Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 426: Paper Jaguars (w/ special guest Alexander Aviña)

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

This week we're joined by returning guest Alexander Aviña to talk about Trump's invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, as well as what it may mean for both Latin America and the world, before finally pivoting to a discussion about ICE's murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Welcome to the show this week, everybody. Before we really get into the nitty gritty, well, we're joined by Alexander Ravina, a long-time returning guest, who we wanted to have on to talk about Venezuela, Cuba, everything that's happening in the world. But then obviously the events of yesterday, January 7th, took place. So, like, we're going to be talking about that. But before we get into any of that, I wanted to run this post by you. from Colombian President Gustavo Petro. I don't know if y'all saw this. What is up with this post he made where it's like a tiger and an eagle like hugging?

It's obviously AI, AI made, but it's like, among the things we discussed, President Trump and I was the disagreement we had regarding his vision of the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America. But he goes on to talk about global peace and democracy and whatnot. But what is Petro's deal, man? Like half the time I'm like, this guy's based. He's like, you know, this is great. Beast mode. And then the other half of the way. He did the killer Mike thing where he raps like he's, you know.

Yeah, it is. One way. And then he gets on the news and CNN. Talks about the cops. That's a good comparison. His daddy cop. Yeah. That's weird.

I don't know, man. It's constant whiplash with him. Right? I think the weird thing is, I think he's pretty safe, right? Because there's presidential elections in Colombia next year. So I think, obviously, we can talk about this. Colombia is on the hit list. But again, there's presidential elections next year, and I think historically the U.S.

has tried to do regime change on the cheap, right? So with, you know, covert, you know, myriad covert ways to kind of influence electoral processes in Latin America. I don't know because, yeah, he, I still, I cite this a lot, and I'm pretty sure I've cited this on on times that you guys have had me on previously. The speech, it gave a COP 28, where he's linking Gaza to, like, he's, like, climate change and migration, like, hits so, so hard. But then he does posts like this with an AI eagle and an AI jaguar,

kind of like their heads leaning toward one another. He's talking, he talked about the U.S. being ruled by a clan of pedophiles, right? Which is like, yes, of course. 48 hours ago. Yeah, right. And then he does this. I mean, it's weird because I was reading a New York Times article this morning. They apparently interviewed Trump for like an hour or so.

I was going to mention that. And in the middle of that interview, Trump received a note saying, hey, Petro's calling and he wants to talk. So, I don't know, man. I think, I think obviously what the U.S. just did in Venezuela is forcing a change of mentality or behavior among some Latin American leaders. I mean, I think overall the hemispheric reaction has been pretty weak and tepid, unfortunately. And these heads of state don't seem to realize that they might be next if they don't do what Trump wants to do. And I think that's one of the points of that abduction was to project a level of U.S. power that actually may not translate into much in like a material sense. But it's all about the projection, which is like very Trumpian, I think.

If I could just offer an analysis of Petro, it's like someone who is constitutionally and spiritually like he don't have internet. You know what I'm saying? Like they, like that's their DNA makeup. Like they don't have internet, but like he's too online. Does that make sense? Yeah, I was about to say he's way too online It's like someone who's an introvert It's like someone who's an INFP or whatever

But they're like They love to be out in social Situation yeah Someone's got to pull the cell phone off With him But yeah, it's weird It's a it's an inch I don't know man

It's uh You also think about like who he's doing this for Right so if it I mean he might be doing this for like domestic political Like cons uh Petro considerations Yeah particularly since he has, there's presidential elections coming up next year. It looked pretty bleak for like his, for the left, but the guy, I can't remember his name right now.

I think it's Ivan. Alizepeda might be the last name. I can't remember. But I think the guy's prospects have actually improved recently, probably because of the stuff that the U.S. has been doing to Venezuela since late last summer, right, with the entry. And they've actually executed Colombians as well. So on the high seas. So it might be something like that.

I mean, but also one thing I come back to, and we can talk about this when we get to like Denzi Rodriguez, the current acting president of Venezuela. Like, it's easy for us to like talk shit. Like I can't imagine talking shit and then also being responsible for the lives of 25 million people in the case of Venezuela, even more in Colombia or over 100 million in Mexico. So maybe that's what explains some of Petro's like seemingly whiplash positions. True. But that AI was pretty weird. I think that the stupid, the noble jaguar, man. I just, anyway.

Oh, I said tiger. Man, I'm sorry. I said a tiger. That's obviously not even closer. Come on, man. You don't have tigers in South America? Come on. Come on.

That's embarrassing. Well, I wish I still edited these episodes. So you touch that up with that. Maybe millions of years ago, Terrence. Oh, man. Sorry to the real jaguar heads out there. They do look so cool You see those pictures of them underwater

Like hunting for fish They're starting to come back in Arizona It's so awesome That's the Really? The whole like U.S. Southwest and Texas Used to be natural habitat For the Jaguars

And there's a few now in southern Arizona It's pretty cool I had no idea One has the nickname of El Hefe Which I think is a pretty cool name for For Jeffer God I'd hate to run into that guy Yeah no no

Well all right Well, so yeah, like I said, we're going to get into the other big news anime this week. But, yeah, I mean, if you'll forgive the potential hyperbole, I mean, I don't know how many times I've said this on this show since in the last nine years we've been doing it. But it feels very much like a turning point. Maybe you guys disagree. I don't know. But it feels very much like another turning point because of some major, major things that have occurred. So obviously we're going to have you on to talk about Venezuela

We talked a little bit about it on the Patreon episode on Monday Just kind of like at that time when we recorded it had just happened Maybe like 36 hours prior to that And so we were kind of speculating on a lot I think that like there was a lot of speculation over like What had happened And why if you're just looking at it at it on the face of it, like, it is kind of a strange thing that, like, Trump would depose the leader,

kidnap him, and his wife renditioned them back to America, but then leave all of his regime and loyalists in place. It's very strange, but it is very in line with who Trump is at his core. So, we could talk about that, but like you had mentioned a second ago, the New York Times interview they did with Trump, which there was some interesting stuff in it, one of which was that the Delta Force team trained in Kentucky at a mock-up facility, like basically like Nathan Filders the rehearsal. Like they basically built a compound replica of Maduro's compound and used that to train on so that they could kidnap him.

I don't know if you guys saw this, but like Celia Flores Maduro's wife was in court this week, had bruises on her face. They had clearly beat her up, like manhand. handled her. So I don't know about you, but that to me pretty much completely throws out the window any speculation that this was like Murdoro arranging this in any way or falling on, even falling on his sword, you know what I mean, they've been in the most noble sense of it, like it, or interpretation of it. It seems very much like this was a kidnapping straight up. Like they brutalized his wife.

You know what I'm saying? Like they probably brutalized him. Like this was a kidnapping. But like in the New York Times thing, and this was interesting, the New York Times, and I don't know, I've not really dug into this. I don't know a whole lot about Venezuela, just getting that, you know, on the table beforehand. You're with the vast majority of Americans. It's all good, man. Well, the New York Times did the classic thing that they always do when they say, like, Trump made the false claim or when they go, like, Vladimir. v Putin in like you know what I mean like everything they have these like signifiers and qualifiers that they use for every um like dogmatic issue or ideological position they have and so

they um i don't know how they worded it in the article but it was basically like Trump didn't give the presidency to machado who ran a successful election in 2024 so i guess the new york times position is that Machado actually won the election and Maduro illegitimately took it from her. So that's another weird thing here. So like, I don't know. Let's just talk a little bit about it. Like, obviously the audience knows what happened.

We talked about it on the Patreon episode on Monday. But like, what can we like discern from everything we've found out since then? Since, you know, really since Saturday, really since, you know, Maduro and his wife have come to America, they've been arraigned in court, all this. Yeah, no, I'm writing something right now trying to figure this out. So hopefully by the time I submit this draft this week and I will come up with an answer. I'll start by the way I start this piece that I'm writing, which is I think we need to have some analytical humility and dexterity.

I think I've seen way too many people online, including members of the so-called Western left, making assertions like that the big one being that like Delci Rodriguez somehow cut a deal with the United States behind Maduro's back to essentially offer him up and offer Celia Flores's wife up to the United States. And that line was being pushed by people like Tarika Lee and Eva Gollinger, who has quite a interesting history, Venezuela. But we don't know. I mean, I think we need to be really careful. I think we need to think about what we know, what we don't know where. a lot of the sources that Western media is using, like where they're getting this information. And obviously, Trump and his people lie, a really important component of this abduction operation is disinformation, right? And this is, so I think we need to keep that in mind when we're trying to understand this from within the entrails of the belly of the beast, as Jose Marti referred to the United States. what we know now, I think the New York Times interview that Trump did with, that Trump did with the New York Times, it shows what this was really all about, right?

It's about oil. And not just about oil, but this is something that my comrade Bickram Gill from the anti-imperialist scholars collective always talks about is it's about oil flows as well. I think you guys have talked about it as well. That this is not just about controlling Venezuela's oil reserves, which is heavy crude oil, the world's, largest proven reserves. But it's also about controlling the flow of that oil and the contours and the power within the global oil market. And obviously in this situation, it has to do with China. So if we step back and we think about the national security strategy that the Trump administration published late last year, they basically can see that they can't compete with China

in Asia. So therefore, they're quote unquote, coming home. And they're going to do to Latin America what they've always done to Latin America, but they're still not going to give up trying to hit indirectly at China. And this is one way, right? Because Venezuela is a close economic political ally of China. China is the main trading partner of all of South America, even of Malay in the crazy person in Argentina.

So that's one, when we step back and think about this on a global scale, this has something to do with China controlling Venezuela's oil, but also controlling oil flows. And this also brings in the question of Iran. They spent, how many months did the Trump administration spend talking about Cartel de los Soles, Tren that Agua, what else did they say? Oh, Hezbollah and Hamas, which is so weird. And Iran, Revolutionary Guard Corps, all in Venezuela.

So that's another justification for interview. I mean, we've gotten so many different, in the end, it was about oil. And, like, in that New York Times interview, like, Trump is very clear about it. It's about oil. we own Venezuelan oil. We're going to run Venezuela. And the way that he talked to the New York Times journalist, he's essentially saying this is going to be a forever war without calling it a forever war.

Yeah. And I think that's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But again, it's not big, but this is not just dependent on Trump or the Americans. Like, I think Venezuelans on the ground have something to say. And what we see right now is a seeming closing of ranks around the Chavista project. We don't see any divisions yet within the,

high political circles, whether it's the Denzi Rodriguez or brother Jorge Rodriguez or Padino, the guy the head of the forces or the guy with one of the best names ever in Latin American history. Dios Dio He literally translates as a God-given hair.

No, God-given hair. Oh, okay. But he has no hair. Like, not Maduro actually should be, Maduro should actually have had that title. But Dios-Dado Cabeo is just, God, I love that name. It's up there with like Marmaduke Grove, who was a Chilean revolutionary Air Force General.

But they have something to say about this as well. But obviously in the U.S. media, that they get portrayed in like very flat in one-dimensional way. It's weird. You mentioned, you know, I remember this being something people talked about with Iraq too. Every time you'd be like, well, it's about oil.

People would be like, well, actually, wait a second. there has been this weird like pushback on that idea that I've seen over the last week where people are like Trump says it's about the oil but we have to learn we have to realize Trump is lying when he's saying stuff so like he's doing some nine-dimensional chess when he says it's about oil it's not actually about oil it's like I I don't really uh I think we can believe him on this one I think we can believe him on this one I think we yeah broken clocks are two times a day and it's funny how like like even though you know we saw them perp walking maduro and then bringing him and his wife you know in front of the judge to be arraigned and all this shit and like in like not a day later the justice department admits that like cartel de losulles is mostly a fiction right so it's like

he's insane this yeah yeah so it's just so wow that like the whole spectrum of maduro being a narco terrorist was always flimsy as hell anyway, but like now it's just not even, there's no pretense about that. It's like, well, then why all the posturing and the court and all that kind of shit?

Is that just, you know? I think that they have to do that, right? Like, I think that's, it's part of the spectacle, right? Like, I honestly didn't, I never expect, I didn't expect them to do a kidnapping operation

that combined what they did to Manuel and Noriega in the late 80s to what they did to like Jean-Bertiega, Trondar Estee in the mid-2000s, I thought that they were going to do more like the Israel playbook, which is just to bomb the shit out of Caracas and try to extrajudicially assassinate the political leaders of the Venezuelan government and some of their military leaders. But so the question that I keep coming back to is why they didn't go that route and why, for like Israel's position in West Asia, why they need that overwhelming projection of just sheer

genocidal military violence. Yeah. But the U.S., for a variety of reasons that we can get into, has to operate on a different terrain. And one of the reasons why, and I think this kind of links to the court and having to go through the spectacle of this court case, is the U.S. is always very interested in the extraterritorial applications of its own laws throughout the Americas as one way of extending U.S. imperial control. Obviously throughout the world, but like we all, Latin America is the workshop, right? It's the laboratory of what they try to do. So, but then this can always blow back, right? Because Tom, you're right.

I read that, if you read the indictment, it's 25 pages, it's really thin, it's really weak. There's no mention of El Cartelle de los Soles because it doesn't exist. There's no mention of fentanyl, right? They've been telling us for months that Maduro was personally trafficking fentanyl into the United States. That's just bullshit. What do we have in there? Can you imagine moonlighting as a fentanyl peddler when you're the head of a country? It's just like.

He was the, they said he was the, titular leader of El Cartelle de los Soles. Right, they act like he was the Walter Watt of this made-up cartel. He was like El Chapo, but a president of a sovereign country. So what's in there? Accusations that he was

that he's been drug trafficking since the late 90s and that him and his wife were moving illegal machine guns. And that's about it. They were using, they granted diplomatic planes and cover for for trafficking of Colombian cocaine. So I think

if we think about the court case I hope it turns out to be like a combination of like Nino Brown and like Fidel Castro's 1953 court case that are in the early 50s that then led to his famous history will absolve me speech where the people on trial actually put the

entire system on trial. Is that when he did the hard thing where he like pulled his shirt off showed he was not wearing a vest? No no this was this was after this was after Fidel's first attempt to take power against Batista after Batista had launched a coup in 1952. It was a Moncada Barracks attack. Oh, that's what like... It went horribly. They failed. Fidel and a bunch of the other M26 movement, future M26

movement leaders get captured. He's put on trial, but he gives, you guys know, Fidel had a gift, the gift of the gab, right? So they put him on trial. Right, he was a lawyer. They put him on trial, and he has a brilliant courtroom speech called, that is now referred to as a history will absolve me speech, where he put Batista in the Cuban system on trial, and he went on this philosophical, legal, historical narrative about humanities or humans' natural right to resist tyranny. So he put the entire system, he turned it around, he put the entire system on trial and moved himself away from it.

I hope Maduro does something else in that regard as well. The way, I mean, so the Nino Brown thing from New Jack City City is because it involves drugs, right? So, Ni no Brown turns around and blames it on the, on the, on the, on the, on the financier of CMB, right? So that's what I'm hoping for with the legal case. Put put, put US empire, put US extraterritorial applications of US law on trial. But we may not get there because Maduro's lawyers are, who are very good, are saying that

he should have immunity as a head of state and they're helped by all these Trump truths that are posted online where he refers to him as president Maduro. So it's pretty clear cut then that Trump can. considers Maduro a head of state, therefore he should be granted immunity. Yeah. Yeah. It might just be the expedited way, but it might rob us of some good rhetorical jams. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you brought up Cuba. I want to talk about Cuba in a second because that has a big role in this as well. You know, you mentioning extraterritorial applications of U.S. law, I think that's a really good point, which is a kind of, you kind of got like a double action because obviously we're seeing the gradual error. or at least reformulation of what we consider to be U.S. law in the United States. Obviously, like, every day we lose more rights, right? Like, we don't even... At this point, like, it is a cop's right to just waste you

if they deem that, like, you are not worthy of human life. But, like, also, this is a long-standing thing. We talked about it on the Patreon episode on Monday. Like, the entire drug control regime was based off of what you were just saying. Like going into South America, I mean, U.S. planners and U.N. planners going into South America and telling indigenous people that they can't use Koko Leaf anymore. You know what I'm saying? Like, what right do they have to tell people that they can't use a plant? You know what I mean?

That's like indigenous to their land. But like this, you know, had applications for, implications for pharmaceutical industry, for how the U.S. global empire was knit in the mid-20th century. there's something I wanted to also mention though a thread that I wanted to tease out like me and Tom talked a little bit about this last night actually the difference between like the US application of imperial power

and the Israel Israeli application of imperial power like right like I think a big reason why it's probably not just one thing but a big reason why the US tries to do it this way is because of the spectacle because of they're trying to apply US law extradition

territorially increase their legal sphere of influence. But part of me wonders if there's also a part of this that might boil down to just Trump's psyche, like psychology. Like his very unique psychology in this sense. Like he is the ultimate daddy's boy. He's the guy that like picks a fight and then gets his dad to like bail him out of it. So it's like he know. And people like that, if you've ever known one of them in your life,

they know that they can't get too far into a conflict because they'll be fucked. So it's like it's almost like Trump wants to do these like precision surgical hits like on Soleimani, on Maduro, in areas where he knows he can just get in and out and and not have to like really commit to any kind of like long term conflict. I think that's one reason why he's left all of Maduro's regime in with that like, but at the same time has committed himself to Venice. like he did in the New York Times article for the indefinite future. They asked him, they said weeks, months, years, and he said, oh, it'll be much longer than that. And so, like, I think, but, but like, compare that to the Israeli model, which is just, like, bomb everyone. And, I mean, this just, like, let's be legends.

Let's just go out, like, legends. Like, maybe we all die in the fire and blaze of glory. Like, fuck it. Like, we'll take the whole world with this. Fuck it. But, like, Trump doesn't have that psychology weirdly enough. Like, he's, he is also. terrified of that.

Yeah, like, well, yes, and he's like self, he's got like a self-protectionist streak to him as well. I don't know. This, but this, because this isn't obviously, we're just talking about one specific administration. Like, obviously, like, what I'm saying doesn't exactly correspond with, you know, the liberal, the democratic way of modeling these things.

But I do think there is use in trying to understand, like, why the Israelis do what they do and why the Americans do what they do. I think that that's a very good framework for looking at it, Alex. Yeah, I think I know nothing. I mean, I hesitate to psychologize Trump, but like those daddy boys

are also getting the shit beat out of them at home too, right? Like, so that that build, that also like, you got to sing Trump's dad. He looks like a caricature of Satan. Yeah, I think, yes, I think he is, you know, with this piece I'm writing him, I want to title it like using Mobb Deep.

Like there is such a thing as a halfway crook. Like he's a halfway crook, right? And part of that is because probably because of his own personal psychology. But also like it's part of his like political sensibility. I mean, that's how he was able to kind of take over the GOP, right? Like his critiques of the Iraq war, his critiques of U.S. war on terror and his ability to really fashion himself as some sort of anti-war president when we know that. all bullshit, but that's a key component of a large part of his political base. He also doesn't like to lose. So he, I think some people around him and perhaps him individually knew that like

putting boots on the ground in Venezuela was going to be a losing proposition. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge country with a well-trained military that believes in a certain political project on top of people defend their homeland and people in Latin America have been defending their own national sovereignty for decades. Someone else around him was smart enough to tell him, hey, we cannot do boots on the ground and send in Abrams tanks on which Maria Corino Macho

Machado can ride in on and then somehow take political power. They're like, what did he say? She doesn't have their respect of the Venezuelan people. No shit. She's been calling for the bombing of her own country and her own people for months now. And her own personal history is a pretty

far-right, oligarchic, fascistic politics. that she's called for violent street protest. She's part of this oligarchic white Venezuelan class that could not countenance the political rise of Hugo Chavez and the fact that for the first time in Venezuela in history, the masses entered the political scene in a very important, determinative way, right? So, yeah, of course she's not going to have the respect of the masses. So someone told them that, and that's a really smart thing, right?

I think also inadvertently, I think one of the consequences of the subductions, operation and let's say they also bombed the shit out of caracas right we now know that including the security detail that was guarding uh maduro more than a hundred people is is what i've seen recently and they also i just saw this morning they bombed which is brings us to the israeli comparison they bombed a medical supply center that provided vital supplies for kidney dialysis patients um so you know and they terrorize an entire capital south american city for for a few hours right so did it did it not did it not being not true that they bomb Chavez's mausoleum?

I don't know. I keeps going back and forth because the mausoleum is near one of the fort or the military bases. So I'm not sure. I mean, I think it's, there's just so much disinformation circulating too. But when you talk about that, I don't know about that one. When you talk about Machado, can I also just point out all the things you mentioned about her like, yes, correct. And she's also just a worm. Like, did you see this week that like after? La Mosca. Did you see like after? I love that video. After this week, after it came out that Trump didn't give her the spot because she didn't offer him her Nobel Peace Prize. She offered him her Nobel Peace Prize.

It's like, okay, I used to think at the most ridiculous episode of like U.S. Imperial history was McKinley's saying that he decided to occupy the Philippines because God came to him in a dream and told him to do so. Now, I think that's been superseded by Trump explanations that. that for Trump's action in Venezuela that hinge on him not winning the Nobel Peace Prize and Maduro having more swag and rhythm than him when it comes to dancing. Like what the... That's the kind of thing about Trump

that drives us insane, right? So we have our historical structural explanation for why he does what he does. But then we get fed these anecdotes that are very believable that are just like so contingent and like unpredictable. Like what are we supposed... And they're also so absurd.

And she's still groveling. I just saw her the other day still groveling about, okay, well, I can give them the prize now. It's like... I think another part of this we need to talk about is Marco Rubio's role in all this. You had mentioned that this is obviously partially to deal a blow against China, like realizing we won't be able to compete with China and Asia.

And as a result, turning our more aggressive imperialist interest towards this hemisphere. It feels very much like Rubio is also using this as an excuse to target Cuba. And so it feels very much, I don't know. I was talking to Tom about this last night. My very first knee-jerk reaction when I heard this was that it felt very much like Putin. I'm not trying to sound like a lib here. Just entertain me for a second.

Oh, no. It felt very much. It felt very much like Putin going after Ukraine. And what I mean by that is like, it's these old sort of unsettled beefs from like the 20th century, like these large like global superpowers that are just like husks of them, their former selves that are obviously paper tigers now. Like this is why the like the lib line on Putin in Russia doesn't make any sense. Putin can barely take Ukraine. It's like a fucking, if you can barely take Ukraine, like there's not a whole.

Yeah, you're not taking Europe. But like the lips have convinced themselves He's the next Hitler or whatever It feels very much like this is a very similar thing Like the United States knows it can't take fucking Venezuela And but it's still trying to fight out these old You know what I mean? Like remnant battles of its, of its, you know,

former glory of the 20th century Or like old scores that weren't settled and all this And I feel like them going after Venezuela Or them going by after Cuba by way of Venezuela is another kind of example of that. But like, Tom, did you want to say something? No, no, no, I was just going to point out. It's kind of funny that, like, Trump is, like, personally deposed, like, Bolton

and kind of relegated him to the kids' table, but he's still doing the perestroika of terror stuff in Latin America that Bolton was wanting the day, you know what I mean? Like, it feels like it's like, oh, yeah, let's just go back to that. Yeah, it's Cuba, Venezuela, and, you know, whatever. Yeah. But anyways, yeah, like, where I was going with that is, like, what is the role in Cuba of all this? And maybe a better way of asking that question is, what is Marco Rubio's role in all this?

Because it's not just, I think, it's not just Trump who wanted Venezuela, who wanted Maduro, who wanted oil. It seems very much like also it's Rubio who wants Cuba. I don't know if that's correct, though. Yeah, I think the two most ideological figures around Trump, are one, Stephen Miller, and that we can come back. to him and then yeah little little narco Rubio who's you know part of a cocaine trafficking family in South Florida he's also really ideological and we I think we've talked about this before right that he's he's part of a political tradition in South Florida I know Tom has some thoughts on Miami that they are objectively speaking the losers of revolutionary 20th century revolutionary

processes in Latin America and from different countries and and a lot of these people fled and they all for some reason went to Miami. And there's a very revanchist, racist, anti-communism that forms part of that political culture. And so when someone like Narco Rubio sees Cuba or Venezuela, it's they are, they're thinking about turning back the entire 20th century, right? Like that's the way one, when they were talking about how Venezuela took our oil and took our, land, Venezuela took Venezuelan oil and Venezuelan land from the Americans. The way I read that was that this goes even beyond Chavismo in the Bolivarian Revolutionary Project. This goes back to 1976 when the Venezuela's partially expropriated and nationalized oil. This goes back to Allende

in Chile in the early 70s, nationalizing copper. This goes back to Mexico, nationalizing their petroleum in the late 1930s. So some of the most radical social democratic ideas, the best ones out of the Latin American 20th century, right? The ideas that had to do with social development, with national sovereignty, with how to achieve social justice, those are the things that people like Narco Rubio are fighting against because they lost those, their families lost the revolutionary process. So they see this as almost like, this is our moment to take it back. This is our moment to kind of push back the success of some of these radical ideas in 20th century Latin America, which essentially were like social democratic with you like obviously with Cuba they took it beyond that

and I would say Chile to a certain extent as well but they're trying to turn back the 20th century and this is why what we see in venezuela right now feels like late 19th early 20th century gumboat diplomacy because that's what we're returning to we're returning to that previous mode of U.S. empire and the Americas where they would send in the U.S. Marines to the tune of like 34 invasions from 1900 and 1934 acting as not just gang for U.S. Empire, but to think, you know, to paraphrase Medley Butler, they were gangsters for Wall Street as well. And so this is, this is why they're trying to go back to that moment. What they don't think about is that that earlier historical moment produced a anti-imperialist revolutionary and even reformist backlash throughout the region. Like there's no, without U.S. Empire and the Americas, there is no 1910 Mexican revolution in the way that it developed, thinking about economic democracy, political democracy, and social democracy. there wouldn't have been all these other revolutionary project that were in direct reaction to U.S. Empire in the region to the point where they forced someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be like, all right, shit, we've got to be a good neighbor now. We'll stop invading you. And this is actually one of the reasons why we see such few overt U.S. military invasions in Latin America. There's very few after World War II. There's Dominican Republic in 1965. There's Grenada, 83. There's Panama, 89. I think that's it.

I guess you could consider like the Contras, you know, funding the Contras. Well, that was their covert shit, right? I'm just talking about like boots on the U.S. boots on the ground, right? Because these type of action infringing upon the sovereignty of a country in Latin America historically has generated effects that end up impinging U.S. imperial designs in a negative way for them. But the question now is whether there are people around Trump that can kind of foresee that. And I don't think so. I think they're just like, they're going full steam ahead. 100%.

You think part of it is like Trump's sort of like frozen in carbonite in the 80s. And so like he's sort of hearkening to the past in a way of like when he was a king. You know what I mean in the 80s? Like, you know, his glory years, you know. And he's like, oh, well, that's what we were doing then. That's what we should be doing now. I don't know. Yeah, but I think, but he politically defined himself against like the neo-cona-cona-eatism.

supposedly, right? But I think the one similarity is that Reagan used Latin America, specifically Central America, for domestic purposes. So it wasn't just a projection of U.S. empire. It was also perhaps more importantly to bring together that unwieldy political coalition that becomes the new right. So you had to bring in the militarists who were pissed off about Vietnam, the neocons that were around the late 70s, early 80s,

and then the Christian right, the evangelical Christian right. So what brought them together, and this is someone like the argument in Greg Grandin's book, Empire's Workshop. What brought them together was waging war, covert war on Central American peasants and workers in the 70s and 80s, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. So I don't know. I think Trump, I worried that Trump was going to try to do something similar. I wrote something right after he took power in 20, well, after he won the election in 2024. But I don't think he's got the juice to do it. I think there's too many, I think the political coalition that he's trying to hold together on the right is too unwieldy and contradictory.

But we'll see. What, you know, we talked about him echoing Cuba and all this. And, like, you know, Terrence had alluded to, like, it seems like there was a lot of Cubans killed in the strikes on Caracas, too. You know, and. Well, they've shut off, it's stopped oil shipments to Cuba, at least heavily cooked in death. Cuban's economy is on, like, the brink of collapse. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're going through, it's a terrible time for Cuba, particularly since Trump ratcheted up the sanctions in 2018, 2019.

After that brief moment we have with Obama, right? Like, it seems so long ago with Obama visiting Havana, right, and them having like an MLB baseball game. But Trump, during 1.0, ratcheted up the sanctions. But then the COVID hit. So that really drained like their hard currency reserves because they would usually would get. that for in the form of tourism. And then by and then the, the weakening of the Boliv also affects Petro-Carib, this, this broader program that Chavez had started to provide cheap, subsidized energy resources, not just to Cuba, but throughout poor Caribbean nations.

So it's had a huge impact on Cuba. Actually, the Financial Times reported earlier this week that Mexico is actually providing most of the oil that Cuba is receiving now. And that's why you have the Cuban crazies in, to quote, Axios article in South Florida now going after Mexico, right? Like Maria Ivira, I can't remember her last name now, but she's a rep somewhere from down there. She keeps going after. And Luna, that other one. Yeah. Yeah.

Psycho. I mean, they're all psychos. Well, in that whole calculus, it was wild to hear Mexico mentioned as like among the places that could be next. And you got Claudia Shambom who's among the most popular. politicians in the world right now. Mexico seems to be, you know, doing pretty well on there. And it's like a weird bit of saber rattling. And, you know, we kind of talked about that in our tunnel to Al-Landalucia episode a little bit. Like the dimensions of that, I was wondering if you might speak a little bit about that, like what that kind of piece of, like kind of,

that throwaway line, that throwaway mention of Mexico might mean and all this. I don't know, man. I like, I, like, so, like, so worried about making predictions now, like anything's possible, right? But if the U.S. did engage in some sort of unilateral military action, like the GOP has been calling for for years now, I mean, the consequences would be catastrophic. And for the U.S., I mean, the U.S.'s biggest trading partner. There's 30 million-plus Mexican heritage peoples living in the U.S. If you really want to do something about stopping drug flows, you think you would

want to negotiate and have some sort of peaceful relationship with the country through which most of the drugs are coming through into United States. I just can't even foresee. I mean, it would put me in an awkward situation for sure to make it all about myself. Like, what the fuck? Like, it'd be really weird to be living in the U.S. if it ever did a military strike against Mexico. But if they couldn't do it in Venezuela, which, again, it's like 25 million people.

I've seen people say that Venezuela geographically is like twice the size of California. Mexico is even bigger. Mexico has over 100 million people. It's right now they have a broadly popular political project with a political party, political coalition and a president that has overwhelming levels of popular support. And if there's one thing that I can say confidently about Mexico is that Mexican nationalism is largely defined by a certain history with the United States, right? So that's also a key thing to think about.

So I don't know, but they might just be crazy enough to try something. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I think the missing ingredient here is like what Israel does. I don't mean to like make it that big picture. But like let's just say Israel does hit Iran again before the end of the month. You've got a global situation that's just been ratcheting. up for two and a half years now.

I mean, you know, you had mentioned a second ago, like oil flows. Like, what is it that the U.S. is trying to secure? Is it like, are they trying to, like, weaken, like, the OPEC plus states? Are they trying to work hand in hand with them? I don't really know anything about all this. This is kind of, like, above my pay grade. Maybe it's above all of our pay grades here. Yeah, me, too.

I well what Trump said what I think Trump mentioned something in the interview with the New York Times and he was trying to get the price of oil to like or maybe one of his I saw this reported elsewhere with one of his advisors they were trying to get the price of an oil barrel to $50 right and then this advisor seemed to think that they still put oil in like barrels just like, come on, man. So, yeah, and also it's interesting to think about, too, like trying to control. Obviously, oil is still very important. The political economy of oil is very important. But trying to exercise this level of imperial control over this when your nearest peer rival seems to be quickly moving in a different, like, alternative resource energy direction. Yeah, the petrodollars is kind of going out.

you know we don't live in the petro dollar days really right way I should I mean that's going to that's been one of the key I mean the US dollar in general has been one of the key pillars of US empire since the end of World War two right so it might be an attempt to kind of refurbish that it's also the domestic consideration right this idea that if you get it to $50 a barrel it's going to bring down gasoline prices within the US even while everything else is like two to three times the cost of what it used to be because of these stupid tariffs I mean I don't know about you guys. I haven't received it my $2,000 tariff check yet, but that they keep, yeah, we're still waiting. So, but, yeah, I don't know. If there's other, this is kind of the weird exercise that, that we're all in,

trying to, like, connect the dots between what's happening in West Asia, what's happening in, the Horn of Africa with Somaliland and Israel, the only state, the Greenland, I mean, we haven't even talked about Greenland. Like, that would be, do you remember in Trump one point? Trump was saying he wanted to trade with Denmark. He wanted to send Puerto Rico to Denmark and then the U.S. would get Greenland. Like, he's been talking about this for a while. If they like, Stephen Miller was saying that only 30,000 people live in Greenland. And so it wouldn't be much of an operation to a military operation to conduct.

And he said, and even then, you know, we'd be liberate, basically he says we'd be liberating the people of Greenland from like Danish colonialism, which is like, wait, what? but that would what does that do to europe like what does that do to nato yeah that was europeans have been saying that kills nato that was the thing this week they were like we get nothing in return they've been saying this for forever now but like basically denmark had released a statement that was like we'll use force if we have to i mean if america tries to invade greenland but then everybody is like well what does that do to nato like the whole point of nato is protecting places like greenland from places like russia so it's like what if the calls coming from inside the house.

You know what do you do in that situation? It's the Marvel comic like Hydra 1 World War II, right? They just infiltrated the U.S. government. No, I think there was, there's a weird, God, what is his name? He's some sort of EU right-wing guy who's always on Twitter, Gunther. Have you guys seen this guy, Gunther something? Eagleman? Yeah, he's kind of insane.

But the other day I saw a video where he's like, listen, if you guys do this to the Americans, like if you guys take over Greenland, We're going to kick you out of all the bases that you guys have in Europe. Like, we're going to react. I'm like, okay, that's a really interesting prospect, right? Because I think Europe would have to take some sort of reaction. And one reaction might be like the military infrastructure of NATO that's dependent on the U.S. might start to go away.

And in that national security strategy document that came out, the stuff that they said about Europe is kind of insane, right? They basically say it's a camp of the Saints type of situation. Like Europe is getting Western civilization in Europe has ended. They've been taken over by migrants. So they're just like a sec, they're an area of secondary importance to U.S. foreign policy. And then they start talking about taking Greenland by force, right? So there's something going on.

So I mean, European leaders are kind of whatever, Europe. We'll see what they do. But if they do react in a way where they're like, no more U.S. bases in Italy, no more U.S. bases in Germany. It would be really interesting to see, particularly when you're thinking about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I am putting my money on the U.S. in such a situation,

especially with leaders like John Federman out there. I don't know if I saw his statement about Venezuela, but it was like, I like Venezuela. They did good job. They invaded, they took Maduro. I like the army. He got a Fox News and called him Venezuelans. I told him, I just don't talk about if you gave that guy like a tattered, like a Tartzan type cloth like over his shoulder in like a massive club and like put him outside of a cave or like a bridge or something like that.

Yeah. Captain Caveman. Like he he would be like your average medieval ogre that like charges people that charges people gold Dragoo. to like enter the cave like that's a city of us. You got to answer a riddles three before you pass by me. Yeah. Yeah. It's very like Game of Thrones character vibe.

God, man. Yeah, it's also like, you know, they've talked about invading Canada too, right? That according to you guys is kind of like the land of Lillipushians, I guess. But next month I'll find out for myself when I visit York University, see if Canadians are really as small as they are. They are, dude. But like they've talked about making it. into the 51st state. I saw a report from a couple weeks ago

that some separatist movement from Alberta was having meetings in D.C. with Trump people. Hell yeah. It's just like, again, this is my point. Like, how do we try to like make sense of this? And the one way I think that we can make sense of this is this is what declining empires kind of do on their way out. Well, it's still a long ways away,

but they kind of lash out. And there's so much incoherence within the Trump administration that I see we see it reflected, right? and the way they're kind of lashing out globally. I think it does, there's been a lot of talk about, like, is what Trump, are what the Trump administration people doing? Is it considered neo-conservatism? Is it something new?

Maybe too early to tell. I see shades of it for sure. But I do think there is a useful distinction to be made, like if we're trying to discern what's going on here, like compare what the GOP under Trump is. doing with like the Democrats. I think the Democrat coalition, a lot of the neocons that were obsessed with the Middle East are still bunkered down in the Democrat coalition, whereas like it feels like there

is a neo-conservative vision more focused on the Western Hemisphere in the conservative camp. And I like, this is the thing. Like people were after Venezuela, people were like, Kamala wouldn't have done this. Kamala wouldn't have let this happen. And it's like, well, okay, if you want to play that game, I really challenge you to make the case that under Kamala Harris administration run with a lot of Biden flunkies and dropouts would not have let Israel just go on a fucking nuclear tear on Iran. Because all the signs were pointing towards the Democrats and Biden letting Israel take it into a very hot, potentially even nuclear war with Iran.

And weirdly enough, Trump has like stayed Netanyahu's hand on that, even though they will let them do it up to a certain point. And I do take it to be the true that like Israel is going to hit Iran again before the end of this month. Who knows, maybe they will succeed and finally get the getting the U.S. to jump in all the way. But at this point, we can say that like if there had been a continuity of government, I think that the or administrations within the government, I think that we would have already. seen a full-blown war with Iran because that is the like we said like they got dick cheney running you know support for Kamala before the end of the election like the the the neocons that were obsessed

with the middle east I think they are all still in the democrat camp and like I like I've said I think that neocons obsessed more with the western hemisphere in Latin America are still operating and mostly in the conservative camp but yeah I think in the I think you're right I think if Harris had won, they would have continued. I think Biden also ratcheted up sanctions against Venezuela. He also maintained the sanction against Cuba, even though he had said initially that he was going to get rid of him. Biden's the one who put the $25 million bounty on Maduro.

So like with everything that we've seen the last 15, 20 years, it's the Democratic Party that is handed over these machineries of death, mass death and suffering over to Trump twice now, right? Obama, the deporter-in-chief did it. It was Obama who declared Venezuela to be a threat to U.S. national security, and that then permitted the sanctions regime, which is an economic war against all Venezuelans. Like, it's not a targeted thing against the leaders of a particular country. We have studies from like the Lancet to talk about the deaths of tens, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans as a consequence of these sanctions that were ratcheted up in 2017 that depended on, Obama labeling Venezuela a national security threat in 2015. And that was after years of covert meddling and the funding of the Venezuelan opposition within Venezuela through like the National Endowment for Democracy. So yeah, I think there is there is, I think the one way we can see to prove your thesis to Terrence and we kind of saw this play out is what happens when Israel negotiates a so-called ceasefire. It's ceasefire. It's ceasefire.

for everyone else, but full, you know, full fire from the Israelis, right? We saw this with the Israelis doing it to Lebanon during the waning days of the Biden administration, and what are we witnessing right now in Gaza? Right. Supposedly, it's a ceasefire, and they're still genocidally starving those people while then using, trying to take out guerrilla leaders while they're with their families and taking out entire neighborhoods, like, just happened yesterday. So, I mean, I think, I think you're right. I think in West Asia, you're still seeing a much more direct convergence between, the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to like approaches and tactics. Whereas in Latin America, I still think there's a stylistic difference.

They're just, you know, Trump is all aided, I think, in the Americas. I think that's what we're witnessing right now. He doesn't give a shit anymore about justifying this in any of the way. That's why the narco stuff was always so weak. It doesn't care. He cares about projecting power without actually having to do the thing that you need to do to actually implement power. I think that's the difference.

And then if you want to connect it to what's happening today, internally within the U.S., that old division where in the global north or inside the colonial metropoles, the way you establish domination is through ideology or hegemony, and the colonies you use brute violence and force. I don't know now, right? Yeah. I think that if we think about that boomerang, it's where that, that border, which I refer to in some of my writings like the Palestine-Mexico border, that there's, that's a permeable

border now that's that's that's that north of it if we think of it as a physical location um we're seeing that boomerang come home and we saw it tragically with that that ice cop not even a cop right i know tom was trying to make this podcast into a pro cop podcast i've heard but like ice let's remember that ice is like not even a cop right they're not police officers trying to make that move so now we witnessed we witnessed an extrajudicial execution of a of a 30 what six 37-year-old woman who now has kids that are left without a mother or a father. I mean, it's, it's, and we've seen, I mean, we were, some of us have been saying this for a while, especially during Trump 1.0, when they were using, you know, Border Patrol, Bortak special units in

Portland during the protest to like pick people off the street, throw them into vans and take them to undisclosed locations to question. Yeah. Yeah, that border has become a lot more permeable now. Well, I think that that's a good place to kind of, you know, start talking about that a little bit. Like this, I mentioned at the top of the show, like it felt kind of like another turning point. And I guess what I mean by that is, you know, in all these ice raids, you know, you were kind of waiting for the moment when they would obviously, like they've already been kidnapping and disappearing American citizens. That's already happened. And in fact, they killed a U.S. citizen. His name was Keith Porter in L.A.

I think over the weekend. New Year's Eve. Oh, yeah, New Year's Eve. Like, it's not received hardly any coverage. But I think part of that is, as far as I can tell, there's no video of it. But, and also he's black. That's another reason why it's not received that much coverage. But like this is a different quality.

and even kind of quantitatively different thing because the killing of her name is Renee Good. This is in Minneapolis. This took place on January 7th. You know, to sort of like tee this up, the administration was really going hard on Tim Walts in the last few days anyways. Like really over the last week, over a story. I hadn't really paid a whole lot of attention to because it was just another example of conservatives really wanting to look at kids

is like conservatives like really wanting to like spy on children and like maybe even take them to be their own. So it's like anytime I see a thing where conservatives are like really interested in kids these days it's like all right I'm going to have to just like not pay attention to that at all because it's probably disgusting and going to really skeeve me out. But it was this thing where they had like

They were like focusing on like child care centers in the greater Minneapolis area in like the Twin Cities and they were saying like oh Like Somalians or stealing taxpayer money and all this and it turns out it was just like some white lady who Owned like 80 daycares and was getting like PPP loans or whatever who knows But um regardless as a result the Trump people were saying that Tim Waltz needs to resign in the midst of all this Tim Waltz did say he wasn't going to run for re-election. And so I guess in this context is when they decide to start doing these more high-intensity raids on Minneapolis. They sit Greg Bowvine there. And it seems to me, I don't know if you guys would agree, but it feels very much like the administration was very much wanting something like this to happen.

and I don't mean that in the sense that, like, you know, you could take that and be like, well, we shouldn't go meet ice in the streets. I don't mean that at all. I mean, like, in the sense that, like, they've been pushing the, they've been pushing the issue to such an extent in places like L.A. and Chicago and Portland that they are wanting, like, really heavy, fraught events to occur where people, or multiple people get killed. And I don't know, maybe you guys, I don't know, it seems very much like, you know, Stephen Miller was on CNN this week telling Jake Tapper, like, force is the only language of the world. Like force and might are the only ways to order the world. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, this is like very obviously like not. A guy that would, if he didn't have the full force of this bloodthirsty military behind him, would get curb stomped by your average guy on the street.

talking about four, shut your fucking ass up. Oh, as an example of that, like, uh, J.D. Vance in the wake of Renee Good getting murdered was basically being like, um, correction. Uh, she actually, you can see her turning her will, 90 degrees to the left. And then like follows up like eight of the most like day of the day of the rope fucking, um, you know, Turner Diaries tweets with like a cute little tweet about like how Hagenda's Oreo smoothie fucking ice cream is his favorite.

You remember almost a decade ago turns when people thought we were being hysterical when we said that this guy's gonna be a Nazi in a few years. Yeah. And we're just like, you know, he's a dead-eyed psycho. No, you're being hyperbolic.

It's weird. He's like a dead-eyed psycho, but like lay epic heckin' paparino psycho. You know what I'm saying? It's like... Which is the worst strain. Yeah. But anyways,

like, you know, this is the context for all this. You know, I guess there's several different threads to sort of tease out here, but I guess maybe the place to start for me is kind of just what we were just talking about, like the difference between Democrats and Republicans on how they would, if something like this would have happened under a Democratic administration. And I think that like that's maybe the wrong way of framing it, like, because as we know, the Democrats don't do anything different when it comes to border control. Like they do these roundups.

In fact, they do it with more gusto and efficiency than even the Trump people do it, which is bizarre to see like Bernie Sanders saying that like, you know, Trump's right about one thing and it's the border, it's the deportations and all this. It's like, no, the Democrats have been doing this even harder than the fucking Republicans. But like... Bernie Colin Maduro. a brutal and ruthless dictator. Yeah.

Like, why do they even seed that ground when they know that's not? You know what I mean? Bernie had really terrible migration in border politics before his first run, right, in 2016. I think people should remember. Like, he had that line about how only corporations and capitalists like open borders. And, like, that's how he framed it until he ran for the primary in 2015, 2016. And, like, people around him, I think kind of. got him to change his mind a little bit by giving him some information and facts so by the time he

ran again in 2020 i think it was 2020 i mean the the program that he offered for migration and borders probably the most progressive that we had at least i think it's since the late night you know definitely since the the the late 19th century but then yeah he's going back to that for some reason he's pivoting back to that well for political reasons probably he's pivoting back i mean he's been whatever he's been shit he's been dog i mean with west asia too i mean it's just like like, come on, man. I think that I, he's, yeah, I have no, I have very little patience for him anymore. It would seem that the justice dims, the progressive branch of the Democrats have taken the,

to conclusion from the 2024 election that like we should still, you know, harp on left-wing economic policies, but that there is a vibe shift and that xenophobia is. We need 18% more racism. Yeah, exactly, right. Yeah. Yeah. But like, the crazy, the crazy thing is like, there's evidence that like being progressive on migration and to reframe the border away from this lens of security that like leads to the deaths of 10,000, tens of thousands of migrants trying to cross to like this Northern Desert. Like during Trump 1.0, right? Like they were out there. Even Harris was out there. No human is illegal. Refugees are welcome. Like that helped in the 2018 elections, right? They did really well. electorally. But the moment that these chicken shit Democrats kind of retreat or they seed the premise to the right into the Republicans, then we get what we got in the middle of the Biden

administration, which was to say, oh, actually the Republicans are right about border security. And we're going to do our own democratic version of the same shit that the GOP's been asking for for decades. And this is the constant pivot. This is what we saw with Obama too during his first and during both presidential administrations, like there's evidence that taking an more honest, intellectually honest position on migration and borders will help you electorally.

But if you cede the ground, if you seed the premise to these racist nativists and allow them to set the terms of the debate, well, of course people in the U.S. are going to go in that direction, which is what we saw during the Biden administration. So now what we have now with ICE is instead of like abolish

ICE as a position, which people like AOC were calling for in Trump 1.0 and remember she was crying at all the cages and whatever. I remember Eric Swalwell talking about we need the limit, the horizon of their anti-ice politics was to demask them. That's not the issue, man. At this point, it seems like the debate is over what it is, which is that like are we going to use it for deportations or are we going to use it for deportations plus? liquidation of dissenters and leftists in the country. And it seems like that's what the difference is. When you talk about the difference between Democrats and Republicans

on how they want ICE to be conceived, the Republicans want to use ICE to essentially erode the base of support for Democrats and Democratic policies. That's why they only send these raids to blue states, pretty much, blue cities. Yeah, the Democrats want to be able to leverage that when the time comes that they might take power again and they want to be able to like

give them a lot of money for training. That's what they want. That's what it'll be. It won't be abolish ice. It'll be they just need more money for training. They just need, you know. That's what we heard yesterday. Yeah.

Like on MSNBC or whatever. You have a lot of Democrats saying, well, this is what happens when you don't have training. Yeah. Like that's not what this is about. You don't need more reps shooting single mothers. No.

No. No, especially like with as a consequence of the big beautiful bill, ICE or DHS, now it has a budget bigger than most of the militaries throughout the world. So how are you going to resize or re-harness this massive police force that, as you're saying, Terence, it's obviously being used for political reasons. And it's being used to terrorize communities. And then it also gives them the added advantage of, like, creating public spectacles of, you know, when people rightfully defend their communities and their loved ones and their neighbors,

and they resist, and that somehow creates these images of, like, public disorder. Then that allows Stephen Miller to go on TV and say, look, these are domestic terrorists. They're waving Mexican flags like they were in Los Angeles. We need even more police. We need more National Guard to go in there and trample on people's rights. And now we're on this situation where, like, we're waiting for the next ICE invasion. Like, I just saw something last week that ICE is going to come to Phoenix now. So, like, people here now are like, oh, shit, like, what do we do?

And that's a weird thing, right? when you're being, when you feel like you're being invaded by your own country, um, it's a really weird thing, right, especially when it's these guys, guys who we've seen on video with SS tattoos like in Minneapolis, or guys who are just executing people on,

on, on video. As part of it to like, obviously Minnesota was sort of, or Minneapolis was sort of ground zero in 2020 for the protest that sort of launched nationwide with George Floyd. You had Philando Castile before that. You had the guy who's name of Skissel,

escapes me now that the cops shot in the parking garage. You had like all these things happened. And then Minnesota famously took to the streets, burnt down the police precinct and all that kind of stuff. Is there sort of a revenge, sort of makeup narrative here, afoot two, coinciding with Trump's,

you know, pension for tap dancing on his vanquished foes that would dare even, you know, challenged him in the first place, like with Tim Walts, especially coming the same week where Tim Walt says he's not going to run for reelection. So Trump sees that as a weakness.

And so now what we get is the result is, you know, this single mother that was there as a legal observer gets murdered. She wasn't even a legal observer, by the way. I don't know where that came from. I think Minneapolis Public Radio did a story about it. She was literally just a mom taking her kid to school and was on her way back from dropping her kid off and just got caught in the middle of this raid. And so they gave her conflicting demands. Like one of them was like, get out of your car. And the other one was like, move your car.

She wasn't even an activist. Like they interviewed her first. first husband and he was like she had no she wasn't an activist she definitely wasn't a legal observer i don't know where i think she was just filming it because they had just gotten caught in the middle of the situation yeah and so it's just like they're just wasting suburban soccer moms at this point anyway sorry tom to interrupt you no and i was just curious how like the whole sort of is it like we got to make an example of minnesota for daring like uh starting like a nationwide movement like in the summer of 2020 and all that kind of stuff

coinciding with a little bit of like tap dancing on Tim Walts while he's like a little politically weak and announced rolling over on a scandal that doesn't even chart in 2026 by the way and announced he's not going to run for reelection. Yeah, probably. I mean, I think that's a plausible explanation. I think also the, as as Terrence mentioned earlier, this like fake corruption scandal that was really built up by, you know, far right think tanks that then allowed, And it involves Somalis, a Somali refugee population in Minnesota. I mean, I think J.D. Vance, it might have been in the same thread, Terrence, or an interview that he gave yesterday where he's saying that the U.S. has a Somali problem. That's what he told Jesse Waters on Fox News.

Like, what kind of language is that? Like, if you, I mean, that's like Nazi-ass language to say this is not about, you know, an instance of fraud or government corruption or government waste. No, he's framing this as a quote unquote Somali problem. Well, we know what that leads to, right? And I think also, like, just thinking about what DHS has done through ICE and then expanding Border Patrol with this guy Bovino who's just, it's just, I don't even know how to describe this guy. If you've seen a picture of him smiling, it's one of the most hideous. It's like Anton Shiger smiling.

That's the way I think about it. The, why are they doing raids like they did in Chicago in the middle of the night where they target it in title, they do like a Taylor Sheriff. iranesque raid on a building to terrorize an entire building families, whether they're migrant families or not, their kids are taken outside in their, you know, pajamas or underwear. Why do that? Why, you know, the, this is one of the, the Democrats will, it is one of the frustrating things, the Democrats will come back and say, well, that's not an effective way of doing deportations. Obama showed us how to do effective deportations.

And I think that's a really interesting thing to think about, right? The raids are all part of this, like, this spectacle that Trump and his people want. That's why you go online, and I know most of these people are probably bots or not real. But, like, the constant posting of, like, I voted for this is really disturbing. But I think it gives us an insight into why they do these type of raids that have resulted in deaths already. I think last year, something like 32 people were killed by ICE, either in actual raids where, like, they ran one guy off a building in California. they ran another guy in California into the freeway. And then a bunch of people have died in ICE private detentions,

for profit detention centers, right? So I don't know. That's what I keep thinking about. Like what is the utility, the political utility of turning, of invading entire communities? I think they want to, on the one hand, I think they do want to provoke a reaction like they did in Paramount in Southern California where the people fought back.

But they also want to show how, quote, powerful ice and border patrol are and how, you know, it's inevitable. They're going to get you and they're going to deport you. But actually their actions are working to increase undocumented migration, right? Like their actions are incentivizing people to not report to their meetings because they'll get snatched up at courtrooms. Right. So they're driving the undocumented migrant population even deeper underground, making it harder for them to even be found. Right. So it's this weird, like their actions are producing on their own terms like the opposite of what they say they want to accomplish

so that leads me to think that there's like a broader political spectacle that's driving all of this yeah there's that makes any sense no I think that you're totally right I think there's a few things here I think a big part of it is I think that this could only make sense in the political context of like the post-pandemic when you had a moment dramatic expanse of the what you would call like the social safety net the welfare state which by definition uh challenges a kind of reformulation of citizenship and so i think right wingers

have been saying this forever that citizens that immigrants are stealing our health care they're stealing our tax money and all this but i think that the reason it kind of like took hold only now in the 2020 and like morphed into this massive state apparatus towards not just targeting immigrants but obviously targeting American citizens is that you have like I said you have the political context for like

what would be a redefinition or reformulation of what makes an American citizen a citizen and so like as you're saying Alex if you're driving immigrants further underground you're making it harder for ICE to find those people but that's not they don't care about that what that means is they'll start shooting suburban moms if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time because then you can like post facto go in and say well she was not a good citizen she was not the right person and so therefore she can be marked for death and I think that like there is obviously there's a spectacle element of it there is that element of it like of kind of like remaking the social contract and allowing a reformulation of rights but something you said earlier Alex I think is

relevant here. I think it pertains here the extra territorial application of U.S. law. I think that like you are kind of having a miniature version of that where you're seeing a challenge of like what federalism is. Because I think a big part of why they do this is that they want Tim Walts and Gavin Newsom to send in their national guards so that they can then show that those leaders are inept and ultimately not even inept, just completely. neutered. They can't do anything about it. I mean, they could, if they wanted to. They could have their National Guard go and, like, fucking shoot every ice person and arrest them. But they're not going to, and they know that. Like, they, the Trump people know that Newsom and Waltz don't have that fucking juice. And so that makes those leaders look weak. And I think that, like, if you're doing that,

the point is to basically challenge the authority of a state versus the authority of the federal government. So like you're having a kind of in my opinion, I wrote an in real time sort of reformulation of the state's relationship to the federal government and the citizens relationship to the state and the citizens relationship to the federal government. It is like it is a kind of like several things are going on and then obviously yeah it's spectacle. It's red meat for their base who you're right like like you guys like I think a big reason why I lost a lot of sleep last night. It's like just seeing people being like quibbling about like, oh, she obviously was like going to hit the guy or or being like I don't care. She was resisting arrest. She was resisting arrest, right? Like, or I don't care like she basically deserved to die. Like you can't. This is, this was J.D. Vance's line. You can't hamper law enforcement proceedings even though she was just literally in the wrong place at the wrong time and was probably videoing it thinking that like, oh, they're probably going to do some bullshit. They won't try to kill me, obviously.

but they're probably they weren't going to do some bullshit but at least i'll have it on video if they try to like mother fuck me you know what i'm saying like also too it like our relationship to reality has changed too because like any objective observer of that video can see that she was not running over anybody or whatever right and yet you have people showing the video and saying look at this you know clearly trying to run this guy over when it's that's not in all what you're looking at they showed a video like that to trump and trump's like well i don't see it that way Yeah, the New York Times did. Like they just said, Tom.

Yeah. Right. To what you just said, Tom. I mean, it's like you see it, but then they're telling you what you're seeing is not what you're seeing. Which is kind of maddening, right? It's like I... Go ahead, Alex. I think it's funny that the state's rights people are the ones getting rid of states rights, right?

It's kind of like the... I thought that's the whole reason we fought that great war between the snakes, you know? Well, that's why I sustained in my classes that the Confederacy actually won the cultural battle, right? They lost the military war and they won the cultural war. And I think that's something that's still around. To bridge those two things, like, I've told this on the show, I think, before, but, like, to the Somali thing and the way that, like, Somalis are being targeted and all this and, like, scapegoated about, like, some Medicare fraud or whatever, when I was on

the city council in Whitesbury, Kentucky, town of 1,600 people, I remember this plain as day. I got this dossier because they would send us Department of Homeland Security, like, briefings, on things that would happen like in eastern Kentucky and like the different counties. The only time this ever happened when I was in office, they sent us this dossier on a Somali family. They had moved from Mogadishu

to Maysville, Kentucky. And it opened a grocery store like an African grocery store. It's not even close to Weisbury. Not even close to Weisbury. Three or four hours away. You know, and like had their names where they're from and like just like all this like and the message was

Al-Qaeda is hot in the Horn of Africa, so you have to just watch these totally, like people that had no proof of any connection, but they had everything on them. And some dickhead in Wattsburg just got this report on them. And you can see how that helps demonize certain populations of people. And so, like, now many years later, somebody that might not, you know, think of that,

oh, well, yeah, we got that. They're part of al-Qaeda. Remember we got that report on them? And like, you know, you see how like the rot starts early, like even years. And, you know. But like that's a really good example, Tom, of when, like, immigrant rights activists will say, they use a quote or a slogan where it says, we are here because you were there. Like, there's a reason why Somalis came to the U.S. because you fucked up their country. Right.

Like for a, and not just like Black Hawk down. Like, I'm talking about what the U.S. did in the 2000s as an as a using. Samalia as a front on the war on terror, destabilizing that region that allowed for al-Shabaab or whatever other groups to come in here and set up. I mean, it's just like anywhere the U.S. goes for counter narcotics, surprise, surprise, more narcotics emerge. Same with terrorists, right? I think that's one of the lessons of the war on terror.

They would go to somewhere and be like, we're going to get rid of the terrorists. No, you actually made more terrorists. So for me, like thinking about migration, we always have to think about U.S. empire. And that slogan to me is really powerful. We are here in the United States because you were there in our country. And this poor family left Somalia because that country was destabilized in part because of short-term U.S. war on terror bullshit, longer-term U.S. Cold War policy. They come to the U.S. as refugees and then they're going to get monitored, surveilled,

in a way that other U.S. citizens will not because of their identity. It's insane. But that's a really interesting way to that town. No connection to anything. On that note, this got totally buried in the news, but I think it was like South Carolina, maybe the FBI, like, arrested, quote unquote, this guy that was, they claimed was an ISIS terrorist

who had been on their radar since he was a teenager, but like the minute he turned 18, they arrested him and said they foiled like a bombing. Obviously they had been pushing him online, And like, because that's like all the things. Yeah, the FBI was like, this is the dangers of online radicalization. And it's like, yeah, you, you guys were just probably pushing him to do bombing and made him into ISIS. Anyways, I'm sorry.

But dude, it's just, I hate to sound. I'm not, I don't say this in a lib. This is my second qualifier that I'm not trying to sound like a lib when I say this. And I don't mean it in a hokey way. You said that a lot in the last few months. Like, I listened to you guys. And there's a lot of Terrence saying, I don't mean to sound like a lib, but...

Because people accuse me, they're like, Terrence is a liberal. This is the biggest lib on the program. Reading your guys' comments are so much fun. I have a lot of, at your expense, but I think they're a lot of fun. I don't mean this in a hokey way either, but like, this doesn't even feel like America.

And I don't, again, I don't mean that, like, the country I know is gone. I mean, like, it doesn't even feel like a country. It feels like a fucking. vacuum where it's or like a video game that you're on the hardest difficulty level like a stealth video game where like you're not you the goal is to not get shot by a nazi to not have your coins stolen through digital crypto magic to you know what i'm saying it's like everything to not get sick your HP points are going to go down like what the fuck it's there's not even a connection

anymore to like that would tie us together in any legal sins Well, I take that back, Terrence. 82% of college agent males are on draft king. That's true. Can you name anything else in American life there's an 82% consensus on in any group? I think you guys talking about, what is that called the company, Kalshi? Colchie. Was it the betting Kalshi?

And then yesterday I saw like a polymarket thing where people were betting on when Catherine Levitt, the spokeswoman, was supposed to end the press conference. and she ended it two seconds before, like, most people had bet. I mean, I'm reading this. I'm just like, it's over. I can't. I can't. I just, seeing the betting on, like, it's just, yeah, I don't know what to do with it.

I got something I had to say about that. I posted about, like, Polly Market and Kalsh, sort of moving the goalposts on, like, their sort of props where, like, there's not an objective win or a loser. And I was like, well, that's just what they're going to do is, like, they're just going to change their interpretation. of invasion or whatever. Like, you know, just talking about there. And the amount of pedants that came out of there to talk to me about bookmaking.

And it's like, brother, I don't, I hate to break this to you. You trying to tell me about bookmaking is like trying to tell Picasso about painting. Like, I've been on both sides of it. Like, I've lost everything I've had twice on sports batting. And I used to run a buck. Like, it's just, it's so, actually, man, you know, they don't set lines based on who they think they're going to win. and they said it on how to get action on equal sides. I'm like, yeah, and sometimes they're wrong,

and that's what I mean by taking to the cleaners. Fucking in. That pisses me off, and somebody tries to tell you about something you know about. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like declining rate of profit pieces, I think it kind of helps us explain why one of the few profitable ventures in the U.S. is, I guess, betting?

Well, yeah. It's like crazy, man. I was telling Tom last night, it's like, when in the 80s and 90s they had to solve the crisis of the consumer by just making debt more easily attainable whether it was student debt housing debt which wound up crashing the economy

consumer debt and credit cards like that in and of itself was already kind of walking on air or trying to ring blood from a stone but like this latest modification of that is genuinely stunning. I mean, like, I don't even have words for, like, basically turning news into not just, like, speculation and punditry,

which already that had been moving in that direction for a while, but turning it into a gamified, this is what I'm saying. Like, it doesn't feel like even a country anymore. It's the ESBM model. It's like, well, like, anybody that's watched sports over the last five years has noticed like gambling has been threaded into the wholesale experience of watching the sports. Like they have real time lines and all this kind of stuff. Betty SPN, Draft Kings, all the little shit around the ticker and all that kind of stuff.

Now they're just doing the same thing for the news because like maybe for the same reasons, maybe viewerships down or something like that or people don't get their news from CNN or CBS anymore. So now they have to add a gamification element into it to get people invested in to rewatch. And it's not really even about being invested. it's just about watching it as an entertainment product. I mean, I'm willing to listen to an offer from Polymarket if they want to come to my lectures and they can set up betting for like how long my lecture on the Mexican revolution is going to last.

If I got a cut, I'm willing to countenance. I'm not short. Because this is coming to universities as well. There's a couple of universities that already signed like major deals with like drafting at the sports level, which is really crazy, right? Because their students are the ones who are like, that demographic is really right. But if they want to, let's just go all out. I'll wear a drafting shirt while I lecture. You know, let's set up the polymarket live betting while I'm lecturing again on the Mexican or Cuban Revolution. Let's do it. I mean, that's where we're,

that's, it's where we're headed. If you think about it to, it's not like when we were going to college, they kind of did a similar thing too. You all remember when the first day you set foot on a college campus. They try to bombard you a credit card offers and all that kind of stuff. It's the same thing with kids. It's just they're trying to get them hooked on the gambling app so they can like extract as much cash from as possible. Same thing they did to us with credit cards or anything. Oh, I got in big trouble my freshman year. Oh, man, especially because I put the address for my parents. So they got that first credit card bill. Rookie mistake. So many like just sneakers and warehouse CDs. I'm so old. Like just like they, my parents were not

happy when they saw what I had spent on that credit card. That's so good. There's just something that's, I think there's two things there. One is that like everything, it's like your question, Tom, like, why expand that out to the news? Like a part of it, maybe it is like viewership is down. Maybe it is just like they just want, it's just turning the news into pure entertainment. But I also think that like one of the weird facets of American life now is it every single

thing is political. Everything's politicized, but like there's no way to change it. Everything's politicized, but it's all completely stagnant and just frozen kind of. So it's just, you live in this state of superposition where everything is real, but you can't do anything about it, but that makes politics artificial. I don't know. There is that thing, but like there is something else that has really been kind of bucking me about this, which is that. That's But I was trying to talk to Tom about this last night. I, you know, I'm not an economist. I'm an optimist in the famous words of George Bush.

But it would seem to me that building an entire economy on debt is already a pretty bad idea, right? But you could maybe make the argument that, like, okay, money is still real banks or central bank issues, bank notes, and we haven't had it backed by a real actual commodity like gold in 50 years, but like, let's just say for the sake of argument, like,

it was backed by the full faith and creditors. You got to do your whole, I'm not a libertarian or anything preface, like you said, I'm not a lib. Yeah, I'm not a libertarian, but like... Not a gold bug? Yeah, I'm not a gold bug either, but like Fiat currency just doesn't mean what it used to mean. And so

if you base your entire economy, not just on debt, but on a, I don't know how to put it, maybe a licit form of debt that like requires people to, I don't know, have disordered relationships to money. I don't know, like, how does that like going to play out on the long term? If like every single person is not just like in hoc to credit card companies and medical debt, you know, hospital care, whatever, or student debt, but also to like four corporations that are like running industries that used to be the province of organized crime, I don't really know how that works in the long run. Where I'm going with this is that this just kind of seems to me like another example of a cat. bash everything out, in-game, like, who cares how many people die in the process?

Like, let's just fucking be legends on the Fury Road. Like, fuck it. Like, I live, I die, live again. It's the kind of like everything in the right-wing sphere needs to have a populist element now. So it's like, well, if we just gamify it all and turn it into the province of gambling, then we can have our, you know,

you can feel like you're a part of the final neoliberal raid on everything. Does that make sense? It's a kind of, it's a fury road. I thought you guys weren't supposed to be doomers anymore. Yeah. Oh, no, dude, trust me. It's fucked, brother. You took us to Mad Max Fury Road.

You can't get more doomer than that. Yeah, I don't, I just have a bunch of questions. I mean, I always go back to the Tanahasi quotes quote about, you know, you expect, the quote he had about, you, you know, the people you expect to put a stop to this. I'm paraphrasing there. are the ones who didn't put a stop to like genocide in West Asia, right? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think we're in difficult times.

We're headed to more turbulent difficult times. And but if you, if we are thinking dialectically, then it's hard to foresee some of these things, right? Because these, the movements, the processes are being produced in real time, right? Like the contradictions are producing something that. we may not be able to see right now, and it might not actually even be better. It might be worse. It might be Mad Max Free Road, which I think also, for me at least, I have difficulty even kind of locating the coordinates from which I would try to do analyze something in real time dialectically. I think that's part of the issue. It's really difficult right now to get a sense of what actually is going on. What do we know? What do we don't know? I mean, we talked about this in the Venezuela case, but I think we can apply that on a broader scale to understand. what's happening on this country. Because I think your sense is right. Terrence, like I think even being in public or being around people, everyone seems very tired.

Everyone just seems like just resigned. I don't know how to describe it, right? So like how, like, you know, thinking about what caused that, how to break out of that is some of the challenges that we have. And for me, I think last time we talked, for me, something that gave me a lot of hope. And it still gives me a lot of hope are how like those community members in Paramount came out and, like, defended their neighbors. defended their families, defended their communities, and that amazing photograph of graffiti that said, like, fuck ice free Gaza. So people on the ground are starting to make really important connections.

The issue is it's largely local or even regional, perhaps. But we kind of saw this yesterday as well, right? With the people coming out and already trying to put, they kicked ice out of that community where they executed the young woman using snowballs. Like so there's a lot of difficult questions, right? like how do we defeat this, this, I mean, rising authoritarian or fascism domestically? And these are really difficult questions because some of the methods that may need to be used or have been used in the past, we've been socialized to think those are bad, right?

Like the use of self-defense is bad or the use of violence is bad or the use of challenging authority is bad or police officers is bad. I mean, these are, so some of this, whatever happens is going to involve a lot of like unlearning or undessocializing a lot of stuff that we've been taught in the last three, four decades. Or walking somebody in a towel room, for example, and you're the only one that walks back out, like that kind of thing. That's bad. Nah, I don't know. I just, you know, if the stakes couldn't be clearer, though, I just wanted to point out that. quote from Stephen Miller, torture is the way to go, torture is a celebration

of life and human dignity. Like these are the people that they better hope this burger rack thing works out. They better hope it does. You're right. It's like you said Tom, it's like it would be kind to just depose them and imprison them. Like genuinely, if

they got what they deserve, they'd be strung up from the fucking lamp post. I mean, like, it's genuinely like what are we doing here? it's hard for me to see how this works. Like what, you have to give your base stuff. Like, what are people getting other than the spectacle?

And that's one thing where I think about how this, perhaps this political project is not going to be able to become hegemonic. Is that these people have to give their political base stuff beyond just images, beyond just the opportunity to post, I voted for this. Like, what are they getting? Yeah. If anything like materially, they're getting the opposite of what they said they were going to get. So I don't know

The problem is you need a party to come in here And kind of take advantage of that or organization But that's I guess that's what I'm talking about The basic calculus unfortunately is that like I think MAGA sees the writing on the wall obviously Because Trump's not going to live forever And they know that they're fucked

Like the coalition is So next Thursday at this point It just doesn't not look good I take it for granted he's going to live for another 10 years That's my I think That's your Polly Market best That's my polymarket bet.

But I just, I think you're right, Alex. I don't see them being able to hold it together. They've made like these kind of gestures. Like yesterday, Trump said that they were banning companies like BlackRock from buying up single unit in households. And it's just like this doesn't mean anything. What was it, the 50-year mortgage or something like that? That's another one they were. Yeah.

Yeah. We're going to take it out of Black Rock's hands and give it to Fandle. I guess in that light, I think, I don't know if y'all saw this, but Trump's statement yesterday that, like, obviously it was intended to troll and trigger the libs once again, but it was like, Democrats have been mad at this for spending $1 trillion on the military. So in light of that, this year, we're going to spend $1.5 trillion on the military. Like, it's genuinely just kind of bunker shit, you know what I mean, like Soviets rolling in, but there's no Soviets this time. It's just like the Soviets rolling it. The Soviet tanks rolling in is like the grim reaper coming, you know, tapping on Trump's shoulder every other week. And so it's like they know, I guess that's the reason it's like balls to the wall.

Like the remake, the Red Dawn remake would just be like the Grin Reaper. It wouldn't even be the Cubans, the Sandinistas or the Soviets. It would just be the Green River. The heavy hand of time, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you guys have been saying that like you think that the Democrats will do well. next year's elections and I guess that'll be a chance to see what what I mean I have we have a

sense of what they can do or not do but that'll be an opportunity for them to show if there is a legit way out of this but you know I think the key thing to pay attention to that like if they insist on an electoral way forward it has to be about correcting the sins of Obama and like it has to be about like some level of accountability like you should never not vote for anybody I'm not would tell people like what to do like twilight or whatever but you shouldn't vote for anybody that's not at least saying we're going to bury these guys under the jail like well based on your new york city experience tom i highly encourage you to intervene in like local electoral i do do it i encourage him to go for it please please tom i'm off that i ain't even i ain't even comment

on that anymore come on dog oh man all right all right i Well, thanks, thanks, Alex, for entertaining our Doom talk towards the end of this episode. I mean, there's a lot more here to cover, but obviously we wanted to just have you to talk about Latin America. It's always fun. No, thank you. This is always fun. And just let's think about validating and always putting to the forefront with the whole my little thing to go back to that. It should be a pretty easy thing to defend the national sovereignty of other countries,

particularly those in Latin America in this situation. It's not a difficult thing to do. You would think that the leaders of sovereign countries would agree with that, but they themselves, like Macron, have basically been like, come arrest me. Fuck it. I don't care. Or we get the Bald Eagle Jaguar.

Or we get the Bald Eagle Jaguar. Thanks, guys. It's always fun. Thanks, Alex. Please go check us out on Patreon. Link is in the show notes. We'll see you over there in a few days and have a great weekend, everybody.