Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro put aside his beef with former US President Donald Trump, who he previously accused of ordering his attempted assassination, in order to wish him “health and long life” after he miraculously dodged a bullet to the brain by literally less than an inch on Saturday. He also added that “I repudiate the attack”, thus showing that he’s above the hatemongering rhetoric spewed by many folks from the Alt-Media Community (AMC) who are upset that Trump survived.
A lot of these people, especially those from the Global South whose countries were victimized by Trump’s foreign policy, fiercely despise him and have made their opinions known on social media. A common claim is that he’s a Zionist and thus supposedly deserved to die or whatever, which is their right to believe, but they’re not doing any service to their cause by lamenting that he wasn’t assassinated. No average American will ever be attracted to whatever they might say from here on out.
Therein lies the self-inflicted damage that they’re dealing since such extreme rhetoric only serves to discredit themselves in the eyes of their targeted audience. Whether they realize it or not, the AMC’s goal is to get average Americans to support a more peaceful foreign policy, which can manifest itself with time by voting for whichever candidate espouses such. Even if that said figure doesn’t ultimately implement whatever they promised, or only does so in part, it’s still better than embracing warmongers.
Maduro knows this and that’s why he “repudiated the attack” and wished Trump “health and long life” despite earlier accusing Trump of wanting to kill him. The Venezuelan leader doesn’t just want to get on the former American one’s good side in case he returns to power, but also doesn’t want to fuel the neocons’ narrative that he needs to be overthrown. Parroting the hatemongering rhetoric that’s popular among many Global South members of the AMC would have therefore been self-defeating.
This insight is relevant for everyone who advocates for a multipolar cause like Palestine since they should know that they’re making it less likely that average Americans will ever warm up to it by wishing that Trump was killed. No real patriot would ever want a serving or former leader of their country to be assassinated since that would throw their country into even more chaos than it already is. They also can’t in good conscience associate with anyone who thinks otherwise either.
Accordingly, those causes that are connected to these folks become discredited by association, thus turning the AMC into little more than an echo chamber. Anyone can be anti-Trump in the political sense, but wishing him death with all that would have entailed for destabilizing the US makes it impossible that any average American will ever listen to them again. Regrettably, many Global South members of the AMC discredited themselves this weekend, and there’s nothing that they can do to redeem themselves.
