When Cheering for Murder Is Disguised as Patriotism

To revel in the image of human beings being blown apart is to confess a kind of moral numbness that civilizations acquire only in their final stages of decay.

Tim Hjersed || When I wrote about the recent U.S. strikes against suspected drug traffickers in Venezuelan waters, the responses I received weren’t arguments—they were celebrations. “I can’t get enough of those boats going kabooooom!!!” wrote one commenter, capturing perfectly the spirit of an empire that has learned to mistake bloodshed for justice.

But beneath the gleeful cruelty, there’s also confusion—a genuine belief that these strikes are not murder, that they serve some protective purpose, or that they “fight the cartels” and “save American lives.”

So let me address that confusion directly, because the truth is more troubling: the people celebrating these killings are propping up the very drug trade they claim to oppose.

Yes, It’s “Murder, War Crimes, or Both”

Some objected to my use of the word “murder” to describe these killings. But I’m not alone in that assessment. The Former JAGs Working Group—an organization of former and retired military judge advocates—issued a statement declaring that orders to kill survivors of attacks at sea are patently “illegal” and that “anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”

Rebecca Ingber, professor of law at Cardozo Law School and an expert in international law, is even more direct: “There is no actual armed conflict here, so this is murder.” Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the second strike a war crime, explaining that “the basic rules of war make very clear that you do not strike wounded people in the water in order to kill them.”

But this isn’t just about the notorious “double tap” strike that killed survivors.

As Phyllis Bennis, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies puts it: “Declaring unilaterally that a war exists (when it doesn’t) and then bombing unarmed civilian boats in international waters is inherently illegal, regardless of whether anyone is killed by the first, second, or tenth bomb. That’s an act of piracy and murder, not a legal use of armed force.”

So yes, I called it murder. Because that’s what legal scholars, former military lawyers, and the law says it is.

The Tragic Irony of the “War on Drugs”

Here’s what countless retired veterans of the war on drugs will tell you. It doesn’t work. Every “kingpin” removed fragments the market, fuels turf wars, elevates younger and more violent competitors, and drives up prices—which fattens cartel profits.

When the Medellín cartel was dismantled, the Cali cartel filled the void. When Cali fell, dozens of smaller, more violent groups emerged. When El Chapo was captured, the Sinaloa cartel splintered into warring factions. This is not speculation. This is the documented pattern across Mexico, Colombia, Central America, and Southeast Asia for more than fifty years. The drug trade does not disappear when you kill operatives; it reorganizes upward in sophistication and brutality.

Meanwhile, the cartel leaders themselves are not even touched by these strikes. The victims are the disposable poor—the couriers and small-time operators who can be replaced within hours. State violence against them does nothing to weaken the drug trade; it fortifies it. When a shipment is intercepted or destroyed, the cost is almost never borne by top leadership. It’s distributed downward. Recruits, couriers, and low-level contractors absorb the risk. The organization treats losses as overhead. Prices rise to compensate. New crews are recruited. The market adjusts.

This is why decades of militarized drug policy have not slowed the trade one inch. The bodies pile up, the drugs flow in, and the industry becomes even more ruthless. Meanwhile, the financial institutions that launder billions in drug money—major banks, U.S. corporations, political elites—remain untouched. Those are the actual beneficiaries of the system.

The 95 people murdered so far by Pete Hegseth is a cruel form of theater for Trump’s base, which performs a familiar “tough on crime” posture while doing nothing to address root causes.

The Venezuela Misdirection

But surely, supporters argue, we’re addressing the overdose crisis—the 90,000 annual deaths from fentanyl poisoning. Aren’t these strikes taking money out of cartel pockets and saving American lives?

The facts tell a different story. First, available data suggest that essentially none of that death toll is directly tied to drugs coming from Venezuela. The CDC estimates roughly 105,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in recent years, about three-quarters involving opioids, especially illicit fentanyl and synthetic opioids. But U.S. and U.N. drug data show Venezuela is not a producer or exporter of fentanyl. Almost all fentanyl for the U.S. market is synthesized in Mexico using precursor chemicals from China.

Cocaine that transits Venezuela accounts for less than 10% of the cocaine entering the U.S., and cocaine is far less lethal per user than fentanyl in the current crisis. Across recent DEA and intelligence assessments, Venezuela does not appear as a significant source or transit country for fentanyl. The fraction of U.S. overdose deaths that can reasonably be attributed to Venezuelan-origin supply is effectively near zero.

So we’re not even bombing the right boats. We’re executing suspects in waters that have almost nothing to do with the crisis being invoked to justify the killings.

What Actually Drives the Death Toll

What’s driving the 90,000 annual fatalities isn’t a lack of violence against suppliers. It’s an unregulated fentanyl market where potency is unpredictable, treatment access is scarce, and users are forced into a criminalized shadow economy.

Fentanyl is not primarily trafficked from South America. The supply chain is diffuse, cheap, and resilient—precursor chemicals from China, production networks in Mexico, finished product moved through small, hard-to-detect channels. This is exactly why militarized border crackdowns don’t work: you cannot “shut down” a synthetic drug that can be manufactured almost anywhere with equipment the size of a microwave.

Every credible public health study shows the same pattern: when drug markets are pushed further underground, contamination and overdose increase. When countries shift to regulation, treatment access, and harm-reduction strategies, deaths go down.

Real solutions start by shrinking the black market that makes fentanyl so lethal. That means expanding treatment on demand, medication-assisted therapy, and regulated safe-supply programs—like those operating in Canada—so people aren’t forced to buy unpredictable street drugs

It means funding supervised consumption sites where overdoses don’t become funerals. Portugal’s model saw overdose deaths drop 93% from 80 per million in 2001 to 6 per million by 2021.

It means shifting resources from punishment to prevention—housing, mental health care, stable income—the conditions that actually reduce chaotic drug use.

And it requires tightening international controls on precursor chemicals while shifting from criminalization to a public health model that treats addiction as a medical issue rather than a criminal one.

These approaches have cut deaths in every country that’s tried them, because they address the real drivers of the crisis instead of doubling down on policies that keep failing.

When Grief Becomes a Weapon

“I’ll assume you don’t have kids that have been affected by fentanyl and family members who have died,” one commenter wrote, as if personal loss automatically validates punitive policy.

This assumption is both false and politically convenient. Many of the strongest critics of the drug war are precisely the people who have buried siblings, children, and friends. They’ve lived the crisis up close, and they know from experience that punishment has never stopped fentanyl—it has fueled the conditions that make it flourish.

It’s true that some call for harsher crackdowns, but others call for treatment access, overdose prevention, and dismantling the illegal market by replacing it with regulation. Both groups are grieving. Their losses are real. But grief cannot substitute for evidence.

The data is clear: decades of militarized enforcement have not reduced drug availability. Killing dealers or “going after cartels” creates market vacancies and more violence, not less fentanyl. Countries that treat addiction as a health issue—not a criminal one—see fewer deaths.

The real divide isn’t between people who’ve suffered loss and people who haven’t. It’s between policies that work and policies that fail.

The Dehumanization Playbook

But perhaps the most revealing responses were those that explicitly embraced eliminationist logic. “Those bringing that shit in are less than humans,” wrote one commenter. “Think of it as vaccinating against smallpox.”

Dehumanization always arrives dressed as necessity. Every atrocity in history begins with the same rhetorical move—dividing the world into “humans” and “less than humans,” and then insisting that violence is simply a form of sanitation. Once you accept that logic, there are no limits. Anyone who threatens the social order, anyone who is inconvenient, anyone who can be blamed for the suffering created by systems of power becomes a contaminant to be “eradicated.”

And let’s be clear: the men killed in these strikes were suspects, not adjudicated criminals. They were denied trial, denied evidence, denied the most basic human right—the right to answer an accusation. When the state executes people without due process and we applaud because we’ve been told they are “dirt” or “disease,” we have abandoned the last moral boundary that separates a society from barbarism.

The smallpox metaphor is not a justification. It is a confession of the worldview that has justified every massacre of the powerless in every empire that has ever existed—including our own.

On Consistency and Hypocrisy

Some commenters attempted to catch me in contradiction. How can I oppose these extrajudicial killings while supporting abortion rights? “No one should cheer for death,” one wrote, “but it is apparently progressive to advocate for abortion… Apply the same rule to all lives, not just possible drug smugglers.”

I share the belief that human life shouldn’t be treated as disposable. That’s exactly why state executions without evidence or trial are so alarming—these were people with histories, families, and rights, killed by government force in a context where due process was entirely absent. That is the very definition of a war crime.

But abortion is not comparable. Most abortions occur in the first trimester, when the embryo or early fetus has no nervous system capable of conscious experience, no brain capable of thought or memory, and no bodily autonomy separate from the pregnant person. A weeks-old fetus is not equivalent—morally, neurologically, or legally—to living adults killed by the state. Treating them as interchangeable ignores every biological and ethical distinction that makes these issues difficult and requires real moral nuance.

Being pro-choice and anti-war crime is not hypocrisy.

Pro-choice ethics are about bodily autonomy, consent, and medical decision-making, not about granting the state power to kill. Opposition to extrajudicial killings is about limiting state violence, protecting human rights, and ensuring governments cannot declare people killable based on suspicion or prejudice.

These are entirely consistent positions: one limits state domination over pregnant people; the other limits state domination over anyone the government decides is disposable. At their core, both views reject the idea that the state can claim ownership over someone’s body or decide whose life is expendable.

Who Actually Hates America

When arguments run out, patriotism becomes the last refuge. “God, youz are some of the most vile scumbags ever,” wrote one commenter. “You people really do hate America.”

The truth is that criticizing state violence is not hatred of America—it’s hatred of the cruelty, corruption, and lawlessness that have hollowed this country out from within.

Loving a nation does not mean applauding every atrocity committed in its name.

Others accused me of “advocating drug smuggling, open borders, and the desecration of our heritage and homelands.” But that’s a cartoon assertion used to avoid the real issue. No one is advocating drug smuggling. What I’m criticizing is a government carrying out extrajudicial killings and the chorus of people applauding because they’ve been told the victims are vermin.

“Open borders” is another fantasy designed to distract: people fleeing violence and poverty don’t become subhuman because a line on a map was crossed. The “desecration of heritage and homelands” language is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. When elites strip your community of jobs, housing, stability, and dignity, they hand you a scapegoat so you never look up and see who actually hollowed out your society.

Refugees didn’t offshore American factories. Migrant laborers didn’t gut our unions. Asylum seekers didn’t flood politics with corporate money. The civilization some say they’re defending wasn’t wrecked by the desperate—it was looted by the powerful, and yet tragically, millions of people continue to direct their anger at the people with the least power while the real architects of decline walk away untouched.

The people who truly hate America are not those calling for restraint and humanity. They are the ones cheering as the government burns strangers alive with no evidence, no trial, and no accountability. They are the ones who mistake vengeance for virtue and propaganda for truth.

What Defending Civilization Actually Means

A society survives only if enough people are willing to say: this is wrong, and we will not be complicit. A culture that cheers for corpses on burning boats is not defending itself. It is dismantling the last traces of its own humanity.

What some celebrate as “kaboom” are not comic-book villains but human beings whose names, histories, and intentions we will never know—condemned and erased without a single piece of evidence ever shown to the public.

Meanwhile, the true architects of the drug trade remain untouched. The governments and corporations that launder its money remain protected. Only the expendable die.

And to delight in that is to stand on the side of the machinery that grinds the powerless into dust while the powerful profit from the carnage. It is the side that redirects your rage downward so you never see who’s actually responsible for the suffering you witness.

That is not patriotism. That is how empires use a compliant population as tools for an agenda that does not serve them. And it is how civilizations lose their way in the final stages of decay—not through invasion or collapse, but through the quiet normalization of cruelty, the celebration of state violence, and the willing surrender of the moral principles that once made us worth defending.

Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action.