Chapo Trap House - 967 - Whitehat feat. Derek Davison (9/8/25)

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

Chapo Senior Foreign Policy correspondent Derek Davison is back once again to talk about the escalating possibility of war in Venezuela. We discuss the recent strike on a Venezuelan boat by Trump and his newly-Christened Department of War, a botched raid into North Korea, our collapsing relationship with India, China’s SCO summit with Russia, and conflict on the Thai-Cambodia border. Plus: a Matt Christman prediction comes true… Find all of Derek’s foreign policy coverage at: www.foreignexchanges.news www.americanprestigepod.com

All I want to be it's a joke all I'm going to be is a joke all I'm going to be is a joke We need problems and place so all I'm going to be is Greetings, friends, it's Monday, September 8th, and this is your Chapo. On today's episode, we will be taking a tour around the world with a guest well known to you. You might remember him from such podcasts as American prestige or substacks, such as foreign exchanges. But to us, he is simply our senior foreign policy, world affairs correspondent. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the show.

Once again, Derek Davison. Always a pleasure to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. I mean, it's never a pleasure to talk about this shit, but always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Well, I don't know who else I'd want telling me about it. But Derek, obviously, there's a lot going on around the world. And I think today, obviously, we're going to begin with Venezuela. But before we get to that, I think I'd like to just begin by framing today's episode with a, you know, a smaller but perhaps, I don't know, telling detail from our government. as of this last week, and that is the Trump administration's decision to, I don't want to say officially rename the Department of Defense, the Department of War, but just to sort of announce that they are going to start calling it the Department of War and encouraging others to do the same.

So, Derek, I'll just begin here with the Department of War, because on one level, it's sort of like, hmm, this is interesting, this is sort of anti-Orwellian. But then on another more obvious level, it's just like, This would be like what the party would do in 1984 if they didn't feel the need to create euphemistic lies to blind people. They're like, oh, the Department of Peace is actually the Department of War. But now they're just like, no, we'll be doing wars.

They don't need to be, by the way, we're going to be doing more wars. We're going to have so many wars. You're going to get tired of wars. And guess the best part, they don't have to be declared by Congress. It's, yeah, they don't even have to get Congress to do the name change, apparently. I mean, like, it's so, it's so funny because. They can't change the name of the department officially. So instead, they're just, like, doing it in every way except going to Congress and asking them to do it, which, I mean, the Republicans would probably do this anyway.

I can't, like, I can't believe that they would push the name to the Department of War. But so they're just going to waste a shitload of money, like scraping the cheap lettering off of the walls and changing the, you know, the website branding to Department of War only for, you know, if they don't actually get it passed. in a formal way, the next administration is just going to undo that. So that's fun. It's always nice to see them just kind of tossing money out the window, basically. Yeah, and I guess like,

and it's also like being justified by Pete Higgseth and his close advisor, John Barleycorn. I mean, they're basically saying that like, oh, when it was called the Department of War, we had some of our greatest victories, like World War II. And then they changed the names of the Department of Defense and it's been nothing but a string of L.

So obviously, the problem was in the name. Yeah, I mean, I can't think of anything else that could have happened in 1949 or around 1949 that could have caused the United States to turn into a bloated giant empire with the military that exists mostly to justify its own budget and defense contractors that are just there to hoover up as much money as possible. Like, I can't think of anything else that would have happened in that same period of time other than changing the name of the department to the Department of Defense that would have caused all these

bad things to happen. If we go back to the Department of War, we'll bring us back to a time when we were beating like, you know, real world beaters. Like the Spanish Empire in the 20th century. The Barbary Pirates. That was the Department of the Navy. Yeah. That is really like Michael Jordan playing against

plumbers. The Spanish, like the Spanish Empire after the invention of the railroad is like, you might as well not even record that game. It was preseason. Yeah, that does not count. It's like week one of the college football season.

You know, you get this D3 school to beat up on. A school that has two directions in its name. It is to harken back to that time. Like the Department of War, as it existed back then, was the Army. There was a separate department of the Navy that was also a cabinet-level position. A part of creating the Department of Defense was bringing all of these military departments and introducing the Air Force as another. separate branch of the military. What I'm hoping is that they go back to that and they have like

they created separate department of the Navy. They could have a department of the Air Force. They could have a department of the space force. Like everybody gets their own cabinet agency because that would be total chaos, which I think would be a lot of fun to watch if they did that. So I'm, I'm pushing for like reverting all the way back basically. Well, I mean, I guess it's just this idea that like, oh, like the Department of Defense. Like none of the wars that have been fought, you know, in my lifetime or certainly since the Department of Defense was given that moniker have been defensive in nature, but it's not like changing it symbolically back to the Department of War is like some fucking, so some great moment of like anti-imperial reality setting in. It's like, no, they're just

doing it because they want to start wars. They would like to do many, many more wars. And they would just like to stop being euphemistic about it. And I guess that's like the direction I'm going with this episode is like, well, I can I just interject here? Because the government of Grenada would have killed you and everyone you cared about. So I don't know what you're saying. I mean, it was absolutely we had to protect ourselves from that military juggernaut. Yeah, I mean, Manuel Noriega. I mean, you know, come on.

Like, these guys are all. Unless we forget the Clint Eastwood film Heartbreak Ridge in which he declared that our record was now one tied. Vietnam won. That was a loss. But we got it back in, you know, saving those college students. But I mean, like, I guess like what I mean is like the death of you. euphemism here is that like we're no longer coily trying to pretend that we're engaged in anything

other than just war, thuggery, theft, and violence on a massive global scale. And it brings to mind to me something Matt said years ago on this show talking about Donald Trump. And he he compared it to when the flesh melts off the T-800s like exoskeleton frame and you just see it's like glowing red eyes. And it's just like, I feel like that's what we're dealing with right now is that just like capitalism and empire, there's no more human suit for it. It's just the Terminator. And, but like,

but here's what I want to go is because, like, the way that they reacted by sharing that video of them blowing up a speedboat in international waters, like they just sunk the battleship Yamamoto or something. Or they just, like, sunk a Chinese aircraft carrier is like, it would be one thing of like, yeah, like you said, if it was a Department of War against ranked opponents,

but this is the most penny anti-thuggery. and murder imaginable. And like the thought I had to do when I saw that video of that speedboat getting blown up and like 11 people getting killed, it's like I remember 15, 20 years ago when Chelsea Manning went to prison for leaking the collateral murder video, it seems now like the US government and Department of War or whoever you want to call it, whoever's in charge there, is just blowing the whistle on themselves, but it's really more like they're like, I don't know, tooting a trombone to announce to the world how strong and powerful America is that we're able

to prevent, protect ourselves from 11 guys in an outboard motor? It really is. I mean, we're still taking their word for it, right? That there were even drugs on this boat. There's no proof of that. And I saw at least one argument in the New York Times, somebody claiming, like an analyst saying it was probably more likely a boat full of migrants, like a human trafficking, smuggling type of situation. as opposed to a drug boat.

So, I mean, it's bad enough to imagine that we're just executing people who are bringing drugs, trying to, I don't even know if they're coming to the United States, just sailing drugs across the Caribbean. We've decided we can blow people up for doing that. And I think there's a good chance it wasn't even a human smuggling operation. I think it could have just been 11 people in a boat. For all we know, right? It may have just been people who are out cruising in a speedboat in the Caribbean.

and the, you know, the same people who brought you Saddam's WMDs decided that there was, you know, Coke on board. If there was Coke on board that ship, why do you need 11 guys on the boat? Isn't the goal to get as much of a load on the boat as possible? 11 guys on the boat seems like a lot of cocaine that they're leaving on the table. Yeah, I mean, there's that. There's so many things that's about the story that just don't make sense. But at the bottom of it, you know, when you strip all of that stuff away, even if the

story is true and these were 11 Venezuelan gang members with drugs on a boat you still can't just declare that to be an invasion of the United States and blow it up like this is a really dangerous precipice that you put us on

or that this administration has put us on if it's just going to start shooting random vehicles that it decides it doesn't like but I do I do like that one of the things I've seen from, you know, sort of the Twitter adi

or like the professional national security types has been, if this order were given by any other administration, the military would have said, Mr. President, how dare you? We cannot just blow up. I mean, like, come on. It's been using the military to fight the war on drugs for years. Yeah, I mean, like, this is not, it's at the same time.

I mean, there is speculation that Hegseth fired a number of, like, ranking generals because they would have said no to this. Well, I mean, I may be. I don't know. I haven't heard because of this specifically, but I mean, he certainly fired anyone who smacked of woke, I guess, for example, you know, any, any POC generals. Well, woke here being people who maybe don't believe Venezuelan drug dealers are a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.

Right. So I'm sure they do have a very friendly coterie of flag officers at this point. But even so, like, I mean, when is the last time? you saw any pushback to anything like that. But, yeah, it's not something that I think another administration would have even conceived of doing because it's just so bottom of the barrel. Like, it's really scraping the worst, the kind of lowest level we could get to on something like this.

You know, Heg Seth has promised more to come on this. But like, before we repositioned to talking about, like Venezuela more broadly. I did love the reaction from our vice president, Harold of the council of grandmothers who said, I don't give a fuck. Call it what you want it. Like,

you know, I don't give a fuck what you call it. And then like, I feel like, I know you saw this, the reaction by that woman who was like, those who are getting mad at J.D. Vann should consider the fact that his mom got addicted to oxies working in a hospital.

So he's not going to have, you know, warm feelings toward drug cartels. And it was just like, they should have drone strike this fucking mom, when she was stuffing in her pockets with fucking noxies. What are you talking about? And like what does that have to do with anything?

She also like sold, uh, I mean, probably pretty shitty pills, honestly. Whenever I read one of these sob stories where it's like, you know, I was, I was a 63 year old nurse and you wouldn't believe it, but I got addicted to opiates. It's always like Tylenol three, which is like way to waste everyone's time.

But, uh, she was selling it to, you know, other women who were emasculating their fat children in sort of a drug ring of a drug that's one

step above melatonin in Tylenol 3. But they should, yeah, they should have probably blown her up. They should have used a GBU 32 with a laser guidance kit in case she got to her car

and it led them to more of her, her Thailand and all three connect, which was just the hospital she worked out. And I mean, is anyone else disturbed by the idea that, like, they're making policy based on the childhood trauma

of the vice president? Like, they're just like, you have to understand this. He has to work it out. Okay, he has to work out his feelings about his mother

by killing 11 Venezuelans in a fucking speedboat. Yeah. I mean, that is like the unstated thing. Like, where does Venezuela come into that process? I mean,

first of all, less of that, like, like over 99% of people, people who get prescribed opiates never, like, developed a dependency. She didn't even get prescribed them. She was just like, she had a headache and either someone was like, hey, have you ever tried like the Tylenol that's good?

Or I don't know, she just pocketed one. But, you know, this is, her whole thing seems like she was self-starting in her addiction. I'll say that. I think most addictions are like that in that you can't. kind of lay the blame at the feet of the nation of Venezuela. But this one especially. Yeah, there's this really no. I mean,

unless Nicholas Maduro was holding her down and like shoving pills in her mouth. The whole JD thing annoys me because it's like it is the greatest example of this uniquely American thing where if something bad happened to you or you, you, you had a shitty experience in one way or another, it automatically is meaningful and that there is some lesson you can evince from it. In this case, it's that, you know, we need to be tougher on, uh, uh, narco terrorists.

Just any, any boat because it can be a narco boat. But yeah, like, there's this like, the people, people have been trying a JD sales job since like 22 since he started going like, Alex Jones is terrific. But he like, part of that is this idea that he has. He has pathos and that he went through all this suffering and it has meaning because he's going to take it out on America's enemies when like, you know, the thing that drives me the most insane about him, it isn't like the political flip-flop necessarily. It's that because who gives a shit about that? It's that his first half of his career was saying, we should kill everyone in my hometown who got addicted to standing up too fast. holding their breath until their face turns blue

in Thailand, all three. So he could become like a third-rate Davos speaker. And now it's like, now he's like fucking, like he's Batman. He saw his mom mugged by Thailand all three and now he has to kill

every Latino. It's so fucking annoying. One last bit from the domestic front about the Department of War. Donald Trump posted the other day, one of these awful like AI images that superimposed his face onto Robert Duvall's character from Apocalypse Now under the headline Chypocalypse Now. And then the caption is, I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War

helicopter, helicopter, helicopter. So and then like in a perfect distillation of the Democrats as like the world's most non-existent opposition party, Tammy Duckworth replied to this by being like, How dare you wear the uniform of the era cab, sir, you are stealing valor? And it's like, I don't think that that's the most objectionable thing about this image and the statement and the sort of intention it seems to imply, which is napalming the city of Chicago and going to war with it. Well, as long as he doesn't do it in a uniform, I mean, you know, he doesn't, you know, as long as he's not disrespecting the troops. I mean, you have to give the president some latitude to carry out his own policies. It's all part of the wonderful system that we've set up for ourselves. The founders wanted it this way.

Could have had another Mark Kirk term, but no. You remember the Mark Kirk 2016 campaign? Oh, my God. He was special. I don't remember all the details. I just remember what a very special man he was. I actually, I got banned. The second time I got banned for Twitter.

Oh, is you saying he was a comms guy? I said it was Mark Kirk's comms guy. That's why I always, I thought it was like something, it was like a very dramatic person back then. And I was like, a wonder if Saudi Arabia did it. But no, it was just me saying that I was Mark Kirk's press secretary. But he was, I don't know, he got like some head injury around that time when he was running against Tammy Dunworth before.

Yeah, yeah, he had a stroke during his first term, he had a stroke. But the stroke made him behave awesomely. Like it really, you know, I think it helped him. he said that Lindsay Graham is a bro without a hoe and when people were like what the fuck are you doing he said I'm from the south side he said that Tammy Duckworth won't stand up

for America oh that was really good that was yeah okay yeah and so Tammy Duckworth like her I think her mom is tie and her dad is just like a white American guy and she said something about like her having ancestors that fought in the Revolutionary War during a

debate and Mark and Mark Kirk was like where from Bangkok he was he was yeah he was he was awesome I miss him so much he was so good but yeah no

this was this was uniquely depressing. I mean, like, if you just described what Duckworth said to me, you know, I didn't know it was real. I would think it was a bit from one of those podcasts that went from 2017 to 2019 that had 38 rotating hosts. But no, it really happened. To refocus on Venezuela here, like, Derek, they have, am I correct? Like, they have moved a lot. large number of naval vessels to the Caribbean. And they seem to be like, you know, pointing them at Venezuela. So, you know, we all remember in the first Trump term, there was the, the brief, the brief Guaido mentum when all Americans in the world invested their hopes in Juan Guaido,

the new leader of Venezuela. We all know how that turned out. But like, as with everything in the second Trump administration, I think he's going to run for prime minister of France now, because the prime You have a better shot at it in Venezuela. For an ambitious guy. But like, so like what, like, what is going on with Venezuela? Like, will the Department of War declare war absent Congress with Venezuela? And like, and broader than that, what the fuck is the trend day, the cartel of the sun? And why is the U.S. claiming Maduro is in charge of it?

So I have to be honest. Like, I mean, I'm not an expert in this space, but I had never heard of the cartel of the until they decided that Maduro, Nicholas Maduro himself, is directly leading it. I'm not even sure that there's 100% certainty that it's a real thing. Like there's a debate over whether this actually exists or if it's a manifestation of certain elements

trying to paint Venezuela as a narco-terrorist state with narco-terrorism being. the new the new hotness and the uh the terrorism the war on terror space um so i don't i don't even know that there's like a definite uh consensus that that this actually exists trend de aragua uh has been known for a long time i mean that's that's pretty well established that that's a a real gang but this cartel of the sun's thing like it's very sketchy to me and again i'm not an expert on Latin American organized crime or anything like that, but it certainly seems weird to me that here's this alleged cartel that we're not sure really exists, but it just so happens that like

every senior figure in the Venezuelan government is also running this cartel at the same time that they're running Venezuela. It seems just a little bit too on the nose to me. So I'm skeptical. that's how bad socialism is everyone needs to have two jobs and like but like i mean no i think it would certainly be newsworthy if maduro and his whole government were part of a cartel but like isn't that the case with like the new government that they just put in charge of ecuador that like literally is a cocaine trafficking cartel i'm sorry a banana and cocaine trafficking cartel but they're our ally he's a banana air okay i mean you know i don't he's an air to the banana fortune the vast banana fortune of Ecuador.

I mean, yeah, there's allegations about all these guys. If not, like, being directly involved in cartels, at least having arrangements with cartels. I mean, Nayy Bokela and El Salvador is, you know, there's loads of allegations about his government negotiating with, you know, MS-13 and other groups to kind of tamp down the crime rate and offering the gangs certain concessions.

if they just stop engaging in so much violent activity. And, you know, there was a big controversy when the administration shipped all those migrants, the Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, along with a number of Salvadoran migrants who wound up in prison, that Buckella was trying to get, like, people who could testify to his government's relationship

with the gangs. He was trying to get them back under his custody and shut them up so that they couldn't be interviewed. by law enforcement in the United States. So, I mean, a lot of these guys, curiously enough, on the right, rather than on the left, have had this accusation incredibly leveled about them. Now, when it comes to Venezuela, right? And like, when I think about all the, like, the marine expeditionary forest wing moved into

Caribbean and, like, all these naval vessels. They have pretty much everything they would need at this point to invade, not to occupy, but certainly to invade Venezuela. And, like, I know this is like, this is almost a hack bit at this point. It's an easy layup. But, like, am I wrong in suspecting that the U.S. government's interest in replacing and doing regime change or invasion of Venezuela? Am I wrong in thinking or suspecting that this has to do with Venezuela's copious oil reserves?

So, like, they just want a government that they will sell Venezuelan oil like, I don't know, like get them a better deal or sell direct only to America or what, like, what's going on with that? Yeah, I mean, that's certainly part of it. Like the administration, I mean, and not just this one, you know, successive presidential administrations have been trying to figure out how to get Venezuelan oil to market without rewarding Maduro because they want the price of gasoline to come down. And this is, this was particularly true after Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022. And the Biden administration was looking for alternatives to Russian oil initially not sure how to handle sanctions and

whether they were going to go after Russian oil exports, which could really have spiked the global price of oil quite a bit and raise prices at the gas pump. They didn't want to do that. So they started casting around, and Venezuela, you know, obviously is the country with the largest oil reserves in the world, or largest known oil reserves, at least, was a huge get if they could get it. And so they hatched this thing with this agreement with Maduro that they would relax oil sanctions provided they saw progress from Maduro in terms of holding, you know, quote unquote free and fair elections and releasing political, quote unquote political prisoners and all of these things that didn't pan out, but they still relaxed a lot of the oil sanctions.

Trump came in this time and turned the spigot off to some extent, but he's been getting, I think, a lot of pushback from Chevron, which is the company, or is it, yeah, I think it's Chevron, which is the company business there to, you know, kind of, you know, go back, revert back to the Biden policy of allowing Venezuela, at least to export oil, at least for Chevron to export and to exploit Venezuelan oil. What's also at play here, though, it's not just Venezuela's oil. It's also Guyana's oil, Guyana, the neighboring country in South America, has supposedly pretty vast, and I don't know all the details of this, but it's probably pretty vast, oil deposits offshore, the western part of the country, which is a region known as

Esikibo, that has been disputed with Venezuela going all the way back to colonial times, like the colonial powers disputed where this border should be. Eventually, it was worked out in a sort of international forum that the area belonged to Guyana. But the Venezuelan government has always disputed that. And then when they discovered, you know, hey, there might be a lot of oil here. Venezuela got very interested in this area and sort of advanced its claims. And Exxon has the development rights for that region. And there's a lot of concern.

Like Maduro has taken some steps. He held a referendum that was, you know, with, you know, with. very dubious turnout figures and so forth, but the idea was, should we annex basically, or should we set up an administration for this Eseqibo region and supposedly one, you know, and one going away, this referendum. He's, I believe they've now held elections, farcical, somewhat farcical elections for local offices for Eseqibo or are planning to run them. I'm not entirely sure how far that process is gone. But he definitely had. designs on this region and you know obviously Exxon doesn't want that to happen because that would

upset the apple cart and so I think it's taken on more more salience even than just the Venezuelan oil because they're worried that he could make a play for these oil reserves that right now are being exploited by Guyana and Exxon that you know if he went after those it would be a big disruption well I guess like with all of the military assets shall we say in the region, like, what are the chances that, like, this gets to be, like, this actually will be kind of like a test case for their, their sort of, their attempt to sort of bring back a more 19th century style of American imperialism and just invade Venezuela. So, I mean, like I said, I think they have everything they would need to do that, right?

They have, I think, three destroyers at this point, a guided missile, a cruiser, they've got one of their literal combat ships, which can sail into sort of shallow. coastal waters. They've got an amphibious combat group. They've got a marine expeditionary unit. They've got F-35s, not that, you know, they would matter that much, but they've got F-35s in Puerto Rico now, all ostensibly, like the cover story here is this is some sort of anti-drug operation where we blow up small speedboats in the Caribbean.

But, yeah, I mean, it looks very much like, like, yeah, I mean, you're not using F-35, so you're not using a marine expeditionary force to blow up, to interdict, and not even interdict, to kill with drones, drug shipments or people shipping trying to ship drugs across the Caribbean. These guys are useful in a ground operation of some kind. And what that would look like absent an invasion of Venezuela, I don't know. Now, could they just be there as a show of force? Possibly. Could this just be limited to, I think we've, once you deploy that much force, it's hard to come back from that. And I think at the very least, you're going to see some, you may see some air strikes that will

be justified as like, this is where, you know, there's a, there's a Hamas tunnel underneath Caracas. No, they'll say like, you know, this is where Treadaragua processes its drugs or this is where this cartel of the sun, you know, its headquarters is in this area. And we bombed that. We didn't bomb, you know, anything that was connected to the Venezuelan government, they might try to kind of get around the fact that that would be an act of war by doing some kind of narco-terrorism again, justification. But I have a hard time believing that they're just going to stop here. And they've deployed all of this force close to Venezuela within striking distance of Venezuela. And they're just going to leave it at that. So I do think

something is coming. You know, if the strikes on the Iran's nuclear facilities or any indication, it seems like they want to be bellicose and aggressive and they want to have this like war fighting posture towards the rest of the world, but they don't want to get, they want it to be quick. They want it to be like a one and done.

But like kind of hard to imagine how like air strikes maybe for Venezuela, but like if they land troops in Venezuela, hard for me to imagine that's going to be a quick war. Like, what is the state of the Venezuelan state in terms of, like, how strong a state are they? And, like, how large is their military? And what would, like, landing the Marines in Venezuela be like? Yeah, I mean, it's not, I mean, they don't have a lot of money. So this is, this is an impoverished state that doesn't have a lot of money to field a first-rate military.

But they have a lot of people. And Maduro, Nicholas Maduro, in anticipation of some kind of U.S. move against Venezuela. Venezuela has called up the country's militia force mobilized at least some portion of it. And that's potentially, on paper, at least millions of people. You know, he's not going to get everybody to show up. So there's a question about how many people he could actually mobilize. But even if it's a fraction of that, that's a pretty difficult order for what is at this point, you know, it's enough to maybe invade or get into Caracas and occupy the presidential palace.

If it goes beyond that, I mean, and you're fighting hundreds of thousands of people in guerrilla campaigns across the country, not that I'm saying it would necessarily come to that, but that's sort of a worst case scenario. That would be extraordinarily difficult for the U.S. military to pull off. And then you have to consider whatever government they would quickly try to put in to replace Maduro and be, you know, sort of the liberation of the Venezuelan people is going to be tarred by the fact that they were put in place by the Americans, and they're going to have to deal with that, which could be, you know, once the U.S. pulls out, you could have an extended insurgency

of some type or, you know, extended period of violence and difficulty. So it's a recipe for collapse, which, you know, at this point I think is, I almost think is the goal. I think it was the goal in Iran. I think it's the goal in a lot of places. It's not necessarily to stand up. We're not in the George W. Bush era of standing up governments that we think are going to survive. We just want to collapse the ones that we don't like and then, you know, shit happens. We don't really care about that. Yeah. I feel like that is the most useful framework to look at it through. Not, I mean, there's a lot of overlap between the first Bush administration and this one, especially on some foreign policy things

and I would say it trends probably more towards neo-conservatism than it does this weird national conservative quasi-isolationism that doesn't actually have a constituency in American politics but it's just another way that we, us and Israel are becoming the same entity

and that's not to say that we haven't had you know, pointless and capricious foreign policy excursions in the very recent past and that this is an Israeli invention. It obviously isn't. The Israeli aspect to it is that the pretences

of, you know, nation building or spreading democracy or even like ridiculous things like invading a country to perpetuate women's rights, those things are out the window and with them is, the idea this idea that

this idea of you break it you buy it that we would occupy any of these governments and give a shit long enough to set up like a puppet parliamentary system and like fabricate an entire new government right

I mean yeah and and the Israeli the Israeli aspect to it is also just that the point of it is that it's kind of slap dash and impulsive and that you do you make these incredibly consequential moves that potentially endanger the lives of like thousands,

if not millions of people out of just like week-to-week news cycle shit. Like it is hard, it seems like a very base and almost early 2000s Internet observation, but it kind of is hard to separate any of this from every other day Trump has to do a press conference where he's like

here's a letter from my friend that's complimenting me on not being a pedophile from 1998 I'm an undercover I'm an undercover FBI informant somebody else has nominated me for the Nobel Prize

for not being a pedophile the undercover FBI agent thing is one of the funniest fucking things I've ever heard did you notice that Mike Johnson has already dropped that line 24 hours as after premiering it.

It's a great acclaim. I love it because like, people who become FBI informants do not become FBI informants because they volunteer to do the right thing. They usually become because they're deeply entrapped by the FBI in a number of other very serious crimes.

Yeah. I can't remember if it was you coined the term white hat pedophile, but like literally going with that is just amazing. Oh, someone posted the clip from 2018 and it was during a live show and it was Matt, Matt brought up

the concept of he basically predicted exactly this line but I think I was the one who said the term white hat pedophile but I think equal credit to Matt for basically predicting this entirely

but yeah it is I think the comparison to both us and Israel especially in Iran and Lebanon and everything else they're doing to neighboring states is a very apt comparison and it's I don't know um we talked about this a few weeks ago this sort of this terrible feeling of you know whether it's like fucking laura loom or whoever that just no one is going to no one of consequence is even going

to offer like a token of resistance uh for this it's even more awful. There is a sense that, like, no one in, no, no European ally, the EU is an entity, no one who maybe has the capability to tug on our chain a little bit, will say, hey, what the fuck are you doing

until it's too late? Well, Felix, I was thinking about that in the context of that, uh, the ice raid that they just did on that, uh, Kundai factory. Georgia where they like shackled something like 300 Korean nationals all of whom had fucking work visas to do like yeah technical work at this like electric car battery plant and like they yeah they had a work visa to be there as guest workers and they were like led out by ice

in shackles and obviously like the South Korean media and government and public are rightly outraged at this because they were like these people were literally guests in our country but like this is what I go back to like there's no. euphemism anymore. Like Trump is calling the bluff of even all of our so-called our allies, a country like South Korea, one of our closest allies, is that just like, oh, you may consider yourself our ally, but you don't have the fucking clout to tell us what to do or fucking scold us or fucking hurt us if we just shit in your face. Like, there's just no limits. Yeah. Same goes for Europe. What is the line and does the line even exist? Well, I mean, I think it's increasingly showing

that, like, it in fact does not exist unless you are a country like China or Russia. Yeah. Or, you know, I was going to include North Korea, but like that brings us to the next story. You know, seeing that they have nukes and everything. Over the mountain down in the valley

lives a former talk show host everybody knows his name. He said there's no doubt about it. It was a myth of fingerprints. I've seen them all. Man, they're all asleep

Well, the sun gets weary And the sun goes down Ever since the water melon And the lights come up on the blackhead town Somebody says What's a better thing to do Well, it's not just me And it's not just you

This is all around the world Derek, an incredible story In the news this week That it's just like It seems like straight out of the Chopper Canon. Could you break down for us the details of this aborted Navy SEAL incursion into North Korea that happened in 2019 towards the end of the first Trump administration? Yes. So as far as I know, and the New York Times broke this. And I mean, this is what I know

of it is when I saw in their piece. But the Trump administration decided in, they said, early 2019 to send a group of seals from SEAL Team 6 into North Korea to plant a listening device. So this was still during the period where he and Trump were sending letters back and forth. And they had their, they were having their summits that never went anywhere. But they were at least talking to one of those. They were pen pals. Yeah, they were pen pals. And he wrote the beautiful letters that President Trump would go on. I call him Rocket Man. I call him Rocket Man.

So they, but they decided they didn't have, they had this blind spot, intelligence blind spot where they couldn't hear Kim Jong-un. And they couldn't eaves drop on his communication. So they were going to plant a listening device. And the whole operation went completely sideways. They got dropped off by a submarine and kind of. sailed in this mini submersible to shore, they got out, they disembarked and, you know, kind of were coming on shore when this little North Korean boat just kind of appeared and there

were these guys flat with flashlights and, you know, they were sailing over to where they had obviously seen some disturbance and they're sailing over to where these seals were coming ashore. And they made the decision in that moment to just airhole everybody on this boat, which were probably people who were out like collecting shellfish. Like there's no indication

that they were North Korean security, although I guess that was one of the things that they were worried about is that these could have been this could have been a patrol of some kind. Well, yeah, but like at that point, if anyone sees you,

you're going to kill them, right? Because like the mission's blown if they like... I mean, yes, they're trying to massage this by saying we weren't sure who they were. I mean, I'm not,

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not apologizing for it. I mean, it's, it's evil beyond imagination. But yes, I mean, realistically, anybody stumbles on you, you're going to, you're going to kill them. So they killed all these guys, uh, and had to pack up and leave. And then never told anybody about it, including Congress. It wasn't until 2021, that the Biden administration briefed select members of Congress without declassifying the operation or making it public or anything that might have, you know, done any good. They just briefed a certain cadre of members of Congress about it and kept it at that. And yeah, so it didn't come to light until this time story, but really troubling, certainly, to imagine what's going on here. An extremely chilling detail

of that story is that after they just blew away everyone on that like little North Korean boat or whatever. There was a detail that the Navy SEALs then punctured the lungs of their corpses with knives so that they would sink to the bottom of the ocean. And I just thought that was like, I don't know, like, that was just so chilling. And like, I think about that in the context once again of like those 11 people getting blown up on a speedboat where it's like, this is what we're supposed to be proud of, of like, our mighty military doing. It's just like, yeah, just like puncturing the lungs of an already dead body so that they can hide it, but more, you know, easily, like, that's grotesque.

And then the one thing, the one detail about this story that, like, I am confused about is it said that, like, the purpose of the mission was to land on a beach in North Korea and, like, install a listening device. Like, how does that work? Like, on a beach? Like, what, like, what were they expecting to hear? Like, have you ever heard of, like, a stingray or something like that? Yeah, yeah.

For people to know, uh, stingray is the communications interception device that, um, a lot of police departments in America actually have it but it's used by militaries and federal agencies too but it's a kind of like surreptitious looking device that can intercept like

stuff specifically from phones and it can be used kind of like a dragnet way and presumably you know this was a device similar to that they said in the article that you know they were able to

do surveillance on North Korea but only from satellites in extremely high altitude planes like U-2s they're not you know there are some countries where they can operate freely in their airspace and they presumably wouldn't need to do this so they could like it's like a small device and they can just

sort of like pilfer like cell signals and just pick up calls and stuff yeah or or like satellite phone stuff right I don't like we don't know specifically what device it was but it's you know presumably presumably it would be some type of

like interceptions device that can accomplish things that you cannot accomplish just from like 80,000 feet or from a satellite

but I think some kind of bolt data collection device rather than I mean they weren't they weren't going into the presidential palace to you know

plant a specific bug it's a moot point because they never got it on the beach they had to kill too many people before they did that

but yeah like I mean I guess I was just about this in context of, I know we had a Seth Harp on the show not too long ago. And like, Derek, like when you hear about something like this happening, like years after the fact, like, shouldn't we just assume that bongles of this nature are happening all the time all over the world at the behest of the newly rechristened Department of War? I mean, yes, I think so. I mean, we should assume that there are operations like this happening all the time. I think it's, you know, I get to the point where it's just like,

you know, you have to assume it's happening, but there's no way to know exactly where or when. I mean, you know, it's all, it's all just kind of, you know, assuming. But yeah, I mean, I think certainly we have to assume they've got, you know, operations like this that have happened or are happening in Venezuela and, you know, in and around Iran, like all of these places we're constantly engaged in this stuff. And the success or failure rate, I mean, it seems like. the failure rate would probably be higher, but, but, you know, we, we just don't know. It takes, uh, the, the, the, uh, the,

the, uh, kind of exclusive like this, I guess to, uh, to get a sense of what failure even looks like in this context, which is, uh, you know, killing a bunch of innocent people and stabbing them in the lungs to sink their bodies in the ocean. That was one of the things that like was kind of a, alarming, but not surprising about the actual New York Times article, um, They went to great lengths to go, you know, we knew about this for a while, but we didn't publish it because we thought it would endanger ongoing J-Soc operations in the same area.

And it's like, okay, so how many fuck-ups like this are there? Like all the time. Like how many? I mean, how many how I always think of it like for the average like for the average American who is consuming like 19 hours of true crime shit a day. Like the most horrifying thing they can imagine is being killed in such a way that their families don't know for like 20, 30 years because their bodies never found. How many people are we subjecting to that just on a daily basis because of these pointless fuckups like this? It is. I mean, that to me was the part of the piece, the Times piece that actually popped was this paragraph, you know,

near the top of it where, you know, they said the Times has withheld some sensitive information on the North Korea mission that could affect future special operations and intelligence gathering missions. Like, is that your job, New York Times? To protect U.S. Special Forces and Intelligence Gathering missions? Or are you supposed to be reporting this shit? Or, you know, are you an arm of the Pentagon or are you reporting on the Pentagon? Like, you kind of have to make a decision there. That was really fucking creepy to me. And, like, Again, it's not surprising, but just them outright saying, like, our first duty is to ensure that no one ever finds out when J-Soc fucks up for the, just in case the one time they get it right. Well, I mean, I think about that certainly in light of their, I wouldn't say outright stated policy, but, you know, sort of subtly implied policy that any Palestinian journalist who doesn't tow the line is a combatant because that they're showing or witnessing atrocities that is.

real and the state department would not like you to know about and therefore are burnishing the image of Amas or the access of resistance in some way so that they can safely just be exterminated by military force. So it's like, well, if the standards of the New York Times are now such that like when it comes to reporting the news versus, I don't know, excising any details that might potentially embarrass our special forces or ongoing military operations that they'll be more than happy to just bite their tongue at that. I think that would perhaps put them in a rather awkward position, at least given their stated principles about who isn't, isn't a journalist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, these guys can bend over backwards to, to justify any

killing of a journalist in Gaza, but here they are like openly saying. Well, I mean, they're just stating that like, we don't publish anything that special forces doesn't want us to publish. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let me. one from North Korea, let's talk a little bit about China. Derek, indeed, incredible things continue to be happening in China. Could you talk to us a little bit about the recent SEO Tianjin Summit? Yeah, I think to take this in context, it was a big week for Xi Jinping. He had the Tianjin Summit, the SEO, and then he had the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan Day at the end of World War II. and he had a big military parade to celebrate that.

So it was a big, like, world stage type of thing. Wait, China was in World War II? That comes his news to the leaders of the European Union and United States government, but apparently. Did you, I don't know if you guys saw the Elisa Slotkin. I was today years old when I learned that China. Yeah, yeah. The Elisa Slotkin speech, which she was like, yeah, the Manhattan Project

when we were in competition with the Russians for a nuclear weapon. Like, what are you talking about, man? Oppenheimer came out last year. seriously like you don't even have to have taken a class on this it was in a fucking movie uh yeah so yeah it's it's fascinating stuff but but so yes the the seo summit um and both of these events were were were showcases for she i mean the military parade obviously was a chance to show off uh china's hardware but but both wasn't quite as good as trump's military parade though i think we can no i mean it wasn't quite as impressive it was was so so so

impressive. Like a Swiss watch. Like so quiet that you could hear the tank treads whining. God damn. So the, what made the SEO summit stand out was that he met with, I mean, Vladimir Putin was at both of these things. And Putin is sort of, you know, really reliant on China at this point. Russia has become closer and closer to a client state. but what was interesting or relevant, I think, about the SCO summit was that he brought in Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, who had not been to China. I think this was his first visit in seven years. And, you know, China and India have been on a bad path until fairly recently had been on a bad path, you know, going back to, I think it was the 2020 or 2021 border clash when, you know, they, you know, their border guards were beating each other with clubs.

With clubs and swords. That was amazing. Yeah. I mean, they intentionally don't let them have fire arms. Well, yeah, yeah, because in that situation, not a good idea to let anybody have firearms. So, yeah, I love, I love borders that are like PVP zones, but like, melee only. It's an average jail. Yeah, you like, you, yeah, you get banned if you bring a ranged weapon. I think that's, I think that's cool. Like, it shows your strain. I mean, yeah. I think that's awesome. So, I mean, so they've been on rough terms.

I mean, they had recently, you know, kind of started to warm back up a little bit. You know, they had reopened commercial activity along the border, which is not a huge thing. I mean, it's a very mountainous, ragged borders. So there's not a lot of commerce happening across it on land, but it's still a symbolic gesture. But what's really advanced this relationship has been Trump punishing. punishing India for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which is fascinating to me. I don't think that's the real reason, but that's the ostensible reason. He's imposed 50% tariffs, 25% under the regular reciprocal tariff scheme, and then another

25% because he's supposedly mad that India is buying Russian oil, which is something that they do because they get it at a discount, but also because they were encouraged to do so by the United States government and European governments to, again, keep Russian oil. flowing to market so that there was no spike in the price of the global price of oil as a result of the war in Ukraine. So he's supposedly mad about this. And he, you know, goes with this 50% tariff. It hasn't talked to Modi, by all accounts, in months. And these guys were pretty good chummy, you know, had a pretty chummy relationship during his first term. Hasn't talked to him in months. Didn't talk to him before the tariffs went into effect.

The Indian government, and this is the real reason I think that he's mad at them, the Indian government has been pushing back after he claimed to have mediated the end of the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir earlier this year, and the Indian government said got very offended at that because they regard, they're very sensitive about the idea of outside intervention when it comes to Kashmir and their relationship with Pakistan. So they push back against that, denied that he had played any role. And I think he got mad at that because it, you know, wrecks his Nobel case. So I think that's the real reason why he's pissed off. But they're, they're captured as this, you know, they're frustrated about Russia.

And, and, you know, without upending, you know, literally going, you can go back to the 90s on this, the United States trying to build up a closer relationship with India, mostly to counter China. Keep the elephant from the dragon away from each other. Yeah, exactly. But without that. And this isn't, this isn't to say that, you know, China and India are suddenly going to be, you know, best friends and close allies or anything like that. But he's, I think he's advanced beyond just normalizing what had become a tense relationship. And they're, you know, pushing further than that, partly because he feels like he can no longer rely on the United States, Modi, that is, can no longer rely on the United States and its support.

And you've got, you know, the U.S. engaging more with the Pakistani government. you had Trump with this fantasy that Pakistan is somehow sitting on, you know, all these, this secret oil reserves that nobody's discovered, but the United States is going to go in and, like, frack, you know, they're going to do fracking in Pakistan and come away with all this oil, which is a fantasy. But still, he's like flip-flop what would have been a very clear direction in U.S. foreign policy for decades and seems to have turned it on his head with respect to, like, India, Pakistan. Yeah, I mean, that seems to be the thing. Even if Even for countries like India and China where, yeah, there's been incredibly tense moments just in the last 10 years, never mind the history before that, you would rather have someone where at least you can, you have a reasonable expectation of what is and isn't okay by them than someone where it's just, it's day to day and even if you do bend to their whims, that doesn't really guarantee.

anything. I mean, this entire thing with just the Trump administration's entire posture with Russia and Ukraine stuff is so fucking weird. I don't know how anyone could make sense out of it. How any country seeking to curry favor with the United States

under the second Trump administration what course of action they could take because they're just completely all over the place. They ran on like, you know, fuck Zelensky, fuck this war, we're ending it. They did that huge thing where J.D. Vance asked him to wear a suit next time. And now, because the talks have gone chittily, because he can't just wheel Russia into accepting whatever stupid settlement he comes up with.

Now he's just, he's defaulting to like, he's sort of the actual official posture of his first administration's state department. and kind of the Biden policy but like done even shittier and the India thing is so weird like you correctly pointed out that like it's this isn't a surprise they haven't just recently started

buying Russian oil and hiding it from us it was in fact we did in fact encourage them to do that but we've historically given India a really long leash with regards to Russia

in comparison to a lot of other places. India famously they're one of the only countries besides Egypt that has a large military that will buy hardware from Western Russian and produce

well Egypt doesn't do this but produce their own indigenous equipment. India they have a bunch of like very modern Sukoy fighter jets and French Raphael's and some of their own

stuff, and we still sell them missiles and other stuff. A lot of other countries can't get away with that, but India is so important to us that we really let them do a lot of other things that typically we wouldn't allow, you know, a less important nation that we could use as a, we don't think we could use as a counterweight against China. We wouldn't allow them to do that. But it's, if you're them, yeah, how do you, what choice do you have except like, well, I guess I have a pretty good guess of what is it isn't going to be okay with China compared

to whatever the fuck this is. It really is. I mean, there have been some instances where in the moment I think people have figured out how to come at Trump and get what you want out of him to some extent. And I think that, you know, to their credit, like Zelensky and the Europeans have figured this out that you like just go and blow smoke up his ass. You tell him you're going to nominate him for, you know, 20 Nobel Peace Prizes and you're going to spend, you know, if you're doing a trade deal, you say, oh, yeah, we're going to spend like a hundred quadrillion dollars in the United States over the next 10 years.

Because it doesn't matter. Like, nobody's going to chat this shit when he's gone. And he doesn't really care. He just wants the smoke blown up his ass. And so you can get things from him in the immediate term. Like if it seemed, like when he had that Alaska summit with Putin and it really seemed like he was yanking once again back in the direction of Russia. and had accepted Putin's arguments, and now he was going to get on Ukraine, they arranged that very hasty, you know, kind of damage control summit at the White House with Zelensky and all

the European leaders who just went there and paid like, you know, they just bent the knee. I mean, really, you had them all sitting around the desk in the Oval Office, like they were sitting outside, like their principal's office. Yeah, like they were fucking, you know, in, you know, in detention and taking lectures from this guy. And that's all he really wants. and they stem the tide. It doesn't go anywhere then.

You can't get him to follow through and do what you want on a long-term scale, but you can at least, like, get in there and kind of interrupt whatever train his dying brain is on and kind of derail it if you just approach him in the, you know, as a groveler.

Like, you just adopt that posture. It makes him very happy. And that, you know, that's one way to do it. But yeah, as you say, like, there's no consistency. There's no way to get him to, like, nailed down to a particular approach or a particular policy. And so in that, in light of that, I think Modi, for one, and you're going to see other leaders do this, too, like thinking even if China is offering me a worse deal, at least I know that from day to day, like, she and the Chinese government are going to be more or less, they're going to stick more or less to the same consistent. message and same consistent policy. Whereas this guy, like, I don't, he's going to wake up one day, and he wakes up one day and he wants to do this and he wakes up the next day and he wants to

do something else. Like it's very difficult to manage that kind of relationship. Derek, in that vein, I have to confess, the first question I had when I was like considering the prospect of Trump more or less shit-kending like 30 years of economic and cultural relationships and close allyship with the nation of India on sort of maybe like pushing them a little bit more into China's orbit or like more than more than they were in the past the first question I had with like Trump giving Modi and India the cold shoulder are all those like right wing culture war meme aggregating accounts that are called like femoid elves clown world and a western aesthetics are they all going to turn on Trump immediately sort of like overnight I mean

it's anything's possible right I mean these guys are moody bodebackers at the end of the day. So I would think at some point they will. But yeah, that's such a weird phenomenon too to have these like troll farms of Indian men posturing as, as white guys from the, you know, from Texas or whatever the fuck. It's so weird. But like, I just, just one more thing for out of this summit. Like, I mean, like, I sort of a headline with it from it was, is he is, his claim that like, that this is the donning of a

global security and economic order that, quote, prioritizes the global self. And like, this would be China, Russia, and India. Like, what are we to make of that claim? And what would that look like if you're from President Xi's perspective? This is a good question. And I, you know, who knows? Because we don't see him taking a lot of steps to implement anything like that. Right. I mean, there was, people were waiting for China to step in during the so-called 12-day war. to assist Iran, and it never happened. And Chinese foreign policy, as to me, consistently been very strictly national interest-oriented. And this idea of building a competing security architecture that would push back against

the U.S. military or offer countries an alternative and potentially a rivalry to the U.S. in places where China's interests are perhaps not as great as the U.S. I just haven't seen any evidence of them doing that. So it's hard to say what it would look like. I mean, I would think mostly trying to sell weapons, really. I mean, I don't want to boil it down to that. But like it really feels like, you know, a transactional thing as far as Beijing is concerned rather than an ideological thing.

And to erect that kind of structure, you have to have some, you know, interest in rivaling the U.S. and picking a fight in some sense. And I just don't see that from China yet. So it may be something that he's considering, you know, as a legacy project. But it's hard to say without some demonstration of it, what he means by that. One last thing, a quick thing to move on from China. Just like another just international thing that I was interested in you explaining. Because you fill us in on this recent border skirmish that took place between Thailand and Cambodia and these subsequent elections in Thailand. What was going on there? What precipitated it? And what is the situation currently? Yeah. So this happened back in July. The conflict happened back in July. The border

crisis started earlier than that. I mean, the Thai-Cambonian border has been in dispute for decades, going back into the 20th century. There have been rulings by the International Court of Justice about segments of it. There's a particular area that has a Hindu temple that was awarded to Cambodia by the International Court of Justice. The Thai government has always disputed that. That was back in the 1960s. So this goes way, way back.

What happened earlier this year, there were a number of incidents. It started in May where there was a clash between border guards, Cambodian and Thai border guards, and a Cambodian border guard was killed during that clash. And then subsequently, there were a number of incidents where Thai soldiers were getting wounded, badly wounded, maimed in several cases, by landmines during border patrols. And because the border is not well defined and they don't agree on where it is, you know, there's arguments about, you know, who was in whose territory and who's fire. first. The landmine incidents, the Thai government has repeatedly, you know, these have happened multiple times, have been several incidents, I think half a dozen or thereabouts. The Thai government has accused Cambodia of laying new landmines in areas where they claim, that they claim had been

cleared. And of course, Cambodia is littered with mines and other ordinance from, you know, we could go all the way back, again, we'll into the 20th century, you know, mid-20th century. But there's stuff all over the place, but the Thai government in the Thai military has been insisting that these are newly laid minefields and modern mines that the Cambodian government has bought and they're mining the border, which is illegitimate. They're not supposed to be doing that. Both countries are party to the anti-personnel mine treaty, so that would be a violation if they're actually doing that. But Cambodia routinely says, you know, look, this is stuff that's been left over from the 20th century. not, we're not laying new minds at the border to try and, you know, catch Thai border patrols. So what happened after a few of those incidents in July, there was an exchange of heavy

fighting artillery, a couple of airstrikes, I think, that lasted for several days, I think five days before it was put to rest, mediated by the government of Malaysia and by the U.S. to some extent, Donald Trump has claimed this is one of the seven conflicts he's ended that justified his Nobel Peace Prize. I love that he thinks getting a Nobel Peace Prize is like getting, being like crowned Miss Universe or something. Yeah, you just have to build up a resume. You have to lobby hard enough for it.

Yeah. And, you know, prepare your speech and evening gown. But it's, I mean, it's lingered past that. And it's, it's lingered particularly on the tie. side in political matters. The prime minister of Thailand at the time, Peyton Shinawatra, was removed from office by the country's constitutional court because of a phone call that she had with the former prime minister, now president, Senate president of Cambodia, Hun Sen, whose son is now Hun Menet is now prime minister. Still obviously,

you know, very influential in Cambodian politics. She called him, and there's a relationship between Hun Sen and her father, Taxin Shinawatra, goes way back. She called him and, I guess, tried to appeal to him to tamp down tension. She said it was costing her, you know, politically, and she needed some space to kind of deal with the military and said some things about the military, about senior military officers that were a little bit over the line

in a country like Thailand where the military and the monarchy, you're really not supposed to insult these institutions legally so but but thinking you know she was talking to this may she called him you know she calls them uncle she they're that close so thinking that she was talking to somebody she had a close relationship with wohunsen turned around and leaked the recording of this telephone call and caused a huge scandal in Thailand and like you know so she was suspended initially and then finally removed from from office altogether which has resulted in her party Poutai losing control of the government to a coalition that's probably not going to hold together.

They're probably going to have to hold a new election a few months. But, you know, so the political ramifications have really really kind of hit hard in Thailand. And there's, I've seen a lot of speculation that the one of the things that's causing this flare-up is that there's, there's been a break in this relationship between Hunsen and Texine. Shinoa, who's fled the country, he's fled Thailand again because he was under legal trouble and then came back when his daughter, or his granddaughter was, or no, his daughter, sorry, daughter, was elected and a prime minister and now has fled again now that she's been ousted. So he's, he's sort of on the run. But they've fallen out over basically personal

issues, but partly having to do with, and I know you guys have heard about this, these like scam centers that are operating in southeastern Asia that there are some, most of them operate in Myanmar because it's really very lawless there and you can set up shop and do whatever you want. But there are some that have been operating in Cambodia maybe with a connection to Hun Sen and his family

and that the Thai government has sort of criticized these places and targeted them to some extent to try and shut them down and that there's tension over that or there's tension over a number of personal matters that has fueled this conflict. But I can't speak any more than, you know, to having read some gossip to that effect. Well, before we wrap it up for today's episode, I should probably mention, I'm sure it will be of interest to our listeners, that as of about 20 minutes ago, the Wall Street Journal did just publish a photograph of the Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein,

birthday card and it is about as weird as you might imagine a pal is a wonderful thing happy birthday and may every day be another secret signed at Donald J. Proh. Yeah. And it's like it's nice. It's nice to have two guys. And then it's like framed in this very crude. So hard for men to make friends with each other. Yeah. This is this, this is the solution to the male loneliness epidemic is sending your bro birthday cards where you draw sort of like the crude hourglass frame of a woman's body and then frame the world's weird. Yeah, frame the world's weird. purest exchange of dialogue within the sort of the body of a woman. So that will be interesting to see where that goes.

It's really sad seeing this knowing he was an undercover. He must have really like been disgusted making that birthday card. But he was just so dedicated to the mission. It's like Donny Brascoe. Yeah. Okay. That does it for today's show. We'll be back later this week.

Once again, thank you to Derek Davison. Always enjoy talking to our chief foreign affairs correspondent. And everyone, please subscribe to American Prestige and Foreign Exchanges. Links will be provided in the show description. That does it for us today, everybody. Till next time, bye-bye. Look, Look, look,

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