EM BURLINGAME: again I'm not saying it's a nuke I'm not saying that that's not what but what I'm trying to say is that there was something else on that ship other than oil it could have been as simple as, it could have been an Azov group of leaders who are coming here to the US or moving somewhere else to lead some jihadis or somebody else

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE OIL. IT'S MUCH WORSE! https://t.co/ri03Qn6uzz via @YouTube

— Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch) (@TFL1728) December 13, 2025

Blaine, retired One-Star General for the United States.  You were second in command for NATO at one point.  Also in charge of logistics for under General Petraeus at some point. 

And EM [Burlingame], you are a former Green Beret, a fabulous writer, and historian.  

Let's start with the Venezuelan oil tanker that was taken by US Security Forces.  On the one side I was just scrolling through X, and it was "Homeland Security and the FBI because it's got sanctioned oil from Iran."  And other reports said that "it's on its way to Cuba and Cuba is now going to suffer."

All noise.

There was something else on that ship it wasn't oil and it probably wasn't drugs.

1:25. Might have been human beings.  

1:26.  Might have been human beings or, even more, it might have been weapons and explosives and fighters.

1:32.  Yeah or somebody's missing trigger or something of a radiological . . .

1:35.  Or, exactly.

1:37.  Right, so people have this misapprobation that we give all . . . I know that most of the world thinks that we care only about oil.  We have more oil than we can use. That's the great excuse but we don't need anybody else's in the world's oil.  So if we do something that, you know, touches on oil, it isn't about oil.  

2:00. Let me broaden it out a little bit.  When I get on American news shows, the shift on this boat everybody seems to think that what we're doing is just trying to stem the tide of drugs into the United States.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The war against the cartels has many tentacles and elements to it.  Drugs is a part of it, it's a very, very justifiable part of it for us to go after those things.  However, there is a much bigger prize out there and that prize is not even in the region it's not even in Venezuela.  That prize sits in Dubai, Qatar, Brunei, Italy the UK.  It's all the world's most powerful who make so much money off of the illicit everything that these people, the cartels, enable.  So what the United States is doing with this campaign is, yeah, we are taking out some of your supply chains.. that's just the attention getting step.  You've got an oil tanker that's owned by 50 shell companies leading up to some Ukrainian oligarch.  Even if it was just oil in there that was shady and enables laundering, that would be enough.  I'm going exactly with EM.  Something else was on that ship that caught our attention.  The other part of it is, if we hit it, which we did, but we took it, we didn't hit it.  We didn't blow it up.  What that means is we know exactly whose rice bowl we just kicked over by taking it.  So we know all the way through.  If you go through the financial forensics and the guys repelled off into the ship.  

4:18.  It's one small little tanker.  It's not going to change anything.  We can sanction the funding on the other side.  We can sanction the sender.  We can sanction the ship owner.  By sanction, I mean we can punish, we can hurt.  Anything that has to do with the seller, the transporter, the insurer of the transporter, and the delivery, the receiver on the other side, and probably two streams up from there.  We have all kinds of tools to punish those people for doing some kind of a resource transaction, natural resource transaction, that we don't like we don't take ships for that.  It's too dangerous too risky and it raises too many issues about piracy on the seas.  Too many PR issues.  So if we take a ship it's because there's something else on that ship.

I want to go back to something Blaine said.  I was in the CIF. I was a counter proliferation guy.  Commanders In-Extremist Force, or it went to CRF, Crisis Response Force, but Commanders In-Extremist Force, we're Delta Force Seal Team 6 light, or the JAG team.  We work with a group called DTRA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, that's public information.  What does DTRA do along with the Russians and the Chinese and others?  We monitor radiological smallest little piece of radiological materials all over the world-- equipment, hardware, component pieces, all of that stuff is monitored and tracked as closely as possibly can be done.  If you're going to force World War 3 and nothing else is working, what is the final step that you're going to go to?

You're going to go nuclear you're going to do a dirty nuke or you're going to do a nuke in some Western city, town, or community and you're going to use Azov Ukrainians, who are fluent Russian speakers, to put in . . . we're going to . . . where you're going to find a passport at the burn down World Trade Center kind of trick.  And you're going to do a dirty nuke or a nuke and you're going to make it look like the Russians did it.

So what do you think Chinese the Russians Iranians Persian and US intelligence the good factions the US intelligence are single-minded focused against right now?  And oh, by the way, the asovs and the British and by the way unfortunately the Americans at the time try this twice already in the Ukraine.

6:53.  Let me add something here that might be very helpful because you viciously tried to besmirch and take away the credibility of me and EM in your recalcitrant remarks not two seconds ago about whether or not we were putting spin on the ball and trying to get inside the heads of your listeners and watchers rent free.  There's this beautiful tool online called Marinetraffic.com.  Anybody can look it up.  Dial your viewer over to Venezuela and Caracas I am in the territorial Waters around Venezuela I'm looking at no fewer than five tankers right now squander but so we're not going to squander the resources to just go and wrap up a whole fleet of tankers it's very inefficient, leads to nothing, doesn't get what you want you want.  However, you heard me in our last talk about my model of the Jenga Tower. Remove several blocks out of the illegal illicit Jenga Tower, then it's worth taking.  And if it's got a prize on board like a dirty nuke a nuclear trigger or components or some parts that are bad because we have sniffers I'm not going to get into that and nobody's going to get to ask me about that that we'll find those things.  And so we picked off this one ship out of a fleet of them now the interesting thing for me is when you look at the US Congress you have a lot of people finding TV cameras this morning to talk into to say,

This is an outrage!  How could the president get into piracy!  He's taking away the ships!

Now you're looking at the people's who's rice bowls are being tipped over by this ship taking, because they're not doing is going, 

Wow, yeah, we got to protect America.  I don't know what's going on with the military, but thank goodness they're out there doing a great job.

8:52.  Let's add to that.  You generally don't take a ship at sea due to the difficulty and complexity of that unless you need to take a ship at sea.  Unless you are worried and concerned about a sea-based transition to some other vessel. Otherwise you track it from Air from space you let it arrive you track a monitor maybe you got some boots on the ground generally you have boots on the ground where it's going to arrive and you deal with it that way so that you don't understand you take a ship at Sea it's because you are concerned they're going to transport something from that ship to something else.

9:32.  And at the higher end, it affected somebody, and they talked into a phone to complain about that and now we know who they are.

9:41.  Correct. Correct.  Correct. Or somebody just made a phone call and said, well, this has been interdicted or this has been delayed and now we know where that . . . so generally these kinds of interdictions and again I'm not saying it's a nuke I'm not saying that that's not what but what I'm trying to say is that there was something else on that ship other than oil it could have been as simple as, it could have been an Azov group of leaders who are coming here to the US or moving somewhere else to lead some jihadis or somebody else that they've been training with in Ukraine or Tren de Aragua or you know it's Devil's Legions assets and it could have been could have been some command on that ship Because by the way that is how they like to transport them because it's too easy to track planes . . .  

10:26.  Let me wield an idea so what if you know how Intel cells in these places are all made out I mean by square footage the cubicle Farms the analysts screens all of that stuff so in these Arrangements you've got the Deep State kids who are running things that are black programs off book because they're working for the bad people and then in the same areas you've got legitimate Intel people just doing their Intel work so in this war in this campaign do you think it's even possible that some of the good kids are going over the cubicles of the bad kids finding out what they're up to and then going and ratting their asses out I think that's what's happening here.

11:11.  

ALEX KRAINER: . . . this is the reason why they have vacuumed up all of these tens of millions of immigrants from everywhere. I think that this is why they have been pouring so much money into things like Black Lives Matter and LBGTQ, Antifa, . . .

And so you now have perhaps millions of people who are ready for a revolution they need a catalyst a catalyzing moment, like a polarizing moment, and then you'll probably throw in a good number of Jihadis that the Brits control and you're going to get a good number of Azovites from Ukraine who are going to take charge. --Alex Krainer

29:25.  You were talking about the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks, the Civil War, both of the Revolution, numbers of people killed, you were talking about the United States, and the United States primed for it, and I think you're absolutely right.  So do most of the guys coming from my world, the Special Operations Intel world, not so much the financial world, those guys seem to not get it.  But one of the things I wonder about it is that I suspect as the Europeans know that they can't defeat Russia in a fight but that's not the intent.  The intent is to use Russia as the excuse to cover for the collapse and to use the build up for war as an excuse but the real intent is the United States and to unleash Civil Wars there and to back it with logistics, manpower, Azov, leadership, highly experienced warfighting experience all of that and they're trying of course in Eastern Europe they are getting their marching papers handed to them at the border.

30:45.  I agree entirely, EM. It's almost obvious that they're doing it because they're not going to stop.  The whole empire doesn't even make any sense without the United States being a part of it.  And so now Trump doing course correction, especially now on Thursday with the publishing of the new National Security Strategy 2025, it's very clear that he's basically abandoning them. And for them, this is completely existential.  So they will do everything in their power to try to topple Trump and maybe even completely topple the American constitutional order.  And I think that this is the reason why they have vacuumed up all of these tens of millions of immigrants from everywhere.  I think that this is why they have been pouring so much money into things like Black Lives Matter and LBGTQ, Antifa, and all of these people, including arming some of them and training them how to use arms.  And so you now have perhaps millions of people who are ready for a revolution they need a catalyst a catalyzing moment, like a polarizing moment, and then you'll probably throw in a good number of Jihadis that the Brits control and you're going to get a good number of Azovites from Ukraine who are going to take charge.  And then you have a recipe for disaster and, of course, they also control the media, so everything is wrapped into this "No Kings," "Trump is overreaching," and on and on.  So I see great danger because the playbook is almost exactly the same as the way they overthrew the Czarist regime.  People in the United States, feeling untouchable, might feel a little bit relaxed because "you can't overthrow . . . you can't do that s*** over here."  Well, you know, they overthrew a 300-year regime that had a continual government under Romanov and everything intertwined with the, with their cultural norms, and traditions, and the Orthodox Church, so it was a very unlikely success, but it was a success.

33:50. . . . because of how they did it.  

33:53.  Yeah because they've been building up for decades.  Look at all the prosecutors, the district attorneys, Sheriffs, look at all the ports in this country, the main ports.  If I was going to do whatever . . . a revolution, if I was going to overthrow the United States and the inertia days, they don't care which one of these factions come out dominant in the end, because they're going to control them and they're going to take them out Stalin style and shoot them.  So they don't really care which factions.  If I'm, you know, as an unconventional warfare, dirty warfare trained guy, an Intel guy, a targeting guy, when I look at the United States we are completely and totally and absolutely primed to be taken down and primarily by being not invaded by armies but by logistically, but by our enemies logistically supporting local forces that are led by foreign because by the most, likes by the way did bring in people from all over the world, even guys that had fought in the Boer Wars, and elsewhere, they brought British-leading or British-connected people from all over fighting in these kinds of dirty wars and sending them in there.  They weren't Bolsheviks.

35:10.  They sent probably as many as 25,000 people before the Revolution took place.  And then when the Civil War took off, it was 300 to 400,000 troops-- Japanese, American, British, Czech, Greek.  

35:33.  Which at the time was a disproportionate number today that would be millions, right?  

35:40.  One of the things that Richard Poe is bringing up on the podcast last time we talked about the sheer number of multiple wars, and multiple armies fighting in the years after the initial Revolution . . .

35:50. . . . for 20 years

35:51.  And it was Churchill actually managing a lot of the White Russian forces because he was being told to manage White Russian forces to fail because they really wanted . . .

36:03.  Yeah because they pretended to be allied, pretended to be allied with them because supposedly because they were against the Bolsheviks and the Communists, but they managed them to failure, kind of like maneuvered them off the cliff.

36:20. No different than when we watch places like Syria.  It's the same thing. Whenever these conflicts look incomprehensible, they're not incomprehensible they just don't fit into a simple narrative whatever the narrative we've been told is it's always something far more ugly than that and it's designed that way on purpose.

36:41.  You put the City of London into the puzzle, and suddenly the whole picture makes sense.

36:49.  The encryption key.  But it's not just the city of London right that's just where things flow through this goes to the Hague to Amsterdam this goes to Rome this goes to the other places that they're centered you know you were talking about Venezuela and you're absolutely right and I've articulated this before that Venezuela is city of London HQ in the Western Hemisphere just the same as they had set up for their Devil's Legions, which is this composite Intel, paramilitary, terrorist organizations, cartels, they've all been brought together under this same umbrella, same leadership structure, same financial structure in the global war on terror.  That's what it really was.  It was a mob war.