“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” —Malcolm X
The Guardian yesterday published an article, “European leaders appear torn in face of new world order after Venezuela attack,” is exemplary of a revealing propaganda frame. In a crude, Orwellian inversion of reality, the British propaganda organ advancing a transnational corporate agenda explains the design of the nascent “new world order,” a system in which transnational corporate state power (TCSP) decides which leaders are to be deposed not sovereign nation states based on national self interests and concern for the human rights of those suffering under the thumb of dictatorial regimes.
A clear instance of TCSP action in this spirit is Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president, ousted in 2014 during the engineered “Revolution of Dignity,” a coup, in this case, a revolution-from-above, ultimately leading to the dictatorship of Volodymyr Zelensky, a leader subservient to TCSP (see History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War). Another example is the long-running effort to remove an American president, Donald Trump, from power and replace him with a leader similarly subservient to TCSP (see The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President).
TCSP action contrasts with the old world order—that is, the existing world order being held together by Trump (and Putin)—in which sovereign states, exercising authority (i.e., legitimate power), make decisions about deposing foreign leaders based on collective self-defense and the rights of people. The TCSP position rejects these principles, asserting that nation-states do not possess such authority because they are not truly sovereign. This assumption underlies the outrage over Russia’s actions in Ukraine. It is this view—not Trump’s actions in Venezuela—that actually constitutes the so-called “new world order.”
See how propaganda works? The framing presumes the prior existence of a new world order in which the United States no longer has the authority—no longer possesses legitimate power—to depose rogue leaders whose actions harm US interests and the interests of the people in their respective countries. This is analogous to presuming a social order in which sovereign (free) individuals no longer possess the right to defend themselves against others who threaten them.
In the “new world order” presupposed by The Guardian and other corporate state media, there is no right to collective self-defense. This mirrors the erosion of individual self-defense rights within states subservient to the transnational corporate order, as seen in governments systematically disarming their populations, as well as in suppressing the right of indigenous populations to protect their homelands from barbarians sent by TCSP to undermine their nations (the replacement project).
Put another way, The Guardian shifts perception by portraying what remains essential to national sovereignty—namely, the collective right to self-defense and shaping the context in which conflict may be avoided—as a radical “new world order,” rather than recognizing it for what it is: the existing world order as upheld by the defenders of Western civilization. In anticipation of TCSP subverting that right for all sovereign nation-states, the propaganda frame recasts collective self-defense against rogue regimes as something novel. The subversion has not yet been fully achieved, which is precisely why voters chose to return Trump to power: as a protective measure against the loss of sovereignty. But The Guardian asks its readers to presume the transnational order is given.
Critics of Trump’s actions invoke the concept of “national sovereignty” without defining it. Propagandists have reduced the term to a glittering generality, selectively deployed to advance the TCSP agenda. (See Will They Break the Peace of Westphalia or Will We Save National Sovereignty for the Sake of the People?) Properly defined, sovereignty refers to authority, independence, and supreme power—whether of a self-governing nation or of an individual’s ultimate control over his own life. Sovereignty carries inherent rights, among the most fundamental of which is the right to collective self-defense.
While Venezuelans are out in the streets of their country celebrating the removal of Maduro from power, the progressive mob—the same mob that claims to protest against fascists and kings and calls for Jews to be driven from their homes in “Palestine” into the sea—is on the streets of America decrying collective self-defense and demanding a dictator be returned to power. Why? For the same reason that they protest against the deportation of Mara Salvatrucha. Because they stand with the TCSP agenda to deconstruct the sovereign nation-state. Progressives are the street gang of the new world order.
The propagandists flip meanings and say that Trump violated the sovereignty of Venezuela, which is like saying that a police officer taking into custody a criminal suspect, or ICE detaining an illegal alien, is violating the sovereignty of the suspect/alien, as if there were no legitimate reason for law enforcement to enforce the law against those who have abdicated their sovereignty by acting beyond human decency and moral boundaries.
Let’s recall the wisdom of Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens noted that sovereignty is derived from the people, the nation, not inherent in a regime. A government’s claim to sovereignty depends on its fulfilling the basic obligations of a state—protecting its population and respecting their rights. When a regime becomes the primary threat to its own people and to those in other nations, it voids the moral basis of its claims to sovereignty. Claimed sovereignty can thus be legitimately overridden when a state commits or enables systematic mass repression or engages in aggressive wars or terror sponsorship. Isn’t this what Democrats have been saying about the Maduro regime for years?
Trump did not “invade a sovereign nation.” His administration arrested the leader of an illegitimate regime and liberated the Venezuelan people from a dictatorship. Maduro will now stand trial in a court of justice. This is legal. But, more importantly, it is moral. This is what makes the legal piece legitimate. Venezuelans were killed in the action. Whose fault is this? Trump gave Madura every opportunity to step down. He was even prepared to allow Maduro exile to Turkey. Madura chose to stay. The blood is on his hands.
Progressives festoon their social media profiles with Ukrainian and Palestinian flags, and are now (predictably) out in the streets calling for the return of a dictator to power in a foreign country. The foreign flags and anti-American/Russia/Israel chants represent affronts to national sovereignty, which is precisely why progressives wave flags and chant slogans; this because progressives are an affront to the morality of national sovereignty. Progressives stand with TCSP, so naturally they will oppose the US bringing to justice those who oppress people.
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One of my favorite takes on the Maduro arrest is that the action was carried out to distract from the Epstein files. This is one of the reasons for opposing it. It was “Wag the Dog.” “Justice for Epstein’s victims!” the chant goes up. “Stay focused on the thing!” That the thing itself is a distraction is beside the point. There is no principle operating here. Trump must be derailed for the sake of TCSP.
Of course, this presumes Trump had something to do with Epstein’s crimes—or at least the distraction wants the public to presume this. Nothing Trump does can be good, so distracting from the good the President does is imperative. To demonstrate the hollowness of the claim, when Clinton’s name comes up over and over again in the files, Democrats become an orchestra of crickets.
Remember in 1998 when, during the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan and the Sudan following the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania earlier that month? There was no opposition to Clinton’s actions coming from Democrats. That was not “Wag the Dog.” Nor was there Democrat opposition to Clinton 1999 bombing Belgrade (see The US and NATO in the Balkans, my first published article in New Interventions).
I, too, denied that Clinton’s action in Afghanistan and Sudan was a “Wag the Dog” moment. But not for the same reason Democrats did. I was no fan of Clinton’s. I knew that the Clinton administration had substantial evidence that al-Qaeda was behind the US embassy bombings. Osama bin Laden had publicly declared war on the United States in 1996 and again in 1998 (the “World Islamic Front” fatwa), explicitly calling for attacks on Americans. Bin Laden made good on the fatwa, not only by bombing US diplomats in Africa, but, while the Bush Administration pretended to be asleep at the switch, on September 11, 2001.
Why is Trump’s action in Venezuela not “Wag the Dog”? Trump told the world from the beginning of his second term that he was reestablishing US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere because of the threat posed to the United States by Chinese and Russian presence in the Americas. That’s what the Panama Canal intervention was about. This is why Trump talks about Greenland. Venezuela is part of a piece. (See my January 9, 2025 essay Monroe Doctrine 2.0.)
Democrats have been talking about the threat the Madura regime presented to US national security for years. Yet they did nothing about it. Trump did something about it. Now it’s “Wag the Dog.”
freedom and reason 