Radio Free Pizza

Zaquerí Nioúel
  • 5.0 (1)
  • News
  • Updated Semimonthly

Dispatches excavating deep trends in society, culture, politics, economics, & media, peppered with indie comics & novels. www.radiofreepizza.com

  1. 4d ago

    Ceasefire with Bombs to Follow

    Since Friday, we’ve been dumbfounded to have learned that “the Lebanese Republic” is the formal name for the government of Lebanon, after it and the State of Israel signed a “framework agreement” on 26 June 2026 in Washington, D.C. Not for the immediate or unconditional withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces from their occupation in Lebanon, but for an eventual end to the state of war that has existed between these governments since 1948. But the mechanism is conditional: Israeli forces will withdraw from Lebanon only if Hezbollah disarms. The plan begins with two unspecified “pilot zones,” where Israel would pull back and the Lebanese army would assume security responsibility. Future withdrawals would depend on additional agreed pilot zones. A security annex reportedly details Lebanese army deployments and Israeli redeployments, but that annex has not been made public. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed the agreement as a way to keep the IDF in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah and other armed groups are disarmed and until Israel no longer faces a threat from Lebanon. Israel’s defense minister said the military has been told to prepare for an extended stay, reinforcing the idea that withdrawal is not immediate or guaranteed. Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem rejected the deal as nonexistent from Hezbollah’s perspective, calling it a “humiliation” and warning that linking Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah’s disarmament is dangerous. Hezbollah official Hassan Fadlallah warned that the agreement could lead to civil war because Hezbollah will not surrender its weapons and would resist Lebanese army measures against it. Hezbollah supporters protested in Beirut after the deal was announced. Obviously the deal remains fragile, as 2026 has taught us about “ceasefires”: previous agreements between Lebanon and Israel during the latest war were not implemented on the ground. Israeli strikes continued after the signing, including a reported drone strike near Nabatiyeh. More than 4,000 people in Lebanon have reportedly been killed since the Iran war began. Some might feel tempted to see the signature itself as the event: Israel and Lebanon at the same table. Israel and Lebanon in the same sentence without the immediate accompaniment of artillery. Israel and Lebanon joined by the words “framework agreement,” “future peace,” “normalization,” “territorial integrity,” “sovereignty,” etc. But skeptics would naturally warn that these fine words won’t necessarily survive contact with reality. Indeed, Lebanese-American journalist Rania Khalek offers a more sobering interpretation: the framework doesn’t represent a sovereignty breakthrough but a mandate for internal war dressed in the language of sovereignty. Because the agreement does not simply imagine the Lebanese state restoring authority over the south after Israel withdraws, but instead makes Israeli withdrawal contingent on the Lebanese Armed Forces first disarming Hezbollah and dismantling its infrastructure (with “verified disarmament” assessed under a U.S.-managed process), Khalek argues that the Lebanese government has effectively joined Washington and Tel Aviv in declaring war on a massive segment of Lebanon’s own population. For her, therefore, the question isn’t whether an impossible diplomatic configuration has appeared that can maintain this framework going forward, but whether in fact one has appeared that will make the lives of Lebanese civilians more difficult. In other words, the sequencing matters: if Israel’s occupation of Lebanese territory is illegal, then Israeli withdrawal should not depend on whether Hezbollah exists, whether Hezbollah disarms, whether Lebanon satisfies American benchmarks, whether Marco Rubio is pleased with the quarterly performance review, or whether the empire has decided that the national nervous system of Lebanon has become sufficiently obedient to be permitted reconstruction. Occupation is not supposed to become lawful until the occupied party gets its domestic politics in order. Yet this, Khalek argues, is precisely the inversion at the heart of the framework. Israel’s withdrawal becomes the prize Lebanon may receive after it proves itself willing and able to wage an internal campaign against the force that emerged, in the first place, from resistance to Israeli occupation. Reconstruction aid and the return of displaced civilians become conditioned on successful disarmament. Lebanese sovereignty becomes something Lebanon must earn by subordinating itself to a U.S.-Israeli security architecture. The government’s monopoly on force becomes not the ordinary attribute of a functioning state, but the euphemism through which a weak, fractured, externally pressured state is invited to attempt the one thing most likely to fracture it further. Similarly, Usama Makdisi understands the Lebanon-Israel framework agreement not as a restoration of Lebanese sovereignty but as another episode in Lebanon’s long history as a stage for imperial politics. Since the nineteenth century, Lebanon has been both central and peripheral to great-power rivalry: a place where local politics are repeatedly entangled with imperial projects. The earlier European-Ottoman struggle helped produce Lebanon’s modern “culture of sectarianism,” and Makdisi sees the current moment as a continuation of that pattern, now under a U.S.-Israeli project that is trying to recover through Lebanon what it failed to achieve in the war with Iran. He persuasively emphasizes the contradiction between how Lebanese officials and Israel describe the agreement. Lebanon’s president and prime minister present it as a step toward restoring the sovereignty of the Lebanese Republic in the south. Netanyahu, by contrast, celebrates it because Israel is not required to withdraw immediately; instead, the burden falls on the weak Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah while Israel remains in occupation. For Makdisi too, that sequencing exposes the agreement’s real nature: after months of Israeli assault on Lebanon’s Shia population, mass displacement, attacks on journalists and paramedics, and thousands killed or wounded, the agreement preserves Israeli power while calling Lebanese submission “sovereignty.” Against the backdrop of southern Lebanon under Israeli occupation, Makdisi argues that the agreement effectively validates Israel’s campaign and gives it leverage over whether displaced Lebanese civilians can return home. He also cites Trita Parsi’s view that the deal undercuts the U.S.-Iran MOU: the former now allows the conflict to continue until Hezbollah has been disarmed, while the latter called for a comprehensive regional ceasefire including Lebanon. Makdisi also compares the agreement to the May 1983 Lebanon-Israel agreement, signed after Israel’s 1982 invasion by a weak, pro-American Lebanese government, widely seen as illegitimate because Israel still occupied large parts of Lebanon and annulled after the 1984 uprising against the U.S.-backed government. To his analysis, the current agreement may face a similar legitimacy crisis, and in that sense raises the same warning as Khalek of the risks that the Lebanese people will now face from their own government. Those, of course, come on top of the risks that they will continue facing from the State of Israel, which he argues has two models for Lebanon: the “West Bank” model, in which a weak local authority performs security functions on Israel’s behalf while Israel continues domination and annexation; or the “Gaza” model, meaning destruction, ethnic cleansing, and obliteration. Lebanese fantasies of being separate from the Palestinian fate, he says, are ahistorical, warning that geography and geopolitics keep binding Lebanon’s future to Palestine’s. Therefore, while some may hail the agreement as peace or sovereignty out of exhaustion, hope, naiveté, or self-delusion, one may safely say that Makdisi warns them against betting on it. Thus, the consequences of the agreement signed last Friday depend almost entirely on sequencing. If Israel withdraws and Lebanon then rebuilds state authority in the south, one kind of future becomes imaginable. If Lebanon must first disarm Hezbollah under American supervision while Israel remains in occupation, another kind of future becomes likely: not peace, but the Lebanese state being pressured to internalize Israel’s war through confrontation with a mass Shia political-military movement rooted in decades of war, occupation, and displacement. Diplomatic language can soften the prospect. “Sovereignty” and “state authority” both sound clean, but not “civil war”: call it “disarmament of non-state armed groups” instead. Therefore, the agreement hides the potential trap of converting the Israeli occupation into a procedural norm, and of outsourcing of Israeli security to a Lebanese state too weak to perform the task without breaking itself—in other words, of formalizing ahead of schedule the Lebanese Republic’s position as a vassal. Certainly, taking orders from Washington and Tel Aviv about which domestic faction must be broken before Lebanese civilians can return to their homes sounds quite different from acting as a sovereign state. Perhaps some pessimists on the possibility of peace would dismiss the agreement as meaningless. For them, however, there’s enough meaning in it to estimate that the prospect of peace in southern Lebanon has only become more distant. Meaningless agreements do not cause Hezbollah’s leadership to denounce them as humiliation, Israeli leaders to celebrate them as achievement, and Lebanese officials to call them sovereignty—even if the answers to “sovereignty for whom” and “under whose supervision” remain open to debate. Of course, those aren’t secondary questions: they are the agreement. If it leads to Israeli withdrawal, civilian retur

    12 min

  2. May 31

    Potential for Pandemonium?

    Two years ago, in one of those Radio Free Pizza dispatches that we imagine certain readers either cherish or regret having survived, we considered the coronavirus pandemic not merely as a public-health emergency, but as a crisis of narrative authority. The question, as we understood it then, was not only whether the official story had been true, or whether the response had been justified, or whether various public-health bureaucrats, pharmaceutical executives, corporate-media personalities, and supranational functionaries had behaved with the wisdom and benevolence they so often attributed to themselves. Obviously they had not. The deeper question was how quickly a population could be trained to accept an emergency as a totalizing explanation for life: for movement restrictions, censorship, mandates, social division, institutional obedience, and the sudden moral reclassification of dissent as a danger to the species. In that dispatch, we also considered the stranger question of “predictive programming,” or what might be called prophetic entertainment: the recurring phenomenon by which mass media appears, whether by design, coincidence, archetypal resonance, or retrospective pattern-seeking, to anticipate the crises through which we later live. That discussion moved through Utopia (2013), The Lone Gunmen (2001), pandemic simulations, vaccine narratives, and the broader problem of how fiction and reality now seem to chase each other around the same haunted carousel. Our point was not simply that television sometimes “predicts” the future. Our point was that modern publics increasingly experience the future through images, storylines, and symbolic templates already supplied to them in advance. That problem has not gone away, but has instead become only more obvious since the official end of the 2020–’23 public health emergency. The next emergency does not need to arrive as another coronavirus pandemic in order to activate the same machinery: it only needs uncertainty, international mobility, anxious publics, public-health coordination, media amplification, and some pathogen or other moving through the world with enough ambiguity to let institutions begin narrating the situation before ordinary people know what to make of it. In other words, the next emergency arrives pre-narrated. Which brings us, naturally enough, to this month’s hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship. May 2026 reports from the BBC and PBS described an international effort to trace passengers and close contacts after an outbreak of the Andes strain of hantavirus aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. The vessel had departed Ushuaia, Argentina, on 1 April with roughly 150 passengers and crew from more than twenty countries, made stops including St. Helena, and was continuing toward Spain’s Canary Islands when the outbreak came under international scrutiny. By 8 May, five cases had been confirmed, including three deaths, while more than 140 people still aboard approached Tenerife for medical assessment, quarantine, or repatriation. Uncertainty defined the situation: investigators had not confirmed where the outbreak began, though Argentine officials were examining whether a Dutch couple may have contracted the virus during a pre-cruise bird-watching trip. Nor was it fully clear how many people had been exposed, since dozens disembarked at St. Helena on 24 April, before hantavirus was confirmed in a ship passenger on 4 May, and some had already traveled onward to other countries. Authorities in at least twelve countries—including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Singapore—were monitoring exposed passengers or contacts, while South African and Dutch officials worked to trace those who may have encountered a Dutch woman who later died after leaving the ship. The World Health Organization (WHO) emphasized that the outbreak was not the beginning of a COVID-like pandemic, describing the general public risk as low because hantavirus usually spreads through exposure to contaminated rodent droppings rather than casual person-to-person contact. The Andes strain, however, is unusual because some scientists believe it can spread between people in rare cases, and symptoms may appear one to eight weeks after exposure. As a result, the incident produced a striking image of post-COVID emergency governance: dispersed travelers, delayed confirmation, incomplete contact tracing, medically equipped repatriation flights, anxious local residents, and public-health agencies attempting to impose order on a biological event already moving across borders. Soon after the hantavirus outbreak emerged, a New York Post article from 13 May reported how social-media users had begun pointing to The X-Files and The Simpsons as supposed examples of entertainment “predicting” the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius. (For our purposes, parallels to The X-Files are more interesting—given that the aforementioned The Lone Gunmen, depicting events remarkably similar to those of 11 September 2001 just six months prior, was an X-Files spinoff—though of course The Simpsons has had a well-documented predictive capacity.) In The X-Files’ 1998 film, a whistleblower tells Agent Mulder that an apparent hantavirus outbreak had actually served as a cover story for something else, calling it a “silent weapon in a quiet war.” Online observers naturally connected that scene to the recent outbreak. An article on Bored Panda offered a more detailed account of the film, explaining that hantavirus functioned as a central plot device in a larger story of alien colonization, government secrecy, and biological cover-up, with deaths connected to a mysterious substance discovered in a cave are publicly explained as a hantavirus outbreak. The aforementioned whistleblower explains to Mulder the supposed outbreak was in fact a government deception concealing “the systematic release of an indiscriminate organism” by men who had been preparing a planned Armageddon for decades. Some commenters also folded the comparison into broader UFO discourse—which we discussed in a February bulletin—especially after former congressman Matt Gaetz claimed on a podcast that he had once been briefed about alleged “hybrid breeding programs” involving captured aliens and humans. That’s particularly interesting when one learns, as The Daily Star mentioned, that the hantavirus outbreak in the film was “a cover-up for alien-human hybrid experiments.” For our purposes, these articles’ significance lies less in whether The X-Files “predicted” anything than in how quickly a real outbreak became absorbed into an older mythology of hidden pathogens, biological cover stories, state secrecy, alien disclosure, and emergency management. The X-Files comparison shows the same symbolic mechanism discussed in our earlier dispatch on predictive programming and the coronavirus pandemic: once an outbreak appears, the public does not interpret it only through epidemiology or official statements, but through the entertainment archive, where fictional emergencies have already supplied recognizable patterns of suspicion, dread, and institutional distrust. Some reporters might frame these comparisons mostly as internet coincidence-hunting, but to our analysis, their significance is more structural: once a real outbreak enters public consciousness, audiences immediately search the archive of mass entertainment for prior images that appear to have anticipated it. But others don’t look to entertainment for evidence of predictions, but instead to the pharmaceutical industry—including our beloved Dr. John Campbell, who discussed the industry’s initiatives against hantavirus on 10 May. Here, Campbell agrees (for once) with the WHO, arguing that hantavirus is unlikely to become a broader pandemic—with the Andes strain spreading poorly between people and generally requiring close contact with someone already visibly and severely ill—and characterizes the individual risk to the public as negligible, with infection far more likely to occur through exposure to rodent urine, droppings, blood, or contaminated dust than through casual contact with passengers from the cruise ship. At the same time, Campbell notes the unusual amount of attention generated by the outbreak, especially given two claims raised by viewers that Campbell managed to verify: that Moderna has been developing an mRNA-based hantavirus vaccine since at least 2024 in collaboration with Korea University’s Vaccine Innovation Center, which provided hantavirus antigen sequence information while Moderna produced mRNA materials under its mRNA Access Program, and that “hantavirus pulmonary infection” appears among the adverse events of special interest listed in Pfizer’s cumulative post-authorization safety report for its BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine through 28 February 2021. Campbell also connects that work to WHO pathogen-prioritization efforts, noting that Hantaviridae appears as a high-priority pathogen family in WHO’s 2024 prioritization framework, discussed in relation to the “Disease X” preparedness concept. Naturally, he asks why an mRNA vaccine would be developed for a disease with low human-to-human transmissibility and whether the public-health rationale, target population, and economic incentives make sense. While the appearance of hantavirus infection on Pfizer’s post-authorization adverse-event report, pointing out that “hantavirus pulmonary infection” appears on a long list of adverse events of special interest, Campbell repeatedly cautions that this listing does not establish causality and may reflect only temporal association, but argues that its presence is nonetheless noteworthy in the context of renewed attention to hantavirus and mRNA vaccine development. The broader conclusion is that the cruise-ship outbreak itself will probably “fizz

    21 min

  3. Apr 29

    Ends of the Embargo

    With the U.S.-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic of Iran entering its eighth week, and a U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz aimed at starving Iran of its oil income now entering its third, the logic of economic strangulation has once again moved to the center of American foreign policy. Of course, some would say it never left—particularly those in the Republic of Cuba, which has been the target of that policy not for weeks or months, but for more than sixty years. In Cuba, that logic has long since ceased to appear as a discrete policy decision, but has become a condition of life. Last month, the island’s electrical grid collapsed again: another in a series of nationwide blackouts that have left millions without power, with the ongoing U.S. oil blockade—which intensified after January’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose administration had been supplying Cuba with oil—having cut off shipments to the island for extended periods. With Cuba faces a worsening humanitarian crisis resulting from the restricted fuel access, high-level talks in Havana between the U.S. and Cuba began earlier this month, though both sides have disputed what was said behind closed doors. U.S. officials have signaled that the island’s leadership faces a narrowing window to implement reforms, with some reports suggesting a two-week timeline tied to the release of political prisoners—claims Cuban officials have denied even as they acknowledge the meetings. Washington maintains that a diplomatic resolution remains possible under the Trump Administration, but the substance of those discussions suggests that material pressure is being leveraged to extract political concessions. Then, just last night, a U.S. Senate vote legitimized growing concern in Washington that U.S. policy toward Cuba may be drifting toward open conflict. Lawmakers blocked debate on a War Powers resolution that would have required congressional authorization for any military action against the island, even as some members argued that the ongoing U.S. energy blockade already constitutes a form of “hostilities.” The measure’s sponsors warned that the Trump Administration is effectively pursuing regime change, citing escalating rhetoric and reports that military options are under consideration. While some officials and analysts suggest that negotiations between Washington and Havana could still produce a diplomatic breakthrough, others argue that current U.S. policy is less about negotiation than coercion—using economic and energy pressure to force political transformation. But the congressional failure to produce a War Powers resolution suggests that, if deteriorating living conditions to demands for political reform, then U.S. policy will shift toward explicit regime change—realizing U.S. President Donald Trump’s prediction last month that he will have “the honor of taking Cuba.” With fuel restrictions collapsing the island’s economy and amplifying the empire’s leverage at the negotiating table, then the blackouts begin to read not as unintended consequences, but as instruments—conditions through which political concessions, and ultimately regime change, are meant to be compelled. Cuba’s energy system depends on imported fuel to run its aging thermal power plants, and without oil, the plants shut down. When the plants shut down, the grid collapses, and everything else follows: food spoils without refrigeration, hospital patients die in blackouts, and water utilities stop functioning. Scarcity compounds across sectors, turning a supply problem into a systemic one. But to fully understand the blackouts, the empty shelves, and the grinding scarcity that defines daily life in Cuba today, we have to return to the origin of the policy that still structures that reality more than sixty years later. Because President Trump’s oil blockade represents only the latest turn of the screw in the country’s decades-long embargo against its former economic colony. In 1959, following the Cuban Revolution, the new government moved to nationalize major industries—many of them owned by American firms. Washington responded not with a single decisive break, but with a series of tightening economic measures. By 1960, the Eisenhower Administration had imposed partial trade restrictions, cutting off key exports and restricting most commerce between the two countries. The decisive turn came in February 1962, when John F. Kennedy formalized a near-total embargo on trade with Cuba—effectively severing the island from its largest historical trading partner. Of course, the U.S. escalation unfolded not only through economic policy, but through covert military action: in 1961, the U.S. backed the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government by force that ended in rapid defeat and lasting hostility. In March of following year, Pentagon officials drafted Operation Northwoods, a now-declassified proposal for a false-flag operation that would result in the deaths of U.S. citizens to justify military intervention—plans that were never approved, but which reveal the extent to which confrontation with Cuba had moved beyond diplomacy into the realm of contingency for direct conflict. Such a confrontation became even riskier when, just seven months after that proposal, the world came within reach of direct superpower conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis following the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles stationed on the island. The crisis ended with their removal, but it did not normalize relations. Instead, it entrenched Cuba’s position as a permanent security concern in Washington’s strategic thinking. The embargo, already in place, took on a new function—not merely as retaliation for nationalization or ideological opposition, but as part of a long-term containment posture. Taken together, these episodes underscore that the embargo did not emerge in isolation, but as one instrument within a broader strategy of pressure, destabilization, and attempted regime change conceived during the Cold War. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the long-term strategy persisted: to isolate the Cuban economy and force political change. Over the subsequent decades, the embargo was not merely maintained—it was codified, expanded, and internationalized. Laws like the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms–Burton Act of 1996 extended its reach beyond U.S. borders, penalizing foreign companies that attempted to do business with Cuba. The result was not just a restriction on trade with the U.S., but a constraint on the island’s access to global markets, finance, and supply chains. In the absence of stable access to global markets, Cuba has not remained entirely cut off. Still, what has emerged in place of normal economic exchange is not recovery, but improvisation: in March, an international coalition of activists delivered humanitarian aid to the island by sea and air, attempting to circumvent restrictions that have choked off conventional supply lines. Organized by the Nuestra America Convoy, the shipment—totaling roughly 20 tons of food, medicine, and basic equipment—represented a show of global solidarity. But it also revealed the scale of the gap it seeks to fill. In a country of more than eleven million people, such deliveries cannot meaningfully stabilize food systems, restore electrical capacity, or sustain medical infrastructure. They exist not as alternatives to normal trade, but as evidence that normal trade has been disrupted. Meanwhile, Russia has signaled that it will continue—and potentially expand—fuel shipments to Cuba, positioning itself as a key backstop to the island’s energy crisis. Following talks in Havana, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov emphasized that Moscow would not scale back its support, framing additional oil deliveries as part of a broader effort to offset the effects of U.S. sanctions and chronic energy shortages. A March shipment of roughly 730,000 barrels of oil—enough to cover only a few weeks of demand—underscored both the scale of Cuba’s dependence on external fuel and the insufficiency of ad hoc relief. While U.S. officials have allowed limited deliveries under temporary exemptions, Washington has otherwise maintained pressure on the island’s energy supply, even as Russia signals its intent to deepen its strategic presence in the region rather than withdraw from it. What emerges, taken together, is not a picture of isolation overcome, but of isolation managed at the margins. Fuel arrives, but not reliably. Aid arrives, but not at scale. Each workaround addresses a symptom, while leaving the underlying constraint intact. The embargo bends, but it does not break; and so the blackouts continue. At a certain point, the question is no longer how the embargo works, but why it persists. Because the conditions now defining life in Cuba aren’t the product of a single decision, or even a single administration, but the accumulated result of a policy that has been maintained, adjusted, and reimposed across decades, long after the geopolitical moment that gave rise to it has passed. Accordingly, its persistence suggests that what we are seeing in Cuba is not a deviation from the policy’s purpose, but its most complete expression. With that in mind, what we are now witnessing in real time in the Strait of Hormuz represents in some senses an accelerated example of the same strategy as the U.S. embargo of Cuba: after a failed military campaign with the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the empire restricted its hostilities to the economic sphere—just as its campaign against the Islamic Republic seems now doomed by the rapid depletion of U.S. military stockpiles. But Cuba doesn’t have the same oil reserves with which to sustain its industries in economic isolation. Instead, pressure accumulates under the embargo that, once sufficiently concentrated

    14 min

  4. Mar 29

    Ghosts from the Machines

    Three weeks ago, rumors began circulating that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been killed in his country’s escalating war with the Islamic Republic of Iran after his early-March video address appeared to show him with six fingers on his right hand. Various “proof-of-life” videos followed purporting to show him alive, but gave us a further cascade of alleged anomalies: coffee foam that remains unchanged after he takes a sip; a jacket pocket that snaps back too cleanly; a wedding ring that flickers in and out of existence; an extra ear canal; a stuttering shirt sleeve. Meanwhile, claims about the provenance of footage for the Jerusalem café setting and for the cabinet meeting offer some potential origin of source material with which AI might have generated some of the above videos. (Perhaps to his own surprise, Netanyahu’s son, Yair, provided additional fuel for these speculations when, on 8 March, he abruptly stopped posting on X for a period of seven days: unusual behavior for a user with more than one hundred thousand posts since starting his account in June 2017, and a period of inactivity matching the Jewish mourning tradition of sitting shiva.) While internet sleuths offer compelling observations, these might yet remain artifacts of compression, motion blur, camera settings, or simple misperception. Even the invocation of AI detection tools—reporting high “likelihood” scores—offers little firm ground, given their well-documented instability and susceptibility to false positives, as when one reportedly flagged the Gettysburg Address as AI-generated. Our own opinion, then, remains only a posture: agnostic, provisional, and contingent on the emergence of verifiable, high-fidelity evidence that has not yet materialized. However, the question of whether Netanyahu died represents not just a factual inquiry, but a case study in epistemic collapse. Viewers dissect frames for anomalies while counterarguments invoke compression artifacts, camera limitations, and the human tendency to over-interpret ambiguous visuals. Each attempt at proof generates a corresponding wave of skepticism, and each attempt at debunking feeds the cycle further. The result is not consensus but fragmentation, with even relatively sophisticated observers arriving at an agnostic position: that the available evidence, whether authentic or artificial, no longer carries sufficient authority to settle the question. In this telling, the most significant development is not the status of the man himself, but the apparent erosion of any shared standard by which such a status could be conclusively determined. Understanding that, the risks exposed by this episode extend well beyond Netanyahu and into the structural stability of the media ecosystem itself. In the near term, the proliferation of plausible synthetic media accelerates the erosion of public trust—any more of which the U.S. certainly can’t afford—particularly when authoritative confirmation is delayed, fragmented, or perceived as unreliable. Over the longer horizon, the implications grow more severe: as we’ve been warned since 2018—and particularly during the 2020 and ’24 presidential election cycles—electoral systems have become increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and coordinated misinformation campaigns (besides those embodied in political campaigns themselves, that is), while the unchecked expansion of AI infrastructure introduces parallel governance challenges, from environmental strain driven by data center resource consumption to the absence of clear regulatory boundaries. What emerges is not a single point of failure, but a layered vulnerability—informational, political, and material—whose effects compound over time. Interestingly, these increasing vulnerabilities to the political sphere from AI-generated content come paired with recent pushes to integrate AI more directly into governance. In January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump launched a sweeping restructuring of the federal government through a series of executive orders aimed at reversing prior policies, freezing hiring, mandating a return to in-person work for federal employees, withdrawing from international agreements, and initiating workforce reductions under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory board instead of an official U.S. government department established by Congress. Central to this effort was the accelerated adoption of AI-driven “algorithmic governance,” promising increased efficiency but also raising profound concerns: as government functions become dependent on data systems and private-sector infrastructure, power shifts toward tech firms, institutional capacity within the state erodes, and decision-making risks being automated beyond meaningful oversight. Early examples—such as algorithmic tools overriding medical judgments—suggested both practical harms and systemic vulnerabilities, while the broader trajectory points toward a deepening fusion of state and corporate power (i.e., fascism), potential displacement of large portions of the federal workforce, and even speculative futures in which digitally governed “network states” challenge traditional democracy. In this light, the transition is less a technical upgrade than a structural transformation toward technocracy—also apparent in other initiatives of the second Trump Administration, as we outlined in a bulletin last year—with long-term implications for accountability, sovereignty, and democratic governance. Moreover, such a transition to algorithmic governance may only introduce further dimensions of dishonesty into modern political life. Terrence J. Sejnowski’s “Large Language Models and the Reverse Turing Test” (2023) aargues that modern large language models (LLMs) represent a major advance in generating human-like text—but also expose a critical weakness: their inherent tendency to produce false or misleading information with confidence. Because they rely on statistical pattern prediction rather than grounded knowledge, they can fabricate facts or reasoning without detecting errors. Rather than possessing true understanding, LLMs operate by predicting likely word sequences based on statistical patterns in their training data. This means they can generate outputs that are fluent, coherent, and persuasive even when they are factually incorrect—a phenomenon often described as “hallucination.” Drawing on parallels to neuroscience, Sejnowski emphasizes that LLMs lack grounding in the real world: they do not verify claims, access truth directly, or maintain stable internal models of reality. Instead, they assemble plausible responses, which can include fabricated citations, incorrect reasoning, or invented facts—especially when prompted beyond the limits of their training. This, of course, creates practical risks in domains like medicine, law, and education, where confident but incorrect outputs can mislead users who assume reliability based on linguistic fluency. Accordingly, the danger of LLMs is not simply that they make mistakes, but that they make them in ways that are difficult to detect. Their outputs exploit human cognitive biases—particularly our tendency to equate articulate language with competence—thereby increasing the likelihood that users will trust and act on erroneous information. While Sejnowski’s warning concerns the epistemic layer—the reliability of what we are told—then the next question is what happens when that unreliable layer becomes embedded within systems of power and access. That, unfortunately, seems the likely result of algorithmic governance in the context of proposals to expand identity verification laws and the introduction of digital IDs, two converging trends with the potential to transform the internet into a highly controlled, identity-based system. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring websites that host pornographic content to verify users’ ages—typically through government IDs or third-party verification—in order to block minors from access. While supporters argued that improved technology makes such checks feasible and comparable to in-person ID requirements, critics warned the law raises serious concerns about privacy, data security, and free speech, with verification systems also risked exposing sensitive personal information and restricting access to legally protected content. The decision set a broad precedent, potentially expanding similar laws nationwide and reshaping how identity verification is enforced across the internet. Since that ruling, seven more states joined the eighteen with existing age verification laws, with California scheduled to introduce its own next year. Here, the U.S. is catching up to other Western nations. Last year, the United Kingdom began requiring all pornographic websites and apps to implement robust age verification measures under its Online Safety Act, replacing simple self-declaration with methods like facial recognition, digital IDs, or banking checks to prevent minors from accessing harmful content. Meanwhile, the European Union has begun implementing an age verification system with digital identity wallets (EUDI Wallets) to let users prove they meet age requirements—such as being over 18—through privacy-preserving, cryptographic credentials that avoid sharing full personal data. Currently being piloted across several EU countries, the system is expected to scale as part of a broader rollout of digital identity infrastructure across Europe. As digital IDs become increasingly mandated, businesses and governments will have strong incentives to require them for access to online and even physical spaces, creating a “licensed” and gated environment. This shift would erode privacy, enable pervasive tracking, and undermine anonymous speech, as users become permanently tied to their real-world identities. Accordin

    16 min

  5. Feb 25

    Space & Invaders

    Dear Radio Free Pizza gourmets, Wild year so far, huh? Sorry I’ve been out of touch: for many months now I’ve been mainly focused on trading options contracts to recover all the money I wish I’d spent on precious metals. But, I’m at least still keeping up a minimum of one post per month, even if none of them are the deep-dish dispatches that had previously been my signature. While the latest release of much-redacted Epstein files has once again made me regret my trademark username and title of this publication (“This even ruins pizza for me”)—though this doesn’t excuse my neglect in covering the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s late-January execution of Alex Pretti in my hometown the week before—regardless, I’ve got a birthday at the end of this month, so it seems like a good occasion for another informal journal. Anyway, maybe you’ve heard that last Thursday U.S. President Trump ordered the release of classified materials on extraterrestrial life. This came on the heels of a 14 February interview with former President Barack Obama, in which he called aliens “real.” Though he walked those comments back the next day, saying that he “saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us,” his successor—who notably established the U.S. Space Force in 2019—would soon claim that Obama “gave classified information” before directing his Secretary of Defense to prepare those documents for public consumption. While some (such as talk-show host Seth Meyers) might have interpreted Trump’s order as an attempted distraction from his numerous appearances in the aforementioned Epstein files, I viewed it through the lens of a comedy sketch from a 2008 episode of The Whitest Kids U’Know. In the sketch, a press conference disclosing the existence of a U.S. moon base ends with one intrepid reporter asking, “We wouldn’t happen to be invading Iran today, would we?” before the press secretary’s face breaks into a smile and he admits, “You got me.” So, you can imagine why: given the transit of the USS Gerald R. Ford from the Caribbean Sea (where it had been stationed in 2025 until the successful kidnapping of the Venezuelan President earlier this year) along with dozens of fighter jets from North America and Europe to join the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, it seems clear that the U.S. stands prepared for the Islamic Republic of Iran to fall short of Trump’s demands for a “meaningful deal” (whatever that is) “over the next probably ten days.” While diplomatic negotiations will resume tomorrow, Iranian officials strongly criticized Trump’s claims in his State of the Union address last night, accusing the president of spreading “big lies” about Iran’s nuclear program, missiles, and recent unrest, comparing its messaging to propaganda tactics. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf warned that Tehran would respond forcefully to any military attack. Since the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have been conducting the Maritime Security Belt 2026 naval exercises with Iran, as they did last year, we can hopefully expect any U.S. aggression to wait until after they’ve departed. This week’s failure of the sewage system aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford adds a little comedy to the situation, with 6500 sailors having only a handful of working toilets. However, The National Review promises us that “The Ford Will Accomplish Its Mission with or without Flushing Toilets”. Regardless, when it comes to whether all this presidential talk of extraterrestrial life is a distraction from the Epstein files or from an impending U.S. strike on Iran: why not both? After all (“in my opinion”), it’s clear to anyone with a brain that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad) asset—though some, mainly in the British press, seem to have misplaced theirs—and that the State of Israel would be the prime geopolitical beneficiary of any U.S. attack on Iran, given (at a minimum, though maybe least of all) the two countries’ military exchanges in the summer of last year. Of course, if the U.S. hadn’t already involved itself in the campaign against the Islamic Republic, then we might have to worry that Israel would attack the U.S. itself to draw it into the conflict, as they did with the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War in 1967. Understanding that, it’s curious to note that claims asserting a legitimate first contact between the U.S. and extraterrestrial life already arose from (among others) an actual Israeli official, as NBC News reported in 2020. That official was Haim Eshed, retired brigadier general in Israeli Military Intelligence (Aman) and former director of the Space Committee at Israel’s Ministry of Science, Technology, and Space. In an interview published in English by The Jerusalem Post, Eshed alleges that aliens exist and that for years both the U.S. and Israel have been in contact with a group he calls “the Galactic Federation.” According to him, President Trump was aware of these aliens in his first term and had been on the verge of revealing their secrets, but this so-called Federation asked him not to in order to prevent mass hysteria. The retired general claims that humanity isn’t ready and that aliens don’t want to reveal themselves until humanity evolves and understands “what space and spaceships are” (whatever that means). Eshed also claimed that an agreement exists between the U.S. government and aliens for research into “the fabric of the universe” at a secret underground base on Mars. “If I had come up with what I’m saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized,” said Eshed—with his translator perhaps not knowing what the phrase “come up with” usually implies in English. (If anyone in the British press is reading, it usually refers to something produced under pressure, like an excuse or deception.) Eshed hit the press again in December 2025 to reiterate his outlandish claims that the U.S. and Israel both maintain diplomatic relations with extraterrestrials. After all, that’s not the only thing that the two imperialists do together: last summer, they conducted joint strikes on Iran, and obviously look like they’ll work together again—even though the White House claimed last year that it had destroyed all the Iranian nuclear facilities over which it now pretends to want a deal. “We eliminated the threat, but the threat remains imminent!” Of course, we’ve been hearing about this imminent threat for decades: for over 30 years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly warned that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon. Beginning in 1992, he claimed Iran was only a few years away from nuclear capability—a prediction he reiterated throughout the 1990s, in U.S. congressional testimony in 2002, in private remarks revealed by WikiLeaks in 2009, and dramatically at the United Nations in 2012 with a visual depiction of a bomb. Despite shifting intelligence assessments—including statements this year from the U.S. Director of National Intelligence indicating Iran is not building a nuclear weapon—Netanyahu continues to argue that Iran could obtain one within months or weeks. His message of imminent threat has remained largely unchanged across decades of diplomatic developments and evolving intelligence findings. Maybe we’ll get a Whitest Kids U’Know reunion this year, too, since it seems like everything old is new again. But until then, we’ll wait with bated breath for the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran that their sketch depicts as the real purpose behind American disclosures of extraterrestrial life. In the meantime, we can learn more about Iran’s position from Max Blumenthal’s interview of Professor Mohammad Marandi for The Grayzone last Friday. Professor Marandi explains (at ~0:19) that Iran’s military drill simulating closure of the Strait of Hormuz is meant as a deterrent message to Washington and Tel Aviv. He outlines multiple methods Iran could use to shut the waterway: sinking ships in its narrow passage, targeting vessels across the Persian Gulf, and striking oil and gas infrastructure. He stresses that Iran does not require long-range missiles for regional warfare, citing its arsenal of medium- and short-range missiles, cruise missiles, drones, anti-ship systems, and asymmetric naval capabilities. With control of one coastline and strategic islands, Iran holds geographic leverage over Gulf monarchies hosting U.S. bases, including Al-Udeid in Qatar, from which the drone that killed General Soleimani was launched. Providing historical context (at ~3:42), Marandi describes Iran’s restraint toward Gulf states after the Iran-Iraq War, despite their financial backing of Saddam Hussein and Western support for chemical weapons used in atrocities like the 1988 Halabja massacre. He recounts how Iran restored relations even after immense losses and notes Tehran later supported Qatar when it faced Saudi-UAE pressure, despite Qatar’s prior role in Operation Timber Sycamore and Syria’s destabilization. He warns (at ~6:22) that a regional war would halt oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf and Caucasus, potentially triggering a global economic crisis worse than 1929. Even if the U.S. is energy self-sufficient, he argues, soaring oil prices would shutter businesses before eventual collapse in demand. While Iran would retaliate against U.S. bases, Israel, and naval assets, the most devastating impact would be the shutdown of regional energy and trade flows. Marandi discusses (at ~8:51) Ali Larijani’s outreach to Gulf states, describing them as fearful but unwilling to defy U.S. policy. He criticizes their symbolic gestures for Palestine while permitting U.S. military operations. The discussion turns (at ~11:20) to Turkey, where Mar

    19 min

  6. Jan 11

    ICE Meltdown

    As you might have heard, earlier this week Officer Jonathan Ross of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 37-year-old U.S. citizen (and mother of three) Renee Nicole Good between East 33rd and East 34th Streets on Portland Avenue in Central Minneapolis. Good’s death has since inflamed national controversy, sparked widespread protests, and made headlines across the country. Video footage obtained from multiple angles—including cellphone video from Ross himself—shows an interaction in which ICE officers approached Good’s vehicle as she was stopped diagonally in the roadway during an enforcement action. An agent shouting orders reached toward the vehicle, and Ross shot Good as she attempted to drive away. Good’s vehicle then crashed further down the block, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. Federal authorities initially released limited details, and have framed Good’s actions as a threat to ICE agents—President Donald Trump claimed that she “viciously ran over the ICE Officer”—though this characterization has been challenged by local officials and independent video analysis. (Ross was involved in a prior vehicle-related incident in June 2025, during which a motorist refused to exit during a stop and dragged him approximately 300 feet, possibly providing relevant context for his later threat perception.) In the aftermath, the federal government’s handling of the investigation has drawn criticism: state authorities, including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have disputed parts of the federal narrative and called for transparent review of the evidence. The FBI is reportedly leading the probe, and state and local agencies have expressed frustration over restricted access to key material. Public response has been immediate and intense: protests have taken place in Minneapolis and are being organized in cities nationwide, often calling for ICE accountability and raising broader concerns about federal law-enforcement tactics. The incident has become a flashpoint in the larger national conversation on policing, immigration enforcement, and civil liberties, with tensions between federal and local officials further complicating efforts to reach a common understanding of the facts on the ground. Longtime Radio Free Pizza gourmets may note this as an escalation of the city’s more longstanding tensions with policing and civil liberties, recalling our January 2024 dispatch that traced the long shadow of the late-May 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s death, when protests escalated into riots, the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct was abandoned on orders and then burned, and more than a thousand properties were damaged. We detailed how the aftermath has been marked not only by material destruction but by a lingering civic demoralization, sharp disagreements over policing, and a persistent sense among residents that public safety has deteriorated. More recent aficionados of our reporting might also remember last year’s journal describing renewed fears about political violence, then made concrete by the politically motivated killing of Minnesota lawmakers unfolding amid nationwide unrest, protests against immigration enforcement (”What else is new?”) and a polarizing military parade in Washington that symbolized deep national division. Accordingly, we can certainly call it fitting that broader conflicts between state and federal governments might here find a potential flashpoint. (If that should become the case, then perhaps we shouldn’t have stopped short of predicting it in a slice from the start of 2024 that noted how American society has become increasingly primed—psychologically, politically, and culturally—for internal conflict, whether sparked by a singular catalyst or from pressures already built into the system.) This killing, then, may well provide a litmus test for how authority, accountability, and restraint are exercised when federal power meets local resistance on the ground. For now, however, open questions remain about the precise sequence of events, the decisions made by the officers on the scene, and how federal use-of-force policies are interpreted and applied in dynamic, high-stakes encounters. To shed light on these questions, we turn now to the analysis of Rev. Augustus Corbett, Esq. Here, Corbett explains (at ~6:40) the foundational decision in Tennessee v. Garner (1985) establishing that, under the Fourth Amendment, police officers may use deadly force to prevent escape only if they have good faith belief the suspect poses significant threat of death or serious physical injury to officers or others. He emphasizes this case forms the starting point for legal analysis in all law enforcement deadly force situations, noting that officers should not kill suspects merely to prevent escape unless the threat condition is met. From there, Corbett goes on to detail (at ~8:45) Graham v. Connor (1989), which set the governing “objective reasonableness” standard for evaluating police use of force. Under this framework, actions are judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, accounting for the fact that officers often make split-second decisions under tense and uncertain conditions. Of course, he points out (at ~19:20) the difficulty of prosecuting law enforcement officers, citing built-in protections from Supreme Court precedent and jury bias favoring police, noting that most cases aren’t even indicted—and even if Minnesota files state charges, Ross may receive Supremacy Clause immunity under the precedent of In re Neagle (1890), which may protect federal officers performing lawful duties if they reasonably believed their conduct was necessary. To determine if Ross has that immunity, courts must consider the totality of circumstances, including the severity of the alleged crime, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat, and whether the suspect was actively resisting or attempting to flee. Corbett emphasizes that this analysis explicitly excludes the officer’s subjective intent—whether good or bad—as well as hindsight judgments informed by slow-motion video review. Applying these principles (at ~23:15) to the available video, Corbett focuses heavily on the direction of the vehicle’s front tires at key moments, arguing that still frames appear to show the tires turned away from the officer rather than toward him, suggesting that the vehicle’s movement was oriented away from the officer’s position. Corbett therefore notes that if the tires had been pointed directly at the officer, the government would have a far stronger argument that deadly force was justified. Instead, the available imagery raises questions about whether an imminent threat existed at the moment shots were fired. Corbett further observes (at ~30:00) from video frames that at the moment of his first shot, Ross’s feet were not positioned directly in front of the vehicle, appearing to have space to move aside rather than fire, which weakens claims of immediate danger. He also addresses what may have been a second shot, arguing that if fired after the vehicle was clearly moving away and no threat remained, justification under Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor would be even more constrained. Examining (at ~35:03) wider video shots showing no apparent bystanders in the vicinity who would have been endangered if the officer had allowed Good to escape, Corbett notes that—since the vehicle was moving away from the officer and no one else appeared to be at risk—the use of deadly force wasn’t justified under Tennessee v. Garner. However, he acknowledges that Graham v. Connor factors still apply, providing built-in protections for law enforcers. Beyond the strictly legal analysis, the case has also exposed how rapidly questions of use of force become subsumed into broader moral and political narratives. In a separate commentary, Glenn Greenwald examines the same footage and public reaction not to adjudicate the shooting itself, but to interrogate how different factions have responded to it—particularly the tendency, across the ideological spectrum, to justify or even celebrate death when it befalls perceived political enemies. Here, Greenwald details how conservatives have pointed to Ross’s own footage as evidence that the agent reasonably feared for his life and therefore acted in self-defense, while critics argue the video instead shows the driver turning away to flee rather than attempting to strike the agent, making the use of lethal force unjustified. Greenwald emphasizes that although the driver and her partner had behaved antagonistically toward officers before the shooting, adversarial or disrespectful speech at a protest is constitutionally protected and cannot, on its own, justify deadly force. He also highlights contextual details about the victim—who reportedly had no meaningful criminal record—to argue that the leap from protest behavior to an assumption of homicidal intent toward officers is unsupported. Greenwald then widens the lens (at ~1:54) to examine reactions across the media and political spectrum. On parts of the right, he observed a shift from legal arguments about use of force to overt dehumanization of the victim, including inflammatory labels, emphasis on her sexual orientation, and narratives portraying the agent as heroic for supposedly “saving” the child from her parents. Some political figures escalated further, referring to the victim as a “domestic terrorist” or implying she deserved to die. On the left and center, the shooting was broadly condemned as murder, but Greenwald draws a parallel to past instances in which online commentators celebrated the on-camera killing of Charlie Kirk, underscoring that the celebration of political opponents’ deaths is not confined to any one ideological camp. He stresses the importance of distinguishing between legitimate cr

    16 min

  7. Jan 4

    The Calamity in Caracas

    Here we go again: this weekend, the United States violated the territory of a sovereign nation for the purpose of regime change, with airstrikes on Venezuelan military targets and critical urban infrastructure cutting electricity across the Venezuelan capital of Caracas before U.S. special forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. U.S. President Donald Trump announced their abduction on Truth Social, later posting a photo of President Maduro blindfolded and handcuffed aboard the USS Iwo Jima, in transit to the U.S. to stand trial as the supposed kingpin of Tren de Aragua and Cartel de los Soles, the Venezuelan crime syndicates—despite the conclusion in an April report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council that Maduro has nothing to do with the former, and the fact that the latter isn’t a hierarchical organization but a moniker invented to describe corruption in Venezuela’s armed forces. What a way to start the year, huh? But our October bulletin on the subject speculated that “maybe a U.S. invasion is on hold until the court renders its ruling” on conflicts of interest in the auction of PDV Holding, parent company of Citgo Petroleum, the U.S. refining and marketing arm of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). That ruling came on 25 November, with a judge approving Elliott Investment Management’s takeover of PDV Holding—clearing the path for the privatization of Venezuela’s crown-jewel foreign asset, pending approval from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. So, maybe we should just feel surprised that the U.S. waited more than a month to kidnap President Maduro. After all, President Trump told us last month that the U.S. “had a lot of oil there […] and we want it back,” though many economists and historians reject the claim, noting that foreign companies never owned Venezuela’s oil and that nationalization—accomplished in stages between 1976 and 2007—followed global norms of resource sovereignty. Though U.S. and European oil companies lost billions in assets, they were partially compensated through arbitration. With U.S. sanctions since 2014 having cripple Venezuela’s oil sector and finances, Venezuelan exports now represent a small share of worldwide oil supply. Accordingly, those looking ahead might expect less of a shock to global energy markets, and more of a contextual shift in currency markets: since Trump told us yesterday that U.S. intends to “run” Venezuela in the interest of “taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground” to benefit “people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela”—i.e., Western oil companies—we can surely expect petroleum exports from the Bolivarian Republic will be sold for U.S. dollars. Thus, the petrodollar system—the original purpose and recent decline of which we’ve covered a couple times in years past—looks like it has found fresh support against its gradual erosion. Regarding just how the U.S. plans to run Venezuela—or rather, what proxies it will employ—our October bulletin contained another speculation that may have had a a similar degree of foresight: installing Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado as the country’s president. Naturally, Machado welcomed the U.S. intervention for which she has long advocated, declaring that Venezuela’s “hour of freedom” had arrived and calling for 2024 opposition candidate Edmundo González to assume the presidency after Maduro’s removal—though apparently stating elsewhere that she is preparing to take power herself. For his own part, Trump has expressed interest in the latter but hasn’t yet committed. Turning now to the U.S., the implications of Maduro’s kidnapping naturally reflect the declining empire’s efforts to maintain hegemony over the Western Hemisphere Trump claimed that the kidnapping represents an exercise of the Monroe Doctrine, under which the Western Hemisphere was declared off-limits to European colonization or intervention while promising U.S. non-interference in European affairs, but the absence of any efforts to bring Venezuela into the European sphere of influence renders Trump’s claims absurd on their face. Though the doctrine’s logic underpinned U.S. actions in Latin America throughout the Cold War—with presidents like Ronald Reagan invoking anti-communism to rationalize proxy wars, sanctions, and support for authoritarian allies—its latest invocation explicitly radicalizes the doctrine, dropping the pretense of opposition to European imperialism and instead simply asserting unilateral U.S. control over the Americas. Continued exercise of this expanded doctrine—or, really, the continued assertion of U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere—could mean laying the foundation for a long-theorized North American Union, which we here at Radio Free Pizza detailed almost one year ago, and which now warrants renewed attention. What once seemed dormant has been reanimated by Donald Trump’s post-2024 expansionist rhetoric—from musing about Canada as a “51st state,” to renewed interest in Greenland’s strategic resources, to threats against Panama—occurring alongside direct U.S. intervention in Venezuela, including regime-change operations, seizures of Venezuelan assets like Citgo, and the extraterritorial application of U.S. courts and force. Placed in that context, Venezuela begins to look less like an isolated case and more like a testbed: a demonstration of how sovereignty can be overridden through sanctions, courts, and military power under the banner of security, narcotics control, or democracy promotion. While mainstream voices dismiss the North American Union as conspiracy, the pattern echoes older supranational ambitions—from NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership to CFR blueprints for a “North American Community”—now resurfacing amid U.S. anxiety over a multipolar world in which blocs like BRICS+ challenge American primacy. The contradiction is telling. Trump’s earlier obsession with border walls coexists uneasily with continental ambitions, suggesting not a coherent nationalism but a reactive strategy to declining dominance. Of course, the risk is that “integration” and “stability” become pretexts for upward consolidation of power, elite control, and the erosion of democratic self-determination. Whether the North American Union emerges as policy, pressure tactic, or political theater, the through-line remains the same: who governs, by what authority, and for whose benefit—an unresolved question now being answered, most starkly, in Venezuela, and in what government takes shape following the success of U.S. efforts toward regime change. If the events of this weekend tell us anything, it is that the language of international law, democracy promotion, and even counter-narcotics has finally collapsed into something far cruder: open force exercised without consent, mandate, or restraint. The kidnapping of a sitting head of state—preceded by airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and followed by boasts on social media—is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a decades-long trajectory in which sanctions, courts, covert operations, and proxy politics gradually replaced diplomacy, only to give way again to naked coercion when those tools proved insufficient. Venezuela now stands as the clearest warning of where that path leads. Its oil was first strangled through sanctions, its foreign assets seized through U.S. courts, its political process delegitimized through narrative warfare, and its leadership finally removed through military force—all while the rhetoric shifted seamlessly from “democracy” to “security” to “we want it back.” That sequence is not unique to Venezuela; it is simply the most complete case to date. As the Monroe Doctrine is refashioned into an explicit claim of hemispheric ownership, and as expansionist talk bleeds into concrete action, the question is no longer whether old imperial patterns have returned, but whether they will now be normalized under a unitary executive that recognizes no meaningful limits. The future hinted at here—whether labeled a North American Union or something else entirely—is one in which sovereignty flows upward, accountability evaporates, and governance is imposed rather than chosen. History suggests that such projects rarely end where their architects intend. What remains to be seen is whether the peoples of the Americas will accept this moment as inevitable—or recognize it, clearly and soberly, as a line that has already been crossed. We here at Radio Free Pizza presume that Latin Americans recognize that already, and hope that the U.S. population soon catches up and mobilizes to reverse the course. Radio Free Pizza is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Radio Free Pizza at www.radiofreepizza.com/subscribe

    11 min

  8. 12/31/2025

    Dishing on Mogadishu

    In the past month, the Somali community of Minnesota—the largest outside Africa—has faced heightened tension after President Donald Trump launched repeated attacks against Somali immigrants, threatened to revoke their legal protections, and supported upcoming immigration enforcement actions targeting the community. Conservatives like President Trump have used isolated fraud cases to malign Somalis broadly, intensifying scrutiny of the community and fear within it. At the risk of sounding heartless, we could say that the community (particularly its elders) probably finds the feeling familiar. Following the start of the Somali Civil War in 1991, refugees were initially resettled across the country, but soon began arriving in Minnesota because of its reputation for effective refugee support, a stable economy, and perceived safety and kindness. Many more later moved to Minnesota through “secondary arrivals,” drawn by family connections, strong refugee resettlement agencies, and economic opportunity. Today, about 84,000 Somali Americans live in the state, with a large share U.S.-born and the vast majority holding U.S. citizenship. Of course, perceived kindness means vulnerability to exploitation, and allegations of fraud seem well-founded: the largest case, Feeding Our Future, involves a COVID-era scheme in which defendants claimed to feed millions of children but instead diverted funds. (Compared to the scheme that was the pandemic itself, this one is at a scale we might call “cute.”) Overall fraud losses across multiple cases could exceed $1 billion, according to prosecutors’ estimates from early December, though more recent estimates put the figure at $9 billion. Most of the defendants—more than 90% across the major cases—are of Somali descent, though prosecutors note the alleged ringleader in the largest case was a white American woman. In addition to labeling Minnesota’s Somalis as “garbage,” President Trump and conservative outlets have suggested fraud proceeds may have funded Al-Shabaab, the Somali terrorist organization that has for two decades wreaked havoc across the country, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged that investigators have so far found no evidence to support terrorism allegations, and no such charges have been filed. Naturally, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the first Somali American elected to Congress, condemned Trump’s remarks as racist and dangerous. Community leaders describe themselves and their fellow Somalis as “under siege,” but note strong support from Twin Cities leadership and resilience within the community. Nonetheless, most Somali Americans in Minnesota continue to face deep socioeconomic challenges: a majority live in poverty or near-poverty, with low median incomes, lower educational attainment, and low homeownership rates compared to other groups. Many small businesses struggle to survive, and language barriers remain common. Researchers and community leaders argue that these patterns resemble earlier immigrant groups and expect second-generation Somalis to achieve significantly better outcomes, but stress that persistent poverty within the community poses a long-term economic challenge for Minnesota as a whole. Again, at the risk of sounding heartless, we could say that the Somali community (particularly its elders) is probably familiar with economic challenges: the estimated $9 billion in fraud sits at just under three-quarters of Somalia’s current GDP, with the country’s economy predictably handicapped after more than three decades of a civil war that has internally displaced more than 2 million Somalis, generated over 900,000 registered refugees in East Africa alone, and led to repeated famines that killed hundreds of thousands. But Somalia’s long-running crisis is not simply the result of internal failure but has been deeply shaped—and worsened—by decades of foreign intervention, particularly by the U.S. and its allies, as historians like Elizabeth Schmidt of Loyola University of Maryland and documentaries like that from Africon Productions make clear. Africon Productions begins its analysis (at ~1:37) with Somalia’s colonial roots during the late 19th century scramble for Africa. The British established a protectorate in the north (British Somaliland) in 1887, while Italians controlled the south (Italian Somaliland) in the 1880s and 1890s. France seized territory now known as Djibouti, while parts of the Somali population remained in what became Ethiopia and Kenya. This fragmentation inaugurated irredentist tensions that persist to this today, and inspired the resistance led by Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who conducted a 21-year rebellion (1899–1920) against British, Italian, and Ethiopian forces, seeking to unite all Somalis under one Islamic government. After World War II, Italian Somaliland came under UN trusteeship in 1950 while remaining under Italian administration, and British Somaliland gained internal autonomy in 1960. The documentary goes on to detail (at ~3:24) British Somaliland’s independence on 26 June 1960, quickly followed by voluntary merger with Italian Somaliland on 1 July, forming the Somali Republic. Aden Abdulle Osman became the first president, and the unification was celebrated across the Somali world as a triumph of nationalist aspirations. The newly independent Somalia adopted a democratic system and aimed to promote unity, democracy, and Pan-Somali nationalism, though the dream of Greater Somalia including all Somali-inhabited regions led to tensions with neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya. Despite these challenges, the 1960s represented a hopeful period when Somalia embraced self-rule, joined the United Nations, and pursued development and national pride before political instability and dictatorship derailed their vision. Detailing (at ~6:35) the aftermath of President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke’s 1969 assassination, the documentary describes how General Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in a bloodless coup. He then suspended the constitution, banned political parties, and declared Somalia a socialist state based on scientific socialism inspired by the Soviet Union and China. Initially, Barre’s regime achieved significant gains through literacy campaigns, infrastructure projects, and anti-corruption measures, positioning himself as a modernizer and Pan-Somali nationalist. However, despite publicly denouncing clanism as backward and divisive, his regime covertly relied on clan favoritism, serving his own Marehan clan (part of the larger Darod clan family) along with allied Ogaden and Dulbahante clans, forming the MOD alliance. State institutions, military, and intelligence services were dominated by these groups, deeply alienating other major clans, especially the Isaac in the north and Hawiye in central regions. We learn next (at ~7:51) how Barre launched a military campaign in 1977 to annex Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, home to ethnic Somalis. Initially successful, Somalia’s army advanced deep into Ethiopian territory. However, the Soviet Union switched sides to support Ethiopia, providing massive military aid and facilitating support from Cuban troops, leading to Somalia’s decisive defeat. The Ogaden War proved disastrous both militarily and economically, humiliating the regime, discrediting Pan-Somali aspirations, and causing massive financial strain. Barre broke ties with the Soviet Union and aligned with the U.S., but the damage was irreversible. The war created thousands of refugees and displaced persons, straining local communities and government resources while causing many Somalis to lose faith in Barre’s leadership. The aforementioned Schmidt describes how U.S. backing after the Ogaden War kept Barre in power despite widespread repression, corruption, and economic collapse. Once the Cold War ended, Washington withdrew its support and criticized Barre’s human rights abuses. Deprived of external backing, his regime fell in 1991, plunging Somalia into state collapse. Warlords and clan militias carved up the country, while Islamist organizations filled the vacuum by restoring basic law, order, and social services—gaining popular support in the process. Africon Productions’ documentary also points (at ~9:07) to the role that competition over foreign aid played in fomenting and fueling the Somali Civil War. As Somalia entered a deep economic crisis in the 1980s, corruption became rampant as the elite, especially those linked to the ruling clan alliance, looted state resources and funneled foreign aid into private accounts rather than supporting development. When the central government collapsed in 1991, international humanitarian agencies rushed into Somalia to address famine and mass displacement. However, with no functioning state authority, warlords and clan militias quickly moved to control ports, airports, and distribution centers where aid arrived. These groups seized shipments, taxed aid convoys, and used relief supplies as currency to buy weapons and recruit fighters. The struggle to dominate aid routes intensified rivalries between warlords like General Aidid and Ali Mahdi. Meanwhile, Schmidt adds, though the U.S.-led UN intervention in the early 1990s initially claimed humanitarian goals, it escalated into a military campaign against selected warlords, especially General Aidid—whose militia, the documentary tells us (at ~17:11), saw foreign troops as threats to his authority. Civilian casualties from airstrikes and raids provoked widespread hostility, culminating in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, where U.S. Rangers attempted to capture Aidid’s top lieutenants. The operation failed, resulting in 18 U.S. soldiers’ deaths and hundreds of Somali casualties. Images of a dead American soldier dragged through the streets shocked the world. By 1995, the U.S. and UN withdrew, admitting failure and abandoning Somalia to its warlords. Following Aidid’s death in

    22 min
See All (84)

About

Dispatches excavating deep trends in society, culture, politics, economics, & media, peppered with indie comics & novels. www.radiofreepizza.com

Information

  • Creator
    Zaquerí Nioúel
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    84
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Diaphora Co.
  • Show Website
    Radio Free Pizza