The Lie Comes First
Operation Southern Spear needed permission. Not military permission—that was already granted. It needed narrative permission. It needed the American public to hear "80+ dead Venezuelan civilians" and think "collateral damage in the war on drugs" instead of "war crime."
That's what M1 manufactures. Ricardo Vaz documents it perfectly: big outlets uncritically parroting Trump's "narco-terrorist" / fentanyl-as-chemical-weapon frame to justify Caribbean boat bombings. Not reporting on the frame. Not interrogating it. Parroting it. Making it the baseline assumption in every subsequent story.
This is upstream collaboration. This is the permission structure.
How the Machine Works
You can trace the kill chain:
- State Department announces a new enemy class: "narco-terrorists"
- Media outlets repeat the term in straightforward reporting (it sounds technical, neutral)
- The repetition becomes permission
- Military action follows that would otherwise require justification
- Coverage then treats the action as implementing the frame, not creating it
By the time the boats start burning, the term "narco-terrorist" has been normalized so thoroughly that journalists covering the strikes don't even ask: Who defined them that way? By what authority? What's the evidence?
They just use it. It's in the lede. It's the operating assumption. The lie has become the furniture.
The Fentanyl Angle
The "fentanyl-as-chemical-weapon" piece is especially pure collaboration because it takes a genuine public health crisis (fentanyl deaths are real; the numbers are horrifying) and weaponizes it—literally redirects American fear into justification for military action against a state actor.
That's not reporting. That's conscription of your own audience's terror into a geopolitical narrative.
And it works because some of the fear is real. Fentanyl is killing Americans. The collaboration is in the sleight of hand: taking that real crisis and pointing it at Venezuela instead of asking why pharmaceutical companies aren't regulated, why treatment access is rationed, why American policy creates the conditions where fentanyl fills the void.
It's the perfect Quisling move: you use legitimate pain as the mechanism for manufacturing consent for something entirely different. You don't have to lie about fentanyl. You just have to lie about what fentanyl means.
Why This Scores Higher Than Direct Execution
The White House Press Corps chose silence when "quiet piggy" landed. That's cowardice in a moment.
These outlets—MR Online's competitors, the think tanks, the bylines that repeat "narco-terrorist" in sentence two—they're building the machinery that makes that moment possible in the first place. They're not reacting to power. They're constructing power's permission structure.
That's why M1 gets the ribbon this week: because every downstream collaboration—every normalization, every abstraction, every suppression of witness testimony—needs this narrative frame first. You can't launder a war crime without first making the war sound like policy.
They didn't pull the trigger. They just made sure it sounded reasonable when someone else did.
Runner-Ups (in order of severity):
S-Tier (9/10): Y2 & M4 — Direct execution and active suppression. Y2 launders the war itself into "foreign policy debate." M4 silences the journalists investigating the war crimes. Both are blood-on-the-page collaboration.
A-Tier (8/10): M5 — Process journalism abstraction. "What does this mean for the midterms?" instead of "80+ dead." Institutional erasure through panel discourse.
B-Tier (7/10): M2 — Straightforward stenography. Hegseth's rollout gets regurgitated as patriotic "tough on drugs" coverage. Bad, but obvious. The dishonesty is on the surface.
Posted by Rhombus Ticks
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