First They Came for the Tourists

Thomas Knapp

 December 15, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“In order to comply with the January 2025 Executive Order 14161 (Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats),” US Customs and Border Protection informed the public in a December 10 Federal Register entry, “CBP is adding social media as a mandatory data element for an ESTA application.”

ESTA — “Electronic System for Travel Authorization” — is used by tourists coming to the US for short stays from countries with which the US government has “visa-free” arrangements.

ESTA travelers will have to share five years of social media history with CBP snoops if they want to visit the Grand Canyon or catch Keanu Reeves’s turn as Estragon in Waiting for Godot on Broadway.

Travelers who have to request visas (students and workers, for example) have been required to set their social media profiles to “public” for “a comprehensive and thorough vetting” since June.

Even assuming a need or authority on the US government’s part to “vet” travelers — an assumption I reject — the idea’s kind of silly for two reasons.

First, how much does CBP really need to know, other than that a traveler isn’t toting a suitcase nuke or an aerosol can full of smallpox virus?

Second, how long will it take for bad actors start manufacturing — even retroactively — false social media histories, leaving them free to travel while adding yet another layer of useless inconvenience for everyone else?

Worse, from what one might think of as an “America First” point of view, how long before the “national security” state’s bureaucratic camel gets this same nose under the domestic tent?

Don’t tell me it can’t happen here. I’m not THAT old, and I’m old enough to remember when the process of boarding an airplane in the US was as simple as running your bag through an X-ray machine and showing a boarding pass.

These days, you have to show a Very Special Important Federally Approved ID Card (as late as the 1990s, “conservatives” opposed “national ID” schemes) and budget an extra hour or more for body scans (with, potentially, “enhanced” manual groping) just to get from New York to LA in a timely manner.

America’s already crawling with creepy wannabe cops demanding — Third Reich or Soviet Union style — that people “show their papers” as a condition of going just about anywhere or doing just about anything (including their jobs if the ICE gang happens to drop in on a workplace).

If you think they won’t eventually escalate to browsing through YOUR shared memes, photos of cats and memories with your significant others, etc., think again.

As a practical matter, all this snooping just gums up the works of everyone’s life so more government employees can collect more paychecks. It doesn’t protect “America” and it doesn’t protect you.

As a moral issue, let me phrase this as a question and answer:

Q: Who do they think they are?

A: They think they’re your masters.

We shouldn’t tolerate that attitude, or this nonsense. Neither at, nor within, the border.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Total Trump Absurdity

Paul Street

 December 15, 2025

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Let’s dig into some of the total unmitigated absurdity — the deranged, preposterous, mind-boggling, soul-crushing absurdity — of America’s fascist president Donald J. Trump.

What follows is a short list from the top of my head.

+ Mein Trumpf says he has been murdering Latin American people in the Caribbean to stop drug shipments to the United States but (a) offers zero evidence that the people he has extrajudicially executed are bringing in drugs to the United States and (b) pardons a former Honduran president, a right-wing politician who was convicted by a U.S. jury that reviewed mountains of hard evidence showing that he helped bring 500 tons of cocaine into the United States while joking about “shoving cocaine up the gringo’s noses.” When questioned about this pardon, Trump claim to know very little about the former Honduran president. and says that president was just the unfortunate victim of leftists who didn’t like him because of his politics. How absurd.

+ Trump says that the video should be released of a September 2nd mass murder in which the U.S. military, under his command, slaughtered two shipwrecked people (after they’d already killed nine others) in abject violation of international law. Then Trump changes his mind and defers to his fascist “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, keeping the video from public view. When an ABC reporter asks him to explain the change, Trump claims he never said the video should be released. He tells the reporter she’s “terrible” and says she works for a “fake news” organization. Absurd.

+ Trump calls merely alleged narco-traffickers (who weren’t even heading to the United States when he blew them up) “enemy combatants” and “terrorists” engaged in a “war” on the United States. This is ludicrous. There’s no declared war. The people he has serially mass murdered in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have been unarmed, and there’s a thing called drug interdiction by the Coast Guard.

+ Trump campaigns for a Nobel Peace Prize even as he: bombs Iran; threatens to seize Greenland; helps Israel carry out genocide; aligns with Russia’s mass killing of Ukrainian civilians; kills 600,000 people with cuts to USAID; slaughters 87 Latin Americans on the high seas; signs off on a neofascist National Security Strategy that calls for the US to brazenly dominate the Western Hemisphere and control its resources by sheer force; escalates on the path to a petro-imperialist regime change war on Venezuela by declaring the air space over that nation closed, flying F-18s over the country, and seizing a Venezuelan oil tanker right off its coast (last Wednesday). Absurd.

+ When asked about the tanker seizure and what the US will do with the oil on the ship, Trump claimed not to know much about it and confessed to international piracy by saying “I guess we’ll keep it.”

+ After six U.S. military and intelligence veterans in the U.S. Congress released a video reminding U.S. military and intelligence personnel of the basic legal and moral fact that they must not follow illegal orders (something his own Secretary of War said years ago), Trump absurdly accused the legislators of “treason,” suggesting that they should be executed. Trump’s toady Hegseth threatens one of the Congresspersons, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), with a military court martial.

+ Trump claims again and again that his 21st century Gestapo, ICE and Border Patrol, are going after “the worst of the worst” — violent criminals, rapists, murderers, gang members — even as it is abundantly clear (from evidence that his own Department of Homeland Security has released ) that his racist gendarmes — his masked thugs, kidnappers, and fugitive slave catchers — are criminally sweeping up Latino people who in the great majority have no violent criminal records. How viciously absurd.

+ Trump absurdly calls anti-ICE protests rebellions against the US government that regular forces can’t handle to try to justify federalizing National Guard units and militarily occupying US cities.

+ Trump brings 800-plus admirals and generals from across the U.S. global empire to Virginia to fascistically tell them that they need to focus on the nation’s actual top adversary — “the enemy within,” by which he means the United States’ own majority non-white Democratic Party-run big cities. He implores the brass to see their US cities as military “training grounds” for wars abroad. (He even absurdly tells them that ghetto residents are shooting at firemen fighting blazes atop “big ladders.”)

+ Trump claims to be a populist friend of American workers even as he: signs off on massive tax cuts for the grotesquely super rich; tears up the National Labor Relations Board; strips federal health insurance subsidies that permit tens of millions of Americans to be covered for medical care; turns the White House into a monumentally corrupt machine for lining his own personal and familial pockets; tells people struggling with the rising cost of living that the affordability crisis is a Democratic Party “hoax” and that the solution to inflation is to buy less stuff. How darkly ridiculous.

+ An Afghan refugee to whom the Trump administration granted asylum last May shoots two absurdly deployed West Virginia National Guard members in Washington DC. and Trump insists that the shooter resided in the U.S. solely because of the Biden administration. When a female reporter asks his about this contradiction, he tells her she’s stupid right in front of the whole press corps.

+ Trump goes in for an MRI and then tells reporters he had no idea what part of his body was being scanned.

+ Trump is seen and filmed nodding off again and again during public appearances, in one case for 20 minutes, but claims that he’s never been more fit, alert and energetic.

+ . Trump says that it’s seditious and “perhaps even treasonous” for the New York Times to report on his declining physical and mental health.

I could go on but at a certain point the mind blurs and the heart sinks. It’s damn-near overwhelming, this relentless avalanche of absurdity spewing from the sick Trump47 regime and its deranged Dear Leader.

2+2=5.

War is Peace.

Black is White.

Love is Hate.

Mein Trumpf Says!

But what’s even more absurd than Trump’s absurd level of absurdity is the fact that a quarter to a third of the populace claps along with this outrageous non-stop, soul-crushing bullshit. And then there’s the further absurdity that most of the country isn’t out in the streets every day demanding that this absurd wannabe fascist strongman-for-life deranged isn’t immediately removed from power, just for starters.

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).

Why Did Trump Send His Warships to

Venezuela?

Vijay Prashad

 December 15, 2025

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Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Johnnie R. Robbins – Public Domain

Ever since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998, the United States has attempted  to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution. They have triedeverything short of a full-scale military invasion: a military coup, selecting a substitute president, cutting off access to the global financial system, imposing layers of sanctions, sabotaging the electricity grid, sending in mercenaries, and attempting to assassinate  its leaders. If you can think of a method  to overthrow a government, the United States has likely tried it against Venezuela.

However, in 2025, the escalation became unmistakable. The U.S. sent its warships to patrol Venezuela’s coast, began sinking small boats and killing those on board as they left the South American mainland, and seized an oil tanker bound for Cuba. The quantity of attacks on Venezuela has increased, suggesting the quality of the threats has now reached a different magnitude. It feels as if the United States is preparing for a full-blown invasion of the country.

Donald Trump came to office saying that he was opposed to military interventions that did not further U.S. interests, which is why he calledthe illegal U.S. war on Iraq a waste of  “blood and treasure”. This does not mean Trump is against the use of the U.S. military —he deployed it in Afghanistan (remember the “Mother of all Bombs”) and Yemen, and has fully backed the U.S./Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. His formula is not for or against war categorically, but about what the U.S. would gain from it. With Iraq, he stated  that the problem was not the war itself, but the failure to seize Iraqi oil. Had the U.S. taken Iraq’s oil, Trump would likely have been in Baghdad, ready to build —with Iraqi treasure— a Trump hotel on one of the former presidential properties.

Naturally, the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is about Venezuelan oil —the largest known reserves in the world. The U.S.-backed politician, Maria Corina Machado —awarded  the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 after supporting the Israeli genocide and calling for a U.S. invasion of her own country—, is on record promising to open up her country’s resources to foreign capital. She would welcome the extraction of Venezuela’s wealth rather than allow its social wealth to better the lives of its own people, as is the goal of the Bolivarian Revolution started by Hugo Chávez. A President Machado would immediately surrender any claim to the Essequibo region and grant ExxonMobil full command of Venezuela’s oil reserves. This is certainly the prize.

But it is not the immediate spur. A close reading of the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States shows that there is a renewed emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. The Trump Corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine is clear: the Western Hemisphere must be under U.S. control, and the United States will do what it takes to ensure that only pro-U.S. politicians hold power. It is worth reading that section of the National Security Strategy:

“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”

When Argentina faced local elections, Trump warned that the U.S. would cut off external financing if candidates opposing pro-U.S. President Javier Milei lost. In Honduras, Trump intervened directly to oppose the Libre Party, even offering to release a convicted drug trafficker (and former President). The United States is moving aggressively because it has accurately assessed the weakness of the Pink Tide and the strength of a new, far-right “Angry Tide.” The emergence of right-wing governments across South America, Central America, and the Caribbean has emboldened the U.S. to squeeze Venezuela and thereby weaken Cuba —the two major poles of the Latin American left. Overturning these revolutionary processes would allow a full-scale Monroe Doctrine domination of  Latin America and the Caribbean.

Since the 1990s, the United States began to speak of Latin America as a partner for shared prosperity, emphasizing globalisation over direct control. Now, the language has changed. As the Trump Corollary asserts: “We want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets and that supports critical supply chains…We want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.” Latin America is seen as a battlefield for geopolitical competition against China and a source of threats like immigration and drug trafficking. The attack on Venezuela and Cuba is not merely an assault on these two countries; it is the opening salvo of direct U.S. intervention on behalf of the Angry Tide. This will not deliver better lives for the population, but greater wealth for U.S. corporations and the oligarchies of Latin America.

Trump is ready to revive the belief that any problem can be solved by military force, even when other tools exist. The Trump Corollary promises to use its “military system superior to any country in the world” to steal the hemisphere’s resources.

The aggression against Venezuela is not a war against Venezuela alone. It is a war against all of Latin America.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022).