Chapo Trap House - UNLOCKED 287 - Killy Elliott feat. Jon Schwarz (2/7/19)

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

UNLOCKED Matt and Will discuss the life and career of Elliot Abrams, the newly appoints "special envoy" to Venezuela who may be the most evil person to ever serve in the US government, with The Intercept's Jon Schwarz Read Jonathan's piece here: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/elliott-abrams-venezuela-coup/

Hello friends, we're back again, it's me and Matt with you here today. Hey, hey, but we have a special guest joining us today. We've got Jonathan Schwarz from the Intercept. Jonathan, how's it going? Well, it's it's great. I'm so glad to be on one of the very few outlets in the United States that is willing to tell the truth about Elliot Abrams. Well, you're you're spoiling it.

We're talking about the life and times and career of one Elliot Abrams. If you've been paying close attention to the news lately, you will have noticed that Elliot Abrams has just been named by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as America's special envoy for Venezuela. And I would like to have it pointed out that I believe it was a week or two weeks before this, that on the show when we were talking about Venezuela, right after they recognized the opposition as the legitimate government, I said, what are they going to get to be the point, man?

Elliot Abrams as a joke, as one of those absurd things that wouldn't happen because it's too on the nose, psychotic and and depraved. And then, boom, they just went ahead and did it. They just they just went and did it, John. And here's the thing, we're in a moment in American culture right now. We're like the hottest genre on, you know, TV, your streaming services, podcasts, movies, the hottest genre is true crime and serial murders. Overall, you know, love the Ted Bundy tapes.

We want to, you know, like people are obsessed with breaking down, you know, the gruesome details of all of these mass murders. Mine, Hunter. Yeah. Serial. All of it. It's everything. We love serial killers. We can't get enough of them. However, I'm a little bit disappointed that in this, this, you know, this phenomenon as part of this, this, you know, this true crime hysteria,

we have left out some of the more prolific mass murderers who have done all of their work, largely from behind a desk. And if you're talking about Elliott Abrams, you're talking about a guy who short of dressing up as a birthday clown has pretty much done it all in service of US empire and capital. He's sort of like a zealot figure for US back genocide. So, Jonathan, why don't you you kick it off for us? Where does Elliott Abrams first sort of come on the scene in on a world stage?

Yeah, well, bringing up serial killers actually is exactly the right way to look at it. Elliott Abrams is sort of like a Harvard educated edgine. You know, they brought him in and I guess you can say, you know, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But I think the chances that we're going to get more of the same from Elliott are pretty high. You know, he he did go to Harvard as an undergraduate. He went to Harvard Law School and he worked actually for two democratic senators in the late 1970s and then very soon afterwards was hired

by the Reagan administration when they came into office in 1981. Those two those two Democrats, though, is Moynihan and Jackson, right? Yeah, that's right. So those dudes loved a good muscular foreign policy. The classic. Yeah, the scoop Jackson Democrats. This is this is old. This is classic old school stuff, man.

If you're if you're a fan of neocons, you know, you got a like the true heads know about the Moynihan scoop Jackson years. Yeah. And so it's no surprise that he was working for them. He fit in perfectly moving over to the Reagan administration. The funny part about his career there is that all of his positions had names like Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Yeah, he's an irony, bro. He's hilarious. Yeah. And he got that job actually

because Reagan wanted to name somebody else to the position. But when the hearings were being held in the Senate, the guys, two brothers, spoke up and said, well, you know, he really does sincerely believe that black people are intellectually inferior. Yeah, it's just this guy named Ernest Lefebvre was going to be the I actually have no idea how to pronounce his name. But that's never been an impediment to us on this show, not even once. Yeah, he Reagan wanted to name that guy, a guy named Ernest Lefebvre

as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. But then it came out that he sincerely believed that black people were inferior intellectually speaking. Yeah, that's right. And Reagan was all the news coverage at the time said, like, like genuinely disappointed that he couldn't get Ernest to work for him. Ernest's scared racist. Yes. And so he had to fall back to hiring Elliot Abrams. But it all worked out in the end.

Yeah, because he went on to being, you know, one of the most prolific point men for US-backed genocide in the history of America, really. And, you know, you wrote this piece for the Intercept, you know, about about Elliot and his life in times. And it really it goes through. There's just like like a rundown of countries and, you know, massacres and disasters that he's been in coups that he's been involved with. Yeah, Venezuela. We'll see how that turns out.

But it was really it was El Salvador, where he sort of first sort of made a name for himself as a guy who facilitates and then covers up mass murders. Would you just like set the stage for us? Like what was like what was the United States policy towards El Salvador? Like during the Reagan administration when he when he got involved, what were they interested in there? Like who were they fighting and how did Elliot get involved? Yeah, well, to understand really what happened in the 1980s,

you have to just understand Central American history, which is that ever since the Spanish showed up, they ran this unbelievably brutal, cruel version of plantation agriculture. And each of the countries in the sort of the middle of Central America, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, we're all run by a sort of tiny interrelated group of white people. And when anyone got out of line, they would just massacre them. And then it had gone on for hundreds of years.

You know, the U.S. had intervened over and over and over again to keep things that way in Central America. But then in 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew the dictator there, the U.S. back dictator, Samoza. And this, of course, alarmed everyone, you know, all conservatives, not just in Central America, not just in Latin America, but in the United States of America, too. Because there were lots of people there who would look at that revolution

and be like, hey, we would like something like that, too, where we'd all be able to eat every day. You write in your article of those countries specifically, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, you wrote each country had large populations who similarly did not enjoy being worked to death on coffee plantations or watching their children die of easily infected, easily treated diseases. Some would take up arms and some would simply try to keep their heads down.

But all, from the perspective of the Cold Warriors and the White House, were likely communists taking order from Moscow. They needed to be taught a lesson. And this is where Elliot and his compatriots come into play. Yeah, that's right. So he's hired by the Reagan administration. He helps create the policy of the Reagan administration towards Central America during the 1980s, which is a low point in US history.

And I think people are probably aware that that's really saying something. It was insanely brutal and cruel to a degree that is really difficult to understand. There is a forensic anthropologist who, I think in the 1990s, went to Guatemala to dig up some of the masquerades and examine what had happened there. And he said, you know, it's really too bad that Jeffrey Dalmer never came to Guatemala because he would have ended up a general.

Guatemala, El Salvador, those are the places where the cruelty was just the most insane. And, you know, I tell some of the stories in this article. Like, I hate, I hate even saying these things. Like these, the relatives of these people that this happened to, they are still alive. You know, the effects of this have lasted, of course, to this day. This was only 30 years ago. It's one of the reasons why, you know, all of the countries in Central America

are in such desperate straits, it's why people from those places want to come here. Anyway, one tale that I mentioned in this article is a woman, you know, briefly left her three small children in her home with her mother and sister. And she went out, if I'm remembering correctly, like to bring lunch to her sons, her out working in the field. And she came back and she found that her three young children, her mother and her sister, had all been decapitated by the Salvadoran National Guard. And just killing people, just cutting off their heads, was not enough for them.

They set their bodies around a table for each body. They took one of its hands and put it on top of the body's head on the table. One of her children was 18 months old. Apparently, her tiny hand kept slipping off the head, so they nailed it onto it. And then they put a big bowl of blood in the middle of the table. Like, that is the behavior of people who have been driven absolutely insane by having absolute power for 500 years. And they see the tiniest bit of rebellion, and this is how they respond.

And we were on their side all the way. You talk about how it's sort of hard to understand this, the longer history of Central and South America, but also specifically these countries, even before the Civil War, were part of what people in America, with the slave power, would hope to become like a kind of empire of slavery, like that it would extend from Florida and the Caribbean all the way into the Southern Hemisphere. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's the right way to think of it, too.

Because people used to talk about the goal of having a golden circle around from Florida through Central America up through the Caribbean that would all be slave states. And as part of that, you describe that horror show scene of staged cruelty and brutality to the bodies of your victims. And it gets back to this idea of the Cold War policy or even going back to slave policy. If people don't like this, they need to be taught a lesson. And how do you teach them a lesson through displays of the most breathtaking cruelty imaginable?

Yeah, and that is more true than people really know about the connection between Central America, their plantations, and US slavery. One of the guys who helped in 1954, the US overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala to return it to its previous barbaric state. And one of the guys who ran that for the CIA was from like an old plantation family, I think on the eastern shore of Maryland. So, you know, he was from a family. They knew what to do when the slaves revolted, and it was something like this.

Eliot gets the job, again, as the, you know, the undersecretary for humanitarian concerns and human rights. And you talk about in the article, his first day on the job is literally the day after one of the most famous massacres that took place in El Salvador. Yeah, that's right. I didn't actually realize this before writing this article. You know, it was December 11, 1981, the unit from the Salvadoran army that was actually part of sort of a larger group that was created and trained by the US army, showed up in this mountain village up near the border with Honduras, and lots and lots of people had gathered in the village who didn't live there because there was so much fear of the army and the fighting that was going on between them and anti-government guerrillas. So, this is El Mazote. They killed over 800 people.

People, it's still not clear to this day exactly how many. There was wholesale rape of girls down to the age of 10. One of the people who survived, there were a very small number of people who survived to report what had happened. I said that he'd seen a soldier throw a toddler up in the air and then catch it with his bayonet. I mean, again, it's like this crazy, almost fictional brutality that was generated by the fury of the people who ran El Salvador, and then behind the scenes, Elliot Abrams and friends, at the idea that these people thought they could get one inch out of line. So, there are these military death squads trained by the U.S. Army and they're just slaughtering villagers in the mountains.

For what point, essentially, to terrify the rural population and to not even flirting or thinking about communism? Yeah, I think that's exactly it. You just want to demonstrate that if you try to do anything to change the way society has been set up for hundreds of years, this is what's going to happen to you. And as you mentioned, the amazing thing about this, this is December 11, 1981, that this massacre begins. It took a couple of days to kill everybody. The next day, December 12, 1981, was the first day on the job for Elliot Abrams as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. And as I say, he immediately snapped into action and covered it up.

It's a typical first day on the job problems. You get in there, you have to figure out what health plan you want, set up your health care savings account, and you have to cover up a massacre of 800 people in El Salvador. And writing the article, this was covered in the news, and he, of course, assured the Senate that all the reports of what had happened were, quote, not credible, and the whole thing was being significantly misused as propaganda by the anti-government guerrillas. Yeah, that's right. Something that I didn't mention is that Abrams was also part of the Reagan administration's attempts to attack all of the journalists who were doing something that was pretty dangerous at the time, which was getting up into the mountains

and actually seeing what had happened, like getting to El Mazote. One was Raymond Bonner. And for a while, his career was kind of ruined at the New York Times because of Elliot Abrams and company. They reported the truth, and for that, they had to be severely punished. So you're saying his bosses at the New York Times didn't 100% go to bat for him? You know, given what we know about the New York Times, that seems absolutely incredible, and yet it's true. Well, I want to go through the many, many other countries where he's done similar things or been involved with similarly unspeakable acts. But before we get there, can you talk a little bit about Elliot Abrams and his family connections to this broader world of neoconservative intellectuals and policy wonks?

Yeah, this is something that only true freaks and weirdos pay attention to. But here we are, so let's talk about it. Come to the right place. Yes. So if you follow the various families which have led the cause of neoconservatism in the United States, you are familiar with everybody in Elliot Abrams' family circles. He married Rachel Adams, who was the son of Midge Dechter, who was married to Norman Potawatts, right? Is the father?

Yeah, Norman. There's Norman and Midge. And is Rachel their daughter? Is she John Potawatts' sister? I believe so. I could be wrong about some of the details. It may be that Midge Dechter had one of them like from a prior marriage. Anyway, there's Wednesday Adams, Uncle Fester, Grandpa Al Lewis, and they're all having, you know, I'm imagining them all having Thanksgiving dinner around that table that you described earlier in this episode.

Yeah, it is very difficult to imagine what a family holiday is like with this family. I think the last scene in society is probably a good approximation. So you may remember that, you know, John Potawatts, this is Elliot Abrams' brother-in-law. There's a lot to say about John, of course, but you may remember in Iraq that he said, one of the tactical mistakes we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going. He said, yeah, yeah, he said the failure of Fallujah, he's like, I'm just spitballing here, but maybe the failure of our Fallujah strategy was letting any military-aged males within the city live. That was John Potawatts during the, again, very recent history of the Second Iraq War.

Yeah, and in fact, I mean, you can understand El Salvador, right, if you listen to John Potawatts. He said, you know, maybe our problem was we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything. Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency? And then they promoted something called the Salvadorian option for Iraq, right? Yeah, that's right. So they took the lessons that they learned in Iraq about decapitating people and brought them, or the lessons they learned in El Salvador and brought them to Iraq. And of course, it seems to have somehow been totally forgotten in America, too.

You know, we were supporting the people who were torturing captives to death with power drills. So all the lessons from El Salvador were brought over to the Middle East. I mean, it is amazing to think about, I mean, not just like the unspeakable nature of the violence being carried out, but just the mentality of someone like a John Pot Horitz who has, you know, let's be honest, never been uncomfortable a day in their life and has barely left the Upper West Side or Washington, D.C. in their entire life, who yet somehow feels no compunction or like no pause whatsoever about, you know, advocating for killing all military age men to teach a lesson to a restive population. It's just like as he's, you know, berating the delivery boy who, for his soda being slightly lukewarm

next to his, you know, Sichuan dumplings or fucking Schnippers burgers or whatever he's stuffing his fucking face with. Here's 127 hours was spending like an afternoon in an un-air conditioned room. And I mean, how do these people like think of themselves? They think that this is like they're the tough, realistic ones, even though that like they personally, you know, like Pot Horitz would fucking pass out walking up a flight of stairs. And but like yet again, like he sees no contradiction whatsoever in, you know, speaking in the most ungodly, unholy ways about like with just such casual ease about, yeah, the Salvadoran option for Iraq. I mean, is this what you just learned from your family and the people around you?

Yeah, you know, it is very difficult to face that people like John Pot Horitz are actually causing like these oceans of pain for people thousands of miles away. Like pain in a way that is like not simply the physical, which is enough pain, but the emotional suffering that we've caused is unspeakable. It's really hard to face and I am going to bring up something that has helped me kind of understand this and live with this nightmarish reality. You know, my grandfather was a professor of colonialism. So he spent his life like sort of studying Spanish colonialism in Latin America. And at one point he wrote something that I've like thought about ever since I read it, which he said, you know, the hostility of those who have power

towards those who can be called inferior because they're different, because they're the others, the strangers has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be the dominant theme in human history. And it's just something about having power turns you into a merciless freak. You know, like yelling at the delivery boy about the dumplings. Also, Midge Dector, his dear sweet mother-in-law. Midge Dector. I mean, again, one of the most purely Dickensian names ever. You know, also speaking of Iraq, she was one of the people in the neoconservative orbit who was quite forthright about, well, we're there for their oil

and we're going to kill them for it. What's the problem? What do you think we're there for? Like, you know, smiles and candy and, you know, hugs or whatever? Yeah. And of course, this was being done while her son-in-law, you know, had a formal title about bringing democracy and human rights to the world. And she said, you know, we're not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We're there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on, namely oil.

And then her son, you know, goes ahead and says, like, and that's why we have to kill all of the Sunni men between 15 and 35. It's the oil. Yeah, but what's interesting about that is that, like, the, you know, outward facing, you know, pose of the neoconservative movement, certainly at the height of the Iraq war, was that they were the idealists and that this was indeed about democracy and human rights, whether or not they, you know, believed it personally is another matter. But, like, what do you think that said, like, that sort of fissure between people like Midge and then, like, you know, I don't know, someone like Bill Crystal or Robert Kagan, who's talking about, you know, Saddam's torture chambers and liberation of the people of Iraq and the Middle East, et cetera. And now you have Elliot Abrams, who's of that whole clique, but is now working for Donald Trump, who is supposedly, you know, this great villain and ogre to them,

because he's, you know, he's sullied Americans, America's honor and, you know, said the loud part quiet about our foreign policy. Yeah, no, it is funny. My favorite thing about the neoconservative movement is that apparently America itself is already a perfect democracy. So there's nothing that they could possibly spend their time on, like, improving the country here. They are free to go around the world helping others. And so, yeah, that's always been, like, that actually goes back to, like, the 1950s, like, the proto-neo conservatives of the 1950s wanted to invade China, because they cared so much about the Chinese people. Conleash Chang, baby.

Exactly. Well, I mean, before 9-11, this current crop of neoconservatives were all obsessed with, they thought China was the huge, they didn't care one witt about international terrorism up until, like, Tuesday afternoon, September 11. No, they were all obsessed with China even in the early 2000s. Yeah, so they've cared about people all over the world so much for so long. And, you know, I'm sure they were upset when, Elliott was upset when, you know, his mother-in-law was saying things that really made the effort to help the world more difficult when she started talking about the oil. Yeah, I mean, it's so unbelievably transparent, and yet, here we are, with everyone talking about how much we care about the people of Venezuela. So, like, nothing ever changes. He's a horrible dictator.

He's a horrible dictator. He's crushing the rights of the Venezuelan people. And that's why, you know, Alfonso Mengele IV and his opposition party, you know, must be respected and installed as leaders. But what makes this even more perverse and just hallucinatory and insane is that they're trying to bring up, back up that neocon human rights propaganda mill in the service of regime change in Venezuela during the presidency of someone who has explicitly said, time and again, that that bullshit doesn't matter, and he doesn't care about any of it, and that's for pussies. And, I mean, that's why neocons initially resisted Trump is because he wasn't going along with their lip service about why we need empire. But they've kind of come up to terms with him because he's the only game in town. But it's astounding how they're just going to ignore the fact that he has changed all of that.

He's changed the rhetoric around all regime change shit. I mean, his big complaint about Iraq, as he said a million times as his brain is fucking winking out, was, we didn't take the oil. I mean, that's the only thing he cares about. He's the guy who said, in an interview, when they talked about how bad their killers in Russia, he said, what, we don't have killers? I mean, how the hell are they able to have the balls to try to keep talking about human rights in a context, not only of the things like, you know, helping the Yemeni people be totally starved and destroyed during the Saudi war there, but also with a president who gives not even lip service to any of the stuff they claim to care about. Yeah, I mean, it is funny because like all of the people talking about foreign policy on American television, like they spent years being outraged by Trump and, you know, they're infuriated by the fact that like, by the time he gets to the end of a sentence, he can't remember what he was saying at the beginning of it.

But like, they themselves cannot remember anything that happened more than five seconds ago. It is incredible. I mean, I think the answer to Matt's question is that they're all just switching teams to the Democratic Party who will spout bullshit about, you know, the human rights of the Venezuelan people or whatever. That is the good point, because while Trump might not be credible on that, he's got a lot of supporters on the Democratic side who are saying, whatever differences I have with the president on the issue of Venezuela, it's too important for us to ignore the horrible human rights violations happening there. And so, yeah, that has been a terrifying progression as the neocons sort of re, they go back, they're going back to the scoop Jackson days and they're sticking themselves barnacle-like to the side of the Democratic Party, because if humanitarianism has sort of run aground as a credible method of convincing Republicans to go along with empire, they still, they know that there's still plenty of easy marks among the Democratic leadership and even electorate. Yeah, and it is possible to imagine that if there were like smarter people at Trump White House, they were thinking, you know, like, well, bring in Elliot, because then the policy will be truly bipartisan. I do want to get to the other countries he's helped carry out atrocities in, but maybe just like, this is a short digression.

We did talk about it on our most recent episode, but John, I wanted to get your take on the latest, the latest boot. Can we talk boot for a second? Because as we said, the boots have become maximum. We've maxed out. More boot than you could really handle, frankly. And I'm talking, of course, about his piece about how America basically needs to be in Afghanistan for at least another three centuries. And just basically, you know, we need to view ourselves like the US cavalry fighting the Apache or, you know, Rome in Gaul or something like that. Yeah, well, you know, this is where Max and I differ, because I think we need to be thinking in terms of millennia.

300 years, far too short a time. Yeah, I mean, when he said that, the first thing that sprang to mind for me was like, how happy all the people in those countries would be to hear that we are going to do for them what we did for American Indians. It is absolutely beyond belief that these people don't even have like a governor inside their own heads. They don't even have an editor who will say to them, hmm, not really the most persuasive way to make this point. I don't know. Now I'm thinking, you know, Trump, Taj Mahal, Sana. Yeah, I mean, it is absolutely inexplicable. Like, like, it's hard to know what exactly the lesson is that he believes that he learned from, you know, the past 20 years of his life. Certainly, it isn't clear in what he's saying now.

Well, yeah, I mean, because that is what amazing is, Boote is the one who has come out and said, like, yeah, I was wrong about Iraq, but he's never been specific about what? Like, just in general, or I mean, I mean, that's, yes, you were wrong in general, Max, but yeah, you're right. He doesn't seem to have, it's just sort of like, yes, I was wrong, but here's why we need to double down and do the exact same thing again. Trust me. I misphrased a few sentences and two paragraphs in 2005, but aside for that. Well, I think what it comes down to is that he has, he realized that the mistake with Iraq wasn't necessarily even the outcome. It was giving people the expectation that it would be a decisive victory. Yeah, because he realizes that that's not the nature of maintaining a colonial force.

That's not the nature of maintaining colonial holdings. Big decisive victories don't happen when you have an empire. You might win a big battle, but that doesn't change the fact that your population is going to be restive and they're going to resist you and you're going to have to fight later on. And the mistake I think he's realizing is you can't give the American people the impression that this is going to be World War II style, go in, raise a flag, leave. That you have to prep people that, no, this is like doing the lawn. It wasn't like mowing the lawn. This is like lawn care. I mean, this is just, this is what it means to be America.

This is what it is to be able to go to Walmart and get 15 pairs of socks for $3. It means having an imperial military presence all over the world. And the mistake is giving anybody the impression that it can be done definitively. Yeah, that American soldiers will ever come home. Yeah, exactly. Like that was the failure, was giving people the false impression that an imperial undertaking ever has an end date. It doesn't. As long as you have an empire, you're going to have military forces outside of your metropole.

And that's just the nature of it. Telling people that you're ever going to come home, that's the mistake. Yeah, and, you know, everybody seems to have forgotten this now, but there's the guy. I think his name is Robert Kaplan, wrote a book about this during the Bush years where he was explaining, like, exactly the same thing as what Max Boot was claiming just recently, but this was years ago. And it was called Imperial Grunts. And George Bush supposedly like read it himself. And he made exactly the same points as Boot. He said that, you know, the war on terror is very much like America's Indian Wars.

The war on terror is like this is a quote from from Robert Kaplan, really about taming the frontier. And also that most of the earth is now, quote, engine country. Oh, wow. But here's the thing, let's give credit to Max Boot where it's due. Because actually on Twitter, when I was complaining about this, he responded that what he had in mind was the Indian Wars, but without the war crimes. Okay, it's going to be the Indian Wars, but we'll be really nice about it. I mean, wasn't that really that was Stanley McChrystal's whole thing?

That was the whole at Petraeus, too. That was the that when Iraq went south and when Afghanistan was really circling the drain in the mid aughts, the magic bullet was coin, right? It was a counterinsurgency that was that was based on getting locals on your side and minimizing civilian casualties. And that was really the snake oil they sold to the politicians who were panicking was, look, we can do this in such a way that we're not killing civilians, and therefore we're not creating more insurgents. And then they tried to put it into practice and just got darned. Those civilians just kept dying. Well, I mean, yeah, like civilians, civilians, but you exclude back to the John Potts thing,

any military aged male with a kinetic battle space as a civilian, right? Yeah, well, that's the unavoidable reality of it is when you have when the entire place is technically an engagement zone, then you're never going to be able to have the clean warfare that these guys imagine that you can have. Now, the most interesting thing about this to me, like this weird freakish school of thought within some of the US military and US elites is the idea that like we could do colonialism, but be nice about it when, in fact, it's impossible to do colonialism now. I mean, I think that's what America's wars have really shown is that something has changed like in world culture, probably more likely it has to do with technology to that all the countries that that we want to colonize, you know, like they can make IEDs like they can communicate with each other via cell phone like there's technology that exists now

in a way that it didn't in the past that that means that colonialism is even more of a futile pointless endeavor than it was 200 years ago. Well, returning to another country on Eliot's hit list, going from, you know, one of the worst things America's ever been involved with in El Salvador to one of the other things worse things America's ever done in the nation of Guatemala. You mentioned earlier, of course, like the brief history there is that the US did engineer an overthrow of a democratically elected government there in 1954. And ever since then, from going on until well into the 80s, Guatemala was basically in a state of civil war, which is a nice way of describing the government killing people all the time. Right. It wasn't much of a war. Yeah, it wasn't really a war.

I mentioned how, you know, when the quote war civil war ended in the 1990s, there was a human rights commission that found that the government was responsible for 93% of the human rights violations. So, Eliot Abrams, you know, it was the early 1980s. I have to say, Will, that you have freed me to say people's names about worrying whether I'm pronouncing them correctly. Efrain Riosmont was the Guatemalan, quote, president in the early 1980s, meaning he was the warlord in charge of everything. During his administration, Abrams was trying to persuade Congress to lift an embargo on sending US arm shipments to Guatemala. And he was saying, well, you know, Riosmont, he's brought considerable progress. He went on the McNeil Lair News Hour and said, you know, if we take the attitude, don't come to us until you're perfect. You know, we're going to walk away from this problem until Guatemala has a perfect human rights record.

Then, you know, then we're going to be leaving the lurched people there who are really trying to make progress. And one of the people he had in mind in terms of making progress was Riosmont. Specifically, he said, because of Riosmont, there's been a tremendous change, especially in the attitude of the government towards the Indian population. Well, Riosmont... Well, I mean, this war, civil war, again, in quotation marks, was mostly a genocide against Guatemala's indigenous Mayan population. Exactly. And it's not just like us sitting here calling it genocide. It's that the court system in Guatemala found Riosmont guilty of genocide in 2013.

Like, they decided that it met the legal definition of genocide. And so Elliott Abrams was, of course, like just what he did every single day of his life promoting democracy, which was, you know, just saying that black was white and up was down. And like, even now, it has the power to shock you. Like, you can find Elliott Abrams saying this on YouTube and you look at him and he's like half owl, half orc. That is pretty much what he looks like. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he is truly one of the worst human beings the United States has ever produced.

And again, you know, there's a lot of competition. And then, of course, there is Nicaragua. You know, it's probably the most famous of these cases because it became a scandal in America because of the Iran-Contra thing, of which he would, Elliott Abrams would eventually end up being convicted of withholding information from Congress before being parted. Now, when we talk about the Iran-Contra thing, it's like, you know, oh, like the arms for weapons or whatever. But really, the whole thing was about Congress had passed a ban on funding serial murder parties in Central America. And the whole thing was really about how to skirt that ban on directly funding mass murder in Central America. Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, Elliott Abrams, Oliver North, all those guys went around the world trying to find the super rich, super right wing governments that would be willing to pay money to kill the Sandinista Revolution.

And this truly is wonderful. And it just goes to show that, like, life truly is a Cone Brothers movie, that Elliott Abrams persuaded the Sultan of Brunei to provide $10 million to help arm the Contras. This was the Sultan of Brunei in this operation was codenamed Kenilworth. No, no, no, I believe I think Abrams was himself. Like, that would be good if it was the Sultan of Brunei. Okay, so Abrams' codenamed Kenilworth scenario was Abrams going around engaging in international espionage, calling himself Kenilworth. So he, under his codename, provided the Sultan of Brunei with the wrong Swiss bank account number. The Sultan of Brunei wired $10 million to somebody.

It never got to the Contras, and that was one of the things that he did that he withheld from Congress. So, I mean, he was just part of the ugliest parts of all of the stories throughout the 1980s. Yeah, and the Contras, of course, were funded by drug money, trained, you know, in Honduras, which was another, at the time, was a right wing dictatorship that was like, you know, in our sphere of influence. And, you know, like, whenever you bring up like the Sandinistas or the Central American Dirty Wars or, you know, the war crimes done, carried out by the Reagan administration, you will often hear people talk about the Sandinistas as being like a similarly, you know, bloodthirsty, nasty, illiberal guerrilla army. I remember reading Jamie Kerchick talk about how they shut down an opposition party's newspaper. They, you know, they censored a political newsletter. But, I mean, that is just, it's complete sophistry. Like, the Sandinistas were a legitimate, you know, nationalist guerrilla movement.

The Contras were 100% a death squad. The Contras lost every single actual engagement they fought with the Sandinistas. And this is really the through line through all of the Central American Dirty Wars, is that all of the right wing militias trained and funded by America never fought anyone. They did not fight a single battle or war. They only fought women and children and unarmed soldiers. Yeah, and they kicked their asses. Well, yeah, they were undefeated against, you know, farmers. Yeah, but that's exactly what the Contras did, and it was the same playbook as El Salvador. It was they fought a war against the, you know, rural population, the, you know, landed farmers, the people who lived off the land, and again, an indigenous population. And they would just slaughter entire villages of people to teach everyone a lesson about being friendly with the Sandinistas or supporting them in any way.

I have a friend who likes to ask, you know, we hear a lot about the School of the Americas, but no one ever mentions the preschool of the Americas. You know, like the world's most brutal toddlers. Yeah, I mean, just the story is incredibly gruesome. The right wing propaganda is suffocating and omnipresent. And, you know, who the hell knows, like what kind of society could have been created after the Sandinista Revolution if we hadn't tried to crush it. And, you know, any country that is under massive attack is going to shut down dissidents, like is going to shut down people who are like, you know, I'm actually on the side of our country's enemies. Like, that's just the way war works. And so it is a tragedy. I think people who went to Nicaragua during that period of time, you know, people who were old enough to have seen what happened firsthand have always said, it's just incredibly sad that given the freedom to create something new, like it truly could have been wonderful.

It would have been fantastic for the rest of Central America. And Iliad Abrams and his friends made sure that never happened. And they're trying to do the same thing in Venezuela in that they're helping to create a humanitarian and economic disaster and then say the only way out of it is if you take, if you accept our guy as your leader, which is what happened with Nicaragua after over a decade of counterattacks, illegal mining of the Minagua Harbor and economic sanctions, all of which were condemned by the U.N. but the United States ignored it, the U.S. pressured the sanity system to having an election. And they lost because people were given the choice of you can keep suffering under the boot of American punitive economic and military actions, or you can try with someone we support and will make it easier for you to function. And they made that choice, which is exactly what's happening now in Venezuela. I mean, a large percentage of the economic dysfunction in Venezuela, of course, you know, whatever's going on there, there's plenty of issues you could talk about. But there is a fucking embargo going on and increased sanctions every day meant specifically to make it impossible to live in Venezuela unless you take what's behind door number two, which is our man, our guy in the MAGA hat, the guy who gets horny and draws.

And we really only have one playbook and we read it every time. I mean, going back even before the 80s in in South America, you know, the, the, I end a, you know, the Pinochet dictatorship, like if you're in the mindset of U.S. Cold War planners, I end a was like he had to go not because he was a dictator, but because he wasn't. Because he was a democratically elected socialist who was, you know, doing a fairly successful job of running a country. And that example could not be allowed to continue. Like socialism always has to lead to disaster, genocide, mass murder and starvation, because that's what we, that's what we make happen every single time. Yeah, it is incredible. You know, people don't really understand, I think for the most part, that the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, like began right after the Russian Revolution. Like it didn't begin after World War Two. Like it began immediately after because the U.S. and the UK wanted to make sure that this would be a catastrophe. And, you know, we actually did invade the Soviet Union, like, like way off in the east of the Soviet Union. There was a Western invasion. And then the Cold War was briefly suspended for World War Two and then brought back in full force afterward.

Back to Nicaragua, this is what, you know, got him in trouble because he was lying to Congress about everything he did with the Contras that eventually got him in trouble. He was sentenced to 100 hours of community service. And he still to this day regards it as he was the victim of just an unspeakable injustice because of that. Yeah, it is really monstrous, you know, to see the criminal justice system be this punitive to somebody who is only trying to support human rights. He wrote a book in which he described his thought process about that at the time where he thought of the prosecutors and said, you miserable filthy bastards, you bloodsuckers. But then he ended up pardoned by George H.W. Bush when he was on his way out the door after being beaten by Clinton in 1992. Do we know whether Elliot performed any of those hours of community service? And if so, where? Yeah, that's a good question. And I tried to find out and I do not know the answer to that. But believe me, if I ever get the answer, I will be telling the world. I'd also like to the Sultan of Brunei to get his money back or maybe, you know, take it out of Elliot, you know, take it up with Elliot.

You know, if you miss the bit, he gets added to the principal. What is it like to explain that to the Sultan of Brunei? Like, do you have your secretary call him up? Like, how exactly does that work? One last thing in his, you know, the Reagan years, Panama and Noriega. Right. Like, it is kind of incredible to go over these things and just see, like, just the mind numbing brutality that Elliot Abrams was supporting over and over and over again. So, like, people who remember anything about Panama, you know, remember that the U.S. invaded to extract Emmanuel Noriega in 1989, again, because we cared so much about the Panamanian people. And what people have forgotten is that Noriega was actually a very close ally of the U.S. through most of the 80s because he was helping us, you know, run everything with the Contras. Now, it was well known to the Reagan administration that Noriega was a large scale cocaine trafficker during that time, but it didn't matter because he was doing what we needed him to do. And there was a guy named Hugo Spadafora. He was popular in Panama. He had been the vice minister for health.

In 1985, he gathered up evidence, which he thought demonstrated the reality, which was that Noriega was a drug trafficker. And he was going to Panama City to release this publicly and he got on a bus. And on his way to Panama City, he was pulled off by Noriega's goons. And there's a great book by Stephen Kinzer called Overthrow, which is sort of the history of U.S. coups across the world. And in it, he says that the U.S. picked up communications between Noriega and the people, you know, who had taken Spadafora, and that Noriega, you know, told him to put him down like a rabid dog. And they tortured him in ways really difficult to imagine or even describe. They finished it up by cutting off his head while he was still alive and dumped his body like in a garbage bag and his head was never found. I mean, if a dog is rabid, you just put it down. That's the humane thing to do.

It was not like a rabid dog because you wouldn't torture a rabid dog to death, which is what they did with this guy. And this was so appalling and, you know, Spadafora had some connections in the U.S. His brother actually persuaded Jesse Helms, like, ultra-right-wing Jesse Helms, to have hearings on Panama and what had happened to Hugo Spadafora. And Abrams did everything he possibly could to shut the hearings down, you know, explaining to Jesse Helms, like, well, you know, he makes mistakes here and there. You put him here telling Jesse Helms, Noriega was being really helpful to us, really not that big a problem. The Panamanians have promised us they're going to help us with the Contras. If you have hearings, it'll alienate them. Yeah, exactly. Like, why do we have to be such sticklers for their rules? The United States, looking the other way when one of their allies cuts off a dissident's head, I don't think that is credible.

That doesn't happen anymore. It couldn't happen, you know, in retrospect, it's preposterous and has no applicability to the present day. I think another interesting throughline here, as regards not just Central America, but really the whole history of the Cold War, is the, you know, rather close relationship and collaboration between the U.S. State and various, you know, drug cartels and mafia gangs, which make for really the perfect allies. Because the thing about, you know, mafias and criminal gangs is that they're quite right-wing in their outlook on the world. They view anyone who's not them or under them as just, you know, cattle, basically. And they have no problem, you know, killing and torturing people. Right, and they're against high marginal tax rates.

Yeah, no, it's true. They are the most natural right-wingers, and we've allied with them over and over again. So, after Reagan and Bush won, you know, during the interregnum of the Clinton years and the 90s, what was Elliot, I mean, other than not sitting in a jail cell, waiting sentencing, what was Elliot up to, like, when he was out of power? Yeah, well, you know, he just found comfortable purchase at all kinds of just, you know, regular, centrist institutions across the elite media sphere. He was a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. I think currently he's on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. He also, this is really very difficult to take, and whenever I think about this, I truly dissolve into a puddle of despair, which is, like, it really takes a lot after exposing myself to this much of these people's activities. He was also on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. Never again in the Eastern Hemisphere.

And here's something that almost no one ever discusses. I've rarely seen anyone say anything about this. You know, if you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, you walk in and the very first thing you see, like, engraved in the wall in front of you is that famous poem about, you know, like, first they came for, like, and I didn't say anything because I was not them. And the Holocaust Museum rewrote the poem. You know, the real version starts first they came for the communists, and I did nothing because I was not a communist. They changed it to first I came for the socialists. And the museum was, you know, it was born sort of in a congressional resolution in 1980. All the money for it was raised during the 1980s.

Reagan laid the cornerstone for it. As I say, Elliott Abrams ended up, like, on the board of it later. Like, of course, they had to rewrite history. Like, they could not tell the truth. First they came for the communists. It would make too many powerful people too uncomfortable. It would raise too many questions. And it is really something that the Holocaust Museum engages in this blatant denial of history.

I mean, again, another interesting throughline is all the ex-Nazis who were involved in teaching various right-wing dictatorships how to surveil, torture and exterminate the various populations. Klaus Barbie, what's up? Yeah. Yeah. And working with drug cartels as well, like, as Klaus Barbie was. Yeah, you know, no, I don't actually know. You would think that Elliott Abrams would be first in line to help Klaus Barbie in Bolivia in the 1980s, although I don't actually know if that happened. I would have to imagine that it did, but I've never read anything about it.

So he spends, you know, the bleak and horrible 90s merely just ensconced in various, you know, yeah, in various charitable institutions of, you know, government and academia and good standing, again, all, you know, within the completely, you know, center to moderate liberal consensus of American intellectual life until he gets yet another chance, not including this current one, in the George W. Bush White House. I mean, like, there's these guys, they never, ever really go away. Like, they're always there until they die, waiting for the call-up, you know, waiting to just do it, start at it again. And wouldn't you know it? He's at it. In the first George W. Bush, the George W. Bush administration, he had his hands in the first coup of Hugo Chavez in 2002.

Yeah, that's right. So I think more naive people in Washington thought that Abrams was such damaged goods he could never serve in the government again. And it is true that the George W. Bush administration decided that, you know, we want him, but we can't take the risk of trying to run him through Congress. So they put him in various National Security Council positions. Like, just like John Bolton, you know, now serving under Trump, they knew that they couldn't get Bolton through Congress. They knew that the same was probably true for Abrams. So he got more positions involving democracy and human rights on the National Security Council. He was involved, it appears, in the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela, which failed because Chavez had so much popular support that he was able to regroup and get back into power.

There's a very little known story about how Iran proposed a peace plan in 2003, which really gave the United States like pretty much everything we possibly ever could have wanted. And supposedly it arrived by fax and ended up on Abrams' desk. And in theory, it should have gone on to his superior, Condoleezza Rice. It should have ended up on her desk, but it never got there. Like, somehow Abrams lost track of it. The old slow walk. I mean, again, back to this idea that he keeps getting appointed to positions that have the word humanitarian or human rights in the title. I mean, what do you think Elliott Abrams thinks human rights are?

Well, I think that's very clear. Like, human rights are the freedom to charge anything that you want for iron ore, you know, that you've mined out of the mountains of Central America, you know. Like, they do actually, these people do have a sort of coherent view of the world. And in it, it's like, you know, it's all about money. And, you know, any attempts to change anything involving money are the most grotesque imposition on human rights imaginable. But when it comes to things like, you know, torture, for instance, you know, pretty, pretty clear cut. Like, there's just all these clients that are like, yeah, sawing people's heads off with chainsaws or whatever. Like, his thing is just like, well, they're not, nobody's perfect, you know, or that like, hey, what do you, what do you want from me?

Like, you want, you want to let the bad guys win? Right. I think it's more than that. I think it's that, you know, you have sort of minor, you know, not very important human rights, like the right not to be tortured or decapitated. And then, you know, you have the truly crucial human rights, which involve the freedom to run your plantation economy without any kind of minimum wage. And so from his perspective, you know, like that's, those are the human rights that truly matter. And it would be nice to have those others. But when push comes to shove, you know, we got to go with the ones that are really important. When you know it, in 2006, he's involved in another coup this time in Gaza, in Israel and Palestine, because you describe what happened there in 2006 after a democratic election.

Yeah. Again, like something, it's totally dropped out of history. It's never discussed any time this history. It's only 10 years ago. In the Washington Post at the New York Times, they turned the history on its head. So what happened was the Bush administration knew that Fatah was losing popular support in the West Bank in Gaza. And they knew, of course, anyone who's not an idiot knew that, you know, Fatah, they were Israel's clients. They were our clients. They were super, super corrupt.

As of course, you know, our clients always end up being, they pushed to have elections to give them popular legitimacy. And to everybody's surprise, Hamas won. Not because I think people thought Hamas was, you know, they loved everything about them, but they actually were not super, super corrupt. And so after pushing for a democratic election, they're like, I don't like democracy anymore. So they decided that they had to, you know, stage a coup and have like create a Fatah militia. This was overseen by, as Vanity Fair reported it, you know, Rice and Abrams. George Tennant was involved. He was like a close buddy of the head of the Fatah militia.

Their forces killed people. They tortured people. But Hamas like knew what was happening. I mean, they weren't morons. They knew what the United States tends to do. And they were able to sort of move first and crush the Fatah forces in Gaza. And so what happened was that that created the stalemate, like the status quo of today, which is that the Palestinians, you know, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are politically separated. They have two different governments.

And, you know, although they would have preferred Fatah to be running everything, that's satisfactory for the United States and Israel, that they're not unified in a way where they can actually put up any kind of fight. So yeah, Hamas is still in control of Gaza, technically, to the extent that any, you know, of the, you know, prison that exists there. But they're happy with the status quo. That essentially worked. Yeah. And so, you know, it wasn't the best case scenario from the perspective of Abrams and Rice. But, you know, it was pretty, pretty decent. You may remember that Hillary Clinton was recorded talking about the coup back, I think, when she was running for the Senate in 2006. And she had a meeting with the editorial board of a small paper in Brooklyn, I think.

And she, they recorded her talking about how upset she was that the Bush administration had tried to have an election. And she said, you know, look, look, if you're going to have an election, at least, you know, make sure that you're in charge of who wins. There we go. Well, you know, and then, of course, the Secretary of State, she would go on to facilitate another coup in Honduras. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's it. That's it. What happened in Honduras is a complicated story.

But weirdly, there were sort of like different factions, as I understand it, in the U.S. government, where Obama was actually concerned about the coup. And, you know, Hillary Clinton was like, oh, right on, more coups. So, again, the guy has an incredible track record, but he's still not over. It's still ongoing right now in this special envoy back in Venezuela right now. So, Jonathan, I mean, leaving Abrams aside for a moment. Like, what do you make of, again, what's going on in Venezuela right now and the general way in which this situation is described in, let's say, the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post? The bottom line is this. Like, if anyone, like, actually truly cares about Venezuelans and, you know, the number of people in the United States for whom that's true may number as many as, like, 20.

If you actually care about Venezuelans, there's really only one thing that you should be doing, which is trying to stop the United States from being involved in any way. Like, the Venezuelan government has enormous flaws. They will never, ever be fixed as long as the United States has any hand in what's happening. That's just a very, very basic principle, like, we need to take our hands off of Venezuela if you want any kind of better future for people there. But also, the opposition party, the guy who has declared himself president now, this is not an opposition party. Like, this is a party of the far right within Venezuela who has been carrying out terrorist attacks in that country for a while now. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. It's like, it happens so often in situations like this. Like, there really are no people who the New York Times would see as nice liberals to support.

And in those situations, when there are no nice liberals, they're like, well, you know, the far right, that's sad, but you got to do what you got to do. So we're on their side. I guess just, like, closing it out, like, as, you know, Abrams is once again doing his thing for democracy and human rights in Latin America. Like, you know, what do you make of the fact that, yeah, this can be announced in the media and maybe someone remarks upon that, oh, like, you know, he lied to Congress during the Iran-Contra thing. But just the history of these things he's done, these unspeakable atrocities that he's helped facilitate over and over again is just, you know, it's just, it's all just ethereal, or it's even remarked upon at all. Yeah, it is incredible. Like, you could not have a better propaganda system if you designed it from scratch. Because, you know, here we are talking, and as far as I know, like, the doors aren't going to be broken down soon and we won't be arrested.

Knock on wood. But, you know, nonetheless, like, yeah, we have the freedom to do this, but most Americans will never know anything about this. Well, what they do know is that there are Hezbollah cells in Venezuela right now, as Secretary Pompeo said. That's been really amazing is watching the Venezuela discourse, the propaganda go back to their greatest triumph of marketing ever, which is the Iraq war. Like, that was like one of the greatest coups ever of convincing a population to do this massive military undertaking and regime change in a country that had nothing to do with this terror attack that had occurred. I mean, to this day, amazing, hats off. And so they're thinking, well, you know, if we need to do something in Venezuela militarily, we're going to go with what works. So you've got Pompeo saying that there's Hezbollah in Venezuela.

And then apparently there was an interview that Bolton did with Hugh Hewitt, where he said that Nicolas Maduro could end up in Guantanamo Bay. That's right. You know, the whole story of the far rights obsession with the the infiltration and the poisoning of our precious precious bodily fluids in Latin America, like is it's longstanding and hilarious. I don't know if you remember that, like right after 9 11, they were talking about how they were going to respond. And Douglas Feith, who was a undersecretary at the Defense Department. And I'm a motherfucker in the world for being one of the stupidest people in the George Bush administration. He wanted to bomb the place, the border where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet. Because, you know, there's like, I think there's like a lot of like Lebanese immigrants there.

And he felt he wanted to do this because he felt it would be a surprise to the terrorists. I bet it would have been. Not just the terrorists. Now, Jonathan, I don't know if you're aware of this, Matt, you might be on I think it was maybe season two or three of the God awful showtime series, Homeland. Oh, yeah. A big plotline was that the Brody, the like American, you know, sleeper cell terrorist was like, you know, spirited away to Venezuela and was being babysat by like, you know, sort of government sponsored gangs and this giant housing project. While he waited for his orders from his terrorist Al Qaeda handlers. I, you know, I did not know that, but that that is exactly how the world works.

And, of course, to carry out to had had suicide bombers coming in from the Mexican border. But yeah, I mean, just just finally, though, Jonathan, like, yeah, that's that's the far right psychos, you know, Hewitt, you know, we know what they're we know what they stand for, we know what they believe. But when it comes to American liberals, they just can't help but fall for this over and over again to despite the fact like, they still think that there's something that America is the good guy in this equation that we're going to get it right this time. And that we are going to help the Venezuelan people it's like why and even though Elliot Abrams is the guy in charge of it. And Elliot Abrams working for John Bolton working for Donald Trump. Yeah. So I mean, what what is it about them that they all they need to do is just read like one op ed in the New York Times that's like, you know, it's certainly not a coup. The situation is, you know, more complicated than that.

But you know, we really need to, you know, consider this, you know, populist uprising and support democracy. I mean, like, they fall for it over and over again and really all it takes is an op ed in the New York Times. So I mean, I know there's no answer. I mean, there's no real answer for this, but just what do you make of this? Are they ever going to learn? Well, in the real world, there are no perfect choices. Yeah. No, I mean, they never will learn. And it's like, I think history has demonstrated that like there's truly something like deep in the psychology of liberalism that makes you fall for this over and over and over again. And like they always I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times.

Like if the choice is between a genuine leftist alternative and the crazy psycho far right, they always go with a psycho crazy far right. But in terms of US intervention, I mean, I was I was thinking about this this week. And as far as like the liberal mindset about that, I really think it's it's it's saving Private Ryan and Schindler's list. I think it's those two Spielberg movies that have convinced liberals that that is the role America always plays and that we may get it right wrong sometimes. But essentially, that is the role that the US military intelligence and just state overall represents in world affairs. Yeah, no, I think that's true. And it's always been my belief that, you know, Americans know absolutely nothing about history beyond maybe three movies involving World War Two. And they like they've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. Another Spielberg movie.

Yeah, another Spielberg movie. They know the Nazis are the bad guys. They've seen Schindler's list. Again, the Nazis are bad. Saving Private Private Ryan, the third Spielberg movie, Nazis, definitely bad. We're against the Nazis. We're against other people around the world. They must be Nazis. Let's go kill them. Jonathan Schwarz of the Intercept. I want to thank you so much for joining us and going into this just god awful miserable history of US involvement and intervention in Latin America. And yeah, will we learn anything? Probably not. Oh, no.

Oh, good Lord, no. That's a ramen. But Jonathan, I want to thank you so much for joining us. It really has been first time long time for me talking to you as a fan of your writings and your blogging as well. I may even venture so far as to say you were one of the reasons that I'm speaking to you now on this podcast. Yeah, same here. Oh, I'm so I'm so happy that that makes me feel fantastic. I've always wanted to be a terrible influence on people.

Well, we will pay it forward to the next generation. Jonathan Schwarz, you can read his stuff at the Intercept. Is there anything else you want to plug or point out? No, beyond the fact that like in all sincerity, jokes aside, like this is one of the most monstrous crimes the United States has ever committed. And if you want to consider yourself a decent person, like please learn about this history, please talk to people from Central America. We could spend the next three centuries atoning for it. And even if we tried, it wouldn't be enough. So so get some books out of the library and start reading.

Once again, thank you so much for joining us today, folks. Goodbye. Bye.