer sense, there was because Cuban, Fidel Castro and the Cuban leadership had for many years outlined a policy by which they understood that part of the goal of, you know, supporting revolutionaries and guerrillas in other foreign, in foreign countries was that it was a way of combating, you know, capitalist forces, more generally a way of hemming imperial ambitions that they viewed as part of a global system and that there was you know in that broader sense it was a way of fighting and and applying pressure against its own enemies namely the united states um you know through through acts of solidarity but in you know but that's that's a pretty abstract thing the reality was that cuba in 1975 uh was faced with

a moral dilemma. The Angolan nationalists who had, you know, competed amongst themselves, various factions to be the ones who would take power after the Portuguese left in late 75, the left-wing Marxist faction, the MPLA, was in control of the capital city and was poised to be able to actually assume the responsibility of government. And they were the favored sons, or at least they were the favorite inheritors of that authority by the departing Portuguese, who were now part of a, you know, a recently installed left-wing junta. And the Angolan's, the remaining two Angolan factions, one was the FNLA, which was very strongly CIA supported, very much aligned with Mobutu

in Zaire, and led by a guy named Holden Roberto. And then you have Jonas Savimbi, who headed a more unknown faction at the time called Unita, but we'll hear more about him later. And the Cubans were, you know, they were told explicitly in mid-75, and they understood because they were in contact with the Angolan, the MPLA leadership, that essentially the CIA and the South Africans had begun arming and mobilizing against the MPLA. There were already border incursions, there had been huge fighting across the country and neighboring South Africa had a huge interest in not wanting to see a common, you know, what they viewed as a aggressive communist government coming to power, in part because, as you said earlier, South Africa occupied Namibia and through its occupation of Namibia, would be exposed to Namibian rebels who would be able to take sanctuary in southern Angola. And so the South African interest, you know, rears his head at this time. So all these threats are rearing their heads against what in November 75 is the new government, the new nation of Angola, led by the left-wing MPLA.

And the South Africans immediately invade, immediately invade from the south. They launched two different divisions. And the FNLA from the north and the central area, they attack. And the FNLA is wiped out because they're pretty incompetent and threadbare, and the CIA operation to fund them is revealed as a big, it's a huge, it's a fiasco. But Unita and South Africa are this really dramatic threat that the Cubans, in an active sort of immediate daring due, send an emergency detachment of armed forces to support the Angolans, who then are able to successfully repel the South African advance. And although the Cuban hand is shown, and the U.S. condemns Cuba in, you know, world fora, like the U.N., for, you know, expanding Soviet, you know, and in Soviet arms, of course, that are fueling all this combat, or at least fueling the MPLA's ability to make, you know, fight this battle, you know, and the U.S. is claiming that, oh, wow, well, we have, you know, there's this, you know, so world Soviet communism is on the march again. a CIA operation is revealed that we had been secretly arming these people, and this is at the height of anti, you know, the post-Vietnam church committee scrutiny of the national security state. And as a consequence, the Angolan operation gets immediately hemmed in.

And as a result, that also means that, you know, because the U.S. refuses to commit to fighting the, you know, to advancing further in South Africa's, capacity at that moment um the cubans are able to be this very decisive force and it doesn't end at this emergency detachment however because the new angolan nation is you know desperately poor they have no expertise the departing portuguese colonists and settlers you know they poured cement and elevators they threw away the keys to their cars um they the angolan population was incredibly rural and there were very few people who were able to you know take up the means of governance and and it was a detachment of cubical cuban technical and humanitarian advisors and doctors who are able to you know essentially help provide some kind of aid in a meaningful way in building this new

nation immediately afterward all the while a Cuban security attachment is necessary you know is committed there again at great expense and cost to Cuban society essentially until that point it had been donated although eventually they work out an arrangement to just meet cost with the angolans they're not profiting from it they weren't mercenaries um and it begins this you know almost 15 year or about 15 year um uh mission that is at once military and humanitarian to support an embattled angolan government which is subsequently you know uh opposed by both south african military forces as well as secret u s secretly funded and armed U.S. proxies.

The show is called Blowback. What do you think the legacy of this is that kind of remains with us today? The two main pieces, I would say, are first that, like, the nation of Angola and the people of Angola suffered enormously. And the legacy of that suffering, I mean, we're talking about a conflict that at some points in the late 80s and early 90s was considered perhaps the deadliest in the entire world. thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people dying, whether it's from malnourishment or disfigurements from landmines. It is not a conflict many people know about.

It's a conflict I certainly knew very little about until we began researching and really and learning about it for this season. And so I think that just the first piece of the legacy that's with us is that this is a country, like many other poor countries in the world, that has been wounded by, you know, the legacy of, you know, of nationalist and anti-imperial struggle, frankly. And then the second piece of it, I would say, is that Angola today and or at least the way in which the, you know, actions and the legacy of things like Angola operate and as pertains to sort of, I, why Ryan asked me on, I think is not something just about Angola specifically, but about something that it represents, which is how America involves itself in foreign conflict to advance a perceived American interest, which in the time of the Cold War was often structured around and had this huge anti-communist ideological component, as well as obviously, you know, rank material interest, if we want to call it that. But it is, I think, if you look,

at the Angola story and we, you know, you trace the lineages of it. Obviously, you arrive at very strange and weird facts like the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was involved with, you know, corporations that had been arming Angolan rebels. Obviously, Southern Air Transport did a lot more than just Angola. But also it's about, you know, how even when these wars are over, when there's money to be made, when there's tons and tons of money to be made, particularly in diamond smuggling in the case of Epstein, the ways in which, yeah, like the, you know, even if the conflict is over, we've moved out, we've pulled up stakes, we're no longer, you know, going, you know, supporting our proxies, we fucked things up enough or destabilized them enough that some of the like

world's historical villains who, you know, who walked the earth until pretty recently, are able to profit immensely from it, like Jeffrey Epstein. The other, the other legacy, the positive legacy, you know, you, talking about on the podcast, Nelson Mandela and a lot of other people cite the defeat of South Africa in Angola as the turning point in apartheid, that that is where apartheid had its back broken. They did successfully liberate Namibia and knock the South Africans out of that and allow an independent Namibia to emerge and then broke the back of apartheid. But so you were in the 70s and 80s, that's where Iran-Contra and Epstein come in, because as you're talking about you, the CIA operation is exposed.

It's the late 70s, early 80s. Like, people don't have the appetite for these wars, these wars, like these CIA dirty wars all over the country. So Congress is like, we're not doing this. You're not backing a secret insurgency in Angola anymore. And, of course, the CIA is like, no, we are. We're going to find a way to do it. And that's where Iran-Contra comes in. And so what we had reported over at Dropside is that Epstein had all of these wild around-Iran-Contra connections.

He was tight with Adnan Khashoggi, who was the financier and the arms trafficker at the center of Iran-Contra. He was a protege of Douglas Lees, a British arms trafficker, who had connections with China, which plays an interesting role that maybe we can get into in Angola, like on the side of the U.S., like China often was because, you know, they're a hostile at the time with the Soviets, was able to kind of arm U.S. allies when the U.S. could not. And we would, you know, with a wink in a nod situation, like, hey, like we can't give weapons directly. Maybe China can. That's where a guy like Douglas Leesk sometimes comes in. And then Stan Pottinger. So it was a, you know, a lawyer and a business partner of Epstein helped set up.

a lot of the kind of legal structures through which the money laundering and such was done for Iran-Contra. And for people who don't know the middleman in Iran-Contra was Israel. So Israel would send weapons to Iran, and then the U.S. would replenish Israel's supplies so that the U.S. was not directly arming Iran. ironic that it's okay for Israel to be directly arming Iran, given that they want to go to war with them constantly. Well, at that time, it was a very, I mean, I actually think that's a good, before I jump to the point of the direct response to what you're just saying, I do want to respond to what you're saying a bit earlier

about the legacy of the Cuban intervention, which is absolutely right and probably what I should have led with, which is that the Cuban intervention, which is, there's not really a precedent for. The historian Pierre-Glaas, whom we interview in the show, he's the the eminent historian having worked through the archives of south african cuban and american governments to sketch a portrait of these 15 years um in his book visions of freedom you know he calls it the one time in history that a poor country comes to the defense of another poor country and that it was

successful that the cubans helped the angolans not merely outlast but successfully repel south Africans it was one of the decisive um you know like uh it was one of the decisive it's indisputable uh factors that led to the south african apartheid regime ultimately agreeing to to to end itself you know there was a there were a number of other factors there was um and what is still not so well understood in the west today um a functional civil war and a violent insurgency being led against the white rule against white rule within south africa but the the the cuban victory at the the city of quito quinovali um you know where you have fidel castro issuing battlefield commands by you know over the phone um it's it's an astonishing scene and it was a it was an

unbelievable uh at the time and you know obviously totally rational the it was it like the it the actual account of the battle makes it clear how it happen but it is a very special and important historical understanding of the significance of the Angolan struggle and the Cuban role in it in why apartheid fell and how it really it was a it suggested the South African apartheid regime was just overmatched in so much what was doing in Southern Africa. Now to your more recent and the specific part about the 80s and sort of how Iran-Contra comes in, I think it's helpful and reading your coverage of this really affirmed this for me. The heart of Iran-Contra and the specific Iran-Contra deal was this convoluted Iran-Contra deal was this convoluted

arrangement by which, as you say, the Americans were supplying arms to the Iranians and using Israel as an intermediary and then using the funds generated from that deal to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. And that is where the name Iran-hyphen Contra comes from. But Iran-Contra as kind of like a signifier for this period of time also kind of works. Because I would argue that the late 70s and Ingola is one example of this into the early 80s. It represents, you know, we think of it as sort of the moment, you know, these birth pangs of neoliberalism in America. It's represented by this horrible economic calamity that begins to come, you know, that's affected both by existing inflation issues and then with the Volker shock. And then abroad,

though, when Reagan comes into power, they're both at home and abroad, there are all these different kinds of policy changes and shifts among the attitudes of the American people that allow for both a kind of rearmament, which was not really possible in the 1970s, and a certain kind of appetite for, you know, foreign intervention. And that also coincides with, you know, all sorts of different deregulation and expansion of rule by finance throughout different sectors of the American economy that also enables, you know, profit to take place from these, you know, sorts of sorted deals and these secret wars that pop up in all sorts of parts, primarily in the third world over the course of the 1980s, Angola being one of them, Afghanistan being another,

Central America being another, we could go on. And, you know, the savings and loan banks crisis is one example of where you can look to see how these kind of converge, where you see savings and loans banks, which were deregulated dramatically and eventually have to get bailed out by the government as a sector at the end of the decade. The spies, drug runners, white-collar criminals, you know, immediately take advantage of the deregulation and are able to use them in some instances it was shown to get to people like, you know, Adnan Khashoggi was connected in part to one, at least one I know. BCCI. the Pakistani bank is another, you know, a financial entity that comes into being during this period,

or at least rises to prominence and participates in a lot of these deals. And I think you can look at Jeffrey Epstein and the involvement of somebody like Wes Wexner, you know, years down the line and their connections to these kinds of figures as sort of an example of what is, you know, what is happening more generally in this period in the 1980s, where you have as a matter of, you know, the policy shifts of the Reagan administration and what we think of as sort of, you know, I would argue like the beginnings of the neoliberal era involve, you know, allowing for the rise of, you know, these kinds of entrepreneurs, not just of war, clearly, but also of intelligence and who straddle the, you know, like the world above and, you know, give rides to people like Bill Clinton, but who are and who were able to make their money by, you know, their adjacency, by dint of their adjacency and their relationships to people who were tied to and ran some of the, much darker stuff. And the key detail there, I don't know if we've said it yet, the money, the profits from Iran selling the weapons to Iran went not only to the contours, but also to

Angola. And so, and into that is, rides Jeffrey Epstein. Out of it, the UAE, as we mentioned the UAE, we got to leave it here, but Epstein linking up with the UAE and the UAE getting involved with Angola is a nice transition point into the way that our contemporary kind of mafia's operate and we're born out of that Iran-A-Ran-Contra era. Super interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Noah, where can people find out more?

Yeah, so our show, our full season, our full 10 episodes are, they're now coming out weekly. But if you want to listen to all of them now at once, you can go to blowback. dot show and hit the button that says subscribe we'll have a we have a special limited series about the history of the u.s israeli relationship coming out this spring we'll have another full season later this year but we have full archives of our seasons about the iraq war korean war Cuban revolution Afghanistan wars rise of the Khmer Rouge um and we got a lot more in the we got a lot more in the hoppers so uh thanks for having me yeah you're very welcome and we'll put a little i'm going to listen

to the Khmer Rouge one yeah oh yeah i don't know enough about that one yeah all right thanks man too appreciate it Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it, Ryan. Thanks for having me, man. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it. That was blowback.

Super interesting. I'm definitely going to listen. Yeah, you don't like it. All right. I guess we'll see you all tomorrow. I'll be on the show with Crystal. This is an I-Heart podcast.