Last week, the U.S. military blew up a boat in international waters in the Caribbean Sea. The boat was on its way from Venezuela to Trinidad. The U.S. military says there were 11 people on board that boat, and that those 11 people were smuggling drugs on the boat, and that smuggling drugs made those people “narco-terrorists” and thus military targets ripe for militarily legitimate killin.’
The assertions of fact there — that there were 11 people on the boat and that they were all criminals smuggling drugs — cannot be confirmed because, again, the boat and all (perhaps) 11 people were obliterated. Because those people have been accused of criminal activity — not charged, just accused — and because those accusations were never proven in court, most of the reporting on this story refers to them as “alleged drug traffickers.” That terminology is misleading here, because there was never any formal allegation — never any consideration of indicting or arresting or convicting or sentencing these 11 people. The plan was just to kill them with the expensive high-tech weaponry the U.S. military has that allows it to kill people from a far-off, safe distance.
“Hey look! It’s a boat! Those people could very well be drug traffickers. Let’s kill them.”
And so those perhaps 11 people are now dead. They were executed without arrest or trial or any non-lethal interaction, because they were suspected/accused of committing a non-capital crime.
It’s entirely possible that there were, in fact, 11 people on that boat and that all of them were, in fact, guilty of the crime of smuggling drugs.
And it’s also entirely possible they were not guilty of that crime. No evidence was presented before the brave kill-button-pressers bravely pressed their kill buttons. And no evidence was produced afterwards.
And we know that sometimes President Trump sends in the military only to have them murder a bunch of innocent civilians and then destroy the evidence before hastily retreating. That has happened before.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul, a stochastic civil libertarian, objected to this extrajudicial killing, noting — correctly — that if the government is allowed to kill anyone it says is suspected of “narco-terrorism” and that same government is allowed to suspect everyone of “narco-terrorism,” then the government is allowed to kill anyone and everyone. And the senator notes that this seems, you know, bad.
Responding to Vice President J.D. Vance’s gleeful celebration of this sinking of this alleged crime-boat, Sen. Paul wrote: “Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”
The Trump administration handled this criticism as it usually does, by posting memes on social media mocking Paul and ignoring the substance of his criticism. This is what you get when the government is run by internet trolls who grew up on 4chan. A White House social media account posted a SpongeBob SquarePants Pietà meme with the dead SpongeBob relabeled as “Dead Drug Dealers” in an effort to mock Sen. Paul for lamenting the death of alleged criminals who weren’t even Americans anyway.
That meme was awkwardly labeled by morally obtuse and somewhat dim people targeting an audience of other people like them, so the Official White House Trolls neither understand nor care that their cartoon clumsily reinforces Sen. Paul’s point.
Because, if you’re not familiar with the Nickelodeon character, SpongeBob SquarePants is not a “drug dealer.”
SpongeBob SquarePants lives in a pineapple under the sea. Absorbent and yellow and porous is he. But he is not a “drug dealer” or a “narcoterrorist” or a member of a Venezuelan cartel.
Slapping a label on SpongeBob re-labeling him as a “drug dealer” does not magically transform him into one.
Not even if the label is slapped on there by an official White House social media account.
Just saying something doesn’t make it true.
A classic pre-Nazibot Twitter joke made that point by saying: “People on here will tweet anything. ‘Charlie Brown had hoes.’ No he didn’t. That isn’t true.”
Riffing off that, I noted that “Any government permitted to kill SpongeBob for dealing drugs is a government permitted to kill Charlie Brown for having hoes.”
It doesn’t matter whether or not SpongeBob is a drug dealer. Once the government is permitted to kill him on nothing more than their say-so, nothing matters. That government has been given permission to kill whoever they say they want killed. That government has permission to do anything to anyone at any time.
This is where things get tricky and complicated but also, I’m afraid, urgent and important in the days and months and years ahead.
The passive construction I used in that “Charlie Brown had hoes” joke above masks all of that complexity. “The government is permitted” by whom? “The government is permitted” by what?
How is that permission granted? How is or can it be withheld?
The Trump administration, and especially Trump himself, asserts that they don’t need permission. That’s an explicitly authoritarian, dictatorial claim. Every legitimate government requires permission because that permission is what makes them legitimate. Without that permission, they’re simply people with lots of kill-buttons and a literal army of kill-button pressers, but not a legitimate government.
Those kill-buttons give them power, but not permission. And although power never seeks permission when it can simply seize it, it still requires permission.
That permission is granted in thousands of ways, some explicit and some implicit. And that permission can be withheld in thousands of ways, some explicit and some implicit.
And this is what we’ve all got to think about and understand, because right now we have a government intent on doing many, many things no legitimate government can or should ever have permission to do. Our job — our responsibility — is to deny them that permission in every way we can.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In