Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

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Watch this week's Friday Free-For-All: GOP Senator Accidentally Blows Iran Secret https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/gop-senator-accidentally-blows-iran?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Join us LIVE on Youtube every Monday at 10am EST for Monday Mourning, where we watch the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to.

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Kristi Noem did not do well on her Face the Nation appearance this weekend. And Katie and Aaron did not miss the opportunity to make fun of it.

From accidentally calling her own agency’s statistics a fake news lie, to contradicting her claim that ICE agents aren’t using chemical weapons against protesters, to admitting the First Amendment no longer exists when it comes to ICE, to claiming that even mentioning the public case of ICE officer and alleged murderer Jonathan Ross is the same as doxxing, she dug herself into hole after hole.

We feel bad making fun of someone so…intellectually challenged, but she’s currently in power running what this week’s guest Craig Mokhiber called “the modern day Brown Shirts,” so we’ve got no choice but to do our part in mockery.

Also in this Monday Mourning: Republicans are tripping over themselves over the stupidity of Trump’s Greenland takeover plans, Democrats continue to only call out Trump’s regime change operations for being unsuccessful, mentioning nothing about their moral implications, and Israeli mega-donors Miriam Adelson and Haim Saban accidentally get outed by their own moderator.

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Watch this week's Friday Free-For-All: GOP Senator Accidentally Blows Iran Secret https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/gop-senator-accidentally-blows-iran?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Join us LIVE on Youtube every Monday at 10am EST for Monday Mourning, where we watch the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to.
In October 2023, Craig Mokhiber resigned as director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights over the UN’s failure to act to stop the genocide in Gaza. Since then, he has been writing and speaking out about Israel’s crimes in Gaza as well as the other wars launched by the US-Israel Axis. This week, we’re focusing on Israel’s secret role in destabilizing Latin America, the Maduro government in Venezuela in particular, and in training ICE.
Useful Idiots: Can you talk about the Israeli regime’s nefarious role in Latin America?Craig Mokhiber: It’s a long story, the history of the Israeli regime supporting far-right governments and death squads in Latin America and attacking or supporting attacks on progressive governments and movements in the region. And that’s why in her first address after the U.S. attacked Venezuela, the vice president, who’s now the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, said that the attack on the country had “Zionist undertones.”People of the region are well aware that the hand of the Israeli regime in destabilizing progressive governments has been going on forever. We’re talking about Israeli weapons, Israeli equipment, Israeli surveillance technology, Israeli intelligence cooperation, spying on opposition, and so on. But what’s really sometimes missed in these conversations is that the Israeli regime has been exporting not just weapons and technology and tactics, but it also exports a kind of violent and racist ideology. Ideas that are very right-wing, very Zionist, very militarist, very anti-human rights, obviously deeply anti-Muslim and anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian and anti-left, and this general idea that tries to frame law enforcement as equivalent to military.That has been a big part of it. And that’s why, after the attack by the US on Venezuela, Israeli regime leaders were absolutely giddy celebrating the attacks on Venezuela and the abduction of the Venezuelan president.Useful Idiots: What about Israel’s role in U.S. crackdowns against its own citizens?Craig Mokhiber: This is what I refer to as the Zionist boomerang. This support for Zionism, fascism, apartheid, all of the crimes of the Israeli regime in Palestine, now it’s come back to our own cities. We’re talking about policing tactics that are entirely inconsistent with international human rights standards. You’ve got decades of the US underwriting apartheid, surveillance, repression, and genocide in Palestine. Those practices are now being brought home.We’ve seen it in the brutal persecution of student protesters. You see it in the distortion of US legislation by Israel. The official adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as an Israeli tool to try to silence dissent about Israeli abuses. You see it in the wholesale suspension of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in the U.S. on behalf of the Israeli regime.This is blowback from support for Zionism in Western Asia and you now see it in the corruption of U.S. law enforcement with this continuous structured flow of Israeli weapons and equipment and surveillance technology. A lot of these things come out of Israel’s so-called counterterrorism tactics. And whenever you hear that word counterterrorism, I think we’ve all learned, human rights runs for cover. It’s surveillance, it’s brutal crowd control techniques, racial profiling, intrusive intelligence gathering that’s now touching all of us.That is a product of this Zionist boomerang. And that alone should terrify everybody who lives in the United States.Watch and share our full, unpaywalled interview with Craig Mokhiber.
And don’t miss this week’s Friday Free-For-All: GOP Senator Accidentally Blows Iran Secret
00:00 Intro
01:42 Lindsey Graham is DEVASTATED Trump didn't bomb Iran
03:58 Treasury Sec brags about destroying Iranian economy
07:40 Sen. Mullin accidentally admits he supports regime change
08:28 Craig Mokhiber interview
19:33 Israel's nefarious role in Venezuela
26:06 The Israeli Boomerang
51:09 Stephen Miller says ICE has full immunity
58:11 An update on genocide in Gaza
1:01:38 The end of the American empire

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Click here for the full interview with Professors Gabriel Hetland and Alex Aviña: https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/full-episode-trump-shocked-after?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Watch this week's Friday Free-For-All: Surprise! Dr. Phil is in Israel's Pocket at https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/surprise-dr-phil-is-in-israels-pocket?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Join us LIVE on Youtube every Monday at 10am EST for Monday Mourning, where we watch the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to.
🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/4906030668972032

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Click here for the full interview with Professors Gabriel Hetland and Alex Aviña: https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/full-episode-trump-shocked-after?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Watch this week's Friday Free-For-All: Surprise! Dr. Phil is in Israel's Pocket https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/surprise-dr-phil-is-in-israels-pocket?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Join us LIVE on Youtube every Monday at 10am EST for Monday Mourning, where we watch the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to.
Read our guests' books:
Democracy on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn
Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside
The Trump Administration’s regime change operations in Venezuela are escalating rapidly, making it a challenge to keep up with the facts, lies, hypocrisies, kidnappings, and killings. That’s why we’re speaking with Professors Gabriel Hetland and Alex Aviña, two experts on the historical implications of US destabilization attempts in Latin America, who deep dive into why Trump is attacking Venezuela, the role oil and natural resources play in this, and the broader conflict it will bring with China and BRICS.
Useful Idiots: Despite the invasion, Alex, you’ve argued that this can be read as a sign of weakness of the United States. Can you elaborate on that?Alex Aviña: The fact that they didn’t opt for a larger military operation could be read as a recognition of the difficulty of such an operation. The military assets that the US had moved in the Caribbean are not nearly enough for an Iraq-style invasion or even what they did to Panama in December of 1989.If we think about the broader context, and thinking about the national security strategy that the Trump administration published late last year, they more or less have conceded that they can’t frontally challenge China and Asia. So one way that they are going to proceed in the future is to indirectly challenge China.China is the largest trading partner for South America, right? Historically every time that the US “comes home” and starts taking it out on Latin America, it’s usually after a moment of defeat or an admission that the global designs of the United States have met obstacles. So they have to retrench their power within Latin America.Useful Idiots: Gabriel, you have a recent article at The Intercept: “The U.S. Desperately Wants Back in the Business of Empire With Venezuela. America carried out a coup in Venezuela to plunder the country’s resources. But Latin Americans will have the last word.” So what do you mean by that, Latin Americans will have the last word?Gabriel Hetland: Trump’s attempt to dominate Latin America doesn’t always work out the way the US wants it to. Specifically, when the US attempts to push Latin Americans around, it sometimes has an immediate or more long-term backlash. And we’ve seen this repeatedly in Latin American history just this year.Trump went after Lula, the president of Brazil, because he was prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro for attempting a coup. He talked about slapping 50% tariffs on Lula, and that helped Lula’s popularity. We saw something similar in 2002 with Evo Morales in Bolivia. The U.S. ambassador called him a narco terrorist and he immediately went to number two in the polls.There’s also going to be a backlash against U.S. imperialism in other countries. In Colombia, Gustavo Petro has had huge rallies all week. Santos, the conservative former president of Colombia, who’s not an ally of Petro, actually said it was good that Petro and Trump were having a conversation. So when the president of the United States goes after leaders in Latin America, it can put conservatives in Latin America on the back foot and force them to actually defend leftists. It can also provide an electoral boost for nationalists and leftists and anti-imperialism overall. I think that it’s very, very likely that we’ll see more of that.Subscribe to watch full interview with Alex Aviño and Gabriel Hetland on the nearly-satyrical levels of racism in the Venezuelan opposition that MAGA is propping up, as well as a controversial question from Aaron.
00:00 Intro
00:47 JD Vance CAUGHT Lying About Minnesota ICE Murder
07:12 Alex Aviña and Gabriel Hetland interview
09:28 What's happening in Venezuela?
13:50 Is the US weakening?
35:09 The real MAGA agenda in Latin America

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Watch the full Monday Mourning here: https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/us-kidnaps-venezuelan-president-maduro?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Click here for our episode on Trump's Venezuela War: https://youtu.be/-R9OJP5K21A
Watch this week's Friday Free-For-All: Katie & Aaron React to Ridiculous 'Melania' Trailer https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/katie-halper-and-aaron-mate-react?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Katie Halper and Aaron Maté go over the worst moments of the Sunday morning news shows that they watch so you don’t have to.
If it's Monday Morning, it's #mondaymourning
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