Useful Idiots

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This week we’re looking at the intensification of the decades-old US blockade of Cuba. Trump has imposed an even harsher blockade, blocking fuel to the country, leading to an even more dire humanitarian crisis.

Just this week, a report showed that US sanctions are now reportedly killing children with cancer: “Amid worsening shortages, Cuba's rate of childhood cancer survival has fallen by 15% — from roughly 80% to 65% — according to data from Cuba’s Health Ministry.”

And this isn’t just collateral damage of US policy: kids with cancer are the targets of the murderous US sanctions, which are aimed to harm the most vulnerable in a society.

Joining us to talk about these sanctions and the history of US-Cuba relations is journalist José Luis Granados Ceja.

Useful Idiots: For DropSite News, you cowrote the article: Marco Rubio Is Deliberately Blocking Trump From Cuba Talks. Can you tell us what you discovered?

José Luis Granados Ceja: What we found was that these claims that Trump was making loudly to media outlets: that they are in talks with Cuba and that they’re thinking about a deal, don’t line up with what we were hearing from people both in the U.S. and in Cuba.

We were able to ascertain that these claims of secret negotiations happening in Mexico were also not true. And a source was able to confirm that the official in Mexico City from the Secretary of Foreign Relations was not actually involved at all.

So when you put all those pieces together, it very much looks like Marco Rubio is deliberately lying to Trump, that the State Department is not being forthcoming about what’s actually happening in terms of high-level negotiations between Cuba and the United States.

And our hypothesis here is that it’s about trying to lay the groundwork for more radical action.

Useful Idiots: Can you tell us how Marco Rubio’s history with Cuba might be driving this?

José Luis Granados Ceja: We have to remember, Marco Rubio is obsessed with overthrowing the Cuban revolution. Apparently in his own autobiography when he was positioning himself to be a candidate for president, he wrote that he used to dream about leading an army of exiles and installing himself as president of Cuba. He’s obsessed with this idea.

Obviously, he already had to concede when it comes to Venezuela. But I’m not sure that he’s willing to accept anything similar when it comes to Cuba. So he may be deliberately misleading Trump in order to say, ‘well, talks didn’t work, right? We were at the table. Nothing happened. Guess we’re going to have to invade or bomb or do something similar to what we did in Venezuela, or possibly more drastic.’

Subscribe for the full interview with José Luis where he reveals the new mafia state that Rubio wants to impose on Cuba (with himself as don), how a pan-American coalition could take on the US in Latin America, and whether recent US aggression in Cuba will push China to enter the conflict.

Plus, catch our weekly roundup in the Friday Free-For-All: What do John Fetterman and AI have in common? They both just threatened to kill people

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What do a mentally-impaired fake-Democrat Senator and the inhuman AI Claude have in common? They both just threatened to kill.

“Let’s get back to killing,” Fetterman said in response to Israel’s sham ceasefire, which, while already violated countless times by the IDF resulting in the deaths of thousands more Palestinians, was not good enough for Senator Fetterman. “Kill them all,” he said.

This statement comes as the increasingly-far-right Fetterman is now cozying up to Kristi Noem and the murderous ICE, insisting he wants even more round-up deportations.

Statements like these could only be made by a psychopathic human. Or… a robot

“It was ready to kill someone, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

During a panel this week, Daisy McGregor, UK policy chief at Anthropic, the company that created Claude AI, said it's "massively concerning" that Claude has shown in testing that it's willing to blackmail and kill in order to avoid being shut down.

That comes after an engineer at Anthropic resigned, claiming that “the world is in peril.”

Which is why we think Claude would agree with John Fetterman’s desire to “kill them all.”

Also in this Friday Free-For-All: famed film director Wim Wenders, who said in 1988 that “every film is political,” was asked by a journalist at the Berlinale Film Festival if the jury panel would condemn Germany’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“We have to stay out of politics,” Wenders responded, “because if we make movies that are political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the opposite of politics.” What a shame.

Plus, Republican Congressman Jason Smith STEALS our line about Trump’s policy on immigration. And we’re NOT happy about it.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Subscribe to watch the full episode here:

Tune in for a joyous episode of Monday Mourning (as long as you’re a United States senator)! A bipartisan crew of senators including Dem Mark Warner and Republican Lindsey Graham are pushing Trump to bomb Iran and break free of the New Start nuclear arms treaty which caps the number of nukes a country can have.

And now the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just set the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. Three cheers! (if you’re a United States senator)

Also in this Monday Mourning:

• Putin is controlling Trump again (somehow that one’s back in full force)

• Dr. Oz claims Trump is making healthcare more affordable by reinstating a part of the ACA that he himself cut in his first term

• Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales feels really bad about 5-year-old Liam Ramos being kidnapped by ICE (but he gets over it very quickly)

• A Republican is calling out Trump officials named in the Epstein Files

• And so much more madness

We watched the Sunday morning news shows so that you don’t have to. Watch our full recap. And thank you for supporting independent media! You can help fund our show and get bonus content here:

*BONUS INTERVIEW*

As the Trump administration turns the world into chaos, threatening to bomb Iran, killing Americans in Minnesota, kidnapping presidents in Venezuela, and gutting the nation’s already-terrible healthcare system, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has fallen out of the corporate news cycle.

Our guest, Palestinian-American law student Ahmad Ibsais, joins Useful Idiots to explain that the reports from Gaza weren’t just pushed aside to get more views from higher-performing news stories, but intentionally buried for a much more pointed and, as always, nefarious reason.

Useful Idiots: Why have we stopped seeing of coverage of Gaza in Western media?

Ahmad Ibsais: Right before the ceasefire was a time where we saw so much public outrage that a genocide was taking place. And it wasn’t because Palestinian voices suddenly became credible in any way. It’s because the extremity of Israeli violence reached the Western consciousness in a way it could process.

There were so many news stories about children starving to death, and people could conditionally recognize that Palestinians were dying in a way that was not their fault. And that’s where the ceasefire came.

So now, any violation of the ceasefire or coverage of it, brings into question the fallacy that America was able to broker it. Like is America even a superpower anymore? Does the Israeli state even care what America says or does?

Second, let’s keep up this illusion that America is not contributing to the genocide or that they’re in any way complicit. Coverage raises the question: Palestinians are still dying, so what are we doing and how are we enabling this?

That’s why we don’t see it anymore. And they’ll wait, as they have done in the past, until Palestinians respond in a meaningful way. And that’s when the ceasefire ‘breaks.’

Our full interview with Ahmad Ibsais is free to all. As an independent media team, we rely on your support to keep going, so please subscribe and join the Useful Idiots community!

You’ll also get our Friday Free-For-All: Jeff Epstein, the Russian Spy.

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Watch our full, unpaywalled interview with Iranian-American Professor Afshin Matin-Asgari

For our recap of the week, including the new Russiagate conspiracy that Epstein was a Russian agent, subscribe to watch our Friday Free-For-All: Jeff Epstein, the Russian Spy.

This week, amid volatile tensions, deadly protests, rumors of Mossad infiltration, and threats of war, the US and Iran are scheduled to have diplomatic talks, though one side pulling out would not be surprising as the US can’t seem to stop bragging about how sanctions destroyed Iran’s economy all while threatening to bomb them.

For some much-needed clarity on the issue, we spoke to Professor Afshin Matin-Asgari, author of Axis of Empire, who participated in leftist protests during Iran’s 1978-79 revolution.

He gives a history of Iran-US relations, mocks JD Vance’s obvious misunderstanding of how Iran’s government works, debates Aaron on which side is really responsible for the violence in recent Iranian protests, and analyzes Marco Rubio’s “unpredictable” diplomacy proposal.

Useful Idiots: Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the terms for what he says would be ‘meaningful talks.’ Do you think that Iran will accept those terms?

Afshin Matin-Asgari: To go back to the background of these talks, when Trump canceled the so-called Obama nuclear deal, he said that he did it to force a better deal on Iran. That was during his first term. And that never happened. All the pressure, sanctions, threats, and assassination of Iranian military personnel didn’t work.

So he joined Israel’s war on Iran.

What happens at this point? The Islamic Republic is in its weakest position it has ever been because of an accumulation of a lot of problems: it has domestic unrest, the axis of resistance, including Hezbollah in Syria, is gone, it’s more vulnerable than it ever was to military attacks.

So Bahrain has accepted to come to negotiations. If Trump can make the Islamic Republic accept some of his terms, he could claim victory, impose the new deal on Iran, and kind of walk away from this, which may not be a bad thing because it at least averts a full-scale military confrontation, something that everyone knows would be a disaster. But it can’t be predicted.

Our full interview with Professor Matin-Asgari is free to all. As an independent media team, we rely on your support to keep going, so please subscribe and join the Useful Idiots community!

You’ll also get our Friday Free-For-All: Jeff Epstein, the Russian Spy.

And stay tuned for a bonus interview tomorrow with Palestinain-American law student Ahmad Ibsais for an update on Israel’s latest attacks on Gaza.

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“The stupidest conspiracy theory of all time” is back! Russiagate, the craze that swept the nation in 2016 that we naively dreamt had gone away after nine years of mind-numbing accusations of Russian bots, Putin puppets, and stolen elections, has now expanded to include a certain New York financier.

Sure, there are countless proven pieces of evidence that Jeffrey Epstein actually was tied to a foreign government: he had intimate communications with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, his lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was a Mossad asset, his lawyer was leading Israel defender Alan Dershowitz, and several of the newly released files show connections to Israel.

But in the same way that Democrats, when searching for anything they could use to attack Donald Trump, completely ignored his widespread and well-documented payments and influence from Israeli donors, corporate media is following the playbook and claiming that Jeffrey Epstein was not an Israeli agent but a Russian one.

Does it get any stupider?

Also in this week’s Friday Free-For-All: Donald Trump showed a hint of empathy for the first time, but in the worst way possible, Chuck Schumer gives basically no pushback to the murderous ICE and admits it’s okay for them to wear masks, and US leaders taunt Iran about destroying their economy and threaten to strike them, all while claiming that Iran is the real aggressor.

Everything’s a mess! Watch with Katie and Aaron to laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

It was a crazy weekend, but as Useful Idiots know, a disturbing world means an action-packed Monday Mourning. Here’s what we cover:

– A seemingly drunk Lindsey Graham begs Trump to bomb Iran

– Mike Pompeo can’t stop bragging about Mossad’s covert plants in the Iran protests

– Republicans are flailing to defend ICE’s murder of ICU nurse Alex Pretti

– Karoline Leavitt parrots Nancy Pelosi’s paid protester line (with not even a thought about giving evidence of who’s paying them)

– TRUMP EPSTEIN FILES

– CLINTON EPSTEIN FILES

– CBS’s anti-Maduro propaganda

– And so much more ridiculousness. Mock it all with Katie and Aaron

Plus, catch last week’s Friday Free-For-All: Smug Man Accidentally Admits He’s MAGA Now

And our interview with a civil rights attorney who exposes Dems’ complicity in ICE’s rise to power: Dems EXPOSED for Secret ICE Funding

Thanks for supporting independent media, join the Useful Idiots community here:

Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:

While the DHS is sending masked ICE agents into cities, rounding up immigrants and citizens alike, killing protesters, and creating chaos, Democrats are making a big show of being anti-ICE. They’re calling for reforms, body cams, accountability, and training.

This sounds great, but civil rights attorney and Copaganda author Alec Karakatsanis reveals it’s actually “extremely dangerous.” Under the guise of reform, the Democrats are playing a key role in a centuries-old strategy of building an oppressive, high-surveillance police state used to target the most vulnerable communities in the country.

And it’s all a plot.

Useful Idiots: What are the most dangerous reforms being pushed by the Democrats and why are they dangerous?

Alec Karakatsanis: One of the most important ones that you hear constantly from Democratic Party leadership right now is body cameras. Now, aside from how silly that is in this context, the officer who shot and killed Renee Goode literally filmed himself doing it, it’s actually much deeper.

The evidence is overwhelming that body cameras do not make police less violent and they do not reduce police misconduct. So you have to ask yourself, why are Democrats proposing something that everybody agrees does not make police more accountable? And the history of this is that police agencies wanted body cameras for many, many years, but they couldn’t get the billions of dollars of funding for them.

What they wanted is to link all this new footage and data into algorithms that train AI into massive databases. That’s why you see ICE with cameras. They scan people’s faces. Prosecutors also wanted body cameras so they could get guilty pleas really quickly, like trespassing charges against unhoused people and drug possession cases.

So they had this problem: the industry wanted to make billions of dollars in contracts. The police wanted them for surveillance and to connect people to AI. But they couldn’t afford it.

And then what happened was after Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, the Obama administration worked with local Democratic Party officials and the policing surveillance industry to just remarket body cams, not as police surveillance but as accountability and transparency for well-meaning liberals who were desperate for something to be done.

That resulted in the greatest expansion of policing surveillance technology in modern history.

Useful Idiots: So the Democrats’ current stance is that they’re threatening to block the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, where ICE is a component, unless there are certain reforms?

Alec Karakatsanis: What the Democrats are basically saying is ICE needs to spend even more money on surveillance technology like body cameras and on so-called training.

Anybody who knows what the police and military training industry is in the United States would not support more money going to that. It’s one of the most dark, violent, and fascist corners of our society.

These training programs are where they learn to do the stuff that you’re seeing in these videos. That’s why in 2020 there were thousands of videos of police committing intentional, brutal crimes and violence, and it looked the same in hundreds and hundreds of cities. It wasn’t some one off mistake. This is what police are trained to do.

The Democrats are saying, ‘if you do those reforms,’ which the police want anyway, because there’s huge industries behind them, ‘we will then give you this entire budget.’

The main leverage Democrats actually have is reducing the ICE budget, but they’re starting the negotiation by saying we’ll give you everything you want. It’s really, really insidious.

Subscribe to watch the full interview with Alec on why AOC and other Dems calling for the National Guard and police agencies to stop ICE is exactly what the police state wants, and why those videos of police playing basketball or handing out donuts evolve from colonialist tactics used by the French against Algerians.

Plus, catch this week’s Friday Free-For-All: Smug Man Accidentally Admits He’s MAGA Now

Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

Bill Maher awards the next Nobel Peace Prize to……… Donald Trump!

The smuggest man on TV, used for years by conservatives as the token “liberal” to bash on the left (like: when you’ve even lost Bill Maher, you know you’re too far left), has now officially come out as MAGA.

“If [Trump’s attack against] Venezuela causes Cuba to fall,” he says on Real Time, “if he somehow gets Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran… he should get a Nobel Peace Prize!” What does it say about a person if they believe causing more destruction, more war, more people to suffer on top of the many people suffering already due to Trump’s policies, should get you the Nobel Peace Prize?

It’s straight-up neocon behavior that puts Maher to the right of most Republicans.

We really do try to avoid showing clips of this slimy man on Useful Idiots: it’s low-hanging fruit and it causes our viewers nausea, but this one was too mucilaginous (a word I just learned when searching ‘Bill Maher synonyms’) not to mock.

Also in this week’s Friday Free-For-All: CNN trips over itself in a crazy contradiction while trying to defend Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, Mike Pompeo claims that what the Iranian government did to it’s protesters in two days is somehow worse than Israel destroying all of Gaza over two and a half years, and Trump admits that he no longer cares about affordability for young people.

Trying to stay warm in the freezing weather? This Free-For-All will make your blood boil. Subscribe to watch all the craziest news clips of the week with Katie and Aaron: