Yea, he better watch out or he’s gonna get a $6000 fine instead of $5000.

I don’t know if people are just not recognizing the metric fuckton of nuance with this situation, or they’re being willfully ignorant. Either way, not my monkeys, not my circus.

A lot of people don’t seem to remember Alex Jones getting banned from YouTube in 2018. While rightwing, ultra-MAGA’s were already a thing, they were relatively small compared today. Alex Jones was the first high profile ban from social media and it was like tossing gasoline onto a small bush fire.

You have to remember that Trump did not win the first time because he had an army of fanatics. A lot of other factors were at play; from people still upset about the DNC’s snubbing of Bernie, to people who weren’t fully paying attention (remember, politics used to be boring), to people who voted for Trump simply “for the lols” (don’t discount this last group, any historical account that doesn’t factor in how important internet memes were to getting that man elected is being willfully ignorant) . Die-hard MAGA’s were relatively rare, and usually a source of ridicule.

Until their spokespeople started getting banned from places. It seems so small by today’s standards. People get banned and deplatformed all the time. But Alex Jones was the first real incident, and people saw it as a massive attack on free speech. To his relatively small number of followers, the man had his free speech rights violated by the left-wing news cabal for daring to speak the TRUTH™. Suddenly, all their bullshit was justified.

I’ve always been pretty far-left but I got a deep chill when that happened. I remember remarking to my friends that banning political speech, no matter how full of shit, would only cause problems in the long run, and so it has. Precedent was broken, and the right took it as a declaration of war. I truly believe things would not have gotten nearly as insane as they are had Google not decided to ban him. He deserved it, but they opened a door that couldn’t be shut again; and following this was a couple years of high-profile bans of rightwing figureheads and safe-spaces, all cumulating to the shut down of /r/theDonald in 2020. And the infection, which had been contained to a few small corners of the internet, suddenly exploded.

I hate this simplified take, it gives people the wrong idea. They aren’t trying to physically get Venezuela’s oil, just like they weren’t trying to physically get Iraq’s oil. In fact, the US would be pleased as a pig in shit if not a single drop of oil ever left those countries. What they are trying to do is start another war to control the price of oil.

The US produces plenty of it’s own oil and is a massive net exporter. They do not need any other country’s oil, except for oil with different weights (which no one ever talks about, and the general public is barely aware of the differences). But when other countries start selling oil for cheap, the US doesn’t like that because it weakens their place in the global market. THAT is the reason for these kinds of wars, the US wants to control the price of oil. Not necessarily the oil itself.

So while saying “it’s a war for oil” is technically true, it lacks a lot of context and makes people who only look at surface level facts think the US is on some “I drink your milkshake” kind of crusade for finding oil, when it’s really just about price control.