The hard right know exactly what they are doing. This war isn’t a lie, it’s a bribe.
It’s a signal to power: there is loot on the table. Venezuela isn’t a talking point, it’s a payout. Oil, contracts, leverage, chaos converted into profit. That’s why it works. Not because people believe it, but because the right people benefit from it.
Once you stop assuming politics is about persuasion and start seeing it as deal-making between elitists, the behaviour makes sense. The spectacle is for the public. The offer is for insiders.
This is how the #deathcult operates: not through truth or lies, but through incentives. When extraction is the reward, outrage doesn’t stop it - it lubricates it.
If you want to resist this, stop arguing about whether the story is believable. Start asking who gets paid, who gets access, and who gets to loot. Basic grassroots journalism #OMN
That’s where the power is.
Through that lens, it becomes pretty self-evident that the capitalist class is a pawn of the ruling class, a lot of the calls to focus exclusively on the capitalist class and get more power to the ruling class are self-evidently futile. Historically speaking, we have examples like imperial China, where the state didn't like the power of the merchants, and so pounded down that class. The result was never more itarian society, it was a more stratified one with those aligned with the state becoming more powerful and everyone else becoming less.
In that sense, what we see in Western societies today is in some ways extremely similar to what we saw in imperial China: individuals end up paying outrageous amounts of resources to train their children hoping that they would get picked as mandarins, bureaucrats who lived as part of the state, because once they became those powerful bureaucrats, their entire families could be taken care of through corruption.
Even in allegedly Democratic states, what we see is a sort of ouroboros of the powerful. The state spends money on its allies, a chunk of that money gets returned to the powerful within the state who then use that money to enrich themselves but more importantly to entrench their own power. Meanwhile some working class schlub is paying 50% of his last dollar to the state, while the state still racks up massive debt nobody intends to pay back in this generation. Those systems don't go away, and they don't even necessarily get diverted when someone else wins an election.
Through this lens, left versus right becomes irrelevant because what really matters is the divide between the powerful and the powerless. It ultimately doesn't matter if you are trying to give power to the mega Rich who benefit from removing agency from the individuals under them, or the mega powerful who benefit from removing agency from the individuals under them, what actually makes the world better is giving power to individuals who would not otherwise have power.
This ends up aligning a lot with the principles of things like the fediverse or other forms of social web, because these technologies take power away from governments or mega corporations and puts a very limited amount of power into the hands of individuals who have sovereignty over themselves in a way that they wouldn't if regulated by either the state or by the megacorporations. That's also where someone like me is deeply skeptical of attempts to centralize control of the fediverse. We take something that is distributed and where each man is in control of his own micronation, and risk producing a new caste of mandarins who exercised disproportionate control over the powerless.
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