President Trump totally upends geopolitics with the arrest and extradition of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. We examine what that means. Plus, Tim Walz is out as the third term possibility for governor in Minnesota, and a transidentifying person possibly breaks into JD Vance s house in Cincinnati.
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00:00:52.000Well, yesterday, Nicolas Maduro, the erstwhile dictator of Venezuela, who, of course, was extradited by the United States in a snatch and grab operation, shocking in its magnitude and competence, appeared in U.S. court for the very first time.
00:01:06.000Again, unthinkable one week ago, and yet here we now are.
00:01:10.000According to the Wall Street Journal, he pled guilty to narco-trafficking charges during his arraignment in federal court.
00:01:34.000He adds that he was a prisoner of war and had been kidnapped from his home in Caracas.
00:01:39.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Monday's hearing kicked off a legal battle with little precedence over a foreign leader in U.S. court.
00:01:45.000The arrest of a head of state presents challenges for both the prosecutors and the defense, and it could be years before this thing goes to trial.
00:01:53.000The judge interjected and told him that there would be a time and place to make the argument that he was wrongfully apprehended.
00:01:58.000His wife sat at the same defense table.
00:02:01.000Apparently, there were some signs of injury sustained during her capture.
00:02:05.000And again, the charges include cocaine, importation, conspiracy, and possession of machine guns.
00:02:10.000They're being detained at a Brooklyn federal jail, apparently to the great consternation of New York Mayor Zorhan Mamdani, who really should be happier about all this after all.
00:02:19.000We just provided an illegal immigrant, Venezuelan drug dealer, with free housing in New York.
00:02:24.000So he really should be quite happy about all of this.
00:02:27.000The next hearing is set for March 17th.
00:02:30.000Meanwhile, what is going on over in Venezuela?
00:02:33.000Well, you have the vice president of Venezuela, a woman named Del Codriguez, who is, by all accounts, just as vicious, brutal, and Machiavellian as Nicolas Maduro.
00:02:45.000Her brother is the head of the Venezuelan Assembly, which, of course, is a puppet group, a puppet legislature.
00:02:53.000The question is whether the United States will be able to exert enough pressure on Del Codriguez to get what we want, namely a reopening of the oil industry in Venezuela, a transition, you would hope, to some sort of actual democratic order that ends the socialist tyranny that has dominated Venezuela.
00:03:10.000You would assume that the reason the United States did not just topple the regime outright is because we do not want tons of boots on the ground in Venezuela and that external pressure will force Del C. Rodriguez to essentially give up the ghost at an unspecified time in the future.
00:03:23.000It'll have to be fairly short order, obviously, because President Trump only has three years left in office.
00:03:28.000And I do not trust a Democratic successor or possibly a Republican successor to do the right thing here.
00:03:33.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Maduro's top lieutenant, Del C Rodriguez, was sworn in as the country's acting president on Monday.
00:03:39.000Small groups of armed civilians known as collectivos, paramilitary units in support of the ousted president, sped around Caracas on motorbikes.
00:03:46.000His loyalists are still very much in power.
00:03:49.000Rodriguez immediately declared a state of external commotion, authorizing police to search for and arrest anyone who supported the raid by U.S. commanders who snatched Maduro and his wife.
00:03:58.000Now, the question is whether some of this is for show, whether she's attempting to demonstrate that she really is a continuation of Maduro's regime while really sort of doing the bidding of the Americans, saying outrageous things, doing outrageous things simply to keep her loyalists in line while actually doing the work of the United States.
00:04:18.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Maduro hardliners in the legislature, including his own son, whose name is Nicolasito, took part in a ceremony on Monday to swear in the National Assembly for a term that is supposed to last all the way until 2031.
00:04:30.000Apparently, armed men were performing spot checks in the Capitol on Monday, stopping drivers to check their vehicles, forcing people to unlock their cell phones for suspect messages.
00:04:38.000At least seven journalists were detained.
00:04:41.000Four of them remained apparently under arrest.
00:04:44.000Apparently, many residents didn't believe they could go out into the streets.
00:04:49.000One banking advisor in Caracas said there's no change at all.
00:04:52.000We're going to remain in the same situation because it's the same people.
00:04:56.000So the question, of course, is what comes next.
00:04:58.000Stephen Miller, a special advisor to the president of the United States, he says, listen, we are setting the terms and conditions here, no matter what the Venezuelan government is currently saying.
00:05:07.000We are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country.
00:05:30.000The United States is running the country during this transition period.
00:05:33.000If that's not true, obviously, that doesn't mean that President Trump is setting the bus fare schedule inside the country.
00:05:41.000Okay, so the question is what that means.
00:05:44.000How much pressure can we actually exert?
00:05:46.000How much leverage can we exert on the Venezuelan government to do the things that we want to see done in Venezuela, meaning an actual change of regime?
00:05:54.000Because let's be clear here, the goal here is not merely to get Del Codriguez to open up the oil industry.
00:05:59.000No one is going to invest in a country in which the dictator can simply revert back to type the minute that President Trump is out of office.
00:06:07.000This has been one of the major problems when it comes to investment in Latin and South America by major corporations.
00:06:12.000If you've got a 10-year runway, for example, to get to the oil that you need, then how are you going to invest 10 years worth knowing that at any moment Del Codriguez could change her mind and simply nationalize the oil industry again when President Trump is out of office?
00:06:26.000And so there has to be real effectuated change with serious commitment and the ability to carry out what needs to happen.
00:06:35.000Again, according to the Wall Street Journal, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino command Venezuela's police and military.
00:06:43.000Those are the forces that kept Maduro in power for more than a decade with their deadly crackdowns on dissent.
00:06:48.000And probably tens of thousands of people were imprisoned or killed by this regime.
00:06:53.000And so you are talking about the functional military apparatus of Venezuela, which typically a dictator will ensure is loyal to him.
00:07:01.000Something happened here that made clear that they were no longer loyal to Maduro and they were hoping that Trump would take his foot off the gas.
00:07:06.000If Trump keeps his foot on the gas, and I mean that almost literally, if the United States continues to inhibit the flow of oil in and out of Venezuela to prevent exports, to control the airspace, it's going to make it very difficult for the Venezuelan regime to continue to buck President Trump's demands.
00:07:22.000Right now, Cabello and Padrino are displaying unity with Rodriguez, but they represent a wildcard for President Trump's bet that the remnants of the regime will fall in line to avoid Maduro's fate.
00:07:33.000For now, Cabello and Padrino appear to be playing ball after that large-scale strike that took out Maduro's personal security apparatus and led to his capture.
00:07:42.000So if the regime falls, then both of them are in serious trouble.
00:07:46.000You could see a world in which they end up having to go into exile.
00:07:50.000They also may not have a hell of a lot of choice because, again, the United States demonstrated its full-scale dominance militarily over whatever the Venezuelan military thinks it is doing.
00:08:00.000In a moment, we will get to President Trump's demands for Venezuela's new government first.
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00:09:16.000According to Politico, the Trump administration is demanding that Venezuela's interim leader take several pro-U.S. actions.
00:09:22.000Her predecessor refused if she wants to avoid also finding herself in court in the United States.
00:09:27.000Officials have told Del C. Rodriguez they want to see at least three moves from her: one, cracking down on drug flows.
00:09:32.000Two, kicking out Iranian, Cuban, and other operatives of countries or networks hostile to Washington.
00:09:37.000And three, stopping the sale of oil to U.S. adversaries, according to a U.S. official familiar with the situation and a person familiar with the administration's internal discussions.
00:09:46.000U.S. officials also expect Rodriguez to eventually facilitate free elections and step aside, but the deadlines for those demands are fluid and U.S. officials stress there are no elections imminent.
00:09:56.000This, by the way, is not a personal thing.
00:09:58.000There are a lot of members of the media right now who are trying to suggest that the reason that President Trump is not putting in place the woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado, that the reason for that is because he has some sort of personal animus that she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
00:10:16.000The actual thing that is happening is that she has no ability to govern because she does not have forces on the ground, Maria Corina Machado.
00:10:25.000If she were in charge of military or something, then there would be the ability to put her in place.
00:10:31.000But if you just say she's in charge now, there is no way to actually effectuate that absent serious boots on the ground.
00:10:38.000This is why when Representative Maria Salazar says that Machado should leave the country, when there's an election, she should.
00:10:43.000The problem right now is how do you make that happen?
00:10:46.000How do you get from point A to point B?
00:10:47.000Here was Maria Salazar making the case for Machado.
00:10:54.000Let's give us a few months until we create the stability.
00:10:58.000And I'm sure that Maria Corina Machado, who is the leader of the opposition of the Democratic opposition, will go back in, be able to put together the process so you can have free and fair elections with international observers.
00:11:11.000I'm sure she will be the nominee that Maduro did not allow her to be, the presidential nominee.
00:11:19.000Now, again, the question of how we get to an election is the big question here.
00:11:23.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the CIA had concluded that Machado would not have the ability to actually effectuate a shift in power in Venezuela at this time.
00:11:31.000She doesn't have the support base, not among the people, but with the actual people who have the guns.
00:11:35.000And it turns out that the people who have the guns typically make the rules.
00:11:38.000According to an intelligence report cited by the Wall Street Journal, it said that Rodriguez and two other top Venezuelan regime figures would be possible interim rulers who could keep order.
00:11:49.000The two hardliners, again, who we've mentioned, that would be Cabello and Patrino, could undo any efforts at a transition, both face U.S. criminal charges similar to those filed against Maduro.
00:12:00.000They are seen as unlikely to cooperate with Washington, but they may be a little bit more likely now that their boss got defenistrated and brought to the United States for trial.
00:12:10.000According to the Wall Street Journal, last year, the CIA cultivated a source within Maduro's inner circle who provided information on his whereabouts.
00:12:17.000The spy agency's close tracking of Maduro's location, which leveraged other surveillance elements, including stealth drones, allowed the army's Delta Force to nab him and his wife during the raid, people familiar with the operation said.
00:12:29.000So, what exactly is going to happen next?
00:12:33.000Well, the better course is likely to compel Rodriguez to initiate a transition of power.
00:12:38.000Presumably, economic discontent, identifying people maybe even lower down on the military infrastructure ladder who have now been elevated thanks to the moves against Maduro, might be a way to effectuate almost a second coup.
00:12:51.000But the threat is out there and it exists very clearly.
00:12:55.000Now, this may not be the end of the story.
00:12:57.000Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says that given the fact that Venezuelan oil is propping up the Cuban regime, Cuba may be next.
00:13:19.000I hope in 26, in our backyard, we're going to have allies in these countries doing business with America, not narco-terrorist dictators killing Americans.
00:13:32.000Okay, well, you know, again, he is not wrong about this.
00:13:35.000Having Venezuela back in Cuba and then Venezuela no longer being able to support Cuba means that Cuba is in danger of falling as well.
00:13:42.000The other country that has come up a lot is the country of Colombia, where Gustavo Petro, who is a radical far-left socialist, is the leader.
00:13:50.000Now, he was only inaugurated in 2022, so he's not been in power for all that long.
00:13:57.000There is a one-term limit for presidents in Colombia.
00:14:01.000And it turns out that many of the politicians who have actually run Colombia in the past were right-wing or center-right.
00:14:52.000If the United States fires a missile, he will be accepting the missile.
00:14:54.000He doesn't have much of a choice about it, but it's not necessary.
00:14:58.000Petro is not eligible to run for re-election.
00:15:01.000Right now, if you look at the polling in Colombia, it's wide open.
00:15:05.000You have somebody from Petro's group named Ivan Cepeda, who's of the left.
00:15:11.000You have a candidate of the right, sort of populist figure, sort of Trumpian figure.
00:15:15.000You have another, sort of more classical conservative figure.
00:15:20.000By August, there will likely be a different regime in place in Colombia.
00:15:24.000So the idea that we need to effectuate some sort of regime change in Colombia is not even true.
00:15:28.000And that's just Petro railing against the machine.
00:15:31.000Meanwhile, again, one of the big purposes here for the United States is to reopen the Venezuelan oil industry in a productive way that is directed toward the West and mostly directed away from Iran and China, cutting out the legs from underneath the oil support base for our geopolitical opponents.
00:15:48.000Right now, China gets an enormous percentage of its oil from Russia and Iran, but it also gets a not insignificant percentage from Venezuela.
00:15:55.000And so if China were to be deprived of that, that would do China pretty significant damage.
00:15:59.000By the way, Chinese weapons were on the ground in Venezuela.
00:16:02.000They didn't do much of a difference against the United States military.
00:16:06.000Right now, Chevron is trying to figure out whether or not to invest serious dollars in the Venezuelan oil industry.
00:16:12.000Energy stocks jumped yesterday on the assumption that the United States would not have taken Maduro if it did not have a plan for a transition to a privatized oil industry in Venezuela.
00:16:22.000According to the New York Times, President Trump has now allowed Chevron to continue operating in Venezuela.
00:16:28.000The company is in prime position to benefit after U.S. forces captured Maduro over the weekend.
00:16:34.000That remarkable turnaround is due in part to a spirited lobbying effort that included several conversations over the past year between President Trump and Mike Worth, Chevron's mild-mannered chief executive.
00:16:44.000So Chevron stayed active in the Venezuelan area, and now they look like they are the company most likely to benefit from a reopening of Venezuelan private oil drilling.
00:16:56.000For Chevron, the rationale for staying in Venezuela was simple, apparently.
00:17:00.000Under a new contract in 2006, the company received an ownership stake in a key Venezuelan project rather than being paid a fee to produce oil there.
00:17:08.000Chevron apparently saw that if oil prices rose in the future, then they were taking the upside.
00:17:15.000Listen, cheaper energy, a Venezuela that is not directed at support of China or is barred from support of China is a win for the United States.
00:17:23.000Does that get us everywhere that we'd like to see Venezuela go?
00:17:27.000But there will be, I would assume, a transitional plan here towards something better for Venezuelans, even if it is not in the immediate term.
00:17:33.000And of course, what President Trump is attempting to do is to effectuate the will of the American people to serve the interests of the American people without getting involved in a large-scale occupation of Venezuela.
00:17:45.000Meanwhile, the DHS Assistant Secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, she's saying that Venezuelans who are here on temporary protected status can now go home because Maduro isn't in charge.
00:17:54.000Well, I mean, we may be a little bit away from that, given the fact that, again, the regime is still in power, is still Mizuro's regime.
00:18:05.000I'm not seeing any changes to our posture on this.
00:18:08.000I think the great news for those who are here from Venezuela on temporary protected status is that they can now go home with hope for their country, a country that they love, that there is going to be peace, prosperity, and stability.
00:18:22.000Tommy, you know, we can hope that that's going to emerge very soon.
00:18:28.000We are in phase A of whatever happens in Venezuela.
00:18:32.000Now, the left's reaction has been exactly what you would predict.
00:18:35.000Some of it is just pure anti-Americanism.
00:18:37.000Internationally, you can see all the enemies of the United States very, very upset.
00:18:41.000So, for example, the representative of Colombia at the United Nations, Leonor Zalabada Torres, had this to say.
00:18:49.000Colombia condemns categorically the events that occurred in the early morning of the 3rd of January in Venezuela, where we saw multiple explosions and air activity over Caracas and other areas of the country as part of a military attack carried out by the United States.
00:19:12.000States, which included bombings of civilian and military infrastructure, creating panic amongst the population.
00:19:21.000All of this represents clear violations of the sovereignty, political independence, and the territorial integrity of Venezuela.
00:19:33.000Other representatives condemning the United States included the Russian Federation as well as China, of course.
00:19:38.000Here is the Chinese representative, Sulei, at the UN, condemning the United States for its actions against Nicolas Maduro.
00:19:46.000On January the 3rd, the United States blatantly launched large-scale military strikes against Venezuela, forcefully seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife and took them out of the country.
00:19:59.000It claimed that it will run Venezuela and even didn't rule out launching a second round of military operations on an even larger scale.
00:20:08.000China is deeply shocked by and strongly condemns the unilateral illegal and bullying acts of the U.S. Our ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, he, of course, had the proper response, which was, who gives a flying bleep what Russia and China and Colombia think of all of this?
00:20:27.000These are not exactly human rights-oriented nations.
00:20:32.000If the UN and the United Nations and this body confers legitimacy on an illegitimate narco-terrorist and the same treatment in this charter of a democratically elected president or head of state, what kind of organization is this?
00:20:55.000And the answer is the United Nations is a garbage organization.
00:20:57.000And I would hope that on his way out of office in three years, President Trump defunds the United Nations entirely, uses eminent domain to take control of the building and builds a Trump Tower there.
00:21:07.000Because honestly, the United Nations is not only useless, it is wildly counterproductive on every available level.
00:21:13.000And meanwhile, protesters in New York City have already gathered in favor of Maduro, according to the New York Post.
00:21:19.000These protests have been organized by the hardcore left-wing group, the People's Forum, which wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.
00:21:24.000They have close ties to China, to China.
00:21:27.000The People's Forum put out a press release saying this war is not about drug trafficking.
00:21:32.000It's about stealing Venezuela's oil and dominating Latin America.
00:21:35.000I think one of the great interviews that I've seen recently was an interview with a person on the streets of Venezuela who's asked about this.
00:21:50.000Like, let's be clear about how foreign relations works.
00:21:54.000Nonetheless, members of the left have been searching for an angle here.
00:21:59.000So naturally, you have Representative Ted Liu of California saying, this is terrible, because now that we have done this to Maduro, what's to stop China or Russia from making aggressive actions in the world?
00:22:37.000Certainly, this illegal action by the president does also take away the moral argument that the United States had against China and Russia with respect to their aggressive actions towards other places and other countries.
00:22:55.000I mean, really, truly a stupid take there.
00:22:57.000Meanwhile, Sonny Hostin, who can always be trusted as a lawyer to give the best legal take over on the view, she says that the kidnapping is illegal, in her humble opinion.
00:23:10.000Well, it's not legal because it violates international law, right?
00:23:13.000And this sort of represents this new, I mean, I've never seen it before, the president of the United States to kill, I believe he killed over, the U.S. government killed over 100 people, including civilians and military, in Venezuela during this kidnapping and capture.
00:23:33.000And international law doesn't allow it unless there is unless Congress declares war.
00:23:42.000Tell us more about international law, Sonny Hostin.
00:23:45.000Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, he went after Marco Rubio, suggesting that Rubio had been deceiving Congress.
00:23:53.000In the lead up to the war in Iraq, the same things were said about Vietnam when comparisons were made in a similar way.
00:24:00.000It is such chicken hawk BS from Rubio, who's not served a single day in uniform, to dismiss that as a phobia.
00:24:09.000You want to tell that to my friends on this bracelet that I lost in combat?
00:24:14.000You want to tell that to the innocent Iraqis that were killed?
00:24:17.000You want to tell that to the Venezuelan people who are saying, we're glad Maduro's gone, as am I, but what the heck is the plan afterwards?
00:24:25.000And are we just going to hand this to another dictator who's going to do the will of our increasingly authoritarian president in Donald Trump?
00:24:33.000Again, the argument that somehow Rubio lied is ridiculous.
00:25:19.000These people don't even know how to run the United States of America.
00:25:25.000So I do have a question here, which is Maduro was running it until five seconds ago.
00:25:30.000So the choices were not the Venezuelan people or Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and President Trump.
00:25:36.000The choices were Nicolas Maduro or a transitional plan that moves toward democracy presided over by a tutelary power in the United States.
00:25:45.000Leave it to Senator John Fetterman, apparently the last same Democrat to just say the quiet part out loud and the obvious part, which is this is a good thing and we should salute our military for what they just did.
00:25:56.000I think I don't know why we can't just acknowledge that it's been a good thing what's happened.
00:26:00.000I mean, I mean, I've seen the speeches from whether it's leader Schumer or kinds of past tweets from President Biden.
00:26:08.000You know, we all wanted this man gone and now he is gone.
00:26:12.000I think we should really appreciate exactly what happened here.
00:26:16.000And I think we did just as I've salute our military, what they've done.
00:26:20.000That was really surgical and precise and very efficient.
00:26:24.000So why we can't celebrate these kinds of things?
00:26:30.000By the way, Ana Navarro, you know, credit to strange new respect for Ana Navarro over at The View, who occasionally, apparently will say the right things.
00:27:11.000And something important has happened here.
00:27:13.000There's an attempt to minimize what's happened here because we don't know exactly what's going to come next.
00:27:17.000Again, you have to imagine that the pressure tactics are not over.
00:27:20.000The administration is saying that over and over.
00:27:22.000But something more important has happened here, and that is that President Trump has substantively killed the Iraq syndrome, the Iraq syndrome, the syndrome that arose in Americans' minds about our role in the world arising from the failure of the Iraq war and subsequent occupation.
00:27:40.000So you have to go back in history to understand this.
00:27:43.000aftermath of the disastrous Vietnam War, America's foreign policy establishment fell into disarray.
00:27:48.000According to a lot of the experts, the Vietnam War hadn't been lost because of a combination of terrible war strategy and domestic discontent.
00:27:55.000Instead, the new conventional wisdom said, the Vietnam War never should have been fought in the first place.
00:27:59.000Not only that, but America had to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.
00:28:04.000The new conventional wisdom suggested that the U.S. should stop engaging in aggressive foreign policy in its own interests.
00:28:10.000Instead, The United States ought to pursue a more dovish or isolationist foreign policy in order to avoid quagmires.
00:28:17.000This conventional wisdom came to be known as Vietnam syndrome.
00:28:20.000Undergirding the Vietnam syndrome was very, very often a thinly veiled anti-Americanism, the belief that America was in fact not good, but a malign force on planet Earth.
00:28:31.000As former Princeton professor Richard Fawkes said at the time, quote, I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat.
00:28:39.000In other words, America is at root guilty, and we learned that in Vietnam, and now we ought to withdraw from the world and acknowledge our guilt.
00:28:46.000The Vietnam syndrome in the real world came with really serious costs.
00:28:50.000As it turns out, a world without a strong America is a far worse world.
00:28:54.000An America dedicated to self-castration on the international stage ushered in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran, among other foreign policy tragedies.
00:29:05.000Well, by the mid-80s, Ronald Reagan had decided that it was time for America to move beyond the Vietnam syndrome.
00:29:10.000In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened to depose a Marxist government in Grenada, a successful intervention that cost few American lives and restored that small island nation to freedom.
00:29:21.000And just a few months later, Reagan's defense secretary, a man named Caspar Weinberger, spelled out six standards to be met prior to a military intervention.
00:29:29.000First, a vital interest had to be at stake.
00:29:31.000Second, the United States had to be prepared for outright victory.
00:29:34.000Third, America needed to have clear political and military goals.
00:29:38.000Fourth, America had to be willing to adjust its strategy continuously.
00:29:42.000Fifth, public support had to be maintained.
00:29:44.000And sixth, all other options had to be exhausted.
00:29:47.000And the Reagan administration and the subsequent H.W. Bush administration ended the Vietnam syndrome with the Weinberger Doctrine.
00:29:54.000In 1989, the United States intervened in Panama to arrest dictator Emmanuel Noriega, restoring democracy to that nation.
00:30:01.000In 1991, President George H.W. Bush initiated Operation Desert Storm to eject Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
00:30:09.000That intervention was specifically designed to fulfill Caspar Weinberger's criteria.
00:30:14.000And so the Vietnam syndrome was basically dead.
00:30:17.000And then, of course, came the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War, which revived it.
00:30:21.000Both wars began with specific missions.
00:30:24.000The Afghanistan war was designed to depose the Taliban regime and prevent the installation of another regime friendly to Al-Qaeda.
00:30:30.000The Iraq War was designed to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
00:30:32.000Both of those objectives were achieved in the early going.
00:30:35.000But then the aftermath in both countries turned into an exercise in large-scale nationbuilding, a project that lasted years and cost over a trillion dollars and cost the blood and lives of thousands of American troops.
00:30:46.000And ever since, critics of American foreign policy have basically revived the Vietnam syndrome in the form of an Iraq syndrome.
00:30:52.000The idea that every single conflict in which the United States is involved must become Iraq or will become Iraq.
00:30:59.000Not, contrary to the usual definition, a justified skepticism of intelligence findings or fear of nationbuilding, but again, a full-scale restoration of the Vietnam syndrome.
00:31:08.000Every single foreign policy intervention is supposed to become Iraq or Afghanistan.
00:31:12.000You hear this repeated ad nauseum from the horseshoe left and the horseshoe right.
00:31:17.000And unsurprisingly, just like with the Vietnam syndrome, the Iraq syndrome ushered in a period of American retreat and international chaos, led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden predominantly.
00:31:27.000Withdrawal from Iraq led to the rise of ISIS under Barack Obama.
00:31:30.000And Iranian proxies around the region grew, and that eventually resulted in the cataclysm of October 7th, 2023.
00:31:36.000Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and prompted, at least in part, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
00:31:45.000China looked at the United States and the world and decided that it was going to spread its tentacles throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
00:31:52.000Well, now, on the tail end of Joe Biden's catastrophic foreign policy presidency, again, in Iraq syndrome presidency, just as Ronald Reagan once did, President Trump has now put the Iraq syndrome to bed.
00:32:03.000Trump has done so with what could be called the Trump doctrine.
00:32:07.000That's a term that I defined back in November 2024 with the following criteria.
00:32:11.000One, America's interests are paramount and they include a lot of things from freedom of the seas to the strength of American allies in contentious regions to yes, oil interests.
00:32:20.000Second, America's interests must be carefully calibrated to our investment in them.
00:32:46.000Again, I said this was his doctrine in November 2024.
00:32:49.000And now in the last year, he has done it twice.
00:32:52.000First, he did so with the June 22nd, 2025 B-2 strikes on Iran's nuclear reactor at Fordo, reestablishing America's deterrence power in the Middle East, reshaping the geopolitics of the region in dramatic fashion.
00:33:05.000Despite all of the caterwalling from his supposed allies declaring that World War III would break out, because again, they had been captured by Iraq syndrome.
00:33:14.000Well, now President Trump has done the same with the ouster of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
00:33:19.000In pursuing these actions, Trump has reestablished American deterrence globally.
00:33:23.000He's made clear America's enemies are on notice, FAFO.
00:33:26.000And he's demonstrating that such action doesn't need to lead to a quagmire or to a full-scale nationbuilding exercise draining America's attention and resources.
00:33:38.000And if it is, it died at the hands of President Trump.
00:33:41.000America is indeed once again feared on the global stage, which is an incredible accomplishment given where we were just one year ago.
00:33:48.000This is what many of us voted for, at least those of us who actually would like to make America great again in the world.
00:33:56.000Well, meanwhile, a lot closer to home, JD Vance's home in Cincinnati was apparently broken into and vandalized, according to the New York Post.
00:34:04.000The deranged hammer-wielding alleged vandal is reportedly the son of a prominent millionaire family who is wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, trans-identifying.
00:34:13.000Oh, you mean that people who identify as members of the opposite sex might have other problems sometimes?
00:34:22.000William DeFour, 26, was arrested early Monday after allegedly shattering four windows at Vance's home.
00:34:27.000Apparently, he was attempting to break into the home around midnight.
00:34:31.000It's unclear whether this person identifies as transgender or non-binary, but he recently appeared to be posting under the name Julia DeFour.
00:34:40.000This person, again, appears to have some serious difficulties.
00:34:43.000He is the son of a pediatric urologist and apparently, again, a fancy family, longtime Democratic Party supporters.
00:34:56.000The reality of mental illness is quite shocking and pretending it away and also creating moral structures whereby if you quote unquote challenge the identity of a person who is clearly engaging in a delusion, you must be threatening them in some way and thus counteraction is justified, which has been the sort of excuse making with regard to everything from the murder of Charlie Kirk to the assault on Covenant Catholic.
00:35:24.000Now, that entire thought process has to be ended.
00:35:29.000The thought process is wrong and it is damaging and it is dangerous.
00:35:33.000In bigger news, apparently Tim Walz has now dropped out.
00:35:37.000We reported this late-breaking news yesterday.
00:35:40.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Governor Tim Wallace has dropped his bid for a third term amid a massive welfare fraud scandal, a remarkable fall for a politician who had ascended to the national stage in 2024 as the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
00:35:51.000Once again, it is astonishing to me that Kamala Harris chose the goofball from Minnesota, who is presiding over legitimately hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud over, for example, the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, just because Shapiro happened to be Jewish.
00:36:03.000Pretty astonishing move by Kamala Harris.
00:36:06.000Senator Amy Klobuchar is seriously considering running for governor.
00:36:10.000She would be the frontrunner, obviously.
00:36:14.000Speaking to reporters Monday in St. Paul, Wallace said it became clear to him he could not run a 2026 campaign and do the work needed to respond to the crisis.
00:36:21.000He, of course, claimed that he is a victim in all of this.
00:36:25.000He did a press conference yesterday, at which, of course, he took no questions from the press after presiding over hundreds of millions of dollars in bilked taxpayer money.
00:36:34.000Here he was yesterday, ripping the people he calls conspiracy theorists.
00:36:37.000Now, again, he can focus in on the Nick Shirley video and say that it was not substantiated well enough, but there were large-scale contemporaneous reports from CNN, from the New York Times, from Chris Rufo, from a wide variety of sources pointing out the extraordinary fraud taking place in the Somali community in Minnesota.
00:36:55.000Here is Tim Walz trying to chalk it all up to conspiracy theories.
00:36:58.000If it were that much of a conspiracy theory, Madud, you should debunk it and continue to campaign.
00:37:02.000The reality is you're a terrible governor.
00:37:04.000You never should have been a vice presidential nominee.
00:37:06.000And it just goes to show you that hanging out with Kamala Harris doesn't put much of a shine on you, as it turns out.
00:37:13.000We've got conspiracy theorist right-wing YouTubers breaking into our daycares, demanding access to our children.
00:37:22.000We've got the president of the United States demonizing our Somali neighbors and wrongfully confiscating funds that Minnesotans rely on.
00:37:35.000Well, again, this is very, very industrial-scale fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:37:40.000We are talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars in fraud nationally and certainly hundreds of millions of dollars inside the state of Minnesota, ranging from food programs built to child care programs built.
00:37:54.000Here was Tim Walz attacking President Trump for all of this.
00:37:56.000Again, it wasn't Trump who did it, Madud.
00:38:03.000Donald Trump and his allies in Washington and in St. Paul and online want to make our state a colder, meaner place.
00:38:10.000They want to poison our people against each other by attacking our neighbors.
00:38:15.000And ultimately, they want to take away much of what makes Minnesota the best place in the country to raise a family.
00:38:21.000They've already begun trying to withhold funds that were meant to help families afford child care, and they have no intention of stopping there.
00:38:30.000Now, again, it is not just Nick Shirley.
00:38:33.000Okay, the Minnesota Star Tribune documented more than $200 million in fraudulent meal and housing programs, Medicaid services, and more.
00:38:41.000Federal prosecutors and President Trump say that the number could be actually in the billions, and they have frozen a bunch of child care funding to Minnesota after those allegations of fraud involving daycare centers that were highlighted in Nick Shirley's video.
00:38:54.000Now, again, not everything in the Nick Shirley video is fully substantiated.
00:38:59.000Some of these places presumably had kids in them, but an enormous number of them had massive violations.
00:39:08.000And again, they are still awaiting further investigation on a lot of these child care facilities.
00:39:15.000According to the Associated Press, Minnesota officials have until next week to hand over information on providers and parents who receive federal child care funds.
00:39:22.000The Trump administration contends have been fraudulently used or risk losing their own federal funding.
00:39:29.000Now, there's some state officials saying that some of these places have been operating as expected, but an enormous number of them also have gigantic failures in terms of their compliance issues.
00:39:40.000Quality Leadering Center, for example, as we discussed yesterday, is a child care center that had something like 121 different problems with it over the past three years.
00:39:51.000Here, in fact, is the manager of Quality Learning Center, who said that Nick Shirley came outside operating hours.
00:39:56.000They've been open for eight and a half years.
00:40:00.000You don't come outside of outside, outside of operational hours, and then say they're using taxpayer money.
00:40:13.000So it's like, are you trying to record that we're doing fraud or are you trying to put the Somali name and their fraud in the same sentence?
00:40:21.000That's what really hurt us the last couple of days.
00:40:28.000We haven't closed once during that period.
00:40:31.000Okay, with 121 violations in three years.
00:40:34.000Okay, which does raise the question of how many violations does it take to get you canceled off the welfare programs in the state of Minnesota.
00:40:41.000Meanwhile, one of these Somali-run daycare centers came out and said that they did have documents demonstrating their legitimacy, but they were broken into and stolen, which seems kind of weird.
00:40:49.000Why that would be the thing that a thief would steal.
00:40:54.000Yesterday morning, I was called by the owner because unfortunately someone came in to our daycare.
00:41:03.000We looked and saw what happened, and we saw that the suspect came in from the back, broke in from the back kitchen, and he also destroyed the wall to come in.
00:41:16.000As we walked around the daycare, we saw that our office doors were broken into as well.
00:41:23.000We saw that, unfortunately, we saw that there was important documentation, enrollment of the children, and also employee documentation that was gone.
00:41:34.000There were also checkbooks that were ripped from our checkpapers that were from our book.
00:41:42.000This is devastating news, and we don't know why this is targeting our Somali community as one video made by a specific individual made this all happen.
00:42:32.000Just we'll slide out the back door without answering any questions.
00:42:35.000Well, I do not think that that is the end of the Tim Walz scandal.
00:42:39.000I do not think that Tim Walz' declaration that he will not run again is going to end all of this.
00:42:44.000You might call some of this the warmth of collectivism.
00:42:47.000It turns out that when you confiscate vast amounts of taxpayer dollars and you redistribute them to all of your friends, when you regulate people to death, but then for your friends, you alleviate those regulations.
00:42:59.000You might call that the warmth of collectivism.
00:43:01.000I'm using this phrase because, of course, last week, Zarm Montani was officially sworn into office in New York City and gave an astonishing speech in which he announced that socialism was the order of the day in New York City.
00:43:13.000Here he was promising the end of rugged individualism in a city about which Frank Sinatra once saying, if you make it here, you can make it anywhere.
00:43:20.000Now, I guess the slogan of New York City is: if you can stay here, we'll give you free stuff on somebody else's dime until we're all bankrupt.
00:43:26.000It's a little longer and doesn't fit on a bumper sticker.
00:43:29.000Here is Mamdani talking about the warmth of collectivism, by which I assume he means the warm embrace of Big Brother.
00:43:35.000There's a great ex-post, I can't remember who put it up, talking about the actual warmth of collectivism, referring to Moscow's centralized heating system under the Soviet Union.
00:43:46.000They built this gigantic centralized heating system under Moscow in the early days of the Soviet Union, and it was utterly inefficient because it turned out they tried to set the temperature for hundreds of thousands of people.
00:43:56.000And so if it was too hot in your apartment, you opened the windows, wasting energy.
00:43:59.000And in other parts of the city, you couldn't get heat.
00:44:02.000But there was the warmth of collectivism.
00:44:06.000Apparently, the cost of heating in Moscow, thanks to this idiotic centralized heating system, was greater than the cost for heating all of France.
00:44:14.000So we can look forward to more of that sort of wonderful policy under Zorhan Mamdani.
00:46:09.000I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist.
00:46:21.000I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.
00:46:27.000As the great senator from Vermont once said, what's radical is a system which gives so much to so few and denies so many people the basic necessities of life.
00:46:49.000Yes, you should definitely trust a man, the most useless man in American politics for decades upon decades.
00:46:54.000You should trust him when it comes to governance, a man who has never produced a single thing of value his entire life.
00:46:59.000His entire life, this man has never produced a single thing of worth.
00:47:03.000But he's going to tell you how the greatest city on planet Earth ought to be run.
00:47:08.000All of us have heard how Zaran's opponents have called the agenda that he campaigned on radical, Communistic in the richest country in the history of the world.
00:47:28.000Making sure that people can live in affordable housing is not radical.
00:47:36.000Providing free and high-quality child care is not radical.
00:47:44.000And making sure that every family in the city, regardless of income, has access to decent quality food and an accordable affordable cost is not radical.
00:47:58.000One of my favorite things about the socialists is they just declare that people should have a bunch of free stuff and it's not radical.
00:48:05.000Okay, your declaration in and of itself is quote unquote not radical.
00:48:08.000It's the things you have to do to try to effectuate that that make it radical.
00:48:12.000Because it turns out the best way for people to get widespread healthcare is called capitalism, which has increased the longevity and lifespan of human beings on planet Earth by decades while socialism has killed literally hundreds of millions of people.
00:48:42.000I had a New Yorker the other day come up to me and asked me if there was any way I could help him get World Cup tickets because he was saying that the cost that he saw for a game was $600, right?
00:48:53.000We have made what used to be a working-class game into a luxury experience.
00:48:58.000And there are too many for whom it doesn't matter where the World Cup is being played in the world, they know where they're going to watch it.
00:50:01.000I am also proud to announce that I will be signing an executive order directing HBD to work alongside the Department of Buildings, the newly invigorated mayor's office to protect tenants, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection,
00:50:16.000and our newly created Office of Mass Engagement to hold rental rip-off hearings across all we will hold these rental rip-off hearings across all five boroughs within the first hundred days of this administration.
00:50:41.000New Yorkers will be invited to participate and to share the realities that animate their daily lives.
00:50:47.000I want these hearings to expose the ugly underbelly of our city.
00:50:53.000Man, this was so much better in the original Russian.
00:50:56.000You know, what if we just had people's courts?
00:51:35.000Can't imagine why so many real estate magnates I know pulled out of deals at the last minute in New York City thinking, hey, I'm not sure I want to work in this crazy hellhole.
00:51:45.000I think the reality is that for centuries, we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good.
00:51:55.000And we are going to, and transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently.
00:52:06.000And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.
00:52:39.000So I could believe that all men who take credit for women's work and all white men who take credit for the work of women of color would one day burn.
00:53:16.000Now, this sort of insane leftism is meeting its match on a horseshoe right.
00:53:23.000Now, the horseshoe right has not taken power.
00:53:25.000The horseshoe right is sort of a splinter movement inside the right.
00:53:30.000It has sort of an outsized punching weight online, but not in real life.
00:53:34.000But there is one piece I want to focus in particularly for a moment.
00:53:38.000That is a piece called Tyrannical Centralization by a person named Curtis Yarvin.
00:53:42.000So Curtis Yarvin is widely read on sort of the fringe right.
00:53:47.000Vice President of the United States, apparently, has been a fan of Curtis Yarvin in the past.
00:53:52.000And he is a representative of a philosophy that is effectively a sort of right-wing fascism, a sort of right-wing response to left-wing centralization.
00:54:03.000So you have the Reds, people like Zarm Mamdani, and then you have their right-wing fascist opposition, people like Curtis Yarvin.
00:54:10.000And I'm using that terminology advisedly because in his latest piece, he basically just says the quiet part out loud, criticizing the Trump administration for not simply dismantling the American Constitution.
00:54:22.000Quote, in an American regime change, take the American version of this L. Ron Council Kabuki, Tricorn Hats, Davy Crockett, or Harriet Tubman, Declaration, Constitution, even the Ancient and Holy Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, and treat it like an Arkansas miscarriage.
00:54:36.000Chuck the plastic bag out the sunroof.
00:54:38.000The possums will get to it first, just assume the sale and act with the energy of an occupying army, nationalize and rationalize.
00:54:45.000Quote, besides absolute power, everything else is just a way to lose.
00:54:49.000That's just where we are in history now.
00:54:52.000The energy, says Curtis Yarvin, that made Trumpism possible is the energy of this illusion breaking down and conservatives breaking free from the cult of the Constitution.
00:55:02.000He recommends the creation of a new kind of political party, which is actually an old kind of party, a hard party.
00:55:08.000A hard party, says Yarvin, is a party designed to take unconditional control of the state.
00:55:12.000A hard party is a party in which all members delegate 100% of their political energy to the party's command.
00:55:19.000Joining a hard party is a political marriage, not an election night hookup with any random politician whose name on a lawn sign catches your eye.
00:55:26.000A hard party is a legal private organization whose goal is to become the ruling party of the next government, like the CCP in China.
00:56:23.000They do not need to read about the issues.
00:56:24.000They do not need to know about the candidates.
00:56:26.000Voting is not some time-consuming, stressful Norman Rockwell exercise of deep moral choices.
00:56:31.000They made one big vote joining the party.
00:56:34.000Eventually, they will be relieved from the duty of filling out ballots.
00:56:40.000So, the reactionary right-wing response to the Zoramdani communism of New York City, symbolized by the right-wing authoritarianism of Curtis Yarvin.
00:56:53.000And it is worth noting only because, again, Curtis Yarvin does have his devotees.
00:56:58.000They're mainly in the online space on the right, or people who sit around pondering whether their chair exists.
00:57:05.000At the same time, they ponder about how to establish an integralist state in America absent the Constitution of the United States.
00:57:12.000In the same way that the left ought to divide off from its communist-leaning splinter faction, the right needs to splinter off from this ridiculous neo-fascist trash.
00:57:26.000It is silly, and humoring it is incredibly silly.
00:57:29.000Not only silly, dangerous, because humoring authoritarian nonsense from people who are purportedly on your side is a great way to be co-opted by those splinter groups.
00:57:42.000Alrighty, coming up, we'll get into a pseudo-controversy over Hilton hotels, which took up a lot of online space yesterday.
00:57:49.000Remember, in order to watch, I have to be a member.
00:57:51.000If you're not a member, become a member.