"Using A Ten-Ton Truck To Kill An Ant"

It's not a signal

Oct 21, 2025

The U.S. military has killed at least 32 people in seven strikes off the coast of Venezuela without telling Congress or the American people who was killed, or on what evidence.
The U.S. is eight weeks into a military campaign in the Caribbean Sea with the twin aims of stopping drugs and, potentially, toppling Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
“Officially, our position is we’re there to stop narco-terrorists. We’re going to blow up their boats. And we’re going to be patient about it. No one is in any rush,” a senior administration official said.
The Trump administration has deployed an unprecedented number of warships, spy planes, fighter jets, bombers, drones, and U.S. Marines off the coast of Venezuela.
Last week, Trump confirmed he’d authorized CIA covert operations on Venezuelan soil. Overhead, the U.S. conducted a “Bomber Attack Demonstration” with B-52s.
“It’s not just the CIA, it’s all of our intelligence capabilities,” said an insider involved in discussions about the operation.” The U.S. knows where Maduro is, where he stays, where he goes. If we wanted to kill him with a missile, we could have done it by now.”
After the unexpected and unexplained departure of SouthCom Commander Adm. Alvin Holsey, the cadence of strikes at sea — and on land in Venezuela — could increase.
The intrigue: Holsey was reportedly concerned about the legality of the strikes and was moving more cautiously than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wanted. The Pentagon denied Holsey raised objections, but hasn’t explained why he took the highly unusual step of stepping down just one year into his command.

The New Yorker is worried.

Since September 2nd, the Trump Administration has attacked seven boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least thirty-two people, on the grounds that they were drug traffickers transporting contraband to the U.S. The President has justified the strikes as a matter of national self-defense, claiming, without evidence, that drugs from the region are responsible for three hundred thousand deaths in the U.S. last year. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” Trump said at the United Nations last month. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.” There were about eighty thousand drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Fentanyl, which was responsible for the overwhelming majority of them, doesn’t come from Venezuela, and the Coast Guard has no record of seizing it in the Caribbean.
In late September, the White House sent a notification to Congress declaring that the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which the government has designated as “terrorist organizations.” Those it killed in international waters were deemed “unlawful combatants.” In an escalation of hostilities against Venezuela, the Department of Defense has recently moved some ten thousand troops into the region, mostly to former military bases in Puerto Rico. Eight American warships and a submarine are now in the Caribbean, and, according to the Times, the Trump Administration has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela. Last week, Alvin Holsey, the admiral in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all military operations in Central and South America, abruptly resigned; the job is typically held for three years, but he had served for less than one.
Legal scholars and experts in the history of executive power have expressed alarm that Trump is acting well beyond the limits of national and international law. But, earlier this month, when Senate Democrats introduced a resolution to curb Trump’s ability to strike narco-traffickers without congressional approval, it failed on largely partisan lines. “This is basically U.S. propaganda through force,” a former senior national-security official who served in the first Trump White House told me. “This is not a counter-narcotics mission. It’s using a ten-ton truck to kill an ant.”
Venezuela’s Socialist government has, for years, propped up other leftist leaders across the region, chiefly in Cuba. There is a clear electoral constituency in South Florida, a vital Republican stronghold, that has opposed Maduro and demanded American action against his government. “If you solve the Venezuela problem, you get three for the price of one,” a state Republican operative told me in 2019. “You’ll make the Colombians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans in Florida very happy.” In 2019, Trump recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the de-facto President of the country. But Guaidó was eventually sidelined in Miami, where he remains in exile. When Trump issued threats against Maduro, in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, the intended audience included voters in South Florida and military officials in Caracas, who, the theory went, might be encouraged to break ranks if they felt the Americans would come to their aid. “Plan A was that the military would come in and save the day,” Frank Mora, a former Ambassador to the Organization of American States, told me at the time. “They don’t have a Plan B or C.” …
The implications of Trump’s use of the military, the former White House official said, are not lost on other Latin American countries, either. “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you,” he told me. “You prove to the Mexicans that you’ll do what you say. The Brazilians thought this was about them. If you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.”

It’s not a signal.

How Israel Won the War, But Lost the PR Battle

My latest in The Spectator:

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the Gaza peace deal brokered by Donald Trump, the past two years have seen Israel achieve an unprecedented litany of military accomplishments in the Middle East. The level of damage done to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis is difficult to comprehend. The end of the Assad regime and, with American support, the demolition of the Iranian nuclear program – setting it back years at the least – were steps that many once thought impossible. Israel has emerged from the post-October 7 period unquestionably stronger in every way except one: its support around the globe, particularly among the youngest voices in the West.
The polling on this question has been consistent and widespread, finding a clear trendline toward increased opposition to Israel and even support for Hamas among younger voters. In America, the widely respected Harvard-Harris poll found last month that nearly half of Generation Z respondents supported Hamas over Israel, and more than a third of millennials shared their views.
Gallup’s July survey found support among those aged 18 to 34 for Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Iran to be just 9 and 15 percent respectively. A Quinnipiac survey which previously showed strong majorities believing it is in America’s interest to favor Israel found support had fallen from 69 percent in December 2023 to 47 percent today, driven by a significant increase in skepticism among younger voters.
And a major study released in October by the conservative Family Research Council that surveyed American Christians found just six in ten regular churchgoers believe it’s important to pray for Israel, and a majority did not believe it was important for the United States or for their churches to support Israel. Consistent with other polling, churchgoing Gen Z respondents ranked the lowest in favoring any kind of support – prayer, verbal, or financial. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, it would have seemed ludicrous to predict this level of dropoff. But for those who consistently conduct polling on this topic, the trend is both undeniable and the reasons too convoluted to explain with simple questions.
“For young people on the left, it’s a racial thing, a victimhood thing,” one pollster told me. “On the right, I think it’s more complicated. There’s a strong narrative that’s taken hold in a younger generation that claims American foreign policy is still overwhelmingly being dictated by the Jews, not ‘America First’ influences. So being an Israel skeptic has become a transgressive revolt against the establishment – and people need to understand that even for those who support him, Trump is the new establishment.”

The rest is here.

The Gig Economy Architecture of Abolishing ICE

Sagnik Basu at Pirate Wires.

We pretend not to see what’s really going on here. We invent myths to make it bearable.
The first myth is Mamadou — the super-rider of TikTok lore, the lightning-fast courier who seems to deliver to everyone at once. New Yorkers post videos of orders “by Mamadou” and write songs about him, calling him “the hardest-working man in New York City.”
Source
As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Mamadou” isn’t one man at all, but dozens of West African couriers who share the same first name. Turning them into a meme lets New Yorkers feel virtuous compassion and solidarity without confronting the exploitation they can’t see (more on that later).
The second myth is the individual tragedy — the sympathetic figure we meet in profiles and quickly forget. The New York Times followed one, Mayco Milano, a Venezuelan father who pays $400 a week to rent an unlicensed moped and another $150 to borrow a stranger’s Uber Eats login. After 12-hour days, seven days a week, he clears barely $300. When police seize his bike — as they have more than 7,000 times to various delivery drivers this year, according to Fox 5 NY — he loses his livelihood overnight but still owes the broker.
This is not just a New York phenomenon, and Milano’s story is not an exception. It’s the business model.
Bike rentals on the black market
Most migrant riders don’t own their vehicles. They lease them from small-time brokers for $300 to $500 a week, cash. Many bikes lack registration or insurance. The New York Post found that one broker can control dozens, collecting envelopes of cash every Friday. When the NYPD conducts sweeps, the owners simply replace confiscated bikes and raise the rent.
Account rentals and identity sharing
The apps don’t hire migrants directly. They require a Social Security number and a verified bank account. So a parallel market emerged: someone with legal status opens an account, verifies their ID, then rents out their login. The Post reports that migrants pay between $100 and $200 every two weeks — sometimes $500 a month — to deliver under someone else’s name. When customers tip through the app, the money lands in the legal account holder’s bank. Migrants get paid later, minus a “service fee” (if the intermediary doesn’t disappear).
Ethnic and digital broker networks
Outside the Roosevelt Hotel or shelters in Queens, you can buy a complete starter kit: moped, helmet, insulated bag, and Uber Eats login — “todo junto,” all together. Ads circulate through WhatsApp groups and Facebook Marketplace targeting Venezuelan and Guinean migrants. It’s an informal franchise system that works because everyone involved is desperate enough to honor it.
Debt and coercion
Many owe smugglers thousands for the trip north. One Venezuelan interviewed by the Times said he borrowed $1,500 and now owes $3,000 with interest. Another told Fox 5 NY he sends a portion of every week’s earnings back home to keep his family safe from the lender. Each confiscated bike deepens that debt.
Cash economy, no paper trail
Most riders are paid in cash. There are no 1099s, no payroll records, no worker’s comp when they crash on wet pavement. The city forfeits tax revenue; the companies forfeit liability; the riders forfeit everything.
Trapped by policy
Under U.S. law, asylum applicants can’t apply for a work permit until 150 days after filing, and they must wait 180 days before the permit can be issued. The gap ensures months of illegal labor.
What we call the “gig economy” is, in practice, a debt-and-fear economy — one that goes unchallenged in hyper-progressive places like NYC precisely because liberals have redefined “compassion” as ignoring the law.
The average New York progressive doesn’t like ICE raids. They think deportation is cruel and that anyone who works hard deserves safety. But that moral reflex — that instinct to equate work with worth — is exactly what sustains this exploitative system.
The young professional who tweets “abolish ICE” orders pad thai at 11 p.m. from a rider whose entire existence depends on ICE looking the other way. They think guilt-tipping 35 percent makes them virtuous. But it’s just exploitation offset by sentiment. That young professional is enabling the system that put this man in $6,000 debt to his smuggler.