QAA Podcast - Black Bag Inc. feat. Abby Martin (E354)

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Julian, Travis, and Jake ring in the new year by chatting about the deluge of disinformation and AI slop created in the wake of the brazen U.S. abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. We interview The Empire Files journalist Abby Martin about her on-the-ground reporting in Venezuela. Plus, Julian reveals the darkest secret of his family line. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Abby Martin https://x.com/AbbyMartin The Empire Files https://www.youtube.com/@empirefiles Earth’s Greatest Enemy: A Film by Abby Martin https://earthsgreatestenemy.com/ All episodes of Annie Kelly’s new 6-part podcast miniseries “Truly Tradly Deeply” are available to Cursed Media subscribers. Sign up now for the most in depth analysis of tradwives you can hear anywhere. www.cursedmedia.net/ Cursed Media subscribers also get access to every episode of every QAA miniseries we produced, including Manclan by Julian Feeld and Annie Kelly, Trickle Down by Travis View, The Spectral Voyager by Jake Rockatansky and Brad Abrahams, and Perverts by Julian Feeld and Liv Agar. Plus, Cursed Media subscribers will get access to at least three new exclusive podcast miniseries every year. www.cursedmedia.net/ Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

PEOPLEAMI-U-O-KIN-E-O-O-O-W-O-O-Oh-O-O-O-O-H-K-BENI. If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast episode 354, Black Bag Inc., featuring Abby Martin. As always, we're your host, Jake Rockatansky, Julianne, Asta La Victoria, Sieve, and Travis View. Well, folks, happy new year. Happy New Year. And nothing fucked up has happened within the first couple days.

No, we're just having fun. Remember the start of last year? It started with that other special The Force operator blowing himself up in Las Vegas in a cyber truck. And then my city caught on fire. If I can quote, I feel like Batman or Halo.

Yes, if I was like, oh, this is absolute insanity. What a crazy way to start a year. But no, boy, it's gotten crazier. I feel like even us who are like in the business of like things getting more and more fucking insane, especially in the news environment,

we still are shocked in ways that almost puts us in that category where it's like, no way, Donnie's going to wriggle his way out of that one. Like, we're failing. We're failing. If the last year has taught me anything, it's like how tame my expectations were for this second Trump admin. I sort of figured that it would kind of end up like the first one that he'd be sort of hampered by investigations. And it would just kind of be sort of the performative as they sort of try to, you know, make him look more, more alive. As the years ticked by.

But like, no, no, I feel I was so wrong in my, in my expectations and that I really, you know, as Abby says later in the interview, like, you know, a couple years ago if you had said, oh, Trump's going to get a third term. I'd been like, ah, that's just like, you know. Yeah, I think there is something to look at their, yeah, Jake, yeah, thanks for bringing it up. Our guest is Abby Martin. We are obviously going to be covering the most insane news item that has dropped into our laps like in the last few days. We're back. It feels good to be back. I think that all of us are glad to be back podcasting and are grateful for our audience. We love you guys. So much. Yeah. And yeah, like all I have to say is like I have some New Year's resolutions. Like they are to fuck a lot more. You know, just just be like, just be very, very sexual this year. Eat like new McDonald's burgers. Discover, discover the menu. I guess I would say. Like if I was being Joey's world tour about it. Learn the UI a little bit more. And then, uh... Um, Travis, do you have any New Year's resolutions?

Uh, you know, it's a cliched one, but like, I am, I am trying to get, like, be a little bit more disciplined about my exercise routine. You know, I go hiking. Like, I need to, like, like, push myself a little bit more. I've been getting into, like, Filipino martial arts, you know, it's with the, uh, the, with, like, yeah, the rattan sticks and stuff. And that's, that's good, stretches my arms real well. So, yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, it's a cliche for a reason. But boy, yeah, I'm getting up in the year, so I need to move a lot more to keep things from falling apart. Travis, I think you're going to be a really meaningful and powerful part of the movement.

Thank you for that. Like, we need your body to be strong and we need you to be kinetically violent in a Filipino style. Okay, great. I think one of my resolutions for this year is to stop trying to, like, read people's facial expressions. What? What? You're trying to become more autistic? I just, I am so, I think maybe it's because I went to, like, acting school or so, or did, like, theater. Theater is a kid that I'm always kind of, like, trying to figure out what's in people's heads.

That's it. It's getting in people's fucking heads. And then you're talking to yourself. It's like, what are they thinking? And, like, what are they, you know, what do they think of me? What are they, what are they going to think of me? You know, that kind of stuff. But it also boils down to looking at somebody and going, oof, they hate me actually. That's a look of hate, you know, I think I'm wanting to leave that behind a little bit more in 2026. Yeah, I think as you kind of like learn to talk to yourself well, you realize that maybe part of the way you talk to yourself like shit is getting in someone else's head and then using their voice to somehow justify it. Using their voice to also talk to you like shit. Your own voice isn't enough.

You need two, three, four voices in addition to your parents that are talking shit to you. At all times. That's right. 2026, baby, we're back. No, it's going to be, no, it's, it's, it's going to be, I don't know. I don't think we can use adjectives that describe something as good in this moment. But I will say that, like, yeah, I have, I have hope and I appreciate you guys. I appreciate our audience and I appreciate our guest, Abby Martin.

And I think that this is going to be a good first episode to launch the year. And sorry it took us a little bit of time to, you know, get back. But, okay, is it okay if we take. 10 or 15 days off, like to love our families? We're so tired. I'm so tired. I can barely announce the military operation. I didn't really do anything about as gets.

Okay, well, I use a voice like, you know, in the way that we're describing before we launch into our little opening, you know, segment that will then lead to the Abby Martin interview. I will say that if I were to do the Trump voice I'd be like Oh wow That doesn't sound right I really hope One of my

Fucking hell I really hope one of my arteries clogs up I really I would love to Have Julian me with a high power All right

Come on It's like this is embarrassing In light of Jake's Well honed Well practiced impression This is weak sauce I know guys I'm sorry Yeah, I didn't terrorize you guys in the tour van for nothing.

I think I'm getting worse. Let's lay out just sort of the bare facts of the situation. So on the night of January 2nd, early into January 3rd, U.S. time, the U.S. launched what they called Operation Absolute Resolve, combining strikes around Caracas with a special operation to seize President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from a fortified location. Writers in The Washington Post both describe months of preparation leading up to the raid, including rehearsals on a replica of the compound and intelligent support,

including CIA assets tracking Maduro's movements. Travis, I heard this conspiratorial claim that the Washington Post was one of two of our major newspapers that knew about this before and hid the information until it was after the operation. Anything on that? That's very unfortunate. What was the other one? New York Times? Oh. New York Times.

Interesting. Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So the... Yes, Jake, they knew. The claim is 24 hours. Yep. They were like, guys, get your MacBooks ready. Oh, no, I just think it was the, it was like the, you know how like they used to have like a Washington like press, what do they call it? Like the people who are there to ask the press pool. Sure. Yeah, so this was just a CIA press pool, and obviously the New York Times and Washington Post representatives, like deep inside Langley, they were just like, no problem, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, commander, yes, sir. That must have felt so cool, like going home that night and like whispering with your loved ones and being like, wow. You know what's going to happen? You know what's going to happen? We're going to do an irreversible thing that is essentially the equivalent of every American imperial lie being printed on our dick, balls, and asshole.

as our whole pants fall off at the middle of Times Square. Awesome. I love it, folks. Reuters says that the operation involved more than 150 aircraft launch from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere. As of this recording, the official death count is 56 people, at least 56 people. That's like, that's... That's... That's...

Yeah, that's a lot of people. You know, to my colleagues in the struggle, we have lost 56 people. As of this recording, Nicholas Maduro and his wife are in U.S. federal custody in New York, both pleaded not guilty at their initial appearance arraignment in Manhattan Federal Court on January 5th, and they are being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, MDC, in Brooklyn, while the case proceeds. Now, all of that's very insane, but what really helped escalate the insanity is Trump's remarks after it, which he just, he just, he's really, really has a real interventionist

hard on right now. It's like he's been talking about, like, what he calls the Don Row Doctrine. He said American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again, while floating or refloating pressure campaigns against multiple countries. He has argued that the U.S. needs Greenland for national security, citing Russian-Chinese activity, and the White House has said that all options for acquiring it are under review, including the military. He has attacked Colombia's president Gustavo Petro as sick and mused that a U.S. operation there sounds good. He has warned Mexico to get their act together about drugs and cartels and said that he has offered. to send U.S. troops. Read the Oswaldo Zavala book. Drug cartels do not exist and enjoy, folks.

He has claimed that Cuba looks like it's ready to fall, tying that to Venezuela's oil lifeline. Oh, wow. I wonder what happened to Venezuela's oil lifeline. He has continued his earlier line about reclaiming or taking back the Panama Canal, often framed around Chinese influence. And beyond the Western Hemisphere, he has warned Iran that if authorities violently kill peaceful protesters, the U.S. would come to.

the rescue saying that the U.S. is locked and loaded, all alongside periodic nods to pass expansion talks, such as making Canada the 51st state. So this, this obviously, Locked and loaded. He's boiled his old blood. He's very excited about it. It's very disturbing and sick, but Jesus Christ. I mean, obviously, yeah, we don't need to call Donald Trump stupid. We all fucking know, but this sentence really rules. American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. Like, listen, we all knew, a lot of people knew what, what has happened, or I guess the history. But if you don't want it to be ever questioned again, you just literally opened, I think probably everybody in the entirety of Central and South America are currently

questioning exactly that. Yeah. He's like, we're going to build a big G.I. Joe base in the ice. That's what we want. We're going to build a lot of snowcastle, secret bases. I was wondering what he could possibly want with Greenland, but if it's to build like a big surveillance, like country. No, no, no, it isn't. It isn't. They already have that. It's Pine Gap.

It's, it's in Australia. It's part of the Five Eyes Coalition. No, no, no, it's oil, dude. It's oil. And which is insane because even if you're like the most cynical, dark fucking sold, like extractor imperialist cunt, they started fracking again. We're doing like offshore fucking drilling.

Like drill baby drill. That was the whole thing. And now he's like, We also need Greenland. We also need Venezuela. We need everybody. We need everything. And it's like, what are you using the oil for at this point?

Like, do you feed on it? Are you Baron Harkonen? Do you need your fucking bath changed? Dude, he's trying to become like the leader of gas town from like the Mad Max universe. Well, no, but that involved an actual lack of gas. This is, it's like watching someone who's lost control of their hunger. They're just ravenous, and they also just fed to total completion. It's just like it's psychotic fucking, there's never going to be ever enough.

It's the ultimate individualistic final state. It's capitalism at its final state. It's consumerism at its final state. The Buddhists call it the realm of hungry ghosts. Desire will never end, my friend. So, yeah, I'm going to do some yoga with Trump, and I think we can fix all of this. Within minutes of President Donald Trump announcing Maduro's capture in the early hour, or January 3rd, a flood of disinformation hit social media, video clips and images, many of them

AI generated or a purpose from unrelated events started circulating. Now, I want to be clear. I live through, you know, the Iraq war in those events. I know you don't really need AI tools or social media in order to like, you know, spread propaganda about a military action like this or to manufacture consent. But I think this is interesting because this is definitely the most significant news event since the start of the AI era. And it's just interesting to see what that looks like. John Stewart, voice and half-baked. Have you ever done the Iraq War on Twitter?

So I think one reoccurring sort of thing you saw was like just these era AI generated videos and images depicting false reactions and Maduro's kidnapping and exfiltration. For example, there was a doctor's arrest photo which went viral. appearing to show Maduro being escorted in handcuffs by two DEA agents. In the fake photo, they have their faces blurred, and this is a dramatic scene that never actually occurred. Yeah, because he's kind of smiling. It's honestly, like, what's so funny is that they're creating propaganda for the Empire,

and there's two ways to see this, right? It's like, propaganda for the Empire would be like, we blackbagged him. Here's the perfect blackbagged photo. AI, please help. The second one is, like, maybe we could get him to smile in it, and then we could, like, claim something like he already knew, like, this man was already working with us or something. Like, there's different aspects to this, I think, that are worth being examined, which is that AI generates an image that is interpretable from, like, various different, like, lenses.

But more than anything, it just takes up the space. It just takes up the space. It just jams everything up. I think, yeah, this is, I think, one of the biggest sort of, like, consequences of AI sort of, like, disinformation is that it's like, it's easier than ever to just flood the zone with shit. is that like it takes zero effort to make a fake so you could just make 20 of them in a like you know like you know like five minutes and so all of a sudden like you know it's it's going to be so much easier to overwhelm the sort of the information space and sort of like smother out any real information uh Travis I'm doing a little bit of like kind of technical research and in trying to get like a numbers figure here. How many Twitter accounts that are posting this shit that are getting hundreds of thousands of like views and retweets?

What percent of those do you think is run from the actual SIOP division of either J-Soc, the DoD, or the Army? Uh, I, I don't, I don't, I don't, Travis, I need an estimate. I don't think you do. Well, I definitely do. I don't think they have plenty of useful idiots who are willing to do this thing without actually being traceable to like, you know, their South Carolina or wherever they have the base there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you know, what fair? Like, obviously huge cop-out, but, uh, since we're like, like, you know, friends and appreciate each other. I think we should keep going with the script. AI tools were also used to churn out these short videos purporting a show Maduro's capture. And some clips shared on TikTok and Twitter

still images of the arrest were animated or sit together to create the illusion of video footage. These fabricated arrest videos amassed hundreds of thousands of views within hours and many trace back to digital creators on Instagram and TikTok who specialize in AI content. So there's like all these people who are like all who are like

a AI specialist. Like they're trying to create disinformation because Like, that's, like, attention for them. That's how they build an audience is making these fakes. Joe Rogan voice. Jamie, could you bring up the AI company's source of funding? Now, perhaps the most emotionally potent fakes were these videos that falsely seem to show ordinary Venezuelans

rejoicing in the streets at Maduro's downfall. One compilation video in particular went viral, claiming the show jubilant crowds in Caracas, crying tears of joy and thanking the United States. In it, an elderly woman seen kneeling and clutching a Venezuelan flag, sobbing as on-screen text proclaims, Venezuelans take to the streets to celebrate Maduro's downfall. Young men and other snippets shout, the dictator finally fell, and another elderly woman exclaims her gratitude to Donald Trump.

So this is all totally bullshit, but even Elon Musk amplified this video by retweeting an account called Wall Street Apes. This is the point where I will say, this is an episode I'm very proud of. I think it's an episode that will probably shock you. And I will just refer to what we talk about later regarding what you just said, Travis. Not all the viral celebration clips were pure deepfakes. Some were just like misrepresented footage. In one case, a video circulated on WhatsApp and Facebook that purported to capture Caracas

residents cheering from their apartment windows at dawn. The camera panned across like high-rise buildings while unseen crowds supposedly shouted. Wait, Travis, Travis, how were they able to afford dawn? I thought that the shelves were, you know, stripped of dawn. How are these Venezuelans trying to pretend to be hungry and they still have dawn? Yeah, only afternoon and sunset and sleep. Yeah, that's all you fucking got. I mean, come on, this is a tight economy.

Like, tighten your fucking belts. So there was a fact check by the Spanish outlet EFE Verifaca that revealed that this video was not shot in Caracas, but actually Santiago, Chile. There's lots of, there are a handful of other examples of this where they show just, I guests like Latino people celebrating. If they said like, well, Latino people. That's, that's, that's what it was, that's what was basically.

Latino people. Yeah. Are Americans, like, sometimes aware that, like, everybody else, like, outnumbers them on earth? Like, are they aware that, like, both China and India are over 2.6 billion? Do they ever think about how central and South America, like, outnumbers them? You just don't, yeah, it's just like, you see, like, America, like, the map is actually, like, America.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, would you like to pay $3.99 for the DLC to, to, find out if there's any other countries. Yeah, I think most people go, no. Nah, man, I'm good, man. What the fuck? I hate DLC.

I heard they made the titty smaller. Oh, all the women, they've got hair under their arms in that, in that expansion. They didn't even shave the underage DLC. Oh, my God. Rape slaves. Jesus Christ, dude.

Come on, man. The joke's not even that. Come on, man. No, no. Steam is literally publishing underage girls. No. Yes. Steam is publishing underage girls and Donald Trump is a pedophile rapist.

No, no, yes, yes. My jokes are not even edgy anymore. No, no, that's true. My whole job has been robbed. No, I'm just, I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Yeah, it's a bit too much for our audience at 2016. And if we're saying, or 2020, fuck.

Oh, you went back. Is it? He gave up the ghost. He went back. It's too much because we're like, happy New Year. No, it's just, I think Americans overall, all, like, we have to live with such cognitive dissonance that any kind of, like, expansion of perspective, I think is inherently not taught to us. Yeah, absolutely. But this is reading

like an article where it's like IDF soldiers are experiencing PTSD. It's like, oh, pardon me if my, you know, sympathy mechanism hasn't been activated. Now, in addition, you know that. Some prominent pro-Trump commentators are reviving false 2020 election conspiracy theories by claiming that recent U.S. action against Venezuela was revenge for an alleged plot to steal the 2020 election

via voting technology companies. Travis, I don't have a joke here. I think that everybody involved needs to be... Okay. So, especially they were targeting Smartmatic. So the founders of Smartmatic were born in Venezuela. However, the company was founded

in Boca Raton, Florida. Yes, they're all fucking guzano's like they're on your side you fucking piece of shit you dumbass but some claim that the company had deep ties to the government of Venezuela which is not true and that the technology was used to rig the election in 2020 I'm sorry if we needed to research

deep ties do you think that it would just take us one night to black bag and helicopter somebody if there was such a fucking intense operation wow these people were so sophisticated let's go back to the Cold War like Russia is doing MK Ultra we got to do it first I see a pattern they're like you gotta unzip

the bag from this side because if you, the zipper can get jammed if he's unzip it from the other side. So yeah, you're going to want to make sure it's facing away from you when you black bag the president. Yes, dude, I was waiting for it. I was like, I don't, I'm

waiting for it where it's going to go. But I do like that, like a really bad, badly translated guide to using an actual black bag. And it's like, and it's like, yeah, it's like, this is the cheapest Amazon black bag. Like, we used to have to pay a bunch of money. Yeah, I was just like building on the fact that it's like months and months and months.

They're like months and months and months just to send the biggest like cyclopaths with like the most kills under their belt like, you know, into a compound like slaughter 40 people. And yeah, I know that like this is there's no point talking to these people as if they're in good faith, right? Like we're not talking about people who are accidentally pushing a lot of this stuff. A lot of it is very intentional whether it's for their own growth, which is the best by the way, the best way to create a truly fucked up state. is to have a bunch of people who are thinking, I'm going to make a bit more money if I can get this to go viral, and I'm also reading where the state is. And if the state is controlling the algorithm a little bit,

even a little bit, which would be crazy because, you know, the guy running Doge is the owner of Twitter. That would be crazy. So obviously, I'm not trying to be conspiratorial. But they are doing it without any knowledge of like the kind of central operation, right? So like the whole like, yeah, that's on a need to know basis. Like you used to actually have to say that to people. But now they're just like, well, I'm going to make like,

I don't know, fucking 600. more bucks this month on Twitter, if I post the thing that it used to, you know, in like 1955, like the U.S. had to pay tons of money and, like, actually get an artist to do. Yeah. For example, uh, the MAGA commentator Benny Johnson claimed that, quote, Nicholas Maduro might be Trump's final revenge for the election theft of 2020. Fuck yourself, Benny Johnson, you fucking fuck you. Oh, boy.

Absolute insanity. Not doesn't make any fucking sense. And then he went on to say this. Ladies and gentlemen, Smartmatic and Dominion voting systems, were the voting systems being used at this time and in these states. And all around the world, they are Venezuelan by design and by systems and storage facilities and through their actual technology. These systems, I have on extremely good authority, can and do rig elections around. the world. Now, how does this lead us to the arrest of Nicholas Maduro? Well, Nicholas Maduro knows where all the bodies are buried. Venezuela is effectively just a proxy state that was being

run by Russia and China and Iran. They were running operations here against America using, yes, the election rigging technology. It's obviously absolute madness. But Trump himself got in on the action by amplifying a video promoting the smart magnetic conspiracy theory. Kulon promoter Jordan Saither had to say this about Trump amplifying that video. Trump shares a video about Dominion's smartmatic machines rigging U.S. elections last night, then shares a screenshot from Drogo essentially confirming that it's no coincidence he is posting on such matters right after Maduro is captured. Drugs may be an issue in Maduro's capture, but I think the real reason, and here's the key words, he thinks the real reason, is that Venezuela was being used to launder election rigging technology by the deep state.

Will Maduro be handing over goods to Trump about smartmatic slash dominion voting systems and their election rigging? I am still talking about 2020. I'm literally fucking speechless. Five years ago. They're fucking baking like the speech that includes the final solution. Like they're taking mind comp and being like, well, what can we learn about this? And it's like, you got what you wanted, right? At least admit, either you don't want this or don't bake it.

Fuck you. Yeah. If it looks bad for us somehow, I'm thinking that the. real reason is something that's actually kind of aligns with the thing that I happen to, I happen to talk about in my videos. But it's, I think it's, I think it's

interesting how Trump is like, continues to signal to his most conspiratorial base, like just on truth social, but like, his hasn't said this shit like publicly, like in press pools, but just online, he keeps saying like, uh, yeah, that's what's, that's why I'm doing this. I'm going to blow the lid off of the election rigging of 2020. Oh, man. He's like, good idea.

I should have thought of that. But now it's true. I have a joke, but it's so unhinged that it would require so many beeps, not because I'm just like adding to the same joke, but just because it has so many moments that need to be beeped that I can't even tell it. So you know what? If you're my audience, you reach out to him privately, and he'll tell you the joke. If you're a QA listener, you can crowd source this one.

You can figure it out for yourself. Because it's never even going to exist because I can't say it. I can't say it. Fantastic. So what's more than that, official government accounts on Twitter have started to just straight up post like QAnon slogans. For example, on January 4th, like the day after this operation, the Department of Labor account posted a close-up image of Trump's face and the words, patriots and control over it, which is like just absolutely a Q&N phrase. So it's like, ah, just not, not, I mean, it's not Trump has as posted Q&N on shit over and over and over again. But like recently, like, yeah, now these official government outlets.

government accounts, I've been doing it too, which is disturbing. I think they've done way worse than post-QAnon. I'm sorry, like there's the new government account like tone and just like communications and it makes Q&ON look like, you know how we we've described it, rightfully as a bloodthirsty conspiratorial movement.

This makes that look like a fucking child's play. This is like an actual fucking psychopath. It's like if you opened a movie about a dystopia, this would read is overwritten. I actually don't think anybody wants what is happening, but they're so far in... A lot of people want what is happening, Jake. A lot of people want what is happening, and they've wanted

it for, I would say, at least 100 years, but we can probably go beyond that, man. I wish they didn't, right? Like, of course, like, most people are just focused on their lives, but the fascist project is a very long project, and I just, I'm going to say, you know, I'm going to drop a couple references. Like I think it's important to look at paperclip, enterly NATO leadership, and just like the kind of through line like here. And maybe actually ask yourself as well, like, why are we such good friends with Germany and Japan so quickly? And yet, okay, at this point, Travis has cut me off. I'm talking to you from a side channel. This is not even the QA podcast anymore. Thank you for subscribing to my new PayPal. I've been banned, actually, from the United States and from our Patreon.

barely speak because the cane that's dragging him off of the stage is is clenching his vocal chords yeah speaking of a of a cane driving us off the stage i mean i think we might drag off this intro from the stage and uh give place to our interview what do you boys think of that sounds like a plan awesome ha ha ha enjoy we're joined by abby martin she has a long history history of journalism, oftentimes journalism that is hard to find for some reason. And her latest project, of course, the Empire Files is probably where you can find her for broader podcasting. And then, of course, she's a filmmaker who has recently released and is currently on a tour promoting her movie Earth's Greatest Enemy. Abby, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for

having me. It's a great honor to be here. It's a great honor to have you on. And I feel like despite my inability to take care of logistics and figure out a way to have you as a guest like in the last seven years, I feel like there couldn't be a more appropriate moment to have you step on. Absolutely, dude. Yeah, I feel like I know you without having ever met.

Why? Is that because I've talked about her so much? Is it because we just talked? Yeah, and well, we just did talk and we did see each other on camera for a little bit. No, just because, you know, of like, Julian, or very early on introduced me to your work. you know, I'm also a big fan of Mike, you know, thank you. I know, yeah, yeah.

It's just like, I like the, I like the bundle. Yeah, I'm not going to get too sidetracked, but I did, I met Mike at a Halloween party, and the only reason that we, like, started talking is because he was the only person at the whole party that recognized I was dressed as David Ike. And he was dressed as Spider-Man. Oh, my God, that is so funny. He had an easy one. Yeah, I started talking to him.

I was like, wait, I kind of recognize this guy's voice or whatever. Anyways, that's how I know Mike and who also works on Empire Files and Abby. Mike Prysner, of course, you're familiar with if you're a listener. He did the incredible two-parter on Tulsi Gabbard. And we've also had him on for various other pieces of great reporting. Anyways. And you know what? How great is Tulsi?

And Tulsi, she's going on. She's doing great things. She's doing great. You know, all of that was just so passionate. Everything that she said was so weird. of listening to. And now, okay, let's not get sidetracked on that. We are here to talk about the fact that the United States of America in an unprecedented move, even probably defeating what people consider the dark era of the CIA that led to the Church Commission, have helicoptered into a sovereign country. They used technology to suppress radars and surface-to-air missile defenses. And they black-bagged a president after killing what is estimated right now to be between 40 to 80 people, including some civilians. They kidnapped him and his wife, and this was, of course, the president of Venezuela and his

wife. And they bopped both their heads. Sorry? They bopped both of their heads. No, as far as I know, I don't know about any of that, but I know that his wife does have rib injuries from what was probably a very violent J-Soc operation involving canoeing everybody except for the presidential couple. All I know is that I, like, rolled over in bed at like 10, 15 this morning and opened CNN briefly, and it was like, military officials say Maduro and wife bumped heads trying to flee.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, right. Bumped heads. Don't forget it was self-defense, though. It's like, it's like three stooges. Their heads balked together. Yeah, it was like, it was like, first they were able to escape the initial military assault, but they were both taken out by two swinging paint cans. that a child launched him. It was like a home alone, like, set up.

It was like, one of them was running down this way. The other one ran into him. Can you believe these guys? Maduro has microman injuries on his toes. Oh, my God. Okay. All right. Come on.

All right. It's not funny. It's not a joke. I turned back over and went to sleep. I was like, this is so fucked up. Can't even deal with this. I really can't process it. Like, I'm actually really looking forward to this episode

so you guys can, like, explain to me and make me feel worse or better. or same as I did before the episode, either up to you, but please, what's going on? To give a little bit of context, just for listeners who maybe are familiar with our catalog, but are not familiar with this issue, we've covered similar issues in the secret history of anti-communism, Jakarta Method episode. Obviously, you know, we've covered American interventionism in the past. It's not our main thing, but there are times in history where I think that it's worth, you know, hitting Travis and then bullying him until he lets me do something like this. Well, I mean, it's added to the paranoia for sure.

I think it was like this is, I think I'm really interested in conspiracism, but you can't really understand it outside the context of, you know, government corruption and covert action and, you know, criminal organization. I think that's necessary for the, to understand some of the more wilder beliefs that emerge from the U.S. sort of like media sphere. 100%. So, Abby, you know, you have a very long history. to give some context for listeners who might not know you on why we're talking about this topic with you,

you have a long history of reporting on interventionism around the globe, including specifically interventionism in Central and South America. And, you know, you're a specialist, but not just that. You've done work on the ground there. You have actually done what a lot of our media refuses to do, which is just go and actually check if the adjectives and the way they're framing something makes any sense if you base it on something on the ground, right? It's very easy for us to just say, hey, this foreign nation is insert, whatever, why even pay attention to it, you know?

And I think that we're seeing this a lot in the media reaction to this, where people are having to open their sentences with, well, of course, we all know that. And I just have one thing to say to those people, fuck yourself and get, actually, that's not, that's rude. Get curious is what I'll say. So, Abby, yeah, you have, you know, you have a lot of experience, including on the ground experience in several South American and Central American countries doing reports. interviewing people directly and being present for social movements that are often depicted abroad as, I don't know, some sort of astroturfed or authoritarian brainwashing operation. So I just wanted to open with that. I want you to tell me what does it feel like to have had those experiences, maybe even get into the experiences,

and how does that play into your perception of what's happened and what we're about to discuss? I mean, being there on the ground obviously gives you a much different clarity because before I went on the ground in Venezuela, even though I had this knowledge and ideology and I had already studied in depth about the history of U.S. colonialism and ravaging and pillaging South Central America for centuries, I still in part believed some of the propaganda. And I'll explain why. Obviously, as a media critic and someone who's been studying media propaganda for decades, I take everything with a grain of salt. And of course, you have to approach everything with a very critical mind, especially when you see the unanimity between the liberal sphere and the conservative sphere of the corporate media

parroting the exact same thing. For example, when you look at the media today, you will not see any media outlet that is subsidized by corporations talking or basically dissecting the propaganda put out that this is a dictatorship, their extrajudicial assassinations, the political repression is dire, people are starving, da-da-da-da-da, this, that, and the other. And you're never going to see any differentiation between that core narrative that underpins the regime change. All you're going to see is kind of a distinction between, hey, this might have not been the way we wanted to go about it. Like, maybe there should be some sort of process for this brazen fucking coup. I'm horrified and disgusted looking at the capture, I guess, after watching and being gaslit by the genocide for three years to now just have everyone kind of just swept up in this propaganda narrative and just have a redux of Iraq, Libya, everything. Well, Maduro's this, but what can you say about the Venezuelans dancing and celebrating the streets? It's like, Didn't we learn? Like, this is this anecdotal nonsense?

Which Venezuelans are we talking about? Which ones? Yeah, they say this every time that they're out in the streets dancing. Yeah, of course. No, no, no. It's never too late to do the exact same thing over and over and never look into something. I would say, yeah, I was quite shocked and I've been quite shocked, and we'll get into this in a bit. I grew up partially in Venezuela.

I spent two years living there as a teenager when I was 14 and 15. And I've also returned there many times over. I have family roots there, and that's something that we'll get into in a little bit. So it's true that the way that this has talked about has been shocking. Obviously, there's the aspect of, like, disinformation where you're just going to post, like, a video of some other crowd gathering and being like, look how they're all celebrating the thing we did. Or straight up AI, where it's like, look at this purely constructed by a GPU in some fucking data farm. That Elon Musk was literally sharing, you know?

It's supposed to be, of course, a Venezuelan grandma crying, you know, about how happy she is that this man has been removed from office. And we're not here, to be clear, I'm not here first to equivocate on whether this action was correct or not. This is not an action that has an excuse, no matter what the math is on the money behind it, or even the intentions of American Empire, or even what you think of a specific leader, there's no excuse for doing this. This is the behavior of what Americans have accused people for years of being authoritarian, access of evil, fascist, all this shit. This is people. purely an expression of that. And so I'm not here to kind of like equivocate on on any of that.

No, no. I think, I think that this is where Kim Jong-un, I would have the exact same response. It's like, we can talk all day about the Bolivarian Revolution and Maduro and the legitimacy of, of the presidency. That's not the point at all. The point is that we should not allow this lawless insanity and this aggressive beliefs of blackbagging a foreign head of state. Yes, which is a very Western idea, right? It's like, well, we're actually trying to figure out the finances and the ethical conversational. around doing something that is literally listed in the Geneva Convention as a war crime and a crime against humanity. And we're going to ignore the fact that we're talking about an insanely unilateral power structure where one country has 800 plus military bases all around the world outside their territory. And the other has, at the tallest second place,

20 to 30 is the estimate for Russia. So we need to just kind of keep that, I think, that larger structure of understanding in place so that we understand. why these conversations and why the media is being dishonest by framing it. And it's not always dishonesty because sometimes they're just going, well, I don't like this leader. Fine, great. You have your right to not like a leader or like a leader or not like their policies or like a policy. The point is, if you're spending half your tweet or even part of your tweet saying this, after somebody did a clear Geneva Convention War Crime, you know, in contravention of like basic sovereignty of another country,

you are part of the problem. You are, advertently or inadvertently, you are opening the conversation saying, there's a version of this that's okay. There is no version of this that is okay. So I will open with that. And then I'm sorry, I got a little carried away. So, yeah, Abby, yeah, please resume answering the previous question. No, I think it's really, I think it's a very, very important point. And it is amazing to see how the diaspora of certain countries are exploited and weaponized.

I mean, look at the Cuban diaspora. Look at the lobby here. Oh, my God. the undue influence of the Cubans. What, you don't like gusannos, the beautiful gusannos. You don't like that gusano, baby. No, my favorite is like the, it's like, for me, when I hear gusano or when I hear someone like that talk, it's like, I just hear the beautiful boaters.

Like, it's like a Trump like, it's like, they're all just like on a yacht somewhere and they're like, well, my opinion about this. And it's like, no one fucking gives a shit. You have no material interest in this. And the only thing you ever do is call for a violent military intervention. by the most powerful colonial power in the world. So, yes, yeah, it's frustrated. They're worms.

I mean, it's crazy that that is the perspective that's given the most weight. I mean, it's not crazy. It's very obvious. But it's just so amazing that I see well-intentioned people, people who are liberals, who get very confused about this notion because no one likes tyranny. No one likes dictatorships, right? We all want freedom. And so it's very confusing when you see these terms thrown around.

And without any, it's so obfuscated and obviously purposefully so. want to just explain why I was captured by some of the propaganda, because it wasn't just CNN, MSNBC, it wasn't just the New York Times. It was literally amnesty international. It was Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that were parroting these claims from the opposition that I just took completely at face value. Yeah, there's an NGO structure. Of course, these are ways to launder what they call soft power. This is not something that I'm, you know, just a kind of theorizing about. This is this is a doctor. documented and factual information about the choices that were made by these organizations and their evolution from a more violent, well, actually, maybe we're back there, but a more violent soft power of the 60s and 70s to the softer approach these days where what you do is you go in there as a humanitarian.

And the idea of humanitarianism, I did want to take a little moment to address that. The idea of humanitarianism is inherently flawed. It means that you are outside of the project of well-being for a community. You do not exist within that society. I don't think nation is really like interesting in this case, but I mean a group of people that have common interests and relate to each other and are wanting to live good and safe and happy lives. Humanitarianism is an inherently colonial idea, which means that you can give charity

if you're nice enough, if you're liberal, if you have that kind of goodness in your hard to go to another country and essentially provide, let's say, medical supplies or food or whatever, right? But it kind of ignores the idea that that is an inherently condescending approach to the world. And what it masks, that condescension masks the fact that these countries are often dealing with two prongs of the same interests, right? So you'll have the NGOs coming in that are all funded and run and staffed by people that I've gone to school with, They can, you know, whatever, like Europe, United States, like all of these kind of, quote-unquote, first world nations and the Western world in general and this kind of power structure that we exist in, this Imperial Corps. And at the same time, the government and the military of those same countries is actively destroying and killing aspects of their infrastructure.

They're killing people for having ideas. And they're at the very least using the international structure of money, which, by the way, is a structure that was built. in the wake of World War II and is centered around, of course, the central currency, the dollar. They're using that structure to buy, and this is not my claim. This is the Lancet, which is, I think, all well-meaning liberal white people will agree. The Lancet is a good outlet. But the Lancet estimates that 500,000 people every single year, die due to sanctions and embargoes alone. This is an ongoing genocide.

This is not some new piece of, like, dropping news. This is not, there's nothing sensational here. We are being asked to look at a larger structure and take it all into account and attempt to figure out what does it mean to be human on Earth in 2026 and moving forward. How can we find meaning moving forward and figure out how our tweet? How are we going to word our tweet? Well, I mean, I think that you just laid something out really devastating, which is that's the status quo. It's completely invisible. Yeah, just being killed for no reason because of this economic exfixing.

Yes. But it's not just the NGOs that are fit within the structure of what you're talking about. It's also leaning heavily. And I think this is just a natural extension of that apparatus that you just explained, Julian, is that all of these people who go and work, who are loyalists or working on behalf of USAID or NED, they go to these countries and then they just consult with opposition figures. And they literally take those claims at face value sitting sometimes just in hotels because Caracas is so dangerous. And when the murder rate was the high. They didn't want to walk around and talk to anyone. So they just literally take it at face value and print it. Yeah, it's complete horse shit, by the way. Like, I've walked downtown Caracas and being around there. And I saw the arrival of Chivisbo and I don't want to kind of like get too far ahead of myself. But the way these foreign countries are depicted, people do that joke about Hollywood movies having the yellow, what do you call it? Like the, like Mexico lens or whatever, where they just suddenly like the plot is happening in Mexico.

and for some reason all the scenes are kind of yellow. Yeah, we are, to simplify it, we are blind and we are blind sometimes by choice, sometimes because our lives are difficult, because we are actually oppressed by our own upper classes within our country structure, but also because we are fed nonstop movies and we're told stay busy, stay, stay moving, and we're told stories about these countries that I've seen the stories that we tell ourselves now from this country right now. I'm in the United States, but I've seen those stories from within the actual country that the story is about from other white people telling me the thing.

And it's, it's, I think you get this kind of, um, dissociative or at least like if, I think if you're curious, you'll start to look into things. I'd put it that way. Well, it's crazy too, because like when this whole thing went down, the thing that got talked about the most, or at least that I saw on social media was like, oh, look how many outfit changes. It was like, whoa, look at the drip. And it, yeah, look at the, and it, yeah, look at the,

fit and like how how did he do that for everything's aesthetic it's nothing yeah like we're so normalized i was thinking when you guys were talking about like they literally came in they black bagged this guy i remember i had a neighbor of mine who also got black bagged when we were children and taken to like a different country to go to like you know troubled youth camp and i was like wow i was like black bagging is so normalized like we do it to the kids to like take them to camp you know like that's like he got he like got carried out in the middle of the night kicking and screaming Yeah. And it was like, yeah, yeah, and the parents stand, oh, we're so sorry. Yeah, and then 20 years later, you're like, oh, it was synodon, and these people are like a murderous rapist.

Does this sound familiar? That maybe right now we could have a perspective that would actually match the fact that every 20 years we find out that 20 years ago, the whole fucking structure was run by murderers and rapists who blackbagged people. Maybe you want to, you know, open a history book that wasn't written by someone who's lived their entire fucking life in the Harvard yard trying to sleep with, age students. But we're, yeah, we're so far from even, I think the general people, especially if you're online, are so far away from even recognizing. I think it's outside of our range of understanding. Yeah. Like if you are a victim of propaganda, and this includes everybody. I'm not trying to say like, you know, everyone, everyone knows I love to bag on Americans, but everybody is capable of this. And there's a moment where you're going to see a weird divergence in what you're experiencing and what you're being told. And at that point, you can either choose to be

curious. You can choose to investigate. Sometimes you have professional tools to do so. Sometimes you're a journalist. Sometimes you're a documentarian. Sometimes you spend years of your life writing a book about it. Whatever. Sometimes you're just a citizen and you're going to get to that point. And I think that's the point of divergence where I would say trust your curiosity at the very least. And on this show, we've had a lot of moments where we're like, well, sometimes curiosity just means you go on YouTube and you start to believe that there's a plan to save the world and that Donald Trump is actually undercover destroying the pedophile like pedivore cabal, right? Sometimes curiosity means that. And sometimes, yeah, this is the idea of like citizen journal, journalism,

it's been perverted a million times over. So we just, I think it's important after maybe 700 or, I don't know, fucking, what have we done? 800 episodes? I don't know. 800 plus, yeah, yeah. Yeah, to just, to just make a distinction there, right? We are not saying, like, do your own research in the Q&N sense. We're saying, have you considered that there are other talented and dedicated journalists that exist in other countries that maybe are worth quoting more than the Washington Post guy collecting $600,000 a year who has never visited the countries he's covering. Have you considered that? That's my challenge. I think you should keep bagging on Americans, actually. We deserve, I mean, there'll be plenty of that. Don't worry.

They don't teach us anything about other countries, like, in school growing up. No, they're invisible. Square dancing. I think there's like a Euro trip where you have to plan like a vacation to Europe or something, and that's kind of the big eighth grade project. You don't really learn anything about other. I mean, the most I knew about Venezuela, like, you know, up until, like, kind of recently, maybe shamefully, is like that that's where they, the spider. Sorry.

That's where the one? No, finish it, finish this. I want to do this shit. Go on. Go on. Come on, Jackie. That's what Jerry Manley. Jerry Manley goes in arachophobia. He goes to Venezuela to photograph the giant spiders, but then he gets bit

and then they send it back to conniva. And that's how, that's how arachnophobia happens, is that the house spider. mates with a Venezuelan spider, supposedly biggest in the world, size of a dinner plate, huge spiders in Venezuela. You guys, this is, you know, the whole America First MAGA, chuds who love, you know, they hated regime change. Trump was the peace president. Tim Poole just said, you guys, the U.S. economy is about to boom because tons of free oil are heading our way. Is this the baby-brained insanity that, like, these people actually think this is how the economy works?

I'm very, I'm very sorry to tell you, Abby, that it actually is because the people, people who determine stock prices and the price of materials in our economy are exactly like him. And so if they get excited, price go up. If they change their feelings. If they change their feelings, DXY go down or up. They change the value of the dollar based on their sentiment. So yes, we're a nation of, and it's not just the United States, but an empire, I'd say, of like, stupid babies who are, our feelings are dictating the, the price of fucking flower for people who can't afford it. And for us, it's like, it's something that we pull up on an app and that

we trade. Yeah. We're a nation of men in tight little hats. And the hats are cutting off the circulation. Come on, come on, guys. I was trying, I was trying to be, I was trying to not alienate our American audience. We have an American on the podcast. We have Adam. Yeah, come on you guys. I mean, Jake, I'm

American. Jake. So is Travis. Yeah, we have an American on the podcast. We have Travis View. Who are you calling a traitor? Wait. Jake. I'm the only not Americans. And I'm the one calling for some restraint so that we can continue to cover the actual specifics of what we're doing. Let's please try to get back on topic. Abby, we'll stop interrupting you. Okay, so let me get on topic by explaining to you why I was hoodwink.

Because before I went, because let me just, full transparency, you guys, I was selling a show for Telesaur. Telesaur was a Latin American conglomerate of, I think, six different Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba. It was created as a counterweight to just the corporate media hegemony that was dictating the futures and narrative. for these Latin American countries that were coming out of the shackles of colonialism and this savagery for centuries. So I was proud to work with Telesaur, but I was also very crystal clear and wide-eyed about what the fuck I was stepping into. And I wanted to really prove my editorial freedom and integrity because I knew that if I just went there with some rosy lens, I would never be taken seriously again. So I went there with the motive to basically tell

exactly what I saw on the ground. I didn't have any handlers. And I went completely independent And what I was most shocked by is that before I went, this was when the opposition won the first election since Hugo Chavez. So I think within 20 years, the opposition couldn't get enough power or popular support to actually win any elections. And the corporate media had been painting Chavez, subsequently Maduro, as not only a narco-trafficker, a drug kingpin, this is what Hugo Chavez warned us about. He said that they were going to apply the Noriega method to him, which was exactly why we invaded Panama. Can you guys quickly explain what you mean when you say the opposition? I'm just like, I know nothing.

That and the Noriega method, please, yeah. Yeah, okay. So Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset that we were friends with, kind of similarly to have been lauded. Not the rapper. Yeah. Jake, come on. And then anyone who remembers, I mean, it's probably been so memory hold to Americans,

but the U.S. invaded Panama in a bloody invasion. There's still mass graves being found today. And this was under the pretense, the absurd pretext that, again, similarly to Maduro, that this was like taking down some sort of drug trafficking operation. And that Noriega was this drug king. pin. So it's just a very disgusting redux of just overt colonialism that that caused such devastation in the country that people are still have remembrance days digging up bones of the relatives. And Americans don't even know that that fucking happened because it's just a dime a dozen.

But for the entirety of the situation, the advancement of the Bolivarian Revolution, the corporate media has been saying the same exact thing, that it's a dictatorship, that he's a thug, that people are starving. It's always been the same narrative, even though the Jimmy Carter Center, which, you know, monitored the freedom of elections all around the world, said in 2012, I think, that Venezuela had the freest elections in the world, the most transparent electoral system in the world. So whatever is happening today, you can't look at it in a vacuum without looking at the demonization of these people of basically every leftist leader in Latin America. And it's always the same script, no matter what. So when I went there, I was like,

oh my God, this was when the opposition, and to explain what the opposition is there's a lot of opposition to obviously the Bolivarian movement. However, none are strong enough to gain enough popular support to mobilize the masses in order to win elections. Okay. So the PSUV is Maduro's party. That's the strongest left base in Venezuela, and they have millions and millions of Chavezas who will die for the revolution. Yeah, to give people some context in a country that maybe Americans are less propagandized about,

This is the equivalent of the Partido Travolador in Brazil, and the last two presidents that have existed, including the current president, have been imprisoned and tortured at different times. Bolsonaro personally oversaw the torture of Dilma Rousseff and then the removal from power with these kind of corruption charges. So we're talking about, you know, like oftentimes a battle or a battle or a struggle, I'd say, between people who have literally been the torturers and people who have gone to jail, tortured and then still have the incredible dignity and nobility to participate in an electoral process after experiencing things that you and I will never even begin to understand. Like having your genitals electrocuted. No, this is like ISIS-style savagery for decades. I mean, a lot of it was posed by...

I mean, it's basically like that. I mean, it's like ISIS-style executions, murder, a cutting beheadings of children. It's like really, really insane. what U.S. trained mercenaries and people were doing to these countries. Wide-scale massacres, this was like, when they talk about the Monroe Doctrine being revived, like, to them, it's a funny joke.

It's the Don Roe Doctrine. Yeah, yeah. To them, it's like, oh, ha-ha, we want to, like, impose our hegemony on our hemisphere, but it's like to Latin America, that's ISIS. Like, that is their ISIS, dude. Yeah, yeah, you're being told like a part of your family is going to disappear and we're going to rape and kill them. Yeah, it's like, you

want to talk about the Jakarta method? Like, that's when this was happening. But to Donald Trump, it's an AI-created cartoon that portrays him stepping over South America, which I'm not joking, that literally was posted by the White House account. No, it's disgusting. It's disgusting. So the PSUV was an embodiment of the sovereignty and independence movements originating from Simone Bolivar and the entire just throwing off the shackles of colonialism in Latin America. So you had the, you know, the emergence of the pink tide, the reclamation of sovereignty from these left or left-leaning leaders. And Hugo Chavez was probably the most powerful one, because

he just had so much stamina, he had so much popular support, and he transformed the economy. He really did. And he lifted millions of people out of poverty. Before we progress down a description of Hugo Chavez, which we have to do, I think we should we should just go back for one second and give the context that Hugo Chavez was not a person who started to appear on TV and then people loved this guy and then his ideas were listened to. He was part of an integral movement and never kind of the single figurehead, like, I don't know, like, I guess, Donald Trump, of a kind of a visual spectacle that then yields a set of policies that are kind of invisible to the people. But then also, let's go back before we get to Chavez to the opposition that I think just to finish that.

Yeah, finish that. Yeah. So the opposition, I mean, when we talk about the opposition, there's a lot of factions, obviously, and there is a lot of left opposition now to Maduro just because of the effects of the crippling of the economy, the sanctions. It's been absolutely devastating. Well, yeah. Have you ever been to a DSA meeting? Like it's going to be like a trotty is being really annoying and arguing with a Maoist and they're both from Portland.

But when we talk about the opposition, it's like we're not, it's not to paint them with a broad brush, but I would say the strongest faction of the opposition that would fill the power vacuum if the PSUB was forcibly removed from power would be fascism. And it's a right wing power vacuum when we're talking about Maria Machada and Mundo Gonzalez. This is a woman who, you know, won the Nobel Peace Prize who just dead. She's like throwing it at Trump because she desperately wants to be the new president. And he's just like she can't manage the country. This is a woman who represents exactly what we're talking about.

In 2002, when Hugo Chavez was, was couped at the barrel of a gun during the Bush administration and he was kidnapped for three days. Maria Machada and all of these people that you still see milling around today had the Carmona decree ready to go. The Carmona decree was basically to dissolve the Constitution and sell every last drop of oil along with every single other, you know, vestige of natural resources and sovereignty to multinational corporations. And so this woman represents exactly what the opposition represents, which is just complete fire sale, privatization of everything and a removal and eradication of the social gains, which would leave millions of people into destitution and poverty again, and also potentially sheep for the slaughter. Sorry, what do you mean by sheep for the slaughter? Because these people are targets of political violence, actually. So when we hear that, you know, Maduro is this thing. Thug who goes and just assassinates political opponents. Actually, when I was there, I found that the opposition, armed to the teeth. We're talking about an opposition party that has received

tens of millions of dollars through USAD, through the U.S. government channels, including Maria Matrota, four decades. These are people who are armed, who actually do commit political assassinations, who do firebomb maternity clinics, schools, socialist enclaves that represent the PSUV. I saw it firsthand. Yeah, I don't think the average American would think, Hey, you know that Juan Guido guy that Nancy Pelosi paraded in front of Congress and allowed to make a speech? His movement, which was a minority movement, set three people on fire in the street on video and killed them. They immolated three people. That's crazy.

And they said, hey, black guy, this is what we do to Chavez does. And they lit him on fire. And he's friends with Nancy Pelosi? Oh, dude, Juan Guido was like, dude, he was like given like a speaking tour. I know she's got big knockers, Jake, but come on. Why does nobody else know this? Ah, well, please reference earlier in the conversation. Yeah, but before I went, it was the height of the protests.

200 people were, quote, unquote, killed in the streets by Maduro's forces. I kept seeing over and over again on, like, CNN and all these other news networks that this, one of Maduro's, like, armed forces was going and just running over protesters. Literally, I kept seeing this image. And my mom was just like, holy shit, why are you going there? Like, please don't go there. You're going to die. And I was just like, I'm going to go.

find the truth, mom. And so I, like, when you're there and I'm in the middle of these protests and I was like, I'm going to go talk to these opposition protesters. I'm going to go in the middle and actually find out what the hell is going on. What you realize is that the government actually had extreme restraint. These opposition Guadimbas were very violent. They were setting up giant flaming barricades. I saw opposition protesters armed, by the way. They have homemade arms that they were shooting and killing people. Half the deaths were caused directly by protesters, executions, running people off the fucking freeway with these flaming barricades. I saw them commandeer and 18-wheeler, dragged the guy out, take over the car.

Holy shit. It was insane. And it took hours and hours for the government to respond at all. And when they did, they just, you know, they threw tear gas at us. And I was like, oh, my God. Well, yeah, no one's going to pretend that the government is effective. Let's be honest. Government, government takes some time.

It's hard for structures to respond. But I don't think that many people know that this is like the actual documented on the ground reality supported by a video and facts. And if you step out of some of the sources that you are familiar with, and I'm not talking about going to follow Joe M or, you know, QAnon guy on YouTube, I'm talking about like, again, people like you, Abby, who were there on the street. And to give some context for Americans here, I guess, it would be the equivalent of, let's say, and this is a tiny micro example, what if Antifa had set on fire three different MAGA supporters in like broad sight and we watch them burn to death.

What do you think the media would say? Because they're already saying it without any body count. In fact, there's an opposite body count where we're being asked to believe that someone like Kyle Rittenhouse is allowed to shoot two people just because he later will find out that they had a criminal record, which I'm not defending them as people. But we're talking about a dissociation and a kind of like divergence of coverage and treatment that is so extreme that it's hard sometimes for people in the West who live in these countries to even begin to grasp it. You are going, you're going to, you're going to become

covered by us. We're going to call you a conspiracy theorist. QAA is going to cover you, dog. If you, if you go to parties, no one's going to want to hang out with you. There's tons of protests, and I'm not trying to say that there are not legitimate protests. Like, there are. The point is that the government allows them, like, because our media tells us the government represses protests, they'll kill you if you have a difference of opinion. That would be crazy if they did that. That'd be crazy if America, like, repressed protest. I just saw a video of someone arrested on the street while she's talking about how she doesn't think.

Oh, yeah, that was amazing. Maduro was supposed to be black-bagged. And the, I think it was a large American outlet. But two guys just step up. They go, yeah, you're being arrested for, you know, obstructing a path or whatever. So you're watching an image, right, where a young woman, a young woman of color in the United States is being pulled off a sidewalk, having an interview with a main stream American platform and charged with like, you know, ridiculous weird shit and taken away, just disappeared again.

And who knows what the fuck the rest of that process looks like. But this is the story that we are told about everywhere else in the world. That's how they do it. Yeah. And I looked through, Julian, what I was telling you was I looked through the death records because I kept hearing this number that was repeated by the NGOs, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, 200 people killed by Maduro's forces, just repeated without question. And so I actually found out more than half were killed by opposition forces.

I looked through all the death records. They were including 13 people who died, getting electrocuted, looting a bakery as being murdered by Maduro. Yeah. Jesus. That's kind of tragic because I do think it's... I know. You're trying to get some bread and then... You're trying to get some bread. All your homies are gone.

That was a sad mass casualty event. Not Maduro's fault, I would say. But what was interesting is that my colleagues who also were working for Telesaur, you get hammered. in these opposition protests and people are just like, who are you with, you know? And if you say Telesaur, you could get killed and lynched on the spot. So I was safe because I was just like, I'm American. Like, I'm American. And they're just like, oh, okay, great.

Like, we're being murdered. We're being repressed. We live in a dictatorship. And I'm just like, okay, so what, you know, who are you? What do you want? And they're just like, I want to be an entrepreneur. I can't be a business owner in this country. That was what one guy told me as he was like holding grenades.

And then my friend later, they found out she was working with Telesore and they actually shot her in the back. She had a bulletproof vest on. They tried to kill her and then they just kept throwing like fire. They got her in a ditch and then just tried to set her on fire. They doused a global vision journalist with gasoline and tried to light him on fire. When they found out that Mike and I were working for Telesaur, they sent a virtual lynch mob. I have thousands of people telling me you will be lynched.

We will lynch you. Who talks like that if you're not a fascist psychopath? What do you mean like in terms of like you're receiving thousands of messages online saying we will lynch you and kill you like we did that. Yes. It's very reminiscent of like, if you read the Jakarta method, like Jakarta is coming. A thing that became a kind of right wing graffiti that they would put on the wall. And it was a reference to a one million person genocide in Indonesia, which we've obviously we've covered and had Vincent Bevin's on. So yeah, there's that kind of, of course, because there's so much, I think, information about like actual physical direct violence, like we kind of

tend to ignore other forms of threats and violence that are constantly repressing and discouraging anybody from looking into this, speaking up about it, becoming a journalist that might care about this. So yeah, you're saying thousands of people were threatening your life personally online. And it was really scary because I was like, this is a rabid, like, psychopathic reaction for really reporting the truth. And I was, like, reporting exactly what Maduro's forces were doing. Like, I reported the deaths that the soldiers committed. reported at all. So let's prove that we're, you know, being extremely fair here. You looked into the death records. You looked into the specific situations. What percent of the deaths that were reported

constantly across all Western media and parroted by everybody? What percent of those actually could be fairly attributed to Maduro, which is, of course, a president who has a military. So we're talking about a big scale here. Yeah, like Padreno's forces. Yeah, I mean, basically, I would say 30, around 30 percent. Okay, well, that's interesting. And guess what? The vast majority of those soldiers were prosecuted and arrested. Really? Yes, absolutely. Because they were such extreme example.

I mean, it was such a national scandal and it was such an international scandal that they had, I mean, I don't know if they would have if it wasn't, but like the point is that they were. And that one video that I told you about of the car that was running over someone, that they kept showing over and over again on the news, what you didn't see in that video.

Right before they showed us the video was a protester throwing a molecule and actually lighting on fire. The guy driving the car, the guy was on fire. Fire. Literally. Oh my God. It's like the scene in Manhunter.

You cannot make this up. It's like the scene in Manhunter where the guys like rolling down the hill in the in the, but then if they imagine if, yeah, the scene in man tenter, it's like, it's a guy on fire in a wheelchair and but they cut it so you never see the guys on fire in a wheelchair. They're like, this poor guard at the entrance of a parking lot like was assaulted. Jesus Christ, I'm sorry. Yeah. Let's keep going. No, I mean, it was a horrific situation and very startling. And as I was in Caracas, I kept hearing also that the media is totally controlled, that you can't say anything, you'll be arrested.

The vast majority of media in the country is opposition controlled. So when I say opposition, it means big business owners, you know, it's the same thing everywhere. But it's like, it's crazy that this narrative is peddled when it was the exact opposite. All I saw were newspapers being like, Aus Maduro, like Padrinos the equivalent of Hitler. And I was just like, what in the hell? What is going on? And so I will start to give some context in my own personal experience here. you know, I lived in Venezuela when I was 14 and 15, and then I lived in Brazil for the remaining three years of high school before I graduated and went to the beautiful nation of Canada, where I found snowboarding and marijuana.

But before that, I was there, right? And my environment was definitely not a leftist environment. And that's not to bag on my family. It's just like, that just wasn't the vibe. Like, you read the English speaking paper and you kind of just said the stuff that everybody was saying to each other in fear that the people, that you're talking about are going to take your house and not allow you to, like you said, run your business or whatever. My family, to kind of work back a little bit there, when I was probably about five years ago, before my grandfather died, he was in his late 80s. I found out something that I cannot believe it took me that long to find out. My grandfather, as soon as I was conscious, and again, living in Caracas Venezuela, my grandfather was a person who, you know, And again, like, respect for addicts.

I have my own struggles with addiction and alcoholism. But my grandfather was someone who drank a rum first thing in the morning because he couldn't afford the whiskey anymore and would just fight with a family at the dinner table. And, you know, he was never like, I guess, like a wife beater or anything like that. But it was just the vibe was fucking rancid. And his job was taking around other Americans in Venezuela to fish for rainbow trout in this lake. And so I was like, well, those are my grandparents. But then I was always like, why are we here?

Why is my family, why are we here? Like, why is my family, like, white people here? Like, I kind of like, just, I don't know. I'm sorry. As a teen, I just didn't have enough curiosity. I just hadn't put it together. But when I was way, way, way later in life, my grandfather. Who's too horny?

So true. I was like, pussy. Like, that's the only thing I'm thinking about. But no, so, like, way, way later, fast forward. My grandfather is now in a state of, like, kind of advanced alcoholism. He's had a big kind of crisis regarding his health, and he's, again, RIP, I love you, man. But this was a man who was past 80 and drooling and making very little sense at this point. But this was the first time in my whole life, after probably 35 years, that I found out something about my grandfather that I probably, I can't believe I didn't know because my mom never told me.

There's a lot of silence. There's a lot of silence in these kind of generations of expats and people who were involved in, like, colonial. and stuff. And anyways, my point is, we were there with my sister and her boyfriend. And her boyfriend literally did like a, like, we're having small talk type shit to my grandfather. He said, hey, what, like, what are you in? Like, what do you do? Like, you know, just, just being respectful. And my grandfather said, well, I was the head of petrochemical for Monsanto in South America. And you're like, oh, God, I thought you were a trout farmer. Fuck. Well, not even, it's not that I ever thought that his politics were good or that we didn't have some roots in the situation.

or anything, but I can't believe it took me and I was probably mid-30s. At this point, I'm, you know, I have my own politics. Like, this is, you know, I actually at that point I had already written a novel set in Venezuela. Like I, you know, like, I was curious about this thing, but this had never come up

in my entire family history on any dinner table or through any of that before. And it came up because a total stranger who, by the way, my sister does not see anymore and I love her new husband. Love you, buddy. But yeah, this was like a totally innocuous moment where I was like, I'm visiting my grandfather in his late life. Like, you know, he's doing bad. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yep. Go ahead, Jake. This boyfriend came in and

just kind of like blew up the lore and then... Oh, he didn't just blow up the lore. He blew it up. He blew it up in the most stupid innocuous way possible. Like, hey, so like, what's your background? What you do? Which obviously, like, you don't really talk to your grandfather like that, right? You're not like, you're like, what industry are you in? What industry are you in? Yeah. But I never, I had no, I had no experience of that because by the, again, by the time I was conscious and aware of things, the reality on the ground in Caracas at my grandparents' home was that my grandfather was unfortunately very much captured by his alcoholism and he did rainbow trout farming like shit. And it wasn't farming. It was like, let's take gringoes out on the boat so they can catch some trout type thing, you know? And because he could speak two languages like that kind of gives you the skills that you need for that. That was like his end game sort of thing, but early game was the Monsa. I just didn't know. That was all I knew.

That was all I knew. That was my first experience. And my grandmother was running, I think this is actually an interesting little story. My grandmother was running a pirate video rental thing. Like, what if Blockbuster was entirely pirated? And she was at the time doing Betamax. Ahead of her time. Betamax and VHS of English-speaking movies and renting those to other expatriates,

other people who spoke English. living in Caracas. So that's where I first watched parenthood, which shocked me for life. Nice. Yeah, very shocking movie. I was like, divorce exists. What the fuck?

I would love to see what her collection looked like. Yeah, your grandma sounds awesome. Oh my God. It was like death star level shit. Like it was like this little room downstairs that like was almost like circular. And it was just like all these VHS and Betamaxes that were like written by hand.

Like there was not a single. There was no cover art. It was all just. And I, as a kid, you're like, I don't even understand what I'm looking at. Like, you don't really fully grasp it. You're just like, oh, I just watched Ace Ventura for the first time. It's so funny.

That's awesome, man. So anyways, so that's my family history. And I think it speaks to my own personal experience on the ground there. And the fact that I found out way later that, like, yeah, the family history was way more complicated than I thought. And when they saw Chavez begin to be a social movement, before any election, before any kind of, quote, unquote, socialist or communist government in the United States, I heard about this man, this word to me, Chavez. I heard about it directly from the mouths of my grandparents and my parents, who would

be like, this man is a thug, and he has a, he has a, like, a standing army, and a, a week ago with batons, they, they started, like, beating and killing people, and I think he might take over the government, and we might have to move away from the country, because he's going to take our house, which I'm like, I don't know, like, you guys seem like you're living in a kind of unstable situation already. Like, I'm, you know, I mean, but at that point, because of ancient wealth and the way that that white expatriates exist, that house was owned. So at least they had that, right?

So even if the situation was all fucked up and my grandmother was, you know, like a pirate VHS Betamax renter, it was maybe the only thing they knew that they still had. And they were fearful. And I don't, I'm not trying to sit here and blame them or something. I'm just expressing what happened. They were fearful that they, someone would take away. the only thing they really knew and owned, the house. And so I didn't know anything else.

I didn't have any education around interventionism yet. That that happened a little bit later. But I was very aware of this. And one of the things that always marks me to this day, preach of ismo, pre the, you know, this country's falling apart economically, quote unquote, and these guys are mismanaging it and all the John Oliver style like bullshit that you hear, but is also obviously part of the, like you said, Abby, the message that everyone hears. I remember reading every day, the one, I think was the main English-speaking newspaper.

And what shocked me and kind of like made me curious was on the cover of the newspaper, they showed the exchange rate between the dollar and the bolivar every single day. And they showed it because it was news, because it could change drastically. And we were already in a deflationary spiral. And that deflationary spiral, which we now you'll hear in the media was blamed on, you know, Chavez and Maduro and whatever, that movement, already existed. to a point where everyone accepted it is totally true. In fact, I remember my father exchanging dollars versus bolivars in front of the bank because

if you went into the bank, you got a worse exchange rate because there were dudes in front of the bank being like, well, within three fucking days, I'm going to make money if I just give you an even better exchange rate to the bank. So I am not saying this because I have ideological beliefs. I'm talking about a direct experience. I know I'm very defensive about this, but that's because people will be very, very dismissive of a lot of this information. Right.

And what this traced back to, once I looked into it, was an event called Viernes Negro, Black Friday. It happened in 1983. That was the Euro's born. What happened that day was, and again, I'm not a specialist of this stuff, but I will say that what happened that day kind of functionally was that overnight, the believer, which is the currency in Venezuela, it depreciated by 50% overnight. So think about this, like, you wake up tomorrow and everything you have in your bank account, everything you own is worth half. as much. And then, if you look into it, you find out that the American interests, the oil companies, and the upper class of Venezuela, which of course are the opposition movements like core and always resistant and fearful of any kind of redistribution of wealth. They were

told early. So they were able to, through the financial system, make a ton of fucking money. But every normal Venezuelan that didn't have that privilege woke up from one day to the next and everything they owned was worth half as much, and everything they needed to buy to feed their children was costing twice as much. And that's, they call it Black Friday. And I'm sorry, but I don't think most Americans even know about that. And that happened way before Chavismo. 83. By the time I'm talking about Chavismo, I'm like a young teenager, like 14, 15.

Yeah. So we're talking way before. No, and it just kept getting worse because the value of the currency is just always kind of arbitrary because of the influence of the U.S. dollar. the fact that so much of the country's inflation is just due to the exchange rate anyway with the U.S. dollar, and it enters through selling oil. And so the sanctions, I mean, you're putting the economy into complete freefall. And the lack of that context of what sanctions did is just astonishing. This was pre-sanctions. The economy was already. Of course. I'm just saying it. Think about how much worse it got. Oh, my God. Yeah. Of course. And then the sanctions happen and then everyone gets

to blame the government. But I'm talking about the fact that a decade and a half or so before we had any Any government that could be described as even remotely left wing, they already experienced a 50% over fucking night inflation event. And that inflation event, if you're trying to blame people and be like, well, you know, I mean, hey, I'm not saying we should black bag Maduro, but he's not great at the economy. Can we have some fucking perspective? The only reason I know this is not because I read a bunch of books and shit.

I mean, I guess I did research it later, but because I was there. I was there. Right. And I experienced it. And so, yeah, parapolitics guys have a field day with my grandfather's thing. look into it or whatever and blame me of being, I don't know, like controlled by something. But I just wanted to, before we continue, Abby, just give my direct personal experience as a person growing up. No, I think it's such an important point because it's another blanket generalized narrative that you hear all the time,

that there's this huge economic collapse that Venezuelans are eating cats and dogs because they're starving. They're eating trash, actually. Can you imagine, like, the anti-poverty like propaganda that you would have to actually believe? believe that poor people are literally eating trash eating trash what they had postmates and they were ordering McDonald's it's so extremely offensive yeah it's insane it's like it's like the darkest like darkest form of like racism and in curiosity you don't care but you care enough to be like oh those black and brown people there yeah they're fuck they're trash eating they're rat eating subhumans this is like the same logic that has fueled every genocide yeah and also yeah

of course you can't trust them you can't listen to them yeah they're giving a sandwich and that's why they vote for Maduro. It's like, wait, which is it? He stole the election or that they're bribed to vote for him? Like, stick with one. That depends. Is the sandwich a combination of ham and cheese and has it been like slightly toasted so that it's melted? Because I would absolutely, I would give my vote. I haven't been given anything for my votes in any of the Western countries. I know, I wish. Yeah, I know. It's like, where's the Soros trying? I mean, but in 2016, I mean, yeah, like this absurd narrative about the inflation rate and stuff, it's like in 2016, the exchange rate doubled. So again, like we're

We're talking about like a, yeah, like a 500% I don't fucking know. It's just insane. It's like in less than a month. It's like this is evidence of an economic war. Oh, oh, of course. This is not a normal situation. And so I went there thinking I was going to, you know, it was going to be complete destitution, like poverty. Everyone's star. I mean, I didn't really think that, but I was just like, what am I going to find? And it's so specific who you talk to. If you talk to, you know, a working class, like, I'm not trying to paint everyone with a broad, but I'm just saying it was very, very like class lines very obviously. I would talk to a woman cover. in jewelry, screaming at me that she has nothing in her fridge and that Maduro was a dictator. I talked to someone else another block away who's a young Chavista who was just like, no, it's complete. She was like, you can go eat food anywhere. She was like, it's an economic war. And I wasn't just like anecdotally taking examples. I've seen the footage.

I spoke with economists and I've talked to them about what exactly was going on. It's fascinating what they did because business owners decided to withhold certain products to make them scarce. toilet paper like paper products for example there's still like an opposition figure who runs the paper product industry and so they were able to manufacture a crisis of a lack of toilet paper and so that's the narrative that gets spun out of control in the rest of the world they're like oh my god look at this insane despot who can't even like give his people toilet paper it's just like it's actually disgusting i would just like to say this is a marifat logic because you just buy a bidet and you'll use

like almost no toilet paper ever like are we obsessed with wiping our ass with toilet paper it's like Dude, the COVID thing, too, it's like, wow. I'm joking, of course, I'm joking. It's crazy. No, no, no, but no, it is kind of crazy during COVID. Everyone was like, we got to get the toilet paper, like, killing each other over. It's like, okay, whoa. Like, you don't, you should just get a fucking, take a shower, dude.

I was in, like, a big red department store a couple weeks ago. He's talking about Target, folks. And, well, I'm trying not to say the names anymore because I've, you've scolded me in the past. I'm trying not to give any free advertisement. No, no, no, you've got to keep the name in if you're telling us a horrible. truth, please. Okay, yeah, I guess it's true. And there was like, I don't know, I was walking through the aisles or whatever, lost probably, and I heard this guy on his phone and he was like, he was like, yo, bro, he was like, shells are cleaned out at Target, dude, there's nothing here.

And I was like, looking around and I was like, it looks fully stocked to me. Like, I couldn't under, like, I couldn't see what he saw. But he was like, oh, bro, like, he was like, bro, dude, dude, there's nothing here. And I was like, I had done plenty of toilet paper. There was plenty of paper towels. I didn't know what he was talking about. This is not an inherent evil that exists naturally among the American population. The majority of the American population is working class. So it's not a blame on people who, I don't know, believe this or think this or even are the person that Jake over heard at Target.

It's the fact that I think we live at a bit of a dissociative state where we have everything we need in so many ways. But then if, like, let's say you don't have a bank account or you're homeless, Like, you have the same conditions as someone living in extreme poverty while you get to look at the shelves that are stocked. But then you still have people who can buy and are on their phone, like Jake said, being like, I can't see nothing. I can't see nothing. Yeah, it's like, oh, they don't have, they don't have the toilet paper endorsed by those three bears that are constantly rubbing their asses in the woods. He's talking about Charmin. By the way, people, we should get rid of Charmin and Target.

Unless they pay you. Unless they pay me. If you reach out and then I'll change. my editorial approach. I mean, there's so much to say about, like, you could debunk this propaganda all day. But the problem with it is this kind of tendency, especially from Americans and Westerners, to have the kind of chauvinist imperial attitude where they think that it's their ordained right to do this shit around the world. Brazen criminality, complete lawlessness. And this is exactly what happens when you don't hold war criminals to account, when you coddle and

protect torturers and war criminals. This is why the Democratic Party basically incubated this situation, this brand of global fascism that Trump is perpetrating and has is drunk with power and impunity. He has not been stopped. The Gaza genocide was allowed to go unabated. It still continues. So this is what happens. These things become normalized and they take it one step further. As you have seen, because of the lack of response and calls for restraint from the EU, they were basically just saying, now's not the time to even talk about legality. Because Maduro's got to go. The information environment obviously is going to be a big part of what we cover. I want to get now into Chivismo and the ultimate arrival of Maduro and what led to our government blackbagging using, you know, J-Soc Special Operations Forces, which you might have heard about on our Fort Bragg cartel episode.

So let's continue in history. I think that, like you said, like you can't really defeat this stuff because we're not talking about an idea, right? Like if Abby and I get on this podcast and we circumvent everybody else and we go on an ideological campaign to convince you of something. there's still going to be, there's still going to be the fact that we're just affecting what you believe about something. What we're describing and what we're trying to cover in this episode, and I would say in general, this is like a life project for me, is the actual power structure and material reality that is happening in these places. And it doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter if you're QAnon or liberal. It does not change the structure.

Your belief does not change structure. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Palestine today, it's such a naked mission of colonialism. Very, very obvious, right? And we have to look at Latin America in the similar lens and framework of those conditions, like you're saying. I mean, we're talking about 500 years of colonialism. And like every other colonized country, they suffered genocide. They suffered repression. I mean, brutality. I mean, it's a legacy of underdevelopment. And that's when you look at, you know, there's a lot of critique of why they didn't try to diversify their economy and not have just oil as the main export. But that's the legacy of underdevelopment. every formerly colonized country today, is that they have to first lift the people out of poverty with their main resource and then they can work to diversify. Cuba is a great example of that, just to kind of double down on that. Cuba used to be a diverse agricultural country that was then converted to a uniquely sugar,

essentially economy under, you know, like slave-owning upper-class people with the backing of, of course, the United States and the Western powers. But before that, the soil was totally different, and they did not focus on sugar. The reason they focused on sugar is because the stock market said sugar is worth money. So suddenly they were like, well, fuck, why are we even growing food? Why are we doing anything? Right. Everything's sugar now. And guess what?

We're going to make these people work in the fields and get sugar. And then we're going to sell it on the international market, the very international market that is behind the sanctions that are starving and killing people because it's worth more than, I don't know, whatever would feed. the local people. I mean, we're so beyond that, I guess, in that moment. But yes, just so people understand how that transformation occurs and how then people get the kind of temerity to talk about these countries and say, oh, well, why are they focused on one crop? Like, seems weird that they're just doing oil. And it's like, do you know why that happened? Like the crude, have you looked at stock go up of crude? Well, and us as Americans, you know, we really just don't want to think about maybe that, like, we're on the bad team, you know.

Like, that's the thing. You watch your sugar and you want your oil, literally. Like, yeah. Literally. Well, and they spend so, they've spent such a good, good amount of time getting us to, like, I don't know, base our entire belief system on like, which president we think is like the better guy or the better girl. And when, when in actuality, you know. The power structures are almost never throughout at least recent American history, but probably even ranging back, never affected, right? So whether you vote for Obama or George Bush, the financial structure and the power structure and the exploitation structure changes by like tiny fragments.

Yeah, I think that's why we spent so much time being like, well, you're worse or like, you're worse. It's because like we don't want to realize how collectively bad we all, you know, that what we're all a part of. And so this. You're not, you're a good American based on whether you step away from this episode believing one thing or another. ignoring the fact that it does not affect the fundamental underlying structure of everything that determines power. Yeah. I mean, especially just that chauvinism where you think that you have the right. I mean, again, it's like all of these things that you can apply to Maduro can be applied to Trump and spades. So it's just completely absurd. But yeah, I mean, the neoliberal doctrine that ruled, you know, in the interim just completely put Venezuela into poverty. It was in a complete total economic collapse as you articulated Julian before anything resembling socialism manifest. So, and people were rising up in protest in the late 80s, and there was a massacre of estimated 4,000 civilians under this martial law guy. I forget his name.

You'll hear, like, Venezuela is the richest country in South America. Why are they starving? And the reality is because that evaluation that they're rich is based on the fact that they discovered that they had oil reserves and that everything that existed before, like, you know, like the arrival of Chivismo in the late, like, 90s and early 2000s. was based on the idea that you're a rich country if you have a bunch of resources. But where do those resources go? They get extracted. They get extracted by multinational companies. I went to school, in fact, in Venezuela.

Ooh, I'm going to give another parapolitics like a moment for them to take me out online. But yeah, I went to school with people who it's like, you meet a kid and you're like, oh, I'm making friends with this guy and he's from, you know, Texas. How did you get here? And it's like, oh, well, my dad works for Exxon. And he was offered a full package where you get to go to the most expensive school. you get your house paid for, and you're here working for Exxon. But you're in Venezuela.

So is that part of how we establish wealth? I do think that if you're talking about richest country in the world and you are a media outlet, or richest country in South America, and you're a media outlet, you might want to look into some of these fucking details. Yeah. I mean, it is crazy just the anecdotal evidence that people just use to be like, well, Venezuelans are celebrating, so that's all we need. It's like, okay, well, then you have a brain of a fucking child because of an infant.

I mean, it's insane. It's like which Venezuelans, which diaspora? What are you, what are we talking about here? What are you saying? It's just another like two or three sentences that you see repeated everywhere and you tell yourself while you go to bed going, ah, fuck, man, I should stop ordering so much food online and start going out a bit more. Yeah, I mean, it's basically, the country was in complete economic collapse.

These neoliberal austerity measures were imposed and it increased poverty dramatically. And so you saw this uprising against it. Civilians were massacred under martial law. It was in this rebellion and anger that Chavez emerged as a leader. And it wasn't just Chavez as a figurehead. Like you said, it was the transformation of this poor country in this mass socialist movement that mobilized this huge majority of people that never had a voice. And it was in an era of extreme inequality and exploitation.

I mean, this was the era that had reigned forever in these people's minds. And so to have that reclamation of identity and sovereignty and independence and rights and a voice that they never had before. I mean, that's what was so amazing. And you see the New York Times, even back when the coup, the Bush administration in 2002 when they had kidnapped Chavez and tried to impose this business leader. But they actually wrote, a would-be dictator has been stopped. Like, that's what the New York Times' line was.

I mean, you can, like, look up the New York Times article where they're glazing Hitler. So I'm not super surprised. Like, you know, and I'm not joking up. But it shows you that they've always said this. It's like, oh, no, he would have been a dictator. It's like, what are you talking about? You know what I mean? Yes, exactly.

So I think that one thing that's really interesting here and important because I think that I'm in a debate club and I think I want to make my point really more profoundly is when we talk about democracy, right? We talk about how Chavez and Maduro are part of an undemocratic system because you don't see the head of the country change every four or eight years or whatever the system is, right? How was democracy manifest on the ground to include the poor that had been exploited for a long time and had never had any say in end? anything. Definitely not elections, but even more than that, they had no levers to control the economy or their material condition. This is a really crucial aspect of this conversation, which is that we consider democracy as this end-all-be-all notion of what Americans think of it as, which is voting every two to four years in elections, I guess, that are just this dog and pony show multi-billion dollar operation. It's completely fake because the candidates are

handpicked. They represent a very small margin of like the, you know, differences. It's like it's all very stage managed. In Venezuela, people think, or even in Cuba, for example, I mean, you could argue that Cuba has a one-party system because they are a country under siege, but they have a huge democratic base of governance, self-governance, and also of just like mass discussions and democratic meetings. So yeah, tell us about the structure of exactly how that actually manifests. Like, bring us to the room where that happens, the room where those people are gathered. Yeah, I'll tell you what I saw. I mean, I went all across Venezuela and not just in Caracas. I went all in the small municipalities. I flew all over the countryside. And I saw meetings of thousands of people from

local barrios, from just community hubs getting together to discuss. Barrios are the equivalent of favelas. They're the poorest and most destitute. Yes. And so these people would come out in mass. It was something that I had never seen before in my entire life. I mean, it was people who were coming out with the intention of working together to overcome this economic war. The problems with the economy, all of these things, it's the ingenuity and creativity of people working democratically together in these mass organizing centers. I have never seen anything like it. Mass rallies. How did those mass rallies functionally affect the state of the Constitution or the laws, which I think we can agree as Americans we have almost no control over? We cannot change our Constitution. We can barely change

our laws. Like, I guess you vote yes or no on prop, whatever, but it's very hard to change anything. And you look around and you go, these are unfair, but we can't change them. How was this feeding in directly to how the structure of power and society worked? Yes, I mean, everyone can be involved in this process. And it is amazing that they can continuously vote on a new constitution, on new referendums that get included and adapted to their constitution. So I'll just give you one example of how the community mobilized to actually overcome a large consequence of U.S. exfixiation on the economy, which is the clap system. This was a system where they tried to circumvent the economic war and the deprivation of food because of the lack of staples

because of these big business owners that were perpetrating this economic war in the economy. So oil flour, toilet paper owned by rich, wealthy, local landowners withheld on purpose to create the illusion that there is an issue with basic functioning and how we're able to feed ourselves in, by the way, the richest, supposed richest country in South America. Like, why can't these people just farm locally and then feed themselves, right? Like, it seems pretty straightforward because of these people. So yes, please. So they addressed that.

Yeah, no, I was a Trump-esque right-wing billionaire who owns Pilar, basically, if I'm remembering correctly, it's the company that runs all these foodstuffs that they had to subsidize themselves. It was this mass effort with millions of people to distribute these clap baskets and make them available. What are clap baskets? It's a basket of exactly those. food staples that you're talking about to try to subsidize the lack of what people were receiving because they were the victims of the sanctions. It would be the equivalent of identifying the poorest people in the country and the government having a policy that is elected by the people to put

together the basics that you need to survive so that even if you're like the poorest American in let's say Detroit, you're still going to get the basic food stuffs and you're not going to have malnutrition in your family and you're going to have like basic dignity. Yeah, I mean it's crazy to think that six million, that's when I was there. So that was 10 years ago. Six million households had already received these regularly. Like, just think about the organizing effort that needs to be made to make something like that happen under such extreme conditions. What do you mean? We have FEMA. We have FEMA. So it's like you can, you know, a country under this kind of war and siege from the largest military empire in the world, it's actually fascinating

that they had so many elections and that they tried to be so transparent and democratic and work willingly with the opposition for the last 20 years. Like I said, when the opposition finally won an election in 2017, the Constitution gave the PSU or gave the ruling body the ability to create an alternative structure because the opposition literally shut down the government. Once they won a portion of the government, they shut it all down. And they refused to work with Maduro's party. And alternative structures are the type of thing where you go, well, our government's not feeding us or taking care of us. It's been like this for decades. Are you familiar with this, American, you know, or at least if you're working class, you might be. But you say, hey, what if

we locally organized to create a kind of alternative to Congress or an alternative to this kind of supposed representative democracy so that we can put in place a system in which our families are actually fed? Exactly. And that's what the Constituent Assembly was. It was an alternative body that was trying to bypass the veto power that the opposition held to just totally stifle any sort of progress at all. And veto every single thing that was going on. Why did that veto exist? Because the opposition finally won support. What I mean is why were they able to, for example, affect whether somebody didn't have food in some barrio, right? Like, why was there any kind of like lever for them to control

the condition? I mean, that's a really good point. I don't, I don't know exactly why, like, the particular laws they were trying to block, but they were really trying to just create a stalemate where the government couldn't do anything at all. And they couldn't pass any budget. Yeah, they couldn't, they refused to participate, even though they were begging them to. So the constituent assembly was their way to say, look, everyone can be a part of this process. We beg the opposition to be a part of this process, but the opposition wanted to paint the picture to the world that it was a, you know, as a dictatorship, that the Maduro wouldn't work with them. It was just completely manufactured, even though they had to really, I mean, when you're talking about democratic

participation, you should see, I was there during the constituent assembly. The amount of people who were motivated and mobilized in the streets was incredible. I've never seen anything like it. And that's why when you see selective outrage or whatever anecdotal evidence of people celebrating, it's like, what about the thousands of people in the streets in Venezuela who are demanding the return of Maduro, who are demanding. Yeah, yeah, your quiet despair is not worthy unless a camera is pointed to you by a media company owned by a wealthy person, right? But it's like every year there's massive democratic initiatives, not just with these

regular meetings of rigorous debate and, you know, ingenuity of how they're going to do all these things collectively together communally. But beyond that, there's constant referendums. There's constant abilities for the entire country to, like I said, change the Constitution constantly. What a novel idea to constantly amend the Constitution to be more inclusive, to be more adaptive to the fucking year, 26. Okay. So I think we've provided enough context here. I think that you and I are angry enough. I think that we can say that we've covered now Chavismo. Both your meters are full. You're both blinking red.

That's right. Yeah, exactly. We're about to press a button to make our super happen. Yeah, no. So we've got Chivismo. We've got Maduro. And again, I'm not going to stoop to the point of criticizing a leader that was just black-bagged. And the reason for that is not that I don't have criticisms.

It's because you can check anywhere else. Okay? So if you need fucking that, you know what? It's provided. And we're not talking about, like, are you the best manager? Are you the best person who's come up with the best alternative thing? Did you determine the right food items for the basket? This is shit.

This is shit you can actually criticize people. This is what we should actually criticize our politicians about. The conversation about Donald Trump should be, what are the items in the food basket that you're providing the bottom 30 or 40% of people here so that we don't have malnutrition in the richest country in the whole fucking world? So, okay. We've made that point. I think we can get to the point where America sends their Fort Bragg.

coked up savages to kill people and blackbag a president. Yeah, I mean, it's great test. And I'm relying on you, Abby. I mean, you pretty much laid it out at the beginning. I think that we don't know much because everything is kind of a fog of war. We don't know if there were loyalists that helped make this operation happen. I think that what's obvious is when you have the full brunt of the military empire coming at you in a special forces operation, there's nothing much that you can do.

Like, there's not much that you can do to stop it. We already know that, you know, at least 50 people did sacrifice themselves to try to stop this, but, you know, what were they supposed to do? They immediately took out the missile capabilities to take down any of the helicopters, and then they did the cleanup operation. And then when they were retreating, obviously, they weren't going to shoot in any helicopters thinking that Maduro could be in them. But this has been basically just an escalatory addition to a 20-year project. You know, Biden did have a $50 million bounty on Maduro's head. 50 million dollar international bounty that looks like some shit from Red Dead Redemption 2, where it's like this guy,

dead or alive, and it says, how much money? How much money from a deal? Well, is he going to give it to Trump then? That's what I was wondering. Maybe Trump did this to get the money from money. I have a great theory. 25 million, right? 25 million. But you know, I like to think, I like to think that because of J-Soc and because of these operators, we might have some millennial homeowners if Trump gives them the 25 million. So I think that's kind of inspiring and I think that we're being critics here. A lot of free oil coming our way, baby. I was going to say, I'll tell you what we can be pretty sure of, is that in a couple years or like six

months or so, there's going to be a movie about this with, like, Claire Danes, and it's going to make all the operators look so awesome. Oh, totally. Ah, you're talking of Clara Danes? The great, inspiring Latina activist, Clara Danes.

Galgado will be playing the fucking, you know, see Maduro hit the three stooges like capture. Okay, yeah, sorry, we have to move on, but I love how they'll rarely like give the full names or they will and like they just expect people to not pay attention but it's like we're we're cutting now to like venezuelan wagner uh hitler smith we're cutting now to person on the ground in venezuela i mean it's crazy it's like

yeah you see biden already had that democrats have been just as complicit with sewing the seats for this you had obama setting up that extraordinary national security threat in 2015 they were overseeing the increase of the sanctions regime. But of course, Trump took it one step further because you had the old guard of the neocon wild gang of the Elliott Abrams and John Bolton, right, who tried to do the Silver Corps, like, coup, like all those disasters that happened during Trump's first term. Yeah, so insane. The installation of Juan Guido.

Remember that that weird coup American? Remember? Didn't you see that in the news where it's, it was like, oh, silver core. I can't keep track. He tried to overthrow, tried to get there, but like they got intercepted by like fishing boats. And it turned out that the contract signed with them was, like, signed by all the major, like, opposition figures that the United States has been working with. And funding, by the way, to the tune of $50 million every single year. Insane. Insane. And that failed, obviously. But that's like they were all so blatant about that and so open.

And even now, it's so surreal to live through the Iraq war propaganda and the manufacturing of consent for that, which was over a year, of just the tediousness of the media trying to sell us that Saddam had. ties to 9-11 and that WMDs existed. It's like there is no pretense. There's no pretext at all. This cartel de los solos thing fell apart immediately. They already dropped that completely. Oh, my favorite new one. They had to admit that an entire, they invented an entire cartel so they could

black bag this guy. And it fell apart within days. I do feel like it's kind of nice to see things work less well. And it's like there could be a silver lining out of this, which is that they might be so scared to go through the full regime change war because they know they'll get fucking trounced because of the guerrilla. capacity of these barrios that have been training for 20 years. I mean, there's six million at least people who are armed. And we're not talking about the actual established armed forces. These are

people who've been training for exactly this in guerrilla warfare tactics for 20 years. And I wonder why they had to do that. I mean, it seems like you might have to look to the last, you know, decades in South America to understand why guerrilla warfare might be necessary to even just maintain control of your own country and get to choose your own leader. It's insane. It's insane. And now we're dealing with the situation where people are just pontificating and having these intellectual debates about, oh, Maduro's legitimacy. And if Maduro was good or not, instead of there's a maniac who just blackbagged a foreign president, he needs to be fucking put on the hague. Yeah. Put on trial for war crimes. Like how is he not impeached? Where's the

articles of impeachment? That's what I'm wondering. Is this not grounds for impeachment for a president? It's sick because as he, he's drunk with power and impunity. And if no one stops him, he's going to do Colombia, he's already talking about Mexico, Greenland. annexing. I mean, where does this stop? Where does it stop? I guess that's what we call a rhetorical question. A rhetorical question. You know, we're all listening to a podcast and having fun together. That's an incredibly good point. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think, I don't know, do you think that there's something that we haven't covered in the kind of lineage that led us to this moment? Because again, like you said, there's a lot of fog of war right now.

There's a lot of different people putting out bullshit. So we're going to get more visibility over what's happening internally to Venezuela. and even internally to the American government and their interventions there in the coming days. We're not trying to be a kind of like breaking news war podcast. But do you think that we've not covered something in that because I want to move on to Earth's greatest enemy? I mean, I think it's going to be hard to tell.

Like you said, we're not soothsayers and we don't know what Trump's plan is. I mean, you know, even if you look at the neocon agenda for Iraq, it's like clearly their plan was not to be in a quagmire for 10 years. It's like they thought it was going to be a cleanup operation. He did the press conference on the aircraft carrier. I don't think Trump has a plan. I think his plan is chaos and that's good enough.

And it's all trophies and photo ops and, you know, potentially they will go through. It depends on how sadistic and psychotic they're willing to be. And the bar is set very, very low for like anything logical. So anything is fair game at this point. That's why it's like I don't think anything's out of the realm of belief. Like if you were to ask me four years ago would Trump try to get a third term, I would say that that was like hyperbolic nonsense pushed out by lives. But now I'm like, I, yeah, I do. Yeah.

Yeah, I do. I would say that the failed that are in chief of Vanity Fair is he danced on video a few too many times on TikTok, and I have blackbagged him and his parties are no longer hot. What do you guys think would happen if like a super elite squad from like another country, like showed up on a couple of helicopters? Oh, come on, Jay. Landed in the front of the White House. Like landed on the front of the White House.

Took out like all the Secret Service guys, 40, 50 guys, whatever. And then like put Trump into the jobbers and like, Kloom away to like a prison. We're like, what would happen? Like, like, what would happen? I mean, I can't even begin to wrap my head around. That's why we're so disconnected. I'm just trying to make the point.

We can't even, yeah. We are so disconnected. We are so the bad guys that we can't even fathom that ever happening. And it never would. It never would. Because locally, locally, as human beings. We would nuke somebody before we let them in our airspace to do something. The reality is that Americans aren't inherently.

bad people. Of course not. My argument is quite the opposite. The American person, on average, is not an inherently violent and evil person. Just like you could probably, actually, this arguments could be a bit weird, but it's like at every point before the worst things that have ever happened, right? Like you have Hitler's Germany, shit like that. The average person is thinking about like, how do I fill my fucking pantry? Yeah. They are not thinking about this shit. Americans are not, uh, this is not the American people. We are talking about a ruthless, overeducated, generations-long project to create a global economy of exploitation that is a neo-colonial, you know, kind of follow-up.

Cabal, if you will. Well, come on now, Jake. You can't have the only Jewish guy on the podcast. Hey, you know, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. You know what this all really serves, though. Yeah, podcasting. Patreon. Yeah, yeah.

Patreon. I mean, yeah, go ahead. Give your big pitch to how it ties in, and I'll take it away. Yeah, so, Abby, you know, your new movie. Obviously, you have worked on movies in the past. You had a movie called Gaza Fights for Freedom that you released some years ago. Certainly before the last three or four year, like, I'd say concentrated acceleration of an ongoing genocide. But now your latest movie is called Earth's Greatest Enemy.

And can you tell us what Earth's Greatest Enemy is and what the central thesis of this movie is? And then also how people can go watch it and support your project. Fraud, led by Tim Walls. That's the greatest enemy that we're seeing right now. Somali fraud. We all got to fucking tackle it before it kills us all. God, if we weren't funny, like, we'd have no hope out here. It's, we have to just laugh at how insane this is.

I mean, I mean, it's, I mean, it's, I spent five years with my husband and partner, Mike Prysner, wondering how had no one synthesized the connection between war and the environment. And we heard those statistics floating around about the U.S. military was the largest institutional polluter, bigger than 140 countries. and we were like, oh, my God, what does this mean? And then when you realize that all these international climate treaties literally exempt not just the U.S. military, but all countries' militaries from their totals.

It's a total farce. And so we tried to just quantify emissions. We went into this project just trying to quantify emissions. And then we realized every stone unturned is another documentary. The amount of pollution that the U.S. military produces on a daily basis is unquantifiable and is literally going to destroy the planet. So not just the arsenal, the maintenance of the arsenal of a global military, Empire, just having the machinery, the tanks, the jets, the Pegasuses, these flying gas stations,

just having that and cleaning the engine parts, dumping toxic waste into the open atmosphere, we're not even talking about war, the effects, the supply chain, all of that shit. Just the arsenal is going to kill the planet, just the maintenance of an arsenal this big. Then when you take in the actual application of the weaponry, war, I mean, there's still dead zones from World War I because of just small armaments. So, you know, we go to countries from all over the world to look at the receiving end of U.S. imperialism, whether it's Guam, Okinawa, Alaska, and just all the bases are dumping zones for indigenous people and killing zones for the soldiers that serve there.

So what we tried to do is prove the thesis that U.S. imperialism is Earth's greatest enemy, because what it is is a protection racket. The U.S. military is a protection racket for resource extraction. That's what it always has served as, and that's what it continues to serve as. Wait, are you saying that Trump might have let it slip that it was about oil or something? Exactly. And so when you see this admittance that, you know, this is just about seizing the oil and tamping down on, you know, basically left and socialist movements, it's because they want economic hegemony. They want U.S. capitalism at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun. I mean, that's what it always has been, but it's so clearly neocolonial. And he talks about it all the time.

the Don Row doctrine. This is what he is admitting. And so this fossil fuel infrastructure, when they talk about greening the military, when you see people like Elizabeth Warren being like, oh, we're just going to slab solar panels on bases or hybridize these Bradley fighting vehicles, what they don't explain is that you cannot green a global military empire. Military empire, it's not habitable with a healthy planet. You just cannot have and maintain a global military empire. And it's not just the maintenance of the arsenal. It's the great power competition. It's the fact. that Russia and China constantly have to amp up their nuclear weapons, their arsenal to try to match our game theory, our encroachment, the pivot to Asia. It's everything. They're killing everyone.

Everyone is being killed by U.S. imperialism. I mean, that sounds grim, but have you consider that in 2027, we're going to get a meme, a meme called the Final Saludong. And Baron Trump will be profiting off the meme coin off the Doncon coin. So you meticulously cover this, once again, going on the ground, like, to actual, like, weapons manufacturing conferences and also, of course, gathering, you know, the necessary documentation and fact-based kind of argumentation that is at the core of Earth's greatest enemy, which is a feature film, right? It's a feature film, yes. Where can people find and support this? Right now, I'm on a director's tour in Europe.

I'm going to Australia, Canada, and I'm also across the U.S. until March and April. hopefully putting it up on streaming in April, but we have to go through a lot of legal issues first with the military. Hopefully all's above board there. Don't get sued. I don't like the sound of that. Well, they'll be easy. They'll be easy to fly through. Those guys, they'll be the easiest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you got to get sign off so you can feature them, you know. But it really is amazing and astounding because you go through, you know, you go, I went through the Pentagon to try to get a sit-down interview with one of these guys. And what I was told through the Pentagon Entertainment Media

division based in Hollywood, California, was that... Don't like that name. Is that any time you see the military and TV or documentaries, it's not just Jack Ryan, it's literally any documentary that you see a military official, they have final say and editorial rights on the script. That's the guy told me. That seems weird. And I was like, wait, that's weird.

I was like, how can you edit what I'm going to say? I was like, it's such a large component of what I'm going to say is your response. Like, how does that work? And he was just like, well, he was like, usually it's not a problem, but sometimes it is. And he was like, and we have to make those changes. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool. Like, that's good. Sometimes it is.

What was your name? Do you have, like, an address and like a phone number? And like, do you, who are you? But it's like, it's never been more naked. Yeah. That's why it's falling apart. Yeah, it's falling apart. Yeah, it is falling apart.

This is the last gasp. This is the last gasp. It's also the greatest. I think that like, sometimes we tend to go like, well, Donnie's losing it now. Or like, oh, the American Empire is like the mask has fallen. This won't be solved or. resolved in any way by masks falling or what you believe. Right.

So we are dealing with something I'm very real and very tangible, but that's shocking. And I mean, there's a whole other episode, obviously, that Jake did cover it briefly in another episode about the relationship between the entertainment industry and the military. But so you were making this movie, sorry, go ahead. Where are you, where can people, yeah? Yeah, I mean, and it perfectly plays into Venezuela, just so obviously so. It's like they're talking about just rampant pillaging of Venezuela because it has the largest oil reserves in the world and this is it's necessitated by the expanse of our military our military is

this big in order to store fossil fuels around the world that was the first extra extraterritorial military bases were literally coaling stations which turned to oil reserves so that it necessitates the size of the military and then the continuous expanse and extraction of fossil fuels because you need to power our military I had generals telling me point blank we need the oil it's a joke that you're talking about alternative energy. We need oil, baby. That's what it's all about. So it's so obvious in late bear. This is the fossil fuel infrastructure of the military empire. And the U.S. military goes around the world. The barrel of a nuclear arm gun threatens the planet to bow down to its dictates. And that's the only reason why Venezuela is on the receiving end today.

Check it out at earth's greatest enemy.com. Bring me to your city. I'm doing virtual Q&As, and we hope to release it on Earth Day. It'd be fun. Awesome. I can't, I can't wait to see you soon. I know that you have a screening in Orange County, which is a great place to help. people about this. Yes, the perfect place. Can't wait to hear, Orange County. Perfect place. If you dress in some fox racing gear, it'll make the message a little easier to swallow. Yeah. So we're going to put all those links, obviously, you know, in the episode description. Abby, you know, I mean, I can't say enough about your work. I think it's very valuable. And I really thank you for making the time to come and talk to us, especially at such a

pivotal time, I think, in honestly human history, but also, of course, Americans' understanding of why their government is able to get to a point where they can blackbag somebody. Like that, like a president, which is not going to lie, I'm still under a little bit of shock. Yeah, like, I'm not so cynical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's not, it's not, it doesn't feel good. And I don't feel better after talking to you. I do have a little bit better context, though, and understanding of what has taken place leading up to this.

Because as you said, so much of the information we get is, you know, the editing out of the guy being set on fire before he drives through the crowd. You know what I mean? Well, Jake, Jake, you know, like this episode actually isn't going out on anything, and you don't have a podcast called QAA. This was actually a kind of organized operation. Just a sample. Where we're just talking on Google Meets to convince you of something.

I've got a lot of friends who care about me a lot and love me. We're going to be very nice to you. Okay. All right, dude. Well, dude, thank you so much. What an honor. It was so much fun. Yeah.

Yeah. So glad that we finally got to do it. And I think we did this moment as much justice as we can do as just, you know, again, just people. People out here trying to fucking figure out what the hell is going on and how we can not head towards disaster as quickly. Everybody just trying to do their best, you know. Absolutely. Some better than others. Including Stephen Miller.

Thank you, Abby. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. You guys rock. Bye. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. you can go to patreon.com

slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a second premium episode for every free one plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. Damn, did we create a network or something? Like, did we expand? We did something new finally after seven years. Oh, we thought about how we want to bring you the best shit and the deeper shit.

We had an opportunity. We had an opportunity to launch this network called Cursed Media, and there's two series now on it. It's a different thing. It's different from Patreon. That's wrong, Jake. I'm going to fact check you, Travis Style. We've got two series that have been created since the inauguration of Cursed Media.

We've actually got the whole archive of series. This is including Jake's excellent Spectral Voyager that he did with Brad Abraham's, the Manclan podcast with Annie Kelly and myself, Julian Field. And of course, 20 whole episodes of Travis. Travis views, insanely good, trickle down. I recommend, like, honestly, the price is worth it just for that. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of good.

There's a lot of good content there. But if you're not doing it for that and you're looking for new content, you're getting three miniseries a year for the yearly fee. That's $24.99. Christ, I hate money. But, but, no, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. Should we target and Google are listeners?

No, no, no, no. This is Christ. Oh, no. Should we try to get their addresses? No, he's ruining it. He can't do it. He fundamentally feels uncomfortable plugging our own shit. Me too, but I can power through it because the content is so good, especially the new series,

first from Live, Science and Transition, and Dr. Annie Kelly, truly tradly deeply, six episodes of each. Give her her PhD respect. Truly, truly cool shows that are sort of branching out for. from our typical coverage of the meltoning, if you will. Dude, honestly, the meltoning needs to involve way more nude, beautiful people. The meltoning. It sucks that the meltoning doesn't include any good picks. Okay, but if we're trying to plug the curse media thing, I think that...

We're still plugging, yeah, right? Yes, Jake, please take it away. But I think that's what we're trying to do is that we, you know, there's only so much. And we will continue, believe us. We're like the quartet on the Titanic. We will continue, obviously, of course, to do QAA until the ship, you know, fully sinks. And by that, I mean Los Angeles breaking off in the Great Quake of 32 and sinking into the ocean. But this curse media gives us a place to expand content and explore more specific, deeper dives into topics that aren't sort of bound by conspiracy theories, politics, while also providing the QAA flavor.

that you know and love we can't make it not us somehow live can't make it not live and he can't make it not annie yeah no i'm absolutely uh you know and then jake of course you know to to kind of break the fourth wall just dropped some sort of drink i'm assuming it's one of those really sweet american like kind of starbucks drinks no i made it myself i actually i made i made i made coffee at home god you really are changed man it's crazy 2026 spittled nonetheless honestly um respect i will say that We are like the quartet on the Titanic, except we are like the black eyed peas playing the original version of let's get it started in here.

Yeah, I knew that made you laugh. Oh, well, I love a good black eyed peas joke. Yeah, that's what we're doing here. So, happy New Year. Happy New Year. Thank you for listening. And I appreciate you personally as a person who, I don't know, who is listening to this.

Unless you're listening to this to, like, study me or something. Yeah, yeah. If you're listening out of spite, you've got better things to do. Yeah, come on. Also, it's been a long episode. Come on, this is the year that you stop hate listening to the pod. I think that's true for people, but it's not true for agencies. I love you. I love you guys. Yeah, I love you guys. I'm really, really excited, really excited to kick off this new year.

I hope Virginia is really nice this time of year. Why? Don't worry. They'll realize. All right, well, until next week, May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. It's a disaster. We've got to fix the country fest. President, if you're going to be any of the world,

the companies are you going there? Are there any other companies that you've talked to about dealing with Venezuela? Maybe Mr. Lundig to talk about that. Are there any other corporations, entities outside of the oil? Well, the oil business, yes, but outside, yes. Howard, do you have steel, you have minerals, right? All the critical minerals.

They have a great mining history that's gone rusty. So steel, aluminum, minerals, I mean, this is all, it's a rich. It was once upon a time, one of the great economies and cultures of the world, and it was destroyed, and now President Trump is going to fix it and bring it back. For the Venezuela. But it's not easy. It's really gone bad. But it's got potential.

What? Any rare earth minerals? They have rare earth, but everybody has rare earth. Rare earth is not rare. What's rare is the processing. We're doing processing plants all of them. There's no such thing as rare earth. Rare earth is everywhere.

What isn't everywhere is the processing of rare earth. And we have a lot of places going up right now. Thank you.