When it comes to destroying your brand, Norwegian Nobel Committee is the Bud Light of peace prizes. After all, back in 2009 they gave the Peace Prize to a President Barack Obama who then went on to bomb at least seven countries, set the Middle East on fire, and even conduct drone strikes on American citizens!

Other awardees have had similarly suspicious records as peacemakers. They even gave a Peace Prize to the likes of Henry Kissinger.

This year has proven to be no different. Last week the Nobel Committee announced that the 2025 Peace Prize would go to Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado. Machado has a long history in the Venezuelan opposition including support for and participation in the US-backed, 2002 coup against then-president Hugo Chavez.

She is likewise a strong opponent of current Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and in 2018 even wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking for Israel’s assistance in overthrowing the Venezuelan government.

Shouldn’t we be cheering anyone seeking to overthrow Maduro’s authoritarian style of socialism that is hardly helping the people of the country? Perhaps, but what Machado is seeking is very different from working for change in her country’s system of government. She has long worked with and been paid by the US government’s “regime change” apparatus, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

NED was founded under President Reagan to do openly what the CIA has been notorious for doing in secret: overthrowing foreign governments that Washington doesn’t like. Scratch any of the “color revolutions” of the past 30 years and you will find the participation of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Nowhere have these coups and revolutions promoted and funded by NED (and the CIA itself) been even remotely successful. They have only produced broken, ravaged, burned-out shells like we have seen in Libya and elsewhere. They produced chaos and called it freedom and democracy. They even helped put al-Qaeda in power in Syria!

No, you don’t have to love Maduro or his style of governance to be critical of outside attempts to oust him. In President Trump’s first term, he set his neocons loose on Venezuela and the result was the almost comical rise of the political nobody Juan Guaido.

I say “almost comical” because Trump’s neocons wasted untold millions of our dollars on the farce.

Is the Nobel Peace Prize just another deep state, soft-power tool intended to boost the US global military empire? The timing of the award going to the relatively unknown Machado is suspicious. President Trump has parked an armada of warships off the Venezuelan coast as his aides openly talk about “decapitation” strikes on the Venezuelan government. After the extrajudicial killing of some 20 civilians in his attacks on at least four boats off the Venezuelan coast, President Trump is openly bragging that no one dares launch a boat in the area.

The “Peace Prize” endows Machado with a new sense of moral authority and gives weight to any “green-light” she may again give to outside militaries to attack her own country.

What’s wrong with heeding Machado’s calls to “liberate” her country? President John Quincy Adams said it best, America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

We should leave Venezuela alone.

Ron Paul is a former member of the House of Representatives. This commentary was published by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

“Being on the left is, like being on the right, one of the infinite ways that man can choose to be an imbecile: both, in effect, are forms of Moral Hemiplegia*.”

~José Ortega y Gasset from his 1930 book La rebelion de las masas [The revolt of the masses], written at the time of the Spanish Civil War

* Moral Hemiplegia = paralysis on one side off the body

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V6c-9O3UHk




Podcast audio:







In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Tristan de Liège and Ben Bayer discuss the widespread claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.



Among the topics covered:




Decoupling from the confusion of “international law”



Validating the concept of “genocide”;



The invalid collectivist elements of the concept;



The absurd UN definition of “genocide”;



Why the valid concept does not apply to Israel;



Sidebar on the issue of just and unjust war;



The genocidal intent of Hamas




Recommended in this podcast is Elan Journo’s book What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Ben Bayer's essay "We Ignore the Unconditional Right to Self-Defense at Our Peril", and the podcast with Elan Journo and Nikos Sotirakopolous, "Did Israel Steal Palestinian Land?"



The podcast was recorded on October 3, 2025, and posted on October 7, 2025. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.





Download video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/6V6c-9O3UHk



Download audio: https://media.blubrry.com/new_ideal_ari/content.blubrry.com/new_ideal_ari/Is_Israel_Committing_Genocide_in_Gaza.mp3

Cheryl Hines got an up close and personal look at the conservative blacklist last year.

Her thought crime? Standing by her man, future Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Hines, the co-star of HBO’s long-running “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” has publicly chastized President Donald Trump in the past. She has no fealty to the GOP. Still, being married to a former Democrat who joined forces with Trump last year made her a pariah of sorts within her industry.

That’s not a conservative journalist talking. It’s The Hollywood Reporter.

But despite the show of unity with her husband, Kennedy’s decision to align himself so closely with Trump will make for, at best, some awkward dinner table conversations at home; at worst, it may result in a full-scale shunning of Hines by the Hollywood establishment.

We may never know what happened behind the scenes in La La Land. Hines’ IMDB page is suddenly thin after decades of steady work. 

One star who went public with his rage against her? “West Wing” alum Bradley Whitford.

“Hey Cheryl Hines, way to stay silent while your lunatic husband throws his support behind the adjudicated rapist who brags about stripping women of their fundamental rights,” Whitford wrote on X. “Gutsy. Great example for the kids. Profile in courage.” 

That was August 2024.

Now, Hines is responding, courtesy of “The Megyn Kelly Show.” The video podcast invited Hines on to promote her upcoming memoir, “Unscripted.” The title refers to her ad-libbed work on “Curb,” a show with no set dialogue over its 12 seasons.

Kelly cheekily told Hines she wanted to slug Whitford in the face for his jarring comments about her guest. 

“Did you ever wanna respond and say, ‘Yo, Bradley, go [bleep] yourself,'” Kelly said.

“Yes, I’ve thought about that,” Hines responded in a comically malevolent voice. She then took a more measured approach to his personal attack.

“I know Bradley, just casually,” Hines began, recalling how she first learned about his comments. “I tried to stay off social media as much as possible, and then I see these texts like, ‘wow, that guy’s an a**hole.'”It took her a few minutes to learn who the “a-hole” in question was.

“I was sort of confused because I didn’t understand what he was hoping for,” she said of Whitford’s social media post. “He’s right! It’s over, Bobby.”

She recalled texting her confidantes, wondering if she needed to say anything publicly about the attack. She opted against that path … until now. She suggests there may be more details in “Unscripted,” out Nov. 8. Hines found some comic morsels in the attack.

“Thank you for this Tweet. Now that you mention it, I’m going to go do some work,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s sort of a silly Tweet.”

Getting serious, Hines said it’s good to stand by your man, a message she hopes her own child, Catherine Rose Young, will see and learn from their Mom.

The post Cheryl Hines Breaks Silence on Her No. 1 Hollywood Hater appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.