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Wall Street Journal accused of selling Trump’s war on Venezuela

In the runup to the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq, many outlets pushed outright falsehoods to support the politicians who craved war. Now, with the US threatening to invade Venezuela, we’re seemingly seeing the same thing happening all over:


‘Narco-terrorism’

Figures in the Trump administration are claiming that Venezula is overrun with what they’re calling ‘narco-terrorists’. Among them is war secretary Pete Hegesth, who was recently accused of ordering the killing of two shipwrecked men (a war crime). This is how he’s discussing the topic:


While his administration is selling this narrative, Donald Trump has openly stated he just wants the oil:

Trump was also excited to discover that leaders can cancel elections if their country is at war:

Trump is so bad at sticking to the script that he literally just pardoned a politician who was heavily involved in drug trafficking:

As Ben Norton noted at the top, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is reliant on a motley bunch of unnamed sources and political insiders to sell their story. Here’s one section from the WSJ article:

The confluence of drug smugglers, jihadists and corrupt officials is part of a growing global alignment among criminal gangs, militant groups and rogue governments that threatens democratic norms and social stability, with profound potential ramifications.

Now, the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro—who it asserts is heavily involved in drug smuggling—has brought global attention to the country’s role in the drug trade. Maduro has denied the allegation.

That’s right; the Trump administration is here to save the “democratic norms” – something he’s famously defended throughout his political career.

It’s no wonder people are reacting to the article like this:

Manufacturing consent

The concept of ‘manufacturing consent’ was described by Noam Chomsky in his book of the same name, in which he wrote:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

He also wrote:

Propaganda campaigns in general have been closely attuned to elite interests.

The Red scare of 1919-20 have served well to abort the union-organizing drive that followed World War I in the sell and other industries. The Truman-McCarthy Red scare helped inaugurate the Cold War and the permanent war economy, and it also served to weaken the progressive coalition of the New Deal years.

The chronic focus on the plight of Soviet dissidents, on enemy killings in Cambodia, and on the Bulgarian Connection helped weaken the Vietnam syndrome, justify a huge arms buildup and a more aggressive foreign policy, and divert attention from upward redistribution of income that was the heart of Reagan’s domestic economic program.

The recent propaganda-disinformation attacks on Nicaragua have been needed to avert eyes from the savagery of the war in El Salvador and to justify the escalating U.S. investment in counterrevolution in Central America.

They’re struggling to manufacture consent this time around, because essentially there is no ‘mass’ media anymore, and people are tired of bullshit wars:

This inability to create a consensus may not prevent an invasion, but it will mean it’s harder for Trump and his cronies to weather the political fallout.

Featured image via Heute / Gage Skidmore (Flickr)

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.