Hey, everybody, Ira here. This thing that you're listening to right now is a little bonus episode

that we decided to throw down the feed in addition to the new show that we just made,

which is called New Lord Drop, which came out of the regular time on the feed Sunday night

and should be sitting right next to this bonus episode in your podcast app.

Let me take a second and explain what you're listening to

right here. When the United States attacked Venezuela last week and captured its president

Nicholas Maduro, I kept thinking about this story that Nancy Updike did for a show a while back

about the 2024 election in Venezuela. In that election, there was this massive grassroots

effort, not just to oust Maduro and elect the opposition candidate, but also they knew that they

were going to have to prove that the opposition actually won. And so what that meant is

tens of thousands of volunteers around the country planned and trained for months.

And then on Election Day, they not only managed to get a huge turnout, going out and voting, they also organized this whole thing where they went around and they collected paper copies of the vote totals from most of the voting centers around the country.

Okay, so they have these paper receipts. They scanned these vote totals, added them up, put everything online, proving that the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, beat Maduro and beat him decisively.

Their numbers showed a two-to-one victory.

People hated Maduro that much.

But election authorities declared Maduro the winner.

He stayed in power.

People protested.

Maduro cracked down with mass detentions. Over 1,500 people.

The United Nations looked into it and found that many of those detainees were tortured.

The world knew who won. Countries around the world, including the United States, went through the opposition's numbers, looked to the receipts, concluded they were solid, and officially recognized Gonzalez, the opposition candidate, as the winner and rightful president of Venezuela.

But this past week, as you probably saw, when the United States captured President Maduro, President Trump did not say,

...