Massa Media [also] had Prior Knowledge of Trump’s Venezuela Assault but Withheld Coverage [The Dependent Media and Trump Serve the Same Masters. Who Benefits from 2 Party Politics Theater?]
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From [HERE] The two largest US newspapers learned in advance of the secret US raid to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, but chose not to publish what they knew to avoid endangering US troops, Semafor reported on 4 January, citing two people familiar with the matter.
Despite so-called hostility toward US President Donald Trump regarding domestic issues, the New York Times (NYT) and Washington Post cooperated with his administration ahead of the operation to attack Venezuela.
US forces deployed more than 150 aircraft to eliminate air defenses, clearing the way for helicopters to insert troops who then moved on to President Maduro’s location.
After Maduro and his wife were abducted, President Trump and top administration officials praised the operation, citing both the lack of US casualties and the total secrecy surrounding it, including from the media.
“The coordination, the stealth, the precision, the very long arm of American justice - all on display in the middle of the night,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said.
Trump approved the assault at 10:46 pm Friday. Though aware of the decision, the NYT and Washington Post waited several hours before reporting it because the White House had warned that doing so would expose US troops performing the operation to danger.
However, the decision showed disregard for the lives of Venezuelans.
US airstrikes accompanying the commando operation killed 40 people, including civilians and military personnel, a senior Venezuelan official told the NYT on Saturday.
One strike targeted a three-story civilian apartment complex in Catia La Mar, a poor coastal area just west of the Caracas airport, killing an 80-year-old woman, Rosa González, and seriously wounding a second person. [MORE]
The Wealth of Billionaires Surges to $8.1 Trillion as Affordability Crisis Hammers Working Class
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The collective wealth of US billionaires surged to $8.1 trillion in 2025 as working-class Americans faced a cost-of-living crisis made worse by President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and unprecedented assault on the social safety net.
An analysis released Friday by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found that the top 15 US billionaires saw the largest wealth gains last year, with their collective fortune growing from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion. That 33% gain was more than double the S&P 500’s 16% increase in 2025.
What IPS describes as the “elite group” of US billionaires includes Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the richest man in the world; Google co-founder Larry Page; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; and Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison.
IPS emphasized that “these staggering combined billionaire wealth totals come as the Trump-GOP budget bill passed in 2025 defunded health insurance, food stamps, and other vital anti-poverty safety net programs, in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and budget increases for militarism and mass deportations.” [MORE]
A Commission Acknowledged that Maryland Authorities and Agencies were Complicit in at Least 38 Lynchings and Promoted Racial Terror. How Many Billions Does the Gov Owe for its Official Oppression?
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ACCORDING TO FUNKTIONARY:
Lynching – the juxtaposition of insensate self-hatred (inferiority complex) and sudden death within the horror-dome of Racism White Supremacy (the expression of the fear of genetic annihilation). For pictorial proof of the Caucasian’s inhumanity to Afrikans (the civilizers of hue-manity), see: “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.”
From [HERE] A Maryland commission recently concluded that state leaders and institutions were complicit in 38 lynchings and the widespread racial terror that followed the Civil War – and said current leaders should atone with cash payments to descendants of the victims.
The commission spent six years and 630 pages documenting how law enforcement, politicians, judges and media contributed to either the deaths, the lack of justice for victims or the systemic racism that empowered White mobs to act with impunity.
Victim by victim, the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s sprawling final report details that complicity. It recommends $100,000 for every surviving descendant of lynching victims and $10,000 for descendants of people who lived in communities terrorized by lynchings, among 84 suggestions for how Maryland could atone for the extrajudicial killings and the racial terror created in Black communities.
“The trauma inflicted by these crimes, often carried out as public spectacles, reverberated through generations. Communities were left to live in the shadow of violence without recourse, justice or recognition,” the report said.
No perpetrators were ever held accountable in any of the deaths, which occurred between 1854 and 1933. Some included mutilations or burnings. Photos of some lynchings were made into postcards as souvenirs. All killed were Black men or boys; one was 14 years old.
Nicholas Creary, a Bowie State University professor and commissioner who helped build the historical record for the report.
“Lynching was not just the murder of an individual,” he said. “It was a communal act, and it was a message crime, intended to silence African American communities and to ensure that they – to use the old colloquial phrase – that Black folks stayed in their place.”
Maryland’s newly elected House speaker, Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s), sponsored the law to create the lynching commission in 2019, when she was a delegate, and has championed its mission.
“This is just the beginning, and there’s a lot of work to be done,” Peña-Melnyk said in an interview.
The law granted the commission subpoena power and resources to collect oral histories, documents, testimony and existing local research, as well as hold public hearings and hire genealogists to track down the full truth about the state’s brutal history.
Maryland is among eight states outside the Deep South where lynching was common albeit less frequent, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative.
More than 4,000 lynchings happened in 12 Southern states between the Civil War and World War II, the EJI report found, with the most – 654 – documented in Mississippi. Another 361 were in Alabama, 549 in Louisiana and 84 in Virginia. Historians have struggled for years to pinpoint how many Black people died in lynchings. As recently as 2020, researchers documented an additional 2,000 lynchings that had not be included in their previous tallies. The current estimate stands at 6,500.
Gov. Wes Moore (D), a potential 2028 presidential contender and the only Black governor of a U.S. state, ran on a “Leave No One Behind” platform in 2022 that included closing the racial wealth gap and dismantling systems of racial oppression.
This year, he vetoed a bill to study reparations for the legacy of slavery, saying that the enduring racial disparity in Maryland had been sufficiently studied and that he wanted to enact policies, not study them.
The General Assembly overrode his veto last month, on the same day the House of Delegates elected Peña-Melnyk as its new leader. The commission details 84 specific policies, divided into nine categories, to remedy the injustice. It’s now working on turning those into legislation for Peña-Melnyk to consider championing in the upcoming General Assembly session.
“Every Black person who modified their behavior out of fear, who lost property to White mobs, who was denied economic opportunity, who fled their community to protect their family, was a victim of this system,” the report said.
The proposals range from the cash compensation to strengthening current due-process protections, law school scholarships, integrating the history of racial terror into school classrooms, and an array of “symbolic reparations” that include apologies and memorials.
The governor’s office has so far been noncommittal about all of them.
“Given the scope of the report, it would be premature to commit to specific proposals before completing a full review,” spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement.
But, Moussa said, “Gov. Moore believes the work of repair demands urgent, measurable action – and his administration will keep delivering results that expand opportunity and close gaps that have held Black Marylanders back for generations.”
Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) said through a spokesman he looks forward to reviewing the recommendations, and “recognizes the painful and necessary work” the commission undertook.
The $100,000 and $10,000 amounts of the proposed reparations are drawn from history: They represent the present-day value of compensation proposed in anti-lynching bills Maryland state lawmakers drafted but did not approve in the 1930s.
David O. Fakunle, commission chair and an assistant professor at Morgan State University, said that while the cash reparations constitute the most eye-catching recommendation, it’s not the most important.
“The number-one recommendation is to tell the truth,” Fakunle said.
“It’s the story that nobody wants to talk about. We’ll talk about slavery, Jim Crow, all that stuff before we want to talk about lynching. There’s a reason: because it’s heinous. It’s the worst of humanity.”
Fakunle said that over the course of six years, the commission notified some people of the fact that their ancestors had been lynched, and heard from descendants of people who had been perpetrators and wanted to make amends. Institutions, such as the Baltimore Sun, acknowledged the role they played in creating a culture that allowed lynching to fester, he said.
Trump DHS Post Propagandizes the US as a White Supremacy Paradise “After 100 Million Deportations” of Non-White People [racist domination by forcefully preventing people from improving their lives]
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From [HERE] The Trump administration provoked horror this week with the suggestion that the United States could be turned into a paradise if over a quarter of the people in the country were deported.
On Wednesday, the official social media account for the Department of Homeland Security posted a piece of artwork depicting a pink late-1960s Cadillac Eldorado parked on a bright, idyllic beach. Over the clear blue sky are the words “America after 100 million deportations.”
The post was captioned by the agency: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”
Social media users later discovered that DHS had, ironically, stolen the image from the Japanese pop artist Hiroshi Nagai without giving credit.
It is hardly the first time the administration has used edgy and inflammatory social media posts to promote its agenda. But DHS has come under particular scrutiny for its style of communication, which often evokes white nationalist rhetoric and symbolism.
Posts by the agency have cheered “remigration,” a term that far-right parties in Europe have often used to describe the forced repatriation of nonwhite populations, including citizens. Other posts have referred to President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign as part of an effort to defend American “heritage” and “culture.”
The agency frequently evokes images of the American frontier and references “Manifest Destiny,” at times explicitly posting artwork glorifying the forced displacement of Native American populations.
An image by the agency, featuring a chiseled Uncle Sam calling on Americans to “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS,” was even directly sourced from an overt neo-Nazi account.
The agency has only continued to double down in the face of criticism this week. On Friday, it posted that “2026 will be the year of American Supremacy” over an image of then-Gen. George Washington crossing the Delaware River, which was emblazoned with the words “Return this Land,” a possible reference to a recently-founded “whites-only” town in rural Arkansas known as “Return to the Land.” [MORE]
James Corbett: Is most of what we see, read and hear on the Internet generated by Bots?
/From [HERE] James Corbett explains that nearly everyone you talk to online is a bot, spy, troll or psyops warrior!
And, as you’re about to see, it gets even worse before it gets (hopefully) better.
Intrigued? Want to know what this means for the future of the internet? Or, much more importantly, what it means for the future of human community? Then read on!
FOREIGN SPIES UNMASKED
If you’ve been “surfing the web” since the early days of the “information superhighway,” you’ll no doubt recall one of the earliest online jokes: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Now, in 2025, it seems we may need to amend that joke to take it from a pithy observation about online anonymity to a dire warning about the weaponization of online anonymity: “On the internet, no one knows you’re a foreign psyops officer.”
You see, last month the social media platform formerly known as Twitter decided to roll out a new feature: a location tool that reveals the country or region in which a given account is based. The result? A lot of foreign psyops warriors got caught with their pants down.
It seems that particular Trump-loving Ivanka fan is based in the MAGA stronghold of . . . Nigeria?
And it’s not just those accounts. The @BarronTNews_ Barron Trump fan account (that posted heartfelt birthday messages to “Dad” Donald before it was exposed as a fan account)? The “UltraMAGA Trump 2028” account? Those accounts and numerous others were discovered to be originating from similarly far-flung corners of the globe. [MORE]
Non-Representative DeMockery: CBS News Poll Finds Most (70%) Americans Oppose US Military Action in Venezuela
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According to FUNKTIONARY:
demockery – a spectacle of the true nature of democracy. What each political party (the jackass and the elephant) wants is not justice but its own idea of what is just (for themselves and their special interests). “We the people have no say, our duty is to obey and pay for lavish lifestyle of our betters, politicos, bankers and men of letters who talk down to us as though to fools, the working stiff, taxable mules. With intent to confuse the dumbed-down herd, economics, science presented by some nerd, with confident arrogance, talk not plain, why attempt with animals to explain the higher thoughts of lofty mind to junk-gene people left behind. For government you’ll fight, be taxed, labour, next election you’re supplied (again) with another savior.” ~ Alan Watt. (See: Government, Justice, Predictive Programming, Equality, Elections, Voting, Politics, Holodeck Court, Ideology, Collective Delusions, Taxtortion, Slavery, Political Money, Freedom, Control & Violence)
ICE is using Border Patrol mobile facial recognition technology to speed up arrests
/Fromm [HERE] Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are deploying mobile facial recognition technology to speed up arrests amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, according to a new report.
In recent months, ICE personnel have used a government-created app called Mobile Fortify in order to ascertain the identity of potential detainees, The Wall Street Journal reported.
It’s been hailed as a powerful new tool by administration officials, while privacy advocates have decried it as a form of unchecked government overreach.
The app allows agents to snap a photo of a suspect’s face with their phone and quickly pull up the person’s name, location, social media history — and sometimes their immigration status.
“Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, said in a statement.
Agency officials said that the app has been used over 100,000 times so far, helping speed up arrests and leading to fewer instances of people with legal status being detained.
Mobile Fortify was developed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection during President Joe Biden’s term, adapting technology already in use at U.S. ports of entry. Initially, it was only used by Border Patrol agents operating near the southern border.
But its use has expanded under Trump, who has vowed to undertake the largest deportation program in American history. And, now that Congress has allocated an additional $75 billion to ICE — making it the most-funded law enforcement agency in the nation — it has the bandwidth to experiment with and broadly implement new technologies. [MORE]
9th Circuit Court Strikes Down California’s Urban Open-Carry Ban as Unconstitutional
/From [HERE] A panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Friday ruled that California’s restrictions on openly carrying firearms in the state’s more populous counties violate the Second Amendment. In Baird v. Bonta, a 2–1 panel affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court’s summary judgment for California Attorney General Rob Bonta, remanding with instructions to enter judgment for plaintiff Mark Baird on his challenge to the state’s “urban open-carry ban.”
Applying the framework set out in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the panel held that “the historical record makes unmistakably plain” that open carry is “part of this Nation’s history and tradition,” and that California did not meet its burden to identify a relevant historical tradition supporting its modern restriction. The majority concluded that California’s “urban open-carry ban that flatly prohibits all open carry in the areas of the state where 95% of the people live is thus unconstitutional.”
The panel rejected Baird’s effort to invalidate California’s open-carry licensing scheme in less populous counties. It held that Baird waived his as-applied challenge to the rural licensing system by failing to contest the district court’s dismissal in his opening brief, and that a facial challenge to the rural licensing structure conflicted with Bruen’s suggestion that “shall-issue” licensing regimes can be constitutional. The panel characterized California’s rural licensing scheme—at least on its face—as “shall-issue,” under which a general desire for self-defense is sufficient to obtain a permit.
California’s open-carry restrictions operate through multiple provisions. State law generally criminalizes carrying a loaded firearm in specified public places and streets (Cal. Penal Code § 25850), and separately criminalizes openly carrying an unloaded handgun in similar public locations (Cal. Penal Code § 26350). California also provides for a license to carry a handgun “loaded and exposed” only where the county population is less than 200,000 and only within the within the issuing county (Cal. Penal Code §§ 26150(c)(2), 26155(c)(2)). [MORE]
The God Given Right to Possess and Carry Firearms for Self-Defense Against Tyranny and Slavery is Especially Vital when a Lawless Racist is in the Blight House and He Represents a Racist Majority
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From [HERE] and [HERE] The Declaration of Independence established a new nation, acting as “one people,” through “thirteen united States of America.” James Madison insisted that the Constitution be ratified by special conventions to make clear that ratification would be “not through the intervention of the Legislatures, but by the people at large”—a distinction regarded as “very material.” For these reasons, incidentally, a state has no unilateral right to secede: the Constitution is not a compact of states but an agreement among the people. See Timothy Sandefur, How Libertarians Ought to Think About the U.S. Civil War.
If this is so and the people are sovereign, it has important implications, the most important of which for our purposes here is that sovereignty is inalienable. This, the first lesson of the American experiment, was demonstrated when our Founders asserted the people’s right to declare independence from the crown and to engage in a legitimate act of revolution. That right, as the Declaration explains, does not arise from light and transient causes but from a long train of abuses and usurpations, which the Founders took care to enumerate in their appeal to the natural law from which sovereignty and sovereign rights derive. Moreover, the sovereign people’s right to revolution is limited by the natural bounds of reason—had the Founders’ rational appeal to their fellows failed to persuade enough of them to willingly risk life and limb in taking up arms in revolution, the American self-government project would have foundered without a shot fired or a drop of blood spilled.
Self-government thus requires that the sovereign people enjoy meaningful exercise of the people’s right to associate with one another, their right to speak their grievances and invoke their right to self-government, and the right, in the face of an aggressor sovereign, to bear arms against it. Mere paper barriers like the rights of habeas corpus and due process are without teeth in the face of unchallenged tyranny. The very essence of sovereignty includes a right to revolution, the right to enforce those rights. It is the ultimate form of self-defense.
In other words, the rights expressed in the First and Second Amendments are the bedrock of the American project in self-government, and the font of our sovereignty. That we can post on each other’s Facebook walls and experiment with Zoroastrianism and go duck hunting are happy byproducts of that sovereignty. But it is silly to suggest these activities are why those amendments exist. As Judge Alex Kozinski put it in his dissent to the Ninth Circuit’s denial of review in Silveira v. Lockyer:
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. [MORE]
Rep Massie Implies Oil Companies Knew of Plan to Kidnap Maduro and Impose Involuntary Rule. Claims Trump is a Puppet of Oil Companies who Seek Unjust Enrichment from Venezuela Colonial Oil Theft
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From [HERE] Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has called out the Trump administration’s attempt to take over Venezuela’s oil industry following the US attack on the country that resulted in the US abduction of President Nicolas Maduro and the killing of dozens of people.
“It’s not American oil. It’s Venezuelan oil,” Massie wrote on X in response to Vice President JD Vance justifying the US military intervention by pointing to the Venezuelan government’s nationalization and expropriation of US-owned oil projects decades ago.
“Oil companies entered into risky deals to develop oil, and the deals were canceled by a prior Venezuelan government. What’s happening: lives of US soldiers are being risked to make those oil companies (not Americans) more profitable,” Massie added.
In another post, Massie noted that one person who stands to gain from the intervention is Paul Singer, a billionaire and GOP mega-donor known for being extremely pro-Israel. Singer has funded a super PAC seeking to oust Massie, who has been under fire from pro-Israel Republicans for his opposition to US aid to the country.
“According to Grok,” Massie wrote on X, referring to the AI chatbot, “Paul Singer, globalist Republican mega-donor who’s already spent $1,000,000 to defeat me in the next election, stands to make billions of dollars on his distressed Citgo investment, now that this administration has taken over Venezuela.”
A US judge recently approved the sale of Citgo, the US-based oil refiner that’s owned by a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, to an affiliate of Elliott Management, a firm founded by Singer. Since 2019, the US has frozen all of PDVSA’s assets in the US, cutting off the Venezuelan government from Citgo.
Installing a US-friendly government in Caracas could be extremely beneficial for Amber Energy, the Elliott Management affiliate purchasing Citgo for about $5.9 billion. Though, as things stand now, the Trump administration remains a long way from that goal, as Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, is now serving as the acting president.
According to a report from POLITICO, the Trump administration has asked private US oil firms that seek assets from Venezuela to be prepared to go back into the country and invest heavily. “They’re saying, ‘you gotta go in if you want to play and get reimbursed,'” an oil executive told the outlet.
The report said that the offer has been on the table for 10 days, signaling oil companies may have been aware of Trump’s plans to kidnap Maduro, something Massie suggested in response to Trump saying that US oil firms will go into Venezuela and spend billions.
“It seems obvious from this video that the administration worked with big US oil companies before the attack to line up billions of dollars in capital for developing Venezuela’s oil reserves, yet they couldn’t be bothered to consult Congress,” Massie said. [MORE]
Barbaric IsrAliens are Silencing the Palestinian Press by Murdering, Injuring and Permanently Disabling Journalists
/From [HERE] The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) said on Saturday that Israel is “implementing a policy of “silencing the press” to “undermine the Palestinian narrative” and “prevent the documentation of crimes.”
In a statement, the Freedoms Committee of the syndicate said, “The Israeli occupation shifted from a policy of restricting journalistic work to a policy of neutralising the press through deadly force, with the aim of silencing witnesses, preventing the documentation of crimes, and undermining the Palestinian narrative on the ground.”
By the end of November 2025, at least 76 Palestinian journalists had been killed and wounded by Israel, in a “dangerous indicator of the escalating targeting policy” pursued by Israeli occupation authorities.
“Journalists are no longer merely ‘potential targets’, but rather confirmed and frequent targets,” the committee said.
According to the Gaza Government Media Office, Israeli forces have killed at least 257 Palestinian journalists in its genocidal war on Gaza since October 2023.
Muhammad al-Lahham, head of the Committee for Freedoms at the syndicate, said the scale and consistency of the attacks amount to international crimes.
The attacks in the past year, he said, “constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, and represent a systematic targeting of a protected group, journalists, within the framework of an official policy to silence the media by force”.
Al-Lahham rejected claims that journalists had been caught accidentally in hostilities, describing instead a deliberate operational logic. What Israel was enforcing, he said, was a “field doctrine based on the principle of ‘no witnesses, no narrative, no image'”.
In December, a report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) found that Israel killed more journalists in 2025 than any other country. It was the third year running that Israel was named the top killer of journalists by the NGO.
Nearly 300 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza in 26 months of genocidal war – or about 12 journalists every month – according to a tally by Shireen.ps, a monitoring website named after Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in 2022. [MORE]
Rules for Thee, Force for Me: America’s Doctrine of Leader-Capture
/From [HERE] Here we are watching the rules (for thee but not me) based order perform its favorite magic trick, of turning performative flexing of might into virtue by simply narrating it as law.
The United States has kidnapped Venezuela’s sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, via an operation carried out by Delta Forces and removed them from the country. The choreography matters. The message matters more: we can reach into your capital, take your head of state, and call it “justice.” But hey, we’ll own that it’s about oil and minerals in the next breath, so at least we are honest bandits
And the world is meant to accept it because the banner says narco-terror and the megaphone says freedom.
But strip the branding off and you’re left with something brutally simple: a doctrine of unilateral capture, the right claimed by one state to arrest another state’s leader by force, without a UN mandate, and without an authorization of war by any recognized international mechanism. This sets an extremely dangerous precedent and raises serious questions under the UN Charter.
And that’s the point isn’t it?
Because rules for thee but not for me, isn’t a slogan anymore. It’s long established Imperial hypocrisy. [MORE]
