When "Good Guys" are the Bad Guys

In the MAGA world, the “good” guys are winning. Everyone else, including hard-working migrants, legal and otherwise, the “woke” media and youth, fabricated narco-terrorists like Nicolas Maduro, or “the blacks,” are losing. You know–the “bad” guys. Now that an ICE officer has just killed an unarmed U.S.citizen named Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, MAGA has placed this white 37-year-old mother of three in that category as well.

The Department of Homeland Security and Republicans claim Ms. Good was among “rioters” who “weaponized” her car against an ICE officer defending himself. Various videos by bystanders, however, including a video analysis by the New York Times, showed there were no rioters, and that the officer who shot her was not in front of the vehicle, but to the side, as Ms. Good tried to pull away. He shot her without apparent warning or legal rationale.

For Trump and MAGA, these facts don’t matter. They live in a black-and-white world, neatly packaged, like in cartoons.

But reality is not so easily categorized or boxed.

A convicted felon is president, the same man who tried to lead an insurrection, who is all over the Jeffrey Epstein files, who lies every time he speaks. A man who doesn’t go to church or knows what it is to go to bed hungry. Who never fought in a war (although he’s Commander in Chief). Yet for MAGA and Christian Nationalists, Trump is their man, their hero, their cult leader. As I’ve written before, “America First” is really “Trump First.”

Good’s murder occurred a few days after the Trump Administration invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cicilia Flores, killed “dozens” of security people and civilians, including over thirty Cuban guards, all without Congressional approval and outside of international laws and protocols. Many analysts have tried to tie all this to a larger strategic plan: This was about control of the world’s largest oil reserves; this was to remove BRICS countries from bringing Venezuela into the fold (and undermining petrodollars as the oil currency of the world); this was about enforcing greater U.S. control of the Western Hemisphere.

All true, all worth looking at.

But this maddening action is also the result of an erratic, impulsive, and narcissistic president, surrounded by similarly disordered cabinet members and White House flunkies like Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. Far from strategic thinking, it’s also the actions of an outlaw presidency.

Trump said in his first public appearance after the January 3 military extraction that those persons mentioned above would be “running” the Venezuelan government. Now they’re backtracking on this, and others have lost a coherent argument for why this actually happened. One that came across social media, like so much nonsense, is that Trump was mad that Maduro mocked his “Trump” dance during a recent speech he made.

This is as good an excuse as any.

Maduro and Lopez are being charged with narco-terrorism in New York state. While drugs may be coming through Venezuela, they are a blip in the tons of drugs being smuggled into the United States. Venezuela has nothing to do with fentanyl or meth, the leading killers of drug users in the U.S. And apparently whatever cocaine comes through that country mostly ends up in Europe. None of which proves Maduro or Lopez’s involvement.

By this measure, why aren’t U.S. government officials considered narcoterrorists? More drugs enter and get used in the U.S. than any other country in the world. We are the world’s largest drug market. Fentanyl and meth and crack began here. There are news accounts of how the CIA worked with drug lords in Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan to “get rid of communism” in Central America and the Mideast.

The truth is the U.S. government has its hands dirty in the decades old, multi-billion dollar drug wars.

Another MAGA talking point is that Maduro rigged the 2024 presidential elections and is not the legitimate president. This despite the election being one of the most monitored, with so many hurdles to jump through for anyone to vote (including no mail-in ballots, ID requirements, ballots checked more than once, and other guardrails, which Republicans claim would make for better elections here).

Yet even if this was the most fraudulent election on earth, what do you call a foreign country coming in and removing the nominal head of state and threatening to run the country from Washington D.C. as well as take over the oil reserves of a sovereign country?

Nobody elected Trump in Venezuela! This makes claims of electoral fraud a joke. Trump is now the dictator of Venezuela by force of arms. Whatever Maduro did, Trump has done worse!

Most of the anti-Maduro forces in Venezuela are elated about Trump’s action. They’re fine with a foreign power coming in and pressuring any remaining government in Venezuela to do its bidding–or else! That’s what many of the Venezuelan opposition consists of—traitors to their own country, not patriots.

I visited Venezuela during the Hugo Chavez years (1999 to 2013). Chavez pulled most of the oil reserves and production back into the country. He didn’t deny foreign corporations the drilling or refining–he wanted them to pay a more equitable price against the measly percentage they were paying to do so. The World Bank even claimed that under Chavez, Venezuela’s economy grew consistently, achieving its highest GDP of $482.35 billion in 2014. Poverty rates fell from almost 50 percent in 1999 to around 23 percent in 2012. Chavez created a literacy campaign. He electrified the slums around Caracas. He also brought in free healthcare and free education. Yes, Cuba helped. I visited clinics in the poorest “ranchitos” (what are called “colonias” in Mexico or “favelas” in Brazil). Cuban doctors provided this healthcare without question. Even me, a U.S. citizen, could get help if I needed it. They didn’t care if you were Venezuelan or not. If you had a pulse, if you were human, and got sick, they’d take care of you at no cost.

I was in Caracas three times–during a World Social Forum, during a conference on revolution in the hemisphere (for which I wrote a paper), and during a poetry festival. I met wonderful revolutionary people. I met people glad to be alive with Chavez as president. I walked in the slum areas and talked with residents who felt they were finally able to get a leg up. Society was beginning to center them, uplift them.

I once sat in front row seats with other honored guests when Chavez spoke for over two hours to 100,000 people in a sports stadium. Without notes, he quoted the Bible, Marx, statistics, and told stories. Not a dull moment. During the Caracas Poetry Festival, I also toured the countryside, including Indigenous communities around Rio Orinoco. People appeared stronger and hopeful. Even though Chavez still had a hybrid economy (it was not totally socialist), the changes were palpable. Art and literature were alive. I saw children reciting poems in makeshift tents. I saw murals on walls. Farms coming alive.

The U.S. media never told that side of the story.

I also met disgruntled people. Mostly business people. Before Chavez became president, there were well-off neighborhoods. Here resided rich and largely “white” Venezuelans, many tied to U.S. industries. Most of the base for the anti-Chavistas came from there. However, with U.S. sanctions, lowered oil prices, and the inability to refine Venezuelan “sour” crude oil, Venezuela began losing ground. Inflation became outrageous. There were “black” markets of currency and goods. After Chavez’s death, the economy under Maduro worsened. Venezuelan funds in U.S. banks got confiscated. Some three million Venezuelans left the country during Maduro’s presidency, including “sanction” refugees. I saw many of them in Chicago in recent years, including in encampments around police stations.

Not all of them are with Trump’s takeover of Venezuela. They are anti-Maduro but still Venezuelan. Did Maduro make mistakes? Undoubtedly, but most of this chaos was due to U.S. economic and military pressures.

After Maduro’s removal, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated that Cuba should “be worried.” He’s made underhanded threats that the U.S. may consider Cuba ripe for the taking. For decades Cuba has been under a massive economic blockade—the longest trade embargo in modern history. They’ve been driven to the bare minimum.

I’ve visited Cuba three times, most recently last October. The country is suffering. There’s poverty in Havana. There are blackouts and long lines for gas and goods. People follow around tourists for hand outs. But there’s so much more–people working together with very little. They share. There’s music and a rich cultural life. Yes, prostitution exists. I’ve seen one or two alcoholics on the street. But it’s not the most paramount thing. Havana is overall a wonderful place. I’ve walked the Malecon seawall and the main boulevards. Lovers sneak kisses. Parents play with their children. The people are kind and embracing.

Cuba has paid a terrible price to be independent of the United States. The alternative is death as a sovereign and self-ruling country.

By the way, I’ve seen much worse in Mexico and Central America, the countries still capitalist and tied to larger U.S. economic and political interests. The poverty in those countries is strangling. Yes, the people there are also amazing. Resilient and creative. But the intensity of what they’re struggling with is on another level. I’ve been to poor-ass areas in San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Guatemala City, and Ciudad Juarez. I’ve been to extremely rough neighborhoods, including where dead bodies lay on the street. I’ve worked among the “garbage dump” people in Mexico and Guatemala. I’ve been inside the worst prisons in the world in those places. Cuba has problems, but not like that.

I’ll also tell you what’s worse than Havana. I’ve been to homeless encampments in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. I’ve seen 13-year-old girls prostituting themselves in Watts. Or women on “crack” in brick-laden Chicago apartment buildings. I’ve been to Kensington in Philadelphia where fentanyl and other drugs have created the “walking dead.” I’ve seen worse in the Bible Belt or trailer-park communities. From the Deep South to the “meth” capital of the world in California’s Central Valley to Walmart-only towns in the Midwest.

The U.S. has no moral standing to consider they are the “good” guys in these circumstances. We can’t take care of our own people, and now we’re going to “run” Venezuela! Perhaps also Cuba. Even Mexico or Colombia. Maybe Greenland?

MAGA is okay with this, even as our own country gets harder and harder to live in for the poor and working class.

It’s time for us to stop all this cartoonish fantasizing of who’s good or bad. For one thing, we should stop the economic blockade of Cuba now–let Cuba move in its own way, its own direction, in its own manner. Right or wrong, at least it’s their country.

The U.S. will trample any sovereignty, as it did with Indigenous nations as well as places like Mexico when it stole half of the country in 1848, and later the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the late 1800s. In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the U.S. try to run Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan–and fail miserably. When the CIA helped get rid of duly elected presidents like Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, those countries went through hell: murders, imprisonments, and disappearances.

In the real world, not a made-up one, the good guys are too often the bad ones.

Justice for Renee Nicole Good!