In a recent appearance on CNN, right-wing pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon defended the Trump administration’s policy of blowing up boats off the Venezuelan coast that it claims are carrying drugs. “Secretary of State Rubio has determined that these boats are carrying terrorists,” she said, “which makes the attacks on them legal.”
The idea that the executive branch can wave away all legal, moral, and constitutional obstacles to doing what it pleases by saying the magic word “terrorism” has been a depressingly standard one in recent American history. Ungar-Sargon’s framing on this point is basically indistinguishable from the kind of thing a bowtie-wearing conservative might have said in 2005 to justify the Bush administration’s policy of “enhanced interrogation” at Guantanamo Bay. But she followed it up with an attempt to give the Trump administration’s lawlessness a “populist” twist:
When working-class Americans in those forgotten Rust Belt communities where you have five kids who’ve overdosed and died, when they see him blowing up those boats, they feel like he sees their pain. They feel like somebody cares.
Reality check: All publicly available evidence shows that the drugs that cause overdoses in the United States don’t come from Venezuela at all. A small portion of the cocaine in America is Venezuelan but approximately none of the fentanyl. Nor is there even any evidence that a majority of Americans in the communities Ungar-Sargon is talking about believe that fentanyl is coming to the United States from Venezuela and thus “feel seen” when suspected Venezuelan drug runners (or random fishermen) are executed without trial. One recent poll shows that a whopping 70 percent of Americans are opposed to any “military action in Venezuela.”
The fact that Ungar-Sargon feels the need to combine her reheated “war on terror” talking points with rhetoric about “seeing” working-class people in the Rust Belt, though, says a lot…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
