We refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Maduro’s presidency. That’s why @RepEliotEngel, @RepDWStweets, @RepShalala, and @RepDMP are joining to introduce legislation to support the people of #Venezuela and hold the illegitimate President accountable for the crisis he created. pic.twitter.com/3JBCJLmwLf

— House Foreign Affairs Committee (@HouseForeign) January 11, 2019

Congress is going to provide millions in aid to the people of Venezuela while hundreds of thousands of US citizens are living on the streets and 31 million don't have health insurance.

They are going to restrict arms to Venezuela including tear gas and riot gear to Venezuela and weapons that they say Maduro turns around and uses on the Venezuelan people and yet they will continue selling them to the Saudis even though they are killing untold numbers of Yemen civilians and bombing civilian infrastructure and blockading the ports so that millions of people are starving to death and especially children. This is what people call genocide. And yet.

DWS is going to stop the bonds that are forming which none is more important than his ties to Vladimir Putin and to have the state department to investigate actively stop Vlad's influence into Venezuela.

Top 5 Dumbest Arguments Defending Trump’s Venezuela Interventionism

Ever since the Trump administration announced that it was no longer recognizing the legitimacy of the elected government of Venezuela I’ve been arguing with people on social media about this president’s brazen coup attempt in that country. The people arguing with me in favor of Trump’s interventionism are almost exclusively Trump supporters, with leftists and antiwar libertarians more or less on my side with this issue and rank-and-file centrists mostly preferring to sit this one out except to periodically mumble something about it being a distraction from the Mueller investigation.
I engage in these arguments not because I enjoy fighting with strangers on the internet, but because it helps me get an idea of what propaganda narratives have been seeded throughout various political sectors. Take a stand online and you’ll quickly have people running up to you saying, in effect, “My media echo chamber told me I’m supposed to disagree with you about that,” and spelling out what they’ve been told to believe.
I have not received a single robust argument in favor of Trump’s Venezuela interventionism, but I have received a whole lot of really, really stupid ones. Here are the top five most common and most astonishingly idiotic of them:

1. “Socialism is bad!”

Most of my arguments on this issue have either begun as or very quickly spun into an attempt to turn the debate about US interventionism in yet another South American nation into a debate about socialism vs capitalism.

Which is of course absurd. The campaign to topple Venezuela’s government has nothing to do with socialism, it’s about oil and regional hegemony. The US has long treated South America as its personal supply cabinet and destroyed anyone who tried to challenge that, and the fact that Venezuela has the most confirmed oil reserves of any nation on the planet makes it all the more central in this agenda.

2. “It’s not interventionism! There are no boots on the ground.”

Oh yes it is interventionism. Crushing economic sanctions, CIA covert ops, illegally occupying embassies, and a campaign to delegitimize a nation’s entire government are absolutely interventionism, and that is happening currently. It’s stupid to make “boots on the ground” your line in the sand when, for example, vast amounts of US resources can easily be poured into fomenting a “civil” war that could kill hundreds of thousands and displace millions as we saw with Syria. And from today’s news about the Trump administration’s appointment of bloodthirsty psychopath Elliot Abrams as the special envoy to Venezuela, it’s very reasonable to expect things to get a whole lot bloodier. Modern warmongering isn’t limited to the form of “boots on the ground”, and making that your litmus test is leaving yourself open to all the same disasters ushered in by the Obama administration.

3. “Maduro is bad!”

I’ve never entered into any kind of argument about whether or not Nicolas Maduro is a nice person, because it’s not my game.

I refuse to legitimize that false argument. It doesn’t matter whether Maduro is a saint or the worst person in the world; Venezuela is a sovereign nation and US regime change interventionism is always disastrous. Completely ignoring the obvious fact that the empire always launches an aggressive propaganda campaign to manufacture support for the elimination of its targets, there is no valid reason to support that targeting. Trying to drag the conversation into a debate about just how bad Maduro is is an attempt to legitimize an agenda that has no validity.

4. “I support the Venezuelan people!”

Again, that’s not the argument. The argument is whether it’s okay for the US government and its allies to violate Venezuela’s sovereignty with starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, an active campaign to delegitimize its government, and possibly much worse in the future in order to advance the agenda of overthrowing its political system.
Of course there are people in Venezuela who don’t like their government; that’s true in your own country too. That doesn’t make it okay for a sprawling imperialist power to intervene in their political affairs. You’d think this would be obvious to everyone, but over and over again I run into people conflating Venezuelans sorting out Venezuelan domestic affairs with the US-centralized empire actively meddling in those affairs.

5. “You don’t understand what’s going on there! I talk to Venezuelans online!”

Do you now?

First of all, this common argument is irrelevant for the reasons already discussed here; sure there are Venezuelans who don’t like their government, but their existence doesn’t justify US interventionism. Secondly, it’s a known fact that online trolls will be employed to help manufacture support for all sorts of geopolitical agendas, from Israel’s shill army to the MEK terror cult’s anti-Iran troll farm to the Bana Alabed psyop for Syria. And here’s this example, just for your information, of a Twitter account talking about how much fun she’s having in Paris and then a few days later claiming she’s in Venezuela waiting in “5+ hour queues to buy a loaf of bread.” Be skeptical of what strangers on social media tell you about what’s happening inside a nation that’s been targeted by the empire, please.