Useful Idiots

This weekend Border Patrol in Minneapolis murdered another peaceful protester, ICU nurse Alex Pretti. Trump officials are having such a horrible time trying to cover for this one that they’re resorting to the cancel-culture lingo they mocked for years:

“It feels as though you’re blaming the victim here,” says CNN’s Dana Bash.

Senior Border Patrol Official Greg Bovino whines back, “The victims?? The victims are the border patrol agents! I’m not blaming the border patrol agents! The victim are the border patrol agents! The suspect put himself in that situation.” And then one more time for good measure: “The victims are the border patrol agents!”

Then deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche uses the word he learned from woke culture, complaining that the media needs to stop “gaslighting the administration about what happened.” What happened was seen by the entire country in footage filmed by protesters. It is not gaslighting to watch the video.

And just to ratchet up the hypocrisy even more, they begin claiming that Pretti acted illegally by bringing a gun to the protest. Pretti had a legal permit to carry a gun. But that doesn’t matter:

“You cannot bring a firearm to any sort of protest that you want,” says FBI Director Kash Patel.

“He brought a gun!” adds Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “I’ve been to a protest. Guess what, I didn’t bring a gun. I brought a billboard!”

So now these guys, the same people who lionized Kyle Rittenhouse for bringing an assault rifle to police-violence protests, are against the Second Amendment? And pro-woke culture? It’s hard to be surprised anymore, but this one’s a lot to take in.

Join Katie and Aaron for all this, and so much more, on a wild episode of Monday Mourning.

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As protests, violence, and confusion continue to unfold and escalate in Iran, with media coverage somewhere between ignorance and propaganda, we try to break through the lies to learn about what’s actually going on.

We spoke to Iranian-Canadian journalist Samira Mohyeddin about why Iranians are protesting the government, how Israel’s Mossad is involved in those protests, the purposefully crippling and murderous effect of sanctions on ordinary Iranians, and why anyone who tells you they know what Iranians think is “full of shit.”

Useful Idiots: At this point, what’s your understanding of what’s happened with the protests in Iran: To what extent are they peaceful? Who’s responsible for the violence? And what is the extent of state repression?

Samira Mohyeddin: This is sort of unprecedented in Iran during the successive number of protests that we’ve had throughout the years. The merchants in the Grand Bazaar have never really protested until now. This happened because Iran’s currency just plummeted to its lowest that it’s ever been, which reduced their ability to import items.

And then things took a very decidedly violent turn, both on the part of the protesters and on the part of the state. All of a sudden you saw buildings being burned, police and security personnel being killed, some of them burned alive. This is very weird. We have been watching protests in Iran for decades. This is not how Iranians protest. I really need to just put that out there.

And then the state repression and violence started with Iranian security personnel using live ammunition on protesters.

Then the internet went out.

So it’s a very muddied story right now both because of the internet blackout, and because you have all these bellicose, reckless statements being made by people like Mike Pompeo and Israel’s heritage minister, Amihai Eliyahu, saying things like, “We were on the ground in June, you better believe we’re on the ground now, we have a hand in this.”

[In addition, on January 2, Mike Pompeo tweeted: Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them...]

Making such statements really provides fodder to the Iranian government, who already thinks all of its grievances that its citizens have are something to do with a foreign hand. So it’s a really awful clusterfuck, to be honest.

Useful Idiots: It’s almost as if Mike Pompeo and people in the Mossad wanted to endanger the protesters to justify whatever their plans are for further bombings of Iran.

Samira Mohyeddin: I mean, it feels like that. This isn’t solidarity, this is sabotage. You can’t pretend to care about Iranians and then write “Happy New Year to the Mossad agents walking beside them.” You are putting a target on the backs of protesters when you say something like that.

Useful Idiots: This week at Davos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bragged that “President Trump ordered Treasury to put maximum pressure on Iran, and it’s worked! Their economy collapsed. They are not able to get imports. And this is why the people took to the streets. So this is economic statecraft. No shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.”

Subscribe to hear Samira’s response to this blatant brag about murdering ordinary Iranians, plus how she landed on the “Top 4 Antisemites” list for calling out the most racist podcast clip you’ve ever seen.

And don’t miss this week’s news roundup, the Friday Free-For-All: Elon Musk Unknowingly Quotes Mel Brooks’ Hitler Character

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Elon Musk is a bad joke teller.

“You know I heard about the formation of the Peace Summit,” Musk sets up the joke in a what else, what else rhythm. “And I was like… is that spelled P-I-E-C-E??” He looks around with a big grin, waiting for the laugh.

There’s silence. Next to him onstage, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink laughs nervously. Only then does Musk realize he hit the wrong punchline. So he does what any good comic does, and explains the joke: “You know, a little piece of Greenland? A little piece of Venezuela? All we want is piece!”

Now which is the worst part of this: that awful delivery, or the fact that in the 1983 film To Be or Not To Be, Mel Brooks plays none other than Adolf Hitler and makes literally the same joke to great laughter from a Nazi audience. But in 2026, it’s told completely unironically.

Mr. Brooks, if you’re a Useful Idiots subscriber, please let us know which one hurts more, the Nazi thing or how he badly he butchered your joke.

Also in this week’s Friday Free-For-All: former IDF soldier Josh Shapiro got offended that Kamala Harris’ 2024 VP vetting team asked if he had ever been an Israeli agent (the answer is yes, he has). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accidentally admits that US sanctions were designed to kill ordinary Iranian civilians. And a new Zohran Mamdani-vs-Israel feud leads to a vicious Twitter battle between Katie and a brain-dead Zionist.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s Friday Free-For-All. Support independent media and subscribe to watch the full episode here:

Kristi Noem did not do well on her Face the Nation appearance this weekend. And Katie and Aaron did not miss the opportunity to make fun of it.

From accidentally calling her own agency’s statistics a fake news lie, to contradicting her claim that ICE agents aren’t using chemical weapons against protesters, to admitting the First Amendment no longer exists when it comes to ICE, to claiming that even mentioning the public case of ICE officer and alleged murderer Jonathan Ross is the same as doxxing, she dug herself into hole after hole.

We feel bad making fun of someone so…intellectually challenged, but she’s currently in power running what this week’s guest Craig Mokhiber called “the modern day Brown Shirts,” so we’ve got no choice but to do our part in mockery.

Also in this Monday Mourning: Republicans are tripping over themselves over the stupidity of Trump’s Greenland takeover plans, Democrats continue to only call out Trump’s regime change operations for being unsuccessful, mentioning nothing about their moral implications, and Israeli mega-donors Miriam Adelson and Haim Saban accidentally get outed by their own moderator.

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In October 2023, Craig Mokhiber resigned as director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights over the UN’s failure to act to stop the genocide in Gaza. Since then, he has been writing and speaking out about Israel’s crimes in Gaza as well as the other wars launched by the US-Israel Axis. This week, we’re focusing on Israel’s secret role in destabilizing Latin America, the Maduro government in Venezuela in particular, and in training ICE.

Useful Idiots: Can you talk about the Israeli regime’s nefarious role in Latin America?

Craig Mokhiber: It’s a long story, the history of the Israeli regime supporting far-right governments and death squads in Latin America and attacking or supporting attacks on progressive governments and movements in the region. And that’s why in her first address after the U.S. attacked Venezuela, the vice president, who’s now the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, said that the attack on the country had “Zionist undertones.”

People of the region are well aware that the hand of the Israeli regime in destabilizing progressive governments has been going on forever. We’re talking about Israeli weapons, Israeli equipment, Israeli surveillance technology, Israeli intelligence cooperation, spying on opposition, and so on. But what’s really sometimes missed in these conversations is that the Israeli regime has been exporting not just weapons and technology and tactics, but it also exports a kind of violent and racist ideology. Ideas that are very right-wing, very Zionist, very militarist, very anti-human rights, obviously deeply anti-Muslim and anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian and anti-left, and this general idea that tries to frame law enforcement as equivalent to military.

That has been a big part of it. And that’s why, after the attack by the US on Venezuela, Israeli regime leaders were absolutely giddy celebrating the attacks on Venezuela and the abduction of the Venezuelan president.

Useful Idiots: What about Israel’s role in U.S. crackdowns against its own citizens?

Craig Mokhiber: This is what I refer to as the Zionist boomerang. This support for Zionism, fascism, apartheid, all of the crimes of the Israeli regime in Palestine, now it’s come back to our own cities. We’re talking about policing tactics that are entirely inconsistent with international human rights standards. You’ve got decades of the US underwriting apartheid, surveillance, repression, and genocide in Palestine. Those practices are now being brought home.

We’ve seen it in the brutal persecution of student protesters. You see it in the distortion of US legislation by Israel. The official adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as an Israeli tool to try to silence dissent about Israeli abuses. You see it in the wholesale suspension of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in the U.S. on behalf of the Israeli regime.

This is blowback from support for Zionism in Western Asia and you now see it in the corruption of U.S. law enforcement with this continuous structured flow of Israeli weapons and equipment and surveillance technology. A lot of these things come out of Israel’s so-called counterterrorism tactics. And whenever you hear that word counterterrorism, I think we’ve all learned, human rights runs for cover. It’s surveillance, it’s brutal crowd control techniques, racial profiling, intrusive intelligence gathering that’s now touching all of us.

That is a product of this Zionist boomerang. And that alone should terrify everybody who lives in the United States.

Watch and share our full, unpaywalled interview with Craig Mokhiber.

And don’t miss this week’s Friday Free-For-All: GOP Senator Accidentally Blows Iran Secret

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“I would support removing the regime,” says Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin on CNN.

“So you’re in favor of taking out the Iranian regime?” responds CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, unable to believe he said that out loud.

“I am, at this point,” Mullin responds proudly, clearly not yet understanding the seriousness of a sitting senator calling to oust a foreign leader…. Until later in the interview when he suddenly backtracks.

“We’re not into regime change…”

“But you just said you are for regime change, there.”

“No, I, I said I’m for the strikes. I didn’t say––”

“You said before that you were for taking out the regime.”

“Yeah, absolutely! That’s different than regime change. We didn’t – we’re not going after the regime. We’re going after the people that are killing their own people, and that happens to be the regime.”

“But just to be clear, you support taking out the supreme leader?”

“If he’s the one…then absolutely!”

“But that would be regime change.”

That’s right, it’s circus day at the GOP!

And just when Katie and Aaron get into the really good ridiculing of Senator Mullin, we flip over to another Republican on CNN who is mad that ICE protests are happening in the streets, instructing them to write “a letter to the editor, or start a podcast.” Ah yes, just like Dr. Martin Luther King would’ve done.

Flip again! AG Pam Bondi is yelling on Fox News about how she gleefully fired six prosecutors who refused to attack the widow of the woman murdered by ICE. Flip again! Karoline Leavitt is yelling at reporters for asking why that woman was murdered. Flip! Flip! Flip!

It’s a crazy circus here at the Friday Free-For-All, and that’s not even getting into the Zio-circus from the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Hitch a ride with Katie and Aaron, they’re crashing through it all.

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“F***ing b****!”

New bodycam footage shows that a male voice, allegedly the ICE officer who shot and killed Renee Good in Minnesota this week, yelled this out after the deadly shots were fired. When confronted with this thorn in the MAGA story that this was a scared ICE officer fearing for his life, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem unravels.

In the days since the shooting, Noem, as well as Vice President JD Vance and Border Czar Tom Homan, have been attacking and blaming Good for her own murder, labeling her a domestic terrorist. As more and more footage of the incident comes out, showing that the car was not being “rammed” into the officer, audio of Good and her partner saying they were leaving the site, and now this, the domestic terrorist accusations are growing thinner and thinner.

MAGA’s getting desperate.

Katie and Aaron analyze this, as well as the unfolding chaos in Iran, where anti-government protests have erupted over a failing economy. MAGA senators like Lindsey Graham and John Fetterman are using this as an opportunity to push for strikes and sanctions against the Iranian people.

And one comment by Mike Pompeo leaks that Israel’s Mossad may be involved in the protests.

It’s a jam-packed Monday Mourning, laugh and cry at it all with Useful Idiots.

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The Trump Administration’s regime change operations in Venezuela are escalating rapidly, making it a challenge to keep up with the facts, lies, hypocrisies, kidnappings, and killings. That’s why we’re speaking with Professors Gabriel Hetland and Alex Aviña, two experts on the historical implications of US destabilization attempts in Latin America, who deep dive into why Trump is attacking Venezuela, the role oil and natural resources play in this, and the broader conflict it will bring with China and BRICS.

Useful Idiots: Despite the invasion, Alex, you’ve argued that this can be read as a sign of weakness of the United States. Can you elaborate on that?

Alex Aviña: The fact that they didn’t opt for a larger military operation could be read as a recognition of the difficulty of such an operation. The military assets that the US had moved in the Caribbean are not nearly enough for an Iraq-style invasion or even what they did to Panama in December of 1989.

If we think about the broader context, and thinking about the national security strategy that the Trump administration published late last year, they more or less have conceded that they can’t frontally challenge China and Asia. So one way that they are going to proceed in the future is to indirectly challenge China.

China is the largest trading partner for South America, right? Historically every time that the US “comes home” and starts taking it out on Latin America, it’s usually after a moment of defeat or an admission that the global designs of the United States have met obstacles. So they have to retrench their power within Latin America.

Useful Idiots: Gabriel, you have a recent article at The Intercept: “The U.S. Desperately Wants Back in the Business of Empire With Venezuela. America carried out a coup in Venezuela to plunder the country’s resources. But Latin Americans will have the last word.” So what do you mean by that, Latin Americans will have the last word?

Gabriel Hetland: Trump’s attempt to dominate Latin America doesn’t always work out the way the US wants it to. Specifically, when the US attempts to push Latin Americans around, it sometimes has an immediate or more long-term backlash. And we’ve seen this repeatedly in Latin American history just this year.

Trump went after Lula, the president of Brazil, because he was prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro for attempting a coup. He talked about slapping 50% tariffs on Lula, and that helped Lula’s popularity. We saw something similar in 2002 with Evo Morales in Bolivia. The U.S. ambassador called him a narco terrorist and he immediately went to number two in the polls.

There’s also going to be a backlash against U.S. imperialism in other countries. In Colombia, Gustavo Petro has had huge rallies all week. Santos, the conservative former president of Colombia, who’s not an ally of Petro, actually said it was good that Petro and Trump were having a conversation. So when the president of the United States goes after leaders in Latin America, it can put conservatives in Latin America on the back foot and force them to actually defend leftists. It can also provide an electoral boost for nationalists and leftists and anti-imperialism overall. I think that it’s very, very likely that we’ll see more of that.

Subscribe to watch full interview with Alex Aviño and Gabriel Hetland on the nearly-satyrical levels of racism in the Venezuelan opposition that MAGA is propping up, as well as a controversial question from Aaron.

Subscribing also gets you our Friday Free-For-All: Surprise! Dr Phil is in Israel’s Pocket

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