All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing our friend Dan McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and of course, co-host of the Liberty Report, four days a week there with the great Ron Paul, to coin a title.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm doing well.
How about you?
Real good, man.
Appreciate you joining us on the show.
So it's been about a year since the big coup that wasn't in Venezuela, and of course, you're always sharp on this stuff when it's the NED at work, but so tell us about Juan Guaido's last ride.
Maybe just like in your first paragraph here, remember Juan Guaido?
For those who don't, refresh our memory about what happened a year ago, and then we'll get into what's going on here now and get our yucks.
All right.
Well, you know, there was a presidential election last year, or actually it was at the end of 18, I guess, in Venezuela, and Maduro was reelected, and I think he was about to take office in January when the speaker of their parliament, the National Assembly actually, got a call from Mike Pence saying, hey, you want to be president?
And essentially saying, if you want to declare yourself president, the U.S. will recognize you as president.
The U.S. was trying to push the idea that Maduro cheated in the elections, and that's kind of an arcane thing, what happened, and I may not need to really get into it, but what it ends up being is, here's a guy who's never run for president, didn't get a single vote for president, just happened to be the head of the National Assembly in the opposition, and the U.S. recognized him as president, and I think about roughly 50 countries followed suit afterward.
They staged a couple of coups, a couple of demonstrations, but the military didn't turn, the coups were unsuccessful, and so doing what it always does in failed policy, Washington doubled down, more sanctions, more sanctions, and now a year has passed, and Guaido, there was a change in the National Assembly, and Guaido lost his role as the speaker, he was voted out, and so this is hence the title, His Last Ride, His Star is Fading, where once he was in the wealthy suburbs, would brawl in a few thousand for his rallies, now there's just a couple of hangers-on, and his popularity has, I think I saw it retreated by 40%, but that doesn't stop the State Department, that doesn't stop USAID, so that's kind of the crux of what we're saying.
And now, so regarding his loss of authority in the Assembly a couple of weeks ago, what did happen with that, and did he really lose, or they just figured out a way to screw him out of his position, which he deserved anyway, as far as I care, but ...
Well, from what I understand, there are competing narratives, and the ones that you hear in the mainstream media are that Maduro took over the National Assembly, undermined it, it's all his fault, and that's what happened.
The other version is that he was prevented from attending the session, which would have had him elected, and so therefore he wasn't elected.
What I've read, and I do rely a lot on the guys over at the Grey Zone, the guys and gals at the Grey Zone Project, because they've done some splendid reporting, and in fact, Max Blumenthal, who broke the story of the aid convoy in February of 2019, that was reluctantly confirmed by the New York Times, just shows what good work they've done.
What it appears to have happened is, this seems to be kind of a Guaido's attempt to be Boris Yeltsin.
The Assembly was meeting, it appeared that he staged him being kept out of it, and was climbing over a fence and clamoring over a fence to get into the Assembly, while a wider pan shows that the whole thing looked pretty staged.
Apparently, he was trying to get in with 11 former members of the National Assembly, something of that nature, and they weren't allowed.
It looked like it was kind of a setup, but whatever the case, the reality is, what happened in the National Assembly, which is anti-Maduro, is that the anti-Maduro opposition split around the time, a little after Guaido's failed coup attempts, and there's one faction that decided it's OK to negotiate with Maduro out of the political stalemate, and the hardline faction, which was represented by Guaido and his group, refused to have anything to do with it and refused to negotiate.
It looks like the more moderate faction of anti-Maduro got the upper hand in the National Assembly, and I think there was, I forget, there was certainly a plurality present at the election that saw Guaido ousted in favor of a different member of the opposition.
Of course, that's not how it's played in the U.S.
It's played that the guy who is now the head of the National Assembly is just a Maduro stooge, which, everything that I understand, is not the case.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it seems like he was a part of a faction, a different faction of the very divided opposition, rather than one of the Maduro guys, right?
Yeah.
Luis Parra is his name, and his party was less radical than Guaido's, so it's their country.
There's going to be a lot of different factions.
There's going to be groups that say, hey, why don't we talk to him?
There's also going to be a lot of State Department types and CIA types that are telling Guaido, no, keep the hard line.
You got to keep the hard line.
You got to keep this thing alive, because they're never going to give up on this regime change policy for Venezuela.
Thank God, they're so bad at this, and that could have really been a crisis if they had figured out a way to try to follow through.
I mean, right away, they were like, oh, geez, well, maybe we need to send in the Marines.
Well, wow, that escalated quickly.
I thought you guys said you had a plan.
What happened to your plan?
Yeah.
Well, they depended on the military going over to Guaido's side, and it just didn't happen for whatever reason.
Maybe it's because unlike elsewhere in Latin America, I'm thinking of Bolivia, the military in Venezuela did not train at the School of the Americas.
If you followed that, all of the guys who did the overthrow of Morales just happened to have trained in the U.S. at the, whatever they call it now, the old School of the Americas.
So when Washington called, they answered.
So that's probably one of the reasons they couldn't get to military.
I bet there's a lot of our tax money was waved in front of those military noses if they would have turned.
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Tell me about, right after this happened, the failure of this, you know, attempt to maintain his leadership of the assembly here.
He went off to meet with Pompeo in, uh, in Columbia.
And then I think I've read this more, it says here, he went to Davos.
And look at this headline.
Did you see his headline?
That Juan Guaido says that the Venezuelan crisis is comparative to Syria, pleads for international intervention.
Yeah, it's incredible.
You know what we ought to do?
The crisis is like Syria in say, like 2011.
And what we want to do is make it more like Syria in 2013.
That sound good?
And you wonder why no one shows up at his rallies, no one shows up to support him.
You know, it's, uh, it's incredible.
And think about the optics.
Okay, here's a guy who's trying to sell himself as a man of the people.
Maduro was stealing from the people and Guaido was going to be a man of the people.
And here he shows up at a place that's the epitome of the elites, you know, the global billionaire elites.
And he shows up to plead with these people, of all people, to help him, to help him take power.
You know, it's just, just think if you're some poor Venezuelan, you're hit hard by sanctions, a bad economy.
And you see this guy hobnobbing with, you know, the George Sorosian elites in Davos.
It's just, it's, it's almost comical.
Yeah.
And I'm not sure, you know, every quote this time, but I know in the past he has explicitly called for American military intervention, send in the Marines to save my country, which if you put the shoe on the other foot, yeah, you'd think I could pronounce that word.
If you put the shoe on the other foot for a minute is the highest treason.
Yeah, it is.
Can you imagine anyone in the U.S., regardless of what you think, anyone in the U.S. who claimed themselves to be president and invited the Chinese military to come over and install him in office?
If it was a legitimate threat, which obviously he is, because he controls millions and millions of USAID and State Department dollars.
That's a legitimate threat.
It is certainly high treason.
And the fact that he's not been arrested, I think it's probably, lately, it's probably testament to the fact that he just really isn't that much of a threat to Maduro any longer.
Yep.
Well, and you know, we have a recent example here.
I mean, we had this entire hoax where the Democrats were saying that Donald Trump was only the president because the Kremlin helped him usurp the rightful throne of Hillary Clinton.
And so, therefore, there's a good example for, how about if Hillary had said she didn't just want help from, you know, George Bush's old FBI director.
She wanted the Chinese to come in and do whatever it takes to put her in the White House in the chair.
It's just completely crazy on the face of it, not just in terms of, you know, the actual relationship between America and China, but for any leader of any country to talk that way about bringing anyone else in to use, therefore, a foreign country's force to put them on the throne.
In what context does that make sense?
Other than throwing out some kind of Vichy leader, you know, and, you know, the French inviting the Americans in to kick out the German puppets for a little while, something like that.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, even, not even going that far, but even the act of asking another country to put economic sanctions on us, please, please destroy our economy because I want to be president.
That would be seen as treasonous as well.
So it's, but, you know, it's good that you bring it up in that context because, you know, I've spent a long time, and I know you have too, Scott, looking at the color revolutions, looking at the USAID, NED revolts overseas, looking at the anti-democratic military coups in the name of democracy.
I'm thinking of places like Egypt.
We've seen it over and over, the people power in the streets that just happened to be guided by the invisible hand in Lengli, and eventually it would come home to roost.
And that's exactly what it's done, I think, in the impeachment, regardless of what you think about Trump.
And we've spent a lot of time criticizing Trump, who's a lunatic and a loser in many ways.
But this is exactly what's come home to roost in the United States.
Yeah.
I mean, it sure looks like they just, you know, amounted.
In every one of these, the color-coded revolutions, there's some kind of a crisis to exploit.
I mean, in most cases, they engineer it one way or the other, but, or just help it along.
They're quick to recognize, you know, an election whose margin is close enough to dispute or whatever it is.
So that's what it looked like they did here.
They just, you know, if we can't get rid of him, and they said this themselves, it's in the CNN story.
They said that, well, we decide if we can't overthrow him, at least we're going to have to rein him in so they can't change our Russia policy.
As explicit as that.
Well, here's what I think you saw what Schiff said Friday, which is that we had to, we had to fight Russia and Ukraine because you didn't want to fight them here.
Completely nuts.
That's a third one of these during this impeachment.
The two State Department officials, Timmerman and Carlin, both said it before, and now Schiff.
It's just amazing to think that they could get away with pushing that line.
It's just, it's so completely ridiculous.
But you know, I guess if you don't know anything about it and people repeat that kind of stuff in public with a straight face enough, then it seems like maybe it must be true.
Otherwise, how come they keep saying it, you know?
And nobody is allowed to contradict them on the TV, so.
And if you hate Trump anyway, or you don't like him, or you, you know, whatever the case, you'd be more likely to, to buy into it.
There are a lot of people on the progressive side that I have a lot of respect for that do not like Trump, but have fought this a lot.
You know, this whole, people like Michael Tracy, you know, and others like that, Max Blumenthal have been very good, I think, in, in not endorsing Trump, but certainly not endorsing this crazy coup.
But I mean, back to Venezuela, Ben Norton did a piece for the Gray Zone, and he had a very handy link to USAID's own website, and pointing out from December, from 2017 to the end of 2019, the Trump administration spent at least $654 million on quote unquote aid-related schemes for Venezuela.
And a lot of that money went to pay the salary of Guaido and his, and his coup administration, i.e. it went into their pockets.
Remember, there was the scandal where they, a group of his people went to Colombia, I think it was, and blew 100 grand over the weekend, you know, on, you know, on God knows what.
So, this is real money, and it's really talk about, you know, we talk about how we're so concerned for the Venezuelan people, and they deserve a better life, and here we blow half a billion dollars, and we kill 40,000 with our sanctions, you know, I mean, people aren't that stupid.
Well, and given it to the most wealthy factions in the country are the ones who are most dissatisfied about the state of things there.
And even with all that money, or perhaps because of all that money, they still can't get their act together.
Maduro is so bad, I have no reason to argue on his behalf that I have ever heard.
And yet, somehow, all the opposition still can't get their act together to unite to form a front that could even begin to challenge his power in any reasonable way.
So, what does that say about them, or about the state of the emergency there?
You know, it's really that bad that they can't let the other guy, you know, drive the opposition coalition for a little while and take the back seat for the good of the country?
And if not, then even if the crisis is that bad, and they can't get their act together to work together to stop the Maduro government and replace it, then how could they possibly be the people who are going to work together to save the country from all the consequences of Maduro's actions up until this point if they did seize power?
It almost makes you start believing that the U.S. wants a failed state in countries like this because a failed state is easier to manipulate.
You buy off a couple people, they do your bidding.
I mean, this one is so bloody obvious, you know, the Guaido regime's ambassador to Washington was an Exxon executive, you know, and Venezuela just happens to have the most oil of anywhere.
You know, it's just such a blatant example of U.S. crony capitalism and corporatism, you know, that it's the crocodile tears for the people, you know, it's hard to swallow.
But as you said earlier, I think, you know, look at the U.S. mainstream media.
It doesn't cover this in any even remotely objective way.
They take the talking points straight from the State Department.
And people like you and I who, you know, who like socialism about as much as we like getting hit in the head, you know, our view to somehow, you know, sympathizes to Maduro.
You know, it's just, there's no news anymore.
You know, you mentioned in your article about how a lot of libertarians got on board for this because the narrative was, look, left-wing bad, oh, and especially hyperinflation.
Isn't that a thing of you libertarians?
You don't like printing money, do you?
Well, this guy prints money.
Let's get him.
And I don't, I don't want to know what percentage of self-identified libertarians in America a year ago fell hook, line and sinker for this stuff.
Well, it's certainly true.
I mean, I remember being attacked by Starwork and who's that crazy doctor who made that video?
You know, if you don't support Juan Guaido, you're a horrible bastard or something.
I forget what it was he said.
It's just incredible.
And as I pointed out in the short piece, almost sort of tongue in cheek, the idea that libertarians like that would want us to support a stooge picked by Washington, by the State Department as some kind of a savior for the free market, since when is the State Department giving a damn about the free market in the U.S. or anywhere else?
You know, it's just so, it's so absurd to have a U.S. government pick stooge as the savior of the free market in Venezuela, you know.
And you know, and I said later in the piece, you know, libertarians, especially if they really cared about, you know, a decent economy in Venezuela, they would spend all their efforts opposing sanctions because sanctions give governments control over the economy, de facto and de jure, because they have to, they have to control all of the shortages.
It gives them more power to control the rationing, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Sanctions are the, are the, are the mother of state power in places like Venezuela.
Yeah, well, so, I don't know, what do you expect to happen there now, politically speaking?
It seems like the Maduro government is completely ensconced there and has the support of most of the people, or at least enough of them.
Yeah, they are supported, you know.
Morales was supported in Bolivia, you know, in the U.S.
This is the problem with having the world's empire on our shoulders, is that the USAID has thousands of people on staff who live for this kind of thing.
If they can't go in and remake Venezuela, then they're out of a job.
Everything depends on it.
And it's not just the U.S. bureaucrats.
It's the corporate entities behind them that are foaming at the mouth at the prospects of making billions of dollars.
You know, the whole thing is a big, crooked scam.
And it's because we believe we have the right to rule the world by the bullet, or the ballot, or the people in the street, what have you, you know, and that's the root of the problem, that we have a USAID, that we have a State Department at all, you know, is a big part of the problem.
Do we need a State Department?
Do we need ambassadors in a hundred and some countries?
You know, this is not the days, I forget who wrote this article recently, but these are not the days of riding on horses and taking months to cross, you know, to get back to Washington.
In this era, do we really need these multimillion, billion dollar embassies and bureaucrats in every country of the world?
You know, what is the purpose?
What is the value to Americans to have this sort of thing?
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of the things I really like, Dan, is that it's your colleague, the great Dr. Ron Paul, who serves as the basis for such a great counterfactual to this whole narrative.
He ran for president in 1988 as the Libertarian Party candidate.
And if only he'd been elected, then at the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it would have been the absolute abandonment of the American empire as well.
Yeah, and we...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Well, just how it didn't have to be this way at all, and it just seems natural from some points of view that, well, wherever power retreats, we can now expand to take in that, take up that space.
But if you have any kind of, you know, knowledge or ethic about, you know, the meaning of having a limited constitutional republic, then you see that as just a great opportunity to not take advantage and to instead make sure to come home and focus on revolution in one country here and lead the rest of the world by example and all that stuff Ron Paul says.
And just think of how different and how much better the last 30 years would have been if that was the story of the end of the Cold War instead of a bunch of Bushes and Clintons.
And think of the peace dividend we would have had, you know, and even to this day, the brightest young scientists at universities.
And you know, my son is studying engineering at Texas A&M, a top university for science.
These kids are all getting sucked into the military-industrial complex because that's where the action is.
You know, the greatest minds are being diverted to creation of weapons of war, weapons of destruction, instead of creating things that will make life more livable, better, reduce poverty, our reliance on fossil fuels, what have you.
All of these great minds are being sucked into the war machine.
And we're all much, much worse for it.
Yeah, man, it's definitely true.
And nothing to show for it at all.
I mean, man, we've got some kick-ass missiles, though.
Yeah, I guess, you know, for people born with missing limbs, there have now been advancements in prosthetics, and the soldiers kind of didn't count, because they would still have their limbs if they hadn't gone to the war.
So that's a wash.
But for people who were born with some birth defects and stuff, I guess there's been advances in fake legs and fake hands.
But be careful, you're going down the life of Brian Path.
But aside from the fake legs, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Yeah.
And I love the way people say, oh yeah, no, we wouldn't have microchips if it wasn't for the government and the military industrial complex.
Jet technology?
Well, that would have never been advanced without the war machine.
I don't know, man.
Read some Hazlitt.
He says, yeah, you don't know that.
We may have had a hundred times better chips by now if it hadn't been diverted.
I think it was Jeff Tucker one day was saying, let's think if there was no post office, we'd probably have vacuum tubes that go under all of our houses, where you just drop your mail in there and it goes.
Someone would have invented that a long time ago and made money off it.
We wouldn't even think twice about it.
Something like that sounds completely like the Jetsons to us, because we have a government mail service.
We would never have an advancement like that, you know?
As if we'd all be sitting here staring at our belly buttons for our entire lives if it wasn't for the U.S. military empire, you know?
Yeah, seriously, we'd have nothing to do at all.
In fact, you know, I read this thing, Dan, you may have seen this, I guess last week.
It was, I can't remember the title of the story, but it was sort of just about military life and this and that.
And they had this quote, it was like the kind of thing you could have made up for a script in your story about it, you know, where the soldier says, hey, listen, you know, I get money for an advanced education.
I got, you know, housing and food and health care for my wife and my kids.
And I've got, I'll never be laid off no matter what.
And you show me a better deal for the working man in this country.
And it's like, yeah, straight out of the, you know, horse's mouth or from the out of the mouths of babes kind of thing or whatever, where like in his innocence, he's demonstrating just how completely corrupt our economy has become.
This great deformation of this American militarism.
It's gotten that far out of control where this guy can't, you know, working class guy can't imagine life out there trying to get construction work on the day to day compared to a life like this.
Shoot.
Yeah.
But like all government promises, they're pretty hollow.
Wait till he goes to the VA and needs to get some actual treatment, you know, they'll do everything they can.
I'm sure you saw the story a couple of weeks ago where they repossessed a veteran's prosthetic legs because he didn't, he didn't pay, he didn't pay for them, you know.
So they, and try, you know, try to cash in that education.
It's not all it's cracked up to be.
But you're right.
It's a bad state of affairs, but these are the only opportunities for people like that.
Yeah.
And because of the economy, people always go, well, you know, war is good for the economy.
Really?
Cause shouldn't we all be rich as sin right now?
Then what's the problem?
As we got plenty of war, I don't know.
Who's economy?
Huh?
Not ours.
Theirs.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, listen, I'm just so grateful that you and Ron Paul are holding down the work that you guys do every day there at the Ron Paul Institute and on the Liberty Report.
It's so important.
And the example that you set is so important for the rest of them too.
And it's all just such great work.
So thank you.
And thank you very much again for coming on the show, Dan.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, you guys, Dan McAdams, he's at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity RonPaulInstitute.org.
And of course, check out the Liberty Report at, I have it right here.
It's RonPaulLibertyReport.com.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSRadio.com, AntiWar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
