967 - Whitehat feat. Derek Davison (9/8/25)

All I wanna be is a jumble.

All I wanna be is ill jumping.

Bring me problems and pesos.

All I wanna be is a

Greetings, friends.

It's Monday, September 8th, and this is your Chapo.

On today's episode, we will be taking a tour around the world with a guest well known to you.

You may remember him from such podcasts as American Prestige or Substacks, such as Foreign Exchanges.

But to us, he is simply our senior foreign policy world affairs correspondent.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the show.

Once again, Derek Davison.

Always a pleasure to be here, guys.

Thanks for having me.

I mean, it's never a pleasure to talk about this shit, but always a pleasure to be here with you guys.

Well,

I don't know who else I'd want telling me about it.

But Derek, obviously, there's

a lot going on around the world.

And I think today, obviously, we're going to begin with Venezuela.

But before we get to that, I think I'd like to just begin by framing today's episode with a you know,

a smaller, but perhaps, I don't know, telling detail from our government as of this last week.

And that is the Trump administration's decision to, I don't want to say officially rename the Department of Defense the Department of War, but just to sort of announce that they are going to start calling it the Department of War and encouraging others to do the same.

So, Derek, I'll just begin here with the Department of War.

Because on one level, it's sort of like, hmm, this is interesting.

This is sort of anti-Orwellian.

But then on another, more obvious level, it's just like, this would be like what the party would do in 1984 if they didn't feel the need to create euphemistic lies to blind people to like, oh, the Department of Peace is actually the Department of War.

But now they're just like, no, we'll be doing wars.

They don't need to be declared.

By the way, we're to be doing war wars.

We're going to have so many wars, you're going to get tired of wars.

And guess the best part?

They don't have to be declared by Congress.

It's, yeah, they don't even have to get Congress to do the name change, apparently.

I mean, like, it's so, it's so funny because they can't change the name of the department officially.

So, instead, they're just like doing it in every way except going to Congress and asking them to do it, which, I mean, the Republicans would probably do that.

Does anyone doubt that Congress wouldn't allow them to change the name?

I can't believe it.

But so, they're just going to waste a shitload of money like scraping the cheap lettering off of the walls and changing the, you know, the website branding to Department of War.

only for, you know, if they don't actually get it passed in a formal way, the next administration is just going to undo that.

So that's fun.

It's always nice to see them just kind of tossing money out the window, basically.

Yeah, and I guess like, and it's also like being justified by Pete Hegseth and his close advisor, John Barleycorn.

I mean, they're basically saying that like, oh, when it was called a Department of War,

we had some of our greatest victories, like World War II.

And then they changed the name to the Department of Defense, and it's been nothing but a string of L's.

So obviously, the problem was in the name.

Yeah, I mean, I can't think of anything else that could have happened in 1949 or around 1949 that could have caused the United States to turn into a bloated giant empire with a military that exists mostly to justify its own budget

and defense contractors that are just there to hoover up as much money as possible.

Like, I can't think of anything else that would have happened in that same period of time other than changing the name of the department to the Department of Defense that would have caused, you know, all these, all these bad things to happen.

If we go back to the Department of War, it will bring us back to a time when we were beating

real world beaters, like the Spanish Empire in the 20th century.

Barbary Pirates.

That was the Department of the Navy.

Yeah, that is really like Michael Jordan playing against plumbers.

Like the Spanish Empire after the invention of the railroad is like, you might as well not even record that game.

It was preseason.

Yeah,

that

does not count.

It's like week one of the college football season.

You know, you get this D3 school to beat up on.

A school that has two directions in its name.

It is to harken back to that time.

Like the Department of War as it existed back then was the Army.

There was a separate Department of the Navy.

that was also a cabinet level position.

So part of creating the Department of Defense was bringing all of these military departments and introducing the Air Force as another separate branch of the military.

What I'm hoping is that they go back to that and they have like they create a separate department of the Navy.

They could have a department of the Air Force.

They could have a department of the Space Force.

Like everybody gets their own cabinet agency because that would be total chaos, which I think would be a lot of fun to watch if they did that.

So

I'm pushing for like reverting all the way back, basically.

Well, I mean, I guess it's just this idea that like, oh, like the Department of Defense, like none of the wars that have been fought, you know, in my lifetime, or certainly since the Department of Defense was given that moniker, have been defensive in nature.

But it's not like changing it symbolically back to the Department of War is like some fucking, so some great moment of like anti-imperial reality setting in.

It's like, no, they're just doing it because they want to start wars.

They would like to do many, many more wars.

And they would just like to stop being euphemistic about it.

And I guess that's like the direction I'm going with this episode.

Well,

can I just interject here?

Because the government of Grenada would have killed you and everyone you cared about.

So I don't know what you're saying here.

I mean, it was absolutely, we had to protect ourselves from that military juggernaut.

Yeah.

I mean, Manuel Noriega, I mean, you know, come on.

Like, these guys are.

Unless we forget the Clint Eastwood film Heartbreak Ridge, in which he declared that our record was now one tied.

Vietnam won.

That was a loss.

But we got it back in, you know, saving those college students.

But I mean, like, I guess like what I mean is like the death of euphemism here is that like we're no longer coyly trying to pretend that, you know we're engaged in anything other than just war, thuggery, theft, and violence on a massive global scale.

And it brings to reminds me something Matt said years ago on this show talking about Donald Trump.

And he he compared it to when the flesh melts off the T800s like exoskeleton frame and you just see it's like glowing red eyes.

And it's just like, I feel like that's what we're dealing with right now is that just like capitalism and empire, there's no more human suit for it.

It's just the Terminator.

And, and, but, like, but here's where I want to go is because, like,

the way that they reacted by sharing that video of them blowing up a speedboat in international waters, like they just sunk the battleship Yamamoto or something, or they just, like, sunk a Chinese aircraft carrier is like,

be one thing of like, yeah, like, Felix, like you said, if it was a Department of War against ranked opponents, but this is the most penny anti-thuggery and murder imaginable.

And, like, the thought I had

when I saw that video of that speedboat getting blown up and like 11 people getting killed.

It's like, I remember 15, 20 years ago when Chelsea Manning went to prison for leaking the collateral murder video.

It seems now like the U.S.

government and Department of War or whoever you want to call it, whoever's in charge there, is just blowing the whistle on themselves.

But it's really more like they're like, I don't know, tooting a trombone to announce to the world how strong and powerful America is, that we're able to

protect ourselves from 11 guys in an outboard motor.

It really is.

I mean, we're still taking their word for it right that there were even drugs on this boat there's no proof of that and i saw at least one uh argument in the new york times uh

somebody claiming like an analyst saying it was probably more likely a boat full of migrants like a human trafficking smuggling uh type of situation instead of as opposed to it to a drug boat so I mean,

it's bad enough to imagine that we're just executing people who are bringing drugs, trying to.

I don't even know if they're coming to the United States, just sailing drugs across the Caribbean.

We've decided we can blow people up for doing that.

And I think there's a good chance it wasn't even a human smuggling operation.

I think it could have just been 11 people in a boat.

For all we know, right?

It may have just been people who are out cruising in a speedboat in the Caribbean, and

the same people who brought you...

Saddam's WMDs decided that there was Coke on board.

If there was Coke on board that ship, why do you need 11 guys on the boat?

Isn't the goal to get as much of a load on the boat as possible?

11 guys on the boat seems like a lot of cocaine that they're leaving on the table.

Yeah, I mean, there's that.

There's so many things about the story that just

don't make sense.

But at the bottom of it, when you strip all of that stuff away, even if the story is true and these were 11 Venezuelan gang members with drugs on a boat, you still can't just declare that to be an invasion of the United States and blow it up.

Like this is a really dangerous precipice that you've put us on or that this administration has put us on if it's just going to start

shooting random vehicles that it decides it doesn't like.

But I do like that one of the things I've seen from

sort of the Twitter audi or like the professional national security types has been, if this order were given by any other administration, the military would have said, mr president how dare you we cannot just blow up i mean like come on i've been using the military to fight the war on drugs for years yeah i mean like this is not it's it's at the same time i mean there is speculation that hegseth fired a number of like ranking generals because they would have said no to this well i mean i maybe i don't know i haven't heard because of this specifically but i mean he certainly fired uh anyone who smacked of woke i guess uh for example uh you know any any poc uh woke here being people who maybe don't believe Venezuelan drug dealers are a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.

So I'm sure they do have a very friendly coterie of flag officers at this point.

But even so, like, I mean, when is the last time you saw any pushback

to anything like that?

But, but yeah,

it's not something that I think another administration would have even conceived of doing because

it's just so bottom of the barrel.

Like it's really

scraping the

worst, the kind of lowest level we could get to on something like this.

You know, Hag Seth has promised more to come on this, but like

before we before we reposition to talk about like Venezuela more broadly,

I did love the reaction from our vice president, Harold, of the Council of Grandmothers, who said, I don't give a fuck.

Call it what you want it.

Like, you know, I don't give a fuck what you call it.

And then, like, Felix, I know you saw this.

The reaction by that woman who was like, Those who are getting mad at JD Vance should consider the fact that his mom got addicted to oxies working in a hospital.

So he's not going to have, you know, warm feelings toward drug cartels.

And it was just like, they should have drone-striked his fucking mom when she was stuffing him her pockets with fucking oxies.

What are you talking about?

And, like, what does that have to do with anything?

She also, like, sold, uh,

I mean, probably pretty shitty pills, honestly.

Whenever I I read one of these sob stories where it's like, you know,

I was a 63-year-old nurse and you wouldn't believe it, but I got addicted to opiates.

It's always like Tylenol 3, which is like a way to waste everyone's time.

But she was selling it to, you know, other women who were

emasculating their fat children in sort of a

drug ring of a drug that's one step above melatonin in Tylenol 3.

But they should, yeah, they should have probably blown her up.

They should have like used a GBU32 with a laser guidance kit in case she got into her car and it led them to more of her Tylenol 3 Connect, which was just the hospital she worked at.

And I mean, is anyone else disturbed by the idea that like they're making policy based on the childhood trauma of the vice president?

Like there's like, you have to understand this, he has to work it out, okay?

He has to work out his feelings about his mother by killing 11 Venezuelans in a fucking speedboat.

Yeah, I mean, that is like the unstated thing.

Like, where does Venezuela come into that process?

I mean, first of all, less of it, like, like, over 99% of people who get prescribed opiates never

like develop a dependency.

She didn't even get prescribed them.

She was just like, she had a headache and either someone was like, hey, have you ever tried like the Tolenol that's good?

Or I don't know, she just pocketed one.

But,

you know,

her whole thing seems like

she was self-starting in her addiction.

I'll say that.

I think most addictions are like that in that you can't kind of lay the blame at the feet of the nation of Venezuela.

But this one especially.

Yeah, there's certainly no, I mean, unless Nicolas Maduro is holding her down and like shoving pills in her mouth.

The whole JD thing annoys me because it's like, it is the greatest example of this uniquely American thing where if something bad happened to you or you, you, you had a shitty experience in one way or another, it automatically is meaningful and that there is some lesson you can evince from it.

In this case, it's that, you know, we need to be tougher on

narco-terrorists.

Just any boat because it can be a narco boat.

But yeah, like there's this like

people are people have been trying a JD Sales job since like 2022 since he started going like Alex Jones is terrific, but he like part of that is this idea that he has he he has he has pathos and that um he went through all this suffering and it has meaning because he's he's gonna take it out on America's enemies when like

you know the thing that drives me the most insane about him, it isn't, like, the political flip-flop necessarily.

It's that,

because who gives a shit about that?

It's that his first half of his career was saying, we should kill everyone in my hometown who, like, got addicted to standing up too fast and holding their breath until their face turned blue in Tyler and all three.

So he could become like a third-rate Davos speaker.

And now it's like, now he's like fucking

like he's Batman.

He saw his mom mugged by Tylenol Three, and now he has to kill every Latino.

It's so fucking annoying.

One last bit from the domestic front about the Department of War.

Donald Trump posted the other day one of these awful like AI images that superimposed his face onto Robert Duvall's character from Apocalypse Now under the headline, Chi Apocalypse Now.

And then the caption is, I love the smell of deportations in the morning.

Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War helicopter, helicopter, helicopter.

So, and then like in a perfect distillation of the Democrats as like the world's most non-existent opposition party, Tammy Duckworth replied to this by being like, how dare you wear the uniform of the Ara Cav, sir?

You are stealing valor.

And it's like, I don't think that that's the most objectionable thing about this image and the statement and the sort of intention it seems to imply, which is napalming the city of Chicago and going to war with it well as long as he doesn't do it in a uniform i mean you know he doesn't he you know as long as he's not disrespecting the troops i i mean you have to give the president some latitude to carry out his own policies it's it's all part of the the wonderful system that we've set up for uh for ourselves that the the founders wanted it this way could have had another mark kirk term but no

You remember the Mark Kirk 2016 campaign?

Oh, my God.

He was special.

I don't remember all the details.

I just remember what a very special man he was.

I actually, I got banned the second time I got banned from Twitter.

Was it when you said he was a comms guy?

I said I was Mark Kirk's comms guy.

And that's why I always, I thought it was like something.

I was like a very dramatic person back then.

And I was like, I wonder if Saudi Arabia did it.

But no, it was just me saying that I was Mark Kirk's press secretary.

But he was, I don't know, he got like some head injury around that time when he was running.

He had a stroke before.

Yeah, yeah, he had a stroke.

During his first term, he had a stroke, but the stroke made him behave awesomely.

Like, it, it really, you know, I think it helped him.

Uh,

he said that Lindsey Graham is a bro without a hoe.

And when people were like, What the fuck are you doing?

He said, I'm from the south side.

He said that Tammy Duckworth won't stand up for America.

Oh, that was really good.

That was, yeah, okay.

Yeah.

And so Tammy Duckworth, like,

I think her mom is Thai and her dad is just like a white American guy.

And she said something about like her having ancestors that fought in the Revolutionary War during a debate and

Mark Kirk was like, where from Bangkok?

He was,

yeah, he was

awesome.

I miss him so much.

He was so good.

But

yeah, no,

this was uniquely depressing.

I mean, like, if you just described what Duckworth said to me,

you know, I didn't know it was real.

I would think it was a bit from one of those podcasts that went from 2017 to 2019 that had 38 rotating hosts.

But no, it really happened.

Well,

to refocus on Venezuela here, like, Derek,

am I correct, like that they have moved a large number of naval vessels to the Caribbean, and they seem to be like, you know, pointing them at Venezuela.

So

we all remember in the first Trump term, there was

the brief Guayida momentum when all Americans in the world invested their hopes in Juan Guaido, the new leader of Venezuela.

We all know how that turned out, but like, as with everything in the second Trump administration, I think he's going to run for Prime Minister of France now because the Prime Minister is deposited.

He has a better shot opening

for an ambitious guy.

But like, so like,

what is going on with Venezuela?

Will the Department of War declare war absent Congress with Venezuela?

And like, and broader than that, what the fuck is the trend, the cartel of the sun, and why is the U.S.

claiming Maduro is in charge of it?

So

have to be honest.

Like, I mean, I'm not an expert in this space, but I had never heard of the cartel of the sun

until they decided that Maduro, Nicolas Maduro himself, is directly leading it.

I'm not even sure that there's 100% certainty that this is, that it's a real thing.

Like, there's a debate over

whether this actually exists

or if it's a manifestation of

certain elements trying to paint Venezuela as a narco-terrorist state, with narco-terrorism being

the new hotness in the terrorism, the war on terror space.

So I don't even know that there's like a definite

consensus that this actually exists.

Trende Aragua has been known for a long time.

I mean, that's pretty well established, that that's a real gang.

But this cartel of the suns thing, like, it's very sketchy to me.

And again, I'm not an expert on Latin American organized crime or anything like that, but it certainly seems weird to me that here's this alleged cartel

that

we're not sure really exists, but it just so happens that like every senior figure in the Venezuelan government is also running this cartel at the same time that they're running Venezuela.

It seems just a little bit too on the nose to me.

So I'm skeptical.

That's how bad socialism is.

Everyone needs to have two jobs.

And like, but like,

I mean, no, I think it would certainly be newsworthy if Maduro and his whole government were part of a cartel.

But like, isn't that the case with like the new government that they just put in charge of Ecuador?

That like literally is a cocaine trafficking cartel.

I'm sorry, a banana and cocaine trafficking cartel, but they're our ally.

He's a banana heir, okay?

I mean, you know, I don't, he's an heir to the banana fortune, the vast banana fortune of Ecuador.

I mean, yeah, there's allegations about all these guys, if not like being directly, you know, involved in cartels, at least having arrangements with cartels.

I mean, Naeem Bukela in El Salvador is, you know,

there's loads of allegations about his government negotiating with, you know, MS-13 and other groups to kind of tamp down the crime rate and offering the gangs certain concessions if they're if they just stop engaging in so much violent activity.

And, you know, there was a big controversy when the administration shipped all those migrants, the Venezuelan migrants, to El Salvador, along with a number of Salvadoran migrants who wound up in prison,

that Bukele was trying to get like people who could testify to his government's relationship with

the gangs.

He was trying to get them back under his custody and shut them up so that they couldn't be interviewed by law enforcement in the United States.

So, I mean, a lot of these guys, curiously enough, on the right rather than on the left,

have had this accusation, I think, credibly leveled about them.

Now, when it comes to Venezuela, right?

And like, when I think about all the marine expeditionary force being moved into the Caribbean and like all these naval vessels.

They have pretty much everything they would need at this point to invade.

Not to occupy, but certainly to invade Venezuela.

And like, I know this is like, this is almost a hack bid at this point.

It's an easy layup, but like, am I wrong in suspecting that the U.S.

government's interest in replacing and doing regime change or invasion of Venezuela?

Am I wrong in thinking or suspecting that this has to do with Venezuela's copious oil reserves?

Because

they just want a government that will sell Venezuelan oil at like, I don't know, like

get them a better deal or sell direct only to America or what, like, what, what's going on with that?

Yeah, I mean, that's certainly part of it.

Like the administration, I mean, and not just this one, you know, successive presidential administrations have been trying to figure out how to get Venezuelan oil to market without rewarding Maduro

because they want the price of gasoline to come down.

And this was particularly true after.

Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022 and the Biden administration was looking for alternatives to Russian oil, initially not sure how to handle sanctions and whether they were going to go after Russian oil exports, which could really have spiked the global price of oil quite a bit and raised prices to the gas pump.

They didn't want to do that.

So they started casting around.

And Venezuela, you know, obviously is the country with the

largest oil reserves in the world or largest known oil reserves at least, was a huge get if they could get it.

And so they hatched this

thing with this agreement with Maduro that they would relax oil sanctions provided they saw progress from Maduro in terms of holding quote-unquote free and fair elections and releasing political, quote-unquote political prisoners and all of these things that didn't pan out, but they still relaxed a lot of the oil sanctions.

Trump came in this time and

turned the spigot off to some extent, but he's been getting, I think, a lot of pushback from Chevron, which is the company, or is it, yeah, I think it's Chevron, which is the company

business there to you know kind of uh you know go back revert back to uh the biden policy of allowing venezuela at least to to export oil at least for chevron uh to to export and to exploit venezuelan oil what's also at play here though it's not just venezuela's oil it's also guiana's oil name guiana the neighboring uh country in South America has uh supposedly pretty vast and I don't know all the details of this

but supposedly pretty vast oil deposits offshore

the western part of the country, which is a region known as Esequibo,

that has been disputed with Venezuela going all the way back to colonial times, like the colonial powers disputed where this border should be.

Eventually, it was worked out in sort of international forum that the area belonged to Guiana, but the Venezuelan government

has always disputed that.

And then when they discovered, you know, hey, there might be a lot of oil here, Venezuela got very interested in this area and sort of advanced its claims.

And Exxon has the development rights for that region.

And there's a lot of concern.

Like Maduro has taken some steps.

He held a referendum

that was, you know,

with

very dubious turnout figures and so forth.

But the idea was, should we annex basically, or should we set up an administration for this Esequibo region and supposedly one, you know, and one going away, this, this referendum.

He's, I believe they've now held elections, farcical, somewhat farcical elections for local offices for Esequibo or are planning to run them.

I'm not entirely sure

how far that process has gone.

But he definitely has designs on this region.

And you know, obviously Exxon doesn't want that to happen because that would upset the apple cart.

And so I think it's taken on more

salience even than just the Venezuelan oil because they're worried that he could make a play for these oil reserves that right now are being exploited by Guyana and Exxon.

That, you know, if he went after those, it would be a big disruption.

Well, I gotta say, with all of the military assets, shall we say, in the region, like, what are the chances that this gets to be, like, this actually will be kind of like a test case for their

sort of their attempt to sort of bring back a more 19th century style of American imperialism and just invade Venezuela.

So, I mean, like I said, I think they have everything they would need to do that, right?

They have, I think, three destroyers at this point, a guided missile cruiser.

They've got one of their literal combat ships, which can sail into sort of shallow coastal waters.

They've got an amphibious combat group.

They've got a marine expeditionary unit.

They've got F-35s, not that, you know, they would matter that much, but they've got F-35s in Puerto Rico now.

All ostensibly, like the cover story here is this is some sort of anti-drug operation where we blow up small speed boats in the Caribbean.

But yeah, I mean,

like, yeah, I mean, you're not using F-35s.

You're not using a Marine Expeditionary Force to blow up.

to interdict and not even interdict to kill

with drones drug drug shipments, or people shipping, trying to ship drugs across the Caribbean.

These guys are useful in a ground operation of some kind.

And what that would look like absent an invasion of Venezuela, I don't know.

Now, could they just be there as a show of force?

Possibly.

Could this just be limited to,

I think we've...

Once you deploy that much force, it's hard to come back from that.

And I think at the very least, you're going going to see some,

you may see some airstrikes that will be justified as like, this is where, you know, there's a, there's a Hamas tunnel underneath Caracas.

No, they'll, they'll say, like, you know, this is where Trende Aragua processes its drugs, or this is where this cartel of the sun, uh, you know, it's its headquarters is in this area, and we bombed that.

We didn't bomb, you know, anything that was connected to the Venezuelan government.

They might try to kind of get around

the fact that that would be an act of war by doing some kind of terror, narco-terrorism again, justification.

But I have a hard time believing that they're just going to stop here and they've deployed all of this force close to Venezuela or within striking distance of Venezuela, and they're just going to leave it at that.

So I do think something is coming.

You know, if the strikes on the Iran's

nuclear facilities are any indication.

It seems like

they want to be bellicose and aggressive, and they want to have this like warfighting posture towards the rest of the world but they don't want to get they they want it to be quick they want it to be like a one and done but like kind of hard to imagine how like airstrikes maybe for venezuela but like if they land troops in venezuela hard for me to imagine that's going to be a quick war like what what is the state of the venezuelan state in terms of like how strong a state are they and like how large is their military and what would like landing the marines in venezuela be like yeah i mean it's it's not

i mean they don't have a lot of money so this is this is an impoverished state um that that doesn't have a lot of money to field uh a first-rate military but they have a lot of people and maduro nicolas maduro in anticipation of some kind of u.s move against venezuela has called up their the country's militia force uh mobilized at least some portion of it and that's potentially on paper at least millions of people uh you know he's not going to get everybody to show up.

So there's a question about how many people he could actually mobilize.

But even if it's a fraction of that,

that's a pretty difficult order for what is at this point.

You know, it's enough to maybe invade or get into Caracas and occupy the presidential palace.

If it goes beyond that, I mean, and you're fighting hundreds of thousands of people in guerrilla campaigns across the country.

Not that I'm saying it would necessarily come to to that, but that's sort of a worst case scenario.

That would be extraordinarily difficult for the U.S.

military to pull off.

And then you have to consider whatever government they would quickly try to put in

to replace Maduro and be, you know, sort of the liberation of the Venezuelan people is going to be tarred by the fact that they were put in place by the Americans and they're going to have to deal with that,

which could be, you know, once the U.S.

pulls out, you can have an extended insurgency of some type or or you know uh extended period of of uh violence and difficulty so it's it's a recipe for collapse which um you know at this point i think is is i i almost think is the goal i think it was the goal in iran i think it's the goal in a lot of places is not necessarily uh to stand up we're not in the george w bush era of standing up uh governments that we think are going to survive.

We just want to collapse the ones that we don't like.

And then, you know, shit happens.

We don't really care about that.

Yeah,

I feel like that is the most useful framework to look at it through.

Not,

I mean, there's a lot of overlap between the first Bush administration and this one,

especially on some foreign policy things.

But,

and I would say it trends probably more towards neoconservatism than it does, you know, this

weird national conservative quasi-isolationism that doesn't actually have a constituency in American politics.

But it's just another way that we,

us and Israel, are becoming the same entity.

And that's not to say that we haven't had, you know, pointless and capricious

foreign policy excursions in the very recent past and that this is an Israeli invention.

It obviously isn't.

The Israeli aspect to it is that the pretenses of nation building or spreading democracy or

even like ridiculous things like invading a country to perpetuate women's rights, those things are out the window.

And with them is

this idea of you break it, you buy it, that we would occupy any of these governments and give a shit long enough to set up like a puppet parliamentary system and

like fabricate an entire new government.

Right.

I mean, yeah.

And

the Israeli aspect to it is also just that the point of it is that it's kind of slapdash and impulsive.

And that you do, you, you make these incredibly consequential moves that potentially endanger the lives of like thousands, if not millions of people,

for just out of just like week-to-week news cycle shit.

Like, it is hard.

It seems like a very base and

almost

early 2000s internet observation.

But it kind of is hard to separate any of this from

every other day Trump has to like do a press conference where he's like,

here's a letter from my friend that's

complimenting me on not being a pedophile from 1998.

I'm an undercover FBI informant.

Somebody else has nominated me for the Nobel Prize for not being a pedophile.

The undercover FBI agent thing is one of the funniest fucking things I've ever heard.

Did you notice that Mike Johnson has already dropped that line 24 hours after premiering it with great acclaim?

I love it because

people who become FBI informants do not become FBI informants because they volunteered to do the right thing.

They usually become because they're deeply entrapped by the FBI, in a number of other very serious crimes.

Yeah.

I can't remember, Felix, if it was you coined the term white hat pedophile, but like literally going with that is just amazing.

Oh, someone posted the clip from 2018 and it was during a live show.

And it was

Matt, Matt brought up the concept of

he basically predicted exactly this line, but I think I was the one who said the term white hat pedophile.

But I think equal credit to Matt for

basically predicting this entirely.

But yeah, it is.

I think the comparison to both us and Israel, especially in Iran and Lebanon and everything else that they're doing to neighboring states is a very apt comparison.

And

it should, I don't know.

We talked about this a few weeks ago, this sort of...

This terrible feeling of,

you know, whether it's like fucking Laura Loomer or whoever, that just no one is going to no that no one of consequence is even going to offer like a token of resistance uh for this it's even more awful

there is a sense that like

no one in no no European ally the EU is an entity no one who

maybe has the capability to tug on our chain a little bit will say hey what the fuck are you doing until it's too late?

Well, Felix, I was thinking about that in the context of that

fucking

ICE raid that they just did on that Kyundai factory in Georgia, where they like shackled something like 300 Korean nationals, all of whom had fucking work visas to do like technical work at this like electric

car battery plant.

And like they, yeah, they had a work visa to be there as guest workers.

And they were like led out by ICE in shackles.

And obviously, like the South Korean media and government and public are rightly outraged at this because they were like, These people were literally guests in our country.

But like, this is what I go back to: like, there's no euphemism anymore.

Like, Trump is calling the bluff of even all of our so-called our allies, a country like South Korea, one of our closest allies.

Is that just like, oh, you may consider yourself our ally, but you don't have the fucking clout to tell us what to do or fucking scold us or fucking hurt us if we just shit in your face?

Like,

there's just no limits.

Yeah.

Same goes for Europe.

What is the line, and does the line even exist?

Well, I mean, I think it's increasingly showing that, like, it, in fact, does not exist unless you are a country like China or Russia.

Yeah.

Or, or, and, you know, I was going to include North Korea, but like, that brings us to the next story, you know, seeing that they have nukes and everything.

Over the mountain, down in the valley, lives a former talk show host.

Everybody knows his name.

He said there's no doubt about it.

It was a myth of fingerprints.

I've seen them all, and then they're all the same.

When the sun gets weary and the sun goes down, they're bustling the watermelon.

And the lights come up on the blackhead town.

Now, somebody says, What's a bad thing to do?

Well, it's not just me and it's not just you.

This is all around the world.

Derek, an incredible story in the news this week that is just like, it seems like straight out of the Chapo canon.

Could you break down for us the details of this aborted Navy SEAL incursion into North Korea that happened in 2019 towards the end of the first Trump administration?

Yes.

So

as far as I know, and the New York Times broke this, and I mean,

this is what I know of it is, is what I saw in their piece.

But the

Trump administration decided

in they said early 2019 to

send a group of SEALs from SEAL Team 6

into North Korea to plant a listening device.

So this was

still during the period where he and Trump were sending letters back and forth.

And,

you know,

they were having their

summits that never went anywhere, but they were at least talking to one another.

They were pen pals.

Yeah, they were pen pals.

And he wrote the beautiful letters that President Trump would go on.

I call him Rocket Man.

I call him Rocket Man.

So they, but they decided they didn't have, they had this blind spot, intelligence blind spot, where they couldn't hear Kim Jong-a and they couldn't eavesdrop on his communications.

So they were going to plant

a listening device.

And the whole operation went completely sideways.

They got dropped dropped off by a submarine

and kind of sailed in this mini submersible

to shore.

They got out, they disembarked and kind of were coming on shore when this little North Korean boat just kind of appeared and there were these guys flat with flashlights and

they were sailing over to where they had obviously seen some disturbance and they're sailing over to where these SEALs were coming ashore.

and they made the decision in that moment to just air hole everybody uh on this boat uh which were probably people who were out like collecting shellfish uh like there's no indication that they were north korean security although i guess that was that was one of the things that you they were worried about is that these could have been this could have been a patrol of some kind well yeah but like at that point if anyone sees you you're gonna kill them right because like the mission's blown if they like um i mean yes uh they they're trying to to to massage this by saying we weren't sure who they were i mean i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not apologizing for it i mean it's it's evil beyond imagination but yes i mean realistically anybody stumbles on you you're gonna you're gonna kill them so they killed all these guys uh and had to pack up and leave and then never told anybody about it including congress it wasn't until 2021 that the biden administration briefed select members of congress without declassifying the operation or making it public or anything that might have

done any good.

They just briefed a certain cadre of members of Congress about it and kept it at that.

And yeah, so it didn't come to light until this time story, but

really

troubling, certainly,

to imagine what's going on here.

An extremely chilling detail of that story is that

after they just blew away everyone on that little North Korean boat or whatever, there was a detail that the Navy SEALs then punctured the lungs of their corpses with knives so that they would sink to the bottom of the ocean.

And I just thought that was like,

I don't know, like, that was just so chilling.

And like, I think about that in the context, once again, of like those 11 people getting blown up on a speedboat, where it's like, this is what we're supposed to be proud of, of like our mighty military doing,

is just like,

yeah, just like puncturing the lungs of an already dead body so that they can hide it more easily.

Like, that's grotesque.

And then the one thing, the one detail about this story that like I am confused about is it said that like the purpose of the mission was to land on a beach in North Korea and like install a listening device.

Like, how does that work?

Like on a beach?

Like, what, like, what are they called?

Have you ever heard of like a stingray or something like that?

Yeah, yeah.

For people who don't know, a stingray is a communications interception device that

a lot of police departments in America actually have it, but it's used by militaries and federal agencies too.

But

it's a kind of like surreptitious looking device that can intercept like

stuff specifically from phones, and it can be used in kind of like a dragnet way.

And presumably,

you know, this was a device similar to that.

They said in the article that,

you know, they were able to do do surveillance on North Korea, but only from satellites in extremely high altitude planes like U2s.

They're not, you know, there are some countries where they can operate freely in their airspace and they presumably wouldn't need to do this.

They could like, it's like a small device and they can just sort of like pilfer like cell signals and just pick up calls and stuff.

Yeah, or like, yeah, or like satellite phone stuff.

Right.

I don't, like, we don't know specifically what device it was, but it's, you know,

presumably it would be some type of like interceptions device that can accomplish things that you cannot accomplish just from like 80,000 feet or from a satellite.

But I think some kind of bold data collection device rather than, I mean, they weren't going into the presidential palace to

plan a specific bug.

It's a moot point because

they never got it on the beach.

They had to kill too many people before they did that.

But yeah, like, I mean, I guess I was just thinking about this in context of, I know we had Seth Harp on the show not too long ago.

And like, Derek, like, when you hear about something like this happening like years after the fact, like, shouldn't we just assume that bungles of this nature are happening all the time all over the world at the behest of the newly rechristened Department of War?

I mean, yes, I think so.

I mean, we should assume that there are operations like this happening all the time.

I think it's, you know, I get to the point where it's just like,

you know, you have to assume it's happening, but there's no way to know exactly where or when.

I mean, you know,

it's all just kind of,

you know, assuming.

But yeah, I mean, I think certainly we have to assume they've got, you know, operations like this that have happened or are happening in Venezuela, in, you know, in and around Iran, like all of these places where we're.

constantly engaged in this stuff.

And the success or failure rate, I mean, it seems like

the failure rate would probably be higher, but

we just don't know.

It takes

a breaking

kind of exclusive like this, I guess, to

get a sense of what failure even looks like in this context, which is, you know, killing a bunch of innocent people and stabbing them in the lungs to sink their bodies in the ocean.

That was one of the things that was kind of

alarming, but not surprising about the actual New York Times article.

They went to great lengths to

go, you know, we knew about this for a while, but we didn't publish it because we thought it would endanger ongoing JSOC operations in the same area.

And it's like, okay, so how many fuck-ups like this are there?

Like all the time.

Like how many, how many, how I always think of it, like, for, for the average, like, for the average American who is consuming like 19 hours of true crime shit a day, like the most horrifying thing they can imagine is being killed in such a way that their families

don't know for like 20, 30 years because their body's never found.

How many people are we subjecting to that just on a daily basis because of these pointless fuck ups like this?

It is.

I mean, that to me was the part of the piece, the Times piece that actually popped was this paragraph, you know, near the top of it where, they said the Times has withheld some sensitive information on the North Korea mission that could affect future special operations and intelligence gathering missions?

Like, is that your job, New York Times?

Yeah, apparently,

U.S.

Special Forces and intelligence gathering missions?

Or are you supposed to be reporting this shit?

Or, you know, are you an arm of the Pentagon or are you reporting on the Pentagon?

Like, you kind of have to make a decision there.

That was really fucking creepy to me.

And, like, again, it's not surprising, but just them outright saying, like, our first duty is to ensure that no one ever finds out when JSOC fucks up for the, just in case the one time they get it right.

Well, I mean, I think about that certainly in light of their, I wouldn't say outright stated policy, but, you know, sort of subtly implied policy that any Palestinian journalist who doesn't toe the line is a combatant because that they're showing or witnessing atrocities that Israel and the State Department would not like you to know about and therefore are burnishing the image of Hamas or the access of resistance in some way so that they can safely just be exterminated by military force.

So it's like, well, if the standards of the New York Times are now such that like when it comes to reporting the news versus,

I don't know, excising any details that might potentially embarrass our special forces or ongoing military operations, that they'll more than happy to just bite their tongue at that.

I think that would perhaps put them in a rather awkward awkward position, at least given their stated principles about who is and isn't a journalist.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know,

these guys can bend over backwards to justify any killing of a journalist in Gaza, but here they are like openly.

We don't publish

to publish.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Moving on from North Korea.

Let's talk a little bit about China.

Derek, indeed, incredible things continue to be happening in China.

Could you talk to us a little bit about the recent SEO-Tianjin summit?

Yeah, I think

to take this in context, it was a big week for Xi Jinping.

He had the Tianjin summit or the SEO, and then he had the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan Day.

at the end of World War II, and he had a big military parade to celebrate that.

So it was a big like world stage type of thing.

Wait, China was in World War II?

That comes as news to the leaders of the European Union and United States government.

But apparently, did you?

I don't know if you guys saw the Elisa Slottie.

I was today years old when I learned that China.

Yeah.

The Elisa Slotty speech where she was like, yeah, the Manhattan Project when we were in competition with the Russians for a nuclear weapon.

Like, oh my God, what are you talking about, man?

Oppenheimer came out last year.

Seriously, like, you don't even have to have taken a class

in a fucking movie.

Yeah.

So, yeah,

it's fascinating stuff.

But, but, so, yes, the SEO summit

and both of these events were showcases for Xi.

I mean, the military parade, obviously, was a chance to show off China's hardware, but both

Trump's

military parade, though.

I think we can do it.

No, no, no, I mean, Trump's supposed as

it was

so, so impressive.

It was a Swiss watch, like so quiet that you could hear the tank treads whining.

God damn.

So

what made the SEO summit stand out was that he

met with,

I mean, Vladimir Putin was at both of these things, and Putin is sort of, you know, really reliant on China at this point.

Russia has become

closer and closer to a client state.

But what was interesting or relevant, I think, about the SEO summit was that he brought in Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India,

who had not been to China.

I think this was his first visit in seven years.

And, you know, China and India have been on a bad path until fairly recently, had been on a bad path, you know, going back to, I think it was the 2020 or 2021 border clash when, you know,

their border guards were beating each other with clubs and with clubs and swords.

That was amazing.

Yeah.

I mean, they intentionally don't let them have firearms.

Oh, yeah, for a good reason.

Situation.

Not a good idea to let anybody have firearms.

So, yeah.

I love borders that are like PvP zones, but like you're laying.

Every jail.

Felix is in every jail.

Yeah, you like, you, yeah, you get banned if you bring a ranged weapon.

I think that's cool.

Like, it kills your strain.

Yeah, I think that's awesome.

So, I mean, so they've been on rough terms.

I mean, they had recently, you know, kind of started to warm back up a little bit.

You you know they had reopened commercial activity along the border which is not a huge thing i mean it's a very mountainous ragged border so there's not a lot of uh commerce happening across it on on land but it's still a symbolic gesture but what's really advanced this relationship has been trump uh punishing punishing India for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which is fascinating to me.

I don't think that's the real reason, but that's the ostensible reason.

He's imposed 50% tariffs, 25%

under the regular reciprocal tariff scheme, and then another 25% because he's supposedly mad that India is buying Russian oil, which is something that they do because they get it at a discount, but also because they were encouraged to do so by the United States government and European governments to, again, keep Russian oil flowing to markets so that there was no spike in the price of the global price of oil as a result of the war in Ukraine.

So

he's supposedly mad about this and he

goes with this 50% tariff.

Hasn't talked to Modi by all accounts in months.

And these guys were pretty good chummy, had a pretty chummy relationship during his first term.

Hasn't talked to him in months, didn't talk to him before the tariffs went into effect.

The Indian government, and this is the real reason I think that he's mad at them, the Indian government has been pushing back after he claimed to have mediated the end of the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir earlier this year.

And the Indian government said, got very offended at that because they regard,

they're very sensitive about the idea of outside intervention when it comes to Kashmir and their relationship with Pakistan.

So they pushed back against that, denied that he had played any role.

And I think he got mad at that because it, you know, it wrecks his Nobel case.

So I think that's the real reason why he's pissed off.

But they've captured it as this, you know, they're frustrated about Russia.

And, you know, without

upending, you know, literally going, you can go back to the 90s on this, the United States trying to build up a closer relationship with India, mostly to counter China.

Keep the elephant and the dragon away from

that, and this isn't to say that, you know, China and India are suddenly going to be, you know, best friends and close allies or anything like that.

But he's, I think he's advanced beyond just normalizing what had become a tense relationship.

And they're pushing further than that, partly because he feels like he can no longer rely on the United States.

Modi, that is, can no longer rely on the United States and its support.

And you've got

the U.S.

engaging more with the Pakistani government.

You had Trump with this fantasy that Pakistan is somehow sitting on all these secret oil reserves that nobody's discovered, but the United States is going to go in and like frack.

They're going to do fracking in Pakistan and come away with all this oil, which is a fantasy.

But still, he's like flip-flopped what had been a very clear direction in U.S.

foreign policy for decades and seems to have turned it on his head

with respect to like India-Pakistan.

Yeah, I mean, that seems to be the thing.

Even if,

even for countries like India and China, where, yeah, there's been incredibly tense moments just in the last 10 years, never mind the, you know, the history before that.

You would rather have someone where it at least you can you have a reasonable expectation of what is and isn't okay by them than someone where it just it's day to day and even if you do bend to their whims that doesn't really guarantee anything i i mean this

this entire thing with um just the the trump administration's entire posture with Russia and Ukraine stuff is so fucking weird.

I don't know how anyone could make sense out of it.

How any country seeking to curry favor with the United States under the second Trump administration,

what course of action they could take?

Because they're just completely all over the place.

They ran on like, you know, fuck Zelensky, fuck this war, we're ending it.

They did that huge thing where J.D.

Vance asked him to wear a suit next time.

And now,

because the talks have gone chittily, because he can't just will Russia into accepting whatever stupid settlement he comes up with, now he's just defaulting to like his sort of the actual official posture of his first administration's State Department and kind of the Biden policy, but like done even shittier.

And the India thing is so weird.

Like you correctly pointed out that like...

It's this isn't a surprise.

They haven't just recently started buying Russian oil uh and hiding it from us uh

it was in fact we did in fact encourage them to do that but we've we've historically given india a really long leash uh with regards to russia in comparison to a lot of other places india famously um

they're one of the only countries besides egypt uh that has a large military that will buy hardware from

western russian and produce well egypt doesn't do this but produce their own indigenous equipment.

India,

they have a bunch of like very modern Sukhoi fighter jets and French Raphaels and some of their own stuff.

And we still sell them missiles and other stuff.

A lot of other countries can't get away with that, but India is so important to us that we really let them do a lot of other things that typically we wouldn't allow, you know, a less important nation that we could use as a, we don't, we don't think we could use as a counterweight against China.

We wouldn't allow them to do that.

But it's, if you're them, yeah, how do you, what choice do you have except like,

well, I guess I,

there's, I have a pretty good guess of what is and isn't going to be okay with China compared to whatever the fuck this is.

It really is.

I mean,

there have been some instances where in the moment, I think people have figured out how to come at Trump and get what you want out of him to some extent.

And I think that, you know, to their credit, like Zelensky and the Europeans have figured this out, that you like, just go and blow smoke up his ass.

You tell him you're going to nominate him for, you know, 20 Nobel Peace Prizes and you're going to spend, you know, if you're doing a trade deal, you say, oh, yeah, we're going to spend like $100 quadrillion dollars in the United States over the next 10 years.

Cause it doesn't matter.

Like nobody's going to check this shit when he's gone.

And he doesn't really care.

He just wants the smoke blown up his ass.

And so you can get things from him in the immediate term.

Like, if it seemed like when he had that Alaska summit with Putin and it really seemed like he was yanking once again back in the direction of Russia and had accepted Putin's arguments and now he was going to get on Ukraine, they arranged that very hasty, you know, kind of damage control summit at the White House with Zelensky and all the European leaders who just went there and paid like obedience.

You know, they just bent the knee.

I mean, really, you had them all sitting around the desk in the Oval Office.

Like, they were.

They were sitting outside, like their principal's office.

Yeah.

Like they, yeah, like they were fucking, you know, in, you know, in detention and taking lectures from this guy.

And that's all he really wants.

And they stem the tie.

It doesn't go anywhere then.

Like, you can't get him to follow through and do what you want on the, you know, on a long-term scale, but you can at least get in there and kind of interrupt whatever train his

dying brain is on and kind of derail it if you just approach him in the you know as a as a groveler you know like you just adopt that posture it makes him very happy and that you know that's that's one way to do it but yeah as you say like there's no consistency there's no way to get him to like nail down to a particular approach or a particular policy and so in that in light of that i think modi for one and you're gonna see other uh leaders do this too like thinking even if china is offering me a worse deal, at least I know that from day to day, like she and the Chinese government are going to be more or less, they're going to stick more or less to the same consistent message and same consistent policy.

Whereas this guy, like, I don't, he's going to wake up one day.

He wakes up one day and he wants to do this and he wakes up the next day and he wants to do something else.

Like it's, it's very difficult to manage that kind of relationship.

Derek, in that vein, I have to confess,

the first question I had when I was like considering the prospect of Trump more or less shit canning 30 years of economic and cultural relationships and close allyship with the nation of India on sort of maybe like pushing them a little bit more into China's orbit or like more than more than they were in the past.

The first question I had was like Trump giving Modi and India the cold shoulder.

Are all those like right-wing culture war meme aggregating accounts that are called like femoid L's, clown world,

and Western aesthetics, are they all going to turn on Trump immediately, sort of like overnight?

I mean,

anything's possible, right?

I mean, these guys are

Modi backers at the end of the day.

So I would think at some point they will.

But yeah, that's such a weird phenomenon, too, to have these like troll farms of Indian men posturing as white guys from the, you know, from Texas or whatever the fuck.

It's just so weird.

But like, just one more thing out of this summit.

Like, I mean, look, I sort of a headline

from it was, Xi is

his claim that like that this is the dawning of a new global security and economic order that, quote, prioritizes the global south.

And like this would be China, Russia, and India.

Like, what are we to make of that claim?

And what would that look like if you're from President Xi's perspective?

This is a good question.

And I, you know, who knows?

Because we don't see him taking a lot of steps to implement anything like that, right?

I mean, mean, there was people were waiting for China to step in during the so-called 12-day war to assist Iran, and it never happened.

And Chinese foreign policy has, to me, consistently been very strictly national interest oriented.

And, you know, this idea of building a competing security architecture that would, you know, push back against the U.S.

military or offer countries an alternative and potentially a rivalry to the U.S.

in places where China's interests are perhaps not

as great as the U.S.

I just haven't seen any evidence of them doing that.

So it's hard to say what it would look like.

I mean,

he's,

I would think, mostly trying to sell weapons, really.

I mean, I don't want to boil it down to that, but like,

it really feels like, you know,

a transactional thing as far as Beijing is concerned, rather than an ideological thing.

And to erect that kind of structure, you have to have some

interest in

rivaling the U.S.

and picking a fight in some sense.

And I just don't see that from China yet.

So it may be something that he's considering

as a legacy project, but

it's hard to say without some demonstration of it what he means by that.

One last thing, a quick thing to move on from China, just like another

international thing that I was interested in you explaining.

Could you fill us in on this recent border skirmish that took place between Thailand and Cambodia and the subsequent elections in Thailand?

What was going on there?

What precipitated it?

And what is the situation currently?

Yeah, so this happened back in

July.

The conflict happened back in July.

The border crisis started earlier than that.

I mean, the Thai-Cambodian border has been in dispute for decades, going back into the 20th century there have been rulings by uh the international court of justice about uh segments of it there's a uh a particular uh area that has a hindu temple uh that was awarded to cambodia uh by the international court of justice the thai government has always disputed that uh that was back in the 1960s so this goes way way back um what happened earlier this year well there were a number of incidents uh it started in may where there was a clash between between border guards, Cambodian and Thai border guards, and a Cambodian border guard was killed during that clash.

And then subsequently, there were a number of incidents where Thai soldiers were getting

wounded, badly wounded, maimed in several cases, by landmines during border patrols.

And because the border is not well defined and

they don't agree on where it is,

there's arguments about, you know, who was in Hughes' territory and who's fired first.

The landmine incidents, the Thai government has repeatedly, you know, these have happened multiple times.

There have been

several incidents, I think half a dozen or thereabouts.

The Thai government has accused Cambodia of laying new landmines in areas where

they claim had been cleared.

And of course, Cambodia is littered.

with mines and other ordinance from, you know, we could go all the way back again, well into the 20th century, you know, mid-20th century.

But there's there's stuff all over the place, but the Thai government, the Thai military has been insisting that these are newly laid minefields and modern, you know, mines that the Cambodian government has bought.

And

they're mining the border, which is illegitimate.

They're not supposed to be doing that.

Both countries are

party to the anti-personnel mine treaty.

So that would be a violation if they're actually doing that.

But Cambodia routinely says, you know, look, this is stuff that's been left over

from the 20th century.

It's not, we're not laying new mines at the border to try and, you know, catch Thai border patrols.

So what happened after a few of those incidents in July, there was an exchange of heavy fighting artillery, a couple of airstrikes, I think, that lasted for several days,

I think five days.

before it was put to rest, mediated by the government of Malaysia and by the U.S.

to some extent, Donald Trump has claimed this is one of the seven conflicts he's ended that justified his Nobel Peace Prize.

I love that he thinks getting a Nobel Peace Prize is like getting like crowned Miss Universe or something.

Yeah, you just have to build up a restaurant.

You have to lobby hard enough for it.

Yeah.

And, you know, prepare your speech and evening gown.

But it's, I mean, it's lingered past that, and it's, it's lingered particularly on the Thai side and political

matters.

The prime minister of Thailand at the time, Peitong Tan Chinoat,

was removed from office by the country's constitutional court because of a phone call that she had with the former prime minister, now president, senate president of Cambodia, Hun Sen, whose son is now Hun Menet, is now prime minister, still obviously very influential in Cambodian politics.

She called him, and there's a relationship between Hun Sen and her father, Taxine Shinoat, that goes way back.

She called him and

I guess tried to appeal to him to tamp down tension.

She said it was costing her, you know, politically, and she needed some space to kind of deal with the military and said some things about the military, about senior military officers that were a little bit over the line in a country like Thailand, where the military and the monarchy, you're not really not supposed to insult these institutions legally.

But thinking, you know, she was talking to this man.

She called him, you know, she calls him uncle.

They're that close.

So thinking that she was talking to somebody she had a close relationship with, well, Hun Sen turned around and leaked the recording of this telephone call and caused a huge scandal.

in Thailand.

And like, you know, so she was suspended initially and then finally removed from office altogether, which has resulted in her party, Putai, losing control of the government to a coalition that's probably not going to hold together.

They're probably going to have to hold a new election in a few months.

But

so the political ramifications have really

kind of hit hard in Thailand.

And

I've seen a lot of speculation that one of the things that's causing this flare-up is that

there's been a break in this relationship between Hun Sen and Taxin Shinowat, who's fled the country, fled Thailand again because he was under legal trouble and then came back when his daughter or his granddaughter was, or no, his daughter, sorry, daughter, was elected and a prime minister and now has fled again now that she's been ousted.

So he's sort of on the run, but that they've fallen out over basically personal issues, but partly

having to do with, and I know you guys have heard about this, these like scam centers that are operating in

Southeastern Asia, that there are some, most of them operate in Myanmar because it's really very lawless there and you can set up shop and do whatever you want.

But there are some that have been operating in Cambodia, maybe with a connection to Hun Sen and his family.

the the Thai government has sort of

criticized these places and targeted them to some extent to try and shut them down and that there's tension over that or there's tension over a number of like personal personal uh matters that have have has fueled this conflict but but i can't uh speak any more than you know to to having read some some gossip to that effect well before we wrap it up for today's episode i should probably uh mention i'm sure it will be of interest to our listeners that as of about 20 minutes ago the wall street journal did just publish a photograph of the donald trump jeffrey epstein birthday card And it is about as weird as you might imagine.

A pal is a wonderful thing.

Happy birthday and may every day be another secret.

Signed, Donald J.

Trump.

And it's like

this dialogue, and then it's like framed in this.

It's so hard for men to make friends with each other.

This is the solution to the male loneliness epidemic:

sending your bro birthday cards where you draw sort of like the crude hourglass frame of a woman's body and then

frame the world's weirdest

exchange of dialogue within the sort of the body of a woman.

So that will be interesting to see where that goes.

It's really sad seeing this knowing he was an undercover.

He must have really like been disgusted making that birthday card.

But he was just so dedicated to the mission.

It's like Donnie Brasco.

Yeah.

Okay,

that does it for today's show.

We'll be back later this week.

Once again, thank you to Derek Davison.

Always enjoy talking to our chief foreign affairs correspondent.

And everyone, please subscribe to American Prestige and Foreign Exchanges.

Links will be provided in the show description.

That does it for us today, everybody.

Till next time, bye-bye.