Well, howdy there, internet people, it's Bell again. So today, we're going to talk about

Trump's going bananas for Venezuela. Every so often, something starts to feel familiar, not because the

details are the same, but because the logic is.

History doesn't repeat. It rhymes.

And the more Trump administration officials talk about Venezuela, the more the tune down south is getting more and more familiar.

But we knew it would.

I did that deep dive into Trump's foreign policy document and the Monroe Doctrine over on the second channel. I said, if it was going to be fully implemented, we'd see a repeat of the

banana wars. The banana wars weren't a single conflict. They were a series of U.S. military interventions across

Central America and the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Countries like Haiti,

Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic found themselves hosting U.S. Marines, sometimes for years at a time.

The public justification was stability, protecting American lives, preventing chaos,

occasionally preventing European influence. But it's foreign policy.

It was about power, and money is power.

American companies, especially fruit and shipping interests,

needed predictable governments, favorable laws,

and uninterrupted access to resources. When local politics threatened that

predictability, intervention unfolded. What made the Banana Wars distinctive wasn't just force.

It was unique because of the normalization of what General Smedley Butler saw as the protection racket.

The generals said, quote,

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service,

and during that period, I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico, and especially

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