The Dispatch Podcast - The Pentagon’s Unprecedented Plan for Venezuelan Oil

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Mike Nelson to discuss the Trump administration’s oil deal with Venezuela and the state of the Iran war six months in. The Agenda: ��Venezuela oil deal —Delcy Rodríguez’s presidency — “We should have the taken the oil!” —The Venezuela model in Iran — “No, Iran is not winning” —NWYT: Milos Yiannopoulos’ deportation Show notes: —Wall Street Journal's reporting on the oil deal —Washington Post reporting on U.S. military leadership The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Don't miss the new season of North of North starting September 8th on CBC Gem. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we return to Venezuela and discuss what President Trump is calling, quote, the biggest oil deal in history, unquote. And then Iran, what is the state of the war six months in? And finally, a true not worth your time, the deportation of Milo Yanopolis. I'm joined today by the dispatch's editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, national correspondent Kevin Williamson, and dispatch contributor retired specials. Forces Officer, Mike Nelson. Let's dive right in. Gentlemen, I want to start today on Venezuela. President Trump, late last week, announced with great fanfare, a deal that the United States had struck with the leadership of Venezuela that would give the United States

access to the vast proven oil reserves of Venezuela. After the capture of Nicolas Maduro and the U.S. decision to shore up the unelected socialist government of Delci Rodriguez, the Trump administration had pushed U.S. oil companies to invest in Venezuela's oil industry and didn't make a lot of progress. Now, it appears the investment is coming for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital with U.S. taxpayers slated to take up to a 35 percent stake in the company. Let me, for the purposes of level setting, read the top of a very detailed and comprehensive Wall Street Journal article about this published over the weekend. President Trump spent months declaring his ouster a Venezuela's leader had secured

the country's oil for America. When U.S. energy companies resisted investing at the speed scale he wanted, his administration devised an extraordinary solution to turn his vision into reality, make the U.S. government itself an investor. The agreement announced Friday evening, would transform the U.S. government from a broker of American oil investments in Venezuela to an investor itself. It would give Washington a direct financial stake in a private company that would be granted centuries-long rights to some of the world's largest proven oil reserves and tie the U.S. more closely to the unelected government that is granting those rights. The private company, led by controversial Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, would have the opportunity

to develop 17 oil fields said to contain 65 billion. barrels of oil or one-fifth of the country's reserves. The Pentagon and a striking expansion of its remit will finance the oil venture and reap the rewards of its future output. Kevin, when you saw this news and read about what the president was announcing, what was your first reaction? Uh, gosh. I kind of tripped over the word controversial in that Wall Street Journal story. Because controversial is a very mild way to put it. Betancor is a person who has an arrest warrant out for him in Switzerland and I think one in Spain as well for money laundering for a case involving embezzlement from the Venezuelan state oil company. So the scheme in question in which some other people have been charged with he has not been charged with anything yet, we should be clear.

And the oil company, his company, has put out a statement saying he's not been charged with any crime in any jurisdiction. Right. But that's because they haven't arrested him in Switzerland. They treasure after they arrest you. They're not the other way around. Anyway, so the scheme was essentially they borrowed a bunch of money from the state oil company and then repaid it in a different foreign currency at an inflated rate to put money in their own pockets, basically, so they could pay the loan back with discounted, discounted dollars. And a pretty old-fashioned kind of banana republic sort of scheme. And this is the guy that we apparently have decided to go into business with. There was actually

talk of sanctioning him, the U.S. government sanctioning him a few months ago, because of his role in some of this stuff, and now we've decided that rather than being a targeted sanctions, he's a likely business partner. It's a pretty scammie-looking thing in the sense that apparently we're taking, we, the Pentagon is taking a 35% stake in this company in exchange for approximately no money, whatever capital this company is going to use to try to develop its resources that it will have access to in Venezuela's going to have to apparently come from somewhere else. There's not going to be much money-changing hands. So it's essentially a Pentagon piece of paper offering a backstop to these guys saying these guys, criminals or not, are our guys.

and they have the support of the U.S. Department of Defense, which I think is probably not the right way to go about structuring an oil deal. A lot of the guys in Texas and elsewhere kind of upset about this. They're like, hey, why do we have the U.S. government subsidizing new competition for us? We've got plenty of oil and gas to develop here on our own. And if we thought it was a good investment, we would be investing there ourselves, but we think it's not a good investment because obviously Venezuela is an unstable place. What's going to happen there after the Trump administration is no longer there to backstop the unelected dictatorial government we put in place there is anybody's guess. But also, it's probably worth pointing out that there's no oil and gas.

There's a whole lot of reserves there, but there's not much being produced right now because they have been a socialist country for a long time, and they've managed to destroy their one very, very profitable industry. So they're producing very little petroleum right now. They are years away, by most estimates, from being able to get any sort of significant production online, which is going to take a lot of investment. And there aren't very many people there who want to invest other than this guy who is striking up a deal with the Trump administration who may or may not go to jail as a money launderer and embezzler. So, yeah, a very Trumpian kind of deal right there. I mean, it's just great. You know, try to get a little something for nothing and get into bed with some possible criminals to do so. That's a very good summary.

I should point out that the Washington Post has reported that the Trump administration had leaned on Swiss authorities. to camp down their investigations of Betancourt because he is a known entity inside of Trump world and a friendly player. They did, yeah. And apparently, so there was travel restrictions on him in the UK where he, I guess, lives, and those were lifted,

but they're apparently still request to arrest him out for the U.S. government and a few others from the Swiss and the Spanish, I want to say. I mean, it was very useful. I learned some things. Summary from Kevin. We should also just say that being a close, confidant of Delci Rodriguez for the last 10 years, by itself means that you're a criminal in some way.

Yes. Because it's a criminal regime. The only way you're allowed to, like, make intense wild profits from this criminal regime is if you were on the inside, it's like becoming a new Russian oligarch in Putin's Russia. You are either on Team Putin or you're not at this point, right? And all the reporting says that he was a close, you know, part of the Delsi Rodriguez, I don't know if the phrase is inner circle or something like that. Like, this has been a gross, corrupt criminal dictatorship for a very long time. You don't get rich with your government contacts unless you're a criminal. I mean, to one extent or another, whether you broke some actual law we can talk about later.

Well, let's go deeper on that. The Trump administration would say, look, we put Delci Rodriguez in. After having teed this up in advance of the arrest of Nicolas Maduro, we've worked well with her since she's been, you know, at least by title in charge of the country. She has agreed to do these kinds of deals with the United States. Remember, President Trump was talking about this in the context of Venezuela within, I think, hours or at least days of the capture of Maduro. He talked about the United States working with Venezuela's oil company. There was that Pentagon press conference where there was this disconnect between some other U.S. officials who were talking about this in sort of the kind of terms that we had grown accustomed to the United States.

They were spinning a story. And Donald Trump came in and said in effect, no, this is what we're doing. We're going in. So we was talking about the United States taking this. And Delci Rodriguez has proven a pliable and in some cases eager ally, even as she claims that she's independent and she's not being pushed around. wouldn't it make sense, Jonah, to work with somebody like Bettencourt who knows her well and has been dealing with them, even if she's, you know, this is ugly business. This is gross. You got to get your hand stirred. But sure. If you're working backwards from the premise that the point of invading Venezuela was to take the oil, then yeah, sure. Like, you leave the regime in place. When you say we put Delsey in, we didn't put Delsey in. Delsey was the next in line to power. to be, you know, essentially the dictator because she was the vice president of Venezuela. We did not have regime change in Venezuela. And so, sure, if the whole theory is that we did this as an imperial adventure to seize resources, that makes total sense.

The problem is I didn't think that that's what this country was supposed to be about, at least not anymore. And moreover, so everyone, not you guys, but there are a lot of people out there who think these are fissidious objections. But first of all, we have been saying that we want to have elections there. And I was willing to actually cut Marco Rubio and some people some slack on this because you can't just flip on a switch and have elections in a country. We've kind of learned that. And I still would kind of like to believe that Rubio would like to have, you know, the opposition have free and fair elections and have a move it back towards a democracy. Here's the problem.

This is going to be very unpopular in Venezuela. The whole reason why the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela exists is to stop the gringoes from stealing our resources. That's why they nationalize the oil industry in the first place. This runs counter to a deep-seated sense of resentment in lots of South America or Latin America, but particularly in Venezuela. And so I'm not saying it definitely won't be popular. I think it won't be popular. The left there is already screaming about this. But this does make it very unlike.

that Trump is going to push for elections anytime soon. Because he's got this deal with the regime as it stands. He doesn't want to risk having it voted out of office and particularly on the back of an election that is all about independence for Venezuela and vote the gringoes out. So now we have this sunk cost problem of having to defend this oil deal in Trump's ego,

which he's, remember, he's been talking about taking oil from people we go to war with for very, very long time. And so that means for sure there's going to be no acceleration of democratic efforts of any kind for the remainder of Trump's presidency. And so that's a problem, right? I mean, like, basically the idea of the Pentagon having this stake is a problem, right? It's basically like the IRGC model of national defense. The IRGC basically owns somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the Iranian economy,

and that's one of the reasons why it's so correct. and ask backward now. You just don't want the Pentagon getting into the grabbing oil for profit, let's get a stake business. There's an incredible moral hazard, which Kevin touched on in terms of our own oil industry. Part of this deal is that we get an X amount of oil at cost, which means like the price that we get is not based on where the market is, which makes it very difficult to create an incentive structure for private firms to go in and invest in all of this, because that means, you know, in an industry that basically runs on the profits from the boom times, if you're going to say during the boom times, like 25 to 50 percent of the oil you're getting

out of the ground, you can't collect any additional profit off of, is just going to make it much less attractive. It's also not clear who we is in that sentence? Yes. So there's so many opaque things about this. There's a lot of effects we don't have. But at the end of the day, I mean, I think the Wall Street Journal is right about this. This is basically the Godfather 2 model.

We now have a government that we can do business with. And it's grotesque. And there's reporting to suggest that, as I've been saying and other people have been saying on this podcast for a long time now, that this was the model that Trump had in mind about the Iran War, too. And that means that we have a military that is focused, at least in no insignificant part, on imperial wars of conquest and aggrandizement. And that's grotesque. There's just a little bit of question begging in here to that I'd just like to address

real quick before we move on, which is the notion that this is going to be profitable somehow. Right. You know, as P.J. O'Rourke famously observed in Iraq, man, it's really expensive to steal oil. You know, doing this sort of thing rather than just buying oil at market prices is almost never something that's going to work out from an economic point of view. And it's not as though we've got U.S. refinery saying, man, what we could really use, you know, it's just some more crude oil because we just don't have access to the stuff we need to put into our

refineries to make gasoline and other fuels out of. It's just not really the case. If we were some, you know, landlocked, resource-strapped country that didn't have access to that sort of thing, maybe in a sense that would make some kind of sense. But there's one thing we don't want for in the United States of America right now. It's crude oil and natural gas. We've got plenty of this stuff. And the reason that prices are high have to do with geopolitical conditions, not just access to raw amounts of raw materials. Yeah, one of the arguments you are hearing from enthusiasts supporting the deal is that this will help the United States relieve the burden of having to work with Canadians on

taking its oil because we're in these trade wars right now, so we'd rather go and do a deal with the Venezuelans. It should be pointed out just for purposes of accuracy. That's not going to happen right away. I mean, you have some people in Trump world suggesting that this will provide immediate relief on gas prices today. It's economically illiterate. Even the most bullish people about this, I mean, the all-bought-in people agree it's going to be a couple years. At least.

If everything goes right for this stuff to get online. So, like, it ain't going to lower your gas prices before the midterms. And when has everything not gone to plan in Venezuela? Right. Yeah, right. All right. we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life?

You know the same way you can skip an ad. I get it. I'm Siaiaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy roll.

ride. Don't miss the new season of North of North starting September 8th on CBC Gem. And we're back. You're listening to the Dismatch podcast. Let's jump in. Mike, both Kevin and Jonah have made reference to Donald Trump's now famous proclamations that the United States should have simply taken the oil in Iraq. It was one of his main, arguably his main critique of George W. Bush and the prosecution of the Iraq war. And when we got out, we should have taken, remember this. When we got out, we should have taken the oil. I'll never forget, some of the pundits, most of them they don't have the brains they were born with.

They said, they're talking about a sovereign country, Iraq, crooked as hell. How about bringing baskets of money, millions and millions of dollars, and handing it out? I want to know who are the soldiers that had that job? Because I think they're living very well right now, whoever they may be. but think of it the money that went out the money we've spent probably probably four trillion dollars over the last 15 years in the middle east a lot to ask about there what's wrong with that mike well first of all uh i hate you so much for make it be listening to that i remember during oi f one in 2003 handing out big stacks of cash as part of you know rebuilding the facilities protection

So I was one of those soldiers who was handing out all the cash. And I am not living, you know, high off the profits of skimming off the top as much as the president might believe. Well, if you remember, actually, let me jump in there. If you remember, you know, Donald Trump is saying we should go and we should take the old. He's shrugging off the very idea of sovereignty, something that he would think would get the the Nat right folks pretty excited. It didn't. But there was sort of a minor one day, two-day controversy over the fact that he seemed to be suggesting that U.S. soldiers were profited. from this because they went in and, you know, took the oil and were giving money away. So, I mean, that was objectionable to calumny against the people fighting our wars.

But at the same time, Trump said this about the U.S. taking the oil. And he was unapologetic about the sort of neo-imperialist argument he was making. And he made it so often that it became one of those things that ought to have been so crazy and so shocking to the conscience that the United States, that a potential leader of the United States would argue that we should just in a rapacious manner go in and seize the oil and grab it. That wasn't the controversy at the time.

Right. Anyway, Mike, on those comments. Well, I do find it funny that he was voicing an objection to the idea, without any evidence, of the mingling of public funds with private profit and corruption. He was concerned that there were these individual soldiers who were scamming off the top,

and now we are doing it to the tune of Bill, as official government policy. But I think this goes back to the beginning of the year when we first seized Nicholas Maduro on this podcast. We talked about what this augured for the future. And there was the potential, hopefully, that we could see a change

for the Venezuelan people, but that there weren't indications yet. The president wasn't saying anything yet. And I think what we're seeing now is we've codified, we are not going to try to change Venezuela for the better. We are going to allow Venezuela to change us for the worse.

Although, you know, I think the president's instance, probably were already going there, as we saw, that he's always seen no problem or distinction between the use of legitimate U.S. power and turning that into a profit motive. And I do think there's a problem with the United States viewing its military arm as a means by which to extract profit. Not necessarily, like, we should fight for resources. We should fight for maintenance of the international order that allows the free flow of trade and things like that. But the idea that in this day and age the United States is doing it for pure seizure of assets, that's, I think, a different

thing than the United States population is comfortable with, of what we use force for. We should, I mean, just to underscore that point, he has said many times, I've heard clips of him a million times saying, to the victor go the spoils. Have you ever heard that phrase? Right. Right. That's what he's talking about. Right. And again, it kind of goes to like the way he said in that clip. You know, people talk about sovereignty. Come on. It's a rock. And, you know, he's showing he's, there are different levels of sovereignty. There's the United States, and we are sovereign, and no one can interfere with us, and we get upset when Europeans' voice concern about some of the things we do,

but we can do whatever we want and run Rothschott in these other countries that are, you know, third world countries that we can intervene in. Right now, what we're talking about, and again, this is not going to demonstrate any value probably within the rest of the president's administration, but we're talking about 20% of Venezuela's oil revenue going to that and court, and the U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon, taking a 35% stake in that. This is the Office of Strategic Capital, which is meant to help re-industrialize or reinvest in the defense industrial base, which is woefully inadequate right now, not only for the

threats we are currently facing, but more importantly for the threats that are coming around the corner and anticipating that. And instead, we're using it as a tool of profit for the president's friends. People should remember, this is the same office that provided $620 million to a company that has a large ownership stake from the Trump boys, Donald Jr. and Eric. So it's been used, like many other things, as a tool to facilitate profit for the president's allies, but also we've seen it here. You know, the United States government taking an ownership stake of U.S. businesses. Now we're extending that across oceans and doing it internationally. One of the things you hear from supporters of this deal is that this is really just Donald Trump

making right the injustices of 2007-era Chavez era seizure of work that the U.S. was doing, American companies were doing in Venezuela, where the Venezuelan government, in effect, declared they were working on nationalizing the oil industry. It had already been largely nationalized, but they were working on that. They seized oil fields. They insisted that the U.S. oil companies working in the country had to cede at least 60 percent of these projects to the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and U.S. oil companies were unhappy. Some of them pulled out, one of them stayed, and that this is simply making up for what the

Chevisistas had done 20 years ago. Kevin, do you buy that argument? Well, no, of course not. Two things. One, there are international arbitration procedures for dealing with that sort of thing. But more important is that I've spent a lot of time. writing about the oil and gas industry over the years. And I've had a lot of interesting conversations with senior people in that world. And they are big boys and girls. They know what they're doing. They know that when they go into business with the government in a place like Venezuela or, you know, these Middle Eastern dictatorships or some of these unstable African countries that they're taking on various kinds of political risks, they don't really have a great deal of choice in that, in that in most

places, the oil companies that are available to do business with, are state-owned oil companies. That's just a norm throughout most of the world. It's not the norm in the United States, but it's the norm everywhere else. So they know that they are getting into bed with some pretty dubious characters from time to time. It's just part of the way their business works. And you know what? Chevron's going to be fine. Exxon's going to be fine. Yeah, it hurt to get mistreated the way they were in Venezuela and to get pillaged the way they were. This has happened to them before. It's going to happen to them again. It's part of the nature of their business. And they're going to be fine. They're going to get through it. And yeah, I just have all the people in the world that I got to worry about

a whole lot. And I'm on their side. You like, I'm pretty pro oil and gas company guy. I think they do good things for the world. I think we need oil and gas. But they don't really need this degree of political handholding. They're going to be just fine. Well, also, I'm sorry, like the more obvious reason why Trump, well, that explanation makes no sense, is that this has been Trump's for decades. Since the 90s. Yeah. And the idea that, like, I mean, this is a classic example of don't take Trump seriously

or literally take them hypothetically. It's another one of these pretextual things where people, look, we have every reason to be pissed off about what Maduro and Chavez did about our oil industry guys down there. And it's all bad. But, like, that's not why Trump did it. Like, it's just simply not why Trump did it. And you can say, well, but they had it coming. I was like, okay.

But, like, I don't, I think it's bad for America. that we have a president doing this. It is not like what the Venezuelans do or don't deserve in some hypothetical context. He's also not returning it to the aggrieved parties, right? So it's maybe taking from the Venezuelans, but it's not giving back to the parties that he claims were aggrieved 10 to 15 years ago.

Yeah. So let's wrap up this conversation with a moment, at least, on elections. There was at the beginning of this, after the seizure of Nicholas Maduro, at least some happy talk about the possibility of election. Delci Rodriguez was potentially going to be an interim. She was somebody we could work with.

We thought we could do this. And then we would move at some point. Some people argued pretty quickly to elections. There really isn't any significant talk about elections at this point. Strange for a group of people who obviously care in such a profound way about free and fair elections and democratic orderliness and the peaceful transfer of power through democratic means. I am shocked that they have not exported this positive, democratic, constitutionalist set of values to Venezuela yet. It's just, it's amazing to me. They've not been able to take these heartfelt commitments they have to the Democratic project and make them work in Venezuela.

And that's exactly what I was going to say. You took the words out of my mouth. I caught Ted Cruz yesterday appearing on Meet the Press with Kristen Welker. She asked him about elections. Cruz was one of the Republicans who had. made the case that we should move quickly to elections. And she asked him about the possibility that we would not be moving quickly to elections, that doing deals like this with Delci Rodriguez further entrenched her in power and wondered about

what Cruz thought about elections. Cruz, who is, you know, I think he's going to run for president in 2028. I think he's doing the kinds of things that one might do if you wanted to run as the conservative free market, sort of movement conservative alternative to the new right in J.D. Vance praised this deal, praised the terms of the deal itself and had no criticism, at least no criticism that I heard of the U.S. government taking stakes in another company, but did, I think, rather meekly for Ted Cruz. We know what Ted Cruz sounds like when he's really fired up about something, and he sort of meekly said, yeah, elections would be nice. And we got to the point,

Jonah where the Republican Party in this era just can no longer be thought of as the party that cares about exporting democracy, human rights, consent of the governed, overseas? I mean, am I just hopelessly naive? Is it hopelessly anachronistic to have such thoughts? Welcome to the party, Steve. For the most part, yeah. I mean, here's one way to think about it. We talked about this in our May a couple of couple episodes, one of the things we got wrong episode. One of the things I have a new found respect for are the arguments about the authority to declare war belonging to Congress, which national security types for most of my life kind of like rolled our eyes at a lot of the

arguments and the war powers resolution arguments and all that kind of stuff. And one of the reasons why even the most hardcore constitutionally fastidious people, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, even John Yoo and all these types, right, is that they've convinced themselves that there's this national security exception for the Constitution that wouldn't apply to domestic stuff, that wouldn't apply to like interstate commerce or something, or even the First Amendment or any of that kind of stuff. And I think that that's what's being tapped into here

is the America F yeah vibe on it. And this is the kind of thing, you know, for Ted Cruz, whatever he actually thinks about this situation, he knows, not to be condescending about it, but the Bubba vote just thinks, or at least he's guessing that they just think this is kind of cool and smart and all of that and they just don't want to get on the wrong side of it.

Like it's criticizing the commander-in-chief, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's what's going on. And I think that's the last thing of all the deformations of the GOP and the right. If they ever ultimately go away, that will be the last one. I think we've come a long way from J.FK's inaugural speech

about bearing any burden, opposing any foe, for the advancement of freedom. to where we are now. And I don't think it's just this that we've seen that the GOP has kind of sold out the old Reaganite ideas of standing up for liberty and democracy and more for the advancement of hard power as defined by what the MAGA movement currently wants. We're not only seeing it here in Venezuela, but we're seeing it all over Europe. We're seeing, you know, bad-mouthing the allies who are standing up for freedom and individual liberty and promoting the allies who want to crack down on the kinds of pluralistic democracies that we've normally sponsored and might even be

pro-Putton, as long as they're willing to go along with J.D. Vance's domestic ideas. Kevin, what are the long-term implications of that? I mean, it's easy to lose sight sometimes of sort of what a dramatic change this is in the long scope of history because we're caught up day to day. I mean, we're now doing our best to break down and understand and analyze this new deal, this announcement, even the company that the Trump administration will be working with put out a statement saying, like, you can't expect us. They were asked about sort of what they'll be doing this. You can't expect us to understand what exactly we're going to be doing in this context.

So we're trying to make sense of something that's very, at this point, ill-formed and probably ill-conceived. But in the big picture, that is a pretty dramatic. If you date it back to Ronald Reagan, I mean, you go to look at George W. Bush's second inaugural was criticized, even by enthusiasts of democracy abroad. in democracy promotion, like me, thought it was sort of too much, too idealistic. Where does that put these arguments at this time? And can you make the case that, in part, what we're seeing today from Trump is a reaction

to that, what we saw in Iraq, what we saw in Afghanistan with the U.S. government, the U.S. trying to take democracy and our views of universal rights of. man and export them. Yeah. You know, I don't want to revisit the Mayaculpa episode, but I was just thinking on top of the list of things I've been wrong about was Ted Cruz. Just what a useless fart worker that guy's turned out to be. But yeah, I think that, okay, the sort of America First label, America First rhetoric all has a history that is ugly and not very helpful. But almost all of us are America firsters when it comes to

policy questions. I mean, mainstream conservatives, mainstream progressives, we're all pretty much America first years in the sense that we believe U.S. foreign policy ultimately should serve U.S. interests. We believe U.S. immigration policy should serve U.S. interests. We believe all sorts of U.S. policy should serve U.S. interests first. The problem is that we have a group of people in charge who don't understand what those interests actually are who confuse U.S. interests with their own weird cultural insecurities and culture conf issues. and who also, of course, have their thinking distorted by the opportunity to make money for themselves and their friends

and they need to hold on to political power because they don't want to get indicted and go to prison. So if I thought that we had a U.S. policy that actually was pursuing U.S. interests in an interesting, useful, intelligent, well-thought-out way, I would be curious about that and would want to talk about it. But we don't have a policy like that. And one of the things that is, I think, misunderstood about,

from that famous JFK speech through the Reagan era and onward is that while we had this very idealistic rhetoric from Kennedy and from Reagan who were famously great speechmakers, we pursued a policy that assumed that building a freer, more stable, less war-torn, more democratic world was something that served American interests. Because we're really good at that game. We're good at capitalism. We're good at exporting stuff. We're good at playing in a global marketplace.

We're good at starting new businesses. We are good at being a leader of, you know, multinational security alliances. That's something we've been good at for a long time. We've been proven that since the 1940s. And now what we're doing is exhibiting this weird case of, you know, it looks like Orban envy, but it's really China envy, I think, that there's this style that autocratic governments have of presenting themselves as being, you know, very powerful, very decisive, able to do things. And autocratic governments can do things

in a very decisive and immediate way that democratic governments can't because they don't have to worry about consensus and democratic buy-in and, you know, consent of the governed and all the rest of that stuff. But that's not actually a game we've ever really been that good at as a country, and it's not one that really has ever very effectively served our long-term interests. We had a great 20th century and early 21st century largely because of this liberal international order that everyone likes to sneer at and piss on, it really, really did serve American interests. Now, it also meant that over time that there were a few hundred million Indians who got to eat, who didn't get to eat before, and a lot of people in a lot of other poor countries whose lives

were improved radically, even in China, which is an imperfect example for all sorts of reasons that we've gone into and will no doubt revisit again in the future. But we really did thrive as a country while building a much better world, and we continue to do that. There's a reason that since the financial crisis, our economy is recovered and grown so much relative to the rich countries of Western Europe and the rest of the world. It's because we're good at that game. It serves our interests. And this kind of, you know, Turkey-style Middle Eastern pissant potentate style, autocratic corporatism. And for people who've read their Jonah Goldberg, they know that this is classic fascist economics. They don't understand this is not a game that is good for the United States.

So you can call it America first. You can say we're serving American interests, but you're not. And This is an empirical question. This is something we can judge. We can look at evidence for and see how well has this worked for us in the past. How well is it working now? If it turned out perfectly exactly the way that they're selling it, that still actually wouldn't be a great win for American interest because, again, we already have a pretty successful global energy business

and we don't need to create a new subsidized competitor for them. So, no, I'm all for going out and doing what's best for the country, of course. But this isn't it. Right. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join, and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month for free.

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Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Mike, if Venezuela has gone I mean, I think what Kevin says is true. I mean, in many respects, Venezuela has gone just as the Trump administration would have wanted it to go.

If we could have been in the discussions with Trump administration, national security officials in the days before the capture of Nicolas Maduro, and we could walk them through where we are some eight months later, I think most people would look at where we are in Venezuela and say, that's more or less it. and now we are going to finally and in fact take the oil. This is a pure and clean win for the United States. And, you know, let people like Jonah and Kevin and you and me worry about the niceties of international relations. We're sort of the hard-headed realists. We understand how the world works and let those guys go whine about their theories. They cannot say the same thing about Iran. We are six months in to Iran these days.

This happened, I believe it was Friday, was the six-month anniversary of the invasion, if I'm not mistaken. And as we've discussed here many times, things have not gone according to plan. And the plan was, to a certain extent, the Venezuela plan. And it simply didn't work. You have, over our many discussions about this spanning the past six months, often gone back to your sort of the list of objectives that the Trump administration shared. They were evolving objectives. You know, one list would have three. Another list would have seven.

Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they changed. They often changed based on whatever limited success we were having in the moment. But as you look back on the past six months and where we are today, what's your assessment? So you're right that the Trump administration would probably, you know, if there's a part in Paradise Lost where God shows out, Adam, the future of human exists, says if you could do this all over again, would you still bite the apple? And he says, yes, because it gave us the free will to love you, whereas we didn't have it before. It's not quite the same thing. The Trump administration would still look at Venezuela for the same things that we're seeing concern about how this will play out in the future.

They would say, this is all great. It's like you said, playing out the way we would want. The other thing that they take away from this is the idea that it was replicatable, that what they did in Venezuela would be the model for Iran. a 24 to 48-hour overwhelming, you know, decapitation strike. The president probably didn't look too much at the differences of the details in the plan. He believed his hype man in chief, Pete Hagseth, telling him that they could do whatever they wanted to, and they executed accordingly. There are a lot of problems that cannot be undone, that from inception were baked into the problems of Iran and will continue to be so. And one of them is the president had no idea what he was trying to actually accomplish. they have now kind of solidified on the Iran will never get a nuclear weapon, which is a virtuous and good goal.

It is also not one we have done anything to advance in the past six months. They did a great deal during Operation Midnight Hammer a year ago in June of 2025 when they struck the nuclear facilities, several of them. They have done nothing to strike any new nuclear infrastructure. They've done nothing to change the calculus of the Iranian regime. In fact, many people believe they probably calcified the desire to get a nuclear weapon in reaction to seeing the way that North Korea is treated and the way that they're treated. And then throughout this, throughout the six months, the administration pursued various means by which to accomplish whatever end they were currently saying was the end that they would accomplish. They seem to now have finalized or settled at least four now on probably the most effective means. which is locking in the blockade,

working to get limited transit through the Strait of Hormuz for our allies and ships that are aligned with us and using the economic tools at our disposal to increase the pressure on the regime. There are problems with that. The economic D-Day that Secretary Besant promised was not quite as crippling as he made it sound in advance. Partially that's because not a lot of countries

that trade with Iran had not entirely gone along with us. And then we also saw it. as played out in the Washington Post or as reported by the Washington Post over the weekend. This is causing strain on the services as a whole in their ability to keep forces forward projected in the Middle East. The three of the other combatant commanders, non-concured, with the retention of forces in Central Command, as well as the Navy as a service as a force provider. External to that story or extra to that story. What do you explain what non-concured means?

Sorry. Okay. Yeah. So every two weeks, unless there are exceptional circumstances, the Secretary of Defense, whoever that secretary is, gets what's called the S-Dob, the Secretary of Defense's orders book. He authorizes either the deployment or the extension of orders for every force around the globe personally. Normally, if you get an RFF, a request for forces,

one of the combatant command says, I need additional capabilities to do this. They send it back through the joint staff. It will be answered by one of the services as a service provider, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Space Force, and then that will go to the second. for approval and say yes. But before that, it will be staffed around the services to identify

risk and say, can we maintain this? European Command, Southern Command, and Pacific Command, all came back answering the question about extension of forces in the Central Command region and said, no, that is not so surprising because that is in direct competition with their interests. If you have a carrier strike group in SengCom, that means it's not available potentially for paycom to do what they want. And we just saw, we've withdrawn the carrier strike route from Paycom. So there is inherent risk that it makes sense that the Paycom commander would non-concur, saying, I don't agree with this extension. What is a little bit more of a red flag or a blinking red light is the chief of naval operations non-concurring, saying the United States Navy cannot provide

or continue to provide these forces enduring without breaking the force. Or I'm highlighting that that might come in the future. And non-concour just means we will follow out your orders, but we disagree with your reasoning. Correct. Correct. It's not a mutiny. It is just saying, this is my way of highlighting risk. And that's what we expect these commanders to do. And this is part, for the record, this is not the first time that non-concurs have happened. They happened back in the day when I was working at Suncom, the other geographic combatant commands would sometimes non-concure with things that we propose. But so while we are locked into this potentially long grinding economic toll that we're trying to take on Iran, it is not without risk. There are means that the president is going to have to

find to adjust and maintain that pressure while, you know, kind of mitigating the risk to the forces and the, and the services. But this still leaves the question, okay, so this is the most effective means to drive effects against the Iranians to what end? What is it at the end of that? When the Iranians finally cry uncle, what is it that we're actually trying to get them to agree to? Because the president is still wishy-washy as to what we're going to say, what does no nuclear weapon ever look like? And I think that the president is, still asleep at the wheel when it comes to that determination, because otherwise we're going to get something that looks a lot like the MOU or JCPOA 2.0. So, you know, going back to, we are in a better

place now probably in terms of strategy implementation than we were three weeks ago or a month ago. Now, this is overnight. We're recording this Monday morning. Overnight, the United States struck La Rock Island, because we saw the indications that the Iranians may try to reseed the straight-width mines and they conducted strikes against our forces in Jordan. So we have kind of come off. We've returned to kinetic activity in a limited way. But we still need an answer to the question is, what are we trying to accomplish at the end of this? I'd also point out not training to talk too much trash, but while we conducted the strikes against La Rock Island, the president posted AI slop that showed, Karg Island is currently, you know, being blown to Smitherians or something like that.

he's like a lot of things just reposting this drivel that is red meat to his base. But it's not entirely clear the president's sure what we're striking or why, because we weren't striking Carg Island. We were striking La Rock Island, different capability, not against the oil infrastructure, against their mining capabilities. So long story short, we are in a better place when we were a month ago, but we're still not in a good place, and that's largely because of the president's in attention. I mean, it would be surprising if President Trump actually did know what we were striking

given his attention to detail on sort of anything and everything but punishing his enemies. Kevin, I want to pick up on the point that Mike makes about progress. We have pretty consistently on this podcast through our discussions and debates about where things are going. I think a central theme has emerged. This was ill-conceived. It's not being well executed. And there's a likelihood that this leaves us in some ways worse off than we'd be if we had

never done these things. even if I think many of us agree with the idea of challenging the nature of the Iranian regime. And I'll continue to be the guy to insist on pointing out that this is illegal legal as well. You should every time it comes up, and you have every time it comes up. I think so. Setting aside that small point, I want to point to a piece published yesterday Sunday from Brett McGurk, who has served, he's a CNN national security analyst, has served in the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden in various advisory capacities,

who wrote under the headline, no, Tehran is not winning. He writes, since mid-July, the U.S. has reimposed its military blockade on Iranian ports and sanctions on Iran's oil trade. In parallel, the U.S. military has worked tirelessly to clear shipping lanes and help protect commercial ships transiting the strait. The result has been an effective blockade on Iranian oil shipments, with global shipments recovering and energy prices remaining remarkably stable. Bloomberg reported this week that oil flows through the strait have recovered to two-thirds of pre-war levels. That means pressure is now compounding on Iran and not the U.S. And if Iran loses its ability to hold the straight hostage, its leverage dissipates rapidly.

And he closes with this. Iran entered the war weakened by years of sanctions and economic mismanagement. Its position today is considered. worse. So six months in, despite all of the challenges, and we should point out that Breck McGurk is not having, despite having worked in all these administrations, he has certainly not seen as a, you know, pro-Trump voice in the media. He's been very critical in, I think, many of the ways that we have of this operation. Six months in, for all the bumbling, for all the poor planning, for all of the warning signs that the president has ignored, that sounds like progress, is it?

is certainly the case that we've made life worse for Iran and that we have weakened their position in the world, certainly. We've taken out a whole lot of their equipment. We've bombed various sites. We have imposed various kinds of costs on them. So, yeah, you can certainly do that. But as Michael points out, the question remains toward what end. The two-thirds thing, just assuming those numbers are true,

still taking a third of that oil off of the market, is huge. It's hugely significant. I've covered car wrecks where the guy had two-thirds of his head left and he didn't get through it. It wasn't good news that he had two-thirds of his head left. We've got two-thirds of that left. The economic sanctions, as I've written a few times, are going to continue to be ultimately ineffective because Iran's major buyer of its oil is China. And the Trump administration is not going to do anything about that. It is not going to launch a, you know, trade crusade or an economic crusade or a military can. campaign against China over its purchases of Iranian oil.

Probably won't even do it with India, which is another buyer. So Iran will have trouble getting that oil out if we continue to, obviously, to blockade the strait and interfere with that stuff. But how long we continue to do that and we'll be able to continue to do that is unclear. And Iran's partners around the world, China and Russia, namely, have the ability to wait out some of this. And China certainly has a long ability to wait out some of this stuff to see what happens in six months because, as we know, the Trump administration has a short attention span because

the president has a short attention span policy changes and what we're doing changes from day to day and from hour to hour and from tweet to tweet. So if you define success as can we make the Iranian suffer, can we make their government weaker, can we blow up their stuff, can we kill their soldiers? Yeah, we can do that all day. But it doesn't seem to be getting us closer to any real goal, which goes back to my earlier argument about our national interest is being pursued supposedly by a group of people who don't seem to understand what those interests actually are. And we went into Iran with,

not to repeat, Joan and Mike here, but, you know, 15 different justifications that we're, you know, kind of making the cycles through is almost being test marketed, it seemed like, you know, from time to time, well, this is why we're in Iran, this is why we're in Iran. And the truth is we're in Iran

because Trump wanted to be in Iran. He thought it'd be easy to do. He thought it'd be a big feather in his cap, and he could say, look, what I did, I did, Venezuela, then I did Iran. The United States is bestriding the war, world with the behemoth and or Colossus. And it's just not not working out that way. So again, I don't see anything that's happening in Iran that couldn't have been accomplished with a great

deal less expenditure, violence, disruption to energy markets and loss of life. Jonah, six months in, are you more optimistic than you were a month ago, three months ago? I mean, again, optimistic towards about what? I definitely think it's going better. I agree with Mike that it's gone better than it was a month ago. The thing is, like, that I keep thinking about, and I like the idea, I'm still bought in on the idea that the only way Iran is going to cease

to actually be a threat is if we get a regime change. But the reason why Trump will not forth, like, so one of the things that, you know, we've known this, Trump has said as much a dozen, two dozen times,

is he never wants to rule out anything because he wants to give all his options and he makes it sound like this is this great, sophisticated thing. He also doesn't want to rule out anything because the baby doesn't want to lose his bottle. And so he will not rule out the Venezuela model for Iran, right? Because he wants to prove himself right. This is something that he wants to do. And so the problem that I worry about is, I mean, failure is really bad, letting Iran have sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz

and coming away as a bloodied, embarrassed, superpower would be really, really, really bad for America and for the world, and it would be very emboldening for China and Russia and some other places. So that's a bad option. But the other thing I worry about is, so what does success look like? So like, let's say you actually do get regime change. It feels to me like the way you get regime change at this point is not the Rodriguez model. The way you get regime change at this point is Iran collapsing into some. civil war of some kind between rival elite factions and warlords and it looks a lot more like Beirut in the 1980s than it does like Venezuela in 2026. And that as a cold-hearted matter of

realist realpolitik foreign policy might be better than Iran, quote, winning. I can certainly make that case. But that doesn't get you the Delci Rodriguez model. It doesn't, it makes it more likely the American troops go boots go on the ground. And so I can say I'm more, I mean, optimistic means implies that I'm hoping for a certain result. And I don't know what result to hope for at this point. That's plausible. You know, I mean, like, I think it would be awesome if the Swiss decided, you know, we should get into the nation-building business. We're incorruptible. We're really efficient. like we'll parachute in, we'll convince everybody that we can't be, that we can be honest brokers,

and we'll run Iran and get it standing up as a, and we'll put it in Swiss receivership, that'd be awesome. I'm not optimistic for that because that's not possible, right? So, like, I don't know. I love the idea of that. It's fantastic. I mean, I would love it, you know, like, and... They could do us next.

So, like, I, you tell me what the best case scenario is, and I'll tell you whether or not I'm optimistic that we're heading in that direction, I think the best case scenario still looks pretty bad at this point in terms of a plausible scenario. And so I'm really just, I'm in a mood like where I basically like, I hope this turns out to have the least worst option happens and the least moral hazard is established by it. And that's about where I am. The problem that seems to me is that we went into Iran not willing to do less and not willing to do more. Right.

If denuclearization is actually our real goal here, we want to have a real strong, credible sense. that they are not going to have a nuclear program that not only requires regime change, that requires American people on the ground, walking around, taking stuff out of the country, blowing stuff up and killing some people who need killing. And not from the air, not with missiles and stuff, but actually going in, taking nuclear materials out of the country,

making sure that the machinery and whatnot has been destroyed and dismantled or taken away and helping their nuclear expert class to find new means of employment, such as pushing up daisies. It seems to me that three, Three months ago, some of the concern, much of the concern maybe, was that Iran had withstood the initial series of attacks that were meant to either provoke, cause regime change,

or to damage them beyond repair that would have gotten them to the negotiating table, that would have seen us to some sort of quick end. And at that time, I think the concern was that the Iranians had more will to wait us out. And that because it was a matter of regime survival, they understood that they weren't going to defeat us militarily, but that they could, for the purposes of, for real existential purposes, continue to wait us out and make this as difficult as it possibly was for the United States to withstand politically. Donald Trump would get bored of the war or get frustrated that oil prices were higher, whatever. And it was really just a contest of wills and the Iranian will was stronger than the American will. Now, though, it seems to me, particularly with respect, Mike, to what you said about this reporting of the Washington Post, the depletion of munitions, the concerns around the world about the U.S. being stretched too thin, that there's a real question about U.S. capabilities. Now, it's not just will.

And that, it seems to me, introduces an entirely new set of challenges and concerns that even if Donald Trump, I will say I'm a little surprised that Donald Trump hasn't folded sooner given the obvious political damage that this has done to him. Now, it may be the case that, you know, he's just being shown stories that tell him he's a magnificent and bold leader and he's not actually in touch with the polling and the public concern about what's happening. But now it seems to me that we have for deeper concern that the United States is exhausting our capabilities in a way that seems unimaginable, given the way that at least I used to think of our kind of inexhaustible supply of military, the things that contributed to our military might, which causes me long-term concern, even if there's short-term good news in the way that I think both you and Brett McGirk laid out. last week on Thursday, we ended with a discussion of somebody who really was worth our time. I want to end today with a discussion of somebody for whom not worth your time might have actually been coined. And that is Milo Yanopolis. Why are we talking about Milo Unopoulos? Because the Trump administration has seen to deport Milo Unopoulos from the United States for

overstaying a visa that apparently expired on July 22nd. And for anybody who's followed Milo Unapolis's, I don't know if you call it a career, what do you call it if you're just a sort of obnoxious, bigoted provocateur? A grift. Career, agrift. Infect. Yeah. I think very few people are shedding tears over his departure. However, given the fact that it comes after he had allied himself and had worked for Marjorie Taylor Green and the sort of MAGA faction that has gone anti-Trump, the question is, to the extent that we're going to have a serious discussion about Milo-Yanopolis departure from our shores,

is this simply retribution by the Trump administration for somebody who's no longer on the team in a way that Milo Yanopoulos was once on the team? Jonah, at least initially, you loved this story. I think the way that you put it, if I'm not revealing deep personal secrets that you share in Slack,

was you love this story more than anyone other than people you're related to. No, I said, I have, I have blood relatives. I love less than this story. Okay, close. Close. Yeah, so, and part of it has to do with the fact that, like, there was a time when Milo was the new hotness, and there were people who were trying to get me on board

and have meetings with him, all this kind of nonsense. And I was like, I want nothing to do with this guy. And this was very early in all of this stuff. This was back when Bannon made him the star, quote-unquote, reporter or something for Breitbart when he took over. Breitbart after Andrew died. And he wanted to make Breitport the platform for the alt-right. And one of the first things that got my attention from Milo

was his piece, I think he co-authored, defending all the neo-Nazis and Pepe of the Frog people and all the Nazi jokes because they were funny and isn't this great and everyone should lighten up and blah blah blah and I was like

okay so this guy's a jackass so and then he's like he's made things personal about me plenty of times I was one of the people who like pushed really hard to have him scrubbed from the CPAC

roster when he revealed all of his other stuff so I there is not a the CERN super collider does not have an instrument that can detect a particle that would metaphorically capture the amount of sympathy I have for Milo.

I think he is an absolutely horrible human being and a sad person in a lot of ways. That said, in the same way that, like, you know, the old expression, you can frame a guilty man, right? If you framed some mass murderer, I would have zero sympathy for the mass murderer. he got, you know, he deserved worse. I could still worry about what it means for the system. And if it's true, we don't really know. I mean, Laura Lumer, taking credit for something

is not what they would call unimpeachable evidence of something. She is taking credit for having pushed them to remove him. She tweeted, loomered, as if, like, that settles it, right? And so if the Department of Homeland Security is selectively deporting individuals, allocating resources they otherwise wouldn't to deport an individual because of political vindictiveness? That's super creepy.

I mean, there are creepier things, but it's super creepy. I mean, I should say, there are creepier things that the Trump administration's doing, in my opinion, but it's super creepy, and it should be explored.

But, like, it's weird. This shows you how messed up my brain is. I'm a big Seinfeld guy. There was the episode where Jay Peterman is trying to write his life, his memoirs, and the story ends with him he's returning a pair of pants to the store

and he ends up falling and getting mud on the very pair of pants that he was trying to return. And that scene just keeps coming into my head when I think about this Milo thing because he's been calling for people to get deported all over the place. He has this coming. The comeuppance is so fantastic,

but that doesn't mean we can't separate the serious issues from the unsurious person. Mike, have you paid any attention ever to Milo Yanapolis? And if so, why? A lot less, thank God, lately than I did or what I was forced to back maybe a decade ago. For the record, I don't believe the president listens to anything I say

or is even aware of who I am for all I know. But if and when the president ever decides to say, you know, throw Secretary Heggseth under the bus, I am absolutely going to say, Nelson, and I'm going to take credit for it. So I will pull a loomer and believe and take credit for, you know, the eventual ousting. I do, I agree, like, it is, there's something very rich about watching this troll who has, you know, demanded the inhuman and extrajudicial treatment of those he does not like getting basically just really kid gloves handling. You know, he got sent back to England,

where he's from, very, very peacefully. It wasn't like ice threw him to the ground. So there is zero sympathy for him. But I do find it problematic that even when targeted against the worst people, the tools of government tend to be used to settle personal grievances or who is loyal and who is not versus what they are actually meant to be used for. They are used universally without fear or favor. We kind of saw this a little bit with the Tate Brothers, where the administration went out of its way to extend extra protection and influence on the Hungarian government

to get them released to come here. Romanian. Oh, I'm sorry, the Romanian government. That's right. Sorry, the Romanian government. And now they've fallen out of favor, so they're doing nothing to help them any further. But I don't think that it goes back to what,

what we started the conversation with, with Venezuela. The president doesn't see any problem with using the tools of government to punish those that he either doesn't care about or hates and to use them to protect those that he does. Kevin, are you happy that Milo Unapolis is gone? Or does this give him sort of a bigger platform? I mean, are we going to have to hear more about this guy now that he's gone? I'm a little more sympathetic, I guess, than Jonah is, which would be impossible not to be, I suppose, according to his estimate. But, you know, I think that this episode is cruel and vicious and clearly vindictive and obviously driven by politics, and the English did nothing to deserve it.

Well, he's one of their citizens. They're responsible for him. They get him back. Return to Center. Circle of life. Carme is a B. I'm going to leave us right there. I'm tempted to tell a big story about the weekly standard and how our owners, when. I tried to get us out. I took the Weekly Standard out as a sponsor of CPAC when Milo Yanopolis was announced as a keynoteer. And we withdrew, I think it was, I don't know what it was, $50,000. We withdrew our sponsorship. And the first call I got from Matt Schlapp, who was the head of the American Conservative Union running. And still is.

And still is, was running CPAC, berated me and called me a coward and said, this is ridiculous. and I'm a, you know, cock, rhino, what have you. And then the owners of the owners. Sorry, go on. This is what I have to deal with with Jonah all the time. You hear him just laughing to himself. The owners of the Weekly Standard then took the money that we had withdrawn from the CPEC sponsorship and put it behind the Washington exam.

which was our sister publication and said that CPAC would still be getting its money from clarity media, which was the holding company. But then the pressure mounted on CPAC to withdraw the offer to Milo Yanopolis and a bunch of other people withdrew. And I got a call from Matt Schlapp thanking me for helping him to see just how problematic Milo Yanopolis was and having the foresight to push him to remove this, and now he had seen what. It was all bullshit, of course. He had just been embarrassed by the fact that he was still defending this guy who at the time was defending, I think he was defending pedophilia or something. And not an easy man to embarrass. Yeah. Yes. This was just so people have the context, like, CPAC was very happy to have him until the story broke

of there being video of him being interviewed, talking about how older men having some, sexual relationships with underage boys, not little children, but like teenagers, could be a healthy and positive thing. And he defended it and went on at great length about this. And even CPAC, or even some people at CPAC, were sufficiently offended by this that they argued he should have his invitation rescinded. How quaint. Simpler times. How quaint things were back at the beginning of the Trump era.

Gorby Dahl, unavailable for comment. Thank you all. for this enlightening conversation about Venezuela, Iran, and Milo Yanapolis. Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast, player of choice, to help new listeners find us. And speaking of support, here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as founding lifetime members, Matt West, Daniel Schweitzer, and Michael Bridie, and many more lifetime members who do not want a shout out here. very glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones, from people who

think CPAC has credibility these days. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hakey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.