Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/31/25 José Niño on How US-Venezuela Relations Spiraled into Military Confrontation

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Scott interviews Jose Nino about the Trump administration’s sprint towards regime change in Venezuela. They discuss the broader historic context behind US-Venezuela tensions, whether the Venezuelan government really is communist and more. Discussed on the show: “30 Years of Failure: How U.S.-Venezuela Relations Spiraled into Military Confrontation” (Libertarian Institute) “Pentagon Tells Congress It Doesn’t Know Who It’s Killing in Latin American Boat Strikes” (Antiwar.com) The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (IMDb) José Niño is the Deputy Editor at Headline USA. He is a Venezuelan-American freelance writer. He is the author of The Ten Myths of Gun Control and How Socialism Destroyed Venezuela. Find him on Twitter @JoseAlNino. For more on Scott’s work: Check out The Libertarian Institute:  https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott’s other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott’s books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at  https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country? Because the babies are making it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

now end this war and now here's your host scott horton all right you guys introducing jose nino he is the deputy editor over there at headline USA working with our good friend ken sylva over there and of course he is a regular contributor at the libertarian institute as well uh welcome to the show how you doing jose good to see you oh i'm doing great thank you for having me on scott uh very good to have you here. So, man, I have to tell, I'm really grateful for this article. I mean, I really love all of your stuff that you write for us. 30 years of failure, how U.S. Venezuela relations spiraled into military confrontation. But I'm just so appreciative of this because

it's so in depth. And you take us back and give us all of the everything important we need to know that's happened since the late 1990s when Hugo Chavez came to power and the different shifts in American policy overall and through the thing. And right up to the current day, the disputed election, the threats of war and the attacks on boats in the Gulf and every kind of thing. So as we are recording this on Friday morning, there are some indications. I don't know. I should be reading the three major papers every morning right now and making sure like what all leaks are coming out of the administration, but they certainly have sent a war force down

to Venezuela, an aircraft carrier battle group, and we have reports of all different special operations command forces and who knows what open leaks about CIA operations there looks like there's I don't know what a 49% chance that the United States of America is about to launch an aggressive regime change war against Venezuela when the last the president said Jose was that Maduro has quote offered everything in other words it's not like Iraq were six months after the war started they ran that piece by James Risen in the New York Times about how Saddam Hussein had tried to surrender. Here, the president admits that the guys tried to surrender before the war and looks like we might

just have one anyway. And I really don't know what to think about it, man. But I'm so interested in your take. But so first of all, I guess maybe can you inform us on your understanding the latest in terms of America's position regarding Venezuela? yeah there's definitely something going to kick off in venezuela and subject to speculation the just amount of military naval assets just bordering venezuela to me suggest there's going to be some type of punitive strike whether it's against

military facilities in Venezuela that allegedly harbored drug traffickers or even a decapitation strike of the regime could is very likely on the table to be honest because of the simple there's a lot of factors in play

you just don't move that many assets there for the sake of gunboat diplomacy because originally i thought this was going to be like gunboat diplomacy but it seems that they're um they're trying to like escalate even further also look at the broader geopolitical picture the russia ukraine conflict is not going well for the united states ukraine proxy and also the chinese um trade war it looks like Trump is on the back foot there. So the U.S.

need to get on the scoreboard. And the logic in a lot of these defense circles and just D.C. in general is that Venezuela could be that kind of tune up fight, if you will, that could get the U.S. back on the wind column. They want, they're expecting it to go like Panama or Grenada in the 1980s. God. You know, I saw where Colonel McGregor was on Tucker Carlson, the other. night opposing this as harshly as he could and warning Trump against it. And that was what they

were talking about too, was that you hear these people in charge running the Pentagon, talking essentially like boys and saying, well, I don't know, we just, we got to win one. We got to do something. We got to show how strong we are. And McGregor, who obviously was a full bird colonel in the U.S. army and is a conservative and a tough guy is like you don't show strength just like randomly killing people that's weakness right that's you're flailing here that's not showing strength at all that's pathetic it's also murderous and criminal and horrible and wrong but it also is in a sense amazing that anyone in charge thinks that's going to make america look tough rather than just making us look like George W. Bush

the bully again more. Yes. Or Obama. I didn't mean to leave him out or Biden for that matter. Yes. This stuff is a form of like nihilistic like sadism. It's it's just the strikes against these boats where there's like no proof whatsoever of these boats being linked with drug trafficking just shows how petty the like national

security strategy of the United States. has become it's like no longer even subtle actually even from like a regime change standpoint like engaging these acts of just rank sadism um against like venezuelan nationals on the high seas or just right off the coast um actually makes it even difficult for like the regime change venture in venezuela to work because a lot of the Venezuelan population is just not going to have it like when you're when you're just like randomly murdering people out in the sea yeah i mean that's a great point, right? What a way to soften up the Venezuelan people for this thing is just by painting America as this absolute murderous villain, right? This looming juggernaut over them

and make them all hate and fear us, especially fear us on the eve of the thing. So you would think if they want any kind of regime change like this, that part of the operation would be to try somehow, I know, futilely, to make the Venezuelan people think that, like oh good finally uncle sam is going to come and save us from these commies when they're just as you're saying they're just destroying any possibility of that by killing these random people and and kyle anzalone has one in the news section on the anti on uh pardon me at the libertarian institute today about how the pentagon admits they don't know who they're killing i just saw that too yes exactly there's there's a boat and remember the commander the the admiral in charge was it the

admiral or who was it that resigned over this who was the admiral in charge of the thing resigned last week right yeah yeah yes there's a lot of taboos actually being broken here because um say what you want about the u.s grand strategy in latin america since the end of the cold war when it's actually gotten on the win the win column it's actually been through like the hidden hand mostly through like these color revolutions where opposition forces can have like some degree of plausible denied ability by campaigning on some local issue but they have like a lot of backers in DC and the NGO consortium there but in this case it's just blatant in your face military action being used to try to like facilitate this regime change venture and they're televising these hits

so like the Maduro regime is making hay of this and going on a lot of alternative media and going to the world to show like these people are engaging in just like outright murder so they're losing a lot of the court of public opinion not just like it's a bit of swell but also like the world in general so like the um the idea of like for example maria korea machado wants like a international alliance to help facilitate this regime change i mean good luck doing that when you have like an administration that's just openly advertising it's nihilistic and sadistic for um punitive strikes against people that are not even convicted like drug traffickers or whatever yeah all right now let's rewind some things here man you know so much about this i'm so grateful again

that you wrote this great piece for us 30 years of failure a u.s venezuela relations spiraled into military confrontation at the libertarian institute libertarian institute.org and i know kyle ran it on antiwar dot com the other day as well uh people can find it in the archives there um not reprinted there but linked in the viewpoint section there um now so i was making the case on uh the provoke show with darrell a couple of weeks ago that yes they are commies like not i don't know exactly leninist or whatever but uh hugo chavez was to the left of the progressives by far and his successor is also a kami and so to most rational people who don't know a whole lot about it, they would just assume that that is

the cause of all of Venezuela's problems. And then I was making the case that there's another major cause of Venezuela's problems and that is America's economic war against them. America is not just our country. America is the world's superpower, the global empire. And they have essentially outlawed multinational corporations from trading with Venezuela in any substantive way. And so you could be a commie regime and still hire some French company to run your oil for you and do a good job of it. The Americans essentially through sanctions make that almost impossible. So this is a huge part of the Venezuelan gang crisis in the United States right now, all of the refugees and all of this stuff and the destabilization of the country. And I'm just settling scores here, Jose, you understand.

Someone in the comments said that I don't know what I'm talking about. And those sanctions didn't even start until a few years ago. But I remember differently. And then I read in your article, George Bush started this sanctions war against Venezuela back in 2005, 20 years of economic war against Venezuela. So we all know that communism is stupid and doesn't work because Mises explained about why you need prices. And so, like, nobody's arguing that. But USA, when we're bragging about it, we remember that USA is number one. we're the superpower. And so when Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Treasury Department declares war on

you, that ain't much less dangerous than when the Pentagon does. And that has been going on a very long time. So can you please take us back to the Hugo Chavez Revolution and the institution of this leftist regime in Venezuela, who'd they replace? How good or poorly did they do business and how long has he been dead? How long has Maduro been in there? And what are the relative causes of Venezuela's decline and the relative excuse is to attack them now? So the Venezuelan regime, honestly,

a lot of people across the political spectrum in the United States, I believe their political analytical software is not up to. dated it's still stuck in the 20th century because they're engaging in Cold War era tropes. It's actually more of a hybrid economy that will situationally become very collectivist and expropriate certain sectors of its economy that are generally in control of like enemies of like the regime or rivals, but it will become like situationally capitalistic. It's more of a mixed economy that does have like price controls and current.

controls, which are very misguided policies in general from like rational economic grounds, but it's not a fully collectivized type of Marxist economy, like a Stalinist, centrally planned economy like the Soviet Union was. It has some elements of like third positionist because when Hugo Chavez came into power, you have to look at the context too. In the late 90s, Venezuela had nearly triple-digit inflation after a series of failed market reforms. And also, since it became like a petro state with like social democratic characteristics in the 70s, it's been mired with big spending issues, currency devaluations. and just a more stagnant economy. This is before Chavez came into the picture.

For example, in 1998, there was a book called, like, introduction to economic growth. And it points out that Venezuela had the dubious distinction at that time of being one of the few countries in the world that actually was poor on a per capita GDP basis than it was in 1958. The only other countries where that demonstrated that trend in that time period were Nicaragua, which had a civil war, and then several sub-Saharan African basket case countries, and that was about it. So the model that was in power before Chavez came into the picture was already failed. And in fact, there were two failed, there were two failed coup attempts against the government of Carlos Andres Perez who tried to implement these neoliberal reforms.

and the bipartisan system that governed Venezuela from the 60s up until the mid-90s just collapsed by then. I mean, this country was in free fall, this narrative that you see being put forward by a lot of political pundits in the U.S. of like a pre-Chavez Venezuela being this paradise. I mean, yes, it is like relatively richer, but it was already like trending downward to begin with. You got to look at things in the macro sense, not just like in a, um, like short term relative sense so chavez really campaigned against that system because of how he perceived it to be corrupt and his system does have an authoritarian street to it and when he started regulating a lot of opposition media like in the early aughts that's when dc started to pay more attention to venezuela you have like

the coup of 2002 the thing is that um To note is that because the U.S. was much more on the project for a new American century agenda, a lot of its resources were more focused on the Middle East. So Chavez, it gave him wiggle room to kind of maneuver and take advantage of the high oil prices of that epoch to build up like the state. It is like very similar to the previous order that governed Venezuela. It was like a petro state where they would use petroleum. rents to subsidize certain sectors of the economy. The previous social democratic order, mostly subsidized upper middle class and higher people, whereas the Chavezda model was more lower middle class and below that it would subsidize.

And it also would use the money, the oil rents, to try to forge alliances with Cuba and other countries to kind of create like a parallel block in Latin America that would challenge U.S. hegemony in certain respects and at least prevent the U.S. from completely dominating the region. Because you have to remember Chavez was inspired by the likes of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nasser in Egypt, and Fidel Castro. He always saw himself as a revolutionary figure that's willing to chart an independent course and oppose U.S. hegemony. And then the Chavez regime took a more anti-Zionist line.

in the later aughts as well as it became more pro-Palestinian and that attracted a lot of negative attention from the uh the zionist superstructure that governs the u.s and for and it didn't help either that chavez also forged alliances with the likes of iran to and cooperated on several defense and economic matters but in general you can make a very strong case that there was um economic mismanagement and there is there are people within the regime and even certain um members of the opposition that will critique the policies on a like constructive grounds but there there's been some forms of not just like official sanctions but also other unconventional methods by the west to make sure that Venezuela would not be normally integrated into like the

world economy because a lot of people tend to fixate on like official legislation of sanctions imposed on Venezuela, but the U.S. regime, it has become more sophisticated in how it will de-platform countries from basic trade routes from payment processors and engaging in commerce, like through SWIFT and other mechanisms. Like the U.S. government can use that type of leverage to convince other countries to not do trade with Venezuela or restrict or at least restrict it and make it really difficult and potentially seize Venezuela and assets that are abroad. And that's one thing we have to keep in mind because, as I said before,

many people still operate under the premise of like 20th century geopolitics and state craft when the game is changing a lot. And one thing to stress, though, that now that we're in the era of great power competition, Venezuela has responded in kind to U.S. overreach by making these overtures to Iran, China, and Russia. And as a result of that, it has become a target for certain factions in the U.S., whether it's China Hawks, whether it's Jewish supremacist in the Israel lobby that want to take a swing at Venezuela just for its connections with Iran or its championship of the Palestinian. cause. It's created a whole assortment of actors that want to attack Venezuela. And to

show this type of issue linkage, when the Trump administration launched the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, they also launched their very own maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela. That was really, really tough

from 2017 to 2020. And that's when you really started to see the hard power being used against Venezuela. threats of military intervention. And now this is just the next phase of it. We're no longer in the type of hidden hand color revolution type of politics. We're kind of going back to a retrofuturistic type of politics that is kind of hybrid

where they have like a regime change agent like Ria Karina Machado. But now you also have the big stick of U.S. naval assets right across the sea that are ready to launch strikes against Venezuela. Yeah. Hey guys, Scott here for Moondos artisan coffees. It's the Scott Horton Show flavored coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good.

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And they will always do you right. that's roberts and roberts brokerage inc at r rbi dot co all right this episode of a scott horton show brought to you by the books i wrote you can see them behind me there enough already fools errand and then enough already and provoked and then of course one might have fallen down there but i got uh ron paul the great ron paul um scott horton show interviews and hotter than the sun to see that one back there over there that way hotter than the sun time to abolish nuclear weapons that's all interviews i did all about nukes and uh really great stuff and i blessed my ass on these things and you know i've gotten a really great reception on all of them uh they were all

been endorsed by ron paul and daniel ellsberg endorsed uh two of the three i wrote he would have endorsed the third one i know but he died too soon unfortunately Tucker carlson says that provoked is the definitive account and in fact that's what glenkins Greenwald and Aaron Mette said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine, so maybe check that up. Hey guys, you know I have another podcast now, right? Yeah, me and the great American historian Daryl Cooper, that is Martyr Made, he's my co-host

and we host a show every Friday night. We might be switching to two days a week here sometime soon, but for right now we're doing Friday nights live at 8 o'clock Eastern Time on the YouTube's. Checked out our Twitter handle. old provoked show all right so um man there's so much there but i want to rewind back to uh the coup of 2002 that you mentioned there and this is something i'm not sure you got so many great links in your piece i wasn't able to track them all then but i'm not sure if you link to this but people can find this there is a documentary called the revolution will be televised

that shows the entire coup and do you have that in here do you link to that you seen that yes i've seen I don't have that link there okay well so let me just describe for a minute because it's really great there's this uh i think they're an american camera crew like college students down there and they're making a documentary about hugo chavez and then the right wing coup plotters arrest chavez and run off with them and take over the presidential palace i guess it is where and the camera crew is just standing right there and the coup plotters just assume that, well, they're cool or they wouldn't be here. So I guess it's fine.

And so they just stand there filming the entire thing. And then they got Chavez is on a plane to Africa or something where they kidnapped him and they're taking them overseas. And then he calls and lets them know that you guys, goose is cooked. Guess what? The walls of the presidential palace are full of a secret detachment of paratroopers, loyal to Hugo Chavez. and the paratroopers come out of the walls of the palace and arrest the coup plotters and take them away

and the plane turns around and brings Hugo Chavez back to power. Like, holy crap. And the whole thing is on film. It's just amazing. And that's Bush, you know, while he's getting ready to invade Iraq, he wants to pull, you know, kind of a one off here. Yeah.

Greg Pallist had said at the time, and I'm fairly certain it was Pallist was the source for this, from the BBC, said what had happened was they intercepted a phone call between saddam hussein and momar kadafi saying that they were going to i forgot either dump the price or ramp it up uh one or the other that the americans disapproved of and since they couldn't get to iraq for another few months they said well let's go ahead and try to get rid of chavez and venezuela so they could counteract the effect of whatever saddam and kaddafi were up to um just as like this minor thing

And so he's got to go there. And then, of course, that completely failed. And I mean, what a spectacular coup d'etat and failure of a coup d'etat. To have the whole thing on camera like that is just amazing to see. And then, of course, I think a lot of what you described about the economic war that came against them after that was a result of that humiliation. Oh, and I wanted to harp on one more point that you said too, would comment about whatever you want. But this is something that Pallas also had said. And he knew a lot about Venezuela.

He knew Hugo Chavez very well, spent a lot of time down there and such. And he had told me that all the oil resources there are just like under extremely rocky barren land where Indians didn't even live there. It was never anyone's private property. The oil was always owned by the government when it was the former right wing government. As you said, the right wing government pumped all that oil and they gave all that money to the rich and the upper middle class. the Hugo Chavez government was no more commie other than in the sense that truly they gave that same revenue to poorer people instead of just the rich

that's the difference between the left and the right clients yeah um and so um you know I thought I think that's important that like essentially you know it's like in Alaska or whatever where the oil is always claimed by the state first and then they enter into a contract with whatever company to pump it And you don't have to approve of that to just recognize that's how it's always been there and then oh hell one more palace thing as I'm talking about this I don't know if this footage was from oh two or later they try they they keep trying to to overthrow the government there they've tried a few different times and there's there was footage one time this was from BBC News night where palace has behind him the right wingers so to speak whatever relatively speaking the right wingers are protesting and they got a pretty big crowd and they're trying to do a move. and overthrow this may have been in o2 no i think this is a separate time whatever it's 20 years ago leave me alone um but you got a pretty big crowd of people who hate chavez and want rid of them

and palace goes look at this dude this is a pretty big deal and these are the yeah but then he turns 90 degrees and you see behind him the freeway is got a million people right this is the left these are the people who support the regime and the same kind of thing happened when they tried to do the Juan Guaido coup under Trump One. And I tried to find this later and I couldn't find it. I swear Max Blumenthal had the tweets that had the footage where they had drone footage of it must have been a million people who were coming out to surround the presidential palace to protect Maduro where it's like, yeah, it's the rich versus the poor and they're a lot more

poor and they're on the side of this guy. And honestly, man, if you think about it, I think about just how much I detest the various American regimes that I have lived under my whole life here. But I'm always going to fight on the side of American independence against any foreign power. So that could ever be a threat to us. But hypothetically speaking, we would always fight against the foreigners before each other. And it makes the same sense for the people of Venezuela too that maybe this guy's economic policies do suck. and maybe he brings on a sanctions war by the rest of the civilized world

but still at least he's our guy and as opposed to a foreign sock puppet installed by people who clearly by definition have foreign powers interests in mind yes Venezuelan nationalism

has been a common denominator of its political scene regardless of what regime has been in place since I would say discovery of oil, like the 1910s, whether you've had like dictatorships, the social democratic order or shabismo, that's been a continuous trend. It's very ingrained. And that's something

that should not be underestimated here. Also, with regards to the talk of like the military intervention, you've seen a weird dynamic that even among the opposition, it's caused a fissure because you have like the two-time presidential candidate, Enrique Caprilyos Radonski, who ran against Chavez right before Chavez died. And then Maduro after Chavez died, he's actually come out against like the idea of like a military intervention. And it's even said that ultimately like these people in D.C. are just going to try to like foment a civil war.

It's not going to be a clean thing. And that also the, the drug. type of trafficking charges they're accusing the Venezuelan government are of it are just spurious and there are like factions on the ground of like the opposition in Venezuela that do have beef with the Venezuelan government they have grievances whether it's on economic policy or like the distribution of like the rents but the red line is the military intervention and it's caused like a huge fissure where really the monolithic support for this regime change intervention is among opposition that's in south florida the expat community there that's just on their computer

talking smack and just getting their minds warped by regime jane propaganda from like the neoconservative and the cuban set there but it's really not as monolithically like supported in venezuela and i'd also um tie in this into iran with the 12-day war there you actually did see a kind of nationalism emerged there too where some opposition forces actually and reform is actually kind of gravitated toward the Iranian state. So these type of punitive strikes do create rally around the flag effects. Yeah. Well, and it is important too back to, you know, Iran and what you were saying earlier about and I think this has got to be the key to the thing. Well, I guess there are two major choices, right? One is they just really pissed off the American empire by reaching out to the bricks

and doing everything they can to stick their thumb. in the eye of the United States right when they should be kissing up, right? Which is a lot. And back to Palace, Palace also talked about years ago, about, and you refer to this a little bit obliquely, but where Chavez was essentially trying to elbow out the IMF and was telling Latin American nations,

I'll give you loans at reasonable interest rates. And they won't be an excuse to gangsterize you out of your property. You just pay me back. It'll be fine. And they really hated. that. So it makes sense that that's what they really hate about the guy. You know, when I was Googling about the oil companies and Venezuela, I found a lot of stories where Houston is telling Washington, please lift the sanctions. No, no, not more sanctions. You're going to destabilize the

oil business there. We're trying to do business. They're on the side of reason most of the time or at least maybe that's just Chevron and maybe that's just, you know, was it a sitcom gas because I also read a thing by Harrison Berger in the American conservative magazine about how Exxon, Standard Oil of New Jersey, they've been pushing for regime change in Venezuela and sponsoring the think tanks that are pushing this agenda in Washington now. So maybe it's both of those things. But, you know, again, Trump said he offered everything. So Venezuela obviously wants no beef with the United States.

They're trying to give in on as much. as they can now to prevent it. But I wonder what you think, like, is there any kind of final straw here or just Rubio got in the presidency here? And he's the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, too. And so we're just stuck with Trump thinking whatever Rubio told him to think or what is going on. Well, on the oil thing, and here's another kind of paradoxical thing that's very similar to the point we were talking about Maria Corona Machado and how the strategy that,

the U.S. is implementing almost like undermines what they're trying to achieve. If you turn this whole venture, is it going to lead not to like a regime change, but actually like a kind of like regime destruction that will create a failed state. That is at the worst environment for oil extraction, the possible. You want to have like an actual like strong state structure that can actually like facilitate private enterprise and bring in foreign investment and engineers to extract the oil. Like, turning into a war zone, that's just not going to work. And this is what just shows how hairbrained is.

Well, now to the Rubio point, the second Trump administration has become more floridified, if you will. It has a stronger Florida influence, whether you look at Pam Bondi or Marco Rubio in this administration. So they're really catering to this weird Cuban, of Zionist, accelerationist, axis in the national security establishment that is going to take very punitive measures, especially against Iran and Venezuela. There's the issue linkage there. And this faction is very much in control because when I look at the national security establishment in the U.S., I just see multiple factions when you have like liberal

internationalists that want to go toe to toe with Russia. You got the China Hawks. And then you have this Cook, Zionist, accelerationist faction that will make, they'll pack with another set of expats with grievances, whether it's Cubans or Venezuelans. And these guys are very much in control. And with Rubio in the mix as Secretary of State, of course, he's going to have disproportionate influence in terms of where he wants foreign policy priorities directed. And I also add, too, with this type of regime change venture in Venezuela, it'll create a

refugee crisis. And that's going to make everybody in Florida that loves cheap labor that wants to turn Florida into just a Latin American style Latifundia with cheap labor. Oh, they're going to love that when that refugee crisis happens so they can import a ton of people and just continue the displacement of American workers as well. Yeah. Yeah, people, I think, are very right to point out that the Democrats like all this immigration legal and illegal because it creates future Democratic voters, and I think that's right. But the other half of that is big business. Cheap labor, cheap voters.

But yeah, they need that downward pressure on labor by scaring the people at the lowest end of the labor force into thinking that, boy, I better not ask for a race now or I'm going to get replaced. And all that, of course, is to counteract the effects of inflationary money. And because there's upward pressure on all prices everywhere, but if you're running a business, upward pressure on wages is your biggest problem. And so if you can import a bunch of cheaper workers, then you do that. And the overall, you know, consequences for the population at large, you know, are going to have to wait.

Oh, it's a regime bonanza when you think about it because it satisfies many factors of the regime. You already have people like Matt Iglesias, who is a person of Cuban Jewish extraction that's called for one billion Americans through mass migration. this guy is an ostensive liberal and these type of people it's perfect because you get to satisfy the regime change fanatics or those who want to stick it to Venezuela and stick it to any country that challenges Israel as well as also just bring in a bunch of cheap labor to satisfy the business lobby and people that want to promote diversity you're hitting every regime change a regime faction checkbox there and it's it's a it's a bonanza for them and that's why it's honestly why you don't really see a lot of people talking about Venezuela to be honest because of most of these people frankly they they don't want to say it publicly but they actually kind of like the idea of having this regime changing regardless of how it goes because one way or the other they're going to get a bunch of refugees that they're just going to integrate into the economy and continue this fake economy going

yeah well good and then that'll be an excuse to bring more troops out into the street to assist ICE in deporting them all. It'll be great. Strategy of tension. Yep. Government will just grow and grow and grow from all directions. Yes. All right.

Well, listen, man, thank you so much for being part of the Institute and all your great journalism and this great piece that you wrote for since 30 years of failure, how U.S. Venezuela relations spiraled into military confrontation by Jose Nino and he's deputy editor over at Headline USA and you find him regularly at Libertarian Institute.org as well. Thank you, man. No problem.

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