Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : Venezuela at a Crossroads

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Max Blumenthal : Venezuela at a CrossroadsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for

freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Wednesday, January 28, 26, Max Blumenthal, joined us now. Max, I know you're traveling. Thank you very much for taking time to join us. I want to explore your ability to explain to us what's happening in Venezuela. But before we get there and before we get to Trump's so-called Board of Peace, your take on the murder of Alex Preti by ICE agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. I don't think a lot of people will be surprised that aged by it or that called it months ago when I said again and again

on our gray zone that the purpose of ICE in this administration exploit and the immigration crisis and or impose a repress of terror on the American population and push the boundaries of the in order to expand executive power under this administration, and that includes using lethal force against protesters and then activating the Trump propaganda machine to brand those protesters as domestic terrorists, according to a Department of Homeland Security bulletin anyone who expresses opinions that are opposed to harsh immigration enforcement or are anti-capitalist, in the words of that bulletin contained characteristics of domestic terrorism. And so protest activity itself puts

Americans' lives in danger according to the parameters of this administration. And that's where they're moving American society and American law. But there's another point here, which I think is pertinent for people who might not necessarily agree with me on immigration, for example, who come from the libertarian camp or even the conservative side or even from MAGA, which is that this administration has wreaked so much havoc in American streets enforcing gun laws. It started in D.C. with the federal occupation of D.C., federal troops, which were basically there as cover for ICE, were rampaging through D.C.'s inner city enforcing gun laws. Then we saw them disarmament. Alex Pretty, who was a licensed gun owner, and then execute him after he was disarmed,

which is sort of the nightmare of every Second Amendment believing American who opposed what the feds did at Ruby Ridge in Waco. And what about the prosecution of Nicholas Maduro, who was being prosecuted, aside from the phony narco terror charges after the Venezuelan president was kidnapped, he's being prosecuted on the basis of a 1934 outmoded, antiquated U.S. gun law because he supposedly possessed automatic weapons because he had a military. So the Trump administration is actually also eroding the Second Amendment of the Constitution as well as the First Amendment, which grants us the right of freedom of assembly. Here's Trump talking about the gun, and he like Cash Patel,

and Christy Noem and the others have no understanding of the Second Amendment. It's going to damage them politically, as you pointed out. But here he is. He's also claiming, and we run this clip, number 15, Chris, he's also claiming he didn't hear what Christy Noem said when she said that Alex Prattie was out there to commit mass slaughter. And when Stephen Miller, who whispers into his ear all day, said Alex Prattie was an assassin. We'll watch all this, number 15.

You agree with the assessment from some of your own officials that Alex Pretti is a domestic terrorist or an assassin? Well, I haven't heard that, but certainly shouldn't have been carrying a gun. But all of, hey, look, bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident, okay? Everyone, unless you're a stupid person, very, very unfortunate incident. I don't like that he had a gun.

I don't like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That's a lot of bad stuff. And despite that, I say that's a... Very unfortunate. Every your view is on the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court has made it clear. It's in the same category as the First Amendment. An unloaded gun is, of course, absurd and of no value whatsoever. His gun was in a holster in the small of his back.

He never touched it. Ice pushed a lady to the ground because she blew a whistle at them and photographed them. Both constitutionally protected behavior. Alex Pretty went to help the woman. that's when they pushed him to the ground, removed his gun from his holster, sprayed pepper spray in his eye. The last thing he saw before he gave up the ghost was pepper spray coming at his eyes and then shot him nine times in the back.

That is defensible? Well, before that, they called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Right, right. And then they called her spouse a domestic terrorist. I mean, we're all terrorists now, I suppose. was Renee Good was not armed. They claimed that she was armed with a vehicle, but the vehicle was driving away.

The officer fired a shot from the side window while she was driving away, shot her in the face, and then called her, I don't know if I can use bad language on this show or what, but he cursed her as strongly as he could have. And then there was video of the officers celebrating afterwards. You see Donald Trump failing to hold his own, own secretaries, his cabinet secretaries accountable because they are following the directives that were handed down by Donald Trump's top aide, Stephen Miller, who designed this entire

program, who seeks to ignite a soft civil war in order to polarize the American electorate. And he had hoped that the Democrats would overreact or that there would be violence against ICE officers, potentially lethal violence, which would have allowed them to escalate the repression, but the opposite has happened. And now they fired Greg Bovino, who was in charge of the Minneapolis occupation, not just because he failed to demonstrate his ability to pull the pin off a tear gas canister that he was demonstratively throwing at a crowd, not only because he threw like a girl when he threw it at the crowd, but because he's simply the fall guy for Stephen Miller and the brains of the Trump administration, the architects of this series of occupations, which was designed

to ignite soft civil war in America. And one last point, does anyone remember Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted of shooting three people? He was holding a gun at a protest. He was holding an automatic weapon, which he loaded at a protest, and he was acquitted, and he was defended by the entire right wing and brought to TPUSA conferences. And he had that gun at a protest because Wisconsin is an open carry state and you're allowed to do that. Chris, play the clip of Trump saying you have the right to carry a gun. The question is on crime prevention. Would you be open to expanding the national concealed carry to apply to D.C. like it does in other states like Texas. Yeah. Well, they have it in some states and they feel strong.

about it. You know, as you know, I'm in favor of it. People have to protect themselves. I'm a Second Amendment person, very simply. People have to be able to protect themselves. Especially, like in Washington, you walk down the street, a guy comes up and slugs you, he's got a, he's got a pistol in his hand. You can be tough, you're going to be in great shape, you can be a powerful person, or you can be a guy that weighs 100 pounds with a gun in your hand. And I'll bet on the guy with a gun 100% of the time, right? And so you need to be a guy. And so you need to protection so I'm a Second Amendment person all the way. Yeah, please. I don't like the fact that he was carrying a gun that was fully loaded and he had two magazines with him and it's pretty

you'll say whatever suits him at the moment. Last question on this before we get to international affairs. Can you draw a line between the military murders and the Caribbean and the ICE murders in Minneapolis? Well, we should also point out Cash Patel said you're not supposed to have a gun at a protest. Yeah, well, Cashmattel doesn't understand the law, federal or state. I mean, we can call this an imperial boomerang, what's taking place here. The lawlessness of the Trump administration and the lawlessness of the U.S. Empire in general has never taken into consideration international law, and we saw that most nakedly with the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro in order to grab Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, the U.S.

military, killed numerous civilians, blew up communications towers, attacked military bases, killed 32 Cuban officers who were protecting Maduro. It was a very bloody raid. And they did it because Trump simply invoked the Don Roe doctrine, which means the strongest power in the hemisphere gets to dominate all of the other powers and plunder their resources. And he's applying the same rules in the streets of America, which is that if you are in the way of federal power, you can and will be shot, and then you will be put on trial before the media and branded a lesbian or a bad mother or a woke person who deserved what you got, or you will actually be prosecuted. The Trump administration actually attempted to prosecute, I believe it was Renee Good, but couldn't because

she was dead. The Trump administration is even trying to invade embassy. for immigration raids like the Ecuadorian embassy in violation of the Vienna Accords, which govern foreign consulates. So it's complete lawlessness across the hemisphere, and it's blowing back into American cities. And people, if they are being betrayed by their local leadership, are going out and actually putting their lives on the line. And they should recognize that that is what revolutionary governments

in the Western Hemisphere have done historically from Cuba to Nicaragua to El Salvador to Venezuela is to actually mobilize against this empire which has never respected their sovereign rights under international law. By what authority is Marco Rubio attempting to become the Governor General of Venezuela? By the authority of the Don Road Doctrine, there's literally no, there's literally no international legal protocol or pretext for this arrangement in which profits that are being extracted from Venezuela's oil industry are being placed in a private account belonging to the Trump administration in Qatar, which will be a slush fund for Trump. the most nakedly, shamelessly corrupt administration in U.S. history, which is acting in the grand tradition of corruption in U.S. administrations. When you say in the hands of the Trump administration, do you mean the Trump organization,

the umbrella company that owns all of his many, many corporations, or the federal government? I don't believe the Treasury Department is taking charge of this account in Qatar. and that is unique. Why is it in Qatar instead of in the United States? And even if it were taken to the United States, it's pure plunder. This is the property of the Venezuelan government, which negotiated this deal at the point of a gun, at the point of a possibly experimental directed energy weapon,

in which the remaining leaders of Venezuela were given calls and told, you have 15 minutes to decide if we kill you or you negotiate this deal with us in which we get your oil and we split the profits with you. They've also enacted a hydrocarbons law in Venezuela's National Assembly, which rolls back the 2007 reforms of the oil industry by Hugo Chavez. Again, they're not just negotiating among themselves like a normal parliament. They're negotiating with the U.S. pointing a gun at the United. their head threatening to come back in and invade. But you have this this multi-billion-dollar arrangement

with an account in Qatar, a country which has substantial influence over Donald Trump, which has paid him hundreds of billions of dollars, gifted him an Air Force One jet. And the American public enjoys no transparency over what happens with that money. Is it going to be reinvested into the U.S., I don't think so. It looks like a personal slush fund for Trump Incorporated. Who has control over the billions collected on the Trump Peace Board? Where's all that cash going? Great question.

I mean, look at the logo of the Board of Peace. It's modeled after the UN Security Council logo, except it. It's embossed in gold. In true... Yeah, I wonder why. Yeah, it's cheesy, Trumpian aesthetics. And the Board of Peace essentially aims to replace the UN Security Council and the more democratic multilateral model of the UN with a one-world Trumpian government

in which countries and individuals who can pay $1 billion get to sit on the Board of Peace This includes not only Javier Mele of Argentina, a Zionist fanatic and member of the Habad cult, to which Jared Kushner also belongs. Jared Kushner is sort of the middleman or the director of the middleman for the Board of Peace, who's not actually in any government role. But you also have Tony Blair,

who also doesn't serve any government, but has been a lobbyist and a rainmaker for the United Arab Emirates, which is the other country involved with Israel and the Epstein Accords, also known as the Abraham Accords, and has worked as a lobbyist for J.P. Morgan. And now he's working for Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison being the billionaire friend of Netanyahu, CEO of Oracle, which runs many data centers, which are powering the AI economy that Trump has invested so much in. Larry Ellison is, as I said, an ideological Zionist who is going to benefit and profit from the so-called master plan put forward by Jared Kushner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where if you look at

the map of the master plan, there are entire sectors of Gaza, which is transformed into a biometrically enforced concentration camp where data centers will be built. And that's a model going forward for any conflict zone in which the Board of Peace manages the conflict resolution, and Larry Ellison is paid into it through his man, Tony Blair. Tony Blair, I should mention, how does he control Tony Blair? The Tony Blair Institute is an influence peddling racket, and Larry Ellison is the largest donor. So that's how I'm just giving you an example of one figure on the Board of Peace to help everyone understand how the Board of Peace works, and it will essentially replace the UN with this oligarchic hypercapitalist pay-for-play model

in which the most powerful get a say and everyone else is a target. So if I were to ask you how Tony Blair got on the board where his billion-dollar contribution came from, the answer is Larry Ellison. Exactly. And doesn't Larry Ellison also own TikTok? Larry Ellison put up the money for TikTok, which is now seeing a record exodus of users who cannot stand the Israeli censorship model. I mean, you have TikTok's new, I think.

We have this. Yeah, watch this. Go ahead, Chris. We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech. So if somebody were to use Zionist, of course, course you can use it in the sense of you're a proud Zionist, but if you're using it in the context of degrading somebody, calling somebody a Zionist as a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against. Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts

that we were banning for hateful activity. We also have, I think, over two dozen Jewish organizations that are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends. There is no finish line. There's no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe. There's no such thing as an end game.

So Jewish Zionists have taken control of TikTok to neutralize the platform as a central hub of Palestine solidarity and anti-war influence by young people who are independently creating this content on their own. And that was something that were senators and Biden administration officials had explicitly complained about. They'd explicitly called for neutralizing TikTok. It's been done. Larry Ellison put up the funds along with Mark Andreessen, this pro-Trump. pro-Israel AI warlord and Ben Horowitz, his partner, his venture capital partner, who's the son of David Horowitz, the anti-Palestinian late agitator. It's a naked power grab by Israel, and now

they're saying that you cannot critique Zionism, which is like banning Americans from discussing fascism in the context of the genocide that Jews and others suffered during World War II. It's, you're not allowed to discuss the ideology. And that's because they're planning on more war crimes and more atrocities, and they have to turn down the temperature because too many Americans and too many young people across the West got wise to what was going on after they saw Israel's response to October 7th. And as a result, there's been an exodus from, interesting word,

from TikTok. Yeah, a lot of people are going to this new, social media site called Upsrolled, which has been founded by a Palestinian CEO who says that he lost over 60 members of his own family in the Gaza genocide. We started an account at the gray zone, but right now it's kind of buggy. We're having some trouble with the video uploads. I hope you start an account there too. But leaving TikTok is a matter of principle. And we should also mentioned that Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, took a special trip down to Miami last week to meet with Miriam Adelson and appeared at the Israeli American Council Conference,

which is the Adelson's version of APAC, to announce that the administration is taking new measures to censor speech critical of Israel. This is completely unprecedented for an attorney general to meet with an Israeli billionaire cutout and then announce a legal crackdown on American citizens for exercising their First Amendment right to criticize and condemn a criminal foreign government. But it's all out in the open right now, and this is the agenda of the Trump-Netanyahu axis.

Wow. I'm not sure where any of this is, is going to go. Oh, by the way, how many Palestinians are on the Board of Peace? No Palestinians are involved in the master plan. It's Jared Kushner, a Habad member, a Jewish Zionist billionaire whose father helped keep Donald Trump's real estate empire afloat, whose father Charles Kushner got a pardon from Donald Trump after he committed more fraud than every Somali-American combined, and then was granted the ambassadorship in France.

It is the most corrupt, nakedly genocidal arrangement, I could imagine, in which Jared Kushner is the CEO of an investment firm, which has an, and he's announced his intention to build real estate on the coast of Gaza. Well, by what legal or moral authority, can Jared Kushner control Gaza? Well, there was the UN Security Council vote in which the U.S. put forward a resolution to create the Board of Peace, and Russia and China did not veto this resolution, and now Vladimir Putin sits on the Board of Peace.

So he's enabling Donald Trump and enabling this corrupt arrangement, I assume, because he wants to find a way of resolving the Ukraine proxy war. But that's what allowed this to take place. And now the only thing standing between the Trump Netanyahu axis using Gaza as a dystopian, biometrically controlled laboratory for disaster capitalism and ethnic cleansing, and then exporting that model to every other conflict zone of the world and maybe into our own cities, the only anything standing between that and us is the Palestinian resistance that they seek to disarm. And to the extent that they cannot disarm the Palestinian resistance and the resistance remains in Gaza,

the master plan fails. Thank you, Max. Thank you for your analysis, as always. Thank you for taking time from your travels. My best to you and your family. I hope we can see you again next week, my dear friend. Thanks a lot, Judge. Thank you.

Safe travel. Stay away from the snow. Trying. Great. Coming up at 1 o'clock this afternoon, Professor Glenn Deeson at 3 o'clock this afternoon, the great Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.