947 – Transcript
Program Disclaimer
The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.
Clip (A History of Violence)
So how’s your dad?
I don’t know. A little weird.
Well, after what he went through, I mean, actually killing someone? I mean, that’s enough to freak anybody out.
Yeah, I guess.
This old man’s some kind of tough guy, huh? What’s he think of his wimp son? Think he’d take this shit? He think he’d make jokes? Go on, bitch. Say something funny. Bobby, leave him alone. Shut up, Skank. Uh-oh. He’s getting mad. Jack, let’s just get out of here, okay?
Jackie’s an asshole. You know that. He doesn’t mean shit. Let’s just go. Let’s just get out of here, okay? Yeah, Puss. Run away.
Goddamn, I bet your dad would be real ashamed by you. Go ahead, bitch. Say something funny. Make me laugh. Okay, you motherfucker.
Get over here, you son of a bitch! Come here. Are you laughing? Are you laughing now, you mother— You goddamn piece of shit! What the hell were you thinking? I wasn’t thinking. Obviously not.
Bobby’s been riding me all year, Dad. He’s a jerk.
He’s a jerk? Yeah, he’s a jerk.
That’s no excuse. You stand up to him. You don’t put him in the hospital.
Oh, big deal. It’s the best thing anyone could have done to him.
Host (Bob Metz)
Welcome, everyone. It is Wednesday, January 14th, 2026. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that’s not right-wing. It’s just right.
It’s the best thing anybody could have done to him. Our opener from the movie A History of Violence speaks to a principle that we’ll hear raised later in our show today, as we consider the nature of force and violence itself.
In the wake of the ice shooting and America’s taking Venezuela’s Maduro into custody, I’d originally hoped to incorporate both events into our broader discussion today, but the controversy over each has reached a point where it’s better just to focus on one at a time, and today we’ve picked the Venezuelan situation. I have a feeling that the ice shooting has yet to explode into its predictable leftist violence responses, which will, of course, be a significant element of any future discussion on that issue.
And just for the record, from everything I’ve seen so far, I think the ice agent’s shooting of the driver in the car was completely justified, which, in any discussion of the use of force is a very critical distinction, as contrasted against whether or not it was right or wrong. And the same kind of discernment, I think, applies to the Maduro situation.
At the root of every civilization or nation sits the mechanism and moral justification for the use of force.
Force can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, such as when I tell you that I find myself forced to raise this issue for discussion today, and I shall submit to that force right after our reminder that you can write us feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform and visit us at justrightmedia.org, where you can access all of our social media links, archived broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show.
Because, as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.
Life, liberty, property. Having a right to any of those things means that you have the right to use physical force in the defense of your or anyone else’s life, liberty, and property. These rights do not exist in any jurisdiction where the ownership, that’s property, of weapons is banned, banned by a government that has to use force to prevent such ownership. Or more to the point, the right exists, but the freedom to act on that right does not.
And the failure to make this kind of distinction, I think, seems to be at the heart of some of the debates among those on the right. As Scottish philosopher John McMurray always stressed, while rights are inalienable, freedom is conditional.
But in a casual conversation, we often use the words freedom and rights interchangeably. And in more critical conversations, though, this can be the cause of a lot of unnecessary arguments and disagreements. And as usual, these and other disagreements over the Venezuela-Maduro situation are being aired loudly by those on the right, although not necessarily in the completely polarized tone of the other infighting on the right we’ve seen lately.
So before warning, over the course of today’s show, we will be hearing very different accounts and assessments about how to interpret U.S. President Donald Trump’s capture of Maduro from the likes of Glenn Beck, who calls Trump’s action the most America-first policy he’s ever seen, to the judgment of lawyer Robert Barnes, who sees Trump’s action as an unconstitutional, illegal act. But even within each of their assessments, things are not exactly as black and white as you might expect.
So if you end up feeling a bit confused about what is actually right in this situation, that’s a perfectly natural reaction. Because while certain principles remain immutable, the facts against which they are applied are not always so clear. Especially when various reports on those facts are so often completely contradictory.
So on that count, and before listening to the various arguments pro and con regarding Trump’s actions against Maduro, I thought it appropriate to establish a brief history and context of the circumstances in Venezuela. Taking them into account might play a significant role in how to judge or assess whether Trump’s actions were ultimately good or bad in terms of America’s own security and its role in establishing a more peaceful world.
Given his long-time journalistic credentials on the broader history of Venezuela and Latin America, Alex Newman appeared on the January 10th podcast of The Fly Over Conservatives, during which he connected a lot of dots that are rarely mentioned in the broader controversy.
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – David Whited)
You’ve been talking about things that are happening now before everybody else was with Maduro.
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – Stacey Whited)
Yeah, with Venezuela. Can you talk about that? So you actually had what is happening in Venezuela under Maduro is just the tip of the iceberg. It is a key part of the color revolution unfolding in the U.S. right now. That came out on December 5th after you did an interview with USA Watchdog. But obviously huge news over the weekend, the arrest of Maduro bringing him back, or bringing him to the United States. Talk about that.
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – David Whited)
How surprised were you when you saw that headline and you saw the action the U.S. forces had taken and such a strategic move on Saturday?
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – Alex Newman)
Well, I knew the Trump administration was going to do something. And I think a lot of the people in the MAGA movement are a little bit perplexed by this. They don’t quite understand it. We voted to end the constant foreign wars and we don’t want any more nation building.
I completely get it, trust me. After the last disasters of the last few decades, it’s very easy to understand why people have had enough with the constant foreign interventionism. And when I first got into journalism, one of my first really major investigative pieces was on the communist takeover of Latin America.
We all know about Cuba, but very few people understood that the whole region was being taken over by a subversive network of communists that unfortunately was being backed not just by the Communist Chinese, not just by the Kremlin, but also by the deep state right here in the United States.
That really got turbocharged under Barack Obama and later under Joe Biden. And so Maduro is literally the tip of the iceberg for this operation. He’s not even the most important player.
He’s an important player because he was providing money for this network, but that is only one small piece of the puzzle. So I’ll try to summarize it really, really quickly, and then if you guys want to go into some details on anything in particular, happy to do it.
But back in 1990, we had kind of the supposed end of the Cold War. You know, communism was allegedly collapsing and the free world won, and woohoo.
And the communists were not happy about it. So Fidel Castro, a mass murderer who enslaved Cuba, by the way, with the help of our State Department, with the help of the New York Slimes, with the help of the Soviet Union, he was a freedom fighter and the George Washington of Latin America is what the New York Slimes was painting him as. He decided to get together with his buddy, Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, who at the time was a radical left-wing community organizer in Brazil.
Today, he is the illegitimate president of Brazil. That should tell you something. They got together with the FARC, in Spanish, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. It’s a terrorist group. They have been murdering civilians and trafficking cocaine for 50 years, trying to take over Colombia.
And then several other key players, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, mass murdering communists and some others, they got together in Sao Paulo, where I lived for four years. I was just in Brazil a couple of months ago. And they created a new movement called the Sao Paulo Forum in English. In Portuguese, the Forum de Sao Paulo, in Spanish, the Foro de Sao Paulo.
And the goal of this movement, they actually put it down on paper in 1997, was to reclaim in Latin America what had been lost in Eastern Europe, namely, communist slavery, communist totalitarianism.
So with the backing of the Russians, with the backing of the communist Chinese, with the backing of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller crowd, and the Obamas here in the United States, they were steadily taking over country after country after country.
And here’s what makes this network different than just like a normal political movement. A normal political movement, a legal, legitimate political movement, tries to convince voters about the superiority of their values, their belief system, their politics.
This movement was using the proceeds from criminal activities, cocaine trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, stealing money. And by the way, Lula got caught doing this, right? This should have been front page news all over the world. The guy was involved in stealing money from Petrobras, by the way, Soros was a big investor, and pumping it into expanding the communist revolution throughout Latin America.
He was arrested, he was tried, he was convicted, he was put in jail, and then he was busted out of prison by his buddy Alessandro de Moraes, the head of the Brazilian kangaroo Supreme Court. So all these guys come together, and little by little, they’re taking over Latin American country after Latin American country.
And the big cash cow for all of this was, first Hugo Chavez, right? They stole all the oil assets from the people who owned them, the investors, the companies, the people, and they put that money at the service of the revolution, and they were importing enormous amounts of drugs into the United States.
And so Trump has talked about the drug element and the oil element. He hasn’t been as public as I think he should be in explaining how this money was not just enriching these criminals in Venezuela, it was being used to enslave Latin America.
And here’s the kicker, here’s why it’s so important for Americans to understand this. These people were being aided and abetted by the Council on Foreign Relations, which I call the deep state headquarters in the United States.
In fact, their head of Latin American division, Julia Sweig, for a long time. Castro apologist, huge proponent of this, they call it the pink tide, I call it the red tsunami. You had Barack Obama openly aiding and abetting the members of this subversive network as they took over countries.
And by the way, this continues to this day. I had Congresswoman Maria Salazar, she represents my district in Miami where I’m from, on my show just a couple of weeks ago saying, even under the Trump administration, there are Biden holdovers, including the U.S. ambassador in Guatemala, aiding and abetting the very same socialists that we’re talking about here. So we have a massive problem and it directly affects the United States.
And I’ll give you a few clues about this and we can get into more depth. You remember when the Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi posted on her Twitter account a picture of herself in Venezuela standing next to Nicolás Maduro, the mass murdering communist dictator also the head of the Cartel de los Soles, and said, oh, it’s so great to be in a country where we have intelligent political discourse. The subversive movements that we’re seeing in the United States are directly tied, not just to Venezuela because Venezuela is puppet of Cuba, which is a puppet of the Chi-Coms and the Russians, international communism, which are, of course, puppets of the deep state.
So it’s deep, it’s like the Russian doll, you know, you take off one and you got another. But Maduro is a key linchpin in this. Now, whether what Trump did was the right approach, I don’t know, I’m glad I’m not involved in having to make those decisions, but there’s so much more to Maduro than what we’re being told in the fake media.
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – David Whited)
Well, it was clean and surgical, you know, that’s for sure. And, you know, it definitely puts a lot of teeth behind his bark with other countries. I know there’s a lot of Colombia and, you know, there’s, you know, a lot of other, you know, the expression, you know, fiddle around and find out has become quite popular. And everybody that’s playing the fiddle right now is like, hey, maybe we should probably, you know, pay attention to this.
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – Alex Newman)
Latin America was ripe for this, but very much like in the United States, they usually don’t come openly announcing what they’re doing. That’s right. And these people do not care about criminal laws. They will murder you, they will imprison you, they will torture you, they will steal money from the state-run oil company to finance fraudulent elections, like we saw in Chile. So these are people who are not guided or even restrained by basic moral principles or moral decency. And they’re liars.
These communists disguise themselves as liberators who are going to redistribute power and wealth to the people when really they’re going to redistribute power to themselves.
The president of Colombia was on American soil just a few months ago with a bullhorn on the streets of New York telling American soldiers not to obey their commander-in-chief, not to obey President Trump. He said, you need to stand with humanity. Now, you know, credit is due to the Trump administration. They kicked his butt out of the country. They said, get back to Colombia.
We’re revoking your visa. That should have been front-page news across this entire country. Why is a foreign head of state on our soil encouraging sedition among our military?
It’s because they’re preparing for something. Maduro was involved, Gustavo Petro is involved, the dictatorship in Cuba is involved, and Lula in Brazil are absolutely involved. And I think Trump’s people have a decent understanding of this. It’s hard though, because the entire federal government has been filled with agents at least sympathetic, if not openly supportive of this Latin American Communist network for decades.
There are agents of Cuba, there are agents of Venezuela at the policy-making level in the State Department, in the National Security Council, and other places. And they are saying to the president and the president’s top advisers, oh no, it’s no big deal. So we have a huge problem on our hands here, and I regard it as a very serious threat to our national security.
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – David Whited)
Is Venezuela sort of a hub of the wheel for election interference globally, maybe within the U.S. as well?
Clip (The Fly Over Conservatives podcast – Alex Newman)
There’s no question about it. In fact, Venezuela needs to be best understood as a colony of the Cuban dictatorship. And the Cubans figured out long ago that armed revolution was probably not going to be a successful vehicle for enslaving populations anymore. So going back to the founding of this forum, they said, hey, we’ll stand candidates up in elections. And if we can’t take power through revolution, maybe we’ll succeed this way.
And of course, you can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. So if you want to win consistently in elections for ideas that have ended up in the murder of over 100 million people just in the last 100 years, not even including the ones killed in wars and starvation, you have to have a mechanism to make sure you can keep winning the elections. And of course, voter fraud is the mechanism they chose.
And so if you look back even decades ago under Hugo Chavez’s leadership, they were working on creating voting systems through machines, through software that would be hackable that they could use to change electoral results. But if I had to guess why he decided to do something this bold, this unprecedented, my guess is the voting fraud nexus probably played a big part in that.
There’s a lot of people now, even some in the MAGA movement who are suggesting that Trump did this to steal their oil. And there are others, I’ve seen others that Trump is a puppet of the Zionists and that’s why he did it.
They didn’t have a Rothschild bank. I don’t take that stuff all that seriously. And here’s one of the reasons why I’m on the oil issue in particular. We’ve got oil coming out of our ears in this country. We probably have more oil than any other country in the world. And now Trump has made clear that we are able to access it. So we don’t need Venezuelan oil to power our economy. We could build nuclear power plants. So I don’t think oil is the real reason. The reason I think oil is so important to this equation though is because the oil money that the Venezuelan government was stealing from the Venezuelan people, and of course from American investors and global investors who invested in American oil companies to fund revolutions throughout Latin America and also to fund revolution inside the United States of America.
Host (Bob Metz)
And of course those revolutions are accompanied by a great deal of violence and outright violations of anything to do with the protection of life, liberty or property. The contradiction of expecting a no more wars as policy to be achieved without the use of force or even an occasional war displays a sense of naivety that I think is more motivated by wishful thinking than by objective reality. It’s like asking the police to maintain law and order against armed criminals without being armed themselves.
The Canadian and American law dictionaries that I have in my possession actually define force the following way. Quote, Power in motion or action, strength directed to an end, used as synonymous with violence in the context of assault. A person may use as much force as is reasonable in the circumstance in the prevention of crime or in the affecting or assisting the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large, end quote.
It is an error to say, as so many on the right often do, that government is force. The use of force actually exists in the absence of government. The reality is that when we speak of government, force is what is governed.
And on this count, you often hear it said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions but so too can the road to heaven be paved with good intentions. Which tends to make motivations less relevant than the principles and actions on which one operates.
Rational government requires rational people, not just in government but throughout the given culture that is being governed. Something I’ll address further in the final quarter of today’s presentation.
The objective governable use of force is a concept of the right. Subjective, ungovernable use of force is a concept of the left. For the left to say that might is right is essentially its operative principle. But for the right, the same sentiment would be best expressed as saying, right is might.
Just ask yourself, why of all the nations in the world did the United States of America ascend to its position of superior might? Because more than any other country, its foundational and operative principles were already right.
Now, to kick off the actual Maduro controversy, here is Stephen Crowder from his own January 7th podcast reflecting on who are the winners and losers as a consequence of Trump’s actions.
Clip (Louder with Crowder podcast – Stephen Crowder)
Donald Trump is in, President Trump is in a unique position right now after Venezuela, after Iran. Don’t make the threat unless you’re going to follow through. It’s you surrender or you will be erased and annihilated. It only works if you follow through. So when you see politicians will say, I will fight to the end and you know they won’t over my dead body. Don’t say it unless you’re willing to fight to the end.
Venezuela. Okay. So this happened over the break, but it’s still developing. I want to give you a summary on the outset.
Obviously, Maduro was captured. Okay. Very effectively. And there are winners and losers. Let me break this down for you. Maduro obviously just appeared in New York to face charges.
Kind of a nice move, by the way, from the United States. As far as I’m concerned, you guys can comment below. You put a hit out on a president, an American president, a member of the cabinet sitting senator. You should be executed. And Maduro tried to put a hit out on Rubio. I mean, that’s enough. That’s enough to me, but there’s a whole lot more than that.
So he appeared in court in New York, which I don’t really like. I would prefer he’d be dead to face these charges related to narcoterrorism.
Announcer:
It’s a long walk to face the wrath of American justice for Nicholas Maduro and his wife Celia. Dressed in matching tan prison uniforms, they’re led in handcuffs from a chopper, headed to their first court appearance, surrounded by heavily armed men.
Maduro entered the court, and was looking at people in the gallery a happy new year. But then he turned defiant, telling the judge that he has been kidnapped. He has been captured at his home in Caracas, Venezuela. And that he is the elected leader of Venezuela and has the right to run his country as he sees fit.
Stephen Crowder:
We’re using that term a little loosely these days, elected leader. Yeah. It turns out it’s pretty easy to be elected if you just lock people out from voting.
Crowder – co host:
That’s true. And by the way, he had the right to run his country however he chose to, right up until we came and took him. Sorry, not sorry.
Stephen Crowder:
And there was nothing he could do about it. Just think about that for a second. It just lets people know how bad-ass the United States military. When we’re unencumbered by rules of engagement that make our mission murky and our presence absurd, this is the kind of stuff we can do.
You saw Iran, you saw this, you may be against it. That’s a conversation to have. But when people just throw out military industrial complex, there’s a lot of red tape. I understand that bureaucracy needs to be cleaned up. There’s also something to be said where the number one superpower of the world, the United States, the gap between us and number two is so wide that the ground can’t be made up.
That’s what gives us the ability to negotiate from a place of strength.
So let me give you the winners. Number one, United States of America. I’m not saying that it’s without consequence, but overall we are the biggest beneficiary of this. So the Monroe Doctrine, many of you are familiar with this, it’s been making the rounds again. This is a major step towards reestablishing that. And that basically means that the western hemisphere is our top priority.
We’re geographically protected by oceans, but we don’t let anyone in our own backyard start screwing around. Now, the second winner is conceptually the concept of deterrence, credibility, massive. This is big. This is big because President Trump proved once again that he will make good on his threats.
Whether you agree with it or not, you need to understand that it’s an important facet taken into consideration from our enemies when making decisions.
President Trump:
He has offered everything. He’s offered everything. You’re right. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States. Thank you everybody.
News Announcer:
President Trump says the U.S. carried out large-scale strikes on Venezuela overnight. He says its president, Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, have been captured and flown out of the country.
Stephen Crowder:
Well, just like his threats on Iran, there’s something to be said for meaning what you say. If you count to three, there better be consequences. Anyone out there have children? You know that, right? If you count to three and don’t do it, you’ve now lost it.
The other winners here would be the people of Venezuela. Again, I’m actually happy that we’re back to killing communists. So let’s compare the Venezuelan reaction, the people who’ve lived under this kind of rule, or similar countries, places like Cuba, versus the American leftists and ask yourself, how are they so out of touch?
Unknown Speakers:
Celebrate for all these 24 years. I think it’s something we not only have to celebrate, but thank our President Trump, because if it wasn’t for him, nothing would be possible. But yeah, I’m super grateful.
Hands up, Venezuela! Hands up, Venezuela!
Big President Maduro!
Four bones aren’t kicking in yet.
What in God’s name was that thing?
If you are a Venezuelan refugee living in the United States of America, understand something. He is saying you’re a rapist drug dealer that will get sent to fucking seek God.
And who voted for this? The people in South Florida, the Venezuelan community, the Cuban American community, the Nicaragua American community voted for this. And for us, this is a very, very happy day.
Stephen Crowder:
Now, let me be clear. There are plenty of people, and I know this, well, why don’t you care about… And then insert whatever group you’re here. These Christians being persecuted there, huh? Seems to me like you’re only pro-intervention. That actually is a valid point. I’m only pro-intervention if it’s in America’s interest. In this case, they happen to be aligned. But it does nobody any favors to act as though the people of Venezuela lived under anything other than tyrannical rule.
So that’s a side benefit. It doesn’t mean that we should free everybody in countries that have never gotten it, right? Second loser is this concept of, I know I’m going a little long today, international law. It’s not a thing. International law.
International law. That’s what people say. I mean, you can say it, and the libertarians and leftists, by the way, who are far closer together. It used to be libertarians were kind of more in the conservative wing, only they wanted a bunch of weed and Bitcoin or whatever it was.
But now they’re basically liberals who claim that they’re not woke. I’m sorry, it’s really hard for me to delineate. When you welcome Islamists with open arms and condemn an action that killed a communist dictator with no loss of life to us, I just think you’re a liberal who wants to pretend that you’re a part of intelligentsia. Because these people are all now whining, this actually, President Trump violated international law.
Unknown Speakers:
It’s not legal to do this. It tells people why not. Well, it’s not legal because it violates international law.
As you have suggested for somebody in a third country to say members of the Trump administration have violated international law or violated the law of their country, and they’re going to storm into our country and abduct these people and take them away.
If a foreign power accused the British Prime Minister of breaking its domestic law, bombed targets in the UK, killed dozens of British citizens and abducted the Prime Minister and his wife in the middle of the night, would the government be able to say that was legal? Or is international law only something that applies when Donald Trump says it can?
People in news and stuff like that saying that like, well, hey, there’s no such thing as international law. Anyway, it’s all bullshit because there’s no enforcement mechanism, which is like, that is true.
Just say true. I’ve always kind of said this thing, that international law is kind of made up. You think that’s a better world? A better world is that if nation states agree that we won’t invade each other and we won’t topple each other’s governments, you could just break that whenever you want to. That is the way the United States of America operates.
Stephen Crowder:
Unless the Nazis or unless Stalin, unless they invaded other countries. So if they just did all that, we shouldn’t do anything. Is that the point? You guys do understand that it is about powerful countries have always been calling the shots. We’re in a very rare moment in history where Donald Trump didn’t just act unilaterally. The people of Venezuela are happy about it.
A huge portion of the American people are happy about it and they’ll be happier about it when they see the results. There was a reason for this. But this idea that, oh, okay, all right, because everyone else said, yeah, true. No, it doesn’t apply.
It’s asinine. Yes, power does matter. It absolutely does. And the fact that Canada is allowed to exist.
So let’s just go right now with Venezuela.
Maduro. All right. Full Moon night, by the way. Just taken out.
Yeah, high visibility is a bad time to conduct. In the biggest, I think, military compound in Venezuela. So you would think that if they were going to use their military might to protect anything, it would be their leader, their glorified narco terrorist, in the biggest military compound. Same thing you would think with Iran, right? If they were going to use their military might to protect anything, it would be the enrichment facility that would be required for them to build a nuke, which I wish I loved anything as much as Iran wants to build a nuke.
You would think so. And they couldn’t do a damn thing. We went in, did what we needed to, got out. And none of our guys lost their lives.
It was very, very low cost, high yield. And now that brings me to Canada. In 1995, the prime minister of Canada was the victim of an assassination attempt.
I believe it was Jean Chrétien. Do you know what happened? A man made it through the perimeter into the prime minister’s house, their White House equivalent, and made it up to the bedroom.
No. What stopped him was the wife saw him out of the corner of her eye, closed the door and locked it. And then called for help. And then called security. And he waited. He had like a five inch blade, by the way.
That’s like a Swiss army knife. Celia Flores should have locked the door. She’s like, hey, hey, there’s the guy. He’s here. He’s here to kill my husband. They’re like, oh, sorry about that. So if we could do this to Maduro, we’re just allowing Canada to play country. That’s a lot of these countries to be clear.
Do you have any idea how easy it would be? That would be an imperialist nation, which by the way, I’m OK with a little bit of conquest at this point because I think it does benefit the United States, which brings us to the third loser here, Canada.
This is a big one and it puts a smile on my face. So the oil, obviously the kind of oil in Venezuela also is very close to that of Canada. Canada needs us to refine their oil. They produce a lot of it, but it’s crude. This could be a huge problem for Canada. Guess they should have built those pipelines.
Announcer:
For decades now, Canada’s oil patch has prospered from the decline of Venezuela’s industry. Now that same industry could pose a new competitive threat.
We went to Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Canada.
Lino Carrillo is one of hundreds of highly trained workers who ended up in Alberta, where he ran a refinery.
The bitumen from Alberta is identical to the bitumen in the Orinoco, identical.
If Venezuela’s oil were to start flowing again at the level it once did, it could pose a problem for Canada, especially given its ease of access to Gulf Coast refineries.
You’ll just pull a tanker up, unload, and then you’re kind of competing directly with Canadian barrels.
Yeah, 90% of Canada’s crude oil was exported to the United States. Well, so now they’re definitely going to be looking at cheaper costs. They’re going to have to compete. As far as oil, only a net benefit really to the United States, the people of Venezuela, not so much to Canada who screwed around and found out, not so much to China and not so much to Russia because there’s more global access to oil. There are a lot of wins going on right now.
Is this morally good or does this benefit the United States?
Nine times out of ten. If it is morally good or if it benefits the United States, the left will be against it. Take note of the libertarians out there who line up on the same sides on almost all of those pivotal issues.
She wrote, this heartless Trump administration policy does nothing to make us safer. It betrays our values and could needlessly send thousands back into Maduro’s brutal dictatorship. Wow. Hell, well, well.
Yikes. In summary, international law is not a thing. Nope. Okay, it’s imaginary. It’s fairy dust. And thank God the most powerful country on earth is the United States of America.
Host (Bob Metz)
You’re listening to Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. With his observation that Maduro was taken out mid-night in the biggest military compound and that they couldn’t do a damn thing and that there was no loss of American life, Crowder repeated an observation made by more than a handful of other commentators. But what none of them said, however, was just how that force physically manifested itself during that military action. And this following account from a January 9th X-posting by @TheSCIF is a bit chilling.
Clip (X-posting – Description of Venezuelan soldier’s account)
A security guard that was protecting Maduro has spoken and you gotta hear what he said. It’s in Spanish but I’ll translate. Also Trump announced you know the cartels, they’re going after them in Mexico. The whole vibe of Latin America has changed because of what happened in Venezuela. And now that we’re getting first hand accounts of people were there.
The soldier says they didn’t hear him coming. He says the Americans had technology superior to anything they’ve ever seen. Everything that they were using for radar for anything was completely taken offline. They had drones and the drones were taking out bases and taking out things faster. They didn’t have no technology.
They’ve never had to fight against drones. He also talks about that there was only eight helicopters. There was only 20 men that were sent in and those 20 men killed hundreds of their men. And none of those soldiers were injured. He talks about it felt like they were firing 300 rounds a minute.
Nothing they’ve ever seen, nothing that they can compete with. And then he also talks to the fact that the Americans had some kind of sonic shock boom that was sent out. And everybody immediately started bleeding profusely out of their nose. They couldn’t even gather themselves because whatever was sent at them made them fall to their knees and vomit blood out of their mouth and out of their noses.
They were incapacitated immediately. He says he never wants to go through that again. Does not want to have to fight with the Americans again. He’s sending warnings to everybody out there that you think you can fight the Americans. You don’t even know what their weaponry is like and what they’re capable of.
Twenty men took out hundreds and that’s starting to spread all through Latin America. And now they’re not saying if you want me come and get me anymore they’re like oh shit. Especially after Trump says hey Mexico you’re on the list too.
Host (Bob Metz)
You know Trump has been talking a lot about just how advanced America’s military forces have become. But what truly concerns me about this kind of technology is what could happen if the left began to employ it for their ends.
Now for a very different point of view it’s an unconstitutional illegal act. That is what Robert Barnes called Trump’s action in Venezuela on Viva Fry’s January 4th podcast coming up on this side of the next bumper. And on the return side in his January 6th podcast Alex Jones fully supported Trump’s pragmatic action and then featured his own clip of Glenn Beck elaborating on that argument.
Clip (Viva Frei podcast – Robert Barnes)
So the Monroe Doctrine written not by President Monroe but written by his Secretary of State. His Secretary of State was a family cousin of the Barnes family you can go back you know Barnes’s were at you know my great great grandfather was the one who said don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes Colonel Prescott. Now they go to Valley Forge look up all the Barnes’s that were there. Plenty and some of them were direct ancestors.
So John Quincy Adams who famously said in a great July 4th speech America is different. America is not an empire. Empires kill constitutional republics.
Hello Matt Walsh time to read a little history. The if you get involved in empire it’s not why the empire is good or bad in its own terms. It’s because America’s founding generation recognized empire will kill a constitutional republic faster than anything. So do everything you can to avoid an empire.
And how he put it still the most eloquent description in American history that I know of said America sets the light of liberty with the example of its constitutional republic and its example of not being an empire because we will not go abroad searching for monsters to destroy. And I see all these people who are in my replies saying no Barnes we have to go abroad to search monsters to destroy. You don’t understand they’re a monster. This was a monster.
Hey dimwit this is who John Quincy Adams was talking to. He was talking to you. That’s who our founding generation said we will not be and we will not become. God bless the vice president but no I don’t think it makes us a great power that we can go kidnap some foreign leader of a poor nation that makes us a disgrace not a great power according to who our founding generation. The you know people are surprised by this they’re expecting us to just cheerlead whatever happens. We are not here I’m not here for politicians I’m here for the Constitution period. End of story. And I say this as a fan supporter and admirer and voter of Trump but I’m not sitting here and lie for him when he gets up there and makes preposterous Bushite claims.
But there’s also a difference between the political analysis the policy analysis and the law analysis I see people conflating this all over the place I even see conservatives championing left-wing communist era doctrines that might makes right that truth is whatever I say it is the law is only what it can be enforced. These people who are adopting a subjectivist moral relativist view and it’s like you claim to be a conservative and you’re championing moral relativism I mean oh my goodness.
So in the law side of the argument because they’re just conflating a lot of these things that it can be legal and immoral it can be illegal and moral it can be bad policy and illegal good policy and legal or good policy and illegal those are all depending on how you value the rule of law compared to other issues.
This was my debate you see over Crowder. He didn’t like the point that I said if there’s a legal process with extradition he was like yeah but this is the president’s country he won’t get along with extradition it’s like but you’re making a policy argument you’re saying you believe this person should be detained should be seized should be removed from power that’s fine that’s a policy argument not a legal argument now there might be legal ways to go about it. What we did wasn’t. But he was conflating and confusing what he wanted to have happen on terms of policy with what is or is not the law and I’m a believer in objective truth. I’m a believer in objective morality which means I believe in the rule of law as an objective truth and as objective morality.
Now when you’re talking geopolitics strategy I agree that you have to look at the way the world is rather than the way the way you want the world to be. I don’t dispute any of that. I also see this it’s amazing to hear the right say we don’t believe in human rights we don’t believe in international law.
Okay you don’t believe in the Nuremberg code remember what all of us were arguing during COVID was that the Nuremberg code should be is the law and should be enforced? Now you’re all saying nope I never believed in that. I was a hypocritical lying fraud. I was just waiting for Trump tell me what to think because I can’t think for myself.
That’s what these people are saying and doing and I got very little patience or tolerance for it the and by the way the polling data only boomer cons are strongly supportive of the war. Everybody already is off the boat everybody already is. That’s a political disaster.
Clip (Viva Frei podcast – Host/Interviewer)
Actually to stop you there. The left no matter what Trump does and he could cure cancer they’ll they’ll hate it. I don’t know who on the left is celebrating it. There is…
Clip (Viva Frei podcast – Robert Barnes)
The neocons and globalists. Rothschild celebrating it. David Frum celebrating it. Every neocon who’s criticized Trump was like woohoo this is great this is awesome let’s have more of it.
Clip (Viva Frei podcast – Host/Interviewer)
What I have noticed is that there’s a fracture on the right but there are very loud cheerleaders for this who are very much berating anybody who even questions it.
Clip (Viva Frei podcast – Robert Barnes)
And then last but not least the relationship between states. You know international law is two components, the relationships between governments and universal norms that apply to all government officials. These are jus cogens principles of international law. That’s what the Nuremberg code is. It says there are certain such universal moral truths. That they are legally enforceable on any government actor anywhere in the world and any private individual anywhere in the world.
So those are the principles of international law that right now people on the right because they’re confusing international law with international institutions. The two things are not the same. Governments don’t make law the governments are there to enforce law but the law exists independent of that in the sense of the constitutions the treaties and jus cogens is universal principles that can’t be changed.
They don’t originate because anybody passed them they are derived from those that truly believe in a sort of a natural law principles or you don’t even have to necessarily believe in those if you just believe in certain universal moral truths I believe in them because I believe the god’s architecture leads to our souls in our minds being able to divine these eternal truths.
So those people who are championing might is right who the law doesn’t matter unless it can be enforced don’t realize they’re championing leftist soviet style communist arguments about moral relativism. Do not fall for that trap you can think this is a good policy good politics you might even have a legal pretext or explanation for it but do not for the love of god fall into the trap of advancing moral relativism.
Clip (Alex Jones Podcast, Alex Jones)
You can be a purist and say America shouldn’t project power anywhere. America shouldn’t make deals. America should let dictatorships be right off our coast and manipulate however they want. We should just be total isolationist. But you have to understand that our country will totally collapse. We will be in an endless total depression in every economic analysis and actuarial. But this is not the old globalist order. We’re fighting all over the world for the new world order to transfer our jobs to China. This is America standing back up and doing every policy you would do to get the country back on its feet again. So if you believe in any self-preservation, what Trump is doing is very pragmatic and makes total sense.
Glenn Beck
Venezuela, China, Iran—they’re all connected. All of these things are connected. And if somebody tells you this is all about the oil, listen to them because it is. But I don’t know if they understand what they’re even saying about that, and I’ll explain in a second. If they’re saying, well, this is about drugs—okay, this is about terror, this is about the hemisphere, this is about the U.S. military and the war machine—yes to all of those things.
So let me pull them apart. First of all, with all of that oil, we don’t need the oil. Have you noticed the gas prices? They keep coming down. We don’t need the oil. We need to pull the oil out of the ground ourselves, which we are. We need to refine it ourselves, which we are. China needs the oil. China buys 60 to 90 percent of all of Venezuela’s crude exports. China also buys 85 to 90 percent of all of the oil from Iran. China also buys nearly half of all Russian oil.
What’s happening right now? Well, 60 to 90 percent of all of the exports from Venezuela now not going to China. Oh, and what else has been destabilized this weekend? Iran. They buy 85 to 90 percent of all of the oil in Iran, and those are huge oil reserves as well. So when people say this is about oil, the argument goes back and, no, it’s not about oil, we don’t need it. No, it absolutely is about oil, but not for us. This is about Donald Trump again playing to win the long game.
If Iran and Venezuela fall at the same time, China loses 70 percent of its non-U.S.-regulated oil supply. Seventy percent. You lose 70 percent of your oil—what else can’t you do? Well, you can’t go into Taiwan. You certainly can’t have a war with Taiwan. You can’t have AI dominance. There’s no BRICS reserve currency. So just on the oil front, absolutely it’s about oil. Game over for now. That’s why this matters, and that’s only one piece of this.
Here’s what Marco Rubio said over the weekend: “We don’t need Venezuelans’ oil. We’re not going to allow, however, is for the oil industry in this hemisphere to be controlled by adversaries of the United States.” Is that imperialism, or is that the defense of the hemisphere?
But we can argue about the constitutionality of what Donald Trump did. Does he have the right to do it? Well, I don’t know. I think he does. I don’t necessarily like it, but I also don’t like the fact that Congress would have to be involved on short-term things. But we can argue about that. There are strict constitutionalists who say absolutely not, and you might be right. There are other people who say no, he has the right, and I have a harder time believing that no, he can do whatever he wants—that’s not true. But we can argue about it.
What you cannot argue about is if you say you’re America First, this is an America First. This is absolutely America First. This is the most America First thing I have ever seen. Notice another thing: Trump is not just confronting our enemies. He’s stealing alliances. The UAE don’t like a lot of the stuff in the Middle East, but notice they’re not being bombed. They’re being courted. Why? Because power flows through relationships, not just weapons.
Host (Bob Metz)
Well, there’s a contrast for you. “We will not go abroad searching for monsters to destroy.” How many times have we heard Salim Mansur repeat those very words on our show? In fact, by the time this broadcast airs, Robert Vaughan’s own discussion with Salim on the Venezuela-Maduro situation should be available on Just Right’s video channels. And if I know Salim, I would guess that he’s taking the Robert Barnes approach on this.
Robert Vaughan:
With the invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its murderous dictator Nicolás Maduro, now would be a good time to ask the following questions: Are international laws only just for us little guys to keep us in line? Can Russia, China, the United States, France, UK—all the five members of the Security Council—do whatever they want because they have veto in the Security Council?
Let’s start off with my guest Salim Mansur.
Salim Mansur:
So the question is: The United States can do anything it wants? Okay, United States can do anything it wants. It is a superpower. It is the most armed nuclear power. It was a leading allied member during the war that brought about this international system that has been at play. It can do that. Or what it has done—it has dialed back America to pre-1776.
Bob Metz:
And unlike Alex Newman’s historical account of Latin America, Salim’s historical focus is on that of the United States. So I leave it to the listener to try and put those things together. But notice the context and framework within which each of the earlier speakers we just heard express their judgments.
Robert Barnes says it can be legal and immoral. It can be illegal and moral. It can be bad policy and legal. It can be good policy and illegal. It all depends on how you value the rule of law, he says. So when he says that Trump’s action was an unconstitutional illegal act, my immediate response to this is: like, so what? Was it moral? Was it a good policy? Was it right? Which of those judgments takes precedent?
While Glenn Beck clearly states that he thinks the strict constitutionalists are absolutely right, he has nevertheless determined that Trump’s actions were the correct ones to take.
Meanwhile, Robert sent me an email about his asking Grok to evaluate what Ayn Rand’s position on the invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of Maduro might have been. And briefly, for context, here’s what Rand actually had to say about physical force.
Quote (Ayn Rand)
“No one may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. Man’s rights can only be violated by the use of physical force.”
Quote (Ayn Rand – on war)
“Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.) Think about that. If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective—that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that any alleged good can justify it—there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.”
Host (Bob Metz)
And here’s what Robert wrote me about Grok’s view of how Ayn Rand might have judged the issue. And this is Robert speaking:
Robert Vaughan (via email)
“The response is that the jury is essentially out on the issue. There may be immediate benefits at the risk of long-term alienation by other nations. The difficulty I have with this response is that in order for the invasion to be judged a proper one by Objectivist standards, the US would have to know conclusively beforehand that the long-term consequences are in favor of bolstering the freedom and security of its citizens. It’s a toss-up.”
Host (Bob Metz)
Precisely.
But in part of his discussion that we did not feature on the show today, Robert Barnes made some startling claims and observations—a very significant one being that Venezuela does not have the richest reserves in the world and that Hugo Chávez just made that up. Extracting what oil Venezuela does have, he noted, will take at least a decade. And thanks to the expropriation of Venezuela’s oil companies in 2007, the country owed a range of large international companies between 21 and 22 billion dollars. And a year or so ago, that was purchased for the bargain price of about seven billion by someone who became a big donor to the Trump campaign in 2024. And his name is Paul Singer—someone Barnes also says is obsessed with Israel. And he points out Paul Singer was also someone who gave a lot of money to get Trump defeated in 2016 and in 2020. And Paul Singer, he also cited, is the man who invented Russiagate.
So if people think that politics makes for strange bedfellows, they have every reason to—especially when they don’t know the details underlying a lot of these relationships.
But in a complete departure from most analyses, Barnes says that the reason we see Maduro smiling and happy in the various news reports we’ve seen is because he’s looking forward to the trial in which he can be seen as either the ultimate martyr or ultimate victor—the latter being the greater possibility given the corrupt jurisdiction in which the trial is being held. This is a deep state operation, not an anti-deep state operation, says Barnes. How is it that we can arrest Maduro but we can’t arrest Fauci, Bill Gates, and any of the Democrats involved in January Six and Russiagate, etc.? Because the deep state doesn’t want those arrests, and they do want Maduro’s arrest, he contends.
On another count, I think that Barnes is misreading a lot of the right-wing commentaries that he says are adopting subjectivist left-wing doctrines like “might makes right” or “truth is whatever I say it is” or “the law is only what can be enforced” or “there is no international law.” These people are adopting the subjectivist moral relativist view, he says. And while that is possible if interpreted as literal principles, that’s certainly not what I intended to project when I made pretty much the same observations on previous broadcasts—in particular, and ironically, on the very issue of Canada’s sovereignty as raised earlier by Stephen Crowder on our own November 5th, 2025 show entitled “No Canada: An Unconventional View.” We argued that the uncomfortable reality underlying all of these issues is that nations are ultimately governed not by laws, rules, or regulations, but by convention. It doesn’t matter what the laws of a given nation may prescribe if no one’s obeying them or enforcing them. Such laws are not worth the paper they’re written on. In fact, such laws create a great disrespect for and distrust of government.
Now, when people do accept and obey certain laws which are enforced by government, then those laws are valid and government becomes relatively trustworthy again. Whether one is governed by laws or by convention is really secondary to the task of discovering the proper principles and practices that can foster a culture of individual freedom.
The bottom line is that when it comes to the use of force, there are essentially three classifications, and they apply as much to domestic circumstances as to international ones: they are initiatory, defensive, and retaliatory.
So the question to ask is: Is what Trump did an act of war? Trump sees himself as a wartime president and has said so on many occasions. Another relevant question is: Did he start this war, or was this a retaliatory action based on previous circumstances? Was his action justifiable?
Well, don’t ask me. In the midst of all the contradictory evidence yet to be validated or invalidated, I’m siding with Grok: it’s a toss-up.
So if you don’t walk away from this broadcast totally confused, well, then we haven’t done our job.
Either way, when it comes to the issue of force, here’s our encouraging you to make it a force of habit to join us each and every week when we will continue our journey in the right direction. And until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We’ll see you then.
[Extro Music]
Clip (Unidentified Comedy Routine)
Speaker 1:
Everybody have a good New Year’s? Yeah? Go to a fireworks display or anything? Venezuela had quite the fireworks display. Holy shit, they really went all out. Like a couple days late, but better late than ever, right?
You know, yeah. This Maduro guy—you see pictures of him—he doesn’t look like he’s been captured to me. He’s giving thumbs up in photos. Looks pretty happy. Looks like he was rescued, you know. Looks like he’s having a better time than Erica Kirk right now.