Get the extended episode, Friday Free-For-All, and TWO MONTHS of Useful Idiots FREE.

Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:

This week we’re speaking to Pulitzer-Prize winner Greg Grandin about the Trump Administration’s regime-change war in Venezuela, which now is mired in controversy not just because we’re trying to overthrow a foreign government yet again, but also because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth presided over a blatantly unconstitutional strike on a speedboat in the Caribbean.

Useful Idiots: Can you walk us through what Trump is doing right now in Venezuela and what is motivating him?

Greg Grandin: The big picture is the America First movement, which imagines that the United States no longer superintends a global liberal political economy in which everybody plays by the rules. That’s happened in the past, and Latin America is key to that.

But then, of course, there’s Venezuela and there’s oil. There was a split within the Trump administration between so-called moderates, who are tied to Chevron, and the war party, Miller, Rubio, and Hegseth. I think those speedboat attacks were the war party’s attempt to preempt any normalization of relationships with Venezuela.

And with Rubio, it’s a confluence of two different strands. One is he was a neocon before he became America First. But he’s also from South Florida, and he’s got deep ties to the Cuban community. And Venezuela is seen as the first step towards taking out Cuba, denying it its oil. So he’s doing it under the rubric of the War on Drugs, which of course is not Donald Trump. That’s a fifty year war.

Behind every single horror that Donald Trump represents exists a long train of U.S. presidents that had first put in the policies that make what Trump does today possible. And that’s nowhere clearer than in the Drug War, which started formally with Richard Nixon in 1973. So there’s many things flowing into it.

Useful Idiots: Do you think Trump will succeed with these plans in Venezuela?

Greg Grandin: The momentum to get Maduro out is quite strong and surprisingly orchestrated, which included the Nobel Peace Prize Committee giving María Corina Machado the prize, and she immediately fulfilled her role as everybody’s worst expectation of what could possibly happen. I can’t imagine any other Peace Prize winner immediately embarking on an alliance with Donald Trump to stage a coup. But that’s where we are.

I think that Trump wants Venezuela settled. That either means Maduro’s gone and some provisional government favorable to the United States is in power, or it means the Chevron faction within the Trump administration keeps Maduro and establishes some semblance of normalcy and keeps the oil pumping.

Now deportation flights have restarted after being halted for a little while. That’s where I’m a little bit dubious about whether Trump is going to go all in on Rubio’s visions. They don’t have enormous support in the United States. It doesn’t have support in the MAGA base. And obviously Hegseth is having all of these problems. The leaking of the footage of that double-tap speedboat killing suggests there’s deep discontent within the military…

Subscribe to watch the full interview with historian Greg Grandin. (Or watch it free with this deal. You’ll also get our Friday Free-For-All: Stephen Miller Says What He’d Do With Pete Hegseth’s Children)

If you thought the Fox News banter between Jesse Watters and Stephen Miller couldn’t get any slimier than we’ve shown on past Useful Idiots episodes, then you’re in for, well, a lot of slime.

This week, Pete Hegseth went on Stephen Miller’s wife Katie Miller’s podcast. (Yes, we know Hegseth did other things this week, mainly war crimes that are getting him in trouble with the military and all that, and we’ll get to that, but first we’ve gotta talk about this.) She asked him which members of the Trump administration he would let babysit his kids.

His response: “Oh, I mean, not your husband or Marco.”

So when Stephen Miller was asked about this by Jesse Watters, you could see the thinly-veiled seething rage lurking in Miller’s eyes. And his response only made it creepier:

“He’s worried that if I babysat his kids, he’d come back after a couple of hours and they would say, ‘Daddy, why don’t you send the military into Minnesota to help us with the Somali refugees?’” It’s the first time we’ve seen Miller genuinely smile and it’s somehow creepier than his usual gaze.

To watch Katie and Aaron play ‘Would you rather have Stephen Miller or Pete Hegseth babysit your kids,’ subscribe to watch the full Friday Free-For-All.

You’ll also see: Hillary Clinton mocking her own students for opposing genocide, Republicans openly pushing to steal oil from Venezuela, and the new gambling site that’s turning opinions into “tradable assets.”

It’s all as bad as it sounds! Support independent media by subscribing to watch the full Free-For-All (or get it free here).

If you haven’t seen this video yet, you’re in for a wild ride:

“It used to be that the media in America was American media,” begins former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz in a speech to the Jewish Federation that is about as antisemitic as anything you’d find on the dark corners of the internet. “It generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. But today we have social media. So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

Hurwitz attempts to spin this to argue that the problem isn’t the carnage, but that young people are seeing it. “And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they’re hearing through this wall of carnage. I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds carnage. And I sound obscene.”

Yes. You do. But not as obscene as you will after saying this next part:

“Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism. Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews. So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.’”

………………

Yes!