Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Madam Johnson.

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We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes of citations needed.

And today, Adam, we want to talk about the United States government's escalating efforts to do a regime change in Venezuela.

Now, the U.S. has been attempting to overthrow the

government of Venezuela for many decades now since the Chavez days in the late 90s, including a

albeit brief but successful coup in 2002. We are now over two decades past that, and we are still seeing the same kinds of

attempts to change the government there forcibly, this time around, Adam, using the facade

of battling drug cartels. Now, while outlets like the New York Times and the Atlantic

sometimes offer kind of thin

and phoned in criticism of the Trump administration's violence and aggression, they largely

serve to launder what Trump is doing through their media outlets, offering actually support for

the broad premise, which winds up actually legitimizing in many ways what Trump is doing,

legitimizing the violence of extrajudicial murder of blowing fishermen out of the water under, again,

this thin pretext of stopping drug trafficking.

Yeah, so let's recap here.

So since early September, the White House has ordered, I don't say airstrikes, because that kind of makes it seem like military operations. They've engaged in eight mass murder sprees of random people were supposedly, were told they're evil drug dealers, even though they've, again, provided no evidence of this, to the extent to which they've rescued people who've managed to survive the boats, they don't even bother trying them. They bring them back to their home countries. So there are these evil drug kingpins who are not even worthy of trial and prosecution because, of course, they're just blowing up random boats. These so-called drug boats are designed to quite clearly provoke Venezuela into militarily responding. So what they're doing is they're

poking Venezuela in hopes that it defends its people, defends its sovereignty, defends its coast,

as again, as any country would, as the United States would, as any country would, and then say,

hey, look, they attacked the United States. We need to go to war against them. Thus far,

...