Trump confirms authorization of covert CIA operations in Venezuela, won't say whether they can 'take out Maduro'



President Donald Trump may have resolved several bloody conflicts since retaking office, but he is clearly not averse to executing military strikes in the Western Hemisphere in the interest of protecting the American people.

The president announced on Sept. 2, for instance, that he had ordered a strike that killed 11 individuals on an apparent narcoterrorist drug boat that was headed to the United States. Following a series of similar attacks, Trump revealed on Tuesday that the U.S. military had conducted yet another lethal strike on an alleged narcoterrorist vessel, killing six men "just off the Coast of Venezuela."

'Venezuela is feeling heat.'

Trump, who has suggested that every such drug boat vaporized amounts to 25,000 American lives saved, confirmed on Wednesday that the U.S. will not limit its actions against Venezuelan cartels, which the administration does not distinguish from the socialist Maduro regime, to kinetic maritime strikes.

The president confirmed on Wednesday — months after the State Department increased the bounty for Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to $50 million and weeks after White House special envoy Richard Grenell reportedly cut off all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela on the president's instruction — that he has authorized the CIA to conduct covert actions on the ground in Venezuela.

During a news conference in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump said he made the authorization for two reasons: first because Venezuela has "emptied their prisons into the United States of America" and second because of the drugs Venezuelan terrorists smuggle into the U.S.

Citing unnamed U.S. officials, the New York Times reported earlier in the day that the authorization meant the CIA could execute lethal operations both in Venezuela — against Maduro and his regime — and elsewhere in the Caribbean, where Trump recently notified Congress that the U.S. is now engaged "in a non-international armed conflict" with several terrorist organizations.

Trump said of the efforts by South American cartels to smuggle drugs into the U.S., "We've almost totally stopped it by sea. Now we'll stop it by land."

RELATED: 'We will stop you cold': Trump announces successful strike against 'narcoterrorist' vessel

The U.S. Navy warship USS Sampson docked in Caribbean waters. Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images

When asked whether he was considering executing land-based military strikes on enemy cartels, Trump said, "I don't want to tell you exactly, but we are certainly looking at land now because we've got the sea very well under control."

Three Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, the nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie, and the littoral combat ship USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul are presently operating in the region.

Maduro, whom the Trump administration has recognized as leader of the specially designated global terrorist organization Cartel de los Soles, claimed last month in response to the American military buildup in the region, "in response to maximum military pressure, we have declared maximum readiness to defend Venezuela."

Caracas has supposedly enlisted over 8 million Venezuelans as reservists.

When asked on Wednesday whether the CIA has "the authority to take out Maduro" — there is allegedly interest among a handful of senior officials in the Trump administration in orchestrating a regime change in Venezuela — the president said that was a "ridiculous question" for him to answer. Trump noted, however, that "Venezuela is feeling heat."

Maduro, whose alleged electoral victories in 2018 and 2024 are not recognized by the U.S., stated in response to Trump's remarks on Wednesday, "No to regime change that reminds us of the failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. … No to coups d’état carried out by the CIA."

Blaze News has reached out to the White House for comment.

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Why the Epstein story cannot be buried



Why does the story of Jeffrey Epstein matter so deeply to the American right? Why does it persist, years after his death, as a source of outrage, fascination, and dread? Why is the call to “move on” met with such visceral resistance?

The answer lies in what Epstein’s case reveals. It is not merely the record of one man’s depravity or even the scale of the crimes committed. It is a window into a concealed architecture of unaccountable power, intelligence protection, institutional rot, and elite impunity. For many on the right, it confirms long-standing fears about how power in the United States is really organized and who it is designed to serve.

These questions strike at the heart of an older conservative concern: Who governs? And who is permitted to ask?

These concerns are hardly new. They are the very ones that helped elect Donald Trump, and they have shaped conservative criticism of the American regime since the New Deal. The Epstein affair provides a rare glimpse into the soft underbelly of the administrative state. At some point, moral clarity demands that we stop parsing and start acting. This is a time to strike, to “fire for effect.”

From the expansion of the federal bureaucracy under Franklin D. Roosevelt to the postwar rise of the national security state, conservatives have warned about the merger of government power with private influence. The most dangerous feature of that merger is not the bureaucracy itself, but the consolidation of authority among entrenched intelligence services, elite financial networks, and foreign-aligned interests. These actors operate in close coordination, beyond democratic oversight, and with the consistent protection of institutional power.

Epstein is valuable because he exposes that structure in plain sight. He had no obvious source of legitimate wealth. His hedge fund, insofar as it existed, had only one known client. Yet, he moved in elite circles, befriended presidents and princes, and maintained access to corporate titans and scientific institutions.

Most disturbingly, Epstein appears to have operated a long-standing sexual blackmail network. The question is not merely how he got away with it, but who allowed him to do so.

Staggering implications

The answers are deeply unsettling. The FBI curtailed its investigations. The CIA has remained silent. The media showed little interest and declined to pursue the story in any depth. Meanwhile, the possible involvement of foreign intelligence services (especially those operating through figures like Leslie Wexner) has been treated as politically untouchable. This refusal to investigate is not born of ignorance or oversight. It is protective behavior. It signals that the wrong people are implicated.

Even if one adopts the minimalist position, that Epstein was not a formal intelligence asset, the implications remain staggering. Why would a known predator be permitted to operate so openly, with so many connections to power? Is the American state unable or unwilling to act when the guilty hold the right kinds of passports or relationships? Have we reached a point where elite networks are simply beyond reach, shielded by layers of shared interest and mutual compromise?

These questions strike at the heart of an older conservative concern: Who governs? And who is permitted to ask?

RELATED: The White House will need to do plenty more to get past Epstein

Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Epstein’s case offers a rare and ugly answer. What it uncovers is not a fever dream of conspiracy but an observable mode of governance that relies on secrecy, compromise, and shared immunity. It appears that intelligence actors have conducted operations not only abroad but also inside the United States, targeting the American elite itself. An immoral country condones sexual blackmail as a mechanism of influence and protection, integrated into a broader system of control ... ironically an indication of a country spinning out of control.

A complicated inquiry

One can find instructive parallels in the operations of Israeli intelligence during the 1980s and 1990s. Under the direction of Mossad officials such as Efraim Halevy, Israel conducted systematic surveillance and developed personal leverage over Syrian elites. These methods included financial inducements, covert recordings, and exposure of private behavior. Such tactics are common in international espionage and are recognized tools of statecraft.

What makes Epstein so alarming is the apparent use of similar techniques within the United States, directed inward rather than outward. The uncomfortable possibility is that foreign intelligence services (including Israeli cutouts operating through figures like Wexner) were not merely bystanders, but active participants or beneficiaries of the Epstein operation. That possibility remains largely uninvestigated, not because it lacks merit, but because it threatens established political alignments.

Wexner’s history as a major donor to Republican candidates is one example of how these relationships complicate any honest inquiry. For a sitting senator or rising intelligence officer, confronting these questions comes at great cost.

This story is not important only because of the criminal sexual behavior it contains. That abuse, particularly of underage girls, is monstrous and demands full exposure and justice. But Epstein’s operation mattered at a higher level because those crimes were used to build networks of control. They were not incidental. They were instrumental. This is the cold logic of espionage deployed inside a supposedly self-governing republic.

RELATED: The conspiracy theorist is the last honest man

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

For the political right, Epstein represents a grim vindication. The warnings about politicized intelligence services, compromised elites, and foreign impunity were long dismissed as paranoia or fringe thinking. Yet, the details of this case suggest those warnings were not only plausible, but understated.

Consider the unequal application of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Consider the way domestic allies are hounded while foreign-aligned actors operate with impunity. Consider the cultural message that those with the right credentials and connections will never face consequences. Epstein’s story reveals the inner wiring of a regime that no longer pretends to serve the citizen, only itself.

Denial becomes confirmation

Was Epstein a direct employee of a domestic or foreign intelligence apparatus? I highly doubt it. My best guess is he was a very well-connected money launderer with a psychopathic lack of empathy who was therefore the perfect tool for intelligence gathering and manipulation. He operated in the open, however, and was criminally harmful to some of the most vulnerable U.S. citizens. But we have seen how little citizenship means in the modern internationalist cosmopolitan soup.

Efforts to bury this story are morally callous and institutionally suicidal. Each attempt to suppress, ignore, or discredit the legitimate questions raised by the Epstein case erodes the remaining credibility of the agencies involved. The denial becomes confirmation. The silence becomes testimony. The cover-up increases the criminality, the offense to the American people.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) warned in his farewell address of a rising military-industrial complex. But the deeper danger he identified was the fusion of state power, private capital, and unaccountable influence. Epstein should be understood as a grotesque product of that fusion. Refusing to confront it will not preserve institutional authority. It will ensure its collapse.

In the end, the Epstein story is not simply salacious. It is foundational. It forces a reckoning with how the American regime truly operates and what moral and political compromises have become routine. That is why so many are eager to see it buried.

And that is precisely why it must not be.

UN agency telling Americans to reduce meat consumption in name of climate change is run by senior Chinese communist official



The United Nations wants Americans and other Westerners to eat less meat. Although the alleged purpose of the internationally requested diet is to futilely attempt to arrest global weather patterns, there appears to be more at play than just so-called distributive justice and climate alarmism.

After all, the director-general of the specific U.N. agency expected to issue this demand during the COP28 summit next month happens to be a top Chinese Communist Party member whose nation, the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, will likely be among the so-called developing nations exempted from the guidance.

What's the background?

Last November, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization indicated it would develop a plan to make the world's food system more sustainable, telling sovereign nations how to change their respective food and farming industries in order to align with internationalists' goal of halting global weather patterns and somehow keeping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Bloomberg reported that the FAO's guidelines, set to be published at the COP28 summit in December, will instruct developed nations whose populations allegedly consume too much meat — according to foreign metrics — to limit their intake.

According the FAO, the average American reportedly consumes around 279 pounds of meat a year. By way of contrast, the average Nigerian reportedly eats 15 pounds of meat annually and the average Chinese resident consumes 133.6 pounds of meat, as of 2020.

Under the guidance, developing countries, including the country with the world's second-biggest economy, will apparently be encouraged to improve their livestock farming.

Not only does the forthcoming recommendation seem to be punitive for Western nations, it may also be counterproductive.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) told Fox News Digital, "Regulating producers out of business in the U.S. will not effectively address global climate change, but export production to foreign countries with hostile regimes and worse emissions profiles while harming food security and affordability. Simply put, the world needs American farmers and ranchers more than the U.N."

Guidelines for thee, but not for Xi

China, which has all but indicated it will not live up to its Paris climate accord commitments, continues to claim it is a developing country.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping's nominal second in command, Han Zheng, claimed at the U.N. general assembly in September that despite its $18 trillion GDP at the time, China is "the largest developing country" and "will remain a member of the big family of developing nations."

While it's presently unclear whether this self-categorization alone — which the U.N. entertains despite American criticism — would exempt China from the dietary recommendation, the director general of the FAO is unlikely to cross Beijing with his agency's road map.

Qu Dongyu has previously been accused of using his position to advance the merciless Chinese regime's foreign policy agenda. Beijing has also been accused of bribing officials to get Qu the gig.

Qu formerly served as vice minister of agriculture and rural affairs for the CCP. As FAO director, he has continued to cheerlead Chinese initiatives such as the communist regime's Global Development Initiative.

"Nobody actually takes him seriously: It's not him; it's China," a former U.N. official told Politico. "I'm not convinced he would make a single decision without first checking it with the capital."

Concerning Qu's promotion of the U.N.'s so-called sustainable development goals, Francesca Ghiretti, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, said, "You need to be aware that these are policies that first and foremost are thought to advance China, either materially or in terms of international reputation, or in terms of diplomacy."

The Washington Free Beacon reported that a reduction in global meat production could greatly benefit China, which is the world's largest meat importer. China's foreign supply could conceivably become more stable and secure if American producers find themselves facing less domestic demand. Such security would undoubtedly be welcome after last year's large-scale food shortages and the regime's promise of material improvement in living year over year.

Concerning Qu's 2019 election to head of the FAO, Kristine Lee of the Center for a New American Security told Foreign Policy, "Chinese officials report back to Beijing and first and foremost serve the narrow interests of the [Chinese Communist Party], rather than truly advancing multilateralism and strengthening transparency and accountability at the U.N."

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Political organization in the total state



We now know that the FBI labeled Donald Trump’s supporters as a distinct category of domestic extremist. While this formal step toward the criminalization of political opposition in the United States is horrifying, it should not really come as a surprise.

After all, the FBI and Department of Justice have spent the last few years repeating the lie that “right-wing extremism” is the most serious domestic threat to the nation. Federal law enforcement agencies cook their statistics on politically motivated domestic threats by excluding groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa from the category of left-wing violence, thereby removing the most egregious example of domestic terror in recent memory — the riots of 2020 — from the data. It is clear that the Democrats are accelerating their efforts to make organic right-wing political organization a criminal offense leading up to the 2024 election, and this poses a serious threat to those who still operate under the assumption that they are protected by the First Amendment.

Popular political organization is a fundamental right. From the Boston Massacre to the Sons of Liberty dumping tea in Boston Harbor, protest has been woven into the American identity from the beginning. American schools regularly praise civil rights or anti-war marches from the 1960s; media depicts the leaders of these movements as national heroes who changed the course of history. It is no wonder that conservatives, who have routinely watched the left get its way after popular political action, would seek to organize their own movements in response to a government that cares little about their concerns.

When the right begins to organize, however, conservatives soon learn that a very dangerous set of forces is arrayed against them. A small misstep can turn into a legal disaster.

After months of leftist rioting and looting where government buildings were placed under siege and militant activists established autonomous zones, many Trump supporters were understandably confused about the rules surrounding popular political actions. The vicious persecution of protesters involved in the events of January 6, 2021, quickly made it clear that the American judicial system had bifurcated: one standard for friends of the regime and one standard for its enemies.

Even more disturbing than the politically motivated prosecutions, however, was the number of federal agents or informants who were present in the crowd that day. It remains unclear just how many of the protesters were working with or for federal law enforcement agencies. But it is clear that the number was high and that some of those individuals played a role in shaping the events that unfolded.

Every totalitarian government knows that in order to maintain control, officials must keep the populace jumping at shadows, terrified to organize or take action.

Groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which have been identified as flash points by the Biden administration, appear to have been deeply infiltrated by the domestic security apparatus. FBI agents and informants have also played a prominent role in engineering other “right-wing” plots like the planned kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The regime leaders are looking for a very particular type of domestic enemy that will justify the expansion of policing powers, and they are more than happy to manufacture them if necessary.

While the January 6 protest has given the regime its most viable pretext for ratcheting up persecution, federal law enforcement has often decided to intimidate political opponents with no real justification.

The Justice Department threatened parents who showed up at school board meetings to protest doctrines like critical race theory and trans ideology that were being forced onto their children by progressive activists masquerading as teachers. Dozens of parents have been investigated by the FBI for daring to challenge the government’s victimization of their children.

We also know that agents from multiple FBI field offices surveilled and investigated Catholics who attend the traditional Latin Mass, singling them out as potential domestic extremists. When you cannot attend a church service or disagree with a school board member without drawing the attention of the national police force, you no longer live in a constitutional republic. You live in the total state.

Now, to be clear, the Biden administration is unlikely to ban all opposing political parties in the United States. At least not formally. For all of their delusional ranting about the rise of a Christian theocracy, most establishment Democrats understand that the Republican Party, as it is currently constituted, is a valuable asset to the regime.

Let’s be honest: Republicans are glorified losers and they are comfortable with that role. Any political party that believes power is bad and should never be used, even if you happen to win an election accidentally, is no real threat to the ruling elite. Most Republican politicians will pretend to care about advancing the ball on one or two issues, but in reality, they are happy to collect their salary, be honored at the local Rotary Club, and call it a day.

The Republican Party is a safe place for marginalized middle America to park its political energy while being farmed for political donations and tax dollars. If a candidate like Donald Trump comes around threatening to provide real opposition, he can simply be slandered and indicted until the “opposition party” goes back to picking safe losers like Mitt Romney or Mike Pence. No reason to destroy a perfectly useful pressure release valve.

While many conservatives had been unsatisfied with this dynamic for a long time, Trump galvanized that feeling into a movement with real momentum. People can and should criticize Trump for his lack of personal discipline and inability to realize the type of change necessary, but the energy he captured was real, and it scared the establishment for a reason. The left called George W. Bush a war criminal and John McCain a baby-killer, but they never tried to put either man in jail to keep them from running for president. Trump may not have been capable enough to pose a threat to the swamp, but the spirit he captured was one of real opposition, not the safe and controlled neoconservatism that has played Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters for so long.

That is why federal law enforcement has largely focused its efforts on parents, traditional Catholics, and meme makers. While Republicans squabble over how much taxpayer money to launder through foreign vassal states, real political discontent continues to grow in the organic communities that have been abandoned by our political elites. Every totalitarian government knows that in order to maintain control, officials must keep the populace jumping at shadows, terrified to organize or take action due to the high probability that agents of the state are working to criminalize their activity. This tactic is particularly effective in our current environment, where Americans believe instinctually that they have the freedom to organize but are also aware that simply making a meme or standing in the wrong crowd can completely ruin their lives.

In politics, the organized activists always beat the disorganized masses, which is why preventing effective organization is the first priority of our aspiring total state. So how should those who recognize this fact organize if they know that the state is actively looking to manufacture scary political enemies that it can parade around to increase its power?

The first step is to avoid giving the regime easy targets, but as we can see from its targeting of parents and churchgoers, the regime is happy to focus on groups that are usually seen as benign. The smartest move for most conservatives is to start local, securing control of sheriff’s offices, county commissions, and school boards.

Large national-level demonstrations are not likely to bring sweeping change and are far more likely to become targets of subversion. Capturing regional political control is often a thankless task. But that kind of diligence can create a bulwark against a corrupt administration seeking to punish dissent.

‘FBI Raid’ on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago Crosses Major Lines
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‘FBI Raid’ on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago Crosses Major Lines

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