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Foreign Affairs Three Big Problems with Trump’s Venezuela Oil Blockade The risks of an unnecessary and illegal full-scale war are rising. Over the past several weeks, under the pretense of stopping the flow of drugs, especially fentanyl, into the United States, the Trump administration has lethally bombed 28 small boats that were allegedly running drugs, killing 104 people. Discarding its disguise as a war on drugs, this month the U.S. seized two oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela. The targets and the increased pressure made it plain that the real goals were regime change and gaining access to Venezuela’s oil. Regime change has been an explicit goal of the U.S. in Venezuela since the short-lived coup against President Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, in 2002. In her Vanity Fair interview, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles says that Trump’s Venezuela strategy is “to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.” In November, Trump told Maduro to resign and leave the country.  And gaining access to Venezuela’s oil has long been a goal of Trump. In a June 2023 speech, Trump said, “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door. But now, we’re buying oil from Venezuela. So, we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe it.” In 2019, when Trump supported the opposition figure Juan Guaidó in a planned coup against Maduro, he pressured him to commit to granting the U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil. Dramatically intensifying the pressure on Venezuela, last week Trump published a Truth Social post calling Venezuela “a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION” and ordered “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.” There are three very large problems with Trump’s blockade. The first pertains to the justification. Though there is no universally agreed-upon definition of terrorism, many scholars argue that terrorist organizations have to be nonstate actors. So, it is not entirely clear that a country or its government can be designated as a terrorist organization.  Trump designated Venezuela a terrorist organization, in part, because of “drug terrorism.” The day before his Truth Social post, Trump designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, based on the claim that “fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.” Trump asserted that fentanyl “threatens our national security” and that there exists “the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks.”  It is true that fentanyl kills Americans. But there is an essential difference between terrorists and drug distributors. A terrorist’s intent, by the generally accepted definition, is to “spread fear among the population” in order to “coerce a national or international authority to take some action, or to refrain from taking it.” A drug distributor’s intent is to make money. They are both criminal, but they are not identical. Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the former president of the National Lawyers Guild, explained to me that, however you define terrorism, “Trump’s designation of the Venezuelan government as a foreign terrorist organization has no legal meaning in international law because the U.S. has no right to enforce its domestic law in the territory or off the coast of another state.” The second problem with Trump’s sanctioning of oil tankers and his blockade of Venezuela is that it is illegal. According to United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX), “the blockade of the ports or coasts of a State by the armed forces of another state” qualifies as an act of aggression. When the U.S. imposed a blockade on Cuba, a 1961 Justice Department memo noted that “a blockade is a belligerent act which, as a matter of international law, is ordinarily justified only if a state of war, legal or de facto, exists.” Article 41 of the UN Charter reserves for the Security Council the right to “decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed,” including the “complete or partial interruption of economic relations.” Only the Security Council can impose sanctions. Cohn explained that “when a state imposes sanctions without Security Council approval, they are called unilateral coercive measures, which violate the UN Charter.” Both the sanctions on oil vessels and the blockade are illegal, and the blockade constitutes an act of war.  The third problem is that the overall campaign against Venezuela of which the blockade is an important component does not protect U.S. interests because the charges against Venezuela are a fantasy. The Trump administration has consistently claimed that the pressure being exerted on Venezuela and on Maduro are about fentanyl. In his Truth Social post, Trump charged Venezuela with “theft of our Assets,” including oil, and with using that oil to finance the “Drug Terrorism” of flooding the U.S. with fentanyl. Trump says that the U.S. “Armada… will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” It is not clear to what Trump is referring when he accuses Venezuela of stealing American “Oil, Land, and other Assets.” It is not at all clear how the oil under Venezuelan ground can be American. Nor is it clear what land and other assets Trump is referring to. The oil reference may be to Venezuela’s nationalization of its natural resources. At the time, the popularly elected Hugo Chávez promised that his “government is here to protect the people, not the bourgeoisie or the rich.” With that promise, he nationalized the electricity, telecommunications, and steel industries to divert the profits from Venezuelan resources into social programs for Venezuela’s people. Most importantly, Chávez nationalized the oil and natural gas partnerships the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA had made with mostly American corporations. But that is not theft, and it is not uncommon. And Venezuela is not a significant source of the fentanyl or other drugs that flow into the United States. Contrary to the Trump administration’s claims, Washington does not believe that Maduro is the head of Venezuela’s drug cartels. An April 7 sense of the community memorandum put together by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and reflecting the findings of the 18 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community concluded that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with [the cartels] and is not directing [their] movement to and operations in the United States.” The memorandum said that the intelligence community “has not observed the regime directing” drug cartels and that the Maduro government, in fact, “operate[s] against it in ways that make it highly unlikely the two sides would cooperate in a strategic or consistent way.” Nor does Washington believe that Venezuela is the source of other types of drugs that kill Americans. U.S. officials say that the small boats that have been struck in the passageway between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago are not carrying fentanyl, but marijuana and a small quantity of cocaine, bound for West Africa and Europe. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, 90 percent of the cocaine that transits into the U.S. enters through Mexico, not Venezuela. The U.S. blockade on Venezuela’s sanctioned oil tankers is illegal. It is an act of war that is based on false charges. Though it is hoped to bring about a coup that will usher in a pro-American government that opens Venezuela’s resources to the United States, the more likely outcome is mayhem and instability. Trump’s order of a blockade caught senior officials at the Pentagon by surprise, and they are unsure of what role the U.S. military is expected to play. But on the day after the order, three ships left Venezuela carrying oil-based products. This time, they were escorted by Venezuelan naval ships. That is a dangerous scenario that could accidentally or intentionally lead to a full-scale war that does not serve Americans’ interests. The post Three Big Problems with Trump’s Venezuela Oil Blockade appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Liberals: This Christmas, Stop Being Afraid Things aren’t that bad. If I had one wish for my Democratic friends this holiday season, it would be this: stop being afraid. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated into fear, and from there into supporting demagogues who pop up to take advantage of your fears. Politics today can sound like a thriller novel in which democratic institutions collapse spectacularly in Chapter 1. Every headline not supporting your own beliefs becomes evidence that “democracy is in danger.” Watch especially for the ones that use the word “existential.” Every deployment becomes an “occupation,” and every move, including something as unimportant as building a new wing on the White House, is read as confirmation of a hardening dictatorship. Every decision becomes something that harks back to the Weimar Republic’s fall. The Democratic Party and the media that orbit it learned that powerful narratives get attention and motivate voters and donors. They had some early help; the “Obama is a Muslim” meme and kerfuffle over his birth certificate were crude forerunners of this style of politics, emotional overstatement masquerading as vigilance. Those early efforts failed because they had no throughline; each crazy idea has to be quickly topped with something crazier. So a celebrity cancellation or social media scandal has to be quickly replaced with desecration of the People’s House; if the news cycle did not produce something fast enough after that, then it was OK to fall back on the old tropes of Trump being a Russian intelligence asset or an actual pedophile, because what cannot be confirmed can at least be repeated. Fear-based narratives exist across the spectrum; the left’s authoritarian panic and the right’s worries about replacement theory are mirror images of a sort. All that is necessary is to ignore or distill complex developments into emotionally charged slogans. This is a terrible way to live: Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate scaled up to the 24/7 news cycle. Overstimulated lab rats will eat themselves to death. Living as if the worst possible outcome is always inevitable is unhealthy for you and bad for the very democracy that fear is eroding. There are reasons to dial back the panic and allow America to get healthy again. Forget what late-night TV says for a moment. Remember that the United States still has robust legal and institutional checks that make authoritarian takeover difficult to impossible. The American system was built with multiple layers of constraint, including an independent judiciary, a legislature with law-making power, a free press, state governments with their own authority, and a civil service embedded in administrative law. These things are robust enough to have withstood the chaos of founding the nation, a brutal civil war that tore the country apart, and the rise in Europe and Japan of real fascism backed by what were then the most powerful armies in human history. The structures that sustained the United States are not theatrical props. They have proven difficult to dismantle, certainly not via an executive order. The system works; last month saw a string of Democratic election victories, and the midterms next year are expected to be tightly contested. The Congress many fear has stopped being a check and balance can on Election Day change into a vibrant opposition. It has happened many times before and if it does not happen this round, it is because the People did not vote for it. Our system allows for change to the right or left, some of which you may not like or support but which comes about righteously. Those warning of dictatorship too easily forget that Trump was twice elected through the same system that produced Obama, Biden, and every other president. Aside from Congress, the courts and existing laws are active brakes on power and always have been. The Posse Comitatus Act, the Insurrection Act, and subsequent case law place very real limits on how the federal government can use the military at home. When administrations have pushed these boundaries, judges and state officials have pushed back and in each instance the feds backed down. The Rule of Law held. The friction has not been noiseless recently, as both the administration and Democrats have their own reasons for trying to make it look like the system is failing (looking tough on crime and installing fear of authoritarianism). But these things are not theoretical. They show the system working. While the precise percentage of the time Trump lost in the lower courts depends on which subset of cases you look at (regulatory challenges, injunctions, district court decisions, major rulings), the consistent finding is that the Trump administration lost in court a large majority of the time, somewhere between 60 to 90 percent. Recent analysis at Stanford shows lower court judges across the ideological spectrum are ruling against Trump at similar rates. He’s lost in 72 percent of rulings issued by Republican-appointed judges and 80 percent of rulings by Democratic-appointed judges. An analysis by the Court Accountability Project found that among 23 Supreme Court rulings and temporary orders related to Trump‐administration actions, the administration secured favorable outcomes in about 90 percent of those cases. The Court has ruled for Trump 17 out of 23 times in emergency appeals in his second term. That’s notable, but hardly proof of institutional collapse and that a whole branch of government has been disarmed. The muscle-tussle between the Supreme Court and lower courts is baked into the fabric of our democracy; just look at the struggle to enact civil rights and end slavery, or to drive home equality in the 1960s. For that matter, a cyclical shift toward a more powerful executive does not lead to kings. The Supreme Court itself shifts based on who happens to be sitting on the bench when a given case arises; that group of justices is itself based on who the people voted into the Oval Office. Future courts can overturn earlier decisions—remember the Dred Scott decision. Sometimes this fits one’s preferences (for example, the Court recently refusing to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage and allowing that to stand as the law of the land) or not (the Court overturning an earlier decision assuring the right to abortion under the same rules across 50 states). It is not erosion, just change. Stop being afraid, but do not become complacent. Polling data show worrying trends in collapsing public trust, which weakens democratic resilience and paves the way for demagogues. A sizable share of Americans express concern about the health of democracy and increasingly question whether opponents play by the rules. That is not to be ignored. But fear that equates every aggressive political act with the end of the republic is marketing to immobilize people instead of motivating legitimate action. When the public constantly sees disaster, it trains people to expect the worst, amplifies fear-based fundraising and media cycles, and ultimately corrodes civic stamina. Energy is diverted into alarmism rather than into voting, reform, and participation. Democracy’s real defense is faith, to gently paraphrase President Obama, not in politicians, but in the institutions and fellow citizens who, time and again, have proven stronger than their own fears. The post Liberals: This Christmas, Stop Being Afraid appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Marijuana Rescheduling Rewards Big Weed, Leaves Social Debate Unresolved Trump’s move benefits corporations but does little to address public health or Gen Z concerns. President Donald Trump last Thursday signed an executive order to reclassify marijuana under federal law, moving the drug from Schedule I to the less restrictive Schedule III. “A lot of people want to see it,” Trump had told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, adding later in the week that the reclassification order “will make it far easier to conduct marijuana-related medical research, allowing us to study benefits, potential dangers, and future treatments.” Classified as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act—alongside heroin and ecstasy—marijuana had remained federally illegal despite widespread state-level legalization, a status that had largely barred cannabis companies from the U.S. banking system and forced them to rely on higher-cost financing. Some view marijuana rescheduling as politically calculated, aimed at reclaiming the popular support that Trump held last year, particularly among Gen Z voters, whose support for the president has hemorrhaged amid rising unaffordability and a series of foreign-policy choices, beginning with U.S. strikes on Iran—which many Americans correctly perceived to have been on behalf of a foreign government rather than our own—and escalating with more recent U.S. military action near Venezuela. With about 71 percent of adults under 30 saying marijuana should be legal for both recreational and medical use, rescheduling could provide the administration with a legislative accomplishment to woo back Gen Z, a demographic for which it otherwise has little to point to, and a potential way to win back lost ground before the midterms. But the administration’s openness to removing federal barriers to the cannabis industry appears driven by more than just electoral calculus; it follows months of sustained engagement between the White House and a small group of industry executives who previously helped secure Trump’s endorsement for a marijuana ballot initiative in Florida last year.  Ahead of that endorsement, Trump met with Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers and Florida GOP Sen. Joe Gruters, according to both the lawmaker and industry sources. Rivers and Trulieve spent more than $92 million to support the “Smart and Safe Florida” campaign backing that ballot initiative. Though the weed amendment ultimately failed, the relationship forged between Trump and the cannabis industry—facilitated by chief of staff Susie Wiles, who previously worked for the firm Ballard Partners, which lobbied on behalf of Trulieve—has lasted through Trump’s first year back in the White House, where the president has discussed marijuana policy in recent Oval Office meetings with senior advisers and executives including Rivers and ScottsMiracle-Gro CEO Jim Hagedorn, as first reported by The Washington Post. Shares of major U.S. cannabis companies rose on the announcement, with firms like Canopy Growth climbing nearly 12 percent in one day. The executive order, though instantly celebrated by the industry, has reignited a debate over marijuana and public health: While reform advocates and cannabis investors see rescheduling as a long-overdue rollback of outdated drug policy, critics argue it primarily benefits large corporate producers—loosening financial and regulatory guardrails and delivering major tax advantages even as the industry markets increasingly high-potency THC products and faces mounting concerns over addiction and youth exposure. ​​Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute is among the executive order’s critics, arguing in recent essays that marijuana legalization and rescheduling discount unavoidable tradeoffs, enable the spread of increasingly high potency THC products, heighten risks of dependency and youth exposure, and fail to eliminate black-market activity.  “Today’s decision represents a surprising departure from the president’s usually sound judgment on drug control policy,” Lehman told The American Conservative. “Rescheduling marijuana will not meaningfully make research easier, make medication more available, or free people from prison. It will hand billions of dollars to the state legal industry. That’s its primary effect. It’s disappointing that this is where we ended up.” As SFGate noted, customers at dispensaries too are unlikely to notice any change, since those operations remain federally illegal. However, Schedule III, “would send a massive tax break to legal operators who would now be eligible to take normal business deductions off their federal taxes.” In an interview with former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Thursday evening, Truelieve CEO Kim Rivers assured Americans that the additional capital created by the executive order will be used in joint ventures with universities to research various chronic diseases. “We are so excited to deploy capital into research areas…now we can go and do meaningful clinical trial research using actual marijuana products,” Rivers said on the Matt Gaetz Show, previewing a time-release product to treat Parkinson’s disease. But Saagar Enjeti, a cohost of Breaking Points, reported Thursday that Trump officials privately acknowledged in a call that evidence supporting medical marijuana research claims was weak, emphasizing instead how rescheduling would amount to a major tax break for large cannabis companies. Tax breaks for large cannabis companies—like those passed in the Big Beautiful Bill—are unlikely to win back the Gen Z support the administration has lost, as younger voters increasingly expect policies that address their economic needs.  The marijuana debate reveals a perverse contradiction: In the name of freedom and personal liberty, government policy and cultural pressure has unleashed a series of addictive vices that now exert profound psychological control over Gen Z, enriching big porn, big gambling, and big weed while financially constraining a generation. The executive order may please corporate investors, but it leaves an honest conversation about marijuana policy and its social consequences unaddressed. The post Marijuana Rescheduling Rewards Big Weed, Leaves Social Debate Unresolved appeared first on The American Conservative.

Excellent choices. The post The seven books that influenced Shirley Manson the most first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

by Matt Vespa, Townhall: The Epstein files are now public. There are redactions, because I don’t know who wants to know which minors were exposed to what during Jeffrey Epstein’s aberrant and illegal sexual escapades. Democrats have been salivating over the release of these files, thinking that a smoking gun will be found to ensnare […]

Late co-founder always felt that collaborating was like “two people painting a picture on the same canvas.” But that didn’t stop him succeeding

This guide focuses on anchoring Bible studies, meetings, and group gatherings in prayer rooted in Scripture.

In the middle of gifts, gatherings, and glowing lights, this prayer helps you re-anchor your heart to the real reason we celebrate.