And Other Notes
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Right wingers are like “Listen to Venezuelans! No, not the Venezuelans in the streets demanding Maduro’s return. No, not the polls saying most people in Venezuela oppose US regime change. Those are the wrong Venezuelans. I meant listen to the Venezuelan talking to Fox News from his mansion in Miami.”
They’re like, “Trump needed to invade Venezuela and abduct its president because otherwise that poor country would be victimized by the whims of a despotic tyrant!”
Actually fellas I’m pretty sure the real tyrannical regime is the one who’s claiming the entire western hemisphere is their personal property and they get to control what happens in every country on half the planet.
Pretty sure what’s tyrannical is invading a country, murdering scores of people, and abducting its leader in order to steal control of its resources.
I kinda think the real tyrant on the scene is whoever’s trying to rule the world and aggressively targeting any country anywhere on the planet that resists that agenda.
Like maybe a really good example of tyranny would be constantly toppling governments and starting wars of aggression and targeting civilian populations with starvation sanctions and waging proxy conflicts and dropping bombs and interfering in elections and circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to kill, subvert and subjugate any population anywhere on earth if they disobey your commands.
Pretty sure the tyrant we actually need to worry about is whoever’s doing that.
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Gotta wash my hair, if it gets any more oily I’ll have Delta Force breaking down my door to steal it.
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Democrats spent more than a decade saying Trump is an evil fascist and then when he invades a sovereign country and abducts its leader all they’ve got to say is oh gosh I wish he’d been more polite about it, he shoulda asked Congress first. They’re just Trump with a rainbow flag.
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So let’s recap:
Russia invades Ukraine claiming there’s a NATO proxy force directly on its border = Crazy. Evil. Worse than Hitler.
US invades Venezuela claiming China is making energy deals there thousands of miles from the US border = Fine. Normal. Monroe Doctrine. Just wish he’d asked Congress.
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This macho “FUCK YEAH! AMERICA! TAKE THEIR OIL!” jingoism from right wing pundits like Nick Fuentes, Matt Walsh and Tim Pool feels planned. It’s too perfectly aligned with the rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War and all Hegseth’s sloganeering about having a mega badass military with FAFO lethality. It appears to be a deliberately crafted PR campaign to get the MAGA crowd fully on board with the US military interventionism which Trump had previously campaigned against.
This is happening for a reason. The empire has agendas planned. The warmongers are already openly salivating for regime change in Iran and Cuba. With the anti-interventionist streak in Trump’s base brought on board with easy in-and-out attacks like bombing Iranian energy infrastructure and kidnapping the Venezuelan president, they can now be expected to be much more supportive of more high-cost interventions going forward.
This is exactly how Kuwait was used, by the way. After the Gulf War the elder President Bush famously proclaimed “It’s a proud day for America, and by God we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Vietnam syndrome referred to the general war-weariness of the American public after the nightmare of the Vietnam War. Bush was saying that the Gulf War had shown Americans that wars can actually be easy, straightforward victories rather than costly, horrific quagmires, so they’d be more willing to support going to war in the future.
We all know what happened after that. The first war with Iraq went so great that the entire nation signed off on doing it again, pushing on to regime change this time. That was of course a complete disaster, and we seem to be ramping up for something like that again.
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I’ve seen a lot of people comparing the ICE shooting in Minneapolis to the abuses we see from the IDF, and I totally get why they are doing this, but it’s important to be aware that while this kind of thing is very Israeli, it’s also very, VERY American.
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Caitlin Johnstone 