BREAKING: US LAUNCHES MILITARY STRIKES ON VENEZUELA

The petrodollar gets what the petrodollar wants

Photo by Jeff Kingma

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BREAKING NEWS

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Roughly an hour ago, multiple sources began reporting that numerous explosions rocked the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and surrounding states early Saturday morning, leaving scared residents running into the streets and parts of the city without power. A US official speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity confirmed what we all feared was coming—the United States has launched military strikes inside Venezuela.

That’s right—the Trump regime is openly bombing inside Venezuela.

Venezuela’s government condemned what it called a “very serious grave military aggression,” accusing Washington of attacking both civilian and military targets in Caracas and the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira. President Nicolás Maduro declared a national state of emergency and ordered the implementation of all national defense plans.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called for the UN and OAS to “meet immediately,” writing on X: “They are bombing with missiles.”

This is the escalation we’ve been watching build for months. Since late August, the Pentagon has amassed some 15,000 troops, aircraft, and warships in the Caribbean—one of the largest naval deployments to the region in decades. The US military, commanded by a cognitively deficient white trash drunk, has already attacked dozens of small vessels it claims were smuggling drugs, killing at least 115 people in what a broad range of legal experts have called illegal extrajudicial killings.

Last month, the CIA conducted a drone strike on a Venezuelan port facility—a clear signal that the regime was escalating its attacks. Trump said land strikes would come “soon.” That statement reflected more than posturing alone–it clearly signaled intent.

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The pretext remains the “narco-terrorist” label Trump slapped on Maduro and his government. Never mind that US intelligence agencies have assessed that Maduro is actually at odds with the Tren de Aragua gang, or that analysts say the so-called “Cartel de los Soles” doesn’t exist as a concrete organization. (This is just like the US government declaring Antifa a terrorist organization when Antifa as an organization does not exist.) But facts have never mattered to the orange psychopath or his fascist toadies—what matters to them is doing whatever the fuck they want to do, consequences be damned.

Venezuela accused Washington of staging the assault to seize the country’s oil and mineral resources. As someone with a pulse and functioning brain, I’d say this tracks, but there’s even more to the story.

Venezuela sits on more oil than any country on earth—more than Saudi Arabia, more than anyone. And for decades, the US dollar has been king because of one simple fact: if you want to buy oil, you need dollars.

This is the petrodollar system. Basically, countries need energy. Energy gets sold in dollars. So countries need dollars. This creates permanent demand for US currency, which means America gets to play by different rules than everyone else. We can borrow more, spend more, and rack up more debt than any other nation because the whole world needs our money to keep the lights on. Economists call this “exorbitant privilege.”

Hugo Chávez understood this. So did Nicolás Maduro. Both tried to sell Venezuelan oil in currencies other than the dollar, and both cozied up to China and Russia, who would love nothing more than to knock the dollar off its throne.

And that’s the real story behind the regime’s obsession with Venezuela. It’s not about the laughable narrative of narco-terrorists flooding America with drugs. It’s about protecting the dollar’s dominance. Because the moment countries stop needing dollars to buy oil, America loses the privilege that’s bankrolled our empire for half a century.

The petrodollar wants what the petrodollar wants, and Venezuela has what the petrodollar wants.

And beyond protecting dollar dominance, there's the simple fact that Trump wants to steal Venezuela's oil and mineral wealth outright—because that's his modus operandi.

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Until now, there is no record of an overt US military combat operation conducted directly on Venezuelan soil. That history ended today.

We’re witnessing the United States wage open war in the Western Hemisphere.

Let the record show that on January 3rd, 2026, our government launched an unprovoked military assault on Venezuela. Not a proxy war or a covert operation buried in classified briefings, but missiles fired in airstrikes, bombs dropped on people because the madman who sits in the Oval Office decided that stealing from Americans wasn't enough—he now wants what belongs to another country, and he's willing to violate international law as casually as he violates domestic law to take it.

This is who we are now.

It’s what America has become thanks to Trump and MAGA. There’s no walking this back. No spin that sanitizes it. No pretending we didn’t cross a line that cannot be uncrossed.

The American empire has dropped its mask, and whatever comes next—the blood, the chaos, the international condemnation—belongs to every single person who enabled this regime’s rise to power.

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BREAKING UPDATE (4:13 AM ET)

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Before this could even go out, Trump announced that US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, forcibly extracting them from the country in what he called a “joint military and law enforcement operation.” ​

Don’t misunderstand me—Maduro is a tyrannical piece of shit who has brutalized his own people, and has an extensive record of unfathomable corruption and systematic human rights abuses. His crimes against humanity are real, but so is this: the United States just launched large‑scale strikes on Venezuela, almost certainly killing or injuring civilians, and then abducted its sitting head of state and flew him out of the country. That is the textbook definition of a crime of aggression under international law, and it likely involves multiple war crimes in the sloppy and reckless way it was carried out. After all, that’s the Hegseth way—sloppy and reckless.

If setting this precedent doesn’t sicken you, you fail to grasp the grave consequences of accepting “might makes right” as a governing principle. Once you swallow that logic, you surrender any legal or moral footing to object when it is applied to anyone else—and someday that might include you. ​

The international legal order exists precisely to prevent powerful states from toppling governments and kidnapping leaders whenever it is politically convenient. The United States doesn’t get to drag foreign heads of state away in chains simply because it wants to—that is the logic of empire, and it directly undermines the principles of sovereignty and international law the United States of America once claimed to uphold, even as those norms have been selectively applied, bent, or entirely ignored across the Western Hemisphere for decades. ​​

This is empire doing what empire does best—overreaching, destabilizing itself further, and spiraling toward an inevitable collapse.

What could be more American than that?

This is a developing story.

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