Weekend Quotables
Becca Good: “We had whistles. They had guns.”
While I was visiting friends in Florida this week, escaping the winter storms in Chicago, anti-Trump and anti-war protesters were heating up across the country and the world. I was overjoyed (but not surprised) by the hundreds of protesters who turned out in Sarasota Saturday to denounce the ICE assault on their community, the U.S. attack on Venezuela, and the murder of Renee Nicole Good.
In-pocket corporate media still insist that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is “politically isolated with no popular support,” a man supposedly abandoned by Venezuelans and propped up only by repression. But that framing leaves out the country’s deep class divisions. This doesn’t mean the government is universally popular or that dissent isn’t widespread. It means the political landscape is polarized along class, geography, and national identity—and that millions of Venezuelans do not see Washington’s preferred outcome as synonymous with democracy.
For eight straight days, thousands of Venezuelans have been in the streets, denouncing the U.S. military assault on their country and demanding Maduro’s release. However, you wouldn’t know this from following CNN, the BBC, or the New York Times. Their silence is not an oversight. It reflects a pattern of compliance. But the silence finally cracked. NBC News has just released footage showing thousands of pro‑Maduro demonstrators in Caracas waving Venezuelan flags and chanting for Maduro’s return.
The Venezuelan protests aren’t an isolated event. They’re part of a growing wave of support for Venezuela that Western media is just beginning to acknowledge.
Weekend Quotables
My Weekend Chutzpah Award goes to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for this great piece of irony on the protests inside Iran.
"Israel supports their struggle for freedom and strongly condemns the mass slaughter of innocent civilians." —Jerusalem Post
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From the coaches
Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers called the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent in Minneapolis “straight-up murder” on Friday, hours after fellow NBA coach Steve Kerr blasted federal officials’ response to the incident.
“What happened in Minnesota was straight-up murder in my opinion. The whole ICE thing, it’s a travesty. We’re attacking brown people. What’s going on in our country right now is absolutely wrong.” — Essentially Sports
Steve Kerr, Warriors head coach
“I’m glad that the Timberwolves recognized her life and the tragic nature of her death,” Kerr said. “It’s shameful, really, that in our country we can have law enforcement officers who commit murder and seemingly get away with it. It’s shameful that the government can come out and lie about what happened when there’s video and witnesses who have all come out and disputed what the government is saying. — NY Times
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Renee Good’s wife, Becca Good
Good told local media that they had gone to the scene of immigration enforcement activity to “support our neighbors”. “We had whistles. They had guns.” — Al Jazeera
Elon Musk
Musk retweeted (with a ‘100%’ endorsement) a post declaring that: “white solidarity is the only way to survive”. — Religion Dispatches
Glenn Kessler fact-checks Trump’s lies
I propose that instead of chasing Trump’s lies, the press should experiment with treating as major news those very rare instances when a statement coming out of Trump’s mouth actually turns out to be true. What we call “fact-checks” today are mostly lie-checks made newsworthy by a consensus that truthfulness is society’s expected norm. Instead, let’s try “truth checks” — Substack post
Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic
Which City Will Donald Trump Bomb First: Tehran—or Minneapolis? — TNR
Correction: Steve Kerr coaches the Golden Gate Warriors, not LA.