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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25449 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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The United States Navy is conducting a full-scale search-and-destroy campaign against alleged drug smugglers in the waters off Latin America and posting the results on Twitter.

The strikes have been going on for almost two months now and have killed over 50 people if Wikipedia is to be believed. I had no idea this was even an option. It turns out that You Can Just Do Things™.

I think that these are all probably smugglers of some kind. I have seen speculation that the some of the crew counts are higher than one would expect for drug running, which could imply human trafficking (consensual or otherwise) as well. If any of these boats were conducting legitimate business I suspect we would have had receipts by now.

The legal justification, to the extent that anyone cares about that anymore, seems to be that:

  • Drug cartels are terrorist organizations.

  • These boats contained cartel members targeting the United States (with drugs).

  • Therefore, these boats contained terrorists targeting the United States (with drugs).

This seems kinda flimsy, but again, does anyone actually care? Democrats are backed into a corner here. They will probably lose if they attempt to litigate whether or not these boats were actually smuggling drugs, but the other strategy would be to condemn the strikes under the legal technicality that they weren’t authorized by congress, even though the boats were smuggling drugs. This makes them look like exactly the kind of out-or touch institutionalists that voters hate.

This seems kinda flimsy, but again, does anyone actually care?

Just as an anecdote, the editor of the Tangle newsletter (which I recommend) considers this extra-judicial killing to be one of the worst things the Trump administration has done.

This is an insane normalization of what should be a major, stop-you-in-your-tracks, likely illegal use of military force. After the first strike in early September, we criticized the lack of evidence for the government’s claims, questioned the legality of the attack, and called the military operation that killed 11 to be Trump’s most lethal use of executive authority yet. Now, the United States has struck at least three more boats off the coast of Venezuela, and we don’t know who was on the boats, what they were carrying, where they were headed, if they were in international waters at the time, or even how many the U.S. has struck.

And in a later post:

One of the most alarming aspects of this situation was that, in the case of at least one of the men who was killed in the strike, some evidence emerged that he was a fisherman. One of the survivors of the recent strike did have a prior record of trafficking drugs, but the other man, from Ecuador, was released by his country and won’t be charged because they said there was no crime to charge him with. In other words, it’s possible that the Trump administration just killed at least one innocent person. At the very least, they declined to detain and charge someone on U.S. soil they just got done trying to kill extrajudicially.

That this administration had not been fighting narcoterrorists but actually killing innocent fishermen off the coast of Venezuela was already something a few journalists had theorized. When Colombia’s president condemned the strikes, Trump pulled U.S. aid to the country, rather than admit a potential mistake.

People care, there's just not much anyone can really do about it.

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