MAGA Voices Change Their Tune After Venezuela Raid. Greenwald: War Propaganda Works
President Trump’s raid to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has ended the anti-interventionism of his top MAGA supporters.
Top pro-Trump voices such as the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and the robotic Catturd X feed applauded the raid, with others warning that Canada is next, even apart from Trump’s plans to annex Greenland.
Podcaster Glenn Greenwald compiled the material in his video on how successful war propaganda turns otherwise non-interventionists into tribal supporters of war abroad.
And former GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whom Trump exiled from MAGA for pushing the release of the Epstein Files, posted a long encomium for MAGA on X.
War With Iran?
Greenwald opened the System Update excerpt by noting that war propaganda has been effective for centuries in uniting people as a tribe.
“War propaganda is designed to stimulate, it is designed to say you’re at war with this other tribe and you have to unite with your tribe,” Greenwald explained:
And when you are told that your tribe is victorious, triumphant, achieving benevolent things for the world … you feel good about it.… This is a human condition. That’s the part of our brain that war propaganda is intended to target.
And one of the things it does is it allows people to feel strong and powerful. They get to watch their side, their group, their country, their tribe go and vanquish bad guys, kill bad guys.… We feel brave. Okay, look at what we just did.
But Greenwald also explained that Trump has completely abandoned one of his key campaign promises: to keep the United States out of foreign wars and stop foreign military intervention.
Just before the Maduro raid, itself a betrayal of that promise, Trump promised war on Iran.
“If Iran sho[o]ts and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump wrote on Truth Social:
We are locked and loaded and ready to go.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be the world’s police force,” Greenwald continued. “And now Trump’s promising to police Iranian protests and protect protesters against the government.”
Worse still, Greenwald said, heretofore anti-interventionist MAGA voices went along with Trump, no questions asked. “And yet you have overnight these people who when Trump was saying we don’t want more regime change wars, we don’t want any more interventions, were saying the same thing,” he observed:
And then the minute Trump abandons it, so did they.
Walsh, Etc.
Particularly susceptible to war propaganda are men who have done nothing courageous physically, Greenwald observed.
Calling the Catholic Walsh a “paragon of masculine bravery and courage … who works for Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire,” Greenwald noted how quickly he became a military interventionist.
“We’ve spent the last 25 years bringing ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ to countries around the globe while our own country has been systematically invaded and now our largest cities are run by foreigners and communists,” Walsh wrote in June:
If you want to know why I’m so avowedly non-interventionist, this is why.
But Walsh thinks differently now.
“I totally support turning other countries in our hemisphere into subordinate vassals of the United States,” he wrote after the Maduro raid:
That’s the very definition of an America First foreign policy.
Four minutes later, he told Canadians “we’re your boss. Now get in line.”
Another fellow “feeling powerful and strong” is fellow Catholic podcaster Michael Knowles, Greenwald noted.
Canada had better beware, Knowles warned:
If I were Canada, I’d be on my best behavior right about now…
Former anti-interventionist Tim Pool claimed that the American economy will “boom” because “tons of free oil [are] heading our way.”
A year ago to the day of the Maduro raid, he favored “ending regime change war.”
Catturd — again, the slavishly pro-Trump X feed — claims that “Venezuela is now more free than New York City.”
Previously, it asked readers to name a regime-change war that had not ended in disaster.
Taylor Greene
Seventy percent of the fentanyl crossing the border comes from Mexico, Taylor Greene noted on X. And “Mexican cartels are primarily and overwhelmingly responsible for killing Americans with deadly drugs,” she wrote:
If U.S. military action and regime change in Venezuela was really about saving American lives from deadly drugs then why hasn’t the Trump admin taken action against Mexican cartels?
And if prosecuting narco terrorists is a high priority then why did President Trump pardon the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez who was convicted and sentenced for 45 years for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into America? Ironically cocaine is the same drug that Venezuela primarily traffics into the U.S.
Taylor Greene believes Trump wants the oil to support a war against Iran, and asked why an American attack on Venezuela is acceptable, but the Russian attack on Ukraine, or China’s possible attack on Taiwan, are not.
“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” Taylor Greene concluded:
Boy were we wrong.
As the baby boomers slip away both in votes and power, the electoral future will be decided for candidates that focus on American economic populism and promising prosperity for Americans only.
As of right now, neither party is offering the solution.
Taylor Greene’s last day in Congress was Monday at 11:59 p.m.
When Taylor Greene announced her resignation in November, Trump celebrated, calling her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown.”
