Did anyone truly believe we’d get a whole week into the new year without state violence, lightly seasoned with yet another breach of international law? I did. I was riding the high of Heated Rivalry Christmas, followed by the historic Mamdani inauguration, and I foolishly believed there were still so many joys in this world — joys our government works relentlessly to suffocate.
And after two years of struggling to find my own sense of meaning, living in a country in perpetual decline, I was determined not to let 2026 be taken from me the same way.
No can do, said the crime syndicate, pretending to be your government.
Only three days into the new year, and it’s already Grand Theft Venezuela. We’re snatching presidents of sovereign foreign countries to steal their resources — or, more precisely, to stockpile oil before attacking another sovereign nation, Iran, in a matter of weeks.
As you already know, the US military attacked Venezuela over the weekend and abducted President Nicholas Maduro, alongside his wife Cilia Flores, leaving at least 40 people dead (latest report has the number at 75 people) in the process.
The most dangerous reality of living in a country in perpetual decline is that the government no longer feels compelled to make its lies believable. The restraint is gone. Now that they have done it, Trump and his ratchet administration are flat-out telling you why; there’s no more chatter about fentanyl or narco-terrorism, or installing freedom and democracy.
Just hear Trump say it with his full chest, following the kidnapping of the President of a sovereign country:
“We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago. We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused to us by that country.”
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.”
And there you have it, rinse & repeat, like so many times before, the might is right, the oil grab camouflaged in America’s go-to moral sermons. Same savage imperialism, stripped of any disguise. We have social media now, and they aren’t even trying to Colin Powell us into obedience.
Let’s be honest, the US has been doing this forever. Nothing about the latest Grand Theft Venezuela is unique.
