The oil tanker seized by the United States off the coast of Venezuela this week was part of the Venezuelan government’s effort to support Cuba....I was just having a conversation about this on Bluesky with a skeptic:
The tanker, which is called Skipper, left Venezuela on Dec. 4, carrying nearly two million barrels of the country’s heavy crude.... The ship’s destination was listed as the Cuban port of Matanzas....
Two days after its departure, Skipper offloaded a small fraction of its oil, an estimated 50,000 barrels, to another ship, called Neptune 6, which then headed north toward Cuba.... After the transfer, Skipper headed east, toward Asia, with the vast majority of its oil on board....
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have for decades sent oil to Cuba at highly subsidized prices....
In return, the Cuban government over the years has sent tens of thousands of medics, sports instructors and, increasingly, security professionals on assignments to Venezuela....
In recent years, however ... [m]ost of the oil allocated for Cuba has instead been resold to China, with the money providing badly needed hard currency for the Cuban government....
I have no idea whether it’s true or not but I know that the paper of Judith Miller aluminum tubes, Clinton email servers, Benghazi, etc is not good at vetting leaks from their Republican contacts and pass everything they share as fact. They are helping us get into another conflict. Caveat emptor
— *it* is happening here (@realworldrj.bsky.social) December 13, 2025 at 7:29 AM
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Yeah, although it's not 2002. Normie Americans don't want to overthrow the Cuban government. They can't even name the current Cuban president. (Hell, I had to look it up.)
— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 13, 2025 at 7:55 AM
the campaign to convince normie Americans will involve horror stories about babies being pulled out of incubators in Havana, Cubans in hazmat suits packaging fentanyl and shipping them to ‘murica stealth nuclear subs, and worst of all, Havana docs performing sex change surgeries on white kids
— *it* is happening here (@realworldrj.bsky.social) December 13, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Obviously, the Trump administration wants regime change in Venezuela, with an interest in seizing the oil and rare earth minerals. In addition, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, stupidly thinks that the fall of the Venezuelan regime will take the Cuban regime down with it, even though schemes that end with "... and then the people will rise up and topple the government from within!" never work.
But the administration and Republican propagandists aren't really doing the kind of sales job you'd expect if they want to persuade Americans to back a regime-change war or two in this hemisphere. We're being told that drugs are coming into America by boat, but we're not being sold on the war with the kind of melodrama rj describes above.
The Republican propaganda effort that actually resembles what rj describes is the one against a country we don't seem to be planning to invade: Somalia. Go to the Fox News website at any given time and the lead story is likely to be about the fraud case involving Somali-Americans in Minnesota. Here's the lead story at the Fox front page right now:
The Treasury Department is reportedly ratcheting up investigations of this. The dean of Republican propagandists, Chris Rufo, says that this was a money-laundering operation for the terrorist group Al-Shabaab. And here come the dubious whistleblowers....
American Greatness has just published this credulity-straining story:
A TSA whistleblower has come forward to say she routinely witnessed Somalian immigrants flying out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport carrying suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars of cash and fake passports.
“It seemed so lackadaisical that these people could get through the airport with all that cash,” the former TSA agent told Alpha News reporter Liz Collin, this week. “Time after time after time. It wasn’t a one time thing.” ...
“I saw suitcases with millions of dollars in cash and the couriers were always Somali men traveling in pairs,” the former TSA agent said.
She added that it “really blew her mind” because they were always able to get through the checkpoints.
“Typically, what would happen is a law enforcement officer would come, check their credentials,” she told Collin, adding that it wouldn’t be too difficult to identify them now because there is a paper trail of their travels, as well as surveillance video.
“Their I.D.s were always documented and probably their plane tickets as well,” she explained. “So there is a trail of that out there.”
The whistleblower estimated that in the five years she was a TSA agent at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport at least “a billion dollars went through the airport.”
It's legal to carry large amounts of cash into and out of U.S. airports if you're flying internationally -- but you have to declare more than $10,000 in cash. The whistleblower seems to believe that all you need is a proper ID and a valid ticket and you're good to go. If she worked for TSA, you'd think she'd know about the reporting requirements.
Maybe all these people had the proper documentation. Maybe there's A Conspiracy So Vast and the law enforcement officers who checked these travelers' bona fides were all in on the plot.
Or maybe this never happened.
And that passport story sounds hinky, too:
The former agent said in one instance, a Somali man has a carry on bag “filled with brand new passports,” lamenting that “he was allowed to go through the checkpoint.”I know that every right-winger who reads this story or watches the video thinks at this point, "Well, law enforcement knew that was illegal, but the travelers were Somalis, and the officers didn't want to be politically incorrect." But that's not how anything actually works.
This is the kind of propaganda you'd expect in the run-up to a war -- but I don't think we're going to war with Somalia. It's just the likes of Chris Rufo doing what they always do: looking for ways to make Democrats (in this case, Governor Tim Walz and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar) look like absurdly tolerant freaks who want to subject Real Americans to deranged cultural ideas. Tolerance of Somalis is the new tolerance of trans people, which was the new tolerance of DEI. Republicans can't sell voters on their actual policies, a problem that's only getting worse in this era of Trump tariffs and the possible collapse of Obamacare, so they need to sell the idea that Democrats are destroying America.
And, of course, all this pleases Trump. I don't know the exact reason he's fixated on Somalia lately. Maybe top Republican message-crafters identified the fraud scandal as an excellent propaganda opportunity, then sold the idea to Trump. Or maybe it all started with him -- he utterly despises Black people, especially Black women, and especially women who aren't deferential to him. Ilhan Omar talks smack to him and is a Muslim from Africa who covers her head. I can't imagine that he could hate anyone more.
So we have a likely war against Venezuela that's barely being sold to Americans (as a result, Americans oppose it by a 70%-30% margin, according to a recent CBS poll), and we have a non-war being sold like a war, because the fight Republicans care about most is the one with fellow Americans who don't agree with them.
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