This piece makes clear how “security threats” are manufactured to justify the same old regime-change playbook. The whiplash narrative—Cuba as Venezuela’s puppet master one year, Venezuela as Cuba’s lifeline the next—reveals how little truth matters when the real objective is control over oil and political obedience. The deaths of Cuban guards and Venezuelan civilians aren’t abstractions; they’re the human cost of decades of sanctions, disinformation, and militarized diplomacy. If the U.S. truly cared about stability or democracy in the region, it would stop strangling economies and start respecting sovereignty. Independent reporting like this is essential precisely because it punctures the myths used to sell permanent intervention.
more than likely, just some petite-bourgeois middle classers who ran away from socialized healthcare and called themselves "political refugees". nothing is more despicable than those who call for war against their own people.
Finally, DropSite has a Latin America desk! And with a top-notch journalist! And thank you for including Belly of the Beast. More collabs with them, please!
We attack Venezuela and Cuba naturally gets nervous. Russia launches an Oreshnik hypersonic multiple war head at the Ukraine. US threatens Greenland.. NATO is pissed off..Israel won't stop
killing Palestinians, SUDAN..What a wonderful world..
The nations doing the most damage to humanity throughout history became governed by cartel political organizations whose leaders seemed to share the same sick, self-absorbed psychological pathology of manipulating people to achieve nothing more than selfish aspirations of delusional self-importance.
One would think that the science/profession of psychology would by now have formalized a way to test and screen such people out of careers in which they they can do long-term, profound damage by gaining major control over other peoples' lives in positions that range from operatives who obtain power over political parties to presidents of major universities.
In the U.S., the two cartel parties evolved to play an increasing role of placing their operatives in charge of the latter, displacing what were once accomplished scholars who were chosen by their other accomplished peers with professional manipulators of people.
For sure. Developmental models of higher order thinking show the highest thinking stages bring developed expertise first into combining it with reflective self-awareness to illuminate how we get in our own way, and finally to empathy that informs us of how exercising our expertise poorly can get in others' way. That is essential when leading teams and uniting brainpower.
The parties seem forced to operate at lower stage reasoning because the narcissist operators are focused on self-interest which directs the purpose of the party from governance to opportunism and corruption.
75 Democrats seizing an opportunity to curry favor with AIPAC by signing on to a bill to praise and thank ICE as Congress funded a massive federal army of occupation that is now killing and terrorizing American citizens in their streets and neighborhoods is a perfect example of opportunistic self-importance converting an organization from a political party that took an oath to defend a Constitution into a self-absorbed street gang aligning with destruction of their citizens Bill of Rights. The 75 witlessly endorsed what later is now backfiring in calls by voters to have them voted out.
Israel surely has no interest in Americans having freedom of speech, academic freedom, and access to information. Their influence is a primary reason we cannot get the information furnished by independent investigative media like Drop Site News any longer through corporate mainstream media like the New York Times.
Who has noted any anti-BDS legislation curtailing Americans' First Amendment rights to criticize the Cuban government or boycott Cuban products? How about Russian? Chinese? Saudi Arabian?... or that of one's own government in the USA?
The last I looked, BOTH cartel parties had passed anti-BDS legislation curtailing Americans' First Amendment rights by making it a punishable offense to criticize the Israeli government or boycott Israeli products in 38 states. That is reality, not conjecture.
As predictable as the seasons. Whatever the stunt is, The Supreme Cult will find for it and spare no effort to provide it with some sort of rationalized legitimacy.
I think so. I mean, as much as Trump pretended to speak out about Russia's actions, the red carpet was only ever rolled out for Putin...actions speak louder than words. There is a reason Putin is not scared of Trump...
I was real excited when I first saw Granados Ceja on Drop Site, then Breaking Points. And now he's an official part of Drop Site, heading the Latin America desk no less. So awesome.
I actually first discovered Soberanía from a commenter here on Drop Site, and have been listening very regularly for the past year or so. Highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in more coverage of Latin America. They truly stand alone when it comes to English-language coverage of the region.
Juan David Rojas is decent, but honestly every time he was on Breaking Points I found myself wishing one of the Soberanía guys had been there in addition or even instead.
“In listening to Blowback’s season on the history of the Angolan civil war in order to prepare for the interview with Kulwin, I was struck by how significant a role corrupt news coverage played in allowing U.S. policy there to unfold as it did and how critical it was when good coverage intervened – such as by Seymour Hersh and others, who exposed the CIA’s dirty war or the war crimes and use of child soldiers by Jonas Savimbi, our man in Angola. If the U.S. role had been documented more thoroughly, and if the genuinely deranged nature of Savimbi had been exposed early, hundreds of thousands of Angolan lives may have been saved and the country could have gotten on with its economic development.”
You also should read Mamdani’s chapter “The Cold War After Indo-china.” I mean Mamdani SENIOR, Zohran’s dad. His entire book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a wonderful piece of thinking about the roots of terrorism. The first chapter is somewhat disconcerting, but once I waded through it to the rest of the book, I couldn’t put it down. One of the best renditions of how U.S. imperialism has shaped the world we know.
The interesting unaddressed question is whether Delcy Rodriguez and her allies set Maduro up. There is no shortage of loose ends that collectively point in that direction.
First, the presence of devoted Cuban medical workers in Venezuela doesn't exactly tell us why Maduro actually needed a squadron of Cuban bodyguards. The question as yet unanswered is this: doesn't the presence of Cuban guards strongly suggest that Maduro could not trust the Venezuelans on his staff? The fact the the Cuban guards appear to have been taken completely by surprise also supports the thesis that they might have been isolated politically from their ostensible Venezuelan comrades -- who were in fact actively plotting Maduro's overthrow.
Second, despite her ritual public protestations to the contrary, Trump and his minions appear supremely confident that Delcy Rodriguez is committed to doing their bidding -- more confident than one would normally associate with a mere fanciful fabrication. To be sure, Trump is a shameless liar. But he seems to genuinely believe he has Rodriguez under his control. Maybe he knows something that we don't.
Third, no one within the leadership structure around Delcy Rodriguez appears to be reacting strongly to Trump's seemingly inflammatory claims to controlling her. This suggests that what Trump is claiming might well be accurate and everyone of consequence except the now deceased Cuban bodyguards is in on the plan.
The admittedly speculative conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Maduro was being opposed publicly from the outside by the disenfranchised bourgeoisie and from the inside by second generation leftists seeking to stabilize their power against the imminent demise of an increasingly unpopular, incompetent and clearly doomed buffoon. Trump decided it was quicker and easier to cut a deal with the leftist insiders than to bring in an unpredictable cadre of outsiders. Thus, Delcy and her crew would be allowed to remain in power as his agents in exchange for deference to the US in foreign matters plus a wee bit of oil.
No one not beholden to Maduro will argue he is not a flaming jackass who has overstayed his welcome and who has never developed any useful competency relating to governance. What he has understood is how to stay in power. At the same time, Maduro's annoying durability has kept the far-right opposition out of power and control of the country's oil assets out of the clutches of a rapacious and relatively tiny group of elites. The greed of the oil-tied political right wing resulted in general inequity and misery among the poor, which led to their pummeling in 1998 and the following elections by Chavez. This did not bring any kind of reconsideration of course for the right in Venezuela - just lies and preposterous claims of fraud by the other side (until the last election, in which there appears actually to have been real and decisive fraud, thanks to incompetent governance from Maduro and ongoing US sanctions).
As to Cuba and the anus-extraction the White House calls "narcoterrorism", any trouble we have with Caribbean and South American nations can be traced to our own terrible foreign-policy decisions. We rebuffed outreach from Castro after a popular revolution deposed Cuba's preceding dictatorship that kept people miserably tied to abusive elites. American Cubans tend to descend from those country-abandoning elites or the employees of those elites, who were fed fictions about the abuses of the "godless communists" taking over. Despite an honest charm offensive from Castro, our government chose to side with the tyrants who fled their country with everything of value they could steal. The US set about trying to overthrow the new government from that moment forward, and imposed the famously ruinous sanctions against and blockade of (for a long time) Cuba. This threw the new government almost immediately into defending the revolution as its first priority. That Cuba had lost its natural primary trading partner and access to trade with most of the rest of the wealthy world gets forgotten when assessing the government there, and that partially, and bizarrely, persists even now. The many successes of the government there in the face of decades of rolling efforts from the US to undermine the Cuban government rarely get consideration from the political-babble class condemning Cuba for not having the sense to govern the way our corporate trolls in politician suits prefer.
Working at arm's length with governments we do not like generally works better for our international standing and national interests, and aligns better with popular sentiment at home, than inventing preposterous pretexts for forcing on sovereign nations our preferences regarding their governance. This "narcoterrorism" bullshit transparently attempts to predicate our militarized imperialist distractions from relentless scandals regarding Republican lawlessness at home on the overly broad definitions of "terrorism" from the early days of the stupid, impossible "war on terror" from the disastrous Bush/Cheney years. As though having a tenuous legal grounding matters to the most lawless administration in living memory. Of course, the terrorism laws we have do not serve to meet even the minimal need here, and the murders and the invasion and kidnappings we have witnessed break many laws, both internationally and at home.
What is clear, from this and other criminality turning up regularly in stories in the news, is that we will see more of this lawlessness and disastrous, self-destructive behavior as long as we lack properly functioning courts and legislative bodies to check this frank depravity. Already, every single Republican in US government needs removal from office, whether by recall, vote, or impeachment, and that house-cleaning project needs to continue for several cycles to cleanse our politics of the normalization of lying, corruption, bigotry, voter suppression, tampering with vote counts while accusing, falsely, their opponents of doing what they themselves have done, bullying and demeaning citizens and journalists, betraying allies against our national interest while supporting one ally with a criminal government, and operating in our government in accordance with bizarre antigovernment beliefs not to improve governance but to undermine it, and so on. Essentially none of this is partisan. A couple of handfuls of legislators from the other party urgently need removal as well. The opposition Democratic Party does, however, believe in the rule of law and the possibility of good governance, and already represents a substantial majority of potential, if not active or regular, voters. In combination with backing good candidates to improve that one viable party, we need to vote, as a country, for that party to be responsible for the massive cleanup and upgrade we need after the mess this disastrous government is making, at home and abroad. If we fail to rally to the cause of representative government, and to its rebuilding and improvement, we will have only ourselves to blame when Republicans continue to plunge us all into tyranny - which is already in place on many fronts, with radical governments, surveillance, tracking, and private prisons, among other horrors, all in line and ready to expand oppression.
Ryan, what do you think of Matt Orfalea's recent post about the Renee Good murder? He says if you look at the videos from all angles the story becomes much more complicated, especially when you take into account the actions of Good's partner, who pretty clearly caused the whole incident. I'm not defending ICE at all, just saying the truth may be somewhere between right and left portrayals.
I watched from all angles and can't imagine how anyone could call it "complicated". Her wife never got aggressive - ever.....the fact that articles could be written to justify shooting someone in the face for speaking out is terrifying.
Thanks for forwarding. I read it and still don't understand how he can be "both sides-ing" what went down. His story clearly shows Renee trying to flee the situation in which she had shown zero aggression(he even includes the video where his wife says, "drive away")......then, the man who has been hired to keep the streets of America safe, shoots her in the face and calls her a "f*cking b*tch" . What's left to debate? It feels like his article tries to explain this heinous action away. Matt Orfalea may be a liberal, but this is the kind of liberal thinking that has allowed American to get where it is today. Shame on him
I think you need to go back and read the whole thread. I did not bring up that fact that Matt Orfalea is a liberal. I actually don't care that he worked for Bernie Sanders either. My problem is that he was giving oxygen to the idea that perhaps this innocent, non violent woman brought on her own death. The fact that his article should be trusted because he is a liberal is what I am responding to. Crimes are crimes and they should not be politicized... I don't think you understood mt point at all.
I was replying to Linda Hagge. Looks like the post went in out of order. Don't know if I can move it but I will try. I can understand when someone is trying to argue with logical fallacy just fine.
When someone shoots a commuter, whether the shooter supported Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders is only considered relevant by a mind rendered imbalanced by conditioned political polarization.
If someone is breaking into a home, is this really the query that should rise to prominence in the home occupant's mind? And just how would any of these answers matter? Would it be OK if the person voted for Trump, but you could shoot the intruder if they voted for Sanders? Good lord; listen to yourself.
I included that information because liberatls and conservatives have reported the incident very differently. with very different attitudes toward Good as well as the shooter. You are making some unwarranted assumptions about me and about how I feel about the shooting.
The only person who "...clearly caused the whole incident" is the person who CHOSE to draw a weapon, CHOSE to target the victim, and CHOSE to pull the trigger multiple times. To rationalize otherwise seems psychotic.
"Firing a gun..." multiple times. He intended to kill. If they put him back on the streets with a gun, he'll take another life because he can.
If we all did the "I feared for my life" defense every time a person with a rolled down car window tried to talk to us, half of the nation's populace would be dead in a month.
It's so weird. There's like this lib-brained fetishization with always seeking to claim the most balanced and reasonable position. Which sounds fine on the surface, until one realizes this mindset will seek the middle of any contested debate no matter how absurd or false one side might be.
It is this tendency which formed the critical weakness through which the MAGA movement has relentlessly (and successfully) pummeled the liberal establishment. No matter how far to the right or far from reality their narratives go, there is a type of overeducated, upper middle-class liberal who will always chase their fabricated middle right off the cliff of fascism.
To be clear I know absolutely zero about this commenter in particular, but the comments here and throughout the thread seem to follow this model to a T.
Nate, look up Matt Orfalea. He is not the person you are describing at all. He is not overeducated or a liberal who is driven to create "balance" no matter what. He's a videographer from a modest background. As I said earlier, he has democratic socialist leanings. Right now he is working for Matt Taibbi.
This piece makes clear how “security threats” are manufactured to justify the same old regime-change playbook. The whiplash narrative—Cuba as Venezuela’s puppet master one year, Venezuela as Cuba’s lifeline the next—reveals how little truth matters when the real objective is control over oil and political obedience. The deaths of Cuban guards and Venezuelan civilians aren’t abstractions; they’re the human cost of decades of sanctions, disinformation, and militarized diplomacy. If the U.S. truly cared about stability or democracy in the region, it would stop strangling economies and start respecting sovereignty. Independent reporting like this is essential precisely because it punctures the myths used to sell permanent intervention.
Any information about whether Rubio's parents were part of the Batista regime?
more than likely, just some petite-bourgeois middle classers who ran away from socialized healthcare and called themselves "political refugees". nothing is more despicable than those who call for war against their own people.
Finally, DropSite has a Latin America desk! And with a top-notch journalist! And thank you for including Belly of the Beast. More collabs with them, please!
We attack Venezuela and Cuba naturally gets nervous. Russia launches an Oreshnik hypersonic multiple war head at the Ukraine. US threatens Greenland.. NATO is pissed off..Israel won't stop
killing Palestinians, SUDAN..What a wonderful world..
The nations doing the most damage to humanity throughout history became governed by cartel political organizations whose leaders seemed to share the same sick, self-absorbed psychological pathology of manipulating people to achieve nothing more than selfish aspirations of delusional self-importance.
One would think that the science/profession of psychology would by now have formalized a way to test and screen such people out of careers in which they they can do long-term, profound damage by gaining major control over other peoples' lives in positions that range from operatives who obtain power over political parties to presidents of major universities.
In the U.S., the two cartel parties evolved to play an increasing role of placing their operatives in charge of the latter, displacing what were once accomplished scholars who were chosen by their other accomplished peers with professional manipulators of people.
Human being seemed to have evolved a tendency for following narcissists and sociopaths. Rational leaders are more the exception. Sad state of affairs.
For sure. Developmental models of higher order thinking show the highest thinking stages bring developed expertise first into combining it with reflective self-awareness to illuminate how we get in our own way, and finally to empathy that informs us of how exercising our expertise poorly can get in others' way. That is essential when leading teams and uniting brainpower.
The parties seem forced to operate at lower stage reasoning because the narcissist operators are focused on self-interest which directs the purpose of the party from governance to opportunism and corruption.
75 Democrats seizing an opportunity to curry favor with AIPAC by signing on to a bill to praise and thank ICE as Congress funded a massive federal army of occupation that is now killing and terrorizing American citizens in their streets and neighborhoods is a perfect example of opportunistic self-importance converting an organization from a political party that took an oath to defend a Constitution into a self-absorbed street gang aligning with destruction of their citizens Bill of Rights. The 75 witlessly endorsed what later is now backfiring in calls by voters to have them voted out.
Israel surely has no interest in Americans having freedom of speech, academic freedom, and access to information. Their influence is a primary reason we cannot get the information furnished by independent investigative media like Drop Site News any longer through corporate mainstream media like the New York Times.
If Machado claiming Cuban advisors invaded Venezuela then it must be safe to say Israel advisors have invaded the US!
Who has noted any anti-BDS legislation curtailing Americans' First Amendment rights to criticize the Cuban government or boycott Cuban products? How about Russian? Chinese? Saudi Arabian?... or that of one's own government in the USA?
The last I looked, BOTH cartel parties had passed anti-BDS legislation curtailing Americans' First Amendment rights by making it a punishable offense to criticize the Israeli government or boycott Israeli products in 38 states. That is reality, not conjecture.
And it is absolutely INSANE.
I'm wondering if Trump will try to pull some stunt to stop our free elections. He'l claim a national emergency and hang on like his buddy Netanyahu.
As predictable as the seasons. Whatever the stunt is, The Supreme Cult will find for it and spare no effort to provide it with some sort of rationalized legitimacy.
Has the US, under this regime, unofficially officially abandoned Ukraine? If trump is now going to sell oil to russia?
I think so. I mean, as much as Trump pretended to speak out about Russia's actions, the red carpet was only ever rolled out for Putin...actions speak louder than words. There is a reason Putin is not scared of Trump...
I was real excited when I first saw Granados Ceja on Drop Site, then Breaking Points. And now he's an official part of Drop Site, heading the Latin America desk no less. So awesome.
I actually first discovered Soberanía from a commenter here on Drop Site, and have been listening very regularly for the past year or so. Highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in more coverage of Latin America. They truly stand alone when it comes to English-language coverage of the region.
Juan David Rojas is decent, but honestly every time he was on Breaking Points I found myself wishing one of the Soberanía guys had been there in addition or even instead.
Ryan:
You wrote:
“In listening to Blowback’s season on the history of the Angolan civil war in order to prepare for the interview with Kulwin, I was struck by how significant a role corrupt news coverage played in allowing U.S. policy there to unfold as it did and how critical it was when good coverage intervened – such as by Seymour Hersh and others, who exposed the CIA’s dirty war or the war crimes and use of child soldiers by Jonas Savimbi, our man in Angola. If the U.S. role had been documented more thoroughly, and if the genuinely deranged nature of Savimbi had been exposed early, hundreds of thousands of Angolan lives may have been saved and the country could have gotten on with its economic development.”
You also should read Mamdani’s chapter “The Cold War After Indo-china.” I mean Mamdani SENIOR, Zohran’s dad. His entire book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a wonderful piece of thinking about the roots of terrorism. The first chapter is somewhat disconcerting, but once I waded through it to the rest of the book, I couldn’t put it down. One of the best renditions of how U.S. imperialism has shaped the world we know.
Jim Toth
Watertown, MA 02472
The interesting unaddressed question is whether Delcy Rodriguez and her allies set Maduro up. There is no shortage of loose ends that collectively point in that direction.
First, the presence of devoted Cuban medical workers in Venezuela doesn't exactly tell us why Maduro actually needed a squadron of Cuban bodyguards. The question as yet unanswered is this: doesn't the presence of Cuban guards strongly suggest that Maduro could not trust the Venezuelans on his staff? The fact the the Cuban guards appear to have been taken completely by surprise also supports the thesis that they might have been isolated politically from their ostensible Venezuelan comrades -- who were in fact actively plotting Maduro's overthrow.
Second, despite her ritual public protestations to the contrary, Trump and his minions appear supremely confident that Delcy Rodriguez is committed to doing their bidding -- more confident than one would normally associate with a mere fanciful fabrication. To be sure, Trump is a shameless liar. But he seems to genuinely believe he has Rodriguez under his control. Maybe he knows something that we don't.
Third, no one within the leadership structure around Delcy Rodriguez appears to be reacting strongly to Trump's seemingly inflammatory claims to controlling her. This suggests that what Trump is claiming might well be accurate and everyone of consequence except the now deceased Cuban bodyguards is in on the plan.
The admittedly speculative conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Maduro was being opposed publicly from the outside by the disenfranchised bourgeoisie and from the inside by second generation leftists seeking to stabilize their power against the imminent demise of an increasingly unpopular, incompetent and clearly doomed buffoon. Trump decided it was quicker and easier to cut a deal with the leftist insiders than to bring in an unpredictable cadre of outsiders. Thus, Delcy and her crew would be allowed to remain in power as his agents in exchange for deference to the US in foreign matters plus a wee bit of oil.
No one not beholden to Maduro will argue he is not a flaming jackass who has overstayed his welcome and who has never developed any useful competency relating to governance. What he has understood is how to stay in power. At the same time, Maduro's annoying durability has kept the far-right opposition out of power and control of the country's oil assets out of the clutches of a rapacious and relatively tiny group of elites. The greed of the oil-tied political right wing resulted in general inequity and misery among the poor, which led to their pummeling in 1998 and the following elections by Chavez. This did not bring any kind of reconsideration of course for the right in Venezuela - just lies and preposterous claims of fraud by the other side (until the last election, in which there appears actually to have been real and decisive fraud, thanks to incompetent governance from Maduro and ongoing US sanctions).
As to Cuba and the anus-extraction the White House calls "narcoterrorism", any trouble we have with Caribbean and South American nations can be traced to our own terrible foreign-policy decisions. We rebuffed outreach from Castro after a popular revolution deposed Cuba's preceding dictatorship that kept people miserably tied to abusive elites. American Cubans tend to descend from those country-abandoning elites or the employees of those elites, who were fed fictions about the abuses of the "godless communists" taking over. Despite an honest charm offensive from Castro, our government chose to side with the tyrants who fled their country with everything of value they could steal. The US set about trying to overthrow the new government from that moment forward, and imposed the famously ruinous sanctions against and blockade of (for a long time) Cuba. This threw the new government almost immediately into defending the revolution as its first priority. That Cuba had lost its natural primary trading partner and access to trade with most of the rest of the wealthy world gets forgotten when assessing the government there, and that partially, and bizarrely, persists even now. The many successes of the government there in the face of decades of rolling efforts from the US to undermine the Cuban government rarely get consideration from the political-babble class condemning Cuba for not having the sense to govern the way our corporate trolls in politician suits prefer.
Working at arm's length with governments we do not like generally works better for our international standing and national interests, and aligns better with popular sentiment at home, than inventing preposterous pretexts for forcing on sovereign nations our preferences regarding their governance. This "narcoterrorism" bullshit transparently attempts to predicate our militarized imperialist distractions from relentless scandals regarding Republican lawlessness at home on the overly broad definitions of "terrorism" from the early days of the stupid, impossible "war on terror" from the disastrous Bush/Cheney years. As though having a tenuous legal grounding matters to the most lawless administration in living memory. Of course, the terrorism laws we have do not serve to meet even the minimal need here, and the murders and the invasion and kidnappings we have witnessed break many laws, both internationally and at home.
What is clear, from this and other criminality turning up regularly in stories in the news, is that we will see more of this lawlessness and disastrous, self-destructive behavior as long as we lack properly functioning courts and legislative bodies to check this frank depravity. Already, every single Republican in US government needs removal from office, whether by recall, vote, or impeachment, and that house-cleaning project needs to continue for several cycles to cleanse our politics of the normalization of lying, corruption, bigotry, voter suppression, tampering with vote counts while accusing, falsely, their opponents of doing what they themselves have done, bullying and demeaning citizens and journalists, betraying allies against our national interest while supporting one ally with a criminal government, and operating in our government in accordance with bizarre antigovernment beliefs not to improve governance but to undermine it, and so on. Essentially none of this is partisan. A couple of handfuls of legislators from the other party urgently need removal as well. The opposition Democratic Party does, however, believe in the rule of law and the possibility of good governance, and already represents a substantial majority of potential, if not active or regular, voters. In combination with backing good candidates to improve that one viable party, we need to vote, as a country, for that party to be responsible for the massive cleanup and upgrade we need after the mess this disastrous government is making, at home and abroad. If we fail to rally to the cause of representative government, and to its rebuilding and improvement, we will have only ourselves to blame when Republicans continue to plunge us all into tyranny - which is already in place on many fronts, with radical governments, surveillance, tracking, and private prisons, among other horrors, all in line and ready to expand oppression.
Ryan, what do you think of Matt Orfalea's recent post about the Renee Good murder? He says if you look at the videos from all angles the story becomes much more complicated, especially when you take into account the actions of Good's partner, who pretty clearly caused the whole incident. I'm not defending ICE at all, just saying the truth may be somewhere between right and left portrayals.
I watched from all angles and can't imagine how anyone could call it "complicated". Her wife never got aggressive - ever.....the fact that articles could be written to justify shooting someone in the face for speaking out is terrifying.
Also, Dani, no one "justified" the shooting.
you didn't but I feel like the article did.
Matt Orfalea is a liberal, former Bernie Sanders supporter. His point is that both left and right have exaggerated their coverage. And if he is accurate, Renee's partner did exacerbate the situation. Here's the link: https://censorednews.substack.com/p/the-shooting-of-renee-good?publication_id=331523&post_id=184057356&isFreemail=true&r=1cce6&triedRedirect=true
Thanks for forwarding. I read it and still don't understand how he can be "both sides-ing" what went down. His story clearly shows Renee trying to flee the situation in which she had shown zero aggression(he even includes the video where his wife says, "drive away")......then, the man who has been hired to keep the streets of America safe, shoots her in the face and calls her a "f*cking b*tch" . What's left to debate? It feels like his article tries to explain this heinous action away. Matt Orfalea may be a liberal, but this is the kind of liberal thinking that has allowed American to get where it is today. Shame on him
I think you need to go back and read the whole thread. I did not bring up that fact that Matt Orfalea is a liberal. I actually don't care that he worked for Bernie Sanders either. My problem is that he was giving oxygen to the idea that perhaps this innocent, non violent woman brought on her own death. The fact that his article should be trusted because he is a liberal is what I am responding to. Crimes are crimes and they should not be politicized... I don't think you understood mt point at all.
I was replying to Linda Hagge. Looks like the post went in out of order. Don't know if I can move it but I will try. I can understand when someone is trying to argue with logical fallacy just fine.
When someone shoots a commuter, whether the shooter supported Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders is only considered relevant by a mind rendered imbalanced by conditioned political polarization.
If someone is breaking into a home, is this really the query that should rise to prominence in the home occupant's mind? And just how would any of these answers matter? Would it be OK if the person voted for Trump, but you could shoot the intruder if they voted for Sanders? Good lord; listen to yourself.
I included that information because liberatls and conservatives have reported the incident very differently. with very different attitudes toward Good as well as the shooter. You are making some unwarranted assumptions about me and about how I feel about the shooting.
No - I'm sure you are very against this shooting just like the rest of us. We're just trying to hash it all out.
I tried three times. The comment keeps linking to your comment instead of Hagge. I give up.
The only person who "...clearly caused the whole incident" is the person who CHOSE to draw a weapon, CHOSE to target the victim, and CHOSE to pull the trigger multiple times. To rationalize otherwise seems psychotic.
I looked at it and saw a man firing a gun in anger who didn't have to.
"Firing a gun..." multiple times. He intended to kill. If they put him back on the streets with a gun, he'll take another life because he can.
If we all did the "I feared for my life" defense every time a person with a rolled down car window tried to talk to us, half of the nation's populace would be dead in a month.
It's so weird. There's like this lib-brained fetishization with always seeking to claim the most balanced and reasonable position. Which sounds fine on the surface, until one realizes this mindset will seek the middle of any contested debate no matter how absurd or false one side might be.
It is this tendency which formed the critical weakness through which the MAGA movement has relentlessly (and successfully) pummeled the liberal establishment. No matter how far to the right or far from reality their narratives go, there is a type of overeducated, upper middle-class liberal who will always chase their fabricated middle right off the cliff of fascism.
To be clear I know absolutely zero about this commenter in particular, but the comments here and throughout the thread seem to follow this model to a T.
Nate, look up Matt Orfalea. He is not the person you are describing at all. He is not overeducated or a liberal who is driven to create "balance" no matter what. He's a videographer from a modest background. As I said earlier, he has democratic socialist leanings. Right now he is working for Matt Taibbi.