Source: CounterPunch
by David S D’Amato

“Trump has never been a peace president or a principled opponent of aggressive war and imperial looting. His crude rhetoric, with its open acknowledgement of Venezuela’s oil riches, merely removes the polite, decorous language we’ve come to expect from our political figureheads. The U.S. government is not pursuing a new logic or discarding old values. It is reinstating our political-economic system’s commitment to imperialism and extraction, only without any pretense to humanitarian motivations or democracy-building.” (01/06/26)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/06/naked-imperialism-in-venezuela/

Source: USA Today
by Sara Pequeño

“On the 2024 reelection campaign trail, President Donald Trump consistently heralded himself as the anti-war president. In his 2025 inaugural address, he said the power of the United States ‘will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable.’ It’s a wonder that people actually believed him. This is the same man, after all, who ordered the assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani and led missile strikes in Syria during his first term. This is the same man who has said that he would turn Gaza into a Mar-a-Lago-esque resort …. Is it really a surprise then that he has skirted congressional approval and allowed an act of war to take place by essentially kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela so that he can be tried on drug trafficking charges in the United States? No, no, it is not.” (01/06/26)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/01/06/trump-antiwar-president-venezuela-oil/88032823007/

Source: The American Prospect
by Ryan Cooper

“When the Bush administration was planning and selling its war of aggression against Iraq in 2002, a common argument made by anti-war activists was that the whole thing was about oil. … This didn’t make all that much sense (for one thing, the war and occupation ended up costing on the order of $3 trillion, and Hussein would have been more than willing to just sell us the oil for a lot less than that), but for an administration whose two top leaders were both former oilmen, it had a surface plausibility. Donald Trump has done Bush one better: He simply said outright that his military attack on Venezuela, in which commandos kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and transported him to Manhattan to be put on trial, was about oil.” (01/06/25)

https://prospect.org/2026/01/06/trump-maduro-venezuela-oil-imperialism/

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger

“The U.S. national-security state’s easy abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro brings to mind Albert J. Nock’s essay about U.S. interventionism in the Spanish-American War in 1898. The U.S. military victory over the third-rate Spanish Empire was as easy as the recent U.S. interventionism against Venezuela. As Nock pointed out in his essay ‘The Conquest of the United States by Spain,’ however, it was Spain that actually conquered the United States, not the other way around. Amidst all the celebrations among American statists over the easy military victory over Venezuela, what these statist fail to realize is that it actually Venezuela that has won the war against the United States.”: (01/06/26)

https://www.fff.org/2026/01/06/the-conquest-of-the-united-states-by-venezuela/

Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie

“It used to be the United States that had problems trying to have its courts make rulings that would make other countries follow its rulings, but other courts have been ploughing the same furrow. And judicial activists in several countries have been using that tendency to subvert the decisions of elected governments and have them overruled by unelected judges. The UK’s Supreme Court has tried to extend a remit it was not given, namely to judge on the constitutionality of Parliamentary decisions. Its declaration that the late Queen’s prorogation of Parliament was illegal was described by Jacob Rees-Mogg as a ‘constitutional coup.’ He was correct. Its use of external courts such as the ECHR to void decisions made by elected UK governments effectively negates the sovereignty of Parliament, which is one of the cornerstones of our democracy.” (01/06/26)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/judicial-overreach

Source: Persuasion
by Damon Linker

“A new generation of right-wing culture warriors is sowing chaos. They will outlast Donald Trump.” (01/06/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/whither-conservatism

Source: TomDispatch
by Karen J Greenberg

“‘Quiet, Piggy!’ The president was intent on silencing Catherine Lucey. The Bloomberg reporter had provoked him with a question about the release of the Epstein files. His insult caught the public’s attention. But Trump’s tongue-lashing lexicon against women has a long history. Other female journalists have been dubbed ‘obnoxious,’ ‘terrible,’ ‘third-rate’ and ‘ugly.’ Vice President Kamala Harris, opposing him in the 2024 presidential election, was labeled ‘retarded’ and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ‘crazy as a bedbug.’ The list goes on (and on and on). And who knows what was redacted from the Epstein files along those very lines? Mind you, those Trumpian insults hurled at women (and regularly offered about them) are anything but performative throwaways. They reveal Donald Trump’s deep and abiding contempt for females, an attitude that has taken a giant leap forward (or do I mean backward?) in policy terms in the Trump 2.0 years.” (01/06/25)

https://tomdispatch.com/trumps-war-on-women/