"The question is: who's really in charge? I know President Trump appears to be. I'm not convinced that's the case because remember... you had this giant Israeli flag suddenly appear in the middle of the Republican convention. And certainly in my lifetime... I don't know of a single instance where either the Democratic or Republican parties held a convention and hoisted a giant foreign flag... I've never heard of that before." -- Col. Douglas Macgregor during an appearance on the Judging Freedom podcast with Judge Andrew Napolitano (Jan. 3, 2026)
Just four days after Benjamin Netanyahu appeared as a guest on Newsmax's The Record with Greta van Sustern and informed the insufferable newscaster that Iran is "exporting terrorism... to Venezuela. They're in cahoots with the Maduro regime... this has got to change," it was announced that U.S. military forces had carried out a large scale operation against Venezuela, capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, who will both "face the full wrath of American justice" after being indicted on drugs and weapons charges in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The capture of Maduro occurred exactly 36 years to the day after US Delta Forces captured Panamanian President/CIA informant Manuel Noriega, and it's unlikely that Netanyahu's recent visit to the U.S.-- the fifth in 2025 by the international fugitive -- and the American operation are unrelated. While talk of 'stolen oil' and 'narco-terrorism' currently dominates the mainstream discourse, the fact that Israel has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since the days of Hugo Chavez has gone virtually unreported.
Prior to Maduro's predecessor Chavez winning Venezuela's 1998 presidential election, relations between the naturally wealthy South American country and Israel had been relatively strong. Venezuela voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947 -- which allocated 55% of historic Palestine to the as-yet-unfounded Jewish state -- and two years later voted in favor of Israeli membership to the UN. By the mid 1960s, Venezuela boasted a robust Jewish population equipped with an impressive communal structure of schools, synagogues and cultural centers organized by middle-to-upper-class members of the community. In 1967, Jewish ethnic solidarity inspired a large number of Venezuelan Jews to travel to Israel to fight alongside their co-religionists in the Six-Day War. Following the conflict, a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Morocco arrived and settled in Caracas contributing to the largest Jewish population in Venezuela's history, numbering 45,000 at its peak, evenly split between Sephardim and Askenazim.
By the mid-2000s, however, relations between Venezuela and the Synagogue began to fray.
The first notable rift occurred in late 2004 following the assassination of Venezuelan state prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who was killed by a car bomb at age 38. [1]
At the time of his death Anderson had been investigating more than 400 people suspected of involvement in the Llaguno Overpass shootout and the failed 2002 coup d'état, during which Chavez was ousted from office for two days before being restored to power by popular support and with the help of loyal ranks within the military. (Accusations of Jewish involvement in the coup were made by Venezuela's ambassador to Russia, Alexis Navarro, as well as by pro-government newspaper Diario VEA.) Speculation about Mossad involvement in Anderson's murder plus a tip that weapons and explosives in connection with the crime had been transferred from the Club Magnum shooting range to the Colegio Hebraica Jewish school in Caracas prompted Chavez to authorize his investigative police force DISIP to conduct an armed raid on the school on the morning of November 29, 2004. Chavez's investigators intercepted busloads of kids and evacuated 1,500 students from the building while searching for any materials related to Anderson's assassination. Ultimately nothing of value was found and the incident was loudly condemned by local and international Jewish organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who referred to it in typically melodramatic fashion as a "pogrom."
Throughout the next two years Chavez's rhetoric concerning Jewish power and influence became considerably more pointed, especially following Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006. It was during this time that Chavez recalled his country's ambassador to Israel and threatened to sever diplomatic ties with the Jewish state in protest of its military operation, describing it as a "new Holocaust" and "similar or, perhaps worse, who knows, than what the Nazis did." Chavez further inflamed the sensibilities of Jews at home and abroad by travelling to Tehran and affirming that Venezuela would "stand by Iran at any time and under any condition."
In January 2009, Chavez finally made good on his threat when Venezuela severed all diplomatic ties with the Jewish state due to its conduct in the 2009 Gaza War which left 1,400 Palestinians dead and over 5,000 wounded. Once again referring to the violence as a "Holocaust" and a "flagrant violation of International Law," Chavez expelled Israel's ambassador to Venezuela and called for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to be tried for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Shortly thereafter, foreign minister Nicolas Maduro met in Caracas with representatives from the Palestinian National Authority and Venezuela officially recognized the existence of a Palestinian State on April 27, 2009. [2]
By this time Chavez was facing tremendous pressure from the international Jewish cabal and it was clear he had a target on his back. Never one to back down, Chavez fought the Jews to the end. According to the World Conference Against Anti-Semitism, Chavez's pro-government media published "an average of 45 [anti-Semitic] pieces per month" in 2008 and "more than five per day" during the January 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and in early 2013 dozens of documents were leaked to the press showing that SEBIN, Venezuela's premier intelligence agency, had been collecting "private information on prominent Venezuelan Jews, local Jewish organizations and Israeli diplomats in Latin America" which outraged the hypocritical Anti-Defamation League who referred to the surveillance as "chilling."
During a nationally broadcast speech in June 2010, Chavez condemned Israel as a "terrorist and murderous state," asserting that "Israel is financing the Venezuelan opposition. There are even groups of Israeli terrorists, of the Mossad, who are after me trying to kill me." Hugo Chavez died on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58 after a two year battle with cancer. He was succeeded as President of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela by Nicolas Maduro who blamed his predecessor's death on "a US plot." [3]
"Narco-Terrorism"
For months the Trump administration has been trying to claim that Maduro is responsible for trafficking boatloads of drugs into the United States, using the unfounded claim to justify deadly strikes on 30 small vessels in the Caribbean and what Trump referred to as "the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs." Initially 'The Donald' tried claiming the boats were carrying fentanyl and that each extra-judicial strike would save 25,000 American lives. However, this outlandish conspiracy theory was dead in the water once even American boob-tube addicts realized that no evidence exists showing that any significant level of fentanyl is produced in South America, as confirmed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
With the fentanyl narrative sinking faster than Maduro's purported drug-trafficking vessels, the Trump administration seamlessly pivoted to talk of 'stolen oil' and cocaine trafficking. While it's true Venezuela plays a role in the international cocaine trade, the US does not appear to be a significant destination as no direct trade route via sea is known to exist between the two countries. In reality, far more cocaine and fentanyl enters America through Mexico and yet, miraculously, socialist president Claudia Sheinbaum's "narco-government" fails to register a blip on Uncle Sam's regime change radar.
Another overt contradiction in Trump's 'war on drugs' narrative is the federal pardon he granted ex-president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had just recently begun serving a 45-year sentence after being convicted in a New York federal court for drug trafficking and firearms offenses and for receiving millions of dollars in bribes from drug cartels, including a $1 million bribe from Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Despite having trafficked an estimated 400 tons of cocaine into the United States over a period of 18 years, Hernandez walked out of prison a free man on December 1, 2025, just days before the Honduran general election in which Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, the candidate from Hernandez's Honduran National Party, who himself was indicted by authorities in 2020 on charges of money laundering, embezzling public funds, fraud, and abuse of authority.
Trump's support for Juan Orlando Hernandez and Nasry Asfura isn't surprising coming as it does from the man who pardoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and is currently engaged in running interference for an international child sex trafficking ring. Indeed, Trump's entire life has been spent swimming in the same swamp he promised to drain and now he's being used as a tool for regime change in Venezuela and soon Iran. Disgraced attorney Alan Dershowitz, who staunchly defended Pollard in his 1991 book Chutzpah, recently told the media that "If President Trump wants to be known as the peace president, he has to be in support of regime change."
Certainly America could benefit materially from Venezuela's resources, but it seems there's a deeper play involving Israel that's the driving force behind the conflict. This was made apparent after Fox News published an article claiming Maduro's Venezuela has become "Hezbollah's most important base of operations in the Western Hemisphere, strengthened by Iran's growing footprint and the Maduro regime's protection" and again after ultra-Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee informed the world that the US overthrow of Maduro was "great news" for Israel because of his country's partnership with Iran and Hezbollah -- which might explain why Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez believes the operation was imbued with a "Zionist tint." When viewed in its entirety it's hard to disagree. Capturing Venezuela's vast oil reserves might even portend an immediate escalation in the Middle East by diminishing Iran's primary geopolitical leverage, e.g., blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see an escalation on that front in the coming weeks and months.
Whatever the case may be, you can rest assured knowing that the Trump administration is not waging a war on "narco-terrorism," a completely meaningless propaganda term. The illegal narcotics destroying the minds of Americans young and old are undoubtedly entering the country under CIA and Mossad auspices, just as they were in the 1980s during Iran-Contra when Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton -- a "terrific guy" according to Trump -- permitted the use of his Mena airstrip for the transport of an extraordinary amount of cocaine into the United States. A highly-placed conspirator within the Iran-Contra nexus was Jewish neoconservative Elliott Abrams (Trump's US Special Representative for Venezuela from 2019 - 2021), who recently advocated for regime change in Venezuela for the purpose of -- among other things -- reducing drug trafficking! Abrams, who crafted the 1998 PNAC letter demanding the removal of Saddam Hussein, was convicted in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts for his role in the Iran-Contra affair after entering into a plea agreement to avoid felony charges of perjury.
Evidentially, international gun/drug running isn't a concern at all for Trump, so long as the perpetrators play for the right team. But hey, MAGA, be of good cheer, your white knight's attack on Venezuela isn't without its supporters...
