Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 437: The A Triple K Conference (w/ Special Guest Alexander Aviña)

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Friend of the show Professor Alexander Aviña joins us as we talk the latest on Iran, as well as the latest crimes of the Donroe Doctrine in Latin America among other topics of import. Support us here: patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

To open up today's episode, I would like to bring y'all's attention to this video. One thing I was raised was, I was raised by the fear of a belt. Okay? And I deserved them, Dad, I did, right? But I never seen a man that could take the belt off so fast, double it up and still hit you. I don't know how in the world he'd done that. I tried it and I just can't. The first video shows new DHS secretary Mark Wayne Mullen describing his daughter pleading with him not to spank her. I'll talk about my kids a little bit here, right? My two beautiful twins that are sitting down there.

Guys, I'll tell you right now, I do spank. I have no problem with that. As I got older, I've had to learn new ways to discipline, though. But my girls, I've never seen someone like it. My girls, I'm telling you, they're loving kids. They're, I mean, truly loving little girls. You just can't imagine how loving they are. I can spank them, and I'm still upset,

and they'll come and crawl on my lap two minutes later, and just hug on me. I've had to learn how to forgive more. Now, you take Lara, for instance, when she was a girl, trying to spank her d'ell was like a four-minute ordeal, because she's like, no, daddy, no, daddy, no, daddy, no. Sorry, Daddy. I'm sorry, Daddy. She just couldn't bring herself to even bend over for me to be able to bust her butt.

This is the new guy who's leading DHS. I mean, I think that's just, I don't know, this story just includes, it's just a confluence of many things that are wrong with law enforcement, like pathologically. Yeah. You know, the 40% statistic that they abuse their families and then also just, I mean, I guess, ancestral pedophilia? There's a weird, yeah, there's a weird... There's some weird shit going on here.

Yeah, some weird shit going on. Yeah, I don't like it. I don't like it. And this is the new... This is the guy who has replaced, I guess. Christy Gnome. Chrissy Gnome, okay. Yeah.

I still haven't gotten to the bottom of how he got into Cherokee Nation. Yeah. I need to know more about that story. Oh, really? Is he... What do you mean? I don't know if he was just like white passing or if he is actually like if it's more like on some like you know.

Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren. Or in fairness, I understand that like tribal enrollment is not necessarily a matter of like blood and race and all that kind of stuff. So I want to be clear about that. Also, the Cherkees split in the Civil War. one segment of them supported this confederacy and another segment of them supported the union.

So maybe it's the Confederacy side that he joined. Maybe two we could be like, forgive the constant Star Trek references, but in Star Trek Voyager, there is a, see, I don't know if he is Native American. He's an actor's name is Robert Beltran. And I don't know if he is of indigenous descent, but I definitely think he is Hispanic, though. It's murky, but anyway, they had his native.

American character on the show. And they had a Native American expert who was actually some white guy who did not at all have any relationship to any tribe. He was the one coaching, providing the Native American sort of mythology and commentary throughout the show. And then years later, people found that he was a fraud. So it could be just a case of mistaken identity. I don't know. Yeah. Was he one of the millions of Americans named something like Andrew Jackson Smith or Andrew Jackson something? You know, that was that trend. I like how Aaron just said Hispanic peoples are murky. That's, uh, we are, we are, we are murky and swarming.

Merky and swarming. I see how it is. Dusky. Dusky. Oh, we're going full of 19th century. It's good. Oh, for real. It's bad.

Um, I, I just, the only reason I brought that up is just like, why would you feel comfortable enough to tell a room full of people that? It's just like, that's where politics is now. like being able to dimension. It's like you've either got the Mike Johnson thing where it's like I jack off with my son and we hold each other accountable for not jacking off. And we show you the point we look at as an accountability measure. I feel like anybody associated with the Trump administration, they have to have, I don't even want

to call it a quirk because these are not quirks. These are like bordering like crimes possibly, right? Oh, did Trump himself? like clearly wants to fuck his own daughter and then like there was the Matt Gates thing where he like had a child he like adopted a kid except he wasn't a kid though

he was like a 20 year old Cuban yeah yeah Nestor what happened to Nestor Nestor? Nestor what happened to Nestor we haven't seen him in a while

we haven't seen this sir a while it's kind of worried I hope he's doing well wherever he's yeah I'm worried hopefully he hasn't been caught up in deportations you know um well I

welcome to the show everybody your introductory segment on weird psychosexual incest things going on with Republicans and you know

we've got a full house here today we're joined by Alexander Avina returning guest to talk a little bit about the United States Empire obviously. I want to talk a little bit about the war in Iran, obviously. But, you know, clearly we also wanted to have you on to talk about, like, what's going on. In South America at the moment,

there were a few stories that came out this week that I thought were pretty relevant, both to how the United States is conducting itself at the imperial and global level, but also how it's affecting, like, domestic politics here in the United States. And also how it's affecting the war in Iran, too. I mean, these things are all obviously interrelated. But, like, maybe a good place to, like, start off. I think that this would, like, be a good sort of umbrella topic or story to, like, let us talk about both Iran and what's going on in South America, especially in, like, Ecuador. You know, I want to talk about that.

But, like, there's this story I saw. in, I think it was NBC. This is about how Trump, inside Trump's daily montage video briefing on the Iran war, I think this also, like I said, this is just related to Iran, but I think this also incorporates what's going on in, like, Ecuador and Venezuela and everything else. This is how Trump gets himself, like, sort of abreast of his, the conduct in operations of his own. military and empire. Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours.

Can I just interject really quick, man? I feel like that's really appropriate for this kind of media inundated error that we live in, that instead of getting like a physical piece of paper or like a briefing that he would have to read and discuss, he's basically getting a TikTok. reel, you know, of the U.S. Empire's greatest hits, latest hits, you know. He's getting a TikTok real. That's the best way

to put it. The daily montage typically runs about two minutes, sometimes longer. Typically with the dance. Listen, brother, if somebody says me a TikTok real or Instagram real that's longer than like 45 seconds, I'm probably not going to watch it, to be

honest. It's like the president's briefing is essentially like the guy that will corner you at a party and make you watch a six minute clip and you just have to like nod like you're interested the whole time. And then all you can say is, damn, that's wild. Yeah, about something you're not, about some shit you're not even interested, like how to replace the engine on his motorcycle or some shit. Yeah, like, dude, I just doesn't care about this at all.

Do you guys remember his first administration? I remember there was reporting that his briefings from like the CIA National Security apparatus that had to be fit on like one page. And now we've like declined from that to like a two minute TikTok real. Then you can just swipe to the, yeah, it's just, man, it's so dark. With a soundtrack, too, I imagine. Oh, there's certainly a soundtrack. That's a great point.

I got to know, like, because, like, obviously Trump's, like a musical guy. Like, I wonder if they put, like, the soundtrack. Cats. Yeah. What is it? Lesmers and Rollets. Oklahoma. Yeah, that would be perfect.

Yeah. Yeah. But that's a great point, Alex, about the, One page briefing things Because it says here A daily montage typically runs about two minutes One described each daily video As a series of clips of quote

Stuff blowing up There's not even There's not even context It's just explosions It's a montage You would at least think that it would be something akin to like I mean I don't know man

The first example I can think of it's like When you're watching World War II documentaries On the History Channel And they like gamify Like the victories and the defeats you know, with text and numbers on the bottom of the screen like a kairad so that you could follow it easily. Or Hamasda's great propaganda videos, but of course, you know, we wouldn't do something like that. The Iranians with their AI bail explosions.

We finally found a good use of AI, and it's Iranians. Those AI videos are off the hook. Those are off the hook. They're so good. They have, they know their enemy. They really know their enemy. They really do. Outslopping the enemy.

well it's they know their enemy at least at the administrative like leadership level we've said this before they i've never seen a um an enemy of america like so optimistic and generous with their reading of the american populace like they they love americans their estimation of us is like very charming like their overestimation of americans listen as a teacher i understand I understand, man. We have to. We have to be that way. Come on. You want to give us the benefit of the down. Yeah. No, and I think historically anti-imperialists and enemies of the United States have generally made the argument that separates the U.S. government from the American people. Right? They've always, that's like a, that goes back, you know, for a long time.

So any enemy that the U.S. has had, that enemy has been very effective. I mean, that's part of their strategy, right? like to divide the American people from their corrupt, decrepit, insane bellicose leadership, right? Which may honestly be the best evidence that Bush actually did 9-11. Because only like American leaders would hate Americans that much that they would be willing to just kill 3,000 Americans. It's totally true. When I was in Cuba, it's kind of funny because you like you juxtapose like this royal treatment that everybody gives you while you're there. Like as an American, my look at. at all the signs about the bloc and everything.

You're like, this makes me feel really strange, but these people are way better than we are. I mean, on the one hand, I always think that, and we talked about on the show, that I don't know, anywhere from 15 to 25% of people in this country or just like bloodthirsty, rabid Nazis, you know? Yeah. But then, you know, on the other hand, I don't know.

I don't want to excuse or absolve Americans of, you know, the crimes that their nation commits. But I mean, you know, it goes without saying that a lot of people don't have a choice. And a lot of people, it's not even that they don't give a fuck, but they don't have the time to give a fuck. And I would like to think of Americans as kind of affable and stupid, if anything, you know, but not necessarily evil. You know what I mean? I'm saying this is a black dude, you know, in the South. Yeah.

No, I think what we need. I mean, you guys talked about this with Devin, right? Like, you guys reference Hanoi Jane. Like, we need that for American, like, the entire American. Like, we need, like, Tehran, Terrence. is for on Tom. Take her on Tom. Just take on Tom.

Like, but you're not, your, your, your, your, audience isn't like American GIs, but like,

the actual American population. Like, it's the most, probably the most common, common comment I get from students after they take a class with me about like Latin America in the 20th century or history of U.S.

Empire or whatever. Like, they're, the most common comment is, I didn't know any of this. And why was, I taught this like in K through 12. Yeah.

Why did I know? Like today, later today, I'm going to be teaching about the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. And like, I know a student's going to come to me and be like, how come we don't know about this? Right. So, part of the-of-ne-11. Right, the original on a Tuesday as well, right? Like actual original. So part of this is like, I think, yeah, I think there is a segment of the U.S. population that we've seen past and present that is just, they're just fascistic.

I don't know how else to say it, right? They do revel in the spectacular violence committee. against people that they've identified as their existential enemies. But there's also a lot of just like lack of knowledge, right? So, I mean, like, what, like 20% of the population of the U.S. goes to college, 25%. And that quarter has very little knowledge of, like, you of history beyond U.S. borders. Like, we have a lot of work to do. So, yeah, Tehran, Tom, come on.

Get on it. I made it. Yeah. I was just going to say, I always think about this. When my mom took the citizenship test, I'm pretty sure all of those questions that she answered than got right to get her citizenship, most Americans who were born here don't even know those things.

Yeah, yeah. So, I don't know. Yeah, that was my parents' complaint. They don't know this stuff, but I do now. Yeah, my mom was like, I had to know the three branches of government. Yeah. They don't.

Yeah. I don't want to be a Pincheguero my whole life. You know what I mean? That's how you start your radio communicate, Tehran, Tom. Yeah. Beechiwitos.

Listen. That is interesting now, actually, because like most, the thing that is kind of accepted wisdom in politics is that foreign policy is the one sort of area of concern that Americans care about the least. And it like causes their eyes to glaze over like when politicians start talking about it usually get the least amount of airtime at debates relating up to. elections and all this. But with the, shall we say, I don't know, long-term sort of secular drift of American foreign policy towards achieving the aims of Israel, at least in the Middle East. This is not the case in South America, and I want to, it's part of the reason I wanted to be on. Well, until you get to the Patagonia region, then it comes back into play.

It does seem to be the case that more and more Americans are starting to, care about foreign policy. And I don't know what that means. Like there has been a ton of obvious, you know, obviously there's been a ton of debate in the last two and a half years, especially in the last two months or so, about the rise of like anti-Semitism or or like sort of bemoaning the fact that like more right-wingers are talking about Israel's relationship with the United States

than left-wingers, at least at the national political level. but like whatever the case is however that shakes out it is just undeniably true that the one issue that most americans can agree on is fuck is real and so i don't know how that shakes out like once you're actually coming to like a new type of american politics or like i wanted to ask you this alex too to add on to what you said terrence and ask you a question Alex, like I feel like foreign policy has always been tied up with immigration as well, immigration policy, you know, about who gets to come into the country, who doesn't, our relationships, international relationships with other countries.

And I wanted to ask, Alex, if you could sort of like sort of maybe give like, or maybe a rundown of how sort of Trump's immigration policy has facted into his foreign policy, especially when it comes to this, what does it operate? total extermination, you know, that the U.S. government is working in concert with Ecuador and how it's ostensibly about targeting drug traffickers. But it also seems to me to me to dovetail with immigration, right, with this really barbaric immigration policy. Yeah, I think, one, I think that the, that commonplace idea within U.S. politics that, like, Americans don't care about foreign policy. I think that's a bullshit argument. It ebbs and flows, right?

So like in the 1980s, a lot of Americans did care about foreign policy, particularly U.S. foreign policy in Central America. You had hundreds of thousands of Americans who went to Nicaragua as part of solidarity campaigns, right? They used their bodies to protect Nicaragua and communities on the borders with Honduras to protect them from these bloodthirsty contra desquads, right? So like, and you had hundreds of thousands of Americans who then set up an underground railroad here in the U.S. for refugees coming from Central America in the 1980s as well, right? And it had electoral consequences. The reason why we have the Iran-Contra Scandals because Americans told their representatives don't let the Reagan administration fund the contras, right?

And that's why they had to do a legal shit to do it, which to this day is like one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history and the fact that people, that shit didn't happen to this people, is one of the reasons why we end up getting the war in Iraq 1.0 and then war on terror. And today, wouldn't it would be out of the new cycle by tomorrow? Totally.

Yeah, yeah. That's another aspect as well. I just want to add it's something that everybody knows about, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like how that was fun. It's something that rappers will mention in their songs. It's just common knowledge, but nobody really interrogates it beyond. Yeah.

Rappers making a career out of that name, right? Yeah, yeah, right. No, it's like so commonplace. But so, but the immigration is the one, like, issue that can tie the domestic and the foreign, right? And it's just the really, you know, Latin American and Caribbean immigration to the U.S. is a harvest of empire. And the reason why people come here is in direct relationship to U.S. foreign policy

in Latin America and the Caribbean past and present. Like they're not coming here just to come here. There's a reason why domestically, but also how the U.S. has dominated Latin America has led to and spurred refugees and migrants fleeing their countries, being robbed of the right to stay home, and then they come to the country that's largely responsible for their suffering

and their displacement to begin with. I think one thing that Trump has done is that he's done a really good thing, for us, I guess, for those of us who want to push a broader anti-imperialist agenda is that he's kind of really knocked down the border between the domestic and the foreign. He's made it the same thing, right? Nikhil Paul Singh is written about this in the equator. He calls it like Homeland Empire, that there's no longer a border, right, like in this ideological space. An immigration is tied to narco- like so that's why they use a term narco-terrorism, right? Like,

narco-terrorism becomes the catch-all way to describe enemies the United States, and you can throw in mythical drug cartels that don't exist, but then they're being used to, you know, kidnap and torture and put on trial like the leader, elected leader of a sovereign nation, like Nicolas Maduro, who I think today is actually, I think today is the first day of his official proceeding, right? So the immigrant, in this, you know, their anti-immigrant policies tied to, at least legally, the cases that they've argued in U.S. federal court, like they tie undocumented migration and refugees to things like the Tren Dara Agua and other gangs that they are, you know,

blowing up to be transnational drug syndicates which Trenada Ragua is not. But nonetheless, it still allows them to say all migrants are drug traffickers, all migrants are narco-terrorists. That's why we can blow them up on boats, right? It doesn't even matter if they're fishermen, if they're migrants, if they're, if they actually are moving weight in the Caribbean or the Eastern Pacific. What matters is that- Dairy farmers in Ecuador. I mean, that story is so messed up because they tortured them, right? Like they launched a military operation.

They blew this shit out of these dairy farms on the border of Colombia and Ecuador. Then they realized they made a mistake. So they went back in there and tortured these dairy farmers and told them not to say anything, right? And like the crazy thing is that like Ecuadorian reporters on the ground have been reporting on this for like several weeks. But now because the New York Times finally got their hands on it yesterday or two days ago, now it's become big news. But like to me, as someone who kind of follows the war on drug stuff, like this is what the war on drugs is. It's a war on poor people. It's being used as cover for both expanding U.S. empire throughout Latin America.

But then it also helps local, you know, right-wing proxy governments like Daniel Noboa kind of establish their dictatorial control in Ecuador with the help of the United States under the cover of a war on drugs. in actuality, he's the narco. Like, that's the thing. Like, if we want to think about a narco terrorist, and I told this to a journalist from Salon yesterday, and he was kind of, I think I kind of shocked him. He didn't know what to say, but he's like, okay, so who's the narco terrorist?

And I'm like, well, that's the president of Ecuador. And he's like, what? Yeah. Right? We have plenty of reporting that his family's tied up. But down is up, up is down. Like, like academics, we get stuck in our little world, right? And things seem like, of course things are this way.

And then you say, The things we think and write, we say it out loud to like a normie, and it sounds kind of insane. You sound like an insane person. Yeah. Alice, I just want to just highlight again, man, that's such a good point about the collapsing of the domestic and the foreign, you know? And I know this is an offset quote. But I mean, I take it as, you know, a definition of fascism that I can accept, right, is imperialism kind of brought home. You know what I mean?

Like those sort of tactics, you know, so yeah, yeah. Well, I want to point out the, so you brought up Ecuador, the dairy farm that was raided and then exploded and then its owners were tortured. You know, we brought up a second ago the videos that they make for Trump to, you know, convince him that the war is actually being won. And by the way, I wanted just to finish that article or just to finish the kind of, take away from it. They said the videos are driving Trump's increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed out

Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can't better influence the public narrative, asking AIDS why the news media doesn't emphasize what he's seeing. I mean, that's just really funny is why are the people amazed at the explosions?

Right. Wait, why aren't they amazed by the explosions like me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can't understand why people, if not everybody has like W.W.E. Like pyrotechnics brand.

You know what I mean? Well, there's several different things there. One of which is that like there are plenty of Americans who would be satisfied just seeing a montage of explosions and being like, that means we're winning. I think the second layer there, though, is that like, I don't know about you guys, I don't like spend a lot of time watching news,

but this war compared to, the Iraq war compared to Kuwait compared to fucking Bosnia and Kosovo in the 90s. This shit is barely even being covered. So like I don't even know like Trump's gap between like what he sees in the

average American sees is obviously you know massive. But like to get back to what I think one of you said a second ago I think it was you Aaron about like empire by way of video or by way of just like mediated spectacle or mediated video.

Um, the, the, the strike in Ecuador on that dairy farm was, um, you know, it was first presented to Trump as a video. It was at this conference for the America's counter cartel coalition. It really rolls off the tongue. Um, it's got, it's like 17. Triple C. Yeah. What's that? Yeah.

I was trying to think of the actual. A triple C. A triple C. Yeah. K. We do it with K. We'll just do it with the K. Yeah.

A KKK. A.K. But it's this coalition that Trump has put together of various right-wing governments in Central and South America to stop cartels. And they had a meeting recently.

No left-wing governments are invited to this, by the way. It's like Petro, Lula, these governments aren't invited. But this they presented this video I think Hegset presented it to Trump

Like this is kind of I don't know It's maybe I've seen too many movies But it is genuinely like The lackeys bring The god emperor Like his daily Like I brought this for you sir

Like I've brought another Mass slaughter for you And you know They present it to the king And he's like yeah I'm winning A ball of like children's blood Or some shit like that

I'm actually out of a skull Right A child skull, actually. Yeah. But like... Yeah, but all those guys are failed Miami club promoters, you know. So they went on to be despots. But as you pointed out,

this story, like, took a few weeks to merge. Like, Ecuadorian journalists started reporting on it, and the New York Times finally released it this week, that this was actually not in any way related to cartel activity or drug trafficking activity, which is literally someone's dairy farm, and they hit it for optics. And, you know, there's a lot to be said there.

I mean, I think that, like, the war in Iran is also very similar. Like, they just blow shit up for optics at this point. Like, there's really no strategy. Like, they're just kind of throwing missiles and, you know, artillery and people at the problem, money at the problem in hoping that, like, maybe it, you know, comes up, America. In the meantime, they can just short the markets and enrich themselves. I mean, I don't know. Did you guys see this story about like how someone placed like a, someone got like $1.5 million off of a short off of oil markets. Like they placed it right before Trump said the thing.

Yeah. That was me. Don't tell anybody. That was me. Just like, has there ever really been a war that is like so. I know we've said this before, but like, and I know I'm already diverging from talking about South of Central America, but like genuinely, has there ever been like a fucking war that's like so clearly like our objectives, just personal enrichment and greed, contrasted with the enemy's objectives,

which is like survival and like, you know, civilization. It's profitable for us to lose for some people. Like in this really cheap miserly way versus like something moral. something survivables, you know what I mean? But there is a parallel here, though, with Central and South America, which is that, like, I don't know if you guys saw this this week, but Doug Bergam, who is like our, I don't know,

what is he, our treasury, that's Besson. I'm hearing this name for the first time. Interior? No, I do. Is he minister the Interior? Is he Interior Secretary? Yeah, yeah. I think he's the Interior Secretary.

Announced that they brought back $100 million worth of gold. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They just stole $100 million worth of gold. from Venezuela. Not the first time in Latin American history also. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did this to Haiti.

Right, they did, right. 1914, 1915, yeah. It is just this personal enrichment and I don't know. I mean, it's just obviously like resource extraction. Go ahead. It's always.

I mean, I think that's what, yeah. One of the things I assigned to my students is Smedley Butler's war as a racket. Because he's like so it's, he was writing about this in the 1930s where he says, listen, I was like a gangster for capitalism.

Like he served in the U.S. military. He's a two-time medal of honor winner in the Marine Corps ends up becoming like a major general began his career in the Spanish American

War of 1898, finished it in the late 20s in China and then became like the police commissioner of Philadelphia and he got fired because he talked shit

about Mussolini called him a fascist but then he writes he becomes this anti-war activist and he gives a speech that then gets published into like a short little pamphlet called War is Iraq

and he says like what I've learned about my career in the military was that I was just a gangster for capitalism that everything I was doing that I thought for the U.S. military was actually for Wall Street banks. And he's like, he has a line where he says, you know, I actually could have given Al Capone a few lessons, a few hints. You know, the best he could do was operate his racket in three districts

in Chicago. I did it on three continents. So, I mean, I think that's always been a feature of U.S. Empire, right? It's just, it's so personalistic and individualized right now, right? It's not a corporation. It's not, you know, ITT or United Fruit Company. Right. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, people around Trump, right? So, like, crass and obvious and transparent that that might be a difference here. It seems like the, I don't know, you know, you could contrast the current administration with, like, the Bush administration. And it's so fascinating how, like, it was seen as controversial to say that we invaded Iraq for the oil. And maybe it is, maybe it is true.

It is a little nuance in the sense that, like, I think that. some of those conservatives really were high on their own supply. Like, they really did start to believe that, like, democracy was something that could be just sort of, like, germinated and seated in a place. But if some of that oil and priceless artifacts fell off a truck, then, you know. But I mean, right. It's got to pick it up, you know. We've mentioned it before, so I don't want to, like, you know, beat a dead horse, but, like,

you said it turns, like, the neocons actually, yeah, they were high on their own supply. They actually seemed to have an ideological vision. You know what I mean? and you could say of how, you know, how evil and awful it was, but, you know, which it was, but these people just, they just want to enrich themselves. This doesn't seem to be any long-term strategy or plan, you know. No, they're like stripping the wires. I mean, that's what they're doing.

This is just like straight up plunder and, like, taking the wires out and leaving. Where, yeah, I think we don't have to ever hand it to the neocons, but there was, I think, I mean, that idea of germinating democracy was. obviously very linked to a particular definition of like free market capitalism or neoliberal capitalism, right? For sure, yeah. That's, they spent, you know, actually, you know, that they tried in Chile in 1973 and then decided to go global with it.

But whereas now I think the decline is very obvious, right? Like the decline of the U.S. empire is very obvious, particularly because it's been shorn of its soft power, right? So all that's left are the fangs. All this left is a hard power. while those of us living in the entrails of the belly of the beast see the decline all around us, right? Like the stuff you guys are talking about with Devin is just those of us who live in certain parts of the country see the decline. There is like what ideological justification could you come up for this?

And so it's kind of perfect that like Trump is going to shepherd us into the decline of U.S. empire. It's going to take a while. It's really, it's going to be very violent and bloody. Part of the reason why is because he's being given these two-minute videos. I mean, and to bring it back to like, South America or even Mexico, that's how he's talked about bombing narco labs and cartels in Mexico. He's like, we have these extremely accurate missiles. I've seen them work. We send a missile into the living room of a cartel member and buy by a cartel member. So it's that the way he's been

presented these images and these ideas are also influencing his policy. But like he right now, he's really frustrated that like the stuff that's come out in the last couple of days, I think it's really funny. Like someone tell the Iranians that they're defeated, because that's what the Americans keep saying. That's what Trump and Levitt and all these people in the administration are like, then we have to keep bombing the Iranians because they don't understand that they're defeated. They don't know how to get up. Right, right.

Jesus God. And it makes sense that like, it is the perfect confluence of several different things, but like one of which is the, as you said, Aaron, like the kind of 90-second TikTok clip. It's like it makes perfect sense now that, like, you could run in America, you could run an empire based off of like you don't need intelligence briefings you don't need reports of like how your strategy is working how this that is doing like if you're moving the you know the line of your forces on the map into the enemy's territory you don't need any of that you just need a 90 second clip of explosions and like that's good enough because at the end of the

day, I don't know, it should be clear to most Americans by this point, but like to make it explicitly clear at the end of the day, the only strategy they have is do war on the weekends and on Monday make sure that you've placated the deity known as the market. You know what I'm saying? Like you, we tame this like fucking ungodly, you know, satanic deity known as the market. And that's the whole, like, that's the whole way we're going to like thread this needle of, uh, you know, Hadrian's walling the, um, you know, hadrian's walling the, um, you know, empire and I don't know it's like this is like the war plan this is the war plan they got when they asked chat GPT for a war plan and it hallucinated yeah that's that's what we're doing that's

that's why it looks so insane meanwhile if you follow alternative media sources like I was reading this morning the Iranians are are announcing their 82nd wave of attacks against US and israeli military installations throughout the region and now they're coordinating with Hezbollah so like you have combined air combined arms operations where the Iranians are providing air cover for Hezbollah defending South Lebanon against an Israeli invasion. That doesn't sound like a defeated entity, right? And they've, despite the massive amounts of violence and horrific carnage that they've enacted upon this country, beginning with, you know, bombing a school, a school of him killing 200 school girls, right? Like, it's just weird, man.

It's just really weird to see. And I think this is the frustration with Trump, right? It's not that he's not frustrated that I think he's frustrated with the fact that the US media is not reporting things the way he wants them But they actually are right like we're not getting like very Accurate or comprehensive information as to what's going on in the region I think I really think the reason well I don't know I was gonna say I really think the reason is like Israel like that's the kind of Thing here that like skews all because like you sent that thing in the group chat Alex like that New York Times story or the

The Times is like, Israel is now fighting in Lebanon, and they may have to stay there after the fighting is over. You know what I mean? Or the Israeli guy that got picked up in L.A. with all the bio-weapons and stuff. Yes, yes. The first thing they say was he had links to China and didn't mention nothing about him being an Israeli citizen.

Right. Later on. Or, I mean, in that first story, Terrence, I mean, just avoiding the word invasion, as many people were saying in the comments. Like, this is a fucking invasion, you know. I mean, it's, it's tempting to say that, like, that's the kind of, you know, um, warping element here.

But like, you know, we saw how WMD was with the New York Times in the media in 2003. Um, so, you know, it's obvious that all these mainstream sources, like, they do exist to basically manufacture consent for empire. None of this is, you know, original or, you know, insightful in any way. But I think that like, with Trump specifically, I think that like something that is kind of routinely astonished me over and over is the whole notion of sort of like decapitating a nation's leadership and just to have the scalp, really.

Like I mean, I guess it, I don't know, I've contradicted myself eight million times already in this episode. But like, obviously it's resource extraction. But like then again, you look at it and you're like, okay, in Venezuela, they just left the entire government in place. In Cuba, they've asked the president to step down because they prefer Raul Castro's grandson. They say they do. They want the Castro in as the president of Cuba.

And so it's like, well, what the fuck is the point then? Like, I don't understand. Like, is Raul Castro's grandson? Is he like a neoliberal? Like, what is the deal there? I think he's raised in America, right? I think he's like a Miami guy. So, like, maybe they're thinking that he's.

Okay, I'm not sure. I see. Interesting. I'm not sure. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's right. There is like a thoroughly like racist argument that underscores this idea, right? And this is like a longstanding idea of U.S. Empire that and it is real for that matter, right? You decapitate your enemy and somehow that thoroughly defeats your enemy.

Like I recently watched a really terrible movie. I don't know if you guys have seen it called The Wall where it's like it's, it came out in 2017. Pink Floyd documentary. No, it's like Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon are in it. And they're like these European mercenaries who end up like on the Great Wall of China because they're trying to steal black powder. Oh, I remember this. Yeah. It's a terrible movie.

Really like famous great Chinese director, but this movie just sucks. But so the Great Wall of China in this movie is built to keep out these like, these mindless monsters that try to periodically invade China. But they're all controlled by like a queen monster. And the whole point in the movie is if you get the queen monster, the rest of these mindless monsters. monsters fall apart. They're like a hive mind. They're a hive mind. They're not capable of any individual thinking or any critical analysis or any

intelligent decision making at all that you could counter with your own intelligent decision making. Which is like so much of like Cold War propaganda was based on that idea, right? Like representing communists in that way. Or like the the head bug and like Starship Troopers, right? That idea though is like a very real one that has existed in like the analysts that work to like spread and propagate U.S. empire. And I feel like that's part of what still operates today in the Trump administration.

But again, also, if they are, if they don't care about so-called democracy or ideology, then it makes sense with what they're doing in Venezuela or Cuba. What they care about is putting in a leader that is amenable to like foreign direct investment that's tied to Trump administration and their people. And as long as they, like Delci Rodriguez, as long as they go along with restructuring and privatizing their economies in a way that's, you know, it directly helps U.S. companies, particularly those linked to Trump, then that's why that's all they care about, which will be really funny to see someone like Marco Rubio go

along with it, right? Because so much of his career is supposedly this ideological struggle against Cuban communism. And in the end, the castros are going to remain in power according to this plan, as long as they just get rid of the eskan. It's almost like the empire's goal is to make war,

but not like really went, like, you know what I mean? It's like to open up loose ends and just make a ton of money and extract resources and kill a lot of innocent people, but there's no like real goal because it's just endless war all over the place feels like the aim, you know. Yeah, it just feels like just there's no desire to maintain it, you know. And I don't know, I was thinking to how much it, how much of the lack of, I don't know, because I guess I want to

ask you guys a question. Like, I think there's kind of been a lack of propaganda, right? When it comes to, I mean, like, when it comes to Iran, I mean, I guess you could say over the past couple years, but directly from the Trump administration, you know, it feels like there hasn't really been an effort. Venezuela, I know these things have been set into motion by other administrations, but I feel like the Trump administration hasn't really made the case to the American public, which is perhaps why he's upset that people aren't reacting to these explosions in the same way that he is. But part of what I think is that, I mean, there's the inshittification of everything, right, where these guys can't even commit themselves to a war plan, right? As awful as that

sounds, right? But truly, they don't give a fuck. They just want to risk themselves as quickly as possible. But also, I don't think people even need to be convinced anymore, you know. I think people are so just beaten down and just so kind of, I don't know if nihilistic or pessimistic is the word, that there's not a shame. A shame. A shame. My asthma is shame. Have you gotten off that idea already? You had it right. You had it right. This don't need to convince anyone of anything anymore. You know what I mean? So I don't know. We're so thoroughly pacified. And I think Trump's using the like Iraq rubric and also at the same time kind of forgetting that they spent 18 months manufacturing that consent after 9-11 and getting everybody hopped up on the war

machine, you know, and he's just like, why is that not happening? It's like, you haven't done anything. And furthermore, there's just no like, yeah, it, and it probably doesn't matter anyway, you know, like you say. Well, there's no, I mean, in a capitalist nation, like, I guess you have to be able to achieve like a territorial dominance at least if you're going to try to as you said earlier Alex like install markets in a sort of like free market

ideology but like how would you do that I guess it's air superiority well like Iran is proving daily that like that's pretty much a fucking myth they shot down an F-18 they shot they've been shooting down fucking jets this time it wasn't the ghost of Kuwait either This was like actual Iranian air defenses that apparently they're rolling out new stuff that they were keeping for now.

That's another thing. Like they know their enemy. They've been studying. It's an existential question for them since 1979. So they've been studying U.S. And if anything, the Iraq war, they learned a lot from the Iraq war. Right? I mean, so they know us.

Their war with Iraq but also our war. That's what I mean. Yeah, yeah. Especially the 2003. And I mean, and they've seen, you know, they've spent decades studying U.S. military strategy. This is why they're so generous, I think, right? We've done deep dives into U.S. military history.

Of course, Americans know their own history as well, right? Right. Apparently. Of course, they have no conviction in their own military. I mean, it's good, right? But like, because it's not an existential thing for us, right? Like the one time that they tried to cast an existential threat to this country, the response, what they told us to do was to go shopping.

Right? Like that's what they said after 9-11. Like we've been attacked. They hate us for our freedoms and our liberties. The best thing you can do is go shopping. Yeah. It's like, go have a burger, drink a beer, get back to normalcy, which, you know, years and years later when they killed Soleimani, it's like prompted the best remark of all time of the U.S. Empire. Who are we going to kill SpongeBob, Spider-Man? I guess that's the thing, right? Is that like, I feel like there are no existential arguments being made by the Trump administration. Maybe sure and the kind of just, you know, just surface level right-wing ways about like, you know, crime in your community committed by immigrants. But it's just, I don't know, man. I just don't know if any of that is hitting anymore. If anyone gives a fuck, you know.

Or as a capacity. So in the Iraq war, again, the neocons did try to present an argument. I mean, they changed their argument. many times, right? But when they settled on the, we're bringing democracy. And the way to define democracy was through the lens of neoliberal capitalism. They tried to present an argument for the superiority of this mode of political and socioeconomic organization.

I think even one of the military operations was called Operation Adam Smith. Like what are they, in the initial invasion. Which I'm sure, which I'm sure most Americans have read. David Ricardo. Yeah. Operation Adam Smith to Operation Totally extermination. Yeah, it should have been the origin, Milton Friedman. But, yeah, right, right.

Friedrich Hayer. But now there is no, there's no attempt to justify ideologically the supposed superiority of, quote, unquote, free market capitalism. It's not that. It's just to grab the bag. And this is like why people, to bring it back to Latin America, they're making the comparison that we're going back to like late 19th, early 20th century moment of like gunboat diplomacy where, I mean, even then you had people like Teddy Roosevelt having presenting a very racist ideological justification for U.S. Empire, but nonetheless, it was gunboat diplomacy.

Like they just would, if the U.S. didn't like what a government in Latin America was doing, they sent in the U.S. Marines. And they didn't really spend much time trying to convince a U.S. domestic population that it was their right or their necessity to do so. I think that's what we're, you know, that's what we talk about hard power of U.S. Empire. I mean, this is what we're witnessing now. But as we know, like, that's not the most effective way of maintaining and sustaining the U.S. Empire. Like, you need to, you need soft power.

But the first thing Trump did when he got into office again was to completely get rid of soft power. Like things like, you know, USAID and other things. Yeah. Yeah, it seems that like it is kind of shocking. Like I was reading that CNBC article about Doug Bergam. Such a messed up name. God damn. Yeah, yeah.

A guy named Bergam stole 100 million of your country's gold. That's a bird. A guy named burger. A guy named burger stole $100 million to the gold. We got Bergammerg. They love Doug. They've been. The hamburger.

Yeah. Sorry. They've been like obsessed with gold. Like, I feel like Yamashita's gold is like back, like as a type of imperial. Who's the dude in New Jersey, the Cuba, the American dude, that it was just taking bars of gold from the chips. Yeah, taking bars of gold. Yeah. Menendez.

Yeah, that's right. Am I confusing with the killer kids? Bob Menendez, I think you're right. Menendez, not, yeah, yeah. Well, there's a, one of the narratives for, that they might poochia peoples have in southern Chile, they said that the way they killed the conquistador of Chile was to make him, they made him drink molten gold when they captured him.

That's hard. That's tight. Bergam. Bergam better watch out. Burgum better watch out. Holy shit, dude. But like, I was kind of shocked, like, there's been several stories that have come out one of which was i saw on like pro publicly pro

public uh like mapping out all the various business interests that align with all of trump's imperial ambitions um and you know reading that cnbc article about venezuela like bergum was just saying like you know um venezuela has amazing resources like this is you know what that trump himself said I think like just two weeks ago, like, we're going to make Venezuela the 51st state. There's been so many 51st states, Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, you know what I'm saying? Like, there's been... Never Puerto Rico. No, they want to get rid of Puerto Rico.

Yeah. I wonder why. But, you know, just sort of like naked, nakedly saying, like, you know, this is... We're just in it for the imperial extraction, for the resource extraction. But, like, I do think... I do wonder like if if maybe this isn't like a little too sort of ham-fisted or a little too unsubtle. But like genuinely I'm kind of starting to wonder. You know, a lot of people have been saying, you know, kind of marveling at the fact that there's not been an anti-war movement

in America since the start of this Iran war and, you know, not even since the genocide, really over the last two and a half years. But I'm kind of starting to wonder if maybe the way forward for any kind of national movement that wants a kind of mass base is just like bringing that element of foreign policy and like making it forefront

front and center and just saying that like look at this point empire is actually bad for you. Right? Like you could make the argument and many people tried to and did in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s and 60s, that, like, empire is actually what gave Americans their, like, stable way of life and subsidized Americans. That is not true at this point.

I mean, no matter how you spin it, no matter how you look at it, it does enrich maybe, like, a few, you know, thousand families in America now. But, like, for the vast majority of Americans, look at what's happening. Like, today, I saw the OECD predicted 4.5%. inflation by the end of this year, just based off of the rise of oil costs, rise of food prices from fertilizer, all this. How is this benefiting anyone? You know what I'm saying?

And furthermore, like, you talk about having an anti-war movement. What about making it even more broad and just like an anti-empirate movement? We have to shrink this thing. Like, it is clearly something that is not helping us. And I don't know, you can include a lot of different things in that, like critiquing ICE. But you would think that the people, too, that would be most amenable to that sort of criticism would be people our age who grew up during, you know, 9-11, the Iraq War, the 2000. Their lives just been a steady stream of catastrophe and the resulting financial disasters. Yeah.

And especially people now who are supposed to be or have been already developing their individual financial kind of lives and family and starting families and whatnot, you know. and just kind of being like, oh, not this shit again, you know. Not now when I'm starting my life. You know what I mean? It's not when I'm coming to vain. Meanwhile, yeah, you've got all these influencers beating in your head that if you're not, you know, waking up at 3 a.m. every morning and work until 1.30 a.m. That you're like a fucking loser that's never going to have anything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right, right. I mean, that would require a political opposition party that puts anti-empirate in the center of its political platform, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen anytime soon. if anything, what they've, what the Democrats have generally wanted to do was to have a smart empire, right? They want, they add smart to everything, smart immigration, smart border, smart empire, right? Like, that's, and that's part of the struggle that we see. I mean, the shit that's come out in the last couple days where people, uh, these like third way or moderate or blue dog Democratic influencers going after like Hassan Piker, right? Like, and then using the anti-Semitic

card to say, we don't want people like him in our party. I mean, this is just like, it just, we're in this feedback loop where even if the Democrats win power, then they just continue to create or generate the conditions that make someone like Trump or someone even worse than Trump possible in a future election or usurpation of power, right? So we're stuck in this just constant feedback loop when the way to disrupt it is to be an anti-empirate. And the way that you can connect the domestic and the foreign is like what the folks in Minneapolis did. Like that's how you can use immigration as a really effective anti-empirator political issue is like look what they did in Minneapolis, connect that to what the U.S. is doing just in Latin America and the Caribbean and see

and make that a political platform or a central part of your political platform. But it's not, I'm just wondering like at what point political realities finally starts to catch up to actual reality. Like you see it with the Trump thing watching the videos, him existing in this state of like pure fantasy and like the real world outside, you know, as you said earlier,

Alex, like Caroline Leavitt being like, when will Iran learn that they're defeated? It's like you guys, they don't even exist in the same reality. Like they can't negotiate an end to this thing or a ceasefire because we don't even exist on the same plane of reality. reality, yeah, we're just, all I do is ever win and like, yeah.

But, and also, like, I don't know if you've seen these videos that, like, the White House has been putting out since the beginning of the war where they, like, I don't know, they use, like, SpongeBob and various, like, cartoons to try to manufacture consent for the war. You know what I'm saying? It's like... They're really doing, like, the whole meme thing, like, the whole thing that the Iranian cleric accused us of, the fact that we have no other idols besides SpongeBob, she's. There was, there was a political. article talked about they interviewed or talked to the people who are in charge of doing the memes and they're like all we're doing every day is is creating banger memes that's what that was their language you had you had the best one of me about the late hits and the penalties when they had like the NFL one yeah yeah yeah which is crazy yeah it's like you're showing all the dirty hits yeah they said touchdown yeah yeah yeah the clip said touchdown and though it was just a bunch of clips of dirty hits and late hits and tackle There was never a touchdown. Yeah.

I mean, so like there's something we can read from that, right? Again, like, anyway. I want to point out, though, that, like, that is an example of them existing in this manufactured reality. It is fantasy. And but this also obviously is true for the Democrats. And so I guess what I'm kind of trying to tease out here, trying to understand is like, when will we wake the fuck up? I'm just saying this both out of frustration, but also just rationally, like, eventually a political party is going to have to reckon with the fact that we live in the real world. We do not live in this fantasy world where there's a smart empire or there's the SpongeBob total death and destruction from above empire.

Like, both are over. They're done. It's cooked. You have to start actually living in the real world. We'll probably be living in the real world, you know, and I'm kind of being glib here. But I don't know, man, you know, when like a Moab or a huge bomb explodes over New York City, they'll, well, that's the X factor, that is the X factor is everybody's fat and happy on the idea that we don't get attacked on our mainland. For part of that is reasons we discussed earlier in the show. They're reverse engineering that to happen by saying that why is Iran only attacking other Gulf like state nations?

I mean, what are you arguing for then? Do you want to be bombed? yeah like you know sorry sorry tom it's just no no no no no i mean i share your frustration but it is like we are kind of like you know just yeah fat and happy to the idea that like we're not going to get we have it to this point got bombed on our mainland and then part of that is because of what we talked about if like the iranians don't want to make war on normal citizens because they are you know like reasonable minded people you know that are making those kind of decisions but like my opinion if those bombs started raining down from above

we'd have a we'd have an anti-war movement real goddamn quick yeah yeah and i'm not saying i want that to happen i'm not i don't want that to happen either yeah thank you for clarifying that yeah please no moab's in the landa please can we can i mean the other way to pose it terence is like can we wake up right like not not to get like maybe jean buddraer was right right we can't escape hyper reality but like if they're like the way things militarily are going if what i'm I've been watching is correct, then we might be heading toward, one possibility is that we're heading toward like a DMB Info moment, right? Like, the NBNFIL was a famous battle in 1954 when the Vietnamese revolutionaries defeated

the French, right? If we get something like that now, like, can people within the United States even recognize it, right? Like, will that even produce a rupture within? I don't know, right? Because, again, we, so many Americans and apparently a large segment, you know, we, so many Americans, and apparently a large segment of our political class lives in a world where you have, you know, SpongeBob bringing death from above.

And we saw, but we've seen this. Like we, the, the dress rehearsal was like what we've witnessed in Palestine, right? Like the way, it's kind of crazy, like what I see, the way I read what's happening now to the US is what we saw happening to Israel and how Israel tried to manipulate and manufacture consent and representation of what was actually going on the ground in Palestine. And they're still doing it today, right? They're still trying to say that we're going to invade South Lebanon. Meanwhile, they're losing like 30 tanks in a day.

But they're putting out videos of these psychopaths wearing women's, Palestinian women's lingerie. And that's what they're consuming. They're not consuming these tank crews getting cooked. So, like, in the American case, if we do get a DMB in full moment, like, how do we, are we able even to process it immediately in the U.S.? Or is it going to be something that, like, the consequences of will not be felt for a long time in a really painful way? I mean, we're feeling it right now, but in like gas and stuff. But, yeah.

I'm starting to think that, like, you'll have a video of, like, a thousand American soldiers storming the beach of Karg Island and just getting shaled and their bodies flying around. Like the fucking, like, ants on a private ride, basically. Yeah, but, like, Pete Hggseth will have one of his, like, AIDS, uh, AI, uh, uh, shop. Iranian uniforms on the American soldiers just getting tossed right and Trump will be like good we're doing great

see that's the okay so the difference would be the joke used to be Americans evade a country and then they make movies of how badly they felt about invading those countries now it's they just complete and so Black Hawk up as opposed to Black Hawk down

right that's the new one fuck man this is so that's what I mean like can we wake up how do you conquer that like sort of inverted mentality. I mean, you got to ask yourself too, because I'm just thinking about Cuba, when Trump can say something like, I think one of the articles you had St. Terrence in the chat, Trump had said something like we can do whatever we want with Cuba. I can do whatever I want with Cuba. I'll take it when I want.

I'll have my scalps basically. For the supposed leader of the free world to make such a statement, you would think there would be an outrage, right? But because Cuba has been this existential enemy, right, to the United States for so fucking long that nobody just accepts that is completely insane and terrifying and what that actually pretends. It's kind of just mass

I don't know. Just seeing videos of babies in the ICE, you know, NICU dying because Americans cut off oil supply to Cuba. The Cuba's had rolling blackouts for weeks now.

Like is committing virtually genocide. You know, not much different than Gaza. I mean, we're not bombing Cuba yet, but just like basically subjecting it to a sort of mass slower. Slower.

It's social. Since 1960. Yeah, right. It's like calorie restriction and all that kind of stuff. Like, I mean, it's concentration. It's like American Gaza in a lot of ways. There is, I do fundamentally believe in a kind of karma, maybe a material

karma in a sense. Like, I don't know if we'll wake up, if have a Suez crisis or a Dimbun Fu moment. But I think Americans will start to wake up if their gas prices are $12 a gallon and if they can't afford food. And I don't think it'll be a good kind of waking up. No. No.

Nobody will know where to place all that frustration because everybody lives in a million different realities and that's kind of part of their calculus. It's the first step of guzzaline. You're not good. have people, I read an article, I think it's an AJC, that you have people from the Carolinas driving down to Georgia, I think, because I think Georgia has done something where we've, but temporarily freezing the hiking of these gas prices, you know, so you have people

that are driving from out of state to come get gas here. And it's just, yeah, you're right, Terrence, when people can't get, you know, when people can't afford fuel, they can't afford food. Now, the terrifying outcome of that is where will they turn that energy towards, right? If there isn't an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement or a movement that can speak to them, you know, then, you know, I'm just terrified of what you would see happen. You know what I mean? Yeah. But there is something that could happen from part of the frustration is that some of the developments that have to happen are beyond the control of Americans, right? Like we're so, as the empire, we're so used to always possessing a, or we're used to the idea that we are the ones who move world history.

Like, we are the ones who possess the agency. And that's maybe one way to read Trump's frustrations right now is that that's not the case. And Iran is demonstrating something, I think, unique, right? That they are not just defending sovereignty, like full spectrum sovereignty, like actual, like economic, national political sovereignty. They're defending that. But in doing so, they're redefining the international context, right?

In a very radical way, right? Like with the Strait of Hormuz, with Ansar Allah has not. even activated. So like once they go in, so that's one of the, we're, we're, I think, living through a really unique historical moment where a global South nation is able to make this type of impact in the international context. Now, I wish in Latin America, three countries in particular could also exercise their power by defending their sovereignty full spectrum. And here I'm talking about the three most populous countries of Latin America, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. And like the window for them to be able to do that

because they're the three countries that didn't get invited to Trump's Shield of the Americas or triple KK, whatever K thing we decided on. But then in Colombia, you have presidential elections in May. And even though Petro's candidate looked pretty good, now the polling is a lot tighter with a bunch of like crazy right-wing candidates versus Ivan Sepeda, who's the Colombian left-wing candidate.

And then in October we have presidential elections in Brazil. And there, Lula is going to, to run again. And he was for a long time, he was polling well ahead of his, is, um, competitors. But now, like, really reputable polling has him losing to Bolsonaro's son. This guy who not only is he bull, Bolsonaro is like dying right now. He's been wasting away. Again. Still got the thums up with a bowling for 16 years.

Flavio Bolsonaro is like his father, but he's also directly implicated in like political assassinations, like in the assassination of Marielle Franco, who was a Soviet. socialist politician, a black socialist politician. So like, this is scary, right? Like if Brazil and Colombia go like Trump's right wing later this year, then that space to actually kind of push back against the shield of the America, against much weaker Latin American countries,

then we lose that and then we're left with then Cuba really is on their own, right? Like then they already are on their own to a certain extent now in terms of oil, but like if the right wins in Brazil and Colombia, that things are only going to get worse, right? So I wish that these three countries were coordinating in a much tighter, more organized way. And like the first thing they could do

is give oil to Cuba. Right, right. Provide oil. Stop that slow strangulation, genocidal strangulation. Man, when we saw the genocide begin, like over two years ago, a lot of people were saying this, and this was my hope too,

that you would see some sort of, and I know it's wishful thinking maybe because of the relations, interrelations between the United States and driven with global capital, I was just hoping you would see some sort of united front, you know, against the West and against the United States. And I think this is a simple question.

I asked there's so many different reasons. But why do you think that's something that we haven't seen yet necessarily, especially in Latin America? I mean, I think it differs across countries. But in general, I think they're, I think they've, the cajoling that they receive from the Biden administration and then the more outright threats of intervention and violence by the Trump administration has dissuaded some of the more bigger, more powerful countries from doing more than just, you know, discursive demonstrations of solidarity or, you know, in Mexico's case, I know they've accepted some Palestinian refugees, but this is a long, I mean, this is a longstanding

issue in Latin American history, where like the way that you confront the U.S. empires to unite as a region, but that's been a nearly impossible task. So, you know, Petro's given very eloquent, very powerful speeches at different international forums about Gaza. I mean, I think if you read his speeches, they're really, they're smart, they're powerful. And I think Colombia actually has done probably the most in terms of like cutting off their coal to Israel. I mean, Colombia was, you know, according to Uwachavez, the Israel of Latin America. So the fact that someone like Petro was able to shut off at least coal shipments to Israel for a time was pretty important. But like it hasn't gone beyond just, you know, discursive, you know, discursive proclamation.

I don't know. I really honestly don't know other than they fear U.S. empire, the repercussions of getting on its wrong side. And in a country like Mexico, right? Like, it's where, you know, there's a long history of the U.S. messing around in that country. And they're still messing around the country today. Yeah. I was just asking, man, because I'm thinking of, you know, like I mentioned it before, my parents, my family's from Jamaica from the Caribbean. And oftentimes, and I don't know enough, but oftentimes I've thought of why can't these Afro-Caribian nations, right? kind of like chip in or get together. And I'm like, well, I mean, the history that these countries right have been beleaguered by not just, you know, a legacy of slavery, but the medallings of the IMF and the World Bank, you know what I mean? And how, yeah, you don't want to get on the bad side of the United States. So it's either to just. Yeah. Austerity breeds right-wing politics. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, just genuinely it does. It kind of like it's a, you know, a petri dish of right-wing populism. And it would make sense that, like, you do have this kind of, like, symbiotic relationship between, I think you pointed it out earlier. Alex, like America's policies in Central and South America then create immigrants coming to America. And a lot of those immigrants are conservative. A lot of them in their communities wind up, you know, supporting conservative politicians. But then they go back and forth. Like, there was a big New York Times story about.

California's Central Valley, how it like went, Latinos in that area went for Trump in 2024, but are now like really shocked by the, you know, violence of the ice roundups. It's really kind of also just as an extra thing to add here, we've not covered this, but it is really kind of fitting in a way to be talking about all this in the wake of these revelations about Cesar Chavez and I mean like a lot of this probably was known for a while right like it's probably not

hugely shocking I'm smugly nodding so for our audience I'm smugly nodding about Cesar Chavez allegations yes but like it's kind of like an example of I don't know maybe this is incorrect maybe this is an incorrect reading of it

but like I kind of see it as an example of like the sort of dying away of a more sort of like glorious dream from mid-20th century of like union organizing and like you or organizing of workers in this specifically like you know highly racialized industry um but just like that paired with the um like the slow rightward drift of a lot of um you know countries in the Western Hemisphere. It's like, I don't know, to me, it just is another example of like the kind of withering or dying of a specific kind of dream of democracy and liberalism.

And maybe that contains within it the seed of something more left wing. I think it goes, I think it goes underground and then it, I don't think it dies. I think it, in Latin America, the idea of social democracy, it gets battered, it gets push back sometimes in the past using, you know, death squad governments and military dictatorships, sometimes through just horrific right-wing austerity regimes that generate mass poverty and that kind of resuscitates the idea of a social democracy. But I don't think it ever, at least in Latin America, it never fully dies. It comes back over. And it's a cyclical thing. So yesterday or Tuesday, last Tuesday, the 24th was a 50th year anniversary of the military

dictatorship in Argentina taking power in 1976. They lasted in power until 1983. They did horrific things. One of the worst Latin American dictatorships disappeared, 30,000 people, you know, kidnapped the children of people who had been tortured and disappeared and then gave them to military families to adopt. Just horrific shit. There was mass popular mobilization and protests in Argentina commemorating that date, right, in a context of Javier Mille doing his crazy as shit. So like, the, the, the, the, The shitty part is that you get, specifically since the pink tide, right, you get, you elect the left, center left government in power, but because we are in a dependent economic region, they are subject to the whims of international economy, global prices.

So as long as commodity prices are doing okay, then the center left governments can do something good in terms of expanding social rights, expanding social democracy. But then as soon as the political economic situation goes downhill globally, then the blame is placed on those left discoveries. And they commit all sorts of their own issues.

I'm not trying to escapate them. They have their own internal contradictions. But then that generates a electoral move

to the right. Then the right do what they do, which is privatized, deregulate, mass pauperization of the

population. They destroy everything that's been created in the previous 10, 20 years by the left. And then the left

has to come in dire circumstances to just kind of make up and kind of taper over some of the worst excesses of right-wing governance before they even get to like, all right, let's rebuild

social democracy. And like, that's a shitty situation to be in, right? And that's what's like going to happen in Argentina. There's going to be, there is a pushback against Malay. But like, what is there going to be left to rebuild on for a left that still believes in like social democracy and social rights? It's going to be extremely difficult. But all that is related against to like US empire. Let me ask you a question about Argentina. What I got you here? What's your thoughts on Juan Peron, like Peronism? like as a response to. Well, I'm not going to break out and sing the chant.

Don't craft me. No, there's a great video on Instagram that I watch sometimes to hype me up. It's Diego Maradona, the soccer player singing the Peron chant, the anthem. No, he's a complicated, super complicated figure, right? Like he ends his political career in the 70s as a right winger. But, you know, the previous decades, he had become a sion of the left in Argentina, sign of the organized working class movement, right? So Peronismo as an idea, it's about social justice, it's about national sovereignty, and it's about economic democracy. Now, whether he embodied that as a

different issue, but the idea of Peronismo is those three pillars. And it's still alive and well in Argentina, despite the mismanagement of governing elites in the past, who said they were Peronistas, but they didn't fulfill all aspects of it for internal and external contradictory. reasons. But it's still there. It's, it's, if people want to read, there's a really good book by Ernesto Seman about, it's called the ambassadors is a working class. That's what I was going to bring up. Yeah, Ernesto is like great historian of Peronismo and I would highly suggest that, you know, listeners check out any of his writings. Peronismo is different from Peron himself, right? Like he, in many ways, he unleashed a political and ideological movement that went way beyond his own

initial intentions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alice, can I ask you. since you're talking about Argentina, I can ask you a quick question real quick, not that you're the ambassador of all Latin American politics, right? But I found this very interesting. So the United States,

the UN had this vote to recognize slavery. Oh, hell yeah, I saw that. As like, you know, a fucking, like, injustice. I forget the exact word for, a crime against humanity, right? And three countries,

which you can already think of the two countries that would vote this down, the United States and Israel, but the third country, I don't know if there were other countries, but the third country in the headline was Argentina.

and I'd like to what would what would what is the what would be any possible background of reasoning behind why Argentina would be like no like slavery Oh that's me lay

That's me lay No but there's a longer history of anti-blackness Across the political spectrum in Argentina So there's They're great historian at UTEP Erica Edwards Who has a book about black Argentina

in the 19th century Essentially like Argentina actually received like a pretty large number of African people through the transatlantic slave trade early on, but particularly in the 19th century after independence, you had the whitening of the country through various processes, some violence, some not, right?

So an Argentina that was much more black in the 19th century, well, now when you think of Argentina, you think of like displaced Italians, right? The other swarthy people. Yeah, there's also that tinge racism where it's like, White and Osiris is the Paris of Latin America. which, you know, Paris says a lot of blame. But it's like, it's like European, more European than the rest of Latin America. Yeah, a lot of this is self.

And like Argentine, there's a reason why Argentines occupy a certain place within the culture imaginary of Latin America. And a lot of it is because it's brought on by themselves, right, the idea that they're more European than Latin America. But like the president before Millet, Alberto Fernandez, who was a peronista, he got into trouble because he repeated like a commonplace quote or saying in Argentina where he said something like he was talking about the civilizational origins of like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.

And he said Mexico came from the pyramids. He said Brazil came from the jungle and Argentina came from the boats. Jesus Christ. So, okay, so all of those are super fucked up, right? But the idea that Argentina came from the boats, he's talking about late 19th century European immigration. Yeah, exactly. He's discounting a whole history of like black and indigenous Argentines.

I mean, there are still a lot of highly organized and loud and Argentine indigenous movements, even though they suffered a genocide in the 19th century, very similar to what the U.S. did, right? So a lot of this is so, they've earned it. They've earned some of the. And I'm sure harboring people by the name of Albert von like Schlock or something like that, you know what I mean? Very Germanic sounding name. Listen, I will defend Argentine.

More Nazis went to the U.S. and Argentina, even though people remember Argentina. But the UN vote. So it was a very important U.N. vote against, you know, about the transatlantic slave trade and possibly setting up something for reparation. So 52 European countries abstained or 52 white countries, right? And then it was Israel. So one of my colleagues sent me the text. And I said, did you see this?

And I responded with a gif from a movie called Blood in Blood Out, which is one of the best movies ever. And it's a scene where these cholos are in an art gallery and they're like, one of them puts the glasses on, his shades on, he's like it's too much he says, I'd say it's too much light in here, it's too white.

My poor colleague, he didn't respond. I think I didn't know I didn't like, I was like, I shouldn't respond it to my colleague with a, with a gift. You're already in hot water with that one guy I want you fired, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, for my gino's a slur thing, yeah. But

But yeah, so yeah, the European countries obviously abstained, and then you had Israel, Argentina, and the United States rejected, which is on brand, right? See, I would have, if I was you, man, instead of sending that jiff, I would have sent, like, a picture of a close-up of a cold gate, like, toothpaste of a tube, where it's at advanced whitening or some shit like that. It's like a little gleam. Or my favorite is the one where it's like the white people in the cotton fields getting hit and like, I've been scotted to Nelkegee. He's smiling from a little boat. Y'all pop that out at least once a year. I have to, I got to behave. Yeah.

Well, I don't, we got a little far afield there. I don't have, where I wanted to kind of take this was like trying to discern like America's sort of imperial project in the Western Hemisphere versus like how Israel is sort of like perhaps complicating that in the Eastern Hemisphere. because it seems like the big debate this week is like, you know, trying to, well, it's been a debate for years now, but trying to discern the exact mechanisms by which Israel exerts power over the U.S. Imperial and diplomatic, you know, and military apparatus. Specifically, I was thinking of that Matt Duss article in foreign policy about how, like, we need to, you know, focusing on Israel. creates anti-Semitism and lets America off the hook. I know we're already over an hour, though, and I've got to go here pretty soon.

I know you do too, Alex. But do we have any, like, final thoughts on that? Like, if there's any way to discern, like, because, like, to me, I see a lot of people online and, you know, not even just online, but also just a lot of, I talk to a lot of friends about this, like trying to delineate. American agency as opposed to Israeli agency. And in my opinion, I think that kind of like looking at the Western

hemisphere and Central and South America is like a kind of, in my opinion, a good way of trying to discern what American aims might be in the imperial realm as opposed to Israeli ones and like trying to discern like the mechanism by which Israel imposes a kind of degree of control over how America operates abroad, but also how they don't really need to do that because America has its own aims and agendas. It could just be a simple matter of, you know, perhaps America's aims and agendas aren't as delineated and clear and coherent in the Middle East as they are in the Western Hemisphere. And as a result, Israel is able to exert a kind of influence

on that. I don't really buy that. but at the same time, I don't really have a really thorough argument for the role that Israel plays in the State Department and the Pentagon and everything. And so, I don't know, those are just some kind of preliminary thoughts. We don't even have to answer them now. We can just kind of in the episode on an open question and maybe think about it for next time we have you on. But, like, I don't know. I didn't know if any of you guys had any, like, thoughts on how that might be one way to understand the Israel-United States connection as it pertains to our sort of imperial endeavors abroad. I think I won't go.

I won't blather on, I promise. But I do think that the U.S. under Trump does have a clear imperial project for the Americas. They are trying, the shield of the Americas project is to enlist all these different right-wing governments that under the cover of expanding a war on drugs, which is just a way to fortify the right-wing in Latin America, as a region, particularly in a moment where they see that their power in East Asia is slipping. A lot of this has to do against China, so they're trying to re-fortify their hold over the Americas, and they're using local right-wing allies to expand their imperial power using

the war on drugs. but this also locally helps these governments become much more authoritarian and right wing, and this solidifies their power locally. And that's what we see in Ecuador with Daniel Noboa, who is the narco president and who's outlawing political opposition parties. Now, it's also, to connect it to Israel, there is no accident that all these right-wing parties and figures, they all are pro-Israel, whether it's Maria Corina Machado in Venezuela to Javier Milet in Argentina, to Bolsonaro in Brazil. So Israel has become a symbol or a flag for this revanchist right wing in Latin America.

And so that's the way I kind of think about these things interconnected. I've written about what Israel has done in Latin America during the Cold War, and they helped advance U.S. interests in the region in ways that the U.S. could not. And maybe we can think about it in that way today. But, you know, when you see the right wingers in Latin America march in the streets, like in Brazil or in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, it's not by accident that there's Israeli flags in those marches as well, right? And it connects maybe to that tablet article that you guys have read about, right? Like, that is like the future, like it's socialism or barbarism.

It's like socialism or Zionism in the way that that author described it. And that conflict is not going to leave Latin America out of it, right? Like Latin America is part of that conflict as well. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I just want to add, I guess she was more true than she'd known in that article when she wrote that Zionism. for everyone, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Like I said, we can just kind of leave it open-ended. I, you know, thanks to Alex for coming on the show and for, you know, having fun with us. I'm a big fan, as you know, so anytime I'm happy to be on and chop it up and laugh a little bit with you guys during these dark times. So I always appreciate the invitation. Of course, man.

Thank you. Well, do you have anything you'd like to plug, Alex? no i'm okay no see you in about eight months i'll have a i did write something about mexican sovereignty vis-a-vis trump

it's just being pitched around right now so it'll be it all something will come out in the next couple of weeks so i'll definitely share it with you guys but other than that yeah i'm just you know trying to survive the semester and everything else in these children of men time so you know thanks again guys

of course man awesome all right brother well um and for everyone else if you'd like to support us you can go to patreon dot com link is in the show notes uh we have content over there for you every monday so please go check that out and um i hope you all have a great weekend and uh we'll see what happens um we are probably looking at a ground invasion of iran uh it is looking more and more likely that that is what's going to happen so I guess, but we'll see, you know? I mean, it seems like the playbook that we've seen for the last three or four weeks is, you know,

coming right on time where they say they want a ceasefire actually, and Iran wants to negotiate with us so bad, and, you know, we need to calm the markets. Everything's fine, and then they escalate more. So, I don't know. We'll see, though. Hope to God there is no ground invasion, but I guess time will tell. So stay tuned. Go check out our Patreon.

And in the meantime, have a great with you. See you later.