Today in Fascism

Spain Was Not a Side Door
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Spain is the washing door into Europe, and it is not a side door. It is a main entrance, held open.

The looted oil wealth of Venezuela landed in Spain. It came out of the Venezuelan state oil company, moved through a private bank in Andorra that the United States Treasury named as a laundering concern for pushing roughly two billion dollars of that money, and it came to rest in Spanish property, in Spanish consulting contracts for work that was never done, in residency papers that turn dirty money into a clean European passport. The former chief of Venezuelan military intelligence, a central figure in the whole narco machine of that state, was arrested in Spain and extradited from Spain to the United States, where he pleaded guilty. The trail of that money ran through Spanish courts for years.

And the cocaine lands in Spain too, by the ton. On the coast of Galicia, where the clans have run the Atlantic beachhead for decades. In the great container ports. In one shipment alone the Spanish seized thirteen tons of it hidden in a load of bananas that had sailed from the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador.



This is what a washing door does. It does not grow the drug. It does not move the drug. It takes the money the drug made, on the way out of the poor end of the route, and it hands that money a clean European suit and a passport. The bodies are an ocean away. By the time a Spanish court even opens the file, the money is already property, already a respectable fortune, already inside Europe for good.

That is why Spain matters. Not as scenery. As the landing.

But a washing door does not stay open by itself. It needs a political class that will not look too hard, and Spain’s has been busy.

The man who was transport minister, the number three in the governing party, the one who helped put the prime minister in power, sat in a Madrid courtroom this year with prosecutors asking for twenty-four years. The charge is bribery and running a criminal organization. During the pandemic the contracts for medical supplies went to a front company that had earned nothing the year before and booked fifty-four million euros in one. A businessman in the middle of it, facing prison, began to talk. He said he carried between three and a half and four million euros in cash, in envelopes, to the minister and his adviser. And he said the masks were the small part. The real money came from rigged public works.

It did not stop at the ministry. The prime minister’s wife is due in court. His brother is due in court. When the police raided the governing party’s own headquarters and carried out the computers, the target was the man who had taken over the machinery of the party, suspected of working to sabotage the judges who would not drop the files.

And the deepest thread runs back to the oil gate. A former prime minister, the political mentor of the man in power now, was placed under investigation for leading a network of influence peddling and money laundering tied to Venezuela. The case turns on a fifty-three million euro state rescue of a small airline wired into Caracas, and whether that airline was a pipe to move Venezuelan money through France and Switzerland and into Spanish property. His years of defending Caracas in public may not have been diplomacy. The courts are asking whether it was a business. European political access, traded for Venezuelan oil money.

The warrants keep getting signed. The raids keep happening. The cash envelopes are being read into the record. The washing door is being pushed shut from the inside. Ask yourself who spent years holding it open, and who they were holding it open for.

That is the money’s end of the road. The other end is a body. And the body falls in the country with the deepest pockets and the widest open gate.
 

Mexico Was the Cut Into America
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The richest market on earth is the United States, and the last gate into it is Mexico.

And that gate was built, not born. In the 1970s a Mexican president tried to turn the country’s own oil and its own ambitions into an independent industrial state, and the answer that came back from Washington was blunt. They were not going to accept a Japan below their border. What came instead was the other machinery. Debt crises. Currency collapses, one after another. Then a trade deal that brought in the foreign car plants and gutted the farms. A country that once grew its own food was opened up until it had to import the corn for its own tortillas. The rural economy died, the work disappeared, and the poverty pushed the people north toward the only paycheck left, while the cartels grew into the only functioning economy left standing across whole stretches of the countryside. You do not get a cartel state by accident. You get it by taking a country apart first and leaving the strongest thing standing in the rubble.

The cartels that hold that gate are the most powerful they have ever been, richer and better armed than many of the governments around them. And the drug they push now is not the drug from the old war. It is fentanyl. It is synthetic, so it does not need a field or a season. It is cheap to make and easy to hide and it is strong enough that a quantity you could lose in your pocket can kill. It crosses the southern line by the ton, and it has buried a generation of Americans, hundreds of thousands of them, in numbers that would be called a war if the bodies had fallen any other way.

The ingredients come from across the Pacific. The precursors are shipped in, the cartels press them into pills and powder in their own labs, and they push the result across the last gate into the country with the deepest pockets in the world. In early 2025 the United States named those cartels terrorist organizations, the same label it would put, months later, on the network buried inside the Venezuelan state.



This is exactly where Tom and Rich and I started. This is the American opium war, and it runs the first move of the old playbook without changing a single step. The drug comes in as the weapon. It poisons the people first, the way the opium poisoned the Chinese first, before anyone fires anything that looks like a shot. And for years the only question Americans were allowed to ask about it was a question about the addicts. Why are they weak. Why can they not stop. Never the other question. Never who opened the gate, who profits from the poison going in, and who is going to profit from the cure and the cleanup and the control that always comes after.

Blame the dying. Never look at the gate. That is not an accident of the conversation. That is the conversation working as designed.

I had the whole machine now, end to end, two hundred years of it laid out in front of me. The drug, the gate, the clean money, the mile, the islands, and the trail of countries carrying the same motion. And every single trail I had followed ran back to the same square mile with no face.

Then I looked at the water between the source and the market, and the trail stopped being history.
 

The Caribbean Was the Platform
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The water between the fields of the south and the streets of the north is the Caribbean, and it has been the corridor the entire time.

The Dominican Republic. Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, American soil itself turned into the doorway onto the mainland. For two centuries this was a route. A place the product passed through on its way to the gate. The islands took the seizures and the violence and the spillover, and they fed the flow north toward Mexico and the line. The route was old, and everyone on it knew their job, and the job did not change for generations.

And that is where the trail ended. Not at a man. Not at a cartel. At a square mile inside London with no face, that priced the risk, cleared the money, hid the owner, wrote the law, and took its cut on everything that moved through the gates it owned.

For two hundred years the machine ran exactly this way, and nobody took a single gate back, because you do not take a gate from something that has no face and no name to fight.



That was the machine the morning I started pulling the thread. Whole. Running. Two centuries deep, and untouched.

Then the water changed.

And for the first time in two centuries, the gates started to move.

Who is moving them, and how, and what it is costing, is the rest of this story. That is Part Two, The Gates Are Being Taken Back. It is already live. Read it next.
 
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Political analyst Charles Blow STUNS a Trumper hack live on air by boldly calling out his bullsh*t to his face: "You are a liar!"

These crooks aren't used to direct confrontation...

"I just believe that this is a news show on a news channel. I have an ethical responsibility to say that you are lying," Blow said on CNN to Hal Lambert, a hardcore MAGA supporter and Republican donor. "You are lying."

Lambert was amplifying the completely false allegations of election fraud that Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, and their entire party have been pushing about the Los Angeles mayoral election. Republican Spencer Pratt was recently knocked out of the running (an unsurprising development given how blue the city is) and conservatives are crying foul.

Lambert tried to interject but Blow plowed through him.

"I didn't interrupt you and you will not interrupt me," said Blow.

"You don't call me a liar on national TV, sir!" whined Lambert. "Do not call me a liar on national TV, sir."

"LIAR!" said Blow, pointing defiantly at him.

"You're a liar," Lambert weakly shot back.

"I can spell it too. I have an ethical responsibility," said Blow. "If people are going to go over here and poison voters' views of an election system that has no proof that it is rigged in any way, spouting the same lie that the President is spouting, we have an ethical responsibility at this table in a news show, on a news channel, to call that out. And I'm going to do that. You can huff and puff. You can huff and puff and be mad all you want, and I don't care."

Blow should be commended for his bluntness and moral clarity. We have allowed our political discourse to rot so thoroughly during the Trump era that men like Lambert feel comfortable going on television and spouting the most absurd, laughable lies with a straight face.

We know for a fact that there was no election fraud. There has never been a shred of evidence for any of these MAGA claims, but the Republican Party has become so warped by Donald's egomaniacal, insecure psyche that they simply can't accept the fact that their political platform is radioactive. Rather than change their pitch to the American people, they screech about rigged elections.

"You keep ignoring what I've said. There is... You're saying..." tried Lambert.

"I'm going to keep ignoring it. Because you're lying," said Blow.

Lambert then tried to jump into a rant about alleged Medicare fraud but host Abby Phillip shut him down, forcing him to focus on his false claims about the California election. He spun his wheels a bit, making vague claims, and Philip pointed out that he has no evidence to back up his outlandish accusations.

"They won't allow evidence to be gathered," Lambert complained.

"The absurdity of your point is that you don't have proof," said Blow. "And then I have to say this. He doesn't have proof. And then he says, 'I don't have proof, and I can prove that I don't have proof because they won't let us investigate.' So you don't have proof, and you just proved that you don't have it!"

"Hal, let me just give you some more information on this," said Phillip. "The federal government has received, I think it's millions of voter registrations from some Republican-led states that have given them access to it. Do you know what percentage of those votes or those registrations where they found actual fraud of any kind?"

"Do you?" asked Lambert.

"Yeah," said Phillip.

"What is it?" he asked.

"It is a fraction of a percentage," she said. "And in some cases, when they double-checked, those flags that they thought were fraud were actually not fraud.

"You're claiming that it's never been looked at. That's false," she added. You're claiming that this administration hasn't been able to look at it. That's also false. You are claiming that just the fact that the federal government hasn't looked at all the state voter rolls as proof that there is fraud is not true."

This is how every Trump proxy should be dismantled whenever they open their mouths to spew their toxic lies. The time for civility is over. Call them out and shame them!
 
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