After mass demonstrations broke out in the aftermath of the disputed Venezuelan elections on July 28, President Nicolás Maduro has taken harsh measures to quell protests and disrupt the political opposition.…

Landing at Luton Airport, as I began a holiday in Britain, I wondered if I would see luggage being hurled across the terminal. Taxis set alight. Travelers doing battle in the car park.  To joke is…

The deadly origins revealed.

Foreign Affairs Government Crackdown Leaves Little Hope for Venezuelan Opposition Despite international pressure—and a possible amnesty offer from the U.S.—Maduro continues to solidify control. Credit: image via Shutterstock After mass demonstrations broke out in the aftermath of the disputed Venezuelan elections on July 28, President Nicolás Maduro has taken harsh measures to quell protests and disrupt the political opposition. Public demonstrations have been disrupted by mass arrests, military force, and the deployment of government-aligned paramilitaries—sometimes to deadly effect. Opposition leadership, including the presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia and the party leader María Corina Machado, are in hiding as government forces seek to detain them. Part of this effort includes what Maduro calls “Operation Knock-Knock,” as police go door to door to arrest people who are alleged to have participated in the protests, usually without a warrant. A portion of the operation included the creation of a toll-free telephone line and social media channel (through the government’s VenApp) for anonymous reports of disturbances and anti-government actors. The president urged Venezuelans to denounce “traitors” to the police. In a speech last week, Maduro announced some of the results of the government’s efforts. “With the civic-military-police fusion, we have reestablished peace in 48 hours! We have now captured 2,229 terrorists… on Saturday, they will be taken to Tocorón and Tocuyito,” he said, referring to two of the country’s prisons. In addition to the thousands of protestors and opposition figures, at least two dozen people have been killed, the majority by Venezuelan pro-government paramilitary forces known as “collectivos”. To supplement the government’s other efforts at tamping down on civil unrest, Maduro has also presented a bill to the National Assembly of Venezuela to restrict the use of social media in the country, arguing that it is a tool of foreign powers intent on undermining Venezuelan sovereignty. The country has already blocked the use of the social network X after its owner, Elon Musk, clashed with Maduro online and accused him of “major election fraud.” In response, Maduro suspended the website for 10 days, stating that it was “inciting hatred, civil war, [and] death.” As internal unrest diminishes in the wake of the government crackdown, international pressure on Venezuela has built. While denunciations from the United States, the UN, and Latin American countries unfriendly to Venezuela were doubtless expected by the Venezuelan government, two countries that have traditionally been friendly with Maduro have also declined to recognize the results announced by the National Electoral Council (CNE). Colombia, led by president Gustavo Petro, and Brazil, under the leadership of Lula da Silva, have asked the Venezuelan government to release the voting records held by the CNE as proof of the election’s legitimacy before they endorse the results. Both countries discussed the matter over the phone Wednesday, but it does not seem that they reached an agreement on the issue. With more than 80 percent of the voting machine receipts from the July 28 election published by the opposition online showing an overwhelming victory for González, it is unlikely that the CNE will ever release the official ballot count. Instead, Maduro has proposed running a second election, a proposal likely to be met with skepticism from Brazil and Colombia. Without a significant change in the behavior of the government, there is little reason for either country to be confident in the legitimacy of a second election when the first remains in doubt. Both countries would like to avoid a further exacerbation of the Venezuelan political and social crisis. Millions of Venezuelan refugees have either passed through or settled in their countries over the past decade, putting strain on local economies and social services and in some places increasing crime significantly. The government crackdown also threatens to further destabilize and isolate the country, leaving it more vulnerable to use by drug cartels and organized crime, which are already a problem in many parts of Venezuela. The United States may also be attempting to pressure Maduro into recognizing González’s election to the presidency. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. has been in secret talks with the Venezuelan government and offered amnesty to Maduro and other government figures in return for a peaceful transfer of power to the opposition, although the White House denied that such an offer had been made. Despite continued opposition protests and international pressure, however, it looks increasingly unlikely that anyone other than Maduro will be leading the country for the foreseeable future. The Venezuelan government has thoroughly coup-proofed the military, regularly purging officers with suspect loyalties and providing generous benefits, including cash bonuses, free housing, and positions in the government to faithful supporters. Any change of government would probably prove perilous not only to Maduro himself, but also to many other political and military leaders who cooperated with him. The consistent hostility of the U.S. and its allies will likely lead Maduro to increased reliance on Russia and China for his government’s support. Both countries immediately recognized his victory in the July election and both have invested in the country in the past. China in particular has shown strong support, loaning the government billions of dollars and investing billions more in the Venezuelan oil and gas industry. Just last year, China and Venezuela signed a new comprehensive partnership agreement, and President Xi will no doubt take the opportunity provided by the country’s instability to draw it further into the Chinese sphere of influence. The post Government Crackdown Leaves Little Hope for Venezuelan Opposition appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs After the Riots, Will the British Right Do Anything? So far from being on the brink of civil war, the UK seems unlikely to see any sort of systematic change. Credit: Paul Oulton via Shutterstock Landing at Luton Airport, as I began a holiday in Britain, I wondered if I would see luggage being hurled across the terminal. Taxis set alight. Travelers doing battle in the car park.  To joke is in no sense to diminish the seriousness of the violence that struck cities like Southport and Rotherham last week. Senseless hooliganism—which followed the murder of three girls, allegedly by a young man of Rwandan heritage—led to dozens of police officers being injured and hotels hosting migrants being set alight. Still, the volume of reports on violence and destruction may have led an outsider to think that localized violence was more ubiquitous than it was—not least when Elon Musk was claiming that “civil war is inevitable”. Actually, the spasm of rage and opportunism that fueled nativist rioting appears to have burned itself out in days. The “counter-protests” that brought tens of thousands of antiracists out into the street last Wednesday in such left-leaning areas as Walthamstow and Brighton had a surreal quality because it was unclear who the counter-protestors had expected to arrive. Wall-to-wall headlines about how campaigners had “faced down” the “far right” obscured the fact—accepted even by Nick Lowles of the left-wing anti-racist watchdog Hope Not Hate—that rumors of massive far right demonstrations had been based on petty online chatter. Since then, leftists have been furiously trying to demonstrate that the riots were more systematic than they were. Attempts to blame the violence on Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage for indulging misinformation about how the Southport killer was a Muslim refugee or known to the security services range from dubious to farcical. First, they suggest that rioters who were moved to violence by the suspect allegedly being an immigrant would have been unmoved by his being the son of immigrants. Second, it ignores the fact that the violence was a symptom of a chronic lack of organization on the right. Leaderless and directionless, rioters struck out with futile and reckless abandon. Now, the weighty hand of the state is doing its best to deter future aggression. The police might have proved themselves to be ineffective, but the courts are mopping up. When Labour came to power, their emphasis was on rehabilitation over imprisonment. Criminals up to and including men who had been imprisoned for manslaughter were being released early. Now, rioters and their advocates are being banged up en masse. Of course, it is only natural that violence and incitement to violence will be firmly prosecuted. The jailing of men, on the other hand, who had done no more than post racially provocative memes points towards a broader crackdown on speech. Establishment commentators are banging the drum for expansive censorship, such as when Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics urged the Metropolitan Police to investigate the author Douglas Murray. (If I were Campbell, who famously worked on the dossiers that promoted British involvement in the Iraq War, I would be careful who I accused of encouraging violence).  The fact is that excitable voices on the right and the left are exaggerating the potential for nativist violence. That is not to claim that such violence does not happen and will not happen (a claim that would be purblind at best given recent events). It is to claim that the numbers, organization and resources are not sufficient to support and sustain concerted violence. Pro-Trump demonstrators in the USA in 2021 had a charismatic leader and access to arms, and all that they achieved was to roam around a government building. British rioters don’t even have those. Most of the public, meanwhile, including people who are sympathetic to peaceful protests, oppose them. There is neither the will nor the way. This is not to be regretted. Concerted violence would only benefit gravediggers and the legal profession. But the thought has a seductive appeal for some commentators in the face of slow British decline. It offers the chance for catharsis, if nothing else (a catharsis that someone like Elon Musk could appreciate vicariously). As Paul Brian and Charlie Nash wrote in these pages in 2020, “apocalyptic political posturing” can reflect “yearning for a climax and a resolution”. Yet it can be pure escapism. It would be careless to rule out the possibility of large-scale violence in the future (because, if nothing else, one never knows quite what the future holds). But far likelier is a grim drumbeat of localized atrocities, fueled by sectarian resentment and mental illness, set against a backdrop of state dysfunction and economic decline. People are likelier to separate than they are to clash, such as when white Londoners moved out to Kent and Essex. The writer Sam Bidwell has wittily referred to the reshaping of social and political norms as “Lebanonization”.  We right-leaning commentators who deplore violence should be self-aware enough to acknowledge our own failure to establish political means through which ill-feeling towards these circumstances can be addressed. Beneath the violence that leapt out of the surface of British communities seethed a hot and deep outrage towards a political establishment that has ignored and misused the popular will for decades. As a migrant myself, it is less and less my place to insist on the specific direction of British politics. But the blatant antidemocratic nature of the neglect and exploitation of majority feeling on the changing state of British society is a fact as plain as the greenness of the grass—a fact that makes outrage over events like the Southport killings ever more acute.  The challenge for right-wing commentators and politicians is to not yammer impotently about such circumstances but to form the institutional and strategic means of promoting and establishing restrictionist and patriotic policies—at the national level, when it comes to future governance, and at the local level, when it comes to resisting top-down attempts to reshape demographics. If the right is all talk then its outrage, justifiable as it is, towards top level power plays and low level hooliganism will be vacuous. Talk is cheap. The post After the Riots, Will the British Right Do Anything? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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One of my favorite bits of ancient wisdom, which I have quoted many times over the years, is the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu’s adage that a battle is won before it is fought because it is won by choosing the terrain on which it is fought. Accordingly, as I noted in a column a few months ago: “If former President Donald Trump and other Republicans on the ballot this fall want to win, they must choose the proper terrain.” He who controls the narrative and framing necessarily controls the result. Every good trial lawyer knows this. And so should every good politician. Although recent days have been more focused and suggest a possible turning of the tide, the electoral terrain for Republicans has generally been rather shaky ever since the bloodless Kamala Harris coup of Joe Biden a few weeks ago. Asking whether Harris — the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants — actually counts as “Black” for U.S. demographic purposes is fair substantive game, but it is certainly not fertile swing voter terrain. Even less compelling, and certainly less propitious, is incontinent friendly fire directed at the popular governor of a crucial swing state, Georgia. Early voting begins in Pennsylvania, arguably this election’s single most decisive battleground state, on Sept. 16. That is just around the corner. Can Republicans pull it together in time and successfully define the electoral terrain? Republicans are not entirely themselves to blame for the current state of the race, which has seen the GOP squander much of its momentum from the former president’s heroic survival of an assassination attempt and the party’s successful nominating convention. The corporate media has aided Democrats every step of the way. After pretending to be real journalists for a few weeks and holding Biden accountable for his palpable senility, the Washington press corps immediately returned to regime-apologist form after party elites succeeded in their coup. Thus, the present spectacle of Harris not answering a single real question from the press for nearly four weeks. Funny how quickly the media went from probing to outright laconic. Republicans and the Trump campaign need to break through the corporate media’s shameless attempt to shield Harris and prairie socialist running mate Tim Walz from any scrutiny whatsoever. Part of that strategy will necessarily entail utilizing alternative media sources, as Trump did earlier this week during his much-hyped X Spaces conversation with Elon Musk. But ultimately, there can be no substitute for hitting the physical campaign trail in the nation’s core swing states — for attending small-town rallies in Pennsylvania, leading local parades in Michigan, going on local news programs in Wisconsin, and the like. And it is imperative that in making the local rounds, Trump and Republicans define the proper terrain on which voters will make their fateful voting booth decisions. It ultimately boils down to this: If Republicans can successfully frame the 2024 election as boiling down to the actual issues — and above all, the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime — then they stand a strong chance of prevailing. But if Democrats and their media propagandists can successfully frame the election as a subjective “vibes” competition or a mere high school-like popularity contest, the GOP could very well lose. Harris is already attempting to distance herself from Biden. Republicans must not allow her to do that. Harris has been Biden’s (tongue-twisted and dim-witted) right-hand wingwoman since day one. Harris owns the Biden-Harris administration’s abysmal record no less than Biden himself. And that record is decidedly unpopular with the American people: According to current polling averages, the Biden administration’s approval rating is 20 points underwater on the economy, 21 points underwater on foreign policy, 29 points underwater on immigration, 28 points underwater on inflation, 19 points underwater on crime, and an astounding 34 points underwater on the war in Gaza. Let’s be blunt: The Biden–Harris administration’s record is about as popular with the American people as venereal disease. That suggests an obvious path to victory in November for the Trump–Vance campaign, and for Republicans as a whole: Stay disciplined and make the case on the leading substantive issues facing the American people. Now is not the time for self-indulgence. Now is not the time for needless distractions. Now is not the time to relitigate the past or to settle old scores. But now is the time for a ruthless, meticulous assault on the entirety of the fetid Biden–Harris oeuvre, and a concomitant positive case as to why a Trump–Vance administration will produce better results for a besieged and beleaguered populace. The road map could not possibly be clearer. In fact, it practically writes itself. All that is left is to execute the plan. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kamala Columbia University Stinks Just a Bit Less Today Poor, Poor, Pitiful Joe The post Republicans Must Make a Laser-Focused, Issues-Based Case to the People appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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