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FTR#1377 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: The program begins with reading of two articles discussing the arrival of fascism in America. The articles are limited in scope, however, Mr. Emory feels a degree of satisfaction to see the overdue recognition of the true nature of the unfolding apocalypse.
From Henry Giroux: “We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing. . . . Americans are not witnessing a slow drift toward authoritarianism. They are living through the violent, coordinated seizure of democratic life by fascist forces emboldened by indifference, cruelty, and the architecture of unaccountable power. . . .”
Following that reading, Mr. Emory presents an informative interview by Amy Goodman of a Guardian journalist who details the fascist forces shaping both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
The influence of Elon Musk’s grandfather on the development of technocratic fascism is a topic that will be explored in future programs.
1.“The Fire This Time” by Henry Giroux; counterpunch.org; 4/4/2025.
We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing.
First, the notion of government as a democratizing public good and institution of social responsibility—that once held power to account, protected the vulnerable, and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is being methodically destroyed. The common good, once seen as the essence of democratic life, has become the enemy of the neoliberal fascist state. It is not merely being neglected—it is being assaulted, stripped bare, and left to rot in the shadows of privatization, greed, and brutality—the main features of gangster capitalism. Public institutions are hollowed out, courts are under siege, regulatory bodies are politicized and disempowered, and the mechanisms of governance now serve only the most ruthless forms of concentrated financial and political power.
Second, we are witnessing a form of ideological cleansing—a scorched-earth assault on critical consciousness. Education, both public and higher, is under siege, stripped of its democratic mission to cultivate informed judgment, critical thinking, and the capacity to make corrupt power visible. What once served as a space for reflection, dissent, and civic engagement is being transformed into a battlefield of ideological control, where questioning authority is replaced by obedience, and pedagogy is reduced to training, conformity, and propaganda. Education is explicitly no longer on the side of empowerment for the many. It has become an ideological tool of massive repression, indoctrination, surveillance, and an adjunct of the billionaire elite and the walking dead with blood in their mouths.
Books that illuminate injustice, affirm histories of resistance, and introduce critical ideas are being banned. Entire fields of knowledge—gender studies, critical race theory, decolonial thought—are outlawed. Professors are fired, blacklisted, or harassed for daring to speak the truth, especially those who denounce the genocidal violence being waged by Israel, which has now taken the lives of over 50,000 Palestinians, many of them children. Journalists are doxxed, detained, or demonized.
Cultural institutions are defunded or coerced into silence. The arts are no longer sacred; they are now suspect. Social media platforms and news outlets are intimidated, policed, and purged. Elite law firms are targeted, intimidated, silenced or forced into complicity by the Trump administration. Scott Cummings rightly argues President Donald Trump’s recent speech to the Department of Justice was meant as a declaration of war against lawyers. Some prestigious law firms and attorneys—once alleged guardians of justice—now grovel before authoritarianism in acts of staggering complicity. The public sphere is shrinking under the weight of repression.
Third—and perhaps most alarming—is the escalating campaign of racial cleansing—a war against the most vulnerable, on bodies, on the flesh, and on visceral forms of agency. This is not hyperbole. Immigrants are caged in squalid detention centers, separated from their families, deported without due process to detention centers in Louisiana or to Guantanamo, or simply disappeared. Muslims are vilified, surveilled, and targeted with impunity. Black and brown communities are over-policed and under-protected, sacrificed to the machinery of carceral violence. State terrorism is normalized. The state is actively criminalizing existence itself for all those who do not fit the white Christian nationalist fantasy of purity, obedience, and subjugation.
This is a war not only against people, but against memory, imagination, and the very capacity to think, make connections, and to dream a different future. The unimaginable has become policy. The unthinkable now passes for normal.
Consider just a glimpse of the horror now unfolding:
Venezuelan migrants are being disappeared into a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. A legendary British punk band, the UK Subs, denied entry for voicing dissent against Trump’s authoritarian policies. A French scientist barred at the border for criticizing Trump, who with sneering smile, tears up the Constitution with performative contempt. Trump violates court orders with impunity. Student visas are revoked in the dead of night. Their dorm rooms raided, their wrists bound in handcuffs, they are forced into unmarked cars by agents of a system that is both cruel and clandestine. Young people—Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Ranjani Srinivasan, Yunseo Chung—are disappeared, imprisoned in Louisiana, and await deportation under a regime of malignant legalities. cloaked in legalese. These are not arrests—they are abductions. Not justice—but the slow machinery of fear made flesh. Dissent is now branded as terrorism, and those who challenge Trump’s authoritarian grip vanish into the void—arrested, erased, rendered disposable.
Trump’s totalitarian machine is waging a relentless war on colleges and universities. As Chris Hedges observes, the administration has threatened to strip federal funding from more than 60 elite higher education institutions under the guise of protecting Jewish students—while already pulling $500 million from Columbia University, an action that has nothing to do with combating antisemitism. The charge is a smokescreen, a cynical pretext to silence protest and crush dissent—especially in support of Palestinian freedom. As Rashid Khalidi observes, “It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to.”
Elite universities once proud of their intellectual autonomy are being transformed into fortified zones of surveillance and submission. Columbia among the most glaring, where the campus now resembles a police precinct more than a place of progressive ideas and democratic values. Only now, as the darkness thickens, are a handful of journalists and liberal commentators awakening to the authoritarian siege on higher education—a siege some of us have been naming for decades.
Americans are not witnessing a slow drift toward authoritarianism. They are living through the violent, coordinated seizure of democratic life by fascist forces emboldened by indifference, cruelty, and the architecture of unaccountable power.
Under such circumstances, it is crucial for people to pay attention to the political crisis that is unfolding. This means being attentive, learning from history, analyzing the mobilizing passions of fascism as a system—one directly related to the forces of gangster capitalism and the force of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism. Language matters, and those willing to fight against the fascist tide must rethink the meaning of education, resistance, bearing witness, and solidarity. And action is imperative: build alliances, flood the streets, defend critical education, amplify resistance, and refuse to be silent.
In the face of this rising tide, resistance must no longer be fragmented, polite, or confined to isolated corners of dissent. As Sherilyn Ifill notes, “it is not enough to fight. You have to meet the moment.” Cultural critics, educators, artists, journalists, social workers, and others must wield their craft like weapons—telling prohibited stories, defying censorship, reigniting the radical imagination. Educators must refuse complicity, defending classrooms as sanctuaries of truth and critical inquiry, even when the risks are great. Students must organize, disrupt, and reclaim their campuses—not as consumers of credentialing, but as insurgents of liberation.
Academics, including faculty and administrators, must form a common front to stop the insidious assault on higher education. Journalists must break the silence, not by chasing access or neutrality, but by naming injustice with moral clarity. Organizers, activists, and everyday people must converge—across race, class, gender, and nation—into a broad front of democratic refusal. This is a moment not just for outrage, but for audacity—for reclaiming hope as a political act, and courage as a shared ethic. Fascism feeds on fear and isolation. As Robin D. G. Kelley brilliantly argues, it must be met with solidarity, imagination, and relentless struggle, based on a revived class politics. In a culture of immediacy, cruelty, and staggering inequality, power must be named for its actions, and the language of critique and hope must give way to mass collective action. History is not watching—it is demanding. The only question is whether anti-fascist forces will rise to meet it.
This darkness is not without precedent, nor is it without models of resistance. During the rise of fascism in Europe, teachers and intellectuals in Nazi-occupied France joined the underground, distributing banned literature and teaching forbidden truths in secret classrooms. In apartheid South Africa, students in Soweto sparked a nationwide uprising, defying bullets with the cry that liberation begins with education. In the American South, Black freedom fighters risked their lives to build freedom schools, challenge police terror, and reimagine democracy in the face of white supremacy. The Zapatistas in Chiapas created autonomous zones rooted in dignity, justice, and Indigenous knowledge. Palestinian writers, youth, freedom fighters, and teachers continue to create under siege powerful examples of resistance, insisting through every poem, every painting, every lesson, that their people will not be erased, their memories will survive, and settler-colonialism will not only be relentlessly resisted but will be defeated. There is no other choice.
Today, movements like Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Futures, Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives and Indigenous Rights Movements are keeping alive the traditions of collective struggle. Courageous campus coalitions, in spite of the shameful crackdowns by the government and in some cases universities themselves, are resisting militarized policing and corporate capture of higher education. Migrant justice organizations are building sanctuary networks to protect those the state seeks to expel. These are not just moments of protest—they are blueprints for democratic rebirth. The task now is to connect these diverse movements in a mass movement with the power to wage strikes, engage in direct action, teach-ins, and use any viable non-violent form of resistance to overcome the fascist nightmare spreading across the globe.
The stakes could not be higher. This is a time to reimagine justice, to reclaim the promise of a radical democracy yet to be realized. Fascism feeds on despair, cynicism, and silence—but history teaches otherwise. Again and again, it is when ordinary people refuse to be silent, when they teach, create, march, strike, and speak with fierce clarity, that the foundations of tyranny begin to crack. Fascism has returned from the shadows of history to once more dismantle justice, equality, and freedom. But its resurgence must not be mistaken for fate. It is not the final script of a defeated democratic future—it is a warning. And with that warning comes a call to breathe life into a vision of democracy rooted in solidarity and imagination, to turn resistance into a hammer that shatters the machinery of cruelty, the policies of disposability, and the totalitarian and oligarchic opportunists who feed on fear. As we stand before the terrifying rise of authoritarianism, it becomes undeniable: the fire we face is not some distant, abstract peril, but a fierce and immediate struggle — the fire this time is the fascist capture of America. This is the moment to make education central to politics, to shape history with intention, to summon a collective courage rooted in the demands of freedom, equality, and justice—to act together with a militant hope that does not yield. Fascism will not prevail—unless we let it. In times like these, resistance is not a choice; it is the condition of survival.
2.“Stop Asking ‘Can It Happen Here?’ ” by Tim Kipp; Common Dreams.
Not since those sweltering days in Philadelphia in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention has the United States confronted so fundamental a restructuring of the federal government. What’s happening! Today, the mainstream press declares “it can’t happen here” because we are not an authoritarian society, which is a reference to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, about a dictatorial take over of the United States. No we are not heading into a coup d’etat, they say, nor are we heading into an oligarchy.
A Contest of Time
With all of its manifest imperfections and unremitting political and economic crises, many self inflicted, this government has survived for nearly 240 years. Of course, through it all the elites thrived while those not fortunate enough to be white and wealthy were obliged to endure. The influential federalist Fisher Ames, in defense of the Constitution, likened our new republic to traveling on a “raft where we never sink but our feet are always in the water.”
Are We Due to Capsize?
This time in our history is different. Today the forces of wealth and power are wielding unprecedented weapons that threaten the fundamentals of the republic. It’s not just policies that are under assault.
Unique concentrations of economic and political authority, dysfunctional legislative and judicial branches, a collapsed political party system, race and class scapegoating and toadying by influential sectors of the mass media combine to provide opportunities for demagogues to sell snake oil to an economically vulnerable and politically disillusioned public. This could be, in the words of the American sage Mel Brooks, a “springtime for Hitler” moment.
What Lurks Within?
Just as Trump’s rise to power is a symptom of undemocratic features of the political economy, an oligarchy and coup d’etat can emerge from a regime that incessantly consolidates power by and for the wealthy. It’s not the greed it’s the need. Power concentration is baked into the scheme. The internal logic dictates that elite political power consolidates and expands in order to preserve and amplify economic power.
Capitalism, according to noted economist Sam Bowles, is a never-ending race that requires aggressive undemocratic strategies to persevere. Well, democracy gets in the way of all of this; it organically interferes with the forces of wealth and power. Thus elite self-aggrandizement is compulsory for survival. Predictably this ceaseless jockeying for advantage in the race comes at the expense of the general welfare of the people or as the African proverb has it “when the elephants dance the mice gets trampled.”
Wizards Behind the Curtain
It is widely understood that Trump is not known for his intellectual curiosity or acuity. During his first term he seldom read his briefing books preferring to lean on his confidantes for any particulars. Presidents, in part are judged by who the advisors are. So who are some of Trump’s “brain trust”?
In the early 1970’s, Roy Cohn, the legal henchman for Senator Joseph McCarthy, became a trusted mentor to Trump. Cohn bragged that, “My scare value is high. My arena is controversy. My tough front is my biggest asset.” He admonished Trump to never admit a mistake. Sound familiar? Another key influencer was—and remains—Steve Bannon, publisher of Breitbart News, a reactionary platform for Republican extremism. Bannon is credited with saying the goal is the “destruction of the administrative state.” Then there’s Stephen Miller, the ever-dyspeptic long-time insider who stated, “I would be happy if not a single refugee’s foot ever again touched American soil.”
In the words of historian Doris Kearns Goodman, in another context, these people are not a “team of rivals” like those that Lincoln assembled. Trump’s team of advisors and cabinet secretaries are the mandatory paragons of sycophancy.
The Coup’s Afoot
The Trump-Republican agenda is in part based on Project 2025, which is a wish list of extremist proposals of an influential ultra conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. As will be shown the ultimate goal is to challenge and repeal foundational theories, structures and methods of how this country operates.
Their methods are straight out of an authoritarian’s playbook. The process consists of serial deceit, edict and executive orders all in arrogant violation of congressional and constitutional mandates and methods. This is a “shock and awe” that sabotages the rule of law. Trump’s second term is a barrage of dismantling of departments and agencies and the firing of hundreds of thousands with no regard for due process or social and human consequences. This is a coup d’etat.
Constitutional Foundations Crumble
This Trump –Musk and Republican Party coup is not a palace revolt that merely changes the faces in power. This is not about tinkering or modifying policy. This is not about upholding long cherished principles and values or a return to the “good old days.” This is about systemic change, about power and how it is structured and wielded and for who’s benefit.
What follows is an exposition of the coup’s structural attacks on governance. The actual specifics of the daily policy plundering will not be emphasized. Rather what will be explored are the why and how of this destruction of the basic architecture and operation of constitutional government. While historically this governing design and process has never been perfect it has always held the virtue of an ideal, of being a worthy democratic goal.
Reneging on the Contract
The insurrectionists intend to break the “Social Contract.” Philosopher John Locke’s foundational principle embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of an implicit agreement between the citizens and their government whereby the people abide by the authority in exchange for a freedom and the security of a stable society. People of good will understand that with freedom comes responsibility. This coup represents a comprehensive attack on the very purpose and methods of governing. Trump and Republicans are willfully undermining citizen’s trust in their government by demolishing the Contract.
How Popular is Sovereignty?
Trump, Inc. is sabotaging the principle of Popular Sovereignty whereby government’s power derives from the consent of the people. There is no need for consent in an authoritarian regime. Do citizens now want more voter suppression with fewer people voting, do they want the wealthy to have more control over campaign financing and who gets to run for office? Do citizens want an electoral system that they can’t trust? Not long ago Trump in his juvenile and artless way mused that when he becomes president the country would be so great that there would be no need for further elections.
Checking the Power of Democracy
An effective coup will subvert basic notions of how power should operate. The constitutional principles of the Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances are designed to prevent one branch from dominating the others and to insure the sharing of powers and accountability.
Republicans and Trump are consciously undermining that balance by promoting dubious theories, such as the “unitary executive” that bestows unrestrained power to the executive. Trump is impounding funds that were congressionally authorized. He is ignoring congressional oversight, thereby making a mockery of committee hearings and denying the senate it’s Advice and Consent authority. “Being president means I can do anything, I have Article 2,” thus spake Trump, the learned constitutional scholar during his first term.
In the early 1970s mainstream historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his book, The Imperial Presidency, warned of the escalation and dangers of an omnipotent president. One of his subjects of course was Richard Nixon who by comparison to Trump looks like a Mr. Rogers in his neighborhood oval office.
A Supremely Political Court
Revamping and controlling the judicial system is vital to the effectiveness of a coup. The U.S. Supreme Court wields extraordinary powers through a legalism concocted in 1803 that bestowed through “judicial review” the irrevocable authority to determine what laws are constitutional. This enables an unelected branch the ability to overturn a decision of elected representatives.
That power, now in the hands of the Trump-Roberts court, is a form of despotism. If insurgents can shape the ideological tenor of the court then politics will replace judicial fairness rendering the court a confederate in the unraveling of democracy.
Working with the Federalist Society over recent decades, the right-wing movement has spent millions to colonize the Supreme Court with a super majority of conservative and reactionary jurists. This hostile takeover of our highest court has turned a once esteemed branch into an ideological bunker where the robber barons take on cases to further limit the “excesses” of democracy.
The Robert’s Court has, among other things, destroyed voting rights protections, eliminated campaign finance regulations, undermined first amendment rights, eroded immigrant and women’s rights and unabashedly championed corporate interests. And perhaps most egregiously has put the president above the law by anointing him with unprecedented immunity. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senate’s most effective judicial watchdog, describes the Robert’s Court as having “advanced a far right agenda” that is “deeply out of touch with the will of Americans.” This court has virtually overturned the rule of law and enabled extremism to reign supreme. . . .
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today’s show with Part 2 of my recent interview with the reporter Chris McGreal, who was the Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian during the last years of apartheid through 2002. He’s been closely following the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Some of McGreal’s pieces include “What does Elon Musk believe?” and “How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa.” I began by asking Chris McGreal to discuss Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman.
CHRIS McGREAL: We see Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. He immigrates to South Africa in 1950. And that’s really when apartheid has just started to kick in. The 1950s are when the most — the first laws — South Africa had had discriminatory laws before, but you see the specific apartheid laws, which are much more aggressive, and in many ways reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg laws against Jews in the 1930s. They have very similar echoes in stripping Black people from the right to work in certain places, their movements, controlling them, confining them to areas. You already had a situation which has now, you know, come to the fore because of recent events with Trump, but —
AMY GOODMAN: You mean with Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute?
CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, but also with the sanctions over land, is that the 1913 Land Act had already deprived most Black people of land in South Africa anyway. At that point, the 7%, or 10%, as it was, of the population that was white owned more than 85% of the land under the Land Act of 1913. So, the apartheid laws kick in in the 1950s.
Musk was born — Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, and at that point the prime minister was a guy called John Vorster. And John Vorster’s background is very telling, really, because Vorster, in the 1930s, had been a member of a neo-Nazi militia called the OB, which was openly sympathetic and linked to the Nazis in Germany. It was responsible for all kinds of attacks, but including burning Jews out of their businesses in Johannesburg.
AMY GOODMAN: And we’re talking about what years?
CHRIS McGREAL: In the 1930s, so the late 1930s. And then South Africa goes to war as an ally of Britain against Hitler. The OB and the groups that support them, like Vorster, people like Vorster, they actively oppose that. They actually are in touch with — OB is in touch with German military intelligence, and they plan to assassinate the prime minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, and overthrow the government and have it support Hitler. That plan fails, because the Germans are unable to provide the necessary weapons and back out.
But in 1942, John Vorster, later prime minister, stands up and gives a speech, and he talks about the system that they — their kind of ideological belief system, which was Christian nationalism. And he says Christian nationalism in South Africa is the same as Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy. It’s all anti-democratic. It’s all the same thing. By 1971, when Elon Musk is born, that man is the prime minister of South Africa. And Christian nationalism is the basis of not only the political philosophy, but the entire education system that Elon Musk is brought up into.
AMY GOODMAN: So, take us from Elon Musk’s grandfather moving to South Africa in the ’50s to his father, how they gained their wealth.
CHRIS McGREAL: So, Musk — Elon Musk’s grandfather moves there in 1950s. He’s not particularly prosperous. He arrives without a lot of money. But it’s Elon Musk’s father, Errol, who makes the real money, principally through investments in emerald mines in Zambia. And, you know, mining conditions in southern Africa in that period were really pretty dire in the 1960s and ’70s, very high death rate, very poor conditions. But the owners got very rich.
And Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life. If you were a white South African in that period and you had any money at all, you lived with servants at your beck and call. You lived in sprawling housing. And what you see with Errol Musk is that when we get a glimpse into just how much money he had, when he and Elon’s mother get divorced, she says at the time that, well, he owns a yacht, he owns a jet, he owns several houses. So there was considerable wealth there.
AMY GOODMAN: Was the grandfather of Elon Musk on the record in his support for Vorster?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, he was certainly on the record in his support for apartheid, very vividly so, yes. And he said that that’s why he had moved to South Africa from Canada in 1940, was in support of it. Now, the grandfather himself is killed a few years later in a plane crash, but it’s not known what Elon Musk’s grandmother’s personal views of Vorster particularly were, but they were both avid supporters of the apartheid system, and the grandmother lived for a number of years afterwards.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’ve been talking about Elon Musk’s maternal grandparents and how they moved to South Africa, but talk about their roots in Canada.
CHRIS McGREAL: Originally, the grandparents have no connection to South Africa. They’re born and grew up in Canada. And in the 1930s, the grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, he’s head of the Canadian branch of a U.S. movement called Technocracy Incorporated. And Technocracy Incorporated is essentially a movement to overthrow democratic governments in the United States and have technocrats, but big businessmen, in many ways, come in and run the country. That’s partly a reaction to FDR’s election and New Deal and massive reforms that he’s introduced in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: So, from Canada, they would help to launch a coup against FDR?
CHRIS McGREAL: No. Canada had its own branch of this movement to overthrow the government in Canada. He, Haldeman, heads that branch. And through the 1930s, it takes on increasingly fascist overtones. They start wearing gray uniforms modeled on the Nazi brown and black shirts. And so, when Canada declares war on Germany in 1939 alongside Britain, the movement is banned, because it’s clearly sympathetic to Hitler. Then Haldeman is arrested.
AMY GOODMAN: Elon Musk’s grandfather.
CHRIS McGREAL: Elon Musk’s grandfather is arrested. They find documents sympathetic to the Nazis and other subversive documents inside his house. And he is sent to prison for a few months, then remains on essentially a subversion watch list for the rest of the war here. So, he’s basically regarded as a Nazi sympathizer, a fellow traveler.
AMY GOODMAN: And about a decade later, he moves to South Africa. Why?
CHRIS McGREAL: So, after the war, he founds another political movement, which has deep antisemitic roots and actually promotes the forgery, The Protocols of the —
AMY GOODMAN: Elders of Zion?
CHRIS McGREAL: Elders of Zion, that’s it. But, obviously, after the war and the Holocaust, there’s no real appetite for that in Canada. It’s a failing political movement. And so, his eye casts down to South Africa. By 1950, the apartheid government has been in power for two years. And Haldeman looks at it and thinks, “That’s just my kind of place,” which clearly that was what he would want to create in Canada and had been trying to create in the 1930s. And so, that’s the point at which he and his wife Maye, they move to South Africa and become very fervent supporters of apartheid.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to blend in some breaking news, in addition to cutting off all aid to South Africa, news of the region. And that is, Sam Nujoma, the freedom fighter turned president, who led Namibia to independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, has died at the age of 95, often referred to as Namibia’s founding father, known for his motto, “A united people, striving to achieve a common good for all members of the society, will always emerge victorious.” What used to be called South West Africa became the independent Namibia. Talk about Sam Nujoma and how that fits into this picture of South Africa through apartheid.
CHRIS McGREAL: So, Sam Nujoma was the head of the South West Africa People’s Organization, which was the liberation movement of Namibia.
AMY GOODMAN: SWAPO.
CHRIS McGREAL: SWAPO, indeed. Really, SWAPO takes off and has — is able to have effect after Angola becomes independent with the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship. The Portuguese colonizers leave Angola, and Angola provides a base then for SWAPO to really fight to liberate South West Africa. That becomes known as the Border War, euphemistically. The South Africans call it the Border War. They actually invade Angola in an attempt to overthrow the Marxist-leaning government of Angola, but also to keep SWAPO at bay. But the war goes on, and eventually South Africa loses that war.
At that period, though, one of the things you see is that Peter Thiel, another member of the “PayPal mafia,” very close friend of Musk, he had been at school in Johannesburg, but his father gets a job on a uranium mine near Swakopmund in what is then South West Africa. And so, Peter Thiel moves there as a child and goes to school there.
And the thing to know about South West Africa, the reason it was separate from South Africa is that it had been a German colony until the end of the First World War. Then it becomes — falls under South Africa’s mandate, partly because at that point South Africa was a British colony. When South Africa becomes a republic in the ’60s, it hangs onto South West Africa, and it becomes a South African colony. But the population, big part of the population was of German ancestry. And you could — I remember going to Windhoek in the early ’90s, and the main thoroughfare through Windhoek was called Hermann Goering Strasse, named not after the Luftwaffe chief, but after his father, who had been a governor of German South West Africa. In Swakopmund, it was even more extreme. It was notorious for many, many years, really into the ’80s and ’90s, as a hotbed of open support, continued support for the Nazis and for Hitler. The New York Times has a story from the mid-’70s of a reporter pulling up at a gas station to get his car filled with gas, and the attendant openly giving a Nazi salute and saying “Heil Hitler” to him. You could go to curio shops in Swakopmund, and they would sell Nazi-themed mugs and flags and things, and they openly celebrated Hitler’s birthday every May. Thiel went to a German school there. So, that’s the atmosphere he grows up in.
His father is an official on a uranium mine there. And the interesting thing about the uranium mine, amongst many other things, is that it supplied part of the uranium to develop the South African atomic bombs in the 1970s, which were developed in league with Israel. Now, part of the deal with Israel was that — is that South Africa would deliver yellow cake uranium to Israel. We don’t know where the yellow cake came from. It may have come from that Swakopmund-area mine, or it may have come from somewhere else in South Africa. But South Africa was shipping yellow cake to Israel at the same time, because it, too, was developing nuclear weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what Peter Thiel has said about all this — you know, I remember, as we cover conventions for decades now, Peter Thiel standing up at the first Republican convention that nominated President Trump and supporting him — and who he is.
CHRIS McGREAL: So, Peter Thiel has said of his time in Swakopmund, and particularly the school, which he describes as particularly a brutal education, that it turned him against government and into a libertarian. And I think that’s an interesting element in all of this, is that one of the things that isn’t necessarily appreciated outside of South Africa is that there’s two kinds of whites there. There’s the Afrikaners, who we’ve been talking about, but there’s a big English-speaking white population. And one of the aspects of the English-speaking population was they, on paper, said they opposed apartheid, but they gained all of its benefits. And most of them, certainly not all — there were some really heroic individuals — but most of them did very little to actually end apartheid.
But one of the products of that is you have people like Musk and Thiel, who have done very well and whose parents did very well out of the apartheid system, who deny responsibility for it. They blame it on the Afrikaners. They blame it on a government, extreme government, extreme right-wing government. But then they have to explain how it is that their own parents were so able to do so well out of apartheid, and then they put that down to individual talent, that they’re naturally gifted, and that leads them down this whole libertarian path, anti-government path, because, essentially, they have to explain how they, too, were benefits of apartheid, without taking responsibility.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about their relationship, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, they’re co-founders of PayPal together. They both, essentially, share the same kind of worldview, from what I can make out. They’re, you know, libertarians. They’re very opposed to any kind of DEI. You’ve seen a deep, deep hostility to DEI. I think Thiel buys into the same message about anti-white, the war on white people in South Africa, that South African white groups like AfriForum have been pushing in the United States. So I think, you know, philosophically, they’re very similar, and obviously they have a very close relationship.
AMY GOODMAN: And then talk about David Sacks, and talk more specifically about what you’re referring to as the “PayPal mafia.” I don’t think most people in this country understand all of these connections and this unusual situation where these, what, some of the wealthiest men in the world work together, founded PayPal and now surround the president of the United States.
CHRIS McGREAL: Yes. So, David Sacks was born in Cape Town in the ’70s. And he moves — his parents take him to Tennessee when he’s 5 years old. So he didn’t grow up in the same milieu as Musk and Thiel, but he did grow up in the white South African diaspora, for sure. He clearly shares the same views. You know, as you say, they’re part of the PayPal mafia. They all get rich from the creation of this company. They’re all at the top running it. And now Sacks has emerged as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, again, part of the same project. So, you can see this —
AMY GOODMAN: And he was a chief fundraiser for President Trump —
CHRIS McGREAL: A big one.
AMY GOODMAN: — as you said, born in Cape Town.
CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, a big. So, they’ve all emerged with, essentially, from what I can make out, the same philosophy. And, of course, that’s only been reinforced by their success. They’re convinced, obviously, of their own genius and worth, and that government, whether it’s South African government or, in this case, it seems to be, the U.S. government, is an obstacle to success.
AMY GOODMAN: And though we talked about it in Part 1, finally, Roelof Botha, making this little quartet, white men of a certain age together, and his history, also a part of the PayPal mafia?
CHRIS McGREAL: Yes, he’s part of it, and he’s been — he has not emerged as an open supporter of Trump. I’m not entirely sure what his personal views are on this. But he does have a very interesting background.
His grandfather was Pik Botha, who was the last foreign minister of apartheid South Africa. And Pik Botha’s job, essentially, was to go around the world, particularly the West, and assure them that apartheid was being amended, was being dismantled, when in fact it was in many ways — although what was known as petty apartheid, which was the routine discriminations, the segregation, was being dismantled, in fact, the political system was actually only reinforcing it, solidifying it. The government of the time cooked up a system of three parliaments that would represent different parts of the population, but — and give people who weren’t — some people who weren’t white a vote, but none of those people were Black. There was no Black parliament, partly because they were being pushed into the independent homelands. The idea was that they were no longer South African anyway.
So, Pik Botha went around trying to apologize and excuse for this system. And he was successful with, you know, conservatives. He saw a lot of Reagan and people. They loved him here, and the same with Thatcher in Britain. They saw them as the acceptable face of apartheid. And he was so deluded by the end. He was convinced. I remember meeting him during the era of the transition to democracy from apartheid. He was so convinced that he was indispensable to the system that Mandela would have to appoint him foreign minister, which he duly did not.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you say the background of all these men’s families was fleeing Mandela’s South Africa?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, they didn’t — some of them left before. I mean, it’s worth noting that Elon Musk left in 1988 at the age of 18, just as he would have become eligible to be drafted into the South African army, as all white males were at that point, which might have led him to fight the Border War that I was talking about in Angola against SWAPO, or it might have led him into the townships, which at that point were in complete ferment. And, you know, you had a huge amount of civil unrest in South Africa at that point. The country had largely become ungovernable. It was under a state of emergency, and the white troops were trying to keep some form of order in the Black townships, like Soweto. He left before he had to do any of that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, very interestingly, for people who aren’t aware, Elon Musk had a company called X.com. It was an online bank. It merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. The merged company was renamed PayPal in 2001. And you have all of these guys who you’ve just laid out — well, I think Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital — but now key players. And that brings us to Trump’s order on Friday to cut off all aid to South Africa and offer refugee status in the United States to the white South Africans who are, quote, “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” But, interestingly, many in the right-wing white lobby say they want to stay and focus on ending Black majority rule. This is Flip Buys, the chairperson of what’s called the Solidarity union.
FLIP BUYS: We might disagree with the ANC, but we love the country. As in any community, there are individuals who wish to immigrate, but the repatriation of Afrikaners as refugees is not a solution for us. We want to build a future in South Africa.
AMY GOODMAN: So, he is speaking in front of a sign that says “AfriForum.” Put this in context. And what about Afrikaners saying, “No, this is our land. We don’t want to come to the United States”?
CHRIS McGREAL: Well, AfriForum is backpedaling furiously now, because there’s been a huge backlash in South Africa from people who blame it for this situation. In fact, some people have accused it of treason. But if you look at what AfriForum was saying just a decade ago, and certainly in 2018, when people like Kallie Kriel, who was head of the AfriForum, and others were coming to the United States, they were claiming there was a white genocide. They were claiming there was a war on white people in South Africa. And they were essentially trying to characterize the post-apartheid era of one of oppression of Afrikaners, that they were the true victims of it.
And this is — they’re not alone in this. There had been a phenomenon, ever since the end of apartheid, of Afrikaners painting themselves as victim. There was a song emerged in the 1990s called “De la Rey,” and it’s very popular with Afrikaners. It’s sung in bars and rugby matches. And de la Rey was a famous general who fought to the bitter end against the British in the Boer War, the Second Boer War in the early 20th century, which the Afrikaners then lost. And this song essentially is an attempt to take Afrikaners back to a time when they were the victims, when it was their women and children dying in the British concentration camp, when they were the people who were oppressed. And it conjures up this Boer general, who — he may be losing the war, but he’s going to fight to the last, a bitter ender.
And this is how they’ve been characterizing themselves, some of them. And AfriForum is part of that kind of attempt to rewrite history and make out that they’re this minority that has long been persecuted, not just by the post-apartheid era, but by the British, and they have a long history, and apartheid was just a means of survival — all they were trying to do was to keep themselves and their culture alive.
It has had one other effect, which they hadn’t expected and has alarmed them, is that in all the orders that have been given out canceling aid and agreements, one of them affects agricultural products being imported to the United States, which have generally been duty-free as a means of helping Africa. One result is that their own products are no longer being imported duty-free into the United States. So, these white South African farmers, who have been complaining of oppression, will now actually be being hit with tariffs or regular duties, and so it’s going to cost them financially, which is one of the reasons they’re so upset by it and pretending that it was nothing to do with them.
AMY GOODMAN: Guardian reporter Chris McGreal. He was the Johannesburg correspondent for The Guardian during the last years of apartheid through 2002.
We did this interview in early February. Over the past two months, Trump has suspended aid to South Africa, expelled the South African ambassador and offered refugee status to white South Africans, claiming South Africa’s discriminating against the white minority. Trump has also just nominated Leo Brent Bozell to be U.S. ambassador in South Africa. Bozell’s son was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for his role in the January 6th insurrection, before he was pardoned by President Trump. One note on Elon Musk’s family: Maye Musk is Elon’s mother, not his grandmother.
Even MORE Fun With Science: Earthquake Weaponry
Well that didn’t take long. Less than three months into the second Trump administration and we’re already in uncharted waters. An administration in open defiance of the courts on multiple fronts. The big showdown between the ostensibly co-equal branches of the US government is underway. No, not a showdown between the executive branch and the legislative branch. The Republican controlled congress has already enthusiastically given up its authority on a range of issues including tariffs. No, this is the big showdown between the executive and judicial branches. The kind of showdown that many of Trump’s closest allies have
long advocated, including his vice president, with the goal of establishing the Unitary Executive, an executive branch that is de facto the supreme branch of the US government.
And as we’re going to see, it’s a showdown that the Trump administration has already effectively won, at least in the sense that the administration is now in open defiance of multiple court orders and appears intent on remaining that way. Including a direct Supreme Court order. Yes, the Trump administration is already openly defying the Supreme Court. But not just the Supreme Court.
But as we’re also going to see, it’s not just that the Trump administration operating a strategy of open defiance in an apparent push to assert the executive branch’s supremacy. The particular cases where the Trump administration is defying the courts are all centered around Trump’s mass deportation policies, a policy area where the Trump administration has been pondering some extremely constitutionally questionable policies. Policies that, as experts warn, could easily be turned against virtually anyone, including citizens, once unleashed. Policies that are normally intended for use exclusively during times of war or insurrection, like the Alien Enemies act or the Insurrection Act, both of which have already been invoked by the Trump administration as part of an apparent ‘war’ on immigration.
Yes, the Insurrection Act — which would allow for the deployment of military forces for domestic law enforcement — has already been invoked by President Trump, on January 20, his first day in office for this second term, under the pretense of combating the ‘invasion’ of undocumented immigrants at the US Southern Border. And while the invocation of the Insurrection Act hasn’t yet resulted in the deployment of the military, that could change very soon following a report to be delivered to Trump on April 20 on the status of the situation at the US southern border. The report is to be authored by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, two individuals who are certain to provide Trump with exactly the kind of ‘update’ he desires. In other words, the domestic deployment of the US military could be coming. Soon. And, again, as experts warn, there’s going to be nothing stopping President Trump was redirecting those military forces towards anyone else he deems to be a ‘threat’, including those who choose to protest these policies.
And then there’s Trump’s March 15 invocation of the Alien Enemies act, targeting members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang that Trump asserts is ‘invading’ the US. It was that invocation that served as the pretext for a number of deportations that have already resulted in court cases. And court rulings. And now in open defiance of those court rulings. As a result, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court in the DC just ruled that there is “probable cause” to find the administration in criminal contempt of court for violating his order to immediately pause any deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
Now, as we’re going to see, the Supreme Court ended up throwing a curve ball at Judge Boasberg with a subsequently ruling that concluded that the deported Venezuleans did not have the proper legal standing to bring their case before Judge Boasberg’s DC courts and instead would have to be brought to in courts from where they were deported (e.g. Texas). But despite that Supreme Court intervention, Judge Boasberg has concluded that the Trump administration still acted in open defiance of his explicit order before that Supreme Court ruling. That’s where things stand in just one of the cases of open defiance of the courts.
And then there’s the Supreme Court’s other ruling. A unanimous ruling ordering the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, someone who was deported to El Salvador despite legal rulings barring his deportation to that country. As is now clear, the Trump administration is just going to ignore that Supreme Court ruling too. This is where we are.
But these acts of open defiance are just part of the authoritarian witches brew currently simmering in the executive branch. Because as we’ve seen, the Trump administration has been given a lot of ideas about additional powers and schemes it can deploy. For example, recall how back in February we got reports of a proposal being floating by Erik Prince for the creation of a private army that would be deputized with immigration enforcement powers. Including powers to round up immigrants and send them to privately run “processing camps” where detainees would be run through an expedited legal process of determining whether or not they are eligible for deportation. As Prince argued, the only way Trump could possibly deport 12 million immigrants within the first two years of his term would be for a massive private expansion of immigration enforcement authority. Steve Bannon has already endorsed the plan. It came with a proposed price tag of around $25 billion.
Well, Erik Prince is back with the a new privatized immigration enforcement proposal. A proposal specifically designed to deal with the legal hurdles associated with the deportation of immigrants to El Salvadoran ‘super-jails’: turn parts of the jails in ‘US territory’, so they won’t be considered to be deported off of American soil. In addition, Prince recommended the invocation of the Alien Enemies act to help get around other legal obstacles. Now, as we can see, just because Trump invoked the Alien Enemies act doesn’t mean he can act outside the bounds of judicial review. And yet, as we are now learning with this open defiance of the courts, Trump really can operate outside the bounds of judicial review. What are the courts going to do? In other words, the invocation of the Alien Enemies act wasn’t actually need after all to get around these legal hurdles. Ignoring the courts was apparently an option the whole time.
So would the US be administering the El Salvadoran jails declared ‘US soil’? Nope. The ‘US soil’ would be leased back to El Salvador which would run the prison. But what about concerns about the treatment of these prisoners at the hands of El Salvadoran policies? Well, there’s a plan for that too: the proposal urges the Homeland Security secretary Noem to “suspend the ICE detention standards” to avoid questions about detention standards established by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Bureau of Prisons. Problem solved.
Overall, the proposal is far smaller than the $25 billion scheme to deport 12 million immigrants in two years. The plan is for Prince’s new firm, 2USV, to facilitate the handling and logistics of gathering “100,000 of the worst criminal offenders” from US prisons, holding them at a 10,000-person detention camp and flying them to El Salvador. The plan also included giving 2USV access to the government’s immigration files from law enforcement agencies to determine detainees’ immigration status.
It’s unclear how much Prince’s scheme would cost since there was no budget in the proposal viewed by journalists. But it sounds like negotiations have already begun with both the Trump administration and the government of El Salvador. This is a plan with momentum.
And, again, as experts keep warning, once such a scheme is deployed against immigrants there’s going to be very little stopping the Trump administration was expanding these operations to citizens and his political enemies. Especially if these El Salvadoran jails are considered ‘US soil’, allowing the administration to argue that no ‘extraordinary renditions’ have taken place. We really are in uncharted waters. Or at least uncharted from the perspective of a government operating from a system of checks and balances. The fascists in the Trump administration are presumably very comfortable operating in these post-constitutional waters:
“Ignoring court orders is a completely different ballgame, and a very rare one, as many legal scholars note with increasing alarm. That’s why people who say Trump should do that, like Vice President JD Vance, have to go back to an 1832 case to find a precedent.”
The US has been dealing with growing executive branch power grabs for decades. But openly defying Supreme Court orders really is uncharted territory. The kind of uncharted territory that adds a chilling context to the contempt proceedings just launched against Trump administration by Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg. This is a much broader mode of contempt:
“Criminal or civil contempt proceedings against the federal government for disobeying a court order are complex and rare, and significant penalties even rarer. Any officials convicted of criminal contempt could be fined or jailed up to six months under a statute and federal court rule cited Wednesday by Boasberg.”
It’s getting serious. That much is clearly. What kind of ‘serious’ is more of an open question. Are we seriously looking at the possibility of Trump administration officials being fined or jailed for contempt of court? Or are we seriously looking at a deepening of this emerging constitutional crisis? After all, even if judge Boasberg rules that an official should be punished it’s very unclear the Trump administration will allow that to happen. Also note the dark irony of how this case also involves a Supreme Court ruling that ultimately removed this case out of Boasberg’s jurisdiction. A Supreme Court ruling that, we now know, the Trump administration would have presumably just ignored had it not been in the administration’s favor:
And on top of the additional contempt of the Supreme Court’s own ruling, there’s also the open contempt of U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’s ruling ordering officials to facilitate Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s return. That’s two US District judges AND the Supreme Court all being openly defied. And the Trump administration is clearly just getting warmed up:
Adding to the constitutional crisis is the fact that these deportations were justified by the administration after the March 15 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, something only previously used during wartime:
And those ongoing acts of constitutional defiance by the Trump administration against the judicial branch brings us to the looming recommendations to be made to President Trump regarding one of the first declarations of his second term: the January 20th invocation of the Insurrection Act based on a declared ‘invasion’ by undocumented immigrants. On April 20, a report compiled on the status of the immigration situation at the US Southern Border will be delivered to President Trump. That report, to be authored by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, will provide Trump with the information he will use to determine whether or not “additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.” In other words, if that report declares there’s an ongoing ‘invasion’, get ready for the deployment of the military — like state national guards — on US soil for domestic law enforcement operations. And then also get ready for those military forces to be deployed against protesters. Because as experts warn, once Trump is given permission to unleash the military domestically, it will be up to him to determine when the ‘threat’ has ended and there will be little preventing him from expanding that ‘threat’ to anyone who opposes him:
“On that date, the president will receive a report from the secretary of defense and the secretary of homeland security “about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.” That act gives the president broad authority to use the military on American soil. As the Brennan Center explains, “The statute…is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, under which federal military forces are generally barred from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.””
What will Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem conclude in their April 20 report to President Trump on the need to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807? Gee, what will this pair of sycophants conclude? It’s not exactly a mystery. What is more of an open question at this point is how long will it be before the powers invoked by the Insurrection Act end up being turned against Trump’s domestic opponents. Or “the enemy from within”, as Trump as put it last year. We know he’s looking for an opportunity. Will the invocation of the Insurrection Act to deport immigrants be the opening he’s been looking for?
And as experts warn, public protests against the invocation of the Insurrection Action against immigrants is itself likely to be used as a pretext for turning the military against those protesters. The troops will only be recalled after ALL the protests have ended and ALL the targeted immigrants and “radical left lunatics” have been rounded up. It’s the logical conclusion of Trump’s years of threats. It would almost be shocking if that isn’t the plan:
Also note how the Insurrection Act language includes the power to call forth militias. Might we see the deputization of the Proud Boys and other MAGA militias? The same ones that were heavily pardoned for their actions on January 6th? It’s hard to rule out at this point:
And that Insurrection Act constitutional peril brings us to one more horrible idea now under serious consideration. Because Erik Prince has a new proposal for the Trump administration: declare parts of the El Salvadoran jails “US soil” and then pay Prince’s company to round up, process, and deport immigrants to that ‘US jail’. So will US officials be operating the jail under this plan? Nope, it will still be El Salvadoran authorities running it, which is why the proposal also includes the recommendation that Kristi Noem “suspend the ICE detention standards” to avoid questions about detention standards established by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Bureau of Prisons. Oh, and Prince also recommends the invocation of the Alien Enemies act to help get around legal hurdles. Hurdles that, as we now know, are already merely optional for an administration that is already operating outside of the boundaries of constitutional law:
“The proposal, exclusively obtained by POLITICO, says it would target “criminal illegal aliens” and would attempt to avoid legal challenges by designating part of the prison — which has drawn accusations of violence and overcrowding from human rights groups — as American territory.”
What a convenient offer: with all of the clamor over the shipping of immigrants to prisons in El Salvador and growing worries that US citizens will be next, we have Erik Prince pitching a plant to turns some of these prisons into US territory. Problem solved, right?
And as we can see, the proposal isn’t to have US authorities operating a prison in El Salvador. No, the plan is to have the land leased back to El Salvador to run the prison. And what about questions about the detention standards being adhered to by the El Salvadoran authorities? Well, there’s a plan for that too: the Homeland Security secretary is urged to “suspend the ICE detention standards” to avoid questions about detention standards. Beyond that, the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act by President Trump is suggested as another means of getting around these legal obstacle. An invocation that Trump did last month:
And while the article suggests its unclear how seriously the White House is considering Prince’s proposal, it looks pretty clear that the administration is VERY interested based on all of the actions and discussions thus far. We are literally told by Trump administration officials that the proposal is likely to be a top subject in the bilateral meetings with El Salvador at the White House next week. These plans are going to happen. Legal or not:
Finally, as the article reminds us, this is merely the latest power-grabbing proposal to the Trump administration by Prince’s new 2USV company in recent months. It was just back in February when 2USV was floating the plan for the creation of a private army that would be deputized with immigration enforcement powers. A private army that would round up immigrants and send them to privately run “processing camps”. Operating some sort of immigrant jail in El Salvador is almost like an extension of that initial proposal. Which is why we shouldn’t necessarily view these as separate proposals. There’s nothing preventing the creation of both private armies and ‘US jails’ in El Salvador:
How long before one of these judges finding the Trump administration in contempt ends up in a ‘US’ El Salvadoran jail? It’s an almost farcically grim question and yet that’s the path we’re on.
And while we don’t have a proposed budget, for this new plan, keep in mind that it’s going to be a lot easier to implement the $25 billion plan to create a private immigration army after Prince’s new 2USV company has already been deputized for this El Salvadoran rendition operation. And, in turn, a lot easier for this private domestic army to serve as Trump’s domestic ‘peacekeeping’ force after that. You know, in case the US military gets cold feet about going full fascist. Because, again, we might be in uncharted waters from the perspective of a functioning system of checks and balances. But this is very familiar territory for the fascists feverishly planning their next move.
President Trump just did another highly predictable horrible thing. It’s hard to say we should be shocked at this point, but it’s certainly cause for alarm: the police functions of Washington DC were just militarized, with 800 members of the DC National Guard now deployed in the city, with promises of more military deployments to come in other major cities.
It’s hard to be particularly surprised. He’s been hinting at something like this the whole time. And not just Trump. Recall how key Project 2025 operative Russ Vought was actively making plans as part of his extensive Project 2025 scheming for the mass domestic deployment of the military during a second Trump term. Then, on January 20, the first day of his second term, the Trump administration declared an emergency on the Southern Border, setting the stage for a future invocation of the Insurrection Act that was feared to potential come as early as April 20, when Trump was set to receive a report on the state of the border ’emergency’. That invocation hasn’t yet arrived, and yet, as we’ve seen, the National Guard has already been deployed to Los Angeles in response to protests over Trump’s immigration policies, a deployment that took place over the objection of California Government Gavin Newsom. But that deployment didn’t require the Insurrection Act. Instead, it relied on Title 10, one of the presidential authorities that allows for the president to call in the National Guard into a state to assist with law enforcement. No arrests or investigations can be performed until Title 10.
But this latest deployment of National Guard troops to DC doesn’t rely on Title 10 or the Insurrection Act. Instead, the authority comes from Title 32, which allows for the National Guard to be brought into a state under the control of the state governor, while being a federally funded action. Title 32 also confers more authority for soldiers to participate in law enforcement activity.
Now, in the case of deployments to DC, it’s President Trump who serves as the ultimate authority, so there’s no conflict with a Democratic governor. But what about other cities? It remains unclear how the Trump administration is planning on dealing with that limitation on presidential authority, although we can reasonably presume that it will be dealt with through an unilateral assumption of such powers. Or perhaps a declaration of the Insurrection Act.
And those questions over the authority President Trump would need to make good on his pledge to deploy the National Guard to cities around the US bring us to another development on this front: we’re now learning about a Pentagon planning document for setting up a permanent National Guard rapid ‘reaction force’ of 600 soldiers. The force would be divided into two 300 soldier units (one in the Eastern US and one in the West), that would be permanently ready for immediately deployment on the orders of the president. The plan apparently relies on an interpretation of Title 32 powers, which will somehow allow for the deployment of these National Guard troops in any state. The planning documents appear to acknowledge the ‘political friction’ that might arise from these deployments which would ostensibly need the cooperation of the governor of the state where they are being deployed.
This is also a good time to recall that, if President Trump determines that he wants a military force that he can deploy at his whims inside the US, the dramatic expansion of the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) might effectively serve as a kind of presidential domestic military. But let’s also recall how, back in February, Erik Prince’s new 2USV company floated a plan for the creation of a private army that would be deputized with immigration enforcement powers that would include the ability to take immigrants to privately run “processing camps”. Prince later came back with a new privatized immigration enforcement proposal: turn part of the El Salvadoran ‘super-jail’ where the Trump administration was sending people into ‘US soil’, so the deportations wouldn’t run into so many legal challenges. The ‘US territory’ would then be leased back to El Salvador, which would continue to manage the prison. Prince’s 2USV were help facilitate the handling and logistics. We definitely shouldn’t be ruling out a privatized-dimension to what Trump is planning. And then there’s the potential deputization of militias like the Proud Boys.
And those prospects for a Trumpian militarization of law enforcement brings us to another development would should have completely expected: we’re already seeing calls from MAGA influencers for sending the military into every US. Yep. That was the enthusiastic message from none other than Charlie Kirk, the influential founder of Turning Point USA. As we’ve seen, Kirk isn’t just another MAGA influencer. He’s a member of the powerful Council for National Policy (CNP), the same entity behind the January 6 Capitol insurrection and Project 2025. According to Kirk, crime is out of control in the US and only the military can solve it. We need tanks and troops on every street until crime goes away. Or as Kirk put it, “We need full military occupation of these cities until the crime desists. Period.”
But Kirk doesn’t stop with his calls for the military on the streets everywhere. He’s also calling for a dramatic expansion of the US’s prison population. “Simple fix. You steal a car, 25 years in prison,” Kirk declared. “I don’t care if you’re a teenager. I don’t care if — well, I was raised without a dad. Well, you’re going to go meet a new dad in jail. We’re done. We’re not putting up with it. We need more prisons, and we need more prisoners.” Long jail sentences for urban youths. It’s like a call to reignite the US’s decades-long disastrous ‘war on drugs’, but this time the ‘war’ will be on pretty much any crime. At least the crimes committed by young minorities.
That’s the remarkable, but not exactly shocking, new development in the US’s ongoing slide into overt fascism. The Trump administration started off setting the stage for a dramatic militarization of the MAGA movement, and here we are, with all signs pointing towards things getting much, much worse.
Well, not everything is looking worse. It turns out crime has been dropping precipitously in the US over the last few years, including in Washington DC. Yep, President Trump is about to militarize law enforcement under the pretense of fighting a crime wave that has been sweeping the US, at the same time crime has declined significantly. And guess who delivered this message about the drop in crime to the public: FBI director Kash Patel, who made that point about the dramatic drop in crime at a press conference with President Trump, delivering that fun fact literally moments after President Trump spoke about the need to call in the military to deal with all this crime. The same alleged crime way that calls for a full military occupation of US cities, according to Charlie Kirk:
“Having already deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this summer to quell protests that erupted over his immigration raids, Trump also suggested that other large cities in Democratic-led states – such as New York City and Chicago – could be next.”
It’s starting in DC. But it’s not staying in DC. President Trump wasted no time hinting at much bigger plans for the military occupation of more major US cities. And as Charlie Kirk has made clear, the MAGA talking-heads aren’t just enthusiastic about the militarization of cities. They want Trump to go much further. Or as Kirk put it, “We need full military occupation of these cities until the crime desists. Period.” The military needs to be called in until crime ends. That’s the line they are already drawing. And, again, it’s not like Kirk is some random pundit. He’s a prominent member of the CNP, the theocratic entity behind the January 6 Capitol insurrection and Project 2025. Charlie Kirk wouldn’t be saying this stuff if his fellow theocrats weren’t on board.
But as we can see, Kirk isn’t just calling for the military patrols until all crime ends. He’s also calling for a dramatic expansion of the US’s prison population, with an emphasis on very long jail sentences for criminal teens. Which sure sounds like a call for a targeted campaign for the mass incarceration of the US’s young minority population. And those that don’t support this militarization of US streets are to be labeled “anarchists”. That’s the framing already underway: the US is in the middle of national crime way that poses an existential threat and those those who don’t support calling in the military want chaos and anarchy:
Crime is so bad only the military to solve it. That’s the narrative they are going with. A narrative contradicted by none other than FBI director Kash Patel:
“Instead, Patel boasted that the country’s homicide rate had hit an all-time low, effectively unraveling the administration’s rationale for forcing the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. National Guard to take over the nation’s capital.”
An all-time low murder rate. That’s what Trump’s director of the FBI touted literally at the same press conference where President Trump pledged more military action in more cities to deal with all the crime.
But while the Trump administration’s rationale for a national militarization of law enforcement may be predicated on a fictitious narrative, we shouldn’t assume the fictitious nature of that narrative is going to serve as some sort of obstacle for the fruition of these plans. Because as the following article describes, the whole legal premise behind the plans to create a permanent rapid reaction National Guard force is based on the same kind of shaky legal theories and assertions of executive power that have been driving this administration all along:
“The documents, marked predecisional, are comprehensive and contain extensive discussion about the potential societal implications of establishing such a program. They were compiled by National Guard officials and bear time stamps as recent as late July and early August. Fiscal year 2027 is the earliest this program could be created and funded through the Pentagon’s traditional budgetary process, the documents say, leaving unclear whether the initiative could begin sooner through an alternative funding source.”
A permanent National Guard rapid ‘reaction force’, waiting to be deployed inside the US at President Trump’s discretion. That’s the plan. Two groups of 300 troops, on standby at all times. And while fast-response teams are nothing new for the National Guard, those fast-response teams are only for use within their states. These forces could be deployed anywhere in the US:
And as we can see, the legal basis for this new National Guard rapid reaction force wasn’t predicated on invoking the Insurrection Act. Instead, it relies on the shaky legal theory that the president can act broadly to protect federal property and functions. Which sounds like an extension of the push to formalize the ‘Unitary Executive Theory’ that has also been a key Project 2025 objective. An expanded interpretation of the Title 32 executive authority, which typically allows troops to be controlled by their state governor but are federally funded. On top of that, National Guard members from one state cannot operate in another state without permission. So how will President Trump deploy troops to states with Democratic governors who don’t approve of the deployment? That remains to be seen, but the ‘solution’ presumably involves a seizure of even more presidential power:
And as the article points out, President Trump already deployed the National Guard to California this year over the opposition of Governor Newsom. But in that case, it was predicated on an invocation of the Insurrection Act. Which is a reminder that the invocation of the Insurrection Act could be one of President Trump’s response to opposition from Democratic governors:
It’s hard to imagine this administration isn’t eagerly anticipating some sort of showdown with a Democratic governor over whether or not he’s allowed to ‘send in the troops’. The kind of scenarios the administration likely isn’t just anticipating but actively orchestrating to make happen. Which is why one of the biggest questions looming over these plans is how long until we inevitably learn that this permanent rapid reaction force is going to be a lot more than just 600 soldiers.
Did the government of Venezuela just capture a CIA-backed group planning a “false flag” operation designed to give the US a pretext for an invasion of the country? That’s the claim just made by Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro days ago. The Maduro government asserted the false flag plot was linked to military drills recently carried out by Trinidad and Tobago “under the coordination, financing, and control” of the US Southern Command.
And as we’re going to see, while evidence of these claims has yet to be revealed by the Venezuelan government, the circumstantial evidence pointing to exactly that kind of scenario has been building for weeks. Evidence that includes the highly provocative policies of the US and statements made directly by President Trump. After all, it was just two weeks ago that we got a report in the New York Times that the Trump administration was unleashing the CIA to executive a regime change operation against the Maduro government, predicated on the assertion that drug cartels operating out of Venezuela — Tren de Aragua and the so-called Cartel de los Soles — are not just allowed to operated by the Venezuelan government but are actively following the orders of Maduro himself. It’s a claim that effectively casts these cartels as Venezuelan terrorist state. A claim that ostensibly justifies the ongoing campaign of military strikes on alleged drug cartels in the Caribbean that has resulted in the extrajudicial deaths of dozens thus far and shows no sign of ending. But also a claim that could easily be wielded to provide further justification for the Trump administration’s militarization of domestic law enforcement.
The Maduro government went on to charge the neighboring government of Trinidad and Tobago was working with the US in this plot, alleging that the military drills carried out this week by Trinidad and Tobago took place “under the coordination, financing, and control” of the U.S. Southern Command. Time will tell if any evidence of this plot is revealed. But the fact that we got reports about the US unleashing the CIA to carrying out regime change operations against the government of Venezuela just two weeks ago is, itself, pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that suggests the Venezuelan government isn’t just making this all up. It’s at least a very plausible sounding scenario at this point. But the circumstantial evidence goes well beyond that report. There’s also the mysterious, and still unexplained, early retirement of the head of US Southern Command, Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey, less than one year into what is typically a three year appointment, which we learned about the day after that NY Times report on the new CIA regime change agenda.
At the same time, on the same day of Holsey’s surprise retirement announcement, we got reports from the relatives of Chad “Charpo” Joseph, one of the victims of an October 12 US attack on ship off the coast of Venezuela. The family, based in Trinidad and Tobago, insist Joseph had no ties to drug traffickers and that he was simply trying to return home from Venezuela. In fact, Joseph’s grandmother claims this was the second attempt he recently made to return after the first attempt resulted in the boat coming under gunfire and having to turn back. And he wasn’t the only citizen of Trinidad and Tabago killed in that attack. The relatives of Rishi Samaroo also insist that he had no ties to drug traffickers or criminals at all. He was also just trying to get home and even texted his sister about the boat trip shortly before the ill-fated vessel departed. Remarkably, not only have the US and Trinidadian governments not released the identities of any of the people killed in these attacks, but the country’s Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, has publicly announced that her nation will assist the Trump administration in its military campaign, adding that the US should “kill them all violently.” That’s part of the context of the Venezuelan claims of Trinidad and Tobago’s alleged role in the false flag attack.
And then there’s the context of the amphibious assault force of 10,000 US marines that is reportedly already assembled Puerto Rico, along with statements from President Trump like “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control.” No one is seriously hiding the regime change ambitions. It’s the evidence of Venezuelan ties to terroristic drug trafficking operations that remains hidden:
“The authorization is the latest step in the Trump administration’s intensifying pressure campaign against Venezuela. For weeks, the U.S. military has been targeting boats off the Venezuelan coast it says are transporting drugs, killing 27 people. American officials have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.”
They aren’t keeping this a secret. Regime change is the explicit goal. Except, it it sort of a secret. Officials only anonymous acknowledge to the media that regime change is the real goal. But officially, it’s not about regime change. And it’s ‘fighting drug trafficking’. At the same time, the US ended diplomatic talks with the Maduro government over President Trump’s apparent frustration with Maduro’s refusal to give up power and deny his government is involved in drug trafficking. So the CIA has apparently been unleashed to do whatever it takes to make regime change happen, but under the official cover of ‘fighting drugs’, and everyone is expected to pretend that this isn’t a regime change operation:
But it’s not just the CIA that is now tasked with planning regime change operations. The US military is also openly making preparations for strikes inside Venezuela, along with some sort of land invasion:
And then we get these additional claims from the Trump administration meant to buttress the claims of state-sponsored drug trafficking. Claims that include the assertion that the Tren de Aragua prison gang operates under the command of the Maduro government and members had been sent into the United States to commit crimes. A claim contradicted in an intelligence assessment produced by the US intelligence community back in February, prompting demands by the Trump administration to have the assessment redone and apparently led to the firing of the National Security Counsel’s acting director. So the current preparations for war are presumably now based on some sort of new corrupted intelligence assessment:
And then we get to the absurdity that this whole regime change operation is predicated on the charge that the Maduro government is directing the actions of terroristic drug cartels. And yet, beyond the corrupted intelligence assessments, we find the US making offers of $50 million for information leading to Mr. Maduro’s arrest and conviction on US drug trafficking charges. Shouldn’t the US government already have that info?
And then we get to the final part of this NY Times piece offering some words of caution from the “mixed at best” history of CIA actions in the Central and South America, which is a remarkable way of summarizing the decades of profound destruction inflicted upon Central and South American populations by the actions of the US government:
And that highly disturbing report about the CIA being “unleashed” upon Venezuela brings us to the following report that came just a day after the above NY Times piece. The kind of report that suggests the US officials tasked with carrying out this operation know this is a disaster in the making. At least, that’s conclusion that is hard to avoid when learning about the untimely, early, and completely unexplained resignation of U.S. Southern Command chief Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey, the figure in charge of military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean:
“Holsey’s unexpected departure comes as the Pentagon faces a wave of high-profile dismissals and resignations, and amid growing controversy over the build up of U.S. military presence in the southern Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela to allegedly target drug traffickers.”
An expected and unexplained early resignation less than a year into what is typically a three-year assignment. Either Holsey was unofficially fired for unexplained reasons or unofficially quit:
And given the timing of Holsey’s suprise resignation — with Holsey’s announcement coming shortly hafter he made a trip to the Eastern Carribean in an apparent failed effort to gain approval for new US radar sites — it’s hard not to suspect he resigned over what is an increasingly illegal regime change operation targeting Venezuela for highly dubious reasons:
But also note some other news that was unfolding on the same day Holsey made his surprise resignation announcement: a woman in Trinidad and Tobago told the Miami Herald that or son was on board one of the ships blown up by the US. Neither the US nor Trinidadian governments have identified the victims of these attacks. Which is points to the kind of illegal conduct that might prompt a Navy admiral to opt for an early retirement:
And as we’re going to see in that Miami Herald article, Chad “Charpo” Joseph’s mother was just one of a number of relatives who were insisting that Chad wasn’t a drug trafficker. He was just someone trying to get home:
“Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar is one of the few Caribbean leaders to openly applaud the U.S.’s warship deployment, going as far as saying her nation will help the Trump administration if asked. She also, in another statement, said that the U.S. should “kill them all violently,” referring to traffickers.”
The US should “kill them all violently.” Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar isn’t hiding her enthusiastic embrace of the Trump administration’s military build up in her nation’s backyard. And as we can see, it’s a stance that is inflaming tensions with the locals in the wake of the killing of Chad “Charpo” Joseph along with another Trinidad citizen, Samaroo. Joseph’s relatives insist he has no ties to drug traffickers. He was just trying to get home. But also note how Joseph’s grandmother recounts a previously attempt to come home weeks earlier that was thwarted when “they shoot up the boat”. It’s hard to see how this isn’t verging on terrorism for civilians simply operating boats in this area:
And it’s not just citizens of Trinidad and Tobago who have been killed in these attacks. Colombia President Gustavo Petro publicly railed against the US policy after learning that Colombian citizens may have been killed in another attack:
That was the immediate response to the strike October 12 strike. Shock and outrage from the relatives Chad Joseph. But his wasn’t the only Trinidadian family shocked and outraged after the attack. The family of Rishi Samaroo had the same shocked and outraged response:
“The US has made public no evidence to back up its claims of drug trafficking involving the vessels.”
Even a week after the attack, the US still provided no evidence of drug trafficking by these boats. Instead, we got more assertions from the families of victims of the attack that they had nothing to do with drug trafficking. That was the message from the family of Rishi Samaroo. Like the family of Chad Joseph, Samaroo’s relatives insist he was just trying to get home. In fact, he apparently texted one of his sisters about his return trip minutes before it departed:
That’s all part of the context of Admiral Holsey’s shock resignation. It’s not just the claims by these families that their dead relatives were innocent victims. It’s the complete lack of evidence provided by the US to justify these strikes. And that brings us to the latest development in this regime change agenda: The Maduro government claims to have captured a CIA-backed group carrying out a “false flag” attack with the assistance of the government of Trinidad and Tobago:
“The regime’s announcement comes amid the fast-growing buildup of U.S. forces in the Caribbean launched by President Donald Trump to combat drug cartels. The administration has signaled that it might soon authorize ground incursions into Venezuela to target the so-called Cartel de los Soles, a narco-trafficking organization the U.S. claims is led by Maduro himself.”
Was a CIA-backed group of mercenaries truly captured by the Venezuelan state? Time will tell, but that’s the claim, coming at the same time the US is declaring another cartel, the so-called Cartel de los Soles, is not only working for the Venezuelan state but is led by Maduro himself. The claims keep getting ratcheted up. Except, when it comes to the capture of a CIA group, that’s a claim that could, in theory be backed up fairly easily. But, for now, we are left with the Maduro government’s claims of disrupting a “false-flag operation” apparently emanating from neighboring Trinidad and Tobago:
But while the Maduro government has yet to show the evidence of this CIA-backed false flag operation emanating out of Trinidad and Tobago, it’s hard to dismiss the claims in the face of President Trump’s open threats of some sort of land invasion, predicated on claims of the Maduro government’s direct role in drug trafficking. Again, US regime change plans in Venezuela aren’t a secret at this point:
“We’ve almost totally stopped it by sea. Now we’ll stop it by land.” We’ll see how long it is before that land invasion happens, but it’s looking like just a matter of time of at this point. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Warned by Trump that’s it’s going to happen. And warned by history that this is going to be a catastrophe. The latest in a long line.
Authorization for CIA covert action against Venezuela is really disheartening. Anyone who’s read about their operations in situations like this know they rely on mercenaries to carry out horrific actions against impoverished people. Recall during the Reagan administration they used the Miskito tribe for this purpose against Nicaragua. They coerced the Miskito by making their normal livelihood of fishing impossible.
This will be yet another tragedy visited on South America unfortunately.
‘Tis the season of regime change. It’s like Christmas for power mongers. And as is becoming increasingly clear, President Trump is filled with anticipation. The government of Venezuela is in his sights and going to topple any day now. At least that’s the plan. The Maduro government just needs the right ‘push’.
At least that the narrative that’s emerging from a series of Trump administration sources, mostly anonymous, who have been speaking with reporters lately. A narrative that suggests the growing US military buildup off the coast of Venezuela is NOT there in anticipation of a major land invasion and full blown US occupation of Venezuela. No, according to these sources, President Trump has no interest in being bogged down in an extended conflict. He wants a much smaller and cleaner regime change scenario. In fact, these sources specifically suggest a Venezuela general might decide to save their own hides by handing Maduro over to the US, ostensibly under the pretext that Maduro is secretly leading the various Venezuelan drug trafficking organizations the Trump administration declared war on.
It’s the kind of mostly-anonymously sourced narrative that might sound familiar by now. Or should sound familiar. Including the public predictions of high level defections from the Maduro government. After all, as we saw back in April of 2019 during the first Trump administration, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton was publicly claiming that three key Venezuelan officials, including Maduro’s defense minister and head of the supreme court, had private pledged to remove Maduro as part of a US-backed regime change plot to install Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s new leader. Now, why was Bolton publicly naming high level coup plotters? Well, as we also saw, one possible explanation was that Bolton was effectively trying to force Supreme Court chief judge Maikel Moreno to stick to the plan after it was learned that Moreno backed the coup plot but didn’t back the plan to install Guaido in power. Moreno felt that he should be temporarily put in charge instead. And Moreno’s blessing was seen as critical for lending legal legitimacy to the coup, making it technically not a coup. This disruption in the coup plot was only learned days before the planned May 1 coup date and the plotters, fearing an imminent government crackdown, ended up moving the coup plot forward by a day. A hapless coup attempt followed. Weeks after that foiled 2019 coupe plot, we got reports that Trump had grown frustrated with Bolton’s optimism that the coup would work and was pissed that Bolton has boxed him into a corner on Venezuela. And yet, the administration was officially leaving “all options on the table”. Notably, Erik Prince had also been promoting the use of Latin American mercenaries to overthrow Maduro and pitching such plans to the Trump administration. So while there is precedent for the US publicly airing their coup plans, it’s not exactly a spectacular precedent.
Weeks after that failed 2019 coupe attempt, we got reports of planning by opposition forces in Colombia for “Operation Venezuela”, a plot that would start with towns on the border with Colombia and end with a march on Caracas. The group pledged their loyalty to Guaido. Their plan was to launch and armed invasion and attempt to rally Venezuelan military forces to their side at that point. And those 2019 reports of a new coup plot immediately following the initial failed coup plot brings us to another currently unfolding story: the US trial over the organizer of a 2020 coup plot is just now getting underway. In fact, an arrest warrant was just issued in recent days for the figure at the center of the plot, former US special forces soldier Jordan Goudreau. The arrest warrant was issued after Goudreau, a three-time Bronze Star recipient, failed to show up to his bond revocation hearing. Interestingly, Goudreau recently appeared on RT, called the US allegations about Maduro’s ties to drug trafficking a “fabrication of the CIA.”
By failing to show up to court, Goudreau put in jeopardy the $2 million apartment that was put up for collateral by his ex-girlfriend, Jen Gatien. It’s the latest twist in an already wild story. The kind of story that gives us insight into the kind of regime change gambits the Trump administration was invested in during Trump’s first term. It’s unclear why exactly Goudreau refused to show up to his court hearing, although Gatien claims Goudreau pledged had turned abusive and swore that he wouldn’t be going back to jail and is a flight risk. It’s quite the turn of events for the couple. Gatien already released “Men at War”, a documentary she produced about Goudreau’s failed 2020 coup plot.
And as Goudreau has made clear in his recent proclamations, he is filled with a deep sense of betrayal on the part of the US government and the fact that the charges he’s facing — arms trafficking charges — stem from an operation that he claims had the support at the highest levels of the Trump administration, and then-Vice President Mike Pence’s office specifically. As we’re going to see, Goudreau’s plot was exposed by an Associated Press report just two days before it was set to start. By that point, his co-conspirators, including Juan Guaido, had already distanced themselves from the plan. But Goudreau remained committed. Two former US special forces soldiers were ultimately arrested and jailed by Venezuelan authorities before being turned over to the US in a 2023 prisoner swap.
But Goudreau’s bitterness appears to also stem from his claims that he was recruited for the coup plot by none other than Keith Schiller. That’s a particularly interesting claim given that Schiller — Trump’s longtime security director and one of the closest advisers for Trump during the opening months of his first term — ended up leaving his position as the director of Oval Office Operations in September of 2017, ostensibly in order to make more money as a private security contractor with his company KS Global. A departure from the Trump administration that came right as Schiller was facing questions related to the ‘Russiagate’ probes. Recall how Schiller appeared in the June 15, 2013 footage in Las Vegas on the eve of the Miss USA pageant where Trump would officially announce the deal to bring the Miss Universe contest to Moscow. The footage, a series of clips from the eve of the Miss USA pageant, documents more than three minutes of interactions between Trump, a Russian oligarch, and Rob Goldstone. As we’re going to see, Schiller’s KS Global was almost immediately hired by the Republican National Committee (RNC) for vaguely described security work following his departure from the Trump administration. Was Schiller running some sort of private regime change agenda during Trump’s first term?
That’s the wild story about the second Venezuelan coup plot from Trump’s first term that’s playing out right now at the same time we’re seeing this US armada forming off of Venezuela’s coast as part of what we are told by anonymous insiders will be a regime change operation that might involve flipping some generals but won’t involve a major US occupation.:
“Sources told the Herald that the targets — which could be struck by air in a matter of days or even hours — also aim to decapitate the cartel’s hierarchy. U.S. officials believe the cartel exports around 500 tons of cocaine yearly, split between Europe and the United States.”
The strikes could start in a matter of days or even hours. That was the message these anonymous Trump administration insiders were delivering via this Miami Herald report, with one suggesting Maduro will be overthrown by a general willing to hand him over to the US. It’s the kind of messaging campaign that suggests the Trump administration wants to send the message that that won’t be a full fledged military invasion and occupation. It will be some sort of regime change stunt. Paying off a general or something like that. That’s the signal being sent here. A signal consistent with the reports about Trump unleashing the CIA and Venezuela’s alleged capture of a group of CIA-backed mercenaries and echoed by figures like Elliott Abrams, himself a veteran the US’s South and Central American death squad tactics in the 1980s. A signal being sent with this article. The kind of signal that appears to be designed to placate fears about a major land occupation:
And then we have the official denials of the story, which is to be expected. But, again, keep in what the underlying messaging being sent by these anonymous sources: that this will NOT be a full blown land invasion but instead is likely to be some sort of regime change stunt. Regime change on the cheap. That’s the message, which is ultimately a message that benefits the Trump administration:
But also note how the official language around this naval build up is that it’s intended to ‘neutralize leaders of the Cartel of the Suns and Tren de Aragua’, not overthrow the Maduro government. The fact that Maduro has been declared the leader of these drug trafficking organizations is just part of the legal gimmickry at work here. It’s not a regime change operation. It’s an anti-drug operation that just happens to target the leader of the country:
And that largely anonymous attempt at expectation-setting for the upcoming regime change actions brings us to the following report on the arrest of Jordan Goudreau, the figure who orchestrated the Trump’s administration’s 2020 coup plot, following his missed court appearance. A missed court appearance indicative of someone who feels betrayed by the Trump administration and refuses to go to jail over that betrayal:
“Judge Christopher Tuite issued an arrest warrant Friday after waiting 30 minutes for Goudreau to show up for the third day of the bond hearing. A probation officer said the ankle monitor Goudreau was supposed to wear was still located in the Tampa area, where Goudreau was living while undergoing equine-assisted therapy supervised by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.”
The timing is remarkable. The arrest warrant over the preparations for this 2020 plot to overthrow the Maduro government was issued right as the Trump administration is apparently planning for round 2 of this regime change agenda. And just days after the Maduro government claims to have captured a group of CIA-backed mercenaries plotting a false flag attack. It would be a lot easier to dismiss Jordan Goudreau’s claims of US backing in his 2020 misadventures were it not for the extensive circumstantial evidence of US interest in some sort of regime change stunt. There was even a movie made about Goudreau’s plot, although it doesn’t sound like there’s going to be a sequel since the maker of that film, Jen Gatien, pledged her apartment as collateral for Goudreau’s release from prison which is now put in jeopardy over his refusal to show up to court. It’s a mess of a story, which is sadly on theme for the Trump administration’s general approach to Venezuela:
And note how Goudreau isn’t the only American who was involved with the ‘Bay of Piglets’ debacle. Two US Special Forces buddies ended up in a Venezuelan prison (they were released in 2023). And then there’s the other very notable co-plotter: Juan Guaido, then the US’s chosen figure to lead Venezuela after the planned coup:
And it’s that reality that Goudreau really does appear to have led a US-backed regime change stunt that went horribly awry during Trump’s first term in office that makes Goudreau’s comments dismissing the allegations of Maduro’s role in drug trafficking as nonsense very difficult to dismiss. This is someone with experience in these matter. Absurd experience, perhaps, but relevant absurd experience:
“The truth of the matter is the Venezuelan opposition is as ruthless and tyrannical as the Venezuelan regime under Nicolas Maduro.”
It’s one of unspeakable realities of this whole affair. This is coup plot designed to install what will be ruthless plutocratic regime. Or rather, the return of the ruthless plutocratic form of rule that long dominated Venezuela and ultimate led to the leftist revolution that has infuriated DC for decades now. And as we can see in the following piece from January of this year, Goudreau was apparently recruited for the scheme by Keith Schiller and operating with the blessing of then-Vice President Mike Pence:
“Attorneys for Jordan Goudreau stated in court filings for the first time that the decorated combat veteran had “authority from the highest levels of the executive branch” for the amphibious raid that ended up with several combatants killed and two of his U.S. Special Forces colleagues in a Venezuelan prison.”
Authority “from the highest levels of the executive branch.” Those were the claims made by Jordan Goudreau’s lawyers in January of this year as part of his defense in the ongoing arms trafficking prosecution stemming from that foiled 2020 coup plot. A plot that followed the April 30, 2019, foiled plot that John Bolton was openly pushing. In Goudreau’s case, his plot was foiled by an AP investigation, published just two days before the planned border invasion with the tiny army in Colombia:
And note how Venezuelan security forces had already infiltrated the rag tag army. It stood no real chance of success. That’s part of the context of the blowing up of this plot by the AP just days before it happened. Whoever thwarted it was aborting a doomed operation. Or at least that’s possibly the motive of the sources of that story:
And when it comes to the statements about the AP investigation finding no evidence the Trump administration was involved with Goudreau’s plot, but he was instead recruited by Keith Schiller, Trump’s former bodyman, and met in Washington with US officials, keep in mind that Schiller was Trump’s director of security before he became president and was one of the people Trump consulted early in his first term, including Schiller recommending Trump fire FBI director James Comey and delivering the message. Schiller’s involvement is highly unlikely to have taken place without Trump’s blessing. Also keep in mind that if Schiller recruited him, he was likely playing senior role in the “Operation Gideon”:
That apparent recruitment by Schiller brings us to Goudreau’s claims that his plot was directly sanction by the Trump administration, and in particular then-Vice President Mike Pence:
And as the following 2019 CNBC piece describes, the mystery over what role Schiller was playing in the Trump administration only grew after he formally left the Trump White House to jump start his KS Global private security company:
“A company owned by Keith Schiller, President Donald Trump’s former longtime bodyguard, has received $225,000 from the Republican National Committee for security consulting since he left his job as White House director of Oval Office operations in September 2017, according to interviews and newly released campaign filings.”
As we can see, Keith Schiller was well compensated after he left the Trump administration in September of 2017 as momentum was building in the Russiagate investigations. And as we can also see, Schiller’s sudden departure from his role as White House director of Oval Office operations was soon followed by that lucrative RNC contract for vague security services that no one can really explain. On the one hand, it has the look of a kind of pay off, presumably for Schiller’s silence in the Russiagate probes (which could have easily revealed more embarrassments for Trump that go well beyond ‘Russiagate’). But on the other hand, with the RNC paying that much money for undisclosed security services at the same time Schiller was allegedly recruiting Jordan Goudreau for a regime change operation, we have to ask: was Schiller serving as some sort of informal Trump administration foreign policy agent?
We’ll likely never get an answer to these questions. Or at least not an answer we can have confidence in. But that’s all part of the reason the trial of Jordan Goudreau will be something to keep an eye on. Assuming he’s actually apprehended. The guy is currently on the FBI’s most wanted list and considered armed and dangerous. So we’ll see how this story ends, but it’s looking like’s heading towards the untimely death of Jordan Goudreau. And, presumably, the death of any interest in getting to the bottom of that insane regime change operation seemingly orchestrated by Keith Schiller in coordination with the Trump White House.