it works out. But everything looks smart.

Well, I saw in the Maze account on X, he was reposting a compilation made by Grabian. I want to give credit to him. But Grabian is one of these online meme makers, I guess, and was reminding us that back in 2024, it seems so funny now that the Harris-Walz team was sending out a memo to start calling JD Vance weird. You remember that? And they wanted to basically paint Vance and everybody who's a Trump supporter as weird. And you see the compilation and you can see how forced it was and you can see obviously they had talking points.

Now, does that even happen on the right? Obviously pro-Trumpers often will say the same thing as other pro-Trumpers, but I'm not aware of anybody getting a memo to do it. Usually if somebody hears something that works, they say, "Oh, that sounds good, so I'll just say it too." But I don't think it happens on both sides. If I'm wrong about that, let me know. I've never seen it.

So as a student of persuasion as I am, it made me wonder who came up with the idea. It's obvious that the campaign was probably the one who said do this, but who came up with it? Was it a professional? Here's what I think it was. Now this would be speculation. I think the Democrats, feeling like they're not good at persuasion, hired somebody who claimed to be good at it. And the people that they hired, again just speculation, would try to use science to back what they were recommending.

And one of the things that science consistently shows is that conservatives don't like icky stuff. If something's non-standard, conservatives just go, and that is sort of built into their brains and almost something they can't change. So the idea here would be that somebody said, "Aha, if you look at the science, the thing that would turn off other voters on the Republican side is to know that they were backing something weird." And so far that actually tracks with what I would recommend about persuasion if I were on their team.

But why didn't it work? Because it definitely didn't work. And I speculate that it didn't work because it was so stunningly unnatural. It was so obviously a talking point and not something that they were feeling in any important way, and nobody cares about weirdness. It just has a free-floating idea. So I think the inauthenticity of it made it impossible to work.

But then as I've talked about at length, time goes by and they came up with the idea, or maybe Mom Donnie did, of talking about affordability. Now when anybody talks about affordability, either side, that connects. So that was probably a real good play. But here's the flaw in their plan. Trump has probably had enough time that he could address enough affordability issues that it would sort of take it off the table a little bit. And his technique of going directly at energy prices as a way to make basically everything less expensive, he has time to make that work.

So he knew right away and he tried to co-opt it that if he started talking about affordability and he started doing something about affordability, it would take their main good attack they've ever had somewhat off the table. So he has to perform and we're watching of course as he's doing things that would in fact lower energy costs if everything goes right. And there's probably enough time for that to work its way through the system again if he gets energy prices lower and affects everything. So once again, Trump has a better approach to things.

All right. So we've all been trying to figure out what is the real reason for the action in Venezuela. Is it really about drugs? Well, drugs might be part of it, but I think all the smart people at this point are saying it's not the only reason, and it might not even be the top reason, but it creates the possibility of doing what we wanted to do in Venezuela.

So I was listening yesterday to Glenn Beck. He was telling us his ideas for why we went to Venezuela and it was very persuasive because he's a good communicator and he's a smart guy. So when he described it, the real play was very convincing I have to say. But then as these things often go, I read the comments and I see a pushback on it and I thought, oh well, there might be a problem with the data. So if there's a data problem that would suggest maybe we don't have the right take on this, I'll tell you what that is.

So Glenn Beck's take is that the real value of the Venezuela action is that it would put pressure on China because there's so much oil that comes from Venezuela that ends up in China that it would be putting pressure on China. And if Iran goes at the same time, which looks like it might, I still won't bet on it, but it looks like there's a pretty good chance that Iran will fall. But we could potentially deny China some large percentage of their total energy. If they're denied their total energy, it would be hard for them to mount a war in Taiwan. It would be hard for them to dominate the world if they're struggling for oil and there's such a large percentage of what they get from Venezuela and Iran that that makes perfect sense from a military Monroe Doctrine point of view.

Now when you first hear this argument, it's very convincing, but the problem with the data is I've seen numbers all over the place about how much China is getting from Venezuela. And I don't trust the numbers. So it could be there's not as much pressure on China as we assume it is if the data is wrong.

Now the other piece of data that somebody questioned and made me go