. It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.

That was really good. But let's talk about the news.

So I assume all of you know by now that there was some action in Venezuela. So I'll give you a little background on it as people storm in and then we'll talk about what it all means.

But I should tell you that after the show, so after the podcast, Owen and Gregorian will be hosting a Spaces afterparty. Now the plan was to, which is very nice of Owen to ask people how I had influenced people, but I think the Venezuela story is going to overwhelm that and that would be okay with me. So don't feel bad if you think talking about Venezuela is more interesting.

So I woke up this morning thinking, you know, maybe it'd be good for me not to be in the headlines for once because I've been in the headlines for a few days. And I look on X and Dilbert is trending. Venezuela gets attacked and Dilbert is still trending on X. So guess I'll have to go with it.

All right. So you know I've often told you that if Trump has multiple options for doing something, he typically picks the option that looks the strongest. And he did it again. So I'm starting to think that you could predict his actions fairly accurately by just saying what's the strongest thing you could do.

Now you might say that the strongest thing would be to send in the whole military, but I would say stronger than that would be to send in special forces of some type and grab the leader of the country and take him back for legal process. To me that seems like the strongest thing, I think. So that's what happened.

So late at night Trump authorized the military, specifically some helicopters. So I guess we sent in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment called SOAR, known as the Night Stalkers. So I guess we went in strong. There had been a lot of practice, a lot of preparation, and allegedly no casualties on the American side. None.

Now I have not heard if there were casualties on the Venezuelan side, but I imagine there were. So Trump watched the whole operation from some undisclosed place and watched them. I guess we have the ability to go through metal doors and get people. So Maduro and his wife have now been arrested and brought back to America.

Now all the people who don't know anything about the Constitution are going to be arguing with other people who don't know much about the Constitution. And I'm sort of in that category. I'm no constitutional expert when it comes to what we can and cannot do militarily. But the argument is that this is not a military action. It is a legal action and that we can go anywhere to pick up a criminal or an accused criminal, an alleged criminal, and that this should be seen as a Department of Justice action that happened to be supported by a number of entities including the military.

So Pam Bondi is telling us what the charges are. So the charges against Maduro, the ex-head of Venezuela, he's being charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States. But that last one's weird. But apparently that gives enough cover that Trump can do what he did.

But if he had remained there and fought militarily and tried to defeat their army or something that would be an entirely different conversation.

Now people who are my age or in that zone, you might remember that the US did this in 1989 against the Panama leader Noriega. And we went in, but there was some violence and death there. And we grabbed Noriega. We brought him back to the United States and he was prosecuted and put in American jail.

So this has some precedent in the sense that if you can sell it as a legal system and not a military system, you can get away with it. Yeah, there's some precedent that Obama went after some individuals. So it's different to go after an individual than it is to go after a country.

All right. So apparently the operation was paired with a bunch of strikes on their military and intelligence operations, but that might have been a decoy. It was maybe just a suppressive action. The reporting, which you can't yet trust — remember, it's still fog of war, right? Fog of war. So you can't trust everything you hear about this. So be cautious. Fog of war.

But the reporting at least on Fox News is that the Venezuelans put up no resistance and that some of them just went home. Do you believe that? Do you believe that the Venezuelan military put up no resistance and they just sort of walked away? Maybe. I don't know. That one's a little hard to believe. There may have been some people who walked away.

All right. Well, so Maduro is being in a larger sense accused of being the head of a cartel called the Cartel of the Suns. So the accusation is that he was never a legitimate leader. So it also is not a true decapitation strike some would say because he was never really the leader of the country legitimately. That's more of an argumentative thing.

All right. So there was tons of coordination between the DEA and the military and the CIA and the Department of Justice. So that part's impressive.

And waiting in the wings is his probable or at least possible replacement, a woman named María Corina Machado, who has won the Nobel Peace Prize already for being sort of the opposition. But she would not really have been able to take over the country until Maduro was gone. So allegedly there will be an election. Allegedly that election will be unrigged.

The reality is that especially if Trump believes Venezuela was involved in rigging our elections, and he might, I don't know if he does, there might be a little payback happening here. The payback would be, oh well, good luck with your next election, but we're going to make sure that it goes our way. And when I say our way, I mean America gets a leader that will be on our side essentially. She will be called a puppet. And maybe that's true. Feels like it would be. Yeah.

Marco Rubio has told us that Maduro is not the legitimate leader. So that's kind of important.

All right. Now let's talk about the chessboard. This is the part I find fascinating. How long will it take before some part of social media says this is all Israel and blames Israel? I woke up this morning thinking, well, at least this won't be blamed on Israel. But it might be. It might be blamed on Israel. We'll take you through it.

So there are a number of chess pieces and one of them is that Venezuela and Iran have historically supported each other to get around sanctions and to get around other big economic problems. So Iran would be weakened by Venezuela falling. It would lose an ally. It would lose one way that they could have made some money in case their other sources got dried up.

At the same time, by coincidence, there's all these uprisings in Iran and Trump has said he would, if the protesters get shot, intervene militarily. Now that didn't sound like as much of a threat until you see what he just did in Venezuela. So if you're Iran and you're the leaders of Iran and you're wondering, huh, will Trump really do that? Would Trump actually attack us and depose our leader? Well, nobody knows. It could be a bluff, but if you just watched Trump go into Venezuela as strong as you possibly could, it would be reasonable to worry about it if you were Iran.

So could it be that Trump's timing is either lucky because it would make things go better in Iran, at least for the American side, or is it planned or just purely coincidence? I don't know. But it's definitely going to make people sort of blah blah blah. You know, he only did it for Israel. You know that's coming. So that's not my claim, by the way. So I'm not making the claim that I know why it happened or what the timing was or anything.

But I do wonder if the only reason is about the drugs because so far the Trump administration is making it all about the drugs. But I've seen pushback where people will say, no, Venezuela is not our biggest problem when it comes to drugs. So you wouldn't do all this if it's only about the drugs. I don't know.

He might. Remember I always say he takes the strongest path. So the strongest path would be this. So that would predict that maybe it was about the drugs and this is just the strongest path. Don't know.

Then there's the Cuba connection because Cuba apparently relies on Venezuela for some of their energy slash economic survival. I'm a little bit skeptical that Cuba will fall because of this, but things will get a lot tougher, but maybe. So my guess is it's not about Cuba, but it might be just one of the side benefits that could happen if you believe that Cuba's government falling is a benefit. It would create a lot of pressure for the United States.

However, also on the chessboard and this is not my own great idea, it could strengthen Trump's support among Latino voters. So especially the older ones, they might say, finally somebody did something about Venezuela and that will weaken Cuba and that's what we've been waiting for. But I don't think you would do it just for votes. Again, it could be that that would just be a side benefit.

So what's so hard about figuring this out is that all these countries are connected and it's not entirely obvious if doing something with one country is intentionally about the other countries or it just works out that way. I don't know.

And then there's the China connection. So China gets energy from, let's see, Iran supplies 10 to 15 percent of China's oil and Venezuela supplied or did about 5 percent of China's oil. Now if you added them together at the high side, would that take China's oil supply down by 15, 20 percent? I don't know. And is that a goal or could China easily replace that much oil? Maybe they just get more of it from Russia or something. So I don't know.

But next on the chessboard is Mexico. So the head of Mexico who is also credibly being accused of being in the pocket of the cartels is of course rejecting this military action but not very hard. So there's an objection to it, but they're not going crazy about it.

And it could be that the leader of Mexico is wondering if she's next because it does seem to me that if the US put together a set of indictments, I guess that's what it would be against Maduro, don't you think they're also looking at misbehaving by Sheinbaum, the head of Mexico? Don't you think that some part of the US machinery already has evidence that she's part of the cartel?

So she's probably looking at this and saying, wait, are you saying that they're going to go nab the head of a country because they have a good case against that person? Because that would be her. So whether or not we plan to do that, it would put a lot of pressure on her to do whatever we wanted. So we might say, well, you know, maybe you're next. How about you give us a good trade deal? Or maybe you're next. Maybe you pay for the wall. Whatever it is.

So that's part of the chessboard. And then Colombia, which has so far not been part of the military action, is probably a bigger source of drugs than Venezuela. So Colombia would also be on the chessboard, would also be wondering if they're next. And I think they also have a leader who might be implicated as part of a cartel, right? I think so. Yeah, it puts Colombia on notice.

It basically puts all these countries on notice. So this action has been compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall in that it could have this ripple effect that's pro-democracy or at the very least pro-American. Isn't it fun? I hate to say how much fun it is trying to figure out what's going on but there's a lot of moving parts.

Then let's talk about Taiwan also on the chessboard. If you were China and you watched what Trump is doing right now, would you get going and attack Taiwan or would you say, holy, we'd better wait at least three years until Trump's gone and then figure out what we can do? I feel like if China is smart, and they are, that they say, well, step back. Step back. This would not be the time to piss off Trump because he always acts in the strongest path. So that they wouldn't be able to count on him standing down. I don't know if he would attack China if Taiwan was attacked, but they would have to be worried about it.

All right. Apparently the Venezuelan defense chief put out a quote that said, quote, we will now surrender. We will now surrender. Your leader is gone. You don't need to surrender. Did we ask you to surrender? I don't remember anybody asking, but he has to say something.

All right. So you might wonder in the broader context what is the economic impact of this? So I went to Grok and asked what the economic impact on Venezuela is in this situation. So apparently lots of energy implications. It would allow other countries to be less able to evade sanctions because Venezuela would help other countries evade sanctions if they didn't like America.

And let's see, the geopolitical importance. This is from Grok so I just asked Grok, you know, give me the context. Venezuela has been a key part of an anti-American coalition so that would include Russia and China. But if you take out Venezuela it doesn't take out the whole coalition but it weakens it.

We didn't want Iran to have some kind of a friendly presence this close to our country, and apparently they did because they were friendly with Venezuela. So if we remove the option for Iran to have some kind of a fuller anti-American presence in our hemisphere, that seems like a good idea.

Then there's a military importance. Did you know that Iran transferred drone-making technology to Venezuela and they've been training the Venezuelans since 2006? So that's not good. So that would weaken one way that Iran could get at us.

Yes, my voice does seem raspy. You're just noticing? Good observation. Yes, my voice is raspy. Yeah, you may not have heard the news.

All right. So Jonathan Turley is reminding us that constitutionally this should be fine, but people are going to argue that it isn't.

All right. There will be lots more developing, but did I hit the high points, right? So I was trying to give you the quick chessboard view of it because it's going to be the only news today. The news is just going to be about that.

However, you come here for more than just news about one story. So with your permission, because I don't have much to add to that besides what I said, I'm going to talk about some other fun news stories. I know, I know this story is so interesting, the Venezuela one, that it's hard to imagine if there's anything else happening. But you want to spend a full hour here with me, right? So we'll do some other stories after I take a sip.

Pause for a sip of whatever you got. Sip it if you got it.

All right. So some other stuff. I'm going to be at the risk of boring myself, but it'll give us something to hang out and talk about.

Okay. Anyway, Catherine Herridge, who many of you know as a notable important journalist, she's talking about why X became the center of real journalism and that the mainstream media is no longer the dominant source of news basically. So here's her take on it which I liked. That reach, meaning who sees what, the reach is no longer about cable slots or front pages. It's about access to decision makers and business leaders and highly engaged readers in the same place at the same time. And that's why independent journalism didn't just survive the collapse of trusted corporate media. It moved to X and took the audience with it.

Now she says there's no question that X is the platform with the greatest reach. Now I agree with all that and here's the part I didn't fully understand. That independent media could never have grown unless they also had access to important people and that they also had a way to publish to everybody who wanted to see them. So X allowed them to have a way to get to everybody. So that was automatically going to be better than a media source you have to watch a commercial.

I would add to this that on X it's very easy to not see any commercials. So if you give me a choice of looking at the news with commercials or looking at the news without commercials that's not a contest, right? So X has an automatic business model advantage. But the part about access to decision makers, that is entirely because the podcasters did a good job and they did a good job of networking and especially on X they would get boosted.

So do you think that Benny Johnson would have had such a big impact or Megyn Kelly or the more controversial Tucker Carlson? Do you think any of that would have happened without X? I don't think so. And then once you give them credibility because you're doing good work, then suddenly you can ask President Trump for an interview and he says yes. Or you could ask lower level admin people and they'll say yes because they're not going to be stabbed in the back like the mainstream media would. And they have huge audiences now bigger than the networks.

So yeah, this is a good observation, Catherine Herridge. And it doesn't look like there's any way that's going to reverse, right? And again, like so many stories, you have to add to it. It's only possible because of Elon Musk. Think about how many stories you have to say that about now. All the DOGE stuff, all the fraud stuff. Only possible because Elon exists and was doing the right thing.

Well, here's a story from The College Fix that more than half of UC Berkeley disability accommodations are based on emotional reasons. Emotional reasons. Half. Right. So there are lots of legitimate reasons for people with disabilities to want accommodations. So if you want a ramp, that's a good reason. If you need a wheelchair, access. Yeah, those are perfectly acceptable and desired accommodations.

But apparently people are coming in with psychological and emotional disabilities. One student famously got approval to bring his mother to class. And it's the most disabled people registered at UC Berkeley since they started collecting data.

Now the reason I bring this up is not this particular story. The reason I bring it up is that looking for scams and frauds is now the new national sport. So at least in my bubble, every day I wake up there's somebody searching for a new scam or uncovering a fraud. I'm really happy about that because that's the only way any of this gets fixed. The only way it gets fixed is if people start thinking it's important to find fraud.

Even I didn't think it was important a few years ago. If you'd asked me a few years ago I would have said something like Governor Mike DeWine said that it was just the cost of doing business. You know, I would have looked at it like a 7-Eleven store and I said yeah of course there's theft. Yeah, 7-Eleven store. Of course there's theft. But you know it's not that big a deal.

But today what we know is that it's the biggest deal. It's an existential threat to the entire civilization. And if we don't pay attention to it, that's on us.

Do you know why we're paying attention to it? I already gave you a hint. His name is Elon Musk who boosted recent reports. Well he's boosting a lot of reports from independent media about how bad things are. Would we be in this situation where people are really paying attention to fraud if Elon Musk did not do that or did not exist? No. I think he gets full credit for that. Again, it's really amazing.

And then I'm having a problem reading the news lately because there are so many stories that look like what I've already seen but might not be. So can you tell me is this a news story or did we already know that according to NewsNation that the assisted living facilities — oh, Gateway Pundit is writing about this — that the assisted living facilities are often just somebody's house and there's no service there at all. Did we already know that? Because it feels like a repeat. But on the other hand maybe it's just a new place and a new set of data.

But in my bubble every time I wake up somebody, Republican usually, is uncovering something fraudulent and that's a good thing.

Next, you may or may not be following the story of ActBlue. If you went onto the street and randomly stopped people and said tell me what you know about ActBlue, how many people could answer that question? Now your audience is very plugged in. So probably half, three quarters of you would know ActBlue, but if you don't, they are a Democrat organization that raises money for a variety of Democrat candidates.

But what they do that's special is that they take small donations. I know. I'll get to it. I'll get to it. They allegedly take only small donations from American sources and then they distribute it to candidates. The reality, and they're being investigated for this — I believe Trump has authorized the investigation — the reality might be, allegedly, that they're a fraudulent organization from top to bottom.

And what they really do is they take large donations, maybe from Democrat billionaires, maybe from overseas, and then they pretend with fancy bookkeeping that it came from individuals. Now that would be really illegal, but that's the accusation.

So what if, and again this falls into that category of every day I wake up and there's new alleged fraud of massive scales. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars here. And I do believe that it's been demonstrated, correct me if I'm wrong, there's plenty of evidence that one person's address has been used multiple times. That would be illegal because it means it's not real. Or that people who are not actively following politics have been donating allegedly small dollar amounts for years but they don't even know about it. If you go to their house and say did you give money to ActBlue they would say what's that? No they didn't give any money.

So even though it's an allegation, yeah, it's called smurfing. I feel there's a 100 percent chance that they're a massive criminal organization. I also wonder if it's big enough that Democrats could not win anything without them. What would the midterms look like without ActBlue being able to put big money into people's pockets? Different, right? Doesn't mean that it would go a different direction, but it wouldn't be the same.

So that's happening. Also good news that's being investigated.

There's an article in Hot Air by David Strom that guesses something I've been saying. I didn't know if anybody else would have the same observation but he did. It goes like this that the psychology — I'm going to paraphrase. This is not what he said exactly — but the American psychology is that things were pretty good and our systems mostly worked and that we were not sitting inside a gigantic fraud.

Well now that we know about the NGOs and we know about all the Somalian fraud, our brains are primed in a way they've never been before to imagine mass conspiracies being true because the scope of how big the fraud is with the fake daycares and everything else. The scope of that is so big that once you learn that was a real thing and that it's been going on for years and years and it's right under people's noses and people can see all the signs. You could see the smoking gun and it didn't matter. You know there could be news reports and it didn't matter. But now it matters.

And what does that do? This is Strom's observation and mine as well. What does that new psychology do to how we think about election integrity? It changes it.

And I think we need a new name for this. A name for the phenomenon where there's a whole bunch of bad things happening individually but when you catch them individually they don't seem like a big enough deal to change the w