[Note: The article was originally published in Portuguese in Folha de. S.Paulo, on January 5, 2026]

The United States, over the past 50 years, has fought more wars than any other country by far. In order to sell that many wars to its population and the world, one must deploy potent war propaganda, and the U.S. undoubtedly possess that.

Large parts of both the American and Western media are now convinced that the latest U.S. bombings and regime-change operation is to “liberate” the Venezuelan people from a repressive dictator. The claim that liberation is the American motive – either in Venezuela or anywhere else – is laughable. 

The U.S. did not bomb and invade Venezuela in order to “liberate” the country. It did so to dominate the country and exploit its resources. If one can credit President Donald Trump for anything when it comes to Venezuela, it is his candor about the American goal.  

When asked about U.S. interests in Venezuela, Trump did not bother with the pretense of freedom or democracy. “We're going to have to have big investments by the oil companies,” Trump said. “And the oil companies are ready to go."

This is why Trump has no interest in empowering Venezuela’s opposition leaders, whether it be Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado (who Trump dismissed as a “nice woman” incapable of governing) or the declared winner of the country’s last election Edmundo Gonzalez, in whom Trump has no interest. Trump instead said he prefers that Maduro’s handpicked Vice President, the hard-line socialist Decly Rodriquez, remain in power. 

Note that Trump is not demanding that Rodriguez give Venezuelans more freedom and democracy. Instead, Trump said, the only thing he demands of her is “total access. We need access to the oil and other things.”

The U.S. government in general does not oppose dictatorships, nor does it seek to bring freedom and democracy to the world’s repressed peoples. The opposite is true.

Installing and supporting dictatorships around the world has been a staple of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. The U.S. has helped overthrow far more democratically elected governments than it has worked to remove dictatorships.

Indeed, American foreign policy leaders often prefer pro-American dictatorships. Especially in regions where anti-American sentiments prevail – and there are more and more regions where that is now the case – the U.S. far prefers autocrats that repress and crush the preferences of the population, rather than democratic governments that must placate and adhere to public sentiments.

The only requirement that the U.S. imposes on foreign leaders is deference to American dictators. Maduro’s sin was not autocracy; it was disobedience.

That is why many of America’s closest allies – and the regimes Trump most loves and supports – are the world’s most savage and repressive. Trump can barely contain his admiration and affection for Saudi despots, the Egyptian military junta, the royal oligarchical autocrats of the UAE and Qatar, the merciless dictators of Uganda and Rwanda.

The U.S. does not merely work with such dictatorships where they find them. The U.S. helps install them (as it did in Brazil in 1964 and dozens of other countries). Or, at the very least, the U.S. lavishes repressive regimes with multi-pronged support to maintain their grip on power in exchange for subservience.

Unlike Trump, President Barack Obama liked to pretend that his invasions and bombing campaigns were driven by a desire to bring freedom to people. Yet one need only look at the bloodbaths and repression that gripped Libya after Obama bombed its leader Muammar Gaddafi out of office, or the destruction in Syria that came from Obama’s CIA “regime change” war there, to see how fraudulent such claims are.

Despite decades of proof about U.S. intentions, many in the U.S. and throughout the democratic world are always eager to believe that the latest American bombing campaign is the good and noble one, that this one is the one that we can actually feel good about. 

Such a reaction is understandable: we want heroes and crave uplifting narratives about vanquishing tyrants and liberating people from repression. Hollywood films target such tribalistic and instinctive desires and so does western war propaganda. 

Believing that this is what is happening provides a sense of vicarious strength and purpose. One feels good believing in these happy endings. But that is not what Americans wars,  bombing campaigns and regime-change operations are designed to produce, and that it why they do not produce such outcomes.
 
 

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

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 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks.