Fourth Reich Archaeology - #069 Fourth Reich Geopolitik 7

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

This week, we return with another installment of “Fourth Reich Geopolitik,” our ongoing survey of the modern geopolitical landscape. In this one we unpack the United States’ recent military aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  As of this writing, the U.S. War Machine has killed no less than 76 people on the high seas off the coast of Venezuela and it has unilaterally–and with no apparent proof–designated these victims as “narco-terrorists.”  The stated goal of this military operation is to stop drug traffickers.  The actual goals appear to be regime change, sending messages to various audiences both foreign and domestic, and flouting the law as only the King of Crime knows how.To be honest, we did not want to do a Venezuela episode at risk of stating the obvious (i.e., that the powers that be are yet again up to their same bag of dirty tricks to personally profit from unspeakable violence around the world). But then we spent some time digesting the mainstream media and academic analysis about the situation, heard some of the most outrageous propaganda imaginable, and realized, yet again, that perhaps it is important for us to discuss this stuff even if it seems obvious. In this episode, we first turn back the clock and lay a little historical foundation of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe’s 19th Century declaration to the empires of Europe that the western hemisphere was off limits–to them, at least.  We thought we’d start off with a short primer on the Monroe Doctrine because it seems like anyone talking about Venezuela is invoking it, and it seems to us that most don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  Next, we speed-run the history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, and the long and storied U.S. tradition of destabilizing economies, overthrowing democratically elected leaders, and exploiting the land and its people to enrich the capitalist ruling class. We then focus specifically on the Spanish-American War at the turn of the 20th century, which really locked in the U.S. as the new kid on the block for the imperial powers, and use that as our jump off point to the modern day to talk about American Imperialism today.  And this latest phase of American imperialism is goofy as hell.  In the age of purportedly “ending the forever wars” and putting “America first,” the Trump administration is going full on Leeroy Jenkins into Venezuela.  Nevermind that the stated purpose of combating drug traffickers is BS, the fact that the Trump administration is deploying the full force of the U.S. Navy to do so shows that the United States has no qualms about going head first into another military quagmire as though the only lesson from the Iraq War was “we can get away with this and nobody will stop us.” (Shoutout to the USS Gerald R. Ford.) As we said in our first episode, and as we’ve been saying it regularly ever since, it is as if we are all suffering from some collective, mass psychosis.  Those in charge say one thing, but do another.  But you know things are getting schizophrenic as hell when with each day that passes, Amerikkka’s fringe reactionary kooks—the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens—are the only ones in the media that dare to call this out.  We are not here to praise these kooks for calling out the U.S. war machine for its hypocrisy. To the contrary, we fully reject their kind.  But that they have identified the problem while, say, the New York Times merely parrots the official narrative, tells you everything you need to know about the sad state of affairs today.

I've heard whispers about the financial support your government receives from the drug industry. Well, the irony of this, of course, is that this money, which is in the billions, is coming from your country. You see, you are the major purchaser of our national product, which is, of course, cocaine, cocaine. On one hand, you're saying the United States government is spending millions of dollars to eliminate the flow of drugs onto our streets. At the same time, we are doing business with the very same government that is flowing. cutting our streets with cocaine. Let me show you a few of the other characters that are involved in this tragic comedy. system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States.

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people. of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information which showed that there were two wars going.

His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small. For example, the CIA. Now he has a mob. I didn't know so long this is to die. The freedom can never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. The state can never be secure.

Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is, I'm thinking. I'm bigger, and I'm done. Welcome back to our show. You're so glad to have you here with us today. We really hope and really do think we're going to enjoy what we are going to lay out in the next hour and a half or so.

Before we get into everything, I want to cover the usual preliminaries. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who listen and support our program. We are so grateful to our loyal community of listeners. We are so grateful to everyone on Patreon and our Patreon fam for all the support that we get. If you do like our show, maybe you've just recently started to listen, maybe you've been listening for a while. If you do like our show, I implore you, please spread the word. like the pod, subscribe to the pod, comment about the pod, tell your friends, your family, your co-workers about the pod. We are a completely 100% listener-supported program here, and we really do

rely on you all to spread the word and get the message out. To that end, we are on social media, on Instagram and X at 4th Reich Pod. And we are accepting correspondence. You can contact us via email at 4thrikepod at gmail.com. And again, we do have a Patreon. And we are so grateful to everyone for your financial support. If you are able to, please head on over to Patreon. and join the club.

And if you aren't able to, don't worry about that at all. Continue to enjoy the pod. Continue to be a part of the community. Be a part of this movement. We are living in the Fourth Reich. It is a sad, true fact of the day. And here at Fourth Reich Archaeology, we are trying to figure out how the hell this happened

and how the hell we can get out. That's right. That's right. And it is becoming more and more palatable to your average observer of world events that indeed this regime under which we are all sadly struggling is something of a Fourth Reich. It finds its roots deeply planted in the soil of the Nazi regime that committed the great holocaust of the 20th century, the Nazi Holocaust of not only the Jews, but also of Slavs, of homosexuals, communists, and Roma or Sinti people. and the Fourth Reich is well on its way to wrapping up a genocide of its own, of the Palestinian people, we send them our love, we send them our solidarity, and our support and hope that the survivors will find justice in the future. but step one towards finding justice is of course pointing the finger hammering the gavel

and declaring culpable the powers that be for their crimes against humanity and it is so important so important that we keep our sights on the criminality of our rulers because there's not any room to make excuses that, oh, this is how it's always been, throw up the hands, there's nothing we can do about it. That is a depressing brand of defeatism that, while attractive and while logical to adopt, given the odds are stacked against us here on the side of humanity. It is something that we cannot give into. We must keep on doing whatever we can to tell the truth,

to spread the truth, and to advocate for those very values that the American experiment purports to, advance things like democracy, equality, justice for all. And that is the subject, once again, of this episode. It's another entry in our Fourth Reich Geopolitic series as we take another break from our ongoing series within a series, Shee Harvey Oswald, into the dual assassination attempts on our sort of forthright every man, President Gerald R. Ford.

And it is fitting that today there's indeed a little hook to old Jerry Ford, and that is that his namesake has been stamped onto the side of the world's largest aircraft carrier. I didn't even know that. I mean, I knew that he had his name on it, but I didn't know that it was the biggest one in the fucking world. Did you know that, Dick? Yeah, I did.

Absolute unit of a ship. You know, they got to give the big dog the big dog ship. Yeah, I guess they do. I guess they do. And we did indeed... clip some of Donald J. Trump's remarks upon the commissioning of the USS Gerald R. Ford in our episode where we covered Jerry Ford's experience way back in World War II. If you've not listened to Jerry World, in particular that I believe was Jerry World Part 4

our series on his war experiences. Do check that out. Check out all the back catalog and especially check out what we have been developing on this geopolitic series. We have traced the quote-unquote science, of geopolitics, from its origins in the British Empire, through its expansion and advancement under the Nazi regime, under the auspices, and the studious eye of Carl Hauschofa, and, of course,

we traced its transatlantic voyage to the new empire, to the empire of the post-World War world, the American Empire. And in our last installment, we discussed the war at home that this Trump administration has been waging through the deployment of troops into major American cities. And we discussed the disregard for legal principles behind the Trump administration's use of military power domestically. And in this episode, which builds not only on the last geopolitic episode, but also, upon especially number two in the series where we talked about immigration and the Trump policy

vis-a-vis the Western Hemisphere. And that's where we're going to pick up today because the Trump administration's actions in the Western Hemisphere outside of United States borders. It's military posturing and use of deadly force against what appeared to just be random fishermen, alleged potential narco-traffickers on the high seas, well, the illegality and the disregard for any sort of legal norms that is on full display. makes the domestic illegality and criminality look almost quaint. Yeah, the thread that I like that we're continuing to pull on from geopolitic six is the shift in focus on policy towards hard power, being this country that is really leaning into

the fact that we are the largest military in the world, the shift towards looking at at the Department of Defense as the Department of War. Pete Heggseth's, you know, announcement that happened in late September or what was it, early October, where he calls, where everyone's called in the room and told that we're no longer going to put up with this shit and we're going to return to America being the, the defenders of the world. And really what we're getting into in this episode is a continuation of that, right? It's the actual effects on that through the the shit they're doing in Venezuela.

Absolutely. And it's pretty jarring, right? To see the ways in which the whole America First crowd, the whole gaggle of voices that supported Trump as the anti-war candidate, as the America First candidate who was poised to end the Forever Wars, who hired Tulsi Gabbard to end the regime change wars that the U.S. was launching around the world, that hired Bobby Kennedy Jr., who was so critical of that military-industrial complex and that deep state, apparatus that he called out for killing his father and his uncle. Well, as could be expected if

indeed you view the world through the Fourth Reich archaeology lens through which Trump is wearing a big old crown on his head that crowns him the king of crime, you would have known from the jump, that that was always a steaming, malodorous heap of bull shit. I wholeheartedly agree. One correction is that Trump not wearing a crown, but a tiara. Maybe he borrowed it from his former Trump pageant queen, Erica Curry. I totally agree. And it is so amazing to see this schism.

in the Trump camp, right? You have the folks like the Tulses and the RFK juniors and even your Tucker Carlson's, your Marjorie Taylor Greens, the folks that are not down with this Venezuela play. And they're left, it's like, you know, they're wondering what is going on. And then they say some crazy things. Some things that, honestly, I agree with. But then you, they do the famous, like, you know, for example, in the case of Tucker, he'll shift from talking about, why are we in Venezuela to we should be focusing on the drug war in America and then have someone like Douglas McGregor on to talk about how we should be instituting the death penalty for drug crimes. Yeah.

And so that's where it takes the turn with him. but it is interesting to see even these die-hard Trumpers start getting critical of the guy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it really is all about that money. It's all about the profit motive, and it's all about exercising power in a way that inures to the benefit of the ruling class. and regardless of how much concessions the U.S. could extract or extort, as the case may be, from the Maduro government, which were many. I mean, by all accounts, Maduro was basically... Basically everything.

Yeah. And yet, nevertheless, he is... being cast in the role in this whole spectacle of Saddam Hussein circa 2003. You know, we often on this podcast harken back for parallels between the present day and the events of the 1970s and the rise of these Fourth Reichs under the flag of Jerry Ford, and his administration and beyond, of course, but now it's really a almost one-to-one analogy to the apogee of course of Jerry Ford's two biggest legacies, namely Dick and Don.

In 2003, of course, Cheney and Rumsfeld came up with the playbook for regime change that brought all the media assets on side, that brought the whole political spectrum on side, and that launched a war based on lies, which went on to kill millions of people, spending trillions of American taxpayer dollars, enriching to the hilt, the military industrial complex, the mercenary corporations, the media corporations, tech corporations, and of course construction like Dick Cheney's own Halliburton. And what we're seeing now is a repeat of so much of that playbook being dusted off as though none of the disastrous fallout from the invasion of Iraq ever fucking happened. It is truly astounding. You know, I myself was almost reluctant to do a Venezuela. focused episode because you look at the facts on the ground and it seems so obvious. But then I popped on for the first time in my life, actually, I'd never listened to it before, but the daily podcast of The New York Times and listened to their episode about

is the U.S. planning regime change in Venezuela, and heard the way in which the mainstream media is once again, albeit with a little bit of faux dissension and faux critique, just regurgitating the lies of the ghouls that would have a boots-on-the-ground hot war in South America to just a despicable and a disgraceful effect. Those people involved in that episode should all be deeply ashamed of themselves, and yet something tells us. me, they wouldn't be even if faced with the truth and faced with their complicity in peddling these lies. Yeah, not only peddling the lies, but doing it in a totally a historical way

with absolutely no reckoning of what like the actual history of the region is and what the actual history of the American foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere is. And that, I think, is truly the repugnant thing, right? Not just that they're spreading the lies, but they're doing it in this way where the listener wouldn't even know Venezuela existed before 2020 or some shit, you know? Like, it was all tied back to Trump one or even maybe Obama. I don't even think they talked about that. But to me, Venezuela is, it is this conundrum.

It's this completely illogical move, and it's all on its face. It's illogical. Of course, the party line, the line from the White House through the Secretary of State is that it's for narco-traffickers, right? These are terrorists. And Venezuela, the attack on Venezuela, is really to change what's going on with the drug war. And of course that's bullshit.

Everybody has covered this and has said that, you know, has shown that that is absolute dog shit. To me, what's really interesting is the next step is like all of the different speculation that's been going on of like, okay, well, what's the real reason for this? Right? Like, it's an afterthought that the stated reason is complete bullshit. everybody agrees that Venezuela is not really the target. If the White House wants to achieve what it is saying it wants to achieve,

they should be targeting other countries, right? There are other countries that are much more major players in the region, not to mention Buckele and El Salvador, right? One of the greatest buddies of this administration. So, like, it seems like the consensus and the, public is like okay the stated reason is bullshit but what gets interesting is when people start speculating of what is the reason for this and that's where it gets um interesting because the truth is we don't really know right there's there's actually no information coming from the white

house beyond what they've already said which we know is bullshit about like what is truly the plan here. Yeah, exactly. And so in this episode, maybe we won't be able to answer that question, even putting our best speculative thoughts towards answering that question. But what we are going to do is to turn back the clock in classic Fourth Reich archaeology style. And we're going to lay a little historical foundation for the so-called Monroe Doctrine, which has zombie-like been brought back from the dead. And we're going to talk a little bit about the history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, in general, in Venezuela, in particular, especially during the Bolivarian period, following the Hugo Chavez regime or presidency, rather.

I guess regime may be a strong word, right, loaded with all the baggage of authoritarianism. But nobody is really claiming that Chavez was an illegitimate ruler, notwithstanding such claims being made about his successor. And we are going to do our best to unpack the absolutely surreal mask-off moment of aggression that the United States has undertaken here. You know, we have focused a lot, especially in our Warren Commission series and elsewhere, on the lengths that the deep state. goes to conceal its fingerprints and to hide its activities in these world-shaping interventions. And here we have everything happening right there on the surface. And it's actually a cause for some cognitive dissonance, right? Especially when you think about all of these sort of

mainstream libs who like to believe that, well, sure, the CIA did bad things back during the Cold War, but that was a long time ago, and the Cold War is over now. And the degree to which not only have the nefarious deeds of the CIA and of the Deep State continue to pace, they are most likely at a rate and volume and intensity that is unprecedented, even at the height of the Dulles Brothers' domination of U.S. foreign policy. And so this is the moment that we are sitting in, and we are going to see if figuring out how we got here, gives us any clues about what might happen next.

And so without any further ado, let's get a dig-in. The war, I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay, we're going to kill them. You know, they're going to be, like, dead. Stop drugs pouring in. I'm on the border of Bolivia, working for pennies.

Treated like a slave, the coca fields have to be ready. The spirit of my people is starving, broken and sweaty. Dreaming about revolution, looking at my machete. But the workload is too heavy to rise up in arms. And if I ran away, I know they'd probably murder my moms. So I pray to Jesus Christo when I go to the mission, process the cocaine paste and play my position. Okay, listen, while I'm loud dance, just get me my product.

In the United States, and he's a fugitive of American justice. So we're going to continue to hunt for, like we always have. This time, we're not just going to hunt for drug dealers with the little fastboats and say, let's try to arrest him. No, the president has said he wants to wage war on these groups because they've been waging war on us for 30 years, and no one has responded. Yo, it's don't come as a challenge, I'm the son of some of the phallist, elected by my people, the only one on the ballot, born and bred to console with feds.

I laugh at fate and assassinate my predecessor to have. this place in a third world fascist state locked the nation with 90% of the wealth and 10% of the population A central intelligence agency takes weight faithfully the finest type of china white and cocaine you'll see Honey I'm home you know the land is gonna be next Suddenly grown it's funny we're so out of this debt for this money we owe would you When I told you that I had two governments overthrown to keep our son enrolled in a private school than to keep our tummy swollen come on a fucking home was built in a foundation of bloody throats the hungry stolen of their souls Of course this country's running coke

I took a stunning oath To hush the ones we know The CIA conducts the flow For these young hustlers that lost the dough Alrighty, let's talk about the Monroe Doctrine Let's talk about President James Monroe And you know Don, we were talking about

Hagseth, we were talking about Trump We were talking about Rubio Talking about the President of the United States The Secretary of the State And the Secretary of War And we're going to talk about a guess who did all three jobs, and his name is President James Monroe. Before he was president, in the early 1800s, he served as the Secretary of War, and after

that the Secretary of State. The trifecta. The reason I bring that up is that this guy was very much a player in the game of geopolitic of the time, and he was coming up. in a time where if you think, like, globally, what was going on was these wars in Europe, the Napoleonic wars. Well, they occurred in the years, you know, right before his presidency, but while he was working these jobs as, you know, Secretary of State as Secretary of War.

And what was happening by the 1820s was that you were getting a period of stability in Europe. and so these European powers started focusing on their colonies. And where were those colonies? They were in South America. They were in Central America. They were in the Caribbean. And it was at this point, President James Monroe was actually in communication with the Brits. And through, like, British influence, decided that it would be a good thing to say on the global stage, like, the Western.

Hemisphere belongs to the United States of America. Like the United States of America will decide what the developing economies and the developing societies in the Western Hemisphere, free of any foreign monarchs influence. What's funny about that is that the British were very much on board with that. And in fact, we're the ones that would enforce that. At the time, the United States, it wasn't really like a major player. in the world. It didn't really have a Navy. And so when they're making this point, when James Monroe shifts to this policy decision in this statement that he gives that, you know, monarchies will stay

out of the West, he doesn't really have any, anything to back it other than the Royal Navy. Yeah, he's got that. And he's got kind of the increasing economic role that the U.S. is playing vis-a-vis the industrializing British Empire, that this is a time when obviously the economy of the United States is very much driven by the plantation system, by chattel slavery in the South, the cash crop being cotton

that is going straight to those mills of Lancashire, of Manchester of the UK and fueling the industrial revolution. So that's kind of the leverage that the US has to keep the Brits out. They're also distrustful of the Brits, even as they are kind of playing them off of the French and the Spanish colonial powers at the same time. 100% the war of 1812 had just sort of wrapped up right like the Brits weren't fully trusted but at the same time the Brits never never fully trusted never trust those fuckers what it was is the alignment of interest right the Brits wanted stability in the region and they wanted influence over the region in a way that they could really only achieve if they got the Spanish and the French and everyone else out of there, right? So it was a common goal that they had. And I think at this point we should say, you know, this doctrine was never announced as a doctrine. It was a policy of

his and it was delineated by the president, President Menbrough, in 1823 in response to sort of the successful wars of liberation in Europe that we were talking about. And it was like a statement, right, where he well in America against European powers right right of course and of course a part of this was the outward sort of bullshit we are always on about of democracy and brotherhood and freedom and all that and you know that's the reason we want the monarchies out of the Western Hemisphere and really they're just sort of looking at ways to cut up the pie and to be the one that facilitate the trade of the crops that you're talking about. Cotton's one, of course, tobacco, you know, sugar, all sorts of things that are so great

in those regions that we're going to be talking about and that, you know, we have been talking about. But let's talk about what the Monroe Doctrine actually was, like getting to the specifics. Yeah. So I will do that. before I do just a little tiny asterisk on the biographical information on James Monroe to point out this was a guy who owned a lot of slaves. Oh, right.

We should have said that from the top. Yeah, he's a Virginian. He was a Virginian. He's like a Virginian total fucking planter class. moneyed boy oh yeah yeah he owned slaves before he took the white house and indeed he had slaves in the white house he did not free his slaves upon his death and he was a like thomas jefferson his his friend and advisor throughout this whole process he was a staunch believer in the supremacy of the white race and the inferiority of all non-whites.

And I think that is important to note. It's also worth noting that he was related to some players in the 20th century, including the Roosevelt family and presidents Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt. and he was also related to friend of the pod, Joe Alsup, who our Warren Commission decided listeners will know as one of the main moving forces behind the decision to put a presidential commission at the helm of figuring out the facts of JFK's assassination. and, of course, Joe Alsup also just an all-around friend of the CIA and all of its godfathers.

So when we talk about this sort of group of people, they have ties that run as thick as blood. When you went the Jefferson route, I was like, oh, damn, Monroe also raped and sexually assaulted and diddled his enslaved, the enslaved. women in his custody, and then you took it a different way. But yes, it should be clear from the top that Monroe was in the game of slavery. He was all over it. Since we're covering Monroe trivia, I think my favorite point is, you know, the Monroe Doctrine is often looked at this, like, statement that the American president made that, like, the colonists, you know, colonist rule has no place in,

the Western Hemisphere, which is, of course, provably false because Monroe himself was a huge proponent of colonization and was, you know, one of the big voices in the colonization of Africa by freed slaves, right? Liberia's capital, Monrovia, is named Monrovia after James Monroe. So, you know, this was not a guy that was wholly against colonization. Yeah, absolutely not. And on Liberia, you know, shout out to Subliminal Jihad's Demon Forces series. Real deep dive on Liberian history there all the way up to the present. Strongly recommend.

Anyways, back to our episode here, a few points, and I'm going to read the summation of the Monroe Doctrine itself that is set forth in Greg Grandin, Friend of the Pod's recent book, America, America, where he distills the Monroe Doctrine into five points. So first, the new world was henceforth off limits for future colonization by any European power. Any effort to extend Europe's system to any portion of this hemisphere would be viewed by the United States as a threat. Point number two, Washington will view events that take place anywhere in the American America's as bearing on its peace and happiness and reserves the right to intervene throughout the hemisphere to protect its interests. So there's that North American colonial point of view. Point number three, Europe is essentially different from the United States, though Monroe

didn't specify the nature of this difference. He did, though, imply that he meant the distinction. between republicanism and monarchism. Number four, the United States would continue to recognize existing European possessions in the new world, and at that time those consisted of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, British Guyana, Canada, and others. And finally, the fifth point is that Washington considered Mexico, Chile, Gran Colombia, which consisted of Colombia, Central America, Venezuela, and I don't know exactly

where the borders are drawn, but a large swath of territory there in the northern part of South America and Central America, as well as Argentina, to all be free countries. and these were the countries that had liberated themselves through force of arms from the Spanish crown at that time. So as you can see, these points are a little bit all over the map, right? On the one hand, you're sending a message to these newly independent states in South America that their big brother to the north, right, brother Sam, not yet unc status, is friendly. It has their back and it would not let their old colonial masters come back and reconquer their former possessions.

And so, you know, however sincere or cynical, that message may have been on the part of Monroe and the other policymakers in Washington, it was received very sympathetically. And indeed, Simon Bolivar reportedly was hyped when the Monroe Doctrine dropped because he saw it as a repudiation of the Spanish by the United States. Of course, the other side of that coin is that the doctrine is sending a message at the same time to Spain and France, especially to get out and stay out of the new world. And it's sending the same message, albeit more implicitly, for the reasons that you discussed, Dick, to the Brits, right? Definitely. It is sending the message out to the Brits,

because to the Brits, what they're saying, and I think it's tied to this idea of manifest destiny that really takes off. in the 19th century and what they're saying is like North America is ours we're moving west right because at the time the Brits really wanted to cut off America right in its tracks they didn't want there to be such a big

influential country out there right they were supporting that Northwest territory seceding from the nation what you know eventually bubbles up into a different permutation becomes the Civil War but for the Brits, the message was, you know, everything out west, that's ours. And South, too, right? Yeah, and South too, of course, sure.

Because the Brits had designs of their own on this new, newly liberated South American and Caribbean territories. Because at this time, and even, of course, to this day, the Brits did have colonial possessions in the Caribbean. that they were continuing to exploit and to utilize as a forward operating base in the Western Hemisphere. And so the Monroe Doctrine was kind of a warning to stay where you are and don't get any ideas about expanding your colonial holdings in the Western Hemisphere. If anybody is going to expand in the Western Hemisphere, it's going to be us, the United States of America. And for that reason, perhaps, the phrase Monroe Doctrine was actually coined by the Brits. They were using this phraseology to poke fun at the imperial pretences of their former

colony their little bastard stepchild in the united states and i think that that's also kind of funny that you know in this bigger zoomed-out picture of the fourth rake that the very idea of a monroe doctrine it wasn't a self-generated idea but it was the brits saying like oh look at those look at those yanks with their little Monroe doctrine and they is that is Monroe the guy is this the guy that starts off this tradition of presidents having doctrines did they occur before him because you know these days it seems like every president it's a doctrine yeah well the thing is is it caught on among the American whites you know they liked the idea of a doctrine they liked the idea of putting their little hooks in their neighbors and staking that claim.

You know, we talked about the sympathy between Monroe and Thomas Jefferson, and at this time, Jefferson was holding out hopes that the United States could bring all these South American Republic sort of under its wing. and expand basically the same apartheid regime throughout the entire South American continent, throughout the whole hemisphere, with Anglo-Saxons on top, and everybody else serving them and working for them in the same way that the slaves at Monticello were working for his personal enrichment. Yeah, basically anywhere where it seemed like the crops would work, the Americans get their grubby little fingers all over it, right? It kicks off in the 1820s, right?

We mentioned in 1823 is when this idea of this policy of the Monroe Doctrine kicks off. And it really just takes off from there in the 1800s to justify all sorts of things, including the U.S. occupation and annexation of Hawaii in 1842. And, you know, building up, too, I think really where it pops off is the Spanish-American War, right, at the end of the 19th century. For sure. And that is where, I would say, like, the U.S. really comes up and out into the 20th century as, like, this imperial power. Yeah, exactly. Like the second half of the 19th century is not so much the U.S. fighting these naval battles

or contending with European powers, that half century is focused on internal continental expansion across North America, of course, the Mexican War, just about doubles. the size of the United States and concomitantly cuts in half the size of the Republic of Mexico. And that's not so much a battle with other imperial powers. That is simply the assertion of American dominance within the North American continent. It's when those islands are once again to the cynical and or idealistic voices of the American press at the end of the 19th century calling for the liberation of the remaining colonial possessions of the brutal and repressive Spanish crown, right? Cuba, Filipinas, Guam, Puerto Rico, all of these Spanish possessions come into the crosshairs of the now fully naval and consolidated U.S. imperial

power ready to get its name on the marquee among the great empires. And so the Spanish-American War concluding in 1898 is the perhaps the apogee of the Monroe Doctrine and its invocation in the expansion of the American burgeoninging. empire. And of course, that's extremely important as a precursor to the first World War, which is, as I think we might have mentioned in our very first episode, it's the first World War whereby the United States leapfrogs the old imperial powers of Europe as that the United States becomes a creditor nation and becomes economically better off and better situated than all of those empires whose imperial cores suffered substantial infrastructural and industrial losses

during the First World War. But the Spanish-American War is not only the key to putting the U.S. on the footing to be able to pull that off, but also shoring up the American mentality for imperialist expansion, because the manifest destiny idea was delineated by the bi-coastal territory of North America, right? Sea to Shining Sea, the frontier kind of ends, again, to borrow from Grandin, you know, in the end of the myth, talking about how once you've conquered the West and you've reached the Pacific, then you need somewhere else to look for further consequences. And the Spanish-American War provided that outlet, and that is really when the great Reichsmen of the modern era come into existence.

I want to just point out one of the great serendipitous, beautiful things that happens in this podcast is we do these explorations and then we find like the perfect jump point to get us back to the modern day. And the Spanish-American War is such a perfect example, I think, of this because, you know, the other thing about the Spanish-American War was that it was very much a, I think, exaggerated by the press and was this source of what's called like yellow journalism and sensationalism and really this move to sell papers and magazines and all of that. and it's like, man, we are right back there today with pretty much anything this administration does on a international scale and its international policy. Yeah, absolutely. And to just draw that line all the way from the Monroe Doctrine and the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century to connect the dots through our, 4th Reichsmen of the Cold War era, perhaps we could take just a brief aside to discuss the

mentor of the Dulles brothers and their boss, old Mr. Cromwell of Sullivan and Cromwell fame. If folks can look up the old program to chill archives, Jimmy, back in the day, did a pretty good series on Sullivan and Cromwell that goes very deep into this, but I just think that it is worth mentioning for the sake of the continuity of the narrative arc and the direct lines between these operators that we see connecting the dots of history. So in that respect, right, we mentioned before that there was Gran Colombia as the unit, the sort of post-colonial national unit that was liberated by the forces under Simon Bolivar from the Spanish in the 1820s. And Gran Colombia had the goal of unifying all.

of the former colonial possessions into one economic and political federation, a republic, if you will, on almost the model of North America, of the United States. And of course, Jefferson, Monroe, and their entire cohort in power in the U.S., was deeply opposed to such unification given its potential to compete with and oust the U.S. from regional hegemony, especially if that southern neighbor were to oppose the chattel slave trade and basically jeopardize the game for the United States. Well, fast-forwarding to the end of the century, to the period after the Spanish-American War, Mr. Cromwell of Sullivan and Cromwell, and his clients in big business and his

friends in the government colluded and conspired to prop up a nationalistic, independence movement within the Isthmus of Panama. Part of that was to carve out the Panama Canal zone and to seek a way across Central America for shipping route. There was at the same time a lot of interest in doing the same thing in Nicaragua to the north of Panama. And eventually, to make a long story very short, the business interests with the advice and assistance of Sullivan and Cromwell are successful in petitioning the U.S. government to support these local sort of astroturfed forces and declare the independent nation. of Panama out of whole cloth and this breaks up Grand Columbia causes it to further fracture and to kind of begin to sow distrust and division within that political unit and of course to carve out under the auspices of the Monroe Doctrine,

because ultimately this is a national interest that we're pursuing here, the Panama Canal Zone, which remained until our boy Jerry Ford came into power in the Americans' hands. I'll I'm a Preguntan

Preguntan If when she I was a little you you've

you've seen to pass to pass I'm Abren their suen

his suenios the soled with a Okay, so that's a historical overlook of the monroe doctrine, what it is, if not a bit oversimplified, but I think it will serve our purposes for this discussion today. And next, I think we should talk about the real politic.

if you will, of how this plays out. So by that, I mean, okay, you have the Monroe Doctrine, essentially drawing a line in the sand and telling all of the European powers, and indeed the world, that, hey, across this line, you shall not pass without going through us. The United States is going to determine the fate of the Western Hemisphere. And effectively, what this means is for the budding countries.

they actually would still have to answer to the United States because the United States was saying, hey, we are responsible for the security of this hemisphere. And in practice, what that means is here you have all of these countries with these great natural resources, things like cotton like sugar, eventually things like oil. Coffee, minerals, tar, back in the day before it was oil. in the northern part of South America, there's a lot of tar bubbling up in the surface there that was a big one for a lot of these resource exploiters to get their grubby little pause on. And that's really, I think, the sort of building block, the starting point is these natural

resources that these burgeoning countries had effectively kicked the crown out of the game because under the old form of economy known as mercantilism, it was, for example, Spain who would have colonies in South America and any of those resources that were being extracted, they would be traded with Spain. Spain would be the go-through for anything that was coming out of, for example, Colombia. And in this new world where you had all of these empires, out, the United States saw an open field and really stepped in as this middleman. And where there

wasn't already some exploitation of the earth happening, the United States decided well through whatever business interest, maybe it was a private business interest, maybe it was a public program, that intervention would be required. Yeah. And a lot of the times it was the same exact industrialist interests, families and companies that we've talked about so much on this podcast. The Rockefellers, for example, the great book that, gosh, we could do many episodes just covering this book alone, Thy Will Be Done, all about the Rockefeller families, exploits in South America, particularly in Brazil and you know it goes on and on ITT international telephone and telegraph setting up the grid down there you got your anaconda copper you've got your mining

interests of all the metals all the minerals and it's just a smorgas board for corporate expropriation that over the course of the 20th century, the U.S. and its corporate sions, the corporate elites, really increase their share of ownership over these natural resources, and always doing so in close collaboration with local stool pigeons, local puppets and puppet regimes and whenever the local government gets a little too big for its britches, as did, for example, the government of Guatemala in 1954, the Dulles brothers and their client, United Fruit, on whose board both brothers sat, of course, went into action. and did a little coup and replaced the government with one to their liking.

And that pattern plays out over and over again. And we wanted to tease out a little bit, you know, because there is this kind of oversimplification that you see in the mainstream media, even in academia, and in popular history, that basically says that was then, this is now, you know, the methods of the Cold War were suited to the needs of the Cold War and no longer is the need for violent intervention, for covert overthrowing of regimes and governments popularly elected, though they may be, that doesn't happen anymore, you know, even if Henry Kisson,

was a jerk when he said, Chile shouldn't be allowed to go socialist just because the people voted it in. We now, looking back on that, that was wrong when it happened and it'll never happen again, type bullshit. But there's a lot of other ways in which the U.S. exercises its imperial power. So you want to talk about some of the less garish and brutal ways that imperial power is brought down upon the heads of the people of Central and South America? For sure. And that's through aid in many different forms, right? Like USAID, I should say, USAID, the Peace Corps programs where Americans will step in. and offer social services or even basic things like food,

and thereby, some would argue, render the country receiving the aid reliant on the American support. And this can have sort of disastrous effects in a lot of ways. I think the Haiti example is a good one, where you had American, an aid coming in and providing rice to Haiti. A program that started in the 80s and went through the 90s and beyond. And Haiti is a country that at the time didn't really need rice. And what this aid effectively did is it put a lot of farmers in Haiti out of business and caused them to move into these cities. Many moved to the capital city, port-a-prince and pretty much overburdened the

city, right? You had the situation where folks were now living in these shacks, these shanty homes piled on top of each other. And fast forward to 2010 and of course the devastating earthquake that killed countless lives that destroyed the city, that destroyed this community of folks. And many would say that this USAID program, it's responsible. And this is sort of a common theme with American aid where a lot of times it is at best, it's tone death. And then in the worst situations, you have these so-called unintended consequences. Or intended consequences, right? It's hard to say what is and what isn't deliberate in these types of maneuvers, because for one, you know, it's worth pointing out that this was,

in kind of a right-hand, left-hand, synchronized operation, where the U.S. also did overthrow the government of Jean-Bartrand, Aristide, and Haiti, amidst these programs of forced dependency. And it also has a domestic political component, because, of course, the rice that is coming into, to Haiti from the U.S. is grown by farmers that are receiving federal subsidies, and those subsidies in turn act as essentially bribes for those communities to support the government in power. In that case, it was first Clinton and later Bush, and it works in concert,

and I would hesitate to buy in to the narrative that characterizes the bad consequences as unintended when kind of maintaining conditions of impoverishment, whether or not the individuals that are involved in carrying out these policies, individuals who are themselves sort of brainwashed into this ultimately white supremacist and racist ideology that casts the global South peoples as inferior and incapable of self-government. And remember the Dulles Brothers uncle, Robert Lansing, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, who himself engaged in a protracted and prolonged military invasion. and occupation of Haiti in his own right famously said that blacks are incapable of self-government.

And I think that that dynamic plays out time and again, you know, whether it's people that are perceived as black or people that are perceived as indigenous as many of the other Latin American countries are, or people that are cast with these kind of, racist tropes and caricatures that are applied to all Latin Americans, you know, the caudillos, the big macho at the top of the pyramid, and the machismo embodied, which again, why did that stereotype come into existence? Is because this is the type of guy, this wealthy, swashbuckling, violent, and brutal personality that is hand-selected nine times out of ten by the imperial powers

to oversee the domain in much the same way as the overseers on the plantation oversaw the slaves under their employ. And so, sorry to kind of derail there, Dick, but I think it's an important point to tease out that all of these policies, all of these different approaches, whether it's the soft power of a peace corps, which could be used for good, and certainly, you know, I know people that have volunteered for the peace corps, and I have no suspicion that they did so with overtly imperialist designs or racist motives, but the system in which they're participating is a soft side of this bigger colonial, neo-colonial, I should say, project to maintain the domination of corporate power and of American power over the periphery.

Maybe to not get too reductive, but it puts it in this sort of paternalistic relationship with America knowing better, right? And it's got this position to say better and do better and show societies, these countries, how to live free and follow the righteous path and things like that. It's from a fundamentally flawed starting point. Part of this is also how these countries, these lands can be used to flesh out domestic policy and sort of create like a blow-off valve for domestic issues. And you mentioned the United Fruit Company and that to me, when I hear that, I think about the Supreme Court case, right? American Banana versus United Fruit, where the Supreme Court of the United States essentially held that the Sherman Antitrust Act, that doesn't apply

outside of the United States. And, you know, in that case, what had happened was United Fruit had effectively created a monopoly on banana plantations, and a competitor sued them in federal court and lost. Notably, both of those companies on both sides of the V, they're both American companies. And they're basically fighting for a stake in the market in a foreign market, right? Of course, whatever they exploit, they will sell globally or whatever, but they're basically trying to suss out how to slice up this pie. And to me, this is definitely part of it, is how, like, American domestic policy, the meets and bounds of what laws we say apply within our borders, That is ripe, fertile ground for all of this.

And when, you know, the country is expanding and taking on new markets and exploiting new lands. Yeah, that's a great point. The other important Supreme Court case on that point, of course, the Nestle case from just the past few years. Exactly. And that brings it full circle. Why don't you riff on that? Because that's exactly what I was getting at. It's like still happening to this day.

Yeah. I mean, in a nutshell, the Nestle's side of the case was argued by Burning Man attendee and Lib. Former. Yeah, former Solicitor General, right? Neil Katyal, Lib favorite of the legal community. And his position was on behalf of Nestle that the company was immune from suit for enslaving children in Africa because the territorial reach of the United States could not touch

the conduct of that company despite the fact that, of course, it's selling its chocolate here in the United States. It employs people in the United States. It has extensive infrastructure and distribution networks in the United States, but never the the less, under U.S. law, it is entitled to commit slavery in what would be violation of a number of U.S. laws if committed on U.S. territorial land. So it's a double standard is putting it mildly that the law permits it and that it is often tied up with things happening at home. And we make this point because we're going to come back to it with respect to the current aggression against Venezuela that may have a domestic angle of its own.

And before we do that, I think just the last couple of points to really wrap up and hammer or home with an exclamation mark here, you know, the imperialism that we're talking about is, if it's not clear by now, entirely a bipartisan project, right? Yeah, for sure. The Haiti stuff, that was Clinton, right? That was Clinton. And then, of course, our fella Neil Cattial, has a lot. Obama's Solicitor General, right?

So 100%, it is a fully like a Western liberal everyone's on board. Yeah. And I often think about what Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, who just a absolute demon of a human being

that wore her evil right there on her mug. She looks like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. And she used to always talk about the diplomat's toolbox. And you've got all these tools in your toolbox that you can use in any given situation. And it'll depend on what the situation is as to which tool you pull out to use to solve the national interest of the United States and pursue that national interest. And so the idea is, you know, yeah, under certain circumstances, you're going to have to bust out the old coup machine. And both Democrats and Republicans have not been shy to do that.

you know, Obama also with Hillary Clinton helming the stage apartment pulled off a coup in Honduras in 2008, 2009. In Libya? Obviously, the invasion of Libya under the auspices of responsibility to protect and all that bullshit. And on and on and on. Ukraine that we've talked about in other geopolitic episodes. I believe with Victoria Newland and her blatant coup plotting there.

And so even what we conceive of as the hardcore right-wing, brutal, and violent tools in the toolbox, the Democrats are by no means shy to use those tools when it suits them, but they're much more vocal and the Republicans are much more vocally against the softer side of things, right? Trump, of course, canceled USAID and pulled the plug on a lot of this money that was going to these NGOs that are essentially working hand and glove with the CIA to foment the conditions that are conducive to regime change, such as in Venezuela, you know, drop site news recently reported, among other things, that the U.S. had spent a bunch of money actively encouraging immigration out of Venezuela to the United States in the hopes that this community of exiles would propagandize. against the Maduro regime. And so there's a ton of tools at their disposal. They use all of them

and usually all at the same time. And it's just a question of what is appropriate under what circumstances, what is plausible under what circumstances. You know, the Trump administration seems pretty ham-fisted when it comes to pulling out the big guns, the 2020 coup attempt in Venezuela that they tried to pull off against Maduro, so-called Operation Gideon, was an epic failure. Does 13 people, including two Americans, are in custody for trying to oust him? Six people were killed during the failed incursion Sunday, according to Venezuelan officials. The armed men were intercepted trying to enter Venezuela by boat from Colombia.

Silver Corps USA, a Florida-based security firm, claimed responsibility for organizing the attempted invasion. At 1700 hours, a daring amphibious raid was launched from the border of Colombia deep into the heart of Caracas. He's told media he was hired by Venezuelan opposition leader of Juan Guaido, who was supposed to pay him $212 million for his services. Guido denies any involvement. involvement. Maduro accused the United States and Columbia of orchestrating the plot, but both countries denied involvement. We'll find out. We just heard about it. But whatever it is, we'll let you know. But it has nothing to do with our government. The bipartisan support for fake President Juan Guaido, likewise, a big old fart noise, fizzle out. And the two,

Bush administration coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, right? They're not pulling out any stops in their attempts to do away with the Bolivarian revolutionary movement in Venezuela for the entirety of its existence. Ever since it came into being more than 20 years ago, all of the dials on that switchboard have been turned up to 10 and yet nevertheless the Chavez Maduro Govierno Bolivariano in Venezuela has continued aflo and has survived notwithstanding the aggressive aggressive attempts to bring it down for sure and just on your point, I think in many ways it's really, it's so important to point out that all of these attempts,

all of these aggressive moves by the United States through each administration, how they've all resulted in these epic failures, cartoonish failures where like in Trump won, his CIA agents are captured. A similar thing just happened, where we're just unabashed. saying to the world, hey, yeah, we're using spies and trying to overthrow government, and all the while failing, like time and again, kind of like, you know, the old lore about how after all the many attempts on Fidel Castro's life, all the cartoonish sort of ways that they tried to get rid of him, it's like totally. been taking up to the next level now with uh with venezuela and i think venezuela is a perfect

microcosm of all the things we've been talking about so far right so you're taking a country with plenty of natural resources plenty of um oil oil reserves we should say that the oil in Venezuela is that sour oil. It's not the sweet crude. Did you know there's a difference between oil, oil rating, the grades of oil? Yeah, I hear the difference a lot. I've never tasted any crude myself. I've never sampled. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know where the origins are the sweet versus sour, but the sour oil is like not as pure, if you will, right? It's got to take some more refinement before it's good to go. But Venezuela's got a lot of it. And in fact, I think it's got maybe the largest deposits in the world. And beyond that, they also have, you know, it's rich in

minerals. So there's plenty of natural resources to be got. And it's funny because it's like in a lot of ways. The story of Hugo Chavez is the story of like the last country to really make oil the thing that it's going to sort of prop up its economy. And what happens is that it backfires, right? Like when you have just that one thing that is holding up your economy, it is a prime target and you know historically that's happened as well no you're totally right and it's actually something that the president of columbia gustavo petro has openly criticized chavez and maduro by extension for putting all their eggs into that sticky sweet basket and over determining the dependence of the economy on oil exports.

And in fact, to just talk about one more of these tools in the old toolbox, after Hugo Chavez died, and in the lead up to the elections for his replacement in 2012 and 2013, one of the mechanisms that the U.S. put into practice, and this is, of course, during the Obama administration was to rally the OPEC nations, the oil-producing nations, especially Saudi Arabia, close U.S. ally, to flood the global market with oil and resultantly tank the price of oil and punish the Venezuelan oil-dependent economy in hopes that that that, would generate sufficient popular will against the government to vote in the opposition to chavismo and it was unsuccessful it was close it was a close election a free and fair election by all

accounts but it was a close one and it was i think a sign that a little bit more sauce was going to be required if the U.S. was in fact going to drop that Venezuelan domino on its path to kind of reconquering the entirety of the Western Hemisphere. Because at the end of the day, Venezuela does not stand alone as a simple sovereign nation atop a bucket of, a single sovereign nation atop a bucket of, natural resources, it is politically a part of the larger scene, which consists of a handful of what you might call anti-imperialist governments, which obviously represent a pretty broad spectrum and are not by any means one and the same, but of course, Kuba being the first and the oldest of these governments, and Nicaragua being a well-established anti-imperialist

government there, and when we say anti-imperialist, let's be clear, we don't mean to bless every policy of these governments, and we certainly have our critiques of how they act, but that's not for discussion right now. Now, the point is that when the U.S. attacks Venezuela, it is seeking to wrench off one of the biggest and richest members of this sort of anti-imperialist, what used to be called the Pink Tide block of countries. nowadays, you know, Lula's, Brazil is a part of this block, and Claudia Scheinbaum's, Mexico, and Petros, Colombia. So there's a large number, larger than there has been in a while, of countries with a real substantial economic footprint in the Western Hemisphere that are, if not aligned, at least in danger of aligning against U.S. interests in the region. And the U.S. isn't very keen to let that happen.

So they're consolidating their own block, kind of a regeneration of Plan Condor that united all these fascist regimes back in the 1970s and 80s with the dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and on and on. And now they have really a foothold in Argentina, with Millay, with Novoa in Ecuador, and with, of course, Buckele in El Salvador, even though he's just a little tiny brother, he does have crypto ATM, so that gives him a little extra juice right there. And I think now that tees us up to transition into the latest. Getting back,

There's a Like, how much, how much, Chouroko, chakurroko, chakurroko, chak, chakurrokocha, chakurrokocha. Getting back on the track with Venezuela, Venezuela is the perfect microcosm because, as we've discussed. So the U.S. has the, let's say, the cover or justification for intervention, and that is that Venezuela is a no good communist country. And given the U.S. foreign policy on all of that, that won't stand, not in the Western Hemisphere. And if we're going to talk

about motivations, of course, there are all of those natural resources. So it should be no surprise that year after year the United States has tried and failed to make something happen in Venezuela and that was going on largely unsuccessful until our man Trump comes in and starts working on cutting a deal with Maduro and for a while it seems like he was able to make movement, right? The administration was able to make movement and effectively get all of these concessions, all of this access to natural resources, to deals, to grants, to be able to extract the country of its natural resources. And for whatever reason, and a lot of people have now sort of put the weight of the blame on this subset of folks within the

Trump inner circle, namely Marco Rubio, there is this motivation to get Maduro out the door, to have this real regime change. And the story that's been gin up is, as we discussed at the top of the hour, this idea that Venezuela is a narco-trafficking state, which for all the reasons we talked about at the beginning of this program, is, you know, 100% fake. Yeah, not only the UN says it's fake, even the U.S. own intelligence assessment says that Venezuela is not a significant source of drugs. like could not be more fake just not even trying low effort fucking fraud and it's just become this cartoonish show it's like we talk about fucking warmonger pete and we talk about this movement

this like movement of conservatives being like you know all gung ho and uh rah rah raw about going to war and using our military and it's just become this display that's just really goofy right because you know we talked about the USS Gerald R. Ford this massive ship this I think are the largest in the U.S. fleet right and it's like what is the point of having that out there right it's just so stupid. as we record on November 12th, it's reported today in the Washington Post that the USS Gerald R. Ford, which to give a sense of the scale, I don't know if we mentioned this before, it carries 5,000 sailors on board and more than 75 aircraft. And the fleet that it's

helming there consists of eight additional warships as well as troops activated for duty in surrounding military bases. U.S. of course has bases in Puerto Rico, in Panama, elsewhere around, and the total troop deployment is in the neighborhood of 10,000. And as a response, Venezuela has mobilized its entire armed forces of about 200,000 military fighting people. And, you know, it's, again, this standoff, which, like everything in the Trump administration, even bringing to bear the full weight of the armed forces of the U.S. here, what are you really going to do here? I mean, what they've done so far is to attack these little boats,

and to be clear, it shouldn't be dismissed as a nothing deal because 76 people have been obliterated, off the face of the earth, we have no idea who these people are, but indications point to them being fishermen. Maybe they are smuggling some migrants in the flow of people from south to north that is made inevitable by the very dynamics of domination that we've discussed earlier. And, you know, these 76 people between 19 different boats are dead. I mean, just imagine like your workplace. Imagine if 76 people you know got killed.

Like it's a substantial number of people to just straight up vaporize based on no real evidence. And when pressed for evidence even worse, the U.S. has provided fake evidence. sometimes pulling out these photos that are years old of different boats that are not the ones that were blown up and just rubbing it in all of our fucking faces that they can get away with murder, murder on the high seas. It is a violation of international law. There's not really even any debate about it, even if these people were. as alleged selling drugs or smuggling drugs into the United States, there is no justification under international law for the use of deadly force to wipe

them out. So it's brazenness for the sake of brazenness in terms of the criminality of the administration. yeah it's completely like spectacular right this concept of using this massive military force to obliterate fishermen and fishing boats under this guise of like fighting the narco drug traffickers and meanwhile completely ignoring like okay uh president trump if you really wanted to do this and say okay we're going to go after the narco-terrorist take a look around at your boys right take a look at bukele right like what is going on there my man you know the absurdity of it all is that there's so much hypocrisy there's so much hypocrisy about what is you know what it is they're trying to do

and what it is they're actually doing and it just does not make any sense completely Yeah, not only Buckele, but look at the U.S. educated president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, who, hey, wouldn't you know it? There is a massive, massive corporation with his family name on it. That's because he's a fucking billionaire, nepo baby, who not only took the president, of that country with obvious support of the U.S., but his little banana shipping company got caught selling and smuggling approximately 700 kilos of cocaine in banana crates over the last five years. And that's just what they've been caught doing. And you could imagine that it represents but a sliver of the total picture.

And the same goes for U.S.-backed former president of Honduras from the right wing, obviously. Juan Orlando Hernandez, right, aka Joe. And his blatant drug smuggling and money laundering activities were so above board that he landed his ass in federal penitentiary in the United States as just this pattern repeating itself over and over again, right? It dates all the way back to the intimate involvement of the so-called deep state of the CIA

in drug trafficking to finance covert operations, to bring drugs into the country and augment the addiction crises that have wreaked havoc upon mostly poor people in the United States and to prop up right-wing dictatorships in the global south, you know, some of which were staffed by actual World War II German Nazis, as always, right? This is the fucking Fourth Reich. It is not metaphorical. This is very much literal when we're talking about collaboration and cooperation between white supremacist Nazis and their trainees in the CIA

with the goal of economic and political world. domination right my question to Donald Trump and I'm pretty sure I know the answer is like this this policy of summarily executing these narco traffickers does that extend to one orlando Hernandez does that extend to Daniel the boa does it fucking extend to the sackler family does it extend to all of these other known traffickers of death and destruction yeah As they say in Spanish, Espera sentado for the response.

You can wait for that answer sitting down because it ain't coming. Right. But all of this is like we could, we can go, believe me, we could go back and forth

four hours talking about all of these puppet regimes installed and propped up by Washington and by Langley who were closely with the drug the greatest drug cartel in history, the CIA,

to keep the world financial system flush with cash. Like you say, there were literal Nazis involved in this plot of the drug trade, right? Keeping the theme of the Fourth Reich front and center, right? literal German Nazis who escaped to South America, guys like Klaus Barbie, Frederick Schwend, many more, folks that ended up making these networks of death and destruction. And, you know, we can go on and on, but we'll save that for another day and just really reiterate that there is an obvious double standard going on.

and none of this makes any sense. It doesn't make any sense if you believe in the purported reasons, right, to spread democracy, to cut down on drug trafficking. Like, if you actually buy into that and try to follow it to its logical end, you're going to end up doing, as the man himself did in his recent episode with Colonel Douglas McGregor, the old Tucker Carlson confused face for sure for sure but what I mean is like even if we were even at looking at it now even if we know what is going on right it still is completely illogical because you have the vibes of what's happening it's like we're setting up to make the same exact mistake we made

in you know Afghanistan we made in Iraq we made in Vietnam we made in Korea like it's the same exact playbook, Oma, right? Yes. Like the lead-up to this thing, it's looking a lot like the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and it's like, even knowing everything we know,

it's just, to me, it's still so fucking absurd. It's like, here we go again, you know? Yeah. And they're not even trying this time around. Like, in 2003, even if the rationale now that was given to the public for the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of that country and its neighbors, at least, at least they came up with some bullshit.

At least Colin Powell could go there to the UN, do his little PowerPoint, wiggle the little tube of fake yellow cake uranium or whatever, plagiarize the movie, the rock to describe some fake chemical and nerve agents or whatever the fuck now they're not even attempting to do that they're not even seeking any international buy-in whether from the UN or from anyone else it is cowboy time right not even looking for not even looking to Congress, right? Like he said it himself. Donald Trump said it himself, right? I'm not going to ask for permission. We're just going to go out there and kill people. So they're just saying it out loud. And the way it's coming off, again, it's just so clunky and goofy. And it's almost like the guy at the

gym that is like really swole up, but it's all glamour muscles, right? Because even this, you know, S. Gerald Ford, it's itself having mechanical problems and it's itself like, you know, having issues. Navy Times reports that the Ford experienced a propulsion system issue associated with a recent design change, requiring a return to home port for adjustments before resuming at-sea testing. This is not the first time the $12.9 billion aircraft carrier has had problems. It was delivered to the Navy nearly two years late and 23% over budget. And President Trump was famously critical of the ship's electromagnetic aircraft launch system, calling it no good. You have these failed sort of CIA operations, or I guess are at least superficially supposed

to be covert, but never mind that Trump is going out and announcing them to the public. Oh, yeah. You should elaborate on that, on that point, because that's actually quite incredible. Well, yeah. I mean, it's like the, so what was it? It was like last week or the week before where he straight up says that we I'm going to use the CIA and use have I've approved covert operations which is like the perfect sort of like terminus point terminal point of this like era of using the CIA to do covert operations at this point it's like everybody knows we're doing them why don't we just say them out loud why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela And is there more information you can share about these strikes on the alleged drug busts in the Caribbean?

Well, I can't do that, but I authorized for two reasons, really. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. They came in because we had an open border policy. And as soon as I heard that, I said a lot of these countries, they're not the only country, but they're the worst abuser. Many, many countries have done it, but not like Venezuela. They were down and dirty. And the other thing of drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela. And a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea, so you get to see that.

But we're going to stop them by land also. Does the CIA have authority to take out Maduro? Oh, I don't want to answer a question like that. That's a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn't it be a ridiculous question for me to answer? Yeah. Yeah, it's nuts. It's quite nuts.

You've got to wonder what would the Alan Dulles's and Frank Wisner's of yesteryear think about the work that they did to keep their fingerprints hidden from all of the covert ops that they were running all around the world and to look now at Trump just going out there and saying it out loud yeah and I think that's part of what I was saying like this is nuts even for someone like me looking at it it's just completely nuts this is like what I'm talking about. It's like none of the, it's almost like you have an animated corpse and it's just responding to electrical signals and like nothing it is saying, oh, you know, even maybe an AI generated piece of content where it's like the words are coming out, the sort of actions are happening and you are left really trying to understand what the fuck you're looking at. Yeah. Yeah, and it's spurred this obvious race among the private sector actors, right? There's a $50 million bounty out on Maduro to solicit information that will lead to his arrest, whatever to the fuck that means, given the fact that the Cartel de los Soles, this cartel that is supposedly heading.

up doesn't actually exist. And in fact, if anything, it was a thing in the 90s when the US backed dictatorship of Venezuela was caught selling drugs. It's just such a fucking joke all of these justifications that they're giving. But yet, notwithstanding the fact that the mendacity is on full display. What really blew my mind was to listen to the way that the liberal mainstream media is covering this stuff and covering for the regime change efforts in eerie echoes of 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, right? I mean, Judith Miller and the New York Times obviously belong in the Hague for the work that they did on behalf of the Bush administration in propagandizing the public to get on board with the disastrous and genocidal invasion of Iraq.

But this New York Times is still doing the same shit. They are still parroting uncritically. the Trump administration's stated reasons for seeking regime change. They are hammering the undemocratic and dictatorial nature of the Maduro regime. And they're coming into dovetailed ideological positions with the likes of Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes, the so-called anti-war. right wing who have openly voiced their support for the invasion of Venezuela under the auspices of the

Monroe doctrine. And let's not forget, I don't think we really talked about her, but the whole thing with Maria Machado, right? That's that's a whole head scratcher. It's like, how does this happen? This person who has very clear and significant ties to the bourgeois class in Venezuela, right? She's got ties to like the electrical, electrical engineering industry and minerals industry. And she is very much tied up in foreign interests, right? Like she is very much, I would say, backed and funded mostly by foreign interests. And I mean, I just can't get, I can't get how it is that even the New York.

times, even the left, even the libs, I should say, are propping up this Machado character. Well, they're so bought in to the legitimacy of institutions like the Nobel Peace Prize that if they were to cast aspersions, a recipient Maria Machado, then they would have to, by extension, cast doubt on oh my god i'm almost going to faint when i say it don't say it don't say it man don't say his name baroque hussein obama not barry look listener i think that probably 90% of you are already on board but if you fucking think that the nobel peace prize is anything but a laurel on the head of the next war-mongering, genocidal, imperialist freak of nature, you got another thing coming. When there's a world where you literally have in real time, so many good people who are fighting

and doing everything they can to ameliorate the ongoing genocide, and then you have this lady as the person that is getting the Nobel Peace Prize. It's like that, I think, tells you all you need to know. In an environment when there is that reality, it's like, okay, maybe this thing doesn't really mean what it purports to mean. Yeah. And just a word on Machado. I mean, she was banned from running for office in Venezuela, not because of political repression

per se, right? Ultimately, her party did run a candidate that got... like, in excess of 40% of the votes, don't want to weigh it in too much on the specifics of the legitimacy of that election. Probably it was actually sketchy. But regardless, like, she was literally running to the likes of John Bolton, the upper crust of the imperialist machine and openly requesting that the United States invade Venezuela, increase the disastrous and devastating economic sanctions that punish the ordinary people of Venezuela much more than they punish the ruling class and the leaders of the government, and she was committing what any disinterested observer

would call treason against not the leaders of her country, but the people, of her country and she was rightly barred from the political system for being yet another one of these want-a-be almost like an influencer level of grifting imperialist lackey her conduct in her entire life is befitting of a cage not a Nobel Peace Prize although you know probably most Nobel Peace Prize recipients are also befitting of a cell in the hague, just like she is. It's something else to listen to Western journalists. I listened the other day to an NPR interview with Machado. And it's just like, is the U.S. interlocutor of these imperialist lackeys, are they actually willingly

participating in this farce, or are they just so fucking stupid that they don't know any better than to treat this person like some kind of a hero? In any event, whether it's one or the other, it's despicable, it's disgusting. It really makes me want to fucking puke. I dedicated this prize to the people of Venezuela and to President Trump because I think he deserves it. I think it's fair. He is the main supporter of this fight against this narco-terrorist cartel. The person who actually got the Nobel Prize called today called me and said, I'm accepting this in honor of you because you really deserved it.

very nice thing to do i i didn't i didn't say then give it to me though i think she might have she was very nice when do you support u.s military strikes of the territory of venezuela as part of what you call a process i believe that the increase in pressure and the escalation that's taking place is the only way to but we're not to understand that it's time to go. And I believe, and I can announce this, that our government will move our Israeli and the seat to Jerusalem. That will be part of our support to the state of Israel. Wow, in God's will. Thank you so much.

who insisted on maintaining operation that have consequences. It is Maduro that started a war against other countries, knowing that that would have consequences. And what also makes we want to fucking puke is the fact that the only voice once again in the mainstream media that is speaking out against this move to hot war in Venezuela who is it dick well I think I got to introduce him and you got to maybe do a little bit but I you know we have here today with us very much enemy of the pod, Tucker, that's Tucker with three K's, Searleson. Tucker, how are you doing today?

Well, you know, I'm here. I'm praising God, praising his only son, Jesus Christ, and I'm just thankful that he died for my sins and that I live in the greatest country in the world, in the history of the world, notwithstanding the fact that it's committed a few policy errors in my judgment and maybe on the way to committing another one. But it's true. You've said it before, and now I'm talking to you again, Don, but we've said it before. It's like these nutcases, these right wingers that traditionally are just, you know, outward, just the manifestation, the physical manifestation of like,

racist idiot, literal white supremacist, they're the ones that seem to be making, at least from a starting point, a little bit of sense. And I think that what we're really seeing is the result of living in this schizophrenic environment where issues are sort of brought up in this contradictory way, right? You have things like the modern conservative movement where you have America First and End of Forever Wars and yada, yada, yada, yada, existing under the Party and Power, the Republican Party, which is very much exerting its military force all over the world and even at home and has very much been public about how it intends to ratchet things up even more. Many more Americans have died of drug odies over the last hundred years than in all wars during that time combined, including the Second World War.

How much of that comes from Venezuela? Well, we have a fentanyl crisis famously. Does fentanyl come from Venezuela? No, it comes from Mexico. What about meth also comes from Mexico? What about cocaine? That would be Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. Not to say that drugs don't come from Venezuela.

Of course they do. But most drugs that wind up in this country do not come from Venezuela. and the cartels that distribute them and kill people in our country are not Venezuelan. They're Mexican. If you were going to take the national security state and use its awesome power to fix the drug problem, well, I mean, maybe you could start by deporting drug dealers. And so to me, it's like one of the greatest identifiable symptoms of this schizophrenic environment is that we end up having someone like Tucker Carlson,

at least for like the first 15 minutes, make some good points. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this on the pod before. I had an episode on Coexist Inc. with Brother Isaac all about Tucker and his schick. And it's really the case that he has a talent for pointing out the flaws in the mainstream narratives and doing so accurately and persuasively, right? I mean, you listen to his take on Venezuela and he kind of marches through one by one, as we have kind of done here, the official justifications calls them out for dog shit and even adds his little vindictive flourishes to some of the people that he hates

that deserve his hatred, like Lindsay Graham, who he says has a psychosexual desire just to kill people, which I think is accurate. Like, you know. Yeah, totally. Right. And then, but what he does is he then ignores like all of the, historical, you know, materialist economic realities of history and ignores whole cloth all of the stuff that we are really focused on, which is like the actual dynamics between

the those in charge of capital and those that are under their thumb. And he sort of brushes away from all of that and ignores all of that and turns instead to, you know, oh, here we have our guest for the day, you know, Colonel Douglas McGregor, and he's going to talk about how we should be killing all of the drug dealers domestically. And that's the solution to this problem, this drug war. Yeah, and when he comes up short for a justification for the administration's path to war with Venezuela, when he kind of goes through the listed justifications and dismisses all of them, what he is left with that he says maybe that's the real reason is what he calls

Globo-Homo, in other words, going after Maduro because Maduro is anti-woke and doesn't allow gay marriage, and that Machado, forget the fact that she would privatize every single industry in the country, dismantle the entirety of the social welfare state that's been built over the last 25-odd years in Venezuela under Chavismo. Forget all of that, right? Forget the fact that there is a massive, popular base for the social and economic policies of the government and government. Venezuela, which Machado and the tiny fraction of elites that she represents, right, you know,

be not confused by her Nobel Prize victory, she's not a popular political figure in her own country. She represents clearly the Yankee imperialism that has plagued and beleaguered the people of Venezuela for generations and is known as such. But Tucker thinks that, you know, she's some kind of a woke vehicle to term Venezuela woke and, you know, not even make a dent in the larger geopolitical picture, which he, of of course, eschews in his misleading propaganda. In Venezuela, gay marriage is banned.

Abortion is banned. Sex changes for transgenderism are banned. It's one of the very few countries in the entire hemisphere with those policies. It is on social policy, not defending the regime, just saying, one of the most conservative countries in North or South or Central America. Only El Salvador really comes close. And by the way, the U.S.-backed opposition leader, who would take Maduro, his place, if he were taken out, is, of course, pretty eager to get gay marriage in Venezuela.

So, to those of you who thought this whole project was Globo Homo? Not crazy, actually. Yeah, and I just want to point out to all our listeners that Tucker Carlson is, you know, a shill for the same home security system and a part of the same home security surveillance state network that the Pod Save America guys are. I'm not sure that the Pod Save America listeners or the Tucker Carlson listeners realize that they're both being sold the same thing from, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's almost like the perfect crime where this company Simply Safe has gone out and got an ad space from both Tucker Carlson and Pod Save America. and I don't know, man, it's like the perfect crime because never will the Pod Save America listeners realize that, you know, the simply safe home security system that they bought after the Pod Johns recommended them.

Never would they ever realize that actually that is the same home security system that Tucker Carlson recommends. it's a perfect metaphor for the whole the whole picture of propaganda on both the quote unquote left and the quote unquote right that they're all just fucking pulling the wool over your eyes and by no means do you have to hand it to Tucker for being objectively factually correct in making the critique of the mendacity of the administration in pounding the drums of war because it's an obvious critique, right? The work isn't in identifying the hypocrisy and identifying the problem. Like that shit is so obvious at this point.

Yeah. The work is really getting to the root of it, which, you know, I'll say it before, say it Again, no one is really doing. Yeah, getting to the root of it and prescribing the correct response to it. Because what he says is, you know, if they get away with this war, they're going to create another migrant crisis and we're going to have even more brown people crossing our southern border. That's like the big evil that he's afraid of, not the loss of thousands. of innocent lives in Venezuela, not the destruction of one of the few bastions of anti-imperialist self-determination, but the negative consequences that it will have for the United States,

just like, I mean, go to London. Look what happened with the war in Afghanistan, the war in Syria, created a migrant crisis, and those countries don't exist anymore. You go to Paris, go to Amsterdam. It's not the same country. It's a Muslim country now. And that's exactly what's going to happen here if the neocons get their way and invade Venezuela. So fuck you, Tucker.

Eat shit. You're welcome to come on the pod any time to debate your positions, by the way. You fucking hack, fucking lying sack a shit. but it is it's it's way too much and you know you have to resist these shit coats because they will lead the masses of people astray and in fact almost everybody with a voice in public on this stuff is deliberately engaged in leading the people astray including i might say the uncritical knee-jerk supporters, and this might piss some of you off, of Maduro. Because for all that we are saying, unequivocally and with no qualms at all, that the U.S. had best,

take its hands off Venezuela, call off the invasion, and stop the imperialist aggression against the people of Venezuela, we are not saying at the same time that everything Maduro does and has done is wonderful, is democratic, is socialistic, and on the road to communism. To be sure, a lot of the programs that have been in place since the days of Chavez,

especially the development of communal production and communal agrarian production and even communal industrial production, that's all great and should be preserved and further advanced. But, I mean, we're not here to pretend like there weren't irregularities with the 2024 elections, right? Even Petro, even Lula and Scheinbaum have all recognized as much. We're not trying to lie to tank our enemies. We're also not trying to lie to prop up people whom we might have more sympathy for. So just putting that out there that, you know, in order for a more democratic system to develop an

emerge in Venezuela, that empowers the likes of the Communist Party of Venezuela that has been increasingly vocal against the Maduro government. The way to facilitate that development is by turning off immediately and irreversibly all of the U.S. sanctions. And, you know, in a perfect world beginning some process of truth and reconciliation and reparations because it really is criminal what the United States has done to the people of Venezuela in the name of human rights in the name of democracy. All of this bullshit has led to many deaths, has led to increased tensions, has led to the hunger and starvation that has gripped many of the poorest people in that country, of which the government is not clean hands, the government of Maduro, but is much less

culpable in the grand scheme of things than the imperialists who would tank the entire standard of living of the millions of Venezuelans simply to bring the country to heal and to expand its network of neo-fascist Plan Condor 2.0 allies in the hemisphere. And so we'll maybe end on that point because it really is something that I think, I think, you know, geopolitically, we need to look at through the lens of the bigger picture

of what the U.S.'s goals are not only with respect to Venezuela, but with respect to the other left. I've heard whispers about the financial support your government receives from the drug industry. Well, the irony of this, of course, is that this money, which is in the billions, is coming from your country. You see, you are the major purchaser of our national product, which is, of course, cocaine, cocaine. On one hand, you're saying the United States government is spending millions of dollars to eliminate the flow of drugs onto our streets. At the same time, we are doing business with the very same government that is flooding our streets with cocaine. Let me show you a few of the other characters that are involved in this tragic comedy. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States.

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are.

In 1945, we began to acquire information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more important. Easy victims of a big lie and a small one. For example, we're in CIA. He knows so long as a die, freedom can never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure.

Pro-harber. A lot of killers. A lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is I'm pretty much of theology. I'm bigger and I'm done. Welcome back to our show. We're so glad to have you here with us today.

We really hope and I really do think we're going to enjoy what we are going to lay out in the next hour and half or so. Before we get into everything, I want to cover the usual preliminaries. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who listen and support our program. We are so grateful to our loyal community of listening. We are so grateful to everyone on Patreon and our Patreon fam for all the support that we get. If you do like our show, maybe you've just recently started to listen, maybe you've been listening for a while. If you do like our show, I implore you, please spread the word. Like the pod, subscribe to the pod, comment about the pod, tell your friends, your

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continue to enjoy the pod, continue to be a part of the community, be a part of this movement. We are living in the Fourth Reich. It is a sad, true fact of the day. And here at Fourth Reich Archaeology, we are trying to figure out how the hell this happened and how the hell we can get out. That's right. That's right. And it is becoming more and more palatable to your average observer of world events that indeed this regime under which we are all sadly struggling is something of a Fourth Reich. It finds its roots deeply planted in the soil of the Nazi regime that committed the Great Holocaust of the 20th century, the Nazi Holocaust of not only the Jews, but also of Slavs, of homosexuals, communists, and Roma or Sinti people.

And the Fourth Reich is well on its way to wrapping on. a genocide of its own, of the Palestinian people, we send them our love, we send them our solidarity, and our support and hope that the survivors will find justice in the future. But step one towards finding justice is, of course, pointing the finger, hammering the gavel and declaring culpable the powers that be for their crimes against humanity and it is so important so important that we keep our sights on the criminality of our rulers because there's not any room to make excuses that, oh, this is how it's always been. Throw up the hands. There's nothing we can do about it. That is a depressing brand of defeatism that while attractive and while logical to

adopt, given the odds are stacked against us here on the side of humanity, it is something that we cannot give into, we must keep on doing whatever we can to tell the truth, to spread the truth, and to advocate for those very values that the American experiment purports to advance things like democracy, equality, justice for all. And that is the subject once again of this episode. It's another entry in our Fourth Reich Geopolitic series as we take another break from our ongoing series within a series she Harvey Oswald into the dual assassination attempts on our sort of forthright every man president gerald r ford and it is fitting that today there's indeed a little hook to old jerry ford and that is

that his namesake has been stamped onto the side of the world's largest aircraft carrier Thank you.