This article was adapted from the Daily Caller’s new Substack, State of the Day. Click here to sign up and get exclusive content, the Caller’s full slate of newsletters, hot takes, and informative, long-form pieces direct to your inbox. 

Venezuela is a hot news item. Thanks to a Washington Post report, allegations of war crimes against Pete Hegseth are swirling around the capital. The U.S. also recently seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. Regime change is in the air, as the Trump administration remains adamant that its strikes against alleged narco terrorists are just and legal. We don’t know where this saga is going, but from what has happened so far, we can still glean a couple of tough but important lessons. (RELATED: FLASHBACK: Trump Reveals What He Always Wanted Out Of Venezuela)

I’m not old enough to remember the news cycles of the early 2000s in the lead-up to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. But from old headlines and op-eds I have seen or read, it’s clear the media were fed a bogus narrative and ran with it, all hiveminding to the same conclusion: war. This was a time in America when the media was top-down and had control over the information on broadcast television and newspapers. 

Today is much different, of course. The media landscape is decentralized, with X, podcasts, websites, blogs, Substacks, etc. This makes it more difficult for the government to craft a narrative, feed it to the media, and keep the narrative controlled in its favor. Even if the Trump administration wanted to make a case for war against Venezuela with congressional authorization, it would be a million times more difficult to control the narrative and win the argument than it was two decades ago. For all its pitfalls, social media gives a voice to anti-war activists who may have been relegated to a tiny........

© The Daily Caller